Here’s my annual Thanksgiving post.
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On Protest, Part 3: What Now?
Part 1: Initial Thoughts | Part 2: Biblical Principles
What do you do when you disagree with an authority?
Providence
Begin by recognizing that God is on his throne and that he has providentially brought you to this place for His purposes. His will is being done. Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything that happens is good; he brings things into your life, and mine, that he wants us to change. He does not call us to be passive. But when hard times come, even including the sinful acts of ourselves and others, he is using those things to make us more like Christ.
That may include changing our thinking, helping us see things from a different perspective, broadening our understanding of what is good and what is evil. It may include bringing to our attention calling he has for us, work that we need to do in order to bring change into his world. It may include simply teaching us patience, or strengthening us against temptation and sin.
But whatever it is, he has his purposes. If changing us, growing us, is his primary purpose for bringing this hardship upon us, it would be a shame for us to miss it, to waste the opportunity to learn and grow.
We need to trust him.
Submission
Our first job, then, is to try, as best we can, to discover that wise and good purpose and pursue it—to subordinate our thinking to his, to act on what we understand his will to be for our own growth. Wise believers have often said that the first question we should ask in hard situations is not “Why is this happening to me?!”—as though life should always be sunshine and roses—but rather “What is God doing to make me more like His Son?”
This calls for honest introspection and careful evaluation. It calls for us to determine for ourselves that God’s will for us is the wisest and best thing, and that we will pursue it no matter the cost. We need to start with the imperfections and failures in ourselves before we set out to change the world into something more comfortable.
Biblical Criteria
After we have begun to clean up our own house, then it’s time to bring careful consideration of biblical teaching regarding the matter we’re upset about. Is the authority with which we disagree actually acting in violation of biblical truth?
This will require objectivity, which of course is difficult when we’re upset or when our own interests are involved. Is a policy unjust? discriminatory? dangerous, or otherwise evidencing poor stewardship? immoral?
There are lots of biblical principles. The key here is to state clearly the principle(s) involved and to demonstrate objectively how the principle(s) are being violated by the policy.
It’s worth noting that our authorities are under authority as well. Employers need to obey national, state, and local laws, even if there’s no biblical principle being violated (other than the requirement to obey “kings and all that are in authority” [1Ti 2.2]). Bring all the legitimately applicable principles to bear on the specific situation.
Humility
We need to recognize our own limitations.
You and I cannot reliably discern motives, nor can we know all the considerations in any decision by an authority. Once again, that authority is in place by divine providence, and I would suggest giving them the benefit of the doubt when we know that there are things we don’t know.
Throwing the Switch
If you are convinced that the authority is acting unbiblically, begin by submitting to the authority’s procedure(s) for challenging the decision. Most employers, for example, have such procedures in place as a matter of policy. If the disagreement is with a governmental body, there are avenues for redress in the courts. We should exhaust the legal options before resorting to illegal activity.
If your conscience forbids you to submit to that authority’s procedures for redress, then disobey humbly and graciously, and submit to the penalty. If you do follow the procedures, and the authority overrules your plea, then you need to make the same decision: must you disobey in order to protect your conscience? If so, then do so, and accept whatever penalty the authority determines. In every action, you must guard your personal integrity and resist the constant temptation to act out of frustration and anger.
I’d like to take one more post to modify slightly what I’ve said here about submitting to the penalty. I think the biblical example is a little more complex than that.
But Thanksgiving is this week, so we’ll talk about being thankful next time, and finish this series next week.
Photo by Teemu Paananen on Unsplash
On Protest, Part 2: Biblical Principles
So we begin with the Scripture’s overarching principle for our existence: it’s doxological; we live for the glory of God (1Co 10.31).
What else applies to questions of protest?
Brokenness
Key to our decision making is worldview: what is the story we find ourselves in the middle of? And from the Scripture we learn that the world is broken. That’s no surprise to us, of course; we can see that by just taking a casual look around. But the Bible places that brokenness in context, giving us a foundation from which to deal wisely and effectively with it.
Sin has damaged God’s creation (Ge 3.1-19; Ro 8.22-23). It has rendered us broken as people (Ro 3.9-19), and it has broken our environment and our circumstances. What we see in the chaos around us, then, makes sense; it is what we should expect.
The world is broken because we broke it—and we are thus broken too. The problem is inherent to us, deep within our spiritual DNA. How likely is it that the solution to this brokenness will come from those who caused the problem in the first place?
But then again, shouldn’t we try? Does the Scripture encourage us to be passive about evil and wait for God to fix it supernaturally, or does it urge us to take action? I think that question answers itself.
Order
It turns out that the lunatics are not in fact running the asylum. There is a God in heaven, whose will is done (Da 2.28, 37, 44). He is taking the chaos that we created and ordering it to achieve his purposes—sensible purposes, good purposes (Ps 37.23). Events are not random, and causes and purposes are not entirely visible and obvious.
A significant part of that purpose and plan is that God is using hardship to strengthen and develop his people, the way a coach pushes his athletes to develop championship caliber in them (2Co 3.18; 4.16-18). God is greater than evil and injustice. He directs us and sustains through those things purposefully, in order to accomplish His goal in us.
Authority
God has established spheres of authority for us. These include the home (Gen 2.22-25), the state (Gen 9.6), and the church (Acts 2.41-47). These authorities, like us, are also broken; parents, political leaders, and pastors are all sinners and prone to grievous error. But they are authorities nonetheless, because God has ordained them for us. It is no accident that we have the parents, state, and church that we do.
These authority structures have spheres, where God has given them authority to operate. As just one example, Jesus was asked if the Jews ought to pay taxes to Caesar (Mt 22.17). We all know that he asked to see a coin, and he pointed out that Caesar’s image was on it—therefore it must belong to Caesar (Mt 22.18-21). What he didn’t say, but clearly implied, was that what had the image of God on it belonged to God; the citizen, as one bearing the image of God (Ge 1.26-27), does not belong to the state, but to God. The state’s authority is limited.
And most especially, all these institutions are under God’s authority, for it is from him that they have any authority in the first place. If a human authority—family, state, or church—asks me to do something that violates God’s will as revealed in the Scripture, then I must disobey (Ac 5.27-29).
This means, of course, that we are all responsible to educate our minds and our consciences from the Scripture so that we can choose biblically in those moments of apparent conflict.
These biblical principles, I think, give us a solid basis for a philosophy of protest and guide us to a proper course of conduct in choosing when and how to obey, to protest, and, if necessary, to disobey.
We’ll get more specific in the next post.
Photo by Teemu Paananen on Unsplash
On Protest, Part 1: Initial Thoughts
I’ve lived all my life in an environment of protest. I came of age in the 60s, so it started early. Activist writers in those days noted that public protest is a way to get on the political agenda; it’s a way to overcome government inertia and stimulate otherwise uninterested authorities to pay attention. Just as Jesus described a presumably fictional unjust judge (Lk 18.1-8)—I guess governmental inertia was a thing in his day too—politicians will often be unmoved by citizens’ problems unless the citizens find a way to make inertia inconvenient in the lives of the leadership.
So people protest. This is de rigeur in democratic societies, of course, where officials face the prospect of being voted out of office, and where the protesters find it reasonably safe to raise their voices. But it happens in totalitarian societies as well, where the risk is considerably higher. The Soviet Union saw public protests in Czechoslovakia in 1968—that didn’t turn out well for the protesters—and in East Berlin in 1989. (That turned out better.) The Chinese Communists saw a confrontation in Tiananmen Square that same year. The people of Iran rose up against the mullahs just last year. And there are many, many more examples.
Over the course of my life I’ve seen many causes promoted by protest: civil rights (both racial and women’s rights), war and peace, economic policy, criminal justice, right to life (as considered in both abortion and capital punishment), terrorism, tax policy, environment, and others. Most recently there have been protests worldwide against Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel’s response in Gaza. Many have expressed the opinion that this one seems bigger, more volatile than what has typically preceded; some are talking seriously about the end of the world.
Well, I don’t know when the end of the world is coming, and neither does anybody else. I think it would be unwise to try to predict it even if Jesus hadn’t told us not to. (If he didn’t know the date when he was walking amongst us, how likely are we to get it right?)
But the protests are ubiquitous, and they’re intense. People are expected to take a side.
Sometimes—often—taking a side is precisely the right thing to do. As an acquaintance of mine commented decades ago, the middle of the road is where the yellow stripe is.
I don’t think the protests are going to get quieter, or the issues simpler, as time rolls on. It’s our duty, I’d suggest, to think through a philosophy of protest, something that can guide us through emotional, murky, and rapidly moving times. As a Christian, I need to base my philosophy of protest, like anything else, on the Scripture. I’d like to take a few posts to offer some suggestions and to invite feedback.
I’ll begin with the overarching biblical principle: we live for the glory of God (1Co 10.31). We pattern our thinking after his, as expressed in his Word; we decide our actions, from choosing a vocation to deciding whether to speed up or stop for that deeply pink traffic light, on the same basis. And we establish our priorities, including the decision to join a particular protest movement, based on his. Only he is worth all our love, all our loyalty, and all our devotion. God is the only person we can follow blindly—and He doesn’t ask us to (Is 1.18).
Next time, we’ll tease out other biblical principles that we need to consider in developing our philosophy of protest.
Photo by Teemu Paananen on Unsplash
Part 2: Biblical Principles | Part 3: What Now? | Part 4: Tactics | Part 5: The Long View
On Fun, Part 5: Question Everything
Part 1: It’s Good | Part 2: On Purpose | Part 3: Loving Your Neighbor | Part 4: Down with Slavery
As promised, here are some questions you can ask yourself as you decide how to get your entertainment, pleasure, and relaxation.
Will It Defile Me?
The Psalmist said, “I will set no wicked thing before my eyes” (Ps 101.3).
That’s good advice, even though it’s getting more and more difficult to follow in the present culture.
A little thought experiment.
When I was coming up in the 1960’s, pretty much all conservative Christians agreed that Christians shouldn’t go to movies—even the good ones, because even then you were supporting a corrupt industry. Now, I didn’t grow up in “fundamentalism,” so I’m not talking about the stereotypical “against everything” folks. These are Christians in the broad circle of evangelicalism. Today, of course, the percentages are exactly reversed: pretty much everybody agrees that it’s fine to go to movies. And in the 50 years between those two surveys, the movies have gotten a lot worse.
I promise you that I’m not making any point about going to movies; that’s not my purpose here. My point is that we are no longer repelled by the things that we used to be repelled by. Our consciences have gotten less sensitive, more leathery.
That’s what daily defilement will do to you, without your even being aware that it’s happening.
Will It Make Me Lazy?
Solomon said, “An idle soul shall suffer hunger” (Pr 19.15). And in case you need a New Testament verse to be convinced, Paul urges the Roman church not to be “slothful in business” (Ro 12.11).
Fun is refreshment to empower the return to work; it’s not a lifestyle. We can’t lie in bed all day just because it’s warm and relaxing and easy.
Will It Make Me Discontent?
The writer to the Hebrews urges them to “be content with the things you have” (He 13.5).
Playing the lottery doesn’t do that for you. Going to Vegas doesn’t do that.
That’s pretty obvious.
But some people will face the same result from less obviously tempting things, things that might well be fine for other believers: going on a cruise, following the lifestyles of rich people, even collecting things (again, if it becomes obsessive).
We’re all different, and that’s why it’s a good practice to ask yourself the question.
Will It Help Me Approve Excellence?
Let’s end with a positive one.
Paul urges the Philippians to “approve things that are excellent” (Php 1.10). And at the end of that letter, he famously encourages meditation on “whatever is true, … honorable, … just, … pure, … lovely, … commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise” (Php 4.8).
I note that this well-known list focuses on moral excellence. Nothing wrong with admiring the physical prowess of a top-notch athlete—that Simone Biles is remarkable beyond words—but in the end our most diligent observation and endeavor should involve being really good at being really good.
We ought to educate our moral standards, rather than finding enjoyment and passive relaxation in the degraded. The long view from the latter seat is nowhere you’d like to be.
Eat. Drink. Play. Love. Enjoy it all.
All to the glory of God.
On Fun, Part 4: Down with Slavery
Part 1: It’s Good | Part 2: On Purpose | Part 3: Loving Your Neighbor
There’s another factor to consider in choosing our fun.
It’s actually a principle that applies in a much broader context, involving more than just the entertainment we choose.
It applies to all of life.
Sometimes people have trouble controlling themselves. They get obsessed with a particular thing, and eventually it dominates them.
As I say, it may involve any number of things besides entertainment. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes it’s study. Sometimes—to someone with “a one-track mind,” it’s literally anything—whatever they happen to be doing at the moment.
Study? Seriously?
Yep.
When I was in seminary, a friend of mine told me that his roommate told him to shut up, because he was busy reading a theology book.
Now, that’s putting the cart before the horse. I wonder if he was reading the section on loving your neighbor.
See what I did there? Neigh-bor? Get it?
What was I writing about?
Oh, yes.
Obsession.
What’s wrong with being really interested in something?
Nothing at all.
The issue isn’t interest: it’s control. Slavery.
Believers have just one Master. He is the master we were designed to serve, and when we try to serve a different one, all kinds of things go haywire. When you put a 15-amp fuse in a 50-amp circuit, you’re going to end up in the dark.
Now, it’s bad enough when the wrong master we choose is our career, or popular acclaim, or wealth.
But it’s even worse, I think, when it’s something so trivial as what we do for fun.
There are obvious examples: drugs, including alcohol, make horrendous masters. Sex, a delightful gift from God, can literally destroy the one who serves it.
But so can a TV show. So can scrolling mindlessly and obsessively and endlessly through a social media feed. So can spending money you don’t have to buy one more rifle or golf club or motorcycle or dress or coin set or gemstone.
How much will be enough?
Just one more. Always just one more.
And the money involved is not the primary issue. Maybe you have plenty of money to spend on such things. But you have no more time than the poorest person in the world—just 24 hours per day, and time is a zero-sum game: time you spend on entertainment is time you’re taking away from something else. Family. Productivity. Sleep. Fellowship. Study of the Word.
I think I’ve made it clear already in this series that you ought to have leisure time. You ought to have fun. But fun is a servant, not a master. You weren’t designed to whittle away your time watching every last episode, or achieving every last level, or playing all 9 million games of Freecell.
So far, just two brief allusions to Scripture in this post.
Let’s get serious.
The Scripture speaks to this idea in both Testaments.
- The wisest man who ever lived said, “He who loves pleasure will become a poor man” (Pr 21.17). This reminds me of the wag’s comment that a government-run lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.
- One of the charges that God levels at Babylon is that she is “a lover of pleasures” (Is 47.8).
- In his parable of the soils, Jesus described one unproductive soil as “choked by the riches and cares and pleasures of life” (Lk 8.14).
- Paul tells Timothy that in the last days, people will be “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2Ti 3.4).
I’d suggest that we approach our fun times with the steely assertion of Paul himself, who said, “All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything” (1Co 6.12).
I’d suggest that if some form of entertainment dominates you, then you’re not having as much fun as you could be having.
Have as much fun as you can.
Next time: some questions to ask as you’re making up your mind.
On Fun, Part 3: Loving Your Neighbor
Part 1: It’s Good | Part 2: On Purpose
Jesus told us that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mk 12.30; Lk 10.27). As we saw in the previous post, we can and should do that in the fun times as well as in the serious ones.
But Jesus, unbidden, identified the second greatest commandment as well: love your neighbor as yourself (Mk 12.31; Lk 10.27). Is it possible for us to do that when we’re “just having fun”?
I think the question pretty much answers itself. If God’s goal for me is being like Christ, then that’s his goal for everybody I know as well. And if I can make my rest and pleasure purposeful for myself, then I can make it purposeful for my friends and associates too.
I can think of a couple of ways to do that.
First, Paul tell us to be sure that we “edify” our brothers and sisters in Christ—that is, we build them up, make them stronger. We can spend some time thinking about how we strengthen their spiritual walk through our shared entertainment experiences. For example, what are your friend’s strengths or gifts, and how can your shared leisure experiences reinforce those gifts? Is he a “people person”? Then how about doing things that bring you across the paths of others, where he can instruct, encourage, enjoy? Can he teach friends how to build a campfire, cook on it, set up a tent? I believe there’s an obvious activity that could serve that purpose. What if he’s more solitary, bookish? How about reading a book together? Visiting a historical site? Playing Ticket to Ride or Settlers of Catan?
Now, I know that many readers of this post will think this sounds unbearably dull. Of course. I’m intentionally trying to give examples for the hard cases. You and your friends can certainly come up with options that fit your personalities and interests more specifically. My point is that you should give it all some thought, rather than just “hanging out” unimaginatively.
I said I had a couple of ways. Here’s the flip side. The opposite of building up is tearing down. We also need to be sure that we don’t cause spiritual damage to our friends by the choices we make in having fun. What are the things your friend struggles with spiritually? (You don’t know? Then it’s time to add some substance to your friendship by talking about your spiritual strengths and weaknesses, victories and struggles.) If he has a problem in an environment dominated by bikinis, then you probably shouldn’t be going to the beach. If he’s tempted to isolate himself from others, thereby avoiding the need to love his neighbor, then maybe video games aren’t the wisest choice.
In a similar vein, we need to respect the consciences of our friends. I’ve touched on that before; let me say here that there is no legitimate place for us to encourage friends to do things that they don’t think they should do—even if we’re convinced that they’re mistaken, and their consciences are being unnecessarily strict with them. When you violate your conscience—in effect, tell it to shut up—you’re weakening it for the next time. Do that enough times, and eventually it won’t speak up at all anymore—and that, my friend, is not a place you want to be. And so it’s not a place you want your friends to be either.
So you engage in activities that you can all enjoy, that will increase your effectiveness as followers of Jesus, that will provide you all with the kind of pleasure and relaxation that God wants you to have.
There’s another general consideration I’d like to address, and then some more specific questions we can ask ourselves as we make our choices.
Next time.
On Fun, Part 2: On Purpose
We’ve established that fun—which I’ve defined as comprising pleasure and rest—is good, in that God engages in such activities and commends them for his people. But Scripture also indicates that humans have a remarkable propensity for turning good things into bad things, and we can all think of ways that people have entertained themselves that are clearly unacceptable.
So it’s worth trying to derive some simple principles, based in Scripture, to help us evaluate the ways we choose our pleasures and our ways to relax.
Really? Do we have to be that obsessive about how we choose to have fun?
Well, I wouldn’t call it obsessive—that word implies that there’s something mentally unhealthy about it. I’d prefer to call it being thoughtful, in the sense of thinking carefully about how we steward our lives, our bodies, and our time.
The Scripture famously says,
Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God (1Co 10.31).
That says, among other things, that
- We ought to have a purpose for everything in our lives; nothing is purposeless, mindless, or “just entertainment”;
- That purpose is outside, or beyond, ourselves; we have other things to consider besides just what we want to do.
So yes, we ought to give thought to how we have fun. I don’t apologize for saying that.
Now, to implement this kind of thinking, we need to begin by defining a key term: what does it means to “do all to the glory of God”? What brings him glory?
I would suggest that honoring him should involve caring about his goals, his purposes. And he tells us what his goal for us as his people is:
Them who are the called according to his purpose, … he did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son (Ro 8.28-29).
Without getting distracted by the arguments about predestination, we can safely conclude that God’s purpose or goal for us is that we be like his Son. Our lives should be a process of becoming increasingly like Jesus.
That’s the Prime Directive.
Everything we do should be purposely chosen for that end.
As a simple illustration, if a sitcom makes me laugh at sin, I can’t think to myself, “Oh, lighten up; it’s just a joke!”
In a life patterned after 1 Corinthians 10.31, nothing is ever “just a joke.”
I’m not suggesting that we should be somber and joyless; but I am arguing that our laughter, which should be abundant, should also be purposeful, should be about things that the Son would enjoy sharing with us.
Recently I had dinner with a group gathered in a midwestern city for a conference of Christian educators. There were 11 of us seated around a large table, and over good food we told stories of teaching and other ministry experiences, and we laughed until our sides hurt. Some of us were closer friends than others, but by the end of the evening we all were united by the simple delight of the experience. No observer would have thought that anyone at the table was a stick in the mud.
What a joy such an experience is. What memories it cements in our minds.
What fun.
Now eating and telling tales and laughing is not the only way to have fun. As beings in the image of God, we are creative, and over the centuries people have come up with all sorts of ways to entertain themselves. And in the future there will be many, many more. Delight in such things is a gift from God.
Let’s think for a few posts about how to experience such delights in ways that move us toward being like the Son.
Part 3: Loving Your Neighbor | Part 4: Down with Slavery | Part 5: Question Everything
On Fun, Part 1: It’s Good
For a radical change of pace, I’d like to spend a few posts thinking about having fun—and specifically, how to have fun and do it right.
I’ll note that my colleague Dr. Brian Hand has written a brief book on the subject, cleverly titled Upright Downtime, which I highly recommend. This series isn’t a summary of that book, but of course our thoughts will overlap in places.
I think the best place to begin is with morals. I’m happy to start with a firm and resolute statement:
Fun is good.
We know that it’s good, because God both practices it himself and endorses it for us.
I’d suggest that what we call “fun” consists of both pleasure, or enjoyment, and rest, or relaxation. God engages in both.
- God takes pleasure throughout Scripture, in all kinds of things:
- Uprightness (1Ch 29.17)
- The prosperity of his servant (Ps 35.27)
- Those that fear him (Ps 147.11)
- His Temple (Hag 1.8)
- Giving his people the kingdom (Lk 12.32)
In just this short list I note that God takes pleasure in not only the service of his servants (uprightness, fear, the Temple) but also in their pleasure (prosperity, the kingdom). More on that in a few sentences.
- God also rests.
- He rested from creation on Day 7 (Ge 2.2). Now, I know that God didn’t rest because he was tired; the passage simply means that he stopped his creative work, because it was finished. But he did stop. The biblical picture of God is not of one who is working feverishly—even though he is working constantly, most noticeably in his providential work. But he is not stressed, and he is never feeling the pressure of getting it all done.
- Jesus, incarnate, rested from his exhausting labors by withdrawing into the wilderness (Lk 5.16). Sometimes he does that to pray, as this verse specifies (see also Mt 14.23); sometimes no specific reason is given (Mt 14.13). If you had three years to save the world, would you be taking days off? Jesus did.
Beyond that, God clearly encourages—even commands—us to take pleasure and rest as well.
- He makes Eden’s trees “pleasant to the sight, and good for food” (Ge 2.9). Multisensory pleasure! And we know that Adam was encouraged to eat of every tree that was good for food, with the exception of just one (Ge 2.17).
- David notes that “at [God’s] right hand there are pleasures forevermore” (Ps 16.11); and again, “[The children of men] shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house; And thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures” (Ps 36.8). This metaphor speaks of an abundance of pleasure, of multiple kinds of pleasure, of swimming in it.
- All through the Song of Solomon, the kings delights in specifically sexual pleasure. Many commentators have tried to lessen the erotic tone of the book by turning it into a metaphor of God’s love for his church; but I don’t see any evidence in the text that it should be read that way. It was God, after all, who designed sex to be pleasurable.
And rest?
- The same Jesus who withdraws into the wilderness for rest takes his disciples with him on at least one occasion (Mk 6.31).
- And then there’s the Sabbath, a central feature of the Law of Moses, where God requires his people to rest every seventh day—on penalty of death (Nu 15.32-36).
Rest is serious business; it’s a basic need for those in the image of God.
But I need to temper the title of this post.
The Scripture is clear that not all fun is good. There is pleasure that is evil, and there is rest that is evil. The God who takes pleasure in many things also reveals that he does not take pleasure in certain other things.
So how do we decide how to have fun?—or more precisely, what kinds of fun to have?
We’ll start on that in the next post.
Part 2: On Purpose | Part 3: Loving Your Neighbor | Part 4: Down with Slavery | Part 5: Question Everything
A Little Interaction with ChatGPT: Can Teachers Spot Fake Student Work? Part 2
In the previous post I presented two questions that I asked ChatGPT, a writing tool based on artificial intelligence, and I included the tool’s response to each question. My interest in trying this was to see if I could spot any evidence that the responses were not written by a student; as a teacher, I want to have some defense against the possibility that a student might use the tool to get out of writing a paper himself.
The first question was “write an essay evaluating Paul’s use of intertextuality in Romans 3.” The second was “evaluate the previous essay for evidence of origination by ChatGPT.”
Here’s my thinking as I read the responses.
The first thing I noticed was how well written it was. The spelling, grammar, and syntax were all nicely polished. The sentences were all grammatically complete. There was no indication that this writer had ever written a text or posted on Twitter (lol). The paragraphs were all coherent. In particular, there were no words that were misspelled but actually spelled other words (e.g. their / there)—that’s evidence of the overwhelmingly common student practice of running the spell checker but not actually proofreading the paper.
Now, I have students who write that well, but they’re in the minority. If my students were to submit something like this, particularly after I’d graded a previous writing assignment, most of them would get caught.
Well, that was easy.
But there are other things to notice as well.
In the first place—and other analysts have noticed this too—the writer doesn’t actually know anything about the topic. The teacher brings expertise to the question and is thus in a position to notice that the tool is just spouting (very nicely) things that he’s imitating from lots of sources; he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.
As one example, the essay notes correctly that a section of Romans 3 cites passages in the Psalms. But it doesn’t mention that near the end of that section, between two citations from the Psalms, is a string of three citations from Isaiah 59. A human would see that and think, “That’s odd. I wonder why he pops out to Isaiah like that. It’s not like he needs more evidence; this is at the end of a long string of perfectly sufficient evidence from the Psalms.” And, as the standardized process of evaluating intertextuality would prescribe, he would examine the contexts of all those citations to see what’s with the intrusion of Isaiah. And he’d find that all the Psalms passages are addressed to “the wicked” or some synonym, while the Isaiah passage is full of pronouns (they, etc.) that don’t identify specifically who’s (not “whose”) being addressed; and the human would need to trace those pronouns all the way back to the very beginning of chapter 58, where we find that the prophet is describing the depravity of “the house of Jacob.”
Aha! Back in Romans 2, Paul is arguing that both Jews and Gentiles are in need of justification, and he begins chapter 3 comparing the two groups. As he lists passages from the Psalms demonstrating the corruption of “the wicked,” he realizes that he needs to document the pious followers of Moses as well—and he goes to Isaiah, to a passage describing not the idolatrous Northern Kingdom of Israel, but the Southern Kingdom of Judah, the Davidic line.
All that is human thinking. Machines can’t do that. And the teacher who reads his students’ work carefully and thoughtfully, and who knows the ins and outs of the topic that he’s assigned, is in a position to spot that kind of major omission.
I also thought the evaluation (the answer to my second question) was off. Obviously, it missed the whole point I’ve laid out above, as I would expect. But it also criticized the essay for not including personal stories, which would be inappropriate in this academic exercise. And its two uses of the conjunction “however” are illogical; the expected word in each case should be “further,” given that following statements are extending the current point, not contrasting with it.
In short, everything it said was true, but it would raise a teacher’s eyebrows at multiple points. This little sample isn’t sufficient basis for a firm conclusion, but as a teacher I’m encouraged by the experiment.
One more thing: this experiment took place in the context of a conversation with several friends on Facebook, which had some entertaining moments. The complete thread is here, dated 2/4/2023. And a well-deserved word of thanks to my longtime friend Joel Lindstrom, who made it possible—and to Scott Buchanan, who added some enlightening content.
Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash
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