City Notes: Books in 25 minutes or less
City Notes (CN) are more than a book review. They are meant to provide you with direct quotes from some books I've read in the last year, so you can get a taste of the overall theme of the book and then begin to chew on what your life might look like if you applied what you read. Here are links to the previous CN books: AND; Life Together; A Meal with Jesus; The Art of Neighboring; A Praying Life; Family on Mission; Leading Missional Communities; Marks of a Faithful Missional Church; Baptism: The Water That Unites; Leadership in Anxious Times; Encounters with Jesus; Exploring More Part 1
Chapter Four | What Counts as Satisfaction?
"(In teaching students) I wanted them to be more aware of what they didn't know than what they did. I was more concerned to hear them ask a question well than see them rush over the question for a hurried, trivial answer. ... having the proverbial lightbulb go off is such a precious experience that I didn't want to shortchange anyone from seeing or experiencing it. ... Searching for information on the Internet is easy; pursuing understanding is hard. ... questioning well means more than 'finding an answer' so that we can simply get on with our lives. Those who inquire well must move from answers to understanding, from the instant gratification of our need for comfort and security toward the deepened desire for the enduring good for wisdom." – pgs. 68, 72
"(Conversation with a senior British fellow who converted to Christianity late in life) 'Sometimes,' he told me, 'I think we ought to wake up in the morning and say 'Lord have mercy, and then get on with it.' Cultivating a reliance on the providence of God to transform us frees us from obsessive self-reflection that can undermine our confidence in Christ's sometimes slow, sometimes imperceptible sanctifying work. We should not be surprised by moments of doubt or uncertainty. But the paradox is that the more we grasp our own frailty and the strength of God's mercy, the more we can simply 'get on with it' and about our day. The Christian life is not constituted by having answers to all our deepest questions but by a life of trustful repose in the gracious sovereignty of God. We live the questions, but as Rainer Maria Rilke put in the other part of the quote, we may 'gradually and imperceptibly live (our) way into the answer.' ... My concern is that our answer-dispensing industrial complex is short-circuiting the work of empowering people and communities to patiently linger over the questions so that their growth into understanding is set within their sorrows and joys together as the church." – pgs. 74, 76
"The first and most important aim of the Christian intellect is not to defend the answers we affirm or to critique those who disagree with us but to understand in its fullness the revelation we have been given. ... Answers and arguments are not primarily tools to improve our witness to the lost or to increase our confidence in the truthfulness of Christianity. They are instead moments in our formation as obedient and loving disciples, given to us to help us more faithfully walk in the footsteps of Jesus and love Him more deeply." – pg. 77
"Near the end of his epic poem, Milton, when Milton arrives from heaven, William Blake writes that he comes: ' ... To cast off the idiot Questioner, who is always questioning / But never capable of answering, who sits with a sly grin / Silent plotting when to question, like a thief in a cave; / Who publishes doubt and calls it knowledge. ... ' Strong words, to be sure. But the sort of pervasive skepticism that Blake denounces is not merely wearisome. It turns out to be impossible." – pg. 79
"You might say Plato grasped some of the fundamental questions: How does an individual relate to community? How do we begin on our journey into understanding? What would we do if we saw a perfectly just man? How shall we overcome the shadow of death, the mortality of the body? While Plato wrestled long and hard with the questions, he did not have the answers. Those only came, the early Christians argued, in the person of Jesus. Jesus is primarily the answer to His own questions, though. Plato's presuppositions are not those of the Old Testament. The Bible has its own set of inquiries, which as we walk with Jesus we learn to pose. What does it mean that Jesus is the Messiah? How will God be faithful to His people? What is the nature of Christ's union with the Father? What is the relationship between Christ's two natures? And maybe most importantly, how should we understand Jesus' sacrificial death? While we are able to grasp some of its meaning without the Old Testament, we can only understand the atonement correctly within the context in which it was given: it makes no sense to speak of Jesus as the 'Lamb of God' without understanding the rituals of sacrifice and absolution for Israel's transgressions in the Torah." – pgs. 83-84
" ... as Jesus' story reveals, the appropriate question is not who around us counts as deserving of our love; the appropriate question is whether we will be ready to dispense mercy to any who need it. In a sense, Jesus is 'the answer' to our fundamental questions. However, His gift to us is more than even a story; it is life itself and life abundantly. We enfold the gospel story into our lives which lends that life its distinctive character and shape. As we hear and retell the good news, it becomes for us a story that we also live." – pgs. 85-86
Chapter Five | The World and Our Questions of It
"People who know the 'right answers' often think they are sufficient. Or people feel like they should have the right answers, making them reluctant to speak up. My goal when teaching was twofold: I wanted to find a question that my students didn't think they already knew the answer to and I wanted to make the familiar seem strange. What they had seen straight, I wanted them to see crooked. What they had known, I wanted them to unknow – or at least feel uncertain about. Where they had uncritical assumptions, I wanted to introduce questions. My hope was that they would be surprised by the Bible's depths, that they would wake up to its power to reorder their lives. I longed for the world of Scripture to seem foreign and wonderful, to disrupt and put to death their platitudes and cliches. We were not always so immune to the depths of things, so inoculated from the power and goodness around us that we may as well be asleep. As every child knows, the world is a miracle. When we first make our appearance, our home is a marvel and its corners and crannies contain a mystery. The most mundane objects become to children momentary sources of joy. And as children grow, their wonder and exploring take the form of questions, which children ask a lot of. One study found children who asked one to three questions every minute. To the youngest among us, the world is a strange and fascinating place. ... It is a joyful thing to be young again, to have our hearts revived with a sense of our own lack of understanding combined with an earnest desire to grow. As we return to our explorations, we find ourselves in a world not of our own making but a world that is good." – pgs. 88-89
"Any intellectual framework that domesticates the world by refusing to recognize its strangeness will eventually run out of energy. The most fulfilling, most romantic frameworks leave room for plenty of unknowns, yet unknowns that can be known as unknowns. Think about friendship: over the course of its life, we will discover a great deal about another person. Even though we are finite, our capacity for change leaves open the possibility that we may always learn more about each other. The other always remains an unknown whom we get to explore (and unknowns will always remain beyond us both, which we can explore together). When we live within the romantic tension of knowing and not knowing, our interests take us out into the world and we are able to experience the joy of learning, a joy that is never finished because there is always a deeper understanding available to us. A Christian's understanding of the world is good, true, and beautiful enough to keep one wondering forever. Like any good home, Christianity turns out to be delightfully odd and quirky, with idiosyncrasies and habits that seem downright strange to outsiders (baptism, anyone?) but that make some sense from within. Regardless of what happens in communion, folks taking a tiny wafer and little bit of wine is pretty odd, isn't it? And those are only our practices: the God we worship took on human flesh, which as a fact is an infinite source of inquiry and praise. But the romance is an adventure because our questions have consequences. The pursuit of truth and understanding is a grand drama, which may end as a comedy or not. When a man pursues a woman, he stands between marriage and refusal. But when he pursues an insight, he risks the possibility of being wrong." – pgs. 94-95
"'Nature gives most of her evidence,' C.S. Lewis once wrote 'in answer to the questions we ask her.' Questions send us out into the world to find answers, but what 'counts' as an answer is in a sense determined by the question we've asked. If we only pose scientific questions, then the world will deliver mechanistic results. If we ask psychological questions, then we may be primarily concerned with people's feelings and secondarily with what's transpiring in their brains. If we ask a historical question – how did this come to be? – then we shall find ourselves with historical answers. If we read Genesis and the only questions that come to mind are about science, then we set ourselves up to find answers that fit." – pgs. 96-97
"Cynicism perpetually sees through. Understanding sees how and why. If our inquiry is oriented toward seeing the world, then we must at some point reach a level we can hold on to. As C.S. Lewis wrote: 'The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.' Even if everything in creation dissolved into the ether, we would still be left with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the 'first principle' who makes possible any knowledge or understanding." – pgs. 100-101
"The experience of being at home completes us. We are genuinely free to be ourselves. There is no understanding the sort of satisfaction that results in: to feel as though we have 'found our place' is to experience a profound and rare good." – pg. 101
"A Christian comes to rest by acknowledging that all things have already been comprehended by God and that they have been given in Christ. 'All things are yours,' Paul tells us, because we are Christ's and Christ is God's. Our particular lines of inquiry may lead us to the outer reaches of the cosmos or the deepest corners of the soul. But in each direction we explore territory that has already been marked out by another. We can explore the world, in other words, because God made it and in His gracious providence has given us the freedom to enjoy it. There is no place where we can escape His presence. He is the One in whom we 'live, move, and have our being.' To use a common medieval formula, God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference does not exist. His presence locates all things and makes them intelligible to us, and in seeing the universe as created, we also see that it has been given by God to us. The confession that God is Creator is the ground from which we understand the world. The paradox of Christianity is that when we set out to explore the things of God, we discover that all else good and beautiful is thrown in as well. In the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are transformed and made as solid as He is, even as we wait for the final glorification of our bodies and the permanent renewal of creation. Our cynical detachment, our despairing skepticism, our obfuscating retreat into grayness and ambiguity – these too will pass when we finally see our Savior 'face-to-face.' We will one day finally be permanently at home in the universe because God first came as a stranger into it. And the more we walk in His footsteps, the more at rest we can be. Even now, within the light of Scripture, we can see partially, incompletely, and dimly – we see men, but still dimly, like trees. But we are still seeing. And by bringing our inquiry in conformity to our confession, our vision is trained so that we are ready for that great day when we shall finally encounter our Savior face-to-face." – pgs. 102-103
Chapter Six | The Liberation of Questioning
"Defensiveness isn't confidence, even though it often mimics it. The defensive temperament is grounded in the fear we might be wrong, rather than the 'fear not' of the gospel. It is not a sign of our belief's vitality but its frailty. It suggests we think our lives are at stake, that if we are wrong, it will be fatal. Such a mindset does not accord with a confident Christian life. As Christians, we do not possess the truth; we live within it and are possessed by it. Our primary role is as witnesses: we are 'not the light' but 'bear witness to the light.' Even when such a witness requires us to contend and draw the sharp lines between truth and error, we can do so without being motivated by the anxieties of defensiveness. The Christ to whom we bear witness willingly suffered the 'defeat' of the cross out of His confidence in the faithful power of God. Within His life we have nothing to fear – even losing or being wrong, for neither state can endure long. ... The hurried rush to defend ourselves often indicates a lack of confidence in God. When we are safe and secure in the hands of Jesus, even those questions that are veiled attacks will neither trouble nor disturb us. Sometimes we ought to speak in response – as Paul does before Felix in Acts 24 – but such speaking will be constituted by a cheerful disregard for our own security and life because the truth that we proclaim has the power of life over death. It is precisely because Paul so eagerly desires the 'fellowship of (Christ's) sufferings' that he is free from the sort of defensive posture of those who desperately cling to their lives." – pgs. 109-110, 112-113
"Our assurance as Christians is not rooted in our own knowledge and love of God but in God's knowledge and love of us. Paul prays that the Philippians' love would 'abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment,' which suggests they have some of both. But three times Paul flips the formula on its head and points to God's knowledge of us as the grounds for the Christian life. My favorite is Galatians 4:9, where he writes, 'But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God ... ' It's almost as though Paul catches himself and wants to make sure the order is right. In 1 Corinthians 8:3, Paul uses the same formula: 'If anyone loves God, he is known by God.' And in one of the key passages that points both to our knowledge of God now and the perfection of that knowledge later, Paul writes: 'For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.' Our confidence in God's knowledge of us – our assurance – takes as its source the love of God as demonstrated in history at the cross. In the person of Jesus, we are encountered by a God who shared every part of humanity. In Jesus' sacrificial love we find mercy for all our intellectual sins and errors, for those questions we ask badly and those we do not ask at all. The cross sets our questioning free by instilling in us the courage to inquire by removing any reason for fear. We are free within the confines of the cross to love God and ask what we want." – pgs. 110-111
"If Christianity were a series of endless questions, it would amount to no more than Platonism. Answers liberate questioning by allowing us to rest. The burden of exploration is too heavy for us to carry, which is why most of us abandon it. But if we allow ourselves to question with no hope of answers, we will someday reach exhaustion. As the author of Ecclesiastes put it, 'I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with.' This is the same God who 'has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.' In the early church, the confession of the creeds would often take the form of a call and response. What do you belief? 'We believe in one God.' Pronouncing our commitment isn't the end of our exploration but questioning's renewal and liberation. Questioning can be a form of self-justification and rationalization, of trying to find out the answers ourselves so that we no longer stand in need of grace. Yet when we live within the creed, we repeatedly acknowledge and confess our need for help." – pg. 114
"We have democratized the encyclopedic mindset through Wikipedia, giving us all instant access to all the information we could possibly want. In such an environment, emphasizing God's unknowability and transcendence – that He is beyond ultimate explanation – seems like an appropriate counterreaction. Yet the emphasis stands in danger of overcompensating by insisting that God cannot be understood at all by His creatures, even in the ways He has ordained to reveal Himself. The result can be a loose, nearly nihilistic emphasis on God's mysteriousness that perpetually sees (or rather, posits) a God behind the God who has given Himself to us in Jesus. The trick is to hold together the unknown with the knowing, the mystery with the revelation, the hidden with the gift." – pg. 116
"'Ask and it shall be given' is the promise. And all the promises of God are 'yes and amen.' But there is no timeline for their fulfillment. And many times when we pose our deepest and most pressing questions to God, we are brought into the heart-wrenching waiting that purifies our souls. Waiting is never easy. But if answers are gifts, we cannot demand them. We have no entitlement, no claim on God such that He owes us answers for His actions or inaction. By assuming a posture of trustful waiting, we surrender our requirement that God meet us on our terms and open ourselves to His questioning of us. We learn in our waiting to respect God's freedom, to remember that God is a person and not an answer or favor dispensing machine. Yet we often feel the absence of God more deeply and pervasively than we can say. We long not for a proposition but a presence. The psalm that best captures it for me is Psalm 13. What begins with a question ends in singing. Like the psalms I have mentioned elsewhere, this one, too, turns to affirming the 'steadfast love' that remains despite appearances. But the time between the question and the presence is waiting and hope, waiting and expectation, waiting and pleading and prayer. Waiting expectantly is not passivity; when we wait, we redirect our attention away from the immediacy of our situation and toward God Himself. We orient our lives toward the promise and live within its domain. Waiting is a posture of the heart that establishes an atmosphere of trustful dependence regardless of the activities we are called to undertake. As a theme, waiting on God pervades the Psalms and Prophets. The most famous is probably from Isaiah 40:30-31. Waiting upon the Lord may feel like despair and darkness, but it is in waiting that our youthful vitality finds its renewal. Yet the renewal often comes through pain and mortification. Cultivating a dependency upon God for 'answers' often involves confronting the sinfulness of our hearts. We do not see, in part, because we are not ready to see: we have not the 'purity of heart' that is necessary for our sense of God's absence to be replaced by the gloriousness of God's presence. Consider Psalm 130:3-6, which frames waiting in the context of the psalmist's confrontation with sin. Our eager longing and expectation for God cannot be divorced from the word of His faithfulness to us. We look expectantly for the marks of His presence, training our eyes to see 'the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.' We make our confession and our inquiries, pleading and prodding God to purify the eyes of our hearts that we might see Him (see also Psalm 25:1-5; 27:13-14; 31:23-24; 33:20-22; 38:13-16; 39:7-8; 40; 62; 69:2-3; Proverbs 20:22; Isaiah 8:16-18; Isaiah 25:9; Isaiah 30:18; Isaiah 33:2; Isaiah 51:5; Lamentations 3:22-27; Micah 7:7; Zephaniah 3:8; Hebrews 6:15 and 9:28; James 5:7-9). Hope is the mark of those who explore well; long-suffering is the heart of the healthy questioning life. As we linger over all that we know while patiently and quietly pleading for the unknowns to be made manifest, our lives will reverberate with confidence in the promises of God. The answers to our deepest questions do not always reveal themselves with the speed or ease we might demand – which is a fact of joy and not of despair to those who live within the promise. The same God who will not allow us to be tempted beyond what we can bear will also only give us the knowledge we can handle." – pgs. 118-121
"There are some goods so immense and fundamental that to take them into ourselves would require our death. The tragic beauty of the cross – a God whose love and forgiveness enters a world where infants die, where children are sometimes killed in schools, where women are abused – the words fail right at this moment. It is true, as John the Baptist said, that 'I must decrease and he increase.' But the 'increase' costs us everything, for the one who unites himself with Christ will also find himself hanged on a tree. To take this terrible good into our lives is to enter into death and through it, the life of Christ. Waiting upon this God undoes our world. His story makes us, not the other way around: 'For I have died, and my life is hidden in Christ with God.' 'To live is Christ and to die is gain.' 'Come and die,' Christ bids us. In surrendering our demand for answers and waiting for them to be given, we submit our questioning to the one who has searched out all things. Our exploring happens in the shadow of the cross, which is a judgment that makes us questionable while manifesting the answer of God. But by questioning our questions, the cross sets them free. Questioning interposes a gap between ourselves and our beliefs, which makes us strangers and unknown to ourselves. Such a distancing is a form of death, as the question brings us to the end of ourselves by focusing our attention on what we are not. That sort of exploration, though, is liberated when we live within God's knowledge of us, a knowledge that extends even to our sinfulness in Christ's work on the cross. We are free to be strangers to ourselves precisely because God is intimate with us, because He is God with us, because He has been God with us in the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ." – pgs. 122-123
" ... God seeks structural integrity all the way throughout our intellectual homes: 'Thou desirest truth in the inward parts,' is David's prayer. As we incorporate the authorized witness of Christ's life into our souls and allow it to infiltrate our lives, we will find its questions and answers undoing and rebuilding our lives on a more firm foundation. Questioning is liberated when we do not ask it to do too much. Reality makes; we do not make it. And at the heart of reality, out of the silence of unknowing emerges the cross. The cross engenders within us the courage to explore without finding, to wait without an answer, to search without seeing –precisely because we know one has already gone before us into death, come back victorious from it, and will come again to consummate His triumph over sin. Our questioning is liberated, ultimately, by the 'assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.' But until then, we place our understanding on the altar and wait for it to be burned up or given back, as Isaac was given back to Abraham. It is not in this country that we will find the end of our exploring but the country that has been prepared for us – a country that we will know with all the strange romantic familiarity of those who have arrived to a home that encompasses within it the universe and that they have been to before." – pg. 124
Next post: Exploring in Communities of Inquiry w/ Good Questions
– Sully
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