Happy Reformation Day!

Timothy George has an excellent piece on Reformation Day posted as the daily article on First Things—a juxtaposition which, I must confess, delights me no end. I particularly appreciate these paragraphs:

On this Reformation Day, it is good to remember that Martin Luther belongs to the entire Church, not only to Lutherans and Protestants, just as Thomas Aquinas is a treasury of Christian wisdom for faithful believers of all denominations, not simply for Dominicans and Catholics. This point was recognized several weeks ago by Franz-Josef Bode, the Catholic Bishop of Osnabrück in northern Germany, when he preached on Luther at an ecumenical service. “It’s fascinating,” he said, “just how radically Luther puts God at the center.” Luther’s teaching that every human being at every moment of life stands absolutely coram deo—before God, confronted face-to-face by God—led him to confront the major misunderstanding in the church of his day that grace and forgiveness of sins could be bought and sold like wares in the market. “The focus on Christ, the Bible and the authentic Word are things that we as the Catholic church today can only underline,” Bode said. The bishop’s views have been echoed by many other Catholic theologians since the Second Vatican Council as Luther’s teachings, especially his esteem for the Word of God, has come to be appreciated in a way that would have been unthinkable a century ago. . . .

Several years ago I was asked to endorse a book by my friend Mark Noll called Is the Reformation Over? I responded by saying that the Reformation is over only to the extent that it succeeded. In fact, in some measure, the Reformation has succeeded, and more within the Catholic Church than in certain sectors of the Protestant world. The triumph of grace in the theology of Luther was—and still is—in the service of the whole Body of Christ. Luther was not without his warts, and we can hardly imagine him canonized as a saint. (Remember: simul iustus et peccator!) But the question Karl Barth asked about him in 1933 is still worth pondering this Reformation Day: “What else was Luther than a teacher of the Christian church whom one can hardly celebrate in any other way but to listen to him?”

Right on.

Happy Hallowe’en!

Yeah, I’ve heard all the arguments about why Christians shouldn’t celebrate Hallowe’en; I used to be one of those making them. I don’t anymore, though I do still think that one should be very careful about how one celebrates it. (A couple pre-teens came by the house this evening dressed as, I think, the villain from the Saw movies; that is deeply not right.) Though I do not share her Catholic assumptions, I think Sally Thomas’ recent article on the First Things website, “The Drama of Hallowmas,” captures some important truths:

As a friend of mine observed recently, there is something medieval about Halloween. The masks, the running around in the dark, the flicker of candles in pumpkins, the smell of leaves and cold air—all of it feels ancient, even primal, somehow. Despite the now-inevitable preponderance of media-inspired costumes, Halloween seems, in execution, far closer to a Last Judgment scene above a medieval church door, or to a mystery play, than it does to Wal-Mart. To step outside on Halloween dressed as someone—or something—other than yourself is to step into a narrative that acknowledges that the membrane between our workaday, material world and the unseen realm of spirits is far thinner and more permeable than many of us like to think. . . .

The secular commercialization of Halloween bothers people far less than do its roots in the pagan Celtic festival of Samhain, which the Romans, after the conquest of Britain, eventually conflated with their own Feralia, a feast honoring the dead. When, in the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV instituted the feast of All Saints, to fall on the first of November, the eve of that solemnity coincided with the date of the ancient festival. The addition of the feast of All Souls in the eleventh century completed the three-day Hallowmas, dedicated to the memory of the Christian martyrs and honoring all the faithful departed.

The absorption of pre-Christian cultic observance into the Christian calendar is not limited, of course, to holidays dealing with darkness and death. The Church settled on the date for Christmas by much the same process. Halloween’s emphasis on darkness makes many Christians squeamish, but, to my mind, what my friend observed about the medieval feel of Halloween is more on the money. There is a drama to be played out, like a mystery play in three scenes, and it makes sense only if you observe all three days of Hallowmas—not only Halloween but All Saints’ and All Souls’ days as well. In this context, the very secularity and even the roots-level paganism of Halloween become crucial elements in a larger Christian story.

I think she’s on to something there. As my wife writes, reflecting on this,

While I don’t think that God needed us—or wanted us—to sin in order to tell his story, the fact remains that we DID sin. The world in which we live has darkness and sin and death and shadow. It is what we know and understand and in order to tell ourselves the story of redemption—of rescue from the darkness—one must necessarily start with the darkness. Maybe Halloween, from a Christian point of view, isn't such a bad place to do that.

It seems to me that a lot of the Christian opposition to Hallowe’en is based on a desire not to start with the darkness, not to have to deal straight out with sin and evil and death. Which is understandable—but not, in the end, helpful. I think Thomas points to a better way. I can’t simply appropriate it, not being Catholic, since that means I don’t celebrate All Saints’ Day or relate to the saints who’ve gone before us in the same way as Catholics do; but I think she has the right idea:

Christian children need not, as some do, dress as saints for Halloween to “redeem” it. There is something right, I think, in acknowledging on Halloween that the day for the saints has not arrived yet. This is salvation history, after all. We are saved from something—even if only from the ordinary, secular world . . .

The cumulative iconography of being, first, a secular character confronting darkness, and then a saint in light, is imaginatively powerful and valuable.

That’s the conjunction we need; that, if you will, is the before-and-after of our lives. To really get it, though, we need to take the “before” seriously.

A note on fascism

In the latest Atlantic, in his review of Peter Hart’s book on the Battle of the Somme, Christopher Hitchens uncorks a remarkable anecdote about “the almost picturesquely reactionary Conservative politician Alan Clark”:

As I marched across Parliament Square, semiconsciously falling into step with the military pace of the right-wing half of this right-left collaboration, Clark said to me: “I suppose you have heard people say that I am a bit of a fascist?” We had a whole lunch ahead of us and I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot, but something told me he would despise me if I pretended otherwise, so I agreed that this was indeed a thumbnail summary in common use. “That’s all [expletive deleted],” he replied with complete equanimity. “I’m really much more of a Nazi.” This was what Bertie Wooster would have called “a bit of a facer”; I was groping for an apt response when Clark pressed on. “Your fascist is a little middle-class creep who worries about his dividends and rents. The true National Socialist feels that the ruling class has a debt and a tie to the working class. We sent the British workers off to die en masse in the trenches along the Somme, and then we rewarded them with a slump and mass unemployment, and then that led to another war that gutted them again.” For Clark, the lesson of this bloodletting was that a truly national, racial, and patriotic class collaboration was the main thing.

That’s a most interesting comment. It does, I think, capture the difference between Nazism and Communism, between national socialism and international socialism, as the latter is all about class unity and conflict between classes. I also have a sense it might have a certain contemporary application, but I’m not sure what. We do most definitely have a ruling class in this country, though it’s more fluid than it was/is in Great Britain; given that fluidity, they have to declare that they have “a debt and a tie to the working class,” but how many of them (in either party) really believe it?

Sarah Palin on safari: big-game hunter bags another RINO

Dede Scozzafava read the handwriting on the wall—or perhaps we might say, in the polls—and realized her campaign for Congress was dead as last month's fish. She might have stayed in and fought for every vote she could get, but the most she could have managed would have been to give the race to the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens; to give her credit, she responded to the situation in an honorable way, suspending her campaign and endorsing Doug Hoffman. Her formal announcement was completely classy, and leaves a much better impression than her campaign's earlier decision to call the cops on the Weekly Standard's John McCormack; clearly, they didn't handle that well, but the grace and character she showed in stepping out of the race more than cancels that out, I think.

(Update: Umm, no, she didn't; despite what she said about acting for the good of her party, she turned around and endorsed Owens, which is the main reason undecideds broke 3-1 for him in the last 72 hours and gave him the race over Hoffman. I hope she enjoys her revenge, and I have to give her points for execution. -10 for class, though.)

This is a major win for Sarah Palin, Fred Dalton Thompson, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Dick Armey, Rick Santorum, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck, and the other Republicans who had the courage and the native wit to revolt against the GOP's revolting choice as its candidate in NY-23 and back the candidate who actually believes in what the Republican Party stands for. It's especially a major win for Gov. Palin, because her endorsement of Hoffman was clearly, by a large margin, the biggest single factor in his moving from third to first in the race. After endorsements from Levin, Thompson, Robert Stacy McCain, RedState, and others, Hoffman was gaining support and his fundraising was picking up, but he still hadn't raised all that much, and he didn't have a lot of volunteers on the ground to build support and get out the vote. With Gov. Palin's endorsement, that changed, especially as her endorsement drew other heavyweights like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and former New York Gov. George Pataki to do likewise.

All in all, while it was a collaborative effort, Gov. Palin is definitely one who gets major credit, perhaps the most credit, for taking down the Scozzafava campaign. Back in Alaska, she put a few trophies on the wall of her war room of "Republicans" who weren't upholding the ideals and positions of the Republican Party; now, with her endorsement of Doug Hoffman, she's added another, her first from the national scene. The national GOP establishment had best pay attention—and so had Blue Dog Democrats.

On the downside of the permanent campaign

One other thing in that Peggy Noonan column, "There Is No New Frontier," that struck me was this paragraph:

I'm not sure the White House can tell the difference between campaign mode and governing mode, but it is the difference between "us versus them" and "us." People sense the president does too much of the former, and this is reflected not only in words but decisions, such as the pursuit of a health-care agenda that was inevitably divisive. It has lost the public's enthusiastic backing, if it ever had it, but is gaining on Capitol Hill. People don't want whatever it is they're about to get, and they're about to get it. In that atmosphere everything grates, but most especially us-versus-them-ism.

I hadn't really thought about the difference between campaigning and governing in that way, but I think she's right. Given that governing has become increasingly partisan, increasingly "us versus them," in recent years, it's no wonder that popular fatigue and disgust with politics has been increasing.

That of course is why the Obama campaign was so powerful, because it found a way to overcome that fatigue and disgust and generate new enthusiasm and energy for Barack Obama; but while they seem to think they can keep that up forever, this would tend to suggest that in fact, if they keep up the campaign approach, they'll ultimately get a nasty case of elastic recoil back in their collective face. He can only keep it up so long before his admirers decide he's just another politician after all . . . and at that point, he's off the pedestal for good.

"A nation fully settled by government"

Peggy Noonan wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago called "There Is No New Frontier" that I've been mulling for a while now; the core of her argument is an analysis of the differing contexts of FDR's expansion of government in the 1930s and Barack Obama's efforts to do the same. It's more of an analogical analysis than a logical one, but I think it holds pretty well:

A big part of opposition to the health-care plan is a sense of historical context. People actually have a sense of the history they're living in and the history their country has recently lived through. They understand the moment we're in.

In the days of the New Deal, in the 1930s, government growth was virgin territory. It was like pushing west through a continent that seemed new and empty. There was plenty of room to move. The federal government was still small and relatively lean, the income tax was still new. America pushed on, creating what it created: federal programs, departments and initiatives, Social Security. In the mid-1960s, with the Great Society, more or less the same thing. Government hadn't claimed new territory in a generation, and it pushed on—creating Medicare, Medicaid, new domestic programs of all kinds, the expansion of welfare and the safety net.

Now the national terrain is thick with federal programs, and with state, county, city and town entities and programs, from coast to coast. It's not virgin territory anymore, it's crowded. We are a nation fully settled by government. We are well into the age of the welfare state, the age of government. We know its weight, heft and demands, know its costs both in terms of money and autonomy, even as we know it has made many of our lives more secure, and helped many to feel encouragement.

But we know the price now. This is the historical context. The White House often seems disappointed that the big center, the voters in the middle of the spectrum, aren't all that excited about following them on their bold new journey. But it's a world America has been to. It isn't new to us. And we don't have too many illusions about it.

Her argument rests less on propositions than on metaphor, on the image she invokes; but it's a powerful image, and if it's a valid one—which I believe it is—then I think her argument holds. The President and his administration think they have an opportunity to bring about another major expansion of government, and are determined not to let the crisis go to waste (to use Rahm Emanuel's language)—but the context isn't what they think it is, and the parallels they think they see with President Roosevelt don't actually apply, because the popular attitude toward government isn't the same now as it was then. They're failing to factor in the reality that those past interventions have had their own effects, and have changed the board in some important ways.

Americans of FDR's time could be persuaded that government could do a better job and fix all their problems, because it hadn't really been tried much before. Americans of our time know better. The New Deal has already been tried, and the Great Frontier, and pushed to the point that another president could stand up and declare, "Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem"; that bell cannot be unrung. While President Obama may well in the end get his government-bloating agenda through, for the powers of the Executive Branch are great, one thing he cannot be is another President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; that opportunity has passed, and ours is a different world.

Farewell to GeoCities

You probably noticed that Yahoo rather ignominiously killed off GeoCities this week; that probably didn't matter a whit to your life, though, which is as good an illustration as anything of why they did it. GeoCities has long since been rendered irrelevant by Blogger, Facebook, WordPress, MySpace, Twitter, Last.fm, and the whole world of what's commonly called Web 2.0. If you're like me, your primary mental picture of GeoCities is of acres and acres of ugly websites (which, unfortunately, spawned imitators such as SiteRightNow that are still around, helping people build GeoCities knockoffs).

As Slate points out, though, that undersells GeoCities. For all the disaster it became (especially for Yahoo), GeoCities had the right idea; in fact, it was ahead of its time. (That may have been the problem—it was too far ahead of its time for its founders to see the right way to implement its core idea; they did the right thing, but the wrong way to produce long-term success.)

GeoCities deserves much more credit than we give it, because it was the first big venture built on what is now hailed as the defining feature of the Web 2.0 boom—"user-generated content."

The company's founding goal—to give everyone with Internet access a free place on the Web—sounds pretty mundane now. But GeoCities launched in 1995 (it was originally called Beverly Hills Internet), when there were just a few million people online. Back then, the idea that anyone would want to carve out his own space on this strange new medium—and that you could make money by letting people do so—bordered on crazy. (Two other free hosting companies—Tripod and Angelfire—started up at around the same time, but they proved far less popular than GeoCities.) In an early press release, David Bohnett, one of GeoCities' co-founders, hailed the idea this way: "This is the next wave of the net—not just information but habitation." Look past the tech-biz jargon, and his prediction is startlingly prescient. Today, few of us think of the Web as a simple source for information; it's also a place for dissemination, the place where we share life's most intimate details. In other words, it's for "habitation"—and GeoCities helped start that trend.

This is why one insider commented,

Had they done things right with GeoCities, there would be no Facebook, YouTube or MySpace.

Unfortunately for them, though, they didn't, because they only got half the picture; they missed what seems, in retrospect, to be the obvious corollary of their big idea.

The site came upon one of the chief ingredients of Web success—letting people put up their own stuff—but was missing what we've since learned is another key feature: a way to help people find an audience for their daily ramblings. The main difference between GeoCities and MySpace is the social network: Both sites let you indulge your creativity, but MySpace gave people a way to show off their pages to friends. On MySpace, your site was no longer shunted off to some little-traveled corner of the Web. Instead it was at the center of your friends' lives—and so there was some small reward to keep hacking away at it. At least, that was true when MySpace was hot, which is no longer the case—just like GeoCities, it lost cultural cachet to newer, better sites that came along after. In this way, too, GeoCities was a trailblazer, the first example of another reality of user-generated sites: They're extremely susceptible to faddism. You want a page on GeoCities or MySpace or whatever else only if other people are there too. As soon as the place becomes uncool . . . everyone leaves in droves.

The result is best summed up by T. S. Eliot:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

This is cool in more ways than I can count

HT: my wife

I think these folks are right to say, "the easiest way to change people's behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do"; but honestly, that only begins to bring out all the lessons from this one. Imagine the teaching opportunity of staircases like that, what they would do for people's understanding and appreciation of music . . . we could use many, many more of these.

Though Hap is right—our kids being who they are, if we had a staircase like that on our regular route, we'd never get anywhere on time.

Adventures in Greek

I wound up this evening, through a series of events, teaching the girls how to say "Thank you" in Greek—eucharistō in Koine, which has evolved to efcharistō in modern Greek. Their attempts to pronounce it were (of course) uneven, crowned by our youngest, who at one point came out with "used-car-isto"; I had to tell her no one would take that as a thank-you. The images that one generated were priceless.

God, game theory, and the inscrutability of providence

If you don't read Fangraphs (and if you're a serious baseball fan, you should), you missed an article recently that was astonishing in both the ambition of its task and the complexity of its argument. Mitchel Lichtman, known to many as MGL, wrote a lengthy post analyzing the Yankees' sacrifice bunts in the eighth inning of the deciding sixth game of this year's American League Championship Series and asking the question, "Were they good calls?" His answer was long, involved, complicated, and highly mathematical, and as such would probably be dismissed by many as arcane and pointless, especially since the Yankees (predictably) won regardless. Such a dismissal would be a mistake.

It would be a mistake because MGL answers that question not simply by calculating probabilities but by using game theory. I won't pretend to understand his article completely at the detail level, but I think I have the essential insight right: predictability is the greatest tactical and strategic sin. Therefore, to maximize one's chances of success, one must be unpredictable, which means not always going with the probabilities.

Look at it this way. One may calculate out all the probabilities as to whether a given move—such as, say, a sacrifice bunt attempt—is likely to help one's team win the game or not, but if you calculate them all out, put them in a table, and then rigidly follow that table, what's going to happen? The other team is going to know what's coming and respond accordingly, and then all your probabilities are knocked into a cocked hat. For the optimum move to remain the optimum move, one must sometimes do something else; failing that, others will adjust, and their adjustments will turn what had been the best move into a failing move.

Read the post if you want a fuller explanation than that and think you can follow it. For my purposes here, I have to admit that I don't really care if Joe Girardi made the right call on those bunts or not; I'm more interested in the underlying reality that sometimes the "best move" isn't the best move, and that sometimes you have to do something that would seem in isolation to be counterproductive in order to best advance your goals.

I'm particularly interested in this with regard to our understanding of God and the workings of his providence. Oftentimes we ask God to do a good thing—heal someone we care about, for instance, or deliver us from a sin that is just killing us—and we lay out all sorts of reasons why he ought to do it, and ask him in faith . . . and he doesn't. Why that is, I don't know, though I'm sure part of it is that there are literally billions of variables in each case that we don't know about. But I wonder—and I suppose this shows exactly the sort of geek I am that this was the first thought that occurred to me as I was reading MGL's piece (well, that and the fact that I read the whole thing)—whether some of the reason why God doesn't do things we ask him to do is because that would be counterproductive in the end.

After all, if God always gave us what we ask for—at least on those occasions when we ask for things that we have good reason to believe are his will—how many repetitions would it take for us to grow complacent? Worse, how many times would it take before we began to believe that we had made God act, and that he was somehow required to give us what we want? (Not many, I suspect, given that some people essentially believe that now.) How long would it be before the vile, poisonous weed of spiritual pride took firm root in our souls?

In the end, of course, any essay into the question of why God does or does not do any given thing must be purely speculative, and I certainly don't claim to be doing anything else; but I thought it was an interesting idea to kick around, anyway.

Politics and the practical problem of evil

In his book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Eugene Peterson begins the chapter on Psalm 124 with this story:

I was at a Red Cross bloodmobile to donate my annual pint, and being asked a series of questions by a nurse to see if there was any reason for disqualification. The final question on the list was, “Do you engage in hazardous work?” I said, “Yes.” She was interrupted from her routine and looked up, a little surprised, for I was wearing a clerical collar by which she could identify me as a pastor. Her hesitation was only momentary; she smiled, ignored my answer and marked the no on her questionnaire, saying, “I don’t mean that kind of hazardous.”

Eugene didn’t pursue that discussion, as there was a line of people behind him, but he notes later in that chapter that the nurse missed his point. It’s not the particular work of a pastor but the life of discipleship in general which is hazardous; and one reason for that is the power of evil in this world.

When we hear the word “evil,” I suspect most of us think of the extreme cases—genocidal dictators like Hitler, for instance, psychotic mass murderers, psychopathic serial killers, and people of that sort—the cases where, you might say, we find it straight up in a shotglass, 120 proof. The problem is, we usually meet it mixed in, hidden behind a bunch of other colors and flavors to sweeten it and make it look pretty, so that people who aren’t paying attention will swallow it whole. A friend of mine first encountered Long Island Iced Tea at the age of 12 at a party his family was attending; he’d had a couple before he or anyone else realized that he wasn’t drinking regular iced tea, in part because the alcohol took a while to hit his system. I guess when it did, he went from zero to blitzed in three seconds flat. A lot of times, we’re like that with the evil in the world—we swallow it without realizing it, and by the time the consequences show up, it’s too late.

The basic problem is that because there’s evil in every one of us, because we’re all tainted, everything we create, even the best we ever do, is also tainted; and that includes every human system—every family, every government, every charity, every association, and yes, every church. They’re all imperfect, because we’re all imperfect. I don’t care whether you vote Republican or Democrat, whether you supported Barack Obama or John McCain, whether you were ecstatic last November 4 or despondent: the Obama administration is deeply flawed, and so would a McCain administration have been, and you could say the same thing about Clinton, Reagan, Kennedy, Roosevelt (either one), Lincoln, Washington, or any other president you might care to name. They were all possessed of considerable virtues, but each was also compromised by evil in ways both obvious and subtle. That’s just the way of it in this fallen world of ours.

What that means is that, if you try to live the Christian life for all your worth—if you really open yourself up to the Spirit for God to lead however he will—you’ll find that in trying to be on God’s side, you’ll wind up on nobody else’s (not completely, anyway). Those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind, Jesus tells us—independent of any human control (or prediction, really). It’s impossible to sign on with any given political program, whether Democrat or Republican, and reflexively support it, because the Spirit will be constantly prompting you to recognize the evil in that program, and in those who’re pushing it, and to remember that they, too, are human and therefore wrong a significant percentage of the time. (Along with that, of course, the Spirit will also be constantly prompting you to recognize the same things about yourself; there lies the beginning of humility.) As Jesus said, no one can serve two masters, so if you’re going to follow him, you can’t follow anyone or anything else; which means that sooner or later, following him is going to put you crossways of the powers that be.

Of course, that truth is clearer and sharper some times and places than others. One of the reasons we give thanks for our political system is that it was designed by people with a clear awareness of human sinfulness; and if the checks and balances they built in as a result, in an effort to neutralize our vices and give virtue the best possible chance to triumph, sometimes make our government resemble one of Rube Goldberg’s ludicrous contraptions, well, it’s a small price to pay, given the alternatives.

Even so, if the temptation to back down, to compromise our faith, to go along to get along rather than standing up and resisting evil when we meet it in our government or our culture, is less obvious and clear-cut now than it has been at other times in human history, that doesn’t make it any less of a threat. We might be better able to fool ourselves into thinking we’re obeying God when we choose to compromise with evil, but that only makes the temptation more insidious, and more dangerous.

As Christians, we need to face the fact that we are always in opposition to the powers that be, at least to some degree. There are governments that do many things we can support, on a qualified basis, but even there, we must always hold ourselves apart from them and be calling them to account for the things they do wrong. We must be careful not to make the mistake (which far too many Christians, of whatever political persuasion, have in recent years) of identifying the work of the kingdom of God with the agenda of any given political party, or of mistaking supporting a political platform for advancing the work of God on Earth. We cannot with integrity sit that comfortably or identify ourselves that closely with any political organization, because we and they fundamentally are not about the same thing.

Rather, we need to recognize that if our primary commitment is to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ, we will make enemies. We will tend to be thorns in the side of those who hold power, digging out the things they want hidden and challenging them to be better than they are (or, maybe, than they want to be); we will also be an irritant in our culture, challenging people in their comfortable assumption that they’re doing just fine, calling them to set aside some of their desires and follow a more difficult path. But if we will hold fast to God, the psalmist declares boldly that God will keep us secure, both against the temptations of evil and against its assaults.

T. F. Torrance rocks the gospel

Maybe it’s partly because I'm a Celtophile, but I have a tremendous appreciation for the Torrance brothers of Scotland (Thomas F. and James B.); they don’t seem to be all that well-known on the American side of the big puddle, but I think both were among the great theologians of the past half-century. I’m particularly grateful for J. B. Torrance’s strongly Trinitarian and covenantal understanding of Reformed theology, which I think provides a powerful corrective to the tendency toward gracelessness in certain strains of the Reformed communions, and for T. F. Torrance’s work on theology and science (a good brief introduction to his thought in this area can be found in the little book Preaching Christ Today: The Gospel and Scientific Thinking).

I mention this to highlight the fact that the two most recent quotes posted on Of First Importance are both from T. F. Torrance, and both wonderful and important statements. Yesterday’s lays out the implications of our union with Christ (a doctrine on which the Scots seem to be a good bit stronger than most Americans):

From beginning to end what Jesus Christ has done for you he has done not only as God but as man. He has acted in your place in the whole range of your human life and activity, including your personal decisions, and your responses to God’s love, and even your acts of faith. He has believed for you, fulfilled your human response to God, even made your personal decision for you, so that he acknowledges you before God as one who has already responded to God in him, who has already believed in God through him, and whose personal decision is already implicated in Christ’s self-offering to the Father, in all of which he has been fully and completely accepted by the Father, so that in Jesus Christ you are already accepted by him. Therefore, renounce yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus as your Lord and Saviour.

Today’s shows how that underpins the gospel of grace:

To preach the Gospel of the unconditional grace of God in that unconditional way is to set before people the astonishingly good news of what God has freely provided for us in the vicarious humanity of Jesus. To repent and believe in Jesus Christ and commit myself to him on that basis means that I do not need to look over my shoulder all the time to see whether I have really given myself personally to him, whether I really believe and trust him, whether my faith is at all adequate, for in faith it is not upon my faith, my believing or my personal commitment that I rely, but solely upon what Jesus Christ has done for me, in my place and on my behalf, and what he is and always will be as he stands in for me before the face of the Father. That means that I am completely liberated from all ulterior motives in believing or following Jesus Christ, for on the ground of his vicarious human response for me, I am free for spontaneous joyful response and worship and service as I could not otherwise be.

This radical understanding, that life is all of Christ, and all in Christ, and none of me, is the heart of the gospel; it’s what we as Christians are called to preach and to live out.

Now, who is this church thing about, again?

I was blown away last night by a great post from the Vice Moderator of the 218th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Rev. Byron Wade. I've never met him, but I'm confident in saying two things about him: 1) he's good people, and 2) he's on the liberal side of things in his beliefs. He was, after all, chosen for this position by the Moderator of that GA, the Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, of whom both those things are also true. (GA always elects liberals.) I've had various interactions with Bruce online—on this blog, and his, and Facebook—and I like and respect him a great deal; he's the sort of person who can disagree with you with grace, respect, affection, and an honest desire to understand where you're coming from. That's all too rare (and probably always has been). As such, though I don't know the man he chose as vice moderator, in my book, Byron Wade comes well recommended for character.

All of this is by way of saying that the following passage comes from someone with a real heart for the church, but not from an evangelical (as in fact he says himself):

The surprising thing that I have heard in my travels is stories about pastors/laity who do not preach and/or mention Jesus Christ. While I have not heard it a lot, it has been said to me enough that it caused me some alarm. . . .

I am in no way a Fundamentalist or a person who is considered an "evangelical street preacher." What I am saying is that I believe that we who call ourselves followers of Jesus Christ may want to preach him to others, for if we don't people will go elsewhere. And I would hate to think that we are losing out on witnessing to others because we don't talk about Jesus.

Byron titled his post (quite properly, I think) "Is it just me or are we supposed to be talking about Jesus?" Read the whole thing—some of the stories he tells truly are worrisome. As I read, two thoughts struck me, both rather sad. First, it's a wonderful thing to hear this point being made by somebody on the liberal side of the aisle; I don't say that all liberal Christians shy away from talking about Jesus, but one doesn't often hear liberals calling out the American church for its Christlessness. Second, several of the stories he tells may perfectly well have happened in churches that consider themselves "evangelical"; when folks like Jared Wilson and Michael Spencer criticize the Jesuslessness of the church in this country, it's not Ivy League liberals they have in mind.

As such, it's a good thing to be able to make common cause with more liberal folks like the Vice Moderator to ask the American church together, "Is it just me, or are we supposed to be talking about Jesus?" Who knows—maybe coming from someone like Byron, it will actually scandalize the church into paying attention.

Another random Internet find

also preserved years ago from someone's signature on a message board:

English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, whacks them over the head, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

"Conservative" ≠ "Republican"

Doug Brady, one of my fellow contributors at C4P, put up an interesting post a few days ago analyzing recent polls showing support for Sarah Palin dropping among self-identified Republicans. Sparked by the fact that these polls show Mike Huckabee as a frontrunner when nobody takes him seriously as such, Doug has come up with an explanation that makes a lot of sense.

We keep hearing that conservatives are leaving the Republican Party in droves and that the primary reason for this is that the establishment GOP is becoming more and more Democrat-light. Rasmussen’s poll, which indicates that 73% of Republicans believe the DC elite in the party has lost touch with the base, is strong evidence of this. We also see this in Governor Palin’s endorsement of Doug Hoffman in NY-23. Even stronger evidence is the fact that even though 40% call themselves conservative, only half, or 20%, call themselves Republicans.

If I received a call from a pollster today, Scott Rasmussen for example, and he asked me to identify my party, I would not identify myself as a Republican. From the above polling data, about half of conservatives would do the same as me. This is important. I don’t know Rasmussen’s precise methodology but I suspect, when he polls for Republican primaries, he excludes Democrats and Independents, using self-identified Republicans for his sample. I further suspect that most of those conservatives who no longer call themselves Republicans (like me) are also those most likely to support Governor Palin. Further, these disaffected conservatives are least likely to support a fiscal liberal like Mike Huckabee or a plastic establishment Republican like Mitt Romney.

In short, the sample may be predisposed to exclude a greater percentage of conservatives who are disgusted with the Republican Party and thus don’t self-identify as Republicans. This would result in an under sampling of those most likely to support Governor Palin and conversely, an over sampling of those most likely to support someone else. This would explain why Huckabee over performs in these polls. Those Republicans who still identify themselves as such are far more likely to be moderate establishment types and, therefore, more likely to eschew a grass roots movement conservative like Governor Palin in favor of a “conventional” choice like Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney. If my logic is accurate, this is bad news for Mitt Romney. These are the very Republicans he should be dominating, and yet he isn’t.

For my own part, I wouldn’t identify myself to a pollster as a Republican either, though that’s as much for theological reasons as anything. That doesn’t translate to primaries, though, since I identify myself by party there in order to be able to vote in the desired primary; as such, I don’t believe Doug’s application of his logic to presidential primaries actually holds. For the rest, though, I think he has a very good chance of being right—indeed, I’m quite sure he is to at least some degree. To my way of thinking, the question is less “Is this skewing Gov. Palin’s poll numbers?” than “Does this foreshadow the demise of the Republican Party?” Could the GOP end like the Whigs? Absent a successful reconquest by Gov. Palin and the rest of the Republican wing of the Republican Party—yes, and for much the same reason: a failure of principle.

The keystone: humility

The connection between my last two posts—the first on why we should talk with those with whom we disagree, and the second on the nature of wisdom—may not be all that obvious, but I think it’s a profoundly important one. Specifically, the connection is humility, which is necessary for both, and which comes from both. It takes humility to talk with those we believe are wrong, not so that we can demonstrate to them how wrong they are, but in a receptive way that is open to what we might learn from them; and doing so teaches us humility, which helps us to grow wise. Wisdom in its turn breeds humility, and teaches us how much we have left to learn from others.

This might sound like a strange thing to say, but it’s true: wisdom is humble. Humility even more than wisdom is underrated, not the sort of thing we tend to praise people for, because it doesn’t draw attention to itself—and because we often tend to consider pride a good thing. From the point of view of the Scriptures, though, humility is one of the virtues which is supposed to define the people of God. The Catholic priest and philosopher Ernest Fortin went so far as to call it “the Christian virtue par excellence . . . humility first of all of a God who would humble Himself to take on our humanity and give His life as a ransom for the many. But humility as well for the believer—to understand that all is grace; that we have no right to claim anything as our own—not our life, not our gifts, not even our faith. We are at every moment God’s creation.”

Think about that: we worship “a God who would humble Himself to take on our humanity and give His life as a ransom for the many.” That’s straight out of Philippians 2. No one ever had more reason to put his own interests and desires first, or to glorify himself, than Jesus; and yet he let go of glory, he let go of all the things pride values, and humbled himself to become a mere human being—and not even one who lived a rich, comfortable life, but a vagabond from the working class; and even beyond that, he accepted the horrible death of a convicted criminal. And he did it all for us, out of love, and set us his example to follow—and Paul points to that in 1 Corinthians 1 and calls Jesus our wisdom from God.

Does this mean, then, that God calls us to look down on ourselves, to put ourselves down and dismiss ourselves as unimportant? No. Those sorts of attitudes are counterfeits of true humility, and are really just pride in disguise; they still focus our attention inward, on ourselves, and they still put us at the center of everything we do. True humility takes our focus off ourselves altogether; it’s what Paul means when he writes in Romans 12:3, “Don’t think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.” Humility is seeing ourselves clearly, in the light of God’s holiness and grace, and accepting what we see; it is the place where we are well aware both of our weaknesses and failures and of our glories and strengths, and don’t make too much or too little of either, because we know that our value and importance rests not in what we have done or what we can do, but only and always in the fact that God made us and loves us. As C. S. Lewis put it, someone truly humble could design the most beautiful cathedral ever built, and look at it and know it to be the most beautiful cathedral ever built, and enjoy it just the same as if someone else had done it.

This is why the Scriptures consistently associate humility with wisdom—to take another example, Proverbs 11:2 says, “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but wisdom is with the humble.” Wisdom begins with the understanding of our own limits—that is, I think, part of the reason for the declaration in Psalm 111:10 that the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; one of the reasons for that is the recognition of just how great God is, and how small and limited we are. Wisdom requires the acceptance that we never know as much, we never understand things as well, we’re never as smart or as far ahead of the game, as we think—and that in consequence, we need each other. That requires humility.

We must humble ourselves before each other if we are to learn from each other; we must humble ourselves before God if we are to grow in his wisdom; we must humble ourselves to receive correction and rebuke if we are to learn from our mistakes; we must humble ourselves to confess our immaturity if we are ever to mature. We must humble ourselves to accept and admit our incompleteness, our brokenness, our sinfulness, if we are ever to be made complete, whole, and holy. And in the last analysis, we must humble ourselves to understand that “all is grace,” that none of us are self-made, but that “we are”—all of us—“at every moment, God’s creation,” if we are ever truly to be ourselves.

(Partially excerpted from “True Wisdom”)

What is wisdom?

Looking over my previous post, it seems to me that lurking under the surface of my argument there is a deeper concern: how do we move beyond trying to feel that we’re right, and actually begin to become wise? In that, I think I might be moving a bit against the grain of Western culture; in this place and time, calling someone “wise” is still considered to be a compliment, but it’s not necessarily the sort of compliment that breeds emulation. We may recognize wisdom as a good thing in the abstract, but I don’t know that it’s something our culture really prizes all that much.

Indeed, I’m not at all sure that as a culture, we’re even all that clear on what wisdom is. We tend to get it mixed up with the other things that we think of as related to our minds, with knowledge and understanding and intelligence—which isn’t helpful, because wisdom isn’t any of those things. Granted, to exercise wisdom, it helps to have a lot of knowledge, but there are many people for whom great knowledge just means the chance to be greater fools. Similarly with intelligence; intelligence can amplify wisdom, but it can’t increase the number of wise options available. It can, however, allow for the invention of lots of new ways to be foolish. Understanding is good and necessary, but we can begin to take pride in our understanding, and when that starts to happen, it can lead us astray very quickly. As the saying goes, logic is often nothing more than a way to go wrong with confidence.

Wisdom, by contrast, is all about being able to separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s about facing the questions, “Is this a good idea, or not? Is this the right thing to do, or not?” and being able to answer those questions correctly. It is the ability to perceive the best thing to do—and then to go and do it. If someone can tell you what they ought to be doing but doesn’t go out and do it, we don’t call them wise, we call them a very particular sort of fool. Wisdom isn’t wisdom until we put it into practice; it’s all about how we live. Wisdom is about doing truth, not just knowing truth.

(Partially excerpted from “True Wisdom”)

Thoughts on argument and talking with "the enemy"

inspired in part by Penn Jillette—not that these are new thoughts for me, but just that his video that I posted the other day has me thinking about them.

The sort of encounter Penn describes in that video is one which is drearily familiar to a lot of us on the conservative side of the American church. It's a type of spat I've seen many times (and in which I've participated) during my time serving within the Presbyterian Church (USA), as an ex- or soon-to-be-ex-member of the PC(USA) lambasts someone who is not leaving the denomination: "How can you stay in that denomination?! They deny the authority of the Bible, they are faithless to the teachings of Christ, they have denied their heritage, they have compromised the Christian faith beyond recognition! The Word of God is not rightly preached, the sacraments are not rightly administered, and church discipline is not only not rightly exercised, it's mocked and rendered unenforceable—the marks of the true church are nowhere present! That denomination is apostate, your money is going to causes contrary to the Word of God, and you are aiding and abetting it! They are using you to do evil! Why haven't you left yet?!"

Yeah, I've heard that sort of thing once or twice before. In my own case, it's actually ironic, since I'm not Presbyterian by ordination; I am ordained in the Reformed Church in America, and all I'd have to do to leave the denomination is go serve a different congregation (though I have no intention of doing so). I am only Presbyterian in that God has called me—twice in a row, now—to serve in this denomination. Of course, from a theological perspective, I don't believe God does anything by accident, and so I operate from the understanding that I serve as an evangelical within the PC(USA) because God wants me to, for reasons which serve his good purposes; and from that I draw what seems to me to be the reasonable inference that there are others, probably many others, whom he calls likewise.

I further point out that the PC(USA)'s liberal wing is far from all of the denomination, that to pronounce them apostate is to declare them to be in desperate need of the gospel and grace of Jesus Christ, and that to respond to that need by turning one's back on them and cutting ties with them is a profoundly un-Christlike stance. Whatever anyone on the Right might say about the Presbyterian Left, Jesus could have said far worse about the Pharisees and Sadducees (and with far more right to do so, since unlike any of us, he was sinless)—and yet he didn't break off all contact with them. Instead, he kept right on preaching to them just like he preached to all the other sinners he met.

I make these points, and I make others, but somehow, they never impress my interlocutors much. They point me to Paul's command to the Corinthians to cast out the guy having the affair with his stepmother, and they hit me with lines like "Come out from among them and be separate"; I point out that these are all commands dealing with the local congregation, and that we have no Biblical warrant for what they're talking about—we have no example of, let's say, Paul commanding the churches in Sardis and Colossae to cut ties with the church in Ephesus because of the outbreak of heresy there—but they remain unmoved. It could be that my arguments are just that bad, but (biased though I may be) I don't think they are. Rather, though I'm not going to label those firing on me from my right as heretics or pay them back in kind (I've been called a heretic once or twice by those folks, but I have no desire to return the favor), I do believe they're wrong, on a fairly basic level. I don't say they're wrong in their own decision to leave—I would have no way of even beginning to know—but I do say they're wrong in judging all those who do otherwise.

Now, of course, the term most frequently applied by folks on the Left when they want to smear Christians on the Right is "fundamentalist"; they love to use the same word for folks like the Taliban so as to imply that conservative Christians, too, believe in murdering their daughters for smiling at men. It's really a pretty slippery term, due to the ways it's been used; in its origins, fundamentalism was and remains a good thing, denoting a commitment to the fundamentals of Christian faith and the concomitant refusal to fudge or elide those fundamentals for the sake of compromise with the world. In that sense, though I might offer a slightly different list as properly fundamental or first-order, I too could be quite properly described as a fundamentalist.

There is another sense, however, in which I am not by any means a fundamentalist; that would be the sense that drives the difference between fundamentalists and evangelicals in America, and has ever since the likes of Charles Fuller and Carl F. H. Henry led that separation a half-century ago. It's less a matter of theological commitments (or at least, it once was) than of one's attitude and approach to culture; to grossly oversimplify the case, the stream which continued to be known as fundamentalism believed in taking the command to come out and be separate very broadly, holding themselves apart from all unsaved culture (something of the Roger Williams approach), while the stream that would come to be called evangelical believed in taking the risk of exposure to culture for the sake of being able to reach and (one hopes) transform the culture.

As such, the argument I'm talking about could be described as a form of the evangelical/fundamentalist argument—and so could the argument Penn had with Tommy Smothers. The spirit and attitude that is commonly meant when most Americans talk about fundamentalism, after all, is one which exists within all movements, not merely within Christianity (or Islam, for that matter); it exists among liberals and atheists, too. Tommy Smothers, in attacking Penn on that occasion, was operating out of what can only be called the most closed-minded and arrogant sort of fundamentalist spirit and approach, while Penn was playing the evangelical role. (That, as I recognize even if he doesn't, is the reason why this video, as well as the earlier one in which he tells of his encounter with a Christian fan who gave him a Bible, have struck such a chord with so many Christians.)

Now, standing up and advocating talking respectfully and honestly with "the enemy" is the sort of thing guaranteed to get one shot at by members of "one's own side," and usually by people who have no compunction about pulling out the heaviest artillery they can find (not always merely rhetorical, either) and blazing away indiscriminately. At the same time, if you talk with those with whom you legitimately disagree about major things, just because you are trying to be respectful and to listen to them honestly doesn't mean they're going to have any such commitment in response; oftentimes, they'll unlimber the biggest cannon they have and fire at will, too. All of which is to say, this can be little more than a good way to put oneself at the center of a circular firing squad. Why bother? Why on Earth would one want to put up with that? Why not just shut up, give up, and go do something else?

There are a couple reasons for persevering in such an approach despite the difficulties it entails. One is that for our own sake, we need to get outside our comfortable little echo chambers and talk to people who have points of view with which we disagree, concerns and interests different from our own, and questions we haven't already learned to answer in our sleep. We need this because if we only talk seriously with people who confirm us in our own opinions and priorities, that breeds arrogance and ignorance. It leaves us thinking we know and understand more than we actually do, which gives us a higher opinion of our judgment and the rightness of our ideas than either actually warrants; it leaves us ignorant of why people actually disagree with us, of what they actually think and believe and value, and why (think of Pauline Kael's fabled reaction to Nixon's victory—she was bewildered that he could have won, because she didn't know anyone who voted for him); and it leaves us unable to properly perceive the flaws and faults in our reasoning and ideas (or, for that matter, in ourselves).

The truth is, there are always things we need to learn that we're highly unlikely to learn from those who agree with us, because they're likely to have the same blind spots—and even if they don't, they're not likely to be motivated and looking to see them in us. We're only likely to learn them from those who disagree with us, who are looking for the chinks in our factual, logical and rhetorical armor, because only those who are looking for those chinks (usually to take advantage of them) are going to spot them and point them out to us. It's only when we're tried and tested that we truly discover our weaknesses, much less find the motivation to address them—and it's only when challenged by someone who disagrees with us and is motivated to try to prove us wrong that our beliefs are truly tried and tested.

This is, of course, exactly the reason we so often tend to avoid such conversations; and at its root, it's a perfectly natural discomfort with learning. Anytime we enter a serious conversation, we create the possibility that we might learn something. That sounds like an unalloyed positive, because we've been taught to think it is, but psychologically, it isn't, at least for adults. After all, to learn something means to have it demonstrated that we were either wrong or ignorant on a given subject; this is uncomfortable at some level even when it comes from people who agree with us, who are likely to be teaching us something we find congenial and to be doing so in a gracious spirit. To learn something from someone who disagrees with us is frequently far more discomfiting, because it may very well be something we don't want to hear, and will often be delivered in a triumphalist spirit—as their "victory" over us. Emotionally, this is something we would prefer to avoid.

Even so, we need to persevere. We need to do so for our own sake, and also because part of showing respect for other people is taking them seriously, which means we have to take their beliefs and arguments seriously. To do so in any meaningful way, we have to engage those beliefs and arguments as seriously as we are able. That seriousness is, of course, limited in part by their willingness to engage with us, which is something we can't control; it's also, often, limited by their emotional connection to their beliefs—some people, by temperament, are inclined to take any disagreement with their beliefs as a personal attack on them as individuals, and thus respond to disagreement poorly, improperly, and in ways which are not constructive. This was a lesson it took me a long time to learn, to recognize that there are such people and that they must be approached differently, and far more carefully, than simply through intellectual argument.

That said, if people are willing to have a serious, substantive, respectful discussion of their beliefs and ours, and if the circumstances permit, then we need to match their willingness. To refuse to engage with the beliefs of others is to treat them with disrespect, because it's essentially to say that their beliefs aren't worthy of being taken seriously—which implies that we don't think they are worthy of being taken seriously. To take an idea seriously is to test it, to apply stresses to it to see if it holds up, factually, logically, and in other ways; we should always do so with an open mind, not assuming its failure before we ever begin the test. We do so, of course, by argument, deploying the facts and reason at our command in an effort to break it down, because that's the only way we have to tell if an idea is in fact valid. The goal is not, or should not be, "winning," being seen to be right and to prove another person wrong; the only proper goal of argument is to discern truth.

This, as far as I can tell, is the approach Penn is taking in talking with those who don't share his positions; and this is what Tommy Smothers denounced as being wrong in itself. That fact suggests that Smothers' real concern is not for truth—actually, it suggests that at some level, he's afraid he might be wrong about some important things, and is strongly resistant to allowing himself (or anyone else within earshot) to consider that possibility. This is very human, and indeed quite a common psychological response to the awareness of dissent; but it's far from noble, and stunts our intellectual and spiritual growth.

Now, there are those who would argue for the sort of defensive response Smothers showed on the grounds that it's necessary to protect the truth; but I disagree. God tells us to stand firm in the truth, but I don't recall him ever telling us to protect the truth. In a very real sense, I don't believe truth needs to be protected—it can take care of itself, because God can take care of himself, and truth is of God; and while people's adherence to the truth may be far more fragile, protecting believers from any sort of challenge is neither a helpful nor a productive way to address that fact. We must, rather, work to address it by deepening and strengthening their understanding of the truth, and their knowledge of and relationship with the God who is Truth; and we do so not by protecting them from questions and challenges, but rather by helping them face those questions and challenges.

Part of that is helping them to understand that just because they don't have an answer to a given question does not mean that there is no answer to that question; oftentimes, there is, but we just don't know it yet. That, too, is one of those things one learns by arguing out issues with people who disagree with us—including that it applies just as well to them as it does to us: just because we pose a question or a challenge that someone else can't answer doesn't mean there isn't an answer for it. (If we fail to understand or remember that fact, sooner or later we'll get blindsided for our arrogance.)

Indecision is the worst decision

and as this video highlights, that's where the White House has left us in Afghanistan, with real and deleterious consequences:

For my part, I think pulling out of Afghanistan, abandoning our allies to the Taliban, would be a mistake; but better that than leaving our troops twisting in the wind. Better just to yank the tooth and get it over with than to let it rot in place like this. Macbeth's comment is not exactly to the point, but seems apposite to me nevertheless:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly.

—Macbeth, in William Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.VII.1-2

HT: Tim Lindell

Found on the Internet

years ago, in someone's sig file:

"Bother," said Pooh. "Eeyore, ready two photon torpedoes and lock phasers on the Heffalump. Piglet, meet me in transporter room three. Christopher Robin, you have the bridge."

Moved by grace

God’s grace is the driving force of all change. . . . God’s grace has both an inward and an outward movement that mirror each other. Internally, the grace of God moves me to see my sin, respond in repentance and faith, and then experience the joy of transformation. Externally, the grace of God moves me to see opportunities for love and service, respond in repentance and faith, and experience joy as I see God work through me.

—Bob Thune and Will Walker, The Gospel-Centered Life

One more quote from Of First Importance for the night, because this quote they posted yesterday is also brilliant; in fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen this put better.

Growing to identify with Christ

Identity is a complex set of layers, for we are many things. Our occupation, ethnic identity, etc., are part of who we are. But we assign different values to these components and thus Christian maturing is a process in which the most fundamental layer of our identity becomes our self-understanding as a new creature in Christ
along with all our privileges in him.

—Tim Keller

What an absolutely brilliant way of putting it. I've written before (at least with regard to politics) that as Christians, we are to find our identity in Christ and Christ alone, and that when anything or anyone else holds that place in our hearts, that we're guilty of idolatry; but the Rev. Dr. Keller has the right of it in pointing out that in fact there are multiple levels to our identity and always will, and that learning to find our identity first and foremost in Christ is a process. It remains true, though, that whenever anything sidetracks us into finding our identity first and foremost in anything or anyone else, that is idolatry, and must be corrected.

HT: Of First Importance

Worldly wisdom and the idolatry of happiness

Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

—James 3:13-4:3 (ESV)

True wisdom, James says, produces peace, while the wisdom of this world produces strife and disorder. This is because the wisdom of this world is characterized by envy and selfish ambition—it is focused on getting more. What that “more” looks like is different with every person. Some desire more pleasure. Some want more money and possessions. Some seek more power. Some long for more recognition. Some crave more excitement. Whatever it is that people want to get, that’s where the world focuses its idea of wisdom: on how to get what it is that you want, or feel you need.

The problem is, as James points out, that such “wisdom” leads to disorder, conflict, and all sorts of evil behavior. The world justifies this in many ways, telling us it’s a dog-eat-dog world, that you gotta do what you gotta do, that all’s fair in love and war, that you have the right to stand up for yourself—whatever it is we need to tell ourselves (and others) to justify us in going out and doing what we’ve already decided we want to do. At bottom is this idea that if I’ve determined I need that in order to be happy—whether it be that car, that man or woman, that job, that house—then whatever it might be, I have the right to have it, because I have the right to be happy. We seem to have forgotten that even the Declaration of Independence only tells us we have the right to the pursuit of happiness, not to be guaranteed to catch it and mount it on the wall with the rest of our butterfly collection.

And what happens? Conflict and pain and heartbreak as people fight over things, over opportunities, over relationships. Marriages are broken up, families torn apart, lives ruined; careers are wrecked and reputations destroyed as rivals sabotage each other; souls disappear into the maw of drugs, sometimes never to emerge again, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Whenever my fulfillment is my highest goal, and the way to achieve that is by getting more of whatever it is I think is going to fulfill me, I will necessarily treat you not as my equal to be respected but as an object which relates in some way to my need for fulfillment. You might be the person through whom I hope to find fulfillment by one means or another; you might be an obstacle to my fulfillment, which I must go around or find some way to remove from my path; you might be a rival who threatens my fulfillment, in which case I must find some way to defeat you; but whatever the case, you are at the most fundamental level a thing to me, not a real person, and deep down I will feel myself justified in doing whatever it takes to make sure that I get what I want with regard to you, because my happiness is at stake, and that has become my idol.

(Excerpted from “True Wisdom”)

The anti-transparency administration

Despite the President's bold initial words, that's what his administration is turning out to be. It shouldn't be a surprise, given the assault on the First Amendment conducted by his campaign in an effort to silence uncomfortable questions before the candidate had to face them; it shouldn't startle us at all that his response to being challenged by a media organization would be to try to shut that organization down. As Charles Krauthammer writes,

there's a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they're engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

There's nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.

Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand "the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties." They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other—and an otherwise imperious government.

The problem is, we have an amazingly thin-skinned administration, one that can't seem to take criticism, or even significant differences of opinion, with any sort of grace; which is all of a piece, I think, with the fact that they also can't seem to take a joke. As such, they don't roll with the tough questions, they don't rise to the challenge of being argued with, and they don't laugh at themselves—or even just let it pass when someone else does. Instead, whenever anyone messes with them, their collective instinct is to get out the biggest hammer they can find and try to smash them.

(Well, whenever any of their American opponents messes with them, anyway . . . if it's a foreign country like Iran or China or Russia, their instinct is rather different, to say the least.)

A few more thoughts on NY-23

First, courtesy of Josh Painter (who is, among other things, the chap responsible for the Bloggers for Sarah Palin blogroll to which this blog belongs), a worthy reflection on what Gov. Palin accomplished with her endorsement of Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman:

The media buzz today will be mostly about one aspect of the endorsement—Sarah Palin distancing herself from her party. But she has also distanced herself from her potential rivals for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, should she decide to seek it. . . .

With her endorsement of Doug Hoffman, Sarah Palin has taken a stand in solidarity with the gathering storm known as the grassroots movement in this country. The disaffected conservatives, conservative libertarians, common sense independents and blue collar Democrats (aka Reagan Democrats) who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore always seemed to us to be former Governor Palin's natural base constituency. These are the the people who have turned out for TEA parties and Townhalls across the country, but there are many more of them who were not able to demonstrate, but feel the pain none the less. It's a big step for the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate to take toward earning their trust as the national public figure who best voices their concerns.

As for the Republican Party, its establishment has refused for too long to listen to the rank and file, and now it has officially been put on notice by Sarah Palin. Hopefully, it will finally pay attention to the voices of the people. Nothing else has seemed to get through to the GOP leadership. Even a recent Rasmussen poll which shows that 73 percent of Republican voters say Congressional Republicans have lost touch with their base hasn't seemed to have had much impact on those who run the GOP Congressional and Senatorial committees. . . .

Former Governor Palin may have just taken the first big step toward leading the Republican Party back to its Reagan roots. She has thrown down the gauntlet. Now let's see if she will pick up the banner and hold it so high that the troops will rally around it.

Second, some news about Hoffman's ostensible Republican opponent, Dede Scozzafava, from RedState:

Jack Abramoff, present jailbird, was convicted of all sorts of crooked schemes. One of his favorites was to funnel money through various organizations into the hands of other people.

It appears Dede Scozzafava is funneling RNC, NRCC, and donor dollars through her campaign account to her family. . . .

Scozzafava doesn’t look to be just an ACORN candidate, but also more and more looks like an Abramoff Republican.

Read the post for the details, which are appalling—she can't even wait until she's elected to start siphoning money off the top. The more I hear about this woman, the worse the GOP (and especially the NY GOP) looks for putting her forward.

And three, all the attention he's been getting from major conservative figures has definitely given Hoffman's campaign a major boost; a lot of the credit for that goes to Gov. Palin, though certainly not all of it. It's good to know he appreciates her.

Book recommendations

No, not from me (though I second many of these, and others are on my to-read list), but from a Twitter poll taken by Johnathan McIntosh of Rethink Mission. Since it was mostly a poll of pastoral types, it's a list of books about God, church, and leadership (including, in the "honorable mention" category, Jared's book Your Jesus Is Too Safe, which I was glad but not surprised to see there). It's a great list of great books (with a definite Tim Keller slant—two of his plus the Jesus Storybook Bible, a wonderful work whose author acknowledges her great debt to Dr. Keller with deep gratitude—which I think is a good thing). If you're looking for something to read, check it out.

On this blog in history: April 22-28, 2008

Worship as orientation
"Specifically, toward God, flat on our faces."

Fantasy, science fiction, and the epic
"Fantasy and science fiction, at their highest, appeal to an essentially theological impulse in the human spirit." See also "Fantasy, science fiction, and the mysterium tremendum."

The Ascension and the Second Coming
Does Jesus teach the Second Coming? I believe so.

Prosthetics, athletics, and the human future
We need to be careful how far we go.

Answering Islam on its own terms
And those terms are religious, not secular/political.

The uncomfortable open-mindedness of Penn Jillette

This is another remarkable video by Penn Jillette, who is I think one of the most remarkable figures of our time, musing over an occasion on which he was raked over the coals by Tommy Smothers.

The Anchoress, writing about this, had some things to say that bear consideration. I particularly appreciated this:

Unchecked capitalism does have its drawbacks; it often so enthralls the capitalist with the material that he forgets the world around him, and lives an increasingly insular—and insulated—life.

But it is not only the greedy capitalist who can become insulated; the ideologue who will only speak with like-minded people is in the same walled-off compound, where it becomes easy to see label someone whose ideas are different than yours as “evil” and “lesser;” to ignore human commonalities in the quest to not simply disagree, but to destroy the other.

In a way, it’s a little like an extreme Islamist cutting out the tongue of the heretic, in order to silence his dissent. They fear allowing another point of view, because it threatens to unsettle; it might persuade others away from the fold. It is a threat to power, control and illusory “peace.” It does not submit. . . .

We see that behavior, of course, on both sides. My email has as many people telling me that this politician or that is “evil” from the right as people telling me I am evil, from the left. . . .

But what is interesting about these Jillette videos is that he seems determined not to be insulated in his life. He will meet with anyone, talk to anyone—engage in a respectful exchange of ideas. When I was being raised by blue-collar, union-loving Democrats, this is what I was taught was “liberal” behavior: a willingness to hear all sides, be respectful and open-minded.

And that would seem to be precisely the opposite of what Tommy Smothers was advocating to Jillette. For that matter, I cannot help but find an irony, there. Smothers was furious that Jillette would talk to “the enemy,” Glenn Beck, but he (and the left) were furious when President Bush would not talk to Iran. All Jillette is doing, really, is what Obama is now doing with Iran: talking to “the enemy” without preconditions. You’d think Smothers would admire that, after all. Yes, irony.

What we call “liberalism” today is something strikingly illiberal. As I twittered before turning in last night, when did “tolerance” become a demand for ideological purity above all else?

Read the whole post—there’s a lot more there, including a moving meditation on Penn Jillette’s naked honesty and introspection in this video; you don’t see many people wrestle with things that openly, or indeed anywhere near that openly. I don’t agree with his politics, and I don’t agree with his atheism; but however wrong I may think his conclusions about what is true may be, he seems quite clearly to be a seeker after truth, rather than after winning the argument or pleasing a particular group of people or any of the other substitutes we human beings tend to find. Indeed, he seems committed to taking the hard questions head-on rather than ducking them or dismissing them, and to treating those who ask those questions with respect rather than defending himself by attacking them. This is a rare and honorable thing, and worthy of great respect.

Bucking the machine

For those of you who haven't been following the special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District (a solid GOP district whose previous officeholder was appointed Secretary of the Army), it's gotten quite interesting. The Democratic Party's first choice begged off—the district, which covers eleven rural counties in the northernmost part of the state, has been in GOP hands since the Civil War, and he appears to have figured a ritual loss wouldn't do much for him—but they managed to find a solid candidate, a local lawyer named Bill Owens. The New York Republican Party, though, might have been worried that the Democrats wouldn't be able to find somebody, since they basically nominated a Democrat of their own for the seat: they hand-picked a candidate, Dede Scozzafava, who's not just to the left of the House Republican caucus, she's to the left of half the Democratic caucus. Michelle Malkin described her as "an ACORN-friendly, union-pandering, tax-and-spend radical Republican, " and if anything, she actually understated the case.

Apparently, Scozzafava was handed the nomination by the party machine as an act of favoritism because of her connections with county GOP chairmen in the state—the machine picked one of its own, and hang principles. The amazing thing is that the national party machine fell into line behind them; though 90% of House Republicans refused to support Scozzafava, the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee sent donations in the six-figure range to keep her campaign afloat, and Newt Gingrich endorsed her. All this despite the fact that there is a true conservative in the race: Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman, who according to reports has now passed Scozzafava in the polls and is setting his sights on Owens.

This evening, Sarah Palin joined the battle, endorsing Hoffman for Congress. She said this summer that she would work for the election of conservative candidates regardless of party, and now she's backed up those words by standing against her own party to support a candidate she can believe in:

The people of the 23rd Congressional District of New York are ready to shake things up, and Doug Hoffman is coming on strong as Election Day approaches! He needs our help now.

The votes of every member of Congress affect every American, so it's important for all of us to pay attention to this important Congressional campaign in upstate New York. I am very pleased to announce my support for Doug Hoffman in his fight to be the next Representative from New York's 23rd Congressional district. It's my honor to endorse Doug and to do what I can to help him win, including having my political action committee, SarahPAC, donate to his campaign the maximum contribution allowed by law.

Our nation is at a crossroads, and this is once again a "time for choosing."

The federal government borrows, spends, and prints too much money, while our national debt hits a record high. Government is growing while the private sector is shrinking, and unemployment is on the rise. Doug Hoffman is committed to ending the reckless spending in Washington, D.C. and the massive increase in the size and scope of the federal government. He is also fully committed to supporting our men and women in uniform as they seek to honorably complete their missions overseas.

And best of all, Doug Hoffman has not been anointed by any political machine.

Doug Hoffman stands for the principles that all Republicans should share: smaller government, lower taxes, strong national defense, and a commitment to individual liberty.

Political parties must stand for something. When Republicans were in the wilderness in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan knew that the doctrine of "blurring the lines" between parties was not an appropriate way to win elections. Unfortunately, the Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate who more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race. This is why Doug Hoffman is running on the Conservative Party's ticket.

Republicans and conservatives around the country are sending an important message to the Republican establishment in their outstanding grassroots support for Doug Hoffman: no more politics as usual.

You can help Doug by visiting his official website below and joining me in supporting his campaign:
http://www.doughoffmanforcongress.com/donate3.html.

Good on you, Governor.

On the blessed inconvenience of children

The quote atop The Thinklings' front page today is one of my favorites, from Gary Thomas:

Kids' needs are rarely "convenient." What they require in order to succeed rarely comes cheaply. To raise them well will require daily sacrifice of many kinds, which has the wonderful spiritual effect of helping mold us into the character of Jesus Christ himself. God invites us to grow beyond ourselves and to stop acting as though our dreams begin and end with us. Once we have children, we cannot act and dream as though we had remained childless.

We've been thinking about that here this week, since our older girls' parent-teacher conferences were last night. It's interesting talking with their teachers (and listening between the lines a bit) and realizing how many of the parents they have to deal with who really don't get this, or perhaps refuse to get this. I wonder if perhaps we're seeing a spillover effect of the abortion regime—after all, if it's legally acceptable to kill an unborn child because letting that child live would be too inconvenient, that deals a heavy, heavy blow to the idea that we have a responsibility to put the needs of our children ahead of our own. The sad irony is, this means that many adults never learn how much better life can be once we "stop acting as though our dreams begin and end with us"; it's the children who have the most to lose, but their parents' lives are impoverished as well.

Embracing the wildness of faith

Bill over at The Thinklings put up a post yesterday quoting Chesterton at length (something almost always well worth doing) on the value of fairy tales for children, and concluding with some additional thoughts of his own:

This really resonates with me, because from a young age I rode like a squire through the Arthurian legends, crouched quietly in the belly of the horse with Odysseus, galloped alongside Centaurs in Lewis' Narnia, and went into the dreadful dark of Moria with Frodo and Sam. These led me one day to open up a Bible and begin reading what Lewis would call the "true myth" of the ultimate, and fully historical, defeat of the dragon.

As parents we should, of course, protect our kids. But I think Chesterton makes a compelling case here for not limiting them with politically correct, neutered fiction that contains no dragons. How will they ever know that the dragon can be killed?

I think Bill's absolutely right about that. As Chesterton says in the essay he quotes,

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

This is much the same point Russell Moore makes in the post I quoted Monday, and so it's no surprise that Bill follows up today by quoting Moore as well. He also adds an extended quote from Danielle at Count the Days on the absurdity that passes for "Christian education" in so many places. It's a great post:

The other day, in my Religious Education class, this question was posed to us:

"What do you want to teach a child by the time they are 12?"

During class we were supposed to get in groups and discuss what we thought kids need to know by that stage in their lives, and honestly, I was kind of appalled by the answers I heard. . . .

One girl had the audacity to call me "harsh" because I said that they need to know that they are sinners. How can anyone have an appreciation or understanding of salvation without first knowing what sin is and that they are a sinner? I understand that the average child cannot comprehend the intricacies of theology, but what Jesus-loving Children's Minister can look at the kids in their ministry and knowingly keep the whole Truth from them? Bible stories are great and important in building a foundation for these kids, but knowing who Zaccheus was, or being able to sing the books of the Bible in order isn't going to get anyone any closer to Heaven. Just sayin'.

I guess the reason it frustrated me so much was because I was thinking of my own (future/potential) children. I don't want my ten/eleven/twelve year old thinking that "being a good person" or being "obedient" means anything without having a personal, intimate relationship with Christ. I mean sure, I want obedient children ;), but in the grand scheme of things that would not be on the top of my list.

And then perhaps the most important point she makes is this:

Children can be taught all kinds of things as long as they are taught in love and kindness. Give kids the opportunity to understand, instead of withholding Truth from them. Offer them the whole Gospel, not just cartoons or cut-and-dry facts. I know I probably sound like some hardcore beat-truth-into-them type of lady, but I hate the thought of kids wasting what can be the most influential years of growth on pointless trivia or partial Truth.

Amen. This is something of a soapbox of my own, and has been for a while—I don't post on it a great deal, just on occasion, but it's something I care quite a bit about in my congregation, and with my own kids—that so much of what we call "Christian education" in the church is just awful, trivial, milk-and-water stuff aimed at teaching kids to be nice, dutiful little serfs rather than at raising them up as followers of Jesus Christ.

The problem is, I think, that too many adults—and not just adults in the church, either—have lost touch with the wildness of the world, and the wildness of their own hearts. Part of it, as N. D. Wilson says, is that our rationalistic and rationalized, scientific and scientistic, we-are-civilized-and-we-can-control-everything culture tends to teach us to see all things wild and perilous as evil; we have tamed immense swaths of our world, made it comfortable and predictable, orderly and obedient, and so we see these as good things, and anything that threatens them as bad.

This logically leads us to lose sight of the wildness of evil, both within us and outside us. Hannah Arendt had an important insight when she wrote of "the banality of evil" (an insight which I believe is much less understood than quoted), but it's equally important for us to understand that while evil is indeed dreary and banal, uncreative and far less attractive than it likes to pretend, it is not thereby tame and predictable and contained. We get reminders of this when things like 9/11 happen, but if we can convince ourselves that such things are outside our own experience—that their lesson doesn't apply to us—then we do so as quickly as possible, convincing ourselves that our own lives are still safe and tame and under our control.

The consequence of this domesticated worldview for the church is that too often, we've tamed our faith. We have trimmed it to fit what this world calls reality instead of letting our faith expand our souls to fit God's view of reality, and we have ended up with a domesticated faith in a domesticated God. After all, if we don't see our world as a big, wild, uncontrollable world that threatens us and makes us uncomfortable, we don't need a big, wild, uncontrollable God who makes us uncomfortable and calls us to fear him as well as love him; a god sized to fit the tame little problems we'll admit to having will do nicely.

There are various antidotes to that, but one of them is, to bring this back around to Bill's post, to Chesterton, and also to Tolkien, a keen acquaintance with the world of faerie. We need stories that do not only show us the wildness of evil somewhere else (for many of our movies and books do that much), but that show us the wildness of evil in our own hearts, and also the wildness of good. We need stories that powerfully communicate, not only rationally but also viscerally, the truth that (to borrow a line from Michael Card) there is a wonder and wildness to life, that true goodness is a high and perilous thing, and that the life of goodness is an adventure. We need to learn to hear the call to faith as the call expressed so well by Andrew Peterson in his song "Little Boy Heart Alive":

Feel the beat of a distant thunder—
It’s the sound of an ancient song.
This is the Kingdom calling;
Come now and tread the dawn.

Come to the Father;
Come to the deeper well.
Drink of the water
And come to live a tale to tell . . .

Take a ride on the mighty Lion;
Take a hold of the golden mane.
This is the love of Jesus—
So good but it is not tame.