Numerical Growth as a Double Standard
Posted on February 7, 2011 by Dan
I want to share a great quote from Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion, by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck:
“Fix-the-church books almost always figure that declining church attendance … means the church has messed something up. Even though the new crop of church books decry the old church-growth models, they still operate with the same basic assumption: namely, that churches should be growing and something is wrong with the church that isn’t.We’ve written before that ministry progress is not measured by numerical growth, but by the creation of disciples who make other disciples. But this post is exposing the double standard, those who would “have their cake and eat it, too.”
This assumption, however, is alien to the New Testament. Didn’t Jesus say tell us that “the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matt. 7:14)? Wasn’t the early church of Philadelphia commended by the Lord Jesus even though they were facing opposition and had “little power” (Rev. 3:7-13)? There is simply no biblical teaching to indicate that church size is the measure of success.
Authors like George Barna like to use statistics showing the decline in church attendance to damn the church, but then quickly defend the 5-person house church because “progress is not measured by numbers.” So if the institutional church is losing numbers, it is always because they are doing church wrong. But if organic churches are not growing, then it’s for some other reason. All I’m asking for here is fairness. Isn’t it possible that a particular church isn’t growing because it is rightly teaching Law and Gospel and people don’t like to hear it? Isn’t it possible that a particular organic church isn’t growing because of the home leader’s pride? It works both ways, which is why numbers are not a good indicator of spiritual maturity nor ministry progress, no matter what church model we’re discussing.
(The following is an edited excerpt from The Belief Instinct, which will be published Feb. 7.)My response:
The scientific jury is still out on whether our species is unique among social mammals in being able to conceptualize mental states—other species, such as chimps, dogs, scrub jays and dolphins, may have some modest capacity in this regard. But there's absolutely no question that we're much better at it than the rest of the animal kingdom. We are natural psychologists, exquisitely attuned to the unseen psychological world. Reasoning about abstract mental states is as much a trademark of our species as walking upright on two legs, learning a language, and raising our offspring into their teens.
There is a scientific term for this way of thinking—"theory of mind." It's perhaps easiest to grasp the concept when considering how we struggle to make sense of someone else's bizarre or unexpected behavior. If you've ever seen an unfortunate woman at the grocery store wearing a midriff-revealing top and packed into a pair of lavender tights like meat in a sausage wrapper, or a follicularly challenged man with a hairpiece two shades off and three centimeters adrift, and asked yourself what on Earth those people were thinking when they looked in the mirror before leaving the house, this is a good sign that your theory of mind (not to mention your fashion sense) is in working order. When others violate our expectations for normalcy or stump us with surprising behaviors, our tendency to mind-read goes into overdrive. We literally "theorize" about the minds that are causing ostensible behavior.
The evolutionary significance of this mind-reading system hinges on one gigantic question: Is this psychological capacity—this theory of mind, this seeing souls glimmering beneath the skin, spirits twinkling behind orbiting eyes, thoughts in the flurry of movement—is this the "one big thing" that could help us finally understand what it means to be human? Could it tell us something about how we find meaning in the universe?
As a human being, you're prone to overextending your theory of mind to categories for which it doesn't properly belong. Many people remember fondly the classic film Le Ballon Rouge ("The Red Balloon," 1956) by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, in which a sensitive schoolboy—in reality Lamorisse's own 5-year-old son, Pascal—is befriended by a good-natured, cherry-red helium balloon. Absent dialogue, the camera follows the joyful two, boy and balloon, through the somber, working-class streets of the Ménilmontant neighborhood of Paris, the glossy red balloon contrasting sharply with the bleak old-Europe atmosphere while adults, oblivious to the presence of an inanimate object that has apparently been ensouled by an intelligent gas, are largely indifferent, even hostile, to the pair. Eventually, a mob of cruel children corners the boy and begins pelting the "kindhearted" balloon with stones, ultimately popping it.
The plot of Le Ballon Rouge exemplifies how our evolved brains have become hypersocial filters, such that our theory of mind is applied not only to the mental innards of other people and animals, but also, in error, to categories that haven't any mental innards at all, such as ebullient skins of elastic stretched by an inert gas. If it weren't for our theory of mind, we couldn't follow the premise of the movie, let alone enjoy Lamorisse's particular oeuvre of magical realism. When the balloon hovers outside Pascal's flat after his grandmother tries to get rid of it, we perceive a charismatic personality that "wants" to be with the boy and is "trying" to leverage itself against the window panes; it "sees" Pascal and "knows" he's inside. Our theory of mind is so effortlessly applied under such conditions that it's impossible to see the scene any other way. In fact, part of what makes the movie so effective is that the young boy in the lead role genuinely believed that the balloon was alive. "The Red Balloon was my friend," recalled a much older Pascal Lamorisse in a 2007 interview. "When you were filming it, did you really feel that way?" asked the reporter. "Yes, yes, he was a real character with a spirit of his own."
As a direct consequence of the evolution of the human social brain, and owing to the importance of our theory-of-mind skills in that process, we sometimes can't help but see intentions, desires, and beliefs in things that haven't even a smidgeon of a neural system. In particular, when inanimate objects do unexpected things, we sometimes reason about them just as we do for oddly behaving—or misbehaving—people. More than a few of us have kicked our broken-down vehicles in the sides and verbally abused our incompetent computers. Most of us stop short of actually believing these objects possess mental states—indeed, we would likely be hauled away to an asylum if we genuinely believed that they held malicious intent—but our emotions and behaviors toward such objects seem to betray our primitive, unconscious thinking: we act as though they're morally culpable for their actions.
Some developmental psychologists even believe that this cognitive bias to see intentions in inanimate objects—and thus formulate a very basic theory of mind—can be found in babies just a few months out of the womb. For example, Hungarian psychologists György Gergely and Gergely Csibra from the Central European University in Budapest have shown that babies, on the basis of their staring response, act surprised when a dot on a computer screen continues to butt up against an empty space on the screen after a computerized barrier blocking its path has been deleted. It's as if the baby is trying to figure out why the dot is acting as though it "thinks" the barrier is still there. By contrast, the infants are not especially interested—that is, they don't stare in surprise—when the dot stops in front of the block, or when the dot continues along its path in the absence of the barrier.
The most famous example of this cognitive phenomenon of seeing minds in nonliving objects, however, is a 1944 American Journal of Psychology study by Austrian researchers Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel. The scientists put together a simplistic animated film depicting three moving, black-and-white figures: a large triangle, a small triangle, and a small circle. Participants watched the figures moving about on the screen for a while and then were asked to describe what they had just seen. Most fell back on a human social behavioral narrative—for example, seeing the large triangle as "bullying" the "timid" smaller triangle, both of "whom" were "seeking" the "affections" of the "female" circle.
So it would appear that having a theory of mind was so useful for our ancestors in explaining and predicting other people's behaviors that it has completely flooded our evolved social brains. As a result, today we overshoot our mental-state attributions to things that are, in reality, completely mindless. And all of this leads us, rather inevitably, to a very important question: What if I were to tell you that God's mental states, too, were all in your mind? That God, like a tiny speck floating at the edge of your cornea producing the image of a hazy, out-of-reach orb accompanying your every turn, was in fact a psychological illusion, a sort of evolved blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? It may feel as if there is something grander out there . . . watching, knowing, caring. Perhaps even judging. But, in fact, that's just your overactive theory of mind. In reality, there is only the air you breathe.
After all, once we scrub away all the theological bric-a-brac and pluck the exotic cross-cultural plumage of religious beliefs from all over the world, once we get under God's skin, isn't He really just another mind—one with emotions, beliefs, knowledge, understanding, and, perhaps above all else, intentions? Aren't theologians really just playing the role of God's translators, and isn't every holy book ever written a detailed psychoanalysis of God? That strangely sticky sense that God "willfully" created us as individuals, "wants" us to behave in particular ways, "observes" and "knows" about our otherwise private actions, "communicates" messages to us in code through natural events, and "intends" to meet us after we die would have also been felt, in some form, by our Pleistocene ancestors.
Consider, briefly, the implications of seeing God this way, as a sort of scratch on our psychological lenses rather than the enigmatic figure out there in the heavenly world that most people believe Him to be. Subjectively, God would still be present in our lives. (For some people, rather annoyingly so.) He would continue to suffuse our experiences with an elusive meaning and give the sense that the universe is communicating with us in various ways. But this notion of God as an illusion is a radical and, some would say, even dangerous idea because it raises important questions about whether God is an autonomous, independent agent that lives outside human brain cells, or instead a phantom cast out upon the world by our species' own peculiarly evolved theory of mind. Since the human brain, like any physical organ, is a product of evolution, and since natural selection works without recourse to intelligent forethought, this mental apparatus of ours evolved to think about God quite without need of the latter's consultation, let alone His being real.
Then again, one can never rule out the possibility that God microengineered the evolution of the human brain so that we've come to see Him more clearly, a sort of divine LASIK procedure, or scraping off the bestial glare that clouds the minds of other animals.
Either way, this cognitive capacity, this theory of mind, has baked itself into our heads when it comes to our pondering of life's big questions. Unlike any science-literate generation that has come before, we now possess the intellectual tools to observe our own minds at work and to understand how God came to be there. And we alone are poised to ask, "Has our species' unique cognitive evolution duped us into believing in this, the grandest mind of all?"
"It’s important to point out that modern philosophy, however, has not been always so friendly to the project of theology. In fact since the eighteenth century, its role has been much closer to mortician than handmaiden. David Hume’s assault on miracles and proofs of God’s existence, Immanuel Kant’s rejection of our cognitive ability to get beyond the limits imposed by the empirical world, the Vienna Circle’s trumpeting of the verification principle and insistence that theological claims fail to express meaningful propositions, and many others have all seriously challenged not only philosophical interest in theology, but also the viability of doing theology at all.Smith is now probably pleased to see the counter-activity of late, in the work of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, if not that of Christopher Hitchens. But what this means is that the naturalists feel threatened by the ground that they have lost. Now is no time for Christian realists to let up. It is no small victory, and certainly a great irony, that God's "last academic stronghold" is the philosophy department. May it move from being last to first, as young people respond to the call to submit their intelligence to the service of Christ the King.
But since the 1960s, the philosophical landscape has changed. Atheist and naturalist Quentin Smith, writing in the journal Philo, charts the trend:
By the second half of the twentieth century, universities and colleges had been become in the main secularized. The standard (if not exceptionless) position in each field, from physics to psychology, assumed or involved arguments for a naturalist world-view… This is not to say that none of the scholars in the various academic fields were realist theists in their “private lives”; but realist theists, for the most part, excluded their theism from their publications and teaching, in large part because theism (at least in its realist variety) was mainly considered to have such a low epistemic status that it did not meet the standards of an “academically respectable” position to hold. The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of [Alvin] Plantinga’s influential book on realist theism, God and Other Minds, in 1967. It became apparent to the philosophical profession that this book displayed that realist theists were not outmatched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy: conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, technical erudition, and an in-depth defense of an original world-view…The Reader in Contemporary Philosophical Theology is a new textbook, coming out at the end of this month, that speaks to this resurgence of interest in Christian doctrine. Edited by Oliver Crisp (based at the University of Bristol, England), the Reader features articles by these leading philosophers apart of this new renewal of Christian philosophy."
…[R]ealist versions of theism, most influenced by Plantinga’s writings, began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians. Although many theists do not work in the area of the philosophy of religion, so many of them do work in this area that there are now over five philosophy journals devoted to theism or the philosophy of religion, such as Faith and Philosophy, Religious Studies, International Journal of the Philosophy of Religion, Sophia, Philosophia Christi, etc. …
Quickly, naturalists found themselves a mere bare majority, with many of the leading thinkers in the various disciplines of philosophy, ranging from philosophy of science (e.g., Van Fraassen) to epistemology (e.g., Moser), being theists. The predicament of naturalist philosophers is not just due to the influx of talented theists, but is due to the lack of counter-activity of naturalist philosophers themselves. God is not “dead” in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.
"The secret to Harry Potter is tied to Rowling’s Christianity... What appears to be a book about witchcraft is a story about Jesus Christ."That's why it's such a great series because it retells the True Story!
"Harry Potter in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series displays Savior qualities every time he defends the wizard (and Muggle) world from the devilish Lord Voldemort. On multiple occasions, Harry willingly presents himself as a sacrifice and, by so doing, is able to destroy the evil wizard. As an innocent baby, Harry becomes the only being to withstand the killing curse, a feat that leaves him with a Christ-like scar on his forehead (instead of his hands and feet). Since his wizard parents are dead, Harry is then raised in humble circumstances - under the stairs of the unbelieving Dursleys, similar to Christ's birth in a stable and his rearing as a carpenter's son. Later, after defeating Voldemort for the second time, Harry lies in a coma for three days, as Christ did in the tomb. As Christ descended into hell, Harry descends to the Chamber of Secrets, and as Christ endured suffering on the cross, Harry endures the Cruciatus Curse. In the end, just as Christ died and was resurrected to overcome Satan and death, Harry dies and returns from death to finally destroy Voldemort. (Wikipedia) "
So wait, it is okay for companies to donate toward gay marriage causes and we never get a news article about that, or toward abortioin, or toward...etc... but when one that has a stated policy of Christian values donates toward groups that oppose gay marriage it is headline worthy? Yeah, there is no bias in media at all (said sarcastically under his breath)I reply:
We can expect more and more of these sorts of headlines as our nation increasingly becomes disengaged from its deistic/theistic moorings. The media may be biased, but they can't be entirely blamed for the situation. The values that Evangelicals hold are indeed becoming more and more suspect, and it in many cases it is ex-Christians who are the skeptics. See this article , "The Leavers: Young Doubters Exit the Church" in Christianity Today: "Imagine a group photo of all the students who come to your church (or live within your community of believers) in a typical year. Take a big fat marker and cross out three out of every four faces. That's the probable toll of spiritual disengagement as students navigate through their faith during the next two decades....What pushed them out? Again, the reasons for departing in each case were unique, but I realized that most leavers had been exposed to a superficial form of Christianity that effectively inoculated them against authentic faith."Person A responds:
So the media's ignorance and prejudice is in a large part a reflection of the religious illiteracy, misinformation and bias of the general public. For example, read some of the comments to this story "Tenessee Pastor: Marriage needed for Church Baptism." Those commentators are not the media. They are our neighbors, family, coworkers. Some of them still understand the Christian faith. But many of them don't, having swallowed the lies of modernist autonomy and postmodern relativism. So what do we do? All too often just serve more pizza at Superbowl lock-ins, play more frisbee, and sing more praise songs.
I agree with you Beth, but can I ask you what you suggest as some good solutions to start moving the minds and hearts toward bibilical morals and toward actaully caring and recognize when they see the values shifting.I reply:
Of course, we will be praying for God to lead us and to soften the hearts and minds of those around us! But here are some other proposals:
Proposal #1: We may need to allow the Lord to winnow His church, the same way he winnowed Gideon's t...roops in Judges 7. Those who are merely "cultural" Christians will need to drop out, and leave only those who are truly committed. That will be a huge blow to the pride and pocketbook of many evangelical churches, but maybe it is the only way to get a good foundation.
Often this sort of winnowing occurs under persecution. We need to start preparing for it: preaching and teaching about the kind of persons God wants us to be, and recalling stories of the saints who have gone before us. So proposal #2: regain a sense of history--reclaim our historical narrative, and don't end the story just with Acts. This will require Protestants to stop the internecine wars with Catholics and other Protestants. (Matt. 12:25) In facing hostile worldviews such as naturalism, we do not have the "privilege" of wasting our energy fighting among ourselves.
Another clue from church history: proposal #3: we might wish to imitate the religious orders that arose in the middle ages--the Franciscans and the
Dominicans. The Franciscans were originally the "right brained" folks , whose ministry emphasized the creative and intuitive aspects of Christian life. The Dominicans were the "Domini Canes"--the hounds of the Lord, engaging in left brain apologetics and running schools. Perhaps it is time we admit that the Gospel might deserve more than just "inductive study" that turns into a values clarification session.
I grew up Southern Baptist. After making my decision for Christ in 1966, I asked my mom how I could learn more about our faith, because Sunday school just wasn't doing it. (When I asked my SS teacher how the Southern Baptists came to be--a question of church history--he sputtered, " Well, from John the Baptist, of course!")
It's this sort of thing that breeds skepticism, no matter what age you are. So proposal #4: we need to offer catechism classes for our kids...teaching BOTH the Bible stories and the THEOLOGY that they embody. Of course, that will mean forcing parents to place their kid's religious instruction participation in sports or other extracurricular activities. Not many parents will do it, but Jesus didn't say all the seeds would land on good ground.
Finally, proposal #5 comes in part from the Pietist heritage of the denomination to which I now belong. We need to offer catechism classes and/or conventicles for adults. Just "making a decision" for Christ isn't going to cut it if the soil isn't regularly watered and fertilized. If we can get adults to commit to Christ and to one another in these small groups, we will break down the temptations toward modernist "autonomy" and strengthen the experience of "participation," which is foundational for a premodern worldview/hermeneutic.
I have no illusions: these groups will be extremely small. Most people will get distracted by the things of this world...but those who don't will be in a position to change that world, through the work of the Spirit in their lives. What would you add or change?
