I was asked recently by a pastors conference organizer to discuss good thinking and writing. Whether I myself think good, and whether I myself write well English, I cannot say. I had a book proposal turned down about two years ago, and I got the distinct sense it was because I just wasn’t up to the level of snuff desired by the well-trained brothers in charge of acquisitions at the publisher. It wasn’t a personal rejection; it was a meritocratic one. And I didn’t disagree with them. I didn’t truly feel I could tackle the topic they asked me to write a proposal for; I was relieved when they turned me down. So I don’t come to this topic as a conquering hero, but as a servant who, like Gehazi, has swindled some goods from richer writers and kept them in secret. And the conference organizer, like Elisha, found me out and threatened me with leprosy if I did not share what meager goods I have with the conference attendees. I did so, and now I want to share them with you. These goods will come spilling out in order, but I think you will find that my thoughts here are nonetheless bulging a bit. I’m tossing a lot of ideas into this video, and I’m talking kinda fast, because the algorithms have already determined that you are the kind of person who likes getting your intellectual money’s worth.
And who are you? Well, you’re some kind of nerd. You, presumably, have to write stuff on some kind of regular basis. You may even have to write Sunday school lessons and emails and devotionals and other things that matter to people, even eternally. And statistically speaking, at least one person watching this video is justified in writing social media posts on controversial issues. What can you do to think and write and think a little better next year than you did this year in all those venues? And what in the world am I, I who am not a writing teacher and certainly not a thinking teacher, going to be able to say in the next bunch of minutes that will help you think and write well?
I’d better just get to it with an opening illustration.
Young Christian intellectual Elizabeth Bruenig, now of the Atlantic, formerly of the New York Times, has devoted much of her writing career to covering the cases of death row inmates. It turns out that one of the premier moral themes that arises from this work is that of forgiveness. Bruenig has advanced theological training, an incisive pen, and two small children, all of which make her especially suited to discuss forgiveness. I want to give an illustration and an insight from Elizabeth Bruenig as I open this video on good thinking and writing. You’ll see why in 35 minutes, or your pizza is free.
Bruenig writes,
Suppose my children are playing together when my younger girl discovers a dress-up gown that she would like to put on. As she begins to shimmy it on, my older daughter notices it and decides that she would like to wear the dress-up gown, so she pulls it off my younger daughter and puts it on herself. In retaliation, my younger daughter pulls her big sister’s hair, demanding that her gown be given back. The scuffle summons me, and after hearing both of them recount roughly the same story, I lightly chastise my younger daughter for pulling her sister’s hair, but then direct my older daughter to give the dress-up gown back to her little sister and strongly chastise her for taking it in the first place. From my older daughter’s point of view, her little sister is having all the fun: not only did she get the gown in the end, she got to pull her sister’s hair and got little more than a gift for it!
But this is because my younger daughter was operating in a state of moral exception. She was behaving in a state where the normal rules of morality—such as the general prohibition on pulling her sister’s hair—did not apply. I would like her not to attack her sister generally, so I chastised her for it, but I clearly didn’t rule against her, and she wasn’t ultimately punished—in fact, she got what she wanted in the end. You can imagine how tantalizing a loophole like this is to a child—it represents the opportunity not only to get what one desires, but the opportunity to indulge a darker, typically repressed desire too, and the only precondition for doing so is being wronged in the first place. As you can imagine, “she hit me first!” is something of a prized status among small children for this reason.
I’m a father of multiple children myself, which makes me an RUF minister: Referee of Unwise Fights. And though I discovered that my wife and many other adults, and even certain children, do not like “the state of moral exception” idea, the idea that the victim of unprovoked aggression gets a pass, a free play from scrimmage, it resonates with me, I must admit. It resonates even though I reject it. I actually do not formally believe in taking or endorsing personal revenge. Ever. God said no. To take vengeance is to take something of his, to steal a prerogative that can be entrusted only to a perfectly just Person. No one else has a reliable scale for weighing out pounds of flesh. And the last person who can be trusted to do such weighing is the one whose dress-up clothes were just snatched.
I will observe, however, that what resonates with me in allowing for some revenge resonates with a lot of people. It isn’t right to grant moral exceptions like this, but we do it: we give each other passes on certain acts of vengeance. Liam Neeson has, I’m told, built a career on giving moviegoers the delicious feeling of living in a state of moral exception where it’s okay to root for revenge. Bruenig goes on to suggest that
these states of moral exception [are] equally attractive to adults[.] That is to say, knowing for a fact that we will hurt one another—nothing seems so clear-cut or obvious … as that fact—is it possible that adults, too, are attracted to states of moral exception, in which they can not only pursue projects of vengeance that would normally be socially proscribed, but also do so with full social sanction? I certainly think so.
And now we get to something of the point of my extended introduction:
Consider the state of social media, where people frequently go in order to find something to be angry about, so that they can express their anger in ways that would typically be forbidden but are permissible in cases only of having been wronged. Had the social media user not sought out an example of someone doing something offensive or outrageous, they wouldn’t have anger to discharge, but it seems to me that acquiring anger and the right to discharge it is precisely the point. (Cable TV also offers you lots of reasons to get pissed off at people and yell at them.)
I apologize for my King James language there, but it could not be helped. I needed that last sentence, because it is profoundly pastorally true.
When I heard Bruenig’s words in a talk she gave, I was busy cleaning up rusty metal with an angle grinder. I paused, took off my gloves, stopped the recording, and took down a note to help me find the words again: “acquiring anger and the right to discharge it is precisely the point” of so much social media usage.
Wow. That is profound. Who can withstand such delicious temptation? And it leads me to my thesis, which is an awfully fancy thing to have in a YouTube video, and which is buried awfully deep into the video already, but here we go nonetheless: if you want to write and think well, you must cultivate the most basic Christian virtues. I’m not preaching a sermon, so I can pick my points. I can name the virtues that occur to me—though I admit here to plagiarizing a writer I respect. Those virtues are faith, hope, and love, just these three. And the greatest of these we will save for last.
First …
Faith: Good thinking (and then writing) has faith in God and sees others’ faith in God-alternatives.
I find the role of faith in good thinking and writing to be absolutely essential. And let me give another illustration. The Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, has become infamous worldwide for its hateful, extreme rhetoric. One of the granddaughters of the founder, Fred Phelps, Megan, joined in the hatred and anger. She picketed funerals with her family and then, when Twitter came out, took her message onto social media.
But unlike at funerals, people you attack on Twitter tend to talk back with equal or greater volume. And Megan Phelps discovered that some of her opponents could be gracious and even persuasive. She began, quietly, to think about the questions her opponents asked her. She ultimately left her cultish group.
An excellent book on good thinking that I highly recommend, How to Think, by Alan Jacobs, comments,
I’d bet a large pile of cash money that thousands of people read Adrian Chen’s profile of Megan Phelps-Roper and said, to others or to themselves, “Ah, a wonderful account of what happens when a person stops believing what she’s told and learns to think for herself.” But here’s the really interesting and important thing: that’s not at all what happened. Megan Phelps … didn’t start “thinking for herself”—she started thinking with different people. To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. Not to mention, when people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.”
This brings me back to faith. You’re never going to get away from the need for faith in specific people, that group of people you think with. It’s the same as the famous line from C.S. Lewis: a man who jibs at authority must be content to know nothing all his life. Most of what we know, Lewis says, we know because reliable people have told us so.
A Christian epistemology—a Christian theory of knowledge, of how we come to have justified, true beliefs—is unembarrassed about the faith that underlies all our knowing. There is, on the one hand, a group of people we think with, whom we trust as partners and even at times as authorities. That group extends beyond our time and place to other teachers whom Christ has given to his church. But, most importantly, we are all together unembarrassed by the faith in God that underlies our knowing. Somewhere near the bedrock of our knowing lies a simple faith that what he says is true is indeed true.
We don’t just know stuff straight, with no mediation. No, the title of my rather moribund blog, drawn straight from Hebrews 11:3, is “By Faith We Understand.” That verse says,
By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. (Hebrews 11:3 ESV)
The same truth that Paul says in Romans 1 that we can’t not know, the author of Hebrews says we know through faith. We understand through belief.
This is why I am a Young Earth Creationist. I can’t say that other Christians who don’t adopt my viewpoint on this matter lack faith. But I can say, positively, that I’m under no burden to think that I’m going to have form major elements of my knowledge independently of my creator—that I’m stuck with empirical methods of knowledge only when it comes to the origins of the cosmos. I expect to have to build a foundation for my knowledge out of cinderblocks he provides.
I could go on at great length about the role of faith in knowledge. Tim Keller has done this well in The Reason for God. There are even non-Christian writers who have done excellent work here, including Stanley Fish, who loves to talk about the role faith plays in so-called “secular” spaces, such as his home space, the academy:
What, after all, is the difference between a sectarian school which disallows challenges to the divinity of Christ and a so-called nonideological school which disallows discussion of the same question? In both contexts something goes without saying and something else cannot be said (Christ is not God or he is). There is of course a difference, not however between a closed environment and an open one but between environments that are differently closed. (The Trouble with Principle)
I find the role of faith in my knowledge to be so helpful for thinking and, therefore, for writing. Because a lot of my thinking—like yours, I bet—is done in dialogue with other people, whether they know we’re listening to them or not. And when I pastor people, one of my jobs is to help them think Christianly in their own dialogue with their surrounding culture. Those parts of our culture that still insist that science disproves Christian faith, that reason and faith are non-overlapping magisteria, that Athens and Jerusalem are actually on separate planets—I find that long attention to the role faith plays in human knowledge helps me see through their claims. What axioms are they assuming? In what or whom does their own faith lie? Knowledge is a moral category. All knowing is either faith-ful to God our maker or it is not. As my seminary teacher Layton Talbert has said, any decision to mistrust God’s words is a decision to trust someone else’s.
I’ve read many articles and books by Stanley Fish. He actually makes this same point over and over again in so many way. I’ll give one more.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel makes just that point when he observes that the assumption by anti-creationists that ID couldn’t possibly be true seems less a conclusion reached by scientific method than an article of faith. It might be said, he continues, “that both the mention of ID in a biology class and its exclusion would seem to depend on religious assumptions.” … It is easy to see why creation science or intelligent design doesn’t have a chance. Any attempt to present it in a state-funded classroom as a legitimate alternative to evolution will be blocked by the state’s unwillingness (given the establishment clause) to give its stamp of approval to a religious position. Any attempt to remove the label “religious” and replace it with “scientific” will be resisted by the arbiters of what science is, who have already made up their collective mind in advance. And any attempt to establish the truth of intelligent design by the usual academic routes of argument and experiment will not get off the ground because the academy, like the liberal state of which it is a mirror and an extension, defines itself by its difference from religion. (Winning Arguments)
I don’t think it’s possible to write clearly without thinking clearly first. So good thinking (and then writing) has faith in God and gains skill in seeing others’ faith in other things. In apologetics, with unbelievers and with your own people, you are often exposing when their faith is in resting in something other than God’s word—and then pointing them to it. To do this well is to think clearly and to at least pave the way for good writing.
Hope: Good thinking and writing means hoping all things for others, and maintaining a hope in Christ’s final, just judgment of sin.
It simply isn’t true that the word “hope” in the NT has a very specific Christian meaning, namely, “confident expectation,” the-opposite-of-I-hope-so. This is called theological lexicography; it’s reading a not-entirely-wrong-but-not-entirely-right theological idea into uses of a Greek word. This idea just doesn’t fit NT usage. Herod “hoped” to see Jesus perform a miracle in Luke 23. He didn’t have a confident expectation.
It’s usage in context that tells us whether a given instance of hope in the Bible is meant to be a confident expectation or a mere wish. And here’s a tip: when Paul talks about a given virtue in the abstract—like “faith” and “hope” and “love”—he’s probably assuming a Christian understanding of those abstract words.
There are languages in the world which don’t have abstract nouns; Bible translators there have to specify both the subject and the object of these things.
What if we had to supply a subject and a verb for “hope” in 1 Cor 13:13, the little verse I’ve used to structure this talk? You know the verse: faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love. Who hopes, and what do they hope in? Well, think of how context might change the meaning of that word for us: if I’m sitting watching the Super Bowl and my favorite team is playing, if I had one anymore, and my father, who has rooted for this team since before I was born, is sitting watching with me, and if it’s the 4th quarter, and if the other team is one touchdown ahead and sitting on our one yard line poised to score again, and my father says to me, “Do you think there’s any hope?” He’s implying that we fans of this team are the hopers, and the object of our hope is Super Bowl victory.
When Barack Obama made “Hope” a political slogan for his first presidential campaign, I think the implied subjects were all Americans and the implied object of the hope was a better economic and cultural future for our nation.
What is the implied context in 1 Cor 13:13? Who is the hoper, and what is the thing hoped for? Paul has just mentioned hope, when he said that “love hopes all things,” and we’ll talk about it in a second. But somehow I think he is speaking in 13:13 at a higher level of abstraction, from a 30,000-foot Christian viewpoint—because he picks out these three virtues—faith, hope, and love—as especially significant. I think the subject of the “hope” here has to be the Christian individually and therefore the Christian church generally. And the object has to be all the things Christians uniquely and ultimately hope for: final salvation, the redemption of our bodies, vindication on the last day, the complete eradication of the power of sin.
How can Christian hope improve your thinking and writing?
I want to draw from 1 Cor 13’s comments about hope to answer this question.
When Paul says that “love hopes all things,” I do think I generally took that as meaning that love believes the best. But I checked with some of our most trusted interpreters, and they felt differently.
I was struck by this paragraph from Gordon Fee in his NICNT volume:
Paul does not mean that love always believes the best about everything and everyone, but that love never ceases to trust God and thus leave justice in God’s hands; it is in this sense that it never loses hope—that God’s justice in the context of God’s goodness will yet prevail where there is human fallenness, even grotesque fallenness.
Then I checked Ciampa and Rosner in the Pillar NTC, and they just quoted that same paragraph from Fee.
So I think it would be a totally legitimate application of the virtue of hope to say this: Christian hope means we can’t take vengeance—that would be stealing something God alone owns.
What is driving the worst public thinking and writing in our culture? Or, to say exactly the same thing, What in the world is happening on Twitter/X?
I’ll say one thing: people are tweeting as those who have no hope. Specifically, they have no hope that their Christian opponents will ever get their comeuppance. So they get increasingly loud in their own efforts to give their theological opponents the vengeful retribution they so eminently deserve. Both sides do this in any dispute. All sides do this in every dispute. And we bite and devour one another like crazed piranhas who have consumed all the other fish in the river and so turn on their own kind.
One of the most disarming things you can do in online discourse is have eschatological hope, to act like the court of public opinion is not the supreme court, that God will get it all right in the end. It just calms you down. You don’t feel such pressure to get others to heel. You might do no less work to persuade them, because we have another hope: that the one who saved us can save anyone. But you don’t get agitated. You are already living by the laws of the future kingdom.
I have hope for true Christians, of course, that they’ll often repent of their errors before death—and be corrected, like me, when they finally know as also they are known.
I have hope for lost people, though of a different kind. I have hope that the righteous will be vindicated and the truth and glory of God displayed. I have hope that the wicked will be compelled to bow the knee to God.
And I have hope that in the end, Pilate will be compelled—along with my debate opponents and, yes, myself—to accept the answer to his question: “What is truth?”
It can be so frustrating to pray to the same God, read the same Bible, and yet disagree with fellow believers. Insofar as much of our preaching and teaching—and therefore much of our writing—deals with matters of disagreement, it would sure help our writing and thinking to have the eschatological hope Paul describes in the love chapter. It would both cool us down and heat us up: our anger could dissipate, and our love for the Lord who is our exceeding great reward could grow. And that, in turn, has a way of helping us love the people to whom we speak and against whom we are compelled to disagree.
So, then: love.
Love
Two little exegetical-theological thoughts before I talk about love’s relationship to good thinking and writing:
First: love is the greatest virtue, right? That’s why love hopes all things but hope doesn’t love all things. Love underlies hope. And faith isn’t bedrock; it’s just close, I said earlier. What is bedrock inside us? Love is bedrock. Love underlies faith. Love is the ultimate virtue; on the two love commands hang all the law and the prophets. Love fulfills the law. Our loves drive our beliefs and our hopes. Who hopes for what he sees? No one. And who hopes for something he doesn’t desire, he doesn’t love? Also, no one.
Second: Gordon Fee suggests in his NICNT volume on 1 Cor that the reason Paul calls love “the greatest” of the triad of faith, hope, and love is that faith and hope will one day no longer be needed—but love will endure throughout eternity, just as it existed before time.
My dad used to speak at Christian writers conferences in the early to mid 1990s. He studied English at UVA. I did not. But, growing up in his home, I always cared about proper speech and writing. And I was most definitely a self-conscious prig about spelling. I won every spelling bee at my tiny Christian school, and this mattered to me a little too immensely. I can still remember how my second-grade crush misspelled “purse”—“P-U-R-S, purse!”—and unknowingly ended any possibility of a future with me.
There is obviously a massive, massive place for learning these mechanics: the rules. And I think we call it “school.” Going back to school is not realistic for most pastors; and DMin programs, to my knowledge, don’t have a rigorous writing component. They assume a certain amount of knowledge of those mechanics.
How can you grow in your skill as a written communicator after the age of 25? I think you really, really have to be driven by love.
What I learned about “the effective speaker” as a freshman in college is true of all effective communicators:
The Effective Speaker has a message to deliver, has a definite purpose in giving that message, and is consumed with the necessity of getting that message across and accomplishing that purpose. (from my freshman speech class notes at BJU)
What does “consumed” mean? It means love.
The Effective Speaker realizes that the primary purpose of speech is the communication of ideas and feelings in order to get a desired response. (from my freshman speech class notes at BJU)
What is “desire”? It’s love.
Do you love your people enough to work at the learning the tools of persuasion? Do you love the truth enough to use those tools without cheating, using rhetorical tricks that the truth would never need to use?
I didn’t understand the value of these tools when they were handed to me as a college freshman. How could I? I only came to see their value as I came to love certain truths—and certain people who needed to believe them.
Now, I’ve given very little practical advice in this video on good thinking and writing, but here are two advices: have you considered reading up on writing (I recommend Joseph Williams’ Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace), then using what you learn in whatever you write, and then—and this is key—finding an editor who might look over what you write before you submit it for some kind, any kind, of publication?
One of the best things that I think ever happened to my own writing was not only reading tons of edited prose but writing it—getting edited by competent people. I don’t mean grammar and spelling, although that’s certainly helpful. I mean structure and argument. My editor at BJU Press, Dennis, was and is a godly and diligent man who made countless helpful suggestions. And my main editor at Logos for something like 200 articles, Tyler, was exceptionally adept at catching structural weaknesses. He loved to cut out my first three paragraphs—and he was right every time. He taught me how to win and keep attention without cheating, which I take to be another way of saying “apt to teach.”
I have met a writer or two who resented being edited. This has never, ever made sense to me. I feel so much safer when I’ve been edited. I’ve been saved the embarrassment of making various errors. I love the truth; I love my readers; I want them to get that truth, and I don’t want my flubs to get in their way.
Why do I manuscript my videos? I am NOT saying that my way is better than others’ way, but here’s my thinking: in my college years, I sat through literally hundreds of sermons that felt to me like wastes of my time. The preachers, including some who were paid to fly across the country and stand before thousands, couldn’t be bothered to do any serious preparation. They subsequently failed at their most basic task—heralding what God said. And this frustrated, insulted, and angered me. I determined not to do unto others what they had done unto me.
To Bible teachers of any kind at all, even those who write a devotional for the tiny Christian school newsletter, I say this: if 100 sheep—or just one—who have come to feed all sit quietly in front of you with their mouths open, what is wrong with asking someone with sharp eyes to look over the grass you’re about to feed them, to weed out sticks or bugs? Feed Christ’s lambs.
Pre-editing a Sunday school lesson every week is a heavy burden. Perhaps you don’t have friends who can do this. Maybe find a friend in or out of the church who might do this for you just once. Or try doing what my respected friend Joe Tyrpak of Church Works Media does: he has frank discussions with his assistant pastors after (nearly) every sermon, where they go over what he could have done differently. He did this to me—and for me—when I spoke at his church, and it was bracing but wonderful. I have not forgotten his very trenchant criticisms.
If all the law and the prophets hang on love, then there is practically no end to the applications rightly ordered loves have to thinking and writing.
Let me give just one more, and I here I appeal again to Alan Jacobs’ book, * How to Think:
While we’re clearing away misconceptions about thinking, let’s tackle another pervasive one: that in order to think well, one must be strictly rational, and being rational requires the suppression of all feelings. … Just as we do not “think for ourselves” but rather think with others, so too we think in active feeling response to the world, and in constant relation to others. Or we should. Only something that complete—relational, engaged, honest—truly deserves to be called thinking.
The most important virtue for all of the Christian life, and therefore for all thinking and writing, is, arguably (and I did argue this) not cognitive but affective. It is, again, love. And it is notable that where we like to say, “That person let his emotions overrule his reason,” the Bible doesn’t talk this way. The Bible doesn’t treat us the way the “faculty psychology” does, as if there are three separable things called “mind,” “will,” and “emotion” inside us. The Bible treats us as psychosomatic unities, as body-soul persons. The Bible doesn’t command our emotions or our thinking or our wills (we do have these things; these are things persons have); the Bible commands us. I draw this from John Frame.
Ultimately, to think and write well, you must have rightly ordered loves. Many non-Christians think and write well. I do not deny this. But those places where they are serving truth and their neighbor are places were, by God’s common grace, God is allowing the publicans to love those who love them. They are suppressing the truth about God that is evident in creation while stealing from his creation truths whose ownership they won’t acknowledge. They ultimately end up serving false gods and stating untruths—and doing poor service for their neighbors—because they do not love the God who is Truth. In the final analysis, they are twisting the marvelous human tools of reason and writing in the service of something other than God.
This must not be us. If we want to think and write well, we have to love God and neighbor.
Conclusion
Let me end by picking up the theme of my opening illustration: forgiveness—and tying it into the greatest virtue in my little talk: love.
A number of friends over the years have highly praised The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, a famous nineteenth century novel whose great length is rivaled only by your expository sermon series, preachers. I picked it up with some expectation.
I really could be wrong, but I hated it, because it seemed to me to be composed mainly of cheap tricks for creating a state of moral exception, for making sure the protagonist could acquire an anger that would provide readers a vicarious gasp then a vicarious thrill.
The book was cool while it was an escape-from-prison story, but I couldn’t find any delight in it once it became a sprawling set of vendettas—and that was about half the huge tome. I just kept thinking…
You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (Leviticus 19:17–18 ESV)
Isn’t this so interesting? The specific context of the original love command is that of setting up a contrast between love and its opposite: vengeance, bearing a grudge. The opposite of this sin, the antidote to it, is the virtue of love.
In a day when you can acquire anger with a click literally moments after you awaken in the morning, we need love to carry us to good thinking and writing. Or else.
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