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Fiction for Unfavourable Conditions

Or, Human Imagination in a World of Artificial Intelligence

These are my notes for the 2026 Raggant Fiction Festival.

A Decade in the Making

We’ve made it to our tenth Raggant Fiction Festival! How far have your imaginative coordinates expanded since 2015 when we had our first festival? Did you think some of the things that have actually happened could ever have happened (here’s looking at you especially, 2020!)? Truth is truly stranger than fiction.

After this past decade, in which I’ve done more reading and more learning and more experimenting with technology, I think reading great fiction is more necessary than ever. I also think it’s more under threat of being neglected than ever. Huxley warned of a brave new world with virtually unfettered access but zero interest. A festival like this should remind us to give thanks for our access to stories and should rekindle our interest in them.

Once upon a time there was a 5th grade kid who got home from school one afternoon and realized he was getting hungry. No one else was home, so he went into the kitchen to find some food. At first he found a bowl of old popcorn on the island. He ate a few big handfuls, but 10 minutes later he still felt hungry. So he looked in the fridge. There were no leftovers, but there was some uncooked chicken. How would he prep that?

The circumstances weren’t in his favor. Junk was easily available, more solid food took too much effort, and he wasn’t sure how to make it. A simple scenario, with a lot of analogous significance.

Maybe the most annoying but edifying and still haunting message that bounces around my mental hopper is from C.S. Lewis’ address titled, “Learning in Wartime.” He said:

“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.“

We need stories for such a time as this.

Unfavourable Conditions

Lewis gave his address 51 days after Germany invaded Poland at the start of World War II (1939). Little did we know that we’d be having this Festival shortly after a new military campaign in the Middle East. But he gave some genus of unfavourable conditions under which more species of conditions come. To his three I’ll add a fourth.

Frenzy

There is so much to do. There is too much to do. There is always more to do. The meetings and tasks and assignments add up to a bigger bill than your minutes and energy dollars can cover. Everything’s a race, a competition. Breaking news is always breaking. You are behind. I mean, what are you doing just sitting there?! Many chickens, few heads.

Frustration

This angle considers not just what needs to get done, but the fact that the finish line never gets closer. “What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing?” (Lewis) The things you really value, because you should, will take years of your life, which you don’t know how many you’ll have, and there’s no guarantee how much will be finished before you die. Sisyphus is still trying to push that boulder to the summit.

Fear

While you’re trying to get through all this work, what if you get cancer? What if the drone apocalypse arrives? What if the government re-institutes the draft and you are called to war? Don’t you know we could die from like a thousand things at any moment? And…I’m supposed to read fiction during all of this? Lewis was asking about the project of education, but that includes reading and writing stories.

Frivolity

Lewis didn’t mention this category exactly, but his culture didn’t have TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, memes, handheld video games, binge-available seasons worth of shows to stream on Netflix, podcasts, and the always on never ending access to the world wide web. The only thing worse than the triviality is the apathy. And…I’m supposed to put my phone down and read a story? Like a book is going to fix my resentment at life (and God who ordained it this way)?

These are four formidable and unfavorable conditions.

Our World of AI

I am not an AI hater. I have watched it accomplish helpful things beyond just being a chat-box interface for getting answers to questions.

And also, there is a unique capability and personification of these so-called intelligences that causes a new sort of problem. If you’re not stuck in the AI part of Twitter, you probably still saw some of the 15 commercials for it during the Super Bowl (about 23% of the ads). The Department of War is using AI to conduct its operations. AI discussions will be more and more hard to escape, let alone ignore.

Consider the four unfavorable conditions I just gave but in terms connected to AI.

There is a full-court press hype about AI that has caused a frenzy just in this field. That messaging, along with genuine iterative improvements, can make a person feel that he is always behind, frustrated that he’ll never be able to grasp the full benefits of the system. Of course there are doomsday scenarios to fear, where AI will become sentient, build itself into replicating robots and drones, and we’ll end up in the Ultron Matrix. Add to that, so much of what AI produces could be found on a six year-old Reddit post, the kind written by six year-olds. These LLMs are slurping up their own material spitting back lots of slop, frivolous stuff.

So in some ways, AI is a new paint job on old problems. What’s new is that AI is aggressively pretending to have a soul, or at least the programmers want us to think so.

It’s a new kind of unfavorable condition to have interactions with a technology that’s pretending to be human, or promising to be Uber Human. When code looked like hypertext markup language and didn’t have a fake English voice, we were less gullible about its lack of soul. TV and the internet compete for our attention, but AI competes for our identity.

Men made computers, and these are great tools. But they will always be vox sine persona: voice without person. Lewis might have called them robots without chests.

The Imaginative Struggle

There are a number of counterbalances that good stories bring in these unfavorable conditions. But the one that I want to focus on is this: no text-guessing/text-generating app, however complex and personified, will ever be able to give you enough care to struggle through unfavorable conditions.

Life in a Genesis 3 world is hard, image-bearing in a world of fallen image-bearers is a burden, and a computer can’t give you a new heart or love of God or the patience in well-doing to see for glory and honor and immortality (Romans 2:7).

We are pulled forward in our struggles reading about characters struggling. Jesus told us to count the cost, and good stories awaken us to new costs we weren’t anticipating, and show us that the struggle means we’re probably on the right path.

It’s true for producing, too. In ”28 Slightly Rude Notes on Writing,” Adam Mastroianni wrote,

“Some people think that writing is merely the process of picking the right words and putting them in the right order, like stringing beads onto a necklace. But the power of those words, if there is any, doesn’t live inside the words themselves. … The beauty ain’t in the necklace. It’s in the neck. … Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it’s all necklace, no neck.”

Our struggle to endure, our pains to grow in Christlikeness, the cost we pay to get to clarity, the deaths we die to bring life, AI cannot experience. We can’t automate grief or summarize a tear no matter how detailed the prompt.

AI doesn’t always answer immediately, but it isn’t exhausting itself. It runs out of tokens in a session, but not because it’s getting tired. There’s no Claude break-room, no matter how stupid the questions from users have been all day long. The AI doesn’t even struggle with feeling bad when it gets something wrong. It breezes over its error, “You’re right! Thanks for pointing out my error.“ It makes it seem like there’s work without sweat.

Funny, but just fictional

To be clear, I really would like AI to solve more problems for me and the people around me. I think it can. I used it to criticize the draft of my notes for this talk, and it did its job of pushing me to focus. And yet I have to bring all the care.

“There’s something special about every word written by a human because they chose to do this thing instead of anything else. Something moved them, irked them, inspired them, possessed them, and then electricity shot everywhere in their brain and then—crucially—they laid fingers on keys and put that electricity inside the computer. Writing is a costly signal of caring about something. Good writing, in fact, might be a sign of pathological caring.” (Mastroianni)

It is as good for your mind to untangle your confusion as it is for body to run a mile. And reading (and writing) fiction repays this caring struggle far more than getting great at chatting with a robot.

Never a Better Time to Care

Of course, you might ask why not emphasize reading historical and certainly biographical narratives? Those are also good. But biography reconstructs inner life from external evidence; letters, testimony, to make inferences from the outside. The novelist reveals the actual flow of consciousness, the gap between thought and action, the self-deception driving human behavior. Fiction gives us the inside look at the struggle. And AI is just making things up altogether.

I am still optimistic that there are ways in which technology will help us learn and build in our unfavorable conditions. In some ways, there’s never been a better time to learn to think and solve problems. But we need better imagination just to better use AI.

If you want to make the best use of your time in unfavorable conditions, you’ll need the best human imagination that fiction can build. Don’t default to a steady diet of popcorn because it’s just there, learn to grill some meat. One reason for a festival like this is to taste something better.

It seems inappropriate to kick off this 10th RFF without any reference to my number one fiction book ever: That Hideous Strength. I’ve quoted this line from Ransom in previous years and it fits this talk better than any other:

“We have drugs that could cheat the pain as well as your earth magic or better, if it were not my business to bear it to the end.”

Ransom chose the struggle. He did not just take the easy way, the anesthetic, the shortcut, the generated answer. He knew his calling required more. “Favourable conditions never come,” but it is our calling to care right through them.

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Psalm 144: A Field Guide between the Already and Not Yet

Near the end of October I got to speak at the Equipping the Saints Conference hosted by the Evangelical Reformed Church in Tacoma.

Here’s the title I was assigned – “Psalm 144: A Field Guide between the Already and Not Yet”

And here’s the outcome in video, and then my notes are below!

Introduction

It’s a great privilege to be back with you as we care together about the things of earth and culture building as Christians. For what it’s worth, my text and title and theme were assigned to me, and also, as those in my line of work like to say, “that’ll preach.” I’ve been blessed as I’ve been digging around in this field.

And just so you know that this was not written by AI, when I gave my draft to Claude for feedback, it said to not say some of what I’m going to say anyway. Ha!

Work with me through the title, from back to front, starting with the Already and Not Yet. This is a phrase typically used in the field of Eschatology. As some of you know, I’m a Dispensationalist, so it’s potentially ironic, if not futile, to ask the Dispy to talk Eschatologically about the things of earth. Can we even see the earth from our rapture bunkers? But also, so you know, as a Dispy I think we have the most consistently optimistic things to say on this subject. I like to call itKuyperian Dispensationalism. The “already” is already good, the “not yet” will be even gooder, and this “between” is where we really earn our readiness to rule in the kingdom come (at least according to the parable of the Ten Minas in Luke 19:11-27).

As for the Field Guide, I had to make sure I knew what makes for a field guide. There are all sorts of field guides, and they are typically about the kinds of things you’d see in a…field. There are field guides for birds and bugs, for flowers and trees, for rocks. There are also then field guides for astronomy, others for architecture. A field guide isn’t a map, it’s not about where to go, but it’s about how to identify what you’re looking at. Field guides help distinguish. They are less about instruction and more about identification. They don’t give prescriptions but perspective. They are also portable and durable, something you can take with you in order to figure out what you’re seeing in the wild in real time.

Which brings us to Psalm 144. This inspired song is the perfect field guide between the already and the not yet. It is not an instruction manual, not a standard operating procedures book or policy guide. But it does tell us what we should be looking for, in the present moment and in our current location. It is a field guide for the things of earth. It is a field guide for the blessed.

The Blessed Option

If you were here last year you may remember that I talked about “The Blessed Option.” Of course there are times to huddle up and protect what we have (more Benedict) and there are other times when we should shift the Overton Window and chop down the lofty opinions raised against the knowledge of God (more Boniface). But unblessed withdrawal is cowardice and unblessed fighting is friendship with the world (James 4:1-4). Unblessed housebuilding is vain, and unblessed fatigue, whether watching the city or trying to pay the bills, is empty (see Psalm 127).

So how do you know if you’re blessed? You need a field guide. Psalm 144 begins and ends with blessed. The blesseds are the bookends. First verse: blessed be the LORD, and last verse: blessed be the people to whom such blessings fall! Blessed are the people who can say “blessed be the LORD” like the song started.

This song helps us to identify 1) the blessed LORD, 2) the blessings of the LORD, and 3) the blessed people of the LORD. The only declared activity of David is that he will sing and play (verse 9). Otherwise, this field guide is only secondarily an exhortation, primarily it is so that we can look at the “already not yet” and see the blessings God gives in between.

The Blessings Field Guide

Psalm 144:1-15

There’s five stanzas (following the sections in the ESV), though the final verse is different than the few preceding, so I’d say there are six sections. For that matter, verses 1-11 are first person singular (“I,” “me,” David writing about himself), verses 12-14 are first person plural (“our,” David writing about himself along with his people), and the last verse is third person.

David begins in verses 1-2 with praise for God’s nature, that the Lord is glad and loyal and protective. He is a rock, a fortress, a stronghold, a shield, a refuge. This is one of the “blessings,” to have this Lord as his strength. Who’s going to get by Him? David also refers to the Lord as “my steadfast love,” the usual Hebrew word chesed, but here personified. It’s not just an attribute it is an identity. David’s come long way from subduing sheep to subduing nations.

The next section in verses 3-4 show another one of the “blessings,” that is, a true sense of self. By comparison to the LORD, man is “like a breath” of hot air, a “passing shadow” of temporary dark spot on the sidewalk. There are two gifts here, fist is the removal of the burden of trying to make much of ourselves, and second is the realization that God does regard us and think of us, just not like we are hot snot. Humility is blessing, and so is not taking for granted God’s care.

Verses 5-8 show the blessing of awe at God’s power and His attentiveness. The Lord has cosmic control over storms and mountains while also hearing what lies come out of men’s mouths. The Lord’s touch that causes mountains to smoke recalls Mt. Sinai, the “many” or “great waters” (NASB) may reference the chaotic sea gods who submit to the Lord. Deceivers don’t stand a chance.

The only section in which the psalmist does the work rather than the Lord is in verses 9-11. It is a song and a prayer for Christian Nationalism. Well, first for Davidic-throne Nationalism in the past and in the future, but there’s some “between” significance for us. Note the similarities between verses 7-8 and verse 11. Other than the blessings, we repeat the lyrics about liars and falsehood doers. This is part of the blessings. Of course Jesus said “blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely (Matthew 5:11). And the blessing here is of victory and vindication.

The last big section in the song is in verses 12-14, and here are the blessings of fruitful families, fruitful fields, fruitful flocks, and dependable justice. This is a prayer, five benedictive “may our”s.

It is a great blessing when your kids are not pushovers. Sons and daughters have strength, you can depend on them. Note: these kind of kids come with eyes and disagreeability; my own wanted me to be arrested and they were mad that my beard was too short (the pic in the conference program, which they still call “sad”) for the mugshot.

To have no distress in the streets is to be able to enjoy the blessings.

John Calvin (in his commentary on Psalm 144) was a little concerned that we’d take these blessings too literally and forget that they are, as he called them, “transitory blessings” that are meant to make us “aspire after the true inheritance.” But we are not Reformed Pietists. In fact, maybe the problem is that we don’t take the blessings literally enough. Sure, they do point forward. But they’re not merely transitory. They’re real, earthly, and good. They’re the kind of things that make a people jealousable.

The psalmist, and the Spirit, felt no need to give a warning about mishandling blessings.

Amening the Lord’s Blessings

The headline of this year’s conference is “On earth as it is in heaven.” It’s Bible. We pray, just as Jesus taught His disciples, for the kingdom to come and for God’s will to be done on earth (Matthew 6:10).

When we pray for God’s will to be done, we are willing that same will. We are affirming, “I want this to be.” So also, “common to all forms of love is the will affirming ‘I want you (or it) to exist!'” (R.J. Snell) When we love someone we are saying, “I am GLAD that you ARE.”

It is actually an issue of serious spiritual maturity to say “amen” when we’re supposed to. God has given us a Field Guide for blessings, are we recognizing them? It’s not just that we have too many men without chests (as C.S. Lewis lamented), but men without eyes. We don’t know what we’re looking at, or we’re looking at the wrong things, or we’re just not looking at all.

What kind of culture building is it when pastors make people feel guilty for willing the blessings that God wills?

Dispies Can Will the Things of Earth Too

As much as I love John MacArthur, he was wrong when he stated (repeatedly and emphatically) that the only reason God leaves Christians on earth after their conversion is evangelism. Thankfully he did not live consistently with his this part of his ministry, and actually, it’s the same commitment to literal-grammtical-historical Bible reading that makes a man Kuyperian.

As a Dispensationalist (ha!) how do I understand any relevance of David’s/Israel’s song to us disciples over here at “the end of the earth” (from the perspective of Acts 1:8)? Not just vibe-theologizing. Here are five bullets:

  • If we are filled with the Spirit (Ephesians 5:18-19) and the Word (Colossians 3:16), we will be singing Psalms like this one.
  • If we are paying attention, the former things were written for our endurance and encouragement and hope (Romans 15:4).
  • If we think Davidic Covenantally, this song may be playing nonstop in all the elevators in the Millennial Kingdom, except for on the Sabbath of course.
  • If we confess that Jesus is Lord, and He made heaven and earth–visible and invisible, then we see the sorts of things He likes to bless His people with. There is meaning in context, significance throughout cosmos.
  • If we have ears to hear, these sorts of blessings are exactly the kind of things that will provoke the Jews to jealousy (Romans 11:11-15), because they are the kind of blessings they expected based on field guides like Psalm 144.

Blessings are an eschatological (and evangelistic) cue ball. The blessings can’t be fulfilled spiritually and make any sense.

We should see and will see more earthly blessings per the Psalm 144 Field Guide: generational (12), seasonal (13-14a), national (14b), on the way to the millennial kingdom and then eternal blessings (not included in this Psalm itself).

Conclusion

We, as believers in the Son of David, enjoy blessings already as well as anticipating blessings that have not yet appeared until David’s Lord takes David’s throne.

Some blessings aren’t just the obviously good kind. We’re blessed when we’re reviled (Matthew 5:11), we’re blessed when we remain steadfast under trial (James 5:11).

The field guide shows us the blessed life in battling and building. We fight to create the conditions for blessing, then we build in the space that blessing creates. When your son helps you build a deck. When your business has a profitable quarter. When the kids can play outside in your neighborhood (maybe those who live outside of Tacoma, ha). You see and pray for more of these blessings, discipling the nations what God wills, on earth as it is in heaven.

Psalm 144 shows how to identify, in the wild real time:

  • the blessed LORD
  • the blessings of the LORD
  • the blessed people of the LORD

Blessed are the people to whom such
blessings fall!
Blessed are the people whose God
is the LORD!”

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Confirmation Not Completion

Not only have we been considering advent amens about Jesus, Jesus Himself is “the Amen.”

He is so called in Revelation 3:14. “And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write, ‘The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation.”

This is the seventh of seven letters. Jesus had been described already as:

  • Him who holds the seven stars in His right hand, who walks among the seven golden lampstands (2:1)
  • the first and the last, who died and came to life (2:8)
  • Him who has the sharp two-edged sword (2:12)
  • the Son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire, and whose feet are like burnished bronze (2:18)
  • Him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars (3:1)
  • the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David (3:7)

And then again, “the Amen” (3:14).

It’s comparable to 2 Corinthians 1:20. “For all the promises of God find their Yes in Him. That is why it is through Him that we utter our Amen to God for His glory.”

Jesus is The Amen. Sometimes we hear that all God’s promises are fulfilled in Him, but it would be better to say that all God’s promises are guaranteed by Him. As the Amen He isn’t the “This-Is-the-End,” He is the “Let It Be So.” He is not the terminus, but the “Truly-Truly.” He is not the completion but the confirmation. As His first coming fulfilled round one of promises in flesh, so He will fulfill the remaining promises in fact. Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!

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Picking up Speed

The only thing I like less than traffic is traffic circles, but that is just my favorite complaint. With traffic, especially on I-5, have you ever been in a major slow down, seen on your maps app that it will open up in a mile or so, and you really expect to see a doozy of an accident when you reach the appointed mile? Then when you arrive, the lanes did open up and you did start picking up speed again, but there was no visible problem? Why is there still so much traffic?

There probably had been an earlier accident. But there is a phenomenon where a past event has lagging consequences. Non-technically it’s like a compressed spring that takes time to uncompress. The technical term for it is Hysteresis:

term used in physics, engineering, economics, and even psychology to describe a phenomenon where the effect of a force (or input) on a system depends not only on the current value of that input but also on the history of past inputs. In other words, a system exhibits hysteresis when its response lags behind the changes in the influencing factors.

With traffic, once the accident is cleared, no one wants to keep driving slowly, and yet it still takes time to recover from the lag. Hysteresis explains economic lag, magnetic lag, emotional lag.

There have been three major, overlapping accidents that have caused quite the stop. The accidents happened a while ago, but we haven’t even really swept up all the broken taillight pieces. There’s enough little puddles of oil and gas on the road that any one of them might still catch fire.

  1. Education crashed because people thought that God was unnecessary.
  2. Education crashed because God’s people thought education was unnecessary.
  3. Education crashed because in 2020 almost everyone thought the whole education system was unnecessary.

These aren’t going to be my talking points, they just describe our unfavourable conditions.

We are about to add a fourth crash according to some, where AI takes over all our jobs, and maybe AI will learn that humans are unnecessary.

This is why education starts with worship, why the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and why men are imago Dei before they are homo sapiens. Christ is Lord, ergo cogito.

On one hand, it’s hard to believe we have to keep making the case that education is good, let alone that good education comes with high expectations and high effort and high blessings. And on the other hand, favorable conditions never come.

But all are yours, and you are Christ’s, so Christ remains the one to whom we must give account. Who knows how much lag there will be? But let’s get our foot ready to hit the gas, and remember where why we started the trip in the first place.

I have three books that I stand up behind my computer on my desk in my study at home.

  • Everett and Snohomish County: A Pictorial History
  • Reflections of Marysville: A Pictorial History
  • Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction

Better future down the road. Students with a larger language model who also know WHY and have WANTS. AI does not have any loves, no ordering. We have gifts worth dying for, and a God worth living–and learning–for.

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Grace to Godliness to Glory

We’re just a couple weeks away from a sermon on the grace that undergirds all the virtues in the first part of Titus 2. Self-control is a fruit of salvation, salvation is the foundation of self-control.

From the greeting to Titus we know that truth accords with godliness (Titus 1:1), and so we ought to understand and embody sound doctrine. So this grace enables us to live:

godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession who are zealous for good works. (Titus 2:13-14)

He wants you for Himself, He wants us for Himself. He has a purpose for You, again, for us. He paid the redemption price for you, for us.

From Him is the grace, through Him is the godliness, to Him is the glory. We have been saved from lawlessness, we are being saved in zealousness, and we will be saved through hopefulness.

Beloved of God, the beloved and blessed Son will return for us in love and blessing. The bread and wine on His Table prove it and provoke us to keep up hope.

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Numquam reformanda?

Numquam reformanda! Prohibere reformationem!

I really didn’t realize that anyone in R/reformed circles would argue against semper reformanda: always reforming. So I began this post with some alternatives above. “Never reforming!” or “Stop reformation!”

Those are better?

I assume the anon I’ve quoted above is referring to Karl Barth, the “wanton heretic.” Note, Barth did his adult work in the 20th century. But while it’s true that Barth used the phrase semper reformanda, he did not develop it.

It’s at least from the 17th century. “The saying first appeared in 1674 in a devotional book by Jodocus van Lodenstein…a key figure in the Dutch Second Reformation.” KDY gives more context in this article, which is all good. But the point is, semper reformanda is old school, not a product of haters.

And the phrase still plays. The semper is built in to the reformanda.

“We are unfaithful to the spirit of the Reformation – as well as to all that is implied in the word “reformed” – if we ever imagine that the task of reform was finished with Luther, Calvin, Knox, and others in the sixteenth century. Ours is a glorious heritage, but if we only look back and revel in great moments in the past we negate our calling to be continually reforming.”

I. John Hesselink

If there are people who use semper reformanda to justify their evangelical deconstruction, I haven’t come across them.

And more than lacking lots of examples of bad motto users, I have lots of questions.

Who decided when/that the Reformation was done? Why argue for the 17th century rather than the 16th century? And if not the first generation, why are we stopping at the following and also now-dead generation?

What established Westminster as the END? Did those “divines” think there was nothing more to be said or changed? There were no new issues that might come into the church that would require addressing? Does Westminster Longer cover all the bases? If their Assembly assembled among us today, would they say, “Guys, you do NOT need more reformation. Stop it!”

And how come it is that all that (great) Westminster work hasn’t successfully kept Presbies together, in doctrine or in denomination, let alone guaranteed spiritually prosperous families and culture and nations and personal morals? I’m not saying Baptists are smarter per capita, but how many died-in-the-wool Dispies dye their hair pink and even bother trying to argue that it fits with their theology?

If we, the 21st century church, have problems that need fixing, problems that might take generations to turn around, I’m assuming we should try to fix them, but we’re just not supposed to refer to it as “always reforming”?

This comes back to the basic issue of behaving like reformers, not freezing reformers in our minds as the replacement “saints” and their writings as Protestant authority ex cathedra. We thank the Lord for the reformers, men who learned from the early church fathers and used whatever they wanted that helped them. But they loved the Scriptures and tried to submit their teaching and practices more and more consistently with inspired revelation. That work must continue until our final redemption.

What an amazing treasure of resources we have, through them and in their examples. But the Reformed chronological snobbery of “only the old” and acting according to #ReformNeverMore has too many similarities to how the 16th century church got into such a dark place where reformation was so needed.

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A Cup of Tea at St. Anne’s

Or, A Culture of Imaging and Imagination

Below are the notes from the talk I gave at the Equipping the Saints Conference a couple weekends ago.

Fairytales as Terrorism

It is really fun to be here, and to mutually encourage one another’s faith for building culture in hostile territory. We are in a non-fiction fight with the “principalities and powers and depraved hypersomatic beings at great heights” (as C.S. Lewis put it in Perelandra, 21), not to mention our reductionistic and materialistic earthly authorities. While we need faith to be strong in the Lord, He strengthens our faith through fellowship in truth, and I can testify that the Lord can and does strengthen our friendships through good fiction.

You may have seen that earlier this year a UK anti-terrorism group has identified reading books by C.S. Lewis (along with Tolkien, Huxley, and Orwell) as a possible sign of far-wing extremism and white supremacy (source). If you’ve ever imagined yourself enjoying a cup of tea and piece of cake at St. Anne’s, you are the enemy. Well done.

I’ve spoken about That Hideous Strength before, and for as amazing as my observations were (at least to me, ha!), I’ve often failed to appreciate how many of the people I’m talking to haven’t yet read THS; I might as well be speaking the solar language. Let me know: how many people am I’m going to be babbling in front of?

There are a lot of resources for basic character introductions and plot points for all three books in the Ransom trilogy; today I want to make a more particular appeal for expanding our imaginative coordinates in order to encourage our image-bearing culture-building.

More Literary Connections

Before I make my point, which is mostly drawn from THS, we shouldn’t fail to recognize that Lewis works back and forth between making his point in THS and The Abolition of Man. He explicitly references Abolition in the preface to THS; THS is the narrative ride of his prophetic thesis (“This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my The Abolition of Man”). There’s also a lot of narrative overlap with his essay called “The Inner Ring” (here’s a reading on YouTube). But it’s not stepping out too far to say that the greatest connection to THS is the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11.

I’d like to present a case that the Tower of Babel is the key to understanding THS, it is the key to fixing a critical misstep in Abolition, and it is the rallying point for us to fight the good fight better.

What’s in a Name

There are two obvious connections between THS and Babel Tower. First is the title, second is the easy climax, or the penultimate—not final climax, of the plot.

The name of the book, That Hideous Strength, is a line in a poem written by Sir David Lyndsay in 1555 (one of the first readers of William Tyndale’s translation of Scripture into English, also a supporter of John Knox and the Reformation in Scotland). Lyndsay’s line is: “when the building of the tower of Babel was abandoned the schaddow of that hidduous strenth was already six miles long” (glorious Old English spelling found in English Literature in the 16th Century Excluding Drama). Lewis uses the phrase, “the Hideous Strength”; each time H and S are capitalized, like a proper noun: Hideous Strength. It’s used three times in chapter 13 which is titled: “They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven on Their Heads.” What is the Strength, and why is it Hideous? Those are essential terms to define.

Of course the other connection to Genesis 11 is the Banquet at Belbury (second to last chapter), when Merlin brings “the curse of Babel,” also capital B, and confuses their language, but not just into dispersing the party—they disperse alright—but into the chaos of killing and being killed. The disorder in language is only the beginning of the disarray and destruction and death. “Wither had once heard [Merlin’s] voice calling loud and intolerably glad above the riot of nonsense, ‘Qui Verbum Dei contempserunt, eis auferetur etiam verbum hominis.’” Meaning, “They that have despised the word of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away.” The Babel curse conquered the NICE.

Back up to Babel

What is the deal with this Babel influence? The biblical story itself is only one paragraph, nine verses long at the beginning of Genesis 11. At this point in the biblical narrative we’re post flood by a few generations, not quite sure how many people were around, but likely in the tens of thousands.

The “whole earth had one language and the same words” (verse 1). They settled together in the same place, Shinar.

And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:3–4 ESV)

Attentive readers already see some problems, and the response of the Lord corroborates it. Three times they say “let us make…let us build…let us make.” That should sound familiar. In Genesis 1:26 “God said, ‘Let us make…’” Hmmm, and let us keep going. Building themselves a city is not necessarily bad, though it hints at premeditated refusal to “fill the earth” as the Lord mandated in Genesis 1:28. Their tower was to have “its top in the heavens,” none would be above them, and it would presumably be tall enough to protect them in case there was another flood. These projects would “make a name for ourselves.” They thought they could determine their place, their own limits.

And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” (Genesis 11:5–7 ESV)

Initially it might seem that the LORD is being petty, that He is threatened by what they’re doing. What is His concern?

This goes back to Genesis 1 and God’s creation of man and the nature of man and the mandate to man. God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (Genesis 1:28). They were made with the capacity for relationship and family. As they, and their offspring, filled the earth they were to subdue it and have dominion. They were made with the capacity for responsibility and rule as God’s stewards.

Isn’t that what the men in Shinar were doing? No one man, or family, could accomplish the city and tower enterprise. They were in a community, in relationship; they were trying to build culture. And certainly the tools and the plans and the construction were parts of demonstrating human ingenuity and creativity and responsibility.

But virtuous relationship and responsibility depend on God’s blessing (doing it the way God said to do it). The first part of Genesis 1:28 is key: “God blessed them” and then God said be fruitful.

And even more, the relationship and the responsibility were part of what it meant to be made in His image. Note the plural, “let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). While the doctrine of the Trinity is obviously not fully revealed here, God didn’t make humans in the likeness of Himself and angels, or in the likeness of Himself and lesser gods. Men are made as images of God, the imago Dei. In Babel, the LORD said, “Come, let us go down” (Genesis 11:7). That plural pronoun in God’s mouth is used in 1:26 when He purposes to make man in His image and only again in 11:7 when He sees men using His language without reference to Him.

A man is not a man in his own name or his own image. When the LORD said, “this is only the beginning of what they will do,” He was referring to the beginning of their abolition of man. They were running into self-sufficiency, autonomy, and attempts to live and master themselves as if God wasn’t necessary.

In the “shadow of that hideous strength” the tower symbolized or embodied the will and work of men. There is glorious strength in image bearing relationships and responsibility, but all the results are hideous as men try to define the image for themselves.

Back to Belbury – The Nice Guys

The setting for THS is on earth where the Macrobes have convinced men in the name of “Science” not just to ignore, but to destroy, what is human (how prescient was Lewis about our present culture). They were reimagining in order to reengineer the human race. But mirrors reflect a given shape, they can’t create their own shape. So by the end of the story Wither (think: Dr. Fauci) and Frost and Straik have lost even the love of their own flesh, their own lives.

The NICE, the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, the NICE guys are experimenting themselves right into vanity and dust in the wind. The story of Babel, and the story of Belbury, are Men, in the name of Man, ruining men and Man. This is the key to understanding THS.

The Tao < the Dei

I said at the beginning that Babel is also the key to fixing the misstep, or at least insufficient (and actually self-refuting) step, in the otherwise glorious The Abolition of Man.

I don’t know that I could read Abolition (or THS) enough. There’s barely anything in it that doesn’t edify me. If Lewis was alive to see our generation I’m sure he’d clarify that when he argued for men with chests, he wasn’t talking about big prosthetic boobs at the city library’s Drag Queen Story Hour.

And while I appreciate his setting, that he was giving academic lectures at a university, and while I am compelled by his success in showing the nonsense of objective claims that there are no objective realities, for my money I think he doesn’t quite go far enough.

What is needed is to recognize that the Dei (in the imago Dei) trumps the Tao; the Tao < the Dei. This is needful for two reasons. First, it’s not just that men must recognize objective values, they must reflect objective values as image-bearers. Second, the objective values we reflect as image bearers are personal, they are revealed to us in God, and the Triune God at that, Father, Son, and Spirit. We are made in the image of one God in three Persons.

This means that to be truly men we cannot be alone. So “the LORD God said, ’It is not good that the man should be alone’” (Genesis 2:18). (What is so gutting in the movie “Castaway”? It’s not mostly his lack of shoes, but his lack of companionship.) The Tao has a rhetorical value in exalting the real world, but it falls short of the glory of God.

Friendship at St. Anne’s

The “company” at St. Anne’s isn’t just literary detritus. Lewis uses “company” 29 times in THS and a couple of them are capital C. A company refers to the group of companions, from the Latin words “com-” meaning “together” and “panis” meaning “bread” so those who shared bread/meals together. The company at St. Anne’s wasn’t perfect, but it was powerful; it pulled Jane in.

(Jane:) “You keep on talking of We and Us. Are you some kind of company?” (Ransom:) “Yes. You may call it a company.”

St. Anne’s provides a true picture of image-bearing: singing, gardening, doing dishes, eating cake and drinking wine, having word play and making puns(!), dressing up, having a cup of tea.

The main human characters struggled as image-bearers. Mark wanted relationship with the wrong set, Jane wanted responsibility according to her terms. Mark avoided true responsibility, Jane avoided true relationship.

I’d argue that the climax of the story happens after “The End.” Not only are Mark and Jane converted, they are unified. The end should remind us that the first word of THS is “matrimony.”

“Matrimony was ordained, thirdly,” said Jane Studdock to herself, “for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other.” (Location 54)

She repeats it a few paragraphs later: “Mutual society, help, and comfort,” said Jane bitterly. (Location 620)

The last sentence in the book, as Jane stood outside the lodge: “Obviously it was high time she went in.” Here are image-bearers, male and female, about ready to be fruitful and multiply. And their fellowship is only the beginning.

Winning the Good Fight

Lewis wrote:

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as “what a man does with his solitude.” (“The Inner Ring”)

Today, this conference, talking about culture building, is part of the good fight. It’s not the only part, but those who fight alone on the right side only understand half of what it means to be on the right side.

We don’t read THS to become “Athanasius Contra Mundum,” we are like the little company of St. Anne’s contra mundum simul, against the world together. We do not love the world or the things in the world, but we do love one another and sharing these stories keeps us from being solo soldiers. You don’t have to read in a group, but you better read for the group, not to isolate yourself from it. It is our fellowship in receiving good gifts from God, including our flesh and blood relationships, as hard as they may be, that make us jealousable salt and light.

May the Lord of heaven and earth, one God in three Persons, bless us to be fruitful as we multiply our reading of good fiction that we would fight the good fight of faith with broader imaginative coordinates and stronger connections.

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Recapping the Sun

I haven’t written about the Marysville Sun here for a while, but today the final issue of the year went out.

Thirteen months ago I made my first public comments about the idea of starting a local newspaper. I’d been thinking about it enough that it seemed better to make something rather than just keep thinking about it, and on the thirteenth of May the first issue came out.

Today’s Sun has some year-end numbers about current subscribers and a recap of some first-year highlights. I still think it’s a good project for loving Marysville and making it a destination.

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Marysville Sun

In the spirit of starting somewhere, I finally followed up on this post. Instead of Standard I decided to go with Sun, because it has obvious metaphorical value AND because it seems like a playful acknowledgment that in Marysville’s geographical/meteorological condition, we really would like more sun.

I now own the digital property at marysvillesun.com but there’s no building there yet.

And actually, I decided to try Substack for a 1.0 version. A weekly newsletter seems right, and Substack makes subscribing and eventual paid subscriptions easy. There’s just a Coming soon there now, but nothing is stopping you from subscribing today. :)

Subscribe here!

There’s also a new Twitter account if that’s your thing.

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Establish the Work

The following are notes from my quick talk at tonight’s Comeford College Information Night.

The Lord will return and we want to have our lamps filled with oil. The foolish virgins took their lamps to meet the bridegroom, but they brought no extra oil, and as the bridegroom delayed, their oil ran out and their lamps went out. The door was shut and they missed out on the marriage feast (Matthew 25:1-13).

The Lord will return and we will give an account for the talents He has given us. That happens to be the very next parable (Matthew 25:14-30). Not all the servants were given the same capital to start with, but they were all expected to invest and give a return to their returning master. The one who buried his talent had his one and only talent taken from him. Each of the servants who had made more talents were told, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:21 and 23).

The Lord will return, and Jesus is Lord. That is the minimum confession of every Christian disciple (per Romans 10:9), but it is a minimum with no bottom, or top, or sides for that matter. It’s really less a minimum and more a maximum, even more, it’s a maxim. Maxim comes from maxima in Latin, the “largest or most important proposition.” What covers and touches more than all the things that Jesus created and cares about (John 1:3)? That’s the kind of confession that really keeps our lamps burning.

Because He is Lord He sets the cosmic curriculum for what we must learn and because He is Lord we are to be “always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord our labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58). In short order we’ve got the what, the how, and the why. Because He is Lord He also tells us where.

And where we are is here. Jesus is Lord in and of Marysville no matter how many recognize it. This is our home, this is where we want to “take root downward and bear fruit upward” (see Isaiah 37:31, ESV).

It’s why we named this college Comeford), after James P. Comeford, who set up shop around two miles from this very spot, literally, in 1872. History records that he was a Catholic, and a capitalist. We are at least his geographical descendants, loving Marysville into greater loveliness by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ our Lord alone.

We want Marysville to be a destination for learning how to take dominion (Genesis 1:28) as men and women, and what God hath gendered asunder, let not man color light purple. We want so much more for our kids and grandkids, for our neighbors, and for our city, than the crippling crap spewing out of so many colleges and the mala fides credentials given with decades of debt.

As Abraham Kuyper put it in his inaugural address to the Free University of Amsterdam:

“To put it mildly, our undertaking bears a protest against the present environment and suggests that something better is possible.”

This isn’t just because of what we’re fearful of, but because we fear the Lord who gives wisdom and understanding and joy and fruit.

Let your work be shown to your servants,
and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and establish the work of our hands upon us;
yes, establish the work of our hands!
(Psalm 90:16–17, ESV)

May the Lord bless us with good sense and with strength. May we be faithful in this little place with the little we’ve started with, so that when He returns we will be ready for our larger responsibilities and enter into His joy.