Why Christians Need Good Literary Fiction in a Lost and Fake World

Over the course of the past several years, there’s been a growing fascination with the use of classical and contemporary fiction to rekindle Christian’s imaginations. Some of this is due to Christians riding the wave of increased cultural interest in an overarching story for the world. On the other hand, it might be argued that some of the first public figures and teachers to dramatically promote the reading and study of great fictional works have been Christians.

Regardless of how this began recently, it should be clear to we who are paying attention to the Christian intellectual and philosophical influencers online and in our real-world communities that there’s an intense and widespread interest in great literary works of fiction, especially those written by the most influential Christian authors of history. I’m thinking particularly of such writers as C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Milton, and John Bunyan. In some respects, this obsession with reading and studying great fantasy stories has led to various distractions from our true mission as the body of Christ – preaching the gospel and making disciples of Jesus. However, I believe that the popularization of good fantasy stories has done mostly good for western believers, as well as for western unbelievers.

The search for meaning, purpose, and truth has found an effective outlet in the use of good stories, and has led many toward answers to those questions. The question is – why? How can made-up stories reveal the truth about reality, and most of all, about the Lord Jesus Christ? And why do people feel the need to search for answers to the ultimate questions of life by delving into fantastical worlds and events? I believe the answers to those questions are found in the ultimate story of Scripture itself, as well as what we observe in life based on our knowledge of the reality revealed by God’s Word.

Scripture Reveals God through Stories

As I recently mentioned in “You’re a Co-Author in God’s Story for Your Life,” God has most clearly revealed Himself through stories. The climax of that story is the good news of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Messiah. But the whole of Scripture is one long, big series of interconnected stories. And this makes sense, since history itself is the story of God revealing Himself to His creation. Scripture simply describes and explains the highlights of that story.

Since we’re living in one wonderful, gigantic story of God’s glory, it’s intuitive that we make sense of our unique place in the world by learning from stories. In fact, the teachings of the apostles (the New Testament) are emphatic in carrying this out. If you read your New Testament, you’ll constantly find references to the accounts of God’s dealings with Old Testament Israel, and His promises to fulfill and complete this relationship through believers in Jesus. And this is what we see in the New Testament – Christians are part of the continuing story of God’s special people, and are in the process of experiencing exactly what He promised He’d do through the Messiah. Thus, God is using we believers to bring about the conflict resolution of the story He began in Genesis 1.

We Learn What’s Real, True, and Good through Stories

As a reflection of this spiritual participation in God’s epic of cosmic redemption through Jesus, we naturally find ourselves looking for more specific stories to understand exactly who we are, and what our role is. If you just think about how children learn about the world, you’ll see my point. Don’t most children learn best when you tell them stories about the most important elements of life? And don’t they naturally make up stories of their own when they role-play in imaginary worlds about them fulfilling adult callings? Hence, it’s obvious that learning and telling stories is an integral part of being human in this world, and learning its essential qualities.

And if you just survey human history, you’ll see that stories have always played a huge role in shaping people’s views of the world. For instance, every ancient culture has some creation myth that attempts to explain how the universe came into existence. Obviously, since these narratives are largely based on sinful human speculation, they’re mostly made-up. Yet they still deceptively gave people a sense of meaning and stability in the chaos, misery, and confusion of human living.

Turning to biblical teaching, we could truly say that God has designed our learning method to come through stories. The clearest proof of this is the fact that even the didactic, or merely instructional, content of the New Testament is set in the context of a story about the original context. In other words, Scripture isn’t usually written directly to us, but was written to a historical audience with their own story. We can only learn what instructions directly apply to us if we understand them in relation to the people and circumstances to which they were originally written. That is, we need to learn the story of those people, at that time, in that place, and then draw applicable principles from our commonalities with them. When you seek to learn how to put the New Testament teachings into practice, you’re learning from the stories of the New Testament people and Christians.

All that I’ve said about learning from stories implies that God has built within us a special power of imagination. This is the ability to create worlds in our minds that aren’t directly affected by real life. The power of imagination is something that’s been recently diligently cultivated and harnessed to help people understand reality, and our place in the world. But it’s important to remember the dangerous tendencies of human imagination.

Imagination Can Be Used for Good or Evil

Like almost every faculty possessed by man, the imagination is a useful tool with the potential for good and bad. As it’s been since the fall of mankind, society usually uses imagination to fulfill their sinful desires of self-autonomy and idolatry. Genesis 6:5 makes this clear when it says,

“. . . every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (NASB95)

In our natural, depraved, condition, all that we think in our imaginations serve sinful purposes. Yet we believers have the privilege and joy of being able to think thoughts in accordance with love and truth. So the Christian’s imagination is now a potential source of goodness, truth, and beauty.

Obviously, the most important place we see this is in the Scriptures themselves. The New Testament is full of illustrations, metaphors, and stories that teach spiritual truth and principles. If the Lord didn’t intend us to use our imaginations to understand who He is, and what we ought to do, then He wouldn’t have included these in His Word.

Although Christians intuitively understand that the imagination is a good gift from God given for our benefit, many of us have dreadful suspicions of creating stories now. There’s much reason to be wary of creating stories, since it’s so easy to misrepresent truth, and to distract people from the most important realities. Nevertheless, our condition as believers, the need for Scriptural instruction, and the unique condition of our anti-modern western society all demand that we strive to cultivate holy creativity, imagination, and story-telling. And this process was started years ago, but has recently been accelerated in response to distortion, corruption, and destruction of helpful creativity.

The Modern Fathers of Christian Storytelling and the Recent Recovery of Their Philosophy

It might be argued that the most recent renaissance of Christian fiction started around the 1950s, with the publication of the first of Tolkien’s and Lewis’s two fantasy series. That would be The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, respectively. Since that time, there have been dozens of Christian novels and fictional stories published, especially around the 90s with the Dispensationalist end-times craze that swept evangelicalism. So, we have at least a few fictional series that incited the Christian imagination in the last century, and recaptured a more adventurous, mysterious, and historically rooted view of our place in the world.

But since the jump-start of the information and Internet revolution that started around the 2010s, and reached a deafening crescendo around 2020, there’s been an increased interest in the thinking, creativity, and storytelling that Lewis and Tolkien taught through their books. You simply have to look for podcasts, YouTube video’s, blogs, and books online to see that for at least the past decade, the fantasy and fiction realm of storytelling has grown in popularity among Christians and non-Christians alike.

What is the explanation for this renewed interest in storytelling that is framed in terms of themes and motifs derived from ancient western civilization? I, along with others, would argue, that this is a push-back against the meaninglessness, mechanical, and stimulation-overloaded technological culture that we live in. Most people are addicted to the apps and websites on their phones, and live their lives as cogs in an industrial machine that gives them constant and meaningless pleasure, while at the same time barring them from most of what it means to be human. Most people are simply controlled by the technology they use, and have no consciousness of a clear purpose for their lives, besides getting the most pleasure they can.

Unfortunately, even many Christians have fallen into the trap of being drained and dragged by their phones, computers, and TVs. Their relationships are shallow because they mostly talk using quick text messages and social media posts. Their thinking is underdeveloped and deformed because they get most of their information of Internet search engines and social media news feeds. And their lives are often mediocre because they’ve been distracted and ensnared by the constant offer of pleasure through entertainment, infinite information, and online “communities”.

This is not to say that the Internet and technology have no benefits. Obviously, I’m writing using Substack, a computer, and the Internet. Yet most of our online access, and phone usage, has been abused and mistreated. Instead of wisely stewarding our digital resources and tools, we have let them dictate how we think and spend our time.

Further, because most of the Internet is controlled and populated by the deceptive desires of godless idolatry, what we learn about the world from all its popular media is often subtle distortions of reality. If what we think about people and the global world is mostly determined by the social media posts we view, and the news podcasts we listen to, then we usually will come away with an unbalanced, and even false, understanding of what people and the world are like.

Thus, the hunger for reality, purpose, and meaning that many fiction enthusiasts have been feeling. Because most of western society has been found to be fake and meaningless, people have been seeking the lacking truth and meaning in satisfying stories. And herein lies one of the paradoxical powers of made-up stories. The world has become so false and deceptive, that many people seem to need a view of the world that communicates the reality about the world in ways that only fantasy stories can do.

This is not to say that the best source of truth and wisdom isn’t the holy Scriptures. Their descriptions of God’s mighty acts in history are the fullest, clearest, and most beautiful revelations of Himself, our nature, and our responsibilities to Him. Yet for those who already believe the gospel, and worship Jesus, fictional stories in the western tradition of Lewis and Tolkien convey a beauty, meaning, and adventurous view of the world unlike much other literature.

What is this view of the world we find in their books and writings, and those like them? It’s an understanding that all truth is God’s truth, and that the stories that were told by the constituent peoples of western civilization had underlying truths about the reality that God made. Further, they’ve called back many westerners to the Christian virtues that built western civilization, such as faith, love, brotherhood, courage, industriousness, tradition, and joy. Especially, I believe that their medieval setting has satisfied the longing of many believers for an intuitive connection with the natural world. In Narnia and Middle Earth, there are no phones, computers, TVs, smart watches, or street lights. The characters live in a seemingly primitive, earthy, and rooted environment. And finally, these worlds recognize the goodness in the differences possessed by the people God has made. Instead of attempting to make everyone the same, with shared practices, looks, and likes, these fantasy worlds appreciate the goodness in the different conditions and behaviors manifested by different people groups – i.e. nations. In a world that has removed many of the local traditions and heritages once celebrated by true communities, people have found a goodness in reading about people who live together with common activities, possessions, and lifestyles.

Besides the unique fantasy genre of the Tolkien and Lewis fantasies, there’s a bit more to say about writing and reading fictional stories in general.

Fictional Worlds Can Bring Out What’s Most Meaningful to Us

I just want to end with some good uses for fictional writings, as well as a reminder to always be guided and enlightened by Scripture. I’ve already said that I believe the recent fascination with fantasy stories has much to do with the falseness and deceptiveness of the hyper-technological world in which we live. And so I’ll repeat that one of the benefits of fiction is that it can exaggerate the realities in our lives that are concealed by our modern thinking through fictional representations of them. Sometimes, in order to see the underlying truth about something, you need to dress it up in a way that makes it undeniable. And that’s how fiction can help us sometimes.

Secondly, fiction helps us understand reality because we believers were made and remade for another world – the new heavens and earth. That world is unimaginable to us now, since our senses are still limited by the constraints of a fallen, corrupted, universe. Yet through fiction, we can grasp something of the other-worldliness of the eternal age. This is exactly what God does in the Book of the Revelation. In that conclusive end of Scripture’s story, John describes pictures of heavenly and eternal conditions, in order to convey a realm that is beyond our current perception. For example, Satan is shown as a dragon, and the eternal community of God’s people is described as a massive city in the form of a cube. Made-up stories can often help us to understand what spiritual entities and events are like. Scripture abounds with these types of illustrations.

Finally, fiction can help us simulate hypothetical scenarios about life that prepare us for the future. Using the governing principles of the real world, we can imagine a multitude of possible events that could happen, and work out what the proper Christian response is. Thinking about the lives of people who are different from us can also improve our understanding of their condition, and move us to compassion and concern.

Much more could be said about the benefits of creating and reading good fictional stories, but I’ll leave it there for now. I hope you have a better appreciation for the need for Christians to harness fictional stories and lore to understand and teach the truths of Scripture that are told through the ultimate story. All of history is God’s story, and we’re essential parts of it. So learn, live, and tell the story of God is doing through His only Son, and by His Spirit. This starts by delighting in the Scriptures, but can often benefit from enjoying and learning made-up stories that powerfully illustrate God’s work in people to prepare them for the next world. We were made to live and tell glorious stories of God’s grace.