A book about God is a book about everything. No wonder books about God sprawl all over the place: the topic ‘God’ touches every other conceivable topic. Any true thing about God will echo in the fibers of all that God has created.

Me, I have no interest in writing a book about everything. I just want to share how the surprising God I encountered lit up my life and rescued me from despair, and I want to help readers encounter that same God. I don’t want this book to sit on bookshelves as a compendium of Christian theology; I want this book to light readers on fire! Yes, to spread a holy fire, that’s why I’m writing this book, and to spread that fire quickly enough to keep it hot.

So when I look at the piles of books, articles, and notecards stacked wobbly around my office floor, my mouth goes slack and my eyes go vacant. I look at my research and I’m pierced with a paradox: all these collected hot-takes, personal testimonies, wise insights, Bible verses, and clever arguments truly helped guide my discovery, but they are not the discovery itself. They are arrows pointing toward a light, but they are not the light.

What am I saying? Maybe that I don’t want to get lost in a labyrinth of arrows. Trying to introduce people to this surprising God feels like trying to describe Michelangelo’s Pietà by carefully examining the dust and chips of marble on the sculptor’s floor.

Open most academic books about God and you often find one of two toils. Open the first book and you’re accosted by the exhausted jargon of a weary scholar, so entrenched in the same fruitless spirals of argument, so numbed by the same circuitous conversations, that their prose dribble across the page, dull and predictable. These books read how I imagine Israelite food critics would read in the 30th year of eating only manna and quail.

Open another book and you’ll find a different woe. Perhaps antsy to escape those stagnant loops of discourse, other scholars dive deep into minutiae. They pull out their microscopes to probe new depths of nuance—way down in the neglected deep—hoping to find a new clue, a new insight, a new twist which might shine new light on the ancient debates still hammering away far up on the dark surface. These books might explore dead languages from old scrolls, questioning the gender of a preposition, or the curious placement of an accent mark on an ambiguous word. Or maybe they spatter the page with symbolic logic until the whole thing looks like some contrived hieroglyphics that only four people in the known universe can understand. While the authors are clearly smart, and they may even be right, they’re so recondite they leave the reader not knowing why any of it matters.

When you write about God you can get easily stuck in the pedantic gravity of the bookshelf and never achieve orbit, never reach escape velocity. I don’t want to get stuck on those same tired intellectual roundabouts, nor do I want to get lost in the weeds of minutiae. I’m not writing this book to simply share information. I want to open a door for readers to hopefully experience the pervasive hope, purpose, and joy that I’ve experienced these past 30 years. I guess what I’m saying: I want to find the signal in the noise, the melody in the cacophony, and I want that melody to make readers dance, just as the melody has made me dance.

The post Reflections On Writing “Surprising God” appeared first on Dan Kent.

Podcaster Nick Loper once confessed: “I thought I liked cashews, until we got some unsalted ones. Turns out I just like salt.”

A similar epiphany happened to me. I thought I liked theology and Bible study. I downloaded sermons, listened to lectures, and read books-too-big-for-backpacks. I even earned a master’s degree from Bethel Seminary.

Many folks bound into seminary with a song on their lips, only to limp away clinging—if they’re lucky—to a fraction of the faith with which they came.

I didn’t lose my faith in seminary.
My faith grew.

Why I found profit while others found loss, I don’t know. Even basic explanations come out sounding patronizing, or like humble-bragging.

Say I point to a simple and impersonal truth, like: seeking God is hard. Notice how this implies that my success came from superior effort: I worked hard enough to overcome the challenge. And notice how this also pins failure to insufficient effort of those others: they were not up to the challenge.

But none of that is true. I doubt I worked harder than anyone.

Me, I blame seminary itself. I don’t mean Bethel Seminary—which I adored—I mean seminary in general. Seminary is doomed to disappoint. You pass through the doors expecting a lively journey, but instead you encounter cryptic scriptures, tedious commentaries, and abstruse debates about how the shape of an accent mark might affect translation. You Betty-Boop into the room expecting a path of rapturous light, but instead it feels like hours and hours of milking flies.

I thought I liked theology. It turns out I just like finding God. I like the gust of relief when I disarm a menacing doubt. I like the swell of euphoria when I comprehend why the good news is actually good—and why it’s actually news. I like the boost of conviction when I come to trust more and more the promises of God.

One promise in particular stokes my levity most. Paul tells the Corinthians:

“For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people’.” (2 Corinthians 6:16)

I carried this charming promise with me into seminary. God will dwell with us. We’ll hear him approaching in the cool of the day. We’ll know what we know by pure perception—no Bibles, no theology. Immediate and intimate observation, little more. That charming promise kept tickling me and nudging me throughout my seminary studies.

It also kept my expectations sober. A promise is a pending thing. “God will dwell with us.” That moment still hangs somewhere out of reach, up in the air. We’re not yet there.

For now, while we wait for that great day, our work is more constructive than observational. We build our picture of God in the workshop of our minds. We each cobble together a forensic sketch from imperfect sources. We go to the gospels and study the wild testimonies of unexceptional people, written in languages few of us know. We debate our perspectives with fallible scholars and we propound our pictures against theirs.

Yes, we have the Holy Spirit, but we must strain to hear his whispers and soft guidance. And all of this we do in a world that looks far more demonic than godly.

I’m surprised we find any traces of light at all.

I carry on because I know this work is not the thing itself. I do not expect rapturous light or euphoric theophanies.

I carry on knowing that anything we find on a path toward a great promise will always thump dull relative to our expectations of what’s to come.

The post Protecting Your Faith from the Dangers of Seminary appeared first on Dan Kent.

Step out in search of free will and you encounter many traps.

Say you make the astute claim that something free must be something uncaused. The way you see it, if something is predetermined it cannot be free. If we witness a free act, we must be witnessing something that has no prior cause.

As reasonable as this seems, and as dapper as the logic might appear, it turns out false. If I make a free choice, then I *caused* something. And so there most certainly is causation in free will, it’s just that *I* am the cause—not my brain, not my values, not my personality, but *me*.

What do I mean by *me*?
What do I mean when I say: “I caused something”?

Guided by the concierge of common sense, all I can really mean by *me* is this physical instantiation of myself.

My body.

So then clever folks are likely to launch their probes at the physical self: where does this physical thing, the body, enact its causes? As of this writing, the brain remains the top candidate for inquiry. But what part of the brain?

At this point you begin to suspect you’ve been lulled into a trap. When looking at a material thing, all you can see is a chain of events—that is, you see determinism. The absolute best thing you could hope for, when peering into your microscope, would be to witness something happen that shows no regard to any chain of events around it—that is, you see indeterminism.

And now you know for sure you’ve been trapped, because neither of these possible outcomes—determinism or indeterminism—are free will.

Something determined is not free, and neither is something un-determined. A free choice is not determined by the chain-of-events—even of the brain. It’s determined by *me*. A free choice is also not un-determined, because that would just be randomness. But when I make a free choice, I *determine* something.

The bait of this trap sits back in the lap of common sense, the cogent claim that “all a person can really mean by *me* is this physical instantiation of ourselves.”

For free will to be true, this common sense claim must be false. In other words, given the harsh binary of matter, between determinism and indeterminism—neither capable of yielding free will—the only way out of the trap is to consider a more classic hypothesis: we are each more than matter. In other words, free will requires dualism. It requires something more than brains, bodies, neurons, or microtubules.

This solution comes with its own basket of problems, I know, but it’s the only way.

The post Free Will Traps and How to Escape Them appeared first on Dan Kent.

“Seek the Lord.”

That imperative is found over a hundred times in scripture.

Why so often?

For one thing, finding God is not easy.

Not because God is a construct, but because God is not a construct.

God is the very real treasure, found by those who truly seek (Proverbs 2:4-5).

God wants to be found, not constructed.
In fact, God sets himself against all of our constructions (Jeremiah 10).
God wants to be found, but on God’s terms, not on ours.

In Exodus 3:13, Moses asks God: “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”

God replies: “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”

Names held meaning in the ancient world. So by asking God his name, Moses was asking what construct best applied to God.

God was having none of that. “I am who I am.”

This is not to say God is pure mystery, or anything like that. No, we call the Bible “revelation” for a reason: God is revealed.

• God is love (1 John 4:8)
• God is light (1 John 1:5)
• God is faithful (1 Corinthians 1:9)
• God is just (Deuteronomy 32:4)
• God is good (Nahum 1:7)
• God is compassionate (Psalm 145:8)
• God is holy (Isaiah 6:3)

Each of these revelations about God mean something constructive, but they are not mere constructions. They are constructs that point to a being who dwells beyond the scope of their demarcation.

We’re told again and again to seek God because we can all fall easily into a lazy groove of comprehension, mentally affirming this-or-that concept of God, while never seeking God himself.

👆 Please read this as a confession.👆

Thirty-five years into my quest for God, I still feel like God is distant. My ideas about God are ample, and I hold them with great conviction. My experiences of God are rare, and I hold the sweet memories of those encounters with nagging suspicion.

Still, I trust that God is more than a construct—in fact, God is the antithesis of construct: God is fundamental reality. God is not only real; God is the realest. And I trust that one day God will dwell with us again in that embodied presence—the same one with which he once dwelled with his disciples.

I don’t know Deepak Chopra, and I don’t know if he did anything sexual with the girls on Epstein’s island. Some who have shared the email-screenshot I shared below also included a picture of Deepak doing the upward-facing dog yoga pose. This seems intended to suggest sexual impropriety.

“Unfair,” I say! Most yoga poses are pseudo-erotic. Heck, I do yoga almost every day, but I refuse to begin until I’m sure nobody else is around. So shame on anyone who includes this picture!

Still, in this context, his comment that “cute girls are real,” seems prurient at best.

I hope his comment was just a slip. I truly hope it was simply a case of Deepak giving himself over to the carousing spirit fostered by Epstein.

I’ve been there. I’ve been around important and powerful people, and I’ve been around them when they’ve been up to no good. I know the gravity and peer pressure they emit, pressure to give yourself over to their revelry. And I know I have succumbed to that pressure, and I’ve said things I wish I hadn’t, things for which I had to repent.

I hope that’s the case for Deepak. I do. I hope that for him because those girls are made in God’s image. They also exist beyond the arbitrary construct of their flesh. They are each irreducible to their bodies. They each carry the breath of God within them. They are each worth Jesus suffering and dying on the cross for.

To treat a treasure of such immeasurable value as if it were a mere construct for sexual gratification, well, I cannot comprehend such woe.

I say “woe” because—when the “I am” returns, and
when we see for certain that God is not merely a construct, and
when we see that God’s love for those cute girls was not merely a construct, and
when we see that God’s goodness and justice are not mere constructs,
woe to those who disregard God’s moral mandates,
woe to those who disregard their own consciences as they blithely exploit God’s children,
woe to them all—because who can withstand the weight of such depravity under the gravity of God’s real and perfect holiness?

The post Deepak Chopra Says God is a Construct appeared first on Dan Kent.

The Book of Revelation begins with an angel telling John: “Do not be afraid.” But then the angel goes on to pummel John with one terrifying vision after another.

How do you explain this? Is John a fraud? He says not to be afraid, but then he paints, in great detail, many scary threats.

That’s the first question I tried to answer in my sermon “Crowns, Not Crutches.”

Ultimately, John does want us to be afraid, but he wants us to fear the right things. We tend to fear the wrong things. We run up the mountain to avoid the tsunami only to be buried by avalanche.

So, what does John want us to fear? That’s the second question that fueled my sermon prep.

John’s Point

John’s point is that we should not fear what this world can do to us, or even what the Beast might do to us. Instead, we should fear God. That is, we should fear our own unfaithfulness to God. We should fear our own betrayal to Christ Jesus, and we should fear our own neglect of his teachings.

That’s a legitimate fear because faithfulness to Jesus isn’t easy, especially here and now in our modern polarized era, in this arena of angry influencers, of manipulative talking heads, of professional conflict-entrepreneurs with their mic-drop political takes, their belittling internet memes, their mastery of mockery, their gourmet skill at ridicule. The journey Jesus calls us to is a richer, slower, deeper journey.

Everything Jesus offers looks like a wet sock compared to the dancing shoes of rhetoric and propaganda we see all around us. I understand the temptation to discard the slow growing fruit of Jesus’s teachings and dive into the fructose of our current culture-war ethos.

• Paul tells us to “be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave us” (Ephesians 4:32), but now we see Christians demonstrating little compassion for people, people who merely vote differently—even though the true impact of a single vote is the statistical equivalent of a gnat pissing on a forest fire.
• We see Christians using whatever rhetorical tactic they can find to tear others down, all while Paul instructs us to build one another up (1 Thessalonians. 5:11).
• We see Christians saying vile things about others even while Paul instructs us to “avoid godless chatter” (1 Thessalonians 5:22).
• We seem stuck in current events and consider everyone from a worldly point of view, even though that’s exactly what we’re told not to do (2 Corinthians 5:6).
• We’re great at “exposing fruitless deeds of darkness” (Ephesians 5:11), but then we cannot seem to keep ourselves from engaging in unwholesome talk about the perpetrators of those deeds (Ephesians 4:29).
• Perhaps we’re patient with some, but we’re certainly not “patient with all” (1 Thessalonians 5:14).
• We let the anxiety of politics rob us of the “peace of Christ” that should “rule in our heart” (Colossians 3:15).
• Instead of filling our conversations with grace and salt (Colossians 4:6), we fill it with labels, judgment, and amateur diagnoses.
• We’re great in the easy unity of agreement, but in the face of disagreement, we’re not good at “making every effort to maintain unity” (Ephesians 4:3).
• We’re good at “reject every evil” that we see in people (1 Thessalonians 5:22), but terrible at “holding on to what is good” in people we disagree with (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

So those are some of the themes that went into this sermon. I hope you get a chance to hear it.

Writing this sermon was a fight, but it somehow came together better than I thought it would. You can listen to it HERE: “Crowns, Not Crutches.”

The post Trading Crutches for Crowns appeared first on Dan Kent.

In 1957, as a college freshman, R.C. Sproul heard the captain of his football team quote a verse from Ecclesiastes, and Sproul’s life changed forever. The verse was Ecclesiastes 11:3:

“If clouds are full of water, they pour rain on the earth.
Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north,
in the place where it falls, there it will lie.”

To me, these words hold no real spiritual punch. They simply babble on about obvious and humdrum things. Yet when Sproul heard them, he said they “pierced my soul.”

Sproul later admitted this verse to be an odd source of epiphany, joking that he might be the only person in history converted by that text.

So why? What was it about that pedestrian text that thumped him so hard in the heart?

Simple. Sproul says: “I saw myself as that tree . . . inert, useless, and rotten.”

After football practice, Sproul dashed to his dorm, fell to his knees, and begged God for mercy. The next day he picked up a Bible and began reading it from the beginning.

(Mis)Reading Ecclesiastes?

Whatever path he took to get there, Sproul found God and I celebrate that.

Still, his path is revealing.

When Sproul read about the fallen tree in Ecclesiastes 11:3, he saw himself. But Ecclesiastes 11:3 is not about the self. Qohelet, the author of Ecclesiastes, does not intend for the reader to identify as the tree. Qohelet is simply riffing on the unpredictability of life. He’s not talking about the reader at all, he’s talking poetically about the reader’s world. Namely, much of life happens outside of our control.

Sproul took interpretive liberties when he identified himself as the fallen tree. Thinking the passage was a divine comment on his own inner condition, he fully admits, was a naïve reading. But the reading moved him deeply and he couldn’t let go of it.

I understand that. Sometimes a text hits us in strange, almost magical ways, and I applaud Sproul’s openness to what might be the peculiar proddings of the Holy Spirit. We believe the Bible a living scripture, so we do well to let the words move us how they do.

The danger comes when we lift those personal and idiosyncratic insights out of ourselves, then shape them into a doctrine for everybody else; the danger comes when we extract those epiphanies meant for our own heart, then use them to ground theology for all hearts.

Sproul’s epiphany wasn’t what Qohelet intended with his text, nor was it the result of sound exegesis. Rather, it was merely the outcome of a special moment, one where the state of his unique psyche crashed into Qohelet’s striking analogy.

Sproul wasn’t seeing something Qohelet was trying to say, he was only seeing himself in a mirror. He didn’t “discover” God’s view of him in the verse, no, he dragged this view of himself with him to the text.

This matters because where we start shapes where we go. Our first readings can echo through each successive reading. For Sproul, the message that came through to him was that “God plays for keeps,” a phrase packed with assumptions about power, control, and dominance. No wonder Sproul, after his encounter with Qohelet, walked the halls of his dorm late into the night, unable to sleep, terrified by what he called his “virgin encounter with the God of the Old Testament.”

Sproul went on to use this personal conversion story as the narrative foundation of his entire theology—including his understanding of salvation. Sproul saw salvation like this:

Salvation is to be saved from God. 

Jesus (the son) saves us from God (the father).

We are rotten and God is enraged at our rottenness. God’s wrath is coming for all rotten people. Christ came to rescue us from this worst of all catastrophes: God’s wrath.

While I reject this view of salvation, what interests me here is the train of thought Sproul rode to get there. He begins with a view of himself (inert, useless, and rotten), globalizes that view of himself to everyone, then constructs a view of atonement from that globalized view.

A Strange Coincidence:

It just so happens that Ecclesiastes also launched my own faith.

Sometime before I reached adulthood—and before I found God—I developed what I would call a heightened sensitivity to futility. Everything seemed meaningless.

While my peers crammed for college, chased careers, or started families, I struggled to muster the gumption to even go to school, or to complete basic life tasks. I stared at the floor while my classmates leapt into their bright futures. Yes, I knew their pursuits were good, but none of those pursuits seemed worth the great labor required, or worth the anxiety incurred.

I was depressed, but I also had something more than Depression. The ferocious force that gripped me was what Albert Camus called “the Absurd.” Camus knew that to be human meant to exist in a paradox: to ache for meaning in a universe that could not provide it.
We go on anyway, acting as if life had great meaning. We pretend things matter more than they do. Camus called this awkward acting a “pantomime,” one that “makes silly everything that surrounds us.”

Consider this pitiable portrait he paints: “A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show.” Camus meant that, whatever the man was talking about on the phone, nothing could be meaningful enough to justify the emotional intensity of the man’s gestures and affect. Whether the man displayed happiness, hatred, anger, or euphoria, nothing matters enough to merit such moods.

Likewise, from the shadows of my ghastly awakening, I couldn’t see much sense to any of the treasures I watched my peers pursue.

Everything Camus wrote—about the meaninglessness of life and about the falsity of humans—perfectly framed the haunt of my own angsty state. In school, I devolved into a sardonic class clown—a real pain in the ass. I got a kick out of exposing the absurdities of life, and mocking anyone who took things too seriously.

Nothing was safe from my nihilistic deconstruction—even sex. Yes, even as a teenager, bullied by hormones, I saw sex—and all desire—as a dupe and a gimmick. Whatever satisfaction one finds in the satiation of a desire lasts not much longer than a sneeze, then the desire returns again.

Even having children didn’t seem worth the trouble. Begetting children, the way I saw from my dark hole, meant bringing more people into the same arena of absurdity I was now waking up to.

To my embarrassment, these dark epiphanies also left me feeling superior. They don’t know what I know, I told myself. I really thought everyone else marched in a parade of soft lies, and that only Albert Camus and I, Dan Kent, dared face the deep and difficult truths of existence.

That was all nonsense, of course. I was not the superior one. I was the weak one, the sensitive one, the one who couldn’t even carry on with simple tasks in the face of a little absurdity. Many of my peers held the same angst in their hearts. But they were simply more mature, or more ambitious, or more capable of accepting their situation for what it was and, unlike me, were able to move on to make the most of their situation. They could work despite the dark. I was the needy one who needed light.

Finding Light

The very last place I thought I’d find light was the Bible. To my mind, the Bible was a primary source of those soft lies, lies to which I watched humanity march. Yep, I was one of those boobs who—without having actually read the Bible—thought the Bible not much more than a woobie for the weak, a crutch for the broken, a comforting writ that mumbled sweet things to fragile people.

Then one day I decided to actually take a peek at the book itself, and I lucked into Ecclesiastes (2:17):

“…I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it meaningless, a chasing after the wind” (2:17).

Yes, a chasing after the wind. That’s exactly how I saw life: everything absurd with nothing worth the trouble. I thought life amounted to a marketplace of desires, each desire flaring up only to burn down to nothing, all of which was followed by death—the final flare-out-to-nothing.

What kind of religious book is this, I thought, and so I read on, carried forward by the accuracy of its dark diagnosis.

Long before Camus there came Qohelet.

Like Sproul, Ecclesiastes lit a fire in me to read more. What else might I find in this Bible?

Eventually I came to the Book of Jeremiah, where the “two ways” poked me in the eye:

“I am setting before you the way of life and the way of death” (Jeremiah 21:8).

When I first read that, a prick of light punctured my darkness. I felt new nodes in my brain power on. Maybe what I thought of as reality was little more than the musty basement of a much larger house. Maybe what I knew of as life was merely one path in life—and it wasn’t even the path of life, but rather the path of death.

The mere idea of an alternative path gave me levity. It meant that my own dark epiphany might be incomplete—and a partial epiphany can be worse than no epiphany at all.

My laments morphed into laughter as I saw, more and more, how my entire existential crisis had emerged from a half-sighted assessment. My whole sad-clown persona made perfect sense if the world were a meaningless circus. But the world is not a circus. The circus is but one possible destination in a much larger two-ways world.

The implications of all this unfolded fast. Everyday choices I once considered banal, I now saw as potential catalysts for new levels of spiritual experience. The living God invited me into his living dance, and I now floated forward with fresh purpose: to find this God, more and more, to pursue this better path the best that I can.

Whatever little glimpses of God’s light I found felt joyous, in-and-of themselves. And then that joyous glow haloed outward, challenging all my frowny intuitions, softening my heart, and improving my sentiments about the rest of life and creation.

How could I still think, for instance, that having children meant forcing them against their will into an arena of absurdity? No, having children meant begetting them into a realm where they, too, might stand before the two ways, and might choose to share in divine goodness. Having kids meant sharing this joyous light with more potential children of God.

My entire thought-life relaxed. I no longer strained to find something meaningful in life. The two ways broke into my days and gave latent meaning to everything. In a short amount of time—months, maybe—I went from starving-for-meaning to stumbling-drunk-on-meaning.

One Map, Different Journeys

I feel camaraderie with Sproul. For both of us, our romance with God’s word started in Ecclesiastes. But, wow, did our paths diverge.

Sproul’s First Date with the Bible terrified him and left him restless.
My own First Date with the Bible exhilarated me and left me hopeful.

The truth is, our paths diverged long before those first encounters with Qohelet. The deviation began back at the luggage rack, back when we first packed our bags for our journeys ahead.

Sproul brought a deep sense of self-loathing with him to the text. Ecclesiastes didn’t tell Sproul he was the fallen tree. No, Sproul already saw himself—deeply and sincerely—as inert, useless, and rotten. Given that baggage, it’s no surprise that the God Sproul found was angry and threatening.

Me, I dragged a great sense of despair to the Good Book, and Qohelet lifted that angst out of me so I could see it in the light. Ecclesiastes gave shape to my despair about the emptiness of life, then pointed me beyond that emptiness toward the God who was the only possible source of meaning great enough, and lasting enough, to fill that void.

Unlike Sproul, the despair I carried wasn’t about me, but about life. Qohelet didn’t convince me that I was meaningless, he confirmed my intuition that everyday life was meaningless, in-and-of itself. Qohelet affirmed my intuition that the things people spent their lives chasing—money, ambition, pleasure, achievement—could never carry the weight of meaning we place on them.

Straightening Out the Warps

Like me, Sproul’s encounter with scripture prompted him to keep reading. That’s good because our first readings are almost always flawed. We each lug a bag of junk to the text, and we’re all guilty of reading it through our own distinctive warp. We do well to keep reading, always with humility, so that the text might reshape whatever distortions we hold.

Over the years, the Bible has thumbed and kneaded my own heart and mind in many ways. It has repeatedly exposed and mocked my ferocious individualism; it has humbled my naïve optimism about human nature; it has gently summoned me out of my anxious isolation and goaded me into community with other believers; it has contested my implicit materialism and opened my mind to the spiritual realm—and also to the workings of the Holy Spirit, which I’ve chronically downplayed or denied.

Many are the flaws I’ve brought to God’s word.

Sproul, too, has opportunities for correction.

To begin with, he is not a dead tree. If humanity were truly inert, useless, and rotten at its core, the incarnation would make little sense. God becoming fully human tells us something profound about the irreducible goodness of a human being. And the God of our scripture does not merely tolerate us, God delights in us (Zephaniah 3:17).

Sproul’s erroneous view of humans as dead trees then misguides his understanding of God’s wrath.

Sproul is right that “the wrath that is to come” will cause great suffering and destruction; the New Testament testifies to such terror.
Sproul is flat wrong, though, about the source of that wrath.

When the New Testament speaks of God’s wrath, especially in the Book of Revelation, the calamity does not get pinned on God. No, the true maestro of the-coming-wrath is the Beast (see: Revelation 12:12, 12:17, 13:7, 17:6).

Satan.

God judges, yes—but the terror of that judgment is not God lashing out in rage. It is God giving evil over to itself. This is why John tells us that Jesus came, not to defeat us, and not to thwart God, but to defeat Satan (1 John 3:8).

Sproul never makes that connection. Shaped by his shame and self-loathing, he saw God as the threat, and he saw salvation as the rescue from that threatening God.

When we come to Scripture believing that we are nothing but rot, we will find a God who confirms that fear. And when we come believing that we are broken but beloved, we will find a God who heals rather than terrorizes.

Yes, sin is real, and, yes, salvation is necessary. But salvation is not God rescuing us from himself. It is God rescuing us from sin, from death, from Satan, and from the false stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Final Thoughts

It’s true, wherever a tree falls, there it will lie. And if the tree trunk fractures from its roots, that tree can only ride slowly down the course of rot and decay, until it finishes its forced deconstruction and returns to soil, or burns away to ash in a passing blaze.

A tree is wholly subject to the whims of circumstance, a mere slave to nature’s decree. It cannot protest, object, or fight back. It can only consent.

I don’t know what dark thoughts convinced Sproul of such sad powerlessness, but Sproul was wrong. You, me, and R.C. Sproul, we are not trees. We are not powerless to circumstance. We can protest and object. We can fight against all apparent fate. We carry God’s breath in our chest and can command our vessel toward a great variety of directions.

Really, that’s the whole point of Ecclesiastes: much of this ostensibly meaningless life storms onward, just outside of our control. But not everything lies out of reach. We have some agency. And how we use that little flicker of sayso, well, that’s also where we find meaning.

This is not to say that everything we do suddenly has meaning simply because we do it from this special nexus of agency. No, only some things matter.

So, which things can have meaning?

The answer to that question is exactly what Qohelet wants to teach us:

“Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commands.”
(Ecclesiastes 12:13)

Sproul and I both applaud Qohelet’s conclusion, but how we understand his conclusion differs greatly. As for fearing God, Sproul will understand that fear from the perspective of a fallen tree. His fear—which kept him up all night terrified—related to God’s wrath. Sproul’s fear was the powerless fear of an inert, useless, and rotten thing.

I don’t see humans as impotent, dead trees, so how I understand the fear of God looks nothing like Sproul’s understanding. For me, the fear of the Lord relates, not to God’s wrath, but to God’s love. The fear of God is not about my powerlessness, it’s about my power. It’s the heavy fear that I might squander the great power God has given me. Really, the fear of God is simply the ultimate form of the fear I carry with me in all my love relationships: that I will live unworthy of that love, that my life will not reflect the value of that love.

God, the one who loves me most, the one who suffered and died for me, represents the ultimate love that I might squander. For that reason, God’s love is the greatest source of relational fear. When I contemplate this loving God, who gave me breath, a mind, and existence itself, and when I consider my life, that’s when the fear of God surfaces. I fear I will mistreat that perfect love. And when I do mistreat it—when I sin—I tremble, not at God’s wrath, but at my own neglect of this most precious thing. I don’t think: what might God do to me in his wrath? No, I ask myself: Did you not appreciate having existence? Were you not grateful for your agency? You were given the breath of a God who loves you, and what did you do with it?

Sproul has no problem fearing God in his way—what else can an inert, useless, and rotten thing do but fear?

I don’t see how Sproul can affirm Qohelet’s second conclusion: Keep God’s commands.

Keeping God’s commands requires a great deal more than what an inert, useless, and rotten thing can do. Only a dynamic, empowered, and wise being with agency can set themselves to obeying God. And it’s down that path of obedience, of becoming the person God wants us to become, that we truly find the great meaning our hearts desire.

The post On Seeing More in Scripture Than What We Bring appeared first on Dan Kent.

All writing disseminates information—even bad writing. Good writing does something more.

Good writing teleports a person. The reader, yes, but also the writer.

What do I mean? When you read good writing, you sense the writer’s presence. You may be reading words written ten decades ago, by someone writing in Sleepy Eye Minnesota or Butternuts New York, yet that person seems so near, right in the room with you, as you consume their written thoughts.

How does one do that? How does one transport a sense of their human presence to the readers of their writing?

Fourteen months ago I embarked on a journey to learn this delightful sorcery. This quest sparked a surge of learning I’m still processing.

Only a certain kind of writing allows for this sort of conjuring. Here are two principles that have moved me closer to my goal:

1. No volunteer sentences.

For a reader to sense my presence in my writing, then my writing must be crafted carefully and intentionally by me. This means:

• No flow-state writing
• No clichés
• No jargon

The best bartenders serve sober. Likewise, the best writers write self-possessed, with intention and care. This means repudiating the romance of writing. All those pictures of geniuses at their typewriters and keyboards, lost in the flurry of ferocious output, riding a flow of prose erupting from some subterranean place within them—what do these images do to our expectations as writers?

I admit, of all the idols of writing nostalgia, the dream of flow enchanted me most. Fingers slapping keys like hail on tin roofs, words streaming down screens, page-after-page of easy prose, oh how wonderful that seems. To relax the critical mind, to open up that cognitive spigot, to not even know what you will write until you are writing it, what a thrill.

Yet, that’s exactly the problem with flow-state writing. Where does it come from? I used to get a kick out of writing things that surprised me. Now I see, if the prose surprises me, than I am not truly its source. And if I am not the source, whatever presence a reader might feel, it won’t be my presence.

So now when I write something unexpected, I look at it with suspicion. Maybe it’s a gift from my muse or maybe it’s a clue to a crime. Perhaps my muse has evicted me from my own writing.

My readers can only sense me in my writing to the extend that I am truly the source of my prose. They must come to trust that I’ve thought carefully about every part of every sentence, that I’ve thoughtfully considered every word, and the order of every thought.

Cliché threatens this entire project. Cliché makes writing easy, but inherently impersonal. By definition, cliché could be from anyone. As Verlyn Klinkenborg puts it, cliché is “the debris of someone else’s thinking.”

Oh, and when you write about something academics care about, look out! You are entering a jungle overrun with jargon, a wilderness of passwords and secret handshakes, where every sentence is policed for compliance to the meticulous linguistic expectations of the inner circle.

But then one day, with the sun bright and with birds chirping, you realize jargon is simply the peer-reviewed “debris of someone else’s thinking.” Academic jargon is simply double-stamped-and-triple-validated-cliché.

No wonder academic writing is such toil to read. Academics don’t write to delight or enlighten you. They write to please an institution.

2. Trust the reader.

The more your writing accommodates the needs of your reader the less your writing will reflect your unique self.

Over the years I’ve heard many publishers and editors coach writers to “write at the 6th grade level.”

They have good reasons for this. Writers left unsupervised can get drunk on their own writing. They tangle themselves in their own technical spaghetti, until reading their prose feels like chipping through a concrete wall with a toothpick.

And yet, “make it simple” isn’t the best solution. The diagnosis is right—technical language pummels readers’ brains in slow motion with a baseball bat—but the prescription is wrong—”dumb it down.”

I say this because some of the best writing I’ve ever read tackles profound and complicated subjects.

What makes writing excellent, even with a difficult subject, is not simplicity but clarity.

Clarity means carefully selecting the perfect word—not necessarily the simplest word—and putting it in the perfect place. Clarity means taking the care to focus on saying exactly what you want to say, and nothing more. That means being conscientious of exactly what your sentences say, what they don’t say, and what they imply. One problem with simple words is they often have the greatest breadth of meaning. So they might make a sentence simpler, but only by making it less clear.

Clarity also means doing away with all of the extraneous infrastructure we torture readers with. Topic sentences, summary sentences, transition sentences—good writing needs none of it. If you write with clarity, and you write conscientiously, the next sentence you read emerges naturally from the previous. Something in the first sentence begets the content of the next.

It makes me think of those little paintings at museums. I mean the ones that are about the size of an iPhone, but then also sit in a frame the size of a king sized mattress.

Good writing needs no decorative frames. Strive for clarity, write cohesively, and trust the reader to follow your thought.

My philosophy degree left me with a ferocious addiction to logical indicators:

In fact.
Indeed.
On the one hand.
On the other hand.
Therefore.
However.
In one respect.
Of course.
Thus.

Reading Verlyn Klinkenborg was like an intervention. Logical indicators, like the ones I’ve abused, “insist upon logic whether it exists or not.” He goes on to say that this type of writing turns out to be “little more than an obsession with transition and the scattering of rhetorical tics—overused, nearly meaningless words and phrases.”

The better I get at making arguments without these crutches, the more my writing feels uniquely mine.

The publishing industry will continue pumping out processed books, pre-chewed prose, writing with training wheels and guardrails.

Me, I like the idea of doing my very best to write with clarity, then trusting my reader to grasp my work. Trust the reader, then write so that they come to trust you. What do they trust you for? They trust that you care about each word and each sentence they read, that you invested your mind into every line written, that your observations are yours and not an echo from someone else. If you haven’t invested yourself in each part of your writing, why should they? And if you must write difficult things, they come to trust that your writing will reward them for whatever struggle they face.

Even though readers can look up words easier now than ever before, some readers will abandon your work at the first sight of a big word. They’ve been coddled and baby-talked for so long, now they’ve come to expect others to think for them, to process ideas for them, to extract life applications for them, and to make sure no idea will challenge them or create any discomfort for them.

Me, I’ve decided to let those readers go. Countless writers will appear, eager to goo-goo-ga-ga them back to numb comfort. A work will curate the right audience. I’d rather produce good writing for a smaller audience than writing that patronizes readers with simplified pseudo-thought.

It’s interesting. I’ve slowed my writing down a great deal as I’ve taken more care in my prose. Despite that, I’ve somehow produced more writing in the past year than I have in the previous five.

If you want to go deeper with some of these ideas, here are the books that have inspired me most:

“Several Short Sentences on Writing,” by: Verlyn Klinkenborg

“First You Write a Sentence,” by: Joe Moran.

The post Two Ways to Write More Human appeared first on Dan Kent.

David Ray Griffin casts a prophetic vision for process theism. In the clearing fog of the future, he sees it ascending the throne of contemporary theology—anointed by theologians, robed by scientists, and crowned by the zeitgeist.

For process theism to ascend to such heights, Griffin admits, it must first usurp older theological paradigms. He maintains great optimism about this. Why? Because process theism:

“…seems more adequate to the new interests of the era.”

Griffin thinks the future of process theism will look very much like the rise of Augustinian theology, which dominated Christian thought for a thousand years. Here comes the money quote:

“I have rather grandiose hopes for the future of process theology—hopes that would make it parallel in importance to the thought of Augustine… this of course sets an enormous challenge before process theologians: to provide a foundation for the post-modern world as effectively as Augustine did for the medieval world.”

He concludes his setup by summarizing his dream:

“As Augustine synthesized old and new so as to provide a theistic foundation for a most remarkable period, so I believe that process theology is in the best position today to synthesize old and new into a new theistic foundation for the post-modern world.”

Maybe he’s right, maybe process theology resonates best within our current zeitgeist, and maybe process theism really is the theological Cinderella of modern science—finally finding its glass slipper. I don’t know.

My alarms go off long before all of that. Something deeper about Griffin’s dream triggers my radar.

1. Should we look to Augustine as model for our next theological revolution?

Griffin credits Augustine’s success to his ability to “synthesize old and new into a new theistic foundation.”

Old and new what? Strangely, Griffin doesn’t specify.

Whatever he meant, I disagree that Augustine found success because of his ability to synthesize. Augustine did some of that, yes, and he was a great communicator. He was also intensely competitive, and many historians have noted that he was incapable of recognizing any view but his own.

He was also a shrewd politician—and by shrewd, I mean unfair. When Augustine brought charges against Pelagius, Pope Innocent agreed to hear them, inviting Pelagius to defend himself in person or in writing—against Augustine’s wishes. But Innocent died before the trial. Pope Zosimus wanted to respect Innocent’s wishes, but Augustine pressured the young pope to hold trial without allowing Pelagius a defense.

But beyond all that, Augustine found success because he was so dang good at working Christian faith into something compatible with secular government.

In other words, he worked theology into something “adequate to the new interests of the era.”

2. Should we build theology according to the “interests of the era”?

Griffin’s phrase jumped off the page and poked me in the eye. Make theology accommodate the interests of the era? Really? Is that what I want for myself? To make theology—the study of God—adequate to my own interests? This seems exactly backward.

Griffin doesn’t sound like a theologian—he sounds like a venture capitalist pitching a divine startup. He isn’t theology—he’s doing market analysis for a god-product.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but theology to me is about ascertaining God’s interests so that I might accommodate that.

Bad theology builds gods for consumers. But building God around our needs is exactly what it means to build an idol.

Good theology knows better. Good theology remembers we are “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36), we are lost in darkness, living in the land of the shadow of death (Matthew 4:16).

Our interests, and the interests of our era, cannot possibly free us—they can only reinforce where we already are. Exalting our needs cannot liberate us—it can only entrench us deeper onto our current wayward paths. We don’t need God to amplify our voices, we need God to interrupt our voices with his.

Make an argument for why process theology is true and I will listen. Advertise the process God as the heavenly product that will solve my modern problems, and I lose interest fast.

I can handle whatever curse befalls me if I know I’m on the path toward truth. I cannot even handle blessings if I’m on a path of untruth—no matter how many intellectual problems those untruths appear to solve.

The post On the Future of Process Theism: Thoughts on David Ray Griffin’s Enthusiastic Prophecy appeared first on Dan Kent.

Lenin kicked off his revolution with the “Decree on the Separation of Church from State and School from Church” (1918). He ended state support of churches, stripped them of their land, and revoked the civil rights of priests.

Stalin intensified this persecution, banning all religious publications and missionary activity, harassing and arresting clergy, and even executing them—or worse, sending them to concentration camps (gruesome facilities which inspired the Nazis), where they were starved and often worked to death.

It wasn’t church corruption which bothered Lenin or Stalin. Corrupt priests “were easily beaten.” Paul Johnson summarizes the true fear of the faithful as follows:

“The men Lenin really feared and hated, and later persecuted, were the saints. The purer the religion, the more dangerous. A devoted cleric, he argued, is far more influential than an egotistical and immoral one. The clergy most in need of suppression were… those who expressed solidarity with [the people].”

Lenin and Stalin—like all despots and tyrants—wanted their people to gain their sense of worth not from God but from the state. They, the leaders, wanted to be the sole determiners of each person’s value and worth, and to divvy all entitlements according to compliance.

Christianity begat a populace who carried in their hearts a basic sense of worth and dignity, and a corresponding sense of inherent rights. Such people resisted exploitation and thwarted Lenin’s revolution. The more a people cared about obeying God’s authority the less malleable they were to Lenin’s.

Lenin and Stalin choked the church in Russia, shrinking it down from over 50,000 churches in 1918 down to a mere hundred or so by the 1930s.

But then, in the middle of the night on June 22nd of 1941, Hitler attacked Russia. Up to that point, for decades, Soviet military leaders were promoted based on their ideological compliance and their history of reflexive obedience. Now, those same military leaders, were worthless without orders. One intercepted radio exchange recorded a Soviet commander imploring HQ for guidance: “We are being fired upon. What shall we do?”

Apparently they didn’t do anything. By noon the Germans destroyed 1,200 Soviet fighter planes.

Maybe it was this dangerous lack of agency (when compliance is forced, agency and initiative die). Or maybe it was the apathy of the populace in the face of war (a dictator can rule with fear, but cannot scare people into caring). Whatever it was, to mobilize national unity and to ignite a sense of patriotism, Stalin relaxed the crackdown on religion.

The Russian Orthodox Church reopened seminaries and many parishes. Religious imagery and religious language were used in patriotic propaganda for the first time since WWI.

The most powerful force in the world is the love of God, and militaries will always seek to exploit that love when it serves their purpose. I hope our “Secretary of War” has a sincere faith in God, and I hope he has given his allegiance to Jesus. It is God’s love, demonstrated perfectly in Christ, that will ultimately save the world—not guns or planes, ships or bombs.

In the meantime, it bothers me when sacraments sacred to my Christian faith are used out of context to rally people to war, or to manipulate the hearts of God’s people toward violence, or to associate the Lamb’s peaceful agenda with weapons of destruction.

Perhaps in this life war cannot be avoided. And maybe God can bring good out of war—I can’t help but feel gratitude that Hitler was destroyed by the military power of America and Britain. But I would never presume war, or violence, were somehow the plan of God, and certainly not the way of Christ.

Allegiance to Jesus is all or nothing. If we want to bring Jesus into the “Department of War,” great. But that means the department needs to look more Christlike, which also means it needs to look less war-like. Our videos will need to boast, not of power and rulership, but of meekness and servitude.

If that’s that’s the path Hegseth wants to go down, I’m here for it.

It’s not though, and we all know where his path leads—

Don’t we?

The post When Warmongers Invoke God appeared first on Dan Kent.

Writing is seduction. Stephen King said that.*

I like this metaphor because, whoa, have I beheld terrible attempts at seduction! I’ve worked at night clubs and fancy restaurants. I’ve heard pickup lines bad enough to flatten your beer. I’ve smelled colognes and perfumes so thick the fire alarms went off.

The gimmicks people use to turn each other on, well, I blush a deep-and-existential blush at the rampant folly of it all. If these amorous dunderheads ever want to find a true romantic partner, they have to lose the gimmicks and superficiality.

Much of the writing we read also rings with superficiality and gimmickry. It’s nobody’s fault. We learn many of these tricks in grade school; then in college we learn more. We learn ways to hook the reader, to transition the reader, and to compel the reader where we want them to go. Much of it, though, amounts to cheap cologne and bad pickup lines.

Me, I have faith in the written word. Good prose can do more than simply transfer ideas from an author to a reader. I think good prose can give a reader the author’s presence. Good writing gives readers a friend.

Yeah, writing gimmicks can be effective pragmatically—say, as toaster instructions, or as propaganda—but gimmicks always come at a cost. They sabotage the humanity good prose magically possesses.

A big part of getting at that magic is simply getting rid of gimmicks. While writing my next book, Surprising God ( @SurprisingGod ), I’ve tried to wrestle as many of the following rhetorical words and phrases—and all synonymous words—out of my prose as I can:

• clearly
• of course
• therefore
• thus
• it follows that
• hence
• consequently
• given that

Yuck!

Don’t get me wrong, I adore logically-sound writing. Too often, though, writers douse their prose with these terms to create the illusion of reasoning. Verlyn Klinkenborg helped me see this illusion. These words, he says, “insist upon logic whether it exists or not.”**

Writers use these words and phrases to inadvertently gaslight readers into thinking logical coherence exists even when it doesn’t. The writer prods the reader with these words, like a dominoes, to some rhetorical climax. As I’ve seen this gimmick more clearly, these words remind me of those bumpers in the gutters at the bowling alley, artificially protecting bowlers from failure by forcing the ball to hit the pins.

I’ve even come to see these words as red flags. When I see writers use them I suspect they do so as a compensation, or a mask, to cover underlying logical insecurity. Think of the many times you’ve read a writer exclaim “clearly” about something he’s about to say, only to find his clear thing isn’t that clear or obvious at all.
Logic-dominoes, as I’ve described them above, turn what could be personal testimony and human presence into impersonal coding:
input/output,
this-follows-that,
start-here-then-go-there,
and so forth.

They suck the humanity and hospitality out of our words and sentences.

Writing without these gimmicks has felt like learning how to write all over again—I’m a philosophy major, for gawd’s sake! How can I write without using syllogistic terms?

I can, though.

I’m a work in progress, for sure. It hasn’t been easy. But the payoffs have been great. For instance, without the crutch of dialectical-barricades, I find myself having to think more carefully about what I’m trying to say, which is always good. I also find my writing comes off less pushy and less brash, which is also good.

We’ll see how it all goes.
__ __ __
* “On Writing,” Stephen King, p.134.
** “Several Short Sentences About Writing,” Verlyn Klinkenborg, p.118.

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