So, you’ve been a fan of the Grishaverse books forever and now that Shadow and Bone is finally a TV show, everything is right with the world. But your Christian grandmother just watched it and is now talking about all the symbolism in it…What’s up with that? Let’s talk about how biblical and literary integration might actually be a good thing.

1)         Understanding Our Roots

Judeao-Christian motifs have existed for literally thousands of years. You can’t escape the tropes: The fight between the light and shadow, the exposure of lies and secrets, the Chosen One–or suffering Savior, the fights between ultimate good and ultimate evil, the Underdog…you get the gist.

No matter what you read, be it fiction or memoir or graphic novel, chances are there will be a concept or trope that actually derives from a biblical story or concept—no matter if the author is a Christian or not. (To you hardcore YA fans, remember the roots of your favorite genre; Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight can be read as a Mormon allegory given the author’s background. Sorry if I brought up bad memories, but I don’t control the nature of the Twilight Renaissance!)

Anyway, when you read books that contain these tropes, you are (sometimes indirectly) taking part in a time-honored storytelling device, and one that our ancient Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs before us practiced through oral tradition!

2)         “It’s the Duality of Man, sir.” – Full Metal Jacket

The Apostle Paul says that, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). We shouldn’t be afraid of reading difficult books, or reading articles about hard topics. If we are afraid of hurting with the world’s hurt, we shouldn’t call ourselves Christians. If you have an area that you know is tempting for you, pray for discernment as you read, ut don’t avoid books merely out of fear; you aren’t giving God enough credit.

Some of you may thinking, “Oh, I’ll just approach reading from different mindsets then, depending on what I’m reading. That will make it easier, right?” Actually…no. As much as I love the Christian community here in the US (including the potlucks, once it’s safe to have them again), we somehow have convinced ourselves that splitting into multiple people to consume different media is okay. But creating two identities for yourself, the Reader and the Christian, can stunt growth. One approach runs the risk of choking out the other. Like Jesus said, “You cannot serve two masters.” He says this of God and money, but it could just as easily be God and Fiction. Or God and Books in General.

When I first read Catch-22, I used to say to my friends: “As a Christian, I should hate it, but as a lover of literature, I love it.” Then I realized, How can I split from the identity defined by my Savior so easily? So, I had to meld my two identities back together, and reflect on the ways that I, all of me, loved the book, while still acknowledging the abominations and horrors that remained unjustified in the novel.

3)         The Laws on our Hearts

We love to quote the “mankind has no excuse not to know God” verse, but how much do we really believe that? The fact that writers understand the grotesque and expose it reveals to the reader her awareness that this world has something inherently wrong in it. Take The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s not a book meant to coddle, or inform, or persuade. Yet the bleakness of the novel contains the cry of someone “not far from the kingdom of heaven.” McCarthy writes so poetically, but most of the impact lies in what he doesn’t say. How he conveys desperation and love alike— it is not already a gift from his Creator? Is there not meaning in mourning?

4)         The Human Element

“Humans are just more cognitive animals” says society, and we know it’s not true, but what greater fiction equivalent do we have to disprove that than Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway? Her lens into not only the human psyche but the flashbacks, the thoughts about thoughts, the character’s physical journey to get flowers…they are all, as Maggie Stiefvater would say, “too big for the mind to hold” (1).  

God created this complexity in us. He didn’t give us the trauma, granted, but our manner of living, our manner of the life in our heads and our life in the physical realm. We exist in that kind of physical/ spiritual duality a reason, maybe to connect us to each other, and to Himself, even more than we already would have been without it.

5)         Make Way for Moral Ambiguity

I first read Artemis Fowl as a sixth grader and dropped into a whole new literary universe because of it: the 12-year-old main character wanted to appear villainous. What??

The church sometimes isn’t super great at exposing young people to moral ambiguity—perhaps because that balance of age and knowledge seems hard to traverse. You might have grown up thinking that the “Hebrews Hall of Faith” was filled with a bunch of good role models to emulate, that David “made a mistake” but was mostly good, etc. At what point, though, does ignorance become neglect? Youth Group did change a bit of that, thank goodness, but you’ve kind of already read Percy Jackson by that point, and learned all about that sweet “moral ambiguity” from a source outside the Scriptures.

What would it be like, then, to reenter into some of those Bible stories from the lens that you have now? What would it be like, after reading The Great Gatsby, which is filled with a whole bunch of terrible people you like anyway, to read Israel’s trek to the Promised Land? What would it be like to read Ecclesiastes while also contemplating Billy Budd, Sailor?

6)         On Entertainment

Pardon me; I’m going to be Socrates for a second and hound you with questions: Why are you reading what you’re reading? Do you ever think about the purpose so starkly? And why are you reading the Bible? Are you reading out of duty, delight, or something else entirely?

We live in a that world revolves around entertainment; it can become so easy to fall into the trap of reading fiction for leisure and the Bible for duty, or the Bible for pleasure and fiction because you have classwork. But if our main reason to read is escape, will we not always be disappointed with our own reality? And with that disappointment growing within us, how can we expect to spread the selfless love of God to a world that so desperately needs it?

7) Empathy. Just…empathy.

We are always in our own heads. Does it bother you that you’re always in your own head and never in anybody else’s head? When we read books, we enter someone else’s head. This is kind of miraculous considering that when we’re reading fiction, we are entering a world that doesn’t exist into the mind of a person who also does not exist. Spooky.

Through experiencing a novel, you start to gain an appreciation for the human race, and God’s hand in our life daily. Listen, I know that God is sovereign. I know humans are depraved. But we live in a world and in a culture so individualized and self-centered; one that profits off t-shirts that say, “I don’t like people.” What is our problem? We are humans. We should like other humans. Or if we don’t like them, at least treat them with dignity, and make an effort to know them, because more connects us than separates us. And even if we don’t understand them, we need to love them anyway.

God is all about empathy, and loving people. His commandments are summed up in “love the LORD your God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind in all of your strength. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22: 36-40). Books bridge the gap between understanding ourselves and understanding others—and that’s what empathy is. 

So let’s all get excited to read again, with eyes wide open to see how God works through the written word!

Works Used

The Holy Bible

Stiefvater, Maggie. The Dream Thieves. Scholastic, 2013.