One of the more famous Charles Spurgeon quotes relates to becoming a good reader. “Give yourself unto reading. The man who never reads will never be read; he who never quotes will never be quoted. He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains, proves that he has no brains of his own.” This exhortation is even more pertinent today than it was when he first said it. Though one would imagine that literacy rates have risen in the past two hundred years, the ability to read books has seemingly plummeted. After all, this is the age of sound bites, video shorts, and status updates. The attention needed to read a book, cover to cover, is hard to come by when we have all become accustomed to getting the plot, conflict, and resolution explained to us in 280 characters or less.
Yet the need to read good books is just as relevant today as it was two centuries ago. Christians should read the Bible and never be done re-reading the Bible, but they do a disservice to themselves and others when they fail to also read Christian biographies, history, and theology books. Imagine how different the Church would be if every Christian would pick up and read Calvin’s Institutes or Augustine’s The City of God!
This is probably already a hard sell for many. Some may have already checked out of reading this article. But my desire here is to exhort you to read more, and particularly to read more fiction, by helping you to see the virtues of fictional works and the benefits that belong to those who invest in fiction. We will examine just three benefits of fiction (though there are many more): 1. How it teaches us to become better communicators and story tellers. 2. How it teaches us about mankind. 3. How it points us to the gospel and our mission to cultivate the earth.
Learning to Tell Stories
Telling a good story depends on a recollection of the events, delivery in tones and inflections, and an understanding of the audience with which one is communicating. Reading fiction helps with all of the above and then some. But have you ever heard someone try to tell a story and just butcher the whole thing?
I have.
Many times.
Typically, the ones who cannot tell good stories are the same ones who are not investing in good reading. But one of the beauties of reading good fiction is that it teaches us how to construct our own stories. Good fiction teaches us how we can introduce our stories in the most interesting ways imaginable. Good fiction helps us understand how to explain characters, environments, and events in fresh and compelling ways. Good fiction even helps us learn how to incorporate conflict and resolution into our stories in ways that are exciting and impactful.
Returning to Charles Spurgeon for a moment, we know that he was one of the greatest communicators of biblical truth that the world has ever heard. He had an innate ability to grip his audience with his words, and the subtle ways he could use language to capture the attention and hearts of his hearers were nearly unparalleled. His preaching is overflowing with rich language, beautiful metaphors, and literary examples that aided his hearers (and now his readers) in understanding the sermons. But how was he able to do all this? He was a great reader.
Spurgeon would often complete six books a week. He read, and read, and read some more. He consumed everything from John Calvin to Charles Dickens. He immersed himself in theological and fictional books, alike. We would do well to learn from his example. To become engaging story tellers, we need to read fiction. To become doctrinally sound speakers of truth, we need the non-fiction. But this is not an either/or scenario. We, like Spurgeon, need both.
Learning to Understand Others
When the Apostle Paul was speaking to the Athenians about their idolatry in Acts 17 and making an apologetic defense of the Christian faith, he does something very interesting: He quotes from two pagan poets—Epimenides from Crete and Aratus. He explains,
The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for
Acts 17:24–28
“In him we live and move and have our being;”
as even some of your own poets have said,
“For we are indeed his offspring.”
This is not the only time that he quotes from pagans. In Titus 1:12, he is likely quoting again from Epimenides when he writes, “One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.’”
What can we conclude about the reading habits of the Apostle Paul, then? Simply that he learned about people—how they thought, acted, and lived—through reading. He engaged the culture by engaging with their stories and writings.
If you want to learn how to best interact with people you need to learn how they think and what makes them tick. You need to learn their worldview. One of the best ways you can learn to do this is through reading. And, once again, both nonfiction and fiction are helpful. By reading fiction, we gain great insight into the minds of those with which we strive to share the gospel. We only have our own lives to live, but fiction has the beautiful and magical ability to transport us into different worlds in the minds of different people. By reading fiction, we actively learn about people.
Reading and Writing Fiction as a God Glorifying Act
You may be wondering, at this point, why reading fiction is worth your time if you can just as easily watch a movie or a show. Who in their right mind would actually want to read one of those 1,000+ page tomes from Brandon Sanderson when you can watch multiple Marvel movies in the same span of time? The answer is that while movies often do possess great value, our God is a God of words and speech. Movies are a primarily visual form of communication, while reading (and writing) is a linguistic form of communication. The best thinkers and communicators depend on linguistic arts. In other words, if you want to most glorify God, you need to become a good reader. It would be even better if you become a good writer of fiction, as well.
One of the greatest defenders of the virtues of reading and writing fiction was J. R. R. Tolkien. In his essay On Fairy Stories, he recounted a letter he sent to a man who had disparaged the value of fantasy and fiction.
“Dear Sir,” I said—Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Subcreator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons—’twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we’re made.
In other words, the very act of reading or writing fantasy is to engage in the creation as the sort of beings God made us to be—vice regents and sub-creators, reflecting his glory to all around us. In fact, reading and writing good stories reminds us of the remarkable beauty of the gospel story. For Tolkien, the gospel story is an example of eucatastrophe—a beautiful and cathartic happy ending to a story where all seems to have gone awry. The best sort of fiction embodies the Great Eucatastrophe and points readers back to the true Gospel hope found in Jesus.
The Gospels contain a fairy story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered history and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of creation. The birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of man’s history. The resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has preeminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the art of it has the supremely convincing tone of primary art, that is, of creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.
It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any especially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed. It is not difficult, for one is not called upon to try and conceive anything of a quality unknown. The joy would have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which the “turn” in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth. (Otherwise its name would not be joy.) It looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the great eucatastrophe. The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and history have met and fused.
For men like Tolkien, fiction leads one to embrace true Christian joy and, as either writer or reader, leads one to embrace their God-given responsibility of being a sub-creator taking dominion of the creation through the act of cultivation.
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.
So, we read fiction to become better story tellers, to learn why people think and act as they do, and to point us to the greatest story of all, wherein Christ redeems sinners, and the creation, for his own glory.1 If one does not know where to start, why not begin with some of the masters of twentieth century fiction? While not everyone will share the same taste in literature, it would seem to me that … Continue reading
References
| 1 | If one does not know where to start, why not begin with some of the masters of twentieth century fiction? While not everyone will share the same taste in literature, it would seem to me that men like J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton wrote enough that everyone should be able to find something to enjoy. Tolkien offers high fantasy, Lewis wrote everything from fantasy to science fiction, and Chesterton wrote incredibly across the spectrum of fantasy. |
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