Christians have traditionally found it difficult to grant integrity to this world of the imagination and have found ways to suppress or discredit the imaginary element in literature. One tendency has been to denigrate fiction and fantasy as being untruthful, frivolous, a waste of time, escapist, and something to be left behind with childhood. Others have tried to excise the imaginary aspect of literature by acting as though literature is a direct replica of everyday life, ignoring all that is unlifelike about it. . . .

[But] there is no valid reason for the perennial Christian preference of biography, history, and the newspaper to fiction and poetry. The former tell us what happened, while literature tells us what happens. 

The example of the Bible, which is central to any attempt to formulate a Christian approach to literature, sanctions the imagination as a valid form of expressing truth. The Bible is in large part a work of imagination. Its most customary way of expressing truth is not the sermon or theological outline but the story, the poem, and the vision--all of them literary forms and products of the imagination. . . Literary conventions are present in the Bible from start to finish, even in the most historically factual parts.

LelandRyken, "Thinking Christianly about Literature"