Types and Tropes: History and Moral Agency in Evangelical Inspirational Fiction

Here's the abstract:

Using as exemplars novels of evangelical inspirational fiction writer Francine Rivers, this article explores how Christian faith is represented as manifest in the emotional lives of characters in inspirational fiction novels. These novels invoke a particularly evangelical way of anchoring Biblical scripture to a modified "typological" understanding of history, that, in turn, anchors characterological claims to moral agency which are grounded in "tropological" or "moral" forms of scriptural interpretation. This narrative organization or "chronotope" models a kind of faith-informed, emotionally centered practice of viewing one's own life and situation that that is widely mobilized in American evangelical culture.

-----

Francine Rivers’s Redeeming Love (New York: Multnomah, 1997) is not only strongly representative of its genre’s conventions, but one of the most popular evangelical romance novels ever written. (74)

-----

The first thing that is apparent in reading inspirational fiction is that this evangelical sense of historicity is shaped by a consciousness of its difference from the dominant senses of history that pervade the wider culture. Stories like Redeeming Love are full of faith-filled characters interacting with secular characters who do not acknowledge the deeper meaning of events because of their ignorance (or dismissal) of redemptive history and typological reference points. (77)

-----

an understanding of space as something in which the material is suffused with a supernatural dimension that connects it to the ethos of the people that inhabit it, illustrates what evangelical readers mean when they say that a work is “faith-filled” or “draws [one] closer to God” (phrases that appears repeatedly in positive reviews of evangelical fiction). (81)

-----

because the story of our world, our real world in both of its dimensions, is formally identical with the fictional—often fantastic and romantic—stories that our hearts are drawn to, then fictional stories can serve a homiletic function: they can provide edification by helping us reflect, profoundly, on our own deeper story, of our relationship with God. (82)

-----

I was thinking that perhaps a content warning for homophobia would be required for the section on Rivers' Mark of the Lion series but the author sums things up better than I could:

The disquieting associations of the blond Germanic superman Atretes with a morality expressed in terms of purity and pollution and linked to notions of ethnic superiority and the idea that (sexual) “deviance” should be punishable by death seem not to have troubled Rivers and her readership. (85)