Anne Rice
Yesterday I learned that Anne Rice, author of the infamous Vampire Chronicles and Mayfair Witches series, now plans to write only "for the Lord." Her first "for the Lord" effort is Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, which is narrated by a seven-year-old Christ.
I know that God's arm is not short and He can soften the hardest heart and change the most fanatical anti-Christian zealot (i.e. Saul) into the most effective Christian witness (i.e. Paul), and I don't want to doubt God's power or the genuineness of anyone's Christian faith, but I'm fairly confident that making Christ the narrator of a novel is not the best way to communicate the truths of the Christian truth. I'm uncomfortable with any biblical fiction, and this seems to take biblical fiction to a new and unwise extreme.
I find the idea of a seven-year-old Christ narrating a novel about himself more horrifying than all Rice's previous books about vampires and witches.
I know that God's arm is not short and He can soften the hardest heart and change the most fanatical anti-Christian zealot (i.e. Saul) into the most effective Christian witness (i.e. Paul), and I don't want to doubt God's power or the genuineness of anyone's Christian faith, but I'm fairly confident that making Christ the narrator of a novel is not the best way to communicate the truths of the Christian truth. I'm uncomfortable with any biblical fiction, and this seems to take biblical fiction to a new and unwise extreme.
I find the idea of a seven-year-old Christ narrating a novel about himself more horrifying than all Rice's previous books about vampires and witches.
posted by Glenda | 8:44 AM
1 Comments:
What I find particularly interesting, however, is the material at the end of the book, where Rice talks about her history, moving away from the church and back to it.
She also talks about how she was at first influenced by higher critics who discounted the gospels as legends written long after the time of Christ ... until she began to do some study. Now she believes (as do I) that all of them -- indeed all the books of the NT -- were written before the Fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.
It's amazing to read comments like this: "I greatly admire Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr." (Gentry is a Presbyterian minister. PCA, I think, who defends early dates for the NT.)
She also recommends commentaries by D. A. Carson and Leon Morris, and spends a few paragraphs praising N. T. Wright.
Alas, her novel also draws heavily on the apocryphal literature about Jesus, which is a pack of nonsense.
Still, she has been reading some interesting and good stuff as background research.
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