Deep and Wide: On the Importance of Expanding One’s Worldview

Many of you remember the children’s church song “Deep and Wide,” which some say teaches kids the depth and limitless amount of God's love for us. Perhaps it does. But recently I have been thinking about those words in a much different way. Can we also have a deep and wide worldview? 

(Photo taken in Florida by Barbara Stellwagen)

Developing a deep and wide worldview is something that all of us who grew up as regular participants in Sunday School and church worship services needed, or maybe still need, to do. That is because our respective worldviews were largely shaped by what we learned there.

Few people would think that their understanding of history, science, economics, and the like that they had as children or teenagers would be sufficient for grasping the contemporary world. The need to have deeper and wider knowledge is readily acknowledged in those areas.

Why should it be different with regard to one’s worldview or theology? (Note that I am referring to theology not just as an academic study but as “faith seeking understanding.”) The search for greater comprehension of reality can and should be engaged in on several different levels.

As I have written in a previous blog post, I was greatly influenced as a third-year college student by D. Elton Trueblood’s book, Philosophy of Religion (1957), in which he emphasized that an unexamined faith is not worth having.*¹ An unexamined worldview is also far less than adequate.

My philosophy of religion college course with Trueblood’s book as the text helped me greatly in beginning to develop a deeper and wider understanding of Christianity, the foundation of my worldview. That process has lasted for more than sixty-five years now. Learning and growing must never end.

Jim Wallis has emphasized the importance of going deeper. Many of you will remember that I have spoken highly of Jim in the past. In fact, he is on my “top ten” list of stimulating/challenging speakers/writers I have heard/read in my lifetime.

Wallis’s book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (2005) is on my top ten list of favorite 21^st-century non-fiction books. It was probably there that I first saw the words, “Don’t go right, don’t go left, go deeper.”*²

Those words apply both to theology and to politics—and perhaps to many other aspects of our worldview as well. Even with a broader view of things, one can still be situated near the extreme right or the extreme left. More important is having a deeper understanding, not just a wider one.

In Jim’s newest book, The False White Gospel (2024), he tells how he became estranged from the conservative evangelical church and the theology that he had grown up in. He joined many others who were protesting the war in Vietnam, racism, and poverty.

He says that like many student activists at that time, around 1970, he was seeking answers by reading Karl Marx, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara. But then he realized that he “needed something deeper.” He found that first by reading Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Jim Wallis’s going deeper also led him to go wider.

In 1971 when he and his friends began publishing what became Sojourners magazine, it was mainly in protest of U.S. warfare in Vietnam. Now they say their mission is “to articulate the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and faith-rooted action” (from the August 2024 issue of Sojourners).

“There is a Wideness in God’s Mercy” is one of my favorite hymns. It was written by Frederick Faber (1814~63), an English clergyman.*³

1 There’s a wideness in God’s mercy / like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in God’s justice, / which is more than liberty.

3 But we make God’s love too narrow / by false limits of our own,
and we magnify its strictness / with a zeal God will not own.

4 For the love of God is broader / than the measures of the mind
and the heart of the Eternal / is most wonderfully kind.

Like Jim Wallis, many of us grew up in churches that had a theology that was too shallow and too narrow. I am grateful that Wallis has helped some of us develop a deeper theology/worldview—and also that Faber’s marvelous hymn text inspires us to embrace a wider view of God’s mercy and love.

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*¹ I wrote about this in a June 2018 blog article, which referred to that same subject in the 16^th chapter of my book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (2019).

*² Even though this book was published nearly 20 years ago, Wallis still uses those words often. In The False White Gospel, his book published in April of this year, he writes, “As I always advise my students, ‘Don’t go right. Don’t go left. Go deeper’” (p. 35). He also has those words on his “God’s Politics” Substack opening page (see here; click “No thanks” at the bottom to read without subscribing).

*³ Faber was ordained in the Church of England in 1839, but he greatly admired John Henry Newman (1801~90) and followed him in converting to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. His hymn was first published in 1854 and more verses were added later. The words above are from the Voices Together hymnal (2020), and the text is from an 1861 hymnal.

Did the RNC Just Nominate the Worst Presidential Candidate Ever?

Disclaimer: This blog post was planned and partially written before the despicable attempted assassination of Mr. Trump on July 13. I categorically deplore all political violence and am thankful that Mr. Trump was not seriously injured or killed. Still, I think the following needs to be carefully considered.

Last week, I conjectured that the current Supreme Court Chief Justice is in the running for the worst in the history of the U.S. Now I am raising the question of whether the Republican National Committee this week nominated the worst presidential candidate ever.

According to Mary Trump, ex-President Trump’s niece, they did. Three days before the beginning of the Republican convention on July 15 in a Substack post, Ms. Trump said that her Uncle Donald is  

The public media’s focus was on Pres. Biden from June 27 until July 13. On June 28, after Biden’s “disastrous” debate performance the previous day, the New York Times editorial board posted an opinion piece titled, “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race.”

For nearly two weeks, there was an onslaught of newscasts and posted/published news articles questioning Biden’s suitability to be re-elected President. Strangely, very little was said about the suitability of Trump being re-elected—until last week.

On July 11, the editorial board of the NYTimes posted an impressive opinion piece declaring that Trump is “unfit to lead” the country. (If you haven’t seen that post, please take a look at it here.)

The next day, Dana Milbank, the prominent Washington Post journalist, posted an article (here) asserting, “The national discussion needs to shift back to where it should be: on Trump’s fitness for office.”

Also on July 12, Ms. Trump (b. 1965), posted “Joe Biden Deserves to Be Elected” on her Substack blog. She pointed out that while Biden was having a press conference with NATO leaders last week, “Donald Trump, fascist and kisser of dictators’ asses [sic], hosted the autocratic prime minister of Hungry.”

She concluded, “Pres. Biden knows what he’s doing. So does Donald. Only Biden wants what’s best for the people of this country. Donald wants only what’s best for him—and what’s best for him will destroy this country and get a lot of people killed.” Strong words from Mary, who has a Ph.D. in psychology!

Nevertheless, Donald Trump was unanimously nominated as the Republican candidate for President on July 15.

Why might Trump be declared the worst presidential candidate ever? Well, many more reasons could be set forth here, but consider these:

    ◈ Trump is the only ex-President to be convicted as a felon—and in addition to those 34 convictions, he has been charged with 54 other felonies. No felon has ever before been a major Party nominee for President, although Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate, was an imprisoned felon in 1920.*¹

    ◈ Trump is the only President to refuse to hand over the power of government to his elected successor.­ Rather than conceding, he sought to manipulate the electoral college vote to his favor on January 6, 2021, and promoted insurrection activities. And he still contends the election was “stolen.”

    ◈ Trump has publicly stated he will seek revenge on his political enemies if he is re-elected. A year ago, ABC News posted, “Trump's unprecedented campaign pitch: Elect me to get revenge on the government.” He apparently (and alarmingly) intends to use the Department of Justice for that purpose.

    ◈ Trump has been heavily influenced by The Heritage Foundation in the past (they recommended the three Supreme Court justices that he appointed), and it is quite certain that if elected he would implement many of the proposals in their “2025 Presidential Transition Project” (aka “Project 2025”).*³

    ◈ In addition to the specific reasons given above, in general, Trump can be considered the worst presidential nominee ever because of the existential threat he poses to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the ongoing democracy of the United States.

In light of the attempted assassination of Trump last week, should those who support the Democratic candidate for President not say negative things about Trump? Is that what fueled the assassination attempt, as some Republicans have charged? There is no evidence at all of that being the case.

What I have written here is not “hateful rhetoric” but a carefully considered opinion based on what Trump has said and done from 2015 to the present.

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*¹ On Nov. 2, 1920, Eugene V. Debs received one million votes in the U.S. presidential election on the Socialist Party ticket while in prison serving a 10-year sentence for a speech protesting World War I. He was arrested and convicted in federal court under the Espionage Act of 1917.

*² Project 2025 has often been in the news in the past few weeks. One recent, helpful explanation of it is found in this Washington Post article.

Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, has stated that Project 2025 would lead to a “second American Revolution” and would be “bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Sen. J.D. Vance, the Republican Vice President nominee, has strongly endorsed Project 2025. Among other things, he has written the foreword to Roberts’s new book, Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America,” due to be published in September. [Note (added on Aug. 9): A couple of days ago it was announced that Roberts has requested that his book not be published until November, after the election.]

*³ It is noteworthy, and completely inexplicable, that back in 2016 Trump’s pick for Vice President referred to him, the Republican nominee for President, as “America’s Hitler.” (Here is the link to what he wrote.)

 

 

 

Original Sin and the Supreme Court

Miguel A. De La Torre is an acquaintance with whom I have had delightful personal conversations and whose written work is always thought-provoking as well as (to me) questionable. “Rejecting Original Sin,” his article posted on Good Faith Media (here) on May 13, is no exception.*¹ 

“We must reject the heresy known as ‘original sin’.” Upon reading those opening words of De La Torre’s brief essay, I decided to write this blog article about it, but last week I altered considerably the content of what I planned to say in the envisioned article.

What Miguel rejects is primarily the traditional interpretation of original sin by Augustine in the early part of the fifth century and then by the Protestant reformer John Calvin in the sixteenth century. Both believed in the historicity of a literal Adam and Eve and the biological transmission of sin.

I agree with Miguel’s rejection of original sin as propounded by Augustine and Calvin. However, he did not deal with the neo-orthodox theologians such as Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. They affirmed original sin but rejected the idea that it is a hereditary trait passed down from Adam.

Niebuhr emphasized the paradox of human nature, where humans are both created in the image of God and yet profoundly flawed. This duality explains why humans are capable of great good and great evil. I think that is a correct assessment—and it may not be so different from Miguel's point.

“I argue not for human depravity but simply for their stupidity.” Those are the striking words with which De La Torre ends his essay. Upon reading that, I wrote in the margin of my printed copy, Is he replacing original sin with original stupidity?

Perhaps we humans are not born sinful as declared by traditional Catholic and Calvinist theology nor born “righteous” (basically good) as asserted by much contemporary liberal theology. Maybe we humans are just born stupid.

Just as original sin doesn’t mean that all humans are equally sinful in how they manifest their sinfulness, neither does acknowledging “original stupidity” mean that all humans are equally stupid. Rather, we are all prone to think, say, and do stupid things.

And that is what led me to think seriously about the U.S. Supreme Court. Back on April 30, my blog post began with the adage called Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” I conjectured that many of Trump’s followers may not be guilty of either.

But in analyzing the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, perhaps they were made not because of malice stemming from “original sin” but because of stupidity.

A “dangerous political heresy” were the words used by the new Republican Party regarding the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision issued in March 1857. That ruling by Chief Justice Roger Taney is widely regarded as the worst Supreme Court opinion ever.

In recent years, though, the Supreme Court has made a series of “stupid” decisions, beginning with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010). Jimmy Carter called that ruling “the most stupid decision that the Supreme Court ever made.”

Back in November 2022, the eminent Robert Reich posted a Substack article titled ”Why I still think John Roberts is the worst Chief Justice since Roger Taney.”*² He says that Roberts was “the moving force” behind Citizen’s United.*³

Last month, on June 28, the Supreme Court issued an opinion that overturns Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. That same day, environmental journalist Jameson Dow (here) wrote, “Among many incredibly stupid opinions the court has issued recently, this is among the stupidest.”

But just three days later, Donald J. Trump v. United States, a stupider decision was handed down, and especially because of that ruling, Roberts may well replace Taney as the worst Supreme Court Justice ever.

Decided by a 6-3 vote on July 1, Roberts wrote the majority opinion, holding that presidents could expect absolute immunity for acts related to key powers granted under the Constitution.

If because of the desire for power (an aspect of Eve’s “original sin”) of political agencies, domestic and foreign, and because of the ignorance of the voting public (“original stupidity”) of U.S. citizens, Trump is re-elected President, the nation will most likely soon see the disastrous effects of the Court’s ruling.

May it not be so!

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*¹ For biographical information about De La Torre, see this helpful Wikipedia article. As noted there, Miguel completed his Ph.D. at Temple University in 1999. My daughter Karen was also doing graduate work in religious studies at Temple at that time and received her Ph.D. the following year. It was through her that I first became acquainted with him.

In a December 2018 blog post, I was somewhat critical of De La Torre's emphasis on hopelessness. I was intrigued, then, by Brian McLaren’s quite positive reference to De La Torre’s ideas about hope/hopelessness in “Hope Is Complicated,” the fifth chapter of Life After Doom, which I wrote about in my June 29 blog post.

*² Reich (b. 1946) worked in the administrations of presidents Ford and Carter and was a Cabinet member of presidents Clinton and Obama. In 2008, Time magazine named him one of the Ten Best Cabinet Members of the century. His Substack post can be found here.

*³ In 2013, Roberts wrote for the court’s conservative majority in Shelby County v. Holder, gutting the Voting Rights Act’s requirement of prior federal approval for voting changes in states with a history of discrimination. For those of us who believe that voter rights should be protected for all, that also was a “stupid” decision.