Of This and Other Worlds

Being currently absorbed with trying to make a very tight deadline, I didn't think I could do anything to contribute to the help_haiti fandom auction, and was feeling sorry about it. However, sinstralpride pointed out that I could offer some signed books, and then it occurred to me that I could also offer to write fanfic after all, provided that the recipient understands I can't do it until April.

So here is my thread: Pro Author Offering Signed Books OR Fanfic. Winner makes a confirmed donation directly to a charity bringing aid to Haiti, and gets their choice of books or a commissioned story in return.

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On a related but more meaningful note, the very talented penwiper26 has continued her series of Psalm-inspired poetry with this take on Psalm 4, dedicated to the singers of Haiti. Lovely and thought-provoking, and the link to the news article made me tear up.

It always amazes and humbles me when people in the depths of sudden and unthinkable suffering can find it in themselves to praise God in song. I can't help being reminded of the apostle Paul and his companion Silas singing hymns in prison after being beaten and put in stocks for preaching about Christ; or Job in the midst of physical agony, financial devastation and shattering personal grief saying to his wife, "Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?" and refusing to curse God and die.

Those of us who live in relative comfort sometimes argue that it's impossible to believe in a good or a righteous God when disasters like the one in Haiti happen. Yet when some of the very people who are hurting the most are the quickest to turn to God in prayer and even in praise, it makes those arguments seem a little less compelling. Or at least it does to me.

Over the last year or so I've been reading through the Bible at the rate of about a chapter a day. I just finished Jeremiah yesterday, which is a really emotionally tough book if you identify even slightly with Jeremiah*, and as I was reading the first chapter of Lamentations I was struck by a thought that's been creeping up on me for a while.

Grief is not a sin.

Well, duh, you may say. Of course it's okay to grieve. We lose people or hear terrible news or suffer disappointment, we feel sad, it would be monstrous if we didn't react that way. And I think most people would agree that this is the case.

And yet it's easy to fall into the trap of expecting that grief, or lamentation, should only last so long or go so far. Just a nice neat little grief, not too long, something you can swallow back and force a watery smile and then put your chin up and keep marching with a smile on your face. Especially if you call yourself a Christian, because Christians are supposed to be full! of! joy! and count themselves blessed when they suffer tribulation, etc.

And for this reason people -- especially religious people, it seems -- can be amazingly cruel and dismissive toward others who are hurting, by trying to pep them up with positive talk and encourage them to stop focusing on all that negative stuff, or even (the worst) condemning and shunning them if they go on grieving and lamenting past the generally accepted time period for such things.

( Where does this come from? Not the Bible, that's for sure... )

Sin, and all the things that have gone wrong with our world because of sin, may be the ultimate cause of every grief we suffer, and it's true that one day all tears will be wiped away forever and that will be a very good thing. But until that happens, grieving and lamenting and suffering over sin and hardship are not just tolerable or permissible to a certain limited extent -- they're actually good and right.

So the next time you're genuinely upset over something terrible that has happened to you or someone you love, and somebody comes up to you and chirps, "Oh, well, praise the Lord anyhow!" You should feel free to punch them in the face** hand them the book of Lamentations.


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* Actually, I keep thinking there has to be a YA novel in there somewhere, because God called Jeremiah to be a prophet when he was just a young teenager. I'll keep you posted if I ever figure the plot of that one out.

** See, that's why I usually talk myself out of writing serious blog posts without spending a week editing them first.

*** No belittlement is meant by the use of this term, believe me; I would gladly have used "Tanakh" instead except that some of my non-Jewish readers wouldn't have understood what I mean by it.

As a parent, I try to be fair and generous with my children, but just the same, there are times when I say "no" to their requests. And not just the kind of requests that are foolish, extravagant, or ultimately harmful -- sometimes I find myself saying "no" even when what they're asking of me is harmless or even potentially beneficial to them, just because I'm too tired or don't have the money or simply don't feel like it.

But God is not like that. ( Here's why... )

I say this for my own benefit more than anyone else's, because I've just had some disappointing news about something that means a great deal to me, and it's all too easy to ask why. But I know that this is not the end of the story, or the whole of it either. And since it wasn't very long ago that a similar disappointment turned into a triumph I could never have foreseen, I am choosing to wait and trust God in this matter, too.

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, to those who are called according to His purpose." (Romans 8:28)

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On a tangentially related note, I told jamesbow I would write a review of his new book Fathom Five, and I still intend to. But a new deadline has come up, and right now I don't have the time to give his story the careful attention it deserves. So, until I can compose a proper review, I'll just say that it's beautifully written, with emotional resonance and an intriguing, well-executed plot, and that you should go read it (and the previous book The Unwritten Girl, which I reviewed here, as well).

And now it is dinner time.

Shawn over at Grey in Black and White has a couple of lovely posts on what worship is, and what it means to God. I think he's on to some really good thoughts here -- simple, yet meaningful, and encouraging to me in my own efforts to understand and practice worship.

From the first post:

I take some pleasure when I receive a compliment, but if you really want to see me happy spend some time telling me about how fine a child my son is (or my daughters for that matter). So it is with the Triune God....

And the second:

Worship is when we are amazed by God, when we are completely taken up by the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and when we express back to the Father what we know to be true about the Son through the leading of the Spirit. It can sometimes be emotionally satisfying, sometimes emotionally draining, and sometimes the emotions have little to do with it. Really, worship is not about having my heart touched; it's about touching God's heart when we acknowledge the perfections of the Son.

Those are just excerpts, though; I do recommend you read all of both posts. They aren't very long, but they're meaty.

It's been a long time -- too long -- since I blogged about anything theological. After sitting through several thought-provoking, heart-challenging messages at the Christian family camp we just attended, it's really come home to me that I've been giving the Lord short shrift in a lot of ways, my online activities especially. So in future, by the Lord's grace, I hope to get back to talking a little more often about the things that really matter -- or perhaps I should rather say, the One who really matters.

After listening to three messages on the subject, I've been thinking about the temptations of Christ (see Matthew 4:1-11 or Luke 4:1-13). More specifically, about the whole controversial topic of precisely what it meant for the Lord Jesus to be "tempted", particularly in light of the book of Hebrews:

For this reason he had to be made like [us] in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted. (Hebrews 2:17-18)

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. (Hebrews 4:15-16)

Some people argue that in order for Christ to experience or be able to empathize with human temptation in any meaningful sense, He had to have the potential to sin, even if He did not actually do so. But the more I think about it, the more I disagree… and tomorrow, I'll try to explain why.

Aha! Now I remember something interesting I wanted to post about. Months ago, Cheryl asked me in the comments of her blog:

What is your approach to Biblical interpretation? (I'm thinking mostly literal vs. nonliteral here, though I'm aware there are many more nuanced approaches and you have one of those. And feel free to direct me to a blog post on this, as I think you've probably written one on it...)

Well, as it happens, I didn't have a blog post written on it, so I had to file her question away for future reference, and now here I am, finally getting around to it (thanks for your patience, Cheryl!).

I do approach the Bible literally -- that is, I believe that it may be read and understood without a secret decoder ring or years of special education. This is not to say that a theological education has no value, but rather that I believe any person capable of reading, say, the average newspaper article should be capable of grasping the basic narratives and concepts of the Bible.

Of course there are difficult texts and passages which require thoughtful consideration before the reader can be at all confident of their meaning; and there are also parts which at first glance seem merely irrelevant or tedious and are hard to interpret in that sense. But I do not believe that the Bible is so packed with allegory, metaphor and figurative language that a reasonably intelligent child couldn't understand the gist of what it's trying to say. I believe that God gave us His Word in order to communicate, not obfuscate.

Note, however, that taking the Bible literally does not mean failing to recognize that it contains poetic language, parables, metaphors and the like. Jesus used all kinds of analogies and figures of speech in His teaching, for instance; and the writings of the Old Testament prophets are full of symbols and visionary language. However, it is generally quite clear in the context when a given passage is figurative or poetic in nature.

In that sense, I read the Bible as I would read any other book -- I begin by assuming that the author(s) of said book have a message that they wish to communicate to me, and that I will be able to understand that message if I read carefully. It may take me a long time -- even a whole lifetime -- to fully grasp everything that is being said, but that doesn't mean that I won't be able to understand any of it.

The problem with the view that the Bible merely "contains" truth or that it is primarily figurative in nature is that it postulates a God who plays favorites with the intelligensia. The more sophisticated a thinker you are, the better you are versed in ancient literature and languages and symbolic interpretation and so on, the more of the Bible you will understand; whereas a person without the same access to higher education and extra-biblical historical writings and so on will be left in the dark. However, Paul in his letter to the Corinthians explicitly stated that God does not give preferential treatment to the highly educated. His message is not merely for some, but for all.

As such, I believe that the Bible can indeed be profitably understood and put into practice by anyone who approaches it thoughtfully and humbly, even if they are not an accredited Biblical scholar; and that it is also possible for a highly intelligent and educated person to miss the interpretive boat, if they approach the text in a spirit of arrogance or with preconceived notions of what it will or should contain.

Mind you, the real difficulty most of us (and I include myself in this) have with the Bible is not that we read it and fail to comprehend what it is saying, but that we read it carelessly or not at all.

As part of a discussion in her LiveJournal, Kate Orman wanted to know why I believe it's important that the things the Bible -- and specifically, Jesus Himself -- says about Adam and Eve and the fall of humanity be literally, factually correct, and not merely figuratively or metaphorically true. Couldn't the first few chapters of Genesis be mythical rather than historical, designed to be appreciated by people less scientifically advanced than ourselves? And couldn't Jesus have been speaking to the crowds on that level?

At first glance, it sounds reasonable enough that even if Jesus was the Son of God and not merely a good human teacher, He might have chosen to accomodate the ignorance of his listeners, speaking in mythical terms that they would understand. After all, He told parables, didn't He?

There's a problem with this idea, however. If you look at the gospels, when Jesus used parables and metaphors, it's generally indicated in or obvious from the context that He is using figurative language. Phrases such as "I am the Door", for instance, would not have been understood literally by any of His hearers, and as He goes on to expound on the meaning of His statement it's clear that He's using a metaphor. Elsewhere it's even more obvious, with phrases like, "And He spoke to them in parables, saying..." and in some cases, as in the case of the parable of the sower, a full interpretation of the parable follows, with each symbolic element assigned its literal meaning.

There are no such indicators, however, when Jesus speaks to the Pharisees about divorce and invokes the example of Adam and Eve. He's not merely using Adam and Eve as metaphors, here: He's arguing that because God literally created a literal man and a literal woman and gave them to each other in a literal first marriage, therefore once a man and woman have been joined in marriage, God means them to belong exclusively to one another and to take their relationship seriously. And in the process of making this argument, Jesus quotes directly from Genesis 1:27 and 2:24, treating both chapters as historical and authoritative accounts of what God actually said and did at the beginning of creation.

If in this passage Jesus were merely making reference to Genesis as a shared myth with no basis in literal historical fact, then wouldn't actually be proving anything, any more than I would be proving something if I said, "The story of Snow White proves that eating apples is dangerous, and therefore you ought not to eat apples." Of course, one might say, the Pharisees were part of a scientifically ignorant culture and didn't know that the story of Adam and Eve wasn't literally true, so it was okay for Jesus to use the myth in this way to convince them. But that puts Jesus in the position of exploiting the Pharisees' scientific ignorance and using a false argument to persuade them. And it also makes His words irrelevant to us today, because if God did not actually create Adam and Eve as distinct male and female human beings whose union generated the rest of the human race, then the whole basis for Jesus's "one man/one woman/marriage is sacred" argument collapses.

But there's an even more serious problem, involving not just this one passage but indeed the whole message of the Bible from beginning to end. What the Bible tells us, beginning with Genesis and carrying straight through to the end of Revelation, is that sin is a real and terrible problem in the heart of humankind, and that since the events of Genesis 3 all creation has been "groaning" on account of it. In other words, the Bible insists that at some definite, historical point in the past, mankind made a conscious, willful decision to rebel against God and His commandment, thus bringing about the moral corruption of humanity, the inevitability of physical death, and all the disastrous faults we see in the world around us. This is why humanity needed sacrifices for sin (a practice we see beginning with Cain and Abel) and ultimately, a divine, infinite, perfect Redeemer to pay sin's penalty and offer us salvation.

However, if there was no Eden, no Adam and Eve, and no literal space-time fall, there is no such thing as sin -- only faulty creation on God's part. We are left to conclude that somehow God neglected to build into the process of evolution a safeguard to keep it from going wrong, leaving man and nature mere victims of a faulty evolutionary process, and a careless or short-sighted or indifferent God the real author of the phenomenon we call sin. In which case the whole idea of God sending a Redeemer in the form of His Son Jesus Christ is sheer mockery -- God trying to cover up His own mistakes and pin the blame on us.

But the Bible tells us very firmly that God did not make creation as we see it today: rather, He created it "good" and it was only corrupted after humanity fell. Both the Old and New Testaments repeatedly assert that God is not the author of sin; rather, He is completely opposed to and set apart from sin, and it is antithetical to His very nature. At the same time, the Bible insists, we human beings are far from being victims of chance or evolution -- rather, we are all directly and materially responsible for our own moral and spiritual choices, and answerable to a holy God.

Neither the divine righteousness nor the human moral responsibility described in the Bible are possible, however, unless there was at some point a literal commandment that a literal Adam and Eve literally chose to violate, and therefore a literal space-time fall in a literal Eden. Otherwise, the whole concept of "sin" is meaningless. We can't talk about morality, only about the way things have evolved to be -- and as such we have no basis on which to judge any creature's behavior as good or evil, right or wrong, because all of us are nothing more than soft machines programmed by our biology, with no reason to resist any of our biological impulses.

My personal conviction is that the story of Adam and Eve as the father and mother of all human beings, and the Fall as the origin of sin and as the reason for man's estrangement from God, may well be powerful in a mythic or symbolic sense, but in the Biblical context it has no meaning unless it actually happened. Without that element of factuality, the whole Biblical narrative of sin and redemption falls apart. Indeed, without that historical narrative and its climax in the literal death and literal resurrection of Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Bible itself would tell us that there is no hope, no meaning, and no value in the Christian faith for anyone, and that Christians are to be "pitied above all men".

NOTE: For anyone interested in a more cogent and thorough examination of these ideas, my brother Stephen L. Anderson has written an article entitled "Can Myth Save the Miraculous?" to be published in a forthcoming issue of Philosophy Now. Recommended.

I took the test at the The Political Compass a couple of weeks ago, and again this morning, and both times it declared me a member of the Authoritarian Left and suggested I read the works of Lenin and Mao Tse-Tung. Wah! Of course, in this context the left-right spectrum is focused on economic policy, and I guess my mistrust of big business and capitalism for its own sake came through there. But Lenin and Mao? That's just wrong. :(

On another quasi-political note, but one more in line with my interests, I turned on CBC Radio One this morning to hear an interview with Jerry Jenkins of the bestselling Left Behind series. Since the focus of the show was political rather than creative, nothing was said about the bad prose, hackneyed dialogue and flat "golly gee" characterization that make those books so (IMO) painful to read and their enormous success (to me) so inexplicable; but apart from that, it seemed like a reasonably fair interview. It's not Jenkins and LaHaye's theology I disagree with (for the most part, anyway); but I believe the cartoonish speculation that drives the books, far from being compelling and persuasive as the authors obviously hope, actually ends up making premillenial eschatology look stupid. Not to mention confusing a lot of readers as to which parts of this sweeping end-times scenario are actually drawn from the Bible and which parts are authorial invention.

Anyway, the Jenkins interview was followed by an interesting talk with two analysts who worry that the bestselling series may have a dangerous effect on U.S. domestic and foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Middle East. They were obviously well familiar with the books and their content -- a good deal more so than I am, in fact -- and most of their discourse was fairly intelligent, but a few of their misapprehensions bothered me. For one, they kept talking about "dispensationalism" instead of "premillenialism" to describe Jenkins and LaHaye's eschatology. The two ideas are often connected, but they aren't synonymous. For another, they seemed to think that premillenialists believe that all Jews will be wiped off the face of the earth in God's final judgment, which is not true either. (Unless, I suppose, one argues that the moment a Jew confesses Jesus as Messiah he immediately ceases to be Jewish, regardless of birth or culture. But even so, there will be a great many more Gentiles judged than there will be Jews, so it's hardly an anti-semitic proposition.)

I shouldn't complain too much, though. It could have been a lot worse.