Literature Lessons Should Be More Like Sermons

The modern literature class resembles an informational briefing. Get your notebooks out and write down these bullet points on William Shakespeare. He acted and wrote plays in Elizabethan England in the late 16^th century. He wrote histories, comedies, and tragedies. His plays explore universal themes, such as love, ambition, and revenge. After reading King Lear, we’ll note where Shakespeare explored the themes of family obligations, loyalty, and self-awareness. You need to memorize these bullet points because these are things educated people know about, and it will be on the test.

The strangeness of this approach becomes apparent when you imagine using it to preach a sermon. Here are several bullet points on the book of John. No stories, no analogies, no jokes, no application, just the facts. We treat the Bible differently from the Great Books because we assume it has meaning that makes a great deal of difference in our lives. But if the point of literature is moral transformation, then we should treat the Great Books analogously. Short of divinely inspired, they have endured through centuries to teach us what it means to be human and to awaken our spirits to nobility. Russel Kirk said, “Until very recent years, men took it for granted that literature exists to form the normative consciousness.” To recover the classics, we have to do more than add them to our curriculum; we have to learn how to teach them according to their proper end, and I suggest that means making literature class less like a briefing and more like a sermon.

Good sermons speak ultimately to the heart. Plato describes man’s three parts as a chariot with a driver and two horses. Though reason should be directing the chariot, one of the horses, passion, will pull the chariot off reason’s path if passion is not held on course by the spirit, otherwise known as the heart or will. C.S. Lewis warns us in The Abolition of Man about teaching to the intellect alone, for it is only the student’s great heart that has enough power to keep his passions in check.

Though I live in Brooklyn, I grew up in the South, where, with two Sunday services, the midweek service, youth group, school chapel, summer camp, and revivals, I heard a lot of sermons, and most of them did me a lot of good. Baptists in some parts of the South aren’t known for their exposition, but they know how to preach to the will. The sermons I heard aimed straight for the heart, and I am still skeptical about sermons delivered without shouting or tears. To reach the heart, we need to make our teaching more like preaching, which means planning and delivering lessons that same way pastors plan and deliver sermons: doing the literary groundwork, discovering the meaning, and making a fitting application.

First, we do the literary groundwork and examine the materials of the work. A sculptor works with clay, but a writer works with plots, characters, setting, suspense, foils, and symbols, and knowing how to recognize these tools makes reading deeply satisfying. The best class I have ever taken was a graduate course called “The Bible as Literature.” By studying the literary elements, the familiar story of David and Goliath yielded new levels of meaning. The imagery of the metals and the armor, the juxtaposition of little and big, and the driving question: “Is there a man in Israel?” all pointed to an ironic and delightful resolution.

We have a lot in common with modern educators at this step; we are both good at examining the elements of literature, but a crucial difference is that our analysis aims for integration, not dissection. We are not just looking at parts, but how the parts connect and point toward a unity. We cannot highlight all the elements of Gothic fiction just for the sake of recognizing elements of Gothic fiction. We have to look through it to something bigger, something more important. We have to transition to the second step in the literature lesson, which is asking: “How do the literary elements add to the meaning of the work?”

Relativism is so entrenched in us that we struggle to believe literature has a real meaning, and two common ways that we obscure the meaning and reinforce relativistic views of literature are offering perspectives and focusing on themes.

Offering perspectives is a popular approach. My friend attends a competitive high school in Queens, where each work of literature is paired with another work of the same time period, but by an author who moved in very different social circles. A story featuring the aristocracy is read with another story of the same time period, told from the perspective of a servant. This approach aims to teach empathy, but it can subvert the real purpose of literature by assuming that a great author is merely giving his limited perspective on human nature, not saying something objective about it.

An older, but still common, approach is to focus on themes. A theme is any topic of human experience that shows up in a work, but the theme does not equal the meaning. Consider two prominent themes in Pride and Prejudice: money and marriage. In discussing these themes, we may lecture on the context of Regency England and speak of the injustice of a woman having to marry for money instead of being able to make her own. Austen may have been making a sardonic comment on the situation, but that was certainly not her point. The point of the context is to highlight the depth of Elizabeth’s temptation. One could almost argue that Elizabeth had a moral responsibility to marry Mr. Collins as the security of her mother and sisters was in jeopardy, but Austen assures us that Elizabeth made the right choice. Austen is not trying to help us consider the perspective of a woman in the early 1800s; she wants us to consider how we, like Elizabeth, are tempted to compromise. Pointing out the sins or unprogressive practices of earlier times is like shooting fish in a barrel: being too obvious, it doesn’t do our souls any good. Themes should be studied only as they relate to the meaning of the work.

The meaning of a story is a truth the narrative reveals about man’s quest for happiness. According to Daniel McInerny, in his recent book, Beauty and Imitation, every work of art is an imitation of a man in action, achieving or destroying his own happiness. Man has purposes in a story, but man also has teleological ends, and the purposes of man measured up against his ultimate purposes reveal the meaning of the story. David purposes to defeat Goliath, and he accomplishes it through fortitude and faith, achieving a surprising reversal of fortune. Since David’s goals of defending God’s glory and protecting Israel match up well with his ultimate end, his story ends well. Saul, on the other hand, purposes to protect himself by letting a kid do his job, and these purposes do not match up with Saul’s end, so his story ends in tragedy.

I still remember the joy I found in finally seeing the meaning in a favorite Bible story: all the clues were pointing to the revelation that David was the true man in Israel. The story ends with David’s formal introduction (Saul already knew who he was) to Israel and to the reader, and we see the glory of David’s plucky faith. The joy we find in this story compels us to accept the meaning, and our wills bend toward David’s virtue and away from Saul’s vices. Our students want to experience true happiness (more than they want to get into a good college, believe it or not), and this delightful story gives them hope and a pattern to follow.

After we find the meaning of a work, we are not yet finished. The last part of a sermon is the application, and it is the most important part because it is the point of the sermon. The application is the student’s response to the meaning of the story.

It might surprise you to hear that the application is the hardest part of the lesson. Poor applications are easy to make, but good ones require work and prayer, and we need to put in that work and prayer because nothing makes a teenager dislike literature faster than a hokey application.

To make a good application, you must know your students, and this is where you have an advantage. You see them every day! You read their homework. Just like a local pastor, your students need you because you are their teacher. The internet blogger cannot make an application the way you can. Talk to them. Pray for insight. Convince them that David’s song lyrics are better than Taylor Swift’s. Be desperate for your students. They live in a dangerous world, and they need you.

Do not think of the application as optional; instead, make it the point of your lesson. Cash in all the work you did on the first two steps. Some students struggle to add a good application to their senior theses, and I tell them: “You have done all this work to convince us of your claim; now preach!”

Literature class need not be a devotional or a replacement for chapel, but it does need to accomplish the purpose of literature itself, which is to lead us to virtue. Analyze the book, but don’t forget to preach.