Monthly Archives: July 2010

Tolkien, Twilight, and Cultural Optimism

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Twilight is a huge seller and one might be tempted to despair.

But don’t.

It is still amazing the number of Tolkien references one finds in Twitter and on Facebook. Tolkien! Not J. K. Rowling. (I would assume she has more references, but she still has movies coming out. Tolkien is still amazingly influential.)

And for all the idiocy of Twilight, I’m sure there are many readers who wanted something better and will continue to look for it.  True, they will be misled by a host of books trying to imitate the worst features, but eventually another Rowling or two will come along.

And Tolkien will continue to be a lighthouse in every scifi/fantasy bookshelf in the world.

There was a time when “Swords and Sorcery” was a real minority report among readers.  It was mostly pulp fiction.  Tolkien changed the world forever by both transforming and popularizing the epic fantasy genre. He and Lewis had insisted people were hungry for it and, while nothing about Tolkien resembled an entrepreneur, he did in fact find a new market.

Gary Gygax has said he was expecting to market D&D to a small group of wargamers. He two broke into a new market, in large part because he had Tolkien to make a way for him.

Yes Twilight has been successful, but it is not going to be here a half-century later. No one is going to vote for Meyers as the author of the century in 2101.

It will pass.

Instead of judging the world by the popularity of Twilight we should look at the enduring popularity of Tolkien and also his better innovators like Rowling.

Just my opinion; but you know what an optimist I am.

Use your body

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There is a passage in C. S. Lewis’ book, The Screwtape Letters, that helps explain the physical side of being spiritual.

In his fourth letter, senior demon Screwtape holds forth on the subject of befuddling a new Christian in his prayers. He starts by mentioning a line from the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge about how he prayed without “moving lips and bended knees.” Coleridge thought he nailed it well enough by merely feeling prayerful, a view that Screwtape endorses in the lines that follow. “At the very least, they [Christians] can be persuaded that the bodily position [like kneeling] makes no difference to their prayers,” he says, “for they constantly forget . . . that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.”

via Joel J. Miller: Author of The Revolutionary Paul Revere.

Last Sunday, I visited a church where the pastor read from Romans 12.1: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present yourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Then he asked us if anyone noticed how he had misread the passage.  No one did.

But Romans 12.1 actually says, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

Of course, that means the same thing as “yourselves,” but the point is that we normally think it doesn’t.

Joel Miller’s post on the use of gestures is very helpful in this regard. I think it also applies to the helpfulness of praying out loud with tongue, lips, and lungs.  Otherwise, prayer becomes difficult to differentiate from daydreaming.

I also pointed to something similar (I think) when I posted “Jesus is Lord”: A Practical Suggestion for Struggling with Sin.

When will Evangelicals take John 3 seriously?

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beaten with brains: The Eschatology of Being “Born Again”.

Of course, the link shows that there is an Evangelical who takes it seriously, but I mean Evangelical “intellectual leaders” who seem to suffer remarkably like Nicodemus when reading John 3.

Baptism is all over the early part of John’s Gospel. John “the Baptist” [!] is baptizing both before and after, demanding that people come to the Jordan and re-enter (as it were) the Promised Land crossing the same border that Joshua originally crossed.  It is not enough to be a member of the old Israel. Israel is dead. A new Israel is needed. A new birth.

How many Evangelicals act like baptism is completely alien to the context of Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus?

And why not acknowledge that Jesus was confronting a certain people at a certain time?  Did David need to be born again? Did Simeon or Anna?  To treat Jesus’ discussion as a lecture on a point in Jesus’ “ordo salutis” is just painful.  There is no justification for it, but it is simply taken for granted.

Everyone says their theology comes from Scripture, but it commonly turns out that one’s theology are simply a list of demands about what certain passages must mean. John 3 and Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus is one of the worst cases for Evangelicals.  One can only pray for the day when we let the text speak to us, rather than demand it conform to what we want to say.