Concordia TheoBLOGical Seminary

Can Evangelical Christians write good fiction?  The answer is “no” according to Reformed theologian, Peter Leithart.  It’s a provocative position, to be sure.  No doubt, for every such assertion, a panoply of exceptions could be found.

Yesterday I blogged about the atrophying of the imagination of modern Christians.  I made the point that church leaders are often concerned about either over intellectualizing the faith, or under intellectualizing.  About emotionalizing too much or not emotionalizing enough.  Those balances are necessary to keep, but it seems to me that there is also a severe aridity of imagination in the church today.

In particular, I tried to point out that there is a problem when believers, especially pastors, diminish the importance of fiction and poetry by concluding that such things are not practical, have no benefit beyond mere amusement, and, as some have claimed, are a waste of time.  These are often the same pastors, I think, who feel that three hours listening to an aged home-bound parishioner detail her battle with sciatica for the ten gajillionth time is not an afternoon well spent.  Having a healthy imagination is critical to having an ability to empathize with others. Everyone knows instinctively that every meaningful story bears repeating.  Ask any toddler who pulls the same ragged choo choo train story off the shelf night after night.

Peter Leithart makes a fascinating case in this article that there is a serious theological flaw in large segments of Protestantism which disables them from writing creatively.  There may be more behind the feeble state of the arts in Christendom than just this one thing, but I’m sure he’s correct, up to a point.

In 1529, reforming churchmen gathered in Marburg to attempt to compose a statement of agreement.  Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli were the two main headliners.  The parties drafted a document with fifteen bullet points and everyone could agree completely on the first fourteen.  It was the final point, the one dealing with the presence of Christ’s Body and Blood in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, where they parted.  Luther was for it.  Zwingli was agin it.  This, according to Leithart, is the root cause for the dearth of great literature from the Zwinglian (evangelical, fundamentalist, protestant) wings of Christianity.

He makes his case more effectively than I can here.  You should read his article.  As Lutherans, we would probably make a similar case, though a bit differently.

I could argue this psychologically and say that the part of the mind which allows one to accept the notion of Jesus’s real bodily presence in the bread and wine is the same part of the brain which permits one to suspend his disbelief to become enthralled in a novel.  This is not to say that the presence of Christ is a fiction.

I hope I can do justice to Leithart.  Zwingli denies that Jesus is bodily present in the supper to be eaten and drunk because he finds such a thing unreasonable.  The finite (bread and wine) cannot contain the infinite (God).  Of course, the Lutherans know that this is not just a statement about the Lord’s Supper.  It is an attack on the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.  If Zwingli is correct that the finite cannot contain the infinite, then how, as St. Paul teaches, could the fullness of the Deity dwell in bodily form?

Leithart accuses the modern theological heirs of Zwingil of a type of Manichaenism, a vast separation of finite and infinite, body and spirit, sign and reality.  No so within classical Christian thought.  That signs can be more than empty symbols, hollow mental constructions, is central to a Lutheran understanding of the Lord’s Supper.

Is it too much of a stretch then to conclude that an incarnational, sacramental theology - in the broadest sense - is necessary to fully appreciate the brilliance and power of myth / story / poetics?  Not really.