A White Man Looks Across the River to a City on Fire.

As a white man, I have absolutely no idea what it is like to be a black man.

I fundraise as a foundational part of doing my work (campus ministry). Once, I reflected on some of the ministry partners that I have connected with over the years... and I realized that as young, white man I had an edge up on every other demographic of missionary. In social situations, in ministry situations, I can walk up to someone and immediately know that they will take me seriously, that they will trust me implicitly, and that, perhaps, I can get my foot in the door. I have cold-called people with little to no personal connection with them.

And I realized: if I were black...

I used to walk late at night when I was in school. I enjoyed those late-night walks, both on campus and then around Glen Carbon when I moved there. From time to time I would see a police officer making rounds. I would give him a nod, he'd nod back and smile, and I would continue my walk. Once, I reflected on those late-night walks and the peace and quiet I solaced in them...

And I realized: if I were black...

I live in Alton. On a clear day, I can drive down Henry Street and see the St. Louis Arch beyond the Clark Bridge. The first time I went into St. Louis from Alton, I drove through Riverview Gardens (which, for those of you who don't live in the St. Louis area, is near Ferguson, MO). When I had arrived, a relative of mine commented: "Why did you drive through there? It's dangerous."

I reflected on this the next time I drove through. "Dangerous" did not come to my mind. Old, run-down, beaten-up did. In need of some TLC and DIY came to mind. In need of economic development came to mind. Riverview Gardens didn't look implicitly dangerous to me. But it certainly looked very black.

I wondered if that's what my relative had meant. North County, I'm told, is a dangerous area. And I wonder if "a dangerous area" in white man's terms really just means "there's a lot of black folks there."

A quick history lesson: North County was designed as a glorious suburban area for the bustling and growing City of St. Louis. I went to the Chicago suburbs last week and spent some time in Libertyville, IL. It was very hipster, very modern, very energetic, very successful: that's what North County was originally designed to be.

During the time of Integration, African Americans started coming north from the city in search of better living options. They were doing the same thing that the white folks were doing -- and, to be historically accurate, there was general acceptance among the white folks in North County. And then real estate agents started coming to the white families and telling them that the black families would make their property values drop. That's what began North County's white flight: fear of losing money. After a few years of this type of unethical real estate operations, the white community had nearly completely left North County.

Racism is fundamentally a fear thing, we should remember. It didn't take too long for North County to begin being called "the rough part of town", simply because it had the highest percentage of African Americans. You don't need a background in sociology to understand what happens to neighborhoods and communities once they've received that type of appellation. When an area begins to be known as "the rough part of town", the rough people will move there.

I bring up this moment in History to say this: white people created the "dangerous" North County through their fears and distance.

Again: I live in Alton. In some sense, North County is geographically more real to me than the City of St. Louis is. All of this chaos going on is happening not too far from me: on the other side of the River. But I hear a lot of white voices in the Metro-East saying: "What does it matter to me?" I hear white voices in the Church (and this really riles me) saying that the riots are the black community's fault, that Michael Brown shouldn't have robbed a store, that the media should give the St. Louis County Police a break.

And you know what? As a white man, I really could ignore the whole thing. I could pretend that it will all go away. "Hear no evil, see no evil..." right? Like I already said: I have it good. People listen to me, police don't arrest me. I can keep living on without giving this whole mess in Ferguson a second look.

Compassion demands more. The Love of Christ demands more. White men who ignore the dire strait of our black brothers commit the same sin as the Pharisees. The Pharisees didn't like changing the way their lives were: they wanted a "pure, Gentile-less" Judaism. Christ challenged them to see their pride over and over again. Eventually, they kill Him. To ignore the plight of the young black man is to see your brother on the road, naked and robbed, and leave him there as you travel to Jerusalem to worship.

As a white man, I have absolutely no idea what it is like to be a black man. But I absolutely must stand up with my brothers. To do otherwise would be heinous and irresponsible and hateful. On August 9th, across the River, past West Alton, Michael Brown was shot and killed not because he had robbed a convenience store, not because he was walking down the street, but because, above all, his skin was several shades darker than mine.

The response? The community of Ferguson was outraged. A few irresponsible people used that outrage for their own purposes. Social media erupted. And the white Church deeply disappointed me.

As a Metro-East resident, I have absolutely no idea what it is like to be a North County resident. But this I'm convinced about: As long as the white church refuses to regard the social, cultural, economic, and emotional hurt of the black community, we will continue in the sins of the Pharisees. And as long as the Metro-East sees this incident as "something happening over there" we will fail to become the beautiful, integrated, diverse community that I believe God has called us to be.

As a white man, I have a very very simple response: to have Compassion for black men. The Gospel demands no less. And that Compassion implies that I recognize the structural, systemic racism that is perpetuated daily against men of color. That Compassion implies that I recognize my role in this systemic racism. That Compassion requires that I stand alongside the African American community in their hurt and their pain and say "THIS IS NOT RIGHT." That Compassion demands Justice.

And that Justice is not an easy "cover it over" or "forget about it." Remember the Trayvon Martin incident? We (white folks) have forgotten about it. In another year, white folks will have forgotten about Michael Brown. The African American community will not. They cannot. And as long as we (white folks) continue to forget and continue to cover things over and continue to not "cry aloud for Justice" as the Word of God demands, then situations like these will keep popping out of the woodwork, and cities will continue to burn, and there will be no Peace.

Compassion demands Justice. Justice requires Truth -- it requires the white community to view their own hearts in the light of God's Truth -- and to begin to fight against the cultural oppression that we (white folks) have created.

As a white man, this begins with accepting one statement: "This is not right."

As a white man, I have absolutely no idea what it is like to be a black man. But I can stand up with him, and I can fight for Justice for him, and I can have Compassion with him. I can pray. I can intercede. I can learn to seek Reconciliation. I can learn to pursue Truth. I can learn, and I can listen, and I can hurt alongside him.

And until young white men learn to do this, systemic racism will continue to destroy the lives of young black men.

My brothers, take up the banner. Stand for Justice.

Gatsby and the New American Myth.

Okay, okay. Obviously I'm behind the times.

I read The Great Gatsby a few days back. At first I hated it. The first few chapters were filled with wholly despicable people. And then I realized, like T.S. Eliot once did, that the novel is brilliant. It is far more than a time-capsule of 1920's grandeur, but a continual testament of American culture. Naturally, I wanted to watch the new movie that came out this past year. I had been on a Baz Luhrman kick anyhow (I had recently watched both Moulin Rouge and Australia), and it seemed a natural continuation of movie-watching.

I won't do a full explication of either novel or movie; and the movie might be suffice to say that it sufficiently exemplifies the book in every manner.

But something else drew me into the newest Gatsby movie: It fit the time.

What I mean by that is that The Great Gatsby was decidedly not a movie about a 1920's party-scene, but about a 2010's party-scene. A century following the Roaring Twenties, here we are again -- culturally and nearly economically.

And here is Gatsby, again. A man searching for a Past that will never exist in a Present that he doesn't prefer. Gatsby claims again and again that he and Daisy can go back in time, and act as if her marriage never happened. Nick shakes his head and says that this is impossible, but Gatsby is, as Nick describes, a "man of hope". Gatsby has a vision of a different world than the one he lives in.

But his vision is not one of the Future, but one of the Past.

I run into this a lot these days. I hear from people -- conservatives and liberals, Christian and secular -- a longing for "the Good Old Days". The days when gasoline was (as it is in the movie) $1.20 for a fill-up, when America was "good and pure and Christian"... ... A Mythic Past which has become the new American myth.

It is a natural iteration for the old American myth (= The American Dream). When the current generation began discovering that the American Dream was just another mythos, they had to psychologically cope with that idea, and they did so by addressing America's Past as a different Myth. An America that was easy and prosperous, free from governmental regulation (or copious with good regulation, depending on one's party lines).

And these men and women are modern Gatsby's. I believe that they are the people whom Luhrman is targeting in his newest iteration of Gatsby. You see, Gatsby believes that the Mythic Past is something which can be returned to through hard work and effort and realized into a True Future. And he is tragically mistaken.

In this understanding, Gatsby is a man of false hope, and Tom and Daisy (whom Nick despises before the end) are the trampling vision of a just-as-mythic future. In Fitzgerald's time, both people existed: the believers of Mythic Past (ie. unprogressive) and the believers of Mythic Future (ie. superprogressive: see Tom's belief in the White Race). Neither are in touch with reality; both proceed as if the world can be rewound or fast-forwarded.

The true reality lies with Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker, people caught between Past and Future. Perhaps that's actually what attracts Nick to Jordan, even lightly. Her dishonesty is not that of blatant denial, but that of present gain. Both are opportunists and people of the present time. (Albeit, I'll leave off a judgment call as to what good or bad they may imply for the Present.)


All this being said, Gatsby, both as novel and as movie, is simply a diagnostic myth. It never makes a claim at having a solution to the problem of Time in America. It reveals it, in brilliant, flashing fireworks.

A Few Good Movies.

I haven't blogged at all for a while. Perhaps it has been a lack of content (which is nonsense) or a lack of will (which is far more truthful), but I would most likely chalk it up to the reality that I will be getting married before the week is out. (Or, since the wedding is on a Sunday, "at the beginning of next week" would be more appropriate.)

On a similar line of thought, I am writing this blog-post on WordPad, because my new house does not have WiFi, nor does my budget afford it quite yet. Hopefully before the summer is out, I will have rectified this problem. Until then, I will most likely use the format of writing blog-posts away from Blogger, come to McDonald's or St. Louis Bread Co. or IHOP, snag some WiFi at the cost of a coffee, and format and post. It is important for you (my readers) to know this; it naturally implies some time-dilation between the writing of a post and the posting of a post.

(For instance! I just mentioned that I will be getting married at the start of next week. But say that I don't finish writing this post by Friday, or that I do and I don't have the Internet-access necessary to post it, this post, complete with its statement about my wedding this Sunday, will likely be posted following the wedding, and, thus, have some natural anachronism to it.)

That behind us, I wanted to note two very distinct movies that I have seen recently. Miss Hannah (my fiance, soon to be my wife!) recently introduced me to two fine examples of brilliant cinema art: 3:10 to Yuma (the new one) and Chocolat. Not only are they brilliant movies, but they are great examples of mythopoetic thought, as I'll share in a moment.

3:10 to Yuma

I would claim (and John Eldredge claims with me) that the Western is perhaps one of the most phenomenal genres for writing American Myth. I've mentioned modern Westerns in this blog before -- such as Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. There's something about "the West," guns and blood that opens up the world of mythopoetic beauty.

Oftentimes, like it is in the newest iteration of 3:10 to Yuma, it is the story of Manhood. In it, a Civil War veteran rancher, Dan Evans, (played masterfully by Christian Bale) makes a pledge to himself to catch and bring in Ben Wade, the notorious criminal mastermind (played just as masterfully by Russell Crowe). The Myth of this movie is convoluted: Ben Wade is Enemy to Evans, but he is also Rival, and, most powerfully, Sage. He consults the Bible and the Book of Proverbs. He makes sketches of nature, and one of Evans holding his shotgun. It is clear that he has a deep appreciation for the rancher and for his family.
The story is one of Evans' quest for a True Manhood. Early in the movie his manhood is questioned by, of all people, his son, when he doesn't fight off men who come to burn his barns. Evans' son sees the dangerous Ben Wade as a more valiant father-figure. Dan Evans is the classic emasculated man: he wants his son to think him a war-hero; but he was given his peg-leg from a stray cannon, and he was given money so he'd walk away.

The hero's journey is from the place of walking away to the point of walking onward. At first, Ben Wade is an unintentional help for Evans in his journey; but at the end of the tale, he becomes the fundamental instigator for his Honor.

There's a strange sense of joy on Evans' son's face at the end of the movie when he holds his dying father. He is proud that his father is a hero -- even though the whole chase seems fairly meaningless by the end.
I find it immeasurably powerful, however. That sense of Honor that a Father has, that a Father gives his Son, that a Son inherits from his Father... When I discovered the joy of running, it gave me a deep sense of Honor and Pleasure knowing that I was carrying on a legacy from my father. Even though Evans dies, in a sense, he brings something more back to his son. In that sense, the story is a perfect Campbellian hero story, almost straight out of the pages of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Chocolat

Obviously, Chocolat is a wholly different sort of movie altogether. It is a little intrepid film concerning a French village with a religious Catholic community ruled by the horribly-controlling Count.

The stage is set perfectly for Myth, however, as the story opens with "Once upon a time..." and the North Wind blows. Vianne and her daughter, Anouk, come into the town in red riding cloaks in order to set up their confectionery... in the midst of the Catholic season of Lent.

The movie is quite endearing as we see a host of character's lives transformed by the forbidden chocolate... and then, of course, confessing their horrid sins of confectionery lust to the parish priest!

There seem to be two or three major Myths underlying the whole story: one if the North Wind of Vianne's mother; the next is the power of chocolate; and, finally, most importantly, the story of Woman (which makes the movie a nice contrast to 3:10 to Yuma and its Man-narrative).

Of course, chocolate is the way to a woman's heart, and it seems to be that every woman in the story who comes into contact with the chocolate is transformed. There's the wife whose husband needs more passion, the widow who has been mourning since the end of the World War I, the mother who is estranged from both son and grandmother following her husband's death, and that grandmother who is sick with (of all things!) diabetes and who feels the pain, more fundamentally, of her daughter's distance. And, of course, there's Josephine, who becomes Vianne's aide after she leaves her abusive husband.

Each of these women are facing some sort of direct conflict; and the answer to each of their conflicts is chocolate.

Best yet is Vianne's profound ability to read people's preferred chocolate. I would say that this translates to the power of discernment in Myth -- sort of like how Meg is a Namer in The Wind in the Door by Madeline L'Engle. Vianne has the ability to peer, in a sense, into another's soul and discover their need and their identity.


I won't go much further in my explication of Chocolat mainly because I have already written a lot here. But I would like to make a side-note on the interesting ways that stories of the Man and stories of the Woman differ. In 3:10 to Yuma, there's a lot of Evans gaining honor and doing brave actions to earn his son's heart. In Chocolat, Vianne is certainly honorable and brave, but it is in her compassion that she turns the hearts of the town.

One of the most intriguing characters in Chocolat is the Count himself, whose wound is that his wife has left him, and he dare not tell anyone. He is the only prominent male character to have some sort of redemption in the movie -- and substantively, it is through his recognition of lack and need, which occurs, of course, over chocolate. Actually, to be more frank, over a chocolate nude statue of a woman.

I love good movies, and I always appreciate sharing them with you. I hope to blog more following my honeymoon, so keep your eyes posted!

"Bad" Movies. A Reflection on the Objectivity of Art and the Modern Church.

I know, Noah came out a month ago. People were kicking and screaming about it then. So, in a sense, I'm kind of late to the party. Then again, apparently Ridley Scott is making a movie about the Exodus story... So perhaps this blog-post is preemptive.

And, importantly, I haven't seen Noah yet. I honestly would really really like to. It intrigues me far deeper than any of the "contemporary religious movies" that were released around the same time (God's Not Dead, Son of God, and, upcoming, Heaven Is For Real). Maybe I'm a rebel. Maybe I'm a fool. Maybe I just think that I loved Les Mis, I loved Gladiator, and how could I not love a movie in which Russell Crowe portrays a Biblical hero?

But I felt very deeply distressed and disappointed as I looked out on my Facebook wall during the time of Noah's release. Left and right there were scathing and hateful reviews of the movie coming from people who either didn't see the movie or didn't give it a full chance. (To be clear: I want to respect people's rights to like or dislike a movie! For example: I watched Prometheus and I really really really hated it. That being said, there were some aspects to it [the animation, particularly] that were good.)

Why did the Church, largely, hate Noah? Most of those who responded negatively to it would say: "Because it was unbiblical!" or "It is blasphemous!" or something like that. Maybe "It supports environmentalism!" (Like Genesis 1 and 2 doesn't?) or "It supports evolution!" (... ... This one is becoming a dead horse.)

But I would say that the Church mostly hated Noah because of a false perspective of Art and a lack of integrity.

Genesis 5-9 is simultaneously a glorious amount of details on the Flood story and an amazing lack of specific detail. When we read a Biblical text, part of our hermeneutic necessarily needs to include the reality that there are details that we do not see. That's part of what a good inductive Bible study will reveal. For example: in the story of Jesus and the woman who anoints His feet with oil, we can't really understand the nature of the passage if we don't understand how Jesus is sitting at the table! In the Pharisee's house, there's a particular layout: the Pharisee at the head, Jesus at a prominent place as the visiting Rabbi. Everyone's sitting on the ground, of course, because their tables are placed on the ground. The woman washes Jesus' feet, and He looks at her while talking to the Pharisee. A 1st century Messianic Jew would have recognized immediately that Christ's decision to look upon the woman means (because of a physical reality!) that He is turning His face away from the Pharisee who invited him -- an incredibly meaningful act. This is something that we cannot understand without more information that is not given directly in the text.

So, for instance, when in the Noah movie apparently Russell Crowe has a manic-depressive moment when he considers killing his grandchildren. Don't get me wrong: I do not believe that Noah would have slain his grandchildren. But the purpose of this (again, I haven't seen the movie) in the movie is to convey the weight of Noah's consideration on sin -- he's realized that God is destroying the earth because of the sin of man, and that this sin is not only in the wicked people "out there" but "in here" -- in his family, in his children, and in his children's children. In that sense, it is a brilliant reflection on the doctrine of Total Depravity. And Noah's response upon discovering this is a logical one for someone under much theological stress.

And the depressive undertone isn't something too far-fetched -- we do read in the Bible that Noah goes from saving the world to getting himself drunk. Sounds like he may have "seen too much" and was trying to self-medicate. We could have a good theological discussion as to why Noah goes on a drinking binge, but it remains that we do not know directly why he did what he did in that passage -- and the creative license of saying "Oh! He's depressed because of the sin of man!" is a legitimate artistic perspective.


I say all of this to note one major point: As a whole, the Church does not understand Art. Think about it this way: Who gets better airplay on Christian radio, the artist who makes deeply nuanced and beautiful music with complicated lyrics (let's say... John Mark McMillan? Switchfoot? Aaron Strumpel?) or the worship leader who has written something that clearly says something theological? (Or semi-theological?)

This isn't about Noah, it's about how the Church responds to artistic media. Is a movie really "bad? I had a great conversation with some Christian friends last week, and they responded to a movie that I mentioned by saying "Yes, it's a great movie, but it's got some questionable things in it." I don't think that they were unjust in saying this (It is a great movie; it does have some questionable things in it.), but I do think that their statement was telling of how we as Christians deal with artistic media!

When I see Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, I don't think that I would say "It's great art, but theologically inconsistent" or "It's great art, but too much nudity." Or when I listen to Beethoven, I don't say "It's great art, but he was crazy" or "It's great art, but he wasn't a Christian" or even! "It's great art, but he was so clearly depressed." To me, the modern Church's perspective on Art is one dominated by a perspective which fundamentally lacks integrity. We treat "classics" differently than we treat modern media; we treat certain things that are wicked different than other things that are wicked; we prefer unrealistic perspectives on our lives to stories that tell the truth as it is (for example: think of how beautifully-profound Gran Torino is; then think about what would happen if you removed all the cussing from it).

And we must be consistent even when films or art portrays our faith. If you dismiss Noah because of the liberties taken with the story, then you should never watch Prince of Egypt ever again (or sing along with that glorious "When You Believe" song at the end), you should avoid any Christian songs with off doctrine (quite notably, from Christmas music, "We Three Kings" or "Silent Night" -- okay, that last one is more of a humorous thought about whether or not the night Christ's birth could have actually been silent...), and most definitely we should take a stand whenever someone misquotes Scripture!!!*

(*Which, using an ancient Jewish rabbinical tradition, Jesus, Peter, and Paul all do. Multiple times.)

My point: How do we as Christians experience Art? I'm not saying that you should sift it through your theology -- most certainly do so! that's part of why I despised Prometheus, as explained in the link above -- but I am saying that you shouldn't judge the quality of a work's Art based on how it stands on your theological stances. We should take Art in the context that it is written. Noah was directed by an atheist who wanted to dramatically retell the Genesis story. I don't know yet whether I'll like it or I won't, but I recognize going in that the director does not believe that God truly is -- I'll judge the work according to its artistic quality, not its theological impact.

Our Massacres. A Reflection on Sin.

Today I read up on the Rwandan Genocide twenty years ago, and I feel somber. Half a world away, while I was growing up in happy little Gillespie, Illinois, nearly a million people were brutally raped and murdered within the course of three months.

This was not some historical genocide that happened half-a-century ago -- which, of course, does not make something like the Holocaust or other mass-murders less terrible -- but this was a real, live, touchable (nearly) expression of how of sin affects the human soul. I wince on the inside as I consider how hundreds of thousands of Rwandans today now experience the HIV/AIDS epidemic due to war rape. I wince all the moreso from reading about the UN Peacekeepers who left a school full of 1,000 refugees, who were subsequently murdered by the drunk men outside.

And I have some problems of my own.

You see: Sin causes hurt. It causes hatred. It causes pain. It causes bitterness. Its effects are complete and total throughout the whole human being. One might say that those who died in the massacres were the fortunate and blessed ones: death is sweet compared to the active work of sin in the world.

Now, I may not have witnessed genocide in my life, but I have witnessed the workings of sin. In America, sin never functions as simply as it does in the rest of the world -- here sin prefers a more insidious system to dissolve the human spirit. It avoids murder for that "nicer" sin of hatred, which leaves a man hating his brother and murdering him in his heart for years, leaving him as an empty husk devoted to hatred. It avoids rape for simple objectification, which leads to sex trafficking and prostitution, enslaving young women to a hopeless life, and enslaving young men to a world of being abusers.

Sin has fooled the Church to reject rational thinking; and it has (strategically) fooled the rational thinkers into rejecting theology; and it has fooled the theologians from accepting a real and living God; and it has fooled the charismatics from accepting a logical and rational God. It has lied about God's supernatural power, and it has lied about His living mercy and justice.

You see, in America sin has lied to us about what sin is. Our Protestant-work-ethic, Bible-belt, Sunday-school mentalities have brought us to an understanding that sin is when you think a woman is hot, when you cuss at your neighbor for letting his dog poop in your yard, when you don't attend Sunday morning service. In America, one finds two groups with different perspectives on sin: the liberals who say that there is no sin (if they call themselves Christians, we can safely [alongside St. Augustine] call them followers of Pelagius); and the religious folk who say that sin rests in action.

But sin is a much bigger problem that our lust, our hate, our selfishness, our imposition of our will (our witchcraft), our murder, our theft, our lies, our massacres. Sin is a much much more offensive issue than any Holocaust or Rwandan Genocide. Sin is much much more destructive than the death of 800,000 men, women, and children, than the 50% divorce rate in America [and the broken families that result, than the 50,000 women who are brought into the US every year for sexual slavery.

The root-cause to our massacres is simple: we have chosen our leadership against the leadership and kingship of the Only King of Life. We have been disconnected to life and pleasure and goodness and mercy and love, and in that world outside of Him, which we can only accurately describe as Hell, we massacre. Sin is our state of rebellion, massacre is our response to living in the state of sin.

I write all of this with a heavy heart: the world is covered, as C.S. Lewis once said, by one dark shadowy wing. Evil rules our streets. Even today, sin is acting among people from sea to sea, from land to land, in obvious ways and in subtle ways, in overt wickedness and in sublime deception.

I do not write this to scare you, dear reader. My heart feels heavy as I thought on the massacres in Rwanda. I am sad. And I see its repetition, like that scene in The Last of the Mohicans, when the caravan is assaulted, or the moment in Blood Meridian when they attack the Indian village. Massacre is in our blood. Like when Russia directed Ukraine's former prime minister Viktor Yanukovych to fire upon the crowd amassing against him. Like Robert Mugabe. Like the unrest in Congo. Like the suicide bombers of the Middle East. Like the massacres that happen here in America: how we slay one another with our tongues and think that we are better off than "those African countries."

Again, my goal is not to scare you. But, perhaps, to sober you. This is to illuminate, not condemn. God says that He sends His Spirit to "convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment" (John 16:8) -- His conviction is His merciful revelation of our massacres.

I say none of this without Hope. My blog is called Apolytrosis -- that is, "Redemption." I do not believe in a God who gives up on us. Even in the days of Noah, God did not give up on His Creation, but He sent the floods as a demonstration of His mercy. (We can talk about that later!) The Gospel's summation is that God sent Christ in the midst of the depth of our death and human condition in order to save us and deliver us from our massacres.

Praise God, that He has set up the Way for us to be free from this world of massacre and death. Praise God! When Christians discuss the coming Kingdom, we should do so with the hopeful expectation of the coming King's Power to bring all things under His authority -- only in such a Kingdom can we truly be safe, can we truly be free from death, can we truly be free from massacre.

Kingdom and the Imposition of the Will.

A concept that has been rattling through my grey matter over the past few months has been the matter of Kingdom as "the range of your effective will." Pastor John Ortberg of Menlo Park Presbyterian in California shared this nugget of revelation back in January during InterVarsity's National Staff Conference in St. Louis, and it's been in the "back of my head" ever since.

Will is a fascinating subject to me. Perhaps it's my professed Wesleyan Arminianism (in contrast to some of my friends' devout Reformed Calvinism). Or perhaps it's something a little more... mythological.

Will and Kingdom are inseparable subjects. A Kingdom is defined as the place where a King has his (or her) effectual rule and reign (unless, of course, [and this complication is worth delving into] that King is either incompetent or deceived). Thinking of political systems, there is always some sense of Will and Kingdom -- obviously Autocratic systems have a total expression of their Autocrat's Will, but even Democratic systems are ruled by a Will, although that Will is a Democratic as opposed Individual Will.

Perhaps more intimately, it is the Self who is the King over the Individual -- or Christ, if that person is a believer. The CEO is King over the Corporation. The Husband is King over the House (and the Wife most emphatically is the Queen).


Will takes a more supernatural expression in literature. For example, in J.R.R. Tolkien's powerful The Lord of the Rings, the One Ring grants its user a phenomenal power of imposing their Will upon others. (This power is not used by Frodo often, but it is implied by how both Gandalf and Galadriel talk about the Ring of Power -- and is described in deeper depth while the Eye searches for Frodo near the end of The Fellowship of the Ring...) The danger of the One Ring, however, is how Sauron himself imposes his Will upon those using it...

I find it interesting and worth investigation what Galadriel says about the Ring and her own Will:

"...'And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!'..." 

                    (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 365-366)

She sees something about the Ring of Power. The Ring gives a great power: it extends ones' Will beyond their natural Kingdoms and imposes their Will upon others' Kingdoms. But Galadriel knows what this Power will do to her: it will make her wicked and corrupt.

Tolkien is onto something. In the Bible, there is a record of how King Saul rebelled against the Lord, and, so doing, he committed the sin of witchcraft. Witchcraft is no simpler than this: to impose one's Will upon the Universe. To do so is to deny the Authority of God Himself. This is why the One Ring's power corrupts.


I could make more conjecture about the Ring of Power, but I want to turn my eyes to the real world:

One of the fundamental relationships between Kingdoms over the past several millenia has been the concept of War. With the aforementioned idea of Will fully grasped, we could say that War is a conflict of Kingdom-Wills. If two Kingdoms have conflicting Wills, then they are at War until that conflict is resolved. This can be overt, such as Germany's expansion into Europe in the 1940's, or Napoleon's conquests; or it can be economic; or it can be political. But however we make it look, War is when Kingdoms have opposing Wills.

I see this in President Vladimir Putin in Russia presently: He has rolled out troops into Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula with the pretension of protecting Russian assets. The truth is that he is imposing his Will upon the people of Crimea, and they are collectively using their Wills to oppose their leadership in Ukraine.

I'm not going to delve into the underlying political/ethno/historical issues at play here. But I want to use this to express how this evidences a real-world example of Imposition of the Will. President Obama has responded to Russia by announcing economic sanctions against the Kremlin and its leadership -- an economic sanction is the Will of the Kingdom of America responding to the actions of the Kingdom of Russia. Russia has responded by pressing on the energy-dependence of Europe, making their Wills weaker. ...


Will is nearly a supernatural force. One can use one's Will to remove another's Will -- that is, Murder, or Witchcraft, or Tyranny. One can use one's Will to limit another's Will -- that is, Bullying (this applies to nations so very clearly). The Bible is clear on this concept of Will: we are to lay our lives [Gk. psyche = will] down. Will is a powerful force -- and we as fallen humanity can only use it for wicked and evil purposes. It is only in the Submission of the Will to the Authority of the King of Kings (whose Kingdom is the Kingdom of Kingdoms!) that we can see Good advanced in the world.

And, so, we pray: "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven..." (Matt. 6:10)

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Consciousness, and Public Restrooms.

Earlier today, I went to a public restroom at my public university, and I had this distinct thought: "Why do we do this? How did we develop the restroom?"

I had a mini-existential crisis on this thought; it is something that I don't consider often and don't really think about. If one thinks about it, it would be far more convenient (from an immediate sense) if humanity didn't worry about where we went to urinate and defecate and just did it as animals do: on a random piece of ground outside. I'm certain that the Earth wouldn't mind more legitimate fertilizer.

As I thought on this, it reminded me of a social phenomenon that is currently happening in cyberspace.

That's right: "Twitch Plays Pokémon."

In this "social experiment" (as some have called it), tens of thousands of Pokémon players from around the world are trying to lead poor Red (and, in the newest incarnation, a misguided boy named [by the community] AJ) through the entirety of Pokémon Red (Crystal in the newest version) by using crowdsourced commands. It seems like a new iteration of the idea of "if you put enough monkeys in a room, given infinite time, they will write the works of Shakespeare."

Except, it's not.

I've been considering this, along with the public restroom thought I mentioned earlier, and realized that Twitch Plays Pokémon has totally different parameters than if, per se, I closed my eyes and pressed randomly-generated commands given through a computer program. Or, if, to make the story more interesting, I had monkeys randomly choosing between the options of "Right", "Left", "Up", "Down", "A", "B", and "START". I do not believe that in my latter thought-experiment I would ever succeed at beating Pokémon.

There is something about the power of Consciousness that makes Twitch Plays Pokémon fascinating. The game relies on a setting called "Anarchy," in which all of the commands from the tens of thousands of people playing are inputted as they are received... But the success of the game is actually not dependent upon real Anarchy.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that, naturally, energy goes from places of higher concentration to places of lower concentration. This governs the movement of light, heat, and even general principles of motion and gravity. Entropy is the measure of disorder in thermodynamics -- and it seems that the entire world is governed on the principle of the universe going from more order to less order. Chemical processes favor those which have a less energized (less unstable) state. For you non-science folks: the universe is spreading out like butter.

Consciousness throws a seemingly-ontological wrench into the system of entropy. Given the basics of the laws of thermodynamics, laws of probability, or the laws of "many monkeys" (as it were), and Pokémon Red could never be defeated by a series of random inputs. Or, if it could, it would take far longer than the 16-day feat that the Internet just churned out (which included, might I add, the capture of Zapdos, an extremely powerful (and revered?) Pidgeot, the resurrection of Omanyte and its subsequent evolution to Omastar, and the defeat of a Dragonite by "All-Terrain Venomoth" in a fundamentally-surprising way).

But a "mindless" mass of individually-conscious beings have done something amazingly surprising: they defeated Pokémon Red in 16 days.

What does this have to do with public restrooms? I find it philosophically to be the same subject. If we were to follow the "normal" process of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics, I do believe that we would live in  a world where everyone pooped outside. Why? Because public restrooms is a higher form of organizing our excrement. Just like how libraries are a higher form of organizing information, and machines are higher forms of organizing simple mechanics, the very concept of a public restroom is an example of a "mindless" mass of individually-conscious beings doing something uniformly that is quite... impressive.

There are a lot of reasons for having public restrooms -- particularly from a cleanliness, hygienic perspective. But the reality that this idea was not an individually-developed idea, but, rather, a cultural/group/"crowdsourced" idea profoundly shows the discrepancy between Human Consciousness and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Our ontological essence directly refutes the core operation of the physical universe.

I like that.

I say all this to make some sort of fundamental claim about the Universe and about Creation. That is, that God has created a universe which naturally and silently progresses towards higher entropy, but the very action of Creation itself disrupts that entropy and counters it. We see this in Genesis 1 when He creates the universe and then immediately gets on to organizing it. I've said this before, and I want to highlight this fundamental mechanism: God's act of Creation not only goes contrary to laws of physics which He has put in place, but He has also given to humans the power to do likewise. Consciousness could thus be defined as "that divinely-imbued power inherent in Man which allows him to create spaces of higher organization and less entropy, contrary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics itself."

And whereas I don't think anyone would go as far and make the claim that Twitch Plays Pokémon is a brilliant example of humanity's powers of higher organization, it is clearly a refutation to the belief that random occurrence could produce victory in the game of Pokémon. The mindless mass is not mindless, but Conscious, and, even, Cooperating. “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." (Genesis 11:6) -- and that is how they can win Pokémon. Likewise, this is why we have public restrooms: not because an individual decided as such, but because Conscious beings naturally have the power to move towards places of higher organization.