Thinking with a Reformed Mind

On the Importance of Presuppositions

2011-12-30T11:15:00.007-05:00

I recently had a conversation — a fairly innocuous one at the outset — which reminded me of how presuppositions can change the entire meaning of things. As I reflected on the conversation, I mentally worked on the primary thought experiment I had used in the conversation, and thought it would make a worthwhile blog post. We'll see how correct that was...

The occasion for the conversation was an interview on a Christian radio station that we were listening to in a car trip. The show's guest was a prominent apologist who was promoting his new book and taking questions from callers. I happened to disagree with much of what the guest was saying, and at times couldn't help but express my disagreement aloud — much to the chagrin of the rest of the car, I'm sure.

At the end of the broadcast, the guest made a sort of 'closing argument', in which he summarized the main point of his book. After the host signed off, I said aloud, 'By the way, don't buy his book. He's wrong.'

Someone responded, 'So you disagree with what he just said?'

'Well... not really,' I replied. 'I think he and I agree on the literal meaning of what he just said. But I know where he's coming from, and so I know that when he says what he just said, it implies different things than if I were to say the same thing.' What I meant was that our presuppositions were different, and that therefore gave different meaning to the same words and phrases.

In philosophy and apologetics, a presupposition is a belief which is foundational to a particular worldview. Usually presuppositions are axiomatic, meaning that one forms one's presuppositions without firm proof of their truth. For example, one of the most universal presuppositions is the belief that one's memory is reasonably reliable — that is, the past actually did happen and is not merely a complete fabrication of one's own mind.

The affirmation or denial of certain presuppositions can have radical worldview-altering effects. Imagine for a second if you were to presuppose that your memory was completely unreliable and that nothing actually occurred before this moment: that everything you 'remember' happening never did happen. Or imagine that the external world does not actually exist: that your life is all one big dream, and everything around you is a figment of your imagination. It would change the entire way you behave and interact with the world, wouldn't it?

One of the theological applications of the idea of presuppositions is the existence of God. Since the early 20th century, apologists and philosophers in the Reformed tradition have argued that one cannot absolutely prove or disprove the existence of God; one can only presuppose his existence or non-existence. I won't here delve into the debate over this so-called 'presuppositional apologetics', but only wish to mention its importance to modern Reformed theology.

At the time, I didn't go into a lengthy definition of 'presupposition'. Instead, I gave the following example, using simple arithmetic, which I've refined for this blog.

Below are two different presuppositions, which I've hidden in a black background. You, the reader, get to participate in this demonstration. Select one and only one of those presuppositions, and move your mouse over its corresponding black box to reveal it.

Presupposition A: The ¤ sign signifies addition. I.e., '1 ¤ 2' is the equivalent of '1 + 2'.

Presupposition B: The ¤ sign signifies multiplication. I.e., '1 ¤ 2' is the equivalent of '1 × 2'.

Now look at Equation 1 below. Given your presupposition, is the equation true?

Equation 1: 2 ¤ 2 = 4

If you have presupposed Presupposition A, you would say that Equation 1 is true, correct? If you have presupposed Presupposition B, you would also say that Equation 1 is true, correct? Now look at Equation 2 below. Is it true?

Equation 2: 2 ¤ 3 = 8

Again, regardless of whether you have presupposed A or B, you would say that Equation 2 is false. If this were all the more data we had, we might conclude that the presuppositions you hold are insignificant. After all, those who presuppose A and those who presuppose B are in 100% agreement about the truth or falsity of Equations 1 and 2! But now look at Equation 3.

Equation 3: 2 ¤ 4 = 6

If you presupposed A, you would say that Equation 3 is true. But if you presupposed B, you would say that Equation 3 is false. Despite the prior agreements, it turns out that the differences between Presuppositions A and B may actually be significant! Go ahead now and look back at the presupposition which you did not select, and you can see how the initial agreements over Equations 1 and 2 occurred.

Those who presuppose A and those who presuppose B may agree on certain statements being true or false, but they may not realize that they agree for different reasons. And while the reasons for that agreement may not have initially seemed significant, eventually the differences came to the surface. In this case, it wasn't until Equation 3 that the contrast between the two presuppositions became apparent. And now that you know what that difference is — the difference between addition and multiplication — you know how much A and B actually disagree!

Finally, suppose that someone instead holds Presupposition C, as defined below.

Presupposition C: The ¤ sign signifies an exponential. I.e., '1 ¤ 2' is the equivalent of '1²'.

Someone who presupposed C would also agree that Equation 1 is true; but he would believe Equation 2 to be true, in contrast to both A and B; and disagree with A that Equation 3 is true, but agree with B that it is false. But it should be obvious at this point that their agreements and disagreements are largely insignificant in the larger picture.¹ Even though C agrees with both A and B about the truth of Equation 1, no one would ever say that their agreement demonstrates that A, B, and C share common ground about what ¤ signifies. In reality, they all believe that ¤ signifies mutually exclusive ideas!

Jumping back to the radio show, the different presuppositions which the show's guest and I brought to the table meant that we could utter the same words — i.e., the same linguistic signs and symbols — but each intend different meanings and implications. It didn't really matter that I 'agreed' with the guest's closing statement. Because we first disagreed on some basic theological beliefs, we were also really disagreeing, even when it appeared that we agreed.

One practical example of this is the contrast between orthodox Christianity and Mormonism on the nature of God. Both religions use the word 'God' throughout their theologies; both believe that God exists in three persons; and both use the word 'Godhead' to refer to the three-parts of God.

But the orthodox Christian and Mormon conceptions of God are quite different. Orthodox Christianity is trinitarian, meaning that it believes that God is three distinct persons who coexist as one being — a paradox of unity and relationship seen as key to understanding who God is. Mormonism, on the other hand, is non-trinitarian and instead believes that God is three persons, who exist as three separate beings.

Without going too deeply into the implications of trinitarianism, suffice it to say that this nuance of difference between orthodox Christianity and Mormonism helps to partially explain many of the more apparent differences between the two religions, such as the Mormon beliefs in other gods, in the existence of the Heavenly Mother, and in the exaltation of believers to become gods themselves.

This can happen across any range of discussions, not just inter-faith ones: Does God exist? What is necessary to 'prove' something? What sources can one use for an ethical system? Can science explain that which is not observable? &c. After all, presuppositions account for some of the most fundamental beliefs by which we understand the world, much like tinted glasses.

In conclusion, I hope you take away the following: even when there is surface agreement, it is often important to be aware of where disagreements may lie underneath the surface. It is important both to understand why we both agree and disagree. While it is important that we celebrate agreement, we must also be careful that we are not also naïvely believing that agreement exists where it really does not.

¹That is not to say that the agreements between contrasting presuppositions are entirely unimportant. In fact, sometimes the small areas of agreement can be very interesting. For example, a mathematician may be very much intrigued by the fact that 2 + 2, 2 × 2, and 2² all equal the same result.

Or put another way: brandywine, pear brandy, and apple brandy are all made from different fruit and each result in different end products. But there's a significance to the fact that all three use roughly the same process to manufacture — at least enough similarity to call all three products brandy.

Further Thoughts on The Meaning of Marriage

2011-12-02T01:41:00.036-05:00

In one of my previous posts, I began to expound upon some of the ideas in Timothy Keller's new book, The Meaning of Marriage. I specifically looked at some of the 'bad reasons' — often, a form of idolization — that people have for overvaluing certain characteristics in potential spouses. (See also my supplementary article where I explained why I treat reasons and motives with such primacy — often even above actions.) This is an idea that I've written about before, and regarding which I've shared a number of other authors' and theologians' thoughts.

I now want to look at a second set of ideas that Keller writes about in the book: the dynamics of marriage. I mean 'dynamics' in its most raw definition — the pattern or history of changes. I want to look at how and why change occurs within marriage and, having recognized those dynamics, what that should mean to how we view and approach marriage.

I first start with one of the fundamentals of marriage which Keller gives. I haven't been able to find this phrasing in the book, but it's one which he used in a recent talk that he gave at Google:

The Christian understanding of the mission of marriage is deep character change through deep friendship.

Keller not only wants us to recognize that people change over the course of the marriage, but that change is one of the purposes of marriage! Because of the special covenant relationship between husband and wife, one of the ways that the marriage glorifies God is to spur each other along in God's work of sanctification.¹ It seems to be Keller's answer to the question that Gary Thomas asked, 'What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?'

There are a couple of facets to this lifelong change. In the first place, a person who gets married will change simply by the fact that he or she is now married. If marriage is the monumental event that we rightly perceive it to be, one cannot help but be monumentally changed by it. By entering into a committed covenant of promise, one's entire life will be different.

In addition to this quantum leap that happens at the moment of marriage, spouses change over the course of the marriage. Much of this is just the natural evolution of a person over a lifetime. Other changes are the result of purposeful effort by both spouses or by other environmental forces.

These dynamics in marriage can, of course, be both positive and negative. The positive changes are going to be those that directly play into the sanctification that each spouse is undergoing. Certain sins which were present at the beginning of the marriage may become negligible several years (decades?) in. Certain quirks which may have annoyed one person may be tolerated as each partner grows in grace towards one another.

But there are also going to be negative changes. Just as certain quirks fade away, minor annoyances known about before marriage may become exasperating when experienced intimately within marriage. Likewise, there may also be certain qualities which one valued in one's spouse which are no longer present. The most obvious example there is physical appearance, but valued aspects of personality may also change.

To demonstrate the point, Keller uses one of his favorite quotes from Lewis Smedes: 'When I married my wife, I had hardly a smidgen of sense for what I was getting into with her. How could I know how much she would change over 25 years? How could I know how much I would change? My wife has lived with at least five different men since we were wed—and each of the five has been me.'

What is remarkable, when you really start to think about the reality of that statement, is that each 'different man' probably had his own positive characteristics and his own negative characteristics. With God's grace, there was hopefully a perceptible progress of sanctification. But it's just that each 'different man' was qualitatively different, but that each came with its own new challenges.

One way to mentally visualize the sort of change which your spouse — and you yourself! — may undergo in the full course of a marriage, is to remember what you were like just before you went off to college. Compare that pre-college you to present-day you. The number of differences between those two people is likely staggering. Many of your high school classmates probably wouldn't even recognize present-day you: physically, personally, spiritually, emotionally. And that was probably only a decade ago or less! Some of those changes were the direct result of going off to college; and some were the natural evolution of you as a human. Now extrapolate that dynamism to 50-plus years of marriage.

Yes, in some ways you have probably stabilized a bit since late adolescence. But the catalyst of many of those changes — moving out of your parents' house, changes to daily life, shift in life goals, new relationships — is comparable to the catalyst which marriage can be. The culture shock of moving out from under your parents' roof is, in many ways, a mirror image of the culture shock of moving in with your spouse and being in a covenant of service to him/her. The change in priorities when you went off to college will also be analogous to the changes in priorities in that same covenant of marriage; your daily routine will change; &c. I don't want to overplay the parallels, but the point should be clear.

You may think you have figured out who you are since you graduated from high school, but the moment you enter into marriage and take that new relationship seriously, your life will change so radically that you will be figuring it out all over again. (And maybe again when you hit that mid-life crisis...) Fortunately, this time around, you'll have someone committed to helping you figure it out and to always remind you that, above all, you are God's child.

Hold on Loosely
For those in marriage, understanding this dynamic nature is a paradigm shift. It means you cannot cling too tightly to the dynamics of life. Love your spouse's physique; love that way he smiles at you; love the way she laughs. But understand that those may pass in time. Even personality traits — which we often see as fairly permanent — will pass and morph over time. Again compare your present personality to the one you had in high school. Marriage simply cannot realistically be based upon such ephemera.

Smedes goes on to say, after the bit above, telling us instead what marriage invites us to grasp onto: 'The connecting link with my old self has always been the memory of the name I took on back there: "I am he who will be there with you." When we slough off that name, lose that identity, we can hardly find ourselves again.' I'll return to what this tangibly means, but I first want to add another observation to the pot.

With this understanding, change becomes something that you not only anticipate and expect, but also pursue. As Keller puts it, the very mission of marriage, as an instrument for sanctification, is to change people. God uses spouses to direct people to him, and as people become more and more directed to him, they change. Thus, for Christians there is a definite telos (purpose or end) to the change that happens in marriage; it is not merely chaotic change or change for change's sake.

Therefore, one of the essential elements of Christian marriage is that you are not only in love with your spouse and you are not only in love with God, but you are also in love with what your spouse is in the process of becoming as you grow closer to God together. You are not satisfied with your spouse as s/he is. Instead of merely saying, 'I love you just the way you are,' you say, 'I love what I see you becoming, and I want to be there as God makes you into that person.'

Of course, this perspective on change within marriage is of a completely different nature from that cliché of the wife who hopes to mould her husband into her own image. Rather, Christ is our model: each spouse should be helping the other to become more like him.

Turn and Face the Strain
But if the mission of marriage is to change your character to better become like God's, that means that marriage will bring you into direct conflict with your own self-centered nature. You will not like this, guaranteed. Thus there will be conflict. Sometimes it will be your self-centered nature battling against your spouse's godliness; sometimes it will be both of your self-centered natures jousting with each other.

Keller likens this process to a rock tumbler. A rock in a tumble polisher will be battered about by other rocks in the tumbler. In the process rough corners are knocked off, but the result is a smooth, shiny gem. There will be parts of yourself that you hold dear, but which marriage will painfully knock off from you. But you will be the better for it. And if you understand the telos towards which God is bringing you two and how he is using marriage to accomplish those ends, you will embrace that conflict.

Pledging My Time
This brings us back to the second half of the Smedes quote. For while both spouses will change over the course of the marriage, there is one constant: the promise you both made before God. How does a marriage endure the pain that some change can bring? The promise. Even though you may fall in love with who you think your spouse is (and Smedes questions whether even your spouse ever knows who s/he is!), you also make a promise to who s/he will become. You promise to love even when you do like. And your spouse has made the same promise to you and your future self. And lest we overlook the obvious, the strength to fulfill those promises in the darkest days of marriage can come only from God.

Just as an understanding of the dynamics of marriage should inform how one faces changes within a marriage, it should also inform how one prepares for marriage. It should inform what you look for in a potential spouse, from the very inception of a romantic relationship.

In light of this, Keller suggests that you should be looking for someone who is our could be your most trusted counselor and best friend. And since, as Keller says, marriage is built upon not just friendship, but deep friendship, your spouse should be someone who deeply understands you.

It Makes a Tiny Spark
Finding someone who will be your most trusted counselor and best friend isn't something you can accurately judge based on that spark of instant attraction or love at first sight. That's something that only comes after you've started to get to know a person, whether through casual friendship over time or intentional dating. And so we should regret, along with Keller, our typical approach.

As Keller puts it, 'What really happens is: you're a single person and you walk into a room with other singles — let's say there's ten other people there. You immediately, by looking at them, eliminate seven. You know you do; it's all on the basis of looks and polish. But probably your best candidate for somebody who could be a lifelong friend partner, you just eliminated. They didn't make your first cut.'

While Keller is careful to say that he is not totally discounting 'attraction' or 'chemistry', he does turn the conventional paradigm on his head. 'Friendship does not flow out of great sexual chemistry; sexual chemistry grows out of terrific friendship.' If we truly comprehend how dynamic marriage is and how much people change even within marriage, this maxim shouldn't surprise us in the least. For if what we know about marriage's dynamism is true, and if your starting baseline is that initial spark of attraction, then your starting baseline is the very thing which has the least permanence.

As a parenthesis, I'm reminded of a sort of challenge which my college friends and I used to discuss. The premise of the challenge was this: when you get married, in the first year of your marriage, put a penny in a jar every time you have sex. Every time you have sex after that first year of marriage, remove a penny from the jar. Chances are, so they say, you won't empty the jar. In other words, you'll have sex more times in that first year of marriage than you will for the entire rest of the marriage.

I have no idea what basis, if any, there is for the myth, but it's at least believable, even if not at all true. And it's believable because we instinctively know how ephemeral those initial sparks of attraction are. Yet we nevertheless look past that and plan for our marriage based more on the short-term rather than on long-term. We naïvely look for someone who gives us that ineffable thrill, when we should instead look for someone with whom we can build a core of friendship that will overshadow even the highest heights of the thrill.

When we understand the telos of marriage, we can also know that those initial sparks will be replaced by something even greater: an even deeper passion. When we judge potential spouses primarily by the things which give us a spark, we are really settling for far too little. We are C.S. Lewis' ignorant child, too easily pleased by mud pies in our backyard when God promises us a holiday at the sea, if only we would endure the train ride to the shore. If we are trusting God to provide someone who gives us that spark, we are trusting him for the absolute wrong thing. We should instead trust God to provide a trusted counselor and best friend. Out of that, says Keller, will grow the sexual chemistry.

Keller illustrates this by comparing 'the almost electrical thrill' he got when his current wife first held his hand when they were dating. Though a small part of it was genuine love, it was a thrill fueled by ego: a puffed-up pride that someone had chosen him. Now when he and his wife hold hands, there is no electrical thrill. Instead the physical act is informed by their history of burdens, turmoil, repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation and is even greater than that initial thrill. And though that initial electricity is gone, neither he nor his wife would ever want to go back to it.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to a newly-wed couple, 'It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.' You and your spouse will undergo all varieties of changes throughout your marriage together — some for good, some for ill. But the passion you thought you had for each other at the moment you made your vows will be overwhelmed by a passion made richer and deeper because you stuck to those vows despite the changes. In fact, you embraced the changes.

¹Tim Challies, in his book The Next Story, suggests that this is indeed the purpose for all of the relationships into which God places us:

God never calls us to a life of ease, a life in which we maintain control and do things on our terms. He puts us in marriage relationships, in friendships, in church communities, for his own reasons; he puts us in such relationships to teach us how to love one another and more and more resemble him in his great love.

A Note on Methodology

2011-11-07T12:42:00.037-05:00

A conversation I had this weekend brought to light an important element to my recent posts that may not be altogether clear. It's something I've clarified over and over in other online discussions, but one that I only just realized I've not clarified here.

In recent years, I've come to realize that — in public discourse, at least — I am often less interested in what people do or think than in the reasons and motives why they do or think those things. The preeminent question in my mind is, 'Why?' When someone makes a claim, I find I am more interested in whether they have good reason to assert that claim than whether it's a per se good claim. When someone takes an action, I find I am more interested in whether they have good motive to act in that way than whether it's a per se good act.

For example, if someone were to make a claim about the nature of free will, rather than criticizing the position, I would immediately inquire as to the reasons behind that position and constructively criticize those. My point in debating the person making the assertion is not to show that their conclusion is false, but to show that their reasoning is bad. It's then up to then to adjust their conclusion in light of the criticism of their conclusions. And so you'll rarely find me debating whether Obama is a socialist; rather you'll find me debating whether those who believe so have good reason to believe so.

This is also the way I have approached marriage and singleness in my recent posts. I'm not so much interested in telling people that what they're doing is wrong or telling people what they should be doing instead. Rather, I'm interested in getting people to think about the motives behind certain things.

This method was probably most prominent in my most recent post, though it still wasn't explicitly stated. In that post, I explored three different reasons for why people value certain traits in their spouses, criticizing each motive. In so doing, I meant only to criticize the reasons, not the valuing of the trait. I wanted people to evaluate the reasons they have for valuing those traits and determine whether they or not they were idolatrous. The point was never that valuing those traits is bad.

For example, one might value a certain level of physical fitness. Look closely at the three reasons I criticized. Do any of them match your own reasons for valuing fitness? If so, perhaps you should reassess how much you value fitness. But it may well be that you have a completely different reason for valuing fitness, such as wanting a spouse who will not die of an obesity-related disease in six months. If that's the case, then you probably don't need to change your approach at all.

Likewise, in an earlier post, I criticized a number of reasons people have for delaying marriage until well into adulthood. That doesn't mean that I think one should never delay marriage. Rather, what I wanted to say with that post was: 'Examine the reasons why you're delaying marriage. Are they good reasons? Here are a few reasons that I think are bad reasons. If these are your only significant reasons for delaying marriage, maybe you should rethink that decision.'

I'll admit that this form of argumentation is somewhat alien to what our culture is used to. Our society is primarily a pragmatic, ends-based one. One wants certain outcomes, and so one acts in ways that will best achieve those outcomes. Likewise, when one makes an argument, one has in mind a specific conclusion and call to action in mind and argues in order to effect that conclusion: 'You are doing X. Here is why X is wrong. Therefore, stop doing X and do Y instead.' People expect that of an argument.

Instead of this approach, however, I approach the matter from the other end of the logic. Rather than telling people what their conclusion normatively should be, I want to give people a better set of norms which they can then apply to themselves. I am saying: 'Many people do X for reason R. R is a bad reason for doing X. If R is a major part of your reason for doing X, reconsider whether you should still do X in light of R being a bad reason.' I don't come out and say, 'Stop doing X and do Y instead', partly because I recognize that people are widely different from each other and may have reasons for doing X which I never considered or which may be good reasons.

I incline towards this method largely because I think it allows for better operation of Biblical wisdom. There are a lot of everyday decisions for which the Bible gives little direct commands. Therefore it is often left to us, being led by the Holy Spirit, to discern what is right. For example, how does one decide which college to attend? The Bible isn't going to tell you. What the Bible does do, instead, is give us principles of godliness. One works from those Biblical norms, taking account of the objective situation and one's own subjective existence, to determine the correct action or belief. Quite often, Scripture simply doesn't paint 'the line' in stark black and white.

A perfect case is the theology of idolatry. In our modern world, our idols are often everyday things: wealth, family, friends, morality, intelligence, &c. None of these things are themselves sinful. The Bible isn't dualistic like that. In fact, they are all good things — blessings from God, even. But when we esteem them from wrong motives — such as when we look to them for ultimate satisfaction — they have become idols. For example, the Bible doesn't instruct us to refrain from esteeming marriage; rather, we learn to refrain from esteeming marriage from wrong motives. When we esteem marriage from wrong motives, we over-esteem marriage and it takes the place of God in our lives.

Likewise, a great deal of nuance can come from exchanging good reasons for bad reasons, even when the resulting action remains the same on its face. Opposing an atheist because you do not share his position is worlds apart from opposing the same atheist because you think he is an idiot. In the context of marriage, the difference between marrying for the right reasons and marrying for the wrong reasons is dramatic. It's the same action, but with vastly different nuances of effects. It changes your entire perspective on the action: both how you approach the action, as well as how you deal with the consequences of the action, both good and bad.

In sum, I think the New Testament model for ethics — once you get beyond the clear black-and-white cases — is more often centered around the question of, 'Are your motivations godly, or are they ungodly?' Of course, certain black-and-white acts never have godly motivations. But more often it's the case that one can perform the same act with godly motivations or with ungodly motivations, resulting in completely different moral acts. This is part of what Paul is getting at when he says in 1 Cor. 10:31, 'So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.' Or as Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Beckett says in T.S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral, 'The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.'

I'm reminded also of a passage in The Catcher in the Rye where the main character, Holden Caulfield, talks about the 'phoniness' of lawyers:

Lawyers are all right, I guess — but it doesn't appeal to me. I mean they're all right if they go around saving innocent guys' lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides. Even if you did go around saving guys' lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys' lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren't being a phony?

For a Christian, the question is, of course, sinfulness, not phoniness. But the principle is similar. The difference between defending the innocent in order to promote yourself as a 'good guy' and defending the innocent in order to promote justice is significant!

That's the sort of difference I seek to tease out in many of the posts on this blog. Even acts most innocent in appearance can have ungodly reasons and motives underlying them. These ungodly 'roots' of our actions can so easily spoil the tree's fruit. Hopefully this note and these examples better clarifies my purposes in writing in the way that I do. And as always, I welcome any and all feedback!

Initial Thoughts on The Meaning of Marriage

2011-11-03T11:50:00.080-04:00

Editorial note: Since first posting this article, I've received some thoughtful criticism, in response to which I've made a few edits. I've also attached a longer note below. I am grateful for the criticism and always look forward to discussion on the topics about which I post!

As I read through Timothy Keller's new book The Meaning of Marriage, I'll try to blog some of my thoughts over the next few days. Here's the first quasi-epiphany...

Most of us have a mental list of our future spouse's 'must have' traits and qualities. Some of these have good Biblical basis (e.g., shared religious faith, a willingness to sacrifice/submit oneself to the other). But most — intelligence, social status, sexual appeal, physical fitness, interests, diet, political persuasion, industry, to name a few — simply do not. The lack of a Biblical basis does not discredit these latter traits. There are, in fact, a good deal of practical reasons to desire certain traits in a spouse. That we value these sort of traits is not inherently bad, but we must be cautious about how much we value them and the reasons we do.

Chances are, whenever we as Christians imagine our future spouse's 'must have' traits and overvalue them, we overvalue them because of one of three broad reasons:

We are seeking something in the other which will satisfy our sinful, self-centered desires, rather than finding satisfaction in Christ. This rationale is easy enough to spot. Men typically want a sexually attractive female because her sexuality seems to promise pleasure. Women typically want a socially successful male because it seems to promise a more comfortable life. There's very little that's not self-centered about this rationale (though I've certainly heard people try to rationalize it, as I have done myself). This rationale is perhaps the easiest to discover and quash. And they are usually also the most superficial traits.

We boast in that trait in ourselves, despising those who do not possess it to our satisfaction, rather than boasting in Christ. This one's a bit more tricky to recognize. It usually comes in the form of 'I couldn't respect a wo/man who isn't XYZ...' This is usually something like intelligence, work ethic, &c. Often there is some good rationale lying behind the trait, but its elevation to a 'must have' is the problematic area. For the reason for such elevation is often because it is a trait which we pride in ourselves. 'I'm a hard-working person,' we say, 'and I could not tolerate someone less industrious than I.' Being industrious is a good trait to have, but if we consider it a 'must have' trait at a level which eliminates 90% of spousal candidates, we will probably find we are boasting in that trait ourselves. When we boast in something other than Christ, we begin to despise or disrespect those who do not themselves possess that same object of boasting. If we pride ourselves on our intelligence, rather than teaching others what we know, we will shun them for their stupidity. If we pride ourselves on our exercise regimen, rather than encouraging others, we will revile those who don't have the same ethic. All of this is more evidence of being curved in on oneself.

We attribute to that trait messianic qualities, thinking it will heal all that is wrong with ourselves, rather than finding healing in Christ. This one is the trickiest to well balance. After all, marriage is about serving one's spouse, and God gives us husbands and wives as a help. And so there is a great deal of merit in looking for a spouse who is strong where we are weak and who can encourage us when we are discouraged. But as with the other rationales, when it becomes a 'must have', chances are that we have not only tilted the scale by looking for someone who can serve us, rather than looking for someone we are willing to serve, but it also indicates that we are looking for a sort of salvation in that trait. 'If only I can find someone who will take the lead in conversations and push me to be more sociable, things would be great.' Not only does this mean we are replacing Christ's work of salvation with the traits of a sinful human, but we also fail to recognize how much that spouse will fail us, even when s/he does possess that messianic trait.

But if 'marriage is a major vehicle for the gospel's remaking of our heart from the inside out and our life from the ground up', then all three of those broad reasons distort marriage into something which it is not. In fact, each of those three reasons is anti-gospel.

Another aspect of the problem is the issue of 'now' vs. 'future'. We are looking for someone who is perfect now, rather than looking forward to what God is making our potential spouse into. Too often we want a finished product, rather than a work in progress. But this also distorts the purpose of marriage, which is a 'vehicle for remaking...' not a luxury cruise for those who've been remade already.

Again, this is not to say that it is inappropriate to look for a spouse who is intelligent, is financially secure, has shared interests, and whom you find sexually appealing.¹ This post isn't so much about what is or isn't a good trait to seek in a spouse; it's about the sinful reasons which I think underlie some of our methods.

The problem is not the presence of these traits in our 'ideal', but the degree to which we sometimes value them and some of the reasons we value them. It's the classic idol problem all over again: it is fine to value work, intelligence, and money, but it becomes problematic when those become an ultimate. Likewise, it's good to expect great things from your spouse. But when we demand 'must have' status of certain traits, we risk setting up idols in the form of an idealized spouse. By setting up these idols, not only do we deny ourselves perfectly good potential spouses for ungodly reasons, but we also set ourselves up for a marriage built on faulty foundations and assumptions.

The Kellers dedicate the book to five couples whom they knew when they were dating and who have all since married — all of whom, on paper, were awful matches: 'Not a chance for any of us.' Speaking for myself, when I read these testimonies I realize how selfish, narrow, and near-sighted my own qualifications are for my future wife.

Cindy and Jim: She was an elegant woman raised Greek Orthodox, quiet, contemplative, and GREEK. Jim was boisterous, rowdy, funny, and Baptist. Then Gayle and Gary: Besides the seven-year age disparity and serious theological differences, Gary led two-week wilderness tours for college students, while Gayle's idea of camping out was staying at the Holiday Inn. Louise and David: Louise majored in art history and English literature and was serious about her Reformed faith. David was an Assembly of God lay pastor who woke up everyone in the dorm singing praise choruses. Wayne and Jane: According to Jane, Wayne was pure, unrefined gold, hidden under a Pittsburgh exterior, while she was a self-confessed Southern snob. Then there was Doug and Adele: Adele was a world traveler and seasoned missionary, Doug a younger Inter-Varsity Fellowship staff member. She had just had a bad breakup with another man (also named Doug). On the eve of their wedding, Adele sat on the bottom of Kathy's and my bed and wept, wondering if she was doing the right thing. She now say, "Our marriage began at the gates of doubt and hell but is now at the gates of Heaven."

And, of course, us. Kathy was Presbyterian, opinionated, and sure that she wanted to be involved in urban ministry (based on one reading of The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson). I had just promised the bishop of my tiny rural, non-Presbyterian denomination that I would not become Presbyterian, though I was attending a seminary tilted in that direction.

Not a chance for any of us. But here we all are, happy, thriving, seeing our children marry and give birth, helping one another through surgeries and deaths of parents and crises of every sort.

I have received some criticism that I don't give here enough attention to the role that attraction — for lack of a better term — plays in romantic relationships. It's a fair criticism and one that I appreciate, and I've already made a number of changes to the post above in light of that criticism.

One of the reasons for this vacuum is that the writing style I feature on this particular blog is analytical, and it's admittedly far less easy to analyze something as subjective as attraction. Though I value attraction and think it should certainly be present when scoping out a potential spouse, I don't feel I have the tools to know how to write about attraction in this particular style. (I almost think it would be a disservice for me to try!)

Instead, when I think about attraction, I think in terms of poetry. I either write poetry or admire others' verse. One need look no further than the romance tags on one of my other blogs to get a sampling (including one of my all-time favorite songs). In a way, the two blogs together act as different perspectives on many of the same topics, including romance.

Another reason is that these posts have been intended as a corrective to popular thought. By and large, we don't need all that much correction to give enough credit to the role that attraction plays in romantic relationships. By instinct attraction is unavoidably present and rightly so. Even I, the seemingly aloof academic, understand how vital attraction is to creating that initial spark: with almost every girl I've pursued, a primary motivation has been attraction. So my emphasis on 'the other stuff' shouldn't be read as me downplaying the role that attraction plays.

So hopefully that helps to explain some of my purposes in how I've approached this topic and why I've concentrated on what I have. As I said, I do think the criticisms I've received are valid, and it's something I'm keeping in mind for the future. As I've said in earlier posts, I'm more than willing to be corrected and shown to be wrong. I'll hopefully have more to say on attraction and such in my next post, as that will look at the dynamic nature of marriage, of which attraction is an enormous part. Look forward to that!

¹But see Michael Lawrence's article, which suggests that, while attraction is key, there is sometimes the need for a change in what attracts us. But we are not called to change what we find attractive simply as an end in itself. Rather, just like Christ changes us in every other area, so too will what we find attractive naturally change as a result of becoming more attracted to Christ himself. It's a combination of biology and spirituality.

There's nothing wrong with having physical and personality traits on your list of what makes a woman attractive. In fact, you need to be physically and personally attracted to the woman you marry. If you're not, marriage won't provide the kind of protection against sexual sin that Paul speaks of (1 Cor. 7:1-9).

But if the physical or personal is entirely (or mainly) what attracts you and these are your highest priorities, then your problem is not with the women around you. Your problem is with God. The more you are in love with the beauty of Jesus Christ, the more you will be attracted to what you see of Him in the woman you're dating and the more important it will be to you. The less you love Him, the more important other things about her will become, things like her figure or style.

How Nevermind Changed the World

2011-09-30T21:29:00.050-04:00

Because this article is so inherently tied to music and musical changes and trends, I've laced it with links to tracks on Spotify. To get the full sense of some of the ideas I'm writing about, please do take full advantage of the links!

Twenty years ago this month the music world was turned upside-down. On 10 September 1991 a band from Seattle released the first single off their second album. 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' would become one of the most important songs in the history of pop music. And two weeks later on 24 September, the full bombshell was dropped in the form of a bright blue photograph of a baby and a dollar bill. Nevermind was definitely one of those defining moments which clearly divides the world into 'before' and 'after'.

What more can be said about Nevermind which hasn't already been said? Quite a bit, in fact, I believe. Well, perhaps it's been said before, but it probably hasn't been said outside of niche music circles. And so I've tried to compile some of the major threads that have gone in and out of discussions about Nevermind as well as provide some new insights. There's two main threads to this article: 1) the hype surrounding Nevermind is completely warranted; 2) nevertheless, everything you know about it is wrong.

Come As You Are

It should first be said that I am in no way a Nirvana fanboy, nor do I view them through the rose-colored glasses of childhood reminiscence. I was only just beginning 2nd Grade when Nevermind was released, but I was all but completely closed off to all popular music in those years. I vaguely remember knowing about a band named Nirvana (and I seem to remember thinking how 'un-wholesome' of a name it was), and I remember fellow students later wearing Kurt Cobain commemorative t-shirts in middle school after he had died. So though I lived during the time when Nirvana made its huge splash, the ripples took a very long time to reach me.

Even now, Nirvana doesn't receive any more play in my music library than any other band. In fact, it receives far less play than most bands. (Except, of course, in the past month, as I've been researching and writing this article!)

I say this in order to assert that my perspective on Nirvana is entirely objective — or at least as much so as can be hoped for. So you can know that when I say that Nevermind is one of the most important albums ever released, I may be exaggerating a tad, but it's not because of any personal attachment or meaning.

In Bloom

With those disclaimers out of the way, I now feel I can safely say it: Nevermind is one of the most important albums ever released. It may even be the most important album, though it would be foolish to nominate any one album in the 60-year history of the album format for that position.

In order to understand why Nevermind had the impact it did, one needs to first understand where popular music was in the late 80s and up through 1991. In the late 80s, the Billboard Hot 100, which tracks top singles in both radioplay and store sales, was dominated by... well... 80s music: Michael Jackson, Bon Jovi, Rick Astley, Fine Young Cannibals, Madonna, Paula Abdul, Steve Winwood, &c. By the time 1990 and 1991 rolled around, some of the 90s trends started to emerge, including early hip hop from MC Hammer, the next wave of boy bands as ushered in by New Kids on the Block, and the Eurodance of C + C Music Factory.

Even on the rock music charts, the flavor was distinctively of the late classic rock variety: Robert Plant, Tom Petty, U2, Van Halen, Eric Clapton, &c. That is, it was still a polished product with soaring guitar solos and such.

But all the while alternative music was rustling in the undergrowth. The first real sign of its impending emergence was Billboard's creation in late 1988 of the Modern Rock chart, which tracked the genre. Among its early chart-toppers were R.E.M., The Cure, The B-52's, and XTC. While these were all certainly alternative bands, these were also all veteran bands, each dating back to the early 80s. The successful bands were tried and true, much as with the popular charts.

All in all, the music scene was relatively stable. (One might say it was stale, rather than stable, but I'm not so sure I want to make that qualitative judgment.) To be sure, there were trends that would come and go with small scenes here and there. As mentioned above, boy bands were about to make a return, and hip hop was finally emerging into the pop charts after over a decade on the streets. And alternative music was also on a slow steady rise, with a number of college radio staples signing to major labels: R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Pixies, and The Replacements. But the changes and evolution in music had been slow and steady for several years.

Nirvana and Nevermind would change all of that. The album and its lead single 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' exploded onto the scene and radically changed the course of music. This past year the 1992 music documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke was restored and released on DVD. The title perfectly captures why Nevermind was important.

Nirvana was the modern form of punk; or rather, one of the modern forms of punk. When Nevermind crashed onto the scene in late 1991, punk had not been a force in music since the mid-70s, and even then, it had been but a minor force. Here and there a band would crossover in a big way, such as when The Clash's Combat Rock reached #7 on the Billboard 200, but that was the exception rather than the rule.

As the 70s wore on, punk died and morphed into post-punk; post-punk eventually morphed into alternative music, which included myriad sub-genres: hardcore punk (Black Flag), jangle pop (R.E.M.), gothic rock (The Cure), dream pop (Cocteau Twins), twee pop (The Field Mice), early noise pop (Dinosaur Jr.), cowpunk (Meat Puppets), grunge (Mudhoney), and loads of other sub-genres. All of these shared a number of things in common: they were amalgamations of the punk DIY ethic, the experimentalism of post-punk, and a fusing of diverse influences.

In 1991, alternative music and the culture at large finally rendezvoused. In 1991 punk broke. It didn't quite sound and look like the punk music that the Sex Pistols had played back in 1977, but it was punk in its evolved form. Nirvana knew this: the title of their second album Nevermind was a tribute to the Sex Pistol's 1977 album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. What Nirvana didn't know was how much of an impact their album would have.

The record studios weren't prepared for the impact either. To date Nirvana had released one album in 1989 — Bleach — a supporting single, and a non-album single in 1990. In recording their first album, Nirvana followed in the DIY ethic of the alternative scene: it cost the band only $606.17 to record and was release #34 on Sub Pop, an small independent label dedicated to the Seattle music scene. The success of these early releases was not insigificant — for an alternative group. It was at least enough for the group to sign an extension with Sub Pop and re-enter the studios for a follow-up.

In 1990, after early demos of the group's follow-up to Bleach circulated, major label DGC Records bought Nirvana's contract from Sub Pop at the behest of Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, a band recently signed to the label. DGC hoped that Nirvana would be able to ride the coattails of their new label-mates. With a bit of luck, DGC hoped, Nirvana would be able to match the success of Sonic Youth's latest record, Goo, which had reached #96 on the Billboard 200.

The rest, as they say, is history. Its success did not come quickly, however. The album was released on 24 September 1991 to little fanfare. It languished for a few weeks until the music video for lead single 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' aired on MTV. The video first premiered, as would be expected, on MTV's late-night alternative show 120 Minutes, but it proved so popular that it quickly began to enter daytime rotation. Shortly thereafter, on 12 October 1991, Nevermind premiered on the Billboard 200 at #40. By 27 November 1991, it had shipped a million units and been certified platinum — something Goo certainly hadn't achieved. And by 11 January 1992, the album had topped the charts, rather symbolically displacing Michael Jackson's Dangerous. The album had achieved success beyond Nirvana's or DGC's wildest dreams.

Breed

As unexpected as the album's success was, that isn't the whole story. After all, fellow alternative band R.E.M. had reached #1 with Out of Time earlier in 1991. But R.E.M. was R.E.M. Though their jangle pop was certainly alternative music, their album's success was propelled by the mandolin-supported 'Losing My Religion' and the orchestral 'Shiny Happy People'. It was another thing entirely for Nirvana's album to be as successful on the backs of singles such as 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', 'Come As You Are', and 'Lithium'. Other alternative acts' success had also been the product of many years of building a back catalog, gradually building up to success. R.E.M.'s first #1 album was their 7th; by 1991 they were journeymen musicians. Nirvana's success was sudden.

Nirvana's breakout was different from other alternative successes, because it had immediate and extensive cultural impact. No one was shaving his head in imitation of Michael Stipe's look in the wake of R.E.M.'s success. But boys everywhere did start to imitate Kurt Cobain's flannel shirts. R.E.M. were the geeks in school that people nonetheless accepted. Nirvana were the guys people wanted to be.

But the real impact was the music. While other alternative bands had surely paved the way for the breakthrough in 1991, Nirvana was the straw that broke the camel's back. It was a rather heavy straw by itself, though. After all, if music as hard and abrasive as Nevermind could top the charts, then everything which the underground scene could offer was theoretically open game. And that's exactly what happened. The harder alternative groups began to see instant success after 1992.

Soundgarden, whose 1989 major label debut Louder Than Love had charted at #108, saw their 1994 album Superunknown hit #1. The Smashing Pumpkins' 1991 debut Gish had barely cracked the charts at #198, but their 1993 follow-up Siamese Dream hit #10. Even Sonic Youth, who represented the far left wing of the alternative wave, witnessed their 1994 album Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star hit #34; five years earlier Daydream Nation, largely considered their breakthrough, hadn't even charted.

Nevermind meant that the entire alternative scene was here to stay. The breakout success meant that alternative music wasn't doomed to only leak through with 'radio-friendly' hits here and there, while remaining largely underground. It's been said that Nevermind was the album that finally convinced mall record stores to add an alternative section to their floorplan. What that means is that many of the iconic alternative bands of the 1990s, even though they had very little in common with Nirvana musically, owe their success to the re-adjustment of the music industry to a broader, more alternative-minded catalog. This would include bands such as Gin Blossoms, Dave Matthews Band, Green Day, Blind Melon, Alanis Morissette, Radiohead, &c. — all bands which probably would not have been given a second look years earlier.

Even more particular to the 'grunge' music of Nirvana and its Seattle compatriots (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains) was the reaction to and against it, as it succeeded on its own terms. As the years progressed, the aesthetic became more polished, evolving into post-grunge. On the other side of the pond, the British music scene, not at all comprehending the angst and mood of the genre, reacted by developing Britpop, giving rise to Blur, Oasis, Pulp, &c. As Noel Gallagher said in a recent interview, 'I didn't realize it at the time, but Definitely Maybe and Nevermind are kind of of the same thing: pop songs with distorted guitars. Which brings us to the second part of this article.

Something in the Way

For all the accolades it receives, Nevermind often receives them for the wrong reasons. Yes, it was an important album. Yes, it was a breakthrough for alternative music. Yes, it changed the direction of music in the last decade of the 20th century. But there are a number of misconceptions about the album in the public mind.

The most prominent misconception about Nevermind that needs to be cleared up is that it is the preeminent grunge album. It isn't. It can't be, because it isn't grunge. In 1992 Kurt was photographed wearing a shirt that read grunge is dead. The shirt was right. At the time it was seen as an ironic statement for the media darling of grunge to make — and there admittedly still is some irony to the statement — but it was a true statement. Not only was Nirvana making a departure from grunge, but it did so by embracing pop music.

In the late 80s, grunge had become a sort of catch-all term for 'music from Seattle'. Part of the problem is that in some senses, grunge was indeed isolated to Seattle. Part of the misunderstanding comes from the geographical orientation of 80s alternative music. Each city had its own underground scene, which was relatively isolated from other scenes. New York had noise; Minneapolis had melodic punk; Los Angeles had the Paisley Underground; Athens, GA had jangle pop; Manchester, UK had Madchester; and Seattle had grunge.

Because of Seattle's geographical remoteness from other scenes, it was a more isolated scene than most of the others. Few alternative bands bothered to tour the far northwest, and few Seattle bands toured extensively outside the region. The result was a genre of music which extensively reflected Seattle. Known for averaging 152 rainy days each year and averaging 3.7 hours of sunlight for much of the year, 'the Seattle sound' was a sludgy, distorted noise: a mix of hardcore punk and heavy metal, equal parts Black Flag and Black Sabbath. As we'll discover, Nevermind was a slight departure from that sound.

The first grunge releases were Green River's EPs Come On Down and Dry As a Bone. Emblematic of the early sound of grunge is 'P.C.C.' and 'Baby Takes'. There's a couple things to notice on these tracks. The first is the relative tempo of each song. The drums keep a fairly regular rhythm, carrying along what is almost like a dirge. This is a direct result of the sludgy influence that the Melvins had, as heard on 'At a Crawl'.

But the tempo of Green River is less important than the monotony of the tracks. It's hard to trace out verses and choruses, much less determine where the repeated phrases begin and end. The only break to the pacing is Stone Gossard's solo section in each song. But listen to each song, paying close attention to the rhythms: the drums, the solid, thumping bass line (the bass tone is also quite representative of grunge music), the strum patterns. It doesn't take long to realize that the composition is pretty minimalist. That isn't to say that there isn't any depth; on the contrary, some of the instrumental interplay is quite developed. But most of the complexity is flourish, rather than the song's basics.

The next band to listen to is Mudhoney, a band which formed by some of the members of Green River after that band dissolved. 'Touch Me I'm Sick' is the lead track from their first release and is representative of their output. There are two things to recognize here. The first is the heavy use of distortion. It's something we almost overlook these days, but that's only because of the influence of Seattle bands. But the distortion is unmistakable here. It's especially marked during the solo at 1:25. Even Green River used a relatively clean effect for their solos.

The second element is again the monotony. With the exception of a short bridge, the same riff is repeated throughout the song. And this is accompanied by repetition in all of the rhythm instruments. Many of these same elements can be found in the early tracks by Soundgarden, another formative grunge band: e.g., Hunted Down, their first single.

This brings us to where grunge was at by the time Nirvana released their first album Bleach. So how does that album compare? Quite nicely, in fact. Listen to the supporting single, 'Blew'. Notice all of the key elements: relatively slow tempo; monotonous sound; the steady, thundering bass and its tone; heavy guitar distortion.

The one big difference to notice is the very distinct difference between verse and chorus. When the band reaches the chorus at 0:45, you immediately recognize it as such. You recognize it not just as a section change, but as the chorus. This was Nirvana's main contribution to grunge: conventional pop sensibilities.

For all its grunginess, Bleach already started to show that Nirvana was moving away from the grunge scene. The third song on the album, 'About a Girl', immediately shows that Nirvana was after something more. The song starts out with a simple, clean guitar. Clean! No distortion! And the featured drum-kit piece is the hi-hat! And is that a tambourine entering at 1:20??

This all was virtually unheard of in Seattle in those days. Now compare the version on Bleach to the unplugged version that Nirvana would play 5 years later. They're virtually indistinguishable. Granted, the monotony is still there, betraying the grunge roots, but so much else has changed in this one song. It's no surprise that 'About a Girl' was the song which would best survive in concert setlists, as Nirvana underwent its stylistic revolution.

So where was Nirvana picking up this 'pop sound', if it wasn't present in Seattle. According to Cobain, it first came from Liverpool, specifically the album Meet the Beatles!, The Beatles' second US album. Featured on that album were 'I Want to Hold Your Hand', 'All My Loving', 'I Saw Her Standing There', and others. While Cobain's melodies and harmonies were not anywhere near as intricate or innovative as The Beatles' were in 1963, the influence is there. In addition to the elements we've already discussed in the previous paragraph, the key change as 'About a Girl' enters the chorus is quite peculiar and Beatles-esque. In fact, the chorus progression destabilizes the entire song — for the better. But perhaps most importantly, 'About a Girl' has the structure of a pop song. It's a clear verse-chorus-verse-solo/bridge-chorus, with distinct melodies and harmonies for each part.

By the time Nirvana starting laying down tracks for Nevermind, Cobain had a new influence — this time from the alternative scene. But rather than coming from his native Seattle, this influence came from all the way across the country in Boston: the Pixies. The Pixies' influence is, in my opinion, the prime reason why Nirvana made the splash it did with Nevermind. The Pixies had perfected — almost to cliché — the loud-quiet-loud dynamics of the verse-chorus-verse structure.

Listen again to the Nirvana and Beatles tracks above. Though you can easily recognize the verses and choruses, it's for harmonic reasons. The chord progressions change, and the one is more notably chorus-like and the other more verse-like.

Now listen to 'Gigantic' by the Pixies. Can you distinguish the verse and chorus and known which is which? Of course you can. But it's not for harmonic reasons. The chord progression doesn't change throughout the entire song. The bass plays the same four measure riff over and over; and when the guitar comes in, it's merely playing power chords based on the bass notes. So how can you tell the difference between verse and chorus? Because of the dynamics: the verse is quiet and the chorus is loud. The same goes for 'Tame' and any number of other Pixies songs.

Having heard that, now compare to 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'. It's probably not going to surprise you a bit when I now say that Cobain has employed exactly the same technique. The chord progression is exactly the same throughout the song. The change that signals you, 'It's chorus time!' is the dynamics. You'll find the same strategy employed on 'Come As You Are', 'Lithium', and 'In Bloom' — the four singles off of Nevermind.

There's one last word to be said about 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'. The song is in F minor with a bass line that anticipates a conventional i–iv–III–VI chord progression. But that anticipation is disrupted by the fact that Cobain doesn't quite play pure power chords, instead strumming strings that shouldn't normally be played. The result is that the song varies between the actual progression and a progression that sounds like I–IV–♭III–♭VI. If you aren't familiar with chord notation, suffice it to say that this accounts for the song sounding off-kilter, like it's about to lose its wheels at any moment. This is precisely the sort of harmonic complexity you'd expect from The Beatles. The difference is here it's subtle, rather than center-stage — not immediately noticeable, but still having an effect. The result is that Nevermind ends up being not so much a grunge album as a combination Beatles/Pixies album with heavy distortion.

The reason I go to lengths to explain all of this music theory is because it's vital to understanding exactly how far afield Nirvana had gone from their grunge roots. By the time Nevermind was released, the only thing grunge about Nirvana was that they were from Seattle and used distortion on their guitars. In truth Nirvana was no longer grunge. Perhaps they had been a few years earlier, but not in 1991. Instead they had diversified their influences beyond the heavy sounds of grunge. Their follow-up album, In Utero, would witness even further progression, as they experimented further with song structure, effects, and studio trickery.

Nevertheless, Nirvana's success in the mainstream ushered in grunge along with the rest of the alternative scene. Including Pearl Jam. Who isn't grunge either. But that's for another article...

Est-ce le langage?

2011-07-25T14:35:00.017-04:00

After a number of practical posts, this blog is now going to take a brief metaphysical turn (let's get metaphysical! metaphysical!). It follows from a conversation I had with my coworker about the artwork of René Magritte—perhaps my favorite artist—and from my reflections in the shower the next morning. (Like so many others, I do my best thinking in the shower.)

René Magritte's paintings have been featured as my computer's wallpaper at work this summer, and my coworker made a comment about La condition humaine (trans. 'The human condition') which was displayed at the time. It got us talking about other paintings of his, including his most famous, La trahison des images (trans. 'The treason of images'), which is displayed above.

René Magritte (1898-1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist known for breaking expectation and forcing the viewer to contemplate the language of art and the role of language generally. Often this involves playing with perspective or an unusual juxtaposition of images and/or words. La trahison des images is not surprisingly the most well-known and iconic of his paintings.

There are two levels to the painting, both of which force a viewer to make interesting observations. The first is the surface absurdity of the piece. The painting's self-caption — an imitation of a wildlife identification guide — translates into English as 'This is not a pipe.' To this the viewer inevitably retorts, 'Of course it is! It's quite clearly a pipe! It's shaped like a pipe; it has the colors of a pipe. What else could it be, if not a pipe?!' The viewer is nonetheless certain that it cannot simply be that Magritte is stupid. But the apparent falsity of the statement creates an immediate tension which cannot be simply resolved. Hence absurdity.

In an attempt to resolve the absurdity, the viewer must contemplate the role which the caption plays in the viewing of the picture specifically and the role of language in perception generally. Does saying that it is not a pipe change reality at all? Does it at least change our perception of reality? Does Magritte, by inscribing those words force the viewer to reconsider one's initial perception that one was looking at a pipe? Does one first doubt the truth of the sentence, or does one first doubt one's perception of what one was looking at?

The second level is Magritte's more obvious intention and one which resolves the tension, but one which can only proceed from having recognized the surface absurdity. Magritte's point is that the image is not reality. What you are seeing is not a pipe, but merely an image of a pipe. The pipe is not real. You cannot stuff tobacco in it; you cannot smoke it. Therefore, how can it be a pipe? What characteristics does it share with a pipe besides appearance? In fact, what I have posted above is removed even further from reality: it is but a digital image of a painting which contains an image of a pipe.

But even Magritte's perspective has its own level of absurdity. For we recognize that Magritte's message is inescapably true, but we also recognize that it violates fundamental linguistic conventions. Imagine if I were to approach you on the street, show you a painting of the White House, and then say, 'This is the White House.' It would require a very unusual mindset for you to correct me by responding, 'No, silly, that is not the White House. That is only an image of the White House.' You might recognize that it is merely an image, rather than the real thing, but it is hardly something you would think worth mentioning. Unless, that is, I were to ask you to open the front door and step inside.

Getting Abstract for a Moment

Art never actually becomes what it depicts. A painting of a pipe can only incite the viewer to imagine a real pipe; it cannot be a real pipe. Yet the more realistic the painting is, the less a viewer needs to imagine in his own mind in order to 'complete the picture'. Magritte's pipe is, indeed, quite realistic. I can immediately tell that it is an image of a pipe; that close resemblance is, after all, what makes the painting's caption seem all the more absurd.

But as realistic as Magritte's painting is, no matter how hard I try, I cannot know what is on 'the other side' of the pipe. I cannot turn it over to see if there is an inscription there or not. I cannot even know if there is tobacco in it.

On the other hand, the less realistic the painting, the more the viewer is allowed to—or forced to—imagine. It is an short step from Magritte's thesis in this painting to arrive at abstract art. If even the most realistic painting of a pipe remains but an image of a pipe and accrues no reality of being a pipe, then what purpose is served by realism in painting (especially with the advent of photography)?

And so instead of trying to inch ever closer towards absolute realism, artists in the 20th century began to charge in the other direction. The question instead became: how non-representational can an image of a pipe be, while yet remaining an image of a pipe? What are the sine quibus non of pipes? Rather than painting an image of a pipe, artists began painting 'pipe-ness'.

Now, if you're really sharp-minded, you may have taken exception with my statement above that art never actually becomes what it depicts. 'What if I were to make a sculpture of a pipe?' you ask. 'And what if I were to make it fully functioning? Would it not then be a pipe? What is required to bridge the gap between art and reality?' This is an excellent question and is one that modern artists have sought to explore — Duchamp asked the same question in reverse: what is required to turn an ordinary object into art — but it is one I don't want to delve into here. So for now I'll just leave that unanswered.

Taking It a Step Further

While there are certainly unresolved tensions in Magritte's painting, I'd like to take his observation one step further and propose a hypothetical. Imagine if I were to paint a work which was a blank canvas except for the following painted across it: These are not words. Would this statement be just as correct as Magritte's? These are the ideas which I began to contemplate in the shower that morning.

That morning I began by trying to think up statements in the same form which seemed superficially false, but which were possibly true when really considered. Being a linguist, my mind immediately turned to language. One of the early statements I considered was These are not letters. But I quickly realized that that would be a false statement. Letters are already images; they are graphical depictions which refer to something else. What you see are letters, and not images of letters. (It might even be asked if one can ever see an image of a letter without seeing an actual letter — in the same way that you see an image in Magritte's painting and not an actual pipe. I suspect not.)

What about words then? We might say that a collection of letters is a word, but what truth is there to that? In one manner of speaking, a collection of letters is indeed a word; we might call it a written word. But in another manner of speaking, one might credibly assert that the arrangement of letters on a page amount to a word no more than the arrangement of pigments amount to a pipe.

Let us accept for a moment the premise that the written statement These are not words is true. This means that assembled letters are not words themselves, but only point to words. But it doesn't really tell us what words, in fact, are. Perhaps words are the phonetic output to which letters point a reader. Under this theory, words exist only as sounds, and written letters evoke these sounds in a reader's mind. (This is at least a plausible theory, since the history of language is clear that spoken language antedates written language.) If this is the case, then it would seem that the statement These are not words would no longer be true if I were to speak it instead.

But if we were to presume that the true essence of words are sounds, then a deaf person cannot be said to ever directly experience words. A deaf person's experience with words would be only indirect through writing or sign. Surely this cannot be the case, since a deaf person's linguistic capacity is not otherwise hindered by his inability to hear. Nor is a blind person's capacity hindered, even though he cannot read. Rather, it would seem that the deaf and blind have developed new ways to communicate language: e.g., sign language and braille.

This would seem, then, to indicate that, if words are the fundamental building blocks of language, rather than a mere construct by which we conveniently divide language which is inherently indivisible, both the written and spoken language are themselves only references to actual words, in the same way that an image of a pipe is only a reference to an real pipe, refering the hearer/reader/viewer to the real thing.

If this is true, then we can take our hypothetical statement to an even more extreme level of absurdity/truth: This is not language. The point of such a statement would be to say that what is read is not language; rather what is read refers the reader to some actuality which is language. The practice of reading is taking strokes of the pen and translating them into language. Compare to the way that you translate pigments on Magritte's canvas into a pipe. In this case, both the letters on the page and Magritte's painting are signs for something else.

While the analogy between a pipe and language can be theoretically simple enough, a large complication is introduced by the fact that the one referent—a pipe—exists in a concrete form, while the other—language—does not. I can give you an actual, material pipe. You can hold it in your hands and even smoke it if you like. But language does not exist in concrete form.

Why Abstraction Matters

Regardless of the concreteness of pipes and language, both can be conceived of abstractly. I am not familiar with pipes and their multiple variations, but it is plausible that there exists not a single pipe in the world which Magritte's painting resembles. In fact, I feel fairly certain that I have not ever seen a pipe that looks exactly like his. Yet I recognize it as an image of a pipe. Even if I have not seen an object whose details mirror Magritte's image, I do not look at it and wonder what this new object is.

The ability of the human mind to think abstractly is essential for human communication. We can see it develop in its immature stages in infants. If an infant is raised around cats and if those are the only furry animals to which she has regular exposure, chances are, the first time she sees a dog, she'll murmur, 'Kitty!' In this case, the infant has over-abstracted in determining that hairy-animal-ness is the defining characteristic of cat-ness, such that every hairy animal is a cat. With correction and further exposure, she will learn the difference between cats and dogs.

But the key is that her ability to conceive of cats abstractly is what allows her to not have to re-learn everything about cats whenever she sees a new cat which she had not seen before.

Language works in the same way, in the form of dialects. If you were to ask an Irishman, an Ohioan, and a Carolinian to pronounce the word 'night', you would get three very different vowel sounds (in IPA, something along the lines of [nɔɪt], [naɪt], and [naːt]). Yet without too much trouble, any speaker of English would be able to understand that all three sequences refer to the same bit of language. And while a bilingual speaker of English and Chinese would understand that 'night' and 晚 refer to different linguistic items, each of those linguistic elements in turn refer to the same concept: the period of darkness between two days.

This latter observation is vital to understanding that even if language is something that exists beyond writing and speaking, it still remains itself a middle-man reference between those modes of language and 'the real thing'. That is, whatever actual form language actually takes, it must still be but a reference.

It is the ability of speakers of language to abstract in this way that allows us to communicate, rather than being require to re-learn every time we encounter a different dialect. With some dialects which are more extremely different from our own, it may require a learning period, in order to determine what each difference is a variation on. The same goes for written language, if one were to read something from the Early Modern English period where spelling is more varied.

Actual Evidence

Up until this point my speculations have been rather... speculative. But as a linguist, I can assure you that my the philosophy of language that I have been advocating does have empirical support in linguistic theory.

The greatest amount of support comes in the research of grammar, with phonology being the sub-topic with which I am most familiar. Contemporary phonological theory says that the sounds we utter when we speak are but reflections of a deeper language within our mind. A language's phonology determines how this deeper language actually comes out of an individual's mouth when he speaks. That is, the 'sounds' stored in our minds are not always the sounds that our mouths actually produce when we speak. The language in our mind is not exactly what we speak.

A good example of this is the plural in English, which alternates between [s] (cats), [z] (dogs), and [ɨz] (ostriches). Though we normally think of the English plural suffix as being the /s/ sound, in actually, it is mentally /z/. This will undoubtedly surprise most speakers of English, but speaks to exactly the non-transparency that I mean. It's actually phonological rules that translate the stored /z/ into a spoken [s] in certain circumstances — namely after voiceless consonants: p, t, k, th. It is the same set of phonological rules that translate the /z/ into [ɨz] after s, sh, ch, which we write as '-es'.

Similar rules determine how the past tense morpheme which we write as '—ed'. And there are tons of other phonological rules which are constantly at play whenever English-speakers talk. Some are reflected in the way we write, but most aren't. In addition to phonology, which governs sound patterns, syntax governs how we arrange words in a sentence to communicate meaning: it's what tells us that subjects come before verbs, that direct objects follow verbs, &c.

What is clear from linguistic studies is that what comes out — whether from our mouths or from our pens — is the product of myriad linguistic rules which alter the underlying language as it exists in our brain, which in turn refers to the ultimate concepts about which we write/speak. What form this base form of language takes is obviously difficult to determine and is a constant source of linguistic theory and research. But the important take-away is that both speech and writing are derived forms of language, at best.

Conclusion

Is language something that is only referred to by spoken sounds and written letters? Or does it actually exist in some form in those sounds and letters? It is fairly easy for us to acknowledge that written letters are merely references to language. After all, we experience and understand language well before we can read.

Both current linguistic theory and my shower-thinking lead me to believe that spoken sounds work in the same way, however. The sounds act only as audible references to language, and language exists only in non-concrete form, which cannot be directly sensed. When we read a book aloud, we translate written letters into language and then translate that language back again into spoken sounds. Writing, reading, speaking, and hearing are all merely ways in which we refer to language.

What application does this have for your everyday life? I have absolutely no clue. If you figure out something, let me know! In the meantime, it's still interesting to think about.

On Christian Singleness, des notes (Attraction)

2011-07-13T14:44:00.008-04:00

Last updated: 30 November 2011

Note: Rather than typing up new post after new post, I'll be editing this post over time, adding different sources. So this post will be gradually growing, as I find more people speaking on the topic. If you check back once in a while, you may find something new here.
Also, note that this post has been split into two posts, roughly corresponding to the topics of attraction and commitment.

Think of this post as one giant footnote (or perhaps an epilogue).

As many readers will know, about two-and-a-half months ago I wrote a pair of posts on the overabundance of unmarried Christian adults in today's world. In those posts I worked through some of the causes I perceived for this persistent problem. If you're unfamiliar with these posts, you can here read part one and part two.

The response to these essays was entirely unexpected. I received more hits to this blog in that week than all of my blogs did in the prior year. And while I suppose I'm glad to know that people were willing to read what I had to say, I hope more that it got readers thinking and discussing the ideas and acting upon the conclusions at which they arrived.

Those two essays were the product of a long period of reflection and prayer about the subject. But as I noted in each post, it wasn't until I found authoritative echoing of my thoughts in the writings of Christian authorities whose judgment, theology, and wisdom I trusted, that I finally sat down to write and publish my thoughts.

This summer I have been reading a lot of theology, as but one exercise as I consider enrolling in seminary after I graduate from law school next spring. One of the areas of 'practical theology' that I have been reading is sex, marriage, gender roles, and the like. And so from time to time I have encountered at least a few articles which address these issues.

Thus the purpose of this post is to share with you others' thoughts on the topics about which I wrote in the previous two posts. I myself won't be saying anything new, but will let the other authors speak primarily. And while this isn't new ground, per se, neither is it simply retreading old ground. Imagine it as the same ground turned over by the plow anew.

I don't quote these authors as proof for my thesis, but as evidence that the accord with which they say it warrants the topic consideration, prayer, and discussion. That is all I ask of those who read. After all, I am no guiding beacon of righteousness on these matters, but am someone who can point the finger at himself with every passage posted above.

Do Looks Matter?
Pastor and assistant professor Jeremy Pierre writes about romantic attraction and the role that God plays in transforming our standards of attraction. Attraction is vitally important, he says, but our standards of attraction are also something which God is in the process of redeeming in us.

Marital love involves valuing your spouse's body. But this isn't exactly the same thing as finding it attractive, at least not in the way we typically think of finding something attractive. We may inadvertently assume that being attracted to something is primarily about its level of attractiveness. Attraction seems like it just happens without our conscious participation, and we therefore conclude it is beyond our control. You're attracted to someone, or you're not, and that's that. But attraction seems so automatic because we are culturally influenced even at the level of desire. Our preferences unwittingly imitate the narrow criteria for beauty reflected in fitness magazines or clothing advertisements, in the fashion of the day or the remarks of family members.

Without dismissing entirely the mysterious nature of attraction, I wish to point out that we are more capable than we often recognize of directing our preferences. We should not presume that our initial aesthetic sensibilities are an unchallengeable law within us. We have some level of direction over them.

This principle can inform the way we seek a spouse. Perhaps this means that singles should be willing to direct their affections toward potential spouses they may not initially find attractive. My reasoning is not that looks are unimportant—remember, our bodies are a vital aspect of who we are. Rather, my reasoning is that our opinion of what constitutes good looks must not be an idol carved in stone. We need to be willing to challenge our own preferences regarding physical attraction in light of the greater principle that attraction stems from valuing a person.

Man Enough to Love a Real Woman
This recent article addresses the problem of idealizing our spouse to the point that every except Lizzy Bennet or Mr. Darcy is excluded as a possibility. Though written from the point of view of a man, it can certainly apply just as well to women.

I was like a lot of single, Christian guys. I just wanted to follow God's will in finding a wife — that's all — oh yeah, and I also wanted a modest version of the Cosmo girl. And, well, I didn't want her to be too needy. Oh, and she also needed to be smart — really smart — but not, like, so smart that she made me feel stupid. And, of course, she needed to be spiritually mature (you know, like me). And one more thing: I wanted her to have a cool and fun personality (whatever that meant).

In other words, I wanted to date the perfect Christian girl — not a real woman.

Of course, I knew what a real woman was like. I grew up in a Christian home with lots of real women around, each of them imperfect in one way or another, yet fully feminine. These women had opinions, unshakable faith, curves, feelings, hormonal surges, weight fluctuations, talents, wrinkles and a regular need for affirmation. It didn't bother me: It was part of who they were, and I loved them for it.

But when it came to prospective mates, I wasn't so gracious. I figured I deserved to have the best qualities of every woman wrapped into a nice package, waiting at the end of a rainbow. And yet, despite meeting dozens of women in my quest, I could never find that perfect, Christian girl. But that didn't stop me from looking for her — until I discovered that, in fact, I wasn't the perfect Christian guy.

Did You Marry the Wrong Person?
Tim Challies, pastor at Grace Fellowship Church, writes about the worries of marrying 'the wrong person' and, in doing so, speaks to the problem that we have with trying to find an 'optimal' spouse, the wrong perspective that such a worry evinces, and the futility in that quest.

I guarantee that you have married the wrong person. We all marry the wrong person. Perhaps I should say it like this: we all marry the “wrong” person. We all marry a person who sins against us, who sometimes exasperates us by helping us worship our idols and at other times irritates us by smashing them to pieces. . . . The wrongness of our spouse is one of the great formative influences on us. The wrongness and the apparent incompatibilities are the very things God uses to mold and shape us. A few years down the road you will look back on all of that wrongness, all you declared to be wrong about your husband or wife, and find that God was not wrong at all. He knew exactly what you needed.

What I have found is that often times, when someone fears that he has married the wrong person, or when he fears that he is about to marry the wrong person, he is looking at the differences between himself and this other person and lamenting that this other person is not more like him. He may describe her personality or preferences or passions, but what he is really doing is showing that he wants this woman, this potential wife, to be more like him. If only she was…me! Too many men, too many women, truly want to marry an image of themselves. And why not? You tend to like your preferences, to like your idols, to like your likes.

But ask any married person what his life would be like if he had married someone who was just like himself and you’ll see the folly of it. Her talkativeness was just the antidote to your quiet nature, drawing you out, filling your home with godly words. Your sexual freedom was just what she needed to release her fears and teach her how to express love in a whole new way. Her constant lateness taught you to be patient and showed you that she wasn’t late because she was selfish, but because she cared, just like Jesus when he showed up “too late” to save his friend Lazarus. In all these ways and so many more, God uses incompatibilities to produce godliness. These differences are truly glorious, the means by which God helps us put our own sin to death.

Men and Women at Prayer
The next piece is by Dr. Philip G. Ryken, former pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church and current President of Wheaton College, from his commentary on 1 Timothy. Ryken's commentaries are essentially edited versions of his expository sermons, and in this sermon, Ryken speaks to what should make a Christian woman attractive to a Christian man and how women should make themselves attractive to Christian men.

Men are usually part of the problem. By evaluating women primarily by their looks, men make women slaves to their appearance. Of course, there must be a sexual attraction between a husband and wife. But a single man who looks primarily for outward beauty is not looking at women the way God looks at them. He has an ungodly aesthetic. . . .

The way to become more attractive is through godliness, not gaudiness. A woman is made beautiful by what she does, not what she wears. This means that the older a woman gets, the more beautiful she can become! Outwardly, the aging process cannot be reversed (see Prov. 31:30); inwardly, a godly woman is becoming more and more beautiful all the time (see 2 Cor. 4:16).

True beauty comes from nurturing the inward woman. Ask questions like these: How much money do I spend on my appearance—on clothes, jewelry, cosmetics, beauty treatments, and the like? How does that compare with my giving to the Lord's work? How much time do I spend in front of the mirror, and how much time do I spend on my knees? . . .

Good works are what a man should look for in a woman. When a man notices a woman who is devoted to the Lord, who gives good counsel, who handles her professional work with integrity, who loves children, who cares for the sick, and who feeds the poor, he should not say, "She's not all that good-looking, but she really loves the Lord!" Instead, he should say, "Now there is a beautiful woman!" A woman who is beautiful in the eyes of God ought to be beautiful in the eyes of godly men.

'The Bar'
Chris Castaldo is Director of the Ministry of Gospel Renewal for the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. Having been raised Catholic, he has written extensively about Protestant-Catholic relations. In his article Dating Across the Catholic/Protestant Divide he addresses cross-denominational dating. While much of the article is addressed to this particular issue, in the context of counseling a particular young woman who came to him, he does make a broader point about what women should seek in men:

The bar must be higher than simply finding a "Christian man" (this is when I imagine that I am talking to my daughter and become animated). I told Ann, "You want a guy who is a man of the Word, who is captivated by the triune God. Someone whose life is defined by redemptive grace from top to bottom, who embodies it, proclaims it, and understands his marital calling in terms shepherding you by this grace. And, if the Lord should one day bless you with children, realize that this man will be one of two people who most influence your family's spiritual life. You're not looking for perfection; but he must demonstrate a credible trajectory toward gospel priorities."

Friendship, Courtship & Dating
This one is a bit hard to link to, since it's multiple word documents from a seminar series. So I'll just link to the zip file containing them all. It is a 13-part series on the full spectrum of romantic relationships, starting from friendship all the way up until marriage, and it addresses each stage in light of God's design for marriage.

The piece I want to pull from here deals with the second essay I wrote. In that post, my assertion was that too many Christian singles have faulty standards of attraction or rely too much of notions of 'compatibility'. Thus, part of the reason why so many Christian men and women remain unmarried late into their twenties is because they have idealized romance and marriage or approach it as a modern consumer. Rather, we should approach dating and marriage with more biblical, realistic standards.

In my post I stated that 'godliness' should be the primary factor men and women should look, but I declined to attempt to define that, aside from bits scattered about. So, the passage I'll pull from the seminar series attempts to define that more precisely through a string of questions to ask about a potential spouse.

In many cases, not having godly priorities and choosing someone who does not exhibit godliness is tantamount to choosing a lifetime of difficulty and struggle. You don't need someone who is perfect, but you do need someone who desires to grow in godliness. This is one of the most important decisions you will ever make, so be careful of the pull and attraction of more worldly priorities. Scripture makes very clear the importance of godliness, so make it the highest on your list.

Ten General Questions to Ask
Here are some general things to consider as you evaluate someone of interest:
Is he/she clearly a believer? (2 Cor 6:14-15) If you have any uncertainty about this, get counsel from others before you move towards a relationship.

Does he/she show an evident love for God (in how he/she spends time, money etc.)?

Does he/she show an evident love for God's Word?

Is there clear evidence of Christian character? Does he/she exhibit the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23) – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control?

Is he/she fruitful in ministry? Or does he/she seem somewhat passive?

Does he/she show clear regard and care for others?

Is he/she faithful and consistent in the Christian life in prayer, scriptural study, etc?

Does he/she have the same view and valuation of marriage as you?

Do you trust him/her and trust his/her character?

Do those who you know and trust think highly of this person?

Questions for Women to Ask
Is this a man you respect? Could you envision yourself submitting to and following him over the course of your lives together? (Eph. 5:22-24) Would this man's leadership make submission a burden, or a delight?

Do you believe he will care well for you and your children? Will he serve you and encourage your spiritual growth? (1 Tim. 5:8) (If you are not sure of this, you can get clues by watching how he interacts with his parents and family, how he interacts with seniors in the church, how he interacts with children in at church?)

Is he growing in godliness and in the characteristics of biblical manhood? (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1 and 1 Peter 3)

Questions for Men to Ask
Do you believe she will care for you well and be a good mother and discipler to your children (as biblically defined)? (Titus 2:4-5)

Is she growing in godliness and in the characteristics of biblical womanhood (see Proverbs 31 and 1 Peter 3)?

Do you envision her being supportive of you and the God-given task of marriage? (Gen 2; 1 Peter 3)

Can you envision her following you and being responsive to your leadership? Would she encourage you in the task of leadership?

On Christian Singleness, des notes (Commitment)

2011-07-13T13:45:00.000-04:00

Last updated: 6 October 2011

Note: Rather than typing up new post after new post, I'll be editing this post over time, adding different sources. So this post will be gradually growing, as I find more people speaking on the topic. If you check back once in a while, you may find something new here.
Also, note that this post has been split into two posts, roughly corresponding to the topics of attraction and commitment. The post on attraction also has the introductory explanation of these posts.

Just Friends
In part one, I had discussed the problem of commitment which is ubiquitous in modern society. Men and women alike fear commitment, which becomes manifest in many different outlets. But men often have the bigger problem when it comes to marriage commitments, which is especially problematic for an relationship whose foundation is covenantal commitment.

In addition to men not 'stepping up to the plate' and entering into relationships that lead to the covenant of marriage, however, women act in ways that allow this passivity to happen, if not encourage it: they allow men to experience the intimate feminine companionship they crave before any commitment exists.

Scott Croft, an elder at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in DC has written a number of posts on relationships, including one entitled Just Friends. When I first read his article, I was incredulous. In fact, I'm fairly certain my jaw literally hit the floor on at least a couple occasions. He was saying so much of the same things I had been saying. Below are a few choice passages, but I highly recommend the entire article as a perfect supplement to my original post.

Scott Croft first lays out his case:

I believe it is extremely difficult and rare — as a practical matter — to honor these principles [to love others and work for their souls' good] in the context of a close, intimate friendship between two single Christians of the opposite sex. . . . Intimate friendships between men and women almost always produce confusion and frustration for at least one of the parties involved. Close friendships by their very nature tend to involve extensive time talking and hanging out one-on-one. They tend to involve a deep knowledge of the other person's hopes, desires and personality. They tend to involve the sharing of many aspects of each other's daily lives and routines. In other words, they tend to involve much of the type of intimacy and companionship involved in — and meant for — marriage. . . . To the extent that one person's romantic feelings have been clearly articulated to the other (and were met with an unfavorable response), to continue in some no-man's land of "good friends," is arguably to take selfish advantage of the vulnerable party. Yes, I know, the other person is an adult who is free and responsible to walk away if he or she is so unsatisfied, but like it or not, it tends not to work that way. Hope springs eternal, whether it should or not.

He additionally addresses the community impact of such relationships, noting that even if both the man and the woman are nominally ok with the way things are, that relationship does not exist in a vacuum.

Finally, there's one more type of confusion to consider. How do others view your "friendship"? Ladies, might there be men who would have initiated with you but for their uncertainty about or discomfort with your intimate friendship with another man? Guys, has a woman perhaps turned you down over questions about a woman friend you spend lots of time with? Would you want to date someone knowing that he or she had a significant, pre-existing, and ongoing emotional bond with another single member of the opposite sex? If I were a single person desiring marriage, the answers to these questions would matter to me.

Croft also discuses the long-term problem that these non-committed relationships create.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that your intimate friendship is one of those rare jewels that is devoid of the potential for hurt or confusion. There's another drawback to such friendships. They discourage marriage. . . . In the past, when both sexual immorality and intimate male-female friendships were much less accepted and less common in society, men and women moved more deliberately toward marriage earlier in life. By offering a taste of the companionship and interactions that make marriage so satisfying, with none of the accompanying commitments or responsibilities entailed in marriage, intimate friendships discourage the pursuit of the grown-up, God-intended outlet for marital desires — marriage. This is especially so in a culture — and a church — that struggles with the widespread sociological trend in its young adults known as "perpetual adolescence."

Croft, too, sees women as sharing some fault for the situation, as it is.

I would especially encourage women who desire marriage to give this argument some thought. If you are one of the many women to complain with great frustration that "Christian men don't initiate," consider this: Are you and your sisters satisfying the intermediate needs of your guy friends such that they feel no particular compulsion to pursue marriage?

One great advantage of Croft's article, however, is that he gives guidance as to how single Christian men and women might instead interact, a topic which I chose not to immediately address (but which may prove ripe for a future essay...)

Single men and women can and should serve in ministry together, study the word together, and hang out together socially. They should go out together, gather around meals, watch movies. In my view, however, these activities should be done, for the most part, in groups rather than one-on-one. . . . Is there a precise formula for whether a friendship or series of interactions is too intimate? If there is, I don't know it. Hang out in groups; serve together. By all means, chat and be friendly with your brothers and sisters in Christ. . . . Just be aware that "friendship" is no more a forum to play married than a dating relationship is. If you find that you are consistently showing one of your opposite-sex Christian friends more one-on-one attention than all the others, whether in conversation or through invitations out, it's probably time for (1) some clarification of intentions and (most likely) a change in the status of the relationship to something more overtly committed, or (2) a change in the way you interact with that person. Beyond that, godly single adults will have to work this out on a case-by-case basis.

Just Do Something
The second selection comes from Kevin DeYoung's book, Just Do Something. The book's basic message is, 'God does have a specific plan for our lives, but it is not one that He expects us to figure out before we make a decision.' We should ask for direction and pray over all things, but we ultimately need to do something, rather than hemming and hawing over every intersection in life.

It is in that context that DeYoung takes a chapter to apply that to pursuing marriage.

Gentlemen, there are wonderful Christian girls waiting for you to act, well, like a man. Stop waiting for romantic lightning to strike. Stop waiting for the umpteenth green light. Stop "hanging out" every night without ever making your intentions clear. Go ask a girl on a date, or ask her "to court," or whatever you think is the appropriate language. But do something. If you want to be single, that's great. Jesus was single. I hear it can be a pretty good gig. But if you want to get married, do something about it. Take a chance. Risk rejection. Be the relational and spiritual leader God has called you to be.

There are always plenty of exceptions, but as a general rule, Christians are waiting too long to get married. There are too many great Christians out there who should be married to one of the other great Christians out there. I remember Elisabeth Eliot saying one time that while speaking at a large Christian singles ministry, she desperately wanted to line up all the men on one wall, all the women on the other, count off (1, 1; 2, 2; 3, 3) and pair up those singles, and get them married.

Let me say it one more time: There is nothing wrong with being single. It can be a gift from the Lord and a gift to the church. But when there is an overabundance of Christian singles who want to be married, this is a problem. And it's a problem I put squarely at the feet of young men whose immaturity, passivity, and indecision are pushing their hormones to the limits of self-control, delaying the growing-up process, and forcing countless numbers of young women to spend lots of time and money pursuing a career (which is not necessarily wrong) when they would rather be getting married and having children. Men, if you want to be married, find a godly gal, treat her right, talk to her parents, pop the question, tie the knot, and start making babies.

DeYoung then goes on to address the perceived problem of 'compatibility':

And while I'm jumping on toes, let me explode the myth of "the one." Yes, in God's secret providence, He has just the right person picked out for you. And yes, once you meet the guy of your dreams, you won't want to be with anyone else. He'll be the only one for you. I know this will sound very unromantic (especially to some of the ladies), but don't think that there is only one person on the whole planet to whom you could be happily married. You're not looking for that one puzzle piece that will interlock with yours. "You complete me" may sound magically romantic, but it's not true. . . . The problem with the myth of "the one" is that it assumes that affection is the glue that holds the marriage together, when really it is your commitment to marriage that safeguards the affection. So ditch the myth and get hitched.

The Friends with Benefits Epidemic
In this article in Relevant magazine, Lauren Lankford discusses the problems that develop when increased intimacy is not matched with increased commitment. Throughout the article, Lankford emphasizes how relationships and sex are yet another way in which God communicates to us analogical truths.

Your desire for sex is proof that God loves you. Your physical draw to another human being is proof that God created you to want to experience unparalleled intimacy in a way that reflects His desire for intimacy with us. God designed sex and the acts and attitudes preceding it to access aspects of your heart, soul, body and mind that could not be accessed any other way.
. . .
Your entire life is the story of God's plan to show you His definition of crazy, unconditional love. Those who marry will find marriage is one of God's primary tools for this. God knew it was not good for man to be alone. God knew we needed a physical way to experience the heartbeat of Himself. So He gave us each other—another human being to commit to and love no matter what. An image of God's passion for His children, an expression of Jesus' love for His bride.

While Lankford's main focus is on the sexual and the physiological reasons why casual physical relationships can become problematic for our emotional well-being, she does not restrict her discussion to that.

Our bodies are created to start bonding within 20 seconds. Your body can't tell the difference between cuddling with your boyfriend and cuddling with a friend while watching a movie. Your heart can't tell the difference between sharing intimate secrets with the sexy new friend or your spouse. Trust, attachment and intimacy build with or without our permission. This is why it's so incredibly important to set physical and emotional boundaries before we get into something it hurts to get out of.
. . .
You were created for hot, passionate sex. You were created to be connected to one person, without ever going through withdrawal. You were created for whole, healthy friendships—unscarred by broken or inappropriate intimacy.

But more than that, you were created to experience unconditional, committed love. When we compromise emotional and physical intimacy before commitment (whether or not we intend to), we sabotage ourselves. And it hurts. Badly. Either now, later or both.

Who's on First?
J. Budziszewski (boo-juh-SHEF-ski) is professor of government at Texas and also a prolific writer on Christian apologetics and ethics. He's written a pair of articles (here and here) on the same topic of non-commitment. They are a fictitious dialogue between himself and a young man whose close female friend has confronted him over his non-commitment. For men, it presents a real challenge to follow the dialogue and compare one's own thoughts and priorities to Mark's. Women, take full advantage of this rare glimpse into the way that the male psyche operates at times!

It's trickier to pull out quotes from a dialogue such as this, so there are only a couple. The first is on why women don't characterize an intimate relationship with a man 'dating'.

"Often girls these days don't call dates dates because guys these days are so afraid of commitment. You won't say that one doesn't apply to you." Mark shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "You see, the girl may feel that the only way the guy will ever court her is if he doesn't have to admit that it's courtship."

On why men don't characterize an intimate relationship with a woman 'dating':

"[G]uys these days are afraid of commitment. It's part of their fear of growing up. And there's another reason. Fear of failure."
"Fear of failure?"
"If you're 'just friends' and she says no to pizza, it's no big deal. But if you ask her on a pizza date and she says no, it's humiliating. To relieve the pressure, guys don't call dates dates."

On Christian Singleness, part deux

2011-04-29T10:00:00.011-04:00

This essay is the second in a series I've written on the overabundance of unmarried adult, urban, Christian singles in cities. In my last essay I addressed the issue of commitment among single Christians and how both men and women contribute to a cycle of non-commitment. In this essay I'll be discussing the hindrance that the quest for 'the one' can have on dating and marriage.

The problems embroiled in the issue of finding 'the one' are manifold, but I'll try to condense the main elements down to two: attraction and timing. These both, when combined with some of the problems of commitment discussed in the previous essay, result in a consumeristic over-analysis and pickiness.

Now, when I talk about these things, keep in mind that the issue in the background to this all is the historically extraordinary number of urban Christians not getting married. So, for example, when I talk about attraction, I'm coming at it from the angle of rejection: i.e., are Christian singles rejecting potential spouses because of skewed ideas of what we should find attractive?

As with my last essay, these thoughts are based on patterns I've seen in my own experience, observation, reading, and discussions with married couples. They do not reflect any actual training, expertise, or authority. At all. Much of what this essay addresses is also more psychological and less exhibited in external behavior. Therefore the conclusions are both more general and more inferential than the previous essay. So I very much welcome and appreciate any criticism or correction.

Maybe I Definitely Know That Maybe I'm in Love

Attraction is the thing that draws us towards someone initially, instinctively, and perhaps even unexpectedly. In some ways, what or who we are attracted to is out of our control. But in many other ways, we are very much in control of our own standards and how we react to attraction.

For men, the cliché attractive features in a woman are the sensual: physicality, sexuality, that feminine mystique. For women, they are usually the personal: confidence, financial security, emotional availability. These features are certainly to be desired, but they should always be subordinated to Scriptural standards of attraction. Rather than trying to enumerate in detail what these standards are, I'll just sum them up as 'godliness'.

Christian singles are at least cognitively aware that godliness should be the primary element of attraction. We can pay it lip service, both in our own inner monologue and in discussion with others. Nevertheless we so often resort to our carnal instincts of attraction when thinking of a person as a potential spouse.

How does this happen? It happens because we often treat godliness as a binary switch: when we look at someone, s/he either has godliness or s/he doesn't. And so long as s/he has it, we tell ourselves, we're free to indulge ourselves in evaluating him or her with those other factors of attraction. Among Christian circles this is an almost unconscious move. I can't tell you the number of times, when discussing romantic prospects, I have said or have heard others say, 'Well... all of them are good Christians, so...,' only as a preface to giving primacy to appearance or intelligence.

Thus, rather than godliness being instrumental in attraction, it's more often just a convenient baseline requirement for initial consideration. Godliness becomes the entry cost for participation in the meat market, but rarely what determines who wins our heart. It is right for godliness to be the sine qua non, but it should also be the ne plus ultra. I fear we reject too many people for superficial reasons, even though they may possess those features which we should find attractive; but we too soon send them packing without a rose before letting these things reveal themselves.

A big part of the problem is the romanticization of romance. Influenced by the likes of Austen, Brontë, and Fitzgerald, we look for a fulfilling transcendence in romantic relationships. In some cases, we look for ultimate fulfillment in romance instead of in God, but more often we view romance as fulfillment supplementary to the fulfillment we find in God — as if God's fulfillment alone is insufficient.

Accordingly, we are in search of 'the one' who will most fulfill us. Yet this is a very consumeristic approach to marriage; it asks, 'How can I get the most out of marriage? How do I maximize my utility?' The consumeristic approach was taken to comically absurd extremes in the television show Seinfeld, where the main characters frequently rejected men and women for ridiculously superficial reasons. But we all do the same thing, to variably lesser degrees.

Christian marriage, however, isn't about maximizing one's own utility. It's about serving one's spouse and glorifying God together. Rather than selecting a future spouse by whether she has man-hands or he refers to himself in the third person, we should be asking whether this is someone with whom I glorify God. Women, is he a spiritual leader to whom you can submit? Men, is she someone you can sacrificially serve as Christ serves the Church?

One of my favorite parables about the folly of using bad standards is a very short story by Franz Kafka, entitled Rejection. In a couple paragraphs it describes a chance meeting between a man and a woman. When the woman rejects the man's advances, each goes into a laundry list of everything lacking in the other person — wealth, appearance, status, &c. The story then concludes with the following: 'Yes, we are both in the right, and lest we become irrefutably conscious of it, we wish — isn't it true? — to instead go each to our own home.'

We all have numerous flaws which are easily seen; and we all have even more that will not surface until years down the road. To quote an article from a 2009 issue of Christianity Today, 'While it may be nice to find an optimal match in marriage, it cannot hold a candle to sharing a mental and spiritual commitment to the enduring covenant between God, man, and woman. It just can't. People change. Chemistry wanes. Covenants don't.'

This doesn't mean that attraction shouldn't play a part. You should certainly long for someone whom you find attractive. But for Christians chemical attraction cannot be the be-all and end-all; it is part, but not whole. We should seek a more comprehensive attraction. God has given us marriage for far more and greater things.

'If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him.'

The other main element which contributes to the issue finding 'the one' is timing. So many singles put off pursuit of a marriage in order to forge a path for themselves or 'figure out exactly who they are'. Only once they have spent enough time sorting that out, can they then find someone who is best compatible with them: that is, one who is walking roughly along that same forged path and shares interest, ideas, and ideals. This is the mindset that initially contributes to so many Christians going well into the 20s, remaining unmarried.

Not only does this feed into the consumeristic pattern described above, it also is highly individualistic. For it views marriage as if it were a business partnership of two individuals who happen to have certain key things in common. But the Biblical view of marriage is not a business partnership; it is two becoming one flesh.

I think the best illustration can be seen with a simplified version of vector math. In vector math, if you have two paths emanating from a point, but heading in different directions, when you add those two paths together, the result is a path midway between them. So if path A is heading north and path B is heading east, when you add them together, the result is a path C heading northeast. If A is headed north and B headed northeast, C will head north-northeast. Thus the more similar A and B are to each other, the more similar C will be to each of them.

This is the way that many think of marriage: the goal is to find someone whose path is close to one's own — someone who is 'compatible' to use the popular lingo — so that the new path forged together least disrupts one's own already existing path. When stated this way, it should be evident how individualistic this is. Under such a system, marriage is no longer about serving each other, but instead selfishly preserving oneself. Rather than coming together as one flesh, the spouses come together as conjoined twins.

Not only do I think that this model is bad in principle, it is also foolish. For it presumes both some modicum of control over the future and that both spouses are able to accurately assess each other beforehand. But as anyone who has lived more than a few years can tell you, both life and people are full of surprises. If you're banking on a marriage being successful because your pre-marriage life paths have been disturbed only a little by your spouse, you are in for a rude awakening when life and/or s/he throws the first curveball at you.

Instead, I think a more proper view of marriage — as two becoming one flesh — throws the vector math model out the window. If A is headed north and B is headed northeast, when the two come together in marriage, they may actually find their 'one flesh' has headed west, which was in neither's original plans. But because each is committed to serving the other in that marriage, this radically new path is one they are excited to forge together.

At this point, I am irresitibly compelled to quote my favorite passage on the subject of the unpredictability of the future. It comes from C.S. Lewis' book Perelandra. In the book, the main character finds himself in a pre-Fall, Eden-like place. When he encounters the Eve character, he tries to explain 'disappointment'. But because she is without sin, her perspective is quite different from his. She responds to him, saying:

'But how can one wish any of those waves not to reach us which [God] is rolling towards us?...What you have made me see is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one's mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before—that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.'

To apply this to marriage: The fewer personal desires that are set in stone before marriage and the more flexible one is to what God brings one's way, the more easily one can, to use Lewis' words, turn the soul to the good one gets, rather than staying fixated on the good one wanted. God will inevitably give each of us a spouse who has different desires, preferences, and passions than we do. We should embrace those in marriage and the new life that we and our spouse have as one flesh, and not dwell on those desires, preferences, and passions of our own that we may be missing out on because of the marriage.

Two caveats to this: the first is that one should always seek a Christian spouse who is following God. This is the one non-negotiable. Wherever his or her path may be leading him or her, it must be leading them ever closer to God. After all, the primary purpose in marriage is for spouses to serve each other as both glorify God.

The second caveat is that I am not saying that compatibility is unworthy of any consideration. But instead consider how you each resolve conflict, whether you are able to guide each other in your walk with God, and whether you are able to forgive one another and repent when the other person points out sins. That is, rather than asking how well you spur each other towards God.

Likewise, if you are certain that God is leading you in a particular direction (e.g., foreign missions), it would be unwise to marry someone who is not also being led in that direction. But that does not imply that you need to first figure out exactly which direction God is calling you; only that if you have a certain direction to take that into account. You and your spouse may enter marriage with no intention, e.g., of doing foreign missions, only to find, once married, that God is leading your new one flesh in that direction.

If you are waiting on marriage in order to first establish a career, to figure out what you desire and 'who you are', or to set a life trajectory, you will be missing out on many opportunities. And that's assuming you will ever a reach a point where you know 'who you are'. (Ask the 50-year-old male going through his mid-life crisis whether he really knows 'who he is'.) You are also setting yourself up for disappointment when things do not turn out as you had planned. Instead, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Postscript
(Particular thanks to one response to my first essay, which encouraged me to write this section.)

One final remark is due. As I showed in the previous article, Hebrews does instruct us to give marriage high honor. But that high honor should not cause so much trepidation that it halts aspirations of marriage. Yes, marriage is sacred, but it is also a normal life event. In 2008, an average of 41,000 couples were married each Saturday in the United States. God also blesses us through marriage; the longer we delay marriage, the longer we delay receiving these blessings.

So while we should recognize marriage as a holy institution ordained by God, we should not try to analyze it as if it were a capital investment. Combining these two approaches will almost inevitably paralyze one with over-analysis and result in picky non-commitment. Instead, simply consider the pattern which Scripture gives for marriage and the elements of attraction which the Bible highlights.

As with my previous essay, let me again close with a passage from Richard and Sharon Phillips' book Holding Hands, Holding Hearts.

Perhaps the biggest reason for the anguish that many feel [in approaching marriage] comes from the burden to find exactly the right partner for life. On the one hand, there is a great deal of wisdom behind this anxiety. This is an important decision! But on the other hand, the normal anxiety is often heightened by unhelpful and unrealistic expectations. The fact is that there is no perfect person for you to marry, and if someone were perfect they should never marry someone like you! There is no other kind of person for you to marry than a flawed sinner in need of God's grace and of a loving companion to walk together with in life. So put your checklist away and examine your attitude in the light of God's word.

Many Christians think they are required to find 'that one person' whom God has chosen for them in order to be happily married. It is certainly true that the God who ordains all things has also ordained the one person you will marry. But God does not tell you who that is beforehand. God does not expect us to plumb his secret will with supernatural knowledge, but rather to exercise our responsibility in a godly and obedient way. We know that God forbids a believer to marry a nonbeliever (1 Cor. 7:39; 2 Cor. 6:14). A woman should not marry a man to whom she is not willing to submit, since God will require this of her (Eph. 5:22–24; 1 Pet. 3:1). A man should marry a woman only if he is willing to show her the self-sacrificing love modeled by Jesus Christ on the cross (Eph. 5:25). But within biblical boundaries such as these, Christians should feel a great deal of freedom and should have confidence that God's grace will enable them to love another in marriage.

What matters most is not finding the one right person but becoming the person that God wants you to be. Before judging the man or woman—scruitinizing and appraising every attribute and characteristic, as if you were buying a horse—you ought instead to scrutinize your own heart. . . . The issue is not whether you can find someone worthy of your love, but whether you are ready to give a love that is worthy of marriage. And if not, then you should turn to God and ask, 'Why not?' God says that it is not good for man to be alone, and this means that we are to learn to love in the way that marriage requires.

On Christian Singleness

2011-04-26T13:19:00.060-04:00

The Problem Stated

One of the ongoing phenomena in urban Christianity is an overabundance of adult singles. Among my group of friends there is much wringing of hands over the fact that men and women don't generally date all that much and very few people are getting married, even though we are all well into our 20s, with some about to hit our 30s. The problem is not isolated to my church's congregation either. I have seen it in other social coteries, and have heard tell from friends about the same phenomenon. It's not that the men and women don't like each other. After all, we do hang out together all the time, and I'm not aware of any covert animosity exchanged after such outings. But yet we all remain single.

Christianity has long been a religion which gives high regard to marriage and family. For example, Hebrews 13:4 instructs that marriage be held in high honor, and throughout the history of redemption, God has worked through families. So while it may not be inherently wrong for there to be a large number of unmarried Christian adults, it is certainly something of which to take note and which warrants examination.

Several months ago I began to seriously contemplate why this extensive singleness is the case. As an adult single myself, I drew on my own experience, observing myself, the Christian singles around me, and the culture around me. For my entire adult life I have lived in two Northeast American urban centers, so while I have only been able to see the culture of those two cities, their patterns became readily discernable. So at the same time I see these patterns, I admit that my theory may not carry into the American South, the Midwest, or the West Coast.

Before going further, let me give the additional caveat that I am speaking in generalities. I am attempting to answer the question of 'why so many?', but am not speaking to 'why person X in particular?' This is a case of historically extraordinary singleness. But there will certainly be those who remain single for historically ordinary reasons. Here I am addressing only the extraordinary portion.

The Conclusion

After much thought I theorized that the problem stems from two distinct roots. The first concerns — in part — a distinctly American version of individualism and its interrelation with marriage and relationships generally. In short, young Americans place too much stock in forging their own path, judging that before they can be ready for marriage, they much first establish their identity, have a long career ahead of them, and determine 'who they are'. Once that is accomplished, then one can find someone else traveling along the same general path and merge lives with him or her. Because this error is a much deeper issue of mindset and cultural thought, with more widespread relevance and effect, I will leave it to another essay.

The second reason, I found, has to do with issues of commitment, particularly in light of the state of inter-gender relationships in 21st-century American cities. Looking at the culture of urban Christian single adults, it would seem ripe for a harvest of marriages. Young men and women often hang out with each other and are even best of friends. One would think that such exposure would lead to a number of dating relationships, many eventually leading to marriage. Yet this is not the case. Why?

The answer, I believe, is that Christian singles have too much of a good thing and unwittingly take advantage of this, resulting in an imbalance that, when combined with a culture of non-commitment, fatally threatens the potential for dating, engagement, and marriage.

A Commitment to Non-Commitment

The first element in this fatal concoction is that young Christians have bought into the Zeitgeist of non-commitment. Always in search of that thing that will give us ultimate fulfillment — or even just a little bit more excitement here and now — we hop around from thing to thing. Instead of earning a gold watch after working with the same company for 50 years, the modern working professional is more likely to have worked in a dozen or more capacities over their career. Rather than planting roots in a single community, Americans move from city to city, suburb to suburb, church to church. And instead of lifelong monogamy, the norm has become serial monogamy.

Within Christian circles this culture of non-commitment is not always manifest in the same way as outside, but it is certainly present. If at all possible, we would prefer to leave a backdoor open somewhere, so that we can escape if what we are doing doesn't quite turn out to be as good as we thought it might. After all, there's always that chance that something better will come along, and one wouldn't want to miss out on that opportunity because of some silly commitment to this lesser thing. The most transparent case of this among Christians is church-shopping and a reluctance to take membership vows in a particular church.

Further exacerbating the problem is our own generational experience of mobility. After all, if one is born, is raised, marries, works, and dies in the same geographic region — as was often the case in centuries past — one can easily determine 'the best' and commit to it without having to worry about later encountering 'something better'. But today's urban youth likely works in a different place from where he went to college, which itself was a different place from where he was raised. And so he is acutely aware that what he thought was 'the best' is only a local reality. With an entire world out there, it seems quite likely that 'something better' will be found, if one can turn over the right rock.

We like to think that non-commitment frees us up and gives us greater liberty. But, as Kierkegaard has said — and as Lewis Smedes has reiterated — unwillingness to commit does not free you; instead it enslaves you. It enslaves you to however the wind blows: when you don't commit, it is circumstances which drive your action, not your will. True freedom occurs when you commit yourself to a certain thing, eschewing changing circumstances and emotional impulses.

The relationship of this culture of non-commitment to marriage should be fairly obvious. After all, marriage is the ultimate commitment, lasting a lifetime. This is especially the case for a Christian who recognizes that marriage is a covenant, which, like other covenants, comes with promises, responsibilities, and blessings, and which has severe restrictions on when it can be broken. So it should be no surprise that marriage has become significantly delayed — if not put off entirely — in a culture committed to non-commitment.

As a Christian man, I place some of the blame for this on myself and my fellow Christian men. Under a proper theology of male headship of the family (Eph 5), it is entirely appropriate for men to be the leaders of committed relationships. I do not mean that necessarily only men may ask a woman out, and never the other way. Nor do I want to comment on how a woman should best encourage a man to step up, if he is not himself leading. Those are both their own Pandora's Boxes which I do not want to open here.

Nor am I ignoring the fact that many relationships stall when the woman does not want to commit. Rather, I only mean to say that, as preparation for male headship, it is often appropriate for men to take a lead in many aspects of a romantic relationship leading to marriage. When they are trapped in a culture of non-commitment, men will often be negligent here.

Enabling the Dysfunction

As convenient as it would be to place all the blame on men and end the discussion there, it's just not that simple — even when so much of the blame can be properly put on the 'immaturity, passivity, and indecision' of men. Most relationship failures should be seen as bilateral failures, with both the man and woman at fault in part. Earlier I suggested that there is an imbalance in contemporary Christian relationships that fuels the culture of non-commitment. What I mean by that is that there is something which — to use the psychological term — enables the dysfunction of non-commitment.

A culture of non-commitment alone could not resist and endure the biological and spiritual drive towards marriage relationships. While this obviously includes sexual drive, it also goes beyond physicality. Men long for feminine companionship; women long for masculine companionship. It is built into the complementarian way in which God created and designed the two genders to interact.

The traditional way to satisfy these desires is through marriage. But Christian marriage is a covenant that requires commitment. And we don't like commitment. Thus if there is a way to have our cake and eat it too — to satisfy the desires without committing — we will certainly be drawn towards it. And so we have found a way.

Modern Christian singles hang out with persons of the opposite gender all the time. A man will ask a woman out to brunch; the two will get drinks after work; they'll catch dinner and movie. But neither one has any overt intention of entering into a committed relationship, even though a fly on the wall would hardly be able to tell the difference. That isn't to say that neither has any romantic interest in the other. In fact, the level of intimacy between the two often evinces exactly the opposite. In some cases, the interest is unilateral, with the other party completely oblivious. In some cases it is mutual. In even some cases, it is unilateral, but the non-interested party nonetheless strings the other person along.

Regardless of whether the interest is mutual or not, the arrangement is tailored to reap all of the emotional benefits of a simulated covenant, minus the commitment. And when one considers how sexually soaked modern American society is — sexually explicit advertisement, readily available pornography, &c. — even the sexual aspects can be simulated without commitment. And so it would seem that many of the superficial benefits of the marriage covenant can be found outside covenant relationship.

This is not necessarily the conscious intentions of the persons involved, but it is certainly the consequence. And it is a consequence which is self-perpetuating. Why should one act against his or her every cultural instinct and commit to a relationship, when he or she can receive the benefits without committing? In fact, I wouldn't hesitate to label these sorts of relationships as the non-sexual version of 'friends with benefits'. (And as said above, any absent sexual benefits can usually be found elsewhere quite easily.)

Another contributing factor to this problem is the fact that Christians, being as obsessed with sexual purity as we are, ignore the fact that intimacy is experienced in many more ways than sexual contact. The level of intimacy which should ideally correspond to a level of commitment is broader than just sex. Yet in the absence of sex, Christians can be naïve about how intimate we become with other people: 'We aren't having sex, so we're OK.' We certainly recognize the possibility on inappropriate intimacy when we talk about married people having 'emotional affairs' with non-spouses, but we seem to not recognize that it can happen before marriage as well.

Now, this should not be read as me decrying any and all platonic male-female relationships. I am saying nothing of the sort. The key element that I want to extract from these observations is that the level of intimacy should match the level of commitment. When there is a mismatch, it opens the door to a vicious cycle. If one wants to avoid being trapped in a culture of non-commitment, the unique benefits of the marriage covenant should not be sought except in a relationship whose commitment is growing ever closer to marriage.

Thus Whither Hence?

So if this is a correct assessment — let me emphasize the 'if' — how should Christian singles respond to it? I didn't originally plan on writing this section, but decided I didn't want the essay to be entirely critical without some form of constructive advice. So this last portion is the least well-thought out section. I'm personally not a fan of issuing one-size-fits-all solutions to complex problems, so I can only offer my own perspective and what I have found works for me, realizing it may only uniquely work for me. But hopefully there is something to be gleaned from it.

The first element is to use Scripture and the guidance of the Holy Spirit to seek wisdom on these issues. After all, not everything that I've said here can be directly deduced from theological exposition. They are the result of my own reflection, prayerful consideration, and personal perspective. I present them not as a condemnation of sin, but as a personal take on the causes of a phenomenon.

The second element is to avoid those elements in play which are obviously sinful. (For example, if you are seeking the sexual benefits of marriage through pornography or through sexual relationships.) Pray for the strength to resist these temptations, as strong and ubiquitous as they may be today. And if necessary, seek out accountability from fellow Christians.

The third element is to remain cognizant of the male-female relationships in your life. Assess how you interact with people of the opposite gender. Do you bounce around from one to another, without committing to anyone? Men, are you taking advantage of feminine companionship, by mismatching levels of intimacy and commitment? Women, are you enabling your male friends by letting them reap the emotional benefits of marriage without the covenant of marriage? (Lest anyone think otherwise, a reversal of these roles is also certainly possible, as in the case of the fabled 'nice guy' who is forever stuck in the 'friend zone'.)

The fourth element is to consult with those around you. Ask them how they see you living. Do they see you as someone unwilling to commit to things? When they look at your interactions with the opposite gender, are they unable to discern your romantic interests from your casual friends? God has given us the church community to spur each other on towards wise and godly lives.

The fifth element is to take simple, practical measures as necessary and knowing yourself. For some, practical measures may start generally: being more willing to commit to things, whether it be people, appointments, or life trajectories. For others, it may be specific to relationships: avoiding one-on-one 'dates' without being honest about your intentions or lack thereof. Drawing boundaries in black and white in such instances can certainly be very helpful, even in cases where there is admittedly gray. Consider this the 'broken windows theory' portion of the essay: difficult problems become easier when you address the seemingly petty problems.

But the key is being self-conscious and self-correcting, asking God, friends, and elders for guidance along the way. The goal is not to alter all your behaviors as an end itself, but to give marriage the high honor that it is due, and thereby giving the glory to God who ordained marriage. Part of that is respecting the benefits and responsibilities of marriage as unique elements of a covenant relationship.

One Who Speaks with Authority

When I first arrived at this theory a few months ago, it was a convenient rubric for reading my own experiences and observations. But I wasn't sure how veritable or universal it actually was. After all, I'm only a 20-something with very little actual life experience, who is predisposed to be suspect of novel philosophies.

Then, several weeks ago, I read a small book by Richard and Sharon Phillips, Holding Hands, Holding Hearts, a book outlining a Biblical view of Christian relationships, dating, and marriage. Since Phillips was a pastor at my old church in Philadelphia and someone whose theological rigor I greatly admire, I had to give it a read.

In one section of the book, the Phillipses answer a few issues unique to the post-modern dating scene of recent years. One passage in particular stuck out to me, which I quote below. He was repeating the same theory I had come up with! Maybe I wasn't crazy after all!

It was, in fact, reading that passage that encouraged me to put this all down on paper. Hopefully it is helpful to someone out there. I admit that I'm still a 20-something with little experience in these matters. So I'm open to correction and hope to hear feedback, both positive and negative. One of the reasons I wrote this is to provoke thought and discussion, and that includes critical discussion. So have at it! And maybe — just maybe — I'll open one of those Pandora's Boxes I avoided above.

'Is it okay for a man and a woman to hang out together a lot when they have no romantic interest in one another?' First of all, if you are part of a nonromantic male-female couple, who enjoy each other's company and are emotionally connected, and yet neither one of you has romantic aspirations for the relationship, you are the first one of these we have ever encountered in years of experience with Christian singles. For this reason and others, we recommend against the practice of adult men and women 'just hanging out together.' For women, it involves an intimacy that is often unwise, given that the man has expressed little commitment and uncertain intentions. Meanwhile, other men who might have interest will be put off, being naturally uneasy and unsure about interfering in such a situation. . . .

For a man, the danger is somewhat different. Many adult men pursue 'friendships' with women because they feel a need for feminine companionship but aren't willing to make the commitment necessary for marriage. But marriage is what most of them really need! Hanging out with a female friend may be an effective coping strategy against loneliness, but it is often too good a coping strategy in that it interferes with God's desire for a man's maturity. Furthermore, for both the man and the woman, even a platonic relationship is likely to cause complications if a real dating relationship comes along. Jealousy, in proper proportions, is a biblically approved attitude toward one's potential spouse, and in the real world the casual guy or gal friend is no help to a healthy romance.

About a month after we started dating, we went on a skiing trip with a large group of Sharon's college friends. It is a miracle that our relationship survived it! Rick felt threatened by Sharon's many beloved guy friends, and she thought her nice-guy boyfriend was acting like a jerk. Whatever this says about our spiritual maturity at the time, experience with ourselves and with others has warned us about the danger to a growing romantic relationship of close 'platonic' friendships.

2000s: A Decade in Review

2009-12-31T14:04:00.002-05:00

(Note: the following is only a first draft and is completely unedited. Since I wanted to get this posted before midnight, I may be editing it a bit over the next few days. The concluding couple of paragraphs is a bit more curt than I like, so I suspect those will be altered at some point.)

(I don't really know what to call the decade in spoken word: 'the two-thousand's' is the most natural, but it's a bit unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, 'the 2000s' is what I'll go with in print.)

We've reached the end of a decade, and I've been thinking about what this decade has meant. In thinking it over, I keep coming back to one phrase, drawing on Francis Fukuyama's own phrase, 'The End of History'. The phrase that keeps ringing in my mind is: the end of the end of history. In many ways, the 2000s were a repudiation of the 1990s and are best evaluated in contrast with the 1990s. Herein I'll specifically look at the two ways which have been most prominent: security and national politics.

Francis Fukuyama published a book in 1992 entitled The End of History and the Last Man, in which he posited that with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, liberal democracy had prevailed, and it was now only a matter of time before liberal democracy became the de facto form of government worldwide. In the wake of its publication, the phrase 'The End of History' became a catchphrase for the advent of an era of peace and prosperity, an era during which humanity would only progressively evolve towards its telos.

Admittedly, this was not really the whole of Fukuyama's thesis, but more of a vulgarization of it. Nonetheless, this vulgar perception of 'the end of history' was reflected in the Zeitgeist of the 1990s. The United States of America was the sole remaining superpower with no obvious pretender to the throne. And American foreign policy reflected this mood of Pax Americana. From the original Gulf War in 1990 though the 1999 war in Kosovo, the United States ably acted as the world's guardian of the status quo. We undoubtedly chose our conflicts, not engaging everywhere: Yugoslavia, but not Rwanda; Haiti, but only abortedly in Somalia; etc. But in each case, opposition to American intervention seemed minimal, and in fact often gained the full support of NATO allies, if not the UN.

And the American perspective on war shifted in the 1990s, too. War was now something you watched live on TV in the security of your living room, even as it was something which our soldiers conducted in relative safety (only 114 American soldiers were killed by enemy fire in the Gulf War).

In the rest of the world, the predicted trending towards liberal democracy seemed to be proving itself true. Apartheid ended in South Africa and Nelson Mandela was elected; Israel was more at peace with its neighbors than it had ever been (it even appeared permanent peace in the Middle East was within our grasp); and there was an explosion of peaceful international treaties and agreements, such as NAFTA and the European Union.

Even domestically it appeared that we had reached a sort of 'end of history'. Most of the domestic themes of the Cold War seemed to have collapsed with the Berlin Wall. The culture war was still present, but was more of a background theme. Even the election of Bill Clinton, the fist Democratic president in 12 years, was a bit lackluster. There was undoubtedly animosity between Clinton and those fabled 'right-wing conspirators', but the animosity was almost fabricated and forced. After all, though a Democrat, Clinton was the most moderate Democratic president in nearly 100 years.

I think it no coincidence that 1990s saw the meteoric rise of political talk radio. The feud between Clinton and Gingrich was more of a soap opera than it was real conflict. For better or worse, the energy we had previously spent on opposing the Evil Empire was now vented through intranational political discourse. But the resulting 'conflict' was a trivial source of entertainment, as well as a vent; Rush Limbaugh would be the first to admit that he is an entertainer and not a serious political advocate.

The fact that the most contentious issues of the day were mere welfare reform and NAFTA speaks volumes. (The one outlying exception to this was, of course, Clinton's 1993 health care package.) Even in the course of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, there was, in retrospect, a quasi-farcical element to the enmity. Certainly, the enmity between the administration and the Congress was real and was personal. But the key was that it remained solely personal. When it came down to business, the two parties cooperated on a great deal, such as the historic balanced budget.

In both the US and the UK, the Democratic reaction against the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberalism of the 1980s was measured and restrained. Economically, as a result, we had never been better off than we were in the 1990s. Our national GDP doubled in those 10 years, and the Dow Jones rocketed from 2,700 (an all-time high at the time) to 11,000, while the NASDAQ composite increased tenfold. All this in spite of the dot-com bubble late in the decade! It was truly the decade of prosperity and economic security.

The 1990s were a decade where we enjoyed living in the end of history. Americans were by and large a happy bunch, where the greatest stress came from PTA politics and balancing all five checking accounts at the end of the month. And whether or not we agreed with the party in power in Washington, it was by and large a foregone conclusion that the national stage was a proper and satisfying one for playing out the big issues of the day: each party's main locus for advancing its respective ideology was the floor of Congress, even if that ideology was to have Congress not act. In sum, we were a secure nation.

All of this changed quite quickly when we hit the 2000s. In November 2000, the political tensions which had been bubbling under the surface finally boiled over. For whatever reason, the 2000 presidential election had a bitter taste to it. Perhaps it was the vapidity of the actual campaign season. Neither side had a truly charismatic candidate, the likes of Reagan or Clinton; neither party was wholly satisfied with their candidate. (As incredible as it seems now, I can remember many a talking head lamenting the fact that it was not instead Cheney v. Lieberman.) Or maybe it was because the electoral dispute cut to the very heart of the theory of representative democracy. Or maybe it was the anti-climactic an uncathartic resolution by per curiam decision of the Supreme Court.

Regardless of the reason, the ensuing acrimony had a different character from the political quarrels of the 1990s. The anger seemed to transcend politics and became cultural again. We were red staters and blue staters: and there was a renewed vitriol with which one referred to the other. The chink in America's armor now seemed evident. The Democratic loss was a bitter demonstration of the perhaps misplaced hope in national politics. For the Republicans, it was but a bittersweet victory, against which legacy Bush would contend for his entire tenure, while hoping he would roll back Clinton's programs. Nonetheless, the national political machine labored on and Bush scored an early victory in passing H.R. 1, the No Child Left Behind Act.

Then came 11 September 2001, the day that would define the decade. The security that we thought we had achieved at the end of the American Century was shattered. We might criticize the President's immediate reaction in that Florida classroom, but that morning it was identical to that of America: disbelief, terror, and confoundment. Never before had American experienced such an attack. To add to the bewilderment, America wasn't supposed to have any enemies anymore. After all, we were living at the end of history, right?

But apparently we did have enemies, and they were unlike any other we had faced before. While they had state sponsors, they were essentially stateless. Though they were technologically inferior by far - crude, even - they had been spectacularly successful. Those things which had made us so secure previously were of little use against this new enemy; those issues with which we had unequivocally entrusted our national discourse were of no avail. But we nonetheless reacted in the way we were accustomed to, hoping that our strategies would prove fruitful.

While it is impossible for us to know of many of the successes in the so-called War on Terror, the apparent failures are quite prevalent. For they remain with us in the form of two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan was supposed to be a quick in-and-out operation to topple the Taliban and bring al-Qaeda members to justice. While the former was quickly achieved, it nonetheless remains an ongoing effort. And the latter goal is virtually untouched, at least in the public mind. For all intents and purposes, the best possible outcome of the now eight-year-old war in Afghanistan would appear to be a pyrrhic victory. And will we really be all that much secure because of it?

The Iraq war, only 17 months younger than the war in Afghanistan, was no less contentious. The same question of purpose, goal, and cost-benefit which was present in Afghanistan was also present in Iraq. But the war in Iraq highlights even more prominently the failure of national politics, for the failure began well before the actual war even began: WMDs. We were assured that Saddam Hussein had been building and storing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (In fact, few people disputed this fact; the debate was more about whether such a fact was sufficient for a preemptive attack.) Once it became apparent that there were no WMDs, the invasion would later be justified on other grounds. But nonetheless, the federal government had failed yet again.

And perhaps most directly relevant to 'the end of history' is that liberal democracy has not truly taken root in either nation. There is still struggle against anarchy and terror. The plan to export democracy worldwide, which Bush laid out in his second inaugural address, seems to have failed. Or at the very least, come at an exorbitant price.

In the autumn of 2005 we witnessed another illustrative example of the failure of our national government. For when Hurricane Katrina struck the port of New Orleans, we immediately cried out to Washington for relief. Washington did eventually come calling in the form of FEMA, but too little, too late. Even now, four years later, parts of New Orleans remain effectively uninhabitable.

The final casualty of the 2000s was an item that had barely limped its way through the decade to begin with: the economy. After all, even though America felt less secure from attack, we still had our beloved economic security. And being Americans, we were more than content to hide our heads in the sand. Certainly, we were no longer in the booming 90s, but we were secure in our finances.

The Enron scandal, like the terrorist attacks just a month before, set the tone for the decade. Combined with the foreign energy situation, various scandals caused the stock market to languish for 8 years. But finally in September 2008, it all came to a head, and the world quickly dove into a recession, the likes of which it had not experienced in 80 years.

But who did we turn to at this moment of crisis and insecurity? The same federal government which had failed us on 9/11, which had led us into Iraq, which had been lax in its response to Katrina. After all, we thought, does not a national problem require immediate national action? Now perhaps the economic bailout was a necessity - most economists seem to still think it was - but has it really brought us more security? Honestly, the question cannot yet be answered, but it is strange that - to borrow some Inside-the-Belt parlance - while Main St. suffered like it hadn't in decades, Wall St. experienced one of its best in a while.

Just a week ago the Senate passed a bill which promises to reform the health care industry in the America. I have no idea whether it will; I doubt anyone really does at this point. But I do think it a symbolic occasion of significance that this should occur at the end of the decade. For it will either mark a fulcrum around which this decade's trends will turn back on themselves, or it will mark a continuation of those trends. It will either show that national politics can achieve useful ends, or it will demonstrate once again that national solutions are not practicable for our nation's biggest problems.

All the while, our nation has become perhaps more bitterly divided than ever. The partisan protests this summer - tea parties, town hall disruptions, etc. - were virtually unprecedented. While it's been said that our country is a purple one - an even mix of red and blue states - as the decade has progressed, it has seemed to be more and more a mixture of deep red and deep blue, rather than purplish hues. If these various trends are interconnected, this partisanship is not promising for our security and national politics.

So what can we learn from the 2000s, and whither hence? I find two lessons in the past decade, corresponding to the two themes. In the first, we would be well to recognize that though American remains the sole superpower in the world, it cannot act like it is. We are not impervious and our security is not impeccable. This applies both to our economic security and physical security.

The hubris of America had reached its pinnacle in the 1990s and in this way the 2000s were a healthy nadir in correcting this attitude. For many years we were effectively spoiled, as a nation. Fukuyama may have been correct that liberal democracy has won out, but that does not mean that it is omnipresent, nor that every corner of the globe is ready for it. Danger still exists in the world and there still exist enemies. And while we may be ever trending towards economic security, that is a macro-trend, not a surety at each moment. We must remain prudent and ever-cautious.

The second lesson is the relative weakness of our federal government. I am neither a libertarian nor a neoliberal, so I am not writing to rail against the evils of government. I do not think the monumental error of the 1990s and 2000s was statism, but nationalization-ism. The American system of government is federal, and properly so. Such a system reflects the diversity of our nation, and it recognizes the locality of government.

For too long Americans had sought to resolve our problems at the national level. The 2000s underscored the limits of the national politics. Was there a single problem presented to the national stage in the 2000s which we have resolved? I can't think of one, off the top of my head. Yet each party thought for sure that its solution to the problem was best for the entire country, despite the variations in geography, demography, and culture.

The libertarians may be correct that some of these problems are the business of no government whatsoever, but many of these problems can be properly addressed by state and local governments. Instead, America sought to hold a national debate on every issue: same-sex marriage, disaster relief, health care, etc.

I am not at all surprised that Congress' approval rating at the end of our decade is 22/68. (Granted, that's a few ticks above its all-time low last summer, 14/75.) After all, we are asking them to resolve the most divisive issues of our time in a way that will satisfy both Californians and Alabamans, both New Yorkers and Kansans. Perhaps we should de-nationalize our political discourse. Rather than asking our federal system to be a national system, let it be a federal system.

I actually think the two lessons tie into each other quite well, in that they both stem from a uniquely American form of audacity. The former lesson being manifest in brashness; the latter being manifest in presumption. America could do well to remember these lessons in humbly moving forward in the 21st century. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Bringing Up Baby

2007-02-23T14:33:00.000-05:00

What happens to someone that dies in infancy? Do they inherit heaven or are they damned to hell? Though the question has been a puzzle since the early days of Christendom (Gregory of Nyssa wrote a treatise on the topic in the 4th century), it seems to have become a question of great concern in the Church in recent decades. Partly because it (!SPOILER ALERT!) remains unanswered, but mostly because the theology behind many people's speculation results in an unnerving conclusion. Therefore, one's answer to the question of infant salvation is a scope into one's overall understanding of sin and salvation.

Before trying to provide an answer, we must first understand the reason why the question is asked in the first place. The common understanding goes something like: all men have sinned; as such, they are in need of a savior; Jesus Christ died for our sins and if we place our faith in him, we will achieve the salvation which we need. Infants, however, are unable to have faith, and therefore the difficulty arises. For how then can infants be saved from damnation?

Age of Accountability

The most common answer in the modern church is the doctrine of the age of accountability. The doctrine states that one is only culpable for his sins once he has reached a mental/spiritual age in which he is knowledgeable of his sins and understands the implications and effects of them and capable of an appropriate response. The child need not necessarily understand the Bible's exact teaching on sin (i.e., that his sins condemn him to hell), only that there is a moral right and a moral wrong, and understand that he is able to willfully choose one or the other.

In other words, the general teaching here is that God inherently has forgiven our sins before this age of accountability. The age, of course, does not correspond to an exact physical age, but is linked, as said above, to a mental age. This leads some of the doctrine's adherents to additionally claim that God does not hold the mentally retarded accountable to their sins either. Alternatively, some claim that the infants are actually without sin until the age of accountability, that what we would call sinful acts in adults are not sinful in infants.

The doctrine of the age of accountability is, of course, an attempt to provide a comfortable answer to the concern that infants are apparently unable to express faith. Likewise, they are apparently unable to repent of their sins. And if, the adherents say, there is no salvation without faith, then the infants cannot otherwise be saved. And since they are not comfortable with a God who would thusly damn those who seem innocent, they have concocted the doctrine.

I say concocted, since the doctrine has no basis in Scripture. It is entirely an attempt at providing comfort to those who do not fully understand the Bible's teaching on sin and salvation. Specifically, it stems from a denial of the doctrines of original sin and salvation by grace alone. It stems from the fact that the original 'common understanding' of the order of salvation, stated four paragraphs above, is flawed in those two doctrines.

Original Sin

The doctrine of original sin, though found throughout the Bible, finds its primary exposition in Romans 5. Here Paul lays out what is called by theologians federalism, not to be confused with political federalism (though I do find it ironic that I am federalist in both politics and theology; and anti-libertarian in both politics and theology). Paul describes man as being represented in history by two figures: Adam and Christ. By 'represented', I do not mean symbolically like an archetype; rather by 'represented', Paul talks of Adam and Christ as being proxies for mankind.

Adam was the first of these proxies and when Adam sinned, sin was brought upon all of mankind (Rom 5:12). Paul is not saying here that man was cursed with the possibility of sin. He is saying that God held the sin of Adam against all of mankind. We can rightly place the blame for the curse of sin on Adam. We are still individually responsible for the sin that we individually commit, for we do willingly commit it, but the initial sin of Adam is the reason we each have a will corrupted by sin. In theological terms, the sin of Adam was imputed upon all men.

This is a doctrine which is offensive to the ears of the modern church, a church which has eagerly adopted the individualism of our culture. For it says that before you committed a single sin, you were guilty (Rom 5:18). Furthermore, it was a man not of your own choosing who brought the curse of sin upon you. How undemocratic and unjust it sounds to our ears! We would much prefer to be our own Adam, determining for ourselves whether to take on the curse of sin. The reality is, however, that God did choose Adam as a proxy for mankind in his own wisdom and for his own glory. It is the clear teaching of Scripture.

The important aspect of this for the purposes of our present discussion is, that just as the adult has inherited sin from Adam, so has the infant: all are in sin and iniquity from the womb (Ps 51:5). It doesn't matter whether the infant has visibly committed sin or is even cognizant of the sin he may be committing. He has already been condemned with Adam. The condition for accountability for sin is not a mental state, but is existence itself.

So how then is an infant to be saved? For does not salvation require a confession of faith and repentance from one's sins? How can an infant repent from his sin, when he is presumably incapable of even recognizing it? This is where a correct understanding of salvation by grace alone is helpful.

Sola Gratia

Most Christians know and love Ephesians 2:8: 'For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.' The meaning is quite plain. Salvation comes by grace, a completely unmerited gift of favor. Further, what we have done is no precondition for salvation.

Yet the majority of the church misunderstands the verse. They instead read it as saying, 'For by faith you have been saved through grace.' For the church preaches that if one has faith, then one will receive salvation. This is the great Arminian Switcheroo (yes, that's the technical term for it). It trades the Catholic system of salvation by manifold works for a system of salvation by one great work, namely faith. In other words, we have merited grace by our faith.

What we thereby end up saying is, that what differentiates us from non-Christians is a work of faith. The reason why we Christians have salvation, we tell each other, is because we have faith: if those who do not have faith would gain faith, then God would grant to them, too, saving grace. But this is not the teaching of Scripture! The teaching of Ephesians 2:8 - and the teaching throughout Scripture - is that grace precedes faith; faith is the evidence and fruit of grace, of God's salvation working in us. There is nothing that we do - not even when we express faith - which is a condition of our salvation. Before the foundation of the world - before we had any chance at all to express our faith - God chose us in his grace to be saved (Eph 1:4). If we take the grace out of the picture, we have also taken God out of the picture.

We can sure of our salvation when we are witness to our own faith. Not because the faith has saved us, but because it is the fruit and evidence of our salvation. Our regeneration precedes our faith.

The Second Half of Federalism
(AKA The Gospel)

So what does this mean? To answer this, we must return to federalism and pick up where we left off, with Adam bringing condemnation upon all of humanity. That, fortunately for us, is not the end of the story. For God sent a second proxy in Christ. And in Christ were two more imputations which would mean the salvation of the world, for which we will consider 2 Corinthians 5:21, in addition to Romans 5.

Firstly, man's sin was imputed to Christ, so that Christ might die for our sins (2Cor 5:21). By '[dying] for our sins' we mean that he took upon the full penalty of death which was due to our sins, so that we ourselves might not be punished for them. For God is just, and sin requires punishment that he might remain just. In return, just as Adam was the proxy who brought on us sin, so Christ was the proxy who brought on us righteousness (Rom 5:18-9). Christ imputed his righteousness on us.

Thus, we understand that God did know what he was doing after all with all that federalism! Without the federal proxy of Adam, there would neither be the federal proxy of Christ. If we were each our own Adam, we would also need to be our own Christ. Is it not just like our sinful and selfish selves to shun the federal headship of Adam and the sin he imputes to us as unjust, but to embrace the federal headship of Christ and the righteousness he graciously imputes to us? Nevertheless, despite this further manifestation of our sin, all those who are in Christ will receive this righteousness on the merit of Christ alone.

Return to Infancy

So we must ask: what does this mean for infants? The ultimate answer is that Scripture is agnostic on the 'salvation status' of individual infants, or even on infants in general. However, the doctrines found in Scripture allow us to know that God does act justly, without having to fabricate a doctrine, such as the age of accountability.

Instead, we know that infants are treated like any other human. They are all born dead in the sin of Adam and will remain dead, unless the grace of God comes upon them. On the same hand, though, neither are they any less capable of receiving God's saving grace than an adult. For if there is nothing that man does which gains him salvation, then an inability to do works cannot preclude one from salvation. They are just as capable of receiving the imputation of Christ's righteousness as anyone else. They may be incapable of expressing this salvation in the ways we expect of adults (how can we know what an expression of faith looks like in an infant anyways?), but it does not mean that they have not been saved.

I would note that several Reformed theologians have speculated on the general and specific salvation of infants, but have quickly admitted that they are but speculations with little, if any, Scriptural basis. Ulrich Zwingli, the Swiss reformer, believed that death in infancy was actually a sign of election, that only those who had been saved were allowed to die in infancy. Peter Martyr adhered strictly to the agnostic view that probably at least some infants were saved, but without witnessing the fruits of salvation, we cannot be sure. Friedrich Spanheim, expanding upon Covenant Theology (perhaps too much), believed that the children of believers were likewise saved and those of unbelievers were likewise unsaved. John Owen believed that the children of believers were surely saved, but the status of those of unbelievers was unsure.

We have assurance, though, that those whom God has elected unto salvation will be saved. No one will 'lose out' on salvation simply because he died in infancy. If one of the elect is to die in infancy, we know that God will remain just and save them in their infancy. The justice of God - and his sovereign execution of that justice - in his work of salvation should always remain the ultimate comfort for all believers.

My Free Will Made Me Write This (I Reeeaally Wanted to Anyways)

2007-02-20T11:45:00.000-05:00

One of the largest misconceptions about Calvinists is that we do not believe in free will. This is both true and not true. For it depends on our definitions (as most things do): what do we mean when we say 'free will'? There are three main schools of thought on free will: strict determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism, each having its own implications on whether we should accept 'free will' as a reality. (Note that in this context, libertarianism is entirely different from the political theory of the same name.)

To answer the question, I will be briefly discussing in this article each form and its application to a Biblical worldview. We will find that not only is just one perspective is true, but that only one fits in with Reformed theology. There is a special pertinence to salvation - indeed, it is the most often subject of the debate over free will - but this article will discuss free will in only a general manner.

Strict Determinism

Strict determinism is an easy philosophy to define and is essentially the denial of free will. External forces are the only factors in determining the fate of each action. Those external forces may include God, the laws of physics, social norms, etc. And each external force (with the possible exception of a divine force) in turn has its own forces acting upon it. Therefore, from Time Zero, the entire fate of the universe has been determined, and is merely acting itself out. But if we were to know all of the forces involved, we could predict the beginning, the end, and everything in between.

Determinism is not at all a foreign concept. Much of science is based upon a deterministic perspective. If we observe an object behave in a certain way under certain circumstances, then we predict that in the exact same circumstances it will behave exactly the same. And many of our everyday decisions are based upon an assumption of some loose form of determinism. For example, I like Starbucks' caramel Frappuccinos. I like them because every time I've had them, they've been delicious. So I assume that the next time I order one, I will enjoy it, as well.

However, the real question is whether determinism is the correct perspective for humans. Are humans guided by nothing more than stimuli? Is my decision to drink caramel Frappuccinos merely an interaction of chemicals in my brain? If so, then we encounter a severe dilemma for the Christian: what use is morality? There cannot be good and evil.

Further, if we have no will, then how can we be held responsible for our actions? Just as we cannot blame the rubber ball for falling to the earth when I let go of it, neither can I blame the assassin from killing the dignitary. All of a sudden, 'The devil made me do it,' is not only a legitimate excuse, but the precise explanation. Every action is at the impulse of a force beyond our control.

Deism was a religious/philosophical belief prominent in the 18th century, which had its roots in determinism. Even though all things in determinism have a cause, there must have been a beginning point. Deists identified that beginning point as the point of creation by God. Since that instant, however, God has not interacted with his creation; this is often known as the 'Clock Maker Model'.

Rather, the Bible does indeed hold us to a moral code. God does judge us based on our sinful works. And the writings of Paul, especially, are filled with the imagery of freedom as opposed to slavery (cf. Romans 6). Further, God has interacted with his creation throughout history, Jesus Christ being the obvious example. Therefore, we must conclude that a strict determinism does not match the view of humanity present in the Bible.

Libertarianism

As I said above, we must first be sure not to confuse this libertarianism with political libertarianism. The two are completely unrelated apart from their etymology and emphasis on freedom. A libertarian view of free will swings to the opposite end of the spectrum from determinism. For it claims that humans are completely and utterly free to do as they wish. From a Christian perspective, God has given humans a free will with which to choose their actions in an entirely free manner.

Of course, 'entirely free' is a bit of an overstatement. If we were truly 'entirely free' from all influences, there would be no pattern to our actions. The fact that I like caramel Frappuccinos would have no bearing on whether or not I'll order one in the future. The libertarian must admit (and has no problem doing so) that there are a number of external influences on the decisions we make. My past experiences with caramel Frappuccinos will influence my future decision to order or not order one.

The distinguishing feature of libertarianism, though, is it claims that when it comes down to it, I am just as capable (though perhaps not 'just as likely') as not ordering a caramel as I am of not ordering one. That is, the decision may be influenced by external factors, but it is not determined by them. This easily addresses the problem of morality that determinism was unable to confront. For if one is able to freely choose between choices, he is certainly culpable for that decision, and can certainly be judged thereby.

The problem that libertarianism encounters, however, is the question of God's sovereignty. If each man has a free will with which he can choose whatever, how can God also be sovereign? Whatever God may will, his plans may continually be thwarted by the actions of man. Whether it be the salvation of an individual or the outcome of a war. If God is not sovereign over man's will, then anything can happen, and God has become shut out. Further, if man is able to make decisions apart from the sovereignty of God, then how can we be assured that 'for those who love God all things work together for good' (Rom 8:28)?

(An additional philosophical problem presents itself against libertarianism. If God is omniscient, then he knows all future events. And if God knows something, then in some manner of speaking, it is set in stone. That is, it can happen know other way; therefore, we are unable to otherwise. I don't think this criticism is much more than a 'gotcha'. It requires many presumptions about omniscience, divine temporality, and epistemology in general. So it doesn't really hold all that much ground unless you accept these certain presumptions, for which we have no evidence nor scriptural witness. But I wanted to mention it, since it is a common critique.)

Libertarianism is the perspective behind Arminianism and Pelagianism, both of which emphasize human free will. Calvinists, on the other hand, do not see any scriptural evidence for human free will of this sort. We see any attempt to propose a sort of sovereignty of man over any element is a fruit of the sin of pride, placing man at the center of his life.

In Eden the serpent told Eve that if she ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that she would become like God. In a sense that is true, for she would gain that knowledge of good and evil. But the Bible does not anywhere indicate that she became sovereign apart from God. Yet this is essentially the libertarian claim: that God may influence my decision, but he does not determine it.

Compatibilism

Compatibilism is the perspective on free will that most accurately represents the views of Calvin, Luther, and other reformers (as well as a number of thinkers in the Scottish reformation, such as Hume and Hobbes). It claims that both determinism and will are compatible and that both are true. That is, that God is sovereign over all, but that my actions are not coerced or forced. The best way to answer how this is possible is to distinguish compatibilism from both determinism and libertarianism.

Compatibilism differs from determinism in that it asserts that will does exist in each man. Man's decisions are not the product of biological or physical laws, but the product of the will present in man's soul. Each man seeks what he wants, and does as he wants; he acts entirely voluntarily. When I choose to order a Frappuccino, it is because I wanted one, not because my biology or external circumstances demanded me to do so. So, in that sense my will is indeed free: free from coercion.

Yet compatibilism is also distinguished from libertarianism, for it claims that God is still sovereign over all things. For while we are free to do as we choose, we are not free to choose anything. We are free to do exactly as we will, but we cannot act contrary to our will. If my will demands that I order a Frappuccino, how can I do any differently? If I did differently, it is because I willed to do differently, not because I acted against my will. The devil may seem to have made you do it, but it was what you wanted to do anyways.

Here is where we return to our initial question: what do we mean when we say 'free will'. For in this sense, compatibilism defines 'will' as something much more definite than libertarianism. Free will is not, as the libertarian understands it, the ability to have equally chosen other than what was actually chosen. Free will is the freedom to do as one wants. As long as you did what you want (which you always do, unless an obstacle, such as the laws of physics, is present), you exercised free will. It does not matter whether you were unable to do otherwise.

Now, if my will can theoretically demand anything, how is this truly different from libertarianism? The crux of compatibilism comes in the combination of the two. For isn't God the creator of all things? Then he is certainly also the creator of man's will. And just as he has designed me to have two blue eyes and light brown hair, he has all the more designed my will to desire certain things. As he is the grand architect of all of creation, he is also in control of the experiences which will further shape my will. No change in my will happens apart from the will of God.

And the most important and miraculous change to my will was its great regeneration. By nature my will desired sin and all things against God. And, sure enough, I was free to do as I wanted, free to pursue sin. In fact, I was a slave to this sin nature and its corrupting power on me. But God, in his grace and despite seeing nothing in me, re-molded my will to instead seek after him. No longer was I in sin's bondage, freed to God. As Paul puts it in Romans 6, I am now a slave to righteousness. And I rejoice in knowing that God will never allow my will to be re-bound to sin, but that I will persevere in righteousness unto death.

Further Reading

Calvin, John. The Bondage and Liberation of the Will

Edwards, John. The Freedom of the Will
Online version

Luther, Martin. The Bondage of the Will
Online version

Calvin and Luther speak more specifically about the role of will in salvation and the freedom from sin that results. Edwards writes more generally about will and its service to the sovereignty of God. The Edwards book is truly fantastic; perhaps his best writing. He says what I'm trying to say, but much better.

You Misspelled Weltanschauung

2007-02-05T11:37:00.000-05:00

Every one of us believes things that we cannot prove; sometimes, in fact, we cannot even convey the slightest semblance of proof. It really shouldn't be surprising to anyone, yet it is undoubtedly disconcerting to a great many. I cannot prove that God exists; likewise atheists cannot prove that he doesn't. We can each offer arguments to support our claim, but in the end, it all comes down to what each of us believes.

What is most ironic, however, is that, often, the less provable a belief is, the more foundational it tends to be in a person's life. The fact that I believe that God exists underlies my entire approach to life, death, etc. It determines my outlook on reason, tradition, politics, and relationships. It forms the foundation for my view on disasters, blessings, and even the mundaneness of life.

On some level, those who are disturbed by these facts are right to be disturbed. After all, how can we justify living our lives based on principles which cannot be proven? Should not reason guide our life, particularly those things which channel all our other thoughts? Nevertheless, each of us has these beliefs, and each of us lives by them. The epistemological term - as well as the everyday term now - for this underlying belief system is a worldview. That is, the view through which you see all other things; the tint of your mind's sunglasses.

Kuyper-Calvinism

The study of worldview has been a fascination of the 19th and 20th centuries, as philosophers and anthropologists deal with how cultures and people determine what they believe to be true. The phenomenon has been of particular importance in Christian circles since the turn of the 20th century. The genesis of the movement began with Abraham Kuyper, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1901 - 1905, who formulated what is now called Neo-Calvinism.

Kuyper saw in the church, particularly the Dutch Reformed Church, a laxity brought on by the brooding modernism of the early 20th century, the ascendancy of liberal theology, and radical individualism. Christianity had become a Sunday religion, one which had no impact on the daily lives of its communicants. Kuyper saw that the Christian church had lost its Christian worldview, adopting instead the modernist worldview. Rather than focusing on God's sovereignty, the church was looking to man, and the seemingly limitless horizons before him.

Neo-Calvinism is, essentially, the adoption of Reformed theology to an increasingly post-Christian culture. There are no major theological changes between traditional Calvinism and Neo-Calvinism; rather the difference is more in points of emphasis. Kuyper's Calvinism specifically addresses the question of how Christianity should interact the secular world.

Kuyper's main goal in establishing a Neo-Calvinist theology was to emphasize to Christians that one's worldview cannot be neutral. If one's worldview is not emphatically Christian, then it will be one of another religion or of secularism. There is not a middle ground when it comes to worldview. Those who think themselves neutral are, in fact, secular in their worldview. Kuyper sought to call Christians back to a Christian worldview.

The Christian Worldview

The next logical question is, 'What is the Christian Worldview?' That question is best answered by answering the three questions that each worldview must answer. For now I'll just list the questions; in future articles I'll provide the Christian answers to the questions. I'll also be discussing some of the practical implications of how we, as Christians, answer the questions, which is the point of a worldview in the first place.

1) What is my relation to God?
2) What is my relation to others?
3) What is my relation to the world/creation?

The short summary of the answers is that all things come back to God: meaning, purpose, motive, glory, etc. Kuyper summarized both his idea of worldview and his practical application to the Christian with the following:

No single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'

This sentence encapsulates much of Kuyper. The first clause summarizes his claim that one's worldview was all-encompassing, permeating every bit of our being. Christian and modern worldviews cannot coexist in the same mind. One will prevail. The second clause summarizes the Christian worldview wherein God is in the process of redeeming all of creation, and no part of it is free from his sovereignty.

If you'd like to read further Kuyper's answers to these worldview questions in his own words, I suggest picking up a copy of the Stone Lectures he gave in 1898 at Princeton Theological Seminary. It's available from most online book sellers under the title Lectures on Calvinism.

The Legacy of Kuyper

Kuyper's theological concerns echoed throughout the 20th century church. His direct intellectual follower was fellow Dutchman Herman Dooyeweerd, who pioneered reformation philosophy and proposed the 'religious ground motive', which is similar to a worldview, but particular to the spiritual aspects which influence all other thought. According to Dooyeweerd all thought is driven by spiritual belief, whether it be the religion of Christianity, the religion of Islam, or the religion of secularism.

As modernism succumbed to the two World Wars and the post-modernism which followed, Christianity found a new voice for its worldview in Francis Schaeffer - he was to post-modernism as Kuyper was to modernism. Schaeffer published a number of books addressing the relationship between the church and the post-modern world, once again calling Christians to adopt the Christian worldview, making their religious beliefs their foundational beliefs, not simply something that they believe in spite of a secular worldview.

Needless to say, as Western culture has gradually parted with its Christian roots, Christians have been required to ask more and more how they are to interact with the world. What middle ground between worldliness and withdrawal are we called to? The legacy of Kuyper and his intellectual descendants has continually sought to call Christians out of these two extremes, to a worldview which affirms the teachings of the Bible.

As with every topic posted on this blog, you can be sure to see further discussion of both the Christian worldview in general and Kuyper, Dooyeweerd, Schaeffer, and others, specifically. So stay tuned.

Federalism

2006-11-17T13:56:00.000-05:00

So it's been nearly two months since my last post. A number of things contributed to that, but I won't go into that. Anyways, I'm back with a new article on the Federal system of the United States.

I picked Federalism since it underlies so much of this country's politics, as well as being one of the issues I most care about (either that or it underlies so many of my issues). The federal system of the United States is one of the factors that gives the United States such a unique political system. It is also one of the most misunderstood aspects of United States politics; so with this article, I hope to give the history behind our Federal system and why it is so important that the United States preserve it.

First the history lesson...

In the spring of 1775 the American colonies were at war with Britain. The battles of Lexington and Concord had just occurred, and the Shot Heard 'Round the World had been fired. The Second Continental Congress, scheduled to convene months before any of this, found itself in a situation they hadn't bargained for. Nonetheless, the Congress handled the situation quite well, attempting to treat with King George III, created the Continental Army which General Washington would eventually lead to victory, and signed the Declaration of Independence. As their final act, however, they ratified the Articles of Confederation, a document which finally united the several colonies.

Anyone who remembers their American History classes in high school probably has a deep bias against the Articles of Confederation. He remembers his teacher telling the class how ineffective and powerless the Articles were. More specifically he probably remembers the Continental Congress was unable to levy taxes or issue paper money (strangely enough, it could issue coins). But the Articles really were quite good; they got the colonies through the last two years of the Revolution, resolved a number of inter-state issues, such as when they passed the Northwest Ordinance.

Ultimately, however, the Articles were insufficient. They had, after all, been drafted and ratified in an environment of war, with the colonies already united against a common foe, Britain. When the war ended, however, many of the powers and incentives of the Articles ceased to be relevant. So in 1787 a Constitutional Convention was convened in Philadelphia to revise the Articles. What they ended up doing was drafting an entirely new constitution, one which has lasted over 200 years.

The change being called for was essentially to create a stronger central government. In modern parlance, they were moving from a confederal government to a federal government. (I'll explain later why I don't think there's really any difference between the two.) The new Federal government was given an executive and judicial branch, was able to authoritatively resolve disputes between states, raise taxes, issue money, regulate interstate commerce. The most important change, perhaps, was the doctrine that the new Constitution and its government would be superior in all matters, a promise which didn't exist in the old Articles.

The elements of the Articles which remained are just as important, if not more so. The new Federal government was only part of the plan. Below the Federal government were each of the states, retaining an good deal of their rights. This implicit guarantee was made explicit in the 10th Amendment included in the Bill of Rights: all 'powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively...'

Thus, for over 200 years, the United States has been a conglomeration of the Federal government and the several state governments, with neither possessing all power or ultimate sovereignty. Or it should have been that way...

In my opinion, the Federal system set up by the Constitution has been all but abandoned. The Federal government has instead become a National government. This is a bad thing, and I'll be talking about all of the ways this has happened in future articles. For now I'll be addressing the question of why we need a truly federal system and some tangible effects we can witness in its practical absence.

Why Is Federalism's Fall Catastrophic?

Anyone who has paid any attention to recent national elections knows that the United States is a country with many diverse political opinions and viewpoints. The whole red state/blue state thing (which, btw, has the colors backwards; but I digress) demonstrates this quite well. This isn't a recent phenomenon, either. The founding fathers recognized this very fact, and it has persisted throughout our nation's history.

The federal system that the writers of the Constitution set up was one that allowed for all of those diverse opinions to flourish. The fear that many Americans had of a strong central government was embedded in that. The citizens of New York didn't want Georgians to be passing laws which would substantially affect how they lived, and vice versa. The federal system instead says 'New York will govern New York, Georgia will govern Georgia, and the Federal government will govern in those matters which require the intervention of a third party.' This was the agreement and understanding that the states united ratified in the 1780s.

Without this federal system, you will have Georgians making decisions for New Yorkers; or Californians for Coloradans. Each and every decision made by the United States government has the potential for enormous fallout, affecting 300 million people's lives. Representatives from urban states will be deciding how rural farmers will conduct their business. And representatives from rural areas will be deciding what values urbanites must adhere to. This is happening today; the Federal government makes all of the decisions, with the states filling in the gaps. A federal system demands it work the other way around, with states making all of the decisions individually and the Federal government filling in the gaps which the states simply cannot fill (foreign policy, interstate commerce, military, etc.).

This modern implementation was not as it was intended, for the founding fathers knew that such a system would fail. Instead, the Constitution allows each state to decide its own values, its own priorities, its own rights, and its own prohibitions. Each state is unique, and any effort to blanket over that fact will begin to tear apart the nation's fabric. Any effort to create an unauthorized 'unity' of law - as happens as a matter of course these days - actually fosters disunity and enmity. Rather, the states and state governments must be a significant part of the political system.

The modern violation of these federal principles is the real cause of today's political strife, not a 'culture war' or any other catchphrase you might want to insert. If you are looking for a reason for why the fall of federalism is catastrophic, just look around. Abortion, medicare, welfare, pork-barreling, education, etc. Just about every contentious issue in our nation today would be a mere fraction as contentious if it were approached in the manner that federalism demands. Instead, we are a nation divided against itself, with citizens becoming more and more bitter towards politics every day.

In articles to follow (and don't worry, not all will be politics; there will be plenty of religion and worldview, as well), I'll begin to outline some of the ways in which the United States government is currently trespassing against federalism, what needs to change, and what effects we can hope to see by it. I hope you enjoy following along.

A Closing Coda on the Terms Federal, Federalist and Federalism
(This is admittedly a not-so-well-written section that may cause more confusion than it clears up.)

There is a historical anomaly in American history that causes the word federal to mean several different things, depending on the context. In the 18th century, as the American republic was being created, it indicated a system with two levels of government: a central government and several sub-governments. In effect, federal was synonymous with confederal; federation synonymous with confederation.

As the Constitutional Convention of 1789 proceeded, however, those who wanted to give the create a much stronger central government became known as federalists. And those who wanted a weaker central government - though still stronger than under the Articles of Confederation - were, of course, the anti-federalists. The terms federal and confederal were no longer synonyms; instead they described similar systems of bi-level government, but indicated different balances of power.

This association of federalism with a strong central government was strengthened with Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison's publication of The Federalist papers, a series of articles which defended the strong-central-government system of the new Constitution.

Even within each camp, however, there was a diversity of opinion. Among the anti-federalists were those who accepted the Constitution as an acceptable balance of power and those who thought it gave the central government too much power. George Mason of Virginia was one of three anti-federalist members of the Constitutional Convention who even refused to sign the Constitution.

In the federalist camp there was also a wide range of opinion. Alexander Hamilton thought that the new Constitution gave too much sovereignty to the states. In fact, if he had been able to have his way in the Constitutional Convention, he probably would have all but done away with the state governments. In the nascent republic he formed the Federalist Party which would seek a strong national government.

James Madison, on the other hand, was a federalist (fairly obvious since he was one of the three authors of The Federalist papers) and a staunch supporter of the Constitution. But when political parties began to form, he found himself at odds with the more radical federalists, such as Hamilton and subsequently co-founded with Jefferson the Democratic-Republican Party, an [ostensibly] anti-federalist party (though certainly an anti-Federalist-Party party).

The wide spectrum of the definitions federalist and anti-federalist makes classifications of early America somewhat difficult, confused even more by what historical figures considered themselves to be. James Madison is one good example of that, as seen above. John Adams is another example, as he was a member of the Federalist Party, but very much believed in states' rights, and recognized that the American nation required a balance of power between the levels of government.

So essentially, in 18th century America, there were really three groups of political thought: those who thought the Constitution was too centralized (e.g., George Mason); those who thought the Constitution wasn't centralized enough (e.g., Alexander Hamilton); and those who thought the Constitution was just right (e.g., James Madison).

But what do those who call themselves federalists in the 21st century believe? Certainly since the 1980's, with the founding of the Federalist Society (which is concerned mostly with the federal judiciary system), for example, federalism has been resurrected as a political persuasion in America. A good way to answer that question is by answering another question: with what founding father does a modern federalist find himself most in agreement? In most cases, the answer will be one of those founding fathers found in the moderate group: Madison, Adams, etc.

Some, in an effort to emphasize the concern for states' rights, will cite Jefferson as a main influence. The more libertarian wing of the modern federalists will particularly look to Jefferson's agrarian republic ideals. Certainly, however, no modern federalist looks to Hamilton as a source of inspiration. For the United States have witnessed the culmination of Hamilton's vision for the federal government, and that travesty is the very reason why federalists have begun to distinguish themselves from other political philosophers.

For in general, both the 18th century federalists and 21st century federalists have the same goals: to establish a balance of power between the federal government and the state governments. In the 18th century, when the federal government had virtually no power whatsoever, that called for an increase in the federal government's power. In the 21st century when the federal government has exercised more power than it is constitutionally permitted, a decrease in federal presence is required.

So, from one angle - looking at the practical steps each is taking to achieve their goals - modern federalists end up looking like 18th century anti-federalists, by each attempting to decrease the size of the federal government. But one must look at the goals of the parties, rather than the means. With that attitude, one sees the close affinity that the federalists of the two ages have.

Clear as mud?

You can be sure of one thing, however. Whenever I use the term Federalist, I will always mean it in the original sense, one which seeks for a balance between the United States government and the governments of the several states. I will never mean it in the Hamiltonian sense, advocating for a very centralized government. Hopefully that will provide a a bit of clarity in my discussions.

O Thou! Whatever Title Please Thine Ear

2006-09-22T18:06:00.000-04:00

The title for this particular post comes from the opening lines of the epic poem The Dunciad by Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744). The poem is a satire (ostensibly written to Jonathan Swift, another satirist and favorite author of mine) relating the story of the goddess Dulness and her quest to bring about a decline of culture throughout the world by means of stupidity and tawdry. It's a wonderful poem which everyone should read but no one does. (You can find a copy - the second, four-book version - at Project Gutenberg.) I thought the line was a perfect fit for this blog, seeing as it's one of the principles behind it. Not to mention that this post is discussing the meaning behind this blog's title. I guess that's kinda important, too, huh?

So what is that meaning? Well, actually there are three meanings wrapped up in that title, and all within the word 'reformed'. Those three meanings pretty much capture most everything you need to know about me to know where I'm coming from and where you can expect this blog to be headed. I thought it was pretty clever.

Meaning #1: Adherents of the Reformed religion; Protestants. (OED)
I am a Christian: more specifically, a Reformed Christian. Reformed Christians are those which follow historically from the efforts, writings, and interpretation of Scripture by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, most notably John Calvin and Martin Luther. Reformed Christians distinguish themselves from the Catholic, Orthodox, Fundamentalist, and Episcopalian (and its sundry descendants) relatives. Some might also distinguish themselves from Lutheran Christianity, in an attempt to align more closely with John Calvin than with Martin Luther. For the most part, the differences between the two are nominal. Thus, in the most strict sense Reformed Christians are Presbyterians, Puritans, and - as you would expect - most denominations with 'Reformed' in their name (such as Reformed Baptists, etc.).

Essentially, however, Reformed Christianity is Calvinistic Christianity. It is a form of Christianity whose core distinctives are found in the Five Solas. I won't expound on it all right now, since I plan on having multiple articles about Reformed theology in the future. Suffice it to say that Reformed theology includes such doctrines as predestination, inerrancy of Scripture, and, ultimately, the supreme sovereignty of God.

Meaning #2: Altered in form or content; esp. put into a better form, corrected, amended. (OED)
Being a Christian, I believe I have been saved by faith. As part of that salvation, I have been made 'a new creation'. That is, it is not only my soul which has been saved from sin, but all that I am, including my mind. My mind has been saved from the complete corruption of sin, just as much as my soul has been (though it may still be affected by sin, as may every other aspect of myself).

The tangible effect of this is that my Christian religion has an immense effect on my worldview. Everything on which I muse is seen through the lens of Christianity. A favorite description of this comes from Abraham Kuyper, influential theologian and Prime Minister of the Netherlands 1901 - 1905:

No single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'

The two-fold doctrine in this quote (I'll definitely be discussing this quote in-depth in another post) governing the Christian worldview has become a recent favorite subject of mine. Most Christians have tried to separate their spiritual life from their secular view of the world. Kuyper, and those who have followed him, have argued that this lifestyle is ultimately futile, essentially creating a 'house divided against itself'. I hope to use my reformed mind in to graft a Christian worldview onto all pieces of the 'mental world': to explain how I see my Christianity in relation to a non-Christian world.

Meaning #3: Altered in form or content; esp. put into a better form, corrected, amended. (OED)
Yes, that's the same definition. I mean to apply the definition in a different manner however: read it alternatively as 'Thinking with a Mind of Reform'. It's a bit of a stretch grammatically, but I think it works... It requires reading the participle as subjective, rather than objective, something which can sometimes be done in English with past participles.

Here I am referring to mostly my view of politics. I have recently realized that I have very few definitive views of policy-making in politics. That is, I don't have strong opinions on taxation, foreign policy, energy, or most of the other major chasms in modern political debate. So, the fact that I'm a Republican doesn't really say a whole lot about the issues that I actually have a passion for. Neither does libertarian or just about any other political label.

Rather, my politics are centered around a reformation of government back to the principles of the Constitution. The Federal Government has overstepped its boundaries so far and so frequently that it's obscene. Furthermore, the balance of power in Washington has become disgusting. My belief is that if we were to keep the Federal Government in check, allowing no authority more than the Constitution allows, much of the political divide (that whole Red v. Blue thing) would virtually disappear. In short, I'm an old school, conservative type of guy. (If you didn't pick that up already, you might want to stop reading this blog. Chances are it'll be waaaay over your head.) I'll leave it at that for now. Much more will be said in future posts.

Conclusion
So those are the three meanings which come out of this blog's title: the three meanings of reform that my mind revolves around. Most of the posts in this blog will deal with at least one of those topics: Reformed Christianity, the worldview of a mind reformed by the salvation of God, and/or the reform of politics and government in the United States.

As I've said before, I have many diverse interests, so every once in a while I'll post something about those. I guess through those you'll get to know me a bit better. Or something like that.

Next topic: as of yet, undecided. Stay tuned.

Opening Argument

2006-09-22T15:29:00.000-04:00

I finally have my own blog. Yay... *rolleyes* I used to have a blog-type thing back a few years back on my college webpage. It had a grand total of three posts over the course of 10 months. Well, I've had a bit on my mind recently (and even more time on my hands), so I figured I'd start it up again. And because I'm too lazy to code it at all or monkey around with a third-party HTML editor, I've unfortunately decided to dive into Blogger.

The purpose of this blog is pretty simple; the non-purpose of this blog is perhaps even simpler. I don't want this to be your run-of-the-mill blog. You won't read about the dull goings-on of my life. You won't read about my reactions to the latest insignificant news story. And you certainly won't see this blog on CNN along with the rest of the inane 'blogosphere' giving their ignorant two cents about political events. But most importantly, unlike all the other social commentator wannabes out there blogging, this blog won't tell you what to think.

Rather this blog is out there as a resource with which I can comment on issues that I've been thinking about recently, informing you, the reader, of the conclusions I've come to and the method by which I came to those conclusions. One of the foundational quotes for this blog is from Calvin Coolidge, our 30th president:

They criticize me for harping on the obvious. Perhaps someday I'll write On the Importance of the Obvious. If all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves.

One of the obvious things that most people - let alone 'folks in the United States' - don't do is think. They allow other people to think for them, form their opinions for them, and ultimately control how they view the world. And because people are so used to that, when they do begin to think for themselves, their capacity for critical thinking is in such a state of atrophy that they are unable to form any coherent or rational conclusion. So, a potential side-effect will be to demonstrate how to think. Not what to think, but the all-encompassing universal approach which must be applied to virtually each and every thought.

But that is indeed merely a side-effect; my purpose isn't to be a resource to society to that end. The up-front purpose is to get my thoughts out there along with the in-depth reasons for those thoughts. Many people have told me that I don't fit many molds; that I am a conglomeration of many spheres of influence; I don't even fit the 'maverick' cliché. Because of that, people have been curious for many of my reasons behind the way that I am: after all, there must be a reason behind all my diverse opinions. That's what this blog will publish. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your view), since every reason has itself another reason behind it, that means that I will probably never reach the bottom of why's.

The second main purpose is entirely selfish - or at least mostly selfish. I have found throughout my life that if I take the time to write out my view on a given subject, it requires me to think quite a bit about the subject, giving me a very good understanding of my own opinion, fleshing out my thoughts. And since I'd like to have that foundation for the most important aspects of my mind, I'll write on those aspects. And if I'm writing, might as well publish for free, right?

Though I'm under no delusions that anyone will actually care. I'll be surprised if there's even half a dozen people who care about any single post on this blog. But mass readership isn't my goal. If it was, I'd be writing for an established newspaper/periodical.

So what does that all mean? It means that every once in a while I'll be writing up an article - and believe me, they'll all be quite lengthy - about a subject I've been pondering recently. Most of the time it'll be political or religious in nature, since those are the two biggest universal interests I have, but there will also be splashes of music, books, history, and other random musings. And there will, of course, be many articles on the logical intersect of religion and politics: worldview.

So, I hope that if you do decide to read this blog regularly that you'll enjoy the time and that it will be time well-wasted. Who knows, I may actually make a difference. Wouldn't my elementary school teachers be proud?

Next Topic: The Title of This Blog (exciting, eh?)