by Jane Craske

Long live novels!
Novels should have gone out of existence by now. With technological changes, a greater variety of material available on the television and the rise of the internet, the demise of the printed book was predicted a long time ago, even if fiction would be around in other forms.

Yet the popularity of book groups and the British phenomenon of Richard and Judy’s book club, suggest that some people intend to carry on reading. Even the Booker Prize is a big enough cultural event to generate a page of reviews in the Methodist Recorder, as well as scandalous stories about the judging process in other newspapers. However, it is those who are already avid novel readers (us bookworms!) who are most likely to be interested in theological reflection on novels.

It started for me with my love of novels from early years. Weekly trips to the library sustained a wide variety of reading through my teenage years, before I began to build my own collection (from Sunday School prizes at first). At university I studied English literature, particularly the novel, and brought some of the concentration on texts I learned there to my later study of theology. In theological research, I was able to read the novels, as well as the essays and plays, of Dorothy L. Sayers.

I discovered black women writing about theology and ethics in conversation with the work of black women novelists.1 Then my own most sustained theological reflection on novels was in the writing of Being Human: In Conversation with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (Inspire, 2007). If you admit to being a bookworm, what would be your history of putting together novels, your life story and your Christian faith?

This article makes two general points about reading novels and the relationship of that activity to theological reflection. Then I offer examples of reflection on novels by two different authors and finally ask what use any of this might be to the preacher.

It takes time
Novels are a problem in the postmodern world, because they take time to read and our lives, it is said, are increasingly ‘time-poor’. You can, of course, skip to the last page or pass over chunks of description in order to carry on to the next part of the plot. But then you’ve focused on only one layer of a novel and missed so much else. The best way is to accept the time it takes to immerse oneself in the experience of reading and lose oneself in the world of this particular novel. The experience of reading is stimulus for reflection in two ways: it can slow us down and give us time to think as well as providing material on which to reflect. Taking time is a way of engaging with something – and theological reflection takes some commitment to be engaged. Similarly, reading is about giving attention and plumbing the depths. It’s about what we allow ourselves to be caught up into; it’s about what we feel as well as what we think. Reading novels can engage our human sympathies, and by engaging them, develop them as well.

Novels are a form of entertainment. Since in Western societies we are able to give more time to leisure and entertainment than was the case in previous eras, we need to put our Christian faith in relationship with our leisure time as much as any other area of our lives. Sometimes I read novels for deliberate ‘escapism’, because they are so different from what’s around me. Sometimes I have sufficient energy to read novels that I know will trouble me or challenge me. There is reflection to be done on my use of leisure time and my levels of energy, in connection with a whole life dedicated to God!

The turn to human experience
The theological reflection on novels which interests me matches a particular theological approach. It is an approach which expects theology to reflect on human experiences in all their variety. Novels are an ideal creative form for this because diversity and range are the great gifts of the novel – a never-ending stream of stories and the imaginative construction of an infinite number of worlds and characters. But though novels are imagined, they emerge out of actual human experiences and reflections. Barbara Kingsolver, as a novelist and a reader of stories, writes: “I love fiction, strangely enough, for how true it is. If it can tell me something I didn’t already know, or maybe suspected but never framed quite that way, or never before had struck me so divinely in the solar plexus, that was a story worth the read.”2 Imagined life relates to actual human experiences.

A range of modern theologies, particularly the contextual theologies that emerged from liberation theology, turn to human experience and expect our reflection on human experience to be a starting point for theology. That starting point is set alongside theological traditions and resources in a conversation from which emerges greater knowledge of God and of people as well as reflective action. Expecting to find God in and through human experience is not the same as reducing God to human experience, however. The God who became incarnate relates intimately to all human experience, but also challenges and transforms our experiences and draws any one person beyond themselves towards God and towards other people. It is the business of theologians (including preachers) to reflect on all the exciting complexity of that, which none of us can discover on our own.

Being Human
What was it that I was doing when reading, analysing, pondering Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy which I would describe as theological reflection? First of all I was reflecting on novels I had enjoyed reading. That may not always be the case! Then I pushed myself to look again, more deeply.

In beginning to analyse what was going on in the novels, I thought about the chief characters, the direction of the plot, but most of all about what seemed to me the implicit values of the novel. I was engaging in particular with the vision of life, the world-view of the novels. However, there is danger in handling a novel as if it has a ‘message’ which we can get to by stripping away all the trappings of the particular story, by ignoring what in fact makes it so special. The world-view of the novel is not simply ‘generalisable’ from out of the particular novel. It has to be explored in the forms that it has in the novel, through the details and not apart from them. What is good for the characters in this novel? What draws them on to something better? What kind of experiences drag them down and destroy them? Where have my sympathies been engaged in this novel? Where they have not, why not? What is it I find myself suspicious of in the narrative? What turns things upside down? Only then might I go on to ask, how does the world of the novel compare with the perhaps more limited experiences in my world?

These kinds of reflections might then be set alongside Christian visions of the good, of what we believe God wants for human beings, of what salvation is about and what sorts of actions or beliefs or circumstances destroy people. Sometimes my reading of a novel may challenge traditional Christian formulations and cause me to examine received Christian wisdom at greater depth. In the case of Pullman’s novels,

I was reading three books which others had already argued were anti-religious, anti-Christian. But I was not interested in somehow proving the books ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, either unworthy in relation to Christian norms or actually OK if I dug down far enough. I was interested in a conversation between some aspects of the novels – the key images of daemons and Dust, visions of good and evil, what was going on in the portrayal of ‘the Church’ or the supposed God-figure of the story’s worlds – and Christian ideas (themselves not uncomplicated). For me the humanistic world of these particular novels asks some tough questions of Christian traditions which have sometimes not been humanist enough to honour the God who loves people and wants them to flourish.

Not the real world?
As for novels I may not have ‘enjoyed’ so much, I recently read Joseph O’Connor’s Redemption Falls 3 (a theological title if ever there was one) with its bleak portrait of America immediately after the end of the War of Independence. It offered food for reflection on the worst that humans can do to each other as well as what might constitute hope and transformation for damaged lives. But it also provoked thought about the many images constructed of and by one human being and the ways in which they deceive. The narrative is woven out of many created voices, giving a multi-layered portrait of the main characters, provoking a recognition of how any one individual is seen differently by others, is even constructed differently by their perceptions. Who is the real person? Is there such a thing in a novel?

What do we mean by ‘a person’ in the ‘real world’? Are there any parallels? We take some aspects of ourselves so much for granted that it takes fiction to make us stop and look more deeply at who we are and how the world we see is constructed. Those are the kind of questions some literary critics or philosophers might ask, and they can be unsettling. What theological perspective can be brought to bear? Does God give us the world only in a simple, authoritarian way? Or does God, perhaps, enable us to create the world, out of what God has already given?

Such questions may seem a long way away from the experience of curling up in an armchair for an enjoyable hour or two with a book. Some might argue that novels do not lead us to the world at all, but away from it, into our own very private space. Perhaps there is a problem in novel reading being often something solitary? But it is only a problem if we refuse to relate what we’re doing in that hour or two to the rest of our lives.

For preachers
William Sangster, writing in a very different world from our own, suggested that the preacher could let his wife tell him about the ‘bestsellers’ of the day: she could save him time in that way.4
I presume we’ve got beyond such sexist stereotypes and snobbery about popular culture!? In fact, contrary to Sangster’s recommendations, I would resist the use of novels as material for quick illustrations. It works even less well than with films, since it is rare (even with Richard and Judy’s recommendations) to find novels that a considerable proportion of the congregation will have read, at least recently enough to remember significant details. That means that an example taken from a novel is likely to take too long to explain to be effective as a sermon illustration. (The Harry Potter books may have been an exception to this rule – but perhaps not for the majority age group in our congregations.)

Instead, theological reflection on novels needs space in which we can give deeper study and consideration – perhaps in small groups, perhaps on our own at first and then testing out the insights with other people. For it is the kind of activity that helps us to grow as reflective people, as reflective Christians and thus also as preachers. Novels encourage exploration: an opening-up of questions rather than a simple provision of answers. That’s the basis for good theological reflection – and good preaching.

Revd Dr Jane V. Craske is Superintendent Minister of the Leeds North East Circuit

1     Particularly in the work of Katie Cannon; Black Womanist Ethics, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988.
2     Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder, Faber and Faber, 2002, p.210.
3     Joseph O’Connor, Redemption Falls, London: Vintage, 2008
4     W.E. Sangster, The Craft of Sermon Illustration, London: Epworth Press, 1946, pp.56-57