Nice People

“You mean everything to me, Arthur. Once, there was Lancelot, a long time ago, but I hadn’t considered him in that way for many years. I thought he was dead. I thought I would never see him again, and then, when I did, I was overwhelmed. I was drawn to him. I couldn’t stop myself. I don’t know why. I love you. You mean everything to me.”

Merlin S4 E9, ‘Lancelot du Lac’ (2011)

You know why Merlin got so bad in its last couple of series? It was because the programme’s creators, after starting out according to the premise that this was an origin story – King Arthur and his crew before they carried out all the daring exploits that made them famous – then had that premise die a clear if not explicit death. They decided they wanted the story ultimately to end with le morte d’Arthur,¹ and so they tried to cram as much of the Arthurian legend they’d previously been deliberately neglecting, except for enjoyable hints and foreshadowing, into far too few episodes to really deal with it. It was messy, it was clumsy, too much was happening in too short a space of time, and things that should have been really dramatic and moving were robbed of the opportunity to be by the brevity of their build-ups. So Merlin had barely even established his aged, bearded, robe-sporting alter-ego Emrys before he became redundant; and Mordred went from being thoroughly loyal to Arthur to hating his guts based on the events of a single episode; and Queen Guinevere’s affair with Sir Lancelot consisted of one evening’s snogging (specifically, the evening of her wedding with Arthur, for extra dramatic impact) that Lancelot only initiated because he was an undead amnesiac under the control of the evil Morgana, and Gwen only consented to because she’d been tricked into wearing an enchanted bracelet that made her supernaturally susceptible to Lancelot’s charms (Morgana’s doing again).

 

That bracelet looked a bit more magicky and sinister than this rather cute one.

That last one annoys me the most. I had always assumed that one of the reasons the character of Gwen was set up, in the first couple of series, as so very sweet and kind and loyal and generally a Nice Person, was as a reminder – since everyone knows that the Arthurian story includes her affair with Lancelot – that even Nice People are capable of really appalling deeds. I was pleased that we the viewers were encouraged to empathise with this character, to see a lot of very commendable things about her; I was pleased that she was not reduced to little more than an easily-dismissed-and-condemned-carrier for the plot point of her infidelity. That Arthur and Gwen’s relationship was painted as so adorable and charming and innocent when it was budding only heaped emphasis on the point. Gwen was absolutely not the sort of person who would carry on with someone else behind her beloved’s back – which is why it was all the more striking when we remembered that she ultimately was, or rather would be.

But no, according to the creators of Merlin, the only reason Gwen betrayed Arthur was because of evil supernatural interference. Even she herself, when confronted by Arthur after he discovered her disloyalty, had genuinely no idea why she did it. By this point she had removed the bracelet and was no longer subject to its influence, and so my opening quotation doesn’t constitute Gwen trying to justify her actions to Arthur’s satisfaction so much as trying to figure out for herself why on Earth she did what she did.² Although this situation wasn’t quite on the level of having been possessed or directly controlled by magic (as happened to various characters by various means in various other episodes), it was abundantly clear that the action had none, or certainly very few, of its origins in Gwen’s own nature or will. It was all down to Morgana’s scheming: what a convenient get-out clause from having to explore what might have driven such a Nice Person to deception and betrayal.

Imagine if the programme had run for longer. Arthur and Gwen could have been married for some years. Perhaps Arthur’s attention was constantly demanded by an endless string of quests and wars and political crises, and his devotion to his people prevented him from neglecting any activity that might protect them, even at the expense of time with his queen. Perhaps Gwen was growing tired of feeling out of place at state events, of putting up with the contemptuous glances and whispers of visiting nobility who, no matter what she did, would never see her as deserving of a throne beside Arthur’s on account of her servile background. Maybe Arthur’s pre-existing arrogance and lack of respect for the status of servant was only being exacerbated the longer he stayed on the throne, getting rather accustomed to the constant homage and honour he was paid, and though he was aware of these traits and attempted to keep their effects under control, Gwen as his wife saw him at his worst, and comments that seemed offhand to him cut at her very sense of self: much as she felt like an impostor as queen, she would have felt just as much of an impostor resuming her old position as a servant, and yet she remembered that everything was so much simpler then, and that she was happy. Maybe Lancelot was the only one who ever really seemed to listen to Gwen, to understand her and care about what she was saying and be prepared to forgo knightly pursuits once in a while for the sake of enjoying her company. Maybe Arthur was away a lot on all his kingly business, and all those snooty foreign nobility meant Gwen hated going with him – Camelot was her home and the rhythms of the place were in her blood and she could sometimes manage to kid herself that she still felt she really belonged – and so she’d stay. And maybe sometimes Arthur would take Lancelot with him, but he liked to distribute opportunities and duties equally among his knights, and so sometimes he wouldn’t take him. And maybe when Gwen was lonely – so crushingly lonely and yet feeling unable to complain, because she was the queen, for goodness’ sake, wasn’t that enough? – Lancelot would be where she found company and solace from her problems. Maybe he would let the affection he’d always harboured for Gwen overcome his loyalty to a king and a friend who, he could persuade himself, would never have to know; maybe she would let her desperation to feel genuinely loved and desired and valued overcome a promise she made a long time ago when everything was different; and maybe that’s how it would start.

 

Someone’s artistic impression of Arthur and Guinevere, apparently, though the tags on stock photos probably aren’t the most reliable source ever.

Well, that’s something like how I imagine the programme’s creators might have gone about it if they’d had the time. It would have been, in a way, all the more emotionally devastating – a ruthless exhibition of Gwen’s failings, Lancelot’s, Arthur’s, inkeeping with each of their characters and without any need to blame all the resultant heartache on the plotting of a convenient nearby villain. It would have acknowledged that so often, the problems aren’t down to specific bad guys wreaking havoc for purposes generally agreed to be nefarious; they are down simply to Nice People giving in to human desires.

If Gwen had known about the magic bracelet, she could have alleged its influence in her defence when she stood facing the judgement of her husband and her king, charged with adultery and treason. We have no such defence to offer against the charges of spiritual adultery and cosmic treason for which all humans will one day have to give an account to the King of the universe. We might, like Gwen, be Nice People in our own eyes, but we still do horrible things – and the Bible makes it very clear that, much as the existence of evil spiritual entities is a reality, our wrongdoings have their origins in our own corrupted nature and will, and cannot be truthfully scapegoated off on some supernatural influence, the equivalent of Gwen’s bracelet.

For there is no truth in their mouth;

Their inmost self is destruction;

Their throat is an open grave;

They flatter with their tongue. – Psalm 5:9³

David wrote those lines specifically about his enemies, but Paul later quotes them in such a way as to confirm that they actually apply to the whole of humanity: “Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin.”⁴ At the inmost self of every Nice Person is destruction. In the real world, Gwens cheat on Arthurs all over the place, and they do it because of their own inclinations, no evil supernatural intervention required. If there’s any justice in the world, then, they’ll one day face the consequences; we’ll all one day face the consequences of our wrongdoing.

Arthur was merciful to Gwen; though her crimes warranted execution, he only exiled her – and later forgave her and agreed once again to make her his queen. God is also merciful to us – but how much more so; he spares us the execution our crimes warrant, forgives us, and adopts us into his family, even though Jesus had to undergo every agony we deserved to make that happen. And part of our new saved, forgiven, adopted identity is that our inmost selves are no longer destruction, because we are gifted Jesus’ own righteousness – the very righteousness that was so generous, humble, and self-sacrificial that it took him to the cross on our behalf – as if it were our own. That means that when judgement arrives, we’ll be able to stand uncondemned despite all our wrongdoings, and also that we are empowered to resist the temptation to commit those wrongdoings even now. It’s a much better deal than even Gwen ever got.

But in order to access all that, we have got to stop kidding ourselves that we’re Nice People who only do wrong because we fall susceptible to the influence of magic-bracelet equivalents, whether we envision those as spiritual attacks or societal influences or injustices of circumstance or whatever. The inmost self of every supposed Nice Person is destruction – until that person acknowledges as much before God and receives from him a new nature found in Jesus’ righteousness. Glory to God.

Footnotes 

¹ This, the episode title of Merlin’s first series finale, is taken from the title of Sir Thomas Malory’s version of the Arthur story, which hit the shelves in the fifteenth century and is still one of the best known and most frequently referred to. If you fancy a peruse, some kind soul has archived the whole thing online (in an updated version that’s a bit easier to read): http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/mart/. 

² Some lovely person has uploaded the whole scene to YouTube; here’s the first part of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSNG2YI9gYE. 

³ Whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+5&version=ESVUK. 

⁴ And again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+3&version=NIVUK. I’ve given you the NIV, much as I’m not the greatest fan of it as a translation, because it gives you footnotes indicating where all the quotations come from so you can go and check them out.

The Heart of the Matter

Papa Smurf:     Knowing what to do doesn’t come from here [pointing at his head] … it comes from here [pointing at Patrick’s midriff], where it matters most.

Patrick:             My spleen?

Papa Smurf:     No, your heart! I’m trying to have a moment here, you whippersnapper!

The Smurfs (2011)

The following is taken from the trailer for Disney’s short film Inner Workings,¹ which was screened in cinemas as a prelude to the studio’s latest animated classic, Moana² (I substitute bold text where the trailer uses blue, and italic where it uses red):

Are you a party animal or a pragmatist?

Are you sensible or spontaneous?

Do you follow your head or your heart?

 

Plodding, logical, mechanical head versus fun, free, romantic heart. Right? Thanks to Ventrilock at freedigitalphotos.net.

The film features Paul, a nondescript employee of a firm enticingly titled Boring, Boring, and Glum, along with his anthropomorphised internal organs, whose struggle for power over control of Paul and his actions constitutes the premise of the story. Although his lungs, stomach, and bladder play minor roles in the action, Paul’s brain and heart are clearly the two candidates for the top management position in his body, and they have very different ideas about how things ought to be run. The heart is all in favour of dancing in the shower, eating ginormous stacks of syrup-smothered pancakes, tootling off on spontaneous beach trips, and chatting to the redhead running the sunglasses stall. The brain, meanwhile, is focussed entirely on getting to work, so that Paul can sit at a desk doing what is apparently the most tedious job ever, in a room full of people who are so uniformly dull that they even eat lunch in monotonous synchrony. Moreover, every one of the heart’s suggestions is met by the brain with a conviction that it is bound to end up getting Paul killed, for example by aquatic electrocution, obesity-induced heart disease, or the attack of an angry shark. Each scenario the brain envisions is played out for us the viewers in 2D-animated form, finishing with Paul being interred in one of an increasingly amusing selection of coffins appropriate to the nature of his demise – so the obesity one is absolutely enormous, and the shark-attack one still has the angry shark attached to it (in which case, goodness knows how they managed to actually get him into the coffin, but hey, it’s a deliberately daft fictional scenario within another deliberately daft fictional scenario, so I probably shouldn’t plough too much thought into the matter).

Head or heart? We’re used to this kind of language: the head is envisioned as the boring, pragmatic one, concerned with what is factual or reasonable, while the heart represents what we really desire for our happiness regardless of the practicalities involved. Familiar as the dichotomy is, however, it does not by any means constitute an inherent or universal notion about the way human thoughts and feelings function. In the ancient world, it was by and large the heart that was considered the centre of thought – both rational and emotional. The brain, meanwhile, was generally assumed to be rather more pointless. Consider Ancient Egyptian embalming practice: the heart was important enough to warrant being replaced into an embalmed corpse before it was buried, while the brain, as we all know from Horrible Histories, was mashed up using a pointy implement and pulled out through the nose.³ Similarly, Aristotle believed the heart to be the seat of the mind and the brain to function as merely a cooling system for the blood; Lucretius, the Roman scientist-poet (because in the good old days of Ancient Rome you could write scientific-cum-philosophical works in hexameter verse and actually be taken seriously) also considered the chest to be where the animus, the consciousness, was located.⁴ The Greek φρήν (phrēn), literally ‘midriff’, can be translated equally plausibly as ‘heart’, meaning the seat of emotion, or as ‘mind’, meaning the seat of intelligence and reason, depending on context;⁵ the Latin pectus occupies a very similar semantic field, sometimes even standing in for the soul or even the individual himself.⁶ (Granted, some people challenged these ideas with theories about neuroscience that resemble modern ones more closely, but their ideas didn’t really take hold.)

Greek and Roman thinkers weren’t helped in their understanding of physiology by the fact that dissection was illegal in their societies, so they probably didn’t even know what a brain looked like.

The heart is also represented as the seat of rational thought of the kind we would tend to locate in the brain in the Bible. The Hebrew for ‘heart’ is לֵב (lēv) and, though it’s usually translated as exactly that, some contexts demand a different rendering. Consider the following;⁷ in each case the word in bold is being used to translate לֵב: 

“But whoever did not pay attention to the word of the Lord left his slaves and his livestock in the field.” – Exodus 9:21

“Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil, for who is able to govern this your great people?” – 1 Kings 3:9

“Then I sent to him, saying, ‘No such things as you say have been done, for you are inventing them out of your own mind.’” – Nehemiah 6:8

“He takes away understanding from the chiefs of the people of the earth and makes them wander in a trackless waste.” – Job 12:24

“O simple ones, learn prudence; O fools, learn sense.” – Proverbs 8:5

That last verse is particularly telling: it’s one of those instances of repetition of the same idea using different vocabulary that positively infests Hebrew poetry, and so the meaning of one half informs the correct understanding of the other.

Now, I’d like to nip in the bud any suggestion that the locating of consciousness, reason, and intelligence in the heart somehow amounts to an outdated, unscientific inaccuracy in the Biblical text that undermines its authority as true. What’s going on is a metaphor, exactly like our own colouring of the heart as the seat of emotion and desire: we know the heart is really nothing more than a prime pump for the circulatory system, but we still say things like, “I love her with all my heart,” or, “He’s heartbroken,” and don’t consider them falsehoods. The metaphor is culturally understood, just like when we talk about, say, the sun rising. (Plus, even if the Bible were affirming something that seemed to contradict the conclusions of modern science, I’d suggest taking the side that’s backed up by divine infallibility.⁸)

 

Just a pump. Thanks to dream designs at freedigitalphotos.net.

Furthermore, I’d like to make it clear that the Bible also refers to the heart the way we do, as the seat of emotion, but since this is an idea we’re familiar with, I felt it needed less concerted demonstration. Nevertheless, a few examples (drawn from some of the same books as those given above) might be appropriate to demonstrate the word’s breadth of meaning:

“And the king said to me, ‘Why is your face sad, seeing you are not sick? This is nothing but sadness of the heart.’ Then I was very much afraid.” – Nehemiah 2:2

“If my heart has been enticed toward a woman, and I have lain in wait at my neighbour’s door…” – Job 31:9

“A glad heart makes a cheerful face, but by sorrow of heart the spirit is crushed.” – Proverbs 15:13

So what’s my point? And what has Inner Workings got to do with any of this?

Well, first off, I think it’s worth bearing in mind, when one is reading the Old Testament and stumbles across an instance of the word ‘heart’, that it does have this very holistic meaning. The ancient-world heart, the Biblical heart, is not some wild, passionate, reckless force that operates independently of reason, intelligence, and pragmatism. If Inner Workings had been written by a team of ancient-world thinkers, there would have been no representation of the brain and heart as opposing forces; the two would have been one and the same. (It would therefore have been rather a boring film, so it’s probably just as well it wasn’t written by a team of ancient-world thinkers.) Knowing this helps inform the way we interpret and apply passages that mention the heart. Try Psalm 57:7, for instance: “My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast! I will sing and make melody!” This is not just about emotional stability, but being deliberately grounded in a sound understanding of the truth – think, ‘my mind is steadfast’ – which is the origin of the desire to praise. I’m not by any means suggesting that the emotional side of things be supplanted by an entirely rational interpretation; rather, the two need to go together. Too often, I think, we detach doctrine from affection – head from heart – when to do so is simply unbiblical and very unhelpful.

There’s also a bit of a warning to be picked up, particularly for academic types like myself. When the Bible warns against following the desires of the heart, it doesn’t just mean the kind of unruly, spontaneous passions generated by Paul’s heart in Inner Workings. The dull, practical purposes of the brain are actually just as deadly. This is, in fact, exactly what Paul’s brain realises at the most poignant moment of the film; as Paul sits in the dull office doing dull work surrounded by dull people, it envisions another version of his death, where he grows old in perpetual dullness and then clambers into a coffin of his own volition. The ending is exactly the same as in every previous scenario. Paul’s brain realises that its own desires will kill him as surely as the heart’s will, however comparatively sensible they seem. The solution the film offers is a compromise between brain and heart that allows Paul to enjoy himself without things getting completely out of hand; what isn’t dealt with is that Paul is still going to die, whether or not he has a nicer time on his way to the coffin that he would otherwise have done. Real life, ongoing and meaningful existence, doesn’t come from following the desires of the heart, the mind, or the ancient-world combination thereof; it comes from being in Christ, who has life in himself, and to whom all those desires are to be submitted. Thank God that he has redeemed both our rational and our emotional aspects that they might be used together in service of his glory.

Footnotes 

¹ One wonders whether there’s really any point making a trailer for a film that’s only going to include a few more minutes of footage than the trailer contains, but if you feel inclined to view it, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoP9OQxSd9c. 

² It’s really good and I encourage you to see it if you get the chance. Here’s a taster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93lrosBEW-Q. 

³ I couldn’t find the song about mummification, but you can have this little sketch instead if you like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kFVgHwEkLE. 

⁴ Lucretius’ poem is given the title De Rerum Natura, ‘About the Nature of Things’. William Ellery Leonard swapped hexameter for iambic pentameter when he translated it in 1916: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0131. 

⁵ It’s the second word on this page; click on ‘LSJ’ for the full rundown: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=frhn&la=greek. 

⁶ Click on ‘Lewis & Short’: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=pectus&la=la. 

⁷ And yes, I did just stick לֵב into the STEP Bible search function and browse the results, so do feel free to do the same: https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=ESV|version=WLC|strong=H3820a&options=HNVUG. STEP Bible is a thoroughly excellent resource and really intuitive to use; you basically just stick whatever it is you’re looking for (translation, book, word) into the search bar and hey presto, everything you wanted to know is right there – although I’ll be even happier once they get the Hebrew tagged and the Old Testament Peshitta on the system. 

⁸ A point I touched on quite significantly last week as well.

Stranger Things Have Happened

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man can invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions, most stale and unprofitable.”

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Case of Identity (1891)

All sorts of strange coincidences, plannings, cross-purposes, and wonderful chains of events working through generations to achieve the most outre results are surely going on in this random city.

And so 2016 draws to a close, and a great sigh of relief ripples across vast swathes of the globe like a Mexican wave chasing the instant of midnight from each time zone to the next. The consensus is clear: this has been one topsy-turvy trip round the sun, and one the world at large is glad to see the back of. There’s been one political shock after another, an endless torrent of celebrity deaths, and I understand one or two unexpected things happened in the world of sport as well (though frankly that entire realm of culture is extremely obscure to me) – not to mention that business about Harambe the gorilla that seemed to provoke a good (one might tentatively suggest disproportionate?) deal of agitation.

If I come across a tad disinterested, that’s probably because, as I frequently mention when the surprising and on some counts distressing extraordinariness of the past year’s events arises in conversation, the primary reaction to said events with which my brain likes to amuse itself is the notion that this is all going to make an extremely interesting history textbook in fifty or a hundred years. Will 2016 be seen as a blip or a genuine turning point? How will posterity’s judgement of our times differ from our own? Will anyone even believe that so many beloved celebrities really did all depart this life within the same twelve-month period?

That last question might not be as silly as it sounds. Excuse me while I lapse into all-out Classicist mode, but I am somewhat reminded of Tacitus’ Annals, the fourth book of which I had to read for my Latin class in my second year at university. In the Annals, Tacitus narrates the history of Rome from the death of the Emperor Augustus, and he does it – the clue’s in the title – on an annual basis, recounting each event according to the year in which it occurred rather than its significance in any longer storyline. This approach, like any, has its pros and cons. I certainly wasn’t too pleased with it when I embarked upon translating an interesting and actually quite moving story of a guy called Sabinus being framed and executed for dissent, only to find Tacitus quite consciously leaving aside the matter of his accusers’ fates to tell a distinctly less thrilling tale pertaining to the taxing of ox-hides in Germany.¹ Still, it does at least mean we can be sure of the year in which any given event occurred – although we often can’t be much more precise than that, because it isn’t totally clear whether the author sticks to arranging his material in chronological order within each year, or not. For example, Tacitus displays a clear if not overwhelming propensity for recording a year’s celebrity deaths towards the end of his account of that year.² Is that because the end seemed as good a place as any to slip them in, regardless of when within the year they actually occurred? Or is it because people were genuinely more likely to die towards the end of the year?³ Perhaps because it was cold and they were old. (Real academic theory.⁴)

My point, then, is this: if we today look at what Tacitus recorded and think, well, it can’t possibly have been the case that the well-known inhabitants of early Imperial Rome were especially prone to expiring near the end of each calendar year – that just seems too unlikely – why shouldn’t some future historian carefully scrutinising our own times conclude that it can’t possibly have been the case that the well-known inhabitants of the modern west were especially prone to expiring within one specific calendar year, namely 2016? That just seems too unlikely. It’s certainly caught us all by surprise, who are actually living through it. If someone had sat down at the start of last January and written a list of predictions for the coming year that had included even half of the events that have been busy shaking the world these past three hundred and sixty-five days, he or she would surely have been dismissed as a lunatic, an imbecile, or possibly some sort of extreme pessimist.⁵ And yet here we are.

Our hypothetical future historian will probably, of course, have access to much, much better evidence against which to test his or her theories than any scholar of the early Roman Empire does today, but suppose otherwise. Suppose there is some disaster and the historians of two thousand years hence are left trying to piece together the events of 2016 from a few written accounts of uncertain reliability. Might they not start to suggest that such accounts were arranged for emphasis, not accuracy; that the writers shoved in more shocking events than really occurred to make some point or other; that it all just looks too implausible and we should see it all as a mythologised retelling shaped by the author’s personal biases?

2016 shows that Sherlock Holmes was right: reality is, very often, more unbelievable than the fiction that purports to imitate it.⁶ Perhaps it’s a little strange, then, that we are so sceptical of the abnormal. I’m not by any means advocating gullibility – believing anything regardless of evidence is as unacceptable as believing nothing regardless of evidence – but the events of the past year have surely cast at least a little doubt over the capabilities of human rational faculties to determine which occurrences are or are not plausible. Scepticism about almost any unlikely-sounding claim can be readily met with a declaration that stranger things have happened.

Good job, Sherlock. Now tell me, from where do you buy your lovely hats?

Plus, that’s just in the sphere of stuff that actually conforms to the known laws of physics and nature. What about when we slide the possibility of divine intervention into the picture?

Now, there are lots of good reasons to trust what God says as recorded in the multi-author, multi-genre anthology we like to call the Bible; an apologetic effort to that effect is not the purpose of this post. Rather, my point is that it seems a little odd that, even as Christians, we often approach the Bible wearing the exact same human-rational-faculties glasses that make us doubt the chronology of Tacitus’ Annals. We have to make concerted efforts to counteract their effects: it doesn’t seem terribly likely that a man survived in the belly of a giant fish for three days,⁷ or that the sun once stood still in the sky to enable a battle to finish,⁸ or that the universe was created in six days,⁹ but we’re aware that this is God’s word and both deserves and demands our full credence and trust, so we tie ourselves in knots trying to reconcile it to what we understand about the way reality works. And we land in all sorts of places: such-and-such is a fable, or a poetic metaphor; such-and-such makes sense if only one surrounds it with the correct historical context, or construes this or that Hebrew word in a sense different to the traditional one; such-and-such is beyond our understanding but happened in a totally literal sense and everyone should shut up and get over it.

I think we’re missing the point a bit. If our own perception of what’s plausible is confounded even by the surprising events of 2016 – which, despite the vitriol and despair in your Facebook newsfeed yelling the contrary, don’t actually break any physical or natural laws of how the universe works – why should we trust it to scrutinise the supernaturally-effected occurrences described in the Bible? If the simple happenstances of natural, explicable reality can yield such unlikely-seeming results, shouldn’t we anticipate that the direct, explicit, exceptional actions of a God almighty over the whole of that reality should yield even unlikelier-seeming ones? Would it not, in fact, be more of a surprise to us if they didn’t? The grounds for our interpretation of any particular passage should have nothing to do with whether we think the events it describes sound likely or not; indeed, if they do, it surely reveals that we are sinfully privileging our own rationality over God’s trustworthiness. If you read Genesis 1 with an awareness of God’s omnipotence and the severe limitations of our human rational faculties and still conclude that it’s a fable or a poetic metaphor, that’s another matter, but I don’t see that there’s any ground, as a Christian, to resort to such explanations just because a six-day creation doesn’t strike you as particularly plausible.

Stranger things have happened.

A man rose from the dead, for instance.

Footnotes

¹ Sabinus’ story starts in the sixty-eighth chapter of the book, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0078%3Abook%3D4%3Achapter%3D68, and is probably the most interesting bit of it, even including the tale of the senator who threw his wife out of a window.

² In, for example, 4.15 (new year starts 4.17) 4.44 (new year begins 4.46), 4.61 (new year begins 4.62). Remember, of course, that the chapter divisions were added later, but hopefully they give some sense of how close the death-records tend to be to the beginning of the account of a new year.

³ For the record, I’d consider the first theory more likely, but for slightly different reasons to those I discuss here. In any case, that doesn’t impinge on the point of this post.

⁴ Though I’m not going to cite it, because this isn’t an academic piece and you can’t make me. Just take my Latin lecturer’s word for it, OK?

⁵ I’m thinking primarily of the deaths here. Not a political comment.

⁶ Don’t you just love it when copyright law doesn’t apply? The whole of the short story from which my opening quotation is taken, as well as lots of other Sherlock Holmes tales, is freely available online: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/CaseIden.shtml.

⁷ That’s from the book of Jonah, in case you never went to Sunday school: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jonah+1&version=ESVUK.

⁸ As recorded in the book of Joshua: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joshua+10&version=ESVUK.

⁹ Aw, come on, you know this one. That’s right, it’s Genesis 1: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+1&version=ESVUK.  

Christmas Conversations with my Internal Theological Snob

“Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot …

But the Grinch, who lived just north of Whoville, did NOT!

The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!

Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.

It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.

It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.

But I think that the most likely reason of all,

May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.”

Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957)

Me:      I love Christmas.

Her:     I hate Christmas.

Me:      I love carol services, and everyone being off work, and pretty lights all over the place, and carol services, and all the exciting only-this-time-of-year comestibles, and wrapping presents, and carol services, and updating my special Christmas playlist, and carol services…

 

Ooh, pretty lights...

Her:     Blimey, did you mention carol services yet?

Me:      All right, there’s no need for that tone. I like carol services, OK? We did three of them last Sunday and it was great.

Her:     It was hard work, you mean. Do you even realise how many Christmas carols are absolutely choc-a-bloc with lyrics that have practically nothing to do with the actual wonder of the incarnation?

Me:      Actually, I tend to leave that sort of thing to you, my dear Internal Theological Snob. You are, after all, awfully good at it.

Her:     I try to be. Frankly, by the end of last Sunday, I was so burnt out I was barely paying attention to what we were singing. Only my most basic heresy filters were running properly. All that rubbish you’d been having us affirm about snow and silence and stables was clogging the system.

Me:      Look, I hardly think we can call the suggestion that it was snowing in Bethlehem when Jesus was born heresy. I mean, I’ll admit it’s not very likely from a historical standpoint, and it’s not in any way Biblical either…

Her:     You’re really not selling this. ‘Not in any way Biblical’ sounds to me like the beginning of a very slippery slope heading somewhere in the direction of, oh, let me see, heresy. But besides that, the key thing to grasp is that it’s missing the point. The meteorological situation in the Bethlehem area is of literally no importance to the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ birth.¹ This is God becoming man we’re talking about, the very second Person of the Trinity through whom all things were created and are sustained taking on the entire nature of a puny human being, giving up reigning over every atom of the cosmos in eternal, unsurpassable love and joy in order to go through all the unpleasantries and indignities of fleshly existence, in order to suffer and indeed die, to undergo hell on behalf of the very human beings who variously failed him, betrayed him, ignored him, or hated his guts, that they might be inducted into the very eternal love and joy he had given up, not according to their own non-existent merits, but by the free gift of Jesus’ own moral perfection, in accordance with the Law that everybody else broke, whereas he endured and obeyed and triumphed over all the evils of the present order and on that account is crowned with the highest honour in the universe and will return to set all things to rights, in unspeakably great glory, yet still bearing the human form he took on, such as it is having been raised imperishable, and –

Me:      You might want to take a breath at some point.

Her:     But do you see my point? We could be singing about that, and instead we’re singing about how terribly cold and snowy it was (or rather probably wasn’t) in Bethlehem. Who cares?

 

Angels: highly relevant. Snow: not relevant in the slightest.

Me:      Yes. I do see your point. Believe me, I do. I do listen to you, my dear Internal Theological Snob, and you talk a lot of sense.

Her:     You think so, huh? Let’s see. Thoughts on the innkeeper everyone goes on about?

Me:      In all likelihood didn’t exist. κατάλυμα (katáluma) suggests a guest-room in a house more than an inn.²

Her:     Very good. And the stable?

Me:      Possible, certainly, but there’s no mention of it in the Bible. Some early traditions feature a cave.³ I reckon the most likely possibility is that the feeding-trough Jesus was laid in was in the main room of the same house whose guest-room was too full.⁴

Her:     I’m impressed. And what about the idea that Mary went to Bethlehem on a donkey?

Me:      An import from the Infancy Gospel of James,⁵ which we can be pretty sure wasn’t in fact written by James, and is in any case about as canonical as that dreadful poem about footprints in the sand.⁶

Her:     I don’t get it. If you know all this exactly as well as I do, why on Earth do you put up with having these superfluous improbabilities chucked at you over and over again as if they’re what Christmas is all about?

Me:      Well. Sometimes I wonder. The emotional high of the festive atmosphere, much as I enjoy it, can only make up for so many annoyances. I was exactly as frustrated as you were when someone mentioned that ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ had been voted the nation’s official favourite carol,⁷ or when I realised that one of the verses of ‘Past Three O’Clock’ is literally about cheese.⁸ I get as wearily, hollowly sad as you do when I realise that many parents who would tick ‘Christian’ on the census will spend more time this December telling their children lies about a fictional character loosely based on a fourth-century bishop from part of what’s now Turkey⁹ than truths about their Lord and Saviour. I’m exactly as sick as you are of the commercialisation, the endless adverts promising that some elusive ‘perfect Christmas’ is attainable if only one spends enough money on the right things, the vacuous popular music pumping from every shop’s sound system, the ludicrous overspending and overeating all excused on the festival’s account. Don’t think I don’t notice it. I’m pretty sure we all do. And it’s positively maddening.

Her:     So you were lying earlier. When you said you love Christmas, you were lying.

Me:      No, I wasn’t. And part of that is, yes, I really enjoy the festive atmosphere, and I relish the opportunity to partake in seasonal activities like eating mince pies and listening to Pentatonix’s version of ‘Mary, Did You Know?’¹⁰ that for some reason aren’t socially acceptable at other times of the year; their very shortlivedness lends them an extra layer of delightfulness. But another part of that is, if one is prepared to wade through the superfluous improbabilities of snow and silence and stables, there are moments that make it worth it.

Her:     I’m not convinced about that. An example, if you please.

Me:      Certainly. One of the reasons I like going to as many carol services as possible is to encounter as many obscure verses of lesser-known carols as possible; some of them express the marvelousness of Jesus’ birth in very lovely and startling ways. So, if you remember, the second carol service we were at last Sunday featured ‘See Amid the Winter’s Snow’, which includes the following:

Lo, within a manger lies

He who built the starry skies,

He who, throned in height sublime,

Sits amid the cherubim.

What do you make of that?

Her:     Oh wow. So my brain is going, like, Isaiah 6 and that whole amazing glorious vision of God’s utter majesty and how Isaiah totally fell to pieces at the notion that such a sinner as himself had seen YHWH, and then how a chunk of that chapter is quoted by John, who states that Isaiah saw Jesus’ glory specifically, and the very thought that a God as great and powerful and awe-inspiring as that could take on such a small and unimpressive form as a baby in an animals’ feeding-trough … oh, the humility of Christ, and now I’m all over Philippians 2 as well, and scooting back to Isaiah and the burning-coal-on-the-lips thing, his power to cover over our sins so that we might be able to stand in the full glory of his presence…¹¹

 

“Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.’”

Me:      I know, right? Not such a bad song once you get past that first bit about snow, is it?

Her:     Well, no, but you have to put up with all that rubbish to get to the good bit.

Me:      And there is manifest the trouble with you, my dear Internal Theological Snob, namely that you might talk a lot of sense, but you’re a right misery-guts. You do it all year round, not just at Christmas: picking apart every statement made by anyone that drifts onto even slightly theological territory in order to assess its Biblical soundness –

Her:     Hey, it’s called discernment.

Me:      And discernment’s great, and I’m very glad you do it, but I often think you take it too far. You’re too critical, too inflexible, and too judgemental of brothers and sisters in Christ who haven’t reached the same conclusions as you. You’re a snob, Internal Theological Snob. All that stuff about the innkeeper and the stable and the donkey – you’re concerned with presenting yourself as clever as much as with preserving Biblical truth. You think you’re always right and you like to show off.

Her:     Oh, confusticate and bebother it, I do. I am a snob. God forgive me.

Me:      He has. The fact that you know you need it is why I keep you around.

Her:     Thank you. Though I should probably tell you I still hate Christmas.

Me:      And I don’t blame you. Maybe one of these years I’ll get fed up enough with all the bits I don’t like that I’ll stop bothering trying to pick out the bits I do. But this year has not been that year.

Her:     Well, I’ll keep trying to persuade you, I’m sure. But in the meantime, shall we end with another obscure verse of a lesser-known carol?

Me:      An excellent plan. Did you have one in mind?

Her:     Indeed, namely the much-neglected last verse of the Calypso Carol:

Mine are riches from your poverty,

From your innocence, eternity,

Mine forgiveness by your death for me,

Child of sorrow for my joy.

Me:      Top choice. A hearty amen to that.

Footnotes

¹ A point also made in hilarious fashion by Lutheran Satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR67HSs4RPI.

² This is the word often translated ‘inn’ in Luke 2:7. There are two other occurrences of it in the New Testament, in Mark 14:14 and Luke 22:11; in both these cases it refers to the room where Jesus ate the Passover meal for the last time and instructed his disciples to take bread and wine in remembrance of him.

³ This was apparently the view of Justin Martyr and of Origen, and is preserved in some church traditions today.

⁴ For a full rundown of the basis for this view, as well as some more detail on the previous point, this article is pretty top notch: http://www.psephizo.com/biblical-studies/jesus-was-not-born-in-a-stable/.

⁵ If you fancy some more information or a peer at the actual text, this seems as good a corner of the Internet as any: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/infancyjames.html. The document also contains another manifestation of the Jesus-was-born-in-a-cave tradition.

⁶ Adam4d will tell you exactly why it’s so dreadful: http://adam4d.com/footprints-sand/.

⁷ Admittedly, I’m not sure where said someone got that information, because Classic FM puts ‘O Holy Night’ in the top spot: http://promo.classicfm.co.uk/nations-favourite-carol/. ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ is only a couple of places behind, though.

⁸ Verse Five, to be precise. I’m not kidding. Look: http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/past_three_a_clock.htm.

⁹ Namely Santa Claus, in case that wasn’t clear. It’s quite good fun reading up on his history; the following seems as decent a place to start as any, should you feel so inclined: http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/HTML/Santa_Claus.htm.

¹⁰ This is probably my favourite Christmas song and nobody does it better than Pentatonix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifCWN5pJGIE.

¹¹ If you don’t know what my Internal Theological Snob is on about, go and read this jazz. And even if you do, go and read it anyway. It’s so important to get our heads around the fact that the baby in the manger is the same being as the Lord on the throne. So here’s the Isaiah, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+6&version=ESVUK, and the John, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+12&version=ESVUK, and the Philippians, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=phil+2&version=ESVUK. (And yes, I realise that Isaiah talks about God being enthroned between seraphim rather than cherubim as in the song, but I tend to feel the point still stands.)