In The Wisdom Pyramid, Brett McCracker really challenges the reader to be mindful of our knowledge intake and its impact on our wisdom and tendency towards misinformation. The information overload that we all experience can lead to feelings of anxiety and helplessness. Even in the midst of those feelings…somehow we keep going back for me! Our constant need for stimulation and content consumption is detrimental to our brains and overall wisdom. The temptation to make every thought public and react immediately should be resisted, as true wisdom lies in maintaining a calm and measured approach. Seeking wisdom involves purpose and intention, choosing sources of truth, and accepting external truth with gratitude, as well as grounding oneself in the timeless wisdom of Scripture.
I highlighted several things while reading and have posted those notes below…
- We must examine our daily diet of knowledge intake. It can be nutritious, making us wise and shrewd, more able to ward off intellectual infections and spiritual afflictions. But it can also be toxic, making us unwise and more susceptible to the lies and snares of our age. p. 17
- Today’s information landscape—which bombards us with grievances and trivialities we didn’t go looking for but nevertheless get sucked into—dignifies irrelevance and amplifies importance, argues Postman. It all adds up to an inflated sense of the world’s terribleness and an angst about our inability to do much about it. p. 31
- Instead of being content with silence in the “in between” moments of life, our fidgety fingers can’t help but reach for the phone—so we can do something, anything, to maximize the time. Indeed, the podcast craze coincides with the mobile-fueled frenzy to “redeem every moment” by listening to episodes while we clean the house or commute to work, or perhaps we listen to an audiobook while we go for a jog. There’s no shortage of content clamoring for our attention—much of it is good content—and the pressure to “watch this, read that, listen to this!” can be hard to resist. But what is all this doing to our brains? The research is not encouraging. p. 38
- Our rapid-fire toggling between spectacles—an episode of a Hulu show here, a Spotify album there—works against wisdom in the moment, by eliminating any time for reflection or synthesis before the next thing beckons. But it also works against wisdom in the long term, as brain research is showing. Our overstimulated brains are becoming weaker, less critical, and more gullible at a time in history when we need them to be sharper than ever. p. 39
- The temptation in today’s world is to make every thought public. But is this wise? Some of the wisest people I know are very slow to publicly share their opinions. p. 44
- Continued first impressions and the folly of “insta-reaction.” Kevin DeYoung noted recently that one of the distinguishing marks of a “quarrelsome person” is that he or she has no unarticulated opinions. “Do people know what you think of everything?” DeYoung asks. “They shouldn’t. That’s why you have a journal or a prayer closet or a dog.” (from “Distinguishing Marks of a Quarrelsome Person, The Gospel Coalition website, June 13, 2019) One of the most valuable areas of biblical wisdom we need for our day is the taming of the tongue. Before we sound off online, we should remember proverbs like:
- “Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin” (Prov. 13:3).
- “Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly” (Prov. 14:29).
- “Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble” (Prov. 21:23).
- Or there is James 1:19—a verse that, if heeded, would prevent all manner of grief in today’s world (but would also probably put social media out of business): “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” The problem, of course, is that today’s media economy is fueled by “quick to speak” rants, mobs, and pile-ons that create traffic spikes and trending topics. To resist this temptation is one of the most challenging yet subversive things a wisdom-seeking Christian can do. “The real strength of the good soldier of Jesus Christ,” wrote Jonathan Edwards nearly three hundred years ago, is simply the steadfast maintenance of a holy calmness . . . sustained amidst all the storms, injuries, wrong behavior, and unexpected acts and events in this evil and unreasonable world. The Scripture seems to intimate that true fortitude consists chiefly of this: “He that is slow to anger, is better than the mighty; and he that rules his spirit, than he that takes a city” (Proverbs 16:32). (from Jonathan Edwards, Religions Affections, ed. James M.Houston, 1986) p. 44
- The antidote to dangerous distractibility is purpose, focus, and intention. Proverbs 4:25 says, “Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you.” This is wisdom in contrast to the unwise woman of folly, who “does not ponder the path of life; her ways wander, and she does not know it” (Prov. 5:6). When you go online, ask yourself what you are going online to do. Is there a specific goal? When you open YouTube, is it to watch a specific thing? When you reach for your phone as you wait in line or walk from one place to another, is it for a purpose or just out of habit? When we aren’t going somewhere, we’ll go anywhere—and the “anywheres” of the Internet are rarely good for us. p. 46
- From cradle to grave, we are formed by others. Contrary to what a “look within” world would suggest, the world outside our heads defines our existence in ways we are foolish to ignore. Rather than seeing this as oppressive, or simply pretending (foolishly) this isn’t the case, we should accept this situation as a gift: truth comes, in large part, from outside ourselves. We can choose the sources of where we look for truth. We can choose how we synthesize truth and apply it as wisdom in everyday circumstances. But we don’t get to choose whether or not something is true. We don’t determine it. We search it out and accept it with gratitude, even when it’s at odds with our feelings or preferences. Thanks be to God. p. 56
- Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. Psalm 1:1–3 p. 66
- Do we stop enough to consider how mind-blowing it is that God revealed himself to us in this way, speaking words to us about himself when he could have remained silent? As my colleague Matt Smethurst has noted, God could have left us in our ignorance, undeserving sinners that we are: But he didn’t. He peeled back the curtain. And then opened his holy mouth. Any authentic knowledge of God hinges on his generous self-disclosure to us. Only through his words can we discover who he is, what he’s like, what he’s after, and how we can know him. This ought to humble us deeply. The Bible you possess is evidence that God loves you and wants a relationship with you. No matter who you are or how many times you’ve spurned his love, he is still moving toward you, still talking to you—still befriending you—through a book. (from Does God Love You? You Own Tangible Evidence”, The Gospel Coalition website, July 22, 2019) p. 77
- Wisdom isn’t just about concepts. It’s about the orientations of our time and energy, the postures that shape our hearts, often on subconscious levels. Prayer, for example, is a crucial habit for gaining wisdom—not only because the Bible says gaining wisdom can be as simple as praying for it (James 1:5, Col. 1:9), but also because the posture of prayer itself cultivates wisdom. Every prayer is a rebuttal to the “look within” logic of our age. To pray is to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers in ourselves. We don’t have sufficient wisdom to make complex decisions. We must humbly turn to God, the giver of wisdom (Prov. 2:6), seeking his guidance in all things. We are utterly reliant on him. p. 86
- One of the beautiful things about being part of a church, and one of its greatest gifts to our generation, is that it grounds us in a bigger story—one that precedes us and will outlive us, where the past and the future matter as much (or more) than the present. In a presentist world where wisdom is shrunk to the narrow confines of immediate relevance, the church broadens horizons. It draws upon wisdom and truth from thousands of years ago and speaks to realities that will exist millions of years from now. It situates us within a story that crosses cultures and borders and transcends time and space. It invites the refugees of a relentlessly unstable world to take refuge in the practices and time-filtered wisdom of two millennia of Christian tradition. Christian heritage is a treasure trove of time-tested truth we would do well to mine. There is a great cloud of witnesses who came before us and wrestled with many of the questions and trials we face today. It’s important for contemporary Christians to avoid chronological snobbery, assuming our issues and insights are unique or new. To guard against this we should familiarize ourselves with our family of faith across time, drawing from and building upon their wisdom. We should read the theology of John Chrysostom and John Calvin, Augustine and Athanasius. We should read biographies of faithful Christ-followers from bygone eras: Martin Luther, William Tyndale, William Wilberforce, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Tubman, Hannah More, Father Damien, Elisabeth Elliot, Charles Spurgeon, Susanna Wesley, and many others. Ultimately the value of continuity in church history is that it releases us from the burden of chasing relevance. Every generation need not reinvent the wheel. We simply need to know our story and place ourselves within it, understanding that the strength of the church is continuity rather than constant reinvention, transcendence rather than trendiness. We need churches to be less concerned with being “up on the times” than being connected to the timeless. We need churches that are shaped by the gospel more than by the zeitgeist. At its best, the church takes us out of the uncertainty of the ephemeral and places us in the certainty of the eternal. It reminds us of our destiny and puts the latest social media obsessions into perspective. Everything ever tweeted and the most-viewed viral videos will be forgotten ashes in the embers of history, but the church will remain. p. 93
- Don’t just inoculate yourself against the epistemological sickness of the online age. Do your part to find a cure. p. 147