Worthless religion

After James 1:26-29 

A definition

of religion:

to visit orphans

and widows

in affliction.

Beyond that:

keep unstained

from the world,

If you can’t

control your

tongue, you’re

deceiving yourself

about your faith;

it’s worthless. 

Your tongue 

speaks from

your heart, so

guard your heart

and bridle 

your tongue.

 

Photograph by the blowup via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

“Dwelling,” poem by Nellie deVries – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

The Fundamentals of the Faith: Why Creeds & Catechisms Still Matter – Jonathan Shirk at Gentle Reformation.

 

Searching for a Sign – Seth Lewis.

 

A Mundane Life Is a Courageous Life – Alan Noble at The Gospel Coalition.

Religion and Poetry Do Mix – and Mix Well

A statistic that even people familiar with the Bible find rather startling is that more than half of the Old Testament is poetry. The Psalms are the most obvious, but large parts of the major prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah and his Lamentations, and Ezekiel are written in poetic form as well. Even the New Testament has poetic sections, including the Sermon on the Mount of the Gospel of Matthew.

But it’s been my own experience – mostly in Protestant denominations but with a not-insignificant overlay of Catholicism – that poetry is rarely if ever mentioned within the church context. My own eyes were opened only a decade ago, when I took a weekend seminar with poet Scott Cairns at a writing retreat. That seminar not only introduced me to Cairns’ poetry but to that of Luci Shaw, Mark Jarman, Dana Gioia, and several others. A door in my mind was suddenly flung open.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings 

Exile’s Journey – Jeffrey Bilbro at Current Magazine on writing and publishing amateur poetry.

“On My First Son,” poem by Ben Jonson – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Passage at Nineteen – poem by Donna Hilbert at Every Day Poems.

“Who is an Evangelical?” by Thomas Kidd

In the early summer of 2016, we bumped into some good friends we hadn’t seen in a while. At one time we’d attended the same church, but we had both gone on to different congregations. We were at a restaurant when we saw them. All four of us would qualify as “evangelicals.”

We chatted, and then we asked, “What are we going to do about the election? How can we vote for either Trump or Clinton?” Their response pretty well summed it up: “It’s a choice between the devil you know and the devil you don’t know.” It was a handwringing moment, and an ongoing struggle, for us all.

I mention that story because of the news media’s fixation with “81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016.” No one cared when 79 percent of white evangelicals voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, because Romney lost. (I should point out that the “81 percent” number has been examined and dissected by a number of people, and it may only be what the news media cartoonishly presented it to be. It’s as if the election was Donald Trump in a vacuum, that it was Trump or no one – when it clearly was anything but that.) But the news media rarely looks any further than its own narrative, and it missed the quandary so many of us evangelicals faced in the 2016 election.

In Who is an Evangelical: A History of a Movement in Crisis, Thomas S. Kidd, the James Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, concisely looks at the history of evangelicalism, its American historical context, its increasing involvement in American politics in the post-World War II period, and what he believes is the crisis it faces today. He sees the crisis as the identification of evangelicals with politics as opposed to its mission of spreading the gospel.

In an interview with Samuel James at The Gospel Coalition, Kidd noted that it’s the news media who consistently identify evangelicals with politics. In his introduction to the book, Kidd notes that he is a “#NeverTrumper,” and an evangelical. He is someone always worth paying attention to. He’s written numerous books on American history, American religious and cultural history, and related topics. His subjects have included Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, the Great Awakening, Baptists in America, the religious history of the American Revolution, Patrick Henry, and a recent two-volume history of America entitled, appropriately enough, American History.

Who is an Evangelical? is, in part, a history lesson. It covers how evangelicals came to be, the role they played in the coming the of the Civil War, the controversy between evangelicals and “fundamentalists,” the importance of Billy Graham, the New Christian Right, and evangelicals from Reagan to Obama. (Evangelical support for Donald Trump can’t be understood without understanding evangelical reaction and response to the Obama era.) Kidd also tackles the “81 percent number,” noting that self-identification as evangelical included many Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, and that there were oddities in the polling process. And he notes the credibility crisis polling itself has been experiencing. 

Thomas S. Kidd

He also points out that, cynics and critics (and the news media) aside, politics isn’t the only defining factor as to what makes an evangelical. In fact, it may be relatively small. What is more important to evangelicals Likely remains what it has always been – the gospel, worship, charitable activity, missions, and teaching. 

Kidd’s book is an important one, whether you consider Trump an angel, a devil, or something in between. He’s telling us that evangelicals have a long history, predating the American Revolution and the Constitution, and will continue to have a history after this current “era of ill feeling” has passed. He’s warning that evangelicals are facing a crisis from too closely identifying with Republican politics. And politics is not what makes an evangelical an evangelical.

Related: 

A Conversation with Thomas Kidd on Evangelicalism – The Gospel Coalition.

Top photograph by Robert Metz via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Why Jesus?” by Ravi Zacharias

In 2012, concerned about how New Age philosophies were increasingly influencing popular culture (and culture in general), Ravi Zachariaspublished Why Jesus? Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality. It’s still a compelling read.

Zacharias, the founder and chairman of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, headquartered in Atlanta, is an author, speaker, Christian apologist, and radio broadcaster. He’s published numerous books, has outreach centers in Atlanta and Oxford University, and publishes a magazine. His purpose in the 2012 book: to point out the shallowness and often fraud of New Age beliefs and practices and to explain why Christianity remains the compelling narrative.

His discussion focuses on two New Age figures, one who’s obvious and one who’s not.

The obvious one is Deepak Chopra, who melds eastern religion with physics and other sciences (often drawing the ire of scientists). The less-than-obvious one, simply because of her global popularity, is household name Oprah Winfrey. The two have often worked together, and both jointly market a 21-day meditation course. 

Ravi Zacharias

Zacharias includes an extensive examination of what both public figures teach and advocate. He then moves to a discussion of Jesus and Christiantiy, making his case. He explains the core of the Christian message, what personhood and relationship really mean, the loss of Christian faith in the contemporary culture (and what’s replacing it), how we reshape Jesus to suit our prejudices, the problems of Christian mysticism, and how we face a choice between as belief system (or systems) that are built on false assumptions and a belief system built upon “magnificent truths.”

Why Jesus?is a classic Ravi Zacharias book. He speaks compellingly and with often devastating insight; he’s kind but firm. He also clearly calls it as he sees it, and it’s difficult to argue against his reasoning and logic. It’s a solid book.

Related:

A Movie and a Talk.

Walking from East to West  by Ravi Zacharias.

Top photograph by Scott Webb via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"God's Secretaries" by Adam Nicolson

King James I ascended the English throne in 1603, following the death of Elizabeth I. The religious issues that had started with Henry VIII and the English Reformation had never really stopped – a swing to the radical Protestant under Henry’s son, Edward; a swing back to the Catholic under Queen Mary; and swing back toward the center under Elizabeth. But the issues were far from settled.

The background of James himself exemplified these conflicts. He was the son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots; he was raised by ardent Presbyterians in Scotland where, for self-protection, he learned to lie and dissemble. And then he becomes king of England (and Scotland) and the head of the Church of England. One of the first things he did as king was to convene a conference at Hampton Court Palace of the various Protestant religious groups and factions, seeking some kind of common ground as long as that common ground accepted him as head of the church.

It was a time of excitement about regime change, expectations of things getting better, and anticipation of the good things the reign of James would bring. It couldn’t last, but of all the things James did, one had by far the greatest and most long-lasting impact – the assembling of six companies of theologians to create a new version of the Bible. It became what we know as the King James Version; it’s impact on religion and the English language can’t be overestimated.

In God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, British writer Adam Nicolson tells the full story of how that version of the Bible came to be. Originally published in in 2003, reissued in 2009, republished yet again in 2011 for the 400^th anniversary of the KJV, and republished in 2016, God’s Secretaries provides the history and context of the times, and how the KJV emerged from it. It was not a sure thing.

Religious conflicts were ongoing. If anything disabused James of his notion of him leading a new era, it was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which a small group of Catholic extremists planned to blow up Parliament, the King and Queen, and government officials.

The conflicts weren’t only between Protestants and the remaining Catholics in England. They could be just as intense between Anglican officials and groups called “Puritans,” people who had a more radical Protestant view. They could be persecuted as much as the Catholics at times; one group, known as the Pilgrims, would eventually leave England for Holland, and a few years later sail in the Mayflower for America. But some of the KJV translators, and particularly the group based in Cambridge University, had definite Puritan sympathies.

Few documents from the translation program actually survive. A few discoveries in the 1950s (by American scholars, no less) of documents mostly in Oxford have shed light on translators themselves and how they went about the process of translation.

The translators had no qualms about borrowing from five previous translations approved for the work. One of those translations was by William Tyndale (1494-1536), and the KJV translators borrowed liberally from it (so did William Shakespeare).

Adam Nicolson

Nicolson is the author of a number of popular history and nature books. His history works include Seamanship: A Voyage Along the Wild Coats of the British Isles (2004);

 Men of Honour: Trafalgar: and The Making of an English Hero (2005); Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson’s Battle of Trafalgar (2006); Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War (2008); Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History (2008); Gentry: Six Hundred Years of a Peculiarly English Class (2011); and The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters (2014), among others. His nature books include accounts of walks in France, Britain, the United States, and Scotland and The Smell of the Summer Grass: Pursuing Happiness at Purch Hill (2011).

“The language of the King James Bible,” Nicolson writes, “is the language …of patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good.” He notes that this kind of language has largely died.

God’s Secretaries is a wonderful story of the KJV, one that places the translation in its time and context, and one that judges the main actors in its creation and its translators in their own era and not ours.

Related: “Tyndale” by David Teems.

Top illustration: the title page of the first edition of the King James Bible in 1611.

A Week of Dickens: “The Life of Our Lord” by Charles Dickens

Was Charles Dickens religious?

It’s a question that comes up now and then. Overt religious themes and characters seem to be rare in his novels and stories, while religious themes like redemption, salvation, and the wages of sin are common. Biographies generally give the subject short shrift, and it may be that the biographers themselves aren’t that interested.

Five years ago, academic Gary Colledge published God and Charles Dickens: Rediscovering the Christian Voice of a Classic Author, and made the claim that Dickens was, indeed, a conventional Christian. He made a good case – certainly he promoted Christian themes and ideas in his novels, stories, articles, and letters. He had been raised a nominal Anglican, and for a time affiliated with the Unitarians. And there’s the question of the big scandal of his later life, when he pensioned off his wife of more than 20 years so he could be with his much younger mistress, actress Ellen Ternan.

Colledge and others have pointed to a manuscript that wasn’t published until 1934. When his children were young, and over a period covering the years 1846 to 1849, Dickens wrote a version of the gospel story. He meant it for his children alone; on his death, the manuscript went to his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, who had lived with Dickens and the children after he forced his wide out (and caused a break with her own family as a result). From Georgina, the manuscript passed from child to child until 1933, when Sir Henry Dickens, the last remaining child, died. The manuscript was published the next year under the title of The Life of Our Lord.

At first glance, the narrative seems straightforward enough, and is clearly based on the gospel story as told in the Bible. There are some differences, and they’re not insignificant. There is clearly an emphasis on good behavior (do good and you will go to heaven” and more of Jesus as a great and good man and less Jesus as the Son of God. The children were read this story when they were very young, so it’s a question how much heavy theological content they would have absorbed. Still, the account is not entirely orthodox.

Charles Dickens

Still, it’s a charming account, and it’s interesting to imagine a man like Dickens reading this story to his very young children.

I have a first American edition from 1934, and it contains an inscription on the flyleaf: “For Faithful & Prompt Attendance, Second Mile Class, Grace M.E. Church, January 1935 – July 1935. Sincerely, Mrs. C.B. Poston.” The book was obviously given as a Sunday School attendance reward or prize. The Grace United Methodist Church has been in the same location in the Central West End of St. Louis since 1892, and was located in downtown St. Louis before that.

His statements of faith can be seen as at odds with many of the things he did in life, including his treatment of his wife, Catherine. At the same time, the causes he fought for and infused in his novels and articles reflected his strong senses of justice and compassion. In the end, he was a man, with the strengths and frailties common to all of us.

Related:

My review of Gary Colledge’s God and Charles Dickens.

A discussion of Dickens and religion at Rick Wilcox’s Literary Life blog.

Top photograph: Charles Dickens with two of his children, Katie and Mamie.