Truth

Review: Live Not By Lies

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Live Not By Lies, Rod Dreher. New York: Sentinal, 2020.

Summary: Drawing on interviews with Christians in the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, Dreher warns of a rise of a similar, though “soft” totalitarianism in the U.S., and outlines what Christians must do to live in the truth.

In The Benedict Option (review), Rod Dreher outlines how he believes Christians, having lost the culture war, must live. Live Not By Lies offers an even grimmer future, the rise of a “soft” progressive totalitarianism functioning by rhetorical and social control, utilizing the capacities already in existence for digital surveillance.

He draws on interactions with survivors of Communism in the Czech Republic and the former Soviet Union. His title comes from a statement by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in what would be his final message to the Soviet Union. Dreher writes:

What did it mean to live by lies? It meant, Solzhenitsyn writes, accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm–or at least not to oppose–to get along peaceably under totalitarianism. Everybody says that they have no choice but to conform, says Solzhenitsyn, and to accept powerlessness. But that is the lie that gives all other lies their malign force. The ordinary man may not be able to overturn the kingdom of lies, but he can at least say that he is not going to be its loyal subject.

Dreher and his eastern bloc interlocutors recognize the same troubling trends around the suppression of truth, the attractions of progressiveness to the discontented, the loss of faith in institutions, and a combination of destructiveness and transgressiveness. He points to the safety and cancel cultures of universities that foreclose open discussion of ideas.

The second part of his work addresses how Christians ought prepare for the rise of progressive totalitarianism. He argues for the importance of cultural memory, particularly the memory of totalitarian regimes. He believes that the family and networks of small groups are critical to resistance. He believes that the church is the critical bedrock of resistance, although it is also important to stand in solidarity with others who resist. It was heartening to not see him reprise the strategic withdrawal into monastic-type communities of The Benedict Option but rather listen and draw upon the testimony of those who resisted in the urban centers of Czechoslovakia and the former Soviet Union

Perhaps his greatest challenge to Christians is to accept the possibility of suffering as testimony to the truth–not sought, but not avoided. Talking with those who suffered, he stresses both the challenge to suffer without bitterness, and the gift of suffering.

I think the two most important lessons of this book are that “it can happen here” and that Christians are woefully unprepared as yet. What troubled me in reading this was that Dreher’s apprehension of threats from the far left seems to have blinded him to threats from the far right. In warning exclusively of a progressive, Communist-leaning totalitarianism, I found him more or less silent about the danger of a fascist totalitarianism. In the “survival of the extremes” character of our parties, it seems increasingly that they are moving toward one of these two polarities. The culture war no longer is Christians versus the secular culture but rather these two polarities against each other, each using parts of the Christian community to gain political leverage.

Where Dreher gets it right is that both of these extremes are built on the lie of ultimate allegiance that no Christian can accept, with a whole host of other lies paving the way to believing this big lie. I believe he is right in recognizing how we may be seduced by lies from one extreme or the other. What I wish he had addressed is how we might be people who turn neither to the Left nor the Right but who are shaped by the narrative of the Gospel of the Kingdom. But in a culture where lying is endemic, the call to not capitulate to the lies and the community that sustains a people of truth is no insignificant thing. A Czech emigre friend told the author that writing this book was a waste of time because, “People will have to live through it first to understand….Any time I try to explain current events and their meaning to my friends or acquaintances, I am met with blank stares or downright nonsense.” I hope he is wrong.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Are You “Sharing” Truth or Falsehoods?

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The_fin_de_siècle_newspaper_proprietor_(cropped)

Reporters with various forms of “fake news” from an 1894 illustration (cropped) by Frederick Burr Opper, Public Domain via Wikipedia

One of the more grievous things about social media is to see the number of posts and memes, many of a political nature, that, when fact-checked, are either half-truths or outright lies. The most unsettling are personal attacks on individuals, based on false information.

I am most disturbed when I see friends who I know as professing Christians engaged in this kind of activity. The apostle Paul in Ephesians calls us to “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). What is disturbing is that much of this activity evidences neither truth nor love.

Sometimes, it may be that we see something that either incites our outrage, or reinforces an existing belief, and it is so easy to click “share” or “retweet.” The thing is that often, that is exactly what the originators of this content want us to do, whether they are partisans in this country or propagandists from foreign countries seeking to sow discord in the American system.

I think that if all professing Christians determined to not share and retweet political posts, without checking their truthfulness before passing them along, it would not stop this practice, but it might make a difference. If they went a step further and let the person who shared the information with them that it was inaccurate, this might give others pause (and might not).

This does raise the question of how we assess the truthfulness of posts and tweets. The Huffington Post recently published an article on “How to Recognize a Fake News Story” that reflects my own practices. They suggested nine practices:

  1. Read past the headline.
  2. Check what news outlet it is published on. (Google the site’s name.) I would add, be aware of the bias of all news outlets, even mainstream media.
  3. Check the publish date and time (sometimes old events are represented as current).
  4. Who is the author? (Search their past articles to see if they are reputable or have a reputation for hoaxes)
  5. Look at what links and sources are used.
  6. Look for questionable quotes and images. (The article suggests tools you can use).
  7. Beware of confirmation bias. (Don’t just share something because it agrees with your point of view–it could be false.)
  8. Search if other news outlets are reporting it. (Especially those with a different bias).
  9. Think before you share.

I also use sites like FactCheck.org, or Politifact.com to check posts, quotes, and memes. Often I end up finding the actual meme or post and then a detailed citation of reputable sources confirming the post or showing it partially true or false. Some people have accused these sites of bias, but I have found them willing to take to task posts across the political spectrum, and to provide reputable sources to back up their findings.

What is most challenging to me however is that I do not want to be found disobedient to the word of God. And I believe that anyone who really loves God and God’s word does not want to be found disobedient, either. Consider some of these scriptures and their implications for what we say and write online:

“You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” Exodus 20:16.

“The Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy.” Proverbs 12:22.

“ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.” 1 Corinthians 13:6

“Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.” Ephesians 4:25

“Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.” 1 Peter 2:1

I spend a good deal of time online with this blog, and on different social media sites I curate. This is a challenging word that I consider:

“But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken.” Matthew 12:36 [All verses NIV]

I just added it up. I’ve written over 1.5 million words on this blog since I began it in 2013. I believe I will give account for every one. As well as my posts and comments on social media. All my emails. My words offline. Apart from grace, I know I’m in deep trouble. But even with grace, I’m sobered that my words, indeed my life, is an open book to God. I love God and I want to tell a story God loves.

If you love God, I think you do as well. We may not always agree, and I don’t think we need to mute our disagreements or our convictions about parties and issues. Can we agree to tell the truth to the best of our ability? Can we agree not to “gaslight” each other? Can we agree to believe the best of each other?

Jesus called his followers the salt of the earth and the light of the world. We may wonder whether what we do makes a difference. I would suggest that it does not take much salt to flavor something. Even a small light can pierce and dispel darkness. “Tipping points” happen when a number of small changes come together and have a cumulative effect. Imagine what would happen if the 65% of self-identifying Christians in the U.S. took truthfulness online seriously. It may not end our political disagreements, but I wonder if it would change the online world and the rancor and discord we encounter.

Will you take truthfulness seriously? Will you encourage this in your social media circles? Do you think I am speaking the truth? Will you share that truth?

False Prophets

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Rembrandt_Harmensz._van_Rijn_-_Jeremia_treurend_over_de_verwoesting_van_Jeruzalem_-_Google_Art_Project

Rembrant, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem

I’ve been thinking about the question of how, in an era of “fake” news, “alternate facts,” and conflicting discourses, one discerns truth from falsehood. It is actually quite an important question, because few of us want to go down a wrong path or be deceived or deluded.

Warnings abound in the scriptures about false prophets along with instructions about how one may discern them. While many of today’s voices are not claiming to be prophets, they are attempting to convince people to believe a certain narrative, and to respond in certain ways based on that belief. They may not claim the label, but they are functioning in the role, even if they do not invoke religious language.

One passage on which I have particularly reflected is Jeremiah 6: 13-15

13 “From the least to the greatest,
all are greedy for gain;
prophets and priests alike,
all practice deceit.
14 They dress the wound of my people
as though it were not serious.
‘Peace, peace,’ they say,
when there is no peace.
15 Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct?
No, they have no shame at all;
they do not even know how to blush.

I notice at least several things here that bear on our contemporary concerns:

  1. Do people have a significant financial interest that is tied to their message? In today’s world, this could come in the form of significant followings that garner advertising dollars, or campaign contributions, or donations to a cause, or a business seeking an “inside” or “preferred” track.
  2. The fact that a person is in a religious office or invokes religious language does not mean their message is true. Jesus warns of “wolves in sheep’s clothing” (Matthew 7:15). Jesus actually describes them as ravenous wolves. Sadly, religious offices and language can be used to exploit people for one’s own purposes or gratification.
  3. Is there a demonstrable pattern of deceit on the part of the speaker, apart from their message? Jeremiah says that they “practice deceit.” In Jeremiah 23:14 (NRSV), Jeremiah describes the false prophets of Jerusalem as “walking in lies.” As children, we may have been taught that when we tell a lie, we make it harder for someone to know if we are telling the truth. If there is a demonstrable pattern of lying in action and deed, we should be even more reluctant to credit a message from such a person as truthful.
  4. They refrain from confronting hard truths that point out flaws, indeed sins, in their hearers lives, or minimize their seriousness. I’ve written elsewhere (and prior to our current administration) that we have dressed the wounds of racism and our treatment of native peoples as though these were not serious national sins. False prophets assure us that there is nothing really wrong with us, that we are all basically good people, and that no serious amendment of our lives is required. Sometimes, such messages are accompanied with the scapegoating of others who are “them,” outsiders in some way on whom we may conveniently place all the blame.
  5. They tell us life will be all right, that we will have peace, even if we are in imminent danger. That’s what we want to hear, after all, isn’t it? In Jeremiah’s day, people were longing for liberation from the yoke of the superpower, Babylon, and the false prophets said it was coming soon. Jeremiah took to wearing a wooden yoke to symbolize this domination. When a false prophet broke the yoke, Jeremiah replied that God would replace that yoke with one of iron (Jeremiah 28).
  6. They are shameless. Dictionary.com offers the following synonyms for shameless: brash, wanton, improper, bold, rude, audacious, flagrant, brazen, outrageous, high-handed, unabashed, immoral, unprincipled, abandoned, arrant, barefaced, brassy, cheeky, depraved, dissolute. While the term “hypocrite” is not on this list, the fact that the moral character of these people is distorted enough that they flaunt what most people are ashamed of means we should not look for truth from this person.

It is noteworthy that Jeremiah, and other true prophets like Elijah, were far outnumbered by false prophets. It’s not popular, and sometimes dangerous, to tell the truth. Indeed, one thing that may distinguish true prophets from the false, is that their message has been personally costly (as opposed to the “gain” of false prophets).

Scripture provides two other important criteria that distinguish false prophets.

  1. A prophet is false if what they prophesy does not come to pass (Deuteronomy 18:21-22). No matter our efforts to defy or deny reality, in the end, we either live by its truth or find ourselves false to our loss. We may say gravity does not exist, but our denial of its reality will be readily and lethally exposed if we step into the air from a tenth story window.
  2. Prophets are false even if what they prophesy comes to pass if they lead us to believe in what is no god (Deuteronomy 13:1-5). For the Christian, if a message invites us to put ultimate allegiance and trust in anyone or anything else than the Triune God of holy love and saving grace through Christ, whether it be ourselves, a political party or figure, a religious teacher, or anything else, that message is false.

I’m not going to point fingers, and I would ask in commenting that you refrain from this as well. Usually, we don’t point fingers at those whose messages we listen to, but rather at the “other guys.” What I might suggest instead is that we use the criteria above to honestly evaluate those to whom we listen. What matters most is that we discern whether those we listen to are telling us the truth. If we are people who teach, or blog, or editorialize, and seek to persuade others, we do well to examine ourselves by these criteria.

At the end of the day, to build our lives, or to build our nation on lies is a perilous undertaking. To speak falsehoods is even more perilous. Jesus warns that on the day of judgment we will give an account for every careless word (Matthew 12:36). He warns that if our words or lives cause a “little one” to stumble, it would be better to have a millstone around our neck and drown ourselves in the ocean than face God’s reckoning (Matthew 18:6).

This is not a game.

Review: Beauty for Truth’s Sake

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Beauty for Truths Sake

Beauty for Truth’s Sake, Stratford Caldecott, (foreword Ken Myers). Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2017 (my review is of the 2009 edition).

Summary: An argument for the unity of faith and reason, beauty and truth, the sciences and the humanities, and for the recovery of education as a lifelong pursuit of wisdom, both rooted in and eventuating in liturgical worship.

As one who has long worked around universities, the fragmentation of knowledge among the disparate disciplines is an established fact. Those who teach in the humanities, and in the sciences often hold each other in mutual suspicion if not contempt, and speak in languages often unintelligible to each other. One of the few things that unites a number of these people is a shared suspicion toward religious faith (sometimes, but not always, warranted by stupid or wicked things done in God’s name).

In this work, Stratford Caldecott contends for an ancient, and yet contemporary vision of a restored unity of knowledge that brings together arts and humanities, math and the sciences, the beautiful and the true, reason and faith in a “re-enchantment” of education that leads to wisdom, and worship. He writes in his Introduction:

“I believe it is possible to remain an active learner throughout life, and yet to maintain a moral compass in good working order. But vital though they are, adaptability and ethics are not enough by themselves. There is a structural flaw in our education that we need to overcome. It is related to a profound malaise in our civilization, which by progressive stages has slipped into a way of thinking and living that is dualistic in character. The divisions between arts and sciences, between faith and reason, between nature and grace, have a common root. In particular, our struggle to reconcile religious faith with modern science is symptomatic of a failure to understand the full scope of human reason and its true grandeur” (p. 12).

Caldecott would argue that our modern fragmented education divorces meaning from fact, dooming the humanities to solipsism and the sciences to sterility. He would argue, along with Dorothy Sayers (in The Lost Tools of Learning) for a restoration of the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and an adaptation of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, expanded for additional disciplines). He believes that the key to the unity of these disciplines is beauty, which serves as a pointer to truth, as well as goodness. He connects the recovery of the poetic imagination with its focus on symbol to the recognition of the symbolic in the scientific study of the natural world, opening us to the wonder of what is beyond. He explores the beauty and symbolism in math and geometry, the structure and beauty of music, and concludes with how this “re-enchanted” cosmology finds its consummation in liturgy.

What I most appreciated in this work is the sense of the recovery of wonder in our inquiry. In the modern academy, it seems that one of the prices paid for advancing in proficiency, whether in “getting good data” in science, or in applying critical theory to historical events or literary works is the loss of wonder–the joy of a good story, admiration for a historical figure, appreciation of the structure of the cosmos. Certainly this is not always so, but to see the wide-eyed wonder of young scholars replaced by cynicism is grievous whenever it happens, and I cannot help but think that the educational flaws Caldecott critiques contribute to this loss.

Where Caldecott may be critiqued is in his “Christian Platonism” that views our language, our numbers, our physical world pointing to a world beyond–the world of forms, ideas, perhaps all found in the mind or person of God. I have to confess that I don’t have the philosophical wherewithal to critique or defend this idea, and I haven’t thought of things in quite these terms. I do believe that all human artistry, and the artistry of the physical world is a reflection of the Great Artist in a general sense. But I’m not as sure about the effort to “symbolize” all physical reality as a signifier of transcendent reality. There is something that feels as if it could be forced to me, akin to those who try to find some spiritual lesson in everything and sometimes reach some pretty wacky conclusions. I think I’d rather be open to beauty where I find it, to be attentive to what it points toward, and aware that we sing God’s songs, and think his thoughts after Him.

I’m not sure if that makes me a Christian Platonist or not. And perhaps that points to the goodness of this book, that it is making me think and re-examine my own understanding. It makes me think about how I relate goodness, truth, and beauty, how it is that I can claim reason and faith are not at odds and that there is an underlying unity to all knowledge. It poses the question to me in my work of how I can claim to suggest that the integration of faith, learning, and practice are a possibility in the modern university, and not just a slogan. Most of all, it inspires me afresh to think of how wonder might lead to doxology.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

 

Thinking and Believing

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Caravaggio_-_The_Incredulity_of_Saint_Thomas

The Incredulity of St. Thomas by Caravaggio. Public Domain

I help people discover how it is possible to both think and believe.

This is often what I say when people ask me what I do. I work in a Christian collegiate ministry with graduate students and university faculty. I say this because it is not obvious either inside the church or inside the university that one person may do both.

In the university world, it is often thought that if one is serious about thinking, that this rules out believing. One study, by sociologist Elaine Ecklund, found that only 36 percent of university professors still claim some form of belief in God whereas 90 percent of the American public does. Sometimes this has to do with the perceived conflict between science and faith, most often due to the evolution wars in this country. Yet there are leading biologists like Francis Collins, who led the effort to map the human genome, for whom this has never been a problem. Sometimes this is a consequence of what I call, “stupid things done in Jesus name.” For some, the wounds they have experienced at the hands of Christians are serious. And sometimes, I’ve met people who simply do not want there to be a God.

I also find that some really do not think authentic faith has room for authentic questions. And yet questions are at the heart of what a university does. Jesus loved questions. He loved it when his disciples asked him questions. And he probably asked more questions than anyone in the New Testament. He even asked questions in response to questions! This runs so contrary to the idea that a person who believes has lots of answers and lots of certainty. For me, it is much more the case of finding someone who I can really trust with my questions, and who often uses questions to transform me and my outlook on the world, if I am patient and persistent enough with them.

Sadly, I’ve often found the church to equally be a place where, if one is serious about belief, it means that one must rule out much of what some people think. Often it comes in the form of some conflict with what we understand the Bible to be saying. Most often, I’ve found the conflict to be apparent rather than real, more often the result of trying to make the Bible answer questions its’ writers didn’t intend to answer. Sometimes there are real conflicts, but then there are also real anomalies in the data of any field, and the worst thing you can do is force a solution, as much as you’d like to “neaten” things up. And sometimes, the conflict is really one between cultural ways of life in society and the counter-cultural life of God’s people. Here, it seems, the answer is to not simply ask what but why–to understand the reasons behind a different way of living.

I think it is equally the case here that people struggle with the idea that an authentic life of faith does not have room for questions. Yet in the gospels, I see that faith is acting on what one does know about God or Christ, even while asking about what one does not know. After all, none of us gets to one hundred percent certainty about anything. We live and act on knowledge about which we have far less than 100 percent certainty all the time.

To the contrary of what some think, I am convinced that the life of faith may actually open up the life of thought and research. First of all, at the heart of the formative practices of Christian faith is the practice of attentiveness, first of all to God, but also to one’s own life, one’s neighbor, and one’s world. Often, attentiveness is the seedbed in which the curiosity that leads to good questions grows. And good questions are at the heart of good research. Don’t get me wrong. I know lots of people who are not believers who are attentive and ask good questions. I’m simply saying that the attentive life that flows from faith prepares us to be attentive, whether in the lab or the art studio, or when we are studying a musical score or a balance sheet or statistical table.

I could go on. The conviction that we worship and follow the one who is Truth ought make us dogged in the pursuit of truth, because we really believe it is out there, and isn’t just a masquerade for who has power. The paradoxes of the faith–the incarnation, the Trinity, humans as the imago dei and yet as finite and fallen–leads, I believe to a flexibility or suppleness in thinking that is open to the answer being “both this and this” rather than an oppositional binary. Certainly, the belief in a Creator who thinks (the ultimate, it seems to me, reconciliation of believing and thinking), gives a powerful rationale for hypothesizing theories, and searching for lawful order in the cosmos, and even for the power of mathematics to map onto the physical world.

At the end of the day, however, what I am about is not an argument about whether it is possible to think and believe. Rather, what I am about is deeply desiring that my friends engaged in the “heavy lifting” of academic or professional life are able to live with this deep sense that the joy they experience in the joining of prayerful pursuit of knowledge and attentive inquiry, the wonder of those “aha” moments, is the pleasure of the Creator upon them, for which they were made.

St Irenaeus wrote:

The glory of God is man fully alive; moreover man’s life is the vision of god: if God’s revelation through creation has already obtained life for all the beings that dwell on earth, how much more will the Word’s manifestation of the Father obtain life for those who see God.”

My longing? Human beings fully alive discovering in the creation of God the glory of God, bringing thought and belief together. That is joy indeed.

Review: The Irresistible Community

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Irresistable CommunityThe Irresistible Community, Bill Donahue. Grand Rapids, Baker Books, 2015.

Summary: Looking at the upper room narratives, Donahue explores how Jesus created community through the table, the towel, and the truth.

As I sat down to write this review, I found my fingers stumbling over the correct spelling of “irresistible”. Then I found myself stumbling over the concept. Was the community Jesus formed in the upper room truly irresistible? I don’t think Judas would have thought so. Frankly, I think this title is a bit of publishing hyperbole. What I do think Donahue has done is describe three marks of a community that changes lives under the leadership of Jesus, and this is in fact an important contribution to the life of our churches and other places where Christians gather and attempt to be “communities”.

The first of these marks is that they are communities that welcome all to Jesus’s table. This involves practicing good table manners from welcoming, to seeing and being the truth, to establishing trust, forgiving, and settling for progress rather than insisting on perfection. Donahue talks about different kinds of tables from the kitchen table to the coffee table to the conference table that each are appropriate at a certain stage of community life. Tables are places of stories, places where we take time to hear each others stories and consider how they come together in the story God is telling through this community.

Our encounters in truly welcoming each other at the table lead to the ministry of the towel, the challenging work of learning to truly serve each other in community. There is the issue of being clear about our identity as serving communities–do we embrace this and clearly understand how we are called to serve? True serving means our towels will get dirty as we jump in where we are needed. True serving means keeping our towels in a circle, remaining accountable to and responsible for each other. True serving means leaning into the sources of renewal when we are tempted to throw in the towel.

Finally, real community is galvanized by the truth. It is a community that hungers for truth and is open to the ministry of the Spirit of truth. It is a community where we tell ourselves the truth, where we lovingly and honestly reflect back to each other the truth we need to grasp about ourselves. It is a place where we challenge false narratives about God, ourselves and others. Truth can be dangerous, calling us into places of risk in the adventure of following Christ

Donahue uses an interesting device to open each chapter. He begins with an “interior narrative” of what each of the twelve disciples at the table are thinking as they sit around the table in the upper room. Each is paired to the content of the chapter.

Welcome. Service. Truth. I do think these are marks of healthy communities. But not all will accept our welcome. People will turn away from our service. And sometimes holding to the truth, however lovingly, will turn away those not ready to face the truth, particularly about themselves. So, while I find the community Donahue describes authentic, transforming, and real, I still don’t get the irresistible. But I think we can learn things from the community he describes that will benefit the communities of which we are part. That’s good enough.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

I Am Bipolar

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No, I am not speaking of a psychological condition of mood swings from manic to depressive. (I should also say that I do not want to make light of an illness with which I’ve know talented and high-functioning friends of mine to live.) It’s simply that I am bipolar (although I’d like to come up with a different term) when it comes to many questions of truth and practice, particular around my faith. I draw this term from an insight of a long-time friend who observed on numerous occasions that I was with him that truth is bipolar and that orthodoxy is the idea of living in the tension of bipolar truths. I’ve found this to be so.

I believe:

  • in a God who is both Three and One.
  • in a Jesus who is both fully God and fully human in one person.
  • both that God is sovereign, and that our choices matter
  • both that we are saved by grace through faith and that we are God’s workmanship created for good works in Christ (these two ideas appear in consecutive verses in Ephesians 2:8-10).

Historically, Christians have gotten into problems when they’ve been uncomfortable with those tensions and emphasized one pole at the expense of the other. I can understand the temptation. While I can articulate to a certain degree how each of these pairs relate to each other, I cannot fully logically reconcile them. Heresy often is the emphasis of one end of the polarity at the expense of the other rather than a complete rejection Christian conviction.

Now, for some of my atheist and other skeptical friends, this all seems crazy and irrational. Yet I would observe that there are a number examples from science to every day life of bipolar truths. We understand light as both wave and particle. For Americans, we have the motto of e pluribus unum–out of the many, one. Every society wrestles with the tension of individual rights and social responsibility.

Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I’m convinced that as infuriating as these tensions can be, when we try to eliminate them by emphasizing one pole of a truth at the expense of another, or one position in a debate while demonizing one’s opponent, we not only make the world simpler, but smaller and lose something of the richness and wonder that pervades life, as puzzling as it can be.

I’ve been considering this quite a bit recently as I’ve reflected on Rich Nathan’s recent book Both-And, which attempts to articulate a vision for life that reconciles many apparent opposites in an either-or world of polarized discourse . Here are some of the other tensions of belief and practice in which I think we are called to live:

  • we both welcome all people as they are and invite them into the transformational journey of discipleship following the wise and gracious leadership of Jesus.
  • we are to live both in the world and not be of the world.
  • we both believe in revealed truth and use our minds to understand the world in which God has place us.
  • we both form communities centered around unchanging truths and welcome the exploration, questioning, and inquiry that enlarge our understanding of these truths and their relevance for our day.
  • we both pursue in word and deed heralding the presence of the rule of Jesus, and realize that the only universal fulfillment of that rule can be in his personal return when “the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” as we love to sing in the Hallelujah Chorus.

The question some might raise is whether this leads to a kind of relativism or shifting ideas about truth. And here I would say that the idea of truths in tension, or bipolar truth, is different from either believing truths that are in utter contradiction (such as that there is both a God and there is no god) or a type of syncretism, that attempts to blend ideas from different and ultimately contrary systems of belief or thought. Both poles find their sense is the character of God, the person of Christ, and the way God has created and ordered his world and church.

I’ve often despaired at the either-or options served up to us in our society, and even more when Christians side up on one side or the other of these polarities and try to get me to join them. Why must I choose between mothers and babies? Why must I choose between free enterprise and the environment? That doesn’t mean that I think Christians will always have the best answers to reconciling these polarities. But I do think that if we see living in tensions like these as an extension of living in the polar tensions of our faith, we might have something to contribute to a society that hungers for peace but struggles to surmount the divide between the various things that polarize us.

Thanks to those of you who have walked with me through this post, which represents an effort to think out something that I think is important both for our faith communities, and for our engagement with the wider world that may not share our convictions. I’d deeply value your thoughts and challenges to this thinking!

Spiritual Formation and the Life of the Mind

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Recently, I posted a list of spiritual formation books I’ve read over the last couple years. Working in an academic setting, I’ve come more to believe that spiritual formation and the life of the mind are closely connected–much as our secular culture tries to divorce reason and spirituality.

virtuous minds

 

A new book I’ve been reading, Virtuous Minds develops this idea. The author, Philip Dow, talks about seven “virtues” of worthy of cultivating in our intellectual formation: courage, carefulness, tenacity, fair-mindedness, curiosity, honesty, and humility. What strikes me in this list is the connection of character and intellect. We’ve all known very bright people who have employed their gifts very badly–falsifying data, cleverly manipulating balance sheets, and more. Intellectual giftedness, without intellectual integrity is a dangerous thing.

Courage, it seems to me begins with a love of truth–indeed, it seems that all of these virtues are rooted in this. Of course, this in turn is rooted in the premise that “the truth is out there”. Truth is not something simply to manipulated for our own power trips and personal prosperity. In fact, these virtues seem to assume that truth matters more than ourselves, even our lives. Courage means being willing to put myself at risk for truth. Humility, on the other hand, means being willing to admit when I am wrong and someone else better grasps the truth than do I.

I’m only part way through this book so I am ‘curious’ to see how the author will help us in the matter of cultivating these virtues. Stay tuned!