theology
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Read an Excerpt of Spero
"Spero is an imaginative fantasy that subtly instructs, entertains, and intellectually provokes the reader. It is fascinating reading. I'm definitely hooked on this series." Jean Heimann at Catholic Fire.
"...intelligent as well as inspiring..." Terry Barga at whattodoabout.com.
Please visit www.birthpangs.com/cart to buy Spero
(and Fidelis) from the author or to buy from Amazon.com
Fidelis, my first book, is Latin for faithfulness. The second book,
Spero, is Latin for hope. Spero is an exploration of what hope is and why we need it. It is an exploration of what things are good to put our hope in and what things are bad to put our hope in. In the fictionalized America of the future portrayed in the Birth Pangs series, all of the things that people have traditionally put their hope in have been brought low. There are no government agencies, no schools, and not even churches. In the face of daily perils, people have to figure out how where they are going to place their hope.
It is interesting to me that the political candidate running on 'hope' is also running on 'change.' I think this illustrates the root of the problem. The best place to put your 'hope' is where it won't shift beneath your feet. Also, we need to be clear about what things we hope to overcome. Nearly all of our systems and institutions are geared to address certain day to day realities that are important but not, I'm afraid, ultimate. There is one problem that surpasses them all: death.
Spero is about people- even good people- putting their hope in lesser means to tackle lesser problems and being confronted with the consequences of that approach.
Spero is about being confronted with our chief problem and challenged to consider what possible solutions there might be to that problem... and whether any of these are within our control, or obtainable by our own effort.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
This is the seventh question posed to me in a now lost audio interview which I am answering now in text. Many of these questions and answers apply to the whole series and this one in this entry does as well:
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. 
Is politics an important part of your world? Should I be searching for hints about the way you feel about capitalism or democracy, or should I be looking past these things as the ’superficial’ layer of relationships, looking for a deeper reflection on civilization in general?
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. Read the rest of this entry »
