Donn Taylor
The chief
objective of commercial fiction must be to entertain. If we writers fail in
that, it will make no difference how much “message” or “theme” we put into our
fiction because we will have few if any readers. That said, fiction also presents
the writer with the opportunity to portray his interpretation, his vision, of
how some part of reality actually works. Even the most blatant “escape” fiction
deals to some degree with the conflict between good and evil. So each fictional
universe necessarily possesses an ethical dimension. Even absurdist fiction—built
on the idea that the universe is illogical—asserts the writer’s belief that
that “truth” is important.
So if we
want to do more than entertain, to invite our readers to share our vision of
the world, we need to think carefully about the breadth and depth of the
worldview we present. For that worldview is the context in which our story is
told. Our characters struggle within the context of their own “here and now,”
dealing with problems appropriate to that age. But can we as Christian writers
also portray that age in the context of biblical time?
I believe
we can.
If we reach
into biblical history, we see God continually calling His people out of the
popular cultures of their times. This is true with Noah and with Abraham. It continues
with His calling the Israelites out of Egypt to be different from the other
cultures, to be the carriers of His message to the world. It continues with the
ministry of Jesus and the New Covenant, followed by the spread of Christianity
among the gentiles.
The pattern
does not stop there. It goes on with the history of Christendom. The world of
Christ’s time was characterized by savagery—crucifixions and the slaughters in
the Roman arena. Christians were called out of that culture but (as the Israelites
had adopted many of the pagan practices of the Canaanites), the early church
adopted many of the Roman cruelties. So the history of Christendom consists of
God’s calling of the church out of that culture. Christians’ response was
gradual, for only in the late seventeenth century did they stop killing each
other over theological differences. Only in the nineteenth century did they
decide that the ancient practice of slavery was evil, and in the early twentieth
that Imperialism was wrong.
In
contrast, the world outside Christendom has remained, and still remains, in about
the same state of savagery it possessed in the time of Christ.
But our
present state of civilization is not a destination. We Christians are still
being called out of the popular culture of our own age. And we, like the
Israelites before us, too often conform to that popular culture rather than to
our divine calling.
My point
for fiction writing is this: The more we can portray our characters’ present-day
struggles in the context of this overall history, the more we will equip our
readers to see their own struggles in those terms. We are not alone in our own
age. We all are tiny but active agents in God’s plan to remake humanity more in
the image of Christ.
If we writers teach
ourselves to think in these terms, we will add a greater dimension of depth to
our fiction—to the benefit of our readers. 
