Ask your neighbors for an off-the-cuff reaction to the words "Christian literature" and you're likely to hear them stumble through a list of belittling adjectives. Despite the swelling ranks of able Christian writers, the reaction demonstrates that we're viewed as an inconsequential presence in the world of literature. This image belies reality-in fact, Christians are heirs to the tradition of Chaucer, Dante, and Donne; successors to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekov; the literary descendants of G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers, and of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. Yet we have, willingly, banished ourselves to the "inspiration" section at the back of Barnes & Noble. And by doing so, we may have abandoned our neighbors and left literature in the hands of writers who'd leave them hopeless. 

All the names just mentioned were, of course, great writers because of their Christian faith, not in spite of it. They understood life and the world through Scripture's arc of Creation-Fall-Redemption-Consummation. And they could, therefore, confront, challenge, entertain, and even delight those in the world around them.

Susan Gallagher and Roger Lundin, in their book Literature Through the Eyes of Faith cite the example of Ahab in Melville's novel Moby Dick. He nails a gold coin to one of the ship's post-a reward to the first man who spots the white whale. One day Ahab stops to ponder the coin. Ishmael, the narrator, reports that:

"...he seemed to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way."

Christian writers, unlike others, understand that every part of God's creation matters; that the world is not, therefore, an "empty cipher"; that it is more than a "cartload" of merchandise that takes up space in the void. Christian writers can delve deeper into the mystery of life and the world, knowing that the whole structure of the universe, as John Calvin put it, "manifest His perfections." The Christian writer, Flannery O'Connor once said, "presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula."

Richard Doster is the editor of byFaith magazine. He is also the author of two novels, Safe at Home (March 2008) and Crossing the Lines (June 2009). Both published by David C. Cook Publishers. 

Sources used:

Gallaher, Susan and Lundin, Roger, Literature Through the Eyes of Faith. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989

O'Connor, Flannery, Mystery and Manners: The Church and the Fiction Writer, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1957.