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.