“Heresy” is a big word

That was one of Mark Driscoll's observations during his message at GCNC last week: “heresy” is a big word, a loaded word, that should only be used carefully, when necessary.  That's not to say that we should never use it—sometimes it's necessary, when people are claiming the name of Jesus to teach things that are significantly at odds with the gospel—but we must be very sure of our ground before we use that word, and equally sure of the spirit in which we use it.  That must never be an accusation hurled in anger, but must only be spoken gently, in a gracious spirit of loving correction.

S. M. Hutchens addresses this in an editorial in the latest issue of Touchstone called “The War on Error: The Business of Confronting Heresy”; it is in general a careful and thoughtful piece that takes note both of the need to name heresy for what it is and of the dangers in doing so overaggressively.

If an accusation is made, it must be made clearly, forcefully, and memorably, so that it is understood by those one is trying to protect from false doctrine: “This is untrue; it is heresy; avoid these people who teach it.”

This must be done judiciously and in the line of duty. If I have any quarrel with certain fathers, it is not that they identified false teaching for what it was, but that they sometimes did it so frequently that it may have become difficult to hear. There is besides a certain pathological temperament that enjoys hunting down and denouncing error and subjecting those who commit it to terror and humiliation that hardens them against truth. The heresy-hunting inquisitor is not a divine office, whereas pastor and teacher are. To the former mentality, exposing error is not a painful task cast in one’s path by the duties of office, but a form of pleasure—a dungeoner’s pleasure of which no good man would be proud.

However, I think there's a point, named in the editorial, where Hutchens himself goes over the line.  Heretical doctrine is not merely doctrine which is in error, but doctrine which is in error on the core matters of the Christian faith, in such a way that the doctrine fundamentally threatens the integrity of the gospel message; it's a significant departure from what C. S. Lewis called “mere Christianity,” nothing else, and nothing less.  Only those things which lead people away from the very means of salvation, then, deserve this label.  As such, I cannot agree when Hutchens writes,

These considerations have weighed heavily on me because of my concern with egalitarianism, which I have identified as a heresy. Although the identification was not difficult from a theological point of view—and our opponents are now in many places returning the compliment, accusing us of subordinationism: but surely one of us is heretical—its publication was very difficult indeed.

This is not just a matter of my being an egalitarian, though I will confess that being labeled a heretic is mildly irritating; it's a matter of Hutchens using a word that's far too big for the subject.  Is egalitarianism wrong?  Perhaps, though I don't believe so; we can debate it.  But when he says “surely one of us is heretical,” he puts that out of possibility:  he says that those with whom he disagrees are not merely wrong, but grievously wrong, to such an extent that it threatens our salvation—and thus that if he were in fact wrong, the same would be true of him.

This is where I think Hutchens is seriously wrong.  I don't see any support for his conclusion, and I don't believe he can support it; scripturally, there is clearly an argument for his complementarian position, but not for the case that that position is essential for salvation.  Indeed, at this point it seems to me that he's guilty of what Ray Ortlund dubbed “Galatian sociology”:  he's added belief in something extrinsic to the gospel to belief in Jesus.  He may well be correct that belief in Jesus ought to lead to his position on male/female roles and relations, but that in and of itself is not enough to justify his conclusion that any other position is heretical.

If anything, in asserting that one must believe in Jesus and in complementarianism, he's made himself vulnerable to a charge of heresy on the grounds that he has made salvation dependent not on Jesus but on right doctrine.  This is what the late Stan Grenz (if I recall correctly) called “the evangelical heresy,” that of putting our faith not in Jesus but in our creeds.  This is not to say that creeds don't matter and right doctrine doesn't matter, because the truth of what we believe matters immensely; but it is to say that it's even more important to put the locus of salvation in the right place, not in the truth of what we believe, but in the truth of the one in whom we believe—or perhaps we might say, in the Truth in whom we believe.  The truth of our beliefs is important, because where we get things wrong, it obscures and distorts our understanding of the one in whom we put our faith—but it's still he and he alone who saves us, not the correctness of our understanding of him.

As such, I believe Hutchens has shown himself guilty of a grave error in pronouncing gender egalitarians guilty of heresy, because he has elevated a particular belief about how God wants us to order our lives to a position of equality with belief in God himself; this is, I believe, a displacement of the proper centrality of the gospel of Jesus Christ for salvation, and that is a serious matter indeed.  I hesitate to declare that his error rises to the level of imperiling his eternal soul; as I said at the beginning, heresy is a very big word indeed, and I don't consider that I have the right to make that judgment.  But I think that Hutchens would do very well to reconsider, if not his complementarian view of gender, at least the theological absolutism with which he holds that position, and whether he's really in line with the gospel of Jesus Christ to declare all countervailing positions not merely wrong but fully heretical.  That way, it seems to me, lies nothing good.

The Obama administration and the criminalization of dissent

I wrote a piece early last October laying out my thoughts as to what the Obama administration would look like, and what his presidency would bring.  At some point, I intend to do a full-scale review of that post, evaluating what I got right and what I got wrong, but at this point I think I can call the shot on three connected predictions I made:  that Barack Obama's talk of bipartisanship would be just empty words belied by a highly partisan administration, that Nancy Pelosi would run rampant, and (most worrisome), this:

I believe the approach we've seen from the Obama campaign to dissent and criticism will be repeated in the policies and responses of an Obama-led Executive Branch; given the clear willingness of his campaign to suppress freedom of speech to prevent criticism of their candidate, I believe we'll see the same willingness from his administration and his chief congressional allies. This will mean a surge in the kind of the strongarm political tactics that we've already seen entirely too often this year. . . .

The Obama campaign's efforts to shout down Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso (in an effort to intimidate Chicago radio station WGN into canceling their appearances on Milt Rosenberg's show) ought to be disturbing to anyone who cares about free speech. Of even greater concern should be the Obama "truth squads" in Missouri, where the campaign enlisted allies in public office to threaten prosecution of any TV station that runs any ads about Sen. Obama that the campaign deems untrue. Not only is this approach outrageously biased (one side's allowed to lie, but the other isn't?), it gets into some very grey areas about interpretation and intent, and thus raises some real concerns as to the approach an Obama Department of Justice might take to the First Amendment.

This kind of approach, like Joe Biden's suggestion that an Obama/Biden administration might prosecute the Bush administration, is nothing more nor less than the use (or threat of use) of political power to punish one's opponents, intimidate critics, and silence dissenters; it's the sort of thing we're used to seeing in Zimbabwe, not here—and as the case of Zimbabwe shows, there's nothing, not even money, that can corrupt a democracy faster, or more severely. I've argued before that one of the great problems with our politics in this day and age is that we absolutize our own perspectives—we assume that our own perspectives and presuppositions are the only legitimate ones, and that those who disagree with us can't possibly be doing so sincerely, but must be acting out of motives that are selfish or otherwise wrong. The criminalization of politics, which we're starting to see urged by the Obama campaign, is a more extreme version of that problem, because it argues that those motives are not only wrong, but are in fact criminal in nature. The chilling effect of that sort of approach should be deeply worrisome not just to conservatives, but also to true liberals.

Unfortunately, it appears that many leftist Democrats aren't true liberals, because President Obama has now invited just such prosecutions, and they don't appear to be worried at all; to its credit, the Boston Globe did call out Janet Napolitano and the Department of Homeland Security for the egregious report that pretty much labeled all conservatives as potential terrorist threats, but an awful lot of Democrats seem to be just fine with it.  Indeed, many who were First Amendment absolutists who loved to wax lyrical about the importance of dissent back when there was a Republican in the White House now seem to think anyone who dares argue with the Anointed One should be drug out into the street and shot.

To repeat:  the willingness of those in power to deal with opposition by criminalizing policy differences—to use brute force as a tool for gaining and maintaining political power—is one of the things that makes places like Zimbabwe the basket cases that they are.  We cannot afford to allow such an approach to corrupt our system.  But even if concern for what's best for the nation doesn't restrain the Obama administration from such banana-republic tactics, enlightened self-interest should, as Matt Lewis memorably illustrated (HT:  Joshua Livestro):

There has been a lot of debate on the potential prosecution of Bush Administration officials who offered legal opinions supporting waterboarding—with some even calling for investigations of high-ranking officials like Dick Cheney. However, one thing that hasn't been given the attention it deserves is the precedent it would set if we were to criminalize national security decisions. Hence, I've finally decided to test out the time machine I've been building in my basement—and you would be surprised what sort of things grew out of the current debacle.

For instance, the following Associated Press story was filed on April 23, 2013, and if it sounds Orwellian, well, it is:

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS TO FACE PROSECUTION

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department announced today that charges could be filed against numerous Obama Administration officials as a result of last year's terror attack in Los Angeles. In announcing the indictments, Attorney General John Cornyn said that top officials showed "gross and purposeful negligence" by releasing perpetrators of the attacks from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and demanding that interrogation tactics be softened against chief planner Mehmet al-Meshugeneh, who had already revealed that a major attack was being planned against a major U.S. sporting event.

"By purposefully disregarding crucial intelligence, and in releasing known participants in the plot into Saudi custody, numerous government officials took action which made the Staples Center bombing possible," Cornyn said. He went on to note that "numerous individuals in the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security knowingly pursued policies which would endanger the lives of Americans. They placed their political priorities above the safety of the citizens of this country, and thousands of innocent people died as a result. These people must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

At the White House, Press Secretary Adam Brickley said that President Sarah Palin stands firmly behind the decision. "It's not as if we relish the thought of prosecuting members of the previous administration," Brickley said, "but, at this point, there is a clearly established precedent—set in place by the Obama Administration themselves—which says that government officials must be held accountable if they contributed in any way to major breaches of the law. In this case, the individuals under investigation do appear to have purposefully allowed these terrorists to continue their actions—prioritizing international public opinion over the lives of the American people. So, while this may be a politically charged issue, there is a real need to prosecute."

In the end, the sort of tactics the Obama administration has now begun to employ are ineffective at silencing dissent (as the case of Zimbabwe, along with many other nations, shows)—all they really do is raise the stakes enormously.  If you're willing to start prosecuting your predecessors, you're going to get the same treatment from your successors unless you can manage to do one of two things:  a) overthrow the Constitution so that you can become President-for-Life, or b) never make a significant mistake.  Taken all in all, I'd say the first is likelier, and neither exactly probable.

All of which is to say that Barack Obama and his senior staff and advisors would do well to remember, and live by, an ancient piece of wisdom:

"So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets."

—Matthew 7:12 (ESV)

Christians should be more Christian

Remember, the three most powerful narratives on the planet are narratives of religion, narratives of nation, and narratives of ethnicity/race.  You cannot afford to forfeit that territory by talking about economics or the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Don't be afraid to be Christian ministers.  If you don't use the Christian narrative to define reality for your people, then someone else will define reality for them with a different narrative.

What makes this quote remarkable and unexpected is the speaker:  Eboo Patel, a devout Muslim.  Dr. Patel, an Oxford-trained scholar, teaches a course on interfaith leadership at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago together with a Christian woman named Cassie Meyer; McCormick being what it is, I would have expected such a course there to push lowest-common-denominatorism, but that seems to be far from the case; judging by the fascinating article on Dr. Patel and the class in the latest issue of Leadership, "Ministry Lessons from a Muslim" (which doesn't appear to be up online yet), he and Meyer advocate respectful conversation between unabashed truth claims.  We need to respect and love those with whom we disagree based on our own convictions, not by setting those convictions aside, and so Dr. Patel, as a Muslim, encourages his Christian students to be more Christian.  He explains this in part by saying,

If you enter a ministerial gathering as a Christian minister and downplay your Christian identity in an attempt to make everyone comfortable, as a Muslim leader, I'm immediately suspicious.  I don't trust you.  Embracing your identity as a Christian creates safety for me to be a Muslim.

That isn't a reaction I would have predicted, but it makes a lot of sense; after all, someone capable of neutering their own beliefs and identity for the sake of a particular goal is also perfectly capable of asking others to do the same—which, to those unwilling to do so, makes them a potential threat.  (By contrast, someone unapologetic about declaring and maintaining their beliefs either will make space for others to do the same, or else will expose their hypocrisy and other sin issues.  That's not pleasant, to be sure, but at least such people can be dealt with straightforwardly.)

This is really cool

I don't remember how I ended up with a year's free subscription to Wired, but I've really been enjoying it; I knew it was a good magazine, but either it's gotten better over the last couple years or else I'd never fully appreciated it before.  The serious articles are consistently very good—for instance, there are a couple pieces from the March issue that I've been meaning to post on, serious pieces on the roots of the financial crisis and what steps ought to be taken to deal with it, and I was fascinated by the one in the May issue on Teller and the research he's involved in on the neuropsychology of stage magic (if that sounds geeky, trust me, it isn't)—but my favorite articles have been some of the lighter ones.

I was particularly pleased to see the piece in the April issue on the German board game Settlers of Catan.  If you haven't heard of it before, you're not alone—in America, it has a ways to go before it's as widely-known as, say, Monopoly or Scrabble; the only people I know who've heard of it found out about it the same way I did, from my brother-in-law—but when they call it a "perfect boardgame" that "redefines the genre," they aren't blowing smoke.  It's a fascinating and enjoyable game on every level.  As the article explains,

Instead of direct conflict, German-style games tend to let players win without having to undercut or destroy their friends. This keeps the game fun, even for those who eventually fall behind. Designed with busy parents in mind, German games also tend to be fast, requiring anywhere from 15 minutes to a little more than an hour to complete. They are balanced, preventing one person from running away with the game while the others painfully play out their eventual defeat. And the best ones stay fresh and interesting game after game.

Teuber nailed all these traits using a series of highly orchestrated game mechanics. Instead of a traditional fold-out board, for example, Settlers has the 19 hexagonal tiles, each representing one of five natural resources—wooded forests, sheep-filled meadows, mountains ripe for quarrying. At the beginning of every game, they're arranged at random into an island. Next, numbered tokens marked from 2 to 12 are placed on each tile to indicate which dice rolls will yield a given resource. Because the tiles get reshuffled after every game, you get a new board every time you play.

The idea is that players establish settlements in various locations on the board, and those settlements collect resource cards whenever the token number for the tile they are sitting on gets rolled. By redeeming these resource cards in specific combinations (it takes a hand of wood, brick, wheat, and wool to build a new settlement, for instance), you expand your domain. Every settlement is worth a point, cities are two points, and the first player to earn 10 points wins. You can't get ahead by rustling your opponents' sheep or torching their cute wooden houses.

One of the driving factors in Settlers—and one of the secrets to its success—is that nobody has reliable access to all five resources. This means players must swap cards to get what they need, creating a lively and dynamic market, which works like any other: If ore isn't rolled for several turns, it becomes more valuable. "Even in this tiny, tiny microcosm of life, scarcity leads to higher prices, and plenty leads to lower prices," says George Mason University economist Russ Roberts, who uses Settlers to teach his four children how free markets work.

Wheeling and dealing turns out to be an elegant solution to one of the big problems plaguing Monopoly—sitting idle while other players take their turns. Since every roll of the dice in Settlers has the potential to reap a new harvest of resource cards, unleash a flurry of negotiations, and change the balance of the board, every turn engages all the players. "The secret of Catan is that you have to bargain and sometimes whine," Teuber says.

Teuber also made the game as flexible as possible, with numerous means of earning points. Building the longest road is worth two points, for instance, and collecting development cards (purchased with resource cards, these can offer a Year of Plenty resource bonanza or straight-up points) also brings you closer to victory. Having options like this is critical. The games that stand the test of time have just a few rules and practically unlimited possibilities, making them easy to learn and difficult to master. (Chess, for example, has 10¹²⁰ potential moves, far more than the number of atoms in the universe.)

Finally, the game is designed to restore balance when someone pulls ahead. If one player gets a clear lead, that person is suddenly the prime candidate for frequent attacks by the Robber, a neat hack that Teuber installed. Roll a seven—the most likely outcome of a two-dice roll, as any craps player knows—and those with more than seven resource cards in their hand lose half their stash, while the person who rolled gets to place a small figure called the Robber on a resource tile, shutting down production of resources for every settlement on that tile. Not surprisingly, players often target the settler with the most points.

In addition to deploying the Robber, players will usually stop trading with any clear leader. In tandem, these two lines of attack can reduce a front-runner's progress to a crawl. Meanwhile, lagging opponents have multiple avenues for catching up.

All of this means that players must use strategy and move smartly, but even flawless play doesn't necessarily lead to easy victory. This is why kids can play with adults, or beginners with experts, and everyone stays involved.

"When a lot of us saw it, we thought this was the definition of a great game," says Pete Fenlon, CEO of Mayfair Games, Settlers' English-language distributor. "In every turn you're engaged, and even better, you're engaged in other people's turns. There are lots of little victories—as opposed to defeats—and perpetual hope. Settlers is one of those perfect storms."

If you like playing games—of any sort—and have people to play with, go pick up a copy and introduce yourself, and them, to Catan.  You'll be glad of it.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

With all due apologies to Inigo Montoya . . .

This is what the president promised us:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

So, what's he doing about it? Well, according to the Washington Times,

The Obama administration, which has boasted about its efforts to make government more transparent, is rolling back rules requiring labor unions and their leaders to report information about their finances and compensation.

The Labor Department noted in a recent disclosure that “it would not be a good use of resources” to bring enforcement actions against union officials who do not comply with conflict of interest reporting rules passed in 2007. . . .

The regulation, known as the LM-30 rule, was at the heart of a lawsuit that the AFL-CIO filed against the department last year. One of the union attorneys in the case, Deborah Greenfield, is now a high-ranking deputy at Labor.

And courtesy of Michelle Malkin:

I wrote two weeks ago about transparency killer Ron Sims, the King County WA bureaucrat nominated to the no. 2 spot at HUD by supposed transparency savior Barack Obama. Those in his backyard who know him best know the lengths Sims has gone to in order to obstruct public disclosure and stop taxpayers from finding out the truth about his office’s shady dealings.

As I mentioned in the column, blogger Stefan Sharkansky sued Sims over his refusal to release public records related to voter fraud during the 2004 contested gubernatorial election. Today, Sharkansky reports, Sims and King Count settled for $225,000, one of the largest settlements for public records violations in state history.

I think someone in the administration needs to go look up “transparent” in a good dictionary.

A pastoral comment on Sarah Palin

I forgot to mention this yesterday, what with everything else going on, but I have another post up over on Conservatives4Palin.  Counsel for leaders within the church is also of value for Christians called to leadership outside the church, since I believe exercising Christian leadership in the marketplace and in government is an important form of Christian ministry.

On this blog in history: January 26-31, 2008

Whose table?
A brief reflection on the Lord's Supper.

The Jesus heresy?
You can't be properly Christ-centered without being Trinitarian; worshiping Jesus without the Father and the Spirit isn't really worshiping Jesus at all.

Church as consumer option?
I'm looking forward to following up on this one by reading Skye Jethani's The Divine Commodity:  Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity.

Justice and mercy
On the need to affirm the justice of God, and why even his mercy is, in a way, an act of his justice.  I want to go back to this one at some point and develop it at greater length.

GCNC video

This is a catchall post for the video of the various sessions as I find it:

Tim Keller, "The Grand Demythologizer: The Gospel and Idolatry" (Acts 19:21-41)

John Piper, "Feed the Flame of God’s Gift: Unashamed Courage in the Gospel" (2 Timothy 1:1-12)

Philip Ryken, "The Pattern of Sound Words" (2 Timothy 1:13-2:13)

Mark Driscoll, "Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth" (2 Timothy 2:14-26)

K. Edward Copeland, "Shadowlands:  Pitfalls and Parodies of Gospel-Centered Ministry" (2 Timothy 3:1-9)

Bryan Chapell, "Preach the Word!" (2 Timothy 3:10-4:5)

C. J. Mahaney, "The Pastor's Charge" (1 Peter 5:1-4)

Ajith Fernando, "Gospel-Faithful Mission in the New Christendom"

Conference Panel Discussion

Ligon Duncan, "Finishing Well" (2 Timothy 4:6-22)

D. A. Carson, "That By All Means I Might Win Some: Faithfulness and Flexibility in Gospel Proclamation" (1 Corinthians 9:19-23)

On a completely different note, but also pertaining to conferences

check this out—it's Heather McDougal at her most unfetteredly creative.  I don't know if I dream dreams like this, but if I do, I wish I remembered them.

7 quick takes: GCNC edition

(GCNC being the Gospel Coalition 2009 National Conference, which I attended earlier this week, for those who might not know.  For those not familiar with 7 Quick Takes Friday, it's hosted by Jennifer F. over at Conversion Diary.)

>1<

Of all the great preachers and all the great sermons I heard (including C. J. Mahaney's, which was essentially a plenary session scheduled as a workshop), the one that—I don't want to say impressed me most, because I don't want to come across as a dispassionate observer doing some sort of ranking, and I don't want to say moved or touched me most, because different messages did that differently—but the one that I keep coming back to the most was Mark Driscoll's.  As he himself noted (and many others commented that evening), it wasn't a typical Mark Driscoll sermon, because of the text assigned; I don't know who was responsible for breaking up 2 Timothy or by what logic he was given 2 Timothy 2:14-26, but it was clearly a God appointment of a most unexpected sort.  If you want to look at the sermon outline, it's up here.

What impressed me the most about this sermon wasn't its homiletical brilliance or its practical usefulness, but rather that I do not believe I have ever in my life seen a preacher so completely submitted to—even conquered by—a biblical text.  At one point, he described the passage as an anvil on which he'd been beating his head, and he was clearly preaching under a sense of deep, deep conviction, brokenness before God, and repentance—and preaching out of that sense, bringing that powerfully alive in the room.  I've long respected Mark Driscoll, even though I've heard some harsh criticisms of him, for his devotion to the gospel, his vision for ministry, and his sheer guts (I grew up in Washington state, I know what Seattle is like); this week, I saw him model a defenseless openness to the word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit that I have never seen nor—to be completely honest—experienced before in preaching.  He didn't have to do that, on a worldly level; I suspect he felt the Spirit driving him to, but even so, the courage that it took to lay himself that bare before the Scripture, to let the word of God challenge and convict him that deeply, and then to preach that, inspired a holy awe in me.  At some point, God is no doubt going to hit me that hard through his word; at some point, maybe he did, and I refused to stand to the mark.  When that day comes (again?), I now have his example to try to live up to.  It's a great gift, if a daunting one.

>2<

Speaking of courage, I should also express my deep appreciation for John Piper, who summarized the main point of 2 Timothy 1:1-12 (and by extension, he argued, of the whole letter; I can't speak for anyone else, but he convinced me) as "Timothy, keep feeding the white-hot flame of God's gift in you, namely, the gift of unashamed courage to speak openly of Christ and suffer for his gospel."  I appreciate him because he wasn't just preaching about his topic, he was preaching it, and preaching through it.  He declared,

If you ask Paul, “How do I feed the white-hot flame of God’s gift of unashamed courage to speak openly of Christ and to suffer for the gospel?” he answers, By the power of God (verse 8)—the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. And if you ask, “How do I express the fullness of this power?” he answers in 2:1, Be empowered by the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And if you ask him, “How do I receive this ongoing grace?” he answers, Timothy, this grace is coming to you right now through the word of God. God’s grace is coming to you in my words. “I have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that I might understand the things freely given me by God. And I impart them in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit” (adapted from 1 Corinthians 2:12-13).

These aren’t ordinary words, Timothy. They are God’s words. You were with me on the beach in Miletus. Do you remember what I said as I left? I said, “I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is powerful to build you up [in courage!] and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified” (Acts 20:32).

The answer, Timothy, is that you feed the white-hot flame of unashamed courage to suffer for the gospel by preaching to yourself the foundational truths of this letter. And you feed the courage of your people the same way. God has ordained that his sovereign grace comes to you with power for unashamed courage through my God-given words.

(That, note, is from the posted text, not a transcript.)  Now, it's one thing to say those words, and there are other preachers who could do that.  It's something else again to preach them as if you believe them, not only in theory, not at some point in the future, not as a possibility, but for that moment, for that sermon, for the people to whom you're preaching—and that's what the Rev. Dr. Piper did, passionately, in the expectation that what he was preaching about, God would do in us.  I don't think I've ever felt so much in the crosshairs of a sermon in my life, and I'm not sure I ever will again.

>3<

I'm very grateful to have been present for C. J. Mahaney's talk, but I have both a confession and a small regret about that.  I was there looking forward to his listed topic (he'd originally told the organizers that he would speak on "Trinitarian Pastoral Ministry"), but that's not what he spoke on; he actually spoke on "The Pastor's Charge," from 1 Peter 5:1-4, and if I'd known that, I probably would have been in another workshop.  I'm glad I wasn't, though.  I do regret the fact that I had too much blood in my caffeine stream—I'd only had one can of Pepsi and no tea all day, which just wasn't enough caffeine at that point, and I would have known that if I'd thought about it—and so I had a hard time shifting gears mentally to catch up to the Rev. Mahaney; I even started to crash a bit early on.  By the grace of God, though, he sent me a second wind, and I'm grateful for that gift, because it was a beautiful and encouraging message on shepherding God's flock; I'll definitely be meditating on this going forward, and I plan to watch the video so that I can catch things I missed in my initial mental sluggishness.  Jared Wilson asked on Twitter, "Anyone else feel like Mahaney was preaching specifically to them?" and I think it's safe to say that many of us there did—probably most of us, at one point or another.

I particularly appreciate this—he was quoting someone, but I didn't get down whom:  "The shepherd must know he is one of the Shepherd's needy and loved sheep."  Amen.

>4<

After Tim Keller's address on Acts 19:21-41, which opened the conference, the thought crossed my mind that I could go home right then and the conference would have been worth the money.  I had no intention of doing anything that silly, of course, but if I had, it would have been.  I've done a bit of posting on some of the idols in our culture, and in the church in this country, but before Tuesday afternoon I'd never thought quite so starkly about the fact that Paul always challenged the idols of the people to whom he spoke, and that we cannot expect to see the transforming power of the gospel in our churches if we don't do the same.  As Ben Patterson likes to put it, we can't just tell people what to say "yes" to, we have to tell them what that means they have to say "no" to.  

The Rev. Dr. Keller did a brilliant job of laying out what it means to discern, expose, and destroy the idols we face—in our own lives, no less than in the church and the culture—and how we do that; and he was unsparing in warning us of the risk we take in so doing, making the point multiple times that idolatry in all its forms is violent at its core.  As radical feminists would say of patriarchy, idolatry is founded on violence, and rests on violence for its legitimation.  There was a lot of wonderful material in his message, but I think I most appreciated his prescription for dealing with idolatry:  rather than trying to hack away at the loves that have become idols in people's lives, help them to love Jesus more, and thus restore those other loves to their proper place and proportion.

>5<

The pastoral application of his message made itself known that evening in one of the random conversations I had (and at any event like this, the random conversations are among the joys of being there); I wound up talking with a woman who was worried about a friend back home who I guess has been doing some heavy wrestling with despair.  As we were talking about this woman's concern for her friend and her efforts to be an agent of grace in this friend's life—she was really struggling hard to find a way to pierce the armor of her friend's despair—we remembered the Rev. Dr. Keller's comment about people who say that they know God has forgiven them but that they can't forgive themselves:  he argued that people who talk that way do so because they're in thrall to an idol, and the idol of course won't forgive them because idols never do.  What you need to do, he contended, is to identify the idol, expose it, and destroy it.  When this came up in our conversation, this woman's face lit with a joyful smile, because she knew what her friend's idol was, and that word showed her what she needed to do to set her friend free to really hear the gospel of grace.  I'm praying for her for the success of her ministry.

>6<

I greatly appreciated the panel discussion Wednesday evening, for a lot of reasons.  One rather odd one is that Ligon Duncan, one of the participants, has a massive pulpit presence—I don't know that he's actually that big a man, but the way he's built, and with that deep, powerful Southern voice of his with his grand, grave cadences—which I think combined with his reputation to work against him with some of the folks there (judging by the semi-sotto voce conversation going on behind me through the first chunk of his message); he doesn't exactly project humility in the pulpit, and it was good to see the humble side of him in the evening conversation before he rose to preach the next day.

More than that, though, there was a lot of experience, and a lot of humble wisdom, and a lot of hard-earned lessons up on that stage that evening, which the participants shared in a remarkably open fashion.  It was comforting to hear from these successful veteran pastors that times of brokenness and failure aren't necessarily disqualifying, but that brokenness and failure are among the things God uses to make us useful; coming just a few months after I heard Craig Barnes say much the same thing, and combined with their firm testimony that Jesus will never abandon us in such times—and that if we will rely utterly on him and his word, that will be enough—it came as a real word of grace.  There was a note of rue in Crawford Loritts' voice as he quoted an old proverb (one I'd never heard before) to the effect that "God never uses anything that comes to him together," and went on to describe suffering as God's marinade for our souls; but there was also a deep faith that had learned to trust God through suffering, and I greatly appreciated it.

>7<

One of the real blessings of this conference was the way in which I felt, time and again, Paul's heart for Timothy—not just indirectly, but coming from the speakers and directed toward us, and especially those of us who are younger in ministry.  John Piper really set the tone on that, and it carried through the whole conference, in various ways.  (In Mark Driscoll's case, as a younger preacher who felt the challenge of his assigned text deeply, he really preached his text as Timothy, as the one receiving the message, rather than from Paul's position.)  Other than the Rev. Dr. Piper, I think I felt it the most strongly from Ligon Duncan, speaking on 2 Timothy 4:6-22, as he shared Paul's appeal with us to do everything possible to be sure we cross the finish line.  He didn't soft-pedal the fact that that isn't easy; as Paul did for Timothy, he made no bones of the truth that just because we're faithful to God doesn't mean we won't be opposed, doesn't mean we won't be betrayed, doesn't mean we won't be abandoned and end up alone.  After all, that's what happened to Paul, and it's what happened to Jesus, and if we're following in their footsteps, why should we expect any different?  But the saving grace is that Jesus has been there, and so he was with Paul in his suffering, and he will be with us as well when those times come; his Spirit will be with us, through whom he will give us what we need to run the race, to fight the good fight, to cross the finish line, if we will just rely on him.

What math class taught me about pastoral ministry

Show your work.  Process matters—it's more important that you tried to solve the problem the right way than it is that you got the right result, because it's more predictive of whether or not you'll get the next answer right, and the one after that, and the one after that.  What matters isn't coming to the right conclusion by whatever method works for you, but whether or not you understand the real problem and how it works; shortcuts may seem to work at first, but in the long run they just mess you up and put you behind.

Pastoral ministry likewise isn't primarily about getting the "right answer" to produce the desired results; it isn't about whatever seems to work.  Rather, it's about all the things that lie behind that.  When you get right down to it, being a shepherd in the flock of Christ (in the flock, because even as we serve as shepherds, we're still ourselves sheep) isn't about doing, it's about being; skills are valuable and important, but in the last analysis, it's not really about the skills you have, it's about your character and who you are.

To be sure, doing is involved, because being is expressed in doing—character is not only expressed but realized (one might even say incarnated) in action, and to say (as I would) that pastoral ministry is a way of life is necessarily to say that it involves the activities and patterns of behavior that make up that way of life.  All true, and all important.  That said, you could have someone who possesses all the skills and does all the activities of a pastor, who has the title of pastor and the paychecks to prove it, who is in no real sense a pastor.  In point of fact, all too many churches do (and some of those churches are quite large and successful on the outside).

This is one reason why—and this is going to sound quite odd and countercultural, and strangely connected—I don't agree with those who bemoan the language requirements which are set by some of our denominations and seminaries.  I've read and heard many pastors treat their knowledge of Greek and Hebrew as functionally useless, and the time spent learning those languages as time that could have been better spent on "useful," "practical" things like more counseling classes and classes in administration; I think such attitudes and complaints are misguided and unprofitable.

Now, in saying this I don't disparage counseling classes, if they're the right sort, or the value of administrative ministry; I'm sufficiently ungifted as an administrator to have no doubt of the importance of such tasks, and the people who taught me pastoral counseling gave me a great deal of insight into how people function, both as individuals and as groups.  I'm particularly grateful for the introduction to family systems theory; nearly a decade on, I'm still working to really understand it (I need to reread Friedman's Generation to Generation again here soon), but what I have grasped has been incredibly valuable over the years.

I say that particularly because that work and that study has been valuable in more ways than just the work of counseling; it's not just about programs and skills and checklists, it helps me understand people, and that's important in everything I do (as it is in everything anyone does).  Thus, for instance, it's made me a better preacher, because you can't preach effectively over any significant period of time to people you don't know.  You can't really minister effectively in any way to people you don't know, and so anything that helps you come to know and understand people is of great worth across the whole range of pastoral ministry.  It's a kind of knowledge and understanding that forms us and shapes us as people to lead and care for other people, and that's the kind of learning that helps us to be good pastors.

The same is true of the time and effort spent learning Greek and Hebrew.  This is, as I said, an odd and countercultural claim, in the face of the many pastors who disparage their ability to decline eimi or distinguish between the Niphal, the Hiphil and the Hitpael, but it's true nevertheless.  The disparagement of language skills rests on two assumptions:  one, that they are only useful in preaching, and two, that one can preach just as effectively without them.  I'm firmly convinced that both of these assumptions are false, and for the same reason:  we're called to lead from the Scriptures (as John Piper and others reminded me this week), and to do that, it's at least as important that we understand the Scriptures from which we're leading as it is  that we understand the people whom we're leading.  As such, anything that helps us go deeper into the word of God is of great worth in every part of pastoral ministry, including but going far beyond preaching.

Since the root and foundation of leadership is self-leadership, this begins with the effect of the word of God on ourselves, in forming and shaping our souls.  I will grant, certainly, that if working with the language is just an academic exercise, if you're only open to the word of God on an intellectual level as a kind of linguistic jigsaw puzzle, then yes, the intricacies of Greek morphology and Hebrew grammar will be a barren field indeed, sowed with the salt of skepticism and watered with the blood of indifference; but the fault there lies not in the language, but in the student, and no one who approaches the text in such a way is likely to find any life in it no matter what they do.  At that point, the only ministry that remains is worldly ministry, for the heart of truly pastoral ministry—the gospel—isn't present, and isn't likely to be.

The reason for knowing the original languages, for studying the cultures into which the original authors wrote (as in, for instance, the invaluable work of Dr. Kenneth E. Bailey), and for other learning of that sort is that it makes us better able to read the word of God and study it seriously.  The value in that isn't in the information we gather, but in the way that information sharpens our eyes, opens our ears, and pricks our hearts to see God, to hear him speak to us, and to increase our love for him.  The purpose in all this is to clear out those things that insulate us from the gospel, and to intentionally open ourselves up for God to work on our hearts and minds through it (including breaking down all those things that we use to defend ourselves from the gospel).  The goal isn't to be a scholar and be able to write papers, though that may have its uses:  the goal is that, in the words of Richard of Chichester, we may know Christ more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly, day by day by day.

The key here is that if we truly seek to be ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ, if we want to be pastors in any meaningful sense, we need to remember that our ministry isn't redemptive—only the ministry of Christ is redemptive—and that we really have nothing of eternal value to give the people we serve except Jesus Christ and him crucified, resurrected, and ascended; we need to repent of the attitude Crawford Loritts exposed and dissected so brilliantly and mercilessly during the panel discussion at the GCNC:  "There is an arrogance in the preachers of this generation in the tacit assumption that God is inarticulate."  I would only add that that arrogance is multiplied in the implicit assumption that we as mere human beings are capable of making up for that presumed deficit in God.

To draw from the Rev. Dr. Piper's plenary message at the GCNC Tuesday night, we can only live the life to which Jesus calls us by the power of God, which is by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, which comes to us through the word of God; it's by his word that he speaks his grace into our lives so that we would experience and live into (and out of) the power of our redemption, and so it's that word and that alone that we should seek to give those whom we serve—indeed, it's the only way we can serve them—in administration and counseling no less than in the pulpit.  To do that, we need to honor our first responsibility as in fact our first responsibility:  to marinate ourselves in the word of God, let it soak into us in every way possible, in thoughtful reading and reflective thought, and of course in constant prayer.

As a result, I think the criticism that seminaries spend too much time on "academic" things like languages and exegesis and not enough on "practical" things like counseling is misguided, for two reasons.  First, the latter are, in reality, applications of the former, and as any good preacher knows, one must first present the truth before one can apply it.  Second, the former are things which can in fact be taught in a classroom setting; the latter, I don't believe can be—they must be learned by doing.  (The same is true of preaching, but one can do preaching in a classroom setting and learn some of what one needs to know from that; this isn't true of most of the other applied pastoral arts.)  The most that a seminary can do is train one in the use of the tools for these aspects of ministry and give one a sense for how to learn in the doing (which is what, among other things, field education is supposed to be for, though in my experience it's rather hit and miss as to whether it succeeds in that purpose); to become good at such matters takes time and experience and the lessons of failure and the faithful wounds of trusted friends and colleagues in ministry as we minister together.

It takes all these things to shape our mindset and form our souls and give us the opportunity to develop the confidence to take on the responsibility which God has entrusted to us to be heralds and ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ—which is, in the end, the confidence that God is faithful even when we're not, and that his gospel is sufficient even though we're not, and that his love is enough even when ours isn't.  The only way to be a pastor is to attend to the process—to what God is doing in our souls and in the souls of the flock he has placed in our care—and to be a pastor, trusting him for everything.  There are no shortcuts, and there is no substitute.  Just show your work, and let God be the answer.

First reflections on the last few days

I'm back home from the Gospel Coalition's 2009 National Conference (henceforth GCNC), Entrusted with the Gospel:  Living the Vision of 2 Timothy, and I have somewhat mixed feelings about that.  On the one hand, I wish it could have been longer.  The presenters were, as one would expect, phenomenal, and I'll have some things to say about the various messages over the next little while; as well, I had some wonderful conversations over the course of the conference.  In particular, I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting Jared Wilson in person and talking with him a bit, which I thoroughly enjoyed—it's no surprise to find that he's as much a man of the gospel and as appealing a person face to face as he is in print, but that's no less a joy for all that—and of running into (via pure God appointment) Dave Moody, one of my classmates at Regent and also a fellow pastor in the PC(USA), whom I always appreciated but hadn't seen in years.  Put all together, it was wonderfully refreshing and energizing, and I do wish it could keep going.

On the other hand, I already have more than I could absorb in a month of Sundays, and if it did keep going, I'd overload my processing capacity before much longer.  It's very human, confronted with a pleasure (and the pleasures of this conference were sharp and deep), to want to prolong it—but deep pleasures are a heady wine indeed, and not only is it true that the body can only absorb so much, the spirit can only absorb so much, before it falls to staggering.

It's worth noting, though, that I don't mean this in quite the way that many probably assume.  At one of the workshops I attended, the presenter spoke of "information overload," but that's not really what I'm talking about; I didn't feel that at all.  Yes, there was a lot of information, and a lot of ideas, and I'm sure that I'll spend a fair bit of time thinking about them, and probably writing about some of them, and that over time they'll make their way into sermons; but I never felt like my head was overstuffed.  I told someone Tuesday night that I felt like I'd been stretched in several directions—but it wasn't my mind that felt stretched, it was my soul.

I think, actually, that the conference served to illustrate a point made by Ligon Duncan, that preaching is not merely information transfer—that while certainly information is transferred, that takes place in order to serve the broader purpose.  The principal point of preaching is that God has chosen to work through it for our transformation; Jesus meets us in his word, and his Holy Spirit operates through it to grow and change us, to the glory and pleasure of God the Father.  What I experienced these last few days wasn't primarily intellectual and informational, though I certainly learned a great deal, and that in itself will take a lot of time and thought to process; rather, it was holistic, God working on my soul in the fullest-orbed sense of that word as the whole of my life in and before him.  Like I said, I feel . . . stretched, and in some ways I didn't expect, and am still feeling out.  This is a good thing.  God is good.

Crown and throne

Crown Him the Lord of love, behold His hands and side,
Those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.
No angel in the sky can fully bear that sight,
But downward bends his burning eye at mysteries so bright.

Worship isn't about our experience, but that doesn't mean our experience is meaningless; and I will tell you that standing to sing that Tuesday night with 3300 brothers and sisters in Christ, all of us singing at the top of our lungs, gave me chills.  I have a sense of what it means that the Lord is enthroned on the praises of his people, because I could feel it, just a little.

All hail, Redeemer, hail! For Thou has died for me;
Thy praise shall never, never fail throughout eternity.

Let all the thirsty come

“Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters;
and he who has no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live;
and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast, sure love for David.”

—Isaiah 55:1-3 (ESV)

The really interesting thing about this is that this invitation and this promise are offered to people who were already outwardly members of the people of God. The nations aren’t excluded here, to be sure—the invitation is given to all who are thirsty—but there’s no explicit summons to them, either, and the invitation is framed in terms of what God did in and for David. The point, one which Isaiah’s been making all along, is clear: though Israel has heard the law, and has heard the prophets, and they have all kinds of head knowledge about God, that hasn’t translated for them into any kind of real relationship with God. They consider him their God because they’re Israelites and he’s the God of Israel, and doesn’t everybody in this country worship God?—but many of them haven’t answered his invitation, and maybe haven’t even really heard it before. They haven’t learned that there’s more to their faith than just being a faithful templegoer.

Indeed, there’s far more. The challenge to us of Isaiah’s expansive invitation is—do we still need to hear it? Have we really accepted it, or are we no different than the Israelites? In this country, it’s very easy to be a Christian, and that means there are a lot of folks who are outwardly Christian for all the wrong reasons, with no inward reality, no real faith in Christ. The church has to shoulder a lot of the blame for that, of course, because there are a lot of churches in this country that don’t give people God’s invitation, that don’t challenge people with the call of the gospel; it’s easier not to, after all, easier just to give people what they already know they want to hear. Even for the church, it’s easier to serve junk food. But underneath and through it all, God’s invitation still goes out: “Come, all of you who hunger and thirst; come to me, that you may live.” And we need to ask ourselves: have we really done that, are we really living in God? Or do we still need to accept it?

(Excerpted from “The Invitation”)

New gig

The folks over at C4P have been kind enough to invite me to join their team, and I've been honored to accept; my first post is up.  I started off working from my post on the citizen punditry, and (as is the way) it evolved from there.

The temptation and peril of theologized politics

The question of the proper interrelationship between religion and politics in this country is a complex one.  There are those who argue that, essentially, there should be no relationship between them—that religion should be kept rigidly separate from politics; but as I wrote last month,

There’s a certain superficial appeal to this suggestion, but a little more thought shows it for the discriminatory idea it really is. Why, after all, should non-religious people be permitted to vote on the basis of their deepest convictions, but religious people be forbidden to do the same? Any attempt to make religion the problem is ultimately an attempt to privilege one mode of thought (the secular) over others, and thus is essentially antithetical to the nature and purpose of the American experiment.

That doesn't mean, however, that an uncritical fusion of the two is a good thing, either; as I also noted in that post, that tends to result in religion becoming the handmaiden of politics. When our faith becomes “a tool to advance a political agenda,” and as such is no longer “free to critique and correct that agenda,” what we have is in fact a betrayal of Christian faith; we have the political heresy that I labeled “theologized politics.”

Now, it should be obvious why politicians encourage such a thing and seek to make every use of it they can; the short-term political benefits are undeniable.  This approach essentially seeks to mobilize Christianity, with its adherents and their assets, as a political force to accomplish the political purposes of one party or the other. The goal is to deploy the church (or as much of it as possible, at any rate) as foot soldiers for the party in this or that political struggle. It’s an effective way to rouse people to active political participation, and to win not merely votes but enthusiastic and committed support. The theological side of the equation, however, is problematic, because the political side is primary; this results in a purely instrumental view of Christian faith, one which “make[s] men treat Christianity as a means,” as C. S. Lewis put it. It moves us from valuing social justice (or any other good) because God demands that of us, which is a good thing, to “the stage where [we value] Christianity because it may produce social justice.” This is a serious problem, because God “will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop.”

The problem with theologizing politics is that it can be a good political strategy in the short term, but in the long term it has a toxic effect on both the church and the political process. One negative consequence for the church should be obvious: if Christians come to value their faith primarily for the excellent arguments it offers for their chosen political agenda, they will value it less for everything else—and this is not good for the church. Beyond this, it’s bad for our spiritual health, in that it’s essentially a replacement of true faith with something else. It’s bad for the community life of the church, because that “something else” is something outside the church, and fundamentally distinct from it. It could well also be financially bad for the church: if the primary goal is the advancement of a political agenda, then contributions should primarily go to that agenda, rather than to the local congregation. And finally, it’s bad for the witness of the church, because when the church becomes identified with one party, then those who don’t support that party will view the church as the enemy and respond to it with hostility.

The toxic effect of this approach on our political system in this country may be less apparent, but it’s still very real. The problem is that good politics requires a mix of passion and dispassion. One must care about one’s own positions and believe in one’s own ideas enough to want to articulate them and fight for them; one must be passionate enough about the problems in this country and committed enough to one’s proposed solutions to be willing to put the work in to address those problems and implement those solutions. At the same time, however, one must have the necessary dispassion to be able to step back and evaluate those ideas and solutions when they aren’t working; to be able to disengage from one’s own positions enough to consider what may be learned from someone else’s; and to be able to work with those with whom one disagrees, to come to compromises when necessary, and to make common cause when the time is right. When religion is brought uncritically into the political mix, only as a way of supporting one’s own positions (and not as a means of critiquing them), it is excellent at stirring people to passion, but not so helpful in creating the dispassion necessary to balance that passion. The result is something which has been aptly called “the politics of inflammation.”

At this point, again, someone might argue that the solution is to remove religion from politics; and again, the response needs to be made that the true solution is not to break that connection, but to repair it. What is needed is to break ourselves of the habit of using the language of Christian faith to support what we have already decided we believe, and to teach ourselves instead to use our faith to critique our politics, and ultimately to rebuild our political convictions on the ground of our faith.

Sarah Palin for the Hoosier unborn

I would have loved to have been down in Evansville to hear RNC Chairman Michael Steele (even after his recent bout with Foot-in-Mouth disease, I still like the guy) and Gov. Palin, but there was no way I could justify the time; and really, it was an event for the folks in Vandenburgh County, and it would have felt like horning in.  So here's the next best thing, courtesy of the folks at C4P—the complete video of her speech in Evansville, beginning with Chairman Steele's introduction:

Note on building a movement

Quoth Robert Stacy McCain,

So if you're a conservative out there in Ohio or Florida or Colorado who's waiting for RNC HQ to save the GOP, you're part of the problem. If you want to be part of the solution, you've got to become an activist. You've got to organize.

Create a movement, and don't worry about who the leader of the movement is. Be your own leader.

Wise words.  One thing though, Mr. McCain:  We're doing it.  We're doing it one flash at a time.

Update:  David Bozeman has some good thoughts on this as well.

One thumb up, one thumb down

I've been meaning to post on the recent pirate attack on the Maersk Alabama and its aftermath, for a couple reasons.  First, President Obama deserves credit for giving the go-ahead for military action; I believe the appropriate response to pirates, terrorists, and anyone else who would hold innocent lives in pawn for their own benefit is best illustrated by the Israeli raid on Entebbe:  no mercy, no quarter, no hesitation.

But second, that requires one other thing:  no negotiation.  Here, in my opinion, is a major black mark on this administration; to first offer to negotiate and then strike was a deeply problematic move, for reasons that Cornell's William Jacobson lays out:

There are two choices when negotiating with hostage takers/pirates. One is the Israeli model of no negotiation. The only thing to be negotiated is the life of the hostage taker. Money, free passage, and other benefits are not on the table. The purpose of this approach is to deter further hostage takers, even if it means the death of the hostage.

The other model is the model of negotiating over almost any benefit, as long as the hostage is freed safely. This is the model Obama initially appeared to follow with the pirates. But if one believes the spin coming out of the White House, then negotiation was a ruse to buy time.

The problem is not in this case, which ended successfully, but in the next hostage taking situation. If one is going to follow a negotiation approach, the trust of the hostage takers in the negotiation process is key. If hostage takers believe negotiation is a ruse, then the hostage is in more danger. Words cannot be just words in a negotiation.

So negotiating as a ruse is the worst of all alternatives. It does not have the deterrent effect of the Israeli approach, or the hostage-safety effect of the negotiation approach.

This point was actually illustrated quite nicely on last Friday's episode of NUMB3RS, for those who follow that show.  The likely result of this approach by the administration will be what the pirates are already threatening:  escalation.  This tactic worked, this time, but it won't work again—and as a consequence of its use, the pirates are much more likely to preemptively kill any Americans they take.

The ironic thing about this is that, all in all, the pirates are probably the best allies we have in the Horn of Africa.

Piracy is not a strategic threat to the US, it is a big problem for Europe and Asia but not for us. It wasn't until Asia and Europe realized we weren't going to solve this problem for them that they stepped up themselves.

Terrorism in Somalia has long driven Navy operations off that coast. On one side, we have a high visibility piracy problem that does not threaten the interests of the United States directly, at all, and our only current national interest regarding the piracy issue is one man with 4 guys in an orange boat 200 yards off the bow of the USS Bainbridge (DDG 96). There is a national economic interest, but the impact to date has not risen to a level that has created a serious concern among global leaders to the point they are willing to commit serious resources toward solving the problem.

On the other side of the Somalia problem, we have the terror problem no one else in the world is interested in doing anything about. And in the middle is the reality that while both the pirates and terrorists are operating in the same black market space, the pirates and terror groups don't like each other.

Then there is another problem. What if we support a government strong enough to remove piracy, but too weak to do anything about the terrorism cells? Piracy is what has the international community involved in the problems of Somalia right now, if that goes away, we are left with the bigger threat to our national interests and no one internationally to help.

In other words, the pirates aren't hurting us that much, but they are hurting the Somali terrorists that are a much bigger threat to us.  I don't like the idea that we might be better off working with them than fighting them—allying ourselves with thugs has never worked out all that well in the past—but from a Realpolitik point of view, it actually makes a lot of sense.  Really, who else is there?  That being the case, even if we leave that aside (as, morally, I believe we should), it does still suggest that our focus in Somalia should continue to be where it has been:  not on fighting pirates, but on stopping terrorists.

HT (for the last article quoted):  Smitty

Political machines hate reformers

That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of most of the news stories about Sarah Palin in recent months. It's the reason for the wrangling between her and the Democrats over the Juneau-area state senate seat; it's the reason for the fight over her AG nominee, Wayne Anthony Ross; it's the reason for the sniping from machine tools in the state legislature like Fairbanks RINO Jay Ramras; it's the reason the New York Times paid a visit to Alaska. This is what all the badmouthing boils down to.

Obviously, the stories about members of her family are not, in and of themselves, in this category; however, the fact that the MSM is more interested in the likes of Levi Johnston than they are in, say, President Obama's child-rapist half-brother Samson is also a reflection of the fact that political machines don't like reformers. Now, I don't happen to think that Samson Obama ought to be a major political story, or indeed that he has any greater significance than anyone else who likes to rape 13-year-old girls, which is one reason I haven't blogged about him; Barack Obama is human, and therefore a sinner like all the rest of us, and the same is true of his family, and some of those folks are going to be worse sinners than others. What matters is who he is and what he does. However, the same is true of Gov. Palin, even with respect to her children—anyone who thinks it's possible to be a good-enough parent to ensure that your 17-year-old daughter is immune to the kinds of bad decisions and sinful acts to which 17-year-olds are prone is probably expecting that check from Nigeria any day now.

If Bristol Palin deserves attention from the MSM, well, what Samson Obama did was a heck of a lot worse—by that standard, he ought to be on front pages as far as the eye can see. And he isn't. Why? Because of ideology, to be sure, but also because President Obama doesn't threaten the machine—he's of the machine, he owes it, and he can be trusted to behave accordingly. Gov. Palin isn't, and doesn't, and can't, and so every bit of influence she gains is a direct threat to the (bi-partisan) political establishment that can neither predict nor control her.

This goes all the way back to the very beginning of her political career. (Note: much of this is covered in R. A. Mansour's excellent post “Who Is Sarah Palin?”) In her first step into politics, she won a seat on the city council of Wasilla. At that point, she had the backing of her mayor. Did she repay his support by being a loyal supporter of his administration, following the expected rules of political patronage? No, she didn't; when she decided that he was governing badly and in a manner that she considered bad for the community, she challenged him, ran against him, and defeated him. He's still complaining about her ingratitude.

Later, after she lost the race for lieutenant governor in 2004, the new Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, one of the entrenched leaders of the oil-money-fueled Alaska GOP political machine, appointed her as ethics supervisor and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. One of her fellow commissioners was Randy Ruedrich, who also chaired the Alaska Republican Party; when she discovered he was guilty of ethics violations, she blew the whistle on him, even though she ended up having to quit the commission (giving up a six-figure salary) to do so. Gov. Murkowski backed Ruedrich, but he ended up paying a significant fine for his actions. In 2006, at least in part because of this and other dubious actions on Gov. Murkowski's part, she ran against him as a Republican but a party outsider, and beat him.

If you're keeping score, that's twice that she was recruited by a Republican incumbent to be a good little foot soldier, declined to be a good little foot soldier in the face of her political patron's bad conduct, and knocked said incumbent out of office. Those of you with a taste for old political fiction will probably understand why, even more than Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, the politician of whom Gov. Palin reminds me most is Orrin Knox, the fictional senior U. S. Senator from Illinois (small irony there) in Allen Drury's Advise and Consent. When it comes to dealing with her own party, she has definitely acted in line with Sen. Knox's motto: “I don’t give a ---- about being liked, but I intend to be respected.”

Now, up until about August 28 of last year, none of this posed any particular problems for the Democratic political machine, either in Alaska or nationally. You see, the national political machine's biggest concern (in both parties) for holding statehouses has to do with the redistricting that takes place every decade, and Alaska has only one House seat and isn't likely to gain a second one; as such, that doesn't apply. Democratic interest in Alaska, then, was primarily focused on trying to unseat the state's senior U. S. Senator, the corrupt but wily and very powerful Ted Stevens, and its lone House member, Rep. Don Young—and in that effort, Gov. Palin was a great help, which made her the Democrats' favorite Republican. Sure, they had every intention of trying as hard as they could to unseat her in 2010, but at that point, she was more a help to them than a hindrance. She'd worked with Democrats in the Alaska legislature to replace laws that had essentially been written by oil-company lobbyists—specifically, the tax code on resource extraction and a gas-pipeline bill—with laws that were better for the people and state of Alaska. Back then, while Alaska Democrats weren't above trying to take her down, they were happy to give Gov. Palin the credit for killing the “Bridge to Nowhere,” because it helped them make their case against the Alaskans who really mattered in her party.

And then John McCain named her his running mate—and everything changed. Suddenly, she was the Alaskan who mattered in her party, because she mattered in the presidential race; she gave the McCain campaign an energy it hadn't had since the New Hampshire primary—the 2000 New Hampshire primary, that is—and thus became Public Enemy #1 for the national Democratic machine, and so for the Alaska Democratic machine as well. Conservatives4Palin has chronicled at length how the Obama campaign's officials in Alaska, folks like State Senators Hollis French and Kim Elton, tried to bring her down (even going so far as to promise an “October surprise”), and how St. Sen. Elton got his payoff for his actions in support of the Obama campaign.

That, by the way, was supposed to be a cascading payoff; the Alaska Democratic Party machine thought it could giftwrap St. Sen. Elton's seat for St. Rep. Beth Kerttula (one of those Democrats who'd supported Gov. Palin until she became a threat to the Obama campaign), and then giftwrap her seat in turn for Kim Metcalfe, who chairs the local party in Juneau. But Gov. Palin doesn't appreciate machine politics when practiced by either party—she's willing to work with Democrats, but she's as opposed to the Democratic machine as she is to the Republican machine, and so she's been refusing to play along with their back-room maneuvers.

Gov. Palin is now in a difficult, though probably inevitable, position: she is opposed by a bi-partisan coalition of the machine politicians in Alaska, who oppose each other on policy but share a common higher loyalty to the old boys' club and the perks and procedures to which they're accustomed. Gov. Palin has the support of a strong majority of the Alaskan people, but only a minority of the state's politicians. This has meant that the state legislature has been in full foot-dragging mode through the entire session—a fact which they now intend, via the Democratic Party PR department (aka the MSM, specifically the New York Times), to blame on her.

That the MSM will coordinate with the Democratic/Republican machine in Alaska on this is, I believe, a sign of their deepest agenda here—not just their general bias against conservatives, but a deeper bias yet: as much as they bleat about "speaking truth to power," they are not the outside critics of the machine that they pretend to be. Rather, they are a part of the machine, they are inside the corridors of power, that's where they want to be, and they really have no true understanding or interest of the world outside those corridors.

This is true, I believe, even of the conservatives within the MSM, which is why a lot of the elite conservative writers have been almost as unfair to Gov. Palin as their liberal colleagues; and if a Democratic version of Gov. Palin were ever to emerge, a true reformer who bucked the party machine, I don't think the likes of Eleanor Clift and Paul Krugman would be any kinder to that individual than the likes of David Brooks and David Frum have been to Gov. Palin. The initial MSM reaction to the appointment of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to Hillary Clinton's vacant seat in the U.S. Senate certainly supports that thought.

In other words, what we're seeing here is the utter bankruptcy of the MSM as an "independent free press"; they are nothing of the kind. They are organs of elite opinion, constituent parts of the political machine. This, more than ideology, is the reason why they're so determined to bring Gov. Palin down, because she represents a threat to their worldview on a more basic level even than ideology: she threatens their sense of their own superiority, and the rules by which they operate, and the perks and the comfort zone which those rules ensure, just as much as she threatens all those things for the machine politicians she's been relentlessly at work to overcome and bring down.

This is one of the reasons why we need the continued rise of the citizen punditry via the blogosphere—we need to reclaim the national discussion on issues from the machine almost as much as we need to reclaim our government. (I say "almost" because whatever its failings, talk radio has also been outside the political machine, for the most part.) And it's why we need to support Gov. Palin, and why I so much appreciate the independents and moderate Democrats who do, because if she goes down to defeat—if the Alaska political machine defeats her, or the national Democratic machine defeats her—the odds that someone else will try to buck the machine and bring real political reform to this country approach zero . . . from beneath.

Remember this, as you read the stories about Sarah Palin: remember that she's spent her career trying to reform the machine politics of Alaska, and remember that political machines hate reformers—and they're the ones who have the money, and the media. All Gov. Palin has is the truth, and the support of those of us who are fed up with the machine. Remember that, and don't believe the hate.

Update: Welcome to folks dropping by from C4P; my posting has tilted toward religious topics in the last week or so, but even if that isn't up your alley, you might also find my post in defense of the citizen punditry of particular interest. I hope to have a reflection on Gov. Palin's visit to Evansville up in the next day or two as well.

Seven stanzas for Easter

I'm not sure why I didn't think to post this earlier; John Updike is best known for his prose, but this poem is a jewel.

Seven Stanzas for Easter

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

Jesus victorious

Atheists often talk about “the problem of evil” as though it were primarily an intellectual issue requiring an explanation, and then they ding God for not providing an explanation they deem adequate.  The truth is, though, the philosophical problem of evil is secondary—the real problem is much more basic:  what are we going to do about it?  God doesn’t offer us an explanation for evil, but that doesn’t mean he has no answer for it.  Jesus is God’s answer to the problem of the evil and sin in this world; in him, God gave us, not the answer we thought we wanted, but the answer we actually needed: he offered us himself. He came down to live our life, to identify with us, to endure the darkness of our fallen world with us, and to defeat that darkness, not with its own weapons, but with light.

When people ask, “Where’s God when it hurts—in the tragedies we see so often, and the large-scale injustices of this world?” they often assume the answer must be “Nowhere”; after all, if there really is a God out there, and he actually heard our suffering, wouldn’t he do something about it? But the truth is, as Easter shows us, God has heard our suffering—he has heard every cry of anguish, felt every blow and every betrayal, and caught every tear in the palm of his hand—and in Jesus Christ, he has done everything about it. In Jesus, he came down to share our suffering with us, drinking that cup to the very dregs. He took the weight of all our sin on his shoulders—the entirety of human evil and human suffering, of all the brokenness and wrongness of the world—and he carried it to the cross, its cruel thorns digging into his forehead, its sharp splinters shredding his back; and there, for the guilt of all the crimes he never committed, he died.

He died for us. He died to pay the price for all the sins we’ve ever committed and ever will commit, for all the pain we’ve endured and all the pain we’ve caused, for all the darkness and brokenness and agony and grief in our poor misshapen world. Our sins deserved death, and more—even our death wouldn’t be enough punishment; not only could we never do enough in this life to make up for them, we couldn’t even die enough to even the balance. Morally, we were in the same position as so many mortgages these days: we were under water, owing more than we were worth. Only Jesus’ death—the death of one whose life was of infinite value and infinite goodness, the life of God himself—only his death could be enough to pay that price, to satisfy the demands of justice for the sins of the world, so that salvation could come to all the nations.

But if his death was sufficient to pay the price of redemption, it still wasn’t enough to accomplish the work; nor was it enough to satisfy God’s promise to his servant. “See my servant,” God says in Isaiah 52: “he shall accomplish his purpose; he will rise and be lifted up, and be exalted most high.” And again in Isaiah 53, “If you make his life an offering for sin, then he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days; . . . Because of his anguish, he shall see and be satisfied. . . . Therefore I will give him the many, and he shall divide the strong as the spoils of his victory.” Justice for the Servant, the fulfillment of God’s promises to him, demanded that his death not be the end; and indeed, for his great work to end in victory at all rather than defeat required something more. If his story had come to its conclusion in that tomb, if he had died and stayed dead like any other man, then in the end, it would have been just another victory for the powers of evil; the price would have been paid for our redemption, but there would have been no redeemer left to complete the deal, and the sacrifice would have been for nothing.

And so, though the powers of evil capered and celebrated across that black, black Saturday, thinking they had won—thinking they had tricked the God of the universe into taking a bridge too far—God’s resounding answer to evil came on Easter morning. The Creed tells us Jesus descended into Hell, and I believe it; and after spending a couple nights there, that morning he got up, reached out his hands, and tore the gates of Hell from their very hinges. He stretched out his carpenter’s hands, those hands that could be so gentle to the weak and the suffering, and his shoulders flexed, and he tore the wall of Death apart. He heaved, and the grave burst open in a soundless explosion that shook the universe from one end to the other, a blinding flash of light that lit the sky from horizon to horizon; and he who had been dead got up, and was dead no more, never again to die.

And in that, you see, is the victory; in that, and nothing else. In that moment, the price that had been paid for our redemption was realized, and we were stripped from the power and control of the prince of darkness.  God in his love has chosen to direct his anger at sin against his Servant—which is to say, against himself—and to take on himself the punishment that justice demanded; all that remains is for us to accept the gift and revel in the love of God.

(Excerpted, edited, from “The Victory of the Servant”)