A biblical view of literature begins with a proper view of God and man. I’ve been mulling over the ramifications of the doctrine of Creation for literary study, but I will sketch that out next week.
While reviewing John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, I was struck by the following passages.
- I readily acknowledge, that designing men have introduced a vast number of fictions into religion, with the view of inspiring the populace with reverence or striking them with terror, and thereby rendering them more obsequious; but they never could have succeeded in this, had the minds of men not been previously imbued with that uniform belief in God, from which, as from its seed, the religious propensity springs.
- Those, therefore, who set up a fictitious worship, merely worship and adore their own delirious fancies; indeed, they would never dare so to trifle with God, had they not previously fashioned him after their own childish conceits.
- Even when under the guidance and direction of these events, we are in a manner forced to the contemplation of God (a circumstance which all must occasionally experience), and are thus led to form some impressions of Deity, we immediately fly off to carnal dreams and depraved fictions, and so by our vanity corrupt heavenly truth.
- For if we reflect how prone the human mind is to lapse into forgetfulness of God, how readily inclined to every kind of error, how bent every now and then on devising new and fictitious religions, it will be easy to understand how necessary it was to make such a depository of doctrine as would secure it from either perishing by the neglect, vanishing away amid the errors, or being corrupted by the presumptuous audacity of men.
Calvin’s point is that we can see humanity’s imaginative powers harnessed for evil not in literature but in the fictitious things men and women say and think about God. Our penchant for fiction is a product of sin.
As far as the biblical basis for this goes, St. Paul identifies the aim of the unredeemed imagination. The Geneva Bible translates 2 Corinthians 10:5 this way:
“Casting downe the imaginations, and euery high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captiuitie euery thought to the obedience of Christ…”
Before redemption, human imagination casts off the knowledge of God and refuses to obey Christ.
But God made the imagination to reflect Him. In fact, the Imagination is one way we see His Image. Calvin testifies to this reality of the imagination as well.
- It is true, indeed, that those who are more or less intimately acquainted with those liberal studies are thereby assisted and enabled to obtain a deeper insight into the secret workings of divine wisdom.
- The swift and versatile movements of the soul in glancing from heaven to earth, connecting the future with the past, retaining the remembrance of former years, nay, forming creations of its own—its skill, moreover, in making astonishing discoveries, and inventing so many wonderful arts, are sure indications of the agency of God in man.
We thus have a contrast between the imagination as God intends it and the imagination has sin has rendered it. Literature provides an excellent way to see that contrast.
Identifying this contrast allows us to:
- Begin our study of literature with the God of the Bible who made us in His image
- Identify the reality of sin without which we cannot accurately interpret any human creation
- Offer spiritual motives for literature: glorifying or dishonoring God.
Experiments in Criticism 