Category Archives: Religion

Religion

Why it’s not called “Very Bad, No Good, Horrible Friday”

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Tissot, “The Sorrowful Mother”

It’s a darker than usual Good Friday for me. I just got word that my boss, the dean of our seminary, a gentle and godly man, passed away suddenly today. He just wrote me a recommendation for graduate school. It must have been one of the very last things he did in his office.

He sat across from me in my office about a week ago, and we discussed our ages. I said I was pretty old to start working for a Master’s. He said, “I’m a decade older than you, and I’m not planning to go anywhere.”

Is it good to die on Good Friday? A complicated question, as is the whole matter of “Good” Friday.

As far as I can tell, there are two major ways of explaining evil in the world (outside of the popular view that “it’s all garbage, so let’s just have a good time until we die”) today. One is what might be called the Buddhist Way, which understands evil to be an illusion, because existence itself is an illusion, so there’s no point getting upset.

The other is what I’ll call the Christian Way (though there are probably non-Christians who hold it in some variety). That way calls for citing the Old Testament statement that “God is a Man of War,” and believing that evil is real, but that He is in the process of defeating it.

Both ways have their problems, and cannot be proved by logic or science. But I know which suits me better. Continue reading Why it’s not called “Very Bad, No Good, Horrible Friday” →

Religion

Reflecting on a Letter by a Lesbian Believer

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Double ExposureHunter Baker has blessed Christians on the Internet by posting this letter, “An Astonishing Message from a Gay Sister in Christ” and his personal response. I feel provoked to share my reflections also.

“She sees herself as a sinner and reaches for the bracing, redemptive, and cleansing blood of Christ rather than the lukewarm saliva of evolving culture.” She is like I am, though the labels differ.

Let me come out of the closet. I am an idolater.

I believe I have an idolatrous orientation. At one time in my life, I would have said one cannot be a true follower of Christ and an idolater, but I see that I am one. I was born this way. I have followed Christ since age seven, but as I became an adult, I realized I made and loved idols regularly. I worshiped (never in church–wait, I don’t think I can say that) myself, my dreams, the attention of others, my books, my relative grades, and other things over the Lord God who made me and rules heaven and earth. I have confessed of this sin, felt free of it, and returned to it within the course of a week.

Many people like me have tried to change the church to accommodate them and succeeded. Some have changed entire denominations. But I don’t want accommodation. I want redemption.

On this day, when we remember the death of the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, I want to take shelter in His bloody side. I can’t change myself.

Authors, Religion

Pixar's Pete Docter

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Radix Magazine, “Where Christian Faith Meets Contemporary Culture,” did an interview a while back with the director of Monsters, Inc., Pete Docter. Pete has since directed Pixar’s Up and written Wall-E and Monsters University. (via Jeffrey Overstreet)

Here’s part of it:

Radix: How would you say that being a Christian affects how you do your work?

Docter: Years ago when I first spoke at church, I was kind of nervous about talking about Christianity and my work. It didn’t really connect. But more and more it seems to be connecting for me. I ask for God’s help, and it’s definitely affected what I’m doing. It’s helped me to calm down and focus. There were times when I got too stressed out with what I was doing, and now I just step back and say, “God, help me through this.” It really helps you keep a perspective on things, not only in work, but in relationships.

At first you hire people based purely on their talent, but what it ends up is that people who really go far are good people. They’re good people to work with, and I think God really helps in those relationships.

Radix: I know you do a lot of praying, and that’s a big part of the artistic part of what you guys do.

Docter: Yes. You could probably work on a live-action movie that takes maybe six months hating everybody else and you’d still have a film. But these animation projects take three or four years, and it’s really difficult to do without having a good relationship with the people you’re working with.

Pete goes on to describe how spelling out the moral of a story, if you have one in mind, undermines your message. “To me art is about expressing something that can’t be said in literal terms. You can say it in words, but it’s always just beyond the reach of actual words.”

Religion

Of course I don't mean YOUR baby…

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G. K. Chesterton wrote, in Orthodoxy, “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.”

As evidence of that contention, I offer this article from CTV News:

Hamlin said the findings suggest that babies feel something like schaudenfreude, a German term describing the pleasure experienced when someone you dislike or consider threatening experiences harm.

Personally I’ve never trusted babies. Shifty eyes.

Fiction, Religion

Faith, Morality in Crime Fiction

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David Masciotra says you can find faith in modern literature by reading crime novels. “The case for faith in fiction is to be made by those who deal with cracking cases for a living—the fictional detectives, private investigators, and troubled protagonists who inhabit the scandalous, seductive, and serpentine setting of noir.” Take Hit Me by Lawrence Block, for example. Mascoitra notes the main character’s desire to kill for money and conviction when confronted by iconography. When the man must pass a crucifix in order to kill someone, he can’t do it.

Mascoitra praises James Lee Burke for weaving these spiritual questions and motives better than most crime authors. Burke wrote to him: “Most of my plots come from the Bible or Greek mythology. I believe in the unseen world and believe the cosmos is probably something like the Oversoul that Emerson wrote of. I believe the essential human drama is between the forces of good and evil.”

Religion

On diversity

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Something from my devotions today: 1 Corinthinas 12: 4-6: “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.”

The devotional I was reading from used the old King James terminology – “diversities of gifts, diversities of working,” etc.

And I got to thinking about word “diversity.”

If there’s any word that’s been abused in our time (and there are plenty) it’s “diversity.” Whenever a contemporary American hears the word diversity, he tenses up, figuring some bureaucrat is about to impose another form of uniformity on him. We’ve made diversity about race, and that’s just stupid.

Snatch up a dozen people from random spots around the world, and set them down together in a room. It’s my certain conviction that the least important thing about any person in that group will be his or her race (their views on race may have significance, though). Gender will matter. Politics and religion will matter, as will cultural tradition. I don’t know for a fact whether general racial traits actually exist in people (apart from physical appearance), but if there are such traits they will have little or no significance, except in terms of how people respond to them.

And yet we talk as if diversity were just about race. A university proudly points to its multi-racial faculty, calling it diverse, even though every single member of that faculty holds ideas and beliefs almost indistinguishable from any of the others.

All this is not what St. Paul is talking about here. The big racial divide in the early church was between Jews and Gentiles, and I’m quite sure the presence of both wasn’t what he meant by diversity.

What he meant was a wonderful truth, a truth Christianity has given as a gift to the world, which the world now takes for granted and thinks it came up with itself.

Paul declared that every human being – however weak, poor, and thickheaded – had a special, precious gift to give the Church, the Body of Christ. However little some individual seemed to have to offer, he did have a gift to share, according to Paul. All members of the Church were like organs in a body. The kidneys might be a little ashamed of their humble function, and the other organs might make jokes about them, but take the kidneys away – put their owner on a transplant waiting list – and it suddenly becomes clear how much those kidneys matter. Everybody matters in the Church.

This truth – in spite of centuries of officious attempts to make the Church an aristocracy where only the elite organs counted – could not be forgotten, and kept (and keeps) pushing through. Everybody matters. The one lost sheep counts. The widow’s mite counts more than the rich man’s endowment.

That’s what diversity actually means.

Reading, Religion

More from Through Norway With a Knapsack

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I’m feeling a bit better now, thanks for asking, having seen a doctor last week and gotten antibiotics and a steroid for my lungs. But a day at work still wipes me out, and I’ve got stuff I need to get done tonight. So, in lieu of the hard work of thinking out a blog post, I’ll just post another short excerpt from Williams’ Through Norway With a Knapsack, last night’s subject.

In this episode, our hero has gotten lost and spent a long day on the mountains, finally finding a guest house late at night, exhausted.

On awakening, I found a stout gentleman sitting at my bedside. He was the pastor of Lom. A Norwegian pastor is not merely a preacher; he is clergy-man, physician, magistrate, arbitrator, and general friend and father, to whom all his scattered parishioners appeal. In a country where there are none but peasant farmers – no aristocracy, no gentry, no towns and villages, no shopkeepers, no professional class – a highly educated man must be strangely isolated, and, unless endowed with the true spirit of Christian benevolence, must be one of the most miserable of men; but, if suited to his work, he may be one of the happiest, for his opportunities of doing unmistakable good, and of witnessing the full fruits of his good deeds, are almost unlimited. Most of these Norwegian pastors are, I believe, excellent men, and render great services to the people around.

In the present instance, the paternal relations of the good pastor of Lom were illustrated in my case, for he sat at my bedside, where he had evidently been watching for some time, as though he feared that some fever or other ailment might result from the over-exertion, excitement and fasting….

Religion

Blind Spots

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Anthony Bradley talks about the rap song “Precious Puritans” by Propaganda. He explains how the song criticizes puritans for condone slavery (which frankly is news to me and troubling), but goes on to say he, the singer, is no better. We all have flaws and blind spots.
However, by singing about puritans in an unflattering way Propaganda has raised the ire of many reformed writers. Bradley suggests this may be typical tribal thinking.

Strachan considers the Puritans “forefathers” and in a tribalist way, some would argue, seeks to protect their legacy. Had Propaganda dropped a track critiquing Roman Catholics, Jeremiah Wright, Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, or preachers of the prosperity gospel, he’d be called a hero. During my seminary years I was rebuked once for mentioning Martin Luther King Jr. in a sermon because of his sins. Why? Because King, like the others, are outside the tribe and are fair game to be critiqued in any form. Since they are not “one of us” there is no expectation of extending grace. Grace is reserved for those with whom we agree.

Non-fiction, Religion

Gospel Deeps, by Jared Wilson

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In warning his readers against divisions, Paul writes, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). The gospel to those of us who are being saved is the power of God. That describes the beauty of a book like Jared Wilson’s Gospel Deeps. It’s an extended meditation on this glorious word of the cross.
“Does love demand freedom?” he asks in chapter one. That’s the idea we get from many stories and some ministers. “What we are asked to believe is that God doing whatever he wants with whomever he wants is a simplistic, fatalistic view of love, and that God letting us do whatever we want is a more compelling vision of his love.” But God, who is the author and giver of life itself, whose character defines love, peace, joy and other virtues, could not be more loving than he is. God is love, though love is not God, as some would have it. “Maybe the reality is a love more multifaceted than we can understand with finite, fallen minds… that the God of the Bible is as transcendent as he is imminent, that his ways are inscrutable, that his love is glorious and astonishing precisely because it is too wonderful for us” (pp. 27-28).
Jared isn’t a mystic on a frozen Vermont hillside. Continue reading Gospel Deeps, by Jared Wilson →

Religion, Writing

"Paperman"

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There’s a good chance you’ve seen this short film already. Paperman is a black-and-white, almost silent production done by Disney animators using only traditional (non-computer) animation techniques. Everybody loves it, and with good reason.

I have to admit that, being me, I had a mixed reaction at first. Then I realized I was wrong. I want to explain why, because it has to do with the nature of Story.

(Spoilers below. Do not read until you’ve watched the film through.)

My initial, self-oriented response was to say, “Life isn’t like that. The Universe does not step in to make your dreams come true.”

Then I saw that I’d missed the point. The point is that when the Universe took a hand in this couple’s story, it was only after the young man had done everything he could from his own end. He’d made his boss mad, and may have sacrificed his job, for the girl. It’s a little like the merchant in Jesus’ parable, who sold all he had in order to purchase the Pearl of Great Price.

If you’re writing a story, you can permit a Deus Ex Machina (I’ve written about this before), but only after you’ve let the character suffer and fail a whole lot. If the audience feels he’s tried his best, and not gotten the reward he deserves, then you can bring the Cosmic Hand in to set things right at the end. If you handle it carefully.

That’s a narrative principle only, by the way. It’s not theological, or only partly theological. Christianity does not teach that you gain God’s acceptance through trying your hardest, followed by God’s pleased intervention to finish the job for you. In Christianity it’s all grace from first to last.

Still, from the experiential point of view, the two things are hard to tell apart. The moment of grace is when the merchant falls in love with the Pearl, when the young man falls in love with the girl. All their efforts afterward are not actually their own accomplishments but entirely the work of God’s grace within, doing business as Love.

It’s a mystery.

Everything is.