Your next car will be powered by termites

Well, OK, not your next car, and not directly—but I'm willing to bet that's the way things are heading. I've been betting on hydrogen fuel cells as the future of power generation (and not just for your car, either) ever since our time in Vancouver when I first heard the story of the remarkable Dr. Geoffrey Ballard (who died early this month at the age of 76) and the company he founded, Ballard Power Systems. The potential for replacing the internal combustion engine and vast coal plants with a power source that produces nothing but water (which in many parts of the world would qualify as a secondary benefit) is staggeringly wonderful—if we can solve two problems: one, storage of hydrogen, which is of course a highly volatile element; and two, finding a way to produce hydrogen that doesn't cause its own set of environmental problems (as, for instance, cracking natural gas would).

I think we might now have a leading contender for solution #2: termites. In an article in the latest Atlantic titled "Gut Reactions," Lisa Margonelli reports on recent discoveries about how termites break down plant material into food in their third gut (or, more accurately, about the microbes, many of which exist nowhere else, which do it for them) and the exciting possibilities those discoveries raise. She of course, and quite rightly, takes this in several different directions, but the line that caught me was right in the beginning:

Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car.

I understand that scientists want to take each one of those tens of thousands of microbes and study each one thoroughly—there's a lot of knowledge there, and a lot of doctoral theses to go with it. Along the way, though, I hope they don't forget to do the most practical thing: follow ArcTech's example.

The Virginia-based company ArcTech trained termites to eat coal, and then rummaged through their guts to find the microorganisms best at turning coal into methane. It cultured those microorganisms and now feeds them coal; the company plans to use the methane they produce to make electricity, and is already selling the by-products, including one used by farmers as a soil additive. ArcTech says this method eliminates virtually all greenhouse-gas emissions from coal-based electricity production.

Let's go and do likewise to provide fuel for our fuel cells, and maybe sooner than you think, you'll be able to look down at your brand new car and think, "This is powered by termites."

Sense of place and the '08 election

My honors English teacher in my junior year of high school used to say that there are three themes in American literature: individualism, sense of place, and the American dream. He said this to a class with a large contingent of Navy brats, including me, including many (though not me) whose only sense of the place in which they lived was that they wouldn't be there much longer and didn't particularly want to be. (The town in which, through my parents' determination, I did the majority of my growing up is a nice town in a beautiful part of the country; but at the time, anyway, it wasn't the kind of place many of my teenage comrades found all that exciting.) I have long thought of John McCain primarily as a counterpart to my father: a Navy pilot, an officer and a gentleman. For whatever reason, I haven't thought of him as a counterpart of my own, though from a different generation: a Navy brat. And yet, he was and is that, too; he too knows what it means to grow up in a world where home is not a place, but an institution and a people.

Peggy Noonan picked up on this, and on the fact that Barack Obama similarly grew up in a variety of places, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal titled "The End of Placeness". She's right that sense of place, which my old English teacher considered such an important American theme, is disappearing; the Rev. Dr. Craig Barnes, of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and Shadyside Presbyterian Church, has had some wise and thoughtful things to say on this. As the Rev. Dr. Barnes puts it, before the GI Bill and the rise of American prosperity following WW II, most Americans were Settlers, people who put down roots in a particular place and stayed there (and settled for whatever way of life they had there); those who didn't were mistrusted. With the GI Bill and the beginnings of modern suburbia, a new generation of Exiles began (exiles being people who know where home is but don't live there; he cites as an example his own family, which always went "home for Christmas" from their suburban life to the tobacco farm in North Carolina). Now, as he says, Exiles are giving way increasingly to Nomads: people (primarily Gen X and younger) who are equally at home everywhere because they aren't really at home anywhere. It's a significant issue for those of us who are pastors, though not everyone has realized it yet.

Having this emerging reality mirrored in our presidential candidates is a strange thing, and I can understand Noonan's reaction to it. That said, as Beldar points out, they mirror this very differently; though this fact is tangential to Noonan's point, it's nevertheless significant.

I suspect part of Sen. Obama's appeal to young voters during the primaries (which seems to be fading somewhat) is that his rootlessness, though an extreme form, is a familar type among those of my generation and younger; while few of us had mothers who married Africans and Indonesians and moved us to another continent, the story's outline is familiar:

Obama, by contrast, can only remember meeting his father once, briefly, when he was 10, and he never met his paternal grandfather at all. They had no presence in Barack Obama's life while he was growing up; they were only dreams and stories and faded photos, with an occasional letter. . . .

While Obama at least had a long-term relationship with his paternal grandparents, even that came at the expense of being effectively abandoned to their care by his own mother—hardly an ideal situation. Indeed, the adults around young Obama seemed in his book to be tied to nowhere and nothing—and outside of their immediate family (and sometimes not even that), to nobody. Obama was both a literal and figurative "step-child."

Of him it may truly be said, as Noonan does, that he is "not from a place, but from an experience"—and from an all too common experience among younger folks these days: the experience of divorce and remarriage, step-parents and moving from place to place as one's mother or father or both chase their own self-fulfillment. The place he's from is the broken family, and it's a familiar one to many.

Sen. McCain, by contrast, grew up with one of the oldest forms of placelessness in the human experience: he grew up in the military. That has some of the same effects, leaving you with the desire to belong someplace; but it doesn't leave you truly rootless, because you find your roots in the military community and culture. (And it is a culture of its own, connected to but apart from mainstream American culture, make no mistake about that; our local college has even started exempting military brats along with international students from its standard cross-cultural class and including them in the "adapting to American culture" class instead.) Those of us who grow up in Christian homes learn to find our roots in the church as well, which is a very good thing in many ways. (This is why, when Beldar writes that "McCain got a rock-solid and abiding 'faith' from his grandfather and father—faith in them, in himself, in the U.S. Navy and the other U.S. military forces, and most importantly, in all of America—while at best, Obama got only 'dreams' from his," I have to say he's missed the most important faith Sen. McCain learned from his father and grandfather: faith in God.)

The effects of this are very clear in this presidential campaign. Sen. Obama can stand before a German audience and call himself a "citizen of the world" because his psychological citizenship is pretty tenuous—his most formative experiences tie him more to Africa and Asia than to America. Sen. McCain could never do that. He doesn't belong to Phoenix any more than Sen. Obama belongs to Chicago, but he is unquestionably rooted in America, down to the core of his being, through his generations-deep roots in the United States Navy. In the end, I guess that's why my respect and admiration for the man trumps my deep reservations about him, and why I trust his instincts even if I don't always trust his ideas.

Is it possible that anyone could be more unlike Obama's mother, with her dizzying moves from husband to husband and country to country, than McCain's mother, who was always the quintessential "Navy wife," wholly integrated into an American military-family culture that is proud and vast and long-standing? However often Roberta McCain and young John moved, they were never alone, never strangers, never "lost"—and they never had to flail about trying to "find themselves." Rather, from birth to adulthood, McCain was surrounded by people whose lives were dedicated to a clear set of ideals and a clear purpose. All those people continuously reinforced and reminded him of the faith—the dedication to duty, honor, and country—that he inherited as a legacy from his grandfather and father.

And for Sen. McCain, that's the bottom line; that, ultimately, is his sense of place.

Back to normal (I hope)

Well, I'm back to work, the kids are back in school, and we finally have our vehicle back (which necessitated a five-hour round trip to return the rental van and pick it up), so at least theoretically, we're back to the normal routine; here's hoping that, at the least, we don't get any more unpleasant surprises for a while. (Pleasant ones would make a nice change, but I'm not getting my hopes up.)

On another note, my brother-in-law recently introduced us to I Can Has Cheezburger?, a large collection of cat pictures (and the occasional pic of other animals) with funny captions; we've gotten some good laughs out of them. Here's a few examples:

Speaking of vandals

we got back from a trip and picked up the car at our hotel to find that someone had tried to steal the platinum out of its catalytic converters. We weren't the only one hit, either, though it seems to have been a pretty incompetent set of thieves (they had damaged the cars but failed to get what they were after). The upside to the downside is that the dealership looked our vehicle over pretty closely and found a couple other unrelated problems which need fixing; the downside to the upside is that the cost of all that is going to be a right hook to the budget.

The interesting thing is that as I was dealing with our crippled car the other morning, I got about the same reaction from everyone: "I don't understand how people can do this. It's sad how there's no respect for other people's property anymore." Personally, I sort of understand it—it goes back to what Jason Lee Steorts was writing about in National Review in the piece I posted on the other day. It's all about the spirit of vandalism: the willingness or even eagerness to deface and destroy those things which one does not personally value. Steorts talks about it with regard to beauty, but I think it's a little broader; vandals destroy order (which is the foundation of beauty) for their own purposes, whether logical or illogical. We don't normally think about breaking into someone's property to steal something as vandalism, but at the spiritual level, it is: it's vandalism for the sake of profit. We might call it applied vandalism. And this whole little mess has driven home for me just how much I agree with Steorts when he writes, "My friends ask what makes me a conservative, and sometimes I wonder myself, but there is an answer, and it’s that I hate vandals." Me too—the acts, at least, even if I'm called to love those who perpetrate them. The spirit of vandalism is the spirit of chaos, of uncreation; it's one of the truest expressions of the mind and character of the Uncreator.

Teach your children well

The title, of course, comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but the theme is as old as history, going back at least to Deuteronomy 6. Unfortunately, too often the church does a poor job of this. It's not that the curricula we use aren't effective—most of those that I know are; nor is it that they don't teach children good things, for those which I've used certainly do. Nor am I saying that churches use them poorly, for though I'm sure a notable percentage of churches do, I have no reason to think that that's broadly true. I can, however, second the point that John Walton recently made on the Zondervan Academic blog: most of our curricula in the American church do a brutally lousy job with Scripture. Dr. Walton does a good job of laying out the ways in which common American curricula misuse, misinterpret and misapply the Word of God, and especially of hammering home the reason why we should care:

If we are negligent of sound hermeneutics when we teach Bible to children, should it be any wonder that when they get into youth groups, Bible studies and become adults in the church, that they do not know how to derive the authoritative teaching from the text?

We all have a working hermeneutic, even though most have never taken a course. Where do we learn it? We learn it from those we respect. For many people this means that they learn their hermeneutics from their Sunday school teachers. Teachers in turn teach what is put into their hands. Perhaps we ought to be more attentive how Sunday school curriculum is teaching our children to find the authoritative teaching of God in the stories.

Stem cells: the heart of the matter

There's a fair bit to be said about embryonic stem-cell research, which I'm surprised to realize I haven't written about here hardly at all; there's the fact that research involving adult stem cells is far more promising and far more productive right now (due to the teratoma problem with embryonic stem cells), the fact that we can now produce embryonic stem cells without creating embryos, and the ways in which the pro-abortion movement is clearly using ESCR as a stalking-horse against the pro-life movement. I haven't written about any of that, but I think I'll probably do so at some point in the fairly near future, because it's an important issue—perhaps the most important moral issue of our time.

For the moment, however, I'll just point you to Tyler Dawn's recent post on the subject, which approaches it from a different angle, and a far more personal one—and in so doing, puts her finger right on the most important point. Thanks, Tyler Dawn.

What "your best life now" looks like in practice

John Stackhouse noted the other day that a lot of Christians don't care about theology because they think it's a dull, dry subject which has nothing to do with their lives. (I would note in response, as a sidebar, that these aren't people who took theology from Dr. Stackhouse.) The problem is, theology is supposed to point us somewhere, and lead us somewhere; as J. I. Packer always insisted, theology should lead to doxology (praising God), and good theology does, but bad theology leads us somewhere else instead. Even the self-help-self-gratification theology of so much pop evangelicalism, which some would say is harmless, isn't.

As Jared points out, this is the lesson of the flap over Victoria Osteen's alleged assault of an airline stewardess. Whether or not she was actually guilty of any sort of assault, what comes through loud and clear is her sense of entitlement, and her husband's. As Jared put it,

That's how Osteen and his variety of prosperity gospelism position Christian identity—to be better, higher, more favored by the world than anybody else. It is a position of entitlement.

And it is the antithesis of grace.

And when that's how you view yourself and your relation to the world, then you don't live the life of humble service to which Jesus calls us; you don't walk the road of self-sacrifice that ends in the cross; and your idea of Christian witness is not martyrdoom but one-upsmanship. It's bad practice, and it's born out of bad theology.

The Joker as vandal and the limits of moral relativism

I can tell the kind of effect The Dark Knight is having from the fact that, even though I haven't seen it, I keep running across reasons to blog about it. Whatever one's opinion of the movie itself, it's undeniably sparking some thoughtful people to write some perceptive analyses of evil, the human heart, and our Western culture. The latest is a piece by National Review's managing editor, Jason Lee Steorts, on the magazine's website called "Lessons from the Joker"; it's an interesting meditation on the Joker, moral relativism, the nature of vandalism, and the way to make moral arguments to those who don't think they believe there's any such thing as right and wrong. I won't try to summarize it—I'm still pondering it, at this point; but I encourage you to read it.

The Russian bear on a rampage

In the latest bit of bad news from around the world, Russia has invaded Georgia, a democratic ally of ours in the Caucasus Mountains that has been hoping to join NATO. Apparently, this is how Vladimir Putin hopes to keep that from happening. Here's hoping we stand up to Russia for their sake. Here's wishing we'd done that years ago.

Change and Christ’s ministry

Most of the time, when you listen to the arguments for change in the church, they usually boil down to this: the world is doing a new thing and we need to catch up with it. There are two unexamined assumptions here. The first is that giving the world what they want and expect is the best way to do the work of the church; the second is that the work of the church is our work, to be done with our tools. Both of these are false. The work of the church is God’s work; the ministry of the church is the ministry of Christ. Only Christ’s ministry is redemptive; only his power can change lives; only his work will bear fruit; only what he is doing will prosper. It’s not our job, it’s never our job, to figure out what people have already decided they want and give it to them; we’re not here to study what the world is doing this week and copy it. Rather, our job is to figure out what Jesus is doing, where his Spirit is moving, and get in on that. This isn’t our church, nor is it our ministry, that we might do as we please; it’s God’s church, and Jesus’ ministry, and we need to do as he pleases. Our focus needs to be not on what we want to do, but on what he wants us to do.

This means two things. First, we need to remember that this isn’t politics, and we shouldn’t be trying to match our ministry to the polls; it’s not our place to cater to our own preferences, or anyone else’s, either. We need to seek God, not the approval of others; our concern needs to be that we’re doing what he’s doing, and what he wants us to do. Second, we need to remember what God has led us to understand along the way, what we’ve already figured out, and to make future decisions in light of that. This is where tradition comes into play, as we remember that the church’s we is God’s royal “we,” in the sense that it’s the whole body of Christ—every nation, every era, and every theological and ecclesiological stream of thought and practice—not just the people we know or those who think like us. We cannot lightly assume our superiority to the church of times past, or in other parts of the world—indeed, we cannot assume it at all.

Does this mean the church shouldn’t change? Certainly not; we should indeed be ecclesia reformata semper reformanda, secundum verbum Dei, the church reformed and always reforming according to the Word of God. Change in non-essentials is important in that non-essential things (such as style) should always be secondary to preaching the gospel message; if those non-essentials get in the way of people hearing that message, or distort it, they should be changed promptly and with as little fuss as possible. But change should always and only be at the service of the unchanging, and never designed merely to please or soothe the culture. After all, as C. S. Lewis rightly observed, those who change with the times inevitably go where all times go.

Barack Obama's foreign vulnerability

There are a lot of people who assume that Sen. Obama, because of his heritage, will have an advantage in dealing with other countries. Part of that, as John Kerry noted, is that if he wins in November, "it would have a powerful message all across the world about the American story. About our making real the words that we live by. That all men are created equal." Part too, I think, is the idea that because he doesn't "look like the guys on the money," non-European leaders around the world will find him more appealing and accessible.

Kerry's certainly right about the symbolic value of an Obama victory—for Americans. What's somewhat questionable is the underlying assumption here that anti-black racism is only an American problem. That's simply not the case: anti-black racism is in fact a significant problem in many of the countries who pose us the biggest challenges, including China and much of the Muslim world, in which slavery of black Africans was never forbidden and continues to be practiced. As such, in dealing with countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, or with the Israel-Palestine conflict, Sen. Obama could actually find his African heritage a disadvantage. That said, it should also be noted that his heritage should be an asset for him in dealing with sub-Saharan Africa, where the US is already generally popular thanks to Bush Administration policies and which should assume increasing significance for American policy going forward.

There's another issue as well for Sen. Obama in dealing with the Muslim world, this one potentially more serious: whether he considers himself that he was ever a Muslim, on Muslim terms, he was, and he clearly isn't now (regardless of what some people might like to tell you, he's definitely a practicing Christian), which makes him an apostate, a murtad. As longtime student of the Muslim world Daniel Pipes points out, that's no small issue. Technically, this would make him subject to religious-based assassination, though it seems probable that prudence would prevail over any such impulse; but as the Christian Science Monitor realized, for the US to elect an apostate Muslim to the White House would be a huge propaganda windfall for al'Qaeda and other jihadist organizations. That, obviously, would create major foreign-policy challenges for an Obama administration.

Do these things disqualify Sen. Obama to be President? No, certainly not, nor do they mean he couldn't have a successful administration—I'm doubtful such would happen, yes, but that's for other reasons. They do mean, however, that the facile idea that electing Sen. Obama will be a boon for American foreign policy is in fact quite dubious.

The things you find by following links

There's a pro-Hillary Clinton website out there that is trying to prove that Barack Obama's birth certificate is fraudulent—that it is in fact a forgery to hide the fact that he's an Indonesian citizen.

Wow.

I have two reactions to this. One, though I'm no expert, from what little I know about the forensic analysis of documents (from reading textbooks and the like a number of years ago), the evidence behind this argument (as presented by its partisans) looks difficult to refute.

Two, the whole idea's completely insane.

Oh, and three: whether this is in fact legitimate or (more likely) the product of the fevered brains of a small group of disappointed Hillary backers, it just goes to show how far people will go these days to try to win an election. If I had to make a prediction, I'd expect this will go the same way as most of the crazy stories I've read over the years. ("Did you know Bill Clinton was running drugs out of the governor's mansion in Little Rock?" Yeah, that kind of crazy story.) Still, every once in a while, one of those stories proves out . . . if this happens to be one of them, the next couple months are going to be a real roller-coaster ride.

The evangelical heresy and the gospel antidote

It's been said by someone, I forget whom (though it may have been my old theology professor, the late Dr. Stan Grenz—it sounds like him), that the evangelical heresy is believing in our creeds rather than in Jesus. We affirm our creeds and our confessions as expressions of what we believe, and as expressions which unite us with other Christians, but we don't believe in them, only through them. Our belief is, and must always be, in God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

When we lose sight of that fact, we get into trouble, as the Rev. Dr. Ray Ortlund points out, because "no matter how well argued our position is biblically, if it functions in our hearts as an addition to Jesus, it ends up as a form of legalistic divisiveness." This is what he dubs "Galatian sociology," the sociological error of the Galatian church. Even if you believe all the right things, if you believe in those things rather than in Jesus, then you are in effect adding those things to Jesus (the error C. S. Lewis called "Christianity And"); the inevitable consequence of that is division from other Christians, and the exaltation of ourselves and our own positions at the expense of others. In contrast to that,

What unifies the church is the gospel. What defines the gospel is the Bible. What interprets the Bible correctly is a hermeneutic centered on Jesus Christ crucified, the all-sufficient Savior of sinners, who gives himself away on terms of radical grace to all alike. What proves that that gospel hermeneutic has captured our hearts is that we are not looking down on other believers but lifting them up, not seeing ourselves as better but grateful for their contribution to the cause, not standing aloof but embracing them freely, not wishing they would become like us but serving them in love (Galatians 5:13).

My Reformed friend, can you move among other Christian groups and really enjoy them? Do you admire them? Even if you disagree with them in some ways, do you learn from them? What is the emotional tilt of your heart—toward them or away from them? If your Reformed theology has morphed functionally into Galatian sociology, the remedy is not to abandon your Reformed theology. The remedy is to take your Reformed theology to a deeper level. Let it reduce you to Jesus only. Let it humble you. Let this gracious doctrine make you a fun person to be around. The proof that we are Reformed will be all the wonderful Christians we discover around us who are not Reformed. Amazing people. Heroic people. Blood-bought people. People with whom we are eternally one—in Christ alone.

The heavy yoke of self-justification

At the Synod of the Church of England at York Minster last month, just before the Lambeth Conference, the Archbishop of Canterbury preached a brave and important sermon—brave and important because he sought to apply the truth of Scripture to the situation in which the Anglican Communion finds itself. In so doing, he offered some characterizations of different parties within Anglicanism with which I don't agree, but any such quibbles are secondary; the core of his message was wise and deeply biblical. This is in keeping with what I've come to expect from Dr. Rowan Williams: even when he arrives at positions with which I disagree (as he fairly often does), he consistently gets there for the right reasons; that's as true as ever in this sermon, which is at heart a meditation on the ways in which we try to replace Jesus' well-fitted yoke with, in the words of one of the Desert Fathers, "the heavy yoke of self-justification."

There's a phrase to ponder—a heavy yoke of self-justification. That's the law, that's the curse. That's the waterless pit indeed—where we struggle ceaselessly, unrelentingly, to make ourselves more right, and to lay hold upon our future. We lay upon ourselves a heavy yoke, from which only the grace of Jesus Christ can deliver us. In a nutshell, we lay upon ourselves the yoke of desperate seriousness about ourselves.

And Christ's promise is so difficult because it's so simple. "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", as the novelist says, that is what Christ offers to us: receiving it is hard. Naaman of Assyria when he came to Elisha to be healed of his leprosy, could not believe that the answer was easy. There must be something complicated for him to do. There must be some magic to be done. The word alone, "release" is not enough. We long for, we are in love with the heavy yoke of self justification. Naaman wanted to go away from Elisha, able to say, "Well I had some part in that—I did the difficult things the prophet asked me". And Elisha, in the name of God, tells him to do something simple, to immerse himself in the mercy of God. And when Jesus says, "Our yoke is easy and my burden is light", that is what he says, to all of us as individuals, to us as a Synod, to us as a Church, to us as a society, to us as a human world: lay aside the obsession to possess the future, receive the word of promise, here. And that's why, as Jesus himself says in the gospel, that's why only some people really do hear the word easily—only the tax collectors and the sinners. . . .

He alone rests in that eternal, unifiable life. That is why he says, "Come to me and I will give you rest; I will give you sight; I will bring you hope."

"My yoke is easy; my burden is light", which is why we need to be where he is, nowhere else, where he is with the Father.

This is a sermon to read (or listen to; video is available below and on the page with the transcript) with our hearts wide open, that the Spirit may use it to bring us to repentance, and to greater wisdom.

HT: Alan Jacobs

The way the future used to be

It's an interesting thing to go back and read American popular fiction from the 1970s—especially, in my experience, near-future science fiction of the period—and see the view presented there of America and its future. What you find, or at least what I've found, is (to use Jimmy Carter's least favorite word) a deep malaise, a sense that the US had become (to quote one of Spider Robinson's characters) a "tired old fraud" whose decline was inevitable. Across various genres, from liberals like SF's Robinson to conservatives like the political novelist Allen Drury, the theme and tone is the same, varying only between "woe is us" and "good riddance": America is fading, decaying, declining, its time at the peak of its success near its end.

It's interesting, as I say, because the actual 1980s ended up looking so vastly different from the 1980s envisioned by novelists in the 1970s, the era of Watergate, gasoline rationing, the hostage crisis in Iran, and, yes, the famous "malaise" speech; rather than ongoing economic collapse and a continuing loss of influence abroad, the decade saw the reassertion of American strength and power, both economically and diplomatically/militarily. By 1984, "It's morning in America" would be a potent campaign theme, and the decade would end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and talk of America as the world's only superpower.

Why? A change in leadership. The election of Ronald Reagan as President in 1980, bearing a message of optimism about America's future and confidence in American strength, combined with economic policies which have set the terms for a quarter-century of economic growth and prosperity, was a major part of this. In Britain, which was having similar problems in the '70s, it was Margaret Thatcher's rise to power in 1979. And though his authority and influence were largely of a different kind, it's surely no coincidence that around the same time Bishop Karol Wojtyla took the throne of St. Peter as Pope John Paul II; he made no economic policies and wielded no armies, though he had many wise things to say about both economics and the world scene, yet surely there have been few people in recent decades who have done more to inspire people and give them a sense that there is reason to hope than he did.

It is a telling thing that the Democratic Party has now nominated a presidential candidate who gives us the vision of Jimmy Carter in the visionary language of Ronald Reagan. Whether it's telling because it means that liberalism has changed, or because it means that we've forgotten that it hasn't, remains to be seen.

The myth of choice

As I'm continuing my “catch-up tour,” I dove back into Confessing Evangelical, John Halton's blog, this afternoon; John's a British Lutheran, and his blog is one of the deepest I know, especially but not only theologically. It's really not an easy one to catch up on—far better to stay abreast of it, really—but I'm enjoying getting back into it. I particularly appreciate his newest post, “I choose, therefore I am,” in which he addresses “the myth of personal autonomous choice—that our decisions are free, conscious, independent, entirely ours alone”—and the difficulty we have in combating that myth. I think his conclusion is particularly important (it's something I tell my congregation fairly often):

I am not denying that we make true choices, and that those are truly our choices. However, what I am saying is we need to be more suspicious of our choices, and more aware of the forces that are at work in influencing them.

Wise words. I encourage you to read the rest of it.

The Dark Knight of the soul

"My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil."

—Flannery O'Connor

I have not seen The Dark Knight, nor did I ever really intend to; I don't watch all that many movies (though it's nice to be able to see them in the theater again), and I've never been a Batman fan. It does sound like a remarkable movie, though, judging from the reviews—and, no less, from the arguments over it in the Christian blogosphere. I know Thinklings Phil and Jared loved it, and I know Brant Hansen hated it, and their reactions seem to be pretty much representative. The most interesting response, though, has to have been the question Grant Thomas asked:

What would Flannery O'Connor think?

As he points out, given her artistic philosophy and her view of what it takes to communicate the reality of sin and grace to an unbelieving world, there's good reason to think that she would have approved of the movie.

I think Flannery would say that Joker shows us that the world we are living in is in the territory of the devil. . . .

I think in light of what I've been reading from Flannery O'Connor, that she would applaud the film for showing evil for what it is. Not only does it make evil look evil (rather than funny like in the old Adam West TV series), but I think Flannery would say that we need the Joker to realize how much we need grace. We need him to wear make up to realize that this kind of person should seem out of place in our world when most of the time we simply think this sort of thing is normal or at least tolerable.

As I said, I haven't seen the movie to be able to judge, but what Grant says here makes sense to me. Read the whole post, including his several quotations from Flannery O'Connor, and see what you think.

HT: Joyce

Sooner or later?

There's a bit of a debate going on (in the comments on this post, for instance, where it's obviously among those pulling for Sarah Palin) as to whether John McCain should name his running mate before Barack Obama or wait until after Sen. Obama has made his pick. Personally, I don't see the advantage to waiting. I stand by what I wrote earlier in my open letter to Sen. McCain, that I think he needs to act and force Sen. Obama to react; he needs to set the agenda, the standard and the tempo so that Sen. Obama needs to play catch-up, rather than dancing to Sen. Obama's tune. Given the dynamics of this election, I do not believe Sen. McCain can afford to be seen as secondary, an "anything you can do I can do better" candidate with no ideas or initiative of his own; he can't let Sen. Obama drive the bus, he needs to take the wheel and drive it himself.

This is not an election for the conventional approach. That's one of the reasons why I think Sen. McCain needs to name Gov. Palin as his running mate, and why I argued in my open letter that he should take an unusual approach to selecting his cabinet team: if Sen. McCain is going to win, he needs to shake up the conventional wisdom and cross up people's expectations. Fortunately for him, he's good at that.

From politicians to squirrels

I think it's an upgrade. Certainly, this is too funny for words . . .

HT: Joyce (Like I said, I'm getting caught up.)

Head falls off hatchet—news at 11!

CNN announced today that Anderson Cooper would be doing a story on Sarah Palin and the Monegan affair—news which of course raised the question of whether it would be a fair story or a hatchet job. It would appear that it was intended to be the latter, because after a number of people connected with Adam Brickley's blog e-mailed CNN with some pertinent facts about the case, Cooper dropped the story. Taken all in all, I'm inclined to agree with Adam's conclusion on this:

Maybe they'll try to go back and rework the story using better facts, but I'm guessing that there won't be any new attempt now that they know just how bad this story would have made them look. "Troopergate" is one of the most poorly executed hit jobs I've seen in my life, and this proves that it has no legs.

The things we leave behind

The road which the church is called to walk as we follow Jesus Christ toward the kingdom of God is a road rather like the Oregon Trail: it leads to someplace better, but it isn’t an easy road. Back in the days of the Oregon Trail, families heading west often started off with far too much baggage; when they hit the Rockies, they found they had to leave many of their things behind, or else they wouldn’t make it across the mountains, and so along the trail one could find tables, beds, dressers, and other pieces of furniture abandoned by families who needed to lighten the load. The road behind Jesus is similarly littered. Matthew and Zacchaeus left behind their tax booths, and the fortunes they had stolen. Simon and Andrew, James and John, left behind their boats, and the family business. St. Francis of Assisi left behind a rich inheritance. John Newton, the author of “Amazing Grace,” left behind the slave trade. Sundar Singh left behind his religion and his family.

Some of the things God calls us to give up if we are to follow him are sinful, some aren’t; some are easy to give up, while others are bitterly difficult to let go. Some are harmful in themselves, while others merely absorb time and energy to no real gain. But all of them are things which compete with his will in our lives, and so they are things which we need to lay aside if we want to follow Jesus on his road. The work of discipleship is, ultimately, the work of aligning ourselves with the grain of God’s will, and against the grain of everything that competes with his will—including many of our own desires, and many of the world’s expectations. The good news is, as Michael Card and Scott Roley wrote a couple decades ago, that there is freedom to be found if we leave all these things behind to follow our Lord.

Things We Leave Behind

There sits Simon, foolish and wise;
Proudly he's tending his nets.
Then Jesus calls, and the boats drift away,
And all that he owns he forgets.
More than the nets he abandoned that day,
He found that his pride was soon drifting away.

It's hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.

Matthew was mindful of taking the tax,
And pressing the people to pay.
Hearing the call, he responded in faith
And followed the Light and the Way.
Leaving the people so puzzled, he found
The greed in his heart was no longer around.

It's hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.

Bridge
Every heart needs to be set free from possessions that hold it so tight
'Cause freedom's not found in the things that we own—
It's the power to do what is right.
With Jesus our only possession, then giving becomes our delight,
And we can't imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.

We show a love for the world in our lives
By worshipping goods we possess;
Jesus said, "Lay all your treasures aside,
And love God above all the rest."
'Cause when we say "No" to the things of the world,
We open our hearts to the love of the Lord, and

It's hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.
Oh, and it's hard to imagine the freedom we find
From the things we leave behind.

Words and music: Michael Card and Scott Roley
© 1986 Whole Armour Publishing.
From the album Scribbling in the Sand, by Michael Card

In defense of the church, part V: process

There are churches out there that are actively poisonous, no question, and there are people who have been badly hurt by such churches. (Not all of them are in the pews, either—some are pastors.) That said, there are a lot of folks out there complaining about the church for a lot less reason, whose gritching essentially boils down to “the church isn’t perfect according to my standards.” Well, no, it isn’t. You aren’t perfect according to its standards either, believe me. There are three things that need to be said here:

1) It's an old saw, but it bears repeating because it obviously hasn’t occurred to a lot of people: If you ever find a perfect church, it will stop being perfect the minute you join. This is the most basic thing to understand: every church is an imperfect combination of imperfect people, of whom you are one.

2) Every good church is in process: specifically, in the process of being grown by God the Father through the work of Jesus Christ as applied to us in the power of the Holy Spirit into the church which God intends for us to be. Every church will hurt you at times; every church will let you down at times; every church will fall short of what it’s supposed to be at times. That’s because every church is made up of people, and people do that. What matters is how they respond to those times, and particularly how the leadership responds; churches ought to admit their failures and shortcomings, apologize and try to make things right, and then work to address them and get better. A church that generally does that, with leaders who usually model that approach, deserve support and praise, not to be bashed for their mistakes. (Even the best of churches won’t always respond as they should; when they don’t, though, they should be corrected gently and graciously, with humility about our own imperfection.)

We have to understand that we can’t expect the church to get everything right; the most we have the right to expect is that the church be in the right process, moving in the right direction. That’s what the church is, after all: not a bunch of people who have it all together, but a bunch of people who are together, growing together, following Jesus together, and helping each other along the way. We need, as Jared put it, to be willing to “submit to community,” even with all its inevitable imperfections, if we're going to live as Christ calls us to live.

3) If you want to receive grace, show grace. It amazes me how many people gracelessly and self-righteously bash churches for being graceless and self-righteous. If you show that sort of attitude, you’re as much a problem as the church you’re criticizing.

The general principle here, it seems to me, is one that Tim Lane and Paul Tripp articulate well in their book Relationships: A Mess Worth Making, in a passage quoted by Jimmy D. at Cruciform Life:

Worshipping God as Savior means that I acknowledge that I am a sinner in relationship with other sinners. I remember that you are still in the middle of God’s work of redemption—as am I. He is still convicting you, teaching you, and changing your heart. He is faithfully doing all these things at the best time and in the best way possible. None of us ever gets to be in relationship with a finished person. God’s redemptive work of change is ongoing in all of our lives. When I forget this, I become self-righteous, impatient, critical, and judgmental. I give in to the temptation to play God and try to change you in ways only God can . . .

When I fail to worship God as Savior, I am too casual about my sin and too focused on yours. Our relationships are often harmed when we try to atone for our own sins while condemning the other person for his. When you are sinned against, you will be impacted by the weaknesses and failures of that other person. When this happens, you need to allow God to use you as an instrument in His redemptive hands rather than seeking to make changes in the other person yourself. Only God can accomplish these things. Are you trying to do work in someone’s life that only the Savior can do? (HT: Jared)

Many churches are guilty of this mistake on a systemic level, and I don’t blame anyone for avoiding such congregations. Even those that aren’t, even those that consciously teach and preach and disciple against this, will still struggle with it, because it’s one of the subtlest of the sins that beset us, and one of the most insidious forms of spiritual pride. But when we bash “the church” for being imperfect without acknowledging our own imperfection, when we denounce “the church” as sinful without confessing that we too are sinners—when we insist that the problems of “the church” are everyone else’s fault and we are innocent of all responsibility and all blame—then we too are guilty of being “too casual about my sin and too focused on yours.”

There are, to be sure, many congregations that have problems that are intractable, and many people who have worn themselves out trying (and failing) to bring change to such congregations; but the answer to that is not to write off “the church” as a whole. Rather, it’s to find a church that will love you for who you are while you heal, and in which, when you’re ready, you can step up and use the gifts God has given you to help grow his church into what he wants us all to be. I do not deny that the church is imperfect, sin-riddled, flawed; I simply deny that that’s justification for attacking or dismissing it. Rather, it’s our call to do our part to help fix the problem.

Previous posts in this series:

Part I: Preaching

Part II: The institution

Part III: Doctrine

Part IV: Jesus

On this blog in history: January 2007

Jared made a point today over at Gospel-Driven Church that I've been thinking about for a bit as well:

One of the inherent weaknesses in the medium of the weblog is the virtual temporariness of the best writing. A good solid piece may exist on a main page for a brief time, and then it disappears into the aether of the archives or random web searches. If a blogger attracts new readers, they will likely never see past posts unless they are the thorough sorts who read archives. But most are not.

His solution to that is to start reposting pieces, which is something I've thought about doing as well, but decided against. Given Jared's example, though, I'm going to try a different approach to the same issue: putting up links posts to past material on this blog. To organize it, I'm going to limit each post to a particular month—maybe everything worth linking from that month, maybe not, depending. We'll see how this works. I'll start with January of 2007 because, though I began this blog in 2003, that was the month in which I first started posting consistently. (Even then, it wasn't much.)

Umm, what was that about grace?
On the confusion of grace and justice.

The butterfly effect and the providence of God
On the ways God works through every circumstance.

The parable of the three little pigs
"The day of the Lord is like three little pigs who went out into the world to make their fortunes. . . ."

Raoul Wallenberg, RIP

As long as we're celebrating great figures in the fight against tyranny, today is a good day to honor one of my heroes, Raoul Wallenberg; this would be his 91st birthday, had he lived. For those not familiar with Wallenberg, he was a Swedish humanitarian sent to Hungary during WW II to rescue Jews from the Holocaust, and is one of those honored at Yad Vashem. He wasn’t officially an ambassador—he was appointed as the secretary to the Swedish legation to Hungary in 1944—but he effectively was, for he had been authorized by no less than the king of Sweden to operate completely independently of the ambassador. His purpose in Budapest was to rescue the Jews of Hungary from the Holocaust. Between his arrival that July and the arrival of the Soviets, who arrested him and sent him off to Moscow, never to be seen again, he saved at least 20,000 Jews and perhaps as many as 100,000. Wallenberg had the courage not to go with the flow in Europe at that time, but to seek to change it at the risk of his life; he had the courage to carry out the desire of his government to save as many Jews as possible from Hitler’s “Final Solution.” That his courage and faithfulness led to his death is no surprise; that he lost his life not at the hands of the Nazis but at the hands of Hungary's Soviet “liberators” is one of history’s bitter ironies.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, RIP

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts."

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The world lost one of its giants today: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is dead of a stroke at the age of 89. Novelist, historian, poet, Soviet dissident, cultural critic . . . to try to sum up the meaning and significance of this towering modern-day prophet, one of the deepest thinkers and most powerful bearers of Christian witness of our age, is beyond the scope of anything so brief as a blog post, though John Piper took a good shot (thanks to Jared for the link); I've linked a few articles below in an effort to do what my words cannot do. For me, the least I can do is to say that our world would be vastly poorer had he never lived. Requiescat in pace, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; you have earned your rest as much as anyone can.

The Last Prophet

Traducing Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn and Modern Literature

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology

Paul Weyrich: A Tribute to Alexander Solzhenitsyn

25 Years

Lions

Skeptical conversations, part VIII: The gifts of the Spirit

Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-VII here. Also, I've updated the credo Wordle post.

But this is starting to move me into ecclesiology—the doctrine of the church—and I’m not done talking about the Spirit yet. If the first element of the Spirit’s work is to reveal the Father and the Son, the second comes at the point of conversion. It is the Son who atoned for our sins on the cross, but it is the Spirit who mediates that to us.

A: What do you mean by that?

R: The work of conversion is the work of the Spirit. It is he who moves us to conviction that we have sinned, and he who calls us to repentance; and it is he who applies the saving work of Christ to us, who sets us free from sin and regenerates us. From that point on, then, the Spirit of God lives within us, which is the third thing which must be said about his work. The Spirit brings us into the fellowship of the Trinity, bearing our prayers to Jesus, interceding for us when we do not know what to pray, and speaking to us in return; and as he began our transformation by bringing us new life, so he works to continue that transformation, nurturing that new life in us and making us more and more like Jesus.

A: And you say this process is going on in every Christian?

R: Yes.

A: I would think, if that were so, that I would see more evidence of that. I can’t say that I see very much.

R: In part, I’d say that there are many who call themselves Christian and aren’t saved; Jesus made it very clear that this would be the case. Certainly there are some remarkable perversions of the gospel out there.

A: Such as that church with their picket signs that say “God Hates Fags”?

R: Ahh, yes, Fred Phelps and his “church.” They do make the rest of us look rather bad, don’t they? But of course, I have to be careful in saying that—I know full well that I make Christians and the church look bad sometimes; and if spiritual pride, which is the sin of the Pharisees, is a subtler sort of betrayal, it’s no less poisonous for all that. Indeed, since it tends to creep in when we do something good, if we don’t watch it pride can corrupt all our victories. That illustrates, I think, the other point that needs to be made, which is that sanctification—the process of becoming holy—is a long, hard fight.

In truth, you might say that it’s two processes side by side. One is the unceasing war on sin, the work of putting sin to death; the other is what you might call the positive element, which is the work of nurturing the good. They are closely interwoven, of course, since our soul is going to grow something, whether it is good or bad; clearing out the weeds is an important part of caring for the good plants, while efforts to kill weeds are rather pointless without trying to grow something valuable in their place. Both, however, are the work of the Spirit in us, and both are also our work; once again, we have that combination. Paul puts it this way in Philippians 2:12-13: “Work out your salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”

A: Interesting. I’ve heard people talk about the Holy Spirit before, but only Pen­tecostals, and they seemed more interested in justifying some fairly odd behavior.

R: Ahh, yes. Well, through his Spirit God has given his people gifts to contribute to the work of the church. Note that well, because a lot of Christians don’t really realize it: these are gifts of the Spirit to the church, not just to the individual, and so they aren’t necessarily new to the person who uses them. Some of the gifts of the Spirit are natural abilities which he blesses—administration, for example, or leadership.

A: Administration is a gift of the Spirit?

R: Well, it’s included in a list of them in 1 Corinthians 12. After all, running a church isn’t any easier than running a business; I can testify from personal experience that having someone gifted in that respect to take care of administrative tasks is a great blessing. It might not seem “spiritual,” but it’s a real asset to the ministry of the church. Anyway, many of the gifts of the Spirit are what you might call natural gifts—the gift of teaching is another example—but the supernatural gifts, such as prophecy, healing and tongues, tend to be the ones that draw the attention. It’s understandable, as they’re somewhat spectacular and tend to provoke strong reactions one way or the other.

A lot of people hold that the Spirit doesn’t give these gifts anymore, but I don’t think that argument holds water. The arguments from Scripture for this position are questionable at best, and the experience of the church worldwide doesn’t support it. For what it’s worth, my own experience doesn’t either, as I have seen the gifts of prophecy, healing, tongues, and words of knowledge and wisdom used to build up and strengthen the church; so for all those reasons, I believe that the Spirit still gifts his people in those ways.

That said, it is clear that there is great potential for self-deception and counterfeit gifts, and so it becomes very important to test any apparent supernatural gift. For example, one of my NT professors in college was a Pentecostal (as were all of my NT professors in seminary; rather an odd thing, that), and her rule for dealing with any apparent prophecy was not to trust it unless the Scripture supported it. Indeed, most of the time I have seen someone receive a word for a church or another person, it has been a word of Scripture—which would be a case of the Spirit directing the application of the text he inspired. I wouldn’t want to establish that as a typical means of exegeting Scripture—

A: Sorry, what does that mean?

R: My apologies—force of habit. Exegesis is the process of drawing out the meaning of a biblical text. It goes together with hermeneutics, which is the process of interpreting that meaning for and applying it to the needs and concerns of one’s audience. Rough definitions. Anyway, I’m a believer in careful exegesis supported by careful and detailed study of the Bible, and just because someone quotes Scripture doesn’t necessarily mean what they say is from the Spirit––the Devil knows the Bible, too, after all. The key is whether the statement offered is in line with the whole of Scripture, not just one proof-text; but then, that goes for all our efforts to interpret the Bible, all of which should be illuminated by the Spirit.

In any case, just to summarize: yes, I believe that the Spirit still gives people supernatural gifts, but these must be tested when they manifest themselves to ensure that they are truly from the Spirit of God. It seems to me, though, that to deny that he can or will give such gifts is rooted in our discomfort with them, and that such a denial is in essence an attempt to limit God, to make him more comfortable and predictable—and that is always a dangerous thing to do.

A: You seem to be a firm believer in a dangerous God.

R: I’m not sure “dangerous” is the right word; I would say “perilous,” perhaps because that’s the word Tolkien uses in The Lord of the Rings to describe those who are good and beautiful beyond the ability of mere mortals to handle. I like the way the writer Annie Dillard put it:

Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offence, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”—and I don’t think “fear” just means “respect.” He loves us, but everything about him is so much greater than we are that even his love for us is perilous—we cannot accept it and remain unchanged. Or as Lewis always has it said in Narnia, he’s not a tame lion. Good beyond imagining, but anything but tame.

A: I’m beginning to think that you’re a Christian for the same reason you’re a Tolkien fan.

R: Good, but backwards: I’m a Tolkien fan for the same reason I’m a Christian. For that matter, so was Tolkien, I think. But the thirst for God is primary, and underlies every other desire for that which is good and true and beautiful, and most especially the longing for something more, because God is the source of all that is good and true and beautiful, and because St. Augustine was right—our hearts are restless until they rest in him.

A: Either that or it’s the evolutionary impulse pushing us forward.

R: You could look at it that way, of course. In any case, I want to go back to my assertion that the gifts of the Spirit are gifts not primarily to the individuals who receive them but to the church. We often don’t think of them that way; we think of them as “my gifts,” even if we realize that we have been given them in order to build up the church. But it’s clear from the contexts in which these gifts are mentioned that they are truly gifts to the church through its individual members; the lists in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12, for instance, occur together with Paul’s description of the church as the body of Christ, in which all the members fit together and each has a role to fill. But while this doesn’t fit our individualistic culture, it does fit the biblical understanding of the church, which is that God calls individuals not as lone wolves but as members of a larger community. His covenant is not with individuals as such but with a people.

Barack Obama: Counting chickens before the eggs are even laid

During Sen. Obama’s recent trip abroad, John McCain charged him with hubris, saying the freshman senator from Chicago was acting like he’s already president. Sen. McCain wasn’t the only one who noticed, either; Paul Weyrich concluded that this was one reason the trip didn’t seem to benefit Sen. Obama.

The Obama campaign began referring to the candidate as if he already were president. . . .

It might have worked but for the contempt the electorate has for the media. I saw at least half a dozen interviews on cables over the air networks. In every case voters said, “He is behaving as if he were already elected.” Most said, “That isn’t right.”

Now it turns out that there was even more reason for that feeling than we knew, because the media have been trying to sweep it under the rug: while in Afghanistan, Sen. Obama told a CBS correspondent that

the objective of this trip was to have substantive discussions with people like President Karzai or Prime Minister Maliki or President Sarkozy or others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to 10 years. [Emphasis mine.]

And it's important for me to have a relationship with them early, that I start listening to them now, getting a sense of what their interests and concerns are.

Now, there are two problems with this. One, it shows once again (as did his “57 states” gaffe) that Sen. Obama has a tendency to get sloppy with numbers—which wouldn’t be a big deal except for the fact that the MSM forgive it in him when they would never forgive it in Sen. McCain. Still, it does raise the question (if only half-seriously), “does this ‘Constitutional scholar’ not realize that there is this little thing called the 22nd Amendment that holds a president to only two, four year terms? Um, that would be a grand total of only 8 years, Barack, not 8 to 10.”

The more serious problem in my book is that it shows considerable presumption, and equal hubris, on Sen. Obama’s part. Who is he to expect to be elected President? And beyond that, who is he now to expect that after being elected, he’ll be re-elected four years from now? And as the invaluable Beldar put it,

If Barack Obama is this cocky and this sloppy now, when he’s not yet even the official nominee of his party, then just how much more insufferable and how much more reckless will he be if he actually does become president of the world’s only remaining superpower?

The arrogance underlying his statement is staggering; it makes my head hurt just to think about it. I wanted to like and respect this guy, I really did, even though I knew I’d never vote for him—but honestly, the more I see of him, the less I think of him.

Segregated worship

And no, I don't mean racial segregation, problem though that is in the American church; as J. I. Packer noted recently in Modern Reformation, segregation by age groups is increasingly a problem as well, and perhaps an even bigger one. As Dr. Packer says,

In the New Testament, the Christian church is an all-age community, and in real life the experience of the family to look no further should convince us that the interaction of the ages is enriching. The principle is that generations should be mixed up in the church for the glory of God. That doesn't mean we shouldn't disciple groups of people of the same age or the same sex separately from time to time. That's a good thing to do. But for the most part, the right thing is the mixed community in which everybody is making the effort to understand and empathize with all the other people in the other age groups. Make the effort is the key phrase here. Older people tend not to make the effort to understand younger people, and younger people are actually encouraged not to make the effort to understand older people. That's a loss of a crucial Christian value in my judgment. If worship styles are so fixed that what's being offered fits the expectations, the hopes, even the prejudices, of any one of these groups as opposed to the others, I don't believe the worship style glorifies God, and some change, some reformation, some adjustment, and some enlargement of spiritual vision is really called for.

(My thanks to Andy Naselli for the quote; MR on the web is subscription-only.)

Hypocrites at Panera

I've gotten the chance this week, among other things, to catch back up on some of the blogs I try to follow; this post over at Between Two Worlds made my jaw drop. Do they really not see the disconnect here? I won't even try to comment; just go read it for yourself.

Death calls us to life

Death calls us to life, because death shows us that what this world understands as life isn’t enough. That, if you face it, will drive you crazy—or it will make you sane.

Fear of the culture and the American church

Fear of the culture has driven the church in a lot of ways over the last two or three centuries. The first part of the story is the birth and rise of modern liberal theology. (Note, I said liberal theology, not liberal politics; this isn’t about whether one voted for John Kerry, or supports Barack Obama. Though it can be related, it’s a different set of issues, as can be seen from the number of prominent evangelical leaders who are quite liberal politically, such as Ron Sider and Tony Campolo.) Liberal Protestantism, though its roots may go back further, began in earnest in 1799 when Friedrich Schleiermacher published his book On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. Schleiermacher, who was only 29 when he began writing this book, was part of a group of young upper-class German intellectuals who met weekly to discuss the ideas of the day. Though the others in the group respected and admired him for his intelligence and wit, though he became quite good friends with most of them, and though he shared most of their beliefs, in one key respect they could not understand him at all. You see, most of those in Schleiermacher’s circle were convinced and passionate atheists, people who despised religion, while Schleiermacher was a minister, a chaplain at the Charity Hospital in Berlin; how could he share so many of their beliefs and yet be a Christian? His closest friends in the group decided to resolve the issue: at Schleiermacher’s birthday party, they badgered him into writing a book.

Though he initially tried to avoid writing it, Schleiermacher took the task quite seriously. His purpose as he set pen to paper was not to challenge his friends’ beliefs, nor to bring them to an encounter with the transcendent, personal, holy God of the Bible; rather, his aim was to present them with a conception of religion, and particularly of Christianity, that they could accept on their own terms. He sought, in other words, to produce a version of religion that fit with what the educated culture already believed, to accommodate religion to that culture. Given the beliefs and expectations of that culture, he produced an interpretation of Christian faith that sounds closer to Buddhism than to historic Christianity, in which religion is “to be one with the Infinite and in every moment to be eternal”; and while those who followed after him argued with one aspect or another of the picture he painted, producing their own pictures of religion to fit their own cultural situations, they accepted his approach to theology, seeking to conform their faith not to Scripture but to the demands of their culture. Thus, we had a later German scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, “demythologize” the New Testament, removing all miracles and other supernatural elements; after all, the educated people of his time didn’t believe in miracles, so there couldn’t have been any.

Around the same time as Bultmann was beginning his career, a backlash was beginning in America. Between 1910 and 1915 a series of twelve booklets were published, titled “The Fundamentals,” which set out five fundamental doctrines of orthodox Christianity. These were: the doctrine of the Trinity; the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, that Jesus was fully human and also fully God; the doctrine of the literal physical Second Coming of Christ; the doctrine that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, by Christ alone; and the doctrine that Scripture is the inerrant word of God. In 1920 the term “fundamentalism” was coined to describe the beliefs of those who held to these five fundamentals, as over against those who didn’t, and for a couple of decades, that’s all it meant. In the 1940s, however, there was a split among those who held to these fundamentals, resulting in a new group which came to be known as “evangelicals.”

The cause of the split was, once again, fear of the culture. The fundamentalist movement had fought liberal theology on detail after detail for years, but it had absorbed the belief that the gospel cannot address the dominant culture without changing; so, refusing (rightly) to conform the gospel to the culture, fundamentalism moved to wall out the culture. When some leaders in the fundamentalist movement—most notably a radio preacher named Charles Fuller, who would give his name to Fuller Seminary—sought to go in a different direction, it was that which provoked the split and launched the modern American evangelical movement.

There was good reason for that, as the cultural separatism of fundamentalism is problematic on a number of levels. Though it has been a pretty effective way to ensure doctrinal purity, it has severely restricted the witness of that part of the American church. What is more, far too many kids who grow up in that subculture go off to college and see their faith melt on their first real encounter with people of other beliefs; sadly, the result of such encounters tends to be people who don’t believe in much of anything anymore.

Unfortunately, while fundamentalism represents the most obvious expression of, and response to, fear of the culture, it continues to be a problem as well for both liberals and evangelicals, if in subtler ways. Specifically, I think many among both liberals and evangelicals are at some level afraid to challenge the assumptions of the culture to which they belong, and so choose to conform their preaching and ministry to fit their culture; the only difference, really, is which section of American culture they’re conforming to. Thus in evangelical circles it seems that most pastors aspire to lead megachurches, and the whole idea of the church as a business and the pastor as its CEO has become very powerful in the last decade or two; thus we have influential pastors of evangelical churches openly measuring their success by their market share. Effectively, then, you can measure how good your ministry is by how good you are at giving your “customers” what they want, whether that be in the music selection on Sunday mornings, in the range of programs you offer, or whatever. The result, too often, is the baptism of American consumer culture, and the Jesus who once overturned the tables of the moneychangers is used to sell coffee mugs, T-shirts and figurines.

The flip side to that is the liberal wing of the American church, which is tuned into a very different strain of American culture. Among liberal pastors, it seems to be an article of faith that our culture—by which they mean the culture of our elites—must correct the Scriptures, rather than the other way around. The Bible, on this view, is a rather outdated book produced by cultures that didn’t know as much as we do about biology, psychology, physics, and any number of other things; therefore, if the Scriptures contradict what our culture believes it knows, we are justified in concluding that it is the Bible that is wrong and must be brought into line. Thus orthodoxy is dismissed as old-fashioned and outdated, as if the truth of a statement could be determined by its age, and by whether or not our culture finds it amenable.

What we need—and it isn’t easy—is to get free of that fear of what the culture thinks of us, and what it might do to us, and to learn to speak the truth whether it’s what people want to hear from us or not. Democracy is the greatest form of government this world has yet invented (which, as Winston Churchill noted, isn’t saying much), but it has the unfortunate tendency to give us the mindset that truth is determined by majority vote; we need to shake ourselves free of that mindset and learn to recognize, and challenge, the unexamined assumptions in our culture that conflict with the character and will of God. We need to learn to look for the unasked questions, and ask them, knowing that we will be challenged if we do, and then stand up to that challenge. If our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world can stand up to persecution when it might cost them their lives, the least we can do in America (and in the West as a whole) is take a little verbal abuse.

Is liberation theology collapsing under its own weight?

A recent dispute between two major figures in the movement's rise, the Brazilian brothers Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, suggests that maybe it is. Certainly, having a significant liberation theologian suddenly turn and unleash a devastating critique of the core assumptions of liberation theology strongly suggests that the movement's day is drawing to a close; and for the response to be less about answering the arguments in that critique than about impugning it as a power grab suggests that it was never really all that theologically sound to begin with, that it was really more about the politics all the time. It also serves as a useful reminder that those who spend all their time denouncing the errors of others are usually those least able (or willing) to accept correction of their own.

HT: Presbyweb

The Pelosi Administration is gearing up

When I lived in Canada, I used to describe the Canadian government as an elected dictatorship. This is because Canada is a parliamentary democracy in which the standing rules of Parliament gave the Prime Minister an extraordinary amount of power to coerce and punish MPs (Members of Parliament) who don’t cooperate (I don't believe that’s changed, but I can’t say for certain). As a consequence, the people of Canada elected the parliament every so often, thus determining who would be the PM, and the PM then pretty much ruled as dictator until the next election. To me, it seemed like rather a travesty of democracy (though to the Natural Governing Party, aka the Canadian Liberal Party, it seemed like a pretty good deal, at least during their long stretch in power).

It appears, however, that Nancy Pelosi doesn’t share my opinion; judging by her behavior today, in which she attempted to use all the powers of her office to shut up a GOP challenge to her preferred policies, it seems she would like the same ability to dominate, manipulate, and otherwise control the House of Representatives that Jean Chrétien once wielded in the Parliament of Canada. Fortunately for us—and I do mean for all of us; if her tactics work, they might be good for the Democratic Party in the short run, but they’ll be bad for the nation in the medium and long run—some of the House GOP have been displaying unaccustomed backbone in the face of her political thuggery, refusing to go home like whipped curs with their tails between their legs. I particularly appreciated this line from Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter: “This is the people’s House. This is not Pelosi’s politiburo.” Amen to that.

The Anchoress is encouraging supporters to call their GOP representative, if they have one, to express their support, and also to call Speaker Pelosi’s office to express disagreement (politely and respectfully!). Personally, I’d go one step further: call your House member, whomever that might be and of whatever party they might be, and make it clear to them that you support democracy, not the attempt to use the rules and bylaws of our government to squash democracy; if issues can’t be debated fairly and squarely because someone like the Speaker of the House uses strongarm tactics to silence opposition, we’re in big trouble.

HT: Bill

Follow the evidence

As I sit here, CSI is going in the other room; it's an old episode, of course, but apparently someone was interested in watching it. I didn't like the episode well enough the first time around to want to watch it again, so I'm in here tapping the keys.

It did spark a thought, though: the preacher's job in studying Scripture (and anyone's, really) is much the same as that of a criminalist or forensic scientist: follow the evidence, wherever it leads. When we run into problems—as individuals, as churches, as denominations—is usually when we set the evidence aside in favor of what we want to believe, or start allowing our preferred conclusions to distort our interpretation of the evidence. As Christians, we need to let Scripture speak for itself, to seek to understand it on its own terms, to the best of our ability; we need to allow it to tell us things that we don't want to hear, to challenge our comfortable assumptions and stretch our cozy faith. We need to allow God to speak through his Word to lead us to the truth, rather than insisting on leading ourselves to our own ideas.

As Gil Grissom is wont to say, “people lie, but the evidence never does.” To be sure, we're never guaranteed to interpret that evidence correctly—even when we're trying our best to be faithful, we still make mistakes because we're still limited; but we can trust the Spirit to work through the process to correct our errors, if we're open to correction. It isn't solely on our shoulders to get it right—that's the work of the Spirit in and through us; ours is to learn to get our own agendas out of the way so that they don't block the Spirit's work.

Sarah Palin hits the bullseye

John McCain leads Barack Obama among women over 40—normally a solidly Democratic voting bloc. To take advantage of this, Dick Morris concludes, McCain should take dead aim at this demographic, perhaps by selecting a female running mate who would appeal to them.

To do that, are there any better options than Alaska's Sarah Palin? I don't think so; and as Adam Brickley points out, people are noticing. Gov. Palin for VP.

Barack's Iraq doubletalk

I've noted before that Barack Obama's position on Iraq hasn't been as consistent as he likes to make it out to be (he even went so far in 2004 as to tell the Chicago Tribune, “There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage”—which doesn't square with his statement earlier this year that “I opposed this war in 2002, 2003, 4, 5, 6, and 7”); but this video (produced, of course, by the McCain campaign), which consists almost entirely of clips of Sen. Obama, makes his back-and-forth record on the situation in Iraq, and I think the fundamental cynicism with which he has approached the whole issue, excruciatingly clear:

I am increasingly suspicious that should Sen. Obama be elected President in November, those who voted for him will find what the liberal netroots are already finding: he is indeed “the black Bill Clinton,” and his promises are secondary to the political needs of the moment.

Yeah, I think I can stop worrying about Sarah Palin

For all that sites like Daily Ko[ok]s have been crowing over the Walt Monegan brouhaha in Alaska and proclaiming it the death knell for Gov. Palin (and for Lt. Gov. Parnell in his run for the House), it appears the people of Alaska aren't buying it: an independent poll has her favorable rating still at 80%.

As regards Daily Kos' premature dancing on Gov. Palin's grave, I'm irresistibly reminded of C. S. Lewis' dry comment in the preface to The Screwtape Letters that "there is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth." That will probably get me into trouble, and I don't mean it seriously—people with their kind of attitude just annoy me, whether liberal or conservative, which is why I couldn't help recalling it. :)

Can a “citizen of the world” be the President of the US?

Barack Obama went abroad to burnish his foreign-policy credentials and trim John McCain's advantage in that area, and at first it seemed to be working; now that he's back, though, the trip pretty clearly looks like a political flop. For the first time since Sen. Obama nailed down the Democratic nomination, we have a poll (USA Today/Gallup) showing Sen. McCain in the lead, by four points; in the Rasmussen tracking poll, perhaps the most accurate one out there, Sen. Obama leads by three points, within the margin of error.

What went wrong for the Chicago senator? One major thing seems to have been his Berlin speech, in which he greeted his German audience as “a fellow citizen of the world,” apologized for America, went out of his way to avoid crediting the US with saving West Berlin via the Berlin Airlift (for that matter, he also snubbed the Brits for their part in it), and referenced the fall of the Berlin Wall without ever mentioning that that came about because America led the West in standing up to Communism.

As a result, his speech doesn't seem to have impressed much of anyone. A letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune noted dryly, “While America may not be perfect, there is no reason to apologize to the Germans, architects of the Holocaust.” In a commentary in Germany's Stern magazine sardonically titled “Barack Kant Saves the World,” Florian Güssgen called Sen. Obama “almost too slick” and said, “Obama's speech was often vague, sometimes banal and more reminiscent of John Lennon's feel good song 'Imagine' than of a foreign policy agenda.” As for the UK, a columnist for the Guardian snidely dismissed the whole thing with a classically British crack: “Barack Obama has found his people. But, unfortunately for his election prospects, they're German, not American.”

It probably didn't help, further, that he kept the American flag offstage, both for his Berlin speech and during his press conference in Paris with French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy; that could only underscore the impression that Sen. Obama cared more about the opinions of his European audiences than he did of the opinions of American voters, whom the trip was ostensibly intended to impress. The thing that might end up hurting Sen. Obama the most, though, was the incident at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, where he had been scheduled to meet with wounded soldiers. According to reports, the Pentagon informed him that he would not be allowed to bring the news media or his campaign staff, only his official Senate staff; in response, Sen. Obama canceled the visit. Sen. McCain's response was predictable on every level, as political opportunity combined with a snub he no doubt felt keenly: he attacked.

If Sen. Obama wants to convince skeptics he can handle foreign policy, he's going to have to do better than this.

Evening prayer

As I'm sure is no surprise to anyone who's spent much time reading this blog, I have an interest in apologetics, which is the rational defense of the Christian faith; as irritating as I sometimes find the attitudes of the so-called "New Atheists," I appreciate the part they've played in stirring up a similar interest in a lot of my contemporaries in the church who'd never paid any attention to apologetics before. Too many Western Christians for far too long have simply conceded the rational arguments to their critics, assuming that their opponents were right, and tried to defend their faith on other grounds; but I don't believe the atheists have the best of the argument (though I'll certainly concede they have arguments which need to be taken seriously and respectfully), and I think it's a good thing that more and more Christians are realizing that.

That said, I think we need to be careful not to go overboard here. Apologetics has gotten a bad name in the past from people who thought they could use it as a bludgeon to beat people into the Kingdom, and we must be careful not to let enthusiasm drive us into such an attitude. We must always remember that the love of God in us should be the primary thing in us drawing people to Christ—we should know the arguments and be able to offer them appropriately, but they should be secondary.

In this, as in so many things, I continue to be educated and humbled by C. S. Lewis, and particularly by this poem of his:

The Apologist's Evening Prayer

From all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.

Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and the needle's eye,
Take from me all my trumpery, lest I die.

The Empire shoots back

I was interested today to find a hit on my blog coming from the blog run by the editors of Canada's National Review of Medicine; it was, of course, to my post on the Canadian healthcare system. I checked out the post in which I was referenced, and came away a little disappointed—it consists, in my view, of little more than a willful misunderstanding of the significance of the article by Dr. David Gratzer to which I linked in my post and a drive-by dismissal of several blog posts (mine included) which dealt with that article, followed by a few moments of patting themselves on the back that a lot of Americans would like to be like Canada. There was no effort to engage with any of the evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, which I and others referenced, or any attempt to make a real case for socialized medicine; honestly, I think I got a more thoughtful response in the comments on my post than these folks offered.

I would suggest, of course, that you read the NRM editor's post for yourself and see what you think, since your opinion might be more positive than mine; for my part, though, I think there's more worth considering in the two comments on that post than in the post itself. I have no objection to the architects and managers of the Canadian system defending it and making the case for themselves—but if they're going to do so, I think they have the obligation to actually make it, which means taking those who disagree with them seriously enough to actually engage their arguments.