This goes well with Friday's post on grace-driven effort; this is E. Stanley Jones, courtesy of Of First Importance:
Grace binds you with far stronger cords than the cords of duty or obligation can bind you. Grace is free, but when once you take it, you are bound forever to the Giver and bound to catch the spirit of the Giver. Like produces like. Grace makes you gracious, the Giver makes you give.
Due to a combination of circumstances, I found myself this week filling in for my wife, who’s one of the book-review bloggers for Thomas Nelson (which now calls their review-blogging program, absurdly, BookSneeze), to write a review of the book Jesus Manifesto by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola. It’s a 179-page (plus footnotes) expansion of a ~2400 word essay they posted last summer, which I noted at the time when Jared Wilson flagged it. The essay was a powerful challenge to the increasingly Jesusless American church, but there was plenty of room to expand on each of their ten points; now, each one gets a chapter. The resulting book is not perfect, by any means—there’s room for criticism, as there is with any human work—but I’m grateful to Sweet and Viola for writing it, and to Thomas Nelson for publishing it and pushing it, because the church in this country badly needs to hear what they have to say.
I will probably come back to this book and interact with it more than once, because there’s a lot here; but for now, let me just post here what I put up on my wife’s blog. The best summary of this book comes from the authors themselves, in the last chapter, in words taken straight from the original essay:
Christians don’t follow Christianity; they follow Christ.
Christians don’t preach themselves; they preach Christ.
Christians don’t preach about Christ: they simply preach Christ.
The purpose of the book is to lay out why that’s so and what that looks like, in order to address “the major disease of today’s church . . . JDD: Jesus Deficit Disorder.”
Sweet and Viola do an excellent job of this; they have written a book which is truly centered on—indeed, saturated with—Jesus. Rather than resting on human wisdom, it rests solidly on Scripture, the word that contains the Word, “the cradle that contains the Christ,” in Luther’s phrase; this is not to say that they ignore the wisdom of Christians through the ages, but they only use it to expound and amplify the voice of the Scriptures as they speak of Christ. This book will make anyone who reads it with an open mind and heart aware of their hunger and thirst for Jesus; one hopes it will do the same for the American church.
Time was, I used to read a lot of systematic theology; I don't do that much anymore. Rather, I'm much more likely to read commentaries. This is not to disparage the work of systematic theology—I still have a lot of it on my shelves, and I make use of it; but I think the church, at least since Aquinas, has tended to make much too much of theological systems, to the point where we identify with and believe in them rather than in what—or rather, Who—they're supposed to point us to. Just consider the labels Protestants use: Lutheran, Calvinist, Wesleyan, Baptist, Reformed, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian. (Those churches which call themselves Catholic and Orthodox are different because they defined themselves against each other—the purpose of their names is to identify them as the true church and the other as not.) I think systematic theology has a useful and important purpose in helping us to interpret Scripture holistically, in the big-picture view, with integrity; but we must always remember that it is merely a guide to understanding, not the substance of our beliefs.
It's easy to lose sight of that, but it's true, because true Christianity isn't about believing in beliefs, it's about believing in a person: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in whom the fulness of the Triune God is revealed. Doctrines, even true doctrines, don't save us—only Jesus saves us; it matters that we believe true things, yes, but we seek to believe true things in order that we may more clearly see and know and believe in the one who is Truth.
Christ cannot be summarized in propositional statements and assertions of fact; indeed, all the true statements we can make about him and his teaching are of necessity partial. We cannot follow him by making up a list of things to do and not to do, or by identifying the things he did and trying to do them; we cannot help others know him merely by telling them things about him, even if every last one of them are true things. Christian faith cannot ultimately be explained, nor can it fully be taught, even though teaching is an important element of the work of the church. In the end, it can only be lived, Christ in us by his indwelling Holy Spirit; and the only way we can fully carry out his command to make disciples is by living in him and allowing others to live closely with us as we do so, so that we can say to them, "Follow me as I follow Christ."
I'm not sure why it had never occurred to me before to post Lincoln's Gettysburg Address for Memorial Day, but I think it's well worth doing—not least because of its insistence that the most important thing we can do to honor those who died fighting for that which is good and true and right is to take up the work and carry it on.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Pete Hegseth, the head of Vets for Freedom, posted this on NRO’s The Corner last year; I posted it at the time, and decided it was worth re-posting this year.
Memorial Day is about one thing: remembering the fallen on the battlefield and passing their collective story to the next generation. These stories, and the men who bear them, are the backbone of this American experiment and must never be forgotten. As John Stuart Mill once said, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.” The minute—excuse me, the second—we believe our freedoms inevitable and/or immutable, we cease to live in history, and have soured the soldier’s sacrifice. He died in the field, so we can enjoy this beautiful day (and weekend). Our freedoms—purchased on the battlefield—are indeed “worthy of war.”
And this day, with America still at war, it is also fitting that we remember the soldiers currently serving in harm’s way. Because, as any veteran can attest, just one moment, one explosion, or one bullet separates Veterans Day from Memorial Day. Soldiers currently in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting for our freedoms today, knowing it’s possible they may never see tomorrow. These troops—and their mission—deserve our support each day, and our prayers every night. May God watch over them—and their families; May He give them courage in the face of fear, and righteous might in the face of evil.
For those who might be interested, I just finished a sermon series working along the lines of the Nicene Creed (though I didn't hit everything the creed affirms) and ending up today with a sermon on the Trinity. I think that's the first time I've ever preached a full sermon on the subject. The texts are all up on the sermon blog; the audio of the sermons can be found on the church website, though at the moment only the first six are up—this morning's message will be posted tomorrow (Lord willing).
Update: OK, the audio of yesterday's message is up.
One of my friends on Facebook posted the chorus to "Revive Us Again" as her status, and now I have Ashley Cleveland's version stuck in my head. Of course, it doesn't take much to get that one stuck in my head; nor do I regret it, because it's a great version. It's also well worth sharing—so, without further ado:
As long as I'm at it, I've been meaning to post Moses Hogan's phenomenal arrangement of "The Battle of Jericho" ever since my wife discovered it a couple weeks ago; since it's in the same general vein, albeit a choral arrangement rather than solo voice with a blues-rock band, now's as good a time as any.
Well, OK, not exactly; but given that people are now defending the White House's job offer to Rep. Joe Sestak by reminding us that the Reagan White House may have tried something similar in California with Sen. S. I. Hayakawa 28 years ago, I think this from James' entry on Brewers Hall of Famer Robin Yount in his New Historical Baseball Abstract is very much on point:
In 1978, after Yount had been in the major leagues four years, he held out in the spring, mulling over whether he wanted to be a baseball player, or whether he really wanted to be a professional golfer.
When that happened, I wrote him off as a player who would never become a star. If he can't even figure out whether he wants to be a baseball player or a golfer, I reasoned, he's never going to be an outstanding player. . . .
But as soon as he returned to baseball, Yount became a better player than he had been before; his career got traction from the moment he returned. What I didn't see at the time was that Yount was in the process of making a commitment to baseball. Before he had his golf holiday, he was there every day, but on a certain level he wasn't participating; he was wondering whether this was really the sport that he should be playing. What looked like indecision or sulking was really the process of making a decision.
This is often true. What Watergate was about was not the corruption of government, as most people thought, but rather, the establishment of new and higher standards of ethical conduct. Almost all scandals, I think, result not from the invention of new evils, but from the imposition of new ethical standards. . . . In the biographies of men and nations, success often arrives in a mask of failure.
I think James' argument is well-taken, and very much applicable to the Sestak scandal. The irony of it all is that the new ethical standards that the Obama White House is now resisting, with some help from a press corps that really doesn't much want to go after them, are the product of the Obama campaign. The people now insisting that politics as usual is "perfectly appropriate" are the same people who were telling us two years ago that we needed to vote for Sen. Obama because politics as usual is unacceptable. Maybe it was unrealistic then; it still looks bad for them now. As the Wall Street Journal summed the matter up,
It's possible that all we really have here is a case of the Obama White House playing Washington politics as usual, which the White House refused to admit for three months because this is what Mr. Obama promised he would not do if he became President. However, this is clearly what he hired Mr. Emanuel to do for him, and given his ethical record Mr. Clinton was the perfect political cutout. So much for the most transparent Administration in history.
Then again, George W. Bush merely exercised his right to fire a handful of U.S. Attorneys, and Democrats made that a federal case for years even though it has since gone nowhere legally. The Emanuel to Clinton to Sestak job offer still needs a scrub under oath by the Justice Department and the relevant Congressional committees.
I believe the phrase we were looking for here is "hoist with their own petard."
Everybody in the post-Christendom West seems to want to claim Jesus, even if they don’t actually know anything about him or like what he actually taught; the vestiges of the cultural authority the church used to have (which are, admittedly, a lot greater here in the U.S. than elsewhere) no doubt have something to do with that, along with the lingering sense that Jesus was somebody really special. The result is a great many attempts to bring Jesus down to the desired size so that his image can be manipulated without fear; Jesus must be reduced to just another great teacher—the greatest of all, perhaps, so long as the difference between him and, say, Buddha is understood to be a difference only of degree, not of kind.
The problem is, that just won’t wash if you actually look at Jesus; as C. S. Lewis pointed out, making the modern world aware of an argument dating back to the early days of the church, that's the one option Jesus doesn’t leave us. He makes claims that no good, sane person would make, and says things that no one who doesn't accept his claims would tolerate.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
If you can praise him as a great teacher, it’s proof you haven't taken him seriously. And as James Stewart points out in his book A Faith to Proclaim, this goes further even than what he taught, into how he taught.
There is nothing in the Gospels more significant than the way in which Jesus deliberately places Himself at the very centre of His message. He does not say with other teachers, “The truth is everything, I am nothing”; He declares, “I am the truth.” He does not claim, with the founders of certain ethnic religions, to suggest answers to the world’s enigmas; He claims to be the answer—“Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.” He does not offer the guidance of a code or a philosophy to keep men right through the uncertainties of an unknown future; He says, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”
Teachers are people from whom we learn and then depart, doing whatever we will with their influence in our lives and our relationship with them; their true authority extends no further than the limits of our submission. While there are many who refuse to acknowledge Jesus' authority, it is not in reality so limited—indeed, it isn’t limited at all; and he did nothing whatsoever to encourage us to think that it was, or is.
Update: It occurred to me today that I missed an even more important distinction in that last paragraph. Teachers are, as a class, primarily important to us for what we learn from them; there may be a significant relationship there as well, but not necessarily, and even when there is, it’s almost always secondary. That’s not to say anything about teachers, but rather about the way our society understands education: the importance of teachers in our lives is all about us. Jesus is primarily important to us for who he is, for our knowing him and being united to him; what we learn from him is secondary, important not for its own sake but because it contributes to our relationship with him.
I haven't been over to Viola Larson's blog, Naming His Grace, for a while—in large part because, for a lot of reasons, I've been very low on energy for dealing with the internecine warfare in the PC(USA)—and now I rather wish I hadn't. Nothing against Viola in the slightest, and in fact it's a good thing that I know about this . . . I just wish it wasn't there to know about.
In an attempt to get the Presbyterian General Assembly to not receive the paper Christians and Jews: People of God the Israel/Palestine Mission Network lied about the Jewish organizations in the United States suggesting that they sent a bomb to our Presbyterian headquarters and burnt down a church. They also lied about the Jewish people in their synagogues. The Israel/Palestine Mission Network lied.
Why won’t more Presbyterians speak up? Surely even those Presbyterians who believe that everything Israel is doing is wrong can’t believe that lying about Jewish organizations in the United States is the right thing to do? Why isn’t there an outcry from fellow Christians about this?
The IPMN insists that the rising anti-semitism, the caricatures of Jewish people, in all countries, is caused by the Jews themselves. That is an old story. Less than eighty years ago such lies led to the death of six million Jews.
Anti-Semitism is on the rise again, driven by this queer alliance between the Western Left and the anti-Western wing of Islam; it's grievous to me to see people trying to use the PC(USA) to further it.
My thanks to Jared Wilson for pointing out this gem from one of my favorite NT scholars,
D. A. Carson:
People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
That's dead-on, but as Jared goes on to say, it does raise another question: what does grace-driven effort look like, and how is it different from all other forms of effort?
I think grace-driven effort springs from parking ourselves at the gospel and beholding. People who behold (super)naturally move into mission. . . .
We don't graduate from the gospel. We hold true to it. And it alone propels us out and empowers us to press on.
Grace-driven effort is effort that flows from the joys and wonders of worship that flows from beholding the amazing gospel of God's grace.
That's dead-on too. If you're having trouble seeing the distinction, you might say it's between doing something because you have to and doing something because you want to. Legalistic religion motivates by pushing and bribing, the carrot and the stick. The push may be an appeal to fear—which is a very powerful driver in most people's lives, since an awful lot of folks out there are slaves to fear in one way or another—or it may be a guilt trip, or it may play on people's sense of their own weakness and inadequacy; the bribe tends to be tailored to people's "felt needs" (hence the popular "7 Steps to a Better ________" approach). Whatever the particulars, it's all about control, both for the leader and for the followers.
The opposite to that, of course, is the drift that Dr. Carson talks about. Grace-driven effort is a wholly other thing; it is the action that springs from amazed gratitude at the unparalleled and almost incomprehensible grace of God; from joy in worship that focuses our minds and hearts on his beauty and goodness; from desire for his restful purity and undivided holiness, which frees us from our chaotic impurity and unrighteousness, which divides us against ourselves; and from whole-hearted love for him who first loved us, and who loved us that much.
The problem, I think, is that too few of us preachers actually trust that message to have any effect; it's too easy and too tempting to go for the "short cut," to go right to messages prescribing whatever efforts we deem most important. But effort which does not arise in response to the gospel of grace, even if it seems to be in the right direction, is not the right sort of effort, and in the end, it will not bear fruit in keeping with repentance.
Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.
—Philippians 3:12-16 (ESV)
It's my observation that Douglas Wilson, of Credenda/Agenda and Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho, is at his best when he can let his snark ascend and just turn it loose; he's also at his best when he has something deep and profoundly important to set his teeth into and be snarky about. (This is, I think, why he was the perfect person to debate Christopher Hitchens.) As such, it's no surprise that his recent guest piece at the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog, titled "Foxy News," is Wilson at his best.
Preaching against porn while consuming it avidly is certainly inconsistent, and is what theologians in another old-timey era used to call "a sin"—a theological category that perhaps needs to be rehabilitated. But I want to consider this issue at another level—we need to start thinking about the politics of porn. . . .
A number of evangelicals are up in arms about President Obama himself, and Obamacare, and Obama-other-things, and Obama-anything-else, and are warning us in dire tones about the impending slavery that is involved in all this "socialism." And—full disclosure here—I am economically pretty conservative myself, just slightly to the left of King Arthur, so I am not pointing out this part of it to differ with any of it. But what I am noticing in this discussion is a striking public tolerance for right-wing skankyness. When I am cruising around for my Internet news, I am far more likely to run into Moabite women at Fox News than anywhere else. . . .
Surely it should be possible to access fair and balanced news without running into women who think they are supposed to be a sale at Macy's—with 40 percent off.
What then? On the assumption that what we are willing to associate with in public is just a fraction of what we are willing to associate with in private, one of my basic concerns about evangelical involvement in politics in the age of Obama (measured in this discussion by their general friendliness to Foxy News) is that they are not nearly as hostile to "slavery" as some of the rhetoric might seem to indicate. I know that politics is supposed to make strange bedfellows, but "strange bedfellows" was always supposed to be a metaphor, wasn't it?
A man cannot sell himself into slavery in his private life, and then turn around and successfully take a stand as a free man in the public square. At least, that is how the thinking used to go among conservatives. If sexual indulgence is one of the more obvious bribes that can be offered to a slave, how does it change anything if a person takes the bribe in private? And if that bribe is taken in private, over time, indications of that reality will start to show up in public, in the sorts of ways I have been discussing.
Be sure to read the whole thing—it's truly priceless. I remember when Fox was a favorite target for ire of conservatives, because of shows like "Married . . . with Children" and, yes, "The Simpsons." (It seems a little strange now to think of that.) People would occasionally point out, as a mitigating factor, that Rupert Murdoch was pretty conservative in a lot of ways, but that was usually dismissed with the comment that the sleaze he peddled disqualified him. Until he launched Fox News, and before too long, political expediency took over . . .
I have thought more than once that someone ought to try to apply systems theory to economics in a systematic way. The application of systems theory to family therapy by Murray Bowen was a huge step forward, as was Edwin Friedman's work in turning Bowen's model more broadly to congregational dynamics and leadership; Rabbi Friedman's book Generation to Generation is one every pastor should read (and periodically re-read). Systems theory helps us to understand that problems don't exist in isolation and can't be addressed as if they did; we all exist within interlocking relational systems, and the problems of any given individual relate to the problems of the systems of which they are a part (and indeed, may have more to do with the health of the system than with that individual).
As a consequence, systems theory teaches us that the brute-force approach to problems, the use of compulsion and coercion, is often not the best approach, because it attacks the symptom without doing anything about the underlying issue—and indeed, will likely make the underlying issue worse. Rather, it's necessary to address problems by changing the system. To do that, you have to identify the ways in which you are supporting the system and enabling its current dysfunction, and then change your own behavior. This changes the incentive structure within the system and shifts the stress of maintaining it off of you and on to the other members; this creates a great deal of pressure on the system which will ultimately, given sufficient time, break it, thus making real progress possible.
The same is true of our economy, which is itself a system—or perhaps one might say, a meta-system, since the "individuals" which interact are corporations, which are their own complex systems—and which is, of course, embedded in the even larger meta-system of the global economy. Problems, whether they be with companies, sectors of the economy, aspects of the economy, or whatever, don't exist in isolation, and can't be addressed as if they did. This means that the brute force approach, the attempt to compel the behavior one desires of a given corporation or industry through legislation and regulation, is at best highly inefficient and at worst actively counterproductive. It's like swatting at a mobile—you put the whole thing in motion, setting it turning in ways you couldn't have predicted, leading to results you didn't anticipate. This is why the Law of Unintended Consequences has such force.
Rather than simply trying to regulate the economy into moral behavior, we need to recognize that it's a complex interlocking system of human relationships, and to try to address corporate and economic issues accordingly. Obviously, this is easier said than done, as the system is far too complex to be fully comprehended by the human mind, but taking this approach at least gets us closer to understanding the real issues. For instance, don't just look at bad behavior—whether of a rebellious teenager or a company that's cooking the books—look at the structure of incentives within the system and see what that behavior is in response to, and what's rewarding it.
This is not a new idea in the world of economic theory; in fact, it's quite important in the work of the Austrian school of thought, of folks like Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. It's one of the reasons I believe they were closer to right than other economic approaches, because they understood and emphasized that the incentive structure drives economic action—that people will tend to do what they have an incentive to do, and to avoid doing what they have no incentive to do—and that when the incentives are out of whack, it will produce behavior which will be bad for the economy. One example of this is Hayek's Nobel Prize-winning theory of the business cycle, which makes clear that if interest rates are set such as to provide an incentive for highly speculative investments, people will speculate; the result will be an economic bubble which will eventually, inevitably, burst. Just check the housing market.
To try to rationalize the economy, then, to produce steady, sustainable growth, we need to understand (as best as possible) how our laws and regulations and the decisions of government entities like the Federal Reserve and Fannie Mae create incentives for counterproductive behavior; and then we need to work to change those incentives to reward behavior that will produce long-term health rather than short-term big profits. This means not trying to fix the economy by regulating it more—indeed, it might well mean deregulating it to some degree, not because "business can be trusted" (it can't, but neither can government), but because deregulation simplifies the system and makes it easier to see what's actually going on.
Hayek, by the way, though an advocate of the free market, was by no means opposed to regulation; he was enough of a realist about humanity to recognize that there is a proper role for government to play in economic matters. As such, there have been those on the Right who have criticized him for not supporting the free-market system enough. From an Austrian perspective, it seems to me, the key is that the government should only regulate cautiously and with humility, out of the expectation that it knows and understands far less than it thinks it does.
Regulation to prevent clear injustice is necessary, as are efforts to insure the free flow of information, because most people will abuse the system if you give them a clear shot and a big enough reason; but regulation to try to control outcomes is almost certain to backfire. When the government tries to pick winners and losers, you end up with crony capitalism and the disasters we're seeing now. The best we can do is to try to keep the process as fair as possible, so that everybody's playing by the same rules; try to keep the structure of incentives as rational as possible, so that the market isn't tilted either towards excessive risk or excessive caution; and to remember this insight from Hayek's 1988 book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (quoted at the end of the rap video "Fear the Boom and Bust"):
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
Incidentally, the odds are pretty good that you've seen that rap video, produced by filmmaker John Papola and economist Russ Roberts (of George Mason University and the blog Café Hayek, which I have in the sidebar), which envisions a rap duel between Hayek and John Maynard Keynes; after all, it's now up to nearly 1.2 million views for one version of it on YouTube alone. If not, though, unless you absolutely can't stand rap—and maybe even then—you really ought to watch it here; it's a great piece of work. Then go read the explication of the video (which I linked above) by one of the posters on Daily Kos (yes, seriously), and Jeffrey Tucker's piece on the website of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. You'll be amazed how much you can learn from a rap video. (For my own part, I'm no more a Keynesian than I ever was, but I definitely have more of an appreciation for his work now than I did.)
I’ve said before that I think the greatest need in American politics is more politicians who, like Sarah Palin, are independent of the party machines, and thus willing to call out and take down their own party when it deserves it—and particularly for a Democratic equivalent to Gov. Palin. There aren't many like that on the Republican side of the aisle (Nikki Haley, whom Gov. Palin recently endorsed for governor of South Carolina, is one notable exception; that would be why the GOP leadership down in Columbia is trying to destroy her before she wins the nomination), but if they're thin on the ground among Republicans, they would seem to be nearly absent among Democrats. The only real figure I can find right now is blogger Mickey Kaus, currently challenging incumbent Barbara Boxer in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in California. His challenge is probably doomed to fail, which is too bad; I have to agree with Jonah Goldberg:
Kaus is way too liberal for me. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be an exhilarating addition to the Senate in the grand tradition of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Like Moynihan, Kaus is a fearless asker of hard and unwanted questions. He may have the single most finely attuned B.S. detector of anyone in the journalism business—or any other business.
When I pastored in Colorado, one of the best people in our congregation was an environmental engineer who specialized in groundwater. A lot of his business involved wetlands in one form or another, but he also got involved in housing construction, helping builders avoid basement water problems. I remember him pointing out one house where the basement had been sunk too deep into the ground, for a combination of reasons, putting it down into an underground stream; as a consequence, whatever that family did, they had water in their basement. Seal the outside, seal the inside, nothing they could do could permanently fix the problem, because whatever you do, water always finds its way in.
When he told me about that, my mind immediately went to politics and the whole question of campaign-finance reform—which is a joke, because the whole concept is that you can keep money out of politics. Not totally, to be sure, but that you can control the inflow—that you can limit how much of it comes in, and how, and where. A lot of well-meaning people believe this, but it's ludicrously out of touch with reality. Laws are fixed, like concrete; money flows, like water; and just as the water will always find its way over, under, around, or through in the end, so too will money. The pressure is there behind it, pushing it in, and the demand is there for it, drawing it in, and so whatever laws you may write and whatever regulations they draw up, all they will succeed in doing is defining the cracks—or loopholes, if you prefer the term—through which the money will inevitably leak.
Want to reduce the importance of money in politics? Well, in the first place you might want to rethink that, since all that would likely accomplish is to further strengthen incumbents and further reduce turnover among our elected officials; but if you do, fine, more power to you. But doing it the brute-force, frontal-assault way isn't going to work, because it never has. If you want to reduce the importance of money, you're going to have to find another way. In the battle of water vs. concrete, the water wins every time.
Picking up my oldest from school today, I saw a girl walking along carrying a sign that read
KEEP PANDA'S SAFE
If you've ever read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, you'll understand why I smiled.
A couple months ago, President Obama gave a speech in St. Charles, MO in which he argued that his health care plan would make Medicare stronger even as it cut the Medicare budget, because “There’s no cutting of Medicare benefits. There’s just cutting out fraud and waste.” As you can probably guess, I’m skeptical about that, but maybe not for the reason you think. I’m not skeptical because it’s him or his party—this is a recurring bipartisan theme. Politico’s Chris Frates put it well when he wrote,
Obama’s efforts follow those of a long line of Republican and Democratic presidents who promised to save taxpayers money by cutting fraud, waste and abuse in the government insurance programs. The sentiment is popular because it has bipartisan support and doesn’t threaten entrenched health industry interests that benefit from the spending.
“Waste, fraud and abuse have been the favorite thing to promise first because it’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff,” said Len Nichols, a former senior health policy adviser in the Clinton administration. The method is “as old as the Bible,” he said.
“It’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff”—that’s it right there. It’s how politicians convince us that they’ll be able to cut government spending (which we want) without cutting any of our programs (which we don’t want). After all, politicians who cut our programs—even if we elected them to cut spending, even if we know government desperately needs to cut spending—tend to become unpopular as a result, at least in the short term . . . and we know there’s nothing politicians hate worse than being unpopular.
The problem is, the idea that we can solve our budget problems (or even make a major dent in them) is a myth—a fairy tale—a chimera. It’s never happened yet, and it isn’t going to, either. That’s not to say, certainly, that we shouldn’t do everything we can to reduce waste and fraud, but we need to do so realizing that we’re fighting, at best, a holding action; we’re never going to achieve victory, and we’re never going to gain enough ground to make a significant improvement in the budget. In truth, just keeping waste and fraud from growing is an accomplishment.
That might seem cynical, but I think it’s just realistic. Waste is an inevitable part of any human activity, as we should all know from daily life. There’s always peanut butter left in the jar when it’s “empty”; there’s always shampoo left in the bottle when we can’t get any more out; there’s always some of the fruit that falls off before it’s ripe. We can and should work to reduce waste—say, the amount of energy given off by our light bulbs as heat rather than light—but we’ll never eliminate it. We’re simply too limited to ever achieve 100% efficiency.
Within large organizations, there’s an additional problem that reinforces and aggravates this reality: cutting waste isn’t to everybody’s benefit. The bureaucracy has its inevitable turf wars, which waste money, and its (often competing) agendas. What’s more, the people who control the money as it trickles down through the system have the same self-protective instinct as anyone; those who benefit from waste want to see it perpetuated, and this waste has a constituency. The people who profit by waste are there, they are connected, they have clout; those who would profit if waste were removed are abstract, theoretical, not present, not connected, and can’t prove their case, since it’s a might-have-been. Anywhere except Chicago, a voter who shows up and argues will beat a voter who isn’t there any day.
As for fraud, any time there’s a lot of money moving around, there will be those unscrupulous and clever enough to siphon some of it off. Whatever ideas you come up with to stop them, or failing that to catch them, will have only limited success; as in warfare, so in this area, the advantage is constantly shifting between offense and defense—the defense may pull ahead for a while, but the offense will always adapt and regain the advantage. What’s more, when it comes to preventing fraud, the defensive position is intrinsically harder, because the fraudster only has to find one loophole in order to succeed, while those on the other side have to keep every last loophole closed, even the ones they don’t know are there. In the end, we can only say of the fraud artist what Dan Patrick used to say of Michael Jordan: “You can’t stop him—you can only hope to contain him.”
All of which is to say, the commitment to fight waste and fraud in government is laudable, and we should certainly do everything we can to encourage our politicians in that direction—but any politician who tells you they can solve our budget problems by eliminating waste and fraud is selling you a bill of goods. The only way to significantly reduce waste and fraud is to significantly reduce the spending that produces and attracts them; if you want to cut waste and fraud, you have to cut government.
Just because it's showing signs of life doesn't mean it's getting better. For those who think otherwise, here are some questions to consider. (And yes, as someone has already demonstrated, there are ways to try to explain away each question; but as any baseball fan knows, if there are a lot of "ifs" and they all have to have the "right" answer for things to go well, things probably aren't going to go well.)
This is an excellent bit from Mark Driscoll laying out the nature of true repentance vs. the false repentance of worldly sorrow—the sort of thing we see in celebrities like Tiger Woods, who practice what he dubs "a pagan version of Catholicism."
who wrote the opinion for the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in American Needle v. NFL. It was an interesting case, turning on the question of whether the NFL is a single corporate entity or a collection of competing corporations, and one with potentially huge ramifications. Had the Court upheld the NFL's claim and allowed them to act as a single corporation, it would have been an immense transfer of power to the NFL which probably would have drastically weakened the players' union; but in denying that claim (as they did, and rightly) there was the potential to significantly weaken the league. Justice Stevens' ruling, from what I can see, did an excellent job of maintaining the necessary balance, laying a clear legal foundation for the NFL as a collection of competing corporations which must by the very nature of their business act cooperatively and collectively in much of what they do. As Doug Farrar sums it up,
Stevens basically said that the Supreme Court, and any other Court, would test function rather than form and avoid absolute impingement of any collective activity taken on by the teams,. But any act in concert with an eye on the evasion of antitrust law would not be allowed or exempted. In effect, as Berthelsen intimated in his statement, the NFL must operate under the same constraints as almost any other business. It was a sound and reasoned ruling that penalized neither side.
Nice job of threading the needle, that.
I don't make any apologies for blogging on political matters; I believe they’re important, and that we as Christians need to learn to see all aspects of life, including politics, with the eyes of faith. There are some things going on in our country right now that deeply concern me, and I think that concern is both warranted and appropriate. That said, there’s a risk in this, too—the risk of coming to overvalue political victories and defeats, to attach too much significance to them. It’s the risk of narrowed perspective, and it has contributed to the politicization of all too much of the American church (on both sides of the political divide).
To counter it, we need to pull back and reorient ourselves. We need to remember not only that this world isn’t all there us, but that for those of us who are in Christ and now live by the Holy Spirit, it isn’t even really our home. In Christ, we have been made citizens of another country, and given the life of the world to come; we don’t simply live in the present anymore—we live in the future, too. Our life comes from the future, from the coming kingdom of God which is breaking into the kingdoms of this world—in us, the people of God. In us, the future kingdom of God is present, the rule of God is exercised, the authority of God in and over this world is proclaimed. We are ambassadors from the future to the present, and the life God calls us to live only makes sense if we see it in that perspective.
Put another way, what we need to understand is that biblically, we are in the last days. To be sure, we’re still waiting for the last last days—this isn’t to say that the end of the world is right around the corner; people keep thinking it might be, but so far, it hasn’t happened. The point is more this: in God’s time, itwill happen, and we don’t know when that will be—and for that matter, many of us will die before then, which will be the end of the world for us, and we don’t know when that will be, either—but whenever it comes, that’s the end toward which we’re moving, when everything God has begun in us will be completed and fulfilled. That’s the destination of our journey, the purpose of our calling, the goal that will make sense of everything along the way.
To live in the last days, and to live in the understanding that we’re in the last days, is to live with that orientation and that focus: toward the future, toward dying and being reborn, toward the kingdom of God. It’s to live with the understanding that what happens in the present is primarily important for the effects it will have in the future; what we do in this world matters, and this world itself matters, not because it’s all there is but because it isn’t. What matters isn’t the things, and the worldly victories, and the worldly praise; rather, what matters is what will endure: the people we meet, the truth we speak, the lessons we learn, the love we give—and of course, the ones we don’t, as well. In the end, if we shut people out, if we refuse to speak or to hear truth, if we withhold love, for whatever reason, the only person we impoverish is ourselves. If we focus our attention, our concern, our efforts, on the things the world values, such as money and power, we may get the rewards the world has to offer (or we may not), but when this world goes, they’ll be gone. As my wife’s grandfather used to say, “You can’t take it with you, but you can send it on ahead”—and it’s only what you send on ahead that will last.
As such, we ought not get too tied up in winning victories now; after all, we worship a God who has been known to do more with earthly defeats than worldly victories anyway. We need to work for what is good and right and true to the best of our ability and the best of our judgment, but we need to remember that in the end, winning isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whether we win or lose, God is in control; what matters most is not that we get our way, but that we do things his way, that we speak his truth in his love, fearlessly, every chance we get. If we do that, we can let the chips fall where they may, because by his sovereign will, he controls every last one of them.
(Adapted from “The Life of the World to Come”)
Erick Erickson is right, this is profoundly disturbing:
In Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela or in Thailand or in former Eastern Bloc countries it would not be unheard of for union goons to show up on a man’s doorstep to intimidate the man into submitting to the thugocracy’s will. It is not supposed to happen here.
A couple of weeks ago, Barack Obama told Wall Street that he, personally *he*, was all that stood between them and pitchforks. Well, Obama’s SEIU buddies decided to break out the pitchforks.
500 SEIU goons showed up on the front porch of a house belonging to a Bank of America Executive. The man’s 14 year old son was home alone and, fearing for his life, barricaded himself into a bathroom.
Yeah, you read that right. The man in question, Greg Baer, is one of the senior corporate lawyers for BoA. He's also a Democrat, but like animals, some Democrats are more equal than others.
Here is what is so stark and troubling about this incident: the media was not invited. The SEIU brought along a Huffington Post blogger to shoot some propaganda, but otherwise the media was not invited. Why not? Because this was an act of sheer intimidation. It wasn’t a publicity stunt. Had a journalist, Nina Easton, not lived next door we may never have known this happened.
Friends, this is not supposed to happen in America. More troubling, the former head of the SEIU, Andy Stern, was Barack Obama’s most frequent visitor to the White House last year. Patrick Gaspard, the guy who was in charge of the SEIU before Stern, is now Barack Obama’s political director. Gaspard’s brother is a lobbyist for ACORN.
The SEIU spent last summer beating up conservatives at congressional town hall meetings about health care. Now the SEIU is sending busloads of goons to the front porches of bank executives to intimidate them and their families.
Two years ago, a lot of us on the Right were looking at Senator Obama and saying, "Look at who this man hangs out with, and look at how they operate"—and the response from the Left was outrage that we would try to "play politics" with something so obviously irrelevant. But as this shows, it wasn't irrelevant. Barack Obama is a product of a political system that sees intimidation as a useful tool in its arsenal for getting its way, and he associates closely with people who think intimidation is a perfectly appropriate tactic to try to get their way; why would anyone be surprised by this? I won't say I predicted it, but honestly, I should have.
If it isn't surprising, though, it's still cause for deep concern, as Erickson points out:
When it becomes fair game to attack and intimidate private citizens and their families to advance a public policy, we cross over from an orderly civil democracy to something decidedly third world.
Had these been tea parties instead of SEIU activists, this would be the front page story of the New York Times.
One doesn't usually see this sort of willingness to scrap in Republican politicians. It's a feisty and effective ad, and one which stands out from the usual run of political advertising in that it actually gives some sense of the candidate's personality. (Pictures of candidates with family and dogs and/or doing heartwarming things don't count; that's just boilerplate.)
The odd thing, if I have my facts right, is that this guy is a primary challenger to a Republican incumbent—though a recent convert, Parker Griffith, who was elected in '08 as a freshman Democrat. Interesting to see this sort of approach from someone who doesn't even have his party's nomination yet. It's a good way to go, I think.
This song gets me every time.
Legacy
I don't mind if you've got something nice to say about me;
I enjoy an accolade like the rest.
You could take my picture, hang it in a gallery
Of all the Who's Whos and So-and-Sos
That used to be the best at such-and-such;
It wouldn't matter much.I won't lie, it feels alright to see your name in lights;
We all need an "Atta boy" or "Atta girl."
But in the end I'd like to hang my hat on more besides
The temporary trappings of this worldI want to leave a legacy—
How will they remember me?
Did I choose to love?
Did I point to You enough
To make a mark on things?
I want to leave an offering
A child of mercy and grace
Who blessed your name unapologetically
And leave that kind of legacy.I don't have to look too far or too long a while
To make a lengthly list of all that I enjoy;
It's an accumulating trinket and a treasure pile,
Where moth and rust, thieves and such
Will soon enough destroy.Chorus
Not well traveled, not well read;
Not well-to-do, or well-bred;
Just want to hear instead,
"Well done, good and faithful one."Chorus
Words and music: Nichole Nordeman
© 2002 Ariose Music
From the album Woven & Spun, by Nichole Nordeman
So on Friday, I put up a post which was sort of about homosexuality but not really; my primary interest was to use that argument to consider our popular theology of suffering, which from a biblical point of view is thoroughly deficient. Predictably, though, someone popped up to ignore the actual content of the post and mount a spirited if more than a little muddled defense of homosexual sex, at fair length—which I think served, ironically enough, rather more to reinforce my point than to challenge it. Much of the content of those comments, I’ll address in that thread; but there were a couple attempts at scriptural argument to which I wanted to respond at greater length.
to start with where is the “easy yoke and light burden” in your condemnation of homosexuality
The same place as in my condemnation of adultery, murder, gossip, lying, substance abuse, theft, cheating, idolatry, and every other sin. Jesus is not here saying that he will never ask us to struggle against our sin—after all, elsewhere, he says, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That’s clearly not in view. Rather, he’s saying two things. One, to pull from a pastor down in Florida,
The word “easy” simply means “fit for use” or “fits well.” Consider for a moment—in context, a “yoke” was used to harness one ox to another for working the fields. Jesus, being the master carpenter knew how to build well-fitted yokes that eased the burden on the oxen.
Did a well-fitting yoke mean the oxen would no longer be doing the work of plowing the field? No. Did it mean they would no longer be constrained to go only where the driver of the team told them to go? No. What it meant was that there would be no unnecessary difficulty and no unnecessary pain for them as they plowed, because the guidance of the driver—Jesus, in this metaphor—would be well-fitted to their size and strength as he sought to accomplish his will through them.
Two, to say that Jesus’ burden is light is not to say that if we follow Jesus, we’ll never have to carry anything that’s hard to bear; that’s just not life in this world. It certainly wasn’t for his disciples, most of whom would die painful deaths for their faith. But you see, a yoke holds together two oxen; the key is not the size of the burden, but the one who bears it with us. What makes the burden light for anyone who takes up Jesus’ yoke is that the believer is yoked together with the Spirit of God, and the Spirit provides the strength to bear the burdens we have to bear—and to bear them lightly, for all that they would be heavy to bear on our own. To find Jesus’ yoke well-fitted and his burden light, we have to actually accept it and put it on.
the fruit of the spirit of galatians the essence of the spirit of christ and the 2nd commandment( love your neighbor….) the summation of all new covenant law(gal,romans)
This comment betrays a very poor understanding of Scripture. It may be willfully so, since this commenter is trying to argue for a version of Christianity that has no vertical component to holiness, only a horizontal one (which, of course, would leave everyone free to define the latter as it suits them, without reference to the biblical witness). Here’s what Jesus has to say about that:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.
You see, the first thing before all others is these: Love the Lord your God with absolutely everything that is in you. Commit yourself to him wholeheartedly, without reservation, and with absolutely nothing in your life that's more important to you than him.
Put bluntly, then: if you aren’t willing to give up homosexual sex to follow Jesus, then you’re in violation of the greatest commandment. That’s idolatry, and it’s a sin.
Of course, this is also true of everything else, including many things which aren’t sinful, so in and of itself, it doesn’t prove that homosexual sex is sinful. However, I’ve never met anyone trying to argue from Scripture in favor of homosexual sex who did so disinterestedly, with no vested interest in the argument; everyone I’ve ever seen argue that position had an a priori commitment to demonstrating that the scriptural witness conformed to the position they wanted to take, and they would not accept or even consider the possibility that the Bible might flatly contradict them. As I’ve already said, it’s my observation that their refusal rested on one proposition which they would not allow to be challenged:
God couldn’t possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.
They valued that more than they valued God; they would only accept a God of whom that statement could be true. That’s idolatry.
It seems to me that all the theological arguments in support of the proposition that homosexual sex isn't sinful boil down, ultimately, to one assertion:
God couldn't possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful.
That's really the bottom line right there, I think. All of the irrelevant arguments* about genetics are simply efforts to reinforce the second half of that sentence, to convince people that not acting on homosexual desires really is that hard and that painful. And yes, I do think this is the bottom line both for those who have desires and for those who don't but who support the pro-homosex position—such folks would, on my observation, affirm this for themselves, and so they're being logically and morally consistent in affirming that this must be true for others as well. (In that respect, I must admit they have a certain moral superiority to many who uphold the scriptural prohibition of homosexual activity, who are simply holding others to a moral standard which they would never dream of applying to themselves. The divorce rate among self-identified evangelicals bears eloquent witness to that.) In our suffering-averse, death-avoiding culture, I suspect you would find overwhelming agreement with this proposition: "God couldn't possibly want me to do something that hard and that painful."
To which I can only say: You have no idea. Our difficulty squaring a loving God with one who allows us to suffer—indeed, who actively sends us trials and uses suffering and struggle (and, yes, failure) for our growth—is ours, not the Bible's. Consider how God tried Abraham, Ezekiel, Hosea, Job; consider how he answered the disobedience of Jonah; consider how he rewarded the faithful witness of Paul. Consider the testimony of Hebrews 11, which offers this summation of the life of faith:
These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.
And ultimately, consider Christ, and the suffering God willingly endured for us. We have a hard time when James says, "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds," but to him, it makes perfect sense: "for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." His priorities are not our priorities, and indeed, God's priorities are not our priorities; we're focused on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain—not necessarily in a crude, hedonistic sense, but even if the pleasures we value are intellectual and rarified, it doesn't change the basic equation—while God is on about something else entirely in our lives.
For the sake of argument, grant everything the advocates of same-sex marriage and ordination of those who practice homosexual sex and the full societal normalization of homosexual practices claim and declare and argue about homosexual desire—grant it all, every last contention and conclusion, and set it against the biblical texts. Does it justify setting aside the historic interpretation of Scripture that homosexual practices are sinful? No, it doesn't, because God doesn't let us off that easily.
Indeed, as much as our culture tends to fixate on sex in various ways, and as powerful as our sexual desires and drives are, they aren't our deepest or most fundamental desires, and they don't fuel our strongest or most elemental temptations. When Paul references homosexual practice in Romans 1, it's in the course of making a greater point about a deeper, more fundamental and more powerful temptation: the temptation to idolatry. Unfortunately, the 21st-century American church largely hasn't followed him there, and thus hasn't even confronted the lesson it truly needs to learn from that, which isn't about sex at all: it is, rather, that yes, God could and does want me to do something that hard and that painful. He wants me to take everything, right down to the thing I most desperately do not want to give up—whatever that may be—and lay it at his feet in total self-surrender.
And here's the kicker: he wants me to do it joyfully, and in fact he gives me every reason to do it joyfully; he wants me to lay it all down, as hard and as painful as it will be, because he has something far better to give me in return. In exchange for my life, he gives me his, which is a life that can face trials and sufferings and still sing hymns of praise from a jail cell at midnight. It's a life that can see pain, and even struggles with temptation, not as something to be avoided or something of which we should only be expected to take so much, but rather as an opportunity to know the grace of Christ and share in his ministry.
*I say these arguments are irrelevant because they commit, ironically enough, the genetic fallacy. Desires are neither stronger nor more justifiable, nor for that matter more expressive of our sense of our own identity, for being genetic rather than the product of our experience and the choices we have made. Whatever conclusions one may draw about a neurological and neurochemical component to homosexual desires, and whatever answer one may offer to the chicken-and-egg question of whether that component is cause or effect of those desires (or, for that matter, stands in some other relation altogether to them), the whole matter is logically irrelevant to the question of what any given individual ought to do with those desires. Whatever their source, the desires exist, and they are what they are, and they must be considered on that basis. The rest is all so much smoke.
Two weeks ago today, I cast my GOP primary vote here in Indiana's 3rd Congressional District for Bob Thomas, who I thought had a real chance to beat the incumbent, Rep. Mark Souder. Ever since moving here, I've been hearing Rep. Souder denounced—by conservatives, mind you—as the worst sort of Republican; the only reason he won re-election last time around is that people held their noses and marked his name to beat his pro-card-check Democratic opponent. If Republican voters around here had felt they had the luxury of throwing away a Republican vote in the House, they would have sent him home. Running up to the primary, there was an anti-Souder direct mail campaign going, and anti-Souder TV ads . . . unfortunately, there were also too many challengers, and he took the primary with a plurality. I thought Thomas had a chance to win because he had the money to advertise, but the best he could do was a third of the vote, and that wasn't good enough; Rep. Souder won.
IN-3 looks pretty stupid for that now.
Eight-term Rep. Mark Souder will announce his resignation Tuesday after it came to light that he was conducting an affair with a female aide who worked in his district office, Fox News has learned.
Multiple senior House sources indicated that the extent of the affair with the 45-year-old staffer would have landed Souder before the House Ethics Committee.
You know, if all the conservative challengers had been willing to get together, unite behind one of their number, and focus on the big picture rather than trying to grab the brass ring for themselves, we wouldn't be in this mess. If conservatives can't even put principle ahead of personal gain at this level, how in the name of all that is right and good are we ever going to reform this blasted party?
Man, I hope Chuck DeVore is paying attention . . .
In an excellent short essay in the latest issue of The City, Baylor's Francis J. Beckwith responds to a Washington Post column by one T. R. Reid claiming that ObamaPelosiCare would reduce the number of abortions. His evidence? There are more abortions per thousand women in the U.S. than in countries like Denmark, Japan, Germany, and the UK. Of course, the birth rate's also quite a bit higher in the U.S. than in those countries, so his choice of statistic is more than a little disingenuous. But then, as Dr. Beckwith points out, there's also a much deeper and more profound problem with Reid's argument:
The prolife position is not merely about "reducing the number of abortions," though that is certainly a consequence that all prolifers should welcome. Rather, the prolife position is the moral and political belief that all members of the human community are intrinsically valuable and thus are entitled to the protection of the laws. "Reducing the number of abortions" may happen in a regime in which this belief is denied, and that is the regime that the liberal supporters of universal health coverage want to preserve and want prolifers to help subsidize. It is a regime in which the continued existence of the unborn is always at the absolute discretion of the postnatal. Reducing the number of these discretionary acts by trying to pacify and accommodate the needs of those who want to procure abortions—physicians, mothers, and fathers—only reinforces the idea that the unborn are objects whose value depends exclusively on our wanting them.
A culture that has fewer abortions because its citizens have, in the words of John Lennon, "nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too," is a sad, dying, empty culture. Mr. Reid seems to think being prolife is just about instituting policies that result in fewer abortions. But it's not. It's about loving children, life, and the importance of passing on one's heritage to one's legacy.
As Dr. Beckwith points out, that cultural emptiness—we might say, the absence of a strong pro-life impulse—has profound negative consequences:
What is going on in these nations is a shared understanding among its citizenry about the nature of its culture and its progeny: our civilization's future and the generations required to people it are not worth perpetuating. It is practical nihilism, for each nation believes that its traditions, customs, and what remains of its faith are not worthy of being preserved, developed, and shared outside of the populace that currently occupies its borders. In practical terms, this means, for one thing, that the present generation of Europeans older than 55 will not have enough future workers to sustain their own health care needs when they are elderly.
So, as we have seen in the Netherlands, involuntary, non-voluntary, and voluntary euthanasia will certainly become the great cost containers (or as they say more candidly in Alaska, "death panels").
That's about it. At its heart, the pro-abortion position is a bet on power; the abortion regime is a classic example of the tyranny of the majority, the powerful abusing the powerless because they can and it suits them. Even the weakest and most powerless women are still infinitely powerful by comparison to their unborn children; and of course, many children are aborted not because women desire the abortion but because they are coerced into it by someone else, usually by the father of the child. Though there are exceptions, almost all abortions are essentially matters of convenience for somebody, driven by the unwillingness to sacrifice pleasures in the present for the sake of the future, and the refusal to allow the self to diminish so that someone else may grow.
This is malignant individualism, a cancer of the ego; and it is not only destructive of human life insofar as it drives the abortion mills, it is also destructive of human flourishing on a broader scale, because it is absolutely inimical to any sort of healthy culture. True growth depends on the willingness to sacrifice, or at least invest, the present for the sake of the future; true culture, healthy culture, arises out of love of life and openness to life, even when that love and that openness carry with them a real cost. To choose abortion is to choose the opposite: rather than choosing life at the cost of one's convenience, comfort and pleasures, it is to choose death for the sake of protecting one's pleasures, convenience and comfort. That may be pleasing in the short term, but in the long term, no good can come of it.
In our politically and culturally polarized society, those who care about issues—whether political or theological—tend to end up divided into parties, labeled accordingly, associated with the like-minded, and expected not to deviate. The assumptions of our “side” exist not to be challenged; the questions and challenges of the other “side” (or “sides”) exist to be defeated by whatever means necessary. This is unfortunate, because none of us is perfect; even if we do have the big things right (something which we can never simply assume), we’re bound to have lots of the details wrong, by virtue both of the fact that we still sin and of the fact that we’re limited in our understanding. To catch our errors, we do well to accept the help of those who are most motivated to point them out to us: namely, those people who think we’re wrong about everything.
In the current issue of Touchstone, Christopher Killheffer writes about this with respect to the Christian response to atheism. As he says, when Christians respond to atheists with hostility and the refusal to listen,
aside from what we’re losing in the public debate, we are also missing an opportunity to grow in our own faith, and perhaps even to have our faith purified. If we listen to atheist messages with curiosity rather than defensiveness, we will find that many of them are not simply poking us in the eye; their content is often interesting and may possibly even be useful in helping us better understand what we do and do not believe.
He illustrates his point well from C. S. Lewis and Benedict XVI, showing their willingness to listen seriously to the challenge of atheism, and thus to use it as an opportunity to sharpen and strengthen and purify their faith. As he says, we need that; and if we don’t let those who disagree with us ask us the hard questions, who will?
Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.
—Romans 12:2a (The Message)
Whatever the culture is, if we’re following Christ, we’re going to be walking counter to it to some degree. That’s just how it is, because cultures are made up of people, and people are sinful, and thus every culture is sinful—even the best of them. Sometimes, if you’re in the right place at the right time, you can influence your culture and make that less so, as William Wilberforce and the rest of the Clapham Sect did; but no one has yet succeeded in turning even one earthly society into a miniature of the Kingdom of God, and no one will until Jesus comes again. Following Jesus is always going to put you at odds with the world in any number of ways, big and small.
As such, the depressing thing about so much of the church is that we’re so comfortable, and so predictable. We can always tell ourselves that we’re countercultural, that we’re standing up for truth, because we’re happy to stand up for the truths that matter to our particular in-group in the face of opposition from those whom we do not fear and whose good opinion we do not value; but that doesn’t answer the bill at all. Even the pagans do that. When it comes to making our own little corner of the world uncomfortable, to challenging the particular subculture (or subcultures) in which we move, we tend to be missing in action. Liberals do not question the validity of same-sex marriage, nor do conservatives try to move the American flag out of the sanctuary; it just isn’t done. Why, if you tried that, the next person mad at you might be somebody you actually care about—and while that might be just what that person needs, we don’t want to face it.
Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Are we that unpredictable, or that uncontrollable? Are we that independent of the conventional assumptions and conclusions of our culture, or our family, or our particular set of close friends? Not really, no; most of us tend to conform pretty closely to the expectations of those whose approval we desire most. That is not Christlike living, however moral we might be by our own preferred standards; that is no sign of the life of the Holy Spirit in us.
Rather, the Spirit of God is at work in the people of God to break that conformity, to renew and transform and grow us into people who can no longer be confined by it. Being a Christian, living out the life of Christ, is not a matter of simply following a bunch of “thou shalt”s and “thou shalt not”s, as if outward conformity to some particular standard was sufficient; but neither is it about some free-form idea of “love” and “grace” that makes concrete standards of behavior irrelevant. Rather, it’s about something far greater than either: it’s about learning to walk according to the Spirit, opening ourselves up to be changed by the Spirit, from the deepest wellsprings of our behavior on out, so that our lives will be set free from the world’s mold, to be conformed instead to the character and the holiness of God.
If we’re truly living Spirit-filled lives, we’re going to make people uncomfortable—and in particular, we’re going to tick off people who, if it were up to us, we would try very, very hard not to tick off. We’re going to be countercultural, not in some cheap fashion, but in a way that truly costs us; we’re going to be reminded that we worship a Lord who said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” We’re going to realize that Jesus could just as well have said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own teachers and colleagues and close friends and best allies, yes, and even the community whose approval he most desires, he cannot be my disciple.”
That’s because Jesus doesn’t call us and the Holy Spirit doesn’t empower us to be counter someone else’s culture, but to be countercultural in our own, in the one in which we live and work and play. God isn’t satisfied for us to tear down the idols we don’t worship, he wants us to reject the ones we do, and the ones we’re tempted to worship, the ones before which our theological and ideological soulmates bow. He raises up conservatives to be labeled unpatriotic, and liberals to be questioned as anti-gay, for being unwilling to let sacred cows lie. He calls us to ask the questions we least want asked, and to be willing to accept—and to give—the answers we don’t want to hear. He commands us to speak the truth, in love, yes, but so clearly and unflinchingly that we risk being rejected by our own people. After all, we’ve been given the Spirit of Christ, and isn’t that what Jesus did?
The more I see of NJ Gov. Chris Christie, the better I like him:
That's just spot-on.
I posted a comment on this on a friend's Facebook page and thought I'd note this here as well. It is honestly bewildering to me the way the Left refuses to recognize that the anti-Western wing of Islam, particularly its jihadists, is adamantly opposed to all that liberals profess to believe and hold dear. I don't want to jump to the negative conclusion and assume that they're all either moral cowards or secretly enamored of Islam's totalitarian impulses, so I keep looking for a more charitable interpretation . . . but so far, I have failed to find one.
Update: Jonathan Gurwitz of the San Antonio Express-News has an excellent column up about this, pointing out an important truth:
About the same time Holder was refusing to utter the threat that cannot be named in the Obama administration, security officials in Indonesia—the world's largest Muslim nation and third-largest democracy—foiled a plot to assassinate the president and top officials, massacre foreigners in a Mumbai-style attack and create a state governed by Shariah, or Islamic law.
That last goal provides a clue as to who was behind this violent conspiracy, though Attorney General Holder may not be able to recognize it. But it is important to do so because in spite of 9-11, Times Square and every event in between, Americans are not the primary victims of Islamic extremism. Muslims are.
Over the past decade, radical Islamists have carried out successful terrorist attacks in Amman, Baghdad, Casablanca, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Riyadh and Sharm el-Sheikh, to name a few Muslim targets. Muslim civilians and leaders, such as Benazir Bhutto, are their principal casualties. In the countries and forbidden zones where they have been able to establish Shariah rule, Muslim women are treated like chattel, Muslim gays are summarily executed and Muslim girls are doomed to illiteracy and honor killings.
America may be radical Islam's fount of all evil. But more often than not, citizens of Muslim nations are their first prey.
Holder and the president he serves do no favor to the overwhelming majority of moderate Muslims when they refuse to identify our common enemy. You can't delegitimize what you won't even acknowledge exists.
Tyler Jones, a church planter with Acts 29 down in Raleigh, has an interesting post up today on the Resurgence website called “The Poison of Quaint Moralism”; it’s addressed to his Southern context but has validity far beyond it. He writes,
The South has been poisoned, and the poison is “quaint moralism.” This poison has systematically infected tens of millions in the South and we are now in the midst of a moralistic pandemic. . . . Our churches are full of good-looking, upright, moral people. The tragic irony is that our goodness is our poison. A great many Southerners claim Christianity as their religion, mimicking righteousness on the surface while their hearts remain unchanged by the gospel of Jesus. I understand the gravity of that statement and do not make it hastily. Here in the South, the gospel has either been ignored or foolishly assumed. We have satiated our desire for God through quaint morality, allowing people to ignore their need for Jesus.
There is a common and deadly misconception that the church is supposed to produce people who live “good Christian lives.” This misconception spreads easily because it bears a strong superficial resemblance to the fruit of true holiness; but it just isn’t so. After all, it’s perfectly possible for most of us to be nice, moral people—good enough on the outside to make most folks happy, at any rate—in our own strength; and in this country with its Christian heritage, the world is perfectly happy to let you live a nice, moral life, as long as you are properly “tolerant”—which is to say, that you don’t do anything that makes anybody else uncomfortable. It’s a way of living that makes it easy for us to look at ourselves and think we’re doing just fine, and not realize how much we need God—while on the inside, our hearts remain closed to him. As C. S. Lewis said,
We must not suppose that if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world.
Moralistic religion is bloodless and powerless; it can affect behavior, but cannot touch the roots of sin in the heart. It directs our attention to ourselves and our own efforts, and thus away from God; it turns us away from grace and toward legalism, and thus waters the seeds of self-righteousness, arrogance and spiritual pride in our souls. The Devil is perfectly happy to make us moral, if only we will be moral to please ourselves (or other people) rather than God; what else, after all, was Jesus’ complaint against the Pharisees? Thus Michael Horton opens his book Christless Christianity with this story:
What would things look like if Satan really took control of a city? Over a half century ago, Presbyterian minister Donald Grey Barnhouse offered his own scenario in his weekly sermon that was also broadcast nationwide on CBS radio. Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia, all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say, “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full every Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.
If Christ is preached, everything else follows. If Christ is not preached, nothing else matters.
There has been a lot written trying to project the outcome of this fall's elections—a task which, as the inestimable Jay Cost has noted, is a lot harder than some people seem to think; but even Cost, who has said his answer to that is "I really don't know," opens his latest post by quoting Bob Dylan's "Thunder on the Mountain." Following a list of the troubles career politicians have been having this year, he writes,
This is the thunder on the mountain, the early warning that something bad is about to blow through the District of Columbia. I don't think there's anything anybody there can do about it. The people have a limited role in this government—but where the people do possess power, they are like a force of nature. They cannot be stopped.
His colleague at RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende, mapped out the November landscape as it looks from here and concluded,
I think those who suggest that the House is barely in play, or that we are a long way from a 1994-style scenario are missing the mark. A 1994-style scenario is probably the most likely outcome at this point. Moreover, it is well within the realm of possibility—not merely a far-fetched scenario—that Democratic losses could climb into the 80 or 90-seat range. The Democrats are sailing into a perfect storm of factors influencing a midterm election, and if the situation declines for them in the ensuing months, I wouldn't be shocked to see Democratic losses eclipse 100 seats.
Though Cost is right about the difficulty of prediction in this environment, because we really don't have anything like good comparables on which to base a meaningful prediction, Trende lays out a compelling argument for his position. Of particular interest is this, from the end of his piece:
The problem for the Democrats is that these voters are packed into a relatively few states and Congressional districts nationwide, diluting their vote share. This is why the median Congressional district is an R+2 district. Thus, the President could have a relatively healthy overall approval rating, but still be fairly unpopular in swing states and districts. The increased enthusiasm that Obama generated among minorities, the young and the liberal is useful, but only if it is realized in conjunction with Democratic approval in a few other categories.
President Obama's policy choices to date are wreaking havoc on the brand that Democrats cultivated carefully over the past twenty years. Bill Clinton worked long and hard to make it so that voters could say "fiscal conservative" and "Democrat" in the same sentence, but voters are finding it difficult to say that again.
If brand damage is truly seeping over into Congressional races—and the polling suggests it is—then the Democrats are in very, very deep trouble this election. There is a very real risk that they could be left with nothing more than Obama's base among young, liberal, and minority voters, which is packed into relatively few Congressional districts. It would be the Dukakis map transformed onto the Congressional level, minus the support in Appalachia. That would surely result in the Democratic caucus suffering huge losses, and in turn produce historic gains for the GOP this November.
Now, anyone who's read much of anything I've written on politics has probably figured out that I'm a pretty conservative sort when it comes to politics; so you might think I'd be rubbing my hands with glee at this prospect. You'd be wrong. In fact, I have significant misgivings about it. To understand why, go back to Cost; after predicting a popular revolt at the voting booth this fall, he says,
That's bad news for the establishment this year. They're going to wake up on the morning of November 3rd and be reminded of who is actually in charge of this country.
Democrats will be hit much, much harder than Republicans. Even so, it would be a huge mistake to interpret the coming rebuke through a strictly ideological or partisan lens. Yet predictably, that's what many will do. Republicans will see this as a historic rejection of Barack Obama's liberalism, just as they saw the 1994 revolution as a censure of Bill Clinton, and just as Democrats saw 2006 and 2008 as admonishments of George W. Bush's foreign policy. These interpretations are only half right. When the people are angry at the way the government is being managed, and they are casting about for change, their only option is the minority party. The partisans of the minority are quick to interpret this as their holy invitation to the promised land, but that's not what it really is about. They were only given the promotion because the people had no other choice.
The entire political class needs to understand that the coming events transcend ideology and partisanship. The electoral wave of 2010 will have been preceded by the waves of 2006 and 2008. That will make three electoral waves in a row, affecting both parties and conservative and liberal politicians alike. The American people are sending the establishment a message: we're angry at the way you are running our government; fix it or you'll be next to go.
That's right on, and I don't think the GOP establishment (or at least most of them) get this. I don't think they get it because I don't think they want to. Let's be blunt here: the Republican Party absolutely deserved the electoral repudiation it got in 2006 and 2008, and maybe even worse than it got. It deserved it because it had abandoned its principles, its philosophy, its ethics, and its commitments, in favor of enjoying power and the fruits that attend thereunto; the hard slap in the face from the voters was well-earned, and should have come as a real wakeup call. I'm not at all convinced it has. As I wrote a few months ago,
I had hoped that the GOP would really internalize the lessons of its defeats in 2006 and 2008, enough to be humbled and chastened, before regaining power, and I really don't see that as having happened; rather, the misplays, miscues, and mismanagement by the White House that prompted Mortimer Zuckerman to declare that the President "has done everything wrong" have handed them a shot at a political recovery that they have by no means earned. This is very worrisome to me. . . . If they do wind up back in the majority, they're likely to wind up right back to the behaviors that got them wiped out in the first place. I believe, to be blunt, that that's exactly what the Beltway GOP is hoping for.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen anything to change my mind on that. If 2010 does turn out to be another "wave" election, it will sweep back into (some) power a GOP establishment that's likely to go right back to carrying on the way they were doing before the voters turned them out. What we need here is not change between the parties, but change within the parties; we'll likely continue to see power bouncing back and forth between them until we get that, or until something else happens and the current system breaks down.
This in a nutshell is the biggest single reason I support Gov. Palin: she isn't a part of the machine, and she has a solid history of opposing business as usual in our political system, in her own party no less than in the other one. I applaud her for working to build up and support candidates who similarly are not creatures of or beholden to the political machine, and I devoutly hope she's correctly picking people who have the character, gumption and understanding to continue to stand against that machine and against business as usual. We need her; we need more people like her in politics—on the liberal side of the aisle no less than on the conservative. Indeed, it may well be that there is no greater need in American politics right now than a Democratic Party equivalent to Sarah Palin. Without more folks like that, the storm that's coming may ultimately sweep away more than just several dozen political careers that will never be missed.
(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)
