Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (1962) is the most important work of biblically grounded fantasy for children produced in the twentieth century after C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, and the book that established L'Engle's lifelong project of writing fiction that took both science and faith seriously - treating them not as competing systems but as different modes of encounter with the same reality.
The novel follows the Murry children - Meg, Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin - on an adventure through space and time guided by three celestial beings (Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which) to rescue their physicist father from the planet Camazotz, where all life is under the control of the terrifying IT, a disembodied brain that enforces absolute conformity through rhythmic pulsation.
The governing metaphor is drawn directly from John 1:5: 'The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.' Mrs. Whatsit explains to the children early in the novel that there is a Dark Thing spreading across the universe - a shadow of evil - and that it is being fought by stars who throw themselves against it and are consumed, just as Mrs. Whatsit herself once was. The fighters against darkness, she tells them, include Jesus, Leonardo da Vinci, Bach, and Einstein: a deliberately mixed list that establishes the novel's conviction that the conflict between light and darkness is the fundamental structure of reality, and that all human creativity and love is a form of participation in the cosmic battle.
Colossians 1:19-20 - 'For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven' - underpins the novel's Christology, which is not allegorical in the Lewisian sense (there is no single Aslan-figure) but atmospheric: the world is a place being reconciled, in which love is the power by which reconciliation happens. Meg's final act of resistance against IT is not violence but love - specifically the love of her brother Charles Wallace, spoken in the face of IT's power - echoing 1 Corinthians 13's insistence that love is the only force that does not fail.
Genesis 2:19-20's act of naming underlies L'Engle's conviction that 'Naming' is a redemptive act. Mrs. Whatsit explains that the creatures of Camazotz have had their names taken from them; Charles Wallace's entrapment by IT consists partly in being un-named, reduced to a unit of the collective. Meg's recovery of her brother involves naming him - calling him by who he is - as an act of love that IT cannot replicate or withstand.
The book was rejected by twenty-six publishers over two years before being accepted by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1962. It won the Newbery Medal in 1963 and has never gone out of print, selling over ten million copies. Its rejections were partly due to editors who felt its mix of science, fantasy, and explicit Christian reference was commercially unviable; the book's subsequent history comprehensively refuted that judgment.
L'Engle was a committed Anglican who wrote extensively about the relationship between faith and art in works such as Walking on Water (1980). She argued consistently that orthodox Christianity was not an obstacle to intellectual seriousness but a framework capacious enough to hold the full complexity of human experience, including scientific discovery, artistic creation, and moral ambiguity. A Wrinkle in Time is the fiction that most fully demonstrates this conviction, and it has been cited by millions of readers as a formative influence on both their faith and their literary imagination.
The novel's climax also engages the biblical theme of the foolishness of God that confounds the wisdom of the world (1 Corinthians 1:25). Meg's victory over IT is achieved not through superior intelligence - IT has all intelligence - but through love, which IT cannot comprehend or assimilate. This is L'Engle's most direct appropriation of the Pauline paradox: the foolish things of the world confound the wise, the weak things confound the mighty, and the love of a child for her father and brother turns out to be the one weapon that omniscient evil cannot defeat. The theological content is embedded in the adventure narrative so naturally that readers encounter it as story truth before they recognize it as doctrinal claim.
A Wrinkle in Time was rejected by twenty-six publishers before Farrar, Straus and Giroux accepted it in 1962, partly because its combination of science fiction, fantasy, and explicit Christian reference was commercially anomalous. L'Engle's response to those rejections - that she would not remove the religious content because it was the point of the book - set the pattern for her subsequent career. She continued to write novels in which faith and science, imagination and theology, were not competing but collaborating, and her four Murry/O'Keefe books remain the most sustained attempt in American children's literature to think seriously about what it means to live in a universe that is both scientifically describable and shot through with transcendent meaning.