Book Review: The Authenticity Hoax

Courtesy of Marc Hays.

http://kuyperiancommentary.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/book-review-the-authenticity-hoax/

Of Stylemongers and Split Infinitives

Just as those preachers who are least fastidious about Greek are often those who are most proficient in Greek (Moises Silva once remarked, "In my own preaching in the past twenty-five years, explicit references to Greek and Hebrew have become less and less frequent."), so those writers least fastidious about certain rules of grammar are often those most knowledgeable of grammar. After all, the man who wrote the following passage could think in Greek by the age of fifteen.

"Having said that the unliterary reader attends to the words too little to make anything like a full use of them, I must notice that there is another sort of reader who attends to them far too much and in the wrong way. I am thinking of what I call Stylemongers. On taking up a book, these people concentrate on what they call its 'style' or its 'English'. They judge this neither by its sound nor by its power to communicate but by its conformity to certain arbitrary rules. Their reading is a perpetual witch hunt for Americanisms, Gallicisms, split infinitives, and sentences that end with a preposition. They do not inquire whether the Americanism or the Gallicism in question increases or impoverishes the expressiveness of our language. It is nothing to them that the best English speakers and writers have been ending sentences with prepositions for over a thousand years. They are full of arbitrary dislikes for particular words. One is 'a word they have always hated'; another 'always makes them think of so-and-so'. This is too common, and that too rare. Such people are of all men least qualified to have an opinion about a style at all; for the only two tests that are really relevant...are the two they never apply. They judge the instrument by anything rather its power to do the thing it was made for; treat language as something that 'is' but does not 'mean'; criticise the lens after looking at it instead of through it."  

-C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism 

Having Heroes, Imitating Others, and "Being Yourself"

Heroes are people we look up to; people we want to be like. According to Professor Allan Bloom, the idea that we should have heroes tends to wither in a culture where we are encouraged to "be ourselves." At least that seemed to be the case with his students. Both Allan Bloom and Jason Hood observe, however, that we all have heroes and we all imitate others, whether we realize it or not. Even though people may claim they want to "be themselves," you will usually find that their "selves" look a lot like certain other "selves" around them (or on TV).

"Having heard over a period of years the same kinds of responses to my question about favorite books [i.e. dead silence], I began to ask students who their heroes are. Again, there is usually silence, and most frequently nothing follows. Why should anyone have heroes? One should be oneself and not form oneself in an alien mold...[But] from what source within themselves would they draw the goals they think they set for themselves? Liberation from the heroic only means that they have no resource whatsoever against conformity to the current 'role models.'"

-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987 A.D)

"...Imitation is simply inescapable. From birth to adulthood, imitation drives our behavior and beliefs. Peer pressure, the herd mentality, word of mouth, and other social factors and processes create fresh plausibility structures that facilitate experimentation with drugs, religion, facial hair, sushi, and new television programs. We rarely adopt a child, try a new diet, or engage in fasting and prayer unless exemplars model these actions and the mindsets that make the actions possible. We keep up with the Joneses, sometimes with reckless abandon, sometimes almost subconsciously duplicating their patterns of speech, consumption, dress, and recreation. We don't often use the word imitation to describe this phenomenon, perhaps in part because we love to think of ourselves as unique and independent actors. But we are all imitators, shaped in a thousand ways by what we see and hear around us."

-Jason B. Hood, Imitating God in Christ: Recovering a Biblical Pattern (2013 A.D.) 

Elijah Was a Human Being Like Us

Some authors have told me that a Christ-centered preacher shouldn't hold up Old Testament characters as examples for his hearers. 'That's moralistic,' they tell me. But does it have to be? I have gleaned much help from these authors, and will continue to do so. But I have come to believe that they have overreacted to the dangers of moralism. As a healthy balance, I heartily recommend Jason Hood's book Imitating God in Christ: Recapturing a Biblical Pattern. It demonstrates how Scripture sets forth God, Christ, and godly people as examples for us to imitate. 

"James refers to Old Testament characters five times in five chapters. Abraham, Rahab, Elijah, Job, and "the prophets" are all used as examples for New Testament-era believers (James 2:14-26; 5:10-18). All five characters responded to the work and promises of God. James notes that Elijah "was a human being like us" whose prayers worked powerfully (James 5:17). I suspect that many Christians today would not make such a connection as they read 1 Kings. Many leaders would never think to encourage their congregations to see themselves in Elijah's story so that they gain confidence in prayer. Only my charismatic friends seem to teach such things."
-Jason B. Hood, Imitating God in Christ: Recapturing a Biblical Pattern

http://www.amazon.com/Imitating-God-Christ-Recapturing-Biblical/dp/0830827102 

Peeling Back the Onion of 'Authentic' Culture

"In a nice metaphor from Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghanian scholar who teaches at Princeton, examining a culture is like peeling an onion, where you discover layer upon layer of influences, borrowings, re-imaginings, and wholesale imports from other places. As an example, he points out that in West Africa, traditional Herero dress for women comes from nineteenth-century Lutheran missionaries. In Canada, it is customary for political leaders to give as gifts to visiting dignitaries Inuit soapstone carvings, but few Canadians realize that carving was introduced to the Inuit by a white carver in 1948.

Examples like this are endless. Every aspect of almost every culture, from musing to music, from dining to dance and everything else you can think of, has been shaped by trade in goods, ideas, technologies, and--more than anything else--by the simple fact of people moving around the planet and interacting with one another. One of my favorite examples is the steel drum ensembles of Trinidad, whose main instruments are the fifty gallon oil barrels left behind on the island by U.S. forces after the Second World War. These drums, along with other metallic objects such as biscuit tins and frying pans, almost completely replaced indigenous drum technology, which used bamboo. But does anyone think Trinidadian steel drum music is any less 'authentic' for it?

A healthy culture is like a healthy person: it is constantly changing, growing, and evolving, yet something persists through these changes, a ballast that keeps it upright ad recognizable no matter how much it is buffeted by the transformative winds of trade."

-Andrew Potter, The Authenticity Hoax

http://www.amazon.com/Authenticity-Hoax-Lost-Finding-Ourselves/dp/B004NSVFOU 

Aslan Will Not Always Be Scolding

“I have come," said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him.” And in less time than it takes to breath Jill forgot about the dead king and remembered only how she had made Eustace fall over the cliff, and how she had helped to muff nearly all the signs, and about all the snappings and quarrelings. And she wanted to say, "I'm sorry," but she could not speak. Then the Lion drew them toward him with his eyes, and bent down and touched their pale faces with his tongue, and said:

"Think of that no more. I will not always be scolding..."

C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

"He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger forever."

Psalm 103:9

Better than their Creed

“…Men are often much better than their creed. That is, the doctrines on which they live are much nearer the truth, than those which they profess. They deceive themselves by attaching wrong meaning to words, and seem to reject truth when in fact they only reject their own misconceptions. It is a common remark that men’s prayers are more orthodox than their creeds.”

Charles Hodge, Ephesians Commentary