Think Theology website

Matthew Syed's book Black Box Thinking is a fascinating exploration of why failure is your friend. In this passage he considers the common practice of brainstorming, whereby everyone throws out ideas and nobody is allowed to criticise them. Counterintuitively, the data suggests this hinders rather than enhances creativity:Without a problem, without a failure, without a flaw, without a frustration, innovation has nothing to latch on to. It loses its pivot. As [James] Dyson puts it: ‘Creativity should be thought of as a dialogue. You have to have a problem before you can have the game-changing riposte.’ Perhaps the most graphic way to glimpse the responsive nature of creativity is to consider an experiment by Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues. She took female undergraduates and randomly divided them into five-person teams. Each team was given the same task: to come up with ideas about how to reduce traffic congestion in the San Francisco Bay Area. These five-person teams were then assigned to one of three ways of working. The first group were given the instruction to brainstorm. This is one of the most influential creativity techniques in history, and it is based on the mystical conception of how creativity happens: through contemplation and the free flow of ideas. In brainstorming the entire approach is to remove obstacles. It is to minimise challenges. People are warned not to criticise each other, or point out the difficulties in each other’s suggestions. Blockages are bad. Negative feedback is a sin. As Alex Faickney Osborn, an advertising executive who wrote a series of bestselling books on brainstorming in the 1940s and 1950s, put it: ‘Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud.’ The second group were given no guidelines at all: they were allowed to come up with ideas in any way they thought best. But the third group were actively encouraged to point out the flaws in each other’s ideas. Their instructions read: ‘Most research and advice suggests that the best way to come up with good solutions is to come up with many solutions. Free-wheeling is welcome; don’t be afraid to say anything that comes to mind. However, in addition, most studies suggest that you should debate and even criticise each other’s ideas.’ The results were remarkable. The groups with the dissent and criticise guidelines generated 25 per cent more ideas than those who were brainstorming (or who had no instructions). Just as striking, when individuals were later asked to come up with more solutions for the traffic problem, those with the dissent guidelines generated twice as many new ideas as the brainstormers. Further studies have shown that those who dissent rather than brainstorm produce not just more ideas, but more productive and imaginative ideas. As Nemeth put it: ‘The basic finding is that the encouragement of debate – and even criticism if warranted – appears to stimulate more creative ideas. And cultures that permit and even encourage such expression of differing viewpoints may stimulate the most innovation.’ The reason is not difficult to identify. The problem with brainstorming is not its insistence on free-wheeling or quick association. Rather, it is that when these ideas are not checked by the feedback of criticism, they have nothing to respond to. Criticism surfaces problems. It brings difficulties to light. This forces us to think afresh. When our assumptions are violated we are nudged into a new relationship with reality. Removing failure from innovation is like removing oxygen from a fire ... Imagination is not fragile. It feeds off flaws, difficulties and problems. Insulating ourselves from failures – whether via brainstorming guidelines, the familiar cultural taboo on criticism or the influence of cognitive dissonance – is to rob one of our most valuable mental faculties of fuel … Failure and epiphany are inextricably linked.

Ideally, a good translation of the word authenteō in 1 Timothy 2:12 – “I do not permit a woman to teach or have/exercise/assume/take/usurp authority over a man” - would provide satisfying answers to four related questions. In order of importance:1. Contextually, does this translation make sense within the flow of Paul’s argument about men and women, Adam and Eve, learning, teaching and quietness? 2. Lexically, does it fit with the way authenteō is used in other Greek literature of the period? 3. Translationally, does it make sense of the ways that the early church fathers and subsequent translators rendered and understood authenteō in their own languages? 4. Etymologically, does it shed any light on the ways that subsequent words (like “authority” and “authenticity”) have derived from it? So here’s my suggestion: what about stepping away from “authority” language for a moment – which is where almost all of the debate, online and in print, is focused – and think in terms of “mastery” instead? That would leave us with this: “I do not permit a woman to teach or master a man; she must remain quiet.” Contextually it fits, but then most of the options do. Despite the lengthy online exchanges over whether the word is “positive” or “negative” (like here and here), in this context at least, Paul clearly thinks of it “negatively” enough to prohibit women from doing it, but not so negatively as to prohibit everyone from doing it. (That is why the recent NIV went for the more neutral “assume authority”, which could go either way.) “Mastery” could be good or bad, depending on the context. Lexically, it fits very well with the way authenteō is used elsewhere. (The first example below involves someone celebrating their “mastery”, and the third involves someone decrying it, which is why none of the “authority”-based translations can make sense of all three texts.) Try these on for size: I was surprised that there was no argument. And since I had mastered him, within the hour he agreed to secure for Calatytis the boatman at the same fare. (Letter from Tryphon to Asclepiades) If Saturn alone is ruler of the body and masters Mercury and the moon, if he has a dignified position with reference to the universe and angels, he makes his subjects lovers of the body. (Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos) Masters will master their servants savagely, and servants will assume an unruly demeanor towards their masters. (Hippolytus, On the End of the World) Translationally, it helps too. Plenty of writers have pointed to Jerome’s use of dominari to translate authenteō into Latin - which, if you are interested, was later changed by Erasmus to the stronger usurpare, hence the King James’s choice of “usurp authority.” “Mastery” language shows clearly how you get from authenteō to dominari, given that a dominus was a master or lord, and from there to the more negative connotations of English terms like “domineer” or “lord it over.” (When you see those terms in an English Bible today, as in Mark 10:42 and 1 Peter 5:3, they translate a quite different word, katakurieuō). The most surprising payoff may be the least important, namely the etymological one. How on earth, we might wonder, does the same Greek word give rise to the words “authority” and “authenticity,” which sound so very different? Again, think about mastery. Clearly, a “master” is an authority figure. But it is also the word we give to the “master copy,” the authentic and original version of something, the one from which other versions derive both their “authority” and their “authenticity.” No doubt there is a broader point to be made here about the way Western people (wrongly) see “authenticity” precisely as a rejection of “authority,” but that’s for another day. So that’s my translation suggestion for the day. Any takers?

I have always regarded (and defended) the BBC as impressively neutral. My general rule of thumb is that when you hear people complaining about the national broadcaster being biased in favour of something, you can usually tell more about the person complaining than you can about the BBC. But clearly that is not true in every case. This week's resignations in the wake of the Panorama affair have brought them under the spotlight again, and these comments from Matthew Syed's column in The Times (which I came across via the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore) are well worth considering:This is why I’d argue (perhaps optimistically) that this week offers a window of opportunity for the BBC. The courageous move would be to acknowledge Prescott’s findings, perhaps even to admit what is, I think, undeniable: that the corporation suffers from institutional bias. I mean, it is not as if it is alone in this. A survey last month by Electoral Calculus showed that 75 per cent of what it called “the establishment” voted for left-of-centre parties at the general election. The think tank More in Common found that many institutions are dominated by “progressive activists” who constitute just 13 per cent of the population. And it is worth briefly noting how we got here. Perhaps the original sin was the progressive march through our universities: since the 1960s the ratio of left-wing to right-wing academics has shifted from 3:1 to 8:1. This has not just tilted young, often impressionable minds in a decisively more liberal direction but had further consequences too. It is striking, for example, that graduates today migrate in huge numbers to metropolitan areas (nearly 40 per cent of Russell Group graduates with firsts and 2:1s are living in London within six months of leaving uni), where they join narrow friendship networks connected to the institutions at which they work, creating a double whammy of social convergence. This is why ensuring true diversity of views at an elite institution like the BBC is about far more than diversity of colour, class or gender. It is about appointing senior editors who (wait for it) are sympathetic to Reform UK; hiring many more who are super-bright but didn’t go to university; constantly encouraging new recruits to express their opinions rather than converge on the predominant ones; perhaps above all, recognising that impartiality is not a destination but an orientation requiring a disciplined awareness of one’s limitations and an insistence on transparency, method and the humility to constantly test assumptions against alternative ones. The BBC will instinctively feel defensive this week and may be tempted to argue that it has all the necessary policies in place. I’d humbly retort (as a friend) that this would be a terrible strategic error. The role of the BBC has never been more important and it is not too late to preserve it from those who wish to bring it down. But all executives should remember that while a liberal world-view predominates within the walls of the organisation, a majority of licence fee payers believe in the following heresies (ie, common sense): national borders matter; love of nation is admirable; biological males shouldn’t compete in women’s sport; people should be judged on merit, not colour; western history is broadly admirable, not shaming. Indeed, how about reading out the previous paragraph at the outset of every editorial meeting? It might help mitigate the otherwise irresistible tendency towards elite groupthink.

Tim Suffield thinks that the modern version of Christian Nationalism is coming to the UK, and I think he's right. Until recently it could be understood as an essentially American phenomenon, which British readers could dismiss as the sort of thing you would expect from people who own guns and oppose state healthcare. But that appears to be changing. I say that for all sorts of reasons, some of which are international in scope (the vibe shift online, Trump II, the collapse of the centre in many European countries, the combination of economic stagnation and global migration, the gender split whereby young women lean left and young men lean right), and some of which are more distinctly British (flags, marches, boats, hotels, the poll lead of Reform, and the response of the other parties to this new reality). Christian Nationalism: coming soon to a church near you.This, as Tim points out, is going to catch a lot of British pastors unawares. Most of us are not comfortable with political theology, let alone adept at it. We may occasionally address political issues - especially when they relate to the Ten Commandments (life, marriage, etc) - but we are mostly untrained in political thought and unused to political conflicts within our congregations. In a world where political discourse operates symbolically more than logically, and online more than in person, this may prove tricky. “When everything is symbolic, but we don’t share the same key to understanding the world, reading other people’s behaviour becomes difficult,” Tim explains. “When the keys we are given to the world through a variety of media that are themselves fractured and polarising, we are inclined to read those who are different to us in the worst possible light.” We are indeed. So one thing we need to get clear on is what we actually mean by the term “Christian Nationalism.” Tim argues that it could (and sometimes does) refer to any of at least fifteen different things, ranging from the self-evidently good to the totally unacceptable. Six of them, it seems to me, are biblical-theological in nature, differing over the extent to which we should expect to see God’s ways taught, lived out or even legislated for in the current age. They form a kind of spectrum, ranging from innocuous, kingdom-not-yet amillennialism to muscular, kingdom-now postmillennialism: 1) Christians who think that God’s word contains wisdom for running a nation 2) Christians who think that churches should be able to preach God’s wisdom for the nation to the nation 3) Those who think it’s appropriate to consider what the political theology of a Christian nation would look like, though they might expect this to be brought into being through conversion or revival 4) Those who want a “Christian nation” to be formed (presumably, whether its citizens have converted or not) 5) Those who want “Christendom” back 6) Theonomists, who think a nation’s laws should look like the Bible’s law code Another six are practical-political in nature, differing over the extent to which “nations” - cohesive, self-governing and usually ethnically related groups with shared history, that are larger than a tribe and smaller than an empire - are natural, biblical, beneficial and in need of defending from globalist mush. (The remaining three, as I read them, are essentially common misunderstandings of the term.) Again, these six form a spectrum, with patriots at one end and downright racists at the other: A) Those who are patriotic and love their nation and are Christians B) Nationalists, in the broad sense of ‘anti-empire,’ who are Christians C) Nationalists in the much tighter, protectionist sense, who are Christians D) Those who are democratic post-liberals (or ecclesiocentric ones) E) Those who are anti-democratic post-liberals F) People who think a Christian nation means a white nation of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ Needless to say, most people (though not all) who think of Christian Nationalism in terms of 1A will probably be favourable towards it. Most people (though not all) who think of it in terms of 6F will probably be hostile towards it. And those of us who do not make any of these distinctions, and use the “Christian Nationalist” label indiscriminately of G. K. Chesterton, Viktor Orban, Danny Kruger, apartheid South Africa, Charlie Kirk, T. S. Eliot, Vladimir Putin, C. S. Lewis, Queen Elizabeth II and the KKK, will find ourselves either baffled or enraged (or both) by what is coming. More to follow, I suspect.

Five years ago today England went into the second full covid lockdown. This was a truly significant event, the repercussions of which on work patterns, the economy, education and mental health are still reverberating. But this is an anniversary that seems to be passing entirely unremarked.Given the impacts of lockdown it is extraordinary that it has been so effectively erased from the national narrative. There are no headlines on the BBC website commemorating the date and analysing the consequences of the decision. There is endless comment and speculation about the measures Rachel Reeves may or may not introduce in the forthcoming budget, but barely a nod to how our current financial predicament is linked to lockdown. The amnesia is really quite weird. November the fifth has long been a date to remember. Sadly, now rather overtaken by the nonsense of Halloween, November fifth is a key date in our national history. Even if people are shaky on the details, Guy Fawkes and the attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament are part of our story. Stories matter. They locate us in space and time, giving a sense of identity and defining culture. (Which is why the flags have the significance they do.) The people of God have stories that help locate who we are, where we have come from, and what our mission is. If we are to know these things we need to know the stories. Amnesia about scripture and church history leaves us scrabbling to understand who we are and what our purpose is. In his excellent book on the role of the Holy Spirit in the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Philip Eveson highlights the significance ‘the doctor’ placed on knowing our story. For instance, the 1859 revival loomed large in Lloyd-Jones’ thinking and was seen by him as, Similar to the supernatural activity of God at the river Jordan, when Israel crossed over dry-shod into the land of Canaan. Telling future generations of what happened in Church History was like answering the question ‘What mean these stones?’, stones which God had commanded to be taken from the middle of Jordan and set up in Gilgal (Josh. 4:21-24). He taught his congregation the importance of monuments and reminders of the great things God has done and that Christians are called to consider historical facts, ‘significant and miraculous facts.’ We see another example of this intentional memory in the longest prayer in the Bible, that of Nehemiah 9. In this prayer the Levites bring to memory the ‘stones’ of God’s acting among them: His work as creator, the covenant with Abraham, the story of the Exodus, the conquest of the land, and God’s constant forgiving of His peoples frequent rebellion. It is these memorial stones that provide a sense of identity, the certainty of hope, and the scope of mission for God’s people. These stones are our story too. We need to know the Bible story. We need to know church history. We need memorial stones to help guide our steps into the future. We should not forget. Six days after Guy Fawkes Day comes Armistice Day: Lest we forget. The slogan stands as a warning – forgetfulness is not simply failing to remember; it is losing a part of who we are. Forgetting lockdown makes it harder to understand our current social woes and more likely we will repeat the mistakes of 2020. Forgetting Guy Fawkes separates us from our national identity and culture. Forgetting the memorial stones of scripture’s story and church history leaves us blowing in the wind of every kind of teaching and deceitful scheming. Remember, remember, the fifth of November.        

Does Nehemiah become self-righteous towards the end of the book that bears his name? When we are introduced to him in chapter 1, he is repenting thoroughly for his own sins as well as the sins of the nation: "we have sinned against you. Even I and my father's house have sinned. We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, and the rules that you commanded your servant Moses" (Neh 1:6-7). By chapter 13, however, he is frequently insisting on the goodness of his actions:“Remember me, O my God, concerning this, and do not wipe out my good deeds which I have done for the house of my God and for his service.” (13:14) “Remember this also in my favour, O my God, and spare me according to the greatness of your steadfast love.” (13:22) “Remember them, O my God, because they have desecrated the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites.” (13:29) “Remember me, O my God, for good.” (13:31) Does this indicate a spiritual decline in Nehemiah’s life? Has success gone to his head? Have the numerous confrontations with recalcitrant Israelites - some of which, famously, involving beating people and pulling out their hair (13:25) - fostered a degree of self-righteousness in this great leader? D. A. Carson wonders about this in God’s Word, Our Story: Learning From the Book of Nehemiah. Here are his reasons, and even if he turns out to be wrong, his punchline is well worth heeding: Why doesn’t this book end up with: “Remember, O Lord, so to work within us by your power according to your covenantal mercies, that we will again revere your name”? Why do we get this repeated refrain in this chapter: “Remember me, Lord, because I’ve done quite a lot of work. I’ve done a pretty good job. I mean, they failed, Remember them, too, for the bad things they’ve done. But remember me for the good things I’ve done”? In other words, this feels like a kind of spiritual declension, a slightly disappointing focus on self, with overtones of self-exoneration. That might be too harsh. Doubtless God will pronounce his own verdict on the last day; he will sort this one out ... There are some people who are used by God to bring along the church of the living God in some wonderfully powerful ways for a period of time, but who end up, late in life, destroying what they build. This may happen for a lot of reasons. Some people get cranky. They discover at 75 that they cannot do what they did at 45, and they resent the younger folk who are following them. Wittingly or otherwise, they begin to destroy what they built. It’s a wise challenge.

“The owl of Minerva flies at dusk.” That was Hegel’s way of saying that wisdom, especially when it comes to the interpretation of history, is only possible at the end of the day when everything has happened and we’ve had time to reflect on it.Coming to terms with the significance of world events is almost impossible in real time. We’re limited by our emotions, our hopes and fears, our awareness of what’s taking place, the outsize narrative-shaping influence of those in power, and our ignorance of the future consequences—and those limitations mean that it can take years for a considered judgment to be possible. That’s why people love to quote the former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who was asked in 1972 about the effects of the uprising in France four years earlier and replied, “Too early to say.” Quite right. Cold takes are better than hot takes. So it’s fascinating that the last 12 months have seen the release of two books that, in different ways, try to make sense of the social and cultural upheavals in Western democracies that peaked in the summer of 2020. (The terminology we use for these upheavals is highly contested: depending on who we are and whether we approve of them, we might talk about the rise of social justice, antiracism, identity politics, cancel culture, racial reckoning, intersectionality, the Great Awokening, or something else.) Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse is a historical and journalistic account of what happened, telling the story of 2008 to 2024 with a focus on the response to George Floyd’s death in 2020. Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite takes a sociological and theoretical approach, defending its provocative thesis using established categories from economics, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. There are obvious similarities between the two books. Both are serious-looking hardbacks from prestigious presses (Knopf and Princeton). Both are well-produced, carefully researched, and blurbed by the kinds of people you’d expect: David Brooks, Jonathan Haidt, Tyler Cowen, Yuval Levin. Both are brightly and engagingly written, with an audience of thoughtful nonspecialists in mind. Both criticize many of the developments they describe but are eager to understand rather than merely denounce them. Both, significantly, are written by men of color in their early 40s who are fiercely critical of the populist right and cannot be dismissed as part of a racial backlash. And both are excellent: thoughtful, readable, provocative, and illuminating. Summer of Our Discontent Summer of Our Discontent begins on May 25, 2020, with Floyd’s murder. The event is horribly familiar: a white policeman kneeling on the neck of a black man for nine and a half minutes until he asphyxiates, captured on camera and instantly broadcast for the world to see. But Williams frames it in an unfamiliar and important way. “George Floyd was a poor man. That was the most salient fact about his life” (xiv). “George Floyd was not simply or even necessarily killed on account of race . . . his death was very much a function of his being impoverished. He died over a counterfeit banknote the vast majority of black people would never come to possess” (77). Indeed, Williams argues, it can be helpful to distinguish between two Floyds: the complex real one and the simplified totemic one. “On the one hand, there was the son and the brother, certainly down on his luck that long weekend, unemployed and carrying methamphetamines and fentanyl in his system . . . dozing in a parked car, having passed a counterfeit banknote moments earlier” (4). “On the other hand, there is the immortalized George Floyd, whose death exists in footage, on wretched loop in our brains . . . the idea, simmering for years without reaching a rolling boil, of intransigent black pain and suffocating white supremacy” (5). Within minutes of his tragic death, the former was almost entirely swallowed by the latter. Within hours, it was being felt and understood in explicitly Christlike ways: Had Floyd not, in some viscerally apparent way, borne the awful weight of his society’s racial sins on his very own neck and shoulders? And had that weight—all of ours massed and taken together—not in turn crushed him? A man died for us on that squalid pavement, not asking why his father had forsaken him but, shatteringly, calling for his deceased mother. The lethargic executioner . . . had washed his hands of the matter—had buried them deep inside his pockets. (7) The following days and weeks saw thousands of protests and millions of people come together in what were probably the largest protests against racism in human history. This raises the obvious historical question: Why? Williams answers by telling the story of the West from 2008 onward, highlighting four key ingredients. The first was the global financial crash, which caused large numbers of white millennials—already progressive on sexual ethics and wrestling with colonial guilt about the 9/11 wars—to rethink the merits of global capitalism and consider social democratic or Marxist alternatives. The second was Barack Obama’s presidency, the start of which was hailed at the time in The New York Times as a “national catharsis” and even the end of the American Civil War, but which could never have fulfilled these colossal post-racial expectations, especially when confronted with regular video footage of young black men being killed by law enforcement. The third was the way in which Donald Trump’s first term radicalized both the right and the left, from the racist march on Charlottesville to the Jussie Smollett debacle, causing both sides to reject basic liberal norms and ushering in a state of exception. And the fourth ingredient was COVID-19, which—besides fueling fear, enforcing isolation, increasing inequality, and driving people online—created a new menu of issues for people to disagree about: lockdowns, masks, vaccines, lab leaks, and whether or not it was justified to violate social distancing restrictions in the name of antiracist protest. Few public figures emerge from Williams’s story with much credit. He’s unsparing in his criticism of Trump, as you might expect, for his general mendacity and ignorance in public office through to his specific suggestions of treating COVID-19 with light-based remedies or injecting disinfectants into people. But in many ways, he’s even more excoriating about the progressive left’s response to that summer’s events. “In the space of two weeks and without really thinking it through, we went from shaming people for being in the street to shaming them for not being in the street” (78), he explains. We’re still paying the price for that intellectual incoherence today. Williams devotes particular attention to the “cult of antiracism” that flourished in 2020—from the conceptual work of Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Nikole Hannah-Jones to the practical outcomes of institutional repentance in Princeton, policing cuts in Minneapolis, forced resignations at The New York Times, and performative antiracism in Portland—culminating in what CNN notoriously called the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” in Kenosha after the shooting of Jacob Blake in August. The book then brings us into the present day, with chapters on the worldwide exporting of American antiracism through social media, “cancel culture,” the spectacle of January 6, and the events in Israel and Gaza since October 2023. Williams has no difficulty in showing that our responses to each of them are colored, often profoundly and sometimes literally, by the summer of 2020. There’s a lot to like about Summer of Our Discontent. Williams is a good storyteller. His narrative blends familiar set-pieces with unfamiliar details; his prose is fluent and occasionally sparkling; and there’s enough humor to compensate for the relentless grimness of the central arc and the unpleasant memories it’ll evoke for most readers. The main piece that’s missing, however, is hope: hope that this uncomfortable story means something beyond a collective plague on all our houses, hope that things either have improved or are just about to, hope that we’ve learned anything at all from what happened. (In fairness, this tone is what we’d expect from a book with “discontent” in the title and “demise” in the subtitle.) Some readers will find it therapeutic to relive that summer in the hands of a confident narrator, safe in the knowledge that we’re all still here five years later. I certainly did. Others, though, will crave positivity: signs of change, a way through, a promising case study, an audacious proposal of some sort. They may need to look elsewhere. We Have Never Been Woke There’s no shortage of audacity in We Have Never Been Woke. In the face of a consensus that the Western world went through a Great Awokening in the 2010s and early 2020s, whether people celebrate or lament it, Musa al-Gharbi calmly but firmly replies, No, we didn’t. Some of us pretended to go through a process of awakening or sincerely believed we had. Others fiercely criticized or ridiculed the awakening and all who sailed in her. But in reality, the so-called Great Awokening never took place: The problem, in short, is not that symbolic capitalists are too woke, but that we’ve never been woke. . . . Symbolic capitalists regularly engage in behaviors that exploit, perpetuate, exacerbate, reinforce and mystify inequalities—often to the detriment of the very people we purport to champion. And our sincere commitment to social justice lends an unearned and unfortunate sense of morality to these endeavours. (20) To make this case, al-Gharbi introduces a few pieces of sociological jargon, the most important of which is Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of “symbolic capital.” We all have resources available to us (or not) on the basis of prestige, recognition, honor, and status within a social hierarchy. This symbolic capital may come from our position, credibility, experience, or trust within a particular organization; it may come from academic credentials, the books we’ve read, the degree we hold, the institution we studied at, or the expertise we claim; or it may be cultural in nature, deriving from our speech, clothing, manners, tastes, opinions, terminology, and so forth. This is vital to understand because “wokeness has become a key source of cultural capital among contemporary elites” (26). One of the main ways in which cultural elites signal their high status, and identify the status of others, is through the positions they hold on issues of race, sexuality, gender, disability, and identity, and the language they use to express them. Progressive views on issues like these signal high status in polite society, particularly if they’re expressed with the right terminology. But they usually make little practical difference to those they purport to represent and frequently function in self-serving and status-reinforcing ways. “As a result of these tendencies, symbolic capitalists and the institutions they dominate may seem much more woke than they actually are” (36). Examples of this disparity between appearance and reality abound. Sexually, people who claim to believe that “trans women are women” don’t act that way when it comes to their dating and marriage decisions. Economically, while the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 sounded like a grassroots protest against inequality, it was overwhelmingly driven by well-paid graduates in symbolic economy hubs who were generally globalization’s winners, not losers. Racially, those who gain the most from the recent surge in corporate and academic DEI programs aren’t poorer employees or students but the professionals who hold the “social justice sinecures” that teach them (107–110). Environmentally, the most progressive urban areas in America see less new housing, more aggressive policing, and greater inequality than elsewhere. Romantically, the people who most disparage “traditional families” are among the most likely to have come from such families themselves and to form such families of their own. Financially, affluent progressives give less of their income away to charity than rural, suburban, and religiously motivated conservatives, and their charitable giving is less likely to go to poorer communities. Everywhere you look, symbolic capitalists are claiming to speak for the poor and marginalized while actually reaping most of the benefits themselves. Consequently, “nonelites would be well advised to ignore what symbolic capitalists say and look at what we do instead” (170). Having said that, We Have Never Been Woke isn’t a tirade against progressivism. There’s plenty of posturing and hypocrisy to be exposed, not least in the chapter on totemic capitalism and competitive victimhood. But al-Gharbi doesn’t descend into partisan ranting, preferring to explain rather than to harangue. He’s clear, for example, that he’s a symbolic capitalist himself, and recognizes that the anti-woke are just as prone to flexing and symbolic posturing as the woke. He considers the similarities between the four periods of “awokening” in the last hundred years—in the 1920s, the 1960s, the 1980s, and the 2010s—and highlights several parallels, which demonstrate that the last decade or so isn’t as unprecedented as we think. Most importantly, he takes performative wokeness seriously as a sociological phenomenon and seeks to account for it. After introducing the phenomenon of “elite overproduction” (99–103), whereby we educate more graduates than we have jobs for and this causes resentment, he moves on to analyze the emergence of the “creative class” (134–46), and continues right through to the development of “luxury beliefs” (which signal status to the rich but ultimately hurt the poor) and “moral licensing” (in which we hold certain positions to insure us against accusations of racism), tying them together coherently (270–95). His tone is nuanced throughout, and his argument is supported by empirical research and quantitative data rather than anecdotes, undergirded by a hundred pages of references. Yet his argument is so clear that this doesn’t involve excessive throat-clearing or punch-pulling. Here’s an excellent example on critical race theory: Let’s be frank here: the ideas and frameworks associated with what opponents label “CRT” are demonstrably not the language of the disadvantaged and the dispossessed. These aren’t the discourses of the ghetto, the trailer park, the hollowed-out suburb, the postindustrial town, or the global slum. Instead, they’re ideas embraced primarily by highly educated and relatively well-off whites, reflecting an unholy mélange of the therapeutic language of psychology and medicine, the interventionism of journalists and activists, the tedious technicality of law and bureaucracy, and the pseudo-radical Gnosticism of the modern humanities. It is symbolic capitalist discourse, through and through. (274) This combination of serious research, lucid prose, and tight argumentation characterizes the whole book and makes it a joy to read. Implications Neither Williams nor al-Gharbi offers solutions as such. Their purpose is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But of the two, al-Gharbi comes closer to pointing a way forward, or offering what I referred to previously as hope. Some of this comes from the books’ respective endings. Where the afterword in Summer of Our Discontent considers the October 7 Hamas attacks and their aftermath, which creates the impression of a permanent doom-loop, the conclusion of We Have Never Been Woke suggests a number of avenues for further study that hint at future possibilities. Some of this difference derives from the time frame. Williams is telling a 15-year story, whereas al-Gharbi is describing a 100-year cycle of which the most recent iteration is just one example. That gives both writer and reader much-needed perspective on a turbulent decade. And some, it seems to me, comes from the implied anthropology. Summer of Our Discontent describes events that happened to us, on our behalf, in which we as readers were observers at best. We’re watching things unfold passively, with minimal agency of our own; our primary role in remembering is to shake our heads in disbelief at what happened in the corridors of power in Washington, Minneapolis, or The New York Times. The central figure of We Have Never Been Woke, by contrast, is us. We’re al-Gharbi’s symbolic capitalists, or we wouldn’t be reading a book like this—and a moment’s thought will reveal that we’re characterized by many of the same hypocrisies, status games, and moral inconsistencies. And because both writer and reader are in the same predicament, we can internalize and reflect on al-Gharbi’s implied challenge: Where have we become performative in our activism and self-serving in our moral logic? How, if at all, are we expressing our stated ideals in genuine relationships with those in need around us? Who are they? Are we being careful not to perform our acts of righteousness before men? Or have we received our reward in full? With five years of hindsight, there’s clearly a widespread sense that the social upheavals that peaked in 2020 went too far. The years since the pandemic have seen a significant pendulum swing in the opposite direction on issues ranging from woke capitalism and cancel culture to unconscious bias training and trans rights. The mood in politics and on social media has shifted substantially in many Western nations. But there’s another sense in which they didn’t go far enough. Many racial injustices were left largely unaddressed by the mass outpouring of performative wokeness. Many of the changes that did result were cosmetic and served only to enhance the position of more affluent, educated, and privileged groups within society. Many of our poorer and less advantaged citizens are still waiting for a genuine awakening to come. Many of our churches are just as segregated as they were in 2019. Neither of these books will solve those problems on its own. But both of them, and al-Gharbi’s in particular, have the capacity to challenge and inform us by reframing the narrative of that turbulent year—as long as we read them with a spirit of humility (“Is it I, Lord?”) rather than smugness (“I thank you, Lord, that I am not like that symbolic capitalist over there”). Vibes have shifted many times before. They will again. And thoughtful cold takes on the last one can help us wisely respond to the next one. This article originally appeared at The Gospel Coalition.

This is a wonderful illustration from Paige Brown. It is all very well knowing a lot and being able to do a lot, she says, but if the fear of God is not foundational then everything will be in the wrong place:I got up one Saturday morning when I was in the tenth grade. I sharpened my No. 2 pencils and walked down to the high school for the PSAT - the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, which determines National Merit Scholarships. Taking the first section, as the administrator repeatedly called out the time, I was right on schedule. When we had one minute left, I was answering the last question of that section, number 70. But as I looked down, ready to fill in my circle for that question, I saw that it was already filled in on my Scantron sheet. I started going back over the filled-in circles in a panic. Where had I skipped? As the administrator called ‘Time!’, I found out that I had skipped the answer line of the third question. So I grabbed my sharp pencils and walked home without even bothering to take the other two parts of the test ... We can be really smart. We can know lots of stuff. We can know all the right answers. But they will all be in the wrong place if the fear of God is not in the first place. It is foundational.

Danielle Treweek’s Single Ever After: A Biblical Vision for the Significance of Singleness is a really impressive piece of work. If you have read books on the subject before, you will recognise some of the emphases: the insistence on the good of singleness, the challenge of being single in the contemporary church, the practical considerations, the debunking of cultural assumptions, the objections to the obsession with being married, and the correction of misunderstandings about the “gift of singleness.” What makes this book stand out, however, is the engagement with Scripture. I’ve preached, taught and written on this subject a fair bit, but I kept finding good biblical arguments I hadn’t considered properly, new ways of saying old things, and exegetical insights that I had missed completely. Here are five passages that stood out to me: Married and single Christians have a different speciality focus. The married Christian specialises in pointing us towards the gloriously intimate relationship which the church will enjoy with Christ forever. The unmarried Christian specialises in pointing us towards the gloriously intimate relationships we will enjoy with one another within the church forever. We are complementary—rather than competing—co-specialists in eternity. (22) When we carefully analyse the original text of [Matthew 19:1-12] we arrive at an unexpected, but I think inevitable, conclusion. The self-made eunuch is not a metaphor for the disciple who chooses never to marry for the sake of the kingdom, but for the divorced disciple who chooses not to remarry because of their obedience to the kingdom. (82) In my early thirties, I twice signed up for online dating. Both times, I selected a dating platform that was geared towards Christians … However, both times, I only lasted a few weeks before I realised I needed to delete my profile and sign out. Why? Because I had found myself compulsively logging in to check if I had any new matches … Online dating made it much, much harder for me to see my singleness as anything other than something to escape from. (96) Yes, the Reformers rightly sought to correct corrupted institutional celibacy and rediscover marriage as a good part of this creation. But in trying to make more of “mundane” marriage and less of “heroic” celibacy, the Reformers ended up making far too much of sex. They overcorrected. And we have inherited that legacy. (123) In [1 Corinthians 7:9], Paul is not raising a theoretical situation that may or may not be relevant. No. He is specifically addressing certain individuals, namely unmarried Corinthian Christians who are actively committing sexual immorality … Paul is not saying that if an unmarried Christian doesn’t think they are cut out for long-term singleness, they are under a moral responsibility to get married. Rather, he is actively calling out unmarried Christians who are not currently exercising self-control … In its context, the verse is saying that it’s good to remain unmarried unless you are enjoying the “perks” of marriage without the actual being married part. It is better to choose marriage than to choose to remain tangled up in sexual sin. (145) It’s a great book.  

In Deuteronomy, as Moses addresses Israel on the eve of entering the Promised Land, he makes regular mention of God’s jealousy. This must be one of the least celebrated of God’s attributes. It is certainly one of the most misunderstood.In our culture, jealousy is almost always portrayed as a bad thing. “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy,” says Iago to Othello in Shakespeare’s play. “It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on.” Or think of the chorus of Mr. Brightside by The Killers, with its wails against “jealousy, turning saints into the sea, swimming through sick lullabies, choking on your alibis.” Many even use the word—wrongly, I think—to describe the seething resentment that rival siblings might feel over each other’s toys. In this context, proclaiming God’s jealousy can feel like an embarrassing reminder of the overweening pettiness of Bronze Age religion. A jealous God? How primitive! This awkwardness leaves noticeable gaps in our worship services and our private spiritual lives. When was the last time you sang a song praising God for being jealous? When did you last hear a sermon on the subject? When did you last mention it in prayer? Yet God’s jealousy is integral to the way Scripture describes him. It appears in the Ten Commandments: “For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God” (Ex. 20:5). It is revealed as part of God’s name: “Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (34:14). It is repeated several times in Deuteronomy, and it undergirds the theology of Ezekiel, Nahum, and Zechariah in particular. There is no getting away from it. Here is the problem. In modern English, most people do not distinguish between jealousy and envy. The two words sound identical. Yet in reality they are near opposites. Envy is a fierce desire for something that rightly belongs to someone else. In Scripture, we see it exposed as a disorder-sowing (James 3:16), bone-rotting (Prov. 14:30), Christ-killing (Matt. 27:18) work of the flesh. Jealousy, by contrast, is a fierce desire for something that rightly belongs to you. Envy is when you want to sleep with someone else’s husband or wife. Jealousy is when you don’t want anyone else to sleep with yours. When we grasp that, we can see why a perfectly faithful lover would feel jealous when jilted by a loved one. In fact, no other response would be fitting. If I did not feel jealous about someone else having an affair with my wife or taking my children from me, I would only be showing how little I loved them. The point is much sharper when we consider things from God’s perspective. Having taken the Israelites out of Egypt and carried them through the wilderness, how could he greet his people building idols and worshiping foreign gods with anything but fierce jealousy? That is how lovers react when they are betrayed—and the greater the love, the greater the betrayal and the greater the jealousy. This is personal for Moses in Deuteronomy 4. He has experienced the consequences of God’s jealousy for Israel: “The Lord was angry with me because of you, and he solemnly swore that I would not cross the Jordan. … I will die in this land” (vv. 21–22). But he is not bitter. Rather, he urges the people to learn from his experience. “Be careful not to forget the covenant of the Lord your God that he made with you; do not make for yourselves an idol” (v. 23), because “the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God” (v. 24). Happily, Moses’s sermon does not end there. Granted, it immediately mentions the possibility—later a reality—that Israel may provoke God’s jealousy by falling into idolatry after settling in the land (v. 25) and face destruction and exile as a result (vv. 26–27). But then comes hope. If, after all this has happened, Israel comes to its senses in the pigsty of exile and seeks the Lord, then “you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul” (v. 29). This is a prophecy, not a mere possibility (v. 30). Because, besides being a jealous God, “the Lord your God is a merciful God” (v. 31). His jealousy brings judgment, but his mercy brings restoration. His jealousy will take his people into exile, and his mercy will bring them back again. And ultimately, the consuming fire of God’s jealousy and the overflowing waters of his mercy will meet at the cross. This article originally appeared at Christianity Today