Reading Is Believing: The Christian Faith through Literature and Film

by David S. Cunningham

In this fascinating and fresh look at the Apostles' Creed, David Cunningham argues that reading fiction and film can lead Christians to a deeper, more precise, and more experiential knowledge of their faith. Drawing on novels, plays, and films by the likes of Dickens, Shakespeare, P. D. James, and Graham Greene, Cunningham discusses the Apostles' Creed in detail, using one primary text to illuminate each article.

Cunningham begins with a brief history of the Christian creeds and their significance. In addition to plot summaries, each chapter includes discussion questions addressing the relationship between literature and faith and concludes with a works cited list and a list for further reading.

This book will delight Christians who want to better understand the creeds and basic doctrinal confessions of the Christian faith. While academics, theologians, and literature and film aficionados will celebrate
Cunningham's keen literary and theological insights, the book is equally readable for those with little background in these fields of study.

Reading Is Believing is an ideal text for Christian education classes, adult Sunday school, and church-based book clubs. It will serve well as a text in theology courses, as well as various courses in the humanities, ethics, and cultural and religious studies.

Genres: Theology

238 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2002

About the author

David S. Cunningham is Professor of Religion and Director of the CrossRoads Project at Hope College, Michigan. He has published widely on the subjects of systematic, doctrinal and philosophical theology and Christian ethics.

He holds degrees in Communication Studies from Northwestern University, and in Theology and Religious Studies from the University of Cambridge and Duke University. His works include Faithful Persuasion: In Aid of a Rhetoric of Christian Theology (Notre Dame, 1992) and These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Blackwell, 1998).

Reviews

[Josiah DeGraaf · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of this book was pretty cool: explore the Apostles' Creed by explaining how different works of great literature intentionally or unintentionally illustrate its theology. The execution of it was surprisingly boring, though and I didn't feel like I learned much from it. Add to this some flirtations with heterorthodoxy (the author has a strange conception of the hypostatic union and leans to Rob Bell's view on Hell), and I didn't feel like this was an incredibly worthwhile book.

Rating: 1.5 Stars (Poor).

[Richard Worden · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an amazing book. The author illustrates each statement of the Christian creed with a piece of literature. Much is to be discovered about the Christian faith by exploring the creed especially when illuminated by secular writings. I was concerned about not having access to the various books associated with "Reading is Believing" until I noticed that the author gives ample summaries of the literature matching each clause of the creed.