DISCUSSION: From Bitter to Sweet

Last updated on: June 21, 2024 at 8:08 am By Gene Veith

From my fellow Patheos blogger Randy Alcorn, an excerpt from a book he has written, Ninety Days of God’s Goodness: Daily Reflections That Shine Light on Personal Darkness. (About Alcorn: A pro-life protest led to an $8.2 million judgment against him and the threat of garnishment of his wages, so to avoid paying the abortion clinic he works as a pastor for minimum wage. The royalties on his bestselling books–some 11 million sold–all go directly to a ministry he has founded, which gives the money away. Read the remarkable story about his life and career here.)

In this passage Alcorn is discussing Psalm 71, especially verse 20: “Though you have made me see troubles, many and bitter, you will restore my life again; from the depths of the earth you will again bring me up” (NIV). He is doing so in light of Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”

Before my mother would make a cake, she used to lay the ingredients on the kitchen counter. One day I decided to experiment. I tasted the individual ingredients for a chocolate cake. Baking powder. Baking soda. Raw eggs. Vanilla extract. I discovered that almost everything that goes into a cake tastes terrible by itself. But a remarkable metamorphosis took place when my mother mixed the ingredients in the right amounts and baked them together. The cake tasted delicious. Yet judging by the taste of each component, I never would have believed cake could taste so good.

In a similar way, the individual ingredients of trials and apparent tragedies taste bitter to us. Romans 8:28 doesn’t tell me I should say, “It is good,” if my leg breaks or my house burns down or I am robbed and beaten or my child dies. But no matter how bitter the taste of the individual components, God can carefully measure out and mix all ingredients together and regulate the temperature in order to produce a wonderful final product.

I would just add that what is really bitter in a chocolate cake is the chocolate part, that is to say, the cocoa. Also that Romans 8:28 is about vocation, that is to say, our “calling” as Christians: “for those who are called according to his purpose.”

Discuss.

What are some examples of “bitter” experiences that turn “sweet”?

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Repairer of the Dung Gate

Last updated on: June 20, 2024 at 8:05 am By Gene Veith

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I would like to commend to you as a Biblical patron saint of vocation Malchijah the son of Rechab, repairer of the Dung Gate.

Let me explain. . .

I was in North Carolina attending the graduation service of Wilson Hill Academy, an online classical Christian school where my daughter is a Latin teacher and one of the administrators.

The Valedictorian was a young man named Caleb Vogel. (I was glad to hear that he will be attending Patrick Henry College, where I was a literature professor and provost, which is finally getting the academic recognition that it deserves.)

In the course of his valedictory address, which drew on J. R. R. Tolkien’s story that I blogged about Leaf by Niggle, Caleb quoted what he said was one of his favorite Bible verses:

Malchijah the son of Rechab, ruler of the district of Beth-haccherem, repaired the Dung Gate. He rebuilt it and set its doors, its bolts, and its bars. (Nehemiah 3:14)

The audience kind of laughed. But then Caleb explained.

For context, recall that the walls of Jerusalem, along with the Temple, had been torn down when the city was taken by the Babylonians and the people taken into captivity because of their unfaithfulness. But now the King of Persia is allowing the Jews to go back to their homeland. The book of Nehemiah is about the rebuilding of the city walls. That includes putting in the gates. And one of those gates was the Dung Gate, set aside for the removal of human waste, which was hauled to the rubbish dump in the nearby Hinnom Valley. (This was the site of “Tophet,” where the idolaters among the Jews would sacrifice their children to Molech [2 Kings 23:10]. “Ge-Hinnom” was rendered in Greek as “Gehenna,” one of the terms the New Testament uses for the place of eternal punishment, generally translated into English as “Hell” [e.g., Matthew 5:22, 29, 30].)

Caleb made the point that the Dung Gate was a very lowly portal. Indeed, whoever had the job of going through it to take out the city’s sewage was doing a very unpleasant, dirty, and humble task. But the Dung Gate is honored in the Bible. And Malchijah the son of Rechab is honored for repairing it. Just think! His name is recorded for all time in the Word of God itself! As Caleb said, “his name is mentioned in the Bible one more time than mine is.”

This means, Caleb went on to say, that no job is to be looked down upon, that no honest worker should be despised, that even the most menial-seeming, low-status tasks are of great value to God.

Caleb’s speech to the high school graduating class of 2024 was about vocation. And he, along with Malchijah the son of Rechab, is underscoring a very important fact about it.

The recent rediscovery of the doctrine of vocation, which I like to think I had a hand in, has led to what is being called “the faith and work movement,” in which Christians in various professions think through how to live out their faith in their work. But this has led to some criticism. Jeff Haanen, in reviewing a book on the subject, sums up his critique in the title of his essay: The Faith and Work Movement Is Leaving Blue-Collar Workers Behind, with the deck “Can it speak to evangelicals outside high-status professions?”

Christians today often focus on the talents they have been given and the fulfillment they feel in their vocation, which tends to be some high status, highly-paid profession. What about the greater number of workers in dead-end, thankless, and tedious jobs, who are often exploited by their employers? What does all of this talk about “vocation” mean to them?

Well, I would urge those critics to study Luther’s treatment of vocation. He is the great theologian of vocation. He writes much more of lowly, peasant-style labor–the farmer through whom God gives us all our daily bread; the servant girl sweeping the floor–than the upper reaches of the medieval social hierarchy. And Luther writes about the sacrifices and cross-bearing that happen in vocation, as God calls us–not just in our economic activity but even more importantly in our families, the church, and the society–to deny ourselves (not fulfill ourselves) as we use our multiple vocations to love and serve our neighbors.

They should read Gustaf Wingren’s Luther on Vocation. Also, for modern applications, my God at Work: Your Christian Vocations in All of Life; Family Vocation: God’s Calling in Marriage, Parenting, and Childhood (with my daughter Mary Moerbe); and Working for Our Neighbor: A Lutheran Primer on Vocation, Economics, and Ordinary Life.

And let us all remember Malchijiah the son of Rechab, repairer of the Dung Gate.

Photo: Jerusalem, Dung Gate*, by Berthold Werner – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6034191

*Not the original or the one repaired by Malchijiah (also known as Malchiah). This one was built in the 16th century by the Ottomans.

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The Loss of Language, Culture, & Relationships

Last updated on: June 13, 2024 at 6:16 pm By Gene Veith

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Language is what makes culture and all human relationships possible. We are seeing a broad based decline in language–not only the loss of the ability to read and write, but the also the ability to speak, listen, communicate, comprehend, and think. If we allow this trend to run its course–as we are beginning to do by letting Artificial Intelligence do our writing and our thinking for us–culture will be impossible and our very humanity will be at risk.

So argues Nadya Williams in her article for Providence entitled A People Without Culture: What the End of Reading Truly Means. She cites an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the much-complained-about topic of how college students have become such poor readers. But this one, “Is This The End of Reading?” by Beth McMurtrie, goes further, saying that students are increasingly unable to handle language and the tasks that require facility with language.

Williams, a classical historian, then gives a vivid evocation of ancient Greece before the dawn of literacy, when its oral culture enabled incredible feats of memory and extended attention spans, as when whole cities would come together to hear Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey recited from memory. Then writing came, retaining and preserving much of the oral culture, while making possible new heights of learning and thinking. Williams writes,

This brings us back full circle to the beleaguered college students whose inability to ingest information, whether written or oral, McMurtrie documents in her Chronicle piece. The students she describes decidedly don’t fit the characteristics of a written culture. The problem is, they don’t fit the characteristics of an oral culture either. Rather, powered by the latest modern technologies of smart phones and AI, they are steadily regressing to a pre-human state of cognition. Unable to receive sophisticated information in any form at all, what is left for them? Profound anxiety and loneliness.

This loss of culture, both oral and written, has significant implications for how any human society, let alone a democracy, functions. How do you communicate with other flesh and blood people with neither the ability to read nor listen deeply? This is a civilization-destroying kind of crisis. Without the possibility of deep, meaningful communication across society, there will be fewer deep friendships, fewer relationships, less healthy marriages, and more intergenerational strife as communication between parents and children becomes harder. There will be less collaboration beyond our immediate circles. All of these activities rely on effective speaking and listening, on remembering information, on understanding people and their ideas, on holding multiple ideas in one’s mind and discerning patterns or conflicts between them.

A “pre-human state of cognition”? I’m not sure what that is. Is she saying that we are starting to think like animals?

Despite that evocation of evolution–or, rather, devolution–Williams is a Christian, who emphasizes the centrality of the Word of God; that is, God’s language, through which He reveals Himself

There is significance, as the early Christians knew well, to the idea of God as Word that became flesh. Words can be transcendent. Words are how God communicates with us—especially, today, through the written word. And words, written or spoken, are how we express our love for God and for other people. Without them, we lose not only culture, but our very humanity.

Indeed, this loss of humanity that is unfolding in front of our very eyes is only further abetted by the hollow solutions readily available. Can’t find a real person to date? AI girlfriends are here for you. Can’t make friends on your own? AI friends to the rescue. Can’t do the reading to write your college papers or job application letters? You guessed it, yet again, AI can do it.

But the nature of human beings as flesh and blood made in God’s image insists on this truth: We have been created for relationship—first and foremost with God, but also with other people. And so, the solution for the literacy crisis in our society can only be relational.

That is to say, talk with each other. Listen to each other. Try to comprehend each other. Read. Read with each other. Write and let other people read what you have written. Read the Bible and listen to the Bible being read. In response to God’s Word, pray with your words. Take to heart what the Book of Proverbs says about words, good ones and bad ones. Recover language.

Illustration by Ghozt Tramp, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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Christianity without Transcendence

Last updated on: April 20, 2024 at 5:45 pm By Gene Veith

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Conservative Christians have long criticized the social gospel of liberal theology, with its this-worldly focus, its presumptuous attempt to build Heaven on earth, and its replacement of evangelism with left wing social and political activism. But today some conservative Christians are turning to a social gospel of their own, the same idea but with right wing social and political activism.

Christians should indeed address problems of this world and, by virtue of their vocation as citizens, they can do this by political means. But they must be careful not to confuse their political convictions, whatever they might be, with the gospel of Jesus Christ who died for the sins of the world so that we might have everlasting life in God’s eternal kingdom.

Carl Trueman has written a thoughtful reflection on Christianity and politics in his essay for First Things entitled The Gateway Drug to Post-Christian Paganism. He tells of re-reading Robert P. Ericksen’s Theologians Under Hitler, which describes how once orthodox theologians, little by little, step by step, succumbed to the Nazi temptation.

Trueman contrasts those theologians with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and, even more so, the confessional Lutheran theologian Hermann Sasse. Trueman praises the earlier Bethel Confession, written by those two Lutherans, as far superior to the more well-known Barmen Declaration, written primarily by Karl Barth. The Bethel Confession, says Trueman, “makes clear that the reason Bonhoeffer and Sasse were able to understand their times was that they placed the transcendent God, his Word and sacraments, and his church above all earthly powers.”

(Trueman links to Faith in the Face of Tyranny: An Examination of the Proposed Bethel Confession by the Swedish scholar Torbjörn Johannson, which includes an English translation of the Bethel Confession. The book was translated by the long-time reader and commenter at this blog Bror Erickson.)

He says of Bonhoeffer and Sasse, “it was their grasp of the transcendent God and his gospel that immunized them to the blandishments of Hitler. They did not collapse the transcendence of God into the immanence of political exigency. And it was that very concern for the transcendent that made them wise actors in the world of the immanent.” Let that last sentence soak in. Their transcendence did not mean that they neglected the problems of this world, such as Nazi totalitarianism. Rather, their transcendent focus made them more effective in addressing immanent, this-worldly concerns, than the theologians who conformed with the culture and went along with the Nazi social gospel.

Trueman then applies all of this to today:

One of the striking lacunae on both the right and left wings of the Christian political spectrum is the general absence of any reference to the transcendence of God and the supernatural nature of the church. Immanent concerns rule the day. The pundits on both sides seem more concerned with making sure that no criticism goes unmocked and no critic’s character goes unsmeared than with relativizing the affairs of this world in the light of eternity.

But the self-aggrandizing rhetoric of social media is only one part of the problem. The deeper issue is that exemplified by the contrast between Bonhoeffer/Sasse and Kittel/Althaus/Hirsch: the inability to resist collapsing the transcendence of God into the immanence of the political moment. When Christians, right and left, do that, they are no longer espousing Christianity—for Christianity that is of interest only because it is politically useful or because it is thought to work in this earthly sphere is merely a gateway drug to post-Christian paganism.

And this leads to an odd, though very Pauline, conclusion: The secret to political integrity and discernment for Christians is a high view of God, his Word and his gospel. Only when this world is set in context of the next can we hope to avoid allowing the perceived demands of our political moment to overwhelm our fidelity to God and, by way of consequence, to those made in his image.

Photo: Hermann Sasse (1937) via Picryl, public domain

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A Parable for Artificial Intelligence

Last updated on: March 30, 2024 at 4:33 pm By Gene Veith

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Trevor Sutton is a pastor who was my co-writer on Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Postmodern World. He is also the author of Being Lutheran, Clearly Christian: Following Jesus in This Age of Confusion, Take Up Your Cross: Daily Prayers for Lent, Man of God: Walking By Faith Devotion Book, and Dr. Bessie Rehwinkel: Hero of Faith.

He is perhaps best known for his work on technology and religion, which was the topic of his doctoral dissertation from Concordia Seminary and the basis for his very helpful Redeeming Technology: A Christian Approach to Healthy Digital Habits.

He and I are collaborating again on a book about technology and vocation.

He has also written quite a few articles in a wide variety of publications on the various issues regarding technology and Christianity. One of them is in the latest issue of Religion & Liberty and is entitled AI and the Discipline of Human Flourishing.

Read his whole discussion of the challenges raised by Artificial Intelligence. I’d like to just bring up one facet that particularly grabbed my attention. He told of a parable offered by Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, in his book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Here is how Trevor tells it:

Several sparrows were hard at work building their nests. After days of long and tiresome work, they began to lament about how small and weak they are. Then one of them had an idea: “What if we had an owl who could help us build our nests?” This idea generated excitement about other ways that an owl could be useful to the sparrows. It could look after the young and elderly. It could offer advice. It could guard against the neighborhood cat.

With great enthusiasm, they embarked on finding an abandoned owlet or an unhatched owl egg. But a surly sparrow named Scronkfinkle warned that baby owls become big owls. He argued that they should first learn the art of owl taming before bringing an owl into their nest. Several others objected to this warning on the basis that simply finding an owl egg would be more than enough work. These sparrows decided they would begin by getting a baby owl—and then afterward they would consider the challenge of taming it. With unbridled excitement, they ventured off to find a baby owl.

Meanwhile, only a few sparrows remained in the nest to begin the work of figuring out how sparrows might tame an owl.

This story has two possible endings:

(1) The baby owl grows up and eats all the sparrows.

(2) The baby owl grows up and learns to think and act like a sparrow. It builds their nests, gathers their food, protect them from predators, and makes their lives easier. But “as more skills and practices shift from the sparrows to the owl, the former get weaker and the latter gets stronger.” The sparrows forget how to build nests, find food, and avoid predators. Depending on the tamed owl “leads to weaker sparrows with diminished abilities and atrophied discipline, skill, and community.”

Bostrom’s point is that artificial intelligence is like that. Like the sparrows, we are rushing ahead with it before we have figured out how to tame it. Some worry that AI will take over the world and destroy us, like the owl eating the sparrows. But even if it doesn’t, even if it does all the good that its advocates say it will, it can only weaken human intelligence, creativity, and resourcefulness.

Trevor, though, comes up with a third option, drawing on another ornithological parable. This one comes from the novel about rabbits, Watership Down by Richard Adams:

The novel tells the story of an intrepid group of rabbits displaced from their warren. As they embark on an adventure of survival, these rabbits conscript the help of a seagull named Kehaar.

When the rabbits meet Kehaar, he is recovering from an injury. They feed the bird and bring him into their makeshift warren. As the bird recovers and prepares to leave, a rabbit named Hazel has an idea: What if the bird could search for other warrens and rabbits? Hazel shares his plan with the other rabbits, saying, “The bird will go and search for us!” One of the other rabbits, Blackberry, loves the idea and tells the others, “What a marvelous idea! That bird can find out in a day what we couldn’t discover for ourselves in a thousand!”

The rabbits hint to the seagull that they have a dilemma, that they are all male rabbits without does and need to find other warrens. Kehaar voluntarily offers to help them. The rabbits partner with the seagull, who helps them survive.

Conscripting the help of this bird does not leave the rabbits weaker or with diminished abilities. This band of bunnies flourishes amid an adventure that requires discipline, skill, and community. The bird’s power does not create an effortless existence for the rabbits. The things and practices needed for rabbits to flourish balance the superintelligence of the bird. Although they employ the bird’s help, the rabbits continue their adventure of survival, which fosters discipline and skill, strength and attention, engagement and community.

Can we or will we use Artificial Intelligence like that? It remains to be seen.

Of course the big question is the nature of the beast: Is AI an owl or a seagull?

Illustration: An owl and a sparrow. AI image generated from Stable Diffusion. [Rationalizing that the subject matter of Artificial Intelligence may be illustrated with an Artificially generated image. I first used what I thought was a better platform, DeepAI, but for the life of me I couldn’t get it to give me two separate birds, just bizarre hybrids. But Stable Diffusion gave me this.]

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Why Conservatism Needs God

Last updated on: March 15, 2024 at 6:58 am By Gene Veith

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Today is the Ides of March. This was the date–March 15, 44 B.C.–when a group of Roman senators assassinated Julius Caesar. Their purpose was to save the Republic and prevent one-man rule. For that goal we should applaud them. But, as so often happens in politics, in trying to prevent that outcome, they brought it about. The consequent civil war led to the rule of Caesar Augustus, the establishment of the Roman Empire, and the de-facto end of a free Republic that had lasted 482 years, a lot longer than ours has. So all sides should beware the Ides of March, which should remind us of the uncertainty and the unintended consequences of the best-laid political schemes.

We have been blogging about the different kinds of conservatism contending today–Christian nationalism, National Conservatism, Freedom Conservatism, Cultural Conservatism, Economic Conservatism, Big Government Conservatism, Integralism, Libertarianism, Reaganism, Trumpism, and other sometimes overlapping political philosophies.

Southern Baptist theologian Andrew T. Walker argues that all types of conservatism need to be grounded in the reality of God. He makes that case in an article for National Review entitled The Case for a Theocentric Right. He writes,

If we are not self-creating creatures, we cannot create ourselves or society in our own image but should act to align ourselves with the Creator’s intentions. We are called to recognize, protect, and honor God’s creational design. . . .

If our existence is due to divine forces outside of ourselves, autonomy is not humanity’s greatest political need. Instead, self-ordering and political ordering around the divine constitute the summum bonum of human existence. While conservatives disagree with one another on the extent to which the government is responsible for directing man to his ultimate good, a failure to recognize the spiritual nature of man will leave humans destitute and bereft of the life-giving, life-sustaining, and life-directing purposes for which they were created. [Whitaker] Chambers’s realization is one that contemporary conservatism must not forget if it wishes to remain true to its history: Theism is at the core of the conservative vision, and modern conservatism must champion the necessity of God as the foundation for political reflection. . . .

[Theism and Christianity] can explain the phenomenological experiences of existence and account for cosmic justice, truth, and order — all necessary political ingredients that find historical resonance in the conservative tradition. Christianity provides the social order with what someone like the non-Christian political theorist Václav Havel longed for but could not find — a “cosmic anchoring,” the notion of an ultimate foundation that orders existence and that political orders cannot supply on their own. Conservatism has never been synonymous with Christianity alone, to be sure, but conservatism’s insistence on what Thomas Sowell calls a “constrained” understanding of the universe, one according to which reality is not endlessly malleable, has given conservatism a religious predilection.

Walker goes on to show how God is a central theme throughout the history of conservatism. He criticizes some recent conservative manifestos for leaving God out. He concludes, “Transcendence and the natural law are thus the foundations of any individual or institution that would don the label ‘conservative.’ We are, after all, trying to conserve something — the truths that anchor the soul and build civilization.”

So you don’t need to be a Christian nationalist or an Integralist to factor God into your political positions. Conversely, when you do, this doesn’t make you a Christian nationalist or an Integralist.

This strikes me as being in accord with the Lutheran doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. Contrary to how some Lutherans have interpreted it, that does not mean that anything goes in the secular realm. God is the King of both realms. He governs His temporal kingdom by His Law (the first use), His providence, and His working through human vocations. Does His sovereignty in His temporal kingdom require a state church or a generic civil religion? No. Acknowledging the existence of God, His creative order, and His moral law does not speak to our salvation. For that, you need an actual religion, a church with its theology and its rites. This is just a worldview.

We should ask, though, is ordering human life or “directing man to his highest good” the government’s job? I don’t believe it is, though some conservatives are saying this is the government’s purpose. When the government becomes, in effect, a church, or when a church becomes the government, its theology can’t help but become distorted. To govern, it must necessarily be preoccupied with the Law.

I would argue for a much more modest role for government–mainly to protect its citizens from invaders, criminals, and disorder, “that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life” (1 Timothy 2:2)–leaving other institutions to contribute to society in their own way (such as the family to raise children), including the church to proclaim the gospel and prepare us for everlasting life in God’s eternal kingdom.

Otherwise, we may end up with either mob-rule or tyranny, anarchy or the state as god, two extremes, with the one leading to the other. That’s the lesson of the Ides of March.

Illustration: “The Death of Julius Caesar” (1888) by William Holmes Sullivan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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