Fantasy, Fiction and Reality

39 Years of Mayhem, 55 Million Dead Are Enough!

2012-01-22T17:04:00.000-08:00

After New Hampshire’s presidential primary, National Review reported that pro-life presidential candidate Rick Santorum had made three telling points about abortion: 1) Science demonstrates that human life is a continuum from conception until death; 2) The debate is about whether it is ever right to withhold the protection of the human community from a class of human beings, the unborn; and 3) Repeal of Roe v. Wade would put this debate back “in an arena where the American public can make this decision.”

Roe v Wade, in denying the protection of the Constitution to an entire class of human beings, hearkens back to the Dred Scott Decision that denied such protection to African-American human beings. And while reversal of Roe v Wade might not afford any legal protection to the unborn in California, for example, the choice would be democratic instead of elitist, the still controverted decision of seven black-robed men.

So I’m in for Santorum, a statesman who has never waffled on abortion.

Pat Robertson: Relativist and Gnostic

2011-09-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

Pat Robertson's acquiescence in divorce for a philanderer married to an Alzheimer's victim was sharply criticized in Christianity Today and warmly defended by Slate.com. I read the Slate.com article, and I think that they got it right when they said that Robertson was just thinking like a Liberal (i.e., a human being?) instead of like a Fundamentalist (i.e., any orthodox Christian). They cited his support of China's One-Child Policy and of the right of a woman to get an abortion in the case of rape by, say, a syphilitic as similar examples of Robertson's right (humane, Liberal) thinking.

In reality, Robertson's Relativism in these three instances parallels that of Albus Dumbledore's argument by which he convinced the hesitant Severus Snape to join in a murder-suicide pact to kill him (Dumbledore) in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." In the case of the wife with Alzheimers, Robertson adds to his Relativism the heresy of Gnosticism. He declares the woman dead already because of the functional loss of her mental faculties. But though the communicaton lines between body and soul are down, the human person and image bearer of God remains until physical death separates body and soul. And since the vow made before God and man is, "Til death do us part," a minister of the Gospel has no right to minimize the obligation of fidelity to the vow for anyone. Those who accept this inconvenient truth and remain faithful to their vows in such a gut-wrenching situation glorify God and model the self-sacrificial love of Christ for his church before the watching world. The men and women who remain faithful to their wives and husbands to the end are real defenders of the institution of marriage and of the power of God's agape love.

Confessions of a Demonized Christian: How I received another "Jesus"

2011-08-24T20:09:00.000-07:00

“‘For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for wholeness and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope’” (Jeremiah 29:11, ESV).

[The Introduction to my forthcoming book, to be published online, follows.]

Many books have been written about demon affliction, but my Confessions of a Demonized Christian is unusual in that it is a frank, first person account of the sin and folly that led to my occupation and affliction by demons while I was already a Christian. Although my Confessions do not rise to the level of Augustine’s Confessions, neither do they descend to the level of the Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, it is said, tried to justify himself by admitting the bad things he had done. My purpose in writing my book as a confession is, first, to help similarly afflicted Christians recognize that they have suffered demonic incursion. Then, by telling the story of how—by God’s grace—I overcame my demons, I want to help demonized Christians overcome theirs. Finally, I want to help others avoid such demon incursion. Therefore, I believe that my Confessions are more akin to Augustine’s than to Rousseau’s because I share with Augustine the goals of the edification of the church and the glory of God.

I think my 38-year track record as a Christian writer shows my seriousness of purpose and the absence of sensationalism in my writing. And all my Christian writing was done after having been demonized in 1970. My first major Christian publication was my exposé in Christianity Today (December 21, 1973) of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s deceptive presentation of Transcendental Meditation (TM) as non-religious in order to insinuate it into public schools in the United States. That was followed by InterVarsity Press’s booklet on TM (1974) and by TM Wants You! (Baker Book House, 1976), a book on TM co-authored with Vail Hamilton (Carruth), a former teacher of TM.

I prepared for these publications by interviewing people involved in TM, often sharing the gospel with them. While maintaining respect for the humanity of TM’s practitioners, I was able to calmly expose the deceptive presentation of Hindu-based TM as non-religious, reveal the anti-biblical character of Eastern spirituality and warn against the dangers of demonic incursion from its practice.

My academic degrees include a BS in Engineering from UC Berkeley and an interdisciplinary MA in Politics and Literature from a small liberal arts university in Texas. With this background, I have published articles on subjects ranging from quantum mechanics (Touchstone, April 2004) to the rescue of Jews in Le Chambon, France. In addition, I have critiqued some of the Harry Potter books for American Spectator Online, and I am working on a literary appreciation/critique of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.”

The New Testament term “demonize” (daimonízomai) denotes being under the power of a demon or demons. I suffered demonization as a pervasive occupation of my body and a devastating affliction of my soul by demons, in which they subjected me to agonies of fear and anxiety and various physical afflictions. They never succeeded in suppressing my mind and gaining complete control of my body, but I did have one Hell of a fight because my body was already thoroughly occupied by evil spirits before I recognized them as demons. Nevertheless, despite their determined efforts, God’s grace was sufficient. What I learned through my experience in using the Scriptures and other means of grace against them, however, will be helpful to any demonized Christian, whatever degree of control the demons may have gained.

I received these demons at first gradually and imperceptibly through habitual sexual sin and later rapidly and palpably through false mystical experience. But there are many other avenues to demonization of believers because sins such as anger, unforgiveness, witchcraft, occultism, and recreational use of drugs have the same temporal consequences for Christians as for pagans: demonization. This, to-some, unpalatable reality has been recognized by a growing number of Christian scholars and leaders including Dr. Neil T. Anderson, Dr. Keith M. Bailey, Dr. Mark I. Bubeck, Dr. C. Fred Dickason, Dr. Ed Murphy and the late Dr. Merrill F. Unger. I share their view of this controverted subject not only from my experience, but also on the basis of the Scriptures. (See Chapter 22.)

To show exactly how demons entered my life requires that I expose the sins of other family members now dead, something that filial piety would forbid were it not for the importance of this material in making readers understand 1) How the devil operates in families and 2) How our sins can harm others in our families.

The form and purpose of my Confessions also require me to reveal my sins that opened me up to demonic incursion, including details of my sex life. This is embarrassing and humbling, and I would not do it were it not necessary to make clear just how sexual sin makes us vulnerable to entry by demons. I don’t dwell on these sins more than necessary for this purpose, but this may be a problem for readers for whom the “M-word” is a taboo. Indeed, one pastor suggested to me that perhaps the reason none of the publishers I contacted was interested in my manuscript was my frank discussion of masturbation (as sin). If that is true, perhaps the reason that alarming numbers of Christian men and pastors are said to remain addicted to pornography is that they are unwilling to confess their sin of lust under the humiliating name of the activity for the enhancement of which they pay good money to pornographers. Perhaps they are not desperate enough to admit just what they use their pornography for. Another reason may be that they have not recognized and dealt with the demonic element of their addiction.

Thus, this book will be helpful to those addicted to pornography as well as to those otherwise demonized because habitual sexual sin gives place to the devil just as much as do anger, unforgiveness, occultism and drug use. Since overcoming any of these sinful habits will likely require dealing directly with the demons involved, recognition of their presence may be the missing link necessary for victory over these sins

And there is certainly hope in Christ for all such habitual sinners and addicts, just as there is for other demonized Christians. So this book is addressed to all Christians afflicted by the devil and to those called to minister to them. For the cautionary yet hopeful story of how I became demonized and then, through the Scriptures and other means of grace, was restored to effective service in Christ’s kingdom, read the book.

David Haddon, August 19, 2011, Redding, California

Reminiscences on the Life of My Brother: Earl's Last Hunt

2011-06-11T12:56:00.000-07:00

My oldest brother Earl's 83rd birthday is today, June 11. Since both our birthdays are in June, and he was 10 years, 18 days my senior, I never forgot it as I sometimes did my other brothers’ birthdays. I had planned to mail him a home-made birthday card produced on my MS Publisher program with a hand-written message and a complimentary close of the one word, “Love.” Unfortunately, I was too late because he died suddenly last Sunday, June 5. Take heed.

He willed to me, among other things, his Winchester Model 94, .30-.30 carbine with which I killed my first deer on Red Mountain, East Fork, Trinity River, Trinity County, in 1956. I just realized that I had returned the favor by loaning him my Model 99 Winchester .308 with which he killed his last deer, probably sometime in the 1960s. After that exhausting hunt, he said he realized, "I don't have to do this." He came to prefer to see the beauty of the living animals and rather disapproved my continued willingness to hunt and kill them. Aesthetically, I agree with him, but like biblical Isaac I still have a yen for venison. I last hunted in 2009 and we didn't even see a buck--until we drove back through French Gulch where they hang around on the lawns even (or especially?) in the middle of deer season.

Henry David Thoreau had a similar development. While at Walden Pond he liked to catch and eat the pike. Later, he gave up such fare, but he admitted that if he returned to live on the Pond, he would be sorely tempted by those tasty fish. As a Transcendentalist (Pantheist) like Emerson, he probably had spiritual reasons for renouncing the killing of animals. As a Christian, I am free to take and eat meat, whether that of wild game or of livestock. Since the forgiveness of sins, my very salvation is based on the shedding of the innocent blood of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, I realize that in some circumstances, the shedding of blood is required for life to be preserved.

Thoreau thought that boys and young men should be allowed to pursue wild game because it brought them out into nature. But he viewed it as a stage through which they perhaps had to pass on the way to maturity. For myself, I'm not dogmatic, but I think those like my brother who renounce the chase have the better part. And perhaps those like my young Christian friend Brian, who never wanted to start hunting have the best of it.

Still, for some hunters, there is another aspect of hunting, the hunter's bond of trust formed over years of hunting together. You always put your life in the hands of your hunting partners and these relationships can become very close. Killing game becomes secondary to the ritual of the hunt, love for the wilderness in which you hunt and the relationships nurtured by the hunt.

Moreover, in gutting and skinning a deer, with blood at least up to your elbows, you get some sense of the reality of what happened to Christ on the Cross when he shed his blood for the sins of the world. And without the shedding of that blood, we all would be lost.

A Tale of Two Cities: New York and Paris

2011-05-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

So French Eurocrat Dominique Strauss-Kahn, key official of the International Monetary Fund, stands accused of attempting to rape an African-immigrant housemaid at a luxury hotel in New York. And the left-wing in France is outraged according to this report on National Review Online: "In French press accounts, one distills a veritable caricature: 'How dare those backward Americans do this? Do they have any idea of who Strauss-Kahn is and what he represents, or how we civilized and sophisticated Europeans deal with these dime-a-dozen sort of low-rent sexual accusations against men of culture from mere chambermaids?'”

According to an international report in the Record Searchlight, Strauss-Kahn was widely expected to run for the presidency of the French Republic despite reports of his affair with a subordinate. Indeed, his reputation as a womanizer had given him the nickname, "the great seducer."

But what I find interesting about Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged sexual assault on the African housemaid in New York is its parallel with a key incident in Dickens's Tale of Two Cities. The sin that motivates the unjust accusation against Charles Darnay (Evremonde) in Dickens's story was the rape of a young peasant woman by his long-dead father, the French noble, Count Evremonde. It seems that the French elite have yet to learn the lesson that Dickens took from the French Revolution, that if you oppress the masses of ordinary people without limit and/or treat them with utter contempt, sooner or later your class (or you) will pay the price.

La plus ca change, la plus c'est la meme chose. N'est ce pas?

Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! Mea Maxima Culpa!

2011-05-11T20:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was on the Shasta College campus here in Redding sharing the gospel with students to whom I hand out leaflets raising questions about Jesus Christ. It's easy because many of the students who pause to take a look at the leaflet are willing to volunteer their opinion of who Jesus is in response to my inquiry. By asking questions and listening first, I find that many students are willing to listen to what the New Testament says about sin, salvation and the Savior. And about every other time I go out there, at least one of the students has been prepared by the Holy Spirit to confess Jesus as Lord.

That didn't happen yesterday, but a couple of young men were willing to read from the Scriptures what the Bible says about Jesus and our salvation and let me pray for them. After several hours of leafleting and sharing, I went upstairs to a room off the balcony above the cafeteria where InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IV) was having a Bible study. We started small but soon an alumnus of Pelican Bay State Prison showed up with his guitar. The IV group leader seemed to identify with the visitor and mentioned that he was a former drug addict and a graduate of the Redding Mission's recovery program. A couple of black brothers came in and I found myself sitting beside a lovely young woman from Bethel's school of ministry who was from Romania and was reading the scripture from a bilingual Romanian-English Bible.

The Bible study was from Matthew 12, a chapter in which the Pharisees criticized Jesus disciples and Jesus himself, calling them Sabbath breakers because Jesus' disciples plucked some stalks of grain and ate the still tender grains and because Jesus insisted on healing the man in the synagogue with a withered hand on the Sabbath Day. Jesus defended his followers and himself summing up his argument by saying, "If you had known what these words mean, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice' (Hosea 6:6), you would not have condemned the innocent" (Matt. 12:7).
The main point of the study seemed to me to be that God was more interested in our heart attitude towards him and towards our neighbors than in ritual obedience.

After discussing the Scripture, we joined in worship songs with help from the visiting guitarist and the young woman from Romania and prayed for one another. I went out to my table on the quad in front of the cafeteria to eat my lunch and distribute a few more leaflets. Almost immediately, I was tested on the study: Would I put mercy ahead of ministry?

A lovely young woman approached and since I didn't immediately recognize her, she reminded me of her name (say, Natalie) and that we had discussed the teachings of the Jehovah's Witnesses with whom she has been studying. I instantly remembered her and began my apologetic demonstrating that Jehovah's Witnesses are polytheists. Their calling Jehovah "Almighty God" and Jesus "mighty god" (Isaiah 9:6) and "a god" (John 1:1, New World Translation only) leaves them with not one God, but two, a high God and a lesser god. This is rather like the situation of Greek mythology with Zeus as the high god and other lesser gods like Hermes. The Witnesses limit their god count to two, but they are, nevertheless, polytheists, not true monotheists.

But providentially, Natalie was interested in bigger game. She innocently asked me why we believe in the Trinity. Now I was ready to lead her to biblical answers to that question, but our guitarist, my brother from Pelican Bay, appeared and offered to help us out. I was none too pleased with his interruption of an ongoing witness I have been working on for a while, but he had a Scripture and Natalie wanted to see it. When I saw that he was taking us to 1 John 5:7 in his King James Version, I lost it.

In anger I told him (the truth) that the Jehovah's Witnesses would chew him up over that verse because it is not in the ancient Greek manuscripts (and therefore not in the original). He stood firm on his King James Bible, but in my anger I succeeded in driving him away. Amazingly, Natalie seemed not greatly affected by our altercation and I continued with my defense of the Trinity by pointing out that the Scriptures refer to three distinct persons as God and yet insist that there is but one God. Thus, God differs from us in that while there is but one person in the unity of each human being, God exists on the high order of Trinity in which there are three persons in the unity of the One Divine Being. I also shared on the personhood of the Holy Spirit from Acts 13:1-4 and on Jesus' claim of divinity in John 8:58 ("Before Abraham, I AM.") by identifying himself by the name God revealed to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3:14.

Indeed, I was so caught up in my ministry to this endangered soul that it was not until she had left and I was ready to head home that I began to realized that I had just been tested on the teaching at the IV meeting. And that I had flunked the test bigtime. I had put my ministry ahead of mercy. What my brother needed was a little mercy from his more knowledgeable brother. Instead, I beat him up verbally and got rid of him.

Today, I went back to the college to see whether I could find my offended brother and ask for his forgiveness--to no avail. I pray that God will comfort him and that I will be able to find him next week to seek forgiveness and reconciliation. Meanwhile, I find myself to be the one most in need of mercy. Thanks be to God whose mercies never come to an end.

Happy Thanksgiving! But Whom Do You Thank?

2010-11-19T20:59:00.000-08:00

Whom will you thank next Thursday on Thanksgiving Day? The Pilgrims thanked God the Creator, but what if you don't believe in the Creator? What then?

Well, you might thank your parents for giving you life. Especially, if you were born since 1973, since they could have offed you before you were born, all in accordance with the Law of the Land. But what if you're not even sure about the meaning and purpose of your life anyway? Whom do you thank then?--What about this man, Jesus Christ of Nazareth?

Graphic: See Albrect Durer's "Bearing of the Cross," 1512: www.backtoclassics.com/gallery/albrechtdurer/bearing_of_the_cross_no_10/

Yes, Jesus Christ, who loved us and "gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God (Ephesians 5:2b). Why not thank him for what he did when he allowed himself to be humiliated, tortured and murdered out of love for us sinners?

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16).

Hawking on Religion

2010-06-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

It is true that if the Christian God is the infinitely wise and powerful Creator of our meticulously designed (to support advanced life forms) planet, solar system, galaxy and universe, then he must be transcendently different from us. And yet, the biblical revelation tells us that we are like him in significant ways, made in his "image and likeness" as personal beings. And this means at least that both God and we can think, choose and act, and love.

Stephen Hawking recently contrasted science and religion (see paste below) and said that religion is based on authority, science on observation and reason. This kind of statement suggests first of all that we should not passively accept his authority when he speaks on subjects outside his field of physics. And then, we must point out that Christian faith is based on reason and observation as well. For example, eyewitness John the Apostle begins his first letter, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched--this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Fathher and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ" (1 John 1:1-3).

While I would agree with Stephen Hawking that the Universe (the Book of the Creation) appears to be about 14 billion and the earth about 4.5 billion years old. On the other hand, I believe that the Bible is, as it claims to be, the Word of God (2 Timothy 3:16) and is therefore true when correctly understood.

The other essentials on which all Christians agree is that Jesus of Nazareth is the eternal God manifested as a man, that he died on the cross for our sins and was raised again from the dead. We are saved by believing this and confessing him as Lord, the Master, our final Authority. So again, Hawking has a point about authority, by faith in Christ we come into submission to and personal relationship with the final Authority, God the Creator and Redeemer, the Holy Trinity.

Hawking on God, Huffington Post, Nicolas Graham, 6/10/10
Stephen Hawking, known for his groundbreaking work in physics, told Diane Sawyer that when it comes to reconciling science and religion, there is only one outcome: "science will win because it works." He also elaborated on his views about God.
"What could define God [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God," Hawking told Sawyer. "They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible."
When Sawyer asked if there was a way to reconcile religion and science, Hawking said, "There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."

The Great Granite Wall at the Head of Stuart's Fork, Trinity River

2009-07-25T13:49:00.000-07:00

Caribou Lakes 55 Years Later

2009-07-24T15:30:00.000-07:00

Late in August 1954, I climbed from Portuguese Camp on the Stuart’s Fork of the Trinity River the 2000 vertical feet up the to the pass on Sawtooth Ridge and then dropped down to Caribou Lake. I can't remember whether or not I spent a night on the lake, but that afternoon or the next, I took a look at the clouds, which threatened rain, and decided to go on down to Big Flat. Sixteen years old and having spent most of the last 2 months backpacking in the Alps with only my elder brother’s .38 special Smith and Wesson revolver for company, I walked on out in one afternoon and evening without any problem.

This July, fifty-five years later at 71, it took me 3 days to walk the perhaps 10 miles of the new trail from Big Flat back up to Caribou Lake. Quite a contrast! Being older and wiser, I had replaced the 4-pound revolver and holster with my beat-up, 4-pound guitar. But with grub for 6 days (i.e., about 12 pounds of dried foods plus a few delicacies), my load was heavier than that of the nearly empty-of-food GI rucksack I had carried out in 1954. This time, I had to pace myself to about 1 mile an hour to make it at all. So I camped Thursday night at Brown’s Meadow, perhaps 3 or 4 miles short of the first lake in the basin.

Friday, I rested, headed out after 3 pm and arrived at Snowslide Lake at about 6:30 pm. I cooked my dinner of mac and cheese and bedded down in a copse of black hemlock with red fir, lodgepole pine and western white pine all around. I got unduly upset at the little white-footed mouse trying to get at the granola in my pack and tossed a shoe his way. Happily, I missed, but I remember his big, dark, mouse-in-the-flashlight eyes contrasting with his white underparts. It would have been a shame to have hurt him. Fortunately, my sturdy internal frame pack seems impervious to small rodents.

Saturday, by-passing the trail down to the Lower Caribou Lake, I took only about 45 minutes to finally make it up to Caribou Lake, which lies at an elevation of about 6800 feet. Its heavily glaciated basin has little soil so that the red fir and black hemlock are scarce except on some parts of Sawtooth Ridge south of the lake. Immediately recognizable by its pendulous branchlets, one weeping spruce stands on the east side of the lake, a rather rare tree said to be a relic species unable to compete with other conifers except in very steep or rocky terrain. Another healthier specimen grows along the trail ascending from Snowslide Lake towards Big Flat.

Sunday, I rested again, but it threatened rain so I moved my camp further south from the outlet to a site on the granite that had room to set up my tube tent. The two young men camped there had welcomed me and my guitar the night before, and we had traded a few folk, pop and praise songs, including as I recall, “I Ride an Old Paint,” “Thou Art Worthy” and “He decidido seguir a Cristo.” They had headed back to McKinleyville earlier in the afternoon, leaving me alone on the lake as far as I could tell.

Monday, I climbed the 7700-foot peak southwest of the lake for the view of the glacial gorge at the head of the Stuart’s Fork of the Trinity River containing Emerald, Sapphire and Mirror Lakes and of the wall of granite beyond them. This magnificent scene speaks to me of the glory of the Creator. And I found myself calling on him for help as I descended by a different route through the cliffs on the west side of the Lake—a route I don’t advise for anyone not equipped for rock climbing. In the evening, I moved my camp back down to Snowslide Lake to give me a head-start on the long march back to Big Flat. It was warm for the mountains and my down sleeping bag was pretty hot, what with the hood closed down to a tiny nose hole to avoid being eaten alive by the many mosquitoes, which had been absent from the upper lake.

I took the new trail both ways given its gentler gradients, but horsemen prefer the old route. Although my pack was about 12 pounds lighter, Tuesday I was on the trail about 9 hours to get from Snowslide Lake to the Salmon River at Big Flat Campground. So on this trip I learned that I’m not the hiker I was 55 years ago, but the mountains remain magnificent.

Miles Stuart Compton, RIP

2009-06-24T17:51:00.000-07:00

I returned Stuart Compton's copy of "The Wind in the Willows" to my friend Sunday afternoon. I took over a year to get around to reading it, but Stuart never reproached me for my tardiness. And whatever Kenneth Grahame's personal beliefs, his animal fable masterfully evokes those immortal longings we all have for the transcendent, longings that C. S. Lewis describes in his essay, "The Weight of Glory."

Stuart had been having severe stomach pain and later decided he wanted to go to the Emergency Room for treatment. I wound up spending the night with him there, not that he seemed to be very sick, but for a couple of other reasons. I don't entirely trust hospitals with older patients and Stuart had turned 80 just last week. I wanted to have a prolife advocate present if his condition became serious. And having just read "The Wind in the Willows," I had in mind the the loyalty of Mole and Rat to each other and to their friends. Jesus' words about visiting Him when he was sick also encouraged me. Consequently, I got to see the early summer sunrise when I finally left the hospital after 5:00 am.

But Stuart had a bad abdominal hernia ever since they removed part of his colon 6 or 8 years ago, and the doctor and the surgeon wanted to repair it. I discussed the risks of surgery with Stuart, but the hernia was troublesome and he wanted to get rid of it. So they repaired the hernia on Monday and I called him at the hospital that evening and Tuesday as I recall. We prayed Tuesday, but I talked with him only briefly because he was in a lot of pain.

Wednesday morning Stuart's immortal longings were suddenly and unexpectedly fulfilled. And this is a realistic way of understanding his death. For as Christians we do not sorrow as those who have no certainty about going to that place for which we all long, the kingdom of God where the Lord Jesus Christ rules and reigns.

On "The Wind in the Willows"

2009-06-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

“‘It’s gone!’ sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “so beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever. No! there it is again!’ he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.

“‘Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,’ he said presently. ‘Oh, Mole! The beauty of it!! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of and the call in it is stronger even that the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.’

“The Mole, greatly wondering, obeyed. ‘I hear nothing myself,’ he said, ‘but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers.’

“The Rat never answered, if indeed he heard. Rapt, transported, trembling, he was possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant, in a strong sustaining grasp” (114, "The Wind in the Willows).

Well, is Grahame spoiling the Pagans of Pan, the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn’? I don’t know, but no matter. His masterful evocation of the ineffable longing for another world would be for C. S. Lewis a clue and invitation to seek that other, unknown world for which we long.

As an animal fable, the four main characters, Toad, Rat, Mole and Badger, represent the four humors or personality types of Sanguine, Melancholic, Phlegmatic and Choleric. Toad is certainly the Sanguine (‘expressive”) and Badger the Choleric (a leader who gets things done). I leave as an exercise Rat and Mole's classification although I think I've figured it out. But Grahame’s characters are like real people in that they sometimes act out of a humor other than their dominant one. For example, Mole's seizing the oars from Rat (and capsizing their boat) on their first outing is out of character for him (but might be expected of Toad).

What is remarkable is Grahame's evocation of those immortal longings we all have for something beyond our experience of this world, longings that tell us we are made for another world and that Lewis describes in his "The Weight of Glory." Grahame uses the Pagan Piper Pan to subcreate this experience in Rat and Mole during their mission of mercy to find the missing baby otter. The question I pose is whether Grahame is consciously using Pan for a Christian purpose or just describing the universal experience of longing for our home country of Paradise, the kingdom of God where the Son of God rules and reigns.

Exiles Longing for Our Native Land

2009-05-02T13:10:00.000-07:00

Every scheme to establish human happiness founders on the rocks of our self-destructive nature and of this world as it is is not being the world for which we were made. On his "Writer's Almanac" yesterday, Friday, May 1, Garrison Keillor (surprisingly to me) read a poem by Anne Porter that powerfully expresses our exile's longing for our native land, a theme that C. S. Lewis developed in his essay, "Weight of Glory."

The address for Anne Porter's "Music" on "Writer's Almanac" is http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2009/05/01. Or ctrl-click here Anne Porter

for access to two of her poems and references to two others.

The poem is published as "Music" by Anne Porter from Living Things: Collected Poems. © Steerforth Press, 2006.

Truth Project: Rousseau's Revolution Redux

2009-04-03T11:38:00.000-07:00

In my last blog, my unstated point was that Catholics had remained intellectually engaged with the problems of culture and society when American Fundamentalists and Evangelicals retreated to build a subculture disengaged from law, government, education and art. In so doing, we disregarded God's creation mandate to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (with people) and to subdue it. The strong Christian foundations of American society and government and the social and religious conservatism of the American Revolution made this luxury possible for a long time, but the secularists and skeptics (such as Thomas Payne) were there from the beginning and their hostility to God and to Christianity eventually bore bitter fruit.

By contrast, Catholics were a somewhat despised minority in America and a target of the French style revolutionary thought that swept away the monarchies of continental Europe during the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Therefore, they recognized the threat of the Revolution both to Catholicism and to the traditional structures of civil society. Their critique of the social effects of the Revolution was cogent, but their sometimes reactionary support of monarchy and the privileged position of the Roman church under it was flawed. In America, however, a Catholic thinker, Orestes Bronson, seems to have recognized the benefits of the ordered liberty experienced here and, I think, developed a Catholic political theory consonant with it. At any rate, American Catholicism adapted to American political freedoms and the result is that Evangelical Christians and many conservative Catholics stand shoulder to shoulder in defending them.

Another life experience that relates to the continuing Revolution recognized by the Truth Project was my time with Christian World Liberation Front (CWLF) in Berkeley. This countercultural Christian ministry was founded by two former Campus Crusade for Christ workers, Professor Jack Sparks and Pat Matriciano, in the late 60s in Berkeley. Some of the Christians in CWLF, such as I, had a traditional church background, but others came to Christ straight out of the Counter Culture with its sex, drugs, rock music, Eastern religion and Revolution. Most of these Christians soon shed their sexual immorality, drugs and Eastern religion, but the rock music and revolutionary politics were more enduring, especially, the politics.

The two ministries growing directly out of CWLF that still exist illustrate the division in its ranks: Right On!, (then a newspaper, now a journal) and Spiritual Counterfeits Project (SCP [an apologetics ministry]). Right On!, in view of the real injustices abroad in the world, tends to side with the revolutionaries, as exemplified by Barack Obama, the latter, with the traditional American political virtues as exemplified by Ron Paul.

For my part, the anti-Christian essence of the Revolution, makes the practical matter of choosing which side I come down in the context of American politics easy. I'll admit that if I were a Native American living in El Salvador, Guatemala, or Columbia (where their majority status makes them a threat to the white ruling class), I might see things differently. But one thing Jesus was not, was a violent revolutionary. Neither were the early Christians who triumphed through Roman persecution by faithfulness, flight and martyrdom.

Truth Project: So What?

2009-03-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

By now I think that I've seen enough of the Truth Project to get the big picture and so have you if you think about it. Del Tackett raises a profound subject and cites Scripture to show how the Triune God of the Bible relates to that matter. The primary goal is to glorify God by showing that while he utterly transcends the material universe, he is present and active (in the fullness of his being) at every point within it. The secondary goal is to show that Christian faith relates to every area of life and to provide some guidance in how we should live in God's creation while not being part of the passing world system.

Focus on the Family and Del are well aware that some of their interpretations about origins and about the social and political implications will be controversial among their Evangelical Christian viewers. They (and Pastor Mark) view this as a good thing; we ought to be aware of our differences and be willing to discuss them without condemning those with whom we differ over issues that have not been settled by the ancient councils and creeds as heresies (e.g., the age of the earth, the best form of government). No doubt there is a correct answer to some of these issues, but we may have to await the return of our Lord for certainty about them.

Last night I realized that because I did my graduate work in Political Philosophy and Literature at a Catholic University, I have a perspective on the Truth Project that perhaps few Evangelicals share. Did you notice, for example, that as an authority on the economics of poverty, Del cites a Catholic scholar? And did you ever wonder why, when Bush wanted to please his conservative Evangelical base, he was able to nominate two Roman Catholic judges with the academic and intellectual credentials to overcome the opposition of the Democrats in the Senate and the elites who love the "Living Constitution" instead of the document as written and intended? And why the Evangelicals welcomed Catholics John Roberts and Samuel Alito with open arms?

The answers go back, in part, to the retreat of conservative Evangelicals from engagement with the intellectual, political, social and artistic spheres of American life in the wake of their rejection by the mainline denominations. Indeed, as I understand it, J. Gresham Machen was, in effect, excommunicated from the Presbyterian Church for his outspoken opposition to Modernism (Liberalism) at Princeton. Many of the "Fundamentalists," as those who maintained the essentials of the faith such as the deity of Jesus, his Virgin Birth and his bloody atonement were called, accepted the Dispensationalist theology that emerged early in the 19th Century with its portrayal of Christians as always and only a beleaguered minority on the periphery of society.

Their theme song was, "This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through" and this truth was taken to mean that Christians had no cultural mandate to fulfill as a godly leaven in every legitimate aspect of society. Evangelism and Christian ministry was the way to really serve God and the concept of farming or business or even education as a calling or vocation from God as Luther had seen it waned. Without realizing it, Fundamentalists and the Evangelicals who emerged as a distinct group after WWII, were living on social and political capital borrowed from the Christians among the founders and the frontier evangelists of the 18th and early 19th Centuries. Only when the anti-Christian agenda of the secularist elites became law through critical Supreme Court decisions in the 1940s through the 1970s did Fundamentalists and Evangelicals wake up to the reality that their retreat from a holistic living out of the gospel was having dire spiritual consequences. Only with the earth shaking consequences of the Roe v. Wade decision's disregard of the biblical view of the sacredness of human life, did Fundamentalists and Evangelicals begin to awaken to what was happening.

More later. Gotta gather and stack the wood before my neighbor rebukes me more firmly.

Blessed be The Tie that Binds

2009-03-01T16:15:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Second Corinthians and was struck by the use of a certain word in verses 9 and 11 of Chapter 13:

Your restoration is what we pray for. . . . Finally, brothers, rejoice. Aim for restoration, comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you (ESV).

In Koine Greek, the verb form is katartizo, which in various translations is "be perfect" (KJV), be made perfect" (NIV), "aim for perfection" (NEB), "be made complete" (NKJV), "mend your ways" (RSV, JB), and "aim for restoration" (ESV).

The context of the letter is a Corinthian church that has been riven by divisions over the personalities of leaders, damaged by tolerance of egregious sin and guilty of disorder in the observance of the Lord's table. Indeed, a few verses before these Paul exhorts, "examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves" (v. 5a).

Given this situation, the translations "mend your ways" and "aim for restoration" seem better than, for example, "be made perfect." Katartizo has a wide range of meaning, but one of the first we see in the New Testament is at Jesus' calling of James and John to be disciples while they were "mending" their nets in the boat with their father Zebedee.

In verse 11 itself, the use of katartizo is followed by a series of exhortations to "comfort one another, agree with one another," and to "live in peace." The emphasis of these is on the loving unity that should reign in the body of Christ for "the God of love and peace " to be "with you." This happy state is followed by the command to "Greet one another with a holy kiss."

Given this emphasis on loving unity, I would use yet another signification of katartizo here, that of being knitted together or united completely (Perschebacher, The New Analytical Greek Lexicon). This is not a very novel insight since a similar passage in 1 Corinthians 1:10 is rendered in the NIV: "I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought."

The passage from chapter13 made me think of that phrase from Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line": "I keep the ends out for the ties that bind." The singer makes an effort to keep his heart strings open to his absent lover in anticipation of their hearts being woven together when they are back together. I am thinking about how all this might be applied to our focus groups. It seems to me that it points in the direction of doing things together beyond our weekly meetings.

Any ideas about this out there?

The French Revolution Lives On!

2009-02-25T16:21:00.000-08:00

The anti-clericalism of the French Revolution forced Catholic thinkers to recognize the distinction between state and society. The very existence of society as a complex entity of various social groups independent of the state and its government was called in question by the radical revolutions beginning with the French and continuing through the Bolshevik and subsequent revolutions including the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cuban and the Cambodian. The revolutionary regimes claimed the right to suppress or control all of the groups that make up a flourishing society including church, family, labor unions, academic faculties, athletic organizations, charitable organizations, simply everything.

In response to this, according to Russell Hittinger, Catholic thinkers saw from Genesis that God had created different kinds of entities. The purely physical powers and objects, animals with a kind of organic unity of each individual and then, marriage, a society of more than one person with a unity and structure of relationships suitable for its membership of husband, wife and children. Other groups within society had their chosen goals but constituted something similar in that they were a unity of persons seeking common goals and were natural to human societies.

As Hittinger puts it, the Catholics looked with favor on all such groups with legitimate purposes and saw them in a hierarchy in which the church was the highest in that its goal of relating to God was the highest purpose, followed by the state, whose goals are temporal but important and then society with its pluriform associations of family and other groups. These thinkers defended the legitimacy of society as against the state, which had no basis for suppressing or controlling its entities in pursuit of their legitimate goals.

Because of the anti-clericalism of the revolutions that swept Europe after 1789 and on into the 20th Century, Catholic thinkers opposed the revolution, often in the name of monarchy, the main political force available to oppose it. Because the American Revolution did not overturn church and society on the model of the French, Americans were slow to recognize the problem of utopian revolutions bent on perfecting human society and human beings, whatever the human cost. But Catholic thinkers did see that they were defending society in its multiform variety when they opposed these revolutions.

Abraham Kuyper's concept of sphere sovereignty, it seems to me, recognizes the same reality that society consists of many legitimate human institutions besides the government that are directly ordained by God and thus have a sphere of action independent of control by the state. I think that sphere sovereignty clarifies the reality without imposing a hierarchy. What the Catholics have seen best is that the revolutionary spirit abroad in the world is bent on totalitarian control of society in order to accomplish its goal of perfecting humanity and creating the earthly paradise. The state must be sovereign over all. Rousseau's idea of a General Will determined by a majority vote has been used to promote totalitarian democracy, but this bears no relationship to the popular sovereignty of the American Republic of our Founders.

Marxism-Leninism was explicit about its goals. But I believe that the spirit of the revolution animates the secular intelligentsia throughout Europe and America. Although Soviet Communism was turned back, the revolutionary spirit has triumphed in Europe and that is why the European Union is unwilling even to acknowledge its Chrsitian heritage. This is what the Culture War is about in America: the revolution. I believe that Del Tackett and the Truth Project get it. But it's not obvious to most Americans and so Christians are bound to differ about issues ranging from gun control to early childhood education.

Education, secularization and gun control are key areas where state control must be advanced in order to bring about the revolution by peaceful means. Christians should be wise in advancing Christian initiatives in education and in resisting secularization and gun control. Hate crimes laws are the leading edge of suppression of religious speech at the moment. But education is the key to long-term success. And well over 90% of American children are in government schools. That is the biggest practical problem.

Of course, the underlying problem is our failure to be the church. That is why I believe--contrary to current appearances perhaps--that our focus groups are the most important thing we are doing. This is where the church will come alive when God visits us.

The Paradox of God's Sovereignty, Man's Freedom

2009-02-21T21:02:00.000-08:00

I thought Ravi Zacharias's response at a university forum to a questioner who posed God's sovereignty as a direct contradiction of man's "free will" was brilliant. His brief response was that neither God's sovereignty nor man's freedom is absolute in this relationship.

Since Ravi didn't have time to make a complete response, I'll try to duplicate it in part and fill in the blanks in the argument from my perspective. To begin with, human beings are limited by their creaturely natures: genetics, parents, the laws of nature and many other things. Therefore, human choices are not entirely free, but are limited by God who has ordained all these things. Nevertheless, Adam at least was free to make the most significant choice of whether or not to obey God, to choose good or evil.

God, by contrast, is inherently completely free, but he freely chose to limit himself by making Adam a moral being with freedom to choose obedience and life or disobedience and death. Thus, God did not choose to impose his prescriptive will of obedience but chose to permit Adam's forseen disobedience.

At this point it should be clear that the contradiction is only apparent, a paradox, not a true contradiction. God freely limits his prescriptive will and man exercises his freedom to choose good or to choose evil. Adam, in fact, chose evil and thereby died spiritually, thus losing the ability to choose the good. Right here is where the real controversy begins. I'm not sure where Ravi goes with it, but I'll take this up again soon, D.V.

Doubting Darwinism Dangerous

2009-02-19T15:15:00.000-08:00

NPR's February 15 feature on Evangelical biology students in Kansas being taught to reconcile Darwinism with their Christian faith glossed over the depth of the difficulty. For these students believe—with some reason—that to get a Phd. in biology they must accept humanity’s not being a special creation of God as a fact as well established as Copernicus’s realization that earth is not the center of the solar system. And, indeed, as your intro indicated, this is what is believed by most academics in biology.

But the revolution of the earth about the sun can be confirmed by direct observations in the present and macroevolution, by contrast, cannot (because of its long time frame). Perhaps the science friendly way to deal with the continuing controversy over evolution is to acknowledge that now, as always since 1859, significant numbers of competent biologists hold that natural selection is a mechanism inadequate to explain the diversity of life.

Instead of allowing further debate and observations, however, those in control of the biological sciences establishment prefer to suppress dissent in defense of the reigning neo-Darwinian paradigm. And I think this intolerance has been well documented in Ben Stein’s documentary on the ID controversy, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Darwin’s Legacy of Purposelessness

2009-02-17T16:53:00.000-08:00

If Darwinism is true, we should be honest and face up to its implications that life has no overarching purpose and no rational basis for moral obligation.

If the rich diversity of organic life on earth came about by an undirected, impersonal process ruled by random mutation and survival of the fittest, then, indeed, human life has no purpose beyond survival and reproduction. Moreover, morality, while it may be beneficial for the group, has no basis for obligation binding on the individual.

As evolutionary philosopher and Tufts University Professor Daniel Dennett eloquently explains, "Darwin's idea--bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid . . . eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view.” So purposelessness replaces the glory of God and amorality replaces the morality of the Ten Commandments of Christian faith.

Our government schools have taught this corrosive idea, the evolutionary creation myth, to generations of American children. This myth makes the implausible claim that unintelligent causes are enough to explain all the astounding complexity of organic life from the single cell to the human brain. When youth taught this myth realize its implications, we should not be surprised that some despair of life and commit suicide. Others have even murdered their tormentors (and others) at school before they turned their weapons on themselves—confident from the myth that no Creator existed to hold them responsible.

But macroevolution can never be directly observed because it requires so much time. And where are the endlessly intergrading fossils recording the gradual process of transformation of species that Darwin expected would be found? And how explain the production of the massive amounts of encoded information in each cell’s DNA by a random process? Finally, how did life ever get started when the mathematicians say that attaining the minimal level of chemical complexity necessary for life by accident would take far more time than the 14-billion-year age of the universe?

For good reasons, then, many Americans remain skeptical of Darwinism.

Marriage Mockers: Christians and Gays Both

2008-10-13T17:20:00.000-07:00

Thank God that the early church required orthopraxy as well as orthodoxy of its members. Now orthopraxy is not sinless perfection, but it does require us not to make provision for the flesh to satisfy its gross desires. Thus, the mockery professing Christians commonly make of marriage by living together before they make their vows in the presence of the covenant community of the church is not acceptable.

It's not enough for a Christian to vote "yes" on Proposition 8 that opposes the mockery of honoring same-sex relations. We must honor marriage by not engaging in the parody of "shacking up" before we marry. Moreover, we should use the older language that called a couple's living together without benefit of marriage "living in sin." For that is an exact description of what it is according to the Bible.

Why Do Christians Believe in the Trinity?

2008-09-18T16:41:00.000-07:00

A Reasonable Answer to Unitarian Criticism of Trinitarian Doctrine

Trinity Defined
Muslims and Unitarians criticize the idea of the Trinity as illogical; they say it violates the logical Law of Non-contradiction: "A" cannot be "non-A" at the same time and in the same respect (or aspect). They claim that Christians say that three gods, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are one God. And if that were what the doctrine said, they would be correct in rejecting it as illogical.

Muslims misunderstand the doctrine, perhaps, because many Christians misunderstand it and are unable to correctly state it. Following Dr. Walter Martin, the doctrine can be stated thus: The one God eternally exists as the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Thus, God is one as to his being, essence or nature, but three as to Persons.

Oneness in Diversity
Now in the Old Testament, God’s oneness is expressed in the word echod, which is a unity that contains diversity. For example, this word occurs in the Jewish affirmation of faith of Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, is one LORD.” Echod also occurs in Genesis 2:24: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”

We often say that marriage is an image of the relationship of God and man, which is based on the biblical metaphor of Christ as the Bridegroom and the collective Body of Christ, the Church, as his Bride. (The individual believer, male or female, is not a “bride” of Christ, and “bridal mysticism” along this line has led to false doctrine and demonization.) But the profoundest symbolism of marriage is in its imaging of the loving unity of the Persons of the Holy Trinity.

Threeness
The threeness of God makes the Apostle John's statement in 1 John 4:8 and again in verse 16 that “God is love” possible. The three persons have been bound together in the unity of perfect love forever. God's love is the structural glue that unites the Trinity and forms the basis for God's fatherly love and of Christ’s husbandly love for the church. Love as I—Thou relationship is only possible among two or more persons. Thus for God to be love, the One God must have more than one Person within his unitary Being.

Consequences of Unitarianism
Muslims deny that God is Trinity and affirm that He is unitary. Logically enough, then, they deny that God deigns to call himself the Father of any human being. Their God is a monad, our Judge, exalted, utterly transcendent. And that explains why he is not seen as a loving father. Love as I—Thou relationship is not possible within a monistic God and therefore a fatherly relationship with his creatures is not to be expected. This is the logical result of any form of unitarianism and should be pointed out to Unitarian-Universalists and to Jews, who lack the logical rigor of Muslims in this respect.

C. S. Lewis on Relational Groups?

2008-09-08T17:03:00.000-07:00

Fern-seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity

By C. S. Lewis, Ed Walter Hooper, © 1975 Fontana/Collins

I made some notes a while back on this little known book of Lewis's essays. They seem to relate to what we are trying to be in our focus groups at Trinity Alliance--David

Christianity is not solitary and individualistic, but neither is it collective in the world’s sense. The enemy tries to convince us that religion is a private matter and if, to defend it, we import the world’s collectivism into Christianity, we fall into his other stratagem.

The true hierarchy is 1) membership in the Body of Christ, 2) personal and private life, and 3) collective life of the secular community. (12-13). “The secular community, since it exists for our natural good and not for our supernatural, has no higher end than to facilitate and safeguard the family, and friendship, and solitude” (13).

“The Christian is called, not to individualism but to membership in the mystical body” (15). The differences between the secular collective and the mystical body show how Christianity can oppose collectivism without individualism. But the term “member” must be clarified to show how like a family the unity of membership is a unity of unlikes, not likes (16). The church “is not a collective but a Body” (17). “We are summoned from the outset to combine as creatures with our Creator, as mortals with immortal, as redeemed sinners with sinless Redeemer. His presence, the interaction between him and us, must always be the overwhelmingly dominant factor in the life we are to lead within the Body; and any conception of Christian fellowship which does not mean primarily fellowship with him is out of court.” (17)

“Unity is the road to personality” (18).

Now McCain Just Needs a Consistent Prolifer at the Top of the Ticket

2008-08-29T20:52:00.000-07:00

McCain is nothing if not shrewd. After floating trial balloons for running mates such as Mitt Romney and Joe Liberman (!), candidates sure to alienate at least part of the party base, he comes up with a religious conservative with truly impeccable prolife credentials in the form of son Trig Palin.

In addition, he let the prolifers have their way on their plank in the platform, which is the strongest in the history of the party. The question now is, how do prolifers keep McCain's feet to the fire so that he will change his position from support of federal funding of unethical stem-cell research to opposition to it. Indeed, the need is for a ban on all human cloning

J. K. Rowling’s Books of Virtues: Sunny Stories Brighten Baby’s Bedtime Bigtime

2008-08-24T20:38:00.000-07:00

Somebody said that "a merry heart doeth good like a medicine." And unlike some of our prescription medicines, a laugh is very unlikely to kill you. So I think it's about time to repeat this humorous take on the very serious subject of childrens' fantasy literature. This original satire of J. K. Rowling's Harrry Potter books first appeared on my blog of December 12, 2007. This satire had been read-tested by one high school senior who loves Harry and has read all the books, some more than once. She liked the satire and didn't realize that I take a dim view of Harry until I told her after she read the satire. This piece is copyrighted so if you download it for your personal use, you may not use it for profit and you may not modify the text in any way. (c) 2007 David Haddon

Hermione Protects Her Muggle Parents
Do any of you uptight, anti-magical parents dare to deprive your young children of their Natural Right to a vicarious enrollment in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry by not buying them the Harry Potter books? If so, just consider Hermione Granger’s touching solicitude for the welfare of her parents described in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Deathly Hallows).

At 17 an adult in the wizard world, she wants to join her pals Ron Weasley and Harry in the hazardous quest to destroy the magical objects or horcruxes that are Dark Lord Voldemort’s means to immortality. Deeply concerned that joining Harry and Ron in the battle against Voldemort might endanger her muggle (non-wizard and hence defenseless against magic) parents, Hermione thoughtfully induces in Mom and Pop Granger the magical equivalent of Alzheimers, then puts entirely new identities into their empty minds, and finally sends them off good as new to England’s old penal colony of Australia. With a daughter like that, you’d surely never need to worry about winding up in a nursing home prematurely!

Euthanasia Anyone?
Or about staying in one indefinitely! For incredible as it may seem, Mistress of Ceremonies Rowling obliges her world-weary senior readers by inserting the classic arguments for euthanasia into the closing pages of Deathly Hallows (pp 682-83). There Albus Dumbledore (the greatest of the good wizards) convinces Snape (the bravest of the good wizards according to Harry) to kill him by asking him “to help an old man avoid pain and humiliation. . . . because death is coming for me” with great certainty. Here and elsewhere Rowling marshals about half a dozen other arguments to justify this murder-suicide pact, but its execution certainly secures Rowling’s claim to having boldly gone where no man has gone before in a popular children’s fantasy, certainly not the likes of J. R. R. Tolkein or C. S. Lewis (her fantasy’s purported resemblance to theirs having been just a teeny bit exaggerated).

Rowling Lights Up Youngsters’ Lives
But the really great thing about Rowling’s Harry Potter books is their down-home cheeriness. As Hilda Ravensfoot described the series, “These books of virtues combine the atmosphere of the spellbook with the effulgence of a sunrise. They are a veritable festival of lights, growing in brilliance with each new volume” (Literate Witch Online, September 31, 2005). Since the ever growing cheerfulness of Rowling’s books is the only point on which all the reviewers and critics agree, it is surely the real reason why her series is so popular.

Kids just love to see Harry bubbling over with high spirits all the time—whenever he’s not being ostracized by the other students, desperately lying to Professor Severus Snape to keep from being kicked out of school for his rule breaking, or badly bummed out about his dark fate. And Hermione’s always so sweet—except when Rita Skeeter writes a new column about her and Harry, Ron puts his foot in it (which is pretty often) or Harry tries to patch things up between them.

Then there’s all those beautiful silver and white unicorns in the Enchanted Forest—dead —because one of the dark wizards liked to slurp up their blood every night as a health drink smoothie. But no one ever messes with those sweet, cuddly thestrals, the fanged and carnivorous, carrion eating, black skeletal horses with blank white eyes and batwings that only someone who has witnessed a death can even see.

Given the sky high rates of depression and suicide among American teenagers, a little inspiration and uplift like this surely can’t hurt. And isn’t that just what Rowling said she was going to do, show young people real goodness, how to live, love, laugh and be happy, all that joie de vivre. I mean who wants to read a dark fantasy about the same kind of thing you see every night on the evening news, especially since 9/11?

Speaking of joie de vivre, surely that’s what those black-hooded, light extinguishing dementors who clamp their jaws on your mouth— and suck out your soul—are all about. Just thinking about them’ll put the joy way down in your soul so deep you can hardly stand it. Just the ticket for the ’tweens!

And how about those happy campers called the Inferi: Corpses “that have been bewitched to do a dark wizard’s bidding.” Harry first gets to meet one when a slimy white hand comes out of the dark, icy water to grasp his wrist. Then he sees “an army of the dead rising from the black water.” A small group of them grab him from behind with their “thin, fleshless arms cold as death” to carry him into the water to share their fate . . .

To top things off, there’s good old Nagini, Voldemort’s big, black pet snake and alter ego. In the last book, she finally kills Severus Snape but first gets to eat poor Professor of Muggles Studies Charity Burbage for “dinner.” Charity’s magically suspended and still living body revolving over the Death-Eaters’ conference table is the image that dominates the first chapter of this book and sets just the right atmosphere for Rowling’s last wild romp with our kids.

Rowling Reels to a Rollicking, Shakespeherean Rhythm of Rigor Mortis
Medieval painter-moralist Hans Holbein’s Danse Macabre has absolutely nothing on Rowling’s, oh, so appropriately named Deathly Hallows! Wikipedia’s death count for the book includes 19 identified characters (excluding Harry’s owl Hedwig) plus about 50 unnamed witches and wizards, mostly Voldemort followers and loyal Hogwarts students killed in the Battle of Hogwarts. Thus, in Rowling’s last fantastic, fatal fantasia with Harry, she forges fatalities fit for a favorable face-off with Shakespeare’s fiercest feuds. “O O O O that Shakespeherean rag!”

Rowling also reveals that stunning Snape-Dumbledore murder-suicide pact previously concealed but already executed in the previous book. Only the “good” wizards make such death pacts in Harry Potter so don’t blame poor old Voldemort who, all on his own, had to suffer seven deaths not even counted as such by Wikipedia, one for each of his soul fragments. With a little help from Harry, Voldemort did finally kill himself, but—unlike the good wizards—he didn’t really mean to do it.

Well, you get the idea: “Lullaby and good night, And may baby sleep tight . . .

Solzhenitsyn RIP

2008-08-06T16:32:00.000-07:00

I learned of Alexander Sozhenitsyn's death only Tuesday. I use several news sources including NPR, but I'm not a news junkie. And Sozhenitsyn fell out of favor with the American elites when he clarified his motivation for exposing the lie that was Soviet Communism in The Gulag Archipelago and other works such as A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This Nobel laureate was roundly booed by the graduating class at Harvard during his commencement address there when he warned the West that her forgetfulness of God was leading her in the direction of the tyranny that the Russian people had suffered under for 70 years.

For Solzhenitsyn was by the time of his exile to America a theist, a Christian theist, who had come to accept his grandparents' primitive belief that Russia was suffering under Communist oppression because they, the Russian people, had forgotten God. Like Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn experienced conversion while in prison, and he blessed his chains, as it were, for bringing him the wisdom to grasp the truth about God.

If you are familiar with Dostoevski's The Brother's Karamazov, you will appreciate Sozhenitsyn's use (in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) of the names "Ivan" and "Alyosha." In both books, Ivan is the character lacking faith, Alyosha, the one having it.But Sozhenitsyn's Ivan is not a doctrinaire atheist, he is a much more humane and likeable character than Dostoevski's. This Ivan is almost American in his mild insistence that prayer may work for you, Alyosha, but not for me. So if you haven't read The Gulag Archipelago (And I've only read the first of its two large volumes.), don't try it first or second. Go instead for the short but powerful evocation of the gulag in his short novel, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Then there is Cancer Ward and other novels and works that may today be more important than the brutal history of the Gulag.

"J. K. Rowling: Sovereign Fantasy-World Creator," to be in "Touchstone," Nov. 2008

2008-07-10T20:55:00.000-07:00

Free at last! Thank God! I'm free at last! Yesterday I got my editor's acknowledgement of receipt of my revised 2226-word ms for Touchstone's forum on Harry Potter to be published in November, the month the next Harry Potter movie comes out. As I understand the forum, my con article will be submitted to a couple of critics for their responses to it.

Over the past 8 years that I have been studying and writing about my bete noire, Harry, I have compiled a massive basis of observations for my criticism, including my notebook with detailed notes on my reading of each of the seven volumes of the series. And I have written thousands of words of detailed commentary. For all of that, I have published only four articles on Rowling's work, three in The American Spectator Online (July ?, 2005; Aug. 15, 17, 2007) and Celebrate Life (Nov/Dec 2007). The mainstream Christian journals have taken the Christianity Today line that these books are a "book of virtues." And even First Things and Touchstone have published favorable reviews on the little wizard.

I have distilled my 5000-word 2007 ms to meet an editorial requirement of about 2000 words. So, instead of my natural approach of building detail on detail, I have cut the details to fit and made my strongest argument on the basis of the contrast between Rowling's Post-Christian imagination and relativist morality and the profoundly Christian vision and transcendent (absolute) morality of Tolkein and Lewis. I think that the necessity of brevity will prove a virtue in this essay.

The lynchpin of my essay, then, is the following words of Aragorn to Eomer in the fields of Rohan when Eomer disputed his passage with Legolas and Gimli on their mission to rescue Pippin and Merry:

"Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house" (The Two Towers, Ballentine pb, 1965, 50, cited by Gene Edward Veith, “Still Ringing True,” World Magazine, 2001).

Do pray for Joanne Rowling and her many readers, that God may grant them his grace.

Prince Caspian Lite

2008-05-29T21:50:00.000-07:00

Before the Pevensie children are jerked out of the London train station by Prince Caspian’s blowing Susan's magic horn, Susan has already been deftly characterized as a loner liar and Peter, rather crudely, as a short-tempered brawler. These flaws seem to be the direct result of their tenures as Queen and as High King in Narnia. An inauspicious beginning for Director Andrew Adamson’s essay at translating C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian into a commercially successful movie, but these character defects help explain why Susan and Peter fail to see Aslan when innocent little Lucy does.

"Prince Caspian" the movie actually begins in media res with a scene not seen but implied in the book: the wife of King Miraz giving birth to a son. But Miraz is usurper of the Telmarine throne of Narnia and murderer of the former King Caspian, who was his own brother and Prince Caspian’s father. Thus, the birth of Miraz’s son as heir to the throne is a death sentence for the youthful Prince Caspian, Miraz’s nephew and rightful heir to the throne. Prince Caspian’s consequent flight results in his meeting the Old Narnians who adopt him as their champion against Miraz.

The quick transition from baby delivery to chase scene as Miraz’s horsemen pursue Caspian works well, cinematically, for a movie full of such chases, two big battle scenes (one newly conceived for the movie), and the single combat of High King Peter and King Miraz. Not for nothing is this children’s story rated PG 13. NPR’s movie reviewer noted a bit sourly that the battle scenes take up the better part of the 2-1/2 hour film. All this fast-paced combat action along with their special effects certainly enhanced the movie’s $56-million first-weekend box office, but the time lavished on them didn’t do much to advance the moral vision of C. S. Lewis’s original.

Nevertheless, the theme of belief vs unbelief is retained as the children and their dwarf companion make the ill-advised decision not to follow Aslan when Lucy sees him and understands his invitation to follow him on their quest to bring aid to Prince Caspian at Aslan’s How (“a low hill”). Later on Aslan tells Lucy that she should have followed him even if the others would not. And the question of why they had not seen Aslan troubles Peter and Susan as revealed in their dialogue with Lucy.

Arrived at Aslan's How, High King Peter prematurely concludes that Aslan has left the execution of the rescue of Narnia up to the kings and queens and their Old Narnian supporters. When his rash plan to make a sortie into the relatively lightly guarded castle of King Miraz ends in a costly rout, he and Caspian blame each other and even get into sword play.

So why are Lewis’s largely exemplary heroes characterized as and behave like such jerks? Simple: The decadence of popular culture in the West is such that had these two teenagers acted as responsibly as their originals, they would have been “like totally unbelievable" to the target audience of movie goers, teenagers and up. Good little girls like Lucy may be tolerated, but virtuous teenagers are oxymoronic.

Even worse, in a misguided effort to dazzle us with special effects and toy with vengeance, the film sensationalizes the Black Dwarf Nikabrik’s introduction of the Hag and the Werewolf and their proposal to revive the White Witch—by reviving her. Thus, she actually appears with a demonstration of her ice-producing power in Aslan’s How, a fortress shrine to Aslan complete with the remains of the broken stone table on which Aslan had been sacrificed for Edmund. This desecration of the fane of Aslan is offensive enough, but her witchcraft is so powerful that she easily mesmerizes both Peter and Prince Caspian who feebly protests, “This is not what I wanted.” Edmund, a teenager but apparently still young enough to retain some virtue, bursts in just in time to save the day.

The revised message of this scene seems to be that the power of witchcraft is so great that it can neutralize if not control the will of the two main heroes. But this flatly contradicts what Lewis was demonstrating. Instead, in the book we see that even at this, the lowest point of his military fortunes, Caspian had quite enough chest to reject with indignation the madness of using witchcraft to substitute the evil Witch for the evil Miraz: “So that’s your plan Nikabrik! Black sorcery and the calling up of an accursed ghost.” His imagination fed by the chivalrous tales of Old Narnia, the real Prince Caspian of Lewis’s book was impervious to such a proposal. But in this scene, the movie Prince Caspian comes across as a slightly doltish Telmarine (complete with a non-descript East European accent) who lacks the virtue to resist the power of the White Witch’s mere ghost.

Thus, Disney subverts one of the central themes of Lewis’s book: An adult mentor's loving nurture of the moral imagination of children through teaching them to love the right stories creates men and women of moral conviction who will act in accord with the virtues they have imbibed from those stories. This subversion is a profound betrayal of Lewis’s vision because the conversion of Telmarine Prince Caspian first to solidarity with his hereditary foes, the Old Narnians, and finally to faith in Aslan parallels Lewis’s own conversion first of his imagination by George MacDonald’s classic fairy story, Phantastes, before his later conversion to faith in Christ. Indeed, I am not alone in believing that Lewis put something of himself in Prince Caspian.

Furthermore, The Chronicles in general and Prince Caspian in particular are Lewis’s artistic response to the poverty of imagination, the inhumanity of the dominant naturalism of the Europe of his as of our day. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis discursively skewered this philosophy (quintessentially Ayers’s Logical Positivism) and its academic camp followers such as the authors of the infamous “Green Book.” But through his fantasy, Lewis gives us a story to capture the imagination of children and so help parents to actually give us men like Caspian, men with chests.

If ever the culture of the West comes to its senses and recovers its Christian roots, this seriously flawed if entertaining attempt to translate Prince Caspian into film must be redone, retaining and emphasizing both of Lewis’s two great themes: 1) The vital role of the right kind of children’s stories in the moral formation of men with chests and 2) The long walk of faith that demands hard steps of obedience to the King.

2008-05-21T15:11:00.000-07:00

Evangelical Manifesto, Part 1 / Memento Mori: Three Extractions

2008-05-09T20:48:00.000-07:00

First the memento mori: I'll complete the Biblical three score and ten next month, and today my dentist pulled three molars from the right side of my mouth. Two had gold crowns and the third a large mercury amalgam filling that had cracked and broken. Perhaps because I also have "moderate periodontal disease," they came out relatively easily and I only had to pay $115 each instead of the $185 listed for "surgical extraction." Because many of my gold crowns have been undermined by decay, my mid-term prospect is to extract all of them and get an upper plate. (The bottom plates tend to work poorly because the lower jaw is too flexible.)

My long-term prospect is, of course, the same as yours, death. But "since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ," and I "rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. . . . Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him!" (Romans 5:1, 2b, 9). I simply take Jesus at his word when he said, "I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life" (John 5:24)

Second, Evangelical Manifesto: The steering committe includes the likes of Timothy George, Os Guinness, Rich Mouw (President, Fuller Theological Seminary), David Neff (Editor in Chief, Christianity Today Media Group), and Dallas Willard (Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California). Charter signers include Leighton Ford, Irwin Lutzer, Jack Hayford on the one hand and Ron Sider and Jim Wallis on the other. Notable by their absence are leaders heavily involved in the culture war such as Jim Dobson and Tony Perkins of Family Research Council.

The Manifesto bills itself as "A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment." The infelicitous statement of the rationale for this declaration of "who we are and where we stand" seems to be saying that living together in societies riven by deep differences about religion and ideology is "one of the greatest challenges of the global era." Lack of clarity in the writing here gets the Manifesto off to a rocky start, but pluralism is certainly a problem, perhaps in ways more serious for Christian faith than they seem to think.

The Manifesto does maintain most of the theological distinctives of Evangelical faith--except for God's judgment and wrath and the Last Things, Heaven and Hell. Since these severely challenged biblical doctrines are so important for effective evangelism, this is a serious defect. Nevertheless, these worthies do maintain first of all that "Jesus Christ is fully God become fully human. . . beside whom there is no other god, and beside whom there is no other name by which we must be saved" (p. 6). This exclusive claim of Christian faith is perhaps where the spiritual battle rages most fiercely today so that point is well taken. More later.

You can find it at http://www.anevangelicalmanifesto.com/

California's Marriage Protection Act is Good Public Policy

2008-04-19T18:21:00.000-07:00

Fifteen-year-old Joshua Roberts "pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon" causing great bodily injury during an unprovoked assault on Levi Snyder outside a local movie theater according to Redding's Record Searchlight for April 17. Snyder was rendered comatose as a result of the attack.

And this story is yet another reason for all California citizens of good will to support the California Marriage Protection Act. This California initiative constitutional amendment would put into the California Constitution California's current marriage statute: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." This step has become necessary because these 14 words have been challenged in the California courts by homosexual activists and the California Supreme Court is set to decide the fate of man-woman marriage during the current session.

We males being barbarians by nature, civilizing each new generation of boys and young men is the basic task of society and fathers are crucial to this task. So when I saw Joshua Roberts's photo in the newspaper I thought, "Dollars to doughnuts he doesn't live with his father." And a local resident who claimed to know the boy confirmed my assumption. Whether this is true of Roberts or not, I believe it is true that the best single predictor for a boy's dropping out of school, getting into drugs or getting into trouble with the law is his not living in a household with his natural father.

And marriage is the social institution that helps men to remain with their children. But in countries such as Sweden and Denmark where same-sex marriages are legal, marriage is said to have tanked. That is, neither gays nor straights are bothering to get married. Thus, same-sex marriage seems to subvert traditional marriage by dishonoring it in the eyes of many people. In the United States where the majority of the population still believes that homosexual acts are sinful, the negative effect on marriage rates could be even more pronounced than in Scandanavia.

So your personal safety as you lock up your bike at the local Movies 10 depends on marriage and the support it affords teenagers and young men by helping keep dad in their homes. This argument has helped hesitant petition signers get up the nerve to do what they ought to do and sign the Marriage Protection Act petition. It works kind of like Garrison Keillor's Powder Milk Biscuits.

McCain Affirms Prolife as the Republican Position

2008-04-17T21:57:00.000-07:00

Family Research Council published today the following interview segment:

At a student forum moderated by MSNBC's Chris Matthews, the Republican nominee reiterated the importance of the party's pro-life platform:

Matthews: ...Would you put a person on the ticket with you, like the former governor of this state who is very popular, Tom Ridge, even though he may disagree on the issue of Roe v. Wade and abortion rights?... McCain: I don't know if it would stop him, but it would be difficult... Matthews: Why that one issue? Why is that one litmus test issue? McCain: I'm not saying that it would be necessarily, but I am saying... the respect and cherishing of the right of the unborn is one of the fundamental principles of my party. And it's a... deeply held belief of mine.

'Nuff said, David

Long Time No See

2008-04-06T18:00:00.000-07:00

I've been working day and night (an exaggeration, of course) what with my circulation of California Initiative Petitions and gathering the firewood from the California Department of Forestry's thinning of the brush and trees of the undeveloped chaparral just east of my house in the approach zone for the nearby light aircraft field on the west side of Redding.

First, I'd like to mention a couple of positives for John McCain's candidacy for President. He was not on my long or short list of candidates, but then there were problems for me with the entire pack. But McCain is a candidate who has taken a bold and clear stand against torture as an instrument in the war against the Islamofascists. He stated the obvious reality that controlled drowning, euphemistically called "water boarding," is torture, something that the U. S. Attorney General has not been able to bring himself to do, probably because of legal implications of the CIA's having used it.

In addition, I expect that McCain will try to find some reasonable and humane solution to the problem of America's eagerly using and sometimes exploiting Mexican immigrant labor in agriculture, industry and domestic service while not giving them any legal status. From a Biblical perspective, we must treat with care these aliens that we have invited by our willingness to pay them for their labor lest we violate the principle set forth in Yahweh's command to Israel about the aliens among them. He said, "Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt" (Ex. 22:21, cf. Ex. 23:9; Lev. 24:22; Deut. 24:17). And Deuteronomy 27:19 pronounces a curse on anyone who withholds justice from the alien.

On the other hand, McCain, at a minimum, must accommodate us prolifers by maintaining the Bush Administration's ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. This move is essential to the success of his candidacy and can hardly hurt him given the recent scientific breakthroughs that have made pluripotent stem cells available by ethical means.

To ensure that I have offended someone, I'll conclude with a comment I posted elsewhere:
Reverend Wright was right when he said that the United States got what it was asking for on 9/11, that is, if he meant a small taste of God's judgment for our national sins such as our putting money before God and legally aborting 50,000,000 of our offspring, black, white, brown and red.

Playing the Ghoul for Fun and Profit

2008-02-12T20:18:00.000-08:00

Redding's Turtle Bay Exploration Park has chosen to exploit the natural human fascination with dead human bodies by hosting Premier Exhibitions' "Bodies Revealed" show. This consists of actual human bodies preserved by a plastination that prevents their decay and permits them to be sectioned so as to reveal human anatomy in great detail.

That the impulse to gaze upon dead human bodies is a from the baser part of human nature was recognized long ago by Plato (in the Euthyphro as I recall). One of the characters in the dialogue confesses that he had succumbed to the temptation to gaze at a body lying beside the road he was traveling and then, smitten with guilt for his shameful behavior, he went on to tell how he rebuked the defective part within himself for its base desire.

But whence this intuitive realization that it is wrong to satisfy that powerful desire to look upon a dead body merely to satisfy that desire. Isn't this just some premodern taboo springing from a superstitious dread of death? That, after all, is the logical conclusion of a naturalistic materialism. If the body is just a sophisticated protein machine, it can be used like a junked automobile for whatever purpose we choose.

But no healthy human culture, let alone any of the great civilizations, has failed to care for and to bury with the respect of ceremony and ritual the bodies of its dead. And for the Christian, the reasons for this are several. First of all, by the mystery of sexual generation, the joining together of two physical entities, the sperm and the egg, calls forth a new person with a human body and a soul complete with mind, will and emotions. And when the human being has been regenerated through faith in Jesus Christ, that being's body becomes a temple of the Spirit of God. Finally, although that body remains mortal, it is destined to be resurrected in an incorruptible state to live forever in the presence of God.

Thus, the taboo against gazing upon a dead body is a reflection of the sacredness of the body as an integral part of the crown of God's creation, humanity, and of its potential as a habitation of God even during its mortal life. To disregard this taboo by making a public exhibit of dead bodies for the entertainment of the public is a step back in the direction of gladiatorial combats to the death. It was Christianity that ended those combats and it is the Post-Christianity of Secularism that welcomes this exploitation of our inner ghouls for fun and profit.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Moral Vision & J. R. R. Tolkein’s

2008-01-23T20:44:00.000-08:00

Monday morning when I heard Martin Luther King Jr.'s magnificent articulation of his moral vision voiced by a young African-American man on NPR's Morning Edition, I was moved. For, indeed, “some things are right and wrong, eternally so, absolutely so.” And this reminded me of a similar moral vision articulated by J. R. R. in The Two Towers: “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

[This is essentially the text of the letter I sent to Morning Edition in response to their Kansas Celebrates MLK piece.]

Reflections on Roe v Wade at 35 Years and 50,000,000 Dead

2008-01-22T16:24:00.000-08:00

This year's juxtaposition of Martin Luther King Jr., Day on January 21 and the anniversary of Roe v Wade on January 22 merits some reflection. As we saw yesterday, in a 1954 speech entitled, “Recovering Lost Values,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said:

Some things are right and wrong, eternally so, absolutely so. It’s wrong to hate; it always has been wrong and it always will be wrong.

As these powerful words would imply, his speech included frontal assaults on moral relativism and pragmatism and on the practical atheism that he saw in churches and church people who failed to stand up for what is right.

So if we believe as Dr. King said that it is always and everywhere absolutely wrong to hate another human being, what does that imply for abortion? My dictionary defines “hate” as “extreme aversion.” And abortion, in fact, involves an aversion to an unborn human being so strong that it requires the destruction of that innocent human being. By Dr. King’s principle, then, abortion must be wrong.

After 35 years and 50,000,000 American lives lost, the American Holocaust continues. O Lord, how long? For encouragement in the endurance always required to defeat evil, I suggest that you turn to Psalm 94 and Psalm 130 .

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Moral Vision

2008-01-21T20:04:00.000-08:00

In 1954, Martin Luther King, Jr., said:

Some things are right and wrong, eternally so, absolutely so. It’s wrong to hate; it always has been wrong and it always will be wrong. It is wrong in America, and it is wrong in Germany, it is wrong Russia, and it’s wrong in China. It was wrong in 2000 BC and it is wrong in 1954 AD.

This morning when I heard this passage from King's "Recovering Lost Values" speech on NPR's Morning Edition, I was struck by his emphasis on moral absolutes. Indeed, in that speech he boldly attacked the moral relativism that he saw as a threat to the moral vision that underlay his dream of justice and peace for America.

Allan Bloom traced the intellectual history of this relativism in post-WWII America to its German roots in his The Closing of the American Mind. But moral absolutes were alive and well in King's mind and in the black churches that formed the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement. They well understood that in America, the surest basis for our knowledge of these absolutes was the Law of God handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai.

But in The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis outlined the "Way" or the "Tao," the universal moral insights of all the great civilizations in opposition to the Greenbook, which instructed British educators in how they should indoctrinate school children in relativism. And the Apostle Paul reveals to us that even in those nations that did not have the Law of Moses, "they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts" (Romans 2:15a).

The first thing I thought of this morning when I heard King's words was the passage from J. R. R. Tolkein's The Two Towers that I cited back in December:

Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them,
as much in the GoldenWood as in his own house.

King's speech deserves study as an example of the power of moral absolutes to motivate the nonviolent battle for justice. And Tolkein's words are an example of the power of literature to cast a moral vision. Thus, J. R. R. Tolkein inculcates moral absolutes imaginatively as surely as does Martin Luther King discursively. And J. K. Rowling just as surely inculcates the moral relativism King abhorred. Literature resembles politics in that, for better or worse, it is always ultimately moral

A transcript of "Recovering Lost Values" is available at: http://www.africanamericans.com/MLKjrRediscoveringLostValues.htm

Runner and Blogger Extraordinaire

2008-01-07T20:36:00.000-08:00

Extreme distance runner (and pastor) Mark Swanson blogs at http://ultrapastor.blogspot.com/. Check it out, but don't take everything he says, expecially about the benefits of running, too seriously. On the other hand, he claims marriage is beneficial, too.

And I'm not sure about how many times he's read The Lord of the Rings, either.

The Fellowship of the Ring Revisited

2007-12-30T17:52:00.000-08:00

I began this blog December 4 with a post about Tolkein's LOTR, and not long after I began rereading The Fellowship of the Ring for only the third time in my life. The story now seems more engaging, richer, than ever before. It's a pity I've waited so long between readings (1966, 2001, 2007), but you will notice that at least they are becoming more frequent as the years pass.

In chapter 2, "The Shadow of the Past," Gandalf tells Frodo the dark history of the One Great Ring of Power and reveals to him that the Ring must be destroyed and that "you were meant to have it." Frodo protests his inadequacy for the task by asking the why questions: "Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?"

Gandalf replies, "Such questions cannot be answered." And he tells Frodo not to suppose that it was for his great merit but that since he has, indeed, been chosen for the quest, he must use such virtues as he has. Frodo still resists undertaking the quest and innocently, yet dangerously, tempts Gandalf by saying, "Will you not take the ring?"

Realizing that he could not resist the temptation to wield the evil Ring for good, Gandalf vehemently refuses Frodo's offer and concludes, "The decision lies with you."

Smoking his pipe in silence, Gandalf awaits Frodo's reply. At last Frodo hesitantly decides to undertake the perilous quest although it "would mean exile, a flight from danger into danger drawing it after me." Frodo supposes that he must go alone, but Sam Gamgee, by his eavesdropping on their conversation, inadvertently yet willingly volunteers to go with Frodo. Thus, the Fellowship of the Ring was born and its first three members selected.

These highlights of Chapter 2 are here written to tempt their readers to reread (or read) the chapter, the book, the trilogy for yourselves.

About the Incarnation

2007-12-25T13:19:00.000-08:00

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. . . (John 1:1, 14a).

That the Creator would take on the form of the creature is, to me, the most astounding revelation in the Bible. This good news of the birth of Immanuel ("God with us") is far more surprising than the good news of the Resurrection. Given that Jesus was the God-man, how could death hope to hold him? But given that man is sinful, who could hope that God would take on himself the very form of sinful man to rescue him? Yet that is what God did in Jesus Christ our Lord.

And for this gift, Christians are humbly grateful as we celebrate Christ's First Advent and eagerly await his Second Advent.

The Golden Compass

2007-12-16T18:54:00.000-08:00

At our focus group dinner this afternoon, someone asked me about The Golden Compass. And while I have been following commentaries on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy at least since Alan Jacobs and Ken Myers discussed their misgivings about it on Mars Hill Audio Journal after the first volume came out, I haven't read it. So I'll limit my comments to noting that his fantasy world is an anti-Narnia. In Alan Jacobs biography of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian, Jacobs quotes this summary of Lewis's message in Narnia as Pullman sees it:

Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-coloured people are better than dark-coloured people; and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it. . . . those of us who detest the supernaturalism, the reactionary sneering, the misogyny, the racism, and the sheer dishonesty of his narrative method will still be arguing against him [even after Lewis's imagined canonization] (p 307).

For detailed comments from someone who has read the book, check out Tom Gilson's blog at http://www.thinkingchristian.net/?p=1111. This page will lead you to recent blog entries on The Golden Compass.

J. K. Rowling’s Books of Virtues: Sunny Stories Brighten Baby’s Bedtime Bigtime

2007-12-12T19:47:00.000-08:00

Is there more than one way to discover truth?

2007-12-04T11:53:00.000-08:00

The Secularism that came to dominate public life in the United States and Western Europe in the 20th Century excluded religion from the public square and claimed that only the methods of science offered verifiable knowledge for questions of public policy. But this attitude is Scientism, not science, and is subject to the same philosophical critique that demolished Logical Positivism: The empirical methods of science cannot verify the claim that these methods are the only source of truth.

Indeed, in Conjectures and Refutations, Karl Popper showed that the limitations of inductive logic guarantee that empirical science cannot verify its theories about reality and therefore makes fundamental progress only by experiments that falsify an existing theory. Nevertheless, unlike Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, Popper was not an instrumentalist denying the possibility of relating the equations of science to underlying realities. He agreed with Einstein that the purpose of science was to discover such truth about reality and that it may well do so. But certainly when it comes to the microcosm and the macrocosm, it is impossible ever to verify a theory based on empirical data. Thus, a proper philosophy of science puts appropriate limitations on the claims to be made for it. Nevertheless, science remains a means to discover truth about some kinds of reality.

I believe that literature, history, philosophy, and revelation as well as science are all valid ways of exploring and learning knowledge about different aspects of reality. Thus, I affirm all of these ways of knowing. My interests are primarily in literature, theology and philosophy, but science impinges on these in its study of the macrocosm in Astronomy and Cosmology and in its study of the microcosm in Quantum Mechanics. So all of these subjects will be on the table for this blog.

Transcendence in J. R. R. Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings"

2007-12-03T10:27:00.000-08:00

Tolkein's fantasy world in The Lord of the Rings lacks direct references to God and contasts sharply with C. S. Lewis's Narnia by Middle Earth's lack of a personal figure representing God as Aslan does in Narnia. But Tolkein's overarching mythology of Middle Earth set forth in The Silmarillion names the Creator of Middle Earth and its creatures Eru, the One, who in Arda, the earth, is called Iluvatar. This story further parallels the Biblical account of creation in Genesis with the rebellion and fall of Melkor, the greatest of the angelic spirits called the Valar, a story obviously modeled on the rebellion of Lucifer against God. And both Gandalf the Grey (not really a wizard, but a Valar) and elven King Elrond, two of the wisest and most powerful beings working for good in Middle Earth during its Third Age, tell us that a higher power is secretly working to thwart the Dark Lord Sauron of Mordor.

Moreover, other good characters recognize a transcendent ethic that contrasts sharply with the relativism of good and evil of contemporary imaginative works such as the Star Wars science fiction movies and Joanne Rowling's fantasy world of Harry Potter and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Consider, for example, Gene Edward Veith's citation from The Two Towers (the second volume of Tolkein's trilogy) in "Still Ringing True," World Magazine, 2001:

"Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the GoldenWood as in his own house."

Have you readers of Tolkein's trilogy noted other examples of this absolute morality that transcends time and place and is common to elves, men and the other rational creatures of Middle Earth? Or of other evidences of Providence in Middle Earth besides Gandalf's reassurance of Frodo that a power other than that of Sauron had brought the One Ring to Frodo and besides King Elrond's affirmation that the apparently chance gathering of representatives of the races of Middle Earth at his palace was not an accident but was ordained? If so, please post them.