Thinking Christian

Yesterday afternoon BreakPoint published my article “Values and Power.” It’s on what’s called the fact-value dichotomy, in the case of Jennifer Keeton, who was told she must either drop her Christian beliefs or be removed from a university counseling degree program. The fact-value dichotomy means basically that it’s okay for Christians to “believe” what we want, as long as we don’t act in public as if we thought what we “believed” was true.

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The ninth topic on my list of resources for basic discipleship of the mind is the Internet. This is the classic good news/bad news situation. I’ll save the good for another post, coming soon. I’ll raise the cautions first, beginning with two contrasting experiences I had today.

Today I had time finally to catch up on a long list of web pages I had set aside to read when I had more time. Most of these came through my feed reader. A few days ago I wrote about using a feed reader to subscribe and keep up with headlines from multiple websites, including this one. Maybe I got too much of it in one day it has something to do with a couple articles I read (see below), or maybe it has to do with the other reading I’m about to describe. Anyway, I have a new piece of advice to offer, specifically to Christians, and who want to grow in discipleship of the mind. If this or any other blog is helping you with that, by all means stay on top of it. If not, then take it off your list now. Because if it’s not helping, it’s hurting.

This afternoon I finished a book I’ve been working on for a week or two: Answering Islam: The Crescent in Light of the Cross by Geisler and Saleeb. I’ll be blogging it soon, but that’s not the point for now. When I laid it down, I thought back on how helpful it had been to take an extensive and unified tour of a single topic. I realized how much it provoked thoughtful reflection in me—and how different that is from my usual experience on the Internet.

The web fosters a grab-and-go mentality. The analogy to junk food is almost too obvious to mention. Here’s this snippet, there’s that interesting little nugget, and oh! man that writer missed a detail there. We bloggers are on the lookout for things to write about, and it’s a lot easier to find something to react to than it is to come up with fresh thinking of our own.

Blogger or not, the web reinforces a reactive mindset. To come to the web just in that way, though, is to come for shallow, surface stimulus, not for depth of insight. At best, it’s an entertainment-seeking approach, an almost mindless flicking-about for diversion we can justify in “Christian” terms by the occasional pearl of insight we might find. At worst, seeking stimulus for stimulus’s sake runs one down the road of stimulus-adaptation and partial random reinforcement, which together feed a harmful spiral of potentially addictive behavior.

That’s the worst case, but it’s not unusual. I suspect a lot of Internet pornography use starts with perfectly innocuous, entertainment-oriented clicking with the hope of finding something intriguing, a hope that often as not falls short. What comes next is, “but there must be something here that could pique my interest,” and then, “well, I know something that will do the trick!” (In the end pornography’s promised satisfaction turns out to be one of the biggest deceptions of all.)

Well, I started off writing about using the Internet for discipleship of the mind, and look where that led. I told you it was a good news/bad news situation. Let me exhort you with this. When you come to the Internet, are you looking for a vague sort of “something interesting”? Or do you have a more focused purpose? Here’s a good test: how many web pages do you read with real care, and how many do you just skim? If you’re not reading with care, you’re developing surface habits. Even if there’s nothing one would call wrong with those web pages, they’re fostering bad patterns in you anyway. The water isn’t deep enough to be worth swimming in.

As I said, today I was catching up on web pages I had set aside for later. These were pages whose headlines I had flagged in my RSS reader as being potential gems, worthy of more serious reflection later on. Some of them turned out that way. I’m certainly not suggesting we all unplug from the Internet. But it was interesting to see what two of those gems had to say. One was titled “‘The Shallows’ by Nicholas Carr: The Internet Warps You.”

“What can science tell us about the actual effects that Internet use is having on the way our minds work?” he [Nicholas Carr] asks. His answer, iterated throughout this often repetitive but otherwise excellent book: “The news is even more disturbing than I had suspected. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators and Web designers point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning. It’s possible to think deeply while surfing the Net, just like it’s possible to think shallowly while reading a book, but that’s not the type of thinking the technology encourages and rewards.”

Something similar just came up today from Tim Challies: “Infobesity,” including this John Naish quote on rebelling against information overload:

It involves fighting—and here’s my own new word—infobesity, by restricting one’s data diet. There are compelling reasons. The glut of information is not only causing stress and confusion; it also makes us do irrational things such as ignore crucial health information…. Catherine Collins, of the British Dietetic Association, says that info-overload is often to blame for this food-choice paradox: “We are so informed that we can’t be bothered.” That’s a fantastic slogan for the twenty-first century. We are so wired to gather information that often we no longer do anything useful with it. Instead of pausing to sift our intake for relevance and quality, the daily diet of prurient, profound, confusing and conflict information gets chucked on to a mental ash-heap of things vaguely comprehended. Then we rush to try to make sense of it all…by getting more.

The last two sentences are reminiscent of the stimulus spiral I described a few paragraphs up from here.

I’m going on a diet. I have unsubscribed from about half of my Internet news feeds. I’m holding on to subscriptions from friends, some that are directly connected to my work, and a limited few that keep me informed on essential news on a broad variety of topics. In addition to that, there are a few bloggers who have consistently helped me to think more deeply about God and life. I’m keeping them on the list. But I’m more inclined to pare down my list than to add to it—so that I don’t build up my own “mental ash-heap of things vaguely comprehended.”

I emphasize again, the Internet is both a good news and a bad news environment. If this blog is helping you in your discipleship, then stick around, and I’ll share with you several other websites that will probably help too.

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Here’s a brand new magazine for southern Virginia, available online for everybody: The New James. Check out my piece on intelligent design! (If you’ve been reading here a while it may look familiar.)

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I don’t know of any way to be a thinking Christian without pen and paper or the electronic equivalent. These are basic tools for taking notes, journaling, accessory memory storage—and more than anything else, for unlearning what we thought we knew, and learning what we didn’t know we knew.

It happens to me over and over again. It happened again yesterday. I have an idea that I mull over when I’m in the car, walking around the neighborhood, doing chores or whatever. I get it all worked out in my head, and then being blessed or afflicted (sometimes I’m not sure) to be a writer, I finally decide to write it down. And then I discover I hadn’t thought it through nearly as well as I thought I had.

Yesterday it had to do with work I’m doing for a book chapter on Christian moral leadership (of which we need considerably more, by the way). Some acts of moral leadership are very practical. An example of that might be volunteering in a free clinic, providing medical services to the indigent. Some ethical leadership, on the other hand, happens as much in the realm of ideas as of practice: influencing culture to change its opinions regarding moral issues.

I thought I had a list of these sorted out in my head: group x is mostly practical, group y is more in the domain of ideas. Yesterday the time came to write it all down. That’s when I realized I had it at least half-wrong. Once I started working it out on the word processor, I realized the matter was considerably less clear-cut than I had thought. Care for the poor (for example) is intensely practical, but there’s plenty of think-work to be done on how best to deliver that care. It should have been obvious, but it didn’t come to the surface until I tried writing it.

I learn by writing. Though it’s just one of many modes of learning, it’s the one by which I really come to grips with what I know or don’t know. I’m speaking only for myself, yet I suspect it may be true for others: it’s how I test what I think I know. It’s how I pull together the threads of experience, reading, conversation, and reflection, and weave a pattern of knowledge out of it all. Sometimes it’s how I discover I don’t know so much after all.

If writing is so important to learning, then what shall we write? Notes on sermons are good, and notes on books we read. By all means, if it’s your book write on the page. (I like to use sticky-note flags for especially important material in books.) Write your prayers and how God answers—now, that’s certainly a learning experience. Write a journal: what’s happening in your life, what you’re discovering in Bible study, how you’re doing. Write down your ideas.

There’s a special case where writing yields additional learning: on a blog. Here at Thinking Christian I’m willing to test ideas and to be tested by others who might disagree. It’s a place to experiment with new thoughts, with the risk I’ll find out I’m wrong. The give-and-take here has solidified much of my knowledge, and corrected some of what I erroneously thought to be knowledge. You can do that on your own blog or on most anyone else’s, including here.

“But I’m not a writer,” you might say. Take heart: though I am a writer, just about every first draft I write is awful. I mean embarrassingly awful: hardly fit for my own consumption, much less the public’s. Here’s my encouragement: for journaling or personal study, it’s okay not to write perfectly. No second draft is necessary. It doesn’t have to be good, and the words don’t have to be spelled right. Just record what’s on your mind. If school taught you to dislike writing, remember this isn’t for anyone else’s eyes. It can be as good or bad as it is, and that’s okay. Wherever you are when you begin, you can grow from there; and if you practice, you will grow. Not just as a writer, but as a thinking Christian.

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I approach today’s topic in Resources for Thinking Christianly with some trepidation. It’s about reading good books. There is problem with that: there are so many of them!

So let’s cut the topic down to size by talking about good books, not-so-good books, and how to tell the difference. The not-so-good ones far outnumber the worthwhile ones. If thinking Christianly is your objective, you can certainly go wrong, even with books from the Christian bookstore. I’m thinking of a book I was reading just this week that tries rather too hard to count Isaac Newton as an orthodox Christian, and Thomas Jefferson as one who respected the Christ of the Bible. Even more common than factually flawed books like that, however, are books that are fail to engage real thinking. Squishy books, I call them. They’re not just at Borders and Barnes & Noble; they’re also at Family, Berean, and LifeWay.

How then do you know what’s a good book? I could list my ten favorites, but that wouldn’t get you very far. Instead I’m going to suggest how to go about looking for them.

1. Rely on good reviews from good sources—Books and Culture, First Things, and Touchstone, among others. Tim Challies is the one Christian blogger I would most recommend as a book reviewer; in addition to his blog, he edits The Discerning Reader. I’ve done a few reviews myself.

2. Read old books. One of C.S. Lewis’s most famous words of advice was,

“It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”

A further virtue of old books is that time weeds out the weak ones. Old books are likely to be good books.

3. Read challenging books. I have nothing against reading for information or entertainment, and I like a Grisham novel as well as anyone; but I grow most when I work hardest. Read material that stretches you. Don’t be afraid to get help with it; that’s perfectly fine. Cliff’s Notes and SparkNotes were off limits for most of us in high school and college—too many students use them as shortcuts. That’s not what you’re doing now, though. They may be just the thing to get you through some difficult classic material you’re working through.

4. Read all kinds of books. For heaven’s sake, don’t think you must limit yourself to Christian non-fiction. Balance your diet. Dostoyevski and Shakespeare may grow you just as much, both mentally and spiritually, as C.S. Lewis or John Piper. Poetry can put you in touch with beauty as almost no other writing can. Biography, nature, history, leadership studies … I could go on and on.

5. Read other perspectives. Today I finished a book by two gay authors on strategy for the homosexual rights movement. Do you think there was no growth for me in encountering their point of view? They are, first of all, two human beings, with a particular human perspective on life. If I as a Christian cannot listen to their perspective, how can I speak God’s truth to them in love? Or, if I do not try to understand naturalism or atheism, could I pretend know what to think about those topics? If my Christianity cannot stand up to differing opinions, then how can I be confident in it? Paul demonstrated knowledge of secular authors, especially in Acts 17.

There is indeed much to read. I love bookstores and I hate them: I want to read everything, and I’m frustrated knowing how much I will never have time for. Do you see why it’s so important to choose our reading wisely? But be encouraged: you don’t have to do this all at once. It’s a lifetime pursuit.

Be encouraged, too, that not every book must be read deeply. I had a class with the late missiologist Dr. Ralph Winter, who advised us, “Don’t read—ransack!” He was referring to a particular kind of reading: for research or for specific information. It’s great advice, though not for all kinds of material: poetry, say, or an extended philosophical treatise. I’ve even used the ransack technique in the Bible—looking for places where Jesus spoke his purpose, for example.

Speaking of the Bible, have you noticed how uniquely it fits the criteria I’ve listed above? It’s challenging; it’s time-tested (a very good book!); it includes biography, history, poetry, theology, philosophy, and more. And if you think it won’t test and change your perspective on life—even as a Christian—then I would say you haven’t been looking into it deeply enough!

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It’s time to pick up my series on Basic Discipleship of the Mind again with my fifth suggested “resource” for Christian thinking: experience; immersion in life. I’m stretching the word “resource” again here, but even though the word doesn’t fit all that well, it still represents an essential element in developing a Christian mind. I worded it this way previously:

Experience: immersion in all of life, including genuine community nearby, the larger community of world awareness, and the global, transgenerational community of great art (including music, theater, film, literature, and visual arts).

I don’t know anyone who can actually do all of that and still hold down a job. That’s okay, though, I didn’t write it as a to-do list that must be checked off, item by item. What I want to say is this: that thinking from within some kind of Christian bubble is not Christian thinking.

My daughter’s school assigned her to read Albert Camus’s The Stranger over summer vacation. Camus was an existentialist, probably the second most prominent after Sartre, and in my opinion better than Sartre as an author of fiction. He was definitely not a Christian, and The Stranger is definitely not a Christian novel. I read it in college—not as an assignment but because I’d been told it was a good and important book—and I’ll be reading it again with my daughter. What I remember most about it is that its atheistic absurdities helped cement my Christian convictions. I can’t predict how my daughter will respond to it—she’s a voracious reader but she tends not to like books this dark—so I’ll speak just for myself: reading good literature, including good atheistic literature (hard to find in the past few decades, but there has been some in the past) has been good for my growth as a Christian.

Being involved in the community has been good for me, too; and I couldn’t consider myself to be developing in Christian thinking if I weren’t at least somewhat aware of what’s happening in the rest of the world. Christian thinking is not thinking only about “Christian” concerns. It’s developing one’s Christian convictions in the context of the most urgent current questions. We cannot escape those questions; whether we know it or not, they affect us. This is the world in which God has called us to live and follow him. How much better to be aware of what’s going on in matters of race, gender, global religions, economics, environment, and so on, than to be mindlessly buffeted by their currents in our culture!

Yes, there’s too much going on in the world to keep up with it all. I don’t write on all of these topics because I don’t think I have a good enough grasp on them to treat them properly. I’m in this discipleship-of-mind process, too. Having been trained as a musician, I understand great music a lot better than I do theater and film; and I know I don’t appreciate great painting and sculpture the way it deserves. I don’t understand Islam as well as I think I should. I wrote last time in this series about allowing ourselves time to grow—and committing time toward growth. If I thought I had to arrive at the end by tomorrow, what hope would I have?

We are all on a journey. We’re walking toward Christ, walking with him—and walking through the world he has assigned us to live in. It’s the world we need to be interacting with as his disciples. It’s the world to which he calls us to bring an authentic, genuine, thoughtful witness for Christ.

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Book Review

Brian Auten of Apologetics 315 has just posted a telephone interview we did together recently. Brian’s website is one of the best for an abundance of resources and training in apologetics. I really appreciate his taking time to do this interview.

One of our main topics was strategies for apologetics. It seems to me that the apologetics enterprise (the apologetics industry, so to speak) is well advanced in its answers to questions about the faith, but that when it comes to connecting that to everyday needs of church and culture, it has some catching up to do. We have good answers, but we’re not delivering them effectively. I’ve been working on this with pastors and worldview ministry leaders for the past year or so, and what we’re hearing from pastors confirms what I’ve been sensing.

There are exceptions. The Truth Project is the finest example I’ve seen. William Lane Craig, though one of the most academic of all apologists, has nevertheless set up a structure for groups to study and learn together in local communities. BreakPoint has its Centurions program. Summit Ministries and Wheatstone Academy have excellent conferences for young people. Ratio Christi, out of Southern Evangelical Seminary, is on an excellent track.

There are others like these, more than I could list here. I want to focus on one of my favorites, though: Gregory Koukl and Stand to Reason. Koukl hosts a weekly talk show on KBRT radio in Los Angeles, reaching nationwide through the AFR network and by podcast (all accessible from that last link). The show is about current issues in philosophy, theology, and ethics; but there’s a subtext. Listening to Stand to Reason, you don’t just learn answers; you learn how to answer. Rush Limbaugh famously warns his listeners, “Don’t try this at home!” Greg Koukl says, “Do try this at home—and in your workplace, the restaurants you visit, in fact, everywhere you go!”

Better than that, he has published a very strategic book on how to do it. It’s titled Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions. Now, I admit to a bit of awkwardness saying Tactics is strategic; the terms are supposed to mean different things. Here’s how it makes sense: the tactics in the book are tactical; the book itself is strategic.

It’s also highly entertaining, readable, and informative. Wait—scratch all that; too many syllables. The book is fun. It’s filled with stories—both successes and failures—from the author’s own experience. I’m making the book required reading for my teenagers this summer. I have no doubt they’ll enjoy it.

Tactics is strategic in that it makes practical apologetics accessible to any Christian. It isn’t primarily about the answers. If you’re old enough to remember the TV detective Columbo you’ll instantly connect to Koukl’s main model: you don’t have to know all the answers if you know how to ask the right questions. There are just three kinds of questions, two of which are easy: What do you mean by that? and How did you come to that conclusion? The third category of question, the kind that can lead a person toward a logical conclusion, takes a bit more study and practice, but it’s an accessible sort of study and practice, as Koukl presents it.

His advice is intensely practical for real-life situations. One example: what do you do if you’re a college student and the professor puts you on the hot seat to defend your faith? Koukl’s first rule is as strategic as you could ask for:

Never make a frontal assault on a superior force in an entrenched position…. The man with the microphone wins. The professor always has the strategic advantage. It’s foolish to get into a power struggle when you are out-gunned.

So what do you do? Cower? Duck and run? Pray for the bell to ring and end class? Not much hope there; I’ve never heard of a college with bells. No, you turn the question back to the professor. How do you do that? I’d rather let the author answer that question; he can do it much better than I. Register on the Stand to Reason website, then go here and look for the January 29, 2006 podcast. Better yet, buy the book.

What I’ve been talking about so far is the first half of the book. The second half is a guide to logic. Maybe that sounds rather academic. Not the way Greg Koukl handles it, though. There’s just one tiny trace of Latin in there: “reductio ad absurdum.” He explains it in English, though, even giving it a new name: “Taking the Roof Off.” It goes like this:

Some points of view, if taken seriously, don’t actually commit suicide [his term for internally contradictory positions---another example of his speaking English when he discusses logic], but they work against themselves in a different way. When played out consistently, they lead to unusual—even absurd—conclusions….

This tactic makes it clear that certain arguments prove too much. It forces people to ask if they can really live with the kind of worldview they are affirming. Those who are intellectually honest will think twice about embracing a view that ultimately leads to irrationality….

The key to dealing with moral relativism, for example, is realizing that for all the adamant affirmations, no one really believes it, and for a good reason: If you start with relativism, reality does not make sense. It is significant that those who want to practice relativism never want relativism practiced toward them.

The “roof” he refers to is a cover the person erects “to protect himself from considering the consequences” of contradictory attitudes within. Do you think you could learn how to take the roof off? I think you can, with guidance from a book like Tactics. It will take practice, of course; the author is honest about his own fumbles and stumbles along the way. It will take some study, too. Koukl’s “Ambassador Model” includes knowledge, wisdom, and character. Though this book (quite appropriately) focuses on just one of these—handling interactions wisely—his overall message includes all three.

There’s a DVD/CD-based training series available to go along with Tactics. I haven’t obtained a copy yet, so I can’t comment on its quality or effectiveness. I certainly support the concept, though: making apologetics accessible. Tactics is good strategy.

Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions by Gregory Koukl. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009. 207 pages. Amazon Price US$10.19.

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