Tried With Fire

I started reading You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K.A. Smith. I had seen his books referenced in other books, and friends had mentioned this one in particular on social media. It also happened to be on sale. I downloaded an audio version too, which was providential. My daughter picked it up after dinner last night, and I joked that I would find her still reading the book after I got home from a meeting. She was. She also mentioned we might be fighting over the book. It's that good. Smith starts out his book questioning the idea that "You are what you think." We may not even know who Rene Descartes is, but we have absorbed the idea that "I think. Therefore, I am." And if our diet of information is only post Enlightenment, then we have no other frame of reference. So "we imaging human beings as giant bobblehead dolls: with humongous heads, and itty-bitty, unimportant bodies." It "reduces human beings to brains-on-a-s...

"American history reveals ambiguity in Americans' behavior and faithfulness to the principles on which the nation was founded. Americans have been true, false and indifferent to their stated ideals over time. There is no golden age to go back to, no glorious past to recover or to "take back." America consists of Americans who are flawed and fallible human beings. Americans have set themselves on a pursuit of justice, equality, of opportunity and of natural rights and freedoms. But Americans of every generation have continually struggled to understand what those things mean, how they are to be applied and who gets to enjoy them to their fullest extent. Religious people have always been influential in these issues, but even religious people who are dedicated to divine principles sometimes fail to see clearly and act faithfully. All people, including Christians, succumb to selfishness, short-sightedness, violence and vice. The human condition is complex, thus the Ame...

I read books about thinking - not only what we think but why we think the way we do. I loved How to Think by Alan Jacobs, and when an author I like recommends other works, I'm interested in checking them out. One of his recommendations was Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman proposes that we have two systems that comprise our thinking. System 1 is the fast one. It's the system that kicks in when we jump to conclusions, know how to get through a sticky traffic situation without consciously being aware of what we are doing, and the source of intuition. System 2 is the slow one. This system requires far more mental energy and engages when we are in a situation that causes us to pause and deliberate. These systems have strengths and weaknesses and rely on one another at different times but not always in the best way. Because System 2 takes more effort, it is lazy and would sooner go along with the gut reaction of System 1. This only works w...

Organic chemistry was a required class for my undergrad major. I hated the lecture, but I liked the lab. It was easier than my physical chemistry lab, and the TA wasn't nearly as tough of a grader as some of the other instructors. I was surprised one day to have my lab notebook handed back to me with a comment of how well I expressed myself in English. It was on the tip of my tongue to sarcastically say that English was read and written even in remote places like New Jersey, but I took pity on  him. He meant it as a compliment, which I received  rather awkwardly, although I tried to correct his wrong impression about me with the usual, "I was born here. I'm an American. Blah, blah blah." There could have been a number of factors that played into his wrong assumption. He was a grad student. He could have been running on caffeine fumes and probably had tons of work on top of a teaching assistantship. He may have come from a part of the country with very few Asian im...

It may be silly for me to post this for my little blog, but hey, why not? Writing is a way to get thoughts out of my head for further examination, so whether it is read or not is secondary. But this also gives me an idea of which subjects struck a chord or possibly a nerve. Based on this list, those subjects are: domestic violence, women in the church and society, the eternal subordination of the Son (ESS) debate, John Piper's rather perplexing statements on justification by faith, and thinking through difficult, ethical issues. Given my interests and concerns, I'll probably keep writing about them in the coming year. 10. If I had my druthers 9. These were tied:  Questioning a false dichotomy  &   The ESS elephant is still in the room 8.  Justified and not sanctified? 7. Roles: Another Andelin Connection? 6. It took "Hidden Figures" 5. Does this say what I think it says? 4. Domestic violence in the Australian church 3. "Me, myself, and I" spirit...

I posted quotes from How to Think about argument as war . If we don't want to fall into that trap, it is easy to make another mistake by overlooking very real differences that need to be acknowledged. Here's what Jacobs has to say about that: "So when people say, "They really mean the same thing, they're just using different vocabularies to express it," 1 or "We all believe in the same God, we just express that belief in different ways," we may with some justification commend these people for attempting to get beyond confrontation, dichotomy, argument as war. But we have to go on to say that the attempt is a facile one. The real story will be far more complicated, and not to be grasped by replacing a fictitious polarity with an equally fictitious unity. Blessed are the peacemakers, to be sure, but peacemaking is a long, hard labor, and not a mere declaration." 2 1. Didn't this happen during the 2016 Trinity debate? 2. 2.  How to Th...

Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every weak point in my argument. His criticisms were right on target . I demolished his argument. I've never won an argument with him. You disagree? Okay, shoot ! If you use that strategy , he will wipe you out . He shot down all my arguments. 1 "The identification of argument with war is so complete that if you try to suggest some alternative way of thinking about what argument is - It's an attempt to achieve mutual understanding; It's a means of clarifying our views - you're almost certainly going to be denounced as a wishy-washy, namby-pamby sissy-britches." 2 "So yes: argument can indeed be war, or at least a contest in which it is possible to lose. But there's another side to this story: what is lost not in an argument but through passive complicity with that militaristic metaphor. Because there are many situations in which we lose something of our humanity by militarizing disc...

It's easy to assume that emotions have little place, if any, in thinking well. After all, an argument based on "I just feel this is the way it is" isn't much of an argument at all. So should we check our emotions at the door? To continue in  How to Think , Alan Jacobs uses the example of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. He was raised by his father to be a thinker, no emotions necessary with a true Brit stiff upper lip. But as brilliant as Mill was, he reached a point of mental collapse. What rescued him from the brink was a volume of Wordsworth's poetry in which he experienced a delight that had been missing for so long. Mill's writes "the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings... when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives." Jacobs interprets this as "The analytical mind constantly separates, divides, distinguishes until its whole mental wo...

Megan Phelps-Roper grew up in Westboro Baptist Church, and Fred Phelps was her grandfather. This was the only mindset she knew, and she believed it. She picketed and protested and used her social media account to denigrate anyone who would try to challenge her brand of hate. However, she interacted with one young man, a Jew in fact, who did not trade fire for fire but engaged her in respectful conversation, as best as Twitter could provide. Through these dialogues, Megan began to question what she believed. She eventually rejected what she had known all her life and now "is a social media activist, lobbying to overcome divisions and hatred between religious and political divides." ( Wikipedia ) Quite a transformation. If you are like me, my first reaction was "I am so glad she started to think for herself ." But did she? In How to Think , Alan Jacobs argues that it wasn't so much thinking by herself as beginning to think with different people.   He als...

After so many decades of not thinking carefully about what I believe and why I believe it, I want to think well. How to Think arrived yesterday which went straight to the top of my reading stack. In the introduction, author Alan Jacobs cites an essay by Marilynne Robinson where she observed that if you associate "rigidity, narrowness of mind, judgmentalism" with the label "puritan", this is exactly what is demonstrated by some people when they criticize the Puritans. She writes "it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved." So the actual historical meaning of a word like "Puritan" doesn't matter anymore. The point is to toss around the same pejoratives "like a password to get into the clubhouse." Jacobs writes - "Robinson further comments that this kind of u...

I am continuing to read The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind in bits and pieces when I get the chance. Every time I pick it up my assumptions are challenged. According to Mark Noll, the Enlightenment had a huge impact upon our country but not just in the secular sphere. American Christianity embraced it as well, which leads me to ask: - Is our propensity toward biblicism less biblical and more a product of the Enlightenment?  - Does biblicism afflict the American culture more than other countries because of our history? - Is our study of the Bible also influenced by this? Are we taking Enlightenment principles of studying the material world and applying it to the Word of God? Is this good or bad? What are the implications? This may not seem practical, but I want to know why I think the way I do and where it came from. Am I child of the Enlightenment (I think the answer is "yes") and to what degree? Just because I am a Christian does not automatically mean that my ...

It's been a while since I've posted regularly. Life has been very full in a good way, and that is where my priorities need to be. I have a couple posts in the works, but they need a little more meditation and marinating. So in lieu of a "real" post here are some things I have been thinking: 1. We don't need to learn patience or kindness if everyone gets it right all the time. Maybe we should stop expecting people to not be normal human beings with normal human frailty and struggles. After all, 1 Corinthians 13 isn't just for weddings. 2. A curmudgeonly character may be funny, even endearing, in a novel, but I don't want to be like that as I get older. See 1. 3. All Christians are not like Mr. Great-Heart in Pilgrim's Progress. Mr. Ready-to-Halt was received at the Celestial City, too. See 1. 4.  Our stories are very real, but they are not normative. My bad experience doesn't invalidate your good one. But just because you haven't walked...

At first glance, this video is an over-the-top parody of traditionalist ideas from the 1950's, but it may be closer to the truth than we would like to believe: It was widely believed in the nineteenth century that "while sinful man was controlled by his brain, delicate woman was controlled by her reproductive organs." Women had wombs that were used for physical creation; men had brains that were used for mental creation... From this belief derived not only the notion of woman's irrational, unpredictable, and mysterious "feminine" nature, but also the idea that childbearing was every woman's ultimate fulfillment while intellectual pursuits were the fulfillment of the masculine nature. A woman who pursued intellectual activities therefore assumed for herself a masculine nature, such women of the nineteenth century were often accused of being "hermaphrodites in mind." Much was made of the supposed smaller size of the female brain and the ...

In Pride and Prejudice , Jane Austen has created a character who is both irritating and amusing - Lady Catherine de Bourgh. She is the epitome of the bossy and nosy neighbor, and her rank and wealth give her the right to be so. As the owner of a large estate, anyone who is economically dependent on her patronage needs to stay in her good graces because she holds the purse strings. Yet, Austen's dry wit makes it plain to the reader that Lady Catherine's omniscience exists only in her own mind. Here are a few examples of how she advises those who have the misfortune of not being as enlightened as herself: When the ladies returned to the drawing-room, there was little to be done but to hear Lady Catherine talk, which she did without any intermission till coffee came in, delivering her opinion on every subject in so decisive a manner as proved that she was not used to have her judgment controverted. She inquired into Charlotte's domestic concerns familiarly and min...

We have been told from ancient times that the unexamined life is not worth living, and I agree with that. And yet I must find myself in a small minority because I find it difficult to find many people who put their own philosophies and their religious convictions under a microscope and ask themselves, "Why do I believe what I believe? Do I believe it simply because it has been passed on to me by my parents or the subcultural community that I have been in?"... Why do you believe what you believe? Because what you believe determines how you live. And so it is a very important question to ask yourself particularly as a Christian, because there is real sense in which we are called upon to justify to our believe systems, not just to our neighbor but to ourselves, because we are called to be mature in our faith. Paul tells us to be babes in evil but in our understanding to be adults, which means we have to use the minds that God has given us to see the basis for our truth. This ...

Without "absolutes" revealed from without by God Himself, we are left rudderless in a sea of conflicting ideas about manners, justice, and right and wrong, issuing from a multitude of self-opinionated thinkers. We could never know who God is, how He is to be worshipped, or wherein true happiness lies. If virtue is sought above harm as a road to temporal happiness, the striving and the progress starts and ends in self - but selfishness is itself a vice! No attitude of mind which does not acknowledge dependence upon Almighty God and seek to glorify Him has any element of good or virtue in it. If the mind of a student is ensnared by these theories and speculations, he will find it a sore task ever to be free of them. Indeed, it is a dolorous task, and something beyond the potential of the slothful or careless, to root out mercilessly ideas and dogmas with which the intellect has long been nurtured. With the world, indwelling sin, and early education all arguing the same way, i...

[F]irst comes the thing, then the idea, then the word. If our ideas are sound to the extent that they faithfully represent the thing, they will be clearly communicable only if we clothe them in words that accurately signify them . Ideas as such are not communicable from one mind to another. They have to be carefully fitted to words, so that the words might communicate them faithfully … How do we ensure that our words are adequate to the ideas they seek to convey? The process is essentially the same as the one we follow when confirming the clarity and soundness of our ideas. We must go back to the sources of the ideas . Often we cannot come up with the right word for the idea because we don't have a firm grasp on the idea itself. Usually, when we clarify the idea by checking it against its source in the objective world, the right word will come to us.   Even though this quote is about good communication in general, D.Q. McInerny's advice could well be applied to how we...

 I just started reading A Little Book for New Theologians by Kelly M. Kapic.  I was interested because he addresses the false dichotomy between theology and living. This idea of "either-or" not "both-and" is alive and well and something I have been trying to dispel from my own life. On one side of the aisle is the life of the mind - how we think and what we think upon. On the opposite side are our feelings, experiences, and daily living. We can see the good on either side, but we often lean one way and perhaps minimize the other. Sometimes we think the subjective is "real life". Sure it helps to read the Bible to get an emotional boost, but what good is theology in the day-to-day grind? Conversely we can get engrossed in the intricacies of what we believe without bearing any fruit of sanctification.But regardless of which way we list, we're all theologians. Any time we speak about God, we are engaged in theology.So according to the author, it beho...

Sarah Flashing: As a complementarian, I am continually bothered by the lack of women in the church implementing their intellectual gifts as theologians, philosophers, apologists, ethicists, economists and so forth because I believe we have put women and their gifts, needs and interests in a box and tied it up—tightly—with a pretty lace bow. Because of the important role she plays in the family, there is often the perception that women’s gifts and needs are limited to the realm of the home. I am not suggesting that those women who abide in this realm are excluded from the community of intellectually-gifted women, many, in fact, are one and the same. But when “keeping the home” (Tit 2) is reduced to teaching women how to make pot-holders out of old socks to the exclusion of developing the life of the mind, then we run the risk of not only losing more women to theological wimpiness, but their children as well. All of this causes me to wonder if the complementarian community is losing i...

One of my pet peeves is the notion that Christian women should only read books written by other Christian women on women's topics. I don't think I'm imagining this, am I? While I'm not discounting the value of application-oriented books or women authors, I take issue with the idea that theology and doctrine are dull, dry, ego-bloating, and impractical. Therefore, "don't trouble your pretty little head about such things".  I don't think anything can be further from the truth. Plus this idea about boring theology is also inflicted on men in this anti-intellectual age, minus the "pretty" part, of course. In Sunday's sermon, one of the takeaway points was how we need to go deep in our understanding of God and not merely stay on a temporal plane. As examples, the pastor mentioned a group of young men in their 20's who have studied  Chosen by God by R. C. Sproul and are now tackling a book by Wayne Grudem on doctrine. He also mentioned a...