A Complex Simplicity

specifically miscellaneous

Back in May, I mentioned being in the middle of a three- (or was it four? Hazy on that already) week course on Elizabeth I, Philip II, and the Spanish Armada.  I suppose that might sound rather dull; I was uncertain going into it, as Tudor England is not my favorite period (haven't forgiven them for Bosworth), but I charged in anyway on the strength of the professor.  Since the time span was so limited, we had to fit a lot into the days: three-and-a-half hour mornings of discussion, reading, presentations, research, the occasional lecture, and a great many movies.

Somehow movies never formed a large portion of my home school experience.  I remember watching PBS as a young kid, and I have particularly fond memories of "Theodore Tugboat" and some show featuring lion puppets, and less fond memories of "Teletubbies."  But after a certain period (maybe when we no longer had cable), TV-watching was limited to after five o'clock in the evening.  It always felt slightly wicked to begin watching something at four-thirty.  At any rate, watching movies for a class is a new thing for me; but since the main thrust of the Maymester was not so much the historical facts as it was the media portrayals of events like the defeat of the Armada, films played a key role.

In particular, we watched parts of the two recent movies starring Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I.  They were very inaccurate.  They were very over-the-top.  They had beautiful cinematography, beautiful lighting.

They made me writhe.

It was not so much what Rachel calls the OSSs (obligatory sex scenes), or even the gross liberties taken with historical events and historical people.  It was certainly not the acting, since the films starred actors and actresses like Cate Blanchett ("...you shall have a QUEEN!"), Geoffrey Rush ("It's a pity the law doesn't allow me to be merciful."), and even my favorite Watson.  It was the fact that all those OSSs were filmed and liberties taken in order to water down history into a simplistic storyline: a pretty, naive girl is thrust into the role of queen and must overcome her insecurities (and all personal feelings) in order to rule her kingdom.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with a simple plot: there are only a few to pick from, after all.  What frustrated me was the complete lack of any nuance, any intricacy, any subtlety.  All Catholics are traitors.  Elizabeth is either completely incompetent or talking back like a skilled politician.  Robert Dudley is either Elizabeth's lover or plotting with the Spanish.  The story itself rode as much on the music and the relative scale of lighting as it did on the characters and their interrelationships. 

Folks.  Folks, this is not good storytelling.

People enjoyed the films.  Though my classmates and I mocked them, I think in the end everyone but myself was willing to shrug and excuse its faults because it was "entertaining."  Entertaining, however, isn't the same as good.  It isn't the same as worthwhile.  It isn't the same as saying that the director and screenwriter and all the many people involved in the production did their job with skill.

A skilfully-wrought story, whether historical or fantastic or literary or whatever, must have intricacy.  If what you see on the surface is all there is to find - if a girl becoming a queen is all there is to it - then the writer has failed.  Life is nuanced.  Life has grey areas.  Art should reflect this subtlety and depth, rather than loudly drawing attention to itself (as films do with exaggerated cinematography, or books do with meaningless but gorgeous prose) and lacking substance in the end.

The leopard in the picture above has very little to do with the substance of my post, but I chose it for a reason.  It's a very simple picture: the profile of a big cat against a washed grey backdrop is all you get at first glance.  But look closer and you see the fur blurring in the foreground, becoming clearer, more detailed, soft enough to touch along the neck.  You notice the tufts from the cat's ears and can count the whiskers.  You see the rim of light along the nose and the bristles along the milk mustache, and the contemplative, possibly malevolent look about the eyes.  Storytelling should be like this, from the Winnie-the-Poohs to the Bleak Houses of the literary world: making its point (leopard!), but also drawing in the attentive reader to notice the details.

On the Fifth Element

pinterest: tempus regina

Goodness, but you readers have a heap of questions!  I've enjoyed watching them flood in, and I'm trying to keep track of them in an orderly way so none fall through the cracks.  If I miss any, be sure to give me a sharp jab with the elbow.  (I'm particularly gratified to see the Assassin getting so much attention - though I still refuse a straight answer to any questions about his identity, his love-interest or -interests, who he works for, and probably his goal.  Which I think may have weeded out half the questions.  He will, however, be getting a post of his own soon with a few half-answers for you, so don't despair!)

I'm not taking the questions in chronological order, but I am trying to give them some sort of order and reply to the similar ones at once.  The most foundational seemed to be the question of time-travel, so I thought I would address those first and see if I could clear the matter up a little.

how does Regina travel back in time?

[kelsey]

My word.  I've never actually said.  Huh!  Anyhow, the time-traveling device in Tempus Regina is an object that looks like a pocket watch and which is "set" much as one might set a typical clock; apart from the perfection of the workmanship, there is at first glance nothing very remarkable about it.  Its history is explored in a little more detail within the scope of the story, of course.

I don't remember why I chose a pocket watch, except perhaps that I've always been fascinated with them.  There is something enchanting, something mysterious and magical, about the working of all those tiny gears for keeping track of time - even more mysterious and magical after reading a book like Longitude or watching, as I just did recently, as vivid a movie as Hugo.  It's astounding to see the lengths to which men have gone in order to chart the skies and the passing of time, amazing to just glance at their ingenuity in capturing something so vast.  And then to shrink all of that intricacy down to something the size of a pocket watch: that confounds me. 

re: the time-travel, do you adhere to any strict rules and/or address the cause-effect paradoxes involved, or in true Whovian fashion do you just use the concept and ignore the paradoxes until one of them happens to make a convenient plot hook?

[chewie]

You would ask this.  You would.

Short answer: Mostly I ignore.  It's so much easier.

Long answer: I can honestly say that since I don't watch Doctor Who, any similarities are both unintentional and very unfortunate.  At least there aren't any blue boxes involved.  I should probably take out the sonic screwdriver during the editing process, though...

There is a helpful graphic (which looks as though it might have been created by the XKCD guy, though I don't think it was) on Pinterest that outlines three theories of time travel.  Theory Number One is the Fixed Timeline, wherein the characters may travel back in time, but the future they leave remains unchanged and cannot be changed by their actions in the "past."  Their actions are already a part of history and cannot be finally altered.  Theory Number Two is the Dynamic Timeline, where the actions of characters who have gone back in time have definite effects on the future they've left.  Kill your grandmother, you die too.  That sort of jazz.  Theory Number Three is Multiverse and deals with parallel/alternate timelines, and I don't mess with that, so we'll leave it alone.

Tempus Regina is primarily a fixed timeline story, where actions are integrated, as it were, into history.  However, there is also tension between that and the possibility of a dynamic timeline, since certain characters cannot know how their actions will affect the future (or if the actions will have an effect at all).  Can a character die before being born?  If someone kills her own father, will she be destroying herself?  What's happening to Kay while Regina is gallivanting in the past?

Based on our own linear thinking, I don't believe time travel would be possible because of all the paradoxes it creates.  You're faced with one at every turn.  Time "travel" would have to be, not actual physical travel, but a mental ability to "see" all times without actually affecting them.  Even if you try to get around the linear idea (there are two competing theories presented in Tempus Regina, neither of which I actually adopt, though I would enjoy seeing readers duke it out over them), you would still only end up with some sort of cosmic pretzel as proposed in the extremely highbrow "Kate & Leopold." 

...so yes, for the most part I ignore.

In the World? Really?

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Last Tuesday, I began a two-part series in which I attempt to communicate something of my philosophy concerning what it means to be a Christian who writes.  The first half, "Changing the World? Really?", primarily focused on the individualistic approach we take to our art, and the misguided notion that we are called upon to change the world.  I wrapped it up with this essential belief: the Church is a people, not just a society of individual persons.  Then I left off with a question:

"Is the pressure on us, then, to change the world as a whole people?  For the Church to rise up and take on the world?  For all believing writers to band together so their books are more like a rock in the ocean of literature than like a drop?"

And I told you my answer was no, which is something of a spoiler.

This mindset is nearly as prevalent as the individualistic approach I discussed before, and would seem to be more biblical (and more in line with my own remarks).  I said that the language used in Scripture is that of a kingdom, nation, priesthood - large words, significant words, and words that have been used to justify the Church shouldering her way into all aspects of the world's business.  "The Church is a powerful force," they say.  "We just need to realize our power, stand up and combat the world."  Political activism is a major avenue for this kind of militarism.

But since I am a writer, I prefer to question something closer to home and more innocuous, and that is the presence of a Christian label in the arts.  I've talked about it before, but the subject flows quite nicely from the first part of this series, and I could not leave off "Changing the World?" without adding this caveat.  It would be too easy to finish reading that post and infer that I find the introduction of the Christian book industry the answer to our individualistic problem.  In fact, my feelings are, to quote Lizzy Bennet, quite the opposite.  I believe the philosophy behind this labeling to be an error on the other side of the spectrum.

It is difficult to tread this minefield without stepping on one objection or another, for the phenomenon of Christian fiction has been around for several decades now and is pretty well engrained in many minds.  If you are a Christian, and your work has scriptural themes, you publish within the Christian book label.  By and large, it is now taken for granted that the industry gives Christians a voice (by bringing many pebbles together to make a rock, and then dropping it in the sea of literature) and allows us to stand out.  It marks our books as different - as soon as you see the publishing house, and sometimes as soon as you see the cover itself, you know the book is Christian fiction.  And there are a lot of such books out there.

It would seem that this is what I was advocating in "Changing the World?".  It isn't individualistic; Christians are uniting, bringing their works together under an obvious heading, not "putting their lights under bushels" and all that.  By banding together, we're seeking to impact the world.  Two fists are better than one, after all.  It's true that we can't hope to make any difference on our own, but once we get together...!

But this is not what I believe is advocated in the Bible.  We are not told to go into all the world, making our own genres and labels and whatnot; that is not being in the world at all, but is in fact a form of monasticism.  We pull back, wanting to be different not by what we think and say and do and live, but by the heading we live under.  We write our novels and tag them as Christian fiction, reasoning (when we do reason about it; I don't believe I did) that it makes sense because we are Christians and our message is Christian.  But our lives are not meant to be pigeon-holed in such a way.  Yes, indeed, the Church is meant to be united - but the Christian book industry is not the Church.

In creating this label, I believe we have lost a great deal of understanding when it comes to the Church's role, and individuals' roles, in the world.  If we are salt, we cannot keep ourselves in the container; we are sprinkled across a decaying world.  If we are leaven, we spread out to "leaven the whole lump."  If we are a mustard seed, we grow so that our branches cover the whole earth.  This is the work of the Kingdom of Heaven, and there is no room for monasticism in it.

The Christian's life is meant to be lived in the world, within sight of unbelievers.  Not after the same fashion as the world, certainly, but also not off in a cloister - or under a different label.  What impact does that have?  I think if we would be honest, we would realize that few unbelievers are likely to pick up a novel with a Christian label, unless it be by mistake.  (And then they seem frequently to be disgusted.)  Much as the genre as a whole may express a desire to stand out, have an impact, etc., the result is a far cry from the vision expressed by Jesus and the apostolic writers.

None of this is particularly easy to say or accept, because the Christian label is so prevalent; there is little we can do about it, even if we wanted to.  My own novel is technically a Christian novel.  If Christianity plays a major role in your story, it may be difficult to be accepted by a "secular" publisher: that is one reason for going the other route, and I freely confess that there are others as well.  This is by no means a condemnation of all Christian books.  It is merely my look at the idea of a Christian publishing industry, and a challenge to the philosophy that underlies it.

Changing the World? Really?

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When a person finds out you're a writer, and they feel any interest at all in the fact, generally the first question they ask is, "What do you write?"  It's less frequent that you get asked why you write, although it does happen occasionally.

The latter question has in fact cropped up a few times in the interviews people have been submitting for this blog party, and it's not an easy one to answer in just a paragraph or two.  So to give it the attention it deserves, I'm devoting a two-part series to pulling together an answer and presenting something of my own philosophy of life and writing.  Of course it hasn't wholly solidified yet; I'm much too young to have a concrete and immutable philosophy of anything.  But for the moment, this is my outlook on what it is that I do and am - as a writer, and as a Christian.  (A silly turn of phrase, that "as a whatever," but we'll leave it for Dorothy Sayers to debate.)

In the circles I run in, including those in the blogisphere, there is a great deal of pressure being put on believers in general and young believers, I think, in specific.  It doesn't really matter what field or vocation you call your own, because the pressure is the same whether you aspire to be a writer or a musician, a laborer or a manager or a whatever.  The pressure is nothing less than to change the world.  Sometimes it is couched in different terms; always it entails a kind of militancy, a combating of the world, an aggressive sharing of the Gospel to anyone who crosses our path.

In writing, which is obviously what I'm most familiar with, this most often takes the form of incorporating the Good News into every story we produce.  Isn't that we're called to do?  Aren't we supposed to go into all the world and make disciples?  And even if we can't, we can hope our books will - and we want to be sure that anyone who picks up our works will find the Gospel in them.  We want to rest assured that our "Christian fiction" - neatly packaged, all loose ends neatly tied off - stands in contrast and opposition to the mass of worldly stuff hitting the shelves right beside it.  We want our writing to change the world, because we think that's our purpose as writing Christians.

But we don't change the world.

Of course there are probably a few works of Christian fiction that have been used by the Holy Spirit to regenerate hearts; I can't imagine there are very many, but God does work in some pretty mysterious ways.  However, His common - but not common; His chosen method of saving men and women is through "the foolishness of the Word preached" (I Cor. 1:21).  We can't expect that through our novels people will be saved in droves and gaggles.  And yet we still have this idea given to us that somehow our writing, almost by the very nature of its being produced by a Christian, will change our society.

That's a pretty tall order, and a great responsibility if it is indeed true.  Consider for a moment how vast is the culture we live in.  Think of the heaps of books - Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey and all other more or less innocuous works - filling and shaping that culture.  And now picture yourself putting in your two cents, your drop into that ocean.  What difference does it make?  In the scheme of things - and remember here the scheme is that of changing the world - does your contribution matter?  Or does the world sit and laugh (if it even notices you) at your attempt to change it?

"Holy cow," you say now, "aren't you bleak today?  I think I'll just go read Dostoyevsky now to CHEER MYSELF UP."  But my point isn't bleak, once I actually get to it.  I'm pretty cheerful when it comes to my writing.  Because my philosophy of what it means to be a Christian who writes is not one of world alteration.  I don't expect The Soldier's Cross to be out there "winning souls," or even just stemming the tide of bad literature.  That's far too much weight placed on one little 92,000-word novel - far too much weight placed on one little just-barely-five-foot girl.  I can't change the world, and I don't expect to.  I don't think God expects me to.  If we could change the world, I expect He would just leave us here until we had finally converted everyone and the world was a happy place.

What it comes down to in my mind, as far as this part of the matter is concerned, is that God has not placed me as a sole individual with the purpose in His thoughts of me accomplishing all these great things.  He has brought out for Himself a people.  He stuck Israel smack dab in the middle of everything - in the sight of all the nations, in fact.  He has stuck His Church smack dab in the middle of everything, too, so that she should be a city set on a hill.  It is hard to grasp or even to say because of our mindset, but He has not called out for Himself individual persons; He has bought a people (made up of individuals, yes, but greater than the sum of its parts!) to be a witness, to be salt and light and leaven and a mustard seed that grows to fill the whole earth.

We lose sight of this; I lose sight of this.  But I think we must stop thinking about ourselves in such a personal and individualistic manner, stop thinking that we're set out alone with our own candles with the weight of the world - literally - resting on our shoulders.  The language of Scripture is that of a nation, a priesthood, a kingdom, a spiritual house.  The pressure is not, and should not, be on us as individuals to change the world.

Is the pressure on us, then, to change the world as a whole people?  For the Church to rise up and take on the world?  For all believing writers to band together so their books are more like a rock in the ocean of literature than like a drop?  Well, I'll sum up my answer as "no," but the rest will come in a later post.

There's a comic that features Moses holding the tablets of stone and telling the people of Israel, "Please hold your applause until I've read all ten."  Please hold your applause (or rotten tomatoes) until I've finish up the next installment, and then see what you think.  And, while you're waiting, don't forget to enter the novel giveaway.  Because you've only got ten days left, and Christmas is coming...!

Growing Art

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We all want to improve.  

I make that a blanket statement, because while there are those writers who already think their writing is as good as it gets, us saner folk still have days when we look at our work and think, "Oh goodness.  I really, really stink at this.  Did I write that?  That is so stupid.  Backspacebackspacebackspace...!" and daydream of a time when our writing is polished to perfection.  (At least, I do.  On rare and not terribly lucid occasions.)

Our desire to improve in the craft of writing is what drives us to read the self-help books and writing blogs dedicated to the subject.  We dig through all the posts on fight scenes or dialogue, hoping to glean something that will make our writing in those areas shine and stand out from the crowd.  We fret and sigh over cliches like "black as pitch" and practically rip our hair out over stray adverbs.  We chew our nails as we wonder if maybe our fantasy world isn't as original, after all, as Patricia McKillip's.  And on top of all that, as Christians we often stretch our brains to amazing lengths to find out how we can fit the Gospel or maybe just a prayer into the plot - because that's what we're supposed to do, right?

Now, some of you know already that I'm not a huge fan of self-help books.  I'm not going to denigrate them, though, because I know that they can hold very useful information and have helped numerous writers work out difficult parts of the writing process; I know that for myself, I frequently store away the tips on such blogs as Go Teen Writers, to be implemented at some later date.  Nothing beats an extensive library and broad tastes, but it is nonetheless helpful for us to see things broken down, the parts examined in detail and then put back together again. 

All things in moderation, however, for this approach can be overdone, and then nothing so thoroughly robs a story of its life.  This self-help business often - necessarily, even - looks at writing in a mechanistic fashion: take it apart, look at the cogs and gears and gerbils, then assemble it and voila! a story!  It can fail to recognize that a story is much less a machine than it is a living organism, needing to be nurtured, not to have its leaves and roots pulled out and inspected.  We simply end up trying too hard.

That is a difficult thing to say without sounding as though I'm implying that writing is an easy flow of words onto paper every single day with no agonies whatsoever.  But of course that is nothing more than a fantasy, and not even a pleasant one when you start to think carefully: what, after all, is writing without any work?  We do have to labor over our stories.  We do have to make the plant grow, and we do have to get rid of all the bugs and the fungus and the what-have-you that distort it.  The point is not to sit back and clear your mind of all the wisdom of other authors and readers. 

The point is to have the right mindset.

Writing is an art.  It isn't the same as putting together the parts of car until when you turn the key in the ignition, the engine comes to life.  It's an art, a work of creation, a tying together of a multitude of thought-threads into a story that feels - and in some ways is - alive.  That is not something that can be taught.  And because of this, we cannot go into self-help books and the like expecting to be shown how to write.  We can be shown how to polish our words.  We can be shown how to spruce up dialogue.  We can be shown when to leave a cliche and when to reinvent one.  But in all that, we cannot be shown how to write.

We can't be taught this, and yet I do believe we can learn it.  We learn it individually in the process of our writing, and also in the process of our living.  Because being a writer is not just an expression of what we do, but of something we are.  I don't know that it is essential and I won't run off on a philosophical rabbit trail; it is enough to realize that writing is a necessary part of who we are.  And I think that perhaps the process of improving our writing is not, after all, so much the process of polishing grammar and the like (however important that is).  It's a process of growing.

Cross-Cultures

pinterest board: wordcrafter

This year I started reading some of The Doorway Papers, works by Christian anthropologist Arthur C. Custance.  I finished the first book, Noah's Three Sons, in January; most of you probably remember that I did a follow-up post called Image Dei, inspired by some of the things Custance wrote.  Apparently his writing tends to be inspiring, because this post flows from the second book, Genesis and Early Man. 

Most of the essays in Early Man deal with the paleontological record and are more technical than the those in Noah's Three Sons, which made it slower going for me.  (Bones get boring after a while.  So do peccary teeth.)  His last section, however, is titled "Light from Other Forms of Cultural Behavior on Some Incidents in Scripture," and this was the one I found to be of particular interest.  He takes some of the more puzzling narratives and instructions in Genesis and expands upon them, showing how they are linked with cultural patterns the world over.  For instance, he starts with the statement in Genesis 2 that "for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife," and goes on to show not only the prevalence of having the man go to his wife's family, but also the practical merit of doing it in this manner and not the other way around. 

I confess, some of the points he addresses were not ones I had ever thought very hard about; but they provided food for thought all the same.  Custance addresses most of the cultural details, including polygamy, without passing overt judgment, just as the Scripture tends to mention them in passing and without critique.  Rather, he delves into the why's and the wherefore's of these cultural norms, presenting them in a clearer light to the befuddled Western mind.

Naturally, this is interesting for its bearing on Genesis.  That was, after all, Custance's intent.  However, being a writer, I tend to look at everything from a writer's point of view.  In this case, the problem of cultures started me thinking about world-building - the crafting of peoples in fantasy worlds that are somehow different from cultures past and present.  We want ours to be unique, and though we may be inspired by ancient Egypt or Norse mythology, we prefer that the inspiration be subtle rather than obvious.  No one wants their story to be the one where the reader can go two pages and say, "Oh, I know where THAT'S from."

All that is perfectly reasonable, and provides incentive for branching out and exercising creativity.  But in reading Genesis and Early Man, it occurred to me that there is as much - or more - to be learned from the similarities between cultures as from the differences.  We tend to assume that the culture of the Eskimos will be vastly removed from that of the Australian aborigines, and to some extent, due to the demands of environment, it is; and yet at the same time, there are some amazing parallels to be noted between them.  Recall the Mankind has a "common ancestor," Noah, and a common starting place, Mesopotamia.  Cultural arteries all flow from that heartland; links between traditions stretch from one end of the earth to the other.

This is a fact worth considering, especially as we build our fantasies and populate them with people out of our imaginations.  Of course we want each culture we create to be different, but what elements do they have in common?  In marriage and in family, in religion and in government, are there threads that unite them?  If the world is tied to Earth, and perhaps even populated by humans, what links still exist between our world and theirs?  I have always thought it a good idea to come up with a history for the peoples; so much of what makes up a culture and its foreign policy depends on its history, so it seems impossible to create a believable world without one.  And now, added to that, I am of the opinion that anthropology - the study of Man - is just as pertinent a study for any writer.

In fact, I'm having a hard time thinking of fields of knowledge that aren't pertinent to a writer.

Logos

I want much more than this provincial life!
I want adventure in the great wide somewhere
I want it more than I can tell...

- beauty and the beast

I am not an adventurous individual. I get nervous about car rides and the idea of being on an airplane makes me shudder. Snowboarding? Tubing? Riding a bike down a really steep hill? They all make me want to slink away to my comfy chair in the living room and settle down with a book. Real-world adventure and I don't get along.

Adventure in the realm of ink and paper, however, is quite a different matter. That I couldn't do without. Whether it be an adventure of the past, as in a biography, or one like Treasure Island, where the action is nearly fantastical, there is something thrilling about it. Through the story we see a wholly separate world; through the characters we are allowed to live the adventure. In a way, it takes us out of ourselves.

I suppose this is a large part of the charm of reading. There is only one Emily Dickinson poem that I have read and enjoyed (although I will admit to not being well-versed in her works), and it is probably also her most famous.

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

Perhaps this is a little embellished, as poetry usually is. Yet it hints at the beauty and power of the written word, its seemingly unlimited capabilities. There are few things that so set Man and his soul apart from the animal realm as his rationality and capacity of both thinking and communicating; last month I wrote a short post on the Imago Dei, and this aspect of Man vividly portrays that God's image in him has not been lost. Jesus Christ is called the Logos, the Word, the thought of the Father communicated, and as humans we are privileged to bear that image through language.

It is impossible to explain the impact of words, yet it is equally impossible to deny that they do indeed have an impact. We joke about the saying that the pen is mightier than the sword and envision a battle between a writer and a soldier, but cliche though the saying may be, it remains true: we would no longer know of the great warriors of history had some writer not chronicled their lives. Words have the ability to transport the reader "lands away," to conjure up another world in his mind, to communicate in a manner that is almost magical. Like so many elements of the human psyche, this is something that, while tangible, is also indefinable.

And yet, also like so many other parts of the human mind, this comes with its own dangers. It is easy to fall into escapism - I know I often do. Is it a godly way of living to shut oneself up in the realm of the written word and never come out? I have heard people declare that they live in the wrong era. These are usually readers, individuals who see another period in the (oft-glorified) mirror of books and wish they had been born in that time. It just seems so much better than the humdrum life we have every day. But not only is this an idealized way of looking at history, it also constitutes a slap in the face of Providence. God knows what He is about; He put us in this day and age for a reason. We must not lose sight of that, or we run the risk of getting so caught up in sighing over days gone by that we forget to live as salt and light here and now.

Are books dangerous, then? Should we all burn our adventure stories? Well, to answer the first question, with our sinful nature it is possible to take anything to excess; and to answer the second, if you intend to get rid of them you should send them to me. Books are wonderfully beautiful and helpful things. So much can be gleaned from them. We cannot live in that realm alone, but I do think we should strive to unite it with the world of our daily lives.

We Have the Mind of Christ

This school year I have been taking a course on Philosophy, and my term paper happens to be on the question What is Truth? I started out with much fear and trembling and intense feelings of the paltriness of my mind, wondering how on earth I could produce a worthwhile ten- to thirteen-page essay on such a difficult topic. I've actually found, however, that writing this report is easier than my other essay for History, primarily because of the large amount of literature on the topic. The issue of objective versus subjective Truth has been around for ages, expressed by Pilate so famously in his brief, skeptical question to Jesus: "What is Truth?" Nowadays, with destructive postmodernist philosophy strong in the world and in the Church, the common answer is that there is no truth. Or, at least, there is no objective Truth. Truth is what you make it to be; it's all a matter of perspective.

This view has worked itself into the modern Church with alarming success, resulting in the widespread belief among professing believers that the Bible is not God's objective Word and does not need to be obeyed. Phrases like "Well, that's true for you..." and "That's just your opinion" tumble easily out of the mouths of the majority of professing Christians. This disbelief (usually subconscious) in the existence of objective Truth in the moral realm then also manifests itself in the types of entertainment that are accepted - in music, literature, art, what-have-you - because if there is no objective Truth, there is no standard and everything is simply a matter of personal opinion.

It's understandable that because of this ecclesiastically-accepted postmodernism, more reformed churches react against it and begin to lay down rules as to what things Christians should listen to or compose, read or write, admire or draw. We begin to see the development of the use of "Christian" as an adjective - "Christian" novels, "Christian" music, etc. - and even if what are termed "secular" forms of entertainment are not wholly condemned, we are encouraged to stay primarily within those categories labeled "Christian." These are considered healthy and safe and God-honoring.

Unfortunately, this reaction to the looseness of modern Christian morality is just that - a reaction. It moves to the other end of the spectrum and begins to construct definitions of "good" and "bad," "healthy" and "unhealthy," "God-pleasing" and "God-dishonoring," that are not found in the Scriptures. Some body of officials is set up to say that this book is good because the author mentions God a few times, but that book is bad because the characters don't profess to be Christians. That music is bad because it uses drums, but this music is sacred because it is in the hymnbook. But do all men not have the Imago Dei? And isn't it possible that the image of God that they bear comes out in a beautiful or powerful or even truthful way in their work, whether or not they are a believer? Paul himself quoted a pagan poet in addressing the Athenians and gave the man credit for speaking truth. Is it not possible for a thinking Christian to find diamonds of truth in the works of Plato or of Marcus Aurelius; in Charles Dickens and in Shakespeare; in works of fiction and works of history?

But you might say, "Well, surely there are a great many bad books and music and art in the world." And I say yes, most certainly; and there are a great many bad books and music and art that call themselves Christian, too. The point is not to be lulled into comfort by tags and labels, not to be trusting because a CD has "CCM" on it or because a novel is in the Christian fiction part of Barnes & Noble. Believers must be thinking men and women - thinking and fearless. When you combine a sanctified mind with trust in God, there is not only no danger in "secular" works, but you will often find good challenges and truths.

In case you think I am saying that Christians can benefit by every genre of book and style of music and ought to read and listen indiscriminately, I'm not. I think that being critical of what you read is as important as being critical as you read. But this critical thinking should not be guided by what the Higher Ups have in their great and boundless wisdom termed "Christian"; it should be guided by a firm knowledge (and by that I mean a scriptural and well-considered knowledge) of objective good and bad.

Naturally, the first question is of the morality of any work. If the lyrics of the song are obscene or the content of a book is immoral, there is no reason for a believer to waste his time in listening to the music or reading the book. But something may be decent without passing the test of objective worth; it may simply not be any good. Personally, I think many "Christian" novels fall into this category. (Sadly, most of the ones I have read fail to pass the first test, either.) The plot is so old that the author is not just beating the dead horse, he is, as my sister likes to say, "beating the greasy patch where the horse used to be." Or the writing is flimsy and unpolished, with no beauty or truth or impact. In one area or another, or perhaps a whole bunch, the book isn't good. Why waste time with such a thing when there are thousands of other objectively good books to be read and enjoyed? Or perhaps a song is clean - perhaps even a rendition of a hymn - but the music is discordant, or the singer's voice is horrid. Is this beauty? Is this worth spending time listening to?

The very fact of the presence of the Imago Dei in mankind that I mentioned earlier demands better things than this. We ought to search for beauty and cherish it when we find it, and not be content to sit in the mud and make pies. It may be that subjectively you don't care for Bach or for Jane Austen, but the mind should be attuned to the objective worth of such works of art. In I Corinthians Paul talks about the wisdom of God and the unsearchable, unknowable depths of His mind, then says powerfully and succinctly: "But we have the mind of Christ." That is a deep thing, having the mind of Christ. I cannot imagine that having this mind of Christ, we are meant to let it stagnate by remaining always in our comfort zone and never exercising the power we have through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We ought always to be searching out good things and enjoying them as gifts from God, and honoring Him in that enjoyment as the Giver of every good gift.