Fictional Religion

Jamie Spencer challenges readers to take a more rational, more scholarly, and more historical-critical approach to the New Testament. He examines twelve writers who, he posits, allow us to see how thoughtful artists over the last 600 years have taken the Christian doctrine they inherited, and applied both its formal tenets and its spirit to the intellectual needs, social contexts and cultural biases of their age. Playwrights, poets and story writers like Chaucer, Shakespeare and C. S. Lewis have performed the same services for New Testament doctrine that Hebrew Bible storytellers provided for Jewish law as laid down in the Pentateuch. Although our creative artists are not allowed official entry into Holy Writ, they shape Christian doctrine and insights in new ways to meet new human conditions. They keep the New Testament new.