Fanboys and Fangirls

I used to be obsessed with Middle-Earth. As a fantasy writer, I wanted to create an entire world, and when I learned that Tolkien already did that – not just the world you see in The Lord of the Rings, but a whole mythos as well – I was fascinated. I still am fascinated today, but I’m no longer set on learning Sindarin. Don’t know what Sindarin is? I’ll tell you: it’s the mark of someone who knows a LOT about Tolkien. Elen sila lumenn omentielvo. I was a fan.

Did you know that “fan” is short for “fanatic”?

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” – Winston Churchill

The dictionary on my tablet even has an entry for the word “fanboyism”: “blind, aggressive devotion.” Ouch. Not a label I would want. Why is this even a word? In this ‘enlightened age’ (*snark*) does “blind, aggressive devotion” have a place? The very fact that such a word exists is proof: obsession reigns in American society today. This is evident not only in the fandoms but in the “hatedoms” as well. You gotta love it or you gotta hate it; there’s no such thing as mere indifference. There are some diversions that have a polarized group of people who know about it, like Justin Bieber: there are people who are obsessed with him and people whose existence seems to revolve around bashing him (at least, it seems so if the topic comes up). Same for Twilight and the books that follow.

Why is obsession such a thing?

We’re looking to fill our empty lives.

When you set up Christ as the lord of your life, dying to your sinful desires and pursuing his will, he fulfills the deepest desires of your heart. Everything else in life is put in its proper place as secondary. Education, career, gaming, comics, Tolkien – what relevance do they hold to a follower of Christ? Only as much as they help further the kingdom of God and bring him glory.

After I started following Christ, fantasy stories went into their proper context. I no longer write as mere escapism, but as participation in what Tolkien termed ‘sub-creation’. I am made in the image of God, who is the Creator; activities that reflect his image bring him glory, so I write with that in mind.

You may recall the Lewis quote from my post on balanced faith. “All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged,” writes Screwtape in his letter to a junior tempter. We are created to worship God with our whole being, and to dwell on whatever is pure, lovely, and admirable. When we reject his sovereignty in our lives, it leaves a big hole in our hearts that we strive to fill.

Let’s turn away fanboyism with an indifferent hand and devote our whole selves to God.

Balanced Ideas in Our Faith

“I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are encouraged.” – The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis

It seems that many bad ideas and heresies in the Christian faith come from a biblical concept that has been twisted too far in one direction or another. I’ve come to the conclusion that several seemingly dichotomous statements are really ends of a spectrum, and the truth is in the middle.

For example, free will and predestination. Are the two concepts a dichotomy, or ends of a spectrum? What is the correct belief about them?

Let’s go extreme in the direction of free will. Such a doctrine states that man chooses God, that we can lose our salvation. Pretty self-explanatory. But go too far, and you end up with Deism: God isn’t involved at all, and us humans determine what will happen to us. There are no such thing as miracles, and Jesus was not God in the flesh. What’s the point of prayer if God’s not involved?

On the other hand, predestination says that God chooses us, and that we can’t lose our salvation. But go too far and you dissolve man’s responsibility for sin; if we’re all predestined, then doesn’t that mean we’re cosmic puppets and that God scripts out sin for us so that Jesus’ sacrifice wasn’t pointless? And how is that a loving God if he doesn’t give us the choice to love Him? What’s the point of prayer if the answers are already laid out?

So the truth must be balanced, because clearly God is sovereign, and clearly man has personal responsibility for sin.

The main problem here is a question of predestination and how it relates to God’s sovereignty. After all, if God knows the future, then that means that the future is set, right?

I think this comes from a misunderstanding of how God perceives time. Remember, he is outside of time, which means that it’s not linear to him. I require another Lewis quote to explain this more clearly; here, in The Screwtape Letters, a demon is explaining to his nephew (a junior tempter), how humans perceive time compared to the spirits:

“…the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it.”

The concept of God experiencing all of Creation all at once while we experience it one event at a time – in other words, everything is in the present to God – kind of leaves the known-future-is-predestined argument wanting, as this argument puts God within the constraints of time and we know He is unbounded by it.

So how does God’s sovereignty relate to our free will? What’s the balance? I can’t say I know for certain, and I’m not much of one for philosophical debates (I’m all about what’s practical – if an idea isn’t true, it isn’t useful to me), but I do know that I have choices and choosing to obey God is a good choice. I also know that God is my Maker and is my sovereign Lord who loves me, so I should choose to obey God.

We see the Bible balancing itself in the matter of faith and works. Paul makes it clear that we are justified by faith in Christ and not by works. Later we see James support that, while we are not saved by our actions, faith is evidenced in what we do. “Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.” What terrible things happen when the church only focuses on one and forgets the other! On one end you get legalism – the idea that we need to earn our way into heaven – which leads into spiritual depression. At the other end you have what I shall call antinomianism, the idea that because we are saved by faith, we can reject all laws, including moral standards of our culture, and live however we want. “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!”

We must be careful to examine the teachings we receive, always checking it against the Scriptures as the Bereans did in Acts 17. If a teaching logically leads to behavior that is not Christlike, we must check if it is a Scriptural concept, and if it is, see what other concepts are meant to go along with it to balance it out. Our enemy would love nothing more than to break the church up into factions over some unhealthy extremism.