Tuesday Tidbit: the wounds of a "friend"

Mark Noll is something of a legend at Wheaton College. Not too many years ago his office was 2 floors below the spot where I am sitting right now as I type this. From that basement room he wrote a book that dropped like a bomb on campus and sent tremors throughout the Evangelical world. The book was as shocking as it was painfully true.

Here's the opening line: "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." Ouch.

He continues, "American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations" (3). Noll includes the text of a dedicatory speech given by Charles Malik for the Billy Graham Center in 1980 (the building in which most of my classes have been held on campus). Malik minced no words: "The greatest danger besetting American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. . . . People are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the Gospel. They have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure in conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, and thereby ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is abdicated and vacated to the enemy." Malik challenged his listeners, "Evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence" (26). Noll says it took him years to fully absorb and process the truth of Malik's words. Evangelicals are known for their activism, but not for their minds.

Noll now teaches at Notre Dame, the premier Catholic liberal arts institution less than 3 hours from here. When I took a class there last summer I lost count of the number of conversations I had that went something like this.

ND student/faculty/person: Where are you studying?
Me: I'm working on a PhD at Wheaton College in Illinois.
ND student/faculty/person (cheerfully): Oh! Do you know Mark Noll? He teaches here.
Me: I've never met him, but I've heard him speak.
ND student/faculty/person: He's great!

Each of those I spoke with gave me two impressions. (1) Mark Noll embodies evangelicalism. And (2) Mark Noll is a prized member of ND's faculty. I gather that he is carving out a space for intellectually rigorous dialogue and changing the way Evangelicals are perceived, little by little. And none too soon. Let's hope that by the time my kids go to college Noll's prophetic critique of Evangelicalism will sound downright strange because it's no longer true.

Tuesday Tidbit: Augustine on parenting

Ok, so Augustine wasn't talking about parenting. He was talking about the role of civil authorities in maintaining a just society. But you have to admit the parallels are striking! Here are his wise words for the day:

"It is a matter of great importance what intention a man has in showing leniency. Just as it is sometimes a mercy to punish, so it may be cruelty to pardon." (Augustine, Letter 153, section 17, [p. 126 of From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought, edited by O'Donovan and O'Donovan])

Chew on that one for a while.

Parents sometimes operate as if they ought to spare their children from any and all hurt -- including punishment. We pick up their toys, do the chores they've left undone, and never get around to giving them the punishments we threaten, all because we don't want them to become discouraged or (worse yet!) to dislike us. Eventually we wonder why we can't get them to do anything at all.

The truth is, our kids need to experience real life if they are going to become well-adjusted adults. In real life, people don't clean up your messes. In real life, people don't do your chores. In real life, painful consequences follow bad decisions. If we spare them all this when they are young, they'll spend the rest of their lives thinking that they've been dealt an unfair hand. They'll continue to act like children long into their adult years, thinking that the world owes them something. We see it all the time, and it's not pretty, is it?

Knowing when and how to show mercy is one of the mysteries of parenting. But Augustine is right: mercy and pardon are not the same thing. As the author of Hebrews reminds us,

"Now, discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." (Hebrews 12:11 NRSV)

Tuesday Tidbit: a "proud humility"

I'm reading H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture for a class by that name with Dr. Daniel Treier that begins this morning. Niebuhr's description of Christ's humility is striking:

"The humility of Jesus is humility before God, and can only be understood as the humility of the Son. He neither exhibited nor commended and communicated the humility of inferiority-feeling before other men. Before Pharisees, high priests, Pilate, and 'that fox' Herod he showed a confidence that had no trace of self-abnegation. Whatever my be true of his Messianic self-consciousness, he spoke with authority and acted with confidence of power. When he repudiated the title of 'Good Master' he did not defer to other rabbis better than himself, but said, 'No one is good but God alone.' There is no condescension in his life toward the sinners, such as might mark an insecure or apologetic man. His humility is of the sort that raises to a new sense of dignity and worth those who have been humiliated by the defensive pretentions of the 'good' and the 'righteous.' It is a kind of proud humility and humble pride, which can be called paradoxical only if the relation to God as the fundamental relation in his life is left out of the account. It is wholly different from all the modesties and diffidences that mark men's efforts to accommodate themselves to their own and each others' superiority-feelings, it is also wholly different from that wise Greek virtue of remaining within one's limits lest the jealous gods destroy their potential rivals. The humility of Christ is not the moderation of keeping one's exact place in the scale of being, but rather that of absolute dependence on God and absolute trust in Him, with the consequent ability to remove mountains. The secret of the meekness and the gentleness of Christ lies in his relation to God." (26–27 in the edition pictured, emphasis mine)

We often think of humility as self-abasement. But as Niebuhr points out here, true humility has nothing to do with self. True humility is rooted in "absolute dependence on God and absolute trust in Him."

Tuesday Tidbit: the power of language

"Languages are ways of 'naming' the world. We cannot enter much at all into another culture unless we learn its language, its ways of naming things and activities. One reason many of today's Americans find it hard to understand and related to other cultures and nations is that we insist everyone speak English and we fail to learn other languages. It is extremely difficult to learn another language—and it is incredibly rewarding as our eyes are opened to other people and cultures with their distinctive sensibilities and sensitivities. Learning to speak someone's name with respect is the beginning of communication and relationship. Learning languages is a fruition of this same attitude, a practice of this essential principle."

-David Gill, Doing Right: Practicing Ethical Principles, 138 (emphasis mine)


This is one reason we've encouraged Eliana (age 11) to learn Spanish. She spends 40 minutes in the morning before school, three days a week, using Rosetta Stone. She's been doing it for 3 years already. I think it's paying off. Some of her very best friends at school, six years in a row, have been girls from other cultures (Cuba, India, Ethiopia, Hawaii, Italy, Indonesia, the Philippines). When they do something she doesn't understand, she doesn't get mad at them. She comes to me and asks, "Mom, is there something I should know about ______ culture that would make her do ______?"

Music to my ears.

Tuesday Tidbit: identifying spiritual handicaps

"We have replaced
repentance with blessing,
discipleship with joy,
servanthood with power,
vulnerability with predictability,
and seeking with success.
Our spiritual handicap is that we are empty
when we think we are full."

-Charles Ringma, Dare to Journey with Henri Nouwen, reflection 94

Tuesday Tidbit: on going to earth when we die

From Christopher H. J. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God:

"The consistent biblical hope, from Genesis to Revelation is that God should do something with the earth so that we can once again dwell upon it in 'rest', in sabbath peace, with him. The Bible speaks predominantly of the need for God to come here, not of the wish for us to go somewhere else. This earth is to be the place of God's judgment, and also the place of God's saving power" (154).

Are you going to heaven earth when you die?

Tuesday Tidbit: tell me who I am

Joel Green, in his book, Practicing Theological Interpretation, says this:

"if this letter [James] is to serve as Scripture for us, then we will allow it to tell us who we are" (18).

What would happen if we let the Bible tell us who we are?