Introduction
Spirituality Introduction
Version 1.0, 3-20-05
There are many kinds of spirituality floating around out there--New Age spirituality, Buddhist spirituality, Hindu, Wiccan. You can even mix and match. Since I am a Christian (and a conservative one), the Christian variety is the kind that I pursue, so that is what you will find here. But even Christian spirituality comes in a wide array, and this fact is what has launched me on my current voyage.
When I was young, I didn't think about spirituality as a thing in itself. I just went about my business of going to church and listening to Christian radio and evangelizing my friends, and my spiritual life went rather well, at least by my standards then. But over time things fell apart. In high school my evangelistic activities took me into apologetics, which was so absorbing that I forgot all about basic things like praying and reading the Bible and, to some degree, even evangelism. Spiritually I dried up. I suppose my spiritual life was dependent on all the evangelism I was doing. Once that dropped off, prayer got boring, and the Bible no longer seemed relevant. I still cared about God; my relationship with him had just lost its earlier vitality.
The groundwork for my spiritual reawakening was laid at youth camp the summer after my junior year in high school, but my renewal really began halfway through my senior year. By a sort of accident I began corresponding with one of my friends at school, and she and I were able to encourage each other in some areas of insecurity. After two or three weeks of this, she wrote in one of her letters that she thought this accidental correspondence was "meant to be." The idea intrigued me, so I started looking for other things that might have been "meant to be." And I found them. This started me on an amazing, spiritual roller coaster ride. God became the Great, Good Conspirator controlling my circumstances behind the scenes to build me up and give me opportunities to minister to those around me. My relationship with God became more conversational. My prayers were now a matter of listening as well as talking. That is, I paid attention to what God might be saying through my thoughts and circumstances. I even began to read the Bible much more regularly and with an enthusiasm that had always been lacking, though my interpretation of the Bible was very subjective.
Then began the Crisis. In the fall I went off to Wheaton, where I continued the same pattern of interaction with God. This was also the time I was introduced to Reformed theology. I had read a little about Calvinism two years earlier on the Internet, but that semester I had Theology of Culture with R. Scott Clark. He showed us not only the doctrine of election but also bits and pieces of the rest of Reformed theology. I never knew you could fall in love with a theological system, but I did. That class sent my thinking in a whole new direction; and like many converts to Calvinism, I felt like my theology had suddenly matured.
That summer I read a lot of Reformed theology on the Internet. While doing a web search for Scott Clark, I found a group called the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. He had written an article in their journal, Modern Reformation. They were Reformed, of course, so I listened to them. Their main focus was not on theological instruction, however, but on cultural commentary, specifically commentary on the state of the evangelical church. It turned out there was not much about the contemporary evangelical movement that they liked. Contemporary worship music, listening prayer, "felt needs" evangelism, in fact anything that smacked of subjectivity was suspect. Christian spirituality, they said, was about the objective, historical, physical, earthy reality of Christ's atoning work on the Cross, communicated through words, water, bread, and wine. And since at that point I implicitly trusted Reformed theologians, I adopted their critique.
I can't say their denunciation of subjectivity came as a complete shock. I had been questioning it myself. In my conversational relationship with God, I tried to be very sensitive to the Holy Spirit and listened very carefully to every little thought I had that sounded like a promise or a command. And I tried to have conversations with God during my quiet times. But I was never sure if the thoughts I heard were God or my mind's own random productions; and in my conversations with God, my side of the conversation was a lot louder and clearer than God's. After about a year and a half of trying to listen to God, I gave up and decided that if God was speaking to me, I couldn't hear him very well.
So when I came back to Wheaton, I had much to complain about, and I didn't mind sharing. But still I was frustrated and confused. I couldn't support any of the restrictive claims and criticisms I was making. I could only cite my Reformed teachers, and their arguments were curiously lacking in Scriptural argumentation. Essentially my new beliefs were just as subjective as my old ones, based only on the authority of the modern Reformers and the new values I had picked up from them.
This threw me into an agonized confusion. I didn't know how to be a Christian anymore, and I was no longer sure anyone else around me knew either. My confusion itself astonished me. I never expected to find so much diversity of opinion within Christianity. I was used to having my beliefs unsettled by atheists. But here were two Christian groups with diametrically opposed ideas about how believers should be carrying out their spiritual lives and ministry. Who was I supposed to believe?
I wasn't just going to leave it at that. No one I talked to had answers that satisfied me, so I concluded I had to find them myself. During Christmas break, I decided to put all of these issues together and figure out this question of Christian growth and experience. So I set to work cataloging my questions and recording my reflections in a notebook. It was sort of an extension of my journal and a precursor to my thoughts pages. Over the next many months I worked very hard at defining the differences between the "objectivists" and the "subjectivists," as I called them. I also tried to define my own reactions to the issues, to lay out the possible answers, and to reason out what the Bible had to say about these things. Now at last I was getting somewhere!
By the end of that summer, my confusion had begun to settle. While I hadn't answered my questions completely, I had developed opinions I could live with, at least for the time being. I concluded that my Reformed friends had in many ways been too hard on evangelicalism. In some cases I thought they were too restrictive. In others I thought they were out of touch with the movement, at least its best sides. And in the case of my central struggle, listening prayer, I began to have doubts about my doubts. My argument against listening prayer was that since the source of inner voices was so uncertain, God wouldn't use thoughts to convey information. Upon reflection, this struck me as a fairly shabby argument. And besides, some people simply had convincing experiences of hearing God speak to them through their thoughts! I was open to the possibility, then, that these other people's experiences were valid and I was just too immature to discern God's voice clearly.
Since then my thoughts have been percolating, and my spirit of independent inquiry has been growing. My questions have changed, too. Since I had some provisional answers to the dilemmas from my crisis, my thoughts shifted to the general question of how one grows spiritually. I spent quite a long time at first fretting over the fact that I was not a very spiritual person. But over time I came to several decisions. First, since I didn't even know how to become a spiritual person, worrying about it all the time was a waste of energy. I wasn't about to give up on the idea of being a devoted Christian, but I figured (and hoped) that God was at least as patient with me as I could be with myself. Second, I wasn't going to obligate myself to anyone and everyone's ideas about what was spiritual, though I did listen more carefully to certain people. Third, it would be better to be somewhat systematic and purposeful in my investigations than to make desperate, haphazard guesses.
Some of my more productive thoughts have revolved around certain other concepts that Wheaton introduced me to during my prior years of confusion. The main thrust of these ideas is that the church has a wealth of wisdom about the spiritual life hidden in the works of its ancient devotional writers. These were people who carefully observed the behavior of the soul and who seriously trained themselves to be godly by means of spiritual disciplines in a way that is rarely seen today. These writers aren't the Bible, of course. Strictly speaking, they are only interpreters. But as people who have been shaped by Scripture's values, they speak with some authority, both about Scripture and about human spiritual experience in matters that Scripture doesn't directly address. They deserve careful consideration. So do many modern teachers, of course. I don't think that wisdom passed from the earth with the eighteenth or nineteenth century.
My penultimate goal is to develop a system for spirituality, as far as I'm able, and my ultimate goal is to live it. I don't mean I want to "put God in a box." I'm aware of that danger, and I believe it can be avoided. I hope so anyway. I thrive on systems. I also don't think I have to have the whole system worked out before I begin to put it into practice. That would be disastrous because in a sense the system is never finished. The best course is to develop both theory and practice at the same time. But the point is that the theory serves the practice and not the other way around.
Christianity Introduction
Version 1.0, 3-20-05
Ever since I was about ten, religion has been overall the most important thing in my life. I had grown up with Christianity all around me, and I was baptized at seven, but ten was the year that religion somehow became magnetic north to me. Some people, when they say, "Religion is the most important thing in my life," mean something like, "I am totally in love with Jesus, and I would do anything for him." When I say it, I mean just that I can't avoid taking it seriously. Sometimes that has meant I'm excited about Jesus, and sometimes it's meant he utterly baffles me, but it always means that I see religious issues as the fundamental issues in life and that they are something I have to deal with in whatever way seems necessary at the time. Thus, the prominent position of this section on this site.
Over the years, my interest in Christian things has settled into five main areas: evangelism, apologetics, spirituality, theology, and hermeneutics. Here's the quick run-through. You can read the subsection intros for more.
I think I was a miniature evangelist even in elementary school, in my low key way, but in junior high that phase really kicked in. And since I was trying to evangelize my skeptical friends, evangelism led into apologetics. Apologetics was very distracting, and in the process of studying God, I forgot about talking to him, which led me into a vexing spiritual dry spell. Not to fear, however, for I had a spiritual reawakening at the end of high school and became super-enthusiastic about spiritual growth and the idea of a personal, conversational relationship with God. This was also when I began my habit of journaling.
Then I went off to Wheaton College and entered The Crisis, which you can read about in the spirituality intro. It basically involved hearing opposing accounts from two different Christian groups of how Christianity is supposed to be lived. The effect of this crisis was to teach me that the world is more complicated than I thought and that I really didn't know how to be the kind of Christian I wanted to be. It also reaffirmed for me that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. I was confused, and no one I talked to had answers that satisfied me, so I concluded I had to find my own. During this time my journal developed into my more organized "thoughts pages" as part of this effort.
Other things happened at Wheaton. For one thing, I began working through my theology. This came partly as a result of discovering Reformed theology my freshman year. I was also involved in an Internet evangelism ministry, which kept evangelistic issues churning in my mind. And working at the Billy Graham Center library gave me exposure to various evangelism and missions movements. My church was another influence, of course. Teaching Sunday school there made me aware of ministry issues, as did watching the church dissolve.
The process of sorting through my questions was aided by grad school. I did my masters at Wheaton in biblical exegesis, and it fed my latent interest in hermeneutics, which is the theory of interpretation. And as is usual in higher education, I learned a lot but came out with even more questions than I had going in.
My last year of grad school, all of these puzzles and others convinced me that it was time to work on my critical thinking and research skills. (Most of that project will appear in the philosophy section.) One side effect of this decision was to bring apologetics back to my attention, this time as much for myself as for anyone else.
In my quest to figure out the world, Christianity certainly gives me the most to think about. It even infiltrates my other subjects of interest. I like to integrate ideas anyway, but Christianity is a special case. I see it as a basic perspective from which to look at everything in life. So there are Christian views of art, money, politics, work, play, computers, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Similarly, there are Christian uses for all these things; and conversely, insights from other areas can inform our understanding of Christianity. I didn't come up with this idea of integrating Christianity with the rest of life, but it's one that to me just seems right.
Blog Introduction
Version 1.1, 5-1-05
Welcome to my web journal and site updates page. And now, a history lesson.
Many eons ago I ran across an online diary on somebody's Geocities site. I didn't think much of it and didn't even bookmark it (which is strange for me), but I filed it away in my memory and moved on. A couple of years later a random person read my website and recommended Xanga to me. I registered and then completely forgot about it for a long time.
I didn't actually pay attention to things like online diaries and weblogs until a few days after September 11th, when I Googled my way into a message board for online diarists. In one thread they had been discussing the attacks while they were happening. The transparency and emotional energy of their posts gripped me. But still I moved on. A few months later I was looking up Choose Your Own Adventure books on Google and wandered into an entry from a diary called urbanality. This time it stuck. The entry was so inviting that I had to read the whole thing. I read all the archives, and I discovered once again something I often forget, that people can be utterly fascinating--as individuals, not just as abstractions.
Online diarying looked so fun that I had to try it myself. So I signed up with Diaryland, urbanality's host, and typed away. I called it Taran, Assistant Pig-Keeper because I had just read the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander.
Then my friend at work April started a weblog at Xanga. This brought my attention to the large number of Wheaton students who had Xanga blogs. An online community of which I could be a part! So I revived my neglected Xanga account.
I like the blog format better than the diary format because the entries in a blog are more accessible, but I don't like the way most people keep their archives. Blogs are typically arranged in reverse chronological order so that the most recent entry is at the top. This makes sense if you're a visitor checking for the latest happenings. It does not make sense if you're a visitor reading through the whole series of them from the beginning. You have to read backwards. Therefore, my archives will be arranged in chronological order! You may feel perfectly free to start at the top of the page like a normal reader of English.
As I stated at the beginning of this intro, this blog is a combination web journal and site updates page. That keeps things simple, and simplicity is something this site can always use more of! I may keep my other blogs going for now, and if so, I'll keep everything unified by posting links to those entries in the Thinkulum blog.
Also, you should notice in my blog's navigation links that I have a page for links to other people's sites. There you will find some terrific people I know online and off who have websites. When you want to read about somebody's life but get tired of mine, you can visit them. :)
Enjoy!
Introduction
Version 1.4, 7-29-06
Hello. Welcome to my website. It's here as a repository for the things that I like, things I think, things I've written, collected, created, or experienced.
Content
What you will find here: essays of various sorts, random musings, reviews and commentaries, a weblog, collections of links and other things, reference materials, creative projects.
I am interested in a lot of stuff. This means that I am almost never bored. Distraction is the more typical problem. It also means that there's a lot to keep track of, so I've tried to keep things organized here. The difficulty is that most of my interests are interrelated and could fit into more than one category. So if the organization seems odd, that's why. I also tend to use my terms broadly for the sake of cramming as much into the category as possible. My interests come and go in phases, so at various times some parts of the site will be updated a lot more than others.
To give you a context for understanding what I post here, I've written introductions to most of the sections of the site. These explain basically how I got into the subject, my general take on it, and what my specific interests are.
My site will be updated very sporadically. To save yourself the trouble of checking my updates page all the time and being constantly disappointed, you can either reading my RSS feed or subscribing to my e-mail updates. If you're into RSS (and why in the world wouldn't you be?), you can get my blog's RSS feed here. I recommend RSS Bandit. Alternatively, you can have my blog updates e-mailed to you by signing up here: You'll get a confirmation e-mail with a link to click, and then you'll be subscribed. Don't worry. I hate spam. Your e-mail address won't be shared with anyone. If you want to contact me, you'll have to wait till the bottom of the page to find out how. ;) What is a "thinkulum" anyway? Um, well, it's a silly pun. According to Merriam-Webster, a vinculum is a "a straight horizontal mark placed over two or more members of a compound mathematical expression and equivalent to parentheses or brackets about them" or more generally, "a unifying bond." In Star Trek, it's the part of a Borg ship that connects the minds of all the drones on the ship and organizes their collective thoughts. The Thinkulum is a web space in which semi-organized and interconnected thoughts are collected in concrete forms. A little about myself, in bullet point fashion. I have three overarching goals in life: to understand the world, to help people, and to keep myself entertained. The result is what you find on this site. This is the reincarnation of my old website. The site was born in 1996 at Geocities when I was a freshman in college, and it was called Andy's Alcove. It didn't have very much on it. Then it went through five other versions, gaining and losing content, most of which was was school papers because it was easier than coming up with original material. In the meantime my ideas, interests, goals, and self-understanding became more and more defined, and this led to my wanting to take my site a lot more seriously. So I pulled things together (over about three years of distraction and procrastination), got paid web hosting, and changed the name to The Thinkulum, and on March 20, 2005, a new site was born. The title of this layout is "Pages from My Notebook." Anybody who knows me in person will probably understand it as a reference to my writing habits. I'm always walking around with a blue notebook that contains whatever notes I'm working on at the time. I call these my "thoughts pages." I write my all my notes on letter-size, white scratch paper (reduce, reuse, and recycle!), which I fold into fourths because I like small writing surfaces, and I use the notebook as my desk. My writing is small and fairly orderly, which is the first thing everybody comments on, and I always use a blue gel ink pen because I like dark, smooth lines. Particular, ain't I? Well, journaling is my hobby. These thoughts pages are the source of much of this site's material, at least in spirit if not in content. I think of personal websites as conversation pieces, so talk to me if you have the inclination. And that's all for the intro. Enjoy!
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