Not a holiday for introverts

Halloween isn't, that is. For all that, I'm pretty sure I enjoyed it as a kid, if only for the candy; but when the candy lost its charm (I have a sweet tooth, but for pastries), so did the holiday, for it's a rather exhausting process. In recent years, I've discovered that it's all the more so for parents. This year was easier; living someplace where we actually get trick-or-treaters, and with our daughters going around together with their friend from the neighborhood and her mother as well as their own, I got to sit on the front porch, read Dorothy Sayers, and hand out candy.

Now, to a lot of folks, the idea that that might be preferable to going around extorting candy from neighbors probably sounds strange; those folks are, with (possibly) a few exceptions, extroverts. To extroverts, who are the loud majority of the human race, they are normal, and those of us who are introverts are "moody loners" who should be treated with some care because "some of them are serial killers." My thanks for that phrasing goes to New Reflections Counseling, Inc., of western Ohio, for their "Introvert's Lexicon," which they describe as "a humorous look at the world from an Introvert's point of view"; if you're an extrovert and there's an introvert in your life, I suggest you read it (and the material which follows it on that page), as it could be helpful to you. (If you want further information, you might also check out Jonathan Rauch's 2003 piece in The Atlantic titled "Caring for Your Introvert," as well as the sidebar materials.)

HT: cranekid

Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei

or, in English, "The church reformed and always being reformed according to the word of God." This 16th-century Latin motto captures the spirit and purpose of the Reformation, and so it has continued to be used through the centuries by those of us who consider ourselves heirs of the Reformation and students of the wisdom of the great Reformers. (You know, the sort of people who look at October 31 and think "Reformation Day," not just Halloween, and write blog posts in honor of the day.)

Unfortunately—aided by a common mistranslation, "the church reformed and always reforming"—in recent times we've seen this motto misused in support of ends which are completely contradictory to the spirit and intent of the Reformation and the Reformed tradition; this sort of thing is quite common in the Presbyterian Church (USA), the denomination in which I serve as a pastor. The tendency is to interpret "always reforming" as the ongoing work of the church, reinventing itself to fit the culture, and set that over against "reformed" as if these are two separate things. Thus, for instance, we get this comment from Adam Walker Cleaveland from a few years ago on his blog pomomusings (emphasis mine):

I think that one could fairly easily make an argument that many of our Presbyterian churches today have focused primarily (almost exclusively) on the "Reformed" aspect, and have not critically evaluated how the church may need to continue to be "always reforming" in light of our current context.

Always reforming. Always being sensitive to the radical openness and movement of the Spirit. Always being aware that we may need to be critically evaluate our theology and methodology. While at the same time, being aware of and sensitive to the things that are part of the tradition of the Presbyterian church, and those things that are important in the holy scriptures. The Bible is an important part of the heritage of the Presbyterian church and the Christian tradition, but we must be wary of creating logocentric churches, where we become strict-constructionists when it comes to our theologies and methodologies, only allowing whatever the scriptures and tradition says. That must be balanced and held in tension with the new waves of the Spirit that may be calling for new theologies and new methodologies in a new world.

In Cleaveland's case, he was coming from a self-consciously "emergent" position, an influence which is only beginning to emerge (if you will) in the PC(USA); but we see this sort of argument all the time from liberals in the denomination. "The Bible is an important part of our heritage, but the world is evolving and we need to evolve with it. Yes, Christians used to believe that homosexuality was sinful, but we know better now. God is doing a new thing, and his Spirit is calling for a new theology that's appropriate to the times. We're supposed to be always reforming—we can't afford to cling to the dead past, we need to move with the present." And so on, and so forth. In a nutshell: "Always reforming, new wind of the Spirit, therefore whatever we don't like about historic Presbyterian theology and morality, we can throw out."

The problem is twofold. First, these are folks who are very interested in reforming the church, but not so interested in the secundum verbum Dei part; I don't know what "according to cultural assumptions" would be in Latin, but that would be more to the point. This is not to say they reject the Scriptures, just that they reject the idea that the Scriptures could be telling them something they really don't want to hear; they want the church to believe what they want the church to believe, and they're happy to offer any interpretation of Scripture they can which supports that, but if they decide they can't sustain those interpretations, they don't respond by changing their position. Instead, they respond by rejecting the authority of Scripture on that point, declaring essentially, "that was then, this is now, and we know better." (Some would point out that secundum verbum Dei is a later addition, which is true; it is, however, a clarifying addition—it adds nothing new to the older motto, but rather makes explicit what was already implicit.)

(It should be noted at this point that most of this can also be said of many who consider themselves evangelicals; the primary difference is that evangelicals don't justify themselves by explicitly rejecting the authority of Scripture. Rather, the evangelical tendency is to privilege the individual interpretation of Scripture and simply insist that yes it does mean what I want it to mean. It still ends up locating primary authority in the autonomous individual rather than in the voice of God speaking by his Spirit through the Scripture, but by a different route and in less straightforward fashion.)

Second, there is the belief that the church is the agent of its own reformation, and that this is about the church reinventing itself and evolving. As McCormick theology professor Anna Case-Winters pointed out in Presbyterians Today several years ago, this is directly opposed to what this motto actually means, and what the Reformation was all about. As she says, this doesn't mean that "newer is better," nor does it leave it to us to determine what "reforming" looks like. Rather, it's about

restoring the church to its true nature, purified from the "innovations" that riddled the church through centuries of inattention to Scripture and theological laxity. . . .

God is the agent of reformation. The church is rather the object of God's reforming work. God's agency and initiative have priority here. . . . Theologian Harold Nebelsick put it well: "We are the recipients of the activity of the Holy Spirit which reforms the church in accordance with the Word of God." The church is God's church, a creature of God's Word and Spirit. As we say in our Brief Statement of Faith, "we belong to God." God's Word and Spirit guide the church's forming and reforming.

What we need to understand here is that this motto isn't about justifying anything we might want to do; it is rather about acknowledging that being the church isn't about justifying what we want to do. It isn't about getting what we want, or believing what we're comfortable believing; instead, it's about the negation of that approach. It's about recognizing that the reason we keep needing God to reform us is that we keep slipping back into building churches that are about us, giving us what we want and keeping us comfortable, and thus keep needing to be called back to the will of God as revealed in Scripture. It's also about recognizing that yes, God still speaks by his Spirit—but that he will not contradict anything he has already said, because who he is doesn't change, and thus that if we think we feel God leading us, we need to test that sense against what he's already revealed in Scripture.

This is why what Dr. Case-Winters says about the 16th century remains true for us today:

In the 16th-century context the impulse it reflected was neither liberal nor conservative, but radical, in the sense of returning to the "root." The Reformers believed the church had become corrupt, so change was needed. But it was a change in the interest of preservation and restoration of more authentic faith and life—a church reformed and always to be reformed according to the Word of God.

Being Reformed means being radical in precisely that sense, for it means not that we're always becoming something new, nor that we're always changing, but that we're always being conformed and reconformed to the unchanging standard of the Word of God, which means of the character and will of the one "whose beauty is past change," as Hopkins put it. It means not that we adapt to this world, but rather we're pulled away from adapting to this world; the goal is not to let this world squeeze us into its mold, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It means accepting that we don't set the agenda, but rather that we're called to surrender to God's agenda, and thus recognizing that we're people under authority—the authority of God, and thus of his revelation to us in his Word—and that we must bow to that authority even when we don't like what we hear, rather than trying to find ways to rationalize what we want to do instead.

It means, in short, allowing ourselves to be Reformed, not by our word and our will, but by the will of God in accordance with his Word.

As though not voting

This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.

—1 Corinthians 7:29-31 (ESV)

John Piper's election message on this text, "Let Christians Vote As Though They Were Not Voting," has been cited all over the blogosphere this last week, and rightly so; if you haven't read it, I strongly recommend you go and do so, because what he has to say is both true and important. It's also worth reading his sermon from this time twenty years ago on "Believing God on Election Day," because while the names have changed, the truth of his points in that sermon hasn't.

To this, I would only add a point that my wife has been talking about quite a bit lately (I thought she'd blogged on it, but I haven't found the post): we as Christians are called to do things for the value of the thing itself, not in the expectation of results. Thus, for instance, we are called to evangelism, not in order to improve the attendance and giving numbers at our church, but even if we don't, simply because telling people about Jesus is a good thing and one of the tasks to which he calls us as his disciples. Similarly, we are called to vote, but if the candidates for whom we vote lose—if we don't get the desired results—that doesn't mean that our votes are "wasted." God has commanded us to seek the welfare of the communities in which he has placed us, and that gives us the responsibility to vote, as wisely as we can; the results of that, however, are not in our hands, but God's. We need to do our part, not to try to do his.

On reasons for an Obama victory

I've said before that I expect Barack Obama to win next week, and that I expect his presidency to be bad for America. I'm afraid we'll see a major national-security crisis to which he'll respond ineffectively (especially since Joe Biden essentially predicted as much), a resurgence of the abortion holocaust (and especially among blacks) under one of the most pro-abortion politicians in the country, the return of stagflation with the revival of the redistributionist economic policies that produced it, a Carteresque ineffectiveness in the face of challenges, a crackdown on free speech to stifle criticism of his administration, and the domination of our government by the hard-left wing of the Democratic Party.

That said, I think Obama's going to win, and for all that I don't think he'll be a good president, I think it's important for this country that he win. For one, I do not assume that America deserves to be blessed simply because we're America; if I'm right that there are hard times ahead, I can't deny the possibility that we as a nation have them coming to us. As nations go, this is a great one and a good one, but we are far from perfect—and those Christians who object to my saying this because they believe America has a special place in God's plan should remember that "judgment begins in the house of God." For another, I believe the church in this country deserves to be judged for its political idolatry; and it seems to me that this judgment must begin with its conservative wing, who must relearn not to put our trust in princes.

And perhaps most importantly, I believe that John McWhorter is right: the time is such that an Obama win may well be necessary for its effects on "race" relations in this country. For all my pessimism about an Obama presidency, part of that is that I see tough times ahead regardless, and I think it's quite likely true that the cost of an Obama defeat would be greater than the benefit. As McWhorter argues,

For 40 years, black America has been misled by a claim that we can only be our best with the total eclipse of racist bias. Few put it in so many words, but the obsession with things like tabulating ever-finer shades of racism and calling for a "national conversation" on race in which whites would listen to blacks talk about racism are based on an assumption: that the descendants of African slaves in the United States are the only group of humans in history whose problems will vanish with a "level playing field," something no other group has ever supposed could be a reality.

The general conversation is drifting slowly away from this Utopianist canard, but nothing could help hustle it into obsolescence more than an Obama presidency, especially for the generation who grew up watching a black man and his family in the White House and had little memory of a time when it would have been considered an impossibility. At the same time, nothing could breathe new life into this gestural pessimism like an Obama loss. It would be the perfect enabler for a good ten years of aggrieved mulling over "the persistence of racism," which, for all of its cathartic seduction, would make no one less poor, more gainfully employed, or better educated. . . .

The grievous result of this fetishization of racism would be that it would put a kibosh on the upsurge in black voters' political engagement amidst the Obamenon. Newspaper articles would quote blacks disillusioned from getting excited about any future black candidate—e.g. "I thought maybe America was finally getting past racism but it turned out not to be true." 2009 would be a year of countless panel discussions, quickie books, and celebrated rap couplets wallowing in the notion that the white man wouldn't let Obama into the Oval Office where he belonged, urgently reminding us that to be black is still to be a victim.

HT: Justin Taylor

For all my pessimism, I think it's important to remember this, and not to deprecate the very real symbolic value of an Obama victory—or the very real practical benefits of that symbolic value; I also think it's important to recognize that justice demands something of this sort in partial balance for the national sin of slavery. I could wish it were someone else, a Harold Ford or a Michael Steele, but Barack Obama is clearly the man God has chosen for this moment, for his own purposes; and it remains true that "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

God was definitely this guy's co-pilot

I've watched this thing twice and I still can't believe he managed a safe landing . . .

Even Democrats can't swallow anti-Palin bias

At least, the Democrats who know her best—those who've worked with her in Alaska—can't; they may be voting for Barack Obama, but they're still objecting to the latest hatchet job.

HT: Adam Brickley

Reflection on the mystery of prayer

Life is filled with mystery, and, much to our chagrin, claiming to know God does not shed any light upon certain dark recesses of our world. In fact, God often appears to cast a very long, very dark shadow, a shadow that can conceal more than we like to admit. Perhaps one of wise King Solomon's more astute observations is found in the introduction to his own prayer recorded in 2 Chron. 6:1: "The LORD has said that he would dwell in a dark cloud." God shows himself in darkness. He invites us to meet in a place where he cannot be seen. Divine self-revelation may obscure as much as, if not more than, it illuminates.

Nothing brings a feeble human being face to face with spiritual conundrums as quickly as prayer, especially petitionary prayer. For many, balancing the prospect of a divine response to our cries for help against the disappointment of heavenly silence in the face of our suffering tips the religious scales in favor of skepticism, atheism, and renunciation. Knocking on heaven's door, asking for an audience with the cosmic king, and then making our requests clearly known is a mysterious enough activity for those of us consigned to inhabit the physical limitations of flesh and blood. But then tracing answers through the fabric of life's chaos, drawing even tentative lines of heavenly connection between the pleas of human uttering and the course of subsequent history—that is a prophetic role for which few of us seem to be qualified. Admittedly, there are always those eager to claim the prophetic mantle, but my experience with life suggests that the longer you live and the more you pray, the less prone you are to give quck, self-assured answers. This is not to deny the possibility of answers; it is merely to acknowledge that nothing in this life, including the realm of the spirit, is automatic, and precious little is ever self-evident. Putting a coin in slot A does not immediately guarantee a Snickers Bar from chute B, especially when the pocket accumulating my spare change belongs to God. The Creator also has his own purposes, which may include sending me something totally unexpected through chute G once I have surrendered the requisite number of quarters.

Prayer comprises the interface between human frailty and divine power. Yet, connection and comprehension are two very different things. Trying to peer from our world into that other domain is a bit like opening your eyes underwater. It is possible to see, somewhat, but not easily, not far, and not without considerable distortion. Light is refracted, distances are difficult to judge, size is deceptive, sticks appear to bend at the surface, brilliant underwater colors vanish when raised to the surface. We may be able to explore both worlds, but it is painfully apparent that we are better suited for the one than the other. This should not stop us from trying to understand how the two realms relate; it ought, however, to curb our human penchant for dogmatism, replacing heavy-handed solutions with a healthy dose of humility and a very gentle touch.

—David Crump, Knocking on Heaven's Door, 14-15

Side comment or two

The other day, I noted that Jared Wilson has begun posting his own 95 theses on the state of the American church; having covered discipleship and community in his first two postings, today he posted 19 more theses on the church—what the American church is vs. what the church ought to be. Unsurprisingly, in his distillation of the ongoing themes of his blog, he's making a lot of important and provocative points, points which I think the church badly needs to hear and consider. I'm not going to try to offer any profound overarching comment on them, at least at this time; but there are a couple side comments which occurred to me.

First, an observation on Jared's Thesis 46: The American Church loves the spirit of the age and idolizes relevancy. This is I think a particularly important point. I've written about the idolatry of relevance before, at some length, with respect to worship; I think this is a classic case of unexamined assumptions corrupting and killing the best of intentions. Certainly, the church should never be irrelevant—but making relevance the goal smuggled in some ideas which completely undermined the proclamation of the gospel, and turned our worship to idolatry.

Second, and much more minor, off his Theses 40-41: Jesus said the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church. Much of what passes for church in America will be prevailed against by hell. One of the things which interests me about the way the church deals with that statement by Jesus is that it's so often read defensively, as if Jesus is saying, "Hell's going to attack the church, but stand strong, it won't defeat you." This, it seems to me, betrays a very limited and modest understanding of the role and responsibility and power of the church, and a very limited vision of who we're called to be and what we're called to do; that in turn, I believe, makes us think that it's well enough to content ourselves with self-help feel-good stuff.

The question people never seem to ask is, when was the last time you saw gates chasing someone down the street? Last time I checked, gates don't move. Jesus' image there in Matthew is offensive, it's about taking the battle to the enemy. To be sure, that too can be overdone and misused, but it's still an important truth: we are not here merely to endure until we get to go to heaven, and thus it isn't anywhere near enough to give the church teaching and programs which will make our endurance more enjoyable, comfortable and fulfilling. Rather, we have been given a mission to go into the strongholds of the enemy and rescue his prisoners, in the confidence that the gates of Hell will not prevail against us—which is not a promise that every battle will always go just as we wish, but is the assurance that we will win the war, because Jesus has already won it. But of course, if we're going to take that mission seriously, then we need preaching, teaching, and worship to match.

Liberal feminist says: “Sarah Palin's a Brainiac”

One of the frustrations of this campaign season has been watching so many people—even conservatives, and even smart conservatives (like Peggy Noonan, or Bird over at The Thinklings)—buy the dismissive leftist line, backed by predatory editing to distort her MSM interviews, that Sarah Palin is intellectually and otherwise unqualified to be VP. On that, listen to Elaine Lafferty, the former editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine:

It's difficult not to froth when one reads, as I did again and again this week, doubts about Sarah Palin's “intelligence,” coming especially from women such as PBS's Bonnie Erbe, who, as near as I recall, has not herself heretofore been burdened with the Susan Sontag of Journalism moniker. As Fred Barnes—God help me, I'm agreeing with Fred Barnes—suggests in the Weekly Standard, these high toned and authoritative dismissals come from people who have never met or spoken with Sarah Palin. Those who know her, love her or hate her, offer no such criticism. They know what I know, and I learned it from spending just a little time traveling on the cramped campaign plane this week: Sarah Palin is very smart. . . .

Now by “smart,” I don't refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect don't really have serious brains in their skulls. I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a “quick study”; I'd heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. What is often called her “confidence” is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly who she is.

For all those old enough to remember Senator Sam Ervin, the brilliant strict constitutional constructionist and chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee whose patois included “I'm just a country lawyer” . . . Yup, Palin is that smart.

It's not a long piece, and it's well worth your time to read the whole thing.

HT: Beldar

Tolkien, story, and the incarnation of virtue

Doug Hagler is, as he says, in the process of spinning down his blog Prog(ressive)nostications, which is too bad; but he's still posting some good stuff. In particular, I appreciate his recent post of a paper on "Tolkien and Virtue Ethics," which is well worth reading if you're interested in either Tolkien or ethics, or the meaning of virtue, or in the power of story to communicate truth, or any combination thereof. It's an academic paper, and thus a bit more formal, but don't let that deter you—Doug has some important things to say. Here's his beginning:

Aquinas, Keenan and others offer modified versions of Aristotle’s system of virtues, but they do so outside of the context of a narrative. Their virtue systems are presented and applied to various problems and subsequently analyzed, but life is not breathed into them. In order to do that, one requires a story. (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 121)

One might argue that for Christians, that story is salvation history as expressed in scripture, but this is not quite the narrative that a virtue ethic requires. A virtue ethic requires a story of ennoblement, wherein the virtues espoused are demonstrated to function. Scripture, on the other hand, is a wildly various collection of ancient genres of writing, usually seen as whole but not composed as a whole. Aristotle’s culture, in contrast, was steeped in these heroic and epic stories (Ibid, 122-125) constituting a rich storytelling tradition, the surviving fragments of which we still treasure thousands of years later.

It is my contention that, despite the great interruption in the development of virtue ethics, which MacIntyre identifies as the entire experiment of modernity, this storytelling tradition continues to this day. The difference is that we do not identify it as such, and it is not widely used as a source for virtue ethics. But we are still steeped in our own stories of ennoblement, and these can be a source for our ethical reflection in the context of virtue ethics.

The example I will focus on is the corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien, with specific focus on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, with reference to this other works, books, essays and letters. Tolkien is a potentially superb example of modern stories as living virtue ethics because he is in an interesting position. On the one hand, he is steeped in the heroic storytelling of northern Europe—the languages, traditions, cultures and so on, from Beowulf to the Elder Edda to the Kalevala. He also set out, particularly in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, to create stories which reflected his own Catholicism (Carpenter, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 172), including the tradition of Catholic moral theology in the tradition of Aquinas. Finally, his stories are avidly devoured by millions of fans worldwide, and have been adapted many times into various media since their publication. (Endnote 1) It seems that there is a clear potential here for one to find living, breathing virtues expressly located in modern storytelling.

Indeed. Check it out.

Nailed to the Wittenblog door

Jared Wilson has undertaken an interesting project/challenge on his blog The Gospel-Driven Church: he's posting his own 95 theses for the American church, 19 at a time for five days. The first 19 went up this morning, headed "On the Discipleship of the Individual Christian," with the rest to come over the course of this week. In doing this, Jared acknowledges a possible charge of arrogance, but I don't think that really follows; the fact that he's deliberately echoing Martin Luther doesn't mean he's comparing himself to Luther, after all, or that he expects his theses to have the same effect as Luther's did. As far as I can tell, he's simply doing what Luther intended to do when he took hammer and nail to the door of the Wittenburg cathedral: systematizing his challenge to the status quo so as to provoke discussion. Judging by the first 19, I'd say he has a good chance of accomplishing that. If you haven't already spent some time considering his post, I'd suggest you do so, and keep checking back for the other 76 theses; and then I'd suggest we all spend some serious time in prayer for the church in this country, and for ourselves.

Grace and consequence

Theologically speaking, legalism and lawlessness are equal and opposite errors, equal and opposite deviations from the gospel of grace. Lawlessness says that our actions don't matter (although almost no one applies that consistently); legalism says they're all that matters. Grace says, "Yes, they matter, but you're using the wrong ruler."

The key is that our actions matter because we matter. Indeed, we matter enough to God that he was willing to pay an infinite price for our salvation; and so our actions matter greatly to him, both for their effect on others (who matter to him as much as we do) and for their effect on us. Our actions have eternal consequence because we are beings of eternal consequence; it could not be otherwise.

Cross-shaped ministry

There's an excellent piece up on the Alban Institute website, written by a Lutheran pastor named John Berntsen, called “The Impossible Task of Ministry,” which I commend to your reading—and not only if you're a pastor; like Dr. Andrew Purves' book The Crucifixion of Ministry: Surrendering Our Ambitions to the Service of Christ, which I wrote about here and here, I think the Rev. Berntsen's piece is important reading for anyone who's in leadership in the church in any way at all. Indeed, one way in which his article could serve the church is as a more accessible introduction to the theme Dr. Purves takes up in his short but dense book; since the article is adapted from a book of his own titled Cross-Shaped Leadership: On the Rough and Tumble of Parish Practice, I'll be interested to read the book and see how he develops it, and how his insights complement and perhaps differ from Dr. Purves' work. For now, here's an excerpt to encourage you to read the article:

At a deeper level, the cross is the story of the world’s resistance to grace. The cross is the showdown—yes, the confrontation—between a steadfastly loving God who wills and calls a world into covenant partnership and a world that wants to live in its own strength, playing God for itself. Jesus comes preaching a kingdom of righteousness, justice, and unconditional love, and the world says, “No thanks. We think our system of merit and scorekeeping and judgment is safer. We prefer the reign of our marketplace to your upside-down kingdom that reckons by grace. So count us out.”

But public leadership in the church is subject to a continuous cycle of death and resurrection. The very initiatives, actions, and plans of leaders undergo the cross. Under the cross, the moment-by-moment doings of ministry are subject to countless deaths and resurrections, few of which are heroic or glorious. So how does this transformation take place amid the rough and tumble of parish practice—through what I call cross-shaped leadership? . . .

Ministry is hard. Ministry is, in fact, impossible. (Just try to referee a fair fight about the virtues of “contemporary” versus “traditional” worship if you need any reminders about that.) It’s a perfect storm in which leaders are pressured either to pick winners and losers or to feed the multitudes by offering a cafeteria of consumer choices. Here’s the good news, though. Once we’ve accepted the truth that ministry is hard, even impossible—once we’ve stopped living in denial of this reality, or perhaps whining about it—it becomes the truth that sets us free. We cease being gloomy servants, weighed down by our resentful conviction that we are all alone in our work, and instead become joyful coworkers of a strong, wise, and consoling Lord.

The crucial challenge of living by grace

Living by grace is a hard balance to keep, because it costs us nothing yet asks everything of us; it flips our transaction-based thinking on its head. We’re used to obeying orders and earning our way. They train us to do that in school—someone tells you to do something, you do it, and then you get graded. You get a job, they tell you to do something, you do it, and then someone else gives you money and tells you you’ve earned it. It’s a transaction—we do, and we get back. Most religions operate the same way—you do, and you get back. But then God comes along and says, “No, no, no—I do, and you give back—not because you have to in order to get, because I’ve already given you everything, but out of love and gratitude, because it pleases me and you want to please me.” Living by grace means living to please God, not in order to earn his favor, but in grateful response to his unearned favor.

The trick in that is, we’re used to working to a line, measuring ourselves against a standard, that says “Good enough.” You work x number of hours, you do y number of things, you sell z amount of product, and you’ve done good enough, and you get to keep your job; add ten or fifteen or twenty percent to that, and you get a raise, and maybe you get a promotion. Perform to a certain measurable level, get the results you want, and then you can stop and say, “That’s good enough,” and go do something else with the rest of your life. The trick about living by grace is that it means we can’t do that with God, because it means we’re motivated not by the need to reach a certain standard, but by gratitude—gratitude for an infinite gift; and if the gift is infinite, then where does gratitude stop? Where do we get to the point that we can say, “That’s enough—that’s adequate thanks for what Jesus did for me”?

The fact of the matter is, we don’t. However much we do, the movement of gratitude for the gift of Jesus Christ continues to draw us on to do things and work at things and make efforts for which we will earn nothing in return, and which will serve not to show everyone how wonderful we are, but rather how wonderful God is; and that’s not how we’re accustomed to living, and it doesn’t fit with our ideas about what we deserve. As such, it isn’t something we can do just by working harder, because that will tend to turn our gratitude into resentment; it’s been well observed—by the science-fantasy writer Anne McCaffrey, of all people—that “gratitude is an ill-fitting tunic that can chafe and smell if worn too long.” The only antidote to that is to keep changing that cloak on a regular basis, to keep renewing our gratitude, to keep reawakening our sense of the heights of God’s glory and goodness and holiness, and the depths of our own sin, and the incredible, world-shattering thing Jesus did to lift us out of those depths and up to his heights, and the horrifying price he paid to do so; that’s why the life of grace begins with worship, why we need to worship together to stay spiritually healthy, because this is part of what our worship is supposed to be about. Worship keeps it ever fresh in our mind just how much we need God’s grace, and how much reason we have to be grateful. Without it, we lose the balance of grace and fall off to one side or the other, into legalism or lawlessness.

The world, of course, pulls us toward lawlessness; it may be happy enough to deal with “spirituality,” but only with all sense of obligation removed—it wants nothing to do with “religion.” (Which reminds me, I need to get back to my chapter-by-chapter review of Jesus Brand Spirituality, since I’ve only posted the first chapter.) Some churches go that way, too, drawn by the culture, but the more common temptation for the church is to react the other way, into legalism. To be sure, the legalism of our own day and age tends to look rather different on the surface than the legalism of days gone by, but it’s the same underneath; as Jared Wilson puts it, “the smiling face that self-help ‘Christianity’ puts on evangelicalism claims to be setting followers free from rules and judgmental religion. But really, by making discipleship about helpful hints and positive power for successful living, it’s really just making a works religion in our new image. In an odd twist, the Oprah-ization of the faith is really just optimistic legalism. Because what is Pharisaical legalism, really, but self-help with bad p.r.?” And as he continues, there are a lot of people who love this, because “they want to be told religion is not about rules and regulations while at the same time being told each week which four steps (with helpful alliteration) they need to do in order to achieve maximum what-have-you. They want to be reassured that works don’t merit salvation while at the same time convinced salvation is about trying really hard to do things that unlock the power or secret of God’s such-and-such.”

This sort of thing is surprisingly appealing. Partly, it’s because it makes things simpler; if you have a list of things to do, then all you have to do is those things, and you’re home free. You can measure yourself against the list, and you know if you’re good enough; you can look at where you stand and where the line is, where the fence is, and know which side of it you’re on. And you know just how far you can push it without going over. Living by grace, you can’t do that; infinite gratitude calls for more than just a limited response. And partly, if it’s just a matter of doing this list of things, and you do do them all, then you can take the credit for that; you can point to them and to yourself and say, “Look at me, I did that. Am I not wonderful?” There’s plenty of room in legalism for ego-stroking; that might be why it’s such an appealing thing to preach, too, because you get to hold yourself up as the model for everyone else to follow. If you’re the sort of person who has it all together—or is good at looking like you have it all together—that can be a great way to attract followers, and attention, and praise, and build a big successful ministry. Like Groucho Marx said of sincerity, if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

And so, throughout its history, the church has been tempted into one form or another of legalism; this spiritual weed just keeps popping up. Whether it’s the belief that you have to follow this set of rules in order to appease the spiritual powers that can block your ascent to God, as Paul denounced to the Colossians, or the belief that you have to follow that set of rules (only they call them “principles” these days) in order to experience the fully fulfilled best-potential life God wants for you—leaving modern-day Pauls to stand and say, “No, in Christ you have been given all fullness”—it’s all the same thing at the core: salvation by doing stuff, rather than by Christ alone. That’s the enemy’s game. He’s always trying to convince us that salvation is not in Christ alone, that he’s not enough, that what he did is not enough, that we need to add something of our own, because he knows that to add anything to Christ is to lose Christ.

And that, Paul says, is trading in truth for falsehood, reality for shadow, and freedom for slavery. Such rules are all about things that only matter in this world, that have no real eternal value; it’s only in following Christ that we can find things of true and lasting value, because it’s only in him that we find the reality, the substance, of which this world is an imperfect copy. It’s only in Jesus, as we talked about two weeks ago, that we can find true fullness of life; it’s only in him that we can find forgiveness for sin and freedom from the burden of our guilt and our regrets. Indeed, it’s only in him that we can find freedom from the powers and authorities of this world; to turn back and follow them is to put ourselves under the thumb of their human representatives. It’s to put ourselves under the thumb, let’s say, of the preachers who say, “If you just follow the rules I lay out, you’ll have that perfect marriage and those perfect kids—and if you don’t, then it’s your fault for doing it wrong.” It’s to submit, perhaps, to the power of sexual desire in our lives—which means, effectively, to some one person who’ll use that power to control us. It’s to put ourselves in thrall, maybe, to the markets, and the economic news, and the gurus. It’s to buy the line, most likely, of one or the other of our political parties, who will be only too happy to tell us that salvation comes from winning this election or voting for this candidate. In short, it’s to live in slavery to what the world tells us we must do, rather than to live in freedom in Christ and what he will do.

And despite what the world will tell you, there’s no need for that slavery. Christ has stripped those powers and displayed their impotence before the whole world—we do not need to submit to them. We do not need to acknowledge them. We do not need to give them power in our lives. In him, we have the power to live free, trusting that he will take care of us, trusting that he will meet our needs—for we give these authorities power over us when we believe that we have to submit to them to have our needs met and to find the kind of life we want to live; but we don’t have to submit to them, we don’t have to give them that power, because Jesus is faithful and he will supply all our needs, and we already have that fullness of life we desire in him. We’re free just to live in Christ—to live our daily lives in the awareness of his presence, open to his voice, seeking his will, trusting him for his guidance and his provision. We’ve been invited simply to enjoy Christ, to rest deep in his presence and his character, so that that will be the foundation of our lives and of everything else we do. The more we walk in him—spending time talking with him each day, practicing the habit of giving him each moment we live and each step we take, learning to keep our eyes and ears always open to see his face and hear his voice in the world around us—the more he works in us to build us up into a strong tower that will stand the storms of life, from which his light will shine into the world.

For my wife

The extraordinary thing is not that Paul said and did all these amazing things;
it's that he said and did them without coffee.

—N. T. Wright

HT: Jared Wilson

Kudos to SNL

You have to give Lorne Michaels and the rest of the folks at SNL credit: they've done a really good job with this election season. They haven't pulled their punches—in fact, at points, they've showed more willingness to tell the truth than the reporters whose job it is to do so; the skit they did on the bailout is perhaps the most obvious example of that, since it was so blunt that NBC felt the need to edit it:

Here's the edited version, which is still quite good:

The one that really got me, though, was their skit of the first presidential debate where they had Obama insisting that under his plan "most members of the Chicago city council, as well as city building inspectors" would get a tax cut "because my plan would not tax income from bribes, kickbacks, shakedowns, embezzlement of government funds, or extortion." I suppose they figured since their McCain followed that with a non sequitur, it was okay, but I still find it hard to believe they actually put that in there.

In line with this, I thought they handled Sarah Palin's appearance quite well. It posed some interesting challenges for Lorne Michaels, as he noted in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, but they rose to the occasion. They didn't hand her anything, but they let her play to her strengths, and I think both she and the show benefited as a result. The way they handled the open was, I think, particularly interesting:

To be sure, Gov. Palin has actually been talking to the press a fair bit lately, but that's fine; as Michaels says, SNL deals with perception, not reality, and the McCain campaign's early folly in sequestering her (courtesy of Rick Davis, who should have been booted all the way out when Steve Schmidt came on board) created this perception. She now has to deal with it in turn—which SNL helped her do. Credit to them.

The myth of fingerprints

I spent a while earlier today thinking about fingerprints, courtesy of Heather McDougal—courtesy of both her own rumination on the subject, which considers various aspects of the whys and wherefores of fingerprints (such as why we have them in the first place, and how they work), and of a 2002 New Yorker article raising questions about the forensic use of fingerprints. They're very different articles, obviously, but both are quite interesting; check them out.

On this blog in history: May 2007

Continuing with the historical links posts and jumping back to 2007, here are the highlights from that May:

The coldest case of all
This was my response to a Cold Case episode that was an ugly and unsubtle commercial for euthanasia.

AI: Amnesty International, or Abortion International?
Protesting Amnesty International's decision to become an abortion-rights organization—and their initial determination to lie to the public about having done so.

Robert E. Webber, RIP
What a great leader of the American church . . .

Musings on worship, illustrated by the Songs of the Week
On how not to make worship about God.

Tributes
Taking note of the death of Jerry Falwell, and of Charles Taylor winning the Templeton Prize.

Put not your trust in princes

Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish.
Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God,
who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed,
who gives food to the hungry.

—Psalm 146:3-7a (ESV)

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.

—Psalm 131 (ESV)

The tendency to put one's trust in rulers and other political figures is, of course, a universal one, a temptation to which we're all prone; it's not just a problem in American politics, by any means. This is not a respect in which America is exceptional. I do think, though, that we've been taking it to unusual heights of late, and especially during this election season—and this isn't just a problem for one side, either. Certainly a number of conservative pundits grumbled about the response to Sarah Palin, calling it nothing more than a bad case of celebrity worship, and I can't count the number of e-mails I've received with subject lines like "We MUST Win!" Well, no, sorry, we mustn't. I firmly agree it would be better if we did and that bad things will happen if we don't, but what of that? Even if we're right, it might very well be better for the long term that the Democrats have their day to do whatever they want. And of course, one must always be humbly aware that one could easily be wrong.

That said, trust in princes is a greater problem on the Democratic side of the aisle, at least this time around; the Obama campaign was built on it right from the beginning—not just in the messianic language about epiphanies and "this is the moment the planet started to heal," but in the whole theme of his campaign. The basic appeal has been, from day one, "Put your hope in Obama." When you do that, this kind of thing is the logical consequence (HT: Bill):

To that I say, no; even if I were voting for the guy, I wouldn't do that. The man is a politician, and a Chicago politician, no less. Anyone who puts their trust in politicians—any politicians—is a fool in the full biblical sense, and I use the term completely advisedly.

Put not your trust in politicians, for in them there is no salvation. Vote, yes; vote wisely, yes; understand the issues and decide carefully, yes, yes, yes. And then leave the results to God. Do what you consider he leads you to do, but don't presume to judge what MUST happen, or to conclude that if the results don't go your way that God must somehow have failed. To know the future and what must be is too great and too marvelous for us. Calm and quiet your soul in the presence of God, and rest lightly in him; pray for the winners, and for the losers, and for all of us, and put your trust and your hope in the only one worthy of them: in the Lord. Put your hope in him alone for this troubled time, and for the time to come, and you will be blessed, for your help and your hope will be the one who "who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry." He takes care of his people, even when he leads us through the valley of the shadow of death, and he will take care of you.

The return of yellow journalism?

To borrow a phrase from Isaac Asimov, future generations of historians will look back and somewhere in the last eight years, they will draw a line and say, "This marks the fall of the mainstream media." (Always assuming the world lasts that long, that we don't blow ourselves up or something.) Orson Scott Card, the science fiction/fantasy author and writing professor, lays out the reasons why in a blistering attack on the MSM: they've chosen to ignore some stories, downplay others, and spend their time inventing new ones, in order to advance the cause of their chosen agenda and candidates, and in the process have become "just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party."

This is not a new thing, nor should it be surprising. As my father-in-law pointed out to me a while ago, the rise of modern standards of journalistic integrity, of the idea that journalists should be fair and impartial and treat all reasonable points of view equally, was driven and made possible by the rise of mass media that made it possible for the first time to market products on a nationwide basis. If you're going to try to sell things to the whole country at once, you need to appeal to the whole country at once, which means that for your news division, a convincingly impartial approach is necessary so as not to turn anyone off. As Jon Shields, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado—Colorado Springs, has pointed out, this was made possible by the consensus-oriented, largely unideological centrism of post-World War II American politics.

The problem is, both of the foundations of that approach to journalism are gone; Dr. Shields' article tells the story of how liberal activists shattered that 1950s centrism, and mass marketing has largely been replaced by niche marketing. You pick a segment of the population and you make money by giving them what they want; along with that goes telling them what they want to hear. The only things left of the grand postwar era of American journalism are the major media corporations it created, which are now in varying states of disrepair, and their abiding conviction that they are the arbiters of truth and impartiality. (Hence their flaming contempt for that upstart Fox, which challenges the latter and competes with them for money.) We on the outside are free to see that that conviction is an illusion—and always was, really—and that the man behind the curtain is the abiding form of journalism in a capitalist society, to which we have returned after a brief aberration. Call it yellow journalism if you like (I for one think that's fair), but don't be surprised by it; remember, the highest award for journalism is the Pulitzer Prize—named after, and established by, none other than Joseph Pulitzer.

Remember, you can't count on the media to tell you what's true. You have to figure that out for yourself.

The far country, and the road home

When you lay me down to die . . . just remember this: when you lay me down to die,
you lay me down to live.

—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”

As I mentioned in my previous post, Sara and the girls and I went up to hear Andrew Peterson last night, which was a very great lift to our spirits. Before kicking into the songs from his new album, he opened with this one to set the theme. It reminded me of a time a couple years ago where I seemed to be surrounded by death. That was the time when Louie Heckert, one of the patriarchs of our little congregation and also one of the sweetest spirits I’ve ever met in a human being, was attacked and killed by a rogue bull moose; if you didn’t hear that story at the time, click the links—and even if you did, click on his name anyway, because if you didn’t know Louie, that was your loss. Around the same time, one of our long-time part-time folks died out in Missouri, as did two other long-time residents of Grand County for whom our church had been praying.

To top it all off, my grandpa died at the same time, and his funeral ended up being the same time as Louie’s. As I was conducting Louie’s funeral, an old family friend was leading Grampa’s; and I could not break down, for Grampa or for Louie or for anyone else, because there were things that needed to be done. That, I think, is the hardest thing about doing a funeral, and the better you knew and loved the person who died, the harder it is: in order to honor Louie properly, in order to create the necessary space for everyone else to deal with their feelings of grief and loss, I had to keep strict control on my own. That’s just how it works. It doesn’t mean that the grief goes away, just that you don’t get to do anything with it.

Nobody tells you when you get born here how much you’ll come to love it and how you’ll never belong here.

—Rich Mullins, “Land of My Sojourn”

As hard a time as that was, the good thing was that it all happened just before Easter, meaning that we were able to respond to all these deaths with the celebration of the Resurrection, because that is God’s answer to death; as one hymn we sang that Easter morning declares, “Christ is risen, we are risen!” because in his resurrection, “Death at last has met defeat.” That is the anchor of our faith, and it’s an anchor we particularly need when the death of someone we love dearly rocks our world. It’s not just because we want the assurance that we will see them again or because we want to believe that they are in a better place, either, though both those things are part of the equation. At a deeper level, encounters with death remind us that no matter how hard we try, we really can’t make our home in this world, because we can never fully belong here; we are temporary, and the world goes on.

God is at home. We are in the far country.

—Meister Eckhardt

What we tend to forget, though, is that the world’s perspective on death is something of an optical illusion; in truth, it’s this world which is temporary. It wasn’t meant to be that way—it’s the result of human sin—but we live in a world which is going to be replaced. The reason we cannot be fully at home here is because this is not the home for which we were made; we were made to live with God, and we live in a world that has rejected him. Our sin, our insistence on our own way, has opened a chasm between us and God—and the tragedy is that as a result, we have created a world for ourselves that we can’t live in, a world which can never be our home. As the German mystic Meister Eckhardt understood, we have made ourselves exiles in the far country, for no matter how hard we try, our only true home is still with God.

I believe in the holy shores of uncreated light; I believe there’s power in the blood.
And all the death that ever was, if you set it next to life, I believe it would barely fill a cup.

—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”

Another of the small graces of that difficult month was the release of Peterson’s album The Far Country, from which this song comes. The album’s title was of course taken from the Meister Eckhardt quotation above, and the album is primarily a meditation on death and Heaven. As I listened to the album, and in particular to the song “Lay Me Down,” I was blessed by the strong affirmation of our resurrection hope from a non-standard perspective. The problem, really, isn’t that we die; the problem is that we aren’t at home, we’re exiles in the far country. In this far country, we die, and those we love die, and it brings us great pain; but God is still at home, and he is here as well in this far country with us, and he sent his son Jesus to make a way, to be the way, for us to get across the gap, to go home to be with him. That’s why we affirm that death has been defeated, that it has lost its sting, because by his death and resurrection Jesus has transformed it; it’s no longer the final curtain in this far country, but the door that opens onto the road back home.

I’ll open up my eyes on the skies I’ve never known, in the place where I belong,
and I’ll realize his love is just another word for Home.

—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”

For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

—Philippians 1:21

The gospel is resurrection

My last post, being focused on the political and international scene, could give one the idea that my concerns are solely with the impending regime change in Washington, DC. That isn’t the case, though. While the foreboding I’ve been feeling is certainly partly due to the political situation, there are a number of personal elements in play as well; I just have the sense of some combination of things coming together, and I don’t know just what, or to what purpose, and it’s been weighing on me.

That’s why Sara and I, even though we’re still feeling the effects of this stomach bug that swept through our family, decided we needed to get up to South Bend last night to see Andrew Peterson in concert. He’s touring solo (absolutely solo, without even Ben Shive) in support of his new album, Resurrection Letters, Vol. II (apparently Vol. I will be coming later), which released on Tuesday. It was a joy to hear him sing his new songs, and a lot of fun to hear him talk about the stories and Scriptures behind each of them; it was a greater joy to be lifted up by the theme running through them, the celebration of the power of the resurrection of Christ in our lives.

This is critically important, because the gospel isn’t about empowering us, or fulfilling us, or satisfying us, or any of that; all of those are effects of the work of God in our lives, but they aren’t its essence or its purpose. The gospel is about a living God raising dead people to life. We were dead without him, we are dead without him, we become less alive every time we turn away from him; and every time we do, his Spirit is at work in us to raise us back up out of the depths into which we keep trying to cast ourselves. He isn’t simply changing us, he’s remaking us, and indeed has already remade us; he’s making all things new, and he won’t stop until he’s done, no matter what this world might do to try to stop him.

This is the answer to my foreboding: whatever may come—for our nation, for our world, for me personally and my family—it’s all in God’s hands, and all accounted for in his plan. It’s all a part of him making us, and all things, new. It’s all a part of the process, begun and sealed in our baptism, by which he’s putting our old selves to death and raising us to new life in him. And in him, by his grace, though things may be dark and troubled along the way, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we need fear no evil, for he is with us; and we may be sure that in the end, as that great saint of the church Julian of Norwich put it, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Scanning the horizon

I’ve been feeling a real sense of foreboding lately. Part of it (though only part) is political, as anyone who reads this blog can tell, and so there’s definitely a component to this which is merely partisan: I’m convinced our next president is going to be a (very) liberal Democrat, and I don’t believe the policies which liberal Democrats support are best for America, which is why I typically vote Republican. That’s a matter of differences of opinion, nothing more; part of the deal in a democracy is that sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, and in the long run by the grace of God you hope it all balances itself out. So far in the history of this nation, in the long run by the grace of God it mostly has.

I don’t believe a liberal Democratic administration will be good for our economy, but that doesn’t really bother me; I’m probably too spoiled anyway, and even if the times wax comparatively bad, my family and I will still have things infinitely better than some of our friends elsewhere in the world. The children who will never be born due to liberal Democratic policies on abortion weigh far more heavily on me (and don’t try to argue the canard that GOP policies have raised the abortion rate—that one’s been thoroughly debunked), as do other likely changes on the social side. But even so, that’s politics; that’s how the system works.

What isn't just politics is that I see heavy weather ahead. The “end of history” celebrated by Francis Fukuyama turned out to be nothing more than a Weimar holiday followed by the rebirth of aggressive fascism—this time in Islamic garb—as a major force on the world stage, the rise of China, the reassertion of Russian power, and the ongoing spread of WMD technologies. There are some nasty cancers growing in the global body politic, and they aren’t responding to herbal therapies. This isn’t helped by the current deflation of the global economy, which creates its own set of problems which must be addressed. From a political perspective, one may say that this candidate would be better than that candidate, but there is no conceivable candidate we could put up with the confidence that they would “fix the problems,” because the problems are simply too big. The situation of our world, as usual, is not amenable to a political solution, though it helps when politics at least manages to produce leaders who can move us in the right direction.

This is why what really bothers me about the upcoming election is not that we’re going to elect a liberal Democrat, but that we’re electing one who I’m increasingly convinced is manifestly unprepared and unqualified for the job. I didn’t feel this concern four years ago, even though I had far less respect for either John Kerry or John Edwards than I do for either Barack Obama or Joe Biden, and even though I consider McCain/Palin a far superior ticket to Bush/Cheney, and even though I think the issues were just as serious four years ago as now. For that matter, if it were Hillary Clinton running with, say, Harold Ford, I would be far less concerned. Yes, several years ago, I wouldn’t have believed I’d say that, but between her Senate tenure and her campaign, she did a lot to change my opinion of her; and love her or hate her (there seems to be little middle ground), Sen. Clinton is someone who gets things done.

To be sure, I would have disagreed with many of the things she did over the next four years—as, I should note, I’ve disagreed with many of the things our incumbent president has done over the last eight, despite the (R) after his name—and I think her campaign has shown significant weaknesses in her administrative ability, and as such, I personally would not have considered her a good president; but I believe she would have been at least a moderately effective president, and possibly quite a bit more, and one whom Democrats would have judged successful. The key here is that I think Sen. Clinton is capable of saying with Orrin Knox (the fictional senior senator from Illinois in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent), “I don’t care about being liked, but I intend to be respected,” and as such I believe she can stand up to people and face them down when the situation calls for it. This is a crucially important ability in a president, and never more than in their dealings with the leaders of other nations who bear America ill will.

I do not believe that any of these things can be said of Barack Obama (except that his campaign, too, has shown significant weaknesses in his administrative ability). He simply has no record of serious accomplishment—he’s never been an objective success in the world outside academia, except at campaigning and winning votes. My brother-in-law, an Obama supporter, assured me recently that he’s gotten a good education; my response was that I don’t question that (though I do wonder why he’s so determined to keep his time at Columbia hidden), but I don’t see that he’s done anything with it. He’s a writer, a thinker, a policy wonk; he’s the guy on the staff who makes a great advisor because he’s full of ideas, but has no instinct for turning any of them into reality. He talks about change, but he doesn’t create it; he talks about compromise and bipartisanship, but isn’t willing to give up anything to make it happen.

As well, and most crucially, he has no history of standing up to his own party, to his own supporters, to his own mentors, unless he’s driven to—and when it comes to conflict between them, as it did recently in Illinois between Gov. Rod Blagojevich and State Senate President Emil Jones (Sen. Obama’s personal kingmaker), he prefers to just avoid the scene altogether. To be effective as a leader requires the willingness to be disliked, to bear the full force of the anger and disappointment of others, and Sen. Obama shows no sign of that as far as I can see.

The thing is, before, it hasn’t mattered. He’s been one of a legislative body, and if he doesn’t bother to vote half the time, the votes will still be held and the business of the session will still go on; and if he doesn’t bother to convene his subcommittee, well, the legislature can work around that to get done what needs doing. And besides, there’s always a higher office to aspire to, and another campaign to run. What happens when he reaches the point when there’s only one of him, and the buck stops at his desk, and there’s nowhere else to go—but down? I don’t see anything to give me confidence in the answer to that question.

And so, my deep presentiment that it will not be well when this nation elects Sen. Obama to its highest office is not just about his conviction that offering ourselves to our enemies as their partner in addressing the problems of this world is a bad way to solve those problems (but a good way to get hurt). It’s not even, really, about my broader sense that his instincts in responding to people and situations point in all the wrong directions. These, again, are concerns at the level of political disagreement, and my unease runs deeper. Let me set them aside for the moment; let me go so far as to stipulate that Joe Biden is right, that when the crisis comes, we just have to trust Barack Obama because “he gets it.” My fear is that even if his instincts are in fact right and he does know the right thing to do, he won’t be able to convert that knowledge to action and actually do it in a successful way. That's going to be an extremely difficult thing to do in the event of, for instance, my personal worst-case scenario: al'Qaeda setting off a suitcase nuke in or near the US Capitol. It would be difficult for anyone, because let’s be honest: the gap from knowledge to effective, timely action is one of the hardest for us to bridge in this life; one of the reasons why we need true leaders is their ability to do so consistently when it matters most. If Sen. Obama has shown anything like that consistency, I haven’t seen it—and I don’t believe it’s going to just show up when he needs it most.

Don’t think this means I dislike the man. I don’t; I’ve never understood anyway how you can dislike someone you’ve never met, but I see little in him to dislike. I see much that is admirable, and much that I believe would make him a joy to know. He’s clearly a very gifted man; if we were discussing him as, say, a potential SCOTUS nominee for another Democratic administration, I think he’d be hard to argue against. What I just don’t see is the kind of inner strength, resolve, and fortitude that it takes to navigate the storms of the presidency to a successful conclusion—and that worries me deeply. I hope I’m wrong; I’ll be praying hard that I’m wrong. But right now, I just don’t see it.

Worrisome thought

Right now, those focusing on Iran are primarily thinking Iran vs. Israel, and understandably so. Another possibility struck me today, however. If I'm right that Barack Obama wins in two weeks, and if he sticks to his promise to begin an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, would that be enough to re-orient Ahmadinejad? Might we not see Iran wait until the withdrawal is well underway, and then invade Iraq? They would have good reason to, from both a tactical and a strategic perspective, if they thought they could catch us at a point when we couldn't respond effectively; I very much doubt Iraq would be able to mount significant resistance on its own.

The case against Barack Obama, in his own words

Guy Benson and Mary Katherine Ham, working with Ed Morissey, have put together a comprehensive closing argument against the election of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) as President of the United States; you can find it here. It covers abortion, tax policy, his judgment regarding his associates and advisors (and mentions his advocacy of prosecuting those who criticize him), his judgment regarding foreign policy, his willingness to look down on people, his willingness to play the race card, and his lack of accomplishments in office—and it's copiously illustrated with video, mostly of Sen. Obama himself and his associates, advisors and supporters. Check it out. If you see everything he and they have to say and agree with all (or most) of it, more power to you; but you just might find he's not the candidate you think he is.

The case against Barack Obama, in Joe Biden's own words

I haven't yet written about Sen. Biden's remarks in Seattle this past Saturday because I've been sick—I think it was Monday evening before I even did so much as turn on either the TV or the computer (which at least saved me from angsting over the Seahawks)—and I still don't have a great deal of energy, but I've been rather astonished by them; I appreciate the points folks like Hugh Hewitt, Beldar (and also here), Bill Kristol, and Tom Maguire have raised in response, which I think are right on. Beyond my amazement at the extraordinary lack of political discipline shown by the Democratic ticket in fundraisers (it's amazing that Sen. Biden actually thought it was a good idea to say what he said, but no more so than Sen. Obama's comments in San Francisco last April), these are the things that really strike me out of all this:

One, it's one thing for me to project a major attack on the US in the first year of an Obama presidency, based just on reading the trends and the tea leaves; it's quite something else when Sen. Joe Biden, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vice-presidential nominee of the Democratic Party—and thus one of the most thoroughly-briefed people in the world, a man who's been told what almost no one is told—says so. It's especially something else when he says the attack will come within six months and offers multiple threat axes. Folks, this isn't just a prediction now, it's the next best thing to a guarantee: if we elect Sen. Obama in two weeks, sometime next year, we're going to get hammered. His own running mate assures us of that, and he's seen as much of the playbook as there is to see.

Two, Sen. Biden says, "I think I can be value added" because "I've forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know"; this would be more reassuring if his partition plan for Iraq and his recent fantasy about the US and France kicking Hizb'allah out of Lebanon didn't indicate that he's forgotten most of what he knew about foreign policy as well.

Three, Sen. Biden pre-emptively dismissed the idea that we have the military capability to respond to what's coming. Saying this in public is nothing less than giving aid and comfort to the enemy; it's something a braver age would call treason. Such remarks, should the Obama/Biden ticket win next month, will do nothing but embolden the enemies of this nation and make them more willing to attack us; whatever they might believe about our ability to defeat them, they will know that our leaders don't believe we can defeat them, and that as a consequence they have half the battle won right there. That will only make them more willing and even eager to attack, because it raises the possible rewards and lowers the risk.

Four, though I don't think it's as obvious as Hewitt thinks that this is what Sen. Biden is talking about, I think he's right to say that

an Iran-Israel confrontation is coming, and that if Obama is president, America will sit it out with, at best, words that do nothing to support Israel or deter Iran. . . . A President Obama will blink when Iran threatens Israel by approaching the nuclear tripwire. A President Obama will seek to force Israel to live with Iran as a nuclear power capable of either striking Israel or shipping to Hezbollah the means of threatening the very existence of the Jewish state, and the supporters of Israel in the U.S. will be stunned and then angry.

I think he's right because I don't think Sen. Obama has the political will to do otherwise. As Dr. Victor Davis Hanson told Hewitt in an interview,

It’s easy to say, as Obama says, it’s a game-changer if Iran were to get a nuclear device. What does that mean, a game-changer? That’s intolerable. What he’s not telling you is that if I choose to make sure that they don’t have a nuclear device, then that means that basically the United States is going to have to impose an embargo or a Naval blockade because the Europeans will still try to profit to the 11th hour, or even a military strike. I, Barack Obama, must be hated by people in Berlin. There’s no more Victory Column great extravaganzas for me. There’s no more fawning interviews with Der Spiegel. It’s going to be hatred from those people. I’m going to be a unilateralist pre-empter, and I’m going to do that, and all the people in the Muslim world and the Arab world that love me and fawn over me are going to hate me as worse than you know what. Okay, I’m willing to do that for a principle. Do you think he’s going to be willing to do that, or John McCain? I’m sorry, but I don’t think that all of that cheap rhetoric about invading Pakistan and a game-changer in Iran is anything other than rhetoric, because I think the problem with Obama is he’s bought into the idea of Vero Possumus, the new presidential seal that he’s promulgating, that the seas are going to cease to rise, that the planet won’t heat up, this is the change that we’ve been waiting for. And he really believe in this Messianic sense that people love him for himself. And he’s not going to be willing to give up that easily.

Unfortunately, messianic leadership only works in combination with messianic wisdom and messianic humility—and those a) are only to be found in the true Messiah, the Son of God, and b) lead not to political victory but to death on a cross. As for messianic leadership without those other components? Well, that doesn't lead to political victory either, but to true disaster.

Five, Sen. Biden's reason for saying all this to those folks in Seattle was to prepare them to hang in for a terrible two years that will see the Obama administration become terribly unpopular. I wonder if he's followed that through to realize just how unpopular the Democrats in Congress will likely become as well? Certainly, everything he says supports my own thought that we could see a GOP tidal wave in 2010 wipe out Democratic majorities all over the place. (If so, all the more important that folks like Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, and the others who will lead the GOP going forward take the time to think long, hard, and deeply about how to address the issues our country faces, both domestic and international.) As Hewitt put it, Sen. Biden sees a crisis coming and "suspects that Obama will react to the coming crisis in a way that demoralizes the country and which shatters public confidence in Obama." I've been comparing Sen. Obama to Jimmy Carter ca. 1976, but this is sounding more like the 1979-80 version of Jimmy Carter—and that's not good news. It's not good news at all.

Six, obviously, Sen. Biden believes that in saying all this, he's making the case for Obama supporters to stand strong behind their candidate. I don't. I do believe, however, that he's underscoring a very important reality. While I'm convinced that electing Barack Obama will only embolden our enemies abroad and weaken our strength at home, and thus worsen the problems we're facing, these problems, on the whole, have little to do with Barack Obama. He hasn't done anything to help them, but neither have most of his colleagues, and some of them he could do nothing about. They exist regardless, and will continue to exist regardless, and thus it would be far too facile to say that electing John McCain would mean that we get to avoid them. We don't. I believe we'll see better economic policies if he wins, but this will still be a turbulent and trying time for our economy no matter what; and while I believe foreign enemies such as Iran and al'Qaeda will be far more circumspect in the face of a President McCain than a President Obama, they're not going to just pack up shop, go home, and sit out the next four years if he wins. Far from it: they'll be working to bring us down either way, and they'll be a clear and present danger to us either way.

All of which is to say: whoever wins, fasten your seatbelts—we're in for a bumpy ride, and a long, long night.

Addendum: here's what Gov. Palin had to say in response to Sen. Biden's remarks:

I can't be the only one

seeing these scads and scads of Obama ads urging, "Vote Early," and mentally adding, ". . . Vote Often," can I?

The guy really is a Chicago politician.

Armies with feet (and heads) of clay

Like Bill, I haven't watched this closely enough to see if it is in fact a valid game (though from what I've seen, it seems to me that White's wasn't a very good game in any case), but it's great fun regardless—even for those who aren't big into chess.

In the end, we can't even foul it up properly

Well, that was a nasty bug. I'm used to riding them out, but that one took me down right and proper. It's the first time I've had to call in sick on a Sunday in almost six years in ministry; and here over 40 hours from first onset, I'm still feeling pretty muzzy.

This has left me with time to think, but not much working in the brainpan to do the thinking with; but in the altogether unsurprising fact that the church kept right on running without me, it has been a reminder that in all these things, God is at work. He takes our strengths and our weaknesses, our successes and our failures, our faithfulness and our rebellion, and he uses all of it; which is not to say that it isn't better to be faithful than to be rebellious, but simply to note that it's beyond our ability even to surprise God, much less to derail him (though we can both delight and grieve him). Even if we devoted everything we had to trying to ruin his work, we would still find that he'd used what we'd done to accomplish his purposes.

That's not precisely what this poem, one of my favorites, is about; but there's a common truth here, I think.

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

Confrontation and reconciliation

Joyce over at tallgrassworship has an insightful post up on dealing with disagreements—one which caught my attention in a particular way because she's taken my post from earlier today on Christian unity and applied it in a way that's congruent with what I was saying but hadn't occurred to me, and it's always interesting to me when people do that. The fact that she's sandwiched that between insights from Justin Taylor and the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund means I find myself in pretty good company, too. And of course, Joyce puts it all together in a very wise and thoughtful way, offering good counsel. I encourage you to read it, and consider it well.

Restorative discipline

The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, speak to your people and say to them, If I bring the sword upon a land, and the people of the land take a man from among them, and make him their watchman, and if he sees the sword coming upon the land and blows the trumpet and warns the people, then if anyone who hears the sound of the trumpet does not take warning, and the sword comes and takes him away, his blood shall be upon his own head. He heard the sound of the trumpet and did not take warning; his blood shall be upon himself. But if he had taken warning, he would have saved his life. But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman's hand.

“So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked one, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked person shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way,
that person shall die in his iniquity, but you will have delivered your soul.

“And you, son of man, say to the house of Israel, Thus have you said: ‘Surely our transgressions and our sins are upon us, and we rot away because of them. How then can we live?’ Say to them, As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?

“And you, son of man, say to your people, The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him when he transgresses, and as for the wickedness of the wicked, he shall not fall by it when he turns from his wickedness, and the righteous shall not be able to live by his righteousness when he sins. Though I say to the righteous that he shall surely live, yet if he trusts in his righteousness and does injustice, none of his righteous deeds shall be remembered, but in his injustice that he has done he shall die. Again, though I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ yet if he turns from his sin and does what is just and right, if the wicked restores the pledge, gives back what he has taken by robbery, and walks in the statutes of life, not doing injustice, he shall surely live; he shall not die. None of the sins that he has committed shall be remembered against him. He has done what is just
and right; he shall surely live.

“Yet your people say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just,’ when it is their own way that is not just. When the righteous turns from his righteousness and does injustice, he shall die for it. And when the wicked turns from his wickedness and does what is just and right, he shall live by this. Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ O house of Israel, I will judge each of you according to his ways.”

—Ezekiel 33:1-20 (ESV)

My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul
from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

—James 5:19-20 (ESV)

Discipline is supposed to be restorative. It's not just to make the guilty pay or the wicked suffer; it's not just to avenge wrong or deter other wrongdoers; it's not just to make us feel better. It's also supposed to bring the sinner to repentance. That's the ultimate purpose; that's why God sent prophets, to give his people warning after warning before bringing the hammer down, and it's why even before sending them into exile, he was already promising to bring them home. God will not tolerate our sin, and he will not simply ignore our wrongdoing, but his desire is not simply to blot out the wicked—it's that the wicked should turn from their way and live.

That's why, when we see someone wandering off the path, we can't just go yell at them, and we can't just kick them out; we need to reach out to them and seek to bring them back—and if discipline is necessary, it must be directed to that purpose, and carried out in that spirit. Otherwise, it isn't true discipline—it's just another sin.