Category: Culture

The Surprising Path to Truth

“We each have our own truth.”

You’ve probably heard that or something like it for years. We can’t determine absolute right or wrong, it is said, and we certainly shouldn’t try to impose our view on anyone else. Instead, let’s be tolerant of each other, and give everyone space.

Christians often see a major problem with viewpoints like this, sometimes called relativism, because we believe God revealed himself and his truth through Scripture and through Jesus who is “the way, the truth, and the life.” As a result, we can know right from wrong.

If people could just get on board with there being a way to know truth, wouldn’t we all be better off? We certainly don’t need a jumble of different viewpoints confusing the landscape. Right?

This way of thinking, however, may miss something valuable. It’s wrong to say that valuing different opinions means we can never find the truth. Rather, valuing different opinions is one of the best ways to arrive at the truth.

Why is that so? Other people probably know things and can see things we don’t. After all, we are finite. Therefore, humility is a virtue.

In addition, because “the heart is deceitful above all things,” we may fool ourselves into thinking we only have the best intentions in voicing our beliefs. We may unknowingly be acting and speaking from less than honorable motivations. Therefore, once again, humility is a virtue.

As Shirley A. Mullen has written in her much needed book, Claiming the Courageous Middle, “Allowing a measure of legitimacy for diverse opinions is, in the long run, not at all necessarily giving way to relativism. Rather, it can be part of an ultimate commitment to the truth, as society makes space for an appropriate exchange of ideas within the circle of its larger commitments.”*

If we always think we are right, we’ll miss the truth. If we are willing to admit that we may sometimes be wrong (which realistically is not hard to imagine for any of us), we then have a better chance of arriving at what is good, true, and beautiful.

Because iron sharpens iron, because we all need each other, Mullen goes on to say, “We often need the animating challenge of dissent to keep us thinking at our best and to keep pushing us toward new possibilities.”* Rather than trying to suppress contrary opinions, we are better together.

If we can’t know everything and yet care about the truth, we will say, “Relativism, no. Pluralism, yes.”

* Shirley Mullen, Claiming the Courageous Middle (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024), pp. 127, 133.

Image by Mirosław i Joanna Bucholc from Pixabay

All Those Dark Futures

The Hunger Games, The Matrix, Divergent, The Maze Runner, Ready Player One, The Road—these are just a few of the dozens of dystopian movies and novels that have exploded on the scene in the last twenty years.

Books depicting a future that has crumbled into economic, ecological, social, or dictatorial disaster are not entirely new. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the nineteenth century offered several versions. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1936) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), however, set the standard for the genre in the last hundred years.

The question I’ve wondered about, however, is why? Why the massive increase in number and popularity? Why all this pessimism? Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker offers one possible explanation.

The Judeo-Christian world view that history is going somewhere, that it has a purpose, has fallen out of favor. Even an atheistic worldview like Marxism which believes that history is headed somewhere—to a workers’ paradise—has also been discredited.

Such positive outlooks have been replaced by a sense that the universe is random and has no purpose. History, therefore, doesn’t matter. “History is not part of any greater story and therefore has little to teach us,” she writes. In fact, our history is merely a source of shame and oppression.* The past cannot and should not tell us who we are, how to act, or where to go.

We are left completely on our own.

While that might seem hopeful to some, it has had the opposite effect. Without a sense of connection to the past and that history is leading us somewhere, all we have left is despair about the future, which is exactly the story that dystopias tell.

Such stories can and do act as cautionary tales. Possibly the first of this genre, Jonathan Swift’s imaginative Gulliver’s Travels (1726) presented a social and political critique of his day. Even the New Testament’s Book of Revelation offers a very dark picture of the future. But it’s purpose is very different than most contemporary apocalyptic visions which may only provide a glimmer of individual hope in the midst of social despair.

Though Revelation may seem confusing, its “main theme is as clear as day: despite present trouble, God is in control, and he will have the final victory. God wins in the end, even though his people at the present live in a toxic culture and are marginalized and even persecuted…. the author’s purpose is to engender hope in the hearts of his Christian readers so that they will have the resolve to withstand the turbulent present.”**

Yes, dystopias can serve a redeeming purpose. But more is needed—the knowledge that we are not alone in our past, in our present, or in our future.

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*Sarah Irving-Stonebreaker, Priests of History (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2024), 34 and 25-28.

**Tremper Longman III, Revelation Through Old Testament Eyes (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2022), 14.

Nietzsche Is Still Laughing

Deep in the recesses of Charles Taylor’s massive tome A Secular Age on the huge shifts that have transformed the Western world in the last five hundred years, he tells a story–a story of a friend visiting a political gathering:

A Buddhist acquaintance of mine from Thailand briefly visited the German Greens. He confessed to utter bewilderment. He thought he understood the goals of the party: peace between human beings, and a stance of respect and friendship by humans towards nature. But what astonished him was all the anger, the tone of denunciation, of hatred towards the established parties. These people didn’t seem to see that the first step towards their goal would have to involve stilling the anger and aggression in themselves. He couldn’t understand what they were up to.*

Taylor says that the person who would have been most delighted with the irony of this story was Friedrich Nietzsche. The late nineteenth-century German philosopher was famous for his idea of “will to power.” He thought, essentially, that there was no morality, no ethics. These were just thin, convenient covers for seeking to gain what we wanted—to impose our control on others!

Such a story would prove to Nietzsche that he was right, that people don’t operate by ideals, even the most high minded. It’s all a sham, a fake, a charade. Even a political party supposedly built on the foundation of peace with the natural world quickly degenerates into vitriol and violence.

We may think this view is cynical. Nietzsche just thought it was reality.

Like those pursuing progressive ways to make the world better, conservative Christians may also disagree with Nietzsche. But in a day in which some think that Jesus’ admonition to love our enemies is wrong or that it just doesn’t apply when it comes to asserting our political will, Nietzsche is still laughing.

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*Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 698.

Image credit: openart.ai photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche laughing.

A Book That Reorganized My Mind

Why was it almost impossible not to believe in God five hundred years ago, and now it’s almost impossible to believe in God? That is the driving question behind Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.

Having read a half dozen books which tout the significance of and make substantial use of Taylor’s magnum opus, I was convinced I finally needed to take the plunge myself. And indeed Taylor’s work reorganized much of the furniture in my mind—and even forced me to rethink the purpose of the rooms themselves!

One example: In the medieval age, not everyone was expected to live up to a spiritual or civic ideal. But society as a whole did so, encapsulated in the famous formula: “the clergy pray for all, the Lords defend all, the peasants labor for all.” Each group served the other two. As a result, the nobles and the peasants, for example, are not expected to live the same specialized spiritual life as the clergy, who in a sense made up in that department what the rest lacked.

All that changed with the Reformation after which all were expected to grow into the ideal, whether Catholic or Protestant. The aim is for all to flourish as God intended. Having read Taylor, I now see that expectation in every sermon, every book, every political speech, every commercial. We are all children of the Reformation. Whether from a democratic, totalitarian, conservative, liberal, religious, atheist, or consumerist persuasion—all aspire to have all people flourish (each with their own formula for what is “perfect”).

Which leads to an irony of our day: If this is the age of relativism and supposed tolerance, why are so many absolutely committed to their brand of Reform even to the point of anger and violence (witness the French Revolution, the tens of millions killed by idealist Communist and fascist regimes, and similar justifications for force and violence today)? And what can be done to disrupt the tendency to compel others to follow our agendas? How might we undo our bent to create our version of the “New Humanity” or “New Society” by paradoxically treating people as less than human?

And that’s what this masterful book does over and over—generates huge questions.

Another example: Taylor makes the case that we live in a world of so many possible belief options that everyone is haunted by doubt. (As Taylor puts it, we are all cross-pressured.)

The believer is haunted by, “What if God, heaven, the resurrection—what if it’s just not true? I’m pretty sure it’s true, but what if it’s not? Am I wasting my life?”

At the same time, unbelievers are haunted by, “What if God, heaven, the resurrection—what if it is all true? I’m pretty sure it isn’t true, but what if it is? What may I be missing?”

I could go on for pages about the provocative, game-changing ideas in the book. I haven’t even mentioned his concepts of our disenchanted world and the buffered self which many other books make first-rate use of (such as Alan Noble’s Disruptive Witness and Mike Cosper’s Recapturing Wonder).

Taylor’s book is not without weaknesses. It seems churlish to mention things that aren’t in a book that already has 775 pages of dense text. Nonetheless, though he describes step by step how the changes over the last five hundred years happened among elite thinkers, he doesn’t do much to unpack the causes or motivations behind those steps.

Besides generating a devotional focus on death, for example, how else did the deaths of one-third of Europe in the Bubonic Plague affect religious thinking? And how else might have the excesses of the papacy and Luther’s reactions led to the various developments Taylor identifies? Also, how might the discovery of the New World have affected the view of our cosmos and ourselves? And in what ways did the continuous religious wars of the sixteenth century spur the development of Natural Law (and the Enlightenment) in attempts to find ways to settle disputes that didn’t rely on religion? (Okay, maybe all that can be A Secular Age: The Prequel.)

Second, Taylor writes in an unnecessarily arcane academic style. For decades I have been an editor of academic books on philosophy, history, and religion. Even so I could only read about ten pages a day because I had to read most of his very dense pages twice to have any chance of decoding his prose. Luckily we have James Smith’s summary of Taylor, How (Not) to Be Secular, which provides some help with comprehension in a briefer package.

A Secular Age is not for everyone. But I was glad I labored through this stunning book, giving me so much to chew on and appreciate.

Why All this Hate?

Why is so much political vitriol spewed these days, not just from politicians and commentators but from ordinary people? Why is social media full of such extreme rhetoric? Why can’t we have a simple conversation anymore?

Yes, cable news and talk radio hosts have taken advantage of our situation. And yes, there are more than 50,000 Russian-linked social-media accounts fueling outrage by sending automated messages on both sides of issues. But these only feed on a pre-existing condition.

In the last few years I’ve read four books which all give the same answer. Interestingly, two books were by conservatives, one was by a liberal, and one was by an independent observer.

What did all these agree on? That the primary cause of all this contentiousness is not political differences. Rather it is loneliness.

In his book Them, Republican Senator Ben Sasse notes that since World War II single-person households have tripled to 26 percent. Rates of depression and addiction are increasing. At the same time, “Between 1975 and 1995, membership in social clubs and community organizations such as the PTA, Kiwanis, and Rotary plummeted. Same with labor union membership and regular church attendance” (p. 26). The trend continues with Covid exacerbating the situation. The causes are multiple but the result is what Sasse calls a Loneliness Epidemic.

Second, conservative commentator David Brooks made the same point in The Second Mountain. Brooks thinks our increasing isolation from one another has led us to gravitate toward twisted forms of connection. As Brooks says, tribalism is the evil twin of community. The first is defined by who is our foe. The second by who is our friend.

In a third book, Upheaval, Jared Diamond, a scientist and historian with a more liberal bent, likewise notes that a hundred years ago Americans were involved in book clubs, bridge clubs, church groups, community organizations, town meetings, unions, veteran’s associations and more. This fostered trust and reliance on each other.

Then radio, then TV, then video games, then the internet, and then smart phones increasingly kept people in their homes. As a result, “heavy TV viewers trust other people less, and join fewer voluntary organizations than do people who are not heavy TV viewers” (p. 352). In short, we are increasingly separated from each other, increasingly isolated.

The fourth book comes from independent author Jeffrey Bilbro who is editor of Front Porch Republic. He writes in Reading the Times, “As Robert Nisbet puts it in his classic study, The Quest for Community, an individual thus alienated ‘not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it.’ Loneliness has now become an epidemic in Western liberal democracies. And, apparently, being lonely is worse for some¬one’s health than being a smoker.” (p. 127)

We are homeless and so search, even yearn, for new types of community, which we are finding on line. “In other words, perhaps it is because we are lonely and detached from our places that we put such outsized importance on the news of the day” (p. 129).

What can we do about this? I’ll take that up in my next installment.
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Image by Grae Dickason from Pixabay

The Book We Need This Year

When I was recently asked to do a six-minute radio interview on Francis Schaeffer’s classic The Mark of the Christian, I was reminded what a good book it would be to read this year. With all the political vitriol sure to be spouted incessantly, Christians will be challenged. Will we follow the world’s ways or follow Jesus’ command to his disciples to “love one another” (John 13:34)?

If we frequently listen to radio, TV, podcasts and even sermons that tell us that people who disagree with our political views are ignorant and unbiblical, if not downright in league with the devil, how can we help but think and feel the same?

Schaeffer makes two compelling points from John’s gospel in this book that can be read in just an hour. First, if we don’t show love toward other Christians, then non-Christians have the right to say we aren’t Christians at all. “By this,” Jesus says, “everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35).

And Jesus was right. That is exactly what happens when my neighbors see how much Christians show hatred toward others. “How can they call themselves Christian when they act so unlike Jesus?”

Schaeffer’s second point is perhaps even more dramatic. When Christians show loving harmony and grace toward each other, that is “the final apologetic.” It is proof that the gospel is true. When Christians are “brought to complete unity,” Jesus says, “then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:21). Schaeffer’s timeless book closes with some very practical counsel on how to do just this.

In 2024 reading The Mark of the Christian can set us on the right path. Who’s lead will we follow? The polarizing voices of our political persuasion? Or the voice of Jesus?

The Environmental Crisis Is Over

A year ago today, the environmental and energy crises ended.

“What? Seriously? They ended? Did I miss something?”

Yes, you did. And so did almost everyone else.

We now have the solution to pollution from oil and coal-burning power plants along with a nearly endless supply of clean energy.

So what is this miracle technology? And why don’t we know about it? Both questions are incredibly important.

What Is the Technology?

The technology is fusion energy. On December 5, 2022, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California demonstrated fusion ignition in the laboratory for the first time after six decades of research and effort by a dozen countries.

Instead of splitting the atom (the fission technology that makes nuclear bombs possible), “nuclear fusion is the process by which two light atomic nuclei combine to form a single heavier one while releasing massive amounts of energy.” Unlike today’s nuclear power plants, no radiation is created, and the technology cannot be made into a weapon—as evidenced by the fact that even during the whole Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union cooperated on fusion research!

There are nearly fifty companies working now on implementing this technology. In ten years the first nuclear fusion power plant could be contributing to the grid. In twenty years a hundred plants could be online. And in forty years all coal- and oil-burning power plants could be decommissioned. Much remains to be done, but the solution is here.

Why Didn’t We Know About It?

How could we have missed something this monumental? That is an equally important question. This could be the most important news story of the century, and yet people don’t know it. Now that I’ve reminded you, you may vaguely recall hearing a report about this first successful fusion test. But you likely don’t remember much about its implications.

The reason few people are aware of it is that the news industry almost never reports what’s important. The sensational, the visually arresting, the emotionally compelling—these dominate our news. And these daily reports have almost no lasting significance to us personally or to our communities.

The news industries emphasize these ephemeral items because their purpose is not to inform but to make money. As I’ve written about before here and here and here, they focus on what will get them eyeballs and ratings.

What’s the solution? How can we be better informed if the news media (or worse, social media) is not the way to do it. This requires multifaceted, multilayered answers, but here is just one: Stop following the news and instead read books.

I have a much better understanding of what’s going on in the world by reading books like Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, Factfulness by Hans Rosling, or Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance. These consider important issues and trends from the last forty years which have much more explanatory power about our crazy world than anything you will ever hear on CNN, FOX, or MSNBC.

I also include long form journalism in this category—whether print or electronic. I learned about the massive implications of nuclear fusion by listening to one of the in-depth (usually three-hour!) interviews by Lex Fridman.*

When we stop following the news, we can be calmer, kinder, and better informed people.

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* Lex Fridman Podcast, “Dennis Whyte: Nuclear Fusion and the Future of Energy, “ January 21, 2023.

Image credit: Pixabay

An Antidote to Fake News

Sadly, fake news and widespread misinformation are probably here to stay. So many fabrications appear so fast that there’s no way we can correct every wrong claim someone makes.

But there is hope. We can use a few quick, handy tools to make us less susceptible to being conned on social media and elsewhere.

With the fun, free, and easy to use Cranky Uncle app, we can start to train ourselves to spot false reasoning and errors in logic. The colorful game in the app introduces us to the five-point acronym FLICC.

Fake experts
Logical fallacies
Impossible expectations
Cherry picking
Conspiracy theories

Cranky Uncle, for example, offers this statement: “A Nobel Prize winner in chemistry says vitamin C can cure cancer.”

Which of the five FLICC techniques listed above is that statement an example of? I missed this one the first time. This is an instance of a fake expert. A chemist is an expert but not in the area of cancer research.

What about this: “Scientific models don’t perfectly match observations so they can’t be relied on.” Which FLICC is this? You probably got this right away—it’s impossible expectations which demand unrealistic standards of certainty.

You can find Cranky Uncle, the brainchild of John Cook from the University of Melbourne, at the Apple App Store or on Google Play. There’s even a version you can use on a browser.

If we can get better at spotting logical fallacies like oversimplification, ad hominem, false analogies, red herrings and more, it’s less likely anyone will make a fool out of us.

Hysteria or Hope

Into the blast furnace of political rage and hysteria, Patrick Schreiner brings a cool, fresh breeze that clears heads and calms souls.

Rather than erupting about particular issues, his book Political Gospel takes a measured and insightful look at what the Bible says about Christians and governments.

First, Schreiner says the gospel is decidedly political but not the way we might think. It is not partisan. It does not justify supporting one party or another. Rather it is political in that the gospel speaks to our common public life that we all share, regardless of our beliefs.

Jesus, after all, said he was king. And certainly the Roman government as well as the Jewish leaders understood that to be political. So political, in fact, that it got him killed.

The word gospel was also taken from the world of politics, a word meaning “good news” that was applied to the announcement of military victories.

Even the word believe (as in “repent and believe the gospel”) was about loyalty as much as faith. Who would we be loyal to ultimately? Caesar or God? That’s political.

With skill and expertise, Schreiner handles all the passages we’d expect and many we wouldn’t that bear on these questions. Yes, Romans 13 encourages submitting to government authorities because their authority comes from God. But we must also lay that alongside Revelation 13 which views governments as sourced in Satan.

How do we deal with this dual nature of civic power? With a dual response—both submission and subversion. Schreiner contends this was Jesus’ own response.

Jesus submitted to a Roman trial when he could have used his power (that is, he could have used violence) to stop it. He didn’t. Nonetheless, he refused to accept Rome’s authority as ultimate. God was the source of whatever authority the government had. While the government could act contrary to God, it was nonetheless responsible for its misdeeds and for failing to provide justice for the weak and oppressed.

Likewise, Paul proclaimed a subversive message contrary to the government’s view of the gods and what it meant to be a loyal citizen, but he submitted to government authorities and procedures when arrested—much like his Master.

Schreiner’s framework, as he himself admits, doesn’t resolve every public debate. We still have knotty problems to untie. But he does offer principles to guide us—principles that clearly don’t include ridiculing others, name calling, self-righteous anger, or violence.

Throughout Schreiner highlights Jesus’ third way—not a compromise between two extremes but a path that refuses to accept the assumptions or categories of either side.

One of his most important insights in applying the framework of submission and subversion is that how we employ these two strategies is dependent on how much power we have in society. “For those with power, submission means sacrifice and service. We sacrifice our own desires and power for the common good.” Subversion means taking advantage of “opportunities to reform” from the inside in the cause of justice for those without power, not for our benefit or that of our group.

Those with less power will spend “more time critiquing or protesting the existing norms” (p. 198-99) even as they seek to show respect for those in authority. In either case, to subvert is to suffer for doing good.

Clearly, when so few American Christians seem to believe we should love our enemies, the church has failed in political discipleship. Political Gospel is a step toward faithfully bearing witness to the kingdom of God.

Entitled to the Truth?

I was with a group of friends recently who have known each other for years . . . ok, decades. Well, let’s just admit it all up front. We are a bunch of old codgers.

We have lived a lot of life together, seen our children grow and marry and have their own children. We’ve seen heartache and laughter. And we’ve stayed well connected.

Our age and stage of life came into sharp focus when Cooper, the twenty-something grandson of someone in our group, joined us for a get together. He had a sharp and active mind with an engaging personality. He listened a lot and then eventually began asking some incisive questions.

We were talking about the problem of fake news. Several voiced outrage at the challenges of discerning what was accurate and what wasn’t as well as at the ethics of those who intentionally put out twisted information.

Then Cooper said, “Can I ask a question? Do you feel you are entitled to the truth?”

Without hesitation everyone chimed in, “Yes.” “Of course.” “Certainly.”

“That’s interesting,” he responded. “Because I don’t think my generation believes that we are. This world of uncertainty is just the hand we have been dealt. Not being sure of what is true and of what isn’t is simply the way things are.”

The irony of Cooper using entitled did not escape me. We were now being gently labeled with a word that we had probably all used to malign people of his age.

I was also struck by the chasm between our generation and Cooper’s. Yes, it made me feel very old. But I appreciated the clarity that Cooper gave to our differences and the added challenges our children and their children have in the world.

My first reaction, nonetheless, when Cooper finished, was to blurt out, “Thank you, Cooper, for pointing out that we are all conservative here.”

Though we were a group of people with mixed political and religious ideas, at this one central point we were all united. We thought that Truth existed, that it was possible to find it, and that we deserved to know what it was. This is a very traditional, very conservative idea. It goes back millennia and permeates a wide variety of ancient cultures. And we all believed it, whether liberal or not.

I was encouraged that we held this important belief in common. Searching together for the truth was not a hopeless endeavor. It was worth us all pursuing.

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Image by Hajnalka Mahler from Pixabay