A Review of REVELATIONS SOULSIGHT, a Novel by Robert Christian Reed

Revelations Soulsight: A clean Christian fantasy full of action by Robert Christian Reed
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This story describes an epic battle between good and evil. However, it is a battle with a difference. Good, strives to keep the battle from ending, since the ongoing battle permits the operation of grace and the rescue of the lost.

The forces of evil, naturally enough, want evil to win the battle and triumph. But there is a third party called The Watchers. They are angels who have taken on immortal bodies and fathered children, the Nephilim. The Watchers also want the battle to end, but do not want Satan to win. So sometimes they help the forces of evil and sometimes they aid the forces of good.

High schoolers Sarah and David Krieger are orphans living in Boston. David is gifted with extraordinary abilities. Johnathan (Uncle John) Adler, their newly designated guardian, takes Sarah and David to his home in Washington state in the high country near the Cascade Mountains. Sarah notices that there is much more to Uncle John and his son Jake than meets the eye. There seems to be a shared secret between Jake, David and Uncle John from which Sarah is excluded.

If you like epic battles, hand-to-hand combat, and fantastic creatures, you will enjoy this book. It is filled with demons such as Baal and Moloch, hell hounds, gargoyles that come to life, and even familiar animals such as dogs and horses that have supernatural abilities.

I enjoyed the exhilaration of the combat in the story. I liked even better that the author uses the action to ask important thought-provoking questions that leave the reader with more than an action-packed story.

At one point, Samyael, one of the Watchers, had commissioned a life-sized painting of Christ upon the cross. He looks at it again and sees Mary crying at the foot of the cross. He asks:

“… why did Mary cry? If she believed in Him, then where was her faith? If she knew her son was the Christ, why did she weep?”

In the end Sarah surprises us. We learn John, Jake, and David’s secret. However, there are enough loose ends to let us know there will be a sequel.

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G. K. Chesterton on Paganism

I have been reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. This book, first published in 1925, has much to say to a 21st century reader. For me, the early chapters generated one of those wonderful intellectual events, when on reading Chesterton’s account, a number of disparate puzzles coalesced for me and came together in an ‘ah hah’ moment.

Let me explain. In chapters V-VII, Chesterton describes three strands of paganism which ran side-by-side: mythology with all of its fantastic stories; philosophy, particularly post-Socratic philosophy which has given our civilization so much; and those strands of paganism which worshiped demons and were linked with human sacrifice such as Moloch worshipers in Palestine and the Aztecs in the new world. In one sense these three strands were contradictory. How could philosophically rigorous thinkers participate in rites and observances related to Bacchus? How could peoples who at least believed in objective values, as Lewis calls it, the tao (The Abolition of Man), degenerate into human sacrifice?

Chesterton showed how these strands really represented three attempts to connect with the spiritual. Mythology was an act of the imagination. Philosophy was an act of reason, but the two always remained separate, if parallel, strands of connection to the spiritual Other. The darker strand of demonology and human sacrifice, was more pragmatic than the other two. At some point, reason and imagination were abandoned and people sought for what worked. And so dark powers were invoked, requiring hideous sacrifices, all to a pragmatic end – they’ll give us the power that we want.

Chesterton goes on to point out that synthesis between the philosophical strands and the imaginative yearning for mystical experience were only thoroughly synthesized in the Middle Ages. From my own reading I can see how Thomas Aquinas was able to bring reason, faith, and mystical experience together. Perhaps this is why pagan societies, for all their shortcomings, were often very open to the Gospel. The imagination, reason, along with objective value had prepared them.

One final point. In my last post, I discussed the book Living at the Crossroads. It was interesting to see how in our current age the imaginative strand and the logical strand have parted company again. We have Postmodernism (imaginative strand) and Modernism (logical, data-driven strand) existing side by side. We yearn for the beauty and meaning of Postmodernism and yet fall back to the sterile world of data and logic because in some sense it is more connected with reality and outcomes. We have lost the synthesis.

If you have read The Everlasting Man, I would appreciate hearing what you thought of it.

Thanks for reading,

Peter