Most Recent Issue
The Fish Tank
Cleanse My…Search History?
Tim Challies’ article “Show All History” in Christianity Today, reminds us of AOL’s disastrous mishap in 2006. Dr. Abdur Chowdhury accidentally released to the public a compressed text file containing twenty million search keywords for over 650,000 users over a 3-month period. Though AOL immediately withdrew the data, it had already seeped through the Internet. These 650,000 were victims of their search histories; histories that were made available to complete strangers, giving them the opportunity to reconstruct a person’s life.
Challies provides the following searches of one of the AOL users:
body fat calliper 2006-03-01 18:54:10
curb morning sickness 2006-03-05 08:53:23
get fit while pregnant 2006-03-09 18:49:37
he doesn’t want the baby 2006-03-11 03:52:01
uou’re pregnant he doesn’t want the baby 2006-03-11 03:52:49
online degrees theology 2006-03-11 04:05:24
online christian colleges 2006-03-11 04:13:33
foods to eat when pregnant 2006-03-12 09:38:02
baby names 2006-03-14 19:11:10
baby names and meanings 2006-03-14 20:01:27
physician search 2006-03-23 10:20:04
best spa vacation deals 2006-03-27 20:04:09
maternity clothes 2006-03-28 09:28:25
pregnancy workout videos 2006-03-29 10:01:39
buns of steel video 2006-03-29 10:12:38
what is yoga 2006-03-29 12:17:31
what is theism 2006-03-29 12:18:30
hindu religion 2006-03-29 12:18:56
yoga and hindu 2006-03-29 12:32:05
is yoga alligned with christianity 2006-03-29 12:33:18
yoga and christianity 2006-03-29 12:33:42
abortion clinics charlotte nc 2006-04-17 11:00:02
greater carolinas womens center 2006-04-17 11:40:22
can christians be forgiven for abortion 2006-04-17 21:14:19
roe vs. wade 2006-04-17 22:22:07
effects of abortion on fibroids 2006-04-18 06:50:34
abortion clinic charlotte 2006-04-18 15:14:03
symptoms of miscarriage 2006-04-18 16:14:07
water aerobics charlotte nc 2006-04-18 19:41:27
abortion clinic chsrlotte nc 2006-04-18 21:45:39
total woman vitamins 2006-04-20 16:38:16
engagement gifts 2006-04-20 16:57:04
engagement rings 2006-04-20 16:58:37
mom’s turning 50 2006-04-20 17:51:13
high risk abortions 2006-04-20 17:53:49
abortion fibroid 2006-04-20 17:55:18
benefits of water aerobics 2006-04-20 23:25:50
wedding gown styles 2006-04-26 19:37:34
recover after miscarriage 2006-05-22 18:17:53
marry your live-in 2006-05-27 07:25:45
He points out that this woman goes from searches on pregnancy, to realization that the father does not want the baby, to turning to abortion clinics and whether or not abortion is compatible with her faith, to dealing with a miscarriage, to eventually moving on. Challies comments, “What is so amazing about these searches is the way people transition seamlessly from the normal and mundane to the outrageous and perverse. They are, thus, an apt reflection of real life.”
The search history made tangible this woman’s most troubling emotions. The sad truth is that we are willing to pour out the depths of our soul to a search engine, often willing to admit more to an unforgiving and permanent track record than we will to a God who offers comfort and grace. This is a distressing glimpse of the reality of the sad plight of the human condition. What twisted search histories inhabit our own hearts? I would hate to see a written transcript of my own sin, but perhaps this is to be taken as a reminder of the darkness we are capable of, a darkness that we often seem to forget. After all, the search history knows us better than we know ourselves—they remember even when we choose not to. Convicting, right? How willing are we to expose our search histories before God? Challies concludes, “While the search engines may never forget, I am grateful that God does forget.” Hebrews 8:12 contains God’s beautiful promise to those who have confessed their sins, “I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” Remember no more – what exactly does that mean. Throughout the Old Testament, when God chooses to “remember” His covenant with His people, He is not actually remember something that he once forgot; rather he is honoring and keeping in mind His promise to them. In the same way, when God says He will “remember their sins no more,” God still knows our sin, but he does not hold us accountable to it. We are not bound to the condemnation that we deserve. God sees our search histories. He sees the depths of our heart, yet he loves us the same.
Grace: something no search engine can ever provide.
Where are you searching?
A Note About Bodies
I was spurred by the recent debate about baptism on the Fish Tank to think in more general terms about how to connect spiritual movements—repentance, salvation, sanctification—to physical facts. Seen from a certain perspective, it can seem downright silly to think that merely getting wet, or eating some bread, or being daubed with oil can affect our essential selves. However, I think that this is undervaluing the extent to which are bodies, far from being just accidental housings to our minds, are actually a fundamental part of who we are. I can’t say that I’ve thought about this issue enough to satisfy myself or solve all the questions I have, but perhaps we can think out loud together.
“Rich Man Poor Love”
I don’t like to watch mushy dramas. But during my mandatory quarantine period in Beijing this summer, I sat in my hotel for three days doing just that. Little did I know that I would be swept up for hours on end by the melodramatic stunts of a Chinese drama entitled Rich Man Poor Love, whose main plot seemed at points unexpectedly analogous to my own love life with God.
In the drama, a filthy rich yet incredibly handsome real-estate mogul falls in love with and marries a low-income college student. However, this is not a happily-ever-after Cinderella story. The marriage is a contract between the two which stipulates that the girl become the mogul’s wife for one year. In exchange, he gives her the large sum of money she needs to pay for her boyfriend’s life-sustaining burn treatment at the hospital. Only after a year does the girl find out that the mogul had been the one responsible for her former boyfriend’s accident. The mogul decides to tell his wife, who has begun falling in love with him, that if she so desires, he will confess his crime to the authorities and face the consequences, which may include the death penalty. Later, in jail, the convict tells his visiting ex-wife that this was the first time he held back nothing and handed his life so entirely into the hands of another.
Reason & Faith IV: Knowing God
Now that we’ve looked at the external benefits of being reasonable, we must explore why it is important internally for one’s spiritual development. For this, I’m going to start with a bold claim – one which would not be controversial were it not for translation problems and for the divide that modernism has constructed between reason and faith. The claim is this: you cannot fully know God without understanding reason. That’s not to say that all Christians should be given a course in deductive logic, nor that you can’t understand God if you’re being illogical (God’s love is, perhaps, the most irrational thing known to mankind). Rather, I argue that reason is one of the fundamental parts of God’s nature that we need to comprehend if we hope to understand Him.
To clarify a bit, it will be helpful to define some of the terms I’m using. Hebrews 11 tells us that “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” This is illuminating, but still requires some elaboration. By faith, I mean trust based upon evidence but without the complete “sight” of deductive proof. Reason, then, is not entirely opposed to faith but works with in conjunction with it. However, I would like to make a distinction between reason and pure logic – the former being of utmost importance and the latter often lacking significance. Whereas I conceive of reason as being natural wisdom, pure logic is an artificially refined and removed from the realities of life. We need reason to know that 2+2=4, but we do not need set theory to do basic math.
Furthermore, pure logic is incapable of proving itself a valid form of finding truth. One could not go about proving that logic is true illogically. Yet self-justification is generally unpersuasive; we rely on other reasons to support our dependence on logic, namely because our intuitions support it. We have faith in those intuitions. G.K. Chesterton put it best when he said: “It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
Reason without faith cannot stand. Faith without reason is foolish. A man without faith cannot know God, and a man without reason cannot understand His true nature. Why is reason so elemental to God’s character? The Scriptures explain.
The Meaning of Baptism: Part 3
For the first two parts in this series, see here and here.
NICK
“God’s gracious giving to faith belongs to the context of baptism, even as God’s gracious giving in baptism is to faith.” (G. R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament, p. 273)
One typically unforeseen hazard of debates is the temptation to define what we believe about a thing primarily by arguing what it is not—or, at the very least, by insisting that whatever else it is, the other person is mistaken about it! Description solely through negation consistently generates lopsided, malformed results. This generally leads to positive characteristics being assumed rather than stated, to rhetoric and exaggeration, and to the habitually unhelpful practice of majoring in the minors. In his essay “The World’s Last Night” C. S. Lewis insightfully pointed out why he had reservations about such tendencies: “For my own part I hate and distrust reactions not only in religion but in everything. Luther surely spoke very good sense when he compared humanity to a drunkard who, after falling off his horse on the right, falls off it next time on the left.”
READ MORE
A Clarification
Based on discussion in the comments of the most recent edition of Nick’s discussion of baptism with me, I thought it would be worthwhile to clarify what exactly I take the role of the Church Fathers to be in understanding what the New Testament teaches about baptism.
God and the Texas School Board
Russell Shorto’s article “How Christian Were the Founders?”, a piece discussing the religious revisions being made to textbooks by the Texas school board, has hovered in the New York Times’ “Top 10 Most E-Mailed” article list for the last week or so. It is an investigative report of the Texas School Board’s curriculum decisions over the last year. These amendments will affect the social science textbooks published in the next decade, and the religious bent of the boards’ amendments to the Texas history curriculum have drawn the attention both of educators and of the nation at large.
So, why mess with Texas? Because Texas is the largest textbook distributor in the U.S., publishing companies tend to tailor their textbooks to Texas’ standards. Thus, the curriculum decisions made in Texas affect not only the students in that state, but almost all children in American public schools (one educator quoted in the article said that Texas “controlled” up to forty-seven states’ curricula). The biggest issue of contention is the board’s attempt to inject Christian doctrine into large parts of American history textbooks, to the point where one school board member commented, “Guys, you’re rewriting history now!” Led by Don McLeroy, the school board head and the most outspoken Christian activist in that political body, the Texas School Board seems well on its way to putting Christianity back into American textbooks and restructuring the way an entire generation of schoolchildren understands American history.
Visit the Fish Tank!
Elsewhere on the Internet
