Why Read Fiction? | Understanding the Bible
Luther, town halls, and Shakespeare
I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure, just as heretofore, when letters have declined and lay prostrate, theology, too, has wretchedly fallen and lay prostrate…Certainly it is my desire that there should be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible…
Martin Luther
Karl Barth famously encouraged Christians to hold their Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, interpreting newspapers through the Bible. And this is all well and good, except for the problem of reading the Bible. It's no surprise that many Christians today think they are reading newspapers through the lens of the Bible, when quite the opposite is happening, and the Bible becomes subject and supporter of their political, or economic, or social views.
We're all in danger of this to some degree, partially because the Bible is a strange collection of books, of ancient cultures, of one-sided conversations in the epistles, of poems and apocalyptic visions. It becomes much easier to reduce the Bible into good and bad, and to read the newspaper through that same lens.
This is why Luther's urging is appropriate: without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot endure. This is a shocking statement. Without poets and critics and writers, we won't have a robust theology of who God is and what this God might be up to, and how that might affect us humans.
Let me, then, add to Barth's dictum: we ought to not simply read newspapers (not that anyone does this, but you get the idea) alongside our Bibles. We ought to open up novels and poems—fiction—and read them, sit with them, and contemplate them alongside the strange books of the Bible. For they inform each other.
A few weeks ago, a U.S. senator took heat for proclaiming in a town hall that “we're all going to die.” This was in reference to Medicaid cuts and their potential affect. And a day or two later, this senator doubled-down (surely knowing better than this) not only “apologizing” that she had to explain that everyone will die, but sneaking in a reference to believing in Jesus in order to live forever.
It's reasons like this that we need to read novels alongside the Bible.
This is the most nihilistic take on our present world and the most cynical take on Jesus that I’ve seen in some time. The Bible’s story continues to urge: what happens on earth matters. Claiming we’ll all die isn’t a ticket to escape responsibility. Jesus, in fact, points to death as a reason to take responsibility for who you are and what you’re doing—by linking the fact of death to the need to repent and bear fruit in Luke 13:1-9.
But to understand this you actually have to read the story and—here's the kicker—know how stories work. This also cuts against the ham-fisted way that some people want to ban books because they have violence, or racism, or challenge traditional values, or sex, or represent childhood trauma, or contain graphic content. Have you read the Bible? It's unrelenting in its portrayal of humanity. Child sacrifice, ethnic divisions, seduction, rape, alternative models of government, alternative economies: all this is there.
Those who want to ban books often haven't read the book to which they're appealing. For not only are all these things there, but we need a storied lens to understand these actions. Judah, for example, ends up unwittingly sleeping with his dead son's wife (thinking she's “only” a prostitute), and gets caught in his hypocrisy. And then, his line--and Tamar seducing her father-in-law--becomes part of the royal lineage of Israel and Jesus.
How do we read such a story? Isn't God benefiting a morally corrupt individual? Isn't Tamar herself taking duplicitous action—and honored for it?
The Bible doesn't give clear comment. For that, we need stories. Stories deal with complex motivations and morally gray actions. This is the stuff of humanity. This is the stuff of the Bible. God seems committed to humans, even when humans are duplicitous. God seems to love it when underdogs get the upper hand.
What this isn't: the easy, moralistic stories to which many people seek to reduce the Bible. What if the story of David and Goliath isn't about slaying our giants, but about God's ongoing deliverance of his people, prefiguring the ultimate deliverance to come through Christ?
You don't read every passage of a novel and ask what the simplistic moral is. Why do we attempt to do so with the Bible? It's not a children's book (and don't get me started there). It's an invitation to a different story, to a different way of looking at the world. Yes, it has embedded ethics. And yes, they often are about championing the underdog, looking out for the helpless, seeking justice for the hurting. This is the repeated refrain of the storyline.
And if you read it like this, like a story rather than a set of simplistic morals, it might change how you look at the world.
As the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, who passed away earlier this month, writes, “The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.”
And the reverse works, as well. When you sit at the breakfast table and read the Bible alongside a work of fiction, you see how they inform each other. The story and scope of the Bible helps us understand fiction, of which there still exist ironclad rules. In good fiction, the motivations of characters are complex. And while their actions must be clear, they receive recompense for their actions: if we follow a cold-blooded murderer, he can’t get away and live in luxury. Or if he does, the rules are being broken specifically to show the lack of morals in society.
In fact, as the poet and literary scholar Michael Edwards writes,
If the biblical reading of life is in any way true, literature will be strongly drawn towards it. Eden, Fall, Transformation, in whatever guise, will emerge in literature as everywhere else. The dynamics of a literary work will be likely to derive from the Pascalian interplays of greatness and wretchedness, of wretchedness and renewal, of renewal and persisting wretchedness.
We read fiction to better understand the Bible, but the sweep of the Bible, the grand narrative, the longing for rescue and resurrection: these inhabit fiction. And we see this in the fiction we read, the way characters must die to who they are in order to become something more, the longing for relationship, the search to return to Eden—ultimately fruitless on our own—the way characters must face their own complicity on whatever problems they’re facing, the longing in every story for Christ—not in some quaint “you need Jesus” sort of way, but for cosmic renewal, for personal transformation, for lasting rescue, for redemption morally, psychologically, and physically.
Fiction points to the beauty and fragility of the human condition. They invite much more emotional engagement and contemplation than we often give them. Take metaphors. When Jesus says that “you are the salt of the world,” this isn’t a moment to analyze. We step into the story and contemplate what salt is, what it might have been 2,000 years ago (certainly more rare and important than now), and ways the metaphor can expand our understanding. Or, when Shakespeare writes one of his most-famous metaphors:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.
We see the fragility and frustration of life. That this is said by a man who recently committed murder in order to become king, it shows the dissolution of hope, of meaning, of purpose in the face of moral turpitude. With a cup of coffee, read alongside the Bible, we see an existential case for morality—it actually helps give life meaning.
The two point toward each other. They give richer understanding to each other. We need fiction in order to read the Bible, because we’re often suckled on fiction, and as we become more sophisticated we cannot allow ourselves to become more simplistic with the biblical text (which is what often happens). And with fiction, we read it not only for pleasure but windows into another life (I’m paraphrasing C.S. Lewis), to see with new eyes our own.
May one enrich the other in your life.