Upstream

In my chat with Dale Stenberg on the Pilgrim Faith podcast, he asked me to define the family, and how male and female are integral to its design. I said a few things about how men and women uniquely contribute to the functioning and calling of the family, but I want to go into more detail right now about the especially sacred calling of mothers.  

During the height of the pandemic, our gym closed. That meant more than me having to try chin-ups on tree branches (which I don’t recommend). Thanks to the childcare service our gym offered, it also meant that my wife lost one of her rare reprieves from watching the kids, along with a chance for us to exercise together. This left her trying to snatch breaks whenever and however she could.  

She took to leaving our brood with me while she strolled around the neighborhood. That certainly helped. A friend of ours and a fellow quarantine mom admitted that she started “checking the mail” in the mornings. She knew the postal truck doesn’t arrive until well after 3PM. But even those brief moments with a door intervening between her and the demands of three lovable savages were a relief. 

Being trapped inside day in and day out with restless, squabbling, irritable little ones is the full-difficulty setting on an already daunting job. No breakfast-in-bed every May could adequately compensate for the extra burden mothers shouldered and are still shouldering in this society-wide shutdown. 

In homes like ours where a sole breadwinner can work remotely, or in those where the main earner’s job has been deemed “essential” a mother can begin to feel her sole purpose is to keep the kids out of her husband’s hair. Her job, she may start to suspect, exists just so his can. 

If anything, I think it’s the other way around.  

Yes, I believe in what I do for a living. I know it does independent good, often for individuals, families, and churches I will never meet or visit. Yet as I record this, listening to my wife singing “The Church’s One Foundation” with our daughter and sons, I want her to know—along with the countless other young mothers who have struggled through the last year and a half—that her toil is not just vital; it’s sacred. 

I caught a glimpse of this recently when I scrolled past a photo of that mailbox-checking mom and her husband (who is one of my dearest friends) with their growing tribe. There’s a quiet power and an aura of deep meaning that surrounds even frazzled mothers when they’re with their children. Especially frazzled mothers. One can almost hear that “choral music” Lewis wrote of in Perelandra—that sense of future generations taking shape, wholly dependent on and indebted to the tired woman with the yogurt stains on her sleeve. 

The image of a young mom, surrounded by her kids in their rumpled Sunday best, half of them paying attention to the camera and the other half swinging wooden swords, sipping from plastic teacups, or casting about for some small corner of creation to subdue, beautify, or stuff into a Critter Keeper can leave me speechless. The sense of self-giving love is palpable. I look at those pictures—those of my own wife and children, especially—and I see natural beauty caught up and glorified in a supernatural vocation. I see potential realized. I see a story being told that, if kept silent, would have left the world  poorer. 

In that role, my wife (and all the moms in her shoes), are exercising an office at which I can only marvel. We fathers have a more straightforward, voluntary, and often comical chemistry with our kids—especially with our boys. It’s why we end up tossing them in the air or hanging them by their feet in so many photographs. And I could record a whole episode on my daughter’s confidence in my dragon-slaying abilities. Of course, there’s mystery there, too. She’s looking for Jesus. And that means there’s a cross in my job description.  

But during the COVID pandemic and all the stress that accompanied it, I became more keenly aware of the unique sacrifice involved in mothering. There are the obvious ways a woman dies to herself in raising a family: she gives up free time and “me time,” she experiences unwelcome physical changes, and on some days, she may not have the time to make herself look presentable. The self-emptying is both literal and metaphorical.  

Yet a woman with children becomes more than herself, not less. She is caught up in an eternal archetype that first gave shape to man and woman, father and mother. She gives testimony that God was not mistaken when He made us the way He did—male and female—and that He has not by any means moved on to a “plan B” for His world.  

I’m not Roman Catholic, but there’s a reason the icons of Mary with her Son have for centuries held such sway over the Christian imagination: the Mother of God represents something creation was designed for. In a very real sense, the whole world was made so that mothers could cradle infants. And the whole world was remade when God chose to enter that embrace (and by doing so, forever hallow it).  

It’s not only that, as Poet William Ross Wallace famously put it, “the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” In some ways, that’s a mercenary view of motherhood. The din of every hurried Sunday morning is the sound of image-bearers being welcomed into the choir—of human souls doing what they were designed to do—of the family, that ancient blossom of creative energy that survived the fall, thriving in the redemptive soil of Calvary. 

In times like the last year and a half, confined to home by events out of our control, I’ve seen more clearly what the Psalmist meant when he called the wife of one who fears the Lord “a fruitful vine” flourishing within his house. Right now, these four walls often reverberate with the sound of chaos. But if I listen closely, especially when Gabi is singing hymns with the kids, I can hear that choral music.  

Shane joins Dale Stenberg on the Davenant Institute’s “Pilgrim Faith” podcast to define the family, unpack its created purpose and structure, and explore how recovering God’s design can transform our culture.

Some of my most revealing discussions happen on airplanes, during long flights. They usually begin when the person imprisoned in the seat beside me asks what I do for a living. When I reply that I work for a Christian worldview ministry, I can see the wheels turning. Occasionally, they’ll reply, “Awesome! I’m a Christian, too, and this is where I go to church.” But more often, I hear defensiveness, reservation, or an implied challenge.

“I believe in a higher power,” some will say. “But I’m not dogmatic about which church or religion is true.” I also hear the ever-present complaint that churches are full of hypocrites and legalists.

There’s one question, though, that seems to bob to the surface more regularly than any other: “So,” my fellow passengers will say, “you’re a Christian. Does that mean you are against…?” and the blank is usually filled with abortion, gay relationships, or some gender identity of recent vintage. On my most recent flight, I was asked why I oppose sex between consenting adults outside of marriage.

This leaves me in a difficult spot. I can launch into an argument for why I reject certain popular claims about bodily autonomy, the harm principle, or the conflation of subjective feelings with identity. I can start critiquing expressive individualism, and challenge my neighbor’s belief that what doesn’t hurt others is none of my business. And I have done these things. But I’ve noticed lately that all of these reactions begin by accepting my fellow passenger’s free association of Christianity with the word “no.”

In America in the 2020s, biblical and orthodox faith suffers from an image problem. Most of those outside the fold seem to view Christianity primarily as a negation of freedoms, rights, and self-expression. Quite naturally on finding that one of these dour, censorious Christian creatures has embarked in the seat beside them, they expect me to justify myself.

Of course, there is a proper place for the word “no.” As every parent understands, “no” can save a life. That’s why it’s short and easy to shout. The oncoming SUV isn’t going to wait for me to explain Newtonian physics to my six-year-old. And society rightly says “no” to the driver of that same vehicle when he decides to get behind the wheel drunk.

If love and authority mean anything, they must mean forbidding or at least discouraging actions that harm or endanger others. And as the drunk driver shows, that can even mean forbidding adults from doing whatever they want with their own bodies. Even the Ten Commandments, especially the second tablet, are largely proscriptive. There’s nothing wrong with “no.” It closes off roads that lead to deception, death, and damnation.

But in allowing Christianity to become a religion associated primarily or even solely with what it forbids, I fear we have made it far too easy for those outside the faith, and even those within, to forget the life-giving “yes” all those “nos” exist to protect.

Those who ask me at takeoff why I’m against abortion or gay love or unfettered passion aren’t asking for a moral or philosophical treatise. They’re asking why I don’t want some people to live their fullest and freest lives. They want to know why the sixteen-year-old with college ambitions should have to throw them away for the sake a blastocyst—why people who experience attractions different from mine should have to live their lives without love—why those who feel the warm prompting of instinct when they look into a stranger’s eyes should have to squash it for the sake of their grandmother’s morals.

They want to know where my God gets off forbidding us from enjoying humanity in all its earthy ecstasy and potential.

The suspicion is obvious (and not just among unbelievers) that something about the Christian faith is sick and repressive. This religion, after all, seems to demand that we renounce our own highest good and joy, that we give up on this creation and all the pleasures it seems to offer. Why? So we can sacrifice our hopes and happiness for some ghostly hereafter. The idea that Christians are really a people who hate our own and everyone else’s humanity is devilishly easy to catch. “You can have all this world, just give me Jesus” is a tough sell when Jesus seems like a story and this world lights up our every sense.

This is where Christianity’s “yes” has the power to rock a person’s worldview, and why we must preach the whole Christian story, not just its “no” to sin.

Thomas Aquinas said it best when he defined love as “willing the good of another.” But this presupposes that the good of another is a matter of objective reality, not merely what we choose or desire at any given moment. We could be mistaken about that good—even laughably mistaken. As Lewis comically proposes in “The Weight of Glory,” our idea of human flourishing may be, compared with the objective reality of human flourishing, as mud pies in the slums to a holiday on the seashore.

But Aquinas’ dictum also presupposes a story that begins before the fall, before the world and human nature were ruined. It envisions a loving God intent on sharing inexhaustible delight with His creatures, who endowed them with near-divine capacities and placed them in a paradise so rich Moses struggled to describe it. And it teaches that even after our first parents chose to kiss the dust, God’s determination to give human beings true joy was so strong, it buried the death and misery we chose and planted a new garden on top of them.

During my discussion with Seraphim Hamilton this week on Upstream, he did a stunning job of articulating God’s plan to glorify creation in and through the perfecting of humanity. But it gets even better. Christianity’s “yes” isn’t just a yes to an objective but general human nature, but to each of our individual natures and personalities in their truest, best, and fullest form. Lily Cherney puts it this way in one of my favorite essays at The Calvinist International:

“…when we exercise self-control and make decisions every day about how to enact our lives, are we shaping ourselves arbitrarily, recreating ourselves according to low ambition or will—or are we rather attempting to become more truly and skillfully who we already are, to discover rather than capriciously invent what it means to be a human, a woman, this woman in particular? Again, the traditional answer is the latter. And this is very good news. What it means is that who we are—who we really are—is on God’s agenda. No part of you will go unfulfilled, unexpressed, and in the end, unglorified, if you give yourself to the pursuit of God’s kingdom. It is only and always the Enemy who wants to make each of us less than we are.”

Yes, Christianity tells us to take up our crosses and deny ourselves. It forbids us from pursuing certain pleasures and from setting up certain visions of selfhood as golden idols. It tells us “no” and teaches us to use the word quite frequently, ourselves. But that is only in the service of a greater “yes.” It is only because our desires, as Lewis says, are not too strong for God. They are too weak. And the story of our salvation is in part the story of learning not to settle for less than real and perfect human joy. We deny

what we mistake for our humanity so that in the end, God can give us back our full humanity—our real selves—the people He intended and always knew we could be.

All of this takes a little longer to explain than most people who talk with me on long flights expect. Which is why I never start the conversation. But when they ask, I never say no.

Seraphim Hamilton joins Shane on Upstream to discuss the grand story of Scripture and the beautiful invitation we have to live inside God's economy.

In his diabolical masterpiece, “The Screwtape Letters,” C. S. Lewis reveals through the pen of his senior tempter how devils persuade humans to accept false beliefs by using jargon:

“Your man,” explains Screwtape, “has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but as ‘academic,’ or ‘practical,’ or ‘outworn,’ or ‘contemporary,’ or ‘conventional,’ or ‘ruthless.’ Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sorts of thing he cares about.”

As Screwtape concludes later in the book, the skilled tempter’s job is to get his human patient to believe something “not because it is true, but for some other reason.”

I can’t help thinking of this passage whenever I experience what I call a “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” moment. I’ll be in a conversation with someone who finds out that I share their view on some political issue of great moral significance. Let’s use abortion as an example. The sense of comradery and trust generated by that agreement will often lead this person to assume that I share their view on some completely unrelated issue—let’s say, hygiene practices during a pandemic, or claims about the integrity of an election.

He or she will give me the “wink, wink, nudge nudge,” as they rehearse their views, presuming that because they’ve come to see me as a member of their tribe, I must share their views on everything. I’m often left in the uncomfortable position of having to smile politely and ignore the remarks, or else explain to my friend that I have a different view—one that may upset them or cause them to question their positive impression of me.

The opposite can happen, too. Recently, someone told me that she was surprised to find out I opposed the ordination of women as church elders (a position she shared), because she had assumed based on my criticism of a certain politician’s behavior that I was “very liberal.” Think about that! Knowing nothing about my beliefs, reasoning, or theological commitments, she filled in these blanks in based on my reaction to an elected official who rarely attends church.

I bring all this up not to pick on anyone, but to illustrate how thoroughly we’ve accustomed ourselves to thinking in jargon and tribal identities. “Left,” “right,” “conservative,” “liberal,” “solid,” “compromised,” “progressive,” “fundamentalist,” “affirming,” “bigoted,” “red-pilled,” “blue-pilled,” “woke,” “based,” “elite,” and “ordinary Americans.” Each of these labels stands for a complex of assumed beliefs and values, and each belief or value is quickly extrapolated to identify a person with one of these labels.

Worse still, these tribal associations and the jargon that signifies them are often how we choose our opinions! Rather than evaluating the merits of individual claims—even those that have little or nothing to do with beliefs we’ve already accepted—we adopt the opinion most common in our preferred tribe. Like consumers watching a TV commercial, the question on our minds is not, “is this idea true?” but “what sort of person believes this, and do I want to be that sort of person?”

In my conversation with Samuel James on the podcast this week, we noted how Christians fall into this trap when it comes to reading and listening to political commentators—especially those who don’t fit neatly into one of our political tribes. The idea that a pastor, theologian, apologist or author could criticize certain behaviors and beliefs of our tribe without outing himself as a member of the opposing tribe is more difficult for us to grasp than ever. Yet in an age consumed by partisanship and identity politics, it’s never been more important to listen to voices who don’t seem to have a side—voices that are difficult to describe using our favorite jargon—voices less interested in reinforcing our tribal identity than in being forthright with us.

Believe me, I get it. The world is complicated, and our newsfeeds are overwhelming. We look for ways to simplify the torrent of information and competing claims. “Good guys” and “bad buys,” “red team,” and “blue team,” “white hats,” and “black hats” “conservative” and “liberal” are convenient shorthands for making sense of the world. Yet as we label each other—as we draw up sides—as we substitute adjectives for honesty—we must listen for the hiss of an Undersecretary of Hell whose one goal is to keep us from asking the only question that matters: “is this true?”

A recent piece at The Gospel Coalition calls out evangelical elites for only “punching right.” In a response, writer and editor Samuel James argues that there’s plenty of nonpartisan Christian commentary—we’re just not listening.

The Dunning-Kruger effect (famously described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger) is the idea that people who know little to nothing about a subject tend to wildly overestimate their competence in that subject. This is because their knowledge is so limited, they lack even the categories to recognize their own ignorance.

We see the Dunning-Kruger effect at work in historian Tom Holland’s confession at the beginning of his book “Dominion.” Holland (whom I interviewed last year on the BreakPoint Podcast), writes that as a schoolboy, he obsessed over two subjects: dinosaurs, and Greco-Roman civilization—and for the same reasons. As he puts it, both were “exciting, large, glamorous, fierce, and extinct.”

But while Holland always knew that Tyrannosaurus rex lacked beneficence, he soon become disillusioned and bewildered by the Greeks and Romans. Why? Because although he admired the military achievements of men like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, the more he read about these men and their empires, the more alien they seemed. Holland realized that they truly were like predatory dinosaurs: vicious, bloodthirsty, and utterly lacking in anything we would recognize as mercy.

This shattered his conception of the ancient world. It dawned on him that he had been viewing the Greeks and Romans through a set of assumptions shaped not by their moral code of conquest and slaughter, but by the ethics of an itinerant mystic and miracle-worker from Nazareth—a man whom the Romans crucified.

Holland’s book is a fascinating read in its own right, but the point I want to make is how easily he let his childhood values—values he inherited from Christianity—inform the way he viewed ancient civilizations. In line with Dunning-Kruger, Tom’s ignorance of shifting moral norms was so profound that he didn’t even notice it at first. He didn’t know enough to know what he didn’t know.

In many ways, his book is the counterpoint to a more recent book we’ve talked about a lot lately at the Colson Center: Carl Trueman’s “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.” Where Holland seeks to illustrate how profoundly Christianity has shaped Western values, Trueman seeks to illustrate how our values have radically departed from the Christian past—so much so that a statement like, “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” now makes intuitive sense to millions.

Yet I think there’s a synthesis to be had between these two masterfully-written historical surveys. And it really comes down to a concept Trueman highlights in his subtitle—a phenomenon that has a lot in common with the Dunning-Kruger effect: “cultural amnesia.”

When I sat down with Dr. Trueman in front of a live audience at the recent Wilberforce Weekend in Fort Worth, Texas, I asked him what he meant by “cultural amnesia.” He defined it as the contempt for, or disregard of the past and the beliefs and values of those who lived there. We hear cultural amnesia in grating refrains like, “It’s 2021, get with the times,” or “you’re on the wrong side of history.” And of course, it’s not difficult to guess at the social beliefs of anyone who deploys these slogans in casual conversation. They’re likely very progressive, and they likely believe that categories and identities younger than the iPhone are non-negotiable pillars of human life.

These sayings are also closely related with Owen Barfield’s concept of “chronological snobbery”—the idea that we’re smarter and morally superior to ancestors simply because we live in the present, and they in the past. But what really fascinates me is the way cultural amnesia or chronological snobbery—call it what you like—tends to blind us to both the good and the bad in our age.

In C. S. Lewis’ essay, “On the Reading of Old Books,” he argues that every age has its characteristic blindness—a blunder of which posterity will marvel, “How could they have thought that?” None of us can fully escape this blindness, he admits. But we can significantly reduce it by reading old books.

It’s not that Lewis thought people in past times were necessarily wiser or more righteous than us, or that they didn’t also have their blind spots. It’s that their blind spots are very unlikely to have been the same as ours. Very often, in fact, their blind spots were the opposites of ours. Lewis suggests that writers from past ages tend to emphasize precisely the virtues we have forgotten, and criticize precisely the vices we have embraced. By exposing our minds to “the clean sea breeze of the centuries,” we make ourselves aware of our blind spots, and realize (as Holland did) that the standards we take for granted—those assumptions we’re not even fully aware of—are very often what’s blocking our view of the past.

In a very real sense, “Dominion” and “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” offer the same insight from different angles: Holland’s book is about how cultural amnesia has blinded us to the good of our age (more specifically, the good our age retains from its long centuries basking in the Christian sun). Trueman’s book is about how we’re blind to the lies of our age—specifically the lie that our identities are primarily grounded in subjective, psychological experience.

The solution both writers offer is strikingly similar: become deeply familiar with the past, with the way those who live there thought, and with how peculiar our assumptions and cultural prejudices are by comparison. It’s this kind of exercise in awareness that can teach us what we don’t know. But more importantly, it will teach us how to know what we don’t know.

Dr. Carl Trueman joins Shane and a live audience at the Wilberforce Weekend in Fort Worth, Texas to explore how a revolution in how we understand selfhood made the transgender revolution plausible.

The late Rich Mullins wrote a lot of songs that changed people’s lives and shaped their faith. But one song in particular has a reputation for grabbing the attention of unwary listeners and has even been known to convert souls. In “If I Stand,” Rich sings: “There’s more that rises in the morning than the sun, and more that shines in the night than just the moon. There’s more than just this fire here that keeps me warm, in a shelter that is larger than this room. And there’s a loyalty that’s deeper than mere sentiment, and a music higher than the songs that I can sing.”

The point of the song is simple: there’s much more going on in this world than just the material facts—more than atoms and energy. We live in a cosmic temple bursting with immaterial meaning, with invisible essences, with symbols and truths laid out in plain view for keen image-bearers to see. Or to hear.

Recently I had the privilege of interviewing the lead members of one of my favorite bands, The Arcadian Wild. We were face-to-face at the Wilberforce Weekend in Dallas-Fort Worth the day after they gave a predictably superb performance for our conference attendees. I asked Lincoln Mick and Isaac Horn what they think it is about music that gives it this unique power to arrest our minds and hearts, and make us vividly aware of the immaterial meaning built into human life and creation.

They told me that music is “ingrained in the fabric of the world” in a way that precedes the very first song any musician ever wrote. In that sense, it is a universal language, accessible to and in some measure understood by all. Where human tongues separate, music possesses a strange and wonderful power to unite. And it does this by laying open the ineffable mysteries of God’s world—by testifying that there is, indeed, more that rises in the morning than the sun.

Isaac pointed specifically the music’s close connection with our emotions—the audible “color palette” as he called it, whose hues we can hear in the lilt of a violin, the laughter of a mandolin, the deep and manly conversation of a guitar. Each of these can evoke emotions—joy, contentment, melancholy, dereliction, longing. Even more, their undeniable reminder of the immaterial pries our hearts open to the surgical touch of well-written lyrics.

We don’t possess the original musical notation for the Psalms. We can guess what they sounded like, but for the most part, God left us to fill in the notes. It’s telling, however, that he preserved the lyrics. This collection of voiceless songs that invite the church of every age to arrange and sing them anew comprise the longest book of the Bible. Spanning the full breadth of human emotion and experience, the Psalter is special revelation for every moment of our lives. Yet the fact that God so prized these words that he delights in seeing them set to melody after new melody in no way diminishes the importance of the notes we use.

God reveals his plan of salvation using words, and even names himself in the second person “the Word.” But music’s close relationship to lyrical truth—and its penchant for preparing the way for that truth—reminds me of a voice who once cried in the wilderness before the coming of the Word made flesh.

Music, this purest form of natural revelation, brooks no argument. It summons tears to our eyes or a smile to our lips unbidden and almost irresistibly. In classical education, it forms one of the Quadrivium, the four disciplines applying mathematics to time and space. It is the audible order of creation, wondrous in its unnecessary beauty and uncanny in its skill at catching sinners off guard. And ever the

loyal handmaid of God’s Word, it reminds us stubbornly of the universe of meaning behind the visible world, and in doing so opens us again to the truth our minds often forget, but our ears never do.

 Shane welcomes Isaac Horn and Lincoln Mick of the bluegrass/folk band, “The Arcadian Wild” to explore the strange and wonderful power music has to convey truth and remind us who we are as image-bearers. This episode was recorded in-person at the 2021 Wilberforce Weekend in Dallas-Fort Worth.