Worldview Thinking with Mark Bertrand, continued

Today we’re continuing the discussion with author J. Mark Bertrand. As a refresher, here’s the question I left you with yesterday:

RLM: That’s a helpful analogy [that our worldview is a puzzle consisting of particular pieces, or ideas]. In your earlier response, you mentioned thinking biblically. Would this be a “new puzzle piece” that makes a person rework the entire puzzle? And since I’m most interested in fiction, how do you believe a rethinking of worldview will affect a novelist?

JMB: Christ shakes up the puzzle pieces for sure. Obviously, when a person repents and believes, there follows a desire to see things differently. “God made the world,” you realize, “so everything is what he says it is. But what does he say it is?” Of course, the same thing happens to believers when they realize that the assumptions they inherited from their tradition might need some rethinking, too. Once you start asking worldview questions, you lose the easy assumption that whatever contemporary Christian culture looks like, that must be synonymous with the biblical worldview.

How does worldview thinking help a novelist? For one thing, it affords a greater awareness of his influences. It makes him a better reader, which automatically improves the writing. Also, contemplating the way worldviews function might help a novelist approach the storytelling task with greater subtlety.

Worldview thinking is often a catalyst for Christians trying to live out their vocations in a more biblical way. The Bible doesn’t lay down rules for writers any more than it does for cab drivers, but that doesn’t mean we can’t bring biblical perspectives to our work. The results will look different depending on the writer, of course. The final chapter of Rethinking Worldview — “Imagining the Truth: Christians and Cultural Contribution” — looks at this is more detail. I wrote it with artists in mind.

RLM: In a recent comment on another blog you reiterated what you said earlier about worldview being a useful tool in sanctification. (Here’s the quote: ‘For me, “rethinking” worldview has involved lifting it out of the sphere of apologetics and trying to situate it within the context of sanctification, so it’s more about the mind of Christ and a life of faithfulness, less about the false assumptions underlying other people’s perspectives and more about the often shaky footings of my own.’) So what do you think a novelist living out his vocation in a more biblical way would look like? How would a biblical worldview affect what an author writes about?

JMB: A novelist living out his vocation in a more biblical way would look like anyone else doing his work to the best of his ability. You’d see an emphasis on hard work, quality, honesty, all the virtues we associate with the so-called Protestant work ethic. In that sense, I don’t think the novelist is any different from other believers who face the difficulty of making a living in accord with their convictions. All of this might fit under the heading of personal piety.

As far as subject matter is concerned, I think that’s going to depend on the artist. Here it’s not a question of personal piety as much as it is theological influence. An author who’s studied Christian theology — and more importantly, believes it — is going to be influenced in the same way that, say, a Marxist author will be. That doesn’t mean he’s a propagandist, but it suggests that the set of ideas he works out in fiction is going to include biblical concepts like creation, fall, and redemption.

How the influence plays out in the selection of subject matter or the finished work is going to vary. This is a terrible oversimplification, but I think artists tend to see either though a wide angle or a zoom lens. Some are trying to capture the big picture in their work, and others focus on a single thread. C. S. Lewis fits in the first category. His best novel, if you ask me, was Til We Have Faces, which is an elegant re-working of the Psyche myth that ends up saying something profound about the nature of holiness and our self-deceiving rebellion against it. But can you imagine Flannery O’Connor writing that book, or Graham Greene? They were also influenced by Christian theology, but it came out in different ways.

I’ve written about the influence of theology on art in a short essay entitled, unimaginatively enough, “Theology’s Influence on Art,” which is online here.

By the way, in the bookstore this week, I found a list posted of the state’s annual reading selections. Apparently South Dakota designates one book a year for everyone to read and discuss. I’m not sure who makes the selection, but I was intrigued to see that Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead was last year’s book, and Peace Like A River was the pick a couple of years back. Both books manifest their theological influences, but they’re very different, and the same is true of most any author you can name.

RLM: I’d agree with you about Til We Have Faces, certainly—it’s high on my “favorites” list.

I’m curious about the set of ideas a Christian author writing from his Biblical worldview will work out through his fiction. You mentioned creation, the fall, redemption. How “theologically correct” must a Christian be when writing fiction?

More tomorrow.