hughbiquitous

Al Mohler offers some suggestions on reading books:

1. Maintain regular reading projects.
2. Work through major sections of Scripture.
3. Read all the titles written by some authors.
4. Get some big sets and read through them.
5. Allow yourself some fun reading, and learn how to enjoy reading by reading enjoyable books.
6. Write in your books; mark them up and make them yours.

I’ve been on a little Ravi Zacharias kick in my drive-time listening habits, listening to a ton of podcasts and lectures of his that I’ve packed into my MP3 player over the last couple of years.

One thing I’ve noticed: I really like the way he deals with issues at the level of the heart as well as the mind. To believers, he challenges them to be passionate in the way they follow Christ in a thoroughly biblical way; with unbelievers, he confronts them with the painful emptiness of the soul that they are experiencing — but does so with warmth, empathy, and sensitivity.

Along the way, Ravi will often address existentialism. Now, I’ve never really been able to get a firm grasp of what that means; I only knew it had something to do with Søren Kierkegaard (as came up in the comments of my July 10 post, Becoming What You Understand — remember that thread, John Lee?). But in his September 3, 2006, podcast, taken from his Leadership and Worship lectures, Ravi finally gave me some traction — and explained a bit about Kierkegaard too.

The clearest way to explain it is by contrast:

• The Christian says, “What we are determines what we do.”
• The existentialist says, “What we do determines what we are.”

But Ravi insists that Kierkegaard was not an existentialist in this sense (read the quote below); he was merely focused on the existential, or experience-driven, aspects of life. Christians have plenty to offer when it comes to existential questions; it’s existentialism as an -ism that is incompatible with the Christian worldview.

From a Reformed point of view, this difference is important — we are regenerated first, and then we believe. We are new creations, and because of that, we confess Christ as Lord. As I see it, this means that to reject unconditional election is to take an existential view of man’s fallenness; that is, to say that one can choose to trust God and thereby become a Christian is to say that what one does determines what one is.

If you’re interested in the fuller treatment, here’s an extended quote from Ravi’s podcast and links to the MP3’s. It’s well worth taking in; I’ve only finished part 1 and I look forward to hearing how he develops his thesis that worship is the answer to man’s existential angst.

I’ve talked about the existential predicament. What do I mean by that? … I would call it “the passion of existence.” “The passion of existence.” In other words, whenever a philosopher uses the word, “existential,” he is at least meaning your existence. All right? He is at least meaning your existence.

But in the classical term, what it really means is there is an awful lot of feeling and passion in this existence of mine, and if I can digress a little bit, so that you can build a philosophical base on this as we go along, the fundamental difference between the Christian and the humanist or the existentialist is right here: the Christian, because of who he is, determines what he must do.

The Christian, because of who he is, determines what he must do. I am a creature created in the image of God; therefore, I shall not lie. I am a creature created in the image of God; therefore, I shall not have an overly inflated opinion of myself, as being a mini-creator myself, I am a created, independent individual. “Essence determines existence” is the way I would put it for the Christian. Who I am essentially determined how I exist practically.

If you were to go to the atheistic existentialist — and the reason I’m using “atheistic” before that is because sometimes you might hear someone saying Søren Kierkegaard was the first Christian existentialist, and if that is possible, what you are really hearing them say is, Kierkegaard’s Christianity was highly experience-oriented. That’s all they’re saying. He kept talking about his feelings in the Christian faith, rather than coming up with doctrines. So if you ever asked a fellow like Kierkegaard to write out a doctrinal statement, he’ll say, “Look, that is completely immaterial; I don’t need to know anything about the eternal lostness of man, I don’t need to know anything about the second coming, I don’t need to know anything about the nature of God and this, all I want to tell you is that in my heart I feel a need, and that need is met as I serve God — that’s all that matters to me.”

Basically, atheistic existentialism would say, “what I do determines what I am,” so if a man says, “Look, I find myself running around and being unfaithful to my wife, and you turn around and say there’s something wrong with it, I say, what do you mean there’s something wrong with it — I’m doing it, aren’t I?” We’re all doing it, aren’t we? And you see, this is where they’re coming from.

What I do determines what I am; it’s what I call a “salvation by survey syndrome:” you know, you find out what everybody’s doing, and on the basis of that, decide what everybody ought to be doing. It’s the Masters & Johnson “what’s average is normal; what’s normal is average; what everybody’s doing is good,” and just leave it at that.

Now there is this one thing though: in my experience, what do I feel? I am a creature of feeling; I don’t get up in the morning detached from my sensations and my desires. And may I suggest to you that one of the things we all feel (and sometimes the women are more honest in admitting it than us men, and young people are more honest in showing it than us adults) is what I call the “feeling of loneliness.” We all feel it..

This feeling of loneliness is man’s existential dilemma. Which basically tells me he is driving outside of himself for some kind of fulfillment, and my thesis is going to be how worship ultimately answers these needs that no other relationship can answer.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

Reasons to Believe’s David H. Rogstad has just completed a series of blog posts under the title “Intellectual Repentance,” dealing with 1 Corinthians 2. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) I might fuss with his characterization of Paul’s attitude toward reason and argument after the Areopagus event, but I’m right with him about this much:

In order to receive God’s gift of life, [the Corinthians] needed to repent. This repentance is not only from their moral failures. They must lose confidence in their independent, self-sufficient ways of thinking and come to a kind of “intellectual repentance.” We are told in many places in Scripture that human wisdom causes us to be puffed up with pride. For Paul to prepare an argument that appeals solely to the mind may, in fact, convince a mind, but he wants to do much more than simply convince them intellectually. He wants their hearts. (Intellectual Repentance, Part 2)

Now, I’m a big life-of-the-mind guy. In general, I think the 21st-century church is not sufficiently characterized by careful, disciplined, God-honoring thought. A student of Douglas Groothuis has said, “Christians should humbly try to be the smartest people on the planet,” and I wholeheartedly agree.

But there’s a trap that is ever-present when Christians seek intellectual formulations of faith: it becomes sterile. I’ve been listening to a series of lectures given by Michael Ramsden at the European Leadership Forum; he often admonishes his listeners that apologetics died in Europe when it became a sterile, academic discipline. Instead, any banners for intellectual Christianity ought to fly far behind the standard of the Gospel message itself. Put simply, the Gospel, with its transforming power, must come first. Any defense or explanation thereof must come thereafter.

There are all kinds of debates about apologetic methods—presuppositional vs. evidentialist apologetics, and so forth—but I’m beginning to think that’s just the sort of sterilizing phenomenon Ramsden (and others) warn against. I’m reminded that Francis Schaeffer tired of such affairs; he simply left them to the academy and went off to actually minister to people.

Similarly, William Lane Craig cautioned in one of his podcasts,

We must never let apologetics distract us from our primary mission, which is sharing the Gospel. And I would only use apologetics when the unbeliever has questions or objections to the Gospel message that we present. We must never make apologetics our focus of attention or the goal in interacting with nonbelievers. …Always get the Gospel out first, and then deal with the arguments and evidence in favor of the Gospel.

Likewise, Ravi Zacharias warns against letting our intellectual pursuits desiccate our ministry:

For those of us in who are in the ministry, we are immersed in [our message]. We are immersed in it. We speak it, we study it, we read it, we proclaim it, we sit around tables and interact with it. And there’s a point at which something very, very dangerous can happen. It’s what I call that danger point that comes in theological training when the Bible becomes merely a textbook that removes itself from becoming a fire within your bones, which it was when you entered in order to study it. And the challenge of the young theological student is to recognize that as much as he or she is critiquing all avenues of sacred writ (because we are there to defend it) and while we are going through authorship and date and this theory and that theory and higher-critical theories, at the end of the day we had better remember it is not we who are reading the book as much as that the book is reading us. (A Fish Out of Water: Loving People)

O God, help us forget ourselves. Help us to forsake technique in favor of trust in Your sovereignty; help us to be doers of the Word and not just defenders of its truth. Teach us to fear You more than men. Fix our eyes on the Cross, fuel the fires in our bellies, sharpen our minds to glorify You with the truth, soften our hearts to love a lost world, and ready us in every way to make disciples of the nations… Amen.

Amen to Ken Samples:

I think one of the greatest apologetic challenges facing Christianity today is the anti-intellectualism present in many evangelical churches. …If our churches are going to be effective in the apologetic and evangelistic enterprise as God commands, then believers must regain the “life of the mind.” Many nonbelievers today view Christians as “feelers,” not “thinkers.” Our churches can reverse this unhealthy trend by embracing reason and rationality as the good gift of an infinitely wise God and by practicing the important intellectual virtues mandated in Scripture—such as discernment, reflection, testing, and intellectual renewal.

Presented here is a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The subject is disk galaxy NGC 5866. On a clear night, you might be able to spot this galaxy with a four-inch-wide telescope in your backyard—but it would look like a fuzzy wisp and you’d have to really know what you were looking for. It is about 63,000 times dimmer than the planet Jupiter.

This galaxy is almost 50 million light-years away—what you see here is the way a sliver of the universe looked 50,000,000 years ago.

This galaxy is 60,000 light-years across. That means that a star could explode at one end of the disk and an observer at the opposite end of the disk wouldn’t see it for 60,000 years.

How big is a distance of 60,000 light-years? Let’s suppose you had a map of this galaxy with a scale of 1 atom on the map = 1 meter in space. Got that? 1 atom = 1 meter. Represented on such a map, our entire solar system would fit within one and a half football fields’ area. The USA would occupy a half a millimeter. You and I would need about an atom and a half.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
    and the son of man that you care for him?

— Psalm 8:3-4

But how big would the map be? It would cover 1/3 of the distance from the Earth to the sun. Such a map would be so big, you could use it to gift-wrap all of the planets in the solar system over 25,000 times. And each one of us takes up about an atom’s worth of real estate on that map.

Sorry, that’s the best I can do to make the size of this faraway galaxy even remotely comprehensible.

Then Job answered the Lord and said:

“Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you?
    I lay my hand on my mouth.
I have spoken once, and I will not answer;
    twice, but I will proceed no further.”

— Job 40:3-5

But there’s more to it than sheer size. Click on the image above to see a large version. Or if you’re really ambitious, download the 11-megabyte full-resolution version.

Look in the background, far beyond NGC 5866. What do you see?

More galaxies. Lots of them. Literally hundreds of them. They’re all over the place. With millions, maybe billions, of stars in each of them. And those background galaxies are millions-to-billions of light-years farther away.

The heavens declare the glory of God,
    and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

— Psalm 19:1

There’s more. Look closely at the dark edge-on view of the disk. What do you see?

You see tiny dots of bright, bluish light. Those “dots”—barely visible unless you look at the full-resolution version—are clusters of a million stars. Each. Our entire solar system would fit inside one of those dots many, many times over.

We have one star, a wimp by cosmic standards, and it lives a hundred million miles away. It takes light from our sun less than ten minutes to reach us.

In one dot that you can’t see unless you download a gigantic photograph taken by a satellite with a 2.5-hour exposure time, there are millions of stars that put our sun to shame. And their light is just now reaching us after a journey that took 50 million years.

You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning,
    and the heavens are the work of your hands;
they will perish, but you remain;
    they will all wear out like a garment,
like a robe you will roll them up,
    like a garment they will be changed.
But you are the same,
    and your years will have no end.

— Hebrews 1:10-12

No more words… I am undone. O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!

Update: Get Google Earth and view NGC 5866 as it appears in the sky, just west of the Big Dipper.