I am happy to share with you that my review of Rod Dreher’s newest book, Living in Wonder, was released this week over at Mere Orthodoxy. I hope you’ll check it out. I really enjoyed Dreher’s book but also concluded that it presented some stumbling blocks to widespread appreciation by Protestant evangelicals. I tried to get both of those elements across in my review. I was a bit surprised to see that TGC’s review of it was so thoroughly critical, without recognizing that there are imbalances and weaknesses within Reformed evangelicalism that Dreher’s book actually helps us to address.
That was the direction I wanted to take my review. After noting my criticisms, I focused in what evangelicals can take away from the ideas in the book. This dovetails with my larger project in recent years to think through the nature of evangelicalism and Protestantism, the state of the culture with regard to spiritual matters (re-enchantment and the demise of modernity), and gleaning the best insights from the sharpest minds wherever I can find them.
While I’m a thorough-going Protestant, or rather because I am settled in my rejection of key, fundamental historical claims made by both Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic authorities, I feel free to read and engage with them without fear of being drawn in. I do not feel threatened by them, and I think it inevitable that each branch of Christendom, especially to the degree that they are shaped by sharp polemics aimed against other branches, will be imbalanced and in need of continual course correction. This is necessarily an endless process of discernement, reformation, and renewal. The end goal is always spiritual renewal, walking with the Spirit, and having the mind of Christ.
I also believe deeply in true small-c catholicity, the Biblical principle of affirming wherever possible, without dishonesty or sentimentality, the true spiritual unity we share with genuine believers which are scattered in many different institutions. It was a bit of a dodge when Billy Graham resolutely refused to pronounce who was in and who was out when it came to salvation, but there is something good about being slow and hesitant to pronounce on such matters when we take into account the incredible human capacity for inconsistency, and the mystery of genuine Spirit-wrought faith. I also recognize that for many people with busy lives and a simple faith, it’s not possible to navigate, assess, and discern all these things and they need trustworthy authority figures in their lives who can do a lot of that work for them.
These things shape my vocation as a writer and thinker for the church. I want to hold my convictions firmly and deeply, and yet be able to converse fruitfully with people from a wide range of perspectives. I want to offer helpful insights into culture, literature, and arts, and yet always make sure to remain in touch and appreciative of simple, hard-working, hands-on people. I want to continually hone my ability to write clearly and creatively, saying what I have to say with a dash of style that makes it enjoyable to read. I have a long way to go in each of these respects, but that is the direction I am aiming towards.
I have been mulling over once again the idea of moving this sleepy little blog of mine over to Substack, the it-place for writers. If I do, I would keep it free and try to move my previous articles and my subscribers over.
In coming days I should have a piece coming out at TGC Canada that I have been working on for quite a few months called Why We Need Beautiful Churches. It’s an attempt to piece together a whole bunch of reading and thinking on aesthetics, beauty, architecture, and the evangelical church. As always, I’m grateful for readers who take time out of their busy lives to consider my words. I don’t take that lightly, and I hope it’s a blessing and benefit to you. And if you do enjoy my writing or glean some benefit from it, I hope you’ll pass it on to others, share widely, and maybe even let me know.
Here is a book that tells a beautiful story in a beautiful way. And yet, there is a lot of darkness to get through before the dawn breaks. The raw honesty of Lande’s story, the power of her effervescent prose, and the drastic nature of her conversion are just some of the elements that make this book difficult to put down and impossible to forget.
For anyone interested in psychedelics, especially those drawn to spiritual illumination via that route, this book is for you. Lande speaks the language, has been down that road, done that, got the t-shirt. And she found something far, far better, in the very last place she thought to look. If I have any complaints about the book, it’s that the conversion comes late in the narrative and then the book ends a bit too abruptly, even if those last two chapters among the most moving things I’ve ever read. Before reaching the back cover, I wanted to learn a bit more about how Christ had transformed different aspects of her life and relationships that had been explored in previous chapters.
There is some debate both inside and outside the church regarding the use of psychedelics. One of the common complaints from psychedelic enthusiasts is that Christians forbid psychedelics out of some blind dogma. But rather than seeing it as a silly religious bias to avoid psychedelics, perhaps it would be better to see two different sources of very ancient spiritual wisdom. One, the Judeo-Christian heritage, teaches us that there is danger in such things, and that practices such as the ingesting of psychoactive substances put us in contact with a world of spirits that is not our assigned place. And yet Christianity fully validates that longing for a connection to the spiritual. The Scriptures make clear that this God-given hunger for the transcendent is meant to be satisfied by God himself, through Christ his Son, as mediated by the Holy Spirit.
The other ancient source of spiritual wisdom comes from those traditions who have for millennia partaken of psychoactive substances to connect with the spirit world and transcend one’s embodied consciousness. To some degree they can deliver on that promise. People can and do make contact with personal spiritual forces, and aside from the thrill of that experience, there is the added buzz that comes from knowing something that so much of society seems oblivious to. These practices make no personal moral demands. There are no ten commandments, no golden rule, no ultimate moral Judge. This makes it particularly compatible with the moral relativism of our age. Lastly, there is no creed or structure of authority like in a church, which resonates with our current cultural suspicion of authority and institutions.
We in the West are now firmly post-Christian. As we cast about for a solution to the spiritual malaise afflicting us, the last place we will tend to look is the place we think we have just been: Christianity. Haven’t we just decided we’re done with those old superstitions? So a journey to the island paradise of paganism, earth religion, eastern philosophy, or psychedelics seems to be just the thing we need for our starved souls in our disenchanted world. But we perhaps forget (or have never learned) that the best of paganism was fulfilled and transcended by Christianity, as G.K. Chesterton chronicled in his book ‘The Everlasting Man’.
For Ashley Lande, and perhaps for many others now journeying through the twists and turns of psychedelia and new age spirituality, the way home spiritually seems to include going round the whole world before arriving back and finding in Christ the Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever.
In the Salinas Valley of California, a novel was born. John Steinbeck wove together strands from his own life, the character of the land, and the first few chapters of Genesis to form a story that is epic, loaded with meaning. The book is both broad and narrow in scope; broad in its tracing of multiple generations of the two main families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks, and narrow in the way it focuses its gaze into the lives of its main characters.
The book was criticized by some as being too heavy-handed in its message. It’s true that the author does not try too hard to hide what he really believes about human nature, good and evil, and the purpose of life. And yet, Steinbeck is an excellent prose writer, and aside from a few bits of dialogue that I felt were clunky, the book holds together, flows easily, and stands as a massive achievement. I found the clarity of the message to be a positive, not a negative, and the clear allusions to Scripture gave it added depth for me.
While some might complain that the self-conscious patterning of the narrative after the Cain and Abel story betrays a lack of imagination or creativity, this objection is a characteristically modern stupidity. In previous eras, it was expected that great art would be patterned after earlier works. Authors were less originators of novel ideas and more stewards of literary traditions. As they retold the same stories, they modified and added to the tradition, making it their own to some extent, leaving their imprint upon it. Although I love creativity and originality, I think there is a particular kind of literary genius in the older kind of storytelling. And what we think of as original work is often drawing on traditions and stories we simply don’t know, so it feels fresh and new to us even though it isn’t. In fact, there is a special joy in discovering the sources that one’s favourite authors have drawn from: “Oh, that’s where she got that from.”
Steinbeck considered East of Eden to be his magnum opus. It has that kind of feel, both in its length (300,000+ words, 600 pages) and in its gravitas. There is not much levity in the book. It takes hold of the heaviest themes that trouble humanity and wrestles with them page after page. It took eleven years of gestation and one year of uninterrupted writing to complete it. Steinbeck said of it, “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years.” And also: “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”
One of the ways this shows up is in the little bits of wisdom Steinbeck seems to have wanted to include in the book. They adorn the narrative but are not in any way necessary to it. For example: “You can boast about anything if it’s all you have have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.” Or, describing how some years were rich and others were lean in the Salinas Valley, “it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
The Salinas Valley in California
The book certainly deals with adult themes—prostitution and murder—but not in a prurient way. I much prefer this handling of such themes to what I encountered in Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth, or what sounds like a similar pornographic quality to the Game of Thrones books by George R. R. Martin. Art should be able to depict sin without tempting the reader to it; great art depicts sin in utterly realistic ways and yet manages to encourage virtue in the reader. The divorcing of art from virtue is one of modernity’s great achievements, to our profound detriment. The modern novel is often a kind of literary nihilism, depicting with indifference the beauty and filth and goodness and evil of the world, as if they were all interchangeable and, after all, who can really tell the difference?
In my reading of 20th-century literature, this amorality has often been a prominent feature. Steinbeck himself was known for it. And yet East of Eden concerns itself with good and evil as real categories, and in that sense it feels different from something like Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, or The Stranger by Camus. Steinbeck, who grew up Episcopalian (Anglican) but called himself an agnostic, held on to solid moral categories even as he lost the surest foundation for them. It is said that his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, explores the moral decline of Americans. It was not especially well received, which makes me think I might like it.
Back to East of Eden. I really enjoyed seeing how Steinbeck shaped his story to mirror the Cain and Abel narrative. But more than that, he included in the novel itself an extended reflection on the Cain and Abel story by some of the main characters, including a detailed discussion of the Hebrew translation into English of Genesis 4:7, “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him” (KJV). The crux of the matter is the last phrase. The KJV renders is “thou shalt rule over him [sin].” Now I happen to have studied this verse in some detail in Bible College during my ‘Exegetical Methods’ class, with a focus on the word translated desire. But here the focus is the verb shalt rule, transliterated as “timshal” (תִּמְשָׁל). In contrast to the KJV, the ASV rendered it do thou rule over it. In the novel, the wisest and best character, the servant Lee, rejects both of these translations because the KJV seems to promise that Cain will rule over sin, while the ASV seems to merely command it. Lee concludes that it should be rendered thou mayestrule over it. The key, for Steinbeck’s purposes, is that it is conditional, that it comes down to Cain’s choice. The consensus among all the main modern translations is that the verb should be translated as you must. I see why Steinbeck did what he did, making clear the conditional aspect that I think is nevertheless present in all the translations.
This central challenge to overcome sin and evil is what animates the drama of the book. Will the Cain-like characters give into the malicious impulses that course through their veins, or will they choose to master sin? In the novel, this struggle is personified in Cal, who learns that his mother is a sociopath, a deeply wicked and malicious person. He finds in himself a mix of malice and goodness, and this discovery tempts him to believe that he is in some way fated towards evil, or helpless in the face of it. Lee, who raised him and knows him best, discerns this and speaks directly to it:
Cal drifted toward the door, slowly, softly. He shoved his fists deep in his pockets. “It’s like you said about knowing people. I hate her because I know why she went away. I know—because I’ve got her in me.” His head was down and his voice was heartbroken.
Lee jumped up. “You stop that!” he said sharply. “You hear me? Don’t let me catch you doing that. Of course you may have that in you. Everybody has. But you’ve got the other too. Here—look up! Look at me!”
Cal raised his head and said wearily, “What do you want?”
“You’ve got the other too. Listen to me! You wouldn’t even be wondering if you didn’t have it. Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now—look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do it—not your mother.”
The novel intends to leave us with the same challenge.
But for all of its moral force and Biblical pathos, the novel is Christless and devoid of redemption. (This is an observation, not necessarily a criticism.) It manages to capture the essence of life East of Eden, that is, life outside of the garden, life among the thorns. Steinbeck captures as much beauty and goodness as can be found in the created world, and I would argue he borrows heavily from the accumulated capital of Christianity in that effort, but ultimately we are left confronted with a moral law, the imperative to choose between good and evil, and the haunting sense that we have not the power to choose rightly, so powerful is the pull of sin.
Here is where a writer like Tolstoy or Dickens would, after a few hundred pages of wallowing in the deepest human misery, bring in the transformative power of love and of grace to serve as an illustration of the gospel. Steinbeck therefore reflects the exhausted and lifeless character of so much mainline Protestant Christianity in the 20th century. It reminds me of what Alan Jacobs described so movingly in his book, Original Sin, where he traced the views of human sinfulness throughout various times and cultures. He showed how many people have tried to deny the depth and severity of human sin, recasting it or ignoring it. This can be a pleasant sort of delusion. Others accepted the true nature of our depravity but then entered into the joy of salvation in Christ, who alone can solve the problem at its root by generating a new heart, new birth, and new creation within the human person. But the bleakest prospect, and the darkest literature, is produced by those who fully accept the depth of human depravity while, for whatever reason, remaining outside of Christ. These people see and feel the problem rightly but not the solution. East of Eden is firmly in this category.
What we don’t find in East of Eden is any mention of the seed of the woman, the promised one who would crush the head of serpent with bruised heel. But this shadowy figure stands above the entire Genesis narrative and alone gives it cohesion. Why was it important that Abel should live? To produce the promised snake-crusher. And contra Steinbeck’s claim in the novel, we are not the descendants of Cain, but of Seth (see Gen. 5). Yes, we have a little bit of Cain in each of us, but it’s Seth, who Eve says God has given her “in the place of Abel,” who produces both Noah and eventually the Messiah himself, Jesus.
Ultimately, it isn’t our ability to choose good over evil, to resist the sin crouching at our door, which makes the decisive difference. That choice, which we make every day to some extent, is a reflection of what is happening more deeply in our hearts, and what is happening on the vertical, spiritual plane which is all but absent in the novel.
The world-historical event that serves as the great hinge of history occurred on a hill not too terribly far from the land of Cain and Abel, on which a man who was also the Lord bled and died like Abel, murdered by his brothers. Hebrews 12:24 says that Christ’s blood “speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” Jon Bloom explains: “For though Abel’s innocent blood cried out for justice against sin, Jesus’s innocent blood cried out for mercy for sinners. Abel’s blood exposed Cain in his wretchedness. Jesus’s blood covers our wretchedness and cleanses us from all sin.”
This may not have been Steinbeck’s understanding, but as I ponder the meaning of the magnificent work of fiction he wrote, I cannot help thanking God that he did not leave us to our own devices in the arid lands East of Eden. Rather, he made a way, through the blood of the cross, to a place even better than the Salinas Valley in the spring.
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It is in the writings of Hosea (the entire book, but especially chapters 1-3) and Jeremiah (chapter 3) that the metaphor of spiritual adultery is developed and clarified. God is Israel’s husband; Israel is God’s bride. But while God is a good, loving, and faithful husband, Israel is described as an adulterous, wayward, promiscuous, whoring wife. Portions of Ezekiel (chapters 16, 23) are so graphic that I wonder how many churches could even stand to hear them read out loud. No wonder Ezekiel didn’t rank atop the podcast ratings… his message was not often pleasant. The language in these passages is jarring, profoundly unsettling, and offensive. And that is precisely the point.
We, like the Israelites before us, are far too adept at euphemising, excusing, minimizing, and denying sin. Needless to say, God seems to take a different view – judging the unfaithfulness of his covenant people to be heinous, evil, and personal. And perhaps that personal element of betrayal is what this metaphor of spiritual adultery really conveys like nothing else. It is one thing to sin in a judicial sense against the law of a good judge, and it is one thing to fall short of the standard of your benevolent master, but it is something quite different to blatantly cheat on your spouse with other lovers.
Just think about the relational dynamics of the first two pictures of sin in contrast with the third. As a lawbreaker and a stumbling servant, I could still look my Lord in the eye, admit my mistake, and vow to do better. But not so easily if my unfaithfulness is personal betrayal to such a jealous and faithful spouse. This is what makes the metaphor of spiritual adultery so powerful, and for the guilty party (that’s you and me, folks) so devastating.
But in that moment of terrible realization, when all the excuses and side-stepping is done, and you find yourself sitting slumped on a pile of ashes, a new light shines. That new light is the incredible promises of reconciliation, mercy, and restitution that we find in the very same passages that moments ago revealed the ugliness of our sin.
Consider Hosea 2:14-20
“Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.
“In that day,” declares the Lord, “you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master.’ I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips; no longer will their names be invoked. In that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the creatures that move along the ground. Bow and sword and battle I will abolish from the land, so that all may lie down in safety. I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord.”
Or Jeremiah 3:14-15
“Return, faithless people,” declares the Lord, “for I am your husband. I will choose you—one from a town and two from a clan—and bring you to Zion.Then I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will lead you with knowledge and understanding.”
Or lastly, Ezekiel 16:60, 62-63
“Yet I will remember the covenant I made with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you… So I will establish my covenant with you, and you will know that I am the Lord. Then, when I make atonement for you for all you have done, you will remember and be ashamed and never again open your mouth because of your humiliation, declares the Sovereign Lord.’”
The language of spiritual adultery is the nuclear weapon of sin-exposition. It’s God’s most potent form of argument, and to those with ears to hear, it is profoundly humbling. Embedded in the book of Hosea is this idea that God would come at his people with such severe denouncements so that they might realize their sickness and seek him.
We see this amazing interaction in Hosea 5:13-15, followed by 6:1-3.
“When Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah his sores, then Ephraim turned to Assyria, and sent to the great king for help. But he is not able to cure you, not able to heal your sores. For I will be like a lion to Ephraim, like a great lion to Judah. I will tear them to pieces and go away; I will carry them off, with no one to rescue them. Then I will return to my lair until they have borne their guilt and seek my face— in their misery they will earnestly seek me.”
“Come, let us return to the Lord. He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence. Let us know the Lord; let us press on to know him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.”
Here are five things I think we can take away from reflecting on God’s Jealousy.
1. Seeing God’s jealousy forces us to un-domesticate God.
There’s an element of unpredictability in God’s jealousy. He is merciful and patient, but woe to the one who experiences the heat of his holy desire! As C.S. Lewis put it so well, he is good, but he is not safe. This is such a needed remedy for us sleepy believers who have a strong tendency to domesticate God with our selective memory and reading. Even Psalm 23 underscores this when at the end David writes “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” The verb translated “follow” literally means “to pursue, chase, persecute.” There’s an intensity and an intentionality that is lost in translation. Instead of capturing the predatory spirit of the verb, we are left with the rather limp image of a puppy following a child.
2. Seeing God’s jealousy sobers us about our sin, and our redemption.
I touched on this earlier, so just a quick word. In light of all that we’ve seen, our sin is uglier than we thought. But the beauty of the gospel is that this ugliness only serves to humble us further (to remember and be ashamed and never again open our mouths, as in Ezekiel 16), and to underscore, highlight, and magnify the depth of the mercy and the sweetness of the grace that would so completely forgive such misdeeds.
3. Seeing God’s jealousy helps us realize the seriousness of God’s covenant with us.
Here’s one where the Scriptures really have to renew our typical way of thinking. We are so accustomed to the optional, leave it if you don’t like it, take it for a spin, no strings attached kind of deal that we can import that kind of thinking into our relationship with God. But the truth is that we are in a covenant with God, with covenant obligations to be faithful and to worship Him alone. This is not the typical we way we frame our Christianity, but that is probably more due to our cultural bias than to a balanced Biblical understanding.
4. Seeing God’s jealousy helps us understand some of the ways God works in our lives.
If God is a jealous God who, in the words of Zechariah 8, is “very jealous… burning with jealousy for” his people, then this might help explain how he deals with us. Looking back on my own life, I definitely see God’s jealousy as one of the reasons he allowed me to go through burnout in ministry. When ministry becomes a rival lover, it becomes very dispensable to God. I suddenly go from Very Important Leader to entirely replaceable. Indeed – for my soul’s sake, I must be replaced, rebuked, brought to repent, and then perhaps restored. Likewise, in all our lives, a function of God’s love is that he brooks no rivals. A redefinition of love for some of us, maybe, but love indeed.
5. Seeing God’s jealousy reminds us that we don’t get to pick and choose which attributes of God we like.
There is a counter-intuitive argument to be made that I first heard from Tim Keller. The argument rests simply on the nature of relationship. If we deny the authority of Scripture, and do away with the troublesome aspects of God’s deeds and character (as defined by our enlightened cultural moment, of course), what we are left with is inevitably a glorified reflection of ourselves. A deified mirror image of our own beliefs. But this is plainly not a God with whom you can have a real relationship, if by real relationship we mean, among other things, the ability to challenge, surprise, and rebuke. The God of orthodox Christianity is revealed to us, and we must change our minds and our beliefs to line up with that revelation; not change the revelation to line up with our own thoughts.
Having recently studied and spoken on God’s Jealousy, I thought I would take time to put down in written form some of what I shared with the good people who were willing to listen to me.
In James 4:4-5 we encounter some unusual language.
“You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us?”
Specifically, the words adulterous and jealously seem strangely out of place. The context makes it clear that physical adultery is not what James is currently addressing, and the idea of God as jealous is not a common one in the New Testament. So how do we make sense of this? What is James trying to say?
Interestingly, the only other place in the NT where adultery is used in a clearly non-physical way is in Matthew 12:39, where Jesus says “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” Even more tellingly, the parallel passage in Luke excludes the word adulterous from the same phrase. Luke 11:29: “As the crowds increased, Jesus said, “This is a wicked generation. It asks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.”
This underlines the Old Testament roots of this language and metaphor. Because why, you say? Well because Matthew was written to a Jewish audience that would immediately have connected the adultery language to those scathing passages in Jeremiah and Hosea with which they were familiar. Luke’s audience, however, was primarily Gentile, and would not have made that connection (thus, I’m assuming, he left it out to avoid the confusion).
So to the Old Testament we must go! We begin all the way back in Exodus 20, in the smoke and thunder of Mount Sinai. In delivering the second commandment, God explains the prohibition of images by saying “for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.” Remember that these words, spoken by the Lord, are some of the very first revelations of himself to his people, who at this point did not have the written law, and were only now receiving the tablets of stone. God is explaining to them what kind of God he is, in contrast to the gods of Egypt or Canaan.
Follow the story to Exodus 32 and we find that the people, having waited 400 years for rescue in Egypt, couldn’t wait the full 40 days for Moses to finish up his business on the mountain. They violate the second commandment in creating and worshiping the golden calf, and then when Moses comes back down the mountain he is, as they say, not impressed, children. Kind of like when I stomp down the stairs and find the kids’ playroom looking like a tornado, a bomb, and a group of chimps had a rave, except very much more so.
So in Exodus 34:14 God says “Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” He has gone a step further from using jealous as an adjective to describe himself and has made it a proper noun – God’s very Name. Jealous. In the next verse, he describes the pagan worship of the Canaanites by saying “they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice for them.” This use of sexual language to describe religious practice begins a long theme winding through the whole of the Old Testament, even if at this point it isn’t clear what exactly is meant, but it is growing clear that there is a link between God’s jealousy, the covenant, and this language of sexual sin.
We find the same language used in Deuteronomy 31 to describe Israel’s future covenant unfaithfulness. “And the Lord said to Moses: ‘You are going to rest with your ancestors, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them.'” Here we see that this language of prostitution is clearly linked to breaking the covenant – an important clue as to the full meaning of this metaphor.
As with so many Biblical themes, what we find in seed form at the beginning of redemptive history grows and unfurls as that history progresses. At this point it would make sense to come away thinking what does this mean?; but further revelation, especially through the prophets Hosea and Jeremiah, will make it crystal clear.
“I can’t understand how anyone could believe that.”
“Anyone who thinks that is a complete idiot and understands nothing.”
We’ve all heard people say things like this, and most of us have said some of them ourselves. But the more I observe people interacting in person and online, the more I see how destructive such attitudes are towards the goals of honest conversation and true discourse.
It is the most natural inclination of any group with shared beliefs to reinforce those beliefs by developing arguments against the beliefs of others. This in and of itself is fine and good. This is why Christians study and discuss the wrong beliefs of Muslims, Mormons, and atheists, and why Camaro enthusiasts talk trash about Mustangs. The last thing we want is to say that one belief is as valid as another, or else we end up with plain old relativism and that is about as helpful as a set of black and white traffic lights or pharmacists who only administer placebo pills.
And yet something critical is lost when the Camaro Club members come to believe that the Mustang is a useless piece of junk and quite literally the worst car ever made, or when a Christian says that Muslims or Mormons or atheists are completely deceived and know nothing about God or the world. What is lost is simply the truth. In the effort of preserving and reinforcing one’s own beliefs, it is all too easy to leave the realm of truth and reality. Constructing crude caricatures of opposing views is so rampant in religious and political discourse that its easy to lose sight of how harmful and destructive it is. And it isn’t just harmful for the one being caricatured. No – it is even more harmful for the one doing the caricaturing, because even if that person holds the view that is really true, he has left the realm of truth in his attack on the other, and is now frankly unable to convince anyone else of the truth.
Why is this? It’s because of a very simple and understandable reaction that always occurs when someone hears their own beliefs misrepresented. It’s essentially impossible to be convinced by an argument that is not addressing your position. And if I can narrow the focus a little bit to an especially guilty party of which I am a guilty member, we Christians are constantly doing this. The other partners in this fumbling waltz of misfired arguments are the atheists, who I daresay are just as bad.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Christians quote Psalm 14:1, “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God”” and then proceed to argue that atheists are all fools and if they had any working brain cells they would see that God exists. Now, the scripture is true, and in the last analysis, when all things are revealed and our profound blindnesses are cured, it will be obvious that it is a foolish thing to say there is no God, sort of like it is a foolish thing to say there is no such thing as speech. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t perfectly understandable why someone would be a committed atheist. In fact, I am quite sure I would be a committed atheist if I had been born to atheist parents and if God had not so clearly intervened in my life; there but for the grace of God go I and you too.
The truth is, if the deepest pre-supposition you held was that there is no such thing as the supernatural, God, or anything beyond the physical world, then it makes sense to look at all the data available and conclude, like so many do, that the universe somehow came into existence through a big kablamo and that by endless chance life came into being and through countless eons evolved into what we see today. A lot of very intelligent, sensible people believe this. Likewise, atheists should be able to imagine how an intelligent and thoughtful person could come to believe that God created all things and that Jesus is the son of God.
We need a kind of intellectual empathy that says “I can see how you could believe that.”
This is the foundation for any conversation which might actually bear the fruit of mutual understanding, growth, and maybe even epiphany.
Defending the truth is a vital and worthy objective. But often in the interest of defending the truth we build walls instead of bridges, creating insular intellectual communities instead of winsome truth-telling communities, based in fear instead of love.
Someone I know came back from a conference a few years ago and told me “Post-modernism is so stupid!” I don’t disagree with the fact but the sentiment is not likely to convince many post-modernists. Forgive the analogy but if you want the dog to come inside you’re going to have to do something other than throw sticks at it.
Republicans routinely demonize and draw caricatures of the Democrats, who then turn around and return the favour with interest. Christians get together and make fun of those stupid know-nothing atheists, who also get together and chuckle at the poor misguided fools who believe in an imaginary omnipotent being. And then there was the guy in my class who had decided that any and all Japanese cars were ugly and stupid and that only Fords and Chevys were worthy of appreciation, a position so untenable that it was hard not to laugh.
Building walls of mutual incomprehension will do a good job of preserving the status quo but it will also prevent any actual conversation and – most shockingly of all – any realization of our own errors and wrong beliefs. Ultimately it is the path to ignorance, blindness, and even hate and violence, for there is a sense in which the kinds of mental attitudes I’ve described contain the seeds of the dehumanization necessary for violence.
The moralist and legalist pays his taxes and demands his rights from God. There are certain things God cannot ask of him. The gospel Christian has come to understand he deserves nothing good, and so relinquishes any concept of rights before God. In the gospel, there is nothing God cannot ask of us.
This is why the legalist cannot handle too much suffering. It is essentially a breach of what he thinks is the deal or contract between him and God.
Any insightfulness in these words should be attributed solely to Tim Keller.
Even if you can’t read nearly as much as Darryl Dash does. He does these nifty 100-Word book reviews, and recently added not One, not Two, not Three, but Four new installments.
“The structure of sin in the human personality is something far more complicated than the isolated acts and thoughts of deliberate disobedience commonly designated by the word. In its biblical definition, sin cannot be limited to isolated instances or [even] patterns of wrongdoing; it is something much more akin to the psychological term complex: an organic network of compulsive attitudes, beliefs and behavior deeply rooted in our alienation from God. Sin originated in the darkening of the human mind and heart as man turned from the truth about God to embrace a lie about him and consequently a whole universe of lies about his creation. Sinful thoughts, words and deeds flow forth from this darkened heart automatically and compulsively, as water from a polluted fountain. … The human heart is now a reservoir of unconscious disordered motivation and response, of which unrenewed persons are unaware if left to themselves, for “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). … The mechanism by which this unconscious reservoir of darkness is formed is identified in Rom. 1:18-23 as repression of traumatic material, chiefly the truth about God and our condition, which the unregenerate constantly and dynamically “hold down.” Their darkness is always a voluntary darkness, though they are unaware that they are repressing the truth.”
From Dynamics of Spiritual Life, by Richard Lovelace
Phil's Scribblings 