Theology Thursday: Saints or Sinners?
I generally try to come to Theology Thursday with a well-thought-out idea, complete with Bible references. But today I just wanted to write about something I’ve been wondering about, but without most of the actual effort involved with making a Biblical case for it. Call it laziness if you want.
It seems that it’s the thing to do these days for Christians to call themselves sinners. Or to emphasis their sinfulness, by way of (perhaps?) trying not to look pompous or judgmental.
Certainly, it wouldn’t necessarily help my witness if I went around calling myself a saint, right? Or should I update my Facebook profile to say something like this:
“Seth: Husband, Father, Baseball Fan, Saint.”
But isn’t just a bit odd to insert “Sinner” there, too? Is that really part of who I am, any more than “Baseball Fan” is? Do I really need to emphasize my own sinfulness? And mightn’t I just as easily put “Human” for all the information it gives? Where does this emanate from?
I suspect there are a number of different motivations that feed this tendency for us to insist that we’re “just sinners, saved by grace.”
- It’s a defense against unbelievers who call Christians hypocrites. If we call ourselves sinners, then we can hardly be called hypocritical when we fail, right?
- It just looks pious.
- We feel, acutely, our own sinfulness and express our gratitude to God by emphasizing it.
- The word “saint” just doesn’t fly today.
I mainly want to write about #4, but I’ll take comments on any of them, or suggestions for other possible motivations. I do think that #3 is certainly a common reason, particularly among men, for going with the Sinner label. I could be off-base here, but I think the types of things men tend to struggle with get more attention, and therefore are felt more acutely. (Definitely generalizing here.)
But I definitely think that the reason we can’t really get away with '”saint” is that it’s not a well-understood word these days. The word itself conjures up, at least to Protestants, images of icons or statues in a Catholic or Orthodox church, and has an almost sterile, ivory tower connotation.
(This in spite of the fact that any treatment of the Lives of the Saints will normally have ample evidence that these saintly folks were awfully human, too.)
“Saint” simply means “holy ones.” Well, that’s not much of an improvement, is it? “Holy” is another misunderstood word, because it doesn’t mean “perfect,” but rather “set apart.”
I know I said I wouldn’t get all Biblical on this topic, but go look at the salutations of the Epistles in the New Testament. A goodly percentage of them are addressed to “the saints” in a particular city. Certainly there was no implication of the people of the churches in those ancient cities being any less sinful than we are today.
At the risk of sounding like Stuart Smalley, isn’t there some value in positive affirmation? I’m not into the Word of Faith doctrine, in which faith is seen as a force and words as having some mystical power. But it seems to me that calling ourselves “sinners” is similar to a person who’s been sober twenty years calling himself an alcoholic. (And here I really step in it.)
Yes, we are sinners. But we’ve been bought with a price and set apart to be saints.
Thoughts?
Ninja Warrior and Competition
Quick comment on the Super Bowl here. Trivial Pursuit is better.
(We managed to miss the onside-kick that sparked the Saints’ getting back in the game. DVR good. And WTG, Saints.)
So it’s getting toward baseball season here, and I’m not just going to wax poetic about how much better baseball is than football, because there’s really little left to be said, and it’s so manifestly true.
No, instead I’d like to opine a bit about competition. I often hear from other parents that they want their boy (I’m being boy-centric here, because I am one, and I have one) to be in a non-competitive league. I. Just. Don’t. Understand. This.
Okay, so I do understand wanting to give kids a low-pressure way to experience sports. And maybe it’s a good entry point, or a toes-in-the-water point for kids who probably aren’t wired for sports competition.
But I think there’s something we miss when we remove competition, and when all the kids get trophies. As Dash put it in The Incredibles, after his mom (Elastigirl) commented that “everyone is special”:
“Which is the same as saying nobody’s special.”
Now, I’m all for rewarding effort and not just performance, and I can see the argument for a trophy being a good carrot to dangle, even if it’s not earned by performance so much as participation.
But shouldn’t our kids be learning to lose well? Learning that, hard as you try, you just might be on a pretty lousy team? That it’s okay to lose if you tried your best?
The thing is, in teaching our kids about losing well, we also get to teach them how to win well. And they learn how great it feels to win.
(Incidentally, this is why I generally don’t let the Boy win. I want him to feel good when he beats me. Though I do sometimes handicap myself to level the playing field. But within those strictures, I still try to win.)
As I’ve written before, we’re big fans of Sasuke, known in America as Ninja Warrior. It’s a lot like ABC’s Wipeout, only a hundred times cooler.
It’s basically the world’s toughest obstacle course, but it’s not just the obstacles that make it cool. It’s the fact that they might go SEVEN YEARS WITHOUT A WINNER!!!!!
On Wipeout, there’s always a winner of the $50k prize. Twenty-four start the competition, and one of them wins it.
On Ninja Warrior, one hundred people start the competition, and most of the time, one hundred are eliminated. Sometimes only two or three even make it past Stage One (of Four). Oh, and the prize is less than $20k.
And they keep making the course harder. If you look back at the first winner (there have been two winners out of more than twenty competitions), his course was much easier than the second winner’s.
But of course, sometimes somebody does win. For instance, The Pancake Eating Boy’s current hero, Makoto Nagano. Here’s a video of him completing all four stages back on Sasuke 17 (the video lacks G4’s English translation, or you’d get the impression that the announcer has just as big a Man Crush on Nagano as The Boy does):
The Boy gets seriously emotionally invested in watching his Main Dude on Sasuke. When Nagano fails, the Boy is very put out.
I think it says something about the Japanese that they’re willing to watch a competition that may not even have a winner and most of the time doesn’t. (Strictly speaking, I think you could call the course itself the winner most of the time.)
But there’s another good lesson on Ninja Warrior, and that’s respect for your opponent. It’s really cool to see the way all the contestants pull for each other. Granted, they’re not really competing against each other, but it’s still awesome to watch how disappointed the All-Stars are when one of their ilk fails early. Even cooler was when all the All-Stars were eliminated (Nagano fell on the first obstacle of Stage Two) and only American free-runner Levi Meeuwenberg was left standing. They did their best to coach him through Stage Three (this time with English subtitles):
Am I off base (Shocking, eh? Baseball term!) about competition? I love the fact that the Boy’s Fall Ball team didn’t win any games last year. It’ll make a winning experience all the more awesome. Plus, it pulls a layer back so the experiences of individual games are the best parts. Okay, so we didn’t win a game, but I made a great play at first base. Or I scored two goals in a losing hockey game.
I could see how a kid could get spoiled by always being on a winning team, but how often does that really happen? When I think back to my Little League days, I only remember being on one pretty good team (hmm…and I was the common element on all those lousy teams). But that one winning year stands out as a highlight for me.
Thoughts? I know this wasn’t a normal Monday post, but I haven’t written a lengthy non-theology post in some time.
Fiction Friday: The Princess Bride
In hindsight, I probably should’ve consulted my sister first. But we hold these truths to be self-evident, that the book is always better than the movie. Or perhaps the exception proves the rule, though I’ve never understood how this could be so.
In any case, The Princess Bride is a charming film, perhaps one of the mostest charmingest ones of all time. (I just gave it to a friend as a late, late Christmas gift, due to his having never seen it.)
The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, by William Goldman, is not charming, and it’s rather shocking and disappointing just how uncharming it is.
Positioned as a redaction of an earlier work by S. Morgenstern, the book has a looooong introduction, stretching to about fifty pages of tiresome descriptions of the author’s history with the book and his struggles to pass his affection for it on to his chubby son. And no, I didn’t mention chubby randomly. The fatness of his fictional son is a major topic in the introduction. Tiresome.
Of course, the entire introduction is fictional, except perhaps the parts about the filming of the movie adaptation. In my mind, though, it was a mistake to even mention the movie, because it’s actually hard to believe the screenplay and the novel were written by the same person.
Actually, I didn’t find the introduction nearly so offensive as I’m coming off here. For the first ten or fifteen pages, that is. In fact, I was actually taken in a bit by the fictional history of the book at first. Until the first few mentions of Florinese history were made. I’m not the most credulous person, so I did a quick Wikipedia search and found what I suspected: the “history” was all fiction.
And don’t get me wrong here, the fictional history thing is actually somewhat charming as far as it goes, but then it keeps going and going. And going.
Nevertheless, I slogged through the introduction, figuring that it would be a somewhat tedious setup to one of the all-time charming books. Alas, no.
I actually found the prose in this book to be strikingly similar to that of Ladies and Gentlemen: The Bible!, which if you recall was the worst book I read last year.
It’s not that the writing is bad, so much as it’s just not to my taste. Authors are not obliged to please me with their writing, so that’s fine, and others may find the writing readable. I just didn’t. It was filled with asides and parentheticals (from “Morgenstern”), in addition to Goldman’s “notes” about his abridgement, the latter of which never did anything but annoy me.
But it’s not just the writing, either. I didn’t care for the characters. Buttercup is a twit, Westley is something of a chauvinist, and Inigo is a bit full of himself and his mad sword skilz. (I can’t say anything bad about Fezzik, however.)
Vizzini was enjoyable, of course, and I can’t say there were no passages I liked in the book. In fact, I’m forced to admit that after enduring a one and a half hundred pages or so, I adjusted to the style and enjoyed some passages a bit. Who’s not going to enjoy the Battle of Wits? Or Fezzik’s fight with Westley?
(The fight which contains a modification of one of my favorite lines, after Fezzik asks the Man in Black why he wears a mask, wondering if he was burned by acid or something: “Oh, no, it’s just they’re terribly comfortable. I think everyone’ll be wearing them in the future.”)
Still and all, the little highlights don’t add up to much. The book fails by every comparison to the movie, and it’s a cryin’ shame. I’m still not sure how the screenplay could be so brilliant and the novel so inane. It’s a mystery.
A quick warning about the ending, too. It’s left somewhat ambiguous, but it’s ambiguously negative, which fits after the author’s frequent asides about how life isn’t fair. So if you were looking for the ending with the Top Kiss of All Time, you won’t find it. The Kiss is described on page 59, and it’s Buttercup and Westley’s first kiss.
Of course, I invite disagreements or commiseration from anyone else who’s read this book. Maybe I’m being too tough on it. Lob me a comment if you’re in either camp.
(Oh, I should probably also mention that this edition of The Princess Bride included the first chapter of Buttercup’s Baby, the supposed sequel. I didn’t read it. Maybe I should have, but I was just not inclined to read any more that I absolutely had to. It would’ve been seventy (!) pages I’d never have gotten back.)
Theology Thursday: Redeemed
Back on New Year’s Eve, I engaged in a short debate-ish thing with my Esteemed Partner in Pavement Pounding about Jephthah, and specifically about whether he sacrificed his daughter in Judges 11. (Whoa, I just totally pulled that chapter reference out of my head! Sweet!) I took the negative proposition, that Jephthah did not sacrifice his daughter, though the wording of the passage seems to indicate he did. (You can go read it if you want. I’ll wait.)
Mostly my position is based in logic. And it goes like this:
- God does not approve of human sacrifice
- God approved of Jephthah (Hebrews 11)
- Therefore, Jephthah did not engage in human sacrifice
But then, a couple of weeks ago, I came across an additional bit of support for my position. (By the way, you’d probably like to know what I think Jephthah did sacrifice, right? The short answer is something acceptable.)
My new evidence came from Exodus 13, when the Lord commanded the consecration of the firstborn. Here’s the passage:
Exodus 13:12-13 (ESV):
12 you shall set apart to the LORD all that first opens the womb. All the firstborn of your animals that are males shall be the LORD’s. 13 Every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck. Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem.
The “shall be the LORD’s” part seems to indicate that they would be sacrificed. But not all species would be sacrificed. Only clean animals. Others would be redeemed with a lamb. And firstborn sons, in particular, were consecrated to the service of the Lord (see Numbers 3), though later the tribe of Levi was taken for that service (but all firstborn sons of other tribes still had to be redeemed).
But my main point here is that an Israelite couldn’t offer just anything to God. Even when bringing a clean animal to sacrifice, it had to be spotless. God seemed to be very particular about what could be offered.
In this passage, the example of a donkey is given. Checking Leviticus 11 (a lot of 11th chapters in this post), we note that the donkey doesn’t have cloven hooves, so it’s unclean. It has to be redeemed (or throttled, apparently).
So, back to Jephthah’s case. He promised to offer what came out of his tent to the Lord. But he was an Israelite, and knew that he could only offer something clean. Anything unclean, he would have to redeem. But it would still belong to the Lord.
So, Jephthah’s daughter would have been redeemed, but would have been consecrated to the Lord. If this is so, and she was dedicated to service, she may not have been able to marry. This makes a good deal more sense when one considers that she lamented not her impending death, but rather her virginity. Jephthah’s grief would be explained by his knowledge that his line would end with her, since she was his only daughter.
This also seems to match the chronology of Judges 11, as one of the concluding verses says this:
Judges 11:39 (NKJV, just because it’s more word-for-word)
39 And it was so at the end of two months that she returned to her father, and he carried out his vow with her which he had vowed. She knew no man.
It might be stretching things a bit, it seems the “she knew no man” happened after Jephthah had fulfilled the vow.
BTW, I’m comfortably out of the mainstream with my interpretation here. Most commentators think that in the time of the Judges, the Law wasn’t observed particularly well, and so resorting to human sacrifice wasn’t be all that surprising, and Jephthah was honored for keeping a painful vow. But the writer of Hebrews doesn’t mention the sacrifice at all, so I think my explanation fits.
Now that we’re done with that, I’m shocked that my feeble little brain is just now really connecting the redemption of the firstborn with the fact that mankind was redeemed by the Lamb of God. The unclean redeemed by the clean. The broader idea of redemption by a lamb/bull is pretty well documented, but this specific idea is just now settling in for me. Guess I need to keep reading.
Fiction Friday: Childhood’s End
Back in November when I read 2001: A Space Odyssey, my dad recommended another Arthur C. Clarke title. Dad knows his stuff.
Childhood’s End is about a lot. The more I’ve thought about it, the more layers I’ve found in the story, even though the actual plot is fairly simple.
In many ways, it’s like the new V show. Aliens show up, flash their superior technology, and offer to help humanity out. Whether the Overlords in Childhood’s 
End ever turn out to be evil, I won’t reveal.
One of the core questions in the book is actually sociological and psychological: Take away suffering and striving, and what is humanity left with? Most of us probably think it’d be great to be free of striving after our wants and needs. And on an individual basis, it’s probably true that it’d be pretty terrific.
But what if all of humanity suddenly had nothing to strive for? What would happen to science? To art? To society? (Clarke also has religion taken out of the picture, which is a popular science-fiction author’s daydream, but I have to be honest that it is necessary to the plot of the novel.)
Another question involves the idea of a mind in the cosmos, but I can’t write much about it without giving away the core mystery in the book. (Of course, as a Christian, there’s no question to me of their being a Mind in the cosmos.)
As I said, this isn’t a complicated story. There aren’t plots and subplots, but the narrative shifts through different eras of humanity’s interaction with the Overlords. And each time, the reader sees more of who and what the Overlords are, and I found myself sympathizing with them and even feeling sorry for them. But again, I can’t reveal too much without completely spoiling the book.
I really admired how Clarke didn’t leave any plot points dangling. One character, in particular, leaves the narrative for a good portion of the book, and I had no idea how he would be important again in the story. But he was. And there was an odd section showing how the humans of The Golden Age entertained themselves, involving, of all things, a Ouija Board. I had no idea how the scene could possibly be significant to the story. But it was.
I’d love to see a film adaptation of this book, but I think it would be a strange movie. Because I’m not sure how the climax of the book would look. In fact, when I think about it, 2001 has some strikingly similar concepts in it. Hmm. I’ll have to google it.
Not sure what’s next up. I have a mop-up non-fiction from last year to finish, and I just started The Princess Bride.
Theology Thursday Lite: In All Points
I have to say that I’m enjoying my less rigorous read-through this year. I’m finding I’m enjoying the reading more, going at a slower pace. I’ve even got a few Theology Thursday topics rolling around between my ears.
So, it’s my first New Testament post of the year!
Matthew 4 details Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. The three temptations are:
- To change stones to bread, to fill his hunger
- To jump off the Temple, counting on God’s protection
- To worship Satan, in exchange for the kingdoms of the world
You can find any number of creative interpretations of the three temptations and what they represent. But the thing I’ve been pondering is this:
Could Jesus have sinned?
Grand Theological Term Alert! The doctrine of The Impeccability of Christ says that Jesus was incapable of sin. I do not hold to this doctrine, and the reason is simple: I don’t think it’s Biblical.
Hebrews 4:15 (ESV, my emphasis):
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
Okay, yes, I’ve strayed a bit from Matthew, but in my defense, I did once do a read-through where I read Matthew and then went straight to Hebrews (whoa, and my first Bible-Blog post was about it.)
I think the verse pretty much says it all, but I’ll admit that my thoughts on this are more logical than anything. And in that respect, I’m willing to have my logic adjusted.
I guess my objection is also a bit emotional, because if Jesus couldn’t sin, I’m not sure what was admirable or meritorious about His resisting temptation. How is it even remarkable in any way? And why would the writer of Hebrews think to mention it?
After all, how could Christ sympathize with us if the temptation He experienced was anything but just like ours?
For instance, I can’t really sympathize with an alcoholic, because I have no particular temptation to drink. (In fact, I’m putting it somewhat mildly. I think beer and wine taste alarmingly like vomit. And that’s when trying what others call “the good stuff.”)
Maybe I’m way off base here, but I think I’m making sense. Comments?
WordfuI Wednesday: I See Rude People
Sometimes it just comes down to the title. I subscribe to the Washington County Libraries New Materials RSS feed, so I see everything that’s added to the library catalog. A good title catches my eye, and I’m generally quick to request the book, even if just for a thumb-through.
(This is how I came across one of my favorite books of 2007, What a Way to Go, which I otherwise would never have sought out.)
Amy Alkon’s I See Rude People: One Woman’s Battle to Beat Some Manners into Impolite Society is a Good Title pickup. It’s a hilarious and surprisingly profound series of chapters detailing her outrageous, yet brave, efforts to take back some ground in the 
battle to improve society.
(BTW, I was attracted to the title, not the subtitle. I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything with the phrase “One Woman’s Battle” in it before. But I’m secure in my manhood, so everything’s cool.)
The book is essentially a humorous call to action. Alkon wants more people to stand up to rudeness in everyday life. She takes on a range of subjects, from bad customer service at banks or law enforcement agencies, to obnoxious cell phone abusers, to the problem of under-parented children (directing her ire at the adults in the equation).
In addition to titling the book well, she also managed to come up with some great chapter titles, including “The Mobile Savage” and “It’s Only Free for Telemarketers to Call You Because You Have Yet to Invoice Them.”
I actually wonder if I would’ve had the guts to post a negative review of this book, because if there’s anything I learned while reading it, it’s that Amy Alkon is scary, and she would find me, as she found the guy who stole her car (after the police were essentially useless in the matter).
Fortunately, I thought it was terrific fun to read, and I very much admire her spunk and her willingness to put herself out there because someone has to.
But the really cool thing about the book is that the subjects are not only funny, but Alkon manages to bring some science to bear on the issues. For instance, she explains why a cell phone conversation is more distracting to use than a loud discussion between two people. (Hearing only half the conversation causes our brains to try to fill in the other half, making it harder to ignore.)
The key takeaway from the book is that most people enable other people’s rudeness by doing nothing. It’s very much like tipping well for poor service. You feel good for tipping well, but you haven’t improved the restaurant’s service, so someone else will suffer through it after you.
(Oh, and another takeaway is that people don’t like to be rebuked, and they’ll act like you’re the jerk.)
In each chapter, there’s a problem Alkon is confronted with, and then an inspiring tale of how she extracted her pound of flesh (like invoicing the telemarketers). There’s something viscerally satisfying about knowing the perpetrators of discourtesy get what’s coming to them, even if most of us don’t want to be the one doing the confronting.
It reminds me of the time my sister and I were flying between Anchorage and Portland (excuse me if I can’t remember which direction), on a Red-Eye flight (read: the one where you’d rather be in bed), and some punk a few rows back was blasting, and I do not jest, Color Me Badd, on a boom-box. And yes, this dates me a bit, but I will point out that the Sony Discman had been invented, so the boom-box was almost anachronistic even then.
Repeated attempts by other passengers to shut him up hadn’t worked, and no one apparently knew the Vulcan Neck Pinch maneuver so wonderfully employed in a similar situation in Star Trek IV, so the torture continued. The cabin crew got involved, right down to the Captain coming back and warning him that it was a federal offense to disobey the flight crew. The jerk was not impressed.
He was somewhat more impressed when the FBI cuffed him at the gate. It was a beautiful thing.
Now, I should probably point out that Amy Alkon is not afraid to use, as Mr. Spock would put it, “colorful metaphors,” and she makes no apology for it. I wasn’t greatly offended by this, but just thought I’d throw it out there that I’m not giving the book an across-the-board recommendation.
The concluding chapter talks about the merits of being nice, one of which is a positive impact on our happiness. It’s all very Happiness is a Serious Problem. There’s also a good bit about how our acting kindly has an influence on others around us. But it also works the other way, and we’re letting the Rudes win!
Finally, I must conclude with the money quote from the chapter about cell phone use. And this one’s for my dad:
One shouldn’t use a cell phone anywhere one wouldn’t feel perfectly comfortable passing a big, loud cloud of gas.
So my old roommate would have carte blanche to talk on his cell anywhere, any time.
Next up is Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke. Also for my dad.
Theology Thursday Book Review: The Creed
I’m singing in church this weekend, and I was also asked to lead the reading of The Apostles’ Creed for one of the services, and so you just know what my reaction was going to be, don’t you?
Okay, so my initial reaction was, “No, thanks.” Nervous as I can get about singing into a microphone, it’s ten times worse to speak into one. However, the service I’ll be speaking in is a small one, and the atmosphere is very family, so I’m going to stretch myself a bit.
My next reaction was, “I’ve got a book about that!” The Creed: What You Believe and Why, by Michael Bauman, is a concise 
treatment of The Apostles’ Creed, explaining each point and adding in testimonials from Christians about what the Creed means to them. I picked it up for a buck from CBD. Mmm…dollar books.
One would hope that most pew-dwellers would already know what each line means, rather than just reciting the Creed without understanding, but then a book such as this would be unnecessary.
Having grown up in a decidedly non-liturgical church (Assemblies of God), I didn’t grow up knowing any Creed other than Petra’s. (Which I still think is an awesome song.) But after taking a Church History course in college, and doing quite a bit of self-study on the topic, I’m now reasonably familiar with the various Creeds.
There are a couple of points I disagree with the author on, but that’s hardly surprising given my tendency to disagree with everyone on something. The first disagreement comes in the Introduction:
A well-written creed marks out the truths that the Bible reveals and requires for salvation.
I’m not one to put knowledge tests on salvation, given that the Disciples were apparently saved before knowing much more than “Jesus is Lord and Christ.” Yes, we have more knowledge today, and so we have more responsibility to shepherd that knowledge, but imperfect belief in Christ is still belief in Christ. Errors can be corrected after conversion.
The other issue is Bauman’s treatment of “He descended into hell,” in which he makes the common mistake of not recognizing that “hell” is a bad translation of “Hades,” which is better understood as The Grave, or the place of the dead, and not a place of punishment. The idea that Christ suffered the tortures of Hell is interesting, to say the least, but I’m not aware of any Biblical case that can be built for it.
One other minor thing was that Bauman recycles the very common idea that God the Father turned away from Christ when he was on the cross. I’ve written before that the idea makes sense but isn’t explicitly taught in Scripture and shouldn’t be taught so dogmatically.
Other than that, though, The Creed is a nice, short work of basic apologetics, and it would be very useful as a resource for new converts or those just wanting to brush up on the particulars of their Faith.
But, of course, I was looking for something I could use, man! And I found it. Actually, several things. First, Bauman mentions the legend of the origin of the Creed. The legend says that the Twelve all collaborated on it (after Pentecost, so including Matthias rather than Bad Judas), with each of them contributing one statement to it. A cool idea, to be sure, but not provable.
The next thing is the fact that The Creed is personal. Even though it’s often spoken communally, it’s phrased “I believe,” not “we believe.”
And finally, Bauman emphasizes that there are two sides to faith. The first is the mere intellectual assent, stating things like “I believe this.” The other side is the trust aspect of faith, where we say, “I believe in Jesus.”
It’s the difference between knowing facts about God and knowing God. It’s the difference between saying, “I know what I believe,” and saying with Paul, “I know whom I have believed.” It’s certainly useful to know what you believe about God, but it’s only a stepping stone on the way to knowing Him.
So now I guess I’m ready-ish for Sunday.
Wordful Wednesday: The Lost Symbol
I never consciously set out to read everything Dan Brown wrote, honestly. Back in 2004, I became aware of the Da Vinci Code phenomenon and decided to give it a look. First, I read Angels and Demons, which I enjoyed rather a lot, even though I had to suppress laughter once or twice when Brown’s writing exceeded my ability to suspend disbelief. (But he got big points from me for using the “pretend to drown/suffocate when being throttled/drowned” thing I always figure main characters should use.)
Then, I read The Da Vinci Code, intending it to be an exercise in apologetics. And true to my expectations, I found plenty to object to. But I also enjoyed the book.
I subsequently read Deception Point, which I enjoyed, in spite of being able to predict all of its twists.
Then I made the mistake of reading Digital Fortress, which I found insulting and actually fairly boring. Perhaps more on the insulting thing later.
The bottom line is that I’m not a huge fan of Dan Brown’s work, but I keep 
reading him.
I’ll admit that I set out expecting to, or perhaps determined to (if I’m being honest) really hate The Lost Symbol. And I can’t say that I found it to be a really good book. However, if I’m being fair, it’s not the worst thing I’ve read. And I don’t expect it to be on my list of Bad Books of 2010.
Because, darn it, I kept turning the pages. Much as I tried to not care what was behind that canvas that the characters initially thought was a stone wall, I wanted to know what was behind that canvas!!!!
The book features the same lead character as Angels and Da Vinci. Namely, Dan Brown, also known as Robert Langdon. It wasn’t so blatant in the first two books that Langdon=Brown, but it’s totally there in this one. (Ooh, and apropos of the current pop-culture Zeitgeist, such a character is often termed an Author Avatar.)
For those who don’t know, Robert Langdon is a Harvard Professor of Symbology, which means he can find wild conspiracies nearly anywhere. In The Lost Symbol, Langdon is once again called upon to decode things that no one else could. But this time, it’s in the United States!
In fact, it’s essentially National Treasure, only without much of the fun.
Langdon is tricked into finding a Super Sekrit Masonic Symbolic Thingamajig and deciphering it. To save his friend’s life, of course. And there are twists and turns, and bad guys seem like good guys, and good guys seem like bad guys, and things aren’t what they appear, blah, blah, blah, yada yada yada. (But the Lobster Bisque was good.)
It’s not that the book was boring or anything, but I didn’t find it all that gripping. And it’s definitely too long, packing about three hundred pages worth of action into a svelte five hundred pages or so.
And I know I’ve said that I like short chapters, but Mr. Brown went a bit overboard, with his typical chapter including about five pages. And normally shifting subplots at every division.
And now we come to the one thing that really hurts Brown’s writing: He doesn’t expect much of his readers.
In the first place, most of his twists are about as unpredictable as a fastball on a 3-0 count. (See how I expect my reader to decipher the baseball analogy?) In the second place, his writing is unusually redundant.
For instance, there's a point in the book in which a character receives a text from her brother's phone, the phone which we know to be in the possession of the Bad Guy. It has its desired effect, and we're able to infer the thrust of the message from conversations Katherine has with the Bad Guy (who she believes to be a Good Guy). However, Mr. Brown apparently wasn't satisfied that we'd understand the origins or contents of the message, so he explicitly states that the Bad Guy sent it.
And then he shows us the message in its entirety.
Again, we already knew everything about the message. And the same kind of thing happens again at least once. It reminded me of the climax of Digital Fortress, where the fate of the free world rested on scientists figuring out the basic difference between Uranium 238 and 235. The reader might not have known it, and Brown didn’t expect them to know it, but the scientists would’ve known it probably a few seconds before I did, which was about five seconds. You might guess I found it rather insulting. (BTW, the answer is “three.”)
The climax of The Lost Symbol comes around a ways from the actual end of the book, after Langdon makes a strange and somewhat cowardly decision, and after the Bad Guy commits a rather grievously stupid error.
That’s as close as I’ll come to revealing the plot of the book, just in case anyone else decides to read it. I will say that it’s basically a long apologia for Freemasonry and Unitarianism.
And of course, it’s not really a Dan Brown book unless there’s some misuse of Scripture. The most glaring was his ridiculous insistence that when Jesus said “The Kingdom of God is within you,” He was making some sort of pantheistic, New Age point about the divine spark in all life. Brother. A much better translation, as agreed upon by anyone who knows anything (read: people other than Dan Brown), is “The Kingdom of God is in your midst.” Meaning it’s arrived.
And that’s not the only erroneous claim Brown, through his characters, makes about Christianity and Christ. But I won’t dwell.
Will I pick up Brown’s next book? I suppose I will. Somebody’s got to do it.
I’ve got a couple of books in the works right now, and I may review one of them tomorrow, as it’s a Theology book and therefore can be reviewed on Thursday. The other is one my dad recommended, and I should finish it later this week or early next week.
Endive, Veggie Recommendations
Today I’m trying some Belgian Endive with my bucket of salad. (Yes, I have a salad larger than my head for lunch nearly every day. And I like it.)
I tasted it this morning, for the same reason I bought it: because I’d never had it before. It basically tastes like lettuce, but there’s something fragrant in there, 
too. A tad bitter, but not as much so as radicchio, and I like radicchio. (In fact, I learn from Wikipedia that both are types of Chicory. Like everybody didn’t already know that!)
On the whole, I think that if I want some bitter stuff in my salad, and I do, I’ll go with radicchio. It’s cheaper, and it adds a nice color to the plate.
--- - --- - --- - ---
On the topic of veggies, I’d be happy to take Veggie Recommendations. Fruit, too. As a semi-veg person, I actually want to try everything in the produce section at the store. I’ve tried a lot, and I can honestly say that I basically like all vegetables. And yes, that very much includes Brussels Sprouts, Lima Beans, and Beets. (Eggplant isn’t high on my list, but served in Pakora form with Indian Food -not Indian Foot, in case you wondered-, I’m good with it.)
(I once thought I liked all fruit, but then I tried kiwano melon.)
One high-priority item I want to try is Bulb Fennel. I’m not crazy about fennel seeds, but I keep seeing the fresh bulbs used on Iron Chef America, and I’ve just got to try it.
Any recommendations? Favorites?