Are C S Lewis, J K Rowling and Philip Pullman overrated?

By Caleb | July 17, 2008

That was the question posed in the Books section of Outpost Gallifrey recently. You might not be surprised to read that my short answer is “No”, but hopefully my further observations might be of some interest…

First of all, I really enjoy all three writers and their books. Secondly, in the interests of full disclosure, I’m a Christian and so have more sympathy with C S Lewis’ religious views than Pullman’s views. Although I disagree with Pullman’s views on religion, I don’t object in principle to him putting them in his books, but I think that The Amber Spyglass is horribly one-sided and swamps the narrative, and is far more preachy than anything in Narnia.

J K Rowling, of course, has very strongly Christian themes running through the Harry Potter series. Having spotted these themes in the first six books, I worked out pretty much exactly how the final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort would play out before reading The Deathly Hallows, except for the part that the Hallows themselves played. I find it slightly odd how the themes in Harry Potter are so Christian, and how it constantly hints at Christianity (such as the fact that Harry was christened, his parents’ gravestone and so on), but seems to completely exclude any explicit mentions of religion at all. It’s an allegory that on the surface is almost entirely secular; Hogwarts is haunted by the absence of God. But I’d argue that with the Harry Potter books, J K Rowling is the best allegory writer of the three authors.

Are they overrated? I think that C S Lewis is underrated in the current climate because Christianity is out of fashion, but as a Christian, I would think that, wouldn’t I? Lewis taps into a rich vein of story and myth that includes Christianity (“the myth that became fact”, as he saw it), but also includes a rich range of folklore and classical mythology. All of it works as simply good story (with the possible exception of The Last Battle, which is actually more Neo-Platonist than genuinely Christian). That Lewis was aware that the Lion of Judah is a symbol for Christ in the Bible shouldn’t stop you enjoying Aslan as being a really cool magic talking lion.

I don’t think that J K Rowling is overrated except in comparison to other writers. The Harry Potter books are great adventure stories, and thoroughly deserve to be enjoyed as widely as they are. The problem is that other writers’ books are just as deserving, or even more deserving of such attention. If only all good stories received the attention that Harry Potter received! The problem is not that J K Rowling is over-hyped, it’s that virtually every other writer is under-hyped.

I think that books 1-3 are the best because they’re concise and to the point. From The Goblet of Fire on, and particularly in The Order of the Phoenix, Rowling is in need of a strict editor with a red pen at the ready. She’s a victim of her own success, in some ways. If she’d had to write the entire series under the normal constrictions that writers usually work under, they’d probably have been quite a lot better. She also doesn’t have any particular flair for language as such. She’s a very good storyteller, but not so good a writer.

I suspect Pullman might prove to be the most transient of the three. I don’t think he finds a big enough story in place of the religious story he rejects. He rejects the Christian story not so much by tearing it down as completely ignoring it. The story of Christianity, of God coming as a man, living a perfect life, and dying and rising to establish his perfect Kingdom that is both now and not-yet, never gets a look-in, probably because Pullman is smart enough to know that he’d never win in a fair fight. The fight against the twisted god of the Authority is fundamentally reactive, and the Republic of Heaven, as Pullman portrays it, doesn’t have the weight of Myth necessary for it to be a truly lasting story. Much the same as secular humanism as a philosophy, actually – it’s defined more by what it rejects, and hasn’t yet come up with anything to satisfy the human imagination in quite the same way as the stories of faith.

I think that the stream of literature that Lewis, Pullman and Rowling represent is very strong and enjoyable I’m working on a novel of my own, and it’s very much intended to stand in the tradition of these writers. In some ways its a reaction and a reshaping of the ideas and themes of these three writers, though hopefully it has many new and original things to say as well. Watch this space!

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Your Labour is Not in Vain

By Caleb | July 10, 2008
Just Walk Across the RoomLast month my church ran an evangelism course in the Sunday evening meetings called Just Walk Across the Room. For the most part, the course and accompanying book contains useful advice on getting to know people, discovering their stories and sharing your faith with them naturally.

It does have some weaknesses though. For one thing, the style is very American, which can seem very cheesy when transplanted to this side of the Atlantic! But more seriously, it has all the theological depth of a paddling pool, and one of the resulting big weaknesses is that it’s very individualistic.

Part Three is entitled The Power of Story, but focuses almost entirely on discovering other people’s stories and sharing your own individual testimony about how you became a Christian. Which is all very well up to a point, and individual salvation is vitally important. But God’s plan isn’t just to save individuals, but to save a people for himself, and ultimately to restore the whole of creation.

The Bible’s Big Story of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Restoration is ignored in favour of explanations like the Bridge Illustration, which is fine as far as it goes, but is woefully incomplete by itself. Worse, the book makes out that our ultimate destiny is “going to heaven” in the sense of disappearing to a spiritual dimension somewhere, rather than heaven and earth being united and renewed in the new creation. It doesn’t just leave out the Bible’s big story, it gets the ending wrong.

Part Four is titled Grander Vision Living, which is ironic given the truncated vision it actually gives. The book says since only people go to heaven, then people are all that matters, which is just a nicer-sounding way of saying that evangelism is the only thing that really matters ultimately.

N T Wright talks about the problems of this view in his book Surprised by Hope:

As long as we see salvation in terms of going to Heaven when we die, the main work of the church is bound to be seen in terms of saving souls for that future. But when we see salvation, as the New Testament sees it, in terms of God’s promised new heavens and new earth and of our promised resurrection to share in that new and gloriously embodied reality—what I have called life after life after death—then the main work of the church here and now demands to be rethought in consequence.

If our ultimate destiny is to live in a resurrected creation, then that means that although the world will be drastically changed and transformed, it’s still the same world! There is continuity as well as change, and so the resurrection means that what we do in this world has inherent worth and value even into eternity. Or as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15:58, because of the resurrection, “Your labour is not in vain”.

N T Wright again:

When we turn to Paul, the verse that has always struck me in this connection is 1 Corinthians 15:58. Paul, we remind ourselves, has just written the longest and densest chapter in any of his letters, discussing the future resurrection of the body in great and complex detail. How might we expect him to finish such a chapter? By saying, “Therefore, since you have such a great hope, sit back and relax because you know God’s got a great future in store for you”? No. Instead, he says, Therefore, my beloved ones, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.”

What does he mean? How does believing in the future resurrection lead to getting on with the work in the present? Quite straightforwardly. The point of the resurrection, as Paul has been arguing throughout the letter, is that the present bodily life is not valueless because it will die. God will raise it to new life. What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it. And if this applies to ethics, as in 1 Corinthians 6, it certainly also applies to the various vocations to which God’s people are called. What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as
yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it, “Until the day when all the blest to endless rest are called away”). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.

We need to always hold to the entire gospel, which both saves individuals and transforms the world. Individual salvation is an irreducible part of the Gospel, as David Couchman commented on his blog Challenging Times recently, and there is a tendency in some circles to go to the opposite extreme of Just Walk Across the Room, and think of the gospel solely in terms of social improvement in the here-and-now, without dealing with the root issue of each individual’s sinfulness before a holy God. Like so many things in the Christian faith, it’s both/and rather than either/or.

This has big implications for my thoughts on Christianity and politics. If our faith isn’t just about getting souls to heaven after they die, but is about proclaiming Christ’s kingdom, which he established in his death and resurrection, then that means firstly, that politics isn’t just a distraction, because what we do in the here and now really matters, and secondly, that Christians need to engage with the problems and politics of the world on a radically different basis, since we know the answer is found ultimately in Jesus and the power of his resurrection. More on this later…

David Field has written up a couple of lectures he wrote on the subject entitled Not the least lash lost, in reference to a line in a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins about the least eyelash not being lost. I’ve only had a skim through so far, but I hope to read it properly soon.

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Doctor Who: “Journey’s End” series finale review (spoilers)

By Caleb | July 8, 2008

“A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”

Journey’s End had explosions, special effects, emotion and punch-the-air moments aplenty. They were all massively entertaining, and I cheered when K9 appeared just as much as the next fan. Who’d have thought that Russell T Davies could have written a finale that would make Last of the Time Lords look restrained?

But although it made great entertainment, it wasn’t particularly good storytelling. I really enjoyed it, but I’m not convinced it was much good. Here’s why…

I think the biggest weaknesses of this story lie largely with the ending, which is unfortunate, because endings are so important. A good ending is what lifts a story beyond a collection of interesting events, and makes it satisfying and meaningful. The ending is one of the most important parts of any story, and the hardest to get right. You’ll remember a good ending forever, but a bad ending can wreck an entire story.

The ending doesn’t completely spoil Journey’s End, which is packed full of great scenes, good characters and dialogue and so on. But because of the weak ending, it doesn’t manage to integrate and resolve the themes and plot. It saps the tale of meaning and significance, and because of that is the least satisfying series finale so far.

In Last of the Time Lords, the conflict between the Doctor and Master actually was essentially an argument about the nature and future of humanity. The Master’s plan was to make humanity into “the greatest monsters of them all” by turning them into Toclafane, which humanity has the potential to become if driven by fear. The Doctor defeated him through humanity’s potential to have near-godlike power when united and driven by hope. The story, while acknowledging our capacity for evil, was ultimately an affirmation of human potential for good, and so, whatever other flaws it may have had, it had something meaningful to say as a piece of art.

Journey’s End doesn’t give the conflict between Davros and the Doctor the same weight and meaning. The big question raised is the effect of the Doctor on his companions. Davros accuses him of turning his companions into weapons, challenging the Doctor about all the people who have died for him in what’s an interesting and powerful scene.

But it has diddly-squat to do with Davros’ evil plan to destroy the whole of reality. His plan doesn’t mean anything, though it would be easy to tweak the script to hint at the ultimate self-destructiveness of evil, in contrast to the creativity that the Doctor inspires (or should inspire, again, the story isn’t all it could be here). Theme runs separately from plot.

For the story to be satisfying, it needed to resolve this conflict between Davros and the Doctor, to counter it through the actions of the Doctor and his companions. But although Donna defeats Davros as far as the plot goes through pressing some buttons, there’s no effective counterargument to his claim.

Russell T Davies claimed on Confidential that there’s “no answer” to Davros’ accusation that the Doctor turns his companions into weapons. But traditionally there are two moral responses to war and violence. One is pacifism – and the Doctor may be guilty of many things, but this isn’t one of them – and the other, which this story seems to forget, is chivalry.

The Doctor has never been a pacifist. The Doctor has always sought the peaceful solution first, but doesn’t shy away from fighting for what he believes in. As the Second Doctor said, “Some corners of the universe have bred the most terrible things, things that stand against everything we believe in… they must be fought”.

But although the Doctor is a fighter, he is not a butcher or a warmonger. The series has, on the whole, recognised that it’s possible, though difficult, to fight the monsters without becoming a monster yourself. “Coward” or “killer” aren’t the only two options, contrary to what the Emperor Dalek claims in Parting of the Ways. It’s possible to fight with honour, to treat your enemy fairly, and to remember that some actions are still unacceptable even in the most desperate of situations.

This story seems to forget this, and resorts to a mushy moral equivalence where the Doctor blowing up a weapon of universal destruction makes him a “Destroyer of Worlds” on a par with the Daleks. Davros’ over the top “I name you eternally… the destroyer of worlds!” might carry a bit more weight if the Doctor hadn’t just saved the entire multiverse.

It also confuses being willing to die for something, and willing to kill for something, which are two very different things. The Doctor inspiring Jabe the Tree Person to sacrifice herself to save the lives of everyone on Platform One, for example, is a rather different moral dilemma to inspiring his companions to be willing to blow up the Earth or the Crucible, but the two things are treated interchangeably.

To resolve the thematic conflict, Donna needed to become like the Doctor not in his abilities (specifically the ability to turn any piece of nearby technology into a “Defeat the Villains” button), but becoming like him morally. For the ending to be thematically satisfying, she needed to defeat the Daleks with heroism, with honour and courage and sacrifice, not technobabble alone.

Technobabble solving the plot isn’t necessarily a problem in itself. Russell T Davies usually does technobabble quite well, going all the way back to the “anti-plastic” in Rose. The technobabble in the previous finales – Rose becoming a Time Godess, the Void becoming a giant vacuum cleaner, and the Archangel Network turning the Doctor into Jesus – worked because they had at least some semblance of logic behind them, but more importantly, the plot fitted with the themes, and so the endings were satisfying. They made sense as myth and fairytale, if not as science.

The themes at work in the showdown between the DoctorDonna and the Daleks were the Doctor’s influence on his companions, and how an ordinary person can save the world. Good ideas, good themes, but badly integrated into the story. Saving the world through typing doesn’t make sense on any level, as science or story.

This brings me on to another problem: Donna’s fate, specifically having her mind wiped of all her adventures with the Doctor, sits awkwardly with both plot and themes. Rather than being a natural consequence of the story so far, it’s an arbitrary imposition. There’s no more reason for Donna to have a memory wipe than for Rose to have one at the end of Parting of the Ways, other than to a contrivance to give us an emotional ending and leave the Doctor on his own in the TARDIS.

In Parting of the Ways, Rose takes on the forbidden powers of a god, and must pay with her life, but the Doctor dies for her, becoming a new man. That price of victory, the cost of godhood, makes sense on a very mythic and primal level, and is part and parcel of the climax. But if “an ordinary person can save the world” is what Davies was aiming for, then wiping Donna’s memory, and all her character development, hardly seems in keeping with that. It is a shocking and upsetting exit for Donna, but it doesn’t seem to mean anything. It’s just a senseless accident that only results indirectly from the climax to the story, rather than the kind of mythic storytelling Russell T Davies has previously employed in the series finales.

Russell does a good job of burying these weaknesses in plotting and theme and structure under a whole host of exciting and crowd-pleasing moments. It’s big, loud and fun, and most people – myself included – were very entertained by it. It got almost 10 million viewers, and an extraordinary Appreciation Index of 91, making it the most watched and most enjoyed programme of the week, an unprecedented combination. These weaknesses only qualify, rather than disqualify, this story’s otherwise astonishing success.

But weaknesses they remain. Perhaps I’m just an idealist, but shouldn’t we all want Doctor Who not only be barnstormingly fun and popular entertainment, but at the same time, to actually mean something?

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Lawrence Miles on the Future

By Caleb | June 24, 2008

Infamous Doctor Who novelist turned blogger and self-styled “uneasy conscience of fandom” Lawrence Miles has a fascinating blog post on the future, both the future as depicted by Doctor Who and “The actual future – the one where we’ll be spending the rest of our lives, unless Bill Gates’ new masterplan to save the world involves messing about with tachyons”, as he puts it.

Like most of Miles’ blog posts, it uses Doctor Who as a launching point for discussing far bigger issues. It’s also very long, almost 10,000 words, but he’s got plenty of interesting and thought-provoking stuff to say, whether or not you agree with his politics (or indeed, with anything else he says). Here are some selections that took my interest:

On thinking of the past through pop culture:

These days, we’re primed to think of specific decades as being made of pop culture, since we’re usually only shown the archive footage when we’re being sold a nostalgia-piece. The very mention of “the ’60s” immediately makes us think of the Beatles, which is rather unsettling, when you consider everything else that was going on. Ergo, talk of “rioting” makes us think of fun-loving long-haired students protesting against the Vietnam War. But we shouldn’t forget that this was the era which made the term “race-riot” so popular…

On 1960s Doctor Who’s view of social control…

…look at the Doctor Who stories made between 1967 and 1968, the clump of episodes now known as Season Five. In the space of a single year, five out of seven stories are set in the future – I’m counting “Fury from the Deep” (deliberately pitched as a near-future scenario), but not “The Web of Fear” (since the idea of the UNIT stories taking place in the ’70s didn’t emerge until “The Invasion”) – and every single one of those five involves a “Controller”. In all but one case, “Controller” is given as the individual’s official rank. We’ll ignore the suspicion that the writers expected all futuristic institutions to be run like the BBC, and concentrate on the broader issue: it was taken as read that if our species isn’t going to get into a terrible muddle, then somebody has to make cold, rational decisions about the distribution of resources, whether those decisions affect a single space-station or an entire continent.

On the social control we actually got…

Neo-liberalism is the ultimate creation of right-wing economic thinking, which assumes that there’s no such thing as society; that as a result, nobody has a responsibility to society, or to any other human being beyond his or her own household; that any plans for the future of a society are therefore pointless; that all political philosophies should be discouraged, other than the promotion of self-interest; that a population will remain placid if you give it enough affordable consumer goods, without any need for the kind of state intervention that might get in the way of big business (essentially a more carefully-calculated version of the Roman “bread and circuses” concept); and that as a side-issue, it’s reasonable to keep producing those goods even if it does destroy the planet’s biosphere and lead to the mass exploitation of dusky-skinned natives outside the Western World, because anything else would be an affront to “freedom”.

Well, to be fair, it did work. Which is to say… without any need for a big central cyber-brain, without inventing the Gravitron or T-Mat, and without the intervention of Ramon Salamander, we’re now a lot less intent on rioting than our forefathers were.

On freedom as defined by neo-liberalism:

The “freedom” in question is the freedom to build yourself a bigger DVD collection than your neighbours and choose whether or not you want fries with that haemorrhage, but then, that’s the only kind of freedom we now understand. Planning for tomorrow is forbidden, since it might involve telling people what to do, and that would destroy the illusion of consumer choice.

On Torchwood:

…children won’t grow up with a stunted social conscience because of Torchwood. But they will grow up with a stunted social conscience because of a culture composed entirely of programmes just like it. Only not quite as awful, and usually not in such sickeningly bad taste. To me, this is the Mini-Pops of the twenty-first century.

Miles also has a habit of taking down his blog posts after a week (for some unknown reason), so catch it while you can! And don’t forget to read his sidebar – the Moffat Times Table is hilarious.

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Review: Prince Caspian

By Caleb | June 23, 2008

A few weeks ago, I got to see a preview screening of Prince Caspian, which is out in the UK on 26th June, courtesy of Christian charity Care for the Family. Here are my thoughts on the film – I’ll try not to give too much away.

First off, it is a very entertaining film, which sweeps you up in the story. As you’d expect from Hollywood, the visuals and the action sequences are very accomplished. Even the child actors are pretty good. I’d definitely recommend the film.

However, the film is blighted by many of the usual mistakes Hollywood makes with sequels, and also with book adaptations. Fortunately the Narnia films have escaped being “updated” to modern day America (a fate which sadly befell the film of The Dark is Rising), and we were spared the traversty of an American Edmund asking the White Witch for burger and fries rather than Turkish Delight, as was the case at one point during The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’s long gestation period in Development Hell. But the grubby fingerprints of conventional media wisdom can be seen on this film.

Rule Number One that Prince Caspian keeps to is the deluded belief that “Sequels Must Be Darker”. Right from the opening shots of the film, as Caspian flees for his life into the night, it’s obvious that this sequel is meant to be “Dark”. Film-makers often make the mistake of thinking that Darkness is necessarily a good thing, and that each successive sequel must get progressively grimmer.

This is all a load of nonsense, of course, as anyone who has seen Spider-Man 3 will have realised. The voiceovers in the trailers intoned solemnly that “Every hero must face the darkness within”, and Peter Parker even got a “cool” black suit just so we got the point. But he wasn’t so much evil as emo, and the film proved the silliest of the franchise, and forgot that one of the crucial ingredients that made the first film so appealing was the sense of fun, the thrill we had as we shared Peter’s joy at soaring across the skyscrapers of New York.

Part of the appeal of the Narnia books is that they aren’t ponderous epics like Lord of the Rings, but fun children’s adventure stories. Which brings me on to Rule Number Two: “All Fantasy Films Must Have Vast CGI Armies Slogging It Out, Or the Viewers Will Lose Interest”. Attempting to ape the Lord of the Rings trilogy misses the point. The battles are all very well done, and also show some originality in the strategies used. But for my money, the simple single-combat swordfight, which fortunately makes it intact into the film, is far more compelling and effective than the sum total of an infinte number of mouse clicks.

Hollywood Rule Number Three is “There Must Be a Romantic Subplot”. Please, no! It’s completely out of place, and also gives rise to a couple of completely jarring and anachronous lines, including a joke on “Call me”. Stop it, stop it now.

This film makes a lot more changes to the story than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The book had a rather unusual structure, with the Pensevie children arriving half-way through the action and having to be told by Trumpkin the story so far of Prince Caspian, and the film straightens it out into something more conventional, which is probably a good idea.

But there’s also a lot less of Aslan, who is less central to the film, and a lot less of the pagan gods and spirits that populated C S Lewis’s Narnia, making it a rather less interesting place. There are also some unnecessary and irritating small changes that fly in the face of some of C S Lewis’s Christian themes.

So a good film, but with a number of flaws. It’s like seeing a great painting a child has thought they can improve on with their crayons, and has left a number of distracting marks and muddy fingerprints. But you can still see a pretty fine picture beneath.

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God and secularism

By Caleb | June 11, 2008

Continuing my thoughts on faith and politics… Tom Price over on his blog A Better Hope asks some Worldview Level Questions About Secular Democracy:

Hazel Blears said, ‘We live in a secular democracy.’ But does she live in an ‘outside, inside’ ? Let me explain. The concept of secular democracy that she has articulated, has on one side, ‘real freedom’ and on the other ‘the closed system’ of secularism. We need to ask some questions about this. What do I mean? Secularism is perspective. Democracy, stable and free, neither needs it nor asks for it. Though some think it means ‘neutrality in public life’ secularism actually means, ‘a doctrine that rejects religion and religious considerations.’ It is at root from the family of perspectives that see the universe as only matter, it’s a naturalistic (atheistic) life and worldview…

I think that “secular” is one of those words like “tolerance”. It can mean two very different things, things that at first glance resemble each other, but are actually very different.

Secularism in the sense of freedom of religion, that the state does not enforce a particular religious or philosophical belief, seems to me to be a right and proper outworking of the Christian worldview. If God has allowed us the responsibility of choosing whether to accept or reject him, who are we to deny this to our fellow humans? Christianity allows freedom because we are called not just to submit to God, but to love him, and love must be in some sense freely given to be meaningful. Freedom has an integral place within the Christian worldview.

However, secularism is often used in the sense that Tom describes, to mean a naturalistic perspective that rejects religion and religious considerations – freedom from religion rather than freedom of religion. The basis for so-called freedom of belief is uncertainty (not “choice” as such, as Tom argues, and so naturalistic secularism isn’t necessarily internally inconsistent) – we can’t impose any one worldview because the jury is still out, we don’t know for certain who’s actually right, or so the argument goes. The claim that no-one really knows the truth for certain is itself a big truth claim, and denies freedom to those who believe they hold the truth. Naturalism actually allows far less freedom than Christianity.

But I think Tom gives up too much too soon to say that this second version is what secularism “actually means”. Just as we need to articulate and argue for a proper understanding of tolerance, one that is in accord with the Christian faith and worldview rather than opposed to it, we need to do the same for secularism.

We need to argue the case for Christian secularism, which gives freedom on the basis of love, rather than naturalistic secularism, which gives so-called freedom on the basis of uncertainty.

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Dispatches: In God’s Name

By Caleb | June 9, 2008

As the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill went through Parliament, Channel 4 aired a documentary about “the rising influence of Christian fundamentalism in the UK”, which I watched with very mixed feelings.

The documentary was very selective and frustratingly one-sided. It failed to properly define fundamentalism: the way it portrayed it seemed to be Young Earth Creationism plus any kind of Christian political engagement. But despite this it raised a lot of questions in my mind about how Christians engage with politics.
Many of my fellow evangelicals would say that the problem with what people like Stephen Green of Christian Voice are doing is basically just the right thing done in the wrong style. All that’s really needed is better PR skills.
But it seems to me that the rot is deeper than just poor communication. And while I’d agree with the so-called fundamentalists on many moral issues, there’s something wrong not just with their style, but with their basic approach to politics.
One of the questions that it made me ask is how can evangelical Christianity avoid descending into fundamentalism? Evangelical Christians are often very careful to define themselves against secularism and theological liberalism, and rightly so. But I sometimes see evangelical Christians, with the best of intentions, slipping into ugly attitudes and modes of thought that are reactionary and driven by fear. We need to resist fundamentalism, in the modern sense of childish belief with adult aggression, rather than the historical theological definition of fundamentalism, just as strongly as liberalism.
But what distinguishes this middle ground between capitulation to contemporary culture on the one hand, and a reactionary fortress mentality on the other? How should Christians engage properly with politics and culture? It’s a big question, and I need time to think it through. As I do so, I’ll share my further thoughts on the subject right here on this blog.
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Catching up

By Caleb | June 9, 2008

My laptop was in for repairs for a few weeks, and so I’ve not been able to update my blog as much. I’ve got quite a lot of half-written material I want to catch up on, in particular on Doctor Who, including the news that Steven Moffat is taking over from Russell T Davies, and on faith and politics, with some thoughts on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill as well as some general thoughts on how Christians should engage with politics, including some comments on the recent Dispatches programme “In God’s Name” and Jim Wallis’ new book “Seven Ways to Change the World”. I’m away for the week at the moment, but hopefully some of this should follow fairly soon!

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To be, or not to be the Doctor…

By Caleb | May 19, 2008

Just saw this from the blog of Neil Gaiman, which made me laugh:

I know that David Tennant’s Hamlet isn’t till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush…

“To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll…. More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you’re looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and… for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?”

There. Thanks. Sorry about that.

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Why look at history?

By Caleb | May 19, 2008

What’s the point of time travel if you can’t change the past? Similarly, what’s the point in studying the events of history, or telling stories about them?

“Don’t try to understand why a fine man is cut off in his prime and an evil one prospers. Try to understand what benefit there is in observing history as it actually happens,” said the Doctor.

“I don’t see that there’s any benefit in it at all,” muttered Ian, “except for the fascination.” His eyes turned to the Doctor’s. “And, frankly,” he went on, with a more definite note in his voice, “that isn’t enough. We ought to be.. to be doing things. Not just watching them happen.”

The Doctor stood up and walked over to the central column. He stared down at the dials and switches for a few seconds and then turned to face them.

“We are doing something. We are learning. Why do people kill each other, steal from each other; rob, slander, hurt and destroy? Why do thousands upon thousands of young men hurl themselves at one another on a field of battle, each side sure in the justness of its cause? Until we know, until we can control greed, destructive ambition, hatred and the dozen and one other flaws that plague us, we are not worthy to breathe.”

Doctor Who and The Crusaders by David Whittaker (1965)

It’ll take more than a knowledge of history to cure the flaws that plague our human nature, but the aspiration to look at history to learn from it, rather than just for fascination or entertainment, is a worthy one.

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