Episode Details

When you reach for a novel, do you ever feel guilty for not picking up your Bible, a devotional, or missionary biography? Some question whether fiction itself is spiritually healthy. And even if novels are harmless entertainment, do we actually need them? Are they worth our time and attention, not to mention our money? Perhaps we have more important questions to ask, such as: What if God made humans to get healthier from reading stories? What if we in fact desperately need them?

We’ll look at how:

1. Fiction is God’s idea.
2. Fiction is personally transformative.
3. Fiction creates stronger communities.

Concession stand

• Of course, we emphasize Scripture reading above any other book.
• However, we don’t address how often or when to read fiction instead of Bible-reading.
• We know not all fiction is morally good or even neutral; we still need discernment.
• We won’t speak as much about Christian-made fiction, only fiction in general.

1. Fiction is God’s idea

Fiction opens up worlds that abstract statements do not, which is why some of Jesus’ best-known statements came in connection with a fictional story or an actual event. Reading fiction can help a pastor grow in his ability to imagine the world he wants his listeners to inhabit.

—Trevin Wax

• God is a storyteller. He spoke and wrote true stories as well as fictional ones.
• Scripture’s stories include Proverbs 7, 2  Samuel 12, and Luke 15.
• Judges 9 even includes Jotham’s fantastical parable of the talking trees.
• The Bible records many visions, dreams, and prophecies.
• All these came true, yet included fictional and fantastical imagery.

Weak imaginations have always fallen before Scripture’s chief enemies: legalists, rationalists, and libertines. Orthodoxy demands imagination, and so we are just asking for serious spiritual problems if we deny the imaginative life to our children.

—Douglas Jones

• Fiction is something God intended humans to create.
• J. R. R. Tolkien said that we are “sub-creators” with God.
• We create worlds and tell stories because God has done the same.
• Fiction counts as a “good gift” from God (James 1:17).
• Fiction is not random, extraneous, or unnecessary, but core to our human experience.

I’ve found that most people who tell me that fiction is a waste of time are folks who seem to hold to a kind of sola cerebra vision of the Christian life that just doesn’t square with the Bible. The Bible doesn’t simply address man as a cognitive process but as a complex image-bearer who recognizes truth not only through categorizing syllogisms but through imagination, beauty, wonder, awe. Good fiction isn’t a “waste of time” for the same reason good music and good art aren’t wastes of time. They are rooted in an endlessly creative God who has chosen to be imaged by human beings who create. Culture isn’t irrelevant. It’s part of what God commanded us to do in the beginning, and that he declares to be good.

—Russell Moore

2. Fiction is personally transformative

Like a magic portal, a story sweeps us into another life and world and allows us to imagine and feel circumstances outside of ourselves. We walk in another’s shoes and see life from a different vantage point. And before we know it, a truth has been planted so deep within our souls that we can’t shake it. We have been both entertained and informed, and maybe even a little changed.

—Alisa Hope Wagner

• Fiction is “the lie that tells the truth.”
• Fiction awakens the moral imagination.
• Nathan didn’t preach a sermon to King David; instead, Nathan gave him an emotional experience.
• Jesus didn