Can fiction help us better understand the Bible?
Has a work of fiction ever helped you to better understand a difficult story or ambiguous character in the Bible?
A great deal of fiction—Christian or otherwise—draws on characters and themes from the Bible. When we encounter a fictional character who’s been inspired by a Biblical one (Superman, for example), we can often gain extra insight into that fictional character by studying the Biblical character that inspired him.
But have you ever experienced the opposite—a situation where a fictional character or story element helped illuminate a Biblical character or event?
The First Things blog has an interesting post that explores what we can learn about Job by studying the fictional character Faust. The close parallels (and key differences) between Job and Faust provide us with a new angle from which to understand Job.
I’ve experienced this on occasion, most recently while re-reading Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. The main character is a priest and (highly flawed) Christ-figure of sorts. In the course of the novel, he interacts with and even helps a person who he strongly suspects will eventually betray him to his enemies… but he helps the man anyway, knowingly putting himself in danger. The priest’s thought process is complex, and he isn’t a perfect picture of Christ by any means, but the exploration of his attitude toward his would-be betrayer has influenced the way I read the interaction between Jesus and Judas. The Bible doesn’t tell us what Jesus thought and felt as he ministered to the man who would betray him to death, and so the insight from Greene’s novel provides some ways to ponder that question.
What about you? What fictional characters or stories have shaped the way you view certain people or stories in the Bible?
The 1984 novel by Robert A. Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice, gave me the idea that I should, maybe, read the Bible.
i read a story fiction story once that really help me so a clear picture of of how the walls of jericho fell down and how the rehab the prositure felt and came to belive how faith after losing faith for decades can change things and break down walls i forget the author but she puts out short stories of women in the bible that are fiction but awsome
The Author you speak of I believe is Francine Rivers. She has several “novellas” published on various Biblical figures, as well as several other fictional novels. I have read each one and can say from personal experience, each one helped me to understand the Bible at a much deeper spiritual level. I highly reccommend any of her titles.
The movie “Squanto:A Warriors Tale” made me realize the truth that God loves all people and all races, no matter how different a person looks.
I love that truth . It gives me and people around the globe hope.
Another obvious fact made so vivid in the movie was that we need to help others, befriend them, and do what a true friend does, lay down your life for them.
Thanks for your thoughts, everybody. I’ll have to check some of these out. Caitlin, I’m not familiar with “Squanto” but it sounds interesting!
The graphic novel ‘Preacher’put me on the road to my faith. The story would not be considered Christian by any stretch of the imagination, most would label it downright blasphemous but it made me consider God himself more and more and how the story depicted him was simply ridiculous. When Jesus found me i saw that he posessed perfectly all the qualities that the most compelling fictional heroes, even ones as cynical as Preacher’s protagonist Jesse Custer, has only that his will and motives were not coming from himself. Jesus didn’t decide to carry out his own will he drew his strength and purpose from God the father.
Fictional heroes can provide access to understanding the different trials that a person doing right must overcome,uncertainty, difficulty, struggle, loss and betrayal. They can also help to highlight the requirements determination, hard work, self-sacrifice and love. But we must remember that all fictional heroes act according to the morality they believe in, the further away from God that is the less like Jesus they become and the less heroic they should be considered.
@Scott thanks for sharing! I can’t imagine that that Ennis would have ever thought his stories would lead people to faith.