Should Christians Read Fiction?

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger, and we don’t know where Bryan Broome is. Hopefully he hasn’t fallen off the face of the earth. We’ll get back to you on that.

Today we’re talking about stories and fiction and why Christians should read fiction, if they should. Let’s not presume our conclusions here.

Why not?

I don’t know. So let’s start off with stories. Why don’t you tell us a story, Greg, that had an influence on your life.

You mean tell about a story, not actually tell it. Thank you, I did not really want to tell a story.

We were talking before the podcast and my first reaction to that question was that my mind immediately goes back to all of the children’s stories that I heard when I was a kid, particularly those that Captain Kangaroo read to me – he was a TV personality, in case you don’t know – when I was 5 and 6, things like The Little House, Make Way for Ducklings, The Story About Ping, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, and there are a few others.

They stuck with me, and when we knew that we were going to have a first baby, we were wandering through a local – we would have called them a department store, I don’t know what this generation calls them – and I saw a bunch of books thrown out on a table, and I looked through them and there was Make Way for Ducklings. We didn’t know the gender of the child and we hadn’t settled on a name, obviously, but I said, “I’ve got to buy that because my baby needs to hear that story read.”

The story is sweet and simple. The hand artwork is also sweet and simple and very well-done, semi-realistic, with a little bit of a comic flair. It’s the story of Mama and Papa mallard, who settle down in a park – I think it’s in New York – and she lays her eggs and the ducklings hatch, and while Daddy goes off to do whatever daddy ducks do, she has to take her ducklings for a walk.

The traffic cop has to stop traffic for them, and everybody is like, “There’s ducks coming!”

“What?”

“Ducks! A bunch of mallards!”

It was C.S. Lewis who said that if a children’s story is not good enough for an adult, it’s not good enough for a child. There is that in us that relates to stories. Stories can be simple or they can be complicated, and both have their appeal. Sometimes the sheer simplicity of a story will strike home with us. You can think of the story of Ruth in scripture, or Esther, which is a little more subtle or complicated.

On the other hand, you can think of Lord of the Rings or War and Peace or Crime and Punishment. There are all kinds of stories with degrees of both simplicity and complexity, and that shouldn’t surprise us. God is one and he’s many. He is simple and yet his attributes are infinite. So we should be able to find things in stories of various sorts that appeal to us.

Of course, the question is why stories at all and why make-believe at all? You’ve mentioned that you’ve heard this, and I’ve heard it too. Why read something that never happened? Why spend your time reading about non-reality when you can read about things that have actually happened? I think there’s a number of answers to that, and we can work our way through.

Then, of course, the other side is why is story so powerful? Why do we like to hear stories? Even if they’re stories that really happened, more or less. Why are we so drawn to them? So those are a couple things we can talk about.

You haven’t told me yet what kinds of stories made an impact on you when you were young?

The first thing that comes to my mind is actually The Great Escape, which is a World War 2 movie, if you’re not familiar. It’s a bunch of British and American and one stray Australian prisoners of war in a Nazi POW camp. It’s based on real events. It’s condensed. Some of the characters are composites of real people, but it’s based on what actually happened when a lot of prisoners of war escaped by tunneling out of the camp.

I think what I can point to as the thing about this story that I like is the teamwork. You have this cast of characters that all have different strengths and weaknesses and friendships that work together. There’s a clear enemy and a clear goal and they work together towards that goal. To see the friendships grow and the setbacks and everything is part of what makes the story so compelling to me.

You start to recognize, “Oh, I know a lot of people who have different strengths and weaknesses. I have a lot of different friendships with different people. I fit somewhere in this line-up.” There’s a place for you to enter in as another character and relate to other people the way you’ve seen relationships modeled for you.

Actually, that’s one of the things that draws me to folk music as well. David teases me because I don’t like this one YouTuber who’s a very excellent singer, but he sings all the parts himself, so his voice doesn’t blend because you can’t blend with yourself. You just have lots of layers. It sounds too perfect to me. I’m like, “Where does someone else jump in?” There’s no invitation to the audience. So that’s what I really enjoy as a common theme in a lot of stories.

I’m a sucker for team stories, particularly if it’s the minor characters all banding together. My favorite is when something has happened to our main heroes. They’re not available, and all the little guys have to get together and maybe save the day or save the big guys or something like that. Those have always appealed to me. When I collected comic books it was also the team books – Avengers, Teen Titans, and things like that.

Then you come to something like Lord of the Rings, and again most certainly there’s a team here, with all you’ve described. You’re not just following one man or one woman. You’re following a community that inter-relate on a lot of levels.

I like the word you picked – modeled. You see life modeled for you, and if they’re Christian heroes, godly heroes, or at least men and women who are conforming themselves outwardly to God’s laws, you can see something admirable, something where you can say, “I want friends like that. I want to be a friend like that. I want to create a team like that. I want a community like that. Oh, wow, look, they’re falling apart. No, they can’t! But they’re going to destroy my favorite TV show. Oh wait, wait, I see! I bet this is what’s going to happen. No, it didn’t happen! Oh wait, there it is, okay, I see. Yes! Yes! I feel so good about it!” and at the end of it all everybody is having fun, drinking and celebrating and playing music and whatever.

I think I would like at this point to address the idea that isn’t it better to study the things that really happened? There’s a problem with that concept, I think. You pick up an autobiography or biography, especially a biography, or a history book and you say, “These things really happened.” Odds are, not.

Biographies or autobiographies, almost certainly not, because the person is telling you some things and deliberately holding back others, because he probably doesn’t want to make himself seem like the sinner and idiot he really is, so you are getting a distorted view. And even if he’s doing his best to tell the truth, or his biographer is, he’s picking and choosing details because it has to fit into a book or a movie.

I appreciated what you said earlier, “based on a true story.” Yeah, we know what that means. Not much. And even a history book, as carefully researched as they may be…

It’s impossible for it to be exhaustive. And even if it had every fact that happened, it would be so much noise that you couldn’t figure out what was important of the things that happened. And then you’ll still only have one person’s perspective on every item of history that happened.

As someone who writes on history fairly often, I remember once upon a time – and I don’t even remember what exactly I was researching, but it might have been Alfred or something – but I went to some reliable history sources and they said, basically, “First A, then B.” Then I went to another book and it said, “No, it was B, then A.” Flat-out backwards.

I was like, “What? I need to actually mention this, and I’m going to just mention it, but in order to get from where I am to where I’m going, I have to at least acknowledge that there were these battles here. So who’s right?” I had to do a lot more research and I had to go through a lot of books, and finally I found out, “Oh, it was A, then B, then A.” He did the A thing twice, but it wasn’t showing up.

Just reading the other multiple accounts of history, I was not getting the whole story. The facts presented just as they were, left out something kind of major to trying to follow the sequence. Yes, they were true as far as they went, but by assuming that they were all truth, they were distorting the narrative for me and I was lost and confused.

If these people had both gotten on the witness stand and said, “We swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” they didn’t tell the whole truth, but you can’t, as you said. There’s too much of it. There’s too much to say. Do you include things like, “And so I kept breathing the whole time, and then I had a snack. The snack consisted of…”

No, we really don’t want to know, but now you’re leaving things out, and what is your reader – or your viewer, if it’s movies or TV – what are they tracking with and what are they interested in? Maybe they actually are interested in what you ate.

On my first trip to Europe, my little journal I kept was very incomplete, but one thing I tried to do every day was write down everything we ate, because you go to a foreign country and eating is a big part of the experience. It’s part of the story. You come home and you tell people, “We went to this place and there was this little place around the corner from the hotel, and they had the best food!” and that becomes part of the story.

Other people might say, “Who cares about food? Relationships, people…”

“No, monuments, historical records, museums.”

“No, weather. What was the weather like there?”

Everybody is going to focus on something.

So there’s always a purpose to which you’re tending your narrative. There always a goal in mind when you choose what to include or not include, right?

Yeah. There’s a focus and an emphasis that’s in the mind of the storyteller. And because we’re not God, because we’re not omniscient, and because we can’t re-create reality so people can watch it, we always have to be selective. And in the process, even if we were sinless, we would still not tell the whole story.

I forget where it is and in what context, but someone was suggesting, “What if you had a map that was so accurate that it included every single geographical detail down to the finest thing in real measurements?” That would be called Earth, and re-creating Earth would be pointless because we’ve already got Earth. We want something that models it that is simpler and that lets us focus on something.

We tell stories to bring focus to a particular sequence of events, in such a way that it brings out something about life, about God’s world, that we think will be entertaining, enlightening, edifying, uplifting, or pick a word here. There are probably a bunch of others. We could talk about all the reasons we want stories, but we’re after something. For that reason, we don’t say everything and we can’t say everything. Then we’re back to, “Oh, and by the way, we are fallen and we are sinners and we do distort, for various reasons.” We exaggerate. We amplify, with a full understanding in most cases.

One of my former students was back in the classroom today. He’s been in the Air Force and he was telling us all kinds of great stories, but his gestures and his mannerisms and his tone of voice – I actually was thinking, “No, that’s not the way you said it at the time, but the way you’re saying it now is sure entertaining.” We all have friends who are great storytellers, but you can say, “No, that isn’t really, I’m sure, exactly the way it happened, but it makes a great story when you tell it that way.”

“Well, historians are more sober and they check their facts and they’re more accurate.” If only that were true, but as someone who’s written two ghost-written histories – one on Alfred and one on William Wallace – you are so limited. There’s so much you don’t know, and you end up having to guess at certain things, and sometimes your guesses are following those who’ve gone before you.

This writer, this bard, this historian, this biographer presented William Wallace in such-and-such a way. How accurate is this? I can honestly say I don’t think it’s that accurate, but it’s all I’ve got so I can caution a little bit. “His biographer says…” implies caution that this is obviously a biased account.

A secondary opinion.

But what is there that’s a primary account, really? “But I saw it on TV. I saw the film from the news cameras.” Oh, good, right. You saw what, a 10x15 area, not even really much of an area, with a limited amount of depth, of action. You don’t know what was to the right, what was to the left, what was behind the camera man, what they’re looking at when they’re looking toward the camera. You did not see reality. Again, a lot of things where we think, “This is exact. This is real. This is the way it is,” it ain’t so.

When I was a kid, my dad was very politically opinionated, and I walked into his barbershop probably to get a haircut, I don’t remember, and he mentioned that the TV show Jonny Quest had been on, and he knew I watched that. It was the one where their plane is forced to land, for lack of fuel, someplace in the Andes and there are condors. It was a cartoon about condors as sort of the mysterious thing in the background. But also up there in the Andes there’s a retired German flying ace from the first world war, who becomes the villain.

My father asked me, “Did you get the propaganda in that?” Dad used the word propaganda a lot, but he never ever explained it to me, so I just had to deduce from the way he used it what it probably meant, and I thought it meant fiction. I said, “Well, yeah, everything’s propaganda (fiction), except the news.”

And Dad looked at me and said, “No. You don’t understand,” and I had no idea what he meant at the time, but I remember that. “Let’s listen to the news! We’ll get the straight scoop. We’ll get the real facts.” That’s probably the last place you’re going to get the real facts.

So this thing of, “You should only listen to real things,” let’s qualify that. “You should read things that are based on reality, or close to reality.” Okay, then that opens most of the world of fiction for you right there.

It’s at that point that people will say, “Alright, so realistic novels and stories and movies are okay, but not anything that is utterly fantastic. I mean, you couldn’t, for instance, have talking trees in any kind of story that would do any good for Christians.”

The Bible disagrees.

The Bible disagrees, as it contains a story that has talking trees. God did not write the story directly, but he blessed it and included it in inspired scripture. And not only are there trees, but they make reference to God and they engage in politics and do all kinds of things that I’m pretty sure trees don’t do. So now we’re falling back on scripture as justification.

The Bible is a book of stories. God is the one person who can tell a story with exact detail, and tell it from the perspective that is absolutely true and relevant, without having to exhaust the material, because he knows infinitely well all the details and he can pick with complete accuracy what he’s going to tell us, and tell it in such a way that we’re not misled or deceived. He’s the only one who can do that.

It is good to try to imitate our Heavenly Father and tell the truth and tell things that really happened, and yet here we find the story in the book of Judges, the talking trees, where God uses such a story, where God is willing to say, “Here. Here’s something that never could happen and never did happen and never would happen, and yet there are things to learn from it.”

The lesson in that particular one, as the trees go out to choose a king, is that the really productive trees don’t want to be king, because they’ve got jobs to do. They have high callings before God. They make oil, they make wine, and so on. But the bramble bush, who’s a complete waste and has nothing going on for him, he’s very excited to be king.

“Oh, he just can’t wait to be king!”

And God thinks that that fictional fantasy story ought to have a place in scripture, so he put it there.

At this point I think we’ve kind of begun to answer things. Are Christians obligated just to read real stories? Well, aside, from the Bible, the question of “real” is a question-begging sort of thing. What meanest thou by ‘real’?

So the question is, “Wait, this story of talking trees. They talked about God?”

Oh, yeah. In that story, that universe, if you will, God is. God does not write a fictional universe that he’s absent from. He does not fill it with another God or no God. The trees acknowledge that God is and that he has a calling upon them. The bramble is sinful and devious and greedy for power, and the other trees are godly. They want to serve God and do the thing he’s called them to, so there is virtue, there is right and wrong, and it’s God’s standard in that God is the God of the Bible.

I think in looking at fantasy, we can see that a lot of things you can mess with. Here we have trees, who don’t talk or think or engage in politics or worship God in our world, and here’s a fantasy world where they do, but it’s the God of the Bible they worship.

It is difficult for a Christian to generate or enjoy living in a fictional world where God isn’t God, where God’s standards are not the standards. It’s hard for a Christian to go into a world where, say, molesting children is okay, or raping women is just fine, or abortion is an acceptable way of dealing with the population. I don’t care if you set it on Mars or Alpha Centauri or some kingdom beneath the surface of the planet or in Never-Neverland. As Christians we balk there and say, “No. I don’t want to go out of a world where God is.” In other words, even in my fantasies God is there, because what’s the alternative?

Think of the Sermon on the Mount here. Am I allowed in my fantasies to reject God and his law and serve my own lust? If I can simply say, “But it’s only pretend,” are we allowed to get away with that? Jesus says no. What’s in your heart and your thought life matters.

So as Christians we can say there’s a place for fantasy stories, for imaginative stories, for stories of things that haven’t happened, couldn’t happen. But even when you go there, in most cases, unless you’re trying to make some kind of odd point, you want God to be there. I mean you want God to be there! Why would you not want God with you? God’s your Lord, your Savior, your best friend. Why would you not bring God with you?

The only kind of exception to this I can think of in scripture is where Paul on a couple of occasions, for just the barest moment, postulates a world where Christ didn’t die. “If they had known this, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” For the moment he indulges in the what-if, a world where Christ didn’t die because people actually realized who he was and decided not to kill him, and then he goes on. That’s it. That’s as far as he can say there.

There’s another passage that I can’t remember right now where he does something very similar. “Let’s eat and drink, for tomorrow we die, if Christianity isn’t true,” and he stops there. In other words, even in fiction, even in imagination, this storyline goes nowhere real fast.

As Christians, we don’t want to do that. Maybe for a quick apologetic effect, but not for staying and living there. These are not worlds that Paul invites into to enjoy, where Christ didn’t die and the gospel isn’t real. They’re apologetics. “Do you really want to be there? Didn’t think so.”

So that’s more the issue than whether or not elves or Eldils are real things or could be real things. The point is, is this book consistent with Christian theology and ethics? Does it reflect God as we know him to be?

That’s bringing us back to, “Why in the world would Christians go into stories or into fiction?” Well, if they’re going into good fiction they’re going into another way of seeing how God might do things under other circumstances, where our vision is focused in on particular things and the imaginative quality. Whether it’s simply we’re creating Avonlea and Green Gables, or we’re creating Middle Earth and Hobbiton, in both cases we’re shown aspects of what is ultimately human life, human character, human interaction, under circumstances that allow us to think about things and evaluate things and enjoy things and appreciate things that we might miss if it were set in the slums of New York or a Los Angeles beach.

Things we can relate to. I was thinking of the prophet Nathan when he confronted David, the way that he approached this very difficult problem, that not only is this person I know involved in something very, very wrong, not only is he guilty, but he’s the king and I am in a lot of trouble if I upset the king.

So the way he goes about this problem of getting the king to see the true nature of his actions is to tell a story, to get his emotions involved, to engage his discernment in way where he’s not on the defensive. He’s actually using his discernment.

And we don’t know if the scenario that Nathan proposed there – this little man and his one little ewe lamb he raised as a daughter – we don’t know whether that had ever happened or not. Nathan is not lying, because he immediately reveals that the story he’s telling is not about lambs and people. It’s about David and women. It could have happened. It’s a likely enough kind of thing that could happen. People are cruel to animals. Rich men steal from poor people and oppress them, and thus the ethical quality.

When people say, “Shouldn’t you be where things could happen?” Well, ethically this can happen. This is the world of creation, of sin and redemption, this little story that Nathan tells. Whether or not the facts ever had been played out in history then or sometime later is irrelevant. He’s not lying, he’s telling a story to make a point, one which David gets immediately.

David is deceived for a very short time, but the purpose is not to deceive David but to undeceive him, to break through the bodyguard of lies he’s set about himself. “I’m the king. It doesn’t matter. He would have died anyway. There was a baby on the way and I can do more for the baby than he ever could. I really do love her,” and all the things that people throw up to make excuses.

Nathan’s story cut through the lies to establish the truth, and fiction can do that sometimes – sometimes on a deep moral issue like this, sometimes just on what is still ethical, but the way we look at life.

And the way we look at other people.

The way we look at other people and situations and places and conditions. You go to Middle Earth and you come back and see our world and you go, “Oh, that’s kind of like this. I’ve never seen Middle Earth but I can see this. This waterfall is beautiful. This forest is enchanting. God is an incredible Creator.”

So those are some of the things. I’m sure we haven’t exhausted it, but keeping an eye of the clock we probably should go back to the idea of story.

In your note to me you said we’ve never defined story. I don’t have an offhand definition of what story is exactly. Usually we speak of some kind of narrative that is a sequenced series of events, cause and effect – this leads to this, which leads to this, which leads to this – and that has rising action. That is, there is conflict that leads to tension and thus to suspense, and it rises to a point where it engages us where we say, “Oh no, how are they going to get out of this?”

And at that peak moment, that climax, we get a resolution, which if the story is good we didn’t exactly see coming. If it’s one that we saw coming, then it’s a story we’ve already heard in one form or another. Sometimes we like to hear the same old story told in a lot of different ways. Shakespeare has been done. I’ve seen Macbeth done traditionally. I’ve seen it done as Mad Max post-apocalypse, and it worked pretty well.

I’ve seen Much Ado done traditionally. I’ve seen it done in a small southern community in the late 1800s or early 1900s. I’ve seen it done apparently post-Vietnam war. So you can tell the same story, and if it’s a good enough story, even though you know where this goes, the telling can grab you and pull you along.

Inferior storytellers just swap out a few names and a few minor details. It’s like, “Yeah, she’s going to go around the corner and she’s going to see the monster. See, there it is. They didn’t do a great job with the plot. The hero’s going to show up and he’s going to have the sword + 3 of destroying--Oh, they used a gun instead. Okay, well that’s cute, all right, it sped things up. Yeah, the partner’s going to…”

Every telling needs some skill to carry it, to make it worth hearing again.

Yeah. And usually we say the story ends with the denouement where we all sit around and, depending on the nature of the story, explain what just happened, explain how we figured things out, explain how the rescue took place. Proposals are made, weddings are had, feasts are celebrated, and we all just have that ahhh kind of experience.

Arguably, the denouement in Lord of the Rings begins right after the rescue of Frodo and Sam on the Field of Cormallen, but it continues on with more storytelling as they return to the Shire, where there’s still action. But at that point we know it’s going to be okay. The big bad guy is down. The little bad guys have become really little. Our heroes are now really heroes, so we just want the assurance of, “Oh yes, it’s okay. Yeah, see? They handled it just fine. Nothing bad happened.” So that resolution period, that closure period is important, but it can take very different forms.

So that’s something of what goes into a story, which distinguishes it from a narrative. It’s not just a sequence of events. “Hey, you want to hear a story?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay. I got up this morning and I forgot that I hadn’t bought any treats for my kids at school, so I got up and did my bath and got out the door early and I went to the store and I bought the candy. Then I zipped to school. And you know what? I gave them the candy.”

I’m so surprised. I’ve overwhelmed.

That’s a narrative, a very bad one, but it’s certainly not a story of any sort because stories imply this idea of conflict.

And meaning and purpose, as well.

The conflict supplies the meaning and purpose.

Now, here’s something that I always talk about in my literature classes. Where does this conflict come from? Before we can understand where it comes from, we need to really briefly talk about the various conflicts that show up all the time. We need to reduce it to something versus something – man vs man, man vs woman, man vs society, man vs God, man vs the devil, man vs nature, and I’m sure I’ve left out a few, but you get the idea. It’s somebody versus something.

As you look at all of these for any length of time, you see in each case the versus, the conflict, is because of sin and the Fall. Men are at odds with each other because they’re sinners. Man is at odds with God because he sinned against God. Man is at odds with creation because creation is now God’s agent for punishing man’s sin. It too is under the curse. And you can go through the list. Even man against himself is dealing with the fact that his body is cursed. His ability to perform at top proficiency is cursed.

Think of what stories would be in an unfallen world. We really have trouble here, where there’s no sin, there’s no conflict, no one hates anybody, no one’s out for himself, everybody loves one another and encourages everybody and is enthusiastic for everyone else’s success, and there’s no danger whatsoever. Jumping off the mountain won’t kill you because the angels will catch you, or you’re simply too wise and you’re never going to do it anyhow, as God doesn’t have stupid children.

So what have you got? What kinds of things could you have where there’s some kind of conflict? Maybe climbing a mountain. Okay, but you know you can’t die. You can’t get hurt. So that’s not exciting. How about two people running a foot race? One of them is probably better than the other because God does not make us all alike, so that’s okay. But when they’re done they say, “Oh, you did so great!”

“No, you did great!”

“Yeah, but you encouraged me on, and that moment when you stopped and helped me get up, that was so kind of you, even though I couldn’t possibly get hurt because this is an unfallen world, but you thought about me.”

“Yeah! Let’s go have a beer,” considering there will be beer in the new creation.

The rest of us are sitting here saying, “That’s a story?” On this side of the Fall we don’t understand how story would have worked without the Fall, so when we come to storytelling – if the story has any depth beyond just being a clever anecdote or riddle or something with a twist at the end, something that’s just a sheer surprise – if it’s going to be a sustained story of any sort there’s going to be conflict, and that conflict is going to be rooted either in sin or the curse.

So at this point, story is recognizing and registering Christian theology. We have a created orderly reasonable world of cause and effect, where things don’t just randomly happen in no particular order, where time flows forward and not backward or in all random directions. A follows B follows C. My actions have consequences, and the consequences have consequences.

So I come into a story, and it can be God’s world as it is, so a time and a place. We look at the Bible, the time and the place. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. We’re in the physical real universe at a particular time, the beginning, and we’ve already got our first character, our hero, God.

Then we learn about our character because God does all kinds of incredible wonderful things. We think, “Wow, what could ever go wrong here?” and then we introduce the secondary characters. They’re called man, and we meet Adam and Eve.

Then we see, “Oh, there’s a test here. Huh, that’s odd. But this is a holy perfect God, and yet here are these people who are finite. Surely nothing could go wrong here. Wait, where did this serpent come from?” and now we have the serpent. We have the dragon and we have the woman and we begin to start seeing the shape that many, many stories will take for centuries to come, as the woman is deceived by the serpent.

Her husband fails her miserably. God does enact his curse upon them and it looks like everything is going to end. There’s going to be no story. Then God does some really creative foreshadowing and says, “I’m going to kill some animals. They’re going to die and you’re not. And I’m going to make this promise about this seed of the woman who will bruise the serpent’s head.”

“What does that mean, Lord?”

“Think about it for 4,000 years.”

So the story begins to unfold. The part of the wonder and the genius of God’s story, of course, is that we don’t know the solution. For 4,000 years people didn’t know the solution. That in part is why the gospel is called a mystery.

Isaiah uses the phrase, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” Paul, in quoting this, says “But God has revealed them to us by his Spirit.” He’s not talking about heaven or eternity or things we don’t know. He’s talking about the gospel primarily.

The gospel, that way of salvation that God has prepared from the foundation of the world, was something so wonderful and so beyond our natural thinking that in the flesh, and even the angels themselves, we could not see where this was going. A holy, just, perfect God has to maintain his integrity, has to punish sinners. There’s no doubt they’re sinners. There’s no doubt they rebelled against God. God said that they would die. He killed animals instead. What? He’s talking about grace and loving sinners and all that. How does that work?

This was Satan’s line for 4,000 years. “You say you’re a holy just God. Then why aren’t all these people dead? That Job guy, he’s not so hot. Moses, Elijah, pffft.” For 4,000 years humanity was saying, “What is God up to?” and all along the way God is dropping hints and clues. He’s doing foreshadowing like a true mystery story.

He knows the solution, but like a good Agatha Christie story, once it’s all out in the open it’s like, “Oh, of course!” and we look back with 20/20 hindsight and we see the slain lambs and the sacrificial blood and the suffering servant of Jehovah and the father offering his only begotten son on an altar. We say, “Of course! It’s so obvious. How did the Jews miss it?” How did everybody miss it for 4,000 years? Because we don’t think that way.

This incredibly clever story was telling us a story that we couldn’t predict, we couldn’t project, we could not see where this was going. How do you solve this? Because the solution that a holy just God who is infinite and transcendent would assume human flesh, human nature, and die in the place of his enemies, in the place of the very people who killed him, so that they could be free and forgiven?

I wouldn’t do that I were God, and neither would any other human sinner. It was so far out of anybody’s calculation that even when Jesus said, “I’m going up to Jerusalem and I’m going to die and on the third day I’m going to rise again,” they didn’t understand.

It’s a true mystery story and also a true romance, because the prince in disguise comes looking for his bride and lays down his life to save her. Of course, it’s also an action story because Jesus is not tossed hither and yon by the forces of society or by political intrigue. He purposely deliberately pursues the path towards the cross, then beats out death, smacks it in the face, stomps it down and rises again, and ascends to heaven to begin smashing nations with his divine power and with the power of the gospel.

So it’s a mystery story, it’s a romance, it’s an action/adventure story, and it has all of the typical elements. We start at a time and a place with a given atmosphere, a given setting. We are introduced to conflict. “How can God do this?” and at each point there seems to be more complications. “The seed of the woman – whatever that means. We need the seed. Oh look, the whole world got corrupt and God’s going to have to wipe out everybody. That kind of ruins the story right there.

“Abraham is going to be the father of the seed. What do you mean he married somebody else? He can’t be the seed. Abraham needs to get back on track. How about this family? They’ve got 12 boys. The seed’s going to come through one of them. What happens if they all gang up and throw one into prison and all the others get corrupted and do horrible sins?

“Oh, we found Joseph. Joseph is the goody two-shoes. He’s the one who – he’s not the one? Judah? The one who went in to his own daughter-in-law, thinking she was a prostitute, he’s the one?”

We already talked about David, an adulterer and murderer. The murderer of the babies at the time of Joash, when Athaliah tries to kill the royal line. When Haman tries to erase the whole Jewish nation. When Herod’s last gasp attempt for Satan – “kill all the babies” and then, “No, wait. Let’s kill Jesus himself. Ha! Got him. Uh-oh. We shouldn’t have done that, should we? I think we just shot ourselves in the head. Yeah, the tomb is open. We’re in so much trouble.”

There’s the story. God’s drama of redemption is a drama. It is a story, and we as his image can learn from his storytelling how to tell big stories and little stories, because the Bible itself in that one big story has all kinds of little stories that make it up, things that really happened, but they’re crafted as story narratives that show us bits and pieces of the action, of the plot unfolding, and draw our attention to particular nuanced things, things about God that we might miss if all we had was the big story.

Romans 8:28 tells us all things work together for good. I love that as part of this conversation about stories, because when we watch a movie where every shot tells us something, where every shot ties us into something else that happens, or a book when nothing is wasted, that is the most satisfying. We say that is an excellently crafted story.

We say, “That had to be there.”

Right. So to go back to what we were saying before about including all of the details we can’t, God does. He put all of those details in there and he’s not going to waste a single one of them.

Both in the history of the world and in scripture. In the history of the world, every detail becomes significant because that’s the story alive and living, moving, unfolding in history. But in the Bible, which is sort of the synopsis, every detail is important.

As a Bible teacher this is really important to me, because I know Reformed pastors/elders/theologians who would die for the truth that every word of scripture is inspired. But when you say, “But why did God put it here?”

“Because it happened.”

“A lot of things happen. Why did he put this here?”

“He just wanted to.”

“Is he making a point?”

“Well, no. That’s just a number or that’s just a color or that’s just a random action.”

“Why did he put it here?”

“Just because it happened. You’re trying to get too much out of it.”

The hidden things belong to the Lord, but those things which are revealed belong to us and our children, that we may learn to do all the words of this law. If it’s in scripture it has some significance, and that’s something you said early on. Story produces meaning because story is interpreted facts.

There’s an underlying overarching interpretation that has selected these facts, and it’s brought them together to produce a meaning. We’ve talked before about finding our place in God’s story as the meaning of our lives, and why knowing the sequence, the chronology of the story is important. Did I get married before or after the baby came? That’s kind of a huge question. It affects all kinds of things.

You mentioned a few minutes ago the word closure, which I find very interesting. I’m sorry for using the word interesting. That’s kind of a verbal non-entity. “This is interesting.”

“Well, what about it?”

So I take back what I said. It wasn’t interesting. It was important though, I think. I’m a very future-oriented person in general, so the kind of book that I’m drawn to by nature is not necessarily fiction. I like reading Marie Kondo, how-to books, 12 Rules for Life…that’s my impulse. But lately I’ve been reading a couple of novels that were really rich and rewarding, and they all had to do with making sense of the past and of difficulty.

That’s much more beneficial, even though it might not seem like it at first – not that it’s directly A leads to B, and B is my growth, and A was this particular thing, but that in real life we don’t have this experience of, “Oh, I learned to do this perfectly, and then I went and did it, and I did it perfectly. Ta da!”

What actually happens is we sin and we make mistakes and we don’t do things perfectly, and then we have to live with the consequences, and hopefully forgiveness and grace and trusting Jesus to take our guilt away, but we still live in this world and we live in a world that’s touched by sin.

I was noticing this definite feeling as I finished each novel over the past couple months, and it was like, “What is this feeling?” That is the feeling of the end of a story which none of us have experienced in real life. Closure is important to us psychologically, and it’s a difficulty when we don’t have it. We kind of have to overcome the fact that we don’t have closure with regard to something that has happened to us that’s important. But actual closure can only come at the end of the Great Story, where all of the things are shown not to be wasted, to see the purposes of everything that we’ve gone through.

I was thinking about this earlier. As we look at the stories within the story of the Bible, the number of happy endings, of full closure with regard to the story, not the history, are few, but there are a number. What I mean by that is the details that are presented as story have an end, and we’re left with the impression that they lived happily ever after. We don’t know what really happened after that, unless the Bible tells us.

Ruth and Boaz is one of the wonderful love stories. There’s a happy ending and, in that sense, there’s closure. We know that they went on to have a baby, and the baby’s name, and that the baby leads right to King David.

We’re not told explicitly about the end of their lives. He was probably a lot older than she was. He probably died and left her a widow for a good time. Presumably the community huddled around her. Naomi would be dead by then, but the boy’s growing up and the boy will take care of his mother, and the story goes on, but that’s a new story. At least literarily we would think of that as a new story.

The old story is they had a baby and lived happily ever after – ever after being this vague-ish term which in real life does not exist except, as you say, until the resurrection. When the resurrection comes, then we do live happily ever after if we’re in Christ. But in the meantime…

We have Abraham. We trace him through Sarah’s death, but he dies old and full of days and apparently happy. We see that Isaac is doing okay, and Jacob I think is alive by then. But we’re not given a lot of the details.

Esther – kind of a happy ever after ending, but secular history tells us that the king she married didn’t reign all that much longer, and Mordecai was already old when he became Prime Minister, so we don’t know historically what happened.

But at some point the story has to stop. If we’re telling it to another human being the story has to stop, because we can’t go on storytelling forever. Only God gets to do that, so we pick a point where it seems like we have resolved the major issues. Whatever we set up from the front as the conflict has been dealt with, and the characters we love, we are assured, will live long uneventful safe happy lives for some indefinite period of time that we need not ask about, and we are wise if we don’t.

To go back and write the sequels – Pride and Prejudice as zombies is really cute, but do we really want to know what happened to Elizabeth and Darcy ten years later? Well, some people do.

Death Comes to Pemberley.

Yeah, exactly. If Jane Austen had chosen to write it then we get sequels. Sometimes sequels are valid, especially if they were in the mind of the author or authoress from the beginning. Sometimes they’re just an attempt to get more money out of things, to milk a product.

We want some kind of ending, some kind of closure, because we’re not God and because we can’t go on storytelling forever. Unlike comic books or the Marvel cinematic universe, which keeps going and going and going, we need an ending. We don’t keep telling the story of Captain America or Batman or Superman…

Or Andy Griffith.

Or Andy Griffith, for 20, 30, 40 years. There’s just a time where, you know what, the actors…

Five seasons, that’s all it should be, every show.

A five-season story, and there needs to be a story arc. It needs to be planned and it needs to wrap through a plot line and conclude. Just the “Here are random days in the lives of…” – that’s what we used to get in TV, but enough producers, directors, and writers have shown us what it can be like to have story arc, to have a beginning and a purpose and an ending and closure, that more and more that’s what we gravitate toward, as opposed to soap operas where the characters just are there forever.

One woman has three miscarriages, four abortions, five murder attempts, six marriages, and it just keeps going because there’s only so many things you can do. But everyone is invested with this character, and the ones who aren’t are dead, and a new audience is constantly coming so we have to keep recycling themes and problems, and it’s very bad storytelling.

So we do look for the closure because there is a God who will bring closure, and because we’re not him we need to do it on a finite level. We need to have the happily ever after. We need to end things.

We could leave it open and assume that we don’t know everything, and these characters are going to go on and they’re going to have their own adventures, but the things that we started, the problems we brought up in the beginning have been dealt with, at least to the point where we’re okay with it. Otherwise we do feel the sort of emptiness that this is not the way stories work.

I got off track earlier and I remember finally where I was going with that – the fact that everything matters. Chekhov said that if you show a gun in Act 1 you have to use it by Act 3.

One of my favorite movies is Charade. Now, it’s not for everybody. I think it’s one of the best films ever made, but it does have some downsides. Audrey Hepburn’s character is made the heroine, and she’s an absolutely ditsy stupid character, but she has to be because otherwise she would be a would-be adulterous terrible flirt and who knows what else. But by shifting lines around and letting her do the come-on lines and Cary Grant carefully pushing her back until the very end, it almost saves that.

It’s an action/adventure/mystery/romance/comedy/drama/western. I think the only thing that’s not there is sci-fi. I often show the movies to my kids, just to talk about how storytelling in movies works. There’s one scene where Reggie and her girlfriend and the little boy have come back from the Alps and they’re dropping her off and she’s getting ready to go up to her apartment, and the whole plotline is about to begin now because of what she’s going to find inside.

The little boy, who’s one of the worst child actors ever in the history of film, calls out, “Aunt Reggie, I wish you were going back to the States.”

“Why do you wish we would go?”

“Because if you were, you could write me a letter.”

“Oh, and then you could save the stamps.”

“That’s right.”

“How about if I just buy you some?”

“Okay,” and then she goes in and the story goes on.

At first glance that seems to be the most wasted ridiculous scene ever, but if you know where this is going you’ll look at it and it’s like, “Okay guys, did you just give everything away or what? Couldn’t you have found a more tactful way?”

If we trust you as storytellers, then that scene meant something. It doesn’t seem to. It doesn’t seem to go anywhere. It just seems poorly done and a complete waste of our time. But if we’re going to trust you, then that just meant something, and it meant something big enough to waste time, big enough for this little French boy actor to muff the lines.

There’s something about stamps. It’s really important to the story, and yet for a very, very long time we hear nothing about stamps, except we keep seeing a letter that is stamped, over and over again, but we’re never shown a close-up.

Now, if we were thinking we would say, “Wait. Nothing’s ever wasted. Let me see that envelope.” It’s not until we’re moving toward the climax that someone finally looks at the envelope and sees the stamps – spoiler alerts.

It’s a little late for that.

Whatever. Anyhow, that’s an example. And of course God in scripture does exactly the same thing. There are lots of things that are hints, that are foreshadowing, and they give a lot away. Honestly, the father offering his only begotten son upon an altar just outside Jerusalem – and naming the place “The Lord Will Provide – it will be seen here on the Mount of the Lord” – what exactly are we missing there except for our own unbelief that cannot conceive of a God of grace.

Now, not everything is like that. Not everything is a clearly-drawn picture of Christ, and sometimes numbers are numbers just to show us, “Hey, there were a lot of people there and that’s important, that this was a big thing,” or there weren’t very many people there. Sometimes the numbers are symbolic, or at least a hint.

When Solomon collected 666 talents of gold a year, and I’ve said this to a point, I think it just means he collected 666 talents of gold a year.

It means at least that.

It means at least that, but there’s only one other time in scripture it appears. Is it impossible that God is setting up something here, when a king who should be leading God’s people in worship is breaking every single kingly rule and about to lead the nation into idolatry? Shouldn’t that suggest something, at the very least?

We had a gas station down on the corner. It was a big orange and blue ball that had 76 on it. It turns out there’s a couple reasons it does. One had to do with the kind of grade of fuel or something, but the other was that the founder of the company really appreciated his American heritage and wanted to celebrate the spirit of ’76, that is 1776. That’s a backward cause and effect, sort of. “I named this this, because of that.”

When our Founding Fathers threw a revolution, they didn’t say, “No, we can’t do it in ’75 because off in the future some guy’s going to name an entire gas station line, and he’s going to say ’76. We don’t want to screw that up for him, so let’s wait a year,” which of course would explain why the revolution was fought in ’76 rather than in ’75 when Paul Revere did the whole riding thing. They had to put it off a year because they had to keep things in line for ’76 gasoline. No, they didn’t. That’s not right.

The one thing that was true history – it really happened in 1776 – becomes a historical precedent for an advertising campaign a couple hundred years later. You think God could pull that off, since he controls all of time and history?

I made a suggestion along these lines in my little book about Revelation, and a very nice man who gave me a good review on the book generally called me to task for that. “You can’t do that. That’s not the way reading scripture goes.”

“Uh, yeah it is, because that’s the way life goes.”

There are all kinds of things that, yes, they really happened, but God’s the one who made them happen. They weren’t historical accidents. They didn’t just kind of pop out there and God said, “Oh, that’s interesting. Hmm.” God ordained them, knowing all things in advance. “Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world,” from Acts 15. So when God ordained that that should be the number of talents of gold that Solomon collected, he already knew that he was going to use that number again.

Is that all there is to it? Doesn’t it mean it really happened? Of course, it really happened, and it’s a minor point. Probably far more significant is the fact that man and beast were created on the sixth day, and that Jesus was betrayed and crucified on the sixth day, at the sixth hour, after six trials. There are other images that work into that, but again we’re back to everything means something. It may not mean anything huge, but God does not just talk to hear himself talk. He talks to tell us things, and it’s up to us to figure it out.

I was teaching along these lines at one point and a gentleman in Sunday School said, “Wait.” He turned to some random passage, probably in Chronicles, and read me, “So there were this many soldiers. Does that mean anything?” I answered truthfully but badly. I said, “I don’t know.” The answer was, “Of course it does, because God put it there.”

Now, if you’re asking me what it means, that’s a very different question. Are you asking, “Does this have some kind of symbolic usage, or is it some kind of image that God is going to develop?” that number does not sound familiar, so probably not. But does it mean something? Absolutely, or God wouldn’t have put it there.

That would have been a better answer than the one I gave, which was, “I don’t know. I haven’t looked at the text. But yes, it does mean something, obviously.”

Whether we know what it means is a separate question.

That’s a very different question, whether or not we know what it means, and how important it is relatively. The Confessions tell us that there are some things that are in scripture that are more urgent to our salvation than other things. But everything serves our salvation. “Those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children, that we may do all the words of this law.”

Sometimes when people get to Revelation or other prophetic books, or even to Genesis 1, they say “I don’t think God ever meant us to understand that.” He says he did, and that’s a cop-out. That’s being intellectually and spiritually lazy to say, “I’m not going to try to figure it out because it’s too controversial and I don’t know.” It’s all right to say, “I don’t know and I’m going to chew on that for a few years.” That’s great.

There are some things we may never know for sure because sin is in the way, and we’re listening to contradictory interpretations from people we respect, and we’re pulled this way and that. That’s life. That’s sinful life in the Christian church. But to give up and say God didn’t know what he was doing, or God didn’t mean anything, is something very, very different.

Returning full circle then, as human beings of course we don’t have God’s degree of accuracy, like the Charade incident. They could have done that much better than they did. It still grates on my nerves every single time, but it was necessary. If they had not done that, if they had not somehow included that little bit of information, then the story would have felt very forced and contrived at the end.

I had an art teacher once argue that all art is abstract. I went to a very conservative school, so students would come in and say, “Oh, I don’t like abstract art. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not beautiful,” and he said, “Well, if you didn’t have the abstract, all you have is the original.”

You have to make decisions about what to include and what not to include, based on what you want to communicate and what is important to communicate for your purposes.

The purpose of art – and this is a line from Lewis’s The Great Divorce – he’s talking to an artist who is being an offered a ticket into heaven.

“Won’t I be allowed to paint at all?”

“Well, yes, when you get there and you’ve been there a while. You will see some things more clearly than the rest of us, and one thing you’ll want to do is tell us about them. But looking comes first.”

And the artist is impatient. “No, the artist needs to be creating right now. I don’t need to wait. I know exactly what I want to do.”

No, that’s not the way it works, but I appreciate the line, “You’ll see some things more clearly than the rest, and you’ll want to tell us about them.” That’s art, whether it’s visual art or literary arts. The author, if he or she is any good, has seen something about reality, God’s reality, and wants to tell it to us in a way that gets our attention and makes it stick. Good writers do that. Bad writers fail miserably. And there are not that many good writers in the end.

But those of us who aspire to writing can keep on working and trying to figure it out and listen to criticism and read good examples of how others have done it, which is the justification for reading not only Christian authors, but non-Christian authors, because God gives skill in lots of ways and lots of directions. There are a lot of people we can learn from, even if we can’t adopt their morality or their religious point of view.

I think we’ve kind of talked all our way around it at this point.

Yes, and that is the end of our time. Do you have any recommendations of stories or of other things?

Watch Charade – Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, music by Henry Mancini, and a cast of characters played by very popular television actors, but they wouldn’t get popular until after they were in this movie. But again, these are not Christian characters and there are some things where we’d say, “Eww,” but there’s only one or two places where you might want to be tempted to – not shut your eyes, but kind of look over at the painting on the wall because this is a little over the top.

With that, it is one of the best movies to come out of Hollywood – out of Hollywood, remember.

All right, Charade. My recommendation is going to be Shop Around the Corner. It’s another really excellent movie in which nothing is wasted. It’s an adaptation of a stage play, so the efficiency of the storytelling is really admirable. There’s only a few sets. Every line matters to tell you about the characters, and it’s just a very beautiful story.

It’s one of my wife’s favorite movies. My kids are learning, “We want your opinion, your honest opinion.”

He’s one of my favorite characters. The only thing he doesn’t want to do in the world is give you his honest opinion – unlike us, we’ve got lots of opinions.

If you’ve got opinions and you want to share them with us, you can email us at [email protected]. Thanks so much for this conversation, Greg. It’s been a delight.

Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. As I said, you can email us with your opinions, comments, questions, and what-not. You can also Like our Facebook page. That would be great. Leave us a review. Tell a friend about us. See you next time.