Life Outside the Box: Jonathan Weyer, Author of "The Faithful"

Jonathan Weyer is a campus minister with the Coalition for Christian Outreach at The Ohio State University and an ordained minister in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. He is the founder of The Thomas Society, a student led ministry dedicated to answering questions from skeptics, doubters, agnostics and atheists. Along with the atheists at Ohio State, he won a Multicultural Award from the university for working to bridge the gap between atheists and Christians. Jonathan has just recently been added to the Secular Student Alliance speaker’s bureau, the only Christian and minister to currently have that distinction. Jonathan is a great guy, a lot of fun, and a deep thinker. 


Today he is bringing us a post about why Christians should be writing horror.

You should read Charles Williams.

What’s that? You’ve never heard of him? I can’t say I’m surprised. His books are hard to find. No one in the evangelical world trumpets his novels as spiritual tour de forces. No one makes epic movies out of them.  Why? That’s probably easy to answer. Williams’ novels are very high on the weird stuff-o-meter. They are stories full of phantom lions, a possessed tarot card deck and two dead girls wandering an in-between world trying to save their friend who is being slowly killed by a magician.

See, I told you.

Still, most people are amazed when I tell them Williams was the driving force behind a little group called the Inklings. Yes, those Inklings, the same writer’s group that contained J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, two of the best writer’s of the 20^th century.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of both. Lord of the Rings is my deserted island book. However, I hate that Williams doesn’t get the credit he deserves, not just the convener of the Inklings, but as an amazingly talented writer. A writer who inspired me to take the leap into the realm of what I call, Sacramental Horror.

I’m sure that phrase is going to raise some eyebrows, so let me explain.

One day, I was reading the two dead girl story called All Hallow’s Eve. I kept thinking, “Could I write a ghost story? Should I? I mean, I’m a minister, isn’t that kind of weird? Won’t it raise some eyebrows?” But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized my own naturalistic bent, which seemed odd to me that I would have such prejudice. So, I set out to write a ghost story called The Faithful, a book full of sacramental horror.

Let’s start with the horror.

First, let me say I’m not talking about modern day slasher movies. That isn’t really horror. It’s basically violence porn and it’s disturbing. What I mean by horror might better be described as an extreme unsettling of a cherished view of the world, especially when it comes to our illusion of safety. This unsettling comes from the use of the uncanny or the supernatural, such as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Frankenstein.

So, how  Is that horror? I think this is because we don’t like changing our view of the world. It requires a kind of death.  I can’t think of anything more horrifying than to have my safely constructed vies of things questioned or shattered. All good art should be able to this, but I think novels of the uncanny have the inside track. They should disturb you. They should cause you to question your carefully constructed reality. They should get you to face things you really don’t want to face. And with stories of the uncanny, or horror, they get you to face things like death, our illusion of safety and the possibility that there is unseen world around us. This, I’m guessing, is the most unsettling notion of all. The one we try to explain away by telling kids, “it’s just your imagination.” When deep down, we realize, it just might not be....

Now, what do I mean by sacramental? This one is much easier. I’m not talking about sacramental in the former sense, as in, the official sacraments of the church. Rather, I’m talking about the Judeo-Christian idea that everything on earth is sacred and belong to the Lord. The physical world and everything in it is "tov", or good. The physical world radiates with reminders of God and holy things.

All good Christian writers see the world this way. Novelists have to be very concrete in their writing. It’s interesting to note that most of the good Christian novelists are Catholic, Anglican or Orthodox. I mean, as I’m sitting here in my coffee house writing this, I can’t think of one good Presbyterian (my side of the church) novelists. They just don’t exist. Presbyterians are very good at abstract theology, but not so good making things concrete. We have a thing about images. They make us theologically twitch.

Taking that all together then, the novels of Charles Williams (and mine, I hope) really seek to unsettle people with the idea of the unseen world crashing into this one, to challenge our default naturalism, which is true even for Christians. They try to get us to see the world of the Nicene Creed which speaks of the “Seen and the Unseen.” Ghost stories, stories of the uncanny or tales of just plain weirdness make us that kid again, reading long after we are supposed to be in bed. We shut off the lights and we are alone. Anything could happen in that alone time. In that aloneness, we have to face the unknown, which for me, is where God starts to speak.

When He does, that can often be scarier than anything I can conceive.