Archive for December, 2008
Looking Back at 2008: Books and Babies
So, the year is at an end. Before the rush of the new one starts, let me take a few minutes to look back.
When I think of last New Years, no time at all seems to have passed. That is because I am in the same location as last year and, well, I don’t feel so very different from then.
In contrast, if I think of some specific books I’ve read or places I’ve been to during the year, many of them seem much further in the past than last New Years. That is because a sense of time is not created in the brain merely by the passing of time, but by the way you fill that time. That’s at least how I experience is, and rumor has it that I’m not the only one.
What, then, were some of the things that filled the year for me?
Well, my wife and I had our third child. That was definitely a biggie. I have also been to three places in the world that I’ve been wanting to go to for a long time: Rome, Paris, and my last contintent to conquer, Australia (not inspired by the current movie of the same title).
Then, as usual, there were books. Not only did I publish three books this year, I also (unlike some authors) read a few I didn’t write. Here are some of the highlights that come to my mind:
I started out the year with Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, which I would still rank as the most interesting work of “science with theological implications” that I have read this year. The most interesting work on science itself, or rather on the many human, all-to human stories behind science, was A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Staying somewhat on the topic of science and religion, the two funniest books were definitely The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a parody religion, and The Year of Living Biblically.
The least funny book, I can definitely say as well: Ulysses by James Joyce, that frustrating monster of a work that I never finished but suspect I might actually grow fond of one day.
And speaking of monster: My longest novel this year was Atlas Shrugged, which I would also rank as the most – how can I say it? – forceful philosophical work this year. It forced me to make up my mind about Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, and I’m still busy processing it.
Philosophy – that reminds me of one of the books that have been on my reading list for several years but I only got around to this year: The Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle, that cornerstone of Western ethics. Other oldies on my reading list were More’s Utopia, Mill’s Utilitarianism, and Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles.
The most interesting re-readings of this year were Homer’s two epic poems and C. S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain – which, to be honest, I did not find as convincing as the first time I read it.
What else? Oh yeah, there were a few German books that I really liked as well. One of them could be translated as Who Am I? And If So, How Many?, which applied modern discoveries in neurology to philosophical issues. Very worthwhile. I don’t think it’s available in English, though, but I haven’t checked yet.
Probably the most interesting work on historical theology was …
But I gotta go now. More next year.
Horus and Jesus in *Religulous*
I finally got a chance to see Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous. Its high entertainment value made the time fly buy, leaving me with the desire for more. Thumbs up for that.
It also made some important points, such as the fact that Christians often engage in the same kind of strained re-interpretation effort of the Bible as some Moslems do with the Qu’ran. Or that we don’t need the Ten Commandments to know that we shouldn’t go around murdering each other.
On the negative side: For a documentary, the movie has an amazingly low degree of accuracy. It starts with little things like Maher not getting the name of the last book of the Bible right (calling it “Revelations” instead of “Revelation”) and progresses to much bigger issues such as the alleged link between the Egyptian god Horus and Jesus Christ. If Religulous were to be believed, the writers of the Gospels copied all the essentials of their (fictional) Jesus from earlier Egyptian sources.
But is that true? Here is what Wikipedia says about it:
As one of Ancient Egypt’s oldest gods, Horus was worshipped at least as early as the Early Dynastic Period, thousands of years before the first century CE, when Jesus was in Palestine. However, there have been many parallels drawn between the life of Jesus and the stories of Horus’ life.[15][16]
Theologian Tom Harpur studied the works of authors who wrote about ancient Egyptian religion: Godfrey Higgins, Gerald Massey and Alvin Boyd Kuhn. In his book Pagan Christ, Harpur argued that all of the essential ideas of both Judaism and Christianity came primarily from Egyptian religion.[17] Harpur noted that Massey uncovered almost two hundred instances of “immediate correspondence between the mythical Egyptian material and the allegedly historical Christian writings about Jesus”.[18]
The 2008 documentary Religulous reiterates the alleged link between Jesus and Horus, claiming that both were born of virgins, fought the devil in the desert and healed the sick and blind. W. Ward Gasque has written that Egyptologists have rejected many of the specific claims made by Harpur and Massey as fallacious, pointing out that there is no evidence of a virgin birth for Horus, and that Harpur’s main source, Alvin Boyd Kuhn, was a Theosophist whose books are mainly self-published and that his other sources are in the main not ancient Egyptian texts but out-of-date authors.[19]
Erasing God from the Picture?
In my last post, I talked about how life on earth is one where you have to play by the rules. You can neither blame God nor give Him credit for every little thing, because actions have consequences and God does not continually change the rules of the game.
That, I think, is simply good Christian theology. But this common-sense thinking can also lead a step further–to the point where one says that things would make a lot more sense if you simply erased God from the picture.
Consider a natural disaster, for instance. A hurricane strikes a city, “steals” billions of dollars from the government, and indiscriminately ravages properties and kills dozens of people. CNN reports on the disaster and inevitably drags a grateful survivor in front of the camera who says, “I thank God that we survived. Our house is still intact and none of our family is hurt. He protected us.”
Well, what of those who didn’t survive? What of the houses that no longer exist? Did God really intervene with the hurricane and direct its path in such a manner that the house of this particular family was spared but the house of the next one wasn’t? It seems much more likely that God simply let the hurricane take its course.
If He did protect people, then it would be through a prompting from within to leave the city: through a prophetic gift such as Jesus’ Olivet Discourse that (if it’s not a later invention) warned Christians in the first century to get out of Jerusalem when they observed certain developments. But those who didn’t listen, those who stayed in Jerusalem between A.D. 68 and 70, had to suffer and starve with the rest.
Still easier, however, is to erase God completely from the picture. Natural disasters are a part of this world; some people chance to survive, others do not. There is no higher power to direct anything, as the continuous disasters on earth are so obviously indiscriminate. Their cruelty exceeds that of the most brutal dictator or terrorist, making no difference between male and female, young and old, innocent and guilty. The only ones spared by the disasters are those rich enough to evacuate at their leisure.
Where is God in all of this? It makes more sense to erase Him from the picture.
PRAYER: Wanting to be Bruce Almighty
Two weeks ago, I wrote in this post about the many unanswered petitionary prayers and about embarrasing testimonies of people claiming that God intervened supernaturally in their lives when their case is more than doubtful.
So, how are we supposed to deal with unanswered prayers and embarrassing testimonies?
I propose that our theology is wrong. God is both blamed and given credit for more than He ought to, because human freedom cuts both ways. If a man makes the wrong choice by deciding to murder my daughter, I can’t blame God; it was not His decision. The only blame we can put on Him is that He has given us so much freedom.
If we blame Him, we cut off the proverbial branch on which we are sitting. It’s only due to our freedom that we can blame Him at all. If we blame Him for our freedom, we blame Him for our very ability to blame Him. Conversely, we don’t have to thank God that we have discovered our wallet on the roof of the car; God probably didn’t intervene supernaturally at all.
What I can thank God for is His being the Source of everything existent: the One who upholds every atom of the universe I live in. I can also thank Him for the order in which He created everything and for the power of choice He has given me.
This power of choice, however, this freedom, necessarily creates a world in which there are real consequences to my actions. If I’m not careful enough to keep watch over my wallet, I might lose it and not find it again. I might pray to God, and sometimes He might perchance intervene supernaturally to help me undo the consequences. But in most cases, I think, His answer is:
“Play by the rules. If you don’t learn to be watchful, you lose things. If you cross a street while reading a book, you will be run over by a car. If you jump out of a helicopter without a parachute, you will die; I won’t change the gravitation of the earth for you, even if you fervently pray in your last minute on earth for me to do so. I can’t change the rules of the game all the time; that would create an extremely confusing world in which no one, once he starts to think about it, wants to live.”
A movie that illustrates this pretty well is Bruce Almighty. Field reporter Bruce Nolan thinks that God isn’t doing a good job and should let someone else take His place, to which God says in essence, “Okay, Bruce. It’s your turn.”
He allows Bruce to play God for a while. And what does Bruce do? He thinks that his almighty powers now give him the right to change the rules of creation as he chooses. For example, thousands of people pray to win the lottery, and Bruce answers every one of them, as a consequence of which everyone wins only a few dollars. From the weather to traffic, nothing is safe from Bruce’s interference. The end result is utter chaos—a completely unpredictable world.
Do we want that? What do people stuck in a traffic jam expect God to do when they pray that He should help them be on time? Move all the other cars out of the way? Magically create a bigger road?
No. He will say, “If you don’t want to get stuck in a traffic jam, talk to your minister of transportation. You know the rules of this world. If your roads don’t have sufficient space for the amount of cars you manufacture, you have to change something. If you can’t find a parking space in a city, don’t ask Me to help you find one; either build more parking spaces or allow fewer cars in the city. Should I create more parking spaces for you or make cars disappear? Which cars should those be? Not yours, that is for sure. Or if you pollute the air, don’t ask Me to clean it for you; you will have to find ways to stop the pollution. You know the rules.”
God honors His creation too much to continually mess with it. Christianity says that He is present in His creation; yes. He does talk to people and guides them; yes. But it is a guidance from within, not from without. He is speaking to the hearts of men in order to help them make the right decisions, not by writing letters in the sky or continually changing the laws of creation. Any change of order must by necessity be an exception. Otherwise chaos will result.
If God answered most prayers in the way we expect Him to, there would no longer be merely one God; there would be millions of gods—millions of Bruce Almightys—all trying to direct the universe according to their will.
“Where Love Is, God Is” – Or Where Love Is, Love Is?
On Christmas Day, I posted Tolstoy’s touching story of Martin the Cobbler, Where Love Is, God Is. It basically gives some flesh to Jesus’ saying that whatever we do to the least of people, we do unto Him.
Finding God in the daily life of human existence rather than in some hyper-spirituality—that has come to mean a lot more to me than in previous years.
But I must be honest: I don’t know if that is God. “Where love is, God is.” Maybe. Or maybe where love is, there is just love. A couple of years ago, I really found peace about a lot of things in my life. Have I found God by finding peace or have I just found peace? Peace, love—they are valuable things in themselves, irrespective of whether there is a God. They might well be clues about there being a God, but ultimately I don’t know. And I’ve found peace about not knowing.
That reminds me of the virtual concert I attended at an IMAX the other day, U2 3D. It was an absolutely fantastic 3D experience of U2 live in South America. One reviewer described it as a “cathedral of sound,” and I agree. The experience was similar to (or better than) the best experiences of modern worship sessions I’ve had in Charismatic churches.
In those churches, powerful experiences during worship are usually equated with God’s presence. “Where powerful music is, God is” almost seems to be their dictum. And maybe they are right. But maybe where powerful music is, there is just powerful music. The thing itself is valuable enough even without a Divine Mover in it.
Love, music, peace—some people find God through these. Others find Him through beauty, reason or work. I wonder, though—and many before me have asked the same question—whether finding God is a help or a hindrance in appreciating what are obviously valuable things in themselves. Do I appreciate love, music, peace, beauty, reason, and work more because I see in them a road to God, or do I appreciate them less with God in the mix?
Is a relationship between two people healthier without making it a triangle of which one is a Divinity? Is love better if I do something good for someone simply because I actually want to help that person rather than doing it primarily because “I do it unto Him”? Or does “doing it unto Him” inspire me to do many deeds of love that, left alone with my human nature, I would never do?
Tolkien Meets Science-Fiction
| Black: The Birth of Evil (The Circle Trilogy, Book 1) | |
| by Ted Dekker |
Imagine an apocalyptic scenario in the near future in which, due to a virus, mankind stands on the verge of annihilation.
Then imagine a Tolkien-nish world with sword fights, ork-like creatures, medieval communities, and brave men.
Now bring the two worlds together through someone who always wakes up in the one reality when he falls asleep in the other, and who, through his constant travel between the two realities, is the crucial person in both.
Voila! You’ve got the fascinating premise of the trilogy.
Some might find this too tall of a tale, but I was enthralled. The first chapter or two left me a little confused. Then, however, the story took on more definite shape and I was served several of my favorite types of literature in one book: classic fantasy, edge-of-your-seat science-fiction, and a supernatural thriller.
Given this superb combination, possible imperfections of the book faded into insignificance.
Be warned, though: The book is not a complete novel on its own but only the first third of a story published in three parts. Moreover, it ends with a cliffhanger. So if you only buy the first book of the trilogy and enjoy it at all, you’ll want to pick up the second book right after finishing “Black.”
How the Christ Child Can Come Today
At Christmas, I often have to think of the story about Martin the Cobbler, Where Love Is, God Is, by the great Russian writer Tolstoy. Do you know it?
One night, old Martin hears God saying to him, “Martin, Martin! Look out into the street tomorrow, for I shall come.”
The whole day, he keeps looking for Christ to visit him. But his only visitors are a poor man, whom he serves some hot tea; a woman with a baby, whom he gives food and a warm cloak; and another woman and a boy, whose quarrel he reconciles. Martin’s expectations were disappointed.
The Lord had not come.
But then, at night, God speaks to him again. “Martin, Martin, don’t you know me?” the voice says.
“Who is it?” asks Martin.
“It is I,” answers the voice, and out of the shadow steps the poor man, smiles, and vanishes.
“It is I,” says the voice again, and out of shadow steps the woman with the baby, smiles, and vanishes.
“It is I,” the voice says yet a third time, and out of the shadow steps the woman and the boy, smile, and vanish.
Christ had really come to Martin that day, and he had welcomed Him.
WHAT CHRISTMAS MEANS: The Incarnation, the Bible, and Godly Paganism (Part III)
But did the Jews not have some advantages as against the Pagans? Yes. C. S. Lewis thought so. Their revelation from God was more clearly defined than in the Pagan world. They did have more light. That, however, is not the same as saying that the Jews had all the light and the Pagans none at all. “The truth is that a Shepherd [a Jew] is only half a man, and a Pagan is only half a man, so that neither people was well without the other, nor could either be healed until the Landlord’s Son [Jesus] came into the country.”[1]
This is what C. S. Lewis wrote in his allegorical Pilgrim’s Regress. There, a personified History tells the pilgrim that God succeeded to get a lot of messages through to the Pagans. The pilgrim asked what sort of messages, and History replied that it was mostly pictures. “You see,” explained History, “the Pagans couldn’t read, because the Enemy [Satan] shut up the schools as soon as he took over Pagus. But they had pictures. (…) And then the Pagans made mistakes. They would keep on trying to get the same picture again: and if it didn’t come, they would make copies of it for themselves. (…) They went on making up more and more stories for themselves about the pictures, and then pretending the stories were true.”[2]
C. S. Lewis thought that Pagan beliefs had a core of truth that came from God, but people perverted the truths. “There was no absurdity and no indecency they did not commit.” But God never gave up. He kept sending new messages to the Pagans that re-awakened the core truths of their beliefs.
“But all the while there was one people that could read,” says History, meaning the Jewish people. “And because they could read, they had from the Landlord, not pictures but Rules.” Due to that, they were of course much narrower in their thinking than the Pagans. They were narrow because they had charge over the Road. “They found it. They sign-posted it. They kept it clear and re-paired it. But you must not think I am setting them up against the Pagans.” And now comes the sentence I quoted above: “The truth is that a Shepherd is only half a man, and a Pagan is only half a man, so that neither people was well without the other, nor could either be healed until the Landlord’s Son came into the country.”
Lewis believed the God-Man Jesus to be the most central and perfect revelation of God to humanity. Everything that leads to Him is, to one degree or another, inspired by God: “If every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of Lights then all true and edifying writings, whether Scripture or not, must be in some sense inspired.”[3]
In relation to the Bible, some Christians give the word inspiration a rather restricted meaning; that somehow the inspiration of the Bible requires a completely different activity from God than when He does something else. But what does inspiration mean? Does it not simply mean that God originated something, that He willed it, that He drove it to be realized?
If so, we should immediately comprehend that the Bible is not the only thing God has willed. All of creation is in a very real sense “inspired” by Him. Lewis quotes Richard Hooker[4] as saying that all things that are of God “have God in them and he them in himself likewise.”[5] The stars, the earth, the wind—creation has originated with God. Only sin is not inspired by God. Everything else is from Him. Indeed, in Him we move and breathe and have our being.
WHAT CHRISTMAS MEANS: The Incarnation, the Bible, and Godly Paganism (Part II)
I continue here from this post.
Now let me at once clarify what C. S. Lewis was not saying. He was not saying that we should, like the Buddhists, toss the Holy Scriptures into a river as soon as we are “enlightened.” He was not suggesting that the doctrine of the Incarnation simply replaces the Bible and henceforth the Bible is of no importance. The Bible does not fade away because of the Incarnation. Rather, when put second to the Incarnation, the Bible receives new significance.
Nor was C. S. Lewis much concerned with “bibliolatry”: with the worship of the Bible in the place of God. Many Evangelicals are careful to point out that they do not place the Bible above God; that they take the Bible so seriously because it points them to God.
However, it is a curious fact that many Christians (perhaps especially Evangelicals) talk more about the Bible than about the Incarnation. Part of the reason is, no doubt, that the Bible furnishes many points of discussion, as this blog post exemplifies. But still, it appears that their whole outlook on human history is Bible-centered instead of Incarnation-centered. It is taught that God revealed Himself to mankind through the Bible. Granted. But Lewis considered this a lesser truth than to say that God revealed Himself to mankind by becoming Man and taking mankind up into Himself, and that the Bible is the clearest witness of that fact.
Do all Christians truly consider the second statement to be a greater truth than the former? And if they say they do, do they only give lip-service to this truth or is their whole outlook on human history actually centered around the Incarnation? Is the Incarnation in fact the high tower on which they stand and view the landscape of this world, or do they stand on the lower building of the Bible and only look up at the tower in acknowledgment of its great truth?
I am not sure that everyone sees the enormous difference this makes. A Christian who views everything—including the Bible—from the high tower of the Incarnation has a very different perspective than a Christian who only looks at the Incarnation instead of from it.
For the latter, the Incarnation is (at best) the most important doctrine in the divinely inspired Bible; for the former, the divine origin of the Bible is one of the doctrines included in the Incarnation. For the latter, the great dividing wall lies between the light of the Bible and the darkness of the Pagan world; for the former, the great dividing wall lies between the things that point to the Incarnation and those that do not—irrespective of whether they are Jewish or Pagan.
I just now spoke of the “high tower” of the Incarnation. One can indeed picture the way C. S. Lewis saw the history of the world as follows. In the middle stands a gigantic building that symbolizes the Incarnation. On the one side of the building is the land of the Jews and on the other side the land of the Pagans. Both sides have smaller buildings and stairs that lead up to the high building of the Incarnation. The buildings of the Jews are primarily the Scriptures; the buildings of the Pagans are some of their mythologies, the truth of vicarious sacrifice, Natural Law, theistic philosophy, etc.
But neither side is automatically led to the top of the tower. Not all Jews climb the stairs of their Scriptures. Some of them never reach the high building of the Incarnation. They have their noses in the Bible all day long, and yet they refuse to come to the Word clothed in flesh. Likewise, some Pagans do not use such help as God has given them to climb the tower. Some turn their mythologies into perversity, their sacrifices into cruelty, harden themselves against Natural Law and ignore theistic philosophy.
However, the fact that not all Jews recognized the Incarnation through their Scriptures does not mean that the Old Testament did not come from God. And likewise, only because not all Pagans used the light God gave them, it does not follow that the light did not come from God at all. He is the Father of Lights; every light—whether in the Jewish or Pagan world—comes from Him.
He is Truth; every true insight is His property.
WHAT CHRISTMAS MEANS: The Incarnation, the Bible, and Godly Paganism (Part I)
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and without Him not even one thing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it. (…) He was the true Light; He enlightens every man coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own received Him not. But as many as received Him, He gave to them authority to become the children of God, to those who believe on His name, who were born, not of bloods, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but were born of God. And the Word became flesh, and tabernacled among us. And we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and of truth.”
The following is an excerpt from The C. S. Lewis Book on the Bible:
God, the invisible Maker behind the universe, the Truth Himself, strapped on His sandals and walked the dusty roads of this earth. The Word of God at one point in our history sat at a well and chatted with a woman of low repute. The Foundation of all existence grew two arms of flesh and used them to hold little children. He had actual hands that He laid on their heads in blessing. He had actual vocal cords and learned human language, clothing His eternal nature with temporary rags.
Indeed, the Word became flesh.
For C. S. Lewis, the Incarnation was not simply the most important event in human history; it was an event so different from anything else that he considered human history to be the history of the Incarnation. He saw everything else only as an add-on to this most central and most wondrous event.
If Lewis is right, this earth will forever be known as the place in which the Word became flesh and took all flesh up into His eternal nature. Our story will be known as the story in which the Author Himself appeared as one of the characters, and then took the other characters by the hand and led them out of the book into unimaginable dimensions. The Author became ink and paper so that the ink and paper would be transformed into three-dimensional beings who could henceforth live and eat and converse with the Author in His own house. The history of humanity is the Incarnation, for all of mankind is forever taken up in that One Man—the God-Man Jesus Christ.
For this reason Lewis believed that, in order to properly understand anything in this world, we have to put it in relation to the Incarnation. And this, of course, includes the Bible. He thought that a view in which the Bible loomed larger than the Incarnation was extremely distorted. A view in which the Incarnation was only mentioned occasionally and the Bible itself was the object of constant attention, he considered wrong.
Either the Incarnation is true or false. If true, then its truth is big enough to accommodate all lesser truths, including the divine origin of the Bible. If false, it renders everything else meaningless, including the Bible. Either the Bible stands second to the Incarnation or it does not stand at all.
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