Yes, I will get aroud to a relevant point sometime...
When I first became a Christian, my parents forbade me to got to Church, meet w Christian friends, read any Bible or book they even suspected was Christian.
That put me as a teenager in the difficult spot of obedience to my parents vs the young convert's hunger for all things Christian.
Besides stealing a Bible from a local Church (boy did that tie me up in logistic knots as a young Christian wo guidance), hiding it with a penlight in my boxspring and training myself to awaken at 3AM for some reading, I found that the Christian message was dripping out of everything. If you even half try, every other song, TV plot or whatever just oozes Christianity (well, not so much for Gangsta Rap, but this was in the 70's)
I have come to believe that Clement of Alexandria (Titus Flavius Clemens) (c.150-211/216), and not Tertullian was correct. As CS Lewis puts it, and I paraphrase, Truth is so firmly woven into the fabric of Cration, that it pokes out even in the most pagan of philosophies. Or in the words of "Uncle Screwtape" of the "Screwtape Letters", "It is unfair! The Enemy (God) has every advantage. Even the vices can be only corruptions of what is Good.
Put another way, I have come to believe that perhaps Paul might have been more correct in His Epistle to the Romans than even Paul suspected. That Truth, Beauty, and the afterglow of God's Hand are so constructed into nature that it takes a serious effort for the mind of man NOT to see the Gospel at every sight.
I think it is not a matter of some writing "weaving in" some Christian idea or another.
Rather the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of constructing a story, especially an attractive one, WITHOUT the Gospel.
I hate chastisement. I love comfort, ease and as some radio preacher once pointed out., I wish my life would always go from mountain top to higher mountain top. I don't like the valleys in my life, and all that fine stuff about God building my character dosen't attract me one bit. "Jump for Joy when men persecute you for My Name's sake?" Are you kidding me?!? No, thanks, give me ease, prosperity, and smooth sailing all the way. That is my honest desire.
But I have to admit, grudgingly, that a little persecution does wonders for the soul, even the soul of a recalcitrant idiot like me, who has so l;ittle desire for His Kingdom or any righteousness whatsoever.
Having His Word so forbidden me for a short span made me very sensitive to His Word written everywhere.
So, to end with something worthwhile, a little known irony that God wove into History:
HG Wells was a popular atheist and novelist. He wrote a short story just before WWI called, if memory serves, "The Day of the Comet" (the movies based on this were COMPLETELY unlike the book. In it, just as WWI breaks out, a comet's tail brushes the Earth, and everyone who inhales it suddenly becomes eminently reasonable, puts down his weapon, and proceeds to joing his Felloe Man in the construction of a great humanist Utopia where, of course, such superstitions as Christianity and religion in general (cause of all wars, have yee not heard?) are replaced by a great, if somewhat nebulously described, communist Brotherhood of Man.
Well, along comes the REAL WWI. And what, praytell, is the only thing that for one day stops the war? A German soldier with a Christmas tree. If you've never heard of it, you ought to read on the Cristmas day truce/armistice of WW1 It is a fascinating historical account of how for at least one day the common soldier, quite at the surprise of the commanders, just put down their weapons and had "Peace on Earth, and Goodwill to men".
I just find it so fascinating, that a war so clearly caused by the utopian dreams of post-Christian Europe, so eagerly fought by secularized nations, as were ALL the massacres of the 20th century, was stopped in it's tracts not by some "Comet of Logi", but by a single soldier with a Christmas tree.
It is as if God, having read HG Well's, decided to write His own short story, not on paper with ink, but on the muddy battlefields of History with the souls of men.
JR
