Nuke's Blog
Periodic ramblings by an old geek…

I’m starting to read at a slightly higher pace now due to mostly going cold-turkey on movies and hulu.com TV episode viewing.  We’ll see how long I can resist this time.  Here are my reviews for the past two months of reading.

 

The Holiness of God (R. C. Sproul)

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Sproul formulates a great book on why the angels sing, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord Almighty.”  While the bulk of the book is well laid out, my favorite two chapters are Chapter 5: The Insanity of Luther, and Chapter 6: Holy Justice.  Here’s an excerpt from the end of Chapter 5:

Once Luther grasped Paul’s teaching in Romans, he was reborn. The burden of his guilt was lifted. The crazed torment was ended. This meant so much to the man that he was able to stand against pope and council, prince and emperor, and, if necessary, the whole world. He had walked through the gates of paradise, and no one was going to drag him back. Luther was a Protestant who knew what he was protesting. Was Luther crazy? Perhaps. But if he was, our prayer is that God would send to this earth an epidemic of such insanity that we too may taste of the righteousness that is by faith alone.

I would like to also add an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 6 just to pique your interest.

Whoever reads the Old Testament must struggle with the apparent brutality of God’s judgment found there. For many people this is as far as they read. They stumble over the violent passages we call the “hard saying.” Some people see these sayings as sufficient reason to reject Christianity out of hand. … Some even go so far as to argue that the Old Testament God is a different God from the New Testament God – a shadowy God with a bad temper, a kind of demonic deity whose blazing wrath is beneath the dignity of the New Testament God of love.  In this chapter, I want to stare the Old Testament God right in the eye. I want to look at the most difficult, most offensive passages we can find in the Old Testament and see if we can make any sense of them.

If those statements ring with you, I suggest you look at the book for that chapter alone.  Suffice to say, I think he did a great job dealing with this difficult question, as well as all the other topics in the book. You’ll have to check it out and judge for yourself.

 

Fablehaven, Book 4: Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary (Brandon Mull)

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Fablehaven, Book 5: Keys to the Demon Prison (Brandon Mull)

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This book series just kept getting better and better.  In comparison to the Percy Jackson series, I found this far more enjoyable.  Percy maintained the same level of fun throughout the series, but this one built and built into an outstanding climax in the fifth book.  I would have to rate the series just slightly below the Harry Potter books, however, which itself is well below my all-time favorite Dark Tower series by Stephen King, and Ender’s Game series by Orson Scott Card.  This all just proves I prefer darker adventure series.  Definitely check out the Fablehaven books if you enjoy these types of books.  Lafe loved them, by the way, and I feel they are safe for kids 8+.

 

Jesus of Nazareth (Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI)

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Sitting down to write this review, I finally noticed the subtitle of this book by the current Roman Catholic pope: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration.  That sums up part of my disappointment with the book, which is that it does not cover the entire life of Jesus. I only found out he had stopped part-way through when I received the book and read the Foreword, explaining the history of the book as he wrote as Joseph Ratzinger.  Only a pope would have to explain things like this.

It goes without saying that this book is in no way an exercise of the magisterium, but is solely an expression of my personal search “for the face of the Lord” (cf. Ps 27:8). Everyone is free, then, to contradict me. I would only ask my readers for that initial goodwill without which there can be no understanding.

So, with that in mind, I started right into the book. I was happy and maybe excited to find out two things: (1) he writes with perfect English (was this translated??), (2) he stuck, for the vast majority of the book, to that which is common to both Catholics and Protestants, dwelling not so much on sticky areas with Protestants like the Eucharist, for example.  What that second point ended up doing by the end was to make the book feel like not much new territory was forged, and some lines that felt to me like they should be drawn weren’t, lest we offend anyone. And, I suppose that was his point… let’s just lay out again what we should know about Jesus, but perhaps have been forgetting with all these “rediscovered Jesus” books out on the market.

 

The Problem of Pain (C. S. Lewis)

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This book was well written, but it didn’t feel like it had the weight of experience. It felt like he didn’t have a ton of faith in what he was writing, so it ended up mostly like an academic exercise. It even seems he agrees with that right away in his preface to the book, pointing out that he didn’t want to even sign his name to it, leaving it as an anonymous book, but was ultimately forced by his publisher to put his name on it. Of course, it could just be my issues come from his difficult English, as I find with most of his books. Anyway, I did find one passage to sum up one aspect of the problem quite well:

My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first, I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent upon God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only things that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over – I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to acquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.

Personally, if you want to work through the problem of pain, you might do better to start with this book and quickly move somewhere more personal, which is what I did right after reading it.

 

A Grief Observed (C. S. Lewis)

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So, this is the book I picked up next. Here we have front-row seats to how C. S. deals with the death of his wife over several months of time. Essentially, we have a collected portion of journal entries here as he moves through various phases of grief. It is a very quick read, and well worth your time whether or not you are dealing with grief or pain. Here is one of the passages I found most striking.

The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable than a Cosmic Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed – might grow tired of his vile sport – might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t. Either way, we’re for it. What do people mean when they say, “I am not afraid of God because I know He is good”? Have they never even been to a dentist?

Now that, my fellow blog readers, is a man writing with some experience with suffering.  Thanks, Ryan, for leading me to check out both of these books.

 

The Screwtape Letters (C. S. Lewis)

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I decided that while I was in my The Complete C. S. Lewis collection, I should at least make it through one more of his classics. This one was a far lighter read, bringing me back up from the downs of the other two books. If you haven’t read this or know anything about it, we have a fictional account of one of Satan’s head demons, Screwtape, writing to a demon trainee, his nephew Wormwood. The short chapters are each written as a letter after some period of time has passed, where he first berates Wormwood for letting the human he is “working on” move one step closer to God (“the Enemy”). He then lays out specific plans for Wormwood to take next in order to gain ground each time. This is a highly entertaining way to lay out those things we find in the world that lead us astray today. As for what happens to this particular human, and Wormwood, you’ll have to read it for yourself.

 

The Power of a Whisper (Bill Hybels)

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I have to admit to you that I went into this book slightly skeptical, thinking it would be all about how God talks to this man, while maybe the rest of us out here get all jealous. It wasn’t like that at all. Bill freely admits that the vast majority of the time, it’s very difficult to tell the difference between when God is doing the talking, or Satan or your mind are. His five-filter “system,” if you want to call it a system, makes great sense. His filters can be summed up as: (1) ask God to confirm, (2) compare it to Scripture, (3) is it wise, (4) is it in tune with your character, (5) double-check it with other people you trust. Come to think of it, that’s good advice for every random thought that creeps into your head. All you secular folks out there can go ahead and start making fun of us now. All-in-all, it’s a good read, and the witness of many other stories from folks other than Bill does the book well. If you enjoy the book, or if you don’t feel you have time for it, at least check out his 2-hour DVD if you have the chance. Thanks, Mom, for loaning me both!

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