Category Archives: Religion

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.

Religion

New Podcast Dramatizes Martin Luther as Events Unfold

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On October 10, 1520, Martin Luther received an official church statement charging him with heresy. Today’s Luther says the bull got to him by a circuitous route.

The Rector of the University of Wittenberg, Peter Burkhard, received the bull from a citizen to whom a Leipzig militiaman had given it. This was, to say the least, an unusual mode of delivery of an official document, probably intended to prevent the University from refusing to accept it.

The Papal Bull condemns him for statements that are “either heretical, false, scandalous, offensive to pious ears, or misleading to the simple.” Clearly Luther was playing precursor to Osteen at this point in his career.

Ligonier Ministries has a new Reformation Day podcast starting October 10 to dramatize Luther’s actions and thoughts, starting at this point, called “Luther: In Real Time.”

Ligonier is also streaming documentary on Luther for free all this month.

Authors, Fiction, Reading, Religion

‘Reading report: The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien: The Rainbow Wizard

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I finished reading The Fellowship of the Ring over the weekend. One can’t really review a work of this eminence. I can only write appreciations. One thing I noted was a detail I’d forgotten, one that was left out of the movies, and it’s  no mystery why. It’s when Gandalf meets with Saruman at Orthanc, and learns his former master’s perfidy:

‘”For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colours!”

‘I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

‘”I liked white better,” I said.

‘”White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”

‘”In which case it is no longer white,” said I. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”’

This is an amazing passage. Saruman the White, whose white color had symbolized his supreme wisdom, has broken the white color down into its constituent prismatic hues.

He’s made it into a rainbow.

We see rainbows all the time today, in churches that believe they’ve “deconstructed” traditional morality and theology.

Was Tolkien an actual prophet? Did he foretell the future of the church?

Religion, Uncategorized

‘The End of Liberal Democracy’

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My close personal friend (well, I’ve met him in actual space and time, which makes us pretty close by 2020 standards) Hunter Baker, of Union University, has a useful article in Touchstone in which he discusses an issue a lot of us are thinking about these days — is liberal democracy failing? Is the experiment over?

Nevertheless, let me, without rehearsing all the relevant developments, simply say that many of those structural limitations have now been overcome, through either amendment, expansive court decisions, or shrewd use of the powers to tax and spend. As a result, a constitution designed to embody Cicero’s wisdom for harmonizing diverse interests and avoiding the excesses of the various classical forms of government has been substantially transformed into something much closer to an ordinary majority-rule democracy. When one notes the calls for the termination of the electoral college, the politicization of the Supreme Court, and the discrediting of federalism due to the South’s intransigence with regard to both slavery and civil rights, it becomes clear that we are reverting to the mean as our Ciceronian (and even Calvinistic, as I’ve written elsewhere) constitutional democracy becomes more typical.

Read it all here.

Non-fiction, Religion

By Dreaming Big, Do You Mean Satifaction?

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I’m in the middle of Carl Trueman’s 2010 book, Republocrat: Confessions of a Liberal Conservative, which sounds like a more political book than it has been so far. His chapter on the secularization of the church suggests secular British society is similar to religious American society with mainly different comfort levels with religious words.

[David Wells] argues that many churches are as secular in their ambitions and methods as any straightforwardly secular organization. The difference, we might say, is the the latter are just a whole lot more honest about what they are doing.

This reminds me of the way some ministry leaders talk of doing big things for God, maybe pulling down a miracle or dreaming a dream only God can fulfill. I don’t want to judge the motives of people I barely know, but I’m skeptical of how much glory God receives from the city’s largest and brightest Christmas display or filling a stadium for what amounts to a religiously themed civics event.

Is it really a big dream for God’s glory when the results hit all the marks for secular success?

Photo by Vita Vilcina on Unsplash