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I haven’t read any of Pullman’s books, which by all accounts are intended to be anti-Christian and anti-God. I have been reading reviews on a few blogs, including thoughts posted by Tom Gilson. Gilson is one of the least reactionary reviewers I’ve found, which I appreciate. He lives up to his blog title, Thinking Christian.

My son Isaiah has read the trilogy, and likes it, even though he is not inclined to share Pullman’s point of view. While not writing an actual review (yet), he has some thoughts on how Christians react to these books, as well as anything that threatens them. Isaiah writes:

When I find something that I don’t agree with, or that threatens or offends me, I analyze it in order to find out what about it disturbs me, why the parts that disturb me don’t make sense, and, if they seem to make perfect sense, what the error is in my thinking. I believe this process is called “learning.”

But when Christians feel threatened or offended, they make no attempt to figure out why. They don’t bother to figure out what exactly the errors are in the other’s thinking, instead giving in to emotions and trying to silence the offending material so they won’t have to deal with it.

Another thinking Christian. I’ve encouraged him to write a review of the books, sharing his reasons why he likes them. If he does, I’ll let you know.

On the lighter side, also check out his informative post on how to prepare for a zombie attack.

I’ve been thinking lately about the importance that the written word (any word, not just The Word of God) has in our Modernist culture, as opposed to what is merely spoken. A few weeks ago Ben Witherington published on his website the text of a speech he gave at Baylor University on the subject of “Sacred Texts in an Oral Culture.” The “speech” got me thinking further on the subject, and also serves, somewhat ironically, as a recursive demonstration of the oral presentation converted to a written form.

On one hand, the pragmatism of converting oral to written information is obvious; any oral presentation has a somewhat limited audience, but the written form greatly multiplies the potential audience, while also serving to preserve the integrity of the material. Witherington’s point, however, was this: in ancient cultures, the written word was not seen as having greater integrity than the oral word, and he posits that the New Testament documents were initially written to be orally presented. We do know that in the 1st Century, the “Word of God” did not necessarily refer to any written document, but to the message as preached by the Apostles.

Due to Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and the resulting growth of literacy, it appears to me (not that I’m any expert) that coincidental with Modernism was a growing reliance on the written word over the oral. Where once someone’s “word” was as good as you’d get (accompanied at times with a covenantal sign or witnesses), written documents grew to be considered more trustworthy. In the West, written tradition is accepted, oral tradition is questioned. In the East (which avoided Modernism and a number of other “isms”), that’s not necessarily the case. Today in the West, our “word” is essentially meaningless, without some piece of paper somewhere with our signature affixed to it. We hear some news item on the radio or TV, and immediately look to confirm it in print (including the electronic written word as “print”). As much as I love the written word, I wonder, have we become a society of bibliolators (or at least bibio-snobs), holding the written word in too high esteem?

But, perhaps the tension is not between the oral and the written, but between the cultural dynamics that accompany them. One is fluid, interactive, and based in community; the other is static, actually discouraging interaction and community. As Marshall McLuhan so aptly put it, “the medium is the message.” In the context of Christianity, we can see differences: On one hand, the Word of God is “living and active;” on the other hand, we have theological nit-picking over words and phrases and the fundamentalist, inflexible words of legalism. Did the Ephesians spend months picking apart Paul’s letter when it was read to them? It would be interesting indeed to know how these letters were received and treated, or how the 1st Century Church would feel about how we treat their letters.

Yesterday I read a very interesting blog post over at Totally Baked that got me thinking in another direction. Quixote writes about the blog’s short-term nature:

[I]n the blog we have access to a streaming ticker seamlessly tracing the internal weather of our collective psyche. Like Heraclitus’ ever-changing river, blogdom is a relentlessly variable torrent of the topical where history is only the last post.

In considering these thoughts, the medieval troubadour or minstrel came to mind, the roving conveyor of news and gossip, completely oral in nature. He was here today, gone tomorrow, to be followed by the next singer of songs and teller of tales, gathering news as quickly as he disseminated it. Could it be that the blog, with it’s overtly communal, participatory, grass-roots nature, has become a vehicle for the type of organic spread of information that we’ve been missing since the inception of the rather imperialist institutions of the book, the tract, the newspaper and the broadcast media? Could it really be they who controlled culture for a time (yes, I know, I really am sounding McLuhanish now).

As I researched (read “googled”) the issue, I came across a very interesting paper by John December entitled “Characteristics of Oral Culture in Discourse on the Net.” The paper states that is was “presented at the twelfth annual Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, University, Park, Pennsylvania, July 8, 1993.” Obviously a very intelligent man, December makes a similar point (pre-blog, of course) about computer-mediated communication:

This paper presents observations of a computer chat and a computer bulletin board system that illustrate qualities of orality in CMC. The implications of these oral qualities in CMC forums is that, ultimately, new discourse communities are created, with vast political, cultural, and social implications, recreating the immediacy of pre-literate cultures, but adding on space- and time-independence.

Would it be even better if blogs disintegrated after a few days, if we were forced to recall, to discuss, and to relay information from our rather inadequate memories? I’m not sure about that. I tend to love being able to Google nearly anything. But, perhaps it is time for us to let go (just a little) of our bibliolatry, our informational imperialism, to loose our grip on “it says right here!” and recover some of the spirit of oral tradition. Perhaps.

Go, blog. Go.

I’ve been reading a very good little book on the theology of Martin Luther, Luther for Armchair Theologians, by Steven Paulson, and am being struck afresh with the power of Luther’s thought and emotion. Luther has been as close to a role model as I’ve had; I was raised Lutheran, something for which I count myself as extremely fortunate. In spite of the many different theological rabbit-trails that I have followed over the last 30 years, I am always brought back by the logic, symmetry and spirit of basic Lutheran theology. However, other than what I learned in my Confirmation classes (which were quite good), I’ve not really studied the ins and outs of Lutheran theology, especially as contrasted with other reformationist strains. So, I figure there’s no time like the present to reconnect with and deepen my understanding of Luther’s theology.

Paulson does a great job of dealing not only with Luther’s main theological insights, but also the context in which he arrived at those insights; amazing, really, in that the book is only about 200 pages long. Luther’s reformation was due primarily with his own personal struggle to understand how he could be saved. His was not a reformation based in rebellion, for he was, like Paul, very good at being a legalist. However, he couldn’t reconcile Roman Catholic doctrine with what he was reading from Paul in his letter to the Romans (and he’d have the same issues with much of evangelical theology today).

Luther’s soteriology (doctrine of how we are saved) resulted in a rather unique anthropology (view of man), which I believe would clarify a lot of confusion among the “undoctrinated” Christians today (those who have no real understanding of what they believe or why). His view is of the simul, the double-life, based on his 2-prong message of The Law and The Gospel. The Law declares us to be a sinner, and through Christ’s death and our baptism, we are dead. As Paulson says, we are “dead, helpless, passive, unable to do anything, and already divinely judged as having no future.” At the same time, through baptism and Christ’s resurrection, “a whole saint is there as well, newly raised from the dead.” One of Satan’s lies is for us to think we are 1/2 sinner, 1/2 saint, in a process of being sanctified through our participation with grace. Why is this a lie? Because then, we do not have Christ as sole mediator, and as Paul says in Galatians, then we have no gospel at all.

The Bourne Theology

Warning: “spoiler” ahead…

This way of looking at the old man - new man duality makes sense, considering what Paul says in Romans, and as I have also been reading through Robert Ludlum’s Bourne trilogy, I began to grasp the concept a bit better. Now, the Bourne books differ considerably from the movies, so if you’ve only watched those, you possibly won’t see what I mean. In the books, the main character, David Webb, was “programmed” by a government agency to play the role of Jason Bourne, the world’s most deadly assassin. Due to a head injury, he “lost” his identity and memory as Webb, and in between the 1st and 2nd books, he recovers his original identity through intensive therapy. In the 2nd and 3rd books, he constantly struggles to maintain his original identity as David Webb, while circumstances force him to assume the hated Bourne identity.

This scenario is remarkably similar to Luther’s anthropology. The Bourne Identity is dead (literally), is hated by David Webb (and others) and has no future. The identity with a life and a future is David Webb; however, Jason Bourne is never far from David Webb, and his only hope of sanity is to keep the identities distinct and in proper perspective. To focus on rehabilitating “Bourne” would be useless, and David Webb would be lost in the process. Bourne must be allowed to remain dead, to allow David Web to live.

The books, by the way, are not great literature, and I’m not a big Ludlum fan. They are, however, much more complex (sometimes needlessly so) than the movies which - like some evangelical anthropologies - tend to ignore the distinction between the identities, instead trying to merge them to simplify the plot. They are great action flicks, though.

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit. - Romans 8:1-4

The Good News is that while all carry around our “Bourne Identities,” we know we have been given new lives along with the righteousness of God. While we still have a memory of these old identities, they are dead and powerless, and the sins of these identities died along with them. We are truly saved and truly free, solely by grace through faith.

The Reformation continues …