Round of applause for yourself. If you are reading this, you are a part of the minority these days.
A 2016 study conducted by Columbia University found that 59% of the links shared on social media weren’t ever clicked by the person who shared them. That means almost 60% of the articles your friends recommended to you, they never read.
Which, in case you aren’t getting it by now, explains the title of this article and the applause for having made it this far.
The truth is, most of us have been guilty of it. A clever or controversial headline scrolls into view, and there you go clicking like and sharing with no more than a passing chuckle or nod of affirmation. A thousand words lay behind that headline, you read none of them. Maybe you opened the article—scrolled through to skim the subheadlines; maybe you actually read some of it; but the majority of the articles shared on your newsfeed aren’t being read at all.
Welcome to the world of headlines—and you thought trying to say something profound with just 140 characters was a challenge. Insights now come compressed into a “4-simple steps” sound bite.
The Subtle Art of Self-Manipulation
Writing a good headline is a richly rewarded art/science. Copywriters have always known it, but these days its the whole game. Just do a google search for “headlines that convert.” There are online headline generators to help increase your chances of getting shared.
One of the key success metrics for most content creators is social engagement. A writer may spend days crafting their argument and fact-checking their sources, but writers know the headline is what counts. Often, the writer isn’t even writing their own headlines. An editor with enough distance from the actual work is better positioned to offer a title that will ensure it gets the best engagement.
Social engagement matters. Social networks want to surface content that gets engagement. If you like it, and your friends like it, Facebook and Twitter are far more willing to keep exposing the content to friends down the line. And an insider hunch, Facebook and Twitter make more money through advertising when you don’t click through to an article, but like, share, and keep scrolling on their platform.
Put it all together, 59% of sharers base their decision on a featured image and a headline—that’s ground for their social approval and the public endorsement of an idea. Content creators keep refining their headlines hoping for a viral moment. Platforms keep promoting the headlines earning the engagement. And after thousands of impressions and hundreds of shares, maybe a handful of people actually read the whole article.
Opinions Easily Shared
The fast-paced nature of our social liking—requiring only our thumb—allows us to offer an opinion without the taxing responsibility of actually forming one. How many times have you liked a post before considering if you really do in fact like it?
What motivates this mindless sharing? Self-definition. A big part of our sharing is defining ourselves and receiving social confirmation of our identity. We share headlines to position ourselves. Far easier than having to read is leading others to believe you have read. A New York Time study found that 68% of people share content to give others a better sense of who they are. A quick headline share is an easy vehicle for articulating your persona of opinions.
A generation ago, most opinions reached only as far as the local diner’s morning coffee gossip. You might have an opinion, but there weren’t very many people interested in hearing it. But an opinion with only the click of a button, that’s a new world.
It’s a world we have been warned about. From Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman.
“In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us.
What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information–misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information–information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing…
I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”
Or as Postman puts it more succinctly later, “People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think”
Postman had in mind television. The torrent of social media news and opinions is a multiplication he could never have comprehended, but it’s the oxygen we breathe.
To Read Or Not To Read?
So, what are my four simple steps for curing the world of uninformed and hastily made opinions… I got nothin’.
Well, there is this—we could start by actually reading.
But then again, you’re already in the 41%.
This winter, Netflix officially removed Moana from its catalog of streaming movies, a devastating blow to my house with two pre-schoolers. It had easily been the most played show on our account for the better part of 2018.
My kids love Moana, and I have to admit, I’ve enjoyed it too. Thankfully my kids are young enough to have missed out on the Frozen craze. I’d take listening to Moana over Elisa any day. The music and incredible visuals make Moana a movie hard not to like and hard not to get stuck in your head.
The Hero’s Journey
Upon Moana’s release in 2016, The Verge wrote: “after 80 years of experiments, Disney has made the perfect Disney movie.” Families seem to have come to a similar conclusion. My four-year-old son has even managed to request the movie’s soundtrack by asking our Amazon Echo to play “the crab song” or “the Maui song.” Enough kids must be putting in the request for Alexa’s algorithm to have learned that “the crab song” is actually “Shiny by Jemaine Clement.” That song has almost 200 million views on youtube, coming in behind “How Far I’ll Go” with 395 million, and that’s not counting the unofficial bootleg copies.
Watching Moana for the first time, I was struck by the visuals. The film is beautiful. Water and hair have always been the most difficult elements for 3-D animators; it’s the reason plastic toys were a good place for Pixar to start. Tangled and Brave gave Disney a chance to master the elements of hair and Moana proved to be its final conquest of water. Disney went so far as to cast the ocean as its own character. That’s just Disney showing off.
But Moana is hailed a success because of the power of its storytelling. What’s Moana about? Well, most parents would probably tell you its a classic adventure story that gives the cliche and outdated princess characterization of a damsel in distress the modern refresh it has long needed. Moana is courageous, determined, and headstrong. She manages to save her family, restore the balance of nature, and council a Demigod out of his self-loathing and back into his own heroic tale. Moana is drawn into this epic role by the call of the ocean—the call to adventure. That call is intoxicating for young and old, maybe more so for the millennial parents stuck in nine-to-five cubicles and sprawling suburban subdivisions. You might say the moral of Moana is simply, follow your inner passion and become who you were truly meant to be.
That’s not a new theme for Disney. They have been refining that story for years. This inner search for a true identity stretches all the way back to a cricket and his famous advice, “when you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are. Anything your heart desires will come to you.” But even that isn’t ultimately Disney’s innovation. Disney’s model for the modern adventure and hero can trace its roots back to men like Joseph Campbell.
Campbell was a mythologist, a 1940s Indiana Jones-type who traveled to exotic places in those silver piston prop planes out of Casablanca. Campbell explored some of the most remote people groups of the world and collected their myths—stories about creation and struggle, the volatile temperaments of their gods, and, on occasion, the heroes who triumphed over it all. After years of collecting these stories, Campbell developed what he coined “the monomyth”: the single plot encompassing all great legends across every religion and tribe.
Campbell explained:
“The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir.”
Eventually, Campbell would come to crystallize his story framework into the now universal advice, “follow your bliss.”
Campbell’s universal plot for a hero’s journey is quickly becoming our culture’s expectations for finding each of our identities. Disney writers and animators often knowledge the work of Campbell as inspiration for their own storytelling. Campbell’s hero arc has shaped movies like The Lion King, The Matrix, The Hunger Games, and Star Wars. George Lucas was religious in his devotion to Campbell’s work.
I realize I’m now at the laborious point where you, as the reader, are getting tired. You expected a puff piece on some heartfelt life lesson from Moana, and instead, you are being dragged into the under-arching narrative supper-structure of Disney storytelling with its implications for developing culture, all of this like some banal college lecture on literary plot diagraming. But I think it’s worth being aware of what you’re watching.
The stories our culture is telling serve as the scaffolding for a modern society and an ideal human identity. Every movie your child watches speaks a word about who they are and how they should identify with the world around them. And Disney, along with our broader culture, has been slowly shifting the portrayal of a hero to shape the cultural shift in our values.
Tim Keller has done important work in diagnosing this modern adaptation of the hero identity. He writes:
“Our cultures are highly individualistic. There is no duty higher than plumbing the depths of your own desires to find out who you want to be. In modern narratives, the protagonist is usually a person who bravely casts off convention, breaks the rules, defies tradition and authority to discover him or herself and carve out a new place in the world. In ancient tales, the hero was the person who did just the opposite, who put aside inner dreams, aspirations, doubts, and feelings to bravely and loyally fulfill their vows and obligations.” (Think of It’s a Wonderful Life as a more modern example.)
The modern adventure story has become the tale of discovering who you want to be and embracing it with single-mindedness, no matter the cost. And while that may seem positive it makes the message of a messiah who would give his life and call us to sacrifice our own foolishness, maybe even incomprehensible.
Let me show you what the story of Moana really does.
A Girl, A Crab, And A Demigod
At the center of the Moana story is the question of identity.
Moana is born on an island. She is born a princess, daughter of the chieftain. She is born into certain expectations and responsibilities concerning her future. Much of her identity has been inherited. But her heart’s desires are incongruent with those expectations of her. Her heart pulls her out onto the open ocean. The movie opens with her family’s struggle to help her integrate who she is with the presumptions of her people—her commitments. But she battles the longing of her own “bliss.”
It’s fascinating because this debate—community expectations and self-expression—are presented in one of the movies catchiest songs, “Where you are”—what my kids call “The Island Song.”
Moana, it’s time you knew
The village of Motunui is
All you need
…
Don’t walk away
Moana, stay on the ground now
Our people will need a chief
And there you are
There comes a day
When you’re gonna look around
And realize happiness is
Where you are
“Happiness is where you are,” sounds like a perfectly legitimate moral for a children’s movie. But, remember, this is the setting that’s holding Moana back. It’s the expectations of the island and her family that lock Moana into a suffocating and claustrophobic version of her self. The songs are catchy, but for Moana, the expectations are crushing.
Take the movies next song. In response to her families expectations of commitment, Moana sings:
I wish I could be the perfect daughter
But I come back to the water, no matter how hard I try
…
I know everybody on this island, seems so happy on this island
Everything is by design
I know everybody on this island has a role on this island
So maybe I can roll with mine
I can lead with pride, I can make us strong
I’ll be satisfied if I play along
But the voice inside sings a different song
What is wrong with me?
That question—“the voice inside sings a different song”—is the conflict of the entire movie and one which resonates with a generation of parents listening from the front seats of their Honda Odysseys. Will Moana give in to the limiting expectations of others or will she bravely shed off the expectations of her community to embrace who she is as an individual.
Always pay attention to the music; the music is the driving force of Disney movies. Where Disney can say most bluntly what the story is about. Moana’s song comes at about the same point in the story that Frozen gave us “Let it go.” Maybe you remember these lines:
The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside
Couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I’ve tried
Don’t let them in, don’t let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know
Well, now they know
Let it go, let it go
Frozen sounds a lot like Moana. It is the new hero story. The struggle and test of courage to embrace who you really are, to shed the expectations of others. And so, Moana, called by the ocean with an epic responsibility to restore order, sets sail. From this point in the story, Moana’s pursuit of her own self-understanding follows a plot rising and falling with alternative possibilities for her identity:
Option One: Please People — Maui
Maui is a buff, tattooed demigod who continually rejects and mocks Moana because of her size, age, gender, and lack of way-finding skills. He can’t see the heroin inside. He mocks the ocean that calls her; he mocks the sense of destiny Moana lives by. “The ocean is straight up kooky-dooks!” The call to adventure, the call of self-discovery Moana feels it crazy. But before too long, Moana uncovers Maui’s own broken attempts to reconcile his identity.
Maui had spent his life attempting to please humans, hoping that their love and affection would help him heal the deep wounds of previous rejection. Maui too has been looking for an identity. He has been hoping to find it in the acceptance of those he serves. He has lost himself in an attempt to please others. An expression of the thing Moana has fled.
The giant crab, Tamatoa (who we will get to in just a moment) puts it pretty succinctly for Maui:
Now it’s time for me to take apart
Your aching heart
Far from the ones who abandoned you
Chasing the love of these humans
Who made you feel wanted
You tried to be tough
But your armor’s just not hard enough
Option Two: Accumulating Possession — Tamatoa
Tamatoa represents another character caught in an identity-driven crisis. His song critiquing Maui’s love for human approval offers his own alternative: possessions. Tamatoa is a giant monster crab with a cave full of remarkable treasures. In fact, Tamatoa has covered his body with a skin of gold and jewels. In case the image isn’t obvious enough, Tamatoa explains to Moana his take on identity:
Did your granny say listen to your heart,
“Be who you are on the inside”
I need three words to tear her argument apart
Your granny lied!
I’d rather be
Shiny
Like a treasure from a sunken pirate wreck
Scrub the deck and make it look
Shiny
I will sparkle like a wealthy woman’s neck
That’s pretty explicit. Tamatoa secures his identity through his accumulation of possessions. I think Disney is taking a pretty obvious shot at Baby-boomers and their accumulation of wealth—like a diamond on a wealthy woman’s neck? Nothing is more unsightly to a young millennial audience than the ostentatious displays of wealth that defined a previous generation. Rejecting adventure for a home full of money is everything millennials abhor.
Option Three: Anger and Violence — Ta Ka
With Ta Ka, Disney makes its biggest philosophical/theological point. There is also an identity crisis at the heart of the film’s quasi-villain, Ta Ka, a fire hurling lava monster who ferociously guards the ruined island of Te Fiti. Ta Ka is the obstacle to Moana’s goal, restoring the heart of Te Fiti. (By now you should be picking up on the symbolism of returning a heart to the island as a symbol of Moana learning to find and embrace her own heart).
When Moana finally reaches the island of Te Fiti, there is no island left to restore. Te Fiti is gone. But Moana realizes what everyone has been missing. The fire spewing Ta Ka is the island mother god, Te Fiti. Ta Ka is Te Fiti without a heart. With its heart removed, the creator God becomes the embodiment of violence, destruction, isolation, and rage. Te Fiti’s identity had been stolen. Without a sense of who she really was, she had transformed from a nurturer to a destroyer. From a God to a monster.
What Moana recognizes is that the villain is no villain, just a misunderstood goddess of life who, having lost her identity, now wreaked havoc. There are no villains, only individuals who have lost their own way. This is a massive point for Disney. There are no “bad guys,” only individuals who have been robbed of their individuality. Everyone has the potential to be a hero. What holds us back is a lack of faith in ourselves.
Moana suddenly finds a kind of kindred spirit with Ta Ka, protagonist and antagonist recognizing the same inner struggle. It’s one of the most moving moments of the film as Moana sings a song fittingly titled, “Know Who You Are.”
I have crossed the horizon to find you
I know your name
They have stolen the heart from inside you
But this does not define you
This is not who you are
You know who you are
It’s worth noting that Moana doesn’t tell Ta Ka who she is. She turn’s Ta Ka’s attention inward. “You know who you are.” True identity is continually pitched as an inward self-attention.
The song is sung for Ta Ka, but it is also Moana’s song. Moana’s recognition of Te Fiti is simultaneously the realization of her own identity and heroism and the cure for the darkness that is spreading from island to island. This is the real darkness, not evil but crushing expectations and lost identity.
Evil is a misidentification, a person trapped by characterization—a heart having been stolen. Hope comes by placing the heart back at the center—a person restored. Knowing who you are is the restorative salvation that puts the world back into harmony. Finding your heart and embracing it brings forth life out of darkness.
Moana is a story about embracing your true identity by embracing your heart’s deepest desires, even if it means sacrificing the expectations of those around you. Moana is a story about salvation through self-discovery.
Every Man A Hero & The Foolishness of the Cross
Disney stories tend to reflect culture. And there is no mistaking Moana as anything other than a tale of our time. Moana is a part of a much larger shifting cultural narrative that goes something like: Deep inside your heart is who you really are, but too often the traditional authorities of society—family, cultural values, and religion—are holding you back. The real adventure of life is having the courage to be yourself, to discover yourself. Judgment becomes the worst of sins and confident expressions of individuality our salvation.
A generation of kids—my kids—are being raised to believe that anything other than radical devotion to their inner desires is a capitulation. The only hope of happiness is in the pursuit of your heart’s desires. Undiscerning parents continue planting the seeds that undermine their own authority, relationships, and influence. We echo the cultural cliches because we believe them. We want the same adventure. Is it any surprise that after three decades of urging youth to “follow their bliss,” we have developed a generation awash in discontentment and shallow commitments. From restless careerism to prolonged adolescence, finding the bliss of your heart’s desires is proving far more difficult than Moana’s quest across the ocean.
It sounds so simple, follow your passions. But most days I can’t decide what to order at the drive-thru window. And I’m supposed to figure out who I want to be fifty years from now.
There is no denying good things in the story of Moana. A female heroine, her return home to her family, the risk of her own safety to restore the ecology of her island. It’s not hard to tease out more palatable morals, but the real question isn’t what good can we find. The real question is what does my son and daughter take away for themselves. The most obvious moral of Moana is that individuality is the great adventure. That is a massive shift in what it means to be a hero. And it is a shift that makes the call of Christ more and more peculiar and difficult to embrace.
From this desperate and insecure need for a self-achieved identity, we expect our children to produce values like courage, sacrifice, conviction, commitment, and respect. C.S. Lewis captures the predicament well:
“We continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
It’s not hard to ride the emotional wave of Moana’s self-achieved salvation all the way home from the theater. But once we arrive back home into the challenges of our pedestrian lives, it’s difficult to sustain the idea that we are each a hero—that each of us is on our own great adventure. Eventual the optimism of the opportunity turns into a crushing weight of self-expectation. Why can’t we figure it out? Why can’t we chart our own course to happily ever afters? Why are we plagued down by failure, broken relationships, and insecurity?
In a world desperately exploring-self desire and self-achievement, there is very little room for the message of the cross. Sure, the Christian gospel can be neatly replotted onto Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. You can pitch Christianity as a path to self-discovery. You can offer the gospel as a means to individuality and structure churches to play the part of guide for each religious adventurer. Most towns offer a buffet of religious options, perfect for the person seeking to construct just the right system for achieving their best life.
We may preach commitment and death-to-self, but we scramble to find the right branding, stage design, and lobby coffee to earn positive social reviews. Christ becomes our cheerleader and spiritual gift assessment the tools for self-discovery. We get obsessed with talking about calling but lose interest in the common callings of husband, father, and member. We find ways to fit the gospel into the new hero expectations of our culture. Christ calls us into our own adventure promising our own heroic self-discovery.
Plus who wants to suggest to Moana, “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” The adventure of the open seas sounds so much more appealing than self-denial and self-death. Who wants meekness and poverty when you can have adventure and achievement.
So, should you boycott Moana? I don’t think so. My kids watch it, but we also talk about it. We talk about its message. We talk about how it applies to life. We talk about how our faith helps us see things Moana doesn’t. We compare Moana’s story to Jesus’. We reconcile that often, especially in Jesus’ story, we aren’t the main character.
The point is not to boycott, but engage. Engagement means parents are going to have to think a lot more deeply about the stories the world is offering their children and how our Christian stories differ. It means we need to better understand our own hearts and desires. It means we need to question many of the cliches we speak about life and meaning. It means we need to take a long look at what our lives have reaped from self-pursuit.
Moana’s grandmother had been the first to offer Moana the potential salvation of self-discovery. She put it perfectly, “Once you know what you like, well, there you are.” It sounds so right, but it cuts deeply against the call of Christ, “Whoever loses their life for me will save it.”
This week, Benjamin Vrbicek released his new book, Don’t Just Send a Resume: How to Find the Right Job in a Local Church. I was honored to not only provide the book an endorsement but also to have contributed an article on bi-vocational ministry. Benjamin has kindly given me permission to share my portion. I hope that it helps convince you to pick up a copy.
“Applying for a job as a pastor can be a strange and disorienting process. It can feel like the means used to land the job—working your connections, crafting a personal brand, positioning for a vote—are the very things you’ll want to preach against your first Sunday in the pulpit. Benjamin’s book serves as a trusted friend to help you keep hold of God in the process. Practical, wise, and well written, I don’t know of any other book as valuable during your transitions.” — Chase Replogle Pastor of Bent Oak Church, Springfield, MO; host of the Pastor Writer podcast
Your Calling Is More Than Your Paycheck: Don’t Rule Out Bi-Vocational Ministry
No one dreams of someday becoming a bi-vocational pastor with a 9-5 side hustle. I sure didn’t. Through Bible college and seminary, I had all kinds of ideas about the church I would pastor: the building, the preaching, the programs, the sermon graphics, the passionately engaged and talented congregants showing up punctually each week.
The churches we imagine so easily construct themselves on the scaffolding of our best curation, never plagued by reality but aided in the limitless potential of abstraction, the best bits and pieces we’ve collected always forming together into what we proudly call our calling—a pastor and his church. No one has to add full-time, salaried, with retirement benefits and reserved parking. It’s what we most naturally imagine when we use the word pastor.
Imagination and ambition are a part of every occupation, but given the proximity to holy and eternal things, pastors may be most prone to dream. I was, but my dream wasn’t panning out. Seven years into a church plant, it hadn’t gone exactly according to plan.
Our church started in a home basement, twenty or so people gathering on Sunday nights for food and Scripture. Before long, we gave it a name and rented space at a local community center. I started to draw a paycheck. It was about one-fifth of the income I needed to pay our monthly bills and put gas in our cars. I had to find additional work, but we sensed God was doing something. So, we continued.
In seminary I got interested in web development—I’ve always had an impractical curiosity. Alongside courses in Greek and Hebrew, I taught myself PHP, CSS, HTML, and Javascript. I started building websites for a few friends and churches. The work continued to grow. In fact, the web work grew faster than the church did. What had once been only curiosity was quickly turning into a career and also a predicament.
I was called to be a pastor, not a web designer. I was supposed to become Moses, not Zuckerberg. I was terrified that allowing web design to become my full-time job was like Moses deciding to cash in on building Nile riverboats while moonlighting the whole exodus thing on the side. How could I call myself a pastor if nearly everyone knew me as a web designer? I felt like I was losing my calling.
Calling and vocation are words we throw around, I think, without really understanding them. We live in a world that only knows how to appraise specialization and expertise. You’re allowed one calling—one vocation—anything more creates a fraction, and fractions are always a compromise, a sacrifice of real potential.
We too often confuse vocation and career. The word vocation comes from an old Latin word meaning “to be called.” Career, by alternative, comes from the Latin for a “wheeled vehicle,” literally, a wheel barrel. A career is a task, a pile of dirt that needs to be moved from one place to another, and hopefully someone is willing to pay you to do it. I mean no disrespect toward the work. There is great dignity in it, and it’s this kind that I have spent most of my life doing. But a vocation is something far more wholistic than a timecard. Your life is made up of countless vocations, a patchwork of callings: spouse, parent, child, neighbor, citizen, hobbyist, friend, employee, follower of Christ, and, for some, pastor. No one’s life is ever a single calling.
So here it is: what I really want you to see is that your calling is not primarily defined by how you pay back student loans or purchase groceries. These are simply the logistics of life. A calling is something far more comprehensive. Your career doesn’t have to define that calling. There is room for a calling and a career.
When I finally came to this realization, something profound happened. I realized that the mark of a pastor was not his paycheck. It meant I could carve out a pastoral vocation supported by, and in my case improved by, outside work. With a paycheck secured, being a pastor took on a reenergized set of priorities: personally knowing the people in my congregation, preparing myself to lead them in Scripture and worship, and cultivating time for prayer. That work can be fit into life beyond a 9-5.
It means most nights you’ll find me with a commentary instead of Netflix. It means we host a lot of meals in our home with church members. And it means I prioritize prayer, forcing me to involve a lot of volunteers for tasks other pastors might find in their job descriptions. But at the end of each week—closing our services in prayer, chatting with couples in the lobby, hauling my son with me to hospital visitations—I still feel like a pastor.
It’s not perfect, and certainly not void of stress, but pastoring never is. I think Paul would have offered similar advice as he did for marriage. If you’re married, great. If you’re single, great. Is your church able to pay you a full-time salary? Great. Do you find yourself having to work outside the church? Great.
The real work is not figuring out a path to the lustrous, full-time image you’ve previously imagined. The real work is recognizing what God is doing and receiving each invitation with vocational gratitude. Dreaming about what you wished ministry looked like is robbing you of what God is doing right in front of you. God alone knows where your career and callings will lead you, but I do know this, the joy is in faithfulness. The dignity of being a pastor is earned in faithfulness, not in a salary. Don’t rule out how God might use another career to make you a better pastor.
The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the . . . moment. – Eugene Peterson, Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best
Recently, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing several other podcast hosts on the Pastor Writer podcast. These days, there are some great podcasts for Christian writers. I thought I’d pass along a list of a few shows I’ve been enjoying.
PS: If you enjoy a podcast, the best gift you can give this Christmas is a review.
The Christian Publishing Show is hosted by Thomas Umstattd Jr., who also co-hosts the Novel Marketing podcast. The show overs valuable insights and interviews on the process of traditional publishing. The podcast is relatively new but is sure to become one of my favorites. I really enjoyed episode 5, How James L. Rubart Went From Rejected and Unpublished to Bestselling Author.
As co-hosts, Karen Ball & Erin Taylor Young, describe themselves as chaplains to writers. They take a contemplative look at the writing life of the writer. The show is a good combination of interviews and insights. I had the honor of being on their show in December. You can listen to the episode at, 083 — Pastor Writer in the Deep with Guest Chase Replogle
The Creative Penn podcast is one of the longest running podcasts for writers. The show isn’t focused on Christian writing, however, Joanna offers some great advice and interviews for self-publishing. It’s a show to keep tabs on.
“The modern hero is the outsider. His experience is rootless. He can go anywhere. He belongs nowhere. Being alien to nothing, he ends up being alienated from any type of community based on common tastes and interests. The borders of his country are the sides of his skull.”
― Flannery O’Connor, The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South
We are facing an epidemic of discontentment and disillusionment amongst men, particularly those like myself, millennials. We’ve been told our entire lives that you can be anything you want to be, but by thirty the truth has finally started to set in. It’s not entirely true, at least not the way we imagined it would be.
Rose Hackman, in an article entitled, “As millennials, we’re all in dire straits. But I worry most about our men” writes about a close friend wrestling with his own feelings of discontentment. She recounts:
“He picked up a discarded, almost empty beer can, and chugged. He talked about his parents, about how stuck he felt in his job, how he felt he couldn’t see a way out. He spoke of inequality and broken dreams in this country, and how useless he felt as an adult… None of his musings were self-pitying indulgence or narcissistic… His complaints and analyses all rang true. Millennials living in the United States do not need statistics to tell us how false the American dream is. We know it from our guts…”
What’s False About The American Dream
What’s “false” about the American dream isn’t the lack of possibility to become what you want to be, that’s more possible at this moment in America than almost any other time or place in the past. What’s false is that that possibility is the highest value. What’s false is that possibility can deliver on a meaningful identity. What’s false is that we need possibility to find ourselves.
Possibility is about control, a kind of freedom that comes with no responsibility. It’s the expectation that we can choose our own being. And we are obsessed with what could be—who we could be. The endless availability of options means we’re never quite done choosing.
When we start to feel uncomfortable with who we are or how our life is developing, we go looking for new options. We start looking for alternatives. Our culture’s obsession with consumerism has convinced us we can choose our way out of any crisis. We find new role-models. We buy new vehicles. We day-dream about new relationships. We live in a world that offers more of these options than ever before. Choose who to love. Choose what to do. Choose a new career. Choose a new place to live. Choose who to follow. Choose who to hang out with. Choose what brands to buy. Choose a profile image—choose a better filter for that profile image. Choose what kind of man you want to be.
We think we can choose our way to discovering our identity. We think we can keep choosing and continue to refine our destiny. The great enemy of our day is any restriction on our free choosing: parents, government, or God himself. Expectations and commitments are the constant threat to our free choice and the potential of who we are hoping to become.
Too often Millennials get a bad wrap for this self-absorption, but it’s hardly just a Millennial quality. Self-interest is as old as the garden; the sin just continues to peculiarly manifest itself in each new generation. For my grandparents it was in reputation and social position; for my parents, it was cars, homes, and vacations; for Millennials it seems to be purpose, adventure, and individuality. Each generation has its way of scaffolding out a desire into a corresponding identity and working to achieve that ideal design. For Millennials, the project is the adventure of self-discovery.
Individuality and the pursuit of your own way have become the new hero’s journey. There is no calling higher than self-discovery. There is no greater adventure than the pursuit of originality. Conformity is death and cowardice. Finding your identity is the hope of salvation, to know and be who you could be.
According to Steve Jobs:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
Your Destiny Lies Within You
Last year, my family went to Disney World. The Magic Kingdom has an incredible light and fireworks show. Thousands of people were packed around the castle watching. The technology is magic. Laser lights, fireworks, music, and video projection bring the castle’s turrets and walls to life with the pantheon of Disney heroes. My three-year-old son sat on my shoulders in awe. I was in awe.
Disney is a master of storytelling. They can move the hearts of grown men and toddlers alike. I listened as the narrator pieced together the show’s songs and animation with these words: “Each of us has a dream, a heart’s desire. It calls to us. And when we are brave enough to listen, bold enough to pursue it, that dream will lead us on a journey to discover who we are meant to be. All we have to do is look inside our hearts and unlock the magic within. Your destiny lies within you; you just have to be brave enough to see it.”
Your identity lies within your heart’s desires. You can not underestimate how much of life is now driven by that pursuit. The pursuit of who you uniquely are is the American dream. It motivates what you post on Instagram, how you describe yourself in a Twitter bio, the brands you buy, and the logos clung to the back window of your car. It is sold in marketing, promoted by celebrities, and preached by too many pastors. To become who you can be, you have to embrace your desires above every other presumption. Or to put it more millennially, “you do you.”
But there is one big problem.
But Your Heart Will Inevitably Betray You
The problem? Who in the world understands his own heart’s desires. For Disney, it always seems clear. But in life, our hearts are a mixed bag of half-baked passions and a war of conflicting desires. Worse, our desires are malleable and easily manipulated by propaganda and sin. Trusting our hearts, what we actually experience is explained much better by Francis Spufford:
“You glimpse an unflattering vision of yourself as a being whose wants make no sense, don’t harmonize: whose desires, deep down, are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to, at the very same time. You’re equipped, you realize, for farce (or even tragedy) more than you are for happy endings.”
Or as the prophet Jeremiah puts it, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”
I need you to recognize what you are attempting to do. You are trusting your heart to produce an identity. You are hoping that passion will guide you to meaning. You are ignoring what we all know; your heart is as confused in its desires as you are in trying to follow it.
The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy had a good analogy for what I’m trying to describe. He once wrote,
“Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road. He knows that each step he takes confuses him more and more, but still he cannot help rushing about.”
Your heart is an insufficient place to go looking for who you are. Your heart can’t guide you out of the woods. And there are consequences of attempting to build towers on the shifting sands of your heart’s desires.
The unacknowledged problem is that all of this depends on knowing what you want. It depends upon your heart’s desires being something you can actually understand and articulate back to yourself. It depends on you making sense to yourself. It’s laughable. Most days I can’t decide if I want Cashew or Sweet and Sour Chicken at the China Cheif drive-thru. Good luck deciding who you want to be in fifty years.
If Jeremiah is right, and no one can truly understand their own heart, or it’s twisted tangle of desires, then placing our hope for an identity on it seems like a flimsy proposition.
What the Flannel Board Failed To Teach You About Samson
Enter Samson. Outside the Grand Palace in Peterhof, Russia sits one of the great statues of Samson. A fountain cast in gold, it depicts a chiseled, shirtless Samson ripping apart the jaws of a roaring lion with his bare hands. Samson looks Herculean. You can almost hear the popping and cracking of the lion’s jawbones buckling under Samson’s strength. The whole scene is suspended in tension. Samson looks every part the hero. Like the sultriest of Greek gods, Samson gives form to courage and brawn. This is the kind of guy they put on the cover of Harlequins.
Samson is everything a man might imagine becoming. I like to imagine him in Ray-Bans, a man bun, and a CrossFit t-shirt, hiking through some remote red stone canyon, documenting his adventurous life on Instagram. He is the model man, driven by passion and restless for adventure and romance. He was fascinated with the seductive nature of Philistia, the risk of roaming into enemy territory only making it all the more adventurous.
Samson’s story is the millennial story—pursue your desires and individuality against any expectation that would hold you back. Your true self is out there on the horizon. Seize it. Don’t let your parent’s stuffy traditions or your community’s prudish tendencies hold you back.
And so Samson charted his course off into the sunset, his heart beating with the adrenaline of passion and possibility. Samson pursued his desires with all his heroic, God-given talent, honestly believing that his heart’s desires would lead him to greatness, but it only quickened his ruin.
He would end up bound, eyes gouged out, forced into slave labor in the temple of the Philistine god, Dagon. His ultimate destination was the furthest imaginable experience from the ideal that drove him to pursue it. His desire cost him the very thing that compelled him.
Betrayed by love, by his own people, by the Philistines he so admired, and by his own strength, his failure wasn’t ultimately entrusting Delilah with his secret, it was not trusting God with his destiny. Ultimately it wasn’t just Delilah who betrayed him. Samson was betrayed by his own heart’s desires. That is a massive warning about how many of us are pursuing our identity.
If you read Samson’s story carefully, you will discover much of your own life. Samson’s story became life changing for me in this way. I watched as he struggled to pay attention to the Spirit’s work, constantly distracted by his desires. I read closely as he suffered under the disillusionment of a life that seemed always to be off the rails. I found myself just as confused by his constantly broken relationships as he seemed to be in breaking them. I watched his restlessness give way to broken vows and suddenly recognized my own wayward tendencies.
That is the way we read Samson’s story well. His life is no easier to understand than your own. Like Samson, we all live in the constant ambiguity of dead ends, false starts, unfulfilled dreams, and disappointments. Learning to read Samson’s story helps you acquire the skills to read and understand your own story. Here were the tools of discernment I needed. This story was the means of piecing together my story. I think it provides the tools most Mellinial men are missing.
You Already Have What You Need
What we discover from Samson’s story is that an identity cannot be achieved it must be received. Who you are becoming is not something you’re very good at leading. Far better you develop the skills of discernment to recognize the work God is leading.
Who you are has more to do with what you receive, the work God has already begun in the pedestrian place you’re already living, than what you might someday obtain.
As one writer explained to his student:
“If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.”
We have lost our disciplines of discernment, gratitude, stillness, and contentment. We are paying the consequences for it. We have reaped lives of disillusionment, discontentment, uncertainty, and anxiety.
But you can stop. It’s what the Bible calls Sabbath. A deliberate act of checking your own ambition, taking your hands off your identity, and paying closer attention to what is already around you. Recognizing that a greater hero is your hope. That salvation, like your idenitty, is a received grace.
The adventure you have been looking for isn’t out there on the horizon, it’s right here: around your kitchen table, reading books with your kids in bed, learning to love your wife through difficult times, faithfully serving a community in work and worship. “Making it your ambition to lead a quiet life,” as Paul would advice.
What you have been looking for—the passion, the calling, the adventure—is already in front of you. You have everything you need to become who you’re becoming. You have God. And As Samson discovered, one single moment of faith is enough to reorient a life—to receive a new identity.
Samson’s story is a treasure trove of human emotion, failed dreams, dulled discernment, painful consequences, confused conclusions, and yet still remarkable life-giving grace. Right now, we need his story desperately. And we need it reminded to us regularly.
Go read it. Reread it.
I think you will discover what I did:
“There must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away “blindly” so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether… Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.
Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
A few weeks ago, I saw the movie, Operation Finale. It tells the story of a secret Israeli operation to infiltrate Argentina and capture Adolf Eichmann, a former Nazi SS officer, credited for his influential role in planning and directing the Final Solution, the German execution of more than six million Jews.
After the war, Eichmann managed to escape to Argentina and was living under an alias to avoid war crime prosecution in Europe. Israeli agents were able to capture Eichmann and deliver him to Israel to stand trial. His trial was televised around the world and was for many, the first eye-witness testimony of the Holocaust experience.
The Depiction of Eichmann
The movie, depicting Eichmann’s capture, is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. Except for minor rearranging of events and the introduction of a sub-plotted love story, the film is extremely historically accurate. There is even a minor depiction of David Ben-Gurion, who for most modern Israelis is something like their George Washington. If you have ever been to Israel, you fly into the Ben-Gurion airport.
But maybe the best part is the depiction of Eichmann. As the movie unfolds, the appalling image of a man credited with millions of murders gives way to the unremarkable image of a mere human, one which must be fed, shaved, and regularly led to the toilet by his captors—blind without his glasses. Scene by scene, Eichmann becomes more human, less the animal he is said to be.
The realization that one of the centuries most grotesque villains was actually a quite normal person need not diminish the man’s guilt—his humanity isn’t a defense, it suggests something far more uncomfortable; the most horrific acts of evil can be carried out by people indiscernibly similar to you and me. Far from an animal, Eichmann was a boring bureaucrat who justified horrific evil as carrying out orders.
Honestly, I think the movie may have actually made Eichmann more interesting than he really was, you know the way Hollywood casting always ends up with characters more attractive and articulate than their historical realities. Judging from historical photos and trial video, Eichmann seems more like someone you would encounter at the DMV than leading a death squad.
If the Movie Intrigues You
If the movie intrigues you, as it did me, get a copy of Hannah Arendt’s, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. There is also a decent 2012 movie on Arendt’s life, simply titled, Hannah Arendt.
Arendt, a European Jew who had barely managed to escape the concentration camps herself, was sent on assignment by The New Yorker to cover Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem.
Arriving at the trial, Arendt made the same observation the movie’s producers sought to capture. Eichmann was far less impressive than his reputation. Stephen Miller summarized Arendt’s comments, writing, “In her critical account of his 1961 trial for crimes against the Jewish people and humanity, Arendt argued that Eichmann, far from being a ‘monster,’ as the Israeli prosecutor insisted, was nothing more than a thoughtless bureaucrat, passionate only in his desire to please his superiors. Eichmann, the unthinking functionary capable of enormous evil, revealed the dark potential of modern bureaucratic man.”
Arendt coined the phrase, the “banality of evil.” You can define banal as, “so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.” What Arendt observed was that evil feeds not just on extremism, but just as frequently on our banality. Sin works its way deepest into the most boring and apathetic lives.
Take these examples from Arendt’s work.
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” — The Life of the Mind
“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” — The Origins of Totalitarianism
“When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. ” — The Origins of Totalitarianism
Maybe the most startling lesson from Operation Finale and Arendt’s work is how ordinary the worst evil can appear and how easily ordinary people can fall into it.
Men Without Chests; Invisible without Uniforms
C. S. Lewis described the condition as “men without chests.” We are able to think but have lost our feel for morality. Truth becomes relative. Right and wrong are questions of pragmatics, necessity, and power. Reason serves only to justify. And virtue only as a veneer. These “chestless” men survive by concerning themselves with only the most unimportant tasks. They live in small self-centered worlds which makes them perfect cogs in the machinery of evil.
Lewis writes elsewhere, “The real mark of hell is a sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon the self. We must understand hell is a place where everyone is perpetually concerned about his or her own dignity and advancement, where everybody always has a grievance, and where everybody lives in the deadly seriousness of envy and self-importance.”
Take Eichmann’s own words, recorded at his trial:
“Adolf Hitler may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost 80 million. His success alone proved that I should subordinate myself to this man.”
“Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one’s own need to think.”
“My heart was light and joyful in my work, because the decisions were not mine.”
At his trial, Eichmann wore a simple dark suit and tie. Operation Finale he depicts him most frequently in his underwear and a white undershirt. Out of his uniform, he appears like any other man. Small, aged, and unimpressive.
Holocaust journalist, Gitta Sereny has wisely observed, their uniform “gives them more certainty than they have.” But in the dock, the Eichmann bears no insignia, no swastika, no medals or ribbons, no flags or rank. Just a man. A man and his choices.
What to do with Eichmann?
Ultimately, Eichmann was found guilty and executed. Thoughtless obedience serves as no defense. But if that verdict serves only to objectify a man into a caricature of evil, we have missed the real warning of his evil.
Writing for The American Interest, Roger Berkowitz concludes, “In other words, evil originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.”
I’m not offering you ten lessons to learn from Eichmann, but instead, a simple question, is it possible that I too could fall into such blind evil and banal evil?
Central to the plot of Ayn Rand’s classic 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, is the repeatedly posed question, “Who is John Galt?” The novel is about an increasingly tyrannical government undermined by a mysterious individual who workes to sabotage the bureaucracy by helping entrepreneurs and business owners vanish from the workforce; Galt covertly subverts the system by robbing it of its best minds and starving it of its greatest resources.
In hushed tones and with sideways glances, that question, “Who is John Galt?” spreads and evolves into a kind of counter-propaganda, a spirit which harasses incessantly at the establishment and invigorated the oppressed with the possibility of hope. I have a congregant who has the question—a kind of statement—on the back window of his truck.
All this came to my mind last week when having overheard a conversation before our men’s bible study, my dad asked, “Who is Jordan Peterson?” Go ahead, you can laugh at the association, but the mention of Peterson’s name—just as often whispered—has become almost as controversial, almost as propagandized as Galt’s.
Who Is Jordan Peterson?
While Galt worked in the shadows, Peterson appears more frequently on the stage, yet their influence on shaping our national conversations are strikingly on par. It’s still hard to answer the question. Who is Jordan Peterson? A psychology professor, having taught at Harvard and the University of Toronto. A Youtube celebrity. A No. 1 best-selling author in almost every country. Or as David Brooks of the New York Times has called him, possibly “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now.”
I get questions about Peterson every week, and for the most part, I’ve stayed quiet. I’ve been digging and doing a lot of thinking. Like others, I have read Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life; I’ve streamed hours of his Biblical presentations, subscribed to his podcast, watched his past classroom lectures, and I’ve read countless articles categorizing him as everything from a right-winged misogynist to the savior of Christianity in the West.
For all the controversy, some things are undisputed. Peterson works hard. He’s everywhere right now, on a world book tour and dominating the Youtube algorithms. He also has his pulse on culture. From politics and psychology to classic Russian novelists and cold war ideologies, Peterson thinking feels universal—it feels religious. Mixed with a hard-to-place Canadian accent and a meteoric rise to public attention, it’s as if Peterson is a personality simultaneously from our past and our future. He seems to know things we’ve all felt but never been able to articulate. He seems to grasp something about where it’s all heading. And, contrary to some of the media’s best attempts at vilifying him, much of his advice has been immensely helpful. His promotion of individual responsibility and the often quoted, “learn to clean your room before you criticize the world” is refreshing and resonating.
But when it comes to reading Peterson as a Christian—or, particularly, as a 30-something evangelical pastor—that’s when my brain starts to hurt.
Attempting to Sort it Out
Peterson is often described as, using a line from The Federalist, a gateway drug to Christianity. Maybe a more tactful title would be as “religious apologist.” It’s a term he feels comfortable using to describe himself. Take for example his highly anticipated two-night debate/discussion with atheist Sam Harris. Peterson is a constant defender of the power of religious belief, the deep significance of the Biblical narrative, and the inherent worth of the Judeo-Christian value system for supporting Western culture and liberty. There is no disputing that Peterson has people considering faith and the Bible in much deeper ways than they had before. You might go so far as to say, Peterson is making it cool for twenty-two-year-old guys to talk about the Bible in their college dorm rooms. That’s an achievement worth taking note of.
But don’t mistake Peterson for a modern Lewis or Chesterton. Peterson’s religious apologetics refuse to bend a knee to the traditional tests of Christian orthodoxy, much to the frustration of many an interviewer. For Peterson, complicating seemingly simple “yes or no” questions is intentional. He’s not interested in being a theologian or becoming a mouthpiece for legitimizing evangelical dogmatics.
Take, for instance, each time he has been pushed to acknowledge whether he believes Jesus physically and literally rose from the dead. Peterson has responded, “I can not answer that question.” Given another opportunity, he explained that he would need forty hours to try and answer. Elsewhere he’s requested three more years to further develop his thinking on the issue.
I want to be careful here. Too many Christians have reached this point and decided to stop listening. Peterson is trying to avoid being boxed in. There is a part of his hesitancy I understand and respect—though certainly, I would answer the question with a simple yes. Peterson understands what is at stake. He recognizes the historical complexity of the moment. He knows that nearly everyone is hoping to finally label and categorize him—some for the sake of an opponent, others hoping for a savior. His refusal to be reduced is part of his appeal. He knows that words we freely throw around can be understood in surprisingly different ways. He wants to start new conversations not be forced into the form of existing household idols. He may be a religious apologist, but he is not a typical Christian apologist, nor certainly not an Evangelical one.
Peterson has also indicated that he needs more time to come to a decision about his personal beliefs in the historical events of Jesus. That honesty is profoundly refreshing, and for me, garnishes him with more respect. In a world that expects theological declarations in 140 characters, maybe forty hours of thinking through the resurrection would do us all some good.
My Approach to Peterson
So as a Christian, I read Peterson recognizing I’m entering into a complicated and evolving middle ground, down a rabbit hole into a world dizzied with archetypal myths, subconscious impulses, evolutionary intuitions, bottomless piles of academic citations, and words which suddenly have much deeper meanings than I have previously given them. And I’m attempting to understand all of this without a doctorate in psychology, any technical experience in a clinical setting, or much knowledge with the literature that underpins Peterson’s thinking—mostly Jungian psychology. I’ve been reading quite a bit of Jung lately, and am humble enough to admit, I might only be grasping around 10% of it. Before you go quoting Peterson on lobsters or using archetypes to prove your points about the patriarchy, you would do well to make a list of what you aren’t clear on; it should be longer than what you are. I think Peterson would confess to the same humility.
The complexity means that all reading and discussing of Peterson should be done with humbleness, patience, and extreme prudence. But it should be done. It must be done, especially by Christians. Joe Carter, an editor at The Gospel Coalition, quotes Augustine to make this point.
Augustine once wrote that if pagan writers have “said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith,” their insights “should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to our use.”
“Just as the Egyptians had not only idols and grave burdens which the people of Israel detested and avoided,” Augustine said, “so also they had vases and ornaments of gold and silver and clothing which the Israelites took with them secretly when they fled, as if to put them to a better use.”
Peterson’s work is full of such vases and ornaments of gold. Take and read. Read and take. There is much to like. But read carefully enough to recognize there is a reason Peterson’s book is 409 pages, and his biblical lectures are usually more than 2 hours long. There is a lot to consider. Christians should be the most discerning in reading and discussing it.
Forming my Own Questions
So, my conclusion on Jordan Peterson? I’d probably need forty hours to answer that.
Instead, I’ll give you this list. Four questions I wish I could ask Jordan Peterson about faith and Christianity. Caveat, I’ve done my best to avoid yes or no questions. These aren’t religious tests—no trial with the stake already kindled in the background. These questions are things I would like to understand better.
Also, I’m not done thinking about or listening to Peterson. I may, from time to time, add questions to this list. Feel free to comment with your own questions or point out what I’m missing.
In addition to the questions, I include a list of articles and videos worth your time. Most are centered around the topic of Christianity and Peterson’s teaching. I’ll continue to add future links to the list.
Questions for Jordan Peterson:
1. In your Biblical lectures, you often point out that you are not a theologian and are attempting to limit your comments to “The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories.” What are the boundaries of psychological insight? How do you distinguish between a psychological insight and a theological one? Are there Biblical questions, outside your public consideration, that people should be asking?
2. Church tradition holds that the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. You often use “Being” to describe the aim of living. What do you see as the chief end of man?
3. Many Christians have associated Jung’s teaching, and by extension yours, with Gnosticism—the idea that salvation is attained by means of acquiring a deeper knowledge. The second-century church wrested with Gnostic teaching that understood the resurrection to be an inner process and not necessarily literal. Irenaeus wrote that Gnostics “claim to be constantly finding something new, and working out what no one ever thought of before.” He confesses, “it is hard to describe their views.” The early church developed creeds as a tool for defining Christianity. In claiming to be Christian, where do you derive your definition of Christian?
4. The Biblical narrative, as a whole, moves towards the hope of a new creation, a restoration of all things. Or as Revelation puts it, “all things made new.” Christ’s call for his followers to share in his suffering and to bear their crosses finds it’s resolve in Christ’s resurrection as the first fruits of a resurrection to come. Christian optimism is shaped by a hope beyond pragmatic self-improvement. You’ve argued for, “faith in the sacrifice of a current self for the self that could be.” You seem to find optimism in the potential of Being through suffering. Is there a discernable hope beyond what can be achieved for the self?
More To Come
Peterson admits that many of his ideas are evolving as he continues to wrestle through his lectures on the Bible. He is currently still in Genesis and planning on picking up where he left off after his current book tour. What follows for Peterson could be incredibly insightful to watch unfold. It’s possible, that as Peterson works through the Biblical narrative, his own conclusions may develop along with the story. Thanks to the democratized nature of online publishing, we all have a front row seat to that process—assuming Youtube doesn’t lock him out again.
As the Bible patiently unfolds its narrative theology how might Peterson’s views develop? Consider his definition of sacrifice from his lecture on Cain and Able, “The idea is that you could sacrifice something of value, and that would have transcendent utility. That is by no means an unsophisticated idea. In fact, it might be the greatest idea that human beings ever came up with.” That definition sounds very much like the world of Genesis—the human utility of sacrificing something of value for something greater—but that hardly captures the full Biblical magnitude of the sacrificial theme.
I wonder how Peterson’s definition will evolve when he reaches David’s great psalm of repentance, “For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart.”
Or what about when he reaches Hebrews 4, “And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.”
Consider Peterson’s point to Sam Harris about the importance of reading the whole story, of considering the end before you conclude about the beginning. “Here is the problem with complicated texts, especially ones that actually constitute narratives, imagine you’re at a movie, and its a movie with a twist at the end. So the entire movie is set up to make you think one particular way, to have one set of experiences. But when you put the twist in at the end, it changes the entire structure. The Bible is a series of books, and they had an influence on one another, and they were sequenced with a very complex editorial process, and there is actually a developmental narrative that links all the chapters together. And what that means is that you have to read the beginning as if it’s also influenced by the end.”
So, what will Peterson do with Revelation, when John associates the return of Christ with the image of a sacrificed lamb. Or, how about the temptation to worship the beast who appears to have been mortally wounded, who only appears to have been sacrificial. Which sacrifice do we trust? Does what is pragmatic tempt us away from what is foolish? Is sacrifice ultimately something of utility or something of defeat? Is the ultimate nature of sacrifice to lead us to the inevitable need of one greater than we can make?
Like each of us, Peterson is on a journey. His narrative has not reached its end. For better or worse, his story is now public. We should be careful to remember that a person is not a position. More than almost anyone else in our culture, Peterson has stood for the virtue of speaking only what one truly believes. I trust him to continue.
What questions would you add to the list? Leave a comment.
(Photo used under Creative Commons Liscense: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America – Jordan Peterson)
It’s hard to overestimate the impact Eugene Peterson has had on me as a pastor and as a writer. This video is a conversation with Peterson and Dean Nelson at the Point Loma Nazarene University’s Writer’s Symposium by the Sea in 2007.
More than writing, Peterson offers deep wisdom into the lifestyle of the pastor writer and the value of the writer’s calling. It’s worth watching several times.
John Piper discusses how to sense if you are being called to write.
If you have ever thought God was calling you to write, Piper offers sound advice on evaluating that call. He describes the levels of awareness that helps us solidify and build confidence in our writing and call.
I’ve recently been working through Craig Keener’s 4-part commentary on the Book of Acts. I’ll be preaching through the Book of Acts this summer and fall. Keener’s book is remarkable and massive. I once heard a scholar suggest that it will be the most important work on Acts for at least the next 100 years.
I came across this interview, in which Keener explains his approach to research and writing. Having written more than twenty books, his advice is insightful and inspiring.
