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.”
“Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.” (Proverbs 25:25, ESV)
There is good news, folks, even now, especially if you’re a C. S. Lewis fan.
There are “new” recordings of C. S. Lewis reading his own work and Chaucer, available from the Rabbit Room Store. That’s surprising in itself, but the source of the recordings is even more remarkable.
In August of 1960, C. S. Lewis’s wife Joy Davidman had been dead for about a month. At that time her ex-husband, William Gresham, traveled to England to see his sons, Douglas and David. It must have been an awkward reunion. Bill Gresham tried hard to get custody of his sons, but “Jack” Lewis strenuously opposed him, winning custody for himself. (According to Joy Davidman’s biographer, she may have exaggerated her stories of Bill’s neglect and abuse. However, it is indisputable that he was an alcoholic.)
However he felt, Bill was gracious enough to ask Jack to read some of his work into the new tape recorder he’d brought along. Jack did so, reading excerpts from Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, and then reading (or reciting) part of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales in flawless Middle English.
I haven’t bought my copy yet, mostly out of laziness, but I’m going to. I can’t complain about the price – three bucks for the whole caboodle.
Proceeds go to benefit the Marion E. Wade Center, which owns the rights.
I’m well into The Two Towers now. An anxious nation will be gratified to know that I Have Thoughts.
I noticed – for the first time, I think – the name of the ancient warrior who – we are told – founded the Kingdom of Rohan. His name was Eorl the Young.
This is where I did a little linguistic analysis, based on my fair knowledge of Norwegian and my sketchy grasp of Old Norse.
I figured Eorl must be etymologically related to the Norse word, Jarl, which means a ruler. I was pretty sure that the Norse cognate when used in personal names was “Erl.” I had looked up the meaning of Erling (for obvious reasons) and learned that the name means “young ruler.”
That makes sense, because the “ing” suffix is common in sagas to indicate “the younger,” as in “junior.” Thus the sons of Arne Arnmodsson (whom I mentioned a few days ago in my post on my novel writing) were known as the Arnmodings.
My guesses were verified by the author of this web site, assuming he knows what he’s talking about.
Therefore, when you encounter the name Eorl the Young in TLOTR, think “Erling.”
Did Tolkien have Erling Skjalgsson in mind when he named the character? I have no evidence for that. But I like to think so. Because what I like is extremely important.
This book showed up as a freebie, and I figured I’d read it before going back to The Lord of the Rings.The Anatomy Lesson, by Robert I. Katz, wasn’t bad at all.
Our hero is Richard Kurtz, a young New York surgeon whose sideline (and a useful one) is martial arts. The Anatomy Lesson is the second book in which he assists police detective Lew Barent in an investigation. The first time constituted the first book in the series.
The mystery starts with what looks like a grotesque practical joke. At a Halloween party for medical students, somebody substitutes genuine cadaver parts for plastic ones that had been set out as decorations. The body parts turn out to come from medical school dissection specimens, but it’s hard to figure out who could have stolen them.
Barent asks Kurtz to inquire into the matter, and one of the people he talks to is Rod Mahoney, a lecturer at the medical school. When Mahoney is murdered in a grotesque manner shortly after that, the motives remain impossible to guess, but soon there is talk of a drug connection.
The story has lots of twists and red herrings; it was challenging. I certainly didn’t figure it out. On top of that, Kurtz and Barent make an interesting team – Barent is the jaded cop who’s seen everything, while Kurtz is young and full of vinegar, and quite enjoys the opportunity to fight bad guys off now and then. Barent is always telling him to stay out of the investigation, but then doesn’t hesitate to call on him when he needs an entrée into the medical world. They’re believable and amusing.
My main problem with this book – and it was purely personal opinion – is that the cause of drug legalization keeps coming up, and the author leaves no question what he thinks. He may even be right – maybe legalization is the only way to mitigate the social disaster – but I’ve never been able to shake the idea that legalizing drugs is a marker of societal surrender and imminent death.
But that’s my opinion. The Anatomy Lesson was an enjoyable read with enjoyable characters. Cautions for the usual.
Tonight, insight into the creative process. Or rather, my creative process.
Because other novelists work very differently from me. They amaze me. Some author friends on Facebook will say, “Well, I only got 1,000 words down tonight. Had the flu and my mother died, but that’s no excuse. Got to punch those numbers up tomorrow.”
Me, at this point I get in about one scene a night. Often only a few paragraphs. After that I haven’t got a clue what comes next, and I won’t know until the next day – maybe. It may take a couple days or a week before I figure out how to coax my characters into going where I need them to go.
It should get better as I get deeper into the plot. Then things will move by themselves. I’m setting up my shots at this point.
Anyway, this is what I’ve been working through recently:
There’s a story (only one) about Erling Skjalgsson that’s not included in Heimskringla. You find it in Flatey Book. I’ve mentioned it here before. It’s the Tale of Erling and Eindridi.
Eindridi was the son of the famous chieftain Einar Tambarskjelve, a very important man. I won’t outline the story tonight, but basically it’s about how young Eindridi gets into a compromising situation with Erling’s daughter Sigrid. Erling is furious, and Eindridi has to undergo the Iron Ordeal (you may recall that ceremony from The Year of the Warrior) to prove that he hasn’t dishonored her. Then old Einar, Eindridi’s father, nearly goes to war against Erling over the insult to his son. But the business is resolved through the two young people getting married.
It’s been my intention from the beginning to include that story in my current Erling book. But there were points I wondered about.
For one thing, another story mentions Eindridi’s wife, and she’s not Sigrid Erlingsdatter. I forget her name, but she’s somebody else.
Now that doesn’t invalidate the story by itself. Wives were a tragically perishable commodity in those days. Childbirth often carried them off. Rich men frequently went through several wives. Still, I found it odd that the connection wasn’t mentioned anywhere else (as far as I know; might have missed something).
Also, I saw Erling and Einar as fairly friendly. Just an assumption on my part, but call it an artist’s instinct.
On the other hand, there is a well-attested marriage alliance that I thought required more explanation. We know that Erling had a daughter named Ragnhild who married Thorberg Arnesson of Giske, son of the powerful Arne Arnmodsson, and one of a group of brothers who swung a lot of weight in the time of King (St.) Olaf Haradsson and his successors.
The Arnesssons were a family divided in Olaf’s time. Some of them supported the king, others opposed him. At the Battle of Stiklestad, where Olaf died, there were Arnesson on both sides.
But Thorberg was one of the pro-Olaf Arnessons. He even went into exile in Russia with Olaf. So why would he marry the daughter of Olaf’s greatest domestic enemy, Erling Skjalgsson?
And I had the brilliant idea – audacious by my mousy standards – of replacing Eindridi with Thorberg in the anecdote. It would achieve narrative economy while solving a problem of motivation.
So I’m doing that. And nobody can stop me.
There was one further problem, though. Last night I had a worrying thought – “Wait! For this to work, old Arne Arnmodsson (Thorberg’s father, if you lost your score card) has to be alive in 1022. But I always had the idea he must have died young.”
This was because there was another brother named Arne Arnesson. And the usual custom in the Viking Age was not to name a baby after a living relative. The old Norse believed that the soul followed the name, you see. So if you named the baby Arne after his father, Papa Arne would likely drop dead. Only one member of the nuclear family at a time was permitted the same name.
But I did some more research and learned that old Arne is believed to have lived until around 1024. So it’s cool. They must have adopted Christian naming practices in the family by the time Arne Jr. was born.
I thought I’d read something less challenging before returning to The Lord of the Rings. So I picked this up…
Victorian London offers a fascinating and atmospheric location for murder mysteries, as Conan Doyle learned to his great (if grudging) profit. Author David Field has begun a new series of mysteries starring a somewhat similar (or reminiscent) team – prominent London physician James Carlyle (nephew, we are told, of Thomas, the philosopher) and Matthew West, an impecunious young Methodist preacher serving London’s poor. We meet them in Interviewing the Dead.
Both happen to be present, out of curiosity, at a lecture given by a spiritualist. The spiritualist makes a prediction – that the spirits of medieval plague victims, whose common grave was dug up during the construction of the Aldgate Underground station, will soon be rising up to take revenge on the living, for the disturbance.
The two men strike up an acquaintance, although they are very different in outlook. Carlyle is the rationalist scientist, and can’t help tweaking Matthew for his faith, which he judges naïve. But they are both concerned – for different reasons – about the spread of superstition among the populace.
Soon reports are coming in of people being terrified by revenants encountered on the streets. Carlyle and West cooperate to apply logic to the problem, and note an interesting fact – all the ghost sightings seem to have involved people who visited pubs owned by a particular brewery. Their inquiries will lead Matthew into considerable danger, both to his personal safety and his career in the church.
I didn’t hate Interviewing the Dead. It was a fairly pleasant read. But it didn’t excite me much either. I’ll give the author credit for being able to write a grammatical English sentence, which is an improvement over a lot of writers today (though there were a couple minor homophone errors). But I found Carlyle hard to like – he’s pretty darn manipulative. Matthew West is OK, though I wasn’t sure of his theology – he hints at not believing in Hell (it’s unclear), and also declares himself in favor or women’s ordination – which I don’t think was even an issue among Methodists at the time. It’s nice, however, I must admit, to encounter a pastor in a novel who isn’t a hypocrite. In spite of all the teasing about the supernatural that goes on between them, Carlyle and West seemed to me kind of dull in their interactions.
But what really annoyed me was the character of Adelaide, Dr. Carlyle’s daughter, whom we are supposed to regard as a romantic object for Matthew. Like pretty much all female Victorian protagonists you run across today, she’s a fervent feminist. I suppose we’re meant to admire that, but honestly, the girl is a bore. She’s rude to all men on all occasions, and can’t speak two sentences without making a speech about being oppressed. I have to concede that the author strongly suggests that her prickliness has more to do with emotional frustration than with ideology, but I still found it impossible to root for the romance.
For that reason, I’m not strongly tempted to renew my acquaintance by reading the next book.
But your mileage may vary. Interviewing the Dead wasn’t bad, really. Just not to my taste.
Conservative Christians often decry the fact that stay-at-home mothers seem less valued than they once were, and the working mom is now the norm. Well, what do you expect from a society where the ability to contribute directly to the wealth-creation process is ultimately the measure of somebody’s social standing and value?
Finishing up Carl Trueman’s Republocratis not the best preparation for the 2020 presidential debates, because his final chapter argues that we have given the pride of place in American politics to an appealing narrative and general aesthetics. We don’t want real debates. We don’t want to wrestle with too many details or facts. We want that feeling that we are better off today than four years ago or the impression that our neighbors are better off. (When was it (2008? 2004?) that many of us feared the direction of our nation, and that while we were personally stable, we believed our neighbors were not?) You may remember when Bill Clinton didn’t offer details when answering a question about drug problems in America; he told us about his brother.
What we will get tonight will be 95% entertainment, especially from our comedian in chief. Fact-checkers will be burning up their keyboards, and many of them will need auditors to fact-check their fact-checking. But voters — let me stop there–fans of a candidate and those who like, tweet, and share are not necessarily voters. The Biden campaign got campaign posters inserted into Nintendo’s popular game Animal Crossing as a way to appeal to college kids, but it’s one thing to gain emotional support from people on the couch and another to gain their vote. The latter takes effort, even thinking ahead a bit. And so many get out the vote efforts have been scuttled, because though people would like to see change, they don’t want to vote for it or perhaps can’t overcome personal hurtles to do it.
But what was I talking about?
Trueman criticizes all sides for sloppy thinking in favor of their preferred narrative. Too many of us excuse our side and condemn the mere suspicion of wrongdoing on the other side. Christians, particularly those who endorse the doctrine of total depravity, should expect to see evidence of the curse everywhere we go, so we should readily understand that the best system or social structure in the world will hurt people and fail others when filled with self-seeking sinners. Because that’s true, we should seek healthy accountability everywhere for everyone, particularly our officials.
Overall, Republocrat is a good book. It mentions some issues you may disagree with, but the main theme of being more circumspect of our political beliefs and aspirations is a good word. Too many of us look for hypocrites only on the other side and broad brush everyone who disagrees with us. We need wisdom and humility to live together as one nation under God.
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?
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.
Another chapter in Carl Trueman’s 2010 book Republocrat deals with Fox News and many people’s uncritical support of it. You’ve heard some of this before; it’s a common complaint that people are not more discerning of their news consumption, just as it is common to praise someone’s wisdom when they agree with you. Trueman begins his critique from a more British angle.
He says he grew up conservative in the British sense and began to question that when conservative leaders showed themselves to be just as self-servingly corrupt as the opposition party was supposed to be. Then the UK had to turn Hong Kong over to the Chinese in 1997. The last governor of Hong Kong as a British colony was Chris Patten, and he pressed as hard as he could to move the region into safe, democratic territory before he left. Everyone knew it was an uphill struggle, and Patten intended to publish his thoughts in a book (entitled East and West when finally published).
His contract was with HarperCollins, a publisher owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man Trueman believed to be a champion of free speech and the free world. His news empire would help guard the world against the Soviet Union and all the evils therein. But Murdoch got Patten’s book cancelled under the guise that it was substandard and boring. That caused what The New York Times called “a week of relentlessly bad publicity” and provoked the publisher to issue a public apology.
The apology represents an unusually public embarrassment for Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.’s chairman, who ordered that the book be canceled because of its highly critical stance toward China, a country in which Murdoch has considerable business interests and even more considerable financial ambitions.
The top brass ordered Patten’s editor to make excuses and cancel the book, because it could threaten Murdoch’s relationship with people Rush Limbaugh calls “the Chi-Coms.” Editor Stuart Proffitt was already on record praising the book, calling it a upcoming bestseller, so a public 180 would embarrass him personally. He refused and was suspended.
This event and others like it caused Trueman to question what the good guys were up to. Were they really standing up for freedom or their business interests? As we’re seeing in the NBA and Disney Studios today, Trueman writes, “Freedom, it seems, was only important so long as it did not do damage to profit margins.”
This is the man behind Fox News and many other news organizations, including Britain’s popular tabloid The Sun, which delivered nude photos to its readers daily on Page 3 and spurred its competitors to do the same. That’s enough to raise serious questions about Fox’s moral authority and general objectivity, particularly to those who think it is the one unbiased news source on the air.
