When reading the book I basically felt that Bessenecker oversimplifies terribly complicated realities in the lives of most Christians. Bessenecker, more or less, suggests that the most authentic Christians and the most servant-focused leaders spend the bulk of their lives either living among the world’s poorest of the poor or ministering to the weakest of the weak. Let me explain. Repeatedly the author holds up for emulation and exaltation those who have been called to live in deplorable and/or difficult locations. For example, the couple called to live in a slum in an unnamed Middle Eastern country are repeatedly held up as examples of Christians who are truly meek and will, therefore, inherit the earth. As well, Bessenecker tells us of Pia, a young woman living among the poorest and most needy inhabitants of Cambodia. Pia’s example is clearly admirable and she is certainly making a huge sacrifice. But is everyone called to live in this manner? Do the Scriptures ever tell us that these are the only ways to be meek in order to inherit the earth? For this reviewer, it seems that Bessenecker has failed to consider that a mega-church pastor or even a Christian CEO of a well-to-do company could also be meek. They might not be called to live in slums or among the most poor but does that disqualify them from being meek? For me this is the book’s main flaw – the author overstates the example of others and understates that meekness is as much an attitude as it is a particular observable lifestyle choice. Of course what this young couple in the Middle East and Pia in Cambodia are doing is exceptional and worthy of serving as a model. However, those living in southern California (like myself) who are also living into God’s calling on their life may also be worthy of emulation. All obedience is worthy of emulation and imitation, right?

This distraction aside, I mostly enjoyed the book. Once Bessenecker moved beyond these overstatements and really settled into detailing his thoughts on leadership, the book proved enjoyable though it was not particularly revolutionary. The author summarizes his own thesis in the conclusion when he says that leaders should cultivate lives where meekness, submission, repentance, following, slavery and obedience are present. In one sense it is hard to disagree with Bessenecker, especially someone like myself who has give the bulk of his adult life over to studying the history of monasticism. In one sense Bessenecker isn’t saying anything that has not already been said by Benedict of Nursia in his Rule. However, whereas most evangelical Christians will not or do not read the Rule, they may read this book, thus making this it a welcome addition. Since I am no expert on Christian leadership literature (or non-Christian leadership for that matter), I am not sure where the book fits in the larger discussion on leadership. However, I would not hesitate to give it to my college students who, I think, could certainly benefit from some wise words on leadership.

Travelers’ Blessings
An interview with Rick Steves
by Amy Frykholm

Rick Steves got into the travel business by teaching travel classes at the University of Washington in Seattle and working as a tour leader in the summers. His 1979 book Europe Through the Back Door emphasized how to cut costs and encouraged travelers to avoid prepackaged tours and encounter local cultures in a more authentic way. His TV shows about European destinations have aired frequently on public television. Steves, a Lutheran, whose business is based in Edmonds, Washington, just published Travel as a Political Act, a series of “field reports” from Europe, Central America, Asia and the Middle East.

What motivates you to teach people about traveling?

To me, travel is a spiritual thing, and I try to create an environment in which people will feel free to consider the effects that travel has on their spirituality. It is a challenge to do that while working in a secular environment.

My desire has always been to inflict on comfortable Americans situations that they have never encountered before in the hope that they will gain an appreciation of their place in the world. I decided on forming a secular tour company, however, because I like to act as a Trojan horse in that regard.

What effect does travel have on people’s spirituality?

People have a lot of fear. The flip side of fear is understanding. When you travel to places new to you, you understand more, so you fear less. And then you can love people, as a Christian should. The less you travel, the more likely that media with a particular agenda can shape your viewpoint. Those of us who travel are a little more resilient when it comes to weathering the propaganda storms that blow constantly across the U.S. media.

What recent insights have you gained from traveling?

In Europe I am always meeting people less driven than I am. For example, I met a man in Greece who spent 20 years working in the U.S. and then went back to the old country to retire. When he returned to Greece, it occurred to him that not once did he take a nap while in the U.S. Culturally, it just wasn’t OK to do that. Europeans know how to enjoy a moment, and that’s something almost subversive for many people in the U.S.

What traveling experiences would you especially recommend for American Christians?

I love to take American Christians to Muslim countries, especially Turkey. One of my favorite moments as a tour guide took place in a village in Turkey. Our group was in the mayor’s living room. He showed me a place on his wall where he hung his Qur’an bag—the most holy place in a Muslim home. He said to me, “In my Qur’an bag I keep a Bible, a Torah and the Qur’an, because Christians, Jews and Muslims are all people of the Word, children of the Book and of God.”

How amazing it would be if we could all share the same “bag”—share the same planet and be thankful to our Creator. Those are the kinds of eye-opening experiences that I try to bring to people through our program.

What are some common travel mistakes that Americans make?

Americans are so proud of their patriots like Nathan Hale, who wished they had more than one life to give for their country. I like to afflict the comfortable a little bit and tell them that the Nathan Hales and Patrick Henrys are a dime a dozen on this planet. That’s not to diminish the importance of such heroes but to say that many groups are waging a struggle every bit as valiant as the one our patriots waged.

For example, every year, nine languages become extinct, and that means that nine ethnic groups have lost the battle to preserve their language. Their patriots who wished they had more than one life to give are gone, and no one speaks their language any more.

Americans are also often guilty of economic prejudices. We tend to think that people who are dirty and don’t have nice clothes have less value and are more expendable. By now so many dirty, miserably dressed people have impressed me with their strength and spirituality that I am not going to discount them.

What about American Christians?

Frankly, many Christians are embarrassingly ethnocentric. They wear their Christianity on their sleeves and think everybody should be like them. I wish I could be their tour guide. I’d put them in a lousy hotel, make them talk to people who don’t speak their language, give them some history to read and hope they can recognize that other people have dreams other than theirs. They might have the Bulgarian dream or the Sri Lankan dream or the Pakistani dream. Many Americans think that everybody should have the American dream.

What are the differences between being a tourist and being a pilgrim?

The system encourages you to be a tourist, because the system is an economic engine. You are led to believe that you need to be a consumer, that you need a fancy hotel, that you need to take a fancy tour. You will go home having done some predictable things—just what the advertising told you would happen.

To advocate something different is an affront to the system. If you are a travel editor, you’re encouraged to promote helicopter skiing and three-day weekends in Reno and jet skiing in Maui—all of which will endear you to advertisers.

You could go to Africa and take in all the finest golf courses and come home having learned nothing. Or you could go to Africa and drink tea with local people, help them out in different ways and gain empathy for them. You’d come home changed. That’s being a traveler. Travelers and pilgrims are people who are connecting, learning, challenging themselves and not doing what’s predictable.

What do you think about mission trips?

If I were planning a mission trip, I would make a point of tackling people’s ethnocentrism. There are a few books that can be helpful. Reading the Bible Through Third World Eyes is one I would recommend. War Against the Poor is another that I have purchased by the hundreds. We’ve got to acknowledge that we in the First World downplay Jesus’ preferential option for the poor. We play up the notion that we should be industrious; we think, “Blessed are those who invest smartly.” When you venture to the developing world you are challenged to interpret the Bible from other people’s perspectives.

Too often, when Christians visit a place where the people are poor, they bring home quilts those people have woven, but they don’t ask, “Why are these people in such squalor?” Mother Teresa was a loving person motivated by her Christian faith, but I think she was so beloved in part because she never asked “why?” When you ask why, that’s when things get really interesting.

Archbishop Oscar Romero saw structural poverty and economic injustice in El Salvador and asked why. And he was assassinated. Thirty years after his death, the power of Romero in El Salvador is just mind-blowing.

Our goal as thoughtful travelers is to see things from an economic-justice point of view. Economic justice is the hard issue. You can travel and then come home and consume with impunity in a way that keeps poor people poor. Or you can travel as a political act and come home inspired to live your life in empathy and solidarity with all of God’s people.

Recently I was one of the judges for a video contest sponsored by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. “God’s Work, Our Hands” was the theme. All the videos showing mission efforts were commendable, but they were mostly about acts of charity, with not much edginess. Nobody was willing to ask about economic justice. Poverty is structural. It is a matter of people’s buying power.

I understand that you personally are trying to make a difference in the area of affordable housing.

My work has always been involved with affordable housing. That’s what I do: I look for places people can have a decent roof over their heads while they are traveling.

I have traveled enough in the developing world to know that land issues are driving a lot of the strife and squalor. If I own land and can make more money by growing fancy flowers to sell to America than by growing rice and beans for local consumption, what am I going to do? It’s a slam dunk—I’m going to grow flowers for export. That’s a land issue in simple terms.

I’ve also had friends and relatives who have been one paycheck away from homelessness. I understand what structural poverty is. The rules are structured to keep landless people down. It’s true both in America and in the developing world, though in the latter you see homelessness in a much more extreme form. So it is a natural thing for me to be excited about affordable housing.

So what have you done?

My wife and I had a little retirement nest egg, like anybody would who runs a good business for a couple of decades. And I thought: This money is just sitting there in the bank giving me taxable interest but not doing anybody else any good. I didn’t want to be a landlord because I don’t have the energy or the temperament for that. This money could provide housing, and there are groups like the YWCA that could use it to house more of the people who are in transition and tough straits. What a great opportunity to put our equity to use. Just buy a rundown apartment building, make it a community effort with a church to spiff it up, and give it to the YWCA to use to help single moms get back on their feet.

I just say, “YWCA, there is a huge need. You are very capable. You need more apartments to house people. Take these 25 units—and bless you for doing all of that.” So every night I go to bed not checking my portfolio to see how my multimillion-dollar investment has done, but knowing that 25 moms and their kids have a nice home. There’s no risk on my part, no stress. I still own the building. It’s a win-win-win situation. My hope is that other people would see that example and partner with the YWCA or churches or whomever and do something similar in their communities.

But that is to get ahead of ourselves. We said a moment ago that to call mission the mother of the church is to assert an agent of mission other than the church that births the church in and through mission. Trinitarian theology speaks of the sending of the Son and Spirit in terms of the trinitarian missions. Corresponding to the eternal processions of the Son from the Father and the Spirit from the Father and the Son in God are temporal missions in which the Son and Spirit are sent into the world. So, in the familiar words of John’s gospel: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’ (John 3:16-17) Or, as John puts it in his first epistle: ‘In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins…. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world.’ (1 John 4:10, 14) The Father sends the Son into the world to save it. We will have more to say later about the character of this salvation; certainly it is a salvation from sin, condemnation and death and for eternal life with God and his people in the new creation. Note that here we are speaking of the Trinity’s mission, divinely initiated and divinely accomplished, a mission whose end is the salvation of the world. (The Spirit is not absent, Jesus having been conceived by the Spirit, anointed by the Spirit, empowered by the Spirit and raised by the Spirit.)

The church’s mission takes its cues from and finds its place in God’s mission. Jesus commissioned his disciples to continue his work, and he explicitly connected his mission to theirs: ‘As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.’ (John 17:18) There is an analogy between the two; even more, the mission of the disciples is included in the mission of the Son. We must say this carefully. Clearly, there is one sense in which the church cannot, does not and must not presume to continue Christ’s work. For one, he and he alone is the sacrifice for sins (see the passage from 1 John 4 above). He has ascended to the right hand of the Father, where he reigns as King and intercedes as Priest on our behalf. Nevertheless, Jesus expected his disciples to be about his work. ‘I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.’ (John 14:12-13) These greater works are not autonomously produced, of course; in fact, they are done by Jesus himself in response to our requests in his name. But then again, it is also we who do them. What are we to make of this confusing sense of double agency? It will help to consider a passage later in John, the Pentecostal moment of the gospel. After his resurrection, ‘Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”’ (John 20:21-22) Again we have the repetition of mission. As the Father sends his Son, so the Son sends his disciples. As a sign and empowerment for this mission, Jesus breathes the Spirit onto them. This is the Spirit who, as Jesus told his disciples just before he died, ‘will teach you everything, and will remind you of all that I have said to you.’ Furthermore, ‘the Father will send [him] in my name’ (John 14:26). The same Spirit who accompanied and empowered Jesus accompanies and empowers his people. Barth points out that ‘“sending” means to be invested with doxa [glory], to participate in the dignity, authority and power given to the one commissioned to go to a third party for the discharge of his mission.’ The mission of the Son is extended, then, in the mission of the Spirit and the church. As Vatican II put it: ‘The pilgrim Church is missionary by her very nature, since it is from the mission of the Son and the mission of the Holy Spirit that she draws her origin, in accordance with the decree of God the Father.’

Not that the mission of the Son and Spirit was an entirely new thing. Jesus is the dénouement of God’s mission, not its beginning. He is the ‘climax of the covenant’ that God established with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But he is its climax, the point at which God’s missional ways with the world and his people are integrated and brought to fulfillment. Whether we consider mission creationally (beginning with God’s establishment of Adam and Eve in Eden and command to serve as a kingdom of priests throughout the earth) or soteriologically (beginning with God’s seeking and finding the scantily clad – but clad, because ashamed – Adam and Eve after they had eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), God’s mission of making a home for himself in his creation among his people can be traced to the opening chapters of Scripture. As G. K. Beale has argued at length, ‘God created the cosmos to be his temple, in which he rested after his creative work. His special revelatory presence, nevertheless, did not yet fill the entire earth because his human vice-regent was to achieve this purpose. God had installed this vice-regent in the garden sanctuary to extend the boundaries of God’s presence there worldwide.’ The rest of the Bible narrates humanity’s repeated failures to do just that, and God’s various missions – his sending of Noah and Abraham, of Moses and David, of Israel among the nations and, finally, of his only Son (and, in him, many sons and daughters) as a light to the world. God’s mission in the world has a long history in only part of which the church is present.

An important implication follows from this rediscovery of the missio Dei. God is a missionary God. This means that mission is first God’s project, not ours. Furthermore, mission antedates the church. In short, an attention to the mission of God suggests a shift from an ecclesiocentric to a theocentric model of mission. Rather than speaking of the mission of the church, we speak of the church’s participation in the mission of God. This does not suggest an eclipse of the church but, rather, its placement in the broader horizon of God’s ways with the world. The church’s existence is not oriented to itself but to God’s reign. As such, it is the vanguard of the kingdom.

For more on this, see the forthcoming book written with David Wilhite, The Church: A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark, 2010).

Socrates wasn’t good at sound bites. His preferred philosophical style was the interrogation, and he could most often be overheard asking questions with the form, “My friends, what is ________ ?” No matter what you were talking about, Socrates would grab ahold of the most important noun and start worrying it with questions about its essence. If you thought you knew the answer, he would keep hassling you until he convinced you that you didn’t really know. It’s a technique that brings a certain harsh clarity, but “What is X?” just doesn’t make a good slogan.

According to Plato’s telling of it, Socrates said the famous sentence, “the unexamined life is not worth living” during his trial in 399 B.C. He was 70 years old, and the city of Athens had him on trial for “corrupting the youth of Athens” by “teaching them not to believe in the gods in whom the city believes.” Socrates spoke in his own defense, and it didnt’ take him long to confound his accusers by showing that they didn’t even know what they meant by “gods.” But though he won point after point at the philosophical level, Socrates did not prevail in court. He was found guilty, and the jury named the penalty as death (Socrates suggested a different penalty: free meals for life). They wanted him to promise to stop doing philosophy, and he said he’d rather die. So it wasn’t a very long trial.

And there, toward the end of his penultimate speech in Plato’s Apology, knowing there’s nothing he can say that will give him an honorable alternative to the death penalty, he says this:

If I say that it is impossible for me to keep quiet because that means disobeying the god, you will not believe me and will think I am being ironical. On the other hand, if I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you will believe me even less. What I say is true, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you.

Notice that Socrates doesn’t just come right out and say it. He says, “Here are some things that you won’t believe me if I say.” It’s not quite the dramatic delivery we would want, with Socrates played by Mel Gibson, yelling “THE EXAMINED LIIIIIIIIIIIIIFE!” as he goes to his death.

The original Greek of the phrase could be translated more literally as “the unexamined life is not livable for a man.” And the root of the word for “unexamined” (exetazein) is not one that shows up much in Plato’s writings. It probably has a military background, and suggests something like a drill instructor inspecting the ranks. And in context, Socrates isn’t so much talking about examining his own life, as hassling the men of Athens: “it is the greatest good” to be “conversing and testing [another form of the verb exetazein here] myself and others” about virtue. Why? Because the unexamined life is not worth living for men, or the course of life that is not subjected to exacting scrutiny is not a humanly livable life.

It’s still a fine motto for your philosophy club. But viewed in context, this Socratic saying doesn’t suggest “it’s nice to have lots of leisure time for navel-gazing” so much as it indicates that philosophy is a calling to honesty and critical thinking, even at great cost.

The Super Bowl and the commercials that come with it have always been an event that celebrated taste and family values. This year while enjoying flatulent horses, objectified women picked for their silicon valleys, and endless advertisements for gluttony and drunkenness, my family will be forced to endure a woman who looks like a woman and a man who practices chastity sharing their heartwarming story.

It is enough to give a viewer heart burn.

This jarring juxtaposition may induce cognitive dissonance by producing cognition in viewers. How will CBS promote the rest of the amusements if the audience stops being without the Muses even for a moment?

Free speech is not an unlimited right either to shout “fire” in a crowded theater, or to praise being alive during modern gladiatorial events. A man cannot enjoy his intellectual slumber if opponents are allowed to disturb him with evidence.

Free speech is abused when speech is used to abuse the dogmas of our intellectual betters. The consensus opinion of the establishment must be protected from the irresponsible ability of people to raise money and share their views. Only the consumer and the intellectually servile are free and this quarterback and his mother are the opposite: selling nothing and thinking for themselves.

It is time to call for a Super Bowl Commercial Czar to police these abuses. Is this commercial the “hope and change” that President Obama promised us?

We are told that this commercial will tell the story of a mother who carried a difficult pregnancy to term. It will celebrate the life and accomplishments of her son. This runs the risk of making people who made a different choice wonder if they have made the right choice. The essence of the pro-choice position is that it hides the fact that only one choice can be celebrated.

This commercial is unfair, because there is no possibility of giving the other side equal time.

How can the abortion industry make something similar? They cannot film a commercial with dead children testifying to the beauty of the choice to abort. This is an undue handicap to those persuaded to choose death.

The hypocrisy of CBS is exposed in this decision. In the past, they have turned down advertisements of a controversial nature. Despite the fact that Americans are overwhelmingly personally opposed to abortion, a commercial celebrating life is controversial to the correct people . . . the minority who like it. After all, any celebration of the choice for life is simply code language for banning abortion. Every thoughtful person knows the phrase “pro-choice” is nothing but clever rhetoric, shorthand for nervous politicians for being pro-abortion. Any argument for choosing life is not about choice at all, because it is not about abortion.

Everybody knows the word “choice” means abortion. Focus on the Family is deceiving the viewers by using it as if it meant the ability to pick between two options. As everyone knows choice is a basis for liberty and so any assault on abortion is an assault on liberty.

Liberty is the basis of this Republic and so this commercial undermines our national life.

The most serious problem with this commercial is the attack on our Constitutional right to the separation of religion and life. Tebow and his mother are forcing all of us, even the non-religious, to think about religion and God. The wall of separation between atheists and a mention of God must remain absolute or the nation will become a veritable theocracy.

Some might argue that “choosing life” need not be religious. Leave aside the shocking news that the commercial was paid for by a religious organization. Forget that Tebow himself insists on giving his religious opinions in public. Think only how uncomfortable this must make mainstream journalists, in particular imagine the pain caused to such a well-known feminist as Keith Olbermann who is charged with protecting the status quo.

Are we willing to live in a society where we must view Olbermann and see him made uncomfortable? It shows the hypocrisy of the “family values” crowd when they confront a man already burdened by his personality and his hair with an offensive commercial. His job already hangs by a thread and such provocation is likely to add him to the swelling ranks of the unemployed undoing half the actual gains of the government stimulus program.

Sadly, this year’s Super Bowl is on CBS and not on NBC and so we will not have an opportunity for Olbermann’s fair-minded commentary during the game to balance out this commercial. Perhaps CBS can hire Olbermann or some other fair-minded person to balance out the commercial.

This we know: the life of the Republic depends on not shouting life in a crowded Super Bowl party.

What we’re doing here on campus is preparing for what’s next. I teach in a general education program, so my students are drawn from all the different majors at Biola. They’re getting themselves ready to be teachers, nurses, doctors, film-makers, singers, entrepreneurs, politicians, pastors, scholars, missionaries, artists, technicians, parents, and educated citizens.

On December 14 of last year, one of our graduates from the class of 2006 died unexpectedly. Justin Key (1983-2009) passed away suddenly at a young age, and his death puts a question mark beside all the work of preparation we are doing here. Justin was a good student, and from the moment he came to the Torrey Honors Institute, we talked about how the education he was receiving was a foundation he could build on all his life. We constantly used the language of preparation, expectations, anticipation, and futurity. We started with Homer and Plato, worked our way through Dante and Calvin and Shakespeare, and kept building his knowledge base through Socratic discussion of great books all the way into the twentieth century. It was a deep investment in broad-based general education, the kind that is supposed to equip young men and women for a lifetime of intelligent growth.

And then Justin died at age 26. I think the little community of teachers and students who kept talking about laying an educational foundation for the future knew that any one of us could die before reaching that nebulous zone, “the future,” that we were preparing for.

But the future we were preparing Justin for was only a few years long. Unknown to us, we were teaching him lessons he would use in the few years left to him after graduation, not in some nebulous land of his thirties, forties, fifties, or beyond. His education with us was one long preparation for big, important things he never got to do. A life that ends so young is thought of as “cut short,” even by those of us who share Justin’s own conviction that the length of his days was in the hands of God, just as his soul now is.

Beyond the grief of losing Justin himself, I learned two lessons from his life and death. That is, I learned one lesson from his life and one from his death; both will stay with me in all my teaching.

First, I learned from his death that while it is wise to prepare for a long and productive life, we shouldn’t pretend that such a life is promised to us, or guaranteed, or certain. This means the time of preparation itself is a real time, a season in which we can meet with God, hear his voice, and obey. If the voice tells us to prepare ourselves, then it is enough that we obey and prepare. The divine command to prepare for the future is not the same as a promise that we will have that future. Justin’s death underlined this for me. He obeyed God and prepared himself; it turns out he was preparing to meet with his God in a future life beyond our imagining. In a class Justin took with me in October 2004, we discussed the attitude that Christians in the fourth century had toward death. In his weekly essay that week, Justin wrote “It seems that Athanasius never feared death, but at the same time had no desire to be killed. He had a sense of purpose and mission in life, and it carried over into his continual flight from persecution… Christians are supposed to live by the spirit. It seems that is also how they are to approach the possibility of death.”

Second, I learned from Justin’s life that we should do what we can right now. Since we will never be adequately prepared for the tasks God may call us to, we need to do whatever we can with whatever we have as we go along. We should do something now with what we know now. There may be time later on to learn more and prepare better. But most of us –I’m thinking especially of my students and colleagues at Biola—have abundant resources.

Justin’s life taught that lesson in various ways, but the most dramatic is his involvement with the California School Project. The CSP is a truly visionary ministry which mobilizes Christian college students to train high school students in evangelizing in California’s schools. Justin was one of the first Biola students to commit to the project, and his early involvement was crucial in the start-up phase of a project that just keeps going. I don’t know how to count the lives changed and the souls saved through this initiative, but it keeps increasing year by year.

In 2006, Justin took my seminar on trinitarian theology. It’s a hard class; we read the most difficult texts that undergraduates could reasonably be expected to grapple with, and they’re all on the difficult subject of the Trinity. At the end of the class, I asked the students to give me an honest assessment of whether all that hard work was worth it. Here is Justin’s last word on the intellectual investment he was making with us at Torrey:

I fully expect our venture into the outermost parts of Christian knowledge of the Trinity to bear fruit in my own life. I have to admit, however, that I am not really sure how. I cannot say that I hung on Augustine’s every word, or that I could follow Aquinas to the rarified heights without, at times, longing at every step to stop. At this point, I am not certain how this journey has benefited me. But I think somehow it has. Thus far, I have enjoyed the concrete B.B. Warfield much more than any other author. His was to synthesize the thoughts of all the other great authors that we read, and in doing so did most of my work for me. I imagine, therefore, that Warfield was only able to do this by first ascending to same the dizzying heights which we have just summited. I hope, therefore, that such a work will benefit me in a similar way.

The work that we do in class, therefore, is worthwhile, and will bear fruit in helping us to understand God. Such fruit, I think, will only come eventually though, in the same way as the worst day of athletic training often becomes a breakthrough into the light. The Trinity is so complex and so unknown that it cannot but require much study before its true secrets come to light. But it is the entity from which the entire world and its inhabitants derive their being, and hence even the most basic truth about it must reveal much about everything else. The highest will always affect the lowest. Our study allows us to see how.

John Wesley: “Nay, I know not that I can write a better on The Circumcision of the Heart than I did five and forty years ago.”

C. H. Dodd in 1958: “I have not attempted any such radical revision [of 1920’s The Meaning of Paul for Today] as would have changed the character of the book. It is a young man’s book. The removal of faults of youth might well have introduced the faults of age.”

F. F. Bruce in 1980: “The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? Since [the fifth edition of 1960] it has received slight amendments for successive impressions or editions, but it will receive no further pervasive revision. It is not the same book as I should write were I tackling the subject today for the first time; it is probably a better book for its purpose than any that I could write today.”

What do we see when we travel? Is it just postcard scenery and famous landmarks? Confusing subway maps and exotic menus? Or can there be more to it than that?

G.K. Chesterton once said that the difference between a traveler and a tourist is that the traveler sees what he sees, while the tourist sees what he has come to see.

For anyone who has had the chance to live, study or travel abroad, it becomes clear that traveling is not just about seeing what we hoped to find; it’s about finding what we never expected, and seeing–with new eyes–things we never imagined.

It’s an education. Or at least a form of education that goes beyond classrooms and textbooks and sometimes the confines of comfort. It’s an education of soul, mind and body, and for a university like Biola, which seeks to know this world better and impact it for Christ, it’s absolutely essential.

In 2009, 321 Biola students participated in off-campus study programs, spread across the world from Indonesia to Costa Rica and on every continent but Antarctica. Whether it’s on an Interterm art department trip to Italy or a summer environmental studies program in the Great Lakes, the number of Biola students experiencing the world off campus has exploded in recent years.

These sorts of cross-cultural opportunities will only become more integral and available for students as Biola moves forward in the next decade. In the newly unveiled Biola University Plan for 2010-2015, President Barry H. Corey writes, “It is more crucial than ever that our students be intellectually and experientially cross-cultural Christians.” And fostering study abroad and off-campus programs that are affordable and attractive to students will be a crucial part of this.

But why is it so important? Beyond missions and evangelism, what is the value of cross-cultural traveling and “getting outside the bubble?” As Christians, what can we learn by traveling? How might it form us spiritually and better equip us to make an impact for Christ? Is there more to travel than just snapping photos and saying, “Been there, saw that?”

A Broader Perspective on God’s World

In 1857, Mark Twain famously said this about travel:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Twain was getting at the idea that travel–beyond mere pleasure and holiday diversion–has a knack for maturing us and broadening our worlds. For Christians, travel can expand our understanding of God’s world–his people, his church and all that he created.

“I think as Christians we can’t understand enough about God,” said Kitty Purgason, professor of TESOL in Biola’s Cook School of Intercultural Studies. “There are so many facets of his character, his will, his creation. Our experiences traveling or living in another culture help us understand that better.”

Purgason knows this better than most. She grew up in India and has lived and studied in Russia, Korea, China, Turkey, Turkmenistan and North Africa. She’s tasted and seen diverse wonders of God’s creation and learned important lessons about her faith along the way.

But many of us–especially us American Christians–would just as soon stay put, said Allen Yeh, an assistant professor in Biola’s Torrey Honors Institute.

Yeh, who has visited 45 countries, thinks that sometimes we become satisfied with our own culture and don’t recognize the value in venturing out and understanding the wider world, especially in terms of God and Christianity.

“The more you see of the world, the more you realize that Christianity is not an American phenomenon,” said Yeh. “The worldwide church together can piece together a fuller view of the gospel. It’s a mosaic.”

When we travel, we realize that our God is a global God, and we need to conceive of him as such, said Yeh.

For many Biola students who have gone overseas for the first time as part of an off-campus study program, this is one of the most valuable realizations they come to: that the Christianity they are a part of is much bigger and beautiful than they ever thought.

For Jennifer Grubbs, a senior intercultural studies major who did an internship with Food for the Hungry in Uganda this summer, the experience of living in another culture awakened her to the beautiful ways that God crafts his church in different contexts.

“I caught a glimpse of what heaven will be like when I was at church hearing the diverse languages worshiping our Lord,” she said. It reminded me of how in heaven all the nations will worship together, yet each in their own unique and beautiful way.”

Senior Dustin McCurry participated in the Torrey Rome program in January and then spent the fall semester studying in Oxford. For him, the experiences opened up his appreciation for the deep history of God’s faithfulness over time.

“It is so easy to be entrapped in my day-to-day life and forget those who have come before,” he said. “However, being in Rome and seeing the millenniums of history contained in the city, specifically the Christian history, gave me a grander picture of God’s people and the history of the church. Now it is much more enriching to marvel at God’s faithfulness and the cloud of witnesses that have gone before us.”

The experiences of Jennifer and Dustin are examples of how travel can wake us up to how expansive and diverse the body of Christ really is.

“Christianity is the most widespread religion in the world, as well as the most multiethnic,” said Allen Yeh. “It is the only major religion in the world without a geographic center. Christians are everywhere, of every color and every language, and I think that’s how it’s meant to be. To not realize that or embrace that is to be very small-minded about what God is doing.”

To travel, then, is to see God’s world with new eyes, to be a learner of cultures and people so that we are better equipped for the Great Commission–for our going out and journeying alongside others toward the truth.

But it also helps us on our own walk, drawing us closer to the Savior and Creator from whom all the wonders of the road spring forth.”

Encountering Christ on the Road

Sometimes travel can be difficult. You’re in a strange place, away from the comforts of home and often without a support network. You don’t speak the language, can’t read the signs and occasionally you just have to rely on others. But this is exactly how travel can be so transformative. In his essay, “Why We Travel,” British essayist Pico Iyer observes the connection between “travel” and “travail,” pointing out the value of travel as both a personal test and an opportunity to identify with the challenges and sufferings of others.

“I travel in large part in search of hardship–both my own, which I want to feel, and others’, which I need to see,” wrote Iyer. “Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion–of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring: while feeling without seeing can be blind.”

Traveling not only confronts us with the suffering throughout the world but it also forces us to recognize the good things we have at home.

When she is at home, Kitty Purgason thanks God for things like hot showers and public libraries. But traveling also makes us realize our own cultural weaknesses, she adds. “It prompts both humility and gratitude.”

It also allows us to connect to the rich Christian tradition that goes back to the origins of our faith.

Movement and travel have always been part of the Christian experience. So many of the giants of the faith have been travelers–from Abraham (whom God called to “leave your country”…Gen. 12:1) to Paul to the itinerate evangelists of the 19th century. And, of course, there is also Jesus himself, who from birth was a bit of a roving exile, frequently homeless and dependent on the hospitality of others on the routes he traveled.

Why is it that the journeying, nomadic lifestyle been such a hallmark of the Christian experience?

In his famous essay, “The Philosophy of Travel,” George Santayana wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”

A Christian might add that it enriches our identification with Christ and draws us closer to his presence by removing status quo comforts.

In some ways travel can be a sort of “monasticism on the move,” writes Iyer. “On the road, we often live more simply…with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.”

It’s an opportunity for us–away from our everyday comforts and routines–to truly rely on God, said Kitty Purgason.

“God has met me in my travels in ways he hasn’t met me at home, and maybe it’s because the usual props that I rely on are taken away, and the usual busyness that I fill life with is removed,” said Purgason.

In this way, travel can reawaken our spirituality, getting us out of our rut and into a more thoughtful, introspective mindset, said Yeh.

“When you are yanked out of your comfort zone or when you are seeing new things, it will jar you in a good way and cause you to think,” he said.

But it can also make you feel a bit uncomfortable, like an alien in a strange land who doesn’t quite belong.

“But the discomfort is a good thing,” Yeh said. “Everyone needs to know what it’s like to be a minority. Everyone needs to know what it’s like to be the odd one out, to not belong. Sometimes I don’t feel like I have a home, because I’ve traveled so much. I feel at home everywhere and nowhere. And that discomfort can actually translate theologically in that we are aliens and strangers in this world. Ultimately our citizenship is in heaven.”

And perhaps this is the greatest thing we can learn from travel–that the Christian experience is not meant to be one of cushy comforts, self-reliance and satisfaction with the way things are, but rather an experience of dependence on God and seeking out the sometimes-overwhelming grandeur and complexity of God’s kingdom.

Travel is a way to meet Christ on the road and to feel the reality of his redeeming work in the world–not just by reading about it in a book, but by experiencing it in the flesh.

In his article on pilgrimage (”He Talked to Us on the Road,” April 2009) in Christianity Today, Ted Olsen points to the story of the Road to Emmaus as an example of how travel–what we encounter in person on “the road”–can transform our understanding of a thing. The men on the road to Emmaus knew about the Resurrection, but they didn’t know it in a transformative way until Christ appeared to them and they eventually realized who he was.

“It goes deeper than just grasping an event’s historicity,” writes Olsen. “It goes to its happenedness. We are not just minds created to soak up knowledge. we are bodies that stand in one place at a time, seeing and feeling our surroundings.”

Travel is about more than just knowing God’s goodness in our minds. It’s about seeing and tasting and feeling it in his created world, and in our fellow man. And though strangers we may be in this world, the reality is that God is here, working in remarkable ways.

If traveling means we can witness all this a little more clearly, why would anyone want to stay home?

That, at least, is the argument of Adam Fox in his 1945 book Plato for Pleasure (revised edtion 1962). “The works of Plato have generally been in the hands of philosophers and scholars when they ought to have been in the hands of the people,” laments Fox. He doesn’t think that 30 million Brits are going to head off to their beach holidays with Plato tucked in their pockets. But he figures that since it only takes about 50 thousand English people to know the works of Dickens and “make him a national treasure,” something similar ought to happen for Plato.

Fox writes to remind everybody that Plato is not only readable, but is actually pleasant to read.

Adam Fox (1883 – 1977) was Dean of Divinity at Magdalene College, Oxford, while C.S. Lewis was there. In fact, Fox was one of the original Inklings. He held the prestigious chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University for four years, and is buried in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.

In Plato for Pleasure, Fox admits that “the Anglo-Saxons are not a philosophical race.” So if Plato is mainly a philosopher who needs to be studied, it’s no use asking the English to get busy at the task. But Fox’s recommendation is that we (English-speakers, not just the English) ignore the professional philosophers. Instead we should simply “take up and read” Plato for ourselves. Note: not study Plato, but read him.

Plato in his Dialogues is such a superb master of literature, and the works are such delightful stuff, that they must be meant primarily to be read and not to be studied. Their entertainment value is very great, and although considerable part of them cannot be read without thinking, we need not and should not stop to think much until we have got to the end of the piece. Then we can stop to think it over or not as we like. The great thing is that as many as possible of those who are capable of any serious reading should read the works for the pleasure of reading. It is to be feared that too many who have had Plato’s works in their hands have not had this idea of pleasure in their heads at all. They have aimed all the time at finding out what he thought or seeing what he says about this or that, when, the works being what they are, this is often not possible, not what he himself intended. (p.2)

Fox warns that there are some difficult passages in Plato: “In the Dialogues a great deal of the thinking is inconclusive and some of it is wrong. Some of it is very dry and parts of it have ceased to have much significance.” But even this is not a disadvantage, says Fox. The bad patches are cautionary; they show you how to avoid the pitfalls that spoil conversations.

You learn from the pages of Plato how to have a good talk and to some extent how not to spoil good talk. You learn how to go hunting for the truth and how precious truth is and how elusive, and you experience all the sport there is in tracking down the truth. You have something of the same sort of pleasure as the successful detective without his sorded setting. And this pleasure in pursuit of truth is very valuable, because most of us are not well equipped to discover the truth. We have not the right kind of courage or the powers of mind. It is perhaps one of Plato’s chief contributions to our social and mental well-being that he persuades us that the search for truth can be in itself a great pleasure, sometimes one might almost say great fun, even if the prey escapes us in the end. (p. 5)

Plato shows that thinking can be fun. Fox quotes a Greek professor (Henry Jackson of Cambridge) as tesifying that “If Socrates is the master of those who teach and Aristotle is the master of those who know, Plato is the master of those who think.”

So what if philosophers can do tricks with Plato that are far beyond the understanding of the rest of us? “Philosophers may point out a multitude of very interesting things in Plato which others would not notice or could not understand, just as a sociologist could point out hundreds of very interesting things in Dickens.” Philosophers and sociologists would be right about all that fascinating stuff. But they would be missing out on the main thing these writings are for: “The proper approach to the widest appreciation of Plato and of Dickens (different as they are) is to approach their writings as works of creative literature. They do not so much describe the world as make a world of their own. Plato had a genius for making up serious conversations such as men hold with each other when they think as they talk. No one surpassed him in representing just that.” (p. 6)

Plato’s dialogues are indeed exquisitely crafted. Fox relates the legend that Plato on his death-bed was still trying to think of a way to improve the first words of his greatest dialogue, The Republic. “True or not, the survival of this anecdote is a testimony to the detailed perfection of his style, and possibly a faint reminiscence of the pains it cost him to attain that perfection.” (54)

Beyond the literary appreciation (which we would expect from a professor of poetry), Fox also commends Plato as instruction in the art of thinking. He anatomizes the elements of Plato’s dialectic:

In the use of dialectic there are several distinguishable lines of procedure. One of these is famous under its Greek name of Elenchus. What is distinctive about it is its effect upon the person who is subjected to the process. It is the same effect as that of a successful cross-examination. It convicts the person under examination of some sort of error. It gets him into a corner. He does not know where to turn next, a situation which the Greeks called aporia, or resourceslessness. (74)

Plato for Pleasure is a fun little exhortation to pick up Plato and read around in the dialogues. Fox may make it sound a little easier than it is. But he is right that no special technical training is needed. The average intelligent reader, hungry for truth and motivated to learn how to think, can jump right in and get a lot out of an attentive reading of Plato.

Where to begin? At the Torrey Honors Institute, we give our students the dialogues Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Phado, Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic, and Timaeus. For more information, check out the Plato chapters in John Mark Reynolds’ new InterVarsity Press book, When Athens Met Jerusalem.

The best example is in the middle of the book, at p. 289: John Dewey has just accepted the position of being chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Chicago, which Menand narrates crisply without omitting any of the ups and downs of university politics and the kind of things that lead professors to change jobs. “Harper could pay only $4,000 for the first year,” etc., and then suddenly, “Dewey… took a train to Chicago. He arrived at a critical moment in American social history. It was the middle of the Pullman strike.”

Period. Transition to the next section. “George Pullman was an engineering entrepreneur. He had made his reputation when Chicago was young by raising large downtown buildings out of Lake Michigan mud in which they were starting to sink.” Those sentences make Pullman sound like Paul Bunyan, and Menand fills us in on how he pretty much owned a whole town as his private property. Then off we go on a zippy history of the Pullman train strike, folding in the state of industrialization and labor relations, before rejoining Dewey, stranded in his train to Chicago, a few pages later. Dewey is apparently politically radicalized by what he sees and hears during the strike, and Menand will follow that thread of thought later in the book.

But look at Menand’s technique: The train strike surprises the reader. It shows up with no warning in the last sentence of a section, and the book’s narrative takes a turn right there at that sentence. It veers off into the characters involved in the labor unions and socialism, and doesn’t come back until it’s covered a lot of interesting ground and the reader has almost –almost– forgotten where the story had originally been going.

The book nearly has a plot. I almost have to write “spoiler alert” before describing its development, in case you want to read it. Remember, this is a book about a phase in the history of American philosophy. Nobody expects it to be so readable, so motivating.

I want to name that technique. When you turn a corner like that in a book about the history of ideas, I think it should be called a Menand. Okay, maybe not. It’s actually a common technique in writing thrillers –it’s one of the handful of things Dan Brown does well the DaVinci Code– and it was used with great comic effect in the early seasons of the Simpsons, when an episode would start with Homer reading personal ads, turn into a story about getting a trampoline, become an adventure with a self-help guru, and end with the whole town imitating Bart. The surprising bit is that Menand can do this with John Dewey and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Surely somebody somewhere has anatomized Menand’s technique, so lesser writers can learn from it. My short list of lessons learned includes: He goes out of his way to put significant historical events into the story. To spell out the story of pragmatism, he starts with the raid on Harper’s Ferry, runs through the Pullman strike, and ends with the first world war. He refuses to pass up an interesting character; his diction is crystal-clear; he does that plot-pivot routine with special attention to the transitions; and he concentrates his insights into crisp, provocative, little summaries. Examples of this last include “The Civil War was fought with modern weapons and premodern tactics,” (49) and “William James invented pragamatism as a favor to Charles Peirce” (347).

When it comes to negotiating the really difficult philosophical topics, Menand opens a special bag of tricks. First, he raises the reader’s expectation that he is about to communicate something important and understandable: After introducing his four main thinkers (Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey), he says “We are still living, to a great extent, in a country these thinkers helped to make.”

Next he simplifies: Pragmatism is not an idea, but an attitude toward ideas. Then he unfolds that simplification amply enough to provide an advance sketch of the whole project:

What was that attitude? If we strain out the differences, personal and philosophical, they had with one another, we can say that what these four thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea –an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but are tools –like forks and knives and microchips– that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals –that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.

He sets the hook in a similar way when he takes us deeper into Dewey’s thought: “Dewey proceeded to write “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” a very short, very technical paper, which he published in 1896 and never reprinted, and which is the key to his thought.” Note the raised expectation, the sense that we are about to be told the real stuff, and the sense that we are in the hands of a confident (not quite cocky, just confident) author who is competent to explain it all to us.

When he has to make a subtle distinction, he links it to something sharply imagined: “The story of… the difference between Benjamin Peirce’s scientific generation and Charles’s … is the story of two demons. The first made its public appearance in 1812…” The two demons, by the way, are personifications of Laplace’s billiard-ball theory of matter (a set of forces which could only be comprehended by “an intelligence which… could know all the forces by which nature is animated”) and James Clerk Maxwell’s insistence that a being with unlimited knowledge would be able to perceive the individual variations which we simplify into uniform states (like cold pockets within a hot zone).

How about three clear sentences on Hegel? Menand has them:

Hegel believed that the Absolute reveals itself not only in nature… but also in history. Reality is an Idea in the mind of the Absolute, and history is that Idea’s gradual coming into consciousness of itself… The idea is always present, but it can realize itself concretely only in the collective consciousness of human beings, and only through time –like (Hegel said) ‘the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its beginning; it becomes concrete and actual only by being carried out, and by the end it involves.”

Well, okay, relatively clear. But certainly motivating.

I read The Metaphysical Club to situate John Dewey, an author who is the opposite of Louis Menand. Dewey could be clear, but he was constitutionally incapable of writing an interesting or motivating sentence. Influential he may have been, but his writings are dull, dull, dull; a wall-to-wall carpet of utterly numbing dull berber. Menand notes this wryly: “In later years Dewey deliberately adopted an antirhetorical style, in the belief that readers should be persuaded by the cogency of the thought rather than the felicities of the prose. He was uncommonly successful in getting rid of the felicities.” And later, citing Henry Steele Commager, “a generation (or part of a generation anyway) seems to have found Dewey’s manner of calmly and often rather colorlessly chewing through received ideas irresistible and indispensable.”

That Menand can make even Dewey interesting is perhaps the ultimate testimony to his power of authorial enchantment. If you’re in the market for an introduction to American pragmatism, read The Metaphysical Club. If you want to try out some Menand stylings for a lower price of admission, he’s written lots of essays that you can find linked by his fan club.