Cody Cook's Blog, page 13

St. Val – Theological Lessons from Amazon’s new documentary about Val Kilmer

Val, the new documentary film on Amazon Video, tells the story of the actor Val Kilmer’s life up until now using narration, footage from Kilmer’s home video camera (including a lot of fascinating video from the sets of his movies), and recent interviews.

This alone should be enough to pique the interest of potential viewers, but there’s another wrinkle in this story: in recent years Kilmer was treated for throat cancer with the result that he must use a feeding tube to eat and his speech has been noticeably altered. This, alongside the normal visible wear and tear that comes with age, creates a strong contrast with clips of Val the young heartthrob. One is struck with a feeling of sadness at what has been lost and an awareness of our collective mortality that we generally try our very best not to let slip into our thoughts.

However, the message that Kilmer wants to leave the audience with is one of hopefulness in the face of difficulty and loss. As a believer in God, his faith provides him with the vision to see what cannot be seen with the unaided eye.

Kilmer’s surprise optimism in parallel with the viewer’s sadness highlights a paradox. On the one hand, we all wish to live in a world where we do not die, do not decay, where sickness doesn’t eat away at our bodies. This universal longing for a such a world doesn’t come from anything we have seen in our experience, but God “has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, NLT).

We call out to God in expectation for the good plans He has for us, knowing that the world we live in is not what it ought to be. In this way, our desire for “the good” becomes a means of seeking and knowing God.

However, the ideal can easily be made into an idol–something that in our forgetfulness of God we cling to desperately and hope for in this life even though we cannot have it. The paradox then is this: the thing that is supposed to point us to God ends up distracting us from Him–we grasp desperately for a long, pain-free life and when it alludes us we feel abandoned by Whomever created us and makes the rules. When reality comes crashing in we experience not only fear, but we get mad. We are angry at God because the world as it exists doesn’t live up to the ideal which He planted in our souls.

We cannot bear to live in the upside down world the apostle Paul described when he wrote, “to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). We don’t understand how life, which God gave to us as a good thing to be enjoyed, can become our death when we cling to it apart from God. We hold so tightly to His good gift that we crush it. It is not life that we should cling to, but God. When we do this, we will find a more abundant life that will not rot away (John 10:10, Matthew 6:19-20).

The Psalmist wrote, “when my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up” (Psalm 27:10, KJV). The lesson in this is that everything in this life is transient…

Except God.

This seems to be Kilmer’s philosophy as well. Val is an honest reckoning of both the world as it is and the divine ideal which pushes against it. Instead of seeing his misfortune as a reason to be angry at God, Kilmer counts it as a reminder that we can’t build our hopes on the shifting sand of present happiness apart from God.

PODCAST: The Gospel According to Brak – A Conversation with Andy Merrill

Andy Merrill, the voice of Brak and co-creator of The Brak Show (also known for his work on Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Adventure Time, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force) was my guest to talk about his work in the entertainment industry, the early days of Cartoon Network, his background in evangelical Christianity, and his present agnosticism.

This was a funny, friendly, and informative conversation that I’m excited to have the opportunity to share with you!

Audio:
https://cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20210727-AndyMerrill.mp3

Intro Music (by Andy Merrill):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cDJ4GbODiw

Outro Music (by Andy Merrill):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCuQo_C95K4

PODCAST: Saved By Baptism?

What are protestants, who believe in salvation by faith alone, supposed to do with passages in the New Testament that suggest that Christians are saved by baptism?

Audio:
http://www.cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20210718-savedbybaptism.mp3

Music:
F E E F I F O by Failed Kingdoms. Available here: https://soundcloud.com/failedk

Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquistors – A Review

Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquistors: The New Attacks on Free Thought was originally published in 1995, but its analysis of two opposite but dangerous trends which he noticed even then, to either silence free thought or treat all opinions as equally valid, could be seen as prescient in light of the recent uptick in campus censorship and even violent acts against those presenting views which challenge the academic progressive consensus.

Rauch’s suggestion is that we should not arbitrate our disputes with violence, nor should we condescend to treat every opinion as just as good as every other opinion. Instead, we should allow gatekeepers invested in the process of discovery to set the terms for the debate. For example, while creationists and scientific racists should not be silenced through the state, they can probably be safely ignored in the public square if the scientific community (those who should know something about this issue and have a process by which the popular view may be challenged by promising upstarts) is unmoved by their pronouncements.

While Rauch’s denouncement of state violence and censorship is commendable, his optimism about the process of critical engagement is at least partly unwarranted. Rauch himself seems to know this on some level as his critiques are often aimed at academia’s unwillingness to budge on its echo-chambering of liberal orthodoxy. This scholarly rigidity to challenges has arguably only gotten worse in recent years as we’ve seen more silencing and physical attacks on college campuses upon perceived ideological enemies (for instance, https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/us/milo-yiannopoulos-berkeley/index.html), often with the tacit or vocal support of the administration. Apart from these more extreme examples, there is also an implicit silencing that happens as the result of efforts to protect political sacred cows; for example, the trend in sex studies to uncritically accept the sometimes questionable orthodoxies of transgender activists (https://reason.com/podcast/2020/08/19/debra-soh-the-end-of-gender).

Of course, none of this changes the fact that free inquiry is still the best means of getting a society closer to truth. It only shows that a culture of rejecting free inquiry can interfere with even the most rigorous processes.

This brings me to another flaw in the book: its uncharacteristic uncuriosity about the process of inquiry and rejection of violence in the Christian tradition.

Rauch connects Christian faith with “the fundamentalist social rule,” that is: “those who know the truth should decide who opinion is right.” He cites Paul’s exhortation in his epistle to the Romans, that God would be right in judging all of us since all of us “suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them” (Romans 1:18-19, NASB) as an example of this fundamentalist social rule. In Rauch’s reading, Paul’s statement is one which stands behind the later “killing, torture, and repression of people who perversely, ‘by their wickedness,’ denied evident truth. Certainly there can be no right to say what is false and what you know is false.”

But is this actually what Paul is saying? This is the same Paul who, eleven chapters later, urges Christians to bless those who persecute them and never avenge or repay evil for evil (12:14-21). Could he be suggesting that Christians should dominate the public square and silence their opponents? No, this is not the course of action that Paul favored. Instead, he went into the public square and argued openly, with pagans by appealing to his day’s philosophical knowledge and with Jews by appealing to the Hebrew Bible. He did not engage in silencing or even suggest that he favored it. That’s what his theologically Jewish and pagan opponents did. Paul was arrested, beaten–sometimes almost to death, and finally killed by the state for freely speaking against and publicly debating the orthodoxies of his time.

Similarly, while the church which gained secular power often abused it by playing politics and silencing–even killing–its opponents, Christianity also has a rich history of non-violence and a suspicion of political power. To begin at the beginning, the early church’s theologians were virtually universally pacifists. After a period of tradition displacing scripture, the church began to revisit the Bible again and restore it to the people in the 16th century. When this happened, a large and outspoken contingent of Christians, called Anabaptists, followed the early church’s model and rejected political power and violence as well.

This is not to say that in the intervening centuries the process of inquiry disappeared. Even the medieval church had a tradition of carefully reading two books–the one being scripture and the other the so-called book of nature–both which came from God. This belief that nature points to God’s creative glory spurred on the Scientific Revolution as Christians believed that the universe reflected a divine creative intent and wanted to know it’s creator better (for further reading, check out Principe’s The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction and Hannam’s The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution).

In addition to this careful reading of the book of nature, a process for reading the book of scripture was also developed that closely parallels the scientific method–hermeneutics. In other words, rules were developed that allowed readers to read the Bible for understanding its authors’ original intent and allowed Christians interpreters to challenge one another to read more carefully.

In other words, despite a tragic history of fundamentalist thinking, Christianity also has not only a deep foundation, but a rich tradition, of rejecting violence and promoting free inquiry.

Finally, Rauch’s contention that religious belief is relegated to the private realm, and therefore that good scientists may appeal to faith for emotional help in private but that it should not influence their scientific work, begs the question. If there are any questions which Christian faith seeks to answer that can be checked using public methods of inquiry and criticism (and there are), then those questions cannot be segregated to the realm of the private. They can and should be put to open inquiry.

While Kindly Inquisitors is an important book on this topic, if one only has time to read one, Haidt and Lukianoff’s more recent The Coddling of the American Mind not only builds on Rauch’s ideas with strong arguments and good research, it’s also more persuasive at making a case for a community of inquiry that’s open to all–even Christians.

PODCAST: -Be perfect? Surely, you can’t be serious! -I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.

In this conversation with artist Jackson Ferrell (http://www.bigjstudios.com), we investigate what Jesus meant when He told His followers to be perfect just as God is perfect by digging into both Old and New Testament expressions of this idea.

Audio:
http://www.cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20210313-BePerfect.mp3

Music:
F E E F I F O by Failed Kingdoms. Available here: https://soundcloud.com/failedk

PODCAST: On Shunning Loved Ones for Christ

A few quick reflections on why love is more than “truth telling.”

Audio:
http://cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20210227-ShunningLovedOnes.mp3

The Old Gods Strike Back!

In the 2017 film Wonder Woman, Diana, the Amazon daughter of Zeus, is pulled into the world of men during the first World War. While the U.S. pilot she becomes romantically entangled with sees the great war as nothing more than human politics as usual, Diana suspects Ares, the Greek god of war, as the animating force behind the scenes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why so many who claim Christianity simultaneously abandon the cross of Christ for political violence and hatred. While one could appeal to human nature—the ways in which our fear, selfishness, and pride often overcome our highest ideals and can even cloud the prompting of the Holy Spirit within us—the Christian scriptures tell us that there’s something else happening behind the scenes.

As I detailed in my book Fight the Powers: What the Bible Says About the Relationship Between Spiritual Forces and Human Governments, the Bible presents a vision of the world in which the machinations and warfare of empires and states reflect a spiritual reality of demonic forces seeking to undermine the kingdom of God just below the surface. Even though Jesus dealt a critical blow to the “old gods” which the apostle Paul called the powers and principalities, they are not yet dead. They struggle, with their last gasps, to dig their claws into the world which Christ has laid claim upon. In lands where many claim the name of Jesus, this means persuading them to follow a false Christ who urges them to take up arms instead of their own crosses. This serves a demonic dual purpose of appearing to baptize what can never be washed clean and in discrediting the one thing that has power to draw in outsiders: the authentic Jesus.

For the Nazis, the war-loving, aryan Christ was only a stop gap until the time when the old gods might come again. The Jewish Christian Heinrich Heine seemed to foresee their time clearly, writing this in his 1834 book Religion and Philosophy in Germany:

“Christianity — and that is its greatest merit — has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals.”

A few decades forward in time, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his book Antichrist contrasted the Christian God with the old nationalist gods, saying, “The truth is that there is no other alternative for gods: either they are the will to power—in which case they are national gods—or incapacity for power—in which case they have to be good.” For Nietzsche, the “death of [the Christian] God” meant that men must become God and define good and evil for themselves. The reader may recall that this is the same temptation that Satan presented to Adam and Eve in order to gain power over them in their ignorance—essentially “you can be like God, defining right and wrong and ruling the world yourself (but really you will have given yourselves over to me).”

While the frailties of human nature can go much of the way to explain how self-proclaimed followers of the crucified Prince of Peace can become cheerleaders for the crucifying empires of men, the Bible pulls back the curtain to let us know that yet more sinister forces are pulling the strings.

Of course, even Donald Trump, perhaps the most divisive American president in at least 150 years, cannot be equated with Hitler. Obviously. But he is a sign that the old gods that Hitler was enslaved to have not given up their plot to destroy the church of Christ.

Make Violence Unacceptable Again

Graphic illustrating the Overton window. Designed by Hydrargyrum.

The Overton window is shifting on violence. While political violence has, in contemporary American history, been seen as concomitant with extremism, the past year has seen riots become mainstream enough that even many of those who don’t condone violence overtly are making excuses for those who engage in it.

The Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, is a snapshot of the shifting range of socially acceptable political policies at a given time. For instance, while being in favor of gay marriage would have been outside of the Overton window in the early 90s, it’s well within it today. Thus the window of discourse has shifted on this topic over time.

The recent shift on political violence probably began with candidate Donald Trump. Trump’s exhortation at a February 2016 rally to “knock the crap out of” protestors “getting ready to throw [tomatos]” drew criticism from his opponents, but cheers from supporters, as did a 2015 statement on Fox and Friends that the best way to approach ISIS terrorists would be, “to take out their families.”

“When they say they don’t care about their lives,” Trump elaborated, “you have to take out their families.”

Fast forward to last week when the violent Trumper rhetoric that Trump refused to tame, but instead fed into with lies and conspiracy theories about vast election fraud that, if true, would mean the extinction of our democracy, resulted finally in an attempted insurrection at the capitol.

While allegations of congressmen giving assistance to the would be insurrectionists have yet to be thoroughly examined, Trump’s tepid response to protestors–“we love you, you’re very special… We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it. Especially the other side. But you have to go home now”–didn’t cut the mustard. Neither did the soft and cowardly responses of many Republican congressmen who still refuse to condemn Trump for fear of losing their next election.

On the other end of the political spectrum, months of protests against police violence which often turned violent were described as “mostly peaceful” by mainstream media sources, most humorously by CNN whose chyron featured the phrase under a scene of part of the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin engulfed in flames.

The unwillingness of many progressive politicians and talking heads to unreservedly condemn the violent elements of these protests is perhaps best illustrated by NPR’s sympathetic August 2020 interview with author Vicky Osterweil about her book In Defense of Looting. In the interview, Osterweil defended property destruction on the grounds that that, “the very basis of property in the U.S. is derived through whiteness and through Black oppression.”

While there have thankfully been many on the right and the left which have condemned violence on their own sides, there is a perceptible shift both in the use of violence and in our willingness to excuse it. But this shouldn’t be. Not only is violence and property destruction inherently immoral and worthy of condemnation, it is leading to increasing polarization which will inevitably arrive at even greater violence and unrest; perhaps even, if the radicals and doomsayers are right, civil war.

To combat this potential future, Americans need to tap into the nonviolent values in our political and religious heritage.

Conservativism as a movement gives prominence to the values of law and order as well as to the worth of every human life–even sticking up for those lives that have yet to be born. Progressivism has a rich tradition of rejecting the violence of war, the death penalty, and, yes, even the violence of riots in the name of worthy causes like civil rights.

Libertarianism shares in the classical liberal tradition of individual rights that conservatism and progressivism likewise emerged from, but it goes even further in its affirmation of the non-aggression principle (NAP) which rejects the initiation of any force whatsoever, making allowances only for self-defense.

Christianity, which has been the dominant religious tradition in America’s history, goes even further, teaching its followers (in Matthew’s fifth chapter in the Holy Bible) to love their enemies, refuse to retaliate when attacked, and pray for those who persecute them.

These founts of America’s social values all agree that peace is preferable to violence, though there is another tradition in our country of unprincipled populist rage and the downgrading of human life. That tradition, the one which we’ve been told doesn’t represent America at her best, is shifting toward the center of acceptable discourse.

It’s time for the Overton window to close on violence.

PODCAST: Christian Duties and Human Rights; PLUS Babies on the Sidewalk, Babies at the Capitol

In a recording from January 8th, I chat with the Anti-War War Vet John Dangelo III about how the classical liberal/libertarian concept of negative rights (aka leave people alone) compares and contrasts with the duties that Christians have to love our neighbors and do to others what we would have them do to us. This leads to the question: Is Ebenezer Scrooge really a bad person?

We also talked about the strange circumstances of his last child’s birth and pro-Trump protesters storming the capitol.

Audio:
http://cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20210113-ChristianDutiesHumanRights.mp3

Video:
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CJztTkplNkp

Music:
F E E F I F O by Failed Kingdoms. Available here: https://soundcloud.com/failedk

Christmas vs. the State

A reading of my article at The Stream about how tyrants from Herod the Great to Stalin and Hitler tried to cancel or co-opt Christmas.

Article:
https://stream.org/the-state-vs-christmas

Audio:
http://cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20201222-ChristmasVsTheState.mp3

Music:
F E E F I F O by Failed Kingdoms. Available here: https://soundcloud.com/failedk