in search of areté

There is something going on in Christian forums and comment threads these days that I understand but don’t want to believe.

Having spent the better part of a year hanging out at one forum in particular - Theologica - and the blog closely connected with it – Parchment & Pen – I keep witnessing this something with regularity. And while I understand what drives and sustains it, I just don’t want to believe it to be true.

Forums thrive on discussions and exchange of information on whatever subject is in view at the moment. These subjects range from doctrinal positions to understanding particular verses or passages to defending one’s theological tradition. And what keeps happening is this:

People are more interested in stating their own opinions, observations, and beliefs than discovering what might be the truth – or at least closer to the truth – about an issue.

Whether in a forum or a comment thread, people go back and forth espousing what they think things mean or what they believe a passage to say or what they understand as the truth. Not only do such people not do research for themselves, they also are uninterested in listening to someone else who either does do research or is a more knowledgeable person in the field.

At Theologica, for example, Marv is quite knowledgeable of and proficient with New Testament Greek. When others make unsubstantiated or just plain wrong claims about what a passage is or isn’t saying, Marv is usually there to help any and all understand things better. I always look forward to his comments.

But not everyone wants to hear him or consider what he says. There are some – thankfully – who do listen and consider what he says. But many, many others act as though it’s just Marv’s opinion and therefore can be ignored. Or they consider their own grasp of the language – usually via Vine’s or Strong’s – to be equal to his or even superior. So they don’t listen.

There are some Reformed people afoot at Theologica, too, who are quite knowledgeable about the Reformed tradition and its doctrines. But their understanding of their own belief system is often ignored because a critic has his or her own understanding of what Calvinism is really about and what Calvinists really believe.

In a word, what seems to be lacking is humility. By humility I do not mean some smarmy self-deprecation meant to demonstrate just how humble they truly are. I mean knowing who they are and who they are not, what they know and what they don’t know.

Teachability is symptomatic of humility. When someone is willing to listen to someone else who knows more or understands more, and will go so far as to reconsider their own position, humility is present.

But I don’t find that much.

And I don’t want to believe that people want to maintain and puff up their own ignorance because, well, it’s their ignorance and not something that someone else told them. It’s as though they would rather be wrong and original than right and indebted to someone else.

This kind of thinking is a death knell for growth and maturity. It pretty much guarantees that people will remain at their present level of understanding – or ignorance – as long as they refuse to listen or allow that they might not know as much as they think.

It does not bode well for them individually or for the church in general. God help us all.

NOTE: I recently wrote the following series elsewhere and thought I should bring them over here, too. They are in inverse order here for the purpose of making reading through them easier.
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In the erudite and ethereal discussions that tend to pop up around here now and then, people use terms such as “historical-critical method,” “form criticism,” “source criticism,” and “redaction criticism” – phrases that exclude most of us from the essence of the conversation. We are left on the sidelines like eunuchs in a harem, knowing that something is going on but not sure exactly what.

Hoping to expose the mystery of so-called higher criticism (at least for myself), I have undertaken to shed some light on the matter by answering a simple question: What if we treated one another’s written statements in the same way many people treat the Bible, i.e., through the lenses of higher criticism? I am not saying that higher criticism is bad – far from it! – but only that more pedestrian documents and writings should be able to enjoy the same scrutiny and privilege as does the Bible. It could serve to further our understanding of both higher criticism and what is actually being said. But what would that look like?

Well, let’s see. Let’s take something said elsewhere on Theologica and subject it to higher criticism, perhaps thereby ennobling the common to the glorious and correcting the misleading to the truth.

I will use the following petition of Rey to clarify my point:

I might conclude from this unexamined passage a number of things: Rey is hungry, it is late, Rey is afraid of the dark and dislikes cold weather, he likes to eat catfish after cooking them, he has no catfish recipes of his own other than those that require a grill, he has strange hopes. But without closer inspection or the corrective lenses of higher criticism, I could be perilously wrong. In fact, in the opinion of more than a few higher critics, I definitely am wrong.

There are three primary types of higher criticism: form criticism, source criticism, and redaction criticism. I’ll give a quick explanation of each before applying them to Rey’s cry for help.

Form Criticism (FC) examines the previous forms a document might have been in prior to what is now in front of us. We know, for example, that prior to the synoptic Gospels being written they existed in an oral form. FC looks at the effect previous forms have upon the final product.

Source Criticism (SC) seeks to find other documents, both real and hypothesized, that might have been used by a writer in producing the text we have. Again, with the synoptics, it is believed by some that Matthew and Luke may have used Mark as source material for their own gospels, and/or relied upon an unknown source (Q) for information.

Redaction Criticism (RC) tries to determine the theological purposes of the writer by looking at how they used the materials to organize or otherwise emphasize things in their books. It assumes, rightly, that each author has a particular perspective and purpose in writing that is not limited to historically reporting what has happened.

We’ll begin our search for the true truth about Rey’s catfish petition in the next post.

Form Criticism (FC), you will remember, examines the previous forms a document might have been in prior to what is now in front of us. We know, for example, that prior to the synoptic Gospels being written they existed in an oral form. FC looks at the effect previous forms have upon the final product.

Our text under consideration now is a petition that Rey made recently:

According to Carson, Moo, and Morris – which is not a law firm – there are a half dozen assumptions made by FC scholars that we will adapt and apply when possible to Rey’s text.

1. “The stories and sayings . . . circulated in small independent units.”

2. “The transmission of the material can be compared to the transmission of other folk and religious traditions.”

3. “The stories and sayings . . . took on certain standard forms . . . for the most part still readily visible [in the text].”

4. “The form of a specific story or saying makes it possible to determine its Sitz im Leben (”setting in life”) . . .”

5. “As it passed down the sayings and stories . . . [the] community not only put the material into certain forms, it modified it under the impetus of its own needs and situations.”

6. “Classic form critics have typically utilized various criteria to enable them to determine the age and historical trustworthiness of particular pericopes.”

Such is the nature of form criticism and how it enables us to better understand the otherwise completely incomprehensible text provided by the Rey Community.
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Next we will further our understanding of Rey and catfish through the lens of Source Criticism.

I earlier defined Source Criticism as a discipline that seeks to find other documents, both real and hypothesized, that might have been used by a writer in producing the text we have. It has its own unique contributions to the study of our text,

We have already demonstrated through the use of Form Criticism that Rey’s missive did not suddenly appear in its final form as a result of him sitting down and simply typing the text. It was the result of a collaboration of his community with various members providing their own oral traditions that resulted in the text as we now have it. Those oral stories would eventually have come down in written form, and Source Criticism will help identify the sources the author must have used in putting together his own retelling of the accounts.

When studying something like the Synoptic Gospels, which allow us to compare and contrast the differing accounts of the life of Christ, it is easier to identify various sources. Such is not the case with the text in front of us, which means we will have to rely on what we already know about use of sources by authors.

The text reflects disparate sources connected by transitions such as “and” and the use of punctuation, particularly “.” (period). It is safe to say that Rey had before him at least five sources: (1) information about the time of day, (2) some sort of weather report, (3) a meteorological report showing both sunrise and sunset times for the date of the incident, (4) evidence from an unknown source about the status of the grill (whether “turned on” or not), and (5) a document or portion of a document revealing the existence of something called “online,” which is apparently a state that human beings can enter into and become.

It is very likely, however, that later collections that included some but not all of the aforementioned fragments were extant at the time and available to the author. These may be referred to as S (for “Situation”) and P (those documents pertaining to the “Petition” itself). A Two-Source Theory (no longer held by conservative scholars) maintained that Rey had at his disposal S and P but none of the other source materials. A more recent and thus truer theory-become-fact position is known as the Two-Plus-Some-Others Theory. This position (held by most at Theologica) reveals that the author relied on S and P, plus an unknown number of specific fragments (ranging in number from 1 to 43,234).

Whatever the number of sources, however, the priority of S – which simply means that it was written first – is maintained by all. It was the first source to come into the author’s possession and served as a template for all additional information, even though some of the later sources might have been earlier.

Equally obvious to the Source Critic is the absence of any sort of search engine that the author might have used to discover recipes for his family’s meal that did not involve time, weather, astronomy, grills, or “onlines.” It goes without saying that, had the author had such information or access available, he would have utilized it and we would not now have the text we have. Rather, it would have taken the form of “Hey, I found a cool recipe for boiling catfish” or some such thing.

With the enlightenment of Source Criticism, therefore, we can now understand that Rey relied on written documents no longer in existence to compile his account as we now have it in the text. The individual sources, upon with the author heavily relied, contributed to the final form of the passage.
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Finally, we will look at Redaction Criticism to further enhance our understanding of the text. Only then will we be able to say with confidence that we understand the story, whether historical or not, as written by Rey.

The final stage of composition for our text -

- necessitates our discovery of the influence of the individual author upon the account. This is the realm of Redaction Criticism, which “seeks to describe the theological purposes of the [author] by analyzing the way in which” sources are used. “Redaction” is a jargon term meant to exclude the hoi polloi from understanding something simple.¹ A redactor is an editor; redaction criticism examines the editing done by the author in the course of telling his story.

Again drawing from CMM (Carson, Moo, and Morris), we can apply Redaction Criticism to the text. There are five basic elements to RC, but I’ll only address four. The last one isn’t really worth the time. Here goes:

I gleaned the following, with a few minor changes for style only, from Robert Pirsig’s book Lila. It seems important to me at numerous levels.

What follows is a portion of a speech made by Ten Bears, a Comanche Chief, at the Medicine Lodge Council of 1867, to the assembled tribes and especially to the representatives of Washington, D.C.:

There are things which you have said to me which I do not like. They were not sweet like sugar, but bitter like gourds. You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and to make us Medicine lodges. I do not want them.

I was born on the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over in that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and like them I lived happily.

When I was at Washington, the Great Father told me that all the Comanche land was ours, and that no one should hinder us in living upon it. So why do you ask us to leave the rivers, and the sun, and the wind, and live in houses? Do not ask us to give up the buffalo for the sheep. The young men have heard talk of this and it has made them sad and angry. Do not speak of it any more. I love to carry out the talk I get from the Great Father. When I get goods and presents, I and my people feel glad since in shows that he holds us in his eye. If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace. But that which you now say we must live on is too small.

The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was the best. Had we kept that, we might have done this thing you ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die. Any good thing you say to me shall not be forgotten. I shall carry it as near to my heart as my children and it shall be as often on my tongue as the name of the Great Spirit. I want it all clear and pure, and I wish it so, that all who go through among my people may find peace when they come in, and leave it when they go out.

From that original perception of the Indians as the originators of the American style of speech had come an expansion: the Indians were the originators of the American style of life. The American personality is a mixture of European and Indian values. When you see this you begin to see a lot of things that have never been explained before.

What is seen in the true American style of life is a cultural adaptation of the American Indian: “the famous old traits of the American Indian: silence, a modesty of manner, and a dangerous willingness to sudden, enormous violence.”

If you take a list of all the things European observers have stated to be the characteristics of white Americans, you’ll find that there is a correlation with the characteristics white American observers have customarily assigned to the Indians. And if, furthermore, you take another list of all the characteristics that Americans use to describe Europeans you’ll get a pretty good correlation with Indian opinions of white Americans.

Many Europeans think of white Americans as a sloppy, untidy people, but they’re not nearly as untidy as the Indians on the reservations. Europeans often think of white Americans as being too direct and plain-spoken, bad-mannered and sort of insolent the way they do things, but Indians are even more that way. In World War II Europeans noted that American troops drank too much, and when they got drunk they made a lot of trouble. The comparison with Indians is obvious. But on the other hand, European military commanders rated the stability of American troops under fire as high, and that is also an Indian characteristic.

Indians don’t talk to fill time. When they don’t have anything to say, they don’t say it. When they don’t say it, they leave the impression of being a little ominous. The well-mannered circumlocutions of aristocratic European speech are “forked-tongue” talk to the Indian and are infuriating. They violate his morality. He wants you to either speak from the heart of keep quiet.

To this day Americans are mistakenly characterized by Europeans as “like children,” naive, immature, and tending toward violence because they don’t know how to control themselves. That mistake is also made about Indians. To this day [1991] white Americans are also mistakenly characterized by Indians as a bunch of snobs who think you are so stupid you can never see how phony they are. That mistake is also made about Europeans.

This anti-snobbery of all Americans, particularly Western Americans, is derived from this Indian attitude. The Cheyenne name for white man is wihio, meaning “spider.” Arapaho use niatha to mean the same thing. To the Indian, whites seemed like spiders when they talked. They sat there and smiled and said things they didn’t mean, and all the time their mind was spinning a web around the Indian. They got so lost in their own web-spinning thoughts they didn’t even see that the Indian was watching them too and could see what they were doing.

One often hears “frontier values” spoken of as though they came from the rocks, the rivers, or the trees of the frontier, but trees, rocks, and rivers do not by themselves confer social values. They’ve got trees, rocks, and rivers in Europe.

It was the people living among those trees, rocks, and rivers who are the source of the values of the frontier. The early frontiersmen such as the “Mountain Men” deliberately and enthusiastically imitated Indians. They were delighted to be told that they were indistinguishable from Indians. Settlers who came later copied the Mountain Men’s frontier style but didn’t see its source.

Freedom was the topic that drove home this whole understanding of Indians. Of all the topics his study of Indians covered, freedom was the most important. Of all the contributions America has made to the history of the world, the idea of freedom from a social hierarchy has been the greatest. It was fought for in the American Revolution and confirmed in the Civil War. To this day it’s still the most powerful, compelling ideal holding the whole nation together.

The idea that “all men are created equal” is a gift to the world from the American Indian. Europeans who settled here only transmitted it as a doctrine that they sometimes followed and sometimes did not. The real source was someone for whom social equality was no mere doctrine, who had equality built into his bones. To him it was inconceivable that the world could be any other way. For him there was no other way of life. That’s what Ten Bears was trying to tell us.

The struggle between European and Indian values is still the central internal conflict in America today. It’s a fault line, a discontinuity that runs through the center of the American cultural personality.

After reading this, I asked a question about this matter on a discussion I began, realizing even as I asked the question that I was not being nearly specific enough to limit the exchanges to the rather narrow corridor of thought I was going down myself. And while this post won’t answer my question definitively, hopefully it will be more helpful than my random, disjointed articulations of thoughts I attempted there.

If I were going to choose one verse that enjoins us to pursue spiritual growth and Christlikeness, I might go with Heb 6:1:

Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God . . .

It is clear from this verse that maturity, growing in Christ, or sanctification is something we have a role in. Whether that role is active or passive, direct or indirect, contributory or facilitation is part of the question about the question. What is our responsibility? How do we participate in this process of becoming Christlike?

There are activities that are necessary but not sufficient for sanctification: prayer, Bible study, fellowship, exercise of spiritual gifts, and many others. There are attitudes that facilitate the process: humility, dependence, patience, faithfulness, discipline, and others; these, too, are necessary but not sufficient.

What is to be our experience of the dynamic of sanctification? I’ve written elsewhere about my understanding of how spirituality and brain science find expression in an integrated way in a believer, but I’ve not said anything about how – or whether – I know I am allowing the process to proceed.

The only way I can effectively explain my thinking at its present stage of development is through analogy. Like all analogies, the few I’m about to offer break down and lose correspondence at some point. But hopefully the gist of my thoughts will be clear enough.

I’ll begin with the analogy of playing golf. I choose golf because it is complex, difficult, and takes time to master. And while Christian maturity definitely takes time, I don’t know that I would call it particularly difficult – although it is invariably painful. But all that goes into playing golf well parallels all that goes into spiritual maturity.

To play golf well, it is necessary to know and become proficient in the fundamentals of the swing: stance, grip, shoulder turn, weight shift, head stability, follow through, and at least one thousand other things that will go wrong from time to time. Each facet of the swing needs to be understood and practiced repeatedly in order to mature as a golfer. This takes years on the driving range and various courses to accomplish.

Spiritual maturity in Christ is no different in this regard. There are things we need to understand, prioritize, reorient, and accept; there are activities – such as prayer, serving, teaching, witnessing – that we need to become more proficient in. Knowing the Scriptures – all the Scriptures – and how they reveal the eternal purposes of God is critical, as is an intimate familiarity with the truths and teachings (i.e., doctrines). We need to be able to think globally, synthesizing the entire corpus of books in the Bible; we need the big picture. But we also need to analyze things in depth, pushing ourselves to comprehend things we can never fully comprehend.

But, whether we’re talking about golf or sanctification, these things aren’t enough; they are, as I’ve said, necessary but not sufficient.

In golf, people say incredibly stupid and infuriating things to you. For example, as you’re getting ready to swing, trying to remember the 1001 things you have to do correctly to produce a well-struck shot, they’ll say, “Relax” or “Trust your swing” or “Don’t think about it, just do it” or something else that is impossible to do when you’re first learning the game.

So, too, in spiritual growth, we’re told to “abide in Christ” or “Walk in the Spirit” or – and this one triggers homicidal urges – “Let go and let God.”

But in a way, they’re right. In golf you have to relax and trust your swing (even though you know the likelihood of betrayal is pretty high!). And in the Christian life it is much the same.

To change the analogy, think about riding a bicycle. Now here’s an interesting fact: if you think about riding a bicycle while you’re trying to ride a bicycle, you’ll probably fall. If you’re preoccupied with the rhythm of your legs, the force on the handlebars, or continually shifting your weight to maintain balance, you’ll fail. Riding a bicycle well means not thinking about it: you just do it. It’s the same with swimming, snow skiing, tennis, or most activities we participate in. We know, we practice, but then we do them without thinking.

Our experience of sanctification, I think, is not conscious. It is something that the Spirit within us accomplishes as we take the swing, peddle the bike, make strokes in the water, or turn gracefully on a downhill run. We are conscious of what is going on around us more than what is going on within us, but we do not have to be conscious of the Spirit’s activity for sanctification to take place. It’s about living in the moment, not trying to force anything or consciously do the right thing to produce a certain outcome.

It doesn’t help to be thinking about sanctification when we’re trying to live the Christian life. Neither does it help to focus on our shortcomings, mistakes, limitations, or immaturity. Thinking to much about what one is doing right or what one is doing wrong grinds the process to a halt. We cannot be deliberately trying to be spiritual; we cannot be deliberately trying to not be spiritual. Either way, it won’t work.

God says, for example, to share the gospel with the lost, not to make sure we’re doing it exactly right as though the outcome somehow depends on our proficiency. But as we share the gospel more and more – or pray, teach, serve, or whatever – two things happen: we get better at it without conscious effort and our understanding of God – Father, Son, Holy Spirit – deepens.

It happens when we’re not even trying or thinking about it. It is as we reflect on our personal history that the growth becomes evident. Many times it’s brought to awareness by someone else who makes a comment to us.

There is obviously more to say but perhaps this is enough for now. To summarize one last time, though, I’m saying that maturity is something that is accomplished as we simply live our lives without conscious effort within the boundaries God has ordained. Our maturity is not our responsibility: it is God’s. Our responsibility is to be involved in activities, to place ourselves in proper environments, and trust God to do what God has promised to do. And to enjoy the experience as it unfolds.

In response to a comment at the aforementioned forum, I wrote:

What that component is that you mention, or at least what I would call it rather than “synergism” (which is not a bad term but not as close), is that there is a zen-like quality to Christian maturity, sanctification, being conformed, etc. Not to the extent of the dissolution of self-object awareness or oneness with the universe – and certainly not the divine within us – but in the sense of it being indirect, non-linear at times, and a non-rational process. Not irrational, but non-rational: it is not logical although there is a logic to it, if that’s not a contradiction. There is an existential element to it, too, i.e., the living-in-the-moment approach to life that is not without boundaries or purpose but is not completely premeditated, either.

It’s a slippery thing, at least to me right now, and almost resists definition or explanation. It’s not a “doing” kind of thing or even a “thinking” kind of thing: it’s a non-self-conscious way of being. But there is a conscious aspect to it, but it is a Christ-consciousness. Even this is not direct; it is more out of the corner of one’s eye, something that happens when we’re looking for it in one place only to catch a glimpse that it is happening or has happened some place else.

Perhaps this is how it has to be. If it were doable by us, we’d surely foul it up. This way, we know in the core of our beings that it is not we who have created this godliness or maturity, but Christ. It is a work of the Holy Spirit working out God’s will in our lives and in our selves. We cannot do it. We can only allow it to happen, but only then by not trying.