One of my favorite authors (and I don’t have many, maybe this guy and C.S. Lewis) is a man named Chuck Klosterman. I was first “introduced” to Chuck’s writing by a friend of a friend at the Flying Saucer in Nashville while attending a Youth Ministry conference. He started talking about this book “Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puff.” I read. I loved it. Last week I picked up his other book, “Killing Yourself to Live.” I read it. I loved it. I decided to spend an entire week of blogs on insight derived from it. Thus, this is the official Chuck Klosterman week on the 2timothy42.org Blog.

I should state from the beginning that Chuck is not a Christian. In fact, he might be considered by some as the polar opposite of a Christian (or at least his lifestyle). He talks at length in this book about the pros of doing drugs and shares pretty intimate details about his sex life (pre-marital of course). But all of this is beside the point and fairly irrelevant. What Chuck is better at than anyone I have read is creatively talking about life in a manner that is both profound and simple. Which is why I like using him as a basis to talk about life and our relationship with God. All this to say, we all can learn something from Chuck, regardless of his lifestyle. But I digress.

On another side note, these entries are going to be a bit longer than my typical 500 word maximum. This is chiefly due to the quotation of his book, and, of course, this unprecedented second digression. But I digress, again.

[Mary Beth, a waitress in a NC Crackle Barrell, asks this question to Chuck.] “Now – obviously – dreams don’t last 100 years. Dreams last like 20 minutes. So that means we are somehow able to understand an accelerated passage of time while we dream…My question is this: Are we only able to understand this because of books and movies and television? Because the difference between real time and dream time seems like something that would be impossible to understand organically.”
-Killing Yourself to Live (Page 70)

This is truly a glorious momment in this book, just like the passage in Sheldon Vanhausen’s “A Severe Mercy” where C.S. Lewis explains that the way we know there is a God, is because we know there is eternity. And the way we know there is eternity, is because we are not satisfied with this concept that we call time.

Time is unnatural to all of us. We know this because we make comments like, “Time flies when you’re having fun.” Or “Didn’t Johnny grow up fast.” And thanks to Mary Beth, “how can we transcend time in dreams?” Yet, despite its unnaturalness, time is a constant. As Lewis puts it, people asking a question about time, is like a fish asking a question about the wetness of water. Except here is the punch line. We weren’t designed to live in time. Nor shall we be constrained to time after our life on this earth is over.

We are all like people who were once rich and now bankrupt, but yet still have the notion of how “life is suppose to be” back when they were rich. There is something deep inside all of us that tells us that something is seriously wrong with this concept we accept as time, and it is this concept that makes me believe that my final resting place will not be in a dream but in eternity.

I went and saw The DaVinci Code this weekend. And before I get into my point of the post, I should say, I loved the book. It was maybe the greatest piece of fiction I have read in a long time. Although from a "historical perspective," the book it quiet laughable. Most of what was inaccurate dealt with Constantine. I found it odd that Dan Brown himself said that Constantine converted to Christianity on his death bed, yet somehow organized the Council of Nicea after becoming a Christian to pick which books were to be in the Bible.

Also, and I am not going to get into detail here, but the Bible was ultimately chosen by the end of the 2nd century, not the middle of the 4th. Sure there were some debates going on, but most of the 66 books we have in our current Bible were decided long before Constantine. One more point on this and I'll get to the real point. In the book/movie, characters are often quoting the Gospel of Phillip and the Gospel of Mary - which are both heretical, Gnostic gospels. But of course, he found passages that support his argument. However, he conveniently left out the other Gnostic gospels, like Gospel of Thomas that has this fanciful quote. "'Let Mary leave us, for females are not worthy of live.' Jesus said, 'Behold, I shall guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.'" Not to "keen" on the female goddess ehh? There were other historical inaccuracies as well, but I digress.

Here's my real point about this movie. Once again, Hollywood has turned Christians into the greatest publicists on the planet. Chuck Klosterman in one of the greatest books ever written, Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs makes this comment about the Left Behind movie produced in the 90s.

"However, I can't ignore my sinking suspicion that the makers of this movie merely assumed their best hope for commercial success was to manipulate the very people who never needed a movie or a book to learn how to love Jesus. They took people who wanted to rescue my soul and turned them into publicists. Which makes me think the people at Cloud 10 are probably a few tiers below Stalin, too."
-Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs

During college, I got the benefit to work along side a producer of The Passion of the Christ for an event held at Azusa Pacific University with Mel Gibson and Lee Strobel that was broadcasted over CCN and also was covered by ABC. And I have to say, after working that event and seeing the events that surrounded The Passion of the Christ (both the controversy and success), I have come to agree with Chuck, Hollywood is great at turning well-meaning Christians into publicists.

And they have done it again with The DaVinci Code. They might come out and say they dislike Christians making a big deal out of nothing, but in actuality, they love it. Controversy is what drives people to read books and see movies. And there is no better group than Christians to spark controversy with. So if you want to make billions of dollars, I suggest you figure out a way to rope Christians into the publicity game, like Chuck said, they seem to be great at it.