My Summer Reading

 

My parents were readers. I remember my mother taking my brother Mike and I to the library to get books.

My parents bought us books to read. As a kid I read through the entire Hardy Boys series.

I used to read books while driving. (I am not recommending this.) Even underlining while driving. (I don't recommend this, either.)

I have not only not stopped reading, I think my reading has increased.

Note, please: To better understand it is important read things from other viewpoints. For example, as a philosophy major, I learned I needed to read atheistic texts that challenged my theistic worldview. Everyone who is excellent in apologetics understands this.

Here's my current summer reading projects.

The Prophets, by Abraham Heschel

The Crucifixion of Ministry: Surrendering Our Ambitions to the Service of Christ, by Andrew Purves

Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking the Things that Matter Most, by Jerry Walls

Free Will: Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation, Uri Maoz and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, eds.

The New Crusades: Islamophobia and and the Global War on Muslims, by Khaled Beydoun

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Johnathan Haidt

Covenant: God's Purpose, God's Plan, by John Walton

Ecclesiastes, by John Goldingay

Dr. Seuss and Philosophy, by Jacob Held, Ed.

Higher! Higher!, by Leslie Patricelli

(Because I have grandchildren.)

The Allure of Toxic Pastors

(Cancun - 3/1/19)

A e years ago Linda and I read The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus' Path of Power in a Church that Has Abandoned It, by Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel. It's excellent! The interviews with Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, and others are inspiring and instructive.

Chapter 8 is on the allure of toxic pastors and leaders. A toxic leader is:

• "someone who maintains power and significance by manipulating followers through their own fundamental drive to be powerful and significant."
•  someone who dominates and controls others.
• someone who wields their personality to cement their power.
• someone who relegates others to positions of dependence on them, rather than on Christ.
• someone who subverts systems designed to hold themselves accountable.
• someone who quickly establishes scapegoats when they fail.
• someone who does not develop other leaders, because they pose a threat to their own power.
• someone who creates "an unhealthy symbiosis between themselves and the organizations they lead, such that their absence would equal the collapse of the organization."
• someone who has ceased living "according to the way of Jesus - the way of love,  humanization, and truth, giving himself (or herself) to the way of manipulation, dehumanization, and deception."

Why do churches with toxic leaders do nothing about this? Because, say Goggin and Strobel, this is what we want. "These are precisely the people we believe possess the "it factor." This is what we are looking for." 

"The reason we desire toxic leaders, according to Jean Lipman-Blumen, is because toxic leaders promise to “keep us safe, anoint us as special, and offer us a seat at the community table.” We want a sense of safety, significance, and belonging, and they are offering it in exchange for loyalty." (P. 148)

A Worship Song from the Prophet Amos

I took my song "Reveal Yourself" from the book of Amos.

Here it is, recorded by our worship leader Holly. Linda sings backup. I'm singing backup and doing the guitar work.

In his book The Prophets, Jewish biblical scholar Abraham Heschel write:

"What is the nature of Him whose word overwhelmed the herdsman Amos? Is His grandeur like a towering mountain? Is His majesty comparable to an inscrutable constellation? Is He sublime as the morning and mysterious as darkness? All comparisons fade to insignificance when confronted with what a person such as Amos asserted:

For lo; He who forms the mountains, and creates the wind, 

And declares to man what is his thought; 

Who makes the morning darkness, 

And treads on the heights of the earth— 

The Lord, the God of hosts, is His name. . . . 

He who made the Pleiades and Orion, 

And turns deep darkness into the morning, 

And darkens the day into night, 

Who calls for the waters of the sea, 

And pours them out upon the surface of the earth, T

he Lord is His name, 

Who makes destruction flash forth against the strong, 

So that destruction comes upon the fortress."

 

Amos 4:13; 5:8–9

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Prophets (p. 35). 

T

Guard Your Mouth, Preserve Relationships

(Monroe County sunset)

I'm reading from Proverbs, searching for wisdom.

Proverbs 13:3 says,

Those who guard their lips preserve their lives, 

but those who speak rashly will come to ruin.

I know a man who spoke everything that came into his mind. He had no filter. He thought he was funny. He embarrassed his wife and children.

I have opened my mouth and ruined a relationship. I was twenty-one. I occasionally played golf with our family's insurance agent. His name was Don.

I remember driving home after a round of golf. Don was in the car with me. We started talking about cats. I told Don about our family's Maine coon cat. He was huge!

"What's his name?" Don asked.

"I named it "El Gato." That's Spanish for "The Cat.""

Then I added, "I didn't want to give him some ordinary name, like "Mittens.""

"Don, do you have a cat?"

"Yes," he said.

"What's its name?"

"Mittens."

That was the last time Don and I ever played golf.

A fool’s mouth lashes out with pride, 

but the lips of the wise protect them.

Proverbs 14:3

(If your cat is Mittens, forgive me...)

Trying to Be Relevant Has Left the American Church Irrelevant

(New York City)

Neither the Old Testament prophets, nor Jesus, were trying to be relevant.

The Church's great distinctive is not We are way cooler than you and your tribe are.

Can a church have culturally relevant things? I believe so. But these things, as awesome as the lights and fog machines might be (we are so easily entertained) , are not manifestations of our great distinctive.  

See, e.g., this: 

15 Then Moses said to him, 

“If your Presence does not go with us, 

do not send us up from here. 

16 How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people 

unless you go with us? 

What else will distinguish me and your people 

from all the other people on the face of the earth?”

Exodus 33

The Gospel is relevant, as the antidote to, our miserable condition. But a presence-driven church is not trying to be culturally relevant. 

Os Guinness writes: 

“Rarely has the church seen so many of its leaders solemnly presenting the faith in public in so many weak, trite, foolish, disastrous, and even disloyal ways as today… This monumental and destructive carelessness has coincided exactly with a mania for relevance and reinvention that has gripped the church. So a disconcerting question arises: How on earth have we Christians become so irrelevant when we have tried so hard to be relevant? And by what law or logic is it possible to steer determinedly in one direction but end up in completely the opposite direction?… We are confronted by an embarrassing fact: Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously; never have Christians been more irrelevant.”

It’s not evil for a church to have a fair-trade coffee bar. I probably like coffee more than you do. Coffee-drinking was so much a part of my Finnish heritage that my grandmother literally had tears in her eyes when she learned I started to drink it. To her, I finally joined the Finnish Faith Community. But something has gone wrong when God communicates to us one thing (“better is one day in my presence”), and it gets misinterpreted as another thing (“better is one day with my barista").

- See my book Leading the Presence-Driven Church.

The Naturalistic Fallacy

The "naturalistic fallacy" is the confused idea that moral conclusions can be drawn from scientific evidence. It is the belief that one can derive "ought" from "is."

Science qua science weighs, measures, and quantifies. Science can weigh the computer I am typing on, but science cannot tell me if it's a "good" computer, or if it's "beautiful." "Good" and "beautiful" are value judgments, about which science says nada.

Science qua science gives no information regarding value. "Value" includes truth, beauty, good (ethical goodness), evil, right, wrong, and meaning. For example, when Crick and Watson discovered DNA they reported the scientific data and added that the double helix structure was "elegant." In saying this they left science, for the moment. When theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer helped to create the nuclear bomb, he quoted the Bhagavad Gita and said, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Not a very scientific statement!

Science qua science does not give us morality. The chief domains of morality are religion and philosophy. We cannot help but speak morally. Inextricably, we are moral creatures. Moral discourse requires a metaphysical framework. One must not make the mistake of thinking that science, despite all its powers, will be of much help here.

Metaethical Studies and Moral Nihilism

 

(Detroit)

Most atheists I know want to be moral. They make strong moral claims, saying "_______ is wrong," or "We ought to do ________." And, "Putin is a war criminal." Indeed, atheists like Richard Dawkins claim religious beliefs are morally repulsive and ought to be discarded. 

But it is questionable if atheism can take us this far. Probably not. Atheism can support utilitarianism, and emotivist ethics, but atheists overreach when they claim some acts are morally wrong. The atheist cannot, without warrant, call certain acts "good" or "evil."

This is a metaethical issue. Here are three books that help me understand this. 

Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can't Deliver,  by University of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith. Smith argues that "the naturalistic cosmos that is the standard operating worldview of atheism cannot with rational warrant justify the received humanistic belief in universal benevolence and human rights." (P. 124)

Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality, by University of Virginia professors James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky. They write:

"When it began, the quest for a moral science sought to discover the good. The new moral science has abandoned that quest and now, at best, tells us how to get what we want. With this turn, the new moral science, for all its recent fanfare, has produced a world picture that simply cannot bear the weight of the wide-ranging moral burdens of our time." (Kindle Location 112)

This, say Hunter and Nedelisky, is "moral nihilism."

Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology, by theistic philosopher J. P. Moreland. Moreland writes: "Given scientism, moral knowledge is impossible. And the loss of moral knowledge has meant a shift from a view in which duty and virtue are central to the moral life, to a minimalist ethical perspective." (Kindle Location 422)

Non-Discursive Experiences of God

(Kitty Hawk, NC)

A non-discursive experience is an experience that is felt and "known" as real, but which cannot be captured in the steel nets of literal language. One has such experiences, but cannot discourse about them. (On religious experiences that "I know that I know that I know" but cannot speak of, see James K.A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues.)

I experience God in a variety of ways, many of which are non-discursive. This is how it should be, right? None of us has epistemic access to the being of God. We fail to fully understand what it's like to be all-knowing, or all-loving, or all-powerful.

The expression of a non-discursive experience is confessional and testimonial. There is a sense in which it cannot be refuted. What does this mean? Say, for example, that I now feel joy. I make the statement, “Now I feel joy.” It would be odd, in a Wittgensteinian-kind of way, for someone to say “You’re wrong.” That would be leaving the language-game I’m now playing. (Wittgensteinian “playing” is what I have here in mind.)

Consider the statement, “I felt God close to me today.” Even a philosophical materialist could not doubt that today I had some kind of numinous experience which I describe as God being with me. They could doubt that what caused my experience was “God.” I understand this. But their doubt has no effect on my experience and the interpretation of it. Their doubt does not make me a doubter, precisely because I am not a philosophical materialist. I see no reason to disbelieve my experiences because others do not have them. This relates, I think, to Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne's "principle of credulity."

At this point I’m influenced by theistic philosophers Alvin Plantinga and William P. Alston. For them, belief in God is properly basic if the noetic framework of Christian theism is true. Plantinga’s work on “warranted belief” and Alston’s work on the “experiential basis of theism” is helpful here. Alston writes: 

“the relatively abstract belief that God exists is constitutive of the doxastic practice of forming particular beliefs about God's presence and activity in our lives on the basis of theistic experience.” 

For Alston, experiential support for theism is analogous to experiential support for belief in the physical world. He explains what he means by “theistic experience.” He writes:

I “mean it to range over all experiences that are taken by the experiencer to be an awareness of God (where God is thought of theistically). I impose no restrictions on its phenomenal quality. It could be a rapturous loss of conscious self-identity in the mystical unity with God; it could involve "visions and voices"; it could be an awareness of God through the experience of nature, the words of the Bible, or the interaction with other persons; it could be a background sense of the presence of God, sustaining one in one's ongoing activities. Thus the category is demarcated by what cognitive significance the subject takes it to have, rather than by any distinctive phenomenal feel.”

For Plantinga, if the noetic framework of Christian theism is true, then I can expect to experience God. God exists, has made us in his image, has placed a moral consciousness within us, has revealed himself in the creation, and desires for us to know him. Plantinga, of course, believes this noetic framework is true. As do I. One then expects experiential encounters with God. They come to us, as Alston says, like sense-experiences.

This is to argue for the rationality of theistic experiences. One can have “warrant” for the belief that such experiences are from God. But these experiences do not function as “proofs” of God’s existence.

Non-discursive experiences, and experiences in general, cannot be caught in the steel nets of literal language. “Experience” qua experience has what French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has called a “surplus of meaning.” “Words” never capture all of experience. All experiencing has a non-discursive quality. Here the relationship of words to experiencing leads to volumes of discussion in areas such as linguistic semantics and philosophy of language.

Even a sentence as seemingly simple as “I see a tree” is, phenomenally, incomplete. Consider this experience: sitting on an ocean beach watching the sun set with the person you are falling in love with. Ricoeur called such experiences “limit-experiences”; viz., experiences that arise outside the limits of thought and language. But people want to express, in words, these events. For that, Ricoeur says a “limit-language” is needed, such as metaphorical expression. So-called “literal language” cannot capture limit-experiences.

Every person has limit-experiences that are non-discursive.

Experience, not theory, breeds conviction. Theorizing either for or against God is not as convincing as the sense of the presence of God or the sense of the absence of God. This is why I keep returning to my “conversion experience.”

Among the God-experiences I consistently have are:
- A sense that God is with me
- Numinous experiences of awe and wonder (not mere “Einsteinian wonder”)
- God speaking to me
- God leading me
- God comforting me
- God’s love expressed towards me
- God’s Spirit convicting me
- God directing me
- Overwhelming experience of God
- God revealing more of himself to me

These experiences are mediated through:
-Corporate worship
-Individuals
-Solitary times of prayer
-Study of the Christian scriptures
-Observing the creation
-In difficult and testing situations

Sometimes I have experienced God in an unmediated way.

I discern and judge such things to be experiences of God because...
-I spend many hours a week praying
-I have heavily invested myself in prayer and meditation for the past 42+ years
-I saturate myself in the Christian scriptures
-I study the history of Christian spirituality
-I keep a spiritual journal and have 3000+ pages of journal entries concerning God-experiences
-I hang out with people who do all of the above
- I've taught this material in various seminaries, at conferences, in the United States & elsewhere around the world. I've gained a multi-ethnic perspective on the subject of experiencing God.

All this increases one’s diacritical ability (dia-krisis; “discernment”; lit. “to cut through”). Spiritual diacritical ability is mostly acquired. It is in direct proportion to familiarity.

The more we live in connection with God, the more familiar we will be with the presence of God. We will speak of it, and our words will fall short of expressing it, which is how it should be.



***

My books are:

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Encounters with the Holy Spirit (co-edited with Janice Trigg)

31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship

31 Letters to the Church on Praying

Deconstructing Progressive Christianity

Pastors Among the Unthinking Herd

(One of my favorite postcards)

I love pastors. I have taught many pastors. I am a pastor. I am not to be conformed to the leadership styles of this world.

The warning Paul issues in Romans 12:1-2 concerns the shape of our hearts; viz., that we not be world-conformed. This is relevant in every age, and especially so in today's America, where the invasion of secularity has captured and shaped the hearts of the masses. Many Christians, and many pastors, have joined the ranks of the unthinking Kierkegaardian herd.

In the midst of this nihilistic wasteland God raises up prophetic voices, even speaking from the grave. One of them is Henri Nouwen. In The Way of the Heart he writes:

"Our society is not a community radiant with the love of Christ, but a dangerous network of domination and manipulation in which we can easily get entangled and lose our soul. The basic question is whether we ministers of Jesus Christ have not already been so deeply molded by the seductive powers of our dark world that we have become blind to our own and other people’s fatal state and have lost the power and motivation to swim for our lives."

(Nouwen, The Spiritual Life: Eight Essential Titles, Kindle Locations 893-896)

Nouwen sees the manifestations of pastoral captivity and world-conformity. They include:

• Pastors are too busy with meetings, visits, many services to lead. Pastors move through life in a distracted way, rarely stopping to ask if any of this busyness is worth thinking, saying, or doing.
• Pastors have become advertisers who must motivate people to come to church, who must make sure the youth are entertained, who must raise money to keep the infrastructure going, and above all, pastors need to see that everyone is happy.
• Pastors have become "busy people just like all other busy people, rewarded with the rewards which are rewarded to busy people." (Ib., K899)
• Pastors have lost their real identity in Christ, and have morphed into affirmation addicts: "Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated or despised." (Ib., K906)
• What matters to many pastors today is not what God thinks of them, but how they are perceived by the world.

Nouwen saw anger in pastoral leaders, coming from culture-shaped hearts that have taken on the consumer values of the world. He writes:

"Anger in particular seems close to a professional vice in the contemporary ministry. Pastors are angry at their leaders for not leading and at their followers for not following. They are angry at those who do not come to church for not coming and angry at those who do come for coming without enthusiasm. They are angry at their families, who make them feel guilty, and angry at themselves for not being who they want to be. This is not an open, blatant, roaring anger, but an anger hidden behind the smooth word, the smiling face, and the polite handshake. It is a frozen anger, an anger which settles into a biting resentment and slowly paralyzes a generous heart. If there is anything that makes the ministry look grim and dull, it is this dark, insidious anger in the servants of Christ. (Ib., K919-923)

Are things really that bad in ministry? I think so. I've taught my spiritual formation materials to five thousand pastors, and Nouwen's insights resonate with me. And, I have discovered the seeds of secularity in my own heart.

The warning the apostle Paul gives against world-conformity is real, and the entrapment is subtle. It doesn't happen overnight. One morning a pastor can wake up and sense that something has gone wrong in his or her heart. They realize, following Nouwen, that they are passengers on a ship that is sinking.

Nouwen's counsel, and mine as well, is: Jump ship! Swim for your life! Run to the place of your salvation, which is the place of solitude and presence of God. Reside there, and be transformed into Christlikeness by the renewing of your mind. (This is why the Desert Fathers went to the desert in the first place.)

***
Two of my books are

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God. 

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

The Meaning of Life

 

                                                                       (Sunset, Monroe, Michigan - 5/26/22)

Does life have ultimate meaning? To answer this question we need to ask: what is the meaning of 'meaning'?

I define 'meaning' as: situatedness within a coherent context. The reason we didn't get the meaning of a joke is that, as one sometimes says, "You had to be there." To understand a joke one must share the context in which the joke is situated. To understand the meaning of a foreign word one must be situated within the particular linguistic context. And so on.

Meaning is contextual. If there were no context, there would be no meaning.

So, does your life, my life, have ultimate meaning? Only if it has a place within a coherent context, or a metanarrative.

If there is no Creator God, there is no coherent, cosmic context. If no context, no meaning, because 'meaning' is situatedness within a context. 

Jean-Paul Sartre understood this. He believed that, in a godless universe, life has no meaning or purpose beyond the goals that each person sets for themselves. In Being and Nothingness Sartre wrote: 

"Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth." 

Which is to say: without God human life has no ultimate, cosmic meaning. Without God, there is no "grander scheme of things."

Commenting on Sartre, philosopher Leslie Stevenson writes: 

"There is no ultimate meaning or purpose inherent in human life; in this sense life is 'absurd'. We are 'forlorn', 'abandoned' in the world to look after ourselves completely. Sartre insists that the only foundation for values is human freedom, and that there can be no external or objective justification for the values anyone chooses to adopt." (Seven Theories of Human Nature)

Sartre is correct. Atheists who attempt to give life meaning are only spinning absurdities out of their own isolated existences. Only if a God who created the universe exists can our lives have meaning.

***

For some discussion on the meaning of life, see, e.g....

The Meaning of Life: A Reader, E.D. Klemke and Steven Cahn, eds.

Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl

The Meaning of Meaning, I. A. Richards and C K.Ogden

The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction, Terry Eagelton

See also this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKGnXgH_CzE