Ranting for the Right Reasons

Thus far this blog has sought to persuade. Persuasion is allright, as far as it goes - it may get a vote or convince your friends to go see a certain movie. Persuasion has a long and illustrious history, I suppose going all the way back to some ancient Roman who invented a system for it so people could study how to win friends and influence pagans.

But true love for the written word is not something which ought to be "convincing." It shouldn't make us say "Oh, yes, I agree with that." It should put a fire in our bones. It should clash like blood on snow. It should make us boil and weep and shout and even dance. We should get so worked up about the flow of ideas and beauty in our books that we're ready to pick up torches and pitchforks and surround the publishing house responsible for "Left Behind". For almost ten years, I would guess, I've been trying to get people off of that treadmill, with no effect. Why is it that most Christians really don't see the tremendous lack... the impoverishment of our books and our stories? Why are we so satisfied with twinkies when one honest, gripping, cathartic story can cleanse the soul like a revelation from God? If money determines what gets printed, and popularity decides what makes money, then we Christians are producing popularity; we are adjusting our standards by the weight of the almighty dollar.

And why do we have to try to adjust reality for ourselves? We can't just absorb the story of Hosea, we have to modernize it and stick in a happy ending. We can't just read the story of Joseph, we do the same thing with that. Why re-write the Bible as a novel, or as a contemporary story? Is that necessary? Obviously not, but is it even remotely helpful?! Why will people testify that such a novel "helped them through" some dark time, when the original from the scriptures never did? This is a sorry condition in which we find ourselves. Go to the word, unless you think it is insufficient by itself and it requires being made into a romance novel! Is reading it too hard? You need things put into dialogue you recognize from modern fiction? From Stephen King? This is sad.

There should be such a demand for originality in thought and expression (among Christians of all people!!) that second- rate offerings just have nowhere to go. Yet they have lots of places to go, and lots of wallets get filled, and lots of things get covered over and lost. Maybe some future generation of Christians will dig through the accumulated detritus and dust of our current trinket-mentality and find some stone foundations, some solid unmovable rocks. Maybe they'll say that somebody built here, but what they've built is gone and only the foundations remain. Maybe that's our only hope. My guess is they won't even know who we were, or where we went, or why we disappeared.

Exceptions which prove the rule - pt. 1

CELEBRATION OF DISCIPLINE by Richard Foster

This book qualifies as "modern" because unless something drastic has happened in the last year which I don't know about, the author is still alive. This book was published in the seventies, and as the name states, it is an exploration of disciplines which have guided and strengthened believers' growth and maturity from the very beginning of the church. It is separated into three divisions; those disciplines which are internal, those which are external, and those which are corporate. Foster has produced a classic by virtue of the fact that his work brings originality to the subject without being isolated from the giants. He leans heavily on George Fox, Theresa of Avila, and a host of other acknowledged masters of the inner life, but it is plain to infer that he has engaged the disciplines himself, and worked through them with reverence.

There are helpful illustrations which make this book especially worthwhile. For instance, his heavy reliance upon grace as the force and means of growth. Look for his explanation of how the disciplines don't change us, but rather place us within the stream of God's grace. One of the concepts I particularly benefited from was this thought - "every discipline comes along with a corresponding freedom." This is illustrated by Demosthenes who gave his voice a workout by making speeches with pebbles in his mouth, standing on the shore, speaking above the sound of the waves. Because of that extravagant exercise he had perfect freedom to speak to people whenever he was asked or required to do so. The eccentric image of a man with rocks in his mouth on the beach may seem like some (disturbed) people to be the point - something esoteric which "makes you better." But the exercise, or discipline, is not the point! It is only a means to an end. This crucial component is too often missing from authors who seek to exhort others to lead more disciplined lives. Or, if it is not missing, it is not sufficiently emphasized.

You ought to absorb this one. It is in reprint and can be found in many different bookstores, mercifully missing from department stores' "inspirational" sections, but easy enough to locate if you are determined. One chapter at a time, ponder slowly, meditate lovingly. You will take exception with a few things in here if you read it thoughtfully (for nobody agrees with every single thought someone else articulates) but for thoughtful readers, those little points of contention don't matter. This book is an oasis in a desert.

Why the Test of Time?

If you are curious enough, and if you go to any trouble about the list of books on the left, then you'll notice that all of them are old, by which I mean all the authors of those books are dead. They belong to another era, another time. They lived and wrote and wept and rejoiced in a generation removed from our own. The most recent book was written by Francis Schaeffer, who passed away in the '80's. But he wrote most of his works in the sixties and seventies, including some of the most influential and imminent approaches to apologetics of any author at any time. The book mentioned here was actually not "written" by him, but was recorded on a tape recorder as he went through a systematic Bible study with some students. Later, someone else put it on paper. Over the last four decades of the twentieth century, the self-destructing culture in America was minutely analyzed and embraced by this man of God, and several of his later books have become modern classics; notably The God Who Is There and How Shall We Then Live?

Missing from this list are any books written in the last ten years - or the last forty years. I want to share why. Elie Wiesel recently wrote that books no longer have the influence they once did, and he is right. When printed books were a new innovation, an author could write one small work and change the world. Today we have such an outpouring of books that they have become much less valuable. There are so many that we take them all for granted. There are so many which are bad, and so many which are worthless, that they invariably undo the good being achieved by the rare ones. In the twenty-first century in America we Christians tend to put too much emphasis on what is new. The most recent is automatically the best. The more modern it is the more we swamp bookstores to snap them up. We have made our standard for excellence the New York Times Bestsellers' list.

I don't want to sound like a killjoy, but we could stand to be a little more discerning. After all, popularity has never been a good gauge of what is worthwhile. One Christian writer observed years ago that if you see all the Christians around you running after a new development, you should run as fast as possible the other direction. What he meant was that trends (monuments to the momentary) pop up among the church just as frequently, if not more, than among non-believers. The more we can recognize them and avoid them, the better. After all, if a movement is truly God-inspired, then it will have staying power in its effects and usefulness. Truth endures because truth does not change. The more true and worthy a book is, the longer it will generally last. Christian classics speak to succeeding generations because they speak to something in the spirit which does not alter with technology or church-growth strategies or psychological breakthroughs. They get in under the surface to the deep part of the soul, to a place where cell-phones and i-pods can't reach. They have weathered the changing of the tide as one generation shuffles off and another takes the stage.

Most books written in any one year are reduced to garbage bins and used-book shelves shortly before they disintegrate. Only a very precious few have staying power, and they demand our attention. We ignore them at a very great risk to ourselves, because they have the lingering aroma of eternity upon them. They never attain to the level of their more popular, less substantial cousins, but somehow after decades have gone by we continue to see them sitting on bookshelves, one or two at a time, while the bestsellers have disappeared. They insinute their way into the world: here a young student, there a lawyer, in another state a middle-aged pastor and on the other side of the country a truck driver each are thinking fresh, deep thoughts brought to the surface by a writer they will not meet in this life. They are connected to an earlier generation by a reality which spans all ages and all races.

This reality has bypassed most of the recent stars of popular Christianity, but it is preserved in the stalwarts. There is magic there, and depth, and familiar surprises which astound and comfort us. By no means should you stop buying and reading new books, but under no circumstances should we ignore the giants of our heritage, the men and women who wrote without much reward or recognition. Their greatness has been proven; their success does not depend on advertising or mass appeal. That is why the test of time matters. It isn't everything, but it's more than what we've become used to.

Imagination and the Spirit: an appeal to Christians who care about the written word

The Bible is the most eclectic group of writings on the planet. Even if you have not sampled every other collection of literature available, it is still safe to say that the writings contained within the Bible are more variegated, more broad in tone, more satisfying in their uniqueness and appealing in their diversity than anything else that exists. The reasons for this are many, and so obvious that we don't need to be reminded of them. But what we do need to remember, or perhaps to hear for the first time, is that to truly enjoy and benefit from the Bible we are required to approach it with an eclectic spirit.
What I mean by that is that we must engage the passage we are encountering as a unique and singular presentation of some truth. I was once told about a pastor who was so carried away by his particularly narrow theology that he only preached - week after week after week - from the book of Ephesians. For that reason both he and his congregation were robbed of the heroism of first Samuel, the beauty of the Psalms, the enigma of Ecclesiastes, the exotic drama of Genesis, the mystery of Daniel and Isaiah and the catharsis of Judges and Jeremiah. It's as if God had prepared a feast with 66 fresh, exciting courses, and this miserly servant was only passing around the potatoes.
Now, given the diversity of style and figures of speech, and the ancient substance of our primary book, one would expect Christians to be the most liberal and free-ranging readers on the planet. You might expect Christians to enjoy the freedom of poetry, the allure of allegory and the drama of truly unique fiction. If you were to judge by our first preference in literature, then Christians ought to be dipping their minds into scholarly efforts written by historians, essays in philosophy, biographies and true stories... even those without happy endings! But there are two different trends which make it clear that this is not the majority experience for believers today.
The first is the avalanche of Christian fiction which is continuously poured into Christian bookstores. Not that it is wrong to use fiction to explore or communicate Christian values, but this is hardly a good staple. Since fiction is the easiest thing to read, the least likely to change a life and the most likely to be transitory in its effects, Christians should limit what they take in of that genre at the very least. But it isn't just quantity that should bother us: it is also quality. Most of the Christian novels I have read over the last thirty years are very little different in tone or style or plot or device from the more massive and less worthy universe of secular novels which are equally easy to read. Granted, some very fresh and innovative writing is being done in fiction, but it doesn't tend to sell well, and so far it hasn't particularly popped up in Christian venues. This doesn't mean that no Christian fiction is worthy and unique and original, but it does mean that the average and ordinary, the predictable and the pragmatic are so abundant and overwhelming that any originality we may have to offer has likely become subsumed.
I recently ran across this observation from Douglas Gresham, and I think that it deserves our attention. He said, "One of the problems with reading Christian books is that because they are all telling the same Truth from the same source, their authors (with some notable exceptions) fall too easily in the trap of comfortably saying the same things, often in much the same ways." If we have properly ingested the writings of Jeremiah and Hosea and Ezekiel, of John and Paul and Mark, we should be avoiding this trap automatically. Sadly, I believe we have (in too many instances) grasped the point, or one of the points, the ancient authors are trying to make without being equally effected by the ebb and flow of the whole context. Most 'modernizations' of biblical allegories or stories are likely to be little more than a second run at the original story dressed up like a popular novel with the names changed so people can pronounce them. One of the great crimes against Christian literature is an inexplicable lack of soaring imagination.
The other trend, aside from a huge outpouring of mediocre stories, is this unbelievable variety of Bibles. Here the other side of the coin is seen - instead of too little variety, too much. We market a different Bible for teen boys, teen girls, Calvinists, people who are struggling with depression, people who want more money, men, women, men under thirty, women over forty, skaters, children, senior citizens, and college students. What difference can their possibly be between these Bibles? Translations aside, not much. The only difference is in the margins.
As a teaching pastor, I have listened in dismay as many Christians, when confronted with a question about a Bible passage, simply respond by reading what their footnotes tell them. Now before I am burned in effigy, let me say that I have no doubt that footnotes and cross-references in the margins of a Bible can help someone who is studying their Bible. Very good. But this trend is clearly getting out of hand. I first noticed this when I picked up a Bible intended for people who are sick or suffering. The Psalms in this Bible were just like my old Bible. The Proverbs weren't any different. Jesus was still telling the same stories in the gospels. The only difference was the profusion of anecdotes, devotional thoughts and encouraging quotations which filled every page, competing with the original text and clearly more attractive in design and layout.
Now that we are floating so far out to sea, it is probably too late to ask: is this really necessary? Have we reached a point where ordinary Christians cannot read a passage and work it out for themselves? Is it too much for us to linger, thinking over a verse or a chapter, chewing on it mentally until we have gotten something beneficial out of it? It is a mark of our unwillingness to work, or think hard, or labour over scripture that our first instinct is to say "hold on, let me see what my footnotes say." The most valuable book for the Christian's mind is a plain Bible with wide margins and no commentary. Such a tool forces us to think for ourselves or do without, and there are too few of them in circulation!
So this is my plea to the dozen or so people who may see this post. Let's raise our standards when it comes to literature. Let's demand more. Let's prepare ourselves for the very best, most imaginative, original, creative writing in the world by working over the plain, unadorned text of scripture, and then demand that authors who want to say something meet those high standards. Put your ultra-thick, super-commentary-filled, stuffed and plucked Bible on the shelves for a little while, sequester yourself with a copy of the Bible which is liberated and plain, and give your imagination and your comprehension a good workout. You may even find that your understand and your subsequent reading become a little more eclectic.