A Christian Review of Anne Rice’s Called Out of Darkness: a spiritual confession

Posted by Anthony on November 7, 2008

A Christian Review of Anne Rice’s Called out of Darkness

Read my reviews of Anne’s other books, Out of Egypt and Road to Cana.

PURCHASE CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS

However, she fell away from all this after high school.  Though the seeds had been planted earlier on, in college she came into contact with people who loved learning, were smart, and cared about doing the right thing- all without religion, Christianity, or Catholicism. Anne reports that the controversies and strict moral teachings of the Catholic church weren’t primarily what drove her away from the faith. It was instead a disconnect between her and God, an inability to separate her relationship with the church with her relationship with Jesus Christ.

In a section on page 124 she says,

The church had become for me anti-art and anti-mind. No longer was there a blending of the aesthetic and the religious as there had been throughout my childhood.

Desperately I sought to escape the sense of sin that seemed to dominate every choice facing me. I lost faith in Hellfire. Or to put it differently, faith in Hellfire simply did not hold me firmly, as faith in God had once done. I left the church.

I stopped going. I stopped being a Catholic…. I quit for thirty-eight years.

…

I could not separate my personal relationship with God, and with Jesus Christ, from my relationship with the church. As I mentioned, I’d stopped really talking to God a long time ago. I hadn’t felt entitled to talk to Him in a long while. I’d felt far too demoralized to talk to Him. I just wasn’t the Catholic girl who had a right to talk to Him. I harbored too many profane ambitions.

I really enjoyed these frank and honest thoughts. I spend a lot of time talking to atheists and nonChristians and a lot of them were Christians at one time. They too could not separate their personal relationship with God and Jesus Christ from the relationship with the church. Incidentally, there are an awful lot of Christians who have this struggle, too. If you read my blog regularly, you will see that I speak to this fairly often.

Anne’s journey back to the faith was embodied in the novels that she wrote. If you don’t know, Anne is the author of the series of vampire books, beginning with Interview with a Vampire. Since I haven’t read these books, I merely report what Anne says about them in her spiritual auto-biography. After a long discussion about the appeal of her books and what drove her to write them, she says:

Read the rest of the entry… »

A Christian Review of Anne Rice’s The Road to Cana

Posted by Anthony on March 30, 2008

Anne Rice’s “Road to Cana.”
Reviewed by Anthony Horvath

Buy on Amazon.com: Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (Christ the Lord)

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (March 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400043522
• ISBN-13: 978-1400043521

Book Description:
Anne Rice’s second book in her hugely ambitious and courageous life of Christ begins during his last winter before his baptism in the Jordan and concludes with the miracle at Cana.

It is a novel in which we see Jesus—he is called Yeshua bar Joseph—during a winter of no rain, endless dust, and talk of trouble in Judea.

Legends of a Virgin birth have long surrounded Yeshua, yet for decades he has lived as one among many who come to the synagogue on the Sabbath. All who know and love him find themselves waiting for some sign of the path he will eventually take.

UPDATE: Anne Rice became aware of this review and liked it enough she had it published on her web page. That is quite an honor. It is the same as what is below, but if you want to read it there, it’s on this page here.

My Book, Fidelis was reviewed on WorldnetDaily.com!

When her first book, “Out of Egypt” was released, I was extremely impressed. She did a fantastic job. I wrote a review of that book which you can read here. I note that I was honored that she found the review and left a comment. You can read that, there, too.

So now we have book two. Titled “The Road to Cana” it picks up where “Out of Egypt” left off, more or less. I wondered to myself how she was going to get another book out of Jesus’ pre-ministry years, but sure enough, she did.One of the things that will catch people’s attention right from the start is Jesus’ attraction to a pretty young Jewish girl. What with that whole ‘Last Temptation of Jesus’ mess, I can see how Christian readers would recoil at the very thought. The attitude and approach makes all the difference. Anne Rice handles it with delicacy and reverence… and this is key… she handles it.

There is no hint anywhere in any of the documents available to us that Jesus had any feelings towards women and even attempts to read into Gnostic literature is unsuccessful at raising that possibility. Why would anyone even dream of including such a plot line then, especially if they are devoutly Christian? The answer is orthodox Christianity essentially demands it. Either Jesus was fully human and fully God or he was not, and if he was fully human- that is, a man, then such feelings almost certainly would have occurred.

I feel that our reverence for Christ often looks the other way concerning his humanity. Do we not realize that he ate, slept, drank, cried, and yes, even urinated? A disturbing thought to some. The whole glory of the thing to others.

Let us consider what it might mean that Jesus did not encounter such feelings. It is written in Hebrews 4:15 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are- yet was without sin.”

It is on account of this fact that the writer continues, “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and grace to help us in our time of need.” (vs 16).

Either Jesus was tempted in every way or he was not. Upon it appears to hinge how we approach the ‘throne of grace.’ If he was tempted in every way, we can be sure that sexual desire, which is built into the human being, was present in Jesus. We can also be sure that the Enemy tried to exploit it. For those who can’t imagine that it is possible to have sexual desire without sin I ask how you thought Adam and Eve were going to get along before the Fall of Man. If you don’t believe in that, well, I guess I got nothing to say. The point is that Jesus, being a real man, would have experienced such things, but unlike us, was the Master of them.

As I said, Rice handles the whole subject reverentially and I suspect that even if the above thoughts are ones that you as a Christian find uncomfortable, you will find that Rice resolves the issue admirably.

This leads into another area that I was wondering how Rice would handle. There is a lingering question as to how much Jesus knew of his own nature. As a one month old child did he recount to his parents how he had created the universe? Or did he sit there and kick his legs and feet and coo and cry? Rice already began laying out her answer in “Out of Egypt” and she continues in “The Road to Cana.” I think I might have a different answer then her, but not too different.

The great value consists in raising the question in the first place. Christians don’t tend to think all that deeply about that which they say they believe. Such thinking might seem to go beyond speculation and into heresy. How dare you question what Jesus, since he was God, could know? But then we have Jesus himself saying “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Matthew 24:36).

These discussions center around Jesus’ ‘kenosis’ and involve also what Jesus’ relationship as a man is to divine attributes besides omniscience. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosis

The point is that even though Jesus was God, as a man and bound to time the way Men are, there were things he didn’t know. Rice does a fantastic job of talking over such issues in a way that orthodox Christians can enjoy and respect, even if they might disagree in some ways.

As in “Out of Egypt” this book is thoroughly researched on the historical details. 1st century Palestine is the background to the New Testament but it is easy for believers and skeptics alike to forget that we know more about that century then just from what we read in the New Testament. Having this background can help us greatly in understanding what we read in the New Testament, unless of course we are in the camp that scoffs at the New Testament by virtue of the fact it mentions miracles. When you know that there no God you know there can’t be miracles. But if you don’t know if there is a God or not then if miracles really happened then that helps answer the question. The miracles in the New Testament apparently occurred in a real historical context, and so understanding that historical context can dramatically affect your investigation.

There is a tendency, for example, to dismiss Christian theism as just one more fantastic mythology out of dozens that existed. This forgets, however, the Jews. The Jews were fiercely monotheistic. Fiercely. Violently. They were not opposed to miracles, of course, but the notion that a man could be God is literally the last thing a God-fearing Jew would have ever conceived of. Such a thing was blasphemy, and they knew it. It is amazing, then, that out of the very last group that could be expected to believe God had become man- the Jews- that very doctrine emerged. Nearly all of the first Christians were Jews.

CS Lewis expands on this point in his essay “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ” found in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics:

“[One approach to explaining the rise of Christianity is to say] that His followers exaggerated the story, and so the legend grew up that He had said them. This is difficult because His followers were all Jews; that is, the belonged to that Nation which of all others was most convinced that there was only one God- that there could not possibly be another. It is very odd that this horrible invention about a religious leader should grow up among the one people in the whole earth least likely to make such a mistake. On the contrary, we get the impression that none of His immediate followers or even of the New Testament writers embraced the doctrine at all easily.”

That is the historical reality to which skeptics tend to dismiss with hand waving as though it were not something that needs to be explained on other grounds if one rejects the explanation that Jesus really was God. The more you know the actual history of the Jews the more you realize just how significant this is and how much it demands an explanation. Those ignorant of that background can be dismissive. Those who know the background know they can’t dismiss it.

Now, I don’t know if Rice plans on making that argument or not, but she draws on some historical events and puts them in “The Road to Cana” that certainly paves the way for an appreciation of CS Lewis’s point.

For example, the arrival of Pontius Pilate and his move to put ‘ensigns’ in the Jewish temple caused a Palestine-wide riot. This is recounted by the Jewish historian Josephus. Rice drops bits and pieces of this famous story, including how it was resolved: thousands of Jews kneeling on the ground, deliberately exposing their necks to the Roman soldiers that Pilate had sent to ‘disperse’ the crowd. When Pilate saw that the Jews were willing to die by the thousands without even putting up a fight just because of some silly (from his perspective) banner hanging in Jerusalem, he relented.

It is from out of a people with this sort of fervor and passion for their monotheistic religion that Christianity emerged.

Rice also helps set the stage for how dangerous life was by pointing out how brigands roamed the hills and those who claimed to be Messiahs were about.

In my opinion, atheists, seekers, and Christians alike should read Anne Rice’s books just so that they can see historically how the whole narrative put together might have looked. When all we know about the context in which Jesus moved and breathed is the New Testament we rob ourselves of critical information that would help us understand what we are reading in the New Testament.

Now, just a few final notes.

One of the things I noticed in “Out of Egypt” was a robust understanding of how different languages would play out in this region, this crossroads of Empires. She continues to show insight into that subject in “The Road to Cana.”

The animosity that Jesus’ own relatives show to Jesus as seen in the New Testament is given a compellingly believable back story. It is my view that something very much as Anne Rice described is what it was like.

Rice is sensitive to the dispute about whether or not Jesus had any actual brothers, that is, through Mary, and not just Joseph. She comes down on the Roman Catholic side of things (ie, Mary had no other children, etc), which I can’t blame her for since she is, well, Catholic. I have no problem with her approach so long as she doesn’t conclude her series on the Christ the Lord with a final book with the Perpetually Virgin Mary as the Intercessor. I don’t expect her to do that.

As I sat back and thought about Rice’s series to this point, I contemplated how courageous it was to try to write something from Jesus’ perspective but upon reflection realized that in fact writing accounts of Jesus’ life where we don’t really have as much material is actually much easier than the task that is now set before her. With “The Road to Cana” completed, Jesus now enters his life of ministry and this is much more thoroughly documented and people are much more familiar with that documentation. I am deeply curious about how she will weave her narrative through well known and treasured stories of the New Testament.

If her first two books are any indication, she will continue to root her accounts on solid historical data. She will continue to be reverent and respectful to orthodox Christian teachings even as she creatively tries to imagine how those doctrines played out in real life. I plan on picking up each book just as soon as I can.

I suggest you do, too. I would even go so far as to say that the books to this point could be useful reading to children, since they often have questions about Jesus’ early life. While you will have to point out that some of it is impossible to prove, you will be able to provide a framework for understanding the context of what is going on. You will also have the opportunity to point to the historical nuggets that abound in the books and thus help them see that Christianity is no mere ‘ancient mythology’ but rather rooted in history. Either it happened, or it did not. And you can find out if it happened by examining the historical ‘fossils’ that are left behind. And if you conclude that it did happen, then we live in a world where God became man, lived, died, and rose from the dead. If true, that changes everything.

A Review of Anne Rice’s “Out of Egypt”

Posted by Anthony on October 4, 2007

Also read my extensive review of Rice’s “Road to Cana.”

In the back of the book she has some notes which were very informative. Here is a brief excerpt that I completely endorse:

Having started with the skeptical critics, those who take their cue from the earliest skeptical New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment, I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud. I’d have to end up compartmentalizing my mind with faith in one part of it, and truth in another. And what would I write about my Jesus? I had no idea. But the prospects were interesting. Surely he was a liberal, married, had children, was a homosexual, and who knew what? But I must do my research before I wrote one word.

These skeptical scholars seemed so very sure of themselves. They built their books on certain assertions without even examining these assertions. How could they be wrong?”

…

What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments- arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts- lacked coherence. They were not elegant. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were no more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.

In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horriefied by it if he knew about it- that whole picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years- that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read.

Amen, sister.

When I first heard about her conversion, I was a little worried, though. I heard it was to Catholicism, and while many Catholics are very devout, their scholarship is based on many liberal premises. I was delighted to read these words of hers, but more importantly, find it evident in her book. By way of contrast, Mel Gibson, also a devout Catholic, sought to direct his “Passion” as ‘authentically’ as possible, and for some bizarre reason decided to film the whole thing in Aramaic…. oops….

Anne Rice handles this issue of Jesus’ language very well. There are dozens of reasons to acknowledge that Jesus would have been, like most other Jews at the time, tri-lingual. He would have known Aramaic, sure, and Hebrew, indeed, but Greek definately. Ms. Rice handles that fact admirably. Since this book only covers Jesus life from his time in Egypt to his time in Nazareth (age 12ish), it remains to be seen whether she will follow through with her solid historical perspective and have Jesus primarily preaching and teaching in Greek, as well. We’ll see.

There are dozens of other historical details that she gets right, too. Perhaps most importantly, she accurately and adequately sets the stage that Jesus is moving against. The break-up of palestine into four tetrarchies after the death of a certain King Herod is a critical historical backdrop for understanding the circumstances that Jesus finally emerged on the scene from.

Another critical element that she admirably emphasizes is Jesus’ Jewishness. Now, in the modern day there certainly are Jews who distance themselves from the Jews of yesteryear who were in the temple-sacrifice system, but Jesus would have very much been immersed in it, as well as the other Jews of that day. This fact comes out loud and clear, and various insights arise that leave many modern readers, even some well-educated conservative Christians, in the dust.

For example, the ritual cleansing with “living water” that was required in order to be clean is included. What constituted “living water” essentially meant water that was moving, ie, it wasn’t stagnant. The health benefits are clearly seen compared to modern advice to wash using ‘running water.’ In fact, ‘running water’ is the same idea. (google mikveh). At anyrate, Jesus’ statements to the Samaratin woman in John 4 where he says “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water” would have conjured mikveh-like concepts. Separated from the knowledge of Jesus’ intrinsic Jewishness, even I thought something completely different about what Jesus meant by ‘living water’ in this passage (eg, maybe something to do with baptism, see John 3).

Anne Rice gets Jesus’ Jewishness right.

While I think that if I would have had the kahoonas to put myself in the place of Jesus to write from his perspective, 1st person like, I would have done it differently, Anne Rice did a superb job in the way she did it and any objections that I might have are mere quibbles. They aren’t even worth mentioning.

For any person seeking to understand the historical setting that Jesus emerged from as established by the historical data itself (devoid of the skeptical/liberal material which dismisses the data, usually), they will find this book very insightful.

I recommend it to all. Even if you are a skeptical/liberal sort, you will benefit from seeing how the conservative school of thought conceptualizes Jesus called the Christ.

A Review of Lee Strobel’s Soon to be Released ‘The Case for The Real Jesus.’

Posted by Anthony on September 10, 2007

Buy the Book, “The Case for the Real Jesus”

Strobel’s newest book was released September 10th, of 2007 and I was pleased to be offered a chance to review it prior to its release. I completely agree with Strobel on the need for such a book. It covers a lot of issues that I deal with on a daily basis in my own apologetics ministries. There is far too much information in the book to expect a comprehensive treatment, and like his other books, he doesn’t pretend to do so. Each chapter has a number of resources that readers can check into to get more information. I give the book nine stars out of ten and recommend it to skeptics and young believers alike who need a primer on the issues. I doubt the more hard core skeptics will be persuaded by anything in it. This is not likely to be Strobel’s fault, but for skeptics like that you may want to suggest some of the more sophisticated references that Strobel provides.

While personally satisfied with much of the argumentation and evidences, I had a more serious objection having to do with his elevation of scholars and his marginalization of ‘popular’ authors. This is ironic since his own book is an admitted popularization, but my concerns go far deeper. However, they are not appropriate for this review, so please go here for elaboration on that point.

Strobel aims to cover six basic challenges facing the traditional and orthodox portrayal of Jesus. These are, in order:

Scholars are Uncovering a Radically Different Jesus in Ancient Documents Just as Credible as the Four Gospels.
The Bible’s Portrait of Jesus can’t be Trusted Because the Church Tampered with the Text.
New Explanations Have Refuted Jesus’ Resurrection.
Christianity’s Beliefs about Jesus Were Copied from Pagan Religions.
Jesus Was an Imposter Who Failed to Fulfill the Messianic Prophecies.
People Should be Free to Pick and Choose What to Believe about Jesus.

Each chapter concludes with additional resources for the reader, and the book itself concludes with one appendix summarizing the Case for Christ and another offering helpful websites.

I found that each of these ‘challenges’ covers pertinent issues that relate to today’s apologetical challenges. Strobel’s approach is to take on the role of the journalist and search out credible scholars to answer his questions about those challenges. Each chapter does a good job of summarizing some of the basic objections and offering solid representations of Christian responses. In my view, this book is better then his previous books like this. It more directly confronts the objections that I actually hear (but of course, experiences may vary).

Every high school Christian religion teacher should put this book in the hands of their students, preferably as early as possible. Ninth grade would not be too early. Students need to be immunized to some of the things that they hear and this book will provide a decent basis to build on for later research. Yet, this book cannot be considered as ultimately sufficient. Strobel himself would probably agree with that. Teachers should take advantage of the sources Strobel gives and expose their students to this material. Once they get to college the students will almost certainly hear the other side- 100% undiluted.

In my view, Strobel should have started with his sixth challenge. Challenges 1-5 contain a reasonably thorough explanation for why the traditional description of Jesus is supported by solid historical methodologies. However, in my experience (more than ten years now), a historical ‘truth’ carries very little weight with people these days, anyway. In other words, skeptics and seekers alike would view a ‘scientific truth’ as made of gold, and even if they thought that something was ‘historically true’ they would never consider something established on historical methodologies to be as persuasive as what they believe is established on scientific methodologies. Issues like this pop up every now and then in Strobel’s book but it gets the fullest treatment in the sixth challenge. Even then, I don’t think this particular reality of our current situation is addressed head on, but the book certainly covers some of the issues related to the matter. Since so much of the previous portion of the book insists on the superiority of the Christian view of the historical record, dealing with objections that dismiss ‘historical facts’ as of very little weight in the first place would have been a good strategy.

Another quick look at the sixth challenge suggests to me that the Christian teacher could probably start with this part of the book and then go back to the first challenge because I think it was written in such a way that you wouldn’t need the earlier parts of the book to address the concerns in his sixth challenge.

One of the most pertinent ‘challenges’ covered was challenge #4, ‘Christianity’s Beliefs about Jesus Were Copied from Pagan Religions.’ The Internet is filled with assertions that Christianity was completely borrowed from such ‘gods’ like Mithra, Apollonius, etc. Some of the key objections to this notion are refuted. For example, in the case of Mithra, the so-called similarities are found in the historical record after the first century, AD. I.e., after the rise of the Christian religion. It would make more sense to claim that Mithra borrowed from Christianity. Or so one would think, but this is a good example of the hardened skepticism of some in regards to the historical method. The observed fact of these parallels existing after the rise of Christianity is not enough to remove the objection in many people’s minds. Where there is smoke, there is fire.

Still, there are people with some sense of reason, and if you get this book into their hands when they are young enough, I think that the argumentation in this section will do a lot of good. It is certainly better to explore this matter before it is heard spouted from a college professor. Kids will think they’ve been lied to. For people first stretching their legs on these matters, they will be confronted with whether or not they’re going to trust the historical method or not. That is a good thing for them to think about before they have the gall to then criticize the historical evidences.

One argument that I wish I would have heard in this chapter was C.S. Lewis’s assertions that certain pagan stories do not pose a threat at all, but rather are predicted by the Christian worldview. The basic idea is that if Christianity is something completely new on the face of the planet, it would actually undermine the Christian account, which holds that all people are created in God’s image and therefore will resonate with common themes. Strobel appears prepared to accept such reasoning, as he allows Paul Copan, in challenge #6, to say, “I believe there are some truths in other religions,’[Copan] quickly replied. As Scottish writer George MacDonald said, “Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam.’ We need to affirm truth where we see it, but we need to remember there are entailments that come with certain beliefs [italics his, pg 240].”

George MacDonald was one of C.S. Lewis’s spiritual fathers, so Lewis’s thoughts on paganism would not only have been appropriate, but apparently acceptable to Strobel. Oh well, you can’t hit everything in a book like this, can you? Maybe I’ll just use this review to guide people into Lewis on this matter (Lewis’s ‘God in the Dock’ collection of essays contains a couple of essays to get you started).

One of the best aspects of the book is his treatment of Messianic prophecies. You will hear skeptics arguing that even if you granted that Jesus performed miracles this would still not be good enough evidence that Jesus was who he says he is, God. Perhaps, they might say, he’s just a very powerfully advanced alien being who is, nonetheless, a finite being. (See this thread at my forum for an example of exactly this.) What the fulfilled prophecies provide, however, is evidence of foreknowledge of future events. If it is the case that there were prophesies thousands and hundreds of years prior to Jesus’ arrival, and he fulfilled them, the plaintive hope that Jesus could ‘possibly’ have just been a finite magician begins to wane. Who left these tantalizing clues in the Jewish documents? Another finite super powerful alien? Can we expect such creatures even to know the future? At what point does our ‘super powerful alien’ match in every respect, God?

Apart from such considerations, which I personally find to be wild-eyed groping speculation, being able to trace Christ and his ministry back to the Old Testament is a significant aspect of Christianity that young Christians and old should be aware of. Many do not understand the point made by Evans in challenge #1 about just how Jewish Jesus was, nor the fact that the first Christians were Jews. Understanding this context is extremely helpful in understanding some New Testament passages which may be confusing but also has the potential to be an extremely powerful apologetic. This is illustrated by the recent conversion to Christianity by Anne Rice, who addresses this issue in her book ‘Out of Egypt.’ She goes so far as to credit this realization as helpful in bringing about her conversion (pages 310-311). So I think it was a really good idea to include this chapter and again, I hope Christian religion teachers will follow up to more firmly flesh out such issues.

In conclusion, taking into consideration the fact that such a treatment would have to be brief on many points and only a survey, I can think of no more helpful book for establishing some of the parameters of the discussion. I would encourage putting the book into students’ hands as early as possible, but please, please, please be prepared to deepen their knowledge beyond the outlines in this book. The book can only be a good start, and if it is not treated as such, might prove to re-create the depressing scenario I sometimes hear: “Yea, I read Strobel’s book as a senior in high school, so I think I know what I’m talking about. What? What’s that? No, I didn’t see the point of going deeper. My college professors easily answered those objections. I mean I also went to Sunday School and VBS, you know.”

copyright Sept. 2007, Sntjohnny