Amazing Beat Box Girl

Advertising & PG Wodehouse

I was talking to one of my former students about advertising a few weeks back. I was shocked to find out he was going to make a career of it; advertising that is. I was shocked because I considered him the salt of the earth, and still do btw, and considered advertising something akin to a mental virus.

But after reconsidering, something I have to do a lot of, I've come to a new perspective thanks to my former student and the humorous P G Wodehouse.

The New Advertising, P G Wodehouse

"In Denmark," said the man of ideas, coming into the smoking room, "I see that they have original ideas on the subject of advertising. According to the usually well-informed Daily Lyre, all 'bombastic' advertising is punished with a fine. The advertiser is expected to describe his wares in restrained, modest language. In case this idea should be introduced into England, I have drawn up a few specimen advertisements which, in my opinion, combine attractiveness with a shrinking modesty at which no censor could cavil."

And in spite of our protests, he began to read us his first effort, descriptive of a patent medicine.

"It runs like this," he said:

Timson's Tonic for Distracted Deadbeats

Has been known to cure

We Hate to Seem to Boast,

but

Many Who have Tried It Are Still

Alive

Take a Dose or Two in Your Spare Time

It's Not Bad Stuff

Read what an outside stockbroker says:

"Sir--After three months' steady absorption of your Tonic

I was no worse."

We do not wish to thrust ourselves forward in any way. If you prefer other medicines, by all means take them. Only we just thought we'd mention it--casually, as it were--that TIMSON'S is PRETTY GOOD.

"How's that?" inquired the man of ideas. "Attractive, I fancy, without being bombastic. Now, one about a new novel. Ready?"

MR. LUCIEN LOGROLLER'S LATEST

The Dyspepsia of the Soul

The Dyspepsia of the Soul

The Dyspepsia of the Soul

Don't buy it if you don't want to, but just listen to a few of the criticisms.

THE DYSPEPSIA OF THE SOUL

"Rather ... rubbish."-- Spectator

"We advise all insomniacs to read Mr. Logroller's soporific

pages."-- Outlook

"Rot."-- Pelican

THE DYSPEPSIA OF THE SOUL

Already in its first edition.

"What do you think of that?" asked the man of ideas.

We told him.

Advertising is one of those things we take for granted and put up with and sometimes appreciate when it's done well. "There are somethings money can't by, for everything else there's Mastercard," is especially insidious because it's so good. There are intangible goods that bring unutterable joy. The insidious part is that you're supposed to go on a spending spree with easy credit to get there.

Can we do advertising in a way that honors the imago Dei in all of us? I hope my student and others prove it is so. I'm sure there are already examples out there, but I just can't think of any right now.

Faith Inspires Hope and Love

Grading and resting have kept me away from the blogosphere for awhile, but this dog has brought me back. She reminds me so much of our last dog Sage. The family of Faith is currently taking her to see injured soldiers from the Iraq war who are learning to cope with their disabilities. Faith does inspire hope and love.

Sacred vs. Secular Education

I've begun reading Wisdom and Eloquence: A Christian Paradigm for Classical Learning by Robert Littlejohn and Charles Evans. They argue that progressive education propounded by John Dewey "vocationalizes" and "secularizes" education. Growing up in America, we assume that the separation of church and state into sacred and secular realms is a practical good for us personally and society. Littlejohn and Evans assert the contrary:

It is a characteristic of un-Christian thinking to separate the sacred and the secular. To the extent that our curriculum structure in our schools do not uphold a consistent, pervasive integration of the sacred into the students academic and social experiences, we have allowed ourselves to become secularized (24).

We must seek to restore the Christian vision of education, which is one of discipleship in all subjects as part of God's creation and redemption in Christ:

Hear, O' Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on your doorposts of your house and on your gates (Deut 6:4-8).

If we are not deliberate about this kind of education and delegating it to those who can train our children in this way, the world will only be too glad to fill the void.

The drive to reform and to be open to reform, together with the inner honing device that should guide such reform, is most easily acquired when we are children.

A Brawl in the Bar of Belief

Last night I watched Collision for the third time. My considered opinion is that it was a great brawl in the bar of belief. Perhaps the most satisfying debate I've ever seen.

The Future of History

The past is the only reliable guide to the future.

Machen is the Man!

Toward a Sure Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Dilemma of Biblical Criticism, 1881-1915 by Terry A. Chrisope


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Well written and insightful account of Machen's struggle with doubt posed by historicism and higher criticism of the Bible. Chrisope deftly tracks Machen's development as a historian and New Testament scholar, showing that Machen resolved his doubt by honest grappling with history and the Bible's truth claims. Machen worked through his questions while teaching at Princeton and founding Westminster Theological Seminary.

Machen came to the conclusion that higher criticism proceeded from the anti-supernatural bias of the Enlightenment. This bias does not arise from the text or its historical context and inevitably warps biblical interpretation. This is because historicism reduces history to naturalistic causes and cannot adequately deal with the historical truth claims of the Bible.

Paul said if Christ is not raised then our faith is in vain. This claim was falsifiable. The fact that the church still exists can only be explained by the fact that no one could disprove the Christians. Machen exposed historicism as a modern idol and clung to the Faith that had called him to faith.

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The Bible Story Worldview

One of my college students remarked today that he had been taught Bible stories, but he had never been taught to view the world through those stories.

Review Essay of That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession

That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession by Peter Novick

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Novick gives a fantastic analysis of the changing views on the questions of objectivity and subjectivity in American historiography. How Novick, a European historian, could write so comprehensively and with such depth and for almost 650 pages is amazing.

He is admittedly a historicist, which, he says, "means simply that ... thinking about anything in the past is primarily shaped by my understanding of its role within a particular historical context, and in the stream of history" (7). I was glad to hear him define it that way, because historicism usually means that history is to be explained solely in terms of naturalistic historical causation, which is a sophisticated way of saying that the historian has an anti-supernatural bias. But that doesn't come into play so much on the question of what American historians think about the "objectivity question."

Novick begins with the original objectivity project of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when historians thought they were following Leopold von Ranke's dictum of telling history "wie es eigentlich gewesen" (as it really was). Turns out that Ranke wasn't a pure objectivist who was only trying to be empirically faithful to his sources. Ranke meant telling history not so much as it "really" was but as it "essentially" (eigentlich) was. This meant that through history we access the essences of things, which is more a Romantic than scientific view.

Regardless, the pure objectivist school thought that the purpose of historiography was the scinetific sel-elimination of the historian from the task of researching and presenting history. The historian went into the library the way the scientist enters the laboratory. He collected the facts, which spoke through the historian who was merely a kind of secretary taking dictation. Studies would proceed until all texts and artifacts would have interpreted themselves and historians would have put themselves out of a job. Hard to believe, but Novick painstaking documents it.

Then come the new historians: Fredrick Jackson Turner, Carl Becker, and Charles Beard, whose work spanned pre and post WWI. They hit a nerve when they pointed out that WWI exposed the fact that the Enlightenment "victory of Reason" didn't happen. They also revealed that, far from being objective, most historians had been involved in WWI propaganda, pretending that the allies were good little boys on the way to Sunday school when the evil German bullies picked a fight.

Becker and Beard made it impossible for historians to to go back to their pre-war confidence in objectivity. Then came the expansion of professional history, where objectivity was a function of academic Ph.D. programs, whose graduates went on to work for the Allies of World War II. Once again, American historians aligned themselves with their national power, which didn't encourage their critical faculties. Speaking the truth to power only meant providing sobering military intelligence and lessons from the past, not necessarily telling the truth to power about power. In other words, historians knew who buttered their bread. After the war, historians tended to succumb to the temptation to justify Allied actions, which sometimes meant concealing the whole story or unrealistic appraisals of FDR and Churchill. The new objectivity was not about personal detachment but about being on the right side--the side of the West which now included America. This is also when the Western-Civ class was born.

Novick points out that Christian historians like Kenneth Scott Latourette acknowledged their Christian view of history and defended it as superior to naturalistic and relativistic notions from historicism. Novick points out that they were better than most who tried to keep their ideological commitments a secret. This was also the age of purportedly objective journalism, which Novick explodes with admissions from the journalists themselves.

Other historians, like Karl Popper and Richard Hofstader, abandoned old objectivist notions of "detachment" and "self-elimination" for much more honest "self-examination" and "historical complexity." They argued that historiography was objective and scientific in so far as its claims were falsifiable, positing a kind of "normed objectivism."

With the advent of the sixties every group became their own historians, as black and feminist historiography privileged the newly liberated perspectives of those who had suffered as part of their social group. Partisan scholarship proudly dealt objectivity another blow.

Chapter fifteen tells the story of the postmodern resurrection of subjectivity and the demise of almost any meaningful notion of objectivity. Historicism and relativism had taught historians to bracket moral questions and merely be faithful to the sources, but Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) took the issue of subjectivity even further.

Kuhn, following Michael Polanyi, argued that science doesn't take place in the abstract but within a "paradigm." A paradigm is an accepted model that is, by its very nature, freighted with worldview commitments promoted by the current scientific orthodoxy. Polanyi argued that science and dogma are not antithetical, but are, in the experience of the scientist, wed together in a committed relationship. The scientific community enforces the paradigm to control dissent and promote indoctrination. Thus science is no cure for subjectivity (a lesson that the current crop of new atheists, like R. Dawkins, hasn't learned). According to Kuhn, however, scientific revolutions can and do take place suddenly when the old paradigm (like Newtonian physics) is overthrown by a new paradigm (like Einsteinian physics) which accounts for the problems encountered under of previous paradigm.

Michel Foucault expanded the idea of the paradigm to the "episteme" which included relationships between the sciences and between the sciences and the culture at large. Together they enforce an oppressive "regime of truth" in society.

Richard Rorty argued (in unison with the new paradigm) against stable foundations of any kind. With that foundation squarely in place, his antifoundationalism left us only with a common solidarity in an ongoing conversation. Rorty said: "What matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right…. Our glory is in our participation in fallible and transitory human projects, not in our obedience to permanent nonhuman constraints" (541). I wonder if he was attempting to get "things right?" Novick points out that Rorty "urged ... the substitution of 'solidarity' for 'objectivity'" (571). So I guess we have solidarity in our subjectivity by which we may say a fond farewell to our former illusions of objectivity. I guess the rest of us must obey this "permanent nonhuman" constraint.

Jacques Derrida chimed in arguing that the relationship between the sign and the thing signified was arbitrary. This means that words and the concepts they signify are not dictated by the words themselves, but by their authors and the readers who play with words and concepts. Thus, words aren't transparent windows on history but opaque symbols revealing "nothing outside the text." Words also subvert their authors by revealing the power play the author is trying to put over on his readers. Isn't the power play signified by the words in the author and thus outside the text? Maybe I don't understand Derrida, but regardless, this pointed the way to new hermeneutic of "Deconstruction" or reducing texts to power.

For literary critic, Stanley Fish, it is the community that teaches interpretation and the interpreter doesn’t discover but makes “ ‘texts, facts, authors, and intentions’.” Standards of right and wrong exist not in the text but within the community. Fish said this is why we can’t agree on an interp of a Shakespearean sonnet though it’s only fourteen lines. "Rational debate is always possible," he hoped, "not, however, because it is anchored in a reality outside it, but b/c it occurs in a history, a history in the course of which realities and anchors have been established, although … they will have to be est. again" (544). If our debates aren't anchored in reality itself but only in a history of literary study then literary history must transcend reality? But if literary history is part of reality, then he hasn't really helped us, has he? Also, if there's no reality outside the community then what do separate communities appeal to when the debate one another? Other communities, themselves, or what? And how, if right and wrong exists only in communities, does anyone ever change communities?

Novick doesn't critique these guys (like I've been doing) but only concludes that "the center does not hold," adding that: "In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Thank goodness the post-modern community isn't the true Israel. Thank God that the sacred text of the true Israel doesn't end with the book of Judges. The Christian meta-narrative doesn't end in self-defeating despair. It doesn't end in the cynical resignation to power plays and apathy toward meaning.

The relativism of Becker and Beard and the postmodernism of Derrida and Fish have done us a great service by making us more aware of how our preconceptions affect our interpretations and how words get out of our control and reveal our self-centered power plays. Peter Leithart, in Solomon Among the Postmoderns, has argued that Postmodernism reveals that everything under the sun is mere vanity and chasing after the wind, which is the point of Ecclesiastes. But unlike Ecclesiastes, Postmodernism ends in the despair of futility, because it rejects God as the basis of knowledge. It rejects his normative interpretation of the world that is revealed in nature, Scripture, and ultimately in the final judgment.

I would give Novick five stars if he would have taken a sane position on the issue and not written in academia-ese. He once refers to something inconsistent as "problematically consistent." My students choked on this kind of stuff. One student said he tried to understand Novick and another that he tried to slit his wrists with Novick.

Mark Noll's "Christianity and the Possibility of Historical Knowledge," responds well to Novick. Noll argues that only the Christian view of knowledge can restore our confidence in reliable knowledge of any kind. This is because God created the world and us in his image, so that we can know his world. We can trust our senses and our reason because God created them to receive and unlock nature and Scripture. The world can be penetrated by our minds because they are made like God's mind, which knows his world perfectly. The correspondence of our minds to the creation is finite and fallible, especially because of sin, but can also be reliable. The link between the something in my head and the something outside it is established at creation and sustained by God's power upholding his creation.

Thus, I would argue that objectivity is seeing and knowing the world and God as God sees and knows the world and himself. This is humanly possible because we are made in his image, and he has revealed himself in the world but preeminently in the Word made flesh and made text. R.C. Sproul said: "We can grasp the infinite, but we cannot hold the infinite within our grasp." Thus scientific and historical knowledge, as well as personal knowledge of ourselves and each other, can correspond to objective reality or Truth.

But Noll also points out that knowledge is a product of our individual points of view, and thus no two people will ever come to exactly the same perspective. Noll also notes that the Christian view of the fall into sin resonates with relativism. I would argue that what postmoderns call "power" Christians call the sin of ambition and pride. These prejudice our perceptions of the world, but the only response left is not "more power to my power play." The Christian response is: "I repent of my grabbing for power, and I die to self in order to seek God's revelation." In this way, we may, like Noll, steer a course between Scylla of scientific objectivity and the Charybdis of relativism, without falling into the trap of either.

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Berlinski on History

In a recent discussion with the Discovery Institute, David Berlinski remarked about the danger of reading history backwards from our present concerns:

It is a mistake to read back into the recent past the political and emotional structure of discussions now current.

Reading things backwards is vulgar as intellectual history and false to the facts – vulgar because it assigns an aspect of permanence to our own obsessions; and false because it distorts the play of forces playing just a few decades ago.

Darren Doane on Collision

I still haven't seen Collision. It's been in the mail since Oct. 26. I guess Amazon is taking its sweet time in getting it to me, since I signed up for free shipping. But click on the title for a great little article by the director of the film.

If Hitchens Is Right

I've been listening to some interviews of Douglas Wilson and Christopher Hitchens concerning the release of their upcoming documentary Collision, which shows them debating whether Christianity is good for the world (click on the title of this post for more info). Hitchens is the global village atheist, and I wonder what would be true if Hitchens is right. I propose the following:

If Hitchens is right there will be no final justice.

If Hitchens is right no one will find out who won the debate.

If Hitchens is right there is no such thing as a debate.

If Hitchens is right there is no standard for distinguishing good and evil.

If Hitchens is right there is no basis for his condemnations of wickedness.

If Hitchens is right there is no such thing as being right.

If Hitchens is right why should anyone care about being wrong?

If Hitchens is right there is no such thing as "good for the world."

Immortality without Eternal Life

Christian bioethicist, Nigel Cameron says:

In the end, taking life made in God's image may not be as bad, in God's eyes, as making life in our own.

Cameron is talking about genetic engineering and the problems it poses to a Christian understanding of humanity. One trans-humanis has said, "We are going to be as gods, we might as well get good at it." He's talking about our ability to isolate certain genes and genetically impart them to our future offspring.

Companies are actually at work patenting genes that will one day be for sale. So if you want your child to be immune to certain diseases in your family, you can buy the right kind of genes to impart that immunity. Great idea, right? But you can also determine eye and hair color as well as select genes for a forty-four inch vertical jump.

The trans-humanists believe that his will eventually lead to the genetic perfection of mankind and even to an immortal body made of synthetic material. Adbusters published the "Cyborg Manifesto" a few years ago in order to alert us to the views of the trans-humanists. As Cameron says, "These are not sci-fi crazies" but people who speak on the National Science Foundation Platforms. Here is part of the Adbusters parody of their views:

Trapped for millions of years in nature's garden with God calling the shots, we have finally discovered an escape hatch. Advances in computer technology, biotech, and nanotech have unlocked the promise of controlling our own evolutionary future, of burning the old DNA blueprint. For the first time in our history we can seize total control. We can declare the human body, its clumsy bones, its tiny brain, its cumbersome systems, a failed experiment. We can transcend our own biological vessels and decide for ourselves what it means to be human. For far too long we followed a genetic script handed down from on high. Now at last we get to direct, to make history, rather than just acting it out (Adbusters, The Cyborg Manifesto, last paragraph, qt. in Mars Hill Audio, vol. 81).

This is our folly: We want immortality without eternal life.

Doubt vs. Trust

When we doubt God, we think we know better or would do better. Given our limited nature, this is the height of arrogance. We need to trust God with his own universe.

God and the Storm

Ran across a good quote in a student's reading journal:

Sometimes you need to stop telling God how big the storm is, and start telling the storm how big God is.

Where Does One Find Happiness after the Industrial Revolution?

If it's generally true that the industrial revolution made work less satisfying, perhaps we responded by trying to make spending more satisfying. Instead of working to find fulfillment, we started working for a paycheck, and we all know what to do with that!

The Comeback Calvin

Timothy George recently wrote a good article in "Christianity Today" on the perseverance of Calvinism. See the link below or click on the title of this post to read.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/september/14.27.html

What's Wrong with a Secular State?

Peter Leithart published an article at the "First Things" website on our deficient understanding of the secular:

And yet, some Christians and many historians and sociologists view secularization as the genius of public Christianity, especially public Protestantism. In contrast to ancient Judaism and Islam, both of which imagine a public space dominated by a single religion, the church separates the sphere of shared life from the sphere of the church, reserving the sphere of the church for believers and regulating it by the demands of the gospel but defending the secular, neutral character of the public square.

John Milbank smells an equivocation in this argument. Western theology, he notes, has always acknowledged the reality of the saeculum, but this is understood in temporal rather than spatial terms. For Augustine, every earthly peace or justice, every political order, is relative to the absolute order, justice and peace of the eschaton. This secular age is a mixed age, during which wheat and tares grow up together. But this temporal secularity, Milbank argues, does not imply a morally neutral, secular public space, in part because, according to the classic view, both church and state partake of the conditions of the saeculum. The secular, Milbank insists, was not a natural order discovered when the veil of sacrality was lifted; the secular had to be created, and then defended, intellectually, politically, and even theologically. Early in the modern period, politicians and theorists formed, with the cooperation of theologians, the secular arena as a public space of amoral power politics, unrestrained economic self-interest, morally neutral social custom and structure. No word from God is permitted within this space, which is a playground where humans are freed to pursue their private happiness without any reference to ultimate ends. (Click on the title for a link to the full article.)

This touches on my earlier discussion of the freedom afforded by a state church. It turns out that Patrick Henry proposed that Christianity be designated as the state religion of Virginia, where he was a four time governor. He wasn't specifying a particular denomination, just Christianity, but he was up against Jefferson and Madison. His proposal did not carry the day though he tried several times. Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom did pass and Madison considered the establishment of Christianity to be a violation of the Roger William's tradition of "offering an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every religion" (qt. Moynahan, The Faith, 592). Patrick Henry's evangelical voice was a minority among our other deistic founders.

Stanley Fish argues that the First Amendment to the Constitution views religion as a dangerous element when combined with government. No doubt state religions have been coercive in the past, but they have also produced the greatest achievements of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the Reformation. Would the Thomistic synthesis, the Sistine Chapel, the reforms of Luther and Calvin, and the music of Johan Sebastian Bach been possible without Christendom state-religion?

Christendom had its share of abuses but it also testified to the fact that "all things hold together in Christ" (Col. 1:17). We have lost this public testimony in America, while also depriving the government of an absolute basis for law. Our government derives "its just powers from the consent of the governed" (The Declaration of Independence). We are still in middle of this experiment which I suggest is going badly. Without a transcendent basis for moral law, right and wrong is only what the individual thinks it is. With no consensus possible, radical individualism tears at the moral fabric of society. The only healing possible comes through repentance and hope for a more robust public square where the church and the state dialogue until the coming of Christ.

Barach Obama recently disbanded the president's council on bioethics, where Christians had a voice on the dignity of human life made in the image of God. The president said that he needed a policy group not an advisory committee. Yikes! This is a step backward. A state with no thoughtful Christian input on one of the most significant questions of our time is secular in the worst way.

A Lazy Thinker

William James said:

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?

Are they found in James' conclusion to his rhetorical question? A lazy thinker forgets to test his theory by applying it to itself.

Subjective Objectivity

Objectivity is seeing reality as it is. How do you do that?

OK, I've tried to establish that objectivity is not neutrality. We can't achieve objectivity by hanging upside down and shaking out the presuppositions. We have to pour in the right presuppositions by hearing the word of God and studying the world of God. Thus the right presuppositions about reality bestow a subjectivity that serves as the means to objectivity. Our presuppositions become the mental, emotional, interpretive instrument that focuses and expands our perceptions of reality. Our perceptions and interpretations must be constantly fine tuned and readjusted by encounters with the subject over our whole lives on into our sanctified eternity.

When radical post-moderns deny objective reality they confuse reality with our perceptions of it. Objective reality exists though we don't perceive it clearly, but as Paul says, "through a glass darkly." Kant said there are no "uninterpreted facts." But there are uninterpreted facts or we wouldn't be able to test our interpretations. The fact that we can test our knowledge means that there is a reality to test it against. There is a reality to account for and the better our accounting the closer we come to seeing objective reality.

When it comes to studying history, I've also argued that we have to acknowledge our presuppositions and realize how they affect our interpretation. Then we can set them in reserve while we try to enter the worldview of another. In this way, we strive to put the subject in historical perspective. After we have accurately understood, we have earned the right to critique and appreciate. We evaluate through our subjective worldview through which we hopefully perceive objective reality in an accurate way. We may congratulate ourselves on having achieved this whenever somebody pays us the compliment of having understood their point-of-view.

In sum, we can be objective in the sense seeing reality as it is from God's perspective and being fair to our subject's self-understanding. Right?

In other words, we need to be impartial when fairness is called for, and partial whenever the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are at stake.