Living in Laodicea

“And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘The words of the Amen,
the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God's creation.

“‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me
on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’”

—Revelation 3:14-22 (ESV)

I laid out below (or attempted to lay out, anyway) my principal concern about the iMonk’s recent jeremiad (a term I use as a compliment, be it noted) in the Christian Science Monitor.  I agree with him that there are far too many churches in this country that aren’t about the gospel, that have given themselves over to the idolatry of causes (whether political, cultural, or otherwise), and are doing a poor job of teaching the gospel to their children (in part because most of the available curricula are terrible).  I even went so far as to say the other week that “too many churches are doing a better job of training future atheists than they are of training Christians.”  But to make blanket statements about “evangelicalism” as if that’s just the way evangelical churches are, which is what it seems to me Michael Spencer was doing (and, imho, too often does), strikes me as unfair; I know a lot of churches that aren’t like that, too.  For my part, I know I do an imperfect job, but I do my level best to preach the gospel, week in and week out, and to see to it that our teachers teach the gospel—and I’m just not that unusual.  Rather, I’m a lot more typical than a lot of the critics of evangelicalism realize.  (And I’ll tell you this, too:  even among those big-church-with-hip-worship-team pastors, in my experience, there are those who really do care about the gospel; as they’re struggling free of the attractional paradigm, a lot of them are doing so with a real sense of relief.)

That said, if this were still mostly an intramural conversation among evangelicals, I’d still be less concerned; even if I think Spencer’s argument is overstated, I do recognize that overstatement has its uses for getting people’s attention (as Flannery O’Connor memorably argued).  What concerns me now with its appearance in the Christian Science Monitor is how it’s likely to be used, and the purposes for which it’s likely to be used:  to beat up on people, and to push political agendas.  That, I believe, will be truly unfortunate—and quite possibly, ironically enough, serve to worsen the very situation Spencer was aiming to address.  That bell can’t be unrung, of course, and we can’t control what people outside the church will make of or do with his argument; but there’s one thing we can do, which is the one thing we need to do anyway:  rather than pointing fingers (whether at the iMonk, or at those whom he critiques, or at the media, or anyone else), we can stop, open our hearts, and examine ourselves.

We have a model for this, as Jared Wilson pointed out earlier today, in Ray Ortlund, who responded to Spencer’s piece with a moving and thought-provoking meditation on this passage from Revelation, the letter to the church in Laodicea:

This was the church in Laodicea. This is too many churches today. We focus on our strengths and successes. And there is just enough good going on in our ministries that we can plausibly refuse a blunt reappraisal of our weaknesses. But the Lord is saying, “That whole mentality is wrong. It is lukewarm. It makes me want to vomit (verse 16). . .  I am confronting you that you don’t love me wholeheartedly, so that you go into repentance and reevaluation and change. Here’s what you need to do: Stop telling yourself you’re okay and go back into re-conversion (verse 18). Change your complacency into zealous repentance (verse 19). Hey, are you listening to me? I’m that faint voice you can barely hear any more. I’m outside your church, banging on your door. You didn’t even notice when I walked out. But I’m back, one more time. If anyone in there is listening, just open the door and I will come in. I won’t smack you down. I will befriend you (verse 20). The others in your church may or may not join us, but all I’m asking for is one open, honest heart.”

Usually, our churches settle for half-way remedies, which is why they limp along in mediocrity. But every now and then, someone humbly opens that door, and Jesus walks in. He is ready to bless any church if anyone there is willing to start admitting, “I am not rich, I have not prospered, and I need everything.”

The path to life doesn’t begin with gathering political power and influence, or with building up money and possessions and prestige; it begins with that humble admission that those things aren’t really what matters, and that in truth, we really do need everything from Jesus.  May God humble our pride that we may truly depend on his grace.

An object lesson in humility

A while back, linking to one of John Stackhouse's posts, I wrote the following:

it's not the belief in absolute truth as such that produces dogmatism, but the combination of a belief in absolute truth with a belief that the self is absolute; and it's to defend that belief in the absolute self that people declare the truth to be relative. For my own part, I believe that the truth is absolute, and I am relative; my certainty is necessarily limited, not by the absence of absolutes, but by my own limited ability to perceive and apprehend them accurately. . . . We should believe what we believe firmly and with conviction; but also with humility. After all, the fact that we believe something doesn't guarantee that it's true; as Dr. Stackhouse says, it's about confidence in God who is truth, not about certainty in ourselves, who aren't.

That was something I'd been kicking around for a while, which I was foolish enough to think I'd come up with on my own.  Turns out the only reason I thought that was because it had been too long since I read Chesterton.  Here's the root and spring of that idea, from Orthodoxy (only much better put, as you would expect), courtesy of Ray Ortlund—and along with it, the reminder of the importance of humility:

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself.

The coming evangelical collapse?

The iMonk, Michael Spencer, has been arguing for a while now that American evangelicalism is going to collapse some time in the relatively near future; now the Christian Science Monitor has taken notice.  Yesterday, they ran “The Coming Evangelical Collapse,” a condensed version of his argument, in their op/ed section—to considerable notice.  After all, Spencer’s thesis is attention-grabbing (and easily exaggerated to be even more so), and one of the things he gets right—that evangelicalism is strongly identified in the popular understanding “with the culture war and with political conservatism”—means that his argument is seen to have strong political repercussions, and thus generates interest far beyond the circles of those who actually care about the problems and paucities of evangelical theology and praxis.

I've been thinking about Spencer’s argument since he first posted this series, and meaning to interact with it here; I haven’t felt I had the time or energy to do so in detail (and anything less would be insufficient), but I think it’s important to do so, and all the more so now that he’s hit the mainstream.  I appreciate a lot of his critique, because the church in this country has some serious weaknesses, and religious complacency is definitely one of them in many areas; but I think his argument has serious problems as well which need to be considered and evaluated.

The biggest one is definitional:  Spencer’s thesis is essentially about a word, “evangelical,” of which the definition is problematic in several respects.  In the first place, it’s viscerally problematic for him (and for others).  Mark Twain is credited with the line, “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it”; as far as I can tell, if the funeral Spencer is predicting actually comes, he will thoroughly approve.  I don’t deny that he has good reason for his negative associations with the word “evangelical,” but I do believe that his negative response to the word leads him (and others) to paint with a broader brush than is warranted, and to tar a lot of people unfairly.

This goes along with the second problem, which is that the way that the word “evangelical” is used—its assumed definition—is problematic, because it’s extremely fuzzy.  This is the first issue John Stackhouse raised against Ron Sider, and it applies here as well:

What does Sider mean by “evangelical”? He doesn’t actually say. . . .

Does Sider mean the evangelical Religious Right? Or does he mean all American evangelicals—say, those who identify with the NAE or Christianity Today magazine or Billy Graham—many of whom, like Sider’s own Anabaptist kin, would not recognize themselves in his contemporary sketch of American evangelical political power brokers? It’s not clear. And it never gets clearer.

This same “terminological confusion” applies to Spencer’s argument:  about whom, exactly, is he talking?  This fuzziness creates two problems.  One, it accepts and encourages an operating definition of “evangelical” that is disconnected from the core of evangelicalism and is based instead on cultural factors, then uses that definition to draw conclusions about that core.  Thus, for instance, if his statement that “evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism” is true, it’s at least as true that a lot of people have come to be identified as evangelicals because they’re politically and culturally conservative and want to attend a church that agrees with their beliefs; the problem is as much one of accretion of nominal Christians as it is of evangelicalism selling out to “Christianity And.”  I talk more about the idolatrous character of American politics than most people, but I still think it’s important to differentiate here.  The problem is less about evangelicalism going off the rails than it is about a number of the people in the pews not being evangelicals at all, but merely fellow-travelers.

Two, this fuzziness allows Spencer to generalize his own experience and the view from his window to a greater degree than is actually warranted.  He declares, for instance, that

There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile.

I’m sorry, but while that might be true in his experience, it isn’t true in mine, and I know an awful lot of colleagues who would similarly demur.  For one thing, while I know it’s trendy in some places to beat up on megachurches, and I’ve taken a club to them myself once or twice, there are a couple of points which need to be made on this.  One, the real issue with megachurches isn’t their size, but rather the attractional approach that built so many of them (and far more smaller churches); and two, as the attractional paradigm is failing—and failing its practitioners as much as anything—more and more people are becoming aware of the fact, and turning away from it.  

I’ve heard statements a number of times lately from large-attractional-church pastors to the effect that “I love the ministry but I hate what I do.”  There’s a growing and broadening awareness that the attractional paradigm has built institutions but not the church, and with it a growing and broadening aversion to servicing the institution anymore.  What we’re seeing, in many of these churches anyway, is the abandonment of the model born out of the awareness that the model isn’t the gospel and doesn’t serve the gospel.  What we’re seeing is a trend that could lead, by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit, to the conversion of many megachurches to the gospel.

Of course, there are and will be many more that continue on in the the “pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented” model that has worked for them to this point; I suspect that they will shrink, as “customers” move on to other things, but I expect we’ll also see shrinkage among those who abandon that model, as people complain that “it isn’t our church anymore.”  Well, no, it’s God’s church, which is part of the point.  This does mean that I agree with Spencer that we should expect decline in the numbers of culturally-identified evangelicals, but I disagree with him on where that’s likely to come from:  I think  it will largely come from the decline of the megachurch, as the paradigm he identifies continues to fail, and as churches which have used it successfully to build numbers shift away from it in pursuit of something else (the gospel, one hopes).

That said, characterizing the evangelical world outside the megachurch as composed solely of “dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile” is simply wrong.  Certainly there are some of both; on the other hand, there are also new churches whose foundations are strong and whose future is vibrant, and there are a lot of established churches that are a long, long way from dying.  Granted, these churches face a significant demographic challenge in attracting the unchurched among Gen X and younger, and granted, there are many established churches that will fail to do so; but that’s far from a new phenomenon.  I was taught in seminary that churches have a normal life-cycle, and that when they enter the decline phase, some manage to reverse it, some try to do so and fail, and some don’t even try; churches dying is a hard reality, but not a new one.  It’s also not an inevitable or a universal one, because some churches do revitalize themselves for a new period of effective ministry.  Those that don’t, make way for new church plants to take their place.  We’re seeing both those things in the American church—maybe not in Michael Spencer’s experience, but certainly elsewhere.

What’s more, we’re seeing some denominations rising to the challenge of supporting, encouraging, and equipping that new growth—my home denomination, the Reformed Church in America, is an example of that.  Spencer asserts that denominations are going to become largely irrelevant, but he doesn’t support that and I don’t believe it; when it comes to denominations, I don’t get the sense that his horizon extends very far beyond the Southern Baptist Convention.  Some denominations will become largely irrelevant, those being the ones that are all about politics (whether external, national politics or internal, ecclesiastical politics)—such as, alas, the one in which I serve, the Presbyterian Church (USA)—if they don’t change their ways.  Those that follow the RCA’s path of refocusing themselves on being a support structure for the mission of the local church, rather than on using the resources of the local church as a support structure for the agenda of the national office, will be completely relevant; and as long as they dedicate their efforts to planting and supporting new churches and revitalizing older ones, the survival rate among both types of congregations should be considerably higher than Spencer’s prediction implies.

Of course, this begs the question:  will those churches be truly evangelical in any meaningful sense?  Will they be gospel-centered and gospel-driven?  No doubt, some won’t be.  Having charged Spencer with conflating that which is truly evangelical with that which is not, I don’t want to be guilty of the same thing by implying that all church plants and revitalized churches are or will be gospel-driven.  Sadly, there’s nothing new about that; from what I can see, the only times and places in which the church has truly been united around the gospel have been times and places of external persecution, in which it was publically unprofitable to be a Christian and the gospel was the only intelligible reason to join the church.  As long as there are other reasons to do so that make sense to the world, people will do so for those reasons.  Nominalism isn’t an evangelical problem, it’s a problem for all streams of the church in all ages in which Christian faith is publicly acceptable.

There is, of course, much more that can be said in regard to Spencer’s essay, and I do want to take some time later to respond to some of his individual points.  My great concern, though, is that the heart of his argument is muddled because he fails to define and delimit whom he means when he says “evangelicals,” and thus that he’s able, in my judgment, to draw conclusions which are rather more sweeping than his actual evidence warrants.  That said, the issues he raises are ones to which all who care about the church in this country, and particularly that the church should be about the gospel mission of Jesus Christ, should consider very carefully—we should all examine ourselves most closely to see whether we’re affected by the problems he lays out, and if we are, we’d best address them pronto.  

As Spencer says (and on this I agree with him whole-heartedly), we live in a crux time in which “the future of our movement holds many dangers and much potential.”  May God so move our hearts to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness that we may avoid the former and realize the latter, not for our fame and profit but for his glory.

HT:  Jared Wilson

Jesus loves Osama—and that's not the worst of it

This is spot-on:

A couple of years ago, the Telegraph ran a story entitled Church's 'Jesus loves Osama' sign criticised. Apparently, some Baptist churches in Sydney, Australia, put up signs which read simply, "Jesus Loves Osama." Smaller print at the bottom contained the Biblical reference supporting that assertion: "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matt. 5:44).

The signs were apparently not well received. Even the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, commented on the sign, noting the church "should have chosen a less offensive way of spreading its message." . . .

So, what's so shocking about the "Jesus Loves Osama" sign? It isn't that someone might understand that the church is saying that a human being's killing of thousands of people is somehow morally acceptable. . . . No one who has the most basic understanding of Christian teaching would arrive at that conclusion. It isn't that the church's priority is wrongly focused. . . . The "Jesus Loves Osama" sign is a statement of straightforward Biblical truth.

The problem is this: we don't want God to love Osama bin Laden. We want there to be people who do such awful things that God's love doesn't extend to them. We want some people—a very select few—to burn in hell. Our skin crawls to hear that some people like Osama bin Laden who have done great crimes may not pay for those crimes in the great hereafter. "Where's the justice in
that?" we cry. 

It isn't justice. It's compassion. It's mercy. It's forgiveness.

This is the scandal of the gospel (or part of it, anyway):  "God loves everyone" actually means God loves everyone, including the people whom we don't like and who hurt us and whom we consider enemies and of whom we don't approve.  He loves those awful liberals and those awful fundamentalists and those awful atheists and those awful evangelicals, and those awful Republicans and those awful Democrats, and yes, those awful terrorists and those awful militarists, and pretty much anybody else that you might consider awful, just as much as he loves you.  And we really don't want him to, and he does anyway; and not only does he love them, Christ died for them on the cross just as he did for you.  Whomever you define as "us," and whomever you define as "them," Christ died and rose again for both, and he loves both, and offers the free gift of salvation to both.  That, and nothing less, is the gospel.

HT:  Shane Vander Hart

The importance of theory

“Most modern people have a curious contradiction; they abound in theories, yet they never see the part that theories play in practical life.  They are always talking about temperament and circumstances and accident; but most men are what their theories
make them; most men go in for murder or marriage, or mere lounging because of some
theory of life, asserted or assumed.”

—Gabriel Gale, in “The Shadow of the Shark.” The Poet and the Lunatics. G. K. Chesterton

Do these taxes feel high to you?

Though the theory underlying the Obama administration's response to the current economic crisis is usually described as "Keynesian," it's interesting to note that John Maynard Keynes himself would demur.  Michael Barone puts it well when he writes,

"Animal spirits," said John Maynard Keynes, are the essential spring of capitalism. We depend on the animal spirits of investors, high earners and entrepreneurs for a growing economy.

Keynes, a subtler analyst of market economies than the single-minded booster of high government spending that so-called Keynesian economists depict, knew whereof he spoke. People don't just respond in linear quantum jumps to the incentives and disincentives they perceive around them. They perk up when their animal spirits are aroused, and they slump down into inertia when they are not.

A good illustration of this comes from, of all people, Whoopi Goldberg.  Read the link, then check out this video (they're from different parts of the conversation):

My wife watched the clip and read the transcript, then looked at me and said, "I didn't think Whoopi was a Republican."  She isn't, but she sure sounds like one here; and if someone like Whoopi feels this way, you can be sure a lot of other rich folk do too.  I think Barone's argument goes a long way to explaining why.

The Clintonites managed to hit a sweet spot with the 39.6 percent rate. It was a number that started with a three. To high earners, not bothering to calculate exact returns to the last decimal point but just concentrating on the big picture, it seemed that the government was taking just about one third—hey, maybe a bit more—of their incomes. They would get to keep the other two thirds, pretty much. So they proceeded to try to make intelligent investments and to earn large amounts of money without being preoccupied with how much the government would snatch from their hands.

Quite a contrast with the 1970s, when the high income tax rate was 50 percent, and 70 percent on "unearned" (i.e., investment) income. In that environment, the animal spirits of the productive class were directed away from making productive investments and toward sheltering their income from seizure by the government. . . .

I think there is a serious risk that the Obama tax proposals are going to bring back those days. Yes, they call for returning the high income tax rate only to the sweet spot of 39.6 percent. But they also want to reduce the amount of the mortgage interest and charitable deductions for high earners, which would channel less money to charities and more to the government (and thus to public employee unions and, through them, to the Democratic Party) and would raise the effective rate on high earners to above 40 percent—a number with a four in front of it.

Add on to that the state income tax rates of 10 percent or so in place or in contemplation in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California—states with more than a quarter of the nation's high earners—and you are looking at income tax rates above 50 percent.

When you get a number with a five in front of it, you are in grave danger, I submit, of directing the animal spirits of our most productive citizens away from productive investments and toward tax shelters: "Those bastards want to take half my money, and I'm not going to let them get it." You are at risk of directing our economy back into the unproductive slog of the 1970s and away from the robust growth of the 1980s, 1990s and most of this decade.

His argument is, in essence, that most economic actions aren't purely rational responses to a detailed command of the facts, but rather are in response to more general perceptions, and that these perceptions don't shift gradually, little by little, but rather tend to do so all at once when a particular threshold is crossed.  As he notes,

When gas prices earlier last year were at $2, $2.50, $3 and $3.50, most Americans opposed oil drilling offshore and in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When they hit $4, opinion shifted. The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors and the governor of Florida suddenly favored offshore oil drilling. As for Alaska, nuke the caribou!

This suggests that taxes can in fact be higher than most conservatives would prefer without causing much of an adverse effect, as long as they don't feel higher to the folks whose investments drive the economy; it also suggests, though, that if you overshoot your target even a little, the adverse effect of your miscalculation is likely to be a lot worse than you would consider to be rational.  If Whoopi's reaction is any guide, I suspect the Obama administration isn't going to know what hit it.

The Peter Principle in the White House

As was the case more than once during the campaign, SNL's doing a better job of dealing with the news (in its own inimitable way) than the people whose job it is to cover it; this sketch captures the deer-in-the-headlights cluelessness of the Treasury Secretary so well, it's almost painful to watch.  For all his résumé, it's clear that Timothy Geithner is out of his depth in doing the job he's been given; he has risen to the level of his incompetence.

Unfortunately, it isn't just Secretary Geithner.  We were repeatedly told during the campaign that Barack Obama was going to improve America's reputation around the world—but that doesn't appear to include our allies, since we're not even two months in to his administration and he's already managed to infuriate the Brits.  Though delivered in the "stiff upper lip" tone that Americans associate with our closest ally, the outrage in the British media at the way President Obama responded to their prime minister's visit is clear.  I'm sure they particularly appreciated this curt dismissal of their concerns from an official in the State Department: "There's nothing special about Britain. You're just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn't expect special treatment."

True enough, I suppose, except of course for the fact that unlike those other 190 countries, the UK has been a staunch and consistent ally of our government . . . 

Now, as the whole David Brooks episode clearly demonstrated, this White House is remarkably thin-skinned when it comes to criticism and complaint, and so when the firestorm erupted, they defended the President—if you want to call this a defense (emphasis mine):

Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been "overwhelmed" by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest.

British officials, meanwhile, admit that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.

But Washington figures with access to Mr Obama's inner circle explained the slight by saying that those high up in the administration have had little time to deal with international matters, let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship.

Allies of Mr Obama say his weary appearance in the Oval Office with Mr Brown illustrates the strain he is now under, and the president's surprise at the sheer volume of business that crosses his desk. . . .

The American source said: "Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero-sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda."

In other words, as Power Line's John Hinderaker summed it up, "Don't blame us, we're incompetent!"  Except that there's one other factor referenced in the Telegraph article:

A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama's inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to "even fake an interest in foreign policy".

It seems clear that indifference—to foreign policy in general and Great Britain in particular—also played a part in this:  Barack Obama and his administration simply didn't care enough about Gordon Brown's visit or our alliance with his country to try to be competent about it, or even to try to hide their lackadaisical attitude about it.

That said, the portrait painted here of an overwhelmed president who's unable to keep up with the demands of his job in any sort of effective fashion is deeply worrying, and particularly when combined with his own expressed opinion that he's "very good" at the job.  This is a member of the Self-Esteem Generation, all right.  It's no wonder he inflated his résumé (follow the links from that post), took credit as a Senator for work he didn't do, and gilded the lily in his autobiography to make his first job look much better, and his decision to leave it much more meaningful and meritorious, than it really was; he's the product of an educational system that's been more concerned in recent decades with making sure students feel good about themselves than about giving them the education they need to live lives that merit a healthy self-respect.  It's all of a piece with him taking a job at a law firm, slacking on billable hours, and spending much of his time working on his autobiography (which he didn't even manage to finish, at least while he was there).

Up until last November, none of this has been much of a problem for Barack Obama; he's had the brains, the grace, and the charm to keep wangling his way along and retelling his story to suit himself without anybody minding enough to cause him any problems.  After all, nothing was really riding on him.  The law firm wasn't depending on him; the Illinois State Senate got its bills passed whether he did any work or just voted "present" (though the man who ran the shop was happy enough to boost him by putting his name on bills anyway); the US Senate kept running along whether the junior Senator from the state of Illinois was in his seat or not.  

Being President of the United States, however, is different; and now, this is a problem.  This is the first actual job he's had since his days as a community organizer (which were, by his own admission, unsuccessful) in which his job performance actually matters—and it's one of the biggest jobs in the world, and his performance is all-important.  Now, it matters immensely whether he gets things done, and whether they're the right things; and unfortunately (for us), he has never cultivated the habit of digging deep and digging in to get things done, he has never cultivated the endurance necessary to true accomplishment—in Nietzche's words, he's never practiced "a long obedience in the same direction"—and so he doesn't have the habits and skills and life patterns necessary to do that job effectively.

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, since it was all there in his résumé, for anyone who cared to look; but too many people didn't.  The McCain campaign tried to make the point, but they couldn't get beyond talking about "experience," as if it was simply a matter of time served, when it was really a matter of character.  This allowed the Obama campaign to counter it emotionally, by making "experience" mean "old, tired, and four more years of Bush"; it allowed them to counter it mathematically by adding Sen. Biden to the ticket, when in fact Sen. Biden's career in the Senate basically consisted of nothing much more than Sen. Obama's time in the Senate, spread out over many more years; and perhaps most fatally, it allowed them to portray Sarah Palin, when she was named as John McCain's running mate, as equally "inexperienced."  Thus what should have been a powerful comparison for the McCain campaign—that Gov. Palin had accomplished far more of substance at a similar age than Sen. Obama—ended up being used against them.  People looked at the numbers and missed the real point:

Two things would leap out from Sarah Palin's résumé—a pattern of overachievement and a pattern of actually getting things done. Two things would also leap out from Barack Obama's résumé—an undeniable wealth of talent and an equally undeniable dearth of accomplishments. . . .

In truth, Sarah Palin is the kind of employee virtually every enterprise seeks—the kind who gets things done. And Barack Obama is the kind of employee a company hires only when it's in the mood for taking a risk and willing to wager that the candidate's past performance isn't predictive of his future efforts.

So far, that risk isn't looking too good.

This is convicting

from Brant Hansen of Letters from Kamp Krusty:

After working in both mainstream and Christian radio, I think I'm ready to write my own book about the many I encounter:  They Like Church But Not Jesus.

I mean it.  I wrote before:  Based on my observation, Jesus is simply not the most influential guy around.  I've seen it over, and over, and over.  In fact, I'd say it's a theme at my job:  People just aren't that into Jesus.  He ticks people off.

-------------------

I've been corrected many times by Christians—after reading something Jesus actually said.  They don't like it.  I'm serious.  "You know, all the commandments can be summed up with love the Lord your God with all your heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus said that, and . . ."

Ringing phones.   "Hello?"

"You forgot one:  Evangelize."

Jesus stands corrected.

Ring.

"Well, it's not quite that simple, you see, because . . ."

No, no.  It can't be that simple.  Not here. . . .

No big deal, but—so you know—it happens again and again.  This is where my "If Jesus Had a Blog" stuff comes from, by the way.  Real conversations with learned Christians, and real objections to stuff Jesus said.

People do love the Bible.  But not the Gospels.  They quote Biblical stuff to me all the time, but it's not ever stuff Jesus said.

Now, to some extent, my own experience doesn't exactly fit with that; at least, I haven't seen that degree of Jesus-avoidance.  What I see is more of a pick-and-choose Jesus—people love Jesus (just look at the songs that dominate "contemporary" worship, to say nothing of our Jesus-ish commercialism), but the Jesus of their own imagination and reconstruction.  Brant's right that the real Jesus continues to tick people off now the same way he did 2000 years ago; the difference is that when he's not physically right in our face about it, we can find tamer, safer, more "spiritual" ways to deal with him than killing him.  We find ways to reduce him to fit our own agenda—including, as Brant notes, using other Scripture to defend ourselves against the radically challenging things he says, which is of course a radical misuse of Scripture.  As Luther reminds us, the Scripture is first and foremost the word which contains the Word, the cradle that holds the Christ; Jesus is the center on which the Scriptures pivot.

I appreciate what Bill Roberts had to say about this over at The Thinklings:

I think there are two paths we can take in response: the first and easiest one is separation: separating between us and them, "Christians" versus "Christ-followers", those who believe they "get" Jesus and those who don't (though all of us Christians think we do). Some have decided to chunk the church and be Christians all on their own. That's tempting, because there are plenty of churches that don't teach the Gospel, that are disobediently pursuing a success that is contrary to success as God defines it, and who avoid talk of Jesus because he offends people.

The other path is the far better one, and far more difficult. It's what I believe Brant's saying here, and it's being said by many others these days, and I'm so thankful for that. The other path is the path of reformation: to preach Jesus, to speak of Jesus, to speak of and live the Gospel 24x7. To face up to Jesus' words, his glorious, terrifying words, and become people who live that Word out every day.

Another addition to the blogroll

As someone who started posting on Sarah Palin a couple months before her nomination helped the MSM see that the deepest desire of their collective heart was to slander libel her to within an inch of their lives, I've been pleased to see the rise of various grassroots networks dedicated to her support.  I tend to be a late adopter on such things (it took a long time for friends to talk me into joining Facebook), but I've jumped in and joined one of them, the Read My Lipstick Network, and their blogroll is now in the sidebar.  (I must confess it seems a little strange to me, not being the type to wear lipstick, but American politics is in something of an odd phase these days anyway.)  For those who are into politics (which isn't everyone who drops in here, I know), there are some good blogs in there, and I encourage you to check them out.

Word of the day: "Overcharged"

Is it just me, or does this tell us way too much about this administration?

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greeted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on Friday before sitting down to their working dinner, she presented him a small green box with a ribbon. Inside was a red button with the Russian word "peregruzka" printed on it.

"I would like to present you with a little gift that represents what President Obama and Vice President Biden and I have been saying and that is: 'We want to reset our relationship and so we will do it together.'"

Clinton, laughing, added, "We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?" she asked Lavrov.

"You got it wrong," Lavrov said." Both diplomats laughed. "It should be "perezagruzka" (the Russian word for reset), Lavrov said. "This says 'peregruzka,' which means 'overcharged.'"

While they're at it, maybe they should give the American people one of those buttons.

HT:  Monique Stuart, via R. S. McCain

Sarah Palin, sexism, and shoddy research

I haven't wanted to waste time and space giving attention to the dubious study that purports to show that Sarah Palin's looks hurt her as a politician; but when Bill O'Reilly interviewed one of the academics behind the study, with Tammy Bruce also in the conversation, I had to post this.  I do think there's some legitimate material here about the way in which women are perceived in our society, but it's clear watching this smirking Ph.D. that she wants people to draw negative conclusions about Gov. Palin which, as O'Reilly and Bruce point out, her study simply doesn't justify.  (The real question here is whether the Democratic Party deliberately used and encouraged societal impulses and tendencies which they would normally have denounced as "sexist" in an effort to undermine Gov. Palin specifically and the McCain/Palin ticket more generally; for my part, I think they did, and believe a study on that could be quite enlightening.)

HT:  C4P

Zimbabwe PM Morgan Tsvangirai injured, wife killed

in a highly suspicious car crash.  They were on their way to their rural home when they were hit by a lorry, which PM Tsvangirai says drove at them deliberately.  The roads in Zimbabwe are bad enough that car accidents are nothing unusual, but this one smells like an assassination attempt, especially as the recently-formed unity government has so far been largely non-functional—despite the formal agreement to power-sharing, Robert Mugabe and his thugs have been unwilling to let the MDC do little things like actually govern.  PM Tsvangirai has left the country, going to Botswana for medical care and a little emotional space.

When my father-in-law heard this, he said, "That's blood on the hands of South Africa."  If this does turn out to be a deliberate attack on the prime minister and his party, then I'll have to agree.

Barack Obama is no John Kruk

If you're not a baseball fan, you've probably never heard the story, and even if you are, you might not remember it.  Today, John Kruk is a scruffy, rotund talking head, but back in the day, he was a scruffy, rotund hitter for the Padres and Phillies.  He was a good one, too; for all that he walked up to the plate looking like an unmade bed a lot of the time, he could pretty much roll out of bed and collect a hit, so it worked for him.  He was a lifetime .300 hitter with an on-base percentage just south of .4oo, and he had enough power to keep pitchers honest; he made the All-Star Game three times in a ten-year career and could fairly have gone once or twice more.

Anyway, I no longer remember the precise situation, but on one occasion, Kruk was confronted by a female fan with a disparaging comment—I think to the effect that he looked too fat to be an athlete (as noted, he was far from svelte).  Slow of foot but quick of wit, Kruk immediately responded, "Lady, I'm not an athlete, I'm a ballplayer."

It was the absolute truth, and dead on point.  Bo Jackson was an athlete.  John Kruk was a ballplayer.  Bo looked a lot better in uniform, but Kruk did more to help his teams win.  Why?  Because being an athlete is about having talent; being a ballplayer is about having skill.  Talent is innate; skill is learned, developed, honed.  Talent limits what you can do with skill, but skill is ultimately what wins ballgames.

I got to thinking about this when I read Michael Gerson's Washington Post column "GOP at the Abyss."  Ultimately, I agree with Jennifer Rubin's assertion that Gerson gets the matter backwards; but I also think he gets there in the wrong way.  Gerson writes (emphasis mine),

[American conservatism] has been voted to the edge of political irrelevance, assaulted by a European-style budget and overshadowed by a new president of colossal skills and unexpected ambition.

The vote I'll grant, but that's happened before.  The budget I'll grant, but the mere fact of the budget doesn't spell curtains for conservatism; if the budget fails, the results are likely to be quite the contrary.  That President Obama's leftist ambition was "unexpected" I most emphatically do not grant; many people saw that one coming, including Sarah Palin, Stanley Kurtz, and (for whatever it's worth) me.

Most significantly, though, I cannot agree with Gerson's statement that Barack Obama is a president of "colossal skills."  He's a president of colossal talent, of rare political gifts, and few actual skills.  The recent commentary on his dependence on the teleprompter, while unimportant in itself, illustrates this.  He has great ability, but very few political and governance skills because he's done little to hone them; he's spent more of his career campaigning for jobs than actually doing them, and it shows—when he needs to accomplish something, he reverts to campaign mode because that's the only way he knows how to get anything done.  That's the only area in which he's done any significant work to develop skills to utilize his talents.  When it comes to actually governing, he's the Bo Jackson of politicians—he can hit the ball a country mile when he makes contact, but he has absolutely no clue what the pitcher's going to throw him next.

Of course, this is by no means a permanent situation; skills can always be developed, and the president now has a powerful incentive to develop them.  He's bound to get better, and as he does, the task of opposition will grow more difficult for the GOP.  But that doesn't mean the GOP ought to buy in to Gerson's gloomy analysis, because the fact is, Barack Obama isn't the colossus at the plate that Gerson takes him for.  He might be pretty good with the roundball in his hand, but in this game, he's no ballplayer at all; he's just an athlete.  He'll hit the meatball and the hanging curve, but a good pitch at the right time will get him out.  The GOP just needs to have confidence in their stuff, focus on their control, and go after him.

We're family; we do for one another

At least, we're supposed to; as John Piper says, that's what it means to be the church, and especially when times get hard:

HT:  Jared Wilson

The world's largest canary?

I don't know if you can imagine the Phoenix Suns' Amare Stoudamire, all 6'9" and 250 pounds of him, covered in yellow feathers and chirping, but if there's a canary in this economic mine telling us that things are going to get a whole heck of a lot worse before they get better, he just might be it.  Symbolically, at least.  Read Bill Simmons' column from last week, "Welcome to the No Benjamins Association," and you'll understand.  Even if you aren't a basketball fan, read it; it's partly about other problems besetting the NBA these days, but what's most telling is the angle it provides on where our economy is now, where it's going, and what the consequences are likely to be for people locked into long-term commitments made before the economy tanked.

On this blog in history: January 21-25, 2008

And now for something completely different
On the wonder of gecko feet.

Forgiveness, repentance, and the Gordian knot
How forgiveness and repentance set us free.

Repentance:  accepting being found
The title sums it up nicely.

In the wilderness
Where true worship begins . . . which might be a hopeful thought for us these days.

Do we need to have it all figured out?

Bruce Reyes-Chow, an occasional blog correspondent, a pastor in the San Francisco area, and the current Moderator of the General Assembly of  the Presbyterian Church (USA), has a wonderful blog post up on "The pastoral secret that everyone already knows, but pastors keep trying to hide":  namely, as Bruce puts it, that

pastors don't really know what the heck they are doing.

There I said it "out loud". We all think it, know it and hard as we try to hide it, most of the folks we attempt to lead, pastor and influence know it too. We don't really know what we are doing.

I have always felt like somewhat of an impostor when it comes to this amazing role that I play in the life of a so many: my family, the congregation I serve or the denomination that I am part of. It is such an honor to be called pastor, but if we are not careful, we begin to believe our own hype and then driven by an insidious need for success, we get into trouble.

Lest anyone think otherwise, Bruce isn't just speaking for himself or talking through his hat here; I don't know that all pastors think this (there are bound to be some who feel they have a pretty good handle on what they're doing and mostly believe they have everything figured out), but judging from the conversations I've had with colleagues (including some who've been pastoring churches longer than I've been alive), he speaks for many of us.  In fact, I just had this conversation recently with a few folks whom I respect greatly—when I expressed this sense to them, they told me not only that they feel much the same way, but in fact said they felt like they know less now than they did when they were young in ministry.

The question is, is this a bad thing?

I'm not at all sure it is (and again, I'm not alone in this).  When we think we know what we're doing, we think we're the ones doing it—and that we're capable of pulling it off.  Truth is, we aren't; our work matters as part of the process, but it's the Holy Spirit who builds the church.  If we know what we're doing and how we're doing it, that means we've found something we can do in our own strength that "works"—which means in turn that we're the ones doing the building.  That doesn't necessarily rule out that the Spirit is also at work, because we can never really tell God what he can and can't do, but in general, organizations that are built that way, while they may be wonderful organizations, aren't great churches.

None of this, of course, is to rule out the importance of giving God our best; he commands and calls us to do so, and he uses what we give him, and it does matter.  It would be just as wrong to use "trusting God" as an excuse for slacking as it is to try to build the church ourselves because we don't trust God to do it right (i.e., our way).  But it is to say that God doesn't ask or expect or even want us to understand everything and have it all figured out and all together.  Rather, what he wants from us, I think, is simply to serve him as faithfully as we can see to serve him in our given situation, in our given moment, and to trust him for the rest.  As Bruce says,

I firmly believe that we must all live in this tension between God's yearning for us to simply embrace our BEING and the gifts that God gives us to get out there and do some serious DOING. Neither posture is better then the other, but must always be held in tension; for if we sway too much to one side, we lose out on the opportunities that the other may provide.

So what do we do to balance this BEING and DOING that God demands and Christ's calling requires?

We listen, we pray, we discern, we act, we reflect and then we do it all over again and again and again and again.

And again and again and again, being faithful day by day by day, until Christ gathers us home.  The faithfulness is our work.  The rest is God's.

Because of Jews

The story is told that on one occasion, Karl Barth was asked why he believed in God, and he responded, "Because of Jews."  When his questioner, surprised, asked, "Why because of Jews?" Barth is said to have responded, "Find me a Hittite in New York City."

Now, I don't know for a fact that Barth said that—though it sounds quite plausible to me—but whether original to Barth or not, it's a good point.  The Jews are to anthropology and human history what the crocodile is to paleontology and zoology:  a remarkable survival from a vanished time.  And no, I'm not comparing Jews to crocodiles—quite the opposite, in fact, which only intensifies the point; where the crocodile has survived because it's an indomitable predator that's too mean and too efficient at killing things to die off, the Jewish people have not survived through power politics, but rather despite them.  They have survived and kept their national and religious identity through conquest and exile, enduring centuries in which everyone's hand was against them.  This is a survival which is unmatched in human history.

To understand this, consider Barth's case of the Hittites—or for that matter, the Philistines, the Carthaginians, the Etruscans, the Assyrians, the Parthians, the Scythians, the Medes, or the Babylonians.  None of these peoples exist anymore.  They were conquered, assimilated, lost their national and cultural identity, and disappeared into memory.  This was, throughout the pagan era, the normal pattern.  Religion was the tentpole of the culture—the people took their identity in large part from the gods they worshiped, and the gods were worthy of worship as long as they sustained the independence of their people and brought them victory in battle.  When defeat came in battle and the nation was conquered, that marked the defeat of their gods by another, more powerful, set of gods; that brought an end to their religion (sometimes more gradually than others), which left the culture largely unsupported and caused it, over time, to collapse.

Along with that, the language would go, because there was no longer anything to keep it alive, and no longer any utility in speaking it.  In the modern era, with the rise of nationalism, we've seen a force develop in resistance to that process, and efforts to revitalize languages from Navajo to Welsh and rebuild the base of native speakers; but in the pagan era, whatever efforts there might have been to keep languages like Hittite alive, they didn't succeed.  There simply wasn't the cultural capital for such an effort to succeed, or even to make sense, and so languages died with their cultures.

The great exception from that time period is the Jews.  Granted, Hebrew largely died as a spoken language and had to be reconstituted, even reinvented; but it was possible to do so, and the people still existed to do it.  They survived conquest by the Assyrians and Babylonians, and endured as a distinct people in exile to be returned to their homeland under the Persians; they endured the rule of the Persians and the Greeks, won their independence for a while, were reconquered by the Romans, who ultimately dispersed them across the empire—and they endured that, too.  They existed as a people and a religion without a homeland, through many different cultures and under many different regimes, for the better part of two millennia; and after all that time, the idea of a Jewish state still made sense, because there was still an identifiable Jewish people to live in it.  We're accustomed to this as we're accustomed to so many things simply because they're facts—and yet, what an extraordinary fact it is!  If we don't stop and think about it, we miss that.

To my way of thinking, then, Barth (or whoever actually said it first) was right to hold up the simple existence of the Jews as a reason to believe in the God of Israel.  This is one of the reasons why, contrary to what folks like FVThinker seem to believe, the God of Israel cannot be disproven on the same grounds as the old pagan gods:  his people still exist as his people, and theirs don't.

Addition to the blogroll

Apparently the economics department at George Mason is big into blogging:  professors in that department maintain four separate blogs on economics and other matters.  I had had some familiarity with one of them, Café Hayek, but the others were new to me.  Since in the current situation, it's good to have a guide or four to help us sort out the good ideas and statements from the bad, and since these bloggers do have interesting things to say beyond the scope of the dismal science, I've linked them and given them their own category down the sidebar a ways.

Obama threw down the gauntlet; Rush picks it up

Obviously, an old-fashioned duel is out of the question, so Limbaugh has challenged the president to its modern-day political equivalent:  a debate.

If these guys are so impressed with themselves, and if they are so sure of their correctness, why doesn't President Obama come on my show? We will do a one-on-one debate of ideas and policies. Now, his people in this Politico story, it's on the record. They're claiming they wanted me all along. They wanted me to be the focus of attention. So let's have the debate! I am offering President Obama to come on this program—without staffers, without a teleprompter, without note cards—to debate me on the issues. Let's talk about free markets versus government control. Let's talk about nationalizing health care and raising taxes on small business.

Let's talk about the New Deal versus Reaganomics. Let's talk about closing Guantanamo Bay, and let's talk about sending $900 million to Hamas. Let's talk about illegal immigration and the lawlessness on the borders. Let's talk about massive deficits and the destroying of opportunities of future generations. Let's talk about ACORN, community agitators, and the unions that represent the government employees which pour millions of dollars into your campaign, President Obama. Let's talk about your elimination of school choice for minority students in the District of Columbia. Let's talk about your efforts to further reduce domestic drilling and refining of oil. Let's talk about your stock market.

I'm quite sure Barack Obama is neither gutsy enough nor foolhardy enough to take that challenge, and in some ways, I wouldn't be happy to see him reduce the dignity of the office enough to do so . . . but that would be a fun three hours.

Update:  Of course, if he doesn't, Jeffrey Lord is right:  his own team's language is going to make him look pretty bad.  After all, David Plouffe called the GOP "paralyzed with fear of crossing their leader" because they haven't taken on Limbaugh; given Limbaugh's challenge to the president,

the Obama crowd has now set up a breathtakingly stupid proposition: either Obama debates Rush one-on-one or he is, in the words of his own staff, paralyzed with fear.

Not good.  None of Obama's guys are chess players, I can tell—so far, there doesn't seem to be one member of this administration who thinks beyond the next move.

The rights of the Author

Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, who formed you from the womb:
“I am the Lord, who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens,
who spread out the earth by myself.”

—Isaiah 44:24 (ESV)

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!

—Psalm 139:13-17 (ESV)

The Lord rules all creation because he made all of it. He is the Author of the story, and it’s his word that brought all things into being; as the author, he has absolute authority over everything that is in the same way as I have, under him, absolute authority over this sentence. Indeed, his is far greater, not only because his authority is over me and working through me as I write, but also because at any given point I might make a mistake, while God never does. His authority is not only complete, unrestricted by any limitation whatsoever; it’s also perfect, unflawed by any error of any kind, and perfectly sufficient, not shared with anyone or anything beside himself. It’s not just that no power can compete with God’s—it’s that in comparison to him there is no other power. He is the great Author of everyone and everything else that exists; there is no one and nothing capable of rising off the page and wresting the pen from his hand.

This includes the fact that the Lord is the one who formed you in the womb. He made, specifically, you. Your character, your body, your gifts, your strengths and weaknesses, the things you value and the things you dislike, aren’t simply the semi-random product of your genes and your environment; sure, God used your genes, and he used the environment in which you grew up and in which you live, but he is the one who created you and who made you who you are. He gave you the gifts you would need to do the work for which he created you, and he gave you the character and temperament he desired you to have to be the person he wants you to be.

Granted, to be human and not God is to be sinful, and so you also have traits that aren’t what God wants for you—but even those have been allowed for, and even in those, he’s at work to teach you to trust him and depend on him, and to trust and depend on others. The point is, God knows you far better and far more deeply than you know yourself, because he is wholly responsible for making you who you are, and he is Lord over your life not just at the superficial level, but all the way down to the deepest wellsprings of your character and nature.

(Excerpted, edited, from “God’s Mysterious Way”)

Buyer's remorse is setting in hard

with folks like David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, Jim Cramer, and Maureen Dowd (and perhaps Evan Bayh, too), as well as Obama supporters on Wall Street.  That's what happens when you buy the rhetoric over the record, folks . . .

Update:  Here's Michael Ramirez's take on this:

Will Darth Biden have to use the Force?

Because there’s a rebellion afoot in the Senate, and the rebel base isn’t on Yavin or Hoth, it might just be right here in Indiana.  I always thought Evan Bayh was a Democrat I could respect, and now I think he’s gone and proved it:

This week, the United States Senate will vote on a spending package to fund the federal government for the remainder of this fiscal year. The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 is a sprawling, $410 billion compilation of nine spending measures that lacks the slightest hint of austerity from the federal government or the recipients of its largess.

The Senate should reject this bill. If we do not, President Barack Obama should veto it. . . .

Our nation’s current fiscal imbalance is unprecedented, unsustainable and, if unaddressed, a major threat to our currency and our economic vitality. The national debt now exceeds $10 trillion. This is almost double what it was just eight years ago, and the debt is growing at a rate of about $1 million a minute.

Washington borrows from foreign creditors to fund its profligacy. The amount of U.S. debt held by countries such as China and Japan is at a historic high, with foreign investors holding half of America’s publicly held debt. This dependence raises the specter that other nations will be able to influence our policies in ways antithetical to American interests. The more of our debt that foreign governments control, the more leverage they have on issues like trade, currency and national security. Massive debts owed to foreign creditors weaken our global influence, and threaten high inflation and steep tax increases for our children and grandchildren.

The solution going forward is to stop wasteful spending before it starts. Families and businesses are tightening their belts to make ends meet—and Washington should too. . . .

Voters rightly demanded change in November’s election, but this approach to spending represents business as usual in Washington, not the voters’ mandate.

Now is the time to win back the confidence and trust of the American people. Congress should vote “no” on this omnibus and show working families across the country that we are as committed to living within our means as they are.

For Sen. Bayh to write this in the Wall Street Journal is definitely a shot across the bow of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate—but he’s not the only hand at the linstocks.  According to Politico,

Moderate and conservative Democrats in the Senate are starting to choke over the massive spending and tax increases in President Barack Obama’s budget plans and have begun plotting to increase their influence over the agenda of a president who is turning out to be much more liberal than they are.

A group of 14 Senate Democrats and one independent huddled behind closed doors on Tuesday, discussing how centrists in that chamber can assert more leverage on the major policy debates that will dominate this Congress.

Afterward, some in attendance made plain that they are getting jitters over the cost and expansive reach of Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget proposal.

Asked when he’d reach his breaking point, Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, said: “Right now. I’m concerned about the amount that’s being offered in [Obama’s] budget.” . . .

Sen. Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who assembled Tuesday’s skull session, added that he was “very concerned” about Washington’s level of spending, especially in a $410 billion “omnibus” spending bill to fund the government until the start of a new fiscal year in October.

As for the tax increases on high-income earners called for in Obama’s plan, Bayh said, “I do think that before we raise revenue, we first should look to see if there are ways we can cut back on spending.” . . .

If the moderate Democrats in the Senate are willing to work with moderate Republicans—as Bayh said they are eager to do—they will negate the White House’s ability to portray opposition to Obama’s spending as partisan obstructionism.

I think we now know why Barack Obama didn’t pick Sen. Bayh as his running mate, eh?  Biden had best go grab the helmet . . .

HT:  Jennifer Rubin

Some people don't need PR

Conservatives4Palin found an astonishing post on the Governor by a blogger who goes by the handle The Aged P, an infrequent poster but clearly someone well worth listening to when he does post.  I'm going to do something I rarely do and quote the post in full, because it would be a shame to chop up the analysis:

The one thing that Gov Palin has not been short of since the election has been advice from Republicans and the media—stand for governor again in 2010, go for the Senate, go for POTUS 2012, wait until 2016, write a book, go into the media, give up politics and concentrate on her family—the options are endless.As an outside observer, however, it strikes me that she is intelligent enough and shrewd enough to make up her own mind. I think that maybe she has already decided on a course – I believe she is going de Gaulle.

General de Gaulle entered France alongside the Allies at the head of his Free French army after years of exile in London. Initially greeted as a returning hero by the French he served as the President of the Provisional Government but within two years he had resigned, disillusioned by the re-emergence of the old inter-party squabbles that had characterised the pre-war regime.For the next few years he led his own political party but, tiring of the political rat race in 1953 he withdrew from public life and retired in self-imposed internal exile to his home in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises to write his war memoirs, and many pundits wrote him off as a man whose time had passed.

His followers, however, retained their cohesion because they saw de Gaulle as a man of destiny who one day would be called forth from his exile by the people of France to rescue them at a time of great danger—which is exactly what happened in 1958 when France was torn apart by the Algerian crisis. The General returned to office but this time on his own terms and remained in power for the next decade.

Since the Alfalfa Dinner Gov Palin appears to have chosen Alaska as her own Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, far enough away from the mainstream of US politics, concerning herself with her responsibilities as Governor and keeping a distance between herself and the spotlight, just as de Gaulle did in the 1950s. She has stayed away from CPAC, she did not attend the NGA, causing some irritation amongst some elements who would prefer her to act as some Joan of Arc type figure scorching across the lower 48 thrusting and slashing at the President and Congress. Staying out of the spotlight is not an option for some of these folk who often see politics as showbiz where your PR people will tell you that you have to be forever working on your next film or album to remain in the public eye.But the Governor does not need any of that—like de Gaulle she is so deeply impressed upon the public’s imagination that she needs no PR, she is simply there.

De Gaulle was relatively unknown to the French people in 1940 but millions of them heard his broadcast from London at the moment of their deepest despair and in those few minutes he became the inspiration and hope for so many. Governor Palin walked onto the stage at the Republican Convention, electrified millions and stole their hearts forever with her grace, her honesty and her love of life sealing there and then a contract and covenant of support through fire and flood whatever may happen. Camille Paglia called her an immensely talented politician whose time had not yet come. But perhaps, one day, just as in 1958 with de Gaulle, a message will go across Canada to the north saying her time has come—and then the banners must unfurl . . .

Other than noting that Gov. Palin isn't exactly in internal exile, but is in fact continuing to do her job as an effective and popular governor, I don't think there's anything here I'd argue with.  Click the link, give this man some traffic and leave a comment, because he's produced a remarkable piece of political commentary here.

And I agree with Ramrocks—that last sentence really gets me.

The limits of liberty

“What exactly is liberty?  First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself.  In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage.  It was free to be alone.  It was free to sing.  In the forest its feathers would be torn to pieces and its voice choked for ever.  
Then I began to think that being oneself, which is liberty, is itself limitation.  
We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out,
we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.”

—Gabriel Gale, in “The Yellow Bird.” The Poet and the Lunatics.  G. K. Chesterton

The anti-bipartisan chicanery continues

Barack Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag, suggested yesterday that the administration would consider using the budget reconciliation to pass its healthcare agenda and energy agenda (particularly their proposed cap-and-trade bill) by inserting that legislation into the final version of the budget.  It's not that those bills are actually a proper part of the budget process—rather, it's that the budget reconciliation (the final version of the budget agreed upon between the House and Senate after each passes its separate version) can't be filibustered.  Orszag's suggested tactic would allow the White House to pass major legislation without debate—and without a single Republican vote.

At least, it would in theory.  In actual fact, as About.com's Kathy Gill points out,

If Democratic leadership pursues this ill-advised plan, moderates do have an out. The out is a constraint on reconciliation that is called the “Byrd rule.” Named after Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), the constraint means that if a Senator believes that a provision of the reconciliation bill is “extraneous” it may be subject to a point of order. After the Byrd Rule is invoked, at least 60 Senators must vote to waive the Byrd rule.

There are two things to be said about this.  The first is that the Byrd Rule is there to prevent exactly the sort of shenanigans that the Obama administration is contemplating, and that's a very good thing; misusing the budget process in that way would just be wrong.

The budget process should be used to manage federal expenditures for programs that have been enacted by Congress. It's bad enough that enabling legislation runs hundreds of pages and that there is no requirement of nexus (relevance). The budget is not the place to shoehorn policy changes that should be the subject of their own enabling legislation.

The second is that Gill's point shouldn't be news to Barack Obama.  Don Surber comments,

Perhaps if Barack Obama had spent a few days in the Senate instead of campaigning, he would know this.

You would think that a former member of the Senate would have more awareness of and respect for the proper procedures of the Senate than President Obama has so far shown.

(Cross-posted to RedState)

Does God hide?

Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.

—Isaiah 45:13 (ESV)

What are we supposed to make of this statement?  What does it mean?  It’s hard to say for sure, but I suspect there are three truths in view here. First, God could be said to hide himself in that he’s often not to be found where we look for him, in the ways in which we expect to find him.  God is not to be found in our conventional wisdom; he doesn’t do things in the ways that we expect, according to what makes sense to us, because he isn’t limited by our knowledge and understanding. That’s why the gifts he gives aren’t limited by our knowledge and understanding, either; that’s why he kept trying to give Israel something so much bigger than they wanted—he kept trying to give them the gift of being the ones through whom he would redeem the nations, when they just wanted him to help them conquer the nations. That’s why the late singer-songwriter Rich Mullins spoke truth when he said, “If you want a religion that makes sense, go somewhere else. But if you want a religion that makes life, choose Christianity.” So often, the problem is that we’re looking for a god who makes sense to us on our terms; it’s not really that God is hiding from us, but that our expectations and assumptions are blocking our eyes and ears.

What this means, in practice, is that God is not found by those who are unwilling to find him; he isn’t found by the proud and the haughty, by those who have all the answers, by those who are confident in their own strength to conquer life on their own terms. He isn’t found by those who aren’t really seeking him, who aren’t willing to surrender their lives to him; he isn’t found by the assertive and the self-sufficient. God is found by the humble and the contrite, by those who know they need him.

This is why it’s said at times that he hides his face from Israel in judgment—Israel knows he’s there, not because they sought him and found him but because someone else did, but too often, they aren’t really seeking him at all, they’re only seeking his benefits. They want him to give them what they want while they disregard his commands, and so he hides his face from them, he turns away and leaves them in the silence until they will humble themselves and truly seek, not their own best interest, but his face.

There’s another aspect to this as well, that in the ancient world, all the other gods had their statues; only the God of Israel, as far as I know, went without physical images for his people to worship. The nations around Israel expected to be able to walk into a temple and see the god—but in this, too, the Lord was (and is) a God who hides. This might seem like a minor point, but in truth it’s quite the opposite. The gods of the world can be represented, can be seen; the one true God can’t. In theological terms, he is transcendent—he’s so far above and beyond us that, as he tells Moses in Exodus 33, no frail, sinful human being can see him and survive the experience. He is too bright to see:  he is “immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” That’s why the poet Henry Vaughan, in one of his finest moments, wrote, “There is in God—some say—a deep but dazzling darkness.”  God’s light is so bright that it overwhelms our ability to perceive it, and becomes to us instead the deepest of darkness. He is too bright, too big, too great, to be seen.

And here, then, is the wonder, and here is the miracle: this God who was hidden from us in unapproachable light, this God whom no one could see and live, crossed that divide in his own power and revealed himself to us as Jesus Christ. This God who forbade us to make any image of him, who would not allow us to imagine our own version of him, gave us more than just an image of himself—he gave us himself, becoming fully human and living a full human life.

When we talk about Jesus coming, we tend to focus on his death and resurrection—especially in this season of Lent—and there’s certainly good reason for that; and we focus too on all the things he taught, and that’s also completely appropriate. But I think we lose sight, sometimes, of the fact that those aren’t the only reasons he came; and that one of the reasons he came is simply that we might know him in a new way and be able to relate to him more closely. God will always be beyond our ability to fully understand, certainly and there will always be times when his face seems hidden to us. That’s just the way it is in this broken, sin-haunted, pain-darkened world of ours. But at the same time, even as it remains true that no one in this world has ever seen God in all his glory, yet it’s no longer true that no one has ever seen God: for as John 1:18 says, God the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, has made him known. The divide we could never cross, he crossed for us, out of love for us; in Jesus, the hidden face of God has been forever revealed.

(Excerpted, edited, from “A God Who Hides?”)

“Send ’em up, I’ll wait!”

This is too good not to post.  Don Surber of the Charleston Daily Mail passed along this conversation from an e-mail correspondent—it was apparently overheard on one of the air-traffic frequencies by a guy flying into Dubai:

Iranian Air Defense Radar: “Unknown aircraft, you are in Iranian airspace. Identify yourself.”

Pilot: “This is a United States aircraft. I am in Iraqi airspace.”

Air Defense Radar: “You are in Iranian airspace. If you do not depart our airspace we will launch interceptor aircraft!”

Pilot: “This is a United States Marine Corps F/A-18 fighter. Send ’em up, I’ll wait!”

Air Defense Radar: (no response . . . total silence)

Programming note

I've been behind on posting sermons over on my sermon blog—I'd wanted to edit a couple of them from the audio to reflect changes in the preaching (something I don't ordinarily do), but I haven't managed to lay my hands on the recordings yet, so I figured I'd do better to just go ahead and post them as is.  I'm hoping to be able to post the audio as well soon, so perhaps I'll just let that be enough.  In any case, I'm now caught up on the current sermon series; I'm not done with 2008, since I still have only one sermon up from the first series of last year, Being Church, but I hope to get the rest of those up soon.

(Cross-posted at Of a Sunday)

This would be a high point in political geekery

Jennifer Rubin reports,

Here at CPAC a well placed source with knowledge of the Republican Senate Committee plans tells me that Larry Kudlow is “considering” a Senate run against embattled Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd. Dodd’s approval ratings have been plummeting in light of the Friend of Angelo scandal and the ongoing effort to stonewall local and national media. Kudlow would bring instant name recognition and plenty of funding, but more importantly a wealth of economic knowledge. A debate between the two over the management of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae would be a thing to behold. Kudlow has been approached and is considering the possibilities.

I hope he does it; that race would be a blast to follow.  Rubin says it would be “the most entertaining and most educational senate race in a long time,” and if anything I think that undersells it; running against Sen. Dodd would give Kudlow the chance to put on a veritable clinic on the economy and the roots of our current problems (one of those roots being Sen. Dodd himself), and given his personality, I think it would be absolutely fascinating to watch him do it.  It would also give the GOP a real chance to steal the seat, since Kudlow would be nearly the ideal person to take full advantage of Sen. Dodd's vulnerability (and would seem to have no qualms about doing so, not being one to pull his punches).

Given the way Kudlow’s interviews with Sarah Palin raised her national profile and gave her the ability to show her stuff, do you think we’d see the governor return the favor by campaigning for him in CT?  That could be a lot of fun, too.

Update:  Looks like Kudlow’s serious about this—he had dinner with Sen. John Cornyn, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to talk about it.

The problem for Barack Obama

This from Mark McKinnon:

Obama can never live up to his stratospheric expectations. He set the bar himself. But now he is realizing how hard it is to clear. He's extraordinarily gifted. As gifted, perhaps, as anyone who has ever held the office. But in today's world, gifted only gets you in the zoo. Then you have to tame the animals.