Pauline Studies 3: Paul and Salvation

I continue to read through Gupta, Heim, and McKnight's The State of Pauline Studies. Here are my previous posts:

• Paul and the Messiah
• Paul and Judaism 

The third chapter is by Ben Blackwell on Paul and Salvation. He had a difficult task -- to herd the cats of Pauline scholarship into distinct corrals. Pretty much all typologies of this sort are inevitably skewed.

Blackwell labels the main options as 1) Reformational, 2) New Perspective, 3) Paul within Judaism, 4) Apocalyptic, and 5) Participationist. The problem is that we are inevitably imposing categories on Paul. The occasional nature of his writings suggests that his language and approach may differ somewhat from letter to letter.

1. Reformational Perspective
We used to call this the "old" perspective, but several prominent Pauline scholars have retained key elements of high Protestant interpretations while making necessary adjustments in the light of late twentieth-century insights. Blackwell includes names like Francis Watson, John Barclay, and Mike Bird in this category, although Watson and Barclay are hard to categorize. Blackwell mentions some key trends under this umbrella: 1) justification as acquittal 2) based solely on divine agency, often formulated in terms of 3) penal substitution. 

I get that Blackwell is trying to move beyond the older "old" versus "new" approach. When I was coming through the ranks in the 90s, the "old" perspective saw Paul contrasting a "grace" approach with a "works righteousness" approach he was combatting in Judaism. In 1977, E. P. Sanders showed that this was a false dichotomy and that, in fact, Judaism was a religion of grace.

Based on Romans 4:8, I do indeed think that Paul's justification language in relation to humans is about forensic acquittal. However, I do not think the phrase "righteousness of God" in Romans 1:17 is about a right standing God imputes to believers (47). I'm not disappointed if I don't fall in this category. I don't see Paul as a monergist or an advocate of some mathematical version of penal substitution.

A key work however is John Barclay's 2017 Paul and the Gift. He argues that grace in Paul is characterized by incongruity and circularity. In it is "incongruous" in that it is disproportional to anything we might try to do to earn it. However, it is not completely unconditional. There are informal expectations ("circularity") that went along with ancient patronage.

However, Barclay (and Wright) are monergists in the end. They believe that God will make sure that the elect will produce the appropriate circular fruits by God's power. In other words, they smuggle in the perseverance of the saints in works clothing. But Paul did not believe that final salvation was assured to those in Christ (e.g. 1 Cor. 9:27; Phil. 3:11).

2. New Perspective
Since I studied under Dunn, you would expect me to fall into this category. I am indeed highly sympathetic to many of the interpretations of Stendahl, Sanders, Dunn, and Wright. On the one hand, I completely agree with this description Blackwell gives: "The NPP argues that Christianity is a fulfillment, albeit a surprising one, of the Jewish faith, not a response to it" (49).

However, I do not see justification language in terms of joining the covenant people of God. It's not that I disagree with this theology. I just don't think this is how Paul uses the dikaioo word group. I also think Paul's thought was more atomistic than Wright's metanarrative approach would see it. Paul can talk metanarrative, but I think it is just one of several rhetorical strategies. I also have never been convinced that Paul primarily functioned using the category of exile. I just think Wright glues too many things together with his brilliant mind.

3. Paul within Judaism Perspective
While I am sympathetic to many aspects of the "radical new perspective," in the end I think most of these interpreters go too far. Yes, "early Christianity was and remained a sect of Judaism for Paul" (51). Of course, it did. I do think that all Paul's letters were written primarily to Gentile audiences.

In Romans 11, Paul does speak of Gentiles being grafted into the Israelite tree. But he does not think that Jews can be justified by the Law. He radically reinterprets justification for Jews as well as Gentiles. He uses some language that is radical in relation to the Law even if he primarily remained Law-observant. He even speaks of Gentile believers keeping the Law (Rom. 2:14) even though they are uncircumcised.

So, again, I'm very sympathetic to many aspects, but Nanos, Fredricksen, and others go too far, IMO. A key work here is Matthew Thiessen's, Paul and the Gentile Problem (2016). I have his shorter A Jewish Paul (2023). 

4. Apocalyptic Perspective
Beverly Gaventa has just produced an important commentary on Romans. She would be a prominent representative of this category, along with Doug Campbell. This group emphasizes the discontinuity of the Christ-event with what came before and it actually uses language found in Paul to describe itself (e.g., Gal. 1:12).

One key dimension of this stream is a focus on Sin as a power in Paul, thus making the problem that Christ solves cosmic rather than merely individual or communal. Similarly, it has a more Christus Victor model of atonement, a more "singular" understanding of grace (without wrath), and a "faithfulness of Christ" approach to the pistis Christou debate. Blackwell sees a lot of Sanders' thinking belonging to this category. And of course, we should think of Käsemann, Beker, and Martyn.

Again, there is a lot I agree with here while thinking other aspects are out of focus. For me, the apocalyptic dimension of Paul fits nicely in the "surprising fulfillment" nature of the NPP. I do believe that, practically speaking, Paul did argue largely backward from plight to solution. Sin is a power for Paul in some of his key letters. And I think that the "faithfulness of Christ" was one feature of Paul's rhetoric.

Was Paul an apocalyptic thinker? Of course.

5. Participationist Perspective
Blackwell places himself in the final category along with Michael Gorman, Richard Hays, and others. Note his 2016 book Christosis. "Both the problem and the solution are related to participation in God's presence." Like the apocalyptic approach, there is much I like about how Blackwell describes this position. As Hays pointed out decades ago, "in Christ" is much more common in Paul's letters than justification by faith. 

Here is how Blackwell describes the participationist approach with regard to salvation: "In response to death from sin, salvation is focused on a reconstituted encounter with God that restores the human experience of (God's) life" (58). I like the sense that this approach features more of the Spirit and actual righteousness in the Christian life. As he puts it, "grace will be effective in creating change" (59).

In the end -- and this is a comment on the state of New Testament studies in general -- I think Christian theology and contemporary philosophy interfere more with exegesis than it should. "Let the text say what it says and then work out the tensions in your theology." As exegetes, we have to forget our Christian doctrine, our love of patristics, the fact that we've read Gadamer or Barth, or our sympathies to metanarratives. Objectivity is unattainable, but exegesis demands we do our best not to infect the text with our concerns.

Key Excerpts from Machiavelli's The Prince

The current Russia-Ukraine conflict got me thinking about Machiavelli's The Prince. Here is a quick collection of M's thoughts.

____________________________

1-3. Leadership of "states" (dominions over people, either principalities or republics) is either hereditary or newly acquired. Hereditary leadership is easier to maintain because it's the tradition. 

New principalities acquired either used to have a principate or used to be free. They are acquired either by your own forces or outside forces. They are acquired either by valor or by good fortune. A "mixed" principate is one where a new part is added.

The possibility of change arises because some think change will improve things (grass is greener). When acquiring a new principate of similar language and customs, the main thing is to end the bloodline of the former principate but leave the laws and customs the same.

It's harder to keep a new territory of different language, custom, and law. Some options are to send colonists or go live there yourself. Occupation doesn't work so well. Be either soft or harsh. If you're harsh, crush them so they can't come back with revenge. People hold grudges against "small insults."

It's easy to line up followers in a new rule among the weaker. But beware, they just as easily switch to follow others too. So don't let powerful individuals close from the outside (foreigners) or let internal people get too much power. 

"A prince must not only oversee current scandals, but future ones as well." Catch problems early and squash them before they fester.

4. Principalities are governed in two ways--by a central authority and distributed leaders who owe their positions to that authority or by distributed leaders who inherited those positions. The first is much easier to rule. France was the second, and there were always malcontents that were trouble.

5. When taking over a place where they used to have freedom under their own laws, it's more difficult. You probably will need to destroy their laws. You could go live there. To let them live under their own laws after installing a group of leaders and taking tribute. Only the first route will succeed in the long term. Immediately eradicate their customs and traditions.

6. Those who come to power by their own power and resources (their own "virtue") crush all their enemies, clear the deck, and succeed. P.S. He puts Moses in this category.

7. It is very hard to succeed if you come to power by good fortune (i.e., by appointment). Cesare Borgia is a near exception, who by his deception, craft, and brutality used then eliminated others. You have to clear the deck. Being nice to people now won't make them forget harm you did to them in the past.

8. Here M treats people who rise to power by villany. He does not seem to oppose their methods--he says he won't comment (and then does). He speaks of the "good and bad use of cruelty." "In cases of necessity, I judge it simply expedient to imitate them." They achieved power but not glory. 

"Cruelty well used (if one can ever say cruelty is good) is when it is practiced suddenly and decisively, but not prolonged." "Act quickly and commit the first offenses right away."

9. When citizens make someone a leader, it is important for the leader to keep the citizens dependent on the state and friendly toward him. Their main desire is not to be oppressed. "a prince needs a friendly populace. Otherwise, in adversity, there is no hope."

But beware of other leaders and magistrates. "In times of trouble, they will try to ruin him."

10. Prince should be able to defend himself. Forget about open territory. Have a fortress. The people from the outside land will get over it after the attackers leave. "The nature of man is such that he feels obligated both for benefits given and benefits received."

11. Church principalities are easy to hold, once established.

12. The fundamentals a state has to have are good laws and a strong army. Mercenaries won't do it. [He really assumes that anyone who has the capacity and opportunity will take control by force. Very dark sense of human nature.]

13. Auxiliary arms--using someone else's troops. Losers rely on them. They are more dangerous than mercenaries because the one who owns them will take you over. "Without its very own native troops, no principality is secure... fate hangs on fortune." Tacitus--"No human thing is so weak and unstable as a reputation of strength not based on actual force."

14. War is the only art that concerns a person in command. [What an adversarial sense of the world!] Neglect of the art of war is why princes lose their states. In peace, a prince needs to be more armed than in war. Hunting is good preparation. And you learn your terrain.

"A prince must always be reading history and study the records of excellent men, the reasons for victory and defeat." No laziness in peacetime.

15. [This is where the interesting material really gets going.] A lot of people aren't good. The person who always tries to be good will fail because of the people who are not good. "A prince who wants to maintain his position needs to learn how not to be good, and then either use or not use the good as necessary." "There will be traits considered good that, if followed, will lead to ruin, while other traits considered vices which, if practiced, will achieve security and well-being for the prince."

"Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good"

16. "Liberality, as it is usually practiced, is harmful." "In our times, no great things have been done except by those who were perceived as misers." "Nothing harms your own resources like liberality." But spend liberally the resources of others. "It is wiser to be known as a miser, which gives you a bad name but not a hated one."

17. "Every prince would want to be thought compassionate rather than cruel. But I need to warn him to be careful about compassion." "It is much safer to be feared than to be loved if one must renounce one or the other." However, short of being loved, the prince shouldn't be hated.

18. Everyone talks about how princes should be people of honesty who keep faith. Not true. Successful princes live by their wits and hold keeping faith in low regard. "A prince needs to know how to handle beasts and men." Laws are the way of man. Force is the way of beasts.

"You need to be a fox to know snares, a lion to scare wolves." A prince who is only a lion will fall into traps. A prince who is only a fox will be eaten by wolves. "Because men are imperfect and don't keep faith with you, neither must you keep faith with them."

The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.

A prince needs to know how and when to deceive. He needs to know when to act badly as well as when to act rightly. [The end justifies the means.] He needs to always seem compassionate, faithful, honest, humane, and religious. But he needs to do whatever needs to be done and have a variable nature.

"A prince deceives to win and maintain the state."

19. It is important for a prince not to be hated or scorned. Other than that he doesn't have to worry about his reputation. Taking your people's stuff is how to become hated. Also to be avoided is the perception of being lazy, effeminate, or fearful. He should be decisive and his judgments should not be reversible.

Two threats to a prince--external and internal. If he is well-armed and has friends, he's good. The best way to avoid plots is to be loved by the masses. "A prince need not worry about conspiracies when he enjoys popularity." "Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are, and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion"

"A prince should let others administrate unpopular measures and only claim credit for popular measures." "A prince will always be hated by someone." "If he has to choose, he cannot afford to be unpopular with the most powerful faction."

20. "A clever prince, some say, cultivates enemies when he can so that his reputation increases when he puts them down." "The prince who fears his own people more than enemies should build forts. Those who fear enemies more should forget forts." "The best fortress is not to be hated by the public."

21. "A prince is always esteemed when he takes a strong stand against enemies or in favor of friends." It always happens that someone who is not your friend will urge you to neutrality." "Princes should avoid obligations to others."

"One can never side-step an uncertainty without stepping into another one. Prudence weighs the qualities of the uncertainty and chooses the best of the alternatives."

22. Three types of ministers--those that understand themselves, those who understand others, those who understand neither. The first two are good. Don't pick a minister who thinks more of himself than you. 

23. The only way to guard against flatterers is to have people tell you the truth. But to keep respect, you should only let them tell you the truth when you ask for it. "A prince who is not himself wise cannot be counseled well."

24. "Men are more drawn by the present than the past." "That defense is only good and certain that rests on yourself and your own virtue."

25. Many believe the world is governed by fortune or God and that there is nothing we can do about fate. "However, free will is not entirely powerless. Fortune may be half arbiter of our world, but she leaves half of the world to our governance." "A prince who relies on fortune gets ruined when fortune changes. A prince succeeds who can adapt to his time."  Also some pretty misogynous comments I won't repeat.

26. An appeal to the Medicis to take back Italy.

A quote from Livy: "That war is just which is necessary."    

 There is no avoiding war, it can only be postponed to the advantage of your enemy.

Alexander never did what he said, Cesare never said what he did.

An unavoidable war is called justice. When brutality is the only option left it is holy.”

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”

Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought… but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands

Never do an enemy a small injury.”

The new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.

Chapter 18

The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.”

It is better to act and repent than not to act and regret.

We have not seen great things done in our time except by those who have been considered mean; the rest have failed.”

Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer.”

a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires."

Book Review -- How Stella Saved the Farm

My next read on innovation is a fable called How Stella Saved the Farm: A Tale about Making Innovation Happen. This is just a great book and I look forward to reading Govindarajan's prose book. Of course everything works out in the end, so I enjoy that. The book isn't a tragedy. 

A middle or elementary school person could read this book. Yet its business principles are superb. Let me just summarize some of the elements:

• The problem is that the human farms are big and use farm equipment, while the animal-led farm is small and more manual. How could they possibly compete?
• Their normal is "faster, stronger, more efficient," but it just isn't enough. They need to do something new and different. They have a contest to make proposals.
• The winning proposal is alpaca wool.
• There are all sorts of inter-animal tensions throughout the book. They work through them all. That part might be a little unbelievable, given that these represent people with their varying personalities.
• I note that gathering information from customers is part of their research ("ethnographic study").
• The head horse has to change the new org chart repeatedly. She has to find the right people for the right positions. It involves some trial and error. There's resistance to change and complaints that they don't have the money or capacity to innovate.
• She decides they need a dedicated team. Then they find some overlap. But it is likely building a new company from the ground up.
• It costs way more than they planned. There were fails and complications. 
• The rooster comes up with three laws for running business experiments:
• 1) Learning first, profits second. "If you put learning first--learning through disciplined experimentation--you'll make better decisions and you'll actually get to profitability sooner."
• You make a hypothesis. You predict what will happen. You measure results. You assess lessons learned. You start over.
• 2) The second law is that "inside a big experiment, there are little experiments." I thought of the saying, "Fail often. Fail fast. Fail forward."
• 3) The third law is that the innovation leader's job is to exercise a disciplined experiment. The evaluation of an innovator is whether she has a clear hypothesis, is identifying the most critical unknowns, is investing time and analyzing results, is communicating the plan to the team, is reacting quickly to new information, etc.

This may be the best business book I've ever read.
 

A Book Observed -- Solving Problems with Design Thinking

I like to keep record of books I read or dawdle with here. I read/skimmed/audibled another book on design thinking: Solving Problems with Design Thinking. There's an overlap in author with the previous book I read. This book gives 10 case studies of design thinking innovation.

Incredibly boring book to me. I swear, these two books on Design Thinking could be subtitled--"how to make innovation as boring as possible so that managers can handle it." I almost get angry when books that could be written more interestingly instead are ventures in self-torture. My time's too precious to throw away. If I teach this MBA class again, I won't be requiring this book.

Perhaps another metric for me on the value of a book is how many tweetable insights and quotes it has. There were some in the book. Here are a few:

• If you take only one thing from this book... it is the awesome power of ethnography, the deep insights produced by getting to know the situation and journeys of your customers as well as the people inside your organization that facilitate providing products and services.
• Don't kill your strategies with completeness. Leave room for the people who must make them real to make them their own.
• Nobody experiences anything by being told about it.
• Thinking smaller--placing small bets and learning fast--is an undervalued innovation strategy.
• One of the greatest challenges of the quest for innovation is impatience, "which makes us rush to solve instead of taking time to understand."
• "The design thinking approach forces you to stay in the question and not define exactly what the problem is." Barry MacDevitt
• "It is more often the recasting and recombination of myriad elements rather than one big 'new to the world' idea."
• "Innovation is a team sport."
• "Research demonstrates that too much information actually degrades the quality of our decisions."
• Leaving space for stakeholders to be part of the discovery of new ideas.

I would say chapter 12, "Where Do We Go from Here?" is the chapter to read in the book. After the ten case studies, it suggests five key benefits to design thinking:

• the way it helps reframe the questions--you get a better sense of what the real questions are (empathy is a key element here, feeling for your customer and employee)
• collaborating to leverage difference--it brings the people who otherwise might pull against each other into the same room and thus overcomes potential barriers
• curates the evidence to distill the essence of your situation
• leaves space for insight, rather than just the creative ones having all the answers (allows emptiness to invite engagement)
• accelerates speed through collaboration that cuts through inertia and bureaucracy

Book Review: Designing for Growth

Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers

I started this book in December. Just finished it this week. It is an introduction to design thinking. It was straightforward. It was simple to understand. I'll confess I found the book very boring. It may not have helped that I tried to cover a lot of it as an audiobook while driving to and from Chicago.

Design thinking is basically a way to operationalize creativity. The book's basic thesis is that managers often don't feel like they are particularly creative or innovative, even though they need to be. Similarly, designers are often far more creative than they are organized. This book is meant to create a Reese's Peanut Butter cup that mixes the peanut butter of the manager with the chocolate of the designer.

It is very useful. The four basic steps are:

1. What is? -- Where are you currently in your organization?

2. What if? -- This is a phase of focused brainstorming.

3. What wows? -- This phase involves actually prototyping and talking to potential customers for input.

4. What works? -- Going beyond prototyping, you do a learning launch with a small sample.'

That all makes sense. The ten steps that the four questions expand out into are:

1. Visualization -- necessary throughout

What is?

A four-step project management sequence is interspersed with these four questions. The first project management step is to have a "Design Brief" that clarifies what problem you are trying to solve and sets kicks off the designing process.

2. Journey mapping -- looking at things from the customer side

3. Value Chain mapping -- looking at things from the organizational side

4. Mind mapping -- Get a group together to find patterns in those mappings. This is a crucial step to determine where you currently are as an organization.

What if? 

The project management tool emerging from the first question is Design Criteria. Hopefully, you now have insight into where your organization is. What are the perceptions of your organization? What is the ideal end state of the process for your organization?

5. Brainstorming -- Giving clearly defined parameters, begin to generate ideas that address anecdotes and stories depicting the problems you are trying to solve. Keep iterating by asking probing questions that question your assumptions, explore the extremes, look back from the future, etc.

6. Concept Development -- Now choose the best ideas that emerged out of the brainstorming process. Combine them. Mix and match them. Look for that spark of creativity.

What wows?

You kick off pursuit of the third question with a "Napkin Pitch." What does the customer want? What assets does your organization have to give? How will the customer benefit? What is the competition?

7.  Assumption Testing -- Begin to plan out how you are going to test the assumptions with which you have emerged from concept development. Will your new concept pass basic business tests like 1) will customers buy it, 2) can you create and deliver it, 3) can you scale it, and 4) how easily can competitors copy you?

8. Rapid Prototyping -- Fake creating the new service or entity. Run it by a very small number of people for feedback. "Fail fast to succeed sooner."

What now?

You launch the final stage with "The Learning Guide." How are you going to test the direction in which you are heading? How much is it going to cost? What remaining assumptions do you need to test?

9. Customer Co-Creation -- Bring some potential customers in and get their input. 

10. Learning Launch -- Now build a more realistic version of your product or service and try it out on a small sample with a small team working on it. A couple months, maybe 100 people. Don't spend too much but spend enough to know whether you're really on to something.
 

Fragments of Reading

It is my practice to "store" memory of the books I've dabbled in here so I can collect the information at the end of the year. I have not completed the following, but I have read or listened to several chapters of each. Don't have the time to write them up.

For the Body

Fault Lines

 

Reading While Black 

Book Review: Helgoland

The burden of literature is great. I've been reading in a number of books these past few months and like to keep a record here, but it is a challenge to find time to read, let alone to record.

On a drive from Nashville to Indiana to Chicago to New York, I listened through a book I bought. (Now there's the burden of going back to underline) It is Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution by Carlo Rovelli. I like Rovelli. He's brilliant. He can make complex ideas understandable.

He also talks too much. It didn't help that the audiobook reader had a pretentious British accent. By the time I was on the last leg of my journey, I was almost hateful toward the verbosity and audiobook reader. Not good from a business perspective.

I did enjoy the first few chapters. It was perhaps the best presentation of Heisenberg and Schroedinger I've ever heard. But like a Jewish apocalypse, it's uncannily accurate until it gets to the future. Since there is no solution yet to the reconciliation of quantum mechanics with relativity, Rovelli can't explain that to us. 

I don't feel like I have the time to summarize the book as I often do. I don't subscribe to the "many worlds interpretation." I would have preferred the "hidden variables" interpretation in my teens and early 20s but not anymore. 

While I found the last few chapters almost unbearably poetic in a British accent, I think he gave us a glimpse of the solution to the current quantum/relativity conundrum in this sentence:

Quantum theory "is the discovery that all the properties (variables) of all objects are relational, just in the case of speed" (83). I am neither smart enough nor young enough to take this kernal to its conclusion, but I wonder if it is the seed of the next revolution.

There is no such thing as inherent speed. "Speed... is a property that an object has relative to another object" (82). What I take from Rovelli's suggestion is that all the fundamental concepts of matter need to be reformulated in this way as well. There is no position but relative position. There is no mass but relative mass. There is no charge but relative charge.

"Objects are such only with respect to other objects" (88).

So who will work this insight through?

After Whiteness by Willie James Jennings

I don't have time to review it, but I wanted to keep record here of my reading. I have finished After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging by Willie James Jennings. 

Jennings is brilliant, of course. I was privileged to meet him briefly at a conference at Yale in 2018 when IWU was incredibly graced for Sarah Farmer to come teach for us in STM. Jennings' commentary on Acts is incredible, superb. I am somewhere in the middle of his, The Christian Imagination.

He is a poet, which makes his writing difficult to move through. After Whiteness at this point is more of an experience, and its relevance is not lost on me to the announcement of Houghton's new president today. Houghton has shown itself again to be a leader in the "building up that glories in the crumbling." Paradox

My main take-away is the need for true conversation between true partners. Humility on the part of the masters of education to submit to unraveling of the academy ideals, the ideals of the old man of the academy.

5. The Discipline of Teams (management series)

1. The third of ten business articles is called "The Discipline of Teams," a 1993 HBR article. One of the key questions of this article is why some teams perform and others do not. "There is a basic discipline that makes teams work. We also found that teams and good performance are inseparable; you cannot have one without the other" (112).

Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith are quite particular about what they identify as a team. It is not just any working group to them. Teams require mutual accountability--they are synergistic units of performance that are greater than the sum of their parts.

"A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable" (112).

"Most successful teams shape their purposes in response to a demand or opportunity put in their path, usually by higher management."

2. A first step is to translate mandates into performance goals.

• Specific performance goals helps to define a set of products to be worked toward and achieved.
• They facilitate communication and constructive conflict within the team.
• provides focus toward results
• "The combination of purpose and specific goals is essential to performance" (114). "Goals help a team keep track of progress, while a broader purpose supplies meaning and emotional energy."

3. A team should be of an appropriate size. Less than 10 is probably optimal. [As an aside, Keith Drury used to say that if there were more than 6 people in the room, the decision was being made elsewhere."]

Teams should have the right mix of skills. There are three key skill areas:

• technical or functional expertise
• problem-solving and decision-making skills
• interpersonal skills

Skill potential can be as important as existing skill.

4. Mutual accountability is essential. "No group ever becomes a team until it can hold itself accountable" (116). Commitment and trust are also essential.

5. Three kinds of teams:

• Teams that recommend things. Two critical aspects -- getting a good start and the hand off after a recommendation is formed. The first requires clarity in the charge. The last often involves re-engagement by the management that gave the charge.
• Teams that make or do things. The team option makes sense at the place where the cost and value of the company's products and services are most diretly determined. A relentless focus on performance is imperative.
• Teams that run things. Remember, a team needs specific performance goals. A top level reporting group is not a team unless it is working toward specific goals that are more distinct than the overall mission of the organization.

6. Successful teams:

• Establish urgency, performance standards, and direction
• Pay special attention to first meetings and actions
• Have clear rules of behavior
• Have a few immediate performance goals
• Challenge each other regularly with new facts and information
• Spend lots of time together
• Give positive feedback

"Saddling Up" -- book review of Jesus and John Wayne

Trying to read a chapter a week of Kristin Kobes du Mez's Jesus and John Wayne. I did manage to read chapter 1 this week, "Saddling Up."

1. In the age of industrialization in the late 1800s, men were feeling less and less manly. There was also a sense of the "feminization" of Victorian Christianity. Thank goodness for world wars to save us men from all becoming sissies. It's really quite pathetic.

du Mez credits Theodore Roosevelt for helping to revive the "Rough Rider" (although I guess as a young man he was ridiculed for a high voice, tight pants, and fancy clothing. In the 1910s, she argues that Christian men set out to "re-masculinize" American Christianity. "In the early twentieth century, a rugged American masculinity united northern and southern white men and transformed American Christianity" (17).

There was Billy Sunday, former professional baseball player. "As an evangelist for war, Sunday was known to leap atop his pulpit waiving the American flag" (18). However, in general, liberals were more in favor of WW1 than conservatives. For liberals, it was a sense of progress, the "war to end all wars." Well, that didn't work. 

Meanwhile, conservatives believed it trivialized the kingdom to call America a Christian nation. "Such a nation does not exist on earth, and never has existed, and never will exist until our Lord comes again" (19). That was out of Biola. And quite right. Pre-millennialists after all expected things to get worse and worse.

"In a move that seems incomprehensible today, liberal Protestants pounced on this ambivalence, denouncing conservatives' 'un-American' faith and labeling their lack of patriotism a threat to national security" (19).

2. In the time between the wars, the militant masculinity thirsting for the world war got old. There was a desire for something more respectable. Here comes the new evangelicalism of the 1940s. "'Evangelical' came to connote a more forward-looking alternative to the militant, separatist fundamentalism that had become an object of ridicule" (21). Further, "George Marsden one quipped that the simplest definition of 'evangelical' might well be 'anyone who likes Billy Graham'" (23).

This statement was interesting: "Contrary to later myths about 'the good war' and 'the greatest generation,' the military was known as an institution where drunkenness, vulgarity, gambling, and sexual disease abounded" (25).

The last part of the chapter discusses the rise of Billy Graham who embodied a sense that faith does not conflict with masculinity. Graham's rise coincided with the rise of the red scare. Two days before Graham's first LA crusade, Russia successfully tested an atomic bomb. Boom! Graham went viral as he preached the need for repentance before Jesus returned. 

Further, Graham linked "patriarchal gender roles to a rising Christian nationalism" (27). "Satan and the communists were united in an effort to destroy the American home" (26).

Some stars made it cool. Stuart Hamblen, a hard-drinking cowboy singer believed and began to write evangelical songs. "Hamblen was in many ways a harbinger of a new era of American evangelicalism" (29). Pat Boone, the actor-singer was another.

One more person closes out the chapter--John Wayne. Wayne wasn't an evangelical. There's no actual evidence that he ever prayed the sinner's prayer. He became a Catholic at the end of his life. He never served in the military.

But he became a model for evangelical masculinity. "Wayne's embodiment of heroic masculinity would come to serve as the touchstone for authentic Christian manhood" (32).

The fact that Wayne was hardly a Christian reveals something significant, I think. It suggests that a great deal of evangelicalism today has very little to do with Christianity at all. It's just predictable humanity pushed about by the tides of culture and human herd nature. Could it be that a lot of American Christian culture is only tangentially Christian?

Bob Black's How Firm a Foundation

I want to keep a record of books as I read them this year. I am an alumnus of Southern Wesleyan University (then Central Wesleyan College). I found out last year that Bob Black, one of my college professors, wrote a history of SWU for its centennial in 2006. It's not available on Amazon or anywhere, but I found one on eBay.

It's really well written. These sorts of histories are usually pretty boring, but Bob did a spectacular job. I don't plan to post any notes, but I did read it over the Christmas break and finished it last week. Lots of back and forth between Houghton and Marion College and Central in the early days. 

There are a few books like this one of the Wesleyan colleges. In a world of self-publishing, none of them need to be out of print.

Book Review: Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning

I have been reading some oldies with my daughter. I don't expect to reach my goal of a book a week, but I did succeed this past week. I must have gotten my copy of Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning in some used book store in the late 80s. It's a 1962 edition, and one of its previous owners read it in 1985. 

Without taking the time to do a full review, here are some of the things I underlined. First, the book is divided into two parts. The first part and the bulk of the book gives Frankl's reflections on his time in four concentration camps. Then the shorter second part gives a taste of his approach to psychology--logotherapy.

Here are some excerpts:

Part I: His Reflections

• "The best of us did not return" (4). This was a striking comment. He indicates that in each moment of culling, escaping death in the camps required someone else to die. Those who survived had to be willing to save their own life over someone else.
• The insult toward them was worse than the beating. (22)
• "Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire" (36). "The salvation of man is through love and in love." There can be a time when enduring suffering in the right way is the only way to achieve fulfillment.
• There was "a strong feeling that fate was one's master, and that one must not try to influence it in any way, but instead let it take its own course" (56).
• "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way" (65).
• "If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering" (67).
• Nietzsche --"He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how" (76).
• "It is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way" (77).
• A poet --"What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you" (83).
• "No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people." "Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society... therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards." (87).

Part II: Logotherapy

• "Logotherapy focuses on the future" as opposed to psychotherapy, which largely focuses on the past. (96) He speaks of a "will to meaning."
• "The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves but rather detected" (99).
• "Man is never driven to moral behavior" (99).
• "There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life" (104).
• "The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour" (108).
• "So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now" (109).
• "Human existence is essentially self-transcendence rather than self-actualization" (111).
• "Suffering ceases to be suffering in some way at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice" (113).
• "Paradoxical intention" is a solution to anticipatory anxiety. Wish the thing you are afraid will happen, and it will help you release from fear.
• Address hyper-intention (obsession) by de-reflection, transcending yourself as the focus of things.
• "Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant."

C.S. Lewis -- End of Course

 The C.S. Lewis webinar is now in the history books. The schedule was:

• "Weight of Glory" in the volume of the same name
• Books I and II of Mere Christianity
• Surprised by Joy (his autobiography)
• "Transposition" in the Weight of Glory volume, which is about being attuned to the spiritual realm beyond the merely material
• "The World's Last Night" on the second coming
• The Last Battle as the last of the Chronicles of Narnia
• Book III of Mere Christianity
• Two more essays in Weight of Glory--"The Inner Circle" and "Membership"
• Screwtape Letters
• Perelandra
• The Four Loves

1. This week we read Book IV of Mere Christianity. We read A Grief Observed. And we read two shorter pieces: "Petitionary Prayer" and "Learning in War Time."

I sense it could be a very long time till I would read something else from Lewis so I want to use the Christmas Break to finish some of his key writings. I think I'll work on the Problem of Pain next and post on A Grief Observed at that time. Then The Abolition of Man and Miracles then we are done.

2. "Petitionary Prayer" was an interesting little piece. Lewis presents an age-old conundrum. Sometimes we are to pray, "Thy will be done" and at other times we are to pray with confidence, "to move mountains." The first expresses uncertainty about what God will do. The second has the faith of complete certainty. 

Lewis' possible solution, as I understand it, is that you will know when God wants you to pray the second kind of prayer. Otherwise it's the first. I liken the sentiment to dreaming. When you're dreaming, you can be uncertain whether you are awake. When you are awake, you know you are awake.

So when it is time to pray with absolute faith you will know it is time. Otherwise, "thy will be done."

The question of Jesus' "uncertainty" in the Garden was brought up in class. Was it more an expression of feeling than uncertainty about God's will? It would not be unbiblical to suggest that Jesus was still not fully accessing his omniscience at this point. There is great certainty but still a lack of access to complete knowledge. And there is genuine dread.

Here's a quote I liked from this short essay: "Wisdom must sometimes refuse what ignorance may quite innocently ask."

3. The essay, "Learning in War Time" basically said, "We are in World War II, why study?"

This is an interesting piece because it argues for a space for knowledge for its own sake despite other things that are more urgent. This is a timely question for me. Education of necessity is increasingly utilitarian--"What job can I get with this major?" Similarly in the church, "If winning souls is the most important thing, why would we do anything else?"

Lewis' argument is that humanity doesn't work like that. We will not be saving souls all the time. Even on the front line in war we will read books. The human mind cannot just do the urgent all the time or we will burn out. We need sabbath.

I have taken a different approach. History, philosophy, religion, literature, art, music, wellness, math, science are actually utilitarian, but not everyone realizes it. A liberal arts education, when it works, does something to you. It chops off the extremes that come from ignorance. There will still be variation, but hopefully it will be a variation that is somewhat in the middle rather than at the extremes. I may write on this.

A quote I liked: "Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered."

4. This week we also finished Mere Christianity, Book IV. Here are some quotes:

• Lewis' delineation of the Trinity seems right--We pray to the Father, through the Son, powered by the Holy Spirit within us.
• He espouses a now common trope. For God to be love, there must be more than one person before the creation. Perhaps so, but this overreads the verse, "God is love," which is a metonymy.
• Book IV is largely about sanctification. There is a lot of commonality between Lewis' theology and Wesleyan-Arminian theology. I even wrote "entire sanctification" in the margin at one point.
• We "dress up" like Christ (chap 7). Eventually, when we take off the mask, we will find that we actually look like Christ.
• "Men are mirrors, or 'carriers' of Christ to other men."
• "It is God who does everything," that is the actual sanctification.
• "The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs."
• "If you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones."
• "If Christianity was something we were making up... we could make it easier. But it is not... We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about."
• "Mere improvement is not redemption."
• "I cannot help thinking that the Next Step will be really new; it will go off in a direction you could never have dreamed of."
• "Just as they are patting down the earth on its [Christianity's] grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place."

C.S. Lewis -- The Four Loves

The C.S. Lewis webinar is almost over. I am behind on my blogging, but I thought I would quickly post a summary of The Four Loves from this week.

But here is the schedule so far.

• "Weight of Glory" in the volume of the same name
• Books I and II of Mere Christianity
• Surprised by Joy (his autobiography)
• "Transposition" in the Weight of Glory volume, which is about being attuned to the spiritual realm beyond the merely material
• "The World's Last Night" on the second coming
• The Last Battle as the last of the Chronicles of Narnia
• Book III of Mere Christianity
• Two more essays in Weight of Glory--"The Inner Circle" and "Membership"
• Screwtape Letters
• Perelandra

I. Summary

The Four Loves was one of his last and, to me, it definitely had a mature feel to it.

He would say there are three "natural loves": affection (a bond such as between mother and child, storge), friendship (which is more than companionship, phileo), and eros (which is more than sex).

They can all play out in good and bad ways. The good ways all resemble God, especially when they function in a "gift" way, for God is the great Giver. They can also function in a "need" way which is not like God.

Being "like" God, however, is different from moving us toward God. The latter is far more important.

Finally, these three natural loves are lower loves. The higher love is God's "charity" or agape. His gift of agape fills and perfects the other loves, and it moves them back to God and toward others.

II. Thoughts

1. I feel like I have entered into Lewis' world here enough that it will take me a little disentangling to get out enough to look at it critically. I have been wrestling with Lewis' metaphysic quite a bit this module, which is to a large extent an Augustinian metaphysic. Lewis' writings have a tendency to shame the non-Platonist, it seems to me. 

He treats ideas and values as real and implies that those who do not are in a sense denying the reality of God. No doubt he received his fair share of mocking at Oxford, so I don't begrudge him portraying his detractors as two-dimensional people who could not perceive the spiritual dimension, the most real dimension. Certainly atheists do tend to be reductionists who do not allow for a reality beyond the empirical.

2. So what is love? I wrestled with this a bit in college. Do I love my girlfriend? I concluded more or less that love is what Lewis calls "affection" or storge (στοργή). It is an attachment to someone. As he says, you don't even have to like someone to be attached to them. They can even be abusive and yet you love them. You are connected to them, drawn to them, attached to them.

Do you wish them well? I suspect a person can have mixed feelings toward someone they love. They may want to "kill them" sometimes. But you find it hard to leave them. You would not want them to die. They are part of you.

3. There are usually feelings attached to such affection. They are feelings of desire. Love, it seems to me, is often a kind of desire for someone. Friendship is a form of this desire when the attachment is very positive. Eros is a form of desire that is more physical in nature and relates to certain kinds of human urges. A number of desires come from our bodies, perhaps all of them are based in our bodies. Lewis calls these "need desires."

There are higher human desires, like the desire for beauty. Lewis calls this "appreciation love." I personally have a strong desire for knowledge. Is the desire to give a different kind of love, a "gift" love, a "grace love"? We can categorize it as different but who is to say that it is not also based in underlying human needs?

4. Then there is Christ's command to love. Most of what I have said so far is not too different from what Lewis says. But it is when he begins to talk about "charity" that his metaphysic begins to come into play.

The Christian command to love is a command to treat other people in a particular kind of way. It means to "do to others as you would have them do to you" (Matt. 7:12). This is not about feelings necessarily. It could involve an attachment to others, but it is in the end about how you behave toward others. The fundamental Christian ethic is to behave in such a way that benefits others.

The New Testament tells us that such a behavior orientation sums up all of God's requirements of us toward others. Again, we do not have to like others to love them in this way. We do not have to desire them or feel attached to them to love them in this way, although I suspect a thoroughgoing attitude of love toward others will create attachment over time. Motion can bring emotion.

Similarly, Paul's theology would suggest, like Lewis, that we cannot consistently exhibit such love without the power of the Holy Spirit. Without the Spirit, we will fail to demonstrate love to others in the manner God commands. This is the plight of Romans 7. There is thus an empowerment from God to love, to behave lovingly toward others. 

Lewis puts it like this: "Only those into which Love Himself has entered will ascend to Love Himself." This is thick language and thus fraught with the potential for extraneous meaning. I have simply said that without God's empowerment, we will find it difficult to behave to the benefit of others and as befits our submission to God--more on this latter category in a moment. 

So we have two senses of love thus far. There is love as a desire of various degrees and kinds toward others. Then there is love as the moral command to act in such a way as to benefit others. [1]

I should also stop here and say that it is the "root" fallacy to think that there must be some common core meaning of love in all these instances. This is a fallacy of hermeneutics. Words often have distinct meanings. They may have historically common origins of meaning we can trace, but meaning is always "synchronic" (a snapshot of usage at a particular place and time) rather than "diachronic" (where past meanings would always be involved in present usage). [2]

The varied meanings of a word are a sort of "word cloud" of meaning. These varied meanings may have some relation to each other, some family resemblance, but they don't have to. Over time, meanings to a word can diverge so extensively that a dictionary will list the words separately rather than as one word with multiple definitions. The fallacious understanding of meaning is very pervasive and especially comes into play in discussions like this one.

5. Our next consideration is what we mean when we say that God is love (1 John 4:8). This is not an ontological statement. It is a metonymy. Love is so associated with God that we can say that "God is love." Any attempt to say, "but it says God is love" and therefore that this must be some sort of statement about God's being is sheer ignorance of language, laughable, linguistic incompetence.

The point is that God behaves thoroughly lovingly toward us. Love so typifies God's orientation toward us that we can say God "is" love. Such a metonymic statement suggests that God is also attached to us. God "desires" us beyond behaving in a certain way toward us. Of course, Lewis is right theologically that God does not "need" us. [3] 

As Lewis says, however, "We had better not follow Humpty Dumpty in making words mean whatever we please." When John says that God is love, we should understand love in normal ways. God wishes our benefit. This is true not only of those who serve him but of his enemies as well (Rom. 5:8). He is "attached" to those who do not serve him.

6. The last dimension of this discussion is the most difficult. What does it mean to say that we must love God with all our being? If God is self-sufficient, it makes little sense that we would act in a way that literally benefits God. Hopefully, the love of God does involve an affection and attachment to God, a desire for God, but I doubt this is what the Old Testament meant. Let's just say that the Ancient Near East was not a touchy-feely place.

So it is doubtful that God commands us to have certain feelings toward him. Feelings are epiphenomena. In themselves they are neither good nor bad. They just are. We can feed them inappropriately. There are ideal emotions to go along with our actions. But raw feeling is amoral and to a large extent biochemical.

The command to love God is a command to orient our behavior in complete allegiance to God. It is thus rooted in an orientation of our behavior. We act in such a way that conforms to his "benefit," understood as that which pleases him. [4]

The vast majority of that which pleases God is the love of our neighbor and enemy, but we probably cannot exhaust the biblical onus in this way without remainder. So we have love as desire. [5] We have love as acting in the benefit of others. The final sense is love as allegiance.

7. So there you have Ken's "three loves," with subcategories: love as desire, love as orientation of action toward the benefit of others, and love as allegiance to God. Since these last two are rooted in action, we could even reduce the list to two kinds of loves: love as desire and love as a type of moral choice toward action.  

[1] To the extent that we do not want ourselves to be harmed and that we are attached to ourselves, we "love" ourselves, a root assumption of the command to love our neighbors as ourselves (e.g., Matt. 22:39).

[2] We had an instance of this dynamic in the Lewis Q & A session. A high school student was puzzled at Lewis' use of the word charity for the highest love. Since meaning is synchronic, she only knew the sense of the word as beneficent giving to those who are in need, sometimes involving pity. Lewis, of course, was operating off the King James Version, where charity is the highest love and translates agape (e.g., 1 Cor. 13:13). The meaning of the word charity changed over the course of the twentieth century.   

[3] These things are theologically messy because of the degree to which metaphor is involved.

[4] It is almost impossible to convey these things without resorting to human analogies that are not quite literal.

[5] With desire perhaps subcategorized into 1) attachment desire, 2) physical desire (e.g., sexual, nourishment, nurture--"need" desires), and perhaps what Lewis calls "gift" loves are more subtle human desires as well-- 3) appreciation and 4) beneficent desires.

C.S. Lewis -- "Transposition"

The final installment in our reading this week for the C.S. Lewis webinar with Peter Meilaender is Lewis' sermon, "Transposition," published in the same collection of sermons as "Weight of Glory." We have also read Surprised by Joy, and Books I and II of Mere Christianity.

"Transposition" was delivered on May 28, 1944, in the chapel of Mansfield College, Oxford. Apparently, Lewis broke down in the middle of reading it and had to sit down before he could finish. I think it would be fair to say that it is the most profound piece of his thinking that I have read.

1. Perhaps the best way to slide into the sermon is to say that he is arguing against reductionism. But I also think he would be dissatisfied with that description. He is arguing for the transcendent. His basic tact, quite fascinating I think, is to note that the same visible "sign" can relate to more than one "signified" (102). He is using here the language of Ferdinand de Saussure.

So some instances of individuals speaking in tongues may just be gibberish, but many of us believe that on the Day of Pentecost something transcendent was happening, something truly spiritual. To put it a more convincing way to outsiders, the same acts can reflect both revenge and justice. The same vowel letter can reflect different sounds. The same sensation can reflect different emotions.

"Transposition occurs whenever the higher reproduces itself in the lower" (103).

2. What if there were a symphonic piece that was put into a purely piano piece. The person who had heard the symphony would know that the piano version was a reduced version, but the person who knew only the piano piece would not know this.

He gave a couple examples that were reminiscent of Plato's myth of the cave. It seems beyond question to me that he is a kind of Platonist (he uses the word archetype more than once). I'm also reminded that some of the Romantics, for whom I believe Lewis had great sympathies, considered themselves neo-Platonists.

One illustration is that of a Flatlander to whom you might try to explain three dimensions. He might say, "Isn't it very suspicious that all the shapes which you offer me as images or reflections of the solid ones turn out on inspection to be simply the old two-dimensional shapes of my own world as I have always known it?" (101).

Also, say a mother and son were in a dungeon, but he too young to remember the outside world (109-110). She, an artist, draws the outside world for him with a drawing pad and a box of pencils. She thinks he understands until, one day, she realizes that he actually thinks the outside world is made up of pencil marks.

The bottom line is that "spiritual things are spiritually discerned" (105). In other words, if you do not have an awareness of the spiritual, the world will inevitably seem materialistic.

3. There is something beyond a sign that signifies something. A picture of a sun or lamp, for example, can be seen because the sun or a lamp is shining on it. "Pictures are part of the visible world themselves and represent it only by being part of it" (102). This relationship, where the sign not only points arbitrarily to something but "the thing signified is really in a certain mode present" goes beyond the symbolical to what he would cal the "sacramental."

What he calls transposition is of this sort. "The heavenly bounties by Transposition are embodied during this life in our temporal existence (111).

4. He ends the sermon with four points. First, "transposition" is not development. It's not growing into the spiritual out of the material, like evolution. "The Spiritual reality... existed before there were any creatures who ate" (112). "Real landscapes enter into pictures" rather than real trees and grass grow out of pictures. This also feels a little Platonic on Lewis' lips, but it can be read in a non-Platonic way.

Point two has to do with the incarnation. Lewis has no problem with the words of the Athanasian Creed that the incarnation worked "not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh but by taking of Manhood into God" (113). His fourth point is similarly on the resurrection. We may feel with our senses the transcendant experience of the Spirit. Not entirely sure what he is getting at here.

Finally, his third point deals with the reductionist, the one who can see "all the facts but not the meaning" (113). He likens the materialist to a dog that can't understand pointing. "A finger is a finger to him, and that is all" (114).

C.S. Lewis -- Mere Christianity Book II

Earlier in the week I posted some thoughts on Book I of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. Today we move on to Book II. This is as far as we are reading in the book for the C.S. Lewis webinar.

1. Book I was titled, "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe." In it, Lewis basically argues that we can discern the existence of a moral standard in the universe and that such a standard is best explained by something like a mind placing demands on us. However, though this law exists, we find that we thoroughly fail to achieve its demands.

Book II is titled, "What Christians Believe."

2. As Book II begins, Lewis characteristically begins working his way through a decision tree, at each step honing in on a more refined understanding of the moral situation of the universe and on the character of its God. For example, the Christian can accept that there is partial correctness in all the other religions of the world. By contrast, if you are an atheist, then you must conclude that the majority of humans that have lived have been wrong about the existence of deity. Score one for theism.

Then he moves to the question of what kind of God we are likely talking about. Is the deity such that there really is no right or wrong? Is the deity beyond good and evil? Or is there definite good and a God who takes sides? He has already argued that good exists. 

So now he contrasts pantheism with a God who is distinct from the creation as creator. If God is identical to the universe or if the universe is part of God, then the moral ambiguity of the universe also applies to God. "If you think some things really bad, and God really good, you cannot talk like that" (40). I do agree with Lewis that God is distinct from the creation. But I argue for this distinction on the basis of ex nihilo creation rather than from a moral perspective because I am more Aristotelian than Platonic. [1]

3. This leads to the problem of evil. "If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong?" (41). Lewis now makes an argument that works with people but I don't think works with logic. It amounts to this. If there is no God then what are you complaining about? "A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line" (41). Here is again his sense that an innate human sense of right and wrong implies it exists. "If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning" (41).

Now I think it was in Surprised by Joy that Lewis remarked that some people who don't believe in God are very angry with God. I think this is a fair observation. It also is self-contradictory. So Lewis rightly points out, I think, that you cannot fault God for evil and suffering if you don't think God exists. I believe Lewis correctly points out that if there is no God, then there is no evil. This is a reason to want to believe in God--if God does not exist, then evil and suffering have no ultimate significance. We're just road kill waiting to happen.

However, there are plenty of atheists who are ok with being road kill. Not very pleasant, but at least consistent.

4. In the second chapter of this Book, he argues that "this is a good world that has gone wrong" (43). He addresses the person who would say, "That's just odd" or "That's too complicated to be likely." He calls such objections "boys' philosophy" (42). "Reality... is usually odd" (43). "Reality... is usually something you could not have guessed." I'm not real fond of this "credo quod absurdum est" argument (I believe because it's absurd), but it's really a side note anyway.

If God is good and the world has evil, Lewis has argued God must be apart from the creation. (I'm good with this point, but I suspect there is a tinge of Neoplatonism here in Lewis' mind.) So is this a situation of a world that has gone wrong (orthodox Christian position) or is there something like a dualism of good and evil in the universe?

In this section Lewis drips Augustine. "Wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way" (44). "No one ever did a cruel action because cruelty is wrong--only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him" (45). "You can explain the perverted from the normal, and cannot explain the normal from the perverted."

Dualism thus does not work because evil is the twisting of the good. The good is the standard and default. "We have no experience of anyone liking badness because it is bad" (44). This fits, by the way, with his comments on pederasty in Surprised.

Now I am not a dualist either, and I am sympathetic to Lewis' argument here. But I am not a moral ontologist like Lewis either, who almost sees good as something like a thing with its own existence. I am more like that great nominalist the apostle Paul when he said, "Nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean if someone thinks it is unclean" (Rom. 14:14). 

So for me our intentions make an act evil in a particular context, not the act itself. It is the nature of our choices in particular contexts, not the acts or even the consequences, although consequences are important to God because people are important to God. There is a difference between evil and suffering.

At the end of chapter 2, Lewis introduces Satan and the "Dark-power in the universe." He is not arguing for dualism so I don't think he would say Satan's existence is in some way necessary. Nevertheless, "Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war" (45). "Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong."

5. Chapter 3 largely presents the free will theodicy (Augustine strikes again). I am sympathetic to this argument. "Free will is what has made evil possible" (47). "If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad." "The better stuff a creature is made of--the cleverer and stronger and freer it is--then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong" (48).

"God designed the human machine to run itself" (49). This human machine was made to run on God-fuel. "God designed the human machine to run on Himself." But human civilization doesn't use the right gas. "That is the key to history." "Each time something goes wrong." We do not run on the right fuel. "They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans." [3] 

But God has sent in help. The first is the human conscience. See my previous post. The second is Jesus, "a man who goes about talking as if He was God" (49).

6. Here then at the end of chapter 3 and into chapter 4, Lewis presents his signature "Lord, liar, or lunatic" argument. The train of thought goes like this:

• Jesus claimed to be God. Therefore,
• Either he was telling the truth (which makes him Lord) or
• He wasn't and knew it (which makes him a liar) or
• He wasn't and he didn't know it (which makes him a lunatic).

I suspect that twenty-first century Brits are more open to the other options than they were in the 1940s. Lewis says you cannot chose the option that says, "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God" (50). No, if he isn't Lord, he must either be a liar or a lunatic.

Now of course if you read someone like Bart Ehrman, he would deny the first premise. Ehrman would deny that the historical Jesus actually claimed to be God. I've also noted that Josh McDowell has added "legend" to the list of options, addressing mythicists who claim that Jesus wasn't even a real person.

7. Chapter 4 addresses the question of atonement. Here I love the phrase "deep magic" from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but Lewis doesn't use that phrase here. Lewis insists that Christians do not have to believe one particular theory on how it works. "My own church--the Church of England--does not lay down any one of them as the right one" (53). But "a man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him."

But Lewis gives his sense of one such theory, penal substitution. He does not take punishment here in the sense of the "police-court sense" (54). Rather, it's about getting humanity out of a hole it got itself into. Humanity is a "rebel who must lay down his arms." "This movement full speed astern is what Christians call repentance."

"Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly" (54). So God becomes human. "He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God" (55). My Western individualism has always made this argument difficult for me to follow. I think Jesus death makes sense broadly as a satisfaction of the justice and "moral order" of the cosmos. 

But the detailed logic of penal substitution seems forced to me, and ultimately I do believe God had the authority and sovereignty simply to pardon humanity. The cross was far more for us than for God. In the end, there is a deep magic done here, but I'm not sure we can put it into a tight syllogism.

He helpfully adds, "Such is my own way of looking at what Christians call the Atonement. But remember this is only one more picture" (56).

8. The final chapter of Book II anticipates the next Book on morals, which unfortunately I will not be covering at this time. In chapter 5, Lewis makes an altar call for a decision. I thought of Billy Graham, whose ministry began in earnest at about the same time. 

"The Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him" (59)... or her. "There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names--Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord's Supper. At least those are the three ordinary methods" (57-58). 

I am always fascinated in such contexts by the fact that the Holy Spirit is not mentioned so often (e.g., in Richard Peace's, Conversion in the New Testament). The Holy Spirit is the indication that a person is a Christian and the only means to the Christian life. The Holy Spirit is the juice on which baptism, faith, and communion run if they run at all. Nevertheless, I do believe in means of grace.

He ends the chapter and Book with two fascinating side notes. One is that "God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him" (60). I am deeply sympathetic to these statements because of the revealed character of God in Scripture.

The final side note has to do with why God doesn't just invade the world to end evil. "Well, Christians think He is going to land in force." (The allusions to WW2 are interesting, which was in process at the original time these lectures were given on the radio). 

"Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it" (61).

[1] And I am more "nominalist" than Aristotelian. Or shall I say Wittgensteinian? I prefer to think of groupings of things by commonalities, "family resemblances," rather than by essences. This third answer to the problem of universals and particulars also fits with what we might call pragmatism.

[2] I doubt Satan has genitalia.

[3] I remembered here that my old colleague Steve Horst is quite fond of Greg Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil. I believe Horst likes Lewis, and Boyd points to Satan as the biggest explanation to the problem of evil.

Dale Carnegie II: "Six Ways to Make People Like You"

In honor of what would have been my father's 96 birthday on October 30, my daughter Sophie are reading his second favorite book (after the Bible), Dale Carnegie's, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Here is my post on Part I.

Part II of is titled, Six Ways to Make People Like You.
Chapter 1: "Do This and You'll Be Welcome Anywhere"

• "It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men [and women] who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from such individuals that all human failures spring." Alfred Adler (52-53)
• "We are interested in people who are interested in us." Publilius Syrus (61)
• "Become genuinely interested in other people" (62).

Chapter 2: "A Simple Way to Make a Good First Impression"

• "Smile" (70).
• "Happiness doesn't depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions" (67... reminds me of Victor Frankl)
• "The expression one wears on one's face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one's back" (63).
• "Smile when talking on the phone" (65).
• "Action and feeling go together... by regulating the action... we can indirectly regulate the feeling" (William James). To put it the way one of my students once did, "Motion brings emotion."
• "Nobody needs a smile so much as those who have none left to give" (70). Anon

Chapter 3: "If You Don't Do This, You Are Headed for Trouble"

• The bottom line of this chapter is, "Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language" (79).
• It seems like my Dad may have talked to me about this sometime, the importance of remembering people's names. I've certainly absorbed it from somewhere. I'll say that my skills at the big picture carry a price on these sorts of unattached details. I remember things in connection to other things. Nevertheless, it is important and I work hard to remember names. I need to work harder.
• "One of the first lessons a politician learns is this: 'To recall a voter's name is statesmanship. To forget it is oblivion'" (77).
• You can extend this to the personal touch. I hear that Jim Barnes would sit throughout certain meanings signing letters to donors. I know President Mullen of Houghton sends personal notes to prospective students. Our online advisor sends not only personal notes and tea to each student, but meets with every online student one-on-one and knows their individual names and situations in detail.

Chapter 4: "An Easy Way to Become a Good Conversationalist"

• "Be a good listener" (88).
• "People who talk only of themselves think only of themselves" (88).
• "Listening is one of the highest compliments we can pay anyone" (81).
• "The ability to listen seems rarer than almost any other good trait" Isaac Marcosson

Chapter 5: "How to Interest People"

• "The royal road to a person's heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most" (89).

Chapter 6: "How to Make People Like You Instantly"

• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. "Let's obey the Golden Rule" (96).
• "Always make the other person feel important" (95)... "and do it sincerely" (105).
• "The life of many a person could probably be changed if only someone would make him [or her] feel important" (98).