Bad theology meets good books
Misconceptions of Christianity in a very boring book
Fellow Pilgrims,
I recently slogged through a new novel by Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword a Novel of King Arthur. I read the whole thing, because I love Grossman’s Magicians trilogy, which is a sort of dark, atheist Narnia/Harry Potter. That trilogy doesn’t match my worldview, but the god that Grossman doesn’t believe in, there, is also a god I don’t believe in: false and cruel and petty. And the trilogy is smart and surprising. (Also, again—super-dark—check content before reading.)
But Bright Sword is a total disappointment. The Grossman voice I love in the Magicians isn’t here. Instead, we get a looooooooooong narration of what’s so dumb about Christianity—not a creative narration—as if prompted from an AI: “write me a take on the Arthurian legends embracing every possible contemporary prejudice.” One should also tell the AI: “make sure to forget that medievals are not moderns.” Also “be moralistic.”
Still, there’s something worth paying attention to here, and it’s insight into what those false ideas about Christian faith might be. Below, a series of quotations from the book and some commentary on antidotes.
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On druid standing stones:
“They were a very different proposition from Christianity, which promised you everything, peace and happiness everlasting, but in the next world, a world no one living had ever seen, and only if you kept to His rules in this world, and His rules were a pain in the ass.”
This is a perfect description of what a lot of people think is true of Christian faith, which is not at all true of Christian faith.
Christian faith is not (only) for the next world. It’s for this world, which is in continuity with that next world. Christian faith is for the heavens and the earth. All things, including this world, were made through and for Christ.
More, the promises of Christian faith are not for those who keep God’s rules. They’re for everyone, offered to everyone who would be united with Christ in faith and so enter into right relationship with God. God’s rules aren’t “a pain;” they are, themselves, peace and happiness; they are, themselves, the good life, but even so, everlasting life is not a reward for following rules; it is a gift of grace given in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Bookish antidotes: Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories
Further, on pagan religion and standing stones:
“It was hard to say what God made of it all, the stones and the fairies and the pagan gods and all the rest of it. The more he saw of it the more the world seemed to Collum to be possessed of two incompatible, irreconcilable natures, the divine and the magical. It was a contested world, grasped at and fought over. No wonder it was such a mess. Collum sometimes wished God and the old gods would just have it out and settle things once and for all, one way or the other.”
Like the prior quotation, which pits this world against the next, this quotation smacks of gnostic dualism (that is, a heresy which would divide creation in two, as though part belongs to God and part does not.) Against gnostic dualism, Christian faith confesses that all that is belongs to God. God is the creator of all things, and there’s no thing that does not belong to God, which might properly stand against God. The world is not halvsies. It’s one whole made by God, loved by God, intended by God for redemption. Nothing, then, is incompatible with redemption. Sin twists things, but sin does not wrench things out of God’s world or beyond God’s power.
Bookish antidotes:
, Cultural Christians in the Early Church: A Historical and Practical Introduction to Christians in the Greco-Roman World (I interviewed Nadya about her book, here.)
Katherine Arden’s Winternight Trilogy.
On the Muslim knight, Palomides—who Grossman has come from Iraq—after he’s endured a forced baptism while passed-out drunk:
“In truth he didn’t know what he believed anymore, or who he was. He was not unfamiliar with Jesus as a prophet of Islam, but he found the idea of God having a son hard to swallow. He’d always thought of Christianity as a crude faith, mystical and rather monstrous, with its incarnation and resurrection and its bizarre triple godhead.”
Well, actually, this is a pretty good statement of certain objections to Christian teaching on Jesus as the Son and on the Trinity. The Jesus thing—flesh, blood, crudity—is often felt as “rather monstrous,” what Paul calls “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Corinthians 1:23). It is in faith that we find that “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25). Crude fleshiness is grace, grace, grace: just the grace needed for us fleshy beings, who have bodies and long for resurrection. On that, though, Islam shares a lot in common with Christianity in belief in a bodily resurrection, so our Palomides would probably not list resurrection among the things he finds difficult in Christian faith.
Bookish antidotes: Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel beyond the West
Timothy George, Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad?: Understanding the Differences between Christianity and Islam
On bodies:
“How do you know what bodies mean?” Orwen asked. “We’re just going to throw them away anyway when we die, like orange peels, and then at the Last Judgment we’ll be given our perfect bodies, so what does this body even mean?”
Christian teaching of the resurrection is not that we “throw away” our bodies. It is that we will be redeemed, body and soul. The body we have in this life is in continuity with the resurrection body that is to come (1 Corinthians 15). Bodies have purpose, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
Bookish antidotes: Richard Mouw, When the Kings Come Marching In: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem
N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.
On rejecting the Christian God:
“I was educated in a nunnery. They taught me that the world is a dead place, that my body is sin, and the only life that matters is the next one. But they lied. The world is alive, and there is no other life.
Ah, the gnosticism continues. Gnostic dualism would assign the spiritual realm to God and the material realm to evil, pitting soul against body. This is antithetical to Christian faith, which teaches that God made people as embodied creatures, and our bodies are precious to God. It is sadly true that some Christian educations have taught the falsities named in this quotation, but they are wrong. God loves the world. This world (John 3:16).
Bookish antidotes: Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
Sarah Coakley, The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God
“Good King Arthur,” William Crane, 1877 via Artvee.
The hero’s resolve:
“If he waited for God to choose him, or fairy, or anybody, he’d be waiting forever. He would have to choose himself.”
Sigh. Our poor medieval knight must be a self-made man. Once, on watching a Barbie cartoon with the moral, “follow your heart,” my tiny daughter said to me, “that doesn’t make sense! Where would you go?” Exactly. This quote expresses an individualism and an isolation from God and community, which cannot lead to the happy end of a journey.
Bookish antidotes: Kelly Kapic, You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News
Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
Alisdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues
Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
On the delight Christian priests are said to take when the king becomes an atheist and gives up on miracles:
“without God always sticking his oar in, upstaging them with His showy marvels, the priests of Britain had finally taken their rightful place as the center of attention. God’s absence was the best thing that ever happened to them!”
I suppose some Christian priests might do so, might have done so. But there are so many priests, pastors, ministers who have no desire to be the center of attention, who rightly fight that temptation to narcissism and live and work to point people to God.
Bookish antidotes: Eugene Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir
Chuch DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse
Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede
There’s a fun thing or two going on in this book. There’s a sympathetic Christian character. But it’s plodding and preachy, oh so preachy, in a way that mostly shows us a faith that is unlike that which we are called to show to the world.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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“The world is not halvsies. It’s one whole made by God, loved by God, intended by God for redemption. Nothing, then, is incompatible with redemption. Sin twists things, but sin does not wrench things out of God’s world or beyond God’s power.” Love this. ❤️