"Expect Great Things From God; Attempt Great Things For God." --William Carey, father of modern missions in a sermon.
John Milton penned Paradise Lost to defend God's veracity and justice in His dealings with mankind. This was an attempt to reach out to many who would not otherwise want to hear any type of apologetics from a Christian and had many audiences: the skeptic, the cynic, the doubter, the contra-Christian, the fence sitter, the newborn believer, the adolescent believer, the mature believer, the backslider, the pagan, the nihilist, the earnest seeker or searcher of truth or the so-called answer, the sophisticated, the naive, the cultured, the Bohemian, and even the curiosity seeker.
We must realize that we don't always know who will read our Christian writings, and should be open to the idea of feeding them despite their identity or affiliation. Know the audience! Did you know that William Shakespeare was a devoted Christian who mentioned Jesus Christ in his will? We can recognize and verify this by his hundreds of direct quotes and allusions to the Bible in his plays, sonnets, and poems. If you remove the Bible from his works, they seem to be empty and aimless. He had a Christian worldview and probably felt that his mission was to reach out to the lost. Many people have doubtless come to faith in Christ by first being softened in the heart by Shakespeare's biblical references.
Many people and students of literature don't realize that our Christian heritage in Western Civilization has been dominated or greatly influenced by Christian literature: Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy) , John Bunyan (Pilgrim's Progress is perhaps the most famous and popular allegory every written), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Robert Browning, Victorian poet with famed wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet laureate (In Memoriam), Robert L. Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped), Charles Dickens, Victorian author (A Christmas Carol), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German Shakespeare, (Faust), not to mention countless unsung heroes of literature. In fact, the very first novel published in the English language, Robinson Crusoe, was most likely meant as an outreach because one can tell by his biblical references drilled into the conscious and unconscious by illustration and repetition. I remember the one verse that stuck out in my mind that changed my way of thinking about literature with the impression only the Bible could make ( cf. Psalm 50:15, HCSB): "Call on Me in a day of trouble; I will rescue you, and you will honor Me." This verse is made real because we see it fulfilled in the storyline and one sees it so often that one is impressed. I may have already been a believer, but this verse brought conviction and God's Word doesn't come back void according to Isaiah 55:11.
There are twentieth-century authors who have greatly influenced literature and the unbelieving masses. J. R. R. Tolkien, who wrote The Hobbit trilogy and C. S. Lewis, author of the classic children's series, The Chronicles of Narnia, have been seen as movie productions, plays, and the subject of literature courses at schools of higher learning, as well as high school English classes. These novels use imagery and metaphoric language to portray Christ. Did you know that it was Tolkien who converted Lewis by telling him that Christianity is the great myth that has come true?
It is a great ambition to want to reach the lost for Christ in new ways such as writing fiction/fantasy, and many analogies and metaphors can be used. But it is vital that one knows one's audience and not forget who you are targeting and keep in mind who to reach out to and you want to resonate with and strike a chord with that will indeed vibrate for eternity. He knows where his audience is and where they should be and want to be. It is a sad commentary on our decaying secularizing culture that it is the best-selling authors who are shaping the values, morals, and ethics and even faith of our society.
But we need not give up the world to the pagans and lose by default and concede everything away without a fight; for Christianity has always survived because it has out-thought, out-lived, and "out-died," the competition. Basically, we are referring to the discipline of apologetics when we defend our faith and try to make it palatable to the unbeliever and this can even be in the format of literary apologetics like that of Tolkien and Lewis. We need more authors to compete with the secular world and welcome any effort by a writer who feels called or gifted to enter this endeavor or discipline.
Soli Deo Gloria!
John Milton penned Paradise Lost to defend God's veracity and justice in His dealings with mankind. This was an attempt to reach out to many who would not otherwise want to hear any type of apologetics from a Christian and had many audiences: the skeptic, the cynic, the doubter, the contra-Christian, the fence sitter, the newborn believer, the adolescent believer, the mature believer, the backslider, the pagan, the nihilist, the earnest seeker or searcher of truth or the so-called answer, the sophisticated, the naive, the cultured, the Bohemian, and even the curiosity seeker.
We must realize that we don't always know who will read our Christian writings, and should be open to the idea of feeding them despite their identity or affiliation. Know the audience! Did you know that William Shakespeare was a devoted Christian who mentioned Jesus Christ in his will? We can recognize and verify this by his hundreds of direct quotes and allusions to the Bible in his plays, sonnets, and poems. If you remove the Bible from his works, they seem to be empty and aimless. He had a Christian worldview and probably felt that his mission was to reach out to the lost. Many people have doubtless come to faith in Christ by first being softened in the heart by Shakespeare's biblical references.
Many people and students of literature don't realize that our Christian heritage in Western Civilization has been dominated or greatly influenced by Christian literature: Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy) , John Bunyan (Pilgrim's Progress is perhaps the most famous and popular allegory every written), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Robert Browning, Victorian poet with famed wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet laureate (In Memoriam), Robert L. Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped), Charles Dickens, Victorian author (A Christmas Carol), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German Shakespeare, (Faust), not to mention countless unsung heroes of literature. In fact, the very first novel published in the English language, Robinson Crusoe, was most likely meant as an outreach because one can tell by his biblical references drilled into the conscious and unconscious by illustration and repetition. I remember the one verse that stuck out in my mind that changed my way of thinking about literature with the impression only the Bible could make ( cf. Psalm 50:15, HCSB): "Call on Me in a day of trouble; I will rescue you, and you will honor Me." This verse is made real because we see it fulfilled in the storyline and one sees it so often that one is impressed. I may have already been a believer, but this verse brought conviction and God's Word doesn't come back void according to Isaiah 55:11.
There are twentieth-century authors who have greatly influenced literature and the unbelieving masses. J. R. R. Tolkien, who wrote The Hobbit trilogy and C. S. Lewis, author of the classic children's series, The Chronicles of Narnia, have been seen as movie productions, plays, and the subject of literature courses at schools of higher learning, as well as high school English classes. These novels use imagery and metaphoric language to portray Christ. Did you know that it was Tolkien who converted Lewis by telling him that Christianity is the great myth that has come true?
It is a great ambition to want to reach the lost for Christ in new ways such as writing fiction/fantasy, and many analogies and metaphors can be used. But it is vital that one knows one's audience and not forget who you are targeting and keep in mind who to reach out to and you want to resonate with and strike a chord with that will indeed vibrate for eternity. He knows where his audience is and where they should be and want to be. It is a sad commentary on our decaying secularizing culture that it is the best-selling authors who are shaping the values, morals, and ethics and even faith of our society.
But we need not give up the world to the pagans and lose by default and concede everything away without a fight; for Christianity has always survived because it has out-thought, out-lived, and "out-died," the competition. Basically, we are referring to the discipline of apologetics when we defend our faith and try to make it palatable to the unbeliever and this can even be in the format of literary apologetics like that of Tolkien and Lewis. We need more authors to compete with the secular world and welcome any effort by a writer who feels called or gifted to enter this endeavor or discipline.
Soli Deo Gloria!