From the Shelf

I love books. I love buying them, I love reading them, I love smelling them, I love looking at them. They are, hands down, my favorite things to purchase. However, I am also cheap. Really cheap. I think all the Scottish blood from my mom's side of the family was somehow concentrated in me, for it is rare that I will buy a book for over $4 - to the point where, at birthdays and the like when I give books as presents, my family asks, "Did you pay more than three dollars for it?" Condition isn't very important to me, except in gift-giving - I prefer my books used - so I have a rather battered collection of books on my shelf. And the nice ones? Oh, those are the ones that friends and family have given me.

Shelf One - Left Side: I have a lot of C.S. Lewis, and not nearly as much as I want. The Parable of Joy by Michael Card, on the far left, isn't really mine; I just absorbed it into my stash. Letters of C.S. Lewis came out of a house that my dad and brother bought and renovated, and The Screwtape Letters and The Joyful Christian were presents. I'm not sure why I still have I Kissed Dating Goodbye; I'm not very fond of it. The Four Loves I bought, back in the day before I knew of the wonderful site called Alibris and bought books from Barnes & Noble. The other books I either bought, acquired for free (no, I didn't steal them), or were presents (like the Norsk dictionary over on the right.)

Shelf One - Right Side: Most of these are historical fictions, as the histories are getting squeezed out to go on my other bookshelf. I've been building my collection of Sutcliff novels for the past few months; Frontier Wolf is missing from this picture because I'm still reading it. I actually spent over $7 each for that, The Shield Ring, and The Mark of the Horse Lord, which just goes to show how much I wanted those Front Street editions. (And don't get me started on all the trouble I went through to get Mark.) Let's see... There are still some research books there, but The Influence of Sea Power upon History is in use. Couple of Costain novels, but I didn't care for Below the Salt and so haven't gotten around to reading The Black Rose.

Shelf Two: Did I mention that I like C.S. Lewis? Many of the books on this shelf were gifts, including the three on the left: The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Pilgrim's Progress, and The Chronicles of Narnia. (Yes, I do still have extras of The Chronicles. I can't seem to get rid of them.) Those hardbacks of Out of the Silent Planet, That Hideous Strength, and the three Chronicles books were from the same house as Letters of C.S. Lewis. The Silmarillion my dad bought for me. I have most of L'Engle's Time Quintet, but I didn't care for the last one and so never bothered to buy it. The green book to the right of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy is The Gammage Cup; I rather wonder how I managed to keep Jenny from taking it with her when she moved out. Over on the right are mostly "girly" books, like Little Women.

Shelf Three: Lamplighter Publishing books on the left, random-assortment-of-classics-which-would-not-fit-on-my-designated-classics-shelf on the right. That copy of Ben-Hur I'm only holding until a friend comes in June and I can give it to her. Most of the other classics I picked up cheaply at booksales or on Alibris. The Lamplighters, which tend to be expensive, I mostly acquired as presents.

Shelf Four - Left: In case you couldn't guess, that Barnes & Noble copy of The Iliad and the Odyssey was - yes - a gift. The lovely edition of Ben-Hur I got from Jenny's mother-in-law; Beowulf was one of Jenny's 3+ copies, and she deigned to let me have it. Shakespeare's works I absorbed into my own collection, as with that hideously orange copy of Wuthering Heights. The Woman in White and Bleak House were both gifts, hence their new condition. I did actually buy Gone with the Wind...for ninety-nine cents. Yes, I'm cheap.

Shelf Four - Right: This Oxford Illustrated set of Jane Austen's novels, a birthday present from my dad, is probably the nicest collection of books I own. (Pride and Prejudice is missing from the photo because I was rereading it at the time.) The copy of Daddy-Long-Legs I picked up at a used-book store; it has a lovely smell. The other cloth-bound books were mostly absorbed from other shelves in the house. Mother West Wind's Children, the blue book, was a childhood favorite.

Shelf Five - I don't have a good photo of this one, but that's all right: I can't reach the shelf without the aid of a step, so it's primarily made up of books that I don't care about very much. I do have three old G.A. Henty's, Les Miserables, Chaucer, A Tale of Two Cities, and some more Shakespeare up there, banished to the top shelf because they wouldn't fit on any other.

Bookshelf Number Two - This is actually an entertainment unit, but who cares? If it can be used for holding books, it will be. This holds my mysteries, histories, and a random assortment of other books that would not fit on my big bookshelf, but were too good to go into storage, such as the Anne of Green Gables series. Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, Dorothy Sayers, and one Mary Stewart novel make up most of my mystery collection.

Those are the books on my shelf. What about yours?

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.