Detecting God

So how do we detect God?  I was in a car traveling with a colleague who just couldn't understand how people could believe without the tangible proof of a repeatable scientific experiment.  It got me to thinking.  Perhaps the tool of the scientific method is just the wrong tool.

Consider this.  To measure distance we use a ruler.  To measure light we use a photometer.  To measure radiation we use a Geiger counter.  A ruler just doesn't work to measure light intensity.  Perhaps when we ask ourselves about detecting God, we assume that we can use the tools that are common to our daily experience:  Rulers, speedometers, cameras, and radios.  But just as a chain saw is a lousy tool for caulking windows, so is the measurement of God's presence by traditional methods impossible without tools designed to the task.

So what are the tools for detecting God?  A humble heart made subject to God will resonate in God's presence in the way that a tuning fork will resonate in the presence of a particular tone.  Though there may be other ways to detect God's presence, it is this humble submission that seems to be the only commonly accepted tool based on human experience.

 Because God speaks through Creation (see Romans 1), there is a place for detecting God by exploring and studying creation.  But that is like discovering the artifacts of an ancient civilization.  There is a difference between discovering a pottery shard and living with an indigenous culture. Both give evidence of the culture, but only one is an experience that is undeniable and experiential.  Studying God's creation and living in relationship with God are both ways of detecting God, but one is a more authentic and complete experience.

So we should study creation, and we should measure it with the tools of science, engineering, and practical living.  But we should also be seeking to explore a more living experience of God whose presence is not measured with a micrometer.

God Speaks

The opening lines from the New Testament letter to the Hebrews opens this way:

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.

As my friends Jacob and Vinod and I wandered across this passage, I began to wonder.  How does God speak?  Many say they have heard from God.  Some describe it as a clear sense, an unmistakable hint, and on rare occasions, a voice.  For me, it has never been a voice.  Perhaps it is because God does not choose to speak English.  

Consider this:  American Sign Language (ASL) is a language.  It has grammar and structure and meaning and consistency.  But it contains very little of what we know as English per se.  One won't recognize cognates, and the system we use to capture and parse the language is optical rather than audible.  It is different in almost every way from spoken English.

Household pets seem to make some of their desires known.  There is meaning without a spoken language.

Is it possible, then that God speaks with clarity and purpose but perhaps only rarely in the form of utterance that we usually associate with the spoken word?  Romans 1 may give us a hint here:

... what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Apparently at least in some occasions, God makes his himself and his purpose clear through creation.

John's famous opening lines, "In the beginning was the word" gives us a hint too.  

There seems to be an overwhelming sense that God communicates, but perhaps not in what we normally consider a spoken connection of words, syntax, and rules of acoustics and grammar.  If, however, it appears to be language-like, then would could assume from analogy that it is learn-able.

The 10th chapter of the Gospel of John includes these words.

“Very truly I tell you Pharisees, anyone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.” Jesus used this figure of speech, but the Pharisees did not understand what he was telling them.

John calls this a "figure of speech."  Perhaps because no other form quite describes how God speaks.  If learning the language of God is like learning other languages, then it requires immersion, focus, determination, practice and guidance from those who are already fluent.

Perhaps that is the meaning of mentoring and discipleship.

An open letter to my daughters and their friends...

Most of what I write here is simply a kind of personal diary; a place where I can write down insights that I'm too afraid I'll forget absent some kind of record.  But today I believe what I have learned is important enough that my daughters need to know this.  So here goes:


Dear Amy, Julie, & Carrie,

My world is different from your world.  Duh.  But your world is different from your world too... or at least it will be.  I am seeing some trends that I believe will shape your adult lives and I think they're worth pondering as you work through the last formal years of your education.  In fact, if I'm right, these trends will be shaping those who think they're shaping the trends:  Your educators, philosophers, and leaders.

Here's where it started for me as I sat in class today:  The professor showed us this video:

Pepsi, the owner of Doritos sponsored a competition to create and then vote for the best advertisement to show at the SuperBowl in 2009.  Thousands of people submitted videos for the contest.  Everyone voted.  This one was the winner.  

What is innovative is not that it is funny, nor that it was among the top-rated commercials of that year's SuperBowl.  Rather, the surprise is it was not created by Pepsi nor by its advertising agencies.  It was not created by anyone with credentials to create.  It was created people whose video was the most liked.  Some call this "crowdsourcing."  In effect, work that used to be done by a company itself, is now opened up to those outside the company to do in competition and without a clear contract.  One winner out of thousands of submissions.  Does the Harvard professor who presented this case recognize that the product he sells (The credentials of a Harvard MBA) may be irrelevant shortly?

I learned today of a company named threadless.com. Threadless is a company that depends on individual artists to design T-shirts.  They come up with cool designs and submit them online to threadless.  Then the general public votes on which designs are best and the company prints the shirts and pays the "winners" a $2000 prize. The company itself has very little assets beyond its idea and business model.  All of the innovation comes from the artists.  Some of whom win the $2000 prize, and others who have to just enjoy the process of competing. Interestingly a lot of pop artists are building a threadless award into their resume if they're a winner.  It is becoming a new credential.

There were other examples in our conversation.  topcoder.com is a site that puts out computer software problems.  Their clients are other companies, like GE, who have software problems.  When topcoder puts out a problem it is really putting out one of its clients' problems.  Once posted, a bunch of freelance computer coders all work on the problem.  The client then picks the best solution out of all of those submitted and the winning contribution gets a cash prize.  Some of the top coders are making half-million dollar incomes in this way.

Here's another one to check out:  inocentive.com.  This is similar to topcoder, except the problems don't  have to be software.  They could be biology or chemistry or sociology or economics.  Apple has done this with the iTunes Ap Store as well.

I understand that major symphonies switched to a model like this in the past.  Auditions are now conducted blindly with instrumentalists playing their audition pieces behind a screen, known only by their numbers so that the judges cannot be biased by reputation, credentials, or history.

Here's the trend to note:

1. Many people compete
2. The top solution wins on its merits alone
3. Winner takes all
4. No credentials required to participate

You probably already have hints of this as people post their lives on facebook only to quasi-compete for how many "likes" they can get.  But the trend is much more profound than that.

1. The flattening of global income among knowledge workers is the certain end of this work.  When all that matters is the accuracy or correctness of your solution, it won't matter if you're in Bombay, Boston, or Bonn.  You'll get the same $2000.  The world of relative affluence in the West will be a curiosity of history for you and your children.
2. The need for certain credentials (a college degree, an MBA, a certification) will become less important than the value of one's solution.  Barriers to entry drop dramatically.  Drop outs who happen to be brilliant software coders (or pop artists, or photographers, or whatever) will win.
   
3. Increasingly, those that can will flourish and those that cannot or will not... will not.
   
4. The need for a completely different social safety net will be dramatic.  When a person's compensation is completely and uniquely tied to one's performance, there will be new psychological and sociological problems that will plague our collective psyche.  (The psychologists and theologians will be in high demand.)  What will it mean for our competitor to be unknown to us -- perhaps next door, perhaps in Bhutan?  What will it mean for the structure and operation of our schools and universities?

So, you're thinking, "Dad, this is deep and I'm distracted with exams or graduation or something trivial like that.  Why now?  Are you serious?"

Well, yes, actually.

In a world in which grace is increasingly irrelevant, you will need solid anchors for your sense of self.  Your mom and I have spent years reminding you that your value is not in your accomplishments, but in the quality of your character and in the intrinsic value established in you by God.  In Genesis we hear that God created and at every step "it was good."  When he created human beings, Genesis says that was "very good."  But you're about to enter a world that will increasingly send you precisely the opposite message.  You're about to raise your own families in a world in which the messages are "perform or exit."

You have watched the community at Potter's House and the life of scavengers in the dump.  You have seen what happens to community when compete or exit is the operating system of the community.  Though knowledge workers of the crowdsourcing world will not be scavenging in the dump, they may be scavenging in cyberspace.  Tough the work is different, I think this trend can have similar effects on the quality of human relationships.

My sense is that it really won't come to this.  It will be worse.  People, in a sense of absolute despair will eventually begin to opt out and there will be some sort of counteracting social upheaval.  I can't predict its details, but its certainty cannot be in doubt.

It will be my role for the next 30 years (or whatever additional time God gives me on this planet) and your roles to propose alternative cultural, philosophical, educational, theological, and value frameworks for those who would reduce human value to an all-or-nothing competition. Those alternates need not be new, but it will be women (like you) and men of unusual character who will need to step into the gap.  You will be lightning rods of truth, clarity, value, grace, and love.  As Christians, you have a scriptural foundation to use as a measuring stick, the revelation of God for clarity of thought, and the grace of God for the hope you will need to thrive.  Others may offer other world views.  But the need to interpret this grace-less world will be profound.  You will need to do this.

As I write these words, I worry that I am being a bit too melodramatic.  I hope so, but I think not.

I have no doubt of your readiness for this task.  I only write it to remind you that though Mom and I have prepared you as best as we know how, we have prepared you with the tools of a culture that is soon to disappear.  Use your formation education to learn to learn so that you can be nimble, humble, curious, and grace-full in the world that is at our doorstep.

It may be for this reason that you are here on this planet. http://threadless.com

And hey...want to go out for ice cream?

Culture, Fluency, and Power

Andy Crouch's book Culture Making, animated an interesting idea.  Cultural fluency = Power.  He recounts his one and only trip to court (an experience I too can only relate to based on one encounter).  The baliff, judge, attorneys and other denizens of Courtlandia passed through its hallways and infrastructure with familiar ease.  But he (and I) found himself exhausted and powerless.  Cultural fluency makes some things possible and some things impossible just as language fluency empowers or frustrates.

As we seek to influence culture broadly speaking, our ability to speak and think with fluency into the details of culture will impact our power in that culture - our power to interpret and to contribute to the formation of that world.  I suspect that just like language, the development of fluency requires exertion and purpose.  We don't just wake up one morning speaking Tajik.  Nor do I wake up in the morning able to influence any of the myriad of arts that impact how my teenagers dress, what the listen to, and how they interpret the world.

So as I have been writing in these "pages" in the last few weeks, this idea of the Church engaging with culture is going to require us to choose with some wisdom what fluency to develop and then to concentrate our energies to develop the ability to exercise the power of that fluency toward an intentional change.  In other words, we are going to have to choose where and how to have power.  That is not typically a word used in Churchlandia.

We will not be able to make cultural impact from without.  We need to move in. We will need to find cultural guides to orient and train us.  But detached commentary - I hate what texting is doing to our teenagers' social skills - is as powerless as my untrained visit to the courtroom.  We must engage in the places where culture is is made.

Capitalism, Culture, Justice...

Michael Porter, the nearly iconic management guru, has written a new article on the future of capitalism.  He argues that we have demonized companies and that as a result we don't let them do what companies do best:  Optimize the use of scarce resources.  Then he argues that companies' actions in the area of social responsibility (e.g. Starbucks Fair Trade coffee bean sourcing policy) only redistributes the wealth from the sale of beans; it does not create more or newer or better use of the resources.  It is a call to a thing he calls "shared value creation."  The shared value is something that is optimized when companies and society engage.

One could look at Acts 2 for a concept of Shared Value. 

To my mind, this is an area that thoughtful Christians should engage.  What does shared value look like?  What is a biblical view of corporate engagement and corporate responsibility?  How can we move beyond token social sensitivity?  How can we use businesses to do what businesses do best in order to optimize the "talents" God has given us?  Should the church really treat business as something foreign, only speaking into the lives of individual workers. or does it have something to say about corporations?

Philip Griffin's March sermon on the relationship between employers and employees is also very helpful when thinking on this topic. In this talk, Philip's emphasis is on the sum of individual righteousness adding together one-soul-at-a-time to build better culture. It may be helpful to hold this in healthy tension with James Davidson Hunter's book, To Change the World.

In this book, Hunter argues that the Church must engage in the elite circles where culture is made if the Church as any hope of impacting culture.  He mentions the cities, universities, and the arts as the key places the Church has missed its calling.  Having just read the Porter article, I wonder if corporations should be added to the list.

I am now reading Tim Kellar's book, Generous Justice. The book is really about how to engage with the word's most challenging problems of the poor, widowed, vulnerable, and oppressed.  (If you are concerned about the issues of relativism and morality, you need to read the chapter on "Empty Concepts.")  About 2/3rds of the way through the book, Kellar writes these words:

Abraham Kuyper's "sphere of sovereignty" can be of some help.  Kuyper was both a Christian minister and the prime minister of the Netherlands at the turn of the twentieth century.  As both a theologian and a politician, he was able to reflect on the respective roles of church, state, and voluntary associations.  Kuyper concluded that the institutional church's mission is to evangelize and nurture believers in Christian community.  As it does this work, it produces people who engage in art, science, education, journalism, filmmaking, business, in distinctive ways as believers in Christ.  The church, in this view, produces individuals who change society, but the local congregation should not itself engage in these enterprises.  Kuyper distinguished between the institutional church -- the congregation meeting under its leaders -- and the "organic" church, which consists of all Christians, functioning in the world as individuals and through various agencies and voluntary organizations.

I continue to read and wrestle with these questions.  As I write these words, I am also reading Andy Crouch's Culture Making.  In the opening chapters he suggests that culture is the activity of making interpreting meaning from our world, but even as culture interprets it becomes part of the world itself.   Concepts worth pondering.

Back to work.