Half Air

. . . And it was not easy!

Before you start picking up stones and cry, “Blasphemer!” let me explain.

If you’ve been here for a while and looked around, you probably know that I run a sister site to Half Air called Tev’s Next Idea.   If you like fantasy and/or role-playing games, you might want to check it out. TNI is where I share my interest in solo role-playing by postings stories based playthroughs of various “pen and paper” games.

I’ve enjoyed solo role-playing since 2019 and, as a scan of my archive will show, I went all in for the first few years.  I was learning, reading, playing, and writing SRPGs almost every free moment I had.  I was always contemplating new stories and characters, and built a long list of things I wanted to accomplish in the hobby. However, as I found myself spending more and more time on solo role-playing, I began to wonder if I could also use that time to share my faith?

WHY CREATE MY OWN RELIGION

While I had no intention of writing “Christian Fiction” or playing perfectly moral characters, ever since I began writing my playthroughs, I always wanted to include characters and situations that reflected my beliefs.  It might be in the specific actions of a character or my choice to avoid universal glorification or acceptance of actions or attitudes that run contrary to scripture. While that was fine, I wanted to do more. So, I added scripture references to the end of many of my posts. They were nothing fancy, just one or more verses that were often related to the events of the story.  I didn’t even hotlink the verse, so it was totally up to the reader if they wanted to look it up.

That sufficed for the last few years, but several months ago I had a thought. What if I create a religion to govern my fantasy worlds which mimics Christianity?  Any new stories I play/write could be set within this overall world, and I would always have available a framework to share my faith through the attitudes and beliefs of the people of at least one of their religions.

CREATING MY RELIGION WAS DIFFICULT

As you can imagine, this came with a whole set of obstacles. The first is the typical treatment of religion in fantasy literature and how I had already established it in my current stories.  If you’ve read fantasy or played role-playing games, you are probably aware that these settings are typically polytheistic, with several gods overseeing the various races, professions, and orders of people.   These deities may work in conjunction with each other, or they may be adversaries. Depending on the type of characters you play, they may even receive powers or blessings from them.

I avoided this conflict in my first game and the world I created.  When there came a point that I needed to introduce a religion to the story, I created a church that worshiped “The Creator” (how original), and generally modeled it as a rather generic representation of the Christian Church. So far, in that storyline, it is little more than a faith-based organization that provides some moral oversight and performs weddings, so its tenants haven’t been explored or detailed too much.

My second adventure, however, is a bit different.  When I was creating the setting and characters, I used a lot of tools to randomly create my world and characters.  This world followed the typical fantasy polytheistic model, and one of my characters was rather passionate about the goddess they worshiped.  As was my style, the tenants of the goddess would line up with a Christian viewpoint in regard to their area of oversight, but I never had a plan to take it further than that. But as it turned out, this was the world into which I decided to inject my religion. That meant I was now challenged to mold my already established religion into one that somewhat mirrored the Christian faith. An interesting task, to say the least.

The second obstacle I had to overcome, believe it or not, was Christianity itself.  God’s plan for the world is so different and unique from all other religions that it is often misunderstood. Most people (even some Christians) think it is simply a set of rules to follow in order to earn favor with God, similar to practically any other religion. But if you look closer, that’s not the case.  Sure, God has given us commands and guidelines, but His intention was not to give us list to be checked off to determine if we deserve His Love.  Instead, they were to show us how to live perfectly with one another, caring for one another, and help each other flourish.  Despite loving us regardless, God does make it clear that he abhors behavior contrary to these comments, what we would call sin, and such behavior, which is man’s nature, breaks His relationship with us.

Most religions teach that it is our responsibly to fix the problem and earn back our favor. Christianity teaches it is impossible for us to fix the problem.  Instead, God agreed to fix it Himself by sending this son Jesus to live a life that perfectly keeps the commands, yet still suffer the wrath we deserved, substituting his life for ours.  When we accept this in faith, God looks at us and sees his son.  This doesn’t mean God ignores our sin; there are still consequences for our actions, but they do not affect our ultimate and eternal relationship with Him.  (For more information on this, you can read more of my faith based articles on Half Air or listen to Rick Gilmartin’s sermon series on the Book of Galatians.)

Here is where my difficulty came in.  When trying to create a religion that mimics Christianity, it’s hard to avoid falling into one of these three categories:

1. You lean too far on the obedience aspect, creating a works-based religion where God’s love and acceptance is dependent on how good you are.
2. You lean too far on the grace aspect, where living your life according to a set of divine guidelines becomes voluntary and bears little consequence.
3. You simply “cut and paste” the Christian religion, at the most, changing the names to hide it behind a very sheer veil.

The first two are obviously misrepresenting God’s plan and the third is, at worst, lazy, and at best, not as creative and personal as I was hoping to be. With these pitfalls in mind, I gave it a shot and came up with . . . something. However, knowing in advance that whatever an imperfect human devised would fall short of God’s glorious plan, I took a few steps to help mitigate the discrepancies and shortcomings.

CREATING MY RELIGION THOUGH A WIDE LENS

For starters, I explained the religion and its history in broad, vague brushstrokes. I could pat my back as having come up with this tactic on my own, but really, it was the only real way to tell the entire story.  I had roughly the equivalent of ten typewritten pages to encapsulate all the history, doctrine, and teachings of all sixty-six books of the Bible. It simply can’t be done in any detail.

I jammed in as many concepts as I could: the Eden story, the fall of man, the deterioration of God’s perfect creation, the incarnation, the substitutionary sacrifice, the trinity, God’s grace, and more. But the way in which much of this happened was left up to the imagination.  I wrote that God loved His creation and cared for His people but left out any real details about how He did that.  The fallen world turned their back on God and didn’t follow His teachings, but what they did exactly is left for speculation.  My goal was simply to lay a groundwork so that in the future I could tell stories that could more thoughtfully fill in the details as I go along.

CREATING MY RELIGION USING AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

Another way I hoped to cover any imperfections was in the method I chose to introduce the religion.  I didn’t present it on a scroll that was handed down to man from God himself.  Nor did I let a priest or bishop teach an unbeliever the truth.  Instead, I had one of my characters, a self-proclaimed historian and storyteller, answer the question, “What do you know about the gods?”.  The storyteller, from a seemingly neutral position, shared what he had learned from texts and tales he had collected over the years. At this point in the story, the reader knows that the storyteller is very knowledgeable, but not necessarily an expert. Anything he says could be a mixture of fact, interpretation, legend, or, yes, even flat-out fantasy. In fact, while relating what he had learned, the storyteller occasionally offers multiple possible explanations or admits the actual facts are up to speculation.

If my goal is to try and share the gospel through this story, don’t I want to make it as accurate as possible? Yes, but I’ve already mentioned that is nearly impossible to do, even for a much more invested and articulate theologian than myself. So, the alternative was to give myself an out.  The storyteller in my adventure has already been well established as someone who takes history seriously, so it is assumed that most of what knows has been researched meticulously, and he is pretty confident that he is sharing the most trustworthy information.  However, if later I realize part of his story isn’t explained in the best way, misrepresents what I believe is the truth, or I’m unable to fit future stories nicely into this original version, I can excuse it by implying that the storyteller’s information was imperfect and up for revision. In the end, I did my best to reshape the Bible story in a way that fit into my fantasy world while still being faithful to its message.  If you are interested in how I did, you can read Megapha: Chapter 6 of my Cyenannore adventure.

But, if I haven’t already warned you enough, let me warn you again: it falls well short of the Truth of God.  For that, there is only one authority: God’s own Word, as revealed in His Holy Bible.