The Christian’s Ultimate Longing
The ultimate longing of the Christian is his/her glorification. When finally, we will be removed from this body of weakness and sin, and clothed in total perfection. When no member in us is tempted to draw us to despair and sin but is only drawn to righteousness (Romans 6:13). When worship is the only default setting in us and the joy of the LORD is our only joy.
The world in its best efforts tries to persuade every man to hope and fulfillment. It offers electrical security gadgets to grant protection; it offers medical aid to grant health care; etc. Sadly, it is only a matter of time when one actually realizes that all that the world gives and promises has its own expiry date and is in need of an upgrade. Therefore I ask the question, ‘What in the world are you groaning for?’ Often we are caught longing and seriously in pursuit of wrong things. We make it our ambition to obtain all that our heart desires, but after we have acquired it, we are still found wanting and groaning.
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The Internet Deathtrap and the Need For Wisdom
The more we diminish the role of wisdom in our everyday life, the more inclined we are to unwittingly “delegate tasks that demand wisdom” to the internet, and the less healthy skepticism or suspicion we’ll have as we use it. It is one thing for technology to quicken our typing ability or to optimize some industrial process, it is another thing to absolve us of thinking, reasoning, and relationship opportunities.
Jurassic Park is easily my favorite movie of my early teen years. It was the first scary movie my parents let me see. The symphonic backdrop was awe inspiring, the acting was solid, and the fictitious story line was plausible and, distinctly rooted in real science. The movie has never grown old on me. It seems, at least in my own mind, that the church has entered our own Jurassic Park and I can faintly hear John Hammond uttering a warm welcome, with dramatic irony, “Welcome to Jurassic Park!”
Our dilemma might best be described by one of the greatest philosophers of all time, Dr. Ian Malcolm (yes, he’s also from Jurassic Park). With a bit of foreshadowing and wise premonition, Malcolm, the naysayer of the park uttered these words before everything went off the rails at Jurassic Park. He said, “I’ll tell you the problem with the [scientific] power that you’re using here. It didn’t require any discipline to attain it…You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves so you don’t take any responsibility for it…your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think whether they should.”
The internet is meant to be a thrilling, helpful, and revolutionary adventure like nothing we’ve ever experienced before; akin to the original Jurassic Park. However, for God-fearing men and women, the internet has become an inescapable death trap, the bleaker version of the park with the T-rex and the velociraptors on the loose. It’s not hard to understand why; the endless stream of information and experiences provided by the internet do not require any discipline to attain, are free and unearned, and because of the decentralized nature of the internet, there is no good authority asking whether things should be done, only producers and consumers asking whether things could be done. The result, as Malcom points out, is inevitable catastrophe.
The Problem with the internet is simple: It’s easy. Too easy. As Teddy Roosevelt put it, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.” There’s something to be said about the correlation between lasting value and effort and this concept demonstrates perfectly the problem with the internet. The internet promises (and seemingly provides) things that are naturally very hard or impossible to obtain, with the quick click of a button. Consider the sexual pleasure that the internet markets to us. This is epitomized by pornography, but it is much broader than this and includes all its corollaries; tabloids, forums, pop-up ads, spam emails, meaningless eye-grabbing articles about lingerie or sex scandals or some strange seductive secret. The internet has identified and freely offered a significant part of the beauty of marriage, with no strings attached and disconnects sex from the life-long process of marital intimacy. The pitch is simple: in 30 seconds anyone and everyone can experience instant gratification. It’s too easy.
Consider the nature of social media. A platform that eliminates the need to meet new people, that abbreviates hard conversations into posts and likes, and that allows like-minded people to self-segregate themselves into echo chambers by interests or political affiliations. It sounds amazing, I know. If not for one problem, it’s too easy. Real relationships with real people develop over time, forged or tested in the best and usually the worst of times. Compassion, empathy, comradery, and shared story are formed through daily experiences. The internet short circuits the whole process. Instead of growing to know a person, their history, family, beliefs, and convictions and then wrestling with them through challenging subjects, we pronounce our opinions in one-line-zingers and we feel a prideful confidence in our bold opinions. Truly being in relationship with others means that we’re always having to measure the relational collateral we have and the cost of pressing upon a hard issue.
And this is not to mention the impact the internet has on our perception of truth, its ability to mold us into consumers, or its impact on our capacity to think and formulate opinions on our own. The beauty of the internet is also its greatest problem: it is designed to relieve the critical work of the mind by allowing it to freely and easily receive and store information without having to do the hard work of evaluating and critiquing what it hears and sees. The internet blunts our power of discernment, and we begin to believe whatever it tells us. In much the same way a powerful drug or drunkenness does, it offers an escape from the rigorous processes of life and markets limitless potential at no obvious cost to us. It’s easy. Too easy.
Through the internet, churches are being divided by each new social issue, destroyed by pervasive access to junk information and junk idolatry, and afforded ample opportunity to back-bite and gossip through each new social media platform. And, as each year passes these things are being handed down to the next generation as normative tools that are easily compatible with Christian living.
On the one hand, Scripture tells us that the human heart is the problem and not the things outside of us (Mark 7:15). It’s an important observation that keeps us away from legalism. However, as Tony Reinke points out, referencing the historian Melvin Kransberg on a recent Mortification of Spin podcast, “Technology is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral.” Affirming the wickedness and the deception of the heart should not prevent us from evaluating the things around us that move us toward or away from righteousness, holiness, and God Himself. The internet is technically amoral, it is neither good nor bad. It is just a collection of codes and algorithms. But can we honestly say that it is neutral? Does it feel neutral to you? Has the easy availability of pornography been a neutral development? Has the spread of disinformation or the watering down of friendships and relationships through social media been a neutral development? Has the dulling of our reasoning and critical thinking been a neutral development? I’ll let you answer these questions for yourself.
The Answer is maybe as simple as the problem and it’s all about wisdom. I first spent time thinking about the inverse relationship between wisdom and technology while reading Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows.” Carr, an expert in the relationship between technology and psychology says, “The great danger…is that we’ll begin to lose our humanness, to sacrifice the very qualities that separate us from machines. The only way to avoid that fate…is to have the self-awareness and the courage to refuse to delegate to computers the most human of our mental activities and intellectual pursuits, particularly ‘tasks that demand wisdom.’” Curiously, this got me thinking, “What are the tasks that demand wisdom?” And more importantly, “Is there such a thing as a task that does not demand wisdom?” From a biblical perspective the answers to these questions are pretty clear: all of life requires some degree of wisdom. Thus we read, “The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life, that one may turn away from the snares of death” (Proverbs 13:14). Or as the preacher put it, “A man’s wisdom makes his face shine” (Ecclesiastes 8:1).
Everything we do requires wisdom. Everything. And, while wisdom is a gift from God it is also a curated development of character. That is, it ordinarily takes time and experience to develop deep meaningful wisdom. This is why Job will describe wisdom as being something found by the aged and learned (Job 12:12), or James will connect wisdom in James 1:5 with the long and arduous process of trials and testing in James 1:2-4. It is also why we are told that wisdom is costly, and yet that we should pursue it at all costs (Proverbs 4:7), and why discipline, correction, and training are so closely tied together with wisdom (Proverbs 29:15). Wisdom is associated with things like patience, endurance, suffering, fortitude, and perseverance while the internet is associated with things like results, ease, immediacy, promptness, and instant gratification.
The more we diminish the role of wisdom in our everyday life, the more inclined we are to unwittingly “delegate tasks that demand wisdom” to the internet, and the less healthy skepticism or suspicion we’ll have as we use it. It is one thing for technology to quicken our typing ability or to optimize some industrial process, it is another thing to absolve us of thinking, reasoning, and relationship opportunities. Because these are the processes in which wisdom develops, the internet gives us the illusion of having wisdom (with all knowledge at our fingertips) while simultaneously stripping us of the real, genuine wisdom we actually need. Since both the fruit of the Spirit and many basic human characteristics are governed by wisdom and cultivated in the basic activities of life, the easy and immediate nature of the internet slowly and methodically dulls these qualities. And so, through the eroding of wisdom, we see the cornucopia of problems described above.
What’s the answer? I would propose the church’s hope to endure the internet age begins and ends with wisdom. We need more wisdom. We need to want more wisdom. We need more preaching on wisdom from pulpits on Sunday mornings. We need more wise discussion and correction in our homes and at dinner tables. We must spend more time in the wisdom literature of Scripture and meditate upon it every chance we are able. And, when it comes to entrusting ourselves or our children with the internet, we have to remember that the internet is not neutral. It can be useful but it also can be (and according to the statistics, likely will be) dangerous for us and a hindrance to our sanctification.
We should measure our ability to safely use and maintain such a risky tool through the window of wisdom. Do we have enough wisdom to surf the web? Can we exercise enough wise restraint to be able to browse the internet on our phones? Does maintaining a social media presence increase our wisdom or does it fuel discontent, division, and angst? How can we wisely discern the flow of information available on the internet and validate its truthfulness and goodness? Do our children have the wisdom they need to have access to the internet in any capacity and what are we doing to defend them from the subtle seductions, ideologies, and patterns of thinking imputed through the internet? And finally, how are we exercising and pursuing godly wisdom to prepare ourselves for the temptations and stumbling blocks that we will inevitably encounter on the internet? The more I read and the more destruction I see being facilitated by the internet, the more I am convinced the answers to these questions are a lot more restrictive and inhibitive than we suspect. We must hold ourselves to a higher standard. Because when everything is said and done, as we’ve learned from all the Jurassic movies, there’s only one sure way to endure Jurassic Park: never to go in the first place.
Bryan Rigg is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is pastor of Mercy PCA in Lynchburg, VA.
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Manning the Cultural Ramparts
Written by Ben C. Dunson |
Monday, September 25, 2023
One reason Rufo’s book is so helpful is that it collects information that otherwise is so scattered as to make it hard to get a good, overall picture of the radical changes taking place in American society. By doing so it shows average Americans that they’re not crazy. Things really are headed off the rails in many ways. Rufo provides copious amounts of documentation for the claims he makes. Rufo’s history is a clear, engaging, and enlightening history of the cultural revolution unleashed on America by radical leftist activists over the last half-century.Apocalyptic Floydianism
George Floyd’s death was an apocalypse.
It was an apocalypse, not in the sense of “chaos” (though there was plenty of that), but in the real meaning of the word: it was a revelation.
Despite the lawlessness, violence, and anarchy that was unleashed by Floyd’s death, America did not fundamentally change on that day. What had been there under the surface for quite some time, however, was revealed in all of its ferocious malice. May 25th, 2020 was, as it were, the storming of the Bastille of the American left’s cultural revolution. It is a revolution still underway, though there are some encouraging signs that a counter-revolution has begun.
America’s Cultural Revolution by Christopher Rufo tells the story of how America arrived where it is today. In short, it is an exposé of the ideologies that were steadily gaining ground for many decades prior to the Floydian Apocalypse.
It is often difficult to realize how much one’s culture and nation have been altered when you are living through the change. The transformation doesn’t happen all at once; our memories fail us regarding last year’s news, and we tend to become desensitized as we are forced to live with the “new normal.” Many Americans are probably no longer shocked that police in major U.S. cities will not even attempt to stop thefts in the range of $700-800, that self-defense against violent crime is increasingly likely itself to be punished (while those perpetuating the crimes get off lightly), that vast crime- and drug-infested tent cities of the homeless have taken over urban centers, and so on.
But then you look back ten or twenty years and it all becomes blindingly obvious: America is a fundamentally different nation than it once was. Rufo begins his book with a striking example. Angela Davis, a figure now nearly universally lauded in mainstream academia and the press, was in the 1970s the darling of Soviet Russia. On a 1972 publicity tour of the Soviet Union, Davis, as Rufo recounts, “praised her hosts for their treatment of minorities and denounced the United States for its oppression of ‘political prisoners’” (1). When approached by a group of Czech dissidents who were struggling against the Soviet regime with a plea to publicize their plight, “Davis responded with ice: ‘They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison’” (1). In the 1970s such unabashed sympathy with Soviet oppression, while popular in radical enclaves, remained on the fringes of mainstream society. It is on the fringes no more:
After the death of George Floyd . . . All of a sudden the old Angela Davis narrative appeared everywhere: America was an irredeemably racist nation; whites constituted a permanent oppressor class; the country could be saved only through the performance of elaborate guilt rituals and the wholesale overturning of its founding principles. (2)
Rufo’s book is an attempt to explain how this great reversal came about.
Viva La Revolución
America’s Cultural Revolution is divided into four parts: first, a history of the cultural revolution; then a separate section on the outworking of the revolution in the areas of race, education, and power (by which Rufo is referring to the undermining of America’s founding political order through the implementation of CRT, DEI programs, and the like). At the head of each section is a biographical sketch of founding figures in the cultural revolution: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell, names that will be known to those who are familiar with the various offshoots of critical theory, but that will be less well known to many. And yet, as the saying goes, ideas have consequences, even the ideas of seemingly obscure and irrelevant academics tucked away in the dark nooks of musty university libraries. The ideas of these four have fundamentally altered nearly every aspect of modern American life. The success of the “long march through the institutions” of thinkers inspired by such ideas has been staggering. However, “the capture of America’s institutions was so gradual and bureaucratic, it largely escaped the notice of the American public, until it burst into consciousness following the death of George Floyd” (4).
Rufo’s narrative framing makes the ideological movements he describes easier to understand than a densely argued philosophical critique. Though he certainly delves into the content of these ideologies he never gets bogged down in overly technical or academic language. Some will inevitably fault him for this, but he is very clear that his book is not an academic exercise for the purpose of nuanced conversation. It is, instead, a powerful warning and a call to action. In Rufo’s adept telling of the story, it is easy to follow how all of these radical ideas have come to infect our society, and it is easy to see how devastating they are.
Put differently, the narrative approach makes it easier for non-academics to understand the origins of the complex ideas of the radical left and how they have led us to the present moment. Reading Rufo we can see that radical assaults on America’s past are not attempts to be honest about the messiness of history, or the fallenness of man, but are in fact attempts to undermine, scorn, and reject the entirety of the American project (apart from the ideology, stories, and heroes of the radical left). Today’s radicals will not be content until they have remade America wholly in their own image. Thus, founding figures in our history–whether Jonathan Edwards, John Witherspoon, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Abraham Lincoln–all must go. We must tear down their statues, we must rename buildings named in their honor, we must erase them from our cultural memory. Consider how they talk about Rufo himself: He is a “shrill ideological bully” who engages in “militant fascist rhetoric” as part of a “reactionary impulse bent on the radical transformation — if not the outright destruction — of America’s leading institutions.” All of this is written about someone whose stated goal is merely to return America to the founding philosophy embodied in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The goal of radical leftists is not nuanced historical understanding. It is total control of all levers of power, with no dissent allowed.
In a short review only the briefest of outlines can be sketched as to the detailed historical information Rufo highlights. He begins his story with Herbert Marcuse, whom he calls the “Father of the Revolution.” Marcuse’s chief insight was that class-based efforts at overturning the “bourgeois order” had failed in Western nations (especially America) due to the fact that the working class in a society that allows for upward mobility almost always remain socially and economically conservative. Absent the restrictions of feudalism or absolutist monarchies the working class would rather rise up to greater levels of wealth and social prestige than burn the system down. Marcuse, therefore, realized that the key to social revolution was convincing other groups to fight against the supposedly oppressive conditions holding them down. Race became the key at first, though other “categories of oppression” were eventually added (gender, sexual orientation, etc.). If you can convince someone with an immutable characteristic (skin color, for example) that he can be nothing other than the target of societal oppression then you are well on your way to creating the conditions of permanent revolution.
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Why I Stand By the Gate
I want to be part of that impact to my flock. I want to make sure those who come to New Life don’t just hear the good news of Christ, but experience Christ through the good news. I want to shepherd by exhibiting our welcoming Savior, and break down any barriers that jeopardize belief in our welcoming Savior. In his first letter, Peter encourages elders to lead not from the stage but from among God’s people.
Every Sunday at the front entrance of New Life Bible Fellowship on you’ll see my Co-Lead Pastor, Greg Lavine. If you have a child, then you’ll enter through the side gate where I will meet you. Regularly, first time attendees will express surprise after the service, either to myself or another New Lifer, that a pastor greeted them at the gate. Churchgoers often say they’ve never been to a church where a pastor serves as a greeter.
Many perceive greeters to be the bottom rung of ministry: the place you put warm bodies, those who don’t have the ability to teach, play an instrument, or run technical equipment. I disagree. Greeters are the first person a guest connects with. Horst Schulze, co-founder of The Ritz Carlton Hotel Company made a massive impact on the service industry with his leadership principles. He recognized that a guest’s experience is most profoundly shaped by front-line employees. Whether a maid or a door keeper, you are a lady or a gentleman: deployed with real authority to serve the guest. I love how biblical Schulze’s vision is. The most important people aren’t those hidden away in corner offices, they are those on the front line. Those rescued by Christ are his servants, delighted to serve in whatever capacity he has for us, even as a door keeper (Ps. 84:10). When discerning who is called to serve as an elder, Paul tells Timothy and Titus that they must serve with hospitality.
You can say your church is friendly, but if your greeters are talking to one another and ignoring guests, your guests won’t experience its friendliness. You can say your church is welcoming to everyone, but if your greeters deliver non-verbal cues that someone doesn’t belong, your guests won’t feel very welcome. You can hope that families are valued, but if families have a confusing experience when they enter your campus, they will feel like second-class citizens.
At the average evangelical church, a guest will arrive, get out of the car, say hello to a greeter or two, find a seat, say hello to those sitting nearby, listen to the worship leader speak, hear the band play, and listen to the host pray and make announcements all before the pastor preaches.
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