In Defense of Making It Up
In the Gospels, when Jesus wants to describe what God is like, he often tells short, multi-layered stories, which we call parables. He does not deliver a thesis he supports with argument and data, nor a traditional treatise on God’s nature as we might expect given centuries’ worth of Christian theologizing. To explain God and what God is up to in the world, Jesus creates fictional tales.
The settings, plots, and characters of Jesus’s stories are familiar to his audience—fishermen inspecting and culling their catch, a woman baking a loaf of bread, people praying in the Temple—but they are still creations of his imagination. Jesus doesn’t relay history, saying, “When I was growing up in Nazareth, there was a shepherd tending a flock of a hundred sheep and one wandered off, so he left the ninety-nine to find the lost sheep,” or, “I knew a guy who, on his way traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, got mugged and only a Samaritan helped him.” No, these specific scenarios and characters did not exist until he made them up.
Jesus’s use of imaginative fiction to bring about new understandings of God is not unique in the biblical accounts. Many of the prophets tell parables they made up. The psalmists use similes and metaphors and imagery in their evocative prayers. Even in the Garden of Eden, we see Adam using his imagination to name the animals. Our understanding of God would be deficient without these acts. It is a testament to a wildly creative God to make creatures who can also imagine stories that reveal something of the real world we could not otherwise see.
We find ourselves in stories, particularly in fictional accounts. Others have explored how stories, more than declarative propositions, cultivate empathy or engage our senses. I wish to emphasize the imagination’s ability to envision, however incompletely, a world of mercy and justice. When we sense things are not the way they should be, we imagine God’s redemptive purposes by first telling stories of a good order where grace and forgiveness replace grudges and grievance. We imagine with Jesus and the prophets the poor, orphan, widow, and stranger at the center of God’s kingdom, no longer shunted to the margins of our societies.
Fiction’s power to shape us is not always beneficial. We can tell fictional histories that whitewash atrocities, erase our culpability so we are pristine victims in a conflict, or ignore the contributions of people we usually deem incapable of doing good. History is paved with harmful lies about others to justify hating them. A story is a tool, one that can reflect truth and help us imagine goodness, or one that can propagate lies and lead us to bitter ends. Imagination, like all of God’s creations, can be warped and demands we handle it with care.
Despite fiction’s possibly destructive power, we are to use our imaginations and tell fresh stories all the same. Creating fiction is a generative act, helping us first see God’s kingdom of beauty and healing when our eyes may only see broken chaos. How could such a thing happen? As Jesus says in a fictional story, it happens like a man scattering seed on the ground, and though he does not know how, the seed sprouts, grows, and becomes an abundant crop of grain. (Mk 4.26-29)
Tyler Watson writes fiction and theology. He has served as a pastor in the Evangelical Covenant Church and earned his MDiv from Fuller Theological Seminary. He has written one novel, The Gospel According to Doubters and Traitors, and several devotionals. You can find more about those works on this site.
