27 November 2013

Seven Days That Divide the World: To Everything Turn, Turn, Turn

Lennox begins his book with an historical anecdote concerning another doctrine that was jettisoned by the church when scientific gains showed it to be demonstrably false: the immovability of the earth and its centrality in the cosmos.

Aristotle believed in a fixed earth that was also eternal. When Aristotle was Christianized by Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Aquinas deemphasized the eternality of the earth as inconsistent with Genesis which taught that the earth had a beginning, but had no problem retaining the fixed earth idea. After all, there were Scriptures that seemed to support that notion:

Tremble before him, all the earth; yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved. (1 Chronicles 16:30)

Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved. (Psalm 93:1)

He set the earth on its foundation, so that it should never be moved. (Psalm 104:5)

For the pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and on them he has set the world. (1 Samuel 2:8)

Lennox notes that the Bible also seems to indicate that the sun moved around the earth:

In them he has sent a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat. (Psalm 19:4-6)

The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. (Ecclesiastes 1:5)

So when Copernicus proposed a heliocentric view of the cosmos this was startling and called into question by both Protestants and Catholics. Martin Luther railed against the idea in his Table Talk. Calvin, likewise, rejected the notion.

About 80 years later, Galileo published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a work validating the heliocentric theory and earning the ire of both Aristotelian philosphers and Christians as well as becoming the prototype of the church-is-anti-science nonsense. Though the "mistreatment" of Galileo is often overhyped (his imprisonment was in the estates of his wealthy supporters and he was never tortured), nevertheless the case does represent a black eye in the Science vs Religion smackdown, especially seeing as how none of us, even committed Christians, remain these days as fixed-earthers. Lennox's closing question is to ask Christians to consider that if we have abdicated our fixed-earth belief because of compromise and thereby made Scripture subservient to science?

While I understand his point here, and anecdotes are fun, they don't exactly make for good policy. Say you know someone who defended a home robbery attempt with their firearm, then you are all like "rah rah guns save lives." Or say you know someone whose five-year old found the family gun and shot his sister, and then you are all like "guns are evil!" Neither position is really validated by your test case. 

It strikes me as the same in this instance. Sure, the Church gave up on the fixed-earthedness of an overly literal reading of obviously poetic passages, but we are asked to give up something more by accepting an old earth governed by Darwinian forces. I mean, we have all been moving-earthers our whole lives, but I still talk about the sun coming up and no ardent scientist has ever said, "Hey you blankety-blank, don't you know that the sun is fixed and we are spinning around it at 67,000 miles per hour in an elliptical pattern that means it is dark when you get out of work in the winter and some places in Alaska don't see the sun for a whole month? What are you, anti-science?"

In other words, science these days isn't telling us, as Galileo did, that we simply misunderstand something about the way God created the world. Science today is telling us that there is no God and something about primordial ooze and that if you believe in God you are just as stupid as someone believing in a flying spaghetti monster (which would be dope, if it was real). The stakes are a bit different, as what is being called into question is more severe. 

I know Lennox knows this, and perhaps I am being uncharitable here, but anecdotes frustrate me. I understand his broader point--the Church should be willing to change when it is definitively proven to be wrong in its understanding of something and has done so in the past--and I will withhold further judgment until I know what Lennox suggests we replace a straightforward understanding of Genesis with, but if you are ever writing a book, please don't start with an interesting story that is at best tangentially related to the one you are attempting to tell. I read this book one time that started that way, and it didn't turn out well.

26 November 2013

Nicholas and Alexandra

I just finished reading Nicholas and Alexandra, Robert Massie's telling of the end of the Romanov dynasty and the rise of Bolshevism and Soviet communism in Russia. It is a fascinating story, truly compelling and multi-faceted. Massie captures the tragedy, ironies, and historical particularities of that moment so well. For a 600 page history book it read like a novel.

I will give a short rundown of the basics. Nicholas, heir to the throne, is suddenly made Tsar when his father, Alexander III, dies unexpectedly. He hastily marries Alix of the German house of Hesse who becomes Tsaritsa. Nicholas is not as strong-willed as his father, but is a competent manager and loyal Russian patriot. The Tsar and his wife have four daughters before having a son and heir, the Tsarevich Alexis who is diagnosed at a young age with hemophilia.

Nicholas is a loving father, but in over his head when it comes to leading a nation through tumultuous times. He had little training, his father thinking that there would be more time to instruct his son in the way of leadership. His wife is a religious mystic, driven mad by her son's disease. She is attended to by Gregory Rasputin, a peasant monk who has a number of uncanny visions and prophecies which wind up coming to fruition. Alexandra becomes devoted to Rasputin and when Nicholas goes to the Eastern front to lead the Russian army in World War I, Alexandra becomes the de facto leader of Russia. Rasputin, by this time firmly established in the household, pulls the strings of ministerial appointments in the government and causes great unrest among the ruling class. Nicholas, too uxorious for his own good, defaults to his wife in a number of disastrous policies. Alexandra is so focused on her hemophiliac son becoming the supreme autocrat of Russia that she refuses to allow any small reforms in the governing structure of Russia, increasing hostilities towards the royal family especially as the war drags on.

Attempting to free the Romanovs from the taint of Rasputin, a number of monarchist gentry stage the murder of Rasputin. It is bungled, but ultimately successful, but by this point the damage is done. Too many people are too upset with the Tsar who reluctantly abdicates his throne. Fearing the breakup of his family, he does not abdicate to his son, the heir, but to his younger, dissolute brother. Hoping to wait out the war in Russia and then retire to England, the royal family is imprisoned in their palace outside of St. Petersburg (Petrograd at the time). When the provisional government falls to the Bolsheviks, they are removed to Siberia. As the white army encroaches on the head city of Soviet Siberia the entire Romanov family, even the dog, is taken to the basement of their prison and executed in gruesome fashion. They are then chopped up into small pieces, burned with fire, melted with sulphuric acid and dropped into an abandoned mine shaft.

One drum that I continually beat is the difficulty of speaking monolithically about history. Reading over my short summary I am struck by how simple that rendering is for something that is anything but simple. Too often we want to impose an easy narrative on past events that makes them readily discernible to us, despite their often infinite complexity. Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, has been portrayed popularly as an impotent man who ceded power to his arrogant wife and through pusillanimity allowed the autocracy and monarchy to be wrenched away from Russia. By the revolutionaries he was bloody Nicholas, the tyrant who entered World War I in a perverse attempt to kill off Russia's revolutionary workers in bloody battle, the very symbol of proletariat suppression.

An irony of the case is that if Nicholas had been the bloodthirsty tyrant the Bolsheviks made him out to be, he would have tamped out their small flame in a number of days. As it was, he was merely an ardent patriot who abdicated in a doomed attempt to save his beloved Russia. He was feckless in a certain sense and unprepared for the wave of hostility that came upon the monarchy in his time. He deferred to his wife too often and should have been willing to make more concessions to popular government. His cousin, King George V of England, willingly saw the powers of the monarchy decrease in his nation and finished his life happily as more of a figurehead than an autocrat.

As for the Empress Alexandra, she was undoubtedly driven mad to a certain degree by the illness of her son. She was a loyal Russian though, and not the German spy of the anti-monarchical propaganda. As for her relationship with Rasputin, it is only fair to say that she had a different religious constitution than most people. A number of Rasputin's prophecies were eerily fulfilled, and though the man himself was a deviant and manipulator, he steadfastly showed to Alexandra his holy side. It is easy to see how she was duped; where some would see mere coincidence she saw miracles of God. Where some saw a lecherous opportunist, she saw the holy man who saved her son.

The first time Clara saw me reading the book she asked me why I was reading it. I told her it was because I love Russia. She said, "I think you just love reading." Which is so true. The reason I love reading is because it unsettles me. It is no secret that I love and admire John Milton, the English poet. Milton, living during the English Civil War, wrote defenses for the revolutionaries who had killed the English king, Charles I. Not in a battle, but through the charade of a show trial. Maybe the case is entirely different and Charles was the tyrant Milton and others made him out to be. Maybe his death was justified. But then again maybe not. At the very least it was more complex than it seemed in Milton's propaganda tracts. The Charles I know is Milton's Charles. How different would Nicholas seem to me if all that I read was Lenin's account of his life? Maybe I should read something a bit less biased about Charles.

As any earnest college freshman will tell you, History is written by the victors, yada yada, that is mostly true. But what is even truer is that history is written by people--people with limited knowledge, biases, and flawed reasoning, about people with limited knowledge, biases, and flawed reasoning and the things they do that often show very little logic and no arc of progression. Yet it is fascinating all the same, and often illuminating. Nicholas and Alexandra and the entire Romanov family are tragic figures of a tragic era, a tragedy made all the more palpable by the horrors of Leninism and Stalinism that followed their demise. Could it have been different? Sure. Was it? Nope. Historical what-ifs are a fun parlor game, but what happened in Russia happened. And while we will never fully grasp all the factors at work that brought everything to bear on that proud people, we can acknowledge that event in its complexity and humanity. Long live Holy Russia.

19 November 2013

Seven Days that Divide the World, Part One

The question of the origins of our earth and the people, creatures, and plants populating it remains as relevant today as ever. What are we, as Christians, to think about all of this? Can we stomach a 4.5 billion year old earth and 16 billion year old cosmos? Does Biblical fidelity require that we take the Bible literally (or literalistically) in its seven day account and withstand the mockery of modern scientists? Can we stake out some middle ground between the two? A sort of god-in-the-gaps theistic evolution or Old Earth cosmology combined with a special creation of Adam and Eve in the garden?

For years I have been noncommittal on this issue. I went to a church in college where the pastor had majored in the physical sciences as an undergrad and was well-known locally as a defender of the Young Earth movement. His enthusiasm never quite wore off on me, but he conveyed the issue as monumentally important and indeed elemental to our Christian faith. He often used Jesus' words in the Gospel of John--"If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe me, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things" (3.12)--as a sort of prooftext for this idea that the physical claims of the Bible bear great weight concerning the truth of the metaphysical claims. 

So this was my major input for a significant developmental period of my life, one in which I furthermore did everything within my power to escape science altogether. Holla at a business major. But I could never quite escape the feeling that maybe the Bible didn't need to be read that way, and as much as I respected and still do respect my college pastor I could never quite believe that the world's scientists (even a good number of the Christian ones!) were in a secret cabal dedicated to defeating a literalistic interpretation of Genesis 1. So I did what any lazy person does: kicked the can down the road. 

But lately that tactic has been unsatisfying. It might have something to do with having kids now and the prospect of having these questions addressed to me, not in some abstract way, but by an adorable little blond-haired, blue-eyed boy who is deeply inquisitive about this world and looks to me as the Explainer. And I don't want to be a liar to my son and daughter. 

I was talking about this recently with a friend who is in a similar position. Neither of us wants to teach our kids comfortable, well-intentioned lies, but neither do we want to be needlessly unfaithful to Scripture. If Young Earth is true, in the face of the overwhelming testimony of the scientific community, I don't want to be too cowardly to teach that to my kids. On the other hand, I don't want to teach them Young Earth Creationism because I am too cowardly to square with scientific truth. He and I both sort of feel as if we will never be fully settled on this issue. And so his question to me was how, practically, do we teach it to our kids. And we settled, unsatisfyingly but probably prudently, on teaching the confusion. Teaching our kids that it is OK to not know everything for sure, and that Scripture was not given to us as a universal compendium of knowledge. 

But I still wanted to know more, and I wanted to know where to turn for answers to this question. I remember an old episode of the Simpsons where there is some debate between Creationists and evolutionists and the evolutionist is a Harvard PhD and the Christian debater has a degree in Truthology from Christian University. It might be a caricature, but that is how this debate feels too often. I don't believe that anyone--secular or religious--comes to science without preconceived notions of what they might find or what they wish to believe, but it often seems as if Christians start with Genesis as if it were a science textbook and proceed accordingly. As admirable as dedication to Scripture is, it can lead down some wrong roads and end in needless reductionistic/antagonistic thinking when it is read incorrectly.

And you can buy a book that will tell you just about anything. I remember being in a lecture once with my Renaissance lit professor and a student spouted out some nonsense, I forget even what it was now. The professor asked him where he had come up with such a ludicrous notion. He said with confidence that he had read it in a book. My professor lifted his thespian's brow and said, "Well, you need to read better books."

Which is to say, I am hopeful that I have found a better book on this subject. I am reading Seven Days that Divide the World by the Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science John C. Lennox. It is a popular level book intended for an audience such as myself and hopefully like you: a Christian who is inquisitive about these issues and wonders how it might be possible to reconcile the claims of science with the doctrine of Creation. And I therefore intend to do something that I haven't done in quite some time: read a book slowly and blog my way through it. I hope to learn something by slowing down and hopefully this can be beneficial for you all as well. So join me, if you so desire. We may not lay these questions to rest (what, after all, would be the fun in that?), but I hope our understanding is increased as well as our charity for the "other side," whomever that might be for you in this debate.

On that note, as I close I want to say that while it is easy and common for our broader culture to mock the views of Young Earth Creationists, I find it abhorrent when other believers do so. As I have moved away personally from Young Earth views I have often asked myself what I might be losing out on by heeding the scientific discoveries of the past two centuries (and longer), and it has made me understand the tight-fistedness with which Young Earth believers hold on to their beliefs and sympathize with them (the loss feels real). And I want to profess humility on this issue: I am not a scientist nor will I ever be mistaken for one. I have never even watched The Big Bang Theory. Do I believe that God could have created the world in six literal days, resting on the seventh? 100%, absolutely yes. Do I believe that is what science tells us? Increasingly no. Do I believe that is the mandatory interpretation of the beginning of Genesis? Again, increasingly no. There. Cards. Table. Meet.

More to come.

12 November 2013

The Shining, or The Only Thing I Fear is Fear Itself

I don't like scary movies. At all. I never have. I never will. I am intransigent on this score. I remember as a kid--I couldn't have been more than five--being at my Grandpa Leon's house, a man with a bit of a laissez-faire attitude toward what was appropriate for children to watch, and refusing to watch Pet Cemetery with him and my three year-old brother. Tyler, so far as I can remember, was undisturbed. (For those of you who know him this might explain some of his viewing habits and preferences.) I sat in the kitchen coloring pictures with my grandma. I have only seen a handful of honest-to-God scary movies since then. And I have hated them all. 

(It should be noted here briefly that for some reason the zombie genre is exempt from this intense dislike. There is something so implausible about a zombie outbreak that is not shared by, say, Hostel that refuses to allow it too far into my head. Zombie movies to me aren't even scary, so much as gross action movies.)

As such, I have also studiously avoided horror fiction as a genre. I have read Frankenstein and Dracula, but that is about as scary as reading has ever got for me. But for some reason I was looking for something new to read on the Kindle and I searched for Stephen King novels. The Shining was the first hit and it was something like $4, which for 400 pages and many hours of entertainment seemed like a bargain. For some reason, in my mind King has always been a hack writer. Perhaps it has something to do with this clip from an old Family Guy (yes, dear God, I used to watch Family Guy). Or maybe it is because I spent a chunk of one unfortunate afternoon watching The Langoliers. But this was really well-written stuff. And for much of the time, absolutely terrifying.

Was there an episode of Friends where Joey is reading The Shining and he gets so scared that he puts it in the freezer? (Oh, and, yes, dear God, I used to watch Friends.) That is how I felt for a good chunk of this book. "Get this thing away from me. Oh wait, what happens next?" Weird things happened while I was reading the book as well. For example, the family is snowed into the hotel on the 7th of November. The day I read that was the seventh of November. Jack makes his last phone call before the winter sets in to the manager of the hotel who winters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I had just read the scene at my lunch break at work and we got a phone call from a Florida area code. There was no one on the other end of the line. I Googled the area code. 305. Serving residents of the Florida coast from Miami up to Fort Lauderdale. I couldn't read it by myself at night. I held Clara tight, and kissed my babies with vigor. In many ways it was even scarier than the film version. 

For me it has everything to do with pacing. Now again, I am no connoisseur of horror movies, but I understand that where the scariest films get a lot of their mileage is the pacing. You have to build to that big moment of fright, whether a gruesome death, or a scared jump/scream-inducing thing, or a big reveal. That is why sound is such a crucial element to scary movies. All film has to do that. And all film fails to do that as well as a book simply because pacing doesn't translate as well to the medium of the film as it does in the book. When you have a 100 minute long film, you can only spend so many minutes building up the tension around a scene. When you have a 400 page book that takes the better part of 15 hours to read, you can go slow as hell.

And that is just what King does, time and time again in this book. For me the scariest scene was when little Danny was in room 217 and the naked ghost woman comes out of the tub and puts her hands around his throat (cut scene). That sentence I just wrote takes about ten seconds to read and isn't that scary. The scene in the book took several minutes. Several terrifying minutes. When the visualization is all in your head sometimes it becomes more acute; your brain is not passive and has to do more work and is therefore more attuned to what is going on. As her hands curled around his neck I could feel pressure on my own. My heart was racing, my eyes flying down the page to try to catch the resolution or the next thing or anything to break the tension of that lingering moment. 

I hated it, and I loved it. It was very weird. Maybe that is how everyone feels about scary movies and I am just sort of getting a glimpse. Not that I want to dwell in that world any longer. My Netflix queue remains bereft of horror movies. My Kindle is unadorned with further scary books. I want the scary stuff to always scare me on those rare moments I indulge whatever reptilian part of our brain digs that stuff. I don't want to become comfortable with it or desensitized to its effects. I regard the capacity to be a 30 year-old man reduced to that five year-old at the kitchen table with grandma as a net positive in my life. 

Speaking of which, that sounds like a good start to a horror movie. A grown man becomes child-like when confronted by fear, taking solace in the memories of coloring pictures idly at his grandmother's table to escape his Philistine relatives, only it is revealed that the pictures he drew were far more lurid and grotesque than anything in the movies he avoided and the sweet innocent boy was nothing of the sort. Reveal: the man is actual in an insane asylum, having murdered his family with an ice pick and a blowtorch after seeing a dead dog in a cemetery (I still have no idea what that movie is about, clearly), and though his doctors think he is rehabilitated he is getting the urge to kill again. And maybe he can read minds. I don't know yet. And maybe that dead dog talks to him somehow. Or all dead dogs can. I don't know. See Spot Kill, Halloween 2016. You're welcome, America.

11 November 2013

Running Log: October 27 - November 9

Well, it happened. It had to at some point, I guess. I have my first running injury. On the first day of this time period, the 27th of October, I took a 10 mile pre-church run. It was freezing cold and given my earlier bad luck with my running tights, I was running in shorts only. My legs felt like leaden weights they were so numb. But I was running fine, accomplishing what I set out to do. With about two or three miles left I started to feel a nagging pain down around my ankle. I figured it wouldn't be a big deal and anyway I needed to get home so I ran it out. Later that day it hurt even worse, right at the Achilles tendon. And it doesn't take a physical therapist to tell someone what a sore Achilles signifies: Achilles tendinosis, a degeneration of the tendon caused by a variety of contributing factors, many of which I am profoundly guilty.

So for the past two weeks my running has been minimal. I took six whole days off immediately after feeling the pain. Since then I have run every other day, never farther than four miles. It is absolutely miserable. To feel as if you are finally getting somewhere and then to have to go back to square one is a terrible feeling. I really need to learn to enjoy lifting weights of riding a bike or something, because my mild depression over not being able to run has led to poor food choices. 

My only consolation is that I am still far enough out from spring races that as long as I recover fairly well from this I should still be able to compete in the spring. I was ahead of pace as far as training goes and my one recurrent problem in running has been peaking before the big races I am training for. Maybe this is my body's way of trying to keep me in line.

If nothing else, there is also a spiritual lesson to be gleaned from this, one that is no less true for its proverbiality: Our bodies break down and fail, and where I need to invest most is not in my physical accomplishments but my spiritual well-being and ambitions. A good lesson, always timely, always necessary.

To a few more weeks of slowly run and slowly accumulated miles.  

05 November 2013

Hemingway & Style

My parents were in Paris a few weeks ago and I asked them to stop at Shakespeare & Company, the famous English book store on the Left Bank. I had been to the location in New York and wanted a book from the Paris location as well. My mom bought me a new copy of The Sun Also Rises, plus a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets and narrative poems. Well done, mom.

I went through a Hemingway phase when I first got into literature six years ago in El Paso. I read The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and every story in the Collected Short Stories in about a six month time-frame. Which is a lot of Hemingway. And he connected with 23 year-old Toby in a far different way than he did the 29 year-old Toby who just reread The Sun Also Rises. When I was younger it was easier to see the adventure to the tales: the bull-fighting, the war-time ambulance-driving, the freedom-fighting, the romance of the abundant wine in the Spanish or French cafes, and to gloss over the despair running through every book. These were the works, after all, of a man who committed suicide, a man in anguish over the loss of religion and the comfort it brings. I still enjoy reading Hemingway, but it didn't consume me the way it did the first time around when I stayed up late at night to read through his corpus. 

Since that first flurry of reading I have read some criticism of Hemingway, criticism that seems to focus on his prose first, those short declarative sentences he is famous for writing. Here is an example:

“The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta. All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout out any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days.” (p 142)

I choose this paragraph, though it could really be almost any other, as quintessentially Hemingway. Hemingway catches a lot of flack for his terse sentence structure. And it can be funny, especially when read out loud. Corey Stoll, playing Papa in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, nailed the cadence of his speech quite well, as well as the bravado. But there is something arresting about it at the same time.

For one, it is easy to follow. Some authors seem to consider inscrutability as a hallmark of good prose, but Hemingway went for intelligibility. For another, it lays bare the events being described. You might not care to know how many pesetas Jake Barnes paid each night for a hotel room, but you will know and you will know that he thought it too much to pay. So much so that he decided to make up the difference by binging on the complementary house wine. In the excerpt above, Hemingway builds up nicely from the length and atmosphere of the fiesta of Pamplona to the effect it has on the speech and actions of the characters. The seven day party disbands the group, might destroy a marriage, ends in drunkenness and fisticuffs and regret. At the beginning of the paragraph a seven day fiesta sounds like a hell of a time. By the end, you just want the thing to be over already. Enough of the shouting.

Yet another attraction to me of the style is the almost poetic nature it can take. I chose the above excerpt for that very reason. The cadence you fall into while reading that paragraph sounds very much like a poem, unrhymed of course and with more than a hint of Homeric influence. One of my favorite poems of all time is Psalm 8, which begins and ends “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.” We go on a journey in the meantime and when the line is repeated at the end it has new emphasis. Hemingway’s style can provide the same effect as that of the Psalmist, though to a different degree of course. And it can be quite lovely.

So give Papa a break, critics. His style may not be widespread and might have lost our to complex word webs, but he was a way better writer than you are and he understood what he was doing. And he was very good at what he did. And true and brave.