Black Dress

Will she walk slowly
Or will she come at all
I can’t believe that I was watching
Can’t believe I made the call

I can’t get a handle on my thoughts
now Guess I’ve already made my mind
He’s a soldier in my battle
I’m the king with too much time

Will she wear that black dress
Will she wear that black dress
As holy as the night
As holy as I want to feel
I want to feel all right

— The Normals, “Black Dress”

The story of David and Bathsheba is well-known. Godly King David sees Bathsheba bathing from the roof. He sends for her, and they have an affair. To cover up the affair, he attempts to induce her husband Uriah to come home from war and sleep with her, but Uriah refuses. David instead arranges for Uriah to be killed in battle so that he can take Bathsheba as his wife without further obstacle.

What if she is angry
I know that we’re both scared
Do I look her in the eye
Or do I even dare to care

I’m drowning in desire
I’ve been good for so long
I know I’ve got no right now
But no one can tell me that I’m wrong

Will she wear that black dress
Will she wear that black dress
As holy as the night
As holy as I want to feel
I want to feel all right

Although the story is well-known, the consequences are less so. Before Bathsheba, David appeared to lead a charmed life. As the beloved of Israel (“David” means “beloved”), he won the love of Saul’s daughter Michal, the loyalty of Saul’s son Jonathan, and the praise in song of Israel’s women. He killed Goliath, earned a position as Saul’s armor-bearer and court musician, won multiple battles against the Philistines, amassed a loyal and successful group of fighting men, and survived multiple attempts on his life from a jealous, insane Saul. He was crowned king first of Judah and then of the entire nation of Israel and won many more battles. He became famous for his poetry and songs. At the culmination of his reign, he brought the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem, amidst singing, music, sacrifice, and dance, making a joyous celebration of the Lord as Israel’s God and David as his regent. And the Lord made a covenant with David, promising that his descendants would always rule.

After Bathsheba, everything went wrong. His first son by Bathsheba died. His son Amnon raped his daughter Tamar. His son Absalom murdered Amnon. Absalom led a revolt against David. David’s trusted advisor Ahithophel (Bathsheba’s grandfather) betrayed David and joined Absalom. Absalom was defeated in battle and killed, despite David’s attempts to spare his life. David had hardly returned from the battle against Absalom when the northern tribes of Israel, led by a man named Sheba, started a second rebellion. David ended his life physically weak, seemingly impotent, with an fragile kingdom that his son Solomon had to act quickly to secure.

Maybe I’ll be good
I could be gone when she gets here
I’ve still got a chance to make this one all right

My temptation’s on the stairway
My temptation’s at the door
My temptation is before me
She is standing before me in that black dress

It’s an intriguing thought - what was going through David’s head as he waited for Bathsheba? Could he have “been good”? From my own experience with temptation and sin, I’d guess that the answer is no - “maybe I’ll be good” is true in the abstract, but in practice it’s a lie to silence a conscience that’s still kicking against the impending action, rather than any real possibility.

In 1 Corinthians 10:13, Paul writes, “God is faithful: He will not let you be tried beyond what you are able to bear, but with the trial will also provide a way out so that you may be able to endure it.” (This sometimes gets distorted into the popular but unbiblical saying, “God will never give you more than you can handle.”) Paul writes this to encourage the Corinthian believers, after warning them of the Israelites’ failures and rebellions in the desert: even though the Corinthians will face temptations, like the Israelites did, God will enable them to stand firm. And I believe that this promise applies to us as well as to the Corinthians. In my more melancholy moments, though, I wonder when God provides the way out. What if, by the time David was waiting at the top of the stairway, alone with his thoughts and his libido, the way out was in the past? Maybe the way out was to spend more time writing psalms the day before so that his thoughts would have been more heavenly-focused that night on the roof. Many people have observed that the story of David and Bathsheba starts “in the spring of the year, at the time when kings normally conduct wars” (2 Sam 11:1); if David had been in the battlefield, alongside his men, the affair could not have happened. Maybe David’s taking of multiple wives (polygamy was tolerated but never condoned in the OT, and see Deut 17:17) made it a bit too easy to take one more. Maybe living in a palace that (literally) raised David over his fellow Israelites (see Deut 17:20) made it a bit too easy to view them as merely a means to meet his wants; certainly it made it a bit too easy to spy on them. And all of this - the palace that rewarded his position and success, the wives that were expected of a king of that time, perhaps even the well-earned respite from battle - was understandable, but the consequences were catastrophic.

I’m afraid that many of our ways out are the same. How many of our angry outbursts, petty selfishnesses, white lies, or opportunities for good passed over due to cowardice or laziness or self-absorption - to say nothing of the bigger abuses and addictions and betrayals and failures - can we honestly hope to avoid in the heat of the moment? And how many of them instead have as the way out to read the Bible, to pray, to fellowship with believers, to practice a lifestyle of serving others rather than using or ignoring them, so that we have the strength to stand firm when the trial does come?

As I said, this is a melancholy line of thought. I’d like to think that I’m capable of doing the right thing, that all I have to do is muster enough willpower or find the right technique or make the correct New Year’s resolution. What if, instead, there are trials which I haven’t even dreamed of bearing down in me in the future, and I’ve already missed the way out due to my failure to pursue God in the past? “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24)

---

The Normals’ song “Black Dress” ends with David’s crushing sin with Bathsheba. But, in the song that immediately follows on their album, they sing:

Oh, we of little faith
Oh, You of stubborn grace

We are the beggars, we are the beggars
We are the beggars at the foot of God’s door

We’ve known the pain of loving in a dying world
And our lies have made us angry at the truth
But Cinderella’s slipper fits us perfectly
And somehow we’re made royalty with You

We are the beggars, we are the beggars
We are the beggars at the foot of God’s door
You have welcomed us in

— The Normals, “We Are The Beggars”

Cyber Damage

I hurt my back last week. I was carrying a heavy box and pivoted at the waist to try to manuever something else, and my back really didn’t like that. I probably would have been okay if I weren’t still recovering from an earlier back injury that resulted from leaning to move a bag of mulch.

By itself, this isn’t very interesting. “Middle-aged man’s body doesn’t work as well as it used to” is hardly newsworthy; “lift with your legs, not with your back” is not revolutionary advice. What’s more surprising to me is how quickly and easily the injuries happened. The box and bag were heavy but well within the limits of what I thought I could handle, and the actions only took a few seconds each, but the resulting injuries were felt for days or weeks. Engineers design their vehicles, machinery, and tools with safety tolerances to ensure that they’ll be able to withstand the forces upon them, and yet I suspect even a high school physics student could calculate the forces and leverage that I placed on my joints and realize that it wasn’t going to end well for me. It’s surprising how easily my strength to act exceeds my strength to handle the results of my actions.

---

Wendell Berry is an American novelist, poet, farmer, and Christian. As an environmental activist, he’s spoken out against nuclear power, coal power, mountaintop removal coal mining, and industrial farming. In his essay “Damage,” he describes one of his efforts to improve his farmland:

I have a steep wooded hillside that I wanted to be able to pasture occasionally, but it had no permanent water supply.

About halfway to the top of the slope there is a narrow bench, on which I thought I could make a small pond. I hired a man with a bulldozer to dig one. He cleared away the trees and then formed the pond, cutting into the hill on the upper side, piling the loosened dirt in a curving earthwork on the lower.

The pond appeared to be a success. Before the bulldozer quit work, water had already begun to seep in. Soon there was enough to support a few head of stock. To heal the exposed ground, I fertilized it and sowed it with grass and clover.

We had an extremely wet fall and winter, with the usual freezing and thawing. The ground grew heavy with water, and soft. The earthwork slumped; a large slice of the woods floor on the upper side slipped down into the pond.

The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge. The fault was mine.

I was careful to get expert advice. But this only exemplifies what I already knew. No expert knows everything about every place, not even everything about any place. If one’s knowledge of one’s whereabouts is insufficient, if one’s judgment is unsound, then expert advice is of little use.

With a palpable sense of guilt, he goes on to reflect on how he caused “a lasting flaw in the face of the earth… that wound in the hillside, my place” that can heal only “in the course of time and nature.” He reflects on how art and culture can make a “map” or “geography of scars” such as the one on his hillside, reflecting the past damage caused by our lack of wisdom, in hopes that future people can learn wisdom and learn their limitations from them. He concludes by quoting poet William Blake:

Blake gives the just proportion or control in another proverb: “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.” Only when our acts are empowered with more than bodily strength do we need to think of limits…

But a man with a machine and inadequate culture-such as I was when I made my pond-is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

As I sat nursing a sprained back muscle, I questioned Berry’s reading of Blake; I’m not even convinced that I can be trusted with my own bodily strength. But this helps prove Berry’s broader point: if we can’t necessarily be trusted with our own bodily strength, then what makes us think we can handle a bulldozer, a power plant, an industrial farm?

---

It’s popular to hate on social media nowadays. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that it’s helped make us “uniquely stupid” and contributed to rising polarization; Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen accused Facebook of prioritizing their own profits and growth over their users’ well-being; recent research provides further evidence that Facebook is harmful to users’ mental health; and so on. And that’s before getting into the more partisan debates and accusations (“They spread misinformation and conspiracy theories!” “They’re censoring our free speech!” “They’re helping the far right!“ “They’re pawns of the far left!“); the constant scrutiny, critiques, and foibles of their tech billionaires founders and would-be owners; or various cybersecurity concerns (such as the recent Twitter whistleblower, Peter “Mudge” Zatko, or concerns over the Chinese Communist Party’s involvement in TikTok).

The root problem might be more fundamental than that, though. On a recent podcast, author Cal Newport describes what he calls “Twitter’s cybernetic curation distribution algorithm,“ with “the effect of all of these individuals making retweet/non-retweet decisions, all pushing and pulsing through a power law graph / topology graph… [that] does a really good job of centering or surfacing things that are interesting or engaging or would catch our attention.” When I hear “cybernetic,“ I’m enough of a sci-fi geek that I start thinking of these guys:

S.C.F., by ptitvinc

In sci-fi such as anime, literature, and tabletop or video games, cyborgs are humans who’ve replaced significant parts of their bodies with high-tech equipment. Sometimes this is done to replace body parts damaged by trauma. Often, though, it’s done to enhance their abilities beyond normal human capacity - heightened strength and durability, electronic senses, built-in weaponry, and so on. (I don’t have much need for built-in weaponry, but a cybernetic spine would have saved me some pain.) In many fictional works, the replacements often come with downsides, such as a reduced sense of touch, or a psychological sense of alienation from other humans; some works do this as part of a Serious Examination of What It Means To Be Human, while more gaming-oriented settings might do it just to discourage players from tricking out their characters with every piece of cybernetic gear possible.

Speaking more realistically and more technically, “cybernetic“ is defined as “control and communication in the animal and the machine“ (Normal Weiner). As applied to Twitter, Cal Newport’s point seems to be that Twitter is the result of interaction between the “animal“ (humans decisions and actions to tweet, reply, and retweet) and the machine (Twitter’s servers sharing people’s tweets with each other and analyzing tweets to decide what are most interesting / relevant / shareable / viral, based on what people have revealed of their interests).

Just like a sci-fi cyborg, the result is strength well beyond normal human capacity: an endless stream of engaging, sometimes addicting, content; the ability to view in real time the shared thoughts of society’s elites, friends, strangers from around the world; the potential to have thousands or millions of people interact with what you have to say. And, just like a sci-fi cyborg, there are downsides: a reduced sense of touch and a sense of alienation from the people on the other side of the screen, as facial expressions and nuance and gestures are stripped away, as complex thoughts and discussions are crammed into 280 characters, as the platform’s incentives push people to forget the humanity of those they’re interacting with and engage in increasingly extreme behavior to get likes, go viral, and fit in with their similarly incentivized online peers.

And, if Wendell Berry is right, if we scarcely have the wisdom to handle a bulldozer or a power plant - if our own musculature can exceed what our strengths can sustain - then what hope do we have of handling the power law graph / topology graph of a cybernetic curation distribution algorithm?

Our online world is changing so rapidly; how can we possibly have a chance to build up Berry’s geography of scars to learn our limitations there?

Plenty of solutions have been proposed: Give up social media, get more government involvement, put the right person in charge. Many of these solutions are, I think, a bit facile. Maybe we should start smaller: Practice the humility of recognizing the limits of our wisdom. Don’t overexert our strengths - don’t do something just because we can. Be sensitive to the damage that our strength may be causing to others or to our environment. Be human more. Be cybernetic less.

The Virtue of Strange Service

Since Queen Elizabeth II’s death last month, I’ve seen countless takes and commentaries on her reign and on the British monarchy.

Royal Diamond Jubilee Visit, by West Midlands Police

On the one hand, she was by all accounts extremely devoted to serving her country and the institution of the monarchy. Commentator David French discusses her lifetime of service, as well as the military service of Princes William, Harry, Andrew, and Philip, and concludes:

There is a tremendous burden tied to that kind of role. As Andrew [Sullivan] notes, when Elizabeth Windsor became queen, she “was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human—for the rest of her life.”…

Duty and honor without power—that’s the role of modern royalty… There is also immense meaning when a monarch lives the values their role demands. Queen Elizabeth lived with honor and did her duty, and in so doing she helped bind together a fractious people. She helped give them a sense of shared identity.

On the other hand, the monarchy - the idea that someone should, simply by accident of birth, be placed into that role for 70 years - is a strange institution, especially to Americans in our belief that all men are created equal. (We even fought a war to end the monarchy - although historian Eric Nelson argues that the early American revolutionaries saw themselves as rebelling against Parliament and weren’t necessarily against the monarchy.)

As part of her role, Elizabeth studiously avoided commenting on political positions. David French explains, “Britain’s constitutional monarchy separates the functions of the head of state and the head of government. The head of state is doing her job when she’s explicitly not political, when she instead conducts the formal affairs of the state and embodies (as well as any human can) certain core national values.” British theologian Alastair Roberts writes, “In resisting entanglement in political conflict and refraining from participation in public political debate, the monarch guards their true character and influence. They stand for something that greatly exceeds political conflicts and party interests, even highly charged ones.”

On the other hand, there are plenty of important political and national issues that may deserve people’s attention. At what threshold does someone with influence decide that something is worth addressing? If the argument is that, in order to preserve your influence for some future need, you must avoid using your influence to address a current need, at what point does that become self-defeating?

Queen Elizabeth was loved by millions of people; the hundreds of thousands of people who stood in queue, sometimes for twenty-four hours or more, in order to pay their respects after her death was a powerful illustration of this. However, the British monarchy and Queen Elizabeth are a reminder and representation of Britain’s history of imperialism, colonialism, and slavery for many others - for example, blacks and Desi who are still dealing with the aftereffects of the slave trade and colonization.

Queen Elizabeth supported numerous charities and helped raise over £1.4 billion for them. On the other hand, she had a personal fortune of roughly $500 million, simply by virtue of her birth, which she was able to pass on tax-free to Prince Charles - in addition to the significant assets of the monarchy itself.

Queen Elizabeth was a devout Christian; in 2000, she said, “For me the teachings of Christ and my own personal accountability before God provide a framework in which I try to lead my life. I, like so many of you, have drawn great comfort in difficult times from Christ’s words and example.” N.T. Wright speaks warmly of her love for and service to Jesus. As “Defender of the Faith” and head of the Church of England in a secular, post-Christian country, she no doubt had an influence for God in her country. On the other hand, as an American Christian, I’m firmly in favor of the separation of church and state: I believe that political power can too easily corrupt the church, and I believe that God gives us free will and we should therefore avoid coercing or compelling others, and there’s an argument that the establishment of religion has contributed to Europe being a post-Christian continent (by allowing Christian churches there to become complacent in government support rather than striving to innovate and reach out).

What do we make of all of that?

If nothing else, Elizabeth’s birth into the royal family reminds me that the American approach of egalitarianism and free individual choice is a relative novelty. Jesus tells a parable which one person might have ten times the gifting of another. Samson, Samuel, and John the Baptist were set aside from birth; Moses, David, Jeremiah, Paul, and others were given huge responsibilities with little say in the matter. The obvious counterargument here is that these people were directly and explicitly chosen by God. Elizabeth, in our understanding, was not (except in the general Romans 13 sense of all human authorities existing under God’s control). For whatever reason, though - whether differences in God’s designs and God-given talents, inequalities from human competition and sin, or the vagaries of a centuries-old British institution - the differences persist, often in spite of people’s efforts to address them, and what you do with your own gifts and powers is often more important than comparing where you stand relative to someone else (Jn 21:22).

It occurred to me, though, that a more direct Biblical reference may be the Rechabites of Jeremiah 35. During the last days of the nation of Judah, when the Israelites were practicing empty formalistic public worship of the Lord, mixed with private syncretism and idolatry, Jeremiah fruitlessly tried to warn his fellow Israelites of God’s coming judgment. In a strange story partway through his book, Jeremiah sent a message to the Rechabites, apparently a small ethnic group descended from Moses’ father-in-law who lived among the Israelites, to invite them to the temple. There, he offered them some wine. They refused, explaining,

“We do not drink wine because our ancestor Jonadab son of Rechab commanded us not to. He told us, ‘You and your children must never drink wine. Do not build houses. Do not plant crops. Do not plant a vineyard or own one. Live in tents all your lives. If you do these things you will live a long time in the land that you wander about on.’ We and our wives and our sons and daughters have obeyed everything our ancestor Jonadab son of Rechab commanded us.”

In response, Jeremiah blessed the Rechabites (Jer. 35:18-19) and contrasted their behavior with the Israelites’:

‘I, the Lord, say: “You must learn a lesson from this about obeying what I say. Jonadab son of Rechab ordered his descendants not to drink wine. His orders have been carried out. To this day his descendants have drunk no wine because they have obeyed what their ancestor commanded them. But I have spoken to you over and over again, but you have not obeyed me.”’

The point isn’t that Jonadab’s restrictions were from God or were, in and of themselves, automatically good. The point is that the Rechabites, out of a desire to honor their ancestor and out of a belief that a simple nomadic lifestyle was worth practicing, faithfully obeyed. As a result, their faithfulness to human instruction, given by one person centuries ago, presented a powerful rebuke to the Israelites repeated unfaithfulness to God’s commandments, delivered repeatedly through Moses and the prophets.

I’ve seen a lot of the takes since Queen Elizabeth’s death, but my opinion on the British monarchy isn’t worth much. On this side of the pond, it doesn’t really affect me, and I can’t change anything. But I can appreciate her faithful service to her country (even if it did come in the form of a strange, anachronistic, human-made institution), and I can appreciate her faithful service to Christ.

High Priestly Garments and Working Steel

The robe is to be on Aaron as he ministers, and his sound will be heard when he enters the Holy Place before the Lord and when he leaves, so that he does not die… These [linen undergarments] must be on Aaron and his sons when they enter the tent of meeting, or when they approach the altar to minister in the Holy Place, so that they bear no iniquity and die. It is to be a perpetual ordinance for him and for his descendants after him.

— Exodus 28:35,43

My first thought when these verses were pointed out to me was of some sort of hazmat or biohazard suit. The sort of thing you’d wear to protect yourself from ebola.

My second thought was that this metaphor would have God in the place of ebola. That seems quite wrong, theologically, so I went with the image of a steelworker instead.

Molten metal can range from 1,200°F to 6000°F. Early industrial steelworkers (for example, in Carnegie’s 19th century steel mills) had minimal safety gear, perhaps just two layers of wool long-johns, but later steelworkers wear layers of FR (flame-resistant) clothing, an apron (sometimes), hood, gloves, and steel-toed boots, all engineered to protect against flames and splashes of molten metal and reflect heat. Depending on the era, clothing would be made of leather wrapped in wet burlap, or asbestos, or aluminized Kevlar capable of withstanding 3000°F of radiant heat and 1100°F of direct contact. Some walking surfaces could be hot enough to melt rubber, so steelworkers could wear wooden shoe guards around their boots for further protection. Melters at the furnace itself would wear cobalt-colored melter’s glasses to let them look directly at molten iron to check its temperature. All of this is to deal with the fact that steelworkers work daily with forces and energy far too powerful for humans to withstand unaided.

Photo by Francisco Fernandes on Unsplash

Reading the Old Testament, it seems that this is an accurate metaphor. God wanted to, and chose to, dwell with his people and walk among them as their God (Lev. 26:11-12). To show this, he placed his presence in the tabernacle and the temple, even though (as Solomon said when dedicating the temple) “heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that” Solomon built (2 Chron 6:18). Yet God’s power, holiness, and glory, when encountering human sin and frailty, are simply not safe. No one could see God’s face and live (Ex. 33:20); even hearing him speak or seeing his messenger brought fear of death (Deut. 5:24-26, Jdg 6:21-22). When God came down onto Mount Sinai to deliver the Law to Moses, anyone who touched the mountain would be executed; otherwise, God would “break out against them” (Ex. 19:12-13,24). Mishandling the ark of the covenant, which symbolized God’s throne within his dwelling place of the tabernacle or temple, resulted in death (Num 4:5, 20; 1 Sam 6:19; 2 Sam 6:6-7). Even the chosen high priest could only enter the most holy place, the place in the tabernacle or temple where the ark of the covenant was kept, once a year. There’s a story that the high priest would tie a rope around his ankle when entering the most holy place so that, if he was struck dead by God’s holiness, his body could be safely dragged out; this is apparently a myth from the Middle Ages, but the Bible does record several priests and would-be priests who died because they failed to properly follow the rituals laid out in the Law.

Read within this light, the rules regarding the priests’ garments in Exodus 28 and the rituals for consecrating priests in Exodus 29 make more sense. The different elements of the high priest’s clothing - a breastpiece of gold and semiprecious stones, an ephod of woven gold and cloth with engraved onyx stones, a robe decorated with golden bells and pomegranates made of yarn, a turban with an engraved golden plate - have symbolic importance (some of which may be unclear now), but besides any specific symbolism, the details of the precision, artistry and expense that went into the garments served to demonstrate the care and value needed to properly approach God in his holiness.

Reading the Old Testament gives me the impression that the priests were closer to the long-john-clad laborers of Carnegie’s day, one mistake away from disaster, than to the drilled, carefully protected steelworkers of today. This is probably an unfair impression, since tabernacle and temple worship continued for roughly one thousand years, and we see mostly low points from its early days.

It does, however, bring us to the New Testament. Christ, as our great high priest, fulfills perfectly the role which Aaron and his descendants did with fear and trembling.

More than that, Christ let us “confidently approach the throne of grace” (Heb. 4:16). What the high priest could do only once a year, painstakingly clothed in his safety gear, at the earthly representation of God’s throne, we can now do with freely and confidence at the throne of God itself.

More than that, we’re told to clothe ourselves with Christ (Rom 13:14, Gal 3:27). It’s as if the high priest’s safety garments are turned inside out - instead of dressing up to protect and isolate ourselves from God’s holiness and power, God enables us to dress up as Christ, the image of God. As described by C.S. Lewis, “If you like, you are pretending. Because, of course… you are not being like The Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of self-centered fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death. So that, in a way, this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek.” As outrageous, perhaps, as thinking we could sculpt a suit of molten steel. But Lewis continues, explaining what it means to put on Christ:

A real Person, Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you. It is not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as He was when He created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has… Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into a new little Christ, a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God; which shares in His power, joy, knowledge and eternity. (Mere Christianity, p. 146-147, 149)

This gets at a truth which we sometimes neglect in Western evangelical churches. We describe salvation and the Christian life as being freed from sin, receiving the promise of eternal life, and being sanctified to be more moral people. And it is all of these things - but not just these things. 2 Peter 1:4 says that we will become “partakers of the divine nature.” Orthodox Christians refer to this as divinization. It’s not that our fundamental nature is changed, that we cease being humans and become divine; instead, through union with God, we are suffused with his grace and holiness. Orthodox Christians use the analogy of a metal in fire; it doesn’t stop being metal, but it’s suffused with the fire’s energy, like molten steel, radiating light and heat to all around it.

A Eulogy for Monoliths

I have an Atlas Obscura desk calendar. Each day, it showcases a different location around the world: sometimes a natural wonder (such as Hierve el Agua, a massive rock formation in Mexico that resembles a waterfall), sometimes unique wildlife (such as the blue ghost fireflies of North Carolina), sometimes human art (such as the House of Mirrors, a private house decorated entirely in mirror mosaics by Italian-Kuwaiti artist Lidia al-Qattan, or Decebalus’s head, a 140-foot-tall mountainside carving of 1st century Romanian king), sometimes just odd bits of local culture (such as a Manhattan collection of items salvaged from trash, kept in the second floor of a garbage truck garage). Each day offers a little glimpse into the variety, beauty, creativity, weirdness, and wonder of earth and its inhabitants.

Photo by Quentin Melson

The Georgia Guidestones are not, to my knowledge, part of my Atlas Obscura desk calendar, but they easily could be. Built in 1980 by a pseudonymous “Robert C. Christian,” representing an anonymous and mysterious group, they’ve been called “America’s Stonehenge.” They consisted of six granite slabs, weighing a total of 237,746 pounds, and are believed to have been intended as a message to survivors of a nuclear war. They were intended as a compass, calendar, and clock and contained the following guidelines in seven different languages:

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

Since their unveiling, they became a tourist attraction (drawing roughly 20,000 annual visitors) and the target of significant speculation (including a documentary) as to their purpose and their anonymous creators’ motivation. They’ve also become the subject of various conspiracy theories; maintaining a world population under 500 million could perhaps be tractable after a nuclear holocaust, but ”guiding reproduction“ evokes dark memories of eugenics and racism, and Christians such as Kandiss Taylor, 2022 Georgia Republican candidate for governor, have alleged that they’re Satanic and related to the New World Order.

On July 6, an unknown perpetrator set a bomb that destroyed one of the six slabs and heavily damaged the capstone. The remaining Guidestones were dismantled for safety reasons. The motives of the attacker are unknown, but it’s likely that they were spurred by the accusations of Satanism and New World Order.

I feel that the world is a bit poorer for their loss. I am, of course, opposed to Satanism, and I do believe that there are malign spiritual forces active in the world. But I believe that Satan is rarely so obvious as to engrave his guidelines on tourist-attraction granite; the consumerism, tribalism, and pressures to compromise one’s ethics and beliefs that permeate modern American society are much greater threats for most of us than eugenics. And, if the Guidestones were intended to promote the New World Order - if they were part of a conspiracy of global elites to establish a totalitarian world government, as understood by some interpretations of the Book of Revelation - then any effort we might make to stop God’s prophecy seems rather misguided. I might even go further and, rather than opposing them, respond with “Maranatha!” (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20); I’m not exactly looking forward to the end-times tribulations as understood by many Christians, but I’m very much looking forward to Christ’s return, and it seems that we may have to pass through the one to get to the other.

These particular conspiracy theories are pretty easy to dismiss. But there’s a deeper consideration here. There’s a strain of Christianity that’s especially attentive and alert to spiritual forces of darkness, to sinister hidden motives, to political or social actions that seem innocuous but may be the first steps toward an evil end. And we should be on guard against such things (1 Pe 5:8, Eph 6:12, 1 Cor 10:19-20, etc.). As James Sire writes in The Universe Next Door,

The New Age has reopened a door closed since Christianity drove out the demons from the woods, desacralized the natural world and generally took a dim view of excessive interest in the affairs of Satan’s kingdom of fallen angels. Now they are back, knocking on university dorm room doors, sneaking around psychology laboratories and chilling the spines of Ouija players. Modern folk have fled from grandfather’s clockwork universe to great-grandfather’s chamber of gothic horrors… While spirit activity has been constant in areas where Christianity has barely penetrated, it has been little reported in the West from the time of Jesus. Christ is said to have driven the spirits from field and stream, and when Christianity permeates a society the spirit world seems to disappear or go into hiding. It is only in the last few decades that the spirits of the woods and rivers, the air and the darkness have been invited back by those who have rejected the claims of Christianity and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (p. 166, 168, 3rd ed.)

There’s a lot to unpack and evaluate there, and the topic of how we interpret and understand spiritual activity in Bible times and ours is far too involved to get into here. But this sort of “direct,” explicit spiritual activity is not, I think, the greatest risk in modern America. Modern culture instead seems to de-spiritualize, depersonalize, and homogenize everything. We’ve gone from family-owned stores where proprietors and shoppers knew each other, to store chains where we interact with minimum-wage workers whose upper management have done their best to make them interchangeable, to (post-pandemic) curbside pickup and deliveries, as if even the minimal interaction of the check-out line is too inconvenient. We can travel two thousand miles cross country—an unthinkable distance in earlier history—and eat at restaurants and stay at hotels barely different than where we left. Internet and cable TV news lets us obsess over words and pictures from people in other states and cities who we’ll never interact with, while the decline of local news means we often know more about current events in Ukraine than in our own communities. So many facets of our existence—our interactions online, our viewing and reading habits, our purchases—are quantized and aggregated and turned into grist for corporations’ efforts to optimize their efficiency and profits. Social media collapses the distances between people—everyone’s talking to each other all the time, with little space to be alone or to be different or to agree to disagree. Our culture wars further collapse the distances and distinct spheres that people used to operate in; Yuval Levin observes,

Our culture war plainly lacks boundaries. Every realm of our lives has become one of its battlefields. Not only in politics but also in schools and universities, in corporate America, in our places of worship and places of work, in civil society and in our private lives, online and in person, there is often just no getting away from that intense, divisive, and rigidly partisan struggle.

It may sound like I’m bemoaning the decline of Western civilization or pining for a lost past. That isn’t my intent. There are many wonderful benefits of our modern economy, technologies, and conveniences; our culture has improved in some areas even as it struggles in others; past times and cultures have dealt with their own sins and struggles; and, as Christians, this world is not our home regardless.

But, precisely because every culture deals with its own sins and struggles, I want to be aware of this one. I want to celebrate the creative, the quirky, the weird. I want to be reminded of the variety and uniqueness of other people, countries, environments, and cultures. I like pausing my workday of developing and debugging software code to read a bit of whimsy or wonder from the Atlas Obscura calendar on my desk. I like living in a world where people can use their God-given gifts, abilities, and resources to create Internet sites and optimize check-out lines but also carve 140-foot statues of Romanian kings and erect mysterious monoliths in Georgia. And sometimes the results may seem wasteful or weird or questionable, but we can question the bad while still thanking God for the good.

Deuteronomy 6:4-9

Hear, O Israel!

Israel’s name means “he strives with God.” Jacob strove with man and God for most of the first part of his life - manipulating his brother Esau into selling his birthright, tricking his father Isaac into giving him his blessing, scheming against his father-in-law Laban, bargaining with God after God’s appearance to him in a dream at Bethel, wrestling with God at Peniel. And Israel, the nation named after Jacob, strove with God too, in continual cycles of rebellion, apostasy, and syncretism. Here, Israel is instead offered - and commanded - to cease their strivings and love God.

The name Israel may also be translated, “God strives.” God strove with Israel. As my grandfather said, “God chose Israel to bear the full brunt of his faithfulness.” No matter how many times they tried to leave him, he pursued them, through prophets, priests, law, and judgment. And, when even that was not sufficient to bring his people to him, God gave his own life.

And God strove for Israel. He chose his people; he delivered them from slavery and oppression in Egypt; he fights for them.

When Jacob wrestled with God at Peniel and was given the name Israel, he finally understood: he strove with God, not in an attempt to bargain with him or exploit his own advantages, but because he recognized that he was dependent on God to bless him. We strive with God to pursue him, to be faithful to him, to acknowledge our need for his blessing.

The Lord our God

“Lord” is how our English Bibles render the Hebrew Yahweh: God’s name as revealed by himself to his covenant people, “I am who I am.” Quoting Alastair Roberts:

And the answer that God gives here [to Moses in Exodus 3:14], “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be” could in some way be seen as not an answer. God isn’t defined by anything other than himself. When we think about naming things we’re typically naming things as a means of getting control over them. When we give something a name we feel we have some power over it, some understanding of it, and yet when God gives his name, God is the only one who can pronounce his name truly, and when he pronounced his name is not a name that we can define relative to anything else. God is self-defining and God’s name is also something that speaks of his existence and perhaps also his self-determination. God will be what he will be. It’s not for us to put God within our control; we cannot do that.

A further thing to reflect on here might be the other attempts that we see in Scripture to ask God’s name. In the book of Judges 13:17-19, the name of the angel of the Lord is asked by Manoah and his wife, and the response is, “Why do you ask my name, seeing it is wonderful?” It is a name that is not truly given. But then Manoah offers sacrifices to “the God who works wonders,” playing upon the name. It seemed here that maybe there’s a giving of a name in a not giving of a name. In Exodus 3, maybe it’s the other way around; maybe there is a giving of a name, but that name that is given is also in some sense not a name. God has a name but the name itself describes something of God’s ineffability, that God cannot be captured by any name, that no name actually is adequate to speak of God, that God exists beyond all names, and what names we have that we used to speak of God are all found to be lacking. Ultimately, God will be who he will be…

There’s a veiling but also an unveiling… [of] God’s commitment to be with his people. Remember, the first time we see “I will be” is in reference to God’s promise, his assuring promise to be with Moses as he goes to the Egyptians. And perhaps one of the things that the name of God describes here is his unchanging and unfaltering commitment to his people, the fact that he is the same yesterday, today, and forever, he’s the Alpha and the Omega, he’s the beginning and the end, he’s the one who does not change, and as a result he will be with his people and assure his people of his presence, not just in their present sufferings but in whatever sufferings they may face in the future.

So, by affirming that the LORD is our God, we affirm his transcendence and his glory, his existence beyond creation and beyond our understanding, but also his presence with us. And we may remember that, while his foundational self-revelation to Moses expressed his ineffability and supremacy, in his ultimate self-revelation in Christ, he gave the name Jesus: “the Lord saves.” I AM saves his people.

The Lord is one!

Quoting Alastair Roberts again:

There are various ways in which this statement has been interpreted and translated. Some see it as, “The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.” That’s a statement of the exclusively of God as the Lord of his people. There are no other gods that they will have besides him…

Another way to take it is that “the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” That being a statement about God’s nature: that God is unique, there is no other being like the Lord, or that God is simple: that there is no division in God, there’s no separation is no distinction between action and potential in God or between genus and species.

It could also be interpreted as, “The Lord our God is one Lord.” The claim there would be that the Lord is not many, a lord of this location and a lord of that location, but the Lord of all the earth, the Lord of all things.

You shall love the Lord your God

“Love” is a heavily overloaded word in English; it may cover how we feel about anything from our spouses to our sports teams to God to pizza. The NET Bible suggests that here it “communicates not so much an emotional idea as one of covenant commitment. To love the Lord is to be absolutely loyal and obedient to him in every respect.”

I appreciate Voddie Baucham’s definition of love: “an act of the will, accompanied by emotion, that leads to action on behalf of its object.” He applies this definition in discussing the New Testament’s command to love each other, but it can apply to God as well: We choose to love God by committing to be faithful to him. This doesn’t depend on emotion, but it’s accompanied by emotion; how can we not feel gratitude, awe, and affection? And we act based on this, seeking to learn more about God, enjoy his presence, deepen our relationship with him, and serve him.

With all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

The heart, in Hebrew thought, was the seat of the will and intellect. We must love God with all of our minds.

The soul refers to someone’s self, life, or being. The Hebrews didn’t think of a human as the union of a physical body and immaterial soul - that was a Greek idea - so the idea is instead to love God with all of one’s being, with all of one’s self. I too often feel scattered or dis-integrated - pulled in a dozen directions by worries and distractions and competing desires. I instead want to be integrated and single-minded, making God my goal, and letting the rest of my life flow out of that.

And we must love God with all of our might - our capabilities, abilities, strength.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

We’re told to talk about these commandments. People naturally enjoy talking about what’s important to them: current events, their families, their work and hobbies, sports teams’ accomplishments, the media they’re following. It should be natural to talk about what we’re learning about God, what our church is doing, what God is doing around us, how we seek to serve and grow.

We’re told to create physical reminders of these commandments. Early Jews took this literally: they put fragments of Scripture in leather boxes, called tefillin or phylacteries, and tied them around their arms and forehead. Physical practices and symbols like those can become rote or legalistic, but if used properly, they serve a useful purpose: we’re physical creatures, and so physical objects and actions serve as a way to direct, reinforce, and remind ourselves of our focus. This may be most obvious as part of the role of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but many Christians also practice it with physical Bibles, kneeling, lifting hands, intentionally chosen decorations and mementos, and so on.

And we’re told to teach these commandments. That can mean formal instruction, but much of teaching is simply a way of life: demonstrating the kind of life that’s transformed by God, showing what it means to follow God, showing that God is real and worth following, so that people who want to know what it means to follow God can use us as examples (Phil. 4:9).

And underlying all of these specific actions is the assumption, belief, and knowledge that this commandment in Deuteronomy 6:4-9 is part of God’s Word; that, like all of God’s Word, it’s worth repeating, studying, and meditating on. At 114 English words, the average adult can read these verses in thirty seconds or so; yet it’s repeated every morning and evening as part of Jewish prayer services for thousands of years. And, as we’ve seen here, even these 114 words have significant depth and richness as we meditate on God’s glory, transcendence, uniqueness, and faithfulness and on what it means to be part of God’s people, to recognize him, to love him with all of our being, and to live out from that.

God and Government

Between Facebook, Twitter, and the ever-expanding op-ed and “analysis” sections of online news sites, it’s hard to go online without finding political opinions. Too bad they all disagree with each other.

Putin invaded Ukraine because Biden is weak. Putin invaded Ukraine because the US has been encroaching on Russia’s sphere of influence for years. Putin would have invaded Ukraine regardless. Biden is doing too much for Ukraine and should pay more attention to matters at home; Biden can’t do more for Ukraine, because we might provoke Russia; Biden should do more for Ukraine and should make Russia afraid of provoking us. Biden is doing great; Trump would do much better; Trump would do much worse.

Jesus said there would be wars and rumors of war (Mt 24:6).

Inflation is transitory and not much to worry about; inflation is a huge problem, and we should vote the politicians responsible out of office. Inflation is because of too much pandemic spending, so we should spend less. Inflation is because of supply chain problems or human infrastructure limitations, and we should spend more to address those.

Jesus said that we would always have the poor (Mt 26:11).

Covid arose naturally from a wet market; Covid leaked from a lab; Covid was a Chinese bioweapon; Covid was the product of an American conspiracy. The best way to deal with it is mask mandates and lockdowns; mask mandates and lockdowns are harmful and should be avoided; we need more vaccination; we need less vaccination.

Revelation says that death and pain will be removed in the new heaven and new earth (Rev. 21:4) - but not before then.

And I enjoy some of these discussions, and I’ve engaged in a fair number myself. But I can’t help but think there’s sometimes some arrogance there. I am neither a foreign policy expert nor an economist nor an epidemiologist; I can have an informed opinion, but humility should remind me that I likely don’t know better than the professionals, and I may not have much basis for thinking that my preferred remedy would actually work.

Within my chosen niche of software development, we have plenty of our own opinions to argue about - enough that these have earned the tongue-in-cheek name of “holy wars.” Which text editor should you use to write source code? Which hardware design is best? Which programming language is best? Should you use a Mac or a PC? One of the most famous holy wars is whether programmers should format their source code with the tab key or the spacebar; this has gained enough notoriety that it made an appearance on HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”

Even tabs versus spaces, though, pales next to the debate of Windows versus Linux. For years, an assortment of developers and upstart businesses pushed Linux, a free operating system, as an alternative to Microsoft Windows, backed by Microsoft’s billions of dollars and monopoly business power. Countless marketing initiatives, technical whitepapers, and websites pushed one or the other. Developers on both platforms competed to write the best Windows-only or Linux-only software. Emotions ran high. In one of the more noteworthy examples, Dan Greer, a cybersecurity researcher, wrote a 2003 report arguing that Microsoft Windows’ dominance was a threat to national security. He was fired from his consultancy the day the report was released.

It turns out that the answer to Windows versus Linux is, depending on how you slice it, either “Both” or “Who cares?” “Both” is because businesses still happily run Windows, while servers and cloud computing (even at Microsoft) often run Linux; “who cares?” is because the operating system on your desktop matters little when all of your activities are conducted through a web browser, and mobile phones and tablets have replaced desktop and laptop computers, both as a focus of innovation and as many people’s primary computing device. Time and change rendered the entire debate irrelevant in ways that neither side foresaw.

Dan Greer is relevant to this discussion for reasons other than his Windows-versus-Linux foray. In 2013, he delivered a talk, “Tradeoffs in Cyber Security”:

I previously worked for a data protection company. Our product was, and I believe still is, the most thorough on the market. By “thorough” I mean the dictionary definition, “careful about doing something in an accurate and exact way.” To this end, installing our product instrumented every system call on the target machine. Data did not and could not move in any sense of the word “move” without detection. Every data operation was caught and monitored. It was total surveillance data protection. Its customers were companies that don’t accept half-measures. What made this product stick out was that very thoroughness, but here is the point: Unless you fully instrument your data handling, it is not possible for you to say what did not happen. With total surveillance, and total surveillance alone, it is possible to treat the absence of evidence as the evidence of absence. Only when you know everything that did happen with your data can you say what did not happen with your data…

We all know the truism, that knowledge is power. We all know that there is a subtle yet important distinction between information and knowledge. We all know that a negative declaration like “X did not happen” can only [be] proven true if you have the enumeration of everything that did happen and can show that X is not in it. We all know that when a President says “Never again” he is asking for the kind of outcome for which proving a negative, lots of negatives, is categorically essential. Proving a negative requires omniscience. Omniscience requires god-like powers…

John Gilmore famously said, “Never give a government a power you wouldn’t want a despot to have.” I might amend that to read “Never demand the government have a power you wouldn’t want a despot to have.”… When you embark on making failure impossible, and that includes delivering on statements like “Never again,” you are forced into cost-benefit analyses where at least one of the variables is infinite. [Emphasis added.]

I don’t know Greer’s religious beliefs - if he’s actually trying to make a theological point, or if he’s using (to him) nothing more than a vivid metaphor. But he’s right. In some of the more extreme versions of our political debates - and in some of what we ask our governments to do or seem to think they can do - we act like war or poverty or disease would cease to be urgent issues if our opinions prevail. In doing so, we claim to solve problems that Jesus himself says are not fully solvable in this lifetime. At best, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment; at worst, we’re asking fallible humans to try to claim enough power to do God’s job. Bob Weinz at Christianity Today made a similar point in 2005, reflecting upon 9/11:

Last March former White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that the U.S. government “failed to prevent the tragedy of 9/11.” He proceeded to apologize for that failure… Clarke seemed to presume that “your government” should somehow have been able to anticipate and prevent evil from happening—both the evil that we call natural disasters, and the evil that comes directly from the hearts and hands of evil people. It is a false premise. To presume the government’s ability to prevent such a catastrophe is to assume that it possesses qualities and abilities that no person, let alone a government, can ever possess. Omniscience and omnipotence are qualities that we ascribe only to God.

There’s a saying: “Opinions are like armpits. Everyone has a couple, and most of them stink.” I saw a more positive alternative online: “Opinions are like luggage: expensive, and heavy to carry around, so don’t take more than you need.” Paul wrote to “reject foolish and ignorant controversies because you know they breed infighting” (2 Tim 2:23) and to “avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, quarrels, and fights about the law because they are useless and empty” (Titus 3:9). There’s nothing automatically wrong with having opinions, debating, and discussing them. It can be an important part of loving God with all of our minds and trying to use our gifts and positions to serve others. But let’s practice humility, realizing that we may easily be wrong. Let’s travel lightly, saving our time and energy for people and service. Let’s avoid foolish controversies, remembering that time and change will render so much of these moot. Let’s remember that we ultimately depend on Jesus to solve the world’s fallenness, rather than hoping in or foolishly empowering our institutions to try and do so.