In an interesting piece in the February 11 New York Review of Books, Gary Kasparov—who reigned over the world of chess for two decades—reflects on his experience of playing against computers. In 1985 he played simultaneous matches against thirty-two computers, beating all of them. Since then, however, computers have become much harder to beat. But not, Kasparov says, because they can now “think” better than humans. Nothing much has changed in this regard, he observes, except that computers make their moves much faster these days. The process by which they choose their moves, however, is exactly what it was in the earlier days of programmed chess-playing: “picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities.”

This eliminating-options way of choosing moves is, as the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus has long argued, very different from how the human expert goes about decision-making in a game like chess. Our human capacity for what Dreyfus describes as the “detached, reasoned observation of one’s intuitive, practice-based behavior,” means that we simply “see” situations, recognizing similarities to other challenges, noting the weakness of an opponent, and the like. Chess-playing for humans, says Dreyfus, is much like driving a car. When we decide to change lanes or make a right-hand turn we do not typically sort through options. The practiced driver simply operates with a sense of what is appropriate in a specific context.

I took special note of the Kasparov piece because I included some thoughts on “thinking machines” in a lecture—“Confessions of an Evangelical Pietist”—that I gave at the Henry Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School  on January 20. The whole lecture will probably be published by the folks at the Henry Center, or they may just put it online. For now, here is the relevant section:

When I was engaged in doctoral studies in philosophy at the University of Chicago in the mid-1960s, one of the hot topics for those of us addressing issues in what was then called “the philosophy of mind” was the question of “minds and machines.” Could a computer ever come to a point in its operations that we would say that it was actually capable of thinking? Could such a computer so closely approximate human patterns of reasoning that we would have to decide that it had a mind?

Some philosophers had no problem with the idea of a thinking machine, since they has a rather low—a naturalistic/reductionistic—view of the human person. One rather flippant way in which some of them put it at the time was that human beings are simply machines that happen to be made of meat.

Others, however, were concerned to maintain the uniqueness of the human person by insisting on a qualitative difference—an unbridgeable metaphysical gap—between human minds and the bearers of so-called “artificial intelligence.” What both sides of the debate agreed upon, however, is that what fundamentally defines the human person is rationality—with the only important     question being whether the human kind of rational intelligence could be replicated in a computer.

I was always uneasy about that shared assumption, and the grounds of my uneasiness became clear to me when I got around to seeing Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: a Space Odyssey. In it, the crew members of a Jupiter space mission rely on the deliverances of a computer they have named Hal. There is no question that Hal, as depicted in the film, is highly intelligent.  But what is more important for me is the fact that Hal is devious. He rebels against the crew, and plots their demise.

Again, that is science fiction. But as such it provides an important insight. A computer would finally come close to being like us, not simply in being able to think like us, but in having the capacity to elicit trust and to betray that trust.  To put it in explicitly biblical terms, it was not so much Hal’s capacity for rational understanding that made him so human-like, but rather that he was the kind of entity to which one could legitimately preach, “Trust in the Lord in all thine heart, and lean not on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3: 5).

To cut to the chase: the heart, in the biblical sense, is the place where we form our fundamental trustings. It is where we set the direction of our lives. We are either devoting our whole being toward obedience to God, or we are rebels against God. We are either covenant-keepers or covenant-breakers.

The commentators are still letting Pat Robertson have it over his suggestion that somehow Haiti had the destruction coming because of that nation’s “pact with the Devil.” And Robertson deserves the criticism. Much of the negative commentary, however, doesn’t get at the real problem with Robertson’s theology of Satan. I’m sure the Devil is happy with what has been happening in that desperate country. What Robertson does not realize, however, is that Satan’s “pact” there is many-faceted. And this distorts his understanding of how God deals with Satan’s tactics.

It has been said that Haiti is 95% Catholic, 5% Protestant—and 100% voodoo. The percentages in that assessment may be a bit off, but there is no question that voodoo-ism is a major reality in Haiti’s culture. And, given my theology, I’m sure that this pleases Satan.

But the Devil also works in other ways as well.  Haiti has long been held in the grip of an oppressive political system that  has fostered one of the worst economic systems in the world. The poverty of Haiti is beyond comprehension to those of us who live with the comforts of a place like North America. All of that too must make Satan happy. In politics and economics too, we wrestle with principalities and powers.

Haiti’s desperate political-economic misery grieves the heart of Jesus. My wife and I heard that message in a poignant way when we visited Haiti in the early 1980s. We were traveling in a van with some Christian Reformed relief workers on the route from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haitien. It was a hot day, and the road was rough. At one point, driving through some hills, we pulled over to get some water from a spring at the side of the road.

It seemed like a remote spot, but suddenly a group of six children appeared. They spoke pleadingly to us in Creole, obviously asking for money. We had been told by our Christian Reformed hosts not to respond to those requests. Wherever we had gone in towns and cities,  we were surrounded by pleading faces and outstretched hands, and we had learned simply to shake our heads and move along.

That’s what we attempted there at the side of the road, but one young man—a boy about 11 or 12 years old—would not let us dismiss them so easily. He had detected that one of our hosts spoke Creole, and he stood tall in front of his group of friends and launched an oration, passionately gesturing angrily toward our group. Our host listened carefully, and then at a certain point smiled, reached into his pocket and gave the young man some money to distribute to his friends.

“What happened there?” I asked the Christian Reformed relief worker when we closed the doors of our van. “The kid preached a brief but eloquent sermon to me,” he said with a grin. “He said that his priest had been teaching them that Jesus cares about the poor, and that those who refuse to respond to the needs of the poor are not friends of Jesus, but are agents of the Devil.”

I wish Pat Robertson could hear that kind of sermon from a Haitian kid. It would give him a clear picture of how Satan is at work in Haiti and what it means to line up with the cause of Jesus. God is indeed upset about Haiti’s “pact with the Devil.” But sending earthquakes to make life even worse for kids like those we met at the side of the road is not God’s way of countering the work of his Enemy.

I watched the “Jurassic Park” movies. At least two of them—I’m pretty sure I did not see the third, and I probably won’t  go back to catch up.  If I weren’t a grandfather I would not have gotten into it at all.

In retrospect, though, I can see that what I originally endured simply out of a sense of intergenerational duty has helped me to think more clearly about the future of theological education. Let me explain.

In a conversation I partcipated in a while back, focusing on the relationship of theological schools to local churches, one young “emerging church” pastor offered the firmly expressed opinion that  “seminaries are quickly becoming dinosaurs.” What he clearly meant to say by this is that seminaries are becoming increasingly  irrelevant to the ministies of the churches, to the point that we will soon be extinct.

That really  does not fit what I learned from the  “Jurassic Park” films.  The dinosaurs did not increasingly become “irrelevant.” They did not start off strong and then gradually become weaker, until they finally just all died off. They were fearsome creatures until very end. Only a major cataclysm could kill them off. And if any of them happened to survive on some remote island somewhere, they are still strong and scary creatures—that’s the Jurassic Park message.

Ironically, then, Fuller Seminary is something like a dinosaur. Not that we are scary, but we are strong. We are not gradually weakening. If we are going to be done in, it will have to be because some cataclysmic outside force decides to target us.

That raises the question, of course, of what makes theological education strong. If seminaries were to weaken “internally,” to the point of approaching extinction, what would be causing that weakening? I think the answer is obvious: we would be cutting ourselves off from our vital connection to the church of Jesus Christ.

Alan Wolfe, the Boston College sociologist, once remarked to me that what he sees as Fuller’s unique character—and he said this as one who has spent time on our campus, but as a visitor from “outside” the Christian faith—is that we maintain both strong scholarship and at the same time have a lifeline to what he called “grassroots evangelicalism.” He went on to say that one of these is eventually going to have to give. We will either move in an exclusively scholarly direction, disconnected from the front lines, or we will dumb it all down in our efforts to stay in touch with the grass roots.

Either one of those moves would be a disaster. We would deserve to become extinct at that point. If there were a Jurassic Park for surviving seminaries in that scenario, no one would want to make a movie about it.

Although it is not exactly a Christmas hymn, the words (and tune) of “In Christ Alone” were going through my head often during this Advent season, especially the opening lines of the second verse:

In Christ alone, who took on flesh
Fullness of God in helpless babe.

I agree with N.T. Wright, who recently wrote that this is clearly one of the best—I think simply the best—of  the newer hymns. But I also agree with Wright’s proposed revision of one word in that second verse. Instead of saying that “The wrath of God was satisfied” on the Cross, it should say that God’s love was satisfied.

In the past I would have resisted that kind of suggestion. And I am still not prepared simply to give up on any notion of Christ’s suffering the divine wrath on our behalf as our substitute. But it was the discovery of a comment by St. Augustine that checked me theologically on this subject.  It wasn’t at that moment when “we were reconciled unto Him by the blood of His Son that [God] began to love us; but He did so before the foundation of the world…”

Significantly, Augustine says this in commenting on John 3:16—a fact that embarrasses me a bit. In all of my years of speaking about the atonement as if somehow God was angry with us until the Son suffered on the Cross,  I never explicitly made the connection to John 3:16, which I memorized almost about the time that I learned to talk: “For God so loved…that He gave His only begotten Son.” It was the love of the triune God that sent Jesus to the Manger and to the Cross.

With Tom Wright I cast my vote for a revision of that one word in an otherwise marvelous hymn!

I tried hard to read Dan Brown’s latest novel, The Lost Symbol.  I really tried. I had arranged to review it for Books & Culture—the pre-publicaton scuttlebutt was all about the Masonic Order, so I thought I could use the occasion to revisit some thoughts I have had in the past about Masonry. I bought the book the day it was released, and started reading, making it through to page 87 before giving up on it. Then I read a comment somewhere by a critic who said that she had quit reading it on page 100, so I went  back and read thirteen more pages, just to see why she had endured longer than I had. No clue. It really is a terrible book.

It’s too bad. John Wilson, Books & Culture’s wonderful editor, was quite understanding when I begged off on the book review assignment. But I was still disappointed, mainly because I lost my pretense for sneaking in those thoughts about Masonry. So I’ll simply express them directly here.

My Uncle Richard joined the Masons when he managed a Shell gas station in New Jersey. He had been told it would be good for business relations.  I was named after my Uncle Richard, and we were quite close. But I was disappointed  in him when he told me, somewhat apologetically, that he had joined the Masons. He was a good Dutch Calvinist—a member of the Reformed Church.  He admitted that there were some things that the Masons said about God and the world that were highly questionable. “But nobody ever really talks about that stuff,” he said.  “It’s more of a service club kind of thing.”

The main defense that my uncle gave for his joining, though,  was that he could “be a witness” in the Masons. Maybe he was. But they had the last opportunity for witness in his case—I sat through their ceremony when they conducted their ritual in the funeral home in front of his open casket. I found the whole thing painful to watch.

I did a little bit of a switcheroo on the witnessing front, though, a few years ago, when some charismatic-oriented students asked me to accompany them on a “prayer walk” on the streets surrounding our Fuller campus in Pasadena. I was a little nervous when they prayed in front of the local Asian-American museum that the Lord would protect our campus from the demonic associations of the Buddhist statuary there. I was less concerned when they rebuked “the spirits of lust” that they saw as hanging out in the large hotel further down the street.

When we got to the Masonic Temple, though, I decided to take the spiritual initiative. I immediately started praying aloud, and I told the Lord that I did not agree with much of what got practiced and taught in that building. I also told the Lord, however, that I wanted to thank him for the good works that were done by the members who gathered there. I explicitly mentioned Shriners’ hospitals for children with serious diseases, and I beseeched the Holy Spirit to work powerfully in that healing ministry.

My fellow prayer-walkers did not say anything about my prayer, but I was glad that I lifted it up. I meant everything I said: they teach bad stuff, but they also perform some good works. I have to admit that I was also thinking about my Uncle Richard  as I prayed. In my own way I was joining him in “being a witness” at a Masonic meeting place.

The “Rebirth Tour” we took last week in New Orleans was a moving experience. No description of the destruction that Katrina brought to the Ninth Ward can prepare one for actually seeing it up close. In our case, the experience was greatly enhanced by an extremely knowledgeable and articulate guide, Raymond Poret, whose commentary was a creative mix of anger over the mismanagement of the disaster, delightful humor, poignant anecdotes about growing up as an African-American in the city—and at least one piece of wise theology!

Mr. Poret signaled his interest in theological matters right at the beginning of the tour,  by describing himself as “a product of a Jesuit education.” That his Jesuit mentors trained him well came through with special clarity at the point when he stopped the bus on a street in his home neighborhood in the Seventh Ward, and pointed to a block-long grassy area. “To you folks that is just a large field,” he said over the speaker system; “but for me it is where the Mother House of the Sisters of Saint Joseph stood, until the hurricane destroyed it. The wonderful community of nuns who lived here has now been dispersed.”

Then he went on to make his theological point. In the wake of the disaster, he and  his family had spent some time in Texas. “It was the Bible Belt,” he noted, “and I’ve got tell to you about something disgusting that I heard there.” A local preacher had gotten some publicity, he said, for proclaiming that the destruction caused by Katrina was a judgment from the Lord on New Orleans because of the city’s many sins. “I get angry about that comment every time I pass this spot,” our guide said with obvious emotion. “The fact is that there was no damage done to the French Quarter—Larry Flint’s Hustler Club is still doing business as usual. But the Sisters of Saint Joseph lost their Mother House. What kind of divine judgment is that?”

A powerful point. That Texas preacher was off-base theologically.  Discerning the judgments of God in present day events is a risky business.  What we can do, of course, is point to the kinds of things that God will call people to account for in the Final Judgment. And one of the sins that will be taken up on that Day bears directly on speaking glibly about what God is up to here and now. It is a warning that comes directly from Jesus himself: “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter” (Matt. 12: 36).

We went to the main New Orleans post office today, and the signs in the lobby said that there is only one daily pickup, at 6:00 pm. I asked a woman who was also mailing something why only once a day. “Oh, that was right after Katrina,” she said. “They’re back now to every hour.”

Our next stop was a grocery store, where in one aisle we saw a large pile of vegetables we did not recognize, so we asked another shopper  about it. “That’s Mirliton,” he responded. “They didn’t know about it in Texas either, when I was there after Katrina. I cooked up a batch for folks there, and they loved it!”

At the checkout station in the same store, the woman ahead of us almost left an item behind. “Did you mean to leave that for me?” I asked kiddingly. She gave me a big grin: “You can have it,” she said. “After Katrina we all share!”

Phyllis and I were amazed at how “Katrina” comes up so frequently in very brief and ordinary exchanges. A few evenings ago we spent time with a small group of local Fuller alums. Katrina was much on their minds also as they discussed the challenges of their ministries. We were impressed by their creative struggles to be Christ’s servants to people for whom Katrina was a life-changing event. New Orleans needs our prayers. It also needs our theological attention.

The Vatican is investigating communities of nuns in America. Apparently the powers-that-be in Rome are convinced that many women in religious orders have gone too far with the reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council  in the 1960s. To conduct the investigation, Rome has appointed the head of one of the more tradiitional orders—a community of nuns who still wear the tradtional habit. There is a real possibility that this will result in an insistence that all nuns return to the practice of living in communities regulated by some of the rules of the pre-Vatican II  era.

You can read all about it in a lengthy—and for me, very compelling—critique of this initiative in the October 9, 2009 issue of Commonweal. It is an anonymous piece, authored by “Sister X,” and it has elicited much response, most of it sharing her sense of outrage that women in religious orders are being singled out for investigation.

A few weeks ago I attended a gathering of scholars where several nuns were present. The subject of this investigation came up frequently, and always with a sense of deep distress. One of the nuns at that meeting is a good friend, and we had a private chat on the subject. She is a wonderful person, a deeply devoted follower of Christ. “I guess the thing that hurts the most,” she said, “is the ‘Why us?’ and ‘Why now?’ issue. Here we have had this huge scandal of sexual abuse on the part of priests, with no real official action on Rome’s part. And all of a sudden they announce, ’We are worried about the nuns, and we’re going to investigate them.’ What in the world are they thinking?”

For what it is worth, I agree with my sister friend. I know her quite well, and in my mind she epitomizes the best of post-Vatican-II Catholicism. She’s a person who has a deep devotional life—in the past she has told me about spiritual retreats she has conducted where she experienced the presence of Christ in her life in powerful ways. She is worldly-wise and ecumenically minded, but with a theology that is solidly orthodox. She is an inspiration to me in many ways.

As an evangelical, I would certainly hate to see the kind of return to the pre-Vatican II past that is being threatened by this investigation. I have all of the standard Protestant criticisms of the Catholicism of earlier times; I have no sympathy for the perspective of those today who want to turn the clock back.

But I also worry about many of the views of folks on the theological left in present day Catholicism. In a recent letter to Commonweal, for example,  a well-known nun-theologian, commenting on the “Sister X “ article, insists that there can be no turning back from what she describes as “a profound conversion in understandings of the church, Christology, soteriology, freedom of conscience, relationships with the world, other Christian communions, and even non-Christian paths to salvation.”

That list bothers me—especially the last item. Most of the other items she cites, on the face of it, look fine, but my guess is that I would have some serious concerns if the writer would tell me what her “conversion” on these subjects meant theologically.

Still, I am with my nun-friend. The Vatican-ordered investigation is deeply distressing. It is hurting some devoted followers of Christ who do not deserve to be treated with suspicion. As one who observes all of this from a distance—but with great interest and concern—I do not want Catholicism to turn back the clock. Neither do I want a turn in the direction of liberal Protestantism. This means that a better option would be to engage in some serious new discussion about what an orthodox Catholicism should look like today. Many of us in the evangelical world would love to engage in some dialogue with “official” Catholicism on that subject. But not with a Vatican hierarchy that arbitrarily picks on Catholics whom we admire as humble servants of the cause of the Gospel.

The years 1638-1688 was not a happy period for Scottish Presbyterians, and that’s to put it mildly. The fact is that things got so bad that the last few decades of that period came to be known as “the Killing Years,” when many of John Knox’s followers were put to death, often en masse, because of their convictions.

To be sure,  theology got mixed in with other factors. The Calvinist “Covenanters” opposed attempts by both Catholics and Anglicans to marginalize their religious influence in Scotland, a situation that was also highly political—the weapons that killed the Calvinists were typically wielded by military units under orders from the British throne. And, of course, there were also strong egos at work on all sides. But for all of that, there is no denying that many “ordinary” believers were martyred simply because of their deep desire to be faithful to the message of salvation by sovereign grace alone.

Recently a group of Scottish Prebyterians from Lanarkshire and Ayshire commemorated those martyrdoms on the Dalzell Estate in Mothersell. They gathered at the 800 year old Covenanters’ Oak, a rural setting where one of the more famous of the illegal “conventicles” was held in the 17th century.  The Reverend Georgina Baxendale preached on that occasion, and she uttered some profound words, as reported by the local paper, the East Kilbride News. She observed that during the fifty year period of persecution, “some 18,000 people (a conservative estimate) were persecuted and perished for their belief in Jesus Christ.” She went on to note that the Church of Scotland’s membership has been declining by roughly that same number annually in the past decade or so. “What would our Covenanting forefathers think,” she asked,  “that what bullying and persecution could not achieve, apathy is achieving today?”

That’s an important question, and not just for Scottish Presbyterians. It is a spiritual challenge to all of the “mainline” denominations—many of whom have similar persecution narratives from their own pasts—who have been losing members by the droves in recent decades. During the Killing Times, one Covenanter theologian, James Guthrie, wrote a tract with the stern title, “The Causes of God’s Wrath Against Scotland.” Maybe it is a time for those of us who care about the spiritual and theological health of the traditional denominations to ask our own probing questions about the present day “causes of God’s wrath.”

This originally appeared in a posting at Duke Divinity’s “Faith and Leadership” site: http://faithandleadership.duke.edu/blog/10-28-2009/richard-j-mouw-advertising-the-gospel

I’m a “Mad Men” fan. I am a year behind, so I watch Netflix DVDs while on my exercise bike each morning. In a Season 2 episode the head of Sterling and Cooper’s television division gets in trouble for a poor ad placement. At a key point in an ABC Sunday Night Movie, a murderous Russian spy is described as an “agitator.” And that point they cut for a commercial break touting a Maytag washer as “the Amazing Agitator.”

I was reminded of a commercial that showed up during the airing, in the late 1970s, of Zeffarelli’s six-part series, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Just after Jesus was baptized by John in the river Jordan, they switched to a commercial for soap: a head-and-shoulders shot of a guy taking shower, with a voice-over promising that with this product “you can be really clean!”

I don’t know enough about the advertising business to determine whether “Mad Men” is a fair representation of the business — although I haven’t read anything from that part of the world accusing the show of caricature. I enjoy the show’s depictions of discussions about how to present a product. Indeed, I find them spiritually and theologically instructive.

In my early days of teaching, at Christian liberal arts college, I was asked to serve on a faculty task force that advised the admissions people about how to portray the school in ads that would reach high-schoolers. We spent hours studying and discussing the magazine ads of dozens of evangelical colleges, focusing on the question, “What is this school saying about itself?” I was surprised how often the basic message seemed to be that the school in question had pretty young women and handsome young men who smiled a lot at each other in social settings. We suggested a very different message: that our school had distinguished faculty. The strategy basically bombed. High school students do not choose a college on the basis of how many scholarly works the faculty produces.

What I learned from that experience was that advertising has to appeal to felt needs and desires. That does not mean that we simply run ads for colleges that appeal to the baser instincts. But there is a “cultural exegesis” that goes into framing advertisements. Many of the staff discussions on “Mad Men” are exercises in exegetical discernment.

To say that there is a legitimate parallel worth exploring between advertising and preaching, evangelism and the like is not automatically to cheapen our efforts to present the Gospel to the larger culture. We will soon enter a season in which we will once again sing about the birth of a baby in Bethlehem: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.” Not a bad stimulus for exegeting the hopes and fears of our cultural peers.