In the book, My Fundamentalist Education, one of the author’s main complaints against Christianity was that it was intellectually deficient, in practice, if not in actuality. In Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller says he once had the same objection. But how he overcame that is one of the best examples of biblical integration I have seen in a piece of literature. Here is what he writes, and notice how he takes a biblical understanding of reality and applies it to his topic. It is well worth the read.

I couldn’t give myself to Christianity because it was a religion for the intellectually naïve. In order to believe Christianity, you either had to reduce enormous theological absurdities into children’s stories or ignore them. The entire thing seemed very difficult for the intellect to embrace. . .

Help came from the most unlikely of sources. I was taking a literature course in college in which we were studying the elements of story: setting, conflict, climax, and resolution.

The odd thought occurred to me while I was studying that we didn’t know where the elements of story came from. I mean, we might have a guy’s name who thought of them, but we don’t know why they exist. I started wondering why the heart and mind responded to this specific formula when it came to telling stories. So I broke it down. Setting: that was easy; every story has a setting. My setting is America, on earth. I understand setting because I experience setting. I am sitting in a room, in a house, I have other characters living in this house with me, that sort of thing. The reason my heart understood setting was because I experienced setting.

But then there was conflict. Every good story has conflict in it. Some conflict is internal, some is external, but if you want to write a novel that sells, you have to have conflict. We understand conflict because we experience conflict, right? But where does conflict come from? Why do we experience conflict in our lives? This helped me a great deal in accepting the idea of original sin and the birth of conflict. The rebellion against God explained why humans experience conflict in their lives, and nobody knows of any explanation other than this. This last point is crucial. I felt like I was having an epiphany. Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story about Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all. Now some people process the account of original sin in the book of Genesis as metaphor, as symbolism for something else that happened; but whether you take it metaphorically or literally, this serves as an adequate explanation of the human struggle that every person experiences: loneliness, crying yourself to sleep at night, addiction, pride, war, and self-addiction. The heart responds to conflict within a story, I began to think, because there is some great conflict in the universe with which we are interacting, even if it is only in the subconscious. If we are not experiencing some sort of conflict in our lives, our hearts would have no response to conflict in books or film. The idea of conflict, of having tension, suspense, or an enemy, would make no sense to us. But these things do make sense. We understand these elements because we experience them. As much as I did not want to admit it, Christian spirituality explained why.

And then the element of the story known as climax. Every good story has a climax. Climax is where a point of decision determines the end of the story. Now this was starting to scare me a little bit. If the human heart uses the tools of reality to create elements of story, and the human heart responds to climax in the structure of story, this means that climax, or point of decision, could very well be something that exists in the universe. What I mean here is that there is a decision the human heart needs to make. The elements of story began to parallel my understanding of Christian spirituality. Christianity offered a decision, a climax. It also offered a good and bad resolution. In part, our decisions were instrumental to the way our story turned out.

Now this was spooky because for thousands of years big-haired preachers have talked about the idea that we need to make a decision, to reject or to follow Christ. They would offer these ideas as a sort of magical solution to the dilemma of life. I had always hated hearing about it because it seemed so entirely unfashionable a thing to believe, but it did explain things. Maybe these unfashionable ideas were pointing at something mystical and true. And, perhaps, I was judging the idea, not by its merit, but by the fashionable or unfashionable delivery of the message. (Miller, Blue Like Jazz, pp. 31-33)

Thanks to the book discussion group last night for a lot of insightful comments and banter. A lot of issues came out of it and we didn’t have time to get into some of them even though they were worth pursuing. Here are a few that I thought might warrant some more feedback from all of you. Please feel free to post comments here and further the discussion.

• Given the fact that Rosen’s dad and step mom were aloof from her spiritual upbringing, what does that say about the families in our school with similar conditions? Can we expect those students to grow spiritually? How do we overcome the hurdle that it presents?
  
  
• One of the comments (Buzz?) was that Rosen, like others, are looking to follow something bigger than themselves. In Rosen’s case, it was the wonder of science. Which leads to the question, are we presenting a full enough picture of God to our students? What might we need to undertake in order to assure that we do?
  
  
• The idea of certainty came up a lot. Rosen makes many comments about how her education was delivered with a definite air of certainty on most subjects. What issues, as Christian school educators, should we take a position of certainty on? What are the implications of doing or not doing that? Why was this such a big issue for Rosen?