Touchstone Magazine
My fellow Evangelicals publish reams upon reams of prose. What we have not tended to write is anything recognized as having literary value by the literary world. What makes this failure remarkable is that our Protestant forebears include a number of people who did: Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, John Milton, and John Bunyan, to mention a few.
Equally remarkable is the host of near contemporary conservative Christians—sometimes quite evangelical and even evangelistic, though not “Evangelicals”—who were also important writers. G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor are all recognized as important literary figures even by people who do not share their Christian commitment.
Where is the contemporary American Evangelical who can make such a claim?....
A True Worldview
First, O’Connor found a true worldview, encapsulated in dogma, which constituted a lens that brings human nature and human significance into piercing clarity. “Dogma,” she said, “is an instrument for penetratingreality. . . . It is one of the functions of the Church to transmit the prophetic vision that is good for all time, and when the novelist has this as a part of his own vision, he has a powerful extension of sight.”
O’Connor understood that good writers do not simply parrot these insights; they must take this doctrinal understanding and apply it to the concrete realities of human life. “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”
When we do not understand this distinction, Christian fiction becomes mere religious propaganda. “The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality.” Doctrine is a light to see human experience by, not a formula to be dressed up in a fictional disguise.
Though O’Connor did not put it this way, the biblical worldview gives us several truths relevant to the writer of fiction or poetry. It teaches us that everything in creation is significant, pregnant with meaning, because it all came from and relates back to the eternal Logos. It teaches us to see life as a drama of redemption in which human choices matter, and to see all of life, not just religious conversion, in those terms.
And it teaches us the value not only of God’s creation but also of our own creativity, for we were made in the image of the Creator. As J. R. R. Tolkien put it in his seminal essay “On Faerie Stories,” “We make still by the law in which we’re made."....
Purposeful Art
The second form of nurture O’Connor felt she had received from the Catholic Church was a definition of art that affirmed a spiritual purpose, indeed, a vocation, for the artist distinct from that of the propagandist. She quotes Thomas Aquinas as saying that art “is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made.” And she adds,
We are not content to stay within our limitations and make something that is simply a good in and by itself. Now we want to make something that will have some utilitarian value. Yet what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God.
This is a telling comment. That which reflects God may have an evangelistic effect. But if evangelism must be the primary purpose of everything we write, then a lot of God’s character will remain unreflected—which will,ironically, not help the cause of evangelism. Also, the emphasis on “the good of that which is made” puts theology on record as affirming the value—indeed, the necessity—of the hard work and craftsmanship required for good writing.....
So it is not surprising that, with no such emphasis coming from its leaders, the popular Evangelical subculture seems even more addicted to pragmatism in itsapproach, as a brief trip through the “Christian bookstore” will show. Fiction can only be justified if it has an overt evangelistic purpose; works of visual art must have a Scripture verse tacked under them.
Perhaps when our theologians become concerned with the good of the thing made, some of our people will, too.
Fictional Mystery
The third form of nourishment O’Connor acknowledged as a gift from the Catholic Church was a sense of mystery. Good fiction ultimately probes the mysteries of life: Why are we here? Why do we suffer? What is the Good?
“It is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners,” she wrote. Therefore, “the type of mind that can understand good fiction is . . . the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery."....
This cannot be unrelated to the fact that we as a community can seem too much like the generation O’Connor described, “that has been made to feel that the aim of learning is to eliminate mystery.” Our services, like our fiction, are justified by their efficiency in achieving pragmatic goals. Our sermons are full of practical, easy steps to spiritual victory, a better marriage, or financial success; our music is designed to express comfortable emotions; everything is aimed at maximizing the body count at the altar call.
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Our failure to encourage our people to apply doctrine to the realities of life; our failure to include in our theology the whole counsel of the God who called Bezalel and Oholiab and gifted them as artists; and our pragmatism, an uncritical reflection of American culture rather than a biblical mandate, with our mystery-impoverished worship tradition are all simple failures to be what we claim to be, faithful to Scripture. They could be changed without threatening any of the doctrinal emphases that we think we have been right about. (more)
