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.

Useful Spiritual Analogies: A Post Not About Endgame

“I understood that reference.”

Marvel Avengers Assemble (2012)

I do enjoy the Subtle Christian Traits Facebook group. If you’re not familiar with it, content posted in this community consists of funny, relatable anecdotes and observations of a Christian and church-culture nature, along with a neverending avalanche of memes on the same subject, a steady trickle of ‘inspirational quotations’, and the occasional profound question or prayer request. Facebook friends, do ask me to add you if you fancy joining the party, though I’ll warn you now that you might want to impose some pretty stringent restrictions on the kinds of notifications you’ll let the group give you if you don’t want to find yourself promptly deluged by them.

Anyway, the reason I brought that up was because this post was prompted by something I saw on Subtle Christian Traits this weekend just gone. The below photograph was captioned by the one who posted it as follows: “Every sermon in every church everywhere this weekend.”

 

I want to credit the photo, but it seems inappropriate to use the name of the person who posted it given that Subtle Christian Traits is a closed group. I'll settle for initials: credit to JP.

And I thought – really?

I mean, yes, obviously, the caption was exaggerating and was perfectly aware of the fact, but equally, at the church in the picture and presumably quite a large number of others, whichever human was responsible for delivering the sermon put said sermon together deliberately around the theme of Avengers: Endgame. Now, as you may remember if you read my blog a lot, I went to a midnight screening of the film in question, so I am as acutely aware as anyone that the earliest possible point at which any ordinary Marvel fan could have completed her first viewing of Endgame was at some stage in the bleary-eyed small hours of the Thursday just gone. In order to have written a sermon about it in time for the service on the Sunday immediately following that Thursday, therefore, our theoretical ordinary Marvel fan must surely have done one of the following:

1) Blocked out that particular slot in the sermon-series calendar as a special one-off as soon as she found out Endgame’s release date, then spent the ensuing weeks and months blindly banking on the hope that a maximum of a couple of days spent contemplating the film’s contents would yield a Useful Spiritual Analogy worth forming a special one-off sermon around;

2) Hazarded, in advance, a guess at what the contents of Endgame might consist of, or at least what its broad intentions as a piece of cinema might be, decided that there was a Useful Spiritual Analogy in that hazarded idea, and then tweaked that analogy after viewing the film to make it fit with the actual contents;

3) Clumsily shoehorned some aspect of Endgame’s contents into what she was planning to spend that sermon talking about anyway;

4) Clumsily shoehorned some aspect of spiritual truth into a speech that essentially consisted of an Endgame review;

5) Bribed, blackmailed, tricked, or otherwise coerced someone heavily involved with the making of the film into spilling some major spoilers a long time ago, and happened to have come up with a Useful Spiritual Analogy off the back off those stolen spoilers in the intervening peroiod;

6) Or possibly, just possibly I suppose, genuinely had a flash of inspiration upon viewing Endgame and been so excited about the Useful Spiritual Analogy that thereupon occurred to her that she simply had to talk about it on Sunday, regardless of how well it fitted with whatever other sermon-series plan she might have been following (or, granted, not; maybe this is the sort of church where you really don’t know what the sermon’s going to be about from one week to the next).

Look, I love Useful Spiritual Analogies lifted out of the world of fiction, as you’ll know very well if you have any familiarity to speak of with me and my weekly ramblings. I’d be the last person to criticise the use of such analogies. But because I love them and I use them, allow me to assure you that I know how they work. They do not occur to one reliably. I can’t walk into a screening of a film knowing that the next couple of hours will definitely yield a blog post; equally, sometimes I leave the cinema spilling over with ideas for at least five. There are pieces of fiction I love that I can’t plausibly relate to gospel truths at all,¹ and others I really don’t care for that Useful Spiritual Analogies just fall out of without me having ever willed them to. I don’t personally have anything to say about Endgame right now that I think would actually edify any of you, but it’s quite possible that in several weeks’ or months’ or years’ time, I’ll be reading the scriptures and something will suddenly click in my brain to the effect of, oh, it’s like that bit in Endgame.

Thanks to CaptainThinker at newgrounds.com for the super cute Endgame fanart.

Which in fact brings us to another point, because sometimes, yes, the analogy occurs to you when you’ve got your head in the Bible, but more usually, it occurs to you when you’ve got your head in the fiction. And I’d say that’s the right way round, actually, because you very much want to have the Bible in your brain when you’re looking at fiction, and indeed all the rest of the time as well; you want to view everything else the world presents you with, with scripture as your lens² – whereas, by contrast, if my mind keeps straying onto Marvel or Doctor Who or Harry Potter or whatever when I’m trying to study God’s word, I tend to consider that more of a hindrance than a help. Makes sense, right? And this means that usually, when the analogies I blog about occur to me, they consist of things I already know about the gospel that are highlighted particularly well by some aspect of the fiction I’m currently enjoying.

Useful Spiritual Analogies are not, in other words, an exercise in going deeper into the meaning of scripture for myself. They rarely start with scripture; sometimes, indeed, I have to go on a bit of a hunt for a passage that makes the gospel point that occurred to me in a way that suits the context. I might perhaps be illustrating a point that’s a new one to some of my delightful readers, and crucially, it’s a very good thing to be reminded of the core gospel truths that one already knows from new and different angles, but Useful Spiritual Analogies are not and must not be the beating heart of a teaching ministry. They’re a great sort of side dish, if you will, but the main meal – the part without which the thing is not substantial – has to start with the scriptures. It has to be rooted in them and grow out of them; it can’t rely on any other material for its form and identity.

The typical faith-and-fiction format of my blog is not, therefore, what I’d call a main-meal teaching ministry. I’d be worried, I mean to say, about any Christian who was receiving most of her teaching in a format like that, that makes the outside analogy a part of what it fundamentally is. If it imposes that on itself as a condition, then the goal has become something other than simply to open the scriptures to one’s brothers and sisters so that they might be built up by them. Doesn’t that strike you as very dangerous?

Now, I’m in no position to comment on the quality of the teaching at the church depicted above, or indeed any church whose sermon last Sunday was themed around Endgame. Maybe some of those sermons were really excellent, I don’t know. Again, I’d be the last person to deny that analogies lifted from fiction can be useful for highlighting spiritual truths. But I really don’t buy that all these preachers themed their Sunday sermons around Endgame because they had seen a genuinely Useful Spiritual Analogy in it that they believed would be more helpful for the edification of the congregation than anything else they might have spoken about.

I suppose the obvious question off the back of that is, well, why, if not for the sake of maximum edification, did all the preachers give sermons about Endgame, then? I suppose I can only assume it comes out of a desire to be making up-to-the-minute references. Maybe they don’t trust their listeners not to be thinking about Endgame all through the service anyway and figure they may as well as try to tap into that. Maybe they think that sermons of this type are a way of attracting more people into the church. Maybe they, like me, are just a little too fond of fiction and prone to getting carried away rambling about it. Any which way, the phenomenon worries me.

Please do your very best to put yourself in the way of proper main-meal teaching, adelphoi – teaching governed by no condition except that it should help the Church to understand what God has said and so be moved to love and serve him more wholeheartedly. And as far as your giftings allow, dispense such teaching. I’d be the last person to deny the value of Useful Spiritual Analogies taken from fiction, but I’d also be the last to say that that’s what the normal pattern of church teaching ought to look like.

Footnotes

¹ For example, the Japanese animated feature Your Name, which I have now decided is my favourite film, has never yielded so much as the germ of a blog post idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU47nhruN-Q.

² Speaking of lenses, by the way, shout out to Pullen & Symes Opticians who recently supplied me with a gorgeous new pair of specs to replace the ones I broke at my baptism: http://opticiansinexeter.co.uk/.