The coldest case of all

I’m a fan of mystery stories, going back a very long way. I remember as a kid sitting in my grandparents’ home reading Grampa’s collection—he had an omnibus edition of Sherlock Holmes, scads of Agatha Christie novels, and probably everything Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout ever wrote. He also had this big blue-dust-jacketed book of true crime stories—it seems to me it might have been a Reader’s Digest book; in retrospect, I’m not sure a child as young as I was should have known who Sam Sheppard was, but at least I turned out OK. (Mostly. I think.)

Anyway, when it comes to reading mysteries, I tend to prefer the Great Detective sort of stories, authors like Christie, Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James, G. K. Chesterton, and (to name someone a bit more obscure these days) Melville Davisson Post; but on TV, I enjoy the current ascendancy of police procedurals quite a bit. (Though I would say that in my book, the CSI series are really more akin to R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke stories than to the classic procedural.) One of my favorites—though I don’t think it’s lived up to the promise of its first season—is Cold Case, in part because the show’s premise allows them to move throughout history, and in part because of a superb cast and generally good writing.

That said, I wasn’t all that pleased with last Sunday’s episode, “The Good Death.” It was an agenda episode, pretty much intended as a commercial for euthanasia, and that posed two problems for me. First, it was pretty unsubtle about its agenda; I don’t mind if a story tries to make a point, but I dislike being bludgeoned, even if I agree with the message. Second, in this case, I don’t agree with the message, since I consider euthanasia a barbaric and anti-human practice, even if many who support it do so out of compassionate motives.

In this particular instance, I especially disliked the episode’s subtext, which is that we should allow euthanasia because hospitals just let patients suffer. As a former hospital chaplain, that blindingly white TV hospital with nary a caregiver in sight (except for the nurse who’d been arrested for euthanizing patients, and the doctor whose only function was to give the diagnosis) doesn’t look anything like any of the hospitals I know. In point of fact, the depiction was a shameful libel on our nation’s caregivers. I don’t say all hospitals are perfect, and I would imagine there are those out there that do fall down on the job, but by and large, the doctors and nurses in this country put a great deal of effort into caring for their patients—and in cases of extreme pain, that doesn’t merely include pain control, it begins with it. Clearly, the writers of this episode know little or nothing about hospice care and comfort care—either that or they suppressed what they know in order to make the case for their agenda seem stronger.

The funny thing is, though, that they actually did a pretty good job of defeating their own argument—which is perhaps evidence of the grace of God working its way through the cracks in human intentions. There was, for instance, the closing song (Paul Westerberg’s “Good Day”), which declares, “A good day is any day that you’re alive”—a remarkable affirmation of the value of life in itself to conclude an episode which tried very hard to make a very different point. More significantly, though, the entire structure of the episode undermined its argument. The case for euthanasia rests, philosophically, on the assumption that suffering is an unmitigated evil, unrelievedly bad. Given that, if you aren’t going to be able to live without significant suffering, life isn’t worth living, and you should be allowed to kill yourself—or someone should be allowed to kill you. And yet, over the course of this episode, we were shown a very different reality, as the suffering of the deceased protagonist (whose death Lily Rush and the rest were investigating) proved in fact to be powerfully redemptive. The pain and other effects of a severe brain tumor transformed one of the most selfish and unpleasant characters I’ve ever run across—well, not to put too fine a point on it, back into a human being—bringing him to the point of reconciling with several people he’d hurt, most notably his wife.

It’s not too much to say, looking at this episode, that the cancer was the best thing that ever happened to this guy. His suffering was redemptive; his life was better for the pain he had endured; and yet, from the perspective of the episode, better to kill him (at his request, it must be noted) than to let him suffer any longer. Never mind that had he lived, he might have fully reconciled with his son, thereby allowing the son to heal much sooner from the damage his father had done him through their lives; never mind any of that. Pain hurts, hurting is bad, anything is justified to end it. Except that in that case, wouldn’t it have been better if he’d never gotten sick?

Simply Wright

One of my frustrations as a pastor is that with everything else I need to do, I can’t do the reading I wish I could do. As Ecclesiastes says, “Of the making of many books there is no end,” and while many that come out each year are of great value, I have neither the time nor the energy to read as many as I’d like to read–or indeed, arguably, as many as I need to read.

It’s not a problem unique to me, of course; which is why, I think, God invented journals and review essays. There are a number of periodicals to which I subscribe, and a handful in particular which I find critically important in keeping up with things and highlighting the books I need to make time to read. The most important are First Things and Books & Culture, which you’ll find linked over on the left side of the page; not far below them is Touchstone, which describes itself as “a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content, with editors and readers from each of the three great divisions of Christendom — Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox . . . [designed to] provide a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church.”

Personally, I find Touchstone a bit more erratic than First Things (and also shorter), but the editors find (or write) and publish some wonderful pieces. In the latest issue, perhaps the best is a review essay on C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity by the Anglican Bishop of Durham, England, the incomparable N. T. Wright. Bishop Wright might just be the perfect person to do this, since like Lewis he’s an Englishman, an Anglican, a scholar (though his field is New Testament rather than Renaissance literature) and a writer who recently wrote a small work of popular apologetics, Simply Christian, which can be profitably compared with Lewis’ book. (I know this because it’s been done.) What’s more, Bishop Wright also happens to be extremely good at what he does, and a man of real grace and humility. (I know that from people I know who are friends of his.)

As one would expect, then, he offers an excellent and quite thorough appraisal of Lewis’ work, pointing out its great strengths and not sparing its weaknesses. There’s no need to recapitulate his points here–go read the article (and give Touchstone some page hits); but I do want to call attention to Bishop Wright’s closing paragraphs:

[Despite the book’s flaws,] the bee flies, and gets the honey. Credit where credit is due. Lewis himself would have been the first to say that of course his book was neither perfect nor complete, and that what mattered was that, if it brought people into the company, and under the influence (or “infection”) of Jesus Christ, Jesus himself would happily take over—indeed, that Jesus had been operating through the process all along, albeit through the imperfect medium of the apologist.And, as another imperfect apologist, I salute a great master, and can only hope that in sixty years’ time children yet unborn will say of me that, despite all my obvious and embarrassing failings, I too was used, in however small a way, to bring people under the influence and power, and to the love and kingdom, of the same Jesus Christ.

Not a bad appetizer

One of our elders here at Trinity has asked me several times over the last number of months if I’d read David Gregory’s book Dinner with a Perfect Stranger. I hadn’t, nor did I want to (though I didn’t say that–no need to be rude, after all); it struck me as something of a Christian parallel to Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, just a piece of well-intentioned schlock.

Well, it seems Steve finally decided I’d had long enough, or something, and loaned me his copy. At least, he gave me his copy with the expectation that I would read and return it; can you really call it a loan when the other person doesn’t want to borrow it? Whatever you want to call it, though, the book was on my desk, and it’s short enough (100 small pages) that I didn’t have any real excuse not to read it; so I did. I was pleasantly surprised–quite surprised, in fact. It’s not great literature by any means, nor is it likely to be mistaken over the long haul for one of
C. S. Lewis’ works (though Gregory clearly admires Lewis–I caught a couple nods to Mere Christianity over the course of the book); for that matter, I wouldn’t even put it with Peter Kreeft‘s work. Still, it’s clearly and cleanly written, and far shorter than I feared on the preciousness one so often finds in Christian fiction. More importantly, the book goes far beyond the sophomoric popular theology I expected to find; Gregory manages consistently to be simple without being simplistic, which is an important and difficult line to walk, and his apologetic is wide-ranging and thoughtful–and deeper than most contemporary Christian nonfiction. On several points (such as the discussion of heaven), his book can even serve (and will, I hope) as a useful corrective to the poor theology served up in many places around the American church.

All in all, I was pleased and impressed: Dinner with a Perfect Stranger is indeed an “invitation worth considering,” for non-Christians and immature Christians alike. It’s not great fiction, but it’s probably good enough writing and storytelling to please most non-academics these days, and it’s not just milk (or chicken soup), either–there’s a lot of good, solid food for the soul here. Recommended.

Note: fans of Dinner with a Perfect Stranger might be interested to know that there’s a sequel, focused on Nick’s wife Mattie, called A Day with a Perfect Stranger.

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

For the last few weeks, I’ve been working my way through David Crump’s book Knocking on Heaven’s Door: A New Testament Theology of Petitionary Prayer. Dr. Crump’s a religion professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, and he’s written a truly superb book; there’s more meat in the introduction alone than you’ll find in many books on prayer. I picked it up after reading Lauren Winner’s review, thinking it could give me a useful frame for a sermon series, and that’s been one of the better decisions I’ve made lately. I will indeed be leaning on this book in my preaching this summer, but it’s done me a lot more good than just that; I can honestly say my prayer life is stronger and deeper as a result of the reading I’ve done so far, and I look forward to seeing what Dr. Crump draws out of the rest of the New Testament. Highly recommended.

Still here

Rather a long hiatus, that–crazy summer + technical problems = dead blog. Oh, well . . . life here in the mountains is settling back into winter calm (which might seem odd, but outside the ski towns it really is pretty quiet up here once Labor Day passes), and we have time to think again.

One of my aims this winter is to read Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel–I started the first book, August 1914, years ago but was sidetracked before getting very far. It may seem like an odd ambition, but I was spurred to it by Daniel Mahoney’s recent piece in First Things, “Traducing Solzhenitsyn,” which is a brief consideration of the various ways in which Solzhenitsyn has been misrepresented and slandered in the West. It’s no surprise, really; he’s a true prophetic voice, and the established order doesn’t like prophets much. It never has. (Though if you listen to debates in the mainline churches, you’ll hear a fair number of people claiming the prophetic mantle for themselves–usually followed by yet another spiel as to why God supports the Democratic Party agenda. Funny, that.)

Another false solution

I’ve had a couple of people recommend Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, but I haven’t gotten around to reading it (with a three-year-old, a six-week-old, and sermons to write every week, I’m a little behind on time for new fiction—new adult fiction, at least). After running across Sandra Miesel’s evisceration of the book in the September issue of Crisis, however, I think that’s just as well; I still intend to read it, but now I’m aware it won’t be for pleasure. The abuse of history to serve contemporary causes infuriates me, and from Miesel’s analysis, this book is a particularly egregious example of that offense. Clearly, though, that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from buying into its portrayal of history and Christianity.

Another piece worth reading on this book is one Miesel co-wrote with the Catholic theologian Carl E. Olson; this is the first part of what will be a two-part article.