What do you get when you combine equal parts whimsy, theology and apologetics? A book called Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl by N.D. Wilson. Subtitled “Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World,” I would have never come across this book, and wouldn’t have considered reading it if I had, except that a relative (and blog reader) strongly recommended it. However, the fact that the book begins with “I am a traveler” was a good starting point considering my blog’s typical greeting.
How to describe this book? I think it was written as an antidote to this quote from the early pages of the book itself: “Marx called religion an opiate, and all too often it is. But philosophy is an anesthetic, a shot to keep the wonder away.” The book makes Christianity exciting and wonderful. It dwells on how interesting, and often bizarre, this world and universe are, and how it can only be explained by an infinitely creative Creator God. As a bonus, I learned a lot about nature from this book!
The book’s main point of view is that God is an artist, constantly creating in ways that we can’t reproduce or even fully understand. God is always speaking things into existence and sustaining those things, including us. “The world cannot exist apart from the voice of God,” and we are “a glop of paint, a character on a stage, an extra in a musical” in God’s creation. Everything we create is an imitation of His infinite creativity. Even the painter Jackson Pollock, when trying to create art that looks random and without design, can’t avoid the fact that he is its creator and that he created it on purpose. It wouldn’t exist otherwise.
There’s also a good deal of philosophy in this book, but in a philosophy-for-poets kind of way that goes just deep enough so you can follow where he’s going, which is usually to show how the philosophy falls short of what the gospel offers. He covers a lot of different viewpoints and always with a touch of whimsy (and at times a little condescension). There’s a bit of Hume, a bit of Nietzsche, and a few others.
My favorite part of the book was his answer to an unbeliever who asked him whether he thought she was going to hell. I won’t spoil it here (you’ll have to read it to find out), but I’m not sure C.S. Lewis could have come up with a better response. If or when I’m asked that question, I hope I remember it.
For some the book’s whimsicality may seem irreverent as it explores our strange universe in all its forms over time. For instance, Wilson at one point wonders: “As for God, His Son turned water into wine. And so we end the story before He turned that wine into urine. (Should we deny that He did?)”. Sometimes Wilson goes for shock value to make us think, and here he asks us whether we really consider how complex and yet orderly this world really is, and how we think about the miracles Jesus performed. And speaking of shock value, now is also probably a good time to warn you that there is a little bit of bad language in the book, if that bothers you.
So, if you’re looking for something to read that is likely very different from other things you read (at least for me), pick up Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl by N.D. Wilson. It was very funny, thought-provoking and edifying all at the same time. I look forward to reading it again, and soon!
Check it out.
