live well. the message of carl creasman.

December 2, 2014 at 7:59 am, by Carl

David Brooks writes for The New York Times while also teaching at Yale and appearing on various news shows.  I have found his words, both written and spoken, to be insightful and deep.  He is from a conservative Jewish tradition, so comes at life with a deep well-spring of faith.  He spoke to a Christian group call The Network back in September.  His address deserves to be read by all who claim Jesus as central to their life.  In the address, David discusses how modern Christianity has built walls between it and the world.  Later, he then turned it around to express that he believes there are ramps between the non-Christian world and our faith.  Here are a few excerpts, but the entire address is powerful…you should go read it all.

On the views of current young adults:  

And these kids turn into the junior workaholics of America. I teach them at Yale….They have tremendous faith in themselves. In 1950, the Gallup organization asked high school seniors, “Are you a very important person?” And at that point 12 percent said yes. They asked the same question in 2005 and 80 percent said, “Yes, I am a very important person.” Americans score 25th in the world in math, but if you ask Americans, “Are you really good in math?” We are number-one in the world at thinking we are really good at math.  Time magazine asked Americans, “Are you in the top one percent of earners?” Nineteen percent of Americans are in the top 1 percent of earners. So they have a lot of self-confidence. And the great desire for fame. Fame used to be low on a value. Now fame is the second-most desired thing in young people.  They did a study, “Would you rather be president of Harvard or Justin Bieber’s personal assistant, a celebrity’s personal assistant?” And of course by 3 to 1 people would rather be Justin Bieber’s personal assistant. Though to be fair I asked the president of Harvard, and she would rather be Justin Bieber’s personal assistant.

On two types of personal values:

The way I express this contrast, this hunger for success is by two sets of virtues, which you could call the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. And the résumé virtues are the things you bring to the marketplace which you put on a résumé. And the eulogy virtues are the things you get expressed in your eulogy. And these are non-overlapping categories. So the eulogy virtues are to give courage, to give honor, what kind of relationships do you build, did you love. And in my secular culture, we all know the eulogy virtues are more important, but we spend more time on the résumé virtues. Another way to think about this is the book Joseph Soloveitchik, the great rabbi, wrote in 1965 called “Lonely Man of Faith.” He said we have two sides to nurture, which he called Adam One and Adam Two, which correlate to the versions of creation in Genesis.

• Adam One is the external résumé. Career-oriented. Ambitious. External.
• Adam Two is the internal Adam. Adam Two wants to embody certain moral qualities to have a serene, inner character, a quiet but solid sense of right and wrong, not only to do good but to be good, to sacrifice to others, to be obedient to a transcendent truth, to have an inner soul that honors God, creation and our possibilities.
• Adam One wants to conquer the world. Adam Two wants to obey a calling and serve the world. Adam One asks How things work. Adam Two asks why things exist and what we’re here for.
• Adam One wants to venture forth. Adam Two wants to return to roots.
• Adam One’s motto is “Success.”
• Adam Two’s motto is “Charity. Love. Redemption.”

So the secular world is a world that nurtures Adam One and leaves Adam Two inarticulate.

On the Walls of American Christianity and the Church:

So the first wall is the wall of withdrawal. Many of my Christian friends perceive a growing difference between the secular world and the Christian world, the difference between Jay-Z and Hillsong and the Jesus culture….Many of my friends fear they are being written out of polite society because they believe in the Gospel. With that comes a psychology of an embattled minority. With that comes a defensiveness and a withdrawal, a fear, and a withdrawal into sub-culture. ….I think that’s being governed by fear and not love.

The second wall is the wall of condescension.  In a lot of the walls come from a unique psychology which I have observed. Which is a weird mixture of – this is going to sound a little rude – in the Christian culture a mixture of wanton intellectual inferiority complex combined with a spiritual superiority complex….It’s off-putting. People who have come to Christ recently may not at all, may not have lived in the church for very long. But they have lived, and read and thought and they haven’t come back from these experiences with empty hands and they have as much to teach as to learn.

The third wall is the wall of bad listening. In my experience, I have had amazing diversity of quality of listening among my friends who are in the Christian community. Some are amazing. Ask great questions. Allow each individual experience to express itself and be known.  But I have certainly known others who have come to each conversation armed with a set of maxims, teaching and truths and may apply off-the-shelf truths and maxims without learning the uniqueness of each situation.

And the final wall is this wall of intellectual insecurity.  I teach at Yale. We are not nice to each other. We brutally attack each other. We are not good Christians.  But out of that comes a hardened appreciation of truth. And sometimes we are brutal to each other because we are brutal in pursuit of the truth and we don’t take…we take our ideas very seriously and we’re sometimes willing to hurt each other because the ideas are so serious. Sometimes we veer on the side of just nastiness. Sometimes in my experience in Bible Study, the desire to be nice, the desire to be affirming, softens all discussion. So the jewel of truth is not hardened. Vague words and ethereal words are tolerated because nobody wants to be too offensive.

On the Ramps to connection between the world and the Church:

So the first ramp is simply the ramp of the Christian example. I was writing a column about how hard it is to teach morality in a classroom, and I got an email from a guy named Dave Jolly, who’s a veterinarian out in Oregon. He wrote to me…And those two sentences leapt out at me and have stayed with me. “What a wise person says is the least of what they give. The message is the person.”

The second ramp is the ramp of spiritual consciousness. We have tried in my business to cure poverty by throwing money at it. We’ve spent trillions of dollars trying to do that. But poverty is rarely about just money. It’s part money but not just money. It’s about behavior, character, self-control, security. It’s about a child having a brain not stressed with fear so they can perceive the world accurately. Who can form their secure attachments so they can attach to teachers, who can reform behavior because people have talked to them in the language or morality and the language of “ought.”

The third is the language of good and evil. This language has become absent in the secular world. The word “sin” is now mostly used in reference to desserts. But if you want to talk about the deepest affairs of the heart, only words like sin, soul, redemption really work. And if you don’t have those words you’re losing the tools.  People don’t change because they decide to be better. If that happened, then New Year’s Resolutions would work. People decide to change because they elevate their loves. And as St. Augustine said, “You become what you love.”  But if you can’t talk about the struggle of sin, if you can’t talk about why some loves are higher than other loves, and ordered versus disordered loves, you don’t have the moral vocabulary, the mental toolkit to think about how to be better.

The fourth ramp is inverse logic. Secular society works by an economic logic. Effort leads to reward. Input leads to output. Investment leads to profit.  You worship a Savior who teaches an inverse logic, which is a moral logic, not an economic one. You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain the strength within yourself. You have to conquer your desires to get what you crave. Success leads to the greatest failure which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success which is humility and learning. In order to fulfill yourself you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself you have to lose yourself.  That inverse logic is the moral logic. There is no other.

And so the final ramp the Christian world has offered America is simply the example of tranquility. One of my Yale students, and this was out of the mouths of babes, said, “You know we all work so hard for success but we all know success doesn’t lead to peace.”

I know, I know…that’s a lot, but if you are a faithful reader, you know I appreciate the written word and deep logic.  David Brooks nails it.  I’ve only given you about 30-40% of what he wrote, so please take the time to read the entire transcript.   It may change your life.

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