Geoff's Miscellany

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Thoughts

Things I used to Believe

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This article has some personal information. Not just in the sense of observations I’ve made, but in the sense of information about myself. For instance, when I wrote about quitting Calvinism, it was about me, but it was mostly about evidence that made a particular view untenable for me. Anyhow:

  1.  I used to believe that people can change or be influenced positively.
    I almost gave up on this idea. A particular piece of counter evidence came to me in thought experiment in a book by Nassim Taleb’s book, The Black Swan: The Impact of Highly Improbably Fragility. On pages 105-106 he gives an interesting scenario. I’ll summarize it. Imagine a group of rats which I expose to increasingly higher dosages of dangerous radiation. Over time rats die. By the end, I have the strongest rats left. I then advertise that I found a method for producing the strongest rats. It hit me that as an educator, any school system that carries students to graduation, also had a series of fail safes (radiation dosages) that kept struggling students from making it along. Anything, it seems, that we should advertise as our own doing can be explained away as the result of poor students failing out, making grades too low to get into college, etc. Do students succeed because of good teacher or do good teachers look good because certain students who would have succeeded went through their class rooms? IQ scores are not static, but unless a student can be motivated to take ownership of active learning, IQ often does stay the same throughout traditional education. Thus, as math classes get harder and reasoning gets more abstract, larger class sizes do less and less for those of average or below intelligence. This led me to think of churches. Do some churches seem to “help people change” because they only attract people who have their act together already?  If a church is legalistic enough or full of enough people who are ‘with it’ then only people who like legalism or who are already ‘with it’ will stick with the program and thus it appears that discipleship has happened. This is sad because people may just be there for similarity of affinity. So on the level of thought experiment (which is what Galileo did, by the way), there is good reason to be skeptical of the efficacy of institutions meant to help people change. Plus, there are good reasons (on the surface of things) to be determinists based upon Scripture itself (Romans 9:6-33)
    But:
    • Arthur Whimbey demonstrated that in certain cases young people under appropriate guidance could improve their abstract reasoning and thus their IQ.
    • Roy Baumeister has demonstrated that people who believe in free will are more likely to overcome addictions, less likely to give up in challenging circumstances, and more likely to try harder at work.
    • Eric Jensen has shown how neuroplasticity is directly relevant to teaching in all subjects.
    • Rodney Stark has demonstrated that Christianity lead to numerous ethical, economic, and scientific reforms in Western Civilization upon which we still rely today. The development, in particular, of the scientific method relies upon the rigorous application of Aristotelian logic that was developed during the Scholastic era, whereas Plato thought that math and geometry were so wonderful precisely because they took logic beyond matter to the pure realm of though, Christians applied Aristotle’s logic to, what they presupposed, was an orderly world.
    • Jeremiah teaches this:
      “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do. Then the word of the LORD came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the LORD. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it. Now, therefore, say to the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: ‘Thus says the LORD, Behold, I am shaping disaster against you and devising a plan against you. Return, every one from his evil way, and amend your ways and your deeds.’ “But they say, ‘That is in vain! We will follow our own plans, and will every one act according to the stubbornness of his evil heart.’
      (Jer 18:2-12)
      Even for God (if you take Scripture to have anything useful to say about God), whatever this means for theories of divine predestination, takes it as given that his judgments upon sinners (apparently even whole nations) can change should those people change their behaviour. The very idea that Jeremiah is trying to combat is in verse 12: the idea that evil people cannot repent and seek God’s mercy. The Lord wants Jeremiah to tell them that they can indeed repent. Thus, nobody is, of necessity, beyond hope. This is the same Jeremiah who elsewhere is asked to stop praying for people because they no longer will be heard, yet the Lord wants Jeremiah to give them opportunity to repent anyway.

    So, I guess I do still think that people can change, but I guess I think it in a different way. In God’s kingdom nothing comes without a cross and self-denial. In taking loving dominion over the earth, nothing comes without effort. Similarly, in personal change there must be self-denial. In helping other people change, there must be effort. There must, one could say, be open revolt against evil and against a false determinism that says, “It has to be this way, I shall just resign myself to my fate and others to their own.” Whatever else Scripture says about God’s ordination of certain events in the cosmos, it also says that Satan is the ‘god of this present age (2 Corinthians 4:4),’ if some evil seems determined or woven into creation it might be because of the previously mentioned reality, not because it is ‘supposed to be this way…therefore there is no use trying to change it.’ So, people can change, things can get better, but only in the context of open revolt against evil. Besides, people make things worse all the time and lots of things are better than they used to be (though admittedly many things are more brutal and terrible than we once thought possible).

  2. I used to believe I was smart enough to get past a system of credentialism.
    I really thought that I could find a way to get certain things to work out in my academic and career goals without going through proper channels. If only it were the 1700s (when I was in junior high we learned about the ‘phlogiston’ theory of combustion and I refuted it based on my knowledge of the combustibility of metals which gain mass through oxidation…I’d have been a pro-chemist). Due to despair about certain mishaps that made getting into my original undergraduate program very difficult, I decided to get my undergraduate degree in humanities. I do not resent the things I learned, nor the fine people who taught me in that department. But I was convinced that I’d find a way through hard work or IQ points to get into a doctoral program in the future. It does work sometimes. For instance, I was told I needed remedial math classes when I tried to take a Calculus class recently. I told her my GRE scores and promised her I’d find a way to learn the material quickly and make an ‘A.’ That kind of trick does not work often though.Turns out that cleverness is only like 5% of things (I did work hard for my Master’s degree, but ultimately the courses on my transcript just weren’t the kind that certain folks expected me to have). If I were 25, I’d just move wherever I needed to move, live at a subsistence level, and take some classes to fix the problem. As it stands, the sobering realities that would face me in the future with any form of student debt and a PhD in the humanities are something I couldn’t justify rationally. Anyhow, to solve this problem I have come up with several solutions:
    1. Get an engineering degree.
      My GRE score, despite not having taken a math class for nearly 10 years was above the average for top 10 graduate programs in engineering. My verbal was even higher, though not by much. My scores weren’t perfect, but I took the test on an extended break from work to avoid needing to use a whole personal day. If I can do SAT math at the level of an engineering graduate applicant (the Calculus class I took last summer just to see if I could handle it: A+), then I should be able to get a B.S. in it no problem.
    2. Get A+ certified.
      Seems easy enough. I can use that to pay for said engineering degree. No problemo (except for all of the studying).
    3. Try as hard as I can to get published in mathematics/geophysics/engineering while I am working on my degree.
      A friend has offered to help with this already. If it can’t work out, I’ll just come up with my own idea.
    4. But what about Greek/Hebrew?
      I’ve kept up with Greek on a very high level while being a full time math teacher. And my Hebrew is not so good. Who knows how I can deal with this problem in the future?
  3. I used to believe that Thomas Aquinas was not worth reading
    I’ve been reading the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologica. A Roman Catholic I will not become, but a hater on scholastic theology I will never be again. Aquinas was wrong about a lot, but he was rigorous, Aristotelian, attempted to be Biblical and often nailed it, and he was clear. It is a silly prejudice and disservice that writers like St. Thomas, Richard Baxter, and Maximus the Confessor are not read more often. I’d take any of those three plus some Calvin, Descartes, and Brunner over most of the recent systematic theologians I’ve read (I’m not saying that those who deal with such contemporary issues as do Alan Padgett, Dave Black, Rebecca Groothius, David Bentley Hart, Martha Dawn, C.S. Lewis, Greg Boyd, Tom Wright, Paul Helm, or Michael Horton are never worth reading). Anyhow, read yourself some Aquinas, or at least some Edward Feser’s Aquinas.

On Writing About the Gospels

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Mike Bird has noted over his blog that

Start with the Gospels as they are, engage them on the level that we have them, get into their story, figure out what they are doing, admire the artistry and theological sophistication, and then afterwards begin looking at things like genre and sources.  Along similar lines, Chris Keith has recently argued that the historical task is not to cast aside the interpretive layer of the Gospels so that one can thereby scrounge through their underlying traditions in the hope of finding a pure and unadulterated image of Jesus in some textual relic. Rather, as Chris Keith says, “the first step in the critical reconstruction of the past that gave rise to the Gospels should be toward the interpretations of the Gospels in an effort to understand and explain them, not away  from them, as was the case for form criticism and its outgrowth …” (Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, 39-40). Hmm. They got me thinking!

Maybe its my inquisitive nature, but I’m committed to explaining how the Gospels came into being as a prerequisite to accounting for what they are doing and why they were written. Though in many ways, such questions must be approached simultaneously, since one cannot study the sources of the Gospels unless one first knows the Gospels themselves.

I, like Dr. Bird, have a tendency to want to explain everything. So, when I teach about the gospels, I want to explain source theories, genre theories, composition theories, etc. But, this does not do justice to the documents as we have received them. The need to explain all that fun stuff can have two functions:

  1. It is super fun for a professor and a small majority of students who can piece that data together into a coherent whole.
  2. It distracts us from the meaning of the documents (and for Christians, from Jesus himself). 

It is not that these theories are not important, they clearly are. It is just that scholarship has atomized the gospels in so many ways so that we can isolate little proton sized morsels of Jesus data and fuse them into a new, synthetic element of Jesus studies material. The problem with this approach is that we miss the gospels for the traditions (or the forest for the trees). I would submit that to understand the ‘Jesus traditions’ (for those who are not Biblical studies majors, the Jesus traditions are the oral traditions about Jesus that eventually ended up in our New Testaments), we must understand the document which contain them. James Dunn, for instance, has argued that “The only Jesus available to us…is Jesus as he was seen and heard by those who first formulated the traditions we have… (Dunn, New Perspective on Jesus, 31).” Dunn’s argument could go one step further though. The only Jesus traditions we have are those which are not only contained in the gospels, but which are interpreted by the gospels. To know the Jesus traditions, one must know the gospels, thus to do historical Jesus work is to do exegesis of the gospels.

 

Greg Boyd and Roy Baumeister on Free Will

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In Greg Boyd’s book, God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God, Boyd makes a claim that at first seems to be non-testable. He notes that certain viewpoints about the future, the possibilities of life, and of God’s nature tend toward certain mind sets.

Along the same lines, if we believe that even God faces possibilities, we will be more inclined to see possibilities as positive than if we believe God faces an exhaustively settled future…People who believe this will be more inclined to see their lives in terms of possibilities. They will be more inclined to adventurously and passionately envisage and pursue what they could be instead of resigning themselves to what was supposedly settled an eternity ago about what they will be.  Boyd, p 94

I read this and thought, “well, that’s an interesting conjecture…but Popper would say, ‘You need to check that against actual empirical data.’ For instance, John Piper has claimed that not believing in possibilities and free will is equally energizing for doing good, “So, I’m deeply convinced from that, and a thousand other illustrations, these doctrines [that God foreordains all events], really, are meant to be lived and loved in the worst and the best of times.“

But, there is some evidence from the social sciences (which admittedly aren’t  given a great deal of credence amongst certain lovers of the hard science), that believing in free will does lead to higher personal efficacy and disbelief in free will leads to moral resignation. Controlling for certain other factors like a constellation of theological beliefs would be pretty difficult. This is especially so because very few people understand theological nuances, especially in fields wherein the inquirers are more likely to be a-religious. For evidence that a-religious people misunderstand religious beliefs with a predictable amount of misrepresentation and general silliness read anything by Daniel Dennett. Anyhow, here is the conclusion of an analysis of several studies on self-efficacy, placement on a free-will/determinism scale, and various behavior traits:

High belief in free will produces effects that can mostly be described as prosocial, but pro-cultural may be an even more apt characterization. Belief in free will seems to promote a less forgiving and more punitive attitude toward people who break rules and thus undermine the implicit social contract that underlies culture. In general, disbelief in free will is linked to disregard for societal rules and norms, as indicated by increased propensities to engage in aggression, cheating, stealing, and slacking off at work, as well as reduced helpfulness. Belief in moral responsibility appears to be closely linked to belief in free will. Baumeister (2008) has proposed that the concept of free will is linked to a new form of action control that evolved in connection with the human propensity to reinvent social life as culture. That belief in free will supports cultural activities is conducive to that view, though it cannot be taken as proof of any evolutionary argument or of the reality of free will.
A second theme is personal agency. High free will belief has been linked to thinking for oneself instead of mindlessly conforming to the opinions of others, to counterfactual thinking and learning from one’s mistakes, to self-efficacy and (sometimes) internal locus of control, as well as to brain activity associated with initiating movement and to actual behavior. Disbelief in free will appears to foster an attitude of passivity, indifference, and perhaps wide-ranging disregard for moral responsibility.
Baumeister, Roy F., and Lauren E. Brewer. 2012. “Believing versus Disbelieving in Free Will: Correlates and Consequences: Free Will Beliefs.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6 (10): 742–45.
 
Again, controlling for other beliefs is difficult. The article notes that many things can be controlled for and that the results end up the same. But historically, the Puritans built culture, became rebels of the state, and were known for (except for certain lapses in terms of witch hunting which were obviously evil) their morals. Same with Augustinian monks. These are groups that have historically not believed in free-will. But, they did believe in the gospel, that control is hard to test. Anyhow, though I really am convinced that people with loads of false beliefs (including ones about free will) can be transformed into Christ-likeness (which I strive for some days), it does seem that believing in free-will has a practical pay-off that makes it seem to be a true belief. Anyhow, Boyd was right. Believing in possibilities can empower others. The article does note that free-will belief can also correlate with being more judgmental. This is something Christians should guard against.

Evangelical Myth: Be as uneducated as children

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There exist several mythologies in evangelicalism. One of these mythologies is that thinking about the Bible is bad. Bertrand Russel cites this myth and this interpretation of the following scripture as one of the many reasons for rejecting the gospel. One passage of Scripture that is utilized in the myth to follow is Matthew 18:1-5:

In that very moment, the disciples came to Jesus saying, “Then, who is the greatest in the kingdom of the heavens?” Then, calling to himself a child, he stood him in their midst and he said, “Truly am I telling you that unless you turn and become as children, you will not, under any circumstances, enter into the kingdom of the heavens. Therefore, if any should humble himself as this child, this one is the greatest in the kingdom of the heavens.” Also, if any should receive (show hospitality to) one such as this child in my name, this one receives me.” (Matthew 18:1-5 author’s translation)

  1. The Myth
    I wish that I could find an example of this in a book or a sermon, but I have to go with anecdotal evidence. Almost every time I ask somebody what they think Matthew 18:1-5 means, they reply, “To trust God without question, like a child,” “to obey Jesus without thinking about it,” or “to obey everything you read in the Bible.” The problem is that this passage does not actually say any of those three things. Not only that, but the very experience of obedience used (that of a child) is not even realistic to the experience of any parent or teacher. Also, the myth comes up when I challenge Christians to read a commentary (even an old one designed for devotions), read a book by C.S. Lewis, learn a Biblical language (that’s a big ask), or read a simpler writer like A.W. Tozer. The response is usually, “I just want to keep things simple, like Jesus says about accepting things like a child.” Admittedly, Jesus does thank God as one point for revealing the gospel to the simple and childlike over against the wise and scribally gifted of the age (Matthew 11:26-30), but the context there is that Christians should learn from Jesus as the giver of true wisdom. Jesus’ statement there is not an indictment of study and knowledge, but an indictment of the arrogant dismissals of Jesus’ ministry by the scribes whose ideologies and actions he challenged. Nevertheless, the myth persists. Christians shouldn’t read or think about Scripture, their faith, or the world because Jesus wants us to be like children, and children, after all, don’t know stuff, invent things, or do Calculus (neither do most people by the way).
  2. Reasons this interpretation does not make sense:
    1. Children ask questions all the time.
      Really, they love knowing things until being smart feels uncool in junior high. One of the most annoying things that children do is ask too many questions when you’re trying to do or explain something very simple to them. The gospel of Luke even says that Jesus was this way: “And it happened that after three days, they found him in the temple sitting in the midst of the teachers and listening to them and inquiring of them. All who heard were impressed by his intelligence and his responses.” (Luke 2:46-47 author’s translation) Now, we’re often amazed at the questions of children because they’re clever though mistaken in their assumptions and observations. The teachers were impressed for different reasons, but they weren’t surprised that Jesus had questions and responses to their own questions. They were amazed at the quality of his questions and answers. In personal experience, we also know that children do not always or perhaps even often “simply obey” without either disobeying or asking questions about meaning (‘why’) and procedure (‘how’). Christians are, of course, supposed to ask those questions.
    2. Christians are commanded all over the New Testament to think.
      If we, as Christians rightly do, assume some type of unity of thought in the Canon of the New Testament, then these commands to think might be thematic of Christian living at any stage of history. Thus, if one passage of the New Testament seems to radically contradict the rest, then we should question our interpretation of it. Here are four examples of commands to think in the New Testament (randomly drawn from memory):

      1. be transformed by the renewing of your mind (Romans 12:1)
      2. love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30)
      3. be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves (Matthew 10:16)
      4. Think over what I am saying and the Lord will give you understanding. (2 Timothy 2:7)
    3. Recent and ancient commentaries say the passage means something else:
      1. John Nolland (recent)
        Though the words of challenge are directed to the disciples, we are not to understand that they are being treated as not having yet undergone this vital reorientation (they have come in humility to Jesus to have their questions answered); sustaining the new orientation and becoming aware of its implications for life are, however, ongoing challenges.1
      2. St. Jerome (ancient)
        And he said. Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. He does not enjoin on the Apostles the age, but the innocence of infants, which they have by virtue of their years, but to which these might attain by striving; that they should be children in malice, not in understanding. As though He had said, As this child, whom I set before you as a pattern, is not obstinate in anger, when injured does not bear it in mind, has no emotion at the sight of a fair woman, does not think one thing while he speaks another; so ye, unless ye have the like innocence and purity of mind, shall not be able to enter into the kingdom of heaven.2
      3. A.T. Robertson (last 150 years)
        Except ye turn, and become as little children. Jesus applies the object lesson to the disciples. The spirit of envy will prevent entrance into the Kingdom of heaven at all. There will then be no need for dispute about preëminence. It is a sharp rebuke. Jesus does not stop to explain about the true idea of the kingdom. He wishes rather to kill the spirit of jealousy. A child is gentle, humble, trustful. Cf. Mk. 10:15 on a later occasion.3
      4. Cornelius Lapide (somewhat ancient)
        Converted, i.e., from this emulation and ambition of yours, which is at least a venial sin, and therefore an impediment to entrance into the kingdom of Heaven.        As little children: for, speaking generally, they do not envy others, nor covet precedence, but are simple, humble, innocent, and candid. I say generally, for S. Augustine (Confess. l. 1, c. 7) testifies that he had seen an infant at its mother’s breasts growing pale with envy, because he saw his twin brother sucking at the same breasts. 4
      5. Calvin (somewhat ancient)
        Whosoever shall humble himself like this little child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. This is intended to guard us against supposing that we degrade ourselves in any measure by freely surrendering every kind of distinction. And hence we may obtain a short definition of humility. That man is truly humble who neither claims any personal merit in the sight of God, nor proudly despises brethren, or aims at being thought superior to them, but reckons it enough that he is one of the members of Christ, and desires nothing more than that the Head alone should be exalted.5

Robertson includes the idea of trust, but notes that the chief idea is of being a child who is not obsessed with status, but rather is lowly in the social system. One commenter I excluded, Hilary of Poiters, includes the idea of listening to what you’re told but only in the context of learning to love, refusing to hate, showing honor to the lowly, and living a life in imitation of Jesus. So the main idea has been preached for quite some time that becoming as a child means to stop vying for social status. This is exactly what the passage is about if read in context. “Who is the greatest Jesus? You said Peter is the rock, you said we’re all sons at the temple, you took Peter, James, and John alone to pray at the mountain…who do you like the most?” Jesus answered, “You cannot even be my disciple (enter the kingdom), unless you get over that attitude.” Later on, the same question is answered with this phrase, “Whoever wishes to be great must become a servant to all.”

Conclusion

The myth that evangelicals buy into, that intentional ignorance and cognitive cobwebs are good, is in the teeth of several lines of evidence. Jesus wants Christians to be humble. He wants them to avoid making live decisions solely for status, but he does not want his disciples to check their minds at the door, and at home, and at work, and when we read (or don’t read) scripture.

1 Nolland John, “Preface,” in The Gospel of Matthew: a Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Carlisle: W.B. Eerdmans; Paternoster Press, 2005), 732.
2 Saint Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected Out of the Works of the Fathers: St. Matthew, vol. 1 (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841), 622–623.
3 A. T. Robertson, Commentary on the Gospel According to Matthew (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911), 200.
4 Cornelius à Lapide, The Great Commentary of Cornelius à Lapide: S. Matthew’s Gospel—Chaps. 10 to 21, trans. Thomas W. Mossman, vol. 2, Fourth Edition. (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1908), 282.
5 John Calvin and William Pringle, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke, vol. 2 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 333.

Reasons Modern Books on the Christian Life are Bad

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I don’t want to just be a content aggregator. Those things are fairly awful, so I’ll quote some content from this post and add my own. The author wrote about nine reasons that modern books on the Christian life are bad. Here are two of them:

3. Drawing on illustrations that apply to only 0.01% of people won’t help anyone.

4. Do I really need to have sectarianism and branding/marketing ever before me?

Some books that really failed miserably on number 3 included Radical by Dave Platt and The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. The stuff in Radical was decent, but it was a book about how to obey Jesus and hardly did a command of his appear, but there was a one year plan for becoming a radical that no woman with merely a mite could afford. Were his five things good (go to a foreign country for a mission trip, pray for a country daily, start giving regularly to a cause, read the Bible in a year, be involved in a mega church…he called it a multiplying community)? I’ll give him 3. Pray for a country and its missionaries daily is excellent counsel. Read the Bible in a year. I’d say try reading the New Testament every month for a year, then try the Old. Even better, read the Bible with a pastor who will help you understand how to read it. Giving regularly to a cause is plausible if you’re financially stable (not in debt nor buying unhealthy food to survive).

Although I’m not too sure which books are so loaded with sectarianism today, I do note that so much of ancient Christian literature had a very Jesus focused literary flavor that is hard to find in much modern fare. C.S. Lewis noted this in Introduction to On the Incarnation:

In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognise, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild, frightening, Paradisial flavour, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe – Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed “Paganism” of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yet – after all – so unmistakably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life: “An air that kills From yon far country blows.”

 

I would actually say that one of the main reasons they are bad is how much they focus on sensationalism or sentimentalism. Everything is about feelings and experiences in so many Christian books and so little is about settled knowledge with which to interpret and gauge experience that very little head way can be made for many Christians. I used to work at a coffee shop where fighter pilots would talk about running game (picking up easy lays) at a local mega-church’s small group meetings. I later read this church’s small group manual and the whole mission of the small groups in the church is to make sure that participants are on board with the lead pastor’s vision for the church with appropriate relationships and meaningful experiences. There is very little about knowing what Scripture says, knowing what Jesus taught, knowing the Father of Jesus Christ, etc. Such knowledge, and there is such knowledge available to those who seek it, is no longer a priority in evangelical culture today. Our churches and, sadly enough, our experiences are impoverished for it.

Bishop Jeremy Taylor and Time Management

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One of the things in life that is often most difficult for people is using their 24 hours well. I’ve been trying to learn to use my time more wisely. One of my biggest distractions is a sense of listlessness. I just sit and idle because I’m “bored.” Boredom is an interesting topic in itself. Is it a result of being physical bodies, but with minds that are irreducible to physical processes? Is it because we’re in an industrial/technological era, therefore so much of our time is spent on things that do not contribute to our survival? Who knows? The point of this is time management in the context of the kingdom of God. Bishop Jeremy Taylor wrote a book entitled, “Holy Living” in the 1600s. He states that there are three means to be employed in learning to live as a Christian: management of time, practicing God’s presence, and holy intentions (or planning in advance to do good). His 23 rules for care of the time are fairly standard for Christian cases of conscience in his era, but they are exceptional today:

1. In the morning, when you awake, accustom yourself to think first upon God, or something in order to his service; and at night, also let him close thine eyes: and let your sleep be necessary and healthful, not idle and expensive of time beyond the needs and conveniences of nature; and sometimes be curious to see the preparation which the sun makes, when he is coming forth from his chambers of the east.

3. Let all the intervals or void spaces of time be employed in prayers, reading, meditating, works of nature, recreation, charity, friendliness and neighbourhood, and means of spiritual and corporal health; ever remembering so to work in our calling, as not to neglect the work of our high calling; but to begin and end the day with God, with such forms of devotion as shall be proper to our necessities.

17. Set apart some portions of every day for more solemn devotion and religious employment, which be severe in observing: and if variety of employment, or prudent affairs, or civil society, press upon you, yet so order thy rule, that the necessary parts of it be not omitted; and though just occasions may make our prayers shorter, yet let nothing but a violent, sudden, and impatient necessity, make thee, upon any one day, wholly to omit thy morning and evening devotions; which if you be forced to make very short, you may supply and lengthen with ejaculations and short retirements in the day-time, in the midst of your employment or of your company.

 

These are only 3 of his quite helpful counsels. It is especially important to note that he does not recommend going full-desert father and abusing the body by sleep deprivation. He also recommends physical exercise as an appropriate way to spend time. It should be noted though that he does say that spending too much time at sport is like eating a meal of sauces or having clothes made only of fringes. I think he’s right, but most disagree with me. Rule 17 is interesting. He says that no matter ones employment, time should be set aside for prayer. He even recommends being severe on oneself to make it happen. This makes sense. If prayer has any efficacy in the Christian life (or if it doesn’t but Christianity is true and Jesus says to pray), then it is a moral imperative to spend time in daily prayer. The fact is that many of us consider everything else to be more urgent and more important than prayer. Thus, we skip it. I hope that Taylor’s rules have a useful effect upon you.