Don't Say "Might as Well"

I closed the door of the Range Rover and strode towards the door of the dilapidated gas station, the one all my friends avoid because they think they’ll get robbed. Some of us are made of sterner stuff, and fear not such things. As it is, I myself now avoid this particular gas station as well, but my reasons for so doing, rather than being fearfully motivated, have to do with the idea that perhaps an establishment as shady as this one can’t necessarily be trusted to dispense a gallon when a gallon is purchased. But I digress.

At least they know what they want . . . 

I pulled my cream fedora down farther onto my brow, straightening my tie as I stepped over the threshold. The other patrons wore stained tank-tops and baggy jeans around their knees, and they looked at me as though I were from Mars. I am not from Mars. I took my place in line behind another customer. He was short, unshaven, wearing faded, concrete-spattered denim, and he was purchasing two 40 oz. cans of Bud Light. As he set them down of the counter, the clerk tried to make some small talk. “Oooooooh,” she said. “Looks like you’re going to party tonight, eh?”

Now, Bud Light isn’t really my idea of a party, but we’ll let that one slide. The man half nodded, half shrugged, and replied, “Might as well!”

I was taken aback, not by these words, but by my reaction to them, which was rather extraordinarily Baptist-y. Now, as a Reformed Baptist I am not opposed to alcohol as such. In fact, it would be a stretch of the truth to describe me as anything other than whole-heartedly in favor. The Lord’s Supper is celebrated with wine, which is no accident. The Israelites were commanded to celebrate with “strong drink,” a kind of ancient beer. The Apostle tells us to “test the spirits,” and I always oblige. (That’s a joke, people. Lighten up a bit, what?). Which is to say that I was altogether surprised to find myself begrudging (ever so slightly, mind you) this fellow his beer. However, I also have a fairly well established philosophy concerning how alcohol is and is not to be used, and it was this sensibility of mine which was offended. It was the shrug and the phrase might as well that raised my Scandinavian eyebrows. Friends, never say "might as well." Don't think it either.

Initially, I suspected my knee-jerk displeasure was merely a reaction against cheap alcohol. Confessedly, I have some not-so-slight inclinations towards snobbery. I want to enjoy alcohol if I drink it, which means that the alcohol needs to be enjoyable; id est the drink in question ought to be one of quality. But this is only a small part of the matter. While I might not enjoy a typical American pilsner (e.g. Budweiser or Coors) as much as a craft ale or an imperial stout, I have to concede that this is a matter of preference. That beverages ought to be enjoyable does not speak to the fact that others enjoy different things than I.

No, but alcohol is to be enjoyed. It is celebratory. Wine is the perfect accompaniment for a fine meal. A jolly evening with friends should include porter and stout and ale. Scotch is the drink you should choose for a quiet evening with a pipe and book. Warm brandy comforts the body and sooths the soul when you have the flu. But these beverages are not to be enjoyed for the sake of the alcohol they contain, nor is alcohol to be used for the purpose of becoming drunk. They are to be enjoyed because they are delicious. If you buy cheap alcohol because you enjoy it, well and good. By all means, let me not stop you. But if you buy the cheapest beer you can find because you are using the beer as a delivery mechanism for alcohol and nothing else, this ought not to be.

Now, if you’re downing two 40 oz. cans of Bud Light because you “might as well,” this raises the obvious question: Might you, then, just as well not? If you are only drinking because you can’t think of anything else to do, I beg to differ, sir. You might better use that money on your wife and family, or on clothes or food or shelter or charity (some might make this argument regardless of the reasoning behind the purchase of the alcohol, but for my purposes here I will conveniently forget that such arguments exist. In the mean time, I shall simply point you to John 12:3-7 and assume that my point is made).

If you are enjoying a beer because you are with old friends and are having a roaring good time, I am with you. If you want a mug of the frosty brew because you have toiled all day in the hot sun and wish to be refreshed, I shall gladly buy the first round. But if you’re drinking “cause, like, why not, like, you know?” then I suggest you repent, quit drifting through life as though it were one of the less exciting rides at Disneyland,  and develop the fine and manly qualities of tenacity and assertiveness.

I have used the example of alcohol, but I wish to illustrate a far broader point. Whatever we do, or say, or think, it should be done purposefully. An action might be neutral in and of itself, but no action is neutral when placed in the context of real life. Do you eat or sleep or read a book or go to the gym? These are neutral actions. But at present, you either should or should not be doing them. Are you playing the violin? Well and good if you are practicing for a symphony, but woe to you if you are watching Rome burn. Do not say “might as well.” Act purposefully, or refrain from acting, also purposefully. “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.”

Doctor Who, Doctor Schaeffer, and Christianity Today

Every once in a while Christianity Today gets it in their minds to publish something. Worse still, every so often I actually read what they publish, and then I get annoyed when it turns out to be hogwash. I quite understand that Christianity Today is writing for the broader evangelical audience, including (unfortunately) those more liberal elements, so I can’t really complain when they publish things which I think very wrongminded. But it’s when they publish something that is just plain silly that I start scratching my head and wondering how the editors ever let this sort of thing in their magazine.

So, a couple weeks back, they published a piece in the “her.meneutics” (not my doing, don’t blame me) section about the wildly popular English Sci-Fi show Doctor Who. I read it, mostly because I actually like Doctor Who, but I was very disappointed by the article. Fast forward a bit, and I was reading some Francis Shaeffer, when something he said reminded me of that article, so I figured it was time to bust out the old ink and vellum, and here we are.

If you were eagerly anticipating a post in which I nerd out over Doctor Who, I’m afraid this might not be fun for you.

I’m not going to argue that Christians can’t watch or like Doctor Who. It’s fun, and funny, and exciting, and clever, if sometimes downright corny. There are certainly worse things on TV these days, and Doctor Who is relatively benign. But, as with all art, it is the product of a certain worldview and as such it is based on certain presuppositions. If a Christian decides to watch it, fine, but he should do so knowing where the show's writers are coming from, and he can then enjoy that which is fun, and dismiss that which is heathen. What we mustn’t do is pretend that it espouses a Christian worldview when it clearly doesn’t (and I say this as one who has given Charlie Daniels’ Devil Went Down to Georgia a rigorous treatment as theological allegory).

Here’s a quote from the article:

The concept of the show involves Christian symbolism; the series reboot gets referred to as a “resurrection” and each new Doctor an “incarnation.” As the central character, he’s a mysterious and powerful hero who travels through space to earth (and across the universe) to help and save . . . Theologian fans use the Doctor’s stories to contextualize the gospel with small group studies on how the sonic screwdriver is mightier than the sword or how we are both inside and outside of time.

Right. Except it’s not Christian symbolism. These are words which have relevance to Christianity, yes, but in context they are completely divorced from any sort of Christian meaning. Implicit in this paragraph is that the Doctor is portrayed almost as a type of Christ. Now, we have such types in Scripture. Moses and David typify Christ. I will be so generous as to assume that the author is not intending to reduce Christ to “a mysterious and powerful hero who travels through space to earth (and across the universe) to help and save.”  I was going to pass over the sonic screwdriver is mightier than the sword bit, but it’s really bugging me, so I shan’t. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is a phrase coined in 1839 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton for a stage-play, so why exactly we’re adapting it to Doctor Who and designing small group studies around it is frankly beyond me. If Solomon had said it that would be one thing, but alas, he did not. As old Leonidas would say, much to the point, elsewhere.

Also, we’re not “both inside and outside of time.” Like, at all. We’re inside time. God is outside of time. God, the creator, is outside of time, and we, the creation, are in time, where he placed us. Right? Right. What do they teach in these schools!

The real problem here, however, is that the Doctor personally, and the show generally, espouse a cosmology that is very un-Christian. It is naturalistic in its presuppositions and existential in its philosophy. Far from promoting Christian ideas, the thrust of the show’s philosophy is an attempt to take a strictly naturalistic cosmology and somehow derive meaning and value from it.

C.S. Lewis once gave a lecture called Is Theology Poetry? in which he considered the argument that Christianity is merely poetic in the same way that Greek or Norse mythology is, and that this is the attraction to it. In the course of his argument, he also considers the poetic merit of evolutionary naturalism, which he compares favorably to a good Elizabethan tragedy: against all odds, life emerges from the primordial goo, against all odds it develops over millions of years. We see the caveman, mastering fire, striving with the elements and with beasts much stronger than he. We see the emergence of modern man, using brain rather than brawn, subduing nature. But then, the universe runs down, and man is powerless to stop it. After emerging the conqueror against all odds, man finally succumbs, with everything else, to nature.  

Lewis remarks that such a narrative deserves a better treatment than it’s gotten. Doctor Who endeavors to give it just such a treatment. Through the Doctor’s travels, we are shown the beginnings of the universe, human history across the ages, great advanced civilizations, and then, finally, the very end of the universe, as time itself runs out, and the remnants of humanity struggle against the inevitable, seeking to hold out as long as possible before everything breaks down and there is nothing left except darkness and silence and nothingness.

Where do we find meaning in such a futile universe? The nihilist rightly concludes that there can be none. But Doctor Who is crafted around the desire to snatch meaning from the jaws of futility. How? In the chance of it all. In one season Seven episode, the Doctor is trying to talk a young girl out of sacrificing her life, saying:

Hey, do you mind if I tell you a story? One you might not have heard. All the elements in your body were forged many, many millions of years ago in the heart of a far-away star that exploded and died. That explosion scattered those elements across the desolations of deep space. After so, so many millions of years these elements came together to form new stars and new planets. And on and on it went. The elements came together and burst apart forming shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. Until, eventually, they came together to make you. You are unique in the universe. There is only one Mary Galel and there will never be another. Getting rid of that existence isn't a sacrifice, it is a waste!

Meaning is thus to be gleaned from the extraordinary unlikelihood of existence, the temporary nature of life, and the uniqueness of each person. The chance and futility of it all is part of the beauty. Indeed, the writers of Doctor Who have done an admirable job of making their cosmology seem attractive.

The problem is that Doctor Who is fantasy, and the sense of meaning propounded by its philosophy is also fantasy. It lasts just about as long as the music continues to swell. When credits roll and the orchestra clears out, so do the bubbly feelings. Glorying in one’s random uniqueness is all well and good until one is actually standing face to face with the real world, and finds that there is no screwdriver-wielding hero to set things right. Such a random universe is, at its core, futile, and, as the nihilist properly concludes, totally meaningless. “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

Entre Shaeffer. I’m going to quote him at length, but it’s well worth reading the whole quote. If I could write like Shaeffer, I would, and then you wouldn’t have to bother.

The two alternatives are very clear cut. Either there is a personal beginning to everything or one has what the impersonal throws us by chance out of the time sequence. The fact that the second alternative may be veiled by connotation words makes no difference. The words used by Eastern Pantheism; the new theological words such as Tilich’s ‘Ground of Being’; the secular shift from mass to energy or motion, all eventually come back to the impersonal, plus time, plus chance. If this is really the only answer to man’s personality, then personality is no more than an illusion, a kind of sick joke which no amount of semantic juggling will alter. Only some form of mystic jump will allow us to accept that personality comes from impersonality . . . No one has presented an idea, let alone demonstrated it to be feasible, to explain how the impersonal beginning, plus time, plus chance, can give personality. We are distracted by a flourish of endless words, and lo, personality has appeared out of a hat! This is the water rising above its source.  No one in all the history of humanistic rationalistic thought has found a solution. As a result, either the thinker must say man is dead, because personality is a mirage; or else he must hang reason on a hook outside the door and cross the threshold into the leap of faith which is the new level of despair (The God Who is There, 88). 

Got that? Doctor Who presents us with a random, impersonal universe. This presents us with the dilemma outlined by Schaeffer, and the Doctor’s solution is the latter option, to ignore the fact that this system doesn't allow for meaning or rationality or personality, and to continue on as though it did. It is the philosophical equivalent of knocking back half a bottle of Smirnoff and pretending your troubles don’t exist. 

For the Christian, on the other hand, there is an actual basis for meaning. There is an actual source for personality. The Christian is not condemned to the futile exercise of attempting to squeeze purpose out of randomness, for he worships a God of order. The Christian is not subject to futility, for God works all things together for good.

My turn to tell a story. You may have heard it, but it bears repeating: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”) For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Is Your Breakfast Virtuous?

“He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart.” 

 – C.S. Lewis

It is well known among my friends and family that I consider cold breakfast cereal to be modern and unvirtuous. And though it puts me at odds, seemingly, with the whole cereal-loving world, I shall stand firm on this sentiment. Cold cereal is unvirtuous. It is not hearty, delicious, and comforting. It is a processed, mass produced, measly little dish for those who think themselves too busy to make a proper meal. Moreover, it is often dubiously flavored, and usually bathed in an impious amount of sugar. If you think cocoa puffs or fruitloops are delicious, I’m afraid you may be nearly beyond hope, but I nonetheless invite you to repent. When I was a child, I ate like a child, or something. I’m sorry you had to find out this way.

All foods are not created equal. They can be virtuous, or unvirtuous. They can be decadent or hearty, gourmet or peasantly. All meals call for virtuous foods, but perhaps none can rise to such virtuous heights or sink to such craven depths as breakfast. Now, one should always strive to eat a virtuous breakfast. After all, is it really conceivable that one should go virtuously through his day if he starts his day with an unvirtuous breakfast? The present writer raises his eyebrows dubiously.

What makes a breakfast virtuous or not? This deserves some consideration. The word virtue comes from the Latin, virtus, meaning manliness, strength, courage, goodness, and excellence. All of these ideas should be embodied in the breakfast you choose. You need a manly breakfast to give you strength and courage throughout your day.  Such a breakfast ought to be highly nutritious, which is related to the goodness of it. And it ought to be delicious, which is, of course, very excellent.

How are we to judge as to which breakfasts meet these criteria? Much of this will have to be intuitive for you, but don’t worry, it comes pretty naturally once you get the hang of it. When in doubt, consider! Can you imagine Winston Churchill eating this breakfast before a long day of winning World War Two, or Teddy Roosevelt eating it before hunting an elk or boxing a foreign diplomat?  Can you imagine it being served out of a chuck wagon to hungry cowboys on the Chisholm Trail?

Simple fare is that which is called for, friends. Simple, but hearty. The sound of pans sizzling with bacon and sausage, eggs frying in grease, the smell of fresh toast and warm butter, the warmth of a mug in the hand - these are the things of which a good breakfast is made.   

Eggs and Coffee

Eggs and coffee should be thought of as the basic breakfast, as a sort of foundation on which the rest are built. You may occasionally forgo the eggs, but this should be done rarely. The coffee really is standard. You need a half-pint of the earthy, inky brew to drive the sleep from the eyes, to clear the mind and to invigorate the limbs. The eggs give you that bit of salty protein which starts ones day off so famously. The eggs should be fried or scrambled; the coffee should be strong and good.

Do you remember in Prince Caspian when Peter and Edmund are looking forward to the prospect of breakfast upon reaching Aslan’s How? Lewis writes that they want “buttered eggs and hot coffee.” Of course they do. That’s a virtuous breakfast, and they’re virtuous chaps.

Bertie Wooster in one of the Jeeves stories opined, "I'm never really much of a lad until I've downed an egg or two and a beaker of coffee." None of us are, Bertie, none of us are.

Bacon, Sausage, Ham, Steak

A breakfast of eggs and coffee is very virtuous, but it is always made much more excellent and cheery by the inclusion of some breakfast meat. Sausage and bacon accompany the eggs so splendidly, and you can use the grease from the bacon or the sausage to fry your eggs. Capital! Ham and eggs is a classic. Steak and eggs is one of the heartiest breakfasts one could ask for. That’s what our boys ate for breakfast before they stormed the beaches at Normandy, ya’ll.

Potatoes

From Dublin to Idaho, and everywhere else for that matter, what could be more virtuous than the potato? Potatoes are dug from the ground, and we all know that agriculture is virtuous. Potatoes have a rare sort of earthy quality. And, no, that’s not just the dirt. I rinsed ‘em first, I promise. They are starchy and delicious – a perfect complement to your eggs. Dice ‘em and fry them in a pan, or grate them and make hash-browns.

When potato crops die, people starve. It's history, folks.

Toast

Simple.  Delicious. What more could one ask for at breakfast? Toast plays a similar role as the potato, balancing out the eggs. I always find that toast goes best with scrambled eggs.

Poptarts

No.

Porridge/Oatmeal

Hot cereal, it should be clear, is in a different category entirely from cold cereal. Now, oatmeal certainly isn’t spectacular, but it has its place. It's good and filling, and sometimes just the thing. It’s also very easy to pack and to cook, and it keeps virtually forever. If you’re hiking the Sierras, you’re not going to be lugging a carton of eggs around in your backpack. A bowl of oatmeal is just what the doctor ordered. It'll warm you up in the morning and give you the energy to hoist up your pack and hit the trail.

Omelets

Oh, boy. There are few things in this world more delicious that a good omelet. Cheese, meat, tomato, and green onion, encased in egg and fried in butter. Of course you can adjust the omelet according to your tastes, but it needs to have meat and cheese and green onion (scallions). The scallions are what really pull the thing together, and raise it from just another egg dish to the heights of culinary art. Truly, the omelet is to be revered, and – aye! – it is virtuous. My favorite? Ham, Tillamook sharp cheddar, scallions, tomatoes, and chopped bell pepper, with Tabasco liberally applied over the top. If you’re in California, you might crown your omelet with a few slices of ripe avocado.

Pancakes, Waffles, French Toast

Of adequate virtue, and often very delicious. There’s a great deal of variation here, though. If these things are frozen, or made from a packaged mix, they are not very virtuous at all. Similarly, artificial syrup is an abomination which will quickly render virtue-less anything with which it comes in contact. Good maple syrup or a rich blackberry syrup, along with plenty of butter, are the proper media for the anointment of your griddle-cakes. Oh, and calling them griddle-cakes or flap-jacks makes them sound much more ruggedly virtuous than pancakes. So do that. Ideally, these should be paired with fried eggs, bacon/sausage, the works. Also, such a sweet breakfast crieth out with a loud voice to be washed down with strong black coffee.

Biscuits and Gravy

Oh-me-oh-my-o! Biscuits and gravy, friends! Nothing is quite so hearty and filling as a breakfast of biscuits and gravy. This is the kind of breakfast that sticks to your ribs. Next time you’re going to be spending the day felling trees or chopping wood, this is the breakfast you need. Lean your ax against the wall, grab a plate of biscuits and gravy and scrambled eggs, and pour yourself a steaming cuppa joe. Hearty. Satisfying. Virtuous.  

Think you’ll fell those trees on a belly full of fruitloops? Not a chance.

Eat up, lads and lasses!