Words Mean Something

This weekend, many churches around the world will celebrate Reformation Day,a commemoration of Luther's nailing the 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517, the event that launched the great Reformation of the church. It is not overstatement to say that Western culture is what it is, in many ways, because of the Reformation. If you are Protestant, if you have the Bible in your own language, if you are middle class and educated, if you live in the assurance that you glorify God in your work, whether you're a pastor or a banker or a realtor or a mom--and these are just a few things--then you have experienced some of the blessings of the Reformation.

Perhaps one of the simplest truths that Reformers like Luther and Calvin recovered is that words--God's words to us in Scripture--mean something. He has communicated with us in meaningful ways so that we can come to an understanding (not complete, of course) of him and the salvation he has provided. As a Roman Catholic monk, Luther wrestled with the church's teaching that salvation was to be earned by man's good works. He realized that even though he would perform good works, he would still sin, and he could never feel assured that he was righteous, that he would be saved.

And then he began to study the book of Romans, where the apostle Paul tells us that in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, and the righteous live by faith. Simple and profound at the same time, these words, "by faith," meant something--something very different from what he had been taught. He also learned from Romans that no one was righteous, and that eternal life was a gift--not something that he could earn. Anyone who has had to work to get a paycheck knows the difference between a gift and something earned, two very different things.

Luther began to see that God's words were different from the words that he had been taught. God said salvation is by faith in Christ's work; the church taught that salvation was by good works. God said salvation was his gift; the church taught that salvation was something that men had to earn.

As Calvin pointed out, it has to be one or the other: "Faith righteousness so differs from works righteousness that when one is established the other has to be overthrown." Because words--and the concepts they represent--mean something, they cannot co-exist. Both the church and the Reformers understood that.

Martyr Anne Askew understood that. At age 25, Anne, living in England during Henry VIII's reign, denied the Roman Catholic teaching regarding the Lord's Supper. The true words of Scripture meant so much to her that she refused to recant when she was tortured on the rack. And when she was carried (because she could no longer walk after being tortured)to the stake to be burned to death, she still refused to recant and died.

And so today, when we say that we believe something, our words have meaning, and that meaning is either consistent with God's words, in line with his truth, or it is not. In this century, with its emphasis on unity, finding common ground, and tolerance, we like to blur the lines and minimize the difference between God's words and the words we and others like to use. Sometimes we'd like to believe that words really don't mean what they mean. Works righteousness or faith--it really doesn't matter, we tell ourselves. But we must learn this lesson of the Reformation. God speaks to us in his word. His are the words of truth. And words have meaning. Salvation cannot be both a gift and something earned. We can't be made righteous both by faith in Christ's work and faith in our own works.

This realization should lead us, as it did the Reformers, to gratitude and a desire to deliver to others the meaningful words of the gospel.

Yancey on Writing

Philip Yancey has some interesting things to say about the art of writing in his new book Grace Notes:

"Of all the arts, writing is the meekest. Painters use color and sculptors work with three dimensions, both media so much more arresting than the writer's thin marks of abstraction. Other art forms--movies, painting, dance, music--we encounter directly, sensually; only writing requires an intermediate step, literacy, for a person to perceive it. Show a copy of King Lear to an Amazon Indian tribe and they'll see something resembling pepper sprinkled on a page.

"Surveys reveal that writers rank very high on the list of addiction-prone professionals. They chain-smoke, mainline caffeine, and turn to alcohol at an alarming rate. Why? Every day a writer must cope with a deep-seated paranoia: I have nothing to say, I've said it all before, I'm a fake and a hypocrite, I write in cliches. In addition, writing is such a disembodied act that we unconsciously seek to involve other body parts, even if it means moving a cup, glass, or wrapped tobacco tube from table to mouth and back."

Autumn

I've been sitting here staring at my blog, trying to think of something to write about. I think I'm experiencing a personal autumn, although the results aren't nearly as lovely as some of the trees I see around me. It's an autumn in the sense that nothing new is growing at the moment, and I'm just basically hanging onto what is there, like the remaining leaves clinging to a tree branch.

Part of my problem is just some minor (and I underscore minor) health problems I've been wrestling with for a while now. Nothing life threatening--certainly not like cancer or heart disease--just annoying. And draining. Leaving me with little energy for writing. And I feel like a complete whiner even mentioning it when I think of the many people around me with real problems.

Hopefully spring will return to me faster than it does to Michigan. Maybe I'll even personally bypass winter. I think that there's probably some flexibility in our personal season changes. But in the meantime, I'll remind myself that autumn isn't just dying leaves; it's also apples and cinnamon, beautiful golds and reds, pumpkins, children dressed in costumes, and snuggling close to someone you love in front of the fireplace.

Manuscript Review Editor, or The Crusher of People's Dreams

When I tell people that I am an editor, the comment that often follows is, "Oh, so you read all day." And I think how lovely it would be to have a job where I was paid to "read all day." It's true, though: the job requires a fair bit of reading. One of the things I spend quite a bit of time reading is manuscript proposals. The publishing house I work for is one of the few that will still accept and respond to unsolicited manuscripts, that is, manuscripts that people just send, either by regular mail or electronically.

On a regular basis, I also review proposals that writers submit to writing services like Christian Manuscript Submissions and Writers Edge. An author pays a fee, and his or her proposal is either posted to a Web site or sent to us in a monthly newsletter. These are both Christian writers' services, so publishing houses like ours, Kregel, Baker, and others subscribe to the service. It's a good way for an author to get his or her manuscript exposed to many publishers without a huge effort.

It's rare to actually find a proposal that makes it past me for further consideration. Because we're so small and publish only about twelve new books a year, we're pretty picky about what we'll consider. I keep a record of my responses to author proposals, and for the past couple of years I've probably sent out about two hundred rejection letters, which makes me the crusher of many writers' dreams.

After doing this task for a little more than four years, I have found that I can usually tell whether something is of interest for us or not within a few lines or paragraphs. There are some definite tell-tale signs that can eliminate a manuscript very quickly. Here are some of the most common:

1. Don't tell me that your manuscript was inspired by God or that you received it from the Holy Spirit.

2. Don't tell me that there are no other books in the whole world like yours or that no one else has ever written on this subject.

3. Don't tell me your book is like Purpose Driven Life, Velvet Elvis, or Blue Like Jazz . One Rick Warren, Rob Bell, or Donald Miller is definitely enough for the publishing world.

4. Don't send me a handwritten proposal on lined notebook paper.

5. Don't misspell a word in your title. (I truly got one of these today.)

While it's a thankless job--writing to people to tell them that we "decline interest in their book"--somebody has to do it. And every once in a great while, I actually discover a good author, which makes the responsibility a lot more interesting.