The Blue Ink Review beat out the competition to provide the first professional review of the book Rekindled, posted here. I was warned to have a thick skin on this review business. Really, it is a fine review. It gets the spirit of the book right. What they say about what I did is true — I certainly did not make the characters use archaic language as that would have made the story really hard to read. I stand by that, even as I claim I did try to map their worldview into our language.
The review however might have made poor Roger roll over in his grave. Let me explain.
My favorite line in the review includes “this is an absorbingly detailed portrait of 17th-century Christendom”. Yikes!! Roger wrote an entire pamphlet denouncing the use in his day of the word “Christendom”, and its common use now isn’t that different. Specifically many Europeans did not follow Jesus — and so Europe should never have been called Christendom in his view. The Algonquian people that came to hear Roger preach may have followed Jesus — he would never have claimed he could be sure — but would never follow European customs. If they did follow Jesus, they would be part of the true “Christendom” for sure. Roger’s point is that the true Christendom is always invisible (in any century) and will never be a single geographic region or culture. Thus, the separation of church and state is critical to church’s success as well as the state’s.
Another line in the review says of Roger’s expectation of the Algonquian people “Because he doesn’t view them as “heathens,” he decides they shouldn’t have to adhere to biblical customs.” Sounded good at first, but wait. On the one hand, he certainly didn’t think Algonquian people should have to follow European customs.
Roger would have said all of the Algonquian people started as heathens, just as we all do. Until we decide to give our lives to following Jesus we are all heathen — Algonquian included. But the deeper meaning of the term “heathen” as the author of the review may have meant is that Roger did not view them as sub-human — and that is most certainly true. Roger certainly would have said all Jesus followers will want to follow the Bible’s commands, even commands that seem impossible to follow. It will be the power of the Holy Spirit that will enable them to come closer to following Jesus, not a person’s own power.
But Roger asked no person that did not want to follow Jesus to obey anything other than laws to keep the civil peace. So in that sense, when a person is heathen (European or Algonquian), he does not expect them to follow biblical custom.
For Christians, for his own life, the Bible was everything. The Old Testament taught concepts physically as a teacher might give a young child large physical letters to teach the alphabet. The New Testament graduated the student to word and sentence level concepts teachable at a more abstract level. As the inspired word of God, every drop, every morsel has significance.
Every culture has a moral code, and Roger would claim the Bible says every moral code in every culture is authorized by God as God is the ultimate delegator of the authority behind every civil ruler. He also would have said we all are doomed to fail the moral code, no matter what it says. As fallen humans (to use his words “Adam’s degenerate seed”) we are all rule-breakers (aka sinners). Just as the Bible reveals, he would have claimed following Jesus is the only way out of that paradox, for any century.
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