For decades, Walter Wangerin Jr., has elegantly woven together the threads of faith and story. His 1978 novel, The Book of the Dun Cow, won the esteemed National Book Award, and he has received half a dozen Gold Medallion Awards from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. His most recent book is Jesus: A Novel (Zondervan), in which he uses his finely honed literary gifts to tell timeless stories in fresh and moving ways.Wangerin teaches theology, English, and creative writing at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Ind., and for many years served as a pastor of a predominantly African-American congregation. He and his wife, Thanne, have four children and a growing number of grandchildren. Currently battling cancer, Wangerin feels he is drawing closer to the Christ he has served and written about these many years.
Youth ministry professor Ginny Olson interviewed him by phone in July…
YWJ: Some of your works are strongly based in fiction — such as Ragman and Other Cries of Faith. But then other works of yours (The Book of God and Paul) blend
history with imagination. How do you begin to approach a novel like Jesus that’s based in history? Does imagination inform history, or does history inform your imagination?
Wangerin: Whenever I write a scriptural kind of novel, I identify certain restrictions within which I must work. For the novel Jesus, I chose not to imagine or create anything that would contradict the Gospels or anything within the whole of Scripture, since the New Testament very often refers to the Old Testament to define who this Christ is. I could not contradict the best archeological knowledge that we have of the times of Christ. Also, I could not go outside the long traditions of faith or of orthodoxy that have been applied to and arisen from Scripture in the past. As well, I could not go outside of my own observation of human character — what I know to be the case, like male-female relationships.
What allowed me a genuine sense of newness and creativity for this book were the two points of view I chose. I chose the beloved disciple, who in the Gospel of John is never named, as the first-person narrator. I did sort of lean upon church legend, that John and Jesus’ mother, Mary, spent time together afterward, perhaps in Ephesus.
And the other point of view was Mary, the mother of Jesus. I would say looking at Jesus from the point of view of a mother opened up to me all kinds of thoughts and possibilities — moods, modes, tones, feelings — that I never would have thought of before, especially as Mary sees her son grow up and grow away from her.
And so on the one hand we have the round of restrictions within which [the novel] must work; on the other hand we have the points of view that shine light upon this story that I’ve never seen before.
YWJ: Why did you choose these two points of view?
Wangerin: I could imagine that these two people embraced the whole of Jesus’ life. I haven’t seen a lot in recent years that deals simply with [Mary] as a Jewish mother who has to deal with the fact that this son is also the Son of God. When she gets really angry near the end, I’m quoting Jeremiah.
The concept of anger toward God the Father for her son was new to me. It actually comes from the prophetic understanding of people, like Jeremiah, who are called into prophetic ministry and are very angry when it seems that God has neglected them.
YWJ: How did you immerse yourself into her character, a female?
Wangerin: It is the skill of the artist to enter into characters that he or she is not. One of the gifts of the artist granted by God is empathy in its extreme form — literally, to enter into the life of someone whom you are not. I think it’s only in the last 25-50 years that we’ve begun to worry about the fact that someone could not enter into someone else. Whites couldn’t write about blacks and vice versa. And I’m afraid that comes from politics much more than the truth.
YWJ: How so?
Wangerin: Well, it’s the politics of the group: Who can speak for whom? Feminism says that men can’t speak for women, and certain ethnic groups say that you can’t speak for them because you can’t experience what they’ve experienced. Now, I have to tell you honestly that I do think they’re correct that sinfulness is the division of human beings. Our sinfulness is what makes us think we know what someone else feels when, in fact, what we’re doing is imposing our views on them. And so I’m not being glib with this capacity of empathy. Shoot, I was the pastor of a black congregation. I know how many white people thought they weren’t racist, but they were.
Nevertheless, I think there are three factors that allow a human being to enter into another one. The one factor is this artistic gift of God. The second is love. Thanne and I, in the deep trust and love we have for one another, communicate to one another things that are peculiarly our own. As she loves and trusts me, she tells me things; and as I love and receive those things from her, I can feel them myself.
The third is hardest to explain in the secular world, but it is the Spirit. I do believe that one of the effects of the Holy Spirit is, as Paul says, that we laugh with those who
laugh and cry with those who cry.
The process of writing is a means of entering into other people. So I begin the novel not knowing fully who this Mary is going to be, but I wait upon her as I write. And for me, my best and most careful way of investigating or studying something is to write about it — but not to write an essay like I know everything at the beginning; rather, it’s the writing itself that is the discovery.
YWJ: In youth ministry today, some portray Jesus as more of an angry prophet. And others depict Him as teddy bear, almost like the tooth fairy. You seem to be able to embrace several different sides of Him. Would you talk about why you chose to portray Jesus the way you did?
Wangerin: The history of the understanding of the Christ remembers both that He is the judge and the Son of the Creator — most powerfully, the Word at beginning, as well as the One who became flesh and dwelt among us. I think that with the long history we have as a church, if anyone simply skims off the surface the bubbles that come to the top, then they don’t take advantage of the deep understanding of the Christ that we have had all these years. … And so this Jesus who comes in my book also remembers what the church has recognized about the Christ through the ages.
YWJ: What were your hopes for readers as they approached this book?
Wangerin: When I write, especially creative writing, it’s not that I have a lesson to tell. I want to tell a good story; and I hope [readers] want to experience a story, as well. And that’s one of the hardest things to communicate to people, and — forgive me — it’s one of the hardest things to communicate to evangelical people. They expect a lesson; they expect something you can reduce to a sentence.
But writing and art are not what you learn intellectually — they are experiences. And so my hope is that anyone who is willing to give him- or herself to the book would experience these things as if it were his or her own experience. I genuinely believe that faith is not a matter of the mind only. If it is a matter of the mind only, it becomes legalistic.
YWJ: That reminds me of an article in Christianity Today, where you wrote about discipleship and children. You said, “Storytelling conveys the realities and the relationships of our faith better than almost any other form of communication we have, for in story the child does more than think and analyze and solve and remember; the child actually experiences God through Jesus and through Jesus’ ministry. The whole of the child is involved in the faith.”2
Wangerin: Exactly.
YWJ: That is what we, as youth pastors, try to do so often: to connect adolescents with the living Jesus. And yet we stumble and struggle.
Wangerin: Well, I think one of the reasons we stumble is that at adolescence, children are in transition. On the one hand, they want intellectual proofs. They’re
asking for that because they’re entering into the realm of logic and the empirical quality of things, which is why they begin to question the issues of faith — which are not empirical.
On the other hand, they still have the ghosts of child standards. They are willing more than they know to relax, lean back and feel as though they’re passive — although they are not — when the story is told to them.
And so, the remarkable balance that a youth leader has to have is between these intellectual questionings and the stories that are more powerful and bear listeners along almost as a river bears a tree limb along. I think youth ministers need to know when to apply one and when to apply the other and to dance sweetly between the two of them.
YWJ: What’s your advice for youth workers on telling a story?
Wangerin: Personal stuff is powerful stuff. There are countless stories that happen to us that show the deity of God in our lives. And they can be parallel to or embrace the stories of Scripture.
Tell the story that makes you, the youth leader, vulnerable. They must be stories that come to a conclusion of forgiveness or health. I’ve heard pastors tell personal stories where the story was not done, and it made the congregations feel very uncomfortable because the congregations began to feel that they should go up to the pastors and comfort them. And that’s a mistake.
It’s got to be a story that’s come to a blessed conclusion because it’s the conclusion that blesses the young people with the story.
YWJ: I’ve been reading your essays on your Web site [walterwangerinjr.org] as you’ve been writing about your bout with cancer. Would you talk about how this is impacting your view of Jesus?
Wangerin: It’s an adventure, something that I don’t have control over; so I’m kind of enjoying watching what’s happening, although it’s happening to me. Talking to
Thanne about it, I don’t know, it hasn’t changed much. I find myself at peace altogether. Little things irritate me, like the grandkids making too much noise.
But the major things about living or dying, that’s all part of the adventure. And I have no doubt that if I die, I’ll be where Jesus is. I don’t know what that means because heaven is beyond my intellectual abilities to define it. But I have no doubt about it. I would say my own faith was ready for [the cancer]. So it didn’t blindside me at all. I was born a melancholy spirit, so I’ve thought about death all my life [laughs]. This is not new.
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1 The Godbearing Life: The Art of Soul Tending for Youth Ministry, Dean, Kenda Creasy Foster, Ron (1998). Nashville, TN: Upper Room Books, p. 37
2“Making Disciples by Sacred Story,” Walter Wangerin Jr., Christianity Today, 2004, www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/002/9.66.html
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Ginny Olson is the director for the Center for Youth Ministry Studies at North Park University in Chicago and the author of ‘Teenage Girls: Exploring Issues Adolescent Girls Face and Strategies to Help Them‘ (Zondervan).
