Sometimes I have Big Thoughts, which seem to me important. It would appear self-evident, though, that if these ideas are any good, someone must have come up with them before me. And if nobody has, itâs probably because theyâre not as good as I think they are.
But I forge ahead, in all the boldness of the simple-minded. I have a sort of an answer to the problem of Theodicy.
No, make that a proposal for an answer.
No, not even that. An approach to a proposal.
In any case, Iâve written about these matters here before, but I think itâs been a while, perhaps quite a long time.
The problem of Theodicy is familiar to many of you. Itâs one of the really big questions â if God is good, why does he permit such horrendous evil to exist in His world? (Recent events in the Middle East have given us ample cause to contemplate this question, when weâre not weeping, tearing our hair, and stocking up on ammunition.)
My proposal for thought is that we ought to look at the universe as a Story.
Every writer knows that thereâs no story without conflict. And conflict means pain. One of the hardest disciplines many writers must learn is how to torture their characters. Although I love reading exciting stories, I often fear I canât bear the stress when a good author turns the dramatic tension (which means fear and pain) up to 10. When Iâm writing, Iâd much rather be nice to my characters (most of whom I quite like), but I know my stories would be degraded.
Does this help explain why thereâs suffering in the universe? Is God telling a great story?
Now I can hear the objections â âThatâs obscene! When we contemplate the evil suffered by innocents in places like Gaza, itâs simply an insult to suggest that God is using those people like toys in some cosmic story-telling game.â
To that I reply â very tentatively â suppose itâs not just a game. Suppose stories arenât actually trivial?
Suppose stories are the most important things there are?
Suppose our universe is not just âaâ story, but âTHEâ story â and that story is the glory of God, the music of the spheres, the liturgy of the Great Throne, the song of angels.
If that still seems trivial to you, I ask this question â âWhat can you suggest thatâs more serious than a story â if youâre in it?â
And suppose â just suppose â you had an assurance from the Author that somehow â in some way you canât comprehend â the ending would be happy?
A newly elected school board member of Peoria Unified School District Board in Glendale, Arizona, has been told to stop quoting scripture at the beginning of school board meetings because the district believed it was a violation of the First Amendment. They took this stand in response to letters from organizations such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
My all-time favorite song is Michael Card’s “God’s Own Fool,” published in 1985 on the Scandalon album. That may have been the first album I bought with my own money. It’s a song about Jesus being misunderstood during his earthly ministry. The last lines are:
So, surrender the hunger to say you must know;
Have the courage to say, "I believe."
Let the power of paradox open your eyes
And blind those who say they can see.
I could understand if someone took lines like this to encourage blind faith, a faith that doesn’t question what we read in Scripture or what our ministers teach, but Christian faith isn’t blind. It’s reasonable and fits the real world He created.
When Jesus tells Peter to check the mouth of a fish for a coin to pay their taxes, Peter believes Him and checks the fish’s mouth. When Jesus tells a couple of His men to go into town, find a donkey and colt tied up, bring them to him, and if anyone asks what they’re doing, say that the Lord needs them, they go into town expecting to find exactly what He has said. That’s a reasonable faith. It’s one that recognizes the limits of our knowledge, not one that denies knowledge altogether.
But what else do we have today?
Art & Literature: David Platzer writes about a Paris exhibit on Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso. “Edmund Wilsonâwho was generally sympathetic to her work and compared it to Yeats, Proust, and Eliotânoted in a 1923 Vanity Fair article that her word-portraits of Matisse and Picasso published in Camera Work made it ‘evident that Gertrude Stein had abandoned the intelligible altogether.'”
Words: If you or someone you know have shown symptoms of being a witcracker, call the number on your screen. You are not alone.
American Words: American pioneers had to make up words for a new world. Rosemarie Ostler writes, “Often these simply combined a noun with an adjective: backcountry, backwoods (and backwoodsman), back settlement, pine barrens, canebrake, salt lick, foothill, underbrush, bottomland, cold snap.” “Yankee is also almost certainly a Dutch contribution. Various theories have been suggested for the wordâs origin (for instance, that itâs a Native American mispronunciation of English), but the most likely one derives the word from Janke (pronounced ‘yan-kuh’), a diminutive of John that translates as something like ‘little John.'” (via ArtsJournal)
Artificial Intelligence: Tech companies are hiring writers and poets to compose somewhat refined work, particularly in Hindi and Japanese. “It is a sign that AI developers have flagged fluency in poetic forms as a priority, while refining their generative writing products.” To what end? (via ArtsJournal)
Photo: Fairyland Cottages Minnesota, 1980. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Portrait discovered in Copenhagen,, believed to be Hans Nielsen Hauge.
I wrote a fairly long meditation on Pietist Christianity and legalist Christianity yesterday. And I think I failed to actually say one of the things I meant to say.
Which is ironic, because that was one of the very weaknesses I meant to criticize (gently) in my hero, the Norwegian lay preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge. Some years back I began work on translating his works, a project another linguist has since taken over. Mostly to my relief. Because Hauge is exceedingly hard to translate. Iâve heard of one scholar who started the same project years back and simply gave up in frustration. âHeâs untranslatable!â that person said.
I think thatâs an exaggeration, but I sympathize. Hauge is very hard to translate. The man was in no way a systematic thinker. He was an enthusiast. He poured his words out onto the page, it appears, just as they came to him. Sometimes he goes on for pages without a period or a paragraph break. I imagine Hauge as being very much like a certain pastor I once worked for. He hired me precisely for my writing skills. Because he found it almost impossible to actually get to the point. He communicated all right in person, because he could supplement his words with facial expressions and gestures. But when writing he just lost his way.
After many years, I think I finally figured out Haugeâs point. Itâs a point he never states in so many words, but once youâve figured it out, it illuminates all the rest of his verbiage. And it explains some of the puzzling â or even apparently unorthodox â things he seems to say.
That central point, I think â and I mentioned this part last night â was that he believed that a true believer â someone who was genuinely âawakened,â as he put it, would find the Christian life easy. They would be filled with the same joy and love he felt. We all know how love lightens burdens. When I was in love, long ago, I would have done many things far outside my comfort zone â and sometimes I actually did those things â just to please her. Just to be close to her. Love made hard tasks light.
This is a beautiful vision, and I believe itâs true in the Christian life to some extent.
But itâs not equally true for everybody. And itâs not always permanently true . I have good reason to believe that Hauge himself, during his ten-year imprisonment, when he was denied books and visits from his friends for long periods, eventually learned that the Way could be hard. He never lost his faith, but he learned that even true believers can struggle.
Some of us arenât like Hauge. Our experience with God may be lower-key, less emotional. We have a smaller tank of emotional fuel to burn (those of us who are introverts feel this especially). Weâre more like John Haugvaldstad, who needed rules and lists to keep himself on the straight path. I believe he took it to an extreme, but for some people this pattern seems prudent. Books like Jordan Petersenâs 12 Rules for Life fill a need for them (us).
Among us Lutherans thereâs an old tension â sometimes fiery verbal warfare â between the Pietists and the âConfessionals.â The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod is the largest and best-known Confessional church body in the US. Going back to the days of immigration, the Pietists and the Confessionalists anathematized one another. The Pietists (like Georg Sverdrup, subject of the journal I edit) condemned the Missouri Synod as cold, formalistic, Catholic-adjacent, and spiritually dead. Confessionalism, Sverdrup wrote, provided a âsleeping pillowâ on which members of dead congregations could slumber while their pastors tried futilely to do all the work of the church on their own.
The doctrine-centered Missourians, on the other hand, condemned the Haugean Pietists as unstable, emotional enthusiasts. If synods and pastors didnât keep a close eye on the laity, checking their every statement for orthodoxy and basically barring them from any kind of spiritual ministry, then everybody would just go crazy. Subjectivism would take over. Youâd have churches abandoning traditional sexual morality, and syncretizing with other religions, and reciting something like, oh, âthe Sparkle Creed.â
Which, sadly, is just what happened. Missouri Synod theologians rarely hesitate in making the charge that all the aberrations we see today in The Very Big Lutheran Church Body That Shall Remain Nameless (as I call it) spring from the subjectivism inherent in Pietism.
I have to admit their prophecies came true.
But I still think Hauge and Sverdrup had a point.
The heart of my own theology, for many years, has been the Incarnation. The Word became Flesh. Somehow, through the power of God, body and mind came into harmony. Justice and Mercy kissed. The absolute and the subjective cooperated perfectly in the one perfect Man.
Thatâs what I want to see reflected in the church, and in myself.
Bust of John Haugvaldstad outside the Mission School in Stavanger.
My mind was so uplifted to God that I had no consciousness, nor can I express what occurred in my soul. For I was outside myself, and as soon as I had come to my senses again, I understood that I had not been serving the beloved God who was good above all things, and that I now thought nothing in this world worthy of esteem. That my soul experienced something supernatural, divine, and blessed, that it was a glory that no tongue can express. I remember it to this day as clearly as if it had been a few days ago, though 20 years have now passed since Godâs love visited me so overwhelmingly. Nor can anyone dispute this with me: for I know that everything good in my spirit followed from that moment, especially the sincere, burning love for God and my neighbor, that I had a wholly altered attitude and a sorrow over all sins, a passionate desire that people should share with me in that same grace, a particular desire to read the holy Scriptures⌠(Hans Nielsen Haugeâs memoirs, trans. by me)
I hope this little essay wonât be too provincial to interest our readers. Iâm writing, as I do so often, about the Lutheran âsectâ in which I was raised, the Haugeans. I came to some realizations about the Haugeans this past weekend, based on reading Iâd been doing and some conversations I had with other members of the Georg Sverdrup Society. The wider implications, I think, touch all Christians.
The Haugean movement, especially as it developed among Norwegian-Americans in this country, was probably best known for its legalism. We were the kind of people who (by and large) did not drink or smoke, did not play cards, did not attend the theater or dance. There were great revivals among the Haugeans in America, especially in the 1890s and the 1920s. After that, the rains never seemed to come again. My own observation, based on what I know of people who grew up in my church in the 1920s, was that the young people were embittered and driven away by all the rules. Being âawakenedâ seemed to mean (to those young people) a commitment to following the rules. Forever.
Based on some recent reading, I think the fault for this probably lies, not with Hans Nielsen Hauge himself but with another man, John Haugvaldstad (1770-1850). I suppose I bear some familial guilt for this development, since Haugvaldstad was a neighbor to my Hodnefjeld ancestors on Mosterøy Island (before he moved to Stavanger), and they were close friends and supporters of his.
Look at the excerpt from Haugeâs memoirs above. Thatâs not the testimony of a rule-bound soul. Itâs the testimony of a man in love. I think Hauge ought to be imagined as a man with a big smile on his face. All his work, all his rugged foot-journeys, his long days and hard work, even his imprisonments, were experienced with joy, because heâd fallen in love with Jesus. For Hauge, the Christian life was fun. That was how the movement began.
But when Hauge went to prison, John Haugvaldstad arose as leader of the movement â at least in Stavanger, an important Haugean center. And Haugvaldstad was a very different soul from Hauge. Haugvaldstad struggled with temptation. At last he decided that the only way to handle temptation effectively was to avoid all questionable activities (“if itâs doubtful, itâs dirty”). Debauchery and fights happened at parties, so avoid parties, dancing and drinking. In fact, avoid all music other than hymns. Donât play cards. (Smoking was acceptable in some circles; it depended.) Donât attend the theater. Donât read worldly literature. And on and on.
It was Haugvaldstad who made the Haugeans teetotalers. Hauge himself was always opposed to drunkenness, but he sometimes seems to have served brandy at social gatherings and he served beer to his household at Christmas. In a famous conversation, he said to John Haugvaldstad, âDitt VĂŚsen er taget, ikke givet!â Which means, âYour temperament is taken [upon yourself], not given [by God]!â
But Hauge went to prison, and he died young, and Haugvaldstad prospered as a businessman in Stavanger. He was highly regarded (heâs considered one of the founding fathers of modern Stavanger), and not without reason. He was a very good man, a man with great concern for the poor. He did much good for his neighbors, and for Christian missions. The esteem in which he was held led many people to make him their role model. The âtemperamentâ of Haugvaldstad became the Haugean norm.
Today, in our situation, I would very much like to see the spirit of Hauge return. I think we could use it.
I read one time that Hitchcock wasn’t going to end the movie Psycho the way he did, but his producer insisted he provide an explanation. The story couldn’t end with a wrap-up of the crime. It needed a psychiatrist to give the audience a reason for it. This is because Americans want to know why an evil thing occurred and how could it be prevented in the future.
I felt this need while listening to a couple crime stories this week. In one story, four boys in rural Vermont decided to break and enter a remote home. Two of them said they would murder anyone who happened to be home, and they all carried knives to help, if the need arose. It did, but only the original two attacked the mother and daughter they found. The story was mostly told by one of the two in police interviews. He was an emotionally distant Mormon kid who lacked friends and was beginning to explore gang activity.
In the other story, an elderly couple was kidnapped in an effort to rob them. He said he would kill them after he’d obtained all the money. The wife was able to tip off the cops, who located the man through his car. This culprit was a family man, described by a church member as a Christian who had it all. He had been even a church elder at some point. But along with all of this, he was also a constant manipulator.
If evil like this can come from both social outcasts and respected members, what can be done to foresee or prevent it? We need a healthy understanding of our common depravity, and that out of the heart these and other great sins come. We are not good people. Only the Lord can make us so.
What other things can we say today?
Great Musician: Tony Bennett died this week. Ted Gioia writes, “I probably own 30 or 40 of his albums, and his singing has been part of my life since childhoodâwhen my Sicilian father played Tony Bennett records at our family home. At times, it almost felt like Bennett was a member of my extended family.
… “I could fill up an entire article just with stories of his acts of kindness. He radiated decency and generosity of heart. That showed up in his life and his music.”
New York City: “As for libraries, the sad truth is that, precisely because of the abandonment of broken-windows policing, those sheltered spaces are havens for the homeless and drug-addicted more than they are resources for the scholarly and intellectually curious.”
Found Music: The Kiffness takes internet videos and makes music with them. The one from July 15 seems appropriate to add here.
Photo: Christie’s Restaurant sign, Houston, Texas. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Writing for Christianity Today, Adam Graber suggests problems with artificial-intelligence-driven Bible reading software.
“As a digital theology expert, I believe these kinds of ‘BibleGPTs’ will continue to advance, proliferate, and eventually become proprietary systems. And as this happens, the church and its leaders will be prompted to make some momentous decisions about the Christian canon. This will, in turn, influence how we interpret the Bible and impact the future of our faith and practice.”
He goes to describe how AI-driven research tools could become like the knowledgeable friend who always has a ready answer for any question but who isn’t grounded enough in the Word to answer wisely every time. It may become another easy way to quickly survey the Bible, thinking we understand more than we do.
If you read the whole article, it doesn’t end as sensationally as it begins. He concludes saying we need to understand the Bible for ourselves, but the tone of the whole leans too much on people’s laziness. That isn’t new. We’ve always been lazy. I doubt AI will usher in more lethargy than we already indulge with the Internet.
Music today. I wanted to share the video above, because Iâd found it â and found it surprisingly beautiful.
Thereâs a story involved with the hymn, âJesus, Din Søte Forening ĂĄ Smake,â (Jesus, Thy Sweet Communion to Savor), which is called âJesus, I Long For Thy Blessed Communionâ in the English translation.
The story does not concern the writing of the hymn. I know nothing about the author, P. J. Hygom, and a quick web search indicates nobody else does either (I presume he was a Dane). The hymn itself is not one I grew up with. When I finally discovered it as an adult, I thought it rather dull. I never considered it beautiful until I heard Sisselâs rendition above. Now Iâve got it as an earworm.
But even its surprising beauty isnât the point. My point is its historical significance.
Iâve written before here about the founder of the Lutheran⌠sect, or whatever youâd call it, in which I was raised. The Haugeans. Hans Nielsen Hauge, a poor farmerâs son, was plowing his fatherâs field on April 5 1796, singing this hymn for his own edification. Then something happened to him. He wrote in his autobiography:
âNow my mind was so uplifted to God that I became senseless, nor can I explain what happened in my soul, because I was completely outside myself. And the first thing I understood when I regained my senses was a feeling of grief that I had not served above all things this dear, good God, and that I now believed that nothing in this world was of any value. And my soul felt something supernatural, divine and blessed; it was a glory which no tongue can express.â (My translation)
So overwhelmed was Hauge by this experience that he devoted his life to sharing the gospel with his neighbors. This would lead him to prominence in Norway, and also to prison and premature death.
But his movement was a seed planted in the right place at the right time. Not only was there a powerful Christian revival in Norway, but society itself was changed.
Haugeâs followers were often called âthe Readers.â That wasnât a compliment. The term expresses the surprise felt by the upper classes when they saw commoners going around with books. This troubled them. Books gave the lower classes uppity ideas.
To this day, Norwegians are among the most literate people on earth, with a surprising number of newspapers per capita.
Tonightâs post is probably of limited interest, but Iâm between books again. I found this drone video of Hodnefjell farm on the island of Mosterøy, (not to be confused with Moster on Bomlø, where St. Olaf instituted Christian law in Norway) a place where some of my ancestors on my dadâs side lived. These were the most historically significant ancestors Iâve heard about. Iâm sure Iâve written about this before.
According to Sigve Bø, my guide last year, the Hodnefjell family (if I remember correctly) had converted to Moravianism in the early 19th Century, a serious matter in state church Norway. But they heard about the lay evangelist Hans Nielsen Hauge and wrote to him, inviting him to visit them. He came and stayed with them on their farm. They were so impressed with his teaching that they converted back to Lutheranism and became âfriends of Hauge.â
They had a neighbor named John Haugvaldstad who also became a Haugean. He disliked farming and left for Stavanger (leaving his incompatible wife, whoâd never much liked him either. They lived separate lives but never divorced). There he became a successful businessman and the de facto leader of the Haugeans after Haugeâs imprisonment.
The Haugean circle in Stavanger had much to do with arranging the first organized party of emigrants to leave Norway for America. This group sailed in 1825 on the sloop âRestaurasjon.â The party was made up of Quakers and Haugeans, all looking for greater religious freedom in the US.
One of the books I’ve been reading this year is Carl F. Ellis Jr.’s Free at Last?: The Gospel in the African American Experience. It’s good history of African American movements and an exposition of the goals and promises they have held over the years. It’s a wealth of information and trivia that would make a great text for a semester course. The trivia mostly comes within the sixty-page glossary of people, places, and terms that may have been referred to in main text.
One of the terms explained in this glossary is the myth of the “curse of Ham.” It’s an idea I’ve known about for years, but I can’t remember how I first heard it. It came up several weeks ago on Twitter by one of those accounts that reads like a gateway drug to radicalization. It’s based on a few verses in Genesis 9, which read: “And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (Gen. 9:24-25 KJV).
It’s a weird passage because of the unclear reason Noah is provoked to curse his grandson and bless two of his three sons. But you see when reading these two verses that Ham is not the one cursed. It’s Canaan, his son. The narrative at this point emphasizes Ham being Canaan’s father, and in the next chapter it spells out the Canaanite peoples and some of the cities they founded, including Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s easy to see the setup for the wrath God would pour on them when bringing Israel back to the promised land.
But the myth is that Noah’s curse was on the father, Ham, touching every one of his descendants in every generation. Ellis says those who paint Christianity as a white man’s religion use this as a proof. Some of them argue it’s a good reason for African Americans to convert to Islam, but aside from this being a foolish interpretation of Genesis, it comes from a ninth-century Muslim apologist.
Ham the son of Noah was a white man, with a handsome face and figure, and the Almighty God changed his color and the color of his descendants in response to his father’s curse. He went away, followed by his sons, and they settled by the shore, where God increased and multiplied them. They were the blacks . . .
Ibn Qutaybah, KitÄb al-maĘżÄrif, p. 26
That, friends, is not Biblical theology. It misreads the written word of God and imagines an explanation to fit some human conclusion. If Christian orthodoxy is anything, it’s bound to God’s word (let the reader understand). Ellis adds that this idea was used to justify slavery within White Christianity-ism (an idolatrous civil religion that uses the language and forms of Christianity for its own ends).
