withallyourmind.net

I’ve just read an important and timely lecture by CS Lewis that I would like to commend to all of you called “The Inner Ring.” It was given at the University of London (King’s College) in 1944 and is about the inevitable development of exclusive circles and cliques within academia and every other field and area of life as well as the intense human desire to be inside of those circles.

Lewis admits that there are hundreds and hundreds of circles, often overlapping, and that their development is natural and unavoidable. They are not even bad in themselves. Nevertheless, the constant desire to be in the ‘inner ring’ is bad. By analogy, Lewis says that “the painless death of a pious relative at an advanced age is not an evil. But an earnest desire for her death on the part of her heirs [is]…”

What makes the desire for the inner ring so bad is that, when unwatched, it is the main cause of good people becoming scoundrels. So Lewis says to his young audience:

To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

Additionally, submission to this vice, as with all others, does not truly satisfy. Instead, Lewis offers two main pieces of advice, one work-related, and the other leisure related:

he quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.

And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

It is a valuable, and not very long, read, and I suggest it in its entirety. The rest is here.

Sorry to make my first official post in awhile something so non-substantive and frivolous, but I came across these at Evangelical Outpost and had to post them. I try not to go out of my way to look at videos online, but I guess youtube is good for something. Go here to watch some funny babies (Kung Fu Baby is my favorite).

It’s been a loooong time since I’ve posted anything here, and it has been at least partly due to the fact that I have spent a lot of time over the last couple months preparing for and then moving myself and my wife and all of our stuff 2,600+ miles across the country. At any rate, I have arrived safely in the bay area and settled into our new place in Berkeley well enough to get back to blogging. Although this blog has obviously become primarily the domain of my father, I do want to continue posting some of my thoughts on it and my goal at this point is to be disciplined about posting twice a week (I’m thinking of every Monday and Friday now, but this may change once my schedule changes when classes begin).

I also want to introduce my new personal website at http://jeremy.withallyourmind.net. Not much is there yet, but it is a work in progress.

I just wanted to add another link to a great website I recently came across. The website is run by Reclaiming the Mind Ministries, and has three pretty impressive free resources. First, there is a theology program that has free online courses in basic systematic theology. Next, there is a weekly ‘Theology Unplugged’ podcast that addresses the theological issues of our day (I see the most recent is by Francis Beckwith on how evangelicals should engage Catholics). Finally, they have a ‘Converse with Scholars’ program that appears to be a live topical chat with prominent Christian scholars about various issues (recent guests have included Paul Copan, JP Moreland, Alvin Plantinga, and William Lane Craig).

The URL is http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/

Sorry to add another, but I can never tire of Calvin and Hobbes. (Click to see full size).

Make sure you have Flash 8 installed, and then go here and click on ‘watch video.’ It’s an eight-minute animation created for Harvard biology students that accurately depicts (though with some added space so we can better see what’s going on) the sorts of things that are going on in every single one of your cells all the time! By far the coolest part is when you see a motor protein literally walking along a track carrying a huge vesicle of lipids. Watch it and try to imagine stuff like that happening in all of your more than a trillion cells. We are indeed ‘fearfully and wonderfully made.’

(HT Kurtis Smith at Blog and Mablog)

(Update: The video I linked to above just has the video with sweet background music. If you go to the Harvard site, you can watch the video with a step by step commentary of everything that is happening.)

I’m going through a little book right now called Scribes, Scrolls, and Scriptures by J. Harold Greenlee, which is basically a brief introduction to the science of textual criticism. Both to augment my own understanding and in light of the recent attacks on orthodox Christianity made by Bart Ehrman and others on the grounds of textual corruption, I thought I would summarize my readings through a multi-part series on the subject. This is the first part.

What Is Textual Criticism?
Before the invention of the printing press less than 600 years ago, the only way to reproduce a given writing was by hand. Naturally, many things, such as letters and receipts, did not need reproduction. Nevertheless, there were many written works like great pieces of literature or religious documents for which copies were always in great demand. To accommodate this demand, a few initial copies would be made from the author’s original (the autograph), and then copies would eventually be made of these copies, then copies would be made of those copies, and so on. We do not have the autograph’s or even the first set of copies for any of the great ancient writings, including the Bible. Instead, we have only copies of copies some distance from the originals and the copies we do have often conflict somewhat with each other and differ from the originals. Textual criticism is the study of ancient manuscripts with the specific aim of applying decided principles in order to discover and recover the exact wording of the originals.

The New Testament and Textual Criticism
Greenlee claims that without a doubt “the most important field of textual criticism is the study of the manuscripts of the New Testament.” He gives three specific reasons why this is so:

Firstly, the New Testament is the most important of all the ancient literary works. There is no gainsaying the fact that Christianity, with at least 33% of the world’s population being nominal adherents, has had an indelible impact on Western civilization. Because of this, the New Testament, upon which Christianity is based, is important to everyone. Obviously, questions about manuscript evidence and textual purity are even more important for those who are Christians and desire to live by the truth expressed in the New Testament writings.

Secondly, the New Testament offers the most promising and wide application of principles of textual criticism because there are far more manuscripts available for it than for any other ancient work. Most works of antiquity have only a handful of surviving copies, with a few having several hundred. The New Testament, on the other hand, has over 5,000 Greek manuscripts in addition to 8,000 in Latin and another 1,000 in other ancient languages such as Coptic and Ethiopic.

Thirdly, the New Testament manuscripts were written much nearer in date to the originals than for other ancient works. The oldest known manuscripts for most of the Greek classics are from over a thousand years after the original writings and for most of the Latin classics, from 300 to 500 years after the originals. For the New Testament, we have numerous manuscripts that are less than 300 years from the originals, with portions of the Gospel of John that most scholars date to within 50 years of the original writing.

The upside of all this is that we have more resources to piece together the exact wording of the New Testament autographs than for any other work of antiquity and it is for this reason that scholars have been confident about their abilities to reconstruct the text with great accuracy. In Part II we’ll take a brief look at the material and tools used for writing from the time of the New Testament to the printing press.

I guess it’s been well over a year now since it happened, but in April of 2005, Greg Koukl and Deepak Chopra had a debate of about half an hour on Lee Strobel’s (since discontinued?) tv show Faith Under Fire. I missed the debate, but heard a lot of good things about it and was pretty disappointed that I missed it and kept hoping it would be re-aired sometime. I know that you can now buy DVDs of the episodes, but as a poor college student I was overjoyed to find out yesterday that the whole thing can be viewed for free on Lee Strobel’s website. (Also, do a search for Koukl and you can watch his entire presentation on Tactics in Defending the Faith, which is a must-see. I’ve downloaded all the parts of both of these to put on a DVD for myself). The videos come in five parts of about 5 to 10 minutes each. For easy reference, here they are (enjoy!):

Part I: http://www.leestrobel.com/videos/Christianity/strobelT1119.htm
Part II: http://www.leestrobel.com/videos/Christianity/strobelT1120.htm
Part III: http://www.leestrobel.com/videos/Christianity/strobelT1121.htm
Part IV: http://www.leestrobel.com/videos/Christianity/strobelT1122.htm
Part V: http://www.leestrobel.com/videos/Christianity/strobelT1123.htm

This is a quote that most believers who have an interest in apologetics and the life of the mind will have heard many times, but I read it afresh today and couldn’t help but feel convicted and inspired and blessed to be in a position to at least make an effort at entering the academic world as a Christian. From the late Charles Malik, who was the president of the United Nations General Assembly from 1958–1959 (and who I just found out today studied philosophy personally with Alfred North Whitehead and Martin Heidegger):

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does the evangelical mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode in the great universities of Europe and America that stamp our entire civilization with their spirit and ideals? For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. (Charles Malik, “The Other Side of Evangelism,” Christianity Today, November 7, 1980, p. 40)

Last week I was extremely fortunate and got to meet Greg Koukl of STR and listen to him speak at several venues here in Tallahassee. The main purpose for his visit was to speak in defense of the pro-life position at the annual fundraising banquet for the local crisis pregnancy center, but he also spoke at a lunch for Christian businessmen and for an audience of students on campus. I spent a lot of time the night before he came anxiously trying to work up the courage to ask him if he had any spare time during which he could meet for coffee or anything. I wasn’t too successful at working up courage, but I got to the event so early that I ended up meeting him and being asked to work at his sales table. Then afterwards, through some stroke of Providence, the woman who organized his coming and who knew I was a fan (though I had never met her in person) asked me if I would be willing to take him out to lunch and drive him around for the afternoon. Naturally, I agreed. I had a great time talking with him about whatever topic came up and I can say I now admire him and his ministry even more. He was extremely courteous to me and everyone else. It was evident he knew his stuff and both his confidence and his humility were visible.

At some point in our conversation, I mentioned our blog and the fact that we were planning to branch out into doing speaking engagements, but that I didn’t have too much experience. He offered me a few tips for public speaking that I thought were good and that others might have interest in. Here are three that stood out to me:

1. Never speak on a topic about which you are not passionate. If you do not care about your topic, it will be clear to your audience and they will not care either. Instead, you must be passionate and let your passion show naturally. A phrase he used was that “if you want your audience to bleed, you’ve got to hemorrhage.”
2. Make sure the speech is well organized and progressive. The listener should be able to give a basic outline of your argument and at any time know where you are in the argument, and where you are going. This seems equally important in writing (and blogging). As one of my professors says, you should be able to look at any paragraph in a paper and see how what it says relates to the problem at hand and where it fits into the overall answer to the problem. Obviously, not everything will be perfectly straightforward from the beginning, but this is something to strive for.
3. At several points in the speech, step back for a second and narrate the progression of the argument up to that point. This helps keep you on topic and organized and also helps the audience see the bigger picture more clearly and cement what they have heard.

It was a great honor and pleasure meeting Greg and spending some time with him and I encourage everyone who comes across this to visit his website and support his ministry. You’ll be glad you did. Here’s a picture I took with him on the last day he was here: