Conspiracy Theories: Navigating the Swamp

What a strange year 2020 has been.

Whether urgent pleas not to be self-centered and to abide by shelter in place orders, equally urgent concerns about the seeming ability of one virus to wipe away the rights of American citizens like a hand sanitizer-soaked sponge across a whiteboard, or gallows humor that seems to be getting a pass as people understand it's that kind of season, my FB newsfeed has been covered up in content about the coronavirus epidemic since late February.

For several days last week much of the focus was on "Plandemic," a video project I had not heard of until a few people on my newsfeed emerged to promote the trailer, and about 2 to 3 times as many people immediately began sharing pre-refutations and urging others not to share it or talk about it. Of course, because of how human psychology works, that made me very interested in it.

I have not watched that trailer, though I plan to do so later. I have already seen one video explaining the Buddhist/New age spiritual beliefs of one of the producers and that Christians may want to be very cautious and do more research before supporting the project. Yet to underline the point of this whole post, when I went back to watch it again, I found that video is no longer available for public viewing on Youtube. Does that make it more or less trustworthy? We cannot know.

1. The Problem: Why I'm Writing This

As a rule I do not spend much time reading about specific conspiracy theories. But I am familiar with how the broader "conspiratorial" mindset works. I was aware of the term "the narrative" long before it entered the popular consciousness, and the Daily Show hadn't yet run those clips showing journalists across many various channels repeating exactly the same lines with which they had clearly all been supplied. If you haven't seen what I'm talking about, a couple years ago there was a dramatic example of the same thing, where journalists on dozens of local stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group were all required to read the same statement on how biased, non-mainstream news online was "dangerous to our democracy". (Apparently the ominous irony was entirely lost on whoever wrote the statement all those news stations were required to read)

So conspiracy theories have become increasingly popular, because more and more people are becoming aware that something is up, on a large scale. Something that, prior to the internet, it would have been very difficult to figure out. When journalists all speak in lockstep, the sheer effort it would take to compare different channels and somehow get that information out to people 30 years ago would make you easily dismissed as a crazy obsessive person. Now, we can all watch these videos on YouTube (before they get deleted) and wonder what's going on.

There is no way to prove conspiracies on the global, generational-spanning scale that are being alleged by innumerable conspiracies theories and schools of thought. We don't have access to that information, and can only choose to believe either what the authorities tell us, which tends to be, uh, "comfortingly consistent," or else what those people who say the authorities are lying tell us, which is of almost endless variety, some that is reluctantly plausible and much that is anxiously fanciful.

But what is quite clear at this point is that the information we are presented with via mainstream media channels has been carefully curated. That realization encourages people to turn to non-mainstream sources, like people in Nazi-occupied Europe subjected to Third Reich propaganda but secretly tuning into VOA or other underground radio broadcasts to get the real news. In fact our situation today is very much like that, because that wasn't exactly the real news either. There was no "real news" about the war to listen to, you either accepted that Allied reports or underground radio (or the German communists, with their "People's Radio," etc.) were telling you the truth, or not.

One difference for us today is that the internet allows "mixed-truth" information to be disseminated at such a rapid pace that there's no way to keep on top of it all. There are not a few radio channels, there are a myriad of channels, some saying the same things and some disagreeing with each other. (Not to mention there is now AI software that can cobble together basic articles and even news reports with visuals and audio voiceovers, making it even easier to dump literally fake news into the turbid waters of online information.)

Social media has altered the equation too, by making these stories show up on your "own" news feed, shared by people you know. There was a popular late night radio show called Coast to Coast AM (I only caught it once or twice, I recall one caller was very interested in lizard people), hosted by Art Bell, and the fringe ideas shared there had their mysterious appeal based partly on their fringe-ness. Now the same process by which morally fringe behavior has become normalized in the eyes of society is being repeated in the world of news, where previously recognized authorities and standards have been dethroned, and now the concepts of "true/factually accurate" and "untrue" are being eroded even more quickly than "right" and "wrong" behavioral standards were in previous decades.

Bell's current spiritual successors sharing what used to be considered fringe theories on their various podcasts and shows are only part of the wave of unverified news and alarmist articles now coming from mainstream sources too. Much of it is designed intentionally to appeal to our sense that we're being lied to, that something big is going on and "the powers that be" are trying to keep us from figuring it out. They often portray themselves like those old underground radio broadcasts, brave men and women trying to get the truth to you despite opposition from the Deep State or Shadow Government or whoever.

To be interested in that sort of content is a very human trait. Just like it's a very human problem to be addicted to looking at your phone too much, because they are specifically designed to take advantage of human psychology to addict you, so the draw toward the world of conspiracy theory is too, for reasons we'll delve into later. That idea of "underground, government-discouraged sources" is also psychologically appealing to Americans in general and Christians in particular. It has nothing to do with the content being true or false, and everything to do with many people being pre-disposed to look favorably on information coming from that angle, and wanting to pass it along to others.

Art Bell, harbinger of the era when fringe news went mainstream

2. The Problem: The Antifragility of Conspiracy Theories

Another reason I'm writing this is that as soon as the Plandemic video trailer began popping up, various Christian outlets began popping up quickly denouncing it. This interested me, because a term those people in the world of non-aligned thought use is "gatekeeping." That is to say, there are people who self-identify or are popularly identified as being "on your side/part of your movement" but who actually exist to supply the appropriate rhetoric to make sure people don't stray too far from the narrative they're supposed to be following.

To be clear, I don't think that's what these editorials by big Christian websites are doing. I think articles like this one contain the genuine thoughts of the writer, who is probably tired of people in his congregation sharing totally unverifiable stories. But that article and others I've seen (Ed Stetzer has written multiple times for Christianity Today calling for Christians to repent and stop spreading conspiracy theories), and the angles from which they approach the problem, seemed a little misguided on a fundamental level. This from Stetzer's article:

"Yet in perpetuating the Seth Rich conspiracy, some Christians again are looking silly. The conspiracies were debunked by independent investigations such as websites like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. And if that isn’t convincing enough, Fox News itself retracted their original story, stating, 'The article was not subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require” and “was found not to meet those standards.'"

Oooh, fact checking websites, and even Fox News itself! Aren't you embarrassed, Christians who believe we can't trust the mainstream media, to hear that the mainstream media has cleared itself of any suspicion? Such failures in perception are one reason I'm writing this article, because they aren't going to help their target audience.

Antifragility, which I have written about in the past, is that quality of things that benefit from disorder, shocks, and apparent damage instead of being hurt by them. The most common metaphor is that of a Hydra from Greek mythology. Cutting off one head only leads to more growing.

A conspiracy theory has a kind of antifragility. This can be seen in that having accepted it, not only are people mentally inclined to defend against every attack on the theory's validity, but the very effort expended in trying to debunk it looks like more proof that it's true. Any idea that says "They'll try to stop me from telling you this, but--" has the potential to gain this kind of antifragility, if a widespread sense of recognition for it emerges. Fringe theories become very powerful if they can ever escape the fringe, and denouncing them as fringe/hearsay/debunked, as Stetzer and others have done, only increases the rate of their spread. As Nassim Taleb (developer of the concept of antifragility) has remarked, for a book to be publicly banned can only help its sales.

I'm sure that some people do share conspiracy theories out of "hatred for Hillary Clinton" as Stetzer claimed in that article, and that is not Christian behavior. We are commanded to love our enemies, and spreading unverified, negative stories about someone in order to discredit them is the sin of slander. But some others shared them because that "banned" motivation: they were trying to get the secret information out despite the blanket of government misinformation.

3. The Problem: False vs. True Prophets

As a rule I do not promote or share specific conspiracy theory-type stories about Hillary or vaccines or 5G or COVID-19, even when they seem probably true. This is because to paraphrase the common dictum about wrestling with pigs, when you enter the muddy arena of semi-truths and rumors and false cover stories and conspiracies to wrestle with swamp creatures, you just get muddy too, and besides, the swamp creatures like it.

That being said, there is a difference between conspiracy theories and "explanations we don't approve of." The emergence of COVID-19 has a lot of weird things associated with it. We shouldn't believe every story connecting the dots by dragging in the Rothschilds and the kitchen sink too, but I also believe there is so much geopolitical dynamite attached to a pandemic that spread out of China that we'll probably never be told the real story by any mainstream news source. We will be told whatever stories make people feel towards China, or Trump, or the CDC, or other parties, in the way that whoever is paying the salaries of those media institutions wants people to feel. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's an observation of how politics and media work in 2020.

I am working as a full-time missionary, and if I am informed that the fallen world is menaced in some new way by fallen leaders working in league together, the best thing I can do is spread the gospel and strengthen churches, not wade into the darkness of the swamp. Behind every corrupt, lying, neo-babelonian politician are 100 others. I would rather lead 10 people to Christ and train them to lead 10 each in turn, and so on. The Church is the ultimate antifragile institution on earth, and it has endured and grown through many centuries of stability and chaos.

In Old Testament Israel, true prophets did not exist alone. There were lots of false prophets spreading disinformation. Some could do so convincingly, with visual aids:

"Now the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat the king of Judah were sitting on their thrones, arrayed in their robes, at the threshing floor at the entrance of the gate of Samaria, and all the prophets were prophesying before them. And Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah made for himself horns of iron and said, “Thus says the Lord, ‘With these you shall push the Syrians until they are destroyed.’” And all the prophets prophesied so and said, “Go up to Ramoth-gilead and triumph; the Lord will give it into the hand of the king.” 1 Kings 22:10-12

In 2020, you and I and anyone with a TV or internet connection are like kings on thrones. Below us are many voices "prophesying" (professing to reveal the truth to us), clamoring for our attention, and we must decide who speaks truly or falsely. The fact that lots of them are saying the same thing does not mean it is true, and in fact none of them may be right, and we may need to call for, as happens in this story, someone else who tells us what we don't want to hear.

That should be a truth-tell we never lose sight of: the Truth will always have some things we don't want to hear. If it sounds like exactly what we expected, if it confirms what we want to believe, it's probably mixed with falsehood. If a conspiracy theory seems "too pat" and seeks to bolster my prejudices against someone, it's probably just addictive, artificially-sweetened fodder created for my mental consumption. Beware of those who offer those snacks for free, it leads to mental obesity.

As for those false prophets, scripture tells us that the proof of a true prophet is that their word comes to pass. So when I hear someone putting out a conspiratorial-type theory that sounds like it may have some real information behind it, or is in line with things I already know to be true, I may give it my ear, but if later it proves to be untrue (which is different than "the story goes away"), then I know that they are at worst a false prophet, deserving of censure, and at best a peddler of unhealthy snacks, best avoided.

4. Christians and Conspiracies: Planned vs Randomness

There are two major competing theories in the West to explain the world we see around us. One is that it all emerged gradually, through changes that took unimaginable lengths of time to slowly happen. Modern science assumes this; the theory of evolution is an obvious example, and even the Big Bang has become problematic for some who want to upgrade the scientific method into an all-encompassing worldview because our universe exploding from an infinitesimal primordial nugget into its current state is too like a creation event that needed an outside force to kick it off.

The other major perspective is that things as we see them now came into being much more rapidly, and could do so by means of important and specific events. In Genesis we see the forming and populating of the earth with life by God as a work He began and completed. There is also Noah's flood and the vast effect on the world that it had, and the languages being divided at Babel. These events dramatically speed up the timeline of reality and human history as we know it to lengths of time comprehensible to our minds (We have no real way to conceptualize one million years or even one hundred thousand, let alone a trillion years)

There is no use trying to reconcile these two perspectives. Either things came about through randomness, which required a basically infinite supply of time to allow them to happen, or they came about through a plan, which required a basically infinite supply of power to accomplish. Whether the design took a long time (Old Earth Creationism) or the randomness also involved near-infinite amounts of applied power (Alien-creator-race theories) is not as important, but we can see both groups trying to massage the arbitrary infinite-ness of one factor (Incomprehensible depths of time, or God-like/Divine power) by balancing it with the other.

As we think about conspiracy theories, it's important to recognize that Christians are typically going to be coming from a worldview that understands there to be a Divine plan behind reality, not that things gradually arose naturally and for no particular reason. Yet in the West they are typically also immersed in a society and culture that holds the latter view.

Modern news is often presented from that Random/Uncaused angle that "things just happen in the world and we tell you about them." Stories about lone gunmen, often the subject of conspiracy theories, are a good example of this. We are assured that it was just one random person who did a terrible thing but it's over now. But with the mainstream media deservedly losing credibility, people begin to search for other explanations behind the story. Perhaps this wasn't a random incident.

And now people are more open than ever to the idea that perhaps major events didn't even take place, that the whole event and news story was faked for some ulterior motive. Maybe there is some big plan, with lots of power behind it, and this is one small piece of it. It would be wrong to say this is unbiblical thinking, as studying a scriptural account of reality in some sense trains our minds to think in this way. (How does this particular story or event fit into the big picture, long-term plan?)

However, the Bible also gives us a balancing principle: Things act according to their nature and the laws that govern them. A good tree bears good fruit, and an evil tree bears evil fruit. Sinful people do sinful things, and so it doesn't require a conspiracy to explain why a few people might do especially wicked things, or want to cooperate to do evil. Whenever we are informed of a "secret master plan" as the explanation for various events, we should remind ourselves that this need not always be the case, and that God's sovereignty means that even if evil people have come up with a secret plan, it will not succeed unless He permits it, to accomplish His greater purposes.


5. Christians and Conspiracies: Selective Listening

Anyone who grew up going to church in the U.S. is probably quite familiar with the debate I mentioned above, between the narrative of evolution's gradual, emergent changes and a universe made quickly into something much like its current form through a specific creation event and subsequent divine interventions.

Yet I cannot recall meeting a single Christian who denied the legitimacy of Science or History outright. What happens instead is that when "experts" make truth claims which are irreconcilable with the Bible's truth claims, we simply ignore those experts. Sometimes we do listen to other things they say, but ignore those particular statements, like parents skipping past "that one scene" in a movie the family can otherwise enjoy together. (a practice which seems endangered now in the days of streaming and uninhibited consumption of media)

The Church is, then, quite comfortable with taking a selective approach to science and history. Did we all stop believing because well-credentialed archaeologists at one point claimed Pontius Pilate never existed, or because many historians still believe the Old Testament was an invented back story to unite various Canaanite groups who found themselves exiled together in Babylon?

While the idea of rejecting "expert" academic claims when they go against what the Bible says but listening to other things they say gives some people fits, in truth for the average believer (i.e. someone not having the academic background to really debate the issue effectively) this is a very robust and pragmatic way of solving the problem. We have different categories of authority, and the Bible is in that "non-negotiable" category, while academic experts are not. (And do not deserve to be, since their authority is mostly borrowed and they rarely have any "skin in the game" -- they won't suffer any consequences except at worst a loss of reputation in their field if their theories turn out to be wrong)

So then, for Christians we're already used to navigating a lower hierarchy of truth claims based on a higher one. When the Bible says there's a reef there, we don't sail that way even when "the latest, peer-reviewed paper on the effect of tidal forces on reef development" says it ought to be clear water. (And those progressive-minded souls in the Church who do make the attempt must be fished out of the water, though often they go down with their ship.)

This means that for some Christians, it's very easy to shift into that mode of thinking where a conspiracy theory (based not on verifiable claims, but believed for other reasons) becomes our guiding truth claim, and we start rejecting official sources when they contradict it. This is a problem because now the conspiracy theory has become the filter by which we judge reality. If we are not careful, just as can easily happen with political convictions, it will become part of that filter by which we read scripture as well. We should be very wary of letting unverifiable claims through a backdoor to become part of our worldview.

Of course, there is another thing Christians do, which provides ammunition for the other side of the debate, the people who have no patience for those attracted by conspiracy theories. Because Christians are used to believing things based on authority, and indeed are taught (more in some circles than others) respect for authority, some transfer this to what they have been taught are, or come to regard as, respectable and reliable sources of information. Any conspiracy theory that comes along, if "debunked" by these respectable sources, will then be considered unworthy of future speculation. And anyone forwarding these conspiracy theories will look incredibly foolish in the eyes of those who still look at establishment media as possessing authority to say what is accurate and what has been proven false.

6. Christians and Conspiracies: Religion vs. Conspiracy

It has been said that the exclusive claims of the world's major faiths force us to conclude that either they are all wrong, or one is right and the others are wrong. Either the LORD, the Creator of the universe, also made humans according to His own likeness, or the Chinese goddess Nuwa made them from dragging a rope through mud, or they were made from driftwood by Odin and his brothers, or they are the result of chemicals that randomly bounced into each other long enough to kick off one reaction that led all the way to human consciousness, but those explanations cannot all be correct.

In the same way, it cannot be true that the way to heaven is to slaughter one's enemies with sufficient valor, to earn enough merit through multiple lifetimes and understand that reality is an illusion, or to trust in the grace of God as seen in the work of Jesus Christ, all at the same time. And those various conceptions of heaven/the afterlife are all mutually exclusive too.

So either we A) reject all religions, or B) we must figure out which one is true. Or, C) we could decide we don't care or couldn't ever figure out what is True, and pick the religion we think is most attractive or useful, or pick some parts of several of them and follow them without regard for potential internal contradictions (which is the approach one typically encounters in Taiwan).

Conspiracy theories are stories that claim, usually with at least some cursory attempt at providing evidence, that many events we see are not natural/normal, but are brought about by the actions of a secretive group with specific motives. But to an atheist or non-religious person, who goes with option A) above, Christianity is exactly this--an attempt to explain observable events and phenomenon (which can "already be explained by Science") by providing a unproveable backstory of unseen forces (God, etc).

This seems like the simplest approach, but our materialist friend has a big problem: he's got to ignore too much of reality to make his theory work. One single, real, true miracle, the kind countless people claim to have experienced throughout human history, renders his choice moot. In these kinds of situations, there are usually 2 strategies he will fall back on.

1) Deny the event: Claim that anyone who thinks they have witnessed something miraculous, supernatural, or violating the laws of physics as we know them were mistaken, confused, deceived, or lying. The burden of historical proof testifies overwhelmingly against this, but your average materialist science groupie has no concept of historical proof, and may in fact consider history to be merely one long struggle to achieve particle accelerators and rockets which can land themselves.

2) Use the Science-of-the-Gaps argument: Because most people throughout history, including many Christians, explained things they could not understand by saying they were or were caused by gods or spirits or other unseen powers, yet now we understand them to be natural phenomenon which we can describe and measure by the scientific method, so all those things and also that which we cannot explain scientifically in 2020 will in the same way be explained by future advancements in science.

Both of these seek to keep reality free of any behind-the-scenes Actor/s whose existence would make his simple dismissal of all religious belief untenable.

Those who dismiss all conspiracy theories automatically are more or less doing the same thing. They are seeking to keep reality and their concept of history and what they read in the news simple and clear: Things happen, and the news exists to inform us of these happenings, and don't try to sell me on some secret society or scheme behind them. If they existed, The Papers Walter Cronkite CNN Fox News would have told us so. Yet these people have a similar problem to our atheist friend above: There must be a true explanation, and if those establishment sources turn out in the end not to be reputable sources, perhaps one of the conspiracy theories floating around is actually the correct story of what happened. So the option of simply dismissing them all is another kind of lazy thinking, or one trying to reduce the world to a more simplistic (and less scary) model than it really is.

7. "Why are Christians being drawn to Conspiracy Theories?"

"If you're a Christian, you think that the entire fabric of the cosmos was ruptured, by this strange singularity, where Someone who is a god and a man sets everything on its head. And to say it's supernatural is to downplay it; this is a massive singularity at the very heart of things. And if you don't believe that, it seems to me that you aren't really a confessional Christian--you may be a cultural Christian, but you're not a confessional Christian. So if you believe that, then it should be possible to dwell on all the other weird stuff that traditionally comes as part of the Christian package." - Tom Holland (Not Spider-Man)

Christians, by contrast, have already chosen B) from part 4 above and believe that one religion is true and only that one, and others cannot be chosen along with it. The others may have much that is good in them, but they must necessarily fall short of complete truth, since none profess Christ as Lord and seek atonement through His finished work on the cross. That is a good, straightforward assertion which we make through faith, and which we believe will one day be sight.

We cannot prove that faith, but we have evidence in lots of areas of life (historical references to biblical events and people, changed lives after a decision of faith, answers to prayer which can't be put down to coincidence, etc) that it is true. This kind of evidence is important because Christians reject option C) up above, believing there is Truth which can be known and believed. We believe the Bible tells a long, true story which can be learned and lived by, which is also the underlying narrative of all human history and reality. A reality which is full of miraculous, wonderful, and terrifying things, and exists partly as an unseen world of which we have scant knowledge.

This understanding of the world, coupled with today's growing recognition of how inaccurate or intentionally misleading is so much of the information we're constantly immersed in, leads people to turn away from now-distrusted official sources and seek the real story behind reality somewhere else, just as believers turn away from academic sources who say Noah's flood never happened but might get misled by a well-spun yarn about finding the real ark somewhere in the mountains of Turkey.

We are misled because we believe that the ark is real, and therefore stories that affirm (or maybe, cater to; or perhaps, take advantage of) that conviction can get past our primary filter which would reject mainstream academic sources claiming it wasn't true. Or worse, we are lazy, and simply see "ark" and "discovered" and share the story without feeling it's important to know whether it's factual or not.

Either way, too many Christians have not developed a secondary filter, one that can intuit if something is plausible within a context of belief on the one hand and selective rejection of mainstream sources on the other. This is true for newly-"woke" Christians who have only recently become aware of the extent to which they've been lied to about the world we live in. Put another way, they hadn't realized that the god of this age who has blinded the minds of unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4) to prevent them from seeing the truth of the gospel did so in certain ways that Christians can easily fall prey to as well if they lose a biblical worldview and do not practice discernment.

Yet this is not a new phenomenon for Christians. Think of the popular eschatology phases where everyone had books and maps and charts and theories about the end times. How many were sure the world was going to already be over by now? How many conspiracy theories circulated about how the antichrist was some politician or world leader of their day? In a sense, we have seen this whole thing before, we just didn't have social media then. How many of those Christian thought leaders who convinced people the rapture was coming at a certain date or that accused various political leaders of being the antichrist were called to account?

Of course, it's more palatable to believe one has been intentionally deceived than to believe one has sinfully failed to exercise discernment, and so the impulse is strong to believe conspiracy-theory-type stories or explanations which make some sense of confused reality and simultaneously assert that things would make much more sense if they weren't being intentionally deceived by a massive conspiracy. Again, this does not mean any particular conspiracy theory is not true, or that none of them are, but it gives us a reason to be cautious about accepting them or sharing them as true.

8. How to be discerning in a climate of conspiracy and information overload?

As we start to wrap up this long post, I want to mention a few ideas we can internalize in order to build a stronger filter which will help us navigate the excess of information and truth claims we're bombarded with. Some of the points are obvious, some perhaps less so, but I hope they are helpful, or at least thought-provoking, as you wade through the claims about the coronavirus and everything else:

1. The person who agrees you are being lied to, might also be lying to you

There is a whole highway system across the internet by which conspiracy theories get shared and passed along and commented on, and they are by nature antifragile; the more mainstream media companies take action to suppress them, the more it looks like evidence that they are true. 

Some followers of conspiracy theories are like preteens who, having realized their dad (or mom) isn't the superhero they'd imagined them to be in earlier childhood, begin to idolize a teacher or older classmate who demonstrates some of the qualities they were disappointed to find lacking in their default hero figure, not realizing they are committing the next step of the same mistake. Thus having realized, to the great disappointment of their healthy lack of cynicism, that they cannot trust the mainstream media whose job it was (and not merely a job, but a sort of implied social contract) to inform them of what was happening in the world, these people now automatically turn a credulous ear to anyone who invokes the new password: "the mainstream media cannot be trusted." 

2. Is your intuition being hijacked?

A person skilled in rhetoric always sounds persuasive, and although it's an art, it's something of a science as well at this point. Humans have buttons, and they can be pushed, and vast amounts of money circulate around that fact. For explanations that are "outside the mainstream," the way the information is presented will attract different kinds of people. For some, authenticity will look like a lone dissenter, a "voice crying in the wilderness" with a bare-basics website, and anything that seems to have some money behind it becomes untrustworthy. For others that would be too fringe to take seriously, and a more polished approach with good rhetoric and some credentialed names will win them over.

P. T. Barnum's famous aphorism, "there's a sucker born every minute," still holds true in 2020. But these days one doesn't need to be a sucker to be deceived, either by mainstream or alternative sources. "Going with your gut" when deciding whether to trust a source or not is dangerous, because decades of studies have figured out what can make people's intuition push them one way or another. Unfortunately your gut intuition has been commoditized, without your permission, and those whose profession is mass marketing, whether its products or ideas they are trying to sell you, know how that works. So a darkly plausible sounding accusation about a politician you don't like, or an empathetically morally outraged article about life-improving information suppressed by profit-hungry forces, or any other article that feeds some sense of satisfying grievance, should be taken with many grains of salt.

3. Hanlon's Razor

"Do not attribute to maliciousness what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Think of the situations, events, well-intended plans, work projects you've seen go wrong before; think of people in very high positions of power or influence who say or do really dumb things. People simply aren't good at executing carefully controlled secret plans, and that goes for rich and smart people too.

That doesn't mean it never happens (the existence of secret societies and political conspiracies is part of the historical record), but it probably shouldn't be your go-to explanation without serious evidence from trusted sources. And what are trusted sources these days?


4. Are there biblical or historical principles that already cover it?

The Bible describes a world where people are flawed and sinful, where people in positions of authority abuse their power to do terrible things, and yet Paul says our battle is not against flesh and blood but with evil spiritual powers of this dark world and in heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

I believe what the Bible says about God's kingdom, which is not of this world, inaugurated by Christ and advancing against the kingdom of this world, which is the hierarchy of secular authority which goes all the way up to the Prince of this World and his fallen spiritual allies. That some world leaders would be deeply under their influence and foolishly imagine themselves their allies instead, and practice perverse rituals to reinforce that belief, doesn't surprise me at all. It has always been so.

So when I see rumors and dark intimations online describing the secret cultish behavior of some world leaders, etc., they don't sound all that conspiratorial to me. We have historical evidence that Aztec leaders were conducting public rituals that involved cutting the living hearts out of their enemies, and Roman emperors were setting live Christians on fire as human candles in Rome. More recently, for decades before and during the turn of the 20th century, seances were popular activities. Many people, including famous people you've heard of, tried to talk to the dead through mediums, sometimes for amusement but sometimes in earnest. In Taiwan up until recent years it was a regular practice for children to be taken to temples and "opened up" to spiritual influence so they can serve as mediums, an ability they apparently retain for life. Though I keep a distance from such things here, my understanding is that the practices continues today, to a lesser extent.

All that is to say, sometimes breathless stories insisting that we should be alarmed that certain famous people are secretly engaged in dark and illicit activities have the opposite effect; the testimony of history, the bible's take on the world, and human nature more or less guarantee some of them are up to much worse things than the average conspiracy theory alleges. That certainly doesn't mean we need to believe every specific story we hear.

5. Know what you can't know, and whether that matters

At this point I view everything I read online on a sliding scale of unverifiability. I don't know if any of it is true, and I can't verify or debunk a CNN article about a bombing in Kenya which proves Al-Qaeda is active there, any more than I can verify the secret discovery of an ancient supercomputer under the Sphinx, or that some government officials instructed their family members to get out of NYC on Sept 10th, or that the Coronavirus is a man-made ploy to get us to accept the vaccine which will be administered via bioinfernal Mark of the Beast technology. I can't know if those things happened to begin with, nor whether the explanation provided to me about those things is correct. There is no strong reason for me to trust an unverifiable conspiracy theory video on YouTube more or less than I trust unreliable poll numbers on MSNBC. (Though in a pinch, if it's MSNBC, I'd go with the YouTube video. Just kidding. Probably.)

If you are sheltering at home because of the coronavirus, and especially if you've suffered or lost friends and/or family members because of it, it's only reasonable to try and figure out what's going on. If the government seems to be lying, with their track record of dishonesty, it's also reasonable to entertain other theories, though not wise to share them with others. What if you are sharing, and thus promoting, false prophecy? But we have to recognize that we won't be able to personally verify if the people telling you it's a planned virus being exploited to create a one world government are correct, any more than people in Beijing will be able to verify if it's a weaponized virus created by the CIA to attack China, as they're being told over there. If it turns out that people really were lying, anger is also reasonable. But will it ever "turn out"?

Will the truth ever be found and explained? We don't know, and that's frustrating enough to turn a lot of people to conspiracy theories to provide an illusion of knowing and thus a little less lack of control.


6. Do you want it to be true?

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils." - C.S.Lewis

Lastly, I offer this Lewis quote not to suggest that some people in positions of power are not involved in filthy atrocities, but that our desire to keep filling our minds with conspiracy stories about them and clinging to those explanations which attribute maximum evil intent to people can be unhealthy.

If you find yourself rejecting evidence for a more mundane explanation ("sometimes accidents just happen") because you don't want there to be a more mundane explanation, because that would be less entertaining, or less cathartic, or because that particular story would prove what you suspected all along about Trump, or Obama, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, or Big Pharma, or Monsanto, then be very, very careful. Because that is a point where the truth of the story is no longer the thing that matters most to you, and you wish evil to be true of others.

That is the negative version of believing something because you wish it to be true. The positive version could be represented by my own sympathy toward stories that claim sightings of creatures thought to be long extinct, because I want them to still be alive, and I want to believe the world is still big enough in 2020 for mysterious life to still be hiding somewhere. So I have to be extra careful to guard my mind against embracing those kinds of stories, which typically are based on very flimsy evidence. A historically famous example of this was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame, who defended various, obviously fake reports of fairies, ghosts, etc., because of his strong desire to prove the existence of the supernatural.

Christians can commit the same error... every time people share a fake story about someone who went to heaven or hell without trying to verify it (witness the ruin caused by this example), they are promoting a lie and weakening the Church's testimony that heaven and hell are real. That it supports what you believe to be true does not mean it should get an automatic pass.

9. Conclusion: Wisdom... and Patience

Simply put, if you believe respectable institutions and elected officials don't cooperate to deceive us, you are a fool. But if you believe and share every conspiratorial, alarmist, or political attack story you see, you are a different kind of fool. We are drowning in information, and sharing half-truths or fake news means you are part of the problem. Yet, if we are not being told the truth by official sources, we will seek for it in other places, and these stories are not going away, and censorship only strengthens their appeal, as we saw above.

I have no delusions that articles like concerned Christians I mentioned earlier, or this one, or others like it, will have any great effect on human nature. But you, reading this, you can change. You can choose to be wise and exercise restraint when you want to share the latest tantalizing rumor or urgent, probably-true update, and to be patient and wait until more facts come out before sharing a conspiracy theory trying to explain an event based on "what we already know about how those people act" vs. whatever evidence is available. If you believe the evidence will be faked or changed as necessary to keep people from figuring out those people are behind it, that is indeed a kind of consistent logic, but it's also an inescapable trap, so just be aware you are in it.

At very least, educate yourself broadly on the topics you are sharing stories about. (And I don't mean in the YouTube rabbit hole way) Don't have a careless attitude towards spreading half-truths and unverified accusations, but be very focused on sacrificial love and doing good in this world, not "raising awareness" or "putting everyone on alert" from the safety of your digital device. Needlessly raising the anxiety level of a world suffocating in anxiety is not a light sin.

So as you encounter stories and rumors about the coronavirus, about political leaders, about alternate versions of history or government cover-ups or aliens or vaccines or false flags or anything else, I hope you will keep some of what I've said here in mind. It would be hypocritical of me to suggest you should just stop listening to alternative theories and believe the official stories about everything--I often do not believe them either. But the fact that scripture calls Satan the father of lies should make us extra careful not to accidentally do his work for him.

"Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil." - Ephesians 5:15-16

Be well, guard your mind and heart, and let His word be a lamp to your feet
and a light to your path among these swamps of misinformation and deceit.

Reviewing Every Book I Read in 2019 - Part III

Wrapping up my review of all the books I read in 2019. If you missed it, Part I is here with great books about the Inklings and Cold War espionage, and Part II is here with entries from both the political right and left, and a beautiful War and Peace-style tale from revolutionary era Sicily.

October (continued)

31. Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) (audiobook)

Background:
The second half of a home assignment has its own special kind of stress, especially when the fruits of the weeks before returning to the field increase in proportion to how social one can be. For serious introverts that can make it an exhausting time as well. During those tiring but good and fruitful days, which included lots of driving around Texas, I listened to a very long and rather unique book I'd read a long time ago. This historical-ish fiction novel was written by geek-overlord author Neal Stephenson, and contains long passages of mathematical theory, explanations of the foundations and basic theories of cryptography, and historical exposition of the second world war period with many satirical additions and emendations.

The Basics:
A multi-era novel with several plot lines taking place during World War II, and in the 90's. The War, English attempts to crack the Nazi's enigma code and the art and science of cryptography in general, and one young genius codebreaker's experiences are balanced against the adventures of a savvy pair of web entrepreneurs in the 90's, hoping to achieve more than financial success through their start-up based in the Philippines.

The Good:
The narrative unfolds at a pace leisurely enough to accommodate Stephenson's usual vast amounts of extraneous but pertinent information, slowly constructing several plotlines that could each be novels in their own right. One takes place in the 90's (the present, at the time of writing) in which some very internet-savvy friends have started what they think can be a ground-breaking web-based business in the Philippines, which begins to evolve into something greater, which involves island dictators, data havens, and Nazi gold among other things. The physical connection to WWII history is but one of the very many ways the story is built into a decades-spanning meta-story that takes the reader from pipe organ math in the Midwest to surprise Komodo dragon attacks on remote Pacific battlefields to top-top-secret Bletchley Park in the English countryside and the heart of the allied efforts to crack Nazi codes. There's so much going on in this work, and Stephenson somehow keeps track of the threads well enough to keep weaving them into the ongoing narrative in unexpected and creative ways.

The Questionable:
Stephenson's writing style is fairly unique. People who don't welcome lots and lots of details, who prefer not to pause every few pages to delve into the inter-connected backstories of the ideas and people that lie behind history and theories we now take for granted, are probably not going to make it through the first several chapters. For some of us, however, the exchange of information is a kind of love language, and Stephenson showers his readers with that sort of agape.

Stephenson takes an interesting approach to the idea of religion and faith. He is by no means a believer, and his writings take a cynical attitude towards faith traditions, correctly observing that vast numbers of people who consider themselves religious have little understanding of what they profess to believe and often live in states of profound ignorance. Yet at the same time he acknowledges the power of faith, and sometimes seems to recognize the universal truths in Christianity are compelling ideas that must be addressed separately from the failings of those who profess to live by them. It seems to be the stance of a man who would like to reflexively smirk at those things atheists like to smirk at, yet recognizes the intellectual slothfulness of doing so and therefore takes a more carefully neutral approach, giving credit where he feels it is due, and taking note when people do live by what they profess.

The Bottom Line:
For engineers or other people who love information and detail, Stephenson's earlier novels (up to and including Reamde) may be unique among all books for their enjoyment value. They manage to combine what would be several college courses' worth of information into an interesting and plausibly constructed narrative, with memorable characters and story moments as well.

32. The Life of God in the Soul of Man (Henry Scougal - Paul Lamb)

Background:
As I got settled back into the swing of ministry, this book was recommended to me by a missionary colleague.

The Basics:
A short book which is an updated English translation of a long letter written over 350 years ago by Henry Scougal. Scougal was a Scottish theologian seeking to encourage a friend whose faith had lapsed, and instruct him in all the vital basics of living the Christian life and seeking a relationship with God. He died at only 28, of tuberculosis, but his published letter lives on centuries later.

The Good:
The list of books I think should be required reading for every English-speaking believer is a short one (Mere Christianity by C.S.Lewis is on it). This book/epistle deserves to be on it as well, not for any deep or impressive new insights raised, but for its earnest description of what it means to be in relationship with one's Creator. In its day Scougal's letter inspired such giants of the Great Awakening as the Wesleys and George Whitfield, and this version is a translation by Paul Lamb which brings the archaic English of the original into a version accessible to modern readers. At only 61 pages long it is not long, and is very much worth the time.

The Questionable:
I could wholeheartedly recommend this book as necessary reading for every believer (especially those who have known God long and need to hear the basics again in a passionate way) except for one glaring flaw which emerges somewhat unexpectedly later in the book: a very strong streak of neo-platonism, the "matter is evil, spirit is good" dichotomy which, taken to a further extreme, leads down the path of gnosticism. The author does not stray outside the bounds of what is recognized to be orthodoxy (the whole Western church has dabbled and more than dabbled in neo-platonism), yet it is a serious flaw in an otherwise joyful and convicting piece of spiritual writing.

The Bottom Line:
With the above-mentioned caveat about neo-platonism, this is a book of great value that I'm surprised I only heard about last year. Anyone who seeks to love God and live a life of faith in this world should read it.

Nov/December

33. Eternal Security (Charles Stanley)

I find my journey of faith tends to move through a slow cycle of emphasizing what can be known and what cannot. At some points at the extreme end of the latter times, the idea of eternal security can seem a little dubious. This need not involve doubting any principle tenet of the faith; for me it most often comes when I consider the vast gulf between who God is and how my life would reflect His glory. It was at a time like that I decided to read a book which set forth a case for eternal security

Thoughts:
The problem with doubts and fears about eternal security is that they are primarily emotional. (Not to say irrational--it's precisely the eternal importance of the question that makes it reasonable to be very concerned) An anxiety regarding one's eternal destination and whether one has "really believed," given the existence of passages of Scripture which seem to suggest the possibility of deluding oneself or falling away, is an understandable struggle and a real challenge for many believers, but not one that can be rectified by "right answers." (Versus, say, a spiritual experience of the presence of God in a unique way which allays one's fears) Therefore, Stanley's attempt to calmly deal with each potential objection by explaining how no passage which appears to suggest salvation can be lost actually means that doesn't necessarily accomplish the stated objective of the book. (To be fair, Stanley admits this up front)

There are a few points in the book where the author makes some leaps of interpretation which simply aren't justified. The most notable is when he attempts to resolve fears over the "cast into the outer darkness" passage in the parable about the wedding feast by saying these are believers too, just less happy ones. Twisting around to find a convoluted interpretation in order to make your case seem more consistently air-tight is a quick way to kill the credibility of your other, sounder exegesis.

The Bottom Line: 
If you are struggling with assurance regarding your faith, this book is not the silver bullet to resolve that, but I don't believe there is any such thing. On the other hand, a look into the passages frequently cited regarding this question, whether you agree with Stanley's understanding of the passages or not, will probably be helpful for you as it was for me. I suspect there are better books out there that address this subject, but other than one or two obvious missteps, this isn't the worst place to start.


34. Salt - A World History (Mark Kurlansky)

One entry in a list of Kurlansky's interesting series of books that take a particular thing or product and examine their far-reaching effects on world history. In this case, salt turns out to be that commodity you already knew was important but never realized how much.

The Good:
Perhaps you didn't know that salad, saucer, and soldier all come from the latin word for salt. I hadn't known that the Chinese logograph for "well" does not, in fact, represent the cover of a water well, but the bamboo scaffolding for a salt well. There are a wealth of interesting facts and connecting flow of history based around salt that I was entirely ignorant of before reading this book. There are even various period recipes included. I listened to the audiobook, and it's an excellent choice for interesting listening that doesn't require much concentration.

The Questionable:
A good portion of the book is given to describing the history of salted fish, which overlaps with some of Kurlansky's other books, like the history of Cod. Some reviewers felt buying the one book and then the other felt like paying twice for a lot of the same content. I have not read the history of Cod, but Salt is very much worth the read as far as I'm concerned.

Bottom line:
A well-seasoned book full of interesting facts and things you probably hadn't heard before.


35. Millennials and the Mission of God: A Prophetic Dialogue (Andrew F Bush and Carolyn C Wason)

Background:
As the end of the year approached, a school board on which I sit all read this book together and did some devotional discussions based on it. Millennials are no longer "the weird college kids" who seem to be on a different wavelength than their elders, and are now the pool of increasingly experienced teachers from which we hire. This book was suggested as a way to better understand the deep generational divide that now exists between older believers and "woke" younger generations, and to some extent it accomplished this purpose, though not perhaps as the authors intended.

The Basics:
This book comprises an ongoing conversation between a Boomer-aged Christian man and a younger Millennial (iPad, not iPod) woman as they try to figure out communication across generational gaps and the challenges and failures of the Church, and sharing the gospel in a brave new world.

The Good:
Had this book pretended to provide answers or some kind of model to follow (other than the importance of connecting across generation and worldview gaps), it would have earned my sincere condemnation. As it is, the book presents itself as a conversation (rather ambitiously described as a "prophetic dialogue" in the title, for reasons I am not sure after reading it) between two people across a generation gap, which serves as a useful frame to consider what has changed in the past half-century, and how conversations between generations with divergent values might look.

Both parties make earnest attempts to communicate with each other, across a variety of communication methods, and the book is presented as a sort of record of how the project went. This allows readers to draw their own conclusions from the dialogue in addition to any that the authors hope to helpfully provide.

The Questionable:
The book tries to illustrate the difference in perspectives of older and younger generations of believers and warn that the divide is getting nearly impossible to cross. It succeeds at this goal in some ways, but this is undermined by the fact that both participants in this conversation come from the same strain of progressive worldview. The older man doesn't seem to realize that the younger woman's quite dysfunctional worldview (something she herself admits) which he sometimes struggles to understand, is simply the ideological offspring of his own, almost two generations down the road. The Boomer asserts that we need more diversity in the Church, praises the Millennial emphasis on this issue, then is disconcerted that these new voices claim he and his ilk have said enough and it's time to shut up and listen, yet doesn't have any strong way to counter this idea.

I was reminded of how Richard Dawkins became famous by blasphemously mocking the very concept of God, yet recently has expressed qualms about the disappearance of Christmas from England. One minor theme of the early 21st century is radical thought leaders of the past several decades getting a good look at the fruits of their efforts and not always liking what they see. (As political groups and ideological scavengers profit from the aftermath)

Bottom Line:
This book can be very informative if approached as the authors intended, not as a book with any answers but as an illustrative dialogue which reveals, among other things, the dyscivilizational dysfunctionality of a woke millennial psyche (e.g. "I spend a lot of time feeling apologetic about the space my body occupies"), and how that conflicts with the very concept of truth, and evangelism, something the book's millennial co-author does helplessly recognize. The conclusions you reach from what you find here may not be what either participant in the book's titular dialogue would agree with, but it may serve as a call to renew our efforts to foster intra-generational dialogue, a warning about where US culture is headed, or a vivid picture of how those who sowed the wind must watch their children and grandchildren reap the whirlwind.


36. Loving Jesus (Mark Allen Powell)

The title says it all. This is a book all about loving Jesus, how it's tough, how we sometimes neglect this particular aspect of our faith, how we need to think about it differently, and how gloriously significant this calling is.

Thoughts:
I highly recommend this book. Whether or not one agrees with every conclusion Powell reaches, the ideas and issues he raises should have an important place in the mind and heart of any Christ-follower. One of his main themes at the outset, and which he revisits, is the idea of a "second naivete"--after the initial naive period of excited new faith, once we have endured unexpected hardship and encountered too many things that don't seem to fit conveniently into any theological boxes, when trying to walk in faith in a broken world has begun to make us harder and more cynical, to willingly embrace and engender the same childlike faith we had at the outset. This is a compelling idea for those of us who have walked long with God and accumulated a lot of baggage on that faith journey. As a theological professor, Powell swims through the dangerous waters of academic religion; many of us who went through seminary understand the head vs. heart struggle that can happen there, and how it's all too easy to lose one's first love in the midst of text critical method papers. However the touchstone that sustains him is his simple love for Christ, birthed back in the "Jesus Freak" days and never lost.

Powell fleshes out a concept in his book which I think is highly valuable for Christians who are not new to the faith, a practiced piety which is not hypocritical or legalistic, but in which love for Christ is expressed through continued devotion whether or not it is accompanied by the enthusiasm of new faith. It is a mature faith which has not fallen out of love with its Redeemer. He works through his overarching ideas methodically using a series of dichotomies (this extreme is often replaced by an opposite extreme) and often finds a way forward by rejecting the false dichotomy presented to us or lazily fallen into and suggesting that, in Christ, we can have the best of both worlds, a child-like love and devotion but also a mature and tested faith.

Bottom line:
This is one of the best books I read in 2019, and one to bump toward the front of your reading list and make sure you actually read. There are concepts introduced by Powell here that, if you have followed God for a while, and especially if you're feeling a little faith-fatigue or "dryness," may be the catalysts to new growth and joy in your spiritual life.

***

Epilogue: 
I am guessing this particular entry won't ever have many readers, being a third-part book review post coming 4 months too late. However, in the multi-year history of this blog it may be the singular post I'm most proud of; it represents my determination to finish a series of posts I started no matter how utterly I lost motivation to do so in the midst of a busy season of major life changes and formidable writer's block. If you do happen to be reading this, I wish you similar success in finishing those tasks you utterly lost motivation to complete halfway through.

Reviewing Every Book I Read in 2019 - Part II

Continuing my review of all the books I read in 2019. I had originally planned this to be a two-part post, but this might be two out of three. If you missed it, Part I is here with great books about the Inklings and Cold War espionage.

July/Aug/Sept

19.-23. The Four Gospels, and Acts

Background:
This summer I visited Europe for the first time. During my home assignment months back in the States, I had a great opportunity to participate in a family reunion trip to southern Norway and meet part of my grandmother's side of the family. Already being on that side of the Atlantic, I joined a younger sibling on a two-day business trip to Italy, and we flew back to the US from Amsterdam, having traveled through France and Belgium to get there. This whirlwind Euro trip was fun, though our hastily-assembled itinerary involved a lot of train riding, and I took advantage of that extra time to do some Bible reading.

Thoughts:
I haven't included scripture in other places on this book list, whether devotional and/or reading for lesson planning and sermons, etc., since I wasn't reading those passages of the Bible "as a book", but for teaching or other purposes. In this case, with the bucolic countryside of eastern France passing by in a pleasant monotony as viewed from a train window, I decided to start reading through the New Testament book-style, rather than in small bites with lots of commentaries and contemplation. I went through the four gospels and Acts, and got a good ways into Romans before the long-train-ride leg of our journey was over, and enjoyed it very much.

I have no especially deep insights to share from that period of reading, although I was encouraged by the sense of continuity: Jesus came and ignited something, and that fire has spread through our world ever since. Truly, when He was lifted up from the earth, did He draw all men unto Himself. Now hospitals in remote jungles bear the sign of the cross, urbane and mocking atheists trouble themselves to blaspheme His name above any other, and majestic cathedrals impress my Taiwanese friends when they visit Europe. That all these things have been accompanied by human sin and mistakes by the Church may be worth mourning, but the Bible doesn't show us a world that lacks these things, except as a glimpse of what lies beyond final judgment.

I could also say that there is so much going on in scripture in terms of recurrent themes and intentional patterns and what the Spirit has woven into the ongoing narrative of the text. I think it's important that our times of looking deeply and up close at the Bible should be balanced with reading longer passages to get both perspectives.



24. The Leopard - Giuseppe di Lampedusa (Audible)

Background:
Having returned to the US, I drove around North Alabama visiting friends and supporters and speaking at some English and Chinese Churches. In I listened to this interesting tale of Garibaldi-era Italy. It began a sort of theme of the second half of the year of filling in some gaps of my historical knowledge; in this case, until coming across this story I had no real sense of the history and culture of Italy between the Renaissance-era Italian city states and the united Italy which existed by the time of WWI. (This story being set in Sicily, it would only take one or two chapters of an alternate history novel to get from the ending of this story to introducing Don Corleone's family from the Godfather series)

The Basics:
A colorful tale that follows the story of a "Prince" or lord of Sicily, Don Fabrizio, and the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy of whom he is a leading figure. It's a beautiful, slow tale, full of depictions of the luxurious and sumptuous lifestyle lived by the aristocracy, which is balanced masterfully with the anxious sense of encroaching problems and dysfunction and the end of an era. At the beginning we meet the Don in or just past his prime, and by the end both he and the Sicily he knew are no more. That sounds sad, and it is depicted with appropriate solemnity, but the book is a celebration of life and beauty in a time and place already exotic to us now.

The Good:
Imagine a compact little version of War and Peace, set in Sicily and not Russia, and with a much smaller cast of characters, and you have something like this book. On the one hand there are the descriptions of the life of Sicilian aristocrats, with dances and the details of food and clothing and reflections on the importance of certain social niceties. On the other hand the great changes taking place on the Italian mainland do find their way into the tranquil, sun-scorched setting, and to varying extents the lives of the main characters are affected. I enjoyed it very much as a mixture of insights into an era and into the human condition, contained in a well-told and not overly long story.

The Questionable:
This isn't exactly a page-turner, it's a poignant tale of the decline of an era and way of life. That's simply not going to interest some people, and I probably would have enjoyed it much less if it were not for the effort that Edoardo Ballerini put into the Audible version I chose. His voice brought to life the excitement and exhaustion of high-class parties, the middle-aged Don's masterful personality yet increasing tendency to fret, the tension of old wealth and new wealth uneasily coexisting as the latter replaces the former, and the simple delight of good food shared with family around the table. Even so, it's a very visual story, and one in which social occasions and the reputation of families and opinions of trusted peasants are important points of narrative tension, so know that going in.

The Bottom line:
This is a well-told story about a Sicilian aristocratic family in slow decline (as they increasingly realize it), and also the ending of classical era Italy. It has historical value as a detailed description of period life and social conventions, and also you will find yourself drawn slowly in to care very much about the Don and his family. I enjoyed as an Audible book, and recommend the Italian narrator if you want to give it a listen.


25. The Heretics of Saint Possenti - Rolf Nelson

Background:
I wrapped up my US visit with a couple of weeks in Dallas, and was able to visit some Chinese churches and friends from my seminary years, and preach one Sunday morning. I then headed back to Taiwan and after very quickly applying to renew my resident visa, made a subsequent seminar/retreat trip to Indonesia. I was getting tired of traveling by this point--I spent most of the past 6 years doing evangelism and church-planting in a specific city district in the largest metro area of Taiwan, then suddenly this summer I was on 27 different flights on 3 continents. (It was a blessed few months I will never forget, but as it ended I was also ready to be in one place for a while). Feeling a little drained, I chose a book that seemed more "pulp" but was connected thematically to The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher, a book I'd read in 2018 for the purposes of policy discussions with some local expat Christian leaders.

The Basics:
A "what if" near-future tale of a burned-out parish priest who notices good men seem to be hard to find in his church. After a mugging sends him into a spiral of self-reflection and confusion about his worldview, he ends up starting his own monastery to bring in struggling veterans and get them back on their feet again. But this isn't your typical monastery...

Thoughts: In early 2017 a popular and controversial book generated lots of conversations in the Christian Right and outside it. This book was The Benedict Option, and one central theme of the book was that Christians today could learn some important lessons from Saint Benedict and the Benedictine Order. The Heretics of St. Possenti is a kind of fictional exposition on that theme from a Red-State-Roman-Catholic perspective, which imagines a new Catholic order being founded as a creative take on that kind of rural community Dreher imagined, and how that might come about. Since the book makes some very straightforward ideological claims, I feel it's better to address those up front so anyone interested knows what it's about:

The term "woke" is typically used to describe young people figuring out the world is a damaged place and deciding they're going to be very vocal about how not okay they are with that fact. Typically they react in directions established by current popular left-wing ideology. There is a somewhat mirror-image phenomenon online, associated with the term "red pill," which is the perspective this book is written from. That unapologetically right-wing perspective is dished out pretty heavy-handedly through much of it; if you have ever read anything by Ayn Rand, you'll get the idea. This is not a subtle book, it intends to inform you of certain problems in the world and certain ways of thinking about them, mostly through dialogue from friends the bishop meets along the way who educate him on these matters (without quite turning and looking at the reader, but it gets close in various places).

There are some sections where the Bishop and others discuss certain Bible passages which are used to support the narrative on the book, and as usual, some of these are worth considering and others rest on shakier exegesis or proof-texting. I would say more effort was put into these sections than on many other parts of the book. I do support certain conclusions the author reaches, but I am extremely careful with exegesis, and I can't really approve of an exegetical method which delves deeply into original language text in some cases, yet retreats to the "well I'm no scholar, but as a simple man it seems" in others. Both can be valid depending on the context, but switching back and forth as convenient just shows you have already reached your conclusion and you're going as deep or shallow into interpretation as necessary to support your ideological point. As I have written previously on this blog, our ideological and other convictions aren't determined by our understanding of Biblical truth but often vice versa, and it takes consistent, serious, long-term effort to reverse that tendency.

The author of this book has very straightforward concepts of who the "good guys" and "bad guys" are. Depending on how aware you are of right-wing/red-pill sensibilities, you may find parts of the book offensive, boring, or at least rather clumsy in their presentation. If the idea of the men's rights movement makes you hot under the collar, or if you consider the idea that some immigrants are problematic to be hateful, this book will probably make you angry or sad or both at the same time. You have been warned.

Aside from the "message fiction" aspect, this book does have some enjoyable sections (the scene of recovering vets singing matins together under the starlight is especially memorable), and proposes a creative solution to the real world problems of men with broken lives, and churches "having a form of godliness but denying its power." If you aren't of the political Right but want to understand the worldview from an insider perspective, this book might be very helpful in that sense. If you are of the political Right, you may enjoy the book, though it's also unapologetically Catholic and saves a few reprimands for we rebellious Protestants as well.

The Bottom line:
This is an interesting premise for a story, but that story is more or less told in service to the book's ideological stance. If that doesn't bother you (whether because you take a similar stance, or because you're not easily triggered by such things), and if the idea of a new militant order of Catholic monks who help strugging vets get back on their feet--and sustain their monastery by ammo sales in the mean time--sounds like fun, you might enjoy it. For me, I'd like to see other creative takes on what people taking the Benedict-Option-style community building idea to 11 might look like, but less infused with Ayn Rand style ideological expositions and simplistic ethnic stereotyping.

October

26. Sodapop Soldier - Nick Cole

Background:
This quick read was a low-effort way to pass some time on my last few flights of the summer.

The Basics:
There is a genre one might call "gamer fiction" (Ready Player One being a well-known example) and this novel is something along those lines: a near-future fiction about a professional gamer playing two very different computer games at the same time, one as his "day job", and one as his side gig. After he receives a certain account on an illegal "anything goes" game, he finds himself caught up in a power struggle which goes in multiple unexpected directions.

The Good:
It's not boring. The author spins an improbable but mostly well-told digital yarn of a simple man whose professional skills at online gaming lead him into a larger web of complications which have him simultaneously pursuing the good life and trying to not to die.

The parts where he and his team are urgently working together against the odds to defeat the online forces of another megacorporation conveyed the excitement of online gaming well. To anyone who doesn't understand what many men and some women find so compelling about multiplayer or co-op style gaming, this book does get that across. There are pop culture references scattered throughout, and the writing style is high-energy and positive. I can't find any specific information on how old the author is, but it's a Gen Z kind of book, where the cynicism present is due less to years of life experience and more to having seen the darker side of human nature the internet so easily reveals, and where anything might be possible if you have skills and hustle hard enough.

The Questionable:
During my years in Dallas I helped with a youth group at a medium-sized church with mostly Asian families, and we had this problem where kids from financially well-off homes would get old enough to really start feeling the lure of "the world" in the biblical sense. As soon as they got a car (usually an expensive newer model) they vanished, never to be seen again. Some of them became truly unapologetic materialists, and church or religion of any kind had nothing to seriously interest them anymore as they strove to live what was considered the best life for privileged young people in the current year. The closest they came to religion was the "church of hustle" where you were expected to work hard, put yourself out there, take chances, join an upwardly mobile team, etc. all in exchange for worldly success and leveraging your abilities to see what you could achieve.

To a young person with enough resources to get into that game, and with a zest for living life and seeing what's out there in the world, that siren call seems nearly impossible to avoid without parents who are strong believers with a good relationship to their kids, and even then some kids latch onto worldly goals and strive after them with all their heart, sometimes returning to Church only after many years of their parents' prayers.

Books like this tick me off a little because they're written from the perspective of that shiny and uber-attractive lie. The protagonist is that guy who saves the world (sort of) and gets the girl (or lots of female attention, at least) and finds a way to make it up to the literally-higher class areas and eat the good food and sample the good life. The best I can say for it is that it's "honestly materialistic"--the author almost seems to be writing himself into the character as someone who simply wants it as good as he knows some other people have, and who genuinely enjoys nice food and nice things, not as status symbols but for themselves. (What I mean by "honestly materialistic" is along the lines of what Paul was talking about "if Christ were not raised." Lacking God, the kind of nice-guy hedonism the book's protagonist aims for would be a very reasonable way of life.)

Sodapop Soldier is a "fun" book aimed at that younger audience; the ones who want a shot at what the worldly world has to offer, the good life and attention from beautiful women and the pluck to run with the big dogs when the chance comes along. Reading it in 2019 helped me realize that as I get into my mid-30's the wealth of shalom looks increasingly attractive when compared to the riches of mammon.

In terms of the book's shortcomings as a book, as someone who has a lot of experience with computer games, the long passages describing events in-game and the carefully rendered detail in the levels were understandable, but the dark and wicked aspects of the black market the protagonist encounters while playing the illegal game were wearying (knowing that world exists doesn't mean reading about it is fun, though it does succeed in heightening the tension for a certain phase of the novel). The excessively deus ex machina / Matrix-style ending of a certain plotline of the book was a bit disappointing as well.

The Bottom line: A gamer action novel that tries to get all kinds of things packed into one book and somewhat succeeds. It's well-written for what it is, but the "nice-guy hedonist" worldview isn't what we need more of in 2020, though it's very Gen Z and so we'll probably see more of it anyway.


27. Beautiful Outlaw - John Eldredge 

Background: I had begun this book last year and bogged down part of the way through. Returning to Taiwan after a summer of traveling, I was ready to settle back into local ministry. Remembering this book, I went back and finished it, and I'm glad I did.

The Basics: It's a John Eldredge book about the humanness of Jesus. Eldredge looks at the life of Jesus and explores His personality, contending that Jesus' divinity did not leave him without a sense of humor, righteous indignation, or even intellectual playfulness.

The Good: This book is a strong call to know and love Jesus, and understand Him especially in His humanity. Eldredge wants us to understand Jesus is fully human, not in the abstract sense but with a real personality. As with all of Eldredge's books, reading it also conveys the warmth of the author's good wishes towards his readers.

The Questionable:
It is nothing against John Eldredge to say that I sometimes struggle to enjoy his style. I have a sort of hyper-rational personality, which means a lot of his friendly overtures and low information density leave me feeling pleasantly impatient, for lack of a better term. It's a good book and a good reminder, but it could be half its length. Jesus is a real person, but He is different from what Eldredge imagines too, because the reality of a person is never like what we imagine a person to be. I am content to not need to fill in those gaps (I have written about the danger of doing so based on popular conceptions, artistic traditions, or our imagination) but for people who need some godly imaginative aids here then Eldredge's book is a good candidate.

The Bottom line: If you struggle with seeing Jesus as a kind of concept or figurehead, or unapproachable symbol of righteousness, etc. then this book should be sufficient to flesh Him out as a real, lovable person, someone who knows us and can be known.


28. Life Together - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Background: For a while now I have been working on a new ministry strategy based on all my experiences on the neighborhood church plant I've spent a few years helping with. Part of this new strategy will involve a team who lives a life of obedient discipleship, and while thinking about that someone mentioned this book and it sounded like a timely reading.

Thoughts:
Bonhoeffer starts the book with a reminder, frequently commented on in our time, perhaps less so in his own, that Christian life is designed to be lived in community. It seems Christianity in the West is highly bifurcated -- there are traditions in which Christianity and community are more or less identical, and those in which community is viewed as an optional part of your "personal faith." There are parts of the Church that in recent years have rediscovered and specialized in community. I suspect they would engage with this book the most enthusiastically, since it's mostly not a pitch about Christian community--one because it's Bonhoeffer, who doesn't waste time persuading when it's clear he is correct (heh), and two because he rightly takes the importance of Christian community as a premise and spends a lot of the book talking about the details of community, how daily life ought to look like, all kinds of practical bits that I hadn't ever given a lot of thought to, and many that I don't necessarily agree are essential.

Bonhoeffer does tend to lapse into that mode where he's going to tell you exactly what the wrong ways are and what the right way is, in detail. When it's Bonhoeffer doing this, often one wants to respond with "Amen!" But in this book he tends to do so for questions of practice. (Can one legitimately assert a particular universal orthopraxy for Christian community?) The points in the book where he begins passionately espousing specific ways to tackle the adventure of doing Christian life together took a bit more effort to get through, since they were practical but written for his own readers (one gets the feeling of reading over the shoulder of his original audience). The ending chapters were very good, however.

The Bottom line: It's Bonhoeffer, and his topic is as relevant today as it was when he wrote it. Very much worth a read and some contemplation.


29. Taliessin through Logres

Background: After my deep dive into the fiction works of Charles Williams in February, I went back to read one of his long poems. I was probably too tired to appreciate it fully, but I'm not sure I'm poetically fluent enough to enjoy it either way.

The Basics: A multi-tiered poetic journey into Arthurian epic which links the Matter of Britain with a poetic ideal of Byzantium.

The Good: A fellow Inkling with Charles, Logres is the name C. S. Lewis uses for "England within England" in the Arthurian context he establishes in That Hideous Strength. Some of those ideas are mirrored in the tale of Taliessin.

Charles Williams is a mad genius, and his long, several-part poem plays with historical and mythopoeic ideas in the context of Arthurian legends and a metaphor of Europe as represented by a human form and truth as represented by geometric realities.

The Questionable:
I found a guide to reading this series of poems online. The guide recommend several readings just to get started on appreciating it and waiting to try to figure out anything close to the author's intended meaning(s) until deep into this process. That may be a joyful task for some, but it has truly been observed that Williams' poetry is not very accessible. What that means for me is that I have to be in a certain mindset to enjoy this kind of poetry, and for me the very particular mindset required to absorb and enjoy Williams' poetry in this work comes perhaps not even once a year.

The Bottom line: Poetry that's too advanced for me to fully enjoy, but sitting under a waterfall can certainly be an enjoyable experience in itself without needing to understand where all the water is going.


30. The Shape of a Pocket

Background: During her summer visit to meet my family in the US, my fiancee needed to find a certain author's original quote for her write-up of an art exhibition here in Taiwan. We found the author and the book on Amazon and I bought it out of curiosity, intending to read it later. It waited for a few months while I was busy with the things described above, and then I had time to explore it. It was a good decision, far from my usual reading habits but a book that I enjoyed very much.

The Basics:
A collection of essays by John Berger on a wide variety of topics in art and culture. This includes his interesting, indirect correspondence with the revolutionary leader Marcos of Mexico's Zapatista movement.

Thoughts:
It's an eclectic array of subjects, from Frida Kahlo to Egyptian death paintings, written by someone who finds everything he writes about fascinating. That in itself makes it enjoyable.

John Berger is something of a "super-leftist," and his ideological companions by extension include the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century. But reading him is a reminder of all the strengths the Left once possessed and by which Leftist thinking became de rigueur throughout western academia. He is possessed of those morals which propelled the leftist revolutions and the idealism which led many to join them.

More to the point of this published collection, his writing reveals a quiet yet lively mind which enjoys solitude and contemplation, yet he writes with a passionate love for humanity and the common struggle of man as he understands it.

There are some portions of the book written as transcriptions of radio talks, which work less well in print than as a radio address, and what Berger intends as the humorous bits have to be experienced vicariously.

The Bottom line: This collection of essays by a British leftist thinker on various artistic and political subjects and his own unique perspectives was enjoyable for me in the way that a couple of the museums I visited in Europe this summer were; I'd never have gone to that place just for that museum, but in seeking things to do in that area, I found some fascinating things worth further contemplation.


That wraps up part II of this review, I'll save my top book recommendations for the end of that part III.

Reviewing Every Book I Read in 2019 - Part I

2019 has been a busy year with lots of life changes, but I did find time to read a few books along the way. Most books I read on the Kindle app (yes I enjoy the sensations of physical books as well but they accumulate quickly in small apartments and are fairly expensive unless you plan on reading them multiple times). Audible has proved a great way to enjoy books on the go as well.

What follows is a mini-review on nearly all the books I read this year, which will serve as a kind of journal of the year as well. Perhaps in this list you'll find a new book or two to enjoy in 2020.

I will note that I didn't include weekly or special Bible readings on this list, though my focus this year was Genesis through Ruth, and also the 4 gospels and Acts.

This post (Part I) covers the first half of the year, when I branched out and read some books unlike my usual reading habits.

January

1. Can't Hurt Me: Master your Mind and Defy the Odds - David Goggins (Audible)

Background: January saw me exhausted after the holiday ministry marathon and a year of big life changes. After a meeting in southern Taiwan, I took a couple days off and continued south to Kenting national park, to a guest house I have stayed at in the past, a short walk from the ocean. I had encountered David Goggins (on youtube iirc) and heard a bit of his story, which inspired me to go find his book, very different from my normal reading/listening material (as the list below will show)

The Basics: Goggins has an unbelievable life story of rising from a very difficult and abusive childhood to become an ultra-marathon runner and join the Navy Seals, in the process becoming an athlete with incredible fortitude and mental control. The book is his own perspective on his life and struggle to achieve his ever-more-challenging goals to find how far human endurance can go.

The Good: Goggins' story is very compelling, and he tells it straight. It was what I needed to hear "on a secular level" during a very tired and demotivated period, though I didn't go all the way and actually work on the transformational challenges he listed at the end of each section. Your own problems and roadblocks will probably seem less daunting while listening to Goggins' forceful encouragement to not let life's challenges stop you. Goggins' well-known "40% rule" is a good concept to internalize. (When you think put forth all the effort you can, you're probably only at 40% of how far you could really go if your mind wasn't holding you back)

The Questionable:
Note: If you get the special audible version, the unusual interview format of the audio book may be off-putting to some. The friend who helped him, while deserving props for being part of the inspiration of the project, also interjects randomly into the narrative to ask questions or occasionally offer his own perspective, and this can be distracting. However I did very much appreciate that the audible narrator is Goggins himself telling his own story, vs. having someone else read it.

Reviews for this book mention that Goggins' relentless drive leads to a very self-focused narrative, and by the end of the book it does get a little tiring. But Goggins never claims to be a well-rounded individual with healthy relationships, he's someone who takes on endurance challenges and persists far beyond most people's physical limits.

Note that there is a certain level of profanity, which didn't bother me given the context (he's talking about getting into the Navy Seals and running dozens of miles on broken bones, etc.), but just mentioning it for those who find it a problem for various reasons.

The Bottom line: If you need or want a "get up off the floor" kind of book from the life experience of a guy who not only got off the floor but came up out of the basement (carrying a piano on his back), this might be it. Not a light or casual read, but it will probably motivate you to get in better shape or get back into the workout plan you slipped out of, and might help you view your own problems and challenges from a different perspective.


2. Bandersnatch - Diana Glyer

Background: And now for something completely different... I've always been a fan of Lewis, Tolkien, etc., and in late January I spent a bit of time reading up on the history of the Inklings, which led to finding this gem.

The Basics: The author invested much time and effort combing through the correspondence of Inkling members, with decades spent studying their work, to piece together a fuller picture of the group, the individual members, and how it evolved over time than I had encountered before. Here you will learn specifics like how C.S.Lewis seriously influenced the development of the Lord of the Rings, but also more information on lesser-known members of the Inklings which were important to the group itself, and what they thought about each others' work.

The Good: There are books out there which delve into the Inklings, but this is among the best. As a serious Tolkien geek, I was delighted to find bits of information about Tolkien's thoughts and creative processes and how the Inkling community shaped his work, despite Lewis' famous denial that Tolkien's work could be influenced (from which comes the title of the book -- "...you might as well try to influence a Bandersnatch!") Glyer does a very thorough job of showing that Lewis' breezy denial wasn't entirely accurate, and he had deep and significant influence on the direction of the LotR story at a pivotal time early in its creation.

The Questionable:
Not really much downside here. Anyone interested in the Inklings, how the Lord of the Rings series was written, etc., will find much of great value here. The work the author put into this is obvious, and the fruit her effort yielded is fascinating and enjoyable.

The Bottom line: If you like C.S.Lewis, read this book. If you like J.R.R.Tolkien, read this book. If you are interested in the Inklings, read this book. If you are interested about how literary-minded people can influence each others' work in positive and occasionally negative ways, read this book. If you have ever dreamed of being part of a group like the Inklings, definitely read this book!


3. Mere Christianity - C.S.Lewis (Audible)

Background: At the very end of January, having enjoyed some time learning more about the Inklings, I got the audio book of Lewis' Mere Christianity, a book I have read quite a few times.

The Basics: Created from a series of talks Lewis gave on the nature of the faith, Mere Christianity touches on a broad range of topics regarding God, Faith, and what it means to be a believer. The original format results in a comfortable, conversational style, and it's a good reasoned defense of the faith starting from universal principles.

The Good: Lewis is a master of speaking reasonably and coherently about the Christian faith, both about the faith itself and what it's like to be a Christian in the world of his day. To me the most deeply valuable concept here is Biblical Christianity presented as the foundation of one's worldview rather than dependent upon it, a point every believer in this age needs to internalize and keep in mind when facing the barrage of ideologies and viewpoints promoted to us on a daily basis.

The Questionable:
In the half a century since this book was published, the issues society wrestles with have shifted, and thus certain parts of the book are aimed at problems that are less urgently in focus now. There is also a British emphasis on "reasonableness" which is pleasant and edifying but I wonder how C.S.Lewis might have re-written the book had he lived longer and seen the dark societal fruits of the cultural revolution the US and England were going through at the end of his life.

The Bottom line: This is a book all English-speaking Christians should read at some point (it doesn't necessarily translate outside of its language and cultural context well, but that does not diminish its value within those contexts, even several decades later). If you have not read yet it, you should; you are likely to find your understanding of what it means to be a Christian to be strengthened or clarified in various ways by Lewis' clear-eyed thinking and explanations. It's not a long read, and it was a pleasant audio book experience with a good narrator.

February

4. - 9. Six Novels by Charles Williams (The Place of the Lion, The War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, The Greater Trumps, Descent into Hell, All Hallow's Eve)

Background: To wrap up my Inklings kick, I delved into the work of a very important Inkling who is not well known or read today, Charles Williams. As Chinese New Year break had come around, I had several days' time to read, and went on a deep dive. By the time I came up, I'd read 6 novels and decided he has a mad genius.

The Basics: Charles Williams was a prolific member of the Inklings. His works were recognized by T.S.Eliot for their unique talent, but his style is deep and less accessible, and thus their popularity have not endured as have the classics of Tolkien and Lewis, though much of his writing was well known and received in his day. Williams tends to blend and fuse societal and historical archetypes together with spiritual concepts (especially the idea of "substitution" -- as Christ did for man on the cross, but brought into all kinds of different human situations), with a dark-ish plot that builds wildly to a crescendo often involving conflict on a spiritual as well as material plane (and fusing them together) until all culminates in a kind of enraptured apotheosis where anything might happen.

The Good: Williams is an excellent writer, and his fiction is deeply poetic. He skillfully weaves stories that invoke spiritual warfare in a very different manner than someone like Frank Peretti did at a later era--they are always from the human point of view, whether humans as pawns of darkness, attempting to use it for selfish ends, or offering themselves as servants to it, and humans resist with faith and usually a dose of courage and good humor (they are British novels after all). For those who have read C.S.Lewis' "Sci-fi" trilogy, the last book is his attempt to copy Williams. (He was only somewhat successful, but that's a good thing in many ways)

The Questionable: The fiercely poetic nature of Williams' writing can make following the plot become quite a challenge once one nears the climax. One needs to read on a different level, bearing in mind the images and associations carefully built throughout the novel which later begin running rampant and transforming and revealing hidden significances. The novels are not easy reading and they can get very dark (depicting occult rituals, etc) when setting up the novel's antagonists, though darkness is always overcome by the inevitably triumphing light. You will probably find yourself asking "what is going on here" at some point in each novel. For evangelical readers, the way Williams writes about Christianity may seem quite strange or even absent depending on the book, as he is often invoking archetypes of the faith and biblical metaphors rather than the direct approach one usually encounters. This may not be very satisfying if one prefers clarity and explicitness.

The Bottom line: If you have some time, are feeling "literarily courageous" and don't mind things getting dark before the light triumphs, and want to tackle some books that will introduce concepts and images to your mind that you'd not expected to encounter in a member of the Inklings, you might want to give one of these books a try.


10. Bamboo Bends - Sheldon Sawatzky

Background: After Chinese New Year ended we resumed our normal ministry schedule. I was sent this autobiography of a retired missionary to Taiwan by his son who I am connected to through some responsibilities on the field.

[Note: This is neither "When Bamboo Bends" nor "The Bamboo Bends," two other books available on Amazon at the time of this review.]

The Basics: A Mennonite missionary writes his life story including many years of work on the mission field in Taiwan, using the metaphor of bamboo, which in the face of storms, bends and flexes rather than standing stiff and breaking.

Thoughts: This is a well-written personal account which could describe the lives and callings of so many missionaries who heeded the call to Go during that era. Coming from a stable, mid-western background, a missionary goes to Taiwan with the desire to serve God. He meets challenges on the field as best he can, sees some successes and disappointments, marries and raises children overseas, earns his PhD, teaches at a local seminary and moves into denominational leadership and eventually retires having participated in the wrapping up of the Mennonite work in Taiwan. Through it all he remains appreciative of small blessings, and remains a loyal member of his denomination and mission board. He is willing to speak up about certain issues he felt were handled improperly or where he was misunderstood at the time, and does a good job of reflecting the complicated nature of missions work in general, not glossing over the negative but always balancing it with accounts of fruit and God's faithfulness in difficult times.

To me the story was valuable for another specific reason: 

As a missionary in Taiwan, I live and work in the context of the legacy of missionaries and mission efforts of Sheldon's era. I never had the chance to meet him personally, but he and many elderly, seasoned missionaries were retiring from the field in the years I first began to visit and fall in love with Taiwan. They left behind a legacy of gratitude in the local church, yet also a vacuum in their wake as they were not replaced by younger missionaries. It was very meaningful for me to read the entire life story of a missionary to Taiwan, and understand the challenges of field prior to my arriving, and the worldview and mentality with which the previous generation of missionaries approached their ministries.

Today we can think of a few things we wish had been done differently, and so it's especially important that we read these stories, and understand to what extent they were pioneers and to what extent they built on the foundation laid before them in turn. These men and women invested their lives on the mission field, and their work bore kingdom fruit and left unsolved problems as well.

For Millennials, the idea of leaving behind unsolved problems for future generations can be a very uncomfortable one, and the idea of being a simple worker for whom that kind of big picture responsibility is simply not on the radar is not always well received. (Indeed, even many church leaders today seem to have embraced with disturbing enthusiasm an unbiblical picture of collective guilt based on even more tenuous associations.)

Thus in 2019 it's more important than ever to hear what our predecessors have to say, and understand them in their own context. Missionaries have never been superheros. These men and women were not cultural or language experts as they went onto the field, though many ended up quite knowledgeable in both areas. There was no over-arching or meta-organization to decide or direct what missionary efforts in an unfamiliar culture should probably look like, or to best predict how work done in certain ways would either aid or frustrate the efforts of subsequent generations of missionaries. Indeed, there is not much like that now either, and probably cannot ever be, and only with the internet have those kinds of meta-level conversations become more prevalent and accessible to a wider audience.

Most missionaries of that era worked hard and faithfully in ways that made sense at the time, as Sawatzky's book depicts, and if hindsight has provided us with insights to which they did not have access, let us not sit on this helpful information and fail to work as hard and as faithfully as they did.

The Bottom line: Some of the details of this book may not be of great interest to anyone not already possessing some knowledge of Mennonite or Taiwan missions history, but I think it's valuable as a well-written account of a life spent serving God overseas. The missionary task is described well by Sawatzky who provides an honest and well-balanced account of the particular joys and challenges of the missionary lifestyle. For that reason I would recommend it to a wider audience who might not otherwise know of it.

March/April

11. Confessions - Saint Augustine of Hippo (Audible)

Background: Having read so many hundreds of pages in February, and with Spring ministry increasing, I did more listening to podcasts and less reading in the following weeks. I did, however, finally tackle a book I had only skimmed many years ago as a high schooler: Saint Augustine's Confessions. I had been unable to get through it at that time, but an audio book with a good reader turned out to be the secret for making it all the way through.

The Basics: Saint Augustine confesses the sins of his youth, and describes his journey to faith. It takes some endurance to get through it all, but there are many points of interest along the way.

The Good: This is a classic literary work of Christendom, and so there is an argument that one "ought" to read it. Either way, I found much of the content surprisingly applicable to our own time. In Augustine's day there are a host of worldviews and spiritual traditions that are competing for attention, and as he describes them one comes to realize that indeed "plus ca change, plus ce la même chose" (the more things change, the more they stay the same). We have our own hedonistic and gnostic rhetoricians today, and Augustine's experience and rejection of them can give us insight into how to face these arguments many centuries later. (There is a particular incident I can only describe as Augustine well into his faith journey, meeting the Jordan Peterson of his day and realizing his rhetorically powerful platitudes are still not enough) Augustine's philosophical interests also lead to some musings on the nature of things from a Christian worldview along the lines of natural philosophy, which I found interesting as well.

The Questionable:
I suppose I'm not supposed to question Augustine, but basically it's a long book and Augustine is a pretty emotional guy. While full of insightful self-critique, in the process of confession he does indulge in what I'd call "wallowing" more than once or twice, and some sections become repetitive. Listening to an audio version helped, as I'd be very tempted to skim past large sections were I reading it in print, but miss some valuable points in doing so.

The Bottom line: To be a well-read Christian, or for a deeper understanding of the philosophical foundations of the West, this is one of those books you need to read. If you commit to it, you are likely to be surprised by many valuable insights about God, the nature of the human soul, the struggle to believe in a pluralistic and rhetorically challenging society, and one very famous figure's journey to faith.

May

12-16. The Dark is Rising series (5 books) - Susan Cooper

Background: For someone who has read quite a lot, the scope of my reading is not as wide and diverse as it could be. For example, I have read the Chronicles of Narnia series several times through, but couldn't point you to any comparable series. I have also become interested in how children's literature inculcates cultural and religious values in each generation. One series written in the 90's which takes aim at the Narnia series was His Dark Materials trilogy, which was publicly acknowledged to be an "anti-Chronicles of Narnia." I had heard enough about that series to decide not to bother with it, but I had heard references to an older series for children/young adults called the Dark is Rising, written within 15-20 years of the Narnia books, and decided to check it out.

The Basics: A classic sort of "chosen siblings" tale deeply rooted in English history and mythology, it has that much in common with the Narnia tales. Where it's totally different is that Cooper writes a very pagan tale where the "Matter of Britain" (King Arthur, Merlin, etc) figures are present and importantly involved, yet Christianity as such is almost totally absent.

The Good: The books are fairly well-written, and they weave together lots of historical and cultural threads with a loving treatment of the local folk culture of the British Isles which has increasingly been lost.

The Questionable:
I have found that Western writers who reject Christianity and try to substitute their own worldview very consistently have a kind of systematic weakness underlying their work; they're trying to ignore not merely the elephant in the room, but the elephant on whose back the palanquin of the West is partly balanced, but trying to get you really excited about some much less comprehensive and fundamental belief system. Materialist atheists are the worst at it, but tradi-pagans aren't much better. Thus I can't take seriously a book or a series with scenes like the following: A clergy member recognizes the tangible presence of evil outside his church, and very sensibly prays to God for protection. In most fantasy books nowadays, this would be treated in a pluralistic way; the pastor's faith would help to fight off the evil or at least delay it, but a buddhist priest or "good guy shaman" would be just as helpful. But this series was written in the 60's, and the British cynicism towards their national church is in full swing, thus the reaction of the main characters is a knowing smirk. "We know the truth about the universe, and it's not your nice little Church of England homilies, but pray if it makes you feel better." But what do they have that's considered superior to faith in the living God, the Messiah at whose Name every knee shall bow in all the universe? On the basis of what greater power will they throw out everything from the conversion of the Roman Empire to Handel's Messiah to holy communion on the moon? Are they atheists who believe it's all superstition and only science can solve this problem? Not even that. Instead they have amulets, and bits of poetic incantations, and wise nature lore, etc. Either the author has simply never been exposed to genuine Christianity (sadly quite possible in England both then and now) or she's being willfully silly.
Having rejected the Biblical metanarrative and Christian worldview, the conclusion of the series is rather weak as well, as all we're left with is nature and the vague elemental forces behind it moving through great cycles. There's no evil, just "dark" and no good, just "light," and neither is inherently friendly to humanity, though light is biased toward freewill and dark is biased toward oppression. Perhaps for people unaware of the Christian worldview, "we've done enough to hold the dark at bay for another long cycle of years" is a satisfying ending. But when compared against the story of Christmas, it gets blown out of the water, something that Lewis captures well in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The victory of Christ is awe-inducing when one understands what is going on; in comparison, "dark-ish-ness defeated temporarily by old wisdom and the elementary power of nature invoked correctly" simply doesn't have any urgency at the cosmic scale Cooper is staging it in by the end.

The Bottom line: Don't get these books for your kids unless you want them steeped in a very pagan worldview. They might serve as interesting stories for older students who have shown sufficient discernment and can discuss the worldview and cultural/historical aspects. But if you want a fascinating take on Arthurian Britain in a context that acknowledges the pre-Christian mythos of England but recognizes the lordship of Christ (and also brings in the dark religio-scientific influences we've been seeing lately in the world), check out C.S.Lewis' book That Hideous Strength.


17. Taiwanese Folktales - Fred H. Lobb

Background: After the preceding foray into English folk mythos, I was motivated to learn a bit more about the local folk stories here. I started to re-read the biography of the most famous missionary to Taiwan (George L. Mackay), still revered with statues in northern Taiwan, and at the same time I stumbled across a reference to this volume. There isn't a huge amount of literature available in English about Taiwanese culture in specific, and this book probably isn't the best way to begin that journey, but it was an interesting series of stories, demonstrating both local particularities but also universal fairy tale tropes.

The Basics: A collection of folktales, Lobb has helpfully organized them into sections based on the legacy culture (Hakka, etc), and included some modern ghost stories at the end. He's also included notes which mention variations on the tales and some anthropological information.

The Good: These are not someone's opinions, but local stories, so they are "raw cultural data." Reading them can help explain local culture in indirect and sometimes archetypal ways, versus a book on the history of the region. As a set of stories that aren't likely to be told much nowadays, there is some value of having them collected, and available in English.

The Questionable: It's a random collection of tales, and some are much more interesting than others. Some seem to be derived straight from the pages of the Brothers Grimm, except for the East Asian setting, while others are very Chinese, like the drowned ghost a man befriends yet manages to keep from stealing anyone's body. Some are dark and violent, but again, so are the European fairy tales which haven't been Disneyfied.

The Bottom line: This may be more of a niche book, which I'm specifically interested in due to living in Taiwan. However hats off to Lobb for his work in bringing together and publishing the collection, and for anyone interested in Taiwan specifically or East Asian fairy tales in general, this might be a valuable addition to your library.

June

18. The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War - Ben Macintyre (Audible)

Background: An overwhelmingly busy Spring warmed into summer as my home assignment loomed on the horizon, and someone recommended this book to me. I can't remember who it was, but I'm grateful as it was a fascinating, true account of Cold War spycraft which kept me entertained on many subway rides around the time of my engagement to my fiancee.

The Basics: The story of the Soviet KGB spy-turned-counter-spy Oleg Gordievsky, his motivations and handlers, how he was eventually outed by a Soviet-paid mole in the CIA, and the hair-raising adventure of eventually getting him out of Russia and into the West.

The Good: The title doesn't lie--this probably really is the greatest espionage story of the Cold War. It has spies, counter-spies, moles, failed and successful operations-within-operations, competition and cooperation between MI6 and the CIA, and the KGB, fake identities and even cool custom spy gear, and it's all a true story. I listened to the audiobook version, and recommend it as a very good book for listening vs. reading.

The Questionable: Not much to say here. It's a detailed historical book with a lot of Russian names, perhaps reading it would be less enjoyable than listening to it as I did.

The Bottom line: If you only read 3 books about the Cold War spy vs. spy era, this should probably be one of them.

First half of 2019 - Winners:

The two winners for the first half of 2019 were Bandersnatch, and The Spy and the Traitor. I highly recommend both, and suggest getting the second as an audiobook.

(Continued soon in Part II)

2 Samuel 24 - Part 1: Did God incite David to Sin? Did David see Jesus?

I have recently returned to Taiwan from 3 months of traveling. This was mostly my home assignment trip to the US to visit churches and supporters in a few different areas, but I also had the opportunity to visit relatives in southern Norway, and went on a governance training trip to Indonesia with some other international Christian school representatives and leaders.

I had a lot of "firsts" during these weeks on the road--first trip to Europe, first trip south of the equator, etc. Those experiences and ideas will no doubt percolate into future blog posts, if I can maintain a bit more discipline in posting. But first I want to do a post on an unusual passage in the history of Israel and an important statement King David makes in the midst of a stressful situation.

Today's post will be on two parts of the story which make this passage special and are worthy of closer attention, and the next post will cover a concept we seem to have all but lost in 2019.

I chose this picture of a statue of David because, somewhat poignantly, it no longer exists.

1. Did God incite David to sin?

2 Samuel 24 describes an unusual episode in Israel's history.
In this passage, Israel has angered God, and God punishes them by inciting David to do a census. Or does He? This idea of God "inciting" David, as the ESV and some other translations put it, is a little confusing. James 1 is clear that God does not tempt people to sin:

1:13-15 Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

In dealing with fallen humanity, God frequently chooses to allow people's own sinful nature and predilections to run their course, or as in the curious case of Job, allows Satan to bring great loss and suffering into someone's life for a higher purpose in keeping with His own will.

David is certainly no stranger to sinful predilections--13 chapters earlier is the story of Bathsheba and David's plunge into deeper and deeper sin which began with sending out the army and "the king's men" but not going with them, and ended in David's assassinating one of those king's men in order to hide his royally-forced affair with the man's wife, and dragging Joab into it as a kind of accomplice.

Of course Joab already had a habit of murdering his and David's rivals (Abner, Absalom, Amasa...), but I do wonder if he felt some lingering guilt over his acquiescence to David on the horrible Uriah/Bathsheba matter. Either way in chapter 24 we find him willing to speak out when David again decides to do something he knows is a bad idea, in this case numbering the troops.

Why was it a sin?

There is no divine prohibition against a census, but it was not something to be undertaken lightly. Exodus 30:11-16 records God's instructions to Moses about doing a census, which requires small ransom that everyone must pay in exchange for their life, the precious metal currency being gathered from everyone and brought as an offering into the temple "that it may bring the people of Israel into remembrance before the Lord, so as to make atonement for your lives." (Ex 30:16) The taking of a census would thus reinforce to everyone that their lives belong to God, and would be a spiritual undertaking as much as a civic one.

We don't know if there was a ransom payment collection involved in David's census (some indirect evidence suggests it was not), but we know that David's advisers and Joab were firmly against the idea as soon as they heard it. Their unified reaction and Joab's pushing back and asking why the King wants to do this suggests that David was observably acting from the wrong motives, not to mention the way he stubbornly overrules them and pushes it through.

(Note: The commands about census-taking also explicitly state in 30:12 that the punishment for neglecting the ransom collection would be a plague, which is exactly what ends up happening in 2 Samuel 24.)

Coming back to the dilemma at hand, if we know from James 1 that God does not tempt to sin, then what do we make of 2 Samuel 24:1? 

As is always the case, comparing two seemingly antagonistic verses against each other without investigating the rest of scripture to see what else can help us understand them could lead us into serious error. Therefore we ought to be aware of a parallel passage of scripture, 1 Chronicles 21. The first verse of that chapter reads as follows:

"Then Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel."

At first glance this might appear to be even more problematic. We have exactly parallel passages, one saying that God incited David to sin, the other saying it was Satan. Which one is it? Could it be both without abandoning the logical principle of non-contradiction?

First let's consider the theological solution which probably most rapidly comes to mind when comparing these two statements. We know God does not tempt to sin, we know that Satan does. We also know that Satan is ultimately subservient to God and cannot defy Him. We could understand this to mean that while 1 Chronicles 21 is being more direct in saying that Satan was the one who incited David, 2 Samuel 24 is emphasizing God's sovereignty and that God allowed this to happen.

A little bit of grammatical ambiguity in 2 Samuel 24:1 helps unite the two passages as well. The Hebrew text of 24:1 does not directly say "God incited David," it has a verb with an unclear subject. God's anger burned and David was incited, and there aren't any other actors directly mentioned in the sentence, leading English translations to either supply the subject of the verb as "he" (God) or for the NASB "it," as in "God's anger incited David."

We certainly cannot interpret the grammar to say that God wasn't involved in David being incited, but putting the two passages together along with what we've seen in Exodus, we can construct a fuller picture of the situation, which would sound something like... "God's anger burned against Israel, and it (this anger) was expressed in allowing Satan to incite David against Israel by holding a census in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons, against the counsel of his advisers, thereby bringing guilt and divine punishment on the whole nation."

2. "The Lord said to... the angel of the Lord"

One might ask why Israel should be punished for David's sin. There is a sense in that in that era, and indeed in most eras, a king represented a nation to a much closer degree of association than our so-called representative democracy represents us. Even today we use the capital city/seat of government of a nation-state or global organization to stand for the whole thing (Washington, Brussels, Rome...). Both things are examples of  synecdoche (using a part to refer to the whole) which is a very commonly used literary device in scripture.

In this particular case, though, we need not delve too deeply into why and how a king could spiritually represent his nation, because the beginning of the chapter states that the reason for the entire incident was that God was angry with Israel and punished them in this particular way.

A real mystery we can only speculate on, based on previous chapters, is what kind of sin Israel had fallen into which brought this punishment upon them via the fallout from David's sinful obstinacy. It's a reminder that with great authority comes great responsibility--as the anointed leader of all Israel, David's sinful proclivities have the potential to hurt not only himself but the entire nation. As the divinely-appointed king, he can function in obedience as a sort of avatar for divine guidance, but also in sin as an instrument of divine punishment.

David immediately regrets his sinful decision, and in his repentance he seeks another function performed by kings in many cultures; that of mediator between God and man. Again unusually, God offers David the choice of 3 punishments. David does not quite choose, but wisely says direct punishment from God, who is merciful, will be better than punishment via Israel's enemies, who are not. David knows God's character, and indeed God relents from the full punishment as the angel of judgment approaches Jerusalem.

What kind of angel was it?

We get some interesting indirect information about the relationship between God and angels scattered around the Old Testament -- Satan's appearance before God along with the other "sons of God" (Job 1); the lying spirit given permission by God to deceive the prophets in Ahab's time (1 Kings 22); the mysterious divine council and condemnation of the "gods"/sons of God (Psalm 82).

Now we have an angel in this passage (verses 15-16) whom God commands to cease and David apparently glimpses (v17), though it's not clear if he saw the angel itself in some form or the effects of it as the plague progresses through Israel. The way the passage reads immediately reminds one of the angel of death in the final plague of Egypt, which has been represented in Hollywood media in precisely that vague and ominous way, as a lethal and sepulchral fog or cloud. Yet the phrasing of the passage suggests the angel's location can be observed and it is at least somewhat anthropomorphic; if it were some kind of otherworldly poison cloud blowing through Israel or a personification of a viral contagion, one could hardly speak of it standing beside the threshing floor of Araunah. As usual, we shouldn't trust pop culture depictions when the Bible gives us a window into the unseen world.

To make matters more confusing, in verse 16 this angel is called "the angel of the Lord," a title which when preceded by the definite article ("the angel of the Lord," not just "an angel of the Lord") seems to indicate a theophany is taking place: an appearance not only of a messenger angel but of God himself in visible form. Many believe these are Old Testament appearances of the Son (Christ), since seeing the Father in His full glory meant death for fallen humans.

We are rapidly getting into detailed trinitarian theological territory here which is beyond the scope of this blog, but a careful exegesis here means that it is at least possible that it is the Son executing judgment on Israel. The One whom David prophetically sees ruling Israel and smashing His enemies with a rod of iron, David literally sees executing righteous punishment on Israel. If our interpretation is correct, it's an astonishing scene: the mortal king of Israel sees the divine king of Israel, his own descendant in the flesh and the One who will sit on his throne forever.

The Lord said to my Lord...

It may seem somehow "insufficiently monotheistic" to have the Son carrying out just judgment on Israel and the Father relenting and telling Him to stop. Yet this passage is not at all a divergence from how scripture describes the Trinity, and indeed how the Father and the Son speak. As we think of the possibility of a Christophany in this passage, let us consider a connected thought expressed by David himself in Psalm 110 verse 1, one later referenced by Jesus himself and confirmed as being about Himself:

The LORD said to my Lord, "Sit at My right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool."

Later in the New Testament we have passages like John 5:19-23, where Jesus says the Father judges no one but has entrusted that to the Son, and that the Son "can do nothing of Himself unless it is something He sees the Father doing." So many passages lead us back to the divine mystery of God's Trinitarian nature; my personal conviction is not to use my fallen imagination to construct pictures or conceptions that are certainly false and almost inevitably heretical, but to let scripture speak correctly for itself, just as basically all the science book diagrams of what an atom looks like are wrong or at least misleading in different ways, but the equations that describe it are correct.

At very least, let us think deeply on Jesus' words and on Psalm 110 and this passage in 2 Samuel. Bringing these passages together, and understanding how "the Angel of the Lord" may be interpreted, I can only conclude that this indeed may have been an Old Testament glimpse of God in a more complete Trinitarian sense than we often see in the Old Testament, one that King David mentions prophetically in the Psalms and perhaps witnesses personally in the midst of his sorrow at the judgment of Israel.

What do you think? Have you heard other takes on this passage? Let me know.

Whether what David saw was a special kind of angel or a Christophany, he heeds the words of the prophet Gad and builds an altar in that place where he saw Him. That altar, and the exchange between David and the owner of the threshing floor, will be the subject of Part II.