Q. You’ve got a fiction series called Birth Pangs. What motivated you to write this series? What’s it about?

I guess you could say that the Birth Pangs series is my own excursion into ‘literary apologetics.’  It’s pretty unique.  A friend has described it as belonging to the didactic genre.  The series is set in the ‘not too distant future’ after America has been laid low by foreign armies and a biological and nuclear holocaust.  Now, they are rebuilding from scratch.  This setting allows me to discuss everything under the sun:  what is truth, what is real, how do you know?  What is the relationship between religion and government?  What does it mean to be human?  Or a man or a woman in particular?  So on and so forth, only in my series there is no government, church, or school to tell the characters what the real answers are.
The series actually came into my head, nearly fully formed, in the last few months of a stint as an over the road truck driver.  I was motivated to write it because I love writing stories but I think the germ of this particular story was my reflecting on all that we take for granted.  For example, as a truck driver I was criss crossing the country on nicely paved and administered roads.  I imagined what life would be like without that kind of infrastructure.  What if I had to walk to California from Arkansas?  What if I couldn’t just go to the grocery store to get food?  Then I started thinking about what life would be like without that other kind of infrastructure we take for granted- our educational systems, our political system, our churches, etc, in short, our intellectual infrastructure.  You could say that the setting of the series was engineered to provide an opportunity to imagine what that would be like.

There is some definite Christian perspective in the series but the whole point of the series is to give other perspectives a hearing, too.  I have a good friend who is an atheist and liberal who has enjoyed both books in the series and some of my more conservative friends enjoy it, too.  I like that I can appeal to both groups, but the series is not for everyone, either.  There can be some meaty philosophy and theology in the midst of the fantastic battles and subtle diplomacy. 

In the novel, you seem to be developing your own “pseudo-theology”, for lack of a better word: some type of Christian-based theology that certainly is fictitious, but is yet, well, orthodox.  Can you say more about this without giving away too much of the series’s secrets?

One of my underlying goals of writing the Birth Pangs series is to ‘re-imagine’ heaven.  The book of Revelation contains numerous images of heaven that I suspect would have resonated greatly with a first century Jew but bores our image rich, media saturated society.  It is to the point where I’ve heard people say that just about anything is preferable to heaven, even hell.  This is ignorance, but it is somewhat forgiveable.  The language in Revelation is symbolic:  whatever it symbolizes will be much greater than whatever we can imagine.  So, you might say that I have cautiously tried to insert some new symbols that I hope will resonate with a 21st century American (or Brit!).

This process of ‘re-imagining’ is not constrained to ‘heaven,’ though.  ‘Re-imagining’ is going on with the Nephilim and the Shadowmen, for example.  I wanted to take the concepts and doctrines that excite me and present them in a way that will excite and inspire others.  Basically, I get the idea that a lot of people think that Christianity is dull.  It isn’t so much that they find the evidence for it uncompelling as that even if it were true they wouldn’t be impressed. 

What they don’t realize is that Christian theology has been at the forefront of creative expression for centuries upon centuries.  Within the ‘confines’ of orthodoxy, there are numerous possibilities.  Just as having specific requirements for something to qualify as a haiku or a sonnet doesn’t constrain creativity, but frees it, so too does orthodoxy.

So yes, the Birth Pangs series is filled with fictitious explorations of orthodox Christian theology, but in theory, if my grasp of Christian theology is accurate (and Christian theology is true!) then everything that transpires in the Birth Pangs world could actually happen in our world.  And what a world it would be if they did!

I want my readers, especially those who are ‘turned off’ from Christianity, to consider that, and realize that perhaps God might have some surprises of his own- because whatever I imagine, what God actually does will blow it out of the water.

A large part of the last few years of your life have been devoted to exploring theological issues on your website sntjohnny.com. Have your experiences in that forum informed this novel?

There is no question that my Internet ministry has informed Fidelis and the entire Birth Pangs series.  The Birth Pangs series has many purposes and one of them is to provide a tool for me to communicate in story form what I have attempted to communicate elsewhere in argument and discussion.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that the series is entirely designed to reflect back on my apologetics experiences, though.  The series is equally informed by events in my life, events in history in general, and my overall way of looking at the world which is distinctly Christian.  While I think it would be fair to say that many characters and events in the BP series can be tied in some way to a forum discussion, or a particular musing about reality in my own life, I’d urge some caution in trying to interpret the whole book and everything in it in that way.

The reason for this is that one of the things I was particularly sensitive to was to make sure that the story was enjoyable on its own terms.  Readers have to be able to relate to the characters and events in the story.  That’s the whole point, really.  I want them to put themselves in the places of the people in the story going through what they’re going through and have them more or less compare what the characters do with what they would do.

The Christian overtones I think are hard to miss but it is my hope that they are not so overbearing as to turn off a secular or even atheistic reader.  In fact, I think readers like that will enjoy some of the fun I have in addressing some of their challenges. 

Political systems really represent individual beliefs, in particular how one’s beliefs impact how one should behave in the wider world and how you believe others ought to behave.  Ultimately, one cannot separate one’s politics from their worldview.  Since the Birth Pangs series is an exploration of worldviews, it follows that political musings will come, too.  A person who derives no political implications from their world view probably doesn’t even understand their world view or doesn’t really believe their world view.

Part of the problem in today’s culture is that many people have a worldview but then political beliefs that are inconsistent with planks in their worldview.  The latent idea is that one’s beliefs are private matters whereas how one feels about the government or governance is in a separate category.  Of course, one’s feelings about politics is in fact a belief, so even the attempt to compartmentalize fails in the end.  Somewhere, somehow, people’s politics relate back to a belief or two that they have.  Much of the heated discourse today arises because people from different political bents cannot trace their political ideas back to their core beliefs and then they present their political assertions as matters of self-evidently true, which of course they are not if you come from a different starting point.

Birth Pangs is very concerned about determining the best starting point.  It is not concerned because it has the goal of erecting a political system.  There certainly are deeper motivations than that!  But it does not pretend that there won’t be political implications.

Now, in the Birth Pangs series, set in the not so distant future in our own country, the various political systems that strive to fill the void have their historic roots in our own past and present.  Socialism and Communism get a special treatment rather than say, a Monarchy, because America has not had anyone advocating for a monarchy for a long time but socialism is constantly advanced under different guises.  There is also a long history with capitalism and a form of democracy, so it is natural that people will rise up who represent shades of that view.

In the Birth Pangs series, though, there is a ‘deeper reflection’ that permeates it all, and that is an analysis of the nature of humanity itself.  In a word, what the theologians call ‘original sin.’  Even those advocating for democracy in the Birth Pangs series tend to forget why there is a need for checks and balances.  Political systems reflect our views about the human race itself.  Do we believe that people are by nature ‘good’?  Do we think that people are in the main ignorant and untrustworthy, not fit for self-governance?  As an exploration of the facts about humanity, a discussion of the political consequences of one’s view on humanity is unavoidable.

Personally, I wouldn’t chalk any aspect of the Birth Pangs series as being merely incidental or superficial.  I wrote it with the idea that the series would be like an ocean… one can dive deep and explore the ocean and it is then filled with excitement and adventure, crushing sometimes, or one can stay in the shallows and have fun frolicing.  I wanted the series to be accessible and enjoyable in the shallows but open to those who wanted to dive deeper at just about any point.  Fidelis is a start to that and it will take the rest of the books to bring to completion.

Why pick a post-nuclear war setting to explore these themes:  first, the theme of human virtue and fortitude, and, second, the theme of ultimate truth?

Interestingly, what I wanted to do in the book decided this setting.  I didn’t start out wanting to have a Mad Max landscape.  A Mad Max landscape was the natural outgrowth of some of the purposes of the book.  What I wanted to get at is a point where everything is stripped away leaving only individual people striving on their own, free from the structures of government, church, and civilization.  There aren’t many plausible scenarios that can give you that and one of the things I wanted to remain is plausible.  I know that there are fantastic elements to the book… but under my argument (slowly revealed over all the books), is that everything in the books can actually be true in our own world.  So, how do we get from the world we are in now to a world in which every man has to fend for themselves, rebuilding what they believe and how they think free from peer influence?  A post-apocalyptic setting is required, unless I want to have a completely fantastic Perelandra world.

Now, I wanted that setting to help lay out virtue and fortitude and even ultimate truth because I believe we take the crutches of society for granted.  I am not saying that society’s influence is bad or improper, only that we shouldn’t take it for granted.  We like to think of ourselves as good and righteous and brave people, but really, what would we be like if there was no policeman to think about or no armies to concern ourselves with?  I think we need those curbs, but my point is that we shouldn’t fool ourselves about ourselves.  We may only be civil because it is imposed on us.  But what if those curbs weren’t in place?

If the curbs weren’t in place, we’d really find out the robustness of our virtues.  We’d find out if we’d behave if there was no policeman to tell us to do so.  We’d find out if we were brave when confronted with an injustice or a dastardly deed we had no policeman to call, but had to do something ourselves.

This ties in now with the question of ultimate truth.  You don’t have anyone telling you what is right or true anymore, yet each and every one of us has an innate sense that there are right or true things, though we grasp at them and nearly always fail to meet our own standards, let alone the standards of others (think CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity, the first chapter).  What are you going to do?  You can’t rely on authorities- authorities are gone.

In the Birth Pangs world, this is the real situation and the people struggle endlessly with them. But I do not think that our situation is much different.  We still have to answer the same questions, only now we might say there are too many authorities, too many voices telling us what is true and real.  Our problem is sorting them out and that basically requires the same process and methodology as starting over from ’scratch.’

I should say that I had wished to make a clean slate in the Birth Pangs world, with literally everything stripped away, but found that I couldn’t.  The same principles I explore are the ones that demand that certain realities persist.  There are still lingering tensions from past hates, for example.  The UN has come in and taken away all of the guns, and a gunless world truly gives us an opportunity to be courageous and test our mettle, but I couldn’t realistically get rid of them all.  That meant an on-going discussion about ‘gun rights’ which couldn’t be avoided.  There are various political movements that surface that have their origins in our own times, and I couldn’t realistically suggest that they were completely gone, either.  What to do about them forms a backdrop to the series.

Still, the main objective I think was reached:  people found out what they were made of without the boundaries and crutches of ‘civilized’ society and likewise flail about for ideas on determining the source and nature of real truth.

Q4. Another major theme that creeps in the background is the role of truth, and how you have an average guy like Fides who could care less abut the ultimate truths and meta-narratives of history constantly having his conscience nagged by these demons, these demons of truth and history. This begins with his being given a Bible and develops with his relationship with Fermion, a mysterious traveler who seems to know a thing or two about truth. Can you speak a little to this overarching theme?

Gladly. From a big picture point of view I think we all tend to begin our investigation into truth against a backdrop of already assuming certain things are true. For example, we think that it is true that we even exist. We take it for granted. We take for granted that our senses don’t deceive us and that our brain accurately interprets the sense data and that our mind processes objective reality. Based on these assumptions we turn our attention to areas of inquiry such as religion, politics, philosophy, ethics, science, etc.

There is a serious flaw in this approach if we’re really trying to get to the whole bottom of things and that flaw is that our explanations for reality also have to explain the things I listed above. You can’t pick and choose what you want to explain. We find that we instinctively take much of what we think we know based on the authority of others. That is not necessarily an insult. Let’s face it, we only have our own narrow experience of reality and to fill out the broader picture we’ll need to hear about other people’s experience of reality- providing those people really exist too, of course. But taking assertions of fact about reality on authority exposes us to other people’s presumptions and things they take for granted, and of course they only have a narrow experience of reality, too.

So what is the average person to do? Provided he cares, that is, and Fides initially doesn’t care. But going against the grain of reality can start to hurt after a time, so eventually Fides has to address the issues. What can he do? The most important thing is not to prejudge things.

If we take an issue like the existence of God, it is easy to find atheists running around talking as though we were obliged to take a naturalistic view of things by default, and any assertion about the existence of God has to be backed up by extraordinary evidence, while any naturalistic explanation is preferable, even with no evidence in sight at all. Now, there is no way anyone can know such a thing without first knowing that there isn’t a God or that if there is one, he’s indifferent to us. You can’t prove this assumption, you can’t verify it, it is axiomatic. But if you’re starting over from scratch- that is, you’re beginning your investigation into reality with fresh eyes, then you know you can’t start with such axioms. Certainly if you have such an axiom it is hardly worth saying that you don’t believe in God and think the evidence for God to be weak. Of course you’d say that. Your axiom forces you to.

Now, the existence of God is certainly something that Fides is exploring but that is not the only thing he is exploring. For example, he is witness to realities such as honor, bravery, courage, beauty, love, and other intangibles. His account of reality has got to respect these things as realities requiring as much explanation as an apple falling to the ground. We explain an apple falling by invoking gravity. How do we explain gravity? See where that is going?

In this context, then, the importance of history in uncovering truth rather than relying on something like the scientific method alone, which is largely constrained to this present moment, is laid bare. For if you must rely on authorities to some extent and other people’s experiences of reality to inform your own experience of reality, then it is not enough merely to consult your contemporaries but also those who have come before you, as well. A contemporary might say something like “Miracles aren’t possible” but if credible voices in the past attest to seeing a miracle, you’re in a bind. You can’t know that miracles aren’t possible. But even if they’re possible it doesn’t mean they happened. And if they don’t happen to you, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened to others.

Now, Fides finds out that these musings are important in other ways. For example, he experiences righteous indignation when witnessing the slaughter of largely defenseless travelers. If some other people want to kill some other people, what is that to him? Why is it all the more bitter when he sees that they are defenseless? Why should he care? But he does care.

This requires an explanation. Preferably a good one. Fidelis is largely a story of Fides constructing the best explanation for everything we experience, not just mechanical observations about the empirical universe, but also of loyalty in the face of imminent death and his own passions and longings.

Here is the second and third questions I was given to answer.

Q2.  Where does Fides come from?  Why bring Fides to life now in this point of your life?

Fides is the main character of Fidelis.  Well, if not the main character he is the one through whom the story is told.  The close connection between ‘Fides’ and ‘Fidelis’ should be pretty obvious.  ‘Fidelis’ is Latin for faithful or faithfulness, as in ‘Semper Fi’ the Marine slogan which means ‘Always Faithful.’

Some readers have noted an allegorical theme in Fidelis and that is not out of line.  In a pure allegory, there would be many one to one correlations… meaning that it should be safe to equate Fides with faith and to try to match Fermion up with something.   Well, you can’t actually do that.  Faith is the key to help unlock some of the main themes in Fidelis and Fides is at the fore front of some of those themes but he is also still his own character.   Fides is struggling with a deep distrust of himself, of people, and God.  In a word, he is struggling with cynicism. He grows into the awareness that faith is not blind, that it is grounded, and that it is compatible with reason and being reasonable.  This completely flies in the face of faith as understood by many people today, the most glaring example being Richard Dawkins who believes that faith is believing something without or even in spite of the evidence.  Even many Christians have a view of faith that is unhealthy.  Fides plays a key roll in the extended discussion on faith that Fidelis is.

Q3.  You open your novel with the words, “Hold steady, son.”  These words contrast sharply with the son’s first flashback, where his first thoughts are “away.”  This theme of the temptation to flee and the virtue of holding steady become very prominent as we see the main character, Fides, developing? Why this theme?  Why this constant assessment of Fides’ courage in the face of often overwhelming odds?

Faith contains an element of risk.  You are sitting in a chair.  It is logically possible that the chair might fail or even cease to exist, dropping you on your toosh.  Despite this possibility, you sit.  You sit because you have a relationship with chairs, and perhaps that chair in particular, and trust that it will hold you.  The risks involved in trusting chairs is mild compared to the trust we are required to put in people, our own selves, and ultimately, God.  If you trust a charlatan you might get burned.  Well, you will get burned.  One solution to this risk is to never trust anyone.

However, we can’t live that way. We literally cannot live a single day without putting some trust in other people.  Even if it means trusting that the US or some other nation doesn’t obliterate the world in a nuclear blast, we are trusting someone.  A life of reasoned and reasonable faith means stepping out and living your life despite the fact that there is a decent chance that you’re going to get betrayed.

For as many times as I’ve been betrayed, I realize that I have betrayed others.  I’ve let people down.  People have let me down.  So what could I do in face of that reality?  I could withdraw.  I could retreat. Running away from situations where we expose ourselves to the frailities and ambitions of people conceivably could keep us from getting hurt.  Fidelis asks, in its own round about way, is such a life worth living?  Despite the risk, is it not perhaps better to live the life of adventure?

That’s where ‘holding steady’ factors in.  Faith in the sense I’m talking about is not and cannot be a temporary and shifty attitude.  If you hold firm in one instance but run like a baby in another you’re asking for trouble.  Here I assume that we’re holding steady on things for good reasons.  I can see why people would want to ‘flee’ if they put their trust in something that they should have known would get them hurt. That’s why its important to have good reasons for the things you trust.

Clearly, this applies to our relationship with God.  Sometimes we feel like we have good reasons for trusting him and then something nasty happens in our lives, the lives of those we love, or on such a massive scale somewhere that we can’t help but notice.  We begin to wonder if perhaps God is like that person who constantly is letting us all down.  Well, if we do have good reasons for trusting him, then it is just at those moments that we need to have a trained attitude to ‘hold steady.’  How many people retreated just when they were on the verge of being helped?

You might say that many have been helped… but many have been hurt.  Grant it.  If your reasons for trusting God also give you confidence that he is aware of the hurt and is taking steps to deal with it, we are simply in a place where our trust is being put to a critical test.

I find that our ability and willingness to be faithful in relationships with other people is a good measure of their ability and willingness to trust God.  In some ways, I think life together is real time training for learning how to trust God. 

 Anyway, holding steady means not budging on the things that are important to you even though it looks like it is about to hurt you.  That means holding steady requires courage.

Here is the first question:

“You have an educational background in theology, you’ve taught in high schools, you’ve been a truck driver for awhile, and you’ve even delivered pizzas for a short time.  With such a diverse background of occupations, how is it that we find you now writing fiction?”

Well, circumstances changed so that I came off the road to watch my children.  It is hard to write with all that noise, but I did manage to scare up some free time.  During one stage of the writing (the end) I had to get up at 5 in the morning for about 2-3 weeks in order to finally bring it to an end.

Fidelis really tracks with my background of experiences.  For one thing, I conceived of the book (and in fact, the whole series) while driving truck.  The thing almost came into my head fully formed.  Fidelis covers a guy traveling back to find his family.  He begins in New Mexico and has to journey to Indiana.  That is a trip I made by truck on numerous occasions and I began imaging what life would be like if I had to make the trip on foot.  Also, when you’re out on the road away from your family on a regular basis you really feel the pain that Fides (the main character) endures frequently.  Basically, my life has been doing what has to be done because it has to be done or my family would suffer… thus the truck driving, thus the pizza delivery.  That is what Fides is about, too.

http://www.holmencourier.com/articles/2007/04/19/features/01author.txt

Holmen author A.R. Horvath  Tony to his friends found inspiration for his debut novel on the road. by Adam Bissen

There is plenty of precedent for that in the American literary tradition, but Horvath didn’t look to racing speeds, madcap adventures or the freedom of the highway when he plotted out his story.

No, when Horvath conceived the trajectory of a planned seven-novel series, he was a professional truck driver, kept away from his family for 10 days at a time as he drove across the country.

After half a year as a truck driver Horvath came off the road, returned to Holmen and wrote Fidelis, book one in his Birth Pangs series, in just four months. Fittingly, it is about one man’s struggle to return to his family after being stranded halfway across the country with obstacles in his path.

When I sat down to write it, I already knew how it was going to go,Horvath said in an interview at a Holmen coffee shop. A lot of places that are described in the book, they are places that I saw with my own eyes.

But, as Horvath found out, writing a novel is only a small part of the battle when it comes to getting it read. It can be a lot more difficult getting it printed and on people’s bookshelves.

Even if an author is talented, lucky and has a well-connected agent, it can take years to break into a major publishing house. Those publishing companies have the clout and advertising budgets to make an author famous, but Horvath didn’t have the time to sit on a second book. He wanted to write, and most every author wants to be read, so Horvath mastered modern printing technology and threw himself into the business: He formed his own publishing company.

Today Fidelis, all 297 pages of it, sheathed in a glossy paperback binding  can be purchased on Horvath’s Web site, birthpangs.com. Internet retailer Amazon.com carries the book, and it can be ordered from any Barnes & Noble.

Coulee Region readers can also pick up a copy from Horvath in person when he gives a reading April 20 at Barnes & Noble in Valley View Mall.

I’ve already got seven reviews (on amazon.com) that are all good, that are all great. Who are these people? I don’t know, but it doesn’t necessarily matter, Horvath said. The thing is I’m generating the interest already through my own channels. If that big publisher wanted to offer me that multi-thousand dollar advance, that’s fine. I’d be their huckleberry. But in the meantime I am going to develop that fan base.

Horvath grew up in Detroit but moved to Holmen in 2001 with his wife, who is from the area. The pair met at Concordia University in Mequon, Wis., where Horvath earned degrees in pastoral ministry and theological languages.

He originally intended to be a minister but he decided he didn’t like that field. Horvath then worked as a teacher for a few years, decided he didn’t like that either, did the truck driving thing and now he stays home full-time to watch his three children.

With young kids around, Horvath said it can be difficult to find a few hours of solitude to work on his books, but he makes the time, writing four to five pages at a sitting. It’s a life that suits him well enough, but it’s a long way from the writing technique favored by one of Horvath’s friends, an author who is currently putting together a book in the mountains of Argentina.

That’s exactly the way I would expect a literary person to write a book,Horvath said. I would be more of the working class style of writing a book, where I just fit it in when I have the time. I don’t have the luxuries of anyone saying ˜Oh, wow, he’s a writer so we’ll give him a little bit of latitude.

The plot of Fidelis and the whole Birth Pangs series  follows one man’s struggle to cross a post-apocalyptic America and return to his family in the Midwest. The book is set in the future with the United States beset by disease, invading armies and small-scale nuclear warfare. The main character, Fides, lands in an airplane in Las Cruces, N.M., and must return to his family while crossing gangs and idealogues who stand in his way.

True to his background, Horvath hints at a lot of religious imagery in recalling the plot of Fidelis. For starters there’s the book’s title (Latin for faithfulness) and the city of Las Cruces (Spanish for the crosses). A major theme in the book is Fides learning what’s important in life and whom to trust as he makes his way through a society with no order. Like other seven-book series The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter Horvath expects Birth Pangs to climax in one final battle in which there can be only one winner.

In addition to writing, editing, publishing and distributing Fidelis, Horvath also is organizing his own promotional campaign. He said he sold 15 copies of the book last weekend at his first-ever book signing in Michigan. In addition to the Barnes & Noble reading, Horvath will lead a discussion May 17 at the Blue Cup Cafe in Holmen. He’s also booked a booth at a large Christian music festival in Illinois in June to get the word out.

But Horvath thinks the most effective vehicle for promoting his book is through Internet advertising. He bought ads on Yahoo.com with the hope that people who type in the search terms fantasy fiction,Harry Potter,Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia will be directed to his Web site.

Although he only picked up the published copies of Fidelis in December, Horvath thinks he is doing fairly well as an independent publisher, having already sold 200 copies in his 1,000-book run.

He’s also gotten a start on book two.

The Internet has really opened the way for small publishers and authors on their own, Horvath said, especially those who have been thrown up against the wall over and over and just can’t get in. They’ve come out, and now they’re getting through.