More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Similarly, we can hardly attain human excellence if we don’t have an understanding of human purpose. Human excellence occurs only when we glorify God, which is our true purpose.
But the desires that are cultivated by books (and other forms of stories, including film, songs, and especially commercials) can pull us toward the good life—or toward false visions of the good life (as Gustave Flaubert shows in romance-reading Emma Bovary).36 Reading well entails discerning which visions of life are false and which are good and true—as well as recognizing how deeply rooted these visions are in language.
Paralleling this philosophical development, contemporary Christian practice, particularly as expressed in American evangelicalism, has largely experienced the replacement of orthodox doctrine with what sociologist Christian Smith terms “moralistic therapeutic deism.”
In fact, the word prudence comes from the word providence, which means, literally, the ability to foresee.
The word prudence developed an analogous meaning within the human realm, referring to the actions of human beings based on foreseeing the consequences of a course of action and choosing accordingly.
The ancients distinguished between two kinds of wisdom: speculative wisdom (sophia), related to the world of abstract ideas, and practical wisdom (prudentia), related to the concrete world of particular actions.
Part of prudence is “the ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason.”
This debate over the essential goodness or depravity of human nature has continued into the present day and is commonly cited as the fundamental division between conservative and liberal theology and politics.
Today conspicuous consumption has spread even more throughout American culture. A recent four-year study, for example, found that the lives of the middle class are “overwhelmed” by stockpiled supplies, clutter, and toys. Three out of four garages are too full to hold cars, and while the United States has 3.1 percent of the world’s children, it has 40 percent of the world’s toys.25 Consumerism sells the idea that material things will make us happy.
intemperance is “a disease of the imagination.”
Consumerism has created a society, Debord argues, in which appearance has replaced both being and having.48 “The satisfaction which no longer comes from the use of abundant commodities is now sought in the recognition of their value as commodities,” Debord explains.
Not coincidentally, many of the first penal reforms in England, begun just before and during Dickens’s lifetime, were led by Christians. Christians were among the first to question widespread application of the death penalty as well as its treatment as a form of public entertainment.
In a perfect world, what is just is also fair. In a fallen world, however, justice does not always feel fair. In our fallen humanity we often bristle at the holiness of a God whose justice does not always strike us as fair. The parable of the workers in the vineyard, all of whom are paid the same agreed-upon wage although some worked fewer hours, is a perplexing example of this (Matt. 20:1–16).
Virtuous courage, in contrast, is more than boldness for boldness’s sake. Courage is measured not by the risk it entails but by the good it preserves.
Because courage is always connected to justice, and because justice is judged by reason, philosophers refer to courage as “a work of reason.”
Huck’s wavering back and forth between what his society has taught him is right and what his godly conscience tells him is wrong forms a considerable part of the narrative.
Similarly, a colleague who is a New Testament scholar describes faith as having three primary elements: belief (cognitive), trust (relational), and fidelity (obedience).
The novel centers on a test of faith that is unimaginable for most Christians today, whose Christianity is marked by a Western triumphalism that dramatically differs from the defeat and defeatism of the Christian experience in seventeenth-century Japan.
Too often, in our tendency to make heroes out of faith leaders, “we fall into a false dichotomy of seeing faith only in terms of victory or failure, which leads us to dismiss and discard the weak,”29 Fujimura points out. This seems particularly true within modern American evangelicalism.
What does it mean to practice faith well? While our works cannot save us, our habits can strengthen our faith. Martin Luther cautioned, “Do not think lightly of faith. It is a work that is of all works the most excellent and most difficult.”42 An understanding of faith as not only a gift that is received but also a virtue that is exercised will emphasize any single moment less and the accumulation of moments more.
I have observed anecdotally that despair is often rooted in unrealistic expectations or idealism, the kind of thinking that inevitably brings disappointment. People quit relationships, jobs, and churches over unmet expectations, often expectations that were never fair or realistic in the first place.
Hope is not the same as oblivion or naiveté. Hope requires reckoning with the world as it is, with reality.
merely human hope, the natural passion that Aquinas says we share with the animals: the arduous pursuit of some good.
Fromm claims that the “deepest need of man” is “the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.”2 This need is so strong, Fromm writes, that if it goes unmet, it will result in insanity. We need companionship—love—so badly that if we lack it, we will create the illusion of it, as Noland does with his volleyball named Wilson, just to survive.
Only when we love as God loves can we heed the beautiful exhortation of Augustine: “Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.”
There is no tyranny like the tyranny of a desire that draws us away from God.
Charity—godly love—cannot be separated from truth. Not just lofty transcendent truths, but the truth about the here and now and all the reality it entails—including our mortality. Truth is true and love is loving only in application.
This falsity around him and within him did more than anything else to poison his last days.” He yearns to shout at them, “Stop lying! You know and I know that I am dying. Then at least stop lying about it!”
The worst paet about him dying was not the illness but the lack of honesty from those around him
The cavalier philosophy of the Latin carpe diem—eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die—is only half true. Tomorrow you die: so how you live today may determine who tends to your most basic needs in your dying days.
Only Gerasim faces the truth about Ivan’s condition. Thus he is the only one capable of offering charity—love that seeks the good of the other in the knowledge that what is good is also true.
Love cannot exist without truth
Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite.58
Anyone can raise a hand, repeat a prayer, and go forward to the altar, but only a truly regenerated heart will bear the fruit of sanctification and persevere until the end.
That “suffering” is the meaning of the root word for patience1 is made clear by the fact that we also use the word patient to refer to someone under medical care.
Nevertheless, pain, suffering, wrongdoing, and injustice are, because of this fallenness, inevitable. Failure to recognize either the current condition of the world or the promise of its future will lead to either of the vices that patience moderates: wrath owing to an unwillingness to accept this reality of the world or dispiritedness that is a form of withdrawal from this reality.
Humility is not, therefore, simply a low regard for oneself; rather, it is a proper view of oneself that is low in comparison to God and in recognition of our own fallenness.32 “Humility is thinking less about yourself, not thinking less of yourself.”
Seeing who we really are—which requires seeing ourselves in relationship to God—is true humility.
