Reading: How Your Social Setting Shapes Your Mind (Slides)

How Your Social Setting Shapes Your Mind
By David Feddes

What shapes your mind?

• Your social setting: Whom do you fit (or fight) with?

• Your actions: What is your pattern of behavior?

• Your heart: What moves your inner self?

Your Social Setting: Whom do you fit with?

Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. (Proverbs 13:20)

One who is righteous is a guide to his neighbor, but the way of the wicked leads them astray. (Proverbs 12:26)

Good parental influence

Hear, my son, your father's instruction, and forsake not your mother's teaching. (1:8)

My son, keep your father's commandment, and forsake not your mother's teaching. (6:20)

The father of the righteous will greatly rejoice; he who fathers a wise son will be glad in him. Let your father and mother be glad; let her who bore you rejoice. (23:24-25)

Bad parental influence

• Do not walk in the statutes of your fathers, nor keep their rules, nor defile yourselves with their idols. (Ezekiel 20:18)

• Do not be like your fathers… they did not hear or pay attention to me. (Zechariah 1:4)

• You always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. (Acts 7:51)

• You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers. (1 Peter 1:18)

Good spousal influence

An excellent wife who can find?
She is far more precious than jewels.
The heart of her husband trusts in her,
and he will have no lack of gain…

Her husband is known in the gates when he sits among the elders of the land…

She opens her mouth with wisdom,
and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. (31:10-11,23,26)

Bad spousal influence

An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who brings shame is like rottenness in his bones. (12:4)

It is better to live in a desert land than with a quarrelsome and fretful woman. (21:19)

Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman and embrace the bosom of an adulteress? (5:20)

He who commits adultery lacks sense;
he who does it destroys himself. (6:32)

Whom do you fit (or fight) with?

Social plausibility structure: Your group setting shapes what you take for granted, what makes sense and sounds right to you.

Most Americans estimate that about 25% of people are homosexual. The actual number is about 1.7%.

My son, do not walk in the way with them. (1:15)

Bad companions

My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. If they say, “Come with us… throw in your lot among us… my son, do not walk in the way with them. (Proverbs 1:10-15)

Leave the presence of a fool, for there you do not meet words of knowledge. (14:7)

Be not among drunkards. (23:20)

Plausibility structure

A system of meaning makes sense and becomes plausible within a particular social setting. A group’s relational ties, institutions, and traditions socialize newer members so that some things seem self-evident and other things seem silly.

Which world do you belong in?

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God. (Romans 12:2)

Do not love the world or anything in the world. (1 John 2:15)

They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us. (1 John 4:5-6)

Controversial government decisions can later become unquestioned societal assumptions.

Plausibility structure
A system of meaning makes sense and becomes plausible within a particular social setting. A group’s relational ties, institutions, and traditions socialize newer members so that some things seem self-evident and other things seem silly.
• What world forms your worldview?
• Christian community is the plausibility structure for the gospel, the social setting where biblical belief makes sense.

Whom do you fit with?

Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.” (1 Corinthians 15:33)

Church as plausibility structure: Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another. (Hebrews 10:23-24)

Mission: influencing social plausibility structures

Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. (Proverbs 13:20)

One who is righteous is a guide to his neighbor, but the way of the wicked leads them astray. (12:26)