Typos and Heresy

“Hail native language, that by sinews weak

Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak,

And mad’st imperfect words with childish trips,

Half unpronounc’d, slide through my infant lips,

Driving dumb Silence from the portal door,

Where he had mutely sate two years before:

Here I salute thee and thy pardon ask,

That now I use thee in my latter task …

I have some naked thoughts that rove about

And loudly knock to have their passage out;

And weary of their place do only stay

Till thou hast deck’d them in thy best array;

That so they may without suspect or fears

Fly swiftly to this fair assembly’s ears.”

John Milton, ‘At a Vacation Exercise’ (1628 or 1631)¹

 

So this is it, then. Welcome to my last regular weekly post. Weird. If you’re wondering about the title, incidentally, it’s taken from a phrase I used to describe the process of editing my blog posts once the substance of them is written: nearly done, just checking for typos and heresy!

 

What a nice-looking writing desk. I’d rather like one like that.

I’ve been planning to stop at this point for a good while now – like, a pre-lockdown kind of good while (so please don’t imagine that the Strange Times We Live In have had any discernible impact on the decision). For one thing, I’ve been doing this ever since I was an undergraduate and I’d quite like to remember what it’s like to live life without the self-imposed obligation of uploading fresh instalments of my ramblings to the Internet the equivalent of every seven days.² For another, I think it would probably do me some good to go for a decent period of time without posting any original content on social media. It can be done in love, for the good of those who see it, but how often does it end up being an offering laid on the altar of human approval? How often have I looked to views and likes and nice comments from people to demonstrate my worth and the worth of my endeavours, when all the while my God and Father had already conferred on me the greatest worth imaginable by ransoming me at the cost of his Son? The sin is in me, not the technology, but nevertheless I think a break would be helpful. Still, these are the less weighty reasons, the ones less specific to the present. The biggest reason is: I realise that I’ve pretty much accomplished what I wanted to accomplish with this blog, and I want to write other things.

 

What was it, then, that I wanted to accomplish? To be honest, I don’t think I completely knew that until it occurred to me in recent months that I had already accomplished it, but the basic essence of the thing is already there in my earliest posts. Especially the third one I ever uploaded. In ‘Paul, a Playwright, and a Poet’, I argued that the Bible provides us with precedent that secular media, art, and culture – what I call ‘fiction’ in its broad sense – can be of use in helping us to understand God and the gospel better. And in a way, ever since, I’ve been trying to prove that. I’ve been trying to find and develop and demonstrate a methodology for directing our enjoyment (or even lack thereof) of Stories, in whatever format, towards our sanctification and the glory of God. I’ve been trying to show that it can be done, and how it might be done, and in the doing of it to achieve those same ends of sanctification and glory. When I say Through Faith and Fiction – for these past five years, or nearly, I’ve been negotiating the terms of that relationship. I’ve been working out how to subject my love of fiction to the faith once for all delivered to the saints.³ And … well, much as these kinds of questions are never completely put to bed this side of eternity, I do feel as if I’ve reached a point where I know what the relationship looks like. I feel as if I’ve found, and demonstrated, how the thing might be done, enough to be sure of how I want to go on doing it.

 

Because the thing is, I didn’t want to provide a methodology merely for writing blog posts about how fiction can help us reflect on faith. You don’t need to write an opinion piece about the latest episode of the Netflix series you’re currently working through in order to direct your engagement with it to the glory of God. You just need, as I’ve put it before, to watch watchfully.⁴ Look for the ideas and values the story is putting forward; compare and contrast them with the truths you know; and so be prompted to fresh reflections on those truths. I hope that, if you’ve seen a reasonable number of the case studies by which I’ve tried to demonstrate this approach over the past few years, you’ve been convinced of its feasibility and benefit.

 

And I do mean benefit. Do you know, I still haven’t come up with a better way of comprehending the natural state of human sinfulness than by comparing to what it is to be born Dalek. I still find it helpful to contrast the Pharisaic attitude to the Law with the characters’ attitude to the Word of Munsell in Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey. I still think about the relative significance of this world and the next in terms of the dream-worlds of Inception. Most recently, I would say that I have genuinely gained a better grasp of what God’s fatherly love looks like from considering the relationship between Zuko and Iroh in The Last Airbender.⁵ I’m not saying, of course, that we need fiction to understand God properly. But it is one of the many auxiliary factors that can help us grow in our understanding of him if we use it properly. Fiction is a way of borrowing an expansion to your human experience, as it were; it grants you to see through other eyes. And the more eyes you have, the more angles you can view God and the gospel from.

 

This isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, an attempt to sanctify back to ourselves the indulgence of a worldly desire – to convince ourselves that bingeing on Netflix series is actually a way holier thing to spend our time on than we’d thought, and so it’s fine to skip over prayer and Bible time in its favour. I have actually, shock horror, come to spend rather less time on fiction than I once did, as I have got holier (which I dare to believe that, over the past five years, I have). But it isn’t just about time. It’s about my affections. I’ve said before that fiction can become an idol for me, which perhaps sounds a bit odd, but gosh, if you could see the way it takes hold of me sometimes. Sometimes I can’t think about anything other than the story I finished most recently or am in the middle of. Sometimes it – a story, a mere created thing, a product of human imagination that has no will or power of its own – seems a prettier and shinier object of my contemplation than the gospel. That, my friends, is idolatry. That’s slavery of the sort from which I have been redeemed.

 

This is a pretty old-looking zapper (as we always used to call them when I was a kid). Have you noticed that the modern ones tend to come with a special Netflix button?

The solution? Well, as I’ve been arguing, to subject fiction to faith: to figure out what it is about this story that’s captivating me so much, and use that to fuel my amazement at how God is even better. Because he is better. Always. That’s how the whole approach I described above works. If I can’t stop thinking about, I don’t know, how Rey came from nowhere and nothing to become the greatest hope of the Resistance,⁶ well, how much better that our God lifts us from less than nowhere and nothing, from very death, to become his own sons and the manifest hope on earth of the new good world to come. If I can’t stop thinking about that epic moment when Captain America showed that he was worthy to wield Mjolnir,⁷ how much better that Jesus proved himself worthy to break open the seven seals of the wrath of God by having freely given himself up to that wrath on our behalf.⁸ If I can’t stop thinking about how even after Zuko repaid Iroh for his love and constancy by betraying him to the Fire Lord, Iroh forgave him without a moment’s hesitation,⁹ how much better that our Father in heaven’s love and constancy extends to the forgiveness of all our many betrayals once for all time, even though that required the giving up of his innocent Son to judgement. It’s not a case merely of chastising yourself for being too heavily captivated by the fiction and clonking yourself over the head with the cold, hard fact that God is better. It’s a case of actively realising that whatever it is about the fiction that’s appealing, in God is the total satisfaction of the relevant root desire and so much more besides.

 

So I don’t want to stop thinking about fiction in the way I’ve been accustomed to articulate on my blog. But I do, as I say, think I’ve accomplished about as much as I hoped to accomplish on that front. And I want to write other things. I’ve actually begun to try my hand at a bit of Bible commentary – no promises as to how it’ll turn out, but I’ll never know if I don’t get it written; and I’ll never get it written if so great a portion not just of my time but moreover of my Will To Write Things continues to be spent on maintaining this blog.

 

This isn’t goodbye forever. Who knows, I may miss it so much that in six months’ time I’m straight back to weekly post uploads; and even if not, I feel sure that there’ll be occasions in the future when I’ll want to unburden myself of some kind of rant for which this blog would be an appropriate venue. But until then – might I extend to you, O Beloved and Precious Reader, my heartfelt thanks. Thank you for reading. Thank you, indeed, to everyone who has read and reflected; to everyone who has critiqued and corrected; to everyone who has been kind enough to tell me that he or she has found what I have posted helpful and has encouraged me to keep writing. Your encouragement has been such a blessing to me and I thank God for you. And my prayer for you, brother or sister of mine, is that you would know our God ever better. The fundamental aim of this blog has been to help us both to do that. It has been, as everything I write will continue to be, dedicated to his glory – the glory of him who has ransomed us from sin and death and, by free and undeserved grace, raised us to the status of sons in his kingdom. He is better than every story. Always.

 

Footnotes

 

¹ Apparently the poem’s date of composition is contentious: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/vacation/intro.shtml. Here’s the full text of it so you can see the bits I skipped: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/vacation/text.shtml.

 

² Although – not that you noticed – I’ve actually been a week behind schedule ever since February. More reasons to stop: I’ve clearly lost something of my momentum.

 

³ Did you catch the allusion? Jude 3: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jude+1&version=ESVUK.

 

⁴ ‘The Art of Watching Watchfully’, under March 2017 in my blog archive.

 

⁵ Well, if I can’t shamelessly reference myself multiple times in a farewell post, then when can I … ‘Born Dalek’ under October 2017; ‘I, pharisee 2: Too Legit to Quit’ under May 2016; ‘This Reality is a Lovely Place, But I Wouldn’t Want to Live There’ under October 2018; and ‘Man Hands on Misery to Man, or Azula and the Dominoes’ from earlier this very month.

 

⁶ Was anyone else really disappointed in The Rise of Skywalker when it turned out she was actually descended from Emperor Palpatine? Regardless, the HISHE for that film is, I’d say, one of their finest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OnieKUgv3I.

 

⁷ Here’s a compilation of the two most relevant clips, in case you needed some more awesome in your day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3dPoo_Yn8w. With a random trailer for the Blu-Ray edition at the end, but whatever, you can skip that.

 

⁸ I’ll give you a reference for that one since it’s pretty specific; Revelation 5: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+5&version=ESVUK.

 

⁹ So here’s a little compilation of Zuko-and-Iroh scenes that should be a nice little feels trip if you’re familiar with the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyvvvpjxtvY.

Glory

“Why couldn’t I, why shouldn’t I …

Go out and be glorious, glorious? –

Do something truly epic – just let me through; just put me to the test,

’Cause I can be glorious, glorious.

I’ll never stop believing that, one day, I’ll be up there with the best.”

Bend it Like Beckham (2015)

The Greek word for ‘glory’ is δόξα (dóxa). It’s related to the verb δοκέω (dokéō), which covers a range of meanings including ‘expect’, ‘think’, and ‘seem’. It has to do with people’s opinions. And so δόξα, the noun ‘glory’, also, etymologically, has to do with people’s opinions. It carries the sense of ‘repute’.¹ Glory, in the ancient Hellenophone mindset, we deduce, is what you have when other people think highly of you.

 

Apparently this kind of flower is called morning glory. Seemed as appropriate as anything given that this post is about an abstract concept.

The main Hebrew word used for ‘glory’, on the other hand, is כָּבוֹד (kāvōd). It comes from the root כבד (kbd), which means ‘be heavy’.² And, as you’ll have noticed if you’ve ever been bowling and got confused about which colour of ball is which, how heavy something is has absolutely nothing to do with how heavy someone else thinks it is. Heaviness is an inherent quality of the thing itself. Glory, in the ancient Hebraiophone³ mindset, we deduce, is something you just have, regardless of what other people think of you.

To be fair, there are some other Hebrew verbal roots whose derived nouns are sometimes translated ‘glory’ that potentially do have more to do with the idea of appearance, like פאר (pʾr) ‘beautify, adorn’. But כָּבוֹד is overwhelming the most common – especially when it’s the glory of God we’re talking about.⁴ Now, כָּבוֹד gets translated as δόξα in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament, but you knew that, right?), because, you know, that’s the closest option the translators had, and I’m not trying to argue that it’s a bad translation or that the concept of כָּבוֹד is completely unrelated to these ideas of praise and name and reputation. On the contrary, the term’s occurrences in poetic paralleling tell us that it’s extremely closely connected to them, and that’s a bit of evidence just as important as its etymological derivation. Check out the following chunks I’ve scooped out of the later chapters of Isaiah (‘glory’ in each instance is translating כָּבוֹד):

“I am YHWH; that is my name, and I will not give my glory to another and my praise to idols.” – Isaiah 42:8

“I will say to the north, Give, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth, every person called by my name, and for my glory I created him, I formed him, also I made him.” – Isaiah 43:7

“For the sake of my name I defer my anger, and (for the sake of) my praise I restrain it for you, so as not to cut you off … For my sake, for my sake, I will do (it), for how shall it be profaned? and my glory to another I will not give.” – Isaiah 48:11

Name, praise, glory – all seem to be much of a muchness. So why did I bother mentioning all that stuff about heaviness as an inherent quality? Well, think about this: why won’t God give his glory to another? Just because he doesn’t want to? Just because he rather likes getting all the praise and worship and admiration, thank you very much, and wants to hoard it for himself, and as luck would have it he’s the Almighty and he can therefore demand whatever he likes of the rest of us on pain of things worse than death? Yeah, that doesn’t sound like my God to me either. In fact, the reason he won’t give his glory to another is because no other deserves it. God is just. He rewards each according to what she has done.⁵ He won’t give his glory to lifeless idols because they don’t deserve it; to do so would be a perversion of justice and righteousness.

So with God, in his kingdom, each person’s glory is exactly proportional to her righteousness. Exactly proportional. In fact, the two are so intricately connected that to be righteous is inherently and automatically to be glorious. In God’s kingdom, glory is not how highly other people think of you, whether rightly or wrongly; it’s how highly it’s fit and right to think of you. Consider the way that Jesus talks about his death in the gospel of John. “The hour has come,” he says in chapter 12, “so that the Son of Man might be glorified. Amen, amen, I say to you guys, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” A moment later: “Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But on this account I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.”⁶

Jesus is talking about his death here. He is describing his death in terms of him and his Father being glorified. His crucifixion itself, not just the resurrection and ascension and all the nice good happy stuff to follow – I mean, that jazz is obviously glory. But so, we see here, is his death. In fact, it’s all inextricably linked: remember Philippians, where the fact that Jesus humbled himself to death, even the death of the cross, is explicitly identified as the reason why God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name above every other name?⁷ That doesn’t just mean, well, fair enough, you went through the horrendous bit, so now you get to be glorious. The act of demonstrating righteousness and obedience and love, to the extent that he died the death he did, was in itself Jesus’ obtaining of his glory. In that moment, though despised by the world, in truth, he was glorious. Think about it: we’re going to spend eternity praising God for the cross. If it were anything other than the pinnacle of his glory, why would we keep bringing it up like that? Why would Jesus still bear his scars in the new creation?⁸

Glory is praise and name and reputation. But in God’s kingdom, you get praise and name and reputation through righteousness. That’s the difference between the glory that comes from man and the glory that comes from God.⁹ Human beings have some pretty dodgy standards for what’s worthy of glory, and on top of that, to human eyes, you can sometimes pass yourself off as meeting those standards when you actually don’t. With human beings, you can accrue praise and name and reputation without actually deserving it. You can defraud them of their good opinions; you can get your δόξα, whether you’re righteous or not. But with God, you just can’t. His standards are unimpeachable, his knowledge unquestionable, his judgements inscrutable: with him, you can only get the praise and name and reputation if you really do deserve it. You have to have the genuine weight of the thing and not just the appearance of it. With God, glory is כָּבוֹד – something you have regardless of what other people think, because his opinion is the right one, and nobody else’s matters.

 

To human eyes, was the idea here.

I think glory is best defined, therefore, as manifest excellence. It’s not just the reward for prior righteousness, but also the righteousness that makes you worthy of the reward in the first place. Now consider in this light those extracts of Isaiah I gave above. When God says he does something for his glory, he doesn’t mean, so that everyone will think I’m really great. He means, because I am really great, and am bound by my nature to demonstrate that greatness. When God seeks his own glory, he is not seeking it as if it were the glory that came from man – cheering crowds and shiny gifts and everybody’s good opinion. He is seeking real glory, manifest excellence, the actual doing of the righteous deeds that warrant the reward. God’s zeal for his own glory is found in his insistence on being and doing good.

To do good, to be righteous, is to acquire glory. There is, indeed, no other way to acquire glory. So what said doing good and being righteous actually involve? That’s an easy one: loving God and neighbour.¹⁰ And what does love actually involve? The first letter of John can help us out here: “by this we know love, that he [Jesus] laid down his life (lit. soul) on our behalf.” Then again: “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his son as the propitiation for our sins.”¹¹ To love, then, is to forfeit what you have for the sake of someone else. The best definition I can think of is this: love is the pursuit of the highest good of another regardless of the cost to the self. I suppose we might equally call it ‘service’.

So God is the most glorious because he is the most loving. And if we want to be glorious ourselves, the thing to do is to love in a manner as much like his as possible. And – this is the point I’m trying to stress here – it is in the very act of demonstrating love that we are glorious. It’s not that we do good and show love now in order that we might later stop doing it and instead enjoy the glory we’ve managed to pile up: eat your vegetables and then you can have pudding. Rather, in doing good and showing love now, we are already gaining the very same glory that we’re promised we’ll later have in full. When Jesus told his disciples that the least among them would be the greatest, he wasn’t saying, make yourself least now in order to be greatest later.¹² He was saying that, in the kingdom of God, to make oneself least is what being the greatest fundamentally looks like. In the kingdom of God, if you want to know who at the party is the biggest deal, you look round and see who’s behaving most like a servant to everybody else. That is the system, the economy, the societal structure, that we should be working to as the embassy of God’s kingdom here on earth. And it’s the one we’ll find, moreover, in the new creation. We won’t stop dedicating ourselves to the service of God and one another in the age to come, as if that were just a temporary pursuit for the present age of injustice and mortality, rather than the real business of existence itself. We will still be giving ourselves up for the sake of the good of others; the difference will be that there won’t be any false, human, worldly standards of glory hanging about confusing us to the effect that giving ourselves up for the sake of the good of others is something other than great and glorious. There won’t be any deceitful glory that comes from man, only the true and perfect glory that comes from God.

It’s the world that has things upside-down here. The world says that to serve others is a position of abasement; God says that to serve others is a position of greatness. Isn’t that just absolutely blooming fantastic? Love and service and making yourself least are not the things you grit your teeth and do because you know you’ll have your glory later; they are your glory. What we’re learning to do right now is to love loving, as it were – to appreciate the righteousness of service for the joyous and excellent and glorious thing that it is. Which is hard, precisely because the world has things so upside-down, but by his Spirit God grants us a renewing of our minds so that we might have the attitude of Christ Jesus, who gained his glory in the ultimate act of humility, the death of the cross.¹³ God, you see, already loves loving. He’s the arbiter here, the one who’s got his standards and appreciations and affections all in the right places. He loves goodness and righteousness and love. And that, O Dear and Beloved Reader, means that he actually loves loving us. Nothing surpasses God’s zeal for his glory; which is to say, his insistence on being and doing good; which is to say, his enthusiasm for showing love and blessing to those on whom he has set his favour. He is thrilled to deluge you in grace and mercy and guide you into greater knowledge of him and sanctify you after the image of his Son – these things which constitute your highest possible good – because it is the very nature of goodness that it doesn’t merely love but loves to love.

Why am I blathering on about this at such great length? Because for far too long, I didn’t realise it at all. Whatever I might have been piously claiming in public, I secretly begrudged God his glory, because I thought his glory was like the glory that comes from man, and that it was ultimately kind of egotistical of him to seek it. And also because now, having refuted that error, I forget. Every day, I forget the goodness of God. And knowing the goodness of God is the fundamental beginning of every aspect of the Christian life. If you don’t see his goodness, you’re never going to be able to learn to reflect it; the reason we shall one day be like him is because we shall see him as he is. So the key business of every day is to remind myself of God’s goodness, and to go on reminding myself until it sinks in. Everything else comes out of that.

God won’t give his glory to another. He himself will do the greatest good and show the greatest love. He already has, in sending Christ to die for us. Glory isn’t just the reward of righteousness; righteousness is glory in and of itself. So ponder the all-surpassing glory of him who is perfectly righteous and let it turn your worldly thinking about what greatness looks like upside-down. And then, only then, once you know that glory is a surrendering of yourself to the love and service of God and neighbour, then go out and be glorious.¹⁴

Footnotes

¹ Check out the relevant LSJ entry if you don’t believe me: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=doca&la=greek#lexicon.

² Here’s the BDB entry for the noun, http://www.ericlevy.com/Revel/BDB/BDB/11/kap-Index.html, but if you click back over the previous few pages you can see the various nuances of meaning of the associated verb.

³ I think I may have made this word up. But I also think it could do with existing, so hey, you’re welcome, world.

⁴ STEP Bible has a search function where you can search by a term used in English translation, which is useful for sorting out different original-language words that have been subsumed under one English rendering: https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=ESV|version=OHB|meanings=glory&options=UVGVNH&display=INTERLEAVED&sort=false&pos=1. Also, did you know STEP Bible now has an app? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tyndale.stepbible&hl=en_US It’s still in development, but still – dreams do come true.

⁵ I mean, yes, with the exception of those covered by the blood of Jesus, obviously, but then also if you think about it, the whole business of the cross was actually kind of a convoluted way of making sure that everyone is judged according to what she’s done but also those God has chosen are saved. Because our judgement fell on Jesus and now we’re judged according to who we are in him. Can I hand you over to Shai Linne here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS5DlIPUzcA.

⁶ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+12&version=ESVUK. Check out also the beginning of chapter 17.

⁷ Whole chapter again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=phil+2&version=ESVUK.

⁸ I explored that idea more fully in ‘Marks of Honour’, under November 2016 in my blog archive.

⁹ Here, and subsequently, I allude to John 12:43. Scoot up a few footnotes for the whole-chapter link.

¹⁰ You’re looking at Matthew 22, Mark 12, and, for an interesting variation where someone else says so and Jesus approves, Luke 10: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+10&version=ESVUK.

¹¹ Click across to chapter 4 for the second quotation: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+john+3&version=ESVUK.

¹² I mean, there are loads of places I could point you for that jazz; try Luke 22: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+22&version=ESVUK.

¹³ For renewal of the mind, you’re looking at Romans 12 and Ephesians 4; and for the rest, you should recognise Philippians 2 from earlier.

¹⁴ My opening quotation from Bend it Like Beckham the musical obviously refers to a rather different idea of what glory is. It’s a cracking song though. Here’s a rather nice cover by someone called Alison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nf2IqeRFdU.