Finding Grace in Fiction

mod-ref-july-07-issue.jpgIn July I noted here the publication of an essay, previously not available online. Modern Reformation has now given me permission to post it. I invite your interaction; please read and then leave a comment.
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“Finding Grace in Fiction”

Like bits of mica captured in granite slabs, the created world glitters with slivers of its creator. Scattered and distorted by the fall, the truths of God’s existence and the human condition yet find expression in the natural world and human culture. Since Adam first described his life in Eden to his children, human culture has revolved around storytelling. Thus fiction is among the richest sources to mine for eternal truths movingly expressed by the one creature among all others made in the image of its supremely expressive creator.

When I tell people I am writing a novel, they often assume I have an evangelistic goal, that my purpose is to “use” fiction as a vehicle for converting the lost. But fiction writing is not an intellectual bait-and-switch tactic by which we lure unsuspecting pagans to the cross with the promise of adventure, mystery, or romance. Nor does the fiction genre need to be redeemed, as though a remarkable story well told does not justify its own existence. Good fiction is fiction that artfully reflects truth, whether that truth is the devastation of human depravity and our utter need for God or the sweetness of grace and the hope of redemption. Since it is not the revealed Word of God, it can no more proclaim the whole of the gospel message than can the complexities of the human eye or the beauty of a landscape. But insofar as fiction accurately—and with skill—portrays aspects of the human condition, it is a worthy pursuit.

And it is a rewarding place to look for God’s gift of common grace. Believers and unbelievers alike demonstrate breathtaking powers of perception and communication. Consider the following examples.

Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner both depict the heartbreaking consequences of racism, of denying the imago dei in our fellow human beings. In Too Late the Phalarope, the setting is apartheid. A pillar of the white community is caught in an affair with a young black mother; it is the color of his mistress rather than his promiscuity that destroys his family. In The Kite Runner, the brother-like bond of two Afghan boys, one a respectable Pashtun and the other a despised Hazara, is torn apart by the violent, fearful, and jealous acts of others and themselves. But the protagonists of both novels repent and seek redemption, and those they have wronged demonstrate the human capacity for forgiveness modeled by Christ. Paton was a Methodist who converted to Anglicanism, so theological themes in his works are perhaps easily explained. But it may be more surprising to find them used by Hosseini, who is Muslim. In a public appearance I attended, Hosseini remarked that he was compelled to write this story from a Christian worldview because redemption is not a concept found in Islam, yet he finds it an undeniable truth, one without which this story simply could not be told.

The characters created by Orthodox Rabbi Chaim Potok practice Judaism to varying degrees of devotion. But the most significant imagery of his masterful My Name is Asher Lev, for example, is Christian. Asher Lev is a gifted artist struggling to find his place in a fundamentalist Jewish culture that denies the legitimacy of visual expression. Tormented by his dual desires to please his parents and fulfill his calling as an artist, he embraces the quintessential image of suffering: crucifixion. His exhibition of a series of crucifixions cements the rift with his now publicly scandalized parents; as it did 2000 years ago, a Jewish boy’s association with crucifixion permanently ostracizes him from his people. Potok, like Hosseini, borrows from Christian theology to tell a story most authentic to human experience.

Jesus said that when we are weak then we are made strong, that the faith of a mustard seed can move mountains. This is movingly illustrated in Peter Hobbs’ The Short Day Dying. In the mining country of 1860s Cornwall, Methodist lay preacher and blacksmith Charles Wenmoth despairs at the poverty and death beating down his faith. But in the forge of his heart, the coals of faith are fanned into a flame by the weakest member of his community, a dying blind girl. Hobbs writes in the style of a nineteenth century journal, with scant punctuation and imperfect grammar, and yet the language and imagery he employs speaks truth in a way no exegetical commentary or systematic theology can. We see the bleak physical landscape paralleling the spiritual. As he trudges between the strip mines posting gospel tracts on poles and giving his own last coins to bitter widows and wheezing miners—nearly drowning in the river on one excursion—we understand why the conflicted minister identifies faith as a stone with qualities both positive (“faith is a hard stone I think quite a small thing but powerful and not easily crushed” [12]) and negative (“faith is a stone I could forget were there and live with always and not know what the oppressive weight in me were” [179]). And yet, how many times have we frail believers reminded ourselves that “they are passing things feelings we should not rely on them for truth…even doubt will not endure the Light of God” (177). By means of bold and sensitive storytelling we participate in Charles’ struggle with the eschatological “already/not yet” of a life bookended by mortality and hope.

And sometimes the value of fiction is what it reveals about the vacuousness of life without God, a conclusion that may be at odds with the author’s intentions. Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker, a novel about a young man who suffers a traumatic brain injury that causes him to believe his sister is an imposter, delves into the rapidly-growing field of neurotheology, the search for the “God gene.” The point of view rotates between the man, his sister, a doctor, and even the Sandhill Cranes crucial to the marsh setting, asking the reader to consider how and why human ancestors evolved to the point of believing in God. What if we could go back and reset our brains to some primal instinct before we invented God? the novelist wants us to wonder. But the regenerated reader is vividly struck by how man without God desperately wants to understand his purpose in the world—and how he cannot come to that truth on his own.

Similarly—though in a much more fantastical setting—the rejection of specific divine revelation in favor of religious pluralism is presented by Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, in which a boy is shipwrecked in a life raft for 227 days with a tiger. In India before the shipwreck, Pi declares himself a religious believer:

It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. (28)

Pi makes you want to believe in God. But which God? Even as he rejects “immobility as a means of transportation,” he refuses to choose between available transportation methods, simultaneously practicing Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam to the consternation of his various religious leaders. Then the ship transporting his zoo sinks, leaving him only a life raft for transportation. As he and his man-eating companion drift across the open sea unable to direct their course, Pi is spiritually afloat with no doctrine to guide him to safety. When he finally reaches land, his skeptical rescuers demand a more probable account of his journey, and Pi obliges. The reader is left wondering which version is accurate, the one the reader experienced with him while he was losing his grip on reality or the more believable one he tells the sailors later. “Since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?…And so it goes with God,” Pi declares (317). Martel’s narrative suggests that the content of faith is not important to God, just the act of seeking. And yet the reader, closing the book, suspects that the act of reading would indeed be more satisfying if it allowed for the discovery of Pi’s true story.

Thus “Christian” truths are not limited to “Christian fiction,” and some of the most eternally compelling protagonists are not the ones who mouth the sinner’s prayer on the final page. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners and the New York Times fiction bestseller lists are a surprisingly deep reserve of theological truths expressed by writers who may not always recognize the source of their illumination. But in reading these books, I learn more about myself, my creator, and my place in a fallen world, fulfilling my purpose—in the words of the Westminster Confession—“to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” (I also discover natural opportunities to discuss these books with my neighbors, a by-product of reading great literature that is an evangelistic task.)

Fiction is, therefore, far more than a dispensable leisure activity. It is an undeserved gift of language, a vital engagement in the cooperative human reflection of the divine image.


Mindy Withrow
is co-author of the History Lives series of church history books for ages 9-14 (volume four is scheduled for release in November). She runs a literary review blog at www.mindywithrow.com and is currently working on her first novel.

Books referenced in this essay:
Paton, Alan. Too Late the Phalarope. New York: Scribner, 1953.
Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead, 2003.
Potok, Chaim. My Name is Asher Lev. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.
Hobbs, Peter. The Short Day Dying. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005.
Powers, Richard. The Echo Maker. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. New York: Harcourt, 2001.

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This essay originally appeared in Modern Reformation (July/August 2007) and is posted with permission from Modern Reformation. For more information, visit www.modernreformation.org or call (800) 890-7556.

29. August 2007 by Mindy
Categories: My writing, On reading | 15 comments