In 2014, I chose to inhabit the heart, mind, and world of one Christian thinker. I wanted to immerse myself in their history in God such that I could think, feel, desire, and do as they might. For me, that lover-thinker is the North African church father, Augustine of Hippo. Somehow my willing wife agreed to name our first-born son, Augustine (of Orlando). So as an Augustinian, I have some skin in the game. Only after we arrived in the labor and delivery room did we realize that our son Augustine would be born on November 13—the very day Augustine of Hippo was born, 1,665 years earlier.

Augustine’s ability to reflect deeply on both God and humanity is unparalleled. Historian Robert Louis Wilken said of Augustine, “It is not hyperbolic to say that during his lifetime he was the most intelligent man in the Mediterranean world…Augustine surpasses measurement. More than any other Christian author in the early centuries, he is a world.”1 Few people have influenced the way the Church thinks and talks about God more than Augustine. And he was a lover of the Psalms…

“If the psalm prays, you pray; if it laments, you lament; if it exults, you rejoice; if it hopes, you hope; if it fears, you fear. Everything written here is a mirror for us.”

Confessions

The very first sentence of Augustine’s Confessions is a quotation from the Psalms, Augustine records his sheer delight when he first began using the Psalms for prayer:

“My God, how I cried to you when I read the Psalms of David, songs of faith, utterances of devotion which allow no pride of spirit to enter in! I was but a beginner in authentic love of you...How I cried out to you in those Psalms, and how they kindled my love for you! I was fired by an enthusiasm to recite them, were it possible, to the entire world in protest against the pride of the human race...As I read the fourth Psalm during that period of contemplation...”2

On my first reading of the Confessions, I was struck by how Augustine had essentially woven a tapestry of psalmic biography. Page after page is laced with allusions and quotations from the Psalms. Journalist Joshua Foer remarked, “Augustine was said to be so steeped in the Psalms that they, as much as Latin itself, comprised the principle language in which he wrote.”3 In other words, when you read Augustine, it’s as though he writes in two languages: Latin and Psalms.

Expositions on the Psalms

Augustine’s longest work was his running commentary on the Psalms. He was ordained in 391 and chose to preach on the Psalms for his first sermon series in 392. Augustine continued reflecting on and drawing from the Psalms throughout his life and ministry, and did not finish his commentary until 418. That’s a twenty-six-year project on the Psalms which ended up being the largest work written in Christian antiquity. “As the psalms are a microcosm of the Old Testament, so the Expositions of the Psalms can be seen as a microcosm of Augustinian thought.”4 While his expositions are not the work of modern exegesis, they are profoundly pastoral, richly devotional, and overwhelmingly Christ-centered.

The Whole Christ

Augustine’s doctrine of the totus Christus–the whole Christ–was integral to his interpretation of the Psalms. Since Jesus said to the persecutor-turned-Apostle, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4), then surely he experienced a solidarity with the suffering of his people. In other words, the whole Christ is that the Head suffers with his body, the Church. Therefore, when we pray psalms of lament, confession, and confusion, it is Christ who prays with us and in us to the Father.

“For the voice is that sweet voice, so well known to the ears of the Church, the voice of our Lord Jesus Christ, the voice of the church toiling, sojourning upon earth” (Exp. on Psalm 58).

“(Christ’s) voice in the Psalms–a voice singing happily, a voice groaning, a voice rejoicing in hope, sighing in its present state–we should know this voice thoroughly, feel it intimately, make it our own.“ (Exp. on Psalm 42:1).

When we see, hear, and feel Christ in the Psalms, we come into agreement with Augustine’s experience of reading the psalms, and ask: “What else can you do but jubilate?”

Death Bed Meditation

Augustine’s friend and biographer Possidius wrote,

“As Augustine lay dying, he ordered those psalms of David which are especially penitential to be copied out (e.g. Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143) and when he was very weak, he used to lie in bed facing the wall where the sheets of paper were put up, gazing at them and reading, and copiously and continually weeping as he read.”

Having found comfort in the Psalms all his life, Augustine knew that in his final moments, much like his Savior (Mark 15.34; Luke 23.46), he needed these words to sustain him. While the penitential psalms bring us into the depths of our need for mercy, they also remind us that Christ is deeper still. With the comfort and confidence that can only be found in meditating on the Psalms, Augustine entered into the rest of his God.

Augustine died on August 28th, 430 AD. Today, we celebrate a man who dove deeply into the Psalms and shared his pearls of great price with the Church he loved.

Happy Augustine of Hippo Day!

Selah.

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Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 20 August 1153) was the last of the church fathers.1 Martin Luther considered him “the most pious of all monks” and preferred “him to all the others.”2

At one time Bernard became very sick, so that it seemed to him that he was about to die. He had a vision of standing before the judgment seat of God. Satan accused him of all his sins. When the accusations were finished, Bernard didn’t defend himself or point to his own obedience.

“I confess that I am not worthy to have the kingdom of heaven by my own merits. But our Lord holds me by a double right: as His inheritance and by the merits of His Passion. The first He keeps for Himself, and the second He gives to me. By that gift I ought not to be put to shame, for it belongs to me by right.”3

What is this double right?

• By nature — He is the eternal Son and heir of all things (Hebrews 1:2).

• By merit — Through His obedient life, death, and resurrection, He earned the inheritance as the Second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:28).

To Jesus’s double right, we respond by giving him ourselves twice over:

“In the first creation He gave me myself; but in His new creation He gave me Himself, and by that gift restored to me the self that I had lost. Created first and then restored, I owe Him myself twice over in return for myself.”4

We belong to God twice over:

1. Creation: God made me.

2. Restoration: Christ remade me.

Jan Veenhof’s Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck will reward anyone who reads it.

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One of my annual re-reads is The Heart of a Servant Leader, a collection of letters from Jack Miller. If you don’t know, Jack Miller was Tim Keller’s pastor from 1984 to 1989 at New Life Presbyterian Church. Miller contributed to Keller’s formation, especially his emphasis on gospel-centrality. John Piper said, “Books don’t change people, paragraphs do — sometimes sentences.” Here is one of my favorite paragraphs from one of my favorite books:

Theological Decentering

Repentance is mind-change that leads to form-change (i.e., transformation). This comes from de-centering Self and re-centering God and what God says.

Praise is telling who God is and what God has done. In its purest form, it is not self-conscious, but a form of self-abandon (2 Samuel 6:14).

M. Scott Peck said, “Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” Christianity teaches that Reality (with a capital R) is the Trinity and the Kingdom. Then decentering my Self and recentering God’s Self is the source of sanity–a return to ultimate reality.

Psychological Decentering

Psychologically, decentering represents a metacognitive capacity thought to reflect three interrelated processes:1

1. meta-awareness

2. disidentification from internal experience

3. reduced reactivity to thought content

To “decenter” is to adopt a self-distanced, nonjudgmental perspective on conscious experiences (e.g., thoughts, memories, feelings). Decentering is the umbrella term under which cognitive defusion and self-as-context take place. It is the ability to step back and get perspective on all that is within us, what the Psalms call the soul. We see this psychological decentering in Psalm 42.11:

In Psalm 42, psychological decentering–the ability to step back, observe the soul, and comment on it–is a prerequisite to the theological decentering of repentance and praise.

In Luke 8:11–15, Jesus tells a parable about four soils. The seed is the Word of God. The soils are the hearts of people. The same seed goes out everywhere. But the condition of the heart makes all the difference. And the invitation of the parable is simple:

Tend to the garden of your heart.

One of the mistakes we make with this parable is assuming the four soils are four permanent categories of people. But all disciples can drift into any of the four soils. So the question is: “What is happening in the garden of my heart?”

The Trampled Heart

“A sower went out to sow his seed. And as he sowed, some fell along the path and was trampled underfoot, and the birds of the air devoured it” (Luke 8.5)

“The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved” (Luke 8.12).

The path becomes hard through the trampling of feet. The trampled heart is a hard heart. What causes a hard heart? Many things. But often your heart feels trampled by someone in your life, or maybe even by God. That can make you angry.

Anger can be a right response to reality. But don’t let the sun go down on your anger, even righteous anger. Because anger left in your heart ages like milk left in your car. Harbored anger turns into bitterness, which hardens your heart to God but invites demonic interference, which results in unbelief.

So what do you do with your trampled heart? Two things: grieve and forgive.

Some superficially forgive to avoid entering into the depths of pain. Others wallow in what was done to them but never release the debt through forgiveness.

• Tears of grief will water the hard soil of your heart.

• Forgiveness will till up your hard heart like a sharp tool in soil.

Grieve and forgive are like two pedals of a bicycle metabolizing the pain of a trampled heart.

The Shallow Heart

“And some fell on the rock, and as it grew up, it withered away, because it had no moisture” (Luke 8.6).

“And the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe for a while, and in time of testing fall away” (Luke 8.13).

The rocky ground lacks a deep life with Christ that enables perseverance. What makes your faith shallow and superficial? Rocks are whatever hinders a hidden life with God. And the frightening thing about rocks is that they are often hidden beneath the surface until times of testing reveal them.

Testing is the great revealer: Do you have roots or not?

God, in his severe mercy, will allow “times of testing” into your life. Because drought-stressed trees have deeper root systems. Now is the time to deal with hidden compromise and put roots deep into Christ—before testing comes.

The Neglected Heart

“And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up with it and choked it” (Luke 8.7).

“And as for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature” (Luke 8.14).

Jesus says the thorns are: “the cares and riches and pleasures of life.”

• Cares = what makes life hard.

• Pleasures = what helps you escape.

Riches promise to cut your cares and give plenty of pleasures.

Money lies to you. The deceitfulness of riches whispers:

• “Money gives me autonomy.”

• “Money gives me status.”

• “Once I have enough money, life will finally feel secure.”

Cares, riches, and pleasures are not bad in themselves. But Jesus says the thorns “choke” the soul.

This may be the most recognizable soil for modern people. We distract ourselves to death. Not all spiritual decline happens through rebellion. Much of it happens through overcrowding. The tragedy is not always that we choose bad things. Sometimes we simply allow good things to choke what matters most. Jesus is inviting us to slow down, simplify our lives around deep-rooted abiding in Him, and breathe again.

The Fruitful Heart

“And some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold” (Luke 8.8).

“As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience” (Luke 8.15).

Fruit is anything God works in you or through you that lasts forever. The fruitful heart is not a perfect heart. It is a receptive heart. A receptive heart has been cultivated by dealing with the birds, the rocks, and the thorns. There is nothing more important than the receptivity of your heart before God. Jesus says the fruitful heart “holds fast” to the Word and “bears fruit with patience.” Fruitfulness is not immediate. It is cultivated.

Who is the Sower?

Almost all commentators agree: the Sower is Jesus. Jesus is still sowing the seed of the kingdom. But here is the mystery at the center of Christianity: The Sower was sown.

Jesus was buried like a seed and rose bearing resurrection life. Christianity is not primarily about what you do, but what has been done for you. You cannot tend to the garden of your heart unless God gives you a new heart.

“And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone…and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26).

If Jesus’s punctured heart gave you a new heart, He can make trampled soil tender, shallow soil deep, and neglected soil fruitful again.

Resources:

• This article is a summary of this sermon on Luke 8:4-15.

• Secrets of a Fruitful Heart by Bob Sorge

• The Scandal of the Kingdom: How the Parables of Jesus Revolutionize Life with God by Dallas Willard

I read A Wrinkle in Time in Middle School. Weirdly, I can’t remember much of the book, but I can remember the classroom I was in while reading it. Since the memory hits record when emotion is alive, I must have been moved by this book.

As I prepare to enter the dissertation phase of my PhD program, I am reallocating time, energy, attention, motivation, and spirit toward writing. I am exploring the writing lives of various authors—old and new. I often draw inspiration from interviews, books, my favorite writing podcast, or quotes about the writing life. Here’s one from Madeleine L’Engle:

I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write.1

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Three Simple Principles for the Writing Life

1. Journal

2. Read

3. Write

The Sermon on the Mount invites, calls, summons, and challenges us to a life of radical discipleship to Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’s manifesto to cultivate kingdom-culture in his self-replicating communities of disciples. Jesus presents a whole new way to be human within the in-breaking reality of the Kingdom of God.

The majesty of Jesus’s magnum opus is broadly recognized. The Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan remarked, “The Sermon on the Mount remains the greatest moral document of all time.” Mahatma Gandhi said, “The Sermon on the Mount left a deep impression on my mind when I read it.” Gandhi read from the Sermon nearly every morning and evening for over forty years. He said, “It is that Sermon which has endeared Jesus to me.” His meditation on the Sermon enabled him to develop his philosophy of non-violence through which he helped liberate both South Africa and India from systemic violence. Even evolutionary biologist and impassioned atheist Richard Dawkins wrote, “Jesus was surely one of the great ethical innovators of history. The Sermon on the Mount is way ahead of its time.” It seems as if everyone can see the beauty and brilliance of the Sermon, except the Church.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were two great Christian leaders of the 20th century who believed the Sermon on the Mount was essential for the Church moving forward. Dr. King said, “It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than a doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action. It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love.” The Sermon on the Mount is not merely about pious religious practice but about life under a new king who shapes a community that changes the world. Staring at the rise of the Third Reich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter to his brother in 1935: “The renewal of the Church will come from a new type of monasticism which only has in common with the old an uncompromising allegiance to the Sermon on the Mount. It is high time people banded together to do this.”

As in every generation, the Sermon on the Mount is perhaps the main conversation Jesus wants to have with his disciples today. The Sermon on the Mount is not merely an ethical agenda or a moral document. It is the constitution of the Kingdom of Heaven—the realm where God is already king. It is a call to live under this rule here and now. As scholar N.T. Wright said, the Sermon on the Mount is “a summons to live in the present in the way that will make sense in God’s promised future; because that future has arrived in the present in Jesus of Nazareth.” Our meditation, memorization, participation, and obedience to the Sermon on the Mount is the part we play in our prayers for the Kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.

Over the course of three chapters (Matthew 5–7), Jesus calls his disciples to a new vision of the good life (called the Beatitudes), a new way to relate to culture (salt and light), and a new (yet old) righteousness that is a reality in the heart and rooted in Scripture. He addresses anger and reconciliation, lust and chastity, divorce and integrity, non-retaliation and enemy love as the mark of maturity. He instructs on giving, praying, and fasting. He deals with consumerism and greed as well as anxieties and priorities. He teaches on contempt and coercion, prayer and proactive goodness. He ends with warnings about the influences in our lives—and a call to radical commitment to actually doing what he teaches.

If we’ve truly heard the Sermon on the Mount, listening beyond the familiarity that breeds contempt, in the end, we will stand with the crowds and be astonished at Jesus’s teaching (Matthew 7:28).

If you want to listen closely and consider Jesus’s call, I’ve created a 28-week study guide for intentional, relational discipleship groups available to paid subscribers below.

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A Knowledge Garden is like your own personal Wikipedia. Some call it a Second Brain or Zettelkasten within the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) field. You sow thoughts and ideas, quotes and questions like seeds. As they grow up, they cross-pollinate with other ideas. The more you link your thinking, the more fruitful your garden.

I’ve been tilling my Knowledge Garden for over a decade. I started with Evernote, then Apple Notes, and eventually put my roots down in Obsidian. Here are some links to get you started.

Philosophy

• You and your mind garden by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

• Building a Second Brain: The Definitive Introductory Guide by Tiago Forte

Tools

• Obsidian is my simple, future-proof, garden bed.

  • Obsidian for Beginners by Nick Milo will get you going (below).

• Readwise collects seeds from my content intake–books, articles, podcasts, etc.

• EReaderIQ tracks the prices of specific Kindle books/authors.

• Snipd allows me to capture moments in podcasts and sows them in Obsidian.

Go Deeper

• Andy Matuschak on Note-writing systems and Evergreen notes

• How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking by Sönke Ahrens

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The uber-fascinating book, Moonwalking with Einstein, quotes Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory:

“My philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about ten years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed.”

This reminds me of Paul and Silas singing psalms in prison (Acts 16:25). I want to be the kind of person that, whether confined in prison or in the back seat of a compact car on a long road trip, can endlessly muse in my memory. I want to be like Mary, who “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19).

How I Learn the Psalms by Heart

First, I want to lay some ground rules that I’ve found to be important, specifically for learning the book of Psalms by heart:

• Memorize the psalm by prayer, for prayer. Memorize the psalm by meditation, for meditation. Don’t get bogged down in the rote-ness of the memorization process. This requires a key mindset shift. Meditation is the means. Prayer is the process. As you’re rehearsing the words of the psalm for the dozenth time, let them roll through your lips as prayer. The process is the prize because prayer is the process.

• Memorize the entire psalm (don’t skip the ugly stuff). For instance, don’t just memorize the lyrical goodness of Psalm 139:1–18 but stop before the gut-wrenching wrath of vv. 19–22. Eugene Peterson calls these “psalmectomies.” The psalm was written as a whole and should be remembered and revered as a whole. I think this Jeffersonian or Marcionite tactic (choose your heretic) has resulted in gagging the people of God during times of crisis. Where do you find words after 911? How do you sing after another race-based shooting? What about a miscarriage or numbing depression? The Psalms give us words.

• Memorize different psalms for different seasons. You may not feel like it now, but there will come a time when you’re boiling mad, and you may just need an imprecatory psalm (Just be sure you know how to use that thing). Or when you’re walking through the dark night of the soul, you may need a lament psalm to fall back on (Psalms 13 and 77). Don’t just memorize the trust psalms (Psalms 23 and 27), as wonderful as they are. Store away a psalm for every extremity of human experience because one day you, or someone you love, will be there.

My Method

1. I print out the entire psalm on a slip of paper that I can mark up and keep in my pocket.

2. I read the psalm aloud 20–30 times with gusto and verve. I usually read it aloud 3–5 times per day, depending on my deadline.

3. I mark the text with insights and inquiries, connections between ideas, and repetition of words or themes. I jot some thoughts on the back of the paper as I meditate on the text.

4. Once I’ve read it aloud about 10 times, I read my first commentary (usually Kidner). This is a huge aid to memorization because it draws my attention to things that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. It also helps me see the structure of the psalm.

5. I use the Bible Memory app to make sure I have it word for word and for regular, repeated review. I review the psalm daily until it is thoroughly impressed into my memory, but I aim to review every psalm at least once every month.

6. I also use the Dwell Scripture Listening App by putting the Psalm on repeat while I go about my daily life.

This method is tried and true…for me. It may not work for you. Many people like to learn the first verse and work through the whole psalm verse by verse. This is really helpful, but I don’t like how atomizing it is. The psalm was meant to be read, prayed, and memorized as a whole. So I like to have it wash over my mind and heart 20–30 times as a whole.

Press On

If you get bogged down or haven’t even started yet because you have a “bad memory”. Just remember one, simple, little, hexasyllabic word: neuroplasticity. Okay, so it’s not simple or little, but it is good news. Neuroplasticity is a term that means your brain works more like a muscle than a hard drive. In other words, the more you use it (say by memorizing all 150 psalms!), the better you’ll be at memorizing. You will not reach max capacity at 256 gigs. Your mind and memory will grow stronger in capacity and retention as you memorize. (Read “Moonwalking With Einstein” if you want some stories about the astounding capacity of the human memory).

Don’t we all want guidance in our lives? Don’t we all long to be consoled by knowing that, despite the difficulties, we are on the right path? Don’t we all want to derive wisdom from our solitude? Hear this encouragement from the Proverbs on how God’s words stored in your heart and mind will benefit you for the rest of your life:

Bind them on your heart always;
tie them around your neck.
When you walk, they will lead you;
when you lie down, they will watch over you;
and when you awake, they will talk with you.

Selah.

• Listen: Memorizing the Psalms by Rev. Benjamin Kandt

• Read: Why Memorize the Psalms

• Read: 150 by 50: Memorizing All 150 Psalms Before I’m 50 Years Old

Originally published on Jan 8, 2018 at PrayPsalms.org.

Our imminent AI future is a current topic of debate and concern. Ross Douthat interviewed Daniel Kokotajlo on his prediction of “AI 2027.” Kokotajlo, a former researcher in the governance division of OpenAI from 2022 to 2024, believes that AI poses an existential threat to humanity in the coming years if we do not do something now. At about minute 45, the most awkward moment of the interview occurs, when Douthat ponders the necessity for researchers to consider consciousness in their development of AI. The exchange goes like this:

Douthat: “Where does consciousness fit into this?”

Kokotajlo: “So this is a question for philosophers, not AI researchers. But I happen to be trained as a philosopher.”

Douthat interrupts: “Well, no. It is a question for both. Right?”

Kokotajlo irritably looks to the corner of the room.

Douthat continues: “Since the AI researchers are the ones building the agents, they probably should have some thoughts on whether it matters or not whether the agents are self-aware.”

Kokotajlo pauses for a long time before shrugging and saying, “Sure,” clearly still annoyed.

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Subtraction Stories

What happened? There was a momentary clash of worldviews. Douthat pressed against the view that science and technology, specifically AI research, are value-neutral. The irony is that Douthat introduces Kokotajlo as the “herald of the apocalypse” because he argues that AI researchers are likely to bring about the total annihilation of the human race. This is a similar point made by Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”1 How do researchers press forward without feeling some moral responsibility to ask questions about the ethics of AI?

In secularism’s subtraction story, science exists in a values vacuum, where all the religious beliefs and superstitions about the world have been extracted, leaving the STEM fields to work with what’s left over: the real stuff. Charles Taylor says that modern, secular culture explains itself “by human beings having…liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.”2 Take human thought, subtract a transcendent reference point for knowledge, and you’re left with liberation. Or so we think. In How (Not) to be Secular, James K. A. Smith explains that subtraction stories are “accounts that explain ‘the secular’ as merely the subtraction of religious belief, as if the secular is what’s left over after we subtract superstition.”3 Despite our disenchanted imaginations, it doesn’t have to be this way. We could believe, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks taught, that “science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”4 Far from enemies, good science and good religion can be friends. And we need friends, especially when tech researchers are making doomsday predictions.

Falling into the Trap

Around minute 55, Douthat steps into the very minefield he had just defused.

Douthat asks: “What do you think is the purpose of humanity in that kind of world?”

Kokotajlo pauses again, this time in contemplation: “It’s a tough question.” Then he offers some thoughts off the top of his head about the inherent worth of wisdom and virtue “because those things are good in themselves.”

Then Kokotajlo turns the question on Douthat, “I don’t know. What would you say the purpose of humanity is now?”

Douthat replies, “Well, I have a religious answer to that question, but we can save that for a future conversation.”

The subtext is that because it’s religious, it doesn’t belong in this interview sponsored by the New York Times. Is religion relevant to this conversation, or not? Secularism has enlightened us to believe that religion and its values do not belong in the public square. Douthat, who had the insight earlier to press Kokotajlo on his world-ending secularism, now misses his own complicity in it. Douthat is intelligent and articulate. He could have given a brief, but brilliant three-sentence answer about the purpose of humanity in the shadow of AI. Something much better than this:

“You’re right, wisdom and virtue are good in themselves, but only because they have a transcendent reference point. The scientific quest began as an exploration to dis-cover God’s wisdom latent in creation. As humans cultivate virtue, they fulfill their purpose to reflect God’s good character in the world.”

Both Douthat and Kokotajlo comment on how some in the tech world believe that the continuation of humanity is not necessarily a worthy goal, and may simply be a form of “speciesism.” Of course, because we have no hope for humanity when we are “without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). So what if AI super-intelligences create an army of robots who exterminate the human race and then launch into space to colonize other planets? Well, we had a good run.

The Gospel as Public Truth

If Jesus was crucified and risen in private, then Christianity might be merely a religion of heart and home. But if Jesus was crucified and raised in public, then the gospel is public truth. The powers-that-be should have considered this before making “Jesus is Lord” a public pledge of allegiance. Peter Leithart said, “If the gospel encompasses everything, if it’s a political, cosmic, social, economic, familial, marital proclamation, if the gospel is about health and technology and psychology, then there’s no need to twist a conversation. Every conversation about anything always already treads on evangelical territory.” This includes conversations about the ethics of AI. Christians need not be shy, especially when asked, about their beliefs about the purposes of God for humanity in the world. There is a lot on the line. This reminds me of a similar, yet more ancient exchange, with the fate of humanity on the line:

Pontius Pilate said, “So you are a king?”

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate (the Postmodern) said to him, “What is truth?”5

Here’s a simple how-to guide to assist you in praying the Psalms.

• Pray through the whole Psalter. Multiply the day of the month by five and pray those psalms. If today is the 15th, then I’d pray Psalm 71–75. You’ll pray through the whole book of Psalms every month. Or start with Psalm 1 and pray it in the morning, afternoon, and evening (Ps. 55:17). Then move to Psalm 2 the next day. Use your ribbon to pray through all 150 psalms, then start over. Don’t mind if you miss a day just pick up where you left off. This way your prayer life will be nourished by a full diet of psalms.

• Make the psalm’s words your words. Augustine of Hippo said, “If the psalm prays, you pray. If the psalm laments, you lament. If the psalm exalts, you rejoice. If it hopes, you hope. If it fears, you fear. Everything written here is a mirror for us.” As you pray the Psalms, you will learn how to pray in every season. The Psalms form in us the affective agility to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.

• Meditate on the Psalms. By meditating before we pray, we are following in the way of the psalmists themselves (Ps. 1, 19:14, 63:6, 77:12, 119, 143:5 145:5). If anything in the psalm sticks out to you: pause, ask the Spirit to shine His light on it, then mull it over in your mind until it begins to ignite your heart. Meditation brings the Scripture into conversation with your soul and your situation. Without a doubt, the warmth of the Psalms is due to the kindling of meditation.

• Memorize the Psalms. Nothing has been more fruitful in my prayer life than memorizing the Psalms. I always have words to give voice to my soul, even when I’m speechless. Jesus modeled this by praying the Psalms from the cross (Matthew 27:46).

• Pray the psalm like an apple tree or a Christmas tree. You can either take the pleas and praises of the Psalms as your own, picking them like apples. Or you can decorate the psalm like a Christmas tree, hanging your pleas and praises on it. Use its words to respond to God, who has already initiated the conversation.

• Pray the psalm in Christ. Jesus is both the one through whom we pray to the Father and the one who prays these psalms to the Father (Hebrews 2:12). As you’re praying the psalm, imagine what the words would mean coming out of Jesus’ lips as both God and man, in His suffering and in His glory. He said that all the Psalms are about Him (Luke 24:44).

For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving,
abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you.
Give ear, O LORD, to my prayer;
listen to my plea for grace.
In the day of my trouble I call upon you,
for you answer me.

— Psalm 86:5–7

Selah.

Originally published at PrayPsalms.org on July 16, 2017.

Released in 2016, Stranger Things has defined a decade (almost) of streaming. It blends nostalgia and nightmare, horror and hilarity. But it is also defined by its decade, and therefore, displays the ideologies of our time.

In Season 5, Chapter Three: The Turnbow Trap, Robin disciples Will in the ways of self-discovery (language warning):

Robin: “And all of a sudden, I was looking at this little version of myself, and that little me, I could hardly recognize her. And she was so carefree, and like, fearless. She just loved every part of herself. And that’s when it hit me... It was always just about me. I was looking for answers in somebody else, but... I had all the answers. I just needed to stop being so g******n scared. Scared of who I really was. Once I did that...I felt so free. It’s like I could fly, you know? Like, like, I could finally be...”

Will: “Rockin’ Robin.”

Robin: “Yeah, Rockin’ Robin.”

Affirmations

1. Robin is right that “looking for answers in somebody else” creates fragility. She’s devastated, “the rest of my life pretty much imploded before my eyes.” Her symptoms came from expecting another to bear the weight of the human soul. Augustine of Hippo is summed up, “Only love of the immutable can bring tranquility.” You’re only as durable as the thing you love most. Robin’s love of Tammy was idolatrous. Her idol failed her. Devastation ensured.

2. Robin’s desire to be carefree, fearless, and have a proper self-love is also good. They are indicators of a healthy sense of self. She finds this in her childhood self and admires it, misses it.

3. Robin said, “I felt so free. It’s like I could fly.” We long for this freedom of integrity–for our outsides and our insides to match. Liberty is found in the freedom to do as you desire. Yet the fish that wishes to live ‘liberated’ from water does not desire rightly. It is not the fish’s design that needs to change, but the fish’s desires.

Challenges

1. Robin turns from drawing her sense of self from another mere human to looking within. This is the most praiseworthy move in our cultural moment. C.S. Lewis said the Devil is happy for you to exchange one idol for another.1 We live in the age defined by expressive individualism, where “personal authenticity is found through public performance of inward desires.”2 Robin heroically helps Will discover who he truly is by looking inside himself.

2. Robin is also influenced by the nineteenth-century Romantic era, which believed that an idyllic, childlike freedom was lost through socialization. If we could only uncover that child-self, with all of its freely expressed urges, we could recover who we truly are. If we could shed all expectations of (and responsibility to) others, we’d be free. This Peter Pan syndrome has juvenilized our era.

3. Robin’s climactic point was, “It was always just about me…I had all the answers.” This narrative has interpersonal and sociological effects. The excessive self-preoccupation of narcissism has been rising since the 1980s.3 Francis Schaeffer pointed out, “Man, having put himself rather than God at the center of the universe, constantly tends to turn inward instead of outward. He has made himself the last integration point of the universe.”4

Stranger Things tells a familiar story. And it is destructive. Is there a better story?

I am who You say I am.

Your sense of self is determined…

• not externally (by looking outward),

• nor internally (by looking inward),

• but eternally (by looking upward).

God alone is self-defining. “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). And the God who defines Himself defines us. Robin said it was “Like, I could finally be...Rockin’ Robin.” The name that expresses who she really is. Adam named the animals (Genesis 2:20), but God named Adam (Genesis 1:26). Adam did not name himself. No one does.

Augustine used a fascinating Latin phrase for sin: “incurvatus in se,” the state of being ‘curved inwards on oneself’. Look inward to find who you are. This is the familiar narrative of Stranger Things. The stranger thing is a lifestyle of repentance and praise.

Repentance and praise restore our sanity. Repentance dislocates us from our center. Praise relocates God to our center. This is the therapy Robin, Will, and all of us need.

You alone, O Lord, are who You are. You could have left us in the dark, but You told us who You are. And in your light, we see light (Psalm 36:9). Reveal to us who we are. I am who You say I am.

Look up.

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My wife and I walked to dinner that night. We had been sitting on our front porch, lamenting another month of infertility. But it was date night, so we wanted to make the most of it. Recently, I heard a teaching on giving thanks, so I suggested we spend the walk thanking God for everything we could think of along the way.

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In All Circumstances

No matter what you are walking through, you can give thanks because God is omnipotent yet intimate. It does not say: “Give thanks for all circumstances,” but “in all circumstances.” Inhabit, open up, feel fully without defense, the circumstances you are in…and give thanks. God has two responses to “deliver us from evil.” First, he rescues us. Second, he gives us the grace to endure. But God’s signature move is not an airlift us out, but to parachute in Himself.

At All Times

There are only two times to give thanks: 1) When you feel like it; 2) When you don’t feel like it.1 The first is by sight, the second is by faith. You will never get back the opportunity to give thanks when you don’t feel it. The devil is never more on his heels than when we, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Father’s will, look around upon a universe from which every trace of God seems to have vanished, and ask why we have been forsaken, yet still give thanks.2

For All Things

Give thanks for all things. That can’t be. For sin? For evil? For calamity? God hates these things. But God allows these things. We give thanks to the God who is well practiced at working through all things, even evil, to bring about good (Rom. 8:28, Gen. 50:20). We give thanks in the face of all things, being convinced “of their loving intent, and good tendency.”3 Gratitude is opposed to grumbling, but not groaning. John Chrysostom, the great “golden-mouthed” preacher of the early Church, had the thought that Christians could give thanks even for hell, because hell was a warning–a pedagogical grace–to keep them in the right way.4

The Trinitarian Key

Give thanks in all circumstances, at all times, for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Want to know the will of God for you? Here it is: give thanks.

But this kind of thanksgiving is symptomatic of the sober intoxication of the Spirit. If you want to give thanks like this, ask for a filling of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit’s abiding interest is to lift our eyes to see our good Father in the gift of His Son. Charles Spurgeon once said, “God is too good to be unkind and He is too wise to be mistaken. And when we cannot trace His hand, we must trust His heart.”

We arrived at our date with new surroundings, but the same circumstances. And yet, we were changed. Our hearts were lifted up in gratitude for the bounty of goodness we’d received from our Father’s hand. We didn’t have the one thing we wanted, but we had a thousand other things we had taken for granted. Giving thanks gave us what we already had, a generous Father who knows what we need before we ask (Matt. 6:8) and a Friend who does “all things well” (Mark 7:37).

Remarkably, the next day I came home to find out that Alana was pregnant. She had been pregnant the day before, but we didn’t know. Surely, we did nothing to deserve this, but I am glad we gave thanks by faith before we saw all that God was doing.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Scroll long enough and you’ll find outrage on both sides. Algorithms feed our extremes. Polarized people side with pundits they don’t know against people they do know. It’s cliché to say we live in a divided moment—but clichés often reveal what’s painfully true. Some claim the middle is the way forward, others dismiss it as mushy compromise. So what do we do?

Tension Keeps the Kite in the Sky

In Dominion, Tom Holland shows that the key to the Jewish understanding of God’s “identity, vivid though it was, lay in its manifold contradictions.” Christians name this mystery the Trinity—ultimate reality as a communion-of-Persons. If God Himself appears to have contradictions (the proper term is antinomy, thank you J.I. Packer), in that case, we can expect that living in accordance with reality will require the ability to hold seemingly competing truths in tension.

Charles Simeon (c. 1759) said it like this,

“I love the simplicity of the Scriptures, and I wish to receive and inculcate every truth precisely in the way, and to the extent, that it is set forth in the sacred Volume. Were this the habit of all divines, there would soon be an end to most of the controversies that have agitated and divided the Church of Christ. My endeavor is to bring out of Scripture what is there, and not to thrust in what I think might be there. I have a great jealousy on this head—never to speak more or less than I believe to be the mind of the Spirit in the passage I am expounding. I would run after nothing, and shun nothing… The truth is not in the middle, and not in one extreme, but in both extremes…Only remember, it is not one extreme that we are to go to but both extremes” (Charles Simeon, H.C.G. Moule, pp. 77-78).

Is Jesus God or man? Is God three or one? Is God sovereign or is man responsible? Do humans have dignity or depravity? Is reality one or many? These are the first principle questions underlying philosophy, politics, economics, and social theories. If we have to hold tensions here, then we can expect there to be tension from the bottom to the top.

This isn’t only a Christian position. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” (The Crack-Up). Niels Bohr, a Danish pioneer in quantum physics, said, “The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

But Christians have been working this out for millennia. In Biblical Critical Theory, Christopher Watkin said, “Given a choice between two camps or positions in our culture, the Bible frequently settles for neither and presents us with something richer than both, a subtler solution that neither position has the resources to imagine.” He helpfully names this as diagonalization. Charles Spurgeon summarizes, “The system of truth is not one straight line, but two. No man will ever get a right view of the gospel until he knows how to look at the two lines at once.” Let me be clear, there is truth and falsehood, but the biblical portrayal of truth is often in tension. To live truthfully requires strength to hold together what others tear apart. Holding tension requires exertion, energy that we often don’t have.

So what do we do?

In Him All Things Hold Together.

Which is it? Has the Lion conquered or the Lamb been slain? Yes. In a sermon on Revelation 5:5-6, Jonathan Edwards1 says, “There is an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies in Jesus Christ.” I call these paradoxical polarities.

Tim Keller unpacks these paradoxical polarities:

In Jesus, “we see qualities and virtues we would ordinarily consider incompatible in the same person. We would never think they could be combined but, because they are, they are strikingly beautiful. Jesus combines high majesty with the greatest humility, he joins the strongest commitment to justice with astonishing mercy and grace, and he reveals a transcendent self-sufficiency and yet entire trust in and reliance upon his heavenly Father. We are surprised to see tenderness without any weakness, boldness without harshness, humility without any uncertainty, indeed, accompanied by a towering confidence. Readers can discover for themselves his unbending convictions but complete approachability, his insistence on truth but always bathed in love , his power without insensitivity, integrity without rigidity, passion without prejudice” (Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical, p. 232).

So what do we do now?

As always, we turn to Jesus. Holding tension isn’t intellectual gymnastics; it’s spiritual formation. What if worship was the way forward? Worship Jesus for all of the admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies that we find in Him. Consider him as Lord, not only over our spiritual lives, but over all of life, everything in heaven and earth. Meditate on this moment in Joshua 5:13-14 as the Lord’s response to the “paradoxical polarities” that people fight over in our cultural moment:

Joshua: “Are you for us (your position), or for our adversaries (the other position)?”

And he said, “No; but I am the commander of the army of the LORD. Now I have come.”

And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped and said to him, “What does my lord say to his servant?”

Let’s go low and listen to our Lord. Selah.

The imprecatory (or cursing or vengeance) psalms are probably the most difficult obstacle Christians face when taking up the Psalms as their own prayers. Here’s why I think we should pray them:

1. Because the Lord’s Prayer teaches us to pray similarly: “Your kingdom come, your will be on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). The coming of the Kingdom includes the vanquishing of the King’s enemies (2 Thes. 1:5–12).

2. Since “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but…against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12), we can pray them against Satan and his legions.

3. Jesus bore the vengeance that the Psalms ask for: “The imprecatory psalm leads to the cross of Jesus and to the love of God which forgives enemies…In this way the crucified Jesus teaches us to pray the imprecatory psalms correctly” (Psalms: The Prayerbook of the Bible, Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

4. We can pray them in self-imprecation, “If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom. 8:13), asking the Spirit to carry on his war against the flesh within us, until everything that opposes God is destroyed.

5. It cannot be an Old Testament problem because there are similar New Testament prayers, like the saints in heaven: “They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Rev. 6:10).

6. Paul prayed imprecatory prayers: “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Our Lord, come!” (1 Cor. 16:22); “If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed” (Gal 1:9).

7. Because in a topsy-turvy world of injustice, they recognize where true justice comes from. “Imprecations are appeals to the Judge of the earth to play the part of Judge” (Teach Us to Pray, Peter Leithart).

8. Praying the imprecatory psalms leaves vengeance up to God. In the same breath, Paul teaches us to “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them”…he also says “never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God” (Rom. 12:14, 19).

9. It shows trust that “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” (Romans 12:19)

10. Imprecatory psalms are the songs of the oppressed, always prayed from a position of vulnerability and weakness, not dominance or triumphalism.

11. To curse enemies doesn’t necessarily mean hell. For David, it primarily meant death.

12. We are primarily praying against God’s enemies, not our own personal vendettas.

13. We are simply asking God to keep his covenant promises to Abraham and his offspring: “I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). We are the inheritors of this promise to bless and curse: “And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (Gal. 3:29).

14. We are following Jesus’ example, who “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly” (1 Pet. 2:23).

15. As James Hamilton points out, a central theme in the Bible is God’s glory in salvation through judgment. We are certainly allowed to pray for this.

16. Because with social justice, we must acknowledge that the liberation of sex slaves comes at the incarceration of the enslavers, the lifting up of the poor is the bringing down of their oppressors, and equality for minorities includes penalties for hate crimes. This is what we are praying for in the imprecatory psalms.

17. Because cutting out parts of the Bible is more like Jefferson than Jesus. Refusing to pray the entire psalter amounts to a rudimentary form of Neo-Marcionism, a heresy condemned by the early church.

18. It would be hard to divide the most beloved of the psalms from the curses. “In almost every case, the imprecation that we find objectionable sits alongside a spirituality that we would envy, as in Psalm 139” (Alec Motyer, in The Psalter Reclaimed, Gordon Wenham, p. 134).

19. We are not taking matters into our own hands but rather expressing trust in the God who “works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed” (Ps. 103:6).

20. It must be understood that our prayers for Jesus’ return imply “the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thes. 1:7–9), which will result in “blood (flowing) from the winepress, as high as a horse’s bridle, for (184 miles)” (Rev. 14:20).

21. Praying imprecatory psalms may be the way that early Christians had “steadfastness and faith in all your persecutions and in the afflictions that you are enduring” since “God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you” (2 Thes. 1:4–6).

22. The Psalms would not be a true mirror of the human soul without portraying our anger and rage. “The Psalms explore the full gamut of human experience from rage to hope. Indeed, it would be very strange if such a robust spirituality lacked such a dimension of vengeance, for we would conclude that just at the crucial point, robustness had turned to cowardice and propriety” (Praying the Psalms, Walter Brueggemann, 63).

How to Pray Imprecatory Psalms

1. Pray them first against Satan.

2. Pray them second against your sinful nature.

3. Pray them third against the world systems of corruption and oppression.

4. Pray them lastly against enemies, God’s, then yours.

Selah.

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This was originally posted at PrayPsalms.org on Jul 28, 2017.

In 2014, I chose Augustine of Hippo to be my mentor across the ages. My aim was to immerse myself so deeply in his writings that his thought forms would become my own—until I learned to think, feel, and desire in ways that are authentically Augustinian. So you can imagine my delight when, in 2019, my wife agreed to name our firstborn son, Augustine. On November 13, 2019 Augustine of Orlando was born. While my wife was still in labor, I received a message informing me that my son shared his birthday with Augustine of Hippo himself. Now, I like to say, I quite literally have skin in the game.

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Augustine’s ability to reflect deeply on both God and humanity is unparalleled. Historian Robert Louis Wilken said of Augustine, “It is not hyperbolic to say that during his lifetime he was the most intelligent man in the Mediterranean world…Augustine surpasses measurement. More than any other Christian author in the early centuries, he is a world.” Few Christians have influenced the way the Church talks and thinks about God more than Augustine. And he was a lover of the Psalms…

“If the psalm prays, you pray; if it laments, you lament; if it exults, you rejoice; if it hopes, you hope; if it fears, you fear. Everything written here is a mirror for us.” — Augustine

Confessions

Augustine records his sheer delight when he first began using the Psalms for prayer. “What utterances sent I up unto You, my God, when I read the Psalms of David, those faithful songs and sounds of devotion which exclude all swelling of spirit, when new to Your true love…What utterances used I to send up unto You in those Psalms, and how was I inflamed towards You by them, and burned to rehearse them, if it were possible, throughout the whole world, against the pride of the human race!…I read the fourth Psalm in that time of my leisure — how that Psalm wrought upon me…when I spoke by and for myself before You, out of the private feelings of my soul” (Confessions, Book IX). My first time reading the Confessions, I was struck by how Augustine had essentially woven a tapestry of psalmic biography. Page after page is laced with allusions and quotations from the Psalms. Journalist Joshua Foer remarked, “Augustine was said to be so steeped in the Psalms that they, as much as Latin itself, comprised the principle language in which he wrote.” In other words, when you read Augustine, it’s as though he writes in two languages: Latin and Psalms.

Expositions on the Psalms

Augustine’s longest work was his running commentary on the Psalms. He was ordained in 391 and chose to preach on the Psalms for his first sermon series (as did I) in 392. Augustine continued reflecting on and drawing from the Psalms his entire life and ministry, and did not finish his commentary until 418. That’s a twenty-six-year project on the Psalms, which ended up being the largest work written in Christian antiquity. While his expositions are not as exegetically precise as we’d prefer today, they are profoundly pastoral, richly devotional, and overwhelmingly Christ-centered.

The Whole Christ

Augustine’s doctrine of the totus Christus–the whole Christ–was integral to his interpretation of the Psalms. If Jesus said to the persecutor turned Apostle, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4), then surely he experienced a solidarity with the suffering of his people. In other words, the whole Christ is that the Head suffers with his body, the Church. Therefore, when we pray psalms of lament, confession, and confusion, it is Christ who prays with us and in us to the Father.

“For the voice is that sweet voice, so well known to the ears of the Church, the voice of our Lord Jesus Christ, the voice of the church toiling, sojourning upon earth” — Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 58.

Death Bed Meditation

Augustine’s friend and biographer Possidius wrote, “As Augustine lay dying, he ordered those psalms of David which are especially penitential to be copied out (i.e. Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143) and when he was very weak, he used to lie in bed facing the wall where the sheets of paper were put up, gazing at them and reading, and copiously and continually weeping as he read.” Having found comfort in the Psalms all his life, Augustine knew that in his final moments, much like his Savior, he needed these words to sustain him. While the penitential psalms bring us into the depths of our need for mercy, they also remind us that Christ is deeper still.

With the comfort and confidence that can only be found in meditating on the Psalms, Augustine entered into the rest of his God. Augustine died on August 28th, 430 AD. We celebrate this man who dove deeply into the Psalms and shared his pearls of great price with the Church he loved.

Selah.

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Sources:

• Augustine and the Psalms by Rowan Williams

• St. Augustine’s Use of the Psalms by Mary T. Clark

Originally published at PrayPsalms.org on Augustine’s Death Day–Aug 28, 2017.

Happiness is sourced in our situation.

Linguistically, happiness is rooted in happenings and happenstance. It has to do with being lucky, favored by fortune, being in advantageous circumstances, and with events “turning out well.” In America, the pursuit of happiness is a right. But like water slipping through the fingers, fortuitous circumstances can be so elusive. So we turn to pleasure instead.

Pleasure is sourced in our senses.

We feel pleasure when we see beauty, hear harmony, taste delicious food, and smell delightful scents. These five senses are a very human way to navigate our world. Ethologists have adopted the word Umwelt, a German word for environment, to denote an organism’s unique sensory world (e.g., bats fly using echolocation and sharks can pick up on electromagnetic fields). We often don’t think about the way our unique set of senses makes contact with the world around us. Creatures connect with the concreteness of their context in different ways.

But for humans, our pursuit of pleasure has altered the “relationship between pleasure and pain, and how understanding that relationship has become essential for a life well lived” (Anna Lembke). Pleasure and pain work like opposite ends of a seesaw. If we only push for pleasure, we teeter on the precipice of pain. Philip Rieff said, “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”

Joy is sourced in our secure attachment.

Humans are relational creatures. We derive joy from being at ease in the presence of our beloved. That may be a friend or family, a dog or God. Someone with whom we feel safe, seen, and soothed–results in the joy of being secure. This is why the Psalms link joy and refuge.

“You make him glad with the joy of your presence.” – Psalm 21:6

“In the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy.” – Psalm 63:7

Yet many do not feel safe, seen, and soothed in the presence of God. What comes to heart when you ask these three attachment questions of God?

1. Accessibility: Can I reach you? Will you pay attention to me?

2. Responsiveness: Can I rely on you to respond and care about my feelings?

3. Engagement: Will you value me, put me first, and stay close?

Richard Beck and Angie McDonald created the “Attachment to God Inventory” to measure if we feel avoidant, anxious, or secure with God. What’s the way forward? Our secure attachment to God is cultivated through intersubjectivity–a communion of consciousnesses (or co-consciousness)–with God. Intersubjectivity is when God knows, and you know that God knows. Feeling felt by God comes when we tell God our feelings as if He didn’t already know. As you pour out your heart before Him, you will come to know that God is a refuge for us, and grow to trust in Him at all times (Psalm 62:8). One of the reasons people don’t feel God is because they don’t feel anything. Given our resistance to feeling pain, we numb our range of feelings, then wonder why we can’t feel God. But strengthening our attachment to God through constant communion enables us to feel joy even in difficult circumstances and painful experiences. Joy remains, even in the absence of happiness or pleasure. We can be sorrowful, yet always rejoicing (2 Cor. 6:10). We come to tell God, “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound” (pleasure). – Psalm 4:7

Happiness, pleasure, and joy are all good. God made us with the capacity for each of them, but the greatest of these is joy. Still, one day, we will experience all three of them in greater abundance than ever known now:

You make known to me the path of life (i.e. to happiness)

in Your presence there is fullness of joy;

at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore. — Psalm 16:11

Selah.

Most mornings around 6:50 am, my son comes running into my bedroom to find me at my desk with a dim incandescent light bulb, buttering my spread-out Bible and journal with a warm yellow light. As I hear the light thudding of five-year-old feet, I swivel my chair towards the door, smile, and extend my arms to receive the boy who made me a father.

I think and write, teach and live at the intersection of theology and psychology. I’ve been contemplating the Venn diagram of attachment theory, the Levitical sacrificial system, and spiritual formation.

When you were a child, you ventured out into the wild world from the security of mom and dad. As the world got dangerous, you ran back to them for refuge. This is called proximity-seeking behavior. This desire of the child to restore closeness with the caregiver is key to attachment relationships.

You learned, both implicitly and explicitly, how to draw near to your primary caregivers.

• What can you bring?

• What can’t you bring?

• What must you bring?

Is it fine to bring flowers and cheers, but not anger and tears? The answers to these questions are inscribed into our nervous system. They pervade our personality and our style of relating for our whole lives. In a thousand ways, you learned from mom and dad what was acceptable and what was unacceptable. I’ve taught my sons and daughter, for better or worse, the moods and moments when I can be interrupted and they can draw near. Louis Cozolino says, “This dance of proximity and distance provides them with alternating rushes of well-being and distress, teaching them that to be close feels good and that to be separated causes pain.”

We were made for proximity.

We desire to draw near.

But something separates.

Mama may get the stain out of your clothes, but she can’t do much for a sin-stained soul. In Leviticus, the Lord provides a way to draw near. Peter Leithart says that “all the offerings of the Levitical system were means of approach.” God wants nearness. We are ambivalent. The ambivalence emerges from the tension between our felt sense of exile in our souls and that man is born reaching for God as the sparks fly upward.

Christianity celebrates Jesus as our means of approach. In Attachment literature, we engage in “proximity-seeking behavior” to increase awareness of secure attachment. In Biblical literature, we “draw near” to experience communion. Because of Jesus, the book of Hebrews bids us to draw near.

• Hebrews 4:16 - Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

• Hebrews 7:19 - A better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.

• Hebrews 7:25 - Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.

• Hebrews 10:1 - For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near.

• Hebrews 10:22 - Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

• Hebrews 11:6 - And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

Consider the answers to these questions, and how they are embedded in your soul and embodied in your relationships, with others, with yourself, with God:

• What can you bring?

• What can’t you bring?

• What must you bring?

By His life, death, and resurrection, Jesus stands as our hope that our proximity-seeking behavior will be met with a proximate and present God.