Fiction in Culture

Consciousness and self-reflection have a talent for observing, connecting and drawing conclusions. The conscious process of connecting and drawing conclusions provides fertile ground for the imagination to create scenarios and rationalize directions for human activities to take in conspiring with events to realize purposeful outcomes. The putting together in mind of events and possible outcomes in life is the work of moral imagination; the artifice of formulating these "conspiracies" in writing is “fiction.” Creative fiction can fit one time but not necessarily all times.

Rationalizing and anticipating outcomes (as in the process of making assumptions and drawing conclusions) is an artifice of imagination that is motivated in purposes of conscional conduct that leads to personal/ social betterment. It’s what “being human” is about. This process is one of moral artifice, and like all artifice is reasoned in experience and conditioned in common sense. When purposes of dominion and control (time-specific presumptions) underlie artifices of fiction, the fiction may become a vehicle of personal/ social injury, as presently is the case with Biblical writing and fixated church.

The Latin saying is as true now as 2000 years ago: “tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis”, times change and we are changed in them. The dogma of one time is the fiction of another. It’s not that fiction is untrue, but it has to be understood in the context of its writing. This is what Pope Pius XII said of the interpretation of Scripture (Divino Afflante Spiritu.)

But what popes say and do may be two different things. Case in point is the Catechism of Pope John Paul II; “[I]n reviewing the new Universal Catechism, Luke Johnson, a leading Catholic exegete, observes “how completely this catechism ignores the results of biblical scholarship. The code for reading the Gospels is the same used by Augustine and Aquinas” (Commonweal, 5/7/93). Once the center of controversy in the church biblical, scholarship seems [now] to have moved to the staid periphery.” http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=10897

The content of any writing has to be discerned in the sense of the times, not literally, simplistically. And so must all “fictional” writing be understood; for example, the past fictions of dominion theology and imperial culture are unacceptable, unworkable today. Churches, presumptions and self-understanding change in the times. If they stand against change they lose credibility and become irrelevant, worse, they aggravate social havoc. And so, religion, creative fiction and consciousness can evolve together on grounds of common sense and universal purpose and converge beyond the lies of fixation in misinformed presumptions. Modern times call for urgent change.