Jesus Is the "True and Better" Jonah

I read the book of Jonah this morning and was struck by what sounded like strong similarities with a passage in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 4, verses 35-41. In Mark, Jesus suggests to his disciples that they cross the "sea", and while sailing "a great windstorm arose" which terrifies the disciples but does not wake Jesus from his slumber in the back. They come to him, asking him to do something lest they "perish"; he gets up, stops the storm, and everything is fine (except that the disciples are now afraid of Jesus, not the storm!).

As I read Jonah, some of these things seemed to have their parallel, as if Mark is picking a theme from his own heritage and demonstrating its present-day tragectory in Jesus' life and ministry. First, like Jesus, Jonah is sent by God to pagan Gentiles in Nineveh (Jesus was crossing the sea on his way to the Gerasenes, a non-Jewish people). Second, unlike Jesus, Jonah splits town in the opposite direction (this would be how Jesus is "better" than Jonah). Third, "a mighty tempest" comes which, like the one that terrified the disciples, gives Jonah's mariner-companions cause for fear of their lives (like the disciples) and which compells them to inquire of Jonah (after they wake him from his slumber in the ship's hold) to invoke his god like they had invoked theirs (just in case), "lest we perish". Fourth, like Jesus, Jonah proves to be the decisive person on board who can do something to fix the problem. Jesus, unlike Jonah, controls the storm, and thus speaks to it and stops it. Jonah can only obey God's command to go to Nineveh which pacifies God's wrath against him. And sixth, like the disciples, "the [mariners] feared the LORD exceedingly" after Jonah goes in the water and "the sea ceased from its raging."

Without wanting to claim too much, I think you'll agree that there's more here than just coincidence; sorting out all the parallels in their proper place and strength is for another time. But it was instructive to see, particularly how effective both men were in their mission: Nineveh repents and is spared God's wrath against their sin, and God's people (which, in Christ, includes Gentiles) are delivered from God's wrather against their sin.

Jesus is the "true and better" Jonah.

BHT

Reading Providence Like Personal Tea Leaves

I've had my share of unexpected, favorable "providences" in life, and read too much of the Bible, to believe that God is neither interested nor active in my life. However, I've also been tempted, as I know many Christians today are, to identify particular events in my life as what are called a "God-thing": events which are so completely extra-ordinary that they defy "normal" explanations, and that are (curiously) in my favor. But while this kind of "tea-leaves" identification has always bothered me to one degree or another, only recently have I come across a way to articulate the positive sense in which God is present and active without being pressed into identifying this or that event as "of God" (as though he is neither interested nor active in the rest of life, mine or anyone else's).

In The Courage to Be Protestant, David Wells says:

[God's greatness over all of life] is a reminder to us that God cannot be had on our terms. He cannot be manipulated. He cannot be bought. He is never subject to our will. If we know him, it is only on his terms. And the result often is that much of what he does by way of his providential rule is hidden from us. Even God's way of working with and through Israel, Paul says, is "unsearchable," and his ways "inscrutible" (Rom. 11:33).

His apparent absence from our lives, then, may not be a sign of his judgment. It may simply be an indication that his ways are beyond us, that he has not felt obliged to explain himself to us in every detail.

Does this not explain the unsettled feeling that even comes over Christians when someone starts to speak of God "doing this" or "wanting that" for us? Is this not acting and speaking as though God's ways of working (with Israel or anyone else) were not all that difficult to see or understand? Why must the natural expectation that "there must be a reason for this or that" issue in our prognosticating what that reason is or will be? Why is it not enough for us to believe the Scriptures when they say that there is, in fact, a reason for this or that, that it has to do with the cross of Christ, our (eternal) welfare and the glory of God, and then carry on in such confident faith?

It may have to do with the fact that we don't like not being able to justify God to skeptics we know, particularly when they are hostile. Regardless of why, it is instructive to us that Scripture, when it identifies God's purposes in particular events, almost always connects them to God's global purposes of redemption through his Son, Jesus Christ, the Messiah; the fact that our "prophetic utterances" almost never do that should indicate how disconnected our vision of life is from God's, and what vision we can and should strive to adopt for ourselves.

This is, of course, a life-purpose that we who know God in Christ will only begin to do in this life and will continue to do throughout eternity; but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try our hand at it now. It also doesn't mean that we stop looking for God's hand in the world. It simply means that when we find it we will see our employment, our spouse, our health, our team's victory, even the grocery store trip, in connection with the redemption of the world and the glory of God in it. It also means that we'll be more thoughtful in our attempts to "take every thought captive to obey Christ" when we attempt to understand and explain God's providential work in the lives of his people, of which we, individually, are each only one.

BHT

What are you, Deaf?

In the Gospel of John 10:1-6, Jesus speaks about how people come to follow him: they recognize his voice as that of their shepherd. A stranger, he says, they simply will not follow, because they do not recognize his voice. When John says, then, that "they did not understand what he was saying to them", are we not to understand that they, his listeners, are not his sheep? The irony is thick.

This brings up the question of discerning truth, though, for the only criteria for verifying Jesus' truthfulness - at least, the only one that Jesus gives - is that you either hear it or you don't. There's no "demonstration" that the shepherd (or even one of the sheep themselves) are able to, or supposed to, give that will prove "objectively" that, yes indeed, this is our shepherd. His sheep hear his voice.

The First Information Age: the 16th Century

Once again, the naivete of the (post)modern world has been demonstrated, and not surprisingly by Neil Postman. In his enjoyably impressive Technopoly, he writes about the overload of information that the modern book (not computer) created. In so doing, he reminds me that the "crises" of our day do not necessarily warrant the fear or euphoria we are so prone to give them, not unlike the toddler whose scraped knee does not necessarily call for mom or dad to drop everything and call 911 but rather, to give a kind word, a good dusting off, a gentle kiss or hug, and "See? All better, now back to having fun!" In many respects, the internet, with it's ability to exponentially grow information, warrants no more euphoria nor denunciations than the printing press received in its day, growing as it did (exponentially) the amount of information available to people. Here's Postman's analogy (pp. 61-62):

Nothing could be more misleading than the claim that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age in the early sixteenth century. Forty years after Gutenberg converted an old wine press into a printing machine with movable type, there were presses in 110 cities in six different countries. Fifty years after the press was invented, more than eight million books had been printed, almost all of them filled with information that had previously been unavailable to the average person. There were books on law, agriculture, politics, exploration, metallurgy, botany, linguistics, pediatrics, and even good manners. There were also assorted guides and manuals; the world of commerce rapidly became a world of printed paper through the widespread use of contracts, deeds, promissory notes, and maps.

So much new information, of so many diverse types, was generated that printers could no longer use the scribal manuscript as their model of a book. By the mid-sixteenth century, printers began to experiment with new formats, among the most important innovations being the use of Arabic numerals to number pages. Pagination led inevitably to more accurate indexing, annotation, and cross-referencing, which in turn was accompanied by innovations in punctuation marks, section heads, paragraphing, title-paging, and running heads. By the end of the sixteenth century, the machine-made book had a typographic form and a look comparable to books of today.

All of this is worth mentioning because innovations in the format of the machine-made book were an attempt to control the flow of information, to organize it by establishing priorities and by giving it sequence. Very early on, it was understood that the printed book had created an information crisis...

What I find illuminating, from my (post)modern perspective, is that what I (and so many) have thought was an "information overload" problem unique to our age by virtue of the specific electronic technologies we have created is actually not the first time in history such a problem has been created and faced. Once again, we are not quite so unique in history as we might otherwise be tempted to think; it remains to be seen what alterations to the Internet (or any other information medium) might be made to manage the volume (even accuracy) of information that we create.

BHT

Well Said, Mr. Lewis

One of the things that keeps me reading these days is coming across material that says clearly and insightfullly what I already think. C. S. Lewis is one such writer. In God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, there is an essay titled "Dangers of National Repentance" which at least sounds prescient (and, upon reading, proved to be so). Mr. Lewis says,

The idea of national repentance seems at first sight to provide such an edifying contrast to that national self-righteousness of which England is so often accused and with which she entered (or is said to have entered) the last war [WWII], that a Christian naturally turns to it with hope. Young Christians especially - last-year undergraduates and first-year curates - are turning to it in large numbers

...men fail so often to repent their real sins that the occasional repentance of an imaginary sin might appear almost desirable. But what actually happens to the youthful national penitent is a little more complicated than that. England is not a natural agent, but a civil society. When we speak of England's actions we mean the actions of the British Government. The young man who is called upon to repent of England's foreign policy is really being called upon to repent the acts of his neighbor - a Foreign Secretary or a Cabinet Minister. The first and fatal charm of national repentance is the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing - but, first, of denouncing - the conduct of others. Unfortunately the very terms in which national repentance is recommended to him conceal its true nature. By a dangerous figure of speech, he calls the Government not 'they' but 'we'. And since, as penitents, we are not encouraged to be charitable to our own sins, nor to give ourselves the benefit of any doubt, a Government which is called 'we' is ipso facto placed beyond the sphere of charity or even of justice. You can indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practicing contrition.

All Christians know that they must forgive their enemies. But 'my enemy' primarily means the man whom I am really tempted to hate and traduce. If you listen to young Christian intellectuals talking, you will soon find out who their real enemy is. He seems to have two names - Colonel Blimp and 'the business-man'. What is certain is that in asking such people to forgive the Germans and Russians and to open their eyes to the sins of England, you are asking them, not to mortify, but to indulge, their ruling passion.

Is it not, then, the duty of the Church to preach national repentance? I think it is. But the office can be profitably discharged only by those who discharge it with reluctance. We know that a man may have to 'hate' his mother for the Lord's sake. The sight of a Christian rebuking his mother, though tragic, may be edifying; but only if we are quite sure that he has been a good son and that, in his rebuke, spiritual zeal is triumphing, not without agony, over strong natural affection. The moment there is reason to suspect that he enjoys rebuking her - that he believes himself to be rising above the natural level while he is still, in reality, grovelling below it in the unnatural - the spectacle becomes merely disgusting. The hard sayings of our Lord are wholesome to those only who find them hard.

One cannot help but think of the growing popularity of the more progressive, liberal political views particularly amidst younger evangelicals, but also amidst the older mainstream Protestant denominations which have abstracted Christian virtues out of their biblical context and wedged them into any and all social and political talk.

One cannot also help feel enormously uncomfortable in an age when, in an attempt to avoid feigned repentance one aligns oneself so closely with political views hardly characterized by humility and true repentance.

It should be clear that only those who believe themselves to be the mouth-piece of God in a world where politics is not ultimate can real humility and prophetic proclamations be made and heard with profit. Also, Lewis' thoughts show once again that public debate was never intended to be, nor can it be, performed at the pace at which news and information are spewed forth today. And we are so much the more impoverished as a result.

BHT

False Dichotomies

As a parent, obedience is often on the forefront of my brain. It came to me this morning how often my insistence of obedience can so easily bring about as well as destroy peace in the home. If I destroy peace, it's often because I'm after obedience from my children in the wrong way or time, or even after unreasonable obedience - expecting that they do something beyond their capacities. This emphasis on obedience to create or maintain peace, it occurs to me, can (and has been) used against me, though - usually when I've ruined the peace. So the objection then comes like this: "Would you rather have peace or obedience?" as though the two are opposed (which, as I've just described, they can be). But turn it around and the dichotomy is self-evidently false: "Would you rather have disobedience or chaos?" Who in their right mind ever thinks of divorcing those two? Disobedience/lawlessness (whether in the home or in society) always go together, which is why, I think, parents of all ethnicities, religions, and ages have, to one degree or another, expected obedience (however they have defined it) to bring about peace and for peace to accompany compliance.

To oppose peace and obedience is to misunderstand both, and to rob oneself of them. It is to become a people-pleaser who will avoid conflict at any cost and call it "good", or a tyrrant whose obsessive and absolute rule is the only stability people (or a wife and/or children) know. Neither is good and neither is desirable. Which is why understanding one's children is so important, and why it is so hard to be an effective and beloved parent.

Protestant Purgatory or Catholic Correction?

Do Protestants and Catholics have more in common on this doctrine of Purgatory than you previously thought? Wright has some interesting comments worth pondering (Surprised by Hope, p. 171):

Paul makes it clear here [Romans 8] and elsewhere that it's the present like that is meant to function as purgatory. The sufferings of the present time, not some postmortem state, are the valley through which we have to pass in order to reach the glorious future. I think I know why purgatory became so popular, why Dante's middle volume is the one people most easily relate to. The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection from the present onto the future. This is why purgatory appeal to the imagination. It is our story here and now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings that form the gateway to life. Of course, this means that for millions of our theological and spiritual ancestors death brought a pleasant surprise. They had been gearing up for a long struggle ahead, only to find it was already over.

I'll not now go into the implications of believing in purgatory which Protestants tend to point out (i.e. that it denigrates the efficiency and sufficiency of the cross; that it places a portion, however small, of their resulting salvation in their own suffering as opposed to Jesus'). What I wish to point out is that for so long I had repudiated any sense of "suffering before heaven" because I had only associated the idea with purgatory and had neglected to see that which is so obvious: this life for God's people is, among other necessary things, nothing less than a purification of the soul, and that: by faith in the atoning work of Christ in our place. Yes, I can believe that.

BHT

Wright Speaks About Rewards Rightly

From Surprised by Hope, page 161-2 (italics Wright's):

We have been taught that we are justified by faith, not works, and, somehow, the very idea of being a Christian for what we will get out of it is distasteful. But the image of reward in the New Testament doesn't work like that. It isn't a matter of calculation, of doing a difficult job in order to be paid a wage. It is much more like working at a friendship or a marriage in order to enjoy the other person's company more fully. It is more like practicing golf in order that we can go out on the course and hit the ball in the right direction. It is more like learning German or Greek so that we can read some of the great poets and philosophers in those languages. The "reward" is organically connected to the activity, not some kind of arbitrary pat on the back, otherwise unrelated to the work that was done. And it is always far in abundance beyond any sense of direct or equivalent payment. The reward of being able to read and enjoy Homer for the rest of your life is way beyond any kind of one-for-one payment for the slog of learning Greek.

BHT

N.T. Wright On The Meaning of "citizens of heaven": Divine Imperialism

I am aware that, in particular theological circles, there's a whirlwind of opinion about N.T. Wright and whether his view on "justification" is orthodox or not. Be that as it may, I'm also aware that many of those same critics are as excited about his writing on the resurrection of Jesus as they are horrified about his views on justification. His larger, more encyclopedic, work titled The Resurrection of the Son of God is the foundation for his smaller, more popular and accessible book titled Surprised by Hope. A friend loaned the latter to me and I've found myself delightfully surprised by how much I enjoy it, and the Christian hope that, by it, Wright has made more clear.

A sample:

Philippi was a Roman colony. Augustus had settled his veterans there after the battles of Philippi (42 B.C.) and Actium (31 B.C.). Not all residents of Philippi were Roman citizens, but all knew what citizenship meant. The point of creating colonies was twofold. First, it was aimed at extending Roman influence around the Mediterranean world, creating cells and networks of people loyal to Caesar in the wider culture. Second, it was one way of avoiding the problems of overcrowding in the capital itself. The emperor certainly did not want retired soldiers, with time (and blood) on their hands, hanging around Rome ready to cause trouble. Much better for them to be establishing farms and businesses elsewhere.

So when Paul says, "We are citizens of heaven," he doesn't at all mean that when we're done with this life we'll be going off to live in heaven. What he means is that the savior, the Lord, Jesus the King - all of those were of course imperial titles - will come from heaven to earth, to change the present situation and state of his people. Jesus will not declare that present physicality is redundant and can be scrapped. Nor will he simply improve it, perhaps by speeding up its evolutionary cycle. In a great act of power - the same power that accomplished Jesus's own resurrection - he will change the present body into the one that corresponds in kind to his own as part of his work of bringing all things into subjection to himself. (p. 100)

BHT

NPFT: Part 3

This third installment of summarizing David Wells' critique of Modernity and the particular strain of Evangelicalism that it has spawned addresses some of the factors that have contributed to make public (and private) life feel superficial. This is not to say that nothing in modern life is substantive; rather, the atmoshere of modernity behaves and functions as though life is not as "weighty" as we might otherwise suspect. The longing for meaning and purpose that so haunts modern humanity does so precisely because we were made for meaning and purpose, and modernity denies this in its own peculiar ways. Why and How it does so is picked up in Chapter 2 of No Place for Truth, as summarized below.

Book thesis: historic, orthodox theological conviction and action are largely absent in the contemporary evangelical church, and this absence has led to a church driven by visions of pragmatic methodology and psychological need. This absence of theological conviction and purpose leaves the church adrift on the sea of human autonomy, and she is thus unable to be of any lasting value to the world and unable to glorify God.

Chapter 2 thesis: with all of its obvious material advantages - improved travel, communications, medical care, educational opportunities, freedom from provincialism - globalization has also released people from the regional and cultural distinctions from and in which they previously found meaning; in the process, a larger, more superficial "world cliche culture" has been created.

We live in a new civilization, one in which the values of modernity – technological progress, expansive knowledge, material affluence – have impoverished the modern spirit. One of the principal effects of the Enlightenment is that humanity is now freed from God and all other transcendent, traditional, and external forms of authority. We naively believe that scientific, technological, and material progress all imply an ability in human beings to also make better selves. This new civilization is a-cultural: urbanization is creating a world civilization that is technological and urban in nature (rather than national and cultural), has little regard for indigenous habits of mind, and is virtually the same in London, Tel Aviv, Washington, or Hong Kong.

Modernization is the process that organizes society around cities for the purpose of manufacturing and commerce. It is driven by capitalism and fueled by technological innovation, and is impersonal because its priorities are production and efficiency. Modernity is the public environment created by urbanization. In this public setting, city life requires a kind of friendliness that will facilitate and perpetuate progress, efficiency, and production – a friendliness that precludes people from being honest about themselves and their views, lest such honesty fracture interpersonal relationships and threaten or reduce productivity. Secularism is the psychological effect of modernity; it is the values and worldview that arise in a modern society, one that no longer takes its bearings from a transcendent order. The relativity and impermanence of everything – from values to possessions – creates a deep sense of homelessness, lost-ness, not belonging, of not belonging in our world. Secularism is the values of the modern age that accommodate life to the absence or irrelevance of God. Secularization is what makes that way of life believable and seem natural. Having stripped public and social life of the transcendent, secularization makes the values of secularism appear plausible and compelling. For this reason, secularization makes Christian faith appear odd and strips it of truthfulness.

BHT

The 21st Century in the Garden of Eden

Because humanity is a unity (meaning that we are all descended from Adam and we all therefore constitute the human race), it ought not surprise us to continually see expressions of its fallen nature throughout history (including the history recorded in the biblical text) even if our fallen nature often takes on various expressions. Human nature, in Adam, is depraved, no matter the time or the place at which it exists.

In reading Herman Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics, volume 3: Sin and Salvation in Christ, I came across the passage below. I was struck by how contemporary the events of the Fall sound from his pen, and how effectively someone from the late 1800s has articulated it for someone in the early 21st century. Biblical truth really is transcendent and eternally practical. See if you don't agree, as he discusses the meaning of God's prohibition against eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil:

[It means] the ability to stand on one's own feet and to find one's own way and speaks of the desire of humans to emancipate themselves from God by cultivating that ability (emphasis mine). In Genesis 3, the issue is not primarily the content of the knowledge that humans would appropriate by disobedience [as though God wants to keep his creatures ignorant of what is good and what is evil, what is wise and what is foolish] but the manner in which they would obtain it. By violating the command of God and eating of the tree, they would make themselves like God in the sense that they would position themselves outside and above the law [of God] and, like God, determine and judge for themselves [rather than trusting him for] what good and evil was. The knowledge of good and evil is not the knowledge of the useful and the harmful [which is necessary to living wisely and avoiding folly], of the world and how to control it [which is necessary to having dominion over the earth in], but the right and capacity to distinguish good and evil on one's own.

The issue in Genesis is indeed whether humanity will want to develop in dependence on God, whether it will want to have dominion over the earth and seek its salvation in submission to God's commandment; or whether, violating that commandment and withdrawing from God's authority and law, it will want to stand on its own feet, go its own way, and try its own "luck". When humanity fell, it got what it wanted; it made itself like God, "knowing good and evil" by its own insight and judgment.

BHT

NPFT: Part 2

My previous post, NPFT: Part 1, as a summary of the entire book No Place for Truth by David Wells, is now followed by my summary of the first chapter. I begin by stating a thesis that I think fairly summarizes the the whole volume, then a statement summarizing the chapter, then a more developed summary of the chapter. My hope is that anyone jumping in can get caught up by reading the statements without having to go back and read everything (though that would help).

Book thesis: historic, orthodox theological conviction and action are largely absent in the contemporary evangelical church, and this absence has led to a church driven by visions of pragmatic methodology and psychological need.

Chapter 1 summary: Modern humanity is stretched too thin. The old world of traditional, established boundaries (e.g. moral, geographic, and knowledge) ensured social and cultural stability; our modern world exposes us to disorienting experience- and information-overload.

Prior to the 19th century in America, the church was “both the place where God addressed his people … and the knot that bound society together.” (p. 24) With the onset of modernity, that knot has been loosed. Part of the Old World’s sense of stability came from the bonds formed by each town’s boundaries (i.e. geographical, organizational, economic, psychological). Today, via television, for example, “we are contemporary observers of the entire world; we are everywhere and have access to everything and thus carry the awful load of being omniscient and omnipresent.” (p. 43) The automobile offers freedom from one’s geographic community (not by psychological escape like that of television, but by physically removing one from one’s community) and has hastened the disappearance of one’s ties to location. Our experience is now universal, not local. It is boundless, not personal. Modernization has worked to bring about the intrusion of the gigantic world outside. Wenham, Mass. (Wells’ case study) made it’s own passage into the modern world principally through these channels of travel and communication. Notably, these two phenomena (travel and communication) are developments that are uniquely suited to rapidly and indiscriminately distributing people and information across geographic space, by which the “awful load” is created and felt.

BHT

NPFT: Part 1

In 1993, I was a college freshman and knew nothing of the term "evangelical", let alone what others, either friend or foe, thought of it. That year, David Wells published the first in a line of four volumes aimed at constructively criticizing the movement. That first volume, No Place for Truth, was said to possibly be "the most provocative book evangelical pastors and laypeople ever read". That has been true for me.

Over the next several weeks, I will be posting first a summary of the book's thesis, followed by chapter summaries that support that thesis. In my summaries, I will aim less at evaluating his argument than I will at strictly summarizing it so that his message is heard without having to sift explicitly through my thoughts as well. This exercise will likely be more fruitful for myself than for any of you, I suppose, since I will have had to wrestle first with Wells, then with myself to articulate it without distorting it. Of course, I will fail at times, and you'll be able to tell what I think of his points.

Since what he has to say is meant for the health and welfare of the church, I will appreciate comments or inquiries, of which I may well not have thought myself. Others' perspectives are always welcome.

Engaging ministry, culture, and the world on the basis of theological reflection and conviction has all but disappeared from the church in America and in the West today, and we are not the better for it. To a large degree, this has come about as a result of the modernization of the West. In the wake and as a result of the 18th century Enlightenment, capitalism, technological innovation, urbanization, and telecommunications have converged to create a milieu (known as “modernity”) in which transcendent meaning to life and objective truth governing morality (seen as left-over consequences of the God-hypothesis of pre-Enlightenment views) have been abandoned. In their place, the values of modernity – efficiency and pragmatism – have usurped God as the ultimate criteria for truth and meaning and have relegated religion and revelation to the status of myths from a bygone era. As a result, moral conviction and theological truth no longer exercise authority over human pursuits; rather, pragmatism now governs society, both inside and outside the church.

With respect to 20th century Evangelicalism, David Wells argues that such a shift in thinking and doing has taken place as follows: first, that the modernization of the West came as a result of the technological and economic development that followed in the wake of the Enlightenment, and that it has taken over the urban centers of the West (“urban” being defined as a city that is technologically and economically developed); second, that this modernization ushered in a new value system called “modernity” that prizes efficiency and pragmatism for progress above moral or principled criteria; third, that this effect has reduced man from a moral, existential being in search of objective truth and in need of redemption to a psychological being in search merely of psychological wholeness and in need of subjective affirmation; this renders transcendence and theology irrelevant and makes experience and pragmatism ultimate and authoritative; and, fourth, that Evangelicals have embraced modernity and its values uncritically (often unknowingly) and are now operating within this framework, using efficiency and relevance as ultimate criteria of truth and progress. Evangelicalism is now defined sociologically and by ministry-methods rather than by theological conviction and confession; we have embraced modernity’s values of efficiency and pragmatism without asking whether we should do so, or what effects it may or may not have on our message and ministry.

Evangelicals today do not dismiss theology because of their unbelief, but because of its perceived uselessness; that is, they confess orthodox theology but more typically do not self-consciously minister in light of it. Nonetheless, they do operate with a theology: it is centered on a God who is on easy terms with modernity and Who, in the absence of moral realities, is quick to endorse modern theories regarding church growth and making people psychologically whole. “Without a vision of God as Other, different from and standing over against the modern world, there is no compelling reason to think thoughts about the world which are not essentially modern.” (p. 291) Pastors today stand or fall by their personality, not their character. Our questions today hardly ever penetrate to the heart of moral reality because modern life is hardly ever about moral concerns. Those who are most relevant to the modern world are those who are irrelevant to the moral purpose of God; ironically, though, those who are irrelevant to the world by virtue of their relevance to God actually have the most to say to the world. They are, in fact, the only ones who have anything to say to it.

An Overlooked Obstacle to Education (Public, Private, or Otherwise)

As a teacher, I encounter the same obstacle every year: students resist learning and enter the classroom predisposed toward skepticism. Most of them are not always hostile (though they certainly can be), but even when they're not, there seems to be a cognitive membrane of resistance to what I'm trying to communicate; autobiographical information is the easiest thing to get across. Whether the students are accomplished academically, average, or struggle, they all seem to share a kind of resistance to learning, participation, and/or generally being open to new things.


One intriguing proposal to explain some of the origin of this phenomenon is rooted in television viewing habits of younger generations, specifically the quantity and nature of violence they view. Notice that I said both "quantity" and "nature". In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman has proposed a distinction between the violence portrayed on television dramas, movies, sitcoms, etc. versus the violence portrayed on news shows, talk shows, and other "reality" types of viewing.


In discussing the difference, he says,

...we must keep in mind that the stylized murders, rapes, and plunderings that are depicted on weekly fictional programs are ... clearly marked as fiction or pseudo-fairy tales, and we may assume (although not safely) that some children do not take them to be representations of adult life. Far more impressive are the daily examples of violence and moral degeneracy that are the staple of TV news shows. These [news and talk shows] are not mitigated by the presence of recognizable actors and actresses. They are put forward as the stuff of everyday life. These are real murders, real rapes, real plunderings.

So what's the difference? Mainly, that while the "stylized" shows portray reality as it might be for some, the news and talks shows present life as it really is for some one in particular. Added to this is the sheer volume of shows and hours that reveal to children what the adult world is like. The result, not surprisingly, is that as children watch more and more television, they are exposed more and more to the world of adults and its deficiencies. Postman continues:

[There are] two items of particular interest as examples of how television is unsparing in revealing the secrets of adult life. The first concerns the incompetence or at least vulnerability of political leaders. In [television's] quest for material, especially of a "human interest" variety, never before have so many people known so much about the wives, children, mistresses, drinking habits, sexual preferences, slips of the tongue, even inarticulateness of their national leaders. Those who did know at least some of this were kept informed by newspapers and magazines, which is to say that until television, the dark or private side of political life was mostly the business of adults. Children are not newspaper readers and never have been. But they are television viewers and therefore are continually exposed to accounts of the frailties of those who in a different age would have been perceived as without blemish. The result of this is that children develop what may be called adult attitudes - from cynicism to indifference - toward political leaders and toward the political process itself. [emphasis mine]

To this less than perfect picture of adulthood (which children are largely spared except for television's influence) is added the "ineptitude, strife, and worry" that fill the adult world. Postman adds that "...the causes of marital conflict, the need for life insurance, the infinite possibilities of misunderstanding, and the myriad afflictions of the human body" are all reason to think that the adult world isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be. And when it comes to education (whether national, state, or local districts), much of what we via television hear has less to do with good news and success stories in general and more to do with perennial financial deficits, contract disputes, physical or sexual abuse of students by teachers, administrators, or coaches, unqualified or "out of field" teachers, or chronic failure of an entire school, district, or state to "move" its students academically. Whether such pessimistic realities are true or not is beside the point. Rather, these are the circumstances and mindsets to which children are exposed via television which they would be spared if such reports and complaints and problems were communicated via media not so easily and conveniently accessed by children.


No wonder, then, that many of my students begin the year sounding more like their parents or the news than like children when they criticize me, the school, the district, or education in general. They have not entered my room with expectant attitudes of discovery, intellectual growth, academic achievement, or more fully realizing their human potential as learners. What they do bring, however, is plenty of demands that I justify my existence as a teacher and mathematic's existence as a "practical" subject worth their time.


Herein lies no small obstacle to education: a student's predisposition to not trust those placed over him or her. And parents know this at least as well, if not better, than teachers: a child who will not trust you will not obey - whether it's for their good or not. They simply will not entrust themselves to the judgment of another if they do not trust him. As it turns out, one of the best ways that parents best prepare their children both to be learners as well as fruitful members of a society of any kind (civic, religious, social, leisure, etc.) is to teach them to trust those who come to them with worthy credentials. This will not cure the abuse of trust that evil men and women will commit, but it will pave the way most effectively for children to enter adulthood in a way that permits, rather than inhibits, learning and growth.


BHT

C.F.H. Henry: Unbelief Is Not Modern

With all the attention and adulation that I've given David Wells' thesis (that modernity has made the gospel implausible), the late Carl F.H. Henry has some comments that have given me pause and that I think have begun to clarify what the root of unbelief is and modernity's challenge to biblical faith.

The crisis of word and truth is not, however, in all respects peculiar to contemporary technocratic civilization. Its backdrop is not to be found in the mass media per se, as if these sophisticated mechanical instruments of modern communication were uniquely and inherently evil.

Why is it that the magnificent civilizations fashioned by human endeavor throughout history have tumbled and collapsed one after another with apocalyptic suddenness? Is it not because, ever since man's original fall...sin has plummeted human existence into an unbroken crisis of word and truth? A cosmic struggle between truth and falsehood, between good and evil, shadows the whole history of mankind. The Bible depicts it as a conflict between the authority of God and the claims of the Evil One.

We need therefore to abandon the notion that modern science and its discoveries are the major obstacles to a living faith in the God of revelation and redemption. In earlier prescientific times, men negotiated their spiritual revolt just as vigorously and did so without invoking science and technology as a pretext.

[quoting Oscar Cullman, he continues:] "We must see clearly ... that the most recent discoveries ... in no way make faith in salvation history more difficult than it was for men during the days of early Christianity." (God, Revelation and Authority, Volume 1: God Who Speaks and Shows, p. 21)

This last statement is what caught my attention, and I had to ask myself if that is what I had heard Wells arguing: Does modernity make the gospel more difficult to believe? Then I recalled that Wells himself chose his words carefully when he wrote that "divine Providence was much easier to assert [not necessarily "to believe"] when Western culture still believed in progress." (p. 160, God in the Wasteland). Among other things, modernity has helped break down the Enlightenment assumption of human progress, which is closely linked with (though not identical to) the Christian doctrine of Providence. This is significant because, in saying this, Wells can still affirm that while the gospel may be less plausible in the modern world (over against the pre-modern and/or ancient worlds), it is nonetheless still just as repugnant to those who do understand it intellectually (whether ancient, pre-modern, modern, or postmodern) and still refuse to embrace it as true and beautiful.

It is one thing for a message to be hard to communicate, and another thing for that message to be joyfully embraced once it is understood. Stripping the modern canvass off the world may make the gospel more plausible, but it won't do anything to soften the unrepentant hearts of a fallen humanity, nor will it make the gospel any more attractive to such blinded souls, though it stood before them in the everlasting light of the Son.

BHT

John Calvin for Postmoderns: citation

In my first post on Calvin, I cited his Institutes of the Christian Religion without giving the title. I suppose the few who read my posts probably knew what I was citing, but since this the web I can never be sure who's reading.

John Calvin for Postmoderns: Follow Up

My aim in the previous post was to point out that God's self-authenticating presence and revelation of himself, through the Bible, by means of the Spirit's illuminating work in that Word is a good thing for believers to know and believe, even though it may sound subjective (and, therefore, threatening). But that's the point: hearing is subjective, in that you can't prove you heard the birds sing, or the horn honk, or the kid laugh. It's possible to marshall evidence that such things have happened, could happen, and even did happen the morning or day you claim that they did, but how can you prove infallibly that your ears heard them?

If proving the truth of Scripture were possible by some test completely apart from God's authority, the authority of that revelation would no longer reside in God but in the credibility of the means that were employed. If I were to prove to you that I am 6'5" tall, I would need an accurate tape measure. But once we both agree that the tape is "objective" (i.e. that it measures accurately), you are no longer believing my claim based on my testimony but on the tape's. This removes any authority that my testimony might have carried. The same is true of God. If we expect some other means of discerning the truthfulness of his revelation to come in and bear witness for him, his testimony is no longer authoritative, and we have robbed God of his authoritative self-revelation. How could we possibly expect something outside God to be more truthful than God himself?

This is not to knock evidential arguments, or reasoned discussions, or biblical exegesis: we do well to show evidences of God's Word being verified as true and corroborating what even unbelievers can discern through natural means. However, if we think that such evidences, or even our own eloquent reason, are enough for people to "see" the beauty of the gospel and embrace it, we (as Calvin said) "mock the Holy Spirit", in that we leave no room for him to work in, through, above, or even in spite of our work. He has, in essence, no work left to perform when we try to remove all subjective aspects from seeing the truthfulness of Scripture: the Spirit has, then, no need to "bear witness with our spirit that we are sons of God", and we would be poor indeed if such work was left undone. We also, in neglecting the Spirit's subjective work of bearing witness to the truthfulness of Scripture, forget that everything we do - as either believer or unbeliever - is done as a result of the sustaining power and presence of the Spirit, whether by common or saving grace.

BHT

John Calvin for Postmoderns

Our day is one in which people tend to believe only those things that can be demonstrated, proved, or shown by some empirical method; we have become a "Show Me" culture. Long before such proofs became popular, the 16th century reformer, John Calvin, recognized some of the problems with people subjecting Truth to such tests (even if it remains a valid method for scientific discovery). The other day I came across some of what he had to say and was encouraged to find that the nature of Christian faith hasn't changed much. In fact, it's as relevant as ever (all excerpts are from Book 1, chapters 7 & 8).

To ask for proofs other than God's personal testimony is to "mock the Holy Spirit", as though some other method or person could better persuade us of God's truth; it is to expect God to speak without being present:

They mock the Holy Spirit when they ask: Who can convince us that these writings came from God? Who can assure us that Scripture has come down whole and intact even to our very day?

"But how does one know when it is God who speaks?" the critic/cynic may ask. To this Calvin responds,

Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Indeed Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.

He even names this quality of Scripture, and shows why it is good, both for us and for God, that his Word be "self-authenticating":

Scripture indeed is self-authenticated; hence, it is not right to subject it
to proof and reasoning. And the certainty it deserves with us, it attains by the
testimony of the Spirit. By this power [of the Spirit's witness to Scripture's
self-authenticating authority and truthfulness] we are drawn and inflamed,
knowingly and willingly, to obey him, [and, in fact,] more vitally and more
effectively than [we could ever be drawn] by mere human willing or knowing!

Truth is cleared of all doubt when, not sustained by external props, it serves as its own support.

And those who persist in seeking after incontrovertible proof (in contrast to particular evidences) of Scripture's truth and authority simply don't have a taste for truth:

Consequently, those for whom prophetic doctrine is tasteless ought to be thought of as lacking taste buds.

As Jesus put it, "I am he who bears witness of myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness of me," and "You know neither me, nor my Father; if you knew me, youwould now my Father also." (John 8:18, 19) And perhaps most difficult of all to hear, "He who is of God hears the words of God; for this reason you do not hear, because you are not of God." (John 8:47) Ironically, this is merely the negative way of saying, as he did in John 10, that the sheep of the shepherd recognize their shepherd - and ignore a stranger - by his voice, and not some external, objective testimony apart from the shepherd himself. For this would detract from the shepherd's authority and truthfulness and place it in the evidence itself, rather than the shepherd.

No wonder Jesus said repeatedly, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

BHT

Resolutions: Best If Served With Zeal

I've never thought highly of resolutions (I'm thinking New Year's mainly). It always seemed to me strange that just because the calendar changed, so many people (inexplicably and all of a sudden) have epiphanies of what's wrong in their life and how to fix it. I always wondered, "If a new date was all you needed, why wait till Jan. 1?"

Needless to say, then, is how un-resolved my own life has been over the years. I've usually stuck to either implementing any improvement-changes "now" instead of trying to make them coincide with New Year's, or watching everyone else's resolutions slowly descend like a day-old helium balloon. This year is no different, but for one thing. I realized how essential that new-found enthusiasm is, whether it comes at year's end or not.

What has always frustrated me about my own resolutions is how quickly my resolve disolves and becomes diluted, not like sugar in coffee, but like strength in the body: rather than have it in the one muscle that needs it, it seems to spread throughout my whole person, leaving the particular "resolution muscle" in question weak and impotent. Knowing that this happens to everyone making resolutions, I've just never got excited about them; getting hyped up before a game that I know I'm going to lose never made sense.

Then it hit me. If it weren't for those enthusiastic times of clear-headed thinking (that usually come with time off around Christmas), we'd never get around to making resolutions in the first place. We'd be just as tired and foggy-headed as we are in March or November. The vigor and zeal of resolutions (whether New Year's or others) are important, not because we find ways to sustain them throughout the year (we don't), but because without them we'd never have the energy or gumption to make daring and far-fetched plans in the first place. We'd never dream to be better people or do greater things.

Yes, our resolve in the midst of life dwindles; no, we won't implement our resolutions without mistakes. But unflagging resolve and perfect execution are never the goal. Then what's the goal? That depends on the resolution. And "thar's the rub". There's a difference between the goal that the resolution is meant to help you attain and the resolution itself. If the execution isn't what you expected, that's not necessarily a bad thing; keep the goal before you. If you're closer to your goal, odds are you're doing fine, and that not adhering to your specific plan to get there need not vex you.

I've got some resolutions this year, and I've actually been excited about beginning. We'll see how well I do. But I'm more comfortable knowing that my resolve will dwindle this time. It's not that I'll find a way to keep it going; it's that the plans I made are worth the effort, no matter how poorly I execute them.

BHT