Did Paul Oppose Fiction?
On the Ask Pastor John podcast, John Piper talks about whether Paul’s opposition to myth is an opposition to what we know today about fiction. It’s a very helpful address.
John says,
Paul’s warning was that myths were leading people away from the truth and thus destroying people. They were, in fact, creating an indifference to the truth as anything fixed and stirring up endless speculations. They were fascinating. They were intriguing people, but not helping them land anywhere.
He also says this,
The use of stories to lead away from truth, and the use of stories to destabilize people by replacing the very concept of firm, true, stable reality with open-endedness, is always going to be a problem. “Ever learning, never coming to a knowledge of the truth” (see 2 Timothy 3:7). That might happen through novels, or TV dramas, or movies, or theater. Do they serve the truth or lead away from it and diminish the importance of it?
But here’s the reason we must not lump all fiction into the category of misleading myth or destabilizing myth. Fiction, as a way of leading to truth, is firmly embedded in the Bible. That’s why we can’t toss it out. God inspired it. God used it. For example, Jesus told parables. The point of these little, short fictional stories was to tell the truth in a peculiar way. The prophet Nathan convicted David of his sin by telling him a fictional story about a lamb. Isaiah developed parable-like stories throughout his prophecies, like the one in Isaiah 5:1–6, where Israel is compared to a vineyard. He goes on and on about Israel as his vineyard.
