Skeptical conversations, part V: The person and work of Jesus

Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-IV here.

A: So you believe Jesus was literally God, or part of God, or however you want to put it.

R: Yes, Jesus is God; specifically, the person of the Son. At the same time, he is a normal human male, with everything that means, except that his human nature was uncorrupted, unfallen. He is at one and the same time fully God and fully man.

A: Like the Red Queen, I, too, can believe six impossible things before breakfast; or at any rate, I’ll be to that point soon. It seems to me you have two problems: first, if Jesus was one of the persons of God, and he was down on earth in a human body, what does that do to the unity of God? After all, as you’ve noted, to be human is to be limited, and to be God is to be unlimited. Which raises the second question: how is it remotely possible that Jesus could have been both divine and human?

R: The answer to your first question is that just because the Son became a human being does not mean that he was in any way separated from the Father and the Spirit; they were still united with him, and the relationships between the three were just as close as they had ever been. This is because he was fully God and did not become any less so in becoming human.

A: Which still leaves the second question: how could he truly have been both?

R: Again, this isn’t something that can be explained propositionally; but again, I think it can be illustrated analogically. For one thing, remember light, which has two seemingly incompatible natures, a wave-nature and a particle-nature—and yet from all we can tell, it is both at once. For another (since there’s a piano over there against the wall) there’s the illustration Jeremy Begbie, the Cambridge theologian and pianist, uses.

A: Theologian and pianist? That’s an odd combination.

R: Yeah, he’s on the faculty in theology—or was last I heard, anyway—and he’s also a Fellow of the Royal College of Music, I believe. Given that combination of interests, it makes sense that he likes to use music to help explain Christology (that’s the term for the doctrine of Christ): when I play a note on the piano, where is the note?

A: Where is the note? Wherever the sound waves are, I suppose; everywhere in the room, though not precisely all at once.

R: Okay, now let me play two notes. Where are they?

A: The same as before—everywhere in the room.

R: But you’ll notice, they occupy the same volume of space; neither one excludes the other, and in fact, when you play them together, they become something more than just two notes. They still are two distinct notes, but they are also a unity. It’s the same way with Jesus; he is both God and man, and his two natures were two distinct notes, but also a unity: they are not blended together like a sauce, nor are they merely stuck together like a sandwich. As the Belgic Confession puts it, “the person of the Son has been inseparably united and joined together with human nature, in such a way that there are not two Sons of God, nor two persons, but two natures united in a single person, with each nature retaining its own distinct properties.”

A: I don’t understand how that can be. How can you have someone who is both infinite and finite, both omniscient and limited in knowledge, both omnipresent and localized, both omnipotent and limited in strength? It doesn’t make sense.

R: I don’t have a good answer. Some thinkers draw from a passage in Philippians 2 where Paul says that Jesus emptied himself, became a man, and took the form of a servant, and they argue that the Son gave up various of his divine attributes when he became human; since the Greek word for “emptying” is kenosis, this is called the kenosis theory. One problem with that approach is that if Jesus did in fact give up some of his divine attributes, he would no longer be fully God; so others have argued that while on earth, he gave up the right to use his powers freely, retaining all his attributes but submitting himself in their use to the will of the Father. To take omniscience as an example, when it was the Father’s will, he drew on it—in prophesying, for example, or in judging the hearts of people who spoke to him—but when it was not, he limited himself to normal human capabilities.

The idea that Jesus reconciled his divinity and his humanity by limiting his exercise of his divine powers makes some sense to me, but there’s a problem with it. It isn’t merely that Jesus was both divine and human, he still is; those two natures were united in him, and he didn’t leave his humanity behind when he left the earth.

A: I noticed that you were saying “is,” not “was”; I was going to ask you if you believe that Jesus is still human.

R: Yes. The Belgic Confession says that his two natures are so united that they were not even separated by his death or his ascension. The Son of God still shares our humanity. Given that, it seems to me problematic to reconcile Jesus’ two natures by saying, if you will, that he made it work on earth by turning down the volume on the God knob—that’s only a temporary solution to the problem. It may well be a true answer, but it isn’t a sufficient answer. So in the end, I have to say that I don’t understand how Jesus Christ could be both fully God with all his attributes and fully human with all our limitations; but I believe that he was.

A: Why does it matter?

R: It matters for a lot of reasons. For one thing, you might remember a song called “One of Us” that was a top hit around 1995 for Joan Osborne; the chorus asked this question: “What if God was one of us?/Just a slob like one of us?/Just a stranger on the bus/Trying to make His way home?” That question has an answer: God was one of us; the Son of God came down and took on everything that is involved in being human. He experienced our pains and our discomforts, our joys and our pleasures, our temptations and our struggles, our ups and our downs. He lived a fully human life, just like any of us, and that includes the full range of temptations; and the fact that he never gave in to any of them, and could not have, only means that he was tempted long past the point where we crumble and give in, making his struggles all the more agonizing.

That’s why Hebrews, which talks about Jesus as our high priest, says this: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” Whatever we’re going through, he understands, because he’s been there himself.

A: Why the term “high priest”?

R: The high priest was the one who brought the petitions of the people to God, and he was the one responsible for the sacrifices; he was the only one allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, which he did once a year, on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Jesus has now taken over these functions. He is our mediator, the one who brings our prayers to the Father and intervenes on our behalf; and he has completed and finished the sacrifices through his sacrifice of his own life. Once for all, he made atonement for all our sins when he died on the cross.

A: I have a problem with that. There was a piece in the paper not too long ago about a new book that raises some important questions about the doctrine of the atonement. If God is appeased by cruelty, if he would torture his son to appease his anger at sin—well, then he’s a child abuser, to be blunt, and you have a religion that sanctions violence and abuse.

R: That’s a common conclusion among feminist theologians; Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker, the two who wrote that book, have been making that argument for a decade now, and they aren’t the only ones. I think, though, that their criticism comes because their theology lacks a proper understanding of the Trinity, and so they are misunderstanding the doctrine of the atonement.

Let me take a step back here and lay this doctrine out, and then come back to this point. First, the problem: evil is real and must be defeated; human sin is real and must be dealt with. Partly, this problem is legal in character, that there must be a penalty paid for our sin, and partly it is relational, that our sin has alienated us from God. The penalty due is death; blood must be shed to pay the price and to satisfy the wrath of God against sin. No lesser price is enough.

God chose to deal with evil by paying that price himself. The Father sent the Son to earth to live among us, and then to die in our place. Jesus was sentenced to death for having broken the law of God, though he was not guilty of any sin at all, and he went willingly to his execution. Because he was fully human, he went to the cross in solidarity with us, for us; because he was fully God, his self-sacrifice was of infinite value. Because he was both, he was the only one who could ever pay the necessary price for us. He took all the sin in the world on his back, and he paid the price for all of it; he took our place under the curse of the law, and took away the power of sin to condemn us. He bore our sentence of death and left us free, and then after three days he broke the power of death by rising from the dead, sealing his victory over Satan.

A: You can see why the objection to this arises.

R: Yes, but as I said, the objection arises because of an insufficiently trinitarian understanding. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross comes out of the relationships among the persons of the Trinity, and the whole Trinity is involved. As the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann has noted, this is not one member of the Trinity causing the suffering of another, as though the Father were standing aloof, using the Son as a whipping-boy; this is God intervening on our behalf, suffering for us, giving himself to pay the price for us. The Father sent the Son to the cross, but the Son went willingly; and remember, all three persons of the Trinity are interconnected, interwoven. The pain of the Son on the cross was shared by the Father and the Spirit.

A: How does this fit with the impassibility of God that you were talking about earlier?

R: You aren’t the only one to ask that question; the classical understanding of impassibility excludes the idea that God can suffer. Now, if that is the case, that brings you to the position that Christ experienced suffering and death only as man, not as God, and that is in fact what many if not all of those who hold to the classical position believe. There’s nothing necessarily problematic in saying that Jesus experienced some things as man and not as God, or vice versa; but it seems to me that to say that he suffered and died only as a man is fatal to the doctrine of the atonement, for it means that in the end, it was only a man who died—and that is not sufficient to save anyone. It also seems to me that the argument that God’s impassibility excludes the possibility of his suffering assumes that God is bound by our time stream in the same way we are; the argument really doesn’t follow otherwise, I think. If God is outside our time stream, then to say that he suffers is not necessarily to say that his suffering changes or lessens him, and there is no inevitable conflict.

A: But as I understand you, he came into our time stream as the man Jesus.

R: True. That is the mystery of the Incarnation, that the Second Person of the Triune God became human; and as a human being he wept and rejoiced, praised God and grew angry at those who fought him. He wrote himself into the story, if you will. The easy way to handle that is to say that all the messy human stuff, that was just Jesus’ human nature, and that is what those who deny that God suffered do; but in anything having to do with God, I am suspicious of answers I can fully understand, at least if they seem to leave problems behind. I am suspicious of collapsing the divine mystery into human rationality, because God is not fully comprehensible and any understanding of God which makes him so can only lessen him.

A: I can see that, I suppose. You certainly have enough mysteries lying about already.

R: True; but it seems to me, as I said, that any God big enough to truly be God is going to be too big to be humanly comprehensible, like a diamond with an infinite number of facets; we can’t possibly fit them all together out of our own wisdom and understanding. As such, I think it’s almost axiomatic that any theology which lacks mystery has sacrificed truth to comprehension at some point.

A: Though of course any theology anyone produces is going to be imperfect regardless.

R: Also true; that’s why humility is a virtue in theology no less than anywhere else. In any case, do you see the flaw in the feminist critique of the doctrine of the atonement?

A: I do. But I think it’s an understandable one.

R: I’ll grant that. Even leaving out the legitimate theological arguments, there is a lot of bad theology in the church, and I don’t doubt that some use the death of Christ on the cross in just the way that Brock and Parker see. But that doesn’t require changing our theology, only correcting those who abuse it.

At any rate, there are two other things to be said about the atonement. One is to define its results, which need to be described in several ways. First, Christ justified those who believe in him; to justify means to make righteous, to make right with God. In our own strength, we can’t stand before God’s just judgment, we can’t measure up to his standards, and so we stand condemned; but in taking the penalty for our sin on himself, Jesus gave us a new standing before God, and we have been declared righteous. Second, by his death Christ established a new covenant between us and God.

A: Covenant? I’m not familiar with the term.

R: A covenant is a solemn agreement—sometimes a negotiated agreement, sometimes unilaterally imposed on one party by the other—binding two parties together in a permanent defined relationship; each side makes specific promises and incurs specific obligations. Biblically speaking, for instance, marriage is a covenant, not merely a contract. Covenants are analogous to a contracts, but rather more serious and binding, and they tend to come with dire consequences attached for those who break them.

In any case, God has made several covenants with humanity throughout history, and in every case, he has been the one who has established the terms. Since the fall of Adam, each new covenant has built on the last, and each has been a covenant of grace—even the covenant established at Sinai, in which he gave Israel the Law. With Jesus’ death, he established a new and final covenant between God and his people, one which brought us into a new relationship with him.

A: A new relationship, legally speaking.

R: Yes, and more. Third, Christ liberated those who believe in him. He defeated sin, death and the Devil on the cross, taking away their power over us and breaking our slavery to sin; in paying the price for us, he redeemed us from slavery. Jesus gave us the freedom to choose to do the right and follow him, and thus to live as we were meant to live. Sin no longer rules us; rather, Jesus is Lord. Fourth, Christ did not merely free us from the power of death, he brought new life to those who believe in him; we are born again, spiritually, we have been adopted as children of the Father, and we have a new life with new power, which is the power of the Spirit of God living in us. We have been regenerated, made new people—not new and different, however. Rather, we have been reborn as the people we were created to be, and are thus more ourselves than ever before, though that process won’t be completed in this life.

One thing that I think you can see clearly from those four definitions is that they are all, in one way or another, relational language: through his death and resurrection, Christ brought about a new relationship between God and his people. This really speaks, I think, to the contemporary concern (at least among Generation X) with alienation; because it’s true, our sin alienates us from God, who is the source of life, and from our true selves, the people he created us to be—and, for that matter, from each other, as our sinfulness warps and breaks our relationships with each other. Jesus restored our relationship with God, he brought healing to our self-alienation, and in setting us free from sin he brings healing to our relationships with those around us.

Song of the Week

One of my very favorite songwriters is the Scottish folksinger Dougie MacLean; this isn't his best-known song by any means (that would be "Caledonia"), but I think it's the one I like best. This particular version benefits from the wonderful Kathy Mattea on backup vocals—they're friends, and it was recorded during a joint studio session. (I'd wanted to post another video from the same session as well, of Mattea singing lead on Dougie's song "Ready for the Storm," but embedding is disabled on that one.)

Turning Away

In darkness we do what we can;
In daylight we're oblivion.
Our hears so raw and clear
Are turning away, turning away from here.

On the water we have walked
Like the fearless child;
What was fastened we've unlocked,
Revealing wondrous wild.
And in search of confirmation,
We have jumped into the fire
And scrambled with our burning feet
Through uncontrolled desire.

Chorus

There's a well upon the hill
From our ancient past,
Where an age is standing still,
Holding strong and fast.
And there's those that try to tame it,
And to carve it into stone—
Ah, but words cannot extinguish it,
However hard they're thrown.

Chorus

On Loch Etive they have worked
With their highland dreams;
By Kilcrennan they have nourished
In the mountain streams.
And in searching for acceptance
They had given it away;
Only the children of their children
Know the price they had to pay.

Chorus

Words and music: Dougie MacLean
© 1991 Dunkeld Records
From the album Indigenous, by Dougie MacLean

Dawkins, analyzed

I've written on Dr. Richard Dawkins and the rest of the "new atheists" once or twice (or maybe three times, or even four), so I was interested to see Dr. John Stackhouse reflect on a recent appearance Dr. Dawkins gave at the University of British Columbia (UBC, pronounced "you-bys-sey"). His comments are in three parts, evaluating Dr. Dawkins as rhetor, ethicist, and mirror (of the style and flaws of a certain type of Christian apologist and preacher); he has some interesting things to say, especially regarding Dr. Dawkins' encounter with West Coast vegetarianism.

The importance of beauty in Christian ministry

Frederica Mathewes-Green has a blog post up on that subject titled "A Golden Bell and a Pomegranate: Beauty and Apologetics," which I think deserves careful reading and reflection. A lot of it is on the specific importance of beauty in worship; she has a distinct Orthodox slant to this, which is only to be expected, but I think her basic point is right.

In worship, it’s about God, and all signs must point in His direction. An atmosphere of beauty teaches wordlessly about the nature of God. It teaches that He is not just a concept to be endlessly discussed; that at some point our capacity to grasp him intellectually fails, and we fall before him in worship. Beyond all we know and cannot know about God, he reigns in beauty. Beauty opens our hearts, and stirs us to hunger for more, to hunger for the piercing sweetness of the presence of God.

As she notes, however, this applies beyond just Christians to the ability of non-Christian visitors to perceive the reality of our worship, and thus to be drawn by it; as such, she argues (rightly, I think) that beauty is actually important in evangelism as well:

What does it take to be a missionary? You need to know your stuff, and you need to have a tender heart toward the people you are trying to reach. But there is one more thing that Orthodox Christianity would contribute to the ministry of evangelism: beauty.

Again, I don't think this is purely an Orthodox contribution; I'll grant, though, that they've continued to make beauty, according to their particular approach, a priority where too much of the Western church no longer does. As such, I do think those of us in Protestant churches, especially, could stand to learn from Orthodoxy in this respect. After all, the poet had a point when he wrote,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

—John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

If we don't show forth the beauty of God, we aren't being faithful to his truth.

Church as a missional community

One of the things that holds the church back in this culture, I believe, is that we think of it as a place. We have the idea that we go to church, we have church, and then we leave church and go back into the “real world”; which, however common it is, is completely unbiblical. We may talk about the important truth that we are the body of Christ, the covenant people of God, but we haven’t really grasped that fact until we realize it’s just as true on Monday afternoon as on Sunday morning. The church is not a place; the building’s just something the church has to enable it to do certain things, most notably to gather to worship God. The church is all of us together, and we are every bit as much the church when we’re out buying, selling, working, playing, and the like as when we’re standing together on Sunday morning singing. Together, we carry out the central part of our mission, worshiping God, but we also prepare for the rest of it—which happens out in the world at large. That’s part of really being the church, that we are as much the church when we’re apart as when we’re gathered together.

The problem is, we lose that when we let our walls define us. “Oh, those walls? That’s the Presbyterian church. And those walls over there, that’s the Free Methodists. And those walls down the road, that’s the First Church of the Brethren.” And those walls define out—everyone not within them doesn’t belong there. But Jesus didn’t define the church by walls, he defined us by our mission in this world—by, as you might say, the form which our daily lives are to take as the expression and outworking of our worship of him. It’s a mission which (like so many things) has three parts, which we can see in his farewell to his disciples in Matthew 28:16-20 and Acts 1:6-8.

First, go into the world. The church is not defined as a group of people who all like to worship in the same way, though you wouldn’t always know it from the way we do things; nor is it defined as a group of people with the same cultural expectations, though if you look at the way so many churches tend to segregate by age, you might come to think otherwise; nor is it defined as a group of people who all believe the same things, though our longstanding denominational boundaries could give you that view. The church is defined as a group of people who have obeyed Jesus’ call to go.

For some people, that means packing up and moving across the world; for more of us, it means sending and supporting those people, while at the same time remembering that we too are missionaries when we go down the street to buy milk. Wherever God leads us, whether Outer Mongolia or here in northern Indiana, that’s our mission field; wherever we are, we’re his missionaries. That’s what defines us as the church—not the details of our beliefs, not the details of how we do church, but the fact that we are a people on the way, following Christ in mission on the road to his kingdom. That’s why my other denomination, the RCA, defines its mission this way: “Our task is to equip congregations for ministry—a thousand churches in a million ways doing one thing—following Christ in mission, in a lost and broken world so loved by God.” That’s the church: a community of people, a community of communities, “following Christ in mission in a lost and broken world so loved by God.” That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Go.”

Next, he says, “Be.” Specifically, he says, “You will be my witnesses.” Note that. He doesn’t say, “You will do witnessing”; he says, “You will be my witnesses.” We’re not just called to “save souls,” we’re called to share the life Jesus has given us with the people around us—and not just with our words, but by the way we live our lives. As St. Francis of Assisi put it, “Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.” That’s not an easy standard; our lives are to be sermons on the word of God, backed up by the things we say. Our call as disciples of Christ is to go out into the world and live in it as he did—talking with others about our Father in heaven, and just as importantly, showing his love to those around us in every way we can think of. We are called to do the work he did: to feed the hungry; to care for the sick; to welcome the outsider; to defend the oppressed; to lift up the downtrodden; to love the unlovable; to break down the barriers between race and class and gender; and to speak the truth so clearly and unflinchingly, when the opportunity arises, that people want to kill us for it.

After all, what’s a witness? Look at the justice system, which depends on witnesses—on people who have seen something important and are willing to tell others what they saw. That’s what we’re called to be. We too have seen something important—we have seen the work of Jesus Christ in our lives and the lives of others, through the power of the Holy Spirit—and we too are called to testify to what we’ve seen. In our case, though, our testimony is to be not only the things we say, but everything we do, the way we live our lives, because our lives must provide credibility for our words; a witness who isn’t credible convinces no one. To be witnesses, to bear witness to Jesus with our lives, means that at every point, our lives are to reflect the love and testify to the truth of Jesus Christ.

Which is impossible, for us; but what is impossible for us is possible with God. That’s why Jesus says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,” and then says, “and you will be my witnesses.” Unfortunately, though, when the Holy Spirit fills us with the love and the grace and the power of God, we don’t stay filled; as the great evangelist D. L. Moody put it, we leak, and so we need to be constantly filled and refilled by the Spirit. That’s one reason we’re called to gather together each week to worship: when we spend time focusing on God, both by ourselves and together as a church, we open ourselves up for his Spirit to change our hearts and our lives, so that more and more we will be the people, and the church, he calls us to be.

So, Jesus says, “Go”; he says, “Be”; and he says, “Do.” Specifically, he calls us to do his work: as his disciples, to make more disciples. Our mission as the church is to go out into the world, not to hide behind our four walls—to live, in full view of the world, lives powered and guided and changed and being changed by the Spirit of God—so that people will be attracted by our example and thus be drawn to follow Christ as we follow him. We are God’s light in the window, calling home those who have wandered far from him, giving direction to people lost in the darkness; but when people come, it isn’t enough just to get them in the door. It’s our call at that point to nur­ture them as we nurture ourselves, to give them a place by the fire and feed them, body and soul, to share our life with them, and to disciple them so that they, too, can take up the call in their turn.

Now, this isn’t just a matter of teaching people to believe true things; by itself, that’s not discipleship. Discipling people is a matter of teaching them true things so that they will go out and live true lives. Our call and our purpose as disciples of Christ is to become like him: to think with his mind, to love the world around us as he loves it, and thus to act as he would act, to follow him in his mission in this lost and broken world so loved by God; and to do that, we need to place ourselves under the authority of his word, to obey his commandments and learn from his example. That’s why preaching and teaching are central to our life as the church, not just because we learn things, but because God builds what we learn into our lives, using it to form and shape us as his disciples.

Finally, Jesus says, “Remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” This is, of course, a promise, but it’s also a framework and goal for our mission. We remember that Jesus is always with us by his Spirit, that we are never alone, without comfort, guidance, protection, or care; but we also remember that there is an end to this age, and that we don’t know when it will be. We remember that Jesus is with us to comfort us, yes, but also to challenge us; he’s with us not only for our sake, but for others’ sake and his own, to enable and empower us to be Jesus to the people around us. We remember that his purpose is in part to prepare us for the end of the age, when he will come again, and to use us to prepare others. We remember that he is with us, not to make us comfortable inside our four walls, but to take us beyond them to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted and comfort those who mourn, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to declare the year of the Lord’s favor—and to warn of the day when his judgment will come—so that when we come home to his kingdom at last, we will hear him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the rest I prepared for you from before the foundation of the world.”

Song of the Week

I'd meant to post this earlier in the week—it's perhaps my favorite Pentecost hymn; a former colleague of mine in Denver, the Rev. Dr. Tom Troeger, wrote the text.

Wind Who Makes All Winds that Blow

Wind who makes all winds that blow—
Gusts that bend the saplings low,
Gales that heave the sea in waves,
Stirrings in the mind's deep caves—
Aim your breath with steady power
On your church this day, this hour.
Raise, renew the life we've lost,
Spirit God of Pentecost!

Fire who fuels all fires that burn—
Suns around which planets turn,
Beacons marking reefs and shoals,
Shining truth to guide our souls—
Come to us as once you came;
Burst in tongues of sacred flame!
Light and Power, Might and Strength,
Fill your church, its breadth and length!

Holy Spirit, Wind and Flame,
Move within our mortal frame.
Make our hearts an altar pyre;
Kindle them with your own fire.
Breathe and blow upon that blaze
Till our lives, our deeds, and ways
Speak that tongue which every land
By your grace shall understand!

Words: Thomas H. Troeger
Music: Carol Doran
FALCONE, 7.7.7.7.D
© 1983, 1985 Oxford University Press, Inc.

“The great challenge in this decade . . . is social revival.”

So says David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party, who has brought about a considerable transformation in the party of Thatcher, a transformation he describes this way: “We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood—in a word, for society.” It seems to be working, since the Conservatives (or Tories) mopped the floor with the ruling Labour Party in local elections held across Britain two weeks ago—Labour even lost in London.

David Brooks certainly thinks there's cause and effect here, and sees a lesson the Republicans need to take to heart. Brooks wrote in last Friday's column,

The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.” . . .

These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They’re trying to use government to foster dense social bonds. . . .

They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control.

As Brooks notes, this isn't an isolated phenomenon, as center-right parties have risen to power recently in Germany, France, and Canada, among other places; the question is, as he puts it, “whether Republicans will learn those lessons sooner, or whether they will learn them later, after a decade or so in the wilderness.” I don't know if his analysis is right or not; but it needs to be considered. Carefully. Given that the direction he suggests is one that would suit John McCain well, I hope the McCain campaign is listening, and will give his analysis that consideration.

The mind boggles

AP: Michigan Girl Scout sells 17,328 boxes of cookies

"It's always been one of those goals I wanted to accomplish," [Jennifer] Sharpe said Wednesday.

Really?

Politics in a nutshell

I've been reminded several times recently of the line (I forget who said it) that the difference between conservatives and liberals is summarized in Brown v. Board of Education. In Brown, if I recall correctly, the Court said that changes should be made "with deliberate speed"; conservatives emphasized deliberate, liberals emphasized speed. As a thumbnail sketch of the two political philosophies, it's not bad.

(As a side note: it works for churches, too.)

Explanations aren't excuses

The Atlantic has a piece up today titled "Burma's Days," which is essentially a thumbnail sketch of why the behavior of the military junta that rules Burma (and renamed the country Myanmar nine years ago), deplorable though it may be, makes perfect sense in light of Burmese history and culture. It's a useful piece for the information in it (and a more useful one yet for the links to other articles), but it's also an irritating example of the tendency among Western intelligentsia to look for excuses for foreign dictators. People who condemn the Israeli government for breathing will look the other way at Mugabe's efforts to depopulate Zimbabwe or calmly explain how the Burmese military should be excused for diverting aid from cyclone victims because "they have reason to be suspicious about their neighbors and outside powers." (And of course, those who wouldn't make those particular mistakes may yet have a soft spot in their hearts for the corrupt rulers of Saudi Arabia, or be perfectly content with the generals running Pakistan; this is a game both left and right can play, and have.) Why is that?

I suppose I can understand the Realpolitik approach that says, essentially, as long as dictators don't give us any trouble, we should let them run their countries however they want; I don't like it, and in the long run, I think it's self-defeating (to borrow from Barack Obama on Pakistan, if we choose to promote stability instead of democracy, we tend to wind up with neither), but at least I can see the logic. But what on earth moves our journalists and public intellectuals to find excuses for these thugs? That, I just don't get.

(As you can see, I go with "Burma" over "Myanmar." The latter is probably closer, as far as I can tell, to what the Burmese people call themselves—not that we let that bother us with places like Hungary—but I have two related reasons for not using it. One, the name change came from the junta, which is an illegitimate government, and therefore in my opinion is likewise illegitimate; and two, it's not just my opinion. I had, for several months several moves ago, a landlord who was in exile from Burma due to his activities with the opposition; he called his country Burma and himself Burmese. He knew a lot more than I do, and had a lot more reason to care, so if it was good enough for him, it's good enough for me.)

Doctrine in a nutshell (or two)

HT: Ray Ortlund

And I never get tired of this song.

Creed

I believe in God the Father,
Almighty Maker of Heaven and Maker of Earth,
And in Jesus Christ His only begotten Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
Born of the virgin Mary,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate
He was crucified and dead and buried.

And I believe what I believe
Is what makes me what I am;
I did not make it, no, it is making me—
It is the very truth of God and not the invention of any man.

I believe that He who suffered was crucified, buried and dead;
He descended into Hell and on the third day, He rose again.
He ascended into Heaven where he sits at God's mighty right hand.
I believe that He's returning to judge the quick and the dead of the sons of men.

Chorus

I believe in God the Father,
Almighty Maker of Heaven and Maker of Earth,
And in Jesus Christ His only begotten Son, our Lord.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
One Holy Church,
The communion of saints,
The forgiveness of sins,
I believe in the resurrection,
I believe in a life that never ends.

Chorus

Words and music: Rich Mullins/Beaker
© 1993 Edward Grant, Inc./Kid Brothers of St. Frank Publishing
From the album a liturgy, a legacy, & a ragamuffin band, by Rich Mullins

The genius of Bach

Bach : music :: Shakespeare : playwriting. Not only in terms of genius, but also in the fact that the power of the work comes through no matter what you do with it (whether it be Nazi-era Richard III or "electronic Bach"). As Jan Swafford writes in Slate,

His music tends to work in all versions, I submit, because the notes-qua-notes are so good. Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky, or [your favorite composer here] were constantly concerned with the instruments that played or sung their work: great notes, too, but intimately bound to their media. In The Art of Fugue Bach didn't seem to care what the medium was; it would work no matter what. A lot of his music—not all, but a lot—is like that: incomparable notes, regardless of avatar. . .

Bach universalized what he called "the art and science of music" by the power of gripping melody, rich harmony, towering perorations, intimate whisperings, explosive joy, piercing tragedy.

That's why, as Swafford writes, a work as demanding and formal as The Art of Fugue can still end up at the top of the best-seller list (as Pierre-Laurent Aimard's solo-piano version did this spring): just because it's Bach at his best. Genius has that kind of power.

HT: Alan Jacobs

Belated thoughts on prayer

Over a month ago now, Barry put up a post on prayer asking, essentially, if prayer changes things, why does so little seem to change? I meant to respond at the time, but for a variety of reasons, didn't get to it; but then I was reminded of his post during a conversation last week with several colleagues in ministry. The question of why our prayers so often don't get the answer for which we hope is a live one for most pastors, and it's one for which I don't have any kind of truly satisfactory answer; but I do have two thoughts.

First, I don't believe that prayer changes things. I believe God changes things. I don't believe there's power in prayer, I believe there's power in the God to whom we pray. I do believe Pascal was right, that prayer is the means by which God gives us the dignity of causality—of doing something other than just passively absorbing his actions—but even if in prayer he allows us a voice in what he does, that doesn't mean there's any power in us or our actions, let alone enough power to compel him to do as we want.

Second, I'm learning to trust that God knows what he's doing. One of my colleagues last week, musing on all the times God has not given him what he's prayed for, made a statement to the effect that "I've come to see all those refusals as my salvation." Experience had taught him that God was right not to grant him his requests. The longer I go, the more times I see in my own life where that's clearly the case, and the more I learn to trust him for his "no" as well as his "yes."

So why doesn't God heal more? Why don't we see people raised from the dead? I don't know. I've been a part of churches where that happened; I've seen remarkable healing take place right before my eyes as I and others prayed. I've also been a part of other churches that were, as far as I could tell, no less faithful in following God—but prayers for healing were rarely granted. I don't know why. I don't suppose I ever will know why. Maybe it has something to do with challenging our modern emphasis on cure over care, which has certainly reached the point of being theologically problematic. But whatever the reason, I'm learning to trust God who has promised that whatever we may bear in this life, in the end, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

John McCain, unnatural politician

A couple weeks ago, Karl Rove had an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he asserted that "Mr. McCain is one of the most private individuals to run for president in history," and argued that the Senator will have to set his reticence aside and open up to American voters if he wants to win in November. Rove has a point regarding what the electorate will want, and what stories are important for Sen. McCain to tell in the course of making his case to the voters; but what I think he fails to understand is that it's not just a matter of being a naturally private person, as if he just needed to overcome his embarrassment and brag a little more. Sen. McCain's reticence, I believe, goes to the heart of who he is.

In the first place, it seems to me that he has a real aversion to making political capital out of things that are truly meaningful to him. The stories he's told about his life during this campaign have been stories he's told to explain himself, to help people understand him, not to make himself look good or play on voters' emotions. Clearly, he would prefer to inspire voters by talking about honor, duty, patriotism and courage, not by bragging about what a wonderful person he is; the stories he's told about himself have tended to be self-deprecating rather than self-exalting.

Similarly, though by any normal definition you'd have to call Sen. McCain an evangelical conservative (and one with a strong personal testimony, at that), he's been very resistant to leading with his faith, preferring to duck such questions or answer them sidelong. I respect that; I think using one's faith for political gain, turning Jesus into a means to an end, is spiritually a risky thing at best. That said, however, running for office is an act of self-communication; if your relationship with Jesus is at the core of who you are and why you believe and do what you believe and do, then you have to tell people that in a way that they'll understand. Though I think his theology is notably off at points, I don't think he deserves the skepticism he's received from other evangelicals; if he wants their active, involved support rather than just (most of) their votes, he's going to need to find a way to make that clear.

Second, I believe there's another issue as well with regard to Sen. McCain's military experience. I think I've written about this somewhere (though I can't find it), but having grown up in a military family, I've spent a lot of time around combat veterans, some of whom were Vietnamese POWs. In all that time, I've noticed a clear pattern in the kind of stories I hear and the kind I don't. I hear funny stories, and stories that show what a sharp pilot Commander X was, or how good a shiphandler Captain Y was; I hear stories as object lessons about leadership and doing your job right, and sometimes I hear stories about fellow officers sold up the river by the politicians. What I do not hear, and have never heard, are stories about the blood and guts of combat (for lack of a better phrase). My brother was with my father when he went to the Wall, and saw him break down; I have never seen that side of his experience, and I would be surprised if I ever do. Because, you see, I have never been there; I don't understand, and I can't.

From my own observations, combat veterans rarely talk about that kind of thing except among their own, with those who don't need to be told how it was because they already understand, because they, too, were there. That's why I never trusted John Kerry, because he was the kind of man who could make political capital out of his medals, and out of turning on those with whom he had served; which told me that he'd only gone into the military for what he could get out of it. Fundamentally, he was a political officer, someone who had put on the uniform as a politician, and such people are not to be trusted.

Sen. McCain, by contrast, went into the service for very different reasons, and served out of very different motives; and though he, too, went into politics after returning to civilian life, he has made very different (and much more limited) use of his military career in the pursuit of his political goals. Karl Rove is asking him to change that, and to cross a line that I suspect he might find not only difficult but even somewhat dishonorable to cross. I think Rove is right, that his campaign will need to find a way to do that if they're going to run successfully; but I also think it might be asking too much of the Senator himself to tell those stories. Maybe their best option would be to get folks like Col. Bud Day to cris-cross the country and tell them for him.

In defense of the church, part III: Doctrine

There's a strong anti-doctrinal spirit in parts of the church these days, as the impulse in this direction of oldline Protestant liberalism is being reinforced by Emergent types who are assiduously reinventing Walter Rauschenbusch; it's a spirit that's captured quite well in this video from Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis:

I'm struck, in that video, by the blithe confidence with which people look into the camera and assert that their church has no doctrinal statement that anyone has to believe because everyone has their different opinions and they're all valid, and that upholding anything as unchanging truth is a waste of time because Scripture is evolving, as if a) they're obviously true, and b) doctrine is obviously a bad thing. The problem is, these statements don't hold.

They don't hold for three reasons. The first is that if you want Scripture to mean anything at all, it can't mean that. You will not find "everyone has ideas and they're all valid" in the Word of God. What you will find instead is Jesus declaring, "I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6); what you'll find is Paul telling Timothy, "But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:14-17). What you'll find, in other words, is a strong concern through all Scripture that the church know and believe and uphold the truth, which in fact does not change, because truth is of God and God doesn't change. If we actually want to follow Christ, that necessarily means that we need to be concerned to know and believe and proclaim the truth—and that in turn means that we do need doctrine, and an understanding of at least the most basic beliefs that we need to hold if we're to follow where he's actually going (as opposed to where we want to believe he's going).

The second reason is that, as John Hatton has noted in a brilliant post on Confessing Evangelical, doctrine is necessary as the "constitution for a community." He pulls this phrase from Columbia law professor Eben Moglen, the lawyer for the Free Software Foundation who helped draft (and enforce) the GNU General Public License; according to Moglen, that's the primary purpose of free software licenses, not that they provide a platform for enforcement, but that they constitute (which is to say, create and give form to) a community with a given identity and purpose. Without that constitution,

groups arise within the community who, being ignorant of the principles on which the community is constituted, start to reject and work against those principles. They do not mean to undermine the community—quite the opposite; they consider they are strengthening it—but by undermining that community’s constitution it is inevitable that they will end up damaging the community itself.

This is a phenomenon with which the church is all too familiar, and it shows why there is a need to teach people the faith. Not because people need to know doctrine inside-out in order to be good Christians; not because it is a useful technique that is effective in building up individuals and the church; but because poorly-taught Christians may find themselves inadvertently undermining the constitution on which the church is built, by coming to reject doctrines they have never even known or understood in the first place. . . .

In addition, the free software movement and the church are both faced by numerous external opponents (variously, the world, the flesh, the devil, and Microsoft ;-) ), and ignorance of the constitution on which each community is founded makes it easier for those external opponents to damage that community and the individuals within it.

The key here is that those who reject doctrine (or conceive themselves to be doing so, anyway) do so because they misconstrue it as primarily regulatory in purpose, as if the main reason we have doctrines is so we can punish those who disagree. As Hatton, applying Moglen, shows, that's wrong: the primary purpose of doctrine is formative, creating us as the people of God, as the kind of community God wants us to be. Set it aside, and you may be fine for a while, but ultimately you'll find "poorly-taught Christians . . . inadvertently undermining the constitution on which the church is built, by coming to reject doctrines they have never even known or understood in the first place." Who we are and how we live begins with and flows out of what we believe; we cannot be a unified community in Christ, we cannot serve God together as his people, in any faithful way for any length of time without holding at least our most important beliefs in common (such as who this God is we're worshiping, and who this Jesus is we're following, and why we're doing this at all). As Rich Mullins summed up the matter in his song "Creed,"

I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am;
I did not make it—no, it is making me;
It is the very truth of God and not the invention of any man.

The third reason the statements I referenced above don't hold is that they fail the Francis Schaeffer test: "Can you live them out?" You can't; Solomon's Porch can't, and their video shows it. In the snippets from Doug Pagitt's sermon (at least, I assume it's Doug Pagitt preaching), he makes such statements as, "Ultimately, community that's Christian means to be a community of love." That's a doctrinal statement. It makes no sense whatsoever without a complete doctrinal context that provides definitions (so that we know what words like "community," "Christian," and "love" mean; they aren't self-evident) and goals (so that we know, for instance, why we value community, and why we want a community that's Christian as opposed to some other kind), and it asserts something that we must believe: a Christian community is a community of love. On the basis of what they say, the folks at Solomon's Porch ought to be completely happy if someone stood up at that point and said, "You're wrong; that might have been true once, but it isn't now"—but they wouldn't. They might say, "all those ideas are important and valued," but if someone tried to interrupt the message to insist that a Christian community is not a community of love, they would find out exactly how important and valued that idea isn't.

And that is necessarily so. It has to be; because if they really believed their own sweeping statements and tried to live accordingly, they would find that the rejection of doctrine is a universal acid that dissolves community. And so, even as the folks in that video insist that all beliefs are welcome, they also say, "If Jesus were alive today, what would he be concerned about? Well, he'd be concerned about what I'm concerned about" (and therefore, by clear implication, you ought to be concerned about that, too). They're not rejecting doctrine as such; they can't, because they wouldn't have a coherent community if they did. What they're rejecting is any doctrinal authority except themselves—which ultimately ends in rejecting the authority and primacy of Jesus, and building a church that's all about us and how wonderful we are.

This is, I believe, where the attack on doctrine comes from. People may say they're attacking the church because it insists on believing specific things, but their overt complaint is in fact incoherent, and merely a mask for the real complaint: that the church is telling them things they don't want to hear. That's not all bad, nor is it necessarily unreasonable, since no church has all its doctrines right, and too many churches teach things which are harmful, or proclaim things in harmful ways; but the problem comes when we start to think that the church should only tell us what we want to hear, and only ask us to believe what we want to believe. That's not the model we have from Jesus. Jesus spent a lot of time telling people things they didn't want to hear, because it was what they needed to hear; if we as the church are to be faithful to his call, we must go and do likewise.

(NB: the last paragraph has been edited to more clearly and accurately express my point.)

Thinking with the fishes

Just a quick post tonight, because I'm dead tired—most of my neurons are sitting in corners sulking, refusing to talk to each other. I have several posts I've been hoping to get done, but . . . well, maybe tomorrow . . . maybe Monday.

Anyway, if you're not familiar with The Porpoise-Diving Life, check out the May issue on the website. I'm more than a little biased here, since my wife contributed a piece, and the editor is Erin Word, whom I like quite well, but I do think there's some good material up. (Sara's, btw, is the last one in the list, "The Mythical Good Christian Is Just a Piece of Topiary.") Reading through a few of the pieces set me in mind, for some reason, of a certain theme that pops up a few times in Paul's letters:

"For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision,
but keeping the commandments of God."

—1 Corinthians 7:19 (ESV)

"For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything,
but only faith working through love."

—Galatians 5:5-6 (ESV)

"But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts
for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation."

—Galatians 6:14-15 (ESV)

Of course, the issue these days isn't circumcision; the new legalism has its own equivalents. Let's just be careful that in throwing off legalism, we don't make a fetish of its opposite. As Paul is at pains to tell us, circumcision is nothing, but neither is uncircumcision . . .

The problem with historical parallels

is knowing what's really parallel to what. This is where the deeper problem with Barack Obama's attempt at historical equivalence comes in. After all, had he wanted to name Republicans instead of Democrats, he could have said much the same thing with greater accuracy by citing Nixon and Reagan; but though his comparison would have been correct in the letter of the matter, it would have been wrong in the spirit. When Nixon opened the SALT talks, or when Reagan went to the Reykjavik summit, they were dealing with a government that worked, fundamentally, on a modern rationalist Western understanding of power and politics in which "if you do this, you will die" is a deterrent. The ability to deter the action of other powers by making that threat is the linchpin of the Western approach to diplomacy; this is not to say that every diplomatic move rests on the threat of force, or that all such encounters are in some way fundamentally hostile, but it is to say that the rules by which the game is played have developed, over centuries, from that point and on that basis. Which raises the question: how do you address an enemy for whom death is not a deterrent?

That, unfortunately, is the situation we're in with respect to powers like Iran, and organizations like Hamas and Hizb'allah. This is the point Alan Dershowitz was trying to get across a couple months ago in his editorial "Worshippers of Death"; that's why he hit his readers with this barrage of quotes:

"We are going to win, because they love life and we love death," said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: "[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah." Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: "We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us."

"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death," explained Afghani al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah. Sheik Feiz Mohammed, leader of the Global Islamic Youth Center in Sydney, Australia, preached: "We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam. Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid." Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech: "It is the zenith of honor for a man, a young person, boy or girl, to be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to serve the interests of his nation and his religion."

In other words, even if talking with our enemies has worked in the past (a dubious assertion, on the whole), there's a lot less reason to think it might work this time, because we don't have the same leverage here; we can't make them behave, because we can't deter them from acting. All we can do is stop them. (As Dershowitz points out, we're at a disadvantage in that, as well; but that's a subject for another post, at least.) Unfortunately, the message doesn't seem to have taken, judging by Sen. Obama's remarks. What matters here isn't whether the American people think talking with, say, Iran or Syria, is a sign of weakness; what matters is that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Bashar al'Assad most assuredly will—and will react accordingly.

Why lawyers shouldn't teach history

"I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk
not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did,
and Truman did."

—Sen. Barack Obama, 5/6/08

I've been meaning to get around to commenting on this ridiculous case of historical malpractice. This might just be the single most wrongheaded political statement I've heard during this campaign (which, given this campaign, is saying something). I can't think of a single enemy with whom either Roosevelt (either Roosevelt, come to that, though I presume he's referring to the Democrat) or Truman had diplomatic conversations except the one with whom we were allied; as for JFK, it was talking to our enemies that got him into trouble. If he'd stood up to the shoe-pounder to begin with, we would all have been better off. (Then, of course, the Kennedy Administration's misbehaviors in Vietnam are surely nothing Sen. Obama wants to hold up as a model.)

RealClearPolitics' Jack Kelly, in his helpful survey of the senator's historical ridiculosity, suggests Neville Chamberlain as a better historical analogue, noting that Chamberlain's declaration of peace "didn't work out so well." I might add that among American Presidents, the real appeasers are folks like Carter—or, if we want to include internal enemies, James Buchanan. I presume Sen. Obama wouldn't have been in favor of continuing to negotiate with domestic slaveowners?

The Gospel in the Ascension

In the church, we talk a fair bit about Jesus’ death on the cross to pay the penalty for our sin, and how his death was for each and every one of us. (At least, we’re supposed to; if your church doesn’t, that’s not good.) Bill had a great little post reflecting on that over at The Thinklings a month or so ago. That's an important truth for us to think about and talk about in understanding just how much God loves us. The only problem is that too often we stop there—we don’t realize that the truth goes even farther than that.

You see, Jesus became a human being with a human body, and in that body he suffered temptation beyond anything any of us can imagine (since he never knew the lifting of temptation that comes with giving in to it), and in that body he suffered agony beyond anything any of us can comprehend—and as great as the physical torment of the crucifixion was, the spiritual torment of taking on the entire guilt for the entire weight of human sin and pain for all of recorded history was far, far greater; and having born all that pain in his body, with the scars of that pain permanently etched in his flesh, he kept it. He kept that body with its map of his suffering, and in that body he returned to the Father’s side. His incarnation was no mere temporary thing; the physical trainer from whom I took a spin class used to tell us, “You can do anything for five minutes” (when we were five minutes from the end and about ready to fall off the stationary bikes), but this was no matter of God calculating that he could, after all, bear being human for thirty years or so. This was permanent—a permanent change with permanent scars.

And here’s the key: he did it for you. This is how much God loves you, that he would go to such lengths as this for you. The Son of God became human for all time, and as a human suffered wounds he will bear for all time, for you. If we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that like everything else about us, our love has limits: we reach a place, if people push us too far, where we have to say, “Yes, I love you, but not that much.” Some of us can go farther than others, but none of us can keep going forever. God’s love can, and does, and has, far beyond where we could have expected. No matter how far you go from God, the Father’s love goes farther. No matter how great your sin, it has a limit, and God’s love doesn’t, and neither does the meaning of his sacrifice on the cross; no matter how great your sin, it’s covered.

That’s important for us to remember in our down times, and the times when we’re wrestling with a temptation we just can’t seem to beat, because those are the times when we risk giving in to despair; those are the times that the devil comes and whispers in our ears, trying to convince us that God has given up on us, that he can’t possibly love us anymore after all we’ve done. The fact of the matter is, when you look at everything Jesus did for us, everything he went through to save us, there’s no way that anything we can do can change his mind about that; the very worst we can do is but a small part of the pain he bore for us. He didn’t come down to this earth under the illusion that we’re better than we actually are; he didn’t come down to take just some of our sin, as if there were some things that even he wouldn’t die to redeem. No, he came down here to pay the price for all our sin, to heal all our wounds and carry all our diseases; he came to raise the dead of a dying world, nothing less, and now he has gone on ahead to prepare our way. Christ has gone up with shouts of joy in order that we might follow him, that we might be invited to live forever in the eternal blessing of the love of God.

Down to her last fingernail

After getting clocked in North Carolina and barely eking out a victory in Indiana, by any rational calculation, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is all but dead. Had she gotten the best-case scenario for which she was hoping—a double-digit win in Indiana and a loss within 5-7 points in NC—she could make a rational case for herself on the basis of the political situation; what the actual results indicate is that Sen. Obama has weathered the blows, at least with Democratic voters, and is still on his feet. Barring the unexpected, her hopes for the White House are over.

The problem is, of course, in this craziest of all campaign seasons, how could we possibly have the cheek to bar the unexpected? When was the last time we had anything but the unexpected? Unless Sen. Obama completely self-destructs, he's the nominee—but his self-destruction somehow seems completely possible, even if I can't imagine anyone without Sen. Clinton's ego actually betting on it. What's more, I can even think of two completely possible ways by which that could happen.

One, while we've heard all we need to hear about the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s beliefs, what we haven't heard him talk about (at least in any detail) is his relationship with Sen. Obama. If someone starts asking him those questions, depending on his answers, that could torpedo Sen. Obama.

Two, final arguments open Monday in the trial of Obama associate Antoin "Tony" Rezko. As Hugh Hewitt notes, "if Rezko is convicted and is facing a long stretch in jail, won't he have to think long and hard about naming names in order to limit his years in federal prison?" Should that happen, things could get very, very messy for Illinois Democrats; the likeliest major pol to go down would seem to be not Sen. Obama but Gov. Rod Blagojevich, but the fact that Rezko did Sen. Obama large, expensive favors would tie him closely enough to the story to be fatal to his ambitions, should it end up breaking open on that scale.

What are the odds of either of these things happening? Who knows? What were the odds of any of the things we've seen so far? But if Sen. Clinton stays in the race until she's pushed out, she maximizes her chance of taking advantage if either one does. So, down to her last fingernail she may be, and there may be nothing but the strength of her blood-red polish keeping it from breaking off—but as long as it holds, she's not going anywhere.

Song of the Week, for a distressed friend

These days, if people have heard of Stormie Omartian, most of them know her for her books, while her husband Michael is primarily mentioned as a producer; that's a shame, because he put out some great albums of his own, beginning with White Horse and Adam Again back in the '70s, and a number of fine ones together with her as well. The only one of their joint albums I have is Mainstream, and the tape is dying after a quarter-century, which is too bad, since it's not even listed on Amazon. I'll listen to it until it goes, anyway. This song is off that album; as I was listening to it in the car on the way back from work the other day, I had the sense that someone I know needs to hear the message of this song. So, no audio, but up it goes.

Believing for the Best in You

After all I've said to try to change your mind,
Are you still going to doubt my words?
You can show me your failures and point out your flaws—
I don't hear you.
There are two sides to every story,
And glory is on your side;
One hope in every dreamer—the Redeemer;
And that is why

I'm believing for the best in you,
Believing for the best in you;
You've got Jesus in your heart, and you love Him so—
Well, that's all I need to know, all I need to know.
I'm believing for the best in you.

You've been searching through the garden of your life
For seeds that were planted there;
When I show you the blossoms and point out the vines,
You don't see them.
You're looking so hard for the flower
When the hour is still ahead,
And all that is not showing is growing,
And that is why

Chorus

The eyes of the Lord are upon you;
He sees what He made you to be.
So arise and shine,
For thy light has come
And there's no way to hide it from me.

Chorus

Words and music: Michael and Stormie Omartian
© 1982 See This House Music/Birdwing Music/Cherry Lane Music Publishing Co.
From the album Mainstream, by Michael & Stormie Omartian

This all made more sense on Mountain Time

Staying up to watch election returns, that is; it's two hours earlier in Colorado. I can't keep doing this when it means being up until midnight on a school night. (Why do elections have to be on Tuesdays, anyway?)

Political junkie or otherwise, I need to start putting sleep ahead of politics.

Well, of course they are

I think Hugh Hewitt's missing the point a bit on Barack Obama (which is rather like a donkey telling an elephant his nose is unimpressive, but bear with me). Hewitt writes,

What Obama has won is the heart of the left, and they don't care that he cannot win Pennsylvania or Ohio in the fall. They want one of their own. They prefer six months of theater they produce to four years of power in which they have supporting roles.

So the Democrats, fresh off the 2004 rejection of an elitist senator from the far left edge of their party, will choose to nominate an elitist senator from an even farther left precinct of their party, only one much less experienced than John Kerry.

Now, I don't disagree with any of that; but the key here is, the Soros/MoveOn/DailyKos crowd do. First, they think Sen. Obama can win in the fall. Second, even if, should someone press them, they might concede that Hillary Clinton would have a better chance, they wouldn't care: they believe the current climate is hostile enough to Republicans that this time they have a shot at electing a President who straight out thinks like them. They believe that this year, they have a real shot at electing "an elitist senator from an even farther left precinct of their party," even though that didn't work four years ago, and they're not willing to give that up for a less-satisfying victory (another Clinton). After all, if Sen. Clinton wins, their odds of electing someone as liberal as Sen. Obama President any time in the near future go down; whereas if John McCain wins, they've convinced themselves that their odds of getting what they want will be even better four years from now (scroll down to the first comment). With that sort of mindset, whyever should they settle for less than what they really want in a nominee?

Children as buying machines

That's one of Heather McDougal's complaints about TV on Cabinet of Wonders, in her post to which I linked last week:

2. People are trying to sell me stuff the whole time and are counting on me not noticing that they are trying to sell me stuff.

2a. When people are trying to sell me stuff, they are willing to do anything they can to get me to buy it, including working really hard at making me hate myself so their product can be the solution.

2b. The people who want to sell me stuff are also thinking of my children as a commodity to be bought and sold, and have absolutely no compunction about trying to turn three-year-olds into buying machines (or using the whine factor to try to get little ones to turn me into their own personal buying machine). Also, they want to make my daughters feel bad about themselves so they will buy things. Yuck.

This isn't a secret, of course; anyone who pays attention (and especially anyone with children) can see it. Still, it's no end galling how shameless media companies are about it; and perhaps the most galling thing is that the worst of all of them that way is Disney. Condé Nast Portfolio (an excellent magazine, btw, and a great read even if you don't read business magazines) has an article up titled “How Mickey Got His Groove Back” which makes this appallingly clear. If you've never run across any of the Mouse's cynical exercises in making money off so-called “tweens” (do we have to keep slicing childhood up into ever-smaller marketing segments?), Karl Taro Greenfeld's opening paragraph should give you the idea:

Perhaps it was my daughters singing along with Hannah Montana—“Get up, get loud, we’re pumping up the party now!”—eight times in a row that morning. Or maybe it was the 16 times I overheard High School Musical and High School Musical 2 playing on the television in the living room, or the several hundred dollars my wife and I spend on Disney tween products—aimed at nine- to 14-year-old girls—every year. Or the fact that a magazine (thankfully, not this one) asked me to profile a Disney tween star and then, almost before I could ask “Who?,” told me that another publication had beaten them to it. Finally, after my eight-year-old daughter pointed to a picture of Hillary Clinton and said she was supporting her for president “because she’s named Hillary, like Hilary Duff,” I decided I had to know: Who is doing this to me?

I wonder what Walt would think.

Old evils never die

they just find new sewers to hide in; as long as our hearts continue polluted, there will truly be nothing new under the sun. Thus, for example, if you think slavery was a peculiarly American crime that basically disappeared in 1865, think again. If Logan Paul Gage's article on E. Benjamin Skinner's exploration of contemporary slavery (an exploration recounted in detail in his book A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery) doesn't make you want to weep, your heart is as hard and cold as the Hope diamond.

Song of the Week

Hap's latest post, "The Beauty of Broken Glass," plays with some wonderful images, and I really encourage you to read it if you haven't. For my part, given my brain's tendency to spin off in random directions, it's no surprise that one of the things it brought to mind was this song by Andrew Peterson. (My wife doesn't care for it, but I like it quite well.)

Just As I Am

What's that on the ground?
It's what's left of my heart;
Somebody named Jesus broke it to pieces
And planted the shards.
And they're coming up green, and they're coming in bloom;
I can hardly believe this is all coming true.

Just as I am, and just as I was,
Just as I will be He loves me, He does.
He showed me the day that He shed His own blood:
He loves me, oh, He loves me, He does.

All of my life
I've held on to this fear—
These thistles and vines ensnare and entwine
What flowers appear—
It's the fear that I'll fall one too many times;
It's the fear that His love is no better than mine.
(But he tells me that)

Chorus

Well, it's time now to harvest
What little that grew;
This man they call Jesus who planted the seeds
Has come for the fruit.
And the best that I've got isn't nearly enough;
He's glad for the crop, but it's me that He loves.

Chorus

Words and music: Andrew Peterson
© 2003 New Spring Publishing (a division of Brentwood-Benson Music Publishing)
From the album Love & Thunder, by Andrew Peterson

Distortion

The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson has a column up on WorldNetDaily on the racism that infects some black churches. His analysis makes a certain amount of sense, and he may well be right that "since the exodus of men, black preachers have retooled their message to play to women's egos"; certainly, one hears enough of that sort of complaint aimed at the white church. Where the Rev. Peterson goes wrong is in the next paragraph:

Bishop T.D. Jakes, for instance, has built an empire by targeting the emotional needs of women. His popular books include "Loose That Man & Let Him Go" and "The Lady, Her Lover, Her Lord."

There are two main problems here, which are (predictably) interrelated. The first is that this is a gross oversimplification of Bishop Jakes' ministry. Rev. Peterson's statements would lead one to expect that Bishop Jakes has written a flood of books "targeting the emotional needs of women," when even a cursory look will show the contrary. Second, Rev. Peterson writes so as to imply from context that Loose That Man & Let Him Go! is a book addressed to women encouraging them to dump the men in their lives, when nothing could be farther from the truth. In actual fact, the book is one of a number which Bishop Jakes has addressed to men urging men "to let Jesus take hold of their limitations and bondages and to come forth into the light of all God has planned for them"—a message I remember him preaching at Promise Keepers—and he's been doing that rather longer than he's been writing to women; the first of his books addressed to women, Woman, Thou Art Loosed!, wasn't published until 1994. (Loose That Man & Let Him Go! came out in 1991; the title, incidentally, is addressed not to women but to the Devil.)

All of which is to say that the Rev. Peterson appears to have an agenda, which he makes clear in the following paragraph:

Worse, Jakes has empowered women to assume leadership positions within the church, despite clear biblical admonitions against it.

It's all well and good to speak of "clear biblical admonitions"; those of us who disagree with the Rev. Peterson's school of interpretation on the role of women in the church don't see anything of the sort, but it's as appropriate for him to use such language as it is for me in return to say that his reading of the Bible is shallow, simplistic, and culturally bound. That's well within the bounds of normal academic rhetoric. What isn't, and what in fact is flat-out inappropriate, is to prop up his agenda by misrepresenting the facts. Whatever his faults and flaws (and no doubt he has many, just like all the rest of us), Bishop Jakes deserves better than that.

Cognitive surplus, Web 2.0, and the transformation of media

Clay Shirky, author of the recent book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has a fascinating piece up on his blog called "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus." An edited transcript of a talk he gave at the Web 2.0 conference, it's the most remarkable analysis of societal transformations I think I've ever run across. He begins with the insight of a British historian

that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. . . .

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. . . .

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

The key insight here is that major societal shifts, if they happen quickly, require some sort of lubricant to get people over the hump until they can adjust to the change of circumstances. (When that lubricant is missing, we get relapses; the case of the USSR after the fall of the Communist Party might be taken as an example.) And for us?

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened—rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. . . .

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

He overstates the degree to which that free time went into TV; a lot of that time went into volunteer service organizations as well, especially among homemaking women. Still, the broader point holds, and I think his analysis of the current situation does as well. The shift we're beginning to see, as he presents it, is this:

Media in the 20th century was run as a single race—consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this [cognitive] surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer.

Media as triathlon—as an interactive activity rather than merely a consumptive activity. I think he's on to something here. For example, how many people these days get their news surfing the Web, following links, blogging, commenting on blogs, and the like, not simply absorbing the news but participating (even if only on the fringes) in a conversation about the news?

And perhaps most crucially, how many of our children are growing up with this as part of their mental framework?

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It's also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing—and when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what I'm going to tell them: We're looking for the mouse. We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?" And I'm betting the answer is yes.

It's a brilliant article, and I think offers a critical insight into what's happening in Western culture, and what's likely to happen next. I recommend you read the whole thing.

HT: Heather McDougal

This is the ending of a beautiful friendship

and from the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s perspective, Barack Obama started it; Barack Obama betrayed him first. That piece in the New York Post has to make Sen. Obama, David Axelrod, and the rest of the folks in that campaign break out in a cold sweat for what the Rev. Dr. Wright might say or do next. I criticized the Rev. Dr. Wright yesterday for betraying Sen. Obama's friendship and the good of his country, and I still think his willingness to hurt this country in order to take down Sen. Obama is despicable; but what I wasn't thinking about yesterday is, as a pastor, how would I feel if I were in his shoes? How would I react to being dumped, downplayed and disavowed by someone whom I'd pastored for twenty years, whom I'd mentored and supported and encouraged and poured my life into, and whom I considered a friend? I've seen that sort of thing happen to colleagues (admittedly for much lower stakes than a presidential race, and for much less provocation than the Rev. Dr. Wright has given), and I've seen how it devastated them; now that I've thought about it, I have a much easier time understanding where he's coming from. I still think he's in the wrong; I still think he should follow Jesus' command to turn the other cheek (and that his tendency to preach that to white folk and not to himself and his own congregation captures much of what's wrong with his understanding of Christianity); but his behavior makes more sense to me now. There but for the grace of God . . .

In the meantime, though, it's interesting what this whole episode has revealed about Sen. Obama (and, as Hugh Hewitt notes, to wonder what more it might yet reveal; if someone sits down with the Rev. Dr. Wright to ask him a couple hours' worth of questions about his twenty-year friendship with Sen. Obama, he may very well answer them fully). As more than a few people have noted, the Rev. Dr. Wright didn't say anything about HIV, or 9/11, or Louis Farrakhan, that we hadn't heard before—the only new material he had was aimed squarely at Sen. Obama; it was only when the Rev. Dr. Wright came after him that he felt the need to denounce his "former pastor." Thus Anna Marie Cox asked on Time's blog,

Is it overly cynical of me to think that Wright diminishing Obama as a mere politician was the true tipping point? Because that seems to be one of the few new arguments (ideas? rants? conspiracy theories?) that Wright made. Sadly for Obama, it may also be the only correct one.

Perhaps even more telling is Scott Johnson's comment on Power Line:

In Obama's eyes, the most serious wrongdoing in Wright's statements is their disrespect of Obama. From the revered father figure who could not be disowned, Wright has become the the father from whom separation must be achieved in favor of his own identity, or the boorish relative who cannot be tolerated. The adolescent grandiosity and adolescent pettiness of Obama's remarks are perhaps the most shocking revelations of this entire episode.

The further Sen. Obama goes, the smaller he gets (and with him, his poll numbers). He's even managing to make Hillary Clinton look good by comparison.

Ascension Day

On this day on which the Western church celebrates the ascension of Jesus, I wanted to point you to the homily Fr. Richard John Neuhaus gave on the Feast of the Ascension last year at the annual Memorial Mass for Catholic military chaplains, "Bearing Witness in a Time of War." It is, I think, a powerful reflection on the reality and significance of the divided sovereignty to which we as Christians in this world owe allegiance. "We bear witness to what is to be, and, for those who believe, already is. The Church—her ministers and her members—is the people ahead of time."