Audio Transcript

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a little niche for us to speak to writers. Most subscribers to this podcast are not writers. I know that. But because of Pastor John’s prolific writing ministry, we get a lot of great questions from writers — and really from all types of Christian creatives. Writing is near and dear to us both, Pastor John — so much so that if you have the APJ book, you’ve likely seen that little section I pulled together “On Writing, Grammar, and Poetry” on pages 411–416. We don’t revisit these themes often, but we do today with this question from an aspiring author, an anonymous girl.

“Hello, Pastor John! I’m seventeen. I just recently discovered this podcast and quickly became a huge fan. I have already listened to all your episodes on hobbies and entertainment, but I would like to ask something of a little more specific nature. I absolutely love literature and writing, but I like to write things that have twists and turns and that are sometimes a little creepy. Is it okay for Christians to write — or read or watch — things like thrillers and murder mysteries, which have some violent or scary elements in them, as long as those elements are not sadistic, sexual, or gratuitous? Or does this violate passages like Philippians 4:8? Sometimes I feel like dark elements serve an important purpose in fiction, because they open the door for great moral and biblical solutions, but I am not sure. I would love your opinion on this matter. Thank you.”

Let me put on my lit-major hat for a few minutes. I don’t usually do this, but I have good memories — a lit major who has spent 55 years almost entirely immersed in the word of God, the Bible, which is a form (from one vantage point) of literature. But from another vantage point, I have found that almost everyone who tries to treat the Bible as literature winds up minimizing the Bible as the authoritative, infallible revelation of the Creator of the universe. The fact that it is both literature and revelation parallels the mystery of the incarnation, doesn’t it? Jesus Christ is both man (which corresponds to literature) and God (which corresponds to revelation). He could not be our Savior if he were not both.

Just so you know, I have not lost the bug. I continue to read and enjoy fiction, and I have written, I suppose, hundreds and hundreds of poems over those 55 years since I was a lit major. I still delight in a picturesque simile like Proverbs 11:22: “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without discretion.” That’s great. That’s just great. Jesus painted impossibly provocative pictures: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). That’s good. That’s really good. I still love the cadences of Psalm 1:1: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.” That’s good.

But the glorious divine logic and reality of Romans 8:32 exceeds the pleasures of these things a thousandfold: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” The glory of that reality cannot seriously be compared to the pleasures of literary style. Both are good; one is glorious.

We Know Darkness

So, here’s the question I have lived with for decades that relates to this young aspiring writer of dark literature. Here’s the question: Why is it that almost all writers of fiction and perhaps even nonfiction find it easier to write seriously and compellingly about the dark than about the light? Why is it that most writers can produce something credible, authentic, moving, compelling about pain and fear but cannot write with the same compelling credibility and seriousness about joy?

You can see this, for example, symptomatically in television ads. If the writers want to portray some deeper emotion — say, of a family in sorrow — they can generally write something and show something that actually has the feel of authenticity about it. But when they turn to show happiness, the default is silliness. It’s just incredible — a big, wide, toothy grin everywhere, and people falling all over the couch and guffawing, and grown people acting like clowns. You get the impression that these writers are out of their element. They don’t know what to do with happiness. They’re stuck at about age ten.

“To be a good writer about the light requires a long and deep walk with God in the midst of human suffering.”

Now, my tentative explanation for this — why it’s easier to portray with authenticity the human experience of fear and sorrow than it is to portray the human experience of happiness with the same authenticity and depth — is that, for most people, the human experience of serious fear is far more common than the human experience of serious joy. Most people have categories for the stark terror of being charged by a grizzly bear or the panic of being surrounded by a mob or the sinking feeling in the stomach of a window being broken in the middle of the night or the heart-crushing grief at losing a loved one. We know these things. We’ve tasted these things deeply.

But we don’t have similar experiences or categories of serious, humble, invincible joy in the face of pain and death. Serious fear and sorrow is common. Serious joy is not. It seems to me that very often, that kind of joy is replaced with the closest many writers can get to it — namely, a kind of stoic swagger in the face of danger. Which shows that the hero or heroine is coolly above it all, which is the very opposite of the humble, serious, invincible joy I’m talking about, which is so rare and, therefore, so difficult to write about.

Writing with Serious Joy

Now, my guess at an explanation for why writing authentically about the dark is easier than writing authentically about the light is this: To be a good writer about the dark requires some literary gift mingled with the experience of darkness and fear and brokenness and sorrow that’s common in this world. But to be a good writer about the light requires more than ordinary human experience of the dark or light. It requires a long and deep walk with God in the midst of human suffering.

The kind of serious joy I’m talking about is especially at home in the heart of a Christian, a Bible-saturated Christian. Those outside the Christian worldview have tasted this because of common grace, but it is the peculiar purview of biblical revelation to understand from the inside out what serious joy in the face of suffering is really like — unless, of course, Christians have been forced into the mold of just being like the world, which happens by the thousands.

So, my short answer to our young writer is this: Of course one can write with biblical faithfulness about the dark because the dark is real. In fact, the only people who know how real and how terrible it is are people who know their Bible. Without biblical categories, the efforts of the world to portray the dark fall far short of reality, no matter how terrible they make it look. But to write faithfully about the dark requires a deep awareness that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). It requires a deep awareness that God is sovereign over the darkness. Creepy is interesting but not necessarily insightful. Darkness will be defeated in the end.

But if you are going to write about the dark in a seriously joyful way that avoids naivete and melodrama, it may take decades of walking through deep waters with Christ. Don’t give up. You may prove to be one of those very rare writers who knows enough about God, knows enough about suffering, has lived enough life and sorrow and serious joy that you could actually write with authenticity about the light even better than about the dark.