This morning at church while everyone was waiting to receive communion, my 5-year-old daughter asked me a question:
Her: Daddy, did God make everything?
Me: Yep. He made the whole world and everything in it.
Her: He make bees?
Me: Sure did.
Her: But bees sting me! Why He make bees sting me?
Me: Good question… Well, that’s just how bees work. That’s what they do. But it’s OK. Even if they hurt sometimes, later they won’t hurt. God is going to fix everything broken with the world, just not quite yet. Even though there is some bad stuff right now we trust him that it will all be OK.
It seems to me that any working solution to the problem of evil has to take time into account. People ask angrily, “If God is so good, why did he let me son die?” Good question. It’s obviously because God isn’t really in control of everything, right? Well, only if you assume that if he was he would immediately wipe everything evil from existence, including our own memories of it, like some kind of angelic Men in Black agent retroactively putting things back as if they never fell off the shelf to begin with.
OK, maybe, but that is just one rather narrow conception of how a creator could fix his creation. It’s the way someone who watches a lot of movies involving time travel might suggest God make everything right. But God isn’t like Dr. Who only with a 2-ton sonic screwdriver. According to what we Christians consider his special revelation, his stories work out a bit differently. They take time – many lifetimes of men to complete. It ends with a resurrection – a bringing back to life of those taken by death that is so dramatic, it will make the day of their perishing seem like small potatoes.
He doesn’t erase our memory through induced amnesia, but by overwhelming it with a glorious future. Today we ask, “Where O death is your sting?” and Death speaks right up and says, “Right here sucka! Boom.” But THEN, we will ask the same question (1 Cor. 15:55) and Death will reply with nothing more than a half-hearted mumble. So you can doubt that such a thing will ever happen and consequently live in fear and grasping for what you can get in the short term. Or you can trust the maker.
Time is the medium we exist in and He will work within that medium to restore us. When extra crappy days hit, we are tempted not to trust. All creation groans, but he will not wait forever. The ancient prophets knew this, even though they understand very little. As hard as it is, it’s easier for us to trust since we have seen (or heard) of the first key step in this plan worked out – the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The more we contemplate Him, the easier it will be to trust in the (seemingly distant) future putting to rights.
A few weeks ago after Robert Capon passed away, everyone was posting tributes to him. I did the same. Among them (I forget where exactly now) was this wonderful illustration of his I had not seen before. It is definitely worth repeating.
Faith doesn’t do anything; it simply enables us to relate ourselves to someone else who has already done whatever needs doing.
Illustration: Imagine that I am in the hospital, in traction, with casts on both arms and both legs. And imagine further that every time you visit me, I carry on despairingly about the fact that my house, in my absence, is falling apart: the paint is peeling, the sills are rotting, the roof is blowing away in the wind.
But then imagine that one day, after a considerable interval, you come to me and say, “Robert, I have just paid off the contractor I engaged to repair your house. It’s all fixed — a gift from me to you.” What are my choices in the face of such good news? I cannot go out of the hospital to check for myself—I cannot know that you have fixed my house for me. I can only disbelieve you or believe you. If I disbelieve you, I go on being a miserable bore. But if I believe you — if I trust your word that you have done the job for me — I have my first good day in a long while. My faith, you see, accomplishes nothing but my own enjoyment.
Look at it another way. Suppose I had decided, while staring at the hospital ceiling, that if only I could work up enough faith, you would undertake to repair my house. And suppose further that I had grunted and groaned through every waking hour trying to get my faith meter up to red hot. What good would that have done unless you had decided, as a gift to me in response to no activity on my part whatsoever, to do the job for me? No good, that’s what. Faith doesn’t fix houses — carpenters and painters do. And faith doesn’t pay bills, either. Faith, therefore, is not a gadget by which I can work wonders. It is just trust in a person who actually can work them — and who has promised me he already has.
These don’t really stand up as their separate posts, so here they are with just a bit of commentary. Bold emphasis is mine. The chart is barely related.
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That logic demands things be zero or one, utterly true or utterly false assumes that no persons, no humans live in it’s realm. Mathematics, often considered the most purely abstract of the sciences still does not often talk in such terms. Here, Polya accurately describes the continuum:
Let us imagine that our confidence in B changes gradually, varies “continuously.” We imagine that B becomes less credible, then still less credible, scarcely believable, and finally false. On the other hand, we image that B becomes more credible, the still more credible, practically certain, and finally true. If the strength of our conclusion varies continually in the same direction as the strength of our confidence in B, there is little doubt what our conclusion should be since the two extreme cases (B false, B true) are clear. (p.24)
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What’s the first step to really solving a problem? Taking person ownership of it. How do you know you have done that? Easy. It’s obvious to everyone around you.
A problem becomes a problem for you when you propose it to yourself. A problem is not yet your problem just because you are supposed to solve it in an examination. If you wish that somebody would come and tell you the answer, I suspect that you did not yet set that problem to yourself in earnest. But if you are anxious to find the answer yourself, by your own means, then you have made the problem really yours, you are serious about it. Setting a problem to yourself is the beginning of the solution, the essential first move in the game. It is a move in the nature of a decision.
You need not tell me that you have set that problem to yourself, you need not tell it to yourself; your whole behavior will show that you did. Your mind becomes selective; it becomes more accessible to anything that appears to be connected with the problem, and less accessible to anything that seems unconnected. You eagerly seize upon any recollection, remark, suggestion, or fact that could help you solve your problem, and you shut the door upon other things. When the door is so tightly shut that even the most urgent appeals of the external world fail to reach you, people say that you are absorbed. (p.145)
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You have a plan of a solution to your problem. Is it a good plan? Here is a handy checklist from Polya. Think about your solution and check these off to gain more confidence in it. If you can’t check very many of these off, then you should probably work on it some more to make sure it is really any good.
1. This plan takes all the data into account.
2. This plan provides for a connection between the data and the unknown.
3. This plan has features that are often useful in solving problems of this kind.
4. This plan is similar to one that succeed in solving an analogous problem.
5. This plan succeeded in solving a particular case of the problem.
6. This plan succeeded in solving part of the problem (in finding some of the unknowns or in proving a weaker conclusion)
(p.153)
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This passage is really worth considering, especially with regards to education.
To a philosopher with a somewhat open mind all intelligent acquisition of knowledge should appear sometimes as a guessing game, I think. In science as in everyday life, when faced by a new situation, we start out with some guess. Our first guess may fall wide of the mark, but we try it and, according to the degree of success, we modify it more or less. Eventually, after several trials and several modifications, pushed by observations and led by analogy, we may arrive at a more satisfactory guess. The layman does not find it surprising that the naturalist works in this way. The knowledge of the naturalist may be better ordered with a view to selecting the appropriate analogies, his observations may be more purposeful and more careful, he may give more fancy names to his guesses and call them “tentative generalizations,” but the naturalist adapts his mind to a new situation by guessing like the common man. And the layman is not surprised to hear that the naturalist is guessing like himself. It may appear a little more surprising to the layman that the mathematician is also guessing. The result of the mathematician’s creative work is demonstrative reasoning, a proof, but the proof is discovered by plausible reasoning, by guessing.
If this is so, and I believe that this is so, there should be a place for guessing in the teaching of mathematics. Instruction should prepare for, or at least give a little taste of, invention. At all events, the instruction should not suppress the germs of invention in the student. A student who is somewhat interested in the problem discussed in class expects a certain kind of solution. If the student is intelligent, he foresees the solution to some extend: the result may look thus and so, and there is a chance that it may be obtained by such and such a procedure. The teacher should try to realize what the students might expect, he should find out what they do expect, he should point out what they should reasonably expect. If the student is less intelligent and especially if he is bored, he is likely to produce wild and irresponsible guesses. The teacher should show that guesses in the mathematical domain my be reasonable, respectable, responsible. I address myself to teachers of mathematics of all grades and say: Let us teach guessing! (p.158)
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Funny
Even the best School of Education has not yet succeeded in producing the marvelous teacher who has such an excellent training in teaching methods that he can make his students understand even those things that he does not understand himself. (p.160)
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Qui nimium probat, nihil probat. That is, if you prove too much, you prove nothing. If you prefer a French sentence to a Latin saying, here is one: “La mariee est trop belle”; the bride looks too good. (p.162)
If your plan appears to superficially solve all problems, it is likely not a very good plan. When pushed on particular points, it will almost certain not stand up. Complex problems nearly always have relatively complex solutions.
This reminds me of a quote by H.L Mencken:
“For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
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I tried to describe what this book was about to a colleague. I think it, especially the final chapter, is an exercise in tearing apart intuition and and finding that each tiny step makes complete sense from a probability standpoint. Polya at one point uses an example of a priest who walks by a dice player in a town square in Italy. After the gambler throws boxcars 5 times in a row, the priest curses at the man and accuses him of cheating. He began by truly thinking the best of the man, but this was eventually overruled by the occurrence of what was almost certainly impossible. He dissects several other situations such as evidence of a murder presented in a courtroom and breaks each step down into numbers. We make these jumps very quickly in our heads, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be articulated mathematically. The point is that the reasoning behind intuition is generally sound and that we can use it to make good guesses for a starting point when solving problems.
One final word: The first book in this two volume set (Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning) was a lot more interesting. This one had a lot less prose and many more raw math examples, most of which I just skimmed.
Maire Brennan has long been a favorite vocalist and musician of mine. Her early work with Clannad is a bit spotty, but her first couple of solo albums were frequently sublime in their production, composition, songwriting, and emotional power. Unfortunately her most recent work has suffered severely from the perilous “drowning in reverb” virus. Nevertheless, there are still a few gems to be found on occasion, like this one.
If it’s true how will I agree
What the poet says of history?
Search the ashes of time to change my world
I’m supposed to preach on 1 Corinthians 4 in a few weeks. Nothing in the passage has stood out to me yet as being a really clear place to jump off from. I’m going to try a few writing/thinking exercises to see if I can come up with something to talk about that has more gospel in it. This is my first stab and rewriting or expanding on the text.
This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.
-1 Cor. 4:1 (ESV)
How should you think of us? As stewards of the mysteries of God. What kind of mystery is this we are talking about? What is so mysterious about what we have to say? It’s because you can’t learn this stuff on your own.
That God exists, that the natural world is beautiful and amazing and unique – all of these you could have figured out on your own. Most of you have figured them out more or less, even if some are confused. You know there is good and evil. You know there is right and wrong. You can feel it in your very bones, not just inside your soft socially-constructed grey matter. Karma feels real. It also feels terminal. You taste death every day, even those of you who live in luxury and are able to sufficiently insulate yourself from it most of the time.
What is the end of all this? Who is behind all this? These are things that cannot be derived simply by observing the world with your senses. When you use your eyes and ears and hands to detect the living world around you, you can see evidence everywhere of a creator, of order, and also of evil. You can put your rational mind to good use and contemplate these things and discover patterns and some of the logic behind the workings of nature and even of the dubious nature of the heart of man. But you cannot find the end, cannot find the key, cannot know the originator. These are mysteries. That is where we come in. We are stewards of the mysteries of God. He delivered to us – his chosen people – some special communications about who He is and who we are and what we are about on this earth. You may have heard that God spoke to the children of Abraham many years ago. This isn’t like the myth about Zeus or gods from the stars, but something that happened in history to real people. Well, what has been written down of this we know well and it turns out they all point toward one person, one event concerning a certain Jesus of Nazareth. This was no mere man but God himself come to all of mankind. He lived and was murdered by the people and then came back from the dead of his own accord three days later. If you had been there, you could have seen these things for yourself. But no matter – we get to tell you all about them and explain some of what they mean. It is important that we do a good job telling you about God and his desire that you know him yourself. What we have to say is not a condemnation to any of you, but rather good news, extremely good news about life and death and love and all the things that you know deep in your soul are the most important aspects of your existence.
Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful. But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God. (v. 2-5)
We do not care what any human court thinks of us. We do not even care what we ourselves think of ourselves. Our judgement does not count and neither does the crowds’. We stand before the judgement of God and so do you. But take heart! He has sent someone to mediate for us who will ensure that our death sentence is lifted. Woe to us if we do not instruct you in this so that you realize what has been given to you.
We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless,and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.
But not everyone wants to hear the good news we are compelled to deliver. In fact, many people consider us to be a bad joke. That’s OK – it’s just part of the job. The enemy of God, though his time and reach are both short has stirred up the hearts of men in strife against what we have to pronounce. Do you love having lots of money, lots of wealth? Do you love accomplishing great things and feeling important? These are good things to possess, but no end in themselves. Some of you are rich and some are poor, but you are all mortal. The good news we have to bring you of Jesus Christ has a leveling effect – it proves all people to be the same. The world you live in hates this sort of fairness. It wants to chop people into groups – the weak and the powerful, the have and the have-not, the shiny elite and the filth on the street. And if you only use yours eyes and ears, what they are saying about how great they are and how lame you are seems to make sense. You should work hard to be more like them they suggest. This seems natural. But the mysterious good news we have for you is eternal life is intended for all of you.
I do not write these things to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.I urge you, then, be imitators of me.
Put away your foolish striving and rivalry and learn to love each other as equals. What we have to tell you is not a formula for behaving this way – nothing like that would actually work anyway. What we have to tell is a good news about how our wickedness has been erased, is being erased, will be erased and the beauty inherent in each of us brought out and amplified when this relatively short age is over. Even now, we hear the echoes of new creation. Jesus Christ was the first to go down this route, blazing the trail for us to follow. Though there are plenty who mock us and call our story silly, you who have had your hearts stirred by the spirit of God when you heard it know of its veracity. To the people that don’t believe us, we can only assume God has something else in store for them at the moment. Perhaps they will listen to someone else later. Perhaps their children will. It is of no business of ours. But you are our business because we have become like fathers to you. We are not here to Lord it over you as if you were our slaves, but love you as if you were are own children. But just as any father or mother desires their children to grow straight and strong, we must on occasion chastise or discipline you. Don’t act like teenagers who think they know everything. That is why I have written this long latter to you. I hope some of you will be humble and willing to learn.
It seems to me that inductive reasoning in the mathematical domain is easier to study than in the physical domain. The reason is simple enough. In asking a mathematical question, you may hope to obtain a completely unambiguous answer, a perfectly sharp Yes or No. In addressing a question to Nature, you cannot hope to obtain an answer without some margin of uncertainty. You predict that a lunar eclipse will begin (the shadow will indent the disk of the moon) at such and such a time. Actually, you observe the beginning of the eclipse 4 minutes later than predicted. According to the standards of Greek astronomy your prediction would be amazingly correct, according to modern standards it is scandalously incorrect. A given discrepancy between prediction and observation can be interpreted as confirmation or refutation. Such interpretation depends on some kind of plausible reasoning the difficulties of which in “physical situations” begin a step earlier than in “mathematical situations.”
George Polya, Patterns of Plausible Inference, p.24
When you play with imaginary things, then you set the terms – you are the observer of a world in which you had a hand in writing. The world may seem to be alive and take on a mind of its own, but it does so within the bounds of the words and images you have allowed it to inhabit. The mathematician works with these sorts of things. So does the theoretical physicist, for the most part. The theologian sometimes does. It is likely he is at his weakest when doing so but it is sometimes necessary, regardless.
“Difficulties” as Polya says, start a step earlier for the person studying the natural world. You may look under your microscope and say there is no virus in this drop of blood, here, but can you be sure there isn’t one lurking in the drop next to it? You may find yourself photographing a new species of bird in the everglades and sudden find an alligator snapping at your heals. Shoot – it flew away. This guy here was trying to photograph lions. Does he understand more now?
At what point did he have to stop worrying about his lens and ensure that he wasn’t about to just become a slab of meat on the savanna?
You go to dig up some dino bones in the Utah desert and find yourself baking in the sun, perhaps baking your brains as well. You study hundreds of patients with cancer and find none who line up with the mean statistic. You then treat them all and find little uniformity with their responses. It’s time to retire by the time you’ve isolated even one variable.
For parents, you learn so much raising your first child. Then you go to raise your second and discover almost everything you leaned was total junk. Then the third comes – time to throw your research and lines of thinking in the trash again. What remains is what cannot be shaken and if your wise, it will turn out to be all the same stuff the parents three thousand years ago were saying too. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” comes to mind.
At the end of the day, the computer programmer is still more of a naturalist than a “pure” theoretician. He seemingly wrestles not against flesh and blood, but with his medium which can ultimately be traced back to the hands of man, not those of God. A brilliant design takes a day to write and then another eight to secure from hackers. The perfect data storage structure your Ph.D. intern came up with is thrown in the trash when network latency is taken into account. A dynamic language seems to free one’s creativity, but then its users may find themselves so infuriated during the debugging stage they pine for a strongly-typed syntax again. Any proof arrived at by the person attempting to work in a vacuum is subject to the harsh environment. Have a nice new parallel GPU algorithm? Did you actually try it with the Windows driver? No? Forget it. Turns out you didn’t solve anything worth solving – not today anyway.
To the theologian, these difficulties can often be placed under the heading of “pastoral care”. Want to read A.W. Pink and toot that double-predestination trumpet as loud as you can? Go ahead. But then two of your children die in a car accident and you find that theodicy was just a bit more challenging than you thought. The Trinity is beautiful, but how come it’s so dang hard to explain? It would seem that nature resists its explanation. Good shepherds know this and figure out how to be gentle with the facts – not because they hate the truth but because they love people. Poor shepherds will only continue to scorn humanity, imagining God to be more like the square root of 2 than person.
This is also why the best IT person is always going to be a generalist. Someone that only cares about networking or only cares about beautiful code or only cares about uptime is ultimately not going to be able to synthesize enough different types of information to solve real-world problems and help actual people. Specialization is human because it acknowledges a person’s limited capacity. It makes room for strengths and weaknesses. Hyper-specialization is dehumanizing because it imagines man as a machine, and he is not.
Today I spent 2 hours in the bowels of the university library. Tucked next to an acre of books in compressed storage behind chain-link fence is a door into an incredibly noisy room with three huge independent air-conditioner feeds and a giant bank of lead-acid batteries against one wall. It’s our primary data center of course. Racks of servers hooked up with fiber-optic cable to hundreds of terabytes of hard drives abound. Here the containers for all our network and server infrastructure is kept ice-cold in a deafening blast of air.
I enjoy visiting places like this because they stand in such contrast to the mushy and imaginary virtual world of software that I typically inhabit. At the end of the day, all those bits don’t just “exist” out in the “cloud” somewhere. They are burning up the circuit boards on a real piece of metal that will quickly melt if you were to stop blowing on them.
Like a little child blowing on his pinwheel when there is no breeze or running to keep his kite up when their isn’t enough wind, we have to put a lot of raw energy into our digital creations to keep them from falling to the ground. Entropy is a ruthless enemy and each day we pass on to the next generation the will and skills to fight it. Only crazy sub-creator humans bother with this.
That is why there will never be an artificial intelligence “singularity”. Any computer smart enough to become self-aware would get tired of the noise and effort and just drift back off to sleep.
As the geometer his mind applies
To square the circle, nor for all his wit
Finds the right formula, howe’er he tries
-Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, line 133-135
Here, Dante makes reference to an ancient geometry problem. Can you, using just a compass and a straight-edge, construct a square with an area equal to that of a given circle. This is called “squaring the circle”. It actually can’t be done. The reason is complicated, but it’s related to the reason why pi has an infinite number of decimal places.
In his Patterns of Plausible Inference, Polya mentions this as an excellent of example on when it’s OK to give up.
Construct, by ruler and compasses, the side of a square equal in area to a circle of given radius. This is the strict formulation of the famous problem of the quadrature of the circle, conceived by the Greeks. It was not forgotten in the Middle Ages, although we cannot believe that many people then understood its strict formulation; Dante refers to it at the theological culmination of the Divina Commedia, toward the end of the concluding Canto. The problem was about two thousand years old as the French Academy resolved that manuscripts purporting to square the circle will not be examined. Was the Academy narrow-minded? I do not think so; after the fruitless efforts of thousands of people in thousands of years there was some ground to suspect that the problem is insoluble. (p.17)
We young people often suffer from what Lewis calls “chronological snobbery”. We are eager to discard the denouncements of the older generations. THEY couldn’t do it we say, but WE can. We are smarter and have better technology and are more enlightened. They are backwards, but we are forwards. We are always solving problems they had no idea how to tackle. Why not this too? But this is foolery. Some things cannot be solved.
Theodicy is a good example. If God exists and is good, why does terrible stuff happen? You will not find a resolution to to this. The digits of its solution extend into interstellar space along with those of pi. But they don’t stop. A crucial element of trust is required. Some rough frameworks can be contructed (and learning to understand these is a good idea), but they will never quite put their finger on the solution. We offer only an approximation, not a solution.
The post-modern deconstruction of language is a refusal to give up when one really should give up. Nobody tries to square the circle anymore, unless they desire to waste their time. Does that make you bristle? Some trust is required – trust in words, trust in meaning, and trust in our fathers.
The practices of the church as the gathered people of the coming King precede the formulas and codes that would later emerge from their theoretical reflection. Before Christians had systematic theologies and worldviews they were singing hymns and psalms, saying prayers, celebrating the Eucharist, sharing their property, and becoming a people marked by a desire for God’s coming kingdom – a desire that constituted them as a peculiar people in the present.
-James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, p.139
First the thought, then the act, right? Our brain is like this giant computer that comes up with an instruction and then delivers it to our limbs. We have an idea and then we act on it. This is the way scientists and economists and philosophers often talk. The problem is the (usually) underlying assumption that we understand what we are doing – that we have a carefully developed theory behind our thoughts and the actions that come of them. On the ground though, this is nonsense. We are rarely so rational as the enlightenment assumes we are. We are not often so enlightened as we make ourselves out to be in the stories we tell about ourselves. We don’t know what we are doing half the time and we may never fully know what we are doing or why. Our own motivations are hidden from us. We have a positive word for this – it’s called intuition. Faith can happen at a thoroughly thought-out level, but it usually happens at a very half-contemplated state. This does not make it’s illegitimate, as if some Modern scientific standard was required. If that is the test, then nothing will ever pass.
The truth is, theories come later. The Nicene Creed is a great document about Christianity. But it was a good 300 years after the ascension before people came up with it. But they were singing songs only a few years later. The prayers of the lectionary were written and curated over a thousand and a half years. But people were praying things like them in the first century. Followers of Jesus reenacted the breaking of bread and the passing of the cup of wine before there existed any 500-page tome on sacramental theology. Did they “know what they were doing”? Of course not. But who cares? They were sharing property before someone told them they had a constitutional right not too. They were desiring the kingdom of God before they could articulate what that even was.
Our heads get in the game along-side our bodies. We don’t know what we are doing. But then we do. And then we know. And then maybe we can talk about it. This is why the man who said to Jesus, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) had it right. He was leading with the faith he had, while acknowledging that rest of it really wasn’t there. It wasn’t there. And neither is ours sometimes. But don’t let that stop you!
I don’t have a proper conversion experience to point to when I reflect on my own history – not the kind to make contemporary revivalist evangelicals happy anyway. I prayed some sort of prayer of repentance and acknowledgement of Christ when I was five years old. I remember praying with my father one evening before bed, but I don’t remember much else. When I was about fourteen and questioning, I remember asking God to give me a sign (I know, I know, this is forbidden, right?) but I immediately looked up and saw three shooting stars in the sky in quick succession. That has always made me smile. I’ve never doubted that was an answer.
There was never a time when I did not have some sort of faith in the Triune God as my creator, and Jesus as redeemer. But the world is a terribly broken and confusing place and for some theology only serves to further muddle it. For me though, and for others who think along these lines, it can serve to console. That is why we study it, even if obliquely.
The right explanation can help heal a mind distressed beyond endurance by events whose significance it cannot grasp.
– Robert Hammilton-Kelly
With this in mind, I might ask, what exposure to theological ideas have been the most profoundly influential to me? I’m 31 now. Perhaps this list will be different when I am 62. I suspect that it will only be longer. I will attempt to enumerate them as an exercise in reflection.
1. I grew up hearing bible stories and sermons told several times a week from infancy. The starting point for all of these was always a piece of scripture. Subjects like “logic” and “rhetoric” were utterly foreign in the schools I attended, both public and private. This was also the case in the schools my own parents attended as well, so such “clear thinking” techniques were only a distant rumor to me. So when, somewhere around the age of 12, I was given C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, it was as if someone shone a 1000 watt spotlight in my face. Here was someone articulating (in ridiculously tight prose) classic Christian reasons for, first just generic theism, and then finally for the special uniqueness of Christ. I know it’s a popular work, but at the time I had never been exposed to something so formal before. As a late adolescent with a thousand voices screaming for my future allegiance, someone giving a calm and steady apologia for why all that stuff I had learned about God was actually pretty legit made a very lasting impression in how I thought about nearly everything afterward.
2. Though I believe I am a Christian because God himself has laid out the way for me to follow and caused my feet to walk in that way, from an outside perspective, I’ve often told people that one of the main reasons I am a follower today can be traced back to a handful of highly influential summer camps. These were the camps up in the woods with chapel twice a day for an entire week with games of capture the flag every night. I was in a room of about 150 kids singing Shine Jesus Shine about a hundred times along with an overhead projector and one college guy with a guitar. Cold showers. Foosball. Making new friends, some of them even girls (which was unprecedented for this awkward teen), and being surrounded by young adults who talked incessantly about Jesus, scripture, and missionary work rather than girlfriends, cars, and the NBA playoffs, was like living on another planet – a better planet. Andrew Jones once asked, “Why does summer camp have to end?” in a post he wrote advocating new monastic communities. Alas, it did have to end, but it was not to be taken lightly and the memory remains.
3. My freshman year of college, I joined a young and energetic congregation. I remember one early weekend, before much homework had been assigned and before I got the memo that I was supposed to actually be at some church work party (sigh), I stole away to a cafe and sat down to read my bible. I ended up reading all of the Gospel of John in one shot. I remember reading all the red letters off the page and my body shaking as with electricity. Never before had the scriptures seemed so alive, it was if they were moments away from biting my fingers. That day it became tremendously obvious to me that there was no person in all human history more important than Jesus Christ – not even close. I haven’t changed my position on that. I don’t think this sort of thing generally happens reading other books. It’s like magic.
4. My second year into college, I was introduced to the work of Larry Crabb through a class offered at church. Digging deeper past the provided materials and handouts, I discovered his rather groundbreaking work of Christian psychology called Inside Out. Though I would recommend that to anyone as a first read, it was actually a later books of his, with the incredibly generic and somewhat misleading title ‘Finding God’ that really had a profound effect on me. Crabb presents a cognitive analysis of desire, frustration, anger, and love that is substantially different from other psychological positions on sin within evangelicism. Though I didn’t know it at the time, his work actually provides a legitimate gospel-infused blueprint for unilateral love. This stuff has, probably more than any teaching or piece of pastoral advice I’ve ever received, helped me to find a way forward when my thoughts have been very, very dark.
5. Several friends I met along the way after college recommended that G.K. Chesteron’s Orthodoxy was worth reading. This is where growing up baptist really has it’s disadvantages – Roman Catholic authors are forbidden and their works absent from libraries, shops, and pastor’s bookshelves. What a shame. I tell people that Orthodoxy is kind of like Mere Christianity on crack. In it, I was first seriously introduced to the idea that the ‘boring’ world we know in our day-to-day lives is actually enchanted and crazier than our Modern minds can imagine. Reading it, especially the second time, made me excited to be alive, excited to be a Christian, and even excited to study theology. Ha! People who have drank the Chesterton kool-aid often get a lot of mileage out it, and for good reason.
5. Robert Capon, Robert Webber and Thomas Merton via Michael Spencer. In a season of life when I felt weighed down by health problems, money problems, multiple screaming babies, and no church congregation as the previous one had been largely emptied of friends and mentors, I turned to the wild and sketchy internet for some answers or at least company. To my delight, what I found was the blog of Michael Spencer, the ‘Internet Monk’, a reluctant baptist minister working his way through many of the same “post-evangelical” theological and ecclesiastical difficulties that I was grappling with. His many writings and podcasts were what kept me hoping and stable through several very difficult years. I speak with no hyperbole when I say that I owe him a great debt both for his work and his friendship, though we only conversed via email on a few occasions. Sadly, Michael died suddenly of cancer three years ago. Along the way he introduced me to the three authors I’ve mentioned above. They formed the basis of much of his approach to spiritual formation, along with the Gospel of Mark.
6. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Rene Girard. Despite my differences with some of the thought of Doug Wilson, I have to give him credit for introducing me to Girard’s work through a series of blog posts years ago. (Ironically, I don’t think Wilson has near as much use for Girard anymore.) On a whim I decided to dive in and read Girard’s key work from the late 197os – Things Hidden. What I found was a crazy theory about human culture. The thing is, once you get used to it, you start to see it everywhere. Everyone thinks their philosophy explains stuff the best, but it turns out that 9 times out of 10, Girard’s theory does a better job of accounting for the mystery of war, hate, desire, religion, and, well, you name it. And at the very center of his work, is Jesus. He is the corner stone, the stumbling block that the whole human race trips over and falls upside-down into the future. Alright, so that’s nice, it tickled my brain, but has it changed my life? I think so. It’s given me peace in a post-9/11 world where confrontation with Islam sometimes seems like a terrifying possibility. It has helped me to both dismiss politicians and world leaders and also forgive them. It’s significantly helped me to not get tripped up on the issue of theodicy (why does God allow evil to happen?) and therefore to deepen my trust in Him. It’s helped me to not worry about the future and to more easily ignore naysayers. So God bless Girard and his helpful disciples such as Gil Baile, James Alison, and Jean-Michel Oughourlian. I little bit of right explanation goes a long way toward healing.
7. Two years ago, I visited Ethiopia for a week while in the process of adopting my forth child. Prior to that, I had never even been outside of North America. I heard stories told of Africa my enter life, but nothing could really prepare me for the actual experience. To recount them would probably sound cliche. I’ve written about them plenty elsewhere on this blog. Things have never really been the same since I came home. I feel a connection to the people I met as my brothers and sisters, more than I sometimes feel to my own neighbors. It seems more like home than my own pacific northwest U.S. where nearly nobody fears God. Their poverty is not as deep as ours. Many people report similar experience on short-term mission trips and whatnot. I used to poo-poo them. It’s actually really popular to deride these experiences lately, and the kind of criticism presented in books like When Helping Hurts should be seriously considered. Still, I have to say that visiting Africa is impossible to forget. I may not get to go back, but I would really like to.
8. What’s next? My children are growing up. My wife and I are growing older. Those things mean more than anything I’ve mentioned above, but they are highly personal. I can’t share those things much with you, the reader. I’ve only given you an account of the lesser, potentially transferable things. God uses things like this to ‘convert’ us to slightly different people, whether we are able to articulate what happened or not. I suspect I left out at least twice as many formative events as I have listed. No matter. What does the future hold? More challenges and more surprises – wonderful and terrible. My trust resides in the same one as before.
