A prayer for you for the Labor Day weekend

Whatever your faith commitments, whether religious or not, whatever your political beliefs, whatever your skin color, culture, background, or language, this is my prayer for you today: May you live this day and tomorrow in the peaceful rest of the grace of God.

Score one for John McCain

Reporter: Mr. McCain, how do you respond to charges that Palin has no experience?

McCain: If Obama had as much experience as Ms. Palin, he’d be ready for the VP slot, too.

Good line, and the right tack to take. (HT: Dr. Melissa Clouthier)

Warning: liberal nastiness alert

I posted a couple weeks ago about the attempt by disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters to challenge Barack Obama’s citizenship status, or something (I never was quite clear on what exactly they thought they were going to prove), and my amazement at how crazy some folks get about politics these days; but what’s going on now as certain elements on the Left try to destroy Sarah Palin (there's no other word for it) far exceeds that for sheer malignant looniness.

The craziest, and ugliest, is the attempt by denizens of the Democratic Underground (way underground, folks, with this one) and Daily Kos to claim that Trig Palin isn’t the governor’s son, but in fact her grandson, and that she faked her own pregnancy to cover up her daughter’s. Their evidence? Gov. Palin didn't show much (as some women don’t), and her daughter Bristol was out of school with mono and looked a little chubbier. That’s it. The funny thing about this attempt at political assassination is that previously, Palin-haters have criticized her for putting politics ahead of the life of her son, traveling too late into her pregnancy—her water actually broke when she was in Dallas for a governor’s conference, and she didn’t immediately go to the hospital, but instead flew back to Anchorage; now, those who want to tear her down are forced to argue that she faked the whole episode. Which is crazy, because if in fact her pregnancy was a charade, what would adding to the charade accomplish except to create a whole new set of doctors who could testify that she wasn’t pregnant? The whole thing is completely nuts; it will be a sad day in American politics if Gov. Palin is forced to release her medical records to disprove it.

Next to that, the garden-variety sexism of CNN reporter John Roberts seems almost wholesome. In case you missed that story, he was the one who wondered on air if it was irresponsible of Gov. Palin to run for Vice President when she has an infant with Down Syndrome. The question clearly floored his colleague, Dana Bash; in reply, she raised an important question: "I guess—my guess is that, perhaps, the line inside the McCain campaign would be, if it were a man being picked who also had a baby, but—you know, four months ago with Down’s Syndrome, would you ask the same question?" Somehow, I don’t think so.

Driving this, I think, is rage that the GOP (in the person of John McCain) had the sheer gall to pick a VP nominee who’s a woman who’s off the (Democratic) reservation. I heard some of that even in Rebecca Traister’s piece in Salon, and I've heard a fair bit more elsewhere. We’re seeing, I think, the true heart of a lot of liberal feminism. It doesn’t matter to them that she’s a woman with a chance to make history; if anything, that makes it worse—she’s not just a normal infidel, she’s an apostate and a traitor, and so must be destroyed. The fact that someone would actually write this (on DU, quoted here) sums it up:

I will attack her for whatever reason suits the purpose of making her look bad to my audience.

When I am among secular people I will attack her for being a religious zealot. When I am among people from church, I will attack her for being of a heterodox denomination. When I am among liberals I will attack her for her conservative views. When I am among conservatives I will attack her for her for anything they are prove to view as shortcomings in ideology. When I am among women, I will deride the obvious pandering of her nomination and the fact that McCain must not think much of womens’ [sic] intelligence, when I am among conservative men who dislike women in authority, I will rub their noses in it.

If I can attack her for opposite reasons over the course of an afternoon, I will consider it an accomplishment.

Same goes for Johnny Boy.

That’s hatred—flat out, pure, triple-distilled, 200 proof, weapons-grade hatred. That’s ugly.

One more reason Sarah Palin won't get Quayled

There are a lot of folks raising the concern with Gov. Palin that, as a newcomer to national politics, she's likely to make mistakes, and if she does, she'll be hammered for them by the liberal media and end up a drag on the ticket. Jonah Goldberg put it this way:

I've been thinking about it and I think the bottom line on Palin is pretty simple. If she does a good job at the convention and survives about three weeks of serious media scrutiny—no horrible gaffes, no unforgivable I-don't-knows to gotchya questions (fair and unfair), no botched hostile interviews—she will emerge as the single most inspired VP pick in modern memory and she will give the Democrats migraines for a long time to come, assuming there are no terrible skeletons we don't know about. But, if she screws up in the next three weeks, gives the press and the late night comedians sufficient fodder to Quayelize her, she'll be seen as anything from a liability to an outright horrible pick. That's it.

For my part, I'd been agreeing with this analysis—confident that Gov. Palin will do well, but still in agreement with the consequences if she doesn't. Now, however, I'm not so sure. Think about it: why did Dan Quayle get Quayled? George W. Bush didn't see a similar media reaction bury him, and he and the English language have a considerably tenser relationship. I think the answer is that it wasn't only Democrats who thought Quayle was a lightweight and not worthy of his position: Republicans didn't either. When Bentsen hit him with the "you're no Jack Kennedy" right cross and he went down for the count, his own party believed he belonged on the mat. That's what was fatal to him. With W., that didn't happen, and so he won two terms in the White House even as every comedian in the nation painted him as an ape in a dunce cap who couldn't spell his own name if you spotted him the "B"and the "u."

This is, I think, relevant to our evaluation of Sarah Palin. Consider that unlike Sen. Quayle, she has evoked a deep and impassioned positive response from national Republicans; Jonah Goldberg (again) is representative on this:

Whatever else you want to say about Palin, the undeniable fact is that she has generated staggering enthusiasm among Republicans. Every few minutes I get another email like this:

Jonah,
Three days ago, I was telling my fiance that I might stay home in November. I could never vote for Obama, and there were things McCain could do (such as a VP pick) that would prevent me from voting for him.

Well, I did it. Today I made my first ever political contribution, and it was to the McCain-PALIN campaign. I'm sold on Palin. And since he picked her, I'm now sold on McCain too.

Sincerely,
[name withheld]

This is profoundly significant, because it means that if she does put her foot in it and give the media the opportunity to label her a lightweight, out of her depth—I'll be surprised if she does, but even the best of us do it at the worst of times—Republican voters aren't going to buy the line. Instead, we'll defend her against it to anyone who will listen, and some people will. Would a gaffe or two on her part deflate the campaign somewhat? Sure, just as Sen. Obama's have deflated his somewhat. As long as she keeps her cool, though, I just don't see it knocking her or the ticket as a whole off their stride.

Note to Sarah Palin searchers

Well, things have calmed down considerably since yesterday's spike (more hits in one day than I've ever had in a month; from what I can see, this was pretty common among pro-Palin sites, as the Net went crazy with people trying to find out who the heck is Gov. Sarah Palin), but the traffic is still running pretty high; and there seem to be two real themes here. First, people looking for dirt on Gov. Palin. Sorry, nothing there but the accusation that she abused the powers of her office in an attempt to get someone to fire her brother-in-law the child-tasering state trooper who drinks beer in his police car and threatened to kill her father—an accusation which a) doesn't seem like much of an accusation (actually, getting the guy fired sounds like a pretty good idea to me), but b) doesn't seem to be true anyway.

Second, I continue to have crowds of folks land here searching for info on Sarah Palin's church, religion, and the like: and for you, I now have an answer. Go here, scroll down to the seventh line, and you will know what churches Sarah Palin attends, or has attended.

GOP angle: the experienced reformers ticket

The best media piece I’ve yet read on the Palin pick is Michael Medved’s. For the most part, he makes the same points that those of us who’ve been agitating for Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket have been making for a while, but what really makes his analysis, I think, is this comment:

Yes, this undermines McCain’s future use of the experience issue, but that’s almost certainly a good thing, too. The experience issue has never worked well in presidential elections: Gerald Ford tried it against a one-term Governor of Georgia (the worthless Jimmy Carter) and lost; Carter tried it against Reagan (no foreign policy experience as Governor of California!) and got wiped out; George H.W. Bush tried to make it stick against Bill Clinton and the result was the lowest percentage of the vote for a Republican candidate since Wiliam Howard Taft. The line McCain’s been using “He’s Not Ready to Lead” is still viable—and should emphasize a discussion of Obama’s policies, not his job history—his radicalism, not his resume. Meanwhile, we should invite comparisons of Governor Palin’s experience with Obama’s: won’t the PTA connect more with middle class voters than “community organizer,” and property tax-cutting small town mayor count more than slippery State Senator who voted “present” a disquieting proportion of the time. In any event, both tickets now balance experience with youthful energy—but McCain is balancing it the right way, with the experience at the top.

I think this is right on target, for two reasons. In the first place, every Democratic soundbite against Gov. Palin on the experience issue is also a soundbite against Barack Obama. Charles Schumer, for instance, said this: “While Palin is a fine person, her lack of experience makes the thought of her assuming the presidency troubling.” OK, Senator, so riddle me this: doesn’t that mean that Sen. Obama’s lack of experience makes the thought of him assuming the presidency troubling? After all, Gov. Palin has considerably more governance experience (technically, infinitely more, since Sen. Obama has none), and a considerably longer list of achievements to her name; how is it that her lack of experience troubles you, and his lack doesn’t? Check this out (HT: Carlos Echevarria):

Or, the thought strikes: does Sen. Schumer really mean (consciously or otherwise), “don’t worry about Sen. Obama’s inexperience—he’s just out front running the campaign; when it gets down to brass tacks, it will really be Uncle Joe running the show”? Is this a Freudian slip here? I’ve suspected for a while that that’s how the Democratic leadership on the Hill sees Sen. Obama; have we just seen that confirmed?

In any case, going back to Medved’s point, prior to Steve Schmidt taking over to run the McCain effort, I remember seeing quizzical headlines asking, “Why is John McCain re-running the Hillary campaign,” pointing out as Medved does that running on “experience” doesn’t work well when your opponent is running on “hope” and “change.” The danger always was that Sen. McCain would lean on that too heavily—and now the presence of Gov. Palin on that ticket both makes that impossible and pulls the campaign back to a hope/change/reform emphasis of its own. The key now is to make the case that John McCain and Sarah Palin are experienced reformers who will put country first, working for the common good, serving the people above all. That, I think, is a message that works for them, since it fits what they’ve done in their careers, and what they care about as individuals; it’s a message they can back up from their own stories and their accomplishments in life; and it’s one that can win in November.

Sarah Palin: not an asterisk

Beldar has a great post up on why Gov. Palin won't be Quayled by Joe Biden which, along the way, captures a lot of why those of us who've been backing her believe in her.

“To serve the common good”

This still revs me up whenever I think about it—we did it. The longest of longshots happened. John McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate—and for today at least, she blew the roof off the place. If you didn't see Sen. McCain's introduction and Gov. Palin's speech (which, judging by what I can see of his reactions, took him by surprise, it was so good) in Dayton this afternoon, the video is below (it's about 27 minutes).

“A ship in harbor is safe—but that’s not why it is built.” —Gov. Sarah Palin

The Palin conundrum for Barack Obama

Several months ago, I was interested to read an article in Salon by one Rebecca Traister on the sexism of some of Sen. Obama's supporters, one which suggested the beginnings of disaffection with him among some female voters (including some who were supporting him over Hillary Clinton). Earlier this week, I began to notice signs that that disaffection had become very real, such as his dropping poll numbers among women, not to mention the blogger who asked, "Why is Barack Obama so afraid of women?"

I posted on that, but unfortunately, I didn't get it phrased quite the way I wanted it, which resulted in a discussion in the comments that never really explored the key question: is Sen. Obama dealing with a perception problem among women—is he giving women the feeling that he doesn't like or appreciate them properly, or that he has a problem with powerful women, and if so, how can he address this? (The latter is a question which I didn't try to answer, because I don't have an answer.) To my way of thinking, the idea seems absurd—would he have married his wife if he had a problem with powerful women? From where I sit, aside from the Senate service, she's more qualified for this race than he is. I'm starting to think, though, that after the long, bruising battle with Sen. Clinton—and perhaps more importantly, his treatment of her after he secured the nomination—that maybe a lot of people, and especially women, don't find it so absurd. If that's so, then it seems to me that would add up to a real problem for Sen. Obama.

In light of that, I was quite interested to hear Dick Morris, in the middle of a paean to Sarah Palin (whom he called "great" and "brilliant" and a terrific pick for John McCain), say this:

She'll demonstrate that the Republicans, unlike Barack Obama, are open to women and believe that women ought to be promoted. Now you have Barack Obama, who spent his whole primary trying to stop a woman from being President, and now he's going to spend the whole general trying to stop a woman from being Vice President, and he's trying to do that with women's votes.

Ouch.

I've been arguing hard for two months now for Gov. Palin on the GOP ticket because of all the things I have been and remain firmly convinced (despite the naysayers) that she brings to Sen. McCain's campaign; but I'm starting to think, as a political matter, that the challenge she poses to the Obama campaign might be important as well. (Update: so does the New York Post's Kirsten Powers, who calls the pick "a brilliant trap" for the Obama campaign.) I said earlier today that I thought the Democrats were making a mistake trying to dismiss her out of the gate as "Geraldine Quayle," a lightweight, rather than taking her seriously, because she isn't another Quayle, she isn't a lightweight; but as well, from some of the reactions I've seen, I'm starting to think that kind of approach has real potential to tick off female voters. Honestly, the GOP should take Morris' quote and plaster it everywhere they can find the wall space, because the more people look at the matter in that way (and I'm starting to think that a lot of folks already do), the more of a problem Gov. Palin is going to pose for Barack Obama and (especially) Joe Biden. I think they're going to find that she's a lot harder to attack than they realize, regardless; but the more voters see the race in the terms in which Morris casts it, the greater the chance the McCain/Palin ticket will really have to peel away not only conservative but also moderate Democrats, and the better their chances of getting to 270 in November.

Minor note

I wrote a piece a little bit ago on "Sense of place and the '08 election," riffing a bit on a Peggy Noonan column and a Beldar blog post. It occurred to me a moment ago that someone should tell Peggy Noonan not to worry quite so much: whatever else they may be, both Delaware and Alaska are most definitely places.

For a 90° turn: meditation on faith and reason

OK, I'm going into overload here; I have to shift gears or I'm going to fry the engine, and besides, I have other things I need to be thinking about. So, while I will no doubt have more to say about John McCain, Sarah Palin, and their detractors before long, I'm going to take a deep breath and send my brain in a different direction: specifically, the issue of the relationship between faith and reason.

One of our best guides in this regard is St. Augustine, in whose writings this issue looms large. It’s only to be expected that this should be so; as a philosopher, he is committed to reasoning his way to truth, but as a Christian he must accept some things as true on faith rather than by his reason, and these two stances might seem incompatible. It’s a major part of Augustine’s task as a philosopher to reconcile these seeming opposites, to prove that Athens does indeed have fellowship with Jerusalem.

Before he can begin building his case, Augustine must define his terms. In doing so, he draws a sharp distinction between knowledge, which is the result of rational thought, and belief, or faith. Knowledge is “the rational cognizance of temporal things”; in other words, it is the understanding, brought about by reason, of the things of this world. Belief, by contrast, is a matter of “consenting to the truth of what is said.” Rather than being an act of the reason to discover something to be true, it is a decision of the will to accept something as true. However, the statement that faith is an act of the will rather than a product of human reason does not automatically make faith opposed to reason. This is a critical point; otherwise, reason and faith are irreconcilable and the entire enterprise of Christian philosophy is in vain. Augustine offers several arguments to show that faith is indeed reasonable, and thus that faith and reason can and do complement each other.

The first point is that faith does not spring out of nothing, but out of rational thought. “For who cannot see that thinking is prior to believing? . . . it is yet necessary that everything which is believed should be believed after thought has preceded; although even belief itself is nothing less than to think with assent. . . . everybody who believes, thinks—both thinks in believing, and believes in thinking.” This means that faith is not antithetical to reason but a possible product of it; reason can lead to faith.

Augustine further argues that faith leads to knowledge, not merely belief. He draws this argument from Scripture, citing the words of Christ in John 17:3 (“And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent,” ESV) and Matthew 7:7 (“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you,” ESV). His point is that “one cannot speak of that being found which is believed without knowledge, nor does anyone become prepared to find God who does not first believe that which he is afterward to know.” The goal of faith, according to this interpretation, is to bring the believer to a point where it is possible to gain true knowledge of God, not simply to rest in believing things about God. Thus reason and faith complement each other in the quest for understanding.

The reason why this is so, according to Augustine, is that some truths are too big for the mind to comprehend them through reason alone. Citing Isaiah 7:9, he contends that “we must first believe whatever great and divine matter we desire to understand.” Our minds are limited, and thus our reason cannot see all truths. Since reason lacks force to compel us to accept these truths, we can do so only by an act of the will.

As such an act isn’t grounded in our own reason, it must be based on authority external to ourselves. Augustine even declares that “for those who seek to learn great and hidden truths authority alone opens the door.” As he sees it, while reason is higher and more fundamental than authority, authority must precede reason in operation, at least for human beings, in order to ensure that reason proceeds in the proper direction to reach truth. He sums up the relationship between the two by saying, “Authority demands faith, and prepares man for reason. Reason leads him on to knowledge and understanding.”

For Augustine, then, the quest for understanding begins with faith in authority, which prepares the soul to use reason to gain understanding of that which is believed. This does not mean, however, that reason is “useless to authority; it helps in considering what authority is to be accepted.” This is very important to Augustine, because faith is worthless if it is misplaced. Those who place their faith in God are on the road to true understanding, because God, the creator of all, is the source of Truth Itself. Those who place their faith in a false authority, however, can never reach true understanding, because the foundation for their reason is flawed. Reason thus has an important part to play in finding a true authority to accept.

In Augustine’s understanding of the pursuit of truth, then, reason and faith are intermingled. Reason provides a basis for faith by determining which authority is worthy of acceptance. From that rational basis, the individual chooses to accept that authority as true. That authority in turn prepares the individual to seek understanding, and gives a foundation for the use of reason in that search. Thus reason and faith are integrated in the search for truth, keeping all of life together as a whole rather than splitting it in two.

It’s important to note here that for Augustine, a questioning faith is true faith because it is seeking to grow in understanding. That is the proper aim of faith, to apply reason to gain understanding of God and the things of God. While Augustine grants that those who fail to do so will still reach heaven, he does not believe that they are truly happy, for they are falling short of that for which they were made.

Is this really helpful, guys?

The bloggers over at PowerLine are quite negative on the Palin pick. Paul Mirengoff wrote, "I'm very disappointed that John McCain would put someone as inexperienced and lacking in foreign policy and national security background as Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency." Why, because Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney have so much foreign-policy experience? Guys, I don't know if you've noticed, but there's kinda this big honkin' landmass in between Alaska and the rest of the US—it's called Canada, and it's a foreign country, and it's one of Alaska's only two neighbors. The other is a little country called Russia (I think you might have heard of it). I don't say that Gov. Palin is accustomed to going toe-to-toe with hostile foreign leaders, certainly, but then, it's not like she's Mike Huckabee's running mate; she'll be understudying a guy who knows the field pretty well, and she's a quick study. Trust Sen. McCain to bring her along on that score.

Now, could we have done better in that regard from the GOP field? Sure. Six months ago, I wanted Condoleeza Rice on the ticket; you could also have picked someone like Richard Lugar. But you guys aren't boosting anyone like that—you want a governor, and there are good reasons it should be so. If you get a governor, though, you're not going to get much in the way of foreign-policy experience. (And incidentally, how much foreign-policy experience did Gov. Reagan have when he was elected 28 years ago, anyway?) In all honesty, I'm not sure how much that matters; it's not Barack Obama's foreign-policy inexperience that worries me, it's his judgment. Where I think experience matters is in the practical details of governing, and having a sense for what works and what doesn't; and there, though Gov. Palin doesn't have long experience, she has highly successful experience, having accomplished quite a bit in a difficult political environment, working against her own party's political machine. Where her inexperience abroad matters is in that sense of what's possible and reasonable, and though she doesn't have that, she can develop it.

And honestly, given Secretary Rice's track record over the last couple years, I think I might just prefer inexperience. (For whatever it might be worth, Johnathan Adler thinks much the same.)

And now the spin begins

as the Democrats try to neutralize the Palin pick. Charles Schumer is already claiming she takes the experience argument against Obama off the table, other Democrats are warning (in appropriately sepulchral tones) that she might be "a disaster"—one even dismissed her as "Geraldine Quayle." For the latter, I think once America gets its first good look at Sarah Palin, I don't think anyone will buy that; she's bright, capable, and a quick study. What's more, it isn't quite true that she has no foreign-policy experience—remember, Alaska doesn't border the US, it borders Canada and Russia. She certainly doesn't measure up to Joe Biden in that respect, but that's what the GOP ticket has John McCain for. And with all due respect, Sen. Schumer: don't just look at the calendar, look at the accomplishments. That's where the experience differential between Gov. Palin and Sen. Obama is very real.

To go one step further, I think the Democrats are making a major mistake here. They're trying to neutralize her with ridicule as a lightweight, hoping for the quick wipeout right out of the box, instead of treating her seriously; and while that would work if she were a lightweight, she isn't, and she's faced worse before. What this means is that, when she comes to the debate with Joe Biden, the expectations for her will be low, because after all, Sen. Biden is a vicious this, that and the other thing—and as George W. Bush found, she will find that low expectations can be a real help. She won't need to "win" the debate with Sen. Biden to win the debate: all she'll need to do is look respectable and not make a fool of herself, and the Democratic attack on her will go down like a house of cards. If in fact she stands up to Sen. Biden and performs well—as I'm convinced she will if the campaign staff prepare her properly—then the attacks on her will backfire in a big way. And if Sen. Biden has one of his "Uncle Joe" moments and she handles it well, she could flip him clean off the stage.

YES!!!!!! MCCAIN/PALIN '08!

All right, I'm breaking my own self-imposed rule, but after all the hijinks played yesterday with http://www.mccainpalin.com/, I'm calling this good enough: it's now firmly McCain-Palin 2008, declaring, "The Wait Is Over" and reads,

It's Official!!! Congratulations Sarah Palin! We are pleased to announce that John McCain has chosen Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate! Sarah Heath Palin is currently the Governor of Alaska and assumed office in 2006. In addition to being the first female Governor of Alaska, she has made history again as the first female Republican Vice Presidential running mate. We are confident Sarah Palin will make an excellent Vice Presidential candidate with John McCain, and we congratulate her on her impeccable record of public service and her recent selection as John McCain's VP!

And indeed, here's the press release from the McCain campaign confirming his selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate!

WE DID IT!

HE DID IT!

MCCAIN/PALIN '08!

CNN is reporting . . .

. . . that Gov. Sarah Palin is the pick. I'm going to wait for John McCain to say so himself before I go bonkers, but . . . yeah.

Incidentally, I've been talking about Palin searches driving my traffic—well, I have half again as many hits already today as my blog's previous high, and it's only 11 am. It looks to me like a lot of this is people who've never heard of the woman and are now trying to figure out who she is and where she came from. Some of the highlights:

• Scads of people looking for "Sarah Palin church," or some variant thereof. I told you, I don't know anything about that.
• Several people looking for "Sarah Palin Seattle Seahawks," which just made me laugh. My dream January: John McCain and Sarah Palin sworn in in D.C., and the 'Hawks in the Super Bowl.
• One person looking for "sara palin firefly." I have no idea what prompted that search, but it landed them here.
• A number of searches on "Sarah Palin Native American." That's her husband's ancestry, not hers (she was born in Idaho), but I'm not surprised at the interest.
• We have people looking for dirt, with a few searches like "Sarah Palin, flaws" and "Sarah Palin skeletons." There don't appear to be any skeletons in her closet; you want to know what there is to know, negatively-speaking, read the CNN story—it's all there.
• Which reminds me, maybe the person looking for "Palin closet" was looking for the same thing; otherwise, that bewilders me.
• I've also seen a bunch of people looking for "Sarah Palin wealthy," or some variant thereof. Umm, no, she isn't (though she's not poor, either).
• Whoever's looking for "Sarah Palin ACU rating" is going to be disappointed, since I don't think governors have ACU ratings. Aren't those calculated from congressional votes?
• Someone wanted to check out Gov. Palin's law school. Just so you know, she's not a lawyer.
• My favorite search? "Sarah Palin humorous VP"
• Longest search? "how many children has Gov of Alaska, Sarah Palin who cares for her children who is her husband"

Choose your targets carefully

Half the battle in any competition is shooting at the right target. (Remember the US biathlete who lost a gold medal a few years back because he got that wrong?) With the Democratic convention concluded, it's clear they've chosen theirs: George W. Bush. They figure they don't have to actually attack John McCain, which is not such an easy thing to do; they can just beat up on the easy target, the unpopular departing president, and then say that McCain is just the same. Superficially, it sounds like a good approach—after all, Barack Obama tells us, Sen. McCain voted with the President over 90% of the time! Wow, right?

Well, not exactly. Sen. Obama's dirty little secret here is—so did he. You see, what he knows and most Americans don't is that some 90% of all Senate votes are unanimous: votes to adjourn (heh!), votes on resolutions to honor the Super Bowl winner, the team that won the NCAA tournament, etc. The political stuff that really matters amounts to less than 10% of the votes. Thus, to say that Sen. McCain voted with President Bush 94% of the time, let's say, is to say that he opposed him roughly 60% of the time when it counted. That may also be misleading, of course; the great problem with tracking Senate vote totals is that you get multiple votes on different versions of the same bill, and grandstanding votes, and a whole lot of junk that accumulates in the voting record that really doesn't help you understand anyone's real positions. It's still more meaningful than implying that Sen. McCain and President Bush agree on 90% of the major issues in this country, because they clearly don't.

This is why Dick Morris is saying that the Democrats blew their convention on the wrong target, because John McCain isn't George W. Bush, and he can prove it; Morris even compares it to the GOP's lousy aim in 1992 and '96 that was such a help to Bill Clinton, since "McCain is the most unlike Bush of any of the Republican senators." All Sen. McCain needs to do is to make that case clearly, and the Democratic efforts will be so much hot air. They're already hard at work doing so, along with deflating some of the other claims Sen. Obama made in his speech.

Of course, the problem for Sen. McCain is that Sen. Obama is an even harder figure to attack directly—because he's a gifted politician, because it's tricky to do so without looking like a racist, and because he just doesn't have much of a record to look at; he, too, needs a broader target to which he can link Sen. Obama. I've been arguing that that target should be Congress, as a way of highlighting Sen. Obama's clear and strong identification with the Democratic agenda; Karl Rove agrees, and notes the particular vulnerability of this Congress, and particularly the fights that are looming. As Rove concludes,

The end result of all of these messy fights is that a Congress—which hit a record low 14% approval rating in a July Gallup Poll before its members left on summer vacation—may become even more unpopular.

Inevitably, John McCain and Barack Obama will be drawn into these fights. And, although both are sitting senators, the advantage may go to Mr. McCain. Democrats control Congress, so they are accountable. Mr. Reid and Mrs. Pelosi are two of the worst advertisements for Congress imaginable. And Mr. McCain has an impressive record of political reform he can invoke, whereas Mr. Obama, who has yet to complete his first term in the Senate, has no accomplishments to point to that demonstrate that he is an agent of change.

The 110th Congress is an excellent target for Mr. McCain. He ought to take careful aim at it and commence firing.

Kudos also to John McCain for class

My understanding is that this ad, congratulating Barack Obama on his victory and noting the poetic nature of his accepting his party's nomination on the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech, is set to run tonight during the Democratic convention.

Kudos to the John McCain Ministry of Disinformation

There's been some talk in recent weeks about the website http://www.mccainpalin.com/, especially among those of us booming Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate. Today, it has in succession redirected to websites purporting to announce a McCain/Pawlenty ticket, a McCain/Hutchison ticket, and now a McCain/Romney ticket. Where it will go by the time you click on the link, I have no idea. Plus, there are other indications and rumors flying—Tim Pawlenty has canceled appearances, the Secret Service is at Mitt Romney's sister's house, and so on—all pointing different directions.

I can only come to one conclusion: the McCain campaign is playing with our minds. Having watched Sen. Obama's pick leak despite efforts to keep everything hush-hush, they've decided to go the other way and flood the arena with disinformation. There are so many red herrings flopping around out there right now, the only thing you're going to accomplish if you dive in is to come up smelling fishy.

I have no idea who Sen. McCain's pick will be; I think the complete absence of any pointers aiming at my favorite governor might be telling, but I'm by no means sure enough of that to say. I am sure of this, though: Sen. McCain said his pick is going to be a surprise, and by cracky, he wants to keep it that way!

Song of the Week

I'd never heard of Brandon Heath before he asked my wife's cousin Curt and his kids to be among the cast of extras for his new video. The video is now out (my thanks to my dear wife for posting it), and though I don't have any of the copyright info, I'm posting it anyway, because it's a great song; I'm not ashamed to say it made me weep. We fall so short of loving others the way God calls us to love; certainly, I do. Dear God, this is my prayer too.

Give Me Your Eyes

Looked down from a broken sky
Traced out by the city lights;
My world from a mile high—
Best seat in the house tonight.
Touch down on the cold blacktop—
Hold on for the sudden stop;
Breathe in the familiar shock
Of confusion and chaos.

All those people going somewhere—
Why have I never cared?

Give me your eyes for just one second,
Give me your eyes so I can see
Everything that I keep missing;
Give me your love for humanity.
Give me your arms for the broken-hearted,
The ones that are far beyond my reach.
Give me your heart for the ones forgotten;
Give me your eyes so I can see, yeah.

Step out on a busy street,
See a girl and our eyes meet;
Does her best to smile at me,
To hide what's underneath.
There's a man just to her right,
Black suit and a bright red tie,
To ashamed to tell his wife
He's out of work, he's buying time.

All those people going somewhere—
Why have I never cared?

Chorus

I've been here a million times;
A couple of million eyes,
Just move and pass me by—
I swear I never thought that I was wrong.
Well, I want a second glance,
So give me a second chance
To see the way you've seen the people all along.

Chorus

Give me your eyes,
Lord, give me your eyes,
For everything that I keep missing.
Give me your heart for the broken-hearted;
Give me your eyes,
Lord, give me your eyes.

Words and music: Brandon Heath and Jason Ingram
©2008 Sitka6 Music/Peertunes, Ltd./Grange Hill Music/Windsor Way Music
From the album What If We, by Brandon Heath

Will he do it?

The interest in Sarah Palin continues to drive the traffic on this blog up and up and up, as the search hits keep rolling in; and it's not just me, either—Adam Brickley's blog, which is the hub of the Palin movement, topped 5,000 hits both Monday and Tuesday (a fact he relayed in his excellent "pep talk," in which he made the case for Palin as well as he ever has). A great many people across this country—many Republicans, but also more than a few moderate Democrats—are catching the vision of a McCain/Palin ticket, and getting excited about the possibility. This is the reason John McCain needs to name Gov. Palin as his running mate, because you can't say that about anybody else; the arguments for the other candidates are all purely rational, coldly political parsings of the data. There are equally strong rational arguments, and perhaps stronger, to be made for Gov. Palin, but among them is this: she excites people. None of the other candidates do that, except Mormons for Romney; none of them excite both wings of the Republican base; none of them excite people beyond the Republican base. Only Gov. Palin does that, and I hope Sen. McCain realizes that.

The question is, will he do it? We'll find out tomorrow—or maybe today, if it leaks the way the Biden pick did. If he does, then yes, the media will immediately go on the attack, but despite them, we'll see the excitement continue to build; if he doesn't, it will deflate. We have lifelong Democrats who are leaning toward voting Republican for the first time; some of them will go back to Sen. Obama. We have disaffected Republicans who don't like Sen. McCain but are thrilled at the prospect of voting for Gov. Palin; some of them won't vote. We have others who like Sen. McCain well enough but aren't energized by him, but would love to turn out and work for a McCain/Palin ticket; they'll still vote for him in November, but most of them won't contribute otherwise. And then there are those of us who will keep beating the drum regardless, but would like to have as many reasons as possible to make our case; there's simply more to be said for McCain/Palin than for McCain/Hutchison or McCain/Pawlenty, let alone McCain/Romney. And yes, for a lot of us, if the Palin energy goes, there will also be a lot fewer people listening to us as we do.

So, will John McCain make history by picking Sarah Palin, Alaska's preternaturally accomplished female governor, as his running mate? I don't know—but I hope so.

Worship for blokes; or, what did that song say?

Some time ago, I referenced a book called The Message in the Music: Studying Contemporary Praise and Worship, edited by a couple of professors at Spring Arbor; it's a good book which I highly recommend for its multifaceted analysis of the lyrical content of the top 77 contemporary worship songs in the American church. (I lack the expertise to comment similarly on the essays devoted to the music itself.) That post was focused on Dr. Lester Ruth's study of the Trinitarian content (or lack thereof) of those songs, but that's only one angle the book takes; there are also excellent and highly valuable essays on topics such as "Contemporary Worship Music and God's Concern for Righteousness and Social Justice" (is anyone surprised to hear the author's conclusion that the songs studied were "sorely lacking" in this respect?) and "Worshiping God in the Darkness—The Expression of Pain and Suffering in Contemporary Worship" (in which respect there were at least a handful of really good songs), among others. It's an important book for anyone interested in planning and leading worship with strong theological content.

One interesting aspect of the book is that there are two different essays approaching the question of romantic lyrics and the influence of American love songs in our contemporary worship music—one of them explicitly from the male perspective. I've been thinking about that again since Hap put up this post considering her responsibility as a worship leader to help lead all those in the sanctuary in worship, not just those who share her perspectives (or vocal range—I do hope you still have your upper register, my friend). As part of her post, she included a fascinating snippet of an interview with Matt Redman (which I've posted as well below) in which he talks about learning to write songs that blokes can worship to without feeling uncomfortable. As Keith Drury showed in his essay in The Message in the Music, romantic-sounding lyrics aren't as much of a problem for as many guys as one might think, because many of us find ways to handle it; but as Dr. John Stackhouse points out, not only are there a lot of us who do find that creepy, but there are some relational and theological problems with that sort of language in worship if we interpret it in the way in which the world teaches us to interpret it.

The thing I most appreciate about Redman's reaction in this interview—which is no surprise, since he tends to be theologically and scripturally strong and aware, but is still gratifying—is that he acknowledges the importance of thinking carefully about the lyrics he writes, so that they use language which is both biblical and free of cultural distortions. This is, as Hap puts it, a major part of responsible songwriting for the church; unfortunately, it's a discipline which is too easy not to practice. The more that folks like Redman and Brian Doerksen and Chris Tomlin, the people who set the musical and lyrical agenda for the Western contemporary church, talk about and practice that sort of discipline, though, the more the rest of the church will follow, and the better off we'll be.

The Risen Lord

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ,
be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin,
so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

—2 Corinthians 5:14-21, ESV

A print of this painting, with a caption taken from this passage, hangs in my office, behind my desk (on the side wall, so I can see it). The artist, one of my favorite contemporary painters, is Dr. He Qi, a painter and philosopher of religious art who has taught at Nanjing Union Theological Seminary and Nanjing University (in the philosophy department). His website describes his art this way:

He has been committed to the artistic creation of modern Chinese Christian Art since 1983. He hopes to help change the "foreign image" of Christianity in China by using artistic language, and at the same time, to supplement Chinese Art the way Buddhist art did in ancient times. In his works, He Qi has blended together Chinese folk customs and traditional Chinese painting techniques with the western art of the Middle and Modern Ages, and has created an artistic style of color-on-paper painting.

If the piece above interests you, I encourage you to explore his website—he's done some truly brilliant work. (You can also find an inexpensive set of prints—taken from the PC(USA)'s 2004-05 planning calendar, which used his artwork—here.)

A couple facts on offshore drilling

This is the offshore-drilling map: what Congress has allowed and what it has disallowed. The green areas are legal, the red aren't, and the yellow aren't under our jurisdiction. (For the rather lurid "No Zone" thing, blame Idaho Sen. Larry Craig—this was produced by his office.)

This is the map of the mockery that China, Cuba, Canada, and other countries are making of that ban, drilling into the Gulf oil fields from sites as close to 50 miles off the coast of Key West.

At the very least, as we debate expanding offshore drilling, we need to be aware that just because we've banned it doesn't mean it isn't happening—it just means it's happening a little further off shore, to the benefit of other countries (some of them our enemies) instead of our own.

McCain/Leno '08

I just got the chance to watch last night's Tonight Show, which was a great one; Jay Leno was at the top of his form. (I especially enjoyed his crack that he had John McCain and Dara Torres on "not for politics and the Olympics, but just because I like being around people who've been told they're too old for the job." Nice shot at NBC there.) It was interesting to note the dead silence from the audience when Leno mentioned Joe Biden, and interesting too to see how well Sen. McCain connected with them; it underscored the point folks have made that he's much better in an informal, unscripted setting than he is in a stump speech. (That, I imagine, is the reason Barack Obama has refused to do the town hall meetings with him, because Sen. Obama is the other way around.)

I expect it helped that this was Sen. McCain's 13th appearance on the show—I got the sense from watching him and Leno that there's a fair degree of friendship between the two of them, as they seemed to enjoy talking with each other. They cracked a few jokes—some at Sen. McCain's expense, a couple at Sen. Biden's—but they also had some serious discussion, and I think some worthwhile points were made. In particular, I appreciated his response to Leno's question about the dollar that the first thing we need to do is "stop sending $700,000,000 a year to countries who don't like us," which was the beginning of his argument for expanded domestic energy production—drilling, nuclear, hydrogen, the works. (Perhaps my biggest surprise of his appearance: he got applause from the audience for calling for offshore drilling.)

If you didn't get the chance to watch Sen. McCain on Leno, the video is below.

One last comment: might I just add how much I hope to see Gov. Sarah Palin sitting in that chair a few weeks from now as the Republican VP nominee? I think she'd rock the show.

To repeat: why John McCain should choose Sarah Palin

It occurred to me today that though I've posted a fair bit about Sarah Palin, it's been a couple months now since I laid out the reasons that convinced me of the truth of the superficially crazy notion that the best running mate for John McCain is the first-term governor of a small red state that most Americans rarely think about. Given that more and more people are discovering her and starting to consider that superficially crazy notion for themselves, I thought that re-running those reasons might be in order.

One, she's young, just 44; she would balance out Sen. McCain's age.

Two, she has proven herself as an able executive and administrator, serving as mayor, head of the state's Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and now as governor; she would balance out Sen. McCain's legislative experience (though he does have command experience in the Navy).

Three, she has strong conservative credentials, both socially (she's strongly pro-life, politically and personally) and fiscally (as her use of the line-item veto has shown); she would assuage concerns about Sen. McCain's conservatism.

Four, she's independent, having risen to power against the Alaska GOP machine, not through it; she's worked hard against the corruption in both her party and her state's government. She would reinforce Sen. McCain's maverick image, which is one of his greatest strengths in this election, but in a more conservative direction.

Five, for the reasons listed above, she's incredibly popular in Alaska. That might seem a minor factor to some, but it's indicative of her abilities as a politician.

Six, she has a remarkable personal story, of the sort the media would love. She's a former beauty-pageant winner, the mother of five children (the oldest serving in the Army, preparing to deploy to Iraq, the youngest a Down Syndrome baby), an outdoorsy figure who rides snowmobiles and eats mooseburgers—and a tough, take-no-prisoners competitor who was known as "Sarah Barracuda" when she led her underdog high-school basketball team to the state championship, and who now has accomplished a similar feat in cutting her way to the governor's office. No one now in American politics can match Sen. McCain's life story (no, not even Barack Obama), but she comes as close as anyone can (including Sen. Obama); she fits his image.

Seven, she would give the McCain campaign the "Wow!" factor it can really use in a vice-presidential nominee. As a young, attractive, tough, successful, independent-minded, appealing female politician, though not well known yet, she would make American voters sit up and take notice [as indeed she is already]; and given her past history, there could be no doubt that she would be a strong, independent voice in a McCain administration, should there be one. (Update: for those wondering how she'd do in debates, go here to watch how she did the last time around. Go here to see her inaugural address.)

Eight, choosing Gov. Palin as his running mate, especially if coupled with actions like giving Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal the keynote slot at the GOP convention, would help the party going forward. The GOP needs to rebuild its bench of plausible strong future presidential candidates, and perhaps the best thing Sen. McCain can do for the party is to help with this. The party needs Gov. Jindal to stay where he is for another term or two (as, I believe, does the state of Louisiana), but in giving him the convention slot that launched Sen. Obama to prominence four years ago and putting Gov. Palin on the ticket, Sen. McCain would put two of the GOP's best people and brightest hopes for the future in a perfect position to claim the White House themselves; in so doing, he would make them the face of the GOP for the future.

Does Barack Obama have a woman problem?

I wouldn't have thought so—he's married to a smart, strong, aggressive woman whom he clearly loves dearly (though I personally find her rather depressing); but I'm beginning to wonder. He's certainly been rather inept in his handling of Hillary Clinton, managing to both cave in to her (and/or Bill) and to tick her off; sending the formal announcement of the Biden pick (even though it had already leaked) at 3 am was just over the top. Now people are starting to ask, "Why is Barack Obama so afraid of women?" I don't believe he is, but with his campaign's connection to the attempted political hit job on Sarah Palin coming right together with his treatment of Sen. Clinton, it does seem clear that he wants a monopoly on the identity politics in this campaign. He understands that "first black President" has a powerful pull, and that he can use that (and more power to him); in consequence, he doesn't want that blurred or undermined by a woman in the race. He didn't want to be upstaged (for which I don't blame him), so he didn't pick Hillary; equally, he doesn't want to be competing in the general election against a woman on the GOP ticket, which would create crossing and conflicting claims in the identity-politics arena. After all, if the Democrats give you the chance to elect the first black man to the White House, and the Republicans give you the chance to elect the first woman (albeit just to the Blair House, the official residence of the VP), then you can make history either way. (And one would have to admit that between the two, the Republicans nominating a woman would be the bigger surprise.)

In any case, I'm quite sure Sen. Obama has no problems with women—but it does seem like more and more women are wondering if he does. (Update: the latest numbers from Gallup show his support among women dropping, and especially among unmarried women, from 46% to 39%.) Some of that, again, is his treatment of Sen. Clinton, who hasn't buried the hatchet—she's doing her best to undermine him, even when she helps him; some is rooted in the behavior of many of his supporters, a problem Rebecca Traister wrote about in Salon a few months ago; some of it comes from who those supporters are, or at least the most visible ones. Stacy at Smart Girl Politics asks, "One last thought....have you ever noticed how many of John McCain's spokespeople on the media rounds are women? Have you noticed how many top business women have lined up to support John McCain? How many prominent women can you name in the Obama campaign?" I'm not sure how widespread this sort of perception is, but Sen. Obama had better do something about it, or he'll wind up seeing a lot more ads like this one:

Elemental powers

“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.
He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame,
by triumphing over them in him.”

—Colossians 2:8-15 (ESV)

The word translated “elemental spirits” in the beginning of that passage is stoicheia, which literally means “elements”; this refers to the spirits who were thought to control the physical world—the four elements, the stars, the other heavenly bodies, the signs of the zodiac—all those things which were commonly thought to control human destiny. These were the powers, people believed, that ruled the world, and had to be placated in order to get on with life.

To most people, I suspect, Paul’s warning in Colossians 2 seems irrelevant—it has nothing to do with how we live now. Sure, there are those who are into astrology and won’t do anything without consulting their horoscope, but most people know better than to think that the stars rule their lives; surely, the concern Paul raises is nothing we need to worry about in our own lives.

For my part, though, I’m not so sure; I think our culture has its own set of stoicheia that continue to assert their authority in our lives. They may look different, and they may not be tied into religious observance (as they were in Paul’s day), but they wield similar influence. I think we need to ask in all seriousness—and try to answer in all seriousness—what are the spirits our society accepts as the elemental powers that rule human destiny?

I don’t have a complete answer to that, by any means; but I think that one force that has assumed that role in our culture, anyway, is sex. The ancients believed the stars ruled their fates, and that however hard you tried to resist or avoid your fate, you couldn’t; increasingly, our culture has much the same view of sexual desire, seeing it as a force too great to resist—and indeed, one which shouldn’t be resisted. Even among Christians, who should really know better, this sort of thinking is used to justify an appalling number of adulteries and divorces; on a larger scale, it’s also the assumption which underlies the debate over homosexuality. Clearly, on our society’s view, asking people not to act on their sexual desires is completely unreasonable—you might as well ask them to jump out a window and not fall.

Biblically, though, that’s neither more nor less than slavery “to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.” Granted, certainly, it’s a slavery which is (at least on some levels) comfortable and pleasant for us, and which is difficult and painful to escape; there’s no question that to tell people, whatever their particular desires may be, that God calls them to resist sexual temptation is to ask them to commit to a difficult and painful struggle, and one in which they may not know true victory in this life. This isn’t something we can do in our own strength; it’s beyond human ability.

That’s why Paul immediately moves from his warning to this wonderful passage about Jesus. We can’t do what God wants us to do: our sin, the debt we can never repay, gives the “elemental spirits of the universe” power over us, and we can’t get free of that power. But what we could never do, Christ did for us, and in us: he took that debt, he blotted it out, and then he nailed it to the cross. In his crucifixion he took those spirits and he disarmed them, stripping them of all their power and authority; in his resurrection he made a public spectacle of them, displaying their powerlessness for the world to see in the light of his great triumph. Nothing in this world has any power over you any longer, Paul says, because you are in Christ and Christ has defeated every other power—he alone is victorious.

Afterpastoring

The Aftermath of Afterpastoring

Afterpastors, or clergy who minister in the aftermath of betrayal of pastoral trust, are challenged with a complex and stressful set of circumstances as they assume the leadership of the troubled congregations their predecessors have left behind. The relationships and interactions in their ministries are frequently characterized by distrust and suspicion. Afterpastors often feel misheard or unheard by lay leaders and congregants, and they often report feeling manipulated, coerced, and sabotaged by lay leaders or seeing their decisions co-opted or corrupted by poor process or underhanded leadership. And many say they are often criticized without cause or unwarrantedly berated for incompetence.

Nearly all afterpastors describe a general reactivity to their presence or position that encumbers their work and relationships. And some describe reactivity so acute that it makes them lightning rods for every upset, conflict, and complaint—large or small—in the congregation.

Let me tell you, barring someone coming in who knows how to address such situations (which is why trained, gifted interim pastors are so important), those effects can linger for a long, long time.

Sarah Palin: hit magnet

The biggest argument people offer against Sarah Palin as a potential running mate for John McCain is essentially that she's too obscure. Part of that is the "Alaska's a 3-electoral-vote state that's going to vote Republican anyway" thing (which I happen to think the Biden pick has neutralized, since Joe Biden also represents a small state that was already safely in the column), but it seems to me that the driving concern there is really that most Americans don't remember Alaska's up there most of the time and don't really take anything that happens up there seriously, and therefore Gov. Palin might as well be from Guam for all anyone in the lower 48 cares—she's just too obscure to be a credible pick.

Now, speaking as a Seattle Seahawks fan still smarting over Jimmy Johnson's comment back in 2005 (our Super Bowl season) that nobody cares about the 'Hawks because "they're way up there in South Alaska," I probably take that sort of twaddle rather more personally, and find it rather more irritating, than is truly warranted. My personal reactions aside, though, I think the folks who call Gov. Palin too obscure to be Sen. McCain's pick are seriously misunderestimating the power of the Internet, especially as an amplifier for good old word-of-mouth advertising. As evidence, I can offer my own experience with this blog. Probably nothing I've done in the last two years has done more to attract traffic than when I started talking about Gov. Palin; every time I put up a post about her, I get a spike in hits. What's more, of the folks who find this blog through searches, over 31% are currently landing here from the search term "Sarah Palin," and another 7% or so are landing from some variant of that. (For all of you looking for information on Sarah Palin's church, I'm sorry, I don't know anything about that.)

I would have expected this sort of result had I been posting on someone like Mitt Romney, who's already understood to be nationally well-known (and who knows, maybe I'll get a spike from mentioning him, too); to see it connected to Gov. Palin tells me that in fact she's already a lot better known around the country than those who are skeptical about her think, and that she's generating a lot of interest and excitement. There's simply nobody else out there on the GOP side (including, alas, our presidential nominee) who has people that fired up, or who has the potential to fire up that many more people. The other VP candidates have their supporters, but the people who will vote for McCain/Romney or McCain/Pawlenty will vote for McCain regardless, and probably about as happily; they don't really add anything to the equation (and Gov. Romney turned off enough people during the primaries that I continue to believe that he would be a net drag on the ticket). Based on what I'm seeing, the same cannot be said of a McCain/Palin ticket, which would generate excitement, support, commitment, and ultimately votes that no other possible combination would.

(Update: we're not just holding serve here, we're seeing this go to a new level; judging by the spike in hits I've gotten today, interest in Gov. Palin continues to multiply. Sen. McCain, the excitement is out there: I hope you have the vision and the cool hand to grab hold of it, even if the CW is that naming her would be a gamble. But then, you have the gambler's nerve.)

(Further update: as the log keeps turning over—I don't pay for StatCounter, so I just get the free 500-entry log—Gov. Palin keeps gaining on the rest of the list; as of now, right around 70% of all the search hits on this blog over that period were looking for Sarah Palin. That's how strongly things are running right now. The wave is there for Sen. McCain to catch if he will.)

One in Christ

Paul gets bashed sometimes by modern Western types for not denouncing slavery and trying to launch an abolitionist crusade; but if he’d tried, he would only have made things worse. He would have suddenly been taken far more seriously by the Romans as a troublemaker (and most likely executed as a result), Christians throughout the empire would have abruptly been treated with far greater suspicion and hostility, people who already didn’t like Christians would probably have been roused to defend slavery . . . and all in all, the gradual drift of Roman society away from slavery would probably have been reversed somewhat, not speeded up. He was simply too outnumbered and outgunned for a frontal assault to work.

In the letter to Philemon, though, we can see how Paul sought to work against slavery in and through the church. He wrote the letter as an amicus domini—a “friend of the master” interceding on behalf of a fugitive slave, in this case Onesimus—and took full advantage of the opportunity as a teachable moment. The keynote of the letter comes in verses 15-16, where he writes, “Perhaps Onesimus was separated from you for a little while.” Note that. He doesn’t say, “Perhaps Onesimus separated himself from you”; he says, “perhaps he was separated.” That’s what’s called the “divine passive,” and you’ll find it all over the Old Testament. The Jews were so careful about not taking God’s name in vain that they avoided using it whenever possible; and so if they wanted to say God did something, they would often write, “It happened.” That’s the divine passive, and that’s what we have here: Paul is gently suggesting to Philemon that it wasn’t Onesimus who did this—it was God.

To what purpose? Onesimus’ salvation, for one; more than that, a major change in his relationship with Philemon as a result. We cannot know how Philemon treated his slaves, though given his position in the church one would hope he treated them well; but it seems likely that he treated them, and thought of them, as slaves—people, yes, but definitely second-class, second-tier. Now Paul is saying, perhaps God was at work here so that Onesimus might be saved and Philemon might have him back “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” in Christ, a fellow Christian. This is the keynote to everything Paul says in this letter, to his appeal to Philemon to welcome Onesimus back rather than punishing him and all the rest of it: Philemon, this man isn’t just your slave anymore, he’s your brother in Christ; I led him to Christ just as I led you to Christ, and you can’t look at him the same way as you used to. In the world, you own him and he’s your inferior; in the church, Jesus owns both of you, and Onesimus is your equal.

This is how the church gradually ended slavery in the ancient world; slaves became members of the church alongside freemen and citizens, and they became elders, and they became pastors, and some even became bishops. About forty years after this letter was written, one Onesimus became bishop of Ephesus; we don’t know if it was the same one or not, but personally, I think it was. And the more people saw slaves as their equals, and sometimes even their betters, the less supportable slavery became, until eventually the Emperor Justinian ended it altogether.

Everywhere this dynamic has been allowed to work (rather than being undermined and suppressed by the church itself, as one must admit has happened all too often), everywhere that Christians have learned to see one another first and foremost as people whom God loves, for whom Jesus died, all the distinctions that we use to say this person is better or more important or more valuable than that one have tended to fade away. That’s why Paul could tell the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”; and we could add, there is neither rich nor poor, black nor white nor Hispanic nor Asian nor American Indian, Republican nor Democrat nor independent, American nor foreigner, not because these divisions don’t exist but because they aren’t what really matters. Jesus is for everyone, and loves everyone equally—that’s what matters in the end. Everything else is just details. Everything else.

One more argument for Sarah Palin

I can't let the news of the Biden pick go by without noting that Joe Biden on the ticket with Barack Obama is the best argument yet for Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket.

Sen. Joe Biden vs. Gov. Sarah Palin

Member of Congress vs. experienced administrator
Pork-winner vs. pork fighter
Washington Establishment vs. Washington outsider
Party insider vs. maverick
Uncharismatic vs. charismatic
"Old" vs. "young"
Unexciting vs. exciting
Hothead vs. cool head

Update: that last is courtesy of Adam Brickley, who has a brilliant post up on how Gov. Palin would neutralize Sen. Biden, the D. C. attack dog, by making him look like a bratty, mean-spirited jerk (which, with Biden, is exactly what you have to try to do, since that's the way he usually beats himself). As he points out, she's done it before.

Joe Biden: Barack Obama’s new backbone

I have to wonder if Sen. Obama's decision to pick Sen. Joe Biden, party and Washington insider extraordinaire, as his running mate wasn't solidified this past week when Dick Morris branded him “the new Jimmy Carter.” Certainly, in my opinion and in the minds of many, Morris was right when he wrote,

Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia’s invasion of Georgia. . . .

Harsh? I don’t think so. As Morris continues,

Consider first the domestic and political. Bill and Hillary Clinton have no leverage over Obama. Hillary can’t win the nomination. She doesn’t control any committees. If she or her supporters tried to disrupt the convention or demonstrate outside, she would pay a huge price among the party faithful. . . . But, without having any leverage or a decent hand to play, the Clintons bluffed Obama into amazing concessions. . . .

If Obama can’t stand up to the Clintons, after they have been defeated, how can he measure up to a resurgent Putin who has just achieved a military victory? When the Georgia invasion first began, Obama appealed for “restraint” on both sides.

He treated the aggressive lion and the victimized lamb even-handedly. His performance was reminiscent of the worst of appeasement at Munich, where another dictator got away with seizing another breakaway province of another small neighboring country, leading to World War II.

After two days, Obama corrected himself, spoke of Russian aggression and condemned it. But his initial willingness to see things from the other point of view and to buy the line that Georgia provoked the invasion by occupying a part of its own country betrayed a world view characterized by undue deference to aggressors.

As indeed he deferred to the Clintons’ aggression. This, I suspect, is where Sen. Biden comes in. Whatever his flaws, he’s definitely a strong character; I think, if Sen. Obama wins in November, that Sen. Biden will be a powerful voice in his ear over the next four years, and a man who will wield considerable influence in our government. Since I happen to believe that Sen. Biden is much more prepared and qualified to be president than Sen. Obama is, I don’t think that’s at all bad. And while I do believe, as I said in the previous post, that selecting Sen. Biden will tie Sen. Obama even more closely to the leadership of the Democratic Congress, at least Sen. Biden represents the realist stream in foreign policy among that leadership. Were I an Obama Democrat, I probably wouldn’t like that very much; as one who generally votes Republican, however, I find that reassuring.

Which of course raises the big question which will be answered over the next two months: has naming Sen. Biden to the ticket accomplished anything politically for Sen. Obama besides reassuring people who aren’t going to vote for him anyway? Stay tuned—we'll find out.

Above his pay grade?

When Rick Warren asked Barack Obama, “At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?”, here was the Senator’s response:

Yes, he really claimed that having an opinion on that is above his pay grade. But that doesn’t mean he thinks all opinions about abortion are above his pay grade. Listen to the audio from the beginning of this clip, taken from comments he made in the Illinois State Senate as he led the fight against the state’s version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act:

In other words, it’s above his pay grade to say that an unborn baby is in fact a baby, but it’s well within his pay grade to say that efforts to protect babies who are born alive after an attempted abortion constitute an undue burden on the women who birthed them. Sounds like what’s really above Sen. Obama’s pay grade is challenging Democratic Party orthodoxy—not a good sign for someone claiming to offer a “new politics” and a post-partisan way of doing business.

But then, this is becoming the pattern. As Michael Reagan wrote,

During the forum, his struggle to please everybody by straddling the issues was plain for all to see. He showed he was willing to say and do what he believed everybody wanted to hear. When you try to find any real depth in his beliefs you quickly discover he is utterly shallow and soulless, a sloganeer instead of a missionary.

He’s just a politician on the make, trying to be all things to all people—an empty suit proclaiming empty promises.

Being without real depth, his platform merely floats on a surface of promises categorized as “Hope” and “Change,” neither of which is clearly defined.

He assures us that he wants to change Washington and sweep away all that this city represents. Yet one has only to look at next week’s Democratic National Convention to understand that it’s not change, but lots more of the same.

For that matter, now that we know Sen. Obama’s VP pick, one need look no farther than Joe Biden. I understand the pick, as a matter of political calculation; it’s the same calculation George W. Bush made when he picked Dick Cheney so that voters could feel sure there was a grownup in the White House. Sen. Obama is hoping Sen. Biden can be his Dick Cheney, a man who has the gravitas and foreign policy experience and solid judgment that he himself lacks. At the same time, though, Sen. Biden is as much a member of the Washington establishment as it’s possible to be; more than all but a handful of people, he is the quintessence of the Democratic Congress. I’ve argued before that an Obama administration will really be a Pelosi administration, as the Democratic congressional powers will run the show and Sen. Obama will have to fall into line to get anything done; bringing one of them right into the inner circle of the administration will only strengthen that.

Sen. Obama got where he is on a wave of excitement, partly because of his racial heritage, but also in large part because of the power of his rhetoric in promising us a new politics and a new way forward, a way out of the polarized partisan warfare of the last decade or three. Right now, it looks like the power to follow through on his promise is above his pay grade.

Skeptical conversations, part IX: The church and its mission

Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-VIII here. Also, I've updated the credo Wordle post.

R: The church, then, is the people of God; and specifically, we are the people God has brought out of slavery to sin. Just as he led the people of Israel on the Exodus, out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land, so he is leading us on a new Exodus toward his eschatological kingdom.

A: I’m not familiar with the word “eschatological.”

R: I’m not surprised. Eschatology is the part of theology that deals with the end times, the Second Coming of Christ and all that; the eschatological kingdom is the kingdom of God as it will be once the world as we know it has ended and been remade new.

A: So that would be Heaven, then?

R: Close enough for now. The point is that the church exists in motion, on the road; and as we journey toward eternity with God, we are to be caring for one another, helping each other grow in spiritual maturity and meeting each other’s needs. We are not left to grow as Christians alone, but we help each other along.

The Bible also describes the church as a body, with Christ as its head. This captures many truths about the church, including that every one of us in the church has gifts to offer and that none of us can go it alone; but it also, I think, makes the point that we are the physical representatives of God in the world. We are the ones Christ left here to be his feet, to go to those who need him, and to be his hands to reach out in love. When Christ was on earth he made a career out of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable; one major element of both was his proclamation of himself as God’s good news for the world, including the news that those whom the religious leaders rejected were welcome to come to God. Another was his ministry of healing and deliverance, setting people free from sickness and demons, raising the dead and forgiving sin. When Christ ascended into heaven, he left that work behind for us, his body, to carry out: the work of outreach, of proclaiming the good news and of working to bring good news into the lives of the poor, the downtrodden and the powerless.

A: It sounds like you’re saying that the church has a social mission to fulfill.

R: Yes. I don’t want to prescribe any one political program—I have my ideas and others have theirs—but social justice, however we might seek to achieve it, is clearly a concern of the biblical writers; you can see that in Jesus’ ministry and also very distinctly in several of the OT prophets, as well as in many other places in the Bible.

A: You’re shattering my image of the church as a collection of Bible-thumping right-wing reactionaries. I’m not sure I like that.

R: Good. The simple fact is, the church has just as many left-wing reactionaries anyway, it’s just a matter of who gets the press and why. Anyway, another major image of the church is as the temple of the Holy Spirit, because God’s Spirit no longer makes his home on earth in a building, but rather in the hearts of his people. Besides completing the picture of the church in trinitarian terms, this points up the third major work of the church on earth (another echo of the Trinity there), which is worship. That is, after all, what temples are for. These three works interrelate, for while we worship God for his sake, not for ours, worship is still necessary to our spiritual growth; and as we grow more like Christ, we are moved more and more to do his work in the world. As we share his good news with others and bring them into the covenant community, they see what God has done for them and are moved to join in worship—and so the cycle continues.

A: All this is very good, I’m sure, but couldn’t a false church make the same claims? How would you distinguish a real church from a church that’s going to end up drinking the Kool-Aid?

R: I think Jim Jones is a bit of an extreme example, to be sure. But the question of telling the true church apart from false churches is a live one, and there are three points which have been offered as the marks of the true church. One, the true church preaches the pure gospel, with nothing added on or taken away. Two, “the pure administration of the sacraments as Christ instituted them”—baptism and the Lord’s Supper (also called communion or the eucharist) are administered faithfully and properly with no distortion of their meaning, nothing added or removed. Three, proper church discipline. The true church doesn’t wink at sin in the lives of its members, and when necessary it disciplines them by one means or another. This is especially true when it comes to leaders who sin. I think this is probably the most obvious area in which false churches show themselves false, since in many cases those who lead such movements take flagrant advantage of their position.

A: But what about sexual abuse by clergy? A lot of churches wink at that.

R: I never said the church is perfect. You’re right, that’s a problem, and it’s one that individual churches don’t always address. Denial is a pretty typical human response to bad situations, after all. But the church as a whole does take clergy sexual misconduct seriously, even if we still handle it imperfectly.

I think, too, that there’s a distinction to be brought in here, which is that the word “church” is used to mean different things—related, to be sure, but not identical. Again, it’s a threefold distinction. You might use the word “church” to mean the church mystical, which is all of the church as it has ever existed or will ever exist throughout time and space, going all the way back to the beginning of humanity’s history and stretching forward all the way into the future. Should we carry on long enough to plant colonies in other star systems, the church of Christ will go with them, and they too are part of the church with us in the mystical sense. Or by “church” you might mean the universal church, the church everywhere in the world today, from Russian Orthodox in Moscow to Southern Baptists in Texas to Pentecostals in Brazil to Presbyterians in Korea. Or, most commonly, “church” might mean the local church—or perhaps one should say the localized church; you might mean a particular congregation in a particular place, but you might also mean, more broadly, a particular denomination, such as mine, the Reformed Church in America. Whether you talk about one small church or the entire church spread throughout space and time, though, the same truths apply, and the same marks; and I suppose that individual congregations can cease to be true churches, or perhaps better to say that they can cease to be true parts of the true church.

Going back to the marks of the true church, however, I would add a fourth, that the true church is characterized by love. After all, God is love, and he created us and saves us in order to bring us into relationship with himself and to make us more like him; just as he is a community of love between Father, Son and Spirit, so he creates us as a community of love to reflect his character. 1 John makes it very clear that anyone who knows God will reflect that in love for him and for others, and the same is true for the church as a whole.

A: That makes a lot of sense. I had a question, though, about the second element you listed as a mark of the true church. What did you mean by “the pure administration of the sacraments”? I’m not familiar with the term.

R: That’s another phrase from the Belgic Confession, which goes on to offer a very good definition of the sacraments: “They are visible signs and seals of something internal and invisible, by means of which God works in us through the power of the Holy Spirit.” There are two that Christ instituted (though the Catholic church counts some others as well), baptism and the Lord’s Supper; and they are ceremonies of the new covenant which correspond to and supersede circumcision and the Passover, which are covenant ceremonies established by earlier covenants.

A: What I know about baptism is that some churches baptize infants while others only baptize adults. Where do you stand on that?

R: My tradition practices infant baptism, and I agree with that. Baptism is the initiatory rite of the covenant, and the covenant is not a covenant God makes with mere individuals but a covenant he has made with his people; so baptism is the sign that one has joined the covenant community. Infants were always understood by the biblical writers to be part of that community, to be under the covenant, as you can see from the fact that Hebrew children were circumcised at birth, not at their coming of age or any other time. This is because baptism is about God’s promise to his people, not about what the individual says or thinks or does. It is not a guarantee that the child who is baptized will be saved, because baptism of itself does not save; that child is free to keep the covenant or to reject it, as is anyone. Baptism is, however, a guarantee of God’s faithfulness.

A: What about someone who is baptized as an infant, rejects God and Christianity, and then later converts? Would that person be baptized again?

R: No, no one in that situation would need to be baptized again; their conversion is rather a validation of the faithfulness of God promised when they were baptized. It is the fruit of that baptism, in a sense, their return to the covenant community in which they were born.

The other sacrament is communion, the Lord’s Supper, and you might call it a covenant celebration ceremony, if you can say that without tangling your tongue. The Passover, which communion supersedes and completes, celebrates the central act of God’s relationship with Israel—his deliverance of them from slavery in Egypt, which launched the Exodus; and communion celebrates the central act of the new covenant—Christ delivering us from slavery to sin, which launched the New Exodus. Unlike bap­tism, communion is restricted to committed believers, because the first Lord’s Supper was something Jesus shared only with his close disciples; those who celebrate it properly are blessed through it, but those who partake when they are not right with God bring judgment on themselves, 1 Corinthians makes that clear.

I like the description in our liturgy of the Lord’s Supper as “a feast of remembrance, of communion, and of hope.” That captures beautifully the fact that this is a celebration in three dimensions. We look back to remember and proclaim what Jesus did for us in his death and resurrection; we look at our present, to celebrate the communion we have with him as we eat and drink—not just as individuals but as his people, and so it is communion with each other as well; and we look forward, as Jesus himself did when he ate that last supper with his disciples, to the time when we will sit down to eat and drink with him in his kingdom, when we will know him fully as he is.

A: I have a question about all this. I know that Catholics believe that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Jesus, though apparently they still look and taste like bread and wine. That has never made any sense to me at all. From what I can tell, it doesn’t make any sense to Protestants either, but the way you talk it doesn’t sound like you understand this to be merely a memorial dinner, either. So how do you understand this, then?

R: That Catholic doctrine, which is called transubstantiation, is rooted ultimately in Aristotle’s metaphysics; he was a great philosopher, but his scientific understanding is a couple millennia out of date. No, I don’t agree with that understanding of the Lord’s Supper, for a lot of reasons, nor do I believe it is merely a chance to sit and think. As in most cases, I think Calvin’s view makes the most sense here. Christ is not physically present on the table, because his body is in Heaven with the Father. At the same time, though, he is present in a special way in the bread and the wine, through the work of the Spirit. This, too, is a mystery, but in communion the Holy Spirit unites us with Christ in a special way as we eat the bread and drink the wine; they are not literally, concretely the body and blood of Christ, but it is not merely metaphorical to call them so, either. Jesus is spiritually present in the elements, and so they are a feast for our spirits.

A: That sounds quite strange.

R: I can see where it would. It’s hard to express, but the Lord’s Supper is more than just a memorial; as with baptism, it’s more about what God does and has done than it is about what we do.

If I may shift topics slightly at this point, there’s one last point to address in regard to the church, and that’s the question of church government. There are three basic forms: first, there is the episcopal form, in which there are bishops above the individual churches, archbishops above the bishops, and so on; the Catholic and Episcopalian churches are representative. Then there is the presbyterian form, which retains the hierarchy but replaces individual bishops and archbishops with representative bodies; that would include the Presbyterians, of course, and the Reformed denominations, including mine. Finally, there is the congregational form, in which the individual congregation is independent and self-governing; congregational denominations are called associations, conferences, or conventions—such as the Southern Baptist Convention—and the individual churches which belong to them are free to disassociate themselves at any time.

A: Given that your denomination is presbyterian in structure, I suspect you’re going to tell me why that’s the best form.

R: I am indeed, and I do believe that. First, though, I want to make the point that none of these three forms of government can really be supported from Scripture. We know that in the early church, congregations were led by elders, and there is clearly some concern that the right people be chosen; and we know that another role was established, that of the deacon, to carry out works of service—providing meals and that sort of thing. We know, too, that the position of pastor evolved as, in essence, the lead elder, to take responsibility for preaching the word of God and administering the sacraments. I can easily affirm that the church should be led by pastors, elders and deacons, and that these people must be chosen according to the call of God. Beyond that, we have no real prescription in the Bible for how the church is supposed to be organized, so it is very much a matter of opinion as to which of these three forms best fits with biblical principles.

And since opinions are like noses, I have one on the subject. My problem with congregationalism is that it atomizes the church. Just as some Christians believe that the individual conscience is paramount and reject the claim of the church on their lives, so does congregationalism exalt the individual congregation at the expense of the greater church. All commitments by any congregation to the larger church are purely voluntary, to be broken whenever it seems good. This leaves church unity a very fragile thing, and what is worse, it emasculates church discipline. Sometimes the leadership of a congregation, or even the congregation in general, need to be disciplined—for instance, every young pastor has heard horror stories about church boards that bring in, chew up and spit out one pastor after another—and in the congregational system, there is no person or body who is truly empowered to administer that discipline, because the congregation literally does not have to sit still for it. So a stronger bond and a real hierarchy are necessary in the church, I think.

The episcopal form goes too far in the other way, though, in setting up a hierarchy of individuals. This elevates a handful of individuals above the rest of the church; and not only does this make the church unhealthily dependent on a very few people—a bad Pope, for instance, can cause terrible problems for the Catholic church—it promotes a sense of inequality in the church which is very much at odds with the gospel. One of the principles which the Reformers strongly articulated is that of the priesthood of all believers—in more modern terms, that we are all ministers and all equal before God, that the only difference between those who are paid and those who aren’t is the details of the job description—and this structure denies that principle.

What I appreciate about the presbyterian form of church government is that it makes the structure of the church corporate and representative. At the level of the church, one has the pastor or pastors, the elders, and the deacons; each group has certain responsibilities, and together they lead the church. The elders and deacons are chosen from the congregation by one means or another, they serve their terms, and then they step down to be replaced by others. They are chosen to represent the congregation to the denomination, but also to represent God to the congregation, to lead them in his name.

The elders and pastors of each congregation in an area make up the classis, which is the first level of government above the church; they, collectively, are the bishop. The classis is both an administrative body, making decisions and handling necessary administrative tasks, and a judicial body, responsible for disciplining congregations when necessary. From among the members of the classis, some are selected to be part of the regional synod, which is the next level up; and some are also selected as delegates to General Synod, which meets every year, which is to our system as the Pope is to the Catholic church, more or less. And so you have the structure for making decisions, and for imposing discipline when necessary; it’s human and therefore imperfect, but the same could be said of our nation’s government. As with the U. S. Constitution, it’s as good a balance as is fair to expect, and all in all it works pretty well.

A: “Pretty well” doesn’t seem like much of an accolade.

R: I believe it was Churchill who once observed that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others; I think the same applies to the presbyterian form. Not much of an accolade? Perhaps. But it’s still a human structure after all, and still human beings running it, and so nothing you can do is going to make it perfect. Really, to form a perfect government you need to find a perfect person and give them all the authority. The further you get from that, the higher the minimal degree of imperfection in the system—and the less damage any one person’s sin can do, and the more chances there are to fix whatever problems may arise.

You see, there’s this split view of the church, in a way. You look at it from one angle and it’s a group of recovering sinners who sometimes do things beautifully and sometimes make big mistakes; and it’s terribly easy, down in the trenches of the day-to-day, to lose sight of the big picture and forget that we’re all headed somewhere. But then sometimes it’s possible to step back and look at the bigger picture, to get a sense of the church mystical, “spread out through space and time and terrible as an army with banners,” as I think Lewis has the demon Screwtape say. We need that change of perspective; if nothing else, we need it for the reminder that we are a pilgrim people, a church on the way, that we are headed for the kingdom of God.