The Christian Storyteller’s Dilemma

There’s no good way to tell a Christian story.

The gospel is perennially uncool. Any story that points to the gospel runs the risk of inheriting its uncoolness. A Christian yarn may end up sounding like a sermon. It may come across as moralizing, over-hopeful, or lacking the secular sheen that modern readers demand. A story designed to draw people to the gospel may end up repelling them instead.

How can a Christian writer craft a story that appeals to the culture while pointing beyond it?

The Moral Proverb

The simplest way for Christians to tell edifying, appealing stories is to talk about how people do and should live. Most successful stories—secular and otherwise—are moral fables.

As Robert McKee explains in his scriptwriting masterpiece Story, all the films we love have an essentially moral message. Great and successful movies—from Casablanca to Star Wars to The Godfather—teach us how to live and how not to.

Pixar’s most lucrative film to date is Finding Nemo. The moral core of the movie is easy to spot. The question that it asks is “When is it right to seek control and when to let go?” The protagonist, Marlin, is terrified of life and seeks to control his son Nemo. His traveling companion Dory has no control—she constantly forgets the past. She embraces her lack of control and approaches every minute as a new, usually delightful, adventure. The story of how Marlin learns to trust Fate and give up control is the driving force behind the story. Since both children and parents struggle with this question, the film appealed to both.

For the Christian writer, the moral proverb offers a good way to tell a story that helps people think through questions of morality and wisdom without violating social norms about how we talk about religion and ethics.

The book of Proverbs provides a model for this kind of story. A proverb like “The borrower is the lender’s slave,” isn’t a weird religious idea. It’s good plain common sense. So we can follow the example of Proverbs by telling stories that portray the best way to live.

Explicit Conversion

The trouble with Moral Proverbs is that they don’t go far enough. The essence of the Christian message is that try as we might, human beings simply don’t do good. Proverbs can help improve behavior. They can steer us away from the most damaging mistakes. They can help us recognize our inability to do good. But they do not make us good. If all the world needed was a little more ethical education, Jesus didn’t need to die on a cross. The gospel begins with the idea that moral education is not enough—that Jesus himself is the key to living the human life well.

This leads us to the second way that Christian writers can frame their stories. A story that shows a character hitting bottom, recognizing her sinfulness, accepting Christ’s death and resurrection, and experiencing life transformation portrays the gospel explicitly.

The only place in a modern bookstore where you’ll find this kind of story in abundance is in the Christian fiction section. That’s a pity, because the Christians who shop in this section are precisely the people who least benefit from these kinds of stories.

Yet some of the greatest novels of all time are explicit gospels. Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. In each of these tales we watch one of the main characters undergo a conversion. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is another familiar example, though here again mainly Christians read it.

Christian writers yearn to portray the gospel explicitly in their stories. The gospel is, after all, the deepest and truest solution to every human life. It is the ultimate resolution to every plot. But secular publishers, reviewers, and readers will tend to see a novel with an explicit gospel as idiosyncratic and sectarian, no matter how superb the rest of the storytelling is. So an explicit gospel is rarely a good option for authors wanting to tell their stories to a broad audience.

The Metaphorical/Allegorical Gospel

C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe offers an oft-discussed option for portraying the gospel in a socially acceptable way. Throughout the Narnia series, Lewis portrayed Jesus as Aslan the Lion. Although it was easy enough to perceive that Aslan was Jesus, the distinction made the story more oblique, less jarring, and more intriguing.

All the elements of the gospel are present in the series—particularly in its first book. Satan is there as the White Witch. Sinners are represented by Edmund. God the Father is described as “The Emperor Over the Sea.” The cross appears as the Stone Table. Lewis tells the gospel, but he tells it allegorically. This has the effect both of veiling it—making it harder to reject outright—and of illuminating it, giving us a fresh perspective on the Christian story.

Although many admire what Lewis did, metaphorical and allegorical retellings of the gospel are uncommon in fiction literature. Perhaps Lewis did his job so well that few others feel the need to retread that ground.

Tight-Lipped Conversion

One of the most generally useful ways of portraying the gospel in a secular story is to show the beginning and the end of a conversion without showing the middle. In this kind of story, we see a character hitting bottom. Later we see them transformed and whole. We are not told explicitly what happened between their collapse and their renewal, but we are given hints that they experienced Christian conversion.

Take for example this imaginary novel. One of the secondary characters—we’ll call him Ryan—is a professional louse. He’s rude and selfish, a drunk and a womanizer. Through the first half of the novel we watch Ryan deteriorate. Every time we see him he is worse off than before. By the midpoint of the book he is unshaven, unkempt, basically homeless after his last girlfriend booted him out, and constantly drunk. Then, for a few chapters, Ryan disappears. None of the other characters know what happened to him and no one particularly cares.

Suddenly Ryan shows up again, and he’s different. He’s still badly shaven but at least somebody washed him. He doesn’t reek of bourbon. But the big difference lies in his eyes, his face. As we hear him speak it’s with a different voice—now humble, helpful, not without wit but far more reserved.

The other characters mutter for a chapter or so about the transformed Ryan. Finally someone comes around to asking him what happened. “I finally found someone who loved me enough to kick me in the seat.” Then we notice that the gold chains that use to decorate his neck have been replaced with a simple cross.

In one sense, a tight-lipped conversion like Ryan’s is a reduction of the gospel. It draws back from an explicit portrayal of Christian faith. But this sacrifice of explicitness is offered in exchange for accessibility. Secular readers may not receive the full gospel but they do get a story they can understand and enjoy. Although the gospel itself remains hidden, the pattern of moral destitution and recovery that characterizes the sincere Christian believer is clearly portrayed.

Tight-lipped conversions serve as an invitation to an inspiring—if vague—hope. Ryan’s cross is a clue that you can ignore or pursue. You may ignore it now, but if you ever find yourself in a dark place like Ryan’s, maybe you’ll investigate further.

Prefiguration Stories

The gospel is a rich and complex story with many different parts and ideas. We cannot understand what Christ did on the cross without grasping these underlying ideas. Sin, holiness, righteousness, love, covenant, forgiveness, atonement, sacrifice, redemption—all of these elements are fundamental to the gospel story.

The Old Testament does not explain the gospel, but it does prefigure it. The Hebrew Scriptures portrayed each of these fundamental elements so that the gospel would make sense when Christ enacted it.

In the same way, modern writers can prefigure the gospel in the minds of their readers by portraying certain elements in clear, vivid terms. A novel that clearly portrays the horror of sin, for example, paves the way for its readers to grasp why God demands retribution for sin.

A wonderful and perhaps surprising example of a prefiguration story is The Lord of the Rings by Catholic author J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien’s novel prefigures the gospel in many different ways, but one of the most obvious is in his portrayal of the hero Frodo.

What is it that makes Frodo a hero? It’s not his strength, his prowess with a weapon. It’s not his wit, his cleverness or charm. It’s not even, precisely, his courage—though his courage is considerable. What makes Frodo such a remarkable hero is two qualities that are fundamentally Christian.

First, Frodo trusts that Fate as he understands it—the unnamed God who lovingly and sovereignly presides over Middle Earth—will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Although Frodo’s own efforts are feeble and basically foolhardy, he trusts that God will honor his obedience and the prayers of his friends by granting victory over the evil Sauron.

Frodo’s second heroic quality is his self-sacrifice. Frodo fully recognizes that although his quest may bring peace to Middle Earth, it will probably destroy him. Indeed, Frodo’s quest does destroy him—he returns as Frodo the Nine-Fingered, wounded and in some sense humiliated. He is haunted by his attachment to the Ring, cannot settle back into life in his old home the Shire, and ultimate abandons Middle Earth to travel to the Uttermost West—a symbol for the afterlife. Frodo accepts the mantle that Fate places upon him despite the terrible cost to himself. This is a Christian view of heroism. It is evocative on Christ’s own quest.

Christian stories can serve the gospel by vividly showing parts of it. Readers may not understand the gospel through a story like The Lord of the Rings, but they do begin to grasp and to love some of the values and ideas that feed into the grand gospel narrative.

Other Models?

Are there are models for how Christians can tell stories that honor the gospel without smacking readers in the face with it? I’m still searching for solutions to this tension. Please share your ideas!