Worth Reading - 9/30

Here are some links worth reading this weekend. I've decided to move the Links Worth Reading series into the regular stream of my blog to simplify the layout.

1. Bruce Ashford, Provost of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote about how Abraham Kuyper has influenced his thinking. A good discussion and a helpful gateway to Kuyper for those that haven't read him before.

Rarely will a reader be trampled by a herd of evangelicals stampeding toward the Abraham Kuyper section of the bookstore. Though there are a number of reasons (like the impediment caused by display stands full of Test-a-mints and Precious Moments figurines), perhaps no reason is more important than this: We Americans rarely read old books, and Kuyper’s books are old.

Kuyper lived in 19th-century Holland, served as a pastor, founded a Christian university, started a newspaper, served in Parliament and as the prime minister, and wrote influential books on theology, culture, and politics. His deepest convictions might be summed up in one sentence:Jesus Christ is Lord of all, and because of that fact, our allegiance to him should shape not only the private but also the public aspects of our lives. If Christ is Lord, he’s not just Lord over private spirituality and church attendance, but also Lord over public affairs like art, science, business, politics, economics, and education. Reading Kuyper got me started on the path toward viewing Christ’s lordship as directly relevant to public life.

I didn’t discover Lectures on Calvinism until I was living in Kazan, Russia, in the late 1990s. I was an embryonic theologue in my early 20s who’d spent my time reading books written in my own day by people just like me. Upon moving to Russia, however, I began to read old books, and Lectures on Calvinism was one of the first. It influenced decisively the way I think and live; I carry its ideas with me today each time I open my mouth to teach a class, pick up my pen to write an essay, or grab the remote to watch the news.

2. Avoiding harm to third parties is often used as the ultimate lever in moral reasoning in contemporary society. The thought is to do whatever you want as long as you don't harm others. That's the basis that people are using to argue for government restrictions on religious faith and practice in the United States. Supposedly, not purchasing potential abortifacient drugs causes irreparable harm to the person who would otherwise be out a few dollars to buy the chemical cocktail. This inconvenience is deemed by some to be sufficient harm that the conscience of people should be violated by the law. In fact, there are some that see any harm (as perceived by the victim) to be sufficient cause to condemn the conscience of others. However, in a careful analysis, one thinker argues that the mere existence of third part harm (actual, not just perceived) is insufficient to warrant curtailing the practice of faithful religion. It's a long article and tightly argued, but well worth your time.

Thus the two arguments, free exercise claims for exemptions and Establishment Clause challenges to exemptions, require looking at similar factors. Both involve examining (1) the nature and seriousness of the burden that the law in question would impose on religious exercise, and (2) the nature and seriousness of the effect on others if the claimant is exempted from the law. But identifying these two considerations does not answer the question how they should be compared with each other. How should burdens on religion and those on others be weighed? And how significant must the third-party harms be to overcome religious claims?

The chief assertion of this article is that harms to others should not be conclusive against religious exemptions under either free exercise or nonestablishment principles. Such harms can certainly be a reason to deny exemption, but they are not the end of the inquiry: a number of factors must be considered. In particular, I argue, Establishment Clause limits on religious exemptions should not be strict. An exemption is not unconstitutional merely because it has negative effects on others: the burdens on others must be significantly disproportionate to the burdens that it removes from religion.

3. Some thoughts on writing for wanna be writers like me. There's more to the writing process than just typing, but certainly not less. A well-framed discussion that's worth your time.

Writing is facing your deepest fears and all your failures, including how hard it is to write a lot of the time and how much you loathe what you’ve just written and that you’re the person who just committed those flawed sentences (many a writer, and God, I know I’m one, has worried about dying before the really crappy version is revised so that posterity will never know how awful it was). When it totally sucks, pause, look out the window (there should always be a window) and say, I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing. I am hanging out with the English language (or the Spanish or the Korean). I get to use the word turquoise or melting or supernova right now if I want. I’m with Shelley, who says that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe, and I am not fracking or selling useless things to lonely seniors or otherwise abusing my humanity. Find pleasure and joy. Maybe even make lists of joys for emergencies. When all else fails, put on the gospel song Steal My Joy refrain is “Ain’t gonna let nobody steal my joy.” Nobody, not even yourself.

4. Aaron Earls discusses the outrage over the infamous Clinton group selfie. It says something about our culture, but it shouldn't be viewed just as an opportunity to castigate millennials. The disfunction goes much deeper. 

I’ll admit there is something disconcerting and unsettling about the photo: Dozens of millennials all seemingly consumed with contorting themselves so that this moment is captured and is captured with them at the forefront.

But perhaps our disgust with those selfie takers goes a bit deeper. Maybe we are just sick of our own self-absorption and pride.

In introducing the topic of pride in Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis spoke of it as the “one vice of which no man in the world is free, which everyone loathes when he sees it in someone else; and which hardly any people … ever imagine that they are guilty themselves.”

Pride claws at every heart, but few want to admit it. Even more than that, few have any tolerance for it the lives of others.

Again, Lewis wrote: “There is no fault that makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.”

If that is indeed the case, I’m afraid it speaks very poorly for those of us in non-millennial generations so off-put by their apparent prideful self-obsession.

5. Here's a podcast from the faculty of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, with my friend David Jones, that discusses the reality of poverty and how we view it.

Putting Poverty Into Perspective

Exploring Hope - SEBTS

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Here's a couple things that I wrote recently that were published elsewhere:

1. Over at the Intersect Project, I had an article posted on the dangers of trying to become financially independent, which is often seen in the Early Retirement movement.

A lot of people want to play with FIRE. Not literal fire, but the principle of being “Financially Independent, Retire Early.”

There are vibrant communities of eclectic individuals from around the globe, though mainly in North America, who seem to dedicate their lives to getting out of the workforce so they can “be free.” You can find blogs, websites, online tools and resources galore to help you live out this principle.

On the one hand, FIRE advocates’ financial responsibility and aggressive pursuit of wealth accumulation is invigorating. The goal of financial independence inspires them to spend less than they make, work diligently and be creative. It is healthy to pursue a worthy goal.

On the other hand, FIRE advocates often see the cessation of work as a good in itself. Some advocates—though certainly not all—see work as a necessary evil, a means to an end. Once they set their sights on financial independence, they see work mainly as the way to earn a large enough nest egg to allow them to live off the passive income for life.

2. Last week, The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics posted a short piece of mine that deals with one argument (among many) against Universal Basic Income.

One obvious problem with this is that the existence of U.B.I. might encourage people who could find work to simply accept the income and stay at home. Observation of human nature seems to point in that direction, which may end up making the system fundamentally unsustainable.

Although questions abound about the economics of U.B.I., concerns for the cost should not be the primary concern for Christians. The deeper problem with U.B.I. is that it encourages people not to find ways to add value to their communities. Work adds economic value, but it also adds a deep relational value that will be difficult to replace.

The conversation about U.B.I. will certainly continue in the future, but it must be broadened to consider the nature of humans and the value of work. There are needs for community and contribution that a check from the government cannot fill.

Some Recent Research on Reading

I love reading. I love books.

Anyone who has been in my home will know that I love books, because I have several thousand on my shelves. The vast majority of them are cataloged online. (Sometimes new ones sneak in and don’t get cataloged right away.)

Reading is such a significant part of our household that we have to discipline our children for reading rather than coax them to do so. This is little surprise since my wife and I both grew up as readers and continue to read a lot.

A National Survey on the State of Reading

A recent Pew Research report on reading piqued my interest because, well, I’m a book nerd. They did a study to see what the state of reading in the US is.

On the side of being interesting and somewhat surprising, despite the proliferation of online media, approximately the same number of folks said they had read a book in the past 12 months. About 73% of respondents say they’ve read a book in any format and about 65% say they have read a real book (i.e., not a digital book). Only about 6% of people have transitioned away from real books to entirely reading on screens. This is comforting, since it promises that our local libraries likely won’t get phased out by publicly funded internet kiosks in the near future.

Much less surprising was that the correlation between income, education, and reading seems to support the value of reading. Correlation does not equal causation. Thus, it may be that higher incomes provide more time for reading. Or, it may be that advanced education inculcates improved ability to read books. The data isn’t clearly causal. However, the correlation between apparent material success (as customarily defined) and reading is striking. It may be that there is a correlation between the discipline of reading and other important, higher order skills.

Children and Reading Habits

Findings from another survey, biennial research done by Scholastic, talk about about reading for children. Given that there appears to be a correlation between material success and reading, and that reading is just a great way to improve your mind, the Scholastic study is important as it shows some factors that influence kids’ desire to read. Again, correlation isn’t causation, but it might give hits about what causes it.

Public Domain Photo of Leeds Central Library, taken by Michael Beckwith. http://ow.ly/PpWm304Gs9Y

As a bibliophile of the degree that some might describe as being a hoarder, the number of volumes in a library is significant to me. As it turns out, my library is way over the expected average. Of the survey respondents, those with children who were frequent readers indicated they had 205 books in the house; those with infrequently reading children had 129 books in their house.

These findings surprised me. First, I was surprised that the number of books for infrequent readers was not lower. I’ve been in the homes of some infrequent readers and usually they live in a book desert, with an occasional pamphlet, but very little in the way of real literature. 129 books in the home of non-readers is surprising to me; I would have expected many fewer.

Second, I was surprised to see the number of books in the homes of frequent readers at only 205. I have more than 200 books on several distinct subjects. I’ll admit that I have a bias toward owning books instead of borrowing them from the library, but that is because by offering a buffet of books to my children (and myself) I feel that I am encouraging them to read. Apparently the several hundred children’s books are overkill by contemporary standards.

Some other interesting data points that correlate with children being frequent readers are consistent with the usual suspects. Parents that read to their children frequently before kindergarten are much more likely to have frequent readers. School age children whose parents read to them presently are more likely to be frequent readers. Frequent computer use has a clear correlation to forming infrequent readers.

Some Thoughts on Reading and Quality Books

For the most part, the Scholastic survey is informative and interesting. However, there are a few items that might be cause for concern. The percentage of students who say they either like or love readings books has declined by about 10% since 2010. The number of children (about 47% of respondents) who say that the amount of reading they have to do in school discourages them from reading for pleasure is unfortunately high. Additionally, more than 60% of students report that they read less now than when younger because there are other things they enjoy doing. Given the large percentage of students that report spending significant time on electronic devices, this may indicate the distractification of our youth, which may influence later educational outcomes.

Another point of concern, which is admittedly more based on generalization and personal observations of the public library shelves, is that about 73% of children report that they would read more if they could find more books that they like. This is natural, but I think it is having a negative influence on the quality of children’s literature overall.

I’ve read plenty of fluff in my day. I still enjoy a good Louis L’Amour book, or a mystery by Ellis Peters or Alexander McCall Smith.

However, the shelves of the local library shelves are sagging under the weight of junk kiddie lit. I’m not basing that merely on grumpy observations of book covers, but on earlier study of children’s literature and attempting to read some of the stuff my kids bring home. The bulk of recently published stories seems more likely to smuggle attempts to justify restructuring traditional societal norms than to provide substantial benefits to the mind through reading. Sometimes good societal changes come through children’s lit, but surreptitiously sneaking various forms of social engineering into children’s fiction is a bit annoying. Even among the good clean fun kids’ books that I’ve read recently, there seemed to be an emotional and intellectual vacuousness; in many of the current offerings the story line is interesting, but the plot predictable and depth of character are flat.

Parents report that they think it is important for their kids to have strong reading skills and strong critical thinking skills in life. Reading is, arguably, supposed to support those things. Kids report being much more likely to prefer books they pick out themselves (90%) and to want more books that they like. But by providing quick, fun, easy to read stories, publishers and book buyers may be subverting benefits of reading.

This is not a dire warning against the library shelves or a call to ban fun books. There is likely some benefit in reading, even if the reading is light and fluffy. The caution should be in considering what we purchase (for home or the local library) and asking questions about the purpose of reading for children as we select the books to populate the common shelves. The best books both delight and instruct. We shouldn’t let the hope of making cotton candy literature becomes a gateway drug to better literature undermine a main purpose of forming readers, which is to help teach people to think better.

Beware the Sea Lion

I learned a new term recently. It can be a noun or a verb. One may encounter a "sea lion," or someone may "sea lion."

The term is drawn from a cartoon in the Wondermark series drawn by David Malki. I've included the image here for your interest.

When I encountered the cartoon, I knew that I had found an amazingly accurate description of a certain online persona.

This cartoon can be found at:  http://wondermark.com/1k62/ 

A sea lion is the sort of person who cannot allow a balloon to go unpricked. Seeing someone post something in public, the sea lion jumps into the conversation. However, the point is not to add anything to the conversation, it is to waste the time of the person who is making the comment.

To be clear, there are times that online conversations can be meaningful, but by definition, the sea lion is not interested in such conversations. Typically he is interested in a) proving himself smarter or more culturally enlightened than others, b) disrupting a conversation he disagrees with, without acknowledging that another person may simply have a different set of presuppositions, c) just generally being a nuisance all while pretending to be the truly mature and civil one, d) silencing speech that he disagrees with and which rely on a different worldview.

Sea lions are annoying, but they are simply a part of internet life. They can sometimes be confused with people who are legitimately asking questions about a topic that they know little about. Recognizing the difference (and avoiding being one) is important.

Some Characteristics of a Sea Lion

1. A sea lion typically recognizes that the comment was not necessarily about him, but chooses to engage it anyway. Some people simply have too much time on their hands, and being the vigilante of the Facebook wall or comments section seems to be their preferred disservice to the world. Never mind that the comment may have been made in jest, intended as a light hearted generalization, or be entirely tangential to the main point; the sea lion boldly goes where no one cares to hear his opinion.

2. A sea lion often plays dumb, attempting to get their victim to fall into a script that they have carefully crafted a rebuttal to. Online debates are often tedious and they tend to fall into certain patterns. College sophomores spend a great deal of time diagnosing those patterns and learning to rebut them so they can look smart in debates. Often the rebuttals are neither fair nor focused on the main point under debate. However, the sea lion is always ready for the unsuspecting fool to play along.

3. A sea lion is often characterized by attempting to move the argument back several steps or by refusing to accept an assumption the other parties have agreed upon. Rarely does the sea lion state that this is his tactic, but attempts to drag the conversation back to his own presuppositions. Often the sea lion is arguing about elementary level concepts when the conversation is on advanced topics that build on a common set of elementary assumptions already agreed upon.

4. Sometimes the sea lion is unaware he has presuppositions. There is an army of ignorant online warriors who seem to be unaware they have a worldview. All reasoning must be done on their terms, because they and only they have rightly reasoned from first principles to final conclusions. They represent truth and all difference in opinion represents a tainted deviation of their truth. This sort of sea lion asks the Christian to prove God when the Christian is debating theories of the atonement. (Let the Christian recognize that of course the atonement is silly and unnecessary if there is no God.) But the sea lion is oblivious that the faith assumption there is no God requires as much suspension of disbelief as any other faith assumption.

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5. A sea lion often takes being ignored or told off as "victory." The other parties couldn't face the crushing logic of the sea lion, therefore they banished him. More likely the sea lion is just a bore and was shushed or blocked for habitually trying to subvert conversations.

6. The sea lion assumes that if someone makes a comment, they must follow up if he replies. This is part of the narcissism of the sea lion. Being the sole mind in the universe and sole arbiter of truth, the sea lion assumes that justice entails dealing with his (often erroneous or ignorant) arguments.

7. The sea lion is usually prepared with links from friendly sources that support his position. (Often he selects his topics by the ones where he's found articles and studies that he can use as irrefutable support.) If the victim does not have rebutting sources at hand, then his argument can be dismissed as being unsupported (and likely unsupportable, of course). If the victim does have rebutting sources, these are dismissed as being hack science, paid for by the Koch brothers (or Soros, depending on the topic and side). The sea lion's sources are, of course, irrefutable because Science and Peer Review. If sources are used from a different field than the sea lion is prepared to defend, then these will be rejected as from a flawed discipline.

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Dealing with the Sea Lion

There is no perfect way to deal with the sea lion. Often ignoring them is the best way. Blocking Uncle Bob is probably going to lead to tense times at the Thanksgiving table.

Sometimes the sea lion has a point, your argument may be flawed or in an inappropriate venue. (At this point, the person may actually not be a sea lion, so it's important to evaluate the pattern of the person's interactions.)

However, often the true purpose of the sea lion is to silence dissenting opinions. Often this is perceived as a part of social justice on the part of the sea lion. At its best it is a form of annoying thought-policing, at its worst, sea lioning turns into a form of harassment or bullying.

Sea lions are often attempting to raise the social costs of online interactions by being persistent, argumentative (though in their minds always civil), and pedantic. They are typically off topic or in the wrong forum, but they typically aren't the vitriolic troll.

Unfortunately, there is no good way to avoid all sea lions, except by not engaging in online speech that disagrees with them. That is exactly what they want.

Therefore, the best thing to do, it seems, is to speak well, use evidence appropriately, and ignore the sea lions until they go away. Very seldom do people change their minds based on online arguments (I have no support for this, but I know it to be true). I will venture to suggest that no sea lion has ever changed his mind based on an online debate, however much time the victim has wasted.

However, if someone has a peer reviewed study to show me, I might just change my mind.

Some Lessons from Dissertation Writing

This week I turned in my dissertation. Now I wait for my defense. In the moment of euphoria before I find out everything that is wrong with the project I’ve been working on for a year, I decided to jot down some of the things that I’ve learned so far about the process.

Some of these lessons are based on advice and counsel that others gave me, but that I’ve since found to be wise. We’ll find out how well I did on the final product in a couple of months. Even if there are flaws (there are, trust me) in my dissertation, here are some things that I have learned through writing the longest academic work I’ve ever attempted.

1.         It’s never going to be perfect. – One of the hardest things to recognize just prior to my submittal of my dissertation was that there were still going to be some imperfections in the manuscript. I’ve read the completed manuscript multiple times. So has my wife. I have no doubt that there are still a few typos, missing words, extra spaces, or the like throughout. At some point you have to let it go.

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2.         You can’t read every possible source. – I wrote each of my chapters, referencing those volumes and thinkers that best related to my point in the text. However, as I was doing my final read through of the dissertation before submitting it, I kept on thinking of additional sources that could have bolstered my point or that I could have read. There are new books in the academic catalogs that are begging to be included in my bibliography and dozens of articles that I downloaded that I never got to read. I could have tried to read and cite more, but sooner or later you have to turn the project in.

3.         Having someone else read it is invaluable. – My amazingly patient wife also serves as my editor. She doesn’t do style manual stuff, but she does read for grammar, clarity, and typographical issues. Having her read my chapters to tell me where I made no sense or where I had errors made a huge difference in the end, I think. There were a number of places she called my attention to that were unclear and needed simple rewording to make the project better.

4.         This isn’t the best thing you will ever write. – Looking at the 358 pages of manuscript is pretty impressive. It’s the longest piece of scholarship I’ve ever written. In fact, most of the chapters are longer than any paper I’d previously written. What I had to continually fight back was the goal to make this my magnum opus. I will write something better later on, so I need to make a good effort but not think that this is the pinnacle of my scholarship. My scholarship and writing should get better in the future. That’s not a ding against my dissertation, it’s a reflection of academic maturation.

5.         Doing a read-through at the end is important. – Before I had the final proofreading done by my wife, I read through the dissertation from cover to cover in about two days. Since some of my chapters had been written about a year before, this was an important step in the editing process. By the end of the writing process I had developed some key phrases and learned to avoid others. I was able to edit the earlier chapters to reflect the language of the later chapters (chronologically) by the end. This step helps the project read more like a cohesive work of scholarship, instead of a collection of essays. I was also able to find some places where I could clarify my own explanations, which, I think, made the end product more readable for someone else.

6.         Creating a project plan with deadlines is vital. – The internet is flooded with “dissertation writing as project planning” sites. There is value in the approach. I only met a couple of my deadlines, so I had to keep revising and extending the project plan. However, by delineating the steps and what it would take to get there, I could focus on the next thing instead of getting overwhelmed by the size of the project. By having an internal deadline (with plenty of margin built in to the institutional deadline) I had something to keep me moving. Because I had looked at the institutional deadline and built my project plan based on that, I knew what I had to do to get the project in on time. This made it easier to prioritize so that I could know when I needed to lock myself away to write or when I could play another game of Monopoly with the kids.

7.         Stay on topic. – There were about a million times in the process of writing that I found interesting rabbit trails to go down. I even ventured down a few of them. I’ve got extensive notes and footnotes to prove it. However, when I was polishing my dissertation, most of the work of those rabbit trails ended up deleted from the final product. I may use some of the material for essays later on, but I sometimes spent a week on research that was interesting, but did little to support my final dissertation. A bit more discipline would have benefited me significantly.

8.         Keep notes on the side ideas. – I wasted some time along the way exploring rabbit trails. However, one of the things that I think will bear some fruit in the future is using some of that material and the ideas that I got while writing my dissertation to produce journal articles at a later date. I’ve got a list of potential topics with some sources that I can chase down now that I’ve finished my dissertation. These don’t all relate directly to my dissertation topic, but there is room for further research. I now have more ideas for the future than my life and schedule can possibly support.

There are probably more things that I’ve learned. Perhaps after my defense I’ll pick up the topic again. Or, I may discover that some of my lessons learned aren’t as helpful as I thought. I’ll let you know what the readers think.

Purveyors of Doubt

It’s become fairly common among some former evangelicals  to spend a great deal of capital feeding the general lack of confidence of the present age and encouraging currently faithful Christians to hop on the bandwagon of uncertainty.

Certainty is a modern notion born out of the Enlightenment. Or better yet, the Enlightenments, because there really were different streams of thought that appeared about the same time with different beginning points. Speaking of which, can we really say that there was such a thing as the Enlightenment since there appear to be such differences between thinkers and there is no absolute beginning point. Also, since the cultural movement that we once called the Enlightenment was largely a European endeavor and involved mainly males, it is likely that the entire enterprise was oppressively racist and sexist. Better not to study thought of the Enlightenment at all since pluriformity of thought prevents any sort of characterization of the era. At best we should have a high degree of confidence in our uncertainty.

Did I lose you? That’s the point of that paragraph, but it represents some of the sort of argumentation that passes for deep thought. It doesn’t need to be factually correct as long as its moved you to a place of doubt where real learning can take place.

The only thing we can be certain of is our uncertainty according to scholars in some circles. This certainly keeps them safe from criticism—Who can criticize what has no form?—but it does little to promote understanding or, when theology is involved, faithfulness.

Faith Amid Multiple Positions

The thinking in some circles appears to be that it is better to be expressively dubious than faithfully committed.

One of the popular ways to cast doubt on orthodoxy, for example, is to say that there have been people who have disagreed with orthodoxy throughout history. Since there is doubt among some thinkers in history, who are we to believe that we can know what is right belief?

Certainly there is room for humility in belief. We understand that different people have thought differently (and indeed, do think differently) about important doctrines. My faith is not undermined by some people having different opinions.

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For example, I have friends who are Presbyterian. They believe that the form of baptism is secondary to the meaning of it, so the evolved practice of sprinkling babies is as acceptable as believer's baptism by immersion. I’ve studied enough church history and read enough theology to know how they get there. However, I think they are wrong. In this case, there is a different set of presuppositions at work. But more important than the position are some simple realities about truth that are revealed by sincere, well-founded disagreement.

First of all, the simple existence of a difference in interpretation of Scripture on the subject of baptism does not imply that there isn’t a right answer. One of us may be right and the other wrong. Or, both of us may be wrong. However, plurality of positions doesn’t mean that there isn’t a correct position.

Second, while I recognize that I have a different position than my Presbyterian friends, I honor them when I acknowledge their positions and take them seriously. What would dishonor both them and everyone else at the table is flippantly saying that the existence of multiple perspectives indicates that none of us should believe anything.

In some ways, that is what the faithless Christian movement is doing. Some people deny objective truth (not just its knowability) to argue against confidence in historical Christian teaching. Sometimes these people argue that since a novel interpretation of a text has arisen within the past several decades from people who argue that they are intentionally rewriting Scripture, then we must reject confidence in orthodoxy.

The False Humility of Doubt

This sounds simplistic. In some cases it may be unfair. However, in many cases the line of argumentation isn’t far off this simplistic summary.[i] Doubt is possible because multiple positions exist. Doubt is preferable to being wrong, particularly when the social costs of being “wrong” are significant. Therefore, doubt is better than certainty. Doubt is humble and humility is biblical, therefore we must doubt.

Most of the time, the doubt that is portrayed as humble is anything but. Such doubt is a way of saying that a previously unthinkable position might be right because the old one might be wrong. In other words, it’s saying that someone’s new and better teaching is probably better than the old one, so those of you who don’t like the new one should be humbler and accept the new teaching. That used to be called heresy.

Think about it another way. The doubt sowers are not being very humble when they essentially call into question thousands of years of belief. “You know all of those people who believed something different than me and held to it despite threat of imprisonment, torture and death?,” they insinuate, “They are just arrogant in comparison to my humble doubt.” Why have faith when doubt is a safer, humbler option?

The thing is that some forms of doubt are a cancer to faith, such as the insatiable doubt that some contemporary marketers are promoting. In order to rewrite Christian ethics and avoid believing traditional doctrines, some people are sowing seeds of doubt in the minds of others. They do it because of “love” or because they are being “kind.” Sometimes they try to revise traditional orthodoxy because they love Jesus and really believe that Christianity has something to offer contemporary people; it just needs to have some of its rough edges shaved off that poke at the citizen of the contemporary world.

Whether the sowing of doubt is done for personal gain or to try to make Christianity fit the popular trends, teaching people to doubt is a bad thing. It’s a bad thing when the people in the church no longer have the ability to believe the traditional teachings of Christianity. It’s a bad thing when people have no trust in Scripture, because if it is wrong on one point, who is to argue that it gets the gospel right? These are significant problems that are exacerbated by the purveyors of doubt.

More significantly, sowing doubt will be a bad thing for some people when their actions are judged by a holy and righteous God. For the Jesus-only hermeneutics people, he alludes to that pretty clearly in Matthew 5:17-20. For those that accept all of Scripture as inspired (even when it disagrees with us), James 3:1 warns us to consider becoming teachers because they will be judged with greater strictness. The context seems to point toward that strictness being in God’s judgment, not just in people’s observations of our social media profiles. That should cause us to rethink how much doubt and discontent we desire to foment.

[i] I’m intentionally not providing specific examples here because: a. It’s unlikely anyone really doubts this point if they have spent any time reading theological blogs. b. The people who are most likely to be offended by this statement and demand an example are probably part of the problem and really know exactly what I’m talking about. c. I blog for fun, not to get into blog wars with people that have too much time on their hands. Many of the doubt bloggers are professional instructors and writers who have more time to wage endless war against belief than I have time to rebut. I’m simply making observations at this point.