The Bible Is Enough
7 Takes on Scott McKnight, Research Tips, Culturalism, Email, another Birthday, and Mothering
Friday is Friyay. Let’s see what we’ve got in the surfeit of open tabs in my browser.
One
I’m almost done with Scott McKnight’s The Bible is Not Enough: Imagination and Making Peace* in the Modern World. I should be already done because it’s so short, but, I keep going back to the beginning, thinking that I must have missed something. The problem is that McKnight seems to be having an ongoing private conversation with someone else. I, the reader, am left in the dark, trying to creep through his prose piecing together his argument with the bits of crumb he lets fall to the page.
I am sort of curious about this other conversation, but I don’t have time to go digging around looking for it. One piece of it is a book called Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. This tome is listed in the chapter footnotes. McKnight refers, spuriously, to the term “humane war,” citing the entire book, as if, to understand what McKnight is talking about, I am going to have to google this other book, purchase it with my meager earnings, and then find the time to sit down and digest its contents. He does this repeatedly, citing whole works without quoting relevant sections. This feels like footnote bullying to me. I’m a busy person. I’d like to know what he’s talking about without having to do a ton of extra reading.
Which is to say, ironically, that The Bible is Not Enough is not enough for me to discover how the Bible is not enough. This is like Alice trying to work out how I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter is not actually not butter:
Two
Not to be obtuse, but, given how short this book is, and how little of whatever McKnight is thinking about is explained in a way that I could understand, I feel like the title is super click-baity. It could have been called something like My Thoughts On How Dumb War Is, or something like that, but I bet that wouldn’t have sold as well. My next book is going to be called Jesus and Justin Welby: How Sex, Money, and Lies Corrupted a Church and Fractured a Communion and I’m going to just cite masses of other people’s work in the footnotes without quoting any of it. You’re going to just have to trust me that I know what I’m talking about. If anyone would like to fund this project, comment below.
Three
Just kidding—I mean, I would like to write another book, but who knows what it will be. I wrote an entire draft of Nailed It Two: The Psalms last year but it was so bad I had to throw it away. I’m slowly picking away trying to do it again. And I have some long sections of our marriage stuff in a document. I’m just replete with free time to work on long projects. Discovering that I can just footnote people without engaging the substance of their content is bound to make it go so much faster.
Follow me for more writing and research tips.
Four
I found this cool blog looking for something else. It’s called Ask A Korean. It looks like he hasn’t posted in a while, but there’s lots of very readable content. I worked slowly (because of so many interruptions) through this post in which he talks about a term he invented— “culturalism” which he defines as
the unwarranted impulse to explain people's behavior with a "cultural difference", whether real or imagined. Because the culturalist impulse always attempts to explain more with culture than warranted, the "cultural difference" used in a cultural explanation is more often imagined than real. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, to a man with a culturalist impulse, every problem looks like a cultural problem.
Verily, I feel attacked. I love thinking about cultural differences and trying to understand why other people do what they do. My favorite is to make sweeping generalizations about American culture in particular. I’m not alone in this, though. McKnight beats me every time with lines like
The reason we are stuck in the ‘humane’ war and white Chrisitan nationalism is in part because those who claim most to follow Jesus lack a peaceful imagination that can shake systemic structures of violence and war to the ground.
And
The terms used to answer that question come from the Synoptic tradition, and for those who approach questions like the death penalty, Christian nationalism’s affirmation of violence, or the ‘humane’ war solution, what Jesus means by the presence of the kingdom offers to Christians a peaceful imagination that can be improvised in our day.
I’m pretty sure that “white Christian nationalism” in this case is a culturalist epithet. It doesn’t require anything more than merely naming it, because, obviously, you know what he means. If you happen to be white or a Christian or live in a nation, too bad. It’s the equivalent of asking someone, when you discover that they’re “from Africa,” if they have any food over there. That’s a thing that was literally said to me in the 90s. That and, “is that a big country?”
Five
Whenever I couldn’t bear The Bible is Not Enough this week I spent a few minutes recovering myself with Cal Newport’s A World Without Email: Reiminaging Work in an Age of Communication Overload. In explaining how bad things are and how we will solve them by throwing email into the dustbin of history he writes:
It also became clear that these changes can’t come too soon: whereas email overload emerged as a fashionable annoyance in the early 2000s, it has recently advanced into a much more serious problem, reaching a saturation point for many in which their actual productive output gets squeezed into the early morning, or evenings and weekends, while their workdays devolve into Sisyphean battles against their inboxes—a uniquely misery-inducing approach to getting things done.
If you know me in real life, you know that all I do is apologize for email failure. It’s the thing I do over and over, more than any of the actual content production you’ve all come to love. I’m excited that soon none of us will have to be chained to the shackles of our inboxes anymore. I have no idea how that’s going to work, but I expect Newport will tell me without me having to make guesses in the dark all by myself.
Six
As you probably all know, I am the mother of six children. The oldest is 21 and the youngest is 12. The fifth child is turning 14 today, so that’s sort of alarming. This celebration brings our busy birthday season to a close. I have three months of recovery before the youngest will turn 13. At that point, I expect I will crumple under the shock of having only teenagers and adults. Though, who am I kidding, the youngest, being taller than all her sisters does not give off the impression of little girl or even tween. They have all grown up faster than I could have ever imagined. Time, as they say, sure does fly. The days, as they say, sure are long but the years are short. My little girls, as they say, sure did grow up fast. Let’s see, what truisms and cliches can I assemble to cushion the blow of time and age?
I will say, though, that in all my child-rearing efforts, while it wasn’t a Scripture Alone kind of activity where I just opened my bible and did whatever it said, such a task is necessarily aided by cultural and societal inclinations and mores, in another sense the Bible was more than enough to meet the challenges of mothering so many children packed so close together. That’s the thing—when people say that the Bible is “enough” they don’t mean that there isn’t anything else, they mean that the wisdom, conviction, salvation, and healing of the Scriptures meted out by the Holy Spirit to the wounds and sins of the believer is more than adequate for salvation. You may have more than the Bible, but you certainly can’t have less. If you are a person facing some kind of impossible task, like raising a child or trying to live in a world rife with conflict, war, distress, disease, and trouble on every side, the Word never falls to the ground, especially when you trust it more than yourself and your own imagination.
Which is to say, I guess I’ll finish McKnight’s book. If I can have a fifth child turn fourteen I can probably do anything.
Seven
The guys over at Stand Firm took on Reformed Zoomer this week if you’d like to give it a listen. I will be later as I concoct an unctuous Meat Pie of my own recipe and invention.
I’m going to try my best to do a Reads The Comments post tomorrow. In the meantime, have a nice day!
*Or, as I typed it several times before I caught my error: “Imagination and Making Peach in the Modern World.” That sounds like a delicious book I would be willing to read.
Please keep writing, whatever that looks like and however it works. Your writing voice is gold!
I’m interested in contributing to the Justin Welby book project. 😃