Thanatos Syndrome book review

The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Thanatos Syndrome was my first Walker Percy novel, recommended to me long ago by a respected pastor. Written in 1987, Thanatos is a thought provoking social critique. Is there really a well-funded group of elites who pursue wide scale social manipulation and control? Sounds too conspiratorial, doesn’t it? But we’ve seen it happen in history several times. With echoes of Grisham’s The Firm, Percy deals deftly with the conspiracy skeptics.

Percy also channels Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, exposing the nihilism that was hitting the main populace in the 80s, ironically amidst great material prosperity. The main character is a psychiatrist who sees it in patients he’s known for a long time. People are reaching out and experimenting sexually, they know facts but have no context to put them in, they are barely self aware. These are all symptoms of a loss of meaning in life, though Percy never puts it that directly. He described a culture losing its way.

The results vary. Listlessness in most. Sexual aberration in a few (described explicitly at points – not for young people). But the Thanatos Syndrome is a sort of spiritual death that has afflicted us, for which the chemical being secretly injected into the populace is just a metaphor.

One interesting feature of the book is that the main character slowly figures out he’s being bribed, then the conspiracy behind it, then the chemicals-in-the-water element, and finally the pedophilia ring. At each point of escalation, he remains perfectly calm and says little. “I see” is the most common thing he says, when he understands and rejects what he sees. This is contrasted with “Yes” when he agrees on a course of action with his few allies. He is emotionally flat. The total absence of any shock registered is itself shocking. The reader can interpret that positively: it’s important for us to see and to act courageously in the face of evil, which he does. And particular emotions are not essential to doing that. Or is it negative? Has the psychiatrist been desensitized to the nihilism surrounding him? Perhaps to a degree. If we aren’t shocked and angered by what we read here, there’s something wrong with us. But the planned, concrete action he takes to stop the evil wins the day.

I’ve heard Percy is a devout Catholic, and this would fit with part of the message of the book. Embedded in the plot is a Catholic home for the disabled and elderly that is shut down by the sinister forces. They argue for euthanasia for the infirm, elderly, and for infants with disease or without fit parents to raise them. Sound familiar? Percy makes the case for the church caring for them instead. This is a profoundly pro-life book, at its core.

It’s a tough read for today’s evangelical, though. It stretches our categories, and depicts the trajectory of evil explicitly. But it also touches on important themes: our desire for normalcy, reputation, money and popularity can distort our moral compass. Wisdom for the world can be found in a church that looks to us crazy and detached from the world. There really are sinister, anti-life forces out there, and they’ll seek to recruit you.

3.5 stars, out of 5.

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The Very First Christmas review

The Very First Christmas by Paul L. Maier
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this up at an antique store recently. Paul Maier is worth reading whatever the genre. Check out Pontius Pilate and the Flames of Rome, for his historical fiction/context on Biblical events.

I expected a little more from this, but it’s a child’s story book. His goal is to cut through all the fake Christmas stories and tell the basics of what happened. What is a manger? Was it a stable? What year was Jesus born? Maier gets too specific on that last one – do we really know it was 5 B.C. for sure? But this is a great go-to for young ones at Christmas time.

Maier uses a dialogue format, which I’m not sure works the best for a book to read your young ones at the bedside. Maybe. To voice questions they might have already could be good. It just seemed a bit clunky in the writing, maybe.

Some of the stronger points were his handling of the Incarnation, and not really addressing Mary as a virgin (not age appropriate). Instead he focuses on the marriage and family history then in a way that a 3-5 year old can translate to their own family.

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On When to Give Our Children the Sacraments

In going over our church membership records, I noted that we have several infants in that stage of “taking communion yet or not?”

As parents of infants who hold to paedo-Communion, you have probably already thought this through plenty, but here are my thoughts.
 

This is How to, not why we ought to
I’m assuming here the paedo-baptist and paedo-communion positions, not defending them.  There are plenty of resources making the case.  My intent is to flesh out how we actually live this position out, once we hold it.
 

No desperate rush
Infants don’t desperately need baptism and communion from day one outside the womb.  Receiving the sacraments is not necessary for salvation.  It IS one of the ordinary means of grace for us, but being ordinary means you don’t need to take extraordinary steps to have your 10-day old receive it.  Your child has God’s grace and blessing on them because they are parent(s) of believers (1 Cor. 7:14), not because they attend church or receive baptism or communion.
 

Urgency and no delay
Set a baptism date as soon as convenient and possible.  Delaying for months starts to degrade the importance of the sacrament.  Some like to delay a bit just to remind themselves of point 2 above, which is okay, I guess.  But you’re extending a situation where they don’t have the sign on them that God wants on them.
 

Communion before other solid food?
On communion timing, it need not follow immediately for infants.  It can be detrimental to force-feed Communion to infants.  For obvious physical reasons, and for the disruption if they are sleeping soundly in their car seat, in the pew.
 

When they see the exclusion
It’s okay to wait on communion until the child notices what is going on.  When they see everyone else receiving, and they aren’t, they might start to wonder or ask.  This could be as late as 2-4 years old.
 

Better before that
But it’s better to initiate as the parent, and start serving them earlier than that.  They aren’t sleeping in the car seat anymore, but neither are they swinging their legs under the pew at 4, wondering why they don’t get the bread.  I would advise giving them the elements when they are alert and awake and easily able to ingest a bit of solid food, probably around 1 year old.
 

Elder involvement
Notify your elders.  Parental initiation is good, since you have the best read on your child’s situation.  But church leadership has the ultimate authority over the administration of the sacraments.  So let your pastor or elder know when your child begins receiving communion.

Exceptions to the pattern

Several of our folks at church don't fit this pattern (intending to have the baby baptised at birth).  They came to a covenantal view of the sacraments when their kids were 5, 12, or 16.  This is a cause for rejoicing, and also discernment.  The elders need to make a determination: how old is too old to baptize a child based on his parents' desire?  At what point should elders seek a profession of faith from the child himself?

A Moral Basis for Liberty review

A Moral Basis for Liberty by Robert Sirico
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Father Sirico is on the academic side, but makes an important point in this 30-page booklet: democratic capitalism has the moral high ground in the ongoing debate over whether it or some form of totalitarian, planned government is the better system.

The debate certainly isn’t over, and Sirico seems to be responding to the last few decades of the dialogue within the Roman Catholic church. Of particular concern is how the terms of the debate stack the deck in favor of the planned economy, instead of the free one. Shouldn’t we plan to give to the poor, instead of rely on individual choice to do so? Lost in that assumption is the fact that liberty is curtailed too much, when a whole society redistributes personal wealth. Lost is the sad fact that the poor are not helped mainly by cash dumped into their account, but by private and local charity knowing them personally, and custom tailoring help to that, in love.

If you don’t know the Acton Institute, they are a good resource at the intersection of theology and politics.

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Maker Versus the Takers review

The Maker Versus the Takers: What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics by Jerry Bowyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an excellent little book. It’s point: “Jesus confronted the takers of wealth, not the makers of it” (xiii). Thus the title: “The Maker (Jesus) Versus the Takers.”

Bowyer’s basic assumption is the same you will hear in any sound seminary: we need to understand what Scripture meant to its original audience, before you can translate and apply it today. He hones in on Jesus’ sayings about wealth, and discovers something startling. “Jesus’ conversations about money take on a more and more adversarial tone the closer He gets to His version of [Washington] DC: Jerusalem” (3).

The author is not a trained theologian, but he takes on passage after passage, and knocks it out of the park 9 out of 10 times. Some examples:

1. “The poor you will always have with you.” This is a reference to Deuteronomy 15, in which God promises Israel will not have any poor, if they follow His commands about debt forgiveness. Israel’s leaders were breaking that systematically in Jesus’ day, and Jesus’ words here were a rebuke to the greed behind it.

2. The promise in Isaiah 9:1-2 that Zebulun and Naphtali would be exalted, after being brought low before, points backward as well as forward to Jesus. Northern Galilee, where those tribes were located, was the first to suffer when the invasions came that led to Israel’s exile. They would be the first restored, with Jesus teaching and healing there first.

3. Part of Israel’s story was Jerusalem trying to exploit the rest of Israel. Think of Rehoboam, who planned to increase taxes. Israel killed the tax man he sent, and seceded! Bowyer points out, from trusted traditional sources like Edersheim and Josephus, that this same story was going on in Jesus’ day. The temple rulers concocted many ways to get as much money from the pious populace as possible. Jesus cleansed the temple of this “den of robbers.”

4. In the parable of the unforgiving servant, Jesus starts with the man who owes 10,000 talents. Pastors love to wow people with how big this is in modern terms, but miss Jesus’ main point. It’s roughly 6 times the size of Israel’s gross national product at the time! And this fits into Jesus telling Peter to forgive 70 times 7, just before. We think the number is just randomly crazy big, but 70 times 7 referred to Israel’s exile. The Bible makes a point that Israel will be in exile for 490 years – the time the land should have had its Sabbaths, but Israel never gave it. So the servant who owed all that money, is the whole nation, or its leaders! 6 years’ worth of productive economy, and in the 7th year, the law said the land should rest, and any debts should be forgiven. But the leaders used legal work arounds to avoid both. Jesus’ point is, you owed God big time, and He forgave you. But you squeeze every penny out of the people you can, with no mercy.

There’s a lot more.
And you don’t have to wade through academic jargon. Bowyer is to the point, though slightly repetitive and disorganized at times.

There are a couple things he gets wrong, or that are a stretch. This is a common failing of those who draw from historical context. History isn’t an exact science, and we can try to make it such, to make our preferred point. Bowyer asserts that “forgive us our debts” in the Lord's Prayer should not be spiritualized, but taken literally. His point that we spiritualize the text too often is a good one, but not in this case. Many times a spiritual sense exactly what the text intends, the earthly reference being a metaphor, and this is one of those.  Besides, how would God forgive our financial debts to others?  Also, I’m uncertain about the timing of Rome’s economic and political disturbance compared to the crucifixion. Bowyer (and Paul Meier in “Pontius Pilate”) makes the case that the economic crisis, and political downfall of Pilate’s Roman sponsor happen just before the crucifixion. So Pilate is politically vulnerable in Rome, and thus more willing to give the Jews what they want, when they demand Jesus’ death. Maybe. Bowyer’s point is a good one: God providentially uses national economic life, as much as anything else. But maybe not specifically in how Bowyer reads the crucifixion timing.

Even with those caveats, I highly recommend this book. It puts in fresh language the historical situation in Jesus’ day, and clearly sets forth what He said about it. The direct political implications are in the short conclusion. I won’t spoil it for you!


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Read. The Bible. Slowly.

In my weekly pastoral routine, I put the bulletin together on Friday mornings.  One part of this is putting Scripture into our opening litany – responsive reading.  Now and then, I will try cutting and pasting the text, to save time.  But due to formatting quirks, it’s just as fast to actually type the text in.

 

I realized today, typing out parts of Psalm 5, that this is one of the more spiritually edifying things I (a pastor!) do all week long.

 

I learned it in seminary, too.  When you have to slow down in the Bible, it is almost always beneficial in drawing you to the Lord.  You may be

 - reading aloud to your family

 - typing or writing it out for your own reasons, like I was

 - studying the grammar, or the original language

But whatever the reason, God was wise to tell us in His Word, not just to READ His Word.  But to meditate on it.

 

Over the centuries, our reading habits have changed drastically. 

1. It used to be in Augustine’s day, that only a few elites could read, and only did so out loud.  First-century pastors would read out loud the latest letter from Paul to their Galatian church, in church, because many in the church couldn’t read for themselves.

2. The Reformation brought a revolution.  Tyndale’s driving motivation was to get every ploughboy a copy of the Bible, and the ability to read it himself.  The last 400 years saw people in the West saturated in the written word, as a result.

3. I’m beginning to believe that the technological revolution is undoing much of that effect.  First it was radio.  Then TV and the silver screen.  Then the internet.  Now social media.  They tell me that Zuckerberg’s “metaverse” is next.  With each of these we are more absorbed in a world of images and sounds, and drawn away from the written word.  See Jacques Ellul’s books for more on this.

 

There are exceptions, I know.  ​I'm not a Luddite, and I do a lot of reading ON the internet.  But there is a reason that the first rule of posting on Facebook is to include a picture, or it won’t get read.

 

So, I encourage you:

1. Read.  Read the Bible every day, even if it’s just for a few minutes.  I recently heard that people who read the Bible 4 times a week or more, are significantly more mature and fruitful in their faith.  Reading Scripture less often than that, the picture changes drastically.  Frequency is a factor.  Also, read good literature, and trusted contemporary authors and speakers.

 

2. Read slower.  Read out loud to your family more.  Train your children in the patience of focusing on the non-visual, spoken word.  It’s fine to help younger ones focus by giving them a coloring page at the same time.  But realize that is a crutch off which to wean them, at some point.  (Caveat: my artist wife sometimes during sermons doodles something related to what I’m saying!)  Have your children write out passages of the Bible at home.  (And not just the commands that they broke, as punishment!)  This works on their hand-writing, and gets them to meditate on God’s Word.

 

To the Word!

Critical Race Theory at School

A few folks have pointed me to "CRT and the Christian School" and I thought I'd jot down some thoughts in response.

John Stonestreet has a better and shorter treatment of CRT here.

I found the article at Reformed Journal to be very unhelpful in the first section.

 - denying the explicit teaching of CRT in schools, when multiple instances have been in the news for a good while now.  Maybe it truly isn't in his school, or maybe he is unaware of it.  Then he admits this misses the critics' point!

 - arguing CRT people don't agree on a common definition, but giving one anyway.

 - setting up a strawman: CRT objectors don't understand it, they deny common grace, they conflate it with other things.

 - whataboutism - are we as worried about Christian Nationalism?  Seriously?  Talk about invoking boogeyman labels.  Holding a conservative political opinion makes one a dangerous "nationalist," but holding a view that CRT asserts does NOT necessarily make you CRT?  Obvious bias, there.

The second section where he lists concerns he's heard about CRT is quite good.  I recognized my position there, which is always a good sign that the other side understands you.

The last section where he responds to those concerns is so-so. He basically says, we doing our best to teach the truth, and the truth is complicated.  Well, yes, obviously.  But are you going to assert in class that America was founded on slavery, or on liberty?  Of course, the truth is somewhere between those, but it is CRT and the 1619 project that are making it an absolute binary choice today, more than conservatives.  There will always be extreme, polarizing positions on cable news on both sides.  The point is, should school boards allow either absolute position to be all that is taught in class?  No.  Banning CRT is not white-washing history.  It is disallowing historical reductionism in the classroom.

The last section could be culled to a few bullet points for school boards to define their position clearly for concerned parents (I took a stab at starting one, at the end of this article).  I believe this is an essential responsibility of boards today, or the leftist training that teachers typically receive will have free reign in our education system.  I am familiar with a similar dynamic in the church: seminaries are often more liberal than the churches they serve.  Churches that call pastors have to know this well, to ferret out potential problem areas in what the pastoral candidate believes.  Boards need to do the same with teachers.

CRT is a heresy, and I use the word advisedly.  Every heresy is a distortion of the truth, taking one aspect of the truth and over-emphasizing or distorting it, while believing many other true things.  What would Athanasius have said to the objection: "why can't we teach Arianism in your churches and schools?  Arians believe the Bible is God's Word, teach the atonement of Christ for our sins, and our need for faith in Him.  The Trinity is complex, so let's not freak out."

This article is doing a similar thing with CRT:

1. Ignoring or downplaying its fundamental error: exaggerating and distorting the (real and true) importance of race in society.  

2. Appealing more to the aspects of the truth that CRT gets right.  

3. Appealing to the complexity of history, when CRT's main assumption is the simplicity of history (it boils down to oppression).

It also ignores the Marxist and Gramscian roots and goals of the movement, and the extent to which such ideas have permeated the education of educators, without using the label CRT.

Holding views aligned with CRT while trying to deny you teach it erodes trust.  The author comes very close to doing this.  I don't mean to imply the author of this article is deceptive, but I do think teachers' unions and professors who train teachers often are.  This author is naive to or unaware of leftist aggression in academia.  He thinks it's insulting to even consider that teachers could grade papers differently based on political opinions, when this happens routinely in schools.

Parents are right to be suspicious.  Yes, their suspicions can be inflamed by political demagoguery on either side.  But if school boards do their job - creating clear policy - this can be an opportunity to advance their vision for their highly commendable endeavor in Christian education.

A statement on Critical Race Theory (CRT) from the school board of _____ Christian School

__________ Christian School is aware of many parental concerns over CRT.  We have communicated and expect our teachers to follow these basic principles in teaching on these issues.

1. Indoctrination

We reject the attempt to teach that America was founded in slavery and cynical self-interest, more than in principles of liberty.

We affirm the reality of racism in our nation, and that our founders did not all live up to their good ideals in this area.

2. Race Essentialism

We reject the attempt to classify people as oppressors or privileged solely by their whiteness.

We affirm that people are often viewed and treated differently based on their race.  Whether to pursue "colorblindness," or to take note of one's race so as to treat them well, is a constructive high school classroom discussion to have.

3. Christian worldview

We reject these and other errors of CRT as fundamentally contradictory to the Christian worldview.

We affirm that CRT shares some goals with the Christian worldview, such as advocating for the marginalized.  The merits of how effectively or justly CRT thus advocates, is a constructive high school classroom discussion to have.