God-In-The-Box

We have a problem. The Bible hasn’t changed in nearly two millennia, but how we view God changes regularly and certain aspects of His character rise and fall in trendy popularity. In short, regardless of how His Word describes Him, we still “create” God in our image.

During pretty much my whole lifetime, our culture focuses on the aspects of God that deal with love—‘Our Father in heaven,’ ‘God is love,’ and so on, with just enough of His justice so that we can get back to mercy, grace, love, peace, blessings, and so on with some sort of ‘context.’

There is also a kick of flavor added in by Lewis (in Narnia), Young (in The Shack) and others, including me who talk about God’s unpredictability, that He is wild and doesn’t conform to our image of him, but we still tend to think of things more on the softer side of wild, as a whole.

It was not like that 200+ years ago.

myth vs. Myth

I just finished listening to a CD set of the BBC Radio version of J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” I’ve read the books, I’ve seen the movies (several times), and this was the second listening to the series. It is simply a great story, an amazingly well done myth of a fictional world.

It got me thinking again of the many things said by both Tolkien and Lewis about myth and stories, and what a pivotal role they played in Lewis’ conversion. It also reminded me of something over which I have puzzled deeply many times:  how we can watch Star Wars, Superman, Star Trek, Narnia, Lord of the Rings and so many others on the big screen and it is amazing entertainment, cinematography, special effects, and we are taken away to new planes of thought and the amazing feats or magic don’t faze, but thrill us. Yet, we use those same moviemaking techniques to tell Biblical stories or projections of Revelation, they ring hollow, fake, cheesy—choose your own adjective. Why the dichotomy, even for believers, but especially for non-Christians?

It turns out, this was exactly C. S. Lewis’ issue when he read the Gospels as a young boy. They read like myths, but in a stilted, banal style that didn’t flow with the majesty, grace and power of the pagan myths. It was like reading a newspaper account of Scarlett O’Hara’s life instead of Margaret Mitchell’s telling in Gone With The Wind. How could anyone believe it? It was mythological like Zeus gestating Dionysus in his leg, but a myth told badly, by authors with no imagination.

Lewis explains the problem and its resolution thus:

“There was no such historical claim (in Hindu mythology) as in Christianity. I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion – those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the pagan world around them – was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this.”

And elsewhere:

“Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this:  that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: and again, that if I met the idea of god sacrificing himself to himself… I liked that very much and was mysteriously moved by it:  again, that the idea of a dying and reviving God (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meaning beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant.’”

“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth:  a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened:  and one must be content to accept in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths:  i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”

“The gospel is myth become fact –a moment in actual history, yet also the perfect mythological story. It is a dream that has really come true. The story of Jesus is the pinnacle where two God-shaped slopes reach together – mythology and history, fiction and fact. All previous history and mythology served to prepare the way for the story of Jesus. Pagan myths were like the star in the East, guiding non-Jewish wise men and woman [sic] to the child Jesus, just as the messianic prophecies had guided Jewish believers to Jesus.”

(Thanks to James Hogan for the Lewis quotes. It is quite an excellent article.)

We are so busy today that we think we don’t have time for story and myth, but our hearts cry out for the transcendent, and somewhere inside, we time to time long for it to appear in this world. It has. And there are two mistakes we can make:  we can miss it and we can dismiss it. Both are fatal folly. Just as our bodies tell us when we thirst for water, so our souls tell us when we thirst for God.

SDG

Hard Questions

A reader commented on last week’s post about ‘American Foreign Policy and Islam’ with “Ummmm....ouch?” I emailed her for clarification. Essentially, she was acknowledging the truth of the idea that the truth does hurt sometimes. Our conversation resulted in the following thoughts.

There were some squishy spots for me as I wrote that post. I want to believe that we usually do the right thing as a nation. I am convinced we do a better job than most other super powers in history, but not as good as we would like. It is strange that no matter how paradisaical a human institution is, there is a dark underbelly to it that supports and sustains the alabaster beneficence. That's one reason why we long for heaven, because we cannot create it here.

The more difficult question is--the people that do the work in the underbelly do things that most people find reprehensible. Are they bad people? Are they good people doing bad things for the greater good? Does that last question even make sense morally? Should we support a system that requires those choices be made? When the actions of these people are brought to light, how do we and, separately, how should we, handle them? Are they heroes, or villains, or something in-between--servants who carry out disagreeable work and made the mistake of allowing their work to be seen by the wrong people? At what point do they bear moral responsibility of their actions and at what point are they given a pass for following orders? Where should the buck stop? Especially in a nation "of the people, by the people and for the people."

What do we as a people need to sacrifice in order to have a morally consistent government? Are we willing to give those things up? It is easy to get outraged, for example, when a group of soldiers torture a prisoner, but is it justifiable to prevent further attacks? What if you found out YOU were the one who would have been killed had that attack been done? Does that change your view of torture? If it does, how do you respond to those who would have been safe anyway when they condemn the soldiers who saved your life? How do we even define torture?

I'm not asking or grilling you--these are what float through my head. I picked torture as a flashpoint issue more than as a personal one, but pick your favorite abuse of power or morality. I don't have an answer for these questions. I believe I am fairly wise for my age, but many of these are beyond me. This is why we need to let God be judge.

What guidance do we see from Scripture? Off the top of my head, Paul explains that government wields the sword by God's authority, so some things are 'ok' for government that aren't ok for individuals, apparently. Jesus and John the Baptist did not condemn soldiers for their profession, and mostly gave them restrictions on abusing their authority over civilians. When we look at the warfare in the Bible, we see Israel using spies, covert operations, and many different things at which we squirm today. Does that make those actions right? In some cases, God told them to. In others, there is no comment, for or against, so it is hard to discern.

Let’s raise the stakes even higher. God is judged by us humans for a large number of things we view as atrocities. A short list:

·         The Indonesian tidal wave that killed hundreds of thousands

·         The Haitian earthquake 1 year ago

·         Disease

·         Killing His own Son on a cross

·         Asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, then condemning people who do it as pagans, saying, “Such things never even occurred to me.”

·         Putting Job through hell on earth, destroying his wealth, killing his 10 grown children all at once and giving him disease, all as some sort of celestial bet with Satan. Yeah, sure, he gave it all back to Job including 10 new kids, but that doesn’t help the first ten all that much.

·         Commanding the Hebrews as they invade Canaan to kill every human, even women, infants, children and the old. (and even in some cases, the livestock!)

·         And so on.

Ultimately, God's moral perfection is more real, wilder, and not as clean cut as we would like it. Once again, He blows our expectations out of the water. We equate goodness with naïveté, with niceness, and so on, and God is anything but. As Western Christians, we seem to spend a lot of time defending strange actions and words by God to non-believers. Maybe we should spend that time trying to understand why He does them and conform our image to His rather than His to ours.

Then Job replied to the LORD:

“I know that you can do all things;

no purpose of yours can be thwarted.

You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’

Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,

things too wonderful for me to know.

“You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;

I will question you,

and you shall answer me.’

My ears had heard of you

but now my eyes have seen you.

Therefore I despise myself

and repent in dust and ashes.”

                                                Job 42:1-6

“He is not a tame Lion.”

                                C.S. Lewis

SDG

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Tonight, I saw the new Narnia movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. My dad’s cousin first introduced me to the Chronicles when I was a boy, and I fell in love. I was not a Christian at the time, but immediately saw the allegory. Incidentally, Lewis’ friend, J. R. R. Tolkien’s main critique of the work was that it was allegory—he despised the genre as being too transparent, and often it is, but at least with Narnia, the plot and characters are richer than most. This post will assume familiarity with the original book, but will avoid movie spoilers as much as possible.

As I have watched the current big-budget Hollywood incarnations of the books, it has been interesting to see what they keep and what they change. Each movie has departed from the original storyline more. They also have taken relatively small episodes where various of the Pevensie children have a character weakness and expand it to major conflict themes which in the end refine the character. In this story, Eustace’s character flaws are the main theme in the book and one of them in the movie, but also both Edmund and Lucy have their demons, including yet another non-canonical apparition of the White Witch.

This movie, while departing from the novel significantly, does so mostly by weaving various events that are in the novel in a new way that makes the story less episodic and more flowing. For a purist, it is disappointing, but when looking to please a commercial audience, it is probably necessary. If you watch it as a standalone movie without a book behind it, it is rather well done. I heartily recommend watching it at a Digital 3D theatre—it is effect heavy, and largely well done without being distracting usually. I will say the computer graphics are a bit crude in a number of places, especially the opening scene, but they did an incredible job on the ship. They got that very right.

Compared to the book, Eustace’s evolution is a bit schizophrenic, but in retrospection, is probably a more realistic series of 3 steps forward and 2 back. I think the biggest weakness was the culmination of their quest—A did not really seem to lead to B, so suspend your disbelief a bit more and attribute it to just being magic and move on.

Reepicheep, of course, largely steals the show, and Caspian is marvelous. Ben Barnes is developing into a fine actor. For those who might be interested, Reep is voiced by non-other than Scottish comedian Simon Pegg, the new Scotty in 2009’s Star Trek, and of “Shaun of the Dead” fame. Liam Neeson continues as an excellent Aslan. Will Poulter is a perfect Eustace. The Pevensie children are yet again well played and their growing maturity as teenagers is well done.

I was thrilled, and it made the movie for me that they kept what I feel is the single most important line in the whole story. At the end, when Lucy and Edmund find out they have outgrown Narnia, Lucy expresses her grief at not seeing Aslan anymore. Aslan’s response is beautiful. Here is the excerpt from the novel:

“You are too old, children,” said Aslan, “and you must begin to come close to your own world now.”

“It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?”

“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan

“Are—are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.

“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

In Lewis’ novel, this interchange is in a scene that is pulled blatantly from John’s Gospel in a way that is both beautiful, yet a little too banal, maybe, to those familiar with the Biblical passage. Of course, all of that is skipped in the movie, but the above interchange is there, and the whole series so far has built to this point where Lewis tips his hand to the reader pointing to Christ, and in a way reveals Narnia as a type of Middle Earth—a place that could fit in our universe for God to use to draw others to Himself. Even as the actors have downplayed the Christian themes of the story in a recent interview, director Michael Apted thankfully refuses to rip the punchline from the story.

Grade: A- and worthwhile. Note to parents: without kids of my own, it is hard to know how to recommend it. As usual, it depends on your child’s maturity. There is violence and scary scenes, but no blood or obvious human death.

PS—for those who want an excellent dramatised version of the story that is completely consistent with the book, I unhesitatingly recommend the Focus on the Family Radio Drama production. They get it. When I hear that Aslan, I hear Christ—love and justice mixed in equal measure, while still being a Person, not a caricature.

SDG