Receive Fantastical Stories With Thanksgiving
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This year my wife and I spent most of our meals also enjoying stories.
Our thank-you prayers for food, which is a long tradition among Christians, have begun to blend with a tradition that is not so common—thank-you prayers for the stories we enjoy.
For example, one of our short prayers might go something like this:
Lord, thank you for this day. Thank You that we go through it. (A health-related prayer and/or prayer for someone we know.) Thank You also for this food and for stories. Help us to enjoy them both and glorify You. In Jesus’ Name, amen.
Fans have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, as SpecFaith newcomer Zachary Totah reminded us Tuesday. Yet if we thank God for things like the Captain America: Civil War trailer, or Amish Zombies from Space (my copy just arrived), or any other favorite fantasy series, I wonder if this might seen strange, possibly even unspiritual or incorrect.
Four silent objections may get in the way of thanksgiving to God for fantastical stories:
1. Shouldn’t we thank God for nonfiction instead?
With all the lies and heresy out there, oughtn’t we focus on, say, doctrine and teaching?
2. ‘God did not directly give us stories.’
This one I discovered when writing a book chapter about popular culture’s origins. My coauthor flagged a phrase I kept using to the effect of “God gave us stories and songs.”
“Technically God doesn’t give them,” he told me. “God gives us the gift of making them.”
True. So why would we directly thank God for a story a human being directly made?
3. ‘A gift like food is neutral, but a story has sin-influenced content.’
The stories for which we thank God include anime stories. Often these stories include ideas and pictures that reflect God’s beauty or even His drama of personal redemption. Yet these stories also includes hideous examples of objectification. Characters are drawn with exaggerated bodily features, and posed and de-clothed for the purpose of making fans leer.
Usually those moments don’t bother me, though I do tend to look away.
But why would thank God for a story that includes corruption?
4. ‘Don’t be such a Christian about it; you’ll ruin the story/art.’
Recently I had a friendly Twitter exchange with a blogger about Doctor Who. I had written a Christ and Pop Culture article about the Doctor’s endorsement of being “prepared to forgive.” My acquaintance said he wasn’t as enamored with this story as I was. To him the Doctor’s rousing speech was over-the-top and not worth the attention.
“I think it’s too generous to read [Christian] categories into Doctor Who,” he said.
@EStephenBurnett I’m not gonna fight about this. I think it’s too generous to read Xian categories into Doctor Who.
— ‾\_(ʘ̅ȷʘ̂)_/‾ (@Frank_Turk) November 20, 2015
Maybe he meant something else. (I will need to ask.) But that phrase reminded me of folks who say that interpreting stories according to a biblical view is just so jejune. It’s a “Jesus juke.” It’s unnecessary. The story works apart from faith-propaganda. So if you thanked God for Art, doesn’t that ignore the fact that Art is good “for its own sake”?1
How to receive fantastical stories with thanksgiving
The apostle Paul implicitly answers these silent objections in 1 Timothy 4:1-5.
Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.
Within this text are four reminders:
- False teachers lie about the goodness of God’s gifts. Thus, thanking God in the right ways for His good gifts is one way Christians fight against false teaching.
- “Everything created by God is good.” We may think first of natural wonders like sunrises and teeming oceans. I do not put “popular culture” in this category, for God does not create popular culture. But He did create humans and gave us a mission to create culture.2 The very fact of culture-creation is His gift. With stories, humans can only rearrange parts of God’s ultimate Story of redemption, including the contrasting elements of sin and twisting that arise from our own rebellion.3 But …
- That does not mean the story is “neutral.” Paul says God’s gifts are good, but we cannot receive them without an intentional process. Something must change on the way to our receiving it. The gift is still not yet holy.
- Paul says, “[The gift] is made holy by the word of God and prayer.” That’s the key. Those “spiritual” activities like good teaching from the word of prayer to our Savior change the gift—or our use of the gift—to become good. So what if we say “art is for art’s own sake,” and we mean art is good without using the word and prayer to receive art with thanksgiving? the apostle Paul, backed by the Holy Spirit, would disagree.
I’ve found this perspective so helpful. Christians do not grow spiritually apart from other gifts like our enjoyment of stories. Instead, it’s all connected. By knowing God’s word and praying to Him, we literally “make holy” things like human story-making. And we will enjoy stories more when we are truly thankful to the Giver of all good gifts.
Note: This December I am stepping back from Thursday articles at SpecFaith to focus on other writing commitments. I hope to return in January, or shortly thereafter, with reviews to share.
Stephen, I’ve watched you slide down this path of carnality long enough. Nothing is more “fantastical” than your tragic attempts to sanctify your idols.
Repent my friend. Please? Before that spirit of unholy slumber sets so deep you’ll never get free.
Greg, that comment makes no sense. You’ve literally just read (at least, I presume you read) a piece that argues against idolatry and for an intentional Christ-exalting reception of good gifts through the word and prayer. And then you make this declaration. You might as well talk up to a street preacher who is proclaiming “repent and believe in Jesus” to passersby, get in his face, and demand that he repent and believe in Jesus.
This approach is also inappropriate and outright unwise. “Watched you slide down this path of carnality”? No, you have not. You have apparently been hoodwinked by a sense of false intimacy thanks to our previous debates and discussions (though many of them have been more positive). The internet is not a local church and you are not a teaching elder here. Nor are we personal accountability partners. Certainly any Christian struggles with various sorts of idolatry, just as you do. What I write about are biblical means of fighting this idolatry, particularly regarding issues of popular cultures and stories.
What you are attempting here has nothing to do with “holiness” or “fighting compromise” and everything to do with some kind of gadfly-ism, and/or some form of digital Don Quixote complex. I’m not sure what else to call it.
IME, “Xian” is a pretty commonly used abbreviation for “Christian,” in the tradition of “Xmas.” It’s actually not that blasphemous: X is also the Greek letter chi, which “Christ” starts with.
But I do think he does have a legit point in that one shouldn’t impose Christian categories on everything. Maybe you can just get away with that in a Western-cultured show like Doctor Who, but it does a disservice to shows with bigger cultural divides than religious US/mainstream Britain.