Babylonian Cuneiform, Virtue Signalling, and Fungal Fake-Wheat

The other night I was preparing for a sermon, and got off on a whole rabbit trail which began with cuneiform and went all sorts of places. (The most fascinating intellectual inquiries always seem to pop up when one is trying to concentrate on preparing a sermon) What began as the discovering of some fascinating scholarship mixed with disappointingly juvenile conclusions about scripture, now continues as a question of how to get rid of the dirty bathwater but keep the baby, intellectually speaking.

1. Not Settling for the Bronze, Owning It

I had heard vague noises about a professor achieving momentary internet attention by deciphering an Akkadian cuneiform tablet only to discover it recounted a Babylonian flood account in which the ark was a massive upright cylinder, but discovered the man himself was actually quite fascinating. It turns out his name is Dr. Irving Finkel, he has a PhD in Assyriology, and a glorious beard to match.

I happened upon Dr. Finkel not via the "real noah's ark" controversy, but after a post one of my seminary professors shared on FB, of a Dr. Jeremiah Peterson doing cuneiform in the original fashion, on a circular, wet clay tablet with a square stylus. It's a beautiful thing. I can't link to his video but here is a screenshot. Apparently he makes these for sale as well, though a quick search didn't reveal any links to an online shop.

This piqued my interest (which is admittedly highly piquable), and headed me off in search of more information, the rabbit trail I mentioned at the beginning. Dr. Finkel turned up early in the process, due to his enviable position as Assistant Keeper for the part of the British Museum which houses 130,000 cuneiform tablets, which he gets to read and keep track of. I don't know who the primary Keeper of the Tablets is, perhaps the position is honorarily kept open for Ashurbanipal himself)

Dr. Finkel should be experienced by everyone, so here he is. Skip to 1 minute in to get past the perfunctory student intro before Dr. Finkel starts speaking.

(Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson, get on this guy's level)


I especially appreciated his asides on education (Babylonian cuneiform lessons involved a schoolmaster with a cudgel who would smack students on the head if they'd not been diligent, a practice Dr. Finkel believes should be brought back in modern schools "to make people learn something") and on cuneiform tablets as a superior method of information storage (in the far future everything from the digital age and indeed the age of print could conceivably be lost, being printed on perishable paper or stored electromagnetically, but in that distant future all the cuneiform tablets will be more or less exactly as they are today)

2. Avoiding both Scylla and Charybdis

Dr. Finkle is a gentleman and a scholar by all appearances, but in his lectures and writings he does lapse into unbeardsmanlike conduct. Celebrating his own discovery of a new Babylonian flood account (apparently the only one to mention the animals going in "two by two" as in the Biblical account) he ran straight into the same error so many secular scholars of antiquity fall into, that of discovering something with connections to the Biblical account and then immediately assuming he's figured out where the Bible writers got their ideas from and proclaiming it as the new definitive "real story behind the Bible." It happens pretty much every time. Anything people manage to discover from antiquity that agrees with the Bible on particular points is automatically regarded as the original, and the authors of scripture must have been copying it.

This kind of modernist intellectual arrogance is common among the more charismatic scientists and professors (I did not choose the examples of Bill Nye and NdgT at random, though much of their own sciencing is in fact Science cosplay), who being good modernists in a post-modern era have a religion of artifacts and lab coats and the distinguished trappings of old-school academia.

This "science is frickin' awesome" movement has been a loud and enthusiastic voice online against a scriptural worldview for years now, although I believe the Trump election is sort of a convenient social landmark which demonstrates the conclusion of that era and the beginning of a different phase, in which many people have finally realized people they used to view as ideologically neutral are actually all pitching narratives at us, and circle their respective wagons. (not necessarily a better situation, but a different and perhaps less naive one)

In general, educated people know better than either to listen to every single thing scientists say, or to refuse to believe any of it, but there's not much at stake either way. For Christians this process is complicated by the fact that we value science as a method of understanding creation, yet recognize that many doing the science come at the process with atheistic premises which clash with a scriptural worldview and both consciously and unconsciously promote these via their efforts. (The scientific method is a great tool for exploring and understanding our physical universe, and even has built in self-correcting mechanisms, but it's naive to pretend that any process which involves humans is not influenced by their premises coming in.)

So for believers there are two mistakes we can make at this point. The first is to throw out whole fields as "tainted" (something people might call fundamentalism, though everyone is doing it these days) or, convinced that sufficiently well-trained experts can successfully set aside their worldview premises and produce raw truth, try to "balance" our faith with these findings (the source of much liberalism in the church).

1. Virtue Signalling: "You have been Weighed on my Scale of what's Okay and what's Not Okay and found Wanting"

The first mistake arises very naturally from a prior mistake, which is to identify one's duty as a believer as finding reliable sources of information (websites, authors, pastors, etc) and passively absorbing them. Then, when a pastor says something wrong, or an author "goes liberal," or "gets too right-wing," people start viewing them with increased wariness, and will perhaps eventually throw them out, and look for someone who will hold fast to an ever-narrowing and more specific range of convictions espoused in certain ways.

Those who go about things in this way, and they are very numerous, often make statements or symbolic actions which have the primary purpose of communicating to other people where they stand on a particular issue. This is called "virtue signalling," in case you've heard the word thrown about recently. They may loudly condemn, or try to convince everyone to stop listening to, a pastor who takes a position with which they don't agree. But they won't write a book with sound theology, or usually even explain what specific things are invalid about the pastor's views and how they determine that. They just want to make sure they've expressed that they're a good person for publicly praising and condemning the appropriate things.

Of course, there are always lies being promoted, and plenty of pastors and books and sources of ideas which shouldn't be trusted. But in the world of ideas, there are a lot to go around. We don't want to narrow our minds to keep all unsafe ideas out, we want to be more discerning, knowing how to navigate the world of ideas safely and effectively, steered by a deep understanding of scripture. This takes time and effort, confidence and humility. But if our goal is to make ourselves more able to see and understand the underlying claims or premises of whatever information is being shared with us, whether through a book, or a TV show, or a sermon, or a scientific article online, rather than to decided if this is "good" or "bad" and then announce to everyone our acceptance or condemnation of it, we're probably on the right track to Jesus' command to be not only innocent as doves, but also wise as serpents.

2. Progressing from Scripture while trying to Bring it along too.

The second mistake may arise from a desire to avoid the first. Recognizing that the world of ideas is primarily not a bunch of atheistic professors trying to sarcast the faith out of their naive students, but often nice or at least very intelligent people on a quest for knowledge who have never accepted the premise of theism, many Christians want to somehow find a way to reconcile the fact that beloved teachers and/or impressive scholars teach that which cannot be reconciled with scripture, with their own conviction of the truth of scripture.

When these two convictions clash, however, it is very often scripture which is expected to conform. The basic (and nonscriptural) idea of progress or progressivism (using it loosely here), that humankind is moving forward from error to enlightenment, makes it tough to hold to any unchangeable standard, because for progressively-minded people such a standard, no matter how brilliant and true in its day, would necessarily be becoming slowly but inevitably outdated and untenable. Evolution is in many ways not merely a theory of the development of the biological life we see around us, but a whole worldview of itself; the idea that things can and will improve as they change over time, and that we all partake in this process not only biologically but societally, morally, etc.

Progressives with a more favorable view of Christianity's influence on the world may say things like "Christianity got so many things right, but we can do better," while others may view it more negatively, but either way the question is not of truth, but of progress. For them the question would be: Is Christianity getting us where we want to go? If not, we can move on from it.

Interestingly, the majority of American Christians seem to have ingested this worldview of progressivism to varying degrees growing up, usually more and more the younger they are, and it has led to a fascinating array of paradoxes in their own beliefs. I see many people trying to say morality is derived from God, while simultaneously updating their own moral sensibility according to secular trends (of the month), without noticing any contradictions. (An extreme example was one person telling me that if Jesus were to do the things He did in the gospels today, some of it would be sin, though it wasn't at the time because people didn't know any better.) This is of course untenable, both in terms of consistency of faith or even rational thought, but reason speaks calmly while trends shout enthusiastically.

3. One Solution: Look to the Wheat and the Tares

If we seek to avoid both of the preceding mistakes--living in a sort of perpetual Inquisition and virtue signalling our allegiance to the increasingly few sources of information which "can be trusted", or else trying to cram secular academia and moral philosophy into the throne alongside scripture and serve both masters--we must do what Odysseus could not, and find a way to avoid both Scylla and Charybdis. Like him, for most of us pragmatically speaking it may be a matter of veering closer to one or the other, with the goal of making it through as unharmed as possible.

Yet I think the concept of "the wheat and the tares" can be applied here to good effect.

Jesus tells a fascinating parable in Matthew 13:24-30: A man sows his field with good seed, but "an enemy" comes and sows "tares" in the field. Interestingly, this isn't noticed until the heads of grain start appearing. ("when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also") This lends credence to the theory that the word translated as "tares" in the KJV (Simply "weeds" in the NIV and ESV) is a reference to a kind of plant called Darnel, which very closely resembles wheat until the grains ripen. (At least according to wikipedia, in the Roman Empire sowing Darnel in someone's field was illegal. So Jesus may have been referencing for His parable a destructive practice common enough to be banned, a scenario with which his listeners would have been familiar)  Darnel is susceptible to fungal infection, and the particular kind of fungus which infects darnel is toxic and causes drunken-like nausea, which can be fatal. Sowing darnel in someone's wheat field was literally small-scale biological warfare, and hard to remedy, though in this case the owner of the field has a wise solution.

(Note: Jesus Himself explains what He meant by the parable in the same chapter. I'm not suggesting this is an alternative meaning, this is just an application which I find helpful in my quest for wise discernment vs. either judgmental over-rejection or naive over-acceptance)

Wheat, top, vs Darnel, bottom. Once threshed, the grains are hard to tell apart.
Credit: http://the-biologist-is-in.blogspot.tw/2016/07/more-crop-mimics.html

Applying this parable to the world of ideas, the parallels immediately jump out. Truth is there for us to grasp, by observing the reality of God's creation and by accepting the special revelation of scripture. However, the Enemy has sown lies throughout the fields of human knowledge (and corresponding heretical ideas throughout the Church), lies which seem like truth--until they bear their false fruit, which leads to toxin-induced drunkenness and death.

What can we do to root out these dangerous untruths? The parable has the servants suggest that the false wheat can literally be uprooted--pulled out from among the true wheat. This is the first mistake mentioned above--over-zealousness in trying to keep ourselves from being in contact with any "tainted" sources of information. The master explains the problem with this in his reply--in doing so, you will throw out much real truth in the process. This is not the right stage for sorting them out, it's too early. But one does not simply accept this false wheat along with the true wheat, which would be the second mistake. Instead, having been taken in, now the wheat is sorted. True wheat is taken into the barn, fake wheat is burned to ashes.

This happens before the wheat is threshed. Thousands of tiny darnel and wheat grains look similar, and once mixed together can't be easily sorted out. But the clusters of grain look different on the different plants, as the picture above shows. Once you internalize ideas (I.e. "Once you take them into your barn," but as Spurgeon would say, there's no need to push a good metaphor/illustration to exhaustion), it can be quite difficult to figure out which ideas you got from what source. The process of distinguishing truth from falsehood does need to happen in the context of where you received the information. The facts, context, and situation all matter; there is no "hypothetical wheat." (And the task of discernment is greatly helped by recognizing how to reject false hypotheticals and "setting aside X" arguments where X is relevant.) If you do find that a certain field pretty much always produces false wheat, it makes sense not to spend most of your time searching for true wheat there.

(Though indeed it's not an entirely one-sided process; our Friend seems to delight in sowing real wheat seed in the night among what the Enemy considers a safe field of tares.)

In summary, the wheat and false-wheat are to be harvested together: we take the good and bad ideas together as they come. It can be tough to distinguish them at first, but we can tell them apart since their fruit is not the same. This is the role of discernment. Not to pull up and throw away anything that looks like a weed before any fruit is ripe, nor to internalize all ideas and try to sort them out later, but to know the difference between true and false wheat by the fruit they bear, and take what is true and discard what is false.

Psalm 119:66 - "Teach me good discernment and knowledge, for I believe in Your commandments."

2 Complicated Things I Miss from America

Been doing some hiking recently. Taiwan is full of mountains waiting to be climbed!

As I move into my 4th consecutive year in Taiwan, getting into medium to early-long-term territory, the things that I miss from the US become more abstract, and sometimes more complicated. As an INTP (i.e. a very analytical personality), serving in the well-developed East Asian nation of Taiwan, I don't really care about this or that particular thing from the States (food, etc), or anything I could acquire by hopping on an airplane tomorrow. If I really missed them enough, I could get access to them one way or another, and I know awesome people who would send all sorts of things to me if I asked nicely.

As you will note below, what I miss at this point are not really specific tangible things, or places. It's almost misleading to say they are things I miss "from America," as they aren't particular to that nation per se but related to my life there before coming out to the mission field.

What I miss are certain aspects of life which are absent or changed when one's career is that of full-time cross-cultural missionary service, and which I know are not available to me so long as I follow this path. It's simply the way mission work goes, much of the time, but I have found that aside from helping people see some natural challenges of missionary life, thinking through these kinds of things often brings forth ideas of how to adapt more helpfully to this way of life. Also, there's that slight chance that someone else is in the same situation, and will be encouraged by the sharing.

So, here is a bit of unpacking of two complicated things I've found I miss over the longer-term.

1. The Feeling of Productivity

I have long felt that most people don't like being productive so much as feeling productive. Most people don't particularly like having to wake up on Monday and go to work, for example, but the morning ritual of dragging one's self out of bed, with the shower, the coffee, enduring morning traffic with morning news or talk radio or music or whatever, which plays itself out over years for millions of middle class Americans, has become a sort of de facto rite of passage. You know you are an adult because you wake up early like an adult, dress like an adult, get annoyed at traffic like an adult, and go to the office to do grown-up things. (This is more or less what many younger millennials only half-jokingly call "adulting.")

As more of a task-focused type than a people-person, in my time on the field I have realized that this feeling of productivity, of boxes checked and specific things accomplished, of doing what the world expects from a responsible adult, is more important to me than I'd realized. Though I'm an INTP who prefers to work via flow vs. a rigid schedule, and requires adequate time for contemplation/processing to stay mentally healthy, as an adult man with a fairly serious case of oldest-child syndrome, I feel responsible for everything I'm involved in and need that sense of accomplishment to not feel that I've wasted a day.

The question of whether a day has been productive or wasted in terms of ministry can be complicated, but in general our sense of ongoing productivity tends to come through "xiao chenggong", the "little successes." Small accomplishments and specific tasks done well which give one a sense of progressing towards a goal. (or better yet, measurable progress towards an impressively big yet humanly achievable goal)

It's tough to get that feeling on a church plant. There's no "going in to the office," as I do gospel-centric activities scattered across a Taiwanese city district (a room in the local community center this morning, the lobby of a local business HQ after lunch, my coworker's home in the evening, etc). It's a job for which sitting at a computer is often necessary, planning lessons, putting together presentations, etc, but there is never any clocking in or clocking out. Missions is a 24/7 job, not defined by specific locations or hours. You are never off the clock, there is no time divided between "work" and "my free time." Meeting with a non-believing friend to chat over coffee, spending the same amount of time in a missions school board meeting or leading a Bible study, are all part of the gospel work, and there is simply no system or scale by which one can rate them in terms of "kingdomliness."

So there is a sense in which I am unable to gauge how much I've accomplished in a day, because there isn't anything to compare against. Just having a class or activity go well doesn't mean much. It's good, but it's impossible to exactly what extent I've advanced the cause of the gospel here, or to what extent we've drawn closer to planting a church, when we can only do that when people respond to the gospel message, which is something we can't control. My passion is that Christ be glorified in Taiwan, whereas most people are either literally bowing to statues, have a sort of vague TED-Talk religion of personal goals and giving back to the world, or are simply focused on personal success and comfort. But we can't change hearts, only the Spirit can do that, so we're putting years of time and effort into something we're intrinsically incapable of accomplishing alone. If God doesn't move, we don't see any fruit from our efforts. As an incoming missionary, I thought this meant He definitely would move, but I have discovered in the past couple of years that God does not alter His pace to cater to a human need for a sense of progress. (He may or may not move, and where God moves one usually finds His servants hard at work, but there is no contract where He agrees to move in proportion to how hard we work.)

Breaking new ground for the gospel doesn't always look impressive, then, and sometimes its fruits are only seen in the harvesting that follows at some point much later, sometimes one or multiple generations later. It's like a business in which nearly all the profit is continually invested back into the business itself. Everything may be proceeding according to the business plan, and there may come a day of tearfully glorious success, when it is revealed to have all been worth it all along, but workers may or may not be willing to keep investing in the future profit when it can't be seen now. (Sadly, many missionaries have left Taiwan when fruit seemed too slow in coming, or simply nonexistent. It's a constant struggle to balance the idea that one will see God working visibly when one is in His will, with the fact that He yet often calls us to continue in faith when we can't see the visible signs we feel should be there, all in tension with the knowledge that He works according to His own timing. As Lewis reminds us in the last Narnia book, He's not a tame lion.)

We say we walk by faith, not by sight, but it's quite a challenge to work by faith, not by sight. I am committed to learning how to live and work in this way, and Lord willing, can disciple others to do the same. Humanly speaking, however, some days I do still wish I could clock out after a hard day's work accomplishing measurable goals of one kind or another, and feel that I'd earned some leisure time.

2. Resource-based Solutions

A. When hardware is lacking
America is almost ridiculously blessed with resources. You can throw "stuff" at a problem, equipment, money, etc. and accomplish huge tasks with efficient use of manpower. It's seriously great to live in an economy and society where you can have your own shed, garage, workshop, etc. filled with your own tools, not to mention owning the space necessary to store them. If people weren't burdened under national debt and quasi-socialist tax burdens, and enslaved by entertainment media, the American economy would be incomprehensibly strong. A lot of people could do what they do at their job in half the time, spend some of their pay to buy capital goods, and spend the other half actually producing things of value at their home.

In Taiwan, and pretty much anywhere else in the world I've visited, these kinds of personal resources are scarce. The society isn't wealthy enough for lots of random individual people to acquire and maintain a whole supply of tools in support of their individual interests. Instead those resources are possessed by the wider family or community, sometimes in a less satisfactory way. You don't have the wrench, but Uncle Chen works at a shop which has one you can borrow next week. In Taiwan, the average person in a city doesn't have much living space to spare for tools or anything else, let alone the extra money to put into time-consuming hobbies. (America is wealthy in ways it's hard to recognize unless one has lived abroad in various parts of the world, though that's beginning to change as the middle-class is systematically destroyed and all the extra money siphoned out of society.)

So that's the first half of the problem. Much of the world simply doesn't have the impressive hardware and resources widely available to Americans, so there isn't the option to simply swoop in with the right tools to get the job done quickly and move on to the next one. Specific example: Our summer campground is a very old facility that requires continual maintenance as things break. We can fix them, but it requires time spent away from ministry to do so, and people who actually know how to do the work decently well, who are few and far between and typically otherwise employed. It would be a fun task for many American men, who have a pickup-truck-load of tools just waiting for the right chance to be used, and pride themselves on knowing how to use them to good effect. As an engineer by trade, there are times when I really miss problems which can be solved simply by acquiring the right tools and possessing the know-how.

B. When Physical Resources Can't Help Much Anyway
More to the point, however, in the case of missions and really anywhere one can passionately demonstrate a worthwhile need, there are good, generous people who would love to provide those resources. They will give sacrificially, they will go to considerable lengths to make sure the work of the gospel (or of charity, etc) is not hampered by the relatively straightforward problem of a lack of funds, or resources which can be acquired by said funds.

But there is not really any hardware which can be thrown at the challenge of building gospel relationships in the dense concrete jungle of a Taiwanese urban community, where there is no open field to raise a tent or park some cars, barely even space for a cluster of people to stand outside and avoid cars and scooters passing by; where whatever is done is done in your home or someone else's or a restaurant, to which people must accept an invitation. (Our community center is by far the best public area for events in our vicinity, and there is lots of competition for booking rooms)

There is a sense in which a trip to construct an entire new church building from the foundation up is vanishingly simple compared to the task of trying to disciple a single local believer. I've run cranes and tied rebar and welded steel columns and poured concrete foundations and laid tile and run pipe and done all manner of things necessary for constructing new homes or churches. It's hard work, but at the end of the day, it's done, and you have something to look at and feel that great sense of satisfaction.

But working with people is an entirely different challenge, and one which simply can't be solved with a bunch of physical labor, hardware tools, and enough funds to cover the project. You need to speak the local language well, you need people to be willing to connect with you, you need time in your and their schedule to meet, you need them to be spiritually open, and to slowly build trust with people somewhat suspicious that you're being nice to them while appearing to get nothing out of it yourself, etc.

So when people ask "how can I help," it can be a little frustrating that I don't have a lot of answers. I would love to have some specific request ready like "we need funds for our well-digging project" or "we need help building an addition on our orphanage," etc, but none of those apply in our context. We don't "need" anything in the sense of physical resources, and even more funds don't necessarily translate into being able to do more, since we already lack the manpower to comprehensively follow up on the community outreach we're involved with now. A few very specific things could enhance our work, especially Chinese-language teaching aids with traditional characters (much of what is available is in simplified Chinese, what China uses).

But the majority of what must be done is a long, slow process of building bridges with people and establishing trust, to let them experience God's love and joy, and sustain a long-term burden for them, praying that they too can enter the kingdom and know Christ as we have come to know Him. We need more people to do more follow-up, to meet new people in our community and make friends and build relationships for the sake of the gospel, to open new doors and be a living witness shining in a still-dark place.

Basically, what we need is neither funds nor stuff, what we need is you--to come help in the work of being fishers of men.