Revelation 11:19-12:17 Explanatory Notes

Continuing my detailed explanatory notes of Revelation. 
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Introduction to the Second Vision
The outline of Revelation with the most explanatory power is one in which John has three visions, each of which begins with heaven being opened: 

Vision 1: 4:1-11:18 (The Series of Sevens)
Vision 2: 11:19-19:10 (The Dragon and the Beasts)
Vision 3: 19:11-22:5 (The Millennium and New Jerusalem)

You may have noticed we've paused partway through the first vision, which begins at 4:1 with a door being opened in heaven. We have looked at Revelation 4 and 5 because they provide an important focus for everything that happens in the book. God and Jesus are the focus. They are worthy. They prevail over all the forces of evil.

The reason we are skipping forward is so that we have all the keys we need to fully unlock the rest of the first vision and the rest of the book. Each vision arguably repeats the same basic sequence of events with a different set of images. This is called a "recapitulationist" approach to Revelation because it sees most of the apocalypse's imagery as a repetition of the same basic points from a different vantage point, like a kaleidoscope.

So we pause the first vision to get our symbolic moorings. We'll walk through the dragon and the beasts in chapters 12–19. Once we have those images decoded, we'll return to finish the first vision with its seals and trumpets. Then we'll be able to read them with much clearer eyes.

11:19 And the temple of God that is in the sky was opened and the Ark of his Covenant appeared in his temple and there happened lightning flashes and voices and thunders and shaking and great hail.  
Thus begins the second of Revelation's three visions. As at 4:1 and later at 19:11, John sees into the sky -- that is, heaven -- to begin the vision. He sees the Ark of the Covenant there, a reminder that the Ancient Near East typically saw earthly temples as miniature versions of the more real sanctuaries for the gods in the sky.  Similarly, Hebrews 8:5 understood Moses to have been shown the pattern of the heavenly sanctuary before it was built (cf. Exodus 25:40).

It's a reminder that no earthly temple can ever be the true temple (cf. Heb. 8:1-2). And, as we will discuss in greater detail later, there can never be another earthly temple that is legitimate, since Christ has forever atoned for all sins (Heb. 10:14). 

The appearance of thunder, lightning, shaking and so forth is a sign of God's presence. We see this imagery elsewhere in Revelation when God appears. It is the language of "theophany," the appearance of God. Hebrews 12:18-19 associates this sort of imagery with the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai.

By this point in the apocalypse, Revelation 8:5 has already shown us this same thundering in heaven, and we will see it again in 16:18. We will argue in the pages ahead that these are not likely a literal sequence of events. They are the same basic image repeated with intensification each time (thunder, then thunder and hail, then a hail unlike any before it).

12:1 And a great sign appeared in the sky. [There was] a woman, having been clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and on her head, a crown with twelve stars. 2 And being with child even she cried out having birth pains even anguishing to give birth.
The clue that unlocks the identity of this woman is the fact that she has twelve stars in her crown. She must represent Israel. As we will soon see, the child to which she gives birth is the Messiah. She is thus true Israel, not to be equated straightforwardly with Jerusalem. 

This is an important interpretive point. In Revelation 11, the earthly Jerusalem is equated with Egypt and Sodom (11:8), that is, the bad guys. It's a reminder that John's community was an outcast group among ethnic Israel. The Jesus movement was a Jewish sect that was quite distinct from the majority of Jews at that time. The woman is thus a faithful subset of Israel.

The imagery of sun and moon reminds us of Joseph's dream of his father, mother, and brothers bowing down to him (Gen. 37:9-10). We will see another woman later in Revelation 17, "the great prostitute" that is Rome. The stars and moon thus hint that it is Israel that holds true heavenly legitimacy.

The counterfeits would have easily come to the audience's mind. Ephesian readers lived in the shadow of the great temple of Artemis, hailed as the "Queen of the Cosmos." Her statues sometimes had the zodiac stars on her chest. The Egyptian Isis and images of Roma also featured heavenly features.

3. And another sign appeared in the sky and, behold, [there was] a great red dragon having seven heads and ten horns and on its heads, seven crowns. 

The dragon here is obviously Satan. The seven heads, we will find out in Revelation 17:9, is Rome. At least Rome is the archetype for the earthly power that is the tool of Satan. The seven crowns represent the first seven major emperors or kings of Rome: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Vespasian, and Titus. 

The ten horns bring us imagery drawn from Daniel 7:7 and 24. They probably should not be taken to be 10 literal kings. [1] They are ten symbolic kings (17:12). But they generally symbolize those subsidiaries that administer the power of Rome in the world, Rome's political representatives in administrative jurisdictions, provinces, and client kingdoms.

4. And his tail sweeps away a third of the stars of the sky and he cast them on the earth and the dragon stood before the woman about to give birth so that it might devour her child whenever she might give birth.

The original audience of Revelation might have heard overtones of a couple of stories from Greco-Roman mythology in this verse. Most commentators point to the story of Python and Leto. Leto is about to give birth to the god Apollo, and the dragon-like Python pursues her to destroy her and her child. But she is carried to safety, and Apollo ends up killing Python, as he was fated to do.

The other story is the god Saturn waiting to devour his children when they were born. He had been told that one of his children (Jupiter) would overthrow him. The imagery of the dragon here may mix the two stories. 

The child about to be born here is the Messiah, Jesus, as we will see in the next verse.

Stars were often understood to be heavenly beings in the Jewish literature of this period. The imagery of an evil agent casting down some of the heavenly host to the earth comes from Daniel 8:10. This is not some primordial fall of Satan and his angels from heaven from the early days of creation. 

The most consistent way to take the imagery is that the dragon defeats about a third of the heavenly host, since in Daniel 8:10 the horn is against those he throws down. Note also the parallel with the fourth trumpet in Revelation 8:12, where a third of the stars are struck. Later Christian tradition would take this imagery to imply that a third of the angels fell with Satan, which seems to stray far from the context.

5. And she bore a male son who is about to rule all the nations with an iron staff. And her child was snatched to God and to his throne. 6. And the woman fled to the desert where she has a place having been prepared by God so that they might nourish her for one thousand, two hundred, and sixty days.

Ruling with an iron staff is an allusion to Psalm 2:9 and a clear indication that this is the Messiah, the Son of God. Jesus Christ will indeed rule all the nations (Ps. 2:8). However, Jesus did not commence that earthly rule when he was on earth. Rather, he died on the cross, rose from the dead, and ascended to heaven. 

The snatching of the Messiah to God's throne is almost certainly a reference to Christ's ascension and session at God's right hand. We remember Psalm 110:1, which played such a central role in the formation of early Christology: "The LORD said to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.'"

The woman flees to the desert. Τhis is true Israel escaping the pursuit of Satan. Here, as in Revelation 11:8, the early Jewish church seems to be a true remnant within broader ethnic Israel. Earthly Jerusalem in this imagery was Sodom, and it was destroyed by the beast, which as we will see, is associated with Rome.

According to early Christian tradition, the Jerusalem church did indeed flee Jerusalem to Pella in the days before Rome laid siege and eventually destroyed the city. [2] This seems to be how Luke understood the prophecy of Mark 13:14. The earlier version in Mark said, "When you see the abomination of desolation standing where it must not... let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains." Luke 21:20 paraphrases this as, "When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies..." 

This is a clear allusion to the siege of Jerusalem, indicating that Luke saw the prophecy fulfilled in AD 70. As we will see, it also fits with the sense we get from Revelation 17:10 that the vision locates itself during the reign of Vespasian. Vespasian had led the Roman campaign in Palestine, and the fall of Jerusalem happened about a year into his reign.

In general, the timing of these verses is very revealing, a key to understanding the tribulation of Revelation. The son is snatched with the ascension of Jesus in AD 30. Then the dragon pursues the woman for 1,260 days. This picture of 42 months, 1,260 days, or a "time, times, and half a time" recurs in Revelation. It is drawn from Daniel 7:25.

The timing begins when the child is snatched to heaven. This is very important. It suggests that the period since Jesus' ascension began the time of the dragon's pursuit of the woman, the church. At the time of the vision, John felt like he was in the thick of that pursuit. Thus, as we have argued, the current day of John was the time of tribulation. And, by extension, we are still in that time.

This three-and-a-half year period is thus not a literal 3.5 years. It had already run about forty years at the time of the vision. And John may also have had the Jewish War in mind. Obviously, these are not tidy referents for the image, but by now we should be used to the fact that these images are more impressions, overlapping, kaleidoscopic.

7. And a war came about in the heaven. Michael and his angels in order to war with the dragon. And the dragon warred and his angels. 8. But he was not strong, and a place was not found for them in the heaven.

Again, given Christian tradition, it would be tempting to see this as a battle that the angels fought in heaven in the early history of the world, resulting in the fall of Satan and his angels. But this is not the context. The context is what we might call the "Christ-event," taking all that Christ accomplished in his coming to earth as a single moment in salvation's story.

This is very reminiscent of what Jesus says in Luke 10:18. His disciples have just returned from a mission, and they are amazed that even the demons obey them. This is when Jesus says that he has seen Satan fall from heaven like lightning. The verse is not about some primordial fall of Satan. It is about the dethroning of Satan with the arrival of the kingdom of God. 

This is the very meaning of Jesus' exorcisms. The use of the finger of God to cast out demons is a clear indication that the kingdom of God has arrived among them, right then (Luke 11:20). So also, at the same time that the male child is snatched up to heaven, after the Lamb of God has accomplished his earthly mission, we can speak of a war in heaven in which the dragon and his angels are defeated.

Michael seems to be the archangel in charge of God's armies (cf. Dan. 10:13; 12:1; Jude 9). The dragon is defeated. He and his angels are cast out of heaven, at least the higher heavens. Perhaps Satan and his angels are cast down to the lowest sky, the sky that we know above us. [3] Ephesians calls Satan the "prince of the power of the air" (Eph. 2:2), another association of Satan with the sky.

9. And the Great Dragon was expelled, the ancient serpent, the one being called the Devil and the Satan, the one deceiving the whole inhabited world was expelled to the earth and his angels were expelled with him.

Here is the full identification of the dragon. He is the serpent of Genesis 3. He is the Devil. He is the Satan. He is the deceiver.

The identification of Satan with the serpent is traditional in Christian circles, but it interestingly does not appear widely in Scripture. Genesis itself makes no mention of Satan, and we have no clear attestation to this connection before the first century BC. [4] Beyond the book of Revelation, Paul also seems to have made this equation. [5]

The fact of Satan's fall is a matter of mixed impact. On the one hand, "we know his doom is sure," as the translation of Martin Luther's hymn, "A Mighty Fortress," puts it. He is cast down to the earth, which includes the air just above us. 

Yet, at the same time, he is still wreaking plenty of havoc. John would likely be surprised to know that he has remained in this fallen yet active position for 2000 years. He is defeated, yet he is still kicking. His defeat is certain, yet it seems partial at present, and he is still causing plenty of damage.

10. And I heard a great voice in the heaven saying, “Now has come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ because the accuser of our brothers [and sisters] was expelled, the one accusing them before our God both day and night. 11. And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their witness and they did not love their life to the point of death.

The snapshot of judgment in the second vision does not stretch out like the Vision of Sevens does. Michael defeats Satan in heaven, and salvation has seemingly arrived. The kingdom of God is here. The authority of Christ is here. The accuser of the brothers and sisters is done for. It is another picture of the final defeat of evil and the commencing of millennium, as we will see in Revelation 20.

Christ’s ascension, Satan’s expulsion, the church’s present ordeal, and the final victory are all blurred together here, although we can logically separate them out.

To call Satan the accuser especially makes us think of Zechariah 3:1, where the Satan accuses the high priest Joshua before the Lord. It also reminds us of Job 1-2, where the job of the Adversary is to test the people of earth to see if they will be faithful to God. Now, those who have remained faithful have been proven, and those who have apostatized have become clear. There is no more need for the great tempter.

Those who have prevailed, who have come out of the great ordeal, are those who loved God and Christ more than their own life. They were willing to die rather than betray that allegiance. And they were able to prevail because of the blood of the Lamb. 

12. Therefore, rejoice, heavens and those dwelling in them. Woe to the earth and the sea because the Devil has come down to you having a great wrath, knowing that he has little time."

The call to the heavens to rejoice reminds us of the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32:43. [6] It is also associated with God's judgment on those who have persecuted his people. In Revelation, the verse reiterates the sense that, while Satan is defeated, he has been allowed to wreak havoc on the earth before his final defeat. That is the moment we are in. This is that moment, the moment of the great ordeal, the great "tribulation."

He is ticked off, like a wounded animal. You may have experience with the great danger that comes from a powerful animal that is wounded. When someone is drowning, one must take care that they do not pull you under in their desperation if you try to help.

Satan is fatally wounded, and he will take as many down with him as he can.

13. And when the dragon saw that he was cast out to the earth, he persecuted the woman who bore the male child. 14. But the two wings of the great eagle were given to the woman that she might fly into the desert into her place where she is nourished there for a time and times and a half of a time from the face of the serpent. 

We have already seen this imagery above (12:6). The dragon attempts to destroy Israel, but true Israel escapes. True Israel will survive the time of this great ordeal, this "time, times, and half a time." Even though Jerusalem herself is destroyed, God will preserve a righteous remnant.

There is some imagery of the exodus here. Being borne out on eagle's wings is reminiscent of Exodus 19:4, where God brings Israel out of Egypt on the wings of eagles. The eagle hovers over its young in the Song of Moses (Deut. 32:11). Israel was nourished by manna in the desert. 

15. And the serpent cast from his mouth after the woman water as a river that it might make her swept away by the flood. 16. But the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed the water that the dragon cast from his mouth.

At first, this seems a peculiar image. Many commentators mention both Israel's escape through the Red Sea (Exod. 15:12) and also Pharaoh's attempt to drown the male children of Israel (Exod. 1:22). 

Some commentators also note an event that took place during the Jewish War when Jewish refugees trying to escape Gadara, fleeing the Romans in AD 68, were trapped against the flooded Jordan River. [7] Whatever the precise connotations in John's mind, we clearly get the sense that the church escapes the Devil's attempts to pursue and eliminate her.

17. And the δragon was furious because of the woman and he went away to make war with the rest of her seed, the ones keeping the commandments of God and having the witness of Jesus. 18. And he stood on the sand of the sea.

The verse we have as 12:18 is put in different places in different versions of the New Testament. The NRSVUE has it as we do. The RSV added it to the end of 12:17. The NIV has it as part of 13:1, as did the KJV (although it reads "I" stood). But some version of the words is in all the translations.

The picture is one where Satan has unsuccessfully managed to pursue the Jewish believers in Palestine. They have escaped his grasp. He is furious at his failure. Now he stands on the sands of the sea looking toward the rest of the world.  He is going to make war with the rest of Israel's seed.

The mention of the Devil going after the seed of the woman may echo Genesis 3:15, which predicted that there would be enmity between the seed of Eve and the seed of the serpent. It also predicted that the seed of the woman would eventually crush the serpent's head.

Who are the rest of her children? Are they Diaspora Jews? Are they Gentile believers? 

In keeping with the imagery Revelation has used in relation to the Jews in Jerusalem, the rest of the woman's seed are at the very least believers. They are not Diaspora Jews in general. And John would probably have thought of Gentile believers as individuals incorporated into the people of Israel.

The key is not whether they are Jewish or Gentile. The key is whether they keep the commandments of God and are witnesses to Jesus as the Messiah. 

Keeping God's commandments is an essential part of all New Testament theology. Paul believed in initial justification by faith, but he also believed in a final justification by works (2 Cor. 5:10). Those that Satan was turning toward were believers in Jesus and yes, individuals who were keeping the commandments of God, both Jew and Gentile.

And just maybe John also had the churches to which he was writing in view.

[1] In the 1980s, some prophecy teachers noted there were 10 countries in the European Common Market at that time. As with all such prophecies, they were wrong. 100% failure rate.

[2] Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.5.3.

[3] Remember that the word for sky is the same word as the word for heaven. We make a far greater distinction between these concepts than they did. Heaven was simply up, and there were layers of sky above us -- that is, layers of heaven above us. Same thing.

[4] Cf. Wisdom of Solomon 2:24; Life of Adam and Eve (Apocalypse of Moses) 16–17.

[5] In 2 Corinthians 11:3, 14 and Romans 16:20.

[6] The Masoretic text reads, "Rejoice, nations," but the Dead Sea Scrolls and Greek translation likely give the more original reading as here.

[7] F. F. Bruce pointed out this possibility, recorded in Josephus, Jewish War 4.433–36.

Revelation 11:15-18 Explanatory Notes

Continued from the last one.
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11:15 And the seventh angel blew the trumpet, and loud voices came about in the sky, saying, "The kingdom of the world has become [the kingdom of] our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever." 

We arrive at the seventh trumpet and the end of the first vision that began in chapter 4. Keener notes that trumpets were often blown when a king ascended to the throne. [1] Perhaps this is why the vision of trumpets was used in this sequence in the first place -- to lead to the reign of Christ. Note that this is also perhaps the first vision's equivalent to something like Christ's millennial reign. 

Each of the visions culminates in the final judgment and final victory of God and his Christ. This is a reminder that the visions for the most part are not sequential but reiterations of the same basic truths. Accordingly, this may be the first time we reach the final arrival of the kingdom in Revelation, but it will not be the last.

You may recognize the words of this verse as the culminating words of the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel's Messiah: "The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ." The Lord in this verse refers not to Christ but to God the Father. In John's mind, therefore, it likely is a reference to Yahweh, which is translated kyrios or Lord in the Greek Old Testament.

The reference to "his Christ" is a reference to God's Messiah, God's anointed one, God's promised king. The phrase comes from Psalm 2, which pictures the nations raging “against the Lord and against his Christ” (Ps. 2:2). The wording matches the Greek translation of Revelation exactly. In the psalm, the nations conspire against the anointed king, and God answers by installing him on Zion and giving him the nations as his inheritance (Ps. 2:6-9).

John has been drawing on Psalm 2 throughout Revelation (see 2:26-27; 12:5; 19:15). Here, at the seventh trumpet, the psalm reaches its goal. The kings of the earth set themselves against the Lord and his Christ, and now the kingdom of the world belongs to them. The “angry” nations of verse 18 echo the psalm’s opening scene, so the section ends where Psalm 2 begins, with the nations in rebellion and God’s response.

It is a little ambiguous as to who will reign forever and ever. Since the Lord is the focus of the verse, a reference to God the Father reigning immediately comes to mind. For example, we note that the next verse focuses on the worship of God the Father.

However, the core function of a Messiah is to reign, so it would not be wrong to think of Christ reigning as well. In the end, they both will reign (22:1-2). Some have argued that the singular refers to both God the Father and Christ. 

The idea that this kingdom will last forever goes back to Daniel. Daniel 2:44 describes a kingdom God will set up that “shall never be destroyed.” Daniel 7:14 and 7:27 describe that rule as everlasting and shared with the saints. 

16. And the twenty-four elders who sit before God on their thrones fell on their faces and worshiped God, 17. saying, "We give thanks to you, LORD God Almighty, the One who is and who was because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign. 

The first vision began with the twenty-four elders around the throne worshipping God the Father. It is thus fitting that the vision should end back on this scene. This literary structure is called an "inclusio," the bracketing of a section by similar elements at the beginning and the end. 

This supports our claim that we have correctly identified where the first vision begins and ends. Similarly, the elders fall down in 4:10, and they praise God for his power in 4:11.

Additionally, we saw the description that God "is and was" in 4:8 at the beginning of this vision. Note that the expression "and is to come" is missing here. Why? Because the kingdom of God has now arrived, a reminder that each vision ends with the final reign of God -- they're not sequential visions.

The expression, "you have taken" is in the perfect tense. It suggests that God took that power and still has it. Similarly, although the word "begun" is not in the Greek, the verb for "reign" is aorist and, in this case, should probably be interpreted as what is called an "inceptive" aorist. This is where the word "begun" comes from.

18. "And the nations were enraged, and your wrath came, and the time for the dead to be judged and to give reward to your servants the prophets and the saints and those who fear your name, the small and the great, and for those who have destroyed the earth to be destroyed."

Coming at the end of the first vision, this verse reads as a summary of the judgment that has taken place. The nations opposed and oppressed God's true people. In response, God finally came in judgment. Now begins the time of vindication when God's servants and saints who have been persecuted will rise from the dead. 

John specifically seems to have those, like the symbolic "two witnesses" earlier in this chapter, who proclaim God's indictment to the world and who suffer as a result. John surely has in mind individuals like Peter, the two Jameses, and Paul who paid the ultimate penalty for their witness. 

Many have since followed. "Small and great" indicates that it is not just the well-known witnesses who will be vindicated. This is the final answer to the question "How long?" in 6:10. The "little longer" in 6:11 has run out.

Yet so many of the unrighteous succeed in their evildoing in this world. The vision ends with a reminder that the dead have not escaped justice. God will raise them for judgment (20:11-15). Those who destroyed the earth will be destroyed.

It is interesting that John does not say they will be punished forever but that they will be "destroyed." Nevertheless, the third vision seems to point to eternal punishment (14:11; 20:10), so this verse does not seem to refer to annihilation.

[1] Keener, Revelation, 352. 

Family History: 2. The Dutch Schencks

A Family History of the United States continues with chapter 2. Previously was Jamestown.
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1. In 1620, Roelof Martense Schenck was born in what would become the Dutch Republic in Europe. In 1650, the year that his father died, he left for America.

He was from a prominent family in the land we now call the Netherlands. We can trace his family’s story back back at least to the 1400s. It would be natural to think that the name "Schenck" is German. That is, if it were really pronounced “shank,” German would make sense.

However, its proper pronunciation is actually “skank.” The skank pronunciation reflects its Dutch origins. One day early in my marriage, we were watching Saturday Night Live, and in one skit, Mike Myers said, “Look at those two skanks.” We looked at each other with surprise. 

From that point on, we realized that a "skank" was a not so flattering a reference to a certain kind of woman.

2. There is evidence of a Wynant Schenck living in the Bleijenbeek Castle in the Netherlands in 1405. The castle was built about fifty years earlier and would generally be in Schenck possession for the next couple hundred years.

As far as direct lineage, we can go back to the mid-1400s:

Textbox: Dederick Schenck van Nydeck
Dederick II Schenck van Nydeck (1481-1525)
Dederick III Schenck van Nydeck (1514-1560)
Pieter VII Schenck van Nydeck (1547-1580)
Maarten Schenck van Nydeck (1584-1650)
Roelof Schenck van Nydeck (1620-1704)

The “van Nydeck” or “van Nydeggen” part indicates the origins of the family in Nideggen, which is currently in western Germany. This is where the family was located when they took on the last name (or surname) Schenck.

At some point in the Middle Ages, people began to take on surnames. Schenck has the sense of a cupbearer or, perhaps more likely for this area, a tavern keeper. So perhaps, the ancestors of the Schencks in 1000s Nydeggen ran a tavern, a place for food and fun.

We also must remember that the national boundaries that exist now did not exist in the late Middle Ages. The Netherlands was not a country then, nor was Germany. All this land was then part of the Holy Roman Empire, which was a vast collection of almost 2000 small states, each with a castle of its own. Although it seems a bit bizarre now, this area of the Netherlands was even under Spanish control in the 1500s. The part of Germany in which Nideggen is located only really became German in 1713 when Prussia took it over.

In those medieval days, this part of the Netherlands was mostly the Duchy of Guelders, and most of it is still in the province of Gelderland today. If you look at where the ancestors of the Schencks were born, they are in this area, although Goch was in the nearby Dutchy of Cleves. This is, by the way, where the family of Vincent “van Gogh” traced back to.

Textbox: Birthplaces
Dederick II (1481-1525) – Bleijenbeck Castle
Dederick III (1514-1560) – Bleijenbeck Castle
Pieter VII (1547-1580) – Goch
Maarten (1584-1650) – Doesberg

3. As I said, Roelof came to America in 1650, the year that his father Maarten died. There is a fun story from the late 1500s about Maarten's uncle, who was also called Maarten. 

This Maarten was born in Goch (1540-1589), like Roelof's grandfather Pieter. Both were military men. Pieter was a general. And Maarten too was a military commander in the fightings of that era. He fought with the Dutch William of Orange in the fight for independence from Spain. This fight began in 1568 and would continue off and on until the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648 (sometimes called the Eighty Years War). At the end of that war, the Dutch Republic was finally born as an independent state. And our ancestor Roelof left for America two years after independence!

Back to Uncle Maarten. He wanted Bleijenbeek Castle for himself, so he physically took possession of it from his cousin. But the court of William of Orange legally favored his cousin. He became unpopular with William’s court. The last straw was the crushing Dutch defeat by the Spanish at the Battle of Gembloux in 1578. You can hear the Schenck in him. “Incompetent leaders. Ungrateful idiots. I want to be on the winning side.” He switched sides and fought in the Army of Flanders (Spanish, Catholic side) for a few years before coming to his senses.

Whichever side he was on, he was known for daring, charisma, and occasionally, winning by cleverness and daring. It is said he could eat, drink, and sleep while riding on his horse, “and his men followed him like dogs.” Again, in good Schenck fashion, after a few years, he didn’t feel like the Spanish were treating him right, and he returned to the Dutch side in 1585. He became Lieutenant Governor of Gelderland. In 1586 he was commissioned to build a fortress in a village that still exists today, Schenkenschanz.

My own father, Lee Schenck (1924-2012), interestingly went through this area of modern Germany when he was in World War II. He had no idea he was passing through the lands of his ancestors. He was always reminded of these “plains of Westphalia, Germany” when we would drive south of Gainesville, Florida, coming home from Indiana. The landscape there comes down from higher ground into lowlands, and it reminded him of his time in Germany.

It is interesting that he was that far north during the war. The Allies took the north Rhineland and Westphalia back from the Nazis from March to May 1945. I knew he was stationed in Nancy, France, and then later in Manheim, Germany. But he must have crossed into Germany at some point in the north. He was well behind the front line when he moved to these places, never really in harm’s way except perhaps from possible leftover snipers.

4. Maarten would seem to have been a tricky character. In a move not unlike the Trojan horse, he got into one city by disguising soldiers on a salt wagon. Maarten met an untimely death that, again, somehow seems quite appropriate for a Schenck. He was trying to take Nijmegen for the Dutch by entering the city through windows on the river Waal.

The river was flowing faster than expected because of rain, and they were not able to enter where they had planned. Half their barges overshot their goal. When they finally were able to get in some windows, they stumbled onto a wedding party that ended their hopes for a surprise attack. In a hasty retreat, he jumped into the river, where his armor and the swollenness of the river caused him to drown. When they found his body a few days later, they decapitated him, put his head on a pike, and quartered his body. He died August 10, 1589.

Our ancestor Roelof Schenck was Maarten’s great nephew, the grandson of Maarten’s less controversial brother Pieter. Pieter was also a general for the Dutch throughout those conflicts—the whole time. Roelof’s father married a woman in Amersfoort, Utrecht in 1619. The Dutchy of Utrecht was to the northwest of Guelders. And that is where Roelof was born in 1620.

5. My impression is that these Schencks were doers, not so much thinkers. Plenty of thinking was going on at the time in the Dutch region, but I’m not sure how much our ancestors paid attention. They seemed much more interested in fighting the war for independence from Spain. The parts of Dutch culture from this period that we prize today largely took place in the County of Holland to the west, where Amsterdam is located. This area was a distinct culture where the primary language spoken was Frisian.

The fight for independence put them on the Calvinist side, and the Schencks would be devoted to the Dutch Reformed Church after they arrived in America. We cannot know whether these Schencks even knew of Jacobus Arminius in Amsterdam and later Leiden (1560-1609). The Schencks of my generation firmly espouse Arminius’ perspectives against the Calvinists, ironically. Arminius argued that God empowered our human wills so that we became able either to choose or not choose God. The Calvinists believed that God predetermined who would be saved.

Arminius taught in Leiden until 1609, when he died. In the aftermath of his death, his view would be considered heresy at the Synod of Dort in 1619, where the Calvinist TULIP became the official position. Again, who knows whether our ancestors had strong opinions on such things. I wonder rather if they mocked those silly Frisians to the west and their arguments over unimportant things.

Textbox: The TULIP
Total depravity – Humans are thoroughly evil.
Unconditional Election – God chooses the saved.
Limited Atonement – Christ only died for the elect.
Irresistible Grace – You will be saved if God chooses.
Perseverance of the Saints – You will make it.

6. This was also the time when Rembrandt was painting, also in Leiden (1606-69). This was the age of Grotius (1583-1645), one of the greatest thinkers of the time. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1618 for being an Arminian. He escaped and finished out his life elsewhere.

Baruch Spinoza was about 18 when Roelof left for America. Spinoza was an unorthodox Jewish philosopher who believed in pantheism and is often mentioned in the trio of rationalists from this period: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Descartes himself, sometimes called the father of modernism, lived in Holland from 1629-1649. It was here that he published his famous, “I think; therefore, I am” (1637).

Our ancestor thus left the Dutch Republic for New Amsterdam in the prime of the Dutch Golden Age. If the greatest thinkers of the day were in Holland, Roelof headed for a new conquest in the New World. Who knows what he thought of them? Crazy liberals? I’m out of here. His family would prove influential in New Amsterdam as well.

Sermon Starters: Today Is the Day (Hebrews 4:1-11)

Title: "Today is the Day"

Location: Hanfield Methodist Church

Text: Hebrews 4:1-11 

A paraphrase: "Since a promise to enter God's rest has been given us, we should be concerned if some of you would miss out. For just like Israel had the promise of entering Canaan, God has given us good news as well. The promise to them didn't help them because they didn't believe in it. For only those who trust God can enter his rest. 

"Remember where Scripture says that God rested on the seventh day? There's also going to be a
Sabbath rest" for God's people today as well. Because they did not enter, God set aside another day in the Psalms, 'Today.' 

"Those who have entered God's rest, rest from their labors like God did on the seventh day. So let's do our best to enter that rest!"

Introduction

• My tolerance for procrastination
• Waiting for a "Round Tuit"
• We can procrastinate important things too: time with children or parents, time with friends and family.
• Illustration

I. There is a future rest.

• Hebrews 4 talks about a sabbath rest. God ordered the world for 6 days. Then he 'rested" from that work. So we are "working hard" right now. Having faith can be hard work too. But there is a rest that is coming in the kingdom of God and in heaven while we wait.
• Hebrews 3 -- They'd left Egypt. They'd been baptized. They were in. They had the promise. They didn't make it. Their corpses fell in the desert. See 1 Corinthians 9 also.
• Glad this is a Methodist church. There is no eternal security in Hebrews.
• Different theories of what they're facing: 1) pressure from synagogue, 2) demoralization of a destroyed temple, 3) delay of Christ's return, 4) fatigue of bearing shame.
• Sometimes we forget God because times are good. Versus "There are no atheists in foxholes."
• C. S. Lewis -- "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." Not sure I like the way he put it, but pain does the job on its own well enough.
• Recurring cancer. This is the audience's second bout with persecution.
• Hebrews 12 -- keep running the race to get the prize (Phil. 3)

II. We can rest today.

• This is not a promise that God will take trouble away. That's a misreading of Romans 8:28, by the way.
• The image above is an oasis. It's a place of peace in the midst of the desert. Revelation 11, the nations trample the outer courts but we're with God in the inner courts.
• Cody Carnes, Christ is My Firm Foundation: "I've still got joy in chaos. I've got peace that makes no sense..."
• Victor Frankl -- living with any "how" if we have a "why"
• Our "why" is Christ.
• There isn't a comprehensive answer to the problem of evil and suffering, but Christ has shown us that he is with us. The Son of God in the fiery furnace. Christ on the cross.
• We can't pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. This kind of rest only comes through the power of God.

III. We enter God's rest daily.

• Hebrews 3:13 blew my mind as a teenager. Enter into God's rest every day that is called "today." That's every day! I've never been alive any day but today! It's never been yesterday for me. It's never been tomorrow for me. It's today every day for everyone alive.
• So every morning, we wake up, and it's another today, another day to enter God's rest. "This is the day that the Lord has made. Let's rejoice and be glad in it.
• My wife is always telling our children, "It's a great, great day if you make it that way!"
• So every morning we should wake up and resolve. "It's another today. I choose to enter into God's rest today."
• When we were starting Wesley Seminary, we had 6 spiritual formation courses in a sequence, and the last one ended up being primarily about overcoming addiction. Something in the book for that class struck me and has stayed with me ever since. If you have struggled at some point with an addiction, the addict needs to wake up every morning and say to him or herself. "I am an addict. Today, I'm not going to give into temptation. 
• The idea was that there is always going to be a hole in that person's psyche, a hole that they are in danger of falling in. They need to pay attention to that hole every day. I've had some push back that this idea contradicts the idea of victory through the Spirit. I'm not denying the power of the Spirit. But this seems to be a reality of our flesh. We always have our flesh with us. The Spirit can empower us to do the good. But if we don't keep plugged in and charged, our flesh is there in our bodies potentially to exert itself again.

IV. Conclusion

• My freshman year of college, we had a Freshman Seminar that tried to teach you how to adjust to living on your own in college. In other words, growing up. I remember there was a chapter in the book for the class: "Be Here Now."
• That title has always stuck with me. If you don't watch it, life will pass you by. And walking with God every day is something you don't want to pass by for sure. How many people have come to God later in life and realized what a blessing they missed all those other years.
• You can close with some moments of silent prayer for each person to ask God to show them how they might need to enter his rest even today.

Preached on my 60th birthday.

Descartes' Meditation II: A Paraphrase

Here is an AI-assisted paraphrase of Descartes' second Meditation. The first Meditation is here.
_________________________

The Human Mind: Why It’s Easier to Know Than the Body

1. Yesterday’s meditation left me drowning in doubt. I can’t forget how much I can doubt, and I can’t see any way to certainty. It’s like I’ve fallen into deep water. I can’t touch the bottom, and I can’t keep myself floating on the surface either.

But I’m going to keep going. I’ll take the same approach I took yesterday. I’ll set aside anything I have even the slightest reason to doubt and treat it as if it were completely false.

And I’ll keep going until one of two things happens. Either I will find something that I can be completely certain about, or I will establish with certainty that nothing is certain at all.

Here’s what is keeping me going. You may have heard of Archimedes—the great ancient Greek mathematician and physicist. He once said that if you gave him a single firm, fixed point to stand on, he could move the entire earth.

(He was talking about levers and leverage. If you have a long enough lever and a fixed fulcrum, you can move any weight. He is often quoted as saying, “Give me a place to stand, and I can move the world.”)

I feel the same way about this project. I don’t need to find a hundred certain things, or even ten. I just need one thing. One single thing I can know with complete certainty. If I can find that, I can build everything else from there.

2. So, let’s do this. I’m going to assume that everything I see is just made up. I’m going to assume that nothing my memory tells me ever actually existed. I’m going to act like I have no senses. I’m going to assume that my body, my shape, the space around me, movement, my location—I’m going to act like all of it is just some fiction my mind has invented.

If so, what’s left? What then can I actually hold onto as true?

Could it be just this one thing: that there is absolutely nothing certain?

3. But wait. Just because I’ve stripped everything away doesn’t mean there’s nothing left. Let me think about this more carefully. Is there something—anything—that I can’t doubt?

What about God (or some kind of being, whatever we want to call it), who is causing all these thoughts to happen in my mind? Maybe there’s a being out there that is causing all my thinking.

Then again, maybe I am causing my own thoughts. Maybe I don’t need to bring God into it at all.

But if I am causing my own thoughts, then I must exist. Am I at least something?

And here is where I hesitate. I just doubted that I have a body and that I have senses. So, if I were nothing but body and senses, then I wouldn’t exist either. Right?

Hold on. I was just now convinced that there was absolutely nothing in the world—no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Was I therefore convinced that I didn’t exist either?

No. Absolutely not. Because I was the one being convinced of all this. Something was doing the convincing. Something was doing the thinking. And that something was me.

So, even if there is an evil demon, a massively powerful, endlessly cunning demon doing everything he can to deceive me, even he can’t make me nothing. Because as long as I am being deceived, I must be something. You can’t deceive nothing.

Therefore, I come to this conclusion after this careful consideration. It seems impossible to escape:

I am. I exist.

That is to say, “I think, therefore, I am.” [1] This “proposition” (pronunciatum) is necessarily true every single time I think it or say it.

As long as I am thinking, I cannot doubt that I exist.

4. But knowing that I exist isn’t enough. I still don’t know clearly what I am. And I need to be careful here. I’ve established one certain thing: that I exist. But now I don’t want to accidentally smuggle in assumptions about what kind of thing I am. That would contaminate the one piece of solid ground that I’ve found: that I exist.

So, let’s go back to basics. What did I think I was, before I started all this doubting? Then let me apply the same filter I’ve been using throughout. Let’s strip away everything that can be doubted, until only what is completely certain remains.

5. So, what did I think I was when we started all this doubting? A man, obviously. But what is a man?

The traditional answer from the time of the Greek Aristotle (384-22 BCE) is “a rational animal.” But that answer just opens up more questions. What exactly is an animal? What exactly is rational? I’d end up chasing definitions down an endless rabbit hole, which is not what I want to do right now. Instead let me think about what naturally came to mind when I asked myself what I was—before I started all this philosophical questioning.

First, I thought I had a face, hands, and arms. In fact, I thought I had a whole physical body. Mind you, it’s also what you’d see if you looked at a corpse. That’s what I call my “body.”

Second, I thought I did things. I ate, I walked, I perceived things, I thought. I attributed all of that to my soul.

But what exactly the soul was I never really stopped to think about carefully. If I tried to picture it at all, I imagined something extremely light and airy. Maybe it was like wind, or flame, or some kind of invisible gas spread throughout my body. Vague, in other words.

As for the body, I thought I understood that perfectly well. Here’s how I would have described it back then:

“A body is something that has a definite shape. It takes up space and fills that space so completely that no other body can occupy the same space at the same time. It can be perceived by senses like touch, sight, hearing, taste, smell. And it can be moved, though not by itself. It moves if something external acts on it.”

What a body cannot do—or so I thought—is move itself, perceive things, or think. Those abilities seemed like something else entirely. In fact, I was genuinely puzzled when I encountered living things that seemed to have both body and these other mysterious abilities.

6. But here’s the problem. Remember I was exploring what would happen if there were an extremely powerful, malicious being dedicated entirely to deceiving me. I was asking, “What can I actually claim about myself right now in that light?”

Let’s go through the list. Can I claim that any of those physical attributes I just described are real? My shape, space, movement, senses? No. None of them. If the evil demon is deceiving me about everything physical, then I can’t claim that any of those things are true about me with certainty. So, let’s set the body aside entirely.

What about the various attributes (characteristics) of my alleged soul? I mentioned nutrition and walking. But if I have no body, I can’t walk and I can’t be nourished. Those go out the window too.

What about perception? What about my seeing, hearing, and feeling? Perception requires a body. And besides, I’ve had plenty of experiences in dreams where I thought I was perceiving things that turned out not to be real at all. So, perception goes too.

But wait. What about thinking?

Here’s where everything changes. Thinking is different from all the others. I cannot doubt that I am thinking right now. Even if the demon is deceiving me, the deception itself requires that I exist as something being deceived. And existing as something being deceived requires thinking. Thinking is the one thing that is completely inseparable from me.

So here is what I can say with complete certainty: I am. I exist. And I exist precisely as long as I am thinking. If I were to stop thinking entirely, I might cease to exist altogether.

So, what am I? Stripped of everything else, I am one thing and one thing only: a thinking thing.

It is a real thing. It is a truly existing thing. I am “a thinking thing.” [2]

7. But wait. Am I anything more than just a thinking thing? Let me push further and see if I can discover something more.

Could I be my physical body? Could I be the collection of arms, legs, organs, and members?

No. I already imagined that all of that might not exist, and yet I would still know I exist. So, I am not my body. [3]

Could I be something like air, or wind, or flame, or vapor? Could I be some kind of invisible physical substance spread throughout my body?

No. I could imagine that all of those things didn’t exist either, and I would still exist. So, I’m none of those things either.

Now, here’s an interesting wrinkle. Maybe those things that I’m imagining don’t exist are actually more connected to me than I realize. Maybe they’re not as different from me as I think.

But I honestly can’t figure that out right now, so I’m going to set that question aside.

Here’s what I can say. I know I exist. And I’m trying to figure out what kind of thing I am. And importantly, I’ve realized that, no matter what I actually am, it doesn’t depend on any of the physical things I’ve been doubting. My existence as a thinking thing is completely independent of my body. [4]

Now here’s something else important. I might be tempted to use my imagination to figure out what I am. But that would be a mistake. Imagination only works with physical things like images, shapes, and bodies. When I imagine something, I’m always picturing something physical.

But I already know that everything physical might be a dream or an illusion. So, using my imagination to understand my mind would be like trying to see something more clearly by going to sleep and dreaming about it. That’s completely backwards.

The conclusion is this: imagination is useless for understanding the mind. The mind can only be understood by the mind itself. That is, it can only be understood by pure thinking, not by picturing anything.

8. So, I’m a thinking thing. But what exactly does that mean? What is a thinking thing?

A thinking thing is something that:

• Doubts
• Understands
• Conceives ideas
• Affirms things (says yes)
• Denies things (says no)
• Wills—wants things, makes choices
• Refuses—doesn’t want things, rejects choices
• Imagines
• Perceives

That’s what I am. All those activities are forms of thinking. And all of them are happening in me right now.

9. That’s actually quite a lot. Think about it. Right now, I am a being who:

• Doubts almost everything?
• And yet understands and conceives certain things?
• Affirms one thing as true and denies others?
• Wants to know more and doesn’t want to be deceived?
• Imagines things, sometimes even when I’d rather not?
• Perceives things, as if through the senses?

Yes. All of that is me. Right now. In this moment.

And here’s the crucial question. Could any of that be false? Even if I’m dreaming? Even if the evil demon is using every trick in the book to deceive me?

No. Because even if everything that I am perceiving is false, the perceiving itself is real. Even if everything I am imagining is false, the imagining itself is real. Even if I am wrong about what I am doubting, the doubting itself is real.

Think about it this way. Right now, I seem to see light. I seem to hear a noise. I seem to feel heat. Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe the demon is feeding me false impressions. Fine. Let’s grant all of that.

But this one thing cannot be false: that I seem to see, seem to hear, seem to feel. All of that “seeming,” that experiencing, is real. It’s happening. And that experiencing is itself a form of thinking.

Therefore, even my perceptions, even my imaginations—even if their content is completely false—they are still forms of thinking. And thinking is what I am.

10. I am starting to get a clearer picture of what I am. But I have to be honest about something. Even now, after everything I’ve just worked through, physical things still feel more real and more clearly known to me than my own mind does.

I know. That’s strange. Think about what I’m saying. Think about the things I have just called into doubt—the physical world, my body, external objects. Those things probably still feel more vivid and more “real” to me than the thing I’ve just proven actually exists: my own mind.

The doubtful stuff feels more real than the certain stuff. That seems exactly backwards. And yet I can’t seem to help it.

Here’s why this is happening. My mind keeps wandering back to the physical world. I’ve been programmed my whole life to pay attention to things I can see and touch and imagine. Asking my mind to focus on something invisible and non-physical—like itself—is genuinely difficult.

So, here’s what I’m going to do. Rather than forcing my mind to stay focused on itself right now, I’m going to let it wander for a moment. I’m going to let my mind look at the physical world that it is so comfortable with.

But I’m going to do this strategically. In this way, afterward, when I gently pull my mind back to thinking about itself, it will be more settled and more ready to focus.

Think of it like letting a restless child run around for a bit before asking them to sit still and concentrate.

11. OK. Let’s look at physical things, the kinds of things we normally think we know best. Not physical things in general, but one specific physical thing. Let’s do a little experiment.

Take a piece of wax. Say it just came from a beehive. [5] Say that it’s completely fresh. It still smells like honey and flowers.

You can see its color and shape. It is hard and cold. You can easily pick it up and hold it. Tap it with your finger and it makes a sound.

In other words, it ticks every box. It can be known by every single one of our senses. If anything can be clearly and distinctly known through the senses, it is this piece of wax right in front of us.

Now let’s put it near a fire.

Watch what happens. The taste disappears. The smell evaporates. The color changes. The shape melts away. It gets bigger as it melts. It becomes liquid. It gets hot. You can barely touch it now. And if you tap it? No sound at all.

So, here’s the question. Is this still the same wax?

Of course it is. Nobody would seriously argue otherwise. We all know perfectly well that it is the same wax. It’s just in a different state.

But wait. If it’s the same wax, what exactly did I know about it? Everything I knew through my senses has completely changed. The smell, the taste, the color, the shape, the texture, the sound—it’s all different. And yet the same wax remains.

Think about it. Whatever I knew about the wax, it wasn’t anything my senses told me. Something else is going on here.

12. Now let’s ask, “What exactly did I know about the wax?” Let me think about this carefully.

The wax wasn’t the sweetness, or the smell, or the color, or the shape, or the sound. All of those changed. What I knew was something more basic. There was a thing that was presenting itself to me in one set of forms before the fire and in a different set of forms after. The same thing, different appearances.

But what exactly is that thing? Let me strip away everything that changed and see what’s left.

What remains is something that takes up space, that is flexible, and that can move and change. That’s it. That’s the wax underneath all the appearances.

But here’s where it gets interesting. When I say the wax is “flexible,” what do I mean? Do I mean I can imagine it changing from round to square?

Well, yes. But it can change into an infinite number of shapes, not just those two. And I can’t picture an infinite number of shapes in my imagination. So, my imagination isn’t what’s grasping the wax here.

And what about the space it takes up—its “extension” in space? That changes too. It gets bigger as it melts, bigger still as it boils. The wax can expand in ways I have never even imagined.

So again, my imagination isn’t capturing what the wax really is.

Here’s the conclusion: I cannot understand what the wax is through my imagination at all. Only my mind, my pure thinking, can grasp it. [6]

And here is the really fascinating part. What about the wax that I know through pure thinking? Is it a different wax from the one I see and touch and imagine? No. It is exactly the same wax. It always was. I just didn’t realize that what I was actually knowing all along was not coming through my senses. It was coming through my mind.

When I perceive the wax, I’m not really seeing it or touching it or imagining it. I’m doing something called “intuition” (inspectio). It is a direct mental grasp of what the thing is. And that mental grasp can be fuzzy and confused, as it was before I started thinking carefully, or it can be clear and distinct, as it is now.

13. But here is something that genuinely surprises me about my own mind. Even when I am thinking all of this through carefully, language keeps tripping me up.

Here’s what I mean. We say things like “I see the wax.” Not “I judge the wax to be there” or “my mind perceives the wax.” Just “I see it.” And that casual way of talking makes it sound like sight is what is doing the knowing. Like my eyes are the thing in charge.

But think about this. Say I am sitting by a window, and I look down at people passing in the street below. What do I actually see? Hats. Coats. That’s it. I see hats and coats moving along the street.

And yet I say, “I see people.” Without even thinking about it.

But what if those hats and coats were covering robots? Machines controlled by springs and gears, moving around in human clothing? My eyes couldn’t tell the difference. What I actually see is hats and coats. What I know is that there are people underneath them. And that knowing—that judgment—isn’t coming from my eyes at all. It’s coming from my mind.

So, when I say, “I see the wax,” I’m doing the same thing. What my eyes actually give me is a set of colors and shapes. What I know is that there is a piece of wax in front of me. And that knowing is a judgment of the mind, not a report from the senses.

Language hides this from us. But the mind is doing far more work than we give it credit for.

14. But I shouldn’t get too distracted by the way ordinary language misleads us. Someone who is seriously pursuing knowledge shouldn’t need to keep tripping over the way everyday people talk. Let’s get back to the main point.

Here’s the real question. Did I know the wax better when I first encountered it, when I was smelling it, touching it, and seeing it with my own eyes? Or do I know it better now, after thinking carefully about what it actually is and how it can be known?

That’s not even a close call.

When I first perceived the wax, what did I actually have? A set of sensory impressions. I had smell, color, texture, sound. But honestly? Any animal could have that. A dog can smell the wax. A cat can feel its texture. There’s nothing distinctly human about perceiving the wax through the senses.

But when I strip away all those surface appearances, I realize something different is going on. When I mentally undress the wax, so to speak, and look at what it actually is underneath, I get to real insight. I might still make mistakes in my judgment. But one thing is certain: this kind of knowing, this grasping of what the wax really is beneath its appearances, requires a human mind. An animal can’t do this. A machine can’t do this. [7]

15. Now, let me turn this whole argument back on myself. Remember, I have not allowed that I am anything other than a mind right now. Accordingly, what can I say about my own mind?

I have just spent all this time figuring out that I know the wax better through my mind than through my senses. But if that’s true, then I must know my own mind even better than I know the wax.

Think about it this way. Say I decide that the wax exists because I see it. Well, it’s at least possible that what I’m seeing isn’t really wax. Maybe my eyes are deceiving me. Maybe I don’t even have eyes.

But here’s what’s not possible. It’s not possible that I don’t exist while I’m seeing the wax (or even just thinking that I’m seeing it). The seeing (or the thinking that I’m-seeing) proves I exist. Every time.

And it’s not just sight. If I determine that the wax exists because I touch it, I exist. If my imagination convinces me the wax is there, I exist. Whatever “faculty” I use or reason I give that leads me to believe anything about the wax, the same reasoning proves that I exist. Every single time. And what is true of the wax is true of every external thing I perceive.

Here’s something worth pausing on. The more faculties I brought to bear on the wax, the more clearly I knew it. These were faculties like sight, touch, imagination, and reasoning. But every one of those faculties derived from my mind. Every time I knew the wax more clearly, my mind was simultaneously revealing itself as the thing doing the knowing.

This fact means that my mind must actually be more clearly known than the wax. And on top of that, the mind has additional ways of knowing itself that have nothing to do with bodies at all. [8]

In the end, what the body contributes to our knowledge of the mind is barely worth mentioning.

16. And just like that, I’ve arrived exactly where I wanted to be.

Here’s what the wax experiment has shown me. Physical things like bodies are not actually known through the senses or through imagination. They are known through the intellect alone. Through pure thinking. We don’t know the wax because we see it or touch it. We know it because we understand it.

And if that is true of physical things, then it follows immediately that my own mind—the thing that does the understanding itself—must be the most clearly and easily known thing of all. It is more clearly known than any physical object. It is more clearly known than the wax. More clearly known than anything.

But I’m not going to rush past this point. I have just overturned something I have believed my whole life: that the physical world is the most real and most clearly known thing there is. It is such a deeply ingrained habit of thought. It won’t just disappear because I have proven it wrong.

So, I’m going to sit here for a while. I’m going to let this new understanding sink in. I’m going to keep thinking about it until it becomes as natural and automatic as the old assumption used to be.

The mind is what knows. And what it knows with absolute certainty is that it exists.

[1] Descartes coined this phrase earlier in his Discourse on Method (1637), but he does not actually use it here in the Meditations. In Latin, it is cogito ergo sum.

I personally agree with the German philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99), who argued that Descartes’ argument only implied that “thinking” was happening, not that I was thinking. The concept of a unified “I” requires much further argument.

[2] Descartes uses several Latin terms in this section: mens (mind), animus (soul). These terms are sometimes also translated as understanding or reason. Descartes is not yet sure which term is exactly right. But whatever we call it, his answer is the same: I am a “thinking thing.”

The Latin for “thinking thing” or “thinking substance” is res cogitans. It is one of his most important technical terms. He pairs it with res extensa or “extended thing.” He uses that term to refer to everything physical that takes up space.

The distinction between these two kinds of substance is the foundation of what philosophers call “Cartesian Dualism.” This is the view that mind and matter are two completely different kinds of thing. This idea has been debated by philosophers ever since.

[3] The philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously attacked this conclusion in his book The Concept of Mind (1949). He called Descartes’s picture of the mind a “ghost in the machine.”

Ryle argued that Descartes’s argument was like being shown all the buildings, faculty, and students at a university and then asking, “Where’s the university?” For Ryle, mind wasn’t a separate thing that inhabits the body. It was just what we call the body doing certain things.

[4] The conclusion that the mind is a completely separate substance from the body was famously challenged by Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680), one of Descartes’s most brilliant correspondents. In letters to Descartes, she pressed him on a problem he never fully solved: if mind and body are completely separate substances, how do they interact? When I decide to move my arm, how does an immaterial mind cause a physical arm to rise? This is called the mind-body interaction problem, and philosophers are still debating it today.

[5] If you have never had any experience with wax, you might do a quick search to get a little background.

[6] Descartes uses the Latin mens (mind) and French entendement (understanding) here. Both of them can mean mind or understanding. This is the faculty of pure rational thinking, distinct from imagination or the senses.

[7] Descartes mentions “common sense” (sensus communis). He doesn’t mean common sense in the way we think of it. He means our mental ability to combine and integrate all our different sense impressions into a single unified experience.

[8] Examples might include pure reasoning, self-reflection, or introspection.

Family History: Jamestown 3

Continued from last post

10. In 1640, Thomas and Elizabeth were married. That same year, they had their son, Augustine I, the first of the Shelburnes to be born in America. 

As I mentioned, Thomas died in 1676, the year of Bacon's Rebellion. Here's the story.

In that year, Nathaniel Bacon led an armed uprising against the colonial government of Virginia. The settlers on the frontier were upset that Native American tribes would conduct raids on "their" land. (Of course, it was only their land because England had said so. No one had asked the Native Americans.)

But the Governor of Virginia -- who was actually related to Bacon by marriage -- would not authorize agressive military action against the Native Americans.

But the rebellion quickly became about more than that. It became about ordinary people versus the elites. Bacon's rebellion swept in small farmers, indentured servants, and even black Virginians -- both enslaved and free. In September, they marched on Jamestown and burned the colonial capital to the ground.

But Bacon would die of dysentery, and the rebellion would collapse. The governor, a man named Berkeley, would hang 23 of the rebels. Then he was recalled to England in disgrace by the king.

Virginia's elite were shaken. The rebel army had united white and black, free and enslaved Virginians. It was a reminder of what always happens when the "little people" have had enough.

Many think 1676 was a hinge point. Distinctions between white indentured servants and black slaves became tightened legally. Those of dark skin were increasingly treated as slaves by nature rather than individuals who might work their way to freedom. The children of Africans were now born into slavery, owned by those whom their parents worked for. 

To be sure, this process had already been under way. In 1662, the slavery of a child was connected to the status of a mother rather than a father. In 1667, Christian baptism no longer implied freedom. Tobacco needed workers. This was the solution.

In 1670, roughly 80% of Virginia's unfree laborers were white indentured servants. By 1700, roughly 80% were enslaved Africans.

11. Augustine I was born in Jamestown (1640-1725). He would see the death of his father Thomas in 1676 and the death of his mother in 1702. 

From what we can tell, his wife was named Mary Mansfield (1656-1729). They would have a son named Augustine II in 1698. If these dates are correct, Augustine Sr. was 58 when Augustine Jr. was born. His mother would have been 42.

Jamestown never fully recovered from its burning during Bacon's rebellion. After the capital building burned again in 1698, the capital of Virginia was moved the next year to Williamsburg.

It is thus probably no coincidence that Augustine and Mary would move further inland about 15 miles to Blissland Parish in 1699. His mother Elizabeth would die in Williamsburg, about 10 miles east of where she had lived most of her life. 

Thus the 1600s came to an end for the Shelburnes. The oldest part of my American lineage had lived in Virginia for most of the century.

Notes Along the Way 4.3 Interviewing at IWU

Continued from here
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20. It's a sign of my privileged life that I immediately had access to a little money when I arrived in Brussels from Africa. I had booked the plane ticket to give me two days on the continent (three?) on my way back. Then I was supposed to meet with Bud Bence in Indiana before finally going back to Florida.

This was before cell phones. If you wanted to send an email abroad, you went to an internet cafe. AOL was riding high. Then there was this thing called writing letters.

Somehow, perhaps by actual letter, I had told David Fox and Rachel Leonard that I would be at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris at noon on something like April 2, 1997. If they could make it, great. If not, I like Paris.

So I landed in Brussels that morning. I rented a car, and tore off for Paris. By noon, I was there at the Arc de Triomphe. I had no phone to call. I had no clear path to email. I waited about an hour and figured they weren't coming. So, what should I do?

Why not drive to Tübingen? So, I got in the car and tore off west. No GPS of course. I don't think I even had a map. But I knew the general path, and there were these things called road signs. Just as it was getting dark, I had arrived. I wasn't exactly sure where Christoph Lorenz was living, but I remembered Reinhard Schmolz's house. Sure enough, he was home.

So I was able to meet up with them for an evening. That was nice. I was sure to have a Doner Kebap and a Currywurst. And I think I spent the night at Reinhard's house.

That might have been it. I may actually have had to head back the next day. Such was the 30 year old Ken. 

I decided to drive back through Luxembourg, just to be able to say I'd been there. It was a long day. At a rest park, a man asked for a ride. Since I was still in the "Ken can't say no stage of my life," I gave him a ride, despite my incredible fears of doing so.

We conversed in German for a good twenty minutes before we finally realized that neither of us was actually German. I think he was Danish. In any case, I was glad when I let him off wherever.

21. Bud Bence had contacted me before I left for Africa, and we had set up a meeting. When my plane landed from Brussels in Indy, I would drive up to Elwood and meet him at a Jim Dandy's there (it's gone now). 

There was an open New Testament position at Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU). Bud was understandably cautious about me. I had studied with James Dunn. He had undergone significant trouble at Houghton College because of a Dunn student, David Meade. Under pressure from the denomination and president, he had let David Meade go. Then, when the faculty had their chance, they dispatched him.

Mind you, IWU celebrated him for his decades there, but Bud once told me that he bled Houghton, so the scar was real.

Bud later told me that it was ironic that he turned out to think more freely than I do. He actually apologized to me for his suspicions of me back at that Jim Dandy. In any case, I must have reassured him enough in Elwood for him to approve of me coming to the campus for an interview.

22. I don't think it was too much longer thereafter that I had my interview. I met Keith Drury and Steve Lennox for the first time. Jim Lo, Keith Springer, the older David Smith (not the one we know today). I don't think Wilbur Williams participated in the interview. Nor did Joe Seaborn. He was leaving the faculty to become the pastor of College Wesleyan.

I gave a classroom presentation based on Bruce Malina's Portraits of Paul, which I had recently read. There were still students around, so it must have been later that month in April. 

Ancient identity was based on gender, genealogy, and geography. I remember Bud asking what a woman did to convert to Judaism, since circumcision obviously wasn't involved. I think I said she would likely be attached to a man, so that would likely mark her transition, but that of course there were the food laws and purity rules. I don't think I knew much about Joseph and Asenath at that time.

23. My interview proper was at Hostess House. I don't think very well on the spot, so it's always a bit nerve wracking. I think best in writing. If I know I'm going to have a high pressure conversation, I rehearse it over and over out loud. Of course, in person conversations are much less predictable than the ones you have to yourself.

I can't remember if Bud asked me his classic "Robert Frost lover's quarrel with the church" question. I mainly remember the two questions Keith Drury asked. First, he more or less asked if I was gay. He said something like, "We have to ask. You're 30 years old and single." 

That was an easy one. I had only dated a little up to that point. Two serious girlfriends. I was painfully shy when it came to women, and the cuter the woman, the harder it was for me to talk to them. And I was a dreamer. I wanted a love story.

A funny story that year. A minister took me to a Hooters. I thought it was incredibly odd. What was he thinking? I thought he might have a problem. But as I thought about it a few years later, I wondered if he was looking for my reaction. People are funny.

The other question Keith asked was equally frank. He pointed out that the Religion Division at that point was entirely male. But there were many female ministry students, and the Wesleyans certainly said that they believed in women in ministry. 

Then came the question. If you have two equally qualified candidates for a department like this one, one is a guy and the other is a woman, who would you hire. I said I would hire the woman.

24. And they did. I suppose that explains what Joe Seaborn said to me from his dark office before I left. It was something like, "I'm rooting for you." But it had a sullen tone to it. I've been in enough searches since then to know this vibe. You can feel it, often accompanied by long silence.

As part of the interview, I also met with Paul Collard, the VPAA. And I met President Barnes. I only remember one question he asked. He said, "Now your father has questions about certain fundraising techniques we use?"

I smiled because I immediately knew the culprit. "That would be my Uncle Eugene," I said. I believe he was actually a Marion College alumnus. My father would never write to someone like President Barnes about something like that.

25. Well I also remember a dinner time back in Fort Lauderdale when I later got a phone call from Bud Bence. Duane Thompson, the philosophy professor, was retiring. They had a one year slot for someone to teach philosophy. No promises of anything after that. Was I interested?

Of course I was interested! I surely didn't want to substitute teach another year.

Bud's emphasis on the "only one year" betrayed his ongoing fears that I would blow something up. That whole first year, he more than once put a job opening advertisement on my chair. I imagine some might also have had questions about philosophy. Sometimes philosophy has an uneasy place at a Christian college. Might they even been thinking about removing it from the gen eds?

Nevertheless, I loved the subject, and I would love teaching philosophy. In the fall of 1997, I would begin teaching at Indiana Wesleyan University.

Notes Along the Way: 4.2 Two Months in Africa

The year after Durham continues from the previous post.
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6. Some time in the fall of 1996, Kerry Kind contacted me about Africa. 

Kerry had left Wilmore and his PhD program at the University of Kentucky to become head of Wesleyan World Missions (and would eventually be over Education and the Ministry). We had been at Stonewall Wesleyan Church together, and he had long felt like I might be a possibility for missions. I've already mentioned that he had asked me if I was interested in taking over as coordinator of the work in England, and of course my sister Juanita had been a missionary to the Philippines for four years (and had married the Philippines General Superintendent's son).

I do think that I had the temperament to be involved in missions. I care very little for any possessions (except for my books). I do not need nice cars, houses, or clothes (perhaps to my wife's chagrin). [1] I have always been eager to learn and adopt the culture of wherever I am. I am above average at languages and consider it anathema not to learn the language of the place you are serving.

7. Those were the days of the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. In 1996, Liberia was just emerging from the scourge. I believe the Pococks had gone there just before the civil war decimated the country, and they had to be evacuated. 

Kerry had a burden to send someone to Liberia to help the church there know that the Wesleyan Church had not forgotten them. I was still single at the time, so I was expendable. :-)

Upon further reflection, they decided against sending me there. The sewer system was not entirely repaired and there was a real danger of hepatitis. So it was decided that I would go teach for two months at Sierra Leone Bible College in Jui, just outside Freetown, Sierra Leone.

The civil war in Liberia had spilled over into Sierra Leone. In February 1997, when I went over, it had not come to Freetown, the capital city. It was mainly up country, especially in the south. I remember a young man whom I ran with a couple times who had escaped a bus rebels had stopped by crawling away.

By the way, next to this young man I might as well have been standing still. The extreme heat (since Sierra Leone is about 500 miles from the equator) made running exhausting. More on running in a moment.

The fearful Kenny was quite present while I was there. Some nights I would look out my window at the lights of the cars coming toward Freetown from Waterloo, wondering if there were rebels in them. Jui is east of the city on a peninsula. When the rebels did come to Freetown -- less than two months after I left -- they would ransack the Bible college property.

8. Kerry prepped me for the trip over the phone, as I recall. He told me stories of the time that he was there. However, I'm not sure they were the best stories to tell me. There was the time he found a cobra behind the fridge. Then there were his tales of hunting down rabid dogs with bats. "If you hear a dog with a strange howl, it's rabid," he said.

That was all so very reassuring. I was quite afraid of snakes while I was there, although I never saw one. They had burned the ground behind where I stayed to discourage them from coming toward the house. There was a day I came across several men preoccupied with a tree. They were at various stages of height in it. When I asked what they were doing, they didn't really say. I wondered if they were fetching a black mamba.

There was a rather large spider in my room for a time. I wasn't particularly troubled by it until I realized it was pregnant. And then, with apologies, I dispatched it to the afterlife. There are limits for such things, after all.

There were large cockroaches that would come out at night. And of course there were many ants that carried off various and sundry things. One night I decided not to throw away the remains of a squashed cockroach. Sure enough, it was gone in the morning.

Another episode of "fun with cockroaches" was when one set of ants from the back of the house were in a tug of war with a set of ants from the front of the house. They were pulling in opposite directions on the parts of a dead cockroach. It was quite entertaining and I watched for some time.

9. The trip to Sierra Leone was like passing through zones of foreignness. The first step was still Western, a stop in Brussels to change planes. It struck me that airports are like liminal zones between countries. You are neither in the country you are leaving nor the one to which you are headed.

The flight south was another zone of greater foreignness. We stopped in Conakry, as I recall, although we didn't deplane. I remember seeing a 747 take off, but then I saw a plane very similar land a few minutes later. Was it the same plane, I asked myself. I imagined some young men taking a joy ride with a 747. I had the feeling that I was entering the theatre of the absurd.

I was picked up from the airport by a Seventh Day Adventist missionary couple. They were perhaps the only Western missionaries still in the country. Everyone else had evacuated. They were living in the Wesleyan house in Freetown. I would spend a couple weekends with them.

In fact, they were going to take me up country to the famed Kamakwie hospital and I think the Gbendembu Bible college. But the very weekend we were to take the trip, the civil war rekindled up country. I would never make it past Waterloo.

10. I taught two subjects: Communication and Historical Books. I'd never taught either. The classroom format was old school, imported from Western colonization, a blast from the past.

As a side note, I once heard a critique of American college teaching for being cultural, and without question it is true. However, the person critiquing was from abroad, and I at least had the question whether what was being advocated was some element of colonial pedagogy from a century ago. I don't remember the details. I just remember wondering whether what was in fact happening was Western colonialism past critiquing Western pedagogy present.

The students in those classes would go on to become leaders in the African church of the future: Usman Fornah, Warren Fornah. Abu Conteh was the Academic Dean at the time. The Principal of the college at that time was a Baptist.

Probably enough time has passed for me to share some of my feelings. No doubt it was in part cultural, but I felt there was some of a "big man" dimension to senior leadership in Africa. You get into top leadership, and you operate like a king.

Suffice it to say, this grates against my holiness background. Leaders who lord it over those under them seem flatly to contradict the teachings of Christ and the New Testament. So, when I was given the opportunity to preach on the campus, I chose Philippians 2 -- how Christ, although having the authority of God, humbled himself and became a servant.

I suspect it is a human dynamic. We like "strong" leaders. And pseudo-masculine guys who get in positions of leadership love it a little too much. In short, we stupidly appoint jerks as leaders. And this happens in holiness circles just as much as anywhere else. And we should know better.

I remember a conversation I had with Keith Drury about someone appointed as a leader that I thought was a horrible decision. Keith's remark was that this person was a strong leader, and that's probably why. Let's just say I believe my reservations were justified by history.

11. I remember a moment in the Historical Books class when I was talking about the contextual nature of Scripture and how passages need to be interpreted in the light of context. A fairly strong reaction, a quote from Malachi 3:6: "I the LORD do not change."

I do not usually think fast on my feet, but my immediate response was that God doesn't change but culture does and that God meets us where we are so that we can understand. Also, God's values play out differently in different contexts.

If you've been reading these posts, you know that there was over a decade of my own struggle in that exchange. 

I did enjoy covering that part of the Bible. I had not really focused on Joshua to Esther before. As for communication, I only remember that I leaned into logos, pathos, ethos, which was in my bailiwick.

12. I enjoy learning about other cultures. There were numerous moments of learning. First, there were the easy ones. Food. I paid a woman a certain amount each week to prepare some easy dishes. Probably the most striking to me was cassava. I liked it. 

It is also toxic if it is not cooked enough. In 2005, at least 30 elementary school children died in the Philippines because the cassava was not prepared correctly by an outside vendor.

One question was with meat or without. My first week I did try some goat. I determined that I could easily be a vegetarian in Sierra Leone.

The rest of the time I didn't bother with the meat. It also cost more and I was on a very thin budget. I think the Wesleyans gave me $200 a month (it might have been $200 for the whole time). I didn't have access to an ATM and there wasn't any easy way for my parents to get me money either. This would have to do.

This amount was tight because I was immediately cast in the role of patron. I understood the construct well enough from Bruce Malina's The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology. However, by the time I got on the plane to go home, I had PTSD from all the entreaties. Even at the airport, a boy asked for money. I had no money. I had nothing. I had given it all away.

I gave the last $50 to a minister in training to buy a sewing machine. Remember those were the days of "Ken can't say no." I hope that it provided a great livelihood to that family. I remember eating with the man. As men, we ate in the foreroom. The women prepared the food and ate separately in the back room afterward. And the children ate separately. It all grated on me, although I understood it was the culture.

13. I was given three offers in marriage while I was there. In two cases, there was an intermediary. One man said, "If you as an American man marry an African woman, you are getting a good deal. She will do whatever you want. It doesn't work so well when an American woman marries an African man." I'm sure that's not universally true, but I wouldn't be surprised if this would be a fairly common sentiment there.

In one case it was an upper class woman who came to me herself -- the elite can always break the rules. As I recall, she boasted that she was not circumcised. She told me that if you look around at all the women I can see, almost all of them have been circumcised. But not her. She said that even in Christian circles, they secretly do it, even though it is frowned on. She said they come for the girls in the night and take them somewhere in secret to circumcise them because it is the cultural tradition. 

Female circumcision is a heinous practice. What they do is cut off the part of female anatomy that is key to pleasure during sex. The limitation of pleasure is thought to discourage cheating. Of course, as usual, men are freer to do what they want.

I remember hearing after I left that a man who had a fairly prominent position in the Wesleyan Church -- secretary of the country or some such -- had a second wife up country. He had been using the relative wealth he received from the Wesleyans to support two families. 

The Wesleyan position on polygamy was that one should not put away multiple wives when one became a Christian but should not take on any additional wives. That seemed like a very wise and just position to take. 

Mind you, polygamy is never prohibited in the Bible. I was very sheepish to mention that in my early days of teaching. I could still see my mother's reaction when I taught. But polygamy is a perfectly normal practice in the OT (e.g., Deut. 21:15). If someone responds, "But what about Genesis 2:24 -- a man leaves father and becomes one flesh?" Yes, a man becomes one flesh with each wife.

This is one of those many unexamined assumptions we have when we read the Bible. We see things that aren’t there. I grew up hearing that you must marry the first person you have sex with because you are married to that person in God’s eyes.

1 Corinthians 6:16 seems to break that idea. There’s no way Paul would tell someone to go marry the prostitute you had had sex with. Yes, you became one flesh with the prostitute. No, you did not marry the prostitute.

Don't get me wrong. I do not believe that polygamy should be a Christian practice. I'm just pointing out that this is a point where we have (rightly and legitimately) played out biblical principles in ways that go beyond the Bible itself.

14. I noticed a stratification in both language and denominations. The highest class spoke Krio, the lingua franca of the country. It is a pidgin English. A prayer might begin, "Papa God. We go tell you tanke for what you done done for we."

The highest class spoke Krio and might be Anglican. Then below that were people like the Methodists. Then below that were the Baptists. As you went down the social classes, you would be more likely to speak a tribal language as your first language, maybe something like Temne. I think the Wesleyans up country mostly spoke Temne.

The relationship between Sierra Leone the country and the tribal regions of the country are a reminder that "map is not territory." [2] The relationship between Sierra Leone the country and the tribal regions of the country are a reminder that “map is not territory.” We draw lines around the world that are not really there. They’re in our heads.

This is, by the way, a key insight to immigration debates. The feeble mind thinks that a border has a real ontological status. It does, but only because human minds consider it so. And the significance of the line may differ from one person to another. Why should it be a big deal for someone to cross an imaginary line? It is only a big deal for those who consider it a big deal. And of course there are consequences if the person that thinks it’s a big deal has a gun.

So, the lines of Sierra Leone were drawn by the British in the late 1800s. I guarantee you they were a puzzle to the Africans that actually lived there at the time, especially out in open country. The British drew a map, but it wasn’t real territory to the people who lived there unless there was someone there with a gun.

I went to the HQ church on Easter Sunday (March 30, 1997) about half way between Jui and downtown Freetown. I was able to catch some of the Krio sermon because of the proximity to English.

I remember one stretch of the sermon. He was talking about how resurrection is not resuscitation. He told a story (I think it's a well known trope) about a man some gravediggers were burying. They noticed the man had some valuables that they decided to come back and steal that night.

But the man was not actually dead. So when they dug up his coffin, he sat up and said, "What's going on?" One of the graverobbers was so scared he had a heart attack and died. Then the not-so-dead man ran into town and said, "There's something crazy going on at the cemetery."

The preacher's point was that resurrection was not like that.

At another time, I went to the wake of a man. The body looked very old and I asked how old he had been. As it turned out, he had been in his thirties (I think). But they did not embalm, so the body had deteriorated that much in one or two days.

15. There was a wealthy Wesleyan church in Freetown. That's where the Wesleyans who were involved in government went. I frankly didn't have a good feeling about some of the dynamics there. One of them -- I can't remember his name -- was later murdered during the civil strife. I think they pulled his car over. Kerry would have known.

During my time there, we did some evangelism on one afternoon each week. I remember talking to a young Muslim man and him expressing how difficult it would be to change religions. He would be shunned by his whole family. Again, Malina's material on group/collectivist cultures provided important framing for these discussions. 

I remember thinking how much more easily an African might understand the culture of the Bible than an American. In fact, I think maybe it was a comment on greeting the brother with a holy kiss that set off the comment on Malachi and God not changing. They pointed out that many Africans do greet each other with a kiss on the cheek. It was harder for me to find areas where they didn't practice things the Bible addressed to believers in ancient culture.

I remember a girl coming out of a hut in a school uniform. It was a clash of paradigms, I would later reflect. In Freetown, you had normal houses near huts. And you had a modern school uniform coming out of a hut. It was surreal to me at the time, but I couldn't quite find the words to express why.

Kuhn later helped. There was my paradigm of the modern city, my paradigm of the private school with uniforms, and my paradigm of the primitive hut. These were clashing together. My assumptions and frameworks were clashing together.

16. I remember having a conversation with one of the Wesleyan leaders about his son, who had sickle cell anemia. You may know that African genetics have a weakness here. He indicated that his son would not likely make it to adulthood, and I believe that turned out to be the case.

The way he said it struck me because of how resigned he was. I have long wondered if death was much more normal in other times and places. When a significant portion of children die as children, do you assume it will happen? Does it become somewhat normal? When women die frequently in childbirth, does it become normalized to some extent?

I've wondered if the problem of evil and suffering looks different in a world where it is just the way it is. Similarly, I've wondered if we are more sensitive to it because we are so blessed with modern medicine and science.

I remember one day someone appeared at my door asking if I had any aspirin. I did. But it struck me how privileged I was to have a bottle of aspirin. Imagine the millennia when you just had to put up with a headache. Yes, any “light challenges” I might have had in my brief two months were nothing compared to what most people have experienced throughout history. And they certainly were nothing compared to what they were about to experience.

17. One of the highlights of my time was a field day. The slow white man was going to run the two mile race. Everyone knew I was a runner. How would I do?

Horrible! I mostly blame the heat. I slowly made my way around the dirt track eight times (it might have been sixteen). The front runner lapped me. Pretty embarrassing. Someone on my team who had never run was way ahead of me. He may have lapped me too.

But near the end he suddenly ran off the track and got down on the ground to rest. He couldn't finish. He was exhausted. So Ken the tortoise continued his rounds and finished second to last.

A compliment (I think it was genuine) given me was that I was not like a lot of missionaries. The person talked about growing up in the shadow of the great Kamakwie hospital up country. I am in no position to say whether his critique was fair, but he clearly thought that the doctors and nurses lived in their own world and stayed separate from the people of the town. With perhaps a small hint of anger, he spoke of the mansions they effectively lived in, and how they would go to work and go home without interacting with nationals much.

I don't know if that was fair or not, but it reminded me of the fact that Albert Schweitzer lived too long. Seen as a medical benefactor for the first part of his service in Africa, he ended being thought of as a condescending colonialist.

I've already mentioned that I felt the weight of the expectation that I would be a patron. By some it was perhaps seen as a moral obligation. I dreamt of a college teaching job that might start off paying, who knows, $40,000 a year? I would be able to support them from afar.

But because I didn't like to say no, by the time I left I felt like I had less than everyone around me. I don't know if I had $5 in my wallet. I was so drained from all the asking and fear of civil war, that I didn't believe the trauma was over until the wheels of the plane had left the ground.

18. The day after Easter, maybe a day or two before I left, I took a taxi to the beach. Somehow it seemed I was charged significantly more than everyone else in the van. Because I didn't want to pay for the taxi back, I walked all the way back to town. It was a very long walk. I was so sunburnt on my ears that I had scabs and eventually had a dermatologist remove the remnants of the scar.

I took public transportation back to Jui. From what I remember, there were people hanging out the sides while the bus like vehicle went at high speeds.

As I said, on May 25, 1997, less than two months later, the rebels did in fact break through to Freetown. The people suffered greatly, including many Wesleyans. Arms were amputated. Pregnant women were cut open. Young boys were recruited and then made addicted to drugs. They did unspeakable things.

I believe Usman Fornah would play a significant role in negotiating peace. I believe he even went to the United Nations (correct me, those who know). I would see him a couple times while he was visiting the States.

I started a family the next year, and the starting salary of a professor turned out not to go as far as I thought it might. In the end, I was not able to give much after I left.

19. I had an old laptop of my dad's from work while I was there. As usual, I had a novel idea afterwards. I think it was titled something like Out of the Darkness. It was to be about a short term missionary abducted by rebels. It was to have a theatre of the absurd feeling to it. He would be freed after appealing to the childhood Christianity of a captor.

Never finished it, of course.

[1] Dare I say that, like Diogenes the Cynic, I find so much of the rules of tidiness to be foolish (e.g., the Kehrwoche in southern Germany). There are individuals I know whose houses are so immaculate that I hesitate to step on the premises. It's a fine hobby. But dare not think it important to spend undue time doing something elective that you'll just have to do again tomorrow! Don't consider yourself superior or me inferior because I don't get alarmed for accidentally wearing two different shoes! Order is practical and cleanliness is healthy, but anything beyond that can be a sickness.  

[2] A term that comes from Alfred Korzybski in a 1933 book Science and Sanity.