Shallow Knowledge

We live in the self-proclaimed Information Age.  Give me an hour and a decent internet connection and I can be an expert on anything.  If I don’t know it, I’ll Google it or Wikipedia it (two verbs that weren’t verbs just a few years ago).  If I know it but can’t prove it, I’ll go find ten clever arguments in my favor, probably not listed in order of importance (or veracity).  I’m a 21st-century man.  I will find it, I will glance at it, and then I will know it.

But will I?

Jumping from blog to blog and title to title on your GoogleReader is certainly convenient, and skimming the headlines and reading parts of articles on DrudgeReport and FoxNews and CNN and even DesiringGod might seem enlightening, but are you really learning in ways that stick and sink in and matter?  Do we know people better after spending an hour clicking indiscriminately from profile to profile on Facebook?

I’m not decrying the online world.  I use it and am bettered by it, every day.  I don’t have it out for the Information Age or promote only months of monkish meditation.  But we have to be careful.

Mainstream political roundtables are fueled by the soundbyte and the barb.  You don’t have to be wise or balanced or even right.  You just have to be quick and clever.  No need to navigate strategically through the issue.  Just run roughshod over it with the tanktread of wit.

Blog-comment discussions are often saturated with unnecessary sarcasm, satire, and caustic remarks often lacking as much in grounds as they do in grace.  They often turn into de-personalized verbal battles where hobby-horses and undocumented factoids trample meaningful, reasonable dialogue (which is why I’m thankful that this blog doesn’t generate many comments, and the few it does generate are typically thoughtful and cordial; maybe I’m not controversial enough).

Sports reporting is necessarily driven by the highlight.  Admittedly important flashes of activity become the very definition of sport.  We train ourselves to believe that the sixty-yard pass play was more due to the lightning-quick wideout than the offensive line (much less the coach’s play-calling and the months spent in practice).  Because highlights can’t show you context and perspective and development.

Online communities are defined by the avatar, the profile-picture, the screenname, and the self-description.  Toss me a few carefully-crafted tidbits of personal information, your favorite customized picture of yourself, and a nifty (but not so nifty it’s cheesy) screenname, I’ll do the same, and voila, we know each other!

But do we?

I realize the attraction of water-skiing through life.  You take in a lot of scenery, you feel the wind on your face, and it only requires a minimal amount of training, skill, and gear.  It’s harder to go deep in meditation and study.  The training is arduous, the necessary skill-level is demanding, and the gear is heavy and inconvenient.  It’s unnerving to descend into an unknown world where visibility is limited and your senses are heightened.  It’s painful to experience the mental bends as you attempt to take what you’ve learned and apply it to life at the surface.  But the world below the surface — the color, the life, the beauty, and the danger – is real, even if it’s not often seen.

I know that there are countless areas of knowledge in my life that are shallow and uninformed, not due to time-constraints or mental inability or lack of opportunity and resources, but due to simple laziness.  This is not to say that a decade of diligence would’ve left me omniscient and infallible.  Only that a single year of humbly exercising mental diligence and careful contemplation makes one incalculably wiser than ten years of lazily microwaving knowledge.  Yet microwaved education is just so… easy.

So perhaps it would be appropriate to slap a warning label on the TV dinners of knowledge.  In this vein, what are some of the perils of contenting ourselves with shallow knowledge?

(1) We lose the ability to meditate or engage in any long-term concentration.  I don’t know how this works physiologically and mentally, but it’s impossible to deny that consistent exposure to our highlight-driven, sound-byte filled, quick-moving forms of reporting slowly handicaps us from thinking long and hard about meaningful and complex things.  We simply find it increasingly difficult to sit still and think well about worthy things.

(2) We undermine the ability to distinguish between significance and insignificance.  The headlines implicitly tell us that stock markets, celebrity marriages, and psychotic murders all carry the same level of societal importance.  Tabloidesque dramas take their place right next to geopolitical jaw-droppers.  Most importantly, the centrality and supremacy of God is absent from most of our public sources of knowledge.  If we mindlessly buy into this implied value system, we undermine our ability to think carefully about the relative weight of various issues.

(3) We forfeit the self-control necessary to discern between assumption and fact, between speculation and established reality.  The seasoned sage warned us long ago: ”The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him” (Prov 18:17).  Therefore, “He who answers before listening — that is his folly and shame” (Prov 18:13).  The quicker we acquire knowledge, the more potential exists for harmful one-sidedness.  The less time we give to listening and pondering, the more we will fall into the folly of hasty answers.

(4) We fuel our fleshly tendency to make quick judgments about people and conflicts and complicated issues.  Much of the news today is filled with unfounded accusations, mid-trial reports, overhyped predictions, inexcusable rumors, and Photoshopped pictures presented out of context.  It’s very hard to be objective, restrained, and impartial in this environment.  Next time you visit your online news source, observe the pervasiveness of bitter gossip, uncertified reports, political posturing, unwarranted accusations, suggestions and speculations masquerading as proven facts, and unnamed slanderers “speaking on condition of anonymity.”  Indeed, “The words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels; they go down into the inner parts of the body” (Prov 18:8; 26:22).  Contenting ourselves with shallow knowledge about people and circumstances opens the door for all kinds of assumptions, speculations, misconceptions, and partiality.

(5) We cultivate an atmosphere where meaningful and productive discussion of important issues is increasingly difficult because someone somewhere said something that supports every conceivable position.  The more we pool our ignorance, the murkier the pool gets.  What’s really dangerous is that over time, we start to think that the pool is murky not because we all dumped in our muddy ignorance but because knowledge itself is murky and indiscernable.  This is where postmodernism is ultimately leading us.

(6) We feed a mentality that deemphasizes or even disregards appropriate authorities.  Everyone has something to say.  It becomes a temptation to think that everyone’s words carry equal value and veracity.  But this is manifestly untrue.  The weight and accuracy of someone’s words depend on some significant variables like character, experience, provenness, study, wisdom, perspective, and balance.  If we aren’t careful, we will diminish the value of credibility.

(7) We subtly learn to treat the Father’s revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ as simply another bare fact that deserves doctrinal memorization and educational regurgitation instead of a lifetime of dedicated thought and increasing astonishment.  Paul prayed that the Ephesian believers “may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:18-19).  He longed for the Colossian church “to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:1-3).  This confronts head-on my fleshly desires for microwaveable nuggets of knowledge that demand no effort and offer only perceived nutrition.  You cannot plumb the depths of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God through Wikipedia, CliffNotes, or even BibleGateway.  Remembering the alliterated outline from the sermon is good, but this is only the beginning of a lifetime of wonder.

I don’t want to be an instant expert or live in the self-deception of knowledgeable naivete.  I don’t want to know what I know quickly and shallowly.  I want it to be deep and weathered and seasoned and scarred.  I want it to be thorough though it’s finite, balanced though it’s tainted with sin.  I think it’s fair to assume that most of us, on our better days, desire this kind of knowledge.  Yet increasingly, much of what we know is still learned through the soundbyte, the highlight, the Google search, the rumor, and the five-minute devotional.  Still, we know through Scripture and experience that knowledge is like wine — it’s better with age.

So may the Lord grant us newfound grace and strength to dig more deeply than we find comfortable, and may He stir in us proper affections for all the beautiful things we find.

Who’s Emerging for the Widows? Thoughts on Missional Partiality

A lot has been said about the emerging and emergent movements, contemporary calls for relevance, the debated value of cultural analysis, and the Pauline call to be “all things to all men” (1 Cor 9).  These are the hot-button topics at the evangelical table (or behind the evangelical woodshed).  They are important topics and these are important discussions.  We have been particularly weak at reaching an increasingly distant culture.

But I do have a question for the emergers, relevanters, culture-analyzers, missional revolutionaries, and all those who relentlessly pursue being “all things to all men”:

Who’s emerging for the widows?

In all the rhetoric about emerging and evolving and engaging and tailoring ourselves to fit into the current cultural milieu, who’s emerging for the elderly?  What about emerging toward the culture of the convalescent home?  What about analyzing the windowless worldview of the shut-in?  What about making your life and the life of your church revelant to the local widows?  What about becoming all things to those with Parkinson’s, artificial hips, cataracts, failed retirement plans, and no family?

Many today are eager to get tattoos and dress hip and overemphasize technology to “relate” to the surrounding culture, to “connect,” and to “open doors.”  But if the majority of these people are truly motivated by a compassionate heart, why aren’t any of our youth dressing like the precious elderly folks in the nursing home?  Who’s learning to play bridge and chess?  Who’s playing vinyl records and eating at the HomeTown Buffet for no other reason than to open doors?

To me, this betrays something very distressing about the current missional swing.  We may be customizing our missionality to fit our own preferences; cloaking our selfishness in a full wardrobe of so-called outreach; crafting our ministry methodology with the tool of public consensus instead of the unwavering words of the prophets and the apostles.  We might not be revolutionaries and radicals after all.  We might just be bandwagoners.

This is not to diminish merciful acts like feeding the homeless, tutoring inner-city kids, or adopting orphans.  It is certainly not to deemphasize evangelism or deny the complications of 21st-century American culture.  Only to say that most of the proclamations about relevance seem to subtly limit that relevance to certain groups of people.  It seems that we’re picking and choosing the groups to whom we want to be relevant.

Call it missional partiality.

Partiality chooses friends based on their relative rating on the social scale.  Missional partiality chooses objects of ministry based on the cool ministry factor.  Partiality engages in relationships based on potential repayment.  Missional partiality engages in ministry based on its subcultural newsworthiness.  Partiality attributes personal value based on personalities and fads and fashions.  Missional partiality attributes personal value based on current compassion trends.

Is it hard to see (or unfair to say) that certain types of compassion are more popular today than others?  I don’t lament mercy ministry trends just because they’re trends, and I must refuse the temptation to judge the motives of others who are engaged in these trends.  But I do think we must be clear: It is possible to exercise faddish compassion simply because it’s the Christianly cool thing to do.  And the quickest way to expose the fact that this is indeed happening is to point to the equally-biblical ministries that are not emphasized as often.  Virtually all youth groups in Southern California take mission trips to Mexico.  I’m guessing that fewer of these groups mobilize themselves to consistently mow the lawns of the elderly in their churches.  And let’s just face it — orphans get more press than widows these days.  As someone who’s adopted an orphan, I would never diminish the value of adoption or the myriad of other ways that you can help an orphan.  But as someone who claims to follow Jesus, I also cannot diminish the value of the other needy object of Christian compassion in James 1:27.  James said “and,” not “or.”

The self-proclaimed subcultural revolution happening all around evangelicalism has some good challenges to present.  I have mentioned this before.  We need to face up to many of the questions being asked (and I think that many churches are, which is exciting).  But what we don’t need is this hot new genre of ministry called cool compassion.  We don’t need the kind of short-lived, fairweather mentality that helps the homeless because it’s hip and also happens to be right.  And we don’t need the kind of mercy ministry that gauges its validity and priority by the bouncing barometer of contemporary public consensus.

Woe to us if we think we’re “in” just because we can map Darfur, detail Joseph Kony, highlight child trafficking, and reference world hunger statistics without lifting a finger.  And woe to us if we sit around playing conversational volleyball with the atrocities of our age while committing ministerial genocide against an entire generation by neglecting the widow and the elderly right around the corner.

A few months ago we went to a local Chinese restaurant after church.  As we were sitting in our booth getting ready to order, a recent TMC grad from our dorm came around the corner and noticed us.  He set his things down on his table and walked over to say hi.  I asked him who he was having lunch with, and he said “a friend.”  I smiled inside, assuming that he was trying to cover up the fact that he was basically on a post-church date with a female interest.  Sure enough, after we talked for a bit, his date came around the corner and slid into his booth.  Only she was about 85.

He introduced us to her and soon went back to sit down.  From time to time I glanced over and saw them smiling, laughing, and conversing the way a sensitive young Christian man and a widow who’s ripened with age interact.  He was a young single man taking a widow from his church out to lunch.  There is much more to biblical compassion than this.  But there is not less.

This isn’t really about widows.  It’s not really about the elderly.  It’s not really about nursing home visitation.  It’s about the partiality that so easily creeps into even the best things that we seek to do.  It’s about that missional lemming in all of us who’s afraid or unwilling to cut the path that Scripture says to cut and instead gravitates toward those smooth and well-traveled trends that are lined with admirers from the church and the culture alike.  And most of all, it’s about the inescapable fact that missional partiality is still partiality.

The Influence of a Father’s Prayer Life

Scottish pioneer missionary John G. Paton reflecting on the influence of his father’s life of earnest, secret prayer:

The “closet” was a very small apartment betwixt the other two [rooms of the house], having room only for a bed, a little table, and a chair, with a diminutive window shedding diminutive light on the scene.  This was the Sanctuary of that cottage home.  Thither daily, and oftentimes a day, generally after each meal, we saw our father retire, and “shut to the door”; and we children got to understand by a sort of spiritual instinct (for the thing was too sacred to be talked about) that prayers were being poured out there for us, as of old by the High Priest within the veil in the Most Holy Place.  We occasionally heard the pathetic echoes of a trembling voice pleading as if for life, and we learned to slip out and in past that door on tiptoe, not to disturb the holy colluquy.

The outside world might not know, but we knew, whence came that happy light as of a new-born smile that always was dawning on my father’s face: it was a reflection from the Divine Presence, in the consciousness of which he lived.  Never, in temple or cathedral, on mountain or in glen, can I hope to feel that the Lord God is more near, more visibly walking and talking with men, than under that humble cottage roof of thatch and oaken wattles.  Though everything else in religion were by some unthinkable catastrophe to be swept out of memory, or blotted from my understanding, my soul would wander back to those early scenes, and shut itself up once again in that Sanctuary Closet, and, hearing still the echoes of those cries to God, would hurl back all doubt with the victorious appeal, “He walked with God, why may not I?”

* John G. Paton, Missionary to the New Hebrides, ed. James Paton (Carlisle, Pa.: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1889/2002), 8.