As my review made clear yesterday, I was bothered by the representation of Christ in Haunt of Jackals. In some ways I found it more pagan than Christian. But that brings me back to a question I’ve asked myself a thousand times since I began writing: how can we faithfully represent God in fiction?
As God is real and alive in the world, and so writing about Him is not like writing about a character who was born entirely of my own imagination — as I am a Christian and responsible to glorify my God and represent Him accurately — as we who write fantasy try to tell the truth about the world even while we explore the possibilities of the imagination — how shall we then write?
I’ve long objected to Christian fiction that gives lip service to God in ways that are trite or shallow — God is a sort of shadowy absence, possibly because we don’t want to cross the line and misrepresent Him. (But then again, depicting God as an absence is certain misrepresentation.) William P. Young’s The Shack was the farthest thing from trite or shallow, yet I don’t feel Christians ought to put words directly into “God’s” mouth as Young did. C.S. Lewis created Aslan, a character allegorical of Christ who was not actually Christ, and this to my mind worked tremendously well. Tolkien created fallible characters who in various ways were types of Christ, much as Moses and Joseph were types of Christ in biblical history. This also works well.
But what do we do when we’re not working in allegory or in purely other-world fantasy? What do we do when our stories intersect with this world, when the God we’re writing about is the same one we know in reality? How can we write about Him without resorting to shallowness on the one hand or to dangerous misrepresentation on the other?
Two examples come to mind of how this can be done. One is Karen Hancock’s The Enclave, which we toured back in July. (See my posts here, here, and here.) In The Enclave, God more than once spoke directly to characters or led them in supernatural ways — but each time, Karen carefully used the words of scripture itself, and she never tore them out of their context. God comforted Cameron by saying “My strength is made perfect in weakness”; He called Zowan out of darkness through the words of Genesis.
This method of involving God as a character isn’t without its drawbacks — we can take scripture out of context and thus misrepresent it, and the use of only scripture as “God’s dialogue” is limiting. But it does work, and I think it works well.
A second method is to involve God through His impact on people. This doesn’t mean the classic Mandie out of quoting “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee” every time the heroine gets into trouble and having the words comfort her. I’m thinking in the veins of George MacDonald’s adult novels, like Malcolm, Sir Gibbie, or Heather and Snow. (MacDonald’s books, which are in the public domain and hard to find, are available to read online here.) Charles M. Sheldon’s In His Steps is another example.
In these books, we don’t hear God speaking or see Him walking around on earth, yet He is unquestionably there, active, and life-changing. We see this in the relationships the characters have with Him. MacDonald’s characters do not give lip service to Christ: rather, their devotion to Him is their key motivation. Their struggles, doubts, joys, and triumphs are inextricably wrapped up in their faith. I can easily imagine a Cal Nichols without Christ; I cannot imagine a Malcolm without Him.
In this type of Christian fiction, God has changed the lives of fictional characters just as He’s changed the lives of Christians in the real world, and just as we are called to live out the faith in such a way that others can “read” his work in us, so our characters can live out their faith and make God a real, present, active character in our books.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue, so please comment! How do you handle this tension in your own writing? How have you seen it handled? Of my conclusions, where do you agree and disagree? What facets am I missing?
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