“All these examples show the problems that happen when authority is twisted. There are many different ways to get it wrong. But true authority is sacrificial and giving, and is embodied perfectly by Aslan himself. Aslan sets the pattern for all authority in these books, and it is the pattern of self-sacrifice and giving. This is the basis of all true authority. Even though it takes many different forms, it is recognizably the same kind of self-giving authority.”
“The Bible is the definitive word on justification, but it is not the only word. If we benefit from sermons and theological articles on justification, we can benefit from literary portrayals of it. Theological exposition enables us to know the truth about justification intellectually. We experience that same truth when the doctrine of justification is embodied and incarnated in fictional images of justification. After all, the biblical images of the reclothed high priest and the tax collector who goes home justified are literary and fictional images of justification, belonging to the same genre as the stories of Shakespeare, Milton, and Hawthorne that I have surveyed.
“Within the Bible itself justification is presented in the complementary modes of theological exposition and literary images. I tell my students that it is possible to set up a profitable two-way street between the Bible and literature, with the Bible enabling me to see a lot in literature that I would otherwise miss, and literature enabling me to see and feel biblical truth better.”
“I have been privileged to know gifted artists who were not acknowledged as such simply because they lived like regular people and didn’t carry on like Lord Byron. (‘Of course, he can draw, but he is not really an artist.’) All of us have received, as an important part of our cultural inheritance, this pernicious myth of the artist. He has soul, and perhaps even rich brown eyes. He is widely misunderstood. He lives in a garret. He feels deeply. He fights the establishment orthodoxies. This last part of the myth has become increasingly difficult for him since fighting establishment orthodoxies has become the establishment orthodoxy.
“But regardless of the details, anyone who wants to be admitted into the land of the artist has to show some version of these papers to the border guards. And while we are on the point, few things are more painful to watch than to see evangelical Christians (who have heard the phrase ‘redeeming the arts’ one time too many) trying to bluff their way past the guards. If artists get to ‘produce art’ then just call yourself a producer, or painter, or writer, or whatever, and hope they buy it. They almost never do, but the neediness of some Christians demands the risk be taken anyway. Repeatedly.”
My Rabbit Room buddy Thomas McKenzie shares a thoughtful blog post about the importance of narrative to connect us deeply to the truth. This is something important to remember during this season (and always). I am all for propositions; we need them. But they matter because of a Story.
He begins by explaining what happens on an especially great episode (one of my favorites) of Star Trek:The Next Generation called “Darmok.” Captain Picard meets up with an alien who is only able to communicate through stories and the allusions to those stories. When Captain Picard figures out the stories (for the aliens it’s “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”), he can finally communicate. Thomas goes on to say…
“I recognize how increasingly like these aliens I am. I was sitting in a meeting a few weeks ago. The person leading the meeting was talking about “spiritual formation.” That’s kind of a buzz word in the church world right now. He had lots to say about this topic, and what he had to say was very well thought out. I, however, had a hard time understanding what he was saying. Why? Because he didn’t use any stories. There were not examples, no parables, no narrative. Because there was no narrative, no “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” no “Juliet on her Balcony,” I couldn’t grasp the material. I understood every word he was saying, but the words were like vapor in a disembodied haze.”
This is good. It speaks to a harmful, knee-jerk reaction we are trained to in this culture by our p.c. masters. I got this from Alan Jacobs, but it is by D.G. Myers. The entire post can be found here. Perhaps good to keep in mind with all the year-end “Top ____” posts. I plan to do that soon, perhaps. So consider this cover. -Sam
“‘The universal reaction to book lists,’ I wrote a few days ago, ‘is annoyance over what has been left out.’ I should have added: followed immediately by an accusation of bias. If you don’t happen to think very highly of a writer—and if, because space limitations make explanation impossible, you are silent about the writer—you will be said to hold a grudge against the class to which the writer belongs. Worse yet, if you fail to mention a sufficient number of members of the writer’s class, although the required proportion remains vague and undefined, you will be dismissed as irredeemably intolerant if not bigoted toward the entire class.
“I don’t know why it took so long for me to figure out what was going on. The accusation of bias has been leveled against me so often that I no longer take it seriously. Only recently, though, did it strike me that the accusation is more than simply a moral fashion. It is a learned response, an intellectual commonplace, picked up in school and college like mono or herpes. It is the voice of the academic literary guild, stripped of any theoretical sophistication, coming from the mouths of latter-day undergraduates who still hope for their professors’ approval.
“Race, class, and gender (and their substitutes and equivalents, adopted by outsiders eager to get in on the game) have finally completed the tendency that Mencken observed so long ago. Their invocation no longer makes it hard to talk about a book’s intrinsic qualities. They have made it so that such talk, when it occasionally occurs, sounds like a dead language. Nobody understands what is being said, and assumes the worse. For any critical discussion that refuses to cloth itself in the vocabulary of race, class, and gender is nothing else—can be nothing else—than an expression of naked bias.
Now, I understand that there are more ways to measure the health of a culture than by lifespan and wealth, but still, this is quite telling.
It’s a wonderful time to be alive in so many, many ways!
“Better is the end of a thing than its beginning,
and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.
Be not quick in your spirit to become angry,
for anger lodges in the bosom of fools.
Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?”
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
Wisdom is good with an inheritance,
an advantage to those who see the sun.
For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money,
and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the life of him who has it.
Consider the work of God:
who can make straight what he has made crooked?”
Mike Cosper has a wonderful post on the ironic, violent meaning of Christmas. Here’s an outtake…
Christmas is violent. It’s earth-shattering. The very order of things, the way the world worked, was being rewritten. In 1811, an earthquake in Missouri caused church bells to ring in Philadelphia and made the Mississippi River run backwards. When the Christ-child gasped his first breath, the hinge of history swung in a new direction, and hell shuddered. The assault on its gates had begun.
We celebrate Christmas right at the Winter Solstice—a bit of metaphorical genius, if you ask me (at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere). Right as the year reaches its coldest, just as the nights get their longest and darkest, we open our Bibles and read,
The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
a light has dawned (Isaiah 9:2).
Historically, the church observed Advent in the month before Christmas, a month of fasting and anticipation. I grew up in churches that skipped the fasts and dove straight into the fa-la-la’s. Discovering Advent was like discovering Good Friday. A deep well of meaning gave Christmas wider and broader dimensions. For all of Christmas’s cause for celebration, there’s an accompanying need to awaken our minds to the surrounding desperation. The world was, and remains in many ways, in darkness. Christmas is part of that glorious already/not-yet tension, where the finished song of redemption awaits the “Amen!” of restoration. We celebrate Christmas in a broken and fallen world, in broken and fallen churches full of broken and fallen people.
Whatever we do in these coming days, let’s not miss the truly epic story of irony and violence that is the “true meaning” of Christmas.
This one’s a shameless plug. (First I wrote “shamless plug” and it’s that too.)
My wife is a super-swell lady and I’m way proud of her. One thing, among many, she does well is make handmade things. (Handmakes things?)
She has a store and in this store, she sells items from time to time. This is a newish thing for us. Anyway, today she has a few new items for sale and I wonder if you wouldn’t mind popping over and having a peek at said items? May-hap you could see if you might like to buy one for yourself, or someone you love, for Christmas, or for sheer jocularity.
It’s good stuff. I actually wrote some of the ad copy (we’re literally a mom and pop shop) and you might enjoy reading it because it’s supposed to be intentionally funny and lead to peace in the Midwest.
There’s a tea/coffee cozy. (This picture -below- of the cozy cozy features my mug on a mug. Ha!)
There’s this thing called a “List-maker.” I have no idea what it’s for, but it’s very cute.
UPDATE: I’m informed this is called a “List-TAKER,” not a “List-MAKER.” Very different, certainly, by Jove. Apparently, this thing “takes” your lists. Then you are listless.
And there’s another of her popular banners. This one’s the best yet, by far. The words look cool and have this subtly glittering quality to them. Like magic. The picture doesn’t quite reveal the magicalness (magicality?) of it, so trust me. It says, “Peace To You.” See it.
Act fast while supplies last. (<–Rhyming.) OK, commercial over. Enjoy.
Here’s a little outtake from Lanier Ivester’s wonderful post over at The Rabbit Room, Two Trees.
“The affair in the Garden was not about keeping rules or breaking them so much as choosing the Desire of our souls or choosing His counterfeit. At the heart of this poem lies that ancient choice, as terrible today as it was when God first granted it in the Garden: heaven or hell? Life or death? Not only for all eternity but for this very moment snared in time. ‘Gaze on this,’ the poet pleads, ‘not on that.’ Love and long for—in other words, submit to and believe—the ecstasy of the Life offered you. Take faith to turn from the ruin of your own heart and fix your eyes on something that is truer than all the sorrow of the world put together.
“It has been said that for every look at self we must take ten looks at Christ. I find that truth expressed with such magnificent beauty in this poem. For while the accepted interpretation—and for all I know, the original intent—of these lines may uphold an inward search for goodness apart from Christ, as a Christian I take great delight in the freedom I have to celebrate the gleaming flashes of truth that glitter and sparkle with such inexorable joy in the world around me. We’re miners, really, we servants of the true King, plunging through a darkened world in enemy territory to retrieve the scattered bits of Eden that were made to flame in the light of the sun. For though far-flung and often couched amid the hard crust of error and inaccuracy, they are there all the same. As C.S. Lewis recounted in Surprised by Joy, longings that disclose eternal realities may be mediated to us by ‘the water-colour world of Morris, the leafy recesses of Malory, the twilight of Yeats…’ That is just the wonder of poetry—or of anything beautiful, for that matter. They bear the opportunity of communicating spiritual truth, these remnants of a lost paradise with which our tired earth is endowed like veins of living gold, and give us courage to hope in a Redemptive Plan that is steadily, patiently, unrelentingly working to restore all things to their original purpose.”
I recommend the entire piece, which includes the poem, The Two Trees, by Yeats. Lanier and her husband, Philip, live in a farmhouse in Georgia. I was privileged to meet them at Hutchmoot 2010. She is a wonderful, careful and thoughtful writer.
She also has a website and a bookstore where she probably has what you’re looking for for the bibliophile in your family this Christmas. Note: It’s not for Kindle.
-Sam
