More links on Iran

mostly from The New Ledger and American Thinker, which have had good runs of stories going.

The Case for Iran: Fighting for Freedom

Bush's Domino Effect

The Seeming Iranian Sitzkrieg

Mullahs Cannot Stop the Persian Reawakening

Will Iran Get The Revolution It Needs?

The Mullahs and the Tiananmen Option

Montazeri Speaks, Iran Listens

Say Goodbye to Cairo: Obama’s Inaction on Iran Clashes With His Words

On Iran: Which Will It Be, Mr. Obama?

Why Obama Can’t Take a Light Touch on Iran

Too Little, Too Late: Why the Iranian election was doomed from the start

And, for a recap of the beginnings of the explosion, Iran’s Path: Bloodshed and Chaos

Hope begins with the right diagnosis

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 3
Q. How do you come to know your misery?

A. The law of God tells me.¹

Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references.

For John Calvin, this is the first use of the Law: it shows us our sin by showing us our fundamental inability to keep it. It strips away our self-deception and our rationalizations and forces us to face ourselves as we really are—which is the necessary predicate for our salvation, because we won't accept God's grace until we accept that we need it.

As well, the Law shows us the true reason for human misery, and thus points us in the direction in which salvation can be found. This is an important gift, because even when we've admitted the problem, we tend to want to misdiagnose it (usually out of wishful thinking of some sort or another) as being something we can address on our own. As Jerome de Jong asks in Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude,

Man seems to be aware of the fact that he is miserable, but has he found the true source of his misery?

Left to our own devices, the answer is, "No, not really."

When man seeks to find the source of his misery within the context of his own experience, the answers which he gives are false. His answers turn him in upon himself and the things with which he hopes to satisfy self. So far is man's own understanding of his misery from leading him to God that all about us we see those who have experienced bitterness, despair, and utter hopelessness, who have out of this experience denied the reality of God. Man's understanding of himself will have to come from outside himself. It must be revealed to him.

The gospel for all

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, but with what is proper for women who profess godliness—with good works. Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.

—1 Timothy 2 (ESV)

Our big problem with 1 Timothy is that we read it as a manual for how to run a church; we reduce it to a practical handbook of disconnected instructions on church government. To be sure, this letter says a lot about how the church should be led, but to read it in that reductionist way is to miss why Paul is concerned about that; it’s to read these commands right out of their Ephesian context, and to fail to see that everything Paul says here is for one purpose: defeating the false teaching that is turning the Ephesians away from the gospel and destroying their relationship with Christ.

That’s true no less of this passage than of the rest of the book. We tend to read it, as we tend to read a lot of the Bible, as if it was written about five years ago to the contemporary Western church to address what we think are the most important questions—and it wasn’t. It applies to us and our situation, it’s the word of God to us and we must listen carefully and obey it, but it was written to different people in a different time and place and culture who had different issues and were asking different questions.

If we lose that and try to read this as a random collection of practical instructions, we miss the heart of this passage, because it follows right on from Paul’s concern in chapter 1. False teachers have arisen within the church in Ephesus, and they have set themselves above the authority of Timothy and the faithful elders of the congregation; they probably gave a wink and a nod to Paul, but only to try to convince people that they were teaching a higher form of what Paul had taught. In truth, though, it was nothing of the kind. According to the false teachers, only those who followed their teaching and the practices they prescribed could know the truth—they were the spiritual elite, and everyone else was cut off from salvation. They were preaching a religion that was elitist and exclusivist; it was only for people who were good enough for them, and smart enough to follow them. Against that, Paul hammers back that salvation is for everyone, the gospel is for everyone. That is what this chapter is about.

So, then, what’s all this about women? The answer is, not as much as you might think. The core of this passage is the first seven verses, which set out the basic imperative: God desires all people to be saved, salvation comes only through Jesus Christ, and the church’s job is to get that message out. Verses 8-15 address issues in the church that were getting in the way. It’s not just issues with the women, either; Paul has to tell the men of the church that they need to gather to pray without anger or fighting. This doesn’t mean they were fighting while they were praying (though they might have been); the point, rather, is that their arguments were dirtying their prayers. That’s the reason for the reference to “lifting up holy hands”; the standard posture of prayer in those days was standing with hands raised, and you were supposed to have purified them before worship began. Paul’s concern is that the men in this church were praying with hands that had been made unclean by their anger and their fights, and that they need to clean up their act.

With the women of the church, he addresses a different concern, because their behavior was interfering with the work of the church in a different way. It’s important to note a couple key things here. First, where the ESV reads, “A woman should learn quietly,” the Greek word here and in verse 12 is the same as in verse 2, where Paul says to pray for those in authority “so that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life.” His point here is about having a quiet and peaceable demeanor, not being noisy, disruptive, and quarrelsome—much the same as he told the men in verse 8. Second, in verse 12, the ESV reads, “I do not permit a woman to teach,” which sounds like a general command that applies everywhere—but that translation gets the tense wrong. A more accurate one would be, “I am not permitting a woman to teach”; you can still read that as a general command that applies everywhere, but it doesn’t have to be. Given the context, I don’t think it is; I think it’s here because it bears on Paul’s primary concern, which is the spread of false teaching in Ephesus.

If so, though, how, and what does dressing up have to do with it? It may seem strange to us that Paul should take the time to tell the women of the church not to dress expensively, braid pearls in their hair, and wear jewelry, but his audience knew why he said it. Every culture has its own set of signals. In that culture, for a woman to dress up and wear jewelry was the equivalent in our culture of wearing the miniskirt and the bikini top: it was understood that she was declaring herself available, or even intent on seduction. Thus for instance the Roman satirist Juvenal wrote,

There is nothing that a woman will not permit herself to do, nothing that she deems shameful, when she encircles her neck with green emeralds and fastens huge pearls to her elongated ears.

Now, granted that what we wear affects how we feel about ourselves, that’s over the top; I suspect that many women really felt that as unfair and unreasonable, but there wasn’t much they could do about it; legally, a woman belonged to her father as long as he was alive unless she was married, in which case she belonged to her husband. Roman women didn’t even get names, they got numbers. You can see why the message of the gospel, of freedom in Christ and a God who loves us all as individuals, was liberating and greatly appealing to women in that culture; and you can see, I think, why the false teachers in Ephesus would have particularly targeted women, and why they found their most receptive audience among the young women, and especially young widows, of the congregation. Under the influence of those false teachers, it seems clear that some of the women of the congregation were using using their freedom and equality in Christ in ways that were extremely unwise and disruptive; combined with that, they’re spreading a false version of the gospel within the Ephesian church. Paul knows that Timothy has to put a stop to that and shut them down if he’s going to keep from losing the church entirely.

His concern, then, isn’t gender roles in the abstract—his concern is what people’s behavior is doing to the teaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ in Ephesus. He’s focused on the particular need to root up and stomp out the false teaching there; to that end, he tells the women of the church that they need to back off, settle down, stop talking, and find their bearings again—just as he tells the men of the church much the same thing, in a different way. The key here is that whatever the people of Ephesus are doing that’s disrupting the church and its work and worship, they need to stop doing—right now.

That’s because the church has a mission, with which nothing must be allowed to interfere—and the false teachers are doing just that, and so are the men and women Paul addresses. The mission is to bring the message of salvation through Jesus Christ to all people in all the world. Paul makes this clear in verses 5-6. There is only one God, and there is only one mediator, Jesus Christ; there is no other God in whom the peoples of this world may find life, and no other mediator through whom they may find salvation, and if they do not find this way, there is no other to be found. And this Jesus gave himself a ransom, not for some, but for all, for God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The good news of Jesus Christ is for all, because his salvation is for all—all peoples, all nations, all languages, all times, male and female both—and the job of the church is to proclaim this truth to any and all who will listen, wherever they may be found and whatever they may be doing.

This is why Paul says to offer every kind of prayer—he uses four different words there, just to make sure his hearers get the point that he means every kind of prayer—for everyone. The false teachers in Ephesus were preaching a religion that was only for “special” people, and so bred a narrow, superior attitude. I suspect from Paul’s command in verse 2 that they even considered themselves superior to the rulers of the day; they saw themselves as the true elite, while the people in positions of power and authority didn’t deserve their eminence. In any case, it seems clear that they lacked any real concern for anyone but themselves, and so they only prayed for those whom they considered worthy of their prayers; the rest of the world could go hang, and in fact deserved to.

Paul has no use for this, and so he says, “Every kind of prayer shall be offered for everyone, without exception; and indeed, you should especially offer every kind of prayer for all those in positions of authority, not only for their own sake, but so that we may live quiet and peaceful lives in all godliness and proper conduct.” The command to pray for those in power is a slight digression, but well taken: if the authorities are opposed to the work of the church, it can be extremely difficult to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. At that point, it’s possible to have a peaceful and calm life, or to live life in accordance with the will of God, but not to do both. For those in authority, then, we pray not only for their own sake, but also that they will use their power in such a way as to help the mission of the church, or at least not to hinder it.

And to those in the church, he says that we, too, must do everything in our power to carry out that mission, and not to hinder it in anything we do. That’s why he tells the men of the church to set aside their anger and their quarrels, which are hindering their prayers—and no doubt turning off people who might otherwise be open to the message of the gospel. That’s why he tells the women of the church not to flout the social conventions of their day, but to adorn themselves instead with their good works—not because jewelry and nice clothes are sinful, but because their dress and behavior was sending the wrong message to people outside the church, giving the enemies of Christianity something to use against it. Believe me, more than one book was written against the church, and more than one law decreed against it, on the grounds that Christianity was undermining the morals of the Roman Empire. And finally, as many of the women in the church were preaching the false gospel of Timothy’s opponents, Paul forbade the women of Ephesus to teach. Anything to keep the false teaching from spreading.

The fundamental point here is clear: we’re called to be people of the gospel, and only of the gospel. We can’t change the message we’ve been given, and what it reveals about God, to conform it to someone else’s expectations or desires—not even if we think it will help us attract more people, since if we’re attracting people to something that isn’t the gospel, we’ve done nothing good. And we can’t let anything other than the gospel get in the way of proclaiming the gospel message—we need to be committed to doing whatever we can to reach whoever we can reach with the good news of Jesus Christ in such a way that they will listen. We need to be committed only and wholly to the service of the Lord, and to doing whatever is in our power to ensure that people who don’t have a relationship with Jesus are introduced to him in the fullness of his truth and love.

Which means that we need to be clear on what’s worth fighting about—and for—and what isn’t. Anything that diminishes the gospel, anything that seeks to take away from the seriousness of human sin, the glory and holiness of God, or the greatness of his grace, we have to fight that, as Paul fought the legalists in Ephesus. That fight’s going on right now in this denomination, and we’re committed to staying Presbyterian so we can keep standing up for the gospel. But what about the other things we fight about—such as the role of women in the church, which drives most of the preaching on this passage? I had somebody call me a heretic in print a few weeks ago because I don’t believe, on my best reading of Scripture, that the word of God forbids women to lead and teach. I don’t claim to be infallible—we’re all fallen, we’re all sinners, none of us get everything right, and I’m no different—and if I’m wrong, I pray God shows me differently, but as I’ve studied the word of God, that’s the conclusion I’ve come to; and in the meantime, does it advance the cause of the gospel for Christians to beat each other up on this issue, or baptism, or communion, or how we do worship, or other such issues?

No, it doesn’t. Those sorts of fights don’t draw people to Jesus Christ, they just draw lines that people won’t cross. That’s not to say that those issues don’t matter, just that getting them wrong doesn’t keep people from perceiving and being captured by the heart of the gospel, that there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all so that we might be saved from the power and penalty of sin and brought to the knowledge of the truth—which needs to be the heart, the essence, the focus, of our preaching, our teaching, and everything we do. It all needs to be about the gospel, for the sake of the gospel, in the service of the gospel, so that when people look at us, yes, we have beliefs about what women should or shouldn’t do, and how we should do baptism and communion, and how we do worship, and all sorts of other things, but so that people recognize that those things aren’t what we’re about: what we’re about is Jesus Christ and him crucified.

(Cross-posted, edited, from “The Gospel for All”)

We need climate change—in the House of Representatives

I didn't have the energy to post on this Friday night, and it's taken a while to get back to it, but I can't help thinking that we've seen the definitive moment of the Democratic leadership of this Congress: they were in such a hurry to ram through their energy tax, they passed a bill that didn't even exist. Seriously. As David Freddoso put it,

Through a series of parliamentary inquiries, the Republicans learned that the 300-plus page managers' amendment, added to the bill last night in the House Rules Committee, has not even been been integrated with the official copy of the 1,090-page bill at the House Clerk's desk, let alone in any other location. The two documents are side-by-side at the desk as the clerk reads through the instructions in the 300 page document for altering the 1,090 page document.

But they cannot be simply combined, because the amendment contains 300 pages of items like this: "Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)..." How many members of Congress do you suppose have gone through it all to see how it changes the bill?

Global Warming is apparently so urgent that we can't even wait until members of Congress know what they're voting on.

There's supposed to be a section of the bill establishing and regulating a financial derivatives market (that's the "trade" part of "cap-and-trade"); as of the time the bill was passed, that hadn't been written yet—there was only a "placeholder." Barney Frank said it was OK because he was sure they'd put a good system in place, and that was apparently good enough. Somehow, the thought of Barney Frank presiding over a sub-prime carbon market, when he refused to see the collapse of the sub-prime housing market coming, isn't encouraging.

More than that, the purpose of this haste is to keep people from thinking about the economic effects of this bill, which aren't going to be good. Bloomberg, the Heritage Foundation, and Investor's Business Daily have all laid it out:

As we've said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million (see charts below).

Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once put it, by 90% adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted gasoline prices would rise 74%, residential natural gas prices by 55% and the average family's annual energy bill by $1,500.

Hit hardest by all this would be the "95% of working families" Obama keeps mentioning as being protected from increased taxation. They are protected, that is, unless they use energy. Then they'll be hit by this draconian energy tax.

Of course, the Democratic majority has been clever enough to make sure that the bill won't actually take effect until 2012, so that it won't mess up their chances for re-election in 2010; but once it does, as the Heritage Foundation notes, people will notice:

For a household of four, energy costs go up $436 that year, and they eventually reach $1,241 in 2035 and average $829 annually over that span. Electricity costs go up 90 percent by 2035, gasoline by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent by 2035. The cumulative higher energy costs for a family of four by then will be nearly $20,000.

But direct energy costs are only part of the consumer impact. Nearly everything goes up, since higher energy costs raise production costs. If you look at the total cost of Waxman-Markey, it works out to an average of $2,979 annually from 2012-2035 for a household of four. By 2035 alone, the total cost is over $4,600.

That's not the only cost, though; Bloomberg notes that this bill will drive a lot of jobs overseas and give foreign energy producers a competitive advantage over American companies. At a time when we're trying to reduce American dependence on foreign oil, this bill will only increase it.

America's biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. . . .

"It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment," Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. . . .

The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported, according to energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie in Houston. Contrary to President Barack Obama’s goal of reducing dependence on overseas energy suppliers, the bill would incent U.S. refiners to import more fuel, said Clayton Mahaffey, an analyst at RedChip Cos. in Maitland, Florida.

"They’ll be searching the globe for refined products that don't carry the same level of carbon costs," said Mahaffey, a former Exxon Corp. refinery manager.

In short, this is going to blow a large hole in our economy. And to what purpose? Well, that's still very much up for debate, as I've pointed out a few times. As the IBD editorial continues,

According to an analysis by Chip Knappenberger, administrator of the World Climate Report, the reduction of U.S. CO2 emissions to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050—the goal of the Waxman-Markey bill—would reduce global temperature in 2050 by a mere 0.05 degree Celsius.

Doesn't sound all that impressive, does it? It's partly because the countries to which we'll be shipping all those jobs have significantly poorer environmental records than the US, as Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) notes:

If one truly cares about the planet, why do we want to make steel in China rather than in the United States where our carbon emissions are one-third that of the Chinese per ton of steel produced? One Arkansas refinery recently testified that under a cap-and-tax regime, they would be forced to close their 1,200-employee plant while India builds the largest in the world to ship fuel to the United States with nowhere near the environmental protections we have. We’re not helping the environment by sending industries that operate cleanly and efficiently in the United States to a regulation-free China or India.

That's probably partly why even within the EPA, there are those who question the value of this bill—but the EPA is unwilling to listen, even to the point of trying to suppress the study challenging global-warming dogma, because "the administration has decided to move forward" and nothing is to be allowed to get in the way (not even the facts). This is a classic example of that "triumph of ideology over science" that the Obama Administration was supposed to be against. Apparently they don't mind it when it's leftist ideology. (Or when it gives them the opportunity to pump money to special interests.)

Now, it seems to me there's hope that the Senate defeats this bill—Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) certainly expects that to happen, and he has a reasonable case—but there was never much for the House, since the House Republicans are functionally irrelevant. That said, I have to give House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) credit for making the most of irrelevance; he didn't have the votes to back him up, but he did a grand old job of carving up this turkey anyway, in what some dubbed a "mini-filibuster." The reason for his speech? Informing the House as to what was in that 300-page "managers' amendment," so that no one who voted for the bill could claim they didn't know. Bravo, Mr. Minority Leader. Bravo.

The shape of comfort

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 2
Q. What must you know to live and die in the joy of this comfort?

A. Three things:
first, how great my sin and misery are;¹
second, how I am set free from all my sins and misery;²
third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.³

Note: mouseover footnotes for Scripture references.

The 129 questions and answers of the Heidelberg Catechism are divided up into 52 parts, one for each Sunday of the year; in the old Dutch Reformed tradition, you're supposed to go through it every year in church on that basis. I don't know anyone who actually preaches or teaches through the Heidelberg every year, though I've heard there are folks in churches that still have Sunday evening services that use those to that purpose.

In any case, Q & A 1-2 make up Lord's Day 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism and together serve as its introduction. #1 lays out the reason for our comfort: "That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ." #2 then connects that to the rest of the Heidelberg, which is laid out according to that threefold structure.

Andrew Kuyvenhoven, in his Heidelberg commentary Comfort and Joy, notes that the folks who wrote this weren't talking about comfort in any light sense (14):

The people who confessed this in the time of the Reformation were being persecuted for their faith. They feared for their lives. But, they said, even if we get killed, we belong to Jesus, body and soul, in life and in death. They confessed their comfort in the face of all threats. . . .

It is the Christian's answer to life's deepest questions and death's darkest riddles. For here and for now it is the only comfort available. Without this comfort, life is senseless and death is hopeless. We need to say with great emphasis that this is the one and only comfort for all people.

And as the Heidelberg says in Q & A 2, this is a comfort which can only be found through the profound knowledge—not merely of the head but in the heart—of the bad news of human sin, the good news of our redemption, and the response of grateful and humble service. Kuyvenhoven lays this out well (16):

True faith has knowledge of sin, grace, and gratitude. If people have a superficial faith, they have a superficial knowledge of sin, of salvation, and of gratitude. Anyone who is growing in faith is growing in the knowledge of guilt, grace, and gratitude. And those of us who have deep faith have a deep knowledge of sin, a warm knowledge of our Savior, and a profound sense of gratitude.

He's right; so was Donald Bruggink when he titled the commentary he edited on the Heidelberg in honor of its 400th anniversary in 1963 Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude. The Christian life is a life of gratitude, born out of the awareness of the depth of our sin and the height of our salvation, or it's nothing at all.

Nice line by Sarah Palin

This from her speech to some of our troops in Kosovo, in response to a rather lame attempt at a joke by John Kerry (or is that redundant?):

Senator John Kerry makes this joke, I don't know if you saw this, but he makes this joke saying, "Well, shoot, of all the governors in the nation to disappear, too bad it couldn't have been that Governor from Alaska."

Well, when he said it, you know, he looked quite frustrated, and he looked so sad, and I just wanted to reach out to the TV and say, "John Kerry, why the long face?"

(laughter, applause)

Now Gov. Palin is on to Germany to visit the wounded in our military hospitals there; in her time in Kosovo, she gave the troops at Camp Bondsteel a real morale boost, and also met with the Lithuanian Minister of Defense, Rasa Jukneviciene.

My only comfort in life and death

For a brief explanation of what I'm doing here, see the previous post. Mouse over the footnotes for the Scripture references. This is, in my book, as wonderful an opening as the famous Q & A 1 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, even if not as well known; I may very well come back to this one tomorrow and write something about it, but I'm too tired tonight. And then again, maybe I'll just let it speak for itself.

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 1
Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own,¹
but belong—
body and soul,
in life and in death—²
to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.³

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,⁴
and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.⁵
He also watches over me in such a way⁶
that not a hair can fall from my head
without the will of my Father in heaven:⁷
in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.⁸

Because I belong to him,
Christ, by his Holy Spirit,
assures me of eternal life⁹
and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready
from now on to live for him.¹⁰

Explanatory note on Heidelblogging

Jared Wilson sparked a thought for me with his latest post, which quotes a section of the Westminster Confession. As a pastor ministering in the Presbyterian Church (USA), I am in some sense connected to the Westminster standards, and I do appreciate them a great deal—but though I serve a Presbyterian congregation, and though I was baptized in one (Northminster, in San Diego), my home ground within the church universal is the Dutch Reformed stream, and specifically the Reformed Church in America. As such, though I appreciate Westminster, it's somewhat foreign to me; it's the RCA's doctrinal standards that I value most, and especially the one that (as it happens) the PC(USA) also affirms, the Heidelberg Catechism.

As such, I've decided I want to blog my way through the Heidelberg, question by question. I don't know that I'll get through all 129 questions and answers in 129 days—this isn't a death march—but I expect I'll post a Q&A most days. No doubt I'll comment on some and not on others, and there will probably be more than a few times as well that I'll quote one of the commentaries I have on the Heidelberg. (There are actually three on my shelves—Andrew Kuyvenhoven's, the one Donald Bruggink edited, and the one by Zacharius Ursinus, who was one of the Heidelberg's authors—which I suppose marks me out as the Reformed geek I am; the Kuyvenhoven was a gift from Hap back in college, which I suppose marks her out as perceptive.) One thing I haven't figured out is how I want to handle the Scriptural footnotes; if I can find a way to include them that doesn't look irritatingly intrusive to my eye, I will.

Reflection on the challenge of speaking the truth in love

As a pastor ministering within (though not of) the Presbyterian Church (USA), I am in some sense under the leadership of the Moderator of the most recent General Assembly, the Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow (who has on occasion commented here, as I have on occasion returned the favor on one or another of his blogs, of which there are several; as a side note, I don't know how Bruce keeps up with his life, given his schedule). As one would expect of an elected official in this denomination, Bruce is a lot more liberal than I am, but I like him a great deal, because he's not a reflexive thinker; though I often disagree with his conclusions, he's a careful and thoughtful observer, and I appreciate the thought he puts into reaching those conclusions—and his willingness to listen respectfully to those with whom he disagrees. Following him on Facebook, I have more than once had my own thinking sparked by the questions he poses for discussion.

Recently, for example, he asked

if speaking "the truth in love" in a way that ultimately causes a destruction of community and tears down the personhood of another can really be God's Truth at all or are these things simply sometimes unavoidable realities to speaking "the truth in love"?

It's a good question, not least because it forces us to face ourselves. It can be easy to justify hurtful words, to ourselves and to others, by saying that we were only speaking the truth in love, when in fact we weren't motivated by love at all—and maybe weren't speaking the truth, either, but just pushing our own agenda. We need to remember that when Ephesians talks about "speaking the truth in love," it's not talking about whatever we deem to be true on whatever subject, it's talking about "the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God"; and we need to remember that if we cannot say something in love, out of a real desire to help and heal and bless the person to whom we speak, then we are not speaking truth.

That said, there's another reality to bear in mind here as well: speaking the truth in love does not, unfortunately, guarantee that the person to whom we speak will be willing to hear and accept the truth, or to accept that love can come in the form of a truth that they do not want to hear. Sometimes, people refuse to accept a community that challenges them where they do not want to be challenged—but a community that depends on the avoidance of uncomfortable truths is no true community, for the real openness and authenticity that true community requires cannot exist under those conditions. We must always do our best to speak the truth in such a way that those to whom we speak can hear and accept it as truth, but we cannot allow our responsibility to speak the truth to be held hostage to the willingness of others to do so.

As to the tearing down of personhood, I think we need to draw a distinction here between our real personhood—who we are as God intended us to be—and our perceived personhood—who we understand ourselves to be. Because of our sin, the two are not the same, and indeed are never completely the same no matter how much we may grow in Christ. I think it's safe to say that real truth spoken in real love never tears down real personhood, but when Hebrews tells us that "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart," it's equally safe to say that real truth spoken in real love will at times cut to the division of our real self and who we only think we are. One of the necessary aspects of speaking truth to each other in love is helping each other see and accept the distinction between the two—that aspects of our lives that we consider to be part of our personhood really aren't, and in fact are inimical to our true personhood. Again, though, that can be a very hard thing to accept, and some people refuse to do so; but we can't let their reaction be the measure of the value of our actions.

Taken all in all, I think the key here is the distinction between that which is real and that which isn't. The truth of God spoken in the love of God will never destroy that which is real and of value, but will only nurture it; it will, however, most assuredly and effectively destroy false community and false personhood, because clearing the ground of counterfeits is essential if the real and the true are to grow and flourish in their place. But how do we know if we are really speaking the truth of God in the love of God? Or if someone else claims to be doing so and we don't want to hear it, how do we know if the community or the sense of our own personhood which we're defending are real? All we can do is examine our hearts, and let the Spirit of God examine us, and let him lead us into the truth—even if, especially if, it isn't what we want to hear.

To the list of Letterman's sexist cruelties, add another

Sarah Palin may have driven David Letterman to something of an apology, and she may have elected to accept his apology, but it doesn't look like any of that changed his fundamental attitude much. In the middle of his (utterly predictable) Top 10 on "Mark Sanford's Excuses," the late-night host uncorked this beauty:

4. If you met my wife you'd be fleeing the country too.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, whatever mockery anyone wants to give Mark Sanford, he has it coming. I think Robert Stacy McCain's (apparently fairly serious) suggestion that he deserves a case of .38-caliber lead poisoning is over the top, but within the confines of the law, whatever anybody can bring down on this man's head is fine by me.

But his wife? This is a woman who has been betrayed at the deepest possible level by the one person on earth who was most responsible to be on her side, and has been dealt unfathomable public humiliation by that man for the sake of his own selfishness and gratification—she doesn't deserve this . . . this . . . I'm trying to think of a word that pastors are supposed to use that's bad enough to describe this, and I'm not coming up with one. What, by all that is holy, gave Letterman and his writers the idea that it's acceptable, let alone funny, to beat a woman when she's down like that? What are we going to get next, a crack about the joy of clubbing baby seals?

Once again, if Letterman weren't such a narcissistic solipsist, he'd be ashamed of himself. What a poor excuse for a human being.

H. L. Mencken, Grover Cleveland, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama . . . and leadership

Of all the blogs I've ever run across, I think Heaven Better Have Lightsabers has to have the most fun name. Fortunately, Hurley's blog doesn't waste its title. Today, he (?) has a post up called "H. L. Mencken on Leadership" which is a commentary on an extended quotation from a Mencken piece on Grover Cleveland, including these selections:

There was never any string tied to old Grover. He got into politics, not by knuckling to politicians, but by scorning and defying them, and when he found himself opposed in what he conceived to be sound and honest courses, not only by politicians but by the sovereign people, he treated them to a massive dose of the same medicine.

*****

No President since Lincoln, not even the melancholy Hoover, has been more bitterly hated, or by more people.

*****

He came from an excellent family, but his youth had been a hard one, and his cultural advantages were not of the best.

*****

He banged along like a locomotive. If man or devil got upon the track, then so much the worse for man or devil.

*****

Any man thus obsessed by a concept of duty is bound to seek support for it somewhere outside himself. He must rest it on something which seems to him to be higher than mere private inclination or advantage.

*****

He was not averse to popularity, but he put it far below the approval of conscience.

*****

It is not likely that we shall see his like again, at least in the present age. The Presidency is now closed to the kind of character that he had so abundantly. It is going, in these days, to more politic and pliant men. They get it by yielding prudently, by changing their minds at the right instant, by keeping silent when speech is dangerous. Frankness and courage are luxuries confined to the more comic varieties of runners-up at national conventions.

Hurley comments,

From my opinion it's perfectly applicable to replace the 'he/him/his' with she and her, president with governor, and Grover Cleveland with Sarah Palin. I don't know what the Governor wants in the future, but she doesn't seem like the sort of lady who is going to let a hoard of ignorant tools define her as a person.

I have to agree, and to add that the last selection he cites is a dead ringer for Barack Obama (and, for that matter, for Joe Biden, definitely among "the more comic varieties of runners-up"). I am reminded in all this of a famous line about President Cleveland, from the speech in which he was nominated for what would be his second term (his third convention, since Benjamin Harrison held the office between Cleveland's two terms), which I have often thought applies to Gov. Palin:

They love him for the enemies he has made.

Will the blood of martyrs water a new tree of liberty in Iran?

We may only hope and pray so, because a river of blood is flowing in the streets of Tehran that could water a whole forest. The Anchoress has a good roundup, as usual—check it out, and follow the links. The Iranian regime has literally declared war on the opposition, sending the militia out to beat women to death, murder unarmed protestors with axes, and throw people off bridges. An Iranian woman told CNN,

This was exactly a massacre. You should stop this. You should help the people of Iran who demand freedom. . . .

In the previous days they are killing students with axes, they put the axe through the heart of young men, and it's so devastating I don't know how to describe it.

This is horrific, this is genocide, this is a massacre, this is Hitler. And you people should stop it. It's time to act.

Another Iranian writes,

I am writing to beg for your attention and assistance in any way possible. An innocent, peaceful, historic momentum, unprecedented in recent history, has come alive in our world that is being brutally put down with violence, lies, and dirty politics for power and riches. You, no matter where you are, have been inflicted by the evil nature of this current going round in our globe.

My brothers and sisters, come together in any way you can. Join the arms of our innocent people whose blood is being shed for peace and human rights which you may be blessed with elsewhere. Our hands are stretched out, reaching out for your support from outside. We are confronting a formidable power as ancient and infectious as hatred, tyranny, intolerance, prejudice and racism. We need your help. . . .

We as a nation are pleading desperately to the world that we MUST not recognize this regime legitimate. We need to use all our strength and unity to pressure it to leave the office before our voice is shut down.

In response to such impassioned pleas, our president boldly decided that since the mullahs hadn't accepted his invitation to the weenie roast, he'd rescind the invitation.

. . . !

Of course, as Mark Steyn notes, Barack Obama does have a timing problem:

he chose as a matter of policy to legitimize the Iranian regime at the very moment they chose to delegitimize themselves—first, by stealing the election to an unprecedented degree and, then, by killing people who objected to them doing so.

That's awfully bad timing, and one sympathizes, as one would if Nixon had gone to China a week before Tiananmen Square. But the fact is it's happened and adjusting to that reality makes more sense than banking on being able to re-legitimize Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.

What really strikes me about this whole bloody, evil vortex—the swirling firestorm of the nihilistic will to power clashing with the desire of a people to be free, a mad dream of some Islamic Nietzsche—is that people are being murdered, shot off rooftops, for shouting "God is great!" ("Allahu akbar!"). A regime ostensibly founded on religion—but more accurately, on the religio-tribal identity that is Shi'ism—has had its true power-mad heart exposed; it's starting to look like its own religion is turning against it, and like the mullahs will sacrifice even Islam for the sake of power. Perhaps that's just a fanciful thought, but it's how things look to me.

It's important to remember, though, that if Springsteen's right and "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," then Ahmadinejad and the mullahs are still the freest ones in this whole fight. They're free to do anything, because if they lose this battle, nothing else matters; they and their supporters literally have no other options but victory or death. The leaders of the opposition can always go into exile, but the likes of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei have nowhere else to go. As such, Spengler is right: this is an extremely complex and dangerous situation, and it's impossible to predict what will happen next. As he points out, the real wildcard in all this is Israel; the Netanyahu government had best be considering their next move very carefully, because the consequences, for good or ill, could be beyond reckoning.

Still, in all this, Robert Kaplan is right to say that there is great reason for hope—and that this is all happening as a consequence of our intervention in Iraq (which is why, incidentally, his fellow Atlantic contributor Jeffrey Goldberg was wrong to portray that intervention as a mistake; it was, rather, a calculated risk):

It is crucial that we reflect on an original goal of regime change in Iraq. Anyone who supported the war must have known that toppling Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Arab—whether it resulted in stable democracy, benign dictatorship or sheer chaos—would strengthen the Shiite hand in the region. This was not seen as necessarily bad. The Sept. 11 terrorists had emanated from the rebellious sub-states of the sclerotic Sunni dictatorships of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, whose arrogance and aversion to reform had to be allayed by readjusting the regional balance of power in favor of Shiite Iran. It was hoped that Iran would undergo its own upheaval were Iraq to change. Had the occupation of Iraq been carried out in a more competent manner, this scenario might have unfolded faster and more transparently. Nevertheless, it is happening. And not only is Iran in the throes of democratic upheaval, but Egypt and Saudi Arabia have both been quietly reforming apace.

On Barack Obama's (mis)handling of Iran

The president is to be commended for giving HuffPo's Nico Pitney the high sign before yesterday's press conference so that Pitney would be primed to pass along this question from an Iranian dissident:

Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad? And if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of—of what the demonstrators there are working to achieve?

As Paul Mirengoff points out, Pitney is also to be commended for hitting the president with that question:

What a terrific question—a query that not one in a thousand American journalists could be expected to match—and kudos to Pitney for selecting it. The question elegantly but pointedly (1) refutes the suggestion of Obama's apologists that the president helps the protesters by remaining above the fray while (2) reminding Obama that he cannot really remain above the fray in any event because he must eventually accept the election of Ahmadinejad by dealing with him as planned or reject that fraudulently reached outcome by changing his course.

However, as Mirengoff continues, the president is not to be commended for his response to that question:

The president could only bob and weave. He responded that the U.S. did not have observers on the ground and therefore could not know whether the election was legitimate. But the U.S. knows that the candidates were pre-screened by the regime, making the election inherently illegitimate.

He responded further that it is up to the Iranian people, not the U.S., to view the election as legitimate or not. But a portion, and probably very large portion, of the Iranian people has already decided that the election is not legitimate; yet the "result" will stand and Ahmadinejad will serve another term. Thus, the ball is now in the Obama administration's court to treat the election as legitimate, by dealing with Ahmadinejad even as he represses his own people, or to demur.

The question thus stands unanswered by Obama, though it answers itself: if Obama treats Ahmadinejad as the legitimate leader of Iran in the absence of significant changes in conditions there, that would indeed constitute a betrayal of what the demonstrators are working to achieve.

It doesn't help that even as he finally offered a strong statement against the mullahs' treatment of Iranian protestors, he still wanted to have them over for hot dogs (and negotiate with their terrorists).

This is the most unrealistic sort of political "realism" imaginable. Michael Rubin lays out the reasons why:

1. The command and control over any military nuclear program would be in the hands of the Office of the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the same groups who are now facing down the Iranian people. In other words, we share a common adversary with the Iranian people. We need to recognize that. The problem has never been the Iranian people—they indeed are far more moderate than their government. We should do nothing to antagonize them (which is why all the talk among some realists of outreach to the Mujahedin a-Khalq or playing an ethnic strategy is wrong, hamfisted, and counterproductive). We need to focus on how to counter and neutralize our common adversary.

2. Realism is about maximizing U.S. interests. Preserving an enemy regime is not realism. It is simply stupid. We should not be throwing a lifeline to the Islamic Republic, the fall of which would enable Iran to emerge as a force for moderation in the region, and allow the Iranian people to take their rightful place among nations.

Bullet dodged

Obviously the big political news of the day was the bizarre story of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's attempt at a secret jaunt to Buenos Aires (over Father's Day, no less!) to tryst with his mistress—news that was especially painful coming so soon after the revelation of Senator (R-NV) John Ensign's extramarital affair (a revelation that came only when the husband he'd cuckolded tried to extort money from him). Aside from saying that the GOP will be better off when neither of these two men represent it in any significant way, the only comment I trust myself to offer is this: I am deeply grateful that the speculation last summer that Sanford might be John McCain's running mate did not bear fruit. Whether it was Sen. McCain's instincts or A. B. Culvahouse's vetting, it's a very good thing that the old maverick went another way; for all the attempts to convince people that Sarah Palin hurt the ticket, if Sanford had been on it, this would all have blown up and the campaign would have been over before the convention.

Oh, and one other thing: the worst sort of hypocrite is the sort who uses their hypocrisy for personal gain, and the worst type of those would have to be those who use it to gain political power. There but for the grace of God go I, I know, but I pray that my soul is never so twisted that I can really comprehend how a man can leave his wife to raise his children while he jets off to another country to have sex with another woman. I know, I am a man, nothing human is alien to me—but I don't really understand that, and I don't want to understand that. That's not the treason of Judas, but it's not too far short of it, and Judas looks too uncomfortably familiar to me as it is.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!

If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.

—Psalm 130:1-4 (ESV)

I found myself, upon reading this psalm (along with Psalms 131 and 134) to my older girls this evening, explaining to them the whole concept of the fear of the Lord. It's rather a difficult one, especially for an eight-year-old and a five-year-old, since obviously I don't want them to go around terrified of God—and yet, they need to understand this. I need to understand this. I'm sure there are many who could do a much better job than I did, but here (more or less) is what I told them.

• Awe. A couple years ago at Thanksgiving, we took a trip through Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, and the Grand Canyon. The kids absolutely loved it. I reminded them of how they'd felt looking out across those great canyons—including the element of fear of what would happen if they fell in. In the same way, only far, far more so, God is great and glorious and beautiful—and not safe.

• Holiness. Our God is a consuming fire, as Deuteronomy and Hebrews tell us; if we as we are, unholy, impure, and frail, were to enter his presence, we would burn like moths in a flame. There's a reason Isaiah was terrified at even just a vision of the holiness of God: it's more than we can bear.

• Wrath. Along with this goes the wrath of God against sin, which is the mainspring of his judgment on sin, which we have richly earned for the waywardness of our hearts—even the best of us. God is the one who cannot and will not tolerate sin, and the judge of all the earth; we should feel in our bones the truth that we deserve only his judgment.

• Discipline. To be sure, you might well say that those who are in Christ have been given instead his grace, and that is true; and yet, our sin still deserves his wrath, and just because we have received grace does not mean we've been given a "get out of punishment free" card. Rather the contrary: "The Lord disciplines the one he loves." As Hebrews notes, discipline is painful rather than pleasant, even though it brings good fruit.

• The untamed God. We cannot control God; we cannot make him do what we want, or keep him from doing what we do not want, and we cannot ensure that he will only ask us to do what we want to do and feel comfortable doing. As Mr. Beaver says of Aslan, God is good, but he isn't safe—and there is nothing less safe than surrendering control to him that he may call us and lead us where and as he will. (Not that our control is ever anything more than an illusion anyway, but it's an illusion to which we cling desperately for all that.) We fear what he may do to us, and where he may take us; we fear the loss of all we've ever known and wanted—and quite reasonably so, for God may indeed require all that of us and more, even to the point of asking us to lay down our lives in his service. Of course, he promises to give us a far better life in exchange, but that's an unknown quantity, and we fear the unknown.

As we are, we could not bear the full presence of God; we could not even survive a glimpse of his face. In Jesus Christ, he has made a way for us to enter his presence, he has opened a way for us through the veil—but he is still the Lord of the Universe and the Creator of all that is, his glory is still a light to blast our eyes out the backs of our skulls and his holiness is still a fire that would burn us beyond even the memory of ash; if he has made it safe for us to come to him, it's not because he himself is safe or because we are somehow worthy to stand in his presence, but rather because he paid the price in himself for us to do so.

Even with all that Christ has done for us, it remains true that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom—because the beginning of wisdom is not to take God lightly, or to take his grace for granted.

Leftist faith and Sarah Palin

In observing the sheer bloody-mindedness with which some on the Left cling, in the face of almost all evidence*, to the "Sarah Palin is a moron" meme, I've come to a conclusion: some liberals are just firmly convinced that all conservatives are stupid, or else we wouldn't be conservatives. This just seems to be an article of absolute faith, core dogma, for some on the Left, judging by the way they treat folks on the Right. Given that, no amount of evidence to the contrary can shake their conviction; they dogmatically insist that Sarah Palin is a moron, with no supporting evidence offered save the fact that she's conservative, and therefore by definition must be a moron. It's simply a matter of faith that they are the enlightened ones, and she is not.

Which is to say that perhaps we've been wrong in talking about conservative Christians as the "faith-based community"; there's a section of the Left that's every bit as much a faith-based community as all that. The difference is, their faith isn't in God, but rather in their own superiority.

*Sure, there's the Katie Couric interview, in which Gov. Palin most assuredly did not acquit herself well—though even there, she did a lot better than the editing made her look. But hey, even the brightest folks look really dumb sometimes; at least she didn't say there are 57 states, or that Austrians speak Austrian, or give the British government a middling assortment of DVDs that can't be played in Britain, or try to get into the Oval Office through a window. Even Barack Obama looks like an imbecile at times, and Joe Biden like a blithering idiot—though to be sure, VP Biden actually is a blithering idiot . . .

A few links on Iran

On The Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez posted a brief interview with Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and a Fellow of the Hoover Institution, on the current situation in Iran. As always, Pipes has some interesting things to say, including his statement that “the startling events in Iran in the week since the election have transformed [Mir Hossein] Mousavi from a hack Islamist politician into the unlikely symbol of dreams for a more secular and free Iran,” and his judgment that Ahmadinejad and the mullahs have been seriously weakened by the protests. (Bernard-Henri Lévy agrees.) Perhaps his most interesting comment, though, is his concluding observation:

I am taken aback by the nearly complete absence of Islam in the discussion. One hears about democracy, freedom, and justice, all of which do play a role, but the key issue is the Iranian population’s repudiation of the Islamist ideology that has dominated its lives for the past 30 years. Should the regime in Tehran be shaken by current challenges, this will likely have profound implications for the global career of radical Islam.

This dovetails with what I’ve heard from other sources (as do the comments by Jared Cohen which I noted last week) that disillusionment with Islam is widespread in Iran, especially among younger Iranians; I would imagine that if the regime were in fact to collapse, what would remain would still be a Muslim country, but a rather exhausted one (perhaps analogous to Europe after the end of the religious wars of the 17th century).

As regards the president’s tepid response to the protests in Iran, Michael Ledeen posted the following:

I’ve received what purports to be a statement from Mousavi’s Office in Tehran. Like everyone else covering the revolution, I get a lot of material that can’t be authenticated, and one must always take such material with a healthy dose of skepticism. That said, the person who sent this to me is undoubtedly in touch with the Mousavi people on the ground, that much is certain. His information has been proven reliable throughout this period. So while the following open letter carefully puts distance between the author(s) and Mousavi himself, I am quite sure that at a minimum it accurately reflects the state of mind of the Mousavi people.

The letter expresses strong displeasure with Barack Obama:

In the name of the Iranian people, we want you to know that when you recently made the statement “Achmadinejad or Mousavi? Two of a kind,” we consider this as a grave and deep insult, not just to Mr. Mousavi but especially against the judgment of the Iranian people, against our moral conviction and intelligence, especially those of the young generation that comprises a population of 31 million.

It is a specially grave insult for those who are now fighting for democracy and freedom, and an unwarranted gift and even praise for Mr. Khamenei, whose security forces are now killing peaceful Iranians in the streets of every major city in the country.

Your statement misled the people of the world. It was no doubt inspired by your hope for dialogue with this regime, but you cannot possibly believe in promises from a regime that lies to its own people and then kills them when they demand the promises be kept.

By such statements, your administration and you discourage the Iranian people, who believe and trust in the values of democracy and freedom. We are pleased to see that you have condemned the regime’s murderous violence, and we look forward to stronger support for the rightful struggle of the Iranian people against the actions of a regime that is your enemy as well as ours.

Ledeen’s post includes several other important things as well, including an excerpt from a speech Mousavi made yesterday. Meanwhile, the inimitable Rich Lowry posted on The Corner imagining how President Obama might have handled several other touchy international situations throughout history, including the Nazi air assault on London:

Any time a city is bombed for 57 straight nights, we take notice. That is something that interests us. We hope all national air forces involved in this dismaying conflict behave responsibly.

Fortunately, British PM Gordon Brown is taking up the slack; leaving the field free for him might be the nicest thing the Obama administration has done for the British government yet (not that there’s any competition for that particular honor).

“We are with others, including the whole of the European Union unanimously today, in condemning the use of violence, in condemning media suppression,” Brown said in Brussels after an EU summit.

“It is for Iran now to show the world that the elections have been fair . . . that the repression and the brutality that we have seen in these last few days is not something that is going to be repeated.

“We want Iran to be part of the international community and not to be isolated. But it is for Iran to prove . . . that they can respect these basic rights,” he said. . . .

During his rant, Ayatollah Khamenei called Britain “the most treacherous” enemy of Iran.

The Iranians have set their sights on Britain because they know they have a cream puff in the White House. Britain poses problems because it can push for EU trade sanctions against Iran.

Brown didn’t roll over when the ayatollah attacked. He hit back. On Friday, Brown’s Foreign Office summoned the Iranian ambassador and sharply critiqued Iranian attacks on Britain and the election process.

After demonstrating weakness, an embarrassed Obama administration slowly and reluctantly has ramped up its criticism of the tyrannical regime in Iran. . . .

Given the opportunity to simply support democracy, Obama decided to take a pass.

The unanswered question is why Barack Obama has been determined to coddle this crazed regime in Tehran.

Every cloud has a silver lining, though, and the one here is considerable; as Jeffrey Goldberg points out, fear of Iran has largely outweighed the hostility of Sunni Arab governments toward Israel, creating the possibility of a Sunni-Israeli alliance. At the very least, as I noted late last year, those Arab governments would dearly love for Israel to take down Iran and its proxies before Iran has the chance to come after them. How this will all play out, I don’t know (certainly, it isn’t as if we have a long history of things breaking right in modern southern/southwestern Asia), but at least there’s the possibility of good things happening.

Update: At least something convinced President Obama to take a stand against the Iranian government and its use of violence against its own people; I don’t know if it was the killings, the poll numbers, or what, but whatever the case, it’s welcome.

What Sarah Palin stands for

Thanks yet again to Seth Adam Smith for doing this.

Thought on the true nature and purpose of the conscience

As I’ve noted before, “conscience” is a problematic word in our culture—not because it’s a hard concept to understand, but because we find it a hard one to accept. We don’t want our conscience to be something that pokes at us and makes us face the fact when we’re doing something wrong; we tend to want to do what we want to do, and we want to believe that if we can convince ourselves we feel good about doing what we want to do, then it must be OK.

As such, what a lot of folks in this world end up doing is essentially turning their conscience off—refusing to pay attention to its promptings, finding ways to dismiss it, teaching themselves to feel good (at least on the surface) about doing what they want to do, and then calling that good feeling their conscience. That way, they can tell themselves (and whoever else might happen to come around) that their conscience is clear about their actions.

Unfortunately, if we really want to, it’s not all that hard to get ourselves to the point where we’re standing proudly defiant of the will of God in the absolute (if self-generated) conviction that we’re obeying his will; and to the casual observer, it can be difficult to distinguish such stands from true acts of conscience. After all, Martin Luther launched the Reformation, in part, with an appeal to conscience, refusing to bow to the power of the Roman church because “to go against conscience is neither right nor safe”; these days, there are a lot of folks running around who want to be little Luthers, condemning the church for its teachings and declaring, “Here I stand.” Some are very convincing.

What too many people lack, though, is the central point of Luther’s statement: “My conscience is captive to the word of God”; this is the foundation for everything else. If your conscience is captive to the word of God, if your focus is on obeying God even when it’s the last thing you want to do, if you’ve been training and strengthening your conscience in faithful study of the Scriptures and in prayer—as Luther had—then yes, to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. If not, then you may very well be going against conscience and not even know it.

The key point is that conscience is not self-generated, because we aren’t the arbiters of reality—no, not even of “our own” reality, because there’s no such thing; whether we like it or not, our reality is the same as everyone else’s. The purpose of conscience isn’t to give us the perception of moral reality that suits our preferences, but rather to help us perceive moral reality as it is—to tell us what truly is right and wrong, not to confirm us in our own ideas and wishes on the subject.

This isn’t something we always want (which is why any person who truly functions as the conscience of an organization is going to be intensely unpopular at times), but it’s something we need, and badly, because we aren’t pure; we’re sullied by sin in all its various forms, and that distorts and occludes our judgment. As much as we may want to be the highest authority in our lives, we just aren’t qualified for the job—and it’s not so much what we don’t know that gets us into trouble (significant though that often is) as what we do know that ain’t so; it’s especially those things that we convince ourselves we know, not because of the available evidence, but because we desperately want to believe them. Those are the areas where we most need correction—and the areas in which we’re least willing to accept it; the role of conscience is precisely to convict and correct us at the points where we least want it, to inflict discomfort in order to prevent greater pain.

(Derived from “God's Grace, Our Counterfeit”)

The wikification of U.S. intelligence

This is highly encouraging:

The key, of course (as the video notes) is not the existence of Intellipedia but rather a shift in mindset among our various intelligence agencies—a shift which has yet to occur—from the fiefdom/guildhall-type thinking that has long prevailed to a truly wikified approach to the production of intelligence. This will be difficult for them, but as Marc Ambinder points out, the potential rewards of such a shift are high:

Rasmussen proposes a new production method called "transparent review" that would remove the walls between collaboration and agency vetting. On the same "page," it would allow different agencies to revise and review the Wiki in question, and then, if they approved of the substance, endorse it, right there on the page. Or, if they differed, they'd be given the space, right there on the page, to explain why. The beauty of this construct is that the dynamism of the intelligence analytical product is kept but the totality of the product becomes authoritative. Dissent is still allowed; consensus is not necessarily encouraged.

On Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and the importance of grace

Speaking of Garry Wills, I've been ruminating lately on his superb essay on Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, which he rightly calls "Lincoln's greatest speech." I appreciate Wills' piece a great deal, since he does a good job of setting the Second Inaugural in its proper context and then offers a careful, thoughtful and perceptive analysis of the speech's purpose and line of thought. In particular, though he makes the case that Lincoln's aim was to lay the groundwork for a pragmatic approach to Reconstruction—an approach based on only one fixed principle, that of the abolition of slavery, and in all other respects concerned solely with what would work best to restore a functioning Union—he shows clearly how the president's argument to that purpose was fundamentally not political but theological, and rooted in a strong sense of the humility proper to human aspirations and human ability to plan and predict consequences in the face of the power, wisdom and will of Almighty God. As Wills writes,

The problem with compromise on this scale is that it seems morally neutral, open even to injustices if they work. Answering that objection was the task Lincoln set himself in the Second Inaugural. Everything said there was meant to prove that pragmatism was, in this situation, not only moral but pious. Men could not pretend to have God's adjudicating powers. People had acted for mixed motives on all sides of the civil conflict just past. The perfectly calibrated punishment or reward for each leader, each soldier, each state, could not be incorporated into a single political disposition of the problems. As he put it on April 11,

And yet so great peculiarities pertain to each state; and such important and sudden changes occur in the same state; and, withal, so new and unprecedented is the whole case, that no exclusive, and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and colatterals [sic]. Such [an] exclusive, and inflexible plan, would surely become a new entanglement.

Abstract principle can lead to the attitude Fiat iustitia, ruat coelum—"Justice be done, though it bring down the cosmos." Lincoln had learned to have a modest view of his ability to know what ultimate justice was, and to hesitate before bringing down the whole nation in its pursuit. He asked others to recognize in the intractability of events the disposing hand of a God with darker, more compelling purposes than any man or group of men could foresee. . . .

The war was winding down; but Lincoln summoned no giddy feelings of victory. A chastened sense of man's limits was the only proper attitude to bring to the rebuilding of the nation, looking to God for guidance but not aspiring to replace him as the arbiter of national fate.

Wills further quotes a letter from Lincoln to Thurlow Weed on this subject:

Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told; and as whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford [an occasion?] for me to tell it.

In general, the thought and intent of our greatest president's greatest work—which is, I think, perhaps the greatest piece of political theology ever produced on this continent—shines brightly through this essay. The one thing Wills doesn't quite get is the way in which the address works and grapples with the grace of God. On the one hand, he says,

Americans must be judged in a comprehensive judgment binding on all—God's judgment on slavery, which was to be worked out of the system with pains still counted in the nation's "sinking debt" of guilt. There was no "easy grace" of all-round good will in the message. The speech was flexible, but it was flexible steel.

On the other hand, he doesn't seem to fully understand what that means, because he writes,

People who stress only Lincoln's final words about charity for all, about the healing of wounds, may think that Lincoln was calling for a fairly indiscriminate forgiveness toward the South, especially since he referred to the North's share in the guilt for slavery. But the appeal to "Gospel forgiveness" is preceded by a submission to "Torah judgment" and divine wrath—an odd vehicle for a message of forgiveness.

What I think Wills fails to understand here (perhaps due to a lack of exposure to Reformed thought) is that this isn't an odd vehicle for a message of forgiveness at all, but rather a necessary one if one is to avoid cheap grace. Those of us in the Reformed stream of Christian thought well understand, as Lincoln clearly understood, is that the good news of grace not only can but must be stated in the context of—indeed, as a response to—the bad news of human sin and divine wrath.

It's precisely this understanding which enabled Lincoln to strike the balance which Wills rightly sees as central to the purpose of the Second Inaugural Address, which enabled the president to argue for "a moral flexibility—with emphasis on morality," and thus to stake out a pragmatic position that meant more than mere lowest-common-denominator pragmatism. One would, I think, be correct in arguing that the failure of the American government to strike that balance after Lincoln's death is the primary reason that Reconstruction ultimately collapsed into a form of least-common-denominator political pragmatism that set the cause of racial equality in this country back over half a century and more.

The most irritating political meme of our time

has to be "take back our country." It drove me nuts when I heard it ad nauseam from liberals over the past eight years, and it's continuing to drive me nuts now that I'm hearing it from conservatives. Not to go all Woody Guthrie on everyone, but this sort of language logically implies that the country has been improperly "taken" by those who have no right to it, that it's "ours" not "theirs" and we have the right to "take it back" from whoever isn't "us"—and this is just bunk. It's all of a piece, attitude-wise, with the folks in Colorado a few years ago who were trying to change the law to allocate the state's Electoral College delegates proportionally rather than on a winner-take-all basis, supposedly because "their votes hadn't counted" in 2004 because Bush won the state's delegates. Yes, their votes counted; they lost. That's how the system works.

In the same way, my vote counted last November, and on the national level, my side lost. The idea that this somehow means that "my country" has been "taken" from me and that I have the right to "take it back" is pure tripe of the most arrogant and self-righteous kind. Yes, we need to do a better job of articulating conservative principles—which means, in part, to pick candidates who can do so, preferably because they actually believe in those principles—but we have no standing to claim any sort of entitlement to victory. Quite the contrary. Learn to lose gracefully, people, and take to heart the lessons of defeat—of which the most important is humility; not only does that make the process of coming back to win the next time shorter and smoother, it makes us better people in the process.

Bogus ethics complaints of the day

Here's a couple more examples of the ludicrous things Gov. Palin's opponents have tried to pull. Regardless of what they say, I can't believe they actually take these things seriously—but they know that their complaints don't have to be serious, substantive or reasonable to drain her energy and money. This is a campaign of persecution using the legal system as its tool, nothing more, nothing less; honor requires us to try to stop it.

On dealing with saints as sinners, and vice versa

Recently, I read a bit (I don't remember where) by Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, airing his grievances with his dead father. It wasn't terribly gracious, but such is the way these days, and given that he clearly had a difficult relationship with his father, one can see where the various eulogies might have gotten a little old. Still, I don't think his extended argument that everyone who had a good opinion of his father was wrong really accomplished anything much worth accomplishing.

Of more interest, I thought, was Garry Wills' piece on the elder Buckley in the most recent Atlantic, which set out to defend its subject against the charge of elitism and snobbery (an odd charge to be mounted, when one thinks about it, against the man who famously declared that he'd rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard). Wills was, for a time, a protégé of William F. Buckley's and quite close to him, before becoming politically and personally estranged from him over the issue of the Vietnam War, and he certainly presents a fair number of his erstwhile mentor's warts; the difference is that he does so in the course of also trying to present some of the man's real virtues, and thus offers a more balanced and thus more valuable picture.

There was a time when I would have been bothered to read a critical portrayal of someone I had long admired. Admittedly, depending on the person and the substance of the portrayal, that can still be bothersome, for one reason or another; but I've come to realize over the years that more often than not, if I'm bothered by such a thing, it means that I was expecting too much of someone simply because I admired one aspect of their life. The mature Christian, I think, is never surprised to find the saint a sinner, nor ever compelled to find the sinner any less a saint. May we bear one another's sins with grace.

Bogus ethics complaint of the day, 6/17/09

Another look at the ludicrous lengths to which some people are going out of fear of Sarah Palin. No one should have to put up with this sort of nonsense.

The terrible beauty of freedom

What's happening in Iran in response to the fraudulent election is nothing short of awe-inspiring. This may be the revolution, and if so, it indeed will not be televised (though the early phases were), but it will be tweeted. The Anchoress comments,

You can feel the pulse. It is a human force for freedom that is pressing, pressing against restraints; fully aware of the danger, it yearns, pressing forward, still. It is a terrible beauty.

Read her post; she has some great comments and, as usual, a terrific roundup of key links on the state of things in Iran. We can be proud of Twitter, and of the people who came up with it and maintain it; we can be grateful that they were willing to reschedule their maintenance to inconvenience Americans instead of the Iranians who are tweeting for their lives, their freedom, and their sacred honor. And we can pray (hard!) for those Iranians, that God would protect them and honor their prayers, that he would work a miracle through them and give them freedom.

Unfortunately, our president hasn’t covered himself with glory in this instance; he seems to think that to “stand strongly with [a] universal principle” is enough, that if he just does that, he doesn’t have to stand with the Iranian people. Don Surber put it well, I think, when he wrote,

As an American, I am embarrassed that a couple of computer geeks who came up with a social network have more brass than my holier-than-thou president. Words, deeds. Odd that Twitter does deeds while the commander-in-chief does words.

Just an observation.

Fortunately, as the Anchoress notes, a 27-year-old Condoleezza Rice appointee at the State Department, Jared Cohen, took up some of the president’s slack when he asked Twitter to postpone their scheduled maintenance. Cohen’s an interesting chap, having spent a fair bit of time wandering around the Islamic world before going to work at Foggy Bottom; in 2007 he told the New Yorker,

“They make alcohol in their bathtubs and their sinks,” Cohen said. “And the drug use—it’s really no different from a frat party. You have to pinch yourself and remind yourself that you’re in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iranian young people are one of the most pro-American populations in the Middle East. They just don’t know who to gravitate around, so young people gravitate around each other.”

Watch out for this guy—he has a very bright future—and be grateful that God put someone in his job at State who knows and cares about the people of Iran, especially since his new boss doesn’t know them and doesn’t seem to care very much. Never mind that, because Barack Obama’s not at the wheel here—he’s on the sidelines, a spectator, pretty much irrelevant; history’s happening somewhere else today. Pray for the people of Iran; pray that God brings the walls down. And pray that when that happens, and the reactions of our government start to matter again, that then they do the right thing.