The roots of disobedience

One of the interesting things about the account in Genesis 3 of humanity’s fall into sin is that it gives us an inside view—not a blow-by-blow account, but the highlights—of the process of temptation. As I noted a few days ago, the snake begins the temptation not with a question, but with a deliberately false statement, because he wants to provoke his target into reacting without thinking. It works for him, as the woman immediately comes back with a correction; indeed, it works very well, because she’s so focused on correcting his misstatement (“God didn’t say we can’t eat from any of the trees”) that she makes a misstatement of her own (“He said we can’t even touch the tree in the middle, or we’ll die”).

The serpent, of course, doesn’t correct her. Instead, he comes back with a most interesting response: he says, “You shall not surely die.” This does a couple things. In the first place, it’s a direct contradiction, a direct challenge to the word of God—he’s calling God a liar, straight out. Genesis doesn’t say, but at this point, maybe the snake took advantage of the woman’s misstatement; I can imagine him saying, “Go on, test it—touch the tree. Touch the tree. See? You’re not dead, are you? You just have a little sap on your hands.” He calls God a liar, and the woman lets it stand; and with that, the first seeds of doubt are sown.

More than that, though, this statement by the serpent shifts the focus of the conversation. Starting off, the focus is on what God said, which means ultimately it’s on God; now, the serpent has changed that, and instead of being on God, the focus of the conversation is now on death. The question of whether or not to obey God is no longer a matter of the character and goodness of God; instead, it’s a matter of whether God is serious about the punishment he promised for disobedience.

This is a necessary shift for the snake. If he’s encouraging her to disobey God and she’s thinking about God, she’s going to come back and say, “No, I don’t want to do that because God is good and he knows what’s best for me and this is what he wants me to do”—and there’s really nothing the snake can say to that. But if he can instead get her thinking about punishment, then when he tempts her, then her response will be, “No, I don’t want to do that because if I do that, God is going to hurt me”—and that, he can argue about. To that, he can say, “No, God isn’t going to hurt you, no, you aren’t really going to die, and really, God’s only saying this because he wants to keep the best stuff for himself.”

You see, the tempter wants to get us into a cost/benefit analysis where he offers the benefit—whatever the temptation of the day is—and God offers us the cost—whatever our punishment is going to be for giving in to temptation; he wants us to see God simply as somebody who punishes us when we do wrong, because if the tempter can do that, then he can always convince us that what he’s offering us is worth the price. If our reason for obeying God is positive rather than negative, though—not just because we don’t want God to punish us, but because we love him and want to please him—then the devil has a much harder time with that.

(Adapted from “The End of the Beginning”)

The hardest part of parenting

is the vulnerability; as one of the commentators over at The Thinklings, BlestWithSons, put it some time ago,

The "what-ifs?" increase exponentially when your heart is walking around outside of your body wearing Buzz Lightyear light up shoes.

I very nearly fell down the stairs carrying my youngest last week; it's the absolute mercy and grace of God that I caught myself and only broke off a toenail. I've been thinking about the what-ifs a lot lately.

On art that can truly be called "Christian"

We in the church in this country tend to throw around terms like "Christian music" and "Christian fiction" pretty carelessly, without really thinking much about them, or what they mean, or even if they actually can mean anything at all. There's a good argument to be made that only people can truly be called Christian; and as for culture and its various components, W. H. Auden once declared, "There can be no such thing as 'Christian culture.' Culture is Caesar's thing." I'm beginning to understand what he meant, I think, and his point is one with which we must reckon.

That said—as Christians, as people made in the image of God, we are most definitely called to be culture makers; in Tolkien's terms, we were made to be sub-creators working under our great Creator, and we have both the need and the responsibility to do so wisely and well, in a way that is true to our faith. As I wrote a while back,

Stories matter. They matter because they're the stuff of our life, of our reality and our nature, and the expression of the creative ability we've been given by (and in the image of) the one who made us—and we matter. They matter because they affect us, moving our emotions and shaping our view of the world, both for good and for ill. And as a Christian, I affirm that they matter because everything we do matters, because the best of what we do will endure forever. And if they matter, then we need to take them seriously, both as readers and, for those of us so called, as writers—for our sake, and for everyone's.

The same can be said, in a bit of a different way, for music, the visual arts, and for the other media in which we create; and if we want to call that "Christian art" as a shorthand, then the shorthand has value, assuming we realize that's all it is. But that still leaves us asking, how do we do this—and when we do it, what exactly are we doing?

Among the folks who are wrestling well with this interlocking set of questions are the writers at the group blog Novel Matters; my wife pointed me this morning to a post there by Patti Hill that I think is particularly good. Of course, she has a real advantage because she starts off quoting Flannery O'Connor, which is always worth doing:

Ever since there have been such things as novels, the world has been flooded with bad fiction for which the religious impulse has been responsible. The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty as possible.

To really understand where O'Connor is coming from in writing this, I think it's important to add a couple other quotes from the same book:

Dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality. . . . It is one of the functions of the Church to transmit the prophetic vision that is good for all time, and when the novelist has this as a part of his own vision, he has a powerful extension of sight.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

For O'Connor, then, I think we can fairly say that it's our obligation as Christians to see the world truly and deeply, as it is rather than as we would like it to be—and that for those gifted and called to write or to create art in other ways (and if you are gifted, then you are called, in whatever way and to whatever degree), there is the further responsibility to represent reality in such a way that others can see more truly and deeply than they did before. Too many people (not just Christians, by any means) shy away from that, because as O'Connor says, it requires getting dirty—really digging into and dealing with the dirt of this world, because you cannot know this world and you cannot see it truly and you cannot portray it rightly without knowing and dealing with its dirt. There's dirt all over the place, and in every human soul; you just can't avoid it.

So then, how? Hill nails it, I think:

We look to Jesus.

No one saw the world more concretely than Jesus. A whore washed his feet with her tears. He not only made wine, he drank it. He touched leprous skin. He invited himself to a tax collector's house for lunch. And, I'm thinking, he heard naughty words there. Caked with blood, spittle, sweat, and dirt he took the nails for us. Gruesome. Violent. Definitely off-putting. That's crucifixion, the purest act of love.

To follow in the steps of Jesus, to write in a God-honoring, "dirty" way, we must see the world—as best we can—as Jesus sees it, with empathy, detail, and love. And so it is for the Christian writer to observe and portray the beauty and brutality and pain and suffering and redemption all through the eyes of love.

Yeah—that's spot-on.

And if it's occurring to you that this all sounds like it's not just about art, you're right; after all, in a way, what we're really asking here is how we're supposed to create art as disciples of Christ—which is to say, how do we understand creation as discipleship—and that inevitably flips us around to the corollary: how do we understand discipleship as creation, as a process in which we stand under God our Creator as the sub-creators of our own lives, as the process of making our lives a work of art for God? As I've asked elsewhere, what does it mean for our lives to be poems for God?

Can the ObamaPelosiCare push succeed?

In the most recent posts on his HorseRaceBlog, Jay Cost analyzes the legislative process that the Democratic leadership will have to use to bring the Senate health care bill to final passage of both houses of Congress, and then the political context in which they will be trying to do so, and concludes that it's possible but will be a very long row to hoe. If you want to understand the fight that's ahead, read his posts; they are, as usual from Cost, meticulous, well-informed, and insightful pieces of analysis.

He bowed to the Sa'udis, he bowed to the Emperor, now he bows to Wall Street

A little over a month ago, the President stood beside Paul Volcker and announced his intention to prevent banks whose deposits are insured by the federal government from engaging in proprietary training. It wasn't a popular move with Wall Street, and it was certainly a move that would have had downsides, but I believed (and still believe) it was a necessary one, for reasons that were laid out well by Jim Manzi of National Review:

The reason that it is dysfunctional to have an insured banking system that is free to engage in speculative investing is simple and fundamental. We (i.e., the government, which is to say, ultimately, the taxpayers) provide a guarantee to depositors that when they put their savings in a regulated bank, then the money will be there even if the bank fails, because we believe that the chaos and uncertainty of a banking system operating without this guarantee is too unstable to maintain political viability. But if you let the operators of these banks take the deposits and, in effect, put them on a long-shot bet at the horse track, and then pay themselves a billion dollars in bonuses if the horse comes in, but turn to taxpayers to pay off depositors if the horse doesn’t, guess what is going to happen? Exactly what we saw in 2008 happens. . . .

Make no mistake, many banking executives right now are benefiting from taxpayer subsidies. Even if they pay back the TARP money, the government has demonstrated that it will intervene to protect large banks. This can’t be paid back. And this implicit, but very real, guarantee represents an enormous transfer of economic value from taxpayers to any bank executives and investors who are willing to take advantage of it. Unsurprisingly, pretty much all of them are.

I gave the President a lot of credit last month for taking this step. As it turns out, that was premature of me, because he's now caved to Wall Street, double-crossed Volcker, and abandoned the plan in favor of one amenable to J. P. Morgan and Government Sachs (Goldman Sachs was the second-largest donor to the Obama campaign, and J. P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon is a particularly powerful and important Obama backer). I suppose his decision two weeks ago to publicly endorse the multi-million-dollar bonuses given to Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein should have been a tipoff that President Obama wasn't going to have the spine to stand up to them and put the Volcker Rule through; after all, crony capitalists never bring the hammer down on their cronies, only on businesses that don't support them.

As such, the President's bold announcement last month now joins his promise that "if you like your current health insurance, you can keep it" and his pledge not to raise taxes on households making less than $250,000 a year in the dustbin of political expediency. Lesson once again: don't take this president's word on it until it actually happens.

Genesis 3 and the voice of temptation

When the serpent tempts the woman in Genesis 3, he doesn’t start off with a question, but with a statement—with a statement he knows is false, and that he knows she knows is false. This is because if he were to ask her a question, she would have to think in order to answer it, and while he wants her to talk to him, he doesn’t want her to think; he wants her to react without thinking, and his opening false statement gets him the reaction he wants.

You see, the serpent wants the woman to talk about God without talking to God. Specifically, he wants her to talk about God to him, so that he can sow doubt and distrust in her ear; but if it ever occurred to her to bring God into that conversation, to allow God to respond to the snake’s lies, then the game would be up, and all his efforts to breed distrust would go for nothing. So he wants her to react without thinking too hard about it, so that he can keep her in that mode of talking about God without actually asking God to join the conversation—which is always a bad mode for us as believers to be in.

(Adapted from “The End of the Beginning”)

Putting sin to death

I've read a lot of books on the Christian life over the years—that tends to be an occupational hazard of being a pastor, after all—and I can't say I remember most of them; but one of the most important books I've ever read, one which has had a profound effect on my thinking, is a little book by the great Puritan pastor/theologian John Owen entitled On the Mortification of Sin in Believers. It's a collection of sermons he preached on Romans 8:13: "For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live"; Owen was a practical and pastoral theologian, and his concern was to lay out exactly how it is we may go about doing that.

It's a splendid book, and of great value to anyone who wants to live a life pleasing to God, which is why I was pleased recently to discover two things. First, the full text of the book is available online through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (which, by the way, is linked in the sidebar here; I'm not sure why it hadn't occurred to me to look there for this book). Second, since Owen is a dense writer and no simple stylist, I was glad to find that Robert Thune has posted a brief outline of Owen's argument, one which links in turn to a longer and more thorough outline of the book. I wouldn't encourage reading either in lieu of Owen's work, because there is so much good in the book; but they provide an excellent orientation to his argument, and the longer outline in particular is a valuable reader's guide.

What Owen is on to is a matter of great importance, and much neglected in the American church, which tends not to want to talk about the struggle against sin (or to take that struggle seriously); as such, his book may well be more important now than it was when it was written, for it provides a necessary corrective to our self-indulgent consumerist culture. It isn't light reading, but it's more than worthwhile, especially with Thune's work to help, and I recommend it to anyone who's serious about the Christian life.

We are not “spiritual”

Justin Holcomb of Mars Hill in Seattle makes this point in an excellent Facebook note:

We do not practice spirituality because we have climbed the ladder to God through human means. Rather, Christianity teaches that our alienation from God is remedied by Christ, who absorbs the sin that separates us from God. God came near to us in Christ, so that Christ could consume that which separates us from God, and thereby, draw us near to him.

We are not “spiritual,” but Christ was “spiritual” for us. In other words, without God nothing is strong and nothing is holy. We are weak and unholy. Our natural inclination is to substitute anything for God. We repel the holy and opt for manageable and convenient versions of God. . . .

Spirituality includes beliefs and practices, theology and rituals, ideas and activities. These are all things that contribute to a rich and vibrant Christian life, both individually and communally. But at the heart of Christian spirituality is a reminder that no spiritual practice or ritual alone can draw us near to God. God must come near to us. That “God-coming-near” is what has happened in the incarnation and that is what we celebrate as Christians. . . . It is not that we have risen to spiritual heights, but that heaven has come down to us.

As I've said before

it's a wonderful thing being married to someone smarter than me. As I was putting together the retrospective post before this one (the first one I've done in a couple months), I was pointed again to a post my wife put up nearly two years ago now, addressed to some dechurched bloggers we'd gotten to know online, asking them, "What would it take for you to give us a chance?" It's a wonderful post, as Sara really lays out well our desire for our little church to be a congregation that's wide open to the reality of each other, in all our messiness and all our struggles and all our darkness as well as all our strengths and triumphs—and thus, as a consequence, wide open to whatever Jesus might want to do in and with and through each of us, and all of us together. I thought she was right on then, and I'm only more convinced of it now.

On this blog in history: May 14-31, 2008

Explanations aren't excuses
A brief note on the tragedy of Burma and those who would try to justify it.

Church as a missional community
The people of God are identified and defined by our destination.

Skeptical conversations, part V: The person and work of Jesus
This is the section of my credo laying out what I understand to be true about Jesus.

Thoughts on the idolatry of relevance
The way for the church to be relevant is not for the church to try to be relevant.

Prince Caspian
So I'm in the minority—I liked the movie, and I think I had good reason.

Thoughts on the nature of Christian faith
Neither simple nor natural nor anything like a crutch.

On not apologizing for Christmas

This past Advent, I preached a sermon series on the women mentioned in Matthew's genealogy of Jesus—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and of course Mary. If you're interested, you can find the texts of the series here. It was the second time for that particular series, as I had preached it four years before in Colorado (though of course all the sermons were revised to one degree or another, since I'm a better preacher now than I was then; at least, I hope I am). It didn't meet with the same degree of acceptance here as it had there, though; that probably shouldn't have surprised me, since I know well the difference in culture between the small-town Midwest and the West, but it did. This was probably the first time I've ever met significant congregational resistance to an entire sermon series, with a number of people pronouncing themselves offended because "the sermons were so explicit" (or so I was told, at least; nobody would tell me who was offended, of course, since then I might actually be able to talk with them about it), and even the suggestion being made that perhaps I should apologize for the series.

But I do not apologize for it; in fact, I insist on it, for good theological reasons. For one thing, I do not share the evident presumption of many that any pastoral offense must necessarily be grounds for apology. Indeed, though there are certainly exceptions, I believe that the problem with most American pastors is not offensiveness but inoffensiveness—we fail far less often because we offend people than because we water down the truth and dodge necessary conflict in a determined effort to avoid doing so at any cost. Though I do not compare myself to Jesus (as no one should, except to see just how incredibly far short we fall), I can't help remembering that we worship a Savior who was frequently, bluntly, and often spectacularly offensive to the respectable people of his day. He was only "gentle Jesus, meek and mild" to the sinners who knew they were sinners in desperate need of grace. To those who thought they were doing just fine, if he ever pulled a punch, I've yet to find it.

This is not of course to say, or even to suggest, that offending people is therefore a good thing in and of itself, or that it's always defensible; far from it. It is, however, to say that there is such a thing as holy offense, and that sometimes the only way to avoid offending people is to avoid preaching the word of God, and particularly the gospel of Jesus Christ. Put another way, if we are going to be faithful representatives of Jesus Christ on this earth, sometimes we're going to offend people, and sometimes that's absolutely necessary and important. The only question is, are we offending people for the right reasons?

Of course, even when the answer to that question might be "yes," it can be at best a qualified "yes," because our own flaws, limitations, errors in judgment, and of course sin always mar even our most excellent efforts. I have no doubt, for instance, that there were things in those messages that I did not do as I should have. For one thing, I manifestly failed to make clear to the congregation what I was doing with the series, and what my purposes were in preaching it—perhaps in part because, though I could easily have done a better job on the first part, I hadn't really stopped to clearly articulate my purposes beyond a vague sense as to what I was doing. To make it sufficiently clear to them, I would first have had to do that work for myself.

Which isn't to say that I didn't know what I was on about, merely that I hadn't taken enough time to bring that fully into focus (a fact which no doubt weakened the messages). In the first place, this series was (and is) aimed squarely at the debilitating sentimentality that clings in sticky cotton-candy clouds to our celebration of Christmas and our understanding of the Incarnation. We have this powerful image of Jesus the innocent and helpless, the perfect baby boy, which is certainly all true enough—but we've let it grow like kudzu all across the December landscape, choking out our ability to see anything else.

If we take Christmas seriously, this must be in truth a disturbing and unsettling holiday, the first intimation that we worship a God who is profoundly and disquietingly unsafe, not because he isn't good, but because he utterly defies either our prediction or our control. It's the first hint that we don't worship a nice, respectable, moral God, but one who—while, yes, he certainly does proclaim a moral code—refuses to be constrained by any moral code we would consider reasonable (or to allow his commandments to be so constrained, either). It's the first warning that God will not respect our conventions and our standards, but in fact is on about subverting them. It's the first indication that reality is not going to conform to our expectations, that there is indeed more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy—and that in fact, in the last analysis, the fool may know more of how things really work than the wise.

In other words, at the heart of the message of Christmas is an announcement that God is not going to play by our rules or abide by our proprieties and protocols; it is the grand upending of our expectations and the complete upskittling of our comfortable assumptions. It isn't a Hallmark-card moment in history, but a crashing, rocketing, tearing scandal—and as Matthew shows us, and as I was at some pains to show in that sermon series, that scandal is embedded in the story going all the way back to the early days of Jesus' family line. It is implicit in the story of Jesus, as it must be, because Jesus comes among us as the ultimate subversive: he must necessarily subvert our expectations of him, because he comes to subvert the governing tragedy of all of human history.

Jesus wasn't born to be nice, and he wasn't born to teach us to be nice; respectability and propriety, while they have their place, weren't what he was about, and he would not be bound by them if they were being used for purposes contrary to his own. The stories of Jesus' ancestresses show us clearly that God can work to carry out his plan even through people whose morality is uncertain and whose grasp on his character is sketchy at best, and that he can turn even deeds which scandalize the upright, done by those who are outside the pale, into elements of his glorious work—and if we do not understand this, then we cannot understand why Jesus was born to an unwed mother among the common people, why he was feared and loathed by the most religious people of his day, or why they contrived to have him killed.

Indeed, if we do not understand this, then we cannot understand why he died, much less why he rose again, for this is the reality and the mystery of redemption. Redemption isn't for the worthy—whether for those we consider worthy, or those who consider themselves worthy—it's for those who know and confess themselves unworthy. Which fact is, inevitably, offensive to many who are unwilling to do so, including many whose unwillingness is rooted in their perception of themselves as "nice Christian people." Which is, in the end, why these are the stories the church needs to hear, if we're to be true followers of the Christ whose name we claim.

Marriage is serious business

It hasn’t happened to me in Indiana, but when I served the church in Colorado, I used to get a lot of calls from couples (mostly from the female half) asking if I could marry them on Friday, or next week, or in two weeks, or next month. Often, the request was accompanied by prattle to the effect that they already had the reception hall, the musicians, the caterer, and everything else all lined up, and now all they needed was a church and a pastor for the ceremony. (Which, Colorado law being what it is, they actually didn’t need, but never mind that.) Sometimes, I instead got the explanation that they were on vacation in the Rockies and had just decided to get married. Either way, they were always surprised and unhappy to hear that I was neither interested nor, in fact, able to drop everything and marry two complete strangers at the last minute with no preparation and no idea of the health of their relationship; they wanted to get married, what more did I need to know? Trying to explain to them that I took their impending marriage far too seriously to marry them never seemed to work, somehow.

And yet, that was neither more nor less than the truth. Marriage is something profoundly serious and important, something which God created for reasons which go far deeper and mean far more than health benefits, or tax advantages, or two being able to live more cheaply than one. It’s not just a matter of convenience, or even of romance; rather, marriage is something that goes to the very heart of who we are as human beings, and even of who God is, because it has to do in a fundamental way with how we reflect the image of God.

You see, when we say that God made humanity in his image, one aspect of that must be that we are relational beings—that his image is seen when we relate to one another in love, and when we work together to care for his creation—because that’s part of what it means to represent God; our ability to love one another and to live together in love reflects the love relationships between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Of course, when our relationships are broken, when they’re unloving, impure, or otherwise contrary to God’s will, then they don’t reflect him very well, but that’s all of a piece with our sinfulness; and even then, it remains true that we are only able to relate to one another as we do because we are made in God’s image.

This is truest in marriage, which God instituted with the first human couple. The God who is by nature in relationship among themself created humanity in his image, male and female, in order that they might be united in marriage—a point underscored, incidentally, by the man’s declaration, “This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman has argued that this is a covenant formula, a pledge of permanent and undying loyalty and commitment; we might describe this as the first man’s wedding vows, but that isn’t strong enough, because the first readers of this text took covenant a good deal more seriously than we do. Unlike our covenant ceremonies—mostly weddings—theirs included pledges and promises along the lines of, “May I be cut to pieces if I violate this covenant.” Nowadays, we try to make breaking a covenant as painless as possible, but that wasn’t God’s idea at all.

God takes covenants, including marriage, very seriously. That’s why Genesis 2:24 offers the comment, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”; the word translated “leave” there is often translated “forsake,” and is used elsewhere to describe Israel’s rejection of their covenant obligations to the Lord. It’s a loaded word, and the point of using it here is clear: the new husband is to set aside loyalty to parents in favor of this new loyalty, this new covenant, with his wife. In a patriarchal culture like that of Israel, in which loyalty to parents was one’s most important obligation, the statement that loyalty to one’s wife—or, reciprocally, to one’s husband—was to come first was a powerful one indeed.

What’s more, it had a powerful reason behind it, even if Israel probably didn’t get the point. For those whom God calls into marriage, it’s important to understand that marriage isn’t about personal fulfillment—that’s a benefit of marriage, not its purpose. Its twofold purpose is to be found here: first, to fulfill the command to be fruitful and multiply; and second, to display the image of God. In the union of man and woman in marriage, united in relationship, potentially to have children as God wills, and especially as they seek to follow God together, we see the image of God as we cannot see it anywhere else. God created us male and female in his image; in marriage male and female are united in a relationship of love, offering us an image of God who is love, for he exists in relationship among himselves, in the love that flows between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In marriage we can see the inner reality of God mirrored in a way that nothing else can show us; this, too, is part of the purpose for which he has ordained marriage.

As such, we as Christians should take marriage very seriously. Our society really doesn’t, unfortunately, and that affects all of our thinking and attitudes to some degree, whether we realize it or not; and we need to work against that in whatever way we can. For those of us who are married, that task begins in our own marriages; for those who aren’t but would like to be, it means keeping this in mind in your dating relationships; and it also means that all of us, even the most utterly single, need to take the marriages of those around us, and especially our family, church family, and other friends, very seriously as well. We need to do everything we can to help others build and nurture strong, healthy marriages that truly embody and reflect the selfless and self-sacrificial love of God; this is part of being faithful to each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, and one of the ways in which we show the world his love for us.

(Adapted from “Created Male and Female”)

Hate speech vs. dissent

This speaks for itself, I think:

Anyone who can't see the distinction has something wrong with their moral compass. (Most likely, I would guess, the magnetic pull of political idolatry.)

The self-dissolution of idolatry

Courtesy of the Anchoress, I was struck this evening by this passage from Pope Benedict XVI. His argument is subtle, but I think very important.

We should see that human beings can never retreat into the realm of what they are capable of. In everything that they do, they constitute themselves. Therefore they themselves, and creation with its good and evil, are always present as their standard, and when they reject this standard they deceive themselves. They do not free themselves, but place themselves in opposition to the truth. And that means that they are destroying themselves and the world.

This, then, is the first and most important thing that appears in the story of Adam, and it has to do with the nature of human guilt and thus with our entire existence. The order of the covenant—the nearness of the God of the covenant, the limitations imposed by good and evil, the inner standard of the human person, creatureliness: all of this is placed in doubt. Here we can at once say that at the very heart of sin lies human beings’ denial of their creatureliness, inasmuch as they refuse to accept the standard and the limitations that are implicit in it. They do not want to be creatures, do not want to be subject to a standard, do not want to be dependent. They consider their dependence on God’s creative love to be an imposition from without . . .

Human beings who consider dependence on the highest love as slavery and who try to deny the truth about themselves, which is their creatureliness, do not free themselves; they destroy truth and love. They do not make themselves gods, which in fact they cannot do, but rather caricatures, pseudo-gods, slaves of their own abilities, which then drag them down.

We want to be more than what we are, and in acting on that desire, we make ourselves less; we want to be free to "follow our bliss," and in trying to grab that freedom, we make ourselves slaves. The human tragedy in a nutshell.

Barack Obama, crony capitalist

Score one for Bill Kristol:

Paul Krugman is, I think, right to be amazed by Obama's embrace of the $17 million bonus given to JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

If Obama's idea of moving to the middle politically is to embrace Wall Street's too-big-to-fail banks, he's crazy. Usually Republicans are the party of Big Business and Democrats of Big Government, and the public's hostility to both more or less evens the politics out. But if Obama now becomes the spokesman for Big Government intrusiveness and the apologist for Big Business irresponsibility all at once—good luck with that.

Besides the political snark, though, Kristol has an important substantive point to make as well:

Doesn't Obama realize how creepy this statement is? "I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen."

This confirms the suspicion that we now live in a world of crony capitalism, where if Obama knows and thinks well of you, then you don't get criticized—but if you're some guy who hasn't spent a lot of time cozying up to government leaders, then you could easily be the object of demagogic assault by politicians.

I know many folks think conservatives are pro-Big Business without any reservation, qualification, or exception, but that's not really true; conservatism, properly speaking, is decidedly anti-crony capitalism. In fact, one of the first signs that conservatives in government are ceasing to be true conservatives in favor of becoming creatures of the Beltway is usually that they begin to favor these sorts of deals; that is, or should be, one of the warning signs for conservative voters.

One other point to note, one which Bill Kristol (being an early supporter of Sarah Palin) undoubtedly knows, is that crony capitalism has been pretty much the normal order of business in Alaska for a long time; whether the people in office were Republicans or Democrats, state policy was effectively set by a bipartisan alliance of senior elected officials and the big oil companies. Or perhaps I should say, that had been the normal order of business, until Sarah Palin was elected governor and began throwing the bums out; and what she began, her successor, Sean Parnell, has so far continued. Taking fresh air, sunlight, and a new broom to crony capitalism has been a big part of her political career so far—and it looks like that's really what we need in DC now, too. Sounds like a ready-made opportunity for a campaign.

The partisan mindset

Gerard Alexander, a professor in the political science department at the University of Virginia, contends that liberals have a particular problem with condescension:

American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension. . . .

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government—and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to "the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind." . . .

It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years' worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: "What do these people really believe? I mean, they're not stupid—life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they're not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?"

In Krugman's world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of "these people"—only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives.

But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst. . . .

In this view, we should pay attention to conservative voters' underlying problems but disregard the policy demands they voice; these are illusory, devoid of reason or evidence. This form of liberal condescension implies that conservative masses are in the grip of false consciousness. When they express their views at town hall meetings or "tea party" gatherings, it might be politically prudent for liberals to hear them out, but there is no reason to actually listen. . . .

Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety—including fear of change—whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic. . . .

These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant—they insist on it. By no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in left-of-center thinking.

Where I part company with Dr. Alexander is in his statement that liberals are much worse than conservatives in this regard. That may well be true in his experience, but it isn't in mine. I think his description of our liberal intellectuals and political leaders is basically accurate, but I can think of many conservatives who are just as dismissive of liberals as folks like Krugman are of conservatives—it's just that they don't have the megaphone. Conservatives inside the Beltway and those who work for the so-called "mainstream" media mostly cannot afford to be right-wing equivalents to Krugman, because very few would manage to survive. Moderation of language and attitude is much, much safer. Outside of that environment, though, it's perfectly safe for conservatives to deride liberals as godless, self-absorbed, shallow, unpatriotic, and power-hungry—and many do.

The key here is that this is the way partisans tend to think, because this is the sort of view of one's own side and the other side which partisanship tends to inculcate. Jay Cost has a much better view of the matter, I think, in an excellent post examining Barack Obama's highly partisan pretensions to bipartisanship. As Cost says, partisanship tends to define one's own side as the ones with rational arguments who are motivated by the desire to serve the public interest, and the other side as calculating propagandists who are motivated by self-interest. This tends to generate and feed the idea that those who disagree with me really know that I'm right, but refuse to agree with me out of nefarious and unsavory motives; this is further driven by the sinful human desire to see ourselves on the side of the angels, and our opponents as hating the good, the true, and the beautiful.

This, I believe, is the great infection in our politics, that we have learned to assume that if our opponents were willing to see reason and do what is right, they would be on our side—and that their failure to do what we want must therefore be willful and malicious, making them not merely our opponents but our enemies. The most important political discipline we can practice, I believe, is that of granting our political adversaries the same assumption of good motives that we grant ourselves.

We need to recognize and admit that even if we may advocate different methods, in many areas we're all working toward the same goals—we all, for instance, want good schools and a strong economy in which everyone can find a job which will support them at least adequately. Of course, there are many areas in which that isn't true, as well—as for instance, with regard to the whole complex of issues around homosexuality; but even there, we need to recognize and admit that those who disagree with us do so because they have an honestly different understanding of what is good, not because they have decided to pursue evil instead. Until we can do this, our politics in this country aren't going to get any better.

The Left on Sarah Palin: the tack changes yet again (updated)

It's interesting, watching liberals try to find some sort of caricature for Sarah Palin that will really stick. They've gone through several versions over the last year and a half, but while they've managed to give a lot of people a negative impression of her, they haven't had anything like the sort of success they had in destroying George W. Bush's public image, and she's shown a disconcerting ability to blow their efforts away whenever she speaks in public or shows up on camera. That may be why the New York Times has elected to take a new tack: portraying Gov. Palin as a political mastermind.

It's a remarkable tactical shift, as long as you don't expect consistency or coherent argument. Ann Althouse, never one to suffer fools gladly (or at all, really), captured the NYT's shift nicely: "Sarah Palin was a blithering idiot until she became a devious genius." I feel a little sorry for the NYT, though—not much, but a little; they don't understand Gov. Palin, because they really don't understand this country as it exists beyond their elite bubble, and so they can't predict what she's going to do next because they don't really know why she's going to do it. As Mark Tapscott points out, her political influence and her strong core of support come from her ability to connect powerfully with the broad base of American voters who feel alienated from our government and the elite political class who control it.

That's also, I believe, why elitist attempts to attack and dismiss Gov. Palin have had relatively little lasting effect; people who've only heard the elitist caricature tend to believe it, but that caricature tends not to survive comparison to the actual woman. In the end, if the Left is going to beat her, it's going to have to do so the old-fashioned way: by accepting that she's a respectable and serious opponent and trying to convince the voting public to choose an equally respectable and serious liberal candidate instead. The politics of personal destruction just aren't going to work against her.

That possibility clearly worries our political and media elites—including the conservatives among them, many of whom it seems would rather lose to a liberal of their own class than help elect a conservative from the hoi polloi—because Gov. Palin is a powerfully gifted and effective politician who excels at retail politics, the kind of handshaking and baby-kissing that propelled Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate. They're used to playing the game of politics by a certain set of rules, and she's doing everything differently, and it seems to be working; that threatens everything they know. Andrew Malcolm, one of the very few truly indispensable political observers out there, sums it up well:

Fact is, love her or loathe her, Palin is doing everything wrong. Unless the game has changed.

That's a possibility that should have our elites lying awake at night with cold sweats.

Update: Add the Huffington Post to the list, as Joan Williams declares,

Sarah Palin is playing chess. I don't know what game the Administration is playing, but they just walked right into her carefully laid trap. Palin, the strategist, is amazing to watch. Her brilliance is her ability to tap in to the class conflicts that drive American politics these days. Obama, whom I have supported since Iowa, just doesn't get it.

All the news that's fit to—wait, what?

Gregg Easterbrook, in his latest Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN.com (which includes, by the way, the best analysis I've seen of why New Orleans won the Super Bowl and Indianapolis lost), has this entertaining collection of corrections from the New York Times:

In the past six months, the Times has, according to its own corrections page, said Arizona borders Wisconsin; confused 12.7-millimeter rifle ammunition with 12.7 caliber (the latter would be a sizeable naval cannon); said a pot of ratatouille should contain 25 cloves of garlic (two tablespoons will do nicely); on at least five occasions, confused a million with a billion (note to the reporters responsible—there are jobs waiting for you at the House Ways and Means Committee); understated the national debt by $4.2 trillion (note to the reporter responsible—there's a job waiting for you at the Office of Management and Budget); confused $1 billion with $1 trillion (note to the reporter responsible—would you like to be CEO of AIG?); admitted numerical flaws in a story "about the ability of nonsense to sharpen the mind;" used "idiomatic deficiency" as an engineering term (correct was "adiabatic efficiency"); said Paul Revere's Midnight Ride occurred in 1776 (it was in 1775—by 1776, everybody knew the British were coming); "misstated the status of the United States in 1783—it was a country, not a collection of colonies" (dear Times, please Google "Declaration of Independence").

The Times also "misidentified the song Pink was singing while suspended on a sling-like trapeze;" confused the past 130 years with the entire 4.5 billion-year history of Earth (see appended correction here); misused statistics in the course of an article complaining that public school standards aren't high enough (see appended correction here); said Citigroup handed its executives $11 million in taxpayer-funded bonuses, when the actual amount was $1.1 billion (in the Citigroup executive suite, being off by a mere two zeroes would be considered incredible financial acumen); said a column lauding actress Terri White "overstated her professional achievements, based on information provided by Ms. White;" identified a woman as a man (it's so hard to tell these days); reported men landed on Mars in the 1970s ("there was in fact no Mars mission," the Times primly corrected).

The Times also gave compass coordinates that placed Manhattan in the South Pacific Ocean near the coastline of Chile (see appended correction here); said you need eight ladies dancing to enact the famous Christmas song when nine are needed; said Iraq is majority Sunni, though the majority there is Shiite (hey, we invaded Iraq without the CIA knowing this kind of thing); got the wrong name for a dog that lives near President Obama's house ("An article about the sale of a house next door to President Obama's home in Chicago misstated the name of a dog that lives there. She is Rosie, not Roxy"—did Rosie's agent complain?); elaborately apologized in an "editor's note," a higher-level confession than a standard correction, for printing "outdated" information about the health of a wealthy woman's Lhasa apso; incorrectly described an intelligence report about whether the North Korean military is using Twitter; called Tandil, Argentina, home of Juan Martín del Potro, a "tiny village" (its population is 110,000); inflicted upon unsuspecting readers a web of imprecision about the Frisians, the Hapsburg Empire, the geographic extent of terps, and whether Friesland was "autonomous and proud" throughout the Middle Ages or merely until 1500; inexactly characterized a nuance of a position taken by the French Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (philosophy majors must have marched in the streets of Paris over this); confused coal with methane (don't make that mistake in a mine shaft!); on at least three occasions, published a correction of a correction; "misstated the year of the Plymouth Barracuda on which a model dressed as a mermaid was posed;" "mischaracterized the date when New York City first hired a bicycle consultant" and "misidentified the location of a pile of slush in the Bronx."

Here, TMQ's pal Michael Kinsley duns the fastidiousness of Times corrections. Kinsley's column complaining about facts contains—you knew this was coming!—a factual error. Mike says the really big hunk of rock in southern Alaska is Mount McKinley on U.S. government maps, though commonly referred to by Alaskans as "Mount Denali." Actually, it is commonly referred to by Alaskans as Denali, which means "Great Mountain" in Athabaskan. "Mount Denali" would mean "Mount Great Mountain."

Granted, everyone makes mistakes, this is over a period of six months, and many of them are trivial (though some are ludicrously huge); still, I'm amused.

Congratulations to the New Orleans Saints

Living in Indiana, surrounded by fans of a truly classy franchise, I couldn't and didn't root against the Colts; but I couldn't bring myself to root against the Saints, either, and I'm very happy for their fans. They really had this one coming; if there's any fanbase that's had to put up with more garbage than Seattle fans, it's New Orleans fans.

This all brings to mind Daniel Henninger's recent column in the Wall Street Journal on American Needle Inc. v. National Football League, a case currently before the Supreme Court:

Most people would rather be a happy fan than anything else. Otherwise, there would not be so many fans for so many sports all over the world. This is irrefutable.

A friend recently emailed me that he didn't think there was any such thing as a truly happy progressive. This is false. If an American progressive's baseball team wins the Word Series, he is happy, if only briefly. A former colleague, a cricket fan, used to seek out late-night TV broadcasts in obscure bars in Queens, N.Y. It made him very happy.

Long ago, then-NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle figured out this greatest of all human truths, that the only value most people have in common, other than life itself, is the desire for a competitive home team. Family members who would sink a dinner fork into each other over Barack Obama's health-care plan will do high fives in the living room later if the Cleveland Browns beat the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Rozelle got the league's teams to distribute TV-broadcast revenue equally, so that no team would be permanently in the dumpster. Basketball and hockey did the same thing. Baseball has not, and it is well established that Chicago Cubs fans do not believe happiness exists.

Thought on gender and God language

If all people, male and female, are made in the image of God—or rather, to put the matter correctly, if humanity collectively, including male and female together, is made in the image of God—then why does the Bible use male language and primarily (though not exclusively) male imagery for God? It’s a fair question, and there are reasons for it—none of which is that God is male. That one is yet another self-interested idolatrous distortion of the biblical text (which, like most such, eventually came back around to bite the folks who pushed it, or at least their heirs).

Indeed, it should be stated quite clearly that the use of masculine pronouns does not mean and is not intended to mean that God is male. That particular confusion doesn’t belong to the original Hebrew but is a product of our largely degendered English language; in Hebrew, which is like every other ancient language in that every word has a gender, where the words “wind” and “brick” and “meat” are all feminine while the words “cook” and “valley” and “mouse” are masculine—where the word “king” is of course masculine, but the word “kingdom” is feminine—the fact that the words for “God” are masculine wouldn’t necessarily be taken as limiting God by gender. To the best of my knowledge, that false interpretation is much more recent than the Hebrew Scriptures.

It’s not enough, though, to say that this is merely grammatical; there were in fact theological reasons for using masculine language for God—and no, they didn’t have anything to do with any sort of supposed male superiority. Rather, they had to do with differentiating the worship of Yahweh God of Israel from the religions of the surrounding nations.

For one thing, in those religions, as in their modern descendants, where a goddess was worshiped as creator, the process of creation was envisioned as the goddess giving birth to the world—meaning the world is made of the same stuff as the deity, and thus is partly divine itself. Genesis rules that out: God speaks, and creation happens, outside himself—he is Father of creation, not its mother. For another, as anyone who has read The DaVinci Code knows, goddess-worship among Israel’s neighbors involved ritual sex, as it also usually does today; this is nothing God would ever tolerate among his people, and especially not in the form it took then, where the temples basically had female slaves to serve as sacred prostitutes.

In both these respects, the relationship between God and his creation—and consequently, the worship he desires from his creation—differs dramatically from the pagan conception; and so there is the need for different language to portray that, to limn a different picture of that relationship than the one the pagans held. The purpose of masculine God-language isn't to define or delimit our picture of God; it is, like most biblical language about God, more illustrative and suggestive than definitive. But it is also, like all biblical language, the language God has chosen, because the boundaries it sets are necessary.

The image of God and creation care

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth
and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

—Genesis 1:26-28 (ESV)

I argued last week that Genesis 1-2 shows us God creating his temple—the natural world—and setting up his image within it—namely, human beings; as such, I contend, we need to understand ourselves as his viceroys over creation, stewards given the task of governing the world he has made, but under his authority, not our own. As I pointed out, this is a democratization of the pervasive idea among Israel’s pagan neighbors that the king was the image and representative of the god and everyone else was second-class.

Operationally, though, what does this say about human beings? The answer is, I think, that verses 26-27, God creating human beings in his own image, find their first application in the command he gives the first man and woman in verse 28: rule the earth and fill it with people. This is what is commonly known as the “cultural mandate.”

Unfortunately, this verse has been misused over the years to justify environmental irresponsibility. There are those who argue that since God gave us dominion over all the other creatures and told us to rule the earth and subdue it, we have the right to do whatever we want with whatever part of the planet we happen to own; and there are far too many in the American church who have gone along with this kind of thinking.

It’s a completely wrongheaded interpretation of the verse, however, for two reasons. First, this command was given to sinless people—it cannot be used to justify sinful actions. Second, when God says, “Rule the earth, subdue it,” and so on, he gets to define what that means and how it’s appropriate to carry out his command. This is one aspect of the basic message of these two chapters: God made the world, and as such he’s the Lord of everything that is; that means he gets to make the rules, not us.

As such, Genesis 1:28 doesn’t mean that God created us to rule the world as we see fit, or that we have the right to do whatever we want with it; rather, it means that he created us to govern it under his authority, as his deputies. The world doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to him; it isn’t our property to exploit, it’s our responsibility to care for according to his will. Creation is his temple, and we are its caretakers and stewards.

As such, the dominion over the earth which God gave us—and which we still have; he didn’t take it back once our first ancestors fell into sin—isn’t a privilege, it’s a duty. Yes, it entitles us to draw support from the earth and its plants and animals, for those who labor deserve a fair share of the harvest; but the key is that we work for the good of all creation, including our fellow human beings.

And if we don’t? If we use God’s creation selfishly, abusing it for our own personal gain? Then rest assured, we will be held accountable. Thomas Jefferson, musing on the evil institution of American slavery, wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever”; and he trembled with good reason. As Paul writes in Galatians 6:7, “Don’t be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.” We will be held accountable by God for what we have done with the world he has given us—for the pollution in our air and water, and for the pollution in our culture. We have abused the earth and we have abused our fellow human beings, and the one is a sin as surely as the other. Our call and our responsibility is to take care of our world—including its people—for the God who made us all, and it is not a task to be taken lightly.

Understanding this is essential to free us from idea that the world exists simply for us to use, which reduces mountains and trees to raw materials and people to assets and resources. God didn’t create us to be resources or assets for someone else’s benefit, and he didn’t create the mountains and trees we see out our windows merely to be raw materials. We may use the trees for wood, and we may draw on other people’s gifts to do things which need to be done, but we must always remember that that’s not all they’re for. Even as we cut individual trees, we need to care for the forest, and the land on which it grows; and even as we take advantage of other people’s gifts to accomplish our purposes, we need to be careful that we aren’t taking advantage of other people. The justice of God demands no less.

(Adapted from “In the Image of God”)

Rahm Emanuel and the limits of apology

The tagline on this video says “Rahm blinks,” but I’m not at all sure I agree.

If you’re wondering what this is about, here’s Gov. Palin’s Facebook note on the subject:

The newly-released mind-boggling, record-smashing $3,400,000,000,000 federal budget invites plenty of opportunity to debate the merits of incurring more and more debt that will drown the next generation of Americans. Never has it been possible to spend your way out of debt. So . . . let the debate begin.

Included in the debate process will be opportunities for our president to deliberate internally the wisdom of this debt explosion, along with other economic, military and social issues facing our country. Our president will discuss these important issues with Democrat leaders and those within his inner circle. I would ask the president to show decency in this process by eliminating one member of that inner circle, Mr. Rahm Emanuel, and not allow Rahm’s continued indecent tactics to cloud efforts. Yes, Rahm is known for his caustic, crude references about those with whom he disagrees, but his recent tirade against participants in a strategy session was such a strong slap in many American faces that our president is doing himself a disservice by seeming to condone Rahm’s recent sick and offensive tactic.

The Obama Administration’s Chief of Staff scolded participants, calling them, “F---ing retarded,” according to several participants, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the “N-word” or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities—and the people who love them—is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking.

A patriot in North Andover, Massachusetts, notified me of Rahm’s “retarded” slam. I join this gentleman, who is the father of a beautiful child born with Down Syndrome, in asking why the Special Olympics, National Down Syndrome Society and other groups condemning Rahm’s degrading scolding have been completely ignored by the White House. No comment from his boss, the president?

As my friend in North Andover says, “This isn’t about politics; it’s about decency. I am not speaking as a political figure but as a parent and as an everyday American wanting my child to grow up in a country free from mindless prejudice and discrimination, free from gratuitous insults of people who are ostensibly smart enough to know better . . . Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Mr. President, you can do better, and our country deserves better.

—Sarah Palin

Of course, as the conversation in that video clip reminds us, we’ve heard something like this before from this administration, as the President compared his bowling to the Special Olympics (on national TV, no less); he made a couple apologies and left it behind him. Now, it appears, he’s hoping his administration will be able to do the same again. I have to say, that doesn’t sound to me at all like “Rahm blinking,” it sounds to me like Rahm Emanuel—and Barack Obama!—trying to pass the whole thing off with a pro forma apology that he didn’t even have to make in person. It’s nothing more than the political equivalent of cheap grace, cost-free pseudo-repentance, and it’s just not good enough.

It’s especially not good enough considering that were the shoe on the other foot, were this a club Rahm Emanuel could use against a political rival, he wouldn’t rest until the last shovelful of dirt had been thrown on that rival’s political career. Should he be fired? That would seem to me to be out of proportion to the moral offense—though the political offense here, causing further problems for an administration that’s already struggling when to this point he’s been largely ineffective at pushing his boss’s agenda, might be enough to start the deathwatch—but either COS Emanuel or President Obama needs to do something more here than merely make an empty gesture. It’s not enough to say, “Tim Shriver forgave us,” as if that should settle it; if they want real forgiveness, they need to demonstrate real repentance, of the sort that actually costs something. After all, as I wrote after the President’s Special Olympics wisecrack,

Michael Kinsley somewhere defined a gaffe as “what happens when the spin breaks down.” It’s a wry observation that captures a real truth about why gaffes matter: because they reveal something about a given politician that said politician doesn’t want us to see. They’re the places where the mask slips. That may not always be true, and the real meaning of a particular gaffe may not always be the one that first comes to mind, but in general, these are meaningful moments that tell us more about our politicians than our politicians will usually tell us about themselves.

What makes repentance? A change of heart. And at this point, it seems clear that a change of heart is exactly what’s needed here.

Song of the Week II

I posted Greg Scheer's "A Mark of Grace" earlier because I admire what he accomplished in that song, but it's far from the only new song I learned at the Worship Symposium last week; there were several, of which my favorite is this one, which is still stuck fast in my head from last Thursday morning:

Creation Sings

Creation sings the Father's song;
He calls the sun to wake the dawn
And run the course of day
Till evening falls in crimson rays.
His fingerprints in flakes of snow,
His breath upon this spinning globe,
He charts the eagle's flight;
Commands the newborn baby's cry.

Hallelujah! Let all creation stand and sing,
"Hallelujah!" Fill the earth with songs of worship;
Tell the wonders of creation's King.

Creation gazed upon His face;
The ageless One in time's embrace
Unveiled the Father's plan
Of reconciling God and man.
A second Adam walked the earth,
Whose blameless life would break the curse,
Whose death would set us free
To live with Him eternally.

Chorus

Creation longs for His return,
When Christ shall reign upon the earth;
The bitter wars that rage
Are birth pains of a coming age.
When He renews the land and sky,
All heav'n will sing and earth reply
With one resplendent theme: The glories of our God and King!

Chorus

Words and music: Keith Getty, Kristyn Getty, and Stuart Townend
© 2008 Thankyou Music
Recorded on the album Awaken the Dawn, by Keith and Kristyn Getty

Doing what comes naturally

It is the most natural thing in the world to falsify God. All we have to do is follow our intuitions and good intentions. But whenever our uncrucified selves take over, bad things start happening. Worshiping Christ alone is an adjustment. It is unnatural—and freeing.

We pay a price to follow Christ. We pay a far higher price not to follow Christ.

—Ray Ortlund