Why I am a Christian Despite Evidence to the Contrary (or Testing the R-squared of a World View)

Human brains try to make sense of the data of the world and of our consciousness, organizing it into a system with coherence and correspondence to reality. We craft a world view to explain a diverse range of empirical, psychological and social data. But there is a saying in science that if you want to measure a trend, never measure more than two points because the more data you have the less likely it will be that you can explain it with an elegant model. And that is the problem in the data-rich[1] post-modern culture is that it is hard to hold together with a simple, parsimonious model. Conflicting data leaves any world view that seeks generality in a position of cognitive dissonance.[2]

Science has dealt with this problem for decades. We use statistics to evaluate the ‘fit’ of explanatory models, which allows us to evaluate the extent to which the model explains empirical reality, while remaining agnostic with respect to factors causing observations do diverge from the model. We call this ‘goodness of fit’ analysis.

This gets to the problem with our discourse, be it political, theological, or marital. We assume that singular data points can make and break a model, without considering how the model performs in explaining the overall data set. For example, while there are very good Christian approaches to reconcile the Biblical creation narrative and the evolutionary narrative,[3] the materialist, naturalist, and even positivist world views fit that data point better. However, when it comes to two of the most fundamental empirical observations that our models of reality have to explain: existence and consciousness,[4] theistic worldviews outperform the secular options.

The problem with talk about, say ‘the problem of evil’ or ‘the fine tuning of the universe’ is that it divorces a single data point and goes all in on a single observation, when the way to evaluate a world view is on overall goodness of fit. Consider the following cartoon of a data set of empirical observations.

There is no simple, elegant model that will explain all of the variability in this data. Even the best possible fit will do well on certain data points and poorly on others. World view selection should not be a process of precisely explaining all of the variation, but optimizing the goodness of fit and then going to work on the residuals.

Some worldviews will explain individual observations better than the optimal world view but will have a poorer overall ‘goodness of fit.’ Consider the two following models of reality. Both are parsimonious and therefore, both have ‘residuals[5]’ for all data points. Notice, world view 1 is a better overall explanatory model of the observations, but world view 2 provides a better explanation of some of the data (e.g. it generates a smaller residual with the problematic data point highlighted). In the simplest statistical language, we can measure the goodness of fit of a model by its r-squared (where a ‘high’ r-squared corresponds to a good fit[6] and a ‘low’ r-squared corresponds to a poor fit). [7]



This changes our approach to reasonable discourse; because the ‘best fit’ world view does not have to provide the best explanation for every observation…it just has to provide the best overall explanation of all observations. So it is totally reasonable to say stuff like “Yeah, I think your world view provides a better explanation of this issue. That reduces my goodness of fit (r-squared) but not enough to change my working model of reality.”

Atheism can have a better explanation of the problem of evil[8] and origins but has higher residuals on the ‘anthropic principle,’[9] contingency, universal impulses for justice and beauty, existence and consciousness. Being explicit about the requirement to fit multiple, diverse data points with a world view adds context to the discussion of any one. Atheism is coherent, credible, and compelling, but, from my perspective, Christianity has a higher r-squared. Same with Islam, which has lower residuals on a few observations (different ones than Atheism) but overall has a lower r-squared[10] as I compute the sum of the residuals:

And this is where confirmation bias can be so powerful. By focusing our attention (and the attention of others) on observations that our world view explains well, we can create the illusion of a best fit. This is one of the reasons I try to read and study broadly and outside of my tradition. By reading secular literature and residing in academic disciplines that tend to be antagonistic to my world view, I can honestly identify the places where my world view returns high residuals. But I have also come to believe that Christianity offers the ‘best fit’ to my empirical, psychological and mystical experience.[11]

An alternative to this is to go with a more complicated model that explains more of the data. This is where pluralism has been so successful. Pluralism complicates the model to explain more of the data and decrease the residuals. However, it is not a parsimonious model and so it does not add much explanatory information to the data. It has no generality. It is just a restatement of the data. This decreases the residuals, but is too contrived to be likely.

Additionally, it has been popular for the ‘new Atheists’ to compare Christianity to ‘extinct’ ancient relations (like Egyptian or Babylonian religious systems) or, and arbitrary imaginary one (they enjoy ‘the church of the flying spaghetti monster’[12]).

But this is not a useful argument. Those world views have no serious contemporary adherents because, they not only have dismal r-squared, but they do not provide a superior explanation of a single observation. Their residual is higher than serious contemporary world views on EVERY observation.

This process of evaluating the goodness of fit is something everyone does either implicitly or explicitly. This is why world view allegiances change so infrequently. World view adherence has inertia of past residual computation. So even if a conversation or a book changes you residual on one or two observations, overall goodness of fit only changes over time. ‘Sudden’ world view changes (like Updike’s patriarch in Lilies of the Valley who loses his faith while walking down the stairs in one day, or CS Lewis’ motorcycle ride where he reports that at the beginning he wasn’t a Christian and at the end he was) are really the result of a process of the long term evaluation of residuals finally shifting the balance to a different model.

This post was written while listening to The Animal Years by Josh Ritter

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[1] Re: the famous maxim that a culture that is data rich is attention starved.
[2] There are three major ways that emerging generations deal with this cognitive dissonance. (1) Uncritically adopt the prevailing model and stop taking data to assess it. This leaves more time for economic pursuits, video games or hooking up. This seems to be the most popular approach. (2) Adopt pieces of classical and innovative models ad hoc. It is pretty common for us to maintain compartmentalized and contradictory models of reality and apply them to different problems in our lives. (3)Adopt a well attested, historical metanarrative (e.g. positivism, Christianity, Islam, existentialism**) and either ignore or actively work to resolve the cognitive dissonance that it generates with data that doesn’t fit well, making adjustments where necessary, but keeping the central assertions intact.
**footnote to footnote: Anyone who has read this blog for very long knows that existentialism has been employed effectively by Christians and atheists. Most of my favorite nineteenth century Christian thinkers (Kierkegaard, Pascal and Dostoevsky) are counted as proto-existentialists. And most of my favorite atheists (Camus, Sartre, Foucault) were existentialists. But I am using it here in the later sense as a non-theistic alternative to positivism (because despite the recent popularity of positivism, I just don’t find it credible enough to afford it the status of a ‘credible historic metanarrative’). In my opinion existentialism is, by far, the most workable form of atheism. I have found positivism entirely useless in moving from ‘how things are’ to ‘how should I live,’ which a world view absolutely must do.
[3] I am doing a seminar that will cover at least a dozen such attempts in a couple weeks. Look for an MP3 to show up on this site and/or the preaching site.
[4] Why is there something instead of nothing? And why do we, as loosely bound collections of elements, cohere as a ‘self’?
[5] A residual is a quantification of the deviation between the observation and the model. For example, linear regression optimizes the ‘best fit’ model by minimizing the mean square of the residuals.
[6] Lower sum of the square of the residuals.
[7] I am using linear regression here as a heuristic which, of course, is an absurd analogy…but it is intuitive and makes the case I am trying to make.
[8] We live in a vacant, uncaring universe and only exist as individuals because every generation that donated genetic material to our collection got that genetic material into future generations primarily through violence, seduction or deception…so of course that is how we treat each other.
[9] Seriously, Dennitt, Dawkins et al. seem a little absurd mounting such a virulent assault on theism from their self-declared empirical high ground only to invoke the entirely non-falsifiable (and empirically unattested) Smolinian parallel universes to respond to ‘fine tuning’ arguments. The anthropic principle isn't a slam dunk for theism. But our interlocutors ought to have the courage to cede the lower residual to Christianity and then try to claim the better overall fit. It would be a more honest conversation.
[10] Than both, in my opinion.
[11] It is confirmation bias for atheists to restrict observations to those that are measurable. Our experiences of consciousness and what sociologists call the broad human experience of transcendence (in various forms) are observations the model has to account for. Those of us who have had limited direct experiences of transcendence tend to have a higher tolerance for substantial residuals on the mystical data. But a model still has to account for them.
[12] This is not philosophy, or even rhetoric…this is bullying. To compare Christianity to ancient Egyptian religions may not be accurate, but at least it is fair. The ‘flying spaghetti monster’ stuff is just douchey. It is an example of a common tactic in this literature to shame or ridicule rather than argue. It is an appeal to vanity (you are dumb, you don’t want be dumb do you, be smart) rather than reason. The rhetorical term for this is ‘horse laugh’ and it is effective for changing minds (because of its appeal to vanity) but is an example of precisely the kind of argument outside of the arena of ‘reasonable discourse’ that they accuse theistic proponents of.

Jacob and the Dragon: How Revelation Chapter 12 is like Lost episode 117

Last year I met with a student who was really interested in the cosmic context of the Bible (e.g. what happened before God created, where did angels come from, why did God create…totally impenetrable questions like that). The Christian scriptures are mostly silent on these things. A lot of the most direct information we have on them is near the end of this 1000 page book (in the cryptic “dragon chapter” - Revelation 12[1]). The student posed the obvious question, “why is the first information we get about the beginning, at the end.” Great question. Here is my take on it. The Christian Scriptures are not a paleo-history text, they are a story that we are invited to join. So they often unfold with characteristic narrative flair.

And that’s why Revelation chapter 12 is works in the narrative structure of the Christian Scriptures like the penultimate episode of Lost.


In episode 15 of the final season of Lost,[2] 117 episodes into the story, with scarcely 2.5 hours of narrative remaining, the story went off timeline.[3] It told the story of the ancient history of the island and the cryptic origin of the good and evil characters.[4] As the narrative was building to a climax, JJ took an entire episode to finally let us in on the back story…because the ending would be more meaningful in light of the back story. Back story is tedious until we care about the story.[5] Jacob’s origin only mattered to us because we cared about Jack, Kate and Hurley[6]. This seems like a pretty good parallel for why the pre-Genesis material in the Bible lands 99.4% of the way into the book.

The stuff in Revelation about the angelic fall is temporally situated before the rest of the story. But that is kind of the point. The Bible is a story of God’s protracted rescue of our wayward species…his inversion of the human predicament. Pre-historic[7] cosmic warfare is not the point of the story. It is a different story.[8] And it is only revealed near the end of the narrative where it casts light[9] on the climactic scene of the story being told.

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[1] Generally I ascribe to a preterist interpretation of Revelation (i.e. most of it was apocalyptic code about the Nero persecutions and is neither about the distant past or distant future) but I kind of think Revelation 12 is an exception.
[2] I am considering episodes 16 and 17/18 a single narrative whole, making 15 the penultimate episode.
[3] Which is an odd thing to say about a show that played so much with timelines.
[4] So, I really like JJ. We were into Alias and really liked Lost. But the guy makes things up as he goes along. This is how the Bible is different than Lost. The Bible knows where it is going from the beginning. Genesis points elegantly towards Revelation, through the lens of the gospels. Lost had to add previously unintroduced characters several seasons in just to escalate the narrative enough to sustain a ratings cash cow.
[5] I mean, who would voluntarily sit down and read the Similarion as a stand alone work.
[6] Frankly, mostly Hurley.
[7] I was going to write pre-paleozoic…but I’m not sure I can place it temporally with that kind of accuracy. In City of God, Augustine places the whole angelic narrative in Genesis 1:1. But depending on how you read Genesis 1-3 (something I will be talking about in the fall and, so, will probably trickle into this blog) it is conceivable that these events could have occurred during some era of earth paleo-history.
[8] One I look forward to hearing, but mostly do not know. But it is worth noting, if there is another grand story that we only have hints at, how many other stories are there for us to hear and tell in an eschatological existence. Reality is likely far more drama rich than we know.
[9] Um, there is a bad pun here given that the whole Lost series was about some light in the middle of the Island. I am reserving my thoughts on the Lost finale for another post (in which I’ll argue that the Lost finale left me with precisely the same senses of satisfaction and disappointment as the Battlestar Galacitca finale). This post should come out with my characteristic relevance…which is to say, within a decade of airing.

The ‘Ideal Free Distribution’ of Professional Incompetence: Applying Patch Dynamics to the Workplace

There is a model in behavioral ecology called the “Ideal Free Distribution.”[1] It argues that as animals look for resources they will deplete the ‘patches’ in their range to the same level of yield (an ‘equal reward rate’). A highly productive patch will attract more organisms until competition is sufficient to justify moving to a lesser quality patch that is less densely populated (and, therefore, has a higher yield of food or mates[2]). Therefore, if the basic assumptions hold[3], all patches, regardless of quality, will be depleted to the same yield or reward rate. Any higher quality or less populated patch would simply attract more organisms until the yield drops to the level of the other patches making the migration unprofitable.

The longer I work, the more I think that this is similar to how the workplace operates. I call it my theory of the equilibrium of workplace incompetence. Any workplace is composed of individuals of varying capability and capacity. Every organization has high capacity people[4] and others that are not so much. But if an organization is looking to optimize total performance, rather than individual performance[5] the high capacity people, with a track record for finishing difficult tasks efficiently, will attract more and harder tasks until their capacity is exceeded, relegating them to a level of incompetence comparable to a low capacity worker muddling through a couple projects.

So, regardless of our capability and capacity, we all go home at night feeling overwhelmed and outmatched. This is part of what Genesis 3 calls the ‘toilsome’ nature of work. But it is also what makes work such an intoxicating and devastating ‘god’[6]. Working harder and building your capacity only make you available for more and harder work. The quest to transcend incompetence has inescapable negative feedbacks.

Post Script[7]: Implications for Sabbath

I am convinced that this ‘ideal distribution of workplace incompetence’ is just one of the reasons why we have to build a stopgap of Sabbath and rest into our lives and refuse to allow our vocation to define our value. I love my job, but it does not love me. It makes a vicious god.[8] It needs to be carefully ‘bounded’ by the discipline of Sabbath. But I think one of the reasons Sabbath is underrated is that it is poorly executed.

In John Walton’s commentary on the opening verses of Genesis 2 he argues that “Both roots (of the word Sabbath) sbt and nwh, move away from the all-too-common misconception of rest and relaxation…The idea of refreshment is most likely.”

We tend to equate the idea of a cessation of work with a commencement of entertainment. The common idea is that “I’ve worked hard, now I just want to veg.” But the discipline of Sabbath is meant to create a boundary around your work to keep it from rising to the level of idolatry and to fill the other time with activities that ennoble and rehabilitate our human capacities that the toils of work deaden. By bounding our work with deliberate and purposeful refreshing we might be able to destabilize the incompetence feedbacks…or at least, we can break their psychological power over us.

This blog was written while listening to Sigh no More[9] by Mumford and Sons
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[1] Fretwell and Lucas 1970
[2] If there is not a sociology study that tests this model with the Friday/Saturday evening bar scene there should be.
[3] And, ecology, like economics, is mostly a study of where, when and how the assumptions don’t hold. The interesting thing about patch dynamics is that it is built on an economic model, so many of the assumptions violated are the same assumptions violated in economics (e.g. rational actors).
[4] Note: I did not come up with this theory initially by observing my own career, but the career of one of my co-workers who is the highest capacity engineer I know, and always has more work than he can execute.
[5] Engineering (and other professional) offices try to individualize productivity and build in accountability with ‘billable hours’. But at the end of the day, you have to pay everyone (especially if you refuse to get rid of poor performers – or even – in the case of federal organizations - non-tryers) so project funds end up spread around at the managerial level. This is an inter-cubicle performance subsidy. It is a helpful way to distribute risk (e.g. sometimes projects run into trouble and take longer than expected and sometimes you bang them out more quickly than expected)…but in most offices there are consistent ‘givers’ and ‘receivers.’
[6] A pole around which we center our lives and derive our meaning and value.
[7] Frequent readers of this blog know (1) that most of my favorite content is in the footnotes and (2) if I add a post script it was probably the point of the post all along.
[8] I really think this is what the Scriptures mean by an ‘idol’. Something that we love that does not love us back. Unrequited love creates a situation of asymmetrical relational power which can diminish the dignity of the lover. In the language of the Bible ‘God’ is different from an idol because he is into the relationship for more love than we are. He subverts the standard power relations of asymmetrical affection by holding all the power but also most of the affection. This allows us to totally vest in him without doing violence to our dignity.
[9] I love this album. I don’t care if everyone else does too. Isn’t it interesting that in most things you have to apologize for loving something people hate, but in music the more popular something is the more embarrassed you are to admit you love it.

Cities Part 4b: Return to Kansas City

I traveled to Kansas City last winter and wrote a post about it despite spending less than 48 hours in the city. So when I returned there last week, I figured it was worth a brief follow up travel post.


The first thing of note is that in the 6 days I have spent in Kansas City in my life, I have been there for near record highs and near record lows. It was 109 on Wednesday and was well into the negative double digits when I visited in February. That is a 120 degree swing. I left an apple in my car on Wednesday and when I came back it was literally baked. Which was delicious – I love baked apples. I’m just sayin…

But Kansas City really is a surprisingly fun place…with enough stuff for a second (mostly picture) post.

I was teaching a joint sediment workshop with another sediment specialist. His material included a field day at the Blue River.


This was an urban river which was the site of the biggest civil war battle west of the Mississippi (adding archeological issues to the standard economic, statistical, hydrological, hydraulic and ecological complexities). There are severe flooding and channel degradation issues[1] and we did some cool hydro-geotech testing.


I went running at night when it cooled to a mere 96 degrees. Usually I ran along Brush Creek, which has a really nice running trail along it and is surrounded by classic hotels and one of the higher end shopping and cultural districts. There is even a gondola.


But my last day in town, I went running early in the morning


around the World War I museum.[2]


I also made it to a Royals Game. I love going to ballparks. Especially nice ones. And Kaufman field is a really nice one.


One of the reason I enjoy going to sporting events when visiting a city, is that it is one of the few things you can do with 20,000 to 40,000 of the cities inhabitants. It is a social experience of the place. Unfortunately, the Royals are terrible…only they are better than the hapless Orioles who they were playing…so 20,000 Kansas Cityans is a little on the generous side.

But there was a hilarious moment. Before the game teams often play a montage of the team highlights. So before the game they flashed up this graphic on the big screen.[3]


I thought it was hilarious that they would call their highlight reel ‘Major League Moments’ as if that is the best they can hope for. Even better, they left the screen up there for about 3 minutes…and then just took it down. No highlights. Apparently, the Royals were not even able to clear the bar of moments that seem characteristic of the Major Leagues.

Then there was this building.


I heard a rumor that it was the building used for the climactic scene of Ghostbusters. I didn’t bother to verify this, because it seems like the sort of thing that makes a better story in rumor form. But that is pretty cool and highlights the eclectic nature of Kansas City architecture.

This post was written while listening to the Mumford and Sons channel on Pandora

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[1] It also runs through the zoo, near the ‘Lagoons of Africa’ which led to a number of jokes about it being a unique ‘habitat enhancement’ project…for hippos.
[2] At the base of the tower is a mural that I found pretty moving, with soldiers and civilians, some antagonistic, others battered by war, all converging on a strong angelic figure in the center and four verses from the Bible:

“Behold a pale horse and his name that sat on him was death and hell followed with him.”
“Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders.”
“What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God.”
“Then shall the earth yield her increase and God even our own God shall bless us.”

[3] Apparently it was the biggest screen in the country until the cowboys put their monstrosity in.

A Musical History According to Youtube – and other short film fun

I would like to see a Broadway show that tells the story of western intellectual history based totally on Youtube musical numbers. It could start with the Declaration of Independence:



Then it could move on to the great economic debate[1] of the last century.[2]



And then could move on to the history of science with one of the epic rap battles. This one is my favorite (though it contains entirely too much focus on Hawkning’s disability).



“There are one million…million, million, particles in the universe that we can observe
Your mom took the ugliest ones and put them together into one nerd.”[3]

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And while I am punting on a blog post with clips, I might as well make it worth your while. This is one of the finest deconstructions of western plausibility structures I have seen in some time:



“If they eat glitter”

And finally, here are two videos our resident film maker[4] made for our campus ministry. The first one is just fun featuring phenomenal steady cam work:

Hunted. from Matthew Francis Pye on Vimeo.

And, finally, these are just the credits of a telanovella[5] he did to promote one of our events.

La Vida Collegio: Opening Titles from Matthew Francis Pye on Vimeo.

And yes, that is our half-wit bunny that Frank is stroking.

For the second year in a row, a promotional piece he did for us made it into the UC Davis film festival, and, on top of that, a cynical reviewer from the campus newspaper (who panned many of the entries) kind of went on and on about how much he enjoyed this.

This post was written while listening to the Brand New channel on Pandora

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[1] Note: don’t lose patience with this clip in the first 2 minutes. Once they start throwing down, its transcendent. Also, I’d like to say, that the film makers declare Hayek the winner, but portray Keynes so fairly, that I am not sure that they are even justified calling the match based on their own arguments.
[2] Incidentally, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I think the exchange actually demonstrates the difficulty of the choice. I did not understand the stimulus solution and am not sure it was a solution…but can’t refute those who say that we would be catastrophically worse off without it. But I guess that is the point for me. The modern supporters of Hayek (including his rapping self in the video) seem to present their position as an all or nothing alternative...while the Keynesian alternative seems to fit well into an economic ‘toolbox’ where one solution does not fit every problem. The bust/boom cycle is a problem, but I’m not sure that Hayekian models make it better – it seems like they could make it worse.
Incidentally, the bottom-up/top-down processes are at the heart of a lot of the debate about ecological processes over the last 5 decades and, surprise, you cannot account for ecological processes without both.
[3] These epic rap battles are kind of crass, and the earlier ones are better in content than the later ones (thought the production is better in the later ones). But ‘Nice Peter’s’ other stuff is pretty great too. I recommend his picture songs, especially nom, nom, nom, babies.
[4] Matt Pye, a PhD student in plant physiology.
[5] I have asked him to consider to bring this genre back to tell the story of Joseph and Potipher’s wife when we teach Genesis this year.

Judah, Joseph and the Role of Self-Donation in Reconciliation: An Alternate Explanation of Genesis 44

Introductory Note: I love innovation. I think creativity is one of the things that makes us fundamentally human. But there is one thing I do where I do not value innovation: Biblical Interpretation.[1] In general I try to let the testimony of the historic church and other wise exegetes temper my wild speculations about what a Biblical text means. I do not fully trust my faculties and let the spatio-temporal community offer their checks and balances to keep me honest. Which brings me to this post. I have never understood the story of Joseph and his brothers and have found most commentaries less than persuasive. Last week I finally realized some things about the larger Genesis narrative that seem to put it in focus. I think I finally get it.

Here is the problem. My interpretation seems novel, which makes me hesitant to preach it. So I would like to vet it to a community. You are this community. Please do not hesitate to weigh in with your take on it in the comments section or to pass it on to friends you think might be helpful. Thanks.

Heroes who are not Heroic: Interpreting Hebrew Narrative

One of the biggest mistakes that people make in interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures is assuming that it is a collection of hero stories that tell us how to live. We look at the lives of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Leah, Rebecca and Joseph and try to mine their stories for insights about how to live good, just and beautiful lives. There is just one problem with that. These are horrible people![2] The exegetical gymnastics that authors and preachers sometimes do to find an ennobling lesson from the darker chapters of their lives are often comical, periodically embarrassing and occasionally dangerous.[3]

Christians believe that these texts have to be interpreted Christological, as the narrative of God’s peculiar use of an unremarkable, nomadic, middle eastern tribe to initiate his plan of cosmic redemption for our species. The point of the stories is that he uses people who are alternately horrible and honorable to do this (and often, particularly in the case of Jacob, they forget to alternate to the latter). I think there are two reasons for this:

1) The Bible is not about people. It is about God. And he uses douchenozzels[4] to demonstrate that his purposes in redemption are not contingent upon our frailties. He will win. He will tell a story that ends with justice, beauty, and glory…and it will not be subverted by the bokeness of his friends or enemies (who are often morally indistinguishable).[5]

2) If God can use someone as paradoxically cowardly and courageous as Abraham, or someone as deceitful and industrious as Jacob, or someone as vengeful and prudent as Joseph, for his cosmic narrative of species redemption…then he can use me for the small, localized tasks of redemption he has asked me to be involved in. I am precisely the kind of person God likes to use. And so are you. Being an agent of redemption really is something ‘just anyone’ can do. You do not need to be anything special.

Which brings me to the confrontation between Judah and Joseph in Genesis 44[6], a text I have read dozens of times, but never seen. Now stories that include both Joseph and Judah are interesting because these two men become the two great provinces of the Hebrew Nation:[7] the Northern and Southern kingdoms. Following the Assyrian exile, ‘Judah’ is often shorthand for ‘the people of Israel.’ But that’s weird, because Judah was an enormous a-hole. So it is interesting how this relationship between these two most important sons of Jacob plays out. There are four stories that include these two brothers that becomes an underlying narrative, itself.

Joseph and Judah: The Story within the Story (in Four Acts)

Act 1: The Sale of Joseph

Joseph was the bratty little son of his Father’s favorite wife.[8] And so his brothers decided to kill him. Except one brother, Judah, decides, “why just kill him, when we could profit from this.” So he talks them into selling the boy into slavery and staging his death.



Act 2: The Sex Scenes

The next story we get about Judah placed awkwardly within the story of Joseph’s rise and fall and rise and fall and rise in Egypt. It is a tawdry little tale of Judah’s mistreatment of his daughter in law that ends in her deceiving him into sleeping with her and then publically outing him to extort him into honorable treatment.[9] The placement of the story of Judah’s sexual brokenness seems curious until it is considered as a contrast with Joseph’s sexual integrity in the following passage. [10]



Act 3: Judah’s self donation

Fast forward decades. Joseph is running Egypt, which, because of his ‘insider information with Yahweh’ is the only land that has food in a regional famine. His brothers come to get food and don’t recognize him. What follows is three chapters of mind games as Joseph toys with his brothers. Commentators do all kinds of exegetical gymnastics to explain Joseph’s behavior[11] but I think the parsimonious solution is that Joseph is being a d-bag. He is an emotional mess seeing his brothers (he has to leave the room to cry not once, but twice[12]) and he reacts with an illogical string of actions that seem motivated by a messy mixture of affection and vengeance…but mostly vengeance. The story comes to the head with Joseph threatening to kidnap Benjamin (his only full brother, and his father’s new favorite)…when Judah stands up to him and offers himself instead. In response to this gesture, Joseph breaks down, reveals himself and is reconciled to his brothers.

Act 4: The Will

Before Jacob dies he prophecies over his twelve sons. Joseph and Judah both get honorable treatment but it is clear that the trajectory of God’s rescue operation, his plan of cosmic redemption, will go through Judah’s family…even though Joseph is generally thought of as the most important son. In fact, when we talk about the patriarchs, it is Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph…but this is wrong, the Davidic line goes through Judah…and TAMAR!! Both Matthew and Luke highlight Perez[13] (one of Tamar’s twins by her father in law, Judah) as part of Jesus’ lineage. But more than that, Matthew even mentions Tamar by name in the genealogy, making her the only woman included in the lineage, though she would seem to be the one he would want to forget. I think Matthew is pointing out how his lineage is messianically legit, but messy…making it existentially legit.

Volf, Vengeance and the Role of Self Donation in Reconciliation

Which brings me to Miroslov Volf and the role of self donation in reconciliation. In Exclusion and Embrace Volf deals with the problem[14] that we generally privilege the oppressed morally over the oppressors.[15] And, while nothing seems more unseemly than to morally implicate the oppressed[16], he argues that one of the great violences that oppression does to the oppressed is to force violence into their hearts. The oppressor not only takes their resources and/or dignity, they create the desire for vengeance in the hearts of their victims. So the greatest wickedness the oppressor does is to create wickedness, a network of sleeper cells of future oppressors. This is why history is replete with accounts of power shifts, where the oppressed easily slips into the role of oppressor. The evil of the oppressor is complete. They have fashioned the oppressed in their own image.

Thus “one of the most insidious aspects of the practice of evil (is that) In addition to inflicting harm, the practice of evil keeps re-creating a world without innocence. Evil generates new evil as evildoers fashion victims in their own ugly image.” (81)

And this is what has happened with Joseph. His brothers’ evil against him has made him into them.[17] But Judah has become someone different in the decades since Act 2. There is actually a note of who he had the potential to become at the end of the tawdry episode with Tamar. When she publically embarrasses him, his response was simply: “She is in the right, not me.”[18]

These men did not invent their own brokenness. Their parents had their own soap opera. And the gist of it is that everyone resented the children of the favorite wife (Joseph and Benjamin).[19] But here is Judah, the very one who sold Joseph into slavery, offering himself into slavery in exchange for Benjamin not in spite of him being Rachel’s son but BECAUSE Benjamin is the only remaining son of his father’s favorite wife. This does not justify Jacob’s favoritism, but it shows that Judah cares more about his father (who would die in sorrow if he lost both of Rachel’s sons) than he does about his father’s mistakes.

Volf argues that the cross is the key to reconciliation. That self donation is the only way to break the cycle of violence. And that is what we see in this story. Judah makes Joseph in his own image by selling him into slavery. But then he unmakes that image by offering himself on behalf of the brother he should hate. And so Joseph[20] and Judah become synonymous with Israel. But it is Judah[21], not Joseph, who becomes the conduit of the covenant. And this seems surprisingly apt. Because we know the climax of the story. It is God’s self donation which redeems and disarms his enemies and makes the way for our reconciliation.

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[1] Alternately, conveying the content of these interpretations into a particular culture is a place where not nearly enough creativity is applied.
[2] Mark Driscoll said in his sermon on Gen 4 “The Bible is not a book about good people and bad people…it is a book about bad people and Jesus.”
[3] Dawkins has an account in his angry little book “The God Delusion” where an atheist read the Bible for the first time and found it delightfully full of all manner of embarrassing content. This is why Christians generally steer clear of the OT. Our OT hermeneutics tent to just be an optimistic form of this. But both are exercises in missing the point.
[4] I find it semantically interesting that the various derivatives of the word “douche” has become an unseemly but acceptable pejorative that replaces taboo words. It kind of operates like ‘frack’ (the BSG version not the ‘hunting for gas by shattering shale version’ which has led to the same pun over and over – which, to be fair, is funny every time). Our linguistic rules of taboo are static but language is not.
[5] Genesis often goes out of its way to paint an honorable picture of the Canaanite rulers that the patriarchs interact with. Often the former are more admirable than the latter.
[6] Dan and I are preaching Genesis next year. So I have been studying it for about 3 months and will probably devote over half of my personal study to it for the next 8 months. So, this blog is going to get some Genesis.
[7] The tribes named after Joseph’s sons compose “the Northern Kingdom” referred to as Ephrium, and the other tribes compose the southern kingdom and are often referred to collectively as Judah.
[8] It is often pointed out that the Bible doesn’t forbid polygamy and actually includes multiple examples of it. But the consensus in OT scholarship is that God’s tact on warning us against polygamy is to provide numerous examples of how it goes poorly. There are no Biblical examples of men taking multiple wives where it does not cause them problems.
[9] And, of all the brothers, and all their wives, this the baby produced by this lurid little affair becomes the line of the great Davidic monarchy and of the Messiah. More on this later.
[10] We have laid out our messages for Genesis, and in 18 passages that we are going to teach, this is the only one where we think the author is actually holding up a character as a moral example to be imitated.
[11] And, worse, derive moral principles from it.
[12] Actually, he cries 5 times in the larger story.
[13] The relation of Tamar’s twins is curious. One of the themes of Genesis (and the Hebrew Scriptures in general) is that God is not held to cultural convention or expectation. Not once, does he select the oldest son to propagate his people, with the possible exception of Perez. But not really, because it is not entirely clear who the first born is between Perez and his brother…which goes beyond flaunting the cultural expectation that the first born has primacy to the point of almost mocking the convention.
[14] “From a distance, the world may appear neatly divided into guilty and perpetrators and innocent victims. But the closer we get the more the line between the guilty and the innocent blurs and we see an intractable maze of small and large hatreds, dishonesties, manipulations and brutalizes, each reinforcing the other…Paul strips down the pretense of innocence.” (p 81)
[15] Now anyone who reads the Bible knows God favors the oppressed and calls us to do the same. But Volf argues that that is an epistemological favor, and a call to end opression, not a moral or intrinsic prefernce. The key to Christian interactions with power structures is we must act on behalf of the oppressed without loosing the humanity of the oppressor.
[16] It smacks of “they had it coming”.
[17] And it is not just his treatment of his brothers. It is clear from the story that he uses his God given insight not just to provide relief to Egypt and the surrounding countries, but to extort the working people of those nations and enrich the Pharaoh at their expense. There are two attempts I have seen to defend Joseph’s actions here: 1) he puts the serfdom tax at 20% which is a relatively light burden compared to what he could have required or 2) Goldengay suggests he was just deeply committed to ‘nationalization’ of the agriculture industry to moderate boom-bust cycles (which is hilarious given the animosity US evangelicals have for ‘nationalization’ – and I suggest that this is primarily an attempt at tongue-in-cheek, wink at us by a cheeky brit). But it is this policy that eventually leads to the enslavement of the Hebrews and the necessity of the exodus. So I am inclined to think it was a ‘moral blind spot’ for Joseph, like his vengeance. Now, I can’t believe anyone is still reading this note, but this also illustrates something else I believe. It is difficult to quantify moral or spiritual maturity because it is not univariate. Joseph was sexually virtuous and had business integrity but struggled with unforgiveness and, um, oppression. It doesn’t make him a villain or a hero. It makes him a person. But we tend to overvalue the moral categories we are good at in order to evaluate ourselves as ‘good people’ and undervalue the stuff we suck at. We cannot be plotted neatly on a univariate scale of goodness. We all have moral blind spots.
[18] Genesis 38:26 This is reminiscent of the story of Nathan and David.
[19] And this is probably more than just petty jelousy. Leah’s story is the tale of a woman mistreated by all the men in her life, who responds with bitterness and her own vengeance, until she finally finds a love that will not fail or mistreat her in Yahweh. So you could see how Leah’s 6 sons would hold a grudge against Rachel’s side of the family.
[20] Actually, Eprhium, Joseph’s son.
[21] And Tamar!!!!! Which is just great. Judah is selected to be the tribe of promise, but through their patriarch’s messieiest relationship. As I argued at the beginning, it is a story of redemption in spite of…and often even leveraging crass brokenness. As Joseph himself famously said “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.” God’s periodic use of evil to bring about a good good does not condone the evil, but is meant to take the sting out of it until he undoes it for good.

Father’s Day and the Death of Sentimentality

One of the marks of my generation – a mark I share - is a general incapacity for sentimentality. This means that many of the social commitments that used to be enforced by sentimental notions of faith, family, and duty are mysterious to us. So we end up having to re-craft these roles out of motivations that either emerge from idealist notations of the true, good, and beautiful or out of our pragmatic impulses for self preservation. We usually default to the latter and it usually ends up looking something like this[1]:

Pete: You don't ever think about divorce?

Ruxin: I've thought about it. But I would never do it.

Pete: What, you have like a moral stipulation ...

Ruxin: No. If Sophia and I split up, 50 percent of the time I would have to spend 100 percent of my time with my kid. Right now, I'm rocking like 50 percent coverage 30 percent of my time, you cannot beat those numbers. Also - If we got a divorce, she would get half of my money, making me ostensibly poor, yet still paying her to just get pounded by other dudes, which will happen because she is still smoking hot, whereas I look like a Nazi propaganda cartoon.


And even when we are inspiring, we are not very inspiring.[2]



Yet the divorce rate has been steadily dropping since the 1980’s.[3] We are the children of divorce of the friends of children of divorce. We know sentimentality won’t carry us for decades but we know the fallout of breaking a family sucks. There is a great scene in a French film from a couple years ago[4] where a dying hedonist is talking to the woman engaged to his son, a man with a wandering heart of his own:

Daughter in Law: When I met Sebastien, I said: With him it's forever, there'll be no one else.

Dying Man: I hope it lasts, for your sake. Because, you know, love...

Daughter in Law: No, no, no! Not "love." Mom and Dad talked like that. "Love." I love you. I love you too much. I don't love you. You can't build a life on pop-song philosophy. Love Me Tender. Love, Love Me Not. It's ridiculous. My parents divorced when I was 7. For several years Dad continued to come over for Sunday lunch. Half an hour before he left, I'd vanish. I'd be lying on the ground in front of his car so he couldn't leave. My kids won't go through that. So now my nocturnal pleasures are provided by my giant-screen Toshiba at the foot of my bed.


But deep down, we want to believe that there is something beyond pragmatic resignation.[5] While sentimentality seems foolish, we are a generation that longs to be part of something transcendent.[6]



Which brings me to Father’s day, yet another artifact of a generation that found ways to not only build a life on sentimentality but also built an economy on sentimentality. This Father’s day is a little different for me, because two weeks ago we had our third kid.[7] That’s a lot of kids for a couple of pragmatic Xers who thought zero sounded like a pretty good number 15 years ago. But that is kind of the point. Making the move from sentimentality to pragmatism was not enough for me.[8] I had to go beyond pragmatism to purpose and beauty before I could even entertain the idea of children. I needed a picture of reality that intrinsically[9] ennobled parenthood. I needed a theology of children.

I needed to recognize that I was designed to live for someone else and I needed to stare down the fear of failure and accept the challenge of working with God (and, often, against our cultural inertia) to raise agents of justice, kindness, curiosity, beauty and the gospel in a generation that will be lovely and broken in ways we cannot yet imagine. These fundamental commitments have moved parenthood from pragmatic resignation punctuated by moments of happiness to an ennobling passion and one of the great joys[10] of my life.

This post was written while listening to The New Pornographers station[11] on Pandora


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[1] From the hilarious, but crass FX comedy “The League” which follows four high school friends who stay connected through a fantasy football league.
[2] So many great lines: “She told me many stories about the chinchilla in her class room.” “Do you want to know why your father spends so long on the toilet. Because he’s not sure he wants to be a father.” “So I got up off the toilet.”
[3] This is just one of the things that infuriates me when boomers b&m about ‘kids these days’ and how Xers are ruining the world. We are not innocent. We have our unique generational sins. But we have redeemed some of the brokenness of those who are reluctantly bequeathing this world to us…and are not, on balance, more broken.
[4] The Barbarian Invasions
[5] This is why so many of us wait so long to have kids. My brother likes to say that the benefits of marriage are easy to foresee while the disadvantages are difficult to predict…while children are just the opposite: the advantages are impossible to foresee and the disadvantages are obvious.
[6] We are just unwilling to pretend.
[7] A boy. But it really bugs me when people say ‘you finally got your boy.’ We were not ‘trying for a boy.’ We decided to have a third child. My girls are amazing and I would have loved a third. Or, as it stands, it will be fun to experience raising both.
Also, I'll use this as my excuse for a recently quiet blog...though it is really only part of it.
[8] We were married 9.5 years before we had kids because (a) we didn’t want them and (b) we didn’t think wanting them was a good enough reason to have them.
[9] You will even notice a little of this intrinsic argument that ‘this is what we were designed to do’ in Louis C.K.’s monologue.
[10] I have written a couple posts about the unexpected joys of parenthood: here and here
[11] I once posted a facebook status that read: “I wish I either lived in a universe where I did not like The New Pornographers or that they had a different name.” It spawned a lively discussion.

Easter Reflections on...the Honey Badger

This is the Honey Badger…He doesn’t give a s#$%![1]



At 5 million views[2], it is likely that you have already seen this. But what you may or may not have seen is the connection between the climactic confrontations with the King Cobra @2:33…and Easter. Of course that is the sort of essential analysis you have come to expect from this little blog.

The first time I saw this clip, all I could think about was Gen 3:14-15 known as the protoevangelium:

14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

Historically, Christians have seen in this verse, the seeds of the entire story…an epic foreshadowing of the entire narrative. Humans would live at odds with each other and a malevolent cosmic force until a special human child will take it on and bring down this enemy at huge personal cost. [3] “He will crush your head and you will strike his heal.”

That’s right, in this analogy, the Honey Badger is Jesus. The story of Holy Week is that a cosmic champion in mortal personhood [4] plays out this script from the opening pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. He takes down the serpant but is mortally wounded in the process.


The days that passed between the cross and the resurrection are like the moments in the video where our hero, the Honey Badger, is overcome by the snake bite[5]. In those seeming interminable clicks of the YouTube clock, his bravery looks like foolishness.[6] We don’t have the data to do the toxicology in our heads but we know that the King Cobra is mythically deadly. Surely the Honey Badger could not survive that. The first time I watched this clip, I mourned the protagonist in those moments, sure he was dead. But he knows something about being a Honey Badger that we don’t. He is actually far more bad ass than we ever guessed.

And that is the story of Holy Week. Jesus lets the serpent bite him instead of us…because he can take it. He can emerge on the other side of death and wrap up his victory over the decimated serpent.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (another, more intentional, illustration of the events of Holy Week), when Aslan emerges from death, he says:

“Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know.[7] Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation.[8] She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack[9] and Death itself would start working backward."


The Honey Badger’s fearlessness (he really doesn’t give a s$#%) is motivated by appropriate confidence that the serpent mortal bite can only inflict a fleeting death…that he will emerge the victor[10] and that the cost is worth the prize. It is a deeply flawed illustration[11], but one that I has captured my imagination this week. I hope that you find this weekend reflective and life giving.

This post was written while listening to The Suburbs by The Archade Fire
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[1] So, there is more colorful language in my latest two posts than in the previous hundred. This should not be considered a trend (though I really want to work a Tim Minchum song into a post I am working on…so there might be a little more to come).
[2] And rightly so. This is a perfect YouTube clip because it works on two levels. The narration is hilarious but the Honey Badger really is remarkable. It works on the levels of joy and wonder, two of the fuels of our humanness.
[3] Revelation 12 paints the picture of these events as an epic battle between a cosmic champion and a serpentine dragon. I am working on a post about how this chapter is like Lost episode 118.
[4] As long as we are making strained comparisons between the gospel accounts and a silly four minute YouTube clip…the comparison is actually uncanny. Jesus spends the first half to 2/3rds of the gospel texts declaring a new mode of humanness and a new reign of Yahweh…demonstrating his authority over the dark forces that plague our existence. Then each of these texts spends a disproportionate amount of time on the climactic confrontation in the final week. This is not unlike the Honey Badger wreaking havoc on lesser serpents and vermin in the first half of the clip and then turns to the climactic death to life battle at the end.
[5] This is really the only place where I question the artistic choices of our skilled narrator. He shows his hand too quickly, not allowing the tension of the perceived death of our hero to strike us with full force.
[6] Along the lines of Schweitzer’s ‘he threw himself against the cosmic wheel and it crushed him” Christology.
[7] Note: The mystery of the Atonement is a rich and multi-faceted idea. In this post I am stressing the Christus Victor aspects of the doctrine (the oldest and most culturally foreign to us), as Lewis did in his story. However, this does not supplant the Anslelmic ‘satisfaction’ aspects of the cross that evangelicals are more familiar with or the ‘moral example’ implications that Liberal (capital L to indicate a precise theological movement not a political leaning) theologians prefer. Any theology of the cross that champions one of these to the neglect of the others is flawed.
[8] My brother pointed out that the film changed this word from “a different incantation” to “another interpretation” and quipped: “a meditation on that script change will say everything about our culture and the caution I was trying to voice above”
[9] There is a picnic spot in Davis, where I sometimes meet the girls for lunch to watch the trains, that is a big slab of rock split in two…we call it Aslan’s Table.
[10] OK, one more strained parallel. In Christian theology, the cross and resurrection initiate the victory but, of course, the world in general and my heart in particular is still full of all manner of darkness. The victory is implemented over time. One author described the resurrection like D-Day. Once we took the French beach heads in WWII, the outcome of the war was determined. But there was still a lot of suffering, and work and war that was still ahead of them. Thus, after the climactic struggle with the King cobra, the Honey Badger turns his energy to a sustained program of snake eradication.
[11] I’m not suggesting that we respond to the liturgical prompting “He is Risen” with “Yeah, the Honey Badger doesn’t give a s$%^.” And like all parables, it is only intended to illustrate a central idea – not to correspond to the prototype in every detail.