Meet David Ulin. David is the book editor for the Los Angeles Times. David reads a lot of books because he gets paid to review a lot of books. It’s David’s job.
But one day David noticed something alarming – the task of reading books was becoming more and more difficult. That’s bad news for a professional book reader.
The problem was not the lack of will to read, but the lack of concentration. He wrote about his experience in the autobiographical article, “The Lost Art of Reading”:
Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being… In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Because the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.
Ulin pointed to the Internet as a primary cause of his withering concentration. And he is not alone. In the summer of 2008 journalist Nocholas Carr published an article in The Atlantic that brought these concerns to popular attention under the provoking title, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He wrote,
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the struggle… And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I sip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Carr and Ulin sound oddly familiar. So what is happening to them? And is this happening to us?
To answer these questions we need to address how online reading habits damage our offline reading habits.
Socially, the Internet offers us streams of fragmented information that must be quickly browsed as they pass. Social media (like Facebook and Twitter) and online browsing patters will train our minds to hunt for information in small, isolated bits. In fact “reading” in the traditional opend-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet,” writes Susan Jacoby. “What we are engaged in—like birds of prey looking their next meal—is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.” Whether our brains are being rewired as a result is a topic of debate. What is less debated is that browsing fragments of information erodes concentration. And this erosion in concentration influences how we think and read books.
This is sort of a hodge-podge of thoughts that have been floating around my head today. I haven’t taken the time to really flesh these out, but am putting them up here with the hopes that they will cause you to think about these things in more depth, too…
I have reflected before on the temptations of Jesus in the desert, and saw in them these three common temptations to us all:
1) Provision
2) Protection
3) Prominence
My initial thoughts on these were that inherent in each temptation was the choice to seek attainment of these things through one’s own efforts, or to seek God (the Father) first and let Him provide these things as He sees fit. Jesus is tempted first by the devil to turn the stones into bread. Now, obviously this would require divine power, something that is not inherent in our nature. But the temptation for Jesus was to use His power for his own gain… not to glorify the Father, but to satisfy Himself.
I saw a book review on Amazon earlier that reminded me of these things, but also prompted me to think in some slightly different directions. It was for a book by Diogenes Allen entitled “Temptation”. This is the short review of it:
This short, readable, and profound book examines the preconditions of Christian spirituality. The jumping off point is a detailed analysis of the temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness: to live for material things, to seek personal security, and to clamor for social position. Once we overcome these temptations, the path is cleared for a spiritual pilgrimage; if we are lucky, the pilgrimage culminates in trust in Christ and faith in the Resurrection. “Temptation” doesn’t present a comprehensive apologetic for Christianity. Instead, it profoundly reorients the reader and offers a view of the human world in which Christianity can make sense. It is really, really good.
I thought it was interesting the way the reviewer broke the three temptations down. There is certainly some overlap with what I saw. In reflecting a bit more on the first temptation today – the one I shorthanded as “provision” – it occurred to me that there is something about this temptation that I didn’t quite see or grasp before. This temptation has to do with “appetite”, which I think sheds a lot of light on the nature of this temptation. Now, an appetite is not necessarily a bad thing, although the way one may choose to feed an appetite may very well be. However, an appetite (a word often used synonymously for “desire”) is a God-given part of our humanity. We need to eat to survive. So God gives us a desire for food. We need to rest to function well. God gives us desire for sleep. We need to procreate to continue to exist. God gives us a desire for sex. We need relationships and meaning. God gives us the desire to communicate and express ourselves. We need to live and grow. God gives us desires to thrive and succeed.
These desires are not bad. Indeed, God created us and created them as a part of us; they all have a purpose. However, because of the calamity of sin and our fallen human natures, these desires are often perverted into grotesque misrepresentations of their original intent. Healthy appetites become distorted obsessions through the perverting power of sin. When we are no longer satisfied with the fulfillment of an appetite according to God’s plan for humanity, but instead seek fulfillment according to our own deviant plans, we succumb to this temptation. Was this not the very temptation with which Satan approached the first man and woman in the Garden?
And speaking of Satan, this was something else that occurred to me as I was thinking about these things earlier. Is it any wonder that we are so susceptible to the temptation of this world? As I was thinking about the evil trinity of our three great adversaries – the world, our flesh, and the devil – I had another thought that was new and rather revelatory. Although we were created in the image of God, we were also created from the dust of the earth. We were fashioned and molded out of the very world in which we live. God’s word says that our flesh was formed from the very dust of it. Is it any wonder then that ‘our flesh’ has such a propensity for the things of this ‘world’? The devil seems to have such terrible power in this world, but really… how much power does he have? He approaches Adam and Eve in the form of serpent. Think about that… he has no hands and feet. But his mouth is full of poison. He cannot wrestle with a man (like God wrestled with Jacob); no he can only ‘suggest’ with his poisonous breath. The devil markets sin and manipulates sinners, but he is only selling something someone already wants to buy. He does not force anyone to do anything against their own power. Rather he tempts them to do something they already desire to do, even when they know that to do so is wrong.
He has no hands and feet. That is the thought that just kept running through my mind again and again as I thought about the devil’s role in this whole business of sin and temptation. He has no hands and feet. All he has is a mouth that is full of poison. He lies, yes. He steals, yes… but when he steals he does so without hands and feet. He steals the same way politicians and corporations do… by convincing someone else to willingly give up something, and convincing them that they will gain something valuable in return. But of course, we have already mentioned that he lies.
He also kills… but here again, the power of life and death is not in his – oh wait, he doesn’t have any hands. As with stealing, so with killing… the devil uses people to accomplish his foul ends. He crouches outside their doors and whispers to hearts that are all too willing to go along with his wicked schemes. It can seem sometimes that Satan really is the prince of this world, and that he is the ultimate master of mayhem in this global Gotham City. However, the real (and I think sad) truth is, that old serpent Satan does not have any power to accomplish anything in this world that a man has not given him. He has no hands. He has no feet.
Jesus was tempted in the wilderness just as we are. The reason that he did not sin is because there was nothing there in his heart for Satan to manipulate. There was nothing distorted in his desires. He was tempted and yet without sin. In the desert temptations, Jesus responded to Satan’s attempt to play on his hunger with Scripture, quoting Moses, saying, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4) Jesus said something very similar to His disciples when they were urging Him to eat after they left the village where He had shared the living water with the Samaritan woman. Jesus told them that He had food they did not know about, and when they were perplexed he told them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to accomplish His work.” (John 4:34) Satan tempted the Christ, but God’s anointed didn’t need to turn stones into bread to satisfy His appetite in the wilderness because despite the hunger he surely felt after forty days without physical food, Jesus’ real appetite (i.e., His greatest desire) was not for food at all, but for His Father… and to know and do His will.
Perhaps I just love this because it provides me some justification for my love of books. But then again maybe — just maybe — there is something to this. John Piper writes in the Introductory chapter to the book “Thinking. Loving. Doing.: A Call to Glorify God with Heart and Mind“:
Healthy Christianity clearly appreciates the life of the mind. Love God “with all your mind,” says Jesus (Matt. 22:37). “Think over what I say,” Paul tells Timothy, and us with him (2 Tim. 2:7). When Proverbs instructs us to “seek it like silver,” the referent is insight, understanding, and the knowledge of God (Prov. 2:3–5). It is a tragedy that in many Christian circles, the life of the mind is not prized, and it is even diminished. Anti-intellectualism in the church (of all places!) is a calamity given that Christians this side of heaven are people of a Book, and thus irreducibly thinkers in some sense.
Jewish author and talk-show host Dennis Prager observes:
One thing I noticed about evangelicals is that they do not read. They do not read the Bible, they do not read the great Christian thinkers, they have never heard of Aquinas. If they are Presbyterian, they’ve never read the founders of Presbyterianism. I do not understand that. As a Jew, that’s confusing to me. The commandment of study is so deep in Judaism that we immerse ourselves in study. God gave us a brain; aren’t we to use it in His service? When I walk into an Evangelical Christian’s home and see a total of 30 books, most of them best sellers, I do not understand. I have bookcases of Christian books, and I am a Jew. Why do I have more Christian books than 98 percent of the Christians in America? That is so bizarre to me.
This hits close to home. Honestly, such an evangelical allergy to books, and its accompanying subtle form of anti-intellectualism, characterized what I would have called “my Christian walk” in high school. I hated reading. Today at my parents’ home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in my old room (now the guestroom) lies a thick stack of CliffsNotes that reminds me how I cut corners to make it through high school reading assignments. At the time, I would not have verbalized any formal anti-intellectual opinions, but my disdain for reading was eroding the foundation of my present and future thinking. Though many tremendous gospel seeds were sewn in those years, it now seems that it was my freshman year in college when God really turned on the lights of new birth, and with it came a voracious appetite for reading—and in its wake, a more engaged life of the mind.
You can also order the audio book from ChristianAudio for less than $5 through the rest of the month. While you are at it, pick up John Piper’s “Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God” for FREE!
“Why must it be like this?” Caleb asked his father. “How can the blood of a lamb save us from death?” (pg 83)
What a wonderful book to help my kids (ummm… and their dad) really think about what life may have really been like in the land of Goshen during the time of the Exodus. The author not only uses a holy imagination to paint a realistic picture of that, but at the same time to tell a story within a story about the atonement Christ made for us by payment of his own blood.
Helen Santos tells a very realistic tale of Caleb (the young boy becoming a man), his God-fearing Israelite father, Asher, and the lamb that changes Caleb’s heart from one that hates to one that loves the sheep he has been called to shepherd. The author tells the story simply, but with enough detail that you genuinely feel like you have gotten a glimpse into life three thousand years ago.
The story of the atonement is told first by Asher to his son Caleb as the father relates the tale of Abraham and Isaac to his own son, and then revealed even more powerfully in the unfolding events leading up to the first Passover. And then completely unveiled in the gospels. (Bible sold separately, not included with this item ;~)
This is an absolute gem of a book. It is a great story to read aloud to kids, but even if you don’t have a kids, it is just a great story. I think anyone could read this and come away with a much greater appreciation of what our Lord has done, in the pondering account of His answer to Caleb’s question: “How can the blood of a lamb save us from death?” It was truly a blessing to read this with my kids, and it definitely kept their interest.
So much of what comes out in theaters is just an escape from every day life. That’s a shame because every day life is where we live and how we live there is what we are truly accountable for. This is one of the rare and exceptional movies with a message that encourages you to look for an entrance back into every day life and to make it meaningful rather than to escape from it by making it seem more meaningless. I wish there were more movies like this one that would encourage us that way. But I am grateful that at least there is one.
If you are a man, especially if you are a father – do whatever it takes to see this movie. Be challenged, be broken, be encouraged… be courageous. And let’s be honest. Most of the time spent watching movies at the theater is just wasted. You will not be wasting your time on this one. In fact, I would say this is one of the few movies you can see where the time and money that you spend is actually an investment.
So what are you waiting for? Get on the phone and call up some buddies and go and see this movie. Today.
“Don’t think that I came to send peace on the earth. I didn’t come to send peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man at odds against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me isn’t worthy of me. He who doesn’t take his cross and follow after me, isn’t worthy of me. He who seeks his life will lose it; and he who loses his life for my sake will find it. He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me. He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward: and he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man will receive a righteous man’s reward. Whoever gives one of these little ones just a cup of cold water to drink in the name of a disciple, most certainly I tell you he will in no way lose his reward. (Matthew 10:34-42)”
I remember being somewhat perplexed by this passage as a brand new Christian several years ago… the Prince of Peace promising not peace but a sword? As time has passed, I have come to understand that where there is a true commitment to Jesus Christ in a family that is not shared by all the members, rather than being united “in Him” (see the epistles of Paul), rather even the closest of relations may and likely will find themselves divided BY Him. James says that “Friendship with the world is enmity with God.” And it is equally true that friendship with God is enmity with the world. Those striving to live for the world will naturally experience tension with those striving to live for the Lord. Even (and perhaps most especially) in the home, when the center and focus of two lives lived out next to each other are completely opposed, the result is hardly what one would call peace.
Christ compels all who are weak and the weary from their labor to come to Him and take His yoke upon them… “for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matt 11:30) And the Apostle Paul warns, “Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness? (2 Cor 6:14)”
How does one reconcile the Prince of Peace promising NOT peace but a sword? It is important to understand that the peace that Jesus came to restore what was not “horizontal”; that is, not in the relations between men or in families. The peace that Jesus came to restore was between fallen and sinful men and a righteous and holy God. Such peace could never be made without a mediator. It should come as no surprise then, that those who have been restored to fellowship with God will find stress and strain in their relations with those who absolutely refuse Him in order that they may pursue and persist in theirs sin and their worldly affections.
I love to read J.C. Ryle’s thoughts on the gospels. Here are his thoughtful reflections on this passage.
“Don’t think that I came to send peace on the earth. I didn’t come to send peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man at odds against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me isn’t worthy of me. He who doesn’t take his cross and follow after me, isn’t worthy of me. He who seeks his life will lose it; and he who loses his life for my sake will find it. He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives him who sent me. He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward: and he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man will receive a righteous man’s reward. Whoever gives one of these little ones just a cup of cold water to drink in the name of a disciple, most certainly I tell you he will in no way lose his reward.”
In these verses the great Head of the Church winds up His first charge to those whom He sends forth to make known His Gospel. He declares three great truths, which form a fitting conclusion to the whole discourse.
In the first place, He bids us remember thatHis Gospel will not cause peace and agreement wherever it comes.“I didn’t come to send peace, but a sword.” The object of His first coming on earth was not to set up a millennial kingdom in which all would be of one mind, but to bring in the Gospel, which would lead to strifes and divisions. We have no right to be surprised, if we see this continually fulfilled. We are not to think it strange, if the Gospel rends asunder families, and causes estrangement between the nearest relations. It is sure to do so in many cases, because of the deep corruption of man’s heart. So long as one man believes, and another remains unbelieving–so long as one is resolved to keep his sins, and another desirous to give them up, the result of the preaching of the Gospel must needs be division. For this the Gospel is not to blame, but the heart of man.
There is a deep truth in all this, which is constantly forgotten and overlooked. Many talk vaguely about unity, and harmony, and peace in the Church of Christ, as if they were things that we ought always to expect, and for the sake of which everything ought to be sacrificed. Such people would do well to remember the words of our Lord. No doubt unity and peace are mighty blessings. We ought to seek them, pray for them, and give up everything in order to obtain them, excepting truth and a good conscience. But it is an idle dream to suppose that the churches of Christ will enjoy much of unity and peace before the millennium comes.
In the second place, our Lord tells us that true Christians must make up their minds to trouble in this world. Whether we are ministers or hearers, whether we teach or are taught, it makes little difference. We must carry “a cross.” We must be content to lose even life itself for Christ’s sake. We must submit to the loss of man’s favor, we must endure hardships, we must deny ourselves in many things, or we shall never reach heaven at last. So long as the world, the devil, and our own hearts, are what they are, these things must be so.
We shall find it most useful to remember this lesson ourselves, and to impress it upon others. Few things do so much harm in religion as exaggerated expectations. People look for a degree of worldly comfort in Christ’s service which they have no right to expect, and not finding what they look for, are tempted to give up religion in disgust. Happy is he who thoroughly understands, that though Christianity holds out a crown in the end, it brings also a cross in the way.
In the last place, our Lord cheers us by saying that the least service done to those who work in His cause is observed and rewarded of God.He that gives a believer so little as “a cup of cold water to drink in the name of a disciple, will in no way lose his reward.”
There is something very beautiful in this promise. It teaches us that the eyes of the great Master are ever upon those who labor for him, and try to do good. They seem perhaps to work on unnoticed and unregarded. The proceedings of preachers, and missionaries, and teachers, and visitors of the poor, may appear very trifling and insignificant, compared to the movements of kings and parliaments, of armies and of statesmen. But they are not insignificant in the eyes of God. He takes notice who opposes His servants, and who helps them. He observes who is kind to them, as Lydia was to Paul–and who throws difficulties in their way, as Diotrephes did to John. All their daily experience is recorded, as they labor on in His harvest. All is written down in the great book of His remembrance, and will be brought to light at the last day. The chief butler forgot Joseph, when he was restored to his place. But the Lord Jesus never forgets any of His people. He will say to many who little expect it, in the resurrection morning, “I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink.” (Matt. 25:35.)
Let us ask ourselves, as we close the chapter, in what light we regard Christ’s work and Christ’s cause in the world? Are we helpers of it, or hinderers? Do we in anyway aid the Lord’s “prophets,” and “righteous men?” Do we assist His “little ones?” Do we impede His laborers, or do we cheer them on? These are serious questions. They do well and wisely who give the “cup of cold water,” whenever they have opportunity. They do better still who work actively in the Lord’s vineyard. May we all strive to leave the world a better world than it was when we were born! This is to have the mind of Christ. This is to find out the value of the lessons this wonderful chapter contains.
There is a world of difference between caring about someone’s happiness and caring about their soul. In “the world” (as the New Testament would call it), we live among countless people who will encourage us to pursue whatever makes us transiently happy. But praise God for the friend who sees past and through that, and who encourages us to first make God happy and let our happiness derive from that. There are many who will encourage us to be happy; few indeed who will encourage us to be holy. Listen carefully to the counsel you receive and weigh it with wisdom.
A man of many companions may come to ruin,
but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.
Better is a poor person who walks in his integrity
than one who is crooked in speech and is a fool.
(Proverbs 18:24-19:1 ESV)
“How many of you are utter strangers to conversion and the Lamb of God, and yet think to sail easily into eternal glory? Ah! brethren be not proud, but think when ye are turning away from Christ Jesus – I am despising the only way to the Father. Let this word sink into your heart, ‘No man cometh unto the Father but by Me.’ ‘Neither is there salvation in any other.’
It is amazing how far a natural man may go in understanding the Word of God. A man may go a long way in comprehending a scheme of divinity. He may know all the doctrines of the Bible. He may be able to distinguish good doctrine from bad doctrine. He may be able to preach clearly and well, and yet he may never have mixed faith with the Word.
How many among yourselves have clear natural knowledge of divine things who show by your unholy lives or unrenewed hearts that the Word has never been engrafted into your soul. The devil has great knowledge of divinity and of the Bible, but he has no faith.
How is it with you, dear friends? Ah! I fear many are contented with the faith of natural men. I fear most are contented with head knowledge or a mere flash of natural affection under the Word. Have you ever had a sweet relish of the things of the gospel? Have you ever felt the certainty of the great things of Christ and eternity from their overpowering glory? Ah! do not take up with a slight work.
Some think they will go to heaven because they have sat under the preached gospel. Learn from the falsehood of this hope. Israel perished from under the gospel. Thousands perished under the preaching of Christ and the apostles.
Some think they are safe because they have believed the gospel. Ah! remember the gospel will be to your hurt if it does not save you. ‘If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they have no cloak for their sin’ (John 15:22).”
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
(Matthew 6:19-24 ESV)
[This took some time to type in, but I thought it was so profound that it would be worth the time it took to be able to share it here. This is from the Introduction to Craig M. Gay's book, The Way of the (Modern) World. I do hope that you will invest the time and attention to read this because I think the spiritual insights and intellectual rewards are well worth your investment. The part about "darkness" and "blindness" is very impacting.]
“The World” in the New Testament
The suggestion that “the world” is an interpretation of human affairs that excludes the reality of God may seem to support the notion – voiced most recently by the theorists of “postmodernity” – that all social worlds are always only interpretations of changing human circumstances, and that “reality” is always, in effect, “socially constructed.” But this is not what is meant. Rather, the point is simply that it is possible for us to imagine our world in such a way that we ignore the real reality of God’s gracious presence within it. The New Testament’s use of the term “world” makes this quite clear.
The New Testament Greek term for “world” is cosmos. In classical usage cosmos originally denoted “building” and “construction,” but it eventually came to mean the “order of things” in the largest possible sense, a meaning readily recognizable in the English terms “cosmic” and “cosmology”. Cosmos has a number of related meanings in the New Testament. Consistent with classical usage, cosmos can mean heaven and earth in their entirety, as in Acts 17:24, where Paul speaks of the “God who made the world and everything in it.” Cosmos can also mean the specific place or sphere of human life, as in Matt. 4:8, where Jesus is offered “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.” Even more specifically, cosmos occasionally denotes the sphere of fallen humanity at enmity with God. This is particularly true in the writings of the apostle John, where cosmos is often used to describe the world of humanity in rebellion against the Father and utterly opposed to the work of the Son. “If the world hates you,” Jesus is said to have told his disciples in John 15:18ff., “keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.” Evangelical theologian Oliver O’Donovan has described “the world” in this latter sense as a falsely structured reality exhibiting an unreal continuity and coherence. “’The world’…,” O’Donovan writes, “is not the real and good world that God has made, nor any other real world, but a fantasy world of sinful imagination, a nothingness which will destroy us if we love it simply because it is nothingness and offers nothing on which we may nourish ourselves.”
As O’Donovan’s comments indicate, “the world” is a human construction. It represents a kind of false order that we construct for ourselves in the place of God’s good creation. Indeed, the cosmos is something we must continually reconstruct and maintain for ourselves in the face of threats posed to its unreal continuities and coherences by the real reality of created order and particularly by the reality of creation’s Creator. But how is this possible? How is it possible for us to create and then maintain a falsely structured reality with continuities and coherences that are unreal? Although the answers to those questions are ultimately shrouded in the mystery of freedom, suffice it here to say that our construction and maintenance of the cosmos require us to lower our sights, metaphysically speaking, and to pretend that the causal continuities of space and time interpret reality without remainder – that is, that the sorts of things we are able to observe in the ordinary course of events circumscribe the boundaries of the possible. Our construction of “the world”, in other words, is often premised upon the assumption that we are capable of comprehending reality in its totality, that we are capable of rendering it stable and predictable, and that we are capable – at least in principle – of making reality work for us. This comes more or less naturally for us, for when it is viewed from within, “the world” appears to be all that there is: the cosmos, the sum-total of reality. Indeed, it is the very nature of “the world” to prevent us from recognizing the existence of anything beyond sensible and temporal regularities. Although the plausibility of this narrowing of our field of vision owes in part to the operations of human reason, it is also a matter of selfish convenience. For once we have reduced reality to a “world” of things and objects, which is the end-product of this convenient fiction, we can begin to exert our will over reality, and we can begin to act “as gods” within it.
The New Testament asserts that our construction and maintenance of “the world” is impelled ultimately by fallen human pride, by our rebellious struggle for autonomy, and by our grasping after a kind of godlike mastery over the world and over each other. To the extent that the creation can be rendered a world of “things” to be exhaustively comprehended by human reason, the desired mastery appears – at least from the perspective of “the world” – to be both possible and plausible. This is why the apostle describes “the world” in terms of “darkness,” but then goes on to suggest that fallen humanity loves this darkness and hates the light of the Gospel (Johne 3:16ff.). For the “darkness” does not refer to blindness as such, but instead to a blindness that is willed, that is, to a kind of blindness that does not understand itself to be blind, but on the contrary believes that it sees and that it comprehends reality in its entirety.
It is important to stress that our sinful construction of “the world” does not preclude religious understanding. On the contrary, it simply requires that the object of religious understanding be subject to more or less “natural” regularities. The Pharisees’ use of the Law in Jesus’ day provides a salient example of this. By rendering Torah perfunctorily, and in terms of more or less predictable causes and effects, the Pharisees sought to establish control over the religious life of Israel. In seeking to maintain this control, however, they neutralized the possibility of having any real encounter with the living God, and it was the deliberate constriction of their understanding for the sake of control that prevented the Pharisees from recognizing the Christ when he came. Needless to say, the deliberate constriction of their understanding for the sake of control still prevents many of our contemporaries – “religious” though they may well be – from recognizing Jesus as the Christ.
Because our humanly constructed “world” is ultimately illusory, however, it is exceedingly fragile and must continually be protected from the light of divine intervention. For the light of the Scriptures and of the Incarnation exposes the narrowness and unreality of the continutities and coherences of our humanly constructed darkness for what they really are – that is, as simply fake – thereby exploding our sinful bid for autonomy and mastery. It is not at all surprising, then, that “the world” acted to kill Jesus as quickly as it did; nor that the gospel of Jesus Christ continues to look foolish from the perspective of the “wisdom of this world” (1 Cor. 1:20ff.). Finally, it is hardly surprising that the authors of the New Testament refrain from using the term cosmos to describe the future redeemed creation, describing it instead in terms of the “kingdom” of God. For the term cosmos, or order as such, carries the insidious connotation of a conception of order that excludes the Creator of order, a ploy which is the very essence of “worldliness” and of human rebellion (cf. Rom. 1:18ff.). When, in the future, the world is redeemed, it will not be known as cosmos but as the Kingdom of God under the Lordship of Christ.
In speaking of the New Testament’s understanding of “the world” as a human construction we collide, as indicated above, with one of the central insights of modern secular social theory, namely, that “reality” is socially constructed. What passes for “reality” in society, in other words is something that we determine and construct together with others. We decide, more or less deliberately, how our world is to be understood and interpreted, who we are and how we fit into the world, what is important and why, and, conversely, what is safe to ignore and neglect. This socially constructed “reality” is held together, furthermore, by way of a whole host of assumptions which we take largely for granted, assumptions which provide a framework for “making sense” of our social environment. Taken together these assumptions form the stock of knowledge that enables us to know and to tell each other who we are and what in the world is “real.”
As we mentioned at the outset, we do not often reflect on the validity of our socially constructed “reality.” Indeed, we go to great lengths to avoid this kind of reflection because it is difficult and only raises disturbing questions about matters which are much more comfortably left unexamined. The truth that one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions, for example, is not easily digested in the context of modern consumer culture. That it is impossible to lengthen our lives by worrying about them is another truth best left unmentioned in the context of the contemporary fascination with modern medical technology. And yet the importance – at least for Christians – of periodically subjecting our social “reality” to critical examination should by now be clear given our discussion of “the world” and of “worldliness.” For if “the world” tends, finally, to be an interpretation of order, or cosmos, that essentially excludes the reality of the living God, then “worldliness” will consist in basic assumptions about our lives that either explicitly or implicitly neglect God’s agency in them, assumptions which we probably take largely for granted. If recent sociological studies of the process called “secularization” are at all correct, this kind of neglect of God is one of the more strking characteristics of modern society and culture.
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