I was recently reading a somewhat lengthy book that expounded on the great themes of Christianity with significant scholarly acumen. The author (I won’t say which one!) knew the ins and outs of grace and the gospel and wrote about it with personal conviction. The right words were used and the correct points were made, but I found it rather unconvincing — dull even.
How can something as revolutionary as the gospel be so boring? God died a tragically grusome death to rescue his people from death. Somehow, the inevitable became impossible. The unending chain of sin and retribution was broken, once and for all. But this author, it seems, was writing to people who already agreed with them. The meaning of words was self-evident and their truthfulness implied, rather than demonstrated.
Perhaps this is asking too much of a theology book. It’s not as thought the genre is known for its rhetorical flair. But when it comes to matters of faith, credibility and rhetoric go hand in hand. Truth without persuasion becomes a falsehood (and persuasion without truth is propaganda). We need to be inspired if we are to believe, to be compelled to assent by more than logic. For God to not simply tell us of his love, but that word became flesh.
In the 1928 foreword to a collection of his plays, Thornton Wilder outlined why he sought to illuminate religious themes through the drama of the stage. Why not leave Christianity to the professional clergy? To him, the artist and the theologian were nearly one in the same. United by their concern for the truth, they are likewise guided by the need for persuasion:
An artist is one who knows how life should be lived at its best and is always aware of how badly he is doing it. An artist is one who knows his is failing in living and feeds his remorse by making something fair, and a layman is one who suspects he is failing in living but is consoled by his successes in golf, or in love, or in business. […]
The art of literature springs from two curiosities, a curiosity about human beings push to such an extreme that it resembles love, and a love of a few masterpieces of literature so absorbing that it has all the richest elements of curiosity. I use the word curiosity in the French sense of tireless awareness of things. (It is too late to arrest the deterioration of our greatest English words. We live in an age where pity and charity have taken on the color of condescension; where humility seems to mean an acknowledgement of failure; where simplicity is foolishness and curiosity is interference. Today hope, and faith itself, imply a deliberate self-deception.) […]
Almost all the plays in this book are religious, but religious in that dilute fashion that is a believer’s concession to a contemporary standard of good manners. But these four plant their flag as boldly as they may. It is the kind of work that I would like to do well, in spite of the fact that there has seldom been an age in literature when such a vein was less welcome and less understood. I hope, through many mistakes, to discover the spirit that is not unequal to the elevation of the great religious themes, yet which does not fall into a repellent didacticism. Didacticism is an attempt at the coercion of another’s free mind, even though one knows that in these matters beyond logic, beauty is the only persuasion. Here the schoolmaster enters again. He sees all that is fairest in the Christian tradition made repugnant to the new generations by reason of the diction in which it is expressed. The intermittent sincerity of generations of clergymen and teachers have rendered embarrassing and even ridiculous the terms of the spiritual life. Nothing succeeds in dampening the aspirations of the young to-day — who dares use the word “aspiration” without enclosing it, knowingly, in quotation-marks? — like the names they hear given to them. The revival of religion is almost a matter of rhetoric. The work is difficult, perhaps impossible (perhaps all religions die out with the exhaustion of language), but it at least reminds us that Our Lord asked us in His work to be not only gentle as doves, but as wise as serpents.
