The Novel as Church: Preaching to Readers in Contemporary Fiction

Epilogue

173 s epilogue Gentle reader, as John Updike’s Thomas Marshfield addresses you in AMonth of Sundays, if you are naught but a reader, then the simplicity of your life is incredible. You are probably much more. You are probably also a Christian believer—or curious about religious belief. Why else would you be reading a book in the Making the Christian Imagination series, unless, as someone with a literary interest, you slipped in by mistake? Your understanding of what it means to be a believer might be no more than that, from a sociological perspective, you believe religion has something to offer to the well-being of humanity . Or it might mean that, from the perspective of the psychology of religions, you believe that either religious observance or personal faith contribute to a person’s health. If you, gentle reader, are also this faithful, or religious, reader then this study has shown you that preaching in fiction takes the form of a wide range of sermons, both satirical and straight. some bolster faith, whereas others problematize it. Some fictional preachers are untroubled, whereas others wrestle with belief. Some preaching in fiction subverts theism in general and Christianity in particular. Sometimes fictional preachers are conventional and adhere to traditional church and religious dogma, whereas others break away and forge new theology on the anvil of experience. both in critique and support of Christianity, fictional preachers have shaped readers’ various understandings of this world faith. In whatever way 174 The Novel as Church s sermons are employed by writers, despite the clanging cymbals of their dissonances, there is yet no end to them in literature. You, gentle reader, may also be a preacher, and if this book has any application outside the academic field of religion and literature, perhaps it encourages actual preachers to seek nonmanipulative, nonhegemonic , nonauthoritarian forms of communication in the pulpit. Effective preaching for the modern world comprises sermons that recognize the interdependence between preacher and hearer and in which both preacher and hearer move along a common pathway of empathic imagination. During the lengthy gestation period of this book, preaching in the real world has continued to change shape. Preachers think more carefully about the nature of authority and recognize that it is never to be assumed. Preachers know that the dominant voice should not be the preacher’s but that of the silence in the gap between the speaker and the hearer, where truth is negotiated and agreed upon. This silence is reminiscent of and akin to the “still small voice” elijah heard on Horeb. Effective preachers are, therefore, more careful about the language they use so that the poetry of theology resonates in hearers ’ hearts. Faithful preachers are more imaginative in their attempts to communicate religious experience, in their hope that hearers find God in the commonplace and the kingdom of God in the as-is world around them. And contemporary preachers have greater audience awareness than they once had. All preachers have much more to learn about the art of preaching, and there will always be those who continue to refine their art. They will be like so many contemporary novelists in that they will preach to fund the imaginative construction of a nonpresently real, godly world. And if you, gentle reader, are also a writer, perhaps this book encourages you not to be as shy of using sermons in your work as was a popular romantic novelist who attended a british church. she would readily include extracts of lectures on veterinary practice in her books about a vet’s clinic, but, as she said in casual conversation with her minister without full explanation, she would not presume to include sermons in her series about the rector of an english village. What opportunities she missed! s Epilogue 175 In a sermon preached in Berlin in 1932, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: A proper sermon should be of the kind that holds out to a child a shining red apple or to a thirsty man a glass of fresh water and asks them, “Do you want it?” In this way, we should be able to speak about the things of faith so that hands are stretching out faster than we can fill them. Sermons in fiction are equally powerful. Some can disrupt faith, and some show the redundancy of certain expressions of Christianity, yet others are capable of showing a remembered, imagined world for which...