John Wilson, the editor of Books and Culture, was on IWU's campus today as part of our "Celebration of Scholarship" extravaganza. He had been on the road and hadn't heard yet that Kurt Vonnegut, who was actually from Indianapolis, had died.
There were two things about Wilson's comments that I found striking.
The first was Wilson's sense that despite the virulent anti-theism of Vonnegut and others like Salmon Rushdie, they could not have given birth to such art apart from the common grace that we all enjoy as humans made in the image of God. He seemed to think that their creations reflected the image of God in them, even though the content they created was sometimes vile.
The second was even more striking. He prayed for Vonnegut, sorta. He made some prefatory remarks about how much we are uncertain of, and mentioned that there was one stream of Christianity that believed a person's eternal destiny might be changed even after death. He did not think the evidence for this was ultimately very good.
But then he prayed. He did not exactly pray for Vonnegut, as I remember. But he thanked God for His great mercy, in fact, had to stop in the middle of the prayer to regain his composure.
It was a profound prayer to me, even though I remember hardly a word from it.
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7 comments:
something that i thought was moving was wilson's compassion for the death of art (vonnegut as artist) and how close and relational vonnegut is for wilson.
i posted my paper. i would love anyfeedback.
-frank
a nice tribute...
I'm sympathetic to what Wilson is saying.
That is all.
RIP Vonnegut
I love Slaughterhouse Five, so I guess that means I like Vonnegut.
I also love C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, so I guess that means I like some hazy form of ultimate universalism?
I sympathize incredibly...possibly too much.
I also think Critical Realism can lend itself to a kind of universalism (at least when I paint it that way) and that is fine by me!
I think we should pray for the dead. Couldn't hurt, right? Maybe you could post about this . . . "protestant canonical thoughts on prayer for the dead"?
I've often wondered if we can pray for things that have already happened. For example, if my sister has surgery, but I forgot to pray before or during, can I pray after? Especially if I have no knowledge of the outcome (I'm not sure it hinges on one's lack of knowledge). Since God exists outside of time, couldn't He hear the prayer before we prayed it, before the surgery.
As for praying for someone after their death...even though God exists outside of time, if we're praying for salvation, it's still a decision an individual needs to make, not something we can make true through our prayers. And when an individual is deceased, I don't see how they can still make that decision.
(Coincidentally, and entirely irrelevantly, I work with John Wilson at Christianity Today, and I was interested to find a reference to him in your blog. In fact, I've told a few people that I think the two of you have similar minds. I think that's a compliment to both of you.)
I would take that as a compliment--not sure you colleague would ;-)
I have thought this about prayer as well. If in class someone requests prayer for a surgery that they then realize has already taken place, I have gone ahead and prayed for it, believing that God knew we would pray. Like you, that's if I don't know the outcome.
You remind me that I've done this as well for suicides and tragic accidents as well, thinking perhaps God could have met them in their dying moments.
But of course prayer itself is greatly mysterious to me, for 1) we do not know how to pray as we ought and 2) God knows what we need before we pray, so why are we to pray at all?
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