Justin Taylor's Blog, page 140

How Constant “Screen Time” Affects Our Lives

Peter Lawler summarizes some key points from Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. First, Lawler comments, “That over-the-top title (which I don’t like) doesn’t do justice to the content of the book, which shows that young people are getting smarter in some ways, but dumber in others. Unfortunately for our future, the ways they’re getting dumber are far more important for their dignity and happiness.”

Here’s his summary of some key points in the chapter on “Screen Time”:

1. Virtually all of our students have hours–and often many, many hours–of daily exposure to screens.

2. So they excel at multitasking and interactivity, and they have very strong spatial skills.

3. They also have remarkable visual acuity; they’re ready for rushing images and updated information.

4. BUT these skills don’t transfer well to–they don’t have much to do with–the non-screen portions of their lives.

5. Their screen experiences, in fact, undermine their taste and capacity for building knowledge and developing their verbal skills.

6. They, for example, hate quiet and being alone. Because they rely so much on screens keeping them connected, they can’t rely on themselves. Because they’re constantly restless or stimulated, they don’t know what it is to enjoy civilized leisure. The best possible punishment for an adolescent today is to make him or her spend an evening alone in his or her room without any screens, devices, or gadgets to divert him or her. It’s amazing the extent to which screens have become multidimensional diversions from what we really know about ourselves.

7. Young people today typically are too agitated and impatient to engage in concerted study. Their imaginations are impoverished when they’re visually unstimulated. So their eros is too. They can’t experience anxiety as a prelude to wonder, and they too rarely become seekers and searchers.

8. They have trouble comprehending or being moved by the linear, sequential analysis of texts.

9. So they find it virtually impossible to spend an idle afternoon with a detective story and nothing more.

10. That’s why they can be both so mentally agile and culturally ignorant. That’s even why they know little to nothing about how to live well with love and death, as well as why their relational lives are so impoverished.

11. And that’s why higher education–or liberal education–has to be about giving students experiences that they can’t get on screen. That’s even why liberal education has to have as little as possible to do with screens.

12. Everywhere and at all times, liberal education is countercultural. And so today it’s necessarily somewhat anti-technology, especially anti-screen.  That’s one reason among many I’m so hard on MOOCs, online courses, PowerPoint, and anyone who uses the word “disrupting” without subversive irony.

Amazon Cuts the Price of eBooks (to $2.99 or Less) for Books You Have Already Purchased in Hardcopy

TNW:

Amazon unveiled Kindle MatchBook today, a new scheme that gives its customers the ability to purchase discounted ebooks provided they’ve already bought the printed edition from the online retailer.

Once a publisher greenlights a title for Kindle MatchBook, it’ll be available for customers to buy for either $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or completely free. The initative will launch next month with over 10,000 titles by Jo Nesbo, Neal Stephenson, and J.A. Jance, among others.

Customers will be able to redeem purchases of books dating back to 1995 – when Amazon first started selling printed editions online – and look up their entire order history to see what’s available to them through Kindle MatchBook.

HT: Cameron Morgan

The Church, Faith, and Work

Tim Keller on the need for churches to equip believers to integrate faith and work:

Most American Christians have been taught to seal off their faith-beliefs from the way they work in their vocation. The gospel is seen as a means of finding individual peace and not as a ‘world-view’–a comprehensive interpretation of reality that affects all we do. But the gospel has a deep and vital impact on how we do art, business, government, media, and scholarship. Churches must be highly committed to support Christians’ engagement with culture, helping them work with excellence, distinctiveness, and accountability in their professions and in ‘secular work.’ Developing humane, yet creative and excellent business environments out of our understanding of the gospel can be part of the work of restoring creation in the power of the Spirit. Bringing Christian joy, hope, and truth to embodiment in the arts is also part of this work.

Christians, he argues, need at least the following from their churches:

First, theological education about how to ‘think Christianly’ about all of life, public and private, and about how to work with Christian distinctiveness. They need to know what cultural practices are ‘common grace’ and can be embraced, what practices are antithetical to the gospel and must be rejected, and what practices can be adapted/revised for use by believers.

Second, they need to be practically mentored, placed, and positioned in their vocations in the most advantageous way. They need cooperation with others in the field who can encourage, advise, and advocate for them. They need help to do their work with excellence and in a way that really helps others and strengthens social cohesiveness rather than weakening it.

Third, they need spiritual support for the ups and downs of their work and accountability for living and working with Christian integrity.

Some helpful works on vocation (and work) include:

Gene Veith, God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life 
Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life [at time of writing, the Kindle edition is on sale for $2.84]
Tim Keller with Katherine Leary Alsdorf,  Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work
Tom Nelson, Work Matters: Connecting Sunday Worship to Monday Work
Greg Gilbert and Sebastian Traeger, The Gospel and Work: How Working for King Jesus Gives Purpose and Meaning to Our Jobs (coming soon)
Matt Perman, What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done (coming soon)

In 2001, Gene Veith wrote a six-part series of articles in the Lutheran Witness that serves as a nice introduction to some of the key issues:

God at work [Every Christian has a particular calling from God]
The masks of God [God works through you in your vocation, whatever it may be]
Family vocation [God works through us in our callings as parents, spouses, and children] (See also Veith’s book, co-authored with his daughter, Family Vocation: God’s Calling in Marriage, Parenting, and Childhood)
Calling [We don't choose our vocations; God chooses us for our vocations]
Citizenship [America is caught up in feelings of patriotism and national unity; Is it really OK to "wave the flag"?]
The gospel and the local church [Christians, both laypeople and pastors, have a vocation in the church]

(Thanks to Matt Heerema for help in tracking down these links.)

You can also watch below as Tim Keller, and then a panel, look at redefining work at The Gospel Coalition’s 2013 Faith at Work Post-Conference:

How Richard Wurmbrand Spent Three Years of Solitary Confinement with Christ

Richard Wurmbrand (1909-2001), whose many years of imprisonment for the gospel included three years in solitary confinement, talks about how he spent his time:

Wurmbrand went on to write Tortured for Christ and to found Voice of the Martyrs.

Passing on an NFL Dream to Go to Seminary

Desiring God has a new video profile on former Michigan State star Chris Norman:

The book is Don’t Waste Your Life.

A Book Both Arminians and Calvinists Recommend You Read

Some encouraging words about Fred Sanders’s new book, Wesley on the Christian Life: A Heart Renewed in Love:

“As Fred Sanders shows us in this accurate and edifying life and thought of Wesley, we all have much to learn from this godly evangelical founder. I pray that God will use this book to awaken his people again, filling us with his Spirit and renewing our hearts in love. I plan to use it with my students in both seminaries and churches. It is a great place for Christians to acquaint themselves with one of the most important leaders in all of church history.”

—Douglas A. Sweeney, Professor of Church History and the History of Christian Thought, Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

“As usual, Fred Sanders brings out treasures of his research without making us do all the digging ourselves. Though respectful of John Wesley, I’ve never been what you’d call a fan. But that’s exactly why a book like this is so worthwhile. Challenging caricatures, Sanders offers a welcoming portrait of Wesley that is too even-handed and well substantiated to be his own fabrication. If the purpose of this series is to display the resources of the past for the present, then Wesley on the Christian Life is a home run.”

—Michael Horton, J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics, Westminster Seminary California; author, Pilgrim Theology

“One of the symptoms of the contemporary malaise of the Methodist movement is a growing disconnect with the actual life and teachings of our beloved founder, John Wesley. Fred Sanders has given us a wonderful gift in this practical introduction to the life and thought of Wesley. Sanders shows us that Wesley’s thought cannot be summarized in terms of doctrinal distinctives, but is fully understood in the sanctifying winds of the Holy Spirit through the means of grace and a transformed heart. I recommend this book to all those ‘restless and Reformed’ brothers and sisters who need to understand this part of the church, as well as all those pastors and laity across the country who are longing for a guide to reintroduce Wesley to ‘the people called Methodist.’”

—Timothy C. Tennent, President and Professor of World Christianity, Asbury Theological Seminary

“Whether one is an admirer or a critic, all must concede that the life and thought of John Wesley have had a decisive effect on later evangelical Protestantism. Yet few of us know much about his understanding of the Christian life beyond the rather vague terms often applied to his thought, Arminianism and perfectionism. Thus, even a hard-hearted Calvinist like myself feels a debt of gratitude to Fred Sanders for this delightful, readable, learned, accessible, and sympathetic treatment of the Methodist patriarch’s thinking on what it means to live as a Christian. A most lovely addition to a very fine series.”

—Carl R. Trueman, Paul Woolley Professor of Church History, Westminster Theological Seminary

“Readers are in for a treat here. Lively and thoughtful, appreciative but not uncritical, this book shows compellingly why even those who would not call themselves Wesleyan have a great deal to benefit from John Wesley.”

—Michael Reeves, Theologian-at-Large, Wales Evangelical School of Theology

Calvinistic Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon was unavailable to write the foreword to Sanders’s book, but in his lecture, “The Two Wesleys” (delivered at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Dec. 6, 1861), he said the following:

To ultra-Calvinists his name is as abhorrent as the name of the Pope to a Protestant: you have only to speak of Wesley, and every imaginable evil is conjured up before their eyes, and no doom is thought to be sufficiently horrible for such an arch-heretic as he was. I verily believe that there are some who would be glad to rake up his bones from the tomb and burn them, as they did the bones of Wycliffe of old—men who go so high in doctrine, and withal add so much bitterness and uncharitableness to it, that they cannot imagine that a man can fear God at all unless he believes precisely as they do.

But he also had little patience for the Wesley fanboys:

Unless you can give him constant adulation, unless you are prepared to affirm that he had no faults, and that he had every virtue, even impossible virtues, you cannot possibly satisfy his admirers.

Spurgeon had a different posture toward Wesley: critical appreciation.

I am afraid that most of us are half asleep, and those that are a little awake have not begun to feel. It will be time for us to find fault with John and Charles Wesley, not when we discover their mistakes, but when we have cured our own. When we shall have more piety than they, more fire, more grace, more burning love, more intense unselfishness, then, and not till then, may we begin to find fault and criticize.

I think he would like Sanders’s book.

For more information and to sample some of the book, go here.

How to Interpret Biblical Genitives

Moisés Silva, in discussing ἒργα νόμου (law-works, or works of law) and πίστις Χριστοῦ (Christ-faith, or faith in/of Christ) has some helpful words about the limitations of grammar in interpreting genitival constructions:

The grammatical case tells us virtually nothing except that there is some kind of unspecified relationship between the two nouns in the construction.

He shows how this works in English:

The corresponding phenomenon in English is the mere juxtaposition of two nouns, such as

spring picnic (an activity that takes place in the spring),

car sale (an event in which someone sells cars [at a special price],

brick house (a building constructed with bricks),

house furniture (furnishings intended for [or found in] a household),

church history (the course of events that have taken place within the context of [or have been produced by or have otherwise affected] the church), etc.

In these cases the first noun (which corresponds to the genitival noun in Greek) functions adjectivally and modifies the second noun.

There is nothing about the grammar, of even about the uses of such a syntactical construction, that tells us how to understand the relationship between the two nouns.

How then do we interpret genitival constructions if grammar is insufficient?

Our interpretation depends rather on two other facts:

(a) our lexical knowledge (esp. of the first noun), and

(b) our contextual or historical knowledge.

Thus we can say that spring picnic entails a “temporal” relationship because

(a) we know that spring designates a period of time and

(b) we know that in our culture picnics are often held during the spring season.

It is unlikely, but not impossible, that spring picnic might refer to, say, an event held in the winter but having spring as its theme (cf. Christmas concert, which does not necessarily take place on Christmas day but celebrates the significance of that day). Should this second sense be intended, we would be able to interpret the phrase correctly only if someone told us specifically about such a peculiar picnic or if we have attended similar events in the past.

The entire essay is worth reading, and to my mind persuasive. See Moisés Silva, “Faith Versus Works of Law in Galatians,” in Justification and Variegated Nomism: The Paradoxes of Paul (ed. D. A. Carson, Peter T. O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid; WUNT 181; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 217-48. The quotes above are from p. 220.

A Pictorial Analysis of the Rhetoric of King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech

Nancy Duarte, author of Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences, looks at Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered 50 years ago today:

You can watch the whole speech here:

HT: @JoeCarter

A Personal Interview with R. C. Sproul Jr. about Suffering and God’s Sovereignty

A very moving interview with R.C. Sproul Jr.—a man who lost his wife to cancer and their daughter with special needs, within 10 months of each other:

What was it that prompted you to attend worship the morning your wife, Denise, died? (00:49)

What enabled you to teach a series on suffering after having just experienced so much? (03:11)

Why should we try to “own” the sovereignty of God in the context of suffering? (05:03)

Why are those in the contemporary church struggling so much with suffering and the sovereignty of God? (07:48)

Why do bad things happen to “good” people? (10:05)

When Jesus suffered and died on Calvary, did God suffer? (12:00)

How do you hope this series will benefit the church? (14:37)

How can Christians encourage those who are in the midst of great hardship? (16:12)

How are you doing? (18:46)

You can see his new teaching series on suffering here.

A Conversation with John Wilson and Andy Crouch on Playing God

An interview on Crouch’s book, due out soon from IVP, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power:

Go here for more information on the book.