Dracula Is A Mirror to Today’s Christian Nationalism

Today, friends, we are going to jump into the way-back machine and take it out for a spin. We are going back…to the 90’s. Not the 90’s of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, coffeeshops and the Seattle grunge scene, Seinfeld, Friends, Arrested Development (the band, not the TV show), Abercrombie & Fitch and other crimes against women’s body image. No, we are going back further, to a place and time very much like our own, in which a fabulously wealthy and powerful God-fearing white Christian empire that controlled a goodly portion of the globe, much like our own, faced fears of its own decline.

The place is Great Britain. The time, the 1890’s.

The 1890’s were a heady and exciting time in Great Britain. Technological advances like the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, and the first underwater transoceanic telegraph cables changed how we communicate and even how we saw the world and our place in it, and created new possibilities for women seeking to live independently and/or attain greater social stature. In the entertainment world, movies were starting to become a thing. The Great Exhibition of 1851, a precursor to today’s museums, brought together artifacts from throughout the British Empire’s colonial possessions all in one place for the first time ever. Previously anyone who wished to view such things had to rely exclusively on written descriptions by missionaries and colonial administrators. Painted dioramas were a 19th-century version of virtual reality, allowing viewers to experience such things as a cruise down the Nile or the Ganges virtually, without ever actually leaving London.

Yet despite all these exciting new developments, there were mounting fears of social/cultural decline. Though the British empire was at the height of its power and glory, there was a growing sense that the peak had been reached and there was nowhere to go but down. This sense was fed by recent military defeats and fears around the rise of Germany and the US as burgeoning economic powers, and just a general sense that the world was running out of unexplored places where adventure could still be found. Changing social and cultural realities such as the ascendance of women and an increasing immigrant population further fed these fears of impending decline.

Not surprisingly, these ever-mounting fears of social/cultural decline found expression in the literature of the period. The 1890’s gave us some of our best known and loved Gothic horror novels: H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and more. These stories gave us the Victorian monster, in which all the social/cultural anxieties of the day – the decline of traditional gender roles as women assumed greater social/cultural power and influence, the loss of white identity due to an increasing population of immigrants from places that were the 1890’s equivalent of what our previous political leadership called “shithole countries”, and the loss of Christian supremacy as these immigrants brought exotic new religions which began to clamor for space in the British religious/cultural milieu – found expression in the form of some larger-than-life supervillain, against whom the Christian heroes of the story would do battle with nothing less than the very fate of humanity itself on the line. The Christian heroes would triumph in the end and readers would breathe an existential sigh of relief. And of course, the larger and more powerful the supervillain could be made out to be, the stronger and sweeter the feeling of triumph at the end.

There are many stories from this period that are worth looking into. The Time Machine is H. G. Wells’ attempt to flesh out what a world in decline would look like. The Beetle gives us a shapeshifting, gender-bending monster with ties to an ancient Egyptian cult and has strong throughlines of queerphobia and transphobia that are increasingly relevant in our present historical/cultural moment. Yen How is an 1890’s predecessor to the more widely known Fu Manchu novels that would begin to appear a couple of decades later. These stories leaned very heavily into stereotypes of the Asiatic criminal mastermind and fears of the Yellow Peril that are increasingly relevant today, as evidenced by right-wing conspiracy theories about nefarious Wuhan virologists cooking up Covid in a top-secret lab somewhere.

The story that is of interest to us today is Dracula.

Dracula has seen numerous adaptations and reboots over the years, in book, movie, TV series, and video game form, each bringing its own unique twist to the tale. So before we go any further, we would do well to review the plot of Bram Stoker’s original version.

The plot can best be summarized in three words, which represent the three overarching movements of the story: East – West – East. In the beginning, a young, naive, freshly minted British solicitor by the name of Jonathan Harker travels east by train to see a wealthy client about a possible real estate deal. That client is none other than Count Dracula of Transylvania. Harker slowly but surely wises up to his circumstances: He has been imprisoned by an immortal vampire who intends to infiltrate London after first feeding him to his bloodthirsty vampire brides. Harker nopes the fuck out, somehow managing to elude all three of Dracula’s brides. After a harrowing journey eventually makes it back home to England and to his wife Mina.

The next movement brings us back to England, where Dracula has arrived via shipwreck at Whitby, a seaside tourist destination. After snacking on a few Russian sailors, Dracula heads inland. He attacks and vampirises Mina’s friend Lucy. He then travels to London where he sets up lairs all around the city. Harker and a small friend group, led by Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, must kill the undead Lucy. This they do by beheading her and impaling her body with a wooden stake.

In the third and final movement, Van Helsing and the vampire hunters have expelled Dracula from London and they head east in hot pursuit, with a sense of urgency as Dracula has attacked Mina and placed her under a curse and they must find and kill him before the curse leaves her in a permanent vampire state. A thrilling chase through the Carpathian mountains ends at Dracula’s castle in Transylvania. There they kill all three of Dracula’s brides and finally Dracula himself, by cutting off his head and stabbing him in the heart. But they neglect to use the required wooden stake, thereby leaving open the possibility that Dracula might one day return.

If just this three-paragraph summary left you gasping for air, imagine how the novel in its entirety must have affected Stoker’s readers in 1890’s England. Whether people loved it or hated it, Dracula elicited very strong reactions. No small part of this was due to its depictions of Christianity.

There were vampire novels before Dracula, but Christian symbolism in vampire stories was not a thing until Dracula. The use of this Christian symbolism makes it clear: Harker and friends are waging a holy war, with Dr. Van Helsing as their fearless, intrepid general. Van Helsing is Catholic, which is a fantastic thing given the state of Catholic/Protestant relations in 1890’s Great Britain. The vampire hunters also include English Anglicans and one American Protestant. Thus, Dracula offers readers the fantasy of Christian unity – an ecumenical brotherhood of modern-day crusaders, setting aside their religious differences to join together in waging holy war. But to these crusaders, the cross is not just a symbol emblazoned on their shields. Instead it is an offensive weapon whose power, as depicted in the story, is very much reminiscent of today’s AR-15.

“Crusader” rifles – That’s a thing, y’all. Google it.

This was a first: Christianity as action movie. But this holy war isn’t merely a product of its time. It has striking connections to our present historical/cultural moment over a century later, in which conservative evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, and others, including some Jews, Muslims, and Hindus (Vivek Ramaswamy is a case in point), all put aside their differences and come together as a brotherhood of modern-day crusaders to fight the culture wars of the far right.

Realism and a culture of immersive spectacle were very much a thing in 1890’s Great Britain. Movies and dioramas created immersive spectacles for their viewers. Gothic authors would create immersive spectacles with words, and Stoker was a master of this. Stoker wrote Dracula in the style of an epistolary novel – instead of telling the story straight through, he presented it as a series of letters, journals, telegrams, fictional newspaper clippings, photograph transcriptions, and more. The novel references places and events with which Stoker’s 19th century readers would have been familiar. A Nordic edition referenced Jack The Ripper.

But Stoker took his realism to another level by reminding his readers of things they would have feared in real life. Dracula is a tale of dueling conspiracies: there is the conspiracy of the vampire hunters secretly waging their war against the undead, a war not covered by the lame-stream media. But Dracula was also informed by another conspiracy, one with which white Christian readers in late 19th century Great Britain were obsessed. Long before Kanye, British anti-Semites were talking about the existence of a secret cabal of wealthy Jewish financiers controlling all of society for their own nefarious ends, which could be glimpsed by obsessively scanning current events – doing your own research. The influx of eastern European immigrants, of whom many were Jews fleeing Russian persecution, was believed to be bringing contagion, and the blame for a cholera epidemic in London was laid at the feet of these Jews. Racist politician Arnold White made hay by proposing that Jews were being imported to England, some by wealthy Jewish benefactors. Then there was the Rothschild conspiracy theory which stated that wealthy Jewish magnate Nathan Rothschild made his fortune by profiting from the bloodshed at Waterloo.

Conspiracy theories are their own kind of immersive spectacle: an amalgam of hard fact, hypothesis, and outright fantasy, all packaged together into an all-encompassing narrative that all comes down to one singular idea – THEY are out to get YOU. The cultural obsession with decline that was in the air in 1890’s Great Britain gave this wings. The idea that the Jews are responsible for the decline of the white race drives the anti-Semitism that Stoker channels into Dracula. From the jump, we know that Dracula is from eastern Europe, as are most Jews. When Harker first meets Dracula we learn that his facial features match Jewish stereotypes. Later, Harker sees Dracula sleeping in his crypt and notes that he looks younger, with fresh blood on his lips. This is the first hint of the conspiracy that will be fleshed out over the remainder of the novel – that Dracula intends to colonize London by replacing its residents with a new race of semi-demons. You could say that Dracula is masterminding a “Great Replacement” of his day. The notion of a wealthy supervillain conspiring to alter the demographics of the West for his own nefarious ends – yeah, that didn’t start with George Soros. But Dracula isn’t just conspiring to replace the English people, he is also buying up England’s native soil. In a key subplot, the vampire hunters must race to locate all the properties Dracula has acquired as hideouts. Another dimension is Dracula’s taste for blood, noted above. This harkens back to one of the oldest anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on the books: the “blood libel”, a medieval conspiracy theory that Jews kidnapped Christian children in order to drink their blood in secret rituals.

This was all part of Dracula‘s realism. The notion of a top-secret Jewish cabal, glimpsed by obsessively scanning current events – “doing your own research” – was very much in the air back then. Sound familiar, anyone?

In response to this, Stoker calls for another kind of conspiracy – that of the vampire hunters under the leadership of Dr. Van Helsing. Much like today’s J6 insurrectionists and their allies/sympathizers, Van Helsing and friends have something of a martyr complex that drives their holy war. They believe that they have no choice but to work in secret because the forces of evil are so pervasive that it is not safe to serve God openly. They “do their own research” to track Dracula’s movements and whereabouts. They trespass, they bribe high-ranking officials, they are less than fully transparent about their motives, they desecrate cemeteries and even corpses. All of which would mortify any good upstanding, God-fearing Victorian. But they alone are the true believers in an age of doubt and apostasy, and that justifies everything. At the end, Harker admits to not having a shred of actual evidence to back up any part of his story. In a very clever twist of reverse psychology, Stoker puts this back on the reader and the question hanging in the air is: Are you going to accept this by faith? If you balk because you want proof, then you place yourself on the side of doubt and unbelief, and you know that these are Dracula’s most potent weapons. So you, pious Christian, had better choose wisely.

Stoker’s invitation to join the holy conspiracy resonates throughout today’s American conservatism. And a new generation of true believers is answering the call with astounding enthusiasm. CPAC is a thing of which some of you may have heard, a Comic-Con of the far right, if you will. At CPAC’s 2022 event, attendees were treated to a very curious exhibit: an imprisoned J6 insurrectionist in a cage in the middle of the exhibit space. Viewers could put on headsets and listen to actual testimony from J6 insurrectionists at their trials. The imprisoned insurrectionist was not someone who actually went to jail, but instead an actor. This actor was a J6 participant who was able to elude jail time by informing on other J6 participants. At one point Marjorie Taylor-Greene entered the cage and led the crowd in prayer for the imprisoned insurrectionist. This whole thing was multiple layers of mindfuck: Was this an actual prayer for a fake J6 insurrectionist? Or a fake prayer for an actual J6 insurrectionist? Or a prayer for an actual J6 insurrectionist by proxy some kind of way that only God could sort out? Whatever it was, CPAC attendees loved it and the whole thing only hardened their resolve. Then there is QAnon, which blends the factual, the hypothetical, and the batshit crazy into an all-encompassing narrative that there is a radical leftist “deep state” in which prominent world leaders are part of a top-secret cabal that sexually exploits children and drinks their blood in secret rituals. Adherents keep tabs on the activities of “Q” by obsessively scanning current events. They build their own personal archives of articles and social media posts, reminiscent of the form of Dracula. They eagerly await “The Storm”, in which “Q” and Donald Trump will take down the “deep state” once and for all, resulting in mass arrests of Democrats and globalists the world over. Donald Trump will be installed as president for life and reign forever and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity, world without end, amen.

120 years before “Q”, Stoker and Dracula tantalized readers with the idea of a holy war waged in secret, not covered by the “lame-stream media”. A war in which a notorious undead supervillain who embodied all the worst fears and conspiracy theories of the day wreaked havoc upon the world that Stoker’s readers knew and loved, but the forces of good, the holy conspiracy, triumphed in the end. That invitation to join the true believers in holy war against the forces of darkness resonates across the centuries. Today’s American conservatives have answered the call with unmitigated enthusiasm, and we see the results all around us in the present historical/cultural moment.

Another Take on the Parable of the Pounds

Today we are going to look at the parable of the Pounds.

Our story is found in Luke 19. Your translation might say “talents” or “minas”. Jesus is among his followers, and he uncorks a parable:

A man of noble birth went to a distant country to have himself appointed king and then to return. So he called ten of his servants and gave them ten minas. “Put this money to work,” he said, “until I come back.”

But his subjects hated him and sent a delegation after him to say, “We don’t want this man to be our king.”

He was made king, however, and returned home. Then he sent for the servants to whom he had given the money, in order to find out what they had gained with it.

The first one came and said, “Sir, your mina has earned ten more.”

“Well done, my good servant!” his master replied. “Because you have been trustworthy in a small matter, take charge of ten cities.”

The second came and said, “Sir, your mina has earned five more.”

His master answered, “You take charge of five cities.”

Then another servant came and said, “Sir, here is your mina, I have kept it laid away in a piece of cloth. I was afraid of you, because you are a hard man. You take out what you did not put in and reap what you did not sow.”

His master replied, “I will judge you by your own words, you wicked servant! You knew, did you, that I am a hard man, taking out what I did not put in, and reaping what I did not sow? Why then didn’t you put my money on deposit, so that when I came back, I could have collected it with interest?”

Then he said to those standing by, “Take his mina away from him and give it to the one who has ten minas.”

“Sir,” they said, “he already has ten!”

He replied, “I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but as for the one who has nothing, even what he has will be taken away. But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them–bring them here and kill them in front of me.”

–Luke 19:12-27

No doubt you are all aware of the traditional interpretation of this parable, which is all over the place in western Christianity. It’s all about the money, and how the servants were faithful (or not) with what they were given. Be like the faithful servant(s). Don’t be like the unfaithful one. Be faithful to God and seek to grow spiritually, and more will be given to you. Don’t squander what God has given you, or it will be taken away from you. And certainly don’t be the subjects who didn’t want this master to be made king over them. The final verse even serves potentially as a nifty type for eternal conscious torment of all who reject God, in full view of God himself and all who are faithful to Him.

I would bet good money that Jesus means something altogether different here.

This parable does not exist in a vacuum. Instead Luke situates it in a specific context: “While they were listening to this, he went on to tell them a parable…” (19:11) What were they listening to? The story of Zaccheus the tax collector is right before this. Jesus has come to dinner at Zaccheus’s house and Zaccheus has promised to pay back everything that he extorted from others and Jesus has said “Today salvation has come to this house…”. That exchange is what they were listening to. Luke gives us even more context: “…because he was near Jerusalem and the people thought that the kingdom of God was going to appear at once.” (19:11)

The parable is a pointed reference to Archelaus, a corrupt regent in the area who some thirty years prior had gone away to have himself commissioned as a ruler and who had appointed servants to exploit the people of his territory on his behalf. Archelaus’s servants were charged with increasing his fortune in his absence, likely by using the exact same methods which Zaccheus himself had used, and of which he had just repented. Why in the world would you think that Jesus, in a roomful of Zaccheus’s tax collector friends, would have made a ruler like Archelaus the hero of his story and commended us to be “faithful” to Him by using the exact same methods of which Zaccheus had just repented?

I submit to you that the real hero of this story is the “unfaithful” servant. He sees through the Archelaus-type’s game and refuses to participate. He calls out the whole thing for what it is, and pays the price for it. Such is the way of this world: Power is set up to protect itself, and those who attempt to speak truth to it will pay the price.

Jesus told this parable to a roomful of people who all thought that the kingdom of God was going to appear at once, in an attempt to tamp down their enthusiasm. This parable was a warning: The kingdom of God is not coming right away. Until it does, your job is to go out into the world and speak truth to the powerful and the perpetrators of injustice in our world. Be warned: It will probably not go well for you, just as it did not go well for the “unfaithful” servant in our story.

Andy Savage Ruined Making Out For Me

There is a beautiful young woman on the horizon of my world.  (And I’m…well, hoping for the best but expecting the worst.  Hey, story of my life:  The other guy always gets the girl while I get to go home to my imaginary wife and 2.6 imaginary kids.)

As you might suspect, this is a crush.  Crushes suck, but there is an upside which makes it all worthwhile, in that you have this beautiful young woman out there on the horizon of your world and you’re trying oh so hard to be the very best you that you can possibly be because she’s oh so worth it and today–any day–could be the day she says “YES!!!!!  I’M YOURS!!!!!  TAKE ME AWAY!!!!!”

I have this recurring fantasy that one night I will be out on a date with her and she will want to take the long way home.  This will involve going to a spot I know that affords the best view of the Atlanta skyline you probably never knew existed, watching the sun set and seeing the light of the setting sun illuminate the buildings off in the distance.  Likely there will be some physical affection–hand-holding, arm-around-the-shoulder, perhaps even a kiss–involved.  This is what we commonly know of as “making out”.

Andy Savage ruined all of that for me.

ICYMI (that’s “In Case You Missed It” for those of you who are not millennials or otherwise well-versed in the ways millennials express themselves via texting and/or social media):  Andy Savage was the teaching pastor at Highpoint Church in Memphis.  He resigned earlier this year over an instance of sexual misconduct from twenty years prior which recently came to light as part of the #metoo movement.

Savage had been youth pastor at a church in the Houston suburbs.  He was in his early twenties, in his first real ministry job.  Jules Woodson was a student in his youth group.  One night she was at church late after a youth group function and needed a ride home.  He took her the long way home, as it were, to a remote spot on the edge of town, and there he did the nefarious sexual deed.  When he was done he suddenly fell to his knees before her and pleaded with her, in a panic, to forgive him and never speak of it again.  Woodson recounts the incident in her own words here and here.

Woodson reported the incident to church leadership.  They covered it up and did not report it to the authorities.  Instead Savage was honorably discharged from his role as youth pastor and allowed to leave quietly after admitting only to a minor indiscretion.  Savage returned to his hometown of Memphis, and there he went on to become a celebrity pastor/speaker/writer/blogger.  The incident was never spoken of again until it resurfaced earlier this year as part of the #metoo movement.

This story hits me in a special place.  Why?  Because when there is a beautiful young woman on the horizon of your world and you’re trying oh so hard to be the very best you that you can possibly be because she’s oh so worth it…well, stories like this hit you in a special place.

Andy Savage has ruined “making out” for me.  And maybe it’s just as well.  Because I can’t fathom–don’t even want to fathom–the notion of going out with a beautiful young woman, taking her the long way home, and having it end the way it did for Savage and Woodson.

Chasing Extraordinary

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to volunteer at one of the Passion 2014 gatherings.  As volunteers it is frequently emphasized to us that any of the students passing through this gathering could be the next Chris Tomlin, John Piper, Louie Giglio, or Beth Moore.  Several will go out from this gathering to start megachurches, influence denominations, start hugely successful nonprofits dedicated to providing clean water in Africa or ending sex slavery in India…who knows?  And we get to be on the front lines of serving them during this time.

Certainly, given the law of averages and the size of a typical Passion gathering these days, there is a strong likelihood that the next Louie Giglio, Chris Tomlin, John Piper, or Beth Moore is somewhere in the room.  But what no one seems to want to talk about very much is that the vast majority of these students will not be the next Chris Tomlin, Louie Giglio, or Beth Moore.  Instead, the vast majority of these students will go out into the real world and take jobs as engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, IT professionals, baristas, nurses, paralegals, plumbers, carpenters, architects, you name it.  The vast majority of these students will live in the city as young professionals, or get married and move to the suburbs and start families.  There they will live as husbands, mothers, fathers, wives, and strive to raise children in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

But in the evangelicalism of our day and age, this is not good enough.

We are addicted to chasing extraordinary.

In so many parts of evangelicalism, Paul is held up as the standard to emulate and strive for.  Look at his zealous, singlehearted, radical devotion to Christ!  Look at what all he went through in order to spread the Gospel throughout the known world of that time!  Look at the passion he felt, that drove him forward in all he did to advance the Gospel!  Shouldn’t you be ashamed if your life is anything less than this?  This is exactly the sort of thing we get from so many pulpits and conferences for zealous young college students in evangelicalism these days.

But who received Paul’s letters?  It was ordinary believers.  Not other apostles.  Not even other pastors.  Paul’s letters were written to ordinary, rank-and-file believers.  Bet you didn’t notice this, did you?

These people, the recipients of Paul’s letters, were carpenters, farmers, traders, sailors, fishermen, shepherds, mothers, fathers, and children.  Compared to the apostles, these people were no great shakes.  Their lives were quite mundane.  They were ordinary people who gathered together in someone’s home to drink their wine and eat their bread and hear the Holy Spirit speaking to them through the words of an apostle.

And then they went home.

And then they got up the next day and lived a perfectly normal life.

And they came back the next week and went through the exact same drill.

And on and on it went, all the way to the very end of their days.

Then they died, and now they are all forgotten.

For most of these people, the most extraordinary thing that happened in their lives was the day they trusted Christ and joined the Christian community.  After that, their lives were completely back to normal.  They listened to the words of Paul, learned from him, then in faith stayed exactly where they were, doing exactly what they were doing before, after he left.

Never in any of Paul’s writings do we get the sense that he was asking his readers to stop being who or what they were.  He never challenged them to pack it all up and go overseas to preach the Gospel.  We never get hints that he is making them feel guilty for living in relative comfort and ease, compared to his lack of it.

For some of you, this idea of identifying with the ordinary rank-and-file believers who received Paul’s letters may seem like a sort of death.  Death to the dream of being extraordinary, of being someone special.

I get that.  I once dreamed that I could one day be the next Chris Tomlin.  I once dreamed that I could stand on a stage and preach or sing in front of thousands.

Matt Chandler, a prominent megachurch pastor in the Dallas area, attended the first ever Passion gathering in Austin as a college student back in 1997.  During those days God turned his world upside down and sent him out as a flaming arrow across the sky for His glory.  Now he is a big-time megachurch pastor, widely recognized as the next John Piper.

Those are the sorts of stories that are celebrated around Passion.  You too can be just like Matt Chandler.  You too can be just like Chris Tomlin, who is now living the dream, married to a former Miss Auburn who is now the woman whom every young Christian woman on the face of the earth would give her very life to be.  Just pray harder.  Surrender more.  Dedicate more fervently.  Live with even greater zeal than before.

I wanted it.  God, how I wanted it.  I have been going to Passion gatherings for over a decade now, just hoping and praying that God would rock my world as he did Matt Chandler’s, and send me out as a flaming arrow across the sky for His glory.

Hasn’t happened yet.

So if this seems like a death to you, death to the dream of being extraordinary, death to the dream of being someone special, I get that.

But for countless others of you, this idea of identifying with the rank-and-file believer instead of the Apostle Paul is the greatest news you have ever heard in your life, next to the Gospel itself.

As noted earlier, we in evangelicalism are addicted to chasing extraordinary.  Meaning that we have GOT to make a good name for ourselves.  We have GOT to do big things for Christ that will be remembered by God and by others for all of eternity.  It is not enough to run your business ethically or raise small children to the glory of God unless you are doing it on another continent, with bullets flying overhead and malaria crouching at your door.  Why?  Because we approach life needing desperately to succeed.  To fail is to die.  Success equals life.

But because of God’s grace, we are free to be ordinary.  We don’t have to go out and turn the world upside down.  Jesus Christ already did that when he won the victory over sin and death at the cross.  We don’t need other people to love, respect, or approve of us in order for us to matter.  We don’t even need anything from God.  Why?  Because we already have everything we need in Christ Jesus.  Because Jesus was extraordinary, it is perfectly OK for us to be ordinary.

The Rich Man and Lazarus: A Picture of Heaven and Hell?

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

“The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

“But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

“He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

“Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

“‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”  (Luke 16:19-31)

This passage is the fire-and-brimstone preacher’s dream come true.  The issue of salvation presented in stark, contrasting terms.  The reality of an eternity with God or separated from Him in a place of intense physical misery, with a great gulf fixed between the two locations.  The urgency to make a decision right now as to where your eternal future will lie.

In the dispensational way of looking at things that a lot of you are probably familiar with, Hades is the realm of the dead.  Not their final destination, but a holding chamber, as it were, where the souls of the dead would consciously await the resurrection at the end of the age.  This place is separated into two distinct regions: one called “Paradise” or “Abraham’s bosom” where the blessed dead would wait to enter into eternity with God, and the other called “Sheol” where the not-so-blessed dead would await judgment and eternal separation from God.

Only the most ultra-super-hyper-literalist types would think that this story refers to an actual rich man and an actual beggar named Lazarus.  But a lot of you who read this story no doubt think that these are types for every person who has ever walked the face of the earth.  Will you be like the rich man, caring about nothing but your own wealth and comfort, showing no concern for the things of God or the needy in your midst, and ending up in hell?  Or will you be like Lazarus, who had nothing in this life and at the end was taken up to Abraham’s bosom to spend eternity with God?  That’ll preach!!!!!

Not so fast, my friend.

What if Jesus had something completely and totally different in view when he told this parable?

Some considerations:

–First, it is very difficult to show from Scripture that Hades refers to anything other than just “the grave” or “the place of the dead”.

–Jesus was using folktale elements to make a point here.  Notice that he draws the widest possible contrast between the rich man and Lazarus.  Notice also that Lazarus is not actually buried when he dies, but is instead carried off by angels a la Elijah, whereas the rich man is buried.  Bet you didn’t notice that detail, did you?

–Note also that this story does not exist in a vacuum.  Luke has placed it in a specific context.  Jesus has just finished telling the parable of a shrewd manager who, on the eve of his firing, did some creative bookkeeping to help people who were in his master’s debt.  He follows it up with some well-known sayings about money, including “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

The Pharisees know that Jesus is talking right at them.  Luke records their reaction thus:

The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus. He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight.

“The Law and the Prophets were proclaimed until John. Since that time, the good news of the kingdom of God is being preached, and everyone is forcing their way into it. It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the Law.”

–Luke 16:14-17

Jesus then goes on to give two specific examples of how they were ignoring the law: the way they practiced divorce (verse 18), and our story.

The story points back to the words about the Pharisees in verses 14-17 by portraying a man who (1) loved money, and (2) justified himself in the eyes of others (note his words and attitude toward Abraham).  The story carries the themes of the Law and the Prophets (verse 29) and the good news of the kingdom of God (particularly in his reference to one raised from the dead in verse 31).  The story knows that God knows their hearts, just as he knows the heart of the rich man, and that what people value highly is detestable in God’s sight.

What if this story was actually providing a warning to Israel, as embodied by their religious teachers the Pharisees, and pointing toward the coming judgment that God would bring upon the nation?  Instead of being about heaven and hell and the urgency for the individual to make a decision for Jesus, this story is about how Jesus is bringing the story of Israel to completion by fulfilling the Law and the Prophets while Israel’s representatives the Pharisees are continuing their ancestors’ unbelief by rejecting the good news of the coming kingdom and by practicing injustice.  So hard were their hearts against Jesus that not even his resurrection from the dead (to which verse 31 is a rather hard-to-miss reference) would change them.

More to the point, the story says, using unique afterlife imagery, that One will be raised from the dead and we are called to listen to Him.

Tolkien, Williams, and Opposite Views of the City

Those of you who are familiar with the writing of J. R. R. Tolkien are probably aware that he was no big fan of urbanization and industrialization.  To him, the unspoiled countryside and simple life enjoyed in places like The Shire and many other parts of Middle Earth was the optimal mode of human existence.  There was a deep distrust of technology and industrialization, and almost a yearning for the rural, arcadian vision of England in times long past.  Cities were, at best, a necessary evil, such as Minas Tirith.  Minas Tirith served a vital purpose in defending Gondor and the rest of the free peoples from the onslaughts of Mordor, but you never got the impression of Minas Tirith as a place where you would want to spend any extended amount of time.  Certainly none of the companions of the Ring, not even the restored king Aragorn, spent a very long amount of narrative time there.  At worst, urbanization was the embodiment of the diabolical, for example Minas Morgul.  Witness Saruman’s takeover and development of Isengard into a headquarters for his war against Rohan in conjunction with Mordor’s assault against Gondor.

I feel Tolkien, a little bit at least.  There are numerous benefits to living in an industrialized, urbanized world, which I am not about to give up anytime soon.  But the unintended consequences of technology have made us at least a little less than fully human while disconnecting us from creation and from each other.  For many of us, our direct experience of creation is limited to the time we spend walking from house to car, car to office, office to car, car to store, store to car, car to house, etc.  And even this interaction with nature takes place in urban or suburban environments where the influence of man upon nature is very heavily felt.  This can’t be a good thing.  I wrote about this in somewhat greater length in response to a quote from Thomas Merton which expresses similar sentiments.

Just lately I have been exposed to Charles Williams.  Williams was a contemporary of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis while they were at Oxford.  He was never very close to Tolkien and Tolkien lamented the influence he had on Lewis.  (That Hideous Strength, the only novel of Lewis’s to be set in an urban environment, was strongly influenced by Williams.)

Williams’ view of the city is diametrically opposed to Tolkien’s.  Most of Williams’ novels are set in the city.  The countryside appears sometimes, but it is seen as basically an extension of the city–a more aesthetically pleasing and less stressful place, economically dependent upon the city, a place where the privileged few who can afford it go to visit from time to time.

In Williams’ way of looking at things, the city has a special place in God’s economy.  Humanity began in a garden (the Garden of Eden), but is moving toward a city (the New Jerusalem).  Civilization, the fruit of living in cities, is the most desirable state of man; apart from this there is only savagery and barbarism.  The Christian life is intended to be lived in the context of community, and city life forces upon you the realization that you live in community whether you like it or not.  Others have labored to put in place what you see and enjoy as you live in the city; you are simply adding your labors to theirs.  The city is the place where human energies are collected and submitted to the process of exchange–in his way of looking at things the Exchange is not just a Christian doctrine of Christ’s redemptive work applied to sinful man, it is also the means by which we live with others in community, bringing our best work and offering it in return for their best.

You can read more about Charles Williams’ view of the city here:  “On Charles Williams” by Mule Chewing Briars at internetmonk.com.

Mark 6:1-6: Jesus Whose Power is Cloaked Under Weakness

Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed.

 

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

 

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith. (Mark 6:1-6)

What is the one thing that the people of Nazareth stumbled over with respect to Jesus?  It was his ordinariness.  They knew him.  He grew up with them.  He played with their kids.  They knew his family.  He was the carpenter.  He was homegrown.  They knew where he came from.  And now he is preaching with the authority of God.  Who knew?

This was a stumbling block for the people of Nazareth, and it is a stumbling block for us today.  We have this Platonic idea that holy = perfect.  If it’s holy it ought to glow like it’s radioactive.  It is not enough for the Bible to be the word of God, it has to be the perfect word of God.  The views of divine inspiration of Scripture that are prevalent in much of evangelicalism nowadays would be very much at home in Islam or Mormonism.  We expect Jesus to walk around with one of those goofy looking halo thingys around his head like an old-school Catholic holy card or an Orthodox icon.  As a carpenter he should have been able to produce perfect chairs with zero defects that fit his customers’ bodies perfectly.

Because this is what the people of Nazareth were looking for, Jesus could do no mighty work there.  Not that his supernatural powers had run out and were in need of recharging, or that he relied on faith to make the whole thing work (like Santa Claus relied on people’s Christmas spirit to make his sleigh fly in the movie “Elf”), but that he would not, in the face of abject unbelief, counter it with a show of power.  “Oh yeah?  Let me show you!!!!!”

The people of Nazareth wanted to see a work of power.  But they could not see it because they could not recognize Jesus.  They failed to recognize his power cloaked under weakness, under his being one of them.

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” during a particularly low point in his life. His son Charles, without consent, had joined the Union army during the American Civil War and was killed in combat. Around the same time his wife also died in an accidental fire. On Christmas day, 1864, he sat down and penned these words.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
and mild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

The carol begins nicely: the bells on Christmas morning remind him of the angels in the Gospels. Peace on earth, good-will to men! Then it takes a dark turn.

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

While we can look back and see 1864 as a good year for the Union, for those living during the time victory was not certain. Battles at the Wilderness and the Crater and the siege of Petersburg were bloody, brutal affairs. Coupled with his double-loss, it was no wonder Longfellow despaired. “There is no peace on earth” is a mild sentiment considering the circumstances.

But the carol doesn’t end there:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

This is not mere sentimentality, or a liberal belief in Progress. For Longfellow, the Gospel rings louder than the evil of men. What sin has done to man, Jesus undoes. The canon may boom, but the church bell peals louder.

Ezra 8 and Celebrity Pastors with Police Entourages

Today I would like to quickly address a practice that is becoming quite prevalent among prominent pastors (in my city, at least).  It is the practice of employing off-duty police officers to act as personal bodyguards.

Now, I do not intend to come off like one of those TR watchbloggers who can quote a million scriptures to show that Rick Warren is the Antichrist or that churches with praise bands and Powerpoints are of the devil.  This is not that kind of blog, and that is not the piece I am going to write.

In this day and age, it is a very sensible thing for a well-known pastor to have a police entourage.  There are lots of crazies running around out there, of whom yours truly is at or near the top of the list.  Some of these crazies stalk famous people for their own twisted reasons, and some would like nothing better than to get their moment of fame by knocking off somebody famous.  A celebrity pastor is a very large and inviting target.  On a more serious note, some well-known pastors are involved in ministry in areas of the world where hostility toward the Christian faith runs very high, and this places them in frequent and real danger.

But…

Consider this story from the Old Testament, tucked away in the book of Ezra.  The Persians had just defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple.  Despite opposition from some uncooperative elements in the Persian government, the project was eventually completed.  Ezra, a Jew who served as a high-ranking official in the Persian court, was given leave to return to Jerusalem along with all of the silver and gold articles used in Temple worship, which the Babylonians had confiscated during their conquest of Jerusalem.

Now there was just one problem involved in transporting all this gold and silver back to Jerusalem:  about 500 miles of desert between Babylon and Jerusalem.  All that empty space made a perfect hiding place for bandits, because no law enforcement agency could possibly hope to cover all that space.  The volume of silver and gold to be transported was north of 800 talents, an amount worth several million dollars in today’s money.  This, of necessity, would require a ginormous caravan, which could not possibly hope to travel secretly through the desert.  If word got out that such a caravan was leaving Babylon, bandits would have descended instantly upon it and seized everything of value long before it ever reached Jerusalem.

Ezra would have been wise to request assistance from the king of Persia in transporting all of this valuable cargo across the desert.  As a matter of fact, he would have been crazy not to.  All indications are that the king was ready to provide Ezra with soldiers and horsemen for protection if he requested it.  But he didn’t.  Verse 22 of chapter 8 (NIV):  “I was ashamed to ask the king for soldiers and horsemen to protect us from enemies on the road, because we had told the king:  “The gracious hand of our God is on everyone who looks to him, but his great anger is against all who forsake him.” ”  Sure enough, God was gracious and all of the gold and silver made it to Jerusalem without mishap.

Again, I am not here to say that police bodyguards are unbiblical or that prominent pastors who have police entourages are false teachers leading the flock towards damnation.  I am not [insert name of your favorite TR watchblogger here].

But…

Imagine if there was a well-known pastor out there somewhere who had the kind of faith that Ezra showed in this story.  Someone who would be willing to step out and say “I know that having police bodyguards is a wise precaution for a person in my position, but I believe that God is gracious to all who look to him.  I know the risks here, but God is bigger than all of them.”

Imagine what it would do for the Christian movement to see that kind of faith in our world today.

On the limits of prescience

“Daily Delivery” by Rob Gallop

Like many American boys my age, my first job was as a paperboy. For those who don’t know what that is, there used to be these things called newspapers that gave you all of yesterday’s news, and companies would hire local boys to hand deliver them to people’s houses. You could also buy a newspaper at a store, or through a machine that operated on the honor system, but many people, especially old and fat ones, preferred to have a boy deliver them to their doorstep so they wouldn’t have to actually get out of the house.

Anyway, every day I would get a stack of newspapers delivered to my house by a van-driving middle aged guy who had a, I don’t know, rapey quality about him. (I know, you’ve always wondered “Who delivers to the delivery guy?”). I would then put the newspapers into individual bags and proceed to drive my ten speed around town so people could finally figure out whether they won the lottery or which of their friends was arrested the night before. I did this every day, including Saturday and Sunday morning, for about two years. For all of this work, I was only paid $150 a month, plus tips. No one ever tipped me.

At the same time, I also fancied myself a bit of a writer. A science fiction and fantasy writer, no less. I imagined a future where I would live in New York, rich off of all my short story sales, drinking champagne every night and hanging out at a lot of coffee shops. Obviously, this was before the bottom fell out of the lucrative short fiction market; now, I only imagine living in Poughkeepsie and drinking Coke Zero.

All of this took place between 1992 and 1993, at the height of the Fab Five and right before internet access became commonplace. I was cutting my teeth on Frank Herbert, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Alan Moore, Robert Jordan, and Neil Gaiman while enjoying the musical stylings of Nirvana and Public Enemy. Bill Clinton was playing the sax on the Arsenio Hall show and Michael Jordan was already the greatest basketball player of all time. This was when I was at my most naive and optimistic; in only a year, Kurt Cobain would kill himself and O.J. Simpson would drive a white Bronco down the highway, thus ending my extended childhood and thrusting me into the cynicism of late adolescence.

So, as I was delivering my newspapers, I had quite a bit of time to think. About an hour and a half every day. During that time I would write stories in my head, most of them sci-fi, and most of them very, very bad. I don’t remember most of the stories, but they were probably blatant ripoffs of popular stuff with a very obvious avatar of me as the protagonist. Oh, and I also probably was a ladies’ man, closely depicting reality.

One story that I do remember was decent, but made irrelevant by modern technology. The protagonist was a young paperboy in an isolated farming town who went from house to house with a 3.5” floppy disk (the things used before CDs and thumbdrives but which were not, in fact, floppy), loading the daily news into each home’s central computer. The character would ride his hoverbike to a house, insert the disk, enter his passcode, and upload the news; after upload, the family could read the news on any computer they had, as well as the TV and a tablet like device (the latter stolen from 2001: a Space Odyssey).

The paperboy, who was never given a name, grew tired of hearing all of the bad news. Day in and day out, he would read about war, rape, murder, famine, and even cyber attacks (which seem quite obvious considering everyone had an unsecured disk drive on the front of their house). The more he, and the town, knew about the world, the more depressed they became. So, in a fit of inspiration, the paperboy decided to rewrite the news to make it more upbeat. (It’s unclear whether cable TV existed in this world.) He wrote what he thought the news should be, making nations sign peace agreements and the murder rates drop precipitously.

Sure enough, the people of the village cheered up. They came out of their funk and started being nice to each other, organizing street fairs and festivals. Block parties were a weekly occurrence. Utopia was at hand. But, of course, that could not be. People from the government found out about the paperboy and tried to shut him down. They sent a new paperboy, a paperman, who delivered the real news while attempting to subvert the false news. The paperboy fought back but was, in the end, defeated by the government. The people, who probably knew the news was fake all along, went back into their black mood.

For a story written by a 13-year-old, The Paperboy wasn’t too bad. I’m sure it wasn’t original, and it certainly was inspired by Nineteen Eighty-Four and Pump up the Volume, but it was enough to earn me an A+ in Mrs. Williams’ English class. At the time that was all I really cared about. While I was hoping for a literary career, I was much too shy to actually show anyone but my teacher the piece. (NB: I’m still much too shy to show anyone my writings.)

As far as literary themes, the story isn’t too bad. It says a lot about the nature of the news and how we are being manipulated by what our newsmasters choose to tell us, as well as how knowledge does not always lead to enlightenment, sometimes it just leads to misery. This is one of the things I have always loved about Dune, and something that shows up quite a bit in my writing; a character seeks to learn a mystery, but upon learning it discovers the Pandora’s Box should never have been opened.

Another key element is the individual rebelling against the collective. This is quite a trope is sci-fi, especially dystopian fiction, but one that appeals to teenagers. I can imagine how pleased I was at writing about a character who was the only one to see the problem and who took it on himself to fix society’s problems. This is, of course, every teenager’s place in the world.

The ending, a dark bit of business that would characterize most of my stories, was more about my feelings of futility in the face of the adult world than anything. This Cassandra complex, of both seeing the future yet being unable to do anything about it, is perhaps a bit too biographical, but it does sum up how I felt at the time. (And often feel today.)

The problem with the story is not necessarily the plot or the characters, cliches and all, but with the treatment of technology. At 13, I could not imagine a world where the internet existed (although it did exist at that very moment) or where people had an abundance of choices for getting information. In the town I lived in, population 500 or so, not a single person had internet access. The library didn’t and the high school didn’t, nor would they for at least 5 more years. The only options for getting news were two out-of-town newspapers, one radio station, a few TV stations from 100 miles away, and, if you were lucky enough to have cable, CNN. Within that context, it made perfect sense that everyone could be fooled by fake news. I was constrained by what I knew, although I could have imagined greater.

Also, while the idea of someone physically uploading news to your home computer network is laughable today, at the time it made perfect sense. I remember sharing this revelation with my friends, who were certain something like that could never happen. There would always be newspapers, they assured me. Again, we were constrained by what we knew. I knew that one day digital news would replace paper news, but couldn’t imagine a scenario in which the bits would be delivered by wire instead of a person. I understand how stupid this is, since there were already technologies in place that did this very thing (computers, fax machines, telegraphs, etc), but at the time it was the only feasible solution. Also, I really didn’t want to lose my job.

The problem I had, one the affects even great writers, is that there is a limit to what I can imagine. For all of the iPads and cellphones that were predicted, there are tons of things that sci-fi writers just got plain wrong. How many stories had flying cars and ubiquitous jetpacks? How many movies and TV shows from the 90’s still had us using giant CRT monitors fifty years in the future? How many imagined the miniaturization of computers and the rise of mobile computing?

This limit to our prescience is nothing to be ashamed of. Storytellers are not in the business of predicting what will happen in the future, they are in the business of telling really good stories. You don’t read Dune to figure out how the Holtzman drive works, you read it to follow Paul on his journey. You don’t care that much of the hyper and warp drive stuff is crap, you just want the hero to rocket off into the stars. And in the case of my (terrible) story, it’s not important that the paperboy’s technology is outdated, what’s important is that he discovers the truth of knowledge.