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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.
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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.”
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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.
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