As I write this, it looks clear that Proposal 3 has passed in the state of Michigan, and that abortion is now considered a constitutional right. I have tried to back away from speaking about politics because there are more important things to talk about, and when I do speak up, I often choose to critique my own movement rather than preach to the choir and raise the banner. I don’t want to win. I want to get at what is true and good together.

But today I want to why it is that so many people see this as a horrifying defeat while at the same time so many more see this as a glorious victory. How can one event be interpreted in such vastly different ways?

Of course, I’ve seen the easy answer online: the other side is pure evil. “They” are full of hate. “They” just want to murder babies. “They” just want to enslave women. No doubt some do, but I hope you, dear reader, are wise enough to know such extreme positions don’t represent the whole group.

So if “they” aren’t pure evil, while else would they disagree with me? The next step is to say they are acting irrationally for one reason or another. Perhaps “they” are driven by an unconscious bias or hatred; some deeper inner drive is overriding their sense of good judgment. Maybe it’s the desire for sex, the desire for freedom, the desire for control, or some kind of homophobia or misogyny or racism. These, if true, may be forgiven to some degree, because we are complex people and sometimes unaddressed issues can throw anyone off course. With a little counseling, a little reflection, a little education, maybe we could overcome some of these hidden drivers.

Less forgivable is the idea that their irrationality is caused by an obstacle not from within but from without. Perhaps “they” have been brainwashed by some organization. Whether it’s the church, the state, the family, some corporation, some NPO, we worry that someone in power is lying to the people and manipulating them. This is less forgivable. In fact, the idea fills us with rage. I am informed! You are a pawn! My team is trustworthy, but yours is destroying my country! How dare they do this, and how dare you let them.

No doubt these are factors, too. We live in a marketplace of influence and attention, and there are some who want influence badly enough to do anything for attention. They will lie if lying gets them more influence. They will manipulate if they think it will benefit them. But how do you know who is playing this game and who is actually after the truth? House used to say “everybody lies.” Is the solution to trust no one? This only hastens the breakdown of society. We can’t live like that.

It is possible everyone is bent on power over principle. But I don’t believe we’re there yet. I think there are people of goodwill who want to raise healthy families, who want to do right by their neighbors, who want to leave to their children a society that is in some way better than the one they inherited. I think that kind of person is still the majority in America. I am convinced that we are not divided by hate or lies, although the haters and liars do benefit from our division. I am convinced we are divided by different beliefs about what it means to be good, and different beliefs about what is true.

So I submit that, despite there being some evil people, some tainted by irrational drives, and some hoodwinked by powerful organizations, we primarily interpret this event in two opposite ways because it seems rational to us. It fits with what we believe about what is true and good. We discern who to trust based on our pre-existing beliefs. We discern what is rational and what is irrational, or what is pure evil and what is accidental, based on our pre-existing beliefs.

And so while many will either lament or celebrate today’s outcome, I lament the underlying reality. I lament that a country full of people who want to do the right thing are so fractured in their understanding of what the right thing is.

Some no doubt believe that the rift has grown too wide, that there is no going back. I pray that this is not true. In fact, I have staked my career on the opposite of this. The reason that I applied myself to the study of philosophy and theology is because I believe it’s possible to discover the truth, and even to persuade one another of the truth. I don’t believe we are locked in our own minds with our own prejudices, helpless to change. I believe that we can come to see truths we would not initially accept. I believe we can grown in our ability to think well, to identify errors, and to help one another do the same.

In some ways it feels silly to have to write that. I have heard grown men tell me to my face that people become who they are are kids and when they are adults, they can’t change. And perhaps it is harder, sure, but it is patently false. We have evidence of this all around us, all throughout history, all throughout literature. Don’t buy the lie that says if you disagree with someone today, you will always disagree for the rest of your lives.

There is a more spiritual version of this argument that I hear as well. It says that people who don’t believe are trapped in their unbelief, and only people who do believe can see the truth. And since these beliefs are foundational to all others, you can never persuade someone who isn’t a believer about anything substantive, and you shouldn’t bother trying. This is a warped doctrine you will not find in the Bible. Don’t believe it.

How can I say this? Easy. We already share a great many beliefs in common. We already have many things in common that we take for granted. We learn to emphasize and brood over our differences, and at a more fundamental level we tend to find our identity in our uniqueness, but the reality is we share much in common, even if it’s only the capacity to emphasize, brood, and be unique. Of course, I believe it’s more than that.

Not only do we already have things in common, but we are already changing. We have changed over the past 10 years, and before that we had changed over the previous 30 years, and so on. Change is happening in the externals and in our fundamental values. And if they can change in one direction, they can change in another.

So if we have some values in common and have demonstrated an ability to change, then it’s not only possible but necessary to try and build on our commonality and change in productive ways.

Some on both sides want to see groups or even government dismantled. The problem with overthrowing the old culture is that the first act of the new culture is destructive. It is not a neutral action or merely an outward facing action, but it is an action that changes us. We become a culture of destruction. Again, we cannot live that way. We need a more constructive approach.

What blocks us first is fear. We are afraid that whoever we are meeting with won’t be honest, will be manipulative, or a pawn of someone else’s manipulation. We need to rebuild trust, which I am told comes through going through difficult times together and finding that we have each other’s backs in a crisis. The past decade has not been good for this either, because whether the issue is race or economy or public health, so many of us feel like we have been through the crisis and found others have let us down. That is a real challenge. I can only hope that we will give each other another chance.

And this brings me to my final point: how do we come to know who was wrong so that we can apologize and reconcile? If it’s true, as I have argued, that there are a great many people of goodwill on both sides, and that our disagreement is not over desiring the truth and doing what is good but rather over what is true and what is good, then we confront again the real task, and it is monumental: we have to find some way of talking about what is true and good constructively. We have to find some way of reexamining our own beliefs to see where they can be corrected and trusting that others will, too.

Because, and this is crucial, to be this divided can only mean one of two things at a fundamental level. For any single conviction where we disagree, either one side is right and the other is wrong, or the disagreement stems from a paradox that needs to be addressed. For example, if I say abortion is always wrong and you say abortion is sometimes right, we are faced with a contradiction. We cannot both be right, at least not in the same sense. We would either have to explore whether there is some imprecision in what we are saying and nuance our positions until we found how they fit together, or, if we find we face a true contradiction, we need to determine which stance is wrong. To do that we need a shared way of exploring our beliefs and some shared set of criteria that identifies what is true.

What I am describing is nothing new. In fact, it is very, very old. There are some who want to give up this process, who see this process as itself part of the problem. But I tend to think that most of us attempt to do something like this but overestimate our abilities and actually practice something far less rigorous and far sloppier.

Is it possible to examine our beliefs and values, to work toward consensus, and to believe the best about each other? I believe it is. The problem is (1) it is hard work, (2) we are too distracted, and (3) simply winning feels like enough. But if my victory is at the expense of half the country, it is a hollow victory. That was true for the end of Roe v. Wade, and it is true again today for those who supported Prop 3 in Michigan.

So I will continue to look for ways to test and refine my beliefs, and for ways to help you do the same. I will try to get better at explaining what I think is true and good and why, and inviting you to discuss that with me. But I call on all people of goodwill to believe the best about the people you disagree with. Some of them are liars and haters; I am not denying that. But please do whatever you can to make sure the people you are connected to get the benefit of the doubt.

It is probably too late for simple solutions, but I hope things will not have to get any worse before we take seriously our responsibility to build a society together rather than tear one apart together.

In exploring Romanticism, I expected to find some key seeds of thought at the root of the movement, things that contrasted with Rationalism. I was not disappointed.

I have taught for years on Descartes’ famous statement, later summarized as “I think, therefore I am.” In case you are unfamiliar, Descartes was a French philosopher/mathematician who was trying to bring about an end to the religious strife in his day by trying to discover truth that would unite, truth that could not be doubted. Not a bad wish. But his method was all wrong: first of all, because he tried to discover this truth by reason alone, shutting out the world of sense experience and inherited traditions. Second, because he opted to search through doubt. His conclusion was that he could find a way to doubt everything except the act of doubting itself. This, he reasoned, was a form of thinking, which must be done by a thinking thing, which must be me! Thus, he “proved” to himself the truth of his existence beyond all possibility of doubt. One perhaps unintended side-effect was the way it cast man as essentially a thinking thing. What am I? A reasoner.

It turned out proving anything else was harder than Descartes thought, which drew attention to the problem of how you know your perceptions are related to reality. This is the turn to the subject, where we focus on the subjective (mind dependent) in hopes of finding a way back to the real world “out there.”

Of course, rationalism as a movement didn’t get stuck in this subjectivity problem. It was too busy making sense of the universe through deduction and induction, through math and experimentation. But it would create other problems that I won’t get into in any depth today. Suffice it to say that, according to Isaiah Berlin, rationalism applied as a worldview was too much for some to bear, and so reactions percolated and coalesced until Romanticism was born.

I’m not able to tell that story yet. What I want to focus on is this: Romanticism as a counter-movement had its own moment like Descartes, with similar ripple effects. The German philosopher Fichte asserted, according to Berlin, “You become aware of the self only when there is some kind of resistance. . . . In the resistance emerged the self and the not-self” (Berlin 108, 109). In other words, “I resist, therefore I am.” I noticed it right away, and Berlin himself circled back to make this very point a few pages later, “I will, therefore I am.”

I have long been fascinated by the relationship between faith and reason, and in some ways this is a part of this larger conversation, the relationship between will and reason. Some scholars think European civilization shifted into modernity because of new teachings about God that placed His will above His reason and even His goodness (see Theological Origins of Modernity by Gillespie). God could never bind Himself by a promise because He is radically free. This is the “voluntarist” (from the Latin for will) picture of God, and the theory is that such a God could not act as the basis for knowledge about reality, so mankind turned to nature looking for something more stable. (I am truncating the argument considerably, but I hope not distorting it too badly.)

If so, it should be of no surprise that this voluntarist conception of God would, through one change and influence after another, result in something of a voluntarist conception of self. If my identity is in my will, especially as an expression of resistance toward the world and its order, then I am going to be encouraged to look inside to find myself, to insist on self expression as a necessary aspect of life, and ultimately to reject any categories that are foisted upon me. This is more or less the picture painted in Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, although he highlights other, later contributors.

Supposing all this is true, then is it possible the same corrective I was taught about Descartes and rationalist skepticism could address Fichte and voluntarist individualism?

Anselm said, quoting Augustine, that “unless I believe, I shall not understand.” He saw his reasoning abilities and overall relationship to truth as dependent on believing rightly, although whether or not he saw himself as a “believing thing,” I cannot say for sure, but that seems unlikely.

Augustine also, with Luther after him, famously emphasized his inability to will correctly apart from God’s work. But this cannot be recast so simply as “Unless I believe, I shall not will [what is good].” Believing itself is usually seen as an act of the will, or at least closely bound up with it. But to some degree this is what we must say; faith is the first act of the will (or among them; I don’t want to be pedantic here) that makes possible the healing of the will. How this first act of faith comes about is a mystery debated over for centuries, but Western Christians are usually united in saying man is incapable apart from some help from God (see Second Council of Orange).

For my part, whichever thread we pull, whether reason or faith or will or any other human faculty, (e.g., conscience, intuition, sense experience, etc.), it will always lead us back to God. He existed first. He created us. He is intimately involved in all of reality. Before man’s reason was God’s wisdom, before man’s will was God’s “let there be.”

The fundamental principle of identity is I AM. And, crucially, that “I” is not me.

(Note: I usually try to write things that I think might benefit others, but this post is shaping up to be a little more personal, self-indulgent, and reflective. If that’s not interesting to you, don’t tell me, as I shall then have to pretend not to know you.)

I’ve been exploring some new trails lately and today I would like to try writing about them. This is in part to collect my thoughts, but also to combat the ever-present urge to wait until you have something better to say.

When trying to land on a specialization, venturing someplace new is a risky proposition. Everything is unfamiliar, which is exciting, but you can’t yet tell what is important and what isn’t. Of course, there are some things fresh eyes appreciate that old eyes have come to take for granted, but in academia, you have to wait there and be patient, take it all in and out and in again.

So I’ve chosen some new trails that run through my hometown. It’s a familiar place seen through new vantage points. Time will tell if it’s the place to settle down or another stop on the way.

I’ve been dabbling in history, you see. History! After majoring in English and theology and philosophy, minoring in film and meddling in music. History, where one Ford thing after another warns away good Baptists and where unplanned obsolescence is made to bow to the latest iPhone Galaxy.

I have always loved systematic theology, and for a time I believed (because I was so taught) the best theology was indistinguishable from philosophy. And while I do defend reason and believe in a good argument and find joy in programming and debugging, I have come to believe that to do that in the academy means contributing to secular scholarship. And I don’t at all enjoy trying to fashion arguments that do not follow from Christian premises or wading shoulder deep into analytic proofs. (Besides, my brother has already claimed the handle “Philosophy Vajda,” so I am too late. I must embrace another identity.)

While systematic theology is my passion, I find it hard to locate a scholarly grounding there. It seems to me that most of theology is either philosophy, history, sociology, or interpretation, but related to theological interests in some way or another. One of my mentors assures me that systematic theology is real and scholarly and essentially means citing the scholars in other disciplines. I am open to that idea, but for now I am unsure. I suspect that if I want to contribute scholarship that exists not just for my denomination or tribe and instead builds on the great city to which all scholars strive to contribute, I must embrace to some degree or another one of these feeder disciplines. If so, history is the obvious choice.

I won’t go into all the personal reasons why, but suffice it to say, history has always been a part of my life, always an interest; it is what I most often read for fun, it is an element in much of my favorite fiction, it is an essential framework for understanding the world. In fact, (this anecdote I will share), while on staff at Cornerstone, I took the StrengthsFinder survey and was appalled to find “Context” was my number one strength. It might as well have said my greatest strength was “walking without tripping” or “breathing with astonishing effortlessness.” Over time I came to see that “context” is so basic to me I was completely unaware of another way to view the world.

But enough of all that. History is a direction, not a destination. I have been poking around a corner of history that is new and old to me. Growing up I was immersed in 20th century history, and it still fascinates me. But over time I came to see that the seeds for the 20th century were planted in the 19th (that is, the 1800s, for you practical types). So I have been dabbling in that century for many years now, mostly in audiobooks and Great Courses, but occasionally in books, too. Marsden’s first edition of The Soul of the University and Noll’s Princeton Theologians, for example.

Right now, I am poking around the early parts. I am learning about the roots of liberalism and their connection with Romanticism, and here’s where things get really wild for me. Nearly to the degree that history is in my blood, Romanticism is, too. Only toward the end of my education at DTS did I become aware that it was its own theological movement, and that its fingerprints were all over my life. I knew Modernity as rationalism, and Postmodernity as a kind of post-rationalism. I had heard about German Higher Criticism and Darwinism and fundamentalism and so on. I knew my denominations. I knew my doctrines. But Romanticism was always talked about under other names, or perhaps only through nearby relations like Pietism, Scottish Common Sense, Idealism, and so on. This really landed on my radar as an area worth exploring after reading Carl Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

So on the one hand, I am curious, and that is always a good sign. I also feel a burden to understand liberalism, postmodernism, and progressivism, and I have never been able to shake that burden. I’m not interesting in winning some apologetic debate; I wish to find the truth, not defeat an opponent. But if I can learn something from these traditions and perhaps bring to light things that could bring healing to the church, that would be an incredible priviledge.

But one last connection. Did I mention I majored in English? In every elective where I had the choice, I focused on 19th and 20th century literature. Until now, that education was preparation for the mind in general, but it has not proved all that useful in theological conversations. So studying the roots and effects of Romanticism puts me in a position to re-engage with my undergraduate work. This is thrilling to me for many reasons, not least of which is that I chose these studies because I enjoyed them and not because I planned to get anything professionally advantageous out of them. I have since been haunted by the need to choose the thing that will make my efforts “count” in some way, (see above), and that always casts a bit of doubt over whether there is anything deeper there to ground the labor. I look forward to exploring further whether there is something there in the natural growth that can feed the more structured enterprise.

Goodness. I sat down with the hopes of sharing what I had been reading about the Romantics, but it’s turned out to be all prelude instead. I promise to come back to it, though I know not when.

I was provoked in my spirit the other day by some tweets from a person I only began following this year. Sometimes it is important to name names, but I’m not ready to do that at this stage. I appreciate some of what he has to say, and he was recommended by a friend from church. I even have a book he co-authored sitting in my stack of books to be read in the near future.

So being new to him, I don’t know if this is his thing or if he’s gone off on a tangent, but there is a reason I don’t think it matters that you know who he is: he represents a way of thinking that has been around evangelicalism for longer than I’ve been alive. So I mean to critique the movement and the idea, not the man.

But what is this strange yet familiar teaching, Josh?

It’s about who church is for.

I almost went on a nostalgic rabbit trail here, but I stopped myself, for you. The point I was going to make stands on its own: I have grown up in churches that embraced change and churches that resisted change, and I am a big fan of the former. But with one caveat: what you change and what stays the same makes all the difference in the world.

I was once someone who pushed for change in one of those resistant churches. I saw modern rock instruments as neutral tools, not the spiritual poison many decried. I saw modern translations as making God’s words more accessible, and how could that be a bad thing? Choirs, pews, hymnals, stained glass—none of it sacred. Just one strategy or another.

What mattered above all else is this: what are we trying to do here?

I bought the idea that church should be welcome to visitors, and that sermons should be evangelistic, and that the Sunday morning experience should be geared around the kind of thing you could invite your friend to, because the pastor was better at sharing the Gospel than the rest of us. I had nothing against old things, per se, but I wanted to see improvement. I wanted to cast off anything that hindered.

But these impulses have changed over the years. Perhaps in part due to other doctrines learned in seminary, learning to appreciate the local church, membership, communion, baptism, etc. I came to appreciate not the value of old things in and of themselves but the possibility that I had not fully reflected on their wisdom. It was not history that won me over but philosophy, teaching me that every object and every image and every practice is part of a network of beliefs. There are no neutral tools.

I’ll save the implications of that thought for another time, but that wasn’t what effected the big change. Seminary didn’t directly change my mind. Instead, I found myself in another church that was generally resistant to change, and it made me reflect on the doctrines behind that. I had never really come back to that main question: what are we trying to do here? Or better yet, what should we be trying to do here?

Sure, there are the big categories of worship, teaching, evangelism, service, and fellowship. (If I recall, that version came through Rick Warren.) I still find this list helpful. But it’s missing a crucial element: who is the Sunday morning service for?

So I began, as any good Baptist would, looking at Scripture. I know the church is the people of God, not the building, so the local church meeting seems to be the local people-of-God meeting. So far, so good. In Acts, we see the apostles going out into the synagogues, the marketplaces, etc. to share the news about Jesus, and people were being invited back to their gatherings. None of the formal elements we recognize in church yet, but obviously a bunch of new people are going to change the dynamics of the meeting.

And there’s a lot of freedom in Scripture about how we can organize a church meeting; there is nothing that prescribes the size of the building, the order of service, the relative emphasis on different aspects. So maybe this is one of those issues? Some churches are inward focused and some are outward focused and we all have our strengths, amen.

But wait. When Jesus recommissions Peter at the end of John’s Gospel, what is His charge? “Feed my sheep.” This is the heart of pastoral ministry as distinct from other kinds of ministry, that the leaders of the church take up Jesus’s work of caring for believers needs. The work of the ministry belongs to all the saints (Eph 4) but pastoring is a unique ministry from one saint to another. It is caretaking.

This doesn’t in and of itself settle all the questions. But it does explain why it bothers me so much when people say things like this: “Church leaders, you need to decide who you’re going to lose: the people in your community who don’t know the love of Christ, or the church member who thinks the church revolves around him (or her).”

I want to read this charitably. I really hope the author meant being willing to offend members who don’t care about other people and refuse to do the minimum to reach them. But I fear some will take it a different way, and indeed some do teach it a different way.

Or then there’s this quote: “The gap between how quickly you change and how quickly things change is called irrelevance. The bigger the gap, the more irrelevant you become.” I’m struggling to find a charitable reading here. As though relevance were a virtue the church needs to cultivate, a fruit of the Spirit that comes from abiding in Christ.

What I fear is this: creating an experience for unbelievers and calling that “church.”

I fear a pastor who would say to his flock “you’re already saved, so get out of my way! I have to go find new sheep!” Presumably, once they are saved, they can get out of the way, too.

I fear a false dichotomy imagined between evangelism and discipleship. Either we evangelize, or we don’t. Either it’s for unbelievers or it’s for you stubborn insiders.

Church is not an experience. It’s a family. When you invite an unbeliever to church, it is not like inviting a friend to go to a restaurant with you; it’s like inviting a friend over for dinner. You don’t say “this is our home, stay out!” You practice hospitality. You make them feel welcome. But it’s still your house, for your family, with your awkward pictures on the wall, your grandma’s old blanket in the corner, and the smell of the foods you cook the most lingering in the air. You’re inviting people to your community, your family, your Heavenly Father.

The pastor on the lookout for unbelievers to add to the flock might say, “look at Jesus! He left the 99 to find the one.” Yes, but who is the one and where did He leave the 99? Isn’t the one a family member who has lost their way, someone perhaps struggling with doubt or burdened by sin or wrecked by life’s circumstances? Isn’t it someone who is already an insider, a believer, who needs help? And in leaving the 99 did He expose them to hunger and danger? No, the good shepherd leads His sheep into fertile pastures and will not leave them unprotected. Jesus does not advocate abandoning the 99. He doesn’t bring the 99 with Him into danger where the one lost sheep had wandered.

This is not either/or. If your vision of the one lost is the person who needs to hear the good news of Jesus Christ, and reaching him or her means mistreating those who are already saved, what kind of good news do your actions preach? Come over here with the rest, so I can leave you, too.

No, “feed my sheep” means don’t let the desire for a bigger flock cause you to overlook the flock you have. Pastor, Jesus has already entrusted these people to you! Don’t let them go hungry in a quest to find the ones that have not yet been entrusted to you.

My pastor in Dallas loved to tell the story of a church member who came to him with a complaint about the way they did something there. Todd would say, “I’m so sorry. No, really, I’m sorry. Would you please forgive me? I’m so, so sorry for whatever I did that gave you the impression that church is about you.” Powerful words. And there is an important truth behind them: just as the family does not revolve around the whims of the individual, so we should guard against trying to make the church fit all of our desires, our preferences, our conveniences. We are in this together. Our job is not to cater to the squeaky wheels.

But nevertheless, I disagree with the words at face value: it’s not exactly right to say that church isn’t about you; you are the church! Again, with the analogy of family: if I say to my brother “family isn’t about you,” I risk communicating or even believing that he doesn’t belong. That’s baloney.

Church shouldn’t revolve around you, but you belong here.

I believe churches should be welcome and hospitable to unbelievers. I believe we should translate our family practices and lingo so that everyone can understand. I believe we shouldn’t set up unnecessary obstacles in the way of our guests. But I also believe church is a family, that it is a place where only brothers and sisters can truly belong, and that the health of the family should be a higher priority than growing the family.

If someone is standing in the way of the change you want to make, especially if that change is something you believe is an obstacle to hospitality, the easy thing is to alienate that sister or brother. But the right thing to do is feed them. Disciple them. Invest in their maturity. And be open to the possibility that the change you want may not be the change your family needs.

I don’t have the platform of the person I’m quoting, and I don’t have my own church to pastor, but I am a student of the Word. “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10). Don’t give in to the false dichotomy that says you must either cater to the whims of insiders or cater to the whims of outsiders. Invest in a healthy family, practice hospitality, and be amazed at how the two work together.