Theological Fiction?
Why would a trained theologian attempt to learn the craft of long-form fiction? A friend spoke this curiosity allowed the other day as we discussed the draft of my first novel which he’d just finished reading.
It’s a fair question. I’m not half bad at this scholarship thing. I love losing myself in dense theolgoical and philosophcial texts, then emerging with new ideas. Those ideas are at home within speicialized conversations, but would suck all the oxygen out of most other rooms.
I also love the challenge of communicating these ideas to a popular audience, whether in a sermon, a blogpost, or a classroom.
So why leave the realm of transcendent truth speculation in order to start telling stories?
The great and now late Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was once asked why, as a student of history, he wrote historical fiction. He responded—and I’m paraphrasing— “History can tell us what happened. But it can’t tell us how it felt to live through what happened. Only fiction can do that.”
I suspect seomthing similar may be true in my discipline of thoelogy. Theological sources—scripture, chiefly, and the gathered tradition who thinks within it—can tell us how the faith language holds together, and how it constructs a meaningul world around God’s promises to cratures. I can speculate on what Providence, for instance, means in such a framework.
But in order to discover what it feels like to live in that Providential world, I’ll need a story. This is what the tradition of theological novelists does. Marilynne Robinson’s fiction is a great example. She writes some great non-fictional theology too. But her tales of Gilead feature Christians who live their faith right where life seems most impossible and graceless. And she needs Jack and Lila and Rev. Boughton in order to get at all of that.
It might not even be this world: C. S. Lewis created fantasy and science-fictional worlds in order to test out ideas about grace, redemption, and virtue. Narnia and Perelandra place the graet theologial themes in adjacent universes, so we can explore them in all their strangeness.
So my tale of coming of age in the farmlands and holiness country of American Midwest is my attempt to do something like that. To test out what it feels to wrestle with the great questions of theology in the liminted thoughtworlds of human culture and life.
I suppose I’m following the trail left by my own curiosities, and finding that it’s taking me into fictional invention. I’m trusting that here too there is capactity for revelation.
Ingredients
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Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
