In his book, The Only WIse God, William Lane Craig ponders the supernatural knowledge of Jesus. But when he gets down to the gritty work of describing that knowledge, he ends up with something rather mundane. Dan argues that true supernatural knowledge looks far greater than what Craig’s theology allows. It looks, rather, unfathomable (as Isaiah says in 40:28) and without limit (as the Psalmist says in 147:5). Craig’s understanding of God’s knowledge is totally limited and easily fathomable. 

Episode 50
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Listen on Spotify:

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YouTube Channel: Surprising God

Dan’s books:
Confident Humility
The Training of KX12

Send Questions To:

Twitter: @SurprisingGod
Facebook: SurprisingGod
Twitter: @thatdankent

The post What Might True Supernatural Knowledge Look Like? appeared first on Dan Kent.

In Bobby Jamieson’s excellent book, “Everything is Never Enough,” Jamieson argues that humans are not autonomous because they depend on creation. Since people depend on forces outside themselves for survival, and because they did not create themselves and cannot sustain themselves, Jamieson says people are not their own. But the thesis of his book is that life is a gift from God. Are these two claims compatible? Dan says no. 

Link to mentioned sermon: Escaping Babylon

Episode 49
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Listen on Spotify:

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YouTube Channel: Surprising God

Dan’s books:
Confident Humility
The Training of KX12

Send Questions To:

Twitter: @SurprisingGod
Facebook: SurprisingGod
Twitter: @thatdankent

The post Who Told You that You were Autonomous? appeared first on Dan Kent.

People will try to make free will compatible with a whole host of things that, on the face of it, seem determined. Folks will try to make free will compatible with philosophical materialism (all that exists are matter and energy), a settled future (Arminianism), and God’s meticulous decree (Calvinism). But our concepts have consequences, and in this episode Dan Kent considers a strange consequence of Calvinist forms of compatibilism. 

Episode 48
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Listen on Spotify:

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YouTube Channel: Surprising God

Dan’s books:
Confident Humility
The Training of KX12

Send Questions To:

Twitter: @SurprisingGod
Facebook: SurprisingGod
Twitter: @thatdankent

The post A Strange Consequence of Compatibilism appeared first on Dan Kent.

William Lane Craig beautifully describes the vertigo experienced when contemplating determinism. Dan Kent asks whether conteplating free will might create an obverse vertigo. 

Episode 47
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Listen on Spotify:

__ __ __

YouTube Channel: Surprising God

Dan’s books:
Confident Humility
The Training of KX12

Send Questions To:

Twitter: @SurprisingGod
Facebook: SurprisingGod
Twitter: @thatdankent

The post My Favorite William Lane Craig Quote Against Determinism appeared first on Dan Kent.

Good sentences give you fodder for contemplation.

I’ve come to adore the writing of Cormac McCarthy this past year. Right now I’m reading “All the Pretty Horses” and I want to share a sentence from that book.

The Context

John Grady and his pal, Rawlins, were preparing to sleep under the stars after a long day breaking wild horses. Oh, also, earlier that morning, John Grady had his first encounter with the daughter of Don Hector, the proprietor of the hacienda.

McCarthy has Grady and Rawlins laying on the earth next to a dying fire, the encounter with Hector’s daughter still ringing in the background of Grady’s mind. Then McCarthy drops this gem:

When I find good sentences like this, sentences that cast a spell on me, I cannot help but contemplate their tricks—hoping I might one day employ those tricks within sentences of my own.

Structure

This sentence moves like a train.
That first clause is the engine, setting the scene.
This is followed by several more independent clauses.
Then, an absolute phrase as the caboose.

These clauses are paratactic, meaning each clause is simply lassoed into the herd, having no hierarchical priority. This is why “and” appears so often throughout the sentence.

If it were hypotactic, you would’ve found many ifs and thens, sinces, or althoughs, peppered throughout, clicking each clause firmly into an assigned slot.

The paratactic style allows the momentum of the sentence to happen in a subterranean way. A momentum of “meaning” accumulates, not simply a rhetorical momentum of content.

Watch how Grady changes in this sentence. He first passively watches nature. Then he reaches out and touches it. Then he presses against it. Finally, he surrenders himself to it.

But what does it mean to surrender to nature?

Not much.

McCarthy wants us to see that Grady is surrendering himself to something else. But what?

We find the answer in the following sentences:

The universe was not the bigger thing Grady surrendered to.

It was love.

John Grady lay on the earth and surrendered his heart to Alejandra.

Now, with both sides of this sentence in mind—the hard day of breaking horses and Grady’s acquiescence to love—we can better see the wonderful work these clauses do in this delicious sentence.

Clause 1

“The fire had burned to coals”

McCarthy begins in the past perfect tense: “had burned.”

Why not “was burning,” or, “burned”?

McCarthy chose “had burned” to capture a sense of dying down, but not totally. It had not yet burned down “to ashes”—something cold and dead.

What was left still had heat, but a controllable heat. Those reckless flames were now gone.

What happened to the fire is what happened to Grady. Maybe the long day of wrestling down horses burned off Grady’s own uncontrollable passions—and his defenses.

Whatever the case, something intransitive happened to both the fire and Grady’s heart. In burning one thing away, something different was allowed to glow.

Clause 2

“he lay looking up at the stars in their places and the hot belt of matter that ran the chord of the dark vault overhead.”

McCarthy chose the simple past tense “lay” then fuses that right away to Grady’s “looking up.” In doing this, McCarthy collapses posture and perception into a single gesture. Grady isn’t lying down and *then* looking up. No, the looking is part of the recline.

Grady’s entire body moves into an act of attention, and he takes in the moment with his whole self. Whatever epiphany is working within Grady is something total.

Then, comes what Grady looks at. Not just “the stars,” but “the stars in their places.” What Grady sees is not arbitrary. It’s meant to be. The sky is ordered, and things are where they belong. In looking at the stars, Grady sees something divine. He sees a cosmos with intention.

Is love part of this order?
Does his heart, too, have a place to belong in this cosmos?

Then, “the hot belt of matter that ran the chord of the dark vault overhead.” This is the Milky Way, but also something more. It’s the cold realm engulfing the warmth of his newborn love, the darkness threatening to swallow that love’s light. He sees not merely space but a “vault,” a place to be either locked away for safe keeping, or to be trapped within.

“Belt of matter” is almost scientific, but also something as casual as a piece of clothing.

Then, “ran the chord,” technically, is geometric, a chord being the straight line connecting two points on a curve. But it also conjures up something musical, a dyadic chord being a harmony between two separate notes, like love itself.

Might Alejandra free Grady from his cold, dark vault?
Might Alejandra and Grady make music together?

Clause 3

“he put his hands on the ground at either side of him and pressed them against the earth.”

In my train image I broke this clause in two. But I analyze them here as one because they feel like a single motion.

After passively observing the order of the cosmos, Grady now acts. He puts his hands on the ground at his sides. He no longer lies there, but now braces himself to that spot.

It’s not the order of the cosmos for which he must brace himself, it is the shifting of his heart. He responds to these elemental realities, now, by pressing against them.

“Against” is an interesting word. You press against something that resists, something that pushes back.

Earth does not press back.

But love does.

Clause 4

“and in that coldly burning canopy of black he slowly turned dead center to the world”

Here Grady’s transformation completes, all while Grady presses against the dirt—an animalistic gesture, a humble posture. He has given himself over to something basic in the order of things; he has succumbed to love.

Having gone “dead,” he no longer resists. He is dead, not just to the prairie, or to the Hacienda, or to Mexico, but “to the world.” He is “dead center,” or, precisely where he must be. The “slowly” turning process doing its divine work in him has now finished.

Life remains cold and dark, but there is a heat burning, and the “vault” has now softened to a “canopy,” and Grady has now shifted to the place he must be: right there in that spot, in the grand scheme of things.

Clause 5: The Absolute Phrase

“all of it taut and trembling and moving enormous and alive under his hands.”

This final absolute phrase gathers up all the clauses into a single, undifferentiated whole.

Now, at the end, that coldness, that blackness, that vault, that deadness, it’s all been pushed away by something “enormous” moving beneath him, carrying him, something “alive” that he might now touch with his hands.

Final Thoughts

The closest thing I have to a writing mentor would be Verlyn Klinkenborg. Of the many lessons I’ve learned from Verlyn, McCarthy excels at one: write with implication.

Says Klinkenborg:

“Implication should be one of your goals. Implication is almost nonexistent in the prose that surrounds you . . . It was nonexistent in the way you were taught to write. That means you don’t know how to use one of a writer’s most important tools: the ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow, the ability to speak to the reader in silence.”

McCarthy is a master of implication. His sentences thump along in dull rhythms, but ring with an uncanny actuality that leaves you knowing more than the words seem to allow.

• • •

Thanks for reading my reflections on this great sentence.

I love breaking down good writing like this. Let me know if you enjoy this sort of thing, too.

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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.

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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.

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