Category Archives: Religion

Religion, Uncategorized

‘The Mansions of the Lord’

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I always post “The Mansions of the Lord” on Memorial Day, because no other song I know expresses it like that one does. It doesn’t work theologically, but even I have to just go with my heart sometimes.

As I wrote in The Year of the Warrior, playing fast and loose with theology in my own right:

“It’s strange to die this way, and me a Christian. If I were heathen yet, I’d know that Odin would welcome me to Valhalla. What welcome has Christ for a warrior, Father?”

I had no quick answer, and Moling must have seen my trouble, because he asked what the boy had said. I told him.

“Tell him I’ve had a dream about Heaven,” said Moling. “The teachers tell us that the Beloved lives outside Time itself. He goes back and forth in it when He wills. And when we go to be with Him, we too will be outside Time.

“It seemed to me in my dream that at the last day the Beloved called together all the great warriors who had been brave and merciful, and who had trusted in His mercy, and He mustered them into a mighty army, and He said to them, ‘Go forth for Me now, My bonny fighters, and range through Time, and wherever there is cruelty and wickedness that makes the weak to suffer, and faithful to doubt My goodness, wherever the children are slain or violated, wherever the women are raped or beaten, wherever the old are threatened and robbed, then take your shining swords and fight that cruelty and wickedness, and protect my poor and weak ones, and do not lay down your weapons or take your rest until all such evil is crushed and defeated, and the right stands victorious in every place and every time. We will not empty Hell even with this, for men love Hell, but I made a sweet song at the beginning, My sons, and though men have sung it foul we will make it sweet again forever.’”

I said these words to Halvard in Norse, and he died smiling.

Blogs, Socials, Religion, Uncategorized

The Christian Air We Breathe, a Memorial Day Story, and Blogroll Links

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I love discussions that delve into how the whole world has changed under the influence of Christianity. Speaking to unbelievers, Glen Scrivener writes, “You already hold particularly ‘Christian-ish’ views, and the fact that you think of these values as natural, obvious, or universal shows how profoundly the Christian revolution has shaped you.”

Scrivener has a new book, The Air We Breathe, in which he discusses how all manner of modern ideals have Christian origins, and when debating Christian speakers, atheists and other non-Christians will assume Christian positions on their way to undermining Christian principles. Black Lives Matter couldn’t exist as a popular American concept brought up in many arguments over human dignity without the foundation of God’s created image so many assume today (despite explicitly rejecting it, as some do). It’s marvelous.

Movies: The state of cinema today (via Prufrock)
“We are in the present losing more movies from the past faster than ever before. It seems like we aren’t, but the mere disappearance of physical media is already having corporations curating what we watch, faster for us,” Guillermo Del Toro said.

A Memorial Day Story: Elliot Ritzema heard from his grandpa via the marginal notes in Citizen Soldiers. “When Ambrose wrote, ‘The Ninth Tactical Air Force had a dozen airstrips in Normandy by this time,’ my grandpa added, We were one of these airstrips, 36th Fighter Group, 32nd Service Group.”

The Hobbit in Bears: Is this is a case of life imitating art?

Photo: Big Ole, Alexandria, Minnesota, 2001. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Religion, Writing

God as Storyteller

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Photo credit; Mike Erskine. Unsplash license.

Consumer warning: I’m about to do a think piece. The management assumes no responsibility for any mental damage that may be sustained by those who rashly read on…

Gene Edward Veith posted about “God as a poet” today on his Cranach blog (I’d link to it, but it’s behind a pay wall). I commented about my own theory, becoming a conviction (wisely or not), that God is a storyteller.

In my case, the idea goes back quite a long time, to when I was learning to tell stories (something I learned relatively late in life). How a story involves taking a (usually likeable) main character, giving him (or her. Or it) a problem, then having them try to solve it. Their attempt not only fails, but makes the problem worse. Repeat as needed, escalating at each stage, until they either a) succeed, or b) fail in a significant way.

And then I noticed that that is precisely how life works (something I haven’t actually learned yet, in practical terms). We face problems, we keep trying, learning what works and what doesn’t as we go, until we find something that works. Or else we die.

And I thought, “Hey, life is like a story. I’ll bet that’s why stories are such a universal human phenomenon.”

And then I got all metaphysical. “Maybe stories reflect reality because God is Himself a storyteller. Scripture certainly presents the history of salvation as a narrative. A narrative with a Hero and a plot.”

And then I thought, “Maybe that answers the ancient question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” If God has shaped all creation as a story, then bad things would have to happen to good people. Because that’s how stories work (see paragraph 3 above). Every writer knows the struggle of creating a character you like, and then subjecting them to torture – for the sake of the story.

Another commenter at Cranach suggested that this trivializes suffering. I can see how they might think that. I seem to be saying that God lets children die of cancer, or live in abuse, just to tell a story.

But that objection depends on two assumptions:

One is that stories are trivial things. If, as I am coming to believe, the creation itself is a story, then it’s the farthest thing from trivial. I’m not deprecating reality – I’m exalting Story.

Secondly, it all depends on what you think of the Storyteller. Whether He’s going to tie all the loose ends up in the end. Whether He created His characters in love, or just to amuse Himself.

I believe that the Storyteller began His story – “Let there be light” – with loving purpose. And He’ll wrap it up by fulfilling His loving promise: “Yes, I am coming quickly!” And then comes the Wedding Feast, and they live happily ever after.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction, Religion

What of Our Deeds Will Matter for Long, Statesmen, and Blogroll

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“Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,
                           Nothing but bones,
      The sad effect of sadder groans:
Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.”
from “Death” by George Herbert

A handful of life paths — intellectual and artistic work in particular — are about trying to create, as Horace wrote, “a monument more lasting than bronze.” They are a calculated gamble that a life dedicated to the difficult and narrow path will continue after our death, however unrewarding it might have been to experience.

But that we even have Horace’s poetry to read is as much a caprice of fate as a function of his poetic virtue. Some manuscripts survive the collapse of civilization, others do not; it seems unlikely that these survivals and disappearances precisely track merit. We have Horace and we are missing most of Sappho.

It’s Very Unlikely Anyone Will Read This in 200 Years (via Prufrock)

Statesmen: A review of The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation by Daniel J. Mahoney. “The best politician employs the intellectual and moral virtues and ‘all the powers of the soul,’ with proper humility and deference to divine and moral law, to better the community.” Has anyone in this generation or last done this? Have we lost this type of man for a while?

Racism: Albert Camus has something to teach us about anti-racism in his book The Fall. “The Fall operates as a reverse confessional with the priest as the penitent who, rather than seeking absolution, wants only to implicate us in his guilt. With this inverted symbol Camus recognizes that power often wears a priestly frock.”

Abolition of Man: Do you think you understand Lewis’s Abolition of Man? Here’s some help. “Through Ward’s page-by-page, sometimes line-by-line, and occasionally word-by-word exegesis of Abolition, we discover the wide plethora of sources upon which Lewis drew to critique his opponents as well as to appeal to Western and non-Western thinkers who have maintained confidence in reason’s capacity to know moral truth.”

Evil: A review of Sarah Weinman’s Scoundrel: “The moral of this tragic story is that people are often too trusting of criminals professing their innocence, and ignore the reality of human nature: Evil exists. Heinous crimes don’t commit themselves.”

Christian Living: What do believers need today? We need power.

Photo: Brooklyn Hotel, closed. Brooklyn, Iowa. 2003. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Truth and Beauty,’ by Andrew Klavan

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He was the living truth. The religious had to kill him because they were religious. The leaders had to kill him because they were the leaders. The people had to kill him because they were the people. The law had to kill him because it was the law.

That was what it was like to be the truth in the world….

When Andrew Klavan released his autobiography, The Great Good Thing, I compared it to C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy. But Surprised By Joy was a kind of re-working of a subject Lewis had handled allegorically in his earlier work, Pilgrim’s Regress, whose subtitle is: An Allegorical Apology for Reason and Romanticism. In his new (fairly short) book, The Truth and Beauty, Klavan addresses the same volatile topic.

As he tells the story, he was troubled by his inability to understand Christ’s teaching. He knew the gospel story. He understood the doctrines (as much as any of us understand them). But how do we follow Jesus’ teachings? Are we really expected to give everything we own to the poor? Not to resist an evil man? To pluck out an eye that leads us to sin? What is Jesus talking about?

His son suggested that perhaps he was trying to solve a problem instead of trying to get to know a Man. So he plunged into the gospels – taught himself Koiné Greek to read them in the original language. And what he began to understand – oddly – led him to the Romantic Poets of England.

The book casts a wide loop, but always returns to those Romantics – Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge on the bright side, and Byron and Shelley on the dark side. And among them, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, in whose novel Frankenstein he finds a key to understanding much of the modern rebellion against nature – Victor Frankenstein, he hypothesizes, was not trying to play God. He was trying to eliminate the Female. Which makes him a harbinger of our times.

There is much to ponder in this book, and I can’t claim I understand it all. I need to read it again. But the answer to the problem of getting to know the mind of Christ, as Klavan sees it, is seeing how in all nature – not only the natural world around us but our own nature – the truth of Christ is revealed. The Trinity is everywhere, giving us glimpses behind the veil, calling out to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The life that Jesus lives is promised to us. The Romantics at their best glimpsed this, and some of them embraced it in the end.

There were things in this book that troubled me from a doctrinal point of view. I think any thoughtful Christian will have a similar experience. Because Klavan isn’t doing apologetics here. He’s peering into mysteries. He may be wrong at some points, but I’m not prepared to say so on one reading of the book. By and large, I think he’s on the right track.

Highly recommended for thoughtful Christians, especially those who love literature.

Music, Religion

‘O Sacred Head, Now Wounded’

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Good Friday. I have a book I want to review, but I’ve got to address more important things on the holiest weekend of the year.

Above, a beautiful rendition of O Sacred Head, Now Wounded, with words I’m not familiar with. The hymn’s origins are complicated. The original poem, of which this hymn is just a section, was written either by St. Bernard of Clairvaux or by Bishop Arnulf of Villers-la-Ville. The section was translated into German by the famed Lutheran hymn writer Paul Gerhardt, a pastor who suffered greatly during the Thirty Years War. The traditional setting is by no less a composer than Johan Sebastian Bach. The traditional American translation of the text came from James W. Alexander, a Presbyterian churchman and scholar.

To my mind, this is the best Lenten hymn. But there are many other fine ones out there too.

I want to write about a point of apologetics tonight. I’ve probably laid it out here before. But it seems to me the absolute, rock-bottom argument for Christianity.

Your mileage may vary. I may even be talking through my hat. All our proofs, I am certain, will whirl away like autumn leaves when we behold the One whom Father Ailill likes to call the Beloved.

Ask anyone what’s the most important thing in the universe. Doesn’t matter who. Christian, Jew, atheist. (This may be different in countries with non-Abrahamic religions – I know less about them. But I’m addressing my neighbors, my fellow Americans and Europeans.)

You know what the answer is: Love. Love is the answer. Love is all you need. The greatest of these is love.

But does this make sense outside of the Christian faith?

I’m sure there are lots of atheists around who also say, “Love is the answer, love is the greatest thing.” They take it for granted. It’s the minimal place-holder for religion they’ve been raised with (even if they were raised by other atheists).

But if there is no God, what does that mean? If the ultimate truth of the universe is impersonal, how can love be the answer? Objects don’t love. Energy doesn’t love. Rocks don’t love. Trees don’t love.

Only persons love.

If some Person doesn’t lie behind all the material things we know, then love means nothing. Because sentient creatures will die out eventually, and then love will go away. And it won’t be the answer.

Christianity says that a Person made the universe, and loved us, and demonstrated the greatest love conceivable in the atonement and resurrection.

Blab about love all you want, but if you don’t believe in that God, then it seems to me you’re just surviving on the scraps you picked up under Christianity’s table.

You could choose Judaism or Islam, I suppose, but there’s no parallel act of love.

Religion

Does God View All Sins to be Equal?

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This being Good Friday, I want to write about an idea that has confused some people, the nature of sin. I’ve heard recently of people saying all sin is equal in God’s eyes so does God condemn an abuser with the same severity as the gossip? No, he does not, and you wouldn’t have to read far into the law God gave Israel in Exodus through Deuteronomy to see that the proscribed punishments intend to fit the severity of the crime.

All sin does separate us from God, even the minor ones, and that is because these sins are the fruit of the original sin that accomplished our separation. The Fall is our original rebellion, the act that put all of us into a state of sin. The toddler screaming at his parents isn’t divinely separated for screaming. The teenager repeatedly refusing parental accountability isn’t marked a divine rebel for these acts. Both of these are examples of the fruit of original sin, and this is the sin that separates all of us from God. Only in this way are all sins equal.

 “Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned— for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given” (Rom 5:12-13 ESV).

Even before we had a law to identify the fruit of sin, deadly sin was in the world, and this is the sin for which Christ atoned on the cross. This is the reason for Good Friday.

The root of sin, the source of every sinful act we have done, has been nailed to the cross and blotted out by the blood of atonement. “As one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men” (Rom 5:18 ESV). That life is available to all who take Christ Jesus at his word–that this sin is a deadly serious matter, deeply engrained in all of us, and that he has atoned for it completely on the cross.

Religion

Easy to Make Counterfeits of Christ

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I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength with friends over the last few weeks. We came to an appropriately seasonal chapter this week. The plans of both heroes and enemies are being revealed, and the theologically minded villain says, “The Head has sent for you. Do you understand–the Head? You will look upon one who was killed and is still alive. The resurrection of Jesus in the Bible was a symbol: to-night you shall see what it symbolised. This is real Man at last.”

The kingdom of God is of this earth, the man says in another place, and we will bring it about in this generation by pursuing this counterfeit Christ called the Head, the first artificial man.

I won’t reveal the particulars of this grotesque evil, in case you haven’t read this one yet, and it doesn’t matter for my point. This is a creative effort of anti-humanist planners who carry on the tradition of the best eugenicists. They wish to remake man in their own image and call him God Almighty.

The creation of divine counterfeits occurs in every generation. Some of them run like a bad sequel; some make even Christ’s followers comfortable.

In a sermon on the importance of gospel ministers in following Christ’s example, Calvin says, “We need not to have our hearts overcharged and time filled up with worldly affections, cares, and pursuits.”

Of very great importance, in order to do the work that Christ did, is that we take heed that the religion we promote be that same religion that Christ taught and promoted, and not any of its counterfeits and delusive appearances, or anything substituted by the subtle devices of Satan, or vain imaginations of men, in lieu of it. If we are zealous and very diligent to promote religion, but do not take good care to distinguish true from false religion, we shall be in danger of doing much more hurt than good with all our zeal and activity.

edited from “Christ the Example of Ministers,” John 13: 15-16

Calvin apparently thought it easy to raise up ourselves even though we intend to raise up Christ, easy to be conformed to the world and call it conforming to Christ.

And didn’t Christ Jesus say, “See that you are not led astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is at hand!’ Do not go after them” (Lk 21:8 ESV).

Religion

Unscrewing the inscrutable

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Photo by Alexander Sinn. Unsplash license.

This post will probably be drivel. Because I’m going to try to talk about things I can’t express. (Doesn’t stop me trying to express them, of course).

To open the proceedings, I’ll talk about my visit to the dentist today. I had a checkup recently, and mentioned to the dentist that I was having trouble with teeth-grinding. He scheduled me for an appointment to get my mouth scanned for an “appliance.”

The appointment was today. I thought it was at 2:00. I got home from the grocery store and realized the time was precisely 2:00. I had missed the appointment. I called to apologize. “We have you down for 3:50,” the receptionist said.

Oh. OK.

So I went in at the hour appointed, and they turned me over to a very pretty young technician. At least she had very pretty eyes. The rest was under a Covid mask. She had me sit in a chair, and then wrestled some kind of scanning wand (about the size of a loaf of bread, or so it felt) into my mouth to scan my bite. It went very slowly. They were having trouble with the scanner today, she explained. At length she called in a slightly senior technician (who also appeared young and pretty), who manhandled the thing for a while, finally pinning it to the mat.

As I sat there having my teeth re-created in digital space, I gave some thought to the wonders of modern science. The amazing things we can do that weren’t even imagined for most of my adult life. And all based on the basic question of logic, “Yes or no? One or not-one?”

I love that thought because it’s utterly consistent with Christian theology. Christian truth is, as Francis Schaefer taught me long ago, “propositional.” A choice is offered. You choose yes or no. Truth and untruth are two different things. Everything else flows from this understanding.

People keep trying to propose some kind of spiritual truth that bypasses binary choices. But they end up saying nothing. Pondering tautologies, imagining them profound. Has anyone ever tried to work out a computing language that manages without the binary? Is such a thing even possible?

I don’t know. I do know that we’re performing miracles with good old true/false.

And this brought to mind a spiritual experience I had this Sunday in church. At communion, which is a good time for spiritual experiences.

As I knelt for communion, I suddenly had – what shall I call it? Not a vision. Nothing as dramatic as that. It was a sort of a thought, except that I couldn’t verbalize it. Still can’t – and I’m considered pretty good at verbalizing stuff.

It was compelling, for just a moment, but afterward, as I walked back to my seat, I tried to put it into words and I realized I couldn’t. It was as if I’d physically touched a truth with my mind, but my mind couldn’t grasp it, and came away with no more than the impression (you might call it a feeling) that I’d encountered a Truth.

It had something to do with eternity. With how it is in eternity with God. That all things are accomplished, that what today we consider incomplete is in fact complete and perfect in God.

That’s not quite it either. But it’s the best I can do.

It gave me a sense of peace and trust. But I can’t explain why.

What I brought home with me was a statement I posted promptly on Facebook:

“There are truths that are beyond reason, not because there’s anything wrong with reason, but because reason’s suspension isn’t tough enough for the terrain up there. For those truths, God has given us wonder.”

Which doesn’t at all explain my “vision” during communion. It just describes how I had to deal with it.

Music, Religion

‘Tryggare kan ingen vare’

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Let me just say at the outset that this may have been one of the best days of my life. I can’t give you details because that would be betraying a confidence, but a development happened in my life that ought to improve my happiness about 50%.

This development happened, I should tell you, soon after I determined for the first time to pray about it daily. Just sayin’.

I’ve been listening to Norwegian Christian radio on my cell phone, as I’ve told you. And because of that, today I thought I’d post a performance of Carolina Sandell’s famous hymn known in English as “Children of the Heavenly Father.” Very familiar to all us Scandinavians, but I believe it’s known to more benighted groups as well. The rendition above was done by the choir of Bethel College — but it doesn’t tell me whether it’s the Bethel College in Newton, Kansas of our own Bethel College (now University) here in Minneapolis.

I hesitate to mention it, but just as I sat down to post this, my Norwegian station played it. Gave me the shivers.

Have a blessed weekend.