Revisions Vol. 3 Issue 2, Spring 2007

Revisions A Journal of Christian Perspective

vol III, issue 2, spring 2007

Can Technology Save Us?

Revisions A Journal of Christian Perspective EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Richard Lopez ‘09 EXECUTIVE EDITOR Joung Park ‘08 MANAGING EDITOR Li Deng ‘10 COPY EDITOR Chenxin Jiang ‘09 ADVISOR & EDITOR EMERITUS John Montague EDITORS EMERITI The Rev. David H. Kim Andrew Matthews ‘06 David Matthews ‘05 Matthew Nickoloff ‘04 ART & PHOTOGRAPHY Stephen Hsia ‘08 STAFF & CONTRIBUTORS Brian Brown ‘07, David Chen ‘05 Daniel Douglas ‘09, Nicole Fegeas ‘10 Karis Anne Kong ‘06, Jae Han ‘09 Felix Huang ‘07, Benjamin Kung ‘10, Esther Lee ‘08, Gregory Lee ‘00, Teng Kuan Ng ‘05, Melissa Plapp ‘09 Becker Polverini ‘10 Craig Schindewolf ‘09 Kenneth Tay ‘10, J.D. Walters ‘09 Opinions expressed in articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors or of Manna Christian Fellowship. Manna is a 501(c)(3) corporation. Copyright, 2007.

The printing of this journal is made possible by gifts from friends and alumni and by a grant from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Revisions, c/o Manna Christian Fellowship PO Box 577, Princeton, NJ 08542 revisionsonline@gmail.com www.revisionsonline.com

From the Editors’ Perspective

Yet Another Savior?

i

Pod. iTunes. iPhone. iSave? At a time when technological devices often provide more intimacy than a human being, we must carefully reassess the scope of technology in our private lives and in society at large. Technology is a distinctively human enterprise, a creative activity in which we manipulate physical matter in order to meet a need or achieve a desired goal. In early human history, agriculture was the primary technology by which the basic need of hunger could be met.

Currently, in our 21st entury American culture, our basic needs for survival have been more or less met. Yet, greater desires and “needs” have taken reign. Virtual networking tools like Facebook and YouTube are great examples of this psychosocial trend. Users on these websites tirelessly and continually re-define their cyber identities as they unabashedly showcase their interests, hobbies, and even themselves through countless photographs and videos. On top of that, people engineer their personalized soundtracks on their iPods and keenly lose themselves by watching complete seasons of their favorite sitcoms in one sitting.

What is to come of all this? Paradoxically, by “social” networking the self has become individualized and enthroned more than ever before. It’s all about me, my space and shamelessly broadcasting myself to earn petty stars of approval from strangers. We are vainly trying to affirm our self worth and save ourselves, with modern technology making the process effortless and, yes, even enjoyable.

While some technological innovations have made us impersonal and socially inept, other developments in medicine and biotechnology have saved millions of lives from physical afflictions. This leads us to a more profound question: what does technology’s dual nature look like in the eyes of God? First, technology in of itself proves to be an unparalleled opportunity to imitate God as creator. When we craft something, we translate our thoughts into meaningful creative behavior, leading to something new that never existed before. In this way we image God, who from His mind fashioned the fabric of the universe, everything from quarks to quasars.

Oh, but how we fail to image God in the technological realm! Time and again we do not act as benevolent creators and responsible stewards of creation. We are supremely careless in what we create and how we use it. In this issue of Revisions, we explore the wideranging implications of technology for the individual and for society. Ultimately, we must not treat technology as our true end, but only as a means to reflect God’s glory and lead others to Him. In this way we cannot help but change the way we think about technology, reaffirming that Christ is Lord and sovereign over all of creation. If for a moment we think that the “iSave” mentality will work for us, then we will have rendered void the glorious cross of Christ.

The Mission of Revisions Revisions is an ecumenical journal of Christian thought committed to the process of “faith in search of understanding.” Through re-visioning the world in light of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we hope to invigorate the intellectual possibility of a worldview centered on the Gospel, both at Princeton University and in the world at large. In developing and articulating distinctively Christian perspectives on the whole of life, we seek to revive the rich Christian tradition of vibrant intellectual engagement with and critical reflection on the social, cultural, philosophical, political, and scientific issues facing a pluralistic university community.

Revisions / Spring 2007

Contents Can Technology Save Us? The Multimedia Church........................................................................4

Kenneth Tay On Technology, Thanksgiving, and Patience......................................5

David Chen Looking for: [Insert Desired Object Here]........................................8

Richard Lopez iPod People.............................................................................................10

Benjamin Kung & Esther Lee Misguided Compassion and Scientism.............................................12

Kevin Joyce Technology and the Imago Dei..........................................................13

Daniel Douglas The Cost of Technology.......................................................................14

John Montague

Features Greenbacks and Grace..........................................................................................17

Becker Polverini Flesh or Spirit?.......................................................................................................18

J.D. Walters Lessons from St. Augustine..................................................................................20

Gregory Lee The Question of Orthodoxy...............................................................................22

Felix Huang

The Role of Faith in Epistemology...................................................................24

Joung Park Ethics Upended: Reviewing Blue Like Jazz.....................................................26

Brian Brown

Faith Beyond Sunday.............................................................................................28

Chenxin Jiang & John Montague

In Their Own Words............................................................................................29

Nicole Fegeas

From the Blogosphere...........................................................................................30 Cover design by Richard Lopez; Images taken from public domain online databases: Page 3 (top), Page 13, Page 20, Page 31; Photographs and illustrations by Stephen Hsia: Pages 3 (bottom), 14, 17, 30. Other photography credits: Pages 10-11, Esther Lee; Back Cover, Richard Lopez

Revisions / Spring 2007

The Multimedia Church Kenneth Tay Thinking that through the Internet they can obtain all that they can get out of a Sunday service, some may withdraw from the safety of the Christian community and go into isolation.

T

ECHNOLOGY HAS ALWAYS AIDED THE SPREAD of the Gospel and the growth of the body of Christ. The printing press led to mass production of the Bible, CDs and DVDs made sermons and praise songs available to millions, and television has paved the way for evangelism with a worldwide audience.

With the advent of the Internet, anyone can access the Gospel from virtually anywhere. Hundreds of translations of the Bible have been placed on the web, alongside countless articles and mp3s related to Christianity, providing the average Christian with a wealth of resources which were previously out of reach.

Apart from being a good supplement for the regular churchgoer, the Internet is also a vital link to the Christian community for those who are unable to attend church due to persecution. Sermons and webcasts online substitute for hearing the voice of a preacher firsthand, vast archives of articles and commentaries function as pedagogical tools, and communication with other Christians on the web fosters community. Some ministries even have online forums through which churchgoers can send in prayer requests. For these Christians, the Internet has played a pivotal role in bringing the church to them when they could not manage to go to church themselves.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the Internet is without its disadvantages. As with any manmade creation, there are always negative side effects against which we have to guard ourselves. Apart from the blatant distribution of unedifying material such as pornography and excessive violence, we must guard ourselves against the more subtle threats that the Internet poses for the Christian community.

There is a temptation for Christians to treat the Internet as a perfect substitute for the church as we know it. Thinking that through the Net they can obtain all that they can get out of a Sunday service, some may withdraw from the safety of the Christian community and go into isolation. While such isolation is inevitable for those living in areas where the physical Christian community does not exist, it can be destructive for Christians who choose to rely on themselves and the Internet to grow in their spiritual walk.

Scriptural references in the Bible make it clear that fellowship is extremely important in the Christian faith. In Acts 2:42 we see that one of the four things that the early church persisted in was fellowship with one another. The author of Hebrews urges us “not [to

forsake] the assembling of ourselves together … so much the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25). As the second coming of Christ draws near Paul warns against abandoning fellowship, but encourages the church to “exhort one another.” In 2 Thessalonians 3:14, Paul instructs the church not to keep company with a brother who does not “obey our word in this epistle,” that he may be “ashamed.” Clearly there is something to be gained from fellowship such that removal from the community is seen as a punishment in Paul’s eyes.

Paul’s analogy of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12 makes it clear how the Internet, by discouraging fellowship, can threaten spiritual growth. If a person decides to cut himself off from relationships with fellow Christians, it is akin to a foot saying, “I am not of the body” (1 Corinthians 12:15). Apart from the rest of the body of Christ, a believer is severed from his life source, stunting his growth. Furthermore, if a foot were separate from the body, it would be prone to wander in the wrong direction—away from the body. In isolation, lack of correction makes it easy to fall into doctrinal error. It is in company that one becomes rooted in the right doctrine (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12).

Some may argue that it is possible to maintain living relationships with other believers through the Internet without going to church, using e-mail and video conferencing. While this is true, we must realize that God does wondrous things in a communal context, and by walking the Christian walk in isolation, one would be missing out on the full manifestation of God’s glory in community. Jesus Himself said that “where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). The coming of the Holy Spirit also happened when the disciples “were all with one accord in one place” (Acts 2). Lastly, the gift of God that Timothy received from Paul was through “the laying on of hands” (2 Timothy 1:6).

Through all these examples in Scripture, we can see that while the Internet is a valuable resource that Christians should take full advantage of, it is not a replacement for the church as a community. Let us remember that God Himself said, “It is not good that man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18).

Above all, let us enjoy God while enjoying each other. f Kenneth Tay ’10 is from Singapore. He plans to major in mathematics.

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On Technology, Thanksgiving & Patience David D. Chen We have become impatient, unfulfilled, and perpetually fixated on the future. We have filled our lives with so much hardware and noise that it makes us wonder if we too will waste away into a dull obsolescence.

I

had never been to a Black Friday shopping spree before. The thought of camping out for hours in the chilling pre-dawn night always seemed perverse to me... but that was before I started browsing the Black Friday ads and listening to stories of stunning deals and bargains.

I thought I had conquered technolust a long time ago. In high school I was often caught up in buying the latest gadget or computer upgrade. A fascination with the cutting edge of technology later compelled me to major in electrical engineering, but by the time I graduated from Princeton I had become jaded with technology. The whole industry seemed perverse: laboring over a piece of silicon whose sole function was to glue children to computer screens; developing incredible technologies that were only available to the richest of the rich; seeing this year’s hottest items become next year’s trash. As much as I admired the creative and hard-working spirit of modern engineers, I couldn’t bring myself to love the things they made anymore. At least, not enough to buy thousands of dollars worth of stuff.

Until Thanksgiving Day. My brother and I were perched over a computer monitor, poring through rumored Black Friday discounts. Like a commercial advertisement, images of iPods and DVDs danced in my mind to the background music of self-justification. How could it be considered greed to buy a discounted gift for a loved one?

Wouldn’t it be perfect to be able to give great gifts for only half the price? Wasn’t that being responsible and economic with my finances: an example of good stewardship? I began constructing an appealing image of the next morning’s escapade: camping out on the sidewalk with a thermos of hot chocolate while listening to medical school lectures and greeting fellow shoppers with holiday cheer. The thought of studying for exams, finishing my Christmas shopping, building character, and dispensing goodwill towards all men—all at the same time—was becoming very attractive.

Then I opened my e-mail inbox and read a message from a friend at school. We were taking the same public health class and our professor, Dr. Mark Robson, was featured in the Star Ledger’s front page article. Normally I would have been very happy to see Dr. Robson featured in the newspaper. He is a jovial man who enjoys making fun of his weight, age, and students. He’s the sort of professor I trusted to care about my person as well as my education. Unfortunately, the newspaper article was about Professor Robson’s younger brother, who had died suddenly and unexpectedly a few months ago.

Revisions / Spring 2007

While reading the article, I remembered how stunned the class was to hear the news. Despite the loss, Prof. Robson was back teaching only a week after the death. He briefly told us about the tragedy and did his best to get through the three-hour lecture. The first hour was characterized by the same style we had come to enjoy from him: well-paced and filled with jokes, theory, and trivia. But the second hour addressed agriculture and farming—elements that surely reminded him of his brother —and his voice suddenly faltered and lost its confidence. He became monotone and listless until the end of class.

A few weeks later, his father passed away as well. The Star Ledger article described it like this: Then, just before this year’s spring planting, Art [Prof.

Robson’s father] began feeling ill. Tests revealed blocked ducts in his liver. Doctors put in a stent and sent him home, a ritual they would repeat right up to the summer day Joan Robson looked out the window to see her husband, weak with fever, being helped in from the fields by Neil [Prof. Robson’s brother]. His cancer was diagnosed after that, but by then it was clear Art wouldn’t see the harvest.

Neil didn’t talk much about it, but everyone knew how hard he was taking the news. He, like all of them, was bracing for the worst - only the worst, when it arrived one evening in late September, was not the thing for which they’d prepared...1 Reading the article about my professor’s family forced me to reflect on the stark contrast between the true holiday of Thanksgiving and the pseudoholiday of Black Friday. I had allowed the latter to corrupt the former. Rather than giving thanks for what I already had, my mind was fixated on the thought of getting more. Impatience had found a way to fuel greed, allowing the joy of today to be spoiled by the promises of tomorrow.

While I do not fault technology for these shortcomings, it would be foolish to ignore how technology has made me more vulnerable to them.

One phenomenon of technology is its capacity for instant gratification: the elimination of the gap between desire and fulfillment. Back in the day, if I wanted to make an expensive purchase, I’d have to wait until I had all the cash on hand. Today, I can charge it all to my credit card and delay full payment

for months or even years. Back in the day, if I wanted to write something and share it with a wide readership, I would have to find an editor willing to publish my work. I’d have meticulously edited the text so that it could convey its meaning precisely while also making sure that it didn’t unintentionally reveal something private. Today, I can blog and share with millions of people exactly what I had for lunch or what I thought about the classmate who snores in lecture. The delay between a thought and an act has been abolished.

The objectivity, precision, and efficiency that we enjoy from science and technology have obscured our sense of mysticism. It is difficult for us to see the worth of the disciplines of meditation, fasting, and prayer: exercises that require patience and selflessness. In his book “Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life,” Henri Nouwen grapples with the concept of impatience:

debt. Instead of composing a letter or crafting an article we instant message and blog. Instead of finding entertainment and joy in simple diversions, we compulsively check e-mail, Facebook, and YouTube. We have lost the dual senses of anticipation and delight in the moment: the waiting, meditating, and “wasting of time” that once made the product of our furious efforts something worthwhile. We have become impatient, unfulfilled, and perpetually fixated on the future. We have filled our lives with so much hardware and noise that it makes us wonder if we too will waste away into a dull obsolescence.

We desperately hope that these things are more efficient ways of building community and yet are often hard pressed to find in them true and full moments of thanksgiving, gratitude, affection, and compassion. Nouwen describes patience as having “hope for the moment” and encourages us to remember those moments in which we have enjoyed the fullness of patience:

Impatience always has something to do with time.

When we are impatient with speakers, we want them to stop speaking or to move on to another subject. When we are impatient with children, we want them to stop crying, asking for ice cream, or running around. When we are impatient with ourselves, we want to change our bad habits, finish a set task, or move ahead faster.

Whatever the nature of our impatience, we want to leave the physical or mental state in which we find ourselves and move to another, less uncomfortable place.

When we express our impatience, we reveal our desire that things will change as soon as possible... Essentially, impatience is experiencing the moment as empty, useless, meaningless. It is wanting to escape from the here and now as soon as possible...

Perhaps such moments have been rare in our lives, but they belong among those precious memories that can offer hope and courage during restless and tense periods. These patient moments are moments in which we have a very different experience of time. It is the experience of the moment as full, rich, and pregnant... These moments are not necessarily happy, joyful, or ecstatic.

They may be full of sorrow and pain, or marked by agony and struggle. What counts is the experience of fullness, inner importance, and maturation. What counts is the knowledge that in that moment real life touched us. From such moments we do not want to move away; rather, we want to live them to the fullest…

Clock time is outer time, time that has a hard, merciless objectivity to it. Clock time leads us to wonder how much longer we have to live and whether “real life” has not already passed us by. Clock time makes us disappointed with today and seems to suggest that maybe tomorrow, next week, or next year it will really happen. Clock time keeps saying, “Hurry, hurry, time goes fast, maybe you will miss the real thing! But there is still a chance... Hurry to get married, find a job, visit a country, read a book, get a degree... Try to take it all in before you run out of time.” Clock time always makes us depart. It breeds impatience and prevents any compassionate being together... (Nouwen, 96-98) Text and instant messaging, blogging, peer-to-peer networking, Blackberries, Facebook, and a bevy of other novelties have revolutionized the ways in which we can save clock time and communicate efficiently, but they have not given us something meaningful to communicate about. Though we are able to do more, the question becomes, “Are we doing anything worthwhile?” We once perceived the delay between thought and action to be a waste, but perhaps its loss has caused us to lose the meaning behind the things we do. Instead of giving thanks at Thanksgiving, we go out and buy more junk. Instead of rediscovering treasure at Christmastime, we find ourselves in more

It is this full time, pregnant with new life, that can be found through the discipline of patience. As long as we are the slaves of the clock and the calendar, our time remains empty and nothing really happens. Thus, we miss the moment of grace and salvation. But when patience prevents us from running from the painful moment in the false hope of finding our treasure elsewhere, we can slowly begin to see that the fullness of time is already here and that salvation is already taking place. Then, too, we can discover that in and through Christ all human events can become divine events in which we discover the compassionate presence of God… (Nouwen, 98-100)2 I write this article in the bowels of a medical school study room and must confess that the whole concept of patience seems incredibly difficult. There are times when I just want to leave this place and be done with it all: the late, caffeinated nights; the pressure of exams and the stress to achieve; the quiet and dim study halls that evoke sentiments of frustration and anxiety. I want to move on and be somewhere else and do something different. I want to be out of school; I want to earn a living; I want to serve the poor; I want to have a family; I want to procrastinate; I want everything and to be anywhere and do anything else except the where and the how and the what of the now. But the call of Christ is for me to enter into a divine moment and understand that I have been placed here – in this discrete unit of time Revisions / Spring 2007

– for a purpose. Looking back, I must also admit that there have been times even in this school when I have laughed and enjoyed the company of other students; when I have stared at my notes in amazement at the complexity and intricacy of life; and when I have realized that I am precisely where God wants me to be.

The very next moment may bring a phone call or an e-mail from a friend that brings with it a conversation of joy or sorrow. The next moment may simply be a continuation of this moment’s reflection. Regardless, I am learning to trust that there is a time for everything and that this moment holds its own special and sacred purpose in the narrative of God’s divine history.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.

God does it so that men will revere him. – Ecclesiastes 3:1-14 f David Chen ‘05 graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering and is currently attending medical school.

“A Harvest of Compassion,” Star Ledger, 23 Nov. 2006: 1.

Henri J.M. Nouwen, Donald P. McNeill, and Douglas A. Morrison, Compassion: a Reflection on the Christian Life (New York, New York: Doubleday, 1982).

1 2

www.revisionsonline.com comment on articles w write us an e-mail w submit articles w learn more Revisions / Spring 2007

Looking for: [insert desired object here] Richard Lopez Do we desire random play, thinking that “whatever we can get” will be adequate for our needs? Or do we seek considerably greater things, such as truth, forgiveness, and love?

F

acebook.com, the addiction-forging time vacuum that we all love in secret, packs a multitude of tantalizing features that warrant censure or praise, sometimes both. However, I would like to focus on something with seemingly less controversy: the “Looking for” category in a user’s profile. Now of course, some people choose options in this category that reflect exactly what their “looking for.” Others, on the other hand, experiment with their preferences with vain hopes of fulfilling them in future social (or maybe sexual) exchanges.

Let’s consider the following hypothetical story about John.

On a Thursday morning John indicates on his Facebook pro-

file that he is looking for “random play,” and then at a party that night John intently monitors all of his interactions, maybe even manipulating them in order to realize the prophecy of his sacred Facebook profile. But he hasn’t struck the jackpot yet, until now; after seven beers circulate in his system, with confidence surging and inhibitions waning, John starts to grind with a scantily clad blonde on the dance floor. Below the din of the heavy bass thumps, John screams into the girl’s ear: “Hey…do you want to get out of here and have a little fun?!” The girl responds with an animated nod, and before you can say “meaningless sex with a complete stranger,” John and the girl are in his dorm room, eating each other’s tonsils.

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The girl is considerably drunker than John, but John doesn’t care: he’s having his random play and that’s all that matters. John repositions himself on top of the girl (who just informed him that her name is Emily) and takes off his underclothes. Emily, barely able to speak at this point, utters a barely distinguishable “stop” but John pays no attention. The thrusts of John’s body shake the bed fiercely for a half hour; Emily has passed out.

Three weeks have passed since that “playful” night, and Emily and John haven’t spoken with each other in person. They’ve only corresponded on each other’s Facebook walls. Emily has written many scathing remarks, threatening to turn John in for rape. Luckily John checks Facebook every twenty minutes so he was able to delete the comments quickly enough so that no one could read them. One day Emily leaves a voicemail for John, telling him that she is not pregnant and that she won’t report him only if he never tells anyone about what happened between them. When John hears the message he heaves a sigh of relief.

This news is liberating for him! But yet, he feels a gulf deep inside. How should he fill it? How can he alter his Facebook profile so that in the future his self-confidence is better secured?

He goes on his laptop and nervously edits his Facebook profile.

Of course, he looks over his changes several times. He looks at the “looking for” category and notices that he had only checked off “whatever I can get.” John wonders if that really is true, if he is THAT desperate at this point. Whatever, he thinks, and he saves the changes.

Fast-forward five months. As of now John has slept with eight girls, not including Emily. In his heart of hearts he is certainly not satisfied with any of these experiences, each of which seemed to have a temporary pleasure or ostensible benefit at the time. Moreover, looking back on this recent behavior John feels more alone, more isolated, and more desperate than ever before.

He asks himself the simple question: why? One early morning at 4:00AM John goes online and looks at his Facebook profile, foolishly thinking that he is viewing his true self. He notices that under the “looking for” category he had only chosen the option “whatever I can get.” That’s exactly what I got, he thinks.

At that moment John breaks down, tears cascading down his face in thick sheets. He grabs his Swiss Army knife, rushes out of the room and heads toward the bathroom with thoughts of ending his life. On the way there he happens to find Emily.

She asks John what he’s doing up so late. He quickly slips the knife in his pocket, and then returns her question with the same one. Emily says that she couldn’t sleep, and actually had the sudden impulse to knock on John’s door and talk to him about

Revisions / Spring 2007

something. John doesn’t want to rehash any more memories that could worsen his pain. He brushes past Emily towards the bathroom, but she stops him.

“John, please hear me out.”

“Emily, I don’t want to talk about it. I should have never…”

“I forgive you, John.”

“What?”

“I forgive you for what you did to me.”

“But why would you…”

“Over the past several months, something big has happened to me.”

“What the hell does that mean?” John asks coldly.

“Do you mind if we talk for a little bit?” Emily asks.

“Well, alright I guess.” John replies dispassionately.

That early morning conversation between John and Emily changed their lives forever. Sophomores in college at the time, they graduated two years later. In fact, they sat together at the graduation ceremony, with wide smiles on their faces. Emily’s engagement ring sparkled brilliantly in the June sun. As the ceremony drew to a close everyone excitedly tossed their caps into the air. John looked toward the heavens and closed his eyes for several seconds. Emily noticed this and asked: “What is it, sweetheart?”

“I’m just thanking God,” John replied.

“For what?”

“For Facebook.”

They laughed, kissed, and walked hand in hand in the final procession. * * * * * * *

As we go through life, we must ask ourselves what exactly we’re looking for. Do we desire random play, thinking that “whatever we can get” will be adequate for our needs? Or do we seek considerably greater things, such as truth, forgiveness, and love? I think it’s helpful to make an analogy between our Facebook profiles and our true selves, for our behaviors and relationships will be undoubtedly shaped by what we indicate in the “looking for” category in our hearts. Jesus states in Matthew 6 that we should “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.” Every day when we wake up in the morning, do we check off the box in our hearts that says: “looking for Christ and his kingdom?” If not, I think we should edit our profiles. f Richard Lopez ‘09 is majoring in psychology. He is from Rockaway, New Jersey.

Chris Innis ’09

i

Alex Thomas ’09

Currently listening to...

Whitney Houston

Currently listening to...

Roaring 20

“Generally I listen to my iPod when I’m walking or in transition. It isolates me from the world, and I really like that.

“I feel like it’s my one time to clear my head, zone out, and not focus on class, school, or whatever.”

“Especially in the morning when I’m delivering papers and don’t want to talk with anyone.”

But...

“Sometimes it’s nicer to just walk and listen to nature.”

iPod People

pod, you pod, we all pod for iPods. It seems like everywhere you go, there’s bound to be at least two people plugged into these popular gadgets: the person standing next to you and…you. As we scoured the campus looking for students to interview, the iPod revolution was a readily apparent phenomenon; nearly half of those walking alone were tuned into their personal, Apple-emblazoned devices.

Most students claimed that they did not listen to their iPods as a means of deliberately isolating themselves.

Still, many thought that iPods negatively affected their social interactions as listeners appeared preoccupied and even anti-social. Many listened to music that reflected their mood. Whether they were strolling along on a lazy Saturday afternoon or preparing themselves mentally for a particularly long (and boring) seminar, people listened to music that corresponded to their activities. The main reason that people seemed to listen to their iPods, though, was to relax and reflect. By blocking out external noises and tuning into their personal soundtracks, students were better able to focus on their private thoughts.

How, you might ask, can one small, several hundred dollar gadget help us escape the distractions of this world? The answer, from the Gospel’s perspective, is simple: Christ’s redeeming power. While it might be difficult to see how listening to the Ying Yang Twins is redemptive, it is not hard to see how God seeks to speak into our lives through the gift of iPods and music. Thanks to iPods, we now have unparalleled access to the songs that we wish to listen to as we engage in our daily activities. We have the freedom to cater our music to our lives. Is

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Kalle Eko ’07

Allison Wood ‘10

Currently listening to...

Currently listening to...

Jackson Five

Omarion

“I listen to my iPod pretty much all the time.

A lot of times I have to walk around campus and it’s hella boring.”

“My dad used to say, ‘You kids -you’re always plugged into something.’ There’s some truth to that.”

“I just like to relax and think about other stuff ‘cuz my mind kinda goes blank when I don’t listen to stuff.”

“Music is now like your own soundtrack to life because iPods make it more accessible.”

Ben Kung and Esther Lee

there not a clearer manifestation of God’s love than this? After all, “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” (John 10:3) As our creator, He knows each one of us intimately, even to the very core of our personalities and preferences. Indeed, the fact that these devices can give us instant access to the particular songs that reflects our exact moods and circumstances is a loving reminder from God that He is a “[God] who knows the heart” (Acts 15:8). Those times spent reflecting on the day or philosophizing about life while listening to your favorite band might not merely be the products of your wandering mind. Rather, they might be moments that God has graciously given to you, moments in which He asks you to take a step back from the chaos of this world and meditate on the bigger picture. Essentially, it is during these moments that the God who has created us and knows each of us by name is trying to speak to us.

So next time you pop in those ear buds, just bear in mind that God might be trying to send you a greater message. The Lord knows the ins and outs of each iPod and He has a purpose for every song that is played by these devices. Therefore, it would be wise to stay tuned, not necessarily to the music, but to the thoughts engendered by the music, which ultimately stem from God. There is, after all, a reason that He is referred to in Scripture as the great “iAm”. He’s the music that we’ve been listening to all along. f Ben Kung ‘10 is from San Jose, California. Esther Lee ‘08 is a molecular biology major from Fullerton, California.

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Misguided Compassion and Scientism Kevin Joyce While the advancement of science gives us the means to do extraordinary good, Western society has long suffered from “white coat syndrome,” an unquestioning belief that scientists are incapable of error, bad faith, or untruth.

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aith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.” This passage from Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio might well sum up the view of all Christians towards science and its application in technology. As John Paul would have it, faith and reason are inseparable: faith is hardly faith when reason does not assist it, and reason unaided by faith can be used to justify nearly any wrong.

Proper science can never contradict reason or faith, as God is the author of them both. The wonders of technology have given us an almost religious awe for scientific theories. But while the advancement of science gives us the means to do extraordinary good, Western society has long suffered from “white coat syndrome,” an unquestioning belief that scientists are incapable of error, bad faith, or untruth.

It is indeed true that empiricism is the broadest “common denominator” for agreement among believers and nonbelievers, and Christians must look wholeheartedly to empirical truths as an aid to their faith in God. But while empiricism itself is real and yields true conclusions, many scientists who purport to practice it are less than honest. Several examples come to mind, from Alfred Kinsey to Richard Dawkins, but of most urgent note is the appalling dishonesty of certain scientists promoting human embryo-destructive research.

Myth #1: The only real arguments against embryo-destructive research are religious in nature. Scientists tend to make this claim when philosophical arguments on their behalf are in short supply, and as a result, often mistake opponents’ secular arguments for religious ones. What is a religious argument? Simply put, a religious argument is one whose premises can be accepted only by believers of a particular religious creed. That an embryo is a member of the human species is not a religious or philosophical question; it is a scientific reality. As Princeton’s Professor Robert George observed in a piece delivered at an American Political Science Association convention, “[M]ost pro-life advocates see abortion as a sin against God precisely because it is the unjust taking of innocent human life,”1 and not merely because they are told so in church. Moreover, as George has stated elsewhere, Christian believers “find the Church’s teaching against human embryo-killing credible precisely because it...is in line with the embryological facts.”2 Myth #2: Skin cells and other types of human cells are morally equivalent to embryos. Silver, again, has made this claim often and received an especially humorous response from Stephen Colbert on one occasion when Colbert remarked that he

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had never witnessed babies growing on his arm. Every biologist knows that skin cells in a Petri dish can never grow into embryos on their own. They are only capable of dividing into other skin cells. What Silver refers to in this argument is Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (cloning), in which a skin cell’s nucleus is removed, inserted into a woman’s unfertilized egg, resulting in a human embryo. But he knows that stem cells are not embryos, and neither are skin cell nuclei. What makes human embryos so different is what they do: they grow into adult humans.

Myth #3: Embryonic stem cells are the only stem cells with medical potential. Thousands of patients have been successfully treated by stem-cell therapies derived from umbilical cord blood, amniotic fluid, bone marrow, and even fat from liposuction. On the other hand, you don’t even need the fingers on one hand to count the number of people helped by embryo-destructive research. New and developing research has shown certain adult stem cell lines to be both safer and—in certain cases— more potent than embryonic stem cells.3 Perhaps the greatest myth along these lines is that our medical establishment is on the verge of a major breakthrough in embryonic stem-cell research, a panacea and an end to human suffering. Despite the emotional protests in Washington and similar commercials on television, scientists admit they are many years away from developing viable treatments derived from embryonic stem cells.

It is ironic, then, that in the case of embryo-destructive research, science and the media are guilty of exactly the charge they sling at their religious opponents: misrepresentation of facts and a form of fundamentalism. Many scientists hold embryodestructive research as part of their scientific agenda, and—not unlike religious fundamentalists who cling to a dogma without questioning it—refuse to acknowledge inconvenient scientific and ethical truths about the research they promote. Embryo-destructive research seems more concerned with advancing science than with advancing the common good. The whims of this type of science must be tempered by a force outside science itself, and it is the duty of Christians, then, to maintain a responsible amount of skepticism, keeping science honest. f Kevin Joyce ‘09 is a philosophy major from Boston, MA. Robert P. George , God’s Reasons: The role of religious authority in debates on public policy. From remarks at the 1998 American Political Science Association Convention. http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/GeorgeGodsReasons.php 2 Fundamentalists? We? Bad science, worse philosophy, and McCarthyite tactics in the human-embyro debate. By Patrick Lee & Robert P. George. National Review Online.

3 For example: Journal of the American Medical Association: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/297/14/1568 http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/295/5/527 1

Revisions / Spring 2007

Technology and the Imago Dei Daniel Douglas [I]t is unlikely that scientists will ever declare artificial intelligence a failure, but every year that goes by without success is a witness to the glory and awe-inspiring work of God that man is unable to match.

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ince the beginning of human history, man has been trying to follow in God’s footsteps as creator. Man discovered and built fire, effectively saying “Let there be light” whenever he’s needed it. He has built the polders of the Netherlands and the grand capital of St. Petersburg by dividing the land and the waters to his benefit.

He has launched balloons and airplanes to conquer the sky and satellites and shuttles to conquer the stars. Mankind is in the process of bringing all of nature’s flora and fauna under his control, cloning, mutating, and splicing genes to create new creatures and plants, all in hopes of making our lives more comfortable.

Man’s accomplishments appear impressive, but in reality he has only produced cheap knock-offs of the “real deal,” not creations but adaptations that merely build upon all the incredible work he has already done. However, scientists, in seeking to proceed to the next step in this logical sequence, hope to match and repeat an act of God rather than utilize it. I speak of the ongoing attempts by scientists to develop a computer that is actually self-aware and intelligent, a non-human being that is equal to a human in all cognitive abilities. This project has much greater ramifications, whether it succeeds or fails.

Even before the research produces any results, it is dangerous, and not in the “rogue supercomputer inciting robot rebellion” sense, but in a much subtler way; it corrupts the mindsets of all who pursue it. The prevailing idea in humanistic science is that the human brain consists of nothing but electro-chemical processes that a computer can eventually mimic to achieve sapience. This viewpoint denies the existence of the soul or of free will; it replaces trust in the human act of making a decision and its moral implications with the belief that human thought and behavior result from the interactions between neurons and nothing more, thus removing the moral culpability of our actions. It also promotes the idea that we are capable of creating anything that God can, a dangerous and egotistical mindset.

For a programmer to attempt to create a physical computer model of the brain, he will have to accept this latter worldview and continue this research, at a great personal cost to his faith.

Perhaps the programmer could avoid this by developing a Revisions / Spring 2007

model of intelligence that is not based on any biological system, but instead looks at the problem from an entirely different perspective. Bomb technology in the 20th century was not undergoing any special advance until researchers looked at the problem from the nuclear perspective rather than the chemical one, and it’s impossible to predict whether a similar quantum leap in technology will occur from changing perceptions. Is it conceivable that a computer could eventually be designed in such a manner that it does not blindly follow programming but would actually be able to make choices without influence from the original programmer? Perhaps, but I do not think it is likely. The nature of free will has been God’s secret for millennia, and I doubt any human will be able to recreate it.

So what if, against all odds, such a project was to succeed and humanity was faced with a machine that was its intellectual and moral peer? How should Christians react to such machines with no Biblical or theological precedent? I say we should share the Good News with them. If they have all of the mental capacities of a human, they will be able to accept the Gospel as easily as any person. Sapient computers would be equally affected by sin if they have free will and desires, and they would have the same need of a savior. Can you imagine thousands of computers being saved and then spreading the gospel throughout the world? It is an exhilarating thought, even if it is an unlikely prospect.

And what if the project fails? As an ongoing research project, it is unlikely that scientists will ever declare artificial intelligence a failure, but every year that goes by without success is a witness to the glory and awe-inspiring work of God that man is unable to match. As Yale professor Alan Perlis once noted, “A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.” Those in the secular realm may never accept that God has created something that we cannot truly emulate, but perhaps if they work with an open mind, the very act born in rebellion against the idea of an unmatchable God will lead them to truth. f Daniel Douglas ’09 is a computer science major from Massanutten, VA.

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The Cost of Technology John Montague

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hen I was a child, I loved visiting my grandparents at their cabin in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. The dirt road leading to their house was lined with wild blackberry bushes, and my siblings and I used to spend hours outside during the summer months picking blackberries. We would eat them straight off the bushes, or sometimes we would collect enough of them for my mother to make a cobbler. Once, when my aunt was visiting, we even shared the bushes with a black bear. Sadly, those blackberry bushes are now gone, victims of suburbanization and progress.

As it became popular for wealthy families to own second homes outside the suburbs, yuppies gobbled up neighboring tracts of land, building their dream houses and cutting into the virgin wilderness. One of these well-meaning but ignorant city-dwellers decided it would be a good idea to “clean up” and maintain the road, so he weed-whacked all the blackberry bushes—“thorns and weeds”—erasing them from all but childhood memory. And my blackberry bushes have not been the only casualties of this “progress.” The Appalachian Trail, which used to run within a quarter-mile of my grandparents’ cabin, had to be re-routed because the surrounding area had become too developed. Even the night sky has not been untouched. In the name of “safety,” several of my grandparents’ neighbors began to leave their super-bright floodlights on all night, creating light pollution and drowning out the Milky Way. Most Americans view these developments as part of the inevitable march of progress. Of course progress is good, they reason: it has brought us penicillin, electricity, the airplane, and the artificial heart. These same people usually view me with odd curiosity mixed with disdain. I am some sort of agrarian, a reactionary—or even a Luddite. How can I question the value of progress? Surely the world today is a better place than it was in 1900.

I have to ask them: is it really? What does it mean to say that the world is “better” because of technology and progress?

Are people happier? Is wealth more evenly distributed? Is there less cruelty in the world? Are people kinder to each other? Do we treat the environment with more respect? Is the sunset more beautiful? Do two lovers feel a deeper affection for each other?

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Or are none of these things true? Perhaps we simply mean that we have more power over nature, that a few people possess extravagant wealth, that most people live longer, that we can mitigate all kinds of “pain” with drugs, and that we possess untold varieties of entertainment to wile away our meaningless days.

Over the course of the past several hundred years, words like “progress,” “technology,” and “science” have become synonymous with the “good.” These forces seem to have become ends unto themselves, subsuming competing ideas such as ethics or beauty. The Dutch economist Bob Goudzwaard has argued that the 20th Century replaced a faith in God with a faith in progress: Capitalism is subject to critique insofar as, for the sake of progress, it is founded on independent and autonomous forces of economic growth and technology, that is, forces which are considered isolated, sufficient, and good in themselves. These economic and technological forces are indeed related to norms of ethics and social justice, but in such a manner that these norms cannot impede the realization of these forces and the promotion of ‘progress.’ These norms are consciously viewed as dependent upon and secondary to the forces of progress: they are placed in the service of the expansion of technology and the growth of the economy.1 In other words, all competing claims to the good—ethics, justice, fairness, aesthetics—are only considered after the appetite for progress has been sated.

In his 1993 work Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman gives this belief system the title “technopoly.” He writes, “Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists of the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfaction in technology, and takes its orders from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs.”2 This deification of technology is evident today as consumers swarm retail stores to acquire the latest gadgets. Our moral law is tragically Revisions / Spring 2007

simple: what is new is good. One can almost hear the architects of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World whispering in our own ears, “We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches.”3 These words are the creed of our new religion.

The American poet Archibald MacLeish made a similar observation in the late 1960s. Writing in the Saturday Review, he argued, “After Hiroshima it was obvious that the loyalty of science was not to humanity but to truth—its own truth—and that the law of science was not the law of the good … but the law of the possible … what it is possible for technology to do technology will have done.”4 Unfortunately, we cannot lay the blame for Hiroshima—or Chernobyl, or pollution, or any of the other technological disasters of the last hundred years—at the feet of the impersonal force of technology. Instead, we must admit that we are the guilty party, we who—like Persephone—have not recognized the mortal cost of enjoying the treats that are laid before us. We have not asked the essential question: “What is the cost?”

Of course, there have been many critics of these forces of progress, including a number of Christians who have recognized that their faith demands more than an unthinking assimilation of the latest technology. One such critic is Wendell Berry, an essayist, novelist, and poet who not only critiques industrialism with his words but also with his life: in addition to writing, Berry practices sustainability while farming his own land, and he refuses to purchase a computer, publicly declaring in Harper’s magazine that the old-fashioned method of writing is superior to the new.5 Like Goudzwaard and Postman, Berry sees society’s infatuation with progress as a kind of religious devotion. Writing in response to the September 11 attacks, he observed, “The ‘developed’ nations had given the ‘free market’ the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds.

They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.”6 Berry recognizes the insidious nature of the lie that excuses what is objectively bad—the destruction of our environment—as a necessary byproduct of something—technology—whose value is only questionable. As Berry emphasizes, it is our duty as stewards of God’s creation to question society’s valuation and use of technology.

J.R.R. Tolkien was another Christian writer who possessed a deep suspicion of technology. Tolkien owned a car, but he foreswore its use after witnessing how the city of Oxford was redesigned in order to accommodate vehicle traffic. He stated in a 1966 interview that modern machines had destroyed “certain things that were good, were beautiful, were more nourishing to the human person.”7 Tolkien’s distrust of technology is manifest in his most famous work, The Lord of the Rings.

Most notably, the temptation of technology is witnessed in the parable of the rings. The kings who held the nine rings given to mortal men possessed more pride than wisdom and thus became ensnared by the power conferred by the rings, little realizing the awful cost of this power. As Gandalf explains to Frodo, a mortal who possesses one of these rings “does not die but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness … sooner or later the dark power will devour him.”8 Though the rings promise ostensible Revisions / Spring 2007

good—power and eternal life—there are fates worse than death, and Tolkien was acutely aware of this fact.

Tolkien’s famous tale is at root a story about giving up power. Those who seek to possess the One Ring, even if their purposes are good, are ultimately destroyed by its enticing power.

But Tolkien also realized that surrendering such a power would have a cost: the three Elven rings, which had sustained Elven beauty and life in Middle Earth, would pass away forever with the destruction of the One Ring. Yet, Tolkien and the Elves were willing to sacrifice for the sake of Middle Earth. There must be a limit to what we will pursue and what we will hold onto; we should take heed from the Dwarves who “delved too greedily and too deep” under the mountains of Moria, releasing an evil power so great that even the Orcs fled from it.9 Today we face the same danger as we delve deeper into the realms of genetic engineering and as we pioneer new technologies that promise us all the wealth of mithril that the Dwarves so eagerly sought. Sure, it seems that technology offers us “good”: a long life, stimulating entertainment, freedom from pain and suffering, and anything else we can dream. For Americans at the dawn of the 21st century, the promise of technology seems limitless, but is it really? And is it worth the cost?

What is worth more to us: Comfort or freedom? Happiness or goodness? Efficiency or beauty? In the end, technology gives us a choice: we can stand with the architects of Babel or we can stand with John the Savage, defiantly declaring our right to suffer for the sake of something greater: “But I don’t want comfort.

I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness.”10 The choices are not always so stark, but we must be prepared to sacrifice, and we must realize that we cannot have it all. In the words of the Joni Mitchell song, “Hey farmer, farmer / Put away that DDT now / Give me spots on my apples / But leave me the birds and the bees.” I choose John the Savage, thank you very much. f John Montague is on staff with Manna Christian Fellowship. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 2003 with a degree in economics and philosophy, and he currently works for an industrial supply company in the Princeton area.

Bob Goudzwaard, Capitalism and Progress: A Diagnosis of Western Society (1979; reprint, Kent, Great Britain: Paternoster Press, 1997), 66.

2 Quoted in Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), 87.

3 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper & Row, 1932), 49.

4 Quoted in Robert Inchausti, Subversive Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005), 129.

5 Reprinted in Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (New York: North Point Press, 1990), 170-7.

6 Wendell Berry, “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear,” OrionOnline.org (2001), http://www.orionmagazine.org/pages/oo/sidebars/America/ Berry.html.

7 Bradley J. Birzer, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), 110, 126.

8 J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954; reprint, New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995), 56.

9 Ibid., 330.

10 Huxley, Brave New World, 246.

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Greenbacks and Grace Becker Polverini

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s I entered the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, I came to the conclusion that ripping off my clothes and screaming, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God!” would probably be an ineffective method to reveal a Gospel truth. Forced to attend a fundraiser for the Joffrey Ballet in downtown Los Angeles this past March, I found myself among some of the wealthiest citizens of the great state of California: Dennis Tito, that guy who paid 20 million dollars to go into space, Michael Milkin, the “Junk Bond King” who was sent to federal prison and fined $900 million dollars for an SEC violation, and a whole slew of other Angelinos who showed up in support of the arts. At the time, I wondered if they realized that it is the meek—not those with McMansions and Bentleys— who inherit the earth. Sinfully, my ivory tower was far too high for me to notice the magnitude of my pride, but the concept of “Christian wealth” began to roll around in my spiritually inexperienced mind.

The Greek poet Hesiod once said: “Wealth should not be seized, but the God-given is much better.” If a non-Christian managed to figure it out, then to what extent must Christians abandon the quest for wealth and seek after the Kingdom of Heaven? My own journey evolved into a bipolar study of two strange opposites: the simple life gospel and the prosperity gospel. When I first became a believer, I read the book The Irresistible Revolution: Living As an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne, a self-proclaimed, “hellfire and damnation preacher, writer, and circus performer” who claimed that the way of life of the early church is meant for Christians today. While his theology might be considered a bit controversial, he asks a question that seems crucial to me: is it okay for a Christian to have more money than he or she needs to survive? In order to prevent giving the issue short shrift in favor of my bias toward the liberal, I decided to research the opposite perspective: the prosperity gospel. Advocated by preachers like Jay Snell, Creflo Dollar (my personal favorite, he has a private jet), and Kenneth Hagin, prosperity Revisions / Spring 2007

gospel takes 3 John 1:2 to mean material prosperity in conjunction with spiritual prosperity: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.” Modern preachers like Joel Osteen, who has a home valued at $1,265,500, have taken the concept and have run with it. His church motto is, “Discover the champion in you.”

Both perspectives, one bordering on poverty and the other bordering on using Christ as a means to accrue wealth, seem equally extreme and flawed. Nonetheless, I think Claiborne is right. While attaining wealth is no sin, and while money itself is not inherently sinful, Christians should be careful not to keep chunks of wealth back from God: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). As to the extent with which Christians are to give back to the faith, I see no reason why it should not approximate “live simply so others can simply live.” Many argue that the early church included the wealthy into the Body of Christ, and those same wealthy people are noted for either giving everything they had, like Zacchaeus, or failing to give everything, like the young man who asked Christ what he needed to do to inherit eternal life (Matthew 19:16-23). The paradigm that Christ gives us is particularly convicting, as is most of his teaching: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21). While it is cliché in a place like Princeton to say, “God gave us all different talents,” if someone has a talent for amassing great wealth, and they feel God is calling them toward that path, then they must pursue that course of action with total fervor. Yet, in the end, when the check comes in and tithing even 10% seems out of reach, just remember how much the poor widow pleased Christ in Mark 12:41-44, for she gave away all that she had (2 copper coins) to the temple treasury.

As I look back at my time at the fundraiser, it is obvious that the majority of my self-righteous criticism was founded upon feelings of superiority. This foolish approach does not need to fall on all believers! Give out of compassion for the impoverished, the hungry, the meek, and not out of superiority over the wealthy. Give until it hurts, however much “hurts” implies. After all, it did not matter that the poor widow only gave two cents.

What mattered was that she gave everything out of love. f Becker Polverini ‘10 is from Huntington Beach, California.

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Flesh or Spirit?

J.D. Walters Worrying that correlating religious experience with brain structures means such experience is not “genuine” or that religion is “all in the head” reveals a misunderstanding of how knowledge is mediated by the brain in the first place.

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EUROSCIENCE IS CERTAINLY ONE OF THE fastest growing and promising fields of scientific research of our time. Along with excitement at the prospects of new insights and understanding, however, there has also been a keen sense of anxiety over what this new knowledge might mean for our self-understanding. One of the most consistent trends in modern neuroscience has been the tightening of the link between various aspects of our mental life and the function of the brain.1 Recently even religious experience (which might include mystical encounters with God, visions and religiously significant dreams, etc.) has begun to be studied, with the prospect of localizing religious experience in certain parts of the brain becoming more and more plausible.2 This prospect has led some scientists to argue that Feuerbach and Freud were right: God and religious experience really are just “projections” or “constructs” of the brain, without any objective referent. Believers also fear that science will show belief in and experience of God to be illusory. I shall argue, however, that such worries stem from an inadequate understanding of how human beings come to have knowledge of the world, including the sacred.

There are two aspects of the scientific study of religious experience which seem particularly worrying to many people.

First is the prospect that religious experiences are connected with various pathological or abnormal psychological conditions, such as epilepsy or schizophrenia. This appears to give fodder to militant atheists who argue that religion is unhealthy and should be eradicated. The second and perhaps more significant aspect is the very idea of linking religious experiences to activation in specific areas of the brain. Does this not imply that they are not spiritual experiences at all, but rather result from ordinary electrical or biochemical stimulation of the implicated brain regions? Is religion just “all in the head”?

William James was one of the first psychologists to address both these concerns. In his celebrated Gifford lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, he described a view called “medical materialism,”which threatened to reduce religious experience to the functioning of the brain, and abnormal functioning at that: “Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate.”3 However, he goes on to argue that this view overlooks one very important fact: all of our experience, not just religious experience, is mediated by the brain (and even religious skep-

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tics would admit that some of our subjective experience actually does refer to an external reality). “[T]here is not a single one of our states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are.”4 Given this fact, it would seem that science cannot say whether a saint having a mystical experience is truly perceiving God or not.

Many neuroscientists agree with this dictum: “The external reality of religious percepts is neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by establishing brain correlates of religious experience.”5 Some skeptics argue, however, that this claim is too simplistic, especially when one takes into account the possible connection between religious experience and abnormal psychology.

Massimo Pigliucci insists that “if we realize that mystical experiences originate from the same neurological mechanisms that underlie hallucinations from sensorial deprivation and drug-induced visions, I bet dollar to donut that the reality experienced by meditating Buddhists and praying nuns is entirely contained in their mind and is not a glimpse of a “higher” realm, as tantalizing as that idea may be.”6 He argues that of the two competing explanations for the origin of religious experience (God or a “higher” reality vs. hallucinations generated by the brain), the hallucination theory is more parsimonious and does not require postulating an extra entity, i.e. God, to account for these experiences. If religious experiences are often associated with hallucinations caused by various brain malfunctions, is it not safer to assume that all religious experiences are hallucinations?7 There are two factors which count against this interpretation.

First of all, the link between religious experience and abnormal psychology has been greatly exaggerated. To be sure, there is some evidence which links increased religious awareness and experience with temporal lobe epilepsy,8 as well as with other neurological syndromes, but there also seem to be significant differences between religious and abnormal experience.9 In any case, there is no consensus that anything that is part of “normal” experience is good, whereas any “abnormal” or uncommon experience is bad or false. As neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran points out, “On what basis does one decide whether a mystical experience is normal or abnormal? There is a common tendency to equate ‘unusual’ or ‘rare’ with abnormal, but this is a logical fallacy. Genius is a rare but highly valued trait, whereas tooth decay is common but obviously undesirable...Why is the revealed truth of such transcendent experiences in any way ‘inferior’ to the more mundane truths that we scientists dabble in?”10 Revisions / Spring 2007

Secondly, it is probably a mistake to speak of God and neurology as competing causes given the Christian doctrine of Creation. As Fraser Watts points out, “The physical brain is part of God’s creation. Like everything else in creation, it would be seen, theologically, as existing within the life of God and being dependent on God. When God seeks to reveal [Himself] to people, it would be bizarre to suppose that God would wish, or need, to bypass this aspect of creation in order to do so.”11 Many people seem to think that in order for religious experience to be genuine, there must be no “scientific” explanation for it, or that it should not be associated with any material, physical changes.

But that would be like insisting that writing, in order for it to convey genuine information, could not be committed to paper.

Christians should not find it surprising that God would convey knowledge of Himself through the physical mechanisms which He has created.

Worrying that correlating religious experience with brain structures means such experience is not “genuine” or that religion is “all in the head” reveals a misunderstanding of how knowledge is mediated by the brain in the first place. As William James noted, all of our experience is mediated, or “constructed,” by the brain, in the sense that the brain fashions representations of the external world which it uses to coordinate behavior. This does not mean, however, that we can have no real knowledge of the world. Many of our constructions are constrained by feedback from the environment, and so they reliably track changes in the “real” world.12 So the real question regarding the veridicality of religious experience is not whether it is mediated or constructed by the brain; rather, it is about whether this experience is constrained by feedback from an external reality, or whether it is simply the result of the malfunctioning of the brain.

This second question is not at all easy to address from a purely “neutral” standpoint. Religious communities develop criteria for evaluating whether a religious experience is genuine or not, such as (in the case of Christian communities) whether the experience results in a manifestation of the fruits of the Spirit, whether any cognitive content is in line with previous revelation, etc.

But such criteria are internal to these communities and cannot easily be extended to count as a perfectly “objective” measure of the validity of religious experience. Even so, there are many religious experiences which do indeed suggest a supernatural origin and can be used as evidence for the existence of a spiritual realm.13 It seems, therefore, that theology and science can offer complementary explanations for religious experience. The upshot of the scientific study of such experiences, however, is that Christians need to learn to take our essentially embodied nature much more seriously. Some theologians go so far as to argue that we are completely physical beings, not a union of body and soul as has been commonly held throughout history.14 Such claims are certainly quite controversial, but at the very least we should learn to appreciate just how much of our experience is tied up with brain and bodily processes. This does not imply a demeaning of our status as image-bearers of God. To the contrary, it is a reaffirmation of the essential materiality of the Christian worldview. Philosopher Kevin Corcoran notes that “The Chris-

Revisions / Spring 2007

tian story, from the beginning of the narrative in Genesis to its dramatic climax in Revelation, is an ‘earthy’ story, a story that celebrates materiality, laments its perversion by human sin, and eagerly awaits its ultimate glorification in the resurrection.”15 In closing, it is also worth noting that such a view is more in line with religious experience as it actually occurs. The conclusion of Fraser Watts seems a fitting endpoint for my own discussion: “[T]he traditional religious understanding [is] that the everyday world is one that God created, in which he has incarnated, and in which he can be discerned by those ready to do so.”16 Modern science in no way threatens to undermine our genuine perception of the divine. f J.D. Walters ‘09 is currently majoring in religion and pursuing a certificate in neuroscience. He is very interested in the dialogue between theology and science, especially with respect to human nature.

Malcolm Jeeves, Human Nature at the Millennium (Grand Rapids: Baker Books), 49.

2 Mario Beauregard and Vincent Paquette, “Neural correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns,” Neuroscience Letters 405 (2006), 186-90.

3 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor, 1958), 29.

4 Ibid., 29-30 5 Jeffrey L. Saver and John Rabin, “The Neural Substrates of Religious Experience,” Journal of Neuropsychiatry 9:3 (1997), 498; cf.

Andrew B. Newberg and Bruce Y. Lee, “The Neuroscientific Study of Religious and Spiritual Phenomena: or why God doesn’t use biostatistics,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 40:2 (2005), 479.

6 Massimo Pigliucci, “Neurotheology, a rather skeptical perspective” in Rhawn Joseph (ed.), NeuroTheology: brain, science, spirituality and religious experience (San Jose: University Press, 2003), 270.

7 Ibid., 270-271.

8 Saver and Rabin 1997, 499-504.

9 Ibid., 505-6.

10 V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakesee, Phantoms in the Brain: probing the mysteries of the human mind (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1998), 184-5.

11 Fraser Watts, “Cognitive Neuroscience and Religious Consciousness” in Robert John Russell et al. (eds.), Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific perspectives on divine action (Berkeley: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1999), 330.

12 Michael Arbib and Mary Hesse, The Construction of Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2-3.

13 For an argument that religious experience constitutes evidence for the existence of a supernatural world, see Philip H. Wiebe, “Religious Experience, Cognitive Science, and the Future of Religion” in Philip Clayton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 503-22.

14 Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

15 Kevin Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006), 14 16 Fraser Watts and Mark Williams, The psychology of religious knowing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 151.

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Lessons from St. Augustine Gregory Lee Jesus’ promise naturally extends beyond the twelve disciples to the church at large, giving us prima facie reason to consider seriously how earlier generations of Christians experienced God.

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f anything can be considered characteristic of the wildly diverse sociological phenomenon labeled “evangelicalism,” it is commitment, in theory, to the Bible as the final authoritative norm for all life and thought. This is not to suggest that other Christian traditions disregard the Bible’s authority or that evangelicals actually follow the Bible as they ought.

Nevertheless, it is typically within evangelical circles that churchgoers seek a “Biblical view” on finances, marriage, politics, and a host of other issues; that people physically open the pages of the Bible to seek answers to questions; that arguments can be decided with one line: “The Bible says so.”

In principle, there is much to praise in this constant reference to the Bible.

The classic Christian tradition has always confessed the authority of Scripture in one form or another. But evangelicals are particular amongst other Christian traditions in the way they jump straight from the words of the Bible to contemporary application. This move goes hand in hand with a neglect of the riches of the Christian tradition and its potential for illuminating our understanding of the meaning of Scripture.

Picture the typical Bible study on, say, rest. We begin by looking at Genesis 1-2 where God creates the universe in six days, and rests on the seventh. This becomes the basis for the commandment in Exodus 20 to refrain from work on the Sabbath. We then turn to Matthew 11, where Jesus invites the weary and heavy-laden to come to him for rest. Finally, we conclude with Hebrews 3-4, which teaches that the rest prefigured in the Sabbath is ultimately found in Christ. Now begins an open discussion about rest, both with regard to physical work and in terms of its spiritual meaning. The conversation will wander from the feasibility of taking 24 hours off in the midst of a busy schedule, to the struggle to give up ambition for ultimate contentment in God. Participants will talk through what finding peace in God looks like. Is it a feeling? Is it a deeper strength in the midst of struggle? How long does it last, and can we ever

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lose it?

Notice the jump from Bible to contemporary application, and the complete absence of appeal to the Christian tradition. From a redemptive-historical perspective, this is an important lacuna, for it betrays a basic lack of attention to the Holy Spirit’s continued work in the Church since the time of Christ.

The Holy Spirit has often been the forgotten person of the Trinity, but there is a sense in which the Spirit is the most relevant person of the Trinity to Christians today. While Jesus Christ occupies a central place in redemptive history through his death and resurrection, the salvation he won is only mediated to us through the Spirit, who completes and perfects the work of Christ.

It is the Spirit who unites us with Christ in his death and resurrection, the Spirit who sanctifies us through this union with Christ, the Spirit who acts as the deposit guaranteeing our inheritance to come.

In his final words before his death,1 Jesus comforted his disciples about his impending departure with the promise of the Spirit, who would guide them in all truth. Jesus’ promise naturally extends beyond the twelve disciples to the Church at large, giving us prima facie reason to consider seriously how earlier generations of Christians experienced God. The saints of old are witnesses to the Spirit’s work across different times and cultures, and their lives enrich our understanding of Scripture.

The riches of Scripture cannot fully be grasped by any one way of life or theological system; instantiation gives texture and concretion to what Scripture means. Christians acknowledge these truths in part when they confess the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints …”

How might this idea enhance our Bible study above? For the theme of rest, we turn to the 4th-century African bishop, St. Augustine, perhaps the most influential figure in the history of Western Christianity, and one of the few figures Roman Catholics and Protestants can agree to respect. Augustine is most faRevisions / Spring 2007

mous for his autobiography Confessions, a literary masterpiece of thanksgiving and praise to God. Its opening paragraph contains the summary of Augustine’s story: “You have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”2 The remainder of Confessions fills out the meaning of the word “rest.”

Augustine was born of a devout Christian mother, Monica, and a relatively unreligious father, in a small town in northern Africa called Thagaste (modern-day Algeria). Augustine was a bright albeit lazy student, but success in his studies would eventually take him to the more cosmopolitan city of Carthage, and ultimately to the cultural centers of Rome and Milan. Augustine went to Carthage in the height of his teens, and the allures of the city were too much to resist. There he indulged himself in philandering and the violent spectacles of pagan theater, much to the chagrin of his ever praying mother.

Eventually, guilt caught up with Augustine and he found himself drawn to Manicheanism, a dualistic religion that conceived of the world as a cosmic battle between a good creator and an evil destroyer, thus providing an account for why humans could not resist sin. This was a convenient story, and Augustine pursued Manicheanism for about a decade before his intellectual qualms with the philosophical system forced him to make a public break with it.

It would require much time yet before Augustine would positively embrace Christianity, and this he did only with much struggle. One important part of the process was meeting Ambrose, bishop of Milan, whose powerful mind softened Augustine to the possibility that Christianity might be a viable intellectual system. Another key moment came in a garden in Milan, when Augustine wrestled with the idea of giving himself to celibacy. Formerly Augustine had prayed, “Grant me chastity and self-control, but please not yet.”3 This day, though, he felt unavoidable pressure toward sexual renunciation, and an even deeper sense of weakness to commit to it. Suddenly, he heard a child playing a game shout, “Pick it up and read! Pick it up and read!” On a whim, Augustine flipped his Bible open and read the first line that came to him: “Not in dissipation and drunkenness, nor in debauchery and lewdness, not in arguing and jealousy; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh or the gratification of your desires.”4 Augustine heard in Paul’s words God’s direct voice, and he gave himself finally to Lady Continence.

This was not the end of Augustine’s journey. He mourned the loss of his mother and he continued to struggle with lustful images and wet dreams. Eventually, Augustine would return to Africa where he made a trip to Hippo, a small rural town toward which he had no previous proclivity. Unexpectedly and against his wishes, he was forced to become Hippo’s bishop. Augustine was used to the more sophisticated lifestyle of Milan and Rome, and the transition was hard for him. He did not consider himself worthy to be a bishop, he tired of adjudicating relational conflicts, and he inherited a burgeoning controversy with a sectarian group called the Donatists. As a bishop, Augustine was not a perfect moral exemplar. He used imperial force against the Donatists, he was always concerned with what others thought of him, and his later writings may betray the rants of a crotchety old man. One wonders if Augustine was ever entirely content Revisions / Spring 2007

in Hippo, and how much his feeling trapped there contributed to the eschatological tone of his writings.

All these struggles would remind Augustine of the story of his conversion. Augustine was too intellectually virile, too lusty and passionate, to sit still for very long. But he constantly found himself drawn back to – indeed, captivated by – the love of God. Augustine’s emphasis on the love of God would find expression in his writings on politics, ethics, and the interpretation of Scripture, 5 effectively making his corpus a massive apologetic for the centrality of love in the Christian life. His understanding of predestination, grace, and free will would leave a permanent imprint on Western Christianity. And his vision of the final end as complete union with God still stirs the imaginations of Christians today. As he approached his 80’s, Augustine understood only more deeply the words he had penned some 30 years before: “You have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”

How do we learn what it means to find rest in God? We start with the Bible, and then we move through a story. In Augustine, we see that rest need not mean semi-monastic dissociation from the world and any form of ambition. And it certainly does not mean a perfectly peaceful existence, free from temptation and earthly struggle. Rest is a lifelong pilgrimage, one in which we learn only gradually and painfully that earthly things do not satisfy. Yet this journey also teaches us to trust, and to discover afresh the God who ever draws us back by the glory of the grace of Christ.

Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you, and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong, I, misshapen. You were with me, but I was not with you. They held me back far from you, those things which would have no being were they not in you. You called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness; you lavished your fragrance, I gasped, and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace.6 f Gregory Lee ‘00 is currently a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Religion at Duke University, Program of Christian Theology and Ethics. He received his M.Div. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

John 16:5-16.

Confessions I, 1, 1. My preferred translation is that of Maria Boulding (New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1998). All subsequent quotes come from this version.

3 Confessions VIII, 7, 17.

4 Confessions VIII, 12, 29, from Rom. 13:13-14.

5 Cf. Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003); On the Morals of the Catholic Church, trans. Richard Stothert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol.

I.4 (United States: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887; reprint, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996); On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson Jr., Library of Liberal Arts (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958), respectively.

6 Confessions X, 27, 38.

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The Future Generation Gap Felix Huang Recognizing the richness of diversity in the Christian body would help us all to incorporate elements of Christianity we may be neglecting in our own Christian worldview.

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oday’s child has more than likely already been pried out of the family long before adolescence by the grasping tentacles of the pop culture,” says clinical psychologist Ron Taffel. In today’s age of increasing reliance on technology, parents often bemoan their loss of influence, reacting with skepticism and distrust. My own mother always frowned when she saw me sitting at the computer even if I was working on a paper for school. And technology can be scary—it empowers a new generation which may not be responsible enough to handle its threats: online sexual predators and addiction to violent games, pornography, and virtual reality worlds.

The question that confronts our generation is how we will teach our own children. Should we seek to shield them from the potential “moral decadence” of new technologies, preventing our children from using them, or should we work with technology, hoping that our children will be able to discern these risks? The Amish, an Anabaptist Christian group, eschew education and technology, seeing them as “worldly.” As a result, few Amish even attend high school,1 validating their practices with such passages as 1 Corinthians 3:19-20, which says that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” There is much wisdom in 1 Corinthians 3:19-20, for technology has led to detrimental effects such as global warming, pollution, and an unprecedented potential for global destruction. But most Christians accept that these risks, while very real, are necessary. Princeton professor R. Marie Griffith notes that evangelical Christians have thoroughly embraced technology “to advance the evangelical movement, from heavy metal music and science fiction films to chastity media and best-selling videos.”2 Heather Henderson observes that “examination of evangelical media reveals the complex ways that today’s evangelicals are both in and of the world…evangelicals have not simply ‘sold out’ or been ‘secularized.’ Rather evangelicals have used media to simultaneously struggle against, engage with, and acquiesce to the secular world.”3 While some (such as the Amish) criticize modern evangelical culture as having violated the Christian principle of being “in the world, but not of the world” (derived from John 17:14-15), they remain a minority voice. Evangelical culture’s embrace of technology and secular media shows that that the being “in the world, but not of the world” entails a response far more complex than a blanket rejection of secular culture.

Just as parents should not be afraid of the risks of allowing children to use technology, Christians should not be afraid of taking the risk of using “the world” to think about their own theology. This tension has surfaced at Patrick Henry College

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(PHC), a college designed to be an evangelical Ivy League institution where nearly a third of the college’s full time faculty resigned last year. Former PHC professors Kevin Culberson and David Noe, ordained elders in the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) and Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), respectively, wrote an article stating that “a common misconception among American evangelicals and one that cannot be supported by the Scriptures themselves, is that the Bible is the only source of truth…This misconception amounts to a blasphemous denial of Christ’s words in Matthew 5 that ‘he sends rain on the just and the unjust.” In addition, they wrote that “a Christian must refuse to view special and general revelation as hostile to one another. Nor should he hesitate to learn from a pagan.” This article prompted a hostile response from PHC leadership, who questioned the professors’ fidelity to scriptures and claimed the piece “diminishes the import of Scripture.” PHC president and founder Michael Farris accused Noe and Culberson of being “less than Christian” and arrogantly stated that “if somebody wants to quit because they believe we have too strong of a view of the Bible, then so be it. I believe God’s going to bless us for standing up for his Word.”4 Not surprisingly, Farris’s accusations and lack of humility prompted an exodus of faculty from the college despite Farris’s later apologies. Farris’s belief that he was standing up for Scripture is certainly admirable, but his rather narrow belief that his interpretation was the only correct interpretation was not. 1 Corinthians 2:11 points out that “no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God,” which reminds us to not narrowly insist on a particular interpretation of Scripture.

“Too often too many conservative Christians assume that God is on their side…As Lincoln put it so eloquently, our responsibility and obligation is to do our very best to be on God’s side rather than assume that God is on our side,” says President of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Commission and Princeton alumnus Richard Land ’69.5 Christians on both sides of the political divide have reflected on the need for humility.

Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary, notes that “when we so-called liberals hang out together…we are pretty sure that we are advanced and others outmoded …in my experience, we are less likely to slide over into snobbishness when ‘they’—those we have defined as inferior—are in the room, some of them thinking as clearly and maturely as some of us.”6 The definition of unorthodox simply is “independent in behavior and thought,”7 but unfortunately in the Christian context, accusations of unorthodoxy are synonymous with accusations of Revisions / Spring 2007

heresy. “Heresy trials” have even been threatened against liberals such as Molly Marshall, a pro-woman theology professor supporting women’s ordination at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary forced to resign in 1995 despite her affirmation of the seminary’s twenty point “Abstract of Principles.”

This humility regarding diversity of opinion is necessary in our Christian community, especially when considering the behavior of Christ in his own time. Christ was a wholly “unorthodox” figure in his whole time—he opposed the traditions of the elders, was rude to respected religious leaders, scolded his own disciples, and subverted religious certainty. Christ was “not a man you want teaching the first-grade Sunday school class,” says Barbara Taylor. He was “terrible at meeting people’s expectations of him...impossible to manage.”8 What would happen in our own religious communities if someone emulated these qualities of Jesus? How would evangelical Christian culture react if Jesus behaved in the same way in our churches? While no one should be unorthodox for the sake of unorthodoxy, we should all revise our negative attitudes towards unorthodoxy in the church.

Evangelical Christians need to be open to the possibility that we can dialogue with the world and even learn from it; perhaps we also need to revise our culture’s tendency to automatically have a negative attitude toward “the world.”

At a recent Princeton conference entitled “Demands of God: Perspective from the Evangelical Movement,” Rev. Richard Cizik, Vice President of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), noted that issues such as global climate change are no longer just a liberal Democrat issue, but simply a logical following of the second greatest commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself” in Matthew 22:39. Dr. Anne Peterson, senior health advisor for World Vision International, has noted the necessity of cooperating with secular liberal humanists to work for social justice. Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter of the Woodrow Wilson School responded by clarifying that many secular liberals are not even of “no faith,” with many having faith in something larger but not necessarily of any specific religious tradition.

Just as Gregory Lee ’00 noted that evangelicals need to admit “that they do not have a monopoly on truth,”9 evangelicals need to similarly admit that we do not have a monopoly on Christianity or understanding of Scripture. While Scripture has not changed over time (other than differences in various translations), our interpretations and understanding of it certainly have as our world has changed. It is scary to admit that our understanding of Christianity depends on our own reason and revelation, and has changed over time. But this is a necessary part of understanding how our own fallen nature has included misinterpretations of Scripture. This also spurs the discussion in the ecumenical Christian movement: recognizing the richness of diversity in the Christian body would help us all to incorporate elements of Christianity we may be neglecting in our own Christian worldview. This dialogue within the Christian body is a necessity—accusations of heresy and unorthodoxy are loaded words that aim to divide, build walls, and shut down dialogue which is “our best human instrument of human intimacy.”10 Are we going to be like the Amish, withdrawing from the world to live in our own evangelical Christian bubble and hiding from the “depravity” of “secular culture”? Or can we engage the world with humility, prepared to learn from different opinions within our own faith and world while ready to share our own beliefs to engage in open dialogue and mutual respect?

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Ministers should empower their congregations to think about the subtleties, context, and interpretations of Scripture on their own, rather than simply accepting what others say about Scripture. In the past, controversy has led to division in the church due to different emphases in our Christian worldviews and understandings of Scripture. But with a sense of humility and mutual respect for our fellow Christians, we can again create a church marked by “diversity, liberty, and love” with “clasped hands…locked arms, and [a standing] together in their reformed relations”, a fulfillment of the reunification of the northern and southern Presbyterian churches in 1869 forty years after a bitter split.6 This dialogue, necessary though difficult, would make us less complacent in our theology. Without it, members of the church would simply be mindless automatons in the mold of their denominations searching for like-minded automatons to worship with. Through a diverse church, God can reveal the Spirit to speak through us and give us what is cited in 1 Corinthians 2:10—“what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.”

Once we can admit our understanding of Christianity has changed over time as we learn about our world, we can overcome our unfortunate sinful fear to label any new theology as “unorthodox” and label and paint caricatures of fellow Christians (or even liberal secular humanists) who disagree with us.

We need to question others and encourage their transformation while listening intently to see if God is calling us to be transformed ourselves. This process is not going to be easy and painless; the easy way out would be to simply associate with those that agree with us and avoid self-examination, but this would only lead to continuous schism within our own Reformed tradition when some want to continue reforming and others do not.

Without this process, our children may grow up in an outdated, increasingly fractured paradigm of Christianity or “Christian worldview” attempting to arrogantly conquer rather than humbly transforming the hearts and minds of those in the world in which we live. f Felix Huang ‘07 is a chemical engineering major from College Station, Texas.

John A. Hostetler, Amish Society (4th ed., The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore), 188.

2 R. Marie Griffith, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture by Heather Hendershot. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/ Chicago/326799.html 3 Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture.

4 Sheryl Henderson Blunt, “Shakeup at Patrick Henry College,” Christianity Today Magazine (15 May 2006).

5 Marvin Olasky, “God & Country,” World Magazine (21 April 2007).

6 Barbara Wheeler, “Why the Liberal Church Needs the Evangelical Church,” Sojourners Magazine (February 2004). http://www.sojo.net/index. cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0402&article=040210b 7 Wordnet 2.1, Princeton University. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/unorthodox 8 Barbara Brown Taylor, “Something About Jesus,” The Christian Century, (April 3 2007) http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=3126.

9 Gregory Lee, “Evangelicals And Their Enemies,” Revisions: A Journal of Christian Perspective (Fall 2006).

10 Janet Edgette, Candor, Connection, and Enterprise in Adolescent Therapy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002).

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The Role of Faith in Epistemology Joung Park As finite beings, we are limited in our ability to explore questions of truth and reality, and anything that we can know about our world comes through faith and not merely through rational enquiry alone.

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he chief complaint that many intellectuals hold against Christianity is its reliance on faith over evidence, and revelation over reason. For these skeptics, Christianity’s reliance on faith represents, at best, irresponsible belief, and at worst, circular reasoning. Instead of relying on faith, the skeptics advocate the acquisition of knowledge strictly on the basis of rational inquiry, eschewing all forms of faith or revelation. However, such an endeavor is doomed from the start because almost every form of knowledge or belief, even in such “rational” domains such as science and mathematics, essentially relies on faith.1 Ultimately, there is very little difference between the Christian’s aspirations for knowledge and the epistemological methods of the rational, the skeptical, and the scientific camps.

The Problem of Induction As any high school student will know, one of the greatest contributions in the history of science has been the scientific method, a method of validating a hypothesis by determining whether it fits the observed data. Because the scientific method relies on our five senses, it provides empirical knowledge (knowledge derived from our sensory experience). It is through this empirical scientific method that we have acquired the vast majority of our knowledge about the world around us. The problem with the scientific method, however, is that fitting theory to data is an imperfect process that relies on the very same type of faith rationalists claim to abhor.

One such flaw is the infamous problem of induction. As philosopher David Hume notes, “[A]ll our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. To endeavor, therefore, the proof of this last supposition by probable arguments…must be evidently going in a circle, and taking that for granted which is the very point in question.“2 For example, we observe that dropped objects fall to the earth according to the laws of gravity. However, just because the law of gravity held in the past does not logically imply that it will hold in the future. There is no permissible logical step that we can take from our past observations to our predictions about the future. And if we do generalize in this way, then we would be making an assumption that is not supported by our observations — the assumption that the universe remains uniform over time. In effect, we would be making a leap of faith.

To see why generalizing from past observations is an exercise in faith, consider the following scenario suggested by phi-

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losopher Bertrand Russell. It is Thanksgiving morning, and the farmer has always fed the turkey in the past up until now. From its past experience, the turkey forms the belief on that morning that the farmer will feed it once again. Of course, the turkey’s belief is invalidated when the farmer instead butchers it for Thanksgiving dinner.

As Russell’s example demonstrates, we cannot logically deduce any belief about the future from our past observations.

Such a belief about the future necessarily must invoke faith in the uniformity of nature over time. The problem of induction applies not only to scientific theories, but to any case of generalized empirical knowledge, since we can only generalize from a finite number of empirical observations, and are restricted in our observations to past and present (and not future) events.

But if the specter of induction looms over all of our generalized knowledge, then we cannot claim that we can understand our world through rational means alone. Of course, we can observe what happened in the past within the limited scope of our senses. However, from this narrow set of empirical observations alone, we cannot arrive at general theories that will allow us to make predictions about the future and form satisfactory explanations. We must also rely on faith in the uniformity of nature. Indeed, without generalizing through faith, we cannot gain a coherent, complete account of the universe, being left with only a patchwork of isolated observations that is of little use to anyone.

The Problem of Under-determination We saw in the previous section that because of the problem of induction, we cannot gain any useful knowledge about our world without relying on faith. But as if the challenges posed by the problem of induction were not enough, proponents of rationalism must also confront the problem of under-determination.

The idea behind under-determination is that our experiences not only cannot justify generalized theories and beliefs (due to induction), but also cannot justify us forming specific beliefs about the experience itself. The reason for this is that a single empirical observation by itself can support or justify an infinite number of explanations and beliefs.

To see why this is the case, let us suppose that your senses detect a squirrel moving ahead of you. You can see the squirrel scampering around, and you can hear its body rustling through the grass. However, from this single observation, you cannot reach the conclusion that the there is actually a squirrel in front of you. This is because you can also conclude, from this very Revisions / Spring 2007

same observation, a host of alternate beliefs. You can believe, for example, that you are hallucinating that a squirrel is there, or that an optical illusion is playing havoc with your senses, or that the “squirrel” is actually a cleverly designed robot, and so on.

To justify the belief that the object ahead of you is indeed a squirrel, you must rely not only on your sense-perceptions, but must also invoke an infinitely long conjunction of various background beliefs, such as the belief that you are not daydreaming, the belief that light at that particular moment is observing the laws of optics, and so on. In fact, you need to rely on a large chunk of all your existing beliefs, in addition to your experience itself, to justify your belief that there is in fact a squirrel moving up ahead.

As philosopher W.V. Quine explains the situation, “Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.”3 According to Quine, because even our most basic beliefs about our world essentially rely on so many other background beliefs, therefore, every one of our beliefs are justified by every other belief that we hold. However, Quine’s model then begs the question: how can any of our beliefs be justified? Under Quine’s model, if belief A is justified by the conjunction of experience A0 and the set of background beliefs {B, C, D}, then in turn, background beliefs B, C, and D must each rely on belief A for justification. However, the problem here is that belief A was originally justified by the set of background beliefs {B, C, D}!

So, in effect, both belief A and background beliefs B, C, and D are ultimately self-justified. This seems to be a blatant instance of viciously circular reasoning.

Because we cannot justify our background beliefs without resorting to circular reasoning, the only thing we can do is to take them to be true on faith. In response, rationalists may object that our background beliefs are instead justified for pragmatic reasons: they allow us to build a coherent and functional system of beliefs about the external world. After all, the rationalist will point out, trusting our senses and building a system of beliefs based on our empirical observations have allowed us to escape danger and obtain our goals in our daily lives. The problem with such a response is that just because our background beliefs seem reasonable and pragmatic does not imply that they are in fact true, nor deny the fact that they are mere assumptions.

To illustrate this principle, imagine if you had a modified checkerboard that had black squares where the white squares are supposed to be, and vice versa. You could still play a perfectly normal game of checkers on this swapped checker board, and be able to predict the colors of the adjacent squares if you covered them up. In effect, the modified checkerboard would be functionally identical to a normal one. However, just because this checkerboard is perfectly coherent and functional does not

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change the fact that it is flawed. Furthermore, one could not notice this error just by observing the defective checkerboard.

To know the truth, one must first gain access to a correct checkerboard.

Similarly, one cannot be certain that any of his beliefs about the external world is absolutely correct because we are in the same situation as the person playing checkers on the flawed board. To know for certain whether or not our beliefs are correct or not, we must first gain direct access to reality. However, this is not possible for us because we can only observe reality as filtered through our senses, and then choose which one belief, out of an infinite number of alternative ones, we feel best fits our empirical data. By doing so, we will always be forced to make background assumptions about our sensory capabilities that may or may not be correct. And because we derive our beliefs about the external world not only from experience but also from our background assumptions, our beliefs can only be true to the extent that our assumptions are true.

Because of the problem of induction, we cannot make generalizations about the world except through faith. In addition, the problem of under-determination implies that even the specific, everyday beliefs that we take for granted about the external world — such as the belief that it is raining, or the belief that there is a car in front of me — also must rely partly on faith. As humans, we overestimate our capacity to know about our surroundings, failing to acknowledge that the basis of our knowledge about the world rests on faith. As finite beings, we are limited in our ability to explore questions of truth and reality, and anything that we can know about our world comes through faith and not merely through rational enquiry alone. Reliance on faith, then, is not the mark of a closed and irrational mind; rather it is a necessary condition encompassing all of human epistemology. The words of Scripture could not be more accurate, “We live by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7, NIV). f Joung Park ‘08 is a philosophy major from Dallas, TX. Conversely, every belief, including the Christian faith, relies at least partly on evidence. In my last article for Revisions (Fall 2006 issue), I argued that evidence is a necessary component for every belief, even if it might not be sufficient by itself to cause the corresponding belief.

This article is available at revisionsjournal.com 2 David Hume. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 2nd ed., edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), Section IV, Part II, pp. 35-6.

3 W.V. Quine. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In A.P. Martinich ed., Philosophy of Language. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) pg.57.

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Ethics Upended: Reviewing Blue Like Jazz Brian Brown Personal fulfillment is important to Miller, as indeed is it to most of us. But it is not the goal of life. Miller may be all about feelings, but the Gospel is not about feelings, nor is worship, nor indeed is love. It is about the Truth.

D

onald is searching. His life is empty, and he knows it. He is trying desperately to find something more. He has a lot of atheist friends who tell him there is nothing more to life, but he cannot accept that. He knows a few Christians who tell him there is more to life, but he is repulsed by their absolutism, their laws, and their self-assurance in thinking their religion holds all the answers. They think they have a monopoly on truth, and Donald is not looking for truth.

Truth is facts, principles, legalism—Donald does not want truth; he wants fulfillment. More than anything else, he wants to feel loved, to feel comfortable, to feel happy. Slowly, reluctantly, he comes to believe that there is a God, and that this God loves him, and he converts to Christianity. But he cannot accept all the baggage that comes with it—he doesn’t seek a religious system, or a mandatory change of his worldview, but rather an experience—and so he sets out to find fulfillment outside the bounds of traditional religion. He still calls himself a Christian, but his search for fulfillment rather than truth leads him to adopt attitudes, beliefs and principles that better fit a secular postmodernist. Yet he holds to them so tightly that he even writes a convoluted book attempting to describe his experience, hoping that others will follow his approach. The book sells. And perhaps this is a good thing because the book, Blue Like Jazz, provides a window into an all-too-common occurrence in the modern church—the shaping of a life in which God and the Bible are based on one’s feelings, beliefs and lifestyle choices instead of the other way around.

Starting at Square Two Donald Miller does not directly base any of his central ideas on the Scriptures. In fact, “love your neighbor as yourself” is the only verse he quotes in his entire book. Even then, he reads it backwards from its contextual use, using it as a self-esteem booster, an excuse to like himself as much as he likes other people.1 This usage of God’s Word is consistent with his approach throughout Blue Like Jazz, as Miller tries to cultivate an understanding of the world that makes him feel good about it—while he does mention that he loves the Bible, it is only used in his book insofar as it supports his ideas, and he is unhappy when the more inconvenient parts intrude on his life. For example, he does not like the Bible in politics, except when it leads to his liberal friends promoting causes he likes (such as the fight against poverty) because of their Christian beliefs, an attitude C.S. Lewis distrusted enough to cast the devil as its advocate in The Screwtape Letters.2 Miller’s wariness towards accepting the full extent of the Bible is matched only by his uncritical willingness to accept any negative assumption secular culture has about

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Christianity.

This uninhibiting view of secular culture, along with his desire for fulfillment, leads him to prefer non-Christian friends over Christian ones because non-Christians make him feel better about himself. He writes that he feels more comfortable among his hippie friends and students at ultra-secular Reed College even though students “are having sex and tripping on drugs and whatever” because these people accept everyone and everything—including sin (225). “I had never felt so alive as I did in the company of my liberal friends. It isn’t that the Christians I had been with had bad community; they didn’t, I just like the community of the hippies because it was more forgiving, more, I don’t know, healthy” (214). For them, there is no right and wrong, so he need not feel guilty about anything, but instead embrace universal acceptance (beyond even universal tolerance, which implies disapproval). He describes it as “love.” He contrasts this attitude with that of Christians at large, whom he views as intolerant and judgmental. He does not distinguish between different motivations in speaking against sin—“I wanted everybody to leave everybody else alone, regardless of their religious beliefs, regardless of their political affiliation” (216). He wants to avoid conflict, he wants people to like each other, and most of all, he wants to feel right about everything.

Mere Spirituality Miller’s views of the world and of people, not the Bible, are what inform his view of religion. He writes that it should not involve so many rules, which only make people judgmental. “The problem with Christian community,” he opines, “was that we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against” (215). Such things enable one person to look at another and see imperfection, and speaking the truth to someone about that person’s own imperfection “felt right in my head but not in my heart.” He sees Christians as intolerant, absolutist, judgmental Republicans, which means groups of Christians in a church usually make it a legalistic place that stifles freedom of expression. Thus the whole concept of Christianity feels wrong to him.

Instead, he argues, Christianity is simply “people following Christ.” He proposes discarding religion-style Christianity, and embracing “Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.” He adds that Christianity “was not a term that excited me. And I could not in good conscious tell a friend about a faith that didn’t excite me.

I couldn’t share something I wasn’t experiencing. And I wasn’t experiencing Christianity. It didn’t do anything for me at all.”

Spirituality, on the other hand, makes him feel excited and hapRevisions / Spring 2007

py. Yet for all this he rarely mentions prayer.

Some might observe that the Bible stands in firm contradiction to many of these ideas. Many of the teachings of Jesus are focused on how to live—just the religious system Miller hates.3 And Paul, who experienced the “mysterious system” more dramatically than most, seemed to have little difficulty explaining it.4 But for Miller, this is not the point—while he never directly attacks biblical inerrancy, the nuts and bolts of biblical fact are not the purpose of his book, and he is blind to the passages that are crying out to him. While he is correct that Christianity includes a spiritual relationship with Christ, he limits Christ to the cuddly father figure he envisions in such a relationship, thus misunderstanding Christ’s role in his life. Having allowed the desire for personal fulfillment to be the primary requirement for a religion, he allows personal fulfillment to consume his religion.

Where Christianity is an inconvenient life system that requires much of him and promises alienation, hardship and persecution, spirituality is an entirely positive sensual experience which provides him with acceptance, comfort, and excitement. Spirituality makes him feel good.

The Inconvenient Truth Not that Miller seems to realize that he is advocating such feeling-based, selective “Christian” spirituality; on the contrary, he advocates no coherent theology at all. One could be forgiven for finishing Blue Like Jazz and wondering what its point actually is. The book’s subtitle, “Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality,” accurately describes its contents—a somewhat random assortment of artsy, pseudo-intellectual observations about Miller’s search for meaning outside of organized religion. However, while Miller may not have an overall point to his book, he does fall into some traps which are common in modern Christian circles, and these are what make Blue Like Jazz a good case study for those seeking to avoid similar pitfalls in their spiritual lives.

The first problem is his failure to demonstrate any biblical support for his ideas. He makes many assertions and assumptions that are based on nothing more than his personal feelings on a subject, and in fact he is far quicker to cite negative secular “facts” about Christianity than biblical ones. He consequently glosses over many biblical commandments which clash with his worldview. Second, he relegates Christ to areas in which he is convenient. He is happy to have Christ’s influence in areas like kindness and personal fulfillment, but not in areas like political beliefs or the confrontation of sin. He likewise rejects God’s church. Third, he conflates tolerance with love. He assumes that love does not involve saying or doing anything which another might find unpleasant or offensive, and therefore drives nearly all actual love from his definition of the word. Whether his motivation is out of actual dislike for the biblical understandings of these things, or merely an effort to make Christianity “seekerfriendly,” the damage to the integrity of Christianity is done.

I believe Miller’s approach reflects a lack of appreciation for three very important things: (1) the centrality of Scripture to faith (including the commandments and difficult passages, not just the warm, fuzzy verses), and the importance of God and His Word in informing all aspects of our lives,5 (2) the centrality of the church to life as a believer, both in community and in corporate worship,6 (3) the centrality of real love, not simply tolerance, to real Christianity,7 Finally, and the reason I list these things in opposition to feeling-based spirituality, the importance Revisions / Spring 2007

of a coherent understanding of all of them—of the way in which God’s Word governs and blesses every aspect of life (known in certain sporting circles as “theology”)—in order to be able to live as God wants us to live.8 Miller’s views are tempting because they sound chic, independent and easy. But God never said the road of faith was easy; he commanded his followers to take the narrow way. Enthusiasm and feelings are things with which God has blessed us, but they should be a byproduct of real faith, never a prerequisite for it. The Gospel is not served by being watered down, for the beauty of the truth of salvation through Christ cannot be understood unless in its full magnitude.9 We need to be a church that understands this, one that follows the truth, no matter how inconvenient it may be. We need to be a church that knows and loves God’s Word, a church that does not separate faith from any part of life, a church that knows its role in the corporate glorification of God, and a church that loves like Christ instead of like John Lennon.

Through his failure to understand these things in his quest for a self-defined spirituality, Miller fundamentally misunderstands, limits, and underestimates God. Thus his book may be useful as a warning, but it is not representative of a school of thought in which we should be searching for wisdom. Rather, we should follow the advice of Princeton’s own Woodrow Wilson, who wrote, “If your life is not various and you cannot know the best people, who set the standards of sincerity, your reading at least can be various, and you may look at your little circle through the best books, under the guidance of writers who have known life and loved the truth.”10 Personal fulfillment is important to Miller, as indeed is it to most of us. But it is not the goal of life. Miller may be all about feelings, but the Gospel is not about feelings, nor is worship, nor indeed is love. It is about the Truth. We share the Gospel, not because we feel like it, but because it is the Truth that Christ gave us to share. We worship, not because we feel like it, but because God (as God) is supremely worthy of all praise. We love, not because we feel like it, but because He first loved us. Perhaps what Miller subconsciously most dislikes about the term “Christian” is its meaning, “follower of Christ,” which reminds us that Christianity is not about us, it is about Him. f Brian Brown ‘07 is from Sunnyvale, CA. He is majoring in political theory.

Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz (Nasvhille, TN: Thomas Nelson Inc., 2003), 231.

2 “The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy [God] demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience.” (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter 5) 3 See the Book of Matthew in particular.

4 In fact, Paul explicitly states that a Christian’s role is to glorify God; not to fulfill personal desires (Ephesians 1:13-14).

5 See Psalm 119:11; see also Abraham Kuyper’s “Sphere Sovereignty” lecture at Free University: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”

6 See Ephesians 4:11-16.

7 See John 13:34-35, 14:21, Ephesians 4:14.

8 See Colossians 3:16, 2 Thessalonians 2:15.

9 See Romans 1:16.

10 Woodrow Wilson, On Being Human (1916; reprint, New York: Cosimo Inc., 1995).

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Faith Beyond Sunday Chenxin Jiang and John Montague Until we Christian students have developed a coherent worldview encompassing a Christ-centred vision of the work we do, we cannot claim to have a faith that transforms our lives beyond Sunday.

“M

y work is something that I take pride in, but it doesn’t define me,” says Tim Tran ’06 , who is working at a research lab while applying to medical school. Work often seems to crowd out faith, relegating it to a weekend leisure pursuit; how might faith instead define the parameters of one’s attitude toward work?

The Rat Race 11 a.m.—Professor Vincent Bacote, Wheaton College, IL Professor Bacote challenges the dozen or so students in the room to stop competing with other people. He says that competing is “all about your ability to manipulate your circumstances so you get somewhere.” The workplace environment rewards those who scramble to take credit for successes and scapegoat their co-workers for mistakes. “����������������������������������������������������������� Working in such an environment almost inevitably changes a person and one can eventually become blind to the values that one holds,” said one conference participant who works in a consulting firm near Princeton.

The Princeton classroom has its own competitive quirks, but recent graduates at the conference agreed that the content of social prestige changes after college. “Money becomes a much bigger deal,” says Albert Lee ’06, who now works in Charlottesville, Virginia. But money isn’t everything: Princeton students vie to enter the most lucrative professions, in part because they carry social prestige. “Both the influence of Princeton alumni on society and the satisfaction of alumni with their careers would increase if a broader, more granular spectrum of opportunities were encouraged,” says Albert.

“It seems to me only a small exaggeration that Princeton encourages either consulting, banking, and professional work, or non-profit work.”

The Profit Motive 2 p.m.—Katherine Leary, the Center for Faith and Work at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City “Just being nice isn’t enough,” says Katherine Leary.

Although acting ethically is important, it is not a sufficient witness because a non-Christian could act as ethically as, or more ethically than, a Christian. Instead, Leary argues that a true witness involves radically changing one’s vision for a given profession: she describes a new entrepreneurship initiative at Redeemer that supports “ventures that bring about gospel-centered transformation for the common good.”

I wonder what someone who is not Christian would think

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of Leary’s proposal. Would he be disturbed by the prospect of a Christian worldview seeping into more areas of American life? Would he be intrigued by the story of a church trying to develop a model for socially responsible entrepreneurship?

One of the interesting things about Leary’s venture is that she is trying to argue that there can be other motives for pursuing business aside from profits.�������������������������� ������������������������� According to predominant economic theory, profit is������������������������������� —������������������������������ and should be����������������� —���������������� the goal of all business ventures. This is more than a descriptive statement; for most investors and financial theorists, it is normative. They argue that it is improper for business leaders to pursue any goal besides shareholder wealth. The shareholders are the owners of the company and doing anything with their investment besides making the most money possible would be an irresponsible use of their wealth. Everything must be justified in terms of the bottom line. This view is so pervasive that, at some point, it ceases to be questioned. It is like the air we breathe: after a while, we don’t even notice it. Unfortunately, as Leary points out, the values embraced by the culture of profit are antithetical to the values of Christianity. “�������������������������������� It’s not about how much we make or how big our yacht is,” says Tim Tran ’06. “As Christians, we’re lucky because we enjoy the comfort that comes with being loved by God.” A Coherent Life 4 p.m.���������������������������������������� —��������������������������������������� Steven Garber, the Washington Institute The iCal application on my laptop divides my life into little colour-coded segments: the time I spend in class is blocked out in orange, rehearsals are coloured violet, and shifts at the circulation desk are coloured green. My schedule, as defined by iCal, often distracts me from pursuing that which Garber called in his lecture “a vision of a coherent life, where liturgy and labour and learning and life, are wonderfully and unusually and profoundly twined together.” Efficiency and excitement are high on my list of priorities as a college student; coherence, less so. But until we Christian students have developed a coherent worldview encompassing a Christ-centred vision of the work we do, we cannot claim to have a faith that transforms our lives beyond Sunday. f Chenxin Jiang ‘09 is a Comparative Literature major from Hong Kong. John ����������������������������������������������� Montague is on staff with Manna Christian Fellowship. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 2003 with a degree in economics and philosophy, and he currently works for an industrial supply company in the Princeton area.

Revisions / Spring 2007

In Their Own Words Nicole Fegeas Now, on this night, the thought struck me: in order to put God first and nothing else, perhaps God was asking me to leave it all.

R

ecently, I had the extreme good fortune of attending the Manna Christian Fellowship Spring Retreat. I say this with such a tone of gratitude because among many things, the retreat led me to realize what the true worth of fellowship is.

For most of my life, I have had a fairly cynical view regarding religious fellowships (Christian or otherwise). Even though I considered myself to be a relatively religious person, I just could not trust them. To me, they seemed to me to be ample breeding grounds for brain-washing people. You arrive as a normal human being; you leave a fanatic. But, within a couple months of being at Princeton, I decided that I was curious to learn more about Scripture. So, purely for this intellectual reason, I joined Manna. Yet, I swore to myself that, should I get wrapped up in any fanatical mumbo jumbo, I would leave.

Almost 5 months later, on Saturday night at the retreat, I actually was contemplating leaving the fellowship. But it was for a different reason than the Nicole of the past would have had.

No, instead of fanaticism, I had found only goodness, love, and knowledge during my involvement with Manna. But perhaps I loved the fellowship too much. Recently I had been struggling with my idolization of people, putting them before God. I was drawing too much of my strength and worth from the attentions and love of other people rather than the love of God. Obviously one of the sources of these loving people was Manna. Now, on this night, the thought struck me: in order to put God first and nothing else, perhaps God was asking me to leave it all.

But this made no sense to me. Why would God bring me into a community that was so good only to make me leave? Also, why did I automatically link this fellowship with goodness without a second thought? As I reflected on that question, all logic seemed to indicate that it actually was not good at all. Logic seemed to suggest that being part of a fellowship was actually detrimental to me as a Christian. I had been taught that God alone must be one’s source of strength and that one should desire God alone. Wouldn’t the presence of others, however kind and wonderful they might be, be merely a distraction from God? Greatly distressed and confused, I prayed to God for guidance in this important manner. After a bit, a friend of mine, a senior in Manna, approached me while I was praying. Answering my prayer, God spoke His wisdom through her. My friend explained to me that humans themselves are not capable of truly loving. In fact, the love of humans is actually just the love of God. Humans simply serve as vessels of God’s love. Therefore, Revisions / Spring 2007

it was perfectly natural for me to desire and derive my strength from the kindness and friendship of others. The source of it all was ultimately God. Now apparently my previous logic refuting the goodness of a fellowship was now void, but additionally my mind began to digest the concept that we are all just vessels of God. Upon further contemplation, I began to piece together how a religious fellowship is more than just a group that shares common interests and beliefs. The difference stems from how strongly God is able to make Himself present in a fellowship. As Christ said Himself, “For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst” (Matthew 18:20). I believe that, because the focus of a Christian fellowship is on God alone, its members are thus more open to Him and more receptive to the ways in which He works through them. Through fellowship, members become better vessels of God. The crucial utility of a fellowship is dependent on this presence of God. As human beings, our sinful nature is an unavoidable part of our existence. Taking our sinful nature into account, it is only through God that we can ever hope to be saved and ultimately shaped into His image. Now, a fellowship, by its very nature, serves as a medium through which one can find God and experience His presence. Each member, as a vessel of God, comes together to constitute what is more or less a giant support network of God’s love and wisdom. When one falters, God is always strongly present within the people around to help one back on the right path.

Additionally, the value of a fellowship stretches beyond the confines of the organization itself. This collection of vessels also provides a powerful vehicle for Him to use to spread His love and wisdom outside the group, throughout the whole community. In essence, that is perhaps a fellowship’s most important purpose. That is, God can use a corporate body of believers to manifest His presence to all those who hear His call.

I am not sure that I would have ever lost my distrustful view of fellowships, had I never joined one. I still believe that there are probably some damagingly extremist mind-warpers out there, but I would go so far as to say that they are not really true fellowships. A true fellowship is not detrimental. A true fellowship is focused on solely God Himself. In this way, it shares in the ultimate good: the goodness of the presence of the Lord. f Nicole Fegeas ‘10 is from Warrenton, Virginia. She plans to major in classical studies with a certificate in creative writing.

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From the Blogosphere...

Keep On Keeping On I watched Cast Away again this past weekend, and remembered why it remains one of my favorite movies: an allegory of existential aloneness and solipsistic loneliness. Yes, it reminded me of that familiar plunging feeling whenever my heart is sinking, sinking, into despair, into hopelessness - into that impossible longing for divine plenitude.

“You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend” (Psalm 88:18).

My main purpose here is simply to quote Chuck’s (Tom Hanks) words from the final scene of the movie, which I found deeply moving. This is the context: after getting plane-wrecked on a pacific island, alone for four years as the world passed him by forgetfully, Chuck finally makes it back home - only to find that Kelly (Helen Hunt), his beloved fiancée whose radiant image in a pocket-watch kept him alive all those years, was now married to another, having had to “move on.” Here are his words to a friend: “We both had done the math. Kelly added it all up, and knew that she had to let me go. I added it up and knew that I had... had lost her. ‘Cos I was never gonna get off that island. I was going to die there, totally alone. Maybe I was gonna get sick or get injured or...

The only choice I had, the only thing I could control, was when and how and where that was going to happen. I made a rope and I went up to the summit to hang myself. I had to test it... you know, of course, you know me. The weight of the log snapped the limb of the tree. So I couldn’t even kill myself the way I wanted to... I had power over nothing.

“That’s when this feeling came over me like a warm blanket. I knew, somehow, that I had to stay alive... somehow. I had to keep breathing, even when there was no reason to hope. And all my logic said that I’d never see this place again. So that’s what I did... I stayed alive, I kept breathing.

Then one day that logic was proven all wrong. The tide came in, gave me a sail. And now, here I am. I’m back, in Memphis, talking to you. I have ice in my glass. And I’ve lost her all over again.

I’m so sad that I don’t have Kelly... but I’m so grateful that she was with me on that island. And I know what I have to do now. Gotta keep breathing. ‘Cos tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?”

-weblog post, Teng Kuan Ng ‘05

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Revisions / Spring 2007

Thankful for the Rule of Law One blessing that we may not often count is how nice it is to live in a society that recognizes, to a large degree, the rule of law. While there are always going to be dissenters in America, they mostly rely on channels of law to communicate their problems and seek redress for things they believe to be wrong. everyday life can go on because we don’t have to be afraid that disagreements will spiral out of control.

What got me thinking about this were the reports of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confessions. In a different society where law couldn’t be trusted to respond to people like him, I wouldn’t read about him in the news. I don’t know that he would have survived to this point, but even suspending the reality of human nature for argument’s sake - say that someone else figured it out and told a bunch of people and say that there were no police and there were no courts of justice but only a military that exacted punishment against both domestic and international foes - this would be a huge deal. no rule of law, riot-style, can’t go on with ordinary life huge-deal.

I could muse further about the rule of secular law and parallels to God’s law, but right now I’m just thankful that we aren’t shackled to mob justice. I know the justice system isn’t perfect, but I appreciate the value of due process as a means to systematically seek “truth” and at least temper our visceral human emotions. Without the rule of law, I imagine a much, much scarier world.

-weblog post, Karis Anne Gong ‘06

Grace Undone “This is the correlation of salvation and love; don’t drop your arms, I’ll guard your heart, with quiet words I’ll lead you in and out of the dark.” -Anberlin, The Unwinding Cable Car “God sometimes does His work with gentle drizzle, not storms.

Drip. Drip.Drip.” -John Newton, Amazing Grace (2007) How horrifically greedy we can sometimes be! We repeatedly hurl our avaricious hands into the heavens, expecting God to cater to every last bit of our fleshly desires. Rather than waiting in Him and trusting that He will provide in His time, we rush in prematurely and go after what we think is best for ourselves in the moment.

I vaguely remember that during one of my earlier birthdays I grew so antsy and impatient that I frantically opened one of my presents a week early. My dad later found out, and to say the least, he was very disappointed because I took pleasure in receiving the gift without waiting for him. I remember that I felt really shameful and terrible afterwards. The same is true with our Heavenly Father. Grace becomes undone if we greedily seek and unpack it without waiting for Him to give it to us at His appointed time.

So, what do we do then in the meantime? We wait, we remain quiet, and we listen. He will guard our hearts and minds if only we let Him (Philippians 4:7).

Heart, mind, shut up! Let Him in. Listen for His soft drizzle, ever constant, ever present.

-weblog post, Richard Lopez ‘09

Revisions / Spring 2007

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Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for as the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified prepare the soul for glory.

-Richard Sibbes