I have a question. How does one go about writing Christianly? Should one go about writing Christianly and what does that mean?
I did a review lately on Gene Veith’s “Reading Between the Lines”. He wrote that good Christian writing should reflect high aesthetic standards as well as sound biblical moral truths. That sounds simple enough. But what if that kind of writing isn’t marketable ? That’s hard –going for those who write for a living.
A look at the bestsellers in our Christian bookstores tells us that what people want is something accessible (linguistically and intellectually) and relevant to their daily lives. We also want quick-bites of advice so we can scan through the lesson for the day and then go out there and do it; after all, didn’t James tell us to be doers and not just hearers, we hum to ourselves.
But that’s like saying, here, let me hammer that nail into the wall, and then you miss, not the nail, but the entire wall , because you have been gazing at the nail in your hand and forgotten about why it is there in the first place. In abbreviated form, we’ve missed the big picture. When our sole pre occupation is with “getting it done right”- sticking to 1 hour devotions, attending prayer meetings, following steps 1- 89 of the “how-to-grow” manual-we lose sight of what God has called us to be – that is to simply BE who we are before Him. We forget that the problem with the nail and the wall was that that we forgot the reference point: whose we are. And when we remember whose we are, we recall that there’s no way we can make it on our own in the many, many years ahead, then we give ourselves up and surrender to His call .And we are called to lay down our frantic anxieties and rest. To put aside our harried prayer requests and listen. To stop giving excuses for sin and beg for forgiveness. To quit trying to put words to the song in our heads and just worship.
Because of this, good Christian writing is first of all, an invitation to come. Come and fellowship. Come and rest. Come and put your case before the Lord. Come and receive. Come and see the cross and Jesus hanging there. Come and worship at the empty tomb.
Good writers write from who they are, not from who or what they are trying to be. The parable replaces the didactic moral sermon. The metaphor replaces the list of instructions. If I am a Christian who follows the Lord, my convictions will be reflected in what I write. Is a writer’s work any more Christian when she cites Scriptures and follows the formulaic “before/after conversion ” plot ? In that same vein, is a writer’s work any less Christian when these words- in black and white print- are absent from her book?
I suppose parallels can be drawn from the Christian music industry. Is a piece from Hillsongs’ any more sacred than Bach’s wordless compositions? Or Mendelssohn’s ? We know that both composers did not write for a specifically Christian audience, but see how the strains of their beautiful music have lasted through the years and proven themselves to be classics. Hillsongs..well…
Goodness. This sounds as if I worry about writing marketable books. That shouldn’t be the concern of a Christian writer, or should it? If it is a question of accessibility, should I then write material that everyone can relate to ? If so, then my role as a writer is merely to reflect their preoccupations, not to challenge the parameters of thinking, beliefs and ortho-praxis. That doesn’t seem to be worth pursuing though. Neither does it seem biblical.
But a work must also communicate. As Moses and Jeremiah’s did. As John’s on Patmos when he gave us Revelations, which when you come to think of it, isn’t an easy book to understand. How can a work communicate without pandering to the hungry likes and dislikes of the consumer-reader? If I see myself, the writer, as a merchant, then my sole preoccupation is that my product had better be marketable to the consumers. But if I see my role of the writer as a prophet- lofty though this may sound- then, I am freed from the trappings of this capitalistic web. Well, a lot freer.
The Christian writer-prophet views writing as a vocation- a medium- through which God’s word is given to the people. Jeremiah used words, but not in the way that technology uses words to transmit information. The prophets used metaphors to convey God’s message to His people. That makes it pretty tricky because metaphors both limit and widen interpretations.
Metaphor also invites listeners and readers to reflect and to participate in-borrowing from Rosenblatt-”meaning-making”: What does that mean? What else could it mean to me, to the other person there, to the world? Metaphor is at the heart of the narrative-story.
As a writer, then I seek to communicate God’s truth to a broken world through the metaphor- the art of writing. The Christian writer’s role is not to transmit – like a recorder-commands, instructions and information. The Christian writer’s vocation is to show God’s truths through variations of shade and light, beauty and the grotesque, sound and silence, and to be a voice in the wilderness that calls out, “Prepare ye the Way of the Lord”.
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