ThinkBlog

[WARNING: SPOILERS.]

Watching Fight Club (1998, Brad Pitt, Edward Norton) with a friend the other night, I enjoyed myself by analyzing it with fresh eyes in light of a better grasp of postmodernism than I had the last time I’d seen it (at least a year ago).

In particular, the following. Insofar as Jack (Norton, the unnammed narrator) must imbue his world with meaning as the Everyman struggling to survive in light of a bleak and godless present, and insofar as Durden (Pitt) as the Nietszschean übermensch becomes a kind of antiheroic leader/god-figure among the men of “Project Mayhem,” the scene at Paper Street Soap Company immediately following Bob’s botched mission to “destroy a piece of corporate art and trash a franchise coffee bar” gives a biting critique of progressive theology—whether it “means” to or not.

When Angelface issues a stern edict to “bury him in the garden” in answer to a frantic cry that “we have to get rid of the evidence—we have to get rid of the body,” this god-figure expresses deep disgust and horror.

Jack: What are you talking about? This is not a f—king piece of evidence! This is a person! He’s a friend of mine and you’re not going to bury him in the f—king garden.

The objection comes from across the table on which sits this fresh corpse: “But sir, in Project Mayhem, we have no names.”

This dark figure rounds on him seriously, finger quivering indignantly, accusingly: “No, listen to me. This is a man and he has a name, and it’s Robert Paulson, ok? He is dead now, because of us, alright? You understand that?”

After a brief moment of silence, the dead man’s partner chimes in with quiet reverence: “I understand.” Turning didactically to his colleagues, as though having taken on a role of priest-mediator between this revelation so seemingly dripping for them all with gravitas, the scene recalls pagan sacrifice rituals on which scrolls of law would later be based. “In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulsen.”

The objector, now suddenly seeming as though recast as studious acolyte, quietly intones, “His name is Robert Paulsen.”

They all take up the cry for this the first true martyr of their gathering: “His name is Robert Paulsen. His name is Robert Paulsen….”

What do we see from this? A sardonic parody of the beginnings of tribal religion—and by extension, all religions, especially ones claiming progressive revelations (Christianity and Islam, e.g.). In the framework of postmodernism, Jack is only clinging to what he knows and is trying to make sense of the world around him; but as one of the founders of Project Mayhem, this everyman has taken on an incredible power for these men, his “followers,” who overinterpret simple statements and turn them into proverbs and parables.

This bleak picture of humanity seems characteristic of the late 1990s, now that we’re far enough from that decade to evaluate it at least a bit better in its historical context, with all its axioms, clichés, and presuppositions. In some sense, Fight Club is as clearly existential as No Exit or Edward Scissorhands, with an austerity of moral grounding that leaves man primal and with his own means of creating a meager truth for himself while he lives—and a bleak picture of the instinct to worship and sacredness that threatens to undermine this primal and paradoxically “higher” state of man.

Men do hear the calls of Christ, but they are willfully deaf, because they think he wants them to do something. But he does not want anything of you; he wants you to receive what he has already done. He comes laden with mercy, with his hands full of blessing, and he knocks at your door. You have only to open it and he will enter in, and salvation will enter with him.

It’s a real struggle, since we earn everything else, for good or for ill, to accept free grace as free. But that’s the gospel—right there, summed up.

On Joy & Sorrow
Our joy is like the wave as it dashes on the shore—it throws us on the earth. But our sorrows are like that receding wave which sucks us back again into the great depth of godhead. We would have been stranded and left high and dry on the shore if it had not been for that receding wave, that ebbing of our prosperity, which carried us back to our Father and our God again.

Tacitus tells us that an amber ring was throught to be of no value among the Romans till the emperor took to wearing one, and then immediately an amber ring was held in high esteem. Bereavements might be looked on as very sad things, but when we recollect that Jesus wept over his friend Lazarus, they are choice jewels and special favors from God. Christ wore this ring. Then I must not blush to wear it.

Our sorrows are all, like ourselves, mortal. There are no immortal sorrows for immortal souls. They come, but blessed be God, they also go. Like birds of the air, they fly over our heads. But they cannot make their abode in our souls. We suffer today, but we shall rejoice tomorrow.

The Quaker was right who, when he saw a lady fretting on the sofa some year or so after her husband was dead, still harboring grief without a token of resignation, said to her, ‘Madam, I see you have not forgiven God yet.’ Sometimes, grief is not a sacred feeling, but only a murmur of rebellion against the Most High.

On Works:
Many Christians appear to think that if they are just believers, it is enough. We do not in business think it enough if we barely escape bankruptcy. A man does not say, if his dear child has been ill in bed for years, that it is quite enough so long as the child is alive. We do not think of our own bodies, that so long as we can breathe, it is enough.

I remember a story of one, who remarked to a minister what a wonderful thing it was to see so many people weeping. ‘No,’ said he, ‘I will tell you something more amazing still, that so many will forget all they wept about when they get outside the door.’

To be unfeeling is to be unfruitful. Prayer without desire, praise without emotion, preaching without earnestness–what are all these? Like the marble images of life, they are cold and dead.

A hard-hearted Christian—is not that a complete contradiction? Must not our hearts have been broken before we could ourselves be penitent? And he who bound them up and healed them did not harden them with his gentle touch. I reckon that he gave them an additional tenderness by the very act of binding them up with his own dear pierced hands.

On Salvation (or, “Wait, I Thought He Was Baptist”):
I believe there will be more in heaven than in hell. If you ask me why I think so, I answer, because Christ in everything is to have the preeminence, and I cannot conceive how he could have the preeminence if there are to be more in the dominions of Satan than in paradise.

I rejoice to know that the souls of all infants, as soon as they die, speed their way to paradise. Think what a multitude there is of them!

It is said there is to be a multitude that no man can number in heaven. I have never read that there is to be a multitude that no man can number in hell.

Some of you could not be happy if you were allowed to enter heaven. Shall I tell you why? It is a land of spirit, and you have neglected your spirit. Some of you even deny that you have a spirit.

These are some I found encouraging and challenging, sometimes one more than the other; though ultimately the two are inseparable.

How unpopular does this sound today, in our culture of weak-minded non-committal laissez faire “tolerance”?

Avoid a sugared gospel as you would shun sugar of lead. Seek that gospel which rips up and tears and cuts and wounds and hacks and even kills, for that is the gospel that makes alive again. And when you have found it, give good heed to it. Let it enter into your inmost being. As the rain soaks into the ground, so pray the Lord to let his gospel soak into your soul.

—Spurgeon

I’ve been thinking lately about how hard it is to meditate in the Christian sense—to meditate in actual prayer, as opposed to just going through the motions of insincere rote incantations. A friend and I were discussing this, in fact: it’s really hard to concentrate on how great God is because mere intellectual assent gets in the way so often. When we are commanded to dwell on God’s sovereignty, it’s not a matter of saying the words that acknowledge that this hypothetical being and-or great commander of the universe is in control. He’s not a Greek god satisfied with rote prayers and insincere libations poured out before Him just to appease His greatness. No, we are commanded to get a grip on Hs actual greatness in terms of what that means for our lives, which is at once terrifying, humbling, and comforting—and it’s the first thing in what we call the Lord’s Prayer! Here’s to making that kind of meditation first priority.

I do not believe there is a single honest man living who, having once heard the gospel simply preached, does not in his conscience believe it to be true. I am persuaded that light will penetrate. There is such force, such energy in Christ, it must and will pierce through some crevice and convince at least a natural conscience. but this is the very reason why men oppose it. They do not want it to be true.

To define the terms:

-> Vanity: desire for praise or adulation or worship; an excessive pride in one’s possessions or qualities.
-> benevolence: inclination to do that which is good, kind, and/or charitable.
-> praise: ascribe worth
-> worship: the highest form of praise

The one thing I would ask is, how would you picture a God who is not “vain”?
Doesn’t vanity conflict with benevolence?

No, because God is God. God is the only one who deserves our praise, adulation, and worship; and He is all-good. He not only loves it and deserves it when we worship Him, but because He gave us life and all things that we receive and enjoy, He rewards that worship by the innate nature of our relationship with God. It’s built in to us that it is immensely rewarding to worship our Creator. In fact, you might say that His “vanity” in this sense is an illustration of His benevolence, because through our praise and worship of Him, He pours out His love and blessing on us (that is to say, we are more attuned and able to receive it).

God deserves our praise also because different freedoms are intrinsic to the offices that different people hold. A gynecologist can go where a stranger can’t; a President can do what a civilian can’t; and cetera.

But even so, let’s take a closer look to see if God does indeed deserve our praise. Vanity and praise are both tied to worth. It’s not that praise itself is silly or unreasonable: we ascribe worth to that which we appreciate, such as saying “This CD is really entertaining [attempting not to confuse “good” here],” “That shot behind the three-point line at the buzzer was amazing,” and that sort of thing. We do that all the time. There are things in the world that have worth; only an extreme cynic would proclaim otherwise, and the burden of proof would fall to him or her. Thus, praise itself is rational.

There is a certain amount of praise that is appropriate–even due–each person. We have all done commendable acts, and we all deserve some praise. Our problem, the problem of vanity, is that we think we deserve a lot more than we do. Most of what we think we deserve actually came by accident: for instance, good looks. That’s why we call it ‘vanity’ most commonly when someone is puffed up about themselves, because that had nothing to do with them. There is a lot more accidental stuff than we’re often willing to admit that gives us a false sense of worth.

God is a different case than us altogether. Nothing about Him is accidental; all His works are of immeasurable worth, and He Himself is of immeasurable worth (along with immeasurable everything else!). Every good quality God possesses is absolutely, totally His own. Furthermore, let’s carry this one more step: we are given all the good things we have by God Himself. If you’re good looking, it’s because God made you that way; if you’re intelligent, it’s because God has given you a sound mind; if you have a lot of money, it’s because God has given you the power to earn it. Et cetera.

The irony in the question of whether God is vain is that if praise is rational, if there is anything worthy of praise, then God deserves it all because “He is the source of every good and perfect gift” (Jas 1). Furthermore, if God is indeed worthy of my praise, He is worthy thereof whether or not I’m blissfully happy, because it is His due.

Thus, not only is it not “vain” for God to want praise and worship in the sense that it would exceed His worth, but it is His right to demand it.

Technorati Tags: vanity, theology, apologetics, God

Christians, how do you feel about Halloween? Should it be celebrated, and if so, how and to what extent? Does it really glorify demons as some have conjectured, or is it a harmless commercialized holiday?

Another bit of mail from early 2004 to the Philosophy Club at GTC’s mailing list. It’s recently become relevant again to some things that have been going on in Bible study and to the questions flying around in my head.

If the Bible is the main source of Christian knowledge on
God, a Christian theoretically would consider the Bible a
prime source of morality. That is, if that said
Christian believes his or her morality comes from the
Bible or Christianity.

The one and only source of knowledge of God is God Himself as He expresses Himself through the Word. Jesus is called the Word of God; so when we speak with Jesus in prayer, we are then also receiving the word of God, and a source of knowledge there also. God will never contradict something He’s already said–this is a crucial point–so we check out everything we hear in prayer with the Bible, so we know it’s accurate and sound. Let it never be said that God wants mindless flunkies who don’t question and are never skeptical: honest skeptics (those who want real answers and for whom their questions present genuine barriers to faith–and are not just an intellectual smoke screen that sum up to be an excuse not to have to believe in someOne that might change their lifestyles) are special in God’s sight. Luke the physician records, “Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” Paul was a first-century theological teacher. Could they trust what he told them? They checked it out in Scripture to be sure. Now, why would they be more noble if God didn’t love and approve of people questioning Him? To ask God a question is to provide Him with an opening to display His wisdom and might in our minds, hearts, and lives–keeping in mind that this question must of course be genuine.

That’s a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to make clear that (1) prayer and the spiritual ministry of Jesus is as important as the written Word; and (2) God rejoices over an honest skeptic.

That being said, if all of the
Bible reflects truth, how does one reconcile such
apparent contradictions? In my opinion, they serve as a
source of invalidation for the Bible. However, I’m
curious as to how a Christian approaches this issue.

I wonder at the objectivity of bringing a generalized claim to the floor without evidence, but to answer your question as to how a Christian approaches this issue–well, by taking each apparent contradiction in turn and seeking out the answer. God is not afraid of our toughest questions, although men (like myself) may not be adequate in speech or knowledge to convey the answers ourselves. “Seek and ye shall find….”

Technorati Tags: epistemology, Christianity, apologetics

“No man sins more unreservedly than he who sins in desperation, believing that there is no pardon for him from God.” —C. H. Spurgeon

I certainly found this to be true in my own life. I was sharing my testimony a couple of weeks ago and I realized that during those dark years of my early college career during which my ignorance of the eternity of “eternal salvation in Christ” I became an altogether reckless individual. As much as we Christians are bad about trying to earn our salvation and depending only half on His grace and half on our own “goodness,” hell hath no greater friend than the Christian who believes himself to have been forsaken. Thank God that His grace is beyond our power to throw away or nullify!

A couple of years ago, when I was Secretary of the Philosophy Club at GTC, I fielded a somewhat-sarcastic question about shellfish and Jewish dietary laws with a serious response, since I figured it deserved an answer with more gravitas than the spirit in which the question had been asked.  I mirror that question/response below unedited because it came up again in a Bible study this past week and I was reminded that I never did put that on here.  It’s a little outside of my current style, and it was written as a mostly-casual email, but I stand behind the concepts expressed.

I posited the immutability of God, to which someone replied something to the effect that His laws sure have, so what does that say?  I answered that the spirit in which those laws were written has not changed; and that furthermore to interpret the OT and NT theologies as being temporally distinct is to tacitly admit that their Author has shifted views.  Thus began the discussion. [If you find an error of any sort, kindly bring it to my attention.]

[Someone] wrote on 2004/03/04 17:41 ET:

> So, you would agree then that eating shellfish is
> still an abomination to God?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what [the questioner] is talking about, he cites Levitical law that prohibits the eating of pork, shellfish, and other certain meats and such things. This was highly important to the Jews before Christ’s incarnation.

You touch on an extremely important and very exciting point—! It is important to understand for what Levitical law was put into place, and why there were all these specific ritual regulations.

Follow me on this. God has made an everlasting covenant with those who love Him and believe on Him. The Lord is the author of life and of *diversity* and has chosen to exhibit and express His covenant of love to us humans in several different stages through the millennia, according to what we could best understand.

The Jews of Abraham’s day, and of Moses’ day, were a very sensate-focused people. They were good with their hands; hard workers, agriculturally and creatively; carpenters, craftsmen, everything. Even their language is highly concrete: there are no abstractions in the Hebrew tongue insofar as words are concerned—that is, they had not the words to express what we consider abstract concepts. Take, for instance, the alphabet. Each letter corresponds to not only a letter, but also a concrete meaning tied to a symbolic meaning that they could not otherwise express. The second letter, for instance, “Bet”—looks like the roof, floor, and side of a house, and it stands for “house” (how ’bout that!). Symbolically, it means “place of dwelling,” “shelter,” &c. Whole words were the same way. When in our language we read, “The Lord is slow to anger,” in Hebrew this reads “I AM [the name of the Lord] is slow to nose.” Slow to nose?! you might say. Yes, think about it: when you’re angry, you begin breathing more heavily and your nostrils flare! Other examples include “horn” for “strength,” and “breath” or “throat” for “soul.”

So what’s the point? Well, just as their language was highly concrete, so was their connection to understanding sin. Over and over in the Old Testament (and the New, for that matter!), there are places where God makes it clear that He desires for His people to abstain from immorality. Well, how does He convey that to a people who don’t have any abstract words? God wants to reveal His truth to everyone, so naturally, He will reveal it to His people however they can best understand. In the ancient Jews’ case, this was through physical actions of either Doing Something or Not Doing Something.

For instance, the reason Jews even today will on proscribed days eat only bread without leaven (yeast) is because yeast is given in the Bible as an analogy for sin. Yeast, like sin, works itself through the dough, ferments (rots) it, spreads like bacteria on a petri dish, and is dog gone near impossible to extract from dough into which it has been worked. So to make His people understand that they are to be set apart morally (”holy”) from those around them, and pleasing to Him, He would have them abstain from dough with yeast in it to remind them that they are to make sure their souls and lives did not contain sins that would end up destroying them.

So then! we come to the shellfish and unclean animals. Just as with other physical demonstrations of purity, outpourings of their spirits that they otherwise would have trouble expressing (i.e., verbally as we often do), God gave specific instructions for them to eat certain things and abstain from others, as further illustrations on a concrete level of spiritual truths that they would otherwise had immense trouble grasping. There were two categories of animals: those that were acceptable for eating and sacrificing to the Lord, and those that were not. The ones that were, were called “kosher”—that is, “clean” or “whole.” The ones that were unacceptable were called “treif”—that is, “unclean” or “ripped.”

Shellfish, pigs, vultures, spiders, flies, bugs, rats, and mice are example of these “treif”—unclean—animals. What these all have in common are that the eating thereof or touching of their dead carcasses (also forbidden by Levitical law) would have contributed exceedingly to the spread of communicable diseases. Pigs will eat anything on the ground, just about; shellfish are the pigs of the ocean; vultures scavenge the dead carcasses of just about any meaty thing; and bugs and spiders could not only sting/bite to death but were also (as now) carriers of various pestilences. So there are health concerns for the Hebrew people back in the day: God was giving them these strict dietary laws, in part, because by abstaining from unclean animals they would keep themselves healthy and from disease. These dietary laws are often still practiced by both Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews) alike today, because by doing so one will be quite healthy. (Don’t believe me? In the US alone, three of six [50%] of the most common food-borne parasites in humans are associated with eating pork, the animal considered among the “most unclean” by the ancient Jews.)

But of course, it doesn’t stop there! God was also illustrating concepts about spiritual health to His people. God’s chosen people whom He loves and who love Him are to be set apart morally, to not pollute their minds and souls with that which does not bring them closer to Him and help them illustrate His awesome love to those that don’t know Him. Eating with someone, or eating something, showed to the Jews an extremely intimate communion. To eat with someone was to commune with them on a level for which we in Western societies have nearly lost an appreciation. We are not to “eat” the spiritual “shellfish” of this world: we only allow our spirits to commune intimately with the “clean” spiritual food that feeds our souls and brings us closer to the glorious knowledge of our awesome and loving God. We are not to feast on “vultures”: not to take into our minds and hearts that which is dead and decaying, that which does not edify us to life and better understanding of Him. (Concrete examples might be participating in mockery and gossip, being around people who cast hateful curses all over the place, &c.) We are not to eat “spiders”: there are certain things to which each person is so morally vulnerable that to be “bitten” by them is to kill them spiritually—to deaden them to the voice of God.

What, then? you ask. Get to the point, Michael: has not God changed His mind, since you, even you, Christian, enjoy Irashiai Sushi Pub and Henry’s BBQ? And I answer thus. These dietary regulations served the purpose of keeping the ancient Israelites healthy both physically and spiritually. When Jesus came, He declared all foods to be “clean.” (Mt 7:14-23) This is because we (humanity) were at a level where we no longer needed physical restrictions to illustrate spiritual principles, and medicines and hygeine had begun to advance to the point that mortality would not necessarily be significantly increased by the partaking of certain foods. We can understand abstract concepts now, and we usually link abstractions with spiritual concepts though there is *not* a stepladder progression from concrete > abstract > spiritual, as some think (and I was once among them). Because we don’t need such constant, physical reminders of God’s laws as Christians—having God’s laws written on our hearts (Heb 10:16, Jer 31:33-34)—all foods are clean.

Take careful note, though, that God has not changed His mind in the slightest. Believers are still to abstain from spiritual “scavengers” and “spiders,” still to keep ourselves set apart from all the spiritual mud, gunk, nast, disease, and mind-numbing junk that this world throws at us. We are to live lives that please our loving and wonderful, morally perfect God. But we no longer are held to using our physical intakes as living illustrations of those truths. What has changed is neither the nature of God nor His morality for our lives, the lives for those who believe in Him—only the way in which that was physically expressed has been repealed to illustrate the powerful freedom that the Christian has in his Lord and savior.

Again, if I’ve been unclear, please let me know so that I can clarify; and, even though I love Judaic culture and language, I’m by no means an expert! Check this stuff out for yourself—and check out the Scripture verses, too. An onine, searchable, indexed Bible in 18 English translations (!) can be found here.

Technorati Tags: God, dietary law, shellfish, Judaica, Christianity, religion, immutability

I was relieved to find that the GRE (the grad-equivalent of the SAT—it’s even by the same people!) has only sixth-through-ninth-grade maths on it; but in my review of some old concepts, I stumbled across factorials, which I last dealt with in programming recursive methods that would take a value and return its factorial only after a memory-and-proc-intensive computation. The factorial of any number is defined as that number times one less than it, times one less, and so forth, all the way down to 1: or, 1 times 2 times 3 and so on until we get to the number itself. Hence, Five factorial (written “5!”) equals 120, because 5*4*3*2*1==120.

But what about 0! ? Prima facie it makes sense that 0! would be 0, because 0*1==0, but it’s not. There is an explanation (which for the curious can be found here) as to why 0!==1, but I think we can all agree it doesn’t seem immediately intuitive.

This provides a funny, perhaps ridiculous, yet telling illustration of Creation. God created ex nihilo Being, i.e., all that exists, by speaking. If we may exercise a bit of comedic license, we can say that God shouted (!) at zero (nothingness) and 1 (Being) was the result; and at first it doesn’t make intuitive sense, but if we know the underlying algorithym (God’s character) everything just falls right into place.

Went to the state fair yesterday with a friend, where an amusing thought struck me as we strolled beneath the creaking, flashing rides.

You enter from the larger reality—in this case, the city of Columbia, SC or, more broadly, the state itself—and don’t quite know what to expect. You come in. There’s a lot of food the eating of which feels really great for that moment and the penalty for which is an expanding waistline and gastrointestinal distress the likes of which could fell pachyderms. There are many distractors: sirens blaring, lights flashing, rides running, workers shouting their a priori approval of your skills at whatever rigged game they’re standing before to entice you to spend wads of cash on meaningless oversized schwag that somehow seems really important at the moment. Everything seems urgent, controlled chaos. The amount of work it took to throw this expensive multifaceted party is almost inconceivable—and it’ll all be over in a few short days, mere moments in which children cry and laugh; in which children of all ages eat and overeat all sorts of things that even a McDonalds junkie wouldn’t touch more than once a year; in which fun will be had, people and jackets will get lost and found, and then—they’ll tear it down for another year.

And it hit me: the fair is like Creation. Insofar as we may attribute “labor” to omnipotent deity, God labored for six days to separate the waters, to scatter the stars in the heavens, to make plants and fish and man. People enter not knowing what to expect, get distracted by all sorts of things that at best don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, eat too much, are unhealthy—then POOF, everyone has to leave the fair sometime and go out into the larger reality, and at the end of time the fair is taken down, and that’s it. All that hullaballoo for just a short burst, in terms of the long run. (Of course if I held to the Greek conception of time, the analogy would go further: the universe would be remade and unmade, time without end, in a cyclical pattern. But I digress.)

HOUSE: … I convinced her she’d be better off without me.

WILSON: You’re an idiot. You don’t think she’d be better off without you.

HOUSE: Right.

WILSON: You have no idea why you sent her off!

HOUSE: —Don’t do this—

WILSON: This was no great sacrifice! You sent her away because you’ve got to be miserable.

HOUSE: That kind of psycho crap get your patients through the long nights? Or’s it just for you? Tough love make you feel good, helping people feel their pain?

WILSON: You don’t like yourself. But you do admire yourself. That’s all you’ve got, so you cling to it. You’re so afraid if you change, you’ll lose what makes you special. Being miserable doesn’t make you better than anybody else, House. It just makes you miserable.

House, M.D. is my guilty little pleasure. I don’t own a TV, and as a rule I don’t watch television. But between this and 24 the small screen has me locked in, at least when it hits DVD. Anyway, I enjoy House because of moments like this in which I not only love/hate the main character, but identify with him to the point that for a second I don’t know whether the look on my face is a grimace or a smile. I think many in academia (and diagnosticians on this character’s level are inevitably still academics, whether abiding in the ivory towers or not) fall prey to this; or at least, I have. This sense of being damaged and proud of it, jaded and happy about it. “Better because I’ve hit bottom.” Tyler Durden syndrome, or something. I wonder: is this a problem for psychologists or theologians?

Tying in with the previous post, isn’t it interesting how much misery arises when we instinctually entertain vengeance? A wrong done to us might turn into anger, and then to grief; but if we don’t then “get over it,” so to speak, that is, to forgive, it becomes a grudge. It’s perfectly natural not to forgive. You have people that will tell you that a civilized individual knows well enough to forgive and that it’s only an impulse of the abased to hold a grudge; but in reality what civilization will tell you to do is merely to sublimate your pain, not to genuinely move past it in forgiveness, which is a uniquely Christian concept based on the forgiveness we have in and through Christ Himself.

Whence this kind of thing springs, too, is interesting; rage and retaliation are driven at base by honor, a sense of one’s own reputation and value in and of oneself over and above another person, or above their (negative) actions done to you. What makes Christ so radical is that He tells us to submit to His power and (only thereby) lay down that sense of selfish pride, the honor in oneself that makes us hold grudges and seek vengeance and nurse ill will and make the ones who did us wrong come groveling back to kiss our feet before they’re in our good graces once again. This is a huge part of the reason that to the Gentiles (Greeks especially), Jesus and His whole message were “foolishness,” that is to say, a laughingstock—because the thymos by which the Greeks governed themselves and their sense of self-seeking pride was the very foundation of personal dignity and warlike sensibilities. The Greeks were appalled to hear anyone known as “wise” to be telling them that they had to lay down their pride and vengeance voluntarily—since the only ones who did that were the ones who were too weak to fight in the first place.

Exodus 21:22-25

“If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

What you don’t get from just that passage alone is that this is prescribed as a limit to vengeance, not a starting point. It was a pre-existing social practice in Israel and all across the world (cf. especially Homeric society in ancient Greece) that if someone hurt you, you hurt them back. If someone takes your eye intentionally and literally, aren’t you inclined to do more than just remove one of theirs? I humbly submit to you that, even today, when we are wounded—emotionally, physically, whatever—we are very tempted to take from the other person more than they took from us. Watch kids on the playground for an unabashed example: all things being equal, if Billy punches Tommy, Tommy will probably knock Billy to the ground, not just punch him in return. Same thing we struggle with today: if someone cheats you out of a few grand, are you tempted to settle out of court (or even in court!) about it “fairly,” or are you tempted to ruin that person professionally? If you are backstabbed, &c.

But taken as a limit, this seems almost as radical to their day and age as “turn the other cheek [when you’re insulted]” does to ours.

It occurred to me over the summer while I was taking a required low-level history course on Latin American civilization that what happened to the Aztecs is a picture of what is prophesied to happen to many—even some believers— in the “last days.”

The Aztecs built their capitol city, Tenotchitlan, on top of the previous civilization’s capitol city, out in the middle of a giant lake where now stands the region of Mexico City. Incidentally, the Aztecs also adopted the mythology of the older civilization as well, which included the ideas that, among other things, the following. They were living in the Fifth Sun, that is, the fifth epoch since the foundation of the world, and a time in which the world was said to end; to stave off the end of the world, they liberally sacrificed humans in the temple at Tenochtitlan.

Quetzalcoatl was the benevolent, bearded messiah-king who was to return with his men from across the eastern seas to save and rule his people, and he would be known by the sign of nothing less than the cross (+ or †)! When the handsomely bearded Cortes arrived in 1519 at Tenochtitlan with the Spanish army in tow, brandishing swords, shields, and breastplates marked with bright scarlet crosses and riding these foreign things the Aztecs had never seen (horses, as it turns out), they were allowed into the city gates with a timid Aztecan leader giving them the guided tour. It seems Moctezuma’s realization that Cortes was not the savior of the[ir] known world came only when he was captured by the gold-hungry Spanish.

Interesting what parallels can be drawn to us, who think of ourselves as so much better informed and more sophisticated….

It has struck me as incredible that I’ve caught onto sales at my new job—a vitamin, supplement, and sport nutrition store—lately. Like, I believe that it’s important to be very healthy, and I truly believe from my own personal studies that X supplements can help support Y and Z conditions.

And it’s struck me how stagnant I’ve been in my walk with Christ lately. Sharing one’s faith is a natural outworking of belief; but this isn’t just some mystical concept. There’s proof in any person who is genuinely selling you something because they believe in it, because it’s worked for them. I can tell you that 4 000+ GDUs daily of bromelain, an enzyme from pineapple, combined with a few drops of sublingual oregano oil and some echinacea/goldenseal combo have helped my sinus inflammation immensely; can I not also tell you the wonders Christ has accomplished in my life? I should be able to; and now begin once again.

It’s been a long time. Here’s to new beginnings and fresh starts that aren’t mere words.