7 Quarrelsome Takes

Lewis and Tolkien, The Christmas Carol, Christian Nationalism, Progressivism, the Tower of Babel, and the Body of Christ....don't try me Satan.

It’s Friday! Just thought I would share the good news. I am slowly crawling my way back to health and such like. Let’s just do seven takes, grabbed out of the cesspool of the internet.

Photo by Jason Betz on Unsplash

One

Some of you may have avoided seeing this true dumbness, but some person was emboldened to express his/her/they/them’s sub-intellectual opinion that Tolkien and Lewis aren’t that great and that they get too much attention from Christians. Here’s the tweet:

Both Narnia and LotR are dumb. Lewis and Tolkien are massively, massively overrated, especially in Christian circles.

I feel like, and bear with me here, that not every opinion a person has is worth putting on Twitter X. I, for example, have been itching to post that my least favorite story in the whole world is The Christmas Carol. Every year the world gears up to kneel before the tender crutch of Tiny Tim, and I just want to scream. I mean, objectively and literarily, it is a good story of course, but it is so Christian-adjacent and not actually Christian that it drives me crazy.

Two

I mean, you couldn’t get more works/righteousness if you wanted to. Scrooge’s sins are abundant and obvious. And he backed into just the sort of corner one hopes so many wicked people will be. He despairs. He is confronted with his inevitable demise. But then, instead of being driven into the welcoming arms of Jesus—the actual reason for the season—he has to take up the task of “keeping Christmas in his heart” for the rest of the year. I mean, I get it, Dickens was not Christian enough to properly articulate the gospel, and so my complaint is essentially pedantic. Nevertheless, I hate it when the denouement, the actual moment of transformation always just means the person trades one kind of work for another.