Faith Venture

There are those people who are hungry–hungry to be told what to think, what to do, where to go.

There are those people who eagerly promote themselves as the feeder of that hunger.

Then there are those people who long to learn, experience, and think for themselves.

You are looking at the wrong side. Just turn it over, that is all you ever have to do, just turn it over.

Nero Wolfe’s personal chef Fritz Brenner to detective right hand man Archie Goodwin in Please Pass the Guilt by Rex Stout

Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe character was the exact opposite of his contemporary Earle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason. Overweight, New York City, pompous and arrogant versus handsome, urbane, action-prone. I’ve read the entire series of each several times.

Here, the words of genius come not from the “genius” himself (Wolfe), but from the Swiss chef that clues Archie in on where to look to solve the murder mystery.

I was reading the same week Effortless by Greg McKeown. He quotes German mathematician Carl Jacobi, “One must always invert. Turn the problem around to the other side. Assume the opposite–then what?”

Do you have a personal problem you are trying to solve? Perhaps looking at it from another point of view. Perhaps take the other person’s point of view and study they problem if it’s a relationship thing.

You are studying some spiritual writing–perhaps John or Luke or Paul or some quote of Jesus in the Christian Bible. Or perhaps an ancient or modern writer like Augustine or Max Lucado. You are stuck. “What did they mean?” you wonder.

Perhaps just pause and then change your point of view. Assume they meant the opposite of what you were thinking. Then consider it.

Sometimes I wonder if understanding Jesus and his interpreters you need to be less read in theology and more read in studies of the world–psychology, farming, geography, history.

Just change your thinking. Reading widely in a number of genres helps. That, by the way, is the path to creativity.

Note: I also like the Robert Van Gulik series of 7th Century China, the Judge Dee mysteries. He was the Dutch ambassador to China before World War II and a China scholar. More contemporary, I enjoyed the “alphabet” series about Kinsey Milhone by Sue Grafton.

Do you ever just wonder what would have happened if…?

I do. As the old advertising slogan said, “Inquiring minds want to know.”

The Apostle Paul’s writings can be divided into two themes. There was the theology arguing Jesus as Messiah, the resurrection, and presenting spiritual development.

Then there are the instructions (usually prefaced by “I say this”) for the organization of the first century church. This, of course, after the early writing (say, 1 Thessalonians) where he expected Jesus’s return to be any day now.

For centuries we have had men (not women typically) pulling sentences out of these later instructions and built religious movements upon them. Look at the variety of Protestant denominations continually splintering off the mother church because of one sentence or another.

Someone asked me recently about the part of Romans 13 where Paul discusses the role of government. Supposedly someone quoted this passage in support of the current US administration. I didn’t hear these same people quoting Romans 13 under the Obama administration. Just saying…

The thesis (I owe my original thinking to the theologian Elton Trueblood and then studies beyond that) of the passage basically is that government is part of the order of things for the stability of civil society. If you are living a just and true life, Paul says, then you should have nothing to worry about from government.

We know with just a cursory read of the last 2,000 years of Western history–or even the last 10 years–that Paul had it wrong. The atrocities visited upon the people by their governments have been manifold.

Paul wrote during the few years of relative calm in the Roman Empire. Later, after Paul appealed his hearing to the Emperor as the right of a Roman citizen and was shipped to Rome as a prisoner, a new emperor came to power. He was so bad that eventually there was an uprising and a civil war. Nero burned down Rome and blamed the Christians. Thousands were killed. Perhaps Paul was one of them.

The Christian church went underground for the most part until Constantine.

What if Paul had written Romans under Nero? We greatly underestimate the power of the idea of the Pax Romana today.