In Praise of Science Fiction

To judge books and movies by their covers, a great deal of current science fiction seems to rest on two stable pillars—boobs and blasters. This is cheap fodder for the gut, but it often lacks what science fiction is best suited to provide—that, is stimulating food for the mind.

One of the easiest ways to make this point is to compare Isaac Asimov’s I Robot with the movie of the same name. The book is a series of challenging intellectual puzzles based on Asimov’s famous “three laws of robotics.” The movie has more in common with Rambo or Terminator than it does with anything Asimov ever wrote.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a good action movie. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a classic that is hard to surpass. (Certainly, its sequels are not its equals.) But all action movies typically offer is a temporary escape from the ordinary business of living. There is nothing wrong with that from time to time, as long as we don’t start living for the next escape.

The better science fiction, however, raises the life’s big questions: What does it mean to be human? Are there other intelligent beings in the universe, and what forms might they take? How might human beings behave if placed in an alien environment? Can we change the present by visiting the past? Where are we headed, both as individuals and as a species?

Consider briefly science fiction’s concern for the future. The suggested scenarios vary widely, of course. Will evolution take a negative turn leading to The Planet of the Apes? Will we be dominated by a super-computer that becomes a virtual deity? Will aliens be our friends or our nemesis?

Asimov’s most enduring vision pictures a galactic civilization that is threatened by chaos. His Foundation Trilogy, its sequels and its prequel suggest that the distant future will be guided through the chaos by the force of mind rather than by technology. In these books, he brilliantly unifies his early I Robot with a later series of robot mysteries solved by the detective Lij Bailey.

From a Christian perspective, the important thing about good science fiction is not the specific future it envisions but the fact that it asks us to look ahead. The current furor over global warming and an increasing concern about a devastating collision with a huge chunk of space rock may have a similar effect.

Without something to draw our attention to the future, we easily develop a constricted view of life. We get up, eat breakfast, go to our jobs, fuss at our co-workers, go home, have supper, numb our minds with an hour or two of television, drop into bed and get up the next day to do it all over again.

If science fiction (or even fictional science, which one side or the other of the global warming debate must be) causes us to think about the future, it has done us a service. Certainly, most people think about the future in these ways without ever giving heed to the Bible’s infallible prediction of what is to come. But no one who is oblivious to the future can be saved. One of the essential doctrines of the New Testament is that Jesus, who died, came to life again and will return to judge the living and the dead.

Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead (Acts 17:30-31).

For after all it is only just for God to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to give relief to you who are afflicted and to us as well when the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power (2 Thessalonians 1:6-9).

Though this future alone is true, other imagined futures do not thereby become irrelevant. Just as the pagan myths of a dying, rising god found their ultimate fulfillment in Christ, so the hopes and fears embodied in the most provocative science fiction find their fulfillment in the twin destines of all human beings. Heaven is more exciting than the best of our dreams; hell is more dreadful than the worst of them.

A Royal Marriage

Psalm 45 celebrates the marriage of an idealized Israelite king. In view of the New Testament’s use of this Psalm (Hebrews 1) and the frequent scriptural use of the marriage metaphor to describe God’s relationship to His people, we read the psalm as a celebration of Christ’s relationship to His church.

Then the King will desire your beauty. Because He is your Lord, bow down to Him (v. 11).

What does it mean for the church to bow before her heavenly husband? An ancient earthly example may help us sense the flavor of this verse. Bathsheba was King David’s favorite wife. God had chosen her son Solomon to be King after David, and David had conveyed this promise to Bathsheba and Solomon. However, in David’s old age, one of his other sons, Adonijah, proclaimed himself king without David’s knowledge. This immediately put the lives of Bathsheba and Solomon in danger. If nothing were done, Adonijah would kill them as soon as David died. So Bathsheba went into the king’s bedroom to ask him to straighten things out (which he did). This is how she came—

So Bathsheba went in to the king in the bedroom. Now the king was very old, and Abishag the Shunammite was ministering to the king. ¹⁶ Then Bathsheba bowed and prostrated herself before the king. And the king said, "What do you wish?" (1 Kings 1:15-16).

After David had spoken with Nathan the prophet about the situation, he called for Bathsheba to come back in.

Then Bathsheba bowed with her face to the ground, and prostrated herself before the king and said, “May my lord King David live forever” (v.31).

Think about this. David and Bathsheba might have been married two decades by this time. She was his favorite wife. Her son was the designated heir. But when she comes in before the king, she kneels down and bends over until her face is on the floor. David is her lord. David is her king as well as her husband. That is what Psalm 45:11 means when it says, Because He is your Lord, bow down to Him.

We must never become so familiar with Jesus Christ that we treat Him like one of our buddies. You and your neighbor may just walk into each other’s houses without knocking—there are some people who do that—but you cannot do that with the Lord Jesus Christ. Even though He loves you, and He wants to spend time listening to you and talking to you, He is still too great a king for you to treat Him with casual disrespect. He is never too busy for you. Your smallest troubles or blessings are not beneath His notice. He wants to hear about them. But still, He is the King, and like Bathsheba, when you come into His presence, humble yourself before Him. He is worthy of your worship because He is a glorious husband and He will transform His people by His grace into a glorious bride.

The Preaching of Christ

Ephesians 2:17 contains an astounding truth. Jesus Christ “preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near.” Christ is our peace, and He established peace (v. 14). That is wonderful enough, but verse 17 says He preached peace. Those far away were the gentiles at Ephesus. Those who were near were the Jews.

But Christ never went to Ephesus. Paul and several of his associates carried the gospel to that pagan city. How did Christ preach to them? We find the answer in 2 Corinthians 13 where Paul rebuked a group of cantankerous believers for “seeking proof of the Christ who speaks in me” (v. 3). When Paul preached, Christ was preaching in and through him.

But we can go further than that. Jesus said to His disciples, “He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me” (Matthew 10:40). So Paul was not the only representative of Christ through whom Christ spoke. When we look back at Ephesians 2, we see that Paul was not just writing about peace between the Ephesian Christians and the Jewish Christians. He had in mind the whole believing world. Whenever Jews and gentiles come to faith, they have heard Christ preaching through His messengers.

Therefore, when an ordinary pastor like me stands in front of an ordinary congregation and opens his mouth, Christ speaks. That is an astounding truth. There are, as far as I can tell, only two criteria that must be met for Christ to speak through me. First, I must preach the gospel. Ephesians 2:17 says literally that Christ gospelled peace. And the apostle Paul insisted, “For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).

Then in the next sentence he provides the second criterion for Christ speaking through His servant. “My message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God” (1 Corinthians 2:4-5).

If I preach the gospel in the fullness of the Spirit, Christ speaks through my mouth. This wonderful truth entails several corollaries:

Ø I have no business preaching anything that is not centered on the gospel of Christ. I must present the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27) in all of Scripture as it relates to the gospel.

Ø Before I preach I must earnestly and humbly seek the purity and power of the Spirit.

Ø Those who sit under true gospel preaching ought to be straining their ears to hear the voice of Christ. They ought not come to hear a man putting on a clever performance. They come to hear God.

Great Father in heaven, be merciful to me a weak and sinful preacher of the glorious gospel of Christ. Be merciful to the people who hear me week after week. May I never stand before them to speak my words but only Yours, and when my words intrude into Your message, may the people not hear or heed them, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Till We Have Faces--by C S Lewis

I just finished this amazing book by a master Christian story-teller. I had read it a number of years ago, and I remembered the basic plot line except for the brilliant ending.

One of Lewis’s most fascinating proposals was that the ancient pagan myths, by embodying the deepest fears and longings of the human heart, point toward their perfect fulfillment in Jesus Christ. In Till We Have Faces, Lewis reworks the Greek myth of Psyche to produce a tale that fits into none of the standard categories for novels. It is first interesting, then puzzling, then at the end incredibly and surprisingly beautiful.

Psyche was born divinely beautiful and destined to be married to a god, but this is really the story of her ugly sister, Orual, whose possessive love for Psyche threatens to destroy Psyche’s happiness. When Orual adopts a veil to hide her ugliness, we recall St. Paul’s reference to the veil that covers the faces of people who reject the gospel (2 Corinthians 4). Along the way we see the emptiness of those oh-so-sensible rationalizations that try to provide a psychological explanation for every encounter with the supernatural.

In some passages I sense the same mystery and wonder that I feel when the little otter meets Pan in Wind and the Willows or when Mr. and Mrs. Beaver describe Alsan to the Pevensie children in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I suppose this is not a book for everybody. (No book is, except the Bible.) But I suspect that there are many who will find that it exposes the ugliness of their own souls without leaving them in despair. We need to see the things in us that must die if we are to see the beauty of our God. Seeing him is the only way we can be transformed from Orual into Psyche.

Hiking

Having begun this feeble effort at blogging, I feel some obligation (be it however small) to provide something for my devoted (or not-so-devoted) following. Since nothing particularly worthwhile has occurred to me, I decided to opt for a modest effort at entertainment. In 1978 my mother published a cookbook called The Sailor's Wife with recipes for outdoor cooking. Family members were encouraged to submit something, so I sent in the following piece. If you are feeling charitable, you might describe it as a poem. My mother matched it with this family photo of us preparing for a trek in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I'm the bloke on the left.

PACKING IN

Sore feet and dirt

And sweat on your shirt

And a rattlesnake under each rock--

It's part of the fun

'Neath the blistering sun

When you go for a twenty-mile walk.

But treasures unknown

Are bought with each groan

As the load wears a hole in your back;

For sumptuous fare

And pure, unbreathed air

Await when you take up a pack.

Burning Books

And many of those who practiced magic brought their books together and began burning them in the sight of everyone; and they counted up the price of them and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver (Acts 19:19).

My first reaction to this verse is to wince at the lost cultural heritage. It would be fascinating to know what kinds of spells and potions the people of Ephesus were using. Evangelical scholar, John Warwick Montgomery has an extensive collection of medieval texts on magic, which gave him the necessary background to write Principalities and Powers (1973). What would it mean to someone like him to have hundreds of first-century manuscripts on the subject?

My reaction is a thoroughly modern one based, I suppose, on my love of old books, my suspicion of government-sponsored censorship,[1] and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. In this 1953 book, Bradbury envisioned a bleak future in which television had turned the majority of the populace into mindless, self-centered morons. Wow what prescience! Since most people no longer read books anyway, the government was able to capitalize on their ignorance, and it banned the reading of books. Firemen no longer put out fires; they burned books. Sometimes whole houses full of books. Sometimes with the owner still inside.

But the book-burning at Ephesus was different. In the first place, people brought their magic books voluntarily because they saw that the power of the gospel was greater than the power of the dark side. These people were not at all interested in 21^st century anthropological concerns. They knew by experience the great spiritual harm those books had done to them, and they wanted to be free.

The reason we have trouble entering into their mind-set is that most of us have never experienced the fear close contact with evil spirits engenders. At least, we have seldom recognized the presence of spiritual evil. If we had grown up on the island of New Guinea or in certain parts of the Caribbean, Africa, or Asia, we might more easily sympathize with the courage it took for the Ephesian Christians to destroy such talismans of power.

---

[1] It is not censorship when a public library decides not to purchase a book that offends community standards. Nor is it censorship if a government agency declines to pay for art that is offensive to many citizens. (Oh how I wish that would happen more often!)

The Importance of Ending Well

When Heather and I were students at Moody Bible Institute (1967-1970), the president of the school was Dr. William Culbertson. One of the things he stressed in his chapel messages was the importance of ending well. I don’t suppose I thought much about that during the early years of my ministry, but this year I turned sixty-three, and Dr. Culbertson’s exhortation has been echoing in my heart. What does it mean to end well?

Dr. Culbertson
(He looked older when we knew him.)

First, it means to maintain a good Christian testimony and reputation to the end of my life. Dr. Culbertson was contending with cancer by the time we left Moody. He was too weak to attend our graduation and he died some months later. We were not aware of his illness until very near the end of the year, but I never saw anything in him except Christ-honoring gentleness. I remember one day when I was hanging out one upper stories of Crowell Hall washing windows. My partner accidentally dropped a water soaked sponge that hit Dr. Culbertson as he walked by. I don’t remember if he even looked up as he continued walking, but all of us on the crew were petrified. We assumed that we would be called into his office and raked over the coals. After a few days had passed and nothing had happened, we decided it was better that the sponge had hit Dr. Culbertson than the vice president of the school. That may have been very unfair to the vice-president, but that is what we said.

Second, ending well means to stay at my post. In this too, Dr. Culbertson is my model. Certainly I may have to reduce my workload in a few years, or the Lord may change my assignment, but I don’t believe God will want me to spend the last years before I meet Him in idleness. I have many hobbies that could keep me occupied for a long time—fishing, hunting, hiking, reading, making telescopes, and observing the stars. Sometimes I wish I had more time for these pursuits, but I dare not make that my goal. I want my service to Christ to last as long as He gives me strength and a reasonable portion of mind. Hobbies are for renewing body and soul, not for living.

Third, ending well means pushing myself to keep growing in Christ and acquiring new useful skills, or at least maintaining old ones. For a number of years I have read the Greek New Testament through every year. This year I am reading a chapter a day alternating between Greek, Latin, and German. The goal is to keep my mind sharp and to force myself to notice things I might pass by in the familiar English version. About three evenings a week I read a chapter from the Hebrew Old Testament. This is a new endeavor made possible by the acquisition of A Reader’s Hebrew Bible, which provides vocabulary entries at the bottom of each page for words used fewer than 100 times. I have become more intentional about getting something out of my reading as well. Except on the busiest days, I make sure I write something about what I have read.

Fourth, ending well means staying flexible and being willing to try new things. I don’t know what that might mean, but I pray that the Lord will enable me to hear His quiet voice. Should we be doing something different at church? Does He want me to write another book? How can we reach out more effectively to lost people in our area and around the world? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but may God graciously keep my eyes and ears open to His work.