Archives for September 2014

One of the weird features of modern education is the marginalization of the lecture. I partially understand why. As a teacher, I find it frustrating to spend a great deal of time developing a lecture that would be interesting to a group of adults who came to see the lecture on purpose only to find high school students feigning interest. Yet, throughout history good lecturing ability has been associated with so many forms of social, institutional, and individual transformation that it is difficult to side with those who say that lectures are oh so passe. What is worse is that some books speak of the lecture as though it were invented by Voldemort or “the great Satan hisself.” While I fully understand and implement Socratic style teaching, active classroom practice, and various other teaching methods, I also appreciate the usefulness of lecturing and doing so well.

Even the most difficult subjects can be lectured about in a way that is simultaneously intellectually rigorous, rhetorically pleasant, and emotionally captivating. For instance, Ramamurti Shankar’s lectures on Electromagnetic Physics are excellent. I’m using them in advance of Physics 2 next semester because everybody tells me that it will be very difficult. So I watch these lectures and take notes. He is very entertaining:

Lecture’s can be done in almost any style and be captivating if the lecturer possesses the traits typically associated with charisma such as warmth, apparent expertise, and presence. If the lecturer is clearly engaged with the topic and the learners (presence) then listening will make sense because the lecture hall has become a group engagement with something outside the minds of those present (physics, history, the Bible, etc). If the lecturer presents the material in such a way that A) many examples and illustrations demonstrate the material’s truthfulness, usefulness, and if possible beauty, B) the lecture itself contains minimal errors of fact or reasoning (apparent expertise), then listening will make sense because the speaker displays superior authority in the matter than those present. If the lecturer enjoys the hearers and wishes their best (warmth), then listening will make sense because the leader in the room only wants to lead the hearers into a state similar to his own.

In this respect a good lecture must always be not merely informative, but argumentative and persuasive. It must be, not only a device for the delivery of facts but a device for shared apprehension of the world from a certain point of view (even if students eventually reject that point of view).

I really think that many pastors could use more deliberate practice with lectures. Many sermons at the end of the day are delivered without any evidence that it is a lecture worth remembering. There is a way to spiritualize this fact by stating something like this: “people remember what you do, not what you say” or “better that people remember Jesus rather than the message (1 Cor 2:1-2).” The problem with this line of thought is that Paul’s letters to the Corinthians for all his critique of rhetoric over substance, were not only remembered but preserved! They were preserved as ways of remembering Jesus. If somebody’s notes from a sermon end up influencing their devotional life in a positive way you’ve done them a service.

Few people are so expert at lecturing that all of their lectures are memorable, but anybody can make it a point to improve one or two of their lectures a week. I know it can be done, I deliver (including sermons) between 7 and 10 lectures of varying lengths a week. Anyhow, I hope that this post can revitalize your desire to lecture well.

Resources:

Itunes University has mountains of excellent classes on many subjects that could teach you to lecture well.

Carnegie’s books on public speaking really are good. Read one of them.

Aristotle’s On Rhetoric is something I make use of often.

The Art of Manliness has an excellent series on rhetoric.

 

George Lakoff writes about pretty much everything because he writes about the fundamentally metaphorical nature of human thought. I’ve read two of his books and when I was in the local university library today I noticed three of his other books:

1. Moral politics : how liberals and conservatives think

2. Philosophy in the flesh : the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought

3. Where mathematics comes from : how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being

These books, from the brief skimmings I gave them today are very interesting. But his book on politics seems confusing. I jumped to the end and read the last chapters prior to my physics class today because I know about Lakoff’s tendency to rehash old material at the beginnings of books. Anyhow, what he does is he shows the difference between conservatives and liberals by highlighting what he considers to be the controlling metaphor for their politics.

1. Liberals have a nurturing parent concept of government.
2. Conservatives have a strict father concept of government.

I don’t mean to do a review or anything like that. I just mean to point out how this seems to poison the well against conservatives. For instance, in chapter 22, Lakoff notes that there are ten assumptions that guide the “Strict Father Model” that he sees in conservative discourse and action. Here they are:

1. There is a universal, absolute, strict set of rules specifying what is right and what is wrong for all times, all cultures, and all stages of human development.
2. Each such rule has a fixed, clear, unequivocal, directly interpretable meaning which does not vary.
3. Each moral rule must be literal, and hence must make use of only literal concepts.
4. Each human being has access to the fixed, clear, unequivocal meaning of moral rules.
5. Each rule is general, in that it applies not just to specific people or actions but to whole categories of people and actions.
6. The categories mentioned in each rule must have fixed definitions of precise boundaries, set for all time and the same in all cultures.
7. All human beings must be able to understand such rules in order to have the free will to follow them or not.
8. These rules must be able to be communicated perfectly, from the legitimate authority responsible for enforcement to the person under the obligation to follow them. There must be no variation in  meaning between what is said and what is understood.
9. People do things they don’t want to do in order to get rewards and avoid punishments. This is just human nature and is part of what it means to be “rational.”
10. But, for this to be true, people must be able to understand precisely what constitutes a reward and what constitutes a punishment. There must be no meaning variation concerning what rewards and punishments are.

The problem with this list is that I’m quite conservative in outlook and almost none of these apply to how I think or have come to my conclusions and while those assumptions do match many conservatives that I know, they also match many people who don’t care about politics and they certainly match the assumptions of a giant stack of books I own about feminist theory (written by people who are not conservative at all).

If you ask many of my friends, you would find that I was quite ambivalent about politics and have only recently become interested in it as I’ve studied the history of western civilization in greater depth and spent time learning what it means to excel at both rhetoric and dialectic (because I teach both to high school students). Most of my conclusions aren’t so much default as steps along the way. Even then, as a disciple of Jesus I find being nurturing to others to be centrally important unless you’re trying to protect the weak or vulnerable from the strong.

The list and perhaps the entire book should probably be understood as Lakoff’s attempt to “reframe” the issues related to politics in such a way that not only his particular value set, but the entire constellation of specific positions he holds are seen as radical attempts to nurture people who have been damaged by conservative thinking. Lackoff has written a manifesto wherein he explains how and why to reframe things using rhetorical questions and redefinitions of issues based upon shared values (this is a good rhetorical tool and can indeed be used to find true things as well). His book antedates the manifesto, but the strategy is present.

My guess is that many conservatives, particularly Christians, do not buy into most things on that list. Libertarians often don’t care about any ethics except being left alone. Christians belief that whole chunks of Scripture were inspired precisely to be fulfilled in Jesus and become obsolete as literal moral or national guidance (Hebrews 8:13). Roman Catholic Christians do believe in absolute truth, but they subscribe to Aristotelian virtue ethics as a part of their theological system, so their conclusions allow for pragmatic based ethics because the absolutes are based upon the nature of things and the commands of God are provisional in their system, not absolute.

Anyhow, it was surreal to read his material couched in a sort of pseudoscientific language as he characterized conservatism as so frightening that he has become more liberal than ever (p 336).

Anyhow, despite my conservative leanings, I’m quite somewhere between Anabaptist and disinterested in the “culture war” because I find that many people I talk to on either side refuse to use reason. I know I should care about politics because they largely determine the future, but the most interesting things about the book aren’t so much political as they are deja vu-ish.

1. In my younger years, before I understood things like categorizing people and treating them accordingly (I had no guile or malfeasance then…the world has hurt me so I’m more bitter and vicious than I used to be sadly), I found my college professors to sometimes treat me strangely when topics of dispute would come up in class discussion and I would state my view. But they did treat me like Lakoff recommends. I simply didn’t know the game and would try to cite facts or articulate arguments thinking we were having a discussion. They would “change the frame” and I wouldn’t know how to keep it. I still remember a psychology professor being pretty sure that the view of Christian character in marriage I articulated from the New Testament wasn’t actually in there precisely because it sounded appealing.
2. When I read Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God, many of his arguments seemed familiar. It’s because they were Lakoffian. Campbell does credit Lakoff’s ideas in a footnote on page 990. So that explains that.

Anyhow, moral of the story: This guy will probably help me understand the world better despite my disagreeing with him about everything related to math, philosophy, and politics. I suspect he figured that since those fields use words and he’s an expert in linguistics, that he could redefine all of the things that use words. We’ll see.

In the past, I wrote about Roger Olson’s mistake in interpreting what it means for God to be good. I made the point with classical theism in mind, which is called so because it was held by older theologians. Anyhow, Olson makes this point:

Here’s what I mean—to be specific. What ordinary lay Christian, just reading his or her Bible, without the help of any of the standard conservative evangelical systematic theologies, would ever arrive at the doctrines of divine simplicity, immutability, or impassibility as articulated by those systematic theologians (e.g., “without body, parts or passions” as the Westminster Confession has it)? Without body, okay. But without parts or passions? The average reader of Hosea, for example, gets the image of God as passionate. While “parts” isn’t exactly the best term for the persons of the Trinity, a biblical reader will probably think of God as complex and dynamic being rather than as “simple substance.”

I like to think of myself as a Biblically minded fellow. I really do understand what Olson is getting at here. But the rub comes in when you look at how inconsistent his own methodology is. On his blog he notes his adherence to evolutionary theory. But what ordinary lay Christian, just reading his or her bible, without the help of any of the standard moderate Christian biological arguments, would ever arrive at the doctrines of natural selection, an old earth, or speciation over time as articulated by these biologists?

Now, Olson’s nearly absurd double standard here is not clear evidence that his conclusions are wrong.

I would suspect that the problem lies in the fact that Olson, for whatever reason, feels he understands the biology well enough to accept the biologists at their word. Therefore, he has to reinterpret the Bible. But the problem is that he does not accept certain aspects of older Christian metaphysics. Since he does not take Aristotelian or Platonic philosophers at their word, he must reject certain conclusions that these thinkers find to be necessarily true about God. The problem with this is that Olson, as far as I know, is not a scientist, but he is a humanities professor. He can examine the Aristotelian claims to see if they’re logical (they are). But he cannot really examine the evolutionary claims in the same way. If I knew Olson, I would challenge him to read more on the topic, because I’m finding that Aristotle’s theory of causality makes sense of all cause and effect in ways that more recent theories do not. Because of that, Aristotle’s metaphysical reasonings seems to apply to the biblical God precisely because the Bible claims things about God that Aristotle’s metaphysics reasons toward: God is pan-causal, unchanging, a-temporal, etc.

The deal is that Olson is, perhaps innocently, appealing to simple biblicism when it suits what he is convinced of (Open theism/biblical personalism) and he is allowing a complicated hermeneutic to determine how he reads Scripture when that suits him.

The sum of the matter is that one need not be convinced of evolutionary theory or classical theism to be a disciple of Jesus. One certainly need not even know about either. The question is, in the realm of ideas where evangelism, apologetics, and good academic work must be done where does the logic lead? Of course Christians who read the Bible simply might come up with false conclusions. That’s true with anything. Paul said that as an apostle he only sees dimly. The argument that a simple view of things is best does not match with experience. A simple view of the Bible is adequate because Jesus doesn’t demand that we be right about everything, he demands that we love God, neighbor, and enemy in his name.  

Note: according to Bruce Charlton, evolutionary theory is largely metaphysical as well.

Also, Edward Feser deals with Olson here.

One of my favorite poets is George Herbert.

One of the most important spiritual disciplines is practicing God’s presence (in the sense of calling God and the things pertaining to him to mind throughout the day).

Thus, one of my greatest delights is this poem:

The Elixir

TEach me, my God and King,
        In all things thee to see,
And what I do in any thing,
        To do it as for thee:

        Not rudely, as a beast,
        To runne into an action;
But still to make thee prepossest,
        And give it his perfection.

        A man that looks on glasse,
        On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
        And then the heav’n espie.

        All may of thee partake:
        Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture (for thy sake)
        Will not grow bright and clean.

        A servant with this clause
        Makes drudgerie divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
        Makes that and th’ action fine.

        This is the famous stone
        That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
        Cannot for lesse be told.

 The power of this particular poem is that it brings Christian mysticism (of the good kind, not some of the weird stuff) to everybody by describing it in brief, easy to remember instructions. It is, in this respect is wonderful commentary on Paul’s instructions concerning being mindful of the Spirit (Romans 8:1-7). The only problem with the poem is that it is not very Christ centered. This makes sense though, because in Herbert’s day, concepts of God were thoroughly Christ oriented and Trinitarian. I would suspect that today this poem might need to be appended with advice such as: when you call God to mind as you work, do so as God is revealed in the gospel stories about Jesus.  

In a previous post I proposed the gospel message (or the kerygmatic traditions) as the center of New Testament theology, not as a theme but as the historical reality behind the rhetoric and theological reasoning found in our New Testament. Now I propose a helpful distinction within the New Testament itself:

Gospel Saying vs Gospel Describing

In our New Testaments we have the four gospels, the sermons in Acts, and the brief allusions to the gospel’s actual content in Paul’s letters. But we also have sections wherein the gospel is not referred to by name, but is nevertheless the referent.

1. The word of life (Philippians 2:16 and 1 John 1:1)
2. The word of God (Acts 6:2, 1 Thessalonians 4:13, and Hebrews 4:12
3. Treasure in Earthen Vessels (2 Corinthians 4:7)
4. The gospel of the glory of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4)
5. The gospel of salvation (Ephesians 1:13)
6. The message of God having no darkness in him at all (1 John 1:1-5)
7. The message that God wants us to love one another (1 John 3:11)

These descriptions of the message of the apostles are very important because they show us what the gospel is like, what the gospel entails, what the gospel means, and what the gospel includes. But these phrases are more like descriptions of a a favorite song or novel. They are not the novel, but they may be important for understanding the novel. If I say, “‘A Study in Scarlet’ by Conan Doyle is an important introduction to the most compelling fictional friendship of all time,” I have given you important information about the book, but that is not the book. What I have said is thematically significant, but it is not even the main plot line. So, when the gospel is called “the word of life,” we might be tempted to think, “Ah, the content of gospel is that God gives us significance, saves us from death, and teaches us how to live.” When in reality, what that phrase means is that, “The message about the Jesus that we preach is the message that God uses to give you significance, save you from death, and teach you how to live.” The gospel narrative/history can be told, described, and applied with various emphases, but these emphases are not the same as the message. For instance, telling about how God is good the maximal sense (1John 1:5) is very important, but neglecting to show how that fact is demonstrated by the Jesus story (which John goes on to do) is not quite the same as saying the gospel.

Why point this out? Because in modern evangelical though we often mistake trees for the forest or the other way around.

We might reason:

1. The gospel is the gospel of our salvation, I’m pretty sure that’s what happens when Jesus dies, so that’s the part that’s the gospel.
2. The gospel is the word of life. Jesus preaches about life in the Sermon on the Mount, that should be the main part I preach about.
3. John the Baptist preached about the Holy Spirit when he preached the gospel, therefore when I preach about the Spirit, I’m preaching the gospel.
4. Jesus said that his good news was about freedom for the captives, therefore when I preach about political causes, I am proclaiming the gospel.
5. The gospel message fulfills the Old Testament, therefore I am discharging my evangelical duties when I talk about prophecy.
6. The gospel is contrary to certain philosophies, therefore when I refute them, I am doing none other than preaching the gospel.
7. The gospel is about eternal life, so when I tell people that if they want to go to heaven instead of hell, they can, I am preaching the gospel.

All of these descriptions are caricatured except maybe for the first one. But it seems to me that the whole gospel can be proclaimed, explained, and applied from any of the vantage points used in the New Testament and perhaps from many vantage points used in church history. But let it be remembered that gospel descriptions are lenses, they are not the thing itself.

 

One gets the impression in the vigor of youth, that growing up is a restless evil and filled with meaningless trivialities. And while certain versions of growing up like growing weak-willed, being obsessed with sports, or having an unhappy marriage really are silly and should be avoided, other parts really aren’t all that bad. It’s almost as if, in the absence of certain evils that destroy the beauty of life for many around the world, that growing up is wonderful.

Ben Meyers posted about apocalyptic thought and creation a few days ago, which in a strange coincidence I had been thinking and writing about myself (the few paragraphs of scratch I have produced share only one or two lines of thought with his own). But one of his points was that certain forms of genuine progress can be made in the world through institutions that exist in the world. Ben’s point here is trivially true if you haven’t been to grad school for theology. And what’s hilarious is that non-theology graduate students also believe change can come into the world, but they often believe that it can come only through institutions and especially through the institutions that they love the most.

Anyway, I don’t think Ben means permanent progress or even progress as equivalent with God’s kingdom. Over all, I agree with him. For instance, by helping a group of kids learn to read you have made progress in the world. This does not mean that evils far worse than the good you assisted in do not happen. It also does not mean that your motives included evil and that you never abused your power as a teacher. It means that people who could not do a good thing (read), now can do that good thing and if they were taught to read at a church or a school, then good occurred through the institution.

I’m as pessimistic about human nature as anybody. I have a natural tendency to be misanthropic and my belief in total depravity gives me several reasons to hold no hope for anybody. But, there are not only humanistic but theological reasons for thinking that genuine good can be done in the world through institutions and for people. Ben has realized that.

What’s hilarious though is that he has received several critiques of his motivations. I suppose its because he teaches in the super-duper influential field of theology and as theology professor and has so much authority and power to protect. Ben was essentially criticized because he had become friendly with institutions because institutions help ensure the future for children and though fallen are a part of the created order. Predictably, his critics think, “He is like totally the man, dude.” While I do believe that the context of others can assist one in interpreting said others’ motivations, it is too difficult to do other the internet. Seeking to divine the motivations of others is fun, but I’m not Father Brown and I don’t work on Baker Street.

So I just want to note that when you leave grad school, become a real pastor, build things with your hands, see people overcome their addictions, write computer programs, help hungry people find food and work, all the while still believing Romans 5-8, seeing the horrors on the news, and burying the young, seeing old friends leave the faith, and dealing with people who won’t make simple decisions to solve a problem they’ve had for decades, etc.  You notice some things and one of them is that being a citizen of God’s kingdom can happen in the very human world of institutions like your job or the church. Yes, institutions are fallen and many (all?) are opposed to God in various ways, but Jesus doesn’t tell everybody to literally sell everything and follow him geographically.* Many people who are his disciples by self-identification (they want to go with him), he leave in their towns.  Neither then do the apostles ask everybody to follow them about. They, instead, instruct them in being the church where they converted and some of them become a part of the traveling circus of ancient Christian mission work. My wife wrote about the very issues Ben deals with, but without the Marxist over-tones, because the same anti-creational rhetoric is used in college ministries in the United States: don’t bother with studying, getting enough sleep, or your personal future, your finances, or the well-being of civilization, proverbs and Genesis 1 are for total noobs!

My concluding thoughts:

1. It’s okay to grow up. Most of Jesus’ disciples were grown-ups.
2. Jesus loved children and grown-ups can make children.
3. Apocalyptic thought does affirm creation precisely by promising that the restless evils therein are not features but defects. Thus, it always comes with a call to some sort of transforming life. The apocalyptic of sin and powers being ineffective against God’s grace in Romans 5-8, still concludes with the ethical norms of Romans 12-15.
4. Experiencing the evils of the world, while still doing good and doing good work is perhaps the precise point of creation-affirming apocalyptic in Scripture, like Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles.

 

*In the following passage of Scripture we see Peter tell Jesus, “We’ve left everything to follow you.” This isn’t true on a literal level in the story. We know Peter still had possessions, he went right back to being a fisherman after the crucifixion. Also, after he is named as a disciple in Mark, he still has a house. Jesus does not chastise him for having a house. The point being that Jesus does, and he can do this, ask different things of different people in the gospels. So the part that is addressed to us is what must be discerned. It is also important to note that the very human pleasures of family and property are precisely what Jesus and the gospel writers assume will lure people into following Jesus.

Mat 19:27-30  Then Peter said in reply, “See, we have left everything and followed you. What then will we have?”  (28)  Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. (29)  And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. (30)  But many who are first will be last, and the last first.