Changing or Describing the World, Charismatic or Charming & Carnal or Spirit-Filled Christians
Here’s your weekly roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, November 24–23, 2024.
Thought-Provoking Content
From Couplets to the Cosmos by Tara Isabella Burton in The Dispatch:
Poetic realism, in other words, makes room for both real meaning outside us and a distinctly human role in participating in—but never single-handedly determining—that meaning.
... In effect, [Charles] Taylor argues that our characteristic powers as human beings lie in our poetic abilities, our capacity to engage as creative beings in a world we are constantly changing even as—and indeed because—we are constantly trying to describe it.
Who the Woke Are by Oliver Traldi in City Journal:
Al-Gharbi introduces a new term for a kind of social status arising out of victimhood culture: totemic capital. This is the “authority afforded to an individual . . . on the basis of claimed or perceived membership in a historically marginalized or disadvantaged group.”
Al-Gharbi address the ubiquity of remakes, adaptations, and spinoffs in contemporary cultural output—just what one would expect if culture is dominated by those who have spent their lives getting better and better at following the rules.
Majority of Practicing Christians Admit to Viewing Porn, Many Comfortable with Habit: Study by Leonardo Blair in Christian Post:
Nearly half, 49%, of practicing Christians who are also porn users said they were comfortable with their level of use compared to 73% of non-Christians. Another 21% expressed a desire to completely abstain.
Are You Charismatic Or Charming? by Ian Leslie in The Ruffian:
The comedian Jimmy Carr has also given this question some thought (standup is as much about developing an onstage persona as it is about jokes), and he offers a succinct definition of the difference. Charm is I come to you; charisma is You come to me.
Once you start thinking about the distinction between charisma and charm you see it everywhere. Cats are charismatic, dogs are charming. A thunderstorm is charismatic, a sunny day is charming. ... The God of the Old Testament is charismatic; the God of the New Testament is charming. Christianity became the world’s most successful religion because it fused charm with charisma; Jesus Christ came to us.
For a Christian, “charisma” should have positive connotations. But Max Weber changed the background of the word for our secular age, and in his usage it's not a positive thing. For Weber, it was the quality Hitler had avant la lettre.
The Pod Didn’t Save America by Mitchell Jackson at BBC Communications:
Republicans fulfilled Breitbart’s prophecy. Republicans dominate the culture, and politics is still downstream from culture. Hence, Trump finally won the popular vote.
Is There a Difference Between a Carnal and Spirit-Filled Christian? by Clarke Morledge at Veracity:
This teaching that originally came out of those early Keswick conferences emphasized the importance of being “spirit-filled” as the key to living the so-called “higher life,” or “victorious” Christian living. But the Apostle Paul only mentions being “spirit-filled” once in all of his New Testament letters, Ephesians 5:18.
The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger by Daniel Engber in The Atlantic:
But it’s one thing to understand that scientists have been cutting corners. It’s quite another to suspect that they’ve been creating their results from scratch.
Business-school psychology may be especially prone to misbehavior. For one thing, the field’s research standards are weaker than those for other psychologists. In response to the replication crisis, campus psychology departments have lately taken up a raft of methodological reforms. Statistically suspect practices that were de rigueur a dozen years ago are now uncommon; sample sizes have gotten bigger; a study's planned analyses are now commonly written down before the work is carried out. But this great awakening has been slower to develop in business-school psychology, several academics told me. “No one wants to kill the golden goose,” one early-career researcher in business academia said. If management and marketing professors embraced all of psychology’s reforms, he said, then many of their most memorable, most TED Talk–able findings would go away. “To use marketing lingo, we’d lose our unique value proposition.”
We Who Wrestle With God by Jordan Peterson Review by Rowan Williams in The Guardian:
Peterson’s readings are curiously like a medieval exegesis of the text, with every story really being about the same thing: an austere call to individual heroic integrity. This is a style of interpretation with a respectable pedigree. Early Jewish and Christian commentators treated the lives of Abraham and Moses as symbols for the growth of the spirit, paradigms for how a person is transformed by the contemplation of eternal truth. But, as with these venerable examples, there is a risk of losing the specificity of the narratives, of ironing out aspects that don’t fit the template. Every story gets pushed towards a set of Petersonian morals—single-minded individual rectitude, tough love, clear demarcations between the different kinds of moral excellence that men and women are called to embody, and so on.
Open Up! by Alan Jacobs in The Homebound Symphony:
The idea is that if people are open to the possibility of something beyond the strictly material, they will eventually become more receptive to the Christian gospel. And by calling attention to phenomena inexplicable by current science, maybe you shift the Overton Window for religious belief. From this point of view it’s a very good thing that, as Matt Crawford says, “America is ready for weirdness.” Weirdness as a gateway drug to Christianity.
In one very general sense I’m in this camp. I too have long wanted to make Christianity a live possibility for people who do not believe. But I have taken a very different approach. Instead of commending spiritual experience I have tried to make the core beliefs of Christianity comprehensible to a world for which such beliefs are strange to the point of outrageousness.
Jacobs is not unenlightened when it comes to the enchantment going on in the majority world. Consider his recent Harper's essay (cited on the above piece) on universal humanism where he closes with a mythopoeic mashup by an Nigerian writer combining the West African Orishas and the Greek Pantheon. It seems to me that what he's arguing for is a Protestant take on re-enchantment, which the Catholic/Orthosox sacramental take, represented by Matthew Crawford (cited above) building on Rod Dreher's latest book, views as something akin to Gnostic world-denial. I read Jacbos as pointing out that Protestant regard for science and skepticism of superstition is, far from world denial, mere insistence on the lordship of Christ over the other powers in our world and on our access to the benefits of that lordship unmediated by the stuff of this world.
The Enclosure of the Human Psyche by L. M. Sacasas in The Convivial Society:
The enclosure of the commons subjected the land to more efficient and persistent means of extraction, time was money. Improvement meant activity. So, too, with the psyche. The mind at rest, the psyche in a moment of silence, is like the land lying unused and unproductive. From this vantage point, what we might feel as the problem of distraction is just the logic of enclosure at work. The unceasing stream of notifications and pings, the persistent way even the built environment beyond the screen hails us—all of this is just the necessary operation of the engines of value extraction efficiently at work on the raw material that is the human psyche. When the enclosure of the psyche is complete, we lose the right to wander and roam and loaf about in thought, just as the enclosure of the commons restricted freedom of movement and disdained economically unproductive but life-affirming forms of leisure.
Fragments
On Non-Reductive Physicalism vs. Substance Dualism
It seems to me that even if we interpret the breath of life as the life-sustaining power of God, it remains the second component of human being, alongside the body/dust because when it departs we cease to exist (Eccl 12:7). So that interpretation would imply substance dualism because the breath of life would be a divine substance and not a human property. I think a non-reductive physicalist view would need to interpret the breath of life as an emergent property that God imparts to the body. Does that make sense?
Under either view, I think we can claim that body is what we are, but not all that we are. We are both our bodies and our minds, and we are the self-consciousness that arises from the relation between the two. This, in my opinion, is the essence of anthropological wholism. Ellen White's statement that “The brain nerves which communicate with the entire system are the only medium through which Heaven can communicate to man and affect his inmost life” (2T 347) is consistent with anthropological wholism. But she would overstate for effect and then walk back. Her goal in writing was typically transformation, and she was willing to sacrifice precision to achieve it. In other words, I wouldn't read too much into that “only”.
To lay my cards on the table, I'm more inclined toward soft dualism than non-reductive physicalism because it seems to me that Gen 2 is presenting two substances from different sources that combine to make us what we are rather than two properties with one arising from the other. But my mind is by no means made up on the subject. It's just that for me soft dualism is the null hypothesis.
OpenAI o1 on My Theological Themes
I asked OpenAI o1 to identify common themes that appear my four published theological articles. It gave me a better sense of my preoccupations and also some ideas for themes I could treat in the future to balance the emphases in my output.
Biblical Interpretation and Exegesis: Employing deep engagement with biblical texts through careful exegesis to uncover theological meanings.
Salvation History and Continuity: Highlighting the continuity of God's redemptive work from the Old to the New Testament, emphasizing the ongoing relevance of biblical teachings.
Theological Engagement with Contemporary Issues: Applying theological insights to modern ethical and societal challenges, such as same-sex marriage and political events.
Adventist Theological Perspective: Grounding his work in Seventh-day Adventist theology and hermeneutics, drawing on Adventist doctrines like prophecy, the Sabbath, and writings of Ellen G. White.
Divine Judgment: Exploring how God's character and judgments inform human morality and ethics, and how divine actions relate to human response.
Engagement with Philosophy: Incorporating philosophical concepts and thinkers to deepen theological analysis and bridge biblical scholarship with contemporary thought.
Eschatology and Apocalyptic Consciousness: Integrating apocalyptic themes and end-time expectations into his analysis, considering how eschatological beliefs impact ethical decisions.
Integration of Theology and Practice: Encouraging the practical application of theological principles in Christian living and decision-making, demonstrating how theology informs ethics and community practices.
Devotional
The Messiah
We think that Mark wrote the first life story of Jesus because it is the shortest and Matthew and Luke seem to have quoted Mark’s a lot when they wrote their versions. He might have been one of Jesus’s youngest followers—possibly referring to himself in Mark 14:51–52—and was a companion of Peter and Paul (Acts 12:12, 25). From his opening lines, Mark’s style of writing—straight to the point—is evident:
Beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the Prophet:
“See, I am sending my messenger before you are present,
One who will prepare your way,
A voice shouting a proclamation in the wilderness:
’Prepare a way for the Lord!
Make his paths straight!’”
[quoting Isaiah 40:3]John the Baptizer was there in the wilderness, and he proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (Mark 1:1–4).
In keeping with Mark’s terse style, instead of starting with Jesus’s birth, he goes straight to his baptism by his cousin John. But what was it about Jesus’s baptism that made it essential to his story? And why did Mark think that his audience would be able to grasp the significance of baptism for Jesus’s identity without further explanation?
For Mark, the ministry of John the Baptist filled the prophetic pattern of a messenger with good news heralding the arrival of a victorious king full of meaning. But by calling Jesus “Christ,” Mark indicated from the outset that another more specific prophecy, a time-prophecy, was operating in the background of Jesus’s life. “Christ” (christos in Greek) is a translation of the Hebrew title “Messiah” (meshiach), which means “Anointed” and referred to the ancient practice of pouring oil onto priests and kings as a rite of induction into office (Exodus 29:29; 1 Samuel 9:6). In the decades before and after Mark wrote, his people were expecting a Messiah to arrive and restore them from exile because they had calculated the seventy-weeks prophecy of Daniel 9.
In the first books of the Bible, a “week” (literally, a “seven”) can refer to a cycle of seven days or a cycle of seven years. Like humans and animals were to rest every seventh day, so the Promised Land was to rest every seven years (Leviticus 25:1–7). This was one of the instructions that the rulers of Israel had ignored in their greed, which caused the exile. God promised that during the exile the land would rest for seventy years in order to make up for four-hundred, ninety years—that is, seventy year-weeks—when it had received no rest (2 Chronicles 36:20–21, compare Leviticus 26:33–35). Daniel 9 opens with the exiled prophet Daniel praying for God to honor his promise and restore Israel after the seventy years were up (Daniel 9:1–19).
God responded by telling Daniel that his people were going to receive another seventy year-weeks—four-hundred, ninety years—to accomplish a list of spiritual objectives that amounted to bringing in the age of restoration (Daniel 9:24). Next, the dating of the time-prophecy:
So know and comprehend:
From the pronouncement of the message to restore and build Jerusalem
Until an anointed prince will be
Seven weeks
And weeks, sixty-two.
It will be restored and built, plaza and moat,
But in distressful times.”
(Daniel 9:25)
Mark’s contemporaries knew they were living roughly four-hundred, eighty-three years—sixty-nine (seven plus sixty-two) year-weeks—after the command to fully restore Jerusalem, which is why so many were expecting the promised Messiah to appear. But when Mark opened his account by identifying Jesus as the Christ, the anointed prince, that implied that his next story should be about Jesus having oil poured on his head. Why did Mark instead go straight to the story of Jesus’s baptism?
Note that in the ancient world, oil was the most power-packed fuel source for both body and fire to burn. The ritual of anointing was an implicit prayer for the power of God’s Spirit to work in the ministry of the anointed (for example, 1 Samuel 16:13). This is explicitly stated in the vision of Zechariah 4 which portrays the anointed priest and king-figure surrounded by oil and is interpreted to mean: “‘Not by strength, nor by vigor, but by My Spirit.’” (Zechariah 4:6c).
Thus, Mark connects Jesus’s messiahship to his baptism because that is when he publicly received the spirit to begin his ministry (Mark 1:10). In fact, if we take an early potential date for Jesus’s baptism—AD 27—and compare it with a plausible date for the decree of Artaxerxes I to completely restore Jerusalem—457 BC (Ezra 7:12–26; Nehemiah 2:4–10)—there are exactly four-hundred, eighty-three years between. While the writers who knew Jesus probably weren't able to date the first event with that level of precision (at least, they left us no evidence that they did), they knew that they were living at the right time, and, like Mark, they recognized in Jesus life and ministry the story of the messianic prince of Daniel 9.