At the Start
I realize that I am a simple-minded girl. Doing the things I do, I don’t realize why I’m doing them until I’m well on my way into the project.
Take pottery for example. When I started, in my head I wanted to make coffee mugs and bowls to eat ice cream out of that were beautiful and had the “I made it!” factor. Reality? That was true, but behind that desire I have discovered my big picture goal is that I desire to make the world a more beautiful place.
When I write on the packing orders of every piece I ship to my customers, I write “Thank you for choosing my artwork to make your world an even more beautiful place.”
Or take Jiu Jitsu. I started it because I have the fundamental belief that if I involve myself in my husband’s hobbies and efforts, he’ll be encouraged to continue. To me, if couples have joint activities, there will be more of two hearts knitting together than there might be otherwise. Now that I’m fully engaged in Jiu Jitsu? Oh I’m all in. And why? Partly because choking people is satisfying (they tap before they are actually choked; it’s not weird) and partly because I love being empowered to take care of myself when the need for self-defense arises.
The Need Arose
When I go out on trail on my bike, for example, usually I’m alone. There was this one time when a guy passed me on his bike and I heard him turn around and start to follow me. I was getting all kinds of prepared to jump off my bike and defend myself.
Finally, considering my previous krav maga training, I stopped, turned to face him, and said loudly, “What do you want?” Surprised, he said was wondering if I’d seen a dog that some lady had lost. I told him I hadn’t and that when I’d heard him following me, I was actually planning about how to pull his arms off. He turned around again and went the other way. Good idea.
Why am I Writing?
Why am I telling you all of this? When I started writing this blog and meeting with you, I thought my primary goal was to tell you how I study the Bible. Well, it is, but as I’ve been chatting with you over the last few months, I’ve found that my bigger picture goal is to show you that I’m continually trying to learn how to think better. How to think more clearly and accurately. And since you’re here, you get to join me in my process of learning better how to think. Because I have not arrived at perfect Bible study and I have not achieved perfect thinking. I’ve heard it said, if we aren’t learning, we must be dead.
Do you remember the definition of hermeneutics? We kick the word around, but what does it mean? In simple terms, it has to do with the study of how to interpret. Primarily scripture in our context, of course, but knowing how to interpret one genre of information would overlap into other areas of information.
In order to improve my brain’s ability to absorb information and then process it rightly, I need to mesh a couple of things. One, I need to understand the rules of hermeneutics to accurately interpret. Then I need to recognize my own experiences, predispositions to fallacious and plain wrong ways of thinking. When rules of study and my own flawed thinking merge, if I’m able to step away from myself to analyze objectively, I can make strides towards learning and growing. Maybe if you watch me learn how to think, it will trigger observations in your own thinking and the process will begin in you as well.
Resources
Websites for How We Think
On our dining room table, my beloved and I have a couple of charts he printed from a couple of websites. As we discuss events of our day and analyze them, we are able to assess our thinking and compare to the types of fallacies and cognitive biases. You can get your own chart for fallacies here and the chart for cognitive biases here.
I went ahead and shared them here in total as well, if you’re like me and you don’t like giving out your email address. Jeremy doesn’t mind so I got them from him.
Side note: By the way, if you sign up with your email address to get my blog, I will absolutely NEVER do anything with it because I seriously hate, hate, hate giving out any of my information and I automatically assume you would hate it too.
Lectures I’m Using
Did you know all of the teaching material of R.C. Sproul is available for free during this mandated isolation period?
The lecture series I’m currently engrossed in is called “The Consequences of Ideas” and can be found here. In it, Sproul takes an average of 22 minutes per lecture and marches across history recounting the development of thought through the exploration of life’s fundamental questions. Learning where some of our methods of thought originated is helpful and interesting.
At this point in writing, I’ve now finished that series. Wow. When you combine the pages of fallacies and biases and the thinking of people like Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Russell, you can totally see how we are in some of our messes today.
As you can see, my phone’s web browser is lined up and ready for all kinds of learning from this resource. I can’t wait to listen!
Sproul specializes in systematic theology which has also been helpful in the past; he was such a gifted thinker and teacher. However, at this point I’m more interested in learning about how we got to the place we are in the arena of thinking and how we go to where we are in the Church.
Next, after listening to the line up of philosophers through the ages, I’m going to listening to Apologetics of the Early Church. Excited! Want to listen with me?
This is a link to The Consequences of Ideas.
This is a link to Apologetics of the Early Church.
Wrap Up
An example of what I mean about the meshing of hermeneutic discipline and my own thinking was given to me in one of Sproul’s lectures I heard yesterday while throwing pots.
Sproul said that if you want to understand what a philosopher is trying to say, start with first understanding what question he’s asking or problem he’s trying to solve. After that, discovering his meaning will be easier.
The hermeneutic rules come into play: discover the meaning of the author. Identify and mitigate my own biases of what I think the author is trying to say. Paul was a philosopher. Men after him were philosophers like Augustine and Jonathan Edwards. Theology and philosophy in antiquity were closely related. Even so intertwined as to be rendered almost indistinguishable.
Related to this ability to discover the biblical authors’ meanings, if I can identify what questions or problems someone is trying to answer or solve, I will have better success in ordinary person-to-person conversations as well. Learning how to think will help me to be a better human to my fellow man. Because if we don’t understand one another, we don’t truly connect.
