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saltylikecrait · 5 years

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Happily Ever After - Royalty AU

For @finnreyfridays; bringing this AU to a close after working on it for a year, I invite everyone to attend the wedding of Prince Finn and Rey Solo.

This fic is looooong, so if you’d rather read it on AO3, the link is here.

The weeks before the wedding had seen a noticeable change on the streets of the capital, mainly by vendors. Unofficial memorabilia in colorful designs and well-wishes to the couple were in high demand, particularly when the palace’s own official merchandise sold out within days. It told the royal family that Finn and Rey’s marriage was popular and they were a little shocked to find that the wedding was getting a mass intergalactic following, particularly in the core worlds. Fashion designs inspired by the past looks of the prince and his wife-to-be were being found all over the galaxy and the HoloNet. Florists were thrilled that such a hardy flower was Rey’s favorite and rumored to be part of her bouquet. Chefs all over the galaxy were preparing specials for viewers to eat while they watched the recording of the event. It was a little over the top, but at least the occasion was a happy one.

And Prince Finn’s popularity with the New Republic only grew, which some entertainment analysts contributed to the popularity of the royal wedding. He had found a board of trusted directors to help with the starting phase of his charity and found a lot of support among the New Republic, especially from individuals that had traveled the galaxy and seen the state of worn-torn and poverty-stricken worlds. Though Rey did not like to discuss her childhood with the public and would only allude to it in bits and pieces, Unkar Plutt – the slime – found that he could make a pretty amount of credits by giving “exclusive” interviews to the press, making himself out to be far more generous than he ever was when Rey depended on him for food. Rey had become the unofficial poster child for Finn’s charity, cited as his muse and an example of hope to all the children in the galaxy that found themselves in terrible situations. Rey spat at that last bit, knowing that her situation was extraordinary and that most of the children on Jakku would always go to bed with half-empty bellies and look towards a future with a short life-expectancy and things that children on wealthier worlds would never have to live in fear over. The beings in the New Republic that made her story as some sort of fairy tale that all children should try to emulate were the ones that had never cared to begin with.

But between all the changes, the victories, the failures, and planning, time seemed to both fly by and drag by. One day, Finn and Rey would complain to each other that the date seemed too far away and the next day they were signing pre-written thank-you notes for gifts that had arrived early.

And then, after a nearly sleepless night, they were up before dawn to get ready for the ceremony.

Finn’s father and Poe are the ones to help Finn get ready. There are staff members assigned to help with specific last-minute details, but on Duuna, it is traditional for the men in the family to help the groom get dressed. Finn has no siblings of his own and had thought to ask a cousin to help, but he decided to invite the one person in the galaxy that he thinks of as a brother. Poe had looked so touched that Finn had almost thought he needed to offer Poe a tissue.

They don’t need to do much, it turned out. So excited and happy, Finn had actually put on his uniform pants and undershirt long before they turned up, not that Finn really needs help to get dressed – he is an adult and men’s suits are not particularly tricky to put on. But he had laid the frock coat on a hanger, waiting to be put on the groom. It was a dark red in color, nearly burgundy, as many citizens had argued, but not quite. It hung a little low to the waist, almost resembling a tunic, traditional wedding attire for the royal family. Though Finn never had to fight in his life – and his parents thanked the Maker every day for that – the royal family had still been instructed in some military practices

“Have you ate yet?” Poe asks, looking over at the tray sitting on a small table in a corner with a small assortment of light breakfast foods. Finn probably asked for it to be brought up for them to share as the morning went on.

“Not yet,” he says. “Though I could probably do with some food now.”

So the three of them sit down and spread jams over toast and pour tea and help themselves to some eggs. Suddenly, as they begin to eat, Adron looks serious and clears his throat.

“I wanted to say something…” he begins.

Finn swallows his bit of toast and looks over at Poe briefly before he waits for his father to continue.

"A father is supposed to give his son advice before his wedding, at least, that’s what my father told me before mine. Maybe one day, you’ll be sitting at this table with your own son and do the same.”

Finn sits up a little straighter, listening.

“I think you and Rey got a lot of this already figured out, so forgive me if I say anything that’s a little redundant,” he chuckles. “You’ve already taken on the responsibility for caring for someone else… actually, for many someone elses, but now you will have additional responsibilities to take on the moment that you agree to taking Rey as your wife at the altar. You must always protect and provide for your wife – as she will no doubt do for you. And you must do the same for your children. You’ve never wanted for anything,” he points out, “but as we’ve seen in the past, the galaxy changes and not always for the better. Remember that, and if the worst does happen, Rey and your children must always come first.

“But I promise you, marriage – a happy, loving one – is not all work. You will not have to give up everything you love to do by yourself because you’ve gotten married. You will feel pride knowing that Rey did not need you, but she wanted to be with you anyway. You will be proud to see your children grow up and to see what they become. And one day, when I have left this world, you will be king, and a king is nothing without the love of his family to support him.”

And then, on a lighter note, Adron tells stories of all the funny and stupid things he did back before Finn was born and he and Maia were newlyweds. Finn knows that his father was doing this to end his talk on a lighter note and to make Poe a little more comfortable and not feel like he was intruding on an intimate moment between a father and his son.

When one of the aids knocks on the door to let them know they are ready for Finn, they stand up and Finn holds his arms out to let his father pull the frock coat over him. Poe then finishes the task by adding the different medals to his coat that identify him as the heir to the throne. Poe himself wears a dress uniform from the New Republic military, decorated with real honors from those he had served - far more impressive, in Finn’s opinion.

To finish, the king places a simple gold circlet around his son’s head, fitting snugly across his forehead. The ruby in the center of it matched Finn’s clothes perfectly.

Adron looks his son up and down. “You look like a king today,” he said, pride noting his voice.

Then the three follow the aid to the back entrance to the gardens. Another tradition. Duuna prefers outdoor weddings, another way to honor the land that had provided them with so much. A last-minute check is made to ensure that everything is ready for them, and Finn and his family shake hands with the people waiting in the back to give the prince their well-wishes.

Also that morning, Rey finds herself in one of the royal suites with an army of staff members at her disposal and a million and one things to do to get ready. Both Finn’s mother and her own adopted mother are with her to see her through the process. It had been a little tricky to find a compromise between two different cultural traditions, but since Rey’s culture was technically of Jakku and it wasn’t a world particularly noted for glamorous weddings, she looked to the two women for advice.

“I know you had your heart set on green for the dress, Maia,” begins Leia, “but you’ve got to see why I thought white would be a wonderful choice for Rey.”

The queen looks the dress up and down. “As much as I hate to admit it, but you’re right. The silver is a nice touch for her skin tone, too.”

The dress had been a point of conflict between the two women. Ultimately, they knew the choice was Rey’s, but they each selected three dresses, hoping that Rey would favor one of theirs. As a child, Rey had no idea of a dream wedding, but occasionally spotted holos of women wearing elaborate white dresses. She thought Maia’s selections of green fabrics were beautiful, but she kept finding her hand skimming the fine white silk and silver embellishments of one dresses that Leia had selected and found herself enamored with the dramatic image it gave her. Rey thought the caplet that fell along her shoulders and cascaded in a long train behind her was a little unnecessary, but she noted how it brought attention to her collarbone and neck, places on her body that she knew Finn’s gazed seemed to wander to when her skin was bare to him.

The dress also served as a good compromise to get Han to calm down. Monster-in-law, Master Luke had teased his old friend as he watched Han pull his hair out over how little of say Rey got in the choices of the wedding planning. Rey even told him that she hadn’t minded much; she didn’t know much about weddings to begin with and she did get to choose her dress, flowers, and meal preference, and that was really all she thought that mattered. Even Chewbacca was getting annoyed to the point that he had threatened to lock Han in the latrine of the Millennium Falcon until the wedding began.

“Rey,” Maia finally asks, “how are you feeling? About all of this?” She gestures to the outfit as Rey’s hair is being done in a traditional Alderaanian braid for the occasion. If she didn’t know better, Leia was getting a little teary-eyed as she watched the droid do the work; few humans still knew how to do all the hairdos.

“I-” she begin. “It’s a little overwhelming, but I have my family around me to support me, and I think that’s made it easier. I was worried that you and the king might not have approved of me as a wife for Finn, but I am happy that you accepted me.”

“You are our family,” Maia affirms. “We’ve thought of you as such since you and Finn moved in together. We knew it was just a matter of time before you became a part of it officially.”

“You had a lot of reasons not to accept me,” Rey points out.

“You’re taking on a lot by marrying him,” counters Maia. “I think Leia and Han would agree with me on that one.”

Watching the exchange with quiet interest, Leia nods her head. Rey can tell it's not easy, but Leia is trying to remain the diplomat in the situation by staying quiet and not butting in too much more on the wedding planning. She already caused an uproar over the dress.

Then, she finally speaks. “When Han first messaged me that he was taking a girl under his wing, I had no idea how special you were going to be to him. After I met you finally, even though you were older, Han and I didn’t argue about bringing you in to our family. We knew you were meant to be a part of it.” She pauses, looking a little sad. “I wish Han had found you sooner, is all. When you told us about Finn, we thought you might be taking on more than you could handle, but Han told me you could handle yourself… and well, Finn’s devoted to you. That’s something in a partner that some people will never find in their lifetime.”

“You are pretty amazing,” Maia agrees with a wink.

“And you make a good match,” says Leia. “Finn will not be an ordinary king, I can tell. You compliment him.”

As the droid places a silver band around her head, Rey grips Maia’s hand. “I’m glad you both were part of this moment,” she tells them. “That you’re here with me now. I never thought that I would ever know a mother, and now I get to know two.”

And if Leia had been composed for most of the morning, now she looks like she was about to burst into tears. “Oh, come on,” she huffs, obviously trying to keep on the face she had been putting up so far. “We better get going. Don’t want the bride to be late to her own wedding.”

Luckily, the suite they had selected is close to one of the back entrances to the atrium where the ceremony would be held and Rey does not have to walk far. She does, however, need help with her train. Rose and Paige – her bridesmaids – help with it, carrying it with care and trying to instruct Finn’s littlest of relatives that were volunteered to help with this part to behave themselves. Leia takes time to make sure that everything is straightened out and in place, fumbling one more time with the band before she has to declare that her work was done.

“You two look pretty,” Rey tells her bridesmaids as she looks them over. She had helped them pick out the dresses (with the additional aid of a designer) and thought that the cut and materials flattered Paige and Rose. They both are wearing red dresses, and hold small bouquets of white and red flowers to match. Their hair has been curled for the occasion – Rey briefly wonders how long they had been up – and decorated with white ribbons that curled and cascaded down to their shoulders.

"Not as pretty as the bride today,” Rose quips but Paige looks Rey over with a little concern.

"You look a little tired,” she comments. “Did you and Finn get any sleep last night?”

Stammering, Rey protests. “W-we did… or at least we tried. It was hard.”

“But you feel okay?” Rey wonders if Paige is just checking last minute to help with any pre-wedding jitters. That was something that she always liked about her, maybe it was because she had always tried to look after her own sister. Paige checks on everyone else first before worrying about herself.

But one of the aids rushes in before she could answer. “Are you ready?”

Feeling the nerves settle in the pit of her stomach – really? Now? – Rey takes a deep breath. “We’re ready.” She tries to keep her voice clear and strong. It has nothing to do with hesitation in marrying Finn, but rather, it has everything to do with the fact that this is being filmed for the galaxy to see. But she still doesn’t want anyone thinking she has any doubts.

Leia does one last check of the silver headband to make sure it is perfectly adjusted, then, with a final nod and wistful glance, she steps out of the way and is led out of the hallway by a guard to be shown to her seat next to Ben (who didn’t seem too thrilled to have to go to such an extravagant event, but at least was polite enough to suck it up and deal with going for the sake of family appearances). The queen has already left to take her seat on a throne close to the altar with her husband.

Han approaches her, preferring to keep out of the way of the bride’s prepping up until this point. “Ready?” He offers her his arm.

Rey takes it, and is glad that she has someone to call a father to give her away at her wedding. When she looks up at him, there is a note of pride on his face and she recalls this as a look that Han often had when he talked about the other children that he had taken under his wing that had met their potential or found their own happiness.

“You’re doing fine, kid,” he says. “I think you’ve chosen a good one.”

“Thank you for doing this for me,” she tells him, gratitude not hidden from her voice.

Han looks at her with a little bit of shock. “I- It’s an honor.”

“No, I mean: thank you for being my father.”

And then he sighs and tries to wave the thought away. “Now’s not the time. Don’t wanna make me cry now, do you?”

The guards swing the doors open, and the heralds see their cue to start the wedding march. The guests in the seats of the atrium look behind them, trying to crane their necks to see the bride make her entrance along with her party.

As Rey and Han take their first steps out to the atrium, the guests all stand for her. She knew this would happen, but she is not use to having this many eyes on her at once and in one place. Taking a deep breath, she begins her slow procession down the aisle and makes slight glances to see who in the crowd that she knew personally. Most of the people here have connections to the royal family.

In the front, Luke stands next to a bored-looking Ben Solo. They are both wearing ceremonial Jedi robes from what they had gathered from the old archives. Luke is smiling quietly and makes a shallow nod of his head when his eyes catch Rey’s gaze. Ben makes a similar gesture, acknowledging their familial connection, thought their relationship is nearly non-existent. There had been a time that she had thought to message her adopted brother for advice on how to control her Force abilities, but she ended up thinking better of it, not wanting to annoy him and straining their already tense relationship further. She was surprised to see him here, actually, once believing that he would simply make a polite rejection of the invite. Perhaps he is doing this because his family pressured him to, or maybe he is thinking this as practice for the future when he might have to attend events as a Jedi even if he was uninterested in them.

Besides her son sits Leia, actually in tears now, and Rey realizes that she had never actually seen her adopted mother cry before. She wonders if Leia thought back to her own wedding, where she and Han made their commitment to each other despite the odds and the criticism against them. Rey and Finn have that in common with them. Or maybe, the rare feeling of being overjoyed has just broken through her usual calm demeanor.

She spots the king and queen on a dais closest to the tree and the platform. They too, look overjoyed by the ceremony and glance back and forth between their son and Rey as she approaches the tree.

Rey had walked this aisle in practice a few times before, but now the aisles seem longer than she recalled them ever being. It feels like she wasn’t making any progress at her slow speed, and she knows that Han wasn’t lagging behind either. Finn is waiting for her at a circular stage in the center of the atrium, under the branches of an ancient tree that the royal family had exchanged vows for generations before. He isn’t actually looking at her, and she can tell by the way Poe looks over his shoulder and then turns to whisper something in his ear that Finn is desperately trying to be the very last person to see the bride. It isn’t a tradition of Duuna, though it has been for many of the core worlds and Finn wanted to do just that.

“No such thing as too much luck,” he had told her when they went over potential new traditions to add in to the ceremony.

Finally getting to see his outfit, she admits that the weavers that helped create his jacket have outdone themselves. The gold threads glitter under the sunlight and the red makes him look regal. He reminds Rey of the princes in the stories she sometimes heard on Jakku, the ones that were obviously not real and told for entertainment value. Beings all over the galaxy are probably swooning over Prince Finn, handsome and so, so loving, at this very moment.

And when she finally reaches the stage and stands behind him as Han lets her go and goes to stand to the side next to Poe, the smile Finn gives her as he finally turns around to look at her as his bride for the first time could replace the sun in brightness. Finn is often happy, but here, the happiness reflects in his smile is contagious. He offers her his hand and leads her to stand in the center of the stage with him, underneath the tree.

Then, he raises her hand to his lips and kisses it as he stared up at her face. A flirt until the very end, she thinks, though she doubts that Finn will ever stop acting that way with her even after they married.

Someone in the seats laughs loudly and Poe leans over to whisper, “You might want to save that for tonight, you two. Gotta keep to royal protocol and all.” He winks.

The officiator, a priest from one of the local temples that worships the Force, approaches them and lifts his hands up to the audience. “You may be seated.”

As the audience scrambles into their seats, Rey hands her bouquet of daisies and roses to Paige and then turns back around to face Finn. They hold their arms out, linking their hands together and find themselves lost in each other’s eyes. Rey only hears bits and pieces of the priest’s speech and how the Force had willed these two young souls to be together.

Then, it is Finn’s turn to speak.

“Do you take this woman as your wife, Your Highness?” asks the priest in a rehearsed manner. “Under the tree that has watched over the unions of your ancestors, do you commit yourself to her and swear by the Force to honor and cherish her?”

Finn looks serious when he speaks. “I do.”

Then the priest turns to Rey. “And do you, Rey Solo, take this man as your husband? Do you commit yourself to him and swear by the Force to honor and cherish him?”

“I do.”

Poe approaches them, holding the rings out on a woven tray. The rings are almost too extravagant in Rey’s opinion, studded in diamonds that feel too luxurious for a woman that had to work her way off of Jakku. In the audience, towards the far side of the front row, BB-8 makes a low hoot out of excitement at seeing Poe do his part in the ceremony. There are quite a few chuckles that can be heard.

With the rings exchanged, the priest finally makes his pronouncement: “You may kiss the bride.”

Finn puts his arms around her waist and kisses her, finalizing their marriage.

Finally, they are married.

“I love you,” Finn whispers, his voice barely audible over the applause of the guests.

“I know," she pauses, teasing him. "I love you, too."

The wedding party then begins to escort the newlyweds away from the atrium, back towards the palace for the start of the celebrations. Behind them, Han escorts Paige out with Poe and Rose trailing close to them. The king and the queen will follow after, a rare breech in normal protocol, but one to acknowledge that today is to honor the bride and groom and the future heir to the throne.

The way back up the aisle is a lot less stressful than it was going down it. Now, all they need to do is get to their next step in the ceremony and politely nod and smile to everyone as they pass. Some people, Rey notes, looks like they had even cried during the ceremony.

An open carriage waits for them near the entrance of the atrium, hovering just a few feet above the ground. Paige and Rose rush up to help Finn with Rey’s dress train as she gets in and the three of them makes sure it is draped so that it will not wrinkle or get dirty during the ride. Then Finn climbs in to sit beside her.

When Finn gives the cue to the driver to tell him that they are settled, the driver calls to the two riders on fathiers ahead of them, carrying the banners of the royal family. The speeder begins to creep forward at a slow pace and the guard of four more fathiers and riders behind them follow, carrying the red flags of the world. There is additional security riding in speeders behind them, of course, security is tight, but this guard is here more for ceremonial purpose than actual security.

The gates of the palace swing open, and they are led to the streets of the capital, beginning their procession. Crowds huddle and push together on the street for a glimpse of their prince and his new bride, and if not for the set barriers on the street, the crowds would have probably gotten too close for the speeders and fathiers to get through.

Rey squeezes Finn’s hand and he turns to give her a kiss – the crowd goes wild with cheers and flashes of cameras nearly blind them – before he turns back to the exterior of the speeder and begins to wave to the onlookers.

A white daisy, like the ones that decorate Rey's bouquet, is tossed as an offering by a young admirer. Rey laughs as she catches it and tucks it into the pocket of Finn’s uniform. Now, she turns and waves to the crowd with Finn in genuine happiness and before they know it, the procession is over and they are back at the gates of the palace.

“Lunch time, I think,” Rey says with a bit of relief.

“It’ll be dinner once it’s ended,” chuckles Finn. “Those things go on for a while.”

He offers his hand to Rey, and she takes it, letting him lead her into the formal dining room where a crowd of guests had been seated. Finn and Rey will sit side by side, next to the king as the guests of honor, since Adron and Maia formally are the only ones to be allowed to head the table. Across from them would sit Han and Leia as the parents of the bride. Rey had noted that Luke was seated next to her, on her right from the dining arrangements and she wondered if he or Leia had requested this so that he would be able to speak with her and Finn without having to yell across a table.

The meal is long, with small ensembles of food to taste instead of large feasts. Each region of Duuna contributed a favorite meal as a wish of good health to the new couple and so shorter courses were done to prevent people from feeling sick and to prevent waste.

Occasionally, Rey glances at Finn, noting how he talks to guests and servers with grace and dignity. This is a side that she only gets to see on rare occasions and she realizes that she will probably get to see a lot more of this. She knows Finn doesn't like formal gatherings, so maybe this is the one exception, but had she met him under these conditions she would have found his charm and demeanor impossible to not find attractive. In fact, she might say that seeing this is making her fall in love with him again. He treats everyone with respect and, funnily enough, keeps a notepad with him to take notes after tasting each dish.

“What’s that for?” she nods.

“Taking notes on the meal to make the formal thank you notes to each region a little more personal.”

Poe laughs a few seats away. “And now you see why half the New Republic is in love with him. Thoughtful as ever, even on his own wedding day.”

Towards the end of the dinner, Finn leans over to kiss Rey on the cheek. “You hanging in there?” he asks. “These formal occasions can just dragsometimes.”

“Guess I’ll be getting used to it, then.” She smiles, though she is eyeing one of the first dessert courses that is finally being brought in. “Though I could be convinced to like them if I always got to eat stuff like that.”

He laughs. “Noted.”

They are all feeling fairly stuffed at this point in the celebration, though most of the guests take the advice of the king and pace themselves on the small amounts of food they are given for each course. The newlyweds are feeling a little jittery, knowing that they still have to change out of their wedding clothes and into something a little less formal for their evening celebrations. Then they will be off tomorrow to travel a short distance to a small private estate with minimum staff to have their honeymoon. They will be there for a week to be given privacy as a new couple, then Finn and Rey will begin their tour around the world, greeting the leaders of each region and sightseeing. Finn knows that Rey will be particularly interested in a recent development in a state-of-the-art greenhouse that protected endangered species to Duuna. And once that tour was over, they will return to the capital for a short breather before starting their intergalactic tour. They will stay with Leia and Han for a short time, and also have a visit with Luke at his school, among visiting the New Republic military spots with Poe as a guide.

At last, Finn rises from his seat and offers Rey his hand. The rest of the dining room rises with them and Finn and Rey glances around the room.

Finn clears his throat. “Rey and I want to thank all of you for joining us today. This may be the happiest moment in our lives and we feel honored to be able to share it with you.” He looks to his wife with a fond smile. “I remember the moment we met like it was yesterday. Rey nearly gave me a heart attack shimmying up my balcony to water my plants. Actually, I think she nearly had a heart attack too.”

There are a few laughs around the table.

“Now, we must be excused. The night is going to go on a little longer and we are going to be exhausted tomorrow, no doubt.”

Rey knows that Finn wasn’t being lewd about his wording, alluding to the start of their travels in the morning, but a few of the guests take the expression as a double-meaning and laugh. Across the table, Paige gives her a wink.

Then they head for the door as the king and queen and Han and Leia follow them. They had their things stored in a spare guest bedroom, since they would not have the time to go back to their apartment a few blocks away.

Their parents retrieve boxes from the bedroom and exchange it with their new son-in-law and daughter-in-law. The newlyweds open the boxes and Finn finds that Han and Leia has gifted him with a jacket that looks like it had been custom-made. It's a party jacket with a subtle, blue woven pattern, like the baskets and cloth that Duuna is famous for.

“I- I don’t know what to say,” says Finn. “This is beautiful.”

Rey, meanwhile, opens her own gift from the king and queen and reveals a green dress that looks like it would fall mid-calf. “Guess you’re getting me to wear a green dress after all,” she laughs.

“We thought you’d want to wear it for the evening party,” Maia explains and she goes over to embrace her new family member. “We hope you like it.”

“I love it,” says Rey.

The women and an aid follow Rey into the ‘fresher to help her get out of her wedding dress. Finn laughs as he watches it be carefully wrapped up and taken away for safekeeping. His change is pretty easy, though he takes extra care with the coat and the medals to make sure he didn’t snag anything. Soon, he finds himself waiting out in the guest living room with Han and his father.

Rey emerges about a half-hour later in the new dress and her hair loosened into a new braid.

“Ready to go have one more festivity before we settle into our new life together?” she asks, offering Finn her hand.

He takes it and kisses it before standing up. “Rey, I would be more than happy to do these events for the rest of my life if it means I get to wake up next to you every morning for the rest of my life.”

“You can’t kick me out now,” laughs Rey. “I’ve just finally moved in the last of my stuff into the apartment. You’re stuck with me forever.”

“Nothing sounds more perfect.”

While this series was a way for me to practice world-building, I had a lot of fun coming up with ideas for clothes and traditions for this particular installment. Rey’s dress was inspired by a dress that I am very fond of and that looks very royal-like and is something I could imagine seeing in the Star Wars universe.

Finn’s outfits were designed in my head. I see his wedding clothes be a sort of combination of military jackets commonly seen in royal weddings with tunics often found in fantasy films/television. Rich, deep colors and thicker fabrics would be the look. John Boyega looks wonderful in burgundy and I thought it would be a nice change from the typical black tuxedos that we normally see worn by men at weddings. As for his circlet, I imagine it as a solid band with a simple red gemstone placed at the front. A crown would have been too much for the wedding, but a circlet would be a nice touch.

#finnrey #finnreyfriday #finnreyfridays #my stuff #royalty au #finnrey aesthetic #aesthetic

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typhonserpent · 5 years

Note

for the asks the odd ones

This is vengeance for what I did to you and @emotionalmorphine isn’t it?

1: what inspires you?Pretty much anything. Music, video games, TV shows, real life interactions, theater, people watching. My muse is a cobbled amalgamate of varying life experiences.

3: what motivates you?Spite.

5: do you write scenes in a linear fashion or do you write future scenes/dialogues sometimes?

Linear. The scenes I look forward to writing are my reward for getting through the boring parts. If I don’t write in a linear fashion I never actually finish what I’m writing.

7: hardest/easiest verse to write for?I find just about any sci-fi universe to be hard to write. I like sci-fi genre but when it comes to crafting or exploring the world I just don’t feel like I have the know-how.Easiest is any fantasy genre because I can explain anything with “it’s magic”.

9: what tv shows, books, or movies inspire for this verse, if any?There aren’t any specific ones. Like I said I take inspiration from everywhere. Even my OC Dalish clan was the result of multiple, different conversations with different people.

11: (if you use) what do you like about archiveofourown?That they host The Vampire Chronicles content.

13: why did ___(character) do ____ in this fic/verse/chapter/scene?Because they caught Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the knife.

15: ask me any spoilers you’re curious about for a verse, and i’ll post the answer in the tagsIt turns out Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father.

17: do you listen to music while you write?Yes, as well as the sound of rain.

19: any edits or art you’ve made for this fic/verse/any edits readers have made? if not, what visuals would you use for one?Goodness no. Unless one has flown under my radar. To my knowledge nobody has made extra content for my fics.

21: this character’s best/worst memory?Again just picking an OC at random … Reesus’ best memory is adopting his daughter and his worst memory is when his mom got sick and passed away.

23: feelings on epistolary fic?Love them! One of my favorite books is The Screwtape Letters.

25: if you outline, do you edit it frequently?Nah, not really. The most editing that happens is rearranging events to happen in the previous or next chapter because I feel like the chapter in question is too light or bulky.

27: when you read fic, how often do you comment?I comment on every fic I read. I used to not do it but I realized how much of a dick move that is so now the rule is if I finish a fic I comment on it no exceptions.

29: do you eat or drink anything while you write?Drink yes, eat no. I like soda and tea.

31: any other questions you want to askMarmalade

33: favorite one-shot you’ve written?Dancing In The Moonlight. I wasn’t very confident about the prompt but it turned out really good and I’m proud of it.

35: any foreshadowing/symbolism you wrote that you hope readers didn’t miss?In You Showed Me the fact that Anders bathes Fenris in red light via the silk sheet is meant to be symbolic of Fenris’ sexual blossoming (similar to Little Red Riding Hood’s red hood representing her entry into womanhood).

37: do you use quotes in the beginning notes/intro to your chapters? if so, what are some of your favorites/what are their significance?Again, in You Showed Me I put song lyrics at the beginning of the fic and used the same lyrics as the chapter titles. It’s mostly just symbolic of the fact that the song was the main inspiration for the fic.

39: any alternate fic titles you were considering for this verse?Working titles tend to be whatever bullshit I throw out to differentiate the word document from other word documents. I always think up titles last. As a couple of examples, Dancing In The Moonlight was saved to my computer as “Cinderanders” up until right before it was published, and You Showed Me spend several months labeled simply as “abo fic”.There’s one on my desktop right now that’s literally labeled, “tescrackfic”.

41: chapter that was the most fun to write in this verse?I always wanted You Showed Me’s epilogue to involve Fenris and Anders mating so I had that one clear as day in my head from day one. It was fun once I finally got to it.

43: emoji this character uses the most whilst texting?:)

45: anyone you share excerpts with?@ethydium mostly and I bounce a lot of ideas off of @anime-hipster-the-amazing

47: story with the most comments?You Showed Me with 59 comments but that’s mostly because of it being a multichapter fic.

49: this character’s starbucks order?Pumpkin Spice Latte

#typhon replies #ask meme #long post

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Batwoman Season 2: What to Expect

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Batwoman ended season 1 with so many cliffhangers it’s almost hard to keep track – Jake Kane was hot on the trail of his daughter, things between Sophie’s ex Julia Pennyworth were heating up, Alice killed Mouse and face-swapped Hush to look like Bruce Wayne. And then the real world gave the fictional one a run for its money, with lead actor Ruby Rose leaving the show and showrunner Caroline Dries and the producers choosing to recast the role.

With Batwoman season 2 on the way in 2021 and Javicia Leslie has been cast as Ryan Wilder, the next hero to step up as Batwoman and defend Gotham City. At DC’s Fandome event, Trish Bendix of The New York Times spoke with Dries, executive producer Beth Schwartz (former Arrow showrunner) and the crew, who teased what next season may bring.

Where’s Kate Kane?

Dries frames the show in terms of two major stories in season 2: where’s Kate, and a new hero rising into Gotham. It’s not exactly a huge surprise that the first question would be the one on every character’s lips.

Obviously Ruby Rose has left Batwoman, but Team Bat hasn’t shared how they’re going to handle her absence, exactly, other than hiring Javicia Leslie to play a new role rather than recasting Kate Kane. So what happened to Kate?

“Is she alive, is she dead, is she missing, is she on the run, is she held captive, is she lost?” Dries wondered allowed, not giving us an inch. “These are all huge mysteries that push us in deep into the season, and all of our characters are going to have different perspectives on that different conspiracy theories, different points of view and it will create a lot of drama, tension, history, intrigue, and it will be shocking and awesome and amazing.”

It’s interesting that Dries mentioned being on the run and held captive since those are all things Kate Kane experienced during various comic book incarnations, while Alice was held captive, missing, lost, and their mother, who was with Alice, was held captive and then killed.

Introducing Ryan Wilder

As for Javicia Leslie’s Ryan Wilder, she’s a brand new character in the world of DC, one whose upbringing was very different from heiress Kate Kane.

“She was a girl who was a statistic of injustice,” Dries said. “The moment she was born, and the system was not built for this person, and she will constantly battle against the system. All throughout she’s battled through it her whole life and she will continue to battle against it as Batwoman.”

As someone who comes from struggle herself, Javicia will be looking out for her community, as well as the proverbial underdog in general. While Batwoman has never shied away from social issues, Ryan brings a different perspective and a different context, both in-world for Gothamites and for the audience consuming the show.

As Leslie put it, “Just to kind of have that crusader that’s from that part of the community, I think that that’s important and that’s really what we’re going to dive into this season.”

The Kane Family

One obvious point of friction fans have wondering about is how removing Kate Kane as a central figure will impact the show, since Kane family dynamics are so central to the first season and much of what had been set up for Batwoman season 2.

While the Kane family has come a long way from where they were when we first met them in the pilot (and lost a few members), Leslie is not anticipating that they will have a warm welcome for Ryan.

While she says Jake Kane “is not about the whole vigilante street kid life,” the family as a whole will likely be grieving Kate’s disappearance in some way, regardless of why they believe she’s gone and for how long. (I mean, none of the options are “on the Waverider with Sara Lance” or “on the run with Reagan the bartender,” right?)

Luckily, Dries gave us some hope that while Ryan and Kate seem very different on the surface, due to their upbringing and background, Ryan may have a positive role with the Kanes in the longterm.

“I think Ryan will, ironically, ultimately unite the Kane family whether or not they realize it,” she said. “There are all these strands of connection that she brings to them.”

Mary Hamilton

Continuing on to the best dressed member of the Kane family, who has also (hot take) potentially saved the most lives, Mary had finally gotten to a good place with her sister last season when she joined Team Bat. What impact will losing her sister and meeting this new person have on her?

“She’s been a person who I think is always looking for families, always looking for community, always looking for somebody to see her, which is, I think, a huge source of why the clinic exists for her,” said Kang. “There are just much deeper personal reasons for that, and I think her and Ryan, Mary and Ryan sort of have that in common.”

Both Kang and Leslie hinted at the idea that Mary and Ryan might find common ground in the way that they are so personally invested in their chosen way to help make the world better.

Leslie said, “It’s funny because a lot of Mary’s patients can be examples of that community, you know the community that gets overlooked by the hospital, by the Crows.”

Given how open a person Mary is, the heart of the show and a real cheerleader for basically every non-evil character on the show, it makes sense that she might be an early person in Ryan’s corner.

We know Mary already has one person in her corner: Luke. It took them most of a season’s worth of delightful jabbing, but Luke opened up, a rarity for him, and Mary showed up for him in a big way during the appeal of his father’s case.

While they didn’t say whether we’d see any movement on this for season two, Camrus Johnson and Nicole Kang spent some time discussing the Luke and Mary ship, which they say took them by surprise. Johnson apparently came up with the HamilFox ship name himself (which he is very proud of), but he was surprised how quickly fans invested in the idea.

“It happened so early,” Johnson said. “It was like episode three maybe and I think they just figured out like ‘oh smart kid, smart kid, they should be together,’ and on Episode Five whenever Luke and Mary met all the fans are like ‘This is it! They have to date!’”

For the sake of the HamilFox shippers, here’s hoping all this encouraging chatter means that our two favorite smart kids get together this season – or at least just keep up the banter.

Luke Fox

We have plenty of big ideas about Luke Fox’s future, based on last season’s interviews with Camrus Johnson and Caroline Dries, but Johnson shared more about where the very cerebral Luke’s head is at heading into season two.

“Luke doesn’t really trust a lot of people. And it took him so long to trust Batman’s cousin,” Johnson said.

If that sounds a bit harsh, think about how long it took Luke to open up to Kate, Mary, Sophie and Julia, or the fact that he’s only told two of those people about his dad. It’s not surprise, then, that Johnson thinks this next year, with a whole new person in the cowl on top of the fallout from last season, is going to be a lot for Luke.

“What he cares most about is keeping Gotham safe, but at the end of the day, Ryan to Luke is someone from the streets and it was already so hard to trust someone that had the army experience,” Johnson said. “To suddenly give this precious Batsuit to this new person is going to be really hard for him.”

Alice unleashed? And new villain Safiyah

While Ryan will (eventually) have some allies, it’s safe to assume at least one person won’t be.

And when it comes to Alice, “anything could happen” really does mean anything. Everyone’s favorite murderer Alice ended last season killing her own adopted brother after teaming up with Hush to make him look like Bruce Wayne, since her (many) plans to take out Batwoman didn’t work.

Skarsten said “She has this like beautiful intricate plan for the demise of her sister. And that will have been foiled.”

Fan favorite Rachel Skarsten thinks she’s going to be “peeved.”

Alice could easily return to one of her favorite people to torment, Mary, considering their hate/hate relationship last season. As Nicole Kang pointed out, Kate will no longer be there to act as a buffer between them.

“There is/was this triangle between Alice, Kate Kane and Mary. And, you know, without Kate actively in that triangle,” Kang said, “anything could happen.”

Skarsten also teased the introduction of new character Safiyah, a fellow villain whom Alice discussed in fearful, hushed tones last season, saying Alice is going to have a lot to worry about and calling it a, “backstory of Alice that we haven’t had the opportunity to see before.”

Sophie Moore

Finally, we left Sophie in some hot water as her mentor, Jake Kane cut her out so he could pull off a double-whammy of a trap for Batwoman and some good old fashioned mercenary brutality (like police brutality, but for more money!)

As Meagan Tandy puts it, “She is going to have a lot on her plate, there’s going to be a lot that’s going to fall upon her.”

She also mentioned that Sophie and Ryan “don’t like each other at first,” which should be an interesting dynamic to watch develop.

“She’s going to really understand the importance of why Batwoman has to stay secretive,” Tandy says, which could be hinting at the Crows’ quest to take her down, and their hinted turn toward the ever-more-militant.

As for a new Batwoman coming to Gotham, Tandy says, “Sophie is going to have no clue.” It will be interesting to see how the writers square that circle with a costume that makes it clear that Batwoman is a Black woman, since Sophie already knows Batwoman is white – or at least, that’s the reason given for why Julia Pennyworth had to be cast white.

In season 1 we saw so much change in Sophie, and it sounds like we could be in for more in season 2, as she stops coloring inside the lines all the time.

“Ryan, and Batwoman, but mostly Ryan, sort of helps pull Sophie out of her shell. And maybe we edge you up a little bit this season,” Dries said, referring to Tandy and her character.

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There are still so many mysteries left untouched for the long hiatus as we (somewhat) patiently wait for the cast and crew of Batwoman to be able to safely create season 2.

Will Ryan and Team Bat be able to hold off the Crows’ push toward authoritarianism? How long can Hush pull of his Bruce Wayne disguise? How many people left in Gotham would actually be able to see through it, other than Jake and Luke? Will whatever happened to Kate bring Julie and Sophie closer together, and send them farther apart? How will the rest of the Arrowverse (lezbihonest, Kara Danvers) respond to Kate Kane’s disappearance?

We’ve got plenty of time, so share your theories in the comments below.

The post Batwoman Season 2: What to Expect appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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benrleeusa · 5 years

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[Eugene Volokh] "The American Legion Briefing: Four Characters in Search of an Establishment Clause Standard"

An analysis of the amicus briefs in the Establishment Clause / cross monument case, from Eric Rassbach at the Becket Fund.

I've been backlogged on various projects recently, so I haven't blogged as much as I'd have liked about many things, including the Court's latest Establishment Clause case. But I thought that I'd pass along this analysis of the briefs in the case from Eric Rassbach of the Becket Fund; unsurprisingly, it track some of the analysis in the Becket Fund's own brief, but I still found to be an interesting, if opinionated, guide.

My own view is that both the Lemon v. Kurtzman test and the endorsement test have ultimately failed to deliver workable legal rules; and I think they have exacerbated religious tensions in American life, even though they have often been advocated as means of supposedly reducing such tensions. I'm also generally inclined towards Becket's history-based approach; though it can yield its own uncertainties, I think it's likely to be better than the current mess. (I have no firm views on the standing argument that Becket makes in Part II of its brief.) In any event, though, here's Eric's analysis; I'd also be glad to post other interesting perspectives from people who have been closely following the case, if anyone wants to pass them along.

The American Legion Briefing: Four Characters in Search of an Establishment Clause Standard [by Eric Rassbach]

The Maryland Peace Cross case, American Legion v. American Humanist Association, will be argued on February 27. The briefs are now in, and the arguments are shaping up much as my colleague Luke Goodrich predicted they would: some people still want the Supreme Court to save the notorious Lemon test from a well-deserved death, some want the Court to punt, some want the Court to adopt a coercion standard, and some want the Court to focus on the historical elements of an establishment of religion. There are thus four main groups of characters searching for an Establishment Clause standard:

The Diehards

First, the plaintiffs American Humanist Association and some of their amici want to save the Lemon test, arguing at times fantastically that Lemon "has brought clarity and consistency to religious-display cases." But there is an air of defeat surrounding this position; it feels like a last stand. Typical in this regard is the amicus brief of Professor Douglas Laycock, which dwells at length (pp. 31-37) on how the Court might uphold the Peace Cross without changing much else in Establishment Clause doctrine. Professors Walter Dellinger and Marty Lederman even filed in support of neither party, saying that this particular Peace Cross ought not be a problem, but other ones they can imagine probably would be. If they think an Establishment Clause case is a loser, it's a loser.

More fundamentally, the Diehards' position is doctrinally adrift. Because Lemon doesn't provide a coherent rule, but the Diehards can't let Lemon go, their briefing often devolves into "here's a bunch of facts about why we should win." These repeat church-state litigants would be better served by renouncing Lemon and starting anew with a more intellectually coherent foundation for their position. In any case, they haven't offered one to the Court here.

The Punters

Another possible outcome for American Legion is a punt. That is, the Court could again avoid dealing with Lemon and apply a totality-of-the-circumstances test. As with previous decisions in this genre (e.g., Van Orden, Buono), such a decision would be valid for one journey only, and would provide no meaningful guidance to the lower courts.

Nevertheless, the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission defendants ask the Court to do just that—arguing that "the Court should not revisit [its] precedents here," but should instead uphold the cross "under existing law," which "would provide substantial clarity for lower courts" and would avoid "generat[ing] deep religious divisions."

Whatever the motive behind this position, it is willfully blind to the reality of Establishment Clause litigation nationwide. As multiple Justices and lower court judges have lamented, the Court's precedents already "generate deep religious divisions." And far from providing "clarity," using existing law (read: Lemon) to decide American Legion would keep lower courts and local governments in the state of Establishment Clause purgatory they've been lamenting for decades.

The Abstract Expressionists

By contrast, the American Legion defendant-intervenors offer a rule, but it is still not quite right. They say that history—and specifically Town of Greece's "historical practices and understandings"—ought to be the Court's guiding principle. So far, so good. But then they take a second step, attempting to reduce all of that history to a single principle: no coercion. There are three problems with this approach.

The first is that as a matter of history it simply isn't true. Professor McConnell's scholarship identifies six characteristics of a religious establishment during the founding era, and in their opening brief the American Legion defendants dwelled at length on those characteristics and Professor McConnell's scholarship. But not every one of the six characteristics of historical establishments is in fact rooted in coercion.

For example, a formal government proclamation of an official state church, with nothing more, is not coercive, though it would certainly have been a problem for the founding generation. The American Legion defendants say in their reply brief that such actions, though "arguably non-coercive," should nevertheless be treated as coercive. But relying on "arguably non-coercive" actions to be deemed coercion simply demonstrates the standard's unworkability. Similarly, government funding—particularly from non-tax revenue streams like park fees or rental income—is not always coercive, even though from a historical perspective the source of the funding would be largely irrelevant.

Second, even where coercion could be alleged, a coercion test does not provide a clear rule of decision. For example, all taxes can in some sense be viewed as coercive, but not all tax-supported funding of religious organizations is unconstitutional. Some funding is problematic—like when the government gives aid exclusively to religious groups for religious purposes. But other funding is permissible—like when government broadly funds both religious and nonreligious groups. The "coercion" test can't distinguish among these types of funding.

Third, like abstract art, abstract legal terms like "coercion" can mean different things to different people. That makes them poor rules of judicial decision. Take the idea of government "endorsement"—the Jackson Pollock of legal ideas. Different courts have taken radically different views about whether a particular government practice "endorses" religious belief or practice. To a certain degree, endorsement is in the eye of the beholder, which is why the endorsement test vexes lower courts and local governments alike.

But the American Legion defendants would replace one Rorschach test with another, because "coercion" is almost as abstract an idea as "endorsement." It is not too hard to imagine scenarios where almost any challenged practice—the Pledge of Allegiance, "In God We Trust" on the currency, or Moses in the courtroom frieze—would be seen as coercive by some (very sincere) litigants. Indeed, in this very case the plaintiffs argue that the Peace Cross is coercive. The upshot is that adopting a coercion standard would put the Court back into the "heaven of legal concepts" it is trying to escape.

The Historians

A simpler rule is the one we offered in our amicus brief: a government practice violates the Establishment Clause only if it shares the characteristics of a historical establishment—as determined by objectively known "historical practices and understandings" at the time of the Founding. And as Professor McConnell has demonstrated, history discloses six main characteristics of a historical establishment: (1) government control over doctrine and personnel of the established church; (2) mandatory attendance in the established church; (3) government financial support of the established church; (4) restrictions on worship in dissenting churches; (5) restrictions on political participation by dissenters; and (6) use of the established church to carry out civil functions.

The historical approach gets the balance between church and state correct. It forbids the state from controlling religious doctrine, compelling religious observance, or providing exclusive funding for religious institutions. But it also avoids needlessly hostility toward religion in the public square.

Several of the briefs criticize our proposed approach. The American Legion defendants say their "general coercion standard" is superior to a historical test for three reasons: (1) "because coercion is the common denominator underlying" the six hallmarks of a religious establishment; (2) because a general coercion test "would likely be more manageable to apply, and (3) because a general coercion test "has already been adopted in this Court's cases[.]" None of these distinctions has merit.

First, as noted above, coercion is not a common denominator of the six characteristics of a historical establishment. Coercion offers no basis for distinguishing between permissible and impermissible types of government funding of religion. It also fails to address non-coercive actions like the use of non-tax government revenues or a government proclamation that "Zeus is Lord of America." Since coercion and history are not coextensive, and the coercion principle is based on history, coercion cannot be a common denominator because it is underinclusive.

Similarly, in practice coercion will also be overinclusive, because the abstract nature of the coercion inquiry will mean that many practices—including passive displays like the Peace Cross—will, for some judges in some locations, be considered coercive. In short, the American Legion defendants are incorrect when they state that "either formulation will lead to the same results."

Second, for the reasons stated above, a coercion test will not be more manageable because its abstract nature would divorce the judicial inquiry from concrete historical fact.

Third, a historical approach has been used by the Supreme Court both in deciding cases like Everson and more recently in cases like Town of Greece. The problem is not that the test has never been used—it is that it has been used inconsistently.

There a few other criticisms of the historical approach. At one point, Doug Laycock claims it is an "anything goes" standard. But this is also not true. As we have pointed out, the historical approach aligns with the outcomes in this Court's Establishment Clause cases since 1947.

Similarly, one of the amicus briefs decries the idea that "eighteenth century apples" can be compared to "twenty-first century oranges". But this is a silly attack on the judicial use of history altogether and belies the general trend in Bill of Rights jurisprudence towards a historical approach, not to mention Town of Greece. If one cannot look at eighteenth century apples, then much of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence in many other areas of the law must go.

In short, there are good reasons to adopt the historical approach, and no plausible reason not to adopt it.

The End, or A Beginning?

As the briefing shows, there are four main paths the Court can follow with respect to the governing Establishment Clause standard. Those paths lead in very different directions. Lemon is a dead end. Punting would leave the courts stuck in the Lemon dead end. A reductio ad coercion would mean decades of wandering in a different wilderness of abstraction.

Only the historical approach offers a method of deciding Establishment Clause cases that can be built out over the long term. Future cases can investigate how the founders thought about funding, or government proclamations, or displays on coinage, and the like. But for now it is enough to undertake a new beginning for Establishment Clause jurisprudence by grounding it in history.

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thejoydaily-blog · 6 years

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Evangelist Bill Piper: Fundamentalist Full of Grace and Joy

Evangelist Bill Piper: Fundamentalist Full of Grace and JoyDesiring God 2008 Conference for Pastors

Resource by John Piper

Topic: Biography

The title I have given this message about my father is “Evangelist Bill Piper: Fundamentalist Full of Grace and Joy.” That title is meant to carry several apparent incongruities or paradoxes or ironies. I expect you to feel tension between the word fundamentalist and the phrase “full of grace,” and between the word fundamentalist and the phrase “full of joy.” But the lead word is evangelist. Underneath being a child of God, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, and justified by faith, and possessing all the riches of the glory of God in Christ—underneath that most basic identity, my father’s chief identity was “evangelist.” Independent, fundamentalist, Baptist evangelist—full of grace and joy.

The Paradoxical Christian Identity

It seems to me that any serious analysis or exploration of a human being’s life will always deal in paradoxes. It will see tensions. Again and again, the serious effort to understand another person will meet with ironic realities. Here is what I mean by irony: It’s the “incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs." The dictionary gives this example: “Hyde noted the irony of Ireland’s copying the nation she most hated.” In other words, it’s a great irony to imitate the people you like the least.

It seems to me that there are very deep and basic reasons why every serious effort to understand another person—especially a Christian—forces us to deal in irony or paradox. One of the most basic reasons is that Christians are both fallen and redeemed. We are saved (Ephesians 2:8-9), and we not yet saved (Romans 13:11). We are adopted (Romans 8:15), yet we wait for adoption (Romans 8:23). We are pure in Christ, but not yet pure: “Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened” (1 Corinthians 5:7). What an irony that unleavened bread should be told to become unleavened.

Our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20); we are sojourners and exiles here (1 Peter 2:11). But the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it (1 Corinthians 10:26); and “all things are yours, whether . . . the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours” (1 Corinthians 3:20-21). We were bought with a price and are slaves of no man (1 Corinthians 7:23). Yet, “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution” (1 Peter 2:13). Our lives are hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). Yet Jesus prays that we not be taken out of the world (John 17:15). Indeed, “some of you they will put to death . . . but not a hair of your head will perish” (Luke 21:16, 18). In fact, you have already died (Romans 6:8). So consider yourselves dead (Romans 8:11). How ironic that dead should be told to consider themselves dead.

In other words, irony and paradox and incongruities are found in every Christian life because our very identity as Christians is paradoxical. That’s what it means to be a Christian. If you’re not a paradox, you’re not saved. In fact, I would go even farther and say, if you’re not a paradox, you’re not a human. What could be more basic to fallen humanity—and what could be more ironic—than that those who are created by God in his own image should use that God-like personhood to deny their Maker? Like a digging ant denying the earth; or a flying bird denying the wind; or swimming fish denying the sea.

Bill Piper: Human, Christian

So there are these two great reasons why, as I have pondered my father’s life, I have found him to be a paradoxical person: He is a Christian, and he is a human. Does it not seem like a strange incongruity—perhaps not a real one—that a blood-earnest, soul-winner, who hammered away at the temptations of the world and the dangers of the flesh should in his sixties celebrate the body of his wife with words like these:

Her hair is like an auburn sea, Wind-whipped, waved, mysterious. Her forehead, like a wall of pearl Stands majestic, proud, serene. Her wide-set eyes are like clear, sparkling, hazel-green pools, calm, compassionate, penetrating. Her finely chiseled nose stands firmly between cheeks that are fair, like pillows of down. Her mouth is soft, pleasant and ruby rich. Her skin is like the feathers of a dove. Her breasts are like rose-tipped apples of ivory, And her belly is like a ocean wave, smooth and restful. Her legs are like pillars of granite, strong and firm. And her feet like those of a deer, swift and beautiful. Her breath is like sweet nectar, Her kisses like perfumed flowers, And her love like paradise.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that Bob Jones University should produce soul-winners that write like Song of Songs. Maybe the incongruity is just biblical faithfulness. But almost everywhere I turned in my father’s life, there were these seeming paradoxes. He was human, and he was Christian.

Corporate Paradoxes

And he lived with other humans and other Christians, who together created corporate paradoxes. Does it not seem like a strange incongruity—perhaps not a real one—that the most fundamentalistic, separatistic, worldliness-renouncing school in America, Bob Jones University, where my father graduated in 1942, should have as part of the commencement celebration in those days a performance of “As You Like It” (1939) and “Romeo and Juliet” (1940) both written by William Shakespeare, who in his own day ridiculed the Puritans, and whose Globe Theater was demolished by the Puritans in 1644? Isn’t it a strange irony how three centuries can turn worldliness into “a delightful comedy”—as the BJU program said in 1939?

So whether personal or corporate, my father’s life appears to be permeated with paradoxes. And under the title “Evangelist Bill Piper: Fundamentalist Full of Grace and Joy,” I hope to capture some of them in a way that gives you hope in the grace of God through the gospel of Christ.

An Old-Fashioned, No-Nonsense Rearing

William Solomon Hottle Piper—named after a Bible expositor that his father admired—was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, January 8, 1919. He was the third and youngest son of Elmer and Emma Piper. His father had been a machinist (I couldn’t forget that he was missing half of one finger), but after his conversion, he became a self-taught Bible student and then the pastor of West Wyomissing Nonsectarian Church. My father told me that he wouldn’t have been surprised if his father could quote virtually the entire New Testament from memory. My guess is that this was an overstatement, but it signals the massive priority of the Bible and Bible Study that passed from my grandfather to my father to me.

The upbringing of the three boys, Harold, Elmer, and Bill, was old-fashioned, no-nonsense, and strict. He gives us a glimpse into the discipline of his father in one of his sermons.

Behavioristic psychologists teach that temper tantrums and defiant attitudes are normal and healthy. To curb them is dangerous. If you discipline the child you will develop within him inhibitions and warp his personality.

I’m glad I had a father who believed otherwise. I got “warped” a good many times, but it wasn’t my personality! . . . O, yes, we had plenty of counseling sessions but generally he did the talking and when he finished I said, “Yes, sir.”

Old fashioned? Indeed it was! Scriptural? Absolutely! Right to the letter.

The strictness of his father had some surprising side effects that were profound. He told me about one of them. It turns out that both Bill and Elmer had disobeyed their father. Elmer was the older, so his father said that he was the more responsible and that he would get the whipping for both boys. My father told me with tears in his eyes a few years ago that he could hear the belt on the backside. Though he was just a boy, he said it was one of the most vivid pictures in his life of the substitutionary atonement of Christ in our place.

In a sermon about the salvation of children, he tells us about his own conversion to make the point that young children can be saved.

That children can be saved I know from my own experience. I have a brother who was saved at the age of seven and another who gave his heart to Christ when he was eight. I received Christ as my Savior when I was a boy of six. Certainly there were many things I did not know, nor need to know. I knew enough to be saved. I knew I was sinful and needed a Savior. I knew that Christ was that Savior I needed. I knew that if I would believe on Him and confess Him as my Savior He would save me. That is all I needed to know and that all any child needs to know to be saved. I trusted Christ and he saved me.2

The Call at Age Fifteen

Besides his conversion at the age of six, probably the most decisive event in his teenage life (and I mean even more decisive than his marriage to my mother at age nineteen) was what happened when he was fifteen.

He told me this story face to face several times over the years, and he always came to tears as he said it. He saw it as a moment of supernatural confirmation on his divine calling that never left him and that stamped his entire life. I will let him tell the story from his book The Greatest Menace to Modern Youth.

I can vividly recall the thrills that accompanied the delivery of my first Gospel sermon. I was fifteen years of age and had just surrendered my life fully to the will and service of Christ. The young people of our community had joined together to promote a city-wide revival and had invited a well known evangelist.

For the Saturday night service, the evangelist decided to turn the entire service over to the young people. For some reason I was asked to bring the message and to give the invitation.

I had been reared in a Baptist parsonage. All my life I had heard great preaching but I had never tried to do it myself. This was to be my first attempt. I didn’t know how but I tried. My heart was filled with zeal and I wanted to do my best for the Lord. The big night came. For my message I had selected some thoughts on about a half dozen Gospel tracts. At the time of the sermon I spread these tracts all over the pulpit and I simply preached from one tract to the next.

I don’t recall a thing I said. It probably was a poor sermon. But the thing that mattered was that when I gave the invitation to receive Christ [this is where the tears would inevitably come], ten precious souls left their seats, came weeping to an improvised altar and surrendered to the Lord Jesus Christ.

The thrill that came to me then is still with me many years later. I knew that Jesus had walked on the water but I felt as I left the building that night that I was walking on air! Believe me, I was on cloud nine! And, better still, I’ve never come down. What thrilled me most was the sudden realization that I had immeasurable power at my disposal. That the God of heaven, the God of the Bible, was willing to speak through me in such a way as to touch other lives and transform them and change their destinies.

I never dreamed such a thrill was possible for me. I had not known such power was at my disposal. I said then, “God, let me know this power the rest of my life. Let me be so yielded to Thee that I’ll never cease to know the thrill and joy of winning others to Christ.” And I can say with honesty, I am just as excited right now [this book was published in 1980, forty-six years later] about the soul-winning power of God as I was at the age of fifteen.

From that day on, my father’s face was set like flint to be a full-time evangelist.

Beside his name in his senior yearbook are the words: “He wants to be an evangelistic preacher.” He never turned back.

Bill and El: The Gospel Songsters

In the last two years that he and his brother Elmer were in high school together they had their own radio program on WRW in Reading, Pennsylvania, called “Bill and El, the Gospel Songsters.” They sang and preached. Their theme song was a song called “Precious Hiding Place.” Until you hear it, you can hardly imagine how different the teenage world was seventy-five years ago.

Perhaps my wife is right in her analysis: When she saw a video of Bill and El, she pointed out that in 1936 adolescence as a distinct cultural phenomenon hadn’t yet been created. There was no such thing as a vast teen culture. There was no teenage music. Frank Sinatra was born four years before my father. He is usually considered the first teen idol. The beginnings of a distinct youth culture was just about to begin. So when my father was in high school the overlap between the music that mom and dad liked and what teens liked was much greater then than now.

In other words, my father grew up much more quickly than I did. He skipped a good bit of the usually-wasted years called adolescence, or what later was called the “teenage” years—the term teenager did not occur in the English language until 1941. He graduated from high school with his sweetheart Ruth Eulalia Mohn in 1936.

You can see from the note in her senior yearbook that her heart was bound together already in the calling of his life. Hers reads: “She intends to take up evangelistic work.”

Marriage to Ruth, College at Bob Jones

After graduation, my father traveled with the Students’ League of Nations and studied at John A. Davis Memorial Bible School in Binghamton, New York. Then on May 26, 1938, he and his brother Elmer in the same wedding ceremony married Ruth and Naomi. Elmer married Naomi Werner. And Bill married Ruth Mohn. Bill and Ruth were both nineteen.

They moved to Cleveland, Tennessee, to attend Bob Jones College. The school had moved to Cleveland in 1933 from near Panama City, Florida, where it was founded in 1927. Ruth and Bill both enrolled. My father was an average student and a very gifted speaker and actor. He had leading roles in several Shakespearean plays. He developed a deep admiration for Dr. Bob Senior, the founder of the school, and quoted him often the rest of his life. My father loved the education he got at Bob Jones. He never belittled the school as an educational institution. When the time would come for cutting off ties with the school, it was a deeply painful thing.

He graduated in 1942 and entered full-time evangelism. My sister Beverly was born in 1943, and I was born in 1946. That same year Bob Jones moved to Greenville, South Carolina, and our family moved with them. Greenville became the base of Daddy’s evangelistic ministry for the rest of his life. This is where I grew up.

The Rhythm of Leaving and Coming Home

Life, in my memory, was a rhythm of Daddy’s leaving for one week or two weeks or as long as four weeks, almost always on Saturday, and then coming home on Monday. When I dedicated the book Desiring God to him, I wrote

I can recall Mother laughing so hard at the dinner table that the tears ran down her face. She was a very happy woman. But especially when you came home on Monday. You had been gone two weeks. Or sometimes three or four. She would glow on Monday mornings when you were coming home.

He had been elected to the board of trustees of Bob Jones before coming to Greenville in 1946, the youngest board member ever elected at that time. In 1952, the University award him the Doctor of Divinity degree in recognition of the impact of his ministry in the churches of the United States.

Over the next decades, he preached in all fifty states, half a dozen other countries, held over 1,250 evangelistic crusades, recorded over 30,000 professions of faith, and published seven books of sermons.

The Challenges of Full-Time Evangelism

The personal toll this took on him, and what it cost my mother, was extraordinary. What keeps you going to hard new challenges week after week when it means you must leave the ones you love again and again? Here’s what he wrote in his book Stones Out of the Rubbish.

As an evangelist, my work necessarily keeps me away from my sweet wife and children much of the time. Some have asked me, “How can you endure being away from them? Why don’t you get a church and settle down?” There is but one answer. When I was a boy of fifteen, I sold out to the will of God. His will since that day has been the supreme passion of my life. There have been failures, mistakes and sins since then, but His blessed will has remained more important to me than family, home or friends. God called me to be an evangelist. I said, “Lord, this will mean homesickness, separation from loved ones, loneliness and sacrifice, but NEVERTHELESS, if that is your will, ‘I will let down the net.’” The blessings He has given have often been more than I could contain. The fruit I have seen has repaid me a million times over for whatever sacrifices I may have made.”5

Part of the burden he carried was the sordid stereotype of itinerant southern evangelists. It grieved him, but it didn’t stop him.

There is a reason why the words “evangelism” and “evangelist” meet with a feeling of nausea and disgust in the minds of thousands of thinking people today. . . . All emotionalism worked up in the energy of the flesh, deliberately aroused for outward results, or toyfully played upon by the impression-seeking preacher can leave nothing but bitterness in the bottom of the cup.

Not Your Typical Evangelist

My father was not your typical evangelist. He was a doctrinally driven, Bible-saturated evangelist. When he preached to save sinners, he explained doctrine. One outline from his sermon notes goes like this—and it is typical of the sort of preaching he did:

Christ is our redemption

Christ is our propitiation

Christ is our righteousness

Christ is sanctification

Christ is our Example

Christ is our Expectation

Christ is our Completeness

He believed that the best way to call for repentance and faith was to unpack the glories of Christ in the gospel, which meant unpacking doctrine. He had about 200 sermons in his arsenal. He told me that about twenty of them were blessed above all others, and he would return to these again and again. What marked out his evangelistic preaching as unusual was not the stories, but basic doctrines of man’s helpless condition in sin, God’s holiness and wrath and the imminent danger of damnation, the glorious fullness of Christ’s saving work on the cross, and the free offer of forgiveness and righteousness to any who believed.

He was the most Bible-saturated preacher I have ever heard. When he took up the reality of the new birth, for example, the message was full of the Bible.

My father loved the Bible. He believed the Bible. He built his life on the Bible, and he preached the gospel at the center of the Bible with unashamed authority and almost no frills. And God used him mightily in the salvation of sinners.

Separation and Exile

In 1957, something happened that broke his heart and changed the scope of his relationships. I don’t know all the details. I just know that in June of 1957, Daddy called Bob Jones from a meeting in Wisconsin and resigned from the board of the school. The ways parted. I was eleven years old. Before that I had watched soccer games at BJU and seen films that they made. The campus was just across the highway from our home. But after 1957, there was no more connection. We were not welcome.

The larger issue above the particular details was the issue of separation. Christian fundamentalism today is defined largely by the doctrine of separation. The issue of whether to separate from Billy Graham and renounce his work became pivotal in 1957. His New York crusade began on May 15 and ran nightly for four months. The supporters of the crusade were not all evangelical. And the lines of separation became blurred. My father would not renounce Billy. And in the end, there was a division between my father and Bob Jones. This was one of the great ironies of his life. The movement that nurtured him and shaped him, the school that he loved and served, would no longer support him. Only near the end of his life was there a reconciliation as Bob Jones III reached out to my father. It was a sweet ending to a long exile.

Death of Ruth, Marriage to LaVonne

In 1974, my mother was killed in a bus accident in Israel. My father was seriously injured but survived. They had been married thirty-six years. A year later, God gave my lonely father a second wife, LaVonne Nalley. I performed the wedding ceremony in December of 1975.

The effect of my mother’s death and my father’s second marriage was profound on our relationship. It took my father one more step away from closeness to me. LaVonne was a southern lady with deep roots in family and place. In the twenty-eight years of their marriage, LaVonne never came to Minneapolis. My father came twice. Since we only saw each other once a year or so, the relationship with the new relatives was cordial but not deep. It never felt very much like family. So it felt like my father had been drawn into an intimacy that was no longer focused on the family he fathered but the new relationship he had with LaVonne.

My relationship with my father had always been one of admiration and respect and tremendous enjoyment when we played games together or fished. But we never talked much about personal things. And with the death of my mother, and the movement of my father’s heart into a new world of relationships, the distance that I felt grew even greater.

In the Shadow of Evangelistic Effectiveness

It never changed my basic feelings for him. I felt a tremendous affection and admiration for him. In fact, in my adult years, I felt a huge compassion or pity for my father, first because of the sacrifices he made to do the work of evangelism, and then because of the death of my mother, and then because of his increasing dementia. My emotional default reaction to my father was never resentment that he wasn’t home enough. My reaction was: How can I show him that I love him and help him to know how much I esteem his work and the faithfulness he has shown?

I always felt supported, loved, and admired by my father. He spoke well of me. He thought I was crazy for leaving my professorship at Bethel to be a pastor, since he thought I was exactly where I belonged. But when the decision was made in 1980, he supported me and loved hearing news from the church. Most of all he loved hearing stories of conversions.

I have always lived in the shadow of my father’s evangelistic effectiveness. I think it’s been good for me, because my father’s life is like a living parable of the priority that God puts on the salvation of one sinner who repents. “I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). My father’s life is a constant reminder of that truth. I am thankful for it.

Homecoming

During the years after my mother’s death and my father’s increasing inability to travel in evangelism, the Lord opened an amazing door with the creation of international correspondence courses that my father wrote. Rod of God Ministries grew up with tens of thousands of people in Africa and Asia taking these courses. That ministry continues today under the leadership that my father put in place. It was a thrilling gift to him as he aged because he was able be involved in writing and teaching into his mid eighties.

Only in the last couple years was his memory so impaired that he couldn’t serve in that way. His second wife LaVonne died August 4, 2003. After a brief stay in independent living in Anderson, South Carolina, near his church, Oakwood Baptist, that cared for him so well, we moved him to Shepherd’s Care in Greenville, owned and operated by Bob Jones University. It was, in my mind and his, a kind of homecoming—to the school he loved and to the fundamentalism he never really left—and paradoxically never really belonged to. I look back on God’s mercy in my father’s final days with tremendous gratitude. The Lord took him on March 6, 2007.

Self-Designated Fundamentalist

After his deepest identity as gospel-glorying child of God, my father’s identity was most essentially evangelist. This defined his life from age 15 to 88. In the last days, his unreality that his mind created at Shepherd’s Care was not casual times with his family but evangelistic crusades. “Across the lawn there is where the meeting will be tonight.” From beginning to end, he was defined by evangelism.

But he was also a fundamentalist. By his own self-designation. It was not a term of reproach but of honor. In the first decade of the twentieth century, liberalism was gaining a foothold in most denominations. The common word for the liberals then was modernists—those who believed that modern science had made some essentials of the Christian faith untenable. My father defined modernism like this:

By “modernists”, we mean ministers who deny the truth concerning Jesus Christ: His miraculous conception, His absolute deity, His vicarious atonement for the sins of mankind, His bodily resurrection, and His personal visible return to this earth. Modernists also deny the need of regeneration by the Holy Spirit and the fact of a literal hell.7

In other words, in the early days of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the battle was not for marginal doctrines or behaviors but essential doctrine—“fundamentals.” When J. Gresham Machen wrote his response to liberalism in 1923, he did not title it Fundamentalism and Liberalism but Christianity and Liberalism because he believed liberalism was not Christianity at all.8

Two years before my father was born, the four-volume set of books called The Fundamentals was published (1917). In 1922, Harry Emerson Fosdick fired his shot across the bow of the ship of the church called “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” My father grew up in this super-charged atmosphere of modernism threatening the very life of the churches in America. In his early sermons in the forties and fifties, he returned to this battle again and again:

Christianity is in the throes of a gigantic conflict with the enemies of the Lord. The followers of Satan have shown their colors and the Faith is being blatantly denied and rejected. Corruption and disintegration have begun in a dozen denominations where the enemy had spread his deadly poison.9

The breach between modernism and fundamentalism keeps getting wider. . . . “The faith once for all delivered unto the saints” has been shunned in favor of bloodless faith which glorifies man, denies his depravity, rejects the absolute authority of the Bible and the Deity of Jesus Christ.10

In fact, by the time my father was ten-years old, most people recognized that the battle to save the mainline denominations from liberalism was being lost. Then the question became how to deal with this, and the debates about degrees of separation altered the meaning of the term fundamentalism in the 1930s. It ceased to mean “orthodox Christianity” over against those who denied essentials, and came to refer one group of orthodox Christians, namely, the ones who believed that the biblical way forward was strict separation from denominations, groups, and relationships that were not fully orthodox and were not separated from those who were not fully orthodox.

Bob Jones University was and is one of the strongest representations of this development of fundamentalism. And my father embraced it and was defined by it—up to a point. For him, the heart of fundamentalism was the true doctrine. His passion was evangelism—saving people from perishing in hell by leading them to the divine Savior and his substitutionary work on the cross. In other words, if the fundamentals were not true, the gospel is a false hope, and evangelism is misleading. Therefore, the note struck more clearly than all notes was the doctrinal importance of fundamentalism:

Though fundamentalists do not agree upon every point of doctrine, they are definitely agreed upon the essential elements of the Christian faith: the total depravity of man, the absolute deity of Christ, the vicarious, substitutionary atonement for sin through the blood of Christ, His bodily resurrection, the need of the new birth and the blessed return of Christ to the earth.11

Another dimension of fundamentalism that he embraced was authoritative preaching that was willing to name evil and defend truth.

Too many present-day pulpiteers are soft pedaling the Gospel. Even many who are robed in the vestments of fundamentalism are void of a semblance of holy boldness in their preaching. They handle sin with kid gloves, avoid great issues and shrink from declaring cardinal doctrines. Pussyfooters in the pulpit! What a tragedy! They are a blight to the Church and a blockade to the Holy spirit’s blessing.

Then there was the fundamentalist vision of separation not just from false doctrine but from all forms of worldliness that weaken the boldness and spiritual power of a Christian.

Every Christian who indulges in the sinful pleasures of this world is a compromiser and a stumbling-block. No dancing, theater-going, card-playing, gambling Christian can hope to be a soul winner or have a testimony for God. If men see this world in you, you will never point them to the next.13

I grew up in a home where it was assumed we would not smoke, or drink, or gamble, or play cards, or dance, or go to movies. We were fundamentalists. So why didn’t I kick against this growing up? I have never thought ill of my parents for these standards. I have never resented it or belittled it. When I was in my early twenties, I was indignant in some of my classes at Fuller Seminary when certain young faculty members were cynical and sarcastic about fundamentalism. They sounded to me like adolescents who were angry at their parents and their backgrounds and couldn’t seem to grow up. I never felt that way about my parents or about the fundamentalism of my past. Why?

Fundamentalist Freedom

I think I know why. My mother and my father were the happiest people I have ever known. This strikes many as an incongruity, a paradox. But this is the key to my father’s influence on me and, I believe, one of the keys to the power of his ministry. The fundamentalist forcefulness in the pulpit, the fundamentalist vision of “the razorsharp edge of truth,”14 the fundamentalist standards that move from the Ten Commandments down to dancing and card-playing—all of this was enveloped in a world of joy and freedom.

Freedom? Fundamentalistic freedom? Yes. I’ll illustrate. When I was in the seventh grade, our class, Mrs. Adams’ homeroom, won the attendance award for the year. The award? The whole class would go a movie at the Carolina Theater on Main Street during school time. My heart pounded. I went home and asked my mother—Daddy wasn’t home—what should I do? She said, “Do what you think is right.” I weighed all the factors, and I went.

The next year, in the eighth grade, a girl called me one night and asked if I would go with her to a dance. It was one of those Sadie Hawkins events where the girls invite the guys. She was a pretty girl. My heart pounded again: Uh . . . I don’t dance, I said. She said, We don’t have to dance, we can just sit and watch. Uh . . . just a minute. I went and asked my mother what I should do. (Daddy wasn’t home.) She said, “Do what you think is right.” Then she checked her calendar, and we were going to be out of town. Saved.

What was my mother, speaking for my father, doing? She was saying: We have standards, son, but they need to come from the inside. If they don’t come from the inside, they are worthless. On these issues, you’re old enough now to discover who you are deep inside. When my parents said, “Do what you think is right,” they were not foolish relativists. They were wise fundamentalists.

“Truthing in Love”

Soon I was old enough to start talking about these issues with my father. Daddy, why is there a split between you and some other fundamentalists? One thing I remember above all about these conversations. He went to Ephesians 4:15 over and over and reminded me that in all our devotion to the truth we must “speak the truth in love.” He used to love to play on the Greek verb and translate it “truthing in love.” He felt as if fundamentalism was losing the battle mainly for spiritual and attitudinal reasons, not doctrinal ones.

Already in the 1940s, there had emerged in my father’s preaching and teaching and writing a warning about the dangers of fundamentalism. For the careless listener, this could sound like he was abandoning the ship of fundamentalism. Some would say he did. He would surely say he didn’t. I don’t think he did. Let me try to capture the spirit of this warning from his own words:

Some professing Christians, often those who boast of their fundamentalism, are given to a grievous censorious and critical attitude toward everything and everybody. As one man I knew has said, “Some people are born in the objective case, the contrary gender and the bilious mood.”. . . For one to profess to know Christ and have real religion and at the same time to manifest a sour, critical, negative attitude is disgusting and abhorrent even to the ungodly. Certainly anyone with such an unsavory nature could never hope to be a “savour of life unto life.”15

Critiquing Fundamentalism

Then there is this amazing passage that folds the critique of fundamentalism in with a much wider concern and shows the scope of my father’s burden. He is not picking on anyone here, he is groaning over the lost power of the church and longing for the day of great revival.

When backslidden Christians confess their waywardness and return to God; when worldly Christians stop their smoking, drinking, dancing, card-playing and show-going and heed again the message of separation; when pharisaic negative religionists who boast loudly of what they do not do, forsake their contemptuous pride, covetousness and carnality and return again to their “first love”; when slothful, sleepy, negligent Christians are filled with the Spirit and feel again the thrill of their salvation; when stagnant fundamentalism is replaced by aggressive evangelism; . . . when anemic sermons are red again with the crimson blood of Jesus; when the average church ceases to be merely a center of social interest and becomes again a source of spiritual influence, does more praying and less playing, more fasting and less feasting, showers of revival fire and blessing will again fall on America.16

He said that there is a world of difference between being separated and being consecrated. If we don’t move beyond separation to consecration, our separation is worthless. This is what my parents were saying to me when mother said, Do what you think is right, Johnny. The issue in this family is not whether we keep separation rules, but whether we have consecrated hearts.

I have seen many Christians who are separated but far from consecrated. They boast pharisaically of what they do not do and fail to see that they are doing almost nothing for God. . . . Consecrated Christians are Christians who are so busy serving the Lord that they have neither time or taste for the things of the world. They have found their joy and complete satisfaction in Christ.17

Fundamentalism ceased to be a term my father could use for himself without profound qualification. And this didn’t change for forty years.

If Christianity, as he said, is not rules and dogmas and creeds and rituals and passionless purity and degrees of goodness, and if the devil himself is a fundamentalist (because he knows all the fundamentals to be true), then what is the heart of the matter? What is Christianity? What was it that undergirded and overshadowed everything else in our home and in my father’s ministry?

Stunned by the Gospel

The answer was gospel-rooted, Christ-savoring, God-glorifying joy. My father was stunned by the gospel. He exulted in the gospel. Everything in fundamentalism was secondary to the glory of Christ enjoyed in the gospel. The gospel meant salvation, and salvation meant, in the end, total satisfaction in Christ:

Other religions are spelled, “Do,” but Christianity is spelled, “Done.” If you would be saved, you must place your trust in the finished and perfect work of Christ on the cross. In Him all sin was punished and God’s holiness was vindicated. God is satisfied with Christ as to the perfection of His life and righteousness, and as to the completeness of His work in the sinner’s behalf. God’s only requirement for salvation is that you, too, be satisfied with Christ and His work.18

Satisfied with Christ

Where did I learn that delight in God is our highest duty? Before Jonathan Edwards and before C. S. Lewis and before Daniel Fuller, there was Bill Piper, unsystematically, unapologetically, and almost unwittingly saying: God’s only requirement is that you be satisfied with Christ.

Long before John Piper read C. S. Lewis’ The Weight of Glory and learned about the folly of making mud pies in the slums because one can’t imagine a holiday at the sea—long before that—he was hearing his father talkabout the cow and the barbed-wire fence by the road.

I have often seen a cow stick her head through a barbed wire fence to chew the stubby grass bordering a highway, when behind her lay a whole pasture of grass. I have always been reminded of Christians who have not learned to completely trust Christ, reaching out to the world for sensual pleasure when rivers of pleasure were at their disposal in Christ.19

“Everyone Wants to Be Happy”

Long before John Piper ever read, “All men seek happiness”21 in Pascal’s Penses, he was absorbing from his father these very truths. This from a sermon in the 1940s: “Everyone wants to be happy. Sinners seek it in pleasure, fame, wealth and unbelief, but they seek in vain. Christians have found the answer to happiness in Christ.”22

And what are these pleasures that this fundamentalist is so ravished by? Like Lewis, my father answered: They are everywhere.

The devil never made a rain drop or a snow flake. He never made a baby smile or a nightingale sing. He never placed a golden sun in a western sky or filled the night with stars. Why? Because these things were not his to give. God is the creator and the possessor of them all and he lovingly shares these things with us.23

Christ Himself, The Supreme Delight

Is it any wonder my father was a poet? Poets are people who see the indescribable glory everywhere and will not be daunted in their passion to make language serve its revelation. My father found reason to rejoice everywhere he looked. He had an invincible faith that all things serve God’s wise purpose to reveal his glory. Even in his final years of dementia, he rejoiced. In the last month that he was able to keep a journal (April of 2004), he wrote, “I’ll soon be 86 but I feel strong and my health is good. God has been exceedingly gracious and I am most unworthy of His matchless grace and patience. The Lord is more precious to me the older I get.”

In other words, not the pleasures that lie strewn everywhere in life, but the pleasures of Christ himself are the supreme delight. “Every believer has in Christ all the fullness the world longs for. Christianity, therefore, far from being dull and dreary or a harsh system of rules and regulations, is a gloriously free, real, victorious and happy life.”24

And, he adds, it never ends:

His grace is infinite. It is fathomless as the sea. In glory, throughout the ages to come, we who are saved will behold an endless display of these riches which we now have in Christ Jesus. [Then, always the evangelist, he says, and I say] I trust that you all are sharing this wealth. If not, you may. Simply place your faith in Christ and start reveling in the riches of God’s grace.25

“Fully Satisfied with Him Alone”

One last thing, lest he fail to get all the credit that he should: He preached a very provocative message once called “Sanctifying God” from Isaiah 8:13(“Sanctify the LORD of hosts himself; and let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.”). What was his answer to the question, How do we “sanctify” God—how do we esteem him and honor him and set him apart is the supremely valuable Treasure of our lives?

He gives his answer in the form of a very personal discovery: “I knew . . . that God was sufficient, abundantly able to supply my every need and the need of all who would trust Him. But to sanctify Him as such, I realized that day that I must live a contented life, a life fully satisfied with Him alone.”26 Or to quote the echo of the father in the son: God is most sanctified in us, when we are most satisfied in him.

What an evangelist! What a fundamentalist! What a soul full of grace and joy!

Thank you, Daddy. Thank you. Under God, I owe you everything.

Endnotes

1 Bill Piper, The Greatest Menace to Modern Youth (Greenville, SC: Piper’s Evangelistic Publications, 1980), p. 30.

2 Bill Piper, A Good Time and How to Have It (Greenville, SC: Piper Publications, 1964), p. 65.

3 The Greatest Menace to Modern Youth, pp. 22-23.

4 John Piper, Desiring God (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2003), pp. 13-14.

5 Bill Piper, Stones Out of the Rubbish, (Greenville, SC: Piper’s Publications, 1947), pp. 63-64.

6 Stones Out of the Rubbish, pp. 27-28.

7 Bill Piper, The Tyranny of Tolerance (Greenville, SC: Piper’s Publications, 1964), p. 28.

8 J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1923), pp. 49-50.

9 The Tyranny of Tolerance, p. 38.

10 Ibid., p. 19.

11 Ibid., p. 29.

12 Ibid., pp. 10, 11, 17.

13 Stones Out of the Rubbish, p. 62.

14 The Tyranny of Tolerance, p. 10.

15 Bill Piper, Dead Men Made Alive (Greenville, SC: Piper’s Publications, 1949), pp. 28-29.

16 Stones Out of the Rubbish, p. 33.

17 Ibid., p. 62.

18 Dead Men Made Alive, p. 24.

19 A Good Time and How to Have It, p. 48.

20 The Greatest Menace to Modern Youth, p. 22.

21 Blaise Pascal, Penses (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), p. 113, Thought # 425.

22 Dead Men Made Alive, p. 30.

23 The Greatest Menace to Modern Youth, p. 39.

24 A Good Time and How to Have It, p. 70.

25 Dead Men Made Alive, p. 62.

26 A Good Time and How to Have It, p. 17.

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rosiesphotogrxphy-blog · 6 years

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Final essay for my A Level personal investigation - ‘All That Glitters, Is Not Gold’

‘All that glitters, is not gold’ is focused on addictions; consisting of replacing addictive substances (eg. alcohol, cocaine and heroin) with glitter. My main inspiration stemmed from Hannah Altman’s ‘And Everything Nice’ project which analyses the standard for female beauty; showing women in states of affliction. Altman has replaced women’s body fluid (eg. Blood, tears and vomit) with glitter to ‘visualise the concept of girls invariably needing to seem attractive, regardless of what is actually happening in the scenario.’ My aim is to raise awareness of the issue of addiction and create an impact on the audience through the use of composition, and narrating through the images.

Hannah Altman is a 21-year-old photography student living and working in Pittsburgh. As shown on her blog, Altman focuses on women and particularly their feelings, societal issues, pain, emotions and secrets. The majority of her photos explore the hidden feelings behind women and they are shown in a dark, mellow way using simple but extremely effective techniques. For example in her ‘Luminous / Weightless’ (2016) project, Altman uses nudity and monochrome with a clever technique where pinholes were put through inkjet prints to ‘celebrate the female body’. Similarly, in her project ‘How to’ (2015), Altman used a mixed media technique where the image burns gradually showing each stage of the process; emphasising different issues and feelings within the women. Figure 1 is a piece from Altman’s ‘How To’ (2015) showing the women’s stomachs burning away possibly demonstrating pregnancy or period issues. Figure 2 is my interpretation of this technique where the burning emphasises the empty feelings of the abuse victims. This is a direct interpretation of Altman’s work but represents a different issue.

Being a feminist and fascinated by glitter myself, my attention was drawn to ‘And Everything Nice’. Hannah also symbolises many impacting female issues in society, including; bleeding, depression, periods and shaving which most women experience but do not normally speak about. These are hidden messages behind the images; ‘analysing the standards for female beauty’ and showing the pressure on women to look attractive. Many of the issues presented in ‘And Everything Nice’ (2015) also link to pregnancy (bleeding, sickness) which is something only women experience, and perhaps Hannah wanted to portray that men do not always understand the pain and pressure women go though in order to create a new life. This idea of ‘hidden meanings’ and ‘societal issues’ relates to ‘All that glitters, is not gold’ because I have used this style to show addictions in my photography.

After researching Altman’s other work, I was highly inspired and wanted to interpret some of her ideas in my own way. At the time, I was studying addictive behaviour in psychology and found it very intriguing and therefore decided to base my project on addictions. Similar to Altman’s idea of analysing the standards for female beauty, addictions are a huge issue in society, so I thought that demonstrating this through my work with a personal approach would be an effective way to present this impacting issue.

Figures 3 and 4 are part of Altman’s ‘And Everything Nice’ project, which are both huge influences on my work and I have used ideas from these images within my photography. For example, figure 3 involves blue glitter to imitate tears. These tears could represent the way women feel with the pressure to seem attractive and the stereotypes that people place on women for them to live up to. I have replicated the blue glitter idea in my own work to show emotion in the abuse, pills, cocaine and alcohol images. This is shown in figure 6. My interpretation figure 4 is shown below in figure 5 where I have demonstrated bulimia as an addiction, using identical ideas to Altman in order to construct my own version. However, I wanted the green glitter to appear more vibrant in my photo so using a brighter colour glitter, a bright white bathroom and flash on my camera achieved this aim and I personally think that my version of Altman’s stands out more and appears stronger. Although I have copied her idea for this photo, I have adapted it in a personal way with a different aim and message behind it; making it raw and original.

Furthermore, the way that Altman made her subjects look are very plain and colourless enabling the eye to focus on the subject, which I have done in my photography where Amelia wore a nude bodysuit to give a ‘neutral’ look so that the costume is not a distraction from the addiction. The women used by Altman look very pure and natural which I have aimed to do with Luke and Amelia with minimal makeup and skin coloured clothes. Also, the background behind the subjects in ‘All that glitters, is not gold’ is plain white which has the same effect of drowning out everything except for the subject and the addiction. Altman uses this technique in ‘And Everything Nice’ (2015) which works effectively. If a busy background was used in my project, there would be no focus on the addiction and it would not be clear to the audience what the scenario is demonstrating.

The images above are my two favourite pieces from ‘And everything nice’ as they are very raw and simple. The simplicity is extremely powerful and directly presents the issues. Once again, the plain backgrounds enable focus on the subject, which I have done in my project. Figure 7 shows a pink razor filled with red glitter to represent blood. The societal issue here is that women feel the need to shave in order to show their beauty and to satisfy the needs of others. However, Altman’s message is that women should not need to change their bodies for society and that they should have the choice to make their own decisions about their bodies instead of being led by other’s opinions. Figure 8 is pink underwear also filled with red glitter representing blood. The message behind this is that periods are not spoken of as they’re a sensitive issue. The use of pink in these images emphasises the women stereotype of this colour which is another hidden message behind ‘and everything nice’.

Addiction is a medical condition that is characterised by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, despite adverse consequences. Addictions are a sensitive issue in society, hence why I wanted to investigate into this subject and present these ideas in a purposeful way. The rewarding stimulus is something that the brain views as positive or something that they need and crave (eg. feeling calm after taking drugs or smoking.) The consequences are generally negative including; pain, death and diseases. However, once the individual has become addicted, they ignore the consequences and begin to rely on the drug. I have demonstrated this idea

in my work by the connection between the subject and the drug. For example, the eye contact between Amelia and the donut or Luke and the cigarettes to emphasise their addiction. There are many causes or reasons for addictions. Exposure to addictive drugs for long periods can easily result in an addiction; especially if the individual does not know any different. The upbringing in a drug use environment with childhood experiences can have an extremely negative effect on people through observation and imitation. Experiencing events such as physical, emotional or sexual abuse, physical or emotional neglect, witnessing violence or mental illnesses can also have a huge impact as adolescents may adopt drugs as a coping mechanism. Under the right influence and circumstances, anyone can become an addict.

To complete this project, I set up a studio at home in my bedroom, using a plain white sheet nailed to the wall as a backdrop. I tried my best to stretch it out enough to avoid creases but as shown in my project, this was a very difficult task and in most pictures, creases are present on the backdrop. However, after editing the creases out, the white background draws the eyes to the focus of the image. The camera used to take the photos is my Nikon D3300 (DSLR) and a tripod was also used for some of the images to stabilise the camera and to capture the ideal shot in the perfect position. I ensured that there was no natural light affecting the studio and instead used a lamp when the studio appeared dull and needed brightening. This studio worked well as the white backdrop effectively enabled focus on the subject. Although the creases were visible in the original photos, the editing on Photoshop resolved this issue and in most images, the creases cannot be seen.

Although my work explores realistic situations based on serious and real life issues, the glitter has created a surreal effect. Surrealism photography is imaginative and ‘out of the ordinary’ which personally, I think ‘All that glitters, is not gold’ touches on. The surreal scenarios using the idea of ‘glitter addictions’ are abstract and artistic and create a narrative style of photography due to the hidden meanings behind the images

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