Anywhere But the Suburbs

By Matt Jenson
Scriptorium Daily

There are occasional days when I heartily affirm with Randy Newman: ‘I love LA!’ More often, I hate it.

On Tuesday morning I flew back to Los Angeles, with its cars and concrete, its hurry and hustle and hassle. I had been in the Southeast for two weeks – with good friends in Nashville and Washington, DC, and a long, meandering drive in-between. When I opened my car door late on the night I arrived in Tennessee, I was taken aback by the sounds of crickets and frogs, instead of the trains from back in suburban Orange County. Everything in Tennessee was green. I rode a lawn mower for two hours just to cut my friend’s grass. He had that much grass.

It was even better as I wandered through the small towns of Kentucky and North Carolina. I’ve been reading Wendell Berry for a while, and like most of his readers, I want to live in Port William, Kentucky. Short of that, it seemed a nice idea to drive to unincorporated Henry County, to the town of Port Royal, on which Berry bases Port William. At dusk, I was driving along the river (‘Watch out for the deer’, they told me), basking in the warm light of the end of the day as it shone on abandoned barns and run-down farmhouses. Why can’t I live here?

I’ve begun to realize that I am reading Wendell Berry poorly. To me, his novels have been an escape – a thoughtful, literary escape, of course, a respectable one. Nostalgia for agrarian society is all the rage among us academic types. I am coming to realize, though, that Port William isn’t the romantic utopia that serves as my intellectual equivalent of comfort food. It is a home for a ‘membership’ (Berry’s word) who have to struggle to receive it in gratitude as their home. Port William is to its members as LA is to me.

This is how Port William’s own Hannah Coulter put it near the end of her life:

‘Most people now are looking for “a better place,” which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no “better place” than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

‘I think of Art Rowanberry, another one who went to the war and came home and never willingly left again, and I quote him to myself: “Something better! Everybody’s talking about something better. The important thing is to feel good and be proud of what you got, don’t matter if it ain’t nothing but a log pen.”’

Suburban Orange County is a lot more than a log pen; but if I’m honest, the one thing needful, the feeling good and being proud of what I’ve got in this home is one of the more difficult aspects of my life. My impulse is to change, and in this I find I am of a piece with the membership of Orange County. We don’t like something, so we change it, abandon it, throw it away – because the whole point is that we are supposed to be happy.

But what if the whole point is that we are supposed to be holy? (Gary Thomas makes this argument about marriage.) And what if being happy were bound up with being holy? Funny. I’ve been a Christian for thirty years, and I am still convinced that dissatisfaction is only ever to be lamented, that is a problem immediately and at all costs to be solved. The dissatisfying suburbs become thus a place for me to flee, nothing better than a log pen. What if the loving Father wanted to conform me to the image of his Son, to make my holy, by teaching me to love the suburbs?

Dave and Lisa Everitt have referred to Cambodia, where they are missionaries, as Paradise for as long as I can remember. I’ve been there. It’s beautiful in parts, but also filled with the poverty and pain flowing from the atrocities of its recent history. I’ll never forget Dave’s story of enjoying a swimming hole only to realize it was one of a string of perfectly round holes, courtesy of a flurry of bombs.

I don’t think it’d ever occur to me to call Phnom Penh ‘Paradise’. But to Dave and Lisa, it is just that. Not because they’re blind to the difficulty of living far from their loved ones and home culture, or because they have romanticized this corner of the developing world. No, it is Paradise because it is what they have been given by God. I suspect, too, that it is Paradise in faith and hope that what they have received from God cannot but be a paradise. And, I suspect that it has become a paradise over the years of loving, sustained attention they have given to it, as they have come to know and be known by the membership of Cambodia.

The difference is that my friends in Cambodia, and those in Port William, know themselves as bound to a place and, in muddled and inconstant ways, seek to live within the limits of where they have been given. Me, I keep thinking of greener grass – of anywhere but the suburbs. On this point, I think I am wrong. I disagree with myself. I repent. Flannery O’Connor was right: ‘Somewhere is better than anywhere.’

20 things I wish I knew as a college student

By Paul Spears
Scriptorium Daily

I don’t know if you are like me, but as I look back on my college years I wish someone would have pulled me aside and given me some tips on how best to pursue an education at the university. So I decided to put together a list called 20 things I wish someone told me while I was in college. This list is in no way exhaustive.

This list is in no particular order of importance (even though some are more significant than others):

1. Be a pursuer of truth. Don’t let the opinion of either the majority or a vocal minority easily persuade you. Don’t just blindly follow tradition. If an idea is true then it can withstand rigorous scrutiny.
2. Take at least an intro to philosophy class and a logic class no matter what your major is. Philosophy and Logic classes help you gain the tools needed for pursuing the truth.
3. Ask, “Why think that?” Not as a naysayer, but as someone who is trying to ascertain how someone justifies their position.
4. Education is a job. Treat it like one. Work 8 hours each weekday (and Saturday if necessary). This includes your time both in and out of class.
5. Manage your free time as if it were gold. How you invest it will determine much of your ongoing success or failure. Think about the parable of the wise investor.
6. Learn the tools that enable you to maximize your productivity. Some tools I would recommend are: Mindjet mind-mapping software, Google Calendar, Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
7. Learn how to type well. If you don’t know how to touch type or you type very slowly you will have to dedicate hours working on a project that could been completed in a much shorter period of time.
8. Learn how to read. You can be literate without knowing how to read well. You need to master how to read a book. An inability to effectively read will lead to you not being able to properly master that content of a text. I highly recommend Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book.
9. Read ahead. If you wait until the last minute to read you book you don’t have the time to reflect on the contents of the book. I realize you are busy, but you aren’t really prepared for a class if you don’t read and reflect on the text assigned.
10. Learn the basics of grammar. If Grammar Rock was non-existent in your house and you think Conjunction Junction is a city in Colorado, you probably need to go memorize the basic rules of grammar. If you think that the semi-colon is the key you use when you are winking at a cute member of the opposite sex on Facebook, you probably need to go memorize the basic rules of punctuation. I hated memorizing the multiplication tables until I realized that math problems go very slowly if I have to stop to think, for example, what 7×9 equals. If you don’t, almost instantaneously, know when to use a semi-colon or comma then you need to back and memorize the “grammar and punctuation tables.” Both grammar and punctuation are necessary for you to be able to accurately express yourself on a subject.
11. Proofread everyting. Get some super type-A authoritarian grammarian to proofread your paper for you. It is better if they catch a mistake rather than your professor. A lack of proofreading communicates a lack of care to your professor.
12. Think of your work as that of an intellectual craftsman. Your abilities will be a reflection of the time and care you put into your work. Doing the bare minimum barely educates you.
13. Learn how to take good notes in class. Good notes will save your bacon when you are trying to remember a concept that was talked about in class, but is not in your text.
14. Record all lectures. With today’s digital recording software storage isn’t a problem, and if you can’t decipher an illegible note you can always go back and listen to the lecture.
15. I know on #11 I spelled everything “everyting.” Did you notice?
16. Study as you go. Don’t wait until the last night to study for a test. When your class ends, that doesn’t mean your studying of that subject is over for the day. If possible, continue to study your subject after a class is over, while it is fresh in your mind. If you wait to review information until days after the class it will take much more time and effort to recall what happened in class.
17. Do opposition research. Read the best arguments against your position. It will force you to develop rigorous justifications of your position.
18. Take time to reflect on your ideas. If you are always task oriented you will never have the mental space to think synthetically. Set aside time just to think about what you have been studying.
19. Read recreationally. If you only dedicate your intellectual life to a certain course of study you can have intellectual atrophy.
20. Stop thinking that you go to school to get a good job. You should work towards academic excellence because you were created to serve the most high God–not to get a paycheck. God made us intellectual creatures, and it is for that reason we pursue the life of the mind. If you work with this in mind a vocation will come.
21. Bonus (via Matt Jenson) Find someone, or a few someones, that you want to think like. One grad school professor tells his students that he doesn’t want them to think for themselves; he wants them to think like him.
22. Bonus # 2 (again from Matt Jenson) Please, please, please, go to a movie on a Friday night. Or a date. Or, I dunno, do something fun.

A Chance at Greatness

By John Mark Reynolds

Not many of us get a chance at greatness, but one man has his chance right now. The man who can make history is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the religious leader behind the planned Islamic Center near Ground Zero.

He can lift America beyond bigotry and beyond hate by speaking a prophetic word as he travels to the Middle East. If he submits to God and speaks justice, then he can witness to his faith in God. He can give meaning to these words:

. . . Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to Allah, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be against rich or poor: for Allah can best protect both. Follow not the lusts of your hearts, lest you swerve, and if you distort justice or decline to do justice, verily Allah is acquainted with all you do.

A few evil Americans hate this Imam simply because he is Muslim. Such people are certainly not living out the Christian faith which commands Christians to love even their enemies and to do to others as they would have done to Christians.

Christians who would deny any right to build an Islamic study center at this moment should think carefully about the implications for their own projects. We do not live in times friendly to any people, including those of the Christian faith, who refuse the libertine spirit of the age. The same arguments may someday be used to create “religion free” property zones, if someone can express offense.

Some of the opposition to the Islamic study center is incoherent. Certainly any society drunk on secular values cannot then claim that the ground of the World Trade Center is “holy.” The sacred and the secular are at war and some secularists who oppose the study center do so because they oppose all religious practice. They hypocritically use the screen of 9/11 to disguise their hatred of all religious practice.

However, most opposition to the center is not based on bigotry, but on reason and the experience millions of Americans have had with Islam in the rest of the world. It is hard to believe platitudes about Islam, when your grandparent’s priest was killed by an Islamic mob. It is difficult to be tolerant when your church’s medical workers are martyred by murderers never brought to justice in Islamic lands.

If Americans are to believe in a Western Islam, they have a right to be reassured that the past experience of Christians in Islamic lands will not be repeated.

It is difficult to see a study center raised near where other Muslims, even bad Muslims, killed Americans in God’s name. The Imam might be prudent to move the center he has a right to build.

The fact that he can do a thing does not mean he should.

A greater number of Americans fear for their future if Islam should grow in America. They do not do this out of unreasoning hate–rather, due to a sad history, they do not trust this man when he says that he respects the American ideals of religious freedom and the freedom to use private property to advance religious faith.

What is this sad history?

There is no nation where Muslims are a majority that Christians are not second class citizens. Christians have not always acted nobly or consistently with their own beliefs in respect to Islam, but it is a fact that no nation with Christians in the majority makes Muslims second class citizens by law.

The Imam can scarcely take a step in Islamic lands without walking by a church made a mosque or near a spot sanctified to Christians by the blood of martyrs.

All over the lands where Muslims are a majority, churches are taken over and turned into mosques. Other churches have been sacked and sit in ruins while their congregations are forbidden to rebuild. Christians, those of other faiths, and even those of no faith, are murdered for practicing their deeply held beliefs.

This is a shame and a crime against humanity.

There is no excuse for bigotry or unreasoning hatred against Muslims, but Arab Americans have history to guide them. Where Arab Christians have become a minority elsewhere, they have died.

So not all opponents of the study center are bigots, some have had parents and grandparents who fled from oppression to the United States. What many Arab American Christians see when they look at this situation is New York City’s Saint Nicholas Orthodox Church in ruins, not rebuilt, and an Islamic study center rising near where Islamic terrorists destroyed an Orthodox church. They want to believe that American Muslims are as committed to American values and justice as they are, but they also know their own history.

What, they might ask, is different? A church is in ruins, but a study center is built. Money from Islamic states that do not respect freedom of religion or the rights of private property flow, but nothing is given to rebuild what was destroyed by co-religionists.

Saint Nicholas is not the first Orthodox Church destroyed by Islamic extremists and then not rebuilt while an Islamic center rises in its stead. All over the Middle East churches have been looted by men the governments publically condemn as “extremists,” but the churches are never rebuilt and the blood of the martyrs cries out for justice in vain.

In Egypt, Indonesia, the Sudan, Lebanon, and Turkey Christians live in terror for their lives.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf can submit to the will of God and stand firmly for justice for those who have no power to speak for themselves. He can stand for the Jews of New York City, forced to protect themselves behind metal detectors. He can stand for the Christian Copts of Egypt, terrorized by extremists. He can stand for the Christians in southern Sudan who are enslaved by Muslims from the north.

If he does, then he will find many of us ready to stand with him for justice. We know that every American has a right to do as he will with private property, but we doubt, for good reason, the commitment of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to American values.

Christians know, to their shame, that there were times in the distant past when it was better to live in Islamic lands than Christian ones. By the standards of the times, Islamic lands were more tolerant than Christian countries. Jews, for example, had civil rights denied them in most Christian nations. But those days are long ago.

Christianity has learned the lessons of history, yet it is not obvious that Islam has. The United States has a huge, active Christian majority. It is politically potent, but individual Muslims still have greater civil rights than they do in most Islamic countries. This is certainly true of Islamic women.

My Muslim friends claim this is not because of Islam, but due to colonialism and other evils of history. Perhaps this is true, but it does not explain the treatment of the Christian “native” populations in nations like Turkey and Egypt. Christians have been in both regions longer than Muslims, but find themselves persecuted and embattled.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has the attention of the world at this moment. He can prove that he is not seeking extremist money or catering to the regressive elements in Islam. This religious leader can act prudently, help rebuild Saint Nicholas in New York while building a study center, and point the way to justice.

Non-Muslims are told Islam demands justice. Americans are committed to advancing justice and want to believe good of their fellow citizens.

Bad practices have often ended in America. A Christian majority learned to accept a Jewish minority as equal citizens. Women gained the vote without bloodshed or civil war. Now the wars of the Middle East can end here as an Islamic imam stands for justice in the nations where his voice is most likely to be heard.

This is a moment for greatness and one man can change everything.

Why Cigarette Smoking is Not a Sin for Others -- Just a Sin for You

By Douglas Wilson

Here is the general outline of a talk I gave this evening at Collegiate Reformed Fellowship.

My point this evening is not that smoking cigarettes is a sin everywhere and for everyone, under any conceivable circumstance. My thesis is a great deal simpler than that. I simply want to argue that smoking cigarettes is a sin for you.

Here are my seven reasons:

1. The Bible says that you should honor your father and mother (Ex. 20:12), and I have to confess that in all my years of pastoring I have never met a kid who took up smoking because he was really eager to honor his father and mother.

2. The Scriptures teach that maturity is a matter of discernment (Heb. 5:14), and this discernment is a function of long practice. If you were to make a list of ten Christians you really respect as having this kind of discernment, all over the age of fifty, and you asked them all whether they thought you taking up smoking at the age of 18 (or younger) was a good idea, what percentage do you think would offer you a light? Is that percentage somewhere close to zero? Does that thought experiment tell you anything?

3. The process of sanctification largely consists of learning to tell the lusts of your body no (Rom. 8:13-14). Jesus teaches us that the one who is faithful over little will be made faithful over much. We can flip this reasoning around, and say that if someone is faithless with a lesser amount, he should not promote himself to the place where he has more to be faithless with. If you can’t run with men, how will you run with horses (Jer. 12:5)? Do you really think you need additional desires to be undisciplined with?

4. A worldview consists of far more than the thoughts you think in your head. A biblical worldview consists of four elements—two of them propositional, and two of them enacted. The two propositional elements are catechesis and narrative. What doctrine do you hold, and what story do you tell? The two enacted elements are liturgy/symbol and lifestyle. An integrated worldview is one in which all four spokes of this wheel are balanced. You ought not to be carving a spoke that does not fit in our axle.

5. You are not C.S. Lewis.

6. Smoking reveals the method of a self-serving ethic. The way others are to view your liberty is not the same way that you should view your liberty. Other Christians should let you do what you want unless the Bible forbids it. That’s how we guard against legalism. But you should use your liberty differently—you should be asking what the reasons are for doing it, and not what the reasons are for prohibiting it. Liberty is intended by God for you to use as an instrument for loving others (Gal. 5:13), and not as an instrument for suiting yourself.

7. And last, my interest in discipleship of young men and women is to find and cultivate leaders. To look for such leadership abilities in the midst of these contagions of herd behavior is like looking for a redwood tree in the pumpkin patch. The motto of the future leaders of the Church will not be, “Guys, wait up!” Neither will it be, “Ooo, where did you get those?” We want to baptize the nations, bringing them to Christ, and so we should not be occupying ourselves with variations on the game of monkey see/monkey do.

How the Trinity changes everything with Fred Sanders

By Michael Debusk
Native Pilgrim Blog

A couple of weeks ago, Jared Wilson shared his view of what is missing in Christian publishing:

We need prose that sings. We need writers who aren’t merely authorities in their areas and can relay information to us in competent ways . . . We need writers who receive on literary frequencies, writers who feel what they write, who convey poetry or beauty or some ecstatic sense in their writing. We need writers whose work emanates off the page the hum and buzz of adoration.

Fred Sanders is such a writer and his new book, The Deep Things of God, soars. Here are a couple of reasons why. First, not many writers could move from a story about one’s uncle, to the Council of Nicaea, to the epistemological theory of Michael Polanyi (don’t let that last bit scare you off!) in a page and a half, but Sanders’ talent for explanation and his natural wit allow him to do it with ease. When folks envision a book about the Trinity, this is not the dry, dusty tome some might expect. Second, The Deep Things of God is not merely for academics, but fellow worshipers. Sanders’ exultation over his subject, the Triune God, beckons you to join him in worship of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And you can’t ask much more from a book about the Trinity than that.

Dr. Sanders was very gracious to take some time to answer some questions about his new book.

MJD: What would you say to the person who sees your book and says, “Oh, great. A book about the Trinity, and with the title The Deep Things of God no less. I’m confused enough as it is”?

Fred Sanders: I sympathize with their exasperation. Just saying the word “Trinity” can be a conversation stopper, because it sounds so lofty, abstract, hoary, Latin, mathematical, and extra-biblical. In fact, the reason I wrote The Deep Things of God is to find a way around those forbidding connotations. So I start out with very familiar and everyday realities of the Christian faith (salvation, prayer, Bible study, fellowship), and work forward to the Trinity. If it works the way I intend it to, this book will have you thinking well about the Trinity before you even know that it’s happening.

As a theology teacher, a lot of my work is to be a Trinity salesman. I am trying to convince conservative evangelical Protestants to buy this doctrine, to buy the whole thing, and to be fully committed to it. To persuade them, I start with things evangelicals already value, and show them how those things are connected to the Trinity.

MJD: The burden of your book is to awaken evangelicals to what they know about the Trinity, so that they will know what they already know; what you call evangelicals’ “Tacit Trinitarianism.” What is “Tacit Trinitarianism” and why is it not enough?

Fred Sanders: “Know what they already know” is a good way to put it. The basic idea is that anybody who has experienced the gospel and is living in fellowship with God is already living in the midst of a trinitarian reality. There’s no other way to account for the Christian life than to give a trinitarian account. For instance, to say that you’re saved is to say that the Father has adopted you as a son in the image of his only begotten Son, and has sent the Spirit of the Son into your heart. To pray to God is to come to the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. So these living realities of the Father, Son, and Spirit are already surrounding us as Christians. When we begin to understand them accurately, we begin to understand the Trinity. First comes the reality, then comes the understanding of it. A lot of teaching about the Trinity can be dull and abstract because, even though it’s true, it takes words and concepts as its starting point, and then gestures towards the reality. The right way to teach the Trinity is to start by attending to the trinitarian reality we are already immersed in before we start to understand its depth.

I call that reality our tacit Trinitarianism, tacit meaning unspoken or unexpressed. When a person first comes to know God in Christ, they are already trinitarian without necessarily being able to express it. As they grow in their spiritual experience and, above all, in their understanding of Scripture, they ought to become articulate about it. Tacit trinitarianism is a rich, fertile ground, and it ought to bring forth understanding. If it doesn’t, something has gone wrong. You can get into a lot of trouble if you know something, but don’t know that you know it. You can stay lost for a long time, driving around the same landmarks but never assembling the big mental map that would get you home. I think the doctrine of the Trinity is that big mental map that locates all the doctrinal landmarks and shows how they go together.

MJD: Why do you think there is such a disconnect between the “Tacit Trinitarianism” that richly underlies evangelical practice and the way evangelicals usually go about thinking about the Trinity?

Fred Sanders: That’s a real puzzle to me. As I say in the book, “we’re too trinitarian to be so untrinitarian.” That is, our experience of the triune God is too rich for our doctrinal expression of it to be so poor. There are probably a lot of contributing factors, but the one I point to is the evangelical genius for simplification and proper emphasis. If you give an evangelical seven important ideas, the first thing they’ll want to know is which one is most important, which one is to be emphasized. It’s not that evangelicals intend to discard the other six ideas –that would be the liberal maneuver. It’s just that they intend to emphasize one point.

So if you’ve got the gospel and the Trinity on the table, evangelicals will always emphasize the gospel. Now here’s the tricky bit. They’re right to do that. The gospel is the part to emphasize. But the Trinity has to still be there, as the massive, controlling, un-emphasized part that gives weight and significance to the emphasized part. When that goes well, as it has for most of evangelical history, it’s beautiful. When it goes wrong, evangelicals try to do more and more with less and less, and an attempt to emphasize the gospel without the weight of the Trinity behind it becomes increasingly shrill and reductionist.

It’s not a matter of choosing between the Trinity and the gospel. On the contrary, you can’t have one without the other. No Trinity, no gospel. How’s that for a kludgy bumper sticker?

MJD: Hence your saying, “the Trinity is the gospel.” So what do you mean by that?

Fred Sanders: When I say the Trinity is the gospel, I mean that the Father sent the Son to redeem us, and the Spirit of the Son to adopt us (Galatians 4:4-6). When we hear about the Trinity, we should think first and foremost about that event, that history, that saving action that God performed for us. It’s pretty sad when Christians hear the word “Trinity” and the dominant idea in their mind is some kind of abstract analogy about shamrocks or the three states of matter. I think the early church pondered its way to the doctrine of the Trinity by figuring out how to condense the whole gospel story into the shortest form. That form is the name that Jesus gave us: the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, into which we are baptized.

In one important sense, which I spend a whole chapter on, the Trinity is bigger than the gospel. The Trinity is who God is, and who God would have been whether there had been creation and redemption or not. The gospel is about aligning us fallen creatures with God, but the doctrine of the Trinity says something about who God himself is. There is an eternal depth of perfection in God that is the source of all the good things he does. That’s the real “deep” thing that the title of the book refers to, following 1 Corinthians 2:10.

MJD: Modern evangelicals don’t have a good reputation for grasping hold of “deep.” What do you see as the dangers that lurk ahead for the movement if shallowness continues to win the day?

Fred Sanders: Shallowness is a besetting problem for the movement. The strong name of the Trinity is the solution. It calls us out into the depths. We are in danger of remaining immature long after the time has come for us to move on to maturity and articulateness. That’s a real spiritual danger, not merely a doctrinal issue. But the doctrinal issue is also important: the fastest-growing varieties of anti-trinitarianism out there are spreading among the low-church, Bible-based evangelical cultures. The offshoot called “Oneness Pentecostalism,” which thinks of Jesus Christ as being the Father, Son and Spirit in person, seems to be growing, and Christians are less and less able to comprehend why that is a problem.

MJD: Do you see the renewed evangelical emphasis on “Gospel-centeredness” and “Christ-centeredness” in competition with a healthy Trinitarianism or a partner?

Fred Sanders: Gospel-centeredness and healthy Trinitarianism are absolutely partners. If they ever appear to be in competition, it’s because one of them has been radically mis-defined or misunderstood. The two have gone hand in hand for most of the history of evangelicalism, as I show in the book: I call witnesses from Calvin to Susanna Wesley to Charles Spurgeon to A.B. Simpson to Oswald Chambers to The Fundamentals to J.I. Packer to Amanda Smith to John Owen to Nicky Cruz, and they all say the same thing: gospel and Trinity go together. If we are losing our grip on how these two go together, it’s a very recent loss, a matter of decades rather than centuries. There is time to recover and there are resources everywhere you look.

MJD: How do you hope someone might be affected by reading your book?

Fred Sanders: I want evangelicals to get the doctrine right and to fall into step theologically. I would hope every reader of this book can get an A on the theology test. But beyond that, I’m praying for the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine itself, to be a means of grace by which people experience deeper communion with the living God. Theology can be that.

The Coming of the Book

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Today (August 10) is the day when, in the year 610, Muhammad began to receive the revelation of the Qur’an. That is, Muslims believe that Allah revealed the Qur’an to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, and most scholars believe that August 10 was the date of that event in 610. The event is called Laylat al-Qadr, “Night of Power,” but the annual celebration of it takes place near the end of Ramadan (first week of September this year), not here at the very beginning of Ramadan. Like all liturgical calendars, it’s complicated (the moon is involved!), and always easy to roll your eyes about the details in somebody else’s religion.

Speaking of somebody else’s religion, the anniversary Laylat al-Qadr is a good occasion to reflect on a point of difference between Muslim theology and Christian theology. The difference is based on an underlying similarity. Both religions are religions of the book: they have definitive and authoritative sacred texts, which they hold to be divinely revealed. According to Christians, the Bible is the word of God, and according to Muslims, the Qur’an is the word of God. Never mind, for now, the obvious fact that both claims can’t be true, since the books assert mutually contradictory claims. The point of similarity is that we have here two religions of the book.

The interesting point of contrast emerges when you ask what position each religion assigns to its book. For Islam, the arrival of the book, the revelation of the Qur’an, is the central event in the history of salvation. According to Islam, Muhammad entered a cave and Allah made his word known to him through Gabriel. The reason there is a Muslim religion, according to Muslim theology, is that the word came to the prophet: There is one God, and his prophet is Muhammad.

What role does Christianity assign to its book? Certainly a very high role, with a claim of divine revelation and therefore a position of authority. But the coming of the book is not the central event in the history of revelation. The coming of the Son of God is that central event. The Bible is the prophetic anticipation of Christ (OT), and the apostolic interpretation of Christ (NT). One part of it looks forward to the central event, and one part of it looks backward to the central event. But the central event itself is not the arrival of a book; it is the arrival of God the Son.

Christians have great and lofty things to say about the Bible and the Bible’s place in salvation history. The Bible is not just the result of human activity preparing for Christ and responding to Christ; it is the result of divine activity as God got personally into the business of making a book. It is inspired, set apart for God’s use in making himself known to souls and building up his church; it is authoritative and inerrant. Christians can even say that salvation history isn’t complete without God getting into the business of inspiring the documents of the New Testament.

But even as Christians prove their credentials as “people of the book” by saying all those things about the Bible, they can never cross the line into saying that the coming of the book is the central event. The place of the central event is already taken, by the Son of God incarnate, crucified, and raised.

The coming of the book, that is, the filling out of the New Testament canon, is something that follows after the central event of the coming of Christ. Compared to Islam, with its centralized singular prophetic spokesman and a special historical event of textual revelation that can be commemorated annually, Christianity looks downright sloppy. I speak reverently, but what God has given us is a series of documents written over a range of times by a range of authors, and gathered together somewhat unpredictably: many letters by Paul (but not every letter he ever wrote), multiple gospels, a history of the earliest church, and various letters by other apostles. Plus Revelation and the anonymous Hebrews! This is the word of God, but it did not descend all at once to a single authorized spokesman in a cave, or on golden tablets.

Out of all the possible dates to celebrate in the Christian calendar (Easter, Christmas, epiphany, pentecost), what would it even look like for us to celebrate a special day for the Christian Bible? Would it be the date of the writing of Mark, or the date of the receiving of Romans? Maybe the moment the ink dried on the Revelation of John? The coming of the New Testament is not one single event. I suppose we could celebrate Canon Day, but that too would be silly. The New Testament doesn’t fit into salvation history in that festival-celebrating kind of way.

Thinking about Muslim theology, especially the doctrine of the Qur’an, is not only a helpful step in understanding Muslim people. It also sharpens our understanding of Christian theology. These two religions of the book both have doctrines of Scripture, but they are very different doctrines of Scripture.

Islam has a higher bibliology (doctrine about scripture), but Christianity stakes its live on something higher than bibliology: “In these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son.”

A “New Agnosticism” — Coming Soon?

By Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

No one seems quite sure what to do with agnostics. In a sense, they are the odd cousins at the theological family reunion. The atheists and the theists know where they stand, but the agnostics? Who knows?

Writing recently at Slate.com, Ron Rosenbaum suggests that perhaps the time has come for a “new agnosticism” to match wits with the “New Atheists,” such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. It’s time for a “revivified agnosticism,” Rosenbaum argues. As he says, their T-shirts will read simply, “I just don’t know.”

Rosenbaum makes an interesting case for his proposed revival of agnosticism. As he cites, the word itself was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Darwin’s aggressive sidekick. Huxley was known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for a good reason, for he was totally committed to evolutionary theory and he was nothing less than pugnacious in argument.

Huxley defined agnosticism in terms of his principle that no one should claim objective knowledge “unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.” In Huxley’s view, this principle of thought rules out any form of theism. At the same time, it supposedly renders atheism unnecessary. In the view of Huxley, atheism actually conceded too much to theism, for it seemed to allow that some adequate evidence for or against the existence of God might be brought forward.

Rosenbaum takes this argument a step forward. Atheists, he insists, actually “display a credulous and childlike faith, [and] worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence — the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence.”

Thus, Rosenbaum wants “a distinct identity for agnosticism, to hold it apart from the certitudes of both theism and atheism.” This is not a small project.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” he insists: “Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer.”

At this point Rosenbaum’s argument gets really interesting. He accuses the New Atheists of intolerance and their own form of heresy hunting, and ridicules them for their untenable faith that all the big questions can be answered with satisfaction by science. The New Atheists, he laments, “seemed to have stopped thinking since their early grade-school science fair triumphs.”

But Rosenbaum has no tolerance for theism, either. In fact, he basically accepts the atheistic rejection of any belief in a personal God. “Let me make clear that I accept most of the New Atheist’s criticism of religious bad behavior over the centuries, and of theology itself,” he asserts. “I just don’t accept turning science into a new religion until it can show it has all the answers, which it hasn’t, and probably never will.”

Well, if Rosenbaum generally accepts the atheist argument, where can his own argument go? It goes to the one “big question” that seems to vex him most — “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Now, that is one of the perennial questions of philosophy and theology, but it is an arbitrary and somewhat eccentric question to establish at the center of his argument. The more central question is, of course, the existence or non-existence of God. But Rosenbaum’s point here seems to be that he lacks any confidence that science can supply an adequate or certain answer to the question of existence itself.

On these big questions, Rosenbaum proposes uncertainty. “Agnosticism doesn’t fear uncertainty.” he insists. “It doesn’t cling like a child in the dark to the dogmas of orthodox religion or atheism. Agnosticism respects and celebrates uncertainty and has been doing so since before quantum physics revealed the uncertainty that lies at the very groundwork of being.”

Rosenbaum clarifies that agnostics do not lack certainty on all questions of knowledge. They accept that some truths can be known, verified, and defended. But not the question of God’s existence or the primary existence of anything at all.

But, in a fascinating twist, Rosenbaum suggests, contrary to Huxley, that the existence of God is not, in principle, unknowable. “I can conceive of logically possible states of affairs in which a God is knowable, and I can conceive of cases in which it is certain that no God exists.”

Well, what might these “logically possible states of affairs” be? At this point in Rosenbaum’s essay, I feel cheated. How can he simply assert that he can conceive of some intellectual conditions for theism or atheism without naming them?

In the end, Rosenbaum’s argument for a “new agnosticism” seems more rooted in attitude than in logic. He accuses both the New Atheists and classical theists of intolerance and a lack of intellectual humility.

But, check out this rather striking sentence: “Agnosticism is not for the simple-minded and is not as congenial as atheism and theism are.” Ah, so by implication, theism and atheism might be for the simple-minded, but it takes a higher intellect to be agnostic. How humble.

He continues: “The courage to admit we don’t know and may never know what we don’t know is more difficult than saying, sure, we know.”

This is one of the central problems with agnosticism as a worldview. In claiming to take a humble approach, it actually ends up in a posture that is rather lacking in humility. The agnostic argues that we, as human creatures, are capable of deciding the intellectual terms when it comes to the big questions such as, first and foremost, the existence and possible knowledge of God.

A first principle of the Christian faith is the fact that special revelation is necessary in order to have any adequate certainty on these questions. Prior to this, the Christian worldview affirms that God has implanted the knowledge of himself in nature. In both forms of revelation, God sets the terms for his own knowability.

The intellectual state of affairs that makes theism possible is the knowledge given by God himself in revelation. Atheism rejects the possibility or actuality of such revelation. Fair enough; at least we know where we stand. Agnosticism requires what divine revelation does not offer — certainty on our own arbitrary terms.

The second major problem with agnosticism is more practical. It just doesn’t work as a middle position or alternative to theism and atheism. Why? Because the question of God’s existence or non-existence is simply too important and fundamental to human life. Every human being acts either upon the assumption that God exists, or that He does not exist. In the main, agnostics side with the atheists on this question, and operate on the assumption that God does not exist.

On this score, the atheists have it over the agnostics in terms of argument. There is little real difference in the two positions in terms of everyday life. Thus, agnostics are counted among the non-believers. But, to Ron Rosenbaum’s consternation, they actually seem less intellectually confident than the atheists. Given what is at stake, living on the basis of a mere assumption that we cannot know if God exists seems a bit flimsy.

Ron Rosenbaum’s argument is worthy of consideration even as it shows where a “new agnosticism” might lead. But, I’m guessing that “I just don’t know” isn’t going to end up as a best-selling T-shirt.