Let me give you what I consider to be a knock-down blow for the hypothesis we considered earlier that we shouldn’t be filling up our imaginations with fiction–imaginings of the way the world ain’t. I’ll offer additional arguments tomorrow (and I’m sure others will or by the time you read this already have offered them in the comboxes), but this one I consider a clincher:
Jesus used fiction.
If you think about it, that’s what his parables are: They’re short fictions.
When he starts talking about a man who went away on a journey and entrusted his property to his servants, it would be a mistake for someone in his audience to yell out "What was his name?!"
Someone actually does do that in Monty Python’s The Life Of Brian when Brian tries to tell a parable, but it’s missing the point. It’s a mistake.
It would be even more of a mistake to try to find out when and where the guy lived in history. When Jesus says things like this, he doesn’t have particular historical individuals in mind (so far as we know).
As a result, his parables are fictions. They may teach truths about the world, but the contain elements that aren’t the way the world is (or was or will be).
And if Jesus can use fiction . . . then so can we.
Just to play devil’s advocate…fiction is not the issue. The issue is “science fiction” or “fantasy” fiction. For example, in D&D there are many Gods that a character can worship. This is different than a fictional parable that includes elements from reality, such as a field and a farmer.
Not that I have a problem with science fiction or fantasy.
Does Dreaming the Impossible Dream count as using fiction?
Sci-fi and fantasy are hardly synonmyous with polytheism, to begin with. Just as realistic fiction posit non-actual events, persons, and/or places (i.e., events, persons, and/or places that God could have created but didn’t, so science fiction and fantasy characteristically posits non-actual technologies, physical laws, and/or creatures (some of which don’t yet exist but might someday, or whose existence or non-existence hasn’t yet been proven, others of which God could have created but didn’t). It’s the same principle.
Beyond that, even some kind of pantheon of finite divine beings (gods) seems not to be inherently incompatible with a baseline theism; in fact, many polytheistic religions have some notion of a supreme God who is more or less unknowable. There is no reason why God couldn’t have created Zeus, Hera, Apollo and Aphrodite if he wanted to, just as he could have created Tom Sawyer or Nicholas Nickleby if he wanted to. C. S. Lewis does something like this in his Space Trilogy.
I hate to take the romance out of things (just momentarily though) but it seems that what we really need to crack is a question of modality.
1. A true proposition is one that is true in the world of the actual.
2. A possible proposition is true in at least one possible world.
3. A contingent proposition is true in some possible worlds and false in others.
4. A necessary proposition is true in all possible worlds.
5. A necessarily false proposition is true in no possible world.
The relevance to literature, as well as the question of the way the world isn’t, goes back at least to old man Leibniz and his possible worlds in the mind of God. Possible World Theory does play a role in literary studies in that a literary text contains it’s own system of modality as I enumerated above plus a bunch that I don’t have the space or right to rattle on about here. Because of modality, each text is autonomous in a way that is a lot like the way the world of real life events has autonomy.
I think the overall significance is that when we consider a text it is helpful, if not even necessary, to bracket or suspend judgement on what is true in some other world, thus eliminating the “what isn’t” from our consideration. The fun thing is that it’s always possible to step in and out of whatever world may be in question.
I also think, aside from modal theory, that there’s something untrue, or unreal, about depriving ourselves of the human quality of the play of imagination. Imagination not only contributes to good fiction, it also contributes to good theology. The tyranny I see of the postmodern world (in which evangelicalism thrives) is that it is threatened by, and in turn threatens the religious imagination by placing limitations on modal possibilities and refusing to allow particular experiences to “give” themselves as real.
I don’t know that I would say that Jesus’ parables are fictions, but rather modalities of truth expressed through infinite possible worlds.
To deny literature of any genre its ontological status, especially on the grounds of one’s assumed faith, is nothing more than to be a philistine.
You just gotta love Jimmy’s nose-pantingly, lip-curlingly, cheek-flamingly, brow-furlingly, bosom heavingly and heart-glowingly informative posts!
To play devil’s advocate with another point: the original argument against fiction was that it portrayed a world or beings that God didn’t create. However, in the case of the parables that Jesus told, God *did* create those, since He was the one actually telling the parables 🙂
Historical fiction can also depict polytheism.
Fantasy and SF can depict monotheism.
Not to say that there isn’t bias. In an online crit group, I once had three stories in succession criticized — by three different people — for being set in a monotheistic, indeed Christian, society. One offered “polytheism has so many more possibilities!”
Even as an artistic point, it misses the point. Stories succeed by being finite, not infinite.