The other day I was listening to a podcast where a relatively well-known voice described doing his research on Taylor Swift’s engagement. That’s a phrase I’ve heard repeated ad nauseam about anything from vacation options to vaccines to decisions about whether to remain protestant.
I’m going to admit, right now, that I hate this phrase. So I wanted to spend a little time examining why I hate this phrase, and I’ll be honest again: I found some yucky stuff inside of me, and I found some insightful stuff.
So first, here’s the yucky stuff. I have a Master’s degree which is a hybrid between a professional degree (think a business MBA) and a research degree (think an MPhil or PhD with a thesis). That probably speaks too highly of the M.Div because it’s not like a PhD, not really. But it’s also designed to teach pastors how to do primary research with an ancient document written in foreign languages (the Bible), so it’s not really like an MBA.
Here is one thing you learn when getting your M.Div, if you’re me, anyway: you don’t know what you don’t know. I went kicking and screaming into my M.Div program, which probably makes me the exception rather than the norm. I could teach the Bible fine, people told me so. A master's degree would cramp my style, I thought. But years into the program, I changed my mind. I realized that the way I had been thinking about the Bible - before seminary - had been thoroughly skewed by American history, chronological snobbery, western individualism (read: arrogance) and a touch of the Romantic.
Here is the other thing you learn in a Masters program, if you’re anybody: there are a discouraging number of secondary sources that are absolutely full of crap. In my case that means Bible commentaries, sermons and popular Christian books that are chock-full of absolutely egregious historical errors, exegetical fallacies, sloppy reasoning, biased presuppositional and wishful thinking or outright pandering.
So now to the ugly thing.
One reason I hate the phrase, “doing my own research” is this: it took me four years of full-time academic training to learn how to do my own research in my own field (the Hebrew/Greek scriptures), and even then I didn’t do much, if any, original research.
So when I hear the phrase, “doing my own research”, part of me groans.
Rolls my eyes.
Throws up a little bit in my mouth.
“No you are not doing your own research”, I think. “You are Googling something. We here in academia which I am barely and not really a part of, we do not call Googling something ‘research’, we call that injecting an IV Bag of sloppily argued propaganda straight into your veins so you can happily continue in your circumstantially biased, culturally conditioned malaise of slogans and catchphrases that appeal to your likewise jello-molded western, individualized intuitions so you can go on justifying whatever self-expressive choices you believe you have the God-given right to because of the US Constitution aka your unquestioned quasi-deist default moral authority even though you barely recognize how truly weird, dangerous, inhumane, philosophically-incoherent and experimental its heretofore unexamined-by-you thesis is in the grand scope of global history.”
You have those thoughts too, don’t you? Sure you do! We’ve all been there.
So yes, I feel a little squeamish around the phrase, “doing my own research.”
On the other hand.
Here is the third thing I reluctantly discovered during my final year of seminary: most people could reasonably learn to read the Bible about as well as I could after years of classes in original languages and history, if they were willing to put the work in and learn a few basic principles.
The ugly thing is, a small, nasty, greedy little part of me didn’t want this to be true, maybe because of the sunk-cost fallacy: if I invested this many years and such-and-such moolah to receive a degree in reading the Bible, YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE THAT FOR FREE.
It’s not very Protestant of me, is it?
Yeah, it’s not. That’s kind of the point of this essay.
Models of Thinking
Model #1: Outsourced Thinking
Let’s rewind to the time of the Reformation.
The dominant mode of thinking at the time is what I’ll call outsourced thinking. Outsourced thinking is the kind that is uncritical of experts. It takes expertise pretty seriously: let the theologians do theology, let the scientists do science, and let the car mechanic do car mechanics.
And so:
Why should we believe indulgences for dead relatives can purchase their way to heaven? Well, that’s what the experts say.
The experts say the earth is at the center of the solar system. The Bible says so (the experts say).
One way we could stop the black plague is by *checks notes*…flagellating ourselves with whips, the experts say.
The question isn’t so much whether these claims can be justified. The question is: Who gave you authority to question that judgment?
This is a wild way of thinking for a modern western person, though not so much for other cultures. Something I learned in seminary was that many of my South Korean friends were getting an education because in South Korea there is tons of deference to expertise. We westerners cringe at that.
But why?
Let’s just get in the shoes of some Pre-Reformation westerners. Imagine the kind of life you could live, say, if everyone around you shared a basic political viewpoint: long live the King! What kind of life would that be? Sure, it’s a herd mindset.
Counterpoint: we’re all part of the same herd. So that’s nice.
Of course, you can imagine this way of thinking, because in some ways, we all do it. Take mathematics. No one even at a collegiate level takes it upon themselves to question basic mathematics. But we all know this doesn’t preclude the possibility that mathematics could be changed. I had a weird genius friend named Steven at the University of Missouri getting his PhD in mathematics, and when he tried to explain something-something-something about 3 dimensional shapes and something-something-something-math to me, my brain turned to oatmeal.
Yeah, STEVEN could change mathematics, probably not significantly, and probably not in any way that would reflect poorly on my 4th grade education.
But not me. I’m not even interested.
This, essentially, is an outsourced model of thinking: we all recognize it would be burdensome and kind of absurd/narcissistic to form our own opinion and do our own research on mathematical systems. We’re not here to question it. We’re hear to learn it and move on.
In one way, we could say this is a “herd mindset”. But we also recognize if we don’t adopt a herd mindset in mathematics, we need to bear something incredibly weighty that we do not - most of us - believe we have the intellect, expertise or desire to bear. Plus, it works.
And that’s fine.
Because we couldn’t bear to live in a world where we need to be the expert on everything: “Maybe gravity isn’t real. Let’s just see!”
None of us wants this, and so we all outsource some of our thinking.
So just imagine a world where this is the model for thinking about nearly everything except your own vocation. Sure, if you’re a potter, you probably have your own hot takes on clay, wheels, and technique. But you probably don’t think too critically about why we’re invading Scotland:
Why is the King invading Scotland?
Because the Scots are evil!
How do we know?
Because the King’s invading them!
Of course it’s easy to see how this kind of circular thinking could lead to, say, the idea that anyone who doesn’t float must be a duck, a witch, or a very small rock:
At the same time…you can kind of see the appeal, can’t you?
Imagine a world where you weren’t expected to have a hot take on…literally almost anything at next month’s Thanksgiving meal. What would you do? You would feast, and rejoice, and move on with your life. Hey, maybe you could even stop smuggling your resentment into political debates and instead actually talk about your feelings! Novel, right?
It’s a trade-off. It really is.
In one way, I think, it explains why in modernity so many young people are returning to an “outsourced” way of thinking by flocking to the Roman Catholic and Orthodox church. But more on that in a moment.
Model #2: Resourced Thinking
Along came the Protestant Reformation.
Martin Luther, you’ll keep in mind, wasn’t a peasant. He wasn’t sitting on his front porch working his way through a Kay Arthur bible study when he stumbled on the idea of justification by faith alone in the Book of Romans. Martin Luther was more like my weird PhD math friend Steven. Luther is a prodigious scholar, proficient in German, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Aramaic. Luther begins as a largely outsourced thinker. He’s not trying to start something.
But through years of working through one existential crisis after another, it dawns on Luther one day that perhaps the reason the Official Church holds a few of its Official Positions is that these particular things give the Official Church a stranglehold on power and also that some of these Official Practices like indulgences are a cash cow not only for the church but for the princes and kings who’ve grifted gold from the church’s bank account to fund their turf wars. Do these observations make Luther the first Critical Theorist, who can say. Do they make him the first Conspiracy Theorist, possibly.
So Luther dips his finger into this big religious socio-political soup and says, “No thank you.” Is he the first to do this? Not at all. You can find all sorts of critics calling out the fact that the Pope seems to juice up people’s anxiety about their dead relatives whenever he just so happens to need money for a pet-project. Luther was in no way an innovator, here. Nor was he really trying to be. He’s feisty, sure. But that famous story about nailing 95 theses to Castle Church in Wittenberg wasn’t really meant to be a rallying cry for the peasantry.
We know that because, pretty importantly, these theses weren’t written in German.
They were written in Latin.
Luther just happened to find himself at a weird intersection of history where these in-house debates - thanks to the relatively recent invention of the printing press - had nascent potential to go viral. So for the first time, the peasantry had access to the Big In-House Conversation. If you wanted to be a little sensational, you could give a pretty good argument for the idea that the Reformation wasn’t started by Luther at all, but by some nameless visionary/whistleblower who decided to take the issue to the streets by translating Luther’s theses into the common tongue.
It would be difficult to describe the kind of revolution taking place in this moment. It would be like AI becoming sentient. There is a sudden lurch in human history. It’s not just that Luther echoes the dissatisfaction of us, the common folk. It’s more like there is a sudden realization: “Wait…I can be dissatisfied with the Church?” And then, like a kid in an abusive household, someone names the Unspoken Thing and…all Heaven breaks loose (excuse the Protestant spin).
The point is: Luther is in no way trying to start a “back to the Bible” movement. More on that below.
But first, what was Luther’s (and later Protestant’s) model of thought?
I’ll call this Protestant model of thinking Resourced thinking. Resourced thinking is a way of looking at the world that, like Outsourced thinking, still shows deference to expertise. There is no world in which the Reformers believed it was a good idea for Joe-Schmo to sit down alone on on Island and weigh the merits of the Trinity. That would be like telling me I should sit down by myself and weigh the merits of the Algebraic system. (In fact, interestingly, Chat GPT recently duped a guy into believing he’d totally deconstructed our mathematical system by appealing to…wait for it…his ego).
The Reformers were well aware that ego, culture, privilege, personality incompetence and sinful bias would always creep into our own personal interpretation of the scriptures. But they were also well aware that unchecked systems of theological power were prone to hoard knowledge so they could also hoard power.
Their solution?
Resourcing: We let the experts remain the experts, but we also bring their primary sources and arguments out into the wild. The experts shouldn’t have these arguments behind closed doors. Rather, they should show people how to read the Bible, think about the Bible, and check expert opinions against the Bible. In this model, we show deference to the experts as well as respect to everyone else. We let the experts lay out the arguments, but the rest of us hold them accountable.
Take Calvin’s Institutes. Calvin wrote his 800 page tome - the Institutes - so lay people could be introduced to the wide-ranging thinking and categories of the church experts….so that after reading this giant book, they could begin to sit down with the Bible for themselves1. He cites twice as many church fathers as scripture passages in his introduction to the book, showing how his opinions not only align with scripture but with the “experts” of church history2.
Think about that: Calvin believed you needed about 800 pages of dense reading material collecting the wisdom of the church and laying out the best arguments for the debatable topics before you could even begin to crack open the Bible for yourself.
Does that sound like any American Evangelical you know?
I’ll wait.
No, of course it doesn’t.
So yes, in this model, it’s very important that we all have access to the primary sources: the scriptures. But the intention of the Reformation wasn’t to go “around” the experts to read the Bible “for ourselves”. The intention was to help us “follow along” as those Christ commissioned to be teachers of the church guided us.
This all may sound stuffy to our highly individualistic standards. But I’d argue it’s still very Punk Rock. At the end of the day, the Reformers believed most people are - or can be, and even should be - capable researchers, if given the right tools. You could maybe even say the Protestants believed everyone had a moral duty to be a capable researcher. That is the point of sola scriptura: not that we don’t need experts or the insights of others, but that everyone should have access to the primary sources so that Christian claims could be tested.
This isn’t mere Outsourcing: check your brains at the door, the experts are talking.
This is Resourcing: we defer to the experts, but we also expect them to show us their work.
Model #3: WithinSourced Thinking
I made the point about Luther being not-so-revolutionary-as-you’d-hoped because I have a very strong hunch that Luther would be flabbergasted by what we Evangelicals call a Protestant model of thought. That’s because, on the heels of the Protestant Reformation was what we might call a “back to the Bible” movement (the Anabaptists - not to be confused with modern Baptists) that both Luther and the much more even-keeled Calvin, later, rejected not as a “bad branch” of Protestantism but as a totally un-Christian model of thought.
“Wait,” you might say, “Isn’t that the entire point of the Reformation? To get back-to-the-Bible? Didn’t all those dudes translate the Bible for us so we could skirt the long-winded scholastic theology debates and read the Bible for ourselves?”
Well, if you hear Back-to-the-Bible Evangelicals tell the story, sure!
That’s because this version of the movement suits American Evangelicalism - which I’d largely categorize as a back-to-the-Bible movement - pretty well. So if you’ve been swimming in American Evangelical waters, yeah, that’s probably how you’ve heard the Reformation story told: “See, these guys wanted us to decide what the Bible says. Not ‘the experts’. Look at this fine statue of Luther flipping the bird at authority and eating a Big Mac, sort of like we did in the Revolutionary War! Also, you know that dude carried. WEEEEEEE!”
But I’d argue most Evangelicals in America have a way of thinking about the Bible and the world at large that the Reformers would have seen as totally naive…and out of control. It’s true not just for the way we think about the Bible, but in the way we think about all of life: medicine, journalism, politics, literature, science, etc.
So “yes” to the first part - the Reformers wanted the Bible in everyone’s hands, for sure.
“No” to the second part - the Reformers did not want anyone reading the Bible “for themselves.”
That might sound like a distinction without a difference, so here’s a somewhat dumb metaphor: imagine you’re on a Night Tour of a rainforest in South America, because you want to see the nocturnal Kinkajou.
Cute, right? You’ve got to see this little guy in person.
Your tour guides are local Amazon Rangers who know the park inside and out, and they know the mysterious ways of the Kinkajou. The tour guides guide you through the dark, showing you some great cute little Kinkajou with their beady glowing eyes along the way. By the way, they insist on carrying the flashlights, and turning them off between Kinkajou spottings.
That’s strange.
At the end of the tour, you’ve had a hoot, but you notice something: your wallet is gone. One of the tour guides pilfered it while the flashlights were off.
So a good-faith ranger notices the problem.
He suggests the next night on our tour that everyone gets a flashlight. That way, we can all see the Kinkajou, but no one gets their wallets swiped.
In response, you and your tourist friends say, “Actually, we’ll just head off into the jungle on our own. We don’t trust rangers anymore.”
The good-faith ranger says, “Don’t do that. You’ll be eaten.”
You say, “No we won’t! We have flashlights now!”
On one level, this is an understandable response.
The only real downside is that it’s absolutely insane.
This is what Calvin and Luther are dealing with. They are fighting for a model of thought that still allows the experts to be experts, while handing out flashlights to the peasantry: Resourcing.
On the one side, you have greedy tour-guides saying: “No flashlights.” (Outsourcing)
On the other, you have wild Anabaptists saying, “No tour guides.”
So here’s where I’d argue that we American Evangelicals aren’t really aligned with the Reformers. We’re in the second camp: “No tour guides.”
That’s because our American Evangelical model of thought is neither Outsourced nor Resourced. Nor is it Outsourced.
Our dominant model of thought is WithinSourced. A WithinSourced view of the world relies heavily on the Sovereign Self - my own experiences, intuitions, logic, cultural norms, etc - to determine what is true. Just a few examples:
A few months ago, an Evangelical friend made the argument that, had we both sat down on a desert island and read the passage we were discussing, it’s most “obvious” reading would be different than what I was suggesting. For him, this was an argument for his “at first glance” reading, because he assumed a WithinSourced model of thinking: my own intuitions are superior to all external sources.
The way the Secular world talks about gender fluidity heavily relies on WithinSourced thinking: despite biology, community, or any other facts, our gender is what we intuit it to be.
Two weeks ago, President Trump announced what he called a breakthrough medical finding: Tylenol allegedly causes autism in pregnant women. I have no opinion on his conclusions, because I haven’t looked at the claims. But what interests me is the explicit appeal to WithinSourced thinking: “And I always had very strong feelings about autism and how it happened and where it came from.” At one point, he explicitly says: “This is based on what I feel.”
This is the irony of becoming a WithinSourced thinker: you subject yourself to Outsourced thinking from folks who know how to play your guitar strings. Politicians are a prime example. Politicians are people with opinions on everything and experts on nothing. They are the least credible source.
And yet, so many Evangelicals have, in effect, Outsourced their opinions to politicians, hack journalists or algorithim-feeding influencers all in the name of…WithinSourcing. How does this happen? Easily. In a 1984ish kind of way, these personalities appeal to “WithinSourcing” as a path toward Outsourcing your thoughts to them:
“See the patterns for yourself” = Let me barrage you with one-sided data and anecdotal evidence then see how you feel about reality after that.
“Think for yourself” = Think like me.
“Don’t trust the media” - Trust my alternative media platform (thanks for your dollars wink-wink).
What happens here is that we end up in a truly Barbaric model of thinking. I don’t mean that in an insulting way. I mean truly, rather than Outsourcing our opinions to Experts, we’ve begun Outsourcing our opinions to Barbarians, who know how to appeal to the most brutal, egotistical, biased and carnivorous side of our human nature:
“Reality is what I feel it is. You can feel it too, can’t you? Aren’t you angry at the things I’m making you angry about? Here’s some smattered data and disconnected experiences in support of this. Now like, subscribe, and join my tribe.”
We call this kind of thing critical thinking and doing our research, but it’s actually the opposite: it’s giving into the elephant-we-all-ride of uninformed intuitions, the part of our brain that bypasses reason for base instinct. Actually, it’s worse. It’s smacking the elephant with a bamboo stick and shouting, “Giddeeyup! Now trust your instincts!”
It’s the blue pill masquerading as the red pill.
This is the WithinSourced model of thinking: it’s the Tower of Babel, a world with no common language because we have no common logic.
Or maybe it’s the Book of Judges: “There was no king in the land, and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.”
Conclusion
Just to be clear, I am a highly intuitional thinker. In Daniel Kahneman’s book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” he makes the point that intuition and instincts can be incredible tools…if you are a professional in your field. So I trust my intuition in my own profession. But people are sometimes surprised to learn that I don’t actually care too much about their conclusions about vaccines, politics, or critical race theory. I have opinions on these things, for sure.
But what I do get my panties in a bunch about is the way people - Evangelicals in particular - come to their conclusions about these things. That’s because most Evangelicals I know have essentially WithinSourced their opinions on issues. Meaning, functionally, they’ve Outsourced their opinions to snake oil salesman and hacks.
That’s all fine, in one sense. If it’s your conviction that WithinSourcing is the best possible model for thinking about the world, I literally can’t reason you: you believe it is the best way to think about the world because you feel it is the best way to think about the world. That’s circular, but at least it’s consistent.
But if you’ll excuse my optimism: my hunch is, most Evangelicals (or Secularists for that matter) have never thought about how they think. They’ve simply…imbibed a WithinSourced view of the world. So I’m inviting you to think about this. Is this the way you want to live? To think? To experience reality? Do you think society can flourish this way?
And…could you imagine what would it look like for us to return to a Resourced view of reality? What would that look like in the various and sundry areas where we must have opinions?
It doesn’t mean we’d all agree on the issues.
But it does mean there would be a common language we can draw from to speak with each other.
Until then, we’re all living in Babel.
Some Stuff to Enjoy:
It’s Fall, so some of this stuff is Fall specific. But my Fall and your Fall might look different, and everyone, that’s okay:
Nature Valley Apple Cereal - I accidentally stumbled on this while secretly raiding our pantry one day and…holy cow. I’m totally addicted. It’s like a grown-up version of the apple cinnamon Cheerios I devoured when I was four. More apply (real apple chunks!), nutty and crunchy. A totally binge-worthy Fall cereal. 5/5 stars
Wonder - It’s time to cozy up for a good book. My heart melted at this book that I’ve been meaning to read for years, the story about Auggie, who has rare genetic defects that make him an eyesore to everyone in the 5th grade. One of the delightful surprises of the book is that it’s multi-perspectival: you hear from Auggie, but you get into the shoes of everyone around him. It’s a panorama of compassion for middle schoolers. Loved it (the audiobook is great, with different voice actors for the different kids).
Tomato Gnocchi Soup - It’s soup season! A friend brought this over the other day and our family raved about it. Some reviews from us and our teenage boys: “I swear to you there will be no leftovers.” “I would go to a restaurant to pay for this.” “Can (insert friend) cook for us every night?”
Octopath Traveler - I’m not a huge gamer, but I do love a good story. So around this time of year, after I’ve met my goal of reading 52 books for the year, I settle into lighter fare. If I can find a good story-driven game, I usually find a little time to play it through on the weekends or holidays. Octopath Traveler is one I’ve had my eyes on for some time, so when it went on sale I nabbed it. I love it. It’s nostalgic and gorgeous. It’s also the intertwining of 8 different storylines that you can explore as much or as little as you’d like. It’s been a perfect Fall pleasure for me, and middle schooler likes sitting and watching (so Dad tells himself).
“Find Your Mood” on Apple Music - I know not many people are Apple Music people. I am by necessity, not by choice. But one thing I’ve totally loved about Apple Music, and only recently discovered, is the “Find Your Mood” feature. Basically, you choose a mood (Energy, Feel Good, Sad, Love, etc) and the app curates music based on your listening history that fits the vibe. I’ve discovered tons of great music this way.
“I labored at the outset to prepare some elementary rudiments by which those who are touched with any zeal for religion might be shaped to true godliness. And, in fact, I wrote this book to serve as a preliminary guide to Holy Scripture, and so prepare and train candidates in theology for the reading of the divine Word, in order that they might both have easy access to it and be able to advance in it without stumbling.”
That’s give-or-take a few, because so much of what he writes isn’t a direct quote but an allusion to something. In his intro, Calvin only cites three scripture passages directly, and four-five more by allusion. In contrast, he directly cites Ambrose (twice), Acatius, Epiphanius, Gelasius, Chrysostom, Cyprian and Augustine. PLUS, he cites FIVE TIMES the consensus of “the Fathers”, “ancient writers” and “holy doctors”. None of that tells us Calvin has a low view of scripture. Read the Institutes and you can’t possibly get that impression.
But it does tell us he has a very high view of the “rule of faith”: reading scripture in the light of the global, historic church’s reading of these texts: the experts. The point isn’t to skirt the experts, but to get people in conversation with the experts. As an incredibly deft scholar himself, he’ll take sides on split issues, or he’ll point out that the modern theologians aren’t tracking with the fathers. But in no possible world is Calvin promoting a “back to the Bible” movement.
Yeah! All these other people Outsourcing and WithinSourcing makes me so mad! And you agree! I'm like you! I like this! I subscribe! (Somebody had to do it). Great article, as always. I appreciate your consistent Resourced thinking approach in your writing.