Lisa Hensley

Two weeks ago, I did a shorter Instagram live where I talked about reading with discernment. How do we read an author we respect and disagree with some of what they say? How do we read people who have differing world views and come away with knowledge we need? I talked about those things in this video, but I’m always left considering the conversation later and I have two thoughts to add.

First, I take my questions about the faith to orthodox believers. They might not be in the same denomination or the same church circles, but I go to faithful believers who profess Jesus with my doubts and my questions. It might take a few tries to find some that are ok with doubts and questions, but I’ll stick around while I’m searching. Then I read deconstructionists to understand what they are experiencing and believe. To be honest, I think most of us have done some sort of deconstructing, even if we haven’t called it that; but there’s a different type who, after they tore apart their faith, never built anything back. Personally, I don’t look to them to answers.

Second, I also think it’s imperative that we have these conversations and that we equip people to deal with questions. For one thing, we can stop living in fear of everyone else if we are no longer scared of their ideas. For another, we cannot truly hide out from these ideas without living a cramped life. We send our college students off to school moaning about how they fall away from the faith, but did we teach them to dig in? To ask questions? To be unafraid of other people’s questions? Did we teach them to evaluate ideas and statement in light of the Bible? To wait in the tension of not knowing an answer? We cannot short-circuit this process and yet we often skip it entirely.

Over the years, my metric for good fiction has changed. I jumped into the Christian fiction realm as a young teenager, read excessively and honestly, found it lacking more and more as I got older. Since my goal here isn’t to critique (some forms of) Christian fiction, I’m going to leave it at that. What I want now is a story that accurately portrays humanity with all the beauty and flaws that come with being human. I don’t want performative sin in an imaginative world where consequences aren’t real. I also don’t want to see evil glorified, that’s a different narrative altogether. But neither am I looking for a pretend world that shows no parallel to reality. Even stories that at first glance seem far removed from our everyday lives such as fantasy or dystopian fiction only work when they reveal the world that we thought we knew.

Some of these stories might have themes that are outside of a kingdom ethic. We will all encounter people whose stories fall outside of kingdom ethics. All of our stories fall outside a kingdom ethic in places. Reading fiction can help prepare us for these encounters around our dinner tables. We need to wrestle with concepts in embodied life and not just academic theories. If this person, from this book, were drinking coffee in my living room, how would I respond to the story?

Of course everyone has different limits. The stories you can read/watch/listen to will be limited by your experiences, past trauma, your age and maturity, personal temptations, and so many other things. I cannot prescribe those limits to you and I have no desire to do that. This is just a potential opportunity to reframe the point of stories.