The Hunger Games Review

In a post-apocalyptic future, 24 teenagers must participate in a reality show in which they must kill or be killed. That is the premise of The Hunger Games, a young adult (!) novel by Suzanne Collins.

The book is set in the country of Panem, which occupies what was once North America. In Panem, 12 districts surround the Capitol, the seat of government and power. The protagonist of the book is 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in District 12 (formerly Appalachia), one of the poorest districts. Her father has died five years before, and her family now consists of her younger sister Prim—whom she loves—and her mother,whom she has contempt for. In fact, with a few exceptions, Katniss has contempt for most people she meets.

For the benefit of those who would like to read the book, I won’t get into many plot details. I will say that Collins is a skillful storyteller, and it was easy to keep reading. I will also say that, for reasons other than Collins’s storytelling skills, the book was a disappointment for me. I felt that Katniss was not a likable protagonist from the beginning, and she did not change significantly over the course of the book. The book comes across as deterministic in the way that it presents the world. There are no surprising twists. The Capitol is in charge and no one can do anything about it. The only thing anyone can do is look out for the welfare of themselves and the people they care about. In this way, it reminded me of Thomas Hobbes’s description of the state of nature, where it is a war of all against all, and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes says this condition obtains where there is no single power to keep everyone in awe. I heard Collins saying, through her story, that this condition also obtains where there is a single power, but it is in that power’s interest to deprive others of any kind of security.

If I were the parent of young adults who read this book, I would probably want to talk to them about the deterministic (or possibly fatalistic?) worldview of the books, and whether it accurately depicted the world as it is. I don’t believe that it does, but I do believe that there are many determinists among us. Collins, apparently, is one.

Real Marriage Review

Anytime you read or listen to anything from Mark Driscoll, you know he is going to be candid. Sometimes that candor is welcome—he is unafraid of naming and dealing with elephants in the room. Sometimes that candor is less than welcome—I admit to having cringed at several of the things he has said during his career as pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle.

Real Marriage, which Mark co-write with his wife Grace, has all of the candor you would expect from Driscoll. They share frankly about their own marriage history, and this vulnerability shows that they are not perfect, but have had to grow in love and friendship over the years. Five of the eleven chapters have to do with sex, and the chapter entitled “Can We _____?” deals with the Driscolls’ opinion on whether certain sexual acts are permissible for married couples. In spite of the interest that chapter has created, I thought two of the other sex chapters (those on sexual abuse and pornography) were two of the stronger chapters of the book.

The Driscolls have a complementarian marriage, and this book will resonate most with those who have a similar perspective. They write that the husband is to be the “primary if not the sole breadwinner” (61). However, there is a lot of advice that even non-complementarians can agree with. Concerning responsibilities, they write that “whoever is best at something and is willing to do it assumes that responsibility” (56). The Driscolls don’t talk about whether it is possible for the wife to be best at making money, or the husband at raising children.

Driscoll’s great strength as a Bible teacher is bridging the gap between the world of the Bible and the modern world. He makes the Bible come alive to his contemporary hearers. Sometimes, however, this impulse toward making the Bible come alive leads him and Grace onto shaky exegetical ground. For example, in saying that a married couple is supposed to sleep in the same bed, they quote Hebrews 13:4, saying it “speaks of ‘the marriage bed’ and not ‘beds’” (167). But in Hebrews 13:4, “marriage bed” is a metonymy for the marriage relationship. They also write, describing ancient interpretation of the Song of Songs, “Until around AD 100, the Jewish rabbis interpreted the Song of Songs in a literal way…. The Song of Songs was read at the Passover liturgy, and the songs were often sung in the pubs to celebrate marital love and intimacy within a covenant relationship” (117). I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to speak of ancient Israel as having pubs.

In the end, I can only halfheartedly recommend this book. There are passages that contain wonderfully good advice—I particularly enjoyed their chapter on friendship—but it is just too uneven. Readers of this book would do well to combine it with other marriage books (I have not yet read Tim and Kathy Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage, but it seems like a good option), and seek out a more experienced, godly married couple to learn from.

The Me I Want to Be

Popular-level books on Christian living are not my favorite genre. Partially this is because I just prefer to read books on theology and biblical studies, and partially because a lot of what some of them have to say has been said better elsewhere by someone like C.S. Lewis. But I like John Ortberg a lot—maybe because we have a similar personality type (INFP, according to the Myers-Briggs temperament sorter). He is able to write straightforwardly about complex realities without over-simplifying, and he has a good sense of humor.

The idea behind this book is that each person is made by God in a certain way, and that it is our task to find out how to flourish given the way we are made. Different things make us grow, and different things give us life. We don’t find out what makes us grow and gives us life by imitating other people. For example, although prayer is something that all people need to flourish, different people flourish most by praying at different times, in different ways, and in different places.

The negative side of this is that each of has “signature sins,” ways of sinning that are connected to the ways we are gifted. Just as different things make each of us grow, different things keep each of us from growing and becoming the “me” we were meant to be. A temptation that one person finds very difficult to resist will be easy to resist for someone else. For example, people with great leadership abilities are tempted to use others.

This book contains a lot of good advice, and each copy contains an access code to a spiritual assessment tool at Monvee.com. I’d recommend it especially for young people who are just beginning to figure out how they have been wired, but older adults can benefit from it as well.

10 Books I’d Like to Read This Year

In some ways I’m a desultory reader; I read what looks interesting or what is available to me at the time. I will continue to read that way this year, but I would also like to prioritize some books that I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Here is what is at the top of my reading list this year:

1. Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi. It seems like this book is cited in every book written in the last 50 years that deals even a little bit with epistemology.

2. God’s Word in Human Words by Kenton L. Sparks. I have a longstanding interest in biblical hermeneutics, and this one has looked interesting to me for a while.

3. The Moral Vision of the New Testament by Richard Hays. Ethics is another longstanding interest of mine, and this is an important book on NT ethics.

4. The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright. I’ve read the first two volumes in Wright’s series “Christian Origins and the Question of God.” I’d like to read this third one before the fourth one comes out—which is supposed to happen this year.

5. Church History by Eusebius. A classic that I’ve never read.

6. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I’ve read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, now it’s time to tackle this one.

7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I’ve never read anything by Austen. I figured this would be a good one to start with.

8. Autobiography by G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton is one of my favorite authors, and I’ve read a couple of biographies of him, but I’ve never read his autobiography.

9. Political Visions and Illusions: A Survey and Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies by Daniel Koyzis. Not a bad book to read in a major election year in the United States.

10. What would you recommend?

Jesus and the Victory of God

I started reading this about a year ago, and finally finished it early in December. N.T. (Tom) Wright has become a book machine over the last few years, sometimes publishing three or four per year. Some of these are popular level re-workings of ideas that he has written about elsewhere, but Jesus and the Victory of God is one of his more massive and academic works. Published in 1996, it is the second volume in his “Christian Origins and the Question of God” series (the first is The New Testament and the People of God, the third is The Resurrection of the Son of God, and the fourth, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, is forthcoming).

The underlying argument of the book is that the “historical Jesus” and the “Jesus of faith” don’t have to be separated, as they have been in so much recent scholarship. You can do rigorous historical study and end up knowing something about how Jesus presented himself to his contemporaries. That’s not to say that the book is devotional in tone. It is academic through and through. Wright simply says that it is possible to know with some degree of confidence who Jesus believed himself to be, and who his earliest followers believed him to be. This means that he invites criticism from two sides: scholars who think that he is too confident that historical questions have answers, and believers who don’t like historical studies that seek to fit Jesus into a first-century milieu. Wright begins with an overview of Jesus studies over the past 100 or so years. Then he argues that Jesus’ public persona was that of a prophet, and the content of his proclamation was the kingdom of God. Then he looks at what Jesus believed his role was with regard to Israel, and the reasons for his crucifixion. Finally, he argues that Jesus’ final journey to Jerusalem was intended to act out symbolically YHWH’s return to Zion.

This is a fascinating book, and well worth the time and effort spent in reading it. Those less academically minded may find especially the initial review of Jesus studies tedious, but those already familiar with the likes of Schweitzer, Wrede and Bultmann will find it interesting. There are things about this book that I love and things that I am not sure about (e.g., that some of Jesus’ parables that the Church has traditionally thought are about his second coming are really about YHWH’s return to Zion as enacted by Jesus). Wright doesn’t talk much about Jesus’ resurrection in this book, but not because he doesn’t think it is important. It is because there was too much material to deal with it in one book, so he wrote The Resurrection of the Son of God over the next seven years. I’d recommend this book to anyone seeking to gain a greater understanding of how Jesus fit into first-century Judaism, and especially those who may be either enamored or troubled by proclamations from the likes of the Jesus Seminar or Bart Ehrman.

2011: The Year in Reading

I finished 44 books in the past year. There were a lot of good ones, and a few not-so-great ones. Here (in no particular order) are 10 that I would highly recommend:

Biblical Studies:

1. Jesus and the Victory of God by N.T. Wright. This is a large book, and not a fast or easy read, but it repays the effort spent on it.
2. The King Jesus Gospel by Scot McKnight. It challenges Christians to have a fuller understanding of what the gospel is (i.e., more than just salvation). I hope that it bears much fruit in the year to come.
3. Old Testament Ethics for the People of God by Christopher J.H. Wright. If you’ve ever wondered what God’s instructions to Israel in the Old Testament have to do with Christians today, this is the book to read.

Business and Leadership:

4. Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality by Henry Cloud. An unusually strong and deep entry from the business/leadership genre.

Cultural Studies:

5. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. This was my first Gladwell book, and it won’t be my last. He’s a joy to read.
6. Gods That Fail by Vinoth Ramachandra. Idolatry is not dead. It has just disguised itself. Another book in the same vein that I read this year was Counterfeit Gods by Timothy Keller.

History:

7. Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction by John Fea. A historian looks at a perennial question. What he says is sometimes surprising, and it won’t completely satisfy those who want to quickly say “Yes” or “No.” I’d recommend this to every Christian with an interest in American history.

Memoir/Biography:

8. Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions by Rachel Held Evans. Evans speaks for a lot of people in her/my generation who grew up in the church and came to decide that things in this world are not always as they seem.
9. The Pastor: A Memoir by Eugene Peterson. Peterson has a lot of knowledge and experience when it comes to both writing and pastoring, and I’m grateful that he has chosen to reflect on his life as a pastor in written form.

Theology:

10. Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just by Timothy Keller. Christians especially ought to ask the question, “What does it mean to be just?” Keller gives answers for those who ask. Like many good biblical answers, they don’t make ideologues on the right or the left very happy.

Honorable Mention:

Okay, I said 10, but I got to the end and couldn’t leave off these two:

Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber
Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream by David Platt

The Origins of Christmas

Every year, I hear people talk about where Christmas came from. Here are two discussions of how there came to be a celebration of Jesus’ birth on December 25.

From Philip Schaff, in his History of the Christian Church:

The Christmas festival was probably the Christian transformation or regeneration of a series of kindred heathen festivals—the Saturnalia, Sigillaria, Juvenalia, and Brumalia—which were kept in Rome in the month of December, in commemoration of the golden age of universal freedom and equality, and in honor of the unconquered sun, and which were great holidays, especially for slaves and children. This connection accounts for many customs of the Christmas season, like the giving of presents to children and to the poor, the lighting of wax tapers, perhaps also the erection of Christmas trees, and gives them a Christian import; while it also betrays the origin of the many excesses in which the unbelieving world indulges at this season, in wanton perversion of the true Christmas mirth, but which, of course, no more forbid right use, than the abuses of the Bible or of any other gift of God.

Had the Christmas festival arisen in the period of the persecution, its derivation from these pagan festivals would be refuted by the then reigning abhorrence of everything heathen; but in the Nicene age this rigidness of opposition between the church and the world was in a great measure softened by the general conversion of the heathen. Besides, there lurked in those pagan festivals themselves, in spite of all their sensual abuses, a deep meaning and an adaptation to a real want; they might be called unconscious prophecies of the Christmas feast. Finally, the church fathers themselves confirm the symbolical reference of the feast of the birth of Christ, the Sun of righteousness, the Light of the world, to the birth-festival of the unconquered sun, which on the twenty-fifth of December, after the winter solstice, breaks the growing power of darkness, and begins anew his heroic career. It was at the same time, moreover, the prevailing opinion of the church in the fourth and fifth centuries, that Christ was actually born on the twenty-fifth of December; and Chrysostom appeals, in behalf of this view, to the date of the registration under Quirinius (Cyrenius), preserved in the Roman archives. But no certainty respecting the birthday of Christ can be reached from existing data.

From Craig Blomberg, in his Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey:

In post-New Testament times, Mithraism (originally from Persia) amalgamated with the Roman worship of Sol Invictus (the unconquerable sun), and a festival to Sol was celebrated every December 25. Christians took advantage of this “day off” to protest against Mithraism by worshiping the birth of Jesus instead. After the Roman empire became officially Christian (fourth century), this date turned into the legal holiday we know today as Christmas. The celebration of the annual death and rebirth of the nature gods finds parallels and contrasts, too, with Christian teaching about the death and resurrection of Christ (34).

It is important to note that Christmas did not start out as a pagan festival. It was the co-opting of a pagan festival. In this way, it is like Festivus, the holiday that Frank Costanza (A character on the TV show Seinfeld) created as an alternative to Christmas. There was already a holiday being celebrated, and Christians used the festive atmosphere to create their own holiday.

Beyond Bumper Sticker Ethics

This is the second edition of Steve Wilkens’s introductory survey of ethical theories. Wilkens, who teaches at Azusa Pacific University in southern California, devotes chapters to cultural relativism, ethical egoism, utilitarianism, behaviorism, evolutionary ethics, situation ethics, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, narrative ethics, natural law ethics and divine command theory. The chapters on evolutionary ethics and narrative ethics are new in this edition.

The idea behind this book is that various ethical theories can be summarized in short slogans, or “bumper stickers.” Even people who do not think about ethical systems organize their lives around one or more of these slogans, and Wilkens wants to bring the theories behind the bumper stickers out into the open so they can be evaluated. Wilkens writes from a Christian perspective, and places the ethical theories in the book into three categories: first he looks at ethical theories that contradict aspects of the Christian worldview, then theories that can be compatible with, but do not require, a Christian worldview, and finally theories that begin from a Christian standpoint.

In each chapter, Wilkens introduces the reader to an ethical theory, primarily interacting with one or two proponents of that theory. For example, in his chapter on ethical egoism he interacts with Ayn Rand, in his chapter on evolutionary ethics he interacts with E.O. Wilson, and in his chapter on narrative ethics he interacts with Stanley Hauerwas. Then he gives the positive aspects of each theory—he believes that all of them have some truth; otherwise they would not be so attractive to so many people—and potential weaknesses.

One potential weakness of the book is that dealing with just one or two proponents of an ethical theory can lead to oversimplification. Wilkens is conscious of that risk, but believes that it is a risk that must be taken in an introductory survey (217). Also, in the chapter on natural law, Wilkens talks about the U.S. Constitution setting forth the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He means the Declaration of Independence (185).

In spite of small weaknesses, I highly recommend this book. All people organize their lives according to some ethical system, and relatively few people take time to reflect on where their ethical system came from and what its implications are. After reading this book, some Christians may realize that the ethical system they have adopted is not as rooted in a Christian worldview as it ought to be. This is a book that is especially well suited as a textbook for an introductory ethics class in a Christian high school or university.

Václav Havel: 1936–2011

Václav Havel, the playwright and dissident who became president of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and the Czech Republic in 1993, died on Sunday.

Havel was still president when I went to Prague to teach English in the fall of 2002. I was there in early 2003 when his term as president ended. For the last month of his time in office, he placed a large neon heart above Prague Castle (where the president lives and works) to show his love and gratitude for the Czech people. During my year there, I not only learned how to pronounce Václav (vahts-lahv), I read a collection of his essays, Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990. I found many of his writings courageous and inspiring, and his idea of “living in truth” is particularly powerful. Here are a few passages I underlined in my copy of Open Letters:

From “Letter to Alexander Dubček”:

There are moments when a politician can achieve real political success only by turning aside from the complex network of relativized political considerations, analyses, and calculations, and behaving simply as an honest person. The sudden assertion of human criteria within a dehumanizing framework of political manipulation can be like a flash of lightning illuminating a dark landscape. And truth is suddenly truth again, reason is reason, and honor honor (48–49).

From “It Always Makes Sense to Tell the Truth”:

I believe that with the loss of God, man has lost a kind of absolute and universal system of coordinates, to which he could always relate anything, chiefly himself. His world and his personality gradually began to break up into separate, incoherent fragments corresponding to different, relative coordinates. And when this happened, man began to lose his inner identity, that is, his identity with himself… It’s as if we were playing for a number of different teams at once, each with different uniforms, and as though–and this is the main thing–we didn’t know which one we ultimately belonged to, which one of those teams was really ours (94–95).

From “The Power of the Powerless”:

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them (133).

If Western young people so often discover that retreat to an Indian monastery fails them as an individual or group solution, then this is obviously because, and only because, it lacks that element of universality, since not everyone can retire to an ashram. Christianity is an example of an opposite way out: it is a point of departure for me here and now–but only because anyone, anywhere, at any time, may avail themselves of it. In other words, the parallel polis points beyond itself and makes sense only as an act of deepening one’s responsibility to and for the whole, as a way of discovering the most appropriate locus for this responsibility, not as an escape from it (195–196).

From “Politics and Conscience”:

I think that, with respect to the relation of western Europe to the totalitarian systems, no error could be greater than the one looming largest: that of a failure to understand the totalitarian systems for what they ultimately are—a convex mirror of all modern civilization and a harsh, perhaps final call for a global recasting of how that civilization understands itself…. They are, most of all, a convex mirror of the inevitable consequences of rationalism, a grotesquely magnified image of its own deep tendencies, an extreme offshoot of its own expansion (259).

It is… becoming evident—and I think that is an experience of an essential and universal importance—that a single, seemingly powerless person who dares to cry out the word of truth and to stand behind it with all his person and all his life, ready to pay a high price, has, surprisingly, greater power, though formally disfranchised, than do thousands of anonymous voters (270).

From “Six Asides About Culture”:

The more an artist compromises to oblige power and gain advantages, the less good art we can expect from him; the more freely and independently, by contrast, he pursues his own vision… the better his chances of creating something good—though it remains only a chance: what is uncompromising need not automatically be good (281).

From “Stories and Totalitarianism”:

[The totalitarian system] began with an interpretation of history from a single aspect, then made that aspect absolute, and finally reduced all of history to that one aspect. The exciting variety of history was discarded in favor of an orderly, easily understood interplay of “historical laws,” “social groups,” and “relations of production,” so pleasing to the eye of the scientist. But this gradually expelled from history the very thing that gives human life, time, and thus history itself a structure: the story (335).

From “New Year’s Address” (1990, after he had been elected president for the first time):

Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would also be wrong to expect a general remedy from them only. Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all (392).

The King Jesus Gospel

The problem that Scot McKnight’s The King Jesus Gospel is intended to address is that the way evangelical Christians preach the gospel doesn’t often lead to lives characterized by discipleship. Evangelical evangelism has been geared toward getting people to make decisions (“accepting Jesus into your heart”), but “we lose at least 50 percent of those who make decisions” (20, italics in original). People become “saved,” but they don’t become disciples of Jesus. Clearly, the evangelical understanding of gospel and evangelism is not leading to changed lives as often as it should.

After calling attention to this problem, McKnight asks, “What is the gospel?” He turns to the New Testament–Paul, Jesus, and Peter–and concludes that the gospel “is declaring the story of Israel as resolved in the Story of Jesus” (79). He argues that Christianity left behind the emphasis on story in favor of an emphasis on salvation during the Reformation; the story-formed Creeds were de-emphasized in favor of confessions (McKnight mentions in particular the Augsburg Confession and the Genevan Confession). He takes pains to point out that the Reformers can’t be blamed for the “salvation culture” that we’ve ended up with. However, the seeds of a salvation culture were planted during the Reformation’s shift from an emphasis on story (of which salvation is a part) to an emphasis on salvation (without the rest of the gospel).

McKnight closes the book with five things that are necessary to regaining a gospel culture:

1. We have to become people of the Story (153).
2. We need to immerse ourselves even more into the Story of Jesus (153).
3. We need to see how the apostles’ writings take the Story of Israel and the Story of Jesus into the next generation and into a different culture, and how this generation led all the way to our generation (155).
4. We need to counter the stories that bracket and reframe our story (157).
5. We need to embrace this story so that we are saved and can be transformed by the gospel story (158).

I would recommend this book, but not on its own. It needs other books to flesh out the full picture. It does a good job of arguing that evangelical understandings of the gospel have led to a salvation culture rather than a gospel culture, but doesn’t go into detail about what a gospel culture looks like when it is lived out (McKnight himself has written a book on that subject called One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow). Also, and this is not really a fault of the book, but I am concerned that as a result of McKnight’s argument there may be people who get an impression that the gospel is “either/or”: that is, it is either the story of Jesus fulfilling the story of Israel, or it is salvation. In reality, salvation is part of the gospel. McKnight makes that point (88), and I think it is very important that we do not lose sight of it.