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I’m a big fan of “Ambient” music, particularly electronic Ambient. Ambient music is more concerned with tones and sounds than with structure or traditional harmony. In this sense, Ambient is a very “postmodern” form of music. I love playing with sound, what in Ambient music we call painting a “soundscape.” So here is a link to an Ambient composition of mine called Psalm 23. As you might guess, it’s inspired by Psalm 23. I’d encourage you to read the Psalm as you listen to the composition.

Technical data: sequenced using Cakewalk Project 5 running three instances of Native Instruments Absynth 3..

By day I’m a mild mannered (usually) law professor, on Sundays I’m a rocking guitarist and worship leader. I love writing music and producing songs in my basement digital studio. I’d like to highlight some of my original songs here. This one is called Glorious (click on the link to hear the Mp3 file.) It’s just me, my guitar and my voice. See the extended entry for the lyrics and technical notes, and drop my a note if you like it. Enjoy!

I just got a copy of Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth, another book that’s been burning up the faith-based blogsphere. This looks like a winner. I’ve only skimmed a few sections, but here’s a thought from the section titled “Enlightenment Idol”:

The hubris of the Enlightenment lay in thinking that Reason was . . . a transcendent power, providing infallible knowledge. Reason became nothing less than an idol, taking the place of God as the source of absolute Truth.

Mainstream Evangelicaldom may be learning from postmodern thought after all. . . .

I received my copy of Hugh Hewitt’snew book, Blog. It’s a book that’s having a significant impact in the blogsphere, particularly among Evangelical bloggers. What’s the fuss?

I’m afraid I don’t have a great answer to that question. I liked the book — I really wanted to like it — but I didn’t love it.

Here’s what I liked: Hewitt does a good job of demonstrating how the blogsphere has grown to rival, and in some celebrated recent examples such as “Rathergate,” to supplant or at least upstage, traditional print and broadcast media. And, he makes some cogent, although not revolutionary, observations about how business organizations should utilize blogs and bloggers. He also refers to some useful blogs that newbies in the blogsphere will want to visit, although at times he seems mostly to be shilling for his blogging friends and promoting his own site.

Here’s what I didn’t like. The book reads like it was cranked out over a few long weekends. If you’re looking for serious analysis of blogging as a social or political phenomenon, this isn’t it. There are many breathless sections about how the blogsphere has “shattered” the “MSM” (Main Stream Media), interrupted with long block quotes and padded with filler such as an “Appendix” comprised of Hewitt’s “early writings on blogging” and a second “Appendix” comprised of e-mails from visitors to Hewitt’s website. Any 220 page book with nearly 70 pages of appendices from old, disjointed writings suggests, to me, that the book’s main themes perhaps aren’t that well developed. It also lacks an index, which again suggests perhaps some haste in getting to press.

The book’s brevity might be understandable if it were a monograph on one or two tightly argued points. It isn’t. In fact, it’s difficult to tease out the book’s main focus. Is it primarily a call to arms for conservative bloggers, or more of a business blogger’s how-to? Is this book in the tradition of Sean Hannity or Stephen Covey? It seems to want to be both, and as a result does strike oil with either.

In addition to problems of style and organization, I think the book includes several important substantive missteps. It seems to me that Hewitt suffers from myopia when he compares blogging to the information revolution that followed Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press. Blogging isn’t the revolution — the Internet is the revolution. Blogging is just the latest tool made possible by the Internet. The sorts of discussions now happening in blogs once happened (and still do happen) on bulletin boards and chat rooms. Years ago they happened mostly on the Usenet and on proprietary boards such as The Well and Delphi.

I would agree that blogging has accelerated this trend by making this sort of informal information exchange easier. Yet it’s important to place blogging in context. Blogging may persist, or it may go the way of the Usenet as new tools arise. The Internet, though, is here to stay. A truly strategic vision for communication will embrace this new tool while recognizing its possibly transitory nature. That Hewitt fails to mention, for example, the growing importance of RSS feeds and newsreaders is a major omission in a book like this.

Hewitt also spends little time on the potential dangers of the blogsphere. He does recognize that jihadist groups have taken to the Internet and blogging, which he seems to employ as a call to arms for good people to occupy the space. Yet, he seems so enchanted by the blogsphere’s potential to correct perceived bias in the traditional print and broadcast media that he never addresses the way network effects can magnify the impact of false information. A case in point, which Hewitt ignores, is the post-election blogswarm about vote fraud started by a blogger whose statistical analysis of the exit polls was inaccurate. Hewitt even briefly refers to the concept of memes, without acknowledging that memes are often bits of false information that replicate virulently over a network. (I’d give a cite to Hewitt’s book where he references memes, but the lack of an index makes the job of searching too difficult).

Finally, Hewitt seems too sanguine about the commercialization of blogging. He goes so far as to suggest pricing models for blog banner ads. Call me a purist, but the last thing I want to see is the extensive commoditization of blogs. In fact, there’s a real danger that the commercialization of blogs will signal the decline of the blogsphere. Public relations professionals have already recognized the importance of the blogsphere and are becoming adept at “seeding” stories in influential blogs, just as they seed stories through “leaks” to the traditional news media. A commercialized, coopted blogsphere will lose its authenticity. Surprisingly, Hewitt doesn’t seem concerned about this. In my view, what we need in the blogsphere is writers who say what they think regardless of the consequences. Once you begin eating from the hands of sponsors, advertisers, and public relations flackers, you become the MSM.

So, if you’re new to blogging or just curious about it and want to learn more, get Biz Stone’s Blogging, which contains much more nuts and bolts information about blog culture and tools. If you’re an active blogger, read Hewitt’s book, but blog about how much more interesting a book it could have been if it had been a more thorough analysis of the blogsphere’s place in the Internet and the culture at large.

The first “spiritual peril” of blogging on which I want to focus is the temptation to self-aggrandizement. If we’re honest about it, many of us who blog will have to admit that we want readers and traffic not so much to win, influence or learn from other people as to be validated by them. Lots of traffic and links means I’m valued. It means there is a pseudo-community over which I command influence. It means — or at least I’m tempted to believe it means — I can think, argue and write better than lots of the “other guys.” A blog can become sort of a “Temple to Me” on the web.

The temptation toward self-aggrandizement manifests itself in a few key ways. A few influential Evangelical bloggers, for example, display gushingly laudatory blurbs received about their blogs from other bloggers or public figures. I mention this not to point fingers, but it seems to me that there’s no purpose for this other than naked self-promotion. This becomes particularly evident if you trace the sources of the blurbs — they often seem to lead in circles. Many Evangelical bloggers also display their ranking in the TLB Ecosystem. Again, to me there seems to be little purpose in this other than to display pride in a high ranking. Self-promotion can also become a factor in the choice to display information in sidebars about books we read or other personal activities. Are we listing those books to show how smart and well-read we are, or to promote conversation about the books?

Perhaps the most insidious form of self-aggrandizement in blogging, however, is “link love” abuse. It’s curious, and frustrating, to me that many of the “elite” Evangelical bloggers seem sometimes to engage in an incestuous link love cycle. They link to each other and then announce on their own sites how the other guy mentioned them in a post. There seems to be at least an implicit understanding that this cycle exists primarily for the purpose of mutual self-promotion. And the “little guy” bloggers, like me, aren’t exempt from this practice. How often do we troll on the “big guys'” blogs hoping to get a link back to our own sites?

Of course, promotion and publicity aren’t evil per se. If you do have something valuable to say, and you want to engage in a conversation with others about it, it’s appropriate and necessary to try your best to get the word out. The blogsphere’s social convention of link love can be a good thing if done in the spirit of sustaining a quality conversation. A nice looking, well designed site, even one with positive blurbs and book listings, lends credibility and can contribute to positive discussion.

My concern is more the spirit in which we practice our blogging. Do we approach our blog in a spirit of humility, of “speaking the truth in love” ( Eph. 4:15), or do we approach it like a wanna-be division of a commercial publishing house? Do we take time now and then to examine our motives for constructing and maintaining our sites?

As a follower of Christ I’m called to be part of a Kingdom in which the “last” are “first.” If my blog is to be an extension of my role in that Kingdom, I must recognize and fight this temptation toward using my blog for self-aggrandizement. As we Evangelicals weigh our role in the blogsphere, I hope we each individually and all collectively always “do it all for the glory of God.” ( I Cor. 10:31.)

Recently some Christian bloggers have suggested some ways Christians can increase their influence in the blogsphere. Evangelical Outpost constructed a new ready-made Evangelical blogroll and sponsored his well-received symposium, for example; Hobbsonline is working on “ChristianPundit”; 21st Century Reformation has issued a call for bloggers to use their technological platform the way Luther used the printing press; and It Takes a Church notes that pastors and theologians should blog so that Christian truth can be communicated more rapidly and more in depth than through other media. Some of the recent interest seems to have been generated by Hugh Hewitt’s new book, “Blog”. (I haven’t read Hewitt’s book yet, but it’s on the way from Amazon….)

Many of these commentaries are quite insightful. They focus on blogging as the next “popular” (in the sense of being widely accessible) means of communicating information, and on how blogs help free us from captive information outlets such as the national news media. Obviously, as an active blogger and reader of blogs, I’m on board with these comments.

I would add to these commentaries that blogging often helps the blogger as much as the audience for whom the blog is written. Perhaps this even is the primary function of many low traffic blogs (like mine!). Blogging helps me internalize, structure and express ideas about theological issues I’m studying or wrestling with, and gives me valuable insights from the perspective of other bloggers from different corners of the Christian faith tradition. In many ways, blogging often feels like those middle-of-the-night theological debating sessions I used to have with my college roommate (and if you stumble across this site, Doug, drop me a line!).

In all of this, however, I think we who wish to maintain a distinctively Christian voice in the blogsphere ought always to beware of the blogsphere’s many temptations. If thought quite a bit about this as I’ve wrestled with why I blog and whether I ought to continue blogging. Here are what I believe are some key problem areas for Christian bloggers:

Self Aggrandizement
Envy
Argumentativeness / Competitiveness
Substituting / Neglecting Physical Community
Disaggregating Theory and Praxis
Ghettoizing Dissenting Voices
Confusing Popularity with Substance
Reverting to the Mean

I’m planning a series of posts on these problem areas. My first post in the series, on “Self Aggrandizement,” follows this introductory post.

I read Isaiah 26 this morning (part of an ongoing study). Chapters 25 and 26 comes after a series of oracles (statements about the future) concerning the nations surrounding Israel and Israel itself, which culminate in a terrifying statement of God’s judgment of all the Earth:

See, the Lord is going to lay waste the earth
and devastate it;
he will ruin its face
and scatter its inhabitants–
It will be the same
for priest as for people,
for master as for servant,
for mistress as for maid,
for seller as for buyer,
for borrower as for lender,
for debtor as for creditor.
The earth will be completely laid waste
and totally plundered.

Consistent with Isaiah’s pattern, Chapters 25 and 26 proclaim hope for the faithful remnant of God’s people despite, and in some ways because of, this terrible judgment. The thought is not merely one of endurance, but of waiting in confident hope for the time when things will be made right. Verse 8 of Chapter 26 struck me today:

Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws,
we wait for you;
your name and renown
are the desire of our hearts.

For God’s people, now is a time of waiting, of desire unfulfilled. As we walk in the way of God’s laws, we see clearly how His laws are ignored and His rule rejected by men, and we ache because we know His laws are perfect, His ways are peaceable, His rule is good. The “desire of our hearts” — the driving force at the center of our being — is that God’s name and renown would be exalted and His peaceable Kingdom would come. As we make Him known in our songs, our celebrations, our mourning, our proclamations of His Word, our study of His Truth, our service and love, we participate in that Kingdom and glimpse what it one day in fullness will be. And we are reminded of the promise, response, and hope that closes the book of Revelation (Rev. 22:20-21):

He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming soon.’
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. day, an excerpt from the “I have a dream” speech:

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

This is cool — the first color picture from the surface of Titan, from the Huygens probe:

MuD and PhuD touched off an interesting, and pleasantly civil (so far) discussion about “theistic evolution.” David Mobley responded with a couple of thoughtful posts (on which I commented) and Randomize followed with his own insightful thoughts.

I’d like to follow up a bit more with some thoughts on the relationship between General Revelation and Special Revelation. Before I do, I’d note that I wouldn’t necessarily define my position as “theistic evolution,” and that although I make some references to young earth creationism, they aren’t intended to reflect the views of any of the bloggers with whom I’m engaging, or to disparage anyone who holds those views.

To me, whatever position you take about how and when God created, a central question and often-ignored question is how information we learn from the world around us impacts our understanding of what we read in scripture.

As summarized in Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology:

There is a possibility of some knowlege of divine truth outside the special revelation. We may understand more about the spcially revealed truth by examining the general revelation. . . . Since both creation and the gospel are intelligible and coherent revelations of God, there is harmony between the two, and mutual reinforcement of one by the other. The biblical revelation is not toally distinct from what is known of the natural realm. Genuine knowledge and genuine morality in unbelieving (as well as believing) humans are not their own accomplishments. Truth arrived at apart from special revelation is still God’s truth.” (Erickson, Systematic Theology, at p. 198.)

I view “science” — a term that actually requires, I think, substantial definition (maybe in a later post) — simply as one way of knowing, not the only or even always the “best” way. Yet, although general revelation does not take precedence over special revelation, neither, I think, should we think of special revelation as “superior” to general revelation. In fact, I believe that “all truth is God’s truth,” and that there is no real conflict between the two sources of revelation, so the question of one taking “precedence” over the other is misplaced. There are only apparent conflicts, because we (a) misunderstand the “text” of general revelation; (b) misundestand the text of special revelation; or (c) misunderstand both.

Some Biblicists accuse those who believe in theistic evolution of elevating “science” over the Bible. I think this sets up a false dichotomy. In fact, it suggests a radical view of both revelation and the capacities of human perception and reason. In essence, it suggests that our perceptions of the world around us, our use of observational and mathematical tools to understand general revelation, are corrupted beyond any reliability whatsoever. I can’t really trust measurements of red shift, parallax, background radiation, and the like, which clearly establish an ancient universe, or my observations of genetics, the fossil record, and geology, which strongly suggest if not establish biological descent with modifications. They are merely fallible human perceptions of nature, so I’m not free to reexamine an interpretation of special revelation that seems to suggest a younger universe.

One critical problem with this view is that it undermines the reliability of special revelation. If my ability to perceive general revelation is so irredeemably corrupt, why should I trust my perception of special revelation? Why is my ability to receive, read and understand the words of the Biblical text (or any commentaries on the Biblical text, including those written by YEC proponents) any more reliable than my ability to understand mathematical calculations that give an old age for the stars and galaxies?

It seems to me that the highly limited view of general revelation taken by some, and by implication its reductionistic view of the faculties of human reason and perception, ultimately would destroy any confidence in the reliability of special revelation and the truthfulness of Christian faith claims. Young earth creationists in particular never seem to be able to grasp this point. In this way, their position reflects an extreme form of postmodernism, or perhaps a form of Eastern Buddhist or Hindu thought, which asserts that nothing can truly be understood through the use of human perception and reason and that what we perceive as reality is only “apparent” and not real.

In contrast, I think a more orthodox view of general revelation affirms that human beings can perceive reality and can use reason to arrive at true statements about reality. This means that, when I observe and study the heavens, I can have some degree of confidence that what I’m observing is real, that the events I’m seeing really happened, that the logical chains of causation leading to and arising from those events correspond to reality, that “reality” isn’t only “apparently” as it appears. I likewise can have confidence that when I read the text of special revelation, it is a real communication that I can use my facilities of reason to understand with some degree of perpiscuity.

Of course, this doesn’t mean human perception and logic are unaffected by the Fall. We are prone to misperception and to errors of reasoning, and thus it is appropriate for us to constantly reevaluate our conclusions. Moreover, our preception and logic have limits; there are some things we can never fully understand, since we are merely human and not God. These limitations, however, apply to our understanding of special revelation as well as to our understanding of general revelation. I’d cite the case of the Earth-centered universe as a textbook example of how we can misinterpret scripture to be making claims it doesn’t make.

What does all this mean for the relationship between general and special revelation with respect to the creation account? It means that if observation and reason from multiple lines of data suggest an ancient age of the universe, and the Bible doesn’t explicity address the matter, we are justified in concluding that an interpretation of the Biblical text that requires a 10,000 or so year old universe is incorrect. This isn’t pitting one form of revelation against the other, or exalting one form over the other; it’s seeking to harmonize them appropriately. Here, I think Wayne Grudem’s perspective in his Systematic Theology, another widely used text from a conservative (inerrantist) evangelical viewpoint, is helpful. Grudem notes that

. . . the lesson of Galileo, who was forced to recant his teachings [about heliocentrism] and who had to live under house arrest for the last few years of his life, should remind us that creful observation of the natural world can cause us to go back to Scripture and reexamine whether Scripture actually teaches what we think it teaches. Sometimes, on closer examination of the text, we may find that our previous interpretations were incorrect.” (Grudem, Systematic Theology, at p. 273.)

I also appreciate Grudem’s Systematic Theology irenic spirit. Although Grudem leans towards a young earth view, his position is well balanced:

Although our conclusions are tentative, at this point in our understanding, Scripture seems to suggest (but not to require) a young earth view, while the observable facts of creation seem increasingly to favor an old earth view. Both views are possible, but neither are certain. And we must say very clearly that the age of the earth is a matter that is not directly taught in Scripture, but is something we can think about only by drawing more or less probably inferences from Scripture. Given this situation, it would seem best (1) to admit that God may not allow us to find a clear solution ot this question before Christ returns, and (2) to encourage evangelical scientists and theologians who fall in both the young earth and old earth camps to begin to work together with much less arrogance, much more humility, and a greater sense of cooperation in a common purpose. . . . [Y]oung earth proponents have too often given the impression that the only true ‘creationists’ are those who believe not only in cretion by God but also in a young earth. The result has been unfortunate divisiveness and lack ofcommunity among scientists who are Christians — to the delight of Satan and the grieving of God’s Holy Spirit.” (Grudem, Systematic Theology, at p. 308.)

I hope at some point, regardless of our particular views on this difficult issue, each of us can find this balance ourselves.