Greg Reynolds has been using his editorship of Ordained Servant to further his quixotic quest to get OPC Church officers to read fiction and poetry. To that end, this month he published "Why Read Literature?," in which Leland Ryken encourages pastors to, well, read literature. I agree most with his argument that literature puts us in touch with authentic human experience. As I heard Tobias Wolff say in an interview once, "The best fiction suddenly illuminates that thing that's been beside us all along and makes us see it for the first time."
I greatly admire these men for pursuing their noble end, but I rather think that by the time men are ordained to the ministry of Word and sacrament, the window in which they might be persuaded to change their minds or take up a new pursuit has been firmly closed until it opens up again a few years just prior to retirement. Better, I think, to go after candidates for ministry. Having seen much too much exegetical obtuseness over the years, I've often thought pastors would produce much better sermons if they'd spent some time with, for example, Hemingway, Tobias Wolff, and the short stories published by The New Yorker. So why not make a paper on The Sun Also Rises a standard requirement of licensure or ordination trials?
Never let it be said I'm not doing my part to keep the OPC distinctive.
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