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Fiction That Every Christian Should Read

For fiction lovers and those who have never turned a novel's page, here are 10 must-reads

by Bonne Steffen and Randy Bishop

When pastor/writer Eugene H. Peterson felt he had hit a stone wall in his ministry in the 1980s, he happened upon a mentor.

For seven months, Peterson and "FD" had a standing appointment for two hours, three times a week. When the last appointment ended, Peterson felt spiritually whole again—his mentor, Fyodor Dostoevsky (FD), had demonstrated through his novels how God and passion were inseparable.

Does fiction have any benefit to Christians? Writer Sigmund Brouwer reflects:

"When I picture Jesus sharing his parables, my imagination is drawn to his audience.

"These were hungry people. Not only spiritually, but in body. They traveled by foot for miles to hear him. Few were educated. Hardly any could read.

"How long, I wonder, would they have sat had he spoke in abstract terms and concepts beyond their grasp? How long would they have remained had he begun to lecture them until they began to squirm? How long if he had preached at them in the way of their synagogue teachers who burdened them with hundreds of rules?

"Jesus did not speak of religion in his recorded parables. Instead, he reached these poor, hungry people with stories which held their attention, stories which involved their emotions, and stories with strong but simple points.

"Why do I read fiction? Because in good fiction there is truth."

Chosen by a panel of knowledgeable judges, the following 10 selections all present glimpses of God's truths through engaging stories that have challenged and encouraged readers for a generation or more.

Last year, a different panel of judges named The Pilgrim's Progress number two in "The Best Devotional Books of All Time" balloting. This year, Bunyan's seventeenth century tale of a pilgrim's journey to the Celestial City, penned while the author sat in an English prison, tops the fiction list.

In the introduction to The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan explains (apologetically) why he has written this allegory of the pilgrim, Christian: "This Book it chalketh out before thine eyes/The man that seeks the everlasting Prize/ … It seems a Novelty, and yet contains/Nothing but sound, and honest Gospel-strains."

Bunyan "grew up" on the Authorized Version of the Bible; the King James Bible was a mere 30 years old when Bunyan was 12. The combination of biblical truth and the sights and sounds of his personal life—as well as a generous dose of imagination—makes those "Gospel-strains" as powerful as they were 320 years ago.

In 1623, at the age of 15, John Milton, Jr. wrote his first verse—rhymed paraphrases of Psalms 114 and 136. His family thought his literary and scholarly gifts would definitely lead him to the ministry. Instead, writing took hold.

From political treatises to sonnets, Milton wrote and wrote, leading him to finish the universal epic poem "Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste/Brought death into the world and all our woe." Paradise Lost was published in 1667.

Though blind, Milton knew both his audience and his primary source well—the King James Version of the Bible. Drawing his story primarily from the first three chapters of Genesis, Milton built on the epic models of Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid. Among English poets, Milton stands next to Shakespeare for the significance of his work.

Regarded by many critics as the finest of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels, The Brothers Karamazov is the sordid story of a patricide, a love triangle, and four sons' search for spiritual meaning. Thoughtful Christians can identify with Smerdyakov, Alyosha, Ivan, and Dmitry as they wrestle with faith and doubt, feeling and reason, love and hate.

Ivan's famous story of the Grand Inquisitor, taking up its own chapter, is a rejection of Christ's plan for the world, yet it plainly illustrates, by contrast, why peace can be found only in him. Ivan's questions about sin, suffering, and the existence of God parallel Dostoevsky's own search for faith, which ended when he read the New Testament while exiled in Siberia for revolutionary activity during the early 1850s.

Dostoevsky had been preparing all his life for The Brothers Karamazov, which he completed only months before his death in the winter of 1881. Brilliant, gripping, and amazingly prophetic for the 20th century, this novel has challenged and influenced millions of readers worldwide—intellectuals, philosophers, novelists, nonbelievers, and believers.

A psychological thriller. A murder mystery. A scathing rejection of humanism, nihilism, and materialism.

All three are valid descriptions of a second Dostoevsky nominee, Crime and Punishment. This novel traces the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual journey of Raskolnikov, an impoverished radical youth.

At the outset, readers enter Raskolnikov's twisted mind and find a man in rebellion against moral absolutes. His thinking leads to murder and allows Dostoevsky to introduce a brilliantly devised set of secondary characters including Porfiry Petrovich, the investigator, and Sonya Marmeladov, the prostitute who challenges Raskolnikov with the truths of Christianity.

Dostoevsky worked on Crime and Punishment and The Gambler simultaneously in 1866, in an attempt to meet a fall publishing deadline. Friends urged Dostoevsky to hire a stenographer, Anna Grigorievna Snitkin, whom he married. The work received public acclaim, the first of the five great novels the Russian Orthodox believer produced in his final 15 years.

It came as a big surprise. When Ox-bridge Professor Clive Staples Lewis, renowned medieval and Renaissance literature scholar, published these seven children's books, beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in 1950, his colleagues were shocked. Why would such an eminent scholar write children's stories?

But millions of children are forever grateful to the man who opened the wardrobe to follow the trail of siblings Lucy, Peter, Susan, and Edmund as they encountered the White Witch and her nemesis, the great lion Aslan.

Lewis strongly claimed that, unlike Bunyan's tale of Christian, the Narnia stories are not allegories. The biblical parallels are there (i.e., Aslan clearly fulfills the role of Jesus), but Lewis didn't want readers to spend endless hours decoding the characters and situations. He trusted children to intuitively understand the depth of the stories, and hoped adults could again see the world through the eyes of a child.

In an age of tumult, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables ("the wretched ones") offered hope for a better future. The French instantly fell in love with this Romantic novel; the first Paris edition sold out within 24 hours.

Les Misérables (1862) traces the life of Jean Valjean, who spent 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. After his release, he commits more petty crimes until he encounters life-transforming grace. He eventually becomes a successful industrialist and mayor. But he cannot rest as he is relentlessly hunted by police inspector Javert, whose obsession with Valjean eventually destroys him. Valjean's adopted daughter Cosette and her love, Marius, also are major players in this sweeping novel.

The novel compellingly illustrates the wonder of grace versus legalism, and the beauty of choosing forgiveness over vengeance. It's a classic worth reading and seeing performed in the theater—more than 40 million people have seen the musical production of "Les Miz."

How do you tell the histories of five aristocratic Russian families in the years 1805-1814 well? It takes almost seven years and a lot of pages. In his panoramic story set against the backdrop of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, Tolstoy succeeds in showing life in its beauty and tragedy. War and Peace (1869) is counted as one of the greatest novels in world literature.

A massive book must include a mass of people; a reader can get dizzy from the myriad characters coming and going. Minute details are included to show life as it really was—Tolstoy didn't hesitate to weave his own family's personalities into fictional personalities. Definite moral conflicts abound, especially between two main protagonists (Andrei who enjoys living for himself at odds with Pierre who says that serving others is the ultimate goal of life). Tolstoy contrasts the sacredness of marriage with adulterous love as well. Above all, Tolstoy gives us life in all its stages—from birth to death and everything in between.

American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne's own family history may have lit the first imaginative spark for The Scarlet Letter (1850). He discovered a magistrate who had sentenced a Quaker woman to public whipping and a judge in the infamous Salem, Massachusetts, witchcraft trials among his ancestors.

Hawthorne's story throbs with obsessive guilt and harsh retribution. Set in Puritan New England, it focuses on the aftermath of an adulterous affair between young Hester Prynne and minister Arthur Dim-mesdale. Prynne cannot hide her shame, especially when Pearl—the illegitimate child from the union—is born. But Hester adamantly refuses to implicate Dimmesdale. Because of her sin and impudence, the town forces Prynne to wear the red letter "A."

Eventually Hester's husband, Roger Chillingworth, learns the truth, and becomes Dimmesdale's mental tormentor. As the book ends, Dimmesdale confesses his sin publicly and dies in the arms of Prynne. Christians should appreciate how seriously Hawthorne treated the theme of sin—especially in lieu of how sin is treated so flippantly today.

Uncle Tom's Cabin has the distinction of being the only novel on our list that contributed to the start of a war.

Many historians say it successfully turned public opinion against slavery and fueled the Civil War. Allegedly, when Abraham Lincoln met author Harriet Beecher Stowe at the White House in 1862, he remarked, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"

Stowe lived with her husband Calvin Ellis Stowe, a clergyman and seminary professor, in Cincinnati for 18 years, separated only by the Ohio River from the horrors of slavery. What she learned from fugitive slaves became the basis for Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Beginning in June 1851, the story ran in serial form in the National Era, a Washington, D.C., abolitionist paper. In 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared in novel form. The book enjoyed enormous success, except in the American South, and was translated into at least 23 languages.

The same year Lewis Carroll sent Alice to Wonderland (1872), a Scottish minister, George MacDonald, sent a young miner, Curdie, on an adventure in The Princess and the Goblin.

The first of the two "Princess and Curdie" books, this fairy tale contains the right stuff—an impetuous but grateful princess, nasty goblins with tender feet, a great-great-grandmother who spins a magical thread, and a brave determined hero. When Curdie uncovers the goblins' plot to kidnap Princess Irene, he knows only he can save the day, though it won't be easy.

MacDonald, father of 11, wrote more than just children's stories. His 53 books—realistic novels set in Scotland and England, adult fantasies, short stories, poetry, sermons, and literary essays set the imaginatively-imbued spiritual standard for many future writers, including C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle.

Additional nominees from the judges: A Good Man is Hard to Find, a collection of Flannery O'Connor's stories; The Robe, Lloyd Douglas; The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien; A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle; The Book of the Dun Cow, Walter Wangerin; First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

	THE JUDGES Jill Baumgartner professor of English, Wheaton College Angela Elwell Hunt novelist, author of The Tale of Three Trees James C. Schaap author, professor of English, Dordt College Luci Shaw author, lecturer, writer-in-residence, Regent College Marshall Shelley executive editor, Christian Reader Bonne Steffen editor, Christian Reader John H. Timmerman professor of English, Calvin College Paul J. Willis professor of English, Westmont College John Wilson managing editor, Books & Culture		Your Votes Are In, Too We asked our readers to select "The Best Christian Fiction of the 20th Century." Here are the top 10 vote-getters: 1. This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti. Peretti's first novel about the invisible battle being waged for the human soul may change your perception of the power of prayer. 2. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. Lewis imaginatively chronicles the war for the soul—through thought-provoking correspondence between a senior devil (Screwtape) and his apprentice (Wormwood). 3. In His Steps by Charles Sheldon. This revived classic, written in 1896, inspired the modern-day W.W.J.D. boom. 4. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fans of this popular children's book depicting American family life in the late 19th century also became fans of the TV show. 5. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Both children and adults love these seven books depicting the world of Aslan, the noble and fearless lion. 6. The Zion Chronicles by Bodie Thoene. Five books take readers from the horror of the Holocaust to the rise of the nation of Israel. 7. The Oath by Frank Peretti. A town is under the influence of supernatural evil. Don't worry, the good guys prevail. 8. Hinds' Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard. An allegory echoing Bunyan's pilgrim. This time, it's Much-Afraid journeying to meet the Shepherd. 9. Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye & Jerry B. Jenkins. A trilogy—Left Behind, Tribulation Force, and Nicolae—transports readers to the end-times. 10. Mark of the Lion series by Francine Rivers. The series begins in A.D. 70 Rome where a Jewish Christian slave girl boldly proclaims her faith.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
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