On truth, fiction and being a Christian writer

Christian Century, Dec 17, 1997 by James Calvin Schaap

Writing as a Christian requires a delicate balancing act because it is not easy both to write novels and to believe, as did O'Connor, that Truth exists. Today almost everyone agrees that writing imaginative literature is a process of personal discovery. For any writer to believe in a priori truth may appear to some not only difficult but murderous--an effort bound to fail. How can there be a quest for truth where certainty already exists? Yet for the orthodox Christian, truth does exist--Christ died that we might live.

Believing that--really believing that--does place boundaries on one's work, as it did on O'Connor's. Despite the heavy doses of both humor and violence in her work, in her own way she always was a preacher. When criticized for the violence in her stories, she argued that in a world antagonistic to the Christian faith it is sometimes necessary to bang people up side the head to get their attention. She wanted, clearly but symbolically, to tell the truth as she saw it--that God's love was made flesh in Jesus Christ.

Belief is central, as O'Connor says. And yet, for some of us at least, belief is a strange bird, since believing does not for a moment relieve us of substantial stretches of unbelief. No less a saint than King David suffered his share of doubts, moments when for some unknown reason God Almighty seemed to have left the building. Psalm 13 is a fascinating little confession; so vehement is David about God's absence that his call to the Lord is chilling--"the howling Psalm," Spurgeon called it. Yet, a few lines later, David is reconciled.

Christians believe--certainly we do; but there are times in all of our lives when we doubt with nearly as much certainty. We believe and we doubt. Our doubt is not so much a manifestation of sin as an emblem of an all-too-human inability to grasp the whole of the gospel. Faith--deep, abiding faith--does not for a minute preclude the possibility of doubt, not in humans. And humans, finally, are all we writers have to work with.

What separates the Sugar Creek Gang novels from the kind of work I love to read and hope to write is not disparate confessions of faith but a difference in perception of what literature is and what it means to be human. The unreality of those novels was not that everybody got saved at the end (well, that too), but that everything always worked out. In life, things don't. Those Christian writers who don't entertain the reality of our sin don't know or won't see the reality of our human condition. Those readers who love that genre of Christian writing don't want to be challenged by what they read; they want simply to be affirmed. And that's OK. Across the board, that's what most readers want today, believers or nonbelievers--and affirmation is what they wanted yesterday and yesteryear. Lord knows there's plenty of room in his tent for people who don't read James Schaap--or Flannery O'Connor.

What the best fiction has always done is approximate life--whether that's by way of street bums, the rich and famous, or, say, hobbits. When the fiction we read creates a world we recognize and feel deeply, it succeeds. The mysteries of life, as O'Connor liked to say, can be communicated only through the manners with which we live. The best fiction creates a sense of felt life by way of characters so fully human they walk off the page.