I now have an article available for your perusal over at the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Online.
Category Archives: Religion
In a Viking church
Here’s something one of my Facebook friends brought to my attention. The Viking Museum at Ribe, Denmark, has unveiled its recreation of what they think a 9th Century Viking church in Denmark would have looked like. It is not – as you can see – exactly what you’d expect. And by you, of course, I mean me.
I’ve never bothered to describe Father Ailill’s church in detail in my Erling books. I assume it was built of wood, and I conceived of it of being similar to the average Viking house. In Hailstone Mountain, I describe it as having at least one tapestry hanging on the wall. It has an altar in front. Pews were not used in those days. I’ve kept it vague.
But here come these Danes now with their bright painted walls. I’m reminded of the church at Åkra, near Skånevik, Norway, an ancestral church of mine I visited two years ago. (Picture above.) It’s not as old as the Viking Age, but pretty old. There was one place where restorers discovered a bit of wall painting underneath a door frame, over the top of the sacristy door. They left that section of frame hinged, so you can lift the piece of wood and see the painting below. They believe it showed a scene of Samson killing the lion.
In any case, I do have quibbles. The brightness of the photos in the article should not be taken to indicate what churchgoers saw in the Viking Age. The building would have been illuminated mostly by lamps. There would have been a lot of shadows. The brightness of the images would have been necessary in part (I think) to make them visible at all in the general gloom.
Speaking of light, I’m curious about the windows in this reconstruction. My own understanding is that glass windows, in that period, were rare and extremely expensive. I expend quite a few words, in my work in progress, The Baldur Game, in having Father Ailill describe, on a visit to England, how amazed he is to see a modestly large glass window in the palace at Winchester. And Erling is quite proud of one small window in one of his halls. I imagined no windows at all in Ailill’s church.
However, the people at Ribe are experts. They undoubtedly know a lot more than I do. (Though I’m not sure Norwegian churches would necessarily have followed Carolingian fashion.)
In any case, those windows look pretty extravagant to me. I wonder what archaeological evidence there is for them.
When a storm is a rock
And when he got into the boat, his disciples followed him. And behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him, saying, “Save us, Lord; we are perishing.” And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?” (Matthew 8: 23-27, ESV)
My Heaven-sent translation work continues. I had a good day yesterday and got a little ahead of my quota. This is good, because I translated nothing on Saturday (and I don’t write for money on Sundays if I can help it). I need to translate 100 pages each month for the next five months to deliver on time. I’m 50 pages in now, and the month isn’t half over yet, so I’m doing just fine.
But it never hurts to run ahead of schedule. Impress the client, and if I finish sooner, I get my final payment sooner.
The laborer, as the Good Book says, is worthy of his hire.
Speaking of the Good Book, I was struck by the passage printed above during my devotions last week. I wrote about the Sermon on the Mount not long ago, and now I’m in the early passages that follow the sermon. I’ve read the Bible a number of times since I was a kid, but I never noticed until recently how much context means.
I wrote about it in my earlier posts – how counterintuitive Jesus’ teaching is (none of these thoughts are original to me, of course. I’m coming to them from the back of queue). The bottom line seems to be, “Build your house on a rock.” But what’s the rock like? It has nothing to do with a good job, or saving money, or investing in bonds or real estate. The rock Jesus is talking about seems to be solidly anchored in mid-air. Invest in Heaven. Step out onto the stormy waves – that’s your real security.
And Jesus demonstrates this in Matthew 8:23-27. Immediately after He delivers the sermon, He’s confronted with human chaos – he meets a leper, the very embodiment of disordered health. He heals the leper. He heals a centurion’s servant – the centurion, interestingly, doesn’t need to observe Jesus performing the miracle; he believes without seeing, earning approval. Then Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law, and then he’s mobbed by a multitude of “many who were oppressed by demons.” That’s the disordered state of the world – exactly what He’s been preaching against; exactly what He came to fix. Then a couple of disciple wannabees show up, offering to follow Jesus, but with reservations. Jesus puts it on the line – it’s all or nothing. They can’t handle the apparent insecurity and back off.
And then what does Jesus do? He gets into a boat and starts across the Sea of Galilee.
I think I’ve written about this before. I allude to the theme frequently in The Baldur Game (it’s coming, it’s coming!). The Jews thought of the sea (any sea) as Chaos, as Sheol, as Hell. The place of maximum insecurity, maximum danger. The opposite of the Rock we’re supposed to build our houses on. And Jesus just sets out to sail on it. Not only that, but He’s headed for the Decapolis — pagan territory, where demons dwell.
And as they’re crossing the Sea (or lake), a storm blows up – which I understand is common on Galilee. And the disciples are terrified, and (one assumes) they’re running the sail down and bailing and rowing like mad…
And Jesus is sleeping like a baby. They wake Him, and He says, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” And he snaps His fingers (so to speak) and the storm turns over on its back like puppy wanting its belly scratched.
What Jesus is saying, I think, is “Buckle up, boys, this is what it means to build your house on a rock.”
The church, I think, is built by people who see faith as an adventure. It withers under people who see it as a job of work.
This is my Father’s world, no matter what Weldon thought
I thought, since it’s Friday, I’d post some music consistent with my overheated musings in yesterday’s post. So here’s a lovely arrangement of “This Is My Father’s World,” one of my old favorite hymns. It was originally published in 1901, with lyrics by Rev. Maltbie D. Babcock (1858-1901), a sadly short-lived Presbyterian pastor who published several popular hymns. The tune is Terra Beata, based on an English folk song. (And I’m pretty sure they cribbed the first line for the Shire theme in the Lord of the Rings movies.)
Here’s an interesting item from the latest issue of the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. It’s all the better for being written by our good friend Dale Nelson:
Pages 22 and 23 feature Dale’s article on Thomas Dewar Weldon (1896-1958), with whom Lewis had a variable relationship. They came to Oxford at the same time, and were good friends for a while. But even before he stopped being an atheist, Lewis grew weary of Weldon’s relentless, materialist cynicism. As a tutor in Moral Philosophy his teaching method (according to R. W. Johnson’s book, Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age) was to first demolish his students’ conventional beliefs, and then to demolish whatever new beliefs they constructed, until they were left “in a state of free-floating agnostic cleverness.”
Weldon declared, in a 1944 lecture at Bomber Command Headquarters, near Oxford, that the carpet bombing of German cities was justified because it would shorten the war and save lives. Lewis was already on the record, along with a number of Anglican clergy, as rejecting that argument categorically.
Weldon was (according to George Sayer) that “hardest-boiled atheist” who remarked to Lewis in his rooms one day that the evidence for the Resurrection of Christ was remarkably good, saying, “Rum thing,” as Lewis recalled in Surprised By Joy.
Weldon was also the model for the Dick Devine, the cynical, flippant character who’s so annoying in Out of the Silent Planet and (promoted to the title, Lord Feverstone) in That Hideous Strength.
Pensees
Thoughts from my devotional time:
Part 1: Building on a rock
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:24-27, ESV)
Whenever I read the Sermon on the Mount, I’m struck by the surreal nature of the whole message. It’s as if someone told us, “Well, obviously the sky is green, and the quickest way to get from New York to San Francisco is by way of Hong Kong.” Look at the Beatitudes – “Lucky you if you’re spiritually poor! The Kingdom belongs to you! Lucky you if you’re mourning, because you’ll be comforted! Lucky you if people push you around, because you’ll inherit the whole shebang!”
These things are – very obviously – not factual, at least about life as we experience it. Jesus is turning our expectations upside down. The world doesn’t actually work the way you think it does, He’s saying. You need to zig when everybody else zags. You need to do take dangerous path instead of the safe one. Where there’s smoke, don’t expect fire. Don’t plan ahead. Don’t budget sensibly. Live like the birds of the air.
Live an impractical life.
And then, here at the end, He comes out with this metaphor of a rock. Which seems an obvious contradiction. He’s been telling us to build castles in the air, and now He’s saying, keep your feet on the ground, No, more than that – build your house on a rock. You need solid foundations.
The point, it seems to me, is this – Jesus is telling us not to believe our lying eyes. The world is not what we think it is. Everything that seems solid is in fact nebulous (a preview of modern Physics, perhaps?) while the really solid things are invisible and counterintuitive and have to be taken on faith.
Part 2: Emotion in faith
I’ve been thinking recently about the problem of emotion in our Christian faith.
I was raised, as I’ve told you, in the Pietist tradition. We believe in having what’s sometimes called an “Ah ha!” moment, when we receive Christ personally, often in a very passionate way. Much in our tradition is aimed at keeping that passion worked up. We’re warned against growing lukewarm, losing our first love.
The more high church tradition, against which my ancestors reacted, dismissed such thinking as “enthusiasm” (a negative term for them). They recognized – very sensibly – that it’s not only difficult, but ultimately self-defeating to try to live with our emotions perpetually amped up. It wears you down, emotionally and spiritually. (Remember how C. S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, describes abandoning his faith as a boy with great relief, after having worked very hard at keeping his fervor up?)
But the high church approach, to us Pietists, seems cold and lifeless.
It occurred to me that imagining the created universe as music, an idea I’ve been playing with recently, might help resolve this conundrum.
If you think of the Kingdom of God as a musical masterpiece, a symphony or an oratorio, then we believers are members of the orchestra, or the choir. If you don’t feel like playing or singing today, it doesn’t matter. You perform your part anyway. Just do the work. The music is the main thing.
And quite often, the music takes you by surprise and you get caught up in it spontaneously.
So when I pray or go to church or serve the in my vocation and “I’m not feeling it,” I do it all the same. Because the music is the main thing.
If my mind is on the music – the Kingdom of God – the religious ecstasy comes on its own timetable. “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)
Bored in Heaven?
[This is an irregular, unscheduled Saturday blog post. I got the idea this morning during my prayers, and I liked it too well to keep to myself.]
I caught a short video clip where a guy was ridiculing the idea of Heaven.
“Isn’t perfection kind of boring?” he asked. “I mean, if everything’s perfect, what’s left for anybody to do?”
The answer to that, I think, starts with C. S. Lewis’ response to those who laugh at images of wings and harps in Heaven – “People who can’t understand books written for grownups shouldn’t read them.”
Is there a more common truism than the statement, “I began to grow wise when I began to understand how little I knew”?
As we grow and learn in this life, we never reach a point where we can say, “Now I’ve got it all. Now there’s nothing left for me to learn.”
On the contrary. The more we learn, the more we grow aware of all that’s left to learn. Sometimes the material is just not available at the moment – unrecorded history, scientific discoveries not yet made, mathematical formulae that haven’t been worked out yet.
It never ends.
And that’s just in this world.
Suppose you were suddenly transported into the Infinite. Do you think you’d run out of things to discover? Do you think you’d run out of truth and beauty, when you’re face to face at last with the very Source of truth and beauty, who is infinite?
It sounds more like an everlasting Quest to me.
This might be why Pride is the greatest sin. If we approach the Ultimate Truth with a prideful, know-it-all attitude, we won’t be capable of enjoying Heaven at all. We might think it dull.
Maybe that’s what Hell is.
The glory in the Face
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:6)
I’ve been thinking about the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. That turn of phrase has intrigued me for a long time.
The glory of God is a frequent topic in Scripture. In the Old Testament, God’s glory is a serious issue. The people of Israel could not bear to hear His voice on Sinai, and asked Moses to be their mediator instead (Exodus 20). When Moses was permitted to see God’s “backside” (Exodus 34) on the mountain, he got the merest glimpse of the least part of the divine glory, and yet his face shown for days.
The Holy of Holies in the temple was so sacred that common people couldn’t enter. When Uzzah touched the Ark of the Covenant – even to keep it from slipping off a cart – God struck him down (2 Samuel 6).
In short, the Hebrews took God’s holiness deadly seriously. God was just and merciful, but nobody to treat lightly. Holiness meant separation, and nothing was holier than God. His holiness could kill you. He was so Other that even images of Him were forbidden.
Then along comes Jesus Christ, claiming to be God incarnate.
Suddenly God – of whom no image might be made – had a face.
That’s amazing, when you think of it.
If He really was the incarnation of that same God who terrified the Hebrews, a tremendous condescension had happened. The voltage had been stepped down infinitely, just so God could walk among men without leaving corpses behind wherever He went. To the contrary, this Holiness healed the sick and raised the dead.
Too often Christians forget what we’re dealing with in Jesus Christ. We take the incarnation for granted. We handle holy things lightly. We ought to remember what incredible power we’re dealing with. The Lion has agreed to be our friend, but it would be wise not to poke the Lion.
More than that, how amazing is it to look in a kind Man’s face, and encounter God Himself? As theologians have observed, only the Highest can descend to the very lowest level. God has always been perfect goodness, but Jesus Christ made that perfection touchable.
The phrase “perfection made better” comes to mind. It’s probably wrong in some theological way, but it’s what strikes me.
From the sublime (mine) to the ridiculous (Netflix)
In today’s really important news, my article on the Lutheran Free Church for the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty Magazine is now available free online. You can marvel at its awesomeosity at this link.
In even better news, I HAVE FINISHED MY MARATHON SLOG THROUGH THE VIKINGS: VALHALLA SERIES.
It was particularly frustrating watching a series that covered events I’ve researched and dramatized in my own novels, observing how the producers took historical events and characters, shuffled them like cards, and dealt them out in random order. Particularly annoying was their treatment of King Magnus the Good of Norway, who is treated here as a homicidal psychopath. I mean, they called him “the Good” for a reason.
But what’s important is that I can write my article now, with an eventual eye to payment. All through my life, I’ve harkened back to a poem I read somewhere, which went like this (more or less):
There’s a little check at the end of this verse.
I see it just three lines away.
And it shall be mine
For the good of my purse
If luck is my fellow today.
(I’d credit the author, but a web search doesn’t reveal his name, and I can’t find it in the book where I thought I saw it.)
‘The glory and honor of the nations’
And how was your Independence Day? I feel like I spent the whole long weekend watching that bloody Vikings series, and I sympathize with the Dark Age Christians who are supposed to have prayed (there’s some controversy about this) “A furore normannorum, libera nos Domine” (From the fury of the Northmen, deliver us, O Lord”).
I mean, will the cursed thing never end? I finally finished Season Four, which turned out to be a double season – twenty episodes. And Season Five apparently has the same number. I grow grateful that they compressed the timeline – an accurate chronology might kill me off. Yet another martyr of Viking atrocities.
The more I watch, the more I’m impressed that the writers and producers simply had no interest in real Vikings at all. They invented some fantasy barbarians, in fantasy outfits and haircuts, and injected them into a fast-forward early medieval chronology. Here and there they throw in an authentic (or semi-authentic) artifact to make it look good, but basically they’re just spitballing – probably under the influence of drugs.
Well, enough of my problems. Let’s turn to something inspirational. Here’s part of what I read in my devotions this morning, from Revelation 21:22-27:
And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
This is part of the big triumph scene in Revelation. God’s enemies have been conquered and disposed of in the Lake of Fire along with the devil and his angels. God’s eternal Kingdom has been revealed – it’s a huge city, perfectly square in shape. (I take this as a contrast with the earlier statement that the sea will be no more. The sea in Scripture symbolizes chaos and disorder, the unruly things God bridled at Creation, and which have now been abolished forever. Instead we now have the City Foursquare, solid, flawless, unshakeable. All the wrong and injustice of the world is gone. No longer will anyone complain that life makes no sense. In the Kingdom, it does make sense. Life is fair at last.)
And I was struck by these verses: “The kings of the earth will bring their glory into it….They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.”
What does that mean? I can’t make pronouncements, being neither a theologian nor a Greek scholar, but what struck me immediately was that the glory and honor of the nations had formerly been outside the Kingdom, and will now be brought into it.
To me that suggests cultural and intellectual glory and honor. The art and philosophy of Athens. The wisdom of China. The strength of Rome. The subtle delicacy of Japan. The courage and honor of Native Americans. The creativity of Africans. No beautiful thing will be lost – they’ll be taken as spoils by the true Kingdom and brought into the City, to the glory of God and for the delight of His elect.
It’s like a backwards missionary effort – even the old heathen things will be christened. As Chesterton wrote in “The Ballad of the White Horse”: “Because it is only Christian men, Guard even heathen things.”
I took that (perhaps in arrogance) as a possible benison on my Viking books.
Personal drivel, plus Cain & Abel
First I’ll tell you what’ s going on in my thrill-packed life. Then I’ll tell you about one of my cosmic revelations. Those are always good for a chuckle.
There’s a shrink-wrapped pile of roofing material sitting in the driveway behind my house. I had hail damage last year and my insurance company authorized a full replacement. But one complication after another has delayed the actual job. First it was supposed to happen today. Then tomorrow. Now it’s all in flux – it may or may not happen tomorrow, like Schroedinger’s Shingles. What makes it annoying is that the contractors are going to be parking a dumpster in front of my garage when finally they get to work, which means I have to park on the street tonight on the possibility that work will start tomorrow.
Even more annoying, my air conditioning is out, and has been for about three weeks now. I have a sort of insurance for that, too – a home warranty. The HVAC tech who autopsied my unit said the compressor had burned out, and it couldn’t be replaced. A new AC unit would have to come in. And that shouldn’t take long.
The warranty company, however, has ideas of its own. They opted to replace the compressor. They have a source for replacements which (apparently) they get at a discount. But that source is not a fast source. So we’re still waiting for the part to be delivered.
Thankfully, we’ve had relatively cool weather recently.
Which is supposed to end tomorrow.
Ah, well. I grew up without air conditioning. And hey, it keeps my electric bills down.
A pack of blessings lie on my head, as the Friar said to Romeo (not long before Romeo killed himself).
And what is my revelation?
It wasn’t a full-fledged revelation, of course. Just one of those moments when two ideas inhabiting separate pigeonholes in my brain suddenly link, and I have an ah ha! moment.
It started out with Jordan Peterson. I’ve grown quite taken with Jordan Peterson videos. He’s not right about everything, but he can see correctly what the problems are. He exhorts me to do things I don’t want to do, which is generally a mark of truth.
Anyway, Peterson was talking about Cain in Genesis 4. Peterson’s interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel is that it represents the Easy Way and the Hard Way in life. Cain sacrificed vegetables, which were (as Peterson sees it) an easy sacrifice. Abel sacrificed animals, which means blood and pain. God was pleased with Abel because he took the Hard Way. The right thing in life almost always means blood and pain.
The spark, the circuit that closed, for me was a comparison to the parable of the talents, of which I think I’ve written here before. There are two versions of the parable. In Matthew 25, the master gives talents (sums of money) to three servants – five to one, two to another, and one to the last. In Luke 19, he calls ten servants and gives them ten talents each. In each case, the servants are told to do business with (invest) the money for him while he’s away. In each case, only one servant fails – the one who, instead of investing the money, hides it safely. He returns the full amount to his master, and his master is furious. He didn’t want security. He expected a profit.
The point in both stories – looking at it this way – is that God expects his servants to stretch their horizons. Do bigger things. Move outside their comfort zones. Break new ground, at least personally.
This isn’t about salvation, of course. Salvation is by grace. This is about our earthly lives – what God expects us to do with the talents He bestowed. We’re not here just to wait passively for Heaven. We’ve been given gifts – for the sake of our families, for our neighbors, and (especially) for the church.
And always God expects the bloody sacrifice, the dying to the self. Taking up the cross.
It all makes me feel tremendously guilty. But even I can recognize the truth of it.