Why the Experts Need the Intelligent Amateurs

“For the task [of] developing an authentic biblical wisdom among the people of God in this generation, we need in particular two kinds of Christians in our churches. One kind will be what rather hesitantly we might call the experts, those called to work in a particular area of life. It may be what they do for a livelihood, and often it is. But in this rather odd fallen world it may be a spare time activity. These people develop expertise by a certain degree of concentration and specialization. They are likely to be experts in only one field, and so in other respects they will be no better off than the rest of us. They tend either to become leaders and spokespersons in particular aspects of life or to provide resources for leaders and spokespersons.

“Besides the experts, we need the intelligent amateurs. These people are ordinary, average Christians who pursue their own callings but who also seek to understand the world around them as far as God grants them resources, abilities, and opportunities. They won’t be experts, but then they won’t speak like that, either. Most of the time they won’t be on platforms or in pulpits or writing authoritative books. This does not mean that they will be silently submissive or inert.

“They will do all sorts of study as their interests lead them, and they will be able to talk clearly, to listen intelligently, to make worthwhile contributions in discussions, and to have opinions worth accepting or disputing. Any of which may lead to discoveries. When they see a call to action, they soberly commit themselves to it. Above all, they know how to ask good questions. Such people are indispensable for creating a climate in which wise leadership can flourish. They may volunteer for community projects, or join education committees, or become precinct delegates, or even deacons and elders.

“The experts need the intelligent amateurs. This above all the expert needs. The worst possible thing is for the experts to go unchallenged. We suffer at present far too much from the tyranny of the expert. Not only does the expert tend to have an inadequately challenged authority in his own area of competence, but he also gets to be listened to with reverence in areas in which he is not competent. So rock stars are interviewed to pronounce on social ethics, physicists pontificate on the meaning of history, and politicians seem expert about everything! The only people who are expected not to address the world (though within the church the situation is different) outside their competence are religious leaders. (We wonder why?)

“Further, constant work within one’s own discipline easily leads the expert to become unaware of significant questions from outside that are vital for that work. Any teacher worth her salt knows, possibly more than she cares to admit, that her thinking and understanding has developed best in response to intelligent questioning, especially the sort that rocks her on her heels and makes her rethink some position.

“The intelligent amateur has a special power of discrimination. This is invaluable. Paul prays for those engagingly loving Christians at Philippi that their love would abound in thorough knowledge and insight, so as to discriminate the best from the rest (Philippians 1:9–10). Experts, curiously enough, are not the best endowed with this ability – maybe they are too busy studying the trees to appreciate the forest and the surrounding countryside.

“None of us can fulfill our callings as well as we might without a supporting community, and the experts are no exception. Other things being equal, a community like the church is going to have teachers and leaders whose quality is chiefly determined by the acumen of its general membership. If the members are suckers, they will be led by fools or rogues and hardly suspect it.

“If we hope to witness Christianly to this age in the Name of the Lord and in the interests of a more obedient culture, it is essential that as a Christian community we do good work in this area. A doctor will tell you that half her task is about good diagnosis, and half of that is about good observation and analysis. Careless work or arrogantly superficial efforts are going to be disastrous on the part of people who think that they are automatically experts because they know the Bible text or have a degree in sociology.

“It would be easy to give up. We may not be experts, and we may not have the time or the talents to embark on taxing programs of study. We may not be used to such demands being required of our intellectual life to become intelligent amateurs. And maybe our background has taught us to believe that our answers must always be simple, so that “he who runs may read” the message.

“Certainly there is a simplicity in the Gospel. To meet Jesus and trust him is the most natural thing in the world for a child. But living faithfully as an adult in a complex world is not simple. We are not expected to think like geniuses (unless we are one), but each of us is expected to think as hard as we can and to make what contributions we can to the ministry of the whole body of Christ in its witness, teaching, preaching, healing, and persuading. We must all do our part in this, as service to God in the world according to our particular gifts and callings. And we may need to be prepared to double up for others who have stopped functioning.” (Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World, S.P.C.K, 2000; cpt 15.)

Applying the Wisdom of Sages in Education

Today we’ll move from the previous post’s examples of seeking wisdom from the natural world to look at three models of wisdom-based schools that were common during Bible times in the cultures of the old world Middle East. These educational models were the temple schools, the royal court schools, and what today we might call home schooling. The first two are broadly analogous to what today we would call religious training and college, respectively. (See the previous post’s introduction to this short 3-part series.)

Because the old-world sages were vital to the development of the wisdom tradition itself, and to their cultures’ education models, let’s begin with a word about what the sages were on about, for their callings were quite different than that of prophets and priests.

Writing about ancient Israel, the Hebrew scholar Leo Perdue makes this helpful distinction: “Unlike prophets who received the knowledge of God in revelatory states (e.g., standing in the council of Yahweh) or priests whose religious experiences included theophanies…, sages came to their understanding of God and the moral life through ways of knowing that included memory, sense perception, reason, experience, and reflection.” He continues: “[By] using their powers of observation and the ability to think rationally, the sages sought to understand God, social institutions, and the moral life through their reflections on creation and human experience, including their own.”

Wisdom scholar Ben Witherington, writing about wisdom and experiences that are common to humanity, put it this way when referencing ancient Israel: “The sages dealt with and drew deductions from the repeatable patterns and moral order of ordinary life, both human life and the life of the broader natural world. For the most part they were trying to explain how God’s people should live when God is not presently intervening and when there is no late and particular oracle from God to draw on.”

Noted Old Testament theologian Gerhard von Rad calls the sages’ kind of learned wisdom “experiential knowledge,” noting that every old-world culture “devoted itself to the care and literary cultivation of this experiential knowledge.” “No one,” he reminds us, “would be able to live even for a single day without incurring appreciable harm if he could not be guided by wide practical experience.” It teaches us to understand events in our surroundings, to foresee the reactions of others, to apply our own unique resources at the right point, “to distinguish the normal from the unique and much more besides.”

To sum up, it was from their studied observations over time that the sages derived and built up a body of knowledge of learned lessons both from the created order of the world and from human behavior in the world. Insights applied from learned lessons are vital to gaining wisdom, and these became huge in the curricula of wisdom education. Over time, sages’ insights were collected and organized into forms of written instruction and used to educate the young about wise, practical decision-making in virtually every area of life in the old-world Middle East.

Previous to its organized and written forms, wisdom was transmitted orally down the generations, usually from father to son (occasionally from mothers), as instruction about life in the world. This kind of “home schooling” is partly what we see in written form in the book of Proverbs. Much of this kind of instruction was taught in a style called the “act-consequence connection.” Here are a few examples. For lack of guidance, a nation falls; do not love sleep or you will grow poor; do not speak to a fool, for he will scorn the wisdom your words (Proverbs 11:14; 20:13; 23:9). A popular one today is: you reap what you sow (Galatians 6:7).

Early forms of home schooling, whether oral or written, were designed to encourage the kind of responsible living that would put the young in harmonious agreement with the divine order that was assumed by old-world cultures to exist in the world. It usually contained proverbs and exhortations, and it emphasized concrete, practical instruction rather than hold up abstract ideals to follow. It emphasized right decision-making in everyday life. And, again, all of this was based on insights that sages had gained from their investigations into the orderly processes of nature and through their years of studied observation and experience of human behavior and interaction.

Over time, such insights were developed into instruction on a wide variety of topics, such as: gaining knowledge from the created order of things; cultivating moral conduct, prudent behavior, and virtue; recognizing principles for living well; understanding the outcomes of one’s choices; and recognizing contrasts, as between the wise and the foolish, the just and the unjust, the good and the bad. The instruction, learned and applied, was meant to free the young person from making costly errors of judgment later on.

Insights about such matters in Proverbs is often artfully crafted in pithy sayings such as maxims, epigrams, adages, or proverbs, intentionally brief in length, compact in meaning, easily intelligible to their audience, memorable, and every now and then delivering a graphic kick. E.g.: Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion; food gained by fraud tastes sweet to a man, but he ends up with a mouth full of gravel (Proverbs 11:22; 20:17).

The royal court schools provided instruction at various educative levels, including what today we would call higher education. The broad purpose of royal court schools, wisdom scholar William McKane concluded, was to prepare recruits “for the learned professions in general and notably for the higher offices of state.” Recruits typically came from the top layers of society, such as children from the royal courts, from courtiers’ families, from the homes of royal officials or temple personnel, from the wealthier families, and suchlike. Only the elite need apply.

In Babylon, for instance, two types of such schools existed. One was called “the table house,” where reading and writing were taught. Today, this of course falls into universal elementary education, but 3,000 years ago it was a privileged education, in which young men were trained with the two essential skills needed for entering royal court service. The graduates were often known as scribes, and those who served as diplomats and ambassadors would also have been trained in the language and culture of important surrounding nations. Ezra the priest, as he is typically know by Christians, was also trained as a scribe. We know from the biblical book that bears his name that he served the Babylonian king Artaxerxes as a shuttle diplomat between the Babylonian capital and Jerusalem.

The other Babylonian school of higher education, according to McKane, offered sons of the elite studies in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, magic arts, theology, and all the varied branches of “‘the learning and tongues of the Chaldeans’ (Daniel 1:4).” The royal courts had their pick of young men from elite families who showed aptitude and potential to serve as public officials. It seems to have been normative for the chosen ones to learn wisdom through tutoring or apprenticeships. The Hebrew young man Daniel and his three friends were among the elite classes of ancient Israel who were taken prisoner in exile to Babylonia, where they were tutored in the studies just described as a prerequisite to entering service as political advisors and officials in the Babylonian royal court.

In ancient Egypt, a long section on Egyptian wisdom “Instruction” details the normative apprenticeship requirements of that nation’s public officials. McKane writes that this Instruction is “an educational manual for one who is to hold high public office…” He concludes that this corpus of teaching “establishes the conditions of effective and successful statesmanship in Egypt. If an official is to succeed in affairs and become a weighty statesman, these are the conditions to which he must attend and give respect.” (The story of the Hebrew slave Joseph rising to high political office in Egypt may hold insight for us about this.)

Careful readers of Proverbs will have seen many proverbs and sections in that book that detail qualities requisite in officials serving in the royal court, including admonishments to Israel’s kings (as rulers) about their behavior and decision making. Von Rad writes that these particular passages “presuppose conditions at court.” They indicate “the royal court as a place where wisdom was traditionally nurtured. This would correspond exactly to what we know of the courts of Egypt and Mesopotamia.”

Scholarship about the temple schools of the old-world Middle East has also shed light about the wisdom-based education of the time. The temple schools, as the name indicates, were attached to a nation’s temples and therefore had a particular religious identity, depending on the nation. Formal religious training for a nation’s priesthood took place in such schools. In ancient Israel, the religious identity would have been monotheistic, centered on Yahweh. In other nations, it would have been polytheistic, centered on a nation’s most prominent gods.

McKane, however, from his extensive research, concluded that we should not think that temple schools dealt only in instruction related to the religious cultus of the nation. In the Egyptian temple schools, for instance, there seems to have been a amalgam of learning. He somewhat compares them to schools founded by cathedrals in the Middle Ages, which were grammar schools and not formal seminaries. There “is no reason to suspect,” McKane writes, “that the temple schools of the ancient Near East were less devoted to the basic elements of academic discipline…”

This may help to explain a basic feature of the old-world Middle East. Quite unlike in the West today, but not unlike some Middle East countries today, religion, social life, and politics were all consciously a whole piece of cloth. One clear illustration is worth noting: in the court systems and the royal courts of both Egypt and Israel, jurists and rulers were to exercise impartial justice when deciding cases and in law-making.

In Israel, this derived from the religious teaching based on the fear of Yahweh (see, e.g., Proverbs 1:1-3; 2:1-9; 8:15; 24:23; 28:21). In Egypt, it derived from the religious concept of Maat,” which put clear ethical constraints on the officials. McKane writes that an Egyptian official “cannot exercise power in the context of the Egyptian state unless he respects at all times the demands of equity, and endeavors scrupulously to act fairly without respect of persons… [Thus] a passion for [impartial] justice was an important ingredient of power and … whoever did not have this capacity for probity and fair dealing in public affairs was disqualified from holding office by a self-regulating process of selection.”

To sum up, wisdom, as theologian David Ford points out, was taken for granted as “the crown of education,” as what was “most desired in a parent, a leader, a counselor, a teacher.” And it was the sages who made this possible.

I do wonder, now that I am at the end of this article, what our country would be like today if the practice of moral conduct; if the cultivation of virtue and prudent behavior; if instruction in principles for living well and for understanding the consequences of one’s choices; and if many other features of wisdom-based old-world education were part of the curricula of our public schools.

Images via Creative Commons. Pencils, by Mark Bonica. Sages, by anon. Skeleton key, by Aphrodite. Surprised look, by George Thomas.

A note from Charles: If you want more of the perspectives that Waging Wisdom seeks to present, I want to invite you to follow the blog. Just click here, find the “Follow” button in the right margin, enter your email address, and click “Follow.” You will then receive a very short email notice when I post a new article. And, hey, if you like this stuff, tell a friend! Thank you.

Seeking Wisdom from the Natural World

Wisdom is both a divine gift and a divinely ordained human task. And let’s fess up. We would all prefer the receiving of a gift over exerting ourselves to work toward a goal. After all, work is, well, work. So I suspect that most of us would rather have wisdom handed to us than work at seeking it. Besides, don’t we have too much going on in our lives already? How can we possibly add to that load the task of seeking wisdom?

Since seeking wisdom takes persistent dedication, and we may get a bit slack at it. So I thought it might be motivating if we took a moment here to remind ourselves of the importance that Scripture places on seeking and applying wisdom. Here are just three of areas in which Scripture places a premium on this: the natural world, education, and the arts. Today we’ll look at the natural (created) world. Education and the arts will be covered in future posts.

The Natural World
Throughout history, theologians and philosophers have attempted to explain the agency through which the material world exists and holds together. This is not the place to review the diverse answers that have been supplied. What I want to highlight is an answer that is typically overlooked by religious communities, including Christian ones.

To a basic question such as: “How did the material, or natural, world get here and why does it keep going?”, Christians, as well as Jewish and Muslim believers, would reply with some version of: “God created it and sustains it.”

To stick within my own faith, Christianity, it you pressed Christians to be more specific, most likely you would hear: “God spoke it into existence by his word,” or “God created through Jesus Christ.” Or some such thing. But what you are unlikely to hear is: “God created by wisdom.” This is an unfortunate omission. For the Bible is clear on this truth, that the wisdom of God is an essential agency to the founding and running the world. See, for instance, Job 28:12-19; Psalm 104:24; Proverbs 3:19; 8:22-31; Isaiah 28:23-29; Jeremiah 10:12; 51:15.

Those passages of Scripture carry much richness, but here I just want to note these three salient ideas of those passages: a) that wisdom was present in the beginning when God created; b) that God sustains the created order by wisdom; c) that human collaboration with God’s wisdom helps sustain the world.

Wisdom, we may say, then, is in some sort of God-ordained way essential to the creation, order, and stability of the natural world, which doesn’t exist like a cat and dog fighting or like a jar of nitroglycerin. Rather, there is a consistency and a reliability to the natural world. The same rules and laws govern this earth as govern the farther reaches of the galaxy. Seasons come and go with persistent regularity. You can count on that, and farmers and meteorologists do.

From this we may conclude that wisdom is not some abstract entity, nor has it been left to gather dust on blueprints in heaven, any more than Michelangelo’s art or Bach’s music was left ignored in their heads. As their gift to us, their art is with us in the world. We can see it and hear it. And those who work to become skilled enough in those kinds of artistic wisdom can have a go at painting it or playing it.

What used to be called the “natural sciences” is the large and varied field where wisdom is sought, discovered, and applied to the multifarious facets and complex intricacies of natural world. First Kings 4:29-34 hints at this about Solomon, albeit in a rudimentary way.

The passage in First Kings celebrates Solomon’s international reputation for wisdom. His prodigious output of proverbs and songs are noted; his practical wisdom and his keen judicial wisdom are commended. And Solomon’s wide breadth of wisdom in natural science is also noted. He is said to have “described” the plant life of the region, from the largest trees (cedars of Lebanon) to the smallest shrubs (hyssop). He “taught about” beasts, birds, reptiles, and fish (the four principle classes whereby the Israelites understood the animal kingdom). To acknowledge that this was all rudimentary is not to say that it was wrong or even that it has become out-dated. After all, even the most advanced physicist began with basic math.

It may be difficult to appreciate the Nobel-like acclaim Solomon received for his accumulated wisdom until we recognize that he lived during a time when the sages of Egypt and of the East were renowned for their wisdom. Everyone knew that. Even so, Solomon is said to have had more wisdom and insight than the sages of the East and of Egypt. And, evidently, he also stood head and shoulders above the sages even of his homeland (Ecclesiastes 1:16).

It might surprise some workers in the natural sciences today to learn that when they discover something more about the created order of things – even today – they are discovering more of God’s wisdom for the way the natural world works. The big question, however, and it has become acute in our day, is how to apply a discovery. What kind of uses should it be put to? Is nothing taboo? Does anything go? Ultimately, this faces us with the question of what should be the proper management, stewardship, of God’s good creation.

Assessing ahead of time the long-term implications and ramifications of any new discovery is not possible because analyzable facts are not yet in evidence by which to base accurate projections. Further, in this world, where by our sin we distort God’s good creational wisdom after we discover it, we will wish in vain that the use of any discovery will have only upsides. British theologian and philosopher John Peck calls this the ICT Factor: the inherent cussedness of things. Uses made of discoveries in the medical and the nuclear sciences are only recent cases in point.

Cultivating a humble attitude in the face of new discoveries and their applications is probably the best we can do. I learned something about this years ago while reading how the scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) approached new discoveries. I don’t romanticize Bacon. The man wasn’t a saint. But in The New Atlantis, his work of fiction, he named his ideal college “Solomon’s House,” which was, he wrote, “the noblest foundation (as we think) that ever was upon the face of the earth…, dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God.” And in his essay “Of wisdom for a man’s self,” he wrote that wisdom used for selfish interests “is a depraved thing.”

We can also learn from his thoughts about his method of induction, for which he has been celebrated. In brief, Bacon – he entered Trinity College at age 12(!) – strongly objected to the highly abstract forms of knowledge (Aristotelianism and Scholasticism) that influenced the Medieval period. His method of induction was meant to help Europeans produce an alternative to that. He sought a more personal and comprehensive relation to nature via a systematic hands-on approach in which knowledge would be derived and built up from the multitude of people’s practical, studied experiences of the natural world. From these experiences, general laws of nature would be developed and employed. “Nature can only be commanded by being obeyed,” was Bacon’s way of putting it.

Evidently this was not, in his mind at least, to be an exercise in selfish ambition or mercenary exploitation. Significantly, when a law of nature was discovered, it was to be employed in what Bacon called “a holy manner” as the science was developed. By this he meant that the natural world must be approached in a humility of not knowing and then proceed from there by studying from the creation what God has actually wrought in it.

Further, our science, he said, should produce works motivated by charity. Knowledge gained ought to be used to serve others, to alleviate human suffering, increase human well-being. Such an attitude aptly describes the way of investigation and cultivation of the earth that the Book of Genesis (2:15) insists should be the motivating principle of and for human work in the world – good stewardship, or management.

Wisdom, then, is imminent in the natural world and may be found by those who seek it there, for it is a world that “speaks” to all peoples everywhere about itself and its Artist (Genesis 1; Psalm 19). Of course, most of us don’t have careers in the natural sciences. But we may grow our own vegetables, or run an urban agricultural initiative, or even serve our community as a Master Gardner.

God’s wisdom is so vital to the proper running of the natural world that to not humbly seek that wisdom and apply it wisely is to contribute to the world’s problems. It is like living in a city under siege and deprived of food.

In Uncommon Sense, John Peck and I tried to capture something of this when we wrote: “When you look out on the world and touch it and use it, you are touching God’s own heart and mind. All the way through it you are touching a product of God’s character.” Best we be good stewards of that.

Top image courtesy of Creative Commons. Old Books, by M. Peterka. Jigsaw, by NASA.

A note from Charles: If you want more of the perspectives that Waging Wisdom seeks to present, I want to invite you to follow the blog. Click here, find the “Follow” button in the right margin, enter your email address, click “Follow.” You will then receive a very short email notice when I post a new article. And, hey, if you like this stuff, tell a friend! Thank you.

Conversation with John Peck: Liberating “Secular” Life with the Wisdom of God

Never heard of John Peck? You’re not alone. He’s been called the most important pastor, theologian, and philosopher you’ve never heard of. It would take thousands of words for me to say why here, so let me try to introduce him to you briefly.

We live in a time when rapid changes in the world in which we live are overtaking us across the spectrum of our Christian lives, and as a result we can unexpectedly find ourselves behind the Eight Ball when it comes to responding to the new challenges in a way that is consistent with a gospel-shaped wisdom. Those who know John Peck will tell you that he has an exceptional ability for helping us get to unstuck. But because he keeps his head down, not enough people are aware of him. Yet for those who are, he is a significant force in the development of a biblical Christian wisdom that has transforming power to meet the challenges of what today we typically call “secular life.”

Before retiring from public ministry, John was a much sought-after teacher and consultant for diverse churches and organizations in the UK, Europe, and the US. He was a cofounder (in 1974) of the inimitable Greenbelt Festival, which is still going strong, and a cofounder and the principal of College House (1976-1995), which ran courses related to the Cambridge diploma in religious studies, focusing on developing a Christian philosophical framework for all of life. But I suspect John would say that his best achievement was the life-long one in which he and his wife, the late Hanna Peck, raised five biological and forty foster children – oh the stories they could tell!

In the interest of full disclosure, John is a dear friend and mentor to me, and we co-authored a book. But that is not why I thought it good to rerun this interview here (first published in 1998). For one thing, John has a grasp of the Bible, culture, and human nature, coupled with a gift for teaching, that is second to none and imparted with graciousness, wit, and skill.

Also, when I revisited the interview recently, I was surprised that I’d forgotten how much ground it covered. There’s biblical wisdom here: for marriages; for those raising families; for earning a living; for running a business or an institution; for writing and publishing books; for those engaged in democratic politics, law-making, or science; for trying to survive as an artist; for identifying disguised idolatries; for gaining a wholistic view of life; for what Christian obedience in “secular life” entails; and much more besides.

Also, a new generation of Christians face such issues today while concurrently feeling at a loss for ways ahead because they are aware of the contradictions implicit in traditional approaches to the emerging challenges. But God’s original wisdom for human beings has what it takes to meet those challenges. This interview focuses on that. So for many reasons it seemed quite natural to rerun it now.

I hope the following conversation makes clear that a wisdom based on the fear of the Lord is essential for meeting the new challenges the world throws at us. It’s a tricky business, this, because there are good things about “secular life” to appreciate, just as there are dubious things to critique and bad things to rebuke. John gets this, and I began by asking him how he first came to see it.

Charles Strohmer: John, you haven’t always thought like a Christian as you do now, have you? How did you arrive at this new attitude of mind that gave you an appreciation for God’s activity in so-called secular life?

John Peck: Well, the sort of nursery, if I can put it like that, in which I was cared for and taught as a new Christian was strong on Christian separation from the world. So we didn’t drink, smoke, dance, play cards. That sort of thing. I didn’t go to a movie theater for ten years. Actually, I’m rather glad that was my first Christian discipline because it left me with a lot of freedom to get to know the Word, to learn how to pray and witness, and so on. But over the years it left me in conflict.

Part of me was committed to what you could call the devotional life, and I would not for a moment want to deny or detract from my Christian obligations here. Trouble was, I couldn’t match that with things in the world that I recognized to be of value. For instance, having done my degree, I was teaching non-Christian religions at Glasgow Bible Institute,* and I could not deny what seemed to me the considerable spiritual power of the exordium in the first chapter of the Koran. I also found a lot of the spiritual psychology of Buddhism teaching me quite unconsciously about different aspects of my Christian devotional life. But I couldn’t match what was going on here with the way I’d been taught as a Christian to see life.

CS: Something quite fundamental wasn’t right?

JP: Yes. And it came to a head in a particular way with literature. My two great loves were the metaphysical poets and Elizabethan drama. I could not deny the value in these, but I had no way to say that I could appreciate that value because there was this complete separation of “the religious” and “the secular” going on in my mind. Secular things were not on; they were bad. Of course, I’d try to pick out bits and spiritualize them, but that wasn’t a satisfactory process. I simply did not have a way to appreciate what was of value in literature (or culture, for that matter) or to criticize what wasn’t.

There was nothing I seemed to be able to do about this, and all sorts of uncertainties arose in me as a result. I knew this left me vulnerable, but there was nothing I could do. Then something happened that changed everything. I had to teach Ethics at GBI, and in pursuance of that a friend lent me a book called The Christian Philosophy of Law, Politics, and the State, by Hebden Taylor. That book introduced me to “modal theory,” and that theory unlocked so many of doors that enabled me to see the validity of the “secular” areas of life.

CS: So that turning point opened you to a new way of seeing life and being a Christian in it. Sounds like a kind of conversion.

JP: Well, I nearly had a nervous breakdown! There were so many things I wanted to explore all at once. And then I gravitated toward others who had already learned this stuff and had begun to explore a Christian perspective of things like politics, business, science, and the arts. In fact, it was in looking at science from the point of view of the Bible that I began to recognize that all science is religiously driven, and it was then that I began to learn what idolatry was. Before that, I thought idolatry was the heathen in his blindness bowing down to wood and stone. It hadn’t occurred to me that you could be a scientist and make an idol of your science.

CS: Or of your politics, or your business, or your art, or your family . . . .

JP: That’s right. These can be disguised idolatries. Another key was that I began to understand that life was no longer divided into two unrelated bits, the religious and the secular. This revolutionized my understanding of spirituality. I saw quite clearly that spirituality is about obedience to God’s order for the universe that we live in, and that God is just as involved in economics, or politics, or science, or art as He is in our church-related (religious) activities. The thing is, once you realize that “secular” life has laws that are ordained by God, then you’re obeying God in obeying them.

CS: Sounds like a whole new world opened up to you. You must have felt like you’d come home.

JP: I remember sitting back from my desk one day and saying about this, “Nothing can be that good!” Although, mind you, I’ve always held it subject to criticism. For example, as a theory, modal analysis doesn’t cope much with the supernatural dimension. But okay. I wasn’t expecting it to be perfect. In fact, I’m quite glad I’m aware of its limitations, because I know folk who’ve made a kind of orthodoxy out of it, which has brought them all sorts of headaches.

CS: What is modal thinking, modal analysis, and how can we put it to work for us?

JP: It will be difficult to summarize here, but I’ll have a go. It’s a theory that looks at the “whole” of life as being made up of different aspects, or modes, of life and existence under God, aspects such as art, law, religion, economics, social matters, and so on. Modal theory sees each of these aspects as functioning by its own God-ordained laws or principles. It therefore helps us get to grips with the way God has ordained that the different aspects of everyday life should be conducted. It gives us a way to do distinctly Christian studies of the arts, business, politics, economics, sociology, and so on. It shows that our obediences to God cannot be limited to the religious and moral modes of our being. And it has unexpected benefits too. It enables us to deal with the paradoxes of Scripture, for instance, and to understand the disguised idolatries of our modern cultures more clearly.

CS: How does Jesus fit into all this?

JP: Well, there’s no way he can be kept out! It’s his creation. For instance, modal thinking gives us a way out of one of our age’s most fundamental problems when thinking about life. For example, nonChristian theories of life fasten on one or two of the aspects as the key for understanding the universe and human nature. So humanists fasten on reason, communists fasten on technology and economics, Buddhists tend to fasten on psychology. And they do this as a way for understanding and judging all of life. This gets them into trouble in the long run because everything can’t be explained only economically or only psychologically, and so on.

Now Christians have their equivalent to this. They often judge the value of everything only in terms of religion and morals. And this gets them into trouble in the long run for the same reason. Modal theory helps you steer clear of this because it shows that no aspect is capable of fully explaining all of life, for each aspect is but a part of life. Further, it helps you to see the aspects as having their unity and explanation in Jesus Christ alone. The Bible can help us understand this, as well as to see where we may be violating God’s laws in the aspects and therefore in need of making changes in our wisdom.

CS: Isn’t there a problem here, as subtle as it is profound? I mean, many Christians think they are already applying this way of reasoning, but in actual fact they are examining and explaining life only with the Bible’s religious and moral ideas, so those become the only remedy for ills within the “secular” aspects of life, such as in art, politics, economics, and social issues.

JP: Yes. Our obedience to God cannot be limited to or defined by our religious and moral obediences. When Christians do this, they violate God’s laws for the other aspects of life without even knowing it. What’s needed is instruction from Scripture for fulfilling our political, economic, and social obediences, and so on.

CS: It’s difficult to get this across. Why is that?

JP: Because people have an assumption that they’re doing it biblically, and assumptions are difficult to discuss with most people. You can be getting it quite wrong without realizing it. I remember running across a Christian business some years ago. It claimed to be Christian, anyway. But its advertising sounded just like the world’s, and I knew folk who worked there who told me that the employers were extremely hard to work for. Now, if you haven’t got a truly Christian theory, or vision, of business as, among other things, a rescue operation – if it isn’t a saving, a liberating, vision – God’s laws for that aspect get violated, things go wrong, and people suffer.

CS: Are you suggesting that the employers assume they’re working out of a Christian view of business just because they’re Christians?

JP: That’s why it’s so hard to discuss it with them at times. You’re dealing with assumptions. Further, should you get going in a good discussion with these folk, it can get quite complicated. One thing I try to point out is that we don’t do anything in life without a theory, or a vision, of how a thing works. And if Christ is Lord, then he has to be Lord even of our theories, our visions, which means that, fundamentally, they have got to have a gospel-shaped character. That’s why I talk about it as being saving, rescuing, and liberating. But it’s difficult to get this over. Most people tend to think that good business is not telling lies, not breaking contracts, not flirting with the secretaries. Well, okay, we need to be good moral people. But that’s not enough of a theory for business. So you find, for instance, that when you talk to a person in business about making contracts that are generous in nature, there’s the rub, because the person is not thinking of business as being a liberating process, for business has been reduced, even for the Christian, to making as much profit as you can. Full stop. And because it’s an assumption, it’s not known.

CS: I was recently burned by this attitude in my field, Christian publishing, and it left me thinking that the enterprise is evolving to become driven strictly by making money. Should publishers like this even refer to themselves as “Christian” anymore?

JP: The problem here is partly economic, certainly, but it’s not just in that aspect that God’s laws are being violated. For instance, the publishers are part of an entire industry in a culture that fails to ask some quite radical questions, such as about the sorts of books that are published – those that sell so well only because they appeal to the prejudices and preoccupations of the worldly Christians, and feeding it.

Just recently I happened to be looking through a Christian book catalog and came across things that were out of this world. Well, out of God’s world, anyway! There was a title in the personal growth section indicating that the book’s contents, which were going to tell us about love, had all the trappings of romanticism. But love isn’t an emotion you can hope to cultivate lastingly, as the catalog blurb suggested. Love is a decision. This book is certainly not talking that way.

Another book I saw claimed to be about gaining emotional freedom. The jacket blurb promised readers a well-balanced emotional life, and I wondered what the author would do with Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or John the Baptist! Others that I saw were filled with “how to” formulas to help readers with their marriages. Methods are how to do it. Well, my wife and I have been married for a long time, through some pretty rough patches, too, but we’ve never read books on marriage about how to keep each other interested. At the beginning we made an assumption that we belonged to each other and that we had to care for each other no matter what. That’s what it’s all about.

CS: So the publishers must do more than examine the economic aspect.

JP: One of the radical questions the industry is not asking about these books is that they’re all concentrating on getting yourself right. To me, the Christian life is about forgetting yourself. It’s about saving, rescuing, liberating others, about getting to know the needs of those around you and doing something about them.

Now that I think about it, one of the things that has helped move our marriage along is that we’ve always been involved in other people’s troubles. My question to Christian publishers is: are we always going to spend our time concentrating on examining ourselves? It’s a kind of perpetual childhood, isn’t it? I mean, it’s kids that are absorbed with themselves, who are the center of their universes. And then there’s all the family stuff, which assumes the nuclear family. I defy anyone to find a nuclear family in the Bible. Certainly the family of God is not a nuclear family; thank God.

CS: Although we try to live like we are one.

JP: And that can produce churches that live like that. It’s a shame, really. I can appreciate the occasional book like this, because you’ve got to have something for children – I mean children in the faith. But this is a whole industry dedicated to giving middle-aged adult Christians children’s material.

CS: Modal thinking and analysis sounds quite different from what we may be accustomed to.

JP: Yes. And when you start to try to cope with the questions it raises, then the complexities begin to arise. It’s like I often say about the gospel: it’s like a daisy; any child can pick one, but if you want to understand it, to study it biologically and so on, it takes a lifetime.

CS: And you use the Bible for this kind of study about secular life?

JP: Yes. For me it meant that I was able to stop reading Scripture through what I call the “stained glass widow effect.” That is, I was able to start understanding Scripture other than religiously and morally and I began to see the Bible’s “secular” wisdom. For example, when I was first involved in the arts with Greenbelt, I was obviously confronted with the need to be able to articulate what art was about and what God’s design for art was – rules for how art works. I’d read a lot of books about it and looked at different theories, some of which were helpful, but when I went back to the Scripture and looked at its art, in particular the parables and the Psalms, then I had living examples, if you will, of works of art that were authorized by God.

That gave me a point from which I could see the positive values of some people’s theories as well as the negative ones. In that process, working as a Christian believing in the gospel of salvation, I came to develop an aesthetic theory. At first I was a bit schizophrenic about the whole thing because I couldn’t see how I could relate to the arts as a Christian. Now I can.

CS: Are you saying that Christians can develop theories like this for business management, economics, education, psychology, politics, the family, and so on?

JP: Absolutely. And now there are Christian writers who are contributing to this. Whereas twenty-five years ago there wasn’t much available.

CS: In your own calling as a teacher, you and some colleagues, such as at College House, have tackled such areas.

JP: That’s right. Take business. We dug around not just for some vaguely Christian moral view of business and management but for something that had the gospel as its heart and how the patterns of the gospel would influence biblical themes of management. We were looking for a distinctly Christian mode of management. So we started with the Gospel, which meant that we looked for ways of doing management that are saving, rescuing, liberating. We also looked into Scripture to see how people were managed and how people in authority managed the managers. Moses, for instance, is classic here. He lost his temper and it cost him dearly, but he learned to delegate authority, and so on.

CS: You’re talking about much more than the kind of rescuing that makes nonChristians Christians.

JP: That’s right. It’s equipping people to do what God wants them to do in their work. Human beings, you see, are more than just religious and moral beings. They are also citizens, which means they live politically (even to not vote is to make a political statement). They are also social, which means they relate to one another in groups of various kinds. They use language and aesthetics. They are economic beings. And so on.

No one escapes this stuff. We have obediences to fulfill before God in these aspects, to make rescues there, if I could put it like that. If you think you can do politics simply by using morality, then you will end up violating God’s authority in the political realm. The same is true for any of the other aspects. God has His own way of ordering them, and if we’re going to have a wisdom based on the fear of the Lord, we’ve got to bring more than the Bible’s religious and moral values to bear on all the aspects.

CS: But surely religion and morality have a bearing on politics and on all the other aspects?

JP: Yes, indeed. To put it simply, one’s faith gives direction not only to one’s morals and ethics but also to one’s politics and economics and art, and so on. And so these too are part of a Christian’s obedience. The problem is that you cannot pass laws, for instance, telling people that they must love one another or else. What you can do is pass laws that liberate people to be loving. For example, laws that make medical professionals nervous or afraid about helping an injured person they may come across on the street, or in a serious accident, are not liberating laws.

CS: But the Bible doesn’t give us fully developed theories of business management, economics, politics, or art. So how may we depend on Scripture in these aspects then?

JP: The Bible provides samples, not exhaustive treatments. It’s St. Paul, for instance, stating that “these things happen for our example.” Now the samples from Scripture are different from samples found elsewhere, in that they are authoritative for the Christian. After all, outside of Scripture, you don’t know what you’re getting. I would say that God’s purpose in the Old Testament was to create a sample of how He would order a culture and its history in a fallen world.

The glory of this is that it does this by taking sin and sinners seriously. Most “good advice” assumes that you haven’t sinned. And this is one of the problems of nonbiblical theories about life. If there’s no sin, there’s no redemption, no true liberty. So something quite fundamental gets left out of the picture. Christian theories of the aspects wouldn’t do that.

CS: Can you give us a sample from Scripture?

JP: How about, instead of looking at the Story of Naboth’s Vineyard as a purely moral lesson, we see it also as instructing us politically. This could help us to see, for instance, how the fear of the god you serve (your faith, even if you’re an atheist) influences your politics in quite practical ways. So you’ve got Jezebel, whose wisdom is based on the fear of a Baal, which gives her a certain politics regarding the land, which has drastic consequence for Naboth.

Elijah then comes along with a wisdom based on the fear of the Lord, which gives him a different view of politics with regard to the land and a way to mount a critique of Jezebel’s political theory. This story, then, can help us to see that different gods rule different ways of thinking about politics. So, if you’ve got a nation whose politics is based on dialectical materialism, or on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness . . . . Samples from the lives of Joseph and Daniel are also quite illuminating.

CS: This is fascinating to me, because folk like Joseph and Daniel held high political offices in “pagan” lands, were highly respected there, and known for doing a good job. And God seemed okay with it. In fulfilling their obediences to God, apparently they had quite a different way of looking at life than we do.

JP: Yes. This is bristling with all sorts of issues, like what one writer calls “responsible compromise.” So, Daniel, for example, is prepared to receive instruction in spiritistic areas and he’s willing to carry the name of a Baal, which must have been a constant thorn in the side, but he’s not willing to compromise in the matter of food. That was his sticking point.

CS: His sticking point?

JP: Yes. We all must have them. When you know what yours are – they’re a matter of conscience under the fear of the Lord – then you can do responsible compromise. It will be different for different Christians. You can have areas of responsible compromise only if you first know where you’ll say, “This far, no farther.”

CS: So as Christians we can use this principle under God?

JP: Yes, as God’s people have always done. And alongside it is the vital thing, for instance, for Old Testament politics. That is, it was not so much the structure of the politics that mattered as it was the tacit agreement between the people and the rulers that they were going to obey the word of the Lord. That’s the key to biblical kinds of politics. The problem with a modern democracy, I would say, is that it is more a demagoguery. Candidates tend to appeal not to people’s consciences but to their desires. There should be a common assumption between the candidate and his constituency that his business in politics is to obey the Law of the Lord.

CS: Sounds like you’re calling us to get to know the Bible as a “secular book.”

JP: You could put it like that. One of the beauties of the thing is that this kind of thinking lets you talk about your family, your business, your politics, your art, and so on from many points of view under God. You are not limited to the religious and moral ways of seeing, as important as these are. We must be obedient to God in the way we live our public lives. And the Book can show us how.

This interview with John Peck was originally published in 1998, in the little magazine Openings, and in 2001, as an Appendix in the book Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World (SPCK, UK).

*GBI is now International Christian College.

A personal note from Charles Strohmer: If you want more of the perspectives that wagingwisdom.com seeks to present, I want to invite you to follow the blog. Simply click here wagingwisdom.com, find the “Follow” button in the right margin, enter your email address just above that button, and then click “Follow.” You will then receive a very short email notice whenever I publish a new article. And, hey, if you really like it, tell some friends! Thank you.

Eye image from Cesar R; Thinking Sculpture image from Davide Restive. Both via Creative Commons.

Better Living through Better Theories

The ability to form and use theories is a gift from God to us. It may be, and often is, misused, but it is still as much a gift from God as human affection or natural beauty, and to be used for God’s glory. It doesn’t matter whether we realize it, or even whether we like it, we are using theories all the time. If we do not use godly ones, and if we do not develop a means of finding out which are godly and which are not, we will be using whatever comes to mind. Since we have no right to presume on God for the things that he has left it our responsibility to do, and since sin influences the intellect often quite unknowingly, the likelihood is that any theory uncritically adopted will be ungodly.

Here’s a quick illustration from law-making. Good laws, in part, liberate people to be loving. So what are we to think of a law that makes medical professionals, who happen upon the scene of an accident, afraid to help the injured person because they could get sued? This is not a law that liberates medical professionals (who could be quite loving in such a situation) to be loving. There is a bad theory behind such a law, which Christians working in the area of jurisprudence could seek to correct.

Since our wisdom informs our theories, the way to better theories, and to better living as a result, is to keep acquiring a wisdom that is becoming increasingly biblical, which, by the way, is the hope of this blog, wagingwisdom.com. I realize that this means we must continue to change, and that that means work, and, goodness knows, we’ve all got enough work to do anyway! But this kind of work is liberating. It sets us free to participate more consistently as co-workers with God in redeeming creation.

Yet we make excuses to get out of this kind of work, never mind that we have obediences to fulfill here as part of our Christian discipleship. Let me just point out one common excuse. On becoming a Christian a radical change gets introduced into our outlook. We now say that we know God, and we are likely to take the supernatural more seriously. Personal religious experience, such as prayer, communion, and church attendance, takes on an entirely new meaning. The Bible, our moral obligations, and the religious attitudes of others also begin to have a different meaning, and we acquire sympathy with the causes that Christians identify with.

Yet it would be unscriptural, besides being extraordinarily naive, to think that our entire wisdom on life changes completely straightaway. The Bible, after all, would not speak of the need for our mind’s ongoing renewal if that were so (Romans 12:1-2). And let’s remember the apostle Paul’s complaint that Christians fail to let the process keep working itself out (1 Corinthians 3:1-3; Galatians 3:1–3; Colossians 2:20-3:2). Part of the difficulty, then, on the way to better theories, is that the process of acquiring a more thorough biblical wisdom stalls entirely too easily because we think we have arrived.

We fall into the trap of assuming that we are living consistent with biblical wisdom, that little, if anything, in our wisdom (the way we see life and live in it) remains unscriptural. This may be true regarding areas of religious convictions and moral decisions, but what about, as we saw in the previous post, our thinking about “secular” life?

In a recent post we considered that we get our wisdom by absorbing it from childhood. This includes absorbing assumptions and developing attitudes to life in conjunction with our families and the community and culture around us. Unfortunately, many of us have been influenced for decades by a process of wisdom formation in which life is thought to be split into the spiritual and the material, the religious (or sacred) and the secular. This has hugely influenced us to see Scripture as being only about spiritual things. So that becomes the only way we know how to think about Scripture and engage with it.

This means that those who desire to learn and develop wisdom for “secular” life will look to sources other than Scripture because the traditional, American Christian community doesn’t think Scripture has much, if anything, to say about our “secular” (our everyday) lives and work – call it life outside the church walls; Monday through Saturday life.

I’m not saying that there is no godly wisdom that can be found in sources other than the Bible. I’m saying that our assumption about the Bible is tragic because the Bible has an enormous amount to say about everyday life – the life where most of us spend most of our time, by far. And once you start seeing it, there is so much of it, you wonder how you every missed it.

Another obstacle in the process of wisdom development is our penchant to go it alone. But we cannot do this on our own. Christian life is about relationships and community in Christ, and the importance of this for the task of increasing our biblical wisdom cannot be overstated.

I’m not talking only about being in a church service every week. I cannot tell you how important it has been for me, personally, to meet regularly with people to “search the Scriptures” (John 5:29), which “are able to make [us] wise” (2 Timothy 3:15). Learning together has been especially important to me during periods when I have been struggling with an important issue and haven’t had a breakthrough. Although sometimes this has simply meant finding one or two good books on the subject or arranging for a longish phone call with a knowledgeable person, meeting regularly with people has proven to be a key for me.

Having said all this, I would not be telling the whole story if I did not add that today many Christians no longer see the Bible as being about spiritual life only, and as a result they are finding it a little easier to do the kind of biblical homework being discussed here. They have been awakened to their need for a truly coherent and thoroughgoing biblical wisdom, one that will inform their theories and speak to the “secular” affairs of life in a godly manner. But this wasn’t the situation decades ago in most Christian circles.

Nevertheless, it still can be a desperate and daunting task. In our fast-paced and changing world, in which nearly every day some unexpected cultural, economic, or political challenge gets thrust upon an unprepared church, we may have few biblical clues to guide us. It still is, after all, a comparatively new enterprise for us, and we often lack signposts, sophistication, and expertise.

Further, ministers may raise bewildered, even disapproving, eyebrows at our questions. Christian friends may struggle to understand what we are talking about and asking of them. Group discussions, even among those who do understand, may feel like a pooling of ignorance. Temptations arise to become impatient, or to fall for easy and dogmatic answers, or to wallow in self-pity (“nobody understands me”). But who said Christian discipleship was going to be easy?

When the Bible commands us not to be molded by the world but to have a renewed mind, surely this includes changing our thinking in secular life. This means that we have got to get on with learning the wisdom of Scripture for secular (everyday) life and work as best we can, so that through choosing better theories we can live lives increasingly for the glory of God in the world.

Parts of this post were adapted from Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World, by John Peck and Charles Strohmer, Chapter 7.

A related post, about the ABCs of Scripture, may help interested readers with some practical steps to take this discussion to another level.

Center image by Ed Yourdon, lower image by Magdalene Roeseler (permissions via Creative Commons).

The Play of Theories

We once had a little fun in a seminar. What is the answer, I asked the group, to the question: “Who will be taken and who will be left, in the story that Jesus tells about “the days of Noah” in Matthew 24? “Is it the ones who are taken who are saved or the ones who are left?” Some said it was the taken, others the ones who were left.

Now I wasn’t asking that question because I wanted to correct the “wrong” answer. The point was to draw attention to the role that theories play in our lives, including in our beliefs. Two different theories were at work in that audience. A premillennial rapture theory was informing the beliefs of those who said that the taken were the saved. For the others, the story of Noah, or at least the aspects of it that Jesus details in Matthew 24:36-41, was the theory.

Bringing up the word “theory” easily puts many people off, but there’s no good reason for that, especially because no one, but no one, gets through a day without relying on theories. “Theory” is not just a word for the intellectual. Besides, who is not “intellectual”? Anyone using the mind is intellectual.

I’m not using the word, here, in the technical sense, for instance, of a scientific theory, or a political theory, or a theory of art, or of any other kind of highly abstract body of thought. I’m using it simply in the general sense of a set of beliefs, or policies, or procedures that inform our daily actions. And most of the time, for many of us, we are not conscious of this until it is pointed out to us, as I did in that seminar.

Several months ago on this blog I told a humorous story about “cannon ball races” in order to call attention to the troubling but overlooked phenomenon that is often at the heart of communication breakdowns. There, we considered the problem of conflicting theories, which in some cases (not that one) can lead to a bad argument, division, enmity, or even violence. Now the communication’s problem in that story, as we saw, easily resolved, but here I want to look briefly at another role that theories play in our lives. It affects larger and more crucial issues that are not so easily solved, such as come up in a society’s disputes about science, education, religion, or politics. Problems in such arenas will be especially difficult to resolve when the people working on them bring different theories to it.

Take an example from the White House. U.S. presidents, at least the wisest of them, will listen to different theoretical voices, so to speak, when they are analyzing international incidents. But as a rule, when it comes to interpreting those incidents and deciding on policies of response to them, presidents rely on insight from their closest advisers, who have been chosen because they hold a theory about international relations that to a large degree agrees with the presidents’ theories.

This is why, as the implications of President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” became clearer in 2002 and 2003, editorials appeared in America wondering if Al Gore would have responded differently to the 9/11 terrorist attack on America had he been the U.S. president. Would Gore have begun a “war on terrorism?” Would he have gone to war in Afghanistan? Would he have invaded Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein? The editorials recognized that Bush and Gore held two different, and conflicting, political theories.

So, most of us don’t advise presidents! But most of us have, at one time or another, found ourselves in a debate over whether home schooling or public schooling is better, or how to discipline the kids, or whether a Democrat or a Republican should be our state’s next governor. Should marijuana be legalized? Should the federal income tax laws be overhauled? Should we have invaded Iraq? What about gay marriage, or national health care, the death penalty? Is global warming occurring?

That these and dozens of other large issues are argued daily across America, and not just around waters coolers but in schools and homes as well, testifies to the different theories at play in the debates.

This post, then, has underlined the fact that different theories inform how people think about issues. In the next post, I want us to consider why we need a wisdom that makes sound theories possible for dealing with life’s pressing issues.

The Strangeness of Scripture

In a tribal area in Asia, a group in the tribe were shown pictures of four objects: a hammer, a saw, a hatchet, a log. They were then asked to say which did not fit together. We Westerners would typically put all the tools together, because we have been taught to analyze and classify things in abstract categories. So to us the log is the odd one out. Because oral societies like this Asian tribe tend to think in concrete-functional terms, this group placed the saw, the hatchet, and the log together, because you could make something with them. The hammer was did not fit because it was no good without a nail.

I heard that illustration years ago from a Westerner with a Ph.D. who worked as an educator among Asian tribal groups. Pamela had been explaining to me about some of the worldview differences she had to consider, between herself and the tribal peoples, if she hoped to teach effectively there inside their worldview for their good.

The illustration, of course, reminds us of obstacles that must be overcome for effective understanding between different peoples in the field of cross-cultural communication. As I noted in a recent post, when we are confronted with the wisdom (the way of seeing life and living in it) of a different culture, it may seem so alien to us that we cannot imagine how any reasonable person would think and act like that.

This is also a huge issue for anyone encountering what to them are foreign-sounding places in the text of Scripture. Some (if not much) of the Bible, of course, is pretty straightforward. Only the most self-serving of adults would pretend to have trouble with: do not steal; do not kill; do not commit adultery; love your neighbor; turn the other cheek; forgive those who sin against you; and many other obvious statements or narratives.

But, truth be told, there are places where the Bible does speak strangely to us. They are puzzling: why did so and so say that, or what’s that all about? I think most people would assume that this occurs because the Bible was written thousands of years ago and by people whose culture was very different from ours today. Of course. But there is more to it than that.

It is not just that the Bible is an ancient text from foreign culture. The Bible also has a way of seeing life and living in it (a wisdom), which includes how I think and reason, and at times its way can be quite different from our way. When I encounter that strangeness in the pages of the Book, I take it as a sign that my own way of seeing, thinking, and reasoning (about God, life, myself, others, my theology, whatever) probably needs a course correction.

Take, for instance, Jesus’ parable of the wages. Crowds had been following Jesus, and because he had been healing people’s sicknesses and teaching about the kingdom of God, they interpreted it as sure sign “that the kingdom of God [the Messianic age] was going to appear at once.” I don’t we think should judge them for this, unless we Christians today want to first judge ourselves for more than a hundred years of failed attempts to pinpoint the time Jesus will return.

Knowing that they were thinking this way, Jesus tells them the parable of the wages. Because this is one of Jesus’ longest parables, I’m not going to cut and paste it here in a short post. But do read it (Luke 19:11-27). What I want to offer is this. If asked today about the coming of the kingdom of God, or the Messianic age, or what Christians typically refer to as the imminent return of Jesus, many Western Christians would trot out their preferred eschatology about the end times, or the rapture, or a sophisticated millennial view, or perhaps some homespun theory in a book they had just read or a film just seen. But not Jesus.

Jesus tells a long and involved story about what today we would call people making capital investments and earning their livings from them. In other words, Jesus responds to their faulty “religious” view about the Messianic age with a story about the importance of one’s stewardship in economic life. Let’s face it, to us that’s an odd way of reasoning. What in the world does earning a living have to do with the coming kingdom of God?

Where you find the Bible speaking strangely to you like that, it is speaking much more than because it’s old and cross-cultural or as a mere curiosity. Like Pamela, who had to get inside the worldviews of the various tribal groups she taught, we have to struggle with the strangeness of the worldview out of which the Bible came to us if that strangeness is to teach us for our good. It is indispensable to the renewal of our minds and to our discipleship to ask questions like: “Why is it given to us in that particular way, and does it have an interpretation for today?” Of course, it’s not often easy to puzzle it out. But we must not collapse mentally in the face the Bible’s wisdom: its way of seeing life and living in it.

The parable of the wages, apparently, is meant to knock in the head a faulty view the crowd held about the coming Messianic age – which they assumed would make life easier for them – that it was going to appear immediately. After all, two of the king’s city managers in the parable do not retire when they get huge raises from the king. They are then placed in charge of additional cities. So now they’ve got more, not less, work to do! Jesus seems to be saying: don’t conclude anything about when the kingdom of God will appear (see also Acts 1:6-7). Instead, get on with earning your livings and be faithful to your employers as you do.

That is as far as I have gotten in puzzling out the parable, and it leaves much else about the parable foreign to me, even after consulting some good commentaries, which did not deal with the why of the economic answer from Jesus in the context of the coming kingdom of God. (If anyone has any insight about this, I’m all ears.)

The strangeness of Scripture arises from the wisdom (the way of seeing life and living in it) out of which it came to us. Struggling to gain gaining insight about the hows and the whys of a text when we encounter its strangeness would enable us to be more fully taught by God’s Holy Spirit. We would then see, think, and act more clearly and consistently biblically and to relate more effectively and communicate more believably to those who hold to different wisdoms. For those concerned about the changes and challenges we face today as individuals, as churches, and in society, it’s worth the struggle.

Top image by George Thomas, middle image by The Iglesia’s, lower image by EMSL, (permissions via Creative Commons).

Related posts: The series of Jesus as a teacher of wisdom, which begins here, and this post on the hard but necessary work of thinking.

Our Children’s Wisdom: Some Questions for Parents

The search for wisdom is so highly valued in the Bible that Christians, others too, often ask, “How do we get wisdom?” It’s a perennial question and a particularly urgent one in the context of raising and educating children (see, e.g., the book of Proverbs). It occupied the minds of baby boomer parents (maybe not as many as it should have!) and it is now pressing in on millennials with kids.

Of course we know two answers right away, that we can get wisdom from the Bible and through prayer. But not everyone prays or reflects on Scripture. And even if the do, there is also an overlooked way in which everyone gets wisdom, even those who don’t pray and read the Bible. Here is some food for thought on this, which may help parents prime the pump.

We get wisdom from childhood, through a process as simple as it is profound. That is, for the most part early on, our wisdom simply grows up with us and in us. We don’t manufacture it or study it as a school subject, and we don’t spend much time thinking about it. We absorb it throughout childhood. It develops in us, and we in it, as a singular part of its development in the history of the family, community, and culture in which we live.

Perhaps the best analogy for the way we “get wisdom”(Proverbs 4:7) in this sense is found in the way we come to speak our mother tongue. We simply “pick it up” as we go along, by hearing, by imitating, by others correcting us. Long before we go to school to “learn English” from textbooks we are already using it with considerable fluency. By the time we begin to study it from books it is such a second nature to us that the way it comes across as a subject to be learned makes it seem strange, like algebra.

We develop in our wisdom in the same way. We pick it up, we absorb it, as we go along. Yet the analogy goes further. When we come across products of other wisdoms – Indian music, African medicine, Chinese architecture – our initial response is commonly like hearing a foreign language for the first time. We say, “How peculiar!” We take it for granted that our products are the normal ones and that the others are odd or even abnormal. This feeling can persist long after we know that the other people naturally regard their products as normal and ours as peculiar or abnormal.

So in the normal course of our formative years, we do not formally learn our wisdom; we absorb it, more or less uncritically, as we go along. It develops in us largely within our homes and through various significant others and authority figures with whom we interact: fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, older siblings, baby sitters, and perhaps Sesame Street and other sources. It’s not long before we are absorbing it from friends and neighbors, our teachers, rivals and enemies, sports and religion, radio, television, film, the Web, social media, the blogosphere, and much more.

But there are two things I want to point out about this process. One is that, although these sources have their own spokespersons and expositors, we are not absorbing each source’s wisdom in its entirety. Nothing even close to that. Instead, it’s done piecemeal. Each of us, from childhood, takes whatever we do take and we give it a particular imprint from our own individual circumstances and personalities, just as we all have our own handwriting. Slowly, what we have absorbed becomes a part of us – from here, there, and elsewhere.

The eyes of our minds are continually and imperceptibly gathering additional tints to their lenses, so our own wisdom – our own a way of seeing life and living in it effectively – is developing in us. Eventually, this absorption process gives us highly developed instincts for responding selectively to the world around us, such as in determining what is important or unimportant. It is our wisdom.

And we notice its distinction from that of others. For instance, by the time we are confronted with the way of seeing and living (the wisdom) of a different culture, much of it may seem so alien that we cannot imagine how any reasonable person would think and act like that. Some of it just gets explained away as being archaic or special or aberrant, or it is ignored or overlooked because there is no place in our minds to put it.

The second thing is this. And it’s as crucial and it is vital. The process of absorbing wisdom from childhood is not just about being taught and relying on obvious facts (don’t touch a hot stove; don’t play in the traffic) or overt moral values (don’t lie; say you’re sorry; be honest). The process is also subconscious. In fact, it is the absorbed, subtle influences and attitudes, the non-taught ones, that can be the most powerfully influential in the long run, and thus the most difficult to identify and change if they are wrong, for they come to us in childhood like the Gibeonite embassy, as if from far away, in disguise, unnoticed until it is too late.

An illuminating illustration, and one with far-reaching ramifications across the spectrum of everyday life, is how children get wisdom from parents subconsciously; that is, the parents don’t realize what hidden values, ideas, and attitudes they are imparting and the children don’t recognize they are picking them up.

Are the children, for instance, raised in a home where they get to see their parents arguing, or do the parents hide their fights from the children? If the former, do the children get to see the parents make up afterward? If so, how that is done will also influence the children. Or are the children left hurting and further bewildered because the parents kissed and made up privately, so the children don’t know that a reconciliation took place or how that was accomplished? And if the parents hid their fights, what has that said to the children as they get older and their own arguments arise?

We are not talking about one-off incidents but patterns of various kinds of parental behavior that betray hidden values, ideas, and attitudes that are rubbing off on the kids. So, to continue. Is an atmosphere of honest questioning fostered in the home, or do the children see in the parents an unapproachableness here? Or if a child pushes it questioning too far, in hopes of a satisfying answer, is he or she then impatiently fobbed off: “Just do what I say!” Or: “That’s just the way it is.” Or: “You’ll understand when you grow up.”

What topics are discussed at the dinner table? What topics are taboo? Does the family ever eat together? What do the children see their parents regularly spending money on, and how much money do they see them spending on these things? What kind of entertainment do the children see the parents enjoying on a regular basis? Is there any pattern of activity in which a child gets involved with a parent in helping the poor, the needy, the aged? Do mom and dad ever admit their mistakes to the children? What is the parental attitude toward religion, politics, the children’s friends, school teachers? How are people of different races treated?

I remembered growing up working alongside my dad in his auto repair business. He was known as “the car doctor,” and you won’t believe me when I say that he began to teach me about cars and car repair starting when I was nine or ten years old. But it’s true. And by the time I was sixteen I was glad of it, for I was earning lot of money as a mechanic! But that’s not what I want to call attention to here. I just needed to say that to get to this.

Year after year of working with my dad in a very public and busy auto repair shop in Detroit, I was able to watch how he interacted with people of different races. I put a lot of hours in at that shop, many days a week, especially during school breaks and the summer months, and I can’t recall ever seeing even a hint of racism in my dad. What I absorbed was his respectful manner of talking to and getting along with all sorts of people. He ended up with regular customers of different races, and in Detroit. Although I can recall my mom saying, “We try to get along with everyone,” neither of my parents ever sat me down to talk about “race issues.” I simply absorbed his peaceable values and attitudes about race throughout my teenage years. What if he had been a racist?

Again, absorbing wisdom is not just about what children are taught. The questions posed above are just several of many that parents need to struggle with for their children’s sakes. Subtle influences are loaded with powerful implications for the shaping of a child’s wisdom. Parents whose children are not home-schooled may not have as much influence over what goes on inside the classroom as they might like, but they do have control over what the children absorb in the home.

(Part of the above was adapted from Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World, by John Peck and Charles Strohmer, chapter six.)

Images by Cayusa, Nidhi M, and Cesar, respectively (permissions from Creative Commons)

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Category Archives: WISDOM SEEKING GETTING DEVELOPING

Why the Experts Need the Intelligent Amateurs

Applying the Wisdom of Sages in Education

Seeking Wisdom from the Natural World

Better Living through Better Theories

The Play of Theories

The Strangeness of Scripture

Our Children’s Wisdom: Some Questions for Parents

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