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Beginning this Friday morning at 6am, we will have our first co-ed study for TheoForum guys and SheoForum ladies. We’ll dive into a range of issues revolving around the nature of the relationship between body and soul – the chemical/biological and the spiritual.
Every other Friday morning we’ll sip coffee and study through Ed Welch’s book, Blame It on the Brain.
I cannot wait!
One more in the stream of thought-provoking pieces from Carl Trueman. Here are the closing paragraphs.
If relationships with others are to be at all meaningful, then they need to embody levels of privacy, and concepts of decency and modesty. To be truly bereaved requires that one is first truly intimate or connected to person. My relationship with my wife is unique; that we do not have sexual relations with others, or flaunt our own for others to see, is vital to the reality and importance and uniqueness of that relationship. The same goes in different ways with friendships and other human relationships. Privacy, decency, modesty are critical, and the levels of these in each relationship determine the nature and importance of that relationship. The whole culture of modern media, from television to internet, is designed to put strain on, if not completely abolish, these basic concepts that are so important. Dare I suggest that one of the battles of the next decade for Christians is not so much how we can use the new media for spreading the gospel, but how we can stop the new media from destroying those things which seem so germane to the normal Christian life as the Bible envisages it, where people matter more than pixels and, no, not everybody has a right to know and see and do everything.
Last summer, I stood by my father’s coffin. There were only eleven of us at the funeral: my mother, myself, my two sisters and their partners, my oldest niece, and dad’s two brothers and their wives. It was just as dad had instructed it should be: a private, modest and decent affair with nobody present except those who really cared; no tears except those drawn from wells dug deep into the lives we had shared with him over many years; no stranger there to trivialize the moment by trying to steal a share in our grief. We grieved truly, and still do every day. But where are the thousands who lined the route of Diana’s funeral, or even those of Jade Goody? Already they have moved on to a new website or tabloid headline or reality TV show. For them, everything changed; and then, two days later, it was back to business as usual. In my mind, however, I remain standing by my father’s coffin. Read more…
“… I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on…
This is how Nicholas Carr begins his brilliantly incisive piece for The Atlantic Monthy, Is Google Making Us Stupid? He continues…
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
I hope you will take the time to read the whole thing, but here are two more quotes to whet the appetite.
“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.”…Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Carr goes on to include some statements made by the guys who run Google about where they’d like to see this movement eventually land. I’ll leave that for you to read (not browse) in the full length article.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
If you haven’t already, I’d encourage you to create a Reading List that records what you’re reading, when you start and when you finish. This practice has helped me over the years to not just browse books but read them and to monitor my reading diet over a given year. If, as Maryanne Wolf argues, “Deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking”, then I want to take care to steward my mind so that deep truths and long reflection do not become things I used to do, but things that I’m actively pursuing, my appreciation and use of Google notwithstanding.
Not that I want to make too much of him (read the piece and you’ll see why), but here’s another great piece from Carl Trueman.
Here’s the ending, but I recommend you read the whole thing.
The American church reflects the culture: ministries built around individuals, around big shots, churches that focus on god-like guru figures, all of them pointing to one door. I have lost count of the conversations I have had with church people anxious to tell of who they heard at this conference, of which person they corresponded with, of how this opinion or that opinion would not sit well with this demi-god and is therefore of little value; and, of course, of how anyone who disagrees with, or criticizes, this chosen hero must, of necessity be morally depraved and wicked. People want the gods to do their thinking for them. All of the Pelagian, Manichean celebrity malarkey of the American political process is alive and well in the church as well. The question is: when it comes to churches and ministries built around messiahs who are supposed to point not to themselves but to the true door, who is going to have the guts to leave the temple?
I read this yesterday morning over at the Desiring God blog:
J. Gresham Machen saw in 1933 what many are trying to say today about the need for private education.
“The only way in which a state-controlled school can be kept even relatively healthy is through the absolutely free possibility of competition by private schools and church schools; if it once becomes monopolistic, it is the most effective engine of tyranny and intellectual stagnation that has yet been devised. (J. Gresham Machen: Selected Shorter Writings, 167)”
Machen was Professor of New Testament at Princeton Seminary from 1915-1929. In many places considered the last of the great Princeton theologians, he fought valiantly against the intrusion of modernism into the church and, in particular, Princeton, and eventually broke with Princeton to establish Westminster Theological Seminary. His writings, such as classic, Christianity and Liberalism, have continued to be influential to the present day. His scholarship and personal example are gifts of God to the Church – gifts that keep on giving.
Al Mohler comments on Facebook’s 5 year birthday, including some helpful advice on how to use and not abuse Facebook.
1. Never allow social networking to replace or rival personal contact and communication.
2. Set clear parameters for the time devoted to social networking.
3. Never write or post anything on a social networking site that you would not want the world to see, or anything that would compromise your Christian witness.
4. Never allow children and teenagers to have independent social networking access (or Internet access, for that matter).
5. Do not allow children and teens to accept any “friend” unknown to you.
6. Encourage older friends and relatives to sign up and use the technology.
7. Use the social networking technology to bear witness to the Gospel, but never think that this can replace the centrality of face-to-face evangelism, witness, and discipleship.
8. Do all things to the glory of God, and do not allow social networking to become an idol or a display of narcissism.
[In case you just popped in, I'm taking some time to keep notes as I read through Calvin's Institutes this year. Glad you came. Hope you check in more often.]
Again, this section of Calvin’s Institutes has been one of the most poignant portions so far. I remember reading this for the first time – roughly 1997. Some authors brought me to a place of thinking of Calvin as an enemy of the gospel, an ungodly proponent of a system of theology that was more indebted to philosophical impositions than biblical truth. Reading this Preface to the King back in 1997, it didn’t take long before I was struck by the sense of Calvin’s strong devotion to Christ and courage in the face of vehement opposition. I started to think in those days, “Crazy, way off base theologically, yes, definitely. But, a calculated deceiver, an ungodly man, a man who seemed to love philosophy more than Scripture. I’m not seeing that so far.” My sense of antagonism against all things associated with the name was no longer personal to Calvin.
From the Prefatory Address, to Francis I, King of France 1536…
“Let not a contemptuous idea of our insignificance dissuade you from the investigation of this cause. We, indeed, are perfectly conscious how poor and abject we are: in the presence of God we are miserable sinners, and in the sight of men most despised – we are (if you will) the mere dregs and offscourings of the world, or worse, if worse can be named: so that before God there remains nothing of which we can glory save only his mercy, by which, without any merit of our own, we are admitted to the hope of eternal salvation and before men not even this much remains, since we can glory only in our infirmity, a thing which, in the estimation of men, it is the greatest ignominy even tacitly to confess. But our doctrine must stand sublime above all the glory of the world, and invincible by all its power, because it is not ours, but that of the living God and his Anointed, whom the Father has appointed King, that he may rule from sea to sea, and from the rivers even to the ends of the earth; and so rule as to smite the whole earth and its strength of iron and brass, its splendor of gold and silver, with the mere rod of his mouth, and break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel … (Dan 2:34; Is 11:4; Ps 2:9).”-Institutes, Prefatory Address, xxv
Analogy of faith
When Paul declared that all prophecy ought to be according to the analogy of faiths (Rom 12:6), he laid down the surest rule for determining the meaning of Scripture. Let our doctrine be tested by this rule and our victory is secure. For what accords better and more aptly with faith than to acknowledge ourselves divested of all virtue that we may be clothed by God, devoid of all goodness that we may be filled by him, the slaves of sin that he may give us freedom, blind that he may enlighted, lame that he may cure, and feeble that he may sustain us, to strip ourselves of all ground of glorying that he alone may shine forth glorious, and we be glorified in him?”-ibid., xxv
On the early Fathers and authority
“It is a calumny to represent us as opposed to the fathers (I mean the ancient writers of a purer age), as if the fathers were supporters of their impiety. Were the contest to be decided by such authority (to speak in the most moderate terms), the better part of the victory would be ours. While there is much that is admirable and wise in the writings of the fathers, and while in some things it has fared with them as with ordinary men; these pious sons, forsooth, with the peculiar acuteness of intellect, and judgment, and soul, which belongs to them adore only their slips and errors, while those things which are well said they overlook, or disguise, or corrupt, so that it may be truly said their only care has been to gather dross among gold. Then, with dishonest clamor, they assail us as enemies and despisers of the fathers.”-ibid., xxviii
“It was a father who thoughts that Christ only should be listened to, from its being said, ‘hear him’; and that regard is due not to what others before us have said or done, but only to what Christ, the head of all, has commanded. This landmark they neither observe themselves nor allow to be observed by others, while they subject themselves and others to any master whatever, rather than Christ.”-Institutes, Prefatory Address, xxx
Marks of the Church
“We on the contrary maintain both that the church may exist without any apparent form, and moreover, that the form is not attained by that external splendor which they foolishly admire, but by a very different mark, namely, by the pure preaching of the Word of God, and the due administration of the sacraments.”-ibid., xxxii
‘Post tenebras lux’: God’s Word & the Devil’s attack
“It is ones of the characteristics of the divine Word, that whenever it appears, Satan ceases to slumber and sleep. This is the surest and most unerring test for distinguishing it from false doctrines which readily betray themselves, while they are received by all with willing ears, and welcomed by an applauding world. Accordingly, for several ages, during which all things were immersed in profound darkness, almost all mankind were mere jest and sport to the god of this world, who, … idled and luxuriated undisturbed. For what else could he do but laugh and sport while in tranquil and undisputed possession of his kingdom? But when the light beaming from above somewhat dissipated the darkness – when the strong man arose and aimed a blow at his kingdom – then, indeed, he began to shake off his wonted torpor, and rush to arms.”-ibid., xxxiv
On the gospel and fallen receptivity
“Paul declares that it is a never-failing characteristic of the gospel to be a “savor of death unto death in them that perish” (2 Cor 2:16).”-ibid, xxxv
Respect/pray for the king, live quiet and godly life
“We, whose voice was never heard in faction, and whose life, while passed under you, is known to have been always quiet and simple; even now, when exiled from our home, we nevertheless cease not to pray for all prosperity to your person and your kingdom. We, forsooth, are aiming after an unchecked indulgence in vice, in whose manners, though there is much to be blamed, there is nothing which deserves such an imputation; nor (thank God) have we profited to little in the gospel that our life may not be to these slanderers an example of chastity, kindness, pity, temperance, patience, moderation, or any other virtue. It is plain indeed that we fear God sincerely, and worship him in truth, since, whether by life or by death, we desire his name to be hallowed”-ibid., xxxv-xxxvi
Closing words: unflinching allegiance to Christ in the face of ‘every extremity’ and a warning: God, the King of kings, will reckon with our persecutors.
“But if the whispers of the malevolent so possess your ear, that the accused are to have no opportunity of pleading their cause; if those vindictive furies, with your connivance, are always to rage with bonds, scourgings, tortures, maimings, and burnings, we, indeed, like sheep doomed to slaughter, shall be reduced to every extremity; yet so that in our patience we will possess our souls, and wait for the strong hand of the Lord, which, doubtless, will appear in its own time, and show itself armed, both to rescue the poor from affliction, and also take vengeance on the despisers, who are now exulting so securely. Most illustrious King, may the Lord, the King of kings, establish your throne in righteousness and your scepter in equity. Basel, 1st August, 1536.”-ibid., xxxvi
Here’s how the Wall Street Journal article, October 2008, opened:
Department stores hire mystery shoppers. Restaurant chains bring in undercover diners to rate their food and service. Churches enlist Thomas Harrison, a former pastor from Tulsa, Okla., and a professional mystery worshipper.
The piece then proceeds to describe the process of evaluation, the kinds of things Mr. Harrison looks for, cost of services, and his ‘cover story’ should someone wonder why he seemed to be looking so intently at everything.
One weekend this past summer, Mr. Harrison drove up to Trinity Church in Cedar Hill, Texas, in a bright-red rented Chevrolet. Armed with a digital camera, he trolled the church’s grounds and its new $13 million sanctuary, snapping shots of weeds growing in the parking lot, loose lighting fixtures and a fuse box missing a lid. “Please cover as soon as possible,” he wrote in his 67-page report. Few staff members were around on a stifling Saturday afternoon, but Mr. Harrison had a cover story just in case: He was a friend of the pastor’s visiting from out of town, and was touring to get ideas before renovating his own church.
He also inspects the website and local restaurants (“have you heard of X Church”?) Of course, the main part of a church’s overall ‘grade’ depends on what Harrison observes when the curtain goes back on Sunday morning.
Seminary professor, Paul Metzger, shares his concern on behalf of those who see this as a practice that betrays how far we have fallen to enlist this kind of service for the sake of growth and as a desperate grab for cultural influence.
Some theologians warn that mystery-worshipper services will drive “spiritual consumerism.” Evaluating churches as if they were restaurants or hotels might encourage people to choose their church not according to its theology, but based on which one has the best lattes or day care, says Paul Metzger, professor of theology at Multnomah Biblical Seminary in Portland, Ore. “We tend to look for religion or spirituality that will give us what we want, when we want it,” Prof. Metzger says. “There’s a pressure for the church to be something that the church is not.”
The concluding paragraph:
Others say that church shopping has become necessary for churches seeking to compete in an increasingly mobile and consumer-oriented society. “My competition is Cracker Barrel restaurant down the street,” says Pete Wilson, pastor of CrossPoint Church in Nashville, Tenn., who regularly enlists a secret shopper to evaluate his 2,000-person congregation. “If they go in there and are treated more like family than when they come to CrossPoint Church, then it’s lights out for me.” (emphasis mine)
As I shared last year in our series in Philippians – there are hundreds of ways to be ashamed of the gospel. Some replace the gospel with good works/social justice – “I am not ashamed of being relevant, loving the poor, working a soup kitchen, etc. for I know it is the power of God unto salvation…” Others replace the gospel with a robust, Made in the USA pragmatism, “I am not ashamed of having a well-oiled, programmatically-satisfying church service, for I know it is the power of God unto salvation…”
In most cases it would not be stated this way. But the emphasis is so strong in that direction that it makes one wonder – did you think the gospel, the magnetic joy and reverence of God-centered worship, a message that enables congregants to hear God speak – did you consider that that might be powerful enough to make those first time visitors skip out on Cracker Barrel next Sunday? If this approach is ‘tried’ and doesn’t seem to ‘work’, then where is our confidence? And what will we try next, when the culture seems to want something more than ceilings with no water spots and children’s workers who have Chuck-E-Cheese like enthusiasm?
What would you pray if given the opportunity to call on God on such a nationally significant occasion as this? If author/theologian John Frame was offering the prayer, this is something like what he’d say:
We pray to you our creator, the mighty king of kings and lord of lords, who governs all things that come to pass and rules over all the nations. You raise up rulers and cast them down at your own pleasure, in the pursuit of your just and merciful purposes. We thank you for the freedom we have to worship you, sought by the founders of this nation, freedom you have given to us through the righteous laws of this land. So we call on you to be with us again during this new era. Be with our new president and all the leaders of this country, that they may be willing to hear the wisdom of your word and thus may image your justice, mercy, and integrity in their public life. As the one who remains constant throughout history, and yet who ordains change from each moment to the next, move our leaders to know how to maintain the foundations of our nation, while changing to meet the demands of new situations. Be our rock, when so much is changing in our lives. We pray for those families whose loved ones have died in defense of our country, and we pray for the young men and women who continue to fight our battles, that they may be victorious, and that their efforts may bring about the fruit of peace. We pray for those who have experienced terrible losses through the changes in the economy, and we pray that the leaders of this nation may seek out the wisest ways of responding. Above all, pour out on this nation your Holy Spirit, that there will be revival in our land, that the hearts of many will be moved to seek you, and that they may find that new life you offer us of love, joy, and peace.
This we pray in the name of Jesus Christ,
AMEN
Carl Trueman strikes again. As usual the blow is incisive and much needed. Here’s the ending…
I could become less obsessed with particularities and more concerned with universals. I could engage less with the accidents of culture and more with the substance of nature. I might even spend less time training people who don’t know the Apostles’ Creed to watch movies that would have made grandma blush and more time teaching them the basic elements of scripture and doctrine. Horribly modernist, I know; in fact, boringly passé. But it might, just might, prove more relevant in the long run than being able to understand the sacramental significance of Sharon Stone or playing ‘Spot the Redeemer Figure’ in the latest Jim Carrey movie.
