Carpe Cakem!

About a year ago, I heard a brilliant 1 hour interview with N.T. Wright about his new book Simply Christian. It’s meant to be a introduction to Christianity and a basic apologetic in the tradition of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I’m not sure why I put this one off so long, but I finally got a hold of a copy and read through it this week.

My verdict is that Mere Christianity still quite a bit better, though Simply Christian has some very excellent sections. Just like Lewis, Wright approaches spirituality in general and then gradually brings in central Christian beliefs and finally church mechanics. In the middle section on Jesus, Lewis stays calm and concise where Wright gets a little bit too excited and tries to deal with too many things at once. Nevertheless, his chapters discussing our desire for beauty are a really excellent and an angle completely missing from Lewis’s work. His concise overview of scripture (The Book God Breathed) is also quite useful. He doesn’t get hung up on any details.

Anyway, the book is definitely worth reading, regardless of where you are on your journey to or in Christianity. It turns out all of the very best parts were quoted in the interview I originally listed to. Smart guy. This extended excerpt begins one of my favorite parts:

One day, rummaging through a dusty old attic in a small Austrian town, a collector comes across a faded manuscript containing many pages of music. It is written for the piano. Curious, he takes it to a dealer. The dealer phones a friend, who appears half an hour later. When he sees the music he becomes excited, then puzzled. This looks like the handwriting of Mozart himself, but it isn’t a well-known piece. In fact, he’s never heard it. More phone calls. More excitement. More consultations,. It really does seem to be Mozart. And, though some parts seem distantly familiar, it doesn’t correspond to anything already known in his works.

Before long, someone is sitting at a piano. The collector stands close by, not wanting to see his precious find damaged as the pianist turns the pages. But then comes a fresh surprise. Te music is wonderful. It’s just the sort of thing Mozart would have written. It’s energetic and elgiac by turns; it’s got subtle harmonic shifts, some splendid tunes, and a ringing finale. But it seems…incomplete. There are places where nothing much seems to be happening, where the piano is simply marking time. There are other places where the writing is faded and it isn’t quite clear, but it looks as though the composer has indicated, not just one or two bars rest, but a much longer pause.

Gradually the truth dawns on the excited little group. What they are looking at is indeed by Mozart. It is indeed beautiful. But it’s the piano part of a piece that involves another instrument, or perhaps other instruments. By itself it is frustratingly incomplete. A further search of the attic reveals nothing else that would provide a clue. The piano music is al there is, a signpost to something that was there once and mght still turn up one day. There must have been a complete work of art which would now, without additional sheet music, be almost impossible to reconstruct; they don’t know if the piano was to accompany an oboe or a bassoon, a violin or a cell, or perhaps a full string quartet or some other combination of instruments. If those other parts could be found, they would make complete sense of the incomplete beauty contained in the faded scribble of genius now before them.

This is the position we are in when confronted by beauty. The world is full of beauty, but the beauty is incomplete. Our puzzlement about what beauty is, what it means, and what (if anything) it is there FOR is the inevitable result of looking at one part of a larger whole. Beauty, in other words, is another echo of a voice - a voice which (from the evidence before us) might be saying one of several different things, but which, were we to hear it in all its fullness, would make sense of what we presently see ad hear and know and love and call “beautiful.”

…Beauty, like justice, slips through our fingers. We photograph the sunset, but all we get is the memory of the moment, not the moment itself. We buy the recording, but the symphony says something different when we listen to it at home. We climb the mountain, and though the view from the summit is indeed magnificent, it leaves us wanting more; even if we could build a house there and gaze all day at the scene, the itch wouldn’t go away. Indeed, the beauty sometimes seems to be in the itching itself, the sense of longing, the kind of pleasure which is exquisite and yet leaves us unsatisfied.

Wright goes on to explain how this unmet longing is actually the voice of our creator God calling to us. Goooooood stuff.

I’ve never read a philosophy book before. Really. I’ve skirted the subject with some of my interests in theology and psychology, but I’ve never jumped straight into one. With Rene Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, I’ll be attempting just that.

I’ve once heard that virtually all western thought is simply a footnote to Plato, and I’m beginning to see what is meant by that quote. So much of modern thought has just assumed all these things that Plato said were true and it’s proponents start with that assumption. Unfortunately, Plato’s ideas were NOT Christian and certainly not trinitarian. The fact that we as Christians continue to hold on to his ideas about metaphysics is actually a huger barrier to our understanding the Bible.

The main Platonic idea I’m talking about of course is the idea that the soul and body are completely separate entities. The soul is immortal. Our body is dust. Our body is just a container for our soul. The soul is good, the flesh is fallen and passing away. Sound familiar? I think I’ve heard this in church before. Except that’s actually not in the Bible. Not at all. This is not the basis of a sound theology of heaven and life after death. This is not the basis for understanding the incarnation and who Jesus is. This is not the basis for our approach to the future and the end of the world. But we are so used to this idea, it’s very hard to part with it.

(Plato on the far left. Not me on the far right. Photo credit.)

In beginning this book, I’m struck by how much the author has in common with N.T. Wright. Both of them feel it necessary to beat up Plato with a big stick before they can move forward with their discussion. They see this faulty idea as being a key thing that is holding us back from growing in our understanding of eschatology and life after death (in Wright’s case) and in religion and social relations in general (in Girard’s case). Girard is also a Christian, but he approaches many of these deep theological from a completely different angle then I am used to hearing. He doesn’t start by exegeting verses from the New Testament, but instead attempts to articulate a more global theory of religion and then work gradually inside from that to Jesus and why he is such a big deal. I’m looking forward to working through this one.

Since the attempt to understand religion on the basis of philosophy has failed, we ought to try the reverse method and read philosophy in light of religion.

-Rene Girard

I was originally drawn to reading something by Anne Lamott after seeing potent quotes from her referenced in other works. Things like:

“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

So while I was in Boston for work a few months ago, I saw her memoir Travelling Mercies for only $2 at a really fine used bookstore just off of Harvard. Now, Lamott is like no one I had ever read before: A liberal, dread-lock wearing feminist activist. I’d spent most of my life growing up in the company of conservatives who wouldn’t touch an author like this with a ten-foot pole. So here is the part where I say my eyes were opened and I gained fascinating insight into a different perspective on faith… Except that I can’t say that. Actually, I wasn’t all that impressed. Lamott is a funny and ironic writer and some of her stories from the book were enjoyable to read. I think she clearly has a handle on the fundamentals of who Jesus is and the nature of grace. Nevertheless, I tired of her frequent detailed descriptions of how bad her drinking problem was before she found Jesus. I don’t think I need to write anymore about it since this one reviewer on Amazon described it very accurately:

About midway through the book, Lamott reads a review of a lecture of hers that described her as “narcissistic”, and that, I think, hits the nail pretty much on the head. It’s not that one cannot find inspiration here, or humor, or compassion; the main difficulty in Traveling Mercies is that the essays are so consistently self-absorbed as to miss many of the lessons she could have learned were she able to get beyond herself even a little bit. So we have her chalking up as a minor miracle her being able to play the `bon vivant’ with a fellow air-traveler who happens to be of a religious and political persuasion at which she would normally have sneered; it never seems to occur to her, however, that were the shoe on the other foot (as in: “I actually talked to a feminist today, and even though she’s spreading Satan’s lies, she really wasn’t all that bad!”), the essay would have read as intolerably patronizing.

Anyway, the next book like this that comes along will need to be a little more highly recommended. There is so much to read and so little time!

You could fill a book - a lot of books - with things Dad doesn’t know. And they have!
-Remy, Ratatouille

Well, I’ve been plowing through all my notes on N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. It reminds me again of how minuscule my own biblical and historical scholarship really is. I’d grown up going to church and reading the bible every day (or at least most days). I’ve read through the whole thing several times and certain sections of it (like much of John) more than I can count. I’d heard lots of sermons on Jesus and the resurrection. I’d even heard some teaching that tried to fill out the picture with some “outside” material like writings from Josephus. I guess I always had been taught or imagined this great BIBLE from 2000 years ago… and then not much else was written worth reading until the reformers came along.

Grinding through Bishop Wright’s tome was like growing up in the backwoods and reading all the books in our tiny public library and then being thrown into the atrium of the Library of Congress. Wright fills out the context of Jesus’ ministry and the early church’s understanding of him by meticulously pouring through many period writings, including:

The Apostolic Fathers
1 Clement
2 Clement
Ignatius of Antioch
Polycarp: Letter and Martyrdom
The Didache
Barnabas
The Shepherd of Hermas
Papias
The Epistle to Diognetus

Early Christian Apocrypha
The Ascension of Isaiah
The Apocalypse of Peter
5 Ezra
The Epistula Apostolorum

The Apologists
Justin Martyr
Athenagoras
Theophilus
Minucius Felix

The Great Early Theologians
Tertullian
Irenaeus
Hippolytus
Origen

Early Syriac Christianity
The Odes of Solomon
Tatian
The Acts of Thomas

Gnostic Stuff
The Gospel of Thomas
Epistle to Rheginos
Gosple of Philip
Other Nag Hammadi Treatises
Gospel of the Saviour

I am sad to admit that the only one of these author’s or writings that I had even heard of was Polycarp. Wow. And after all that, the core narrative in the Bible is still the same. I think it has even more meaning having read the testaments of those early Christians who clung to it, just as we do. They may have had understood it differently than we do now (some more than others), but we worship the same risen savior!

In describing current events in the church as global politics, the main character in Ian Morgan Cron’s book Chasing Francis makes a pretty convincing case that things now aren’t so different from the way they used to be:

Another similarity between the Middle Ages and today has to do with the state of Christendom. In Francis’s day, the church was hemorrhaging credibility; it was seen as hypocritical, untrustworthy, and irrelevant. Some people even wondered if it would survive. Clergy were at the center of all kinds of sexual scandals. It had commercialized Jesus, selling pardons, ecclesiastical offices, and relics. Sermons were either so academic that people couldn’t understand them or they were canned. Popular songs ridiculing the church and clergy could be heard all over Europe. The laity felt used by the professional clergy, as if they were there to serve the institution, not the other way around. The church had also become dangerously entangled in the world of power politics and war…The demise of feudalism and the return of a money economy brought the rise of the merchant class and a ferocious spirit of aggressive capitalism. Greed ran riot in the culture. To top it all off, Christians were at war with the Muslims.

Sound at all familiar?

I’ve never read Walt Whitman’s masterpiece Leaves of Grass, but I came across this excerpt from it in Chasing Francis, by Ian Morgan Cron.

After the seas are all cross’d, (as they seem already cross’d)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,
After the noble inventors - after the scientists, the chemists, the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet, worthy that name,
The true son of God shall come, singing his songs.

This is really quite wonderful! God is at once all these things, and we, in his image are reflections of those facets. He is a great captain and warrior. A meticulous engineer and designer, crafting the very fabric and physics of our universe. He created all the foundations of biochemistry and how protein in our cells interact in our bodies to keep us alive. He tossed all the stars and heavenly bodies into space in just such a way and even fashioned our own earth our of many different materials. Finally, he is very concerned about ethics, obedience, but also grace and gifts. He has hard rules of justice written on our conscience from birth, yet in his kindness finds all sorts of ways to break them.

And yet, God is NOT finally about ethics (and I’ll include the rest of philosophy and theology in there too). He is an artist. A painter, a musician, a sculptor, and creative designer. A writer of poetry and not just prose. The arts end up getting closer to explaining/describing God than do any of the other disciplines.

Cron goes on to quote some great commentary by Pope John Paul II on this subject:

In order to communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the church needs art. Art must make perceptible, and as far as possible attractive, the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of God. It must therefore translate into meaningful terms that which is in itself ineffable. Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colours, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look or listen. It does so without emptying the message itself of its transcendent value and its aura of mystery.

The last part is the best. Even when the message is “converted” into art, it doesn’t lose it’s contents. The Bach B minor Mass surely points to God, even if you don’t understand the German being sung. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel isn’t just illustrations off passages from the Bible. The skill that went into the choice of colors, the lines of the figures - all of it points to the Lord. Good fiction points to God. Must smarter people have explained this all better than I can right now.

One of the character’s in Chasing Francis adds his commentary to this:

The church is realizing that there is an awareness of God sleeping in the basement of the postmodern imagination and they have to awaken it. The arts can do this. All beauty is subversive; it flies under the radar of people’s critical filters and points them to God. As a friend of mine says, “When the front door of the intellect is shut, the back door of the imagination is open.”

The emphasis above is mine.

Thomas a Kempis on why you don’t need to surf YouTube all evening:

If thou wilt withdraw thyself from speaking vainly, and from gadding idly, as also from listening to novelties and rumors, thou shalt find leisure enough and suitable for meditation on good things. (The Imitation of Christ, Ch. 20)

Alright, I always thought that one of the main things I would do with a blog is write about what I was reading. I plan to mostly just include excerpts with little or no commentary from me. I figure that what the author has to say is probably more interesting to say than what I have to say about it! Actually, the main reason I will be blogging about them is to help ME remember what they said later.

So I have been collecting books at used bookstores and such and throwing them in my shelf with the intention of reading them “soon”. Well, I really only get a couple of hours of reading in each week so it’s pretty slow going. I had just finished a book and decided to sit down and write make a list of all the things I wanted to read. That way I could order and and decide what to read next. In my mind was a picture of 5 or 6 books waiting in the queue, but when I went to take a look I was shocked to find the number was closer to 25. Geesh! I’m never going to get these read!

Well, here they are in no particular order. Well, their kind of in order. Oh nevermind.

Reaching for the Invisible God by Philip Yancy - This book was recommended to me by an older Christian man I admire. I’m about half-way though it right now. It’s kind of a hodge-podge of quotes and stores and doesn’t seem very well thought out. I think that’s kind of the point though. How else do you write about something mysterious and confusing, eh?

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas A’Kempis - I see this book quoted all the time. I guess it is one of the great Christian mystic classics.

Contemplating Jesus by Robert Faricy & Robert Wicks - I found this at a yard sale. It’s a very short book on contemplative prayer and meditation. I think it’s Catholic.

The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis - Lewis is one of my favs and so I try to snatch up anything by him I can find cheap. This book is a survey or medieval literature. Looks interesting.

Getting Real by 37 Signals - This is a short online book about software development. I’ve read about half of it but need to go back and finish it. Apparently reading it will make me a slick agile programmer like the cool kids.

The Idylls of the King by Alfred Lord Tennyson - This is Tennyson’s great King Arthur epic in verse. I’ve tried to read it before, but got bored. I’d like to try again though.

Parenting with Love and Logic by Foster Cline and Jim Fay - My wife read this and found it very helpful. I’ll read it too.

A Serrated Edge by Doug Wilson - This is probably Wilson’s most controversial book. It is a defense of the use of satire by Christians to ridicule, well, all kinds of things. I typically agree with Wilson, but I know from some of his other writings that I don’t buy everything he argues for on this particular topic. But don’t bash it until you’ve read it right? So I’m going to read it so I actually know what I’m talking about.

Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Doug Wilson - One of Wilson’s older books advocating classical education. Some of it is kind of dated, but it looks like it has some stuff in it. Coming from both a background of private school, public school, AND home school, I am often thinking about what to do for my own kid’s education. I’m interesting in finding out more about the classical model.

How to Think Straight by Antony Flew - This is an introduction to logic and rhetoric. Yet another topic that I feel deficient in since I’ve never studied it formally.

Poems (no title?) by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - I pickup this very old (1850’s era) book at an auction. I remember reading “The Wooing of Hiawatha” in school and thought I should check outs some other stuff from Longfellow. Most of it rimes, so I am cool with that.

The Tempest by William Shakespeare - My first introduction to this book was seeing Patric Stewart playing Jean-Luc Picard playing Prospero in the holideck on Star Trek. when I was young. Now that doesn’t happen every day. It seems that this story in particular resonates with other people I have read. Loreena Mckennitt sang a beautiful piece to part of it’s text as well. I want to find out what all the fuss is about.

Music and Ministry: A Biblical Counterpoint by Calvin Johansson - The first thing I did when I saw this book was to use the index to see what he had to say about rock. Since he didn’t take the incredibly silly stance that electric guitars are inherently and abstractly demonic, I decided he probably had his head on straight. Actually, I’ve skimmed though a lot of this book and might just start writing about some of it right away. It is surprisingly well thought out.

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis - One of the few Lewis classics that I haven’t gotten around to yet.

Peace Like a River by Lief Enger - I bought this book for my wife after hearing an interview with the author on the Kindling’s Muse Podcast. She read the whole thing in one sitting and really loved it. I haven’t read any fiction for a while, so I thought I would give this a shot.

The Nautical Chart by Arturo Perez-Reverte - I picked this up because I thought it was by the same guy who wrote “The Shadow of the Wind”, but I got the foreign names mixed up. It still looks interesting though.

And now for some books that I’ve read recently and will probably write about first…

The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton - The auto-biography of this early 20th century Trappist monk. I had never heard of him until I started reading Michael Spencer’s blog (www.internetmonk.com).

Against Christianity by Peter Leithart - The first few chapters of this were especially dynamite.

Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton - The classic quirky British apologetic. It’s full of one-liners and everyone likes to quote it to sound clever. Well, actually it is pretty nifty. I’d like to read this one again too.

Fidelity by Doug Wilson - A straight forward and excellent book on morality and the typical troubles that men face.

Wild at Heart by John Eldridge - OK, OK. So there is plenty to bash in this book if you want to. Nonetheless, I think some of his observations are quite keen and he communicates them very well. I’ll have to sort them out again since it’s been a few years since I read this.

Inside Out by Larry Crabb - One of my favorite books. ‘nuf said.

That’s plenty folks.