Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.

~Agent Smith

• 
  The Matrix
  Director: Lana Wachowski

The program of control (Smith) describes to Morpheus the reason for the failure of a Utopian world with human inhabitants, us.

This is actually a premise that is recycled over and over again as a plot line for man vs machine dystopic futures. Asimov’s, I-Robot and the Terminator series would be the common references. Mankind creates a simple machine with some basic programming to protect humanity, and the program works out the logical conclusion of the annihilation of humanity being the only way to help us reach our ultimate goals of peace and tranquility without compromising the programing in the process.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

~Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

• 
  I, Robot
  Author: Isaac Asimov

I believe these narrative expressions of our fear of self-aware technologies powered by our rules of behavior says a lot about our hopes for the future of humanity. The safe happy worlds we imagine tend to turn into nightmares when we have the power to enact them.

It is not really a problem of power and control, but more so of imagination. We don’t quite know how to imagine a world that is lacking evil and is still interesting enough to keep us involved. We pass up the obvious solution for the annihilation of evil, because it is directly connected to us. So instead, we are engaged in a very long conversation of changing what we imagine “the good life” to be such that everyone could actually accept “the program” that leads us there.


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Categories: N.T. Wright, Advertising, Society, Heaven, Evil, C.S. Lewis, Movies, Books, Culture, Christianity, Theology
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People say, ‘The Church ought to give us a lead.’ That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way. By the Church they ought to mean the whole body of practicing Christians. And when they say that the Church should give us a lead, they ought to mean that some Christians–those who happen to have the right talents–should be economists and statesmen, and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting ‘Do as you would have done by’ into action. If that happened, and if we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly. But, of course, when they ask for a lead from the church most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political programme. That is silly. The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live for ever: and we are asking them to do a quite different job for which they have not been trained. The job is really on us, on the laymen. The application of Christian principles, say, to trade unionism or education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters: just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists–not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time.

~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

• 
  Mere Christianity
  Author: C. S. Lewis

When you make the comparison to the arts (plays and novels) anything that sounds like a Constantinian ministry of artistic performance immediately strikes us as silly. Of course I don’t expect the pope or my pastor to write great works of fiction, even though they may.

But in many ways I do believe American evangelical aspirations towards political power yearn for something that has the reach and control of Roman Catholicism but all the down home quaintness of southern preaching. It’s a strange collection of skewed desires. Regardless, America still presents an amazing opportunity for laymen to serve in their very best efforts on every front of social concern… something I all too often take for granted.

Categories: Politics, C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Art, Books
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The more we read about Jesus and the background to his life, it was quite obvious that there was very little to ridicule in his life, and therefore we were onto a loser.

~Michael Palin of Monty Python

• 
  Monty Python’s Life Of Brian - The Immaculate Edition
  Director: SONY PICTURES

As far as comical satire goes, it could be argued that no one does it better than Monty Python. Nothing is sacred or beyond the scope of their intellectual buffoonery… except perhaps the very life of Christ.


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Categories: C.S. Lewis, Monty Python, Satire, Jesus, Christianity, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Books, College, Culture, Malcolm Muggeridge, Movies
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This is a statement many of us have leaned on when trying to describe a culture of uncritical acceptance of ideology in some group or movement usually focused on the charismatic leadership of a single figurehead, a cult.

Those people are drinking the Kool-Aid…

I think I may have even looked up the origins of this colloquial phrase a few years back, but it was not until I watched this PBS documentary on Jim Jones and the Jonestown mass suicide that I realized what a grave tragedy I was flippantly recalling when I uttered this snarky put-down in reference to Steve Jobs and Apple consumers.

• 
  Jonestown - The Life & Death of Peoples Temple
  Director: Stanley Nelson

Going down in infamy as the greatest loss of American lives (915) in a single day next to only the attacks of September 11th; I see why atheists contend for the end of religion being a good step towards a more reasonable and safe society.

Was Christianity or Jim Jones at fault for nearly 1000 people drinking a fatal cyanide laced kool-aid mixture?


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Categories: Cults, Progressivism, Orthodoxy, Christianity, Bible Study, Faith, Movies
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… the tendency of conservatism to produce individuals who swing violently from one extreme to another.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” runs the familiar maxim, and this pitfall is its religious equivalent…

…Yesterday’s conservative fundamentalist suddenly becomes the Pied Piper for today’s Emergent doubters, yesterday’s Bible College student the leading skeptic about the Bible’s authority, yesterday’s student Christan group leader today’s radical theological revisionist, yesterday’s advocate of “theistic proofs” today’s enthusiast for encounter groups, yesterday’s son of a Christan leader, today’s sharpest tongued attacker of his father’s faith–and so on. Modern conservatives are oscillation-prone–and having swung from one side to the other, the rest of his or her life is spent in a series of compulsive attempts to purge a new-found liberal soul of its immature conservative past.

~Os Guinness, The Last Christian on Earth

• 
  The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy’s Plot to Undermine the Church
  Author: Os Guinness

It’s hard to swallow at first. Conservative, doesn’t that mean strong and sturdy and forever unchanging? Are not conservatives the defacto bulwarks of society? Well, conservationists may be, but conservatives by history and personal experience do seem to live out this vicious cycle.


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Categories: Conservatism, Christianity, Art, Books
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Naturally, some leaders of the Christan right huffed indignantly as being described as “useful idiots,” while many outside the movement smirked in agreement. But equally naturally, no one did anything, and the protest was ignored. As these brave Evangelicals can all see now, the Christian right failed to achieve almost all its stated goals. More importantly, it so abandoned the traditional Christian maxim of “doing the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way” that it came to contradict the Adversary’s ways altogether. Instead of His superhuman command to “love your enemies,” “turn the other cheek,” and “do good to those who hate you,” the Christian right became so politicized that it was carried away and became all-too-human, demonizing their foes with relish and indulging in fear-mongering with abandon.

~Os Guinness as an “Anti-God Spirit of the Age Espionage Agent”, The Last Christan on Earth

• 
  The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy’s Plot to Undermine the Church
  Author: Os Guinness

I still remember quite vividly a centering conversation I had with my old youth pastor about 15 or 16 years ago concerning politics. We were talking though the news of the day and I was confidently reciting back some of the imperious yet witty accusations of Mr. Limbaugh as he radio lobbed volley after volley of contentious bombs from right to left. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I sure admired his confidence and I was enjoying experimenting with methods of appropriating this confidence in a moment of political discussion.

At some point in the conversation, my youth pastor said something to the effect of, “I don’t listen to that guy very much…”

To which I replied, “Ya, but when you do… don’t you think his arguments are right?!”…

“Yes, I do, and I suppose that is why I don’t listen to him.”

Ok, now I was in a knot. Not only did this not make sense to me, I was entering an unanticipated riff in my Christian world that would pit the obvious righteousness of Rush against a strange ambivalence on behalf of my beloved youth pastor. So I continued to press him on this and eventually he produced a self defense that sounded something like this…

I don’t listen to Rush, because often times I do end up agreeing with him, he gets me all riled up, and then there is nothing for me to do about it. I am simply mad with no positive outlet, what good is that?

In that moment, I do believe he won me over… but the temptation to politicize my life, either right or left, is always there. Recent reading has resurfaced this topic and warning.

The other error, made by both the religious left and the religious right in recent decades, is to politicize faith, using faith to express essentially political points that have lost touch with biblical truth. That way faith loses its independence, the Church becomes ‘the regime at prayer,’ Christians become ‘useful idiots’ for one party or another, and the Cristian faith becomes an ideology in its purest form. Christian beliefs are used as weapons for political interest.

~Os Guinness, The Last Christian on Earth

• 
  The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy’s Plot to Undermine the Church
  Author: Os Guinness

Or as another Christian sociologist (I think he would hate that title, but I do think it is apt) puts it…

The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call “Christianity And”. You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing.

~C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

• 
  The Screwtape Letters
  Author: C. S. Lewis

Categories: Politics, Admonishment, C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Mentors, Books
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I recently finished up a tour of the history of Christian Theology through an audio lecture series. Dr. Phil Cary walked me through the formation of Christian Theology as it began to find articulation immediately after Pentecost, then debated with the founding patriarchs, into the medieval period, through the protestant reformation, in the midst of modernity, and right up into the current discussion with postmodern theologians.

It was a whirlwind…

At one point in the lecture series, after defining the fundamental essences in practice; of Catholicism, Calvinism, and Lutheran theology he paused to compare and contrast these three ways of faith.

He did so in the most interesting way for me, by a comparison of the types of anxiety each faith tradition creates in the mind and life of the practitioner.

Catholicism was defined by the anxiety produced by the possibility of committing a mortal sin, or being in a state of sin that is essentially out of grace. One never really knows what their status is here and must live with the anxiety and uncertainty of this possibility. Fortunately they have a regular opportunity for confession.

Calvinists, including most modern protestants, are not so much concerned with any particular sin or a state of sin… but rather the reality of them being one of the “elect” according to the foreknowledge of God, and as such rescued from sin.

How do you know if you are one of the “elect”, well in a strange twist of irony… by feeling. If you had a traumatic conversion experience involving a “leap of faith”, then forever more you have that moment to look back on and know you are one of the “elect”. And going forward your good works will be evidence of your authentic faith experience.

But, if you should fall away into a backsliden sinful life… that could be evidence that your conversion experience was not authentic in the first place and you were never actually one of the “elect”, you were never truly “saved” to begin with. So in some sense, a true Calvinist, never knows for sure if their conversion experience was authentic or not, only time will tell… that is their perpetual state of anxiety.

Professor Cary did not make this next connection exactly, but I would also place experiential evidences of the Holy Spirit or miraculous moments into this category. If you have a supernatural confirmation of your faith, then you can forever look back on that with confidence… or with suspicion, “was it in my imagination?”, “was it group hysteria?”, “did I give into some sort of emotional trick?”, “is the evidence really real?”.

This one is more for all those intellectual quasi atheists / agnostics, waiting for the road on Damascus experience to bowl them over. That is more my bag…

And then the Lutherans, perhaps the most pitiful of them all. All sins are mortal sins, and you should always be in a state of seeking forgiveness on your knees before a bloody cross of redemption. Don’t worry about the eventual possibility of backsliding, you are most certainly in a state of backsliding even now and if you had any clue of your actual wretchedness you would be begging for forgiveness even now. The anxiety of the non-existent state of grace, yet there always is grace to be had if you ask for it.

In some ways, I identify with all three of these traditions. At any given moment, I may be living out the anxiety of one, both, or all three… and it is very anxious indeed. And perhaps it is to this “livability” of Christianity that the current crop of postmodern theologians / philosophers wish to help us out with. Often times, this seems to dip into a more modern mythologizing and psychologizing of faith than an experiential freedom, and just comes up lacking for me…

I am encouraged however, to find an existentially satisfying response to all three of these sources of anxiety in the Great Grandfathers of the Christian faith. Most recently that has come to me in the form of George MacDonald and his pithy paragraphs of wisdom, instruction, and observation. These three excerpts seem to address the issues of anxiety presented by all three of the aforementioned faith traditions with solvency and practicality. More often than not, I just trust his advice…

Do you ask, “What is faith in Him?” I answer, The leaving of your way, your objects, your self, and the taking of His and Him; the leaving of your trust in men, in money, in opinion, in character, in atonement itself, and doing as He tells you. I can find no words strong enough to serve for the weight of this obedience.

~George MacDonald, Faith

Instead of so knowing Christ that they have Him in them saving them, they lie wasting themselves in soul-sickening self-examination as to whether they are believers, whether they are truly sorry for their sins–the way to madness of the brain, and despair of the heart.

~George MacDonald, The Misguided

Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because He said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.

~George MacDonald, The Way

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

For MacDonald, the obvious duties of our lives are inseparable from our relationship with the Father, Christ, and the Holy Spirit… there is nothing to figure out, just obey.

Categories: Christianity, Anxiety, George MacDonald, Theology
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This commandment, that we should love our enemies and forgo revenge, will grow even more urgent in the holy struggle which lies before us and in which we partly have already been engaged for years. In it love and hate engage in mortal combat. It is the urgent duty of every Christian soul to prepare itself for it. The time is coming when the confession of the living God will incur not only the hatred and the fury of the world, for on the whole it has come to that already, but complete ostracism from “human society” as they call it. The Christians will be hounded from place to place, subjected to physical assault, maltreatment, and death of every kind. We are approaching an age of widespread persecution. therein lies the true significance of all the movement and conflicts of our age. Our adversaries seek to root out the Christian Church and the Christian faith because they cannot live side by side with us, because they see in every word we utter and every deed we do, even when they are not specifically directed against them, a condemnation of their own words and deeds. They are not far wrong.

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom

• 
  A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer was a man who lived on the front lines of his theology. At first glance, the sentiments he expresses here do not seem much different than what I appreciate as the common anxiety of modern Christian evangelicals.

The world does not understand us, no… much more… they hate us and they don’t even know why exactly, its diabolical and unreasonable.

Isn’t this just a hopeless pessimism? Can’t progress be made? Are there not good people everywhere for whom Christians can team up with and do good?

Well, yes there are, they are everywhere… and they are still being persecuted, tortured, and killed everywhere in the world.

Bonhoeffer goes on in page after page of his writings to describe his coming to terms with the demand of being crucified along with Christ as an essential part of his Christian life… there would be no mild mannered progressive movement that could circumvent the cross in his time. He witnessed his own country turn into the hideous Nazi regime and grow into a full fledged systematic murder machine. Sobriety was his to behold, but nihilism was never his comfort.

We do not reciprocate… hatred and contention, although (our enemies) would like it better if we did, and so sink to their own level. And how is the battle to be fought? Soon the time will come when we shall pray, not as isolated individuals, but as a corporate body, a congregation, a church: we shall pray in multitudes (albeit relatively small multitudes) and among the thousands and thousands of apostates we shall loudly praise and confess the Lord who was crucified and is risen and shall come again. And what prayer, what confession, what hymn of praise will it be? It will be the prayer of earnest love for these very children of perdition who stand around and gaze at us with eyes aflame with hatred, and who have perhaps already raised their hands to kill us. It will be prayer for the peace of these erring, devastated, and bewildered souls, a prayer which will penetrate to the depths of their souls and rend their hearts more grievously than anything they can do to us. Yes, the Church which is really waiting for its Lord, and which discerns the signs of the times of decision, must fling itself with its utmost power and with the panoply of its holy life into this prayer of love.

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, A Testament to Freedom

• 
  A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I have a couple of close friends who were living in New York during the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Each of them recounted moments of awareness in the immediate aftermath of the attacks that were filled with grief, remorse, and something of an enlarged empathy that could even accommodate the attackers.

Then they described the political call to “return to life as normal”, to “start buying and selling again”, and the promise that this act would not go unanswered… this meant war.

That’s when the accounts become distracted, muddled, and conflicted… the consolation of political leaders just seemed to come up lacking with an untimely constriction of mourning.

Perhaps Bonhoeffer can still speak to us something honest; not of mere consolation, but of brutal hope.

Categories: War, Enemies, Christianity, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Books
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About five years ago now I read a little book that really got me going. As I went along for the ride with Brian McLaren’s fictional retelling of his own faith journey in “A New Kind of Christian”, I found myself viscerally compelled to agree with his sentiments at the close of pretty much every chapter. This guy was a pastor of the traditional western Christian faith for whom the answers and approach regarding how and why we should live out the Christian faith were simply failing him in every conceivable way.

In the introductory forward of the book McLaren compared this flirting with letting go of faith as being tantamount to a contemplation of suicide.

At that time I could only see two alternatives: (1) continue practicing and promoting a version of Christianity that I had deepening reservations about or (2) leave Christian ministry, and perhaps the Christian path, altogether. There was a third alternative that I hadn’t yet considered: learn to be a Christian in a new way. That is the subject of this book. beginning that August day, when the gloom inside my heart was so dark and the sunshine around me was so blazing and stark, a process of reevaluation was somehow set into motion. Perhaps I was like a person who spends a few days feeling suicidal and then decides, “If I could seriously ponder ending my life, then I can do anything. I can change anything in my life. So instead of ending my life altogether, I’ll end my life as I’ve been living it and start a new kind of life. I can now see a third alternative to status quo and suicide.”

~Brian McLaren; A New Kind of Christian, Introduction

• 
  A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey
  Author: Brian D. McLaren

And five years or so later I still find myself describing this time of soul searching in my life where I too began to reevaluate everything I had been given from my Christian heritage and ask all the questions that had been lingering just around the corners of my tidy Baptist up bringing.

I was not alone… and I did not intend to go alone, I am not sure what the final count was… but I think I may have bought close to a hundred copies of this book and gave it out to every Christian friend I had (That’s what you get for attending a modern Mega-Church).

Some folks were ready for the discussion, others not so concerned, and still others were very concerned with squashing the bold heresy wrapped up in the book’s tacit post modern assumptions concerning truth and the nature of the knowledge of God.

It is a conversation that I do not seem to be able to escape either on my own, in my church, or even my past.

In a seemingly providential confluence, I began attending a new Church community that embraced this conversation, and I had the wry pleasure of watching my fundamentalist Christian college of yesteryear undergo a complete cou de tau of the traditionalist faculty in the midst of the now infamous “Truth and Certainty” debacle. Even now it remains an amazing spectacle of tactics and counter tactic espionage in the name of preserving or redefining the essence of Christian truth claims.

• The accusations, www.cedarvillesituation.com
• The Response, www.cedarville.edu/academics/avp/truth/
• The Investigation, www.aaup.org/AAUP/protect/academicfreedom/investrep/2009/cedarville.htm

And now, Mr. McLaren is releasing a new book that seems to be poised as more of a complete treatise on the current subject matter rather than his usual sprawling dialogues and random musings… I have yet to read it… but read it I will…

• 
  A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith
  Author: Brian D. Mclaren

Many of the Ideas that were once revolutionary to me will now be old hat, but I am sure he will stir up some new questions that will send me off reading and discussing all over again. I must admit that I like Brian… I like his candor and his posture… I think he has developed a rather thick skin for criticism and most all of the conservative flaming arrows hurled his way seem to transform into harmless drops of rain as they encounter his conversational rain coat of honesty and ecumenical charity.

• A recent NPR story…

A posture of honesty and communally detached personal convictions (whether modern or post modern or super modern) can quickly end you in a mess of ideas that really amount to a false reality of your own invention. I do believe I was guilty of this kind of post modern licensure the first time around. Slow conversations with distant mentors like Mr. Ken Myers and the careful scholarship of true theologians like N.T. Wright have helped to push my eagerness back in line with a more responsible heritage of Christian conversation. Not to mention the very real presence of faithful mentors who are willing to come patiently alongside me and show me the way.

I do believe that Christianity is in the midst of a new flowering, and the debate may be hot… but when you look at our history, it has certainly been carried out with much less charity in centuries past. There was a time in history when the ancient relatives of my Baptist brothers, the Anabaptists, where burned at the stake for disagreeing with the views of infant baptism by the state church.

Is it possible that the Church has truly become more sanctified in its humility and appreciation of history?

Unjustly firing a tenured professor has to be better than being burned at the stake.

Thank you Jesus for sending the Holy Spirit and giving us such fine dialectic teachers as Socrates, help us not to quench the former or kill the latter.

Categories: Scripture, Christianity, Cedarville, Post Modern, Books, Theology
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What happens when one strand of reality is singled out and stretched too far is hardly surprising. Wider reality springs back and has the last laugh. Pressed too far, for example, reason becomes rationalism and rebounds into mysticism; or freedom becomes anarchy and rebounds into authoritarianism. We thus become masters of irony and connoisseurs of the art of the side effect, the unintended consequence and the unknown aftermath. Reality rebounds, and things turn out the opposite of what they seem and what people expect. Strength becomes weakness; love becomes pornography; pleasure becomes boredom; and so on.

We have had classic successes with this tactic in the lives of individuals. You might call it the “Samson Syndrome”, because you see the cycle so clearly in the namesake. Trace the line from Samson’s early promise, to his extraordinary exploits, to his careless delinquency and ultimate downfall. Samson could become prodigal only because his strength was prodigious. When his gifts become his master, they were the key to his undoing. Et voila, strength turned to weakness. “All men that are ruined,” said Edmund Burke, “are ruined on the side of thier natural propensities.”

~Os Guinness, The Last Christian on Earth

• 
  The Last Christian on Earth: Uncover the Enemy’s Plot to Undermine the Church
  Author: Os Guinness

Categories: Christianity, Culture, Church, Books
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Sure, Christians (and perhaps especially evangelicals… those vocal and rowdy bunch) are often times highlighted in the media for scandals of the typical political and celebrity variety; sex, drugs, power abuse, and embezzlement. But it would seem that evangelical Christians themselves are the harshest critics of the movement’s more subtle yet deeply pernicious sins… like not thinking, feeling, or living.

My youth pastor gave me this book about 15 years ago now, Mark Noll’s “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind”. I am still caught up in the whirlwind of trying to figure out what is this “Christianity” that has been thrust upon me from before I was able to think critically about anything. At that moment, the dawn of my adult life, this book was a sign post of responsibility going forward.

The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind…

By an evangelical “life of the mind” I mean more the effort to think like a Christian–to think within a specifically Christian framework–across the whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political science, literary criticism and imaginative writing, historical inquiry and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science, social theory and the arts. Academic disciplines provide modern categories for the life of the mind, but the point is not simply whether evangelicals can learn how to succeed in the modern academy. The much more important matter is what it means to think like a Christian about the nature and workings of the physical world, the character of human social structures like government and the economy, the meaning of the past, the nature of artistic creation, and the circumstances attending our perception of the world outside ourselves. Failure to exercise the mind for Christ in these areas has become acute in the twentieth century. That failure is the scandal of the evangelical mind.

~Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

• 
  The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
  Author: Mark A. Noll

I have recently caught up again, in bodily conversation, with my youth pastor from yesteryear… it appears that we are still both working out some very old challenges, perhaps we will be doing so until the day we die. Should we go into politics or stay home with the family? Should we go into academia or serve community non-profits.

The balance between thinking and doing is certainly a precarious one. I am reminded of a quote that escapes me now from C.S. Lewis where he suggests that often times the worst response to duty is to write a book (or blog post) about it… that is, we are tempted to simply cogitate on a problem instead of taking the obvious action of work in front of us.

28 Do not say to your neighbor,
“Come back later; I’ll give it tomorrow”—
when you now have it with you.

~Proverbs 3:28

I am tempted by this retreat into the gray tower of critical thinking and I am grateful to the ready challenge of friends and mentors who would call me down and into the fight I would otherwise be satisfied in merely observing from a safe distance. I think MacDonald sums up the call pretty well as follows…

He who does that which he sees, shall understand, he who is set upon understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and speaking foolishness…. It is he that runneth that shall read, and no other. It is not intended by the speaker of the parables that any other should know intellectually what, known but intellectually, would be for his injury–what, grasped, perhaps even appropriated. When the pilgrim of the truth comes on his journey to the region of the parable, he finds its interpretation. It is not a fruit or a jewel to be stored, but a well springing by the wayside.

~George MacDonald, The Way of Understanding #108

• 
  George MacDonald
  Author: C. S. Lewis

So here I am again, I think both of these wise Christian mentors are right and have the very advice I need to heed right now.

I don’t believe it is a conundrum that should end in stagnant ambivalence, but rather the two should dance together and form the shape of your life and mind.

So yes; think, feel, pray, do, live… and repeat…

Categories: Thinking, Christianity, Challenges, Criticisms
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