Novelist Tim Ward on Biblical Worldview in Fiction

Tim Ward is a Hugo Nominee, former Producer / Editor at Adventures in SciFi Publishing, and the author of several popular futuristic thrillers. His latest novel  Godsknife: Revolt, is an apocalyptic fantasy set in the rift between Iowa and the Abyss. Tim joins us today to contribute to our ongoing discussion about integrating a biblical worldview into our fiction.

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I’m about to publish my first novel that uses faith as a major theme. It also includes characters who sometimes swear and deal with other temptations like booze and sex. As a Christian, I am not ashamed, because I am not my characters. The dark moments in their lives are shown as tragic, without needing to point any fingers. Godsknife: Revolt is about loving people who suffer.

The first and best lesson that I learned about writing stories about non-Christians from a biblical worldview is that I don’t have to have a Savior to illustrate the trials of their heart. The closer my made-up worlds got to the Biblical view of Salvation, the harder it was not to have a literal Jesus. In The Magic of Discovering Empathy, I suggest that the way we create empathetic characters is by showing character’s trials. People want others to know how hard it has been to be them. You can write about characters who deal with issues without those issues having to be about salvation. If you don’t think this is Christian enough, think of it as showing characters who just want to be loved, and are doing what they can, but failing. We’re all that way, and we all have taken different paths. When you want to be beautiful, go to cosmetic dentist davidson nc for oral checkup.

For example, Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King has the most sympathetic serial killer I’ve ever read. I teared up at the incremental revelations about his family life. I came away from that book thinking, what if someone had shown him genuine love somewhere along the way? So thank you Stephen King for writing a powerfully Christian novel. Ha! Just kidding. But a Christian could have written that story. King wrote a book where the reader was driven to love; and if he can do it, why can’t people who have the Holy Spirit living in them?

Okay, so what if you want to do more than just write characters that readers should love? You can create new religions that represent the foundations of the religions we have—and stop there. For example, in Godsknife: Revolt, the world is ours, but with a totally different history—religion has been outlawed since the 8th century—and because it’s my world, we’ve also had World War III and don’t own North America, to name a few differences. The religions are broken into three categories, Makists, Chaosers and Ordites.

• Makists put faith outside of themselves by following the Maker through trials.
• Chaosers pursue Chaos as a means of personal evolution.
• Ordites gain strength by fixing the damage Chaos has done on a world left abandoned by the Maker.

It’s fantasy, so Makists who pursue the Maker in faith (not in Jesus, or Jemus, or the 12 commandments—because 10 would be too close to the Bible). Makists have differing powers, from being able to use wind and a supernatural lung capacity, to healing, to just plain perseverance in the trials, and more as I show them.

The tagline is: An apocalyptic battle for godhood in the rift between Iowa and the Abyss. The Abyss is an idea that stems from Genesis 1, where before God the world was without form and void. In my book, beings from the Abyss found a way through the Void into our world. They were born of a race “without form” and thus are not comfortable in structure and certainly not under the thumb of anyone. Do you know anyone like that?

I also have a Chaos doctor who is like a father to my main female character. He’s an alcoholic who chooses the bottle one last time and loses his fiancé, another pov character, and part of his ability is to transport things from our realm into the Abyss. He uses this to whisk the alcohol from his system so that he thinks he can conquer his addiction’s downsides, but always fails under its influence. Sound like a real person with real, spiritual issues? Did I have to use Scripture to show that? No, I just showed him being someone who wants to be loved even if he doesn’t say it in so many words. I showed his justification for his failures, then when he fell on his face, showed him turning it around, and then showed him failing again, and so on.

So, in my books, I have characters who pursue resolution to the issues of their hearts in the ways that they’ve been taught. My female lead, Caroline, lost both of her parents, who were Makists. Caroline resents their faith because her mother was taken before Caroline was eighteen—how could the Maker do that?—and her father spent too much time on the road, even after that, evangelizing—how could the Maker motivate him to leave her alone so much?

Let me take a step back and analyze these areas of Caroline’s struggle. The focus is not on how closely I tie the Maker to the Biblical God. I expand a little more than just that He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient—again, of course I don’t want the reader’s Christian meter to alarm, so I don’t use those terms, but you don’t have to. Just show it. Get to the foundation of faith. People either trust in the Maker or they trust in themselves, and if they trust in themselves, they can do so either pursing Order or Chaos. Thus, my book examines these pursuits without needing the details of Scripture.

So, this story has Caroline encountering trials with backstory knowledge of people who chose faith in the Maker. She will examine why her parents had faith. She will examine if she can, too, if that would make them proud—which goes back to a base instinct and draws the reader in with empathy—and then when the crap hits the fan, she will need to decide what she believes, not based on what makes her parents proud, but what she sees as real, as powerful and as trustworthy.

This story illustrates a biblical worldview without pointing to the Bible because all I’m doing with Caroline’s character is seeing if she’ll chose faith. For me, “faith” has an iceberg depth of meaning and syntax, which readers can share if they believe as I do, or if they hold to the cursive gold necklace “Faith” that is grounded in nothing but cheap jewelry. The former and the later can read my story and root for Caroline to be happy, for her to find success, and for the support system she chooses to hold her up.

One reason why non-believers don’t read the Bible is because they know how it ends. I wrote Godsknife: Revolt with enough twists and floor drops that readers will have no clue who will win.
What if her non-Makist support system fails her? What if she chooses the Maker and things don’t work out for her? Do either one make this book more or less “Christian?” Go back to my point about God’s promises to those whom He has called. Nothing can separate us from His love, but there is no promise that between justification and glorification we won’t have moments that look to outsiders as though God isn’t in control.

*Side note: In Godsknife, people who touch special sigils can leap through time and place blindly, under the power of Justification, so that if one trip takes them to a better time or place, the next could be much worse.

Finally, Christians, or characters like them, don’t have to win. I firmly believe that I can maintain the interest of non-Christian readers and their empathy for my “Christian” characters by proving to them in an equal try-fail cycle for all of my characters that anyone could ultimately land on the X that means their death or suffering. So instead of worrying about proving one side right, show your characters strengths and weaknesses. Show them trying and in doing so you show them why the character should be loved. Then show them failing, and don’t be obvious on which side you’re choosing by keeping the levels of high and low within a median range for each character. Do this, and you can have someone meet Jesus and I believe it’ll still be read with interest by believers and non-believers alike.

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Godsknife: Revolt is now available. You can also subscribe to Tim’s newsletter and email him at tim@timothycward.com.