The Myth of Thinking for Yourself

Don't we need instruction, wisdom, and truth beyond ourselves?

Months ago, I read a social media post by a popular Christian writer. “I’ve turned in my most recent manuscript,” this person wrote (my paraphrase), “and I’ve noticed it has fewer citations than my previous books. Looks like I’m maturing into my own voice. Looks like I’m growing into the courage required to think more for myself.” I couldn’t help but find this writer’s sentiment misguided, mistaken, even dangerous.

Does anyone really think for himself? I can’t help but see that this formulation is just one more expression of the cultural zeitgeist that is spiritually deforming us, the messaging that insists we should listen to ourselves and be true to ourselves and live our own truth. I can’t help but wonder, isn’t this the opposite of what it means to be a Christian? Don’t I need instruction, wisdom, and truth beyond my own self-important, self-referential intuitions? Hasn’t the Bible given me enough reasons for mistrusting some of my reflexive responses? Hasn’t my own experience?

Back to the question of book-writing and source material: on one hand, a mass of undigested citations in anyone’s work reveals intellectual laziness (and probably also pride). As I learned in graduate school (then failed to successfully practice in my own early work), borrowed words must not simply be cited; they must be explained, synthesized, and effectively woven into the larger argument. Purportedly, if someone is buying your book, they’re most interested to hear your ideas, not quotations from your sources. (Yes, folks: just read some of precious Amazon reviews of my books.) Part of the hard work to which scholars and writers, thinkers and teachers, is argumentation, and it’s risky work, knowing very well you might be proven wrong.

But what to say of the writer who prides himself on fewer citations? The writer who believes his book is better because his learning supposedly suffers less influence from others?

The post bothered me for several reasons. First, I think there is a real crisis of learning today, one that needs to be challenged. Collectively, I can’t help but think we are losing our will to engage the efforts learning requires of us. It seems to me that we’re growing more resistant to the efforts that study requires and that this resistance will only increase with the rise of AI.

Listen to this NPR interview with Mustafa Suleyman, who co-founded DeepMind, to understand the optimism. They’ll be your research assistants! Just imagine the efficiencies! What he means, of course, is not simply that AI will find answers to our questions. It’s that they will also articulate the questions we’ll want to ask. Learning itself will become a frictionless process, one that never requires the frustration of false starts and dead ends.

I simply couldn’t disagree more: the rewards of learning are often in the labor of learning.

Again, citations are not proof of learning, but at the very least, they evidence that a writer has engaged the process of learning from others. Sure, I can come to the blank page, thinking my own thoughts. But what better writing might be possible if I have other voices in my head to challenge my intuitions, contest my instincts, dispute my untested assumptions, tell me I'm simply dead-wrong? Not to mention that a writer who is citing less is never thinking for himself. We are all a mixed bag of the influences that have been exerted upon us, both explicitly and implicitly: our families, our schooling, our communities, and more.

Worse than all this, the “intuitional” writer—one who prides himself on his own unassailed originality—might be tempted towards an authoritarianism that is anti-institutional and anti-authority. This is an insight I gained from Russell Moore’s recent book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. There is certainly an American appeal to this “outsider voice,” to the one who prizes independence and cannot be bought or sold. The appeal is one of independence—and the virtue of independence. But this is a misunderstanding of virtue, as if virtue can ever be formed apart from communities. Thinking is an inherently collective act. This is underscored in Karen Swallow Prior’s book, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. (I read both books to prepare to host Dr. Moore and Dr. Prior on the ERB Podcast. You can listen to that interview here.)

But the real book I want to bring to bear on this question of “original thinking” is Collin Hansen’s 2023 spiritual and intellectual biography, Timothy Keller, which I finally finished late last fall. The point of the book is to emphasize that while Tim Keller’s influence has been vast and important, Keller was indebted to the influence of many, many others.

I’ve taken two pages of notes to record some of those influences, but that list would prove tedious to share with you here. Suffice it to say that there are dead Puritans, British preachers, women like Barbara Boyd and Elisabeth Elliot, seminary professors, sociologists, and pastors on that list. There is his wife Kathy, who “would become the most formative intellectual and spiritual influence on Tim Keller’s life” (4).

Hansen concludes at the end of his book that Keller was influenced by many—and “quick to credit his influences” (265). “By citing so many others, Keller leaves the impression that he’s not an original thinker. Rarely will you find an idea in Keller that you can’t trace back to someone else. To understand Keller is to read his books’ footnotes, where he shows the work of processing and wrestling with his sources . . . Keller’s originality comes in his synthesis, how he pulls the sources together for unexpected insights. Having one hero would be derivative; having on hundred heroes means you’ve drunk deeply by scouring the world for the purest wells,” (265).

Keller was the consummate student, admitting what he didn’t know and dedicating himself to the labor of learning. This is what skeptical New Yorkers saw and trusted in him, as he quoted from diverse sources in his preaching. As a learner, Keller was also a listener, paying close attention to the doubts and questions raised by a wide variety of people. “Long before he wrote any bestselling books,” Hansen writes, “[Keller] heard what felt like every possible objection to Jesus. And when he returned home, he’d check his books to see if he could better answer those qestions . . . New Yorkers couldn’t understand how he seemed to know just what they were thinking. . . They didn’t know how much time he spent, not speaking, but listening to improve his own culturally situated understanding of the gospel,” (194). What’s clear is that Keller constantly saw gaps in his learning, then sought knowledge and experience to fill those gaps. This was never simply a chase to accumulate more information but rather the work of the ministry to which he had been called. Most importantly, this commitment to learning was a gospel orientation toward the world. It meant Keller thought soberly of himself and thought highly of many others—the posture to which all Christians are called.

Instead of thinking for myself, I’d love to take up the practices of listening and learning. I’d love to remember the debts I owe to many (then credit them and tell them thanks if possible). Which is to say: I may have just given myself an idea for the next letter.