After You Believe

I received N.T. Wright's latest book After You Believe from Ooze Viral Bloggers. This is probably the first book I've received from that program that I don't have any major disagreements with. In it Wright tries to show what the future has to do with the here and now. His goal is not to lay out some sort of Christian ethical rulebook. Rather this book is about the formation of Christian character. Wright attempts to travel a path between a rules-based approach and a authenticity-based approach to the Christian way of life. This book is definitely worth a read.

Thy Kingdom Connected

When it came in the mail, I was looking forward to reading Thy Kingdom Connected by Dwight J. Friesen. But I ended up being more annoyed by the book than enlightened. The problem with the book, for me, was that Friesen just didn't make the case for why the network metaphor was helpful. He spoke of links and nodes instead of relationships and things/places/people. Fair enough. But why? What does it do for us? Where does "links" take us that "relationships" doesn't?

The reason I found this book annoying is that Friesen consistently used highly technical terms from network theory, chaos theory, and other sciences and applied them to theology. This, in itself, isn't really problematic but the way Friesen does this reminded me of the way some people have taken Einstein's theory of general relativity and tried to somehow link it to epistemological relativism. Another example would be how some people have tried to take quantum theory and apply it to New Age theories (it is not surprising, I guess, that Friesen quotes Fritjof Capra a number of times).

For example, on page 98 Friesen - while talking about chaos theory - talks about "human beings, our interpersonal relations, and creation" as a dynamical system. As he correctly points out in an end note (his endnote on the definition of "dynamic systems" appears to be a direct quote of Wikipedia without reference, by the way), a dynamic system is a mathematical formalization. But, unless you are a reductionist of the greatest sort, human beings (let alone our relationship with other human beings or the entire creation) aren't dynamic systems. Dynamic systems are models. They are deterministic models. That's why they are useful to scientists and engineers. But even as a Calvinist, I don't believe humans or creation are deterministic in the way that dynamic systems are. And I doubt Friesen does either. Which means he either doesn't truly understand what the term means or he is not using it in the way that people who study chaos theory use it. And this is why I found the book annoying - he draws on certain terms from various subjects (chaos theory, network theory, etc.) and then uses those terms in a way that is quite different than how they are used in those subjects. And that makes me wonder "Why?"

I should end by saying there was a lot in the book that I agreed with (e.g., his discussion of the "other"). I just really didn't like the way the manner in which he arrived there.

Through the River

Through the River was written to popularize the work of Paul Hiebert. Having never read any of Hiebert's work, I am unqualified to judge whether they were successful in that goal. The book was very accessible.

Through the River takes a look at the subject of truth - what we mean by it and how we arrive at it. Through lots of analogies and stories, the Hirst's introduce the reader to three different epistemologies - or truth lenses, as they call them. They bring the reader to River Town, in order to tell the story of the Rock Dwellers, the Island Dwellers and the Valley Dwellers. These represent the truth lenses of positivism, instrumentalism, and critical realism.

This book frustrated me more often than not. In order to build up a case for critical realism, I felt the authors to often assumed things about the other two truth lenses that don't really follow from the epistemologies themselves. For example, the Hirst's seem to think that part of what it means to be a positivist is that you must be more concerned with the truth than with loving others. Now, I have no doubt that there are plenty of people in the world who do this, but that's not something that positivism entails. I would say similar things about their presentation of instrumentalism.

What this book does well is describe 3 different attitudes people can have towards truth. Over and over they talk about those who favor truth at the expense of relationships, those who favor relationships at the expense of truth, and those who try to balance truth and relationships. This is great, but where the authors go wrong is in suggesting that these groups correspond to positivism, instrumentalism, and critical realism (respectively).

Overall, I didn't think this was a great book and I probably wouldn't recommend it to others. A much better book on this subject was Esther Meek's Longing to Know. It is very readable and does a much better job at exploring the nature of truth and knowledge.

Again...

I think I might start posting again.

The List

Well, I didn't make it to 26 books in 2008. Rather, I came in at a paltry 19 books. Here's the list:

The Shock of the Old - David Edgerton
Colossians Remixed - Walsh and Keesmaat
How (Not) To Speak of God - Peter Rollins
The Age of Missing Information - McKibben
Irresistable Revolution - Shane Claiborne
Not the Way It's Supposed to Be - Cornelius Plantinga
The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan
Consuming Jesus - Paul L. Metzger
Blue Like Jazz - Donald Miller
The Reason for God - Tim Keller
Pagan Christianity - Frank Viola
Being Consumed - William Cavanaugh
The Powers that Be - Walter Wink
Sex God - Rob Bell
Derrida - Live Theory - James K.A. Smith
Surprised by Hope - N.T. Wright
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
Subverting Global Myths - Vinoth Ramachandra
Jesus Wants to Save Christians - Rob Bell

The best books I read were Colossians Remixed and The Omnivore's Dilemma. The Reason for God was also very good. The worst book I read was Dawkin's The God Delusion, not because I disagreed with it, but because it was poorly written and utterly unconvincing.

I am again going to try to read 26 books in 2009. At the moment I'm reading Freedom of Simplicity by Richard Foster.

Surprised by Hope 3

The final section of Wright's book could be said to revolve around I Corinthians 15:58:

"Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain."

I Corinthians is all about resurrection - the resurrection of Christ and the future resurrection of our bodies. And the final verse gives us our hope for the present life - that the work we do now for the Lord is not in vain. If we combine this with what Wright has pointed out earlier in the book (that our souls don't "go to heaven" after we die, but rather we are saved from death to a new earth by resurrection), then it becomes clear that Christians cannot have the attitude that what we do right now doesn't matter because this is not our final home. I've seen this argument used by some Christians to say that we don't have to care for the environment, for example.

Overall, Surprised by Hope was very good - probably one of the best ones I've read so far this year. I highly recommend it.

Surprised by Hope 2

The second part of Surprised by Hope takes a look at what God's purpose is for the world as a whole (as opposed to what God's purpose is for individuals). Wright begins by looking at two popular visions of God's purpose, one optimistic and one pessimistic. The first is the myth of progress. This is the myth that we are hearing all the time right now in this political season. This myth is a distortion of the Christian view of God's purpose. The myth of progress states that the world is continually getting better, especially through science and technology or the economy, and is on its way towards a utopia. Barack Obama recently said, for example, that "America is the last, best hope of Earth." I believe he borrowed that line from Abraham Lincoln.

Wright points out that the myth of progress can neither explain nor get rid of the horrible evils that we see in the world. If we have been progressing, why was the 20th century the bloodiest century in the history of the world? Wright points out "the last two hundred years remains helpless before world war, drug crime, Auschwitz, apartheid, child pornography" and countless other atrocities. Despite what our politicians seem to believe (and despite all the good things America has done), it seems to be helpless in the face of all these things. The myth that we are making progress seems to be just that - a myth.

The second, pessimistic, view that Wright talks about is what he calls "souls in transit." The hope in this view is for something else besides this world. While the myth of progress said things are getting better, the souls in transit view says that this world is bad and our hope is in something beyond this world. This view sees our souls as good and our bodies as bad - the hope that lies ahead comes when we shed our "material selves" and return to some spiritual existence.

Neither of these views is the hope that Christians have for the future. The Christian hope for the future is that God is going to renew and restore His entire creation. Creation is good, but fallen. The future hope for the world is that the fallen creation will be redeemed. "Redemption doesn't mean scrapping what's there and starting again from a clean slate but rather liberating what has come to be enslaved." Evil isn't physical matter, but a rebellion against God. So redemption isn't our souls going to heaven, but our body and soul (and, in fact, the entire Creation) turning back towards God. This also means that our future hope, as individuals, isn't that we will go to heaven and spend eternity there with God. Rather, our future hope is that death will be defeated and we will be resurrected to live on a new (restored) earth.

The third part of the book takes a look at what all this means for the present. What does our future hope mean for the hear and now?

Surprised by Hope

Well, I've read a few more books since my last post - Walter Wink's The Powers that Be, Rob Bell's Sex God, and James K.A. Smith's Jacques Derrida: Live Theory.

Right now I'm reading N.T Wright's book Surprised by Hope. The book is about what Christians have to hope for. Wright says he wants to deal with two topics - hope for the future and hope for the present.

Wright starts out by discussing the popular views in our culture about what happens after we die. Some people belief that nothing happens, we are just no more. This would be the view of atheists or naturalists. Others believe that we are in some way "absorbed" into the rest of the world - like a drop of water falling into the ocean. This is a view that may be held by New Age religions or Buddhists. There are also beliefs about ghosts and speaking to the dead and all kinds of other psychic beliefs.

Christians, Wright points out, can be just as confused as the rest of the world about what happens after death. The popular view of what Christians believe happens after you die is that if you're good you go to heaven and you are with the angels and with God and you meet all your dead relatives. And if you are bad, you go down - to hell - where all sorts of unspeakable things happen. But Wright points out that "there is very little in the Bible about 'going to heaven when you die' and not a lot about a postmortem hell either." What then?

Well, the traditional Christian view is not that we "go to heaven when we die" but, rather, that our future holds a resurrected body and a renewed earth. Christian hope, then, is "centered firmly on resurrection." Christians don't believe in a disembodied soul that goes to heaven - they believe that there will be new bodies and a new earth.

That's about as far as I am so far. I expect the rest of the book will be about how our hope in our future, bodily resurrection relates to our hope here in the present as members of the kingdom of God.

The Lie

"The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me." - Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

Long Time, No Write

So I've been slacking off in writing on this blog. I've also been slacking off in reading, but it's summer, so that's to be expected. Since my last update I've finished off The Omnivore's Dilemma. I've also finished Consuming Jesus by Paul Metzger, Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and Being Consumed by William Cavanaugh. Being Consumed was probably my favorite of the three, although Blue Like Jazz was very good, also.

Being Consumed was about how Christians should approach economics. He argues that Christianity offers an alternative to consumerism. Instead of an insatiable desire to consume new products, Christians should both consume and be consumed by Christ. This idea is typified in Matthew 25:

"I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me."

This verse isn't just about Christ telling us that we should do good things for others. How often do we interpret "feeding the hungry" or "clothing the poor" as a chance to take out our check book and write a check to somebody we'll never meet? Christ is much more radical here - he identifies himself with the poor and the needy. Many times, I'm afraid, Christians today use "charity" in order to make it so they don't need to identify with the least in this world. Instead, we can just remain comfortably where we are, write a check, and never even encounter the poor or the hungry. Anyways, those were just some thoughts that came up while reading the book.

I've read 11 books so far and we are about half way through the year. I'm a little behind, but hopefully I'll be able to pick up the pace in the last half of the year.

The Omnivore's Dilemma 2

While the first section of The omnivore's Dilemma was about industrial food, the second section looked at what the author called "pastoral" food. One might say that if the theme of the first section of the book was corn, then the theme of the second section is grass. Most of this section focused on a farmer named Joel Salatin. Joel farm produces beef, chicken, pork, turkey, rabbit, milk, eggs, and produce. But Joel considers himself first and foremost a "grass farmer" because the grass on his farm is what holds it together. The cattle are all grass-fed (as opposed to the corn-fed cattle in industrial agriculture). After they are finished feeding on grass in one section, Joel herds them to another section. A couple days later Joel lets the chickens into that section of the pasture and they peck at the cow pies to eat the insects, fly larvae and parasites out of them. This does a number of things. It spreads the manure around so that it acts as a natural fertilizer for the grass. This means he doesn't have to spread any artificial fertilizers on his farm. It also reduces the amount of chicken feed Joel has to buy and at the same time gives the chickens protein (making their eggs bigger and more healthy). It also gets rid of all the harmful parasites, making the farms safer for the cattle. Because of this, Joel says he doesn't have to spray his cattle with pesticides and other chemicals like most industrial farms.

That's only one part of how the whole farm functions together. Pollan goes on to explain how the pigs, the rabbits and all the other species work together and rely on each other. Because of this, Pollan says Joel's farm functions more like an organism than the industrial farm described in the first section. The industrial farm is like a machine - all the parts are discrete and abstract and efficient as possible. The machine is concerned with growing as much corn as possible and making cattle as fat as quickly as possible, amongst other things. Another way of saying this is that the industrial farm is linear - corn is grown in Iowa, which then heads off to another state to either a processing plant or to a farm to feed cattle. A farm like Joel's, however, is interconnected and circular. There is no "beginning" to Joel's farm since the grass relies on the chickens, which rely on the rabbits, which both rely on the cattle, which relies on the grass, which relies on the ... On the industrial farm, the corn is the beginning. Technically, we might say that the fertilizer factory is the beginning since the corn relies on fertilizer. They have to use fertilizer because 1) they need to pack as much corn on their farms as possible and 2) very often the manure from huge industrial cattle lots will kill the crops because it has too much nitrogen and phosphorus. One of the differences between the two types of farms is that the problems on industrial farms (like what to do with all the animal waste) aren't problems for farms like Joel's. Again, this is because all the parts of the farm are interconnected and work together, rather than separate and abstracted from each other.

There's a lot more I could write about this section (like how studies show that grass-fed beef tends to be better for your health than corn-fed beef), but I've probably already written to much. The next post will be about the final section of the book, where Pollan hunts for his own food.

The Omnivore's Dilemma 1

Michael Pollan's book - The Omnivore's Dilemma - begins by pointing out the fact that as humans, we can eat whatever we want. Whereas many animals are forced by their biology to eat only a few things (for example, koala bears eat little more than eucalyptus leaves), humans can eat anything from tomatoes to chicken to Twinkies. And so Pollan sets out in this book to answer the question "What should we have for dinner?"

He tries to answer this question by looking at where our meals come from. The first meal that Pollan picks is the fast food meal. He easily could have picked any meal that you might grab out of the local grocery store's freezer (aka, processed foods), too, since most of them have a similar journey. If I had to sum up this portion of the book in two words, I'd have to pick the words "corn" and "oil."

Pollan spends about 100 pages talking about corn. That sounds boring but it really wasn't. Much of the corn story takes place on a small Iowa farm. Most of the corn grown in the U.S. really can't be eaten by humans. It is either fed to animals (which we then eat) or it is processed in to various chemicals and used to make all kinds of processed foods. Pollan writes that a 32 ounce container of soda that you might get at McDonald's contains 86 grams of high fructose corn syrup. That means a large portion of the soda you drink comes from the corn fields by way of a processing plant. Pollan estimated that when he, his wife and his kid went to McDonald's, the food they ordered required 6 pounds of corn. So, for example, besides the corn used to make the soda, the cow that his hamburger came from needed to eat 3.5 pounds of corn just to gain a half point of edible meat. In addition, many of the processed foods we eat from the supermarket are made from products of corn. Pollan list all kinds of chemicals (which are made from corn) that are in the foods we eat every day.

"So what?" you might ask. Does it matter that a lot of our diet originates from corn? Well, it depends. Pollan points out that in order to grow and process all the food his family ate in that fast food meal, 1.3 gallons of oil had to be used. (Interesting fact: The average item in your average grocery store has travelled an average of about 1500 miles to get where it is at. That's one reason food prices can go up when the price of gas goes up.) He also points out that the reason corn is so cheap is because we make too much of it. For many farmers it costs more to grow a bushel of corn than to sell one. But because the corn industry is so huge, the U.S. government offers subsidies to encourage farmers to keep planting it. Unfortunately, the way these subsidies are set up, they tend to discourage farmers from switching to other crops - essentially forcing many farmers to farm only corn (and soy beans). Pollan says that these types of government policies have turned us into a nation of koala people, with very little variety in our diets (since most things contain some variety of corn). And this lack of variety, Pollan argues, is also bad for our health. But I'll save that for another blog post.

The Reason for God 3

I haven't really updated this in a while, but since my last post I've finished Keller's book. Keller, in the next few chapters, continued to look at various objections to the Christian faith. The last half of the book turned to looking at reasons for believing that Christianity is true. Keller didn't attempt to prove Christianity, but rather wanted to provide clues to suggest that Christianity helps us make sense of the world more than any other religion (or non-religion).

I thought Keller was at his strongest when he was distinguishing between religion and the gospel. Now, most people consider Christianity a religion, but Keller means something very specific by the term "religion." Religion, for Keller, refers to any belief system that holds salvation comes through moral effort. The gospel of Christ, then, isn't religion since it proclaims that salvation is by grace alone. Here is one quote from that chapter:

"The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less."

Tim Keller at Google

Since I'm reading his book, I thought I'd link to this video of Tim Keller speaking at Google. Apparently one of the many perks of working at Google is that they bring in all kinds of people to speak to their employees. If you want a pretty brief overview of what his book is about, the video below might be worth watching.

The Reason for God 2

The next two doubts that Keller looks at are "how could a good God allow suffering?" and "Christianity is a straightjacket."

The first doubt is probably one of the toughest questions Christians have to ask themselves, I think. Keller doesn't only ask "why is there evil and suffering?" but also "why is there so much evil and suffering?" We may be understand why God allows some evil and suffering - I'm sure most people have had hard times and trials that they've learned from or have caused them to grow closer to God (the story of Joseph shows this, for example) - but there also seems to be a lot of pointless suffering and evil. Keller rightly points out that just because something appears pointless to us doesn't mean it is pointless.

Keller goes on to point out that Christianity is unique amongst all other religions in that it claims that God became human and shared in our suffering. Jesus faced rejection, despair, loneliness, poverty, torture, imprisonment and a brutal death. God suffers, in love, for his fallen creation. This, Keller says, doesn't explain evil and suffering, but it does explain what evil and suffering are not. God doesn't allow them because he doesn't love us - he isn't indifferent towards our sufferings because he took them on himself and has promised to end them.

The "Christianity is a straightjacket" objection goes something like this - Christianity makes absolute truth claims, which means it excludes people and means that it doesn't allow Christians the freedom to think for themselves.

Keller points out that all communities make truth claims and even communities that claim to be inclusive are exclusive towards some. Even a liberal democracy (a country that believes in individual human rights, the division between public and private, etc.) is exclusive towards those cultures that don't accept those beliefs. It is impossible for any culture to be totally inclusive. Part of this objection is that it says that Christianity isn't open to various cultures - it is an "enemy of pluralism." But Keller says that this history of Christianity shows otherwise. Christianity originally was centered in Jerusalem and dominated by Jews, but later moved to the Mediterranean, then Northern Europe, then western Europe and North America, and today is growing the most in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This is in contrast to religions like Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, which have largely remained centered in one geographic (and cultural) location.

Christianity, says Keller, is able to make truth claims but at the same time has been embraced by various cultures because there is much freedom in how Christianity's core beliefs (the Apostle's Creed, the Ten Commandments, etc.) are expressed. Freedom isn't the "absence of restrictions" but rather being made able to live the way we are supposed to live. "Freedom in Christ" doesn't mean we can believe or do whatever we want. It means that we are made whole through Christ's death and resurrection. We are free to be who we are called to be. This is the exact opposite of a "straightjacket."