29 March, 2024

Epic and Eternal: Find This Book and Read It! (Part 12)

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by | 14 October, 2012 | 0 comments

By Charlie W. Starr

 

Epic: The Story God Is Telling and the Role that Is Yours to Play
John Eldredge
Nashville: Thomas Nelson, first published in 2004

When I read this issue in past years, I complained about the lack of fiction books among the choices, even to the point of writing a letter about it to Christian Standard. I”m a literature teacher and a writer. I understand the power of stories. I believe Christians should look more to the imagination for its importance in teaching truth and reaching people. So I”m somewhat self-shocked by the fact I”m choosing a nonfiction book to tell you about. Epic: The Story God Is Telling and the Role that Is Yours to Play, by John Eldredge, is so good that I shook with nervous excitement while reading it a few years ago. I choose to tell you about it instead of a great work of fiction because it introduces you to why fiction matters.

God is telling a story, the story of all creation. It”s a story so important to life that he has buried it deep within our hearts (see Ecclesiastes 3:11). It is a story of a people who once lived in paradise, who then were attacked by dark forces and found themselves in desperate need of a hero to save them. It is also a love story””the story of a man who finds a woman in need of rescue, who never disappoints her, and who gives value and meaning to her life. It is the story of Titanic, of Star Wars, of The Lord of the Rings, of the great epics of Western civilization and the great love stories of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. In the story, a hero rises to save his people and his beloved. Doing so often means paying the ultimate sacrifice, but though the hero dies, he is reborn by some divine intervention. The greatest stories we tell in books and movies are all versions of this story.

And this story is the gospel story, the story of Christ, both an epic battle against dark forces to save his people, and an eternal love story of the groom who comes to save his bride. This is the one story””sometimes called the hero”s journey, sometimes called the monomyth. It is the story God has placed in each one of us, and so it is the story we often tell in various ways, in our own versions, in our myths, and even in the way we tell stories from history. Once we know the story, we have a new way of appreciating the stories we love to watch and read, and we have a way of connecting to others, and a chance of introducing them to the gospel.

When Epic first came out, I told my students, “This is what I”ve been teaching in my English classes for the last 15 years, and I hate Eldredge for writing it first.” But I”m glad he wrote it. Read it. And then read one of the great works of fiction. They”re not so fictional after all.

 

Charlie W. Starr is humanities chair at Kentucky Christian University, Grayson, Kentucky. His column, “Arts and Media,” appears monthly in The Lookout.

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