Category Archives: discernment

Civility, Clarity, discernment, Holiness, Laziness

Slow to Speak, Slow to Anger

We have it on good authority that Socrates believed that the unexamined life was not worth living. 

I’m not sure he was right or wrong, but I am sure that our unexamined conversations can be very dangerous.

I’m honestly not sure, when I think about it, that our conversations are usually menat to communicate anything as much as they are often dances of rhetoric meant to help us maintain our own presently-held prejudices. So often very complicated ideas and concepts (even good ones) are boiled down to slogans, not so that people can understand what we’re saying, but more so that we can be more assured in our own correctness, even with people who disagree with us.

The same bombastic statement can serve multiple roles in doing that. When I say that “Socialized medicine is a right”, while the statement is a meaningful claim that can have merits and demerits, I’m not often asking to hear them. More likely I’m trying to get people who already think like I do to affirm my position, and to anger and disgust those who do not agree with me. In the first case, I will get wise knowing nods to my statement, and in the other I will get snarky (or even angry) counter-claims. In either case, I’m not actually communicating as much as seeking affirmation (from the enlightened people who agree) and identifying an outgroup (seeing those who disagree with me to be the unthinking brutes that they are).]

Yet, I’m commanded in scripture to have a different goal:

James 1:19–20 (ESV) — Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

In context, James is speaking about the need for believers to submit to the teachings of God, first by working to understand them, and secondly by avoiding the ways we can avoid being taught (such as through speaking too early and so losing the opportunity to hear what is being taught, or by just getting angry and so closing our ears to something we may need to hear).

The Christian is meant to be seeking the righteousness of God, and that requires that I not skip the all-important early steps in a conversation. First that I seek to understand what the other person is saying. This means breathing when we hear the slogans of the other person and try to understand what might actually be wisdom in what is being said. If we can’t see it, we can ask questions to learn from the person what it is they mean, and give them the time to express it before coming to the conclusion that they are wrong. After all, even if we have heard the same slogan a thousand times and each of those thousand times defended poorly, it may be that this time the person has thoughtfully come to a conclusion, and the fact is there may be something correct in what they say that will lead us to greater righteousness. A place that our anger will rarely bring us. 

In short the first step is to assume that the person is at least as thougtful and knowledgable as you are, and even if they are not, to recognize that they may have wisdom to impart to you. God has developed that person to the place they are, and has put them into our lives as a gift. It is best we use the gift well. 

Of course, this is not to say that we are never to speak, and never to anger. There are very foolish ideas around, I know, I believed many of them at various times in my life. But James is wise in telling us to be quick to hear and sloe to speak and slow to anger. There is a time for speaking and anger, but only after we have heard. 

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charity, Church and State, Civility, Culture, Debate, discernment, Law, Pastoring

Online Reading (January 31, 2020)

Bit of a monster post today. There are lots of interesting things going on:

Brexit: Today the European Union loses one state as the UK leaves.

Psychology:  professor claims humans hardwired to dismiss facts inconvenient to their worldview.

Writing: Why is so much Christian writing, er, um, bland?

Free Speech: John Stackhouse criticizes UK cities for barring Franklin Graham from speaking because some strongly disagree with him?

Complementarianism: Should complementarieans call female Church leaders pastors? John Piper says no. 

Charities Law: Australian lawmakers seek to limit the ability of charities to advocate for their position. 

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Apologetics, Clarity, discernment, discipline, Truth

Wisdom comes from admitting you can be an idiot (but would like to be less of one)

The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice. (Proverbs 12:15 ESV)

Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him. (Proverbs 26:12 ESV)

If there’s one mistake that comes from binary thinking, it’s the assumption that the opposite of a particular error is the truth; if X is wrong, then anything that is not X must be right. This is the reason people imagine that because communism is bad, capitalism must be good, and because capitalism is bad, socialism must be good, instead of looking at each of these things critically and seeing that all of them have good points and bad points.

Christians are not immune to binary thinking, especially when it comes to the concept of clarity. Some Christians, in response to questions of the truth of Christianity, retreat into artificial clarity, whereby they imagine that absolutely everything that they believe must be definitionally the truth, and never be questioned. For them, the very question is the same as disbelief. 
On the other side of the equation, and often in reaction to the undoubted dogmatism of the above, some Christians seem to think that because we question things, we must never make a claim to truth. For them, to make any unambiguoius claim that something is “correct” is the same as saying that nothing can be doubted. In both cases, they are mistaking personal conviction for truth. In one case, saying that in order to have truth, you must be unambiguously convinced of it, in the other case, saying that in order to have any ability to question things, you must never make a claim to truth.

A moment’s thought undercuts the false dichotomy. My car keys are in a place whether I have forgotten where I put them or not. The acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s/s whether I know that or know it or not, and murder is wrong, even if I were a psychopath.
Even more to the point, the Bible undercuts the false dichotomies of truth rather clearly. In the two proverbs I quote above, the Word of God explains to us that we must separate our own view of ourselves from wisdom itself. Firstly, we are told that it is foolish to assume that are ways are definitionally right and will brook no dissent; we are fools to be merely right in our own eyes. Rather we should listen to advice, and that to fail to do so makes us worse than fools.
But the opposite error is also avoided. The author of these proverbs doesn’t just give us the bumper sticker “question everything”, but rather lets us know that there is are “right ways” and “hope”, but that they are not found in a lack of questioning, but in truth. We listen to advice so that our ways might be corrected.
Christians are called to have the humility to both accept that there is knowable truth, and that we are not the ultimate arbiters of that truth. That is to say. I can be an idiot, but that doesn’t mean I *am* on every point, and I can learn.

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Blogroll, Christianity, Culture, discernment, Love, Philosophy

Love is more real than we think.

 

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. (1 John 4:8–12, ESV)

Given the fact that the Bible tells me that “God is Love”, it’s surprising how long I lived under the impression that love was primarily a need or lack in me that was fulfilled by someone else. This leaves me imagining that God loves me because He needed someone to love, or because He was lonely or some such thing. Yet love is, when we get right down to it, more real than that. Love is not the result of need, but the power by which needs are fulfilled, primarily by God.

It is true that love needs an object (one of the reasons I believe in a trinitarian God…. that and the Bible tells me so). We talk about a love interest romantically as someone who “completes me”, or who I “need more than air” (or some other romantic verbiage that looks kinda silly outside of the romantic films they feature in). In the regular friendship situation, we think of friendship love as that which staves off loneliness, or gives meaning to our lives.

Love does those things, but I’m learning that the instrumental way we define things (something is like this, because this is the way we can use it) is at best a little deficient. It makes something the Bible seems to speak of in powerful and glowing terms into a mere method of fulfilling a need. It serves to make me as the object or subject of love more important than the love involved, as if love is valuable because it helps me, instead of being something that is valuable whether it meets my felt needs or not.

Even when John talks about love and how God is love, he says that God’s love is made manifest (revealed, made clear) in that He sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sins. It’s not that He is loving because he sent His son, but that he is love, so as a result He sent His Son. God’s love is not a result of God’s loving actions, but is the ground for God’s actions. He is not love because he does loving things, but he does loving things because He is Love.

Seems like a minor distinction? It’s actually very profound, especially if we see God’s love (as Paul does) as the ground for our own actions. You see, we do not love because we want to be loving, but because we have God’s love in us, we should do loving things. It is a reuslt of having been love.

Love is a positive thing, a real thing,not a fulfillment of need. It is not a corruption, but real in itself. Thus love is not about how we need others, but ultimately about how God’s love overflows in us, and through us to others.

Bradley Hook / Pexels

 

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