Thinking horizontally is one example of a cultural divide between geeks (those under 40) and geezers (boomers over 40), according to Warren G. Bennis, a professor at the University of Southern California and Robert J. Thomas, Executive Director of the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business in Boston, Massachusetts. For instance, geeks are more “willing to talk about bringing their faith to work… However, they speak of ‘spirituality’ and ‘meaning,’ not ‘religion’ and ‘God.’”¹ They don’t look vertically for truth, they look horizontally to shared stories.

Younger Americans embrace “plane” truth because they’ve grown up in what Charles Taylor calls a “secular age.”² It defines morality by looking sideways rather than looking up. Most teens, twenty- and thirty-somethings are saturated in this secularism and flinch at a faith that looks up. Yet geeks forget that all horizontal activities (i.e., a society) used to be ordered by a vertical authority (i.e., the sacred). Our modern age has become a “deathwork” because it denies an absolute morality and makes it impossible to say, ‘Thou shalt not,’” wrote sociologist Philip Rieff.³ For example, when you say, “The Bible says…” – a vertical authority – younger people will retort: “Who made you God?”

This, however, could be good news. For too long, geezers have been infatuated with vertical proofs and PowerPoint presentations. This includes Christians. Geeks, on the other hand, are open to patterns. The “four chapter” gospel teases out patterns, not proofs. It turns the Bible horizontally to the landscape orientation and stitches together stories stretched from Genesis to Revelation. Work and rest is a good one for Labor Day. Work was designed in creation as a good thing, along with rest. Yet our default, because of the Fall, is that we often feel guilty when we rest. The Sabbath reminded the Jews that, when they never rested in Egypt, they essentially became pack animals. What can you do to enjoy work and rest? Turn your Bible sideways, “…there was evening and morning, a day” (Genesis 1:3, 6, 13, 19, 23, & 31). Catch that? Every day begins at sunset, when we go to sleep. God created us to first enjoy rest. It’s our destiny in eternity.

What if you told your geek friends a horizontal story explaining why we like to kick back and look forward to Labor Day? There’s nothing wrong with thinking vertically. But Baby Boomer Christians (geezers) have made it an art form, which might be why younger Americans are becoming more resistant to Christianity, according to Barna Research Group president David Kinnamon. “The nation’s population is increasingly resistant to Christianity… the aversion and hostility are, for the first time, crystallizing in the attitudes of millions of young Americans. A huge chunk of a new generation has concluded they want nothing to do with us. As Christians, we are widely distrusted by a skeptical generation. We are at a turning point for Christianity in America. If we do not wake up to these realities and respond in appropriate, godly ways, we risk being increasingly marginalized and losing further credibility with millions of people.”⁴

I think a horizontal faith is an appropriate, godly way to connect Sunday to Monday. When you point out that people live by a common code of ought, is, can, and will – or design, default, do, and destiny – you’re starting with a horizontal authority. It’s a short step from there to the “four chapter” gospel of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.

On May 7, 1963, in Cambridge, England, C. S. Lewis gave his last interview before succumbing to cancer. He said that his faith was most helped by his studies of the literary men of the Middle Ages, and by the writings of G. K. Chesterton – storytellers all.⁵ Perhaps this is why younger people continue to enjoy reading Lewis. “I suggest that we should also do what C. S. Lewis did so very well,” writes Catholic commentator Richard John Neuhaus.

[W]e should tell better stories that winsomely, even seductively, reintroduce the Great Story; being confident, as Lewis was confident, that the pagans then and now, in the fine phrase of Edward Norman, got it “broadly right.” We must help them to tell their story, for, whether they know it or not, their story is the story of God’s ways with His creatures, the story of salvation.⁶

When Jack Nicklaus won the 1965 Masters with a record-breaking score of 271, Bobby Jones, the Masters’ patron saint, remarked, “He plays a game with which I am not familiar.” If you’re not familiar with the “four chapter” gospel, don’t worry. It might be easier to see while you’re lying down this weekend. Turn your bible to the landscape orientation and discover a horizontal faith that connects with young and old alike.

____________________
¹ Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas, Geeks & Geezers: How Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2002), p. 57.
² Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
³ Philip Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, Kenneth S. Piver, General Editor, Volume I, Sacred Order/Social Order (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2006).
⁴ David Kinnamon, unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why It Matters (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), p. 39.
⁵ www.cbn.com/special/Narnia/articles
⁶ Richard John Neuhaus, “C. S. Lewis in the Public Square,” First Things, Vol. 88, September 1998, pp. 30-35.

Bonhoeffer spoke of the good virtue when he returned briefly to New York in 1941. He was appalled to find “Protestantism without the Reformation” and said that only in “the Negro churches” did he hear the missing Reformation piece - “the final hope.”¹ As far back as the 1940s, the idea of biblical hope as an ancient virtue was disappearing.

Hope is a unique virtue in the Christian faith because it “does not disappoint” (Rom. 5:5). “Disappoint” comes from two words - dis (to negate) and appoint (to see what is going to happen). Disappointment is when your vision for the future fails to materialize. Hope is never so foolish as to dispense confident visions about the “here and now.” Visions involve seeing - optical - that make people optimistic. But optimism is a false virtue, writes Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School. It “does not pay attention to truth.”²

The truth is that we cannot see what will happen tomorrow (James 4:14). Yet “vision casting” does this very thing - all the while being relentlessly upbeat and perpetually positive (ever hear a vision for a church falling apart at the seams?). The Bible begs to differ. In Hebrews 11, half the people soar in this life, the other half are sawn in two.

“Vision casting” breeds optimism that nurtures starry-eyed idealists who are disappointed when their dreams die. Disappointment then sours into cynicism, which Oscar Wilde defined as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Whew - no wonder optimism is a false virtue! This is why God is never disappointed. When things go awry, God is grieved. In Genesis 6:6, for example, he was grieved over the spreading stain of sin. This means there’s a whopping difference between disappointment and grieving. When the unforeseen happens, believers can grieve, yet with hope (I Thess. 4:13-18) because hope does not disappoint. We’ve forgotten this.

The Enlightenment hooked us on a drug called progress in this life, which is why George Orwell said that futurism is the major mental disease of our time. We might fudge the facts by saying “vision casting” is nothing more than a “preferred future.” In reality, it’s optimism - just like the hundreds of Chinese shipped in to the Beijing Olympics when attendance fell below forecasts. They wore yellow shirts inscribed with “Cheering From Beijing Workers.” Failed visions make it hard to face reality.

Boston University professor Peter Berger warns that whoever slurps up Enlightenment ideas had better have a long spoon. He “will found his spoon getting shorter and shorter - until the last supper in which he is left alone at the table, with no spoon at all and an empty plate.”³ The empty plate is crushing disappointment from failed visions. Real progress, wrote C. S. Lewis, is made when we resist ideas such as vision casting.⁴

Vision is a biblical idea - but not the way we use it today. Our rendition is more about motivating people and managing the church. The pastor imparting vision “hasn’t the remotest connection with what the church’s pastors have done for most of twenty centuries,” writes Eugene Peterson.⁵ Earlier Christians believed vision had to do with a person, not a plan - as the old hymn reads: “Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart; Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.” They believed in hope “as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast” (Heb. 6:19). They taught that “without a vision, the people perish” - Proverbs 29:18 - meant a lack of the guiding power of wisdom derived from good teaching.⁶ It had nothing to do with “vision casting.”

This is why Bonhoeffer highlighted the Negro churches’ emphasis on hope. Four years later, on April 7th, 1945, Bonhoeffer and a group of other prisoners celebrated Easter with a short service. He read from 1 Peter 1:3, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Bonhoeffer was then taken back to the notorious concentration camp Flossenbürg, where on the night of April 8th, he was arraigned, convicted, condemned to death, and in the gray dawn of the following morning, April 9th, was executed by hanging. The camp was liberated days later.

Christians are to “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (I Pet. 3:15). If no one is asking you for the reason, perhaps you’ve lost your rear view mirrors. It’s not difficult to reattach them and become hopeful as “a way of avoiding disappointment,” Bonhoeffer wrote. It’s why “wise people condemn optimism.”⁷ With rear view mirrors, you’ll caution others against optimism as a false virtue but commend hope as a true one.

____________________
¹ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. N. H. Smith (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 279-280.
² Stanley Hauerwas and Thomas Shaffer, “Hope Faces Power: Thomas More and the King of England,” Christian Existence Today: Essays on the Church, World and Living in Between (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1988), pp. 200-201.
³ Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor, 1970), p. 22.
⁴ Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life & Works (New York, NY, HarperCollins, 1998), p. 607.
⁵ Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), p. 1.
⁶ Bruce Waltke, The Book of Proverbs (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 446.
⁷ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, First Touchstone Edition, 1997), p. 15.

Of course not, said F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like Gatsby, Americans believe in the green light, “the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” According to New York Times columnist David Brooks, our defining feature is how we live now (and always have) in the future tense.² But never looking back means never learning how we got to where we are today. A poignant example is “casting a vision.” When you look in the rear view mirror, you see that “vision casting” is very recent. More troubling, it yields a false virtue that accounts for why few people ask about our hope. Ready to look back?

We begin way back, about 500 years, to the dawn of the Enlightenment. This was a philosophy that threw off the ancient “four chapter” gospel for a new world confident in scientific advancement. Using the tools of technology, we could now see the future – like predicting harvests and humidity. “Progress” became the new paradigm. Optimism was the new result. But the Enlightenment overlooked the fact that the human heart and history are different than humidity and harvests.

By the early 1800s, “progress” had gone from innovative to inevitable with the Whig Theory of History, which holds that progress is the essence of the human story. From backroom politics, “progress” fanned out to boardroom paradigms with the writings of German economic theorist Max Weber (1864-1920). Weber’s “Charismatic leader” prodded “progress” with his or her “supernatural” qualities to see the future.³ But this supernatural charisma wasn’t drawn from the Bible as much as from the atheist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). It was produced rather than a gift of Providence.

Nietzsche understood that the Enlightenment had evicted the idea of eternity, so he suggested that people stop hoping for happiness in the next life. There is no next life, said Nietzsche. There is no grace, since there is no God. We instead need a charismatic leader – a “superman,” Nietzsche called him – to paint a preferable future in this life.⁴ Weber agreed when he said that modern capitalism needed an “economic superman,” with charismatic qualities that are available to all, to see the future.

Weber said the scary side of seeing the future is that the charismatic leader is the least stable individual. Visions often don’t come to fruition. Christianity anchored charisma in creeds, as the late Philip Rieff noted: “There is no charisma without creed.”⁵ But Weber didn’t subscribe to creeds, so charisma had to be anchored in personalities and institutions, such as business corporations. If you drive up the road to the twentieth century, this is why “vision casting” is an integral part of leadership development.

When Weber’s theory of the charismatic leader was applied to the sociology of religion, charisma and “vision” became church management tools to produce motivated congregations. Even Martin Luther’s idea of the priesthood of all believers unwittingly played a part in this. Charis originally meant gift and was only bestowed by God, but nineteenth-century Protestant theologians who subscribed to the priesthood of all believers began to see charisma as a program of growth derived from curriculum rather than an act of Providence with grace derived from creed. The new church leader was a charismatic individual who would “cast a vision” for the church’s future. By looking back you can see how the Judeo-Christian idea of charisma was run off the road. Optimism became the new virtue, since optimism and vision come from “optic,” seeing.

The only problem is that optimism is a false virtue, writes Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School. It’s false because optimism “does not pay attention to truth.”⁶ The truth is that no one, except God, sees the future. The reality is that we don’t know what tomorrow will bring. There are, however, “more idols in the world than there are realities, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche.⁷ Is it possible that we have made an idol out of vision casting and optimism? In the Bible, idolatry is making anyone or anything, other than God, responsible for my sense of well-being today and tomorrow. Optimism gives us a false sense of well-being about tomorrow. But perhaps the ancient church can save us.

G. K. Chesterton said that the church is “the only thing which saves a man from being the degraded child of his own age.”⁸ He was referring to an ancient church, one you can see only with rear view mirrors. The good news is that we can attach a pair of mirrors and look back before the Enlightenment to fix this problem. When we do, people will ask us about our hope. Hope – this is a clue toward recasting vision. Tune in next week for the rest of the story – and drive carefully until then.

____________________
¹ George Barna, Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 2005), p. 32.
² C. f., David Brooks, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
³ Max Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organisation (translated by A. M. Henderson and T. Parsons, New York, NY: Free Press, 1947).
⁴ Roberto Cipriani and Laura Ferrarotti, Sociology of Religion: An Historical Introduction, translated by Laura Ferrarotti (published by Aldine Transaction, 2000), p. 40.
⁵ Philip Rieff, Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2007), p. 4.
⁶ Stanley Hauerwas and Thomas Shaffer, “Hope Faces Power: Thomas More and the King of England,” Christian Existence Today: Essays on the Church, World and Living in Between (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1988), pp. 200-201.
⁷ Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ (London UK: Penguin, 1968), p. 21.
⁸ Robert Kniller, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), p. 272.

Henri Poincaré was the nineteenth-century mathematician whose insights advanced non-Euclidean geometry. But his work didn’t go forward until he stopped thinking about mathematics and simply boarded a bus. “At the moment when I put my foot on the step,” Poincaré wrote, “the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it… upon taking my seat in the omnibus, but I felt a perfect certainty.”² Halting one activity (“left brain” research) led to Poincaré’s “Aha” epiphany.

Albert Einstein unlocked the mysteries of electromagnetic field equations discovered by James Clerk Maxwell years before.³ But Einstein wasn’t delving into Maxwell’s theory as much as daydreaming about light beams. Taking a break from investigative work (a “left brain” activity) led to Einstein’s insight. Arresting or stopping the thinking process is what I describe as the “doggie head tilt.” This picture comes from my one talent – I can simultaneously hum and whistle. When I make this sound, dogs stop dead in their tracks and their heads tilt. Arf? It’s like a stun gun to the left hemisphere of the brain. But why in heaven’s name would we want to do this – stop the “left brain” in its tracks?

It’s simple – the “doggie head tilt” slows operations in the left hemisphere of the brain so that blood rushes to the right. The right is where insight occurs. The left hemisphere of a human brain excels at information, according to Mark Jung-Beeman, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University. The right hemisphere deals with insight. It helps you see the forest for the trees, he says.⁴ When Henri Poincaré was mentally stuck and hopped a bus – a mindless activity for him – his left hemisphere was relaxed and his right half was revving. Bang! Insight! When Einstein dreamt about light beams, blood had shifted to the right hemisphere. Bang! Insight! When I get behind the wheel of a car – an essentially mindless activity for me – the insights start to roll in (of course, if it’s a completely mindless activity, Bang!).

This approach contradicts the classic model of focusing on facts, says John Kounios, a cognitive neuroscientist at Drexel University.⁵ Focus is about blocking stuff out. It only activates the left hemisphere. And, as Einstein said, you can’t solve a problem in the frame that created it. “There’s a good reason Google puts Ping-Pong tables in their headquarters,” Kounios adds. Fun and games loosen the left’s lock on your noggin. It’s a lot like hitting a baseball. Gripping the bat too tightly makes your arm muscles tighten up, crimping your wrists and slowing your bat speed when striking the ball. Focusing on facts gives the “left brain” too tight a grip and crimps the right hemisphere, slowing the speed of insight. That’s why intense people are rarely insightful people. It’s why fervently passionate people, even if they are Christians, rarely gain fresh perspectives.

This is doubly important for Christians, since we live in a “been there, done that” world where our “nation’s population is increasingly resistant to Christianity,” writes Barna Research Group president David Kinnamon. “The aversion and hostility are, for the first time, crystallizing in the attitudes of millions of young Americans… they want nothing to do with us.”⁶ The conventional model of evangelism simply presents facts about Jesus. But this activates the left hemisphere of the brain that delights in debate and is often resistant to new ideas. The “doggie head tilt” pushes people over to the right hemisphere. I experienced the benefit of this the first time that I read C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra. My “left brain” judged Adam and Eve harshly for so quickly falling prey to the Serpent’s temptation. Yet, as great fiction so often does, Perelandra arrested my “left brain” and activated my right, so that I began to imagine the events of Genesis 3 as a slow, seductive slide – something I have experienced several times in my own life. Suddenly the story sounded very different… and made sense.

In his 1908 essay “Mathematical Creation,” Poincaré insisted that when you hit an impasse, “nothing good is accomplished” by repeatedly poring over the same data. You should distract yourself, preferably by going on a “walk or a journey.” C. S. Lewis had wrestled with Christianity for a while but when he went on a journey in the sidecar of a motorcycle, the left hemisphere of his brain relaxed and his right was unexpectedly activated. Bang! Insight! Aha, it makes sense now… I’m a believer!

You might not have a sidecar available, but you can activate a friend’s right hemisphere when you open with the “doggie head tilt.” When, for example, a friend said he distrusted the canon, I asked him if he used Wikipedia. Arf? I then paralleled Wikipedia (something he did trust) with the canon. Aha! – a flash of insight. In a world where increasing numbers of people relegate Christianity to “been there, done that,” bearing down on the left hemisphere with Bible data is a dead end. As Einstein famously said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Insightful Christians open conversations with the “doggie head tilt,” knowing that Huh? must precede Aha!

_______________________
¹ C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1955), p. 238.
² Jonah Lehrer, “The Eureka Hunt: Why do good ideas come to us when they do?” The New Yorker, July, 28, 2008, pp. 40-45.
³ Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2007), p. 7.
⁴ Jonah Lehrer, “The Eureka Hunt: Why do good ideas come to us when they do?” The New Yorker, July, 28, 2008, p. 41.
⁵ Lehrer, “Eureka,” p. 42.
⁶ David Kinnamon, Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why It Matters (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), p. 39.

Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics, marking Japan’s recovery from World War II and it’s emergence as an economic juggernaut. Remember when “Made in Japan” was going to take over the world and Japanese corporations were buying up baubles such as Rockefeller Center? What happened? Japan got old. “We have become a full-fledged aged society,” a government report declared in May of 2008. “The pace of aging … is expected to enter a phase that no other country in the world has yet experienced.”²

Japanese are living longer than ever but having fewer children than ever. By 2050, 25 percent of the population will be 75 or older, and 40 percent will be 65 or older. That compares with 16.2 percent projected for the world by the United Nations for those aged 65 or older in 2050. A doddering nation will be dying economically. Fifteen years ago, Japan ranked fourth among the world’s countries in gross domestic product per capita. It now ranks 20th. In 1994, its share of the world’s economy peaked at 18 percent; in 2006, the number was below 10 percent. By 2050, Japan’s economy will be about the size of Indonesia’s or Brazil’s, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.³

The People’s Republic of China appears to be following the same flight path. The reason for China’s dramatic aging however is different. “Because of the Communist Party’s notorious one-child-per-family policy, the average number of children born to a Chinese woman has dropped from 5.8 in the 1970s to 1.8 today – below the rate of 2.1 that would keep the population stable,” writes John Pomfret, a former Beijing bureau chief of The Washington Post and the author of Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China.⁴ China’s elderly will balloon from 100 million people older than 60 today to 334 million by 2050, including a staggering 100 million age 80 or older. Fewer than 30 percent of China’s urban dwellers have a pension, and none of the country’s 700 million farmers do. “And China’s state-funded pension system makes Social Security look like Fort Knox,” writes Pomfret, who lived in China for over two decades.

The picture gets hazy when you throw in Chinese traditions. It is usually the sons, rather than daughters, who care for aged parents. In the early 1990s the average 60-year-old Chinese woman had five children. Her counterpart in 2025 will have fewer than two. A third or more of these women approaching retirement age will likely have no living sons.⁵ Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer and economist at the American Enterprise Institute says China’s demographic time bomb is “a slow-motion humanitarian tragedy in the making.”⁶ The haze however is not just from Chinese traditions. The environmental degradation means China’s declining economy will require an instrument landing.

Pomfret moved his family from China to Los Angeles in 2004. When people asked him why they’d moved, he joked, “For the air.” He meant it. This year, China will surpass the United States as the world’s No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases. It continues to be the largest depleter of the ozone layer. And it’s the largest polluter of the Pacific Ocean.

Sixteen of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China, 70 percent of the country’s lakes and rivers are polluted, and half the population lacks clean drinking water. The constant smoggy haze over northern China diminishes crop yields. By 2030, the nation will face a water shortage equal to the amount it consumes today; factories in the northwest have already been forced out of business because there just isn’t any water. China is clearly on the same flight path as Japan. The frog in the kettle is the myth.

“Well that’s, may I say, bull___. If a frog had a means of getting out, it certainly would get out. And I cannot imagine that anything dropped in boiling water would not be scalded and die from the injuries,” says Dr. George R. Zug, curator of reptiles and amphibians at the National Museum of Natural History.⁷ The “critical thermal maxima” of many species of frogs means that as water temperature increases, frogs become more and more active in their attempts to escape.⁸ China’s leaders are more active these days as they step up attempts to reduce air pollution in Beijing and elsewhere. They’re not sitting sublimely in the stew and boiling to death.

All that glitters is not gold, wrote William Shakespeare. Keep that in mind as NBC dazzles viewers with the glitter of China’s Olympics. Pray for China’s leaders and the reforms needed for the country to advance as it ages. On the other side of the coin, all that is gold does not glitter, wrote J. R. R. Tolkien. Pray for the countless Christians in China – some seen and many unseen – working to renew and transform China. They won’t win any gold medals but their work is critical to China’s future.

___________________
¹ Blaine Harden, “For Japan, a Long, Slow Slide: Declines in Productivity, Population Combining to Stifle Economic Growth,” Washington Post, February 3, 2008; A17.
² Mike Nizza, “Japan: ‘A Full-Fledged Aged Society,’” New York Times, May 20, 2008.
³ Harden, “Japan.”
⁴ John Pomfret, “A Long Wait at the Gate to Greatness,” Washington Post, July 27, 2008; B01.
⁵ Nicholas Eberstadt, “Old Age Tsunami: Asia’s graying populations could roil the global economy,” Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2005.
⁶ Pomfret, “A Long Wait.”
⁷ “Next Time, What Say We Boil a Consultant,” Fast Company, Issue 1, October 1995.
⁸ www.ou.edu/cas/zoology/Hutchison.htm. Dr. Richard Hutchinson is Professor Emeritus from the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Zoology.

The idea of the nuclear family as a residential unit was largely non-existent before the sixteenth century, according to McGill University architecture professor Witold Rybczynski. A private home was a luxury few could afford. Most families squatted in the squalor of emerging cities or eked out a living as farmers and tradespeople. Children were often sent away at a young age to live and work with others or they stayed and contributed to the workforce along with unrelated servants or apprentices.¹ In this agricultural age, homes were the building blocks of society, a nation’s economic engine. But the rise of science, technology and the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution would change all that.

The biggest change churning out of the Industrial Revolution was women staying home while men went to work in dark and dangerous factories. The English poet William Blake (1757-1828) captured this convulsion in his famous poem, “The New Jerusalem.” It’s an ode to “England’s pleasant pastures” being blackened by the soot spewing from “these dark Satanic Mills.” Bring me my charriot of fire! wrote Blake, calling Christians to build the New Jerusalem on “England’s green and pleasant land” – not in the cities.

In this new world, the home became a sanctuary rather than a building block. “From the 1830s on, moral reformers argued that the family home was a key to a Christian life. In a crass and stormy world, fathers would carry out the grubby business of earning money, and mothers would make the home a refuge where the family could pray and grow spiritually,” writes Alexander von Hoffman, an historian and specialist in housing and urban affairs as well as a senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies since 1997.² It was during the Industrial Revolution for example that men began to describe their work as a “job” – an old English word for “criminal activity.”³

Many American churches piggybacked on this peculiar view of dividing home from work. Sociologist Robert Bellah calls it “the cult of domesticity” that sprang up as Christians considered their home a “sacred place” while work was something that men put up with.⁴ This made religion a significantly privatized experience writes Bellah.⁵ Home became “a haven in a heartless world” as nineteenth-century reformers thought that urban boarding houses and apartment buildings lacked the sort of privacy and purity needed to raise children well. In this setting, Christians carved out a private life disconnected from the public one.

“The prospect of possessing one’s own house,” wrote George B. Emerson in 1871, “and that a pleasant one, with a garden and trees, and room for the children to play, in safety, must be a strong motive with any man to regularity, good conduct, and economy.”⁶ Emerson (1797-1881) was the first principal of the first English High School in the United States and a distant cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He believed that the home was “the most sacred place for man and for woman, and especially for children” because it developed the Victorian virtues of “truthfulness, industry, order, frugality, reverence, purity, and self-control.” The home became more sacred than other places except church.

This doesn’t have to be the end of the story. In the ancient Judeo-Christian faith, home and family matter but they’re not the most sacred place. Scripture talks about patterns more than places. “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up” (Deut. 6:4-7). A walk characterizes the sacred, not four walls. Designating our homes and churches as havens in a heartless world overlooks the reality that God is everywhere. Every place can be sacred.

The good news is that over the last forty years Christians have highlighted the sacredness of marriage and the home. Why not highlight the sacredness of what most people do for most of their waking hours – work? Why not start small groups specifically for people in the workplace, such as educators, artists, investors, and business professionals? Until Christians recognize that every place can be a “sacred place,” we’re furthering the disconnect between the private and public life. Then when friends say they don’t care what others do in their private life, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.

_______________
Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York, NY: Penguin, 1987).
² Alexander von Hoffman, “Home Values Are Down, and Not Just at the Bank,” Washington Post, July 20, 2008; B01.
³ C. f., Andrew Kimball, “Breaking the Job Lock,” Utne Reader, January/February, 1999, Vol. 35: 24-28.
⁴ For more on this important trend, see Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 26-51; Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151-74; Richard Sennett, Families Against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1972-1890 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); and Kirk Jeffrey, “The Family as Utopian Retreat from the City: The Nineteenth Century Contribution,” Soundings 55 (1955):21-40.
⁵ Robert Bellah et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1996).
⁶ Alexander von Hoffman, “Home Values Are Down, and Not Just at the Bank,” Washington Post, July 20, 2008; B01.

Samuel Morse grew up in the nineteenth century characterized as an industrial revolution, a transportation revolution, or a market revolution. In 1817 for example it took nineteen days over back-breaking rutted roads to get from New York City to Cincinnati. But Oxford historian Daniel Walker Howe believes the nineteenth century was primarily a “communications revolution.”¹ This is because for centuries, the most immediate adversary – “the first enemy” – was distance.² It took months and even years to get messages from one place to another. People hated distance and sought to conquer it.

The Morse Code opened the floodgates. It promised “a unified American discourse… but at a considerable cost,” said media theorist Neil Postman.³ Henry David Thoreau described the price tag: “We are in a great haste to construct a telegraph from Maine to Texas. But Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”⁴ Distance may have been a downer but it enjoyed one advantage over immediacy – it provided breathing room for discernment. I remember for example when the US mail was delivered to a metal box at the end of our driveway and it sat there until you were good and ready to retrieve it. We then had to go some distance to get it. I remember when – you might not believe this – nobody answered the phone if no one was home (no answering machine). And no one had a mobile phone. Yes, it’s scary but true. Somehow, someway, my parents got along fine without knowing where all four kids were every moment. And we survived into adulthood. It’s a miracle.

Today we have obliterated distance. You can draw a straight line from the telegraph to Treos. This summer for example I’ve talked for free with my daughter in Rwanda and son in London. Distance? What distance? Cost? What cost? Oh, there is a cost but we can’t see it up close. We’re being pumped with “information (at a very rapid rate) which answered no question we had asked… or leads to any meaningful action or reflection or analysis,” said Postman.⁵ We’re on the receiving end of an information fire hose – and no one knows they’re drowning. In fact, Librarian of Congress James Billington believes it’s worse than that. “Our society is basically motion without memory, which of course, is one of the clinical definitions of insanity.”⁶ Sane people devote some time to distance.

Distance is an ancient discipline called solitude. “In solitude we find the psychic distance, the perspective from which we can see, in light of eternity, the created things that trap, worry, and oppress us,” writes Dallas Willard.⁷ It is solitude that “enables us to return to society as free persons.”⁸ Jesus regularly distanced himself. Without creating an appropriate distance from the daily deluge, Henry David Thoreau said our existence “withers from a lack of a hidden life. Conversation degenerates into mere gossip and those we meet can only talk what they heard from someone else.”⁹

New technologies promise to do something for us yet we are often unaware of what they will undo said Neil Postman.¹⁰ “A man in Maine and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about. The telegraph may have made the country into “one neighborhood,” but it was a peculiar one.”¹¹ What’s peculiar is that Blackberry, Treo, and Facebook have become modern day iron lungs. You’d have to be insane to willingly live in an iron lung.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? asked T. S. Eliot. Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? Wisdom is seeing life through a wide-angle lens. A wide-angle lens doesn’t work up close. This summer might be a good opportunity to begin the weaning from always needing to be “in touch.” The truth is, people who are mostly in touch are mostly out of touch. How about loving “the first enemy” instead? Jesus said to love your enemies. What he really meant was echoed by Abraham Lincoln, that you destroy an enemy when you make that person your friend. Distance might have been inconvenient but it was never an enemy. When you live with your big nose pressed against the small screen all the time that’s hard to imagine – and change.

“The fact of the matter is this: the essence of morality is to tell you that in some circumstances you must do what you don’t want to do,” advises Dr. Dallas Willard.¹² Turn off your phone when you’re with friends. Check emails only once a day. I’m not suggesting that we become Luddites.¹³ I am reminding us “in quietness and trust is your strength” (Isaiah 30:15). You can’t find quietness in a life of continual communication. Why not love distance and make it more of your friend?

_____________________
¹ Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 5.
² This term originated with the French historian Fernand Braudel in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds (London, UK: Fontana, 1976), p. 355.
³ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 1985), p. 65.
⁴ “The Bigelow Papers,” Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, ed. Marjorie Kaufman (Boston, MA: 1978), p. 18; Henry David Thoreau, Walden intro. Norman Holmes Pearson (New York, NY: 1964), p. 42.
⁵ Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 1985), pp. 68-69.
⁶ Joel Achenbach, “The Too-Much-Information Age,”
Washington Post, March 12, 1999, p. A01.
⁷ Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1988), p. 161.
⁸ Willard, Spirit, p. 161.
⁹ Willard, Spirit, p. 162.
¹⁰ Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, (New York: Random House, 1993), p.5
¹¹ Postman, Amusing, p. 67.
¹² www.lewissociety.org/willardinterview
¹³ The Luddites were a social movement of English textile workers in the early 1800s who protested against technologial advancements produced by the Industrial Revolution. The movement was named after a mythical leader, Ned Ludd.

Traditional Judaism and Christianity both have much to say about “ends” – the end of history or what is called eschatology, writes Daniel Walker Howe in his excellent new book, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. “The colonial Puritans conceived of their relationship with God on the model of ancient Israel’s covenant,” which meant a belief that the world would become progressively better.¹ The ends justified the means – early American Christians and Jews invested in restoring culture and redeeming people. According to historian James Moorhead, the colonial church “planted one foot firmly in the world of the steam engines and telegraph while keeping the other in the cosmos of biblical prophecy.”²

The theological term for this view is called postmillennialism (Christ returns after the world gets better) and was “the most widely held viewpoint on eschatology among Protestants in antebellum America,” writes Howe.³ Up to the early 1800s, Protestants “celebrated reformers, inventors, and Christian missionaries.”⁴ They shared twin commitments to society and souls. “Postmillennialism legitimated American civil religion… and belief in America’s responsibility to conduct an experiment in free government.”⁵ But after 1814, postmillennialism went into eclipse.

In September 1814, Captain William Miller’s American forces were hopelessly outnumbered by British General George Prevost’s troops invading from Canada. Yet Prevost inexplicably ordered his forces to withdraw. Miller attributed his salvation to divine intervention and quit the army, turning his life over to Christ. Lacking training in biblical studies and being ignorant of Hebrew and Greek, Miller developed a premillennial view that Jesus’ return was imminent (the world was not getting better). Believing that Daniel 8:14 was the key verse, Miller calculated that Christ would return between March 1843 and April 1844. The target date passed, Miller publicly apologized, but the idea of the world going to hell in a hand basket stuck. The ends justify the means, so Protestants began to promote saving souls over worrying about a doomed society. If the world is spiraling downward until Christ returns, why rebuild cities, businesses, and society since they are not going to get better?

If you’re a Protestant, the odds are pretty good that you’re a product of premillennialism since it focuses far more on converting people than caring about the culture. Over the last 100 years, it has spawned upwards of 95% of today’s student ministries, missionary organizations, and independent churches (that’s why I believe nineteen out of twenty American Christians would say the world is deteriorating while their church is improving – it fits their view of the end of history). But what if this view is a deviation from historic Christianity? Jim Collins says great companies exhibit “the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”⁶ What if the “brutal reality” is that these churches and missionary organizations “are not necessarily the norm within the Christian tradition, still less the authentic core; nor, perhaps, have they ever been,” as Philip Jenkins suggests?⁷ For thousands of years, good Jews and Christians held a seamless view of cultural reform and conversion. Elevating souls over society is the Johnny-come-lately.

G. K. Chesterton said the function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange. Some Christians have a settled opinion that only two things are eternal – the Word of God and human souls. But before the 1800s, it was also believed that “the achievements of human civilization, art, technology, and culture are not obliterated. All that is unclean is excluded, but all that is worthy will find its place as an offering to the King of kings,” said Lesslie Newbigin.⁸ Business, art, food, technology, and every achievement of human civilization as they ought to be also goes into eternity. If this is a proper view of the end, it justifies investing more in renewing culture than we currently do today. And – get this – by making the world a better place, we might discover a better way to win people to Christ. The greatest revival ever in Japan came as a result of General Douglas Macarthur’s cultural reforms after World War II. They included a new constitution producing a paradigm shift in Japanese thinking: Hirohito was no longer considered divine. Over the next few years, over 2,000,000 Japanese came to faith in Christ.⁹ Renewing culture greased the wheels for conversion. That sure sounds like a win-win for the world and the church.

__________________
¹ Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 286.
² James Moorhead, World Without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 2.
³ Howe, p. 289.
⁴ Howe, p. 289.
⁵ Howe, p. 289.
⁶ Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t (New York, NY: Harper Business, 2001), p. 13.
⁷ Philip Jenkins, “Companions of Life: What Must We learn, and Unlearn?” Books and Culture, March/April 2007, Volume 13, No. 2, pp. 18-20.
⁸ Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), p. 115.
⁹ William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas Macarthur – 1880-1964 (New York, NY: Dell, 1978), p. 555.

[Editor’s Note: Mike is taking two weeks off to celebrate his son Mark’s wedding to Christy. This article originally appeared in Comment magazine, the opinion journal of the Work Research Foundation: www.wrf.ca/comment.]

Comment: What are your favourite tools?
David Greusel: I haven’t loved a computer since I stopped using a Macintosh at work in 1993. There is a long sad story about Apple’s inability to penetrate the architecture/engineering market which could be the subject of another essay. Nevertheless, I use all of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook) quite heavily and in about equal measure. Google SketchUp is a wonderful software tool for quick three-dimensional visualization.

What I really love is drawing freehand. I prefer to draw in ink, using both a black Pilot V Extra-Fine Razor Point and a black Pentel Sign Pen. I prefer to draw on white rolled sketch tissue, which goes by a number of unsavory nicknames. And I often color my drawings with felt-tip markers, of which I have found Chartpak AD markers to be by far the best. Prismacolor coloured pencils are a joy to use, as well.

Comment: Tell us about a project that delighted you.
David Greusel: I think the project that has given me the greatest delight is PNC Park, the home of Major League Baseball’s Pittsburgh Pirates. This was a project where I loved the city I was working in, loved the site that had been selected, and really enjoyed working with the team officials who were involved in the process. Over the course of the project, they came to trust me as a designer, and that trust is the most valuable thing an architect can have.

So not only was working in Pittsburgh and working for the Pirates enjoyable, but the way the project turned out was also a delight. Of course, I could show you any number of spots in the finished project that could have been designed or executed better, but the overall project exceeded everyone’s expectations. Watching the sunset reflect off Pittsburgh’s skyline across the Allegheny River while attending a game on a summer evening is a sublime experience. I am still thrilled when I have the chance to visit Pittsburgh and see the ballpark.

Comment: How do you plan your work?
David Greusel: As much as we like to romanticize the image of the lone architect sketching on a pad, architecture in practice is hugely collaborative and involves a great deal of planning. Project planning involves the allocation of staff resources to particular projects as they flow through the office, and there is a dynamic quality (fewer people at first, more as the project matures) to that flow which takes some doing to manage. Additionally, we have to coordinate the involvement of many engineering consultants, bringing them into the project when there is enough of a design to talk about, but not before the design is too far along. Collaboration and planning are a huge part of how architecture works in the real world.

Comment: How does your work connect to other aspects of your life?
David Greusel: First of all, I feel called to be an architect. This has taken some time to acknowledge, having spent many years in a dualistic Christian culture where secular work was thought to be less significant than full-time Christian service. I now see that working as an architect is full-time Christian service, at least in my case. It’s just not what we normally think of as “ministry.” Though of course it is ministry as well.

I have also come to believe that the idea of achieving “work-life balance,” as it is referred to in the Human Resources departments of large companies, is a myth. I don’t cease to be an architect when I go home at night any more than I cease to be a husband and a father when I leave home for work. I have been trying very hard to de-compartmentalize my life the past few years. I want to be a whole person, who is husband and father and architect and citizen twenty-four hours a day, attempting to order my various responsibilities so that I can discharge them well. But I think the notion that what results is a “balance” between work and family and community commitments is absurd. It is more like a well-rigged sailing ship, where keeping the lines in proper tension results in moving briskly across the ocean to your intended destination. My life is at least as complex as a three-masted schooner, and that requires making constant adjustments to keep the lines in the proper tension, neither too taut nor too slack.

[Editor’s Note: Mike is taking two weeks off to celebrate his son Mark’s wedding to Christy. This article originally appeared in Comment magazine, the opinion journal of the Work Research Foundation: www.wrf.ca/comment.]

Comment: How would you explain what you do to an interested nine-year old child?
David Greusel: As an architect, I draw the designs for buildings before they are built. That way the people who are building the building know what to build. My work is to come up with the plans for buildings. In nearly thirty years, I have designed a lot of buildings of nearly every type imaginable: schools, churches, stadiums, and grocery stores, to name a few.

Comment: What first drew you to this work?
David Greusel: I can remember as a kindergartener playing on the floor with wood blocks. Adults around me would look at the things I built and say, “He’s going to be an architect, isn’t he?” I didn’t know what an architect was, but it sounded like fun.

Later, in high school, I found myself building models of buildings for my own amusement. So the choice of architecture for a college major seemed fairly obvious. Though I have dabbled in writing and theater work since then, it’s clear to me that I have always been called to be an architect.

Comment: As a novice, what were your most valuable learning experiences?
David Greusel: When I first graduated, I worked for a small firm in Wichita, Kansas that employed six people most of the time I was there. What was invaluable for me was being in the same room as the other architects, all of whom, of course, had more experience than I did. I would overhear their conversations, their phone calls with contractors, and their casual questions to each other (“Does two-by-four cabinet blocking go horizontally or vertically?”). I have often said that the two and a half years I spent in this small office was my real architectural education. It was definitely the reason I passed the architectural licensing exam on my first try.

Comment: What is the best advice you’ve ever been given?
David Greusel: Apart from Scripture, I think it would be never to make the same mistake twice. It is indisputably human to make mistakes. But to make the same mistake over again means that you’re not learning anything.

Comment: From what sources do you draw inspiration for your work?
David Greusel: Because my current work requires me to design in many different cities, I try to learn as much as I can about the culture, history, and architectural traditions of a place before I start designing there. In the best case, I spend one or several days just walking around a new city, trying to get a feel for it, before I ever set pencil to paper. I am inspired by the builders who have come before me. I want to know why they made the choices they did, why they used the materials they did, and what they were trying to create in their community so that my addition to the city will be part of a continuing conversation, not an architectural one-liner.

Comment: What rituals and habits structure your work day?
David Greusel: It would be nice to be able to answer that I spend the first half hour of every work day sharpening my colored pencils, but that would be untrue. One of the things I love about my work is that there is no such thing as a “typical day.” Frequent travel of course creates immense variety in my days, but so also does the number of projects I have worked on, and the myriad of people I have met and worked alongside in doing all those projects over the years. So apart from drinking hot tea and responding to email, my work day has very little about it that is either ritual or habitual.

[Next Monday, David will share a bit more about the tools he uses and one particularly favorite project – PNC Park in Pittsburgh (home of the Pittsburgh Pirates.)]