A. N. Wilson's return to Christian Faith

Read his testimony here.

Infinite Jest

I just finished Infinite Jest last night, which I’d decided to read upon hearing about DFW’s suicide last fall. All the obits were calling it his most significant work and I’d already loved his two essay collections and got IJ for Christmas.

This book is one that surely gives book reviewers (which I’m not), as DFW says, “the howling fantods,” because 1). it’s impossible to do justice to in a review and 2). there’s so many different brilliant facets in the book it’s hard to know where to start in response.

So I decided to go with bullet points.  These are intended to summarize some of my reactions, but more to convince anyone on the fence about taking the IJ plunge, that it’s worth it.  (There are no true spoilers below):

• this book is very long, as in over 1000 pages and took me 2 ½ months to read. But, unlike every other real long novel I’ve ever read, I didn’t have trouble staying engaged.  To be honest this was partly because a lot of the time I was having to work to keep track of what was going on (especially in the beginning). But just as I began to wonder if a master plot would emerge from the tangle of different characters and vignettes, the big picture did start to come together for me around the 200 page mark.

• to my surprise, I found this overall plot compelling and kept wondering where he’d go with it.

• IJ has the best narrative descriptions I’ve ever read about a host of subjects:
• alcohol and drug-abuse (especially pot and prescription drugs)
• the recovery culture (AA, NA, etc)
• youth competitive tennis
• clinical depression
• a certain kind of dysfunctional family – withdrawn alcoholic father, overcompensating impossibly-perfect mother.

• the book is set in the near future and, considering it was written in the early 90s, is down-right prophetic about the technology-driven entertainment/information revolution we’ve lived through in the past decade.

• the book is comedic satire of the highest order, especially of the following subjects:
• America
• our addiction to entertainment
• terrorists
• college radio
• avant-garde film

• fair warning: I was disappointed in the ending and feel (as of now…this could change) that it’s the weakest part of the book. DFW intentionally decided not to tie up the plot’s loose ends and I wish he had. But I could be missing something about his intentions here, and the disappointment doesn’t come close to outweighing the joy I got from reading this thing. 

Notes on the Nature of Sin, Part Three

The Progress of Idolatry. 

First, idols attract us with a promise. “If you live for me and serve me, you’ll get what you’re ultimately after in life – happiness, success, significance, approval.”  So the immanent work idol promises the glory of success, security, power.  The fitness idol promises beauty, approval.  The money idol promises ultimate security, power. 

However, the idols’ promises are conditional: idols require sacrifice, service, work.  You’ll only get what the idol promises if you live for it.  You must pay the price the idol demands.  So, idolatry always generates tons of stuff you “must do” to get the life offered.  Secular idolaters experience these as “compulsions” or addictions.  For example, “I must work 80 hours this week, I must be with this person, I must have this sexual experience, I must exercise this much, eat this much…”  Religious idolaters experience these as “commands,” behaviors or feelings you must do in order to satisfy the god/religion/authority figures.  “I must share the gospel 5 times this week, must pray 30 minutes, never taste alchohol, be a leader in the church, meditate this way, complete this ritual..” 

Idolatry generates lusts of all kinds.  Lust is disordered desire; desire ‘out of bounds’ and desire ‘out of balance’ (Allender).

And idolatry is by nature legalistic; the salvation is offers is always only “by works.”

As the idol is served, the idol enslaves its worshipper. Though initially idolatry makes you feel like you’re in control, the longer you serve it the more your come under its control.  You find that your idol requires more and more sacrifice for fewer results. “An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula” (Lewis).  You keep “enlarging the very void you’re trying to fill” (Plantinga). This bondage leads to intense frustration, anger, pain, a sense of meaninglessness, as well as awful consequences in your own life.  Yet, even though life is unraveling, pride often keeps people going: “I will make this work!”

Keller points out that because idolatry is built on lies, our idols generate “delusional fields” in which our thinking and reasoning becomes deeply distorted and detached (to varying degrees) from reality.  Idolatry leads us to engage in all kinds of rationalizations, willful blindness, and avoiding/tampering with evidence.

In the end your life becomes a deeply distorted charicature of real human life as it was created to be lived. You always resemble what you worship (Jerram Barrs).  If you spend your life worshipping work you’re “all business.”  If you spend your life worshipping sex you wind up a “dirty old man, a perv.”  Someone who lives for money is a “miser.”  Idols turn us, literally, into a joke. But idols don’t only destroy us; they destroy the ones we love, our relationships; and depending on which idols we choose to serve, they can destroy our health, our finances, our careers, our minds, our emotions, our will.

Idols lie, curse and kill.

Idolatry is the sin beneath all our other sins.

Idolatry breaks the first commandment (have no other gods before me) and the greatest commandment (love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength); and breaking these central commands leads us to break others. 

Finally, idolatry breaks our hearts and the heart of God who made us for himself.

Changing Idol-Sets.

Idols are obviously destructive and many people become aware of this during the course of their lives, especially when some catastrophe hits as a result of idolatry.  For example, a sex or substance addict eventually gets fired and ends up bankrupt and divorced. He is tasting the bitter fruits of his sin.  He may see that his idolatry or addiction is ruining his life and may attempt to ‘turn over a new leaf’ and change.  However, it is very common for a person in this situation merely to choose another set of idols for which to live.  The idolater may exchange his alcohol/comfort idols for religion/control idols (his ‘bad’ idols for ‘good’ ones).  The reverse often happens as well: the religious idolater experiences some tragedy and embraces sex or substance idols for the comfort and escape they offer.  (In The Simpsons’ Movie, when the town panics everyone in the church runs into the bar and everyone in the bar runs into church!).  This is essentially what you see the younger brother and older brother doing in the parable in Luke 15.  The younger brother, presumably, has been living at home working for dad, doing the right thing.  He’s doing his religious/relational duty.  He then punts this relationship and becomes the rebellious prodigal.  His return causes the righteous older brother to rebel against the father, leave the house, humiliate his dad, makes insulting demands, just like the younger brother had done. 

Another way to put this: there’s something like a “righteous” vs. “rebellious” or “legalism” vs “license” dialectic movement to our sin.  We tend to go from one pole to the other, but all in the mode of idolatry and alienation from God.  In the south it’s very common to go from one pole to the other throughout life: growing up you’re religious, during the teenage/college years you’re rebellious, during early adulthood you’re religious again, during mid-life you’re rebellious, and the last phase is often religious. The tragedy is that so many do not truly ever repent of their idolatry and turn from their religion/rebellion idols to worship and serve the true God. 

Of course, it’s possible and quite common for these two different idol sets to co-exist in someone’s life at the same time; for us to be “righteous/legalistic” in one area of life (our public, church life) and “rebellious” in another area of life (our private life, our sex life, etc).  This produces the “double-life syndrome,” which is especially common among church pastors and leaders. 

Notes on the Nature of Sin, Part Two

Idolatry, Idols and Idol-Clusters.

In our proud unbelief and self-trust we turn away from a worship-relationship with God.  But, when we stop worshipping God as God, we necessarily worship something in his place; we adopt god-substitutes. The first thing we worship in God’s place, the first god-substitute we choose, is ourselves.  In our unbelieving state we dream of being god (Gen. 3).  In other words, we not only rebel against God, we seek to usurp his throne and take his place. This is the first dimension of idolatry produced by the root-complex of sin: the idolatry of self rooted in our desire to be god.

Ezekiel 28.1-3: 

1The word of the LORD came to me: 2 "Son of man, say to the prince of Tyre,  Thus says the Lord GOD: "Because your heart is proud,  and you have said, 'I am a god, I sit in the seat of the gods, in the heart of the seas, yet you are but a man, and no god, though you make your heart like the heart of a god…"

 We all seek to make ourselves gods in certain ways; most fundamentally, we aspire to transcend human limitations and secure God’s glory, his “godness” or transcendence.  Keller suggests that there are four primary aspects of God’s transcendent glory that we strive to secure in our pursuit to be gods: comfort, approval, control, and power. 

Comfort: pleasure, freedom, lack of care/stress, rest, play/fun.

Approval: affirmation, love, acceptance, intimacy, beauty, relationship.

“Glory”              Control: order, security, certainty, discipline

Power: success, winning, influence, responsibility.

These are the self-oriented “heart idols” that generate all other sin in our lives.

In order to attain one or more of these ultimate ‘glory’-goals, we go on to partner with immanent idols (Keyes): some aspect of creation that we think will give us what we’re after (Jer. 2.10-13, Romans 1.18-25).   It’s important to see that we always employ our immanent idols in the service of our ultimate, transcendent idols.  For example, we use sex (an immanent idol) to gain god-like comfort; or we use strict religious performance to gain god-like approval from others; or we accumulate massive wealth to attain god-like power.

Here is an expanded list (partly drawn from Keller) of other aspects of creation that we may worship as immanent idols: physical beauty, body/fitness, image/reputation, safety, work, sex, alcohol/drugs, success, art/creativity, sports, sleep, religion, possessions (car, clothes, house, watch, vacations, etc), morality, performance, other people (spouse, kids, parents, friends, boss), some group (church, guild, peers, club, the ‘inner ring,’ race, culture, city, family), suffering, politics/agendas, knowledge, expertise, technology, information, talents, intellect, emotions, etc. 

Calvin said our hearts are idol factories.  We really can worship just about anything.  And the combination of immanent and transcendent idolatries are almost endless.

It’s possible to group immanent idols into idol sets or clusters.  Broadly speaking, we see two primary idol sets or clusters in the Bible: idols of “religion/morality/duty/order” and idols of “rebellion/immorality/desire/freedom.”  These produce, respectively, the “sins of moral/religious people” and the “sins of immoral/irreligious people” (Keller).  See the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18), the Younger and Older Brother (Luke 15), Simon and the Prostitute (Luke 7), the 2 sides of the flesh in Gal. 3 and 5 (Gal. 3 is the flesh idolizing goodness, responsibility, tradition, duty, law, roles, work and Gal. 5 shows the flesh idolizing pleasure, immorality, freedom, sex, money), pagan type sins in Romans 1 and religious type sins in Romans 2.  (Interestingly, these poles also align with the ancient Apollonian and Dionysian poles in Greek religion and the Gnostic and pagan categories one finds across various world religions and philosophies where either the immaterial/spirit/soul or the material/body is worshiped).

A friend of mine (David Jones) suggests that another pair of contemporary idol sets are idols of achievement (rule) and idols of belonging (relationship) and that each person and culture tends to gravitate to one or the other.

Notes on the Nature of Sin, Part One

What follows below is something I wrote up for our elder training this past spring.  It summarizes thoughts on the nature of sin that have slowly come together over the years. Alot of the ideas below are influenced by Sinclair Ferguson, Tim Keller, Richard Lovelace, Jack Miller, et al. 

Notes on the Nature of Sin & Idolatry: Part One

Introduction:  Sin is notoriously hard to define; in fact, some theologians say that since evil is by definition absurd, explanations of it will always be impossible.  In any case, we can summarize Scriptural teaching on sin and one of its primary expressions, idolatry.

Towards a Definition of Sin.

One classic biblical definition of sin is to say that sin is breaking God’s law; or, as the WCF puts it, “sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of God’s law.”  Sin always violates God’s moral standards that are communicated to us in his Word, witnessed to by the order of creation and human conscience.  We break God’s moral law in thought, word, deed, in sins of omission and commission.  But, while sin is never less than breaking God’s law, it is much more than this.

One way we can more deeply grasp sin is to understand that sin has an internal root that bears external fruit in our lives. External sins involve more obvious expressions of rebellion against God and his order: murder, adultery, verbal cruelty, preening self-righteousness.  Such external sins are the fruit of more internal, root sins of the heart, mind and human personality.  For example, the root sin of anger can produce, if unchecked, the fruit sin of murder.  Therefore, if we’re going to understand sin we need to understand its root as much as is possible.

Sin, at its root, is the natural human disposition against God that is a blend of pride, unbelief and self-reliance.  Lovelace, following Luther, argues that unbelief is logically primary: unbelief that God is good and good to me, and therefore unbelief that God’s word to me is reliable, true, trustworthy. (Or, to put it the opposite way, sinful unbelief is actually the belief that God is not good, trustworthy, or just – see Genesis 3.1-6.  I discussed this more in a post a while back here). But note that already inherent in this unbelief are a host of other sins.  Unbelief contains an inherent self-reliance or self-trust (Jer. 17.7-9): every time we disbelieve in God we are automatically believing in or ultimately trusting ourselves and our goodness, judgment, knowledge more than God’s. This, of course, is incredibly arrogant – thus, unbelief also partakes in the sin of pride.  Perhaps these three parts of sin – unbelief, self-reliance and pride – are best thought of as perspectives on the heart of sin as it operates in fallen human beings.