A New Testament World in 2015: To Eat, or Not to Eat

A Bit of Context: Skip if you Hate History

 

Roots in history...

The Old Testament became clearer to me once I had lived in Taiwan. I don't mean that I was enlightened as to the theological significance of certain passages (although that's happened naturally along the way too), but that you simply look at the Old Testament differently when you've lived in a culture that was around in one form or another while it was being written.

For example, around the time Moses was ruling as the Prince of Egypt, the Shang dynasty was succeeding the mysterious Xia dynasty as the precursors to the ancient Chinese empire. Chinese culture had barely begun to develop then, of course, but the important thing is that it's considered the same culture in a sometimes jumpy but unbroken line since then. That line was frayed and all but severed in China by the devastating and culturally suicidal Cultural Revolution, an intentional attempt to break from the past, but in the end China is still China. (Taiwan never experienced the Cultural Revolution, and Chinese visitors are sometimes shocked to see how traditionally Chinese it feels, like an alternate future in which China was never Communist)

In cultures this old, regardless of the great changes experienced along the way, certain ancient things get passed down, even a lot of things of which people inside the culture are unaware, and including some things we see in the cultural setting of both the Old and New Testaments. A lot of the context of Biblical culture applies more easily.

So it is for reasons of history and not of cultural compatibility that America and Christianity have been so closely identified. Historically speaking, America was settled largely by Christians from Europe when Europe was still Christian, and therefore from its earliest days, the faith and ideals associated with it were present.

Culturally, however, it's one of the current existing cultures least like those in the background of scripture. Most Americans today are descendents of those who left the Old World and together created a new one, quite unlike the place they left behind. Even back at America's founding, the post-enlightenment West was teetering at the brink of the Industrial Revolution, and already entering Classical Modernity. The West had been Christian for a while, at least in the official sense. The dark, old fear and ritual appeasement of the spirit world of the pre-Christian West was confined to the remotest areas where the church was least strong, or else carried on in folk traditions. Those kinds of traditions are usually tied closely to the land, and only in the countryside of the earliest-settled parts of the US do you see these kinds of folk traditions having any kind of strength. Mostly they endure in individual family customs, things done because grandparents did them, though the grandparents themselves might not have fully understood why, only that it's nice to keep family traditions alive.

So ironically in the foremost country of the New World, one that had (at the beginning) an appreciation for but the least possible ties to global Antiquity, the ancient books of the Bible were more known, revered, and followed than in most of the Old World where the very cultural legacy of those events could be seen and felt all around. Americans believed the Bible even while they could only guess at what life was like back then, whereas in much of the world life continued much as it had at that time.

Taiwan and the world of the Bible

Traditional worshipers offer incense to a goddess idol

Here in Taiwan it is nearly the opposite. The legacy of those ancient days in which the Bible was written can be seen around one. People perform spirit-channeling or exorcism rituals and occasionally still cut themselves bloody in front of idols to evoke a response. Food is offered to idols before being eaten. Divine lots are cast. Whole pigs are sacrificed to ancestral spirits. The "spreading trees" the Old Testament talks about in connection with idolatry are here and there, called "divine wood" and often marked with red ribbon. Birds and insects are placed alive in the back of some newly-made idols as sacrifices in order to bind their associated spirits to them. The lunar calendar is closely followed, and all religious and traditional events are based on it. (like in Jewish culture)

One can walk through noisy and bustling markets filled with the smell of internal organs, fresh produce, and incense wafting from the central temple (around which most traditional markets are based). Beggars and monks beg, stall owners call out to for you buy their wares, idol processions pass with blaring trumpets and pounding drums, navigating streets which are not always straight; a maze known to locals but confusing to outsiders.

The difference in 2015 is that those monks sometimes have smart phones, and you can get to those temples by taking the subway. But technology is merely a feature of life, and in the East (outside of Japan, perhaps, but to some extent even there) it rests much more lightly on the shoulders of culture.

In terms of Biblical culture, America is like having moved far away from the old family farm to a new house in the city, and your descendents having to look at pictures of old farmhouses and tractors and imagine what it was like for their family to have once lived there. Taiwan is like still living in a family farm, generations later. The old farmhouse has electricity now, and your tractor has GPS, but it's still an old farmhouse and tractor. You "get" that life, because you still live in that context, and the advances of technology are a comparatively minor difference compared to that major point in common.

For a more vivid example, imagine the difference between someone saying "there is a rabid dog loose in the next building," and "there is a rabid dog loose at the end of this hallway." In the former case you recognize the threat, but also that there is an effective separation between you and it. In the latter, you feel the force of the threat directly because there is nothing between you and it but an expanse of empty space. Taiwan feels like that; ancient times are only separated from you by the passing of generations here, and you feel their force.

So while those dwelling in the lands of suburbia or coffeeshopolis can only imagine what it might be like to live in the cultures of the Bible, in Taiwan one has the sense of what it would be like if those cultures were merely updated to the present, without any real breaks from the past. Give Paul a cellphone, Demetrius a megaphone to incite the protestors in Ephesus, stick King Agrippa in a motorcade, and maybe get the lecture hall of Tyrannus some whiteboards and a projector, and you get the idea.

Food Sacrificed to Idols: A Personal Example

If you have spent more than a couple years in church, you are probably familiar with the writings of Paul. One of the things Paul talks about, in one of his brilliant passages about Christian freedom/responsibility, is the question of eating food, in this case meat, which has been sacrificed to idols.

²⁵ Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience. ²⁶ For “the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof.” ²⁷ If one of the unbelievers invites you to dinner and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience. ²⁸ But if someone says to you, “This has been offered in sacrifice,” then do not eat it, for the sake of the one who informed you, and for the sake of conscience— ²⁹ I do not mean your conscience, but his. For why should my liberty be determined by someone else's conscience? ³⁰ If I partake with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of that for which I give thanks? ³¹ So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. (1 Corinthians 10:23-31, ESV)

I. Application in America:

This and passages like in it Paul's letters are sometimes invoked when one is considering issues like drinking alcohol for Christians. The Bible condemns drunkenness and a drunken lifestyle, but does not call alcoholic consumption itself a sin, yet there are Christians with such a strong tradition of abstinence from all alcohol that their conscience does not permit them to drink at all. In their case, then, abstaining is right and proper, and violating their conscience to drink would be sin. (Though a careful study of scripture might lead them to see that there is nothing inherently sinful about it, and if they changed their mind based not on pressure from other believers but on the testimony of scripture, then drinking would no longer be sinful for them) 

Paul both condemns their placing that rule on others (many pastors seem to totally ignore this passage), and also condemns attempting to persuade someone to violate their conscience. In other words, the one who does not drink alcohol cannot condemn the one who does (though he can exhort him to avoid drunkenness if that danger exists), but the one who drinks can't try to persuade the one who doesn't drink to have a drink with him, in violation of his conscience, and might best avoid drinking in front of him altogether. Paul is happy to give up a freedom out of concern for someone, yet strong in his condemnation of those who would take away the freedom altogether.

Now in America we would less frequently cite 1 Cor 8, and more commonly go to Romans 14 (which mentions both eating and drinking, and drinking wine). This is because the question of things having been sacrificed to idols is not really a pertinent one to us. Those passages can even make the Bible feel further away and less applicable to us today. (As I keep reminding people, that is not because the Bible is weird, but because we are weird, in terms of how all people throughout history and around the world have lived/live now.)

Gotquestions has a good article on the topic of meat/food sacrificed to idols, which in some ways underlines my point:

"One of the struggles in the early church concerned meat which had been sacrificed to idols. Debates over what to eat might seem strange to most of us in modern society, but to the first-century believers, it was a subject of great consequence. As the apostles dealt with the issue, they gave instructions on several broader topics with application for today..."

Americans often feel they have to get pretty abstract when looking for applications of scriptural teaching, because the culture in America is so different. It's hard to imagine a direct application of the passage about meat sacrificed to idols, and any attempt to cleverly figure out a cultural parallel is probably going to be a stretch at best. We can see the general lesson Paul is getting at, however, and that's good enough for us.

In Taiwan today, however, the passage can be applied a little more directly...

II. Application in Taiwan:

Table of food and spirit money laid out for ancestral spirits in my neighborhood a few days ago

In Taiwan, in AD2015 just as much as AD15, there is a direct and immediate application.

Idols are still worshipped, not abstract ones like wealth or popularity, but actual statues and figurines. Part of this worship involves placing food before them, often fruit and bowls of rice, but sometimes chickens, pigs, whole prepared meals and other things as well. (rituals differ in different sects, traditions, and places)

Similar tables, set out last week in front of a nearby Starbucks and bank

An additional form of idolatry is the worship/appeasement of ancestral spirits. Especially right now during Ghost Month in Taiwan, one can see tables loaded with snacks, incense, and spirit money (which gets burned later, in a ritual meant to send it into the spirit world so ancestors will have better status there too), laid out as an offering to spirits, to ask them not to bother the store, business performance, employees, or owners.

No one wants to waste all the snacks, so usually they all get divided up among the employees later, who take them home to their families and eat them.

Now imagine my surprise one day upon returning home to my apartment to find a couple little bags of what look like trash sitting in the hallway outside my door. A closer investigation revealed they were not trash, but actually snacks and a couple of drinks (tea and soda).

Some really Taiwanese snacks, plus Heysong Sarsaparilla and tea

Within a few seconds I guessed what had happened. It is not only businesses, but apartment buildings as well that will put out offering tables. I had in fact noticed a poster several days earlier on our bulletin board downstairs which notified residents that the offering would happen at a certain day and time, for anyone who wanted to attend the ceremony. (Because of the layout of our building and the road downstairs, they can't just leave the tables out all day) Seeing the snacks, I realized that it was in fact the day the bulletin had mentioned, and so it seemed one of my neighbors had thought of me and brought me back some of the snacks from the offering.

My initial reaction was to feel good that they had remembered me. (I moved in recently and have only recently met my neighbors and had one or two elevator conversations with them) Then, I pondered whether to eat the snacks or not.

It was sort of a funny surprise to realize that I had encountered a problem for which I could apply Paul's writings not only conceptually but very literally. Because I now live in a culture that stretches back to biblical times, the examples drawn from that cultural background suddenly were directly relevant to me.

So I looked up what Paul had said about eating offerings to idols, and again felt impressed when I realized I was now living in the world he was talking about. It was like stepping back in time, except I had really just left the West and entered the wider world, where many places haven't broken with the past on their way to the present.


III. To Eat, or Not to Eat?

Now I had to figure out whether I was going to eat the snacks or throw them away. Like the question about eating blood*, it's not something I take lightly or ignore as merely an issue for those times. Because while we may not see it in America, we still live in the world described in the Bible. God's rules don't simply vanish into the aether over the centuries, either He specifically released us from following them or we still have to.

(*- It's a common ingredient in food here, and I do eat it along with my Taiwanese friends, but only after deciding that it was not wrong as a Gentile Christian for me to do so, after a careful study of scripture and conversations/debates with a couple of Messianic Jewish friends) 

But it seems in this case, I had stumbled on a problem that first-century believers also faced, and therefore I had direct guidelines from Paul on how to deal with this:

1. (1 Cor 8:4-6) Paul clearly says that an idol is nothing of itself. While it's easy to see that idolatry is a short road to entanglement in evil spiritual influence (in Taiwan you can literally observe this), the idol itself is not a real god, and believers recognize that it is not a true god, nor participate in idolatry simply because the food has at one point been physically been located in front of it. (or in my case, on a table on display)

2. (Romans 14) Paul says that despite having freedom, we should not harm the spiritual life of fellow believers by causing them to violate their conscience. In this case no Taiwanese believers were present. If they had been, depending on who it was, it would probably be right to refrain from eating, knowing that it was a deep cultural issue for them, because of their former ways. (1 Cor 8:7) On the other hand, they might explain they too had cast off idolatry, demonstrated their allegiance to Christ through baptism, and regarded the food as nothing special, in which case this wouldn't specifically be a reason not to eat it, but an occasion to rejoice in our freedom in Christ and eat with thanks.

3. (1 Cor 10:27-29) Paul says that we can simply eat food that might have been sacrificed to idols without questions of conscience, but if someone informs us it was offered to idols, we should refrain from eating, not for our own sake but for theirs. In this case, it was exactly like verse 27. The food was simply left outside my door, without even a note saying where it came from or who had left it there. They also have no idea what I did with it, merely that it was gone if they ever came back and checked, since one can't leave bags of snacks sitting out in the hallway. On the other hand, had they knocked on my door while I was home and informed me that it had been offered in the "bai bai" (word in Taiwan for traditional rituals), and asked if, since they knew I was a Christian, I was able to eat it, a strong case can be made based on those verses that I would need to politely decline.

4. (1 Cor 10:30-31) Finally, Paul says that if our conscience is not bothered, we can eat (or drink), with thanks and giving glory to God. This is what I decided to do. Finding that, based on the other passages, I was not forbidden to eat in general, did not have the religious/cultural background that made it a matter of conscience for me, and would not be offending the conscience of anyone else, whether believers or nonbelievers, I ate the snacks with thanks, and appreciative that my neighbors had thought about me. My prayer is that one day they will know the true God, and rather than snacks from offering tables eaten separately, we might eat and drink Christ's Communion together and rejoice in the knowledge of the Lord who alone is worthy to receive the praise they had formerly been offering to idols and spirits.

To Babel and Beyond: A Brief Early History of Man, Biblical Version

Intro: Alternative Histories

A lot of modern Christians exist in a weird sort of parallel universe, historically speaking. We basically take for granted accounts of modern history provided by secular historians, going back until perhaps the medieval era where we find some divergence. (Were the Dark Ages really a benighted era for Europe, or a tumultuous but progressive time of rapid growth for the Church and repelling of jihad, unfairly characterized by post-enlightenment scholars trying to emphasize the achievements of earlier and/or later eras?)

Beyond that, Roman history is pretty much agreed upon, with some A.D. quibbles about whether this or that persecution was accurately described by the church. Go back as far as the Bronze Age, however, and periods of history described in Scripture, and controversies erupt. Go back still farther, and completely alternate histories emerge, until eventually you have two entirely divergent explanations for the existence of humanity and human civilization, which are both rooted in and provide a basis for a deeply divided worldview which can be seen in every level of society today. (either God made us good and we went bad, and all that that entails, or we evolved from apes and are still progressing towards something greater, and all that that entails)

In this post, I want to lay out an example of what a history of early mankind might look like from a Biblical perspective, based on the authority of scripture and linked with the discoveries of modern archeology/anthropology. (There have been a number of serious attempts to match up Biblical history and chronology with the Bronze Age history and dates determined by scholars. I'm just broadly focusing on an earlier time frame than that, mainly to show how you can start from the Biblical account and find that much of the data lines up automatically with it)

Bear in mind, "antiquity" for people like the Romans was
as far back in history as the Romans are for us.

Early History of Man: Bible Version

With the supposedly overwhelming authority of "Science" preached at us every day, we can find it hard to give the events described in the Bible the same weight as we do the pronouncements of archeology or anthropology, even when they construct entire eras of proto-civilization from surprisingly scant pieces of evidence, evidence which sometimes itself was even faked. I'm not saying there is no real science taking place, but often the real artifacts, discovered and catalogued according to (actual) science, the method, are described using almost entirely imaginary scenarios according to Science, the secular humanist belief system for which many faithful atheists profess their love and devotion. These stories can be drastically revised with the discovery of a single new piece of evidence, and frequently are (or aren't, despite the contradicting evidence) but somehow we are expected to consider them as authoritative and the Bible as a book of myths. Lacking an authoritative scriptural narrative, that might be all we could expect, but it's both amusing and frustrating that we're expected to toss out the Bible which is continually found to be more reliable, historically, and instead bow to a secular narrative which changes with the wind and trends.

Scholarship being what it is, and theologians being who they are, my dream of one day seeing a solid attempt by the Church to put forward a coherent timeline of the early history of man (in keeping with the evidence and data we see around us, just separated from their surmised alternative secular explanations) is probably inherently impossible. It would collapse in heated arguments, mostly about minor details.

But here I'd like to at least lay out what we do know, from the Genesis accounts, and then flesh in some details based on things we've discovered, to paint a brief picture of the road from Adam to Babel and beyond.

1. Earliest history

I will begin with Adam and Eve having to leave the garden. (Despite the popularity of attempting it, there's not much point in trying to guess where it was; the great flood would certainly have altered the landscape and course of rivers too much to go by what we see now) After they were forced out, their descendents formed two rival camps; the descendents of Seth, and those of Cain. That we do know from Scripture. We have no reliable knowledge of what this period of history looked like, since nothing survived the flood and if it did we'd have trouble knowing whether it was pre or post flood. We have Scripture's account, however, that it was violent, lawless, and increasingly evil.

Humans had become very numerous before the flood (based on the numbers in Genesis, there were almost certainly hundreds of millions of people and possibly many more) and that global catastrophe had not yet restarted everyone around Ararat and then the plain of Shinar in Sumeria. Since everyone apparently spoke the same language up until Babel, and had hundreds of years of life to explore the world, it's probable some of the remnants of remote and ancient cities for which modern science has little explanation were from this time. (There's evidence to suggest Phoenicians got across the Atlantic, and we still don't know how the Egyptians and Romans managed some of their construction feats, so there's no reason to assume pre-flood people were less capable, especially if they had hundreds of years to master their craft.)

An important factor to remember is that while Scripture says that all human life on earth perished in the flood, and that the "fountains of the deep" opened, clearly a destructive event and probably related to this discovery, it doesn't say that every inch of the earth's surface was thoroughly pulverized. It's possible that in some places, the water would have simply risen rapidly and covered everything, leaving behind what had originally been there. Devoid of life, almost certainly heavily damaged, but not necessarily destroyed. (if a shipwreck can survive at the bottom of the sea for centuries, and a huge tsunami ravages but doesn't "disappear" a modern city, then an ancient city of stone would not vanish after about a year underwater or suddenly be reduced to pebbles when hit by incoming water either, though it might be buried under mud or rubble, as indeed people have discovered some were. It would be interesting if advances in technology reveal more deeply sunken cities around the world)

The picture of early human history currently presented by secular anthropology doesn't really fit what we see around the world, but a pre-ancient world full of cities of people who suddenly vanish, and civilizations emerging abruptly in the Middle East and then soon elsewhere around the world, each with stories of a great flood, does fit the picture rather well.

2. Post-flood

The flood narrowed the total human gene pool down considerably, to Noah and his three sons and their wives. Currently, genetic science claims human genetic diversity reflects the mixture of three "pre-human" contributing sets of DNA; I can't help but wonder if we're actually seeing the genetic legacy of the three sons of Noah. Or their wives, if you want to get mitochondrial. Conversely, since all of current human diversity is from those three sons and their wives, 6 people out of however many were alive at the time (probably a huge population, as mentioned above), it's not surprising we occasionally find some prehistoric (in the literal sense: before recorded history) human remains that look quite different than anyone on earth does today. The "hobbit" bones found in Indonesia, and all the "primitive" skulls (some with bigger brain cases than the average modern human) found in various places, make sense if you imagine the incredible human diversity that must have existed before the flood. What are now explained as pre-human ancestors probably are remains from those other humans.

In terms of the flood event itself, from Noah on there is much evidence of man's expansion from a new beginning. Fascinatingly, despite all the attention given to Sumer, there is quite a bit of evidence that much of "modern" human civilization started right near where the ark is thought to have come to rest in Southeastern Turkey; horses were first domesticated around there, and wheat and corn strains can be traced back to their ancestral cultivars around the same area. (For example, from Wikipedia: "Genetic analysis of wild einkorn wheat suggests that it was first grown in the Karacadag Mountains in southeastern Turkey.") That only makes sense, if humans got off the ark and started rebuilding what was lost in the flood, and planting crops and vineyards. There's also an amazing, very ancient ruin, described as possibly the world's oldest temple, less than 300 miles from the Mountains of Ararat, which features massive stone slabs covered with lifelike relief carvings of animals. Scholars are confused because they date it to a time supposedly before the existence of metal tools or even pottery. (Right.. that's the description of someone clinging to a false timeline)

Later, the account of Babel suggests that humans didn't spread out after the ark, but stayed together. (it would make sense; the task of rebuilding civilization would require everyone) Since God had told them to spread out and fill the earth, however, the idea of a pan-human civilization that clustered in one place and built a tower to the heavens was not in the plans. We don't know exactly what method God used to confuse and divide the languages (as a linguist I'm quite curious). I've seen creative theories on neurolinguistic viruses, given that the world's population were all concentrated in one place. It's impossible to know of course, but fun to think about, and it will be interesting to see if advances in neuroscience and linguistics don't provide explanations for how it could have occurred. Either way, we can see the division of Babel is still there today. You can observe language fragmentation happening naturally anywhere (to an extreme degree in places like Papua/New Guinea or the Caucasus Mountains), and the trend has only recently been overcome in the developed world by national education policies (China has an uncountable number of local dialects, Mandarin is just the artificially-enforced national language), and the prevalence of TV and the internet.


Shinar, where the tower of Babel was located, is in the Fertile Crescent (sometimes referred to as the "Cradle of Civilization"). Archeologists/anthropologists describe two basic centers of culture, one around what is now Eastern Turkey, and one down in modern day Iraq, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. The latter contains what some consider the oldest city in the world, Eridu, which is a very probable site for the Tower of Babel itself, with a very old, huge, and incomplete ziggurat. (Sumerian mythology even claims it to be one of the first 5 cities built -before- the Flood. Perhaps that simply a boast, or perhaps the name was remembered and used again)

One of the ancient mounds at Eridu

Another fascinating site, Çatalhöyük, is about 500 miles west of the "Mountains of Ararat" where the ark landed. It is one of the most ancient settlements ever discovered, has unique architectural properties, and is quite unusual in that there are no streets; houses are clustered together, honeycomb-style, and the roofs are used for travel. In the linked article, they comment that, unusually, the dozens of bodies buried under the floor of each house are unrelated to each other. Also the houses had white plaster walls, some covered in elaborate artwork. It makes you think... might those wandering out in the years after the flood have formed at least one memorial city for the countless lost lives? The corpses would not vanish into thin air, remember. If it's true that there were hundreds of millions to billions of people alive before the flood (as the Genesis numbers suggest), not to mention all the animals, you'd doubtless find corpses all around, left by the receding waters (or collected into drifts here and there, mixed with debris). The roof-walking habit might have been an adaptation to the post-flood period, to avoid the rotting vegetation and corpse-ridden ground as much as possible, or even be based on an ark-like idea of a common deck surface with hatches leading below to the various compartments, as there were only a few people alive at the beginning and Noah had spent a very long time building the ark and would have been the most experienced person around and in charge while he was alive (and sober).

See, it's easy to form plausible-sounding conjectures from the evidence available, going from what you believe the conditions of the time and context to have been. I have no idea if that's even close to the reality of that ancient city, but what I just did is no different from what secular anthropologists do, except I am basing my theory on a scriptural context. (Basically I have more reason to be confident in my hypothetical interpretation of the data than I do theirs)

But is it a coincidence that the "world's oldest temple" and "world's most ancient settlement" are located within a few hundred miles of the ark's resting place (and even closer to each other), and the "world's oldest city" is in Shinar with a huge, unfinished ziggurat nearby a natural supply of pitch? It's unreasonable to insist it must be, when it conforms so closely to the pre-existing Biblical narrative. (Unless you are like an atheist I once argued with, who said a certain thing couldn't possibly be true, because if so that means God did it.)

3. Post-Babel

With regards to the Flood and Babel, Sumerian mythology has such obvious references to these events that many scholars believe the Bible borrowed its accounts from them. (Since the content of what existed of the Old Testament was oral at that point, and there are some similarities of style between the two, it's just as reasonable to conclude that everyone knew these events had occurred in fairly recent history and had their own versions of the account. The Sumerian account is "aggrandized," however, and mixed with stories of their gods; the Biblical record reads like a very sober and straightforward account of the event by comparison. Entirely aside from faith in scripture, it very much reads like the Biblical account is the original, and the Sumerian account is the flowery, mythologized version)

The genealogies in Genesis 10 provide a tantalizing picture of humans spreading out after the Flood/Babel, though unfortunately we don't have enough information to put all the pieces together. Some people are specifically pointed out as the ancestors of certain peoples, mostly those relevant to the Hebrews, being in their vicinity. One clear example occurs for Greece, where one grandson of Noah (Javan) is used consistently in Hebrew scripture as the word for Greece. One of Javan's sons is named Tarshish, the name of a location referenced repeatedly in scripture (notably as the place to where Jonah tried to flee). It is not known for certain whether this is the city of Tarsus in modern Turkey (where the Apostle Paul was from) but it's likely, and the city is ancient enough for this to be the case. There is also a grandson named Cush, which is the ancient civilization of Ethiopia, also Ashur - Assyrians, and Aram - Arameans, whose language, Aramaic, was the common local language during Jesus' life.

Beyond the grandsons, whose nations can be identified, many further descendents can be as well.
(There is also much conjecture... for example some think the Sinites are the ancestors of China)

Based on the grandsons of Noah, one can basically populate the ancient world from SE Russia to the Arabian peninsula and Ethiopia, and from Greece and southeastern Europe to Persia, in other words the entire Near East stretched farther north and south. Every grandson corresponds to a known location. (Observe how different this is from the imaginary and mythical lands of other ancient religious accounts)

Of those groups that wandered off to further points of the globe, we don't know the account of their travels, but interestingly in the secular account of history you suddenly have the roots of the great world civilizations all popping up in different places in the same era. It works out that from Babel in the Fertile Crescent, the meeting place of Europe, Asia, and Africa, descendents spread out and traveled until they found good places to settle down and start working on a minor version of what everyone had been attempting in Sumeria, such as the Indus and Yellow River valleys. (There is a Great Flood story in ancient Hindu scriptures, and in Chinese legend as well)

Egypt, one of the oldest civilizations of all, was around basically from the beginning...

"Egypt is called Mestraim by the Hebrews; and Mestraim lived not long after the flood. For after the flood, Cham (or Ham), son of Noah, begat Aeguptos or Mestraim, who was the first to set out to establish himself in Egypt, at the time when the tribes began to disperse this way and that…" Eusebius, 4th AD historian.

(Of course Eusebius is writing many centuries after the event. As I mentioned at the beginning, antiquity has its own antiquity... the Greeks and Romans idealized the distant past as we sometimes idealize their time)

4. A word about Old Testament chronology

On the topic of Egypt, a problem arises: there is not enough time in apparent Biblical history for well-chronicled Egyptian history to have occurred. For a good treatment of that subject which basically assumes Ussher's dates (a very young earth), go here. That article acknowledges there is no way to get from Ussher's early date of the flood/creation to a reconciliation with Egyptian history, even as it holds to the very young earth theory, and suggests the minimum required missing years might be found here and there throughout the chronology.

However, the problem is resolved if we acknowledge the practice of "telescoping" in Hebrew genealogies, as described here in pretty good detail. Some have difficulty stomaching the idea that the Bible could be inerrant if the genealogies are constructed differently from their own ideas about them, but I think it's important to remember that the Bible is inerrant in the original texts, and those texts written not by modern people but by ancients who had some different literary habits than we do; being carried along by the Spirit to write inerrantly does not mean the end product would look exactly as it would look were they to be written in English today, and that is nothing that should make us nervous. Also, note that telescoping the genealogies only moves the date of creation back by a few thousand years, as compared to the trillions of years that evolution demands. It is not an attempt to accommodate secular creation theories, merely an acknowledgement of Hebrew chronological practices.

As a creationist who has studied linguistics and biblical languages, I have no problem with the idea that the Hebrew writers of the Old Testament followed their usual practice of 'arranging' genealogies, just as the gospel writers sometimes rearranged the chronology of Jesus' ministry to emphasize certain points. Putting back in the unselected generations adds in a satisfactory amount of time to allow for the development of modern civilization from antiquity -in accordance with the Biblical account, not springing from alternative, evolution-based secular theories- which means we don't have to pretend in faith not to see the pyramids, but also aren't conforming our biblical interpretation to secular chronologies, which see a 10,000 year earth as identically ridiculous to a 6,000 year earth, considering the vast depths of time needed for non-life to become life (no amount of time is enough) in their Creator-less models.

So although I am open to any valid evidence that does not go against the authority of scripture, as of right now, the creationist + expanded genealogy timeline is the opinion I hold and feel best interprets scripture in the light of what we know while holding it as inerrant. It also allows for the Great Flood being a global event, as scripture clearly attests, and not localized. If the flood was only local, then ancient civilizations like the Maya can be getting their start right alongside Hindu and Chinese civilizations, people already being over there, without needing extra time to populate Central America. If it was global, as the Bible attests, and humanity had to start over from Ararat, you need time after Babel for people to migrate all the way to the New World and build up enough population to begin thousands of years of Mayan city-building and civilization. The best dates for those civilizations in fact reflect the latter situation, with Near East civilizations being the oldest, followed by other Asian civilizations, followed by ancient New World cultures and others.

On the other hand, maybe they just sailed straight over... (Kon-Tiki)

5. In Closing

For more on the grandsons of Noah and their descendents and where they went/who they became, there are lots of different theories that can be found by googling, but not much of real value; many of the theories are pretty tenuous, based on guesses about names and place/people group names they sound like. The truth is that, beyond the grandsons in the genealogy, which can mostly be strongly identified with places within the ancient near eastern world, we can't say how the rest of the globe was peopled by their descendents. We do know that nothing took as much time as is usually demanded by secular scholars, who with long ages to fill, have people spending thousands of years without upgrading their flint points. (The Darwinian "long, slow, steady" evolution idea and its roots in gradualism, has influenced all of secular academia. A look at the real world reveals things are more like grains of sand falling on a pile, where steady change actually produces sudden avalanches and snowball effects on a regular basis.)

One good thing is that as we are increasingly able to catalog sources of ancient material and written documents (if the neo-caliphate doesn't blow them up first), and communicate those findings over the internet, we are able to uncover knowledge about the ancient world perhaps unknown since deep in antiquity. As we learn more, the Biblical account is proven more and not less reliable. It may be that in the coming days, even the mystery of people movements away from Babel and to the ends of the earth may begin to be solved.


I hope that was interesting. Feel free to leave a comment if you think I'm missing something or you know of additional info that would be helpful to throw into the mix.

Struggles Not In Common

A Carnival of Symbology

A trip to a night market in Taiwan is consistently one of the most memorable experiences for newcomers to the island. The barrage of colorful sights, music competing from different shops, smells of food cooking, of cigarette smoke, of flowing crowds like rivers of humanity, make for an absorbing, fascinating, and sometimes overwhelming introduction to Taiwan and "how things are" here.

Among the stalls you can find nearly everything; from delicate fruit, honey, and shaved ice creations to fried chicken butts on a stick, tacky souvenirs to designer handbags, discount kitchenware to silk ties... the only thing you're not likely to find is a spot quiet enough to make a phone call without shouting.

Among all this even a cursory examination of some of the smaller stalls will reveal a wide array of cigarette lighters, from led light-enhanced chrome zippos to cheap plastic bic-types, covered in random designs drawn from the global soup of symbology, everything from Snoopy to the Nazi flag.

An Arresting Symbol

Wait, the Nazi flag? You might be highly offended at this. It was certainly jarring to see on my first visit to Taiwan. But do you know the history behind the Nazi flag design and its instantly recognizable swastika? It's not a symbol the Nazis made up, but a very, very old one co-opted by Hitler, with his fascination for ancient objects and symbols of power, and exploited in the Nazis' self-serving reconception of history according to their twisted ideals.

The term swastika actually comes from a Sanskrit word, svastika, which denotes a good luck charm or mark, and the symbol itself is thousands of years old, found across the ancient world from Roman mosaics to Japanese clan symbols. It was used for thousands of years as a religious or lucky symbol with various connotations, and became closely identified with Buddhism. Across East Asia, including my city district, it still is:

Does this offend you? Do you wince a little automatically when you see it? What might go through a visiting Jewish person's mind? Should Westerners for whom the symbol is 100% synonymous with hate, racism, and death camps try to get Buddhist people in Asia to stop using it, when that's not what it means to Buddhist people at all?

In Taiwan, the symbol can be seen fairly frequently. It's one of the most compelling reminders that I am not in the West, that I am in a place where even symbology is different, where what "everyone" instantly recognizes as a symbol of historic evil is instead regarded as a positive symbol and displayed in various religious contexts, even used on area maps in the subway stations to denote the locations of Buddhist temples. (Christian churches are marked with crosses).

The emotional impact of the symbol having been co-opted by the Nazis is simply absent here, to the extent that at times the graphic being used is the actual Nazi flag. While some might simply be trying to borrow a recognizable or "rebellious" symbol to put on the lighters or other places, its use in some other situations convinced me that often it's just a case of someone thinking it was a colorful version of the normal Asian religious symbol. The horrible and unbreakable associations of the symbol for Westerners don't exist here, because this is not the West. Though there was frequently contact and a bit of overlap, for the most part Far Eastern history is not Western history, and Western history is not Far Eastern history. Many horrible historical incidents and times of suffering in East Asia are enshrined in the cultural consciousness of people here, events of which most Westerners have never even heard, and vice versa. Our struggles are different, and the legacies of history that affect us today are different. That is part of what it means to be a member of a different culture.

When Symbol Interpretations Collide, Identities Suffer

What we might call "symbol conflict" is just one of the many discontinuities one encounters and must endure when crossing cultures. And now the internet, with its vast resources of instantly accessible information, provides uncountable opportunities for these encounters with no context whatsoever. If you saw a bunch of monks with swastikas on their heads, and didn't know the history of the symbol, you might be incredibly confused. Your imaginative explanation probably could not be devoid of references to Hitler, Nazis, or white supremacy movements, because that's the only context you know for that symbol.

Globalism means that our symbols, our cultural memes and shared understandings of things, more and more often rub up against different interpretations and understandings of the world. Sometimes these are mutually exclusive. Sometimes one interpretation wins, as we've seen in the US with the recently revived debate over the Confederate flag. To a minority, it's a meaningful and important symbol of the heritage of their land and culture, something that ties them to their forebearers and unites them as a group. That race-based slavery was part of that culture in the past is not seen as something positive, but is also not the primary association being made, any more than the primary association of the American flag for Americans is the conquest and slaughter of America's indigenous inhabitants. To the majority, however, the Confederate flag is simply a symbol of racism and slavery, and that interpretation has won out. Even as I write this, the flag is being taken down around the South in many official contexts where it was still being used, as Southerners in positions of authority decide that, rightly or wrongly, perceptions are not going to be changed by more explaining. (Whether demands to eliminate all symbols of Southern history will be taken seriously remains to be seen. There are many who desire, like a new Pharaoh, to have the names of old rivals chiseled away, erased from history itself.)

So the minority is being forced to abandon their symbol, because what it communicated to the majority outside the culture was not the same as what it communicated within their culture. And it may be that the majority is not particularly concerned with what the minority might think about these symbols as regards their identity, because any separate identity along those lines is also considered negative and desired to disappear. There are parallels to this in history. At the beginning of the Meiji era of Japanese history, when its rulers decided that Japan would become a modern nation and sought to imitate many Western ways and customs, many of the old feudal rules concerning the samurai were discarded en masse and new rules banning the distinctive samurai hairstyle and the wearing of swords put in place. Many samurai resisted to the utmost of their abilities, and there were large-scale rebellions; their very identity was bound up in these symbols, and their disappearance marked not only the end of their own role in society but the fading of an entire historical era into the past, never to return. No one likes to be declared a living obsoletion, socially undead. But the changes were inevitable, and the samurai were ended, and died off; victims, in a sense, of globalism in its early stages.

Samurai from the Satsuma clan, who initially fought with the Imperial Army
against a samurai army resisting the Meiji era government, then themselves
rebelled after realizing the new government would end the samurai way of life.
(This is the historical basis of the movie The Last Samurai, as described here)

Tolerance vs. the Will of the Majority

The swastika has not disappeared, however; it is a common sight in this part of the world. To be honest, I haven't gotten used to it yet, perhaps I never will. Perhaps I shouldn't, even outside of my home culture context. But I recognize that what it evokes for me is simply not what it evokes for the vast majority of people who grew up here. That's part of what it means to live as a minority in a culture different than one's home culture; in a nutshell, it doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what the entire foreign expat community here thinks. If I began defacing every swastika I saw, I would be put in jail, and rightly so. It doesn't matter how it makes me feel, because my feelings are not those of the people of my host culture. I am not in the context from which those negative associations arose. Our historical struggles have been different; we've overcome different hardships and weathered different storms, and we've developed different symbols or have come to associate the same ones with very different meanings.

Truly accepting diversity means not pretending we are all the same. It means recognizing that some cultures and historical legacies are so different from ours that a powerfully negative symbol of hate in our culture can be a powerful symbol of blessing in theirs. If we understand this, we can accept it. But many people don't actually accept it. They simply abide what they can't change, but then change it at the first opportunity. "On earth as is best in my opinion." They can't accept any viewpoint other than their own, and so when they use the term diversity what they really mean is homogeneity; that there are and should be no differences between people, because lacking the supernatural love of Christ or even a culture of respect, which can stretch across wide barriers of creed or color, they have no means of handling real differences. Sometimes those who shout the loudest about diversity are actually proclaiming their inability to tolerate it. (They typically reveal themselves by trying to silence anyone who truly disagrees with them.)

A Struggle We Do Share

Everyone is not the same. Sometimes our worldviews are radically different and irreconcilable. Living and ministering in Taiwan means both trying to learn and understand the different worldviews of people in my new context, accepting what I can accept, and showing the love of Christ always -and respect where it is due- to those people who hold views I can't accept. After all, I still hold views Christ can't accept, and His love for me doesn't vary on that basis.

So our struggle is not whether we can love someone or not based on whether their ideas and cultural views are reconcilable with ours or not. The story of the Good Samaritan, told in response to someone asking Jesus who could be considered their neighbor (an attempt to narrow the love requirement down to as few people as possible), is about someone whose very identity as a "tainted blood" Jew was repugnant and unacceptable to Jesus' Jewish audience. The struggle is whether or not we can love our neighbors, whoever they might be and whatever they might think about the world. Tolerance can only accept differences, it cannot heal wounds. But the love of Christ expressed through we who know it can take the initiative; it does not need to pretend there are no barriers to leap across them and turn the different, into family.

An INTP on the Mission Field: Not Being Understood

(This is Part 3 in my current series on INTPs and Christian ministry. Go here for Part 1, Part 2)

The Overcommunication Problem

Do you ever suffer from facting-at-the-mouth? You're having a normal sort of conversation with someone, could be a long-time friend or a new acquaintance, and suddenly an issue comes up you're interested in and, often mostly unbeknownst to yourself, suddenly from your mouth begins to issue forth a rich and dense thunderhead of information regarding that topic, with possible lightning-strike tangents to related ideas.

This is perfectly acceptable to nearly any fellow INTP, as we love a good tempest of information (very different from "brainstorming," which is sometimes difficult to endure), but I have discovered that other people do not communicate in this way. Some of them even have a fairly strong aversion to it.

As I brought up in a previous post, people talk, and argue, for different reasons. Some of them find the process mildly stimulating regardless of whether the sounds coming out are actually conveying any thoughts or sentiments they'll remember 10 minutes later. For an INTP who has not created some kind of mental subprocess which can keep this going while their brain stays in a safe place, this kind of discussion can be like torture. Imagine someone cooking, not to make food anyone is going to eat, but just because they enjoy pouring things in bowls and mixing them around, and it's all going to be tossed out when they get tired of it, and that this requires at least two people and they can sort of drag other people into this process in such a way that it's rude to decline.

But INTPs can do a much more wearying version of this. We don't realize it, because speech for us is among other things a fairly efficient (given the options at our disposal) method of communicating ideas back and forth rapidly, and that's what we like to use it to do. If we could legibly write on sheets of paper much faster than we could speak, you would occasionally see two INTPs sitting beside each other with legal pads, scribbling furiously and nodding.

What we do is this: once a normal, unsuspecting person brings up a topic that interests us, we lock into the conversation with laser-like focus and begin trying to upload information verbally to their brain in order to have the necessary relevant data in each other's RAM to be able to analyze it productively. We expect the other person to be doing this too, of course, since it's possible they have picked up some info we managed to somehow overlook, and so their look of slight alarm and/or physically observable attempt to back out of the conversation is confusing because that's signalling the opposite of the intense exchange of ideas we're revving up for.


To reverse the cooking analogy earlier, imagine someone suggests making pizza and you enthusiastically agree, then begin clearing out a space beside the back door and hauling in bricks. When they ask you confusedly what you are doing, you also respond confusedly.
You: "Building a pizza oven, of course. Didn't we say we wanted to have pizza?"
Them: "Oh. Uh... we're just sending Rachel to the store for frozen pizza crust. Which brand of canned tomato sauce do you like?"
You (Frustrated at yourself for misreading the situation and at them for rejecting your idea which would have resulted in a superior outcome, in this case much tastier pizza, you speak too quickly and don't really mean it the way it comes across): "Oh sorry, I thought we were having real pizza. Well if not then it doesn't really matter which sauce you pick, anything's fine with me."
(Awkwardness ensues.)

When you're used to doing things very thoroughly, that's what feels rewarding and satisfying, but a lot of people find it "too much." That can be what conversations are like for INTPs. We want completeness and a comprehensive "theory of everything" approach, or at least a theory which fits into our personal theory of everything. Sometimes that comes out in how we talk about anything. Laying all the groundwork like that is practically a parenthetical statement for us, and one that is sometimes not even necessary if the other person is tracking with us, but it can be baffling and tiresome to someone who didn't intend to club the issue over the head and dissect it right there on the table beside the coffee machine. They were just making conversation until the coffee was ready. To them, the interaction might seem a little like this... (Bill Murray in this case actually muttering the things an INTP might uncharitably be thinking)

Bill Murray is being a jerk in that clip, and sometimes people do put down INTPs fact-vomit tendencies to negative motivations, thinking we want to show off, or impress them with how smart we are. It's a reaction with which I became quite familiar, growing up, and adults are sometimes no different. But while sinful people will have sinful motivations, mainly we talk like that because we think everything is really interesting. If your brain kept shooting off on tangents while other people were talking, and you thought all of them were really fascinating, you might talk similarly. It's like ADD of the mind's association matrix. In response to the idea of "tea," say, my brain might go down any of a number of paths:

Tea -> Drinking Tea -> Calmness -> Serenity -> Firefly -> Joss Whedon -> Whedon's ability to realistically portray characters with religion despite his own atheism
|
Green Tea -> Oolong Tea -> Taiwan High Mountain Tea -> Nantou -> '99 Earthquake -> That mountain with the whole side missing that I saw on my trip to visit my friend and we also went to this cool aviary
|
Matcha -> More caffeine than coffee -> coffee caffeine content -> espresso -> The time that I was in the airport in North Carolina and at Starbucks I ordered a Doppio Espresso and the guy pronounced it with an incredibly strong accent and it was funny but I was worried it might be pretentious to think so
|
Matcha Pocky -> Pocky -> That guy in Fast and the Furious 3 Tokyo Drift was holding a stick of Pocky in his mouth and not eating it -> I can never manage to do that for more than a few seconds -> I should be more disciplined -> I didn't do pushups today
|
Japanese Snacks -> Octopus balls -> Danshui Taiwan -> Bitan is at the opposite end of the Taipei metro from Danshui as I was saying to someone a couple days ago but it's rarely visited because fewer people know about it, but it would be a good place for short-termers to visit for a more relaxing experience of Taiwan

So my coworker might still be in the process of pouring some tea, and I have now decided I will see if our incoming short-termers this summer want to visit Bitan. I might introduce it as if it's a new topic I just remembered I wanted to mention. In particularly irritating INTP mode (one that I try to suppress or train myself out of, conversationally), my brain might insist it wants to discuss Joss Whedon's ability to write characters with religious beliefs well despite his own atheism, and if I don't stop myself I might automatically begin working the conversation down the path my brain took to get there from tea. Maybe that's not an INTP thing but my own particular weirdness, but it's something nowadays I can usually stop myself from doing. (harder to stop in Chinese, however, because I have less control over observing what I say, because most of my mental effort is going into saying it correctly)

This is why it was hard to pay attention in class. Or not fact-dump in conversations.
And it's especially hard not to do this when people are praying in my second language...

Now, occasionally someone does want more information on a certain topic, and they might actually seek INTPs out in that situation. We -like- to have our brains picked, and I suspect (it's true for me, at least) we don't care so much whether someone profits from using that information for their own purposes. We're not in it for the money, we're trying to construct a model of the universe in our heads, and by consulting us and then acting on that information you're basically buying into our model. This both validates us and our carefully constructed views, and also means we are influencing the world of ideas, which is the kind of influence that matters to us. Anyone can win the lottery and have money, but explaining a system to an interested person and seeing the light go on over their head, or overhearing someone telling someone else an idea that you originally told them, in a way that demonstrates it's already become part of their own world view, that's the sort of thing that gives us the warm fuzzies. (That no one else believes we are capable of experiencing)

Being Misunderstood

All this leads to a very common phenomenon among INTPs: feeling misunderstood.
I was once talking with a girl I was interested in, and the topic of pets came up. She said she couldn't imagine me having a pet unless it was a snake, or maybe a robot. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, things with her went nowhere, but did result in a pretty cool trip to Mexico)

I was a bit surprised at that response, in that I didn't think I came across to people that cold-bloodedly, but then I am surprised at least half the time I hear other people's descriptions of me, because none of it usually sounds like how I think of myself.

That in itself is probably quite common ("O, wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us!"), but INTPs may specifically suffer from the feeling of not being understood and the wish or desire that this could be different. The problem for us, I think, is twofold:

1. As described above, we don't communicate normally (whatever that means).

It's hard for other people to get to know us, a fact very commonly mentioned in descriptions of INTPs. I suppose that because it's hard for us to let them. We bring up abstract topics and give them a thorough scrutiny and talking-over, and that's conversation for us. I don't really know how to talk about "myself," and am not much more able to talk to other people about themselves either.

As an example: Though I think I've improved over the past few years, when someone tells me they are sad, there is always that temptation to begin talking about sadness, as a concept. Sometimes the best I can do instead is to approach the conversation as discussing the topic of "sadness as it relates to [other party in conversation]". Since this involves talking through it (being P and not J, we're less likely to offer any sort of direct or implied judgement regarding the cause or appropriateness of their sadness), sometimes the other person may even find the conversation helpful and feel better afterwards. If I can succeed in not actually saying all the stuff my brain is writing into the conversational prompt regarding all the ideas that branch forth from what the other person is saying, it's not unusual to be told I'm a good listener.

2. Our whole approach to life is centered around understanding.

For an INTP, understanding is an endless quest. We want to know everything and why it ticks, and how it relates to everything else. We want to understand other people too, and sometimes can do surprisingly well at this along certain lines, since knowing someone for a while lets us build a sort of behavioral model for them, and that information goes into how we do this for other people too, so we can get quicker and more accurate at it as we go along, if we keep training in the discipline of actively engaging with various kinds of people. I'm thinking that a wise, old INTP would be an excellent judge of human character, because he's had a lifetime of observing people and building a mental model of their behavior, what different sorts of people are like and what they tend to do and how they react to things.

Because of our deep desire to know, we also have a deeper than usual desire to be known. The unknowability of our personality then presents a big problem, since we find it hard to let people know us yet desire greatly that they should. Those people who are willing to put forth the effort to get past our barriers and know us well are often rewarded with our devotion and gratitude, though in their child-like intensity these can be burdensome as well, depending on the depth of relationship desired. It must be admitted that a sense of proportion is not really one of our strongest features...

In Cross-Cultural Ministry

Setting aside all the accusations that the Myers-Briggs types are invalid to begin with, which I don't find to be the case, as if nothing else it's a heuristical model of considerable value, there is the fascinating question of whether the Meyer-Briggs scale can be applied across very different cultures. Their own info on that is here, but it's minimal, and the question is one I'd like to revisit in a future post.

Since an INTP on the mission field is probably immersed in a different culture and different language, the chances of being understood are even less likely. And in terms of meeting like-minded people, God can bring anyone into our lives according to His timing (something that happens all the time here), but by default INTPs are probably not the local people you're going to run into, except possibly as your language instructor. And given their conversational propensities, if they don't already speak English you're going to need a lot of language ability to talk with them. Depending on their level of introversion, INTPs are not necessarily going to rush to meet a foreign face either, though they may proactively make your acquaintance if they have good English themselves and you're a chance to practice it.

There's also the issue of coworkers. Feeling your national coworkers or local ministry partners don't understand you is natural, given the cultural and language gaps that probably exist. I probably seem entirely rational half the time and totally inexplicable the other half, to them, though as my Chinese ability has increased I've been able to do some of the "looking at it from my perspective, it's similar to how a Taiwanese person would feel about X" explanations which have helped, or at least moved things a bit closer to the recognition that Westerners are not mysterious entities who do strange things for our own incomprehensible purposes and can only be reacted to, not understood.

But your Western coworkers are another matter, because we expect them to "get" us, since by comparison we all seem more like to each other than like our target culture. That expectation can lead to a whole range of problems, however, since even in the same national culture there are widely different regional cultures (it's likely that someone on a team from Maine and someone from Texas will have to be working across fairly significant cultural gaps), and also it doesn't account for personalities. I've been told repeatedly by experienced missionaries that some of the greatest difficulties encountered by missionaries are conflicts with fellow missionaries. It hasn't happened yet, but I am led to understand it probably will. (A bridge that can be crossed in as Christ-like a manner as possible when I come to it)

It's certainly possible you will have a team leader who is brisk, brusque, and who sees your objections or analytical comments as not contributing to the discussion or getting anything done, and shuts you down. Or, your team leader may be sensitive and empathetic, and resist the "negativity" that involves rejecting any ideas or making anyone feel left out of the conversation. Either one can be frustrating, but cross-cultural ministry offers even fewer opportunities to pick your own coworkers.

So it's important to realize at the outset that you are probably not going to be understood, and frankly it's likely that most people place a lower priority on the whole concept than you do. So a big part of INTPs coping with cross cultural missions is something I've mentioned before, simply growing thicker skin and dealing with it.

However...

It doesn't actually matter. People won't understand the weird way your brain works, or why you can talk for hours with some people and only have short, awkward exchanges with others. But your intense need to be understood is already fulfilled, by a God who created you, and understands you better than you understand yourself. It may sound like I suddenly shifted into Sunday school mode, but I haven't. Because within the realization that God knows you better than you know yourself lies a key to overcoming a significant weakness of the INTP personality.

Jesus did not say the greatest commandment is "Know Thyself." (That's not even from the Bible, in case anyone was confused, and it predates the Latin version -referenced for example in The Matrix- being from an ancient Greek sage whose precise identity is unknown. See! That's what we do. That's a miniature example of what I'm talking about at the beginning.)

Jesus did say, however, that we were to love God, love others, and make disciples of all nations. The Bible is essentially a primer, compiled across various authors, genres, and centuries, that tells you who God is, and what He wants us to do in this life. So:

A. God knows us better than we know ourselves
B. He commands us not first to know ourselves, but to know and love Him, and love others
C. In following His commands, we will in the process find the fulfillment we sought in wanting to be known.

This is true for a reason I mentioned in a previous post. INTPs often play by the rules of reasonableness and logic, but aren't aware that there are social rules which aren't in the guidebook that came with our personality. The same is true of Scripture: God doesn't answer us according to the varying ways we seek fulfillment (ways that differ by personality type, among other things), He commands us according to our nature, and as we follow Him we find our fulfillment.

In our tight circle of logic, we come to the end of ourselves. In following what seems natural and instinctive for our personality, we eventually run into a dead end, because Eastern philosophy is wrong, the answers are not inside us, the answers come in following the God who created us and knows how we "tick," and knows that what while we have X, and Y, and are naturally (and logically, but based on our limited information) seeking Z to fulfill ourselves, what we actually need is Blue, or 2, or Circle. We need something from outside ourselves, something we couldn't arrive at or guess through our own efforts, even the powerful analytical and intuitive efforts of which INTPs are so capable.

So when we stop trying to find fulfillment through being understood, and depend on God to love Himself and love people (not something we can succeed in doing by trying under our own power), we find several things happen:

1. We stop caring so much about being understood, about receiving the understanding of others, yet discover our drive to understand can aid us greatly in serving God. Our personality comes from God too, and is a gift from Him to serve Him in our particular way; it is only the defects that are from sin. Solving the defects cannot be done by means of the particularities of our personality but by turning to the God from whom our personality is derived.

And actually when under conviction, we find that being understood is terrifying: the truth is far worse than we feared. We wish God might not know us so closely, see weaknesses and evil we haven't even uncovered yet. The bad news is that we are perfectly known by infinite Goodness, and that damns us to hell because we are not Good. The good news is that there is one man, Christ, who is Good, because He is God who is Good, and if we ally ourselves with Him, His goodness will count for us too.

2. The trap of introspection grows weaker the more time we spend outwardly focused. The melancholia, self doubt, and recursively negative introspection that often accompany the INTP personality type are difficult to shake because they trap us into trying to get to the end of them, whereas they are actually endless. I tried for years; it ended in total despair, and damage to my psyche or whatever that part of me should be called which I'm still recovering from now. Simply having your mind fully occupied with something that doesn't leave you processing cycles to get sucked back into the Darkening Corridor may only be a temporary solution (sometimes temporary relief is enough), but the more you do it, the more you'll find your mind can stay in the sun.

3. When the black hole of nihilism is filled with God's infinity, it overflows. That God's love is infinite rolls off the tongue nicely in a praise song, but think about what we're saying. There is a black hole at the center of our being, that abyss into which unredeemed men dare not look, from which they distract themselves with everything from TV to building empires. When we surrender to God and enter His kingdom, that hole of endless Nothing becomes filled with Himself, and He is more Something than the Nothing is Nothing. He can overcome it, He can fill the black hole up, break back across the event horizon, and pour out into the universe unstoppably. That's what He does in our souls.

What is the opposite of a black hole?

The transformation can be even more obvious in an INTP because we feel the gravitational pull of that black hole very strongly. We construct our vast and sturdy array of logic to withstand it, and logic is very strong. It is the wisdom from which the world was created. But one tiny error, one imperfection, -inevitable, due to our humanity- and the weak link will begin a chain of failures, the girders of reason warping under the strain, and the whole thing comes crashing down like a house of cards. It can be rebuilt in our minds over and over; we are made in the image of God. But it is never sufficient.

Christ does not withstand the black hole's gravity with His strength, He fills it up. It stops sucking in the light and begins flowing forth with it, becomes an every-dimensional fountain, like our souls do when filled with Him. We are changed; the dry stubble of our souls becomes the bush in the desert- a vessel for the holy fire which though it burns does not consume, but brings life. Embrace God, and surrender to Him. If you struggle with the inner darkness, ask the Light of the World for help. And to those caught in the icy shroud of depression He can send His holy fire. He did it for me. The solution to the deepest and darkest problems of the INTP soul is not a perfect syllogism, but the very presence of God.

And so was the plight of man for generations.
Their souls remained frozen.
Enslaved in darkness.
Until the day that fire fell from Heaven.

"Fire Made Flesh" - Becoming the Archetype

INTPs and Music

(This is Part 2 in my current series on INTPs and Christian ministry. Go here for Part 1.)

Intro (Important)

In some ways it's difficult to even write about music for me, rather like a bird trying to write about air density. I can't speak for all INTPs, but I suspect we have much of what I will share in common.

1. I should note here at the beginning that when I say "music" I mean 1) the music itself. Lyrics are another thing, which I'll mention if relevant. Depending on the song, they might "join with" the music to produce the effects I'll describe later, or they may stand apart from and be separable from it. 2) Not: this artist and that artist. To me that's like thinking about auto parts primarily according to which company makes them versus what they do in your car. ("I need to repair something on my car." "Ok, do you want a Nissan part, or a Honda part, or..?")

2. Another very important fact starting out is that INTPs, stereotyped as creatures of soulless (and tactless) logic, experience what I'd call the "revenge of the feelings." We don't "speak the language of emotion" well at all. (Being a guy this is more or less expected; I imagine it's more difficult for women) That's great when dispassionately analyzing something, or when having an argument where you find it easy to stay icy cool and the other person gets all blustery. But when the feelings do pop up, whether positive or negative, they tend to surge strongly and unstably and we don't know what to do with them. (This theory suggests that's the norm for INTPs, and that one of the reasons we're so skilled at rational thinking is that we had to become so, to reign in our own dialed-too-high emotions. The description is a little more exaggerated than my personal experience but some good stuff over there) INTPs can get a bit odd during these times. It's like we're intensely focused on reading an eyechart and then someone throws a bucket of blue paint on it. "T... Q... P... Blue. Blue. Blue? Blue!? *sigh* Blue... Blue everything."

As linked above, the INTPexperience website posits that it's not that we're robots
it's that we feel things too strongly and have to learn how to keep control with reason
It's an interesting chicken-and-egg problem, at least

So when I talk about "feelings" in this post, understand that's where we're coming from. Not because we're delicate snowflakes, but because finding quick and effective ways of dealing with unpredictable, disruptive feelings is an important issue for INTPs, and Music is probably our primary ally in this struggle.

Music: Some Personal Background

For INTPs, including myself, music is much more than just "something to listen to," something to provide a low level of mental stimulation to help alleviate boredom. (Even less is it primarily a background track for me to express myself by singing over) Rather, music itself and the act/process of listening to it is a primary and necessary means of self-expression. Sometimes it feels inseparable from the act of being conscious of the persistence of my own existence.

Thanks to parents who had me take lessons, I have played piano since childhood (I can read music, but rely more on my natural ability to play by ear). I actually play rather poorly, because I am doing too many things at any given time in my life to devote a lot of time to practicing. (And I tend to move on when I have a certain song down about 90%, which doesn't work when playing for other people) I realized years ago, however, that there was a strange paradox in my piano abilities. Ask me to play in a church service next Sunday for people to sing along and I will break out in cold sweat. I can possibly get through it without any mistakes, but it's extremely mentally taxing and requires disproportionate amounts of practicing beforehand. That kind of playing comes from a different place in my brain, one that is not very skilled. I can and have improved it by practice in the past, but the stress involved is worse than that of public speaking.

On the other hand, if I am improvising, I could go for half an hour regardless of whoever might be listening, easily weaving in chunks of those songs I am all but unable to perform "as written" if ordered to. Indeed, much of my problem with trying to perform music from rote memory is that my brain is constantly trying to be in improvisation mode instead, so it's almost impossible to just play what's on the sheet, which is what most people want from a non-professional musician. It seems that music performed as "rote" is weirdly difficult and stressful for me, like pushing against a mental block, but music that flows out naturally is not stressful at all, and people do seem to enjoy listening to the result.

Moving to Taiwan this time, I found myself initially living for several months without a piano. This was very difficult, because it meant one of my primary (as an INTP, there aren't many) means of emotional catharsis was denied to me. Yes I could listen to music, but I needed an outlet, a way to draw out the turbulence building inside as the pressure of a host of new cultural and social experiences mounted. Some people have very natural ways to let out this kind of emotional stress, but INTPs are not so fortunate, we need aids of some kind. When I recognize my emotional state is becoming noticeably disordered, sometimes I need to go hide and play whatever comes into my head for an hour, and though I don't understand how the process works, by the end I feel better. It's the musical equivalent of walking it off.

Now I am sure there are INTPs much more disciplined than me who have spent the necessary time to better train themselves to pour their musical self-expression into songs they have memorized and play according to the sheet. (Though it does seem the "too many irons in the fire to focus on one" problem is pretty common for INTPs)

But in general I am given to understand that a peculiarity of INTPs is that for us music is not something primarily external but reflective of our own inner emotional state. It's a means of sympathetically connecting with our own isolated Fe, perhaps because it entirely skips over the "does not compute" roadblock that INTPs encounter when trying to process their emotions and simply accesses those emotions directly. It is perhaps rather like someone asking an awkward person who actually does want/need to be hugged if they want a hug: if it depends on them, due to their awkwardness the hug is not likely to happen even though they want it, whereas just hugging them proactively would solve the problem.

Music itself does not ask permission to do what it does, it just rushes through the subterranean tunnels of our auditory nerves and pops up into the otherwise-heavily-guarded innermost parts of our minds and hugs us (or encourages us, or motivates us, or irritates us, or sedates us, or yells "on your feet, boy!" like a drill sergeant, or dances us down wet city streets under luminescent globes of multicolored light, or lures us out to bleak paths of monochromic solitude) without asking. That's the delight and beauty and usefulness and danger of it.

In case you were worried, yes I did solve my piano problem

"Existential resonance" and the Usefulness of Music

Music is a vital part of self expression for a INTP, but it's more than that, and I don't mean that in a "music is totally a huge part of my life" way. Our relationship with music is two-fold: we use music as a tool to efficiently manipulate or regulate our emotional/mental state, and also to reflect or express it, as a means to embody those difficult-to-analyze feelings so we can get a better look at them.

For example, we might wonder how to explain, say, "What it felt like on Monday morning at 7:10AM when I went out to my car and after several days of rain the air had been washed clean and now the morning sky was perfectly blue and I was aware of the rush of a sensation that an eternity of potential lay ahead into which I was constantly moving and for a moment I felt deeply alive and joyful at being so" using human language. A smell-memory might come close, but those tend to be narrower in scope. One is left using words to describe it, as I just have, and hope to evoke similar emotions in someone else. A good painting or well-taken photo might be able to do it as well, though visual art tends to be even more subjective.

But for me, the song Cyberbird is what represents and evokes that complicated and very specific emotional state fairly precisely. So if I perceive on a given day that I am feeling lethargic and melancholy and would benefit from feeling more like what that song represents for me, I might listen to that track. (If you follow the link you'll notice that the song is not in English. That's more or less irrelevant for what I'm describing, if anything it helps; lyrics you understand can be distracting. [Question for INTPs: Do you find yourself often listening to music with lyrics in languages you don't understand? That's never bothered me] Also, recognize that watching the video will influence the impression you get from the song, but listening to the song alone, you might be able to get a little of the impression I described)

This is what I mean by music being "useful" for INTPs. We use it music in an intentional way to achieve desired emotional states, and I am willing to bet good money that every INTP with access to the internet has a rich and complex mental -and probably also digital- set of playlists of songs which apply to different situations and can be used to push emotions in the desired direction. (For my readers: I would actually really like to hear some examples of what yours are, if you would be kind enough to share them below)

Of course everyone does this to some extent; there's a reason we have "workout mixes" or "pop hits from the X'ies." We all know music can evoke certain feelings in us; INTPs have just gotten this phenomenon down to a science and turned it up to 11, as it were. Rather than "energetic" or "calm" I have certain tracks for "that comfortable feeling of mental alacrity after sundown" or "pivoting away from melancholia to the warmth of a lonely sun-washed beach in a place I've never been before" or "wandering Taipei at night between the time the restaurants close and the subway stops running" I doubt we're the only ones who do this, but it seems consistent across the personality type.

In manipulating your own mental state you can only force it so far, of course; there has to be correspondence/resonance with your external state to achieve the desired effect on the internal state. So, say, I want to feel less sorrowful about something bad that has happened but it's a rainy night and no friends are available to talk to. Certain jazz tracks work perfectly for this, because they mesh perfectly with the current "noir-ish" external state but jazz tends to shortcircuit sorrowful feelings for me because it doesn't resolve, just like the sorrow is like a failure of life to "resolve" successfully, so there is catharsis.

I may still be sad about what happened -I may even want to be, as sadness is an appropriate and healthy response to tragedy- but my mood will have leveled out some, the overwhelming "spike" that INTPs experience blunted. It's too much of a stretch to try to feel "happy" immediately, but hey, I'm an INTP so I don't expect that anyway. After a couple of the right tracks (I know more or less which ones I'd play) I'll probably feel balanced and regain my mental equanimity. If I'm feeling inventive or the situation calls for it, I can carefully work my way from one emotion to a very opposite one with the right playlist.

Music is not merely about our mood or mental state, however, but provides a kind of window even deeper into the nature of being and reality. Perhaps the closest an INTP comes to experiencing timeless joy outside of the overwhelming presence of God Himself is when both of those processes -music influencing our mental state and also embodying it for us- fuse together and provide a sort of existential resonance, where the music perfectly syncs up with reality as we experience it and becomes the language, or perhaps the reflected shadow of the language, in which the persistence of our being is written.

In a sense it is like, maybe, how we are rarely aware of the existence of air around us, and may have trouble conceiving of ourselves as constantly living, moving through, and breathing a mix of gases (not so hard to recognize in Taiwan, thanks to super-humidity). But when a breeze is blowing just right, you can feel the air moving around you. Music is like that. Music captures passage through time in a form you can hear, but experience more deeply than that, so you are aware of time flowing around the fact of your continued existence, like a fixed needle testifies to the persistent existence of a turning record on the turntable by the ongoing stream of music it produces.

As a limited example of the experiential side to this, it might be helpful to think of a movie. While it would be silly to suggest the characters in the film could hear the soundtrack itself (that's what we call "breaking the fourth wall"), as the audience we experience the film holistically, and the music is an integral part of what's happening, maybe even subconsciously. (We "notice" the music but we don't usually give active thought to it when our attention is engaged by the film, it's just "persuading" us to feel a certain way about what we're watching happen)

For me, life is experienced both as an active participant and on (at least a couple) higher levels of mental abstraction as a spectator, so when I actively choose to listen to a given song at a given time, to some degree I'm intentionally providing a soundtrack for the movie of my life that I'm also watching. There are times when I start to listen to a song and think "no, this doesn't work for Now," (using our analogy, it isn't the right soundtrack for this part of the movie) and I change it. But "Now" really represents both my external state (experienced weather, time of day, what I'm doing, location, what I can see around me, etc) and my internal state (excited, weary, ticked off, depressed...), and when chosen properly, music can become the perfect expression of the ongoing interaction between the internal and external states.

Music and Ministry for INTPs

So after all this you may be wondering where the ministry connection might be. (Actually if you are an INTP you may have been wholly occupied in comparing and contrasting my own perspective on music to your own and developing a potential explanation for the source of any discrepancies)

I hope the ramifications of what we discussed above are pretty obvious as pertains to our personal lives, which are intimately and inextricably linked to any ministry we set out to do. Of course, music may play a more direct role in your ministry as well. Either way, there are several applications for believers, and for those of us in ministry or considering it:

1. Filter. The first point is simple; anything which affects us so deeply, which grabs and holds our attention as spiritual beings and even resonates with ongoing reality as we experience it, is something that as believers we have to be careful about.
All music contains implicit propositions, assertions made by the form of its composition, and we need to be aware of what they're suggesting to our minds. This is entirely apart from the explicit propositions made by lyrics which may be present. Both are important, and both need to be payed attention to, as there is a cost to letting in too much unhealthy content- GIGO: Garbage in, Garbage out, as they taught us in computer engineering school.
I am going to guess that most Christian INTPs don't have problems with listening to all different kinds of music; we're curious, have very wide-ranging interests, and are mostly cognizant of the message of what we're listening to, and can make the distinction. But while I personally would never presume to do the job that Paul clearly leaves up to us as individual Christians with our own discernment about what is profitable and right according to our own consciences, it's obvious that we can't be prideful either; there are limits to how effectively the human mind can block influences when we choose to immerse ourselves in them. We are probably not as immune as we imagine ourselves to be. I'm merely advising caution.


2A. Observe your tendencies. Since INTPs often listen to music which reflects their internal state, the music you find yourself drawn to is a reasonably helpful indicator of your spiritual state as well. So while there is a lot of music that is more or less "neutral," (How do you categorize the Blue Man Group?) if you never find yourself naturally drawn to praise or worship music, songs that explicitly honor God, it doesn't mean you're an apostate, but it might be something to consider, a reminder to reexamine yourself spiritually.
I certainly have songs that remind me of scriptural truths and attributes of God that it's safe to say the writer/composer never intended, but to make these the entirety of one's spiritual music diet would be like only reading books about scripture and never scripture itself.

2B. Instruct your habits. By the same token, since music affects us as spiritual creatures and INTPs have often mastered the art of selecting music based on how it affects them, it only makes sense (indeed, in some sense it is our spiritual duty) to intentionally fill some of our music consumption time with music that points us to God. If we can lift our mood from ourselves to consider Christ and the nature of the God we serve and love by listening to music composed for that purpose, we certainly should be making a habit of it. I am guilty of not always being as intentional about this as I should.

3. Let the Music Testify. If we consider ourselves to be more aware than most of the power of music, we should be making full use of it as we serve God in our ministries. It's easy to see how much the right music changes the mood of an event, and so we might put more effort into doing this intentionally. Lots of people know there should be music of some kind, but I suspect few will have put as much thought into what music might suit a particular situation as INTPs will often have. (Note: Just don't be surprised or offended if ministry coworkers reject your suggestions and put on whatever music they always do because they personally like the familiarity of it and aren't thinking in terms of what mood it might or might not give to the event as perceived by those attending. Not everyone thinks in those terms. Just be patient and be willing to accept the fact that your choices might indeed not give everyone else the impression they give you personally.)

Some might ask, isn't choosing music to produce a desired mood "brain-washing" or "emotional manipulation"? It all depends on your motive. Are you trying to trick someone into doing something they wouldn't normally do? Do you believe anyone can be convinced into truly accepting the gospel simply by you creating the right atmosphere? I hope not. Yes some churches do intentionally try to use music for emotional manipulation, sadly, and all I can say is either they are foolish to think they can use man's intelligence to use tricks to accomplish what only the power of God can, or else they are wolves in sheep's clothing whose punishment will be justifiably severe.

But I certainly don't think inviting someone to your home to share the gospel with them means you have to serve bad-tasting food for fear that delicious food would be a kind of manipulation. Good music is something we enjoy as the Church. Martin Luther reportedly asked why the devil should have all the good music, and I am pleased to report that he does not, even in what some like to call his particular style of music. And much of the world's good music came out of Christianity one way or another, so there's no reason not to use it as a testimony. So bring on the pipe organs of cathedrals and the cute kids with plastic ukuleles and everything in between, and let them hear our God is worthy to be praised with skillfully played music.
(Yes, Christian pop radio stations, I said skillfully played)

About those plastic ukuleles... I was speaking from experience.

Summary

Music is a powerful drug, they say. In that context, INTPs are like pharmacists, who can self-administer with the right medications and doses to keep a healthy mental state. The "dark side" of this would be INTPs who purposefully misuse those drugs. You can mess yourself up with music too. But be aware of the power and potential of music, and it can not only transport you to other worlds, but anchor you more firmly in this one and redirect your gaze from the trap of endless introspection outward to reality as it passes by, moment by moment, opportunity by opportunity, the only place where we can serve God and proclaim His gospel.