You seem to be making what I view as an unwarranted connection between Christians’ personal social interaction and their occupational calling.  You assert in your response to D.M. Dutcher that “if Christian readers and authors don’t behave like Christ when faced with cold shoulders or conflicts, there is no point in us professing to show truths in our books that secular authors really do not show. They can behave like jerks or egomaniacs and yet tell great stories. If we’re jerks, even if we also tell great stories, what would set us apart? Why do we say we’re unique?”  In your reply to me you again ask, “if we don’t have something Christlike to show in our behavior, even if not specifically in our stories but at least ourselves, then what is the point of us? Implicit answer: not much.”

The most relevant portion: when I said “there is no point in us professing to show truths in our books that secular authors really do not show.” You questioned that assumption. You asked: What if we aren’t “professing to show [such] truths” at all?

But that answer is not, in fact, implicit, for the rhetorical question it purports to complete is itself founded on the false premise that the fiction written by Christians must have a “point,” and that’s a premise which, in practice, assumes writing to be a means instead of an end.

Here’s where we definitely agree: stories are not merely a means to an end. They have intrinsic God-glorifying value. I hope Speculative Faith has always pushed this truth. Stories are not mere means to things like Moral Improvement (as if the chief end of a story is to repeat a Moral Truth memorably). They are also not mere means to Good Feelings, or Niche Marketing, or Entertainment, as this Reading Is Worship series has so far suggested. Rather, they are means to glorifying God.

I argue that this is the point of all stories.

But it’s vulnerable to misunderstanding, likely because it sounds Spiritual.

So my open question, for “research,” is this: when you heard a claim that “the purpose of Story is to glorify God,” what meaning do you hear?

I think I may know a little of what you hear, so I’ll try to answer that below.

But if writing’s a means, then it cannot be worship.

This may depend on the what we mean by “writing.” When I think of “writing,” I think of creativity, not merely a utilitarian effort to communicate. I’m thinking of art, metaphor, skill, honest explorations, faithful renderings of humanity, endearing reflections of beauty, goodness, and truth. In this, worship is visceral. Not only overt. Yet this also doesn’t rule out, say, having a character sing a praise song.

If I try to “accomplish” something with my writing – if I attempt to “make a difference” or “change the world” or “give God a good name,” then my writing ceases to be a personal expression of praise and instead becomes a mere tool.

It may. Or it may not.

Take a popular secular example: The Hunger Games. Did Suzanne Collins want to “change the world”? We don’t know, but the themes she explored certainly have something to say about our culture’s views or potential views of civil authority and pop entertainment. (If anyone thinks her presentation subtle, it is not, especially when she over-overtly gives the Capitol citizens a “vomitorium” in Catching Fire.)

Surely Collins wanted to “make a difference.” Even while sharing a great story.

As for “changing the world” or “giving God a good name,” again we seem to have definition differences. I’ve argued that glorifying or worshiping God can indeed be a “subconscious” activity. (After all, Scriptures assure us that rocks and whales do it.)

So let us suppose one Christian sits down and says, You know what? I want to write a great story. If his motives are (relatively) sin-free, that story will bring glory to God, with or without overt religious themes. Why? Because he is no longer a depraved sinner; Christ has redeemed him. And if Christ (ultimately) can echo truth and glorify Himself through non-Christians thanks to common grace, He will surely do this through the works of a Christian.

But let’s suppose another Christian says, I want to write a story about specific Christian themes: redemption, human nature, heroism, sacrifice, maybe even church politics or relatively “minor” theological questions. He wants to glorify God in a different way, more “explicitly,” by crafting a story about Christians, maybe even for Christians. Is this inferior? It might be. Or it might be a fantastic, well-made tale.

Really, it depends on the author and his personal depth in the faith.

• If he has drawn deep from that original, Epic Story of God’s Word and reality, then that will affect his writing, regardless of the kind of story he wants to tell.
• If he is a Christian “on the side,” seeing that as entirely separate from his writing life and stories as a means “to themselves” only, I do suggest his writing will offer nothing new.

Notice I do not say “nothing spiritual, nothing of worth, nothing With a Point.” I mean nothing new. A Christian’s motive to write for God’s glory should be precisely to make better stories. If he wants to write primarily for Moral Betterment, or Entertainment, or Proselytization, or as a Cultural Pushback, his story will likely be inferior. Not as joyful. Not as heartfelt and original.

But there seems to be a greater different in our definitions:

Pure worship wants nothing; it’s the recognition of reality, not the advocacy thereof (here’s hoping that definition makes sense).

Hmm. If I’ve understood you right, I wholeheartedly disagree. (Yet I am confused, because you also name-check Piper, who discourages “disinterested worship”!)

In worship, we want more of God. And we want to share Him.

If needed, I can prove this Biblically, with references and mini-essays galore. Or I can simply supply the names of excellent books on this issue — especially Desiring God by John Piper and Heaven by Randy Alcorn — which both Biblically put to rest the perennial notion of “disinterested” worship. They build on the Biblical case of C. S. Lewis, who wrote frequently about (and according to) a Biblical concept of joy.

One of the best examples of this is in The Great Divorce, chapter 9. In this admitted allegorical tale, Lewis himself is taken via “airbus” to a vision of Heaven, or rather Heaven’s outskirts, in which Heaven’s citizens confront the residents of the dull, boring, gray slums of Hell (symbolizing the real world choices we have while living).

In this chapter, a heavenly Spirit confronts the “ghost” of a citizen of Hell. The ghost is awed by the landscape of Heaven, but wants to paint it — neglecting the Source.

[The Spirit is speaking] “When you painted on earth — at least in your earlier days — it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too. But here you are having the thing itself. It is from here that the messages came. There is no good telling us about this country, for we see it already. In fact we see it better than you do.”

“Then there’s never going to be any point in painting here?”

“I don’t say that. When you’ve grown into a Person (it’s all right, we all had to do it) there’ll be some things which you’ll see better than anyone else. One of the things you’ll want to do will be to tell us about them. But not yet. At present your business is to see. Come and see. He is endless. Come and feed.”

There was a little pause. “That will be delightful,” said the Ghost presently in a rather dull voice.

“Come, then,” said the Spirit, offering it his arm.

“How soon do you think I could begin painting?” it asked.

The Spirit broke into laughter. “Don’t you see you’ll never paint at all if that’s what you’re thinking about?” he said.

“What do you mean?” asked the Ghost.

“Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you’ll never learn to see the country.”

“But that’s just how a real artist is interested in the country.”

“No. You’re forgetting,” said the Spirit. “That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light.”

“Oh, that’s ages ago,” said the Ghost. “One grows out of that. Of course, you haven’t seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake.”

“One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower — become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.”

Ah, it’s a beautiful thing, yet I cannot end there; there’s a few more things. …

My point here is this: immature Christians have just as much reason to write speculative fiction as the most Christlike amongst us.  If writing really can be worship, then it’s unthinkable to crack open its gate only to the “deserving”

Oh, I definitely agree. I’ve no desire to institute, much less be, some kind of “gatekeeper.” Yet we should also encourage maturity, don’t you think? And in this case, we can lovingly recognize differences while also pointing to Scripture — especially the Scriptures that relate to personal peacemaking and learning how to love even legitimate legalists (while recognizing our own legalisms!).

– to those who’ve achieved a level of sanctification sufficient to dispel fellow Christians’ fears of that they’ll indulge in some kind of embarrassing display.  That’d be akin to the asphyxiating idea that a certain level of sanctification is necessary before a believer goes out into the world to witness or minister or serve others’ needs.  The Body of Christ will atrophy into emaciation if we all feel we’ve gotta get buff before we can show up at the gym.

Agreed and amen. This is a worse danger if we point “non-buff” brothers and sisters to themselves and their own efforts, rather than those of Christ!

I’m also in total agreement with your remarks about “points.” When we understand the definition of worship to be sin-free, sometimes-conscious-and-sometimes-not desire for more of God and our enjoyment in Him (and thus more of His glory), anything we do fulfills that “point.” Worship and enjoyment of God are “the point.”

To run yet again the perpetual risk of dependance upon the example of a “Patron Saint”: Tolkien never once characterized his works’ existence as being justified by having a “point” that anyone here would accept as “Christian.”  His stated purpose was not to glorify God or “show truths,” but rather to create a “mythology for England.”

And yet that in itself is a way of glorifying God. Whether or not Tolkien knew it, he was participating in the redemptive work of Christ. He had been redeemed, and so he set out to in a sense help in redeeming creation — to “subcreate,” to tell stories that end in “eucatastrophe.” That term was his, and he had obviously thought it through. It seems reductionistic to say his only goal was to create a new mythology. Like the story itself, it was “a tale that grew in the telling,” with many goals.

It seems some authors (perhaps myself included) are wont to take one aspect of either Tolkien’s or Lewis’s motives, separate that motive from the whole, and make a guiding philosophy out of it, whether “secular” or “spiritual.” The whole is more complex and we must wrestle with that. With them, there was no such thing as “secular,” and that belief made their work more endearing and transcendent.

Neither do we read Tolkien because he lived an exemplary life (though an argument could be made that he did); we read Tolkien because his works speak to us in deep and profound ways.

Agreed. (You seem to be arguing against that annoying Christian belief that we must be faithful to Good Christian Authors with exemplary lives, even if their stories are badly written!) I simply offer the reminder that Tolkien could not have written such a work if he had not kept growing, kept challenging himself, and thought seriously, and very Biblically, about the reasons for subcreating and themes.

Here is where we may have the most profound disagreement:

We should by all means exhort, encourage, and edify one another further into personal sanctification and professional craft.  But the idea that we should go home and rethink our lives if we don’t meet some arbitrary standard of personal maturity constitutes an unreasonable ultimatum.

My goal has certainly been the former, not the latter! At the same time, I do believe this constitutes an issue of Christlikeness. If we have been slighted, we should react as He would have us react. It becomes less about genre wars or market forces, really, and more about plain peacemaking. And if then we find that others (such as the prevailing Christian publishing culture) do indeed cling to un-Biblical ideas or reactions to brothers and sisters, then that is another issue. But at least we’re not (as) guilty of the same behavior, as far as we can tell!

My argument that Christian writers shouldn’t “force it” (“it” being the glorification of God) kinda assumed you were thinking of glorification in terms of “making a difference in the world.”

Ah, not my intention, though. Unless “making a difference” is defined as “sharing great stories with the world that will reflect truth, beauty, and goodness.”

After all, your attempt to provoke thought on the matter consisted of comparing Christian writers to secular writers.  How else can one interpret that approach other than as an appeal to external results based on the assumption that God is only glorified when some cultural “need” is being addressed in a uniquely Christian way?

Good challenge. Here I do concede I was thinking of authors who do want to Make a Difference, either in the ways you’ve described or by showing the world that Christians can tell great stories also, maybe even better. Yet even if we have all the writing talent in the world, “but have not love,” we are nothing (1 Cor. 11). Here we see again that it matters tremendously why we read or write — not for Moral Improvement, not to be a Counter-Culture (or a cultural-affirmer!), not merely to proselytize, but to follow the dictum just as you quoted:

In contrast to that definition, I quote John Piper: “God is most glorified in me when I am most satisfied in Him.”

And the rest I agree with completely (with only the reminder that this applies equally to reading stories as well as trying to write our own). 

Ultimately the only Need is for God Himself. All else is a means to that end.

And I have also begun to think that story-telling, unlike other vocations (which are still vital and God-honoring) is nevertheless a unique way to do that. Storytellers are, after all, trying to imitate God in their “sub-creating” of worlds, and in their reflections of good-vs-evil battles are “riffing” on the Gospel. This makes the connection more direct. If we know that, it could help us craft even better stories — because we may explore more variations on the theme. We’re “in” with the Author.

Hope I managed to make it a little more intelligible this time around.

Same here.

P.S.   You gained +100 acerbity for comparing Joel Osteen to the Joker.  That put a smile on my face.  😉

(Double takes.) Ohhh! I see what you did there.

I’ll admit it’s an unfair comparison, though. The Joker would never tell weekly lies to a stadium full of people. He would very honestly try to blow them all sky-high.