The Christian Aspects of Reviewing.

When Suanna and I decided to begin Xianworldview we wanted to give a rating on a scale of 1 to 10 how much a novel conformed to a Christian worldview. By world view we meant all of the beliefs about the world that are taught in the Bible. But it soon got very hard to do this because we found it was hard to quantify certain things. What we found was that there are really two aspects to what we called a Christian worldview. How much does the novel’s theology, its beliefs about God and the supernatural, conform to the Christian theology? And how much do the novel’s characters and cultures conform to biblical morality?

The problem is how do you come up with one score that incorporates both of these? And what about aspects of the novel you are willing to allow the speculative fiction author to change from our world that are different from the Christian worldview? For instance, the bible is opposed to magic in any form, yet that is one of the cornerstones of most fantasy novels. We allow for magic in fantasy novels as long as it isn’t portrayed in a way that is opposed to Christianity.

So in the end we removed the rating and just included our thoughts on these issues in our reviews.

Still one of our goals was to allow people to come here and find suggestions for books that are decidedly Christian Science Fiction or Fantasy. So we created our recommended reading list. When we come across a book we really like, that has a strong Christian message or worldview we add it to this list. We also might highlight a book from time to time on Xianworldview that might not rate as strongly Christian enough to make the recommended list, but still be a good one for a Christian to read.