Picture a young, impressionable man in Egypt about 2500 years ago. He cheated a customer of his, and now he's facing the man in the market. He knows his thumb was on the scale, even as he lies straight to his customer's face, and he knows the man cannot prove a thing. He's scot-free.
His customer knows as much himself, and that he cannot press this young man any harder. But before he leaves he whispers, "Would I could see you in the Hall of Maat!"
The young man, let's call him Thoth, smiles and throws the man a sugared date as he leaves. When the man throws it back, he catches it and pops it in his mouth, thinking for just a moment how it look so very much like a heart.
He bites down on the heart in his mouth, and remembers Ammut.
His mouth becomes very dry.
His mind travels to that day, be it tomorrow or a generation away, when he will appear in the Hall of Maat. Every man dies, and every man appears before the forty-two gods in the Hall of Maat. In that hall, a man makes one profession of innocence before each god. The sixth confession before the Lion and Lioness god is that I have not made light the measure of corn. The seventh before Merti-f-em-tes is that I have not deceived. The twenty-forth before Nekhem that I have not been deaf to the truth.
Maat is "balance", and in the Hall of the Balance Thoth's heart will be weighed against a feather. His heart will be weighed after he has made forty-two negative confessions ("I have not...") to the forty-two gods in the presence of merciful Osiris. If he has told no lies during his confessions, his heart will be lighter than a feather.
Ammut, crocodile, lion, and hippopotamus, will watch the scales on that day. When his heart remembers this day, and it is heavy as a stone, Ammut will devour his heart and he will die forever.
Osiris was once human, and he pleads the cause of the humans who appear in Maat, but Osiris would have nothing to say for him unless he makes his crimes right again. But even then, what hope is there? Thoth would need to be ritually buried, mummified, and buried with the scrolls of the prayers of the dead to even know what to say to Osiris to persuade him to defend his cause. Burial was expensive beyond Thoth's wildest dreams and the books of the prayers he could never afford. Without the scrolls by his side as he entered the afterworld, he would never know what to pray to the gods. And what merchant could afford a book of the prayers?
Thoth was the god who recorded the trial of each human. Our young Thoth could write the divine Thoth's transcript already.
There was no hope.
====
This story was not given at the museum the other day, when I viewed the bodies of Egyptians who'd spent fortunes preserving their bodies. The stories I did read, though, stirred me deeply. These men and women were desparate to live forever, and willing to spend any amount of money to have that chance.
The bodies I saw were those of the rich, but all Egyptians shared the same fears and the same hopelessness. They lived as good lives as they could, and still went to their graves without certainty their many works and prayers could turn Ammut away. They hoped, but their hope was based on nothing more than the stories their priests told.
And that's the last line of questioning. Where did the priests get their stories? And before you answer that question, remind yourself the bible tells how the priests of Egypt were able to turn their staffs to snakes, call lice, and call frogs from nowhere. Would you believe a man who could do these things? Would you fear the stories he told you?
This story is something I imagined as I wondered what a laborer like myself would do in Egypt. I was raised Assemblies of God here in twentieth-century America and I cried myself to sleep many a night wondering whether God would reject me for my sins in the end. What if I knew the decision were in Anubis' hands and only my perfections could keep my heart from Ammut's maw.
====
I've often wondered whether the ancients could really believe the things our scholars say they believed. The three thousand year old bodies I saw this weekend declare the passion of the people whom they were.
I praise the Lord Jesus for the kind and gentle mercy He shows to us all.
06 September, 2012
03 July, 2012
Idols? They're a Personal Thing
A thought here about idols in America. Basically, we don't have any and we might be slightly better off if we did.
In Sunday School we were looking at Samuel and how he made Israel throw away their Ba'als and Astartes. The conversation turned and turned until someone said something that made America's problem crystal clear.
The gist was this. When you sacrificed some grain to Ba'al or did a dance for Astarte or whatever it is you did to gain their favor, you rather expected and even felt entitled to a good crop or a son or whatever you prayed for. And that's why God was so offended by those idols. Some Israelite would sacrifice to Ba'al, received rain from YHWH Who sends His rain on the just and the unjust, grow a nice crop, and tell all his friends how trustworthy Ba'al was. The Israelites really trusted Ba'al in his little sphere of the world. God would not share the credit for the things He did with anyone, imaginary or not, so He fought back.
In America, that could never happen. We put our trust in 401k or the Affordable Healthcare Act or the stock market or welfare or private enterprise. When one of those things fails us, we're disillusioned or depressed or angry, but we don't feel personally betrayed. Our systems and processes are not personal. They're not idols.
The same goes for everything else they call an idol in America: TV, rock stars, sports teams, movie stars, political heroes. We're a lot more likely to ascribe the success of our personal favorites to God than we are to praise them for delivering something to us we'd actually received from God. We don't personally trust personal idols the way everyone did three thousand years ago.
Instead, we don't trust anything beyond ourselves and our kind. Our science, our governments, our culture. We trust our systems and processes, and we are simply assured there's nothing relational to them at all. That ancient Israelite trusted a "someone" named YHWH or Ba'al with his crops. Either way, he knew something was beyond in the control of some other being to whom he could and should relate. The modern American buys a tractor, digs a well, irrigates, and handles pests using tools well within his control. As long as rain comes to someone, somewhere, he'll be able to buy water from his neighbors or the aquifer or somewhere and he'll be fine. And if not, there are a couple safety nets he can fall into. There's nothing personal, nothing relational, about it.
American pagans don't have idols any more, but they don't have anyone else to relate to either. And when we become converted, I think it's very hard for us to make the transition to there suddenly being an invisible Being in our lives Who cares for us and about us, to Whom we can relate.
I'm not quite sure what it all means yet, but it was an interesting discussion. I love Sunday School.
In Sunday School we were looking at Samuel and how he made Israel throw away their Ba'als and Astartes. The conversation turned and turned until someone said something that made America's problem crystal clear.
The gist was this. When you sacrificed some grain to Ba'al or did a dance for Astarte or whatever it is you did to gain their favor, you rather expected and even felt entitled to a good crop or a son or whatever you prayed for. And that's why God was so offended by those idols. Some Israelite would sacrifice to Ba'al, received rain from YHWH Who sends His rain on the just and the unjust, grow a nice crop, and tell all his friends how trustworthy Ba'al was. The Israelites really trusted Ba'al in his little sphere of the world. God would not share the credit for the things He did with anyone, imaginary or not, so He fought back.
In America, that could never happen. We put our trust in 401k or the Affordable Healthcare Act or the stock market or welfare or private enterprise. When one of those things fails us, we're disillusioned or depressed or angry, but we don't feel personally betrayed. Our systems and processes are not personal. They're not idols.
The same goes for everything else they call an idol in America: TV, rock stars, sports teams, movie stars, political heroes. We're a lot more likely to ascribe the success of our personal favorites to God than we are to praise them for delivering something to us we'd actually received from God. We don't personally trust personal idols the way everyone did three thousand years ago.
Instead, we don't trust anything beyond ourselves and our kind. Our science, our governments, our culture. We trust our systems and processes, and we are simply assured there's nothing relational to them at all. That ancient Israelite trusted a "someone" named YHWH or Ba'al with his crops. Either way, he knew something was beyond in the control of some other being to whom he could and should relate. The modern American buys a tractor, digs a well, irrigates, and handles pests using tools well within his control. As long as rain comes to someone, somewhere, he'll be able to buy water from his neighbors or the aquifer or somewhere and he'll be fine. And if not, there are a couple safety nets he can fall into. There's nothing personal, nothing relational, about it.
American pagans don't have idols any more, but they don't have anyone else to relate to either. And when we become converted, I think it's very hard for us to make the transition to there suddenly being an invisible Being in our lives Who cares for us and about us, to Whom we can relate.
I'm not quite sure what it all means yet, but it was an interesting discussion. I love Sunday School.
29 May, 2012
Mockingjay
I had strong feelings about The Hunger Games and shared them a couple weeks ago.
I didn't decide to read the last two in the series in order to blog review them,
but now that I have I may as well share some thoughts.
Up until the very end of the third book, I found the reading pleasant and the story engaging. By the end of Mockingjay, the series was just too heavy for me. I was seriously disheartened by the story, and never felt like the author made it worth that cost for me. My review would be that as a thrill ride, the trilogy meets expectations. As young adult literature, it's a poor offering.
Why? Simple. By the end of the book only a handful of characters have shown themselves unambiguously good, and they have been destroyed. Peeta is the best of the bunch, and by the end he's been destroyed and remade so many times as to be unsurvivable. The series does a phenomenal job of portraying the pointlessness of good.
From here, I'll be putting up big *** spoilers. ***
There were two big hooks on which the story hung, romance and politics. Let me take them in order.
The romantic money quote was Gale's, "Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can't survive without."
Gale is right, and the author's description of Katniss' self-assessment is consistent with the character's story arc. Katniss really is so mercenary through every the page of the story.
She suffers an army of doubts and guilts as each of her decisions hurts Gale, Peeta, and a legion of innocents along the way. Suzanne Collins adds Katniss' traumatic issues to her original poverty and loss issues, creating an insurmountable cluster of obstacles to her ability to love. Katniss grows further and further from being able to make those decisions necessary to build a family.
The portrayal is compelling and sad.
Why do this to a character? What's Collins' point?
In the last handful of pages Katniss gives a thumbnail sketch of how she and Peeta overcome the scars each bears. Katniss does not grow into the skills of inner survival within the story. The story is unrelentingly about scar layering on scar. Incredibly and pointlessly, the salvation of Katniss never makes it into the dramatic narrative. Suddenly it's the last chapter of Mockingjay, Gale is gone, and Peeta is inevitable. No choice. No struggle. Just a convenient end to turmoil. Katniss never crawls out of the deep crater into which Collins' story has blown her. She just sort of tells us about her twenty years of recovery as if emerging from it were a difficult but undramatic thing.
Politics holds center stage in Mockingjay (immediately behind the action, of course.) The rebel District 13 stands opposed to the tyrannical capitol, Panem.
Panem gave us the hunger games in the first place. Panem is debauched on the luxuries stolen from the twelve districts. Its citizens are weak in body, mind and character. Its leader is greedy for power in its purest form, and will do anything to make sure his people continually swim in the bread and circuses that are so key to securing his power.
District Thirteen is the mirror image of Panem. Its citizens know no pleasure, and are strong in body, mind and discipline. Its leader is also hungry for power and will do anything to make sure her people continually swim in the revenge dream that's so key to securing her power.
The mirror imaging builds steadily throughout Mockingjay until it culminates in the rebel leader's decision to either exterminate her vanquished foes or subject them to a hunger games populated by Panem's children. Collins labors mightily to move the reader from sympathy with the rebels to disgust with Panem, the rebels, and presumably all governments.
The money quote of the political story is Plutarch's. He delivers this whilst the rebels are dreaming of the peace and the new republic surely just around the corner upon the war's end. Katniss asks him whether he's preparing for another war. He replies, "Oh, not now. Now we're in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horros should never be repeated. But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid being with short memories and a great gift for self-destruction. Although who knows? Maybe this will be it, Katniss." Plutarch being named after the great historian and being cabinet-head of the new nation, this quote is quite fitting. More to the point, it's hopeless and delivered in a moment of giddy happiness. The contradiction should not be lost on the reader.
Mayhap government in abstract is OK, but it'll never work in real life. Collins doesn't give us a money quote on the principles of governing (she does offer a vague hope in republicanism) but my impression is she wants to scream out to our children that the worst of us always rise to the top. At the very least, we should be very suspicious of any and every government ... and of any who would oppose government.
To say in giving us Coin she's given us no Washington is the deepest of understatements. Coin is as evil as Snow, and in every way. Before the book ends, Coin has attempted the murder of Katniss, succeeded at murdering Prim, killed hundreds of innocent children, and re-instituted the hunger games for exactly the same purpose as Panem instituted them in the first place. It also bears saying Coin is no Lincoln, and has no interest in reconstruction. Given the opportunity to give our children an incredible set of role models, Collins ignores every redeeming character of history.
Instead, she's given us the ugliness of the French Revolution without all the inconvenient restraints of reality. Robespierre and Napoleon couldn't genetically engineer monsters that hiss Katniss' name, smell like roses, and hardly knew how to die, nor could they invent parachuting presents with which to immolate children. What's more, I question whether even such monsters as Robespierre and Napolean would have done so if they could. Collins' leaders only regret that their evil is thwarted. She carefully mingles her mixture of fantasy and hyper-reality with her presentation of geo-politics. In the end, the conclusion is unstated, subliminal, and unavoidable. Leaders are the real inhuman monsters.
The message can actually be helpful - in its place and time. It reminded me the "helpful" intrusions of the TSA into our privates and the intrusion of thought police for our well-being are not to be blindly trusted. She has a solid point, but I question whether it's the point to be making to adolescents. And I'm sure the use of hyper-violence and the lack of any redemptive character are unconscienable in a book for teens.
America is still a republic, and government of some form is necessary. People do very poorly without some kind of objective justice system in place, and the despair this series promotes is an enemy of that cooperation needed to form a just society. The instinct to cooperation is much harder to build than that to selfish cynicism. If The Hunger Games contained any meaningful example of constructive cooperation, I missed it.
In the end, every character's arc shared one commonality. To the degree that character was strong and willing to be unscrupulous, he or she was a winner. To the degree a character was weak and/or good, he or she was a loser. I believe Peeta, Boggs, and Finnick were the best characters in the book. I hardly need to tell how they were rewarded for their decency. May the Lord shower blessings on those who decide to be like Peeta after all they saw him endure. And need I point out Katniss was a winner? A guilt-plagued winner, but a winner from start to end.
The author's stated purpose in writing this series was to explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age. I cannot imagine any value in this book, except to inflict a small piece of that damage on our children, and that without any redeeming counter-example to the destruction. It's an emminently readable series, up until the far too heavy ending, and that discourages me only more. Rather like the taste of fine liquor, once it's grown on you it seems hard to ever lose it again.
I wish our children didn't have such a taste for this fare. I wish I didn't.
Up until the very end of the third book, I found the reading pleasant and the story engaging. By the end of Mockingjay, the series was just too heavy for me. I was seriously disheartened by the story, and never felt like the author made it worth that cost for me. My review would be that as a thrill ride, the trilogy meets expectations. As young adult literature, it's a poor offering.
Why? Simple. By the end of the book only a handful of characters have shown themselves unambiguously good, and they have been destroyed. Peeta is the best of the bunch, and by the end he's been destroyed and remade so many times as to be unsurvivable. The series does a phenomenal job of portraying the pointlessness of good.
From here, I'll be putting up big *** spoilers. ***
There were two big hooks on which the story hung, romance and politics. Let me take them in order.
The romantic money quote was Gale's, "Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can't survive without."
Gale is right, and the author's description of Katniss' self-assessment is consistent with the character's story arc. Katniss really is so mercenary through every the page of the story.
She suffers an army of doubts and guilts as each of her decisions hurts Gale, Peeta, and a legion of innocents along the way. Suzanne Collins adds Katniss' traumatic issues to her original poverty and loss issues, creating an insurmountable cluster of obstacles to her ability to love. Katniss grows further and further from being able to make those decisions necessary to build a family.
The portrayal is compelling and sad.
Why do this to a character? What's Collins' point?
In the last handful of pages Katniss gives a thumbnail sketch of how she and Peeta overcome the scars each bears. Katniss does not grow into the skills of inner survival within the story. The story is unrelentingly about scar layering on scar. Incredibly and pointlessly, the salvation of Katniss never makes it into the dramatic narrative. Suddenly it's the last chapter of Mockingjay, Gale is gone, and Peeta is inevitable. No choice. No struggle. Just a convenient end to turmoil. Katniss never crawls out of the deep crater into which Collins' story has blown her. She just sort of tells us about her twenty years of recovery as if emerging from it were a difficult but undramatic thing.
Politics holds center stage in Mockingjay (immediately behind the action, of course.) The rebel District 13 stands opposed to the tyrannical capitol, Panem.
Panem gave us the hunger games in the first place. Panem is debauched on the luxuries stolen from the twelve districts. Its citizens are weak in body, mind and character. Its leader is greedy for power in its purest form, and will do anything to make sure his people continually swim in the bread and circuses that are so key to securing his power.
District Thirteen is the mirror image of Panem. Its citizens know no pleasure, and are strong in body, mind and discipline. Its leader is also hungry for power and will do anything to make sure her people continually swim in the revenge dream that's so key to securing her power.
The mirror imaging builds steadily throughout Mockingjay until it culminates in the rebel leader's decision to either exterminate her vanquished foes or subject them to a hunger games populated by Panem's children. Collins labors mightily to move the reader from sympathy with the rebels to disgust with Panem, the rebels, and presumably all governments.
The money quote of the political story is Plutarch's. He delivers this whilst the rebels are dreaming of the peace and the new republic surely just around the corner upon the war's end. Katniss asks him whether he's preparing for another war. He replies, "Oh, not now. Now we're in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horros should never be repeated. But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid being with short memories and a great gift for self-destruction. Although who knows? Maybe this will be it, Katniss." Plutarch being named after the great historian and being cabinet-head of the new nation, this quote is quite fitting. More to the point, it's hopeless and delivered in a moment of giddy happiness. The contradiction should not be lost on the reader.
Mayhap government in abstract is OK, but it'll never work in real life. Collins doesn't give us a money quote on the principles of governing (she does offer a vague hope in republicanism) but my impression is she wants to scream out to our children that the worst of us always rise to the top. At the very least, we should be very suspicious of any and every government ... and of any who would oppose government.
To say in giving us Coin she's given us no Washington is the deepest of understatements. Coin is as evil as Snow, and in every way. Before the book ends, Coin has attempted the murder of Katniss, succeeded at murdering Prim, killed hundreds of innocent children, and re-instituted the hunger games for exactly the same purpose as Panem instituted them in the first place. It also bears saying Coin is no Lincoln, and has no interest in reconstruction. Given the opportunity to give our children an incredible set of role models, Collins ignores every redeeming character of history.
Instead, she's given us the ugliness of the French Revolution without all the inconvenient restraints of reality. Robespierre and Napoleon couldn't genetically engineer monsters that hiss Katniss' name, smell like roses, and hardly knew how to die, nor could they invent parachuting presents with which to immolate children. What's more, I question whether even such monsters as Robespierre and Napolean would have done so if they could. Collins' leaders only regret that their evil is thwarted. She carefully mingles her mixture of fantasy and hyper-reality with her presentation of geo-politics. In the end, the conclusion is unstated, subliminal, and unavoidable. Leaders are the real inhuman monsters.
The message can actually be helpful - in its place and time. It reminded me the "helpful" intrusions of the TSA into our privates and the intrusion of thought police for our well-being are not to be blindly trusted. She has a solid point, but I question whether it's the point to be making to adolescents. And I'm sure the use of hyper-violence and the lack of any redemptive character are unconscienable in a book for teens.
America is still a republic, and government of some form is necessary. People do very poorly without some kind of objective justice system in place, and the despair this series promotes is an enemy of that cooperation needed to form a just society. The instinct to cooperation is much harder to build than that to selfish cynicism. If The Hunger Games contained any meaningful example of constructive cooperation, I missed it.
In the end, every character's arc shared one commonality. To the degree that character was strong and willing to be unscrupulous, he or she was a winner. To the degree a character was weak and/or good, he or she was a loser. I believe Peeta, Boggs, and Finnick were the best characters in the book. I hardly need to tell how they were rewarded for their decency. May the Lord shower blessings on those who decide to be like Peeta after all they saw him endure. And need I point out Katniss was a winner? A guilt-plagued winner, but a winner from start to end.
The author's stated purpose in writing this series was to explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age. I cannot imagine any value in this book, except to inflict a small piece of that damage on our children, and that without any redeeming counter-example to the destruction. It's an emminently readable series, up until the far too heavy ending, and that discourages me only more. Rather like the taste of fine liquor, once it's grown on you it seems hard to ever lose it again.
I wish our children didn't have such a taste for this fare. I wish I didn't.
07 May, 2012
The Hunger Games
“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, definitely stretches the mind. The author describes herself as continuing to "explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age," and The Hunger Games fits that bill. Here are my thoughts on whether children should be exploring these effects along with Ms. Collins. Expect large and small **** spoilers **** to follow.
When it became wildly popular a couple years ago, I was approached by several people who thought I'd probably enjoy it. They were right, and yet I decided not to read it. I'd enjoyed Steven King's The Running Man (the book was wildly different and better than the movie, clear down to what the running game actually was.) I was thrilled by Rambo: First Blood (movie only) and Loius L'Amour's Last of the Breed (a fantastic tale of a lone, hunted man trekking across Siberia and living by his wits and skills.) I like this kind of story a lot. I even enjoyed The Lottery, which exposed the evil of utopias built on unjust sacrifice.
I knew I should like this book, but I couldn't get past its backstory. A society enthralled with watching children brutally murder each other was not an imaginary world in which I wished to live. I took a pass. I didn't read the book until last week, when circumstances motivated me to overcome my aversion. Now that I have, I'd like to share the challenges I find in Suzanne Collins' work. I'll save you some suspense and let you know I don't recommend it.
The author surely serves up an edge-of-your-seat thrill-fest. And it's more richly imagined than I'd been led to believe. The book is not merely a rejection of a culture obsessed with reality TV. In Collins' world, 90% of the populace watches the hunger games solely because it's mandatory viewing. The bourgeios of the capitol, Panem, are rolling in the wealth stolen from its 12 outlying districts and they gleefully savor the drama of watching inferior children slaughter each other. The twelve districts, though, have a much more awkward relationship to the TV show. The government created the hunger games to palpably remind the districts Panem will kill and relish doing so should the districts attempt to repeat an earlier insurrection. Most of the people in the districts hate the hunger games the same way any sane person would hate watching their own children killed for propaganda.
The book is really about one child's formation and probably about revolutionary politics (I've not read the second and third books, but if the series doesn't end with an attempt to overthrow Panem I'd be mystified). Katniss is formed by a youth of extreme poverty -- the near-death-by-starvation and constant-weakness-through-unrelenting-scarcity breed of poverty. Katniss must grow up suddenly at age eleven when she becomes her family's breadwinner. Panem's theft of all her district's wealth leaves her in that awful position, and she deeply resents Panem. Her childhood as a whole shapes Katniss into a person who cannot form relationships easily.
The meat of the book takes place after she's thown into the life or death struggle which is the hunger games. One boy and one girl from each of the twelve districts are dropped into the wild and required to kill one another until only one victorious survivor remains. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to tell you Katniss survives. I knew that when I started the book, and it proved true. There are other spoilers I'd be happy to divulge if there are any parents out there who want a cheat sheet to understand what their children are reading.
The hunger games themselves change Katniss in two ways. Throughout the days of training and publicity leading up to the actual battle, through the weeks of conflict, and even during the closing ceremonies, Katniss is discovering she's loved by Peeta, the boy selected from her district. From the moment they're introduced to each other, Katniss can't make heads or tails of the his kindness. Nor can she understand her own emotional and chemical responses to his love. The struggle unbalances her, but in a milieu of the constant threat of death she has no time to work it out. Peeta honestly loves Katniss, but she is deeply disabled by her childhood. She's incapable of believing and rejoicing that she's loved. Instead, she interprets all his honest care and concern as some carefully devised survival strategy. Katniss is unable to receive Peeta's honest love.
The violence of the games also deeply wounds Katniss. She spends several weeks in the woods with death behind every shrub. Any of us who watch the evening news knows of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the author returns Katniss to civilization with a mondo case of it. Katniss's first trauma happens within seconds of the games' start. A boy coughs up blood on her because he was hit in the back with a thrown knife. It's a gruesome picture, and it's only the beginning. Before the hunger games are over she's killed a handful of children herself, and watched helplessly as another handful die. Death coming so suddenly charges every second, waking or sleeping, with rational, valid, deadly fear, and she's in the arena for weeks. Gathering food, for example, becomes doubly dangerous; a lack of food will kill her, but so might an ambush while gathering it. Every action or inaction might be the thing that kills you.
The author successfully holds us on the edge of our seats while Katniss faces real danger. The author also successfully portrays the scars Katniss will bear for life after her experiences. Katniss suffers survivor guilt when children she respects and enjoys die instead of her, but is surprised at her lack of joy over the deaths of her enemies. Katniss remembers some of the victory celebrations of previous victors, but finds no such elation in her own heart. Her enemies are just more dead children to Katniss, children who never should have been in the arena at all.
All this is consistent with Ms. Collin's stated goal, to explore the effect of war and violence on those coming of age.
I understand the story and follow its execution accurately. I'm not intrisically turned off by action or violence. I grasp the themes and the concepts the author invites us to digest. And with all this explanation up front, I recommend children not read this book.
Oliver Wendell Holmes' quote at the top of this post weighs heavily on my mind. Suzanne Collins evidently has decided children will profit from having their minds stretched by this brutal introduction to death. I disagree.
We introduce our children to sex. When children introduce themselves to sex, things are difficult for them at best and can easily turn unhealthy. Responsible parents manage this introduction with a degree of care, balancing the flow of information to match the maturity of their children. Handing a child The Hunger Games teaches violence and death to children on the same level as sending them off with a softcore pornographic novel to teach them sex.
Why do we withhold pornography from our children? Because it offers up what I'll call hyper-reality. It paints imaginable situations with imaginable outcomes that speak to our most elemental fears and lusts. Low quality pornography paints barely imaginable situations while the higher quality stuff approaches the believable, but whatever its quality the addictive power of pornography is in its hyper-reality. It condenses and distills the joy of sex into a thrilling ride. It invites the reader to believe for a few pages.
The Hunger Games is hyper-reality. Harry Potter is fantasy. The cruciatus curse, which causes an agonizing death by excessive pain, is simply not real. Les Miserables fits as reality. Gavroche is killed when he bravely runs out in the street to retrieve ammunition. Harry Potter portrays larger-than-life dangers that could never happen, while Les Miserables might really come to any of us some day but its dangers are life-sized. The Hunger Games portrays larger-than-life violence in a believable way. It's highly thrilling, but hyper-reality always is.
Reading The Hunger Games raised a lot of questions in my mind. Despair sells. Violence and chaos are now primary marketing devices. Relatively speaking, The Hunger Games is decent and upstanding in its handling of violence. The late Heath Ledger's character, the Joker in The Dark Knight, sets a hideous standard for the degree of random violence people will pay good money to ingest. Compared against The Dark Knight, Suzanne Collins' book is a nunnery of restraint in its depiction of each death, but then again The Dark Knight doesn't portray children killing children for as children's fare.
Stretching your hamstrings is a good thing, but done wrong it can lead to injury. Stretching the mind is what growing up is all about, but dangerous stretching can leave our children with injured lives. The Hunger Games sets twenty-four very human, very young peers to the task of brutally killing each other, and vividly shows us how they go about it. There's no way to spin that as constructive, or as a healthy way to introduce children to the realities of war and violence. There's no way this book can fail to stretch the young minds of its readers, and no way it can do so safely.
Perhaps, it's just darkest before the dawn. Perhaps, in the third book Katniss shows us the way to overcome the scars of war. Perhaps, Ms. Collins will show our children what Victor Frankl learned in Nazi death camps, that life is always worth living once its meaning has been grasped. If so, then maybe I can make room for her having gone so far over the line. The subject is and should be horrifying, so I doubt I could reconcile to it. Even so, I see no glimmer of Man's Search for Meaning peeking through from The Hunger Games. I'd have to see it to believe it, and I'd need someone to promise me it's there in the third book before I'd have any intrinsic desire to see it for myself, but the Internet is all about people telling me I'm wrong ... and ya'll are right pretty often.
Until that time, at age forty-seven I'm left with the image of the boy from District 9's blood splattered on my face and the orange backpack over which we fought. The image won't ruin my life, but I'm surely no richer for it.
Will our children profit more?
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, definitely stretches the mind. The author describes herself as continuing to "explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age," and The Hunger Games fits that bill. Here are my thoughts on whether children should be exploring these effects along with Ms. Collins. Expect large and small **** spoilers **** to follow.
When it became wildly popular a couple years ago, I was approached by several people who thought I'd probably enjoy it. They were right, and yet I decided not to read it. I'd enjoyed Steven King's The Running Man (the book was wildly different and better than the movie, clear down to what the running game actually was.) I was thrilled by Rambo: First Blood (movie only) and Loius L'Amour's Last of the Breed (a fantastic tale of a lone, hunted man trekking across Siberia and living by his wits and skills.) I like this kind of story a lot. I even enjoyed The Lottery, which exposed the evil of utopias built on unjust sacrifice.
I knew I should like this book, but I couldn't get past its backstory. A society enthralled with watching children brutally murder each other was not an imaginary world in which I wished to live. I took a pass. I didn't read the book until last week, when circumstances motivated me to overcome my aversion. Now that I have, I'd like to share the challenges I find in Suzanne Collins' work. I'll save you some suspense and let you know I don't recommend it.
The author surely serves up an edge-of-your-seat thrill-fest. And it's more richly imagined than I'd been led to believe. The book is not merely a rejection of a culture obsessed with reality TV. In Collins' world, 90% of the populace watches the hunger games solely because it's mandatory viewing. The bourgeios of the capitol, Panem, are rolling in the wealth stolen from its 12 outlying districts and they gleefully savor the drama of watching inferior children slaughter each other. The twelve districts, though, have a much more awkward relationship to the TV show. The government created the hunger games to palpably remind the districts Panem will kill and relish doing so should the districts attempt to repeat an earlier insurrection. Most of the people in the districts hate the hunger games the same way any sane person would hate watching their own children killed for propaganda.
The book is really about one child's formation and probably about revolutionary politics (I've not read the second and third books, but if the series doesn't end with an attempt to overthrow Panem I'd be mystified). Katniss is formed by a youth of extreme poverty -- the near-death-by-starvation and constant-weakness-through-unrelenting-scarcity breed of poverty. Katniss must grow up suddenly at age eleven when she becomes her family's breadwinner. Panem's theft of all her district's wealth leaves her in that awful position, and she deeply resents Panem. Her childhood as a whole shapes Katniss into a person who cannot form relationships easily.
The meat of the book takes place after she's thown into the life or death struggle which is the hunger games. One boy and one girl from each of the twelve districts are dropped into the wild and required to kill one another until only one victorious survivor remains. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to tell you Katniss survives. I knew that when I started the book, and it proved true. There are other spoilers I'd be happy to divulge if there are any parents out there who want a cheat sheet to understand what their children are reading.
The hunger games themselves change Katniss in two ways. Throughout the days of training and publicity leading up to the actual battle, through the weeks of conflict, and even during the closing ceremonies, Katniss is discovering she's loved by Peeta, the boy selected from her district. From the moment they're introduced to each other, Katniss can't make heads or tails of the his kindness. Nor can she understand her own emotional and chemical responses to his love. The struggle unbalances her, but in a milieu of the constant threat of death she has no time to work it out. Peeta honestly loves Katniss, but she is deeply disabled by her childhood. She's incapable of believing and rejoicing that she's loved. Instead, she interprets all his honest care and concern as some carefully devised survival strategy. Katniss is unable to receive Peeta's honest love.
The violence of the games also deeply wounds Katniss. She spends several weeks in the woods with death behind every shrub. Any of us who watch the evening news knows of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the author returns Katniss to civilization with a mondo case of it. Katniss's first trauma happens within seconds of the games' start. A boy coughs up blood on her because he was hit in the back with a thrown knife. It's a gruesome picture, and it's only the beginning. Before the hunger games are over she's killed a handful of children herself, and watched helplessly as another handful die. Death coming so suddenly charges every second, waking or sleeping, with rational, valid, deadly fear, and she's in the arena for weeks. Gathering food, for example, becomes doubly dangerous; a lack of food will kill her, but so might an ambush while gathering it. Every action or inaction might be the thing that kills you.
The author successfully holds us on the edge of our seats while Katniss faces real danger. The author also successfully portrays the scars Katniss will bear for life after her experiences. Katniss suffers survivor guilt when children she respects and enjoys die instead of her, but is surprised at her lack of joy over the deaths of her enemies. Katniss remembers some of the victory celebrations of previous victors, but finds no such elation in her own heart. Her enemies are just more dead children to Katniss, children who never should have been in the arena at all.
All this is consistent with Ms. Collin's stated goal, to explore the effect of war and violence on those coming of age.
I understand the story and follow its execution accurately. I'm not intrisically turned off by action or violence. I grasp the themes and the concepts the author invites us to digest. And with all this explanation up front, I recommend children not read this book.
Oliver Wendell Holmes' quote at the top of this post weighs heavily on my mind. Suzanne Collins evidently has decided children will profit from having their minds stretched by this brutal introduction to death. I disagree.
We introduce our children to sex. When children introduce themselves to sex, things are difficult for them at best and can easily turn unhealthy. Responsible parents manage this introduction with a degree of care, balancing the flow of information to match the maturity of their children. Handing a child The Hunger Games teaches violence and death to children on the same level as sending them off with a softcore pornographic novel to teach them sex.
Why do we withhold pornography from our children? Because it offers up what I'll call hyper-reality. It paints imaginable situations with imaginable outcomes that speak to our most elemental fears and lusts. Low quality pornography paints barely imaginable situations while the higher quality stuff approaches the believable, but whatever its quality the addictive power of pornography is in its hyper-reality. It condenses and distills the joy of sex into a thrilling ride. It invites the reader to believe for a few pages.
The Hunger Games is hyper-reality. Harry Potter is fantasy. The cruciatus curse, which causes an agonizing death by excessive pain, is simply not real. Les Miserables fits as reality. Gavroche is killed when he bravely runs out in the street to retrieve ammunition. Harry Potter portrays larger-than-life dangers that could never happen, while Les Miserables might really come to any of us some day but its dangers are life-sized. The Hunger Games portrays larger-than-life violence in a believable way. It's highly thrilling, but hyper-reality always is.
Reading The Hunger Games raised a lot of questions in my mind. Despair sells. Violence and chaos are now primary marketing devices. Relatively speaking, The Hunger Games is decent and upstanding in its handling of violence. The late Heath Ledger's character, the Joker in The Dark Knight, sets a hideous standard for the degree of random violence people will pay good money to ingest. Compared against The Dark Knight, Suzanne Collins' book is a nunnery of restraint in its depiction of each death, but then again The Dark Knight doesn't portray children killing children for as children's fare.
Stretching your hamstrings is a good thing, but done wrong it can lead to injury. Stretching the mind is what growing up is all about, but dangerous stretching can leave our children with injured lives. The Hunger Games sets twenty-four very human, very young peers to the task of brutally killing each other, and vividly shows us how they go about it. There's no way to spin that as constructive, or as a healthy way to introduce children to the realities of war and violence. There's no way this book can fail to stretch the young minds of its readers, and no way it can do so safely.
Perhaps, it's just darkest before the dawn. Perhaps, in the third book Katniss shows us the way to overcome the scars of war. Perhaps, Ms. Collins will show our children what Victor Frankl learned in Nazi death camps, that life is always worth living once its meaning has been grasped. If so, then maybe I can make room for her having gone so far over the line. The subject is and should be horrifying, so I doubt I could reconcile to it. Even so, I see no glimmer of Man's Search for Meaning peeking through from The Hunger Games. I'd have to see it to believe it, and I'd need someone to promise me it's there in the third book before I'd have any intrinsic desire to see it for myself, but the Internet is all about people telling me I'm wrong ... and ya'll are right pretty often.
Until that time, at age forty-seven I'm left with the image of the boy from District 9's blood splattered on my face and the orange backpack over which we fought. The image won't ruin my life, but I'm surely no richer for it.
Will our children profit more?
01 April, 2012
Eleven Pullups
Hello All,
I've started a new, autobiographical blog. I'm calling it Eleven Pullups, and am still cogitating about the subtitle. It'll be something remotely like, "Learning to Talk to God." It's going to deal a lot with exercise and with failing. If either of those subjects interests you, feel free to drop by.
http://elevenpullups.blogspot.com/
I've started a new, autobiographical blog. I'm calling it Eleven Pullups, and am still cogitating about the subtitle. It'll be something remotely like, "Learning to Talk to God." It's going to deal a lot with exercise and with failing. If either of those subjects interests you, feel free to drop by.
http://elevenpullups.blogspot.com/
Comment Moderation: My apologies
Sorry to the handful of you who made valuable comments out here, and I didn't notice. It turns out Google auto-enabled a setting that turned moderation on for any post over 14 days old, then didn't let me know. I've read all the comments, and appreciated them, though I don't think responding to them all makes sense. If you're interested in a dialogue, try me again. I've given Google an email address. :-)
13 March, 2012
The Lion's Jaw
I planted my feet in the imperial box, grabbed Caesar by the scruff of his collar, dragged him to his feet beside me. Turning, I presented him to the assembled Romans of the Colosseum. Facing the crowd now, I could see the bloody path I'd wrought to arrive at this place. Using nothing but the jawbone of Caesar's lion, and the strength of the Lord's right arm, I'd fought my way to the seat of power. Behind the carnage lay the marks made when I hit my knees and prayed for this deliverance He'd wrought.
I preached the story of my Deliverer to the stunned ears of Rome's rich and poor. Caesar imagined he was a god, but my God was Caesar of Caesars. I challenged the stunned crowd to tell me how I could possibly be standing here now, with the empire in my hands, if this Caesar were whom he pretended to be. And, jawbone ready behind Caesar's neck, I asked Rome to choose the impostor's fate - thumbs up? or the lion?
It was then, surrounded by 50,000 speechless Romans, I heard the Small Voice. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it."
The spell of my fantasy was broken.
My knees still pressed into the sand of the Colosseum floor. The lion still roared through the iron grating. Caesar still ruled this place from his seat of splendor. I was still going to die.
And after that, the Light would shine. Still.
I preached the story of my Deliverer to the stunned ears of Rome's rich and poor. Caesar imagined he was a god, but my God was Caesar of Caesars. I challenged the stunned crowd to tell me how I could possibly be standing here now, with the empire in my hands, if this Caesar were whom he pretended to be. And, jawbone ready behind Caesar's neck, I asked Rome to choose the impostor's fate - thumbs up? or the lion?
It was then, surrounded by 50,000 speechless Romans, I heard the Small Voice. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it."
The spell of my fantasy was broken.
My knees still pressed into the sand of the Colosseum floor. The lion still roared through the iron grating. Caesar still ruled this place from his seat of splendor. I was still going to die.
And after that, the Light would shine. Still.
17 January, 2012
A Way to Pray - Whisper a Secret
The perfect way to pray is the way you need to right now. Be it praise or lament, ecstacy or liturgy, the words in your heart are the perfect ones to share with your Lord. There is no perfect way to pray any more than there's a perfect way to talk to your Mom. Still, there are a couple things you can do or remember that can make your life on Earth a little easier.
The first one sounds ridiculous, but give it a shot anyway.
Tell God a secret.
I told you it would sound ridiculous.
God being omniscient and all, it doesn't make a lot of sense to "let Him in on" a secret you've been hiding. But I'm not thinking of a secret you're keeping from God. Tell God something you don't want your boss to know. Tell Him something you don't want your wife, your kids, or your Mom to know. Tell Him something you're glad your pastor doesn't know.
Sometimes we're tempted beyond what we notice, and one day our weakness carries us away. Sometimes we wear down under a heavy burden. Sometimes we're afraid. We all have our limits, and very few of us enjoy advertising them, but they are an important part of who we are. Whispering a secret out loud to God is an important part of letting Him love us fully.
Telling God a secret doesn't make the pain go away, but it opens a dialogue. It turns a subconscious burden into a conscious request we can lay at God's feet, and the Spirit accepts all such invitations. I've been happily shocked at how much richer my conversations are with God after I've intentionally spilled some beans. Once you've told God your secret, you'll find the Spirit enables your spirit to pray with it and pray about it with solid purpose and direction.
Set aside ten minutes. See whether you don't find yourself coming back for more.
The first one sounds ridiculous, but give it a shot anyway.
Tell God a secret.
I told you it would sound ridiculous.
God being omniscient and all, it doesn't make a lot of sense to "let Him in on" a secret you've been hiding. But I'm not thinking of a secret you're keeping from God. Tell God something you don't want your boss to know. Tell Him something you don't want your wife, your kids, or your Mom to know. Tell Him something you're glad your pastor doesn't know.
Sometimes we're tempted beyond what we notice, and one day our weakness carries us away. Sometimes we wear down under a heavy burden. Sometimes we're afraid. We all have our limits, and very few of us enjoy advertising them, but they are an important part of who we are. Whispering a secret out loud to God is an important part of letting Him love us fully.
Telling God a secret doesn't make the pain go away, but it opens a dialogue. It turns a subconscious burden into a conscious request we can lay at God's feet, and the Spirit accepts all such invitations. I've been happily shocked at how much richer my conversations are with God after I've intentionally spilled some beans. Once you've told God your secret, you'll find the Spirit enables your spirit to pray with it and pray about it with solid purpose and direction.
Set aside ten minutes. See whether you don't find yourself coming back for more.
22 August, 2010
Negro Spirituals
I've spent a week distractedly listening to "Let My People Go: Negro Spirituals." And I thought I'd never listen to Jazz. (That's how iTunes classifies the album.)
Conclusion.
The songs use the word, "I," an awful lot, and that sounds pretty immature. They don't sing much about God. Instead, they sing about themselves. Most of the songs could be mistaken for children's songs, or are even childish. And they appear to be the original fountainhead of dozens of musical conventions about which I've complained over the years. They repeat themselves. They seldom seem to engage the mind, but always the emotions. They scream.
Or ...
What if it's me that's wrong.
These are the songs of people who rose from strength to strength and hope to hope and faith to faith while suffering inhumanities I can describe but not possibly imagine. Slavery in the American South was a mixed bag, with some owners dealing honorably with their property as people and others dealing out unimaginable cruelties. The faith of these Africans stood equally strong under both tests.
What's more, when the long awaited blessing of freedom came to these people, they could hardly rise up and call it blessed. Lincoln ended ended some cruelties but Jim Crow Laws ensured the blessings of liberty were yet denied to them and their posterity. In a time before welfare, a time of deep, true poverty I've only seen in foreign lands, these African-Americans continued to declare and live within the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
If it's me that's wrong. If, by some chance it's the fat and happy product of the richest generation that has something to learn about the kinds of songs that strengthen the spirit to face a world where Satan wears a size 11 boot, then I've got much to learn indeed.
I wonder.
Conclusion.
The songs use the word, "I," an awful lot, and that sounds pretty immature. They don't sing much about God. Instead, they sing about themselves. Most of the songs could be mistaken for children's songs, or are even childish. And they appear to be the original fountainhead of dozens of musical conventions about which I've complained over the years. They repeat themselves. They seldom seem to engage the mind, but always the emotions. They scream.
Or ...
What if it's me that's wrong.
These are the songs of people who rose from strength to strength and hope to hope and faith to faith while suffering inhumanities I can describe but not possibly imagine. Slavery in the American South was a mixed bag, with some owners dealing honorably with their property as people and others dealing out unimaginable cruelties. The faith of these Africans stood equally strong under both tests.
What's more, when the long awaited blessing of freedom came to these people, they could hardly rise up and call it blessed. Lincoln ended ended some cruelties but Jim Crow Laws ensured the blessings of liberty were yet denied to them and their posterity. In a time before welfare, a time of deep, true poverty I've only seen in foreign lands, these African-Americans continued to declare and live within the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
If it's me that's wrong. If, by some chance it's the fat and happy product of the richest generation that has something to learn about the kinds of songs that strengthen the spirit to face a world where Satan wears a size 11 boot, then I've got much to learn indeed.
I wonder.
04 July, 2010
For a Helmet, Hope
Link to first post in this series.
Friends, I really like to put well-thought-out ideas out here, and I'm afraid I can't really deliver these days. There's too much going on. Way too much. But, this Postmodernism stuff is still burning a hole in my pockets so let me put some quick summary guesses out here.
All attempts to stop Postmodernism's "erosion" of our inspired religion are both doomed and misguided. Christianity is not postmodern, but it's not anti-postmodern either. Postmodernism is an informed way of reacting to the world in which we live. Some people are doing Postmodernism in a very ugly way, but others are doing it with utmost sincerity - just the way we did Modernism and Romanticism in our time.
Postmodernism is an accurate reaction to the horrors of a fallen world when the Information Age forces us all to face those horrors honestly.
The question before the house is how Christians react to hardcore reality. For reasons I hope I've already given, we can no longer hide behind "It'll all be worth it in heaven," or "God is ordering everything for the good." Both those statements are true, but we have to face up to facts. Things aren't good now, and Jesus didn't come selling heaven. Jesus meets people where they are, not where we'd like them to be. We need to know how Jesus meets us now.
Over the past 4000 years, there've been many, many times and many, many prominent verses. Luther gave us, "the just shall live by faith." The fundamentalists brought, "The Word was with God and the Word was God," into new focus. I'd like to suggest the verse for our time is, "Jesus wept."
The urge of every youth movement is to assume no one who came before them was as passionate, caring, concerned, informed, intelligent, spiritual, persuaded, committed, or somehow just didn't get it. I know I made that mistake in spades, but I can't do it again. Now that I'm 46, I need to grab hold of "Jesus wept," but to do so without letting go of any of the other words that have come before. "Jesus wept" informs "The just shall live by faith" and "The Word was God." It doesn't replace them; it defines them.
The just live by faith in a Man Who weeps with them. The Word Who is God includes stanzas of mourning.
Jesus didn't weep when He heard His friend Lazarus was dying, nor after he'd died. He didn't weep when He explained to Martha the theology of death, resurrection, and life. He wept when Mary fell on the ground and asked Him why He'd not come sooner. He wept, just like we do, when the pain touched Him. The pain touched Almighty God in Flesh when the tears of those He loved were wept to Him.
Jesus is touched by those things that touch us.
I look out at all the disasters and pain in the world, in my church, and in my family and I'm crushed. I could as soon save those I love as win three tennis matches all at the same time. I might win or lose any one match if I practice and train, but this life shoots too many balls at us. It's hopeless.
Jesus weeps.
I don't know how to make Jesus weeping sync-up with God ever-blessed. I don't know the theological magic it takes to reconcile the God Who declares He brings disaster with the God Who weeps when the disaster strikes, but Jesus is YHWH in flesh and YHWH wept with Mary.
All of which brings us, finally, to the heart of the matter. I've come to believe Postmodernism is a failure of hope. A Christian Postmodernist can muster the faith to believe in Christ and the love to give his lif to God, but he can't hope being a Christian will make any difference. He reads God's promises and hears God declare them yeah and amen, but they don't seem to work in real life. A Christian's life looks an awful lot like a non-Christian's life, minus the sleeping in on Sunday.
Christianity makes sense when Jesus raises Lazarus, but I want Him to raise every Lazarus and He doesn't. He raised one man to make one point at one time. He raised Lazarus to show us Whom He was, but Lazarus died again a few years later and Jesus didn't raise Him again. There are Lazarus's all over this place whom Jesus doesn't raise, and that makes no sense. I'm so happy with Jesus I could bust, but then I'm a Modernist with a deep well of irrational hope from which to draw. What do I tell my children? Where's the hope? What's the hope?
(For this, I have to thank my wife. I flat didn't see where to go next, but she found it.)
Heb 5:7 While Jesus was here on earth, he offered prayers and pleadings, with a loud cry and tears, to the one who could deliver him out of death. And God heard his prayers because of his reverence for God.
Jesus wept again before He died. He wept strongly and prayed ... hard ... for fear of personal suffering. Jesus even understood fully why He would suffer. It didn't help. Knowing "why" didn't end the tears. Jesus even had the assurance God heard His prayers. He had every benefit we imagine might make our suffering tolerable, and He wept all the same. He died all the same. And so must we.
I would like to hear whether any Postmodernists can find some hope there. Jesus wept for us and He wept for Himself, but the evil still came. He prayed and God answered by delivering Him over to His enemies, but the story didn't end there. A couple days later God delivered Jesus. He delivered Him from death, from shame, from tears. Jesus is not just the Firstborn from the dead, but Firstborn from tears. Jesus wept, but weeps no more, and He will deliver us from our tears. Jesus earned the power to dry our eyes.
Jesus' death has not yet removed evil from this world, but He told us it wouldn't for a while. We weep when pain comes to those we love and we weep when pain comes to us and we pass through the valley, just like our Lord did.
We answer pain with hope, hope founded on the victory of our Forerunner, Jesus the Annointed. His victory was not over pain but through it, and ours will be too. He promised it would be that way, and we need to grab hold of His example.
To do that, I might recommend we grab hold of an example of Americans who've done this before, beautifully and brilliantly. America's slaves learned to hurt and hope through pain, injustice, grief, and unanswered prayers. They composed songs that called out every pain honestly to the Lord and waited on Him for a deliverance they could only expect after death. I suspect the best answer to Postmodernism is going to sound a lot like a negro spiritual.
On this July 4th we'll celebrate our freedom, but maybe we really need to celebrate the hope of some who lived an American Nightmare.
Friends, I really like to put well-thought-out ideas out here, and I'm afraid I can't really deliver these days. There's too much going on. Way too much. But, this Postmodernism stuff is still burning a hole in my pockets so let me put some quick summary guesses out here.
All attempts to stop Postmodernism's "erosion" of our inspired religion are both doomed and misguided. Christianity is not postmodern, but it's not anti-postmodern either. Postmodernism is an informed way of reacting to the world in which we live. Some people are doing Postmodernism in a very ugly way, but others are doing it with utmost sincerity - just the way we did Modernism and Romanticism in our time.
Postmodernism is an accurate reaction to the horrors of a fallen world when the Information Age forces us all to face those horrors honestly.
The question before the house is how Christians react to hardcore reality. For reasons I hope I've already given, we can no longer hide behind "It'll all be worth it in heaven," or "God is ordering everything for the good." Both those statements are true, but we have to face up to facts. Things aren't good now, and Jesus didn't come selling heaven. Jesus meets people where they are, not where we'd like them to be. We need to know how Jesus meets us now.
Over the past 4000 years, there've been many, many times and many, many prominent verses. Luther gave us, "the just shall live by faith." The fundamentalists brought, "The Word was with God and the Word was God," into new focus. I'd like to suggest the verse for our time is, "Jesus wept."
The urge of every youth movement is to assume no one who came before them was as passionate, caring, concerned, informed, intelligent, spiritual, persuaded, committed, or somehow just didn't get it. I know I made that mistake in spades, but I can't do it again. Now that I'm 46, I need to grab hold of "Jesus wept," but to do so without letting go of any of the other words that have come before. "Jesus wept" informs "The just shall live by faith" and "The Word was God." It doesn't replace them; it defines them.
The just live by faith in a Man Who weeps with them. The Word Who is God includes stanzas of mourning.
Jesus didn't weep when He heard His friend Lazarus was dying, nor after he'd died. He didn't weep when He explained to Martha the theology of death, resurrection, and life. He wept when Mary fell on the ground and asked Him why He'd not come sooner. He wept, just like we do, when the pain touched Him. The pain touched Almighty God in Flesh when the tears of those He loved were wept to Him.
Jesus is touched by those things that touch us.
I look out at all the disasters and pain in the world, in my church, and in my family and I'm crushed. I could as soon save those I love as win three tennis matches all at the same time. I might win or lose any one match if I practice and train, but this life shoots too many balls at us. It's hopeless.
Jesus weeps.
I don't know how to make Jesus weeping sync-up with God ever-blessed. I don't know the theological magic it takes to reconcile the God Who declares He brings disaster with the God Who weeps when the disaster strikes, but Jesus is YHWH in flesh and YHWH wept with Mary.
All of which brings us, finally, to the heart of the matter. I've come to believe Postmodernism is a failure of hope. A Christian Postmodernist can muster the faith to believe in Christ and the love to give his lif to God, but he can't hope being a Christian will make any difference. He reads God's promises and hears God declare them yeah and amen, but they don't seem to work in real life. A Christian's life looks an awful lot like a non-Christian's life, minus the sleeping in on Sunday.
Christianity makes sense when Jesus raises Lazarus, but I want Him to raise every Lazarus and He doesn't. He raised one man to make one point at one time. He raised Lazarus to show us Whom He was, but Lazarus died again a few years later and Jesus didn't raise Him again. There are Lazarus's all over this place whom Jesus doesn't raise, and that makes no sense. I'm so happy with Jesus I could bust, but then I'm a Modernist with a deep well of irrational hope from which to draw. What do I tell my children? Where's the hope? What's the hope?
(For this, I have to thank my wife. I flat didn't see where to go next, but she found it.)
Heb 5:7 While Jesus was here on earth, he offered prayers and pleadings, with a loud cry and tears, to the one who could deliver him out of death. And God heard his prayers because of his reverence for God.
Jesus wept again before He died. He wept strongly and prayed ... hard ... for fear of personal suffering. Jesus even understood fully why He would suffer. It didn't help. Knowing "why" didn't end the tears. Jesus even had the assurance God heard His prayers. He had every benefit we imagine might make our suffering tolerable, and He wept all the same. He died all the same. And so must we.
I would like to hear whether any Postmodernists can find some hope there. Jesus wept for us and He wept for Himself, but the evil still came. He prayed and God answered by delivering Him over to His enemies, but the story didn't end there. A couple days later God delivered Jesus. He delivered Him from death, from shame, from tears. Jesus is not just the Firstborn from the dead, but Firstborn from tears. Jesus wept, but weeps no more, and He will deliver us from our tears. Jesus earned the power to dry our eyes.
Jesus' death has not yet removed evil from this world, but He told us it wouldn't for a while. We weep when pain comes to those we love and we weep when pain comes to us and we pass through the valley, just like our Lord did.
We answer pain with hope, hope founded on the victory of our Forerunner, Jesus the Annointed. His victory was not over pain but through it, and ours will be too. He promised it would be that way, and we need to grab hold of His example.
To do that, I might recommend we grab hold of an example of Americans who've done this before, beautifully and brilliantly. America's slaves learned to hurt and hope through pain, injustice, grief, and unanswered prayers. They composed songs that called out every pain honestly to the Lord and waited on Him for a deliverance they could only expect after death. I suspect the best answer to Postmodernism is going to sound a lot like a negro spiritual.
On this July 4th we'll celebrate our freedom, but maybe we really need to celebrate the hope of some who lived an American Nightmare.
20 June, 2010
Hope: Where We All Fail
(Link to first post in this series)
I keep struggling to understand the mystery of Postmodernism. My kids see the world in a radically different way than do I. Radically. Where I keep trying to perceive a coherent tapestry in the confusing threads of pain and joy entangling me, my kids observe, "We're screwed." They think in biological, gritty terms of despair like that, when I never could. I keep seeing hope and they keep seeing reality. It's disconcerting.
I think I've found a clue, though, where we're both wrong.
I saw it first in my younger friends. Paul said God left us with Faith, Hope, and Love. My friends are capable of believing unbelievable things and you can count on them for love. They just can't hope. They can hope for little things; jobs, friends, families. Ask them, though, whether God's goodness can redeem and they'll kind of freeze. Whether they parrot or reject the party line, it seems the comfort of real hope will elude them.
Postmodernism is cobbled together from a thousand little bricks of despair.
Modernists, aka the good guys, look nothing like that. Modernists rest unfailingly in richest hope. Modernists know God is going to make sure everthing works out for the good. Modernists know we're learning more about everything every day, and we're growing stronger, smarter, spirity-er.
Modernists, I'm coming to see, fail by resting on unfounded hope.
We really looked at the Western World's steady progress from benighted medievalism to rationalism to the capstones of democracy and freedom, and ascribe that progress to divine intervention. God was on our side. We're rich and brilliant, aren't we? God must be blessing us. We hooked our faith to the wagon of progress and urged the horses to give it all they had.
When the West ascended to lofty heights we saw the hand of God. We even called it "Manifest Destiny." It was obvious to anyone with eyes in their head that God was going to get us to wherever we needed to be.
Us Modernists have kids, though, who don't think so much of the emperor's new clothes. All that hope in which us Modernists invested smells to them like so many fish tales. We all know what happened to our economy when the Housing Bubble burst, but Modernism inflated a Hope Bubble that couldn't last. Our hope was leveraged out of proportion both to the reality of God's promises and to the realities we live with on the ground.
The answer to both Modernism's hyper-inflation of hope and Postmodernism's recessionary deflation of hope is a correct valuation of what God has promised and what He's delivered. The false overpromises of Modernism won't work any more, but the hopeless fears of Postmodernism won't work either. There's a valid comfort in God's promises rightly valued, and we need that comfort to survive. Even after the bubble a house is really worth the land its on, the materials of which it's constructed, and the neighborhood into which it's joined. The only value the housing collapse stole is the speculative worth it might have had upon resale.
Even so, the Christian life has measurable worth. The relationship it gives to God and people, the growth we experience in the Spirit, and the strength the unified love of His people embodies are true and lasting riches. The false promises of a recipe to make America great, end divorce, and free the subjected people of the world are gone, but the value of knowing God hasn't shaken at all.
Jesus eased the lives of many for the three years of His ministry, but not of all. Health and wealth did not radiate from Jesus in 30 AD into all the corners of Africa, South America, and Asia. He touched the Jewish lives He touched and was content to be limited in that way.
The church today has the same powers and limitations. We can make a difference in our community, and if we do we'll have done what our King could do.
I'll be back to look at this from another perspective.
I keep struggling to understand the mystery of Postmodernism. My kids see the world in a radically different way than do I. Radically. Where I keep trying to perceive a coherent tapestry in the confusing threads of pain and joy entangling me, my kids observe, "We're screwed." They think in biological, gritty terms of despair like that, when I never could. I keep seeing hope and they keep seeing reality. It's disconcerting.
I think I've found a clue, though, where we're both wrong.
I saw it first in my younger friends. Paul said God left us with Faith, Hope, and Love. My friends are capable of believing unbelievable things and you can count on them for love. They just can't hope. They can hope for little things; jobs, friends, families. Ask them, though, whether God's goodness can redeem and they'll kind of freeze. Whether they parrot or reject the party line, it seems the comfort of real hope will elude them.
Postmodernism is cobbled together from a thousand little bricks of despair.
Modernists, aka the good guys, look nothing like that. Modernists rest unfailingly in richest hope. Modernists know God is going to make sure everthing works out for the good. Modernists know we're learning more about everything every day, and we're growing stronger, smarter, spirity-er.
Modernists, I'm coming to see, fail by resting on unfounded hope.
We really looked at the Western World's steady progress from benighted medievalism to rationalism to the capstones of democracy and freedom, and ascribe that progress to divine intervention. God was on our side. We're rich and brilliant, aren't we? God must be blessing us. We hooked our faith to the wagon of progress and urged the horses to give it all they had.
When the West ascended to lofty heights we saw the hand of God. We even called it "Manifest Destiny." It was obvious to anyone with eyes in their head that God was going to get us to wherever we needed to be.
Us Modernists have kids, though, who don't think so much of the emperor's new clothes. All that hope in which us Modernists invested smells to them like so many fish tales. We all know what happened to our economy when the Housing Bubble burst, but Modernism inflated a Hope Bubble that couldn't last. Our hope was leveraged out of proportion both to the reality of God's promises and to the realities we live with on the ground.
The answer to both Modernism's hyper-inflation of hope and Postmodernism's recessionary deflation of hope is a correct valuation of what God has promised and what He's delivered. The false overpromises of Modernism won't work any more, but the hopeless fears of Postmodernism won't work either. There's a valid comfort in God's promises rightly valued, and we need that comfort to survive. Even after the bubble a house is really worth the land its on, the materials of which it's constructed, and the neighborhood into which it's joined. The only value the housing collapse stole is the speculative worth it might have had upon resale.
Even so, the Christian life has measurable worth. The relationship it gives to God and people, the growth we experience in the Spirit, and the strength the unified love of His people embodies are true and lasting riches. The false promises of a recipe to make America great, end divorce, and free the subjected people of the world are gone, but the value of knowing God hasn't shaken at all.
Jesus eased the lives of many for the three years of His ministry, but not of all. Health and wealth did not radiate from Jesus in 30 AD into all the corners of Africa, South America, and Asia. He touched the Jewish lives He touched and was content to be limited in that way.
The church today has the same powers and limitations. We can make a difference in our community, and if we do we'll have done what our King could do.
I'll be back to look at this from another perspective.
12 June, 2010
All Odd Postmodernists are Primed
(First post in series)
It's an old joke, really, but I'm going to make a point from it anyway. Sorry.
How a mathematician, physicist and an engineer prove that all odd numbers, (greater than 2), are prime.
- Mathematician: "Well, 3 is prime, 5 is prime and 7 is prime so, by induction all odds are prime."
- Physicist: "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 isn't prime, (bad data point), 11 is prime, and so is 13, so all odds are prime."
- Engineer: "3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime 13 is prime, so all odds are prime."
I think maybe it's a good thing aspiring theologians aren't told by their professors that God said all odd numbers are prime and then asked to prove it. I suspect their proofs might look a little bit like this:
- Calvinist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is ... Who art thou that repliest against God!
- Arminian: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, Christ's atonement sufficed for 9, but 9 didn't heed the call of prevenient math.
- Pentacostal: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, Oh! Hallelujah oh Lord! We praise you for the mystery of 9. Your ways are glorious and the sight of your glory ... la! la! holelulalalaleboo!
- Fundamentalist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 was good enough for Paul, and it's good enough for you! Repent sinner, or face the judgment with factors for 9 that the Bible, the HOLY Bible, testifies against!
- Ecumenicist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not a doctrine over which to divide. Sure, some say it has factors, but division over oddness brings tears to the heart of God. Where some would divide we must add, and even multiply! Instead of factoring 9, let it be a factor. ... Ummm. We don't know what to do with 81, but 81's clearly a non-essential.
- Postmodernist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, ... Ummm. 9's not prime. Ummm. Neither are 15, 21, 25, 27 .... Hey! Who made up all this garbage!?!
- Calvinist, Arminian, Pentacostal, Fundamentalist, and Ecumenicist in concert: Off with their heads!!!
I'm beginning to really feel the plight of the Postmodernist. When the Modernists (and all denominations and non-denominations over 40 years old are modernist) answered the questions of the atheists, higher critics, and apostates of 50 years ago, their answers were merely human. They had the divine revelation in front of them, but they were humans working to parse it out. Their answers had gaps.
Then came the information explosion.
My children heard about God's sovereignty from me. Then they heard about the burning of Falun Gong members in China, the genocide in Rwanda (perpetrated by Christians on Christians), the plight of Muslims in Palestine, the deaths of aborted babies by the millions, the fall of Christian leaders, the weirdness of the bible and how no one can agree on what it should say much less what any of it means, the fact that history is written by the winners, and that everyone who holds power is corrupt.
They are bombarded with information every day that says a sovereign God is either a figment of some oldster's imagination or He's pathetic.
To which Modernists reply, "God has a wonderful plan for your life. You are separated from Him by your sin...."
God has been mocked before. He's been rejected before. He's been forgotten, disproven, and declared dead. Today, He's being called out on His record. The Internet has catapulted "The Problem of Evil" (Theodicy) straight at the heavens and not bothered to wait for an answer. Every evil in the world, and every failing of Christianity in the face of those evils, is published to anyone who cares to subscribe.
Faith seems almost impossible with a high pressure pipeline spewing (honest) bad news into each of our minds, but the church's answers seem stuck in the 1950's. So many churches just keep asserting 9 is prime. God is sovereign. This world is the best of all possible worlds under the loving care of a loving God. God has a wonderful plan for your life.
I can hardly blame my children for rejecting my apparent naivette.
Time has expired for the evening, but the skepticism of Postmodernism seems very honest to me. I don't blame them for digging their heels in and wondering where the real answers are hiding.
05 June, 2010
Accepting The Challenge of Jesus
NT Wright, in The Challenge of Jesus, continues to turn my thinking about real life inside out. And he does it in the best way, by splattering my thinking about Jesus.
The first six chapters of the book are a studied attempt to show wrest Jesus from the shaky throne He holds in our minds. Wright doesn't capitalize "He" when using pronouns to reference our Lord, and that's true of the whole book. Wright de-capitalizes Jesus, and unearths an uncomfortably alien Man in the process. Jesus is not a Western man, and we all know that. Many authors fill in Jewish details about Jesus. Wright goes further. Jesus is also not a universal man . Jesus is wholly Jewish. He wouldn't have connected with Postmodern American folk any better than Peter or Paul.
Six chapters of unwrapping what it means to this American to follow a Man (for the record, it will be a while before I quit capitalizing pronouns referencing the divine Man) with limitations more than covers the price of admission for this book. Wright tied my mind in knots as I slowly unwrapped the implications of the kingdom of heaven being Jewish, the sacraments of Christianity being substantive, the crucifixion in light of zealot history, and so much more. Each layer Wright peeled away cleared my mind, and somehow buried all my mental housekeeping. The book left me with years of rebuilding to do.
I don't want to talk about those six chapters. I need to talk about them, but time doesn't permit me to do everything I need to do. I want to think out loud about the last two chapters.
Wright closes this book with a good old-fashioned challenge.
Wright takes a long, hard look at today's mental landscape and acknowledges the valuable contribution of Postmodernism to humanity. The words "valuable" and "postmodern" have never cohabitated in a single sentence of mine before. I'm so Modernist I still believe stories should have happy endings and villians should be punished. Wright looks at Postmodernism and finds the value in their rejection of all things certain. He finds accuracy in their depiction of the fall, in their assessment of its reach, in their ultimate hopelessness facing the world that really is.
Frankly, I'm as unhinged by the frank revelation of the foundational hopelessness of my children and their peers as I am by Wright's reconstruction of Jesus. To say I'm Modernist is to say I still hope "it can all be fixed." I foundationally assume anything wrong can be put to rights and we're all together in trying to find the best way to do it. My children know better. They know we're all screwed, and no one else really even gets anyone else's pain, much less is working together to fix everything. (I wanted to use another word than "screwed" back there, but there's no synonym. It means bad things were done to us that left us crippled, but it doesn't quite mean we're doomed. And crippled is an antiseptic word, where my children mean a very, very septic act has been done to everyone.)
Wright says Postmodernists have forsaken all metanarrative, and after I unwrap for myself what that means, I see he's right. My children don't believe there's a big puppetmaster in the sky making sure it all turns out for the best, but I do. My parents did and all my peers still do. Christian or not, us Modernists believe there's a happy ending out there waiting for us to get to it. My children don't believe. They know. They know divorce happens to everyone and "winning" the Cold War births a War on Terror, and if we win that war we'll need to kill someone else until someone finally kills us. My children know that if there's a puppetmaster out there, he's a .... Well, I won't use the words they'd use, but they don't like him very much.
Wright doesn't challenge these Postmodernists. He challenges me. He tells me to embrace their accurate understanding of the fall. I weep as I type this, because I don't want to live in their world. I don't wish them to have to live in their world, but I certainly don't want to join them there. I don't want to release the metanarratives that've comforted me through these two generations, and certainly not so I can wrap their cold, accurate, crushing view of reality around my terrified heart each night as I go to sleep.
Wright's right. I must.
Before I'm done thinking out loud, I hope to have thought through one of his challenges. Wright applies his sweaty Jesus to the Postmodern mindframe, and it works. The Modernist Jesus Who's simultaneously puppet, master, and bliss-filled guru spoke to us who never really grappled with the horrors of real life. It takes the real Jesus to wrestle real life to the ground and take victory over it (a Modernist reinterpretation of Postmodernism if ever there were one.) The money paragraph for me is where Wright directly applies his sweaty Jesus to guys like me who program computers for a living.
I intend, over the next few posts, to work my way through to a real way of programming within the context of the real kingdom of the real God. I have no idea where this is going, but it sounds like a helpful metanarrative. :-)
The first six chapters of the book are a studied attempt to show wrest Jesus from the shaky throne He holds in our minds. Wright doesn't capitalize "He" when using pronouns to reference our Lord, and that's true of the whole book. Wright de-capitalizes Jesus, and unearths an uncomfortably alien Man in the process. Jesus is not a Western man, and we all know that. Many authors fill in Jewish details about Jesus. Wright goes further. Jesus is also not a universal man . Jesus is wholly Jewish. He wouldn't have connected with Postmodern American folk any better than Peter or Paul.
Six chapters of unwrapping what it means to this American to follow a Man (for the record, it will be a while before I quit capitalizing pronouns referencing the divine Man) with limitations more than covers the price of admission for this book. Wright tied my mind in knots as I slowly unwrapped the implications of the kingdom of heaven being Jewish, the sacraments of Christianity being substantive, the crucifixion in light of zealot history, and so much more. Each layer Wright peeled away cleared my mind, and somehow buried all my mental housekeeping. The book left me with years of rebuilding to do.
I don't want to talk about those six chapters. I need to talk about them, but time doesn't permit me to do everything I need to do. I want to think out loud about the last two chapters.
Wright closes this book with a good old-fashioned challenge.
Wright takes a long, hard look at today's mental landscape and acknowledges the valuable contribution of Postmodernism to humanity. The words "valuable" and "postmodern" have never cohabitated in a single sentence of mine before. I'm so Modernist I still believe stories should have happy endings and villians should be punished. Wright looks at Postmodernism and finds the value in their rejection of all things certain. He finds accuracy in their depiction of the fall, in their assessment of its reach, in their ultimate hopelessness facing the world that really is.
Frankly, I'm as unhinged by the frank revelation of the foundational hopelessness of my children and their peers as I am by Wright's reconstruction of Jesus. To say I'm Modernist is to say I still hope "it can all be fixed." I foundationally assume anything wrong can be put to rights and we're all together in trying to find the best way to do it. My children know better. They know we're all screwed, and no one else really even gets anyone else's pain, much less is working together to fix everything. (I wanted to use another word than "screwed" back there, but there's no synonym. It means bad things were done to us that left us crippled, but it doesn't quite mean we're doomed. And crippled is an antiseptic word, where my children mean a very, very septic act has been done to everyone.)
Wright says Postmodernists have forsaken all metanarrative, and after I unwrap for myself what that means, I see he's right. My children don't believe there's a big puppetmaster in the sky making sure it all turns out for the best, but I do. My parents did and all my peers still do. Christian or not, us Modernists believe there's a happy ending out there waiting for us to get to it. My children don't believe. They know. They know divorce happens to everyone and "winning" the Cold War births a War on Terror, and if we win that war we'll need to kill someone else until someone finally kills us. My children know that if there's a puppetmaster out there, he's a .... Well, I won't use the words they'd use, but they don't like him very much.
Wright doesn't challenge these Postmodernists. He challenges me. He tells me to embrace their accurate understanding of the fall. I weep as I type this, because I don't want to live in their world. I don't wish them to have to live in their world, but I certainly don't want to join them there. I don't want to release the metanarratives that've comforted me through these two generations, and certainly not so I can wrap their cold, accurate, crushing view of reality around my terrified heart each night as I go to sleep.
Wright's right. I must.
Before I'm done thinking out loud, I hope to have thought through one of his challenges. Wright applies his sweaty Jesus to the Postmodern mindframe, and it works. The Modernist Jesus Who's simultaneously puppet, master, and bliss-filled guru spoke to us who never really grappled with the horrors of real life. It takes the real Jesus to wrestle real life to the ground and take victory over it (a Modernist reinterpretation of Postmodernism if ever there were one.) The money paragraph for me is where Wright directly applies his sweaty Jesus to guys like me who program computers for a living.
I intend, over the next few posts, to work my way through to a real way of programming within the context of the real kingdom of the real God. I have no idea where this is going, but it sounds like a helpful metanarrative. :-)
04 June, 2010
The Rooster Crowed
At that moment the Lord turned and looked at Peter.
Up until that moment, Peter was riding high. He was tracking with his Lord. He was an undercover agent gathering critical intelligence about the events of his Master's arrest and torment. He was lying low and staying close.
He was a hero.
And then the rooster crowed and the bloodied Man Whom Peter loved turned and looked at him.
He'd denied being with the Lord to a servant girl, a servant of the high priest, and some bystanders. Nobodies. Peter didn't look the high priest in the eye and deny Jesus was the Christ. He cunningly kept his cover to servants and bystanders.
Jesus said we'd be judged by every little word said in passing, and here we see it. Jesus valued Peter's response to that servant girl. Denying Jesus to a servant girl was one with denying Him before Caesar. And He didn't brook spying as an excuse. Astounding.
Lord have mercy.
Up until that moment, Peter was riding high. He was tracking with his Lord. He was an undercover agent gathering critical intelligence about the events of his Master's arrest and torment. He was lying low and staying close.
He was a hero.
And then the rooster crowed and the bloodied Man Whom Peter loved turned and looked at him.
He'd denied being with the Lord to a servant girl, a servant of the high priest, and some bystanders. Nobodies. Peter didn't look the high priest in the eye and deny Jesus was the Christ. He cunningly kept his cover to servants and bystanders.
Jesus said we'd be judged by every little word said in passing, and here we see it. Jesus valued Peter's response to that servant girl. Denying Jesus to a servant girl was one with denying Him before Caesar. And He didn't brook spying as an excuse. Astounding.
Lord have mercy.
28 May, 2010
Picture Mosaic
You've probably all seen things like this picture mosaic of Jesus.
In itself, it's really a pretty cool picture of the church. All of us, assembled carefully, make a bird's-eye picture of Jesus on Earth. I post this, though, because it occurs to me the picture only works because some of the shots that make it up are pretty dark. It's impossible to bear the image of God on Earth without bearing the unbearable some portion of the time. He did.
In itself, it's really a pretty cool picture of the church. All of us, assembled carefully, make a bird's-eye picture of Jesus on Earth. I post this, though, because it occurs to me the picture only works because some of the shots that make it up are pretty dark. It's impossible to bear the image of God on Earth without bearing the unbearable some portion of the time. He did.
07 March, 2010
The Sacred Perspective
Last night Dana and I watched the 2007 clip of Tom Cruise browbeating Matt Lauer on the evils of antidepressants. Dana was blown away by the odd way Cruise sounded. She couldn't put her finger on it, but she really didn't think he sounded right.
Mr. Cruise was conned.
He bought into a very simple con job. He's a good guy (barring a normal dose of sin and a superstar level of narcissism) who really wants to make the world a better place. He cares deeply about things, and L Ron Hubbard's folk told him a shortcut to helping the whole world. On the subject of antidepressants, for example, they told him something like, "You could dedicate a lifetime of study to pharmaceuticals, or you can study what we've already learned about them. You can sift through hundreds of experts' opinions, and spend years trying to figure out which of these experts has sold out to big pharma, and eventually you'll work your way down to the results we've already compiled. Or you can study our results and start helping the world TODAY."
It's a shortcut, and it's an appealling one.
I've been there and done that.
Gene Edwards once told me I was the foremost expert in the world on church history. I'd very much imagine he's since rescinded that opinion (forcefully) but he appeared to say it in complete sincerity. And when he said it, I believed it might be true.
They say you can't sucker an honest man. They're right. Gene offered me a too-good-to-be-true deal, and I bought into it because of my inner dishonesty. He'd written a handful of books and gave us personal talks touting his incredible insights into a grabbag of subjects: family, church, Trinity, missions, child-rearing, psychology, emotional development. One of his core subjects was church history. I could either study hundreds of books written by hundreds of authors on the subject of church history and do the hard work of weeding out all their conflicting errors, or (for the amazing low price of a few of Gene's books!) I could have the world's most complete view of church history.
I placed my confidence in Gene the same way any mark hands his savings over to a huckster. I went all-in, as they say in poker, with a pair of deuces. (For non-poker readers, I gambled everything I owned on the weakest possible pair.)
One day, I took all my cheap brilliance to an Internet News Group dedicated to church history, and floated a couple leading questions their way. I remember asking what they thought the literacy rate was in first century Europe. Those historians answered me in ways I'd never imagined. I learned more about literacy from that one question than I'd learned in all my studies of Gene's work. Those men and women knew their history deeply and widely and verifiably. Gene's pitch was rich in promises and conclusions, but devoid of peer-reviewed data. I walked away from that news group knowing I'd been rolled, and the diploma Gene had spoken to me wasn't worth the air it had briefly disturbed. It was a sick, unsettling feeling, but I owned my loss and started the process of reevaluating my "investment."
What happened to me, and what I'm sure happened to Mr. Cruise, is that instead of learning a single subject from many perspectives, I learned every subject from Gene's sacred perspective. Instead of the humility that comes with learning to respect experts in their fields, I thought I could quickly rise above all the experts in every field because I had the magic feather of Gene's divine insight.
Beware the expert with divine insight into everything, and run in terror from the man who needs your trust. When a man needs your confidence, look closely to what he's offering. All too often that free lunch costs your life savings.
Mr. Cruise was conned.
He bought into a very simple con job. He's a good guy (barring a normal dose of sin and a superstar level of narcissism) who really wants to make the world a better place. He cares deeply about things, and L Ron Hubbard's folk told him a shortcut to helping the whole world. On the subject of antidepressants, for example, they told him something like, "You could dedicate a lifetime of study to pharmaceuticals, or you can study what we've already learned about them. You can sift through hundreds of experts' opinions, and spend years trying to figure out which of these experts has sold out to big pharma, and eventually you'll work your way down to the results we've already compiled. Or you can study our results and start helping the world TODAY."
It's a shortcut, and it's an appealling one.
I've been there and done that.
Gene Edwards once told me I was the foremost expert in the world on church history. I'd very much imagine he's since rescinded that opinion (forcefully) but he appeared to say it in complete sincerity. And when he said it, I believed it might be true.
They say you can't sucker an honest man. They're right. Gene offered me a too-good-to-be-true deal, and I bought into it because of my inner dishonesty. He'd written a handful of books and gave us personal talks touting his incredible insights into a grabbag of subjects: family, church, Trinity, missions, child-rearing, psychology, emotional development. One of his core subjects was church history. I could either study hundreds of books written by hundreds of authors on the subject of church history and do the hard work of weeding out all their conflicting errors, or (for the amazing low price of a few of Gene's books!) I could have the world's most complete view of church history.
I placed my confidence in Gene the same way any mark hands his savings over to a huckster. I went all-in, as they say in poker, with a pair of deuces. (For non-poker readers, I gambled everything I owned on the weakest possible pair.)
One day, I took all my cheap brilliance to an Internet News Group dedicated to church history, and floated a couple leading questions their way. I remember asking what they thought the literacy rate was in first century Europe. Those historians answered me in ways I'd never imagined. I learned more about literacy from that one question than I'd learned in all my studies of Gene's work. Those men and women knew their history deeply and widely and verifiably. Gene's pitch was rich in promises and conclusions, but devoid of peer-reviewed data. I walked away from that news group knowing I'd been rolled, and the diploma Gene had spoken to me wasn't worth the air it had briefly disturbed. It was a sick, unsettling feeling, but I owned my loss and started the process of reevaluating my "investment."
What happened to me, and what I'm sure happened to Mr. Cruise, is that instead of learning a single subject from many perspectives, I learned every subject from Gene's sacred perspective. Instead of the humility that comes with learning to respect experts in their fields, I thought I could quickly rise above all the experts in every field because I had the magic feather of Gene's divine insight.
Beware the expert with divine insight into everything, and run in terror from the man who needs your trust. When a man needs your confidence, look closely to what he's offering. All too often that free lunch costs your life savings.
07 February, 2010
The Soloist
For reasons that fascinate me but don't belong here, I'm not going to give a full review of The Soloist. You will enjoy this movie as much as you can relate to its subject, homelessness. If you have a schizophrenic homeless person in your life, this movie will resonate deeply with you. If you care about the homeless at all, it will touch you. It is based on a true story, and you feel the reality of it the whole way through.
The moral of the movie is simple. The homeless don't need to be fixed nearly so badly as each homeless person needs to be known as a person, and every person needs a friend. It's a great moral.
Here's the rub of the movie. You can't always fix the things that make a man choose homelessness. Sure, sometimes you can do things that make room for a miracle, but when a person has chosen a life outside of the culture there's always some root cause. We like to think they just misunderstood something or had a run of bad luck, but sometimes it's nothing like that. Sometimes it's nothing anyone can explain, fix, or prevent. The co-protagonists of this movie tried everything to improve this man's life and got nowhere the hard way.
The movie asks a tough question (and answers it to its own satisfaction) that I think Christians need to answer.
The moral of the movie is simple. The homeless don't need to be fixed nearly so badly as each homeless person needs to be known as a person, and every person needs a friend. It's a great moral.
Here's the rub of the movie. You can't always fix the things that make a man choose homelessness. Sure, sometimes you can do things that make room for a miracle, but when a person has chosen a life outside of the culture there's always some root cause. We like to think they just misunderstood something or had a run of bad luck, but sometimes it's nothing like that. Sometimes it's nothing anyone can explain, fix, or prevent. The co-protagonists of this movie tried everything to improve this man's life and got nowhere the hard way.
The movie asks a tough question (and answers it to its own satisfaction) that I think Christians need to answer.
Can you be a friend to a broken man, apart from needing to save him?
06 February, 2010
Where are all the good pencil sharpeners?
Just whining.
I've not had a good pencil sharpening experience in years, and good pencil sharpeners used to be everywhere. Is everyone completely sold out to "engineering" and "efficiency?"
I wonder where I've sold out.
I've not had a good pencil sharpening experience in years, and good pencil sharpeners used to be everywhere. Is everyone completely sold out to "engineering" and "efficiency?"
I wonder where I've sold out.
04 February, 2010
Nahum
I don't read Nahum very often. I don't know anyone who does. There's that one little line, "Behold on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news," but Isaiah said it first and that little bit more beautifully.
And come on, what's Nahum really got to say, anyway. Hey! Nineveh! God used you to scourge Israel, but you shouldn't have taken such pleasure in the job. Now you're going to pay worse than you made Israel pay.
It's not the world's most inspirational message. So, why's it there? Why would I say it's there in light of my new thoughts about scripture? Care to take a guess?
It's only 3 chapters, so why don't you give it a little look?
Here're some thoughts to entertain as you read it.
The Ninevites are the children of the folk who heard Jonah and repented.
The Lord opens this book by describing Himself, and never quits. He's defining Himself to His enemies.
In between describing Himself and the things He will do to His enemies, He describes some pretty clear things He'll do for His own people.
He tells them how to wait for Him.
And He makes a great point of making sure Nineveh understands that it's for violence everywhere they are judged.
This is Jesus speaking. There is no difference between the voice of Yahweh here and the voice of Jesus in 2nd Thessalonians or the Revelation.
And speaking of the Revelation, what we see Jesus claim in Nahum is more than passingly similar to what He claims is coming at the end of time.
So paint the picture in your mind. Think of it as a movie, and Nahum happens at about the 1/3 point. In an old time sheriff movie, you might see John Wayne deal with some petty criminal early on. That's significant. You know when the climax of the story arrives the standard he's set. You know that sheriff. You know whether he's kind or cruel, brutal or lax, consistent or creative.
As you read Nahum's pre-history, don't expect to read a roadmap of what God will do. Expect to meet God dressed for vengance and coming to relieve His people of their punishment. Not everything I read in this book sits well with me, but it's all true. It's Who He IS.
24 January, 2010
A Perfect Circle
When I was a kid, I tried really hard to draw circles. I imagined a circle was a line that bent around smoothly until it met back up with itself. I could draw a perfect circle if I could just bend the line around at exactly the same rate until the end met back up with the beginning. I got pretty good at it even.
And then I took geometry. Did you know a circle is the collection of all points the same distance from a center? That's a completely different way of looking at this shape. A circle is no longer a bendy line over which I have to sweat to make sure it bends just right. Give me a compass setting and as long as I know where the center is, I can fill in little bits of the circle anywhere I want to. They'll always meet up. Understanding "center" makes circles very easy.
It can be hard to tell the difference between freehand and compass-drawn circles, though. They're both just round lines.
Seeing the bible as a novel rather than a theology feels the same. My new conclusions look the same as the old ones. I'm relieved to feel a little surer my theology is round, but I doubt I'm really going to believe much differently. The joy comes when I feel a passage's impact before I categorize it, when I can tell where it fits in the narrative before I think about which theological team might claim it as a proof-text.
Take this earth-shattering promise from Isaiah:
This is staggering.
Matthew Henry responds to it like this:
Jamison, Fausset, and Brown have this to say:
Those statements don't sound staggering to me, and that's a problem. They sound correct, but this is a staggering moment in scripture. If you look at this as just another promise about God restraining His wrath or as a prophecy of the end times or as a commentary on God's free will trumping man's free will, it ends up sounding like the 4th line of a 12 line geometry proof. It might be critical, but it sure ain't compelling.
If I were to provide Cliff Notes for this passage, to comment on it as a part of the ongoing story of God's self-unveiling, it'd sound more like this:
I want to ask the perfect question of this verse, but I can't, and I hope you won't expect it of me. But there's something at the edge of my mind. What is He planning? Is He excited? Does He feel anything like that rush of adrenaline I feel when I double-down on a bet and put my house up as collateral? Is He showing something like the smug glee of a magician flamboyantly reaching down into his hat when he knows the rabbit's up his sleeve the whole time? Or do we see the confidence of a skilled craftsman turning a lump of gold into a pomegranate?
But who cares if I don't know the perfect question. I'm in awe. God reveals Himself in a new light here.
There are so many layers of mystery in this passage. So far I've only looked at the surface! Remember that it was Jesus Who led Israel out of Egypt, and Yahweh Who walked on Earth. God never changes, only our understanding of Him. There's only one God yesterday, today and forever. The great and mysterious revelation of Isaiah 54 is consistent with Yahweh's wrath at Israel all those generations before and consistent with the mercy of God in Christ. Paul's God of propitiation, sanctification, and manifestation is unchanged from Job's God of fearful trials and burning correction.
No matter what I see in God at any point in scripture, it's there in Him at every point of scripture. That He would leave so many generations to live and die with so little insight into His sacrificial mercy is yet another powerful insight into His nature. He is comfortable with Who He IS, even when we misunderstand Him. He feels no need to explain Himself to anyone. If Jonah mistakes Him for some local god, only powerful in the region of Canaan, and seeks to flee to Tarshish, Yahweh does not lecture him on the true scope of His power. He simply tells Jonah what he needs to know and do, and places him back on the path to Nineveh.
Does the magnificence of God's self-confidence not strike you? Does it not impact you that He promised Israel never to rebuke them again? And does it not floor you that He never made that promise before?!
Do you want to dilute that feeling, or dry it up like a tangerine baked in the desert? Try to solve the mysteries of the millenial kingdom with this verse. Or look for some root principle of sovereign grace that's been eluding you. Talk about all the things God does and will do, instead of Who He IS. The beauty of even the best well-formed proof cannot compare to majesty of God Himself pulling back the curtain and letting us get to know Him.
As I've read through the Old Testament, my ears have been slowing down. The rhythm of my reading is changing. I was raised on critical half-verse proof-texts, but I'm finding the value of whole chapters and books. God gave us a Bible rich with verses that prove nothing, and I've always wondered why. Why bog us down with so much trivia?
I'm starting to believe He's given us all those long passages for the same reason parents talk in front of their babies so much. A lot of it's over our heads, but we hang on His every word. We get to know our Father in heaven by listening to Levitius and Chronicles and Zechariah. We absorb His words and see generations of His acts, and are made ready to talk to Him. I've done my time indexing the exciting verses and ignoring the "unimportant" ones, and maybe now I'm done with it. We'll see.
And when I'm done drawing Isaiah 54 my way, what I have before me is a circle. It looks round to me, but I just don't really know. Does it look round to anyone else? I don't know. I don't think God cares how round it is any more than I cared if my babies said, "Dada," all wrong, but I'd like to be drawing my circle from a true center.
Right now, I am revelling in looking at the Bible in this new way. I feel like a kid rereading books 1-6 of the Harry Potter series for the 4th time and waiting anxiously for that 7th book. There's so much we know know about Yahweh that Abraham only felt. There was so much revealed in Christ that David only suspect due to his own calling and character. It's amazing to think about David succeeding at things because God knew one day He'd succeed at those things Himself. God gave David's victories to foreshadow His own, to unveil Himself.
And it's amazing to know there's yet more to be revealed. As much as was revealed in Jesus' first coming, there's a tome about to be written. The plot of God's novel only seems simple if you ignore the complications of His long-awaited return, Israel's restoration, the holiness of His Name before His enemies, the full realization of His kingdom, judgement and so many other themes.
I'm still unsure how many ways there are to profit by the Bible, but I'm loving this new way.
And then I took geometry. Did you know a circle is the collection of all points the same distance from a center? That's a completely different way of looking at this shape. A circle is no longer a bendy line over which I have to sweat to make sure it bends just right. Give me a compass setting and as long as I know where the center is, I can fill in little bits of the circle anywhere I want to. They'll always meet up. Understanding "center" makes circles very easy.
It can be hard to tell the difference between freehand and compass-drawn circles, though. They're both just round lines.
Seeing the bible as a novel rather than a theology feels the same. My new conclusions look the same as the old ones. I'm relieved to feel a little surer my theology is round, but I doubt I'm really going to believe much differently. The joy comes when I feel a passage's impact before I categorize it, when I can tell where it fits in the narrative before I think about which theological team might claim it as a proof-text.
Take this earth-shattering promise from Isaiah:
Isa 54:8-10
With a little wrath I hid My face from you for a moment; But with everlasting kindness I will have mercy on you," Says the LORD, your Redeemer. For this [is] like the waters of Noah to Me; For as I have sworn That the waters of Noah would no longer cover the earth, So have I sworn That I would not be angry with you, nor rebuke you. For the mountains shall depart And the hills be removed, But My kindness shall not depart from you, Nor shall My covenant of peace be removed," Says the LORD, who has mercy on you.
This is staggering.
Matthew Henry responds to it like this:
He will not be so angry with them as to cast them off and break his covenant with them (Ps. 89:34), nor rebuke them as he has rebuked the heathen, to destroy them, and put out their name for ever and ever, Ps. 9:5.
Jamison, Fausset, and Brown have this to say:
I am about to do the same in this instance as in Noah's flood. As I swore then that it should not return ( Gen 8:21 9:11 ), and I kept that promise, so I swear now to My people, and will perform My promise, that there shall be no return of the deluge of My wrath upon them. LOWTH, on insufficient authority, reads (the same will I do now as), "in the days of Noah."
Those statements don't sound staggering to me, and that's a problem. They sound correct, but this is a staggering moment in scripture. If you look at this as just another promise about God restraining His wrath or as a prophecy of the end times or as a commentary on God's free will trumping man's free will, it ends up sounding like the 4th line of a 12 line geometry proof. It might be critical, but it sure ain't compelling.
If I were to provide Cliff Notes for this passage, to comment on it as a part of the ongoing story of God's self-unveiling, it'd sound more like this:
What just happened!?
We've known this God for a couple thousand years now, and suddenly He changes all the rules? Yahweh made Eden perfect, then cast out the man who ruined it. He destroyed every living thing when the men He'd cast out of Eden corrupted the rest of His Earth. He flooded it all out. Gone. He only narrowly decided to gamble on His creation one more time and spared Noah. He did vow He'd see this second chance through to the end, but not before He'd shown us His driving obsession with perfection.
We saw it again when He brought His people out of Egypt, then killed all but Joshua, Caleb and their families in the desert. And again when He established a nation, then brought the Assyrians to sweep most of them away. And according to Isaiah, the Babylonians were coming to sweep the rest away soon. Yahweh is not afraid to be angry. He's not afraid to sweep everything away and start over fresh. He's unafraid to fail, but utterly incapable of settling for second best.
And with this one promise He closed the door on Himself.
In this promise He did nothing less than monkey-trap Himself. He promised to hold on to Israel, without ever letting go and without any conditions. All His previous promises had conditions. We spent hundreds of pages learning this about Him. He's a cagey God Who promises the moon to those who meet His conditions, but Who curses the man who tramples on His promises just as enthusiastically.
What's He got up His sleeve?
Who is this Yahweh that He can dare us to disbelieve Him this way?
I want to ask the perfect question of this verse, but I can't, and I hope you won't expect it of me. But there's something at the edge of my mind. What is He planning? Is He excited? Does He feel anything like that rush of adrenaline I feel when I double-down on a bet and put my house up as collateral? Is He showing something like the smug glee of a magician flamboyantly reaching down into his hat when he knows the rabbit's up his sleeve the whole time? Or do we see the confidence of a skilled craftsman turning a lump of gold into a pomegranate?
But who cares if I don't know the perfect question. I'm in awe. God reveals Himself in a new light here.
There are so many layers of mystery in this passage. So far I've only looked at the surface! Remember that it was Jesus Who led Israel out of Egypt, and Yahweh Who walked on Earth. God never changes, only our understanding of Him. There's only one God yesterday, today and forever. The great and mysterious revelation of Isaiah 54 is consistent with Yahweh's wrath at Israel all those generations before and consistent with the mercy of God in Christ. Paul's God of propitiation, sanctification, and manifestation is unchanged from Job's God of fearful trials and burning correction.
No matter what I see in God at any point in scripture, it's there in Him at every point of scripture. That He would leave so many generations to live and die with so little insight into His sacrificial mercy is yet another powerful insight into His nature. He is comfortable with Who He IS, even when we misunderstand Him. He feels no need to explain Himself to anyone. If Jonah mistakes Him for some local god, only powerful in the region of Canaan, and seeks to flee to Tarshish, Yahweh does not lecture him on the true scope of His power. He simply tells Jonah what he needs to know and do, and places him back on the path to Nineveh.
Does the magnificence of God's self-confidence not strike you? Does it not impact you that He promised Israel never to rebuke them again? And does it not floor you that He never made that promise before?!
Do you want to dilute that feeling, or dry it up like a tangerine baked in the desert? Try to solve the mysteries of the millenial kingdom with this verse. Or look for some root principle of sovereign grace that's been eluding you. Talk about all the things God does and will do, instead of Who He IS. The beauty of even the best well-formed proof cannot compare to majesty of God Himself pulling back the curtain and letting us get to know Him.
As I've read through the Old Testament, my ears have been slowing down. The rhythm of my reading is changing. I was raised on critical half-verse proof-texts, but I'm finding the value of whole chapters and books. God gave us a Bible rich with verses that prove nothing, and I've always wondered why. Why bog us down with so much trivia?
I'm starting to believe He's given us all those long passages for the same reason parents talk in front of their babies so much. A lot of it's over our heads, but we hang on His every word. We get to know our Father in heaven by listening to Levitius and Chronicles and Zechariah. We absorb His words and see generations of His acts, and are made ready to talk to Him. I've done my time indexing the exciting verses and ignoring the "unimportant" ones, and maybe now I'm done with it. We'll see.
And when I'm done drawing Isaiah 54 my way, what I have before me is a circle. It looks round to me, but I just don't really know. Does it look round to anyone else? I don't know. I don't think God cares how round it is any more than I cared if my babies said, "Dada," all wrong, but I'd like to be drawing my circle from a true center.
Right now, I am revelling in looking at the Bible in this new way. I feel like a kid rereading books 1-6 of the Harry Potter series for the 4th time and waiting anxiously for that 7th book. There's so much we know know about Yahweh that Abraham only felt. There was so much revealed in Christ that David only suspect due to his own calling and character. It's amazing to think about David succeeding at things because God knew one day He'd succeed at those things Himself. God gave David's victories to foreshadow His own, to unveil Himself.
And it's amazing to know there's yet more to be revealed. As much as was revealed in Jesus' first coming, there's a tome about to be written. The plot of God's novel only seems simple if you ignore the complications of His long-awaited return, Israel's restoration, the holiness of His Name before His enemies, the full realization of His kingdom, judgement and so many other themes.
I'm still unsure how many ways there are to profit by the Bible, but I'm loving this new way.
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