Shawful

There was a knock on my door a few days ago, and I opened it up to find a young man dressed in a nice suit at my door. “Oh great, more Mormons” I thought. Close. It was a cable guy. He rehearsed his introduction to me and went over his official-looking clipboard noting what services his company was providing for me. He observed that I didn’t have cable and asked if I would like that service. I calmly declined the offer, explaining that I didn’t watch tv.

The young man stared at me blankly for a moment, trying to process my response. “Oh, you must get a lot of streaming video through the internet, right?”

“No” I replied, “I don’t watch tv.” The cable guy looked at me as if I had told him I would like to discontinue my oxygen services, for I have no need of breathing.

Since this young man was clearly unable to process this notion of not watching tv, and standing in awkward silence in the doorway was a waste of both of our time, I explained “My family is more of the book-type.”

“Oh!” A light seemed to go on for him, and he scribbled something on his clipboard: apparently “book people” is a demographic the cable company recognizes?

This got me thinking about the fact that there actually are people out there who don’t read much, and their lifestyles do indeed fit in those atrocious statistics I hear of, that the average North American family spends some 4-8 hours per day in front of the tube.

I think TV has its place, but there are a few things about the very nature of the flickering box that militates against something desperately needed nowadays: a lifestyle of informed reflection. The ability to think in linear terms. The ability to identify foundational principles and competing moral visions that lurk behind our actions. The ability to formulate sound arguments and communicate one’s ideas with clarity, force, and leadership. The ability to identify when a person doesn’t have their facts quite right.

Over the years, it has struck me how difficult it is to cultivate a well-educated mind. For starters, it takes information, and lots of information. Not just superficial facts, but depth of knowledge into history and human psychology. Acquiring such knowledge takes a lot of time and energy: we need to read, we need to listen, and we need to reflect. Learning is something that comes slowly. To learn and to love knowledge requires a good amount of discipline and energy, and a lifestyle consistent with those goals. All of this sounds a tad ascetic, and I suppose it is, but there are few things as satisfying and freeing as having a good framework of knowledge with which to understand what’s going on in the world around you. It’s freeing, liberating, a source of joy and peace. It also means work: often times the world around us is not good, and we need to work to change that. Knowledge gives us the needed information to know what to do, where to go, and how one ought to go about one’s business of doing good works.

Contrasted with this is the couch potato lifestyle. Generally living a life of informed reflection and good works makes the world of the couch potato seem quite offensive, shallow, and irrational. What argument could justify a duty to subject one’s mind to screenshots that change every 3 seconds, to be berated by a host of flickering advertisements and a general proclivity to toilet humour? Again, these all have their place: a well-educated mind needs periods of rest, passivity and laughter. But there is a vast difference between a season of rest and a lifestyle of stimulated passivity.

Television has a way of sucking us into ignorance: it is awfully enjoyable and entertaining, and to that extent can even be addictive. Even documentaries, which are a little more informative in nature than the sitcom or movie, leave us passive viewers of information imparted to us in the form of a dramatic narrative. The production of most documentaries is much more concerned with the rise and fall of a story than in cultivating a deep understanding of the subject matter. It’s informational, but it’s information placed in a dramatic narrative format and more often than not, it’s information that is sacrificed to the drama rather than the other way around.

So what does one typically do if one finds oneself caught in a dearth of knowledge? It isn’t much fun to be in the dark about what’s going on: ignorance is a powerful form of bondage, just as knowledge is a powerful tool for freedom. Learning is hard, while entertainment is easy, and entertainment has a pull to it that can numb the pain of bondage too much of it can bring.

As the proverb goes: “Taking the path of least resistance is what makes men and rivers crooked.”

Knowledge

I heard an excellent sermon the other week in which the speaker introduced the concept of “double knowledge” found in Calvin and Augustine. Calvin wrote in the institutes that in the act of knowing God, we also know ourselves and in the act of knowing ourselves, we also know God. These are the two sides of knowledge, hence “double knowledge”.

True? False? I would add a third category of knowledge “the world”, so that in every act of knowing the world around us we also know God and ourselves, and so forth. This is called multi-perspectivalism, and it basically regards “the entire body of knowledge” as consisting of three perspectives: knowledge of God, knowledge of ourselves, and knowledge of the world. In knowing one of these perspectives, we know the other two. Multi-perspectivalism, like double knowledge, is a statement about the nature of knowledge.

I imagine at this point that this post is sounding like a perfect example of why so many people despise philosophy and theology. I do have a practical point, and I hope in this post I can explain the relevance and importance of these ideas. I believe it to be of great practical import not just to Christians, but anyone interested in anything to do with knowledge, be it scientific, psychological, personal, practical, or theological.

Let’s start with the two “perspectives” Calvin has pointed out to us: that to know God, we must know ourselves, and to know ourselves we must know God.

The Angst which needed Relief

The force of this idea was one of the central reasons why I found a need to accept the existence of God. My “starting point” for this was at the height of a crisis over anxiety and my personal identity: my high school years. In the midst of stoners, metalheads, homeys and immigrants, the question “who am I?” naturally weighed upon me. Not having a stable home life (my parents being in the midst of a painful separation) directed my attention to this question all the more poignantly. Like many teens, my inner thought-life was regularly characterized by a sense of loneliness and a need for personal stability and identity. In a nutshell, I needed to know myself.

Numerous options were presented to me, directly or indirectly. I could find my identity through social conformity. This was very unappealing and smacked of rank shallowness. Of course, I was a shallow person, but relieving my anxieties by wearing the latest name brands and going with whatever the majority did struck me as a whole new level of shallowness I wasn’t willing to go to. (or so I reasoned in my teenage hubris)

So if a solid sense of personal identity wasn’t to be found in conformity to the majority, where was it? Band geeks? Jocks? Some other minority? Socially, this is the direction I went in (I wisely chose to be a quasi-metalhead D&D geek) but of course, this was no real solution, for it did not lend any clarity to the mystery of the value of an individual in a group. I merely identified myself with a particular group, and my individuality seemed to just dissolve into the morass of the social mores of that one group. What made me different, or what made me, me? I still found a stark lack of understanding about myself, other than an obvious felt need to belong.

What I found necessary for any kind of certainty in knowledge of myself was to find some sort of a measuring line that did not shift and change depending on my moods, my friends, or what anyone else, including myself, thought of me. I could compare and contrast myself with my surroundings: “Who am I compared to Joe? To a foreigner?” You get the idea. Exercises in “compare and contrast” are limitless, but none of my immediate surroundings provided an answer to what my heart craved: identity. Some solid standard of measuring me, which could not be found anywhere in the world, which consisted entirely of relativity.

Does Anyone Have a Ruler I could Borrow?

What I discovered was that I could not know myself truly without God. Until God entered the picture, there was no way to attain knowledge of me other than by comparing and contrasting myself with other relative objects and people in the universe. What could not be answered were crucial things like: “Am I a good person?” “What ought I to do with my time, talents, and energies?”

You can see how inevitable shallow answers are to these questions in a world without God. Q: Am I good? A: I am better than Bob and Suzie, but worse than Douglas. Q: What ought I to do? A1: What you decide for yourself you ought to. A2: What the majority says you ought to. A3: What a certain individual (parents, a professional, a cherished friend) says you ought to.

Briefly, let me break down the unsatisfactory nature of Answers 1-3 above.

1. This results in using yourself as a measuring stick to form an opinion of yourself. The problem is, in going on the search for meaning and identity in the first place, you have confessed from the outset that “yourself” is in need. The very cause of anxiety is the lack of solidness within the individual.

2. With the “ought” found in the majority, we are left with the question “which majority?” At that time in my life, this was the majority of high school students. Even if one finds a majority that’s a little more mature, the question then arises “Why ought I to conform to this majority?” Simply put, there is nothing in the nature of “a majority” that makes a majority obligatory to follow. This is similar to Answer 1, where I found there is nothing in the nature of an individual that commands obligations. There is nothing in the nature of majorities that commands obligations.

3. This answer (some other individual) bears the same problems as 1 and 2.

The only answer that rings plausible for coming to some sort of knowledge about yourself is in God, for God is not relative and changing in nature. When God speaks his evaluation of a person’s goodness, he speaks with authority. Unlike any human or worldly measuring tool, it is within God’s nature to be self-sufficient. The need I experienced (and I think we all experience and need) was for something without the quality of relativity. Only God fits this description.

If Rulers are Imaginary, Why do I Want one so Badly?

To be the philosophical irritant, we may throw the entire inquiry back further: why do I even care enough to seek an answer to these feelings and thoughts? Why seek such a thing as an identity, a solid ground to form some sort of knowledge about myself? If God does not exist, if there is nothing but matter and the shifting sands of relative existence, then how could relative matter possibly give rise to a being which seeks absolutes? Again, the very nature of the quest and inquiry can only be explained by the existence of a God who seeks us, and puts such quests in our hearts that we may find Him. Without knowing God, I find it is quite impossible to form a coherent picture of ourselves and so I agree with Calvin, that in knowing ourselves we know God, and in knowing God, we know ourselves.

Love

The third and most important xian virtue is love.

When speaking of the love of God, there is something about the term "love" that is well, corny. In the midst of a hurting world that looks at suffering and corruption with such serious denunciations, God’s love can sound like a pipe-dream of rainbows and lollipops. Where is God’s merciful intervention and concern? While love sounds nice, we need real answers, not a romantic fairy-tale.

Is the love of God a romantic love? I certainly wouldn't want to suggest it isn't romantic. Contrary to the often stoic portrayals of Jesus in the church's artwork throughout the centuries, I think we ought to be comfortable with a theology that asserts God as the ultimate romantic, and author of romance itself, romantic love being part of his very nature as God.

Though we do see illustrations of God's romantic love in scripture, romantic love is not the main emphasis, and a strictly Romantic view of God's love can be very meaningless to a lot of people.

Some verses of the bible have become "theme verses": verses that sum up well the overall message of the bible. As regards God's love, John 3:16 is one of those verses. Unfortunately because of the way it is worded, it can also be prone to misunderstanding. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life." The part of this verse that is often misunderstood is the "so". I have often heard it interpreted that "for God so loved the world" is meant to be an expression of the grandeur of God's romantic feelings of love. Something like an infatuated, glassy-eyed "I love you sooooo much!"

I suspect that the popularity of this verse has contributed to abit of the uncritical use and presentation of the love of God.

In truth, the "so" of this verse is really speaking of manner, or kind. It would be more accurately (but less simply) translated as "For in this way, God so loved the world: that he gave his only begotten son."

Of course, this does not mean the romantic and emotional element of God's love is absent from the text, but the main thrust is the exemplary manner of God's love: the laying down of the life of God for the sake of a world in need of God.

I find this is a much more instructive and helpful summary of what is most important to know about the love of God: a willingness to lay down our lives for others. This is the love that God calls us to have in our hearts.

This is much more sober, practical, credible and winsome than the portrayal of this Christian virtue as a romantic fling with the Lord.

Given how frequently the Christian faith is subjectivized and privatized beyond recognition, it's important to remember the objective quality of God's love. God's love is identifiable and in some sense, measureable. So much so, it's almost unmistakeable, for it has definite qualities to it. “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 cor 13:4-7) Why is this so important? Because in love there is a real, objective and practical tool to evaluate whether or not you are a good person.

The horrible temptation (I would even go so far as to label it demonic) is to delude ourselves with moral excuses. Many have an abundance of religious romance, church flings and a hodge-podge of cuddly cherub-like thoughts that never amount to any action. Not all have (or have been taught how) to cultivate genuine character.

While growing in the love of God doesn't fit into a tidy 5-step formula, the cultivation of the virtue of love must at least be wrestled free from foggy, unmeasureable notions of God's love as mere romance.

Contagious Hope

Christian hope is a contagious hope. It is more than something an individual thinks will happen, but is something Christians share corporately. Our future hope of eternal life is not a vision of a private mansion to compensate for all the comforts we missed out on in this life. Our hope is the hope of fullness of fellowship with God, fullness of human community, fullness of harmony with the creation. In this sense, Christian hope must be shared, and even demands that such hope be spread around.

There is an element of Christian hope that fuels an excitement, a zeal that is sometimes louder than the message itself. It is an excitement that reminds me of the charged trial dialogue wherein Peter and John replied to the council: “...we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:20)

All people, regardless of their worldview or religion at some point experience the logical conclusions of their views of the future. At some point in life, all people have to come to psychological terms with the future: that is, they have to come to a liveable peace with what they believe the future entails. This may be as simple as anxiety over one’s upcoming career, or as epic as wondering what awaits us after the grave. All worldviews say something about the future, even if they choose to remain silent about the future.

(A small aside on that last comment: even if one says the future is unknowable, that belief lodges itself into the mind as true, and therefore must find practical expression. If the future is entirely unknown, this results in certain obligations. For example, when encountering those who claim to know the future: claims of future-knowledge are then claims of falsehood, and we are to react to falsehood accordingly. So even agnosticism about the future entails obligations, and a lifestyle that is consistent with genuine ignorance.)

Consider what the Christian hopes is coming: justice to the wicked, fullness of fellowship, absence of death. Who can fail to be moved by God’s promise to “wipe every tear from their eyes”? (Rev 7:17) All wrongs will be righted, life will no longer have the curse of death upon it. Moreover, jerks, manipulative people, hypocrites, power-mongers, corrupt politicians, -everyone of vile character -will be excluded. (I feel I ought to elaborate on the exclusion of the wicked from heaven, but that's a topic for another post. For this post I'm satisfied with saying that the absence of evil people is a good thing to look forward to.) This hope is revitalizing, energizing. Life does not end in death, nor are we at risk of our good work ever being destroyed, nor is the future lost in agnosticism. If God’s promises are in fact true, any alternative one previously held seems all ashes and mire.

Herein lies the contagion of Christian hope. It seeks, even insists on being spread around. I think this gets misconstrued more often than not. To be sure, at times this becomes an adversarial issue, but at the core, what we proclaim in Christ (or rather, what God has proclaimed in Christ) is fullness of joy. This is the express motive stated by John: “...and we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.” (1 Jn 1:4)

Missing out on Christian hope is like having to work on Christmas day. Having done that numerous years in a row, it gets pretty sickening to become socially sidelined on missing out in crucial moments of turkey and wine, presents and laughter, and late night conversations by the fire while the frost grows on the windows. Missing out on Christmas is to be left out in the cold, and the spread of Christian hope seeks to include others in the joy of Christmas fellowship.

Transforming Hope

I have often heard the notion that Christian hope tends toward evil behavior. Perhaps you’ve heard that too. Allow me to share a few examples that may have a familiar ring to them: “The Christian hope in a future state of heavenly bliss keeps Christians from seeing real-world problems: rather than finding practical solutions to human suffering, they just focus on a pipe dream of kingdom come.” Or perhaps this one, whom we’ll call “the senseless Christian”: “Jesus is going to come back soon, so there’s no sense bothering about all the nonsense going on now: he will right all the wrongs when he comes back in the next few years.”

How are we to respond to these propositions? The first objector claims that there is an incipient evil within Jesus’ teachings. The second, though a believer, seems to have come to a similar conclusion regarding mercy towards a suffering world. He doesn’t think Jesus’ teachings are evil, but let’s face it: his application of Christian doctrine certainly is.

My first response is to say that the bible teaches the very opposite of these things: that the future hope of God bringing justice to the world has the opposite effect: it promotes activity, compassion, benevolence, justice, etc. We may say to the first objector that at the very least, he must present his objections to the actual teachings of Jesus, not what he supposes their outcome will to be. The bible does indeed teach there is a future state of justice to come to the world, but this future hope transforms the way we live in the present for good. “Let us hold fast our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful; and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds...encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.” (Heb 10:23-25)

To give this objector credit, I think he is correctly perceiving an evil tendency in the human heart, but this tendency is not within Jesus’ teachings themselves. There is a tendency we have to twist reason and good sense, to twist the good and holy into something profane and sinful. I don't find it implausible that someone will take a promise of justice to come and distort it into an excuse for moral laxness.

This objector assumes a spirit of hypocrisy within the believer: that since God will one day render justice to each for their misdeeds, the believer is exempt from such judgment. I think the fallacy here is plain: by this logic, we would be reasoning as follows: “God is going to judge all the world’s misdeeds: except mine.” I think it makes much more sense to reason that if God is going to right all of the wrongs in this world, and we find we have wrongs in our soul, isn't that strong motivation to get rid of those wrongs? Or are we supposing that God’s process of righting corrupt human hearts on judgment day will be all lollipops and rainbows?

To the second person, we may justly censure his passivity and demonstrate through a simple reading of the bible that his profession is at odds with the teaching of the Lord he claims to follow. His passivity is simply storing up judgment for himself.

The second person also seems to be assuming that God only cares about 100% success in our charitable efforts, rather than a heart of love that drives charitable energies. That is, the senseless Christian imagines God will come and say: “Well, you tried to do good, but the appointed day of judgment came, which ruined all your benevolent plans, so I’m not going to really look at what you did, or what was in your heart.”

It is true that many of our charitable efforts don’t succeed, (think of giving funds to a homeless person who simply uses it to buy drugs) or they simply aren’t as efficient a use of our time and energy as they could be. We should be giving thoughtful attention to genuinely useful and productive charity. However, I think the problem with the “senseless Christian” isn’t a heart that’s concerned about more effective charity. Rather, his mind seems to be looking intently for an alibi to keep charity out of his heart, and has twisted Christian doctrine in so doing. His hope is not set on a real idea of justice, (see my last post for my comment on how our hopes need to be based in reality) but on a justification of himself no matter what’s in his heart.

I think transforming hope concludes with the exhortation to hope in the truth, and live accordingly.

The Logic of Hope

Of the three Christian virtues, faith hope and love, hope is the virtue I hear about the least in sermons and books. I certainly have no memory of ever being directly exhorted to cultivate more hope in my life. Yet in numerous places in the bible, Hope is commended as one of the elementary staples of the Christian life. (Rom 5:5; 1 Cor 13:13)

“Hope” seems to stand out from the other two virtues. Faith is easy to grasp, for it is wedded directly to our basic concepts of religion. Whoever heard of calling oneself “Christian” but having no faith in the basic articles of belief, or whoever heard of a “faith” that had no expression of personal piety? Likewise, love is a pretty intuitive concept, for it forms the basis of Christian ethics: it tells us how we ought to treat one another. So Faith is foundational by definition. Love provides the practical relevance of Christianity. Why should hope have a place among these two fundamentals?

Perhaps one of the reasons hope is seldom discussed is because of an abundance of wealth. Hope is by nature a future thing, and since we have so much comfort in the present, why bother with the comforts of the future? What if we regularly faced real poverty, with bare bread and water, or with a regular risk of death by exposure? Hope does seem to have more gravity in a context of suffering, for though the destitute are helpless now, it comforts the sufferer to know that one day justice will be made reality. Though the present may be all death and disease, the future will be life abundant, which makes the present more bearable.

Nevertheless, I would like to argue that hope needs place of prominence in our minds regardless of our standards of living. Hope remains fairly shallow if it is only seen as an answer to present financial misfortune. It’s unfortunate that hope doesn’t get more air-time, and so I hope to throw out some seeds of reflection on cultivating the virtue of hope by reflecting on a few aspects of hope.

First off, I take it as basic that our hopes must be firmly rooted in reality. We have all now and then taken our pipe-dreams seriously, or been around people with wildly unrealistic personal ambitions for honor, power, and wealth. Such hopes tend to either be corrupting by nature, or be doomed to failure from the outset. Needless to say, we would do well to avoid such false hopes. Bad hopes corrode the soul, or they fizzle out and die in a crippling burst of disappointment. Genuine hopes fuel people with an energy that is difficult to quench. Idealy, those genuine hopes reflect a concrete reality to come that is more than just a private ambition or religious preference.

What this means is that the heart and mind must have a sense of assurance, a certainty that what we hope for will come to pass. It can’t be a passive wish, or a plausible theory. It must take its seat in our hearts with a weighty certainty that fixes our eyes. The author of Hebrews compares Christian hope to “an anchor of the soul”. (Heb 6:19) Hope is so essential because of its weightiness in the Christian life. It is that bedrock, that mass of iron below the surface that keeps faith alive in the midst of the howling tempest. Without that anchor, trials and distractions can capsize and shipwreck faith.

In a very general way, “certainty” is something often associated with empirical evidence. Again I wonder if one of the reasons hope isn’t the hot topic it should be is because the logic of hope fits uncomfortably with scientific investigation. The logic of Christian hope is not subject to surveys and scientists. It’s not something we can cherish by ourselves and get ourselves up into a state of certain hope by engaging in various sorts of “proofs”. Christian hope is based on the promise of God, and no Christian hope deserves to be called such, if it isn’t rooted in an encounter with the God whose Spirit inspires confidence. Simply put, God is good, and knowledge of God’s goodness, especially his love for us shown in Christ, I think is what forms the chief core of certainty that rallies the Christian heart to have an unwavering hope in an unimaginably wonderful future that is yet unseen.

Faith

Faith is a much maligned virtue. In common usage faith is often described as some sort of flighty mental activity that is the antithesis of evidence and reason. I can’t help but feel a little insulted at this misunderstanding of faith, as if one of the primary Christian virtues Jesus calls us to is shutting our minds off. Of course, genuine faith is nothing of the sort. Faith requires mental content, and well-reasoned reflection. I’ll briefly write about these aspects of faith in turn.

For starters, faith requires content, and is far from an empty-headed activity. I’m not sure if my experience can be applied to everyone, but I find it impossible to exercise faith in something I’m ignorant or uncertain of. Faith as an act requires some knowledge of the person we’re trusting. In fact, I would say it requires a lot of knowledge. How much would you trust a stranger? Would you trust a stranger to give you good directions? Would you trust a stranger with your wallet? How about your soul? Why then would anyone expect a person to come to a meaningful faith in God apart from any knowledge about him? If you're a particularly skeptical kind of person, you likely want some sort of reasoned evidence for faith, and faith just ain't gonna happen without some basic questions answered. In my experience, any kind of faith that isn’t accompanied by a good knowledge of God’s acts and commands, as well as clearly articulated reasons why a person believes, ends up showing itself sooner or later as a fragile faith, or worse, a counterfeit one.

This idea of a good knowledge of God’s acts and commands brings us to the next characteristics of faith I’ve chosen: reasoning. Faith is something that, the moment you try to do it, forces you to reason intensely about it. It’s one thing to say: “I believe in God”, but what is that faith in God unless it’s related to other things in your life? “Faith in God” is not a coherent concept unti it has a context, for it is not as if we are bodiless souls floating about in a void with the Lord. When faith is flexed it is flexed in places and relationships. What does it mean to believe in God in the workplace? What does it mean to believe in God in relation to friends, family members, governments, other religions? Faith demands reasoning because when faith is exercised, it is brought into conflict. A faith that does not reason is a faith that cannot act, and a faith that does not act cannot be faith, for faith is by definition a verb.

To be sustained, faith needs regular education. Knowledge must constantly be on the increase. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for a Christian to work hard at increasing their biblical knowledge-base (and their knowledge of the world where they are doing their believing) early on in their spiritual walk, only to cease studying and reflecting for many years. Some may suddenly find themselves having a crisis of faith in their early 40's as they try to get by on the faith of their early adulthood. Or perhaps more commonly, a teenager may find their Sunday-school faith irrelevant to their growing adulthood, and may cast off their childhood faith altogether. In a sense, we are supposed to cast off our childhood faith, but that is so we may embrace a more mature understanding of God. (1 Cor 13:11) Without regular content, reflection, exercise, and age-and-situation appropriate study, a person’s faith will not and cannot amount to much.