Artistic Witness (Audiofeed 2025 Transcript)

Last week, I had the privilege of being invited to speak at Audiofeed, a music festival in Urbana, Illinois. My time at Audiofeed was deeply sweet. The gracious opportunity I was given to speak is far outranked in my memory by the genuine community, compelling performances, and encouraging conversations I enjoyed there. I’m grateful to Kevin Schlereth for the invitation to share my story and convey my confident belief that there’s no such thing as the sacred/secular divide because there is a sovereign and irresistibly gracious Christ. If we find the Hound of Heaven is chasing us down, we’ve never been safer. He will use everything at His disposal, which is, well…everything. And thank God.

I also want to thank all who chose to attend this rando’s moment at the mic. The gift of your presence and attention is so much.

I continue to be abysmal at choosing titles — so much so that the working title became the title, and, even as I copy it here now, remains the title. Love for italics also going strong.

But I digress. Here’s the transcript:

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My name is Abbey Sitterley and I’m a writer, musician, and church communications director from Rochester, NY. I’m super stoked to be here with you today. It’s been a goal of mine to make it to Audiofeed for a few years because I love community, especially community that gathers around the intersection of faith and art.

We are all here, traveling from far and wide to be at a music festival, so odds are good that most of us are at least art appreciators or artists ourselves. The arts have this magnetic effect on people, right?

The working title of this talk has been pretty straightforward, Artistic Witness, and you might be wondering two things at the outset: (1) who is this rando? (2) is she gonna say we should make more art to evangelize about Jesus?

The answer to the second question is “No,” and you’ll understand why because of the first. 

I’m from a small town outside of Rochester, NY, an only child from a Christian home. And when I was little my family went through a significant church hurt experience that ended with us losing much of our community. Predictably disillusioned by the moral hypocrisy of Christians who were known more for their hatred of secular culture than their love for one another, I was pretty bitter, and this bitterness churned and grew well-into my high school and college years. Yet, despite my complete disregard for religion, I couldn’t suppress the reality of a spiritual dimension to my life. And so, I went on a deep dive into all sorts of things, from Eastern mysticism and chakras to theosophy and whatever else I could fit into my cafeteria-style approach to spirituality. I was willing to consider everything but the faith I grew up in. 

I was working on my creative writing degree and so much of this searching I did happened on artistic rails: poetry, film, fiction, zines, whatever. This stuff was my god. Somehow, I stumbled into the world of Catholic mystic poetry, Catholicism being distinctly non-evangelical enough to be slightly entertained. I poured over the beauty in Julian of Norwich’s writings, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, and baptized my pretentious literary student angst in the appeals found in St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul. 

I started reading Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, like The Turkey, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, and Revelation shocked and unnerved me. Here was God as the Hound of Heaven staring down characters caught between the paws of grace, trying to wiggle free to no avail. I felt just as, in O’Connor’s terms, ‘Christ-haunted’ as the south they were set in. As deeply gothic fiction, O’Connor’s stories are clearly crafted to neither comfort nor convert. Rather, they merely escort the reader to meet the startling contrast of man before his Maker and promptly abandon one there. 

At the same time as I became acquainted with the beauty and terror of Christianity, a side I’d never known, so-called secular art was also doing a work on me. I began watching The X Files for its reputation as a cult classic sci-fi series and found that same spiritual longing underpinning the show’s entire framework. The tagline phrase ‘I want to believe’ was a touchstone for me, a new openness. Mulder’s unslakable thirst for truth alongside Scully’s empirically-driven skepticism mirrored the same tension happening in my own heart. 

I couldn’t escape the existential reckoning. Films like Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Mike Cahill’s I-Origins, gave me an unflinching view of human frailty and futility. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy novels broke my mind on the rock of nihilism and absurdity. 

Meanwhile, I’d discovered my all time favorite band (and Audiofeed alumni, actually) the Soil and the Sun, who sang lines of Scripture like it might have really happened and could maybe, possibly, potentially, be true. I was being hollowed and wooed at the same time. It was while reading George MacDonald’s Lilith that I realized I not only believed Christianity was true, I wanted it to be true. 

At one point, a friend of mine recommended Madeleine L’Engle’s classic work Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art. L’Engle was different than other Christian authors I’d read. In Walking on Water, she explains how the doctrines of Christianity gave intrinsic spiritual worth to creativity. Not only were we image-bearers of God, we were called to partake as co-creators in the world. And as co-creators, we had to humbly admit that our work isn’t really ours, but rather a profound gift of God’s goodness and divine will. 

See, these pieces of art were blasting my worldview apart. When the Soil and the Sun sang, “The Lord is my God, He created me,” they weren’t doing that in an evangelistic way, they were telling a story. But I walked around campus for a week marvelling at the idea of being a created thing, not an accident, but something fearfully and wonderfully made by Someone. 

Synecdoche dragged personhood and the psyche out into the open and stripped mortality bare. What’s the point of “doing my little job, living my little life, eating my little meals?” It evoked realization of what John Vervaeke calls the Meaning Crisis - 21st century man’s loss of meaning and purpose that has us disconnected from ourselves, each other, and the world. What was telos, the purpose, of my life? Am I just a ghost driving a flesh machine around playing games? 

I believe that the questions, the fear, the awe, the marvel all these cultural artifacts were evoking in me was divine revelation, directed by the sovereignty of God, to baptize my imagination by the power of the Holy Spirit — to see both a need for Christ and a beautiful Christ for my need. 

For me, one of the deepest ways I know Christianity is true is because I wanted nothing to do with it when Christ ambushed me. I was not looking for it. I wanted anything but. Christianity is true because God not only uses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, but He uses both art that acknowledges Him and art that refuses to, for His own purposes, for His glory and our good. 

And this makes total sense. We were created to co-create with the Uncreated Creator. Creativity is His business. This is partly why evangelistic propaganda feels so fake and plastic — we don’t fit Him into our work, He fits us into His. All of our art, all of it, says way more than we ever intend. Art is God’s work first, so there’s an eternal quality to it. 

And artists have been having this debate for eons, haven’t we? What is behind artistic inspiration? Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God has put eternity into the heart of man. This is where art meets us, doesn’t it? Beyond words and explanation? David Lynch always refused to explain the meaning behind his work and I think he’s really acknowledging that there’s something to art beyond explanation. It also speaks to the subjectivity of art, that art, human co-creation, naturally tells on the human condition as well. 

There’s been a lot of great work done by missiologists with the idea of ‘subversive fulfillment.’ 

Based on the work of J. H. Bavinck and re-contextualized by Daniel Strange, subversive fulfillment is a really helpful framework for understanding how we live out from the eternity in our hearts and how the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only thing that can meet it. 

According to Bavinck, and later Daniel Strange, there are five magnetic points of the human experience that we are either “consciously or subconsciously” talking about in any given time. Expressed through our values, our choices, our conversation, and of course our art, these five points “itch” at us, Strange says, and we are always trying to scratch them. 

The five points are: 

1.  Totality = a desire to connect 

2.  Norm = a code of life 

3.  Deliverance = a way out 

4.  Destiny = a way we control

5.  Higher Power = a way beyond 

I really commend Daniel Strange’s book Making Faith Magnetic for deeper dives into each of these than I’ll touch on here, but just upon description, one or two of these might resonate with you at the top, right? 

Maybe you sense a deep desire to want to connect with others, to feel a part of something, for a global interconnected world, or maybe you are obsessed with wanting to know God’s will for your life, or are really captivated by the idea that we’re not alone in the universe and they’re really get at something in the X Files. 

I bet if you take a look at the art you’re making, or the art you just enjoy, you’ll see one or two of these pop out loud and clear. Think about the music, movies, poems, and novels that have impacted you. I would bet each of them touches on one of these magnetic points:

Totality, Norm, Deliverance, Destiny, and Higher Power.

These magnetic points are everything we’re longing for at one point of time or another. We want to be a part of something, to live flourishing lives, to be delivered from our fears, to know where we’re going, and to know why we’re made. 

The nature of these longings come into clearer focus when we look at them from a Christian anthropology, a Christian understanding of man. 

To borrow Francis Schaeffer’s term, we were created by the infinite-personal God, YHWH, and as His handiwork, we are imprinted in His image. In the beginning, God made us and said man was a good thing. We had relationship with Him, Adam walking in the cool of the day with God in intimacy and fellowship. Then God said, “It’s not good for man to be alone” and created woman from Adam’s side. 

But then Adam and Eve fell, fell out of right relationship with God, out of right relationship with each other, and out of right relationship with the world. And as their children, we reap this same broken whirlwind, cosmic rebels against God, bent toward sitting on the throne of our own hearts rather than surrendering ourselves to the only one who was made to satisfy us. 

Just as we are made in God’s image and therefore bear His mark, His creation speaks of Him by what we call ‘general revelation.” The Higher Power magnetic point surges when we encounter beauty and grandeur in creation, the sense of Norm when we see the way God has used cultural myths and fairy tales to set the stage for what Tolkien calls the True Myth. The eternity in us screams there is an infinite-personal God, but as Paul says in Romans 1, we suppress this reality. 

Romans 1:18-23: The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

In that last verse there, we see that we not only suppress the truth of the infinite-personal God, but we substitute created things instead: power, money, sex, material things, created things. 

And so, these magnetic points, which are meant to find their full expression in the love and power of God, are fed and dulled by lesser things. Yet, as I said earlier, art tells on us. What we create tells us what our substitutes are (romantic love, the American dream, politics, social identity) but it also shows their incompleteness. 

Because creativity was God’s work before it was ours, its eternal nature has the potential to awaken us from our suppression. Even idols can’t help but point to what they fail to be.

I like how Peter Leithart puts it: 

“Now, we need to add that the God imaged in our speaking and making is not some abstract and unknown character, some God-in-general, but the God revealed in the story revealed in creation, history and Scripture. If we cannot help but manifest God's character in our creations (including our story-telling), and if the character of God manifested in our creations is known through a story, it follows that we cannot help but retell His stories in our own. 

God's story tells of a good creation, marred by a rebellion and a curse, which is overcome by the coming of a Redeemer to restore the world. All other stories are contained in that basic story. This does not at all mean that every writer is self-consciously and deliberately writing Christian allegory. It means that every writer tells stories that reflect in some way God's story ... Because of the way God created and governs the world, and because knowledge of the Creator and Governor of the world is inescapable, the rebellion of the imaginative writer is constrained. Somewhere, even in the stories of the most self-consciously rebellious story-teller, God’s story shines through.” 

I love that, “the rebellion of the imaginative writer is constrained.” 

Mankind’s broken attempts to suppress and substitute the general revelation of God do not succeed. The Unmoved Mover will have His way, will pursue us with an irresistible grace that we can’t escape from. 

And this is what the Gospel does. It subverts our suppression, showing us the bankruptcy of our pathetic patchwork attempts to shroud the general revelation of God, and it fulfills us, giving us the specific revelation of God’s word: that we are not our own, that meaning and destiny are only found in God’s will, that only the one who made us can tell us how best to live, that there is only one Deliverer and His name is Jesus.

The Gospel is exciting! And it’s the power of God working for repentance, not of our own making. This subversive fulfillment is happening all the time, and I argue that the arts are a potent vehicle for this work of God. We don’t need to be tied to explicit evangelism as artists, because again, creativity is God’s businesses before it was ours. The eternity in your heart calls out to the eternity in mine, and we converse over the same questions humanity has been asking since the fall - these magnetic points of totality, norm, destiny, deliverance, and higher power - and the Lord uses it in His own timing to call us into the fold. 

And so the Christian artist, with this in mind, can find freedom in obedience to the creative call. Obedience modeled by the mother of Jesus. 

Here’s Madeleine L’Engle:

“The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver…

...I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.

As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child's creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.”

When we like Mary, walk in humble, courageous obedience, we find a creative freedom like never before, to create in celebration of our God-given stewardship as co-creators. To make art that is worshipful in the explicit sense, yes, art that plainly declares the lordship of Jesus Christ in word, yes, but also art that simply arises from the worldview of what it looks like to live “coram deo” before the face of God. To borrow from G. K. Chesterton, creativity understood in this way simply allows “room for good things to run wild.” 

So create with fervor, with freedom. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts and lean into the constrained nature of your creativity. 

Creating in this freedom also means that we should resist judging the outcome. Of course you and I want others to know the reality of Christ’s lordship. And there’s a guarantee of this: “All those whom the father has called will come.” Even if our small obedient work only leads someone an inch, or wakes someone up to the knowledge of their need for a savior, isn’t that a miracle enough? 

We need nothing more than the humility and hope the director Krzysztof Kieślowski who wrote, 

“At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it.”

Realization of the soul today. Surrender of the soul at the acceptable time. 

What I’m hoping to inspire is not more evangelistic art for Jesus, but art from a place of freedom and confidence in the Holy Spirit’s power to use our creativity for God’s slow, patient work in the world. To sow seeds of faithful, prophetic witness that may only stir the heart one small step toward a long obedience in the same direction. 

And so just as there is no sacred / secular dichotomy, there is no creative dichotomy of creative and non-creative. Hospitality is an art. Loving your wife as Christ loved the church is an art. Making a meal for a struggling friend is creative. Raising your children in the fear and admonition of the Lord is an art. 

If you are living and moving and having being, you are a co-creator, whether that’s in intricate ceramics or folding laundry. 

So maybe you’re here and you don’t call yourself an artist necessarily. Maybe you’re raising a young family or maybe you just love a band so much it hurts. Just as the triune God, the first Creator, existed before time began in intimate community with each person of the Trinity, so do we need artistic community. Patronage, appreciation, feedback, encouragement, prayer, your presence, artists need people who will resonate with their work and share it with others, to stir up renewed passion for the arts as our cultural tastes become dulled by materialism and the consumeristic mindset.  

Francis Schaeffer said,“Each generation of the church, in each setting, has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.”

My challenge to you today is to listen. Listen to the art you love, listen to the art you’re making. Listen to the culture, listen for the longings, the magnetic points, that are humming beneath our loves, our hates, our political fervor, our artistic tastes and temperaments. Where are there cries for deliverance? What is this novel saying about what defines a flourishing life? What longings does your art reveal in your heart? How is the general revelation of the infinite-personal God poking through like stars in the night of our rejection? 

God uses the things we do not expect, art that even explicitly rejects Him, to draw His own to Himself. If you are a parent of a child who once professed faith but has walked away from God, take heart. If you are praying earnestly for a parent or a friend who has deconstructed, who has become cold or indifferent to the things of God, take heart. You never know what slow work of the spirit is already moving like saws in their heart, to cut away the misconceptions, the bitterness, the calcified self-awareness of their need. 

This is my story, and the more I speak with others who have encountered YHWH through similar channels, the more I take comfort in God’s creative plan for salvation. Keep praying. Be earnest. Listen to their lives, to your own, and find ways to meet each other at the magnetic points - not trying to solve it for them, but simply walking alongside. 

I’ve heard it said once that “Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.” 

There are lots of ways to talk about where the bread is. 

We can write essays and sermons about the bread.

We can paint arrows to the bread. 

We can write songs describing the absence of the bread. 

Make movies about the feasting on the bread. 

Poems about how we get in the way of the bread through the dumb ways we talk about getting to the bread. 

At the end of the day, we are simply beggars. And if we’ll be obedient as co-creators to work authentically before the face of God…If we listen to the place and time we’re in and trace the longings of our human condition…And if we then lean into the freedom that rests and trusts in the sovereign, wise, kind mercy of God…

We’ll experience the unparalleled joy that comes from witnessing the Lord at work on this side of eternity.
As Andy Squyres says, “After we die, we will have no more chances to love God from impossible circumstances.”

May our artistic witness be a witness of obedience, of listening, of freedom. May we let good things run wild in our creativity. May we paint true the longings of our need for a savior and the excitement of having found the answer in Jesus Christ. May we resist the temptation to evangelize from our own strength and instead rest in the power of Holy Spirit’s slow, patient work. And may our excitement grow for the Christian answer, the explosive power of the gospel to subvert our sin and fulfill us as we were made to be filled. 

The Hound of Heaven is hot on our heels. He will not rest until we rest in Him, to glorify and enjoy Him forever. 

Thank you. 

Being the Church

In addition to my full time job, I’ve moonlighted as a freelance writer for a variety of outlets. Most close to my heart is Renew the Arts, a Christian arts patronage nonprofit from Sugar Hill, Georgia. I’ve been connected to Renew the Arts for a few years now under the title of “Chief Storyteller.” In this capacity, I get to do what I love: telling stories of how God is working in the lives of his people to bring about shalom. These stories end up on the Renew the Arts blog, providing readers insight on what hosting a house concert looks like, what patronage means to artists, and how we can be the hands and feet of Christ in supporting artists and their craft.

For the April blog post, I interviewed Trailand Elztroth, a singer-songwriter from Mississippi who plays music full time and tours nationally on the Porchlight network.

There were more than a few great moments in my conversation with Trailand, but my favorite was his recollection of a show hosted by Pastor Garrett Soucy in rural Maine. Soucy and some of the other local pastors invited their congregations to gather together for Trailand’s performance, offering a connection point needed to bring together their communities.

“I think some of them had to have traveled to get there,” Trailand recalled. “The pastors are connected, but the people feel so distant. To see them pull together…the sense of community and fellowship I saw up there…It was such a good experience for me as an artist. They laughed at all my jokes and sang along. Afterward, they stacked like ten picnic tables in a long line and we just ate, drank, and had fun way into the night.”

https://renewthearts.org/behind-the-porchlight-trailand-eltzroth-shared-stories/

In his book Strange New World, Carl Trueman argues that the church's bears its best witness to the world when she is the bonafide church. Rather than expend energy squabbling in the culture wars, a more prophetic course of action sees us retrench in the very things that make the church the bride of Christ: obedience to the authority of Scripture, fervent prayer, the gathering of the saints, and the otherworldly nature of the sacraments.

Trueman states this succinctly in an article for Public Herald Magazine:

“It might sound trite, but a large part of the church’s witness to the world is simply being the church in worship. Paul himself comments that when an unbeliever accidentally turns up at a church service, he should be struck by the otherworldly holiness of what is going on. The most powerful witness to the gospel is the church herself, simply going about the business of worship. Many Christians talk of engaging the culture. In fact, the culture is most dramatically engaged by the church presenting it with another culture, another form of community, rooted in her liturgical worship practices and manifested in the loving community that exists both in and beyond the worship service. Many talk of the culture war between Christians and secularism…but perhaps ‘cultural protest’ is a way of better translating that [biblical] idea into modern idiom.…The church protests the wider culture by offering a true vision of what it means to be a human being made in the image of God.”

The church should be a Christ-adoring beacon, heralding the counter-cultural, upside-down Kingdom of God through means that both repulse and entice the world in their brazen holiness.

It's initiatives like the one these Maine pastors have taken that will, in Steve Taylor's words 'wow the deadness' in our churches and our society at large. Rooted in our liturgical worship and fortified by the Sunday morning gathering of the saints, our Christian witness should spill out in ‘cultural protests’ like hospitality and artistic engagement, demonstrations of a better story lived out through the pursuit of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Christians are inundated with theology resources and spiritual formation frameworks; we are weak in orthopraxy. We have abdicated our role as culture-defying agents of hospitality, the very characteristics of the early Church that mystified the surrounding Roman culture. Furthermore, our churches tend to be siloed, almost competitive, and we have lost the art of the potluck as a great unifier of villages and denominations.

The human need for community goes beyond church membership rolls. Opening our homes and churches to each other will not only create a bulwark against the anti-Christ messages of our day, but it will foster new opportunities for exhortation, encouragement, and communion as the body of Christ. Do the Lord's work: pass the mashed potatoes.

Gathering in and of itself is sweet fellowship but uniting to experience art together provides a new level of engagement. With the advent of streaming and digital downloads has come the commodification of music, which, in turn, has morphed its meaning from a shared world into a means of self-curation. I'm thinking, of course, of the playlist (as someone with over a dozen playlists bearing names such as 'songs for the end of the world' and 'late night work vibe,' I recognize I'm one to talk). As such, we are losing certain dimensions of the listener experience, including active listening, exposure to things we might not choose ourselves, and the unpredictability of live performance. Live musical performance itself has, in the same vein, also become commodified. We expect artists to play the hits, not their 'subpar' new stuff (though these will also be favorites of ours in three years), and to perform them just like they sound on the album. No creative license, please!

House shows decentralize the musical performance, demonstrating that audience resonance is a necessary component of the live experience. The chemistry between artist and listener, both in the midst of the performance and in conversations to follow, is life-giving and unrepeatable.

The more I work with Porchlight and trace the ripple effect of simple hospitality, the more I see this movement as a liturgy cultivator. Slowly, as most of God’s work seems to be, Porchlight is catalyzing the reintegration of hospitality as a thriving form of Christian witness. We have kept our doors shut for too long in spirits of fear, snobbery, sloth, and greed. Unity in celebration of the arts helps us turn the door handle again.

For those of us who struggle with evangelism and are concerned with how to best display Christian witness in a world increasingly hostile to it, take heart. Every day, the Lord uses our stories and our witness in ways we’ll never know. Step into community. Open your home. Give yourself away. Christ says you’ll find life more abundant than ever before.

NOTE: My conversation with Trailand included his story as an artist, the philosophy and theology behind his work, and his heart for the house concerts. Do dive into the full piece HERE. Also, new to the Renew the Arts blog this week is a conversation with Porchlight artist and host Steve Chab. In this piece, Steve describes house shows as “Thanksgiving with music” - that’s pretty spot on. Learn more about Steve and his commitment to fostering community in Pittsburgh HERE.

The Problem of Worship: Part One

I take book recommendations seriously, especially those from my favorite podcasters. When Parker Settecase of Parker’s Pensées recommended David Chalmers’ Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy as a good introduction to simulation theory, I hit that ‘add to cart’ button real fast. 

My interest in the simulation hypothesis goes way back, thanks to a plethora of weird YouTube videos. When I was in college, I read the Upanishads and fixated on this phrase as a spiritual admission that we live in God’s dream - or maybe our own?: 

“We are like the spider.

We weave our life and then move along in it.

We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.”

We all have an innate sense that there is some design to this whole ‘reality’ thing. No matter how reality is defined, it seems we cannot escape the presence of a prime mover: a detached god, a frog-headed god, a simulator coding on a supercomputer. All our discoveries seem to have a shadow on them, a power watching from the corner. 

REALITY+

Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy by David Chalmers argues that “virtual reality is genuine reality.” Yes, says Chalmers, a simulated world of our own creation is just as real as the experience of reality we are engaged in right now. I won’t, and can’t, faithfully regurgitate Chalmer’s positions for you, so I recommend perusing his landing page of books and articles on the subject. This book is mind-bending in the best ways and it’s taken me since January to get through a quarter of it. 

In chapter 7, entitled “Is God a hacker in the next universe up?”, Chalmers explains how simulation theory has shifted his belief in the probability of God. A self-described atheist, Chalmers resembles something of a deist or agnostic, open to the possibility of someone somewhere flipping the switches. The chapter is overall quite generous to the idea of intelligent design, positing for our imaginations the simulator as a woman conducting reality through a supercomputer. The conclusion, however, takes a rather fascinating turn:

And if she does, does she really deserve our worship? To paraphrase Len's personoid Adan 900: Any god that demands our worship doesn't deserve it.

Even if our simulator is a benevolent being, why should we worship her? She may be working to create as many worlds as possible with a sufficient balance of happiness over unhappiness in order to maximize the amount of happiness in the cosmos. If so, we might admire her and be thankful to her—but, again, there's no need for worship.

I find myself thinking that even if our simulator is our creator, is all-powerful, is all-knowing, and is all-good, I still don't think of her as a god. The reason is that the simulator is not worthy of worship. And to be a god in the genuine sense, one must be worthy of worship.

For me, this is helpful in understanding why I'm not religious and why I consider myself an atheist. It turns out that I'm open to the idea of a creator who is close to all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. I had once thought that this idea is inconsistent with a naturalistic view of the world, but the simulation idea makes it consistent. There remains a more fundamental reason for my atheism, however: I do not think any being is worthy of worship.

The point here goes beyond simulation. Even if the Abrahamic God exists, with all those godlike qualities of perfection, I will respect, admire, and even be in awe of him, but I won't feel bound to worship him. If Aslan, the lion-god of Narnia, exists as the embodiment of all goodness and wisdom, I won't feel bound to worship him. Being all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and entirely wise aren't sufficient reasons for worship. Generalizing the point, I don't think any qualities can make a being worthy of worship. As a result, we never have good reason to worship any being. No possible being is worthy of worship.

I'm sure many religious readers will disagree, but even they may agree that a mere simulator would not be worthy of worship-and therefore that a simulator is not a god in the full-blooded sense. If so, we can at least ask the question: What could make a being worthy of worship, and why?

These final paragraphs are so fascinating to me. Why not settle the chapter at, “We might be intelligently designed?” Why the rumination on worship? I’ve thought about this a lot over the past few weeks and have decided that the “problem of worship,” as I’ll call it, is a starting line to articulating complicated truths of the Christian faith. 

THE DEMAND

Let’s break down Chalmer’s conclusion line by line: 

And if she does, does she really deserve our worship? To paraphrase Len's personoid Adan 900: Any god that demands our worship doesn't deserve it.

Even if our simulator is a benevolent being, why should we worship her? She may be working to create as many worlds as possible with a sufficient balance of happiness over unhappiness in order to maximize the amount of happiness in the cosmos. If so, we might admire her and be thankful to her—but, again, there's no need for worship.

Does God demand our worship? Yes. 

This idea is like the sound of nails meeting a chalkboard at first. Who does God think He is to demand worship? At the outset, Chalmers makes a fair point. Anyone who demands our love for the sake of the demand meets appropriate refusal. "Um, no. That is not how love works," we'd say. This is not how worship works, either.

According to Scripture, we were created to worship God (Ecc. 12:13, Ps. 16, Ps. 119:14, Phil. 2:9-11). This is the highest purpose of the human soul. Assuming it’s true that God made us to be worshippers and worship is the thing we’ve been created to do– the uttermost zenith of all human enterprise –then it would be the best possible good for the highest demand on us to be the thing that we were created to be. 

Early Christians Worship in the Catacombs of Saint Calixtus / From image: "Fig 8: 'Divine Service in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus, A.D. 50."

As St. Augustine famously confessed, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” If Christian anthropology is right, then complete fulfillment is manifested in our worship of God. 

Of course, “What are we created for?" is predicated upon the question "Who is the God who created us?" The purpose we've been given depends greatly on the personality, attributes, and motives of the god who fashioned us into worshippers.

We could look at this from the full spectrum of morality: If God is evil according to our general conception of evil, then yes, this demand might be twisted. But most don't consider the Judeo-Christian God evil, even if they have never read His scriptures or encountered Him personally. At worst he is irrelevant, at most he is restrictive and gives arbitrary, outdated rules.

If He is neutral, from the deist perspective-- not interested in human affairs and benign in His judgments of them-- then the demand for worship feels unbalanced. Why does He demand personal engagement when He Himself does not personally engage? Why does He require spiritual intimacy if the only intimacy He's interested in is vague weather control?

But as Francis Schaeffer insisted, we aren't dealing with an impersonal god. We are dealing with “The God Who Is There - and He is not silent.” 

Then, it behooves us to ask, who is this God? What is He like? What does He want? How can we know Him? 
These are dangerous questions. Asking them, we knock on the door of eternity. 

Sometimes we don't want the door to open. We'd rather pace on the front porch with our preconceptions of a vague, evil, or impersonal God than actually ask, seek, knock. I love the way Tim Keller phrases this: 

“Describe the God you've rejected. Describe the God you don't believe in. Maybe I don't believe that God either.” 

Reader, you not only have a personal invitation to ask, seek, and knock -- you have a guarantee along with it:

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8) 

HAPPY, OR WHATEVER

Even if our simulator is a benevolent being, why should we worship her? She may be working to create as many worlds as possible with a sufficient balance of happiness over unhappiness in order to maximize the amount of happiness in the cosmos. If so, we might admire her and be thankful to her—but, again, there's no need for worship.

I agree. The invention, cultivation, and preservation of happiness are not enough. If personal happiness is the grand plan for the cosmos, it's a paltry mission, poorly executed at that. 

No serious ethicist or philosopher calls happiness the highest zenith of human good. Instead, meaning, agency, and human flourishing are the worthier pursuits. These things are more fulfilling alternatives to mere happiness and mood. We may worship our own happiness, but we know better than to trust in it. And if we don’t distrust our emotional whims, that's a matter of poor taste.

Would you give Norman Bates his happiness? I shudder to think what states of happiness occupy some personalities. 

We might be thankful for happiness, but we don't worship for happiness. Christians especially do not worship God for happiness. On the contrary, Christians worship God especially when they are not happy. Not even God tells us to worship Him solely because He lifts our moods!

Saint Job. Line engraving by L. Vorsterman after Sir P.P. Rubens. / Iconographic Collections

Consider these few Scriptures (I encourage you to experience their contexts):

“Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, ‘Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’” (Job 1:20-21) 

“Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.” (Habbakuk 3:17-18)

"O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
 my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
 as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
  beholding your power and glory.
Because your steadfast love is better than life,
   my lips will praise you.
So I will bless you as long as I live;
    in your name I will lift up my hands.” (Psalm 63:1-4)

Worship, despite state or circumstance, tends to make us not happy, but peaceful, contented, transcendent. The Westminster Confession of Faith says the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. If we were created to glorify God, it makes sense that glorifying him and enjoying Him is our highest good. The God who is there invites deep intimacy. That, not happiness, is worthy of worship.

For those who grew up in Christian homes, worship may feel like a given. Sit through too many emotionally manipulating worship nights at Bible camp or youth group altar calls and worship can feel more like a rote performance than spiritual intimacy. We may see worship as something for us, dependent on our stylistic preferences and the feeling of transcendence afforded by a hive switch. 

The problem of worship, articulated well by Chalmers, can function as the stick of dynamite needed to turn over the calcified soil of our hearts. Ask yourself, “Why worship God?” and see what comes out of your heart. Then, go to the Scriptures, and ask the same. Let God teach you about what, and Who, you were made for.  

He is The God Who is There. Ask, seek, knock. 

30 in 30

Another five years around the sun done and done.

The older I get, the more I realize I still have so much to learn. And I love it. Humbly aware of my ignorance: this strikes me as a safe place to be.

At some point in the last five years, I fell in love with Dag Hammarskjøld's Markings, a series of personal reflections that the late Swedish diplomat never intended to publish. From existential ruminations to natural observations and spiritual contemplations, Hammarksjold's writing style is like a distilled diary: none of the fluff and, at times, scathingly honest. He's not afraid to critique himself, nor neglect the beauty of being a fallible human being.

Inspired, I began to jot down little lessons and ponderings as I found them. Some of these are included here, alongside other guidelines and truisms I've garnered through things like a global pandemic, professional opportunities, books and nature, national travels and inward journeys, expectations unfulfilled, and good and beautiful things, too.

Without further ado…

Here are some things I know about living life so far:

1. Resist broad labels for complex issues, even if convenient.

2. You have yet to discover all your heroes.

3. Chumps go to Costco without a plan, but the wise go to Costco at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday mornings.

4. Learn the art of not needing to have the last word.

5. Anyone who says faith is a clear linear process and not a winding, arduous, unexpected journey is selling something. Anyone who's left their faith and believes they are now qualified to help you leave yours is selling something.

6. Never underestimate the power of a snack, a nap, and a glass of water.

7. You will die. This is not an excuse not to care for yourself. You will die. This is not an excuse to enslave yourself to the cult of wellness.

8. The Diderot effect is real. Frugality is the spiritual cure. Take Paul seriously in 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12.

9. When you go out, refrain from ordering meals or drinks that you could prepare at home. Make novelties novel again.

10. Be careful with your own heart and others'. Be especially careful around those who aren't careful with their own.

11. When you don't know what or how to pray, pray the prayers that God never says no to: a) “Humble me” b) “Cleanse my heart” c) “Make me more like Jesus.”

12. Pray every time, over everything, that your spirit is prompted to.

13. Wake up at the same time every day regardless of how late you went to bed. The human body has no concept of 'catch-up sleep.'

14. Always pack an extra capo.

15. Comfort zones are not static: the more you satisfy them, the more they shrink. Choose the uncomfortable. Keep pushing the boundaries of your little anxieties.

16. Sabbath and rest are not optional.

17. Don’t lose your desire to walk. You can walk your way into good ideas and out of bad ideas.

18. Self-improvement books tell. Faerie tales show. Experience teaches.

19. Followers of Jesus are known by their love for one another, not by their theological prowess. Following Jesus is nothing less than obedience.

20. Humility, family, and locality are the best barriers to state propaganda.

21. Inquiry and reflection are two of the best tools in your arsenal.

22. It's better to help someone learn how to ask good questions than merely provide pat answers.

23. Work with your mind? Rest with your hands. Work with your body? Rest with your mind.

24. People are not backup plans.

25. Resist the urge to react to every swing of the cultural pendulum. Chesterton was right: dead things go with the stream and only living things can go against it. But wise things navigate the stream.

26. Know when to stop talking about your grief.

27. In the multitude of counselors is wisdom, so seek out advice from others, but don't use counsel-seeking as an excuse to put off acting when you should act. Holiness is "…the power to act as we ought, to be response-able, able to respond with appropriate power to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. The right thing at the right time." (Dallas Willard)

28. Silence before God is more important than ambitious productivity.

29. Occasionally, practice the discipline of not defending yourself.

30. Invest more time in your family than you think you need to.