Why are so few significant novels produced within the evangelical tradition? Why is it increasingly difficult for the serious novelist to give expression to his view of life within the framework of this tradition? The answer is not simple.
Of course there are those who decry fiction as a whole, who either oppose it or neglect it, considering it unworthy of the concern of thoughtful men, particularly of Christian men. Such indifference or hostility may be justified when one considers the annual flood of works which have no purpose beyond mere entertainment, and this sometimes of the lowest order, and the increasing number of novels that are morally defiling.
However, fiction may be and often is a significant vehicle of thought, a means of carrying truth alive into the heart by way of the imagination, and no one seriously interested in knowing the best that has been thought and written can afford to neglect completely this powerful force in the shaping of life. For serious fiction has had an extensive influence upon multitudes of readers, affecting, often subtly, their views of life, their moral ideas and attitudes, and thus their conduct.
And this shaping power of fiction is not confined to those novels which aim directly at social reform, or which are openly concerned with customs and manners. There is a pervasive spirit emanating from the general portrait of life revealed in an author’s selection of his material, by what he includes or omits, by the slanting of his material toward a point of view.
Fiction and drama are closely related, and plays and cinemas are often drawn from works of fiction, and together they wield an influence beyond all calculation. Roman Catholics, realizing this, have made effective use of both media of communication, and they can list some of the great novelists, as well as many of the more popular. And the other liturgical branches of the Church, Anglican, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, have each produced their share of significant writers.
LIFE IN AN ARTLESS SETTING
Evangelical churches have not fared well in the area of the novel. It would seem that our form of the Christian faith has either been the object of cynical and satirical attack in fiction, or it has been handled sympathetically by pious but artistically limited writers. The latter give either a shoddy two-dimensional picture of life or a prim and proper portrait, so emasculated, so colorless, or so obviously faked that the books say nothing about life of any significance, and can be read only by the already convinced who believe that they are keeping themselves “pure,” “unspotted from the world,” by reading an adulterated rather than an adulterous version of life.
What are the reasons for this sad state of affairs? Why have no recent novelists of stature arisen within the evangelical tradition to handle life within a religious context with the same sort of power and beauty one sometimes finds within the liturgical traditions?
The reasons are many.
THE USE OF SYMBOLS
There is first in the evangelical form of Christianity a tendency to eliminate wholly or at least to minimize the use of symbols, and thereby to reduce religious experience to an ethereal, completely spiritual relationship with the divine that does not adequately, if at all, clothe itself in the visible and the tangible.
This decrying of the symbol is the product of a certain extreme reaction in the Protestant Reformation. So gross had become the dependence on the tangible in the medieval Church that it had often approached the idolatrous. In trying to sweep away this error, some of the more radical reformers actually fell into the opposite error, basically a denial of the meaning of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, which is at the heart of the Christian faith.
And this sweeping denial of the function of symbols, of the importance of symbols, cuts at the very roots of any genuinely artistic representation of the Faith in life, for art deals in symbols. The symbolic is its language, its means of communication.
One cannot properly study the Bible, the supreme Revelation, and at the same time the supreme achievement of literary art in the world’s literature, and not observe the dependence of the biblical writers upon symbols, upon the tangible, the concrete in the communication of spiritual truth. Even at Pentecost, the most spiritual of experiences surely, there is the wind and there is the fire. Jesus does not merely speak a word to a blind beggar. He makes clay with spittle and lays it upon his eyes. And at the last hour of greatest intimacy with his disciples, He took bread and poured out wine. The mightiest books of the Bible in literary power are the most symbolic: Genesis, Job, The Psalms, Isaiah, the Apocalypse.
It may well be that the evangelical branch of the Church must recover a sense of the meaning and function of symbols (as it veritably seems to be doing) if it is to produce writers who can communicate the experience of the Faith with power and beauty. The church building that cannot be distinguished from a lecture hall in appearance is not functioning as a spiritual instrument, though spiritual activity may be going on within it unaided by the setting. It may shelter the congregation adequately from the elements, but it does nothing in itself to lift the spirit Godward. And the ministry of the Word in such a building receives no assistance from the stones that should cry out in praise to God.
One cannot deny that there may be, that there have been, great outpourings of spiritual power without the assistance of instruments, but one must admit the difficulty of its representation for the artist. Too often the creative writer within the evangelical tradition is left with the most meager, and sometimes even pitifully shoddy instruments with which to shadow forth the most holy faith in graphic and pictorial terms.
THE WIDE PROVINCE OF ART
But this is only one of his problems. There is further the pressure upon him to select subjects which are in “good taste” in the Victorian sense. He is required to shun any realistic probing into the basic and most vital problems confronting the individual and society. And yet all life, high and low, sordid and noble, vile and pure, is the province of art.
Surely if the Bible is to be our standard, we must admit that nothing lay outside the province of the inspired writers. There are passages in the Bible concerned with the grossest and sometimes the most shocking forms of evil. There are stories of Sodom, of the Benjaminite war, of Amnon and Tamar. And there are the less startling but no less realistic stories of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, of David and Bathsheba, of Hosea and his faithless wife.
It certainly is not necessary for the Christian writer to dwell on the portrayal of evil in human experience. Indeed he cannot be a Christian writer if he prefers to wallow in human perversity and sin, to titillate the perverted taste and the defiled imagination of the carnally-minded reader.
But, on the other hand, he cannot be a true artist, he cannot be a significant writer, if his vision does not include the whole of human life, the depths of depravity as well as the heights of aspiration. If Christian readers, and Christian editors and publishers, insist on imposing unbiblical restrictions on contemporary authors, they will continue to produce men of little power and less vision, incapable of stabbing awake the conscience of the unregenerate.
Ibsen, whose dramas often shocked the prudish of his day, was once compared to the naturalist, Zola. This aroused him to anger. “Zola,” he said, “descends into the cesspool to take a bath; I, to cleanse it.” Ibsen was there suggesting a profound difference in the handling of evil in fiction and drama. The portrayal of evil per se does not make an evil book. If that were true it would be necessary to cut out great portions, not only of the Bible, but of the works of Shakespeare as well.
Unless there is a growing demand for Christian writers who will be free to write about the whole of life with compassionate honesty, the Christian faith cannot find any great expression in fiction.
“Let marriage be held in honor among all,” wrote the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, “and let the marriage bed be undefiled.” But the Christian novelist seems almost as embarrassed in dealing with sex as is the non-Christian novelist in dealing with prayer. Surely there is an area between prudery and pruriency where the Christian view of sex may be handled honestly, forthrightly, and even beautifully, as in The Song of Songs.
So long as certain areas of life are handled only by the non-Christian writer, we will continue to advance a non-Christian view of life in its deepest recesses. We cannot combat the pagan view of sex in our time by ignoring its significance in human experience, or worse, by preserving in a realistic age the Victorian prudery and hypocrisy that made an ugliness of what God intended to be beautiful.
The sex relationship can be sacramental, an “outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace.” But without the divine grace, without the spiritual aspiration infusing and inspiring the mutual love of two people, it tends to become merely the physical drive for personal gratification, which it is too often in fiction and in life. Surely the Christian novelist has a responsibility to reveal the distinction.
Of course, sex is only one area of life in which the realistic approach is needed in our time. Some of our great social problems cry out for a Christian treatment in fiction. Where is the great labor novel written from a Christian perspective? Where is the farm novel dealing honestly with that problem in our national life? Where is the missionary novel written with depth and power, recreating the whole milieu in which the transplanted Christian faith operates? Why does the popular denigration and disparagement of the missionary, as in Michener’s Hawaii, go unchallenged? Where is the novel dealing with the momentous ferment in Japan? Where is the Christian novel realistically and dramatically coming to grips with Communism?
THE PROPER AND THE PRUDISH
But not only is the Christian novelist limited in his selection of material; he is forced to handle even the properly selected material in a prudish and unrealistic manner. And yet we are living in a realistic age, an age that is as earthy and frank in its diction as was the age of Shakespeare. And that was the age also of the King James Version of the Bible, published in the same year (1611) as Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest. And the same earthy Anglo-Saxon words provide the translation from the earthy and realistic Hebrew text.
Here again, if the Bible is to be our standard, the modern Christian prophet should be able to call a spade a shovel as well as his ancient prototypes.
Why should “the prophetic voice in modern fiction” (as William R. Mueller suggests in his recent book under that title) be largely heard in writers that are non-Christian? It has not always been so. There have been great Christian voices in fiction: Dostoevski, Merezhkovski, and Sienkiewicz, to name a few.
Is the evangelical tradition then so artistically anemic that it can produce nothing full-blooded, full-bodied? Must the great writers of our time be intellectual rebels? Can the Great Acquiescence produce nothing worthy of our time, some mighty expression of our Faith’s triumphant and transforming power?
Most of the so-called “Christian” novels are artistically reprehensible, however proper their morality or their message. Often their characters are paper puppets, mere mouthpieces for the author’s pious propaganda. They have nothing of the vitality we seek in fiction of a genuine sort. They are cut to fit the moral, which is often as obvious as the message of Edgar Guest in verse. There is no subtlety in the handling, no sense of irony. The dialogue reads like written, not spoken English. There is little of idiom or idiosyncracy to identify one particular person from another. They all speak the speech of their author. There is no real understanding of all sorts and conditions of men. There is no all-embracing, Christlike compassion.
Is it any wonder that these artificial representations of life say nothing to those outside of the fold, and very little to those of education and intelligence within it?
And finally, all of this papier-maché world of romantic illusion, often so far removed from the real, or so pale a representation of it as to be unrecognizable, is too frequently conveyed in a style so shabby, so literal, and so careless as to disgrace the Faith they would proclaim.
Hemingway is said to have gone over the manuscript of The Old Man and the Sea 80 times. By comparison, stylistically, some of the religious novels of our time resemble the first draft of a college composition. There is no sense of the poetic, no attempt to create the rhythms of effective prose, to shape the imagery that lifts the mind from the dull commonplace, that rising from sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate.
One novelist at least in our time has done the thing beautifully, and he is an Anglican, within a liturgical tradition. Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country is not only a novel dealing realistically with one of the most serious problems of our time, but it is a thing of classic beauty, of poetic power and simple grandeur that lifts the spirit singing after the heart has been broken.
No sensitive spirit can come away from a reading of such a novel untouched, unchanged. Here are the evil, the sordidness, the irony, the tragedy, and the pathos of life. But here also are love and joy and peace that pass understanding. Here the Christian message is given wings. But here also it speaks in a voice with the sound of many waters, a voice that is prophetic, that speaks to our condition and to our need.
THAT THE MESSAGE GO FORTH
Only as Christian editors and publishers, Christian ministers and laymen rally to encourage the writing of works of such power and beauty will the Message go forth persuasively as it should in fiction to the troubled hearts and the confused minds of men in our time.
We will continue to neglect or to inhibit this potentially great vehicle of truth to our own loss and to the limitation of the artistic expression of the Faith. An alerted and aroused ministry might help to create an educated and intelligent laity that could in turn raise the standard of creative writing within the evangelical tradition.
Only as we see the necessity of the total penetration of our culture by the Gospel can we bring every thought into submission to the high and holy will of Christ.
Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.
