Piety kills the creative mind. — Flannery O’Connor
A comprehended God is no God. — Madeleine L’Engle
One of the most misunderstood quotes of all time is Nietzsche’s “God is dead.” It’s been misconstrued by so many religious adherents that it is almost impossible to discuss the quote, so embedded and drowned is it in misunderstood rhetoric. The concept that Nietzsche was trying to convey, however, is one that is still relevant today because postmodern discussions do not posit God as a foregone conclusion. The presence or absence of God in literature, then, is a vital concern to all who wish to write fiction for a postmodern audience.
In this essay I present a model that was put forth by Martin Marty at the 1997 meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature, since updated and printed in the Spring 1998 issue of the journal “Christianity and Literature”. From that model I draw certain conclusions about the presence and absence of God in postmodern literature and put forth what a Christian author’s response should be.
As its director, Martin Marty says the Public Religion Project lives “by few absolutes. But one survives: no one is to whine about how secular the culture is or how secular elites ban spiritual, religious, godly, or specifically Christian discourse” (261). The reason for that absolute is that, although “many. . .may do such banning” (261) it is not a culturally conscious attack. Marty brings up two points against whining: “First, ’secular’ is not always the most accurate designation for cultures such as ours” (262) and, second, “it is extremely rare for anyone to change ways of thinking and acting in response to the whiners, except to decide to turn away from them” (262).
Instead of the cultural-elite conspiracy, Marty puts forth some “other more profound, perhaps integral, reasons why religion and Christianity are not as prominent in Western literature today” (262). The first reason “has to do with the disguise that religion wears” (262-3). Marty writes:
[Religion] is in public but usually covertly so in literature of any depth. . .. When the Christian message arrives [in “evangelical genre fiction” it is] unmediated and gets stated overtly, unsubtly, and hence unartistically. . .. (263)
Thus, Marty argues, the discussion of religion and Christianity does appear in artistic literature, but in covert rather than overt ways. Marty quotes Hollywood legend Sam Goldwyn: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union” (qtd. on 263).
The main reason for the whining, Marty argues, is that in post-modern culture, God is no longer a central character. In pre- and early Enlightenment writing we have Dante and Milton and the late-comer Blake who all have God as a character. He is there as a character and is apprehended, if not comprehended. When we get to the twentieth century, however, a subtle but distinct shift occurs. Marty illustrates this shift by examining the ideas of historian Michael Oakeshott. Marty encapsulizes Oakeshott’s view of history: “the act of writing a constructive narrative, demonstrating an interest in the meaning of sequences, causes, and some forms of explanations, seems to admit no way of letting the historian bring God on stage as was done confidently when providential history ruled” (266). To quote Oakeshott, “‘God in history’ is a meaningless phrase” (Oakeshott 129, qtd. in Marty 267). That is, if “history is the name we give the product of historians” (Marty 267), then the presence of God in history is impossible. Oakeshott writes, “an event without a cause (other than God) is not in any sense an historical event. It may belong to ‘what really happened’. . .but it certainly does not belong to history” (Oakeshott 129, qtd. in Marty 267).
Marty writes that “[t]his is the history whose stuff is also the raw material for the writer of fiction and poetry” (267). However, Marty notes, “[t]his way of writing. . .is a major departure from most of the Christian historical writing of the past. … [M]any Protestants wrote that God had waited to produce the Reformation until the printing press was invented. … Historians in such schools knew what side God was on in the persecution of wars” (268).
Marty concludes this section by noting that “ours is not an epoch in which such employments of Providence - as opposed to some sort of belief in Providence - are effective or appear authentic in history” (268).
And here, I believe, Marty sums up effectively why “evangelical genre fiction” (Marty’s term, cf 263) fails: it attempts to comprehend God when readers desire to apprehend Him. As has been stated repeatedly — especially within the past decade — we live in a postmodern culture. As Jean-Francois Lyotard has so succinctly put it, postmodernism is an “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv), and how do many Christians view and express their faith except as the metanarrative? Metanarratives, however valid they may be, are not within the current realm of artistic expression: they are didactic in an age that shuns didacticism. Thus, the comprehensiveness of a metanarrative, valid as its content may be, fails in the very fact of its being: by attempting to proselytize and “witness” the evangelical genre fiction is alienating the very audience it wants to reach. It is, indeed, preaching to the choir.
As a result, those of us who wish to communicate the reality of being a Christian are left with the model that Marty details in the second half of his address: deus absconditus, God absconded. This model, Marty argues, “will frustrate those who confuse the language of worship or witness with the intuitions of the artist” (271). The idea of deus absconditus is not, however, as un-Biblical as it may sound. Recalling that Latin is far removed from Modern English, we must look back to the literal meaning of the Latin and not the modern meaning of “abscond.” What we find is that it would be better translated as “concealed or hidden.” But even that can be problematic until we realize that, when asked by Moses to reveal Himself, God shows only his hindparts (which is, in itself, a wonderfully folksy idea). That is, as Marty writes, “one must get used to paradox — deus absconditus = deus revelatus” (273): God concealed is also God revealed. Or, as Alister McGrath puts it, “Deus absconditus is the God who is hidden behind his revelation” (McGrath 165, qtd. in Marty 273).
This not only makes sense, but it also reveals another reason why evangelical genre fiction fails: its very attempt to convey a God of metanarratives as a character instead only conveys the God of deus revelatus — through evangelical genre fiction we see only the hindquarters of God. And of what value is that? Such a rendering of God reveals not Him, deus omnes, but only the author’s conception — nay, merely the author’s selection — of God. What we end up with is even more of a deus absconditus than in non-evangelical fiction; that is, instead of showing ways to see through the veil, they just create another veil — for we see in a glass darkly.
God, then, is indeed dead — or at least as a character in literature. His “appearances” only through our filters, our experiences. Through an author’s selection we see a character who fits more into the author’s plot than into the pages of divine revelation. This selection of God, then, becomes more a graven image — an artifact of history — than a representation of Him Who created us. What we should be focusing on is not God as a character, but God as He reveals Himself to us, for as one character in the film “Shadowlands” put it, “we read to know we are not alone.” The postmodern author as well as the author speaking to a postmodern audience focuses not on God as a character, but on how we respond to the world around us. God as a character is a deus ex machina and the postmodern reader knows that. The works of God can still appear in literature (just as they appear in real life) but the postmodern audience does not want the deus ex machina cop-out of “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” for even the most holy of Christians has to function in the world and grapple with the ramifications of faith. What greater function can literature fulfill than to let the world know we Christians are there grappling with life in a way they can understand? We may have the answer in Him, but all of life is still a question being asked. As St. Paul has said, we are to work out our salvation.
Copyright © 1998 by Matthew Winslow.