My brother has passed on to me the oh-so-infamous Farenheit 451 meme. You can read all about its history at Jim’s site.

You are stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. What book would you be?

As my brother points out, it’s rather a strange question at first glance. I’ll not repeat his explanation (since you should have already read his post).

Though I’m tempted to choose The Everlasting Man (just because walking around being called “The Everlasting Man” would be kind of fun), I am impelled to choose Chesterton’s other masterpiece Orthodoxy, the book that revealed the overwhelmingly beautiful truths of Christianity.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Not that I can remember, though Beatrice in Dante’s Paradisio almost did it for me, I think. I can’t tell if it was her or the poetry. I think the poetry.

What was the last book you bought?

You’d think from the above titles it would be something as snobbish as Milton or as esoteric as Eliot. You would think. You’d be wrong.

It was How I Trade Options, by Jon Najarian.

What are you currently reading?

For my Academy classes, I am reading LOTR. I’m currently half way through (at the beginning of book four). It needs no explanation, but I will say I have been particularly struck by Tolkien’s use of Providence to move his plot and the forces of good along.

For my business interests, I’m digesting Najarian’s book (above). Options seem to be a good investing vehicle for people with little capital and low risk thresholds like me.

For my marriage prep, I’m reading through Passionate Marriage. I highly recommend it, though I’m only 3 chapters in.

Of course, this week is also Plato week for me, if that counts. I’ll be spending long hours ruminating on love, rhetoric, and relationships with Dr. Al Geier and Plato’s Phaedrus.

What five books would you take to a deserted island?

I’ll take “book” to mean either “bound pages” or “an intentionally unified work” (as in the last choice). That said, I’d take my UBS 4th edition, and for the others I’d (begrudgingly!) limit myself to Plato’s complete works (the height of Greek thought), Dante’ Divine Comedy (the height of Medieval thought), my Riverside Shakespeare (the height of Renaissance thought), and Barth’s Church Dogmatics (the height of Modern thought) .

Whom are you going to pass this book meme to and why?

Jonathan, though my hunch is he’ll spurn it.

Update: Reverse psychology works. Jonathan took my challenge, broken link and all, and proved himself sufficiently more nerdy than me.

The next couple days I’m going to revist a couple recent posts where people have left insightful comments that I would like to fully respond to. I’m going to begin with this post regarding PZ Meyer’s post about giving “proper reverence” to everyone who has gone before us, rather than singling a certain tribal people (Jewish) out for special honor. Meyer’s post was a smash hit, as the comments indicate. It was featured in Carnival of the Vanities and made it to the new Smarter-than-I carnival (a creation of my brother) by “popular demand.”

Kevin Keith, who I am guessing is from leanleft, made the following quite lengthy and helpful comment. I would encourage you to read the whole thing and then peruse my comments at the bottom.

You didn’t understand the post.

[Myers] first evokes the immense temporal history of “human” or hominid species – extending back over 1 million years for Homo spp. and at least 4 million or more years for Australopithecus spp.. He then notes that the Bible, whatever else it might be, is essentially a record of the current Homo species over the most recent span of about 2,000 years (some quibbled with his dates, arguing it covers historical events as long as 3 or 4,000 years ago, but his basic point remains). Thus, the Bible – whatever it has to tell us and whatever it records – accumulates (some of) the human experiences and wisdom of only 1/75th to 1/50th of our species’s history, 1/500th or so of our immediate ancestors’ history, and 1/2,000th to 1/1,000th of what might reasonably be called “human” history. And, he notes, it is a profound and moving document – but one limited to only a tiny fraction of all that may have been known or seen in our history.

His observation is that if we are to hold the experiences – and what was learned from them – of people who lived 2,000 years ago in reverence, as he believes we should do, then it is almost heartbreakingly sad to note that the equally fraught, equally noble experiences of their ancestors, and those ancestors’ ancestors, and so on all the way back have been lost without any but the slightest record or remembrance. The experiences, hopes, fears, and beliefs of those earlier humans are as awesome and as worthy as those of humans in the time of King David, or today – and it would take thousands of Bibles to tell even the bare outlines of their stories, yet we have not a page or a line from them. The Bible – a record of the most ambitious and inspirational aspects of human history – covers only a hair’s-breadth of the span of the full story of human experience and belief. Pre-H. sapiens species had social rituals, including formal burials with flowers and artifacts, that speak of deeply-felt emotions and conceivably of religious beliefs, as well as of organized social structures. Their stories are part of our story, and they must be fascinating, but they are lost. The stories we do have of “early” humans are actually quite recent in terms of the whole span of human history, and given how moving those stories are, what is lost to us must be of incalculable value.

This leads to two conclusions: (1) we should recognize our history and beliefs – including the Bible – not as unique or as some sort of culmination of an historical trend, but as a continuation of a long history whose prior inhabitants had their own stories, beliefs, triumps, tragedies, and hopes – equally valuable and equally inspirational as compared to ours; and (2) we should avoid over-exalting the Bible as the last word on anything, when in fact it is just the most recent word, dwarfed by the 98.67% to 99.95% of human history that it doesn’t mention. This is hardly a radical observation – it is simply the importation into social history of the obvious and well-known facts of biological history (i.e., that we are merely a continuation of a long evolutionary line, and not yet a very long-lived branch of that line as well). The import of this observation is to encourage us to remember and feel for the (almost always overlooked) truly human experiences and imaginings of our pre-historical and immediate evolutionary forebears, and to remember as well to keep our understanding of the Bible and its significance within its very limited historical context.

Your remark that “it’s ALSO the revelation of God of the Universe who happens to be nothing less than the source and center of all meaning” is irrelevant. Human history is (at the outside) over 4 million years long; the Bible covers a period of a couple of thousand years that ended almost 2,000 years ago. Even if there is a god who created this world and dictated the Bible (a god who, bizarrely, seemed to need to crib much of it from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and then set his followers to take a vote on which of its many versions was supposedly the one actually dictated), the fact can’t be changed that most of what has happened in the world isn’t part of the Bible, and virtually all of human history was lived before the Bible was composed. Those humans’ history and experiences are as valuable as ours; their joys and sorrows were surely as inspirational as ours, their events and doings surely as inspirational, their beliefs and aspirations surely as heartfelt. The Bible records none of it – which is to say that the Bible is not the pinnacle of human wisdom but merely the surviving fragment of a vast store of wisdom and experience that was (likely) never written down. And so we should value it for what it is, but not more than that, and take up the burden of trying to discern what else there is that might be known for ourselves. To believe the Bible is the first and last word on everything is to deny the obvious fact that there were hundreds of thousands, and indeed millions, of years of experience with, no doubt, every topic mentioned in the Bible that came before the first Bible story was conceived. The Bible thus can’t be the first, nor likely the last, word on anything. And so we honor it as a partial record of a tiny fraction of a noble history, but no more than that because it cannot, in actual fact, be and is not anything more than that – even if (some, a, the) god did dictate it. Somehow that god forgot to dictate the other 1,999 volumes, leaving us on our own to discover what else we might have – and may someday – know besides.

I appreciate Kevin’s tone and his engagement with us here at Mere-O. We’re always looking to welcome new readers.

I appreciate his attempt to help me understand the post, though I did have a good understanding of it when I wrote my original post. What I didn’t understand was why people were so impressed with it. I think I do now.

Myers’ post and Keith’s recapitulation rest on an egalitarian view of human history, a position that suggests all time-slices of history are created equal. They provide no grounds for this position, though they do assert it repeatedly and vigorously. They are particularly intent on defending the time-slice of “pre-history,” or the human experiences had before the time of the Bible that are (quite frankly) unknown to us. Claims about this “pre-historical” period are obviously tendentious and speculative.

However, it is interesting that they claim these unknown histories are “just as valuable as our own.” Let me grant this for a moment–what makes history valuable at all? My own philosophy is that history is valuable because it gives a sense of self-identity–it informs my perception of my self and my place in the cosmos.

Yet this account of history destroys any egalitarian notion of history. Certain time-slices of the cosmos have obviously been radically more influential on our self-understanding and sense of identity as human persons (which most philosophical naturalists are bent on unmaking) than others. I take it that the events of Scripture (even limited to ad.0-33) have shaped human identity immeasurably. The whole concept of a person, after all, began as category of Christian theology. There was no sense of auto-biography before Augustine began working out the Trinity, because there was no such thing as the self. What Myers and Keith call “pre-history” had no such effect on our human identity, at least not in any way that we might recognize. Why are we being asked to put on an equal plane experiences that we have no record of and that seem fundamentally the same as our own?

I’ll be more to the point. Keith writes, This leads to two conclusions: (1) we should recognize our history and beliefs – including the Bible – not as unique or as some sort of culmination of an historical trend, but as a continuation of a long history whose prior inhabitants had their own stories, beliefs, triumps, tragedies, and hopes – equally valuable and equally inspirational as compared to ours; and (2) we should avoid over-exalting the Bible as the last word on anything, when in fact it is just the most recent word, dwarfed by the 98.67% to 99.95% of human history that it doesn’t mention.

Keith presumes that there is something intrinsic about more data or more experience that contributes to wisdom. I’m at a loss as to even understand how that might be. I am curious to know what he means by “wisdom,” since I have doubts that it is the sort of “wisdom” that Plato, Aristotle, or Aquinas might have appealed to.

Furthermore, Keith misunderstands the approach to Scripture that I and most other Christians have. The question is not one of time, but one of truth. Keith (and Myers) are so caught up in a garden-variety chronological snobbery–whereas chronological snobbery for Lewis meant veneration of things new, for Keith and Myers it means veneration of time above truth. Fundamentally, if Scripture is as it claims to be (namely, the historical record of the revelation of the God of the Universe), the length of the time-slice that it happens in seems utterly irrelevant. We as Christians (or as natural philosophers) are not interested in the first word, nor the last word–only the true word. Scripture claims to be the revelation of God to man–if true, then it is The Word and demands reverence and obedience. It does not merit this by virtue of anything other than it’s veracity. If it is true, then it is more valuable than any other history, for it claims to inform where Man comes from, who Man is, where He is going, and most importantly, who the Lord and Maker of the Universe is–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Creative guru Allison Howell, who is also a good friend, has recently started an invitation business. I was going to lavish praise on her, but then I realized that I’m not able to really capture how highly I think of her and her work, which you really must see. She is flat out good at what she does and also very reasonably priced. I am a huge fan of small businesses and I really hope Allison’s succeeds. If you know of anyone approaching their wedding or in need of invitations for any other reason, send them to her.

For me, education is the most tantalizing subject, so I have to jump in. If you haven’t read Matt’s last post entitled, “King for a Day”, please read it before this one.

Matt, I agree with you that education really ought to point students towards truth. However, it is unclear to me how such a thing ought to be performed. Truth, ultimately, is something that is “seen” – some data is brought to the students mind to be considered and then is judged as true or false. The mental “seeing” of true data appears analogous to literal seeing with our eyes. We can’t rightly say that parents teach their children to see in this way. Similarly, I don’t know how we could teach a student to “see” with their minds – there is something inherently natural about it.

Perhaps herein lies the answer to the cunundrum: education doesn’t – properly speaking – make the student to see. Rather, a good education would enhance and develop a student’s natural ability to see. It would affirm his or her common sense.

A further suggestion on how to accomplish this goal is to look to the ancients. The key was a story or set of stories that accurately represented the way the world is. The Greeks used Homer and the Romans used Virgil. Their young ones engaged in what came to be called the Paideia.* Augustine a came along and suggested that Christians read the Bible as their epic poem because it most accurately represented reality. Now we use all sorts of different stories.

Personally, I must say that the single best influence on my education would have to be my mother reading Bible stories to me every morning before school and having it read to me in church. Other suggestions on ways to help students perceive truth would be much appreciated, but like a good Evangelical, I’m going to go with the Bible!

*(Buy a great book on that subject by Werner Jaeger here – I don’t think it’s public domain yet.)

Mark at Pseudo-Polymath is dreaming about what he would do if he were king. His first item of business? Education.

An excerpt:

However beyond that (with one exception below) the only thing We would require of our primary education system is that it teaches its students how to be good students, i.e., how to learn well. In order to learn well a student needs four “canonical” education skills: Memorization, Reasoning, Dilligence and Perseverance. If your students remember what you say, connect the dots, are careful, and work hard they will excel. If they improve at those things, no matter what they are learning now to practice those skills, when they arrive at their place of secondary education if they are not prepared a the particular class, they will be a quick study in catching up.

There is an exception to my granting a complete freedom of curriculum. The one exception is drawn from history. The Ancient Greeks all read Homer, in Greek no less . An educated Englishman of the 15th-17th century all were read Euclid, the Bible, and a number of other common texts. A common “canon” of texts given to our students to give them a shared set of national symbols to facilitate communications would be a really good thing. I think it would be wonderful if we could come up with 3-8 texts we all have studied carefully and learned well. However, I don’t have any good suggestions for what those texts should be. Deciding that small number of texts which should all be engaging as well as deep enough to provide material for life’s lessons should be an amusing and lively discussion.

Now, Mere-O is largely in favor of serious education reforms. Our preferred type of learning is what might be called the classical educational model. Rather than narrowing the canon to 3-8 texts to give students a “shared set of national symbols,” we would advocate a much larger number of texts designed to give the student an understanding of “western thought.”*** Progress is only progress if you don’t repeat someone who has gone before. Furthermore, we would be suspicious of a “complete freedom of curriculum.” It seems to presume that all books or ideas are equally important, which I find indefensible.

Furthermore, Olson neglected perhaps the most important aspect of any education: Truth. Olson wants to develop “skills” in students, but it’s not clear what those skills are beneficial for other than the discovery or acknowledgment of true statements about the world. “Skills” such as thinking, memorization, etc. are not ends-in-themselves, but only means to-an-end, an end which needs no justification. After all, what exactly are you “learning” if you aren’t coming to understand true statements about the world?

Incidentally, some of our readers might notice that the above complaint could also be applied to Sayer’s essay Lost Tools of Learning. They would be correct.

I am looking forward to hearing about more reforms from Mark. It’s a great series!

***The astute reader will point out that what we call “western thought” may have had serious influences from the “east.” This is quite likely true. However, it seems plausible to label “western” those books which shaped “western culture,” even if they are influenced by the east.

Thanks to Grace Hill Media, I’ve recently become more “in tune” with what’s happening in Hollywood. I am really starting to enjoy thinking about media and the possibilities of communicating messages to broad audiences. With this topic in mind, I attended Biola’s Media Conference today. Among the highlights:

• I don’t know if it will be a very good docu-drama, but hearing Steve Borden (a.k.a. Sting) talk was awesome. Borden was funny, genuine, and downright honest about his life during and after his career as a pro-wrestler. Hearing his stories was a lot of fun!
• I got to see clips from The Visitation, a new movie that Ralph Winter is working on. The Visitation is adapted from Frank Peretti’s book of the same name. It will be interesting to see if Winter is able to turn a profit on it at all. He has much better prospects with the Fantastic Four, which I also saw the preview to. It looked to me like a run-of-the-mill comic book flick, but then again, I’m no expert.
• Perhaps most exciting was a never-before seen preview of Narnia: The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe. They had finished it (or mostly finished, at least) last night at 6:00, just in time to show it at the conference. For those worried about the movie’s fidelity to the books, they pointed out that Douglas Gresham, who is Lewis’s son and proprietor of his estate, is a co-producer on the movie. The movie looks really, really, good. It was fun to get a sneak peak at it.

It was a great day–I met some fantastic people and made some great connections. My only disappointment was that I didn’t get to meet the fantastic people from Grace Hill. I’m sure they had a representative there, but I didn’t run into him.

If you haven’t heard of this cinematic sleeper hit, it’s about time you did. It’s a hybrid documentary/narrative intended to undermine the dusty, stale certainty in which many people spend their bored and boring lives and restore them with the fresh, uncertain vibrancy available only to those with the guts to stomach it. A daring combination of science, spirituality, and philosophy, with interviews with top physicists and killer cgi special effects, the film succeeds in being informative and experiential. Check out the trailer for a taste. The film has been recently released on DVD.

Just take a second and drop an email to Senators Boxer and Feinstein. Let them know that the filibuster is undemocratic because the minority are tyrannizing over the majority – the same majoritarian rule that lies at the heart of American government. Watch Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to see how a filibuster used to be done and ought to be done. I’d like to see our California senators taking turns doing the same thing – then I would be silent!

With all the news coverage of the passing of Pope John Paul II and now the election of Pope Benedict XVI, I have begun to hear more people abuzz with talk of ecumenism and the possibility of unity between Roman Catholics and Protestants, specifically evangelicals. There seem to have been three major evangelical responses to the death of Pope John Paul II and the sudden rise of interest in the Catholic Church. The first is an unqualified acceptance of the Catholic Church as Christian, and of its pope as a true Christian man (redeemed, saved, born again) now enjoying eternal pleasures in heaven with God. The second is an uncommitted (or non-verbalized) theological position on the Catholic Church, combined with a general admiration for much of the good work done by Pope John Paul II, and a hope that Pope Benedict XVI will further that work. The third is a decided opposition to the Catholic Church and its doctrine, arguing that though Pope John Paul II may have done many good works, those works combined with the Catholic Church’s theology are insufficient for his salvation.

More often than not, however, it seems that many academically oriented evangelical circles, it is assumed that the Catholic Church upholds and teaches true Christian doctrine that is sufficient for salvation and is compatible with evangelical teaching. It is precisely this attitude that puzzles me.

A very brief glance at church history reveals that the Council of Trent met for two major reasons: to respond to the teachings of Protestants, and to reform the Catholic Church. At the conclusion of the (lengthy and oft-interrupted) Council, certain decrees and canons were issued in direct opposition to the teachings of the Protestants. I have listed a few of the major issues at the end of this post; the full text can be found here. A quick perusal of these canons will reveal that the Catholic Church has condemned many doctrines of Protestant churches and holds doctrinal positions that directly contradict the teaching of many Protestant churches. The Catholic Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation was not one of favorable acceptance, nor even one of benign tolerance, but an out and out rejection and anathematization of the doctrines being preached by the Reformers. My point here is not to debate whether the Catholics or Protestants are correct (although I might as well state that being a somewhat doctrinally conservative evangelical Christian, my sympathies lie definitively with the Protestants), but rather to ask how it can be possible for the Catholic Church and Protestant evangelical churches to be in communion and Christian fellowship with one another when the doctrines and decrees of Trent have not been overturned by the Catholic Church.

There seem to be two legitimate ways that this would be possible. One would be for the Catholic Church to overturn or overrule those doctrines and decrees of Trent that anathematize Protestants. The other would be for the Protestants to change their position and acknowledge the falsity of their doctrine and accept the teaching of the Catholic Church as true. A final, and in my mind, illegitimate way to deal with this division is to speak in general, vague and generic terms regarding doctrinal issues so that both parties can say the same words in joyful unison while meaning very different things.

Now, there certainly has been movement towards unification between Protestants and Catholics, and it becomes important to know how this has happened. Has the Catholic Church changed, have the Protestants, or has there been an increasing amount of generic and vague discussion allowing for an appearance of agreement?

The Catholic Church has not changed its position since Trent. The Catholic Catechism finds its origin in the Council of Trent (see paragraph 9). Further, the Catholic Church at Vatican II, recognizes that any ecumenical movement cannot involve change or contradiction to Catholic teaching (see paragraph 24).

An example of what seems to fall in the third class of generalities and vague statements is found in “Evangelicals and Catholics Together”, a document affirming the essential Christian unity between Catholics and Protestants. This document explicitly mentions numerous areas of disagreement that were dealt with at Trent, claiming that these differences (many of which were sufficient fodder to anathematize Protestants in the 16th century) are not sufficient to destroy Christian fellowship between Catholics and Protestants. This seems to deny the conclusions of the Council of Trent by not allowing the full import of the decisive issues to be brought to light, but rather to be neatly swept under the rug with the large brush of “unity in the love of Christ.”

I tend to think that if there has been any change, it has been on the part of Protestants who can more easily change because they aren’t tied to quite as strict a religious authority structure as the Catholic Church (some have no religious authority structure other than their own souls and their interpretation of the Bible). However, I am interested to hear how Protestants who accept the Catholic Church as Christian are able to do so, if not by compromising on issues that were seen to be of the utmost importance by the Reformers.

If Catholics and Protestants of the 16th century saw the issues raised by Luther and other Reformers and addressed at the Council of Trent as so divisive that blood was shed over them in that century and for many more to come, what has changed that now allows for this spirit of ecumenism to come to the forefront? Have Protestants and Catholics really misunderstood what each other have been saying for the past five hundred years? Perhaps we should look to the spirit of our age, when Tolerance is preached as the crowning virtue of mankind, for an answer. After all, we too are deeply influenced by our times, and we live in a time when world peace, tolerance ad absurdum, and being nice above all else, have risen to the top of many people’s agendas. The modern giants of Human Progress on the Council Room walls of the United Nations have not been overthrown by post-modernism, but have only taken on a new form. They still are radically opposed to the Gospel of Jesus by placing man and his wisdom at the center of the cosmos.

How can ecumenism between Catholics and Protestants move forward without sacrificing the Truth to the wisdom of men?