further thoughts on "Notes from a Tilt-a-Whirl" : the problem of evil

So . . . more on N.D. Wilson's "Notes from a Tilt-A-Whirl". Wow. I think I'm going to be re-reading and chewing on and quoting this one for years. I'm still turning over in my mind what I think of how he addressed the problem of evil. Because, for the most part, he doesn't see much of a problem. He presents it in artistic terms--a painting needs light and shadow, a story needs conflict for a plot line. And I certainly take his point that much of what we blithely call "evil" might actually not be so--that it is simply a higher, greater, more dangerous, sharper edged good than we are prepared to handle. Do we want sharp edged mountains in our world? Or would we rather have a world where no foolish grade schooler can ever concuss herself on a steep snowfield? I think it was worth it . . . since I didn't end up dying anyway . . .

But what of the evil we do see? The real, undeniable, pit-of-hell stuff? Is that from God? Does he actually desire it? Is it simply the shading in his pencil sketch? No--God is light, and in him there is no darkness. God is not tempted by evil, nor does he create or encourage evil, nor does he set us up for a fall for his own purposes. The evil in the world, the sin in the world, is our fault. God doesn't need it. God doesn't want it. It is not an addition to God's color pallete.

Would Wilson agree with me? Well, I can't entirely tell from the book. Maybe he just figured that other takes on dealing with the problem of evil had been well addressed in other places and he was doing something different here. He is presenting, if you will, the problem of Good. The problem is that Good is too much for us to handle. And it's certainly true that if we stop trying to reduce Good to fuzzy bunnies and safety scissors, our perspective on evil looks a little different. If we stop trying to equate evil with "anything I don't want," and remember that the plotline of this universe is about more than my comfort--if we attempt, at all, to take it in context--maybe the problem turns out to be a little different than we thought at first.

7 quick takes: volume 090724

7 books I'm reading this summer when I'm not blogging

1. The Dresden Files (Jim Butcher): okay, a whole series of books. This summer's fluff. Jim Butcher has a deft hand at weaving a lot of stock Fantasy/Sci-Fi elements with snarky humor and likably flawed under-dog characters. Plop the whole thing in a familiar setting--like an alternate-reality Chicago--and it's easy to see why Butcher's managed to land himself on top of the best seller lists.

2. Watership Down (Richard Adams): Book club book for the summer. A pleasant re-read. I must have been about seven or eight when my dad read this to my brother and me for bed-time reading.

3. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy): The other book club read for the summer. I actually read this when I was fourteen and hated it. Re-reading it at 34 is proving to be a college course's worth of insight into how our life experience informs our reading. I'm not sure if I like it or not this time round. I'm not sure I can even really compare. I feel like I'm reading a completely different book.

4. Story (Robert McKee): A book about writing screenplays that has a lot of material which is directly applicable to novels. My writing classes in college focused on structure at the sentence and paragraph level. They never addressed such things as plot arc and scene selection--those macro-structuring issues with which I've struggled a great deal in my attempts to write. This book is a God-send.

5. Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl (N.D. Wilson): My next book review book for Thomas Nelson. A philosophical, apologetic hymn of awe to a Creator-God who is too great for us to even begin to comprehend. Beautiful.

6. God's Prayer Book (Ben Patterson): A how-to devotional guide for Protestants on the spiritual discipline of praying the book of Psalms. A birthday present from my best friend. A not-so-subtle hint from God.

7. Cicero (Anthony Everitt): A biography of the great Roman orator. An overview of Roman politics that makes our current, corrupt American politics look like a model of integrity.

What are you all reading this summer?

As always, 7 Quick Takes are sponsored by Jen at Conversion Diary

Christless Christianity

One of the (many) books that my husband brought home from the Gospel Coalition conference in April was Michael Horton's "Christless Christianity."  It's a blistering critique of the American church, one that I've been interested to read since reading Jared Wilson's praise of it a couple of months ago.  And I'm torn.  

My biggest complaint of the book is this:  I'm not sure you could tell from this text whether the good Michael Horton believes that God is a god of love or not.   Dr. Horton's contention is that awareness of God's holiness and majesty are absent in most of the American church.  That the knowledge of impossible gap between God's holiness and our sin, and our complete helplessness in the face of our sin is missing.  I do not argue any of these points.  But salvation in this book seems to be primarily an escape from God's wrath.  There is little sense that we are being saved into anything positive.  That I should want to avoid having Michael Horton's God angry at me, I am very clear on.  But once I'm assured that Christ's atoning sacrifice has taken care of that . . . then what?  Has works salvation infiltrated the American church?  Undoubtedly.  Is the average American church goer able to articulate the fact that our sin is so great and God's wrath with it such that only Christ's death could deal with the problem.  Maybe not so much.  But my friend Barb wrote this recently about understanding the reality of God's wrath without understanding his love:  

I have always viewed sin as something that we do that falls short of a rule that God made. Sometimes this was an intentional act on our part, sometimes it was unintentional. Either way when we did this God was anywhere from mildly frustrated to totally consumed with rage toward us. Sin ultimately gave us the death penalty. Jesus had to die to allow God to even have contact with us. He had to kill his Son for our screw-up-ed-ness. No wonder he was pissed off.

It's an imbalance which doesn't to leave you with a God that you're looking forward to spending eternity with . . .

That said, I presume that Horton probably figures that the American church doesn't need to understand that God is love.  That our buddy-buddy, I'm-okay-you're-okay, God understands if you just try your best . . . or even if you just try some type of culture needs to get it pounded through their skulls that our sin is serious business that we're talking about.  Horton does a masterful job of tracing out works-righteousness and showing how and why human religion constantly returns to it.

He also does a great favor to the American church by diagnosing the dominant spirituality of our age as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.  (This amorphous spirituality is characterized by the beliefs that:

1.  God created the world
2.  God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and most world religions
3.  The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself
4.  God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life, except when needed to solve a problem
5.  Good people go to heaven when they die )

By naming Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as the Christ-less, feel-good, self-affirming pablum that it is and then uncovering salvation-by-works (Pelagianism) in many and various forms that it hides itself in the landscape of American spirituality, Horton exposes much in the church that needs to be seen for what it really is and reveals a great deal about why so many American churches produce so little in the way of actual disciples.

seven quick takes, volue 090313

things that make me happy edition

1.  Euchre, in its many variants.  Especially 5-handed.
2.  Sour Cream Pound Cake * 
3.  Scrabble on Facebook--except, of course, when I've got a fistful of one point tiles.
4.  Re-reading a good book.  By my definition, it's not a really good book unless it's better the second time.  And the dozenth.
5.  Lolcats
6.  Artwork on my walls and mantle.  I'm thankful every day for those with the call, skill, and patience to add beauty to our lives.  My father, Ando Hiroshige, He Qi, Vincent Van Gogh, Ruth Lampi and others.
7.  Dvorak's Sixth Symphony

*from All-American Comfort Food

1 1/4 cups butter, softened
3 cups sugar
6 eggs.
3 cups flour
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1 8 oz. carton sour cream
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1-2 tsp. other extract**

Grease and flour 10 in. bundt pan.  Cream butter and sugar.  Add eggs one by one, beating well.  Combine dry ingredients.  Add to wet alternately with sour cream.  Add vanilla.  Pour into pan.  Bake at 325 for 90 minutes.

**  for whatever flavor you want to make it.  The cookbook suggests almond, but I don't like almond.  I've succesfully used this cake as a base for coconut, pineapple, and rum pound cakes.  

If you want to be really decadent, glaze it:  1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup water, and 1-2 tsp flavored extract.  Boil 1-2 minutes.  Loosen cake from pan and pour over.  Remove cake when glaze is soaked in.  

7 quick takes is hosted by Conversion Diary.  Like you didn't know that yet.

7 quick takes, volume 090130

1.  Thank  you Kate for the picture on the left.  It's made my week.

2.  You can watch my dad on TV!  Episode 2808, Lumberjack Fan Carving.  In my entirely biased and correct opinion, his work is pretty cool.

3.  I'm sorta geeked over the announcements of the 2009 Caldecott and Newbery Award winners.  New books to get for--my kids.  Right.  They're for the kids.

4.  If I had time and energy to kill on post-graduate studies, one of the master's theses that I'd like to write is the argument that much of the best literature these days is being published in the YA category.  I think that one of the reasons that this is so is because there is still pressure to keep literature aimed at 10-13 year olds clear of "adult themes" and "adult content."  In other words, an author can't write voyeuristic, profanity strewn, pulp and have it sell just on that basis.  YA writers actually have to write good stories.  

5.  Barna Study:  1 in 3 "Christians" say Jesus sinned.  Um . . . do they not even understand that that defeats the point?  Theology, people, theology!

6.  English departments all across the U.S. would be better off if they just admitted that modern lit-fic is just another genre, and not morally superior to all the genres out there.

7.  my children are home today on yet another snow day, and I'm completely baffled.  We had no new snow the other night.  It's not warm, exactly, out there, but 10 degrees now with a high of 18 this afternoon and a 30% chance of snow hardly seems to warrant cancelling--and the roads were fine when I was out on them last night.  I especially wish that if there was going to be a cancellation that I could have found out about it when I still had a chance to go back to sleep, and hadn't gotten up, had 2 cups of coffee, fed my daughter breakfast and had her getting ready to go while I called to check on her car pool before I found out about it.

7 Quick Takes Fridays are hosted by Jennifer F. at Conversion Diary

UPDATE:  My kind husband pointed out that my take #6 had the exact same link as #5 . . . that it did not, in fact, pull up the fascinating article by Julian Gough that I intended to reference.  That's now been fixed.

for the child on your Christmas list

I recommend The Christmas Alphabet, one of the more beautiful pop-up books I've seen.  I've been thouroughly enjoying reading it with our three this season--I've yet to read it again without noticing something more about the intricate cut paper artwork that Robert Sabuda's created here.  Indeed, nearly anything by Robert Sabuda is worth having.   Follow the "Customers who bought this" links on Amazon . . . you'll find it worth your time.

7 quick takes Friday

nod to Jennifer--hey, I can do that!

1. Reading / re-reading Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller." (I never actually made it all the way through the first time.) Brilliant. Dense. Post-modern. Funny. Anyone else out there read it? What do you think? Which of the 10 starts of stories there would you most like to know the rest of?

2. Battling the stomach flu at our house. It's taken out two of the three girls and me. Makes it hard to get ambitious.

3. John Stackhouse has a good post up today on humility. Intersects nicely with some of what Philip Yancey writes on the subject. And some subjects I've been thinking about from a lot of angles. What do we get to take credit for?

4. Had a long talk yesterday with a Unitarian Universalist. On looking a little more closely at the history and principles of this religion I find it to be so syncretistic as to be incoherent and non-sensical. And more sadly, I find it to be merely yet one more version of works-based legalism--I'm good enough, you're good enough, if we just try to find it within ourselves to be good enough . . . there is little room for thoughtlessness here--one might even say, childishness. How much more a Father in Heaven who invites us to come to him as children, knowing that our little attempts to put a dent in our own selfishness truly accomplish nothing--like subtracting a handful from infnity . . .

5. I really dislike laundry. It seems to me the most Sisyphean of household tasks. And in our house, the only place to fold is the dining room table, which means that there's a whole lot of other picking up that I have to be on top of before I can even start the laundry. I am inevitably and continuously behind. Especially when there's a sick toddler in the house.


6. There's another mom at my daughter's preschool building an igloo from old gallon milk jugs at hot melt glue. It's pretty cool. Here's an example of someone else doing it. (Ours isn't done yet).

7. I liked this Pearls Before Swine.

I'm increasingly disturbed by the obsession with weight in our culture, and America's focus on image as opposed to health. What if Cathy really were as trim as shown in this strip and still the neurotic, obsessed maniac we've seen in the comic pages for decades? Sadly, it's very plausible.

sketching worlds larger than ourselves

One of the reasons I so appreciate Neil Gaiman as a writer is the depth and breadth of the worlds that he builds. They're bizarre, multi-tentacled things, and there's always the indication of much more beyond the edges of the page. They reflect reality that way--there's more here than any one of us can understand. Too many fantasies fall into the trap of wanting to explain everything. Of wanting their characters and readers to understand how it all fits together. But when an author contracts her story-world into something that I can understand, with nice neat squared off corners and no messy remainders, it rings hollow to me. This "ordinary" world is already boundless. If you're going to add in magic, fantastical creatures, futuristic technology, and the like, why should it shrink? I like that Gaiman's characters neither know it all, or expect to know it all. That we as the readers tend to know rather more than any of the characters, but still get the sense that there is much, much more that we do not know.

Gaiman's newest book is The Graveyard Book. It's an homage of sorts, to the Jungle Book, about a boy whose family is murdered, who is taken in by the ghosts of the local graveyard and raised with a somewhat different understanding of reality than most of us have. It is much less macabre and horrifying than such a descripton makes it sound. Gaiman's dry, observant humor and keen insight of human nature and of children and how they go about life make for a great read or listen. Neil Gaiman is currently touring the U.S., promoting the book, reading a chapter each evening which is being recorded and posted. There are currently four chapters up. You can listen to them here.

In chapter 2, (around the 11-13 minute mark), Gaiman neatly reminds us of how much of what we take as fact, we in fact take on faith. (Bod is the boy, Scarlet his new friend)

Bod would introduce Scarlet to some of his other friends. That she
could not seem them did not seem to matter. She had already been told
firmly by her parents that Bod was imaginary, and that there was nothing at
all wrong with that. . . . So it came as no surprise to her that Bod also
had imaginary friends. He would pass on their comments to her.
"Bartleby says that 'Thou dost have a face like unto a squished plum.' . . .
Scarlet was happy. She was a bright, lonely child, whose mother worked for
a distant university teaching people she never met face to face, grading English
papers sent to her over the computer, sending messages of advice or
encouragement back. Her father taught particle physics. But there
were, Scarlet told Bod, too many people who wanted to teach particle physics,
and not enough people who wanted to learn it. So Scarlet's family had to
keep moving to different university towns, and in each town her father would
hope for a permanent teaching position, which never came.
"What's particle physics?" asked Bod.
Scarlet shrugged. "Well," she said, "there's atoms, which is
things that is too small to see. That's what we're all made of. And
there's things that's smaller than atoms, and that's particle physics."
Bod nodded and decided that Scarlet's father was probably interested
in imaginary things.

I've been meaning to link to this

Rev. Kathy Escobar at the "The Carnival in My Head" has up a post on the six stages of faith, as laid out in the book The Critical Journey.

I think that there's a lot of truth here and that this could be a valuable tool for a lot of people, including me. I may post more on it . . . sometime . . . when the rock tumbler in my brain has battered it around enough that I can get a peek at what I think about it.

HT: Deconstructed Christian

One of the best things about re-reading is re-discovering exchanges like this

The creature laughed, scornfully. "I," it said, "am frightened of nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing," it said.
Charlie said, "Are you extremely frightened of nothing?"
"Absolutely terrified of it," admitted the Dragon.
"You know," said Charlie, "I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?"
"No," said the Dragon, uncomfortably, "I most definitely would not."
There was a flapping of wings like sails, and Charlie was alone on the beach. "That," he said, "was much too easy."

--Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys, pp. 348-349

10 Things that make me happy

Tag! I'm it.

Rules . . . the usual. You know. Follow 'em . . . post 'em . . . tag more people . . . nah. If you haven't seen these on Rob's blog already you can go look at them there.

1. Coffee: Well, what did you expect to be first on my list? This includes it in all forms. Fresh-brewed. Lattes. As a mixed drink. Ice cream. But not left-over-and-oxidized-from-yesterday-and -then-reheated. That's not happiness. That's just desperation.

2. The music turned up really loud on a sunny morning.
3. A good morning with my kids.
4. A couple of hours to write
5. Worshipping together with people who are right there with me
6. My husband. I'd elaborate, but none of you really want to read my getting sappy.
7. Rereading a great book
8. Arches National Park
9. Coyote and road runner
10. Poking a stick in the campfire.

11. Rome
12. comics
13. chocolate
14. prayer
15. cats!

For your reading pleasure

I recommend Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union. It's always a delight to find a previously unread author with a back catalog to devour. The last time I was this taken with a read was when I read Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Chabon is a master of prose. Never mind the fact that the book's written in present tense. Quite beside the fact that you'll stop noticing that you're reading present tense after about the first chapter, it serves a purpose. (The POV character is severed from his past and is pointedly neglecting his future--to tell this story nearly requires that it be always living only in the immediate moment). The plot is beautiful, the characters vivid, and this Sitka-that-never-was is alive in a way that makes me wish that the U.S. had given part of Alaska to the Jews in 1940 after all . . .

What I did not expect to find in so secular an author and his vulgarity riddled book was an extended meditation on the nature of faith and the desire for home. And not just an earthly home, but a spiritual one . . . and how much of that can we have here on earth anyway? And what does our salvation look like? And how much of our own salvation can we create for ourselves? What is this thing we call faith really made up of?

"In the Presence of My Enemies"

by Gracia Burnham with Dean Merrill

Some of you might remember having run across Gracia's story some years back. From May 2001 to June 2002, she and her husband Martin were hostages of the Abu Sayyaf--the Filipino branch of Al Qaeda. The book is her account of that year, and a tribute to Martin, who was killed during the rescue. Gracia was here in Warsaw, speaking at my friend Lindsay's church--Lindsay invited me along to hear her speak and then, when I was standing at the book table browsing the book to decide whether I wanted it said, "I'll get you a copy of that!"

The prose is pretty much the horrible boiler plate that you'd expect from this sort of first person account. Very Reader's Digest. What can you expect when the account is put on dictaphone and then handed over to a professional page producer to cull down to manageable book size? But you don't read a book like this for the prose . . .

The Burnhams came out of standard Very-Conservative-Christian-America. She was a PK. He was a missionary kid. They met at Bible college. Back out to the mission field. The luncheon that I went to was very much standard BCW (Better Christian Woman) fare. Getting up to speak, Gracia was obviously at home in this setting and fluent in church speak . . . and yet. And yet, more than five years after her rescue she had obviously still not come fully to terms with her experience. It had marked her too deeply. And the book, written in the first few months after her rescue shows that even more. Even when she tries to shove all her feelings and reactions into standard conservative Christian boxes, things keep leaking out. There's too much, and it's too messy and too complicated. She's grown beyond her boxes. And here's the interesting thing. Maybe I'm just reading this in, but it sounds to me like she's really not sure she likes this growth or wants it. If her year as a hostage and the life of her husband--a truly horrible ordeal--was the price God extracted from her to grow her more into the woman in the image of Christ . . . well, couldn't God have put up with a little less Christ? Or, do I really want my God to be so big and so ruthless about turning me into exactly who he created me to be that he would use a method like that to get me there?

This has me thinking a lot more about the whole BCW thing. As I noted on my own blog, those posts of Erin's have been very influential on me this spring--they've given me language and a framework to explore and understand some things that I've been thinking about for a long time but only in a very muzzy manner. This book has collided with all that and produced some very interesting wreckage. But that's another post.

(Cross posted at The Unfinished Book Club)