Discernment From the Inside Out — Peter Goertzen — Ep. 112

This is Anabaptist Perspectives, and I'm Kyle Stolzfuss. With me today is Peter Gertzen. Peter, you're an educator, is that right? I'm a high school teacher. You're a high school teacher. Okay. I think one of the things that you've witnessed and why you're here with us today is just the enormous amount of information that's available, well, to high schoolers, but to all of us. I mean, we're just bathed in information from the moment we get up. If you're a smartphone user, to the time we go to sleep, it's everywhere. It's always present. What are some of the effects of this information deluge that we have these days? And can you help us think about how to process all of the information that we're getting?

Well, I think the most important thing to keep in mind, or an important thing to keep in mind, I should maybe say first, I certainly don't have all the answers. I can only scratch the surface when it comes to dealing with information.

And it's certainly something that I'm still learning how to best deal with for myself. But a very important issue is that the central problem with information is not the content of the information or where it comes from, but how we receive it and respond to it. The problem is largely internal to ourselves as information consumers and not external in terms of what the information is and where it comes from. It's like Jesus said, "What corrupts us is not what goes into us." Jesus was speaking in the context of the Pharisees' preoccupation with cleanliness and following correct rituals.

And Jesus didn't repudiate those concerns exactly. He said in another place that you should listen to the Pharisees and do what they say to do, that those are good things. But Jesus says that becoming ritually unclean through what enters us is not nearly as significant a problem as what comes out of us. It's not what goes into us that defiles us. It's what comes out of us. The problem is not with the world, although the world certainly has many problems. The world is corrupt. Much of the information that is out there for us to consume is corrupt.

But we are all born with that same corruption within ourselves.

The world is not something external to us. The world is something that we are born as part of. When John talks about the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, yes, those things are out in the world. The world is full of these things. But we also, as fallen human beings, are full of these things ourselves.

And when we think about information that we receive and that we react to, the main problem is receiving and reacting to information wrongly. We need to be cleansed by the Holy Ghost and by the grace of God through Christ in order to correctly receive and respond to information.

So the problem, just to summarize and encapsulate what you're saying, the problem here isn't so much the information, but it's in our response to it. It's the information itself is in some ways, it's somewhat passive. And we, as the person who's actually looking at it, who's beholding, who's receiving and sifting and responding to that, you're saying that's where a lot of the obligation lies. Yes. Okay. I'm reminded here of elsewhere in the Gospels where Jesus says, "The light of the body is the eye. And if therefore the eye be singled, thy whole body shall be full of light." And he's looking at the eye, not so much as the physical instrument that we have, this biological thing, but it's the instrument by which we perceive things.

And I think he's just acknowledging there, everybody sees in some way, but not everybody sees the same things. And depending what it is, how it is we come to the information, we see the situations and circumstances. Different eyes see different things. And he's saying, "Keep your eye single in all of that." And I'm hearing you saying something similar. Yes. Yeah. And I haven't brushed up on my interpretation of that passage lately, but I believe that Jesus is referring to purity when he talks about the eye being single.

And if you have more thoughts about that, I'd be glad to hear it. But I think that's part of the concept there. When our perception, when our eye is purified by a love for God rather than ourselves, then we are full of light.

But when our eye is darkness, then how great is that darkness? Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It reminds me just to quote Ananias Nin, I think. She just says that we don't see things as they are. We see things as we are. And the encouragement here is to be a kind of person who's being purified, and then we can actually begin to see things the way they are. Yeah. But let's set that in some contrast, okay?

If that's the ideal of seeing things truly and rightly through Christ and through his bringing us to life and seeing them truly, how do we tend to respond? Well, we tend to respond in ways that feel good to us. Sure. Nobody likes to feel bad. Nobody likes things that are unpleasant to them. So we have a natural tendency as fallen human beings to receive and respond to information in ways that feel good to us.

A related concept is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is choosing to believe information that supports what we already think or what we want to think. It is a bias in favor of whatever will confirm our prior commitments. A great example of this is what happens when your car starts making a funny noise. Now, I don't know about you or about other people, but when my car starts making an unfamiliar noise, then my initial response is to try to explain that away as something that's not really a problem. Because I don't want my car to be broken. It's really inconvenient for my car to be broken and to have to take it to the shop and spend hundreds of dollars fixing it.

I don't want that to be the case. So when my car makes a funny noise, I want to think that, I don't know, a stone got stuck in my tire or something. Something that's not really a problem that's easily fixed. I don't want to think that there is truly something wrong with my car. And so I look for explanations that will prove that there's nothing really that wrong with my car. The problem ended up becoming a bigger problem because I did not address it like I should have at first because I didn't want to. I interpreted what I was experiencing based on what I wanted to be true and not on what actually was true.

Reality is not assembled according to my desires. Reality doesn't care about what I want. It is what it is. And if I don't orient myself to reality as it is, then I am going to have problems. So you're almost saying here, it sounds like, that this desire of confirmation bias, the terms you gave to it there, in a sense, it's a flight from reality. Why do we want to get away from reality? You've said as much. You just kind of reiterated. Sure. Sure. Because it's not always nice. We don't always like reality. We don't always like the way things are.

So we look for a way of thinking. We look for information that will tell us that reality is more like we want it to be.

And this doesn't always mean that the way we want things to be is wrong. Sometimes the way we want things to be is the way things are or the way things should be, but not always. So we have to be on guard against that. This has to be one of the significant challenges of just being a human. We have our needs. We have our wants for security. We want our wants for health. And we want the people around us to thrive. These are generally good things to want. Right. Right. But they can become distorted in a way that just makes us reject what actually is. And when we do that, you're saying we're setting ourselves up in some ways to reject some of the gifts and the awarenesses that God might have for us.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And with that, it's important to remember that even when things are not how we want and when they are not how they should be, there are many things in this world that are not as God intended because of sin, because of the fallenness of the world.

It's God's grace that repairs that. So we don't need to rely on facts or supposed facts to bring reality in line with the way it's supposed to be. There is going to be a period of time until the return of Christ and the recreation of the heaven and the earth that the book of Revelation talks about, that things will be set right.

But that is where we place our hope. It's a constant temptation and mistake that we all face, that I certainly face, to look for that kind of redemption now in things that I can experience and see now instead of trusting God to set it right in the future. Isn't this the original sin in some ways? In some ways. It's the grasping for the full fruition of knowledge and goodness and truth now, but the present reality of just being one of God's creatures in a fallen world. Actually, in some ways, it postpones that, puts it into the future. We have the hope. It overlaps with what we have, but not the fullness of it quite yet.

Yes. Absolutely. And this is maybe getting a little bit speculative, but if you recall the sin that Adam and Eve committed, it was eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

It was not God's intent for Adam and Eve at that time, at least. At least not yet. Yeah. Perhaps. Again, this is speculating to a large degree. It was not God's intent for Adam and Eve to have that full experience of knowledge.

But they did. They disobeyed God, and they ate of the fruit of that tree. And I suspect, again, some speculation going on here on my part, but I suspect that the sin of Adam and Eve has had a special negative impact on our ability to know what is good and bad and true and false. Interesting. Okay. So I hear you carrying here about confirmation bias. And one of the reasons we bias to confirm the things that we want to hear and understand and see in the world is it just makes us more comfortable. And sometimes reality is very uncomfortable.

What additional factors might you talk about here that sometimes rearrange how we look at the facts? Well, yeah. How you look at the facts, that's an important point to bring out. Because correctly receiving and responding to information is more than just deciding what to believe, deciding what's true. Our response to facts, even correct facts, true facts, is also important. A good example of this is found with Osama bin Laden, of all people.

Sometime after the 9/11 attacks and the US invasion of Afghanistan, bin Laden wrote a manifesto. It was a letter to the American people. And you might be surprised how much you agree with it.

He talks at some length about the corruption of American culture and the negative impact of America on the world. And there are some things he says about that that I would disagree with. But other things are very difficult to disagree with. We would say amen to a lot of the things that he says about the sin and corruption in American society.

He speaks very strongly against things that we would agree are wrong: sexual immorality and substance abuse, things like that.

So Osama bin Laden correctly identified true problems that our society has. There were some things there that he was absolutely correct about. But his response to those facts was wrong, which is, putting it mildly, his response is to tell Americans that they need to convert to Islam or face God's judgment, Allah's judgment, which he and his followers will mete out in Allah's name. That's really odd here. Exactly. Yes.

Which is incorrect, to put it mildly. Islam is not the solution to the problems in our society. And it's certainly incorrect to commit acts of violence against people, even if they have been correctly identified as sinners. The Bible and Jesus and the apostles clearly teach against those solutions that bin Laden identifies.

So he has correctly identified facts, but his response to those facts is very deeply flawed in many ways. And that's something we have to watch out for as well. Even after we identify something that's true, we can respond to that truth in the wrong way.

He's correctly identifying the facts. And we can even agree with some of the facts. But the diagnosis that he places, the narrative he attaches it to, and the solution he finds because of that, suddenly things are kind of radically out of phase with where we need to go. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So we've talked about bias and discomfort. We've talked some about our sinfulness and how it tends to close us in to really closed systems that just confirm what it is that we want because it's more comfortable. Talked about some of the attitudes that we attach facts to.

These are some of the negative consequences or negative ways to talk about facts, to talk about discernment in the midst of these facts. Can you begin to move us forward now and paint more of a positive picture for how we can actually encounter the facts and perceive well? Yeah. Well, I can move in that direction at least, hopefully. I do want to give credit to my friend Kendall Myers. He's helped me think about some of these issues, and especially the solutions to these problems. It would be easy, much like bin Laden, to correctly identify these problems of the corruption of our hearts and bias and things like that.

You can stop there. Yeah. Yeah. We need to move beyond that and find the true solutions. And if the problem is centered in our hearts, in our fallen, sinful, corrupt hearts, then that's where the solution needs to lie as well.

We need the grace of God through Jesus to recreate our hearts, to renew our minds, like Romans 12 talks about, to make us into people with the correct priorities. Jesus said that the two greatest commandments are to love the Lord with all of our beings, and secondly, to love our neighbors as ourselves.

The children's song is correct. It's Jesus first and yourself last, and others in between. And placing the Lord and our neighbors and ourselves in correct order within our own hearts is going to go a long way. Well, yeah, it is going to solve this problem. The issue, of course, is that this is an ongoing process of sanctification throughout our lives as Christians. It's certainly not complete in my own heart.

But when our hearts are correctly ordered in these ways, then we begin to find freedom from these issues of bias and wrong responses. When my priority is what feels good to me, I'm going to be biased in favor of what seems like it will benefit me.

That problem is dealt with when our priority is what is going to honor God, what's going to bless my neighbor. Then I don't need to worry anymore about what's good for me because my priority is the honor of the Lord and the good of my neighbor.

So confirmation bias then is going to be eliminated. And it will help us to more clearly perceive what is true and to respond correctly. Instead of responding based on what's going to feel good to me, I respond according to what will honor God and what will bless my neighbor. But simultaneous to this, if I'm hearing you right, simultaneous to this honoring God and honoring neighbor, you're actually beginning to see the world. And it's almost like you're seeing the world rightly for the first time. Well, yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting point.

I'm not sure I'd thought about it in quite that way, but I think you're right. Because the world, again, like I said before, the world is not arranged for our convenience. The world doesn't exist to make me feel good. The Bible tells us that the world was created for the honor of God.

And when I am oriented towards the honor of God, first of all, then I am going to be able to see the reality for what it is in a way that I can't when I am turned towards myself.

There's a distinction, and I think it was Luther who really liked to use the language of man turned in on himself. It goes back. It predates him. It's in Croato's say. It's this portrait of man kind of living in his own shadow. And you're really unable to get outside of that. You can't really even enjoy God's creation because of how self-interested we kind of naturally become. Yeah. And the opposite of that isn't just man open to the world. It's man oriented toward God. And that actually allows us to see and honor God in our relationships, but in some ways just to even see the world for the first time. Yeah. Exactly.

It's a pretty dramatic difference. It is. It is. Yeah. If we're turned towards ourselves and dwelling within our own shadows, like you were saying, then we can't see anything. We can't even see ourselves properly. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Yeah.

That's a good way of putting it. Okay. Well, let's take something of a practical turn now, if we can.

I'm curious what you might say here about fact and narrative. We've mentioned a little bit with maybe Osama. He had a certain reading of the facts because of how, as a Yahadist, as a certain kind of Muslim, it just ended inevitably in a certain diagnosis. And that's the narrative that you're attaching to those facts. Can you just talk to me about fact and narrative? Sure. Yeah. And bin Laden is a good example of how facts and the narratives or the overall perspectives that the facts are placed within. And you can keep on unpacking what narrative you mean. Yes. Yeah. That's a good question. It's the overall account of reality, the story that is taken to explain the way that things are.

So in the case of Osama bin Laden, the overall narrative is a narrative of the truth of Islam, that Islam is the solution to the world's problems. And that is a false narrative. That's what I believe as a Christian.

But within that narrative, there are some things that are true. It is true, for example, that as Muslims teach, there is one God. That is a fact. And it is true that many of the things that Muslims consider sinful are, in fact, sinful according to the scriptures. A false narrative often, probably, usually, maybe even always, is going to contain some things that are true.

We can't dismiss the concept of the existence of one and only one God just because that's something Muslims believe. And their overall belief system is incorrect. Yeah. That obviously is nonsensical.

So we can't dismiss all information just because of where it originates from or where it is found. There are going to be some things that are true that come from sources that are mostly wrong. That's just the way it is. And by the same token, there can be sources of information that are mostly right, that have overall a correct narrative, sources that are oriented towards God, that are in obedience to the scriptures overall. And sometimes that's going to show itself in falsehoods that we may continue to promote, even though we are growing towards what God intends for us and our overall orientation is towards the truth. I know that I'm certainly wrong sometimes.

I look back at some things that I have said in the past, things that I believed were facts that I now do not believe. And 10 years from now, there will probably be things that I look back on about this moment, maybe even this presentation. I don't know. And that at that point, I'll say, "That wasn't quite true. That piece of it was false."

So we can't dismiss every piece of information just because of where it comes from. And we can't accept every piece of information just because of where it comes from either. In this fallen world, truth and error is going to be mixed up. That's a difficult fact that maybe doesn't make us feel good. But that's the way it is. And we need to deal with that as best we can. And we won't do that perfectly, but it's something we need to strive for.

But Peter, this all sounds very complicated. You're telling me that there's some true facts that can be attached to false narratives. And because of that, you may have to somehow work with discern which of those facts can be true, but somehow reject and discern the narrative, right? But there's also narratives which are true, which may contain some facts which are actually erroneous, right?

And this sounds like hard work. It's very hard work. Yeah. Wouldn't it be simpler just to have some kind of ideology that makes sense of it all, it's the narrative and the facts? Right? And we've got it? I think this is what they call a rhetorical question.

Yes. Sure, it'd be simpler. Okay. So why don't you do that? Well, because, like I was saying before, it doesn't line up with reality. That's not the way things are. Things just aren't that simple. And again, reality is not constructed for our convenience.

Yeah. It would be much easier if we could simply find a dotted line somewhere that we could sign our name to and everything above that is all correct. Yeah. But it is hard work. And I'm not sure what answers I have for that exactly.

I certainly don't have all the answers by any means. But the most important thing is to trust in the grace of God and ask for the grace of God to change our hearts, to be oriented towards Him so that we are removing our own corruption.

Or really, the Lord is removing our corruption from our hearts and helping us to see the truth more clearly. And I hear you saying this is a process. It's going to take time for us to begin to see the world truly. It's simpler in some ways to just grab for something that's hasty and quick, but it's going to take time. And it's probably a skill that, like any skill, takes practice. You have to try, and there's going to be some failures along the way. Yeah. And I'm certainly still practicing myself. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, one comment I would just have here is that many times it's in the more complex scenarios that happen that it becomes even more difficult, and the complexity is kind of amplified. Sometimes I'm thinking, just an example, an airplane crashes. And they're trying to figure out what was the sequence of events, what's the narrative that helps us to understand what happened. And they've got facts. Well, littered all over a field somewhere, there's the facts. But they've got to somehow try to make a coherent picture of how this all happened.

They start with the facts sometimes and some pieces of narrative. Sometimes the first assumption and the narrative that's constructed, it fits with the facts. Other times, there's an accumulation of evidence that starts to point the narrative in another direction. Sometimes the narrative that they started with was totally wrong. And there was something they didn't anticipate. The facts eventually kind of teeter that narrative right off. But the more complex of a scenario we have, the more humility is required to remain open to some of the possibilities here. Yeah. That's a great example and a very important point about humility. We need to stay humble. We need to recognize that we are going to make mistakes.

Even as the work of sanctification in our hearts continues, even as we do our best and we do work hard, we are not going to get it right all the time. And we need to have the humility to accept that and be prepared to face the consequences of being wrong.

In every situation where we have to receive information and figure out how to respond to it, be ready to accept that we may be wrong and that there might be consequences for that. And we just need to accept that and trust God's grace to carry us through even those negative consequences.

And one of the significant reassurances we have in Christ's kingdom is that there's actually space for people to be humble. There's a security that we have in the narrative, in the story, in the economy of God, I guess you'd say, for human beings to be who we are, fallible, but also at the same time being changed from glory to glory into the likeness who is Christ himself, right? Yes. So there's space for us to be humble. And there's a security that we have because of who God is and how he's worked with his people. Exactly.

What other practical things could you say to us as people who are wading through the information maze that we have these days? The information, again, it's just having more information isn't particularly helpful. We need a certain set of spectacles to put on and look at it. And I'm hearing you saying that we have something of those in Christ himself.

Let's just talk practically. What other than humility could you offer? Yeah. One thing that I think is important on a practical level is to look as closely as we can at where information comes from and what the ultimate source of any particular piece of information is.

And something that I've started to notice is that frequently when some piece of information is put forth, when you try to find out where that information came from, well, it turns out that it kind of didn't come from anywhere.

There's no clear indication of where this information even originated. And that should cause us to question that information. Or sometimes even if a source is given for the information, the source turns out to say something different and not to support the information as it was presented. And just kind of a silly example of that, evidently, there was one of these things going around in social media that the country of Japan is planning to outlaw microwave ovens.

And that sounds kind of silly, but who knows? Weird things do happen. But when you look at where this information came from, it appears that the source of this information was an article on a website that did indeed say that Japan is going to outlaw microwaves. But down at the bottom of the article, there's a little disclaimer that said essentially, "By the way, this is a joke.

This is not actually true." People fools. Yeah. That kind of thing. So if you would see this, "Oh, Japan's going to outlaw microwaves." Well, if you can find a source for it, drill down as deep as you can, and you find that ultimately there's nothing there. Somebody was making a joke, and that's where this came from. And that's a simple example. But it often turns out to be that way, that either no source for a certain piece of information can really be found, it can't be verified in any way, or the source that is given ends up saying something completely different than what has been purported.

So do your own source work, I hear you saying.

One final question, I guess. And that's just simply this. Okay. More and more frequently, I think we're going to find ourselves in tough conversations. Our world globally, but even especially maybe in American cultures, is pretty fragmented and pretty touchy.

People hold their opinions pretty closely, and they're very personal. So we're going to find ourselves in conversations with people with whom we disagree. And sometimes it's just an arrangement of the facts. Sometimes it's a completely different narrative. So suppose you're in a conversation with somebody who's pretty dogmatic about the narrative that they're part of, but you're disagreeing with it. How could you possibly engage in some kind of constructive conversation? Oh, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if I have the answers there.

That's something that I do struggle with. And I think the best thing that I can say is that we need the grace of God in those times. And I do become increasingly convinced that my response to information and my response to other people, my interaction with other people, it's going to rise out of who I am.

And if I am a good person, then the things that I do, the way that I think, the way that I speak is going to arise out of the goodness that God is doing within me. And you can't fake that. I don't think that there's any checklist that we can mark off.

There's the fruit of the Spirit. Now, I guess we could look at the fruit of the Spirit as some kind of checklist. Okay. So I'm going to be loving, and I'm going to be gracious and joyful and all these things.

But not unhelpful. Yeah. But these are not the fruit of me trying really hard. These are the fruit of the Spirit. These fruits arise out of the work of God in my heart.

And certainly, it's good to think about how I should interact with other people. Yeah. I absolutely need to be intentional about doing the best that I can, but also recognize that the best that I can do is going to be the result of God's work within me.

So I need to submit to Him, to live in harmony with God and His purposes for me. And the fruit of that is going to be responding graciously to other people when these difficult situations arise. I hear you, for one, just because it's hard to imagine these situations. Each one is so different, each of these encounters.

But I hear you pushing back against any kind of formula or reduction. And you're saying to have these encounters successfully with people who are different than we are, who hold different narratives, different facts, there's nothing short of just being in Christ through the Holy Spirit that actually allows that kind of encounter to happen. Yeah. I think that's right. And certainly, the Bible does give us examples of what we will be like when God is working in our lives. We need to be humble. We need to be gracious.

We need to be bold as well and speak the truth. And yeah, it is good to think about those goals, to think about these things, but as things that God wants to accomplish within us, not so much things that we can create through our own power within ourselves.

Okay. Well, thanks for talking with us, Peter.