I was going to write about something else, but I was talking to one of my students yesterday and a topic came up which made me think. Some background first: when I am not writing sci-fi fantasy books (The Lamb among the Stars series) – which is most of the time – I teach geology and other subjects. Anyway, we were discussing impact events in class three days ago. For those that don't know, impact events are when meteorites or comets strike the earth at very high speed and leave a crater. In the geological record there are some craters that are several hundred kilometres across which must have made given quite a bang even on the other side of the earth. (I am aware that some readers of this site probably do not believe either in the geological record or impact craters; well, as Paul would probably have said, ‘Grace and peace to you’.) The discussion had been pretty much along the lines of how impact craters were difficult to study because no one has actually seen a really large one happen. (And frankly we don’t want to either.) Impacts also have a curious property of leaving only indirect evidence behind. After all, most of the key data is simply vaporised. So, all we can really do with impact craters is look at the crater, measure it, examine the material blasted out all round and then sit down to try and reconstruct exactly what happened.

Well one of my students, a thoughtful fellow, has started reading through the Gospels.   One of the nice things today is that young people in the UK have had almost no exposure to the Bible so they start off with no real presuppositions. I got talking to him and his puzzled comment was that after carefully reading about half of Mark's gospel, he was struck (I summarise) by how curiously absent any ethical teaching was. He had been expecting something like a book of rules or a series of sermons on how to live and had found neither. Here, I should add that I rarely say the right things on such occasions and usually end up with a ‘I wish I had said ….’ feeling.  So I began to try to make the point that, to a very large extent, the gospels were not about ethical teaching but about the extraordinary person of Jesus himself. The student looked puzzled and I went on. ‘You see, the writers of the New Testament were trying to come to terms with the significance of God – in Jesus – coming to be with men.’ Then I had a flash of inspiration. ‘I said look, it's a bit like an impact event. Something utterly awesome has happened and the Gospels and the Letters come from people who are standing round the crater trying to make sense of what has happened.’ He smiled quietly and nodded. ‘I see. Yes. Helpful.’ Time will tell whether this was indeed a helpful image. If it was let us praise the Holy Spirit; if it wasn't then, blame me.

Let me make two quick points from this probably inadequate evangelism. The first is this: it illustrates that the imagery of science has an awful lot of mileage in explaining spiritual concepts. There are many other places where science has gone some way towards providing suitable imagery. The particle/wave duality of light is an idea that is very useful in explaining things like predestination and free will. I also rather like the idea of the resurrection of the dead being like the transfer of the spiritual software of the soul onto new eternal hardware. In short, science may help, not hinder evangelism. I suggest in our fiction, Christians ought not to move so far into the realms of swords and sorcery that we utterly neglect science.  The lab, not the realm of Faerie, may be our best recruiting ground. 

The second point is the one most relevant to this group. It is that imagination is useful in sharing the gospel; it allows old truths to be freshly presented and new truths to be effectively shared. To do this well – or even adequately – requires that we keep our imaginations well exercised. Writing speculative fiction may conceivably do good to our readers; writing and reading it may also do good to our apologetic ability.