Accomplishment

It is a source of recurrent annoyance to me that I seldom accomplish.

Not that I don’t do anything; not even that I don’t do the things I actually manage to do fairly well. There is just a great gulf fixed between (my perception of) my capabilities, and what actually bears fruit.

As a general rule, I seldom pass judgment on people. (I didn’t say never … just seldom.) I do judge actions: some actions are good, beautiful, praiseworthy; other actions are bad, ugly, blameworthy. But I see in myself the potential for both things; I see this potential in others. I do judge ideas: some are true; others are not. Some are beneficial; some are harmful. Some are good; some less so. I’ve become aware that to evaluate ideas in this way does garner negative responses. People take it personally when thoughts they’ve found meaningful are not warmly received. I do the same – so it all works out.

But it is very rare that I attach value to a person as a person based on his actions or ideas. What makes people valuable is not those things. It is even rare that I can’t empathize with sometimes alien ideas and acts. Much of the time – not always – I can get where people are coming from.

But I have also seen and honored potentials. It takes no imagination to see what is as it is now and make little of it. It is a much better view to see what may be. I have been puzzled, frankly, by why people can’t or choose not to do this. That is not optimism – it is simply recognition.

Now, potentials do not give worth either. But I do admire the grand endeavor – the thing attempted because the attempt itself would be worthwhile. It can be anything for which we have a passion. In many ways, the things we love enough to dare define us. Often the attempting matters as much as the result.

Nonetheless, I am annoyed at my lack of accomplishment.

The Berean Alternative (part7d: noble characteristics of Bereans)

 7d. The Bereans were willing to work

 The Bereans were willing to put in the work. They searched the Scripture daily. This was not a haphazard whim. They were not letting the Bible fall open, covering their eyes, and pointing to a text … giving God every opportunity to guide their divination. No. They searched. The examined meticulously, carefully, completely. They did this every day. In one sense this was only logical – Paul was making claims based on the Hebrew Bible; he was making assertions about it. Did the Scripture really indicate that the Messiah must suffer and would rise from the dead? But it was a practice that would apply to any truth claim. It is impossible to measure a claim against Scripture without knowing Scripture.

 If we seek to know what the Bible says about any topic, if we seek to know whether a claim is biblical or not, if we seek to know what Christianity teaches, we cannot do this without knowing the Bible. Don’t mistake me – it is self-evidently possible for those who cannot read to be Christians. It is also quite possible for those who don’t have access to the Bible. Even for those who lack the time for detailed study of the Bible. But if we want to know what the Bible says, if we wish to use this tool we are given for discernment – we must put in the time and work to study the Bible. I’m not speaking here of theory or of interpretations or of inspirational reading or even devotional reading. Those all have their uses, but the greatest need in terms of discernment is going text by text to become familiar with the actual contents of Scripture across the board.

 

I believe the Bereans were noble because of their posture: they were open to a word from God, they were waiting for the appearance of the Christ, they took the Scriptures to be true, they were willing to measure teachings against Scripture, and they were willing to do the work required. Equally, I believe that is a posture we ought to adopt when we are required to make decisions about the ideas, truth claims, values, doctrines, philosophies, courses of action we encounter every day. In short, I am proposing this Berean model as a viable alternative for Christians making decisions today.

The Berean Alternative (part 7c: noble characteristics of Bereans)

 7c. the Bereans accepted biblical authority

 The Bereans believed the Scriptures were true. We know this because they searched the Scriptures to see if what Paul was saying was true. If they did not start with the belief that Scripture was true, this would have been a very foolish exercise. They trusted the testimony of the Bible. They eagerly listened to Paul, but they checked what he said to see if it matched what the Bible taught. They were not testing Paul’s message against traditions. They were not evaluating his teachings according to philosophies. We must ask ourselves: what would have happened had the Bereans found Paul’s claims in conflict with Scripture? I think the answer is self-evident: Paul would have been rejected.

Are we willing to trust Scripture to the same degree? Are we willing to say that, no matter how persuasive the presentation, no matter how much we want to believe or don’t want to believe an idea, we will be willing to be guided by Scripture? We must be honest on this point. Some things taught in the Bible we want to believe. They appeal to us. Other things in the Bible don’t appeal to us. We would just as soon not believe them if we could have our preference. Some things fit in with our agendas, with our goals, with our priorities. Are we willing to subject every idea, every agenda, every priority to the Scripture as a measure of its truth? Or do we want to use our feelings? Our suspicions? Our desires? What happens if the message is one we don’t like? What happens if the speaker is one we don’t like? The Bereans were clearly willing to let the matter be judged by Scripture.

 

The Berean Alternative (part 7b: noble characteristics of the Bereans

7b. the Bereans were waiting expectantly

The Bereans were waiting expectantly for the appearance of the Messiah. Paul was announcing the arrival of that Messiah. Paul proclaimed to them that Jesus was the Messiah, and that the Messiah had suffered and risen from the dead – in accordance with Scripture. Certainly this proclamation had many details that differed markedly from what the Bereans expected. But if they had not waiting for the Messiah in the first place, it is doubtful that they would have eagerly received such an announcement. Such an expectation was based on prophecies that were many centuries old.

Christians today find ourselves in a similar situation. Christianity has universally looked for the return of Jesus – in the Apostles Creed, we say, “From thence He (Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord) shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” Hebrews tells us, “Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.” Paul tells Timothy there is a crown of righteousness waiting for “all who love His appearing”. Paul tells the believers at Philippi that their “citizenship is in heaven. And they eagerly await a Savior from heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables Him to bring everything under His control, will transform their lowly bodies so that they will be like His glorious body”. Paul describes Christians in Corinth eagerly waiting for the day when Jesus Christ is fully revealed. At the very end of the Bible, John says, “He which testifieth these things saith, ‘Surely I come quickly.’ Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus…”

The Bereans had the Law and the Prophets. We have the Gospel. Yet, like them, we still wait for something. We still wait for the fullness of Christ to be revealed when He returns in glory. Do we desire that? Is it something we eagerly await? Are we excited at the prospect? Or would it be a terrible inconvenience to our daily routines? For some, the works of fiction writers and speculation about events surround the return of Jesus cultivate a sense of adventure. For others these create worry and dread. Still others regard them as they might occult materials or tales of the supernatural – mentioning the prophecies of the Bible in the same breath as the writings of Nostradamus, the Mayan calendar, or astrological signs. Some imagine they can hasten or ward off these events. I’m not talking about any of those reactions; instead, at a fundamental level, do we really desire the appearance of Jesus? John saw what this meant more clearly than we do. To experience his vision must have been truly terrifying. Yet he could say, “Even so, come Lord Jesus”.

The Berean Alternative (part 7a: noble characteristics of Bereans)

 7a. the Bereans were receptive

 

The Bereans received the message with all readiness of mind. They heard, listened to, thought about what Paul was telling them. They knew it required attention. They did not say, “I’ll think about that later.” They did not reject it out of hand. They did not focus on the messenger – but the message itself. That is what they received. This indicates that the Bereans were open to a word from God. They had an expectation that God very well might have something for them. They were not sitting in judgment on that message – looking for the flaw, looking for the excuse to discredit. Instead they were eager for it. They were excited by the prospect. And they engaged their minds – not their emotions. The focus was not on how they felt, but on the message itself. In short, the Bereans were open-minded to the truth. They were actively engaged.

My blog is a mess

My blog is a mess. This will come as no surprise to a reader. I’m going to try to clean it up a little – to make it so the menus at least work better. But I make no promises.

There is a reason for the messiness. The blog serves (or was intended to serve) as a catch-all for a variety of my interests, thoughts, ideas. These often do not go together. They are far from seamless.

I am an inconsistent creature on the best of days. , and my mind tends to have two guiding traits. I am something of a mismatcher – it is the way I understand the world and myself. I see the differences among things that often pose as similar. (“Which one of these is not like the others? …) At the same time, I am constantly amazed at the connectedness of dissimilar things – the ways in which they are the same. (Perhaps they are similar only in my head … ).

The net effect of that is a haphazard arrangement of notions that seldom work together. Aesthetically, I hope that only describes the short-term situation. I mean here that they may eventually converge in some undisclosed place and time. (I hope for such an eventuality, but I have no reason to imagine it to be a true thing.)

The part of me that organizes things … that spends huge tracts of time planning out things that never actually get done … would prefer different venues for different purposes and different audiences. This would fit; it would have a certain symmetry.

But it would be untrue. I am not particularly virtuous – a more fair minded observer would note that I have good features and bad features – kind of like most people. Yet I feel a compulsion to tell the truth … or at least to be as honest as I am able.

What remains is a rather disorganized writing project that may or may not go anywhere.

The Berean Alternative (part 6 What’s so noble about the Bereans?)

The reader of Acts 17 is informed that the Bereans were nobler than the Thessalonians. Nothing in the text leads us to believe they were particularly aristocratic in mundane terms. Instead, “noble” seems in this case to describe a character trait: the Bereans are displaying the behaviors that nobility should display. The usage is similar to the dual way we use “noble” in English, or the way we describe certain actions as displaying “class”, or the way we might speak about “background”. Something about the Bereans’ actions is being highly commended.

So what exactly was noble about them?

In this brief passage, the Bereans model a posture of biblical discernment. And if we are seeking an approach to making decisions about truth claims, values, ideas, and actions, we would do well to examine what exactly it was about the Bereans that was being approved.

The incidents described by the writer of Acts took place millennia ago, in a very different culture, in a very different world. We make assumptions about people from different times, try to visualize their lives, maybe feel we cannot relate to them or they to us. We immediately notice that they wear different clothes, eat different foods, have different customs, different beliefs. We might imagine we have progressed, and are therefore smarter, more knowledgeable, less credulous, less easily fooled.

The Berean Alternative (part 5 the Bereans)

Because Acts records the spread of the gospel, we are able to see different reactions to hearing the message. Some laughed or scoffed; some wanted to hear more; some thought Paul was trying to add a god; some were jealous; some were offended; some thought Christians foolish; some clearly didn’t get it; some were violent; some considered the gospel an offense to their gods; some believed. But the reaction of one group stands out. Paul’s hearers at Berea were described as noble.

These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. Therefore many of them believed; also of honorable women which were Greeks, and of men, not a few.

    – Acts 17:11

The Bereans have been confronted with arguably the most radical truth claim of all time – the gospel that Paul preached. Christians who have grown up with that gospel don’t often comprehend just how outlandish Paul’s claims are. Paul was telling the Bereans that Jesus was the Messiah, that he was the son of God, that he died for their sins, that he rose from the dead, that a righteousness was available to them that did not come through observance of the law, but by grace, through faith. To accept this truth claim would necessarily alter everything else in their lives. Yet they did not dismiss it out of hand. The writer of Acts calls their reaction noble. For us, they model a posture of biblical discernment that we would do well to imitate.

The Berean Alternative (part 4 – alternatives)

This is not a polemic against change. Many changes are good. Many changes truly are advances – things we could not imagine our lives without. Some change is essential to life. This is not an exercise in nostalgia for a real or an idealized past. Elements of the past are good and bad; some features of our past we are well rid of. This is not really an assertion that the rate and scope of change is increasing or that this particular period is one of abrupt change. Nonetheless, the perception of an increasing rate of change is widespread. This is also not an embrace of pessimistic fears – some dire dystopian vision for the future. Some things are predictable; much remains unknown; and, like the past, it will be something of a mixed bag.

Instead, this is an acknowledgment of an intense difficulty faced by many Christians today. All of these things – the perceived rate and scope of change, the perpetual stream of data, the marketing of ideas, cultural value shifts and church fads – leads us to one, simple question. How is a Christian to decide? In one sense this circumstance is a gift to us: it gives us a chance to examine what we believe and why. But in another sense it presents us with a great challenge: we need a methodology to identify what is truly Christian and what is not. When we find ourselves out of our reckoning, how do we know what is right and what is wrong? When new ideas – especially new religious ideas – come knocking at our doors, which do we accept? Which do we reject? Not all ideas are equal. Some are good; some are bad; some are Christian; some are incompatible with Christianity; and some are basically neutral. How do we process all of the data? In short: how do we make wise decisions?

The question is simple. Its implications are vast, but the question itself is simple. And there are really only a few alternatives.

The Berean Alternative (part 3 – the quest for the new)

“The Times, They Are a-Changin’,” is a sentiment and tune I have heard my whole life. It had already passed into conventional wisdom or cliché before I was born. “Don’t stand in the doorway,” Dylan advises, “For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled.” And, “Please get out of the new [road] if you can’t lend your hand.” This could almost be an anthem for our day. It seems hard to keep up: we are bombarded with endless streams of data. They do not rise to the level of information. They are not meaningful or ordered enough for that. They simply consist in random factoids, images, slogans, statistics, commercials, news and pseudo-news, celebrity, gossip.

This occurs without filter, as if all assertions of fact or interpretation were equally true, equally sensible. At the same time, the data is partially filtered – each individual data source filters itself to support its own agenda. Ideas, like products, are being marketed to us. They are presented in their best possible lights to make us want to accept them. But the net effect blends into noise. Its very volume requires vast amounts of time and energy simply to process. Yet all of it affects how we make decisions, what we accept, what we reject, what we think.

From magazines in the supermarket and commercials on television we learn: younger is better than older – take years off your appearance, how to look and feel years younger; thin is better than fat – take this pill, follow that program, and lose the weight you’ve wanted to lose; a person’s value is found in sexual attractiveness. We’re told that faster is better, more modern, more technologically sophisticated; we’re given the impression that people who have lived in prior times were stupid. We’re told our careers and our wealth and our successes define us.

This is far less harmless than it might seem. We acquire beliefs and attitudes without even consciously noticing them, and we end up allowing the same habits of mind that determine what trash bags and razors we purchase to determine how we spend our lives, what religion we practice, how we vote, how we act at our jobs, and how we treat people.

The Berean Alternative (part 2 – the problem)

Do you ever feel that we’re living as sleepwalkers might?

That we go through the motions of work, family life, school, spending time with friends, paying bills …

That we get up, eat without tasting, hurry late to appointments or activities only to get caught behind Clem Kadiddlehopper out for a Sunday drive – that jerk’s going to make us late…

That we rush to the store to buy products or even gifts that don’t satisfy nearly as much as we hoped they would…

That we talk and talk and talk and talk and never penetrate beneath the surface…

That we work harder and have (or accomplish) less…

That we watch movies or go online and laugh at things that aren’t really funny or tear up to dramas we don’t really care about…

That the news makes us angry or sad almost without fail – there are always bad things happening in the world, but worse there is always someone abusing our trust, taking advantage of others, acting unjustly…

That politics get us all worked up – support our candidate, endorse our cause, or face the end of the world alone and unprepared…

That people make decisions for the stupidest reasons when they can articulate their reasons at all – and, gulp, that we catch ourselves doing the same thing…

That there is just too much information, too much to keep up with…

That we go to bed frustrated and wake up tired…

That something’s not right, that this can’t be the way we’re supposed to be…

I do.

The Berean Alternative (part 1 – introduction)

The Berean Alternative

Introduction
When I was young my family used to go to the beach. Not all that often, but because I love to swim, I have vivid memories of the experience. I wasn’t much for playing in the sand or lying in the sun, and we almost never went where there was a board walk. My time was spent in the water.

It was a sense experience. Without consciously trying to recall it, I can taste salt water in the air. I can hear the clamor of people playing and enjoying themselves, the cries of dazzlingly white gulls, and the reassuring sound of calm waves. I can squint at the almost painful brightness of the sunlight. I can feel the sharp sting of cold water on my feet and legs as I first entered. The ocean’s buoyancy was all wrong; it lifted me higher than swimming pool water. My feet recall the grit of ever-present sand. The scene constantly changed according to the waves and sky. This combination of sense experiences could absorb my attention so completely that I would grow oblivious to my wider surroundings.

Left to my own devices, I would stay in the water all day. Except, of course, every so often I would need to get out – to get a drink, use the bathroom, eat lunch. I always hated the lunch break, even if I was hungry. The more learned authorities would compel us to remain on dry land after we finished for some interminable period … lest we be afflicted with a cramp. This is an experience I have never had while swimming, but they made it sound sinister enough.

Every time I would exit the water, for whatever purpose, almost at a run once freed from its resistance, and head to where I was sure to find my family and my stuff, a strange thing happened.

I would arrive, hot sand clumping on my feet, in a tremendous hurry to get back to the real business of swimming. And it would suddenly dawn on me: I did not recognize a single person. The blankets, towels, cooler on the beach were not mine. What buildings there were, were unfamiliar. In fact, the beachscape offered no sign whatsoever where I was or where I needed to be. A confused panic would set in as I scanned the area for anything I knew or any frame of reference. The sounds of people having fun – their day at the beach – seemed no longer joyful, but hostile. The sun-heated sand began to feel distinctly unpleasant. The gulls, the breeze, the waves offered no help.