Christian Fiction

Merrie Destefano, sweetly tagged me for a meme. I’ll get to that, though I’m not sure I’ve ever had an odd job. Certainly nothing as odd as the creepy job she had.

And Noel Devries posted a response to my sex in the CBA post. I’ll talk more about that at some point, too.

But today I want to call attention to some discussion that was opened up last week at Becky Miller’s A Christian Wordview of Fiction site. The discussion is all about what makes a book Christian. And whether Christians should purposely weave Christians themes into stories or just aim for a good story, a work of art, and hope that a Christian theme emerges. Or do we even have to hope for a Christian theme to come out? Is art, for art’s sake, glorifying to God even if there is no salvific or soul-enlarging theme woven through? If you care about the discussion, you can read the posts here, and here, and here.

I forgot I was a blogger now and could post my looonnnnggggg and tiresome opinions over here, so I ended up blogging on her blog. And I would have been happy to leave it there.

But then I went over read this post at Back to the Mountain. And that blog, which describes things Steve didn’t like about Andrew Peterson’s book, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, made me realize where all the people were coming from who say we don’t need to labor to write Christian books, we should labor for good art and that will glorify God.

Steve liked things about the book and posted about them here.

But he was also bothered by some things. He didn’t like what he saw as needless vulgarity. He didn’t like the disobedience in the children that wasn’t paid back, and he didn’t like what he calls bullying in one of the adult characters.

Now all three of these things fall under the heading of personal preference, I think. If you don’t like bodily function humor then no amount of argument is going to change your mind. And I’m wiling to admit that I’m uncouth and I wish I were more genteel. So I don’t knock a guy for disliking vulgar humor. I thought that humor was well done, but hey, I’m not the best judge of such things, I like the farting preacher videos, after all.

The disobedient children deal…I can appreciate Steve’s point. Kids do disobey but we don’t want our heroes disobeying their parents. I’m trying to remember when the kids in the book disobeyed. I think they snuck off on a treasure hunt when their mom and grandfather thought they were somewhere else. I don’t think they lied outright as much as they didn’t disabuse the folks of the incorrect notion they held. I just didn’t see a lot of disobedience going on. And that makes me wonder if we don’t judge books written by Christians more harshly than books written by nonChristians. Do we expect that Christians should know better and their characters should be sinless or else reap the consequences of every sin? Because that never happens. Even Rahab the liar is rewarded for protecting the spies and God doesn’t put in a disclaimer telling us he is truth, he loves truth, and if she’d trusted him he could have trusted the spies without her help. Yes, lying is sinful. No, we don’t always get caught and punished for it. So we Christians don’t want to write books that lead children astray and make it seem like disobedience is a good way to get a job done because it works for the heroes in books all the time. But I didn’t think there was any danger of children getting that message from On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness.

The bullying adult character? I didn’t see him as a bully at all. I saw him as blind and, yes, unlikable, but I could forgive him because his motivation was to protect his family. He was a larger than life, tough guy who lived a rough life and who took action when he thought something was threatening the ones he loved. He was an old sinner. No doubt. To wish him dead is kind of a strong reaction, but, again, that’s a matter of personal preference.

So all of that is kind of hard to argue against and not really worth spending too much time discussion, maybe.

What makes me post about this is this paragraph–Steve’s final comment:

Theology. Those who are familiar with my reviews are probably wondering about the theological points. There aren’t many. The Good Guys acknowledge and revere the Creator, and they do pray. There isn’t a lot happening here theologically, but such as occurs is good. (In a story of this sort I think we can allow a low bar, especially for the first in a series.) Perhaps later installments will improve on that–I admit the theology of multiple sentient species is tricky, and I do wonder about the nature of the Fangs: are they more or less demons–the designated damned? Or can they be saved? And what is salvation here anyway? (The humans evidently derive in some way from Adam, so they do need a savior.)

I’m running out of time and so are you so I’ll try to say something about this tomorrow. I just wanted to get it on here today for you all (yes, you, my many, many readers ) could think about it. Does there need to be theology in this book? Is there theology in every book whether we plan it or not? Do we have to deal with sin in our books in an eternal sort of way or can we just look at how the character’s actions affect them and others in time frame of the book?