FORGET NONE OF
HIS BENEFITS, volume
8, number 13, March 26, 2009
Surely there is no one like him among all the people, I Samuel 10:24.
Image over Substance
The nation of Israel decided they wanted to be like every other nation and have
a visible king to rule over them. God relented and directed Samuel to Saul of
the tribe of Benjamin. Samuel anointed Saul as king and then presented him to
the people saying, “Do you see him whom the Lord has chosen? Surely there is no
one like him among all the people.” So the people shouted and said, “Long live
the king!” The author of 1 and 2 Samuel tells us that Saul was an impressive
and imposing figure. He was taller than everyone else, from his shoulders
upward. When Samuel says that no one was like him among all the people, this
surely means that he was striking, handsome, presidential or kingly in
appearance. He had the image. He just looked like a king. Saul’s rule was an
abject disaster, almost from the beginning. He did not have the character for
the job, and this became painfully obvious as his reign played out over several
years.
Today is no different. People generally long for image over substance. If you
are over forty years old then you remember the television commercials of the 1960’s. They were
one minute long, slow moving, and they actually tried to sell us on the
benefits of the product. Do you remember the Shell Oil commercials where a car
had a gallon of gasoline and another car had a competitor’s gasoline, and the
distance each car traveled on one gallon was computed? And then there were the
tire commercials where junk was thrown from the back of a box truck as a car
ran over the debris, and the tires did not go flat. Compare this with today’s
commercials— the thirty second, fast moving, rapidly flashing images that do
not try to sell you on the virtues of the product. It is all about image, name
recognition, anything to grab your attention. Substance is not the issue.
Why is it that we rarely, if ever, see someone seemingly unattractive reading
the news on television? Why do political candidates spend millions of dollars
to project the right image to the electorate? Why do mayors and governors
retain ad agencies to sell their programs to their constituencies? Why did our
president recently go on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno Show? He knows his
program popularity is waning while his personal popularity with many is still
very high. His image “connects’ with many and he wants to cash in on it.
Image over substance has always been a problem. See Saul as king over Israel. But why today
is this problem so pervasive? No doubt postmodernism has impacted us
significantly. Back in the days of modernism (until the 1970’s) scientific fact
and well reasoned arguments would usually carry the day. See the commercials of
that era. But we now live in a postmodern world. Image regularly trumps
substance. But why? Because many have been conditioned to distrust authority.
It goes like this, “Hitler thought he was right. Churchill, Roosevelt, and
Stalin all thought they were right. Each did great harm in his own way. Thus
you cannot trust anyone. They all have their own agenda. There is no difference
between the CIA and the old KGB.” In other words people have lost
confidence in the possibility of objective truth. The only thing left is image.
“I like so and so because he looks good, because he has a presence about him.
He is cool.”
Coupled with the emergence of postmodern thinking is the loss of critical
thinking among the twenty and thirty somethings. Almost without exception, the
only ones studying propositional or syllogistic logic today are homeschoolers
in the Classical Christian School milieu. Most of us over fifty
remember taking at least a few weeks of classes in critical thinking. Not so
today. Most young people simply do not know how to reason, to spot fallacious arguments.
A good example of this in Christian writing is to contrast the writing of James Boice
and Donald
Miller. Boice is cogent, direct, to the point while Miller
rambles. But the young people love Miller.
Because there is a dearth of critical thinking in using syllogistic arguments
or a failure in pointing out fallacious arguments like post hoc ergo
propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) and the argumentum ad hominem
(attacking the person instead of his ideas) the postmodern mind is not
impressed with rational or logical
arguments. Facts are not important. It’s how they feel about the
ideas or the person rather than the logic of what is being said. When one seeks
to use logic to explain a position the likely response is, “Yeah,
whatever.” And the Berkeley
and Columbia University radicals of the 1960’s are now the
tenured professors in universities and colleges. They often are poisoning the
minds of our young people, even Christian youth, who have not the mental
toughness or training to resist their arguments. Many churches, Christian
schools, Christian parents of public, Christian and homeschooling students have
also failed to train the minds and hearts of their students, not giving them
the theological and logical framework of the Christian view of the world so
that they might stand against the onslaught that so often comes. And the
western church largely exacerbates the problem by catering to younger people
with images flashing on a screen in worship services rather giving them Spirit
anointed preaching (what many call logic on fire), failing to engage them in
deeper biblical and theological teaching, treating them like babies instead of
young adults with the potential of using their God-given minds. You have read
the statistics about biblical illiteracy. Pretty frightening stuff!
What are we to do? The problem will not go away quickly. It is a long slow road
back to sanity. There must be a commitment from parents, pastors, and Christian school teachers
to train our young in critical thinking and Christian world view. We need to
teach our children how to debate, write, to spot error, and to stand firmly
without wavering when they encounter error. May it be that you ought also to
think twice before doling out $40,000 per year to put your children in colleges
and universities where professors will do their very best to undermine all that
you have taught them? I am not saying that you are sinning by putting your
children in secular colleges and universities. I am saying, however, that you
need to be sure your child can stand against error, that he knows how to spot
it and refute it.
FORGET NONE OF HIS BENEFITS is a weekly devotional by Reverend Al Baker, pastor of Christ Community Presbyterian Church in West Hartford, Connecticut.
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