Category Archives: Religion

Non-fiction, Religion

If We Win the Leaders, Will We Win the Nation?

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I gather family devotions is a challenge for everyone. I remember my parents pulling us together a couple times for what resembled the semblance of something like a worship service. It was awkward. I didn’t like it. My father-in-law regularly read from the Bible after supper, so that’s the pattern that drew me in.

Since we have homeschooled our kids from the beginning, my wife read through the Bible with them during the morning routine. That and my desire to read something that applied the Word, if not strictly devotional, is what steered me toward reading through Christian books instead of the Bible. We read a few of Jared C. Wilson’s books, at least a couple of Jerry Bridges’s. After using the Advent readings from our church, I was at a loss for what to start next. My wife suggested a few of the small books from our shelf, and that’s what got us into Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ.

This ain’t light reading. Wurmbrand is a Romanian minister from Bucharest who grew up atheist and came to faith through reading the Bible. He became an leader of the Underground Church after Communism began to strangle all of its citizens. What he and other believers suffered was demonic.

He writes like a missionary, as you would expect, and one of his principles provoked us to push back. He advocates winning people of influence first.

How was Norway won for Christ? By winning King Olaf. Russia first had the Gospel when its king, Vladimir, was won. Hungary was won by winning St. Stephen, its king. The same with Poland. In Africa, wehre the chief of the tribe has been won, the tribe follows. We setup missions to rank-and-life men who may become very fine Christians, but who have little influence and cannot change the state of things.

We must win rulers: political, economic, scientific, artistic personalities. They are the engineers of souls. They mold the souls of men. Winning them, you win the people they lead and influence.

Wurmbrand might have looked to the book of Daniel and asked whether Nebuchadnezzar’s repent and apparent faith did anything to turn Babylon around or the sympathy King Darius had for Daniel bore any fruit. Who was saved when Jonah preached to Ninevah? That nation was blessed by avoiding God’s wrath for a few generations, but when Nahum returned 150 years later, he said, “And all who look at you will shrink from you and say, ‘Wasted is Nineveh; who will grieve for her?'”

Certainly a people are blessed by Christian leaders. A society organized on biblical values is better overall than any other society, but it would not usher in faith for anyone by mere leadership. When civil leaders turn a country to Christ, it isn’t often by Christian means. The faithless see opportunity and take it by declaring themselves faithful.

God uses society and influence in ways we don’t often foresee. Remember how he has told us to care for widows and orphans. They aren’t the influential ones today, but they could be tomorrow. A common result would be that they seek Christ wherever they go and repeat the truth to a family or congregation, thereby keeping a few more people on the straight and narrow. Who can say this is an unambitious plan?

Religion

‘The Beauty Doesn’t Stop on Christmas Day’

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Matthew’s Gospel has the account of the Magi’s visit, and it never occurred to me to wonder why “all the chief priests and scribes of the people” didn’t go with them to Bethlehem. Did they write them off as pagans on a goose hunt?

Valerie Thur makes this point as she writes about how much she has longed for Epiphany this season. In this story of eastern wise men,

we see God for who he is: the Savior of all nations for all time. The same God who perfectly orchestrated Israel’s history so that he was born of the line of David created a specific heavenly object so that he could draw these wise-men to himself: the source of all true Wisdom. We see a Savior who loved the world so much that he chose to become one of us for all of us: Jews and Gentiles alike. No circumstance can deny the will of God. There is no distance that God cannot bridge: if he has already restored the bridge between man and God, how much more will he bridge our earthly gulfs of loneliness, guilt, fear, and doubt?

Music, Religion

‘Glade Jul/Silent Night’

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It’s a Christmas miracle... sort of. You know how the movie “White Christmas” goes, when they’re all in the ski lodge, hoping/praying for snow so they can save the business, and they get a big snowfall on Christmas Eve? That happened here, in the magic wonderland of Minnesota. We’d gotten some snow early this winter, but a long stretch of warm temperatures and dry weather left all nature naked and ashamed. But last night the blizzard came in pure Hollywood style, depositing 8 or 9 inches, I guess. Today you could film a Hallmark special here. Something for the kids, anyway. If they have to remember a premature year without the grandparents, they’ll at least have memories of sliding and snowballs. And, of course, of delayed presents because the Post Office is backed up like the Donner Party.

As you no doubt deduced, the video above is the one and only Sissel, singing “Glade Jul,” which is the Norwegian version of Silent Night. Pretty much the same idea in the lyrics, except that we replaced the words for “Silent Night” with ones for “Happy Christmas.” Because we could.

And Glade Jul to you, too.

Music, Religion

The Word Was Made Flesh, Merry Christmas

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This is the real meaning of Christmas: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 ESV).

This does not mean God posed as a man for a few years, casting an illusion on everyone in order to influence them with well-spoken sermons.

It does not mean God sent his spirit into a man for a time, having found someone who was sufficiently humble to indwell for divine purposes.

It does not mean that God actually is a man who lives eternally on another plane but for a season he came to Earth to do things.

It also does not mean that Jesus was only a man who connected dots like no one before him and introduced some darn good principles to Western civilization.

It does not mean that a uniquely spiritual man called on divine power to perform marvelous works and speak with wisdom beyond the scope of mortal reason.

Those ideas are a bit easier to understand. The truth is beyond us. Christ Jesus, born as a child to a poor, virgin woman, was the Word of God from the beginning, both with God and actually God. The invisible, eternal God became a mortal man. That doesn’t make complete sense to us, but it is the only hope for ourselves and all the world.

Merry Christmas.

Religion

‘Intolerance’

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Still from D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance,” (1916)

I posted this on Visage Volume yesterday, and though I garnered some quibbles, I still think it holds up.

The issue of Christianity’s “intolerance” has come up. I often hear the contention that the “old gods” were tolerant, while Christianity introduced intolerance. This is based on an uninformed assumption that the old days were just like ours. In fact, the “old gods” were not tolerant, and certainly not universal. They were parochial. They cared about their own people (when it suited them), and no others. Zeus cared nothing for the Parthians. Thor couldn’t care less about the Irish. Christianity brought in a new idea (anticipated by the Jewish prophets) that one God had created all, loved all, and redeemed all. If that’s true, then His message is applicable to all. The moment you make the statement, “God loves everyone,” or “everyone matters,” you are appropriating Christian theology.

Music, Religion

‘Det Lyser i Stille Grender’

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I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this number by Sissel here before (though not this performance, which conveniently includes subtitles). But it’s high on my list of Norwegian Christmas songs that deserve to be known outside the neighborhood.

According to this Norwegian account, the lyrics come from a poem by Jakob Sande. It was first published in 1931, but the author didn’t think much of it. When Lars Soraas, who was putting a Christmas songbook together in 1948, asked him for permission to use it, Sande had forgotten about it completely. Since then it’s become his best-known work.

Music, Religion

‘Mitt Hjerte Altid Vanker’

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Wrote a sizeable chunk of text for the next Erling book last night, and today I’ve been working on what I think might be a clever piece for The American Spectator Online. Which left me little mental capacity for fresh ideas for posts. You know me well enough to guess what that means, especially during Advent: Sissel with a Christmas song:

This is one of Sissel’s most popular Christmas numbers, original a Danish song, done here in a concert in Iceland. The title means, “My heart always lingers,” and if you’re interested in an English translation, a kind soul in Norway has provided us with one here.

I note that the translator, judging by the coat of arms on his profile, seems to come from the island of Karmoy, my ancestral home.

Religion

Pilgrim Fathers

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It has long been my custom to post about holidays on the holidays themselves, so that whatever I write isn’t generally read until the party’s over. It suits my character.

But today I’m going to write about Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving Eve. Just a few thoughts.

It’s become fashionable to denigrate the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony, as you are surely aware. They were bigots, they were imperialists, they spread disease among the native population. And, most of all, they weren’t that important. There were lots of earlier colonies in America – what makes them so special?

My short answer is, the Mayflower Compact, the first voluntary self-government plan in the English tradition, in what became the United States. The English tradition is the one we built on; it’s where we got our concepts of civil rights and self-government.

It will be no surprise to you that I’m up to here with revisionist history (unless I’m doing — or translating — it myself, as with Viking Legacy).

I think a lot of us have a sense that our civilization is senescent now, that it’s growing old and fading. That it lacks the energy to perpetuate itself and must inevitably fall to the new fascists of Wokeism.

But you know, if we’re senescent, it was a pretty accelerated decline. I know I’m old, but one man’s lifetime makes for a pretty brief ride from the robust patriotism I remember from my youth to the contemptuous national self-loathing of today.

It occurs to me it’s possible we may not be in our national old age, but in our national adolescence. Like adolescents, we’ve suddenly discovered the sins, foibles and hypocrisies of our parents, and we’re rebelling. We take the blessings Mom and Dad worked hard for for granted, not understanding the sacrifices they made, the prices they paid.

If we’re just in our adolescence, we might have adulthood to look forward to. Maybe we’ll grow up. Maybe we’ll come to appreciate our parents, as most kids eventually do.

Maybe we’ll develop thankful hearts.

Fiction, Reading, Religion

Reader’s report: ‘the Return of the King’: Happy endings

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And he sang to them, now in the elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.

Blogging my way through The Lord of the Rings, now reading The Return of the King.

I’ve gotten through the hardest part. The ring is destroyed, Sauron is fallen; his followers are scattered and defeated. The great evil has passed, and the world begins to heal under the wise power of the King and the White Wizard.

Tolkien’s essay on Fairy Stories emphasizes the importance of the Eucatastrophe – the surprising happy ending. The eucatastrophe doesn’t work unless the dramatic tension is intense. All must seem lost. Any hope that remains must be no hope at all. “We must do without hope,” as one of the characters says. Only after the good side has lost hope and continues fighting merely out of a stubborn determination to die on the right side, if the right must fall – only then can you have a real eucatastrophe.

It seems to me that most writers – and I am certainly one of them – are a little shy about happy endings. We know how to pile up the obstacles; we know how to frustrate our heroes and test them past the point of despair. But when – beyond all expectation – they triumph in the end, we’re not sure what to do with the victory. Mustn’t do an end zone dance, after all.

Tolkien does an end zone dance. He knows that the drama doesn’t exist for its own sake. It exists for the sake of the happy ending, just as the saga of humanity itself exists only for the sake of Christ’s Kingdom. The Return of the King should be read side by side with the Book of Revelation.

He describes in loving detail how friends are reunited, the wounded are healed, the land is cleansed, the pollution is washed away, and justice is restored. He understands that after the sufferings his characters (and the reader, vicariously) have endured, they well deserve a reward.

I need to bear this in mind as I work on my latest Erling book. My current story actually involves a happy ending with historical warrant. I need to be less shy about rejoicing and vindication.

Like most modern people, I know more about depression than rejoicing. More about ambivalence than victory. I need to look to the Word of God to guide me in subcreation.

Religion

Do Evangelicals Love Doctrine over People?

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What’s your initial reaction to suggestion that evangelicals love doctrine over people? It’s a common claim in come circles, perhaps most common among those who feel rejected.

The other day on Twitter, a believer with a successful academic career (judging from a distance) retweeted this claim, noting its truthfulness, and another believer with a successful publishing career pushed back, saying anyone who has taught Sunday School should know how little doctrine most evangelicals understand.

This second point rings true to me and seems to be supported by surveys like Ligonier’s State of Theology, conducted again this year. If members of evangelical churches love doctrine so much, why are so many unsure of certain basic facts every Christian should know? But why is the charge of being unloving to their neighbors assumed by so many, even within the church?

Perhaps evangelicals are one of the many groups of people who claim to hold to doctrinal standards but in reality hold only to a comfort zone. I mean they love people about as much as everyone else does, but they talk up the doctrine side of things. They claim loyalty to a creed or church, but the truth is they only know what the creed sort of looks like, because what they really hold to is the comfort of the group and place. They like the habits they do all together, the people who hang out here, the tone the pastor sets in each service. They call that comfort zone the Christian faith.

If that’s true, their comfort zone won’t stay Christian long.

Of course, only some evangelicals do this; the fear is that most do it. Cultural observers frequently ask why the church isn’t known for loving our neighbors above anything else. It isn’t only due to the reporters who only report on a public figure’s faith when he or she is using it to beat down others.