A few good reasons to not like Hollywood.

1. Johnny Depp is celebrated as a great actor, apparently in virtue of his ability to look perpetually surprised at his own drunkenness.
2. Mel Bay.
3. Jurassic Park came out when you were young enough that you still remember it with nostalgic fondness.
4. Tim Burton.
5. Slow motion and 3-D.
6. Every musical score is the product of equal parts Howard Shore, John Williams, and unbridled maudlin sentimentality.
7. Films in which Shia LaBeouf manages to stutter and look confused become massive box-office successes; films in which he proves his acting abilities remain largely unknown.
8. Films which are remakes of themselves (Johnny Mnemonic/The Matrix) don't even have the decency to cast a human being in the lead role. Granted, both films feature Keanu Reaves playing himself as a computer, but at least 2001 featured a computer who could act.
9. Russell Crowe actually seems like a really good actor compared to most of his colleagues.
10. Steven Spielberg is allowed to make historical dramas.
11. Steven Spielberg is allowed to make films.
12. Steven Spielberg.
13. The Academy Awards.
14. Books that are shorter than War and Peace are allowed to be made into more than one film.
15. CGI.
16. Tom Cruise.
17. The original version of Sleuth is out of print; Saving Private Ryan exists in a collector's edition.

The proud and the humble.

We need to be careful at the outset not to let our humility become our arrogance, and to let ourselves diminish for the sake of the Gospel. The problem with all heresies is that they're always predicated on hubris—the heretic believes he sees the truth of Scripture more clearly than all the saints who have come before, and that his own reason is superior to their collected reason.

This doesn't mean we affirm truth by consensus or anything of the sort. The logical reaction to "one finite man can't apprehend all truth by himself" is not "truth is that which has been agreed upon by the majority." What we need to affirm, instead, is that God has given us as much truth as we can handle in His Word, that He intends His whole Church to apprehend that Church as a body rather than as individuals, and that the truth present in the Bible is bigger than any one or group of us.

By bigger I don't mean to suggest that it is therefore immaterial or shouldn't be sought after, but that the Bible, for all its clarity, is also incredibly abstruse at times and presents problems that aren't easily dismissed. How could it be otherwise? Christians take the Bible to be the self-revelation of a transcendent God communicating Himself both narratively and propositionally to finite human beings who are necessarily limited.

No heretic takes any of that seriously. That doesn't mean he can't make a seemingly airtight case for his position, or that he can't root that position in his own interpretation of Scripture; it simply means that he doesn't think his intellect is limited, and that he can figure everything out if he just thinks about it hard enough. In essence, then, he sets himself in a position of equality with the King of Heaven and Lord of the Universe.

Heretics often make their ideas seem humble. They couch them in peculiarly imminent terms, often gentle terms, trying to give us a sense of their Christian virtue and willingness to submit to Truth rather than to mere Tradition. What they fail to acknowledge is that their whole project is inherently arrogant, and abbrogates one of the key tenets of the Christian faith: the emphasis on unity.

An appeal to tradition is likely to spark controversy of its own in many quarters. What I mean is not tradition in the Roman Catholic sense, in which extrabiblical doctrine and practice is imported in virtue of its use within the Church. Tradition in the Reformed sense refers to no more than the essential teachings of the Church as maintained by faithful Christians through the power of the Holy Spirit acting on reason and practice. The clearest and most basic expression of these teachings can be found in the ecumenical creeds, and in the three forms of unity and the Westminster standards.

Submitting to these doctrines requires humility. Do the creeds and confessions contain doctrines that are difficult to understand and grasp? Absolutely, but so too does the Bible. Assuming that we can make perfect sense of God Himself is beyond courage: it's outright rebellion and unmitigated pride posing as intellectual freedom. To those who would reject the creeds I can only ask what alternative there is; how can we be sure we've got it right if we jettison the teachings of all those who came before us in the name of Jesus?

Humility requires our admission (primarily to ourselves) that we can't know everything, especially everything about God, and that we can't know anything perfectly or fully. Jesus didn't call a bunch of individuals to individually be His Church; He calls individuals to become united in Him as His Church, submitting to Himself and to one another in love. This doesn't appeal to human pride, but it is the only way we can hope to be united to Christ, or to understand the truth of His incomprehensibly gracious and beautiful Gospel.

God, the maker of analogies

Another thing heretics often do is to try to establish a single metaphor for God and His workings in and through the world. One of the men I mentioned in the last post has attempted to make his new theology coherent by using a "God-as-author" analogy in which God's sovereignty is explained by comparing Him to a novelist and we humans to the characters in the novel.

There's nothing immediately wrong with the analogy. In some ways, in fact, it's very helpful: we often trip up on the doctrines of God's election, foreknowledge, and foreordination, and imagining Him to be writing us can be useful in explaining those things. It's when the analogy doesn't stop where it should that the whole thing goes wrong.

Christ's deity, for instance, is whittled down to fit into the overriding metaphor. Christ is no longer the eternally-existing second person of the Trinity, He's simply a human God used to put Himself into the story He was writing. Christ, then, is as created and ontologically one-sided as we are, except that Yahweh put Himself into the consciousness of Jesus so He could interact with us.

Too many things are wrong with that to address them all here. The point is, if the individual in question were willing to relinquish his analogy when biblical doctrine has clearly outgrown or transcended it, he wouldn't be in the position he is of rejecting centuries of received Christian doctrine. Of course, he doesn't care that he's done this, but we should.

We should also try to learn something about the use of analogies in the Bible itself. God never uses a single metaphor to explain Himself, His operations, or His will for mankind simply because a single metaphor isn't sufficient. God created metaphor, and He created the analagous objects and ideas which serve every metaphor; how could just one ever tell us everything we need to know about Him?

If our goal really is to get at the root of the Bible's message, it seems to me that our first task should be to understand what kind of book the Bible is. It isn't simply a collection of literary pieces, and it isn't only a series of rational/intellectual propositional statements. Why? Because God can't be reduced to a single theme, idea, or rational precept.

The problem with heresies is that they never give God His due, they never allow the God of the universe to transcend or overwhelm or baffle His creation, they never suffice. We should be afraid of worshipping a God who stays strictly within humanly comprehensible lines; we should be terrified not to worship the God of all things who routinely challenges our perceptions and our clockwork reductionism.

The Danger of Heresy

Sometimes heretics (especially those emerging from orthodox quarters of Christianity) misrepresent the Christian attitude toward heresy. This should surprise no one, but it does call for clarification and rebuttal. A couple men I'd consider mentors in the early stages of my intellectual pilgrimage have recently revealed themselves as heretics (forthrightly, as it happens), and have made the same mistake many others have made in trying to guess why Christians eschew their teaching.

The misrpesentation is this: Christians are characterized as believing it is doctrinal knowledge alone that leads to salvation, that without doctrinal knowledge an individual is eternally damned, and that lack of such knowledge makes one an enemy and an outsider. The difficulty, I believe, is that heresy is always a lack of, or distortion of, orthodox Christian propositions, and therefore its formulators see everything in terms of the intellect.

Orthodox Christian doctrine is often hard to swallow, even for the most devout. How can Jesus have two natures? How can God be three persons yet indivisible? How can man be responsible for his actions even while his every action is foreordained by God? In what way precisely does the atonement take away our sins? These are all difficult questions (difficult is really too soft a word), and no one has ever answered them adequately.

The reason for this should be obvious to anyone. These doctrines are truths about an infinite, transcendent God, recorded for us asystematically in a book that defies genre and categorization in any meaningful sense except as the Word of that same transcendent God. That Scripture is God's own self-revelation is the only reason we are able to understand anything about Him; even so, we are finite and sinful human beings, and the only resolution we can offer for many of the doctrines we find between Genesis and Revelation is to plead for mystery.

If the Bible states two things that seem to be in opposition (God is three persons yet one God, for instance), we accept both of these concepts as truth and assume that they are deeper and more glorious than we can comprehend. As Christians, our immediate response should not be to dismiss one or the other (or both) of these concepts, but to plead ignorance as to their fulness. Any other response is blasphemous in its arrogance and pride.

Heretics assume that, when they encounter a doctrine they don't understand, it is the doctrine rather than the reader that must yield. Human reason, for them, can be bound by nothing, least of all by propositional concepts. So, they attempt to make sense of every part of Scripture, using as guide only their reason and casting aside all reliance on past saints, the wisdom of the ancients, or the received/traditional/orthodox interpretations.

This is because heretics misunderstand true spirituality and the necessity of pure doctrine. Good doctrine isn't so essential simply because it's knowledge; it's essential because it helps us identify the God we serve and worship. Likewise, true spirituality isn't a purely rational or intellectual matter; it's the transformation of the heart, soul, mind and body through the healing agency of the Triune God, the reclamation of what was lost to salvation and goodness.

It's ironic that heretics so often blame the orthodox for overemphasizing knowledge when that's exactly what they're doing. It's also strange that anyone could think the Holy Spirit would have so abandoned His people as to allow them to wallow for two millennia in false doctrine, and that one or two people would be the lone voices in the wilderness proferring the truth. Such ideas are sad in their arrogance and ludicrous in their absurdity.

Does the Bible ever use the word Trinity? Of course not, and no true Christian supposes it does, or that the doctrine is laid out anywhere in anything close to a systematic form. But the Bible does present an organic picture of God that reveals insofar as we can understand who He is, who we are, and what our relationship with Him is and should be. Why does the Bible go on to reveal paradoxes concerning Him? Because He is the transcendent God, and we aren't meant to understand everything about Him, nor would we survive the ordeal were such knowledge given to us mere mortals.

Love and Fear

There were hundreds, thousands of birds. There were so many birds I was still seeing them after they were long past, moving specks entwined in the soft orange of the sun blending with the horizon. They were swallows, brown and not still and crowded in the air, but I thought they might be doves come to warn us of God's love.

All men tremble at God's wrath; how many weep and shake in the shadow of His love? How many see those gentle birds as harbingers of peace, rather than harpies from the throne of the Most High sent to terrify us into His presence? Why is love now all gentle smiles and kindness? What about the kindness of fire and whirlwind?

Where I live it's rare to see more than a moderate flock of birds at one time. Traffic on the freeway slowed in the midst of silent wings, each of us awed by the sheer number. Number itself is frightening to those who are singularities. We are one; in the face of multiplicity we tremble, afraid of being overwhelmed. This is partly why we fear God.

God is perfect singularity because He is also perfect multiplicity. We fear Christ because He is both God and man, a lion and the lamb, two natures in one person. When one thing reveals itself to be more than itself, our human propensity is to hide, to shut ourselves away from what is capable of overwhelming us. So it is with the peace and love of God.

The love of God that set the Son at the Father's right hand is the same love that will judge all men from the throne of justice. The peace that surpasses all understanding issues from the same source as the wrath that plagued Egypt tenfold. Moses strikes a rock and lives; he strikes another, and dies. For all that we can know about God from His Word, He remains a mystery, transcendent.

We embrace the softness of swallows, the hazed blur at the edges of wings as they flail in the sunset, clouds that have deigned to come near the earth. We listen to their high voices like the voices of careless angels, sharp and clear and sudden. We smile as they play, smile as they jerk their little heads back and forth, smile as Adam must have smiled naming them.

But when they swirl like an Israelite smoke column, cutting us off from the sky, hemming us to the dust from which God stirred us, then we wish them dispersed. Then their song becomes a banshee shriek, a siren of impending doom, the storm that is God's love. All the swallows but one flock, and we are afraid because the many are one.

It is good to fear God, as much because He is love as because He is all perfection and strength. How can we exult in the selfless love of Christ without hiding our faces from its ultimate expression on the stark and lonely cross? How can we love His creation without dreading its terrors? How can we love the little swallow and not shake when he becomes a host?

The Importance of Reading Books

A lot of people talk about how important it is to read books but seldom provide compelling reasons. It isn't enough to encourage reading for its own sake—that's just begging the question. It's not even enough to encourage reading certain kinds of books for their own sake—that's just posturing. When anyone tells me to read the Classics, for instance, simply because they're the Classics, I immediately want to know why they're the Classics, who gave them that distinction, what a Classic even is, and why reading one is inherently beneficial.

Others give one-dimensional answers when asked why reading is important. The purpose of reading, they may say, is to gain knowledge, or to "broaden oneself," or to understand, or some other not necessarily bad but far from complete answer. Of these apologists I want to ask, why is knowledge important? won't experience broaden me? can't I understand without books?

The immediate reply to the second question will likely be, "But you can't have as many experiences in real life as you can in books." So reading is simply an existential exercise? We read only to dip our feet in a wider pool of experience than would otherwise be open to us? If that's the case, why not simply watch a bunch of movies? It generally takes less time to watch a film than to read a book, so if we just watch plenty of movies we'll be all right. Oh, the reply comes, reading is so much better than just watching movies. But why?

Such questioning is likely only to produce frustration, however. For many defenders of reading, their arguments are couched solely in terms of preference: these individuals like to read, and so they try to construct paradigms in which reading is preferable to not reading. None of these paradigms are very realistic, however, and usually they're simply another ruse for separating the goats and the sheep. Am I saying that reading, then, is merely a game, unimportant, and worthless?

I am saying no such thing. Reading books (the right ones, anyway; there's plenty of garbage out there) is extremely important, and I'll be the first to defend the practice. But anything worth doing is worth defending properly, and the more important an activity is, the more important it becomes to defend it well and responsibly. Simply saying "read cause it's good" or "read these books cause they're these books" is juvenile and actually a pretty good reason not to read whatever is being presented as worthy literature.

While vicarious experience has a modicum of value (not near as much as is often assumed), and knowledge can be a good thing (a wonderful thing, even; and also, a terrible and horrible thing), these are not in themselves sufficient reasons to read books. The real reason to read is for perspective. It's awfully easy to assume humankind has progressed imeasurably, or philosophical questions are different today than those posed by Socrates and Aristotle, or that Americans know what's going on better than anyone, or that Europeans are inherently more sophisticated than everyone else, or whatever. The only real way to understand these are all lies is to read authors who identify them as such.

Sure, going to Europe will probably clue you in to the fact that rednecks, hipsters, and drug addicts exist everywhere, but then again, you might be so overawed by the exotic unfamiliarity of it all that you come back with a universally positive report. Sitting in your chair at home and reading about another culture from a fairly objective point of view will likely yield much more balanced results, though. And while it's entirely possible that your chosen author will have rose-colored glasses of her own, or will be a curmudgeon with nothing nice to say, that will (to an observant reader) become clear as the book progresses.

Which is the reason to read widely. It's not going to do any good to read for perspective if you only read one or two authors, or only read three books a year, or only read escapist literature, or only read fiction. These habits will simply succeed in foisting narrow perspectives, and will probably end up worse in the long run than if you read nothing at all. Reading for improvement or benefit is pretty much either a commitment or nothing; you can't do it halfway.

Perspective is largely why we read the Bible. It shows us who we are, who God's people are, what the world is like, why it is like that, and (supremely and all-importantly) it shows us who God is. We don't read Scripture simply for the stories (or, as pomos would stress, the story), for knowledge, or for fun. We read God's Word for the perspective no other book can offer, and this is why we ought to read it more often than any other book. At the same time, good books can help flesh out this perspective, or enhance our biblical perspective, and this is why we read those other books, too.

MGT and other things I've never heard of.

I recently read a book by Calvin Beisner called Evangelical Heathenism?: Examining Contemporary Revivalism. In it, he reveals a contemporary heresy known as Moral Government Theology, which is basically a form of Pelagianism and open theism. Apparently many leaders of Youth With a Mission have been or are mixed up in this doctrinal error (heresy, blasphemy, etc.), actively teaching that humans are born with the internal ability to choose good or bad, that God doesn't know the future, and that God's goodness hinges on His constant choices rather than His inherent nature.

Needless to say, there's a lot wrong with this idea. What really disturbed me, however, is that such an idea exists and is largely unheard of. The fact that almost no one has heard about MGT while at the same time it is so pernicious and apparently widespread bodes ill for the watchfulness Christians are supposed to maintain in the face of doctrinal error.

How many Christians have been unwittingly drawn into this way of thinking? It would seem that a doctrine teaching a god who is neither omniscient nor omnipotent would be automatically rejected by Christians across the board, but that is apparently not the case. Obviously, there are many firm enough in orthodox doctrine that they can't or won't be dissuaded from the truth, but what makes these doctrines appealing to less well-educated Christians?

There seem to be only two factors, both working in tandem. First, the idea that we are completely autonomous free moral agents who can thwart the will of God plays on our inherited human pride and arrogance. This is likely a subconscious motivating factor, but one nonetheless that is powerful and omnipresent in all of us: every time we sin, we're asserting our own godhood.

The second factor is lack of knowledge and rejection of any kind of authority. Our churches are notoriously lax in doctrinal instruction, opting for feel-good sermons and opinion-based Bible studies rather than rigorous doctrinal catechesis and exhortation. But it's more than that: contemporary Christians are completely uncomfortable with the notion of objective absolute truth, and with the idea that humans can obtain it.

Oddly, this seems most rampant in what most would classify as conservative Evangelical churches, concentrations of Fundamentalism in its most restricted and unbiblical sense. On one hand, they cry out that there is truth and meaning, but through their behavior and teaching they deny it. How is this best demonstrated? Through the near-universal rejection of the creeds and confessions of the historic Body of Christ.

But, they argue, the Bible is our final authority! As interpreted by whom? we may well ask, to which the response is usually silence or an appeal to the Holy Spirit. Yet, if the Church is truly a body, wouldn't the Holy Spirit reveal Scriptural truth to the group as a whole, rather than to each person individually? Can we not trust anyone but ourselves? Such spiritual solipsism is not only dangerous, it's rank unbiblicism.

By it, heresies like MGT are allowed entry under the guise of proper interpretation and piety. Ultimately, if there is no objective interpretive method external to the individual, there is no interpretive method, and therefore no grounds for dismissing heresy. If, on the other hand, the Holy Spirit has revealed truth to the Church as a whole to be safeguarded by all true believers, then we have guidelines for objectively determining what is right and what is wrong, for dismissing heresy, and for training the saints in doctrine. If we let this go, we've relinquished our faith entirely, and only destruction will ensue. The only proper response is faithful doctrine and faithful living in the face of opposition from without as well as from within.

Chaos and Light

If it is true of moths and flames, it's much truer of humans and chaos. Where darkness gathers, people throng; where it is light they disperse and flee. Shame and guilt, carried by each of us, prefers to hide rather than to be made known, but there's more to it than that.

Finite humans constantly struggle against confusion. There's too much to make sense of, so to remain sane we hide in oblivion, erasing the boundaries to make room for paradox. Somehow we convince ourselves that the void of chaos is more interesting, more liberating, and more all-encompassing than the colors and definition of broad daylight. Somehow we believe what we can't see is deeper than what we are able to behold. Somehow, we believe chaos is more mysterious than order.

Whatever else John Hillcoat may believe, at leat he understands that such a proposition is absurd, that the light will always be more fascinating than the darkness, and that the complexity of good is sufficient to render evil meaningless. His two most recent films, The Road (2009) and Lawless (2012), ably demonstrate this.

In both films, evil is an ever-present force. It is often tangible (as in The Road, in which the physical darkness is often associated with the presence of evil), and permeates both landscapes and individuals, bending them away from what is true toward what is rotten and dead.

What is striking in Lawless particularly is the director's reluctance to show evil directly, instead intimating its presence and horror through suggestion and the withholding of detail. Evil is certainly there, and it is certainly evil, but there's no reason to dwell on it directly because, as evil, it is inherently not worth our devoted attention. By contrast, the camera lingers long on the central characters who, though lawless themselves (they're Depression-era bootleggers in Franklin County, VA), are nonetheless devoted to an ethic and character standard that has no reason to hide itself.

The film featured exquisitely fine performances all round, but of special note are the roles of the three brothers Forrest, Howard, and Jack Bondurant, played by Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke, and Shia LaBeouf respectively. Each actor endows his character with a complexity, humanity and power that could never exist in a purely evil person....as brilliantly demonstrated by Guy Pearce's role as the bad guy, a chilling individual indeed, but more chilling because he lacks so much depth.

Hillcoat doesn't pander to our desire for titillation by showing us just how bad Pearce's character (Charlie Rakes) is, instead giving us hints that get the point across, while saving the camera's gaze mostly for depictions of the horrors evil causes, as well as the constant moral quandaries with which principled people are constantly confronted.

Lawless is a good film for a number of reasons; but it's especially refreshing to find a movie that gets at least one important thing very right. Societies and cultures are always huddling around in dark places, hoping the smoke never clears. A film like Hillcoat's latest effort looms bright, just like the bootleg stills on the hillsides of Franklin County.

The Tribulation of Temptation

It's easy to think of temptation in terms of its object. The point, we assume, is that we aren't supposed to have something we want. If a Porsche drives by, we identify the automobile itself as our temptation, that somehow it is the car itself that is tempting. This is completely wrong: the temptation isn't the car, but to engage in sinful thoughts about the car, i.e., envy and covetousness.

To be mistaken on this point leads to two problems. The first is to make us think that objects themselves are bad; the second, and worse, mistake is to think that temptation itself is somehow sin, that we incur guilt when we are tempted. If this latter point were true, Christ Himself would have been guilty of sin, because He was tempted by the Devil in the desert.

This temptation of Jesus is often presented with an underlying confusion. If Christ was, by His nature, not able to succumb to temptation, why did His temptation at the hands of Satan make Him exhausted to the point that angels had to administer to Him? This confusion, it seems to me, results from the objectification of temptation.

If Christ's exhaustion resulted from His desire for what the Devil offered, His sinless nature and perpetual sinless state would be called into question. As Christ Himself points out again and again, it isn't simply our actions that implicate us, but our thoughts and attitudes as well, anything that is in opposition to God's will and Law.

On the other hand, if we take temptation to be another form of tribulation or trial, a hardship we endure rather than a desire we repress, there is no confusion. Christ was so exhausted because His temptation came directly from the Devil himself. Things aren't bad in themselves: Christ in fact received all the things the Devil offered Him, but from God not Satan.

How much more able to withstand temptation will we be if we can learn to see it as tribulation rather than simply thwarted desire? It's not that the sin we want to commit is something that actually should be desired: the point is that we endure the temptation and conquer it through Jesus' power and grace because it should not be desired. Temptation is no sin, but we must resist it so that we do not sin.

Rule Suburbia

My wife and I went camping about a week ago. We cooked all our food over a fire, slept on the implacably hard ground, felt the morning coolness, and walked to a small lake. It was a lovely weekend, but it was far from the escape I'd envisioned.

Americans (for the most part) don't understand the purpose of camping. The campground where we stayed was wooded and close to the beach....and resembled nothing so much as suburbia relocated to the outdoors.

Here was the opportunity to leave daily existence with its distractions and boredom behind, and instead these hundreds of campers decided to bring the distractions and boredom with them, to use while complaining about the mosquitoes and the dirt.

I'm not sure what that is, but it's not camping. No commitment to enjoying nature or a primitive existence here. Instead, RVs with televisions larger than my tent, smartphones constantly vomiting "personalized" ringtones shared by thousands of people, microwaved meals (again, courtesy of the RVs), screaming children, loud music, and generators powering TVs to which were attached Xboxes and Wiis.

Why even go camping?! Unless you embrace the experience, living out of doors, even temporarily, is miserable. You don't get to shower properly, you don't get a good night's sleep, your food is undercooked, and there's mud everywhere. All of which become genuine pleasures when you seek them as an alternative to the daily routine—and even more annoying and aggravating if you're trying to pursue your daily routine despite them.

The behavior I witnessed at the campground (ironically) is the result of certain strands of Christian thinking as much as typical American consumerism. The idea that God calls man to dominion over the created world has been so bent out of shape that many now take it to mean we have the right of all creation, that it belongs to us to do with as we will. This is neither a proper understanding of dominion, nor a proper understanding of the Church's role in relation to Jesus Christ.

But this idea has led in turn to a worse one: the idea that creation is in fact meant to serve us. While I don't for a second intend to imply that the opposite is true (we are not the servants of creation, either), or that we should worship nature or extend toward it more respect than God Himself has given it, I do mean to imply that man is still part of the created order, crown though he may be, and as such has no right to turn it to purposes beyond what God has designated for it.

As the great Jacques Ellul pointed out, cities were first formed as acts of rebellion against God. That's not to say Christians shouldn't live in cities; cities are as viable a dwelling for Christians as for anyone else, especially given that the New Jerusalem is itself a city. But cities, while they have their place, should not be allowed to encroach further than their own jurisdiction.

There are things nature tells us about ourselves and (more importantly) about God that we can never learn in an urban or metropolitan area. To take the city into nature, therefore, is to wilfully subject the wilderness to man's desire for comfort, his desire for control, even his desire for community that is not God-sanctioned. For how can God condone community that is predicated on mere numbers and presence, rather than on meaningful knowledge and relationships?

God is not nature, as the pantheists assert, nor is he present in nature the way panentheists suggest; but He is the Lord of nature just as he is the Lord of the city, the Lord of the Sabbath, the Lord of Heaven, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The insensate drive to bring man's creation wherever man goes is not only arrogant, it's idolatrous.

I wouldn't imagine these ideas are conscious in most people, but I would suggest they are at least subconsciously present to one degree or another. I'm not going to stop camping as a result of this nonsense, though; but I am going to find a more secluded place to do it in.

Art's Objective Standards II

Once the creator's intent, and ability to consistently and effectively convey that intent, have been determined, it's essential to then assess the content of any work of art. Is what the creator is saying good? Does it make logical sense, and does it fit into what we know about the world, human nature, God, and history? Or is it humanistic, cliche, pernicious, false?

In our time, it's considered passe, uncharitable, and to some extent even dangerous to make value judgements of any kind. The typical postmodern bilge about "it may not be right for me, but it's right for you" or "one must find truth/peace/meaning in one's own way" have conditioned entire populations to refrain from judging anything on strictly moral grounds, instead reducing all art criticism to "I like it" or "I don't like it" or to mere intellectual posturing.

Even Christians have largely accepted these conditions. Instead of holding everything up to Scripture for comparison and analysis, we retreat into the fallible and usually inaccurate territory of trying to "feel" whether things are good or not. Unfortunately, our feelings are too susceptible to sin, illogic and confusion to ever be appropriate guides. This is why the Medievals insisted emotion must be subservient to the reason, and the reason to divine authority; without this graduated chain of command, we're left with the slavery of solipsistic subjectivity.

As a result, we have Christians who love the movie Braveheart, Christians who read the Twilight novels religiously, Christians who listen to Eminem on a regular basis, all because they've (consciously or unconsciously) jettisoned the idea that there's an ideal standard of good and bad by which to evaluate everything. I'm not arguing for monasticism; watch Braveheart, read Twilight, listen to Eminem: but do so from a judgemental standpoint, determining whether these things are the types of things Christians ought to fill their minds with on a regular basis.

This is the real crux of the issue: people on both sides try to force a dichotomy, and dichotomies are nearly always false. On the one hand are those who say we (as Christians) shouldn't engage the culture at all, that even the most minimal contact with secular art will pollute us beyond repair, and that there's nothing the world has to offer us on any level. On the other hand are those Christians who assume that interacting with art means we have to accept it all willy-nilly and immerse ourselves in it if we want to have any kind of voice.

The truth is less narrow and less broad than both of those. Christ never tells us to close our eyes, put our hands over our ears, shut our mouths, or tie our hands behind our backs. He tells us to be in the world, but not of it. In other words, live among people, but don't let them carry you away with false beliefs or sinful behavior. In a very real sense, this requires knowing something of the culture in order to combat it and offer something more real in response.

What is wrong is to accept anything with a meaningless, vapid or pernicious message as an integral part of our daily lives. I wouldn't now why Braveheart is a bad movie if I'd never watched it, but if I continued to watch it over and over again knowing it is bad, that's when I've crossed the line of reasonableness and godly character. Maybe many viewers don't know why it's bad, but that simply reflects lack of absorption in the one thing we ought to revisit every day as often as possible: God's Word.

It's frankly disturbing how many people say they haven't got time to read their Bible, but they spend hours (or even one hour) watching television or listening to music or reading comics every single day, seemingly unaware of the hypocrisy. There is only one sure standard by which to judge all things, and that is God's Word, and any Christian who attempts to "engage" the culture on any level without the protection of Scripture is doomed to failure or complete defeat.

Christians ought to understand the culture around them, and we all have a responsibility to respond in a biblical manner: what we should never do is replace our adherence to God's Word with this understanding. Ironically, it is such an exchange that makes any insight gained utterly meaningless, and which simultaneously undercuts any witness or responsible voice we might have. To understand art, we must understand the Bible, and we must understand it more thoroughly and more faithfully than any painting, novel, album, statue, or film.