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Introduction to Literature: More Fascinating Questions

I continue to deliberate on fascinating problems to present my students with rather than a series of facts with which to stuff them.

My next series of questions come from the first real chapter of Literature Through the Eyes of Faith. I’ve put together question with examples from scripture, everyday life, and literature as possible test case answers. You can find the questions and answers after the jump.

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All Truth

On the final day of class last week, I had students read Arthur Holmes’s classic statement on Christian education: “All truth is God’s truth.”

It forced me to try and articulate for my students the truth I felt we had discovered together in our literature and writing courses. I realized that if I began and ended the course with Holmes’s statement, I probably would have had a good litmus test for what to emphasize and omit over the course of the semester. I tend to be so fixated on tactics that I forget to reiterate the deeper reason for the tactics. In other words, I err on the side of teaching students efficiency rather than effectiveness.

If the goal is to discover and learn the truth about the world, we’ll have a different orientation to reading and writing.

The basic premises of a Christian orientation to literature and writing are that:

  1. When we reading and interpret books, we exercise an aspect of God’s image in our lives and find a concrete place to see the gap between ourselves and our maker (i.e. our interpretations are limited and prone to error).
  2. Thus, reading provides us a place to discover truth (facts) and meaning (interpretation) about God’s world. Literature allows us to access those facts and interpretations in a different, and potentially more powerful, way then descriptive prose.
  3. When we write, we engage in a special form of communication that God used to reveal Himself to humanity.
  4. Thus, writing provides a means to more truthfully and faithfully think God’s thoughts after Him.

If I kept coming back to these points and used literature to illustrate them, I would give students a more affective relationship to the idea that all truth is God’s truth. It’s not enough to know or repeat this. This idea should be formative. As I consider that statement’s effect on my life, I will be more able to convey its important to my students so that their own wisdom begins with a proper relationship to God and truth.