Luke 10:27

Song of Expiation

2012-01-30T17:29:00.000-08:00

Song of Expiation

Thank you God for the things You never do
You never forsake us, you’re always true
You are our rock while we are but dust
You never change; in You we can trust.
Loving Trinity, You make all things new!

You are our God and You’re always good;
You cannot sin-- but You saw that we would.
You detest envy, pride, greed, and lust,
You’re merciful, and You’ll always be just.
You rescue us: help us be what we should.

Not out of wrath but because of Your love
The Son left his holy throne above.
He took our sin, and made it His own
Cleansing us by His blood; He atoned
Proving Your constant and glorious love.

We were the ones who turned when we Fell
You never changed, but chased us ev’n to Hell
When on that cross as Christ bled and died,
Your staunch love, O God, was magnified,
so that with You Lord, we might ever dwell.

Who was and is and is to come—O Lord
Upon us Your precious blood was poured;
Not to appease you, but our hearts to cleanse,
Restore relations, make us your friends—
Through You all creation shall be restored!

Thoughts of an Evangelical Covenanter on why a line of "In Christ Alone" isn't biblical

2012-01-26T15:25:00.000-08:00

Okay, it's more than you ever wanted to know, I’m sure, : ) but here’s my understanding of why Covenanters don’t usually sing “the wrath of God was satisfied” :

“The Scriptures teach that no change took place in God's disposition towards man in consequence of his sin; that, therefore, it was not God who needed to be reconciled to man, but that it was man who needed to be reconciled to God; and that, consequently, reconciliation is a work which proceeds from God and is directed towards man, and aims not to appease God, but to cleanse man from sin, and to restore him to a right relation with God.”

–P.P. Waldenstrom (a “father” of the Evangelical Covenant Church)

The grammatical problem revolves around the meaning of the words “hilasterion/ “hilasmos” which have been translated as “propitiation” and “expiation.” This is a thorny one, with scholars lining up on opposite sides regarding the proper translation. According to Theopedia,

Propitiation literally means to make favorable and specifically includes the idea of dealing with God’s wrath against sinners. Expiation literally means to make pious and implies either the removal or cleansing of sin.

The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means; but the word “expiation” has no reference to quenching God’s righteous anger. The difference is that the object of expiation is sin, not God. One propitiates a person, and one expiates a problem.

We do not read scripture (or translate it!) alone, but rather as part of a community--a tradition. (Acts 25:30-31) Depending upon our tradition, we will interpret scripture differently, and “hilasterion/ “hilasmos” is just one of those instances."

I’ve written some other Covenant pastors, to see how they deal with the issue in regard to “In Christ Alone.” Some have changed the line in question:

‘the love of God was glorified’
‘Till on that cross as Jesus died
The love of God was magnified’
‘the love of God was satisfied"

while others do not sing the song, period.

Bottom line: All this pretty much challenges the popular Substitutionary Theory of the Atonement, which will not sit well with those traditions that are grounded in Anselm's theory.

Want to dig deeper?

1. You can read about Waldenstrom here

Waldenstrom was famous for his question, “Where is it written?” This was the motivation for his exploration of the doctrine of the atonement.

2. Here is Waldenstrom’s sermon, “Be Ye Reconciled to God,” which is the classic statement of Waldenstrom’s position.

http://www.gospeltruth.net/recon_walden.htm

In keeping with his conviction that doctrine must be grounded in scripture, Waldenstrom presents scriptural arguments for his theory of the atonement, and addresses criticisms of his interpretation.

3. This site gives some historical background for Waldenstrom’s teaching: “P.P. Waldenstrom and the Atonement.”

http://www.mv.com/ipusers/concov/Covenant%20Heritage%202.htm

Here’s a relevant passage:

One of the topics that Waldenström turned his biblical lenses on was that of the atonement, the way that we are made right with God, the way in which our broken and shattered state is made acceptable to God.

In his monumental tome on Covenant history, Karl Olsson tells it this way:

In 1870, young Waldenström was having some conversation about the atonement with some fellow pastors. They were talking about the official Lutheran position called in Latin, satifactio vicaria, the idea that "the suffering and death of Christ had been the means of satisfying God’s wrath. Justice demanded that God punish man eternally for his sin against the majesty of God, but Christ had intervened between God’s justice and man, had appeased God’s wrath, and how his (Christ’s) righteousness could be imputed to man for the latter’s justification" (Olsson, Karl, By One Spirit, Covenant Press, Chicago, 1962, p. 109). So as the pastors where talking about this, Waldenström asks his famous question, "Var står det skrivet?" Where is it written?, the pastors laughed! (By One Spirit, p. 110). Waldenström conducted a lengthy search of scripture and found no where in the Old or New Testament that God was the one reconciled. God’s position did not change in the atonement. Rather, our position did.

In a famous sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 1872, published in The Pietist, Waldenström used our gospel text for the day and outlined the reasons why the official Lutheran belief in the atonement was all wrong for those who live as citizens of the Kingdom of God. He had five points in his core argument:
1) "That through our fall no change has entered the heart of God.
2) That because of this it was no severity or anger against man which through the fall rose up in the way of man’s redemption
3) That the change, which occurred in the fall, was a change in man alone, in that he became sinful and thus fell away from God and from the life which is in him.
4) That for this reason an atonement indeed is needed for man’s salvation, but not an atonement which appeases God and presents him as being once again gracious but (an atonement) which removes man’s sin and makes him once again righteous, and
5) That this atonement is in Jesus Christ." (Covenant Roots: Sources &; Affirmations. p. 119-120).

In other words, the death of Christ does not change God from a wrathful God to a loving God. God has always been gracious and loving. And yes, God has hated sin but God has not hated us! It wasn’t humanity that God was wrathful about, but sin.

Now, one could argue that if one read everything Martin Luther wrote that one would not find a consistent message about God being wrathful against humanity. Luther talks a lot about grace, and he also talks about our inability to see God’s love due to our own sin, therefore we see wrath. Luther speaks in this way to encourage people to try Christ, who alone can put away this wrath of God. (Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, Fortress Press, 1966, p. 171) But Luther does talk an incredible amount about the wrath of God, the law which we can never keep and which therefore leads us to despair and sin, and therefore, deeper into God’s wrath (Althaus, p. 177).

In the Swedish church of the day, the Lutheran teaching was that of a wrathful, angry God who needed the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ to be merciful. Waldenström investigated this thoroughly, and decided that it was not God who moved in the atonement, but humanity which is made righteous as before the fall. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and each of those personae is love. Waldenström defines the role of Christ as the representative of God "to take away our sin," rather than "our substitute in order to take away the wrath of God." (Covenant Roots: Sources & Affirmations. p. 123)

Doesn’t Paul make it very clear that "we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son" (Rom 5:10) rather than the "God was reconciled to us through the death of his Son?" Waldenström points out verse after verse in which God is doing the reconciling, not being reconciled himself. In the Old Testament it is clear that the many references for the need for atonement is remove the sin of the people, not to change God (Lev 16). From Leviticus, "For on this day atonement shall be made for you, to cleanse you; from all your sins you shall be clean before the LORD" (Lev 16:30).

And clean we must be if we wish to approach God, who is righteous. Christ’s death and resurrection allows us to be made clean, giving us fellowship with God.

4. Finally, I think many Covenanters would agree with N.T. Wright here:

http://www.ntwrightpage.com/sermons/Word_Cross.htm

“Face it: to deny God’s wrath is, at bottom, to deny God’s love. When God sees humans being enslaved – and do please go and see the film Amazing Grace as soon as you get the chance – if God doesn’t hate it, he is not a loving God. (It was the sneering, sophisticated set who tried to make out that God didn’t get angry about that kind of thing, and whom Wilberforce opposed with the message that God really does hate slavery.) When God sees innocent people being bombed because of someone’s political agenda, if God doesn’t hate it, he isn’t a loving God. When God sees people lying and cheating and abusing one another, exploiting and grafting and preying on one another, if God were to say, ‘never mind, I love you all anyway’, he is neither good nor loving. The Bible doesn’t speak of a God of generalized benevolence. It speaks of the God who made the world and loves it so passionately that he must and does hate everything that distorts and defaces the world and particularly his human creatures. And the Bible doesn’t tell an abstract story about people running up a big debit balance in God’s bank and God suddenly, out of the blue, charging the whole lot to Jesus. The Bible tells a story about the creator God calling a people through whom he would put the world right, living with that covenant people even when they themselves went wrong, allowing them to become the place where the power of evil would do its worst, and preparing them all through for the moment when, like the composer finally stepping on stage to play the solo part, he would come and take upon himself, in the person of his Son, the pain and shame, yes, the horror and darkness, yes, but also, in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, in Paul and Acts and Hebrews and 1 Peter and Revelation, in Ignatius and Irenaeus and Augustine and Aquinas, in Luther and Calvin and Cranmer and Hooker, in Herbert and Donne and Wesley and Watts – he would take upon himself the condemnation which, precisely because he loves us to the uttermost, he must pronounce over that deadly disease we call sin. To deny this, as some would do today as they have for hundreds of years, is to deny the depth and weight of sin and the deeper depth and heavier weight of God’s redeeming love. The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

I’m grateful that our freedom in Christ allows us to consider multiple ways of expressing the mystery of His work on the cross, and trust that our fellowship in Him will not be broken over this issue. The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. May Christ’s blood bind us together in His Spirit!

In Him,

Beth

My response to Peg Tittle, "Ethics without Philosophers (the Appalling State of Affairs in Business")

2012-01-25T22:37:00.000-08:00

Here is my response to Peg Tittle's online article:

I smiled as I read your article,"Ethics Without Philosophers (the Appalling State of Affairs in Business." While I am in total agreement that ethics shouldn't be taught be non-philosophers, I disagree with your statement, "(Avoid those who teach Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Aesthetics; and run away as fast as you can from those who teach Kant and Derrida.)"

One's ethics (as well as one's politics and aesthetics) is a product of one's metaphysics. What one thinks is real and true will affect what one thinks is good and right. You call for us to "work together." But how are philosophers going to work together with non-philosophers if we can't even work together with each other?

Finally, there is also more to ethics than what Modernism would have us believe. (See Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. http://www.amazon.com/Three-Rival-Versions-Moral-Enquiry/dp/0268018774 . You haven't addressed the contributions that Virtue Ethics is able to make to business ethics.

I submit that "this terrible misunderstanding, this doing ethics without philosophers" has come about precisely because modernism has reduced ethics exclusively to dilemmas and principles. When business ethics is reduced to a series of dilemmas, it is just a variation on the business case study. Principles alone are like mathematical formulae--just plug and chug that Principle of Utility or that Categorical Imperative or whatever "Methodology for Ethical Decision Making" you choose, and voila--you've done ethics! A person doesn't have to have a higher degree in mathematics to be able to get the answer to quadratic equation. It seems that we philosophers have allowed ethics to be reduced to a similar state, so no wonder people without philosophy degrees are becoming ethical consultants.

However, there's a bit more to ethics than just principles: there's character and there's telos/goals/ends. Of course logic and critical thinking are necessary, but they are not sufficient. (Hopefully, they are also areas in which non-philosophers will have some expertise and practice.) But philosophers are the peculiar folks who wonder about things like "what is the good life?" "What is a good person?" "what is justice?" Those are questions that non-philosophers don't have time to deal with, or aren't interested in. But in grappling with them, philosophers are stretched into areas of metaphysics, epistemology and the history of philosophy, and are able to bring a unique perspective as well as valuable expertise to business ethics, environmental ethics, medical ethics, etc.

Philosophy flies with two wings: analysis and synthesis, and business depends on its ability to soar.

Dialogue with a pagan, Part 1

2012-01-22T00:59:00.000-08:00

My new Google+ pagan friend from the U.K. referred me to this video:

Here's m y response:

As I am not a Calvinist, I have no problem believing that this fellow was once a Christian.

Our noetic structures are like rafts. The beliefs that we hold are like the logs of the raft. We are constantly adding new logs to expand our raft, and getting rid of old logs are "leaky" or which don't fit together well with the new ones. What is interesting is the criteria we use to admit new logs and to eliminate old ones. I'll be curious to hear this fellow's story, and his criteria.

Hierarchy is second nature for Calvinists

2012-01-20T23:24:00.000-08:00

a response to David Fitch's post about Mark Driscoll on Reclaiming the Mission:

I think Dave is right – hierarchy for everything is second nature to Calvinists. Jonathan Edwards was the same way. He applied hierarchy to everything – acts of God, the Godhead, etc. I think they apply Reagonomics (I know – anachronistic) to theology; i.e. find out what theory or definition is the king and then hyper-focus on it and then depend on the trickle down effect from your hyper-focuson one aspect to positively affect every other aspect without being directly involved with those other “lower” aspects. Piper does the same thing with much of his work.

Socialist Jesus

2012-01-17T17:46:00.000-08:00

Scriptural evidence for the Transcendentals

2012-01-14T11:08:00.000-08:00

Not only all good things are God's, but they are good insofar as they participate/relate to /reflect Him, who is Good (Mark 10:18). The same goes for truth--all truth is God's truth, because a thing is true insofar as it participates/relates to /reflects Him who is the Truth (John 14:6). Again, it can be said of beauty--a thing is beautiful *insofar* as it participates/relates to /reflects God's beauty (Ps.27:4).

But if God is One (Deut. 6:4), and if He is Goodness, Beauty, and Truth (as per above) then that means that Keats is right: those three "transcendentals" are "convertible." Truth is beauty, beauty is truth, and so on. Or to put it another way, whenever we find goodness, we will also find beauty and truth; whenever we find truth, we will also find goodness and beauty, etc.

Pietism in the drivers seat, and Doctrine riding shotgun

2012-01-04T12:43:00.000-08:00

Too often Reformed Christians disparage their siblings who are Pietists. Brad Boydston makes an astute comment on Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog:

"There are two reasons why Pietism gets misunderstood. The first is that it is a renewal or life movement rather than a doctrinal movement. It’s not saying that doctrine is bad — or unimportant but that it should not be in the driver’s seat. The car should be driven in a relational manner. That idea is troubling to those who have a rigid doctrinal system that they believe should drive everything.

Secondly, because it is not a tight system requiring uniformity in all matters, there are people within Pietism who have at times driven off in pretty weird directions — mysticism, extreme individualism or extreme focus on experience — to the degree that it pushes aside sound doctrinal input.

As I see it, though, you want to have a Pietist driving the car or it will never go anywhere significant. But you also need to have someone with a doctrinal orientation riding shotgun — and reading the map. They may annoy each other occasionally but the map reader is necessary or the driver can end up going in circles.

In 1 Timothy 4:16 the apostle tells Timothy to watch his life and doctrine. The church needs both the doctrinal and pietistic impulses. We’re the healthiest when we have been able to integrate both. Spener was calling the church to reintegrate both impulses. Those who caught the vision from him ended up doing some pretty amazing things — evangelizing the world, developing the notion of public education, caring for orphans and refugees…"

Comment by Brad Boydston — January 4, 2012 @ 10:39 am
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/01/04/pietism-what-is-it/

25 clever ideas to make life easier

2011-12-31T01:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2pUNUa

hull strawberries with a straw...
Use wire to make a space to store gift wrap rolls against the ceiling, rather than cluttering up the floor...

store bedlinen sets inside one of their own pillowcases and there will be no more hunting through piles for a match...

Find tiny lost items like earrings by putting a stocking over the vacuum hose...

Make an instant cupcake carrier by cutting crosses into a box lid....

Microwave your own popcorn in a plain brown paper bag. Much healthier and cheaper than the packet stuff....

Brilliant space-saver: install a tension rod to hang your spray bottles...

Use egg cartons to separate and store your Christmas decorations.

KEEPER: "What's wrong with libertarianism"

2011-12-29T21:35:00.000-08:00

What's wrong with libertarianism

"The perfect liberty they seek is the liberty of making slaves of other people." -- Abraham Lincoln

Apparently someone's curse worked: we live in interesting times, and among other consequences, for no good reason we have a surplus of libertarians. With this article I hope to help keep the demand low, or at least to explain to libertarian correspondents why they don't impress me with comments like "You sure love letting people steal your money!"

Good libertarians and the other kind

This article has been rewritten, for two reasons. First, the original article had sidebars to address common objections. From several people's reactions, it seems that they never read these. They're now incorporated into the text.

Second, and more importantly, many people who call themselves libertarians didn't recognize themselves in the description. There are libertarians and libertarians, and sometimes different camps despise each other-- or don't seem to be aware of each other.

If you--

have never heard of (or don't think much of) Rothbard, Rockwell, Rand, and von Mises
accept that the FDIC is a pretty good idea
want a leaner, more efficient government, but don't dream of getting rid of it

...then this page isn't really addressed to you. You're probably more of what I'd call a small-government conservative; and if you voted against Bush, we can probably get along just fine.

On the other hand, you might want to stick around to see what your more fundamentalist colleagues are saying.

The Un-Communism

Libertarianism strikes me as if someone (let's call her "Ayn Rand") sat down to create the Un-Communism. Thus:

Communism Libertarianism
Property is theft Property is sacred
Totalitarianism                                             Any government is bad
Capitalists are baby-eating villains                Capitalists are noble Nietzchean heroes
Workers should rule                                     Worker activism is evil
The poor are oppressed                                The poor are pampered good-for- nothings

Does this sound exaggerated? Let's listen to Murray Rothbard:

We contend here, however, that the model of government is akin, not to the business firm, but to the criminal organization, and indeed that the State is the organization of robbery systematized and writ large.

Or here's Lew Rockwell on Rothbard (emphasis mine):

He was also the architect of the body of thought known around the world as libertarianism. This radically anti-state political philosophy unites free-market economics, a no-exceptions attachment to private property rights, a profound concern for human liberty, and a love of peace, with the conclusion that society should be completely free to develop absent any interference from the state, which can and should be eliminated.
Thomas DiLorenzo on worker activism: "[L]abor unions [pursue] policies which impede the very institutions of capitalism that are the cause of their own prosperity." Or Ludwig von Mises: "What is today euphemistically called the right to strike is in fact the right of striking workers, by recourse to violence, to prevent people who want to work from working." (Employer violence is apparently acceptable.) The Libertarian Party platform explains that workers have no right to protest drug tests, and supports the return of child labor.

On Nietzsche, as one of my correspondents puts it, some libertarians love Nietzsche; others have read him. (Though I would respond that some people idolize executives; others have worked for them.) Nonetheless, I think the Nietzschean atmosphere of burning rejection of conventional morality, exaltation of the will to power, and scorn for womanish Christian compassion for the masses, is part of the roots of libertarianism. It's unmistakable in Ayn Rand.

The more important point, however, is that the capitalist is the über-villain for communists, and a glorious hero for libertarians; that property is "theft" for the communists, and a "natural right" for libertarians. These dovetail a little too closely for coincidence. It's natural enough, when a basic element of society is attacked as an evil, for its defenders to counter-attack by elevating it into a principle.

As we should have learned from the history of communism and fascism, however, contradiction is no guarantee of truth; it can lead one into an opposite error instead. And many who rejected communism nonetheless remained zealots. People who leave one ideological extreme usually end up at the other, either quickly (David Horowitz) or slowly (Mario Vargas Llosa). If you're the sort of person who likes absolutes, you want them even if all your other convictions change.

Who needs facts?

The methodology isn't much different either: oppose the obvious evils of the world with a fairy tale. The communist of 1910 couldn't point to a single real-world instance of his utopia; neither can the present-day libertarian. Yet they're unshakeable in their conviction that it can and must happen.

Academic libertarians love abstract, fact-free arguments-- often, justifications for why property is an absolute right. As a random example, from one James Craig Green:

This concept of property originated in some of those primitive tribes when individuals claimed possessions for themselves as against the collective ownership of their groups. Based on individual initiative, labor, and innovation, some were successful at establishing a separate, private ownership role for themselves. [...]

Examples of natural property in land and water resources have already been given, but deserve more detail. An illustration of how this would be accomplished is a farm with irrigation ditches to grow crops in dry western states. To appropriate unowned natural resources, a settler used his labor to clear the land and dug ditches to carry water from a river for irrigation. Crops were planted, buildings were constructed, and the property thus created was protected by the owner from aggression or the later claims of others. This process was a legitimate creation of property.

The first paragraph is pure fantasy, and is simply untrue as a portrait of "primitive tribes", which are generally extremely collectivist by American standards. The second sounds good precisely because it leaves out all the actual facts of American history: the settlers' land was not "unowned" but stolen from the Indians by state conquest (and much of it stolen from the Mexicans as well); the lands were granted to the settlers by government; the communities were linked to the national economy by railroads founded by government grant; the crops were adapted to local conditions by land grant colleges.

Thanks to my essay on taxes, I routinely get mail featuring impassioned harangues which never once mention a real-world fact-- or which simply make up the statistics they want.

This sort of balls-out aggressivity probably wins points at parties, where no one is going to take down an almanac and check their figures; but to me it's a cardinal sin. If someone has an answer for everything, advocates changes which have never been tried, and presents dishonest evidence, he's a crackpot. If a man has no doubts, it's because his hypothesis is unfalsifiable.

Distaste for facts isn't merely a habit of a few Internet cranks; it's actually libertarian doctrine, the foundation of the 'Austrian school'. Here's Ludwig von Mises in Epistemological Problems of Economics:

As there is no discernible regularity in the emergence and concatenation of ideas and judgments of value, and therefore also not in the succession and concatenation of human acts, the role that experience plays in the study of human action is radically different from that which it plays in the natural sciences. Experience of human action is history. Historical experience does not provide facts that could render in the construction of a theoretical science services that could be compared to those which laboratory experiments and observation render to physics. Historical events are always the joint effect of the cooperation of various factors and chains of causation. In matters of human action no experiments can be performed. History needs to be interpreted by theoretical insight gained previously from other sources.

The 'other sources' turn out to be armchair ruminations on how things must be. It's true enough that economics is not physics; but that's not warrant to turn our backs on the methods of science and return to scholastic speculation. Economics should always move in the direction of science, experiment, and falsifiability. If it were really true that it cannot, then no one, including the libertarians, would be entitled to strong belief in any economic program.

How to try new things

Some people aren't much bothered by libertarianism's lack of real-world success. After all, they argue, if no one tried anything new, nothing would ever change.

In fact, I'm all for experimentation; that's how we learn. Create a libertarian state. But run it as a proper experiment. Start small-scale. Establish exactly how your claims will be tested: per capita income? median income? life expectancy? property value? surveys on happiness? Set up a control: e.g. begin with two communities as close as we can get them in size, initial wealth, resources, and culture, one following liberalism, one following libertarianism. Abide by the results-- no changing the goalposts if the liberals happen to "win".

I'm even willing to look at partial tests. If an ideology is really better than others at producing general prosperity, then following it partially should produce partially better results. Jonathan Kwitny suggested comparing a partly socialist system (e.g. Tanzania) to a partly capitalist one (e.g. Kenya). (Kenya looked a lot better.) If the tests are partial, of course, we'll want more of them; but human experience is pretty broad.

It's the libertarians, not me, who stand in the way of such accountability. If I point out examples of nations partially following libertarian views-- we'll get to this below-- I'm told that they don't count: only Pure Real Libertarianism Of My Own Camp can be tested.

Again, all-or-nothing thinking generally goes with intellectual fraud. If a system is untestable, it's because its proponents fear testing. By contrast, I'm confident enough in liberal and scientific values that I'm happy to see even partial adoption. Even a little freedom is better than dictatorship. Even a little science is better than ideology.

An untested political system unfortunately has great rhetorical appeal. Since we can't see it in action, we can't point out its obvious faults, while the ideologue can be caustic about everything that has actually been tried, and which has inevitably fallen short of perfection. Perhaps that's why Dave Barry and Trey Parker are libertarians. But I'd rather vote for a politician who's shown that his programs work in the real world than for a humorist, however amusing.

My friend Franklin

At this point some libertarian readers are pumping their hands in the air like a piston, anxious to explain that their ideal isn't Rothbard or von Mises or Hayek, but the Founding Fathers.

Nice try. Everybody wants the Founders on their side; but it was a different country back then-- 95% agricultural, low density, highly homogenous, primitive in technology-- and modern libertarianism simply doesn't apply. (The OED's citations of the word for the time are all theological.)

All American political movements have their roots in the 1700s-- indeed, in the winning side, since Loyalist opinion essentially disappeared. We are all-- liberals, conservatives, libertarians-- against the Georgian monarchy and for the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You can certainly find places where one Founder or another rants against government; you can find other places where one Founder or another rants against rebellion, anarchy, and the opponents of federalism. Sometimes the same Founder can be quoted on both sides. They were a mixed bunch, and lived long enough lives to encounter different situations.

It cannot have escaped those who have attended with candor to the arguments employed against the extensive powers of the government, that the authors of them have very little considered how far these powers were necessary means of attaining a necessary end. --James Madison
Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. --Thomas Jefferson

All the Property that is necessary to a man is his natural Right, which none may justly deprive him of, but all Property superfluous to such Purposes is the property of the Public who, by their Laws have created it and who may, by other Laws dispose of it. --Benjamin Franklin

The Constitution is above all a definition of a strengthened government, and the Federalist Papers are an extended argument for it. The Founders negotiated a balance between a government that was arbitrary and coercive (their experience as British colonial subjects) and one that was powerless and divided (the failed Articles of Confederation).

The Founders didn't anticipate the New Deal-- there was no need for them to-- but they were as quick to resort to the resources of the state as any modern liberal. Ben Franklin, for instance, played the Pennsylvania legislature like a violin-- using it to fund a hospital he wanted to establish, for instance. Obviously he had no qualms about using state power to do good social works.

It's also worth pointing out that the Founders' words were nobler than their deeds. Most were quite comfortable with slave-owning, for instance. No one worried about women's consent to be governed. Washington's own administration made it a crime to criticize the government. And as Robert Allen Rutland reminds us,

For almost 150 years, in fact, the Bill of Rights was paid lip service in patriotic orations and ignored in the marketplace. It wasn't until after World War I that the Supreme Court began the process of giving real meaning to the Bill of Rights.

The process of giving life to our constitutional rights has largely been the work of liberals. On the greatest fight of all, to treat blacks as human beings, libertarians supported the other side.

Why are they trouble?

Crackpots are usually harmless; how about the Libertarian Party?

In itself, I'm afraid, it's nothing but a footnote. It gets no more than 1% of the vote-- a showing that's been surpassed historically by the Anti-Masonic Party, the Greenbacks, the Prohibition Party, the Socialists, the Greens, and whatever John Anderson was. If that was all it was, I wouldn't bother to devote pages and rants to it. I'm all for the expression of pure eccentricity in politics; I like the Brits' Monster Raving Looney Party even better.

Why are libertarian ideas important? Because of their influence on the Republican Party. They form the ideological basis for the Reagan/Gingrich/Bush revolution. The Republicans have taken the libertarian "Government is Bad" horse and ridden far with it:

Reagan's "Government is the problem"

Phil Gramm's contention that the country's "economic crisis" and "moral crisis" were due to "the explosion of government"
Talk radio hosts' advocacy of armed resistance to "jack-booted government thugs"
Dole's 1996 campaign, advancing the notion that taxes were "Your Money" being taken from you
Gingrich's Contract with America (welfare cuts, tax cuts, limitations on corporations' responsibility and on the government's ability to regulate them)
Dick Armey's comment that Medicare (medical aid for the elderly) is "a program I would have no part of in a free world"
Bush's tax cuts, intended not only to reward the rich but to "starve the beast", in Grover Norquist's words: to create a permanent deficit as a dangerous ploy to reduce social spending
Jeb Bush's hope that the Florida state government buildings would one day be empty
Intellectual support for attacks on the quality of working life in this county and for undoing the New Deal

Maybe this use of their ideas is appalling to 'Real Libertarians'... well, it's an appalling world sometimes. Is it fair to communism that everyone thinks its Leninist manifestation is the only possible one? Do you think I'm happy to have national representatives like Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry?

At least some libertarians have understood the connection. Rothbard again, writing in 1994:

The truth is that since we have been stuck with a two-party system, any electoral revolution against big government had to be expressed through a Republican victory. So it is certainly true that Newt Gingrich and his faction, as well as Robert Dole, have ridden to power on the libertarian wave.

Can you smell the compromise here? Hold your nose and vote for the Repubs, boys. But then don't pretend to be uninvolved when the Republicans start making a mockery of limited government.

There's a deeper lesson here, and it's part of why I don't buy libertarian portraits of the future utopia. Movements out of power are always anti-authoritarian; it's no guarantee that they'll stay that way. Communists before 1917 promised the withering away of the state. Fascists out of power sounded something like socialists. The Republicans were big on term limits when they could be used to unseat Democrats; they say nothing about them today. If you don't think it can happen to you, you're not being honest about human nature and human history.ui

What about the social side?

The Libertarian Party has a cute little test that purports to divide American politics into four quadrants. There's the economic dimension (where libertarians ally with conservatives) and the social dimension (where libertarians ally with liberals).

I think the diagram is seriously misleading, because visually it gives equal importance to both dimensions. And when the rubber hits the road, libertarians almost always go with the economic dimension.

The libertarian philosopher always starts with property rights. Libertarianism arose in opposition to the New Deal, not to Prohibition. The libertarian voter is chiefly exercised over taxes, regulation, and social programs; the libertarian wing of the Republican party has, for forty years, gone along with the war on drugs, corporate welfare, establishment of dictatorships abroad, and an alliance with theocrats. Christian libertarians like Ron Paul want God in the public schools and are happy to have the government forbid abortion and gay marriage. I never saw the libertarians objecting to Bush Sr. mocking the protection of civil rights, or to Ken Starr's government inquiry into politicians' sex lives. On the Cato Institute's list of recent books, I count 1 of 19 dealing with an issue on which libertarians and liberals tend to agree, and that was on foreign policy (specifically, the Iraq war).

If this is changing, as Bush's never-ending "War on Terror" expands the powers of government, demonizes dissent, and enmeshes the country in military crusades and nation-building, as the Republicans push to remove the checks and balances that remain in our government system-- if libertarians come to realize that Republicans and not Democrats are the greater threat to liberty-- I'd be delighted.

But for that, you know, you have to vote against Bush. A belief in social liberties means little if you vote for a party that clearly intends to restrict them.

For the purposes of my critique, however, the social side of libertarianism is irrelevant. A libertarian and I might actually agree to legalize drugs, let people marry whoever they like, and repeal the Patriot Act. But this has nothing to do with whether robber baron capitalism is a good thing.
We tried it, and it failed

The libertarianism that has any effect in the world, then, has nothing to do with social liberty, and everything to do with removing all restrictions on business. So what's wrong with that?

Let's look at some cases that came within spitting distance of the libertarian ideal. Some libertarians won't like these, because they are not Spotless Instances of the Free Utopia; but as I've said, nothing is proved by science fiction. If complete economic freedom and absence of government is a cure-all, partial economic freedom and limited government should be a cure-some.

Pre-New Deal America

At the turn of the 20th century, business could do what it wanted-- and it did. The result was robber barons, monopolistic gouging, management thugs attacking union organizers, filth in our food, a punishing business cycle, slavery and racial oppression, starvation among the elderly, gunboat diplomacy in support of business interests.

The New Deal itself was a response to crisis (though by no means an unprecedented one; it wasn't much worse than the Gilded Age depressions). A quarter of the population was out of work. Five thousand banks failed, destroying the savings of 9 million families. Steel plants were operating at 12% capacity. Banks foreclosed on a quarter of Mississippi's land. Wall Street was discredited by insider trading and collusion with banks at the expense of investors. Farmers were breaking out into open revolt; miners and jobless city workers were rioting.

Don't think, by the way, that if governments don't provide gunboats, no one else will. Corporations will build their own military if necessary: the East Indies Company did; Leopold did in the Congo; management did when fighting with labor.
Post-communist Russia

Or take Russia in the decade after the fall of Communism, as advised by free-market absolutists like Jeffrey Sachs. Russian GDP declined 50% in five years. The elite grabbed the assets they could and shuffled them out of Russia so fast that IMF loans couldn't compensate. In 1994 alone, 600 businessmen, journalists, and politicians were murdered by gangsters. Russia lacked a working road system, a banking system, anti-monopoly regulation, effective law enforcement, or any sort of safety net for the elderly and the jobless. Inflation reached 2250% in 1992. Central government authority effectively disappeared in many regions.

By the way, Russia is the answer to those testosterone-poisoned folks who think that guns will prevent oppression. The mafia will always outgun you.

Today's Russia is moving back toward authoritarianism under Putin. Again, this should dismay libertarians: apparently, given a little freedom, many people will demand less. You'd better be careful about setting up that utopia; ten years further on it may be taken over by authoritarians.

Pinochet's Chile

Or consider the darling of many an '80s conservative: Pinochet's Chile, installed by Nixon, praised by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, George Bush, and Paul Johnson. In twenty years, foreign debt quadrupled, natural resources were wasted, universal health care was abandoned (leading to epidemics of typhoid fever and hepatitis), unions were outlawed, military spending rose (for what? who the hell is going to attack Chile?), social security was "privatized" (with predictable results: ever-increasing government bailouts) and the poverty rate doubled, from 20% to 41%. Chile's growth rate from 1974 to 1982 was 1.5%; the Latin American average was 4.3%.

Pinochet was a dicator, of course, which makes some libertarians feel that they have nothing to learn here. Somehow Chile's experience (say) privatizing social security can tell us nothing about privatizing social security here, because Pinochet was a dictator. Presumably if you set up a business in Chile, the laws of supply and demand and perhaps those of gravity wouldn't apply, because Pinochet was a dictator.

When it's convenient, libertarians even trumpet their association with Chile's "free market" policies; self-gov.org (originators of that cute quiz) includes a page celebrating Milton Friedman, self-proclaimed libertarian, who helped form and advise the group of University of Chicago professors and graduates who implemented Pinochet's policies. The Cato Institute even named a prize for "Advancing Liberty" after this benefactor of the Chilean dictatorship.

Destination: Banana Republic

The newest testing ground for laissez-faire is present-day America, from Ronald Reagan on.

Remove the New Deal, and the pre-New Deal evils clamor to return. Reagan removed the right to strike; companies now fire strikers, outsource high-wage jobs and replace them with dead-end near-minimum-wage service jobs. Middle-class wages are stagnating-- or plummeting, if you consider that working hours are rising. Companies are rushing to reestablish child labor in the Third World.
Where the gains go

Under liberalism, productivity increases benefited all classes-- poverty rates declined from over 30% to under 10% in the thirty years after World War II, while the economy more than quadrupled in size.

In the current libertarian climate, productivity gains only go to the already well-off. Here's the percentage of US national income received by certain percentiles of the population, as reported by the IRS:

                     1986             1999
Top 1%       11.30 19.51
Top 5% 24.11 34.04
Top 10%       35.12 44.89
Top 25%       59.04 66.46
Top 50%    83.34    86.75
Bottom 99%   88.70          80.49
Bottom 95%   75.89          65.96
Bottom 90%    64.88 55.11
Bottom 75%    40.96         33.54
Bottom 50%    16.66 13.25

This should put some perspective on libertarian whining about high taxes and how we're destroying incentives for the oppressed businessman. The wealthiest 1% of the population doubled their share of the pie in just 15 years. In 1973, CEOs earned 45 times the pay of an average employee (about twice the multipler in Japan); today it's 500 times.

Thirty years ago, managers accepted that they operated as much for their workers, consumers, and neighbors as for themselves. Some economists (notably Michael Jensen and William Meckling) decided that the only stakeholders that mattered were the stock owners-- and that management would be more accountable if they were given massive amounts of stock. Not surprisingly, CEOs managed to get the stock without the accountability-- they're obscenely well paid whether the company does well or it tanks-- and the obsession with stock price led to mass layoffs, short-term thinking, and the financial dishonesty at WorldCom, Enron, Adelphia, HealthSouth, and elsewhere.
Welcoming your new overlords

The nature of our economic system has changed in the last quarter-century, and people haven't understood it yet. People over 30 or so grew up in an environment where the rich got more, but everyone prospered. When productivity went up, the rich got richer-- we're not goddamn communists, after all-- but everybody's income increased.

If you were part of the World War II generation, the reality was that you had access to subsidized education and housing, you lived better every year, and you were almost unimaginably better off than your parents.

We were a middle-class nation, perhaps the first nation in history where the majority of the people were comfortable. This infuriated the communists (this wasn't supposed to happen). The primeval libertarians who cranky about it as well, but the rich had little reason to complain-- they were better off than ever before, too.

Conservatives-- nurtured by libertarian ideas-- have managed to change all that. When productivity rises, the rich now keep the gains; the middle class barely stays where it is; the poor get poorer. We have a ways to go before we become a Third World country, but the model is clear. The goal is an impoverished majority, and a super-rich minority with no effective limitations on its power or earnings. We'll exchange the prosperity of 1950s America for that of 1980s Brazil.
Single-villain ideologies

Despite the intelligence of many of its supporters, libertarianism is an instance of the simplest (and therefore silliest) type of politics: the single-villain ideology. Everything is blamed on the government. (One libertarian, for instance, reading my list of the evils of laissez-faire above, ignored everything but "gunboats". It's like Gary Larson's cartoon of "What dogs understand", with the dog's name replaced with "government".)

The advantage of single-villain ideologies is obvious: in any given situation you never have to think hard to find out the culprit. The disadvantages, however, are worse: you can't see your primary target clearly-- hatred is a pair of dark glasses-- and you can't see the problems with anything else.

It's a habit of mind that renders libertarianism unfalsifiable, and thus irrelevant to the world. Everything gets blamed on one institution; and because we have no real-world example where that agency is absent, the claims can't be tested.

Not being a libertarian doesn't mean loving the state; it means accepting complexity. The real world is a monstrously complicated place; there's not just one thing wrong with it, nor just one thing that can be changed to fix it. Things like prosperity and freedom don't have one cause; they're a balancing act.

Here's an alternative theory for you: original sin. People will mess things up, whether by stupidity or by active malice. There is no magical class of people (e.g. "government") who can be removed to produce utopia. Any institution is liable to failure, or active criminality. Put anyone in power-- whether it's communists or engineers or businessmen-- and they will abuse it.

Does this mean things are hopeless? Of course not; it just means that we have to let all institutions balance each other. Government, opposition parties, business, the media, unions, churches, universities, non-government organizations, all watch over each other. Power is distributed as widely as possible to prevent any one institution from monopolizing and abusing it. It's not always a pretty solution, and it can be frustratingly slow and inefficient, but it works better than any alternative I know of.
The problem with markets

Markets are very good at some things, like deciding what to produce and distributing it. But unrestricted markets don't produce general prosperity, and lawless business can and will abuse its power. Examples can be multiplied ad nauseam: read some history-- or the newspaper.

Since natural resources are accounted as free gains and pollution isn't counted against the bottom line, business on its own will grab resources and pollute till an environment is destroyed.
The food business, on its own, will put filth in our food and lie about what it's made of. The few industries which are exceptions to food and drug laws (e.g. providers of alcohol and supplements) fight hard to stay that way. The food industry resists even providing information to consumers.
Business will lock minorities out of jobs and refuse to serve them, or serve them only in degrading ways.
Business will create unsafe goods, endanger workers, profiteer in times of crisis, use violence to prevent unionization-- and spend millions on politicians who will remove the people's right to limit these abuses.
Thanks to the libertarian business climate, companies are happily moving jobs abroad, lowering wages, worsening working conditions.
The same libertarian climate encourages narcissists to pay themselves handsomely while ruling incompetently, and leads to false accounting, insider trading, and corruption.
Businesses create monopolies and cartels when they can manage it; and the first thing monopolies do is raise prices.
Businesses can create bureaucracies as impenetrable and money-wasting as any government. (The worst I've ever had to deal with are health insurers. And no, it's not "government regulation" that makes them that way; insurers have an interest in making the claims process as difficult as possible.)
State-controlled media are vile; but business-controlled media are hardly better, especially given the consolidation of major media. Democracy needs a diversity of voices, and we're moving instead toward domination of the airwaves by a few conglomerates.
The poor are ill-served even for basic services: they pay more for food; they pay through the nose for rotten apartments; they can't get loans even if they can get bank accounts; if they can get a job it's ill paid, with no health benefits. Poor areas are also highly polluted (in ways that cause massive health problems), while lacking such services as movie theaters.

Libertarian responses to such lists are beyond amazing.

"Businesses would be stupid to do those things." Then they're stupid, because they do them. Private racial discrimination, for instance, lasted a hundred years; and it wasn't ended by businessmen changing their minds, but by blacks and liberals organizing. The Libertarian Party platform actually hopes to legally re-enable private discrimination.
"The market will correct those problems." In a few cases it will-- if you wait long enough. But very often it's simply impossible: e.g., the monopolist has made sure no alternatives exist. (One of the railroad tycoons, for instance, was careful to buy up steamship lines.) And though it was sometimes possible to break a monopoly by starting a well-bankrolled competing business, that was no consolation to (say) an oil producer who saw Rockefeller consolidating all the refineries. He could hardly start up his own refinery, and he'd be bankrupt before anyone succeeded in doing so.)

Slavery is another example: though some hoped that the market would eventually make it unprofitable, it sure was taking its time, and neither the slave nor the abolitionist had any non-governmental leverage over the slaveowners.

(Libertarians usually claim to oppose slavery... but that's awfully easy to say on this side of Civil War and the civil rights movement. The slaveowners thought they were defending their sacred rights to property and self-government.)
"We believe in laws too." And they do, rather touchingly; they just don't believe in enforcing them. Enforcement of the laws passed by democratic legislatures is called "men with guns" or "initiating force" in libertarian ideology. And without enforcement, laws are just pretty words. You can see this today in Latin America, which often has very progressive laws. The business and landowning elite just ignores them.
"So what do you want, state-run movie theaters?" The single-villain ideology is so strong that the only response some people can make to a market failure is to invent a statist response and criticize that. Sometimes the best solution to these problems is to use the market-- once it gets a good liberal kick in the pants to go find one.

And those are the better responses. Often enough the only response is explain how nothing bad can happen in the libertarian utopia. But libertarian dogma can't be buttressed by libertarian doctrine-- that's begging the question.

Or it's simply denied that these things are problems. One correspondent suggested that the poor shouldn't "complain" about not getting loans-- "I wouldn't make a loan if I didn't think I'd get paid back." This is not only hard-hearted but ignorant. Who says the poor are bad credit risks? It often takes prodding from community organizations, but banks can serve low-income areas well-- both making money and fostering home ownership. Institutions like the Grameen Bank have found that micro-loans work very well, and are profitable, in the poorest countries on Earth, such as Bangladesh.

A balanced society

A proven solution to most of these ills is liberalism. For fifty years liberals governed this country, generating unprecedented prosperity, and making this the first solidly middle-class nation.

If you want prosperity for the many-- and why should the many support any other goal?-- you need a balance between government and business. For this you need several things:

The rule of law. That means regulations, effective police, and fair courts. As Stephen Holmes said, "There is no rule of law until the Mafia needs lawyers." Neal Stephenson makes the same point in Zodiac: in a liberal society, you can shame companies into obeying the law, because companies don't like bad P.R. You don't have that leverage with mafias.
Consumer trust. That means that abuse and fraud are prosecuted, and you don't have to get things done by paying bribes (a big reason most poor countries stay poor).
Responsive government and business. That means democracy, stockholder and union rights, and a free press. Personally, I think we'll eventually realize that monarchy doesn't work for business, either.
Competition. Monopolies charge higher rates, stifle innovation, abuse dependent companies, and provide lousy service. (The robber barons of the 1800s were explicitly after monopolies, and they wanted them in order to raise profits.)
A wide-based business pyramid-- not just a few multinationals on top. Smaller companies are usually the engine of innovation and city development, and the biggest producers of new jobs.
No barriers to social rising or business innovation (e.g. racism, monopolies, "licensing" whose only purpose is to protect existing business, unavailable loans or courts, an out-of-reach education system, bribes, mafias).
Government costs money

Perhaps the most communicable libertarian meme-- and one of the most mischievous-- is the attempt to paint taxation as theft.

First, it's dishonest. Most libertarians theoretically accept government for defense and law enforcement. (There are some absolutists who don't even believe in national defense; I guess they want to have a libertarian utopia for awhile, then hand it over to foreign invaders.)

Now, national defense and law enforcement cost money: about 22% of the 2002 budget-- 33% of the non-social-security budget. You can't swallow that and maintain that all taxes are bad. At least the cost of those functions is not "your money"; it's a legitimate charge for necessary services.

Americans enjoy the fruits of public scientific research, a well-educated job force, highways and airports, clean food, honest labelling, Social Security, unemployment insurance, trustworthy banks, national parks. Libertarianism has encouraged the peculiarly American delusion that these things come for free. It makes a philosophy out of biting the hand that feeds you.

Second, it leads directly to George Bush's financial irresponsibility. Would a libertarian urge his family or his software company or his gun club to spend twice what it takes in? When libertarians maintain that irresponsibility among the poor is such a bad thing, why is it OK in the government?

It's no excuse to claim that libertarians didn't want the government to increase spending, as Bush has done. As you judge others, so shall you be judged. Libertarians want to judge liberalism not by its goals (e.g. helping poor children) but by its alleged effects (e.g. teen pregnancy). The easiest things in the world for a politician to do are to lower taxes and raise spending. By attacking the very concept of taxation, libertarians help politicians-- and the public-- to indulge their worst impulses.

Finally, it hides dependence on the government. The economic powerhouse of the US is still the Midwest, the Northeast, and California-- largely liberal Democratic areas. As Dean Lacy has pointed out, over the last decade, the blue states of 2004 paid $1.4 trillion more in federal taxes than they received, while red states received $800 billion more than they paid.

Red state morality isn't just to be irresponsible with the money they pay as taxes; it's to be irresponsible with other people's money. It's protesting the concept of getting an allowance by stealing the other kids' money.

Unacceptable morality

Ultimately, my objection to libertarianism is moral. Arguing across moral gulfs is usually ineffective; but we should at least be clear about what our moral differences are.

First, the worship of the already successful and the disdain for the powerless is essentially the morality of a thug. Money and property should not be privileged above everything else-- love, humanity, justice.

(And let's not forget that lurid fascination with firepower-- seen in ESR, Ron Paul, Heinlein and Van Vogt, Advocates for Self-Government's president Sharon Harris, the Cato Institute, Lew Rockwell's site, and the Mises Institute.)

I wish I could convince libertarians that the extremely wealthy don't need them as their unpaid advocates. Power and wealth don't need a cheering section; they are-- by definition-- not an oppressed class which needs our help. Power and wealth can take care of themselves. It's the poor and the defenseless who need aid and advocates.

The libertarians reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's description of people who are so eager to attack a hated ideology that they will destroy their own furniture to make sticks to beat it with. James Craig Green again:

Typical excuses are "the common good", "public morality", "traditional family values", "human rights", "environmental protection", "national security", and "equality". Each appeals to the confused hysteria of a segment of the population. Each allows property to be denied its rightful owner. Each denies the concept of self-ownership.

Here's a very different moral point of view: Jimmy Carter describing why he builds houses with Habitat for Humanity:

From my rural boyhood, when I often spent the night with black neighbors who lived in unheated and dilapidated shacks, to my years in the White House when I saw the plight of the homeless and those trapped in poverty housing worldwide, I have known that shelter matters. And I know, as a Christian, that I have a responsibility to serve where I can, that as I treat "the least of these", I treat my Creator.

Is this "confused hysteria"? No, it's common human decency. It's sad when people have to twist themselves into knots to malign the human desire (and the Biblical command) to help one's neighbor.

Second, it's the philosophy of a snotty teen, someone who's read too much Heinlein, absorbed the sordid notion that an intellectual elite should rule the subhuman masses, and convinced himself that reading a few bad novels qualifies him as a member of the elite.

Third, and perhaps most common, it's the worldview of a provincial narcissist. As I've observed in my overview of the 20th century, liberalism won its battles so thoroughly that people have forgotten why those battles were fought.

It's hard to read libertarians without concluding that they've never been out of the country-- perhaps never out of the suburbs. They don't know what Latin American rule by the elite looks like; they don't know any way of running an industrial economy but that of the US; they don't know what an actually oppressive government looks like; they've never experienced a depression; they've never lived in a slum or experienced racial discrimination. At the same time, they have a very American sense of entitlement: a gut feeling that they've earned the prosperity they were born into, that they owe the community nothing, that they deserve to have whatever they want, that no one should stand in their way.

In short, they're spoiled, and they've evolved a philosophy that they should be spoiled.

I don't want to leave out the possibility of honest confusion. Some people may be attracted by parts of the libertarian program without buying into its underlying morality.

The bottom line

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." --Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have my own articles of faith. I think a political philosophy should

benefit the entire population, not an elite of whatever flavor
offer a positive vision, not just hatred for another philosophy
rest on the best science and history can teach us, rather than science fiction
be modified in the light of what works and what doesn't
produce greater freedom and prosperity the closer a nation comes to it.

On all these counts, libertarianism simply doesn't stack up. Once people are able to be rational about politics, I expect them to toss it out as a practical failure and a moral mess.

KEEPER: The secret ingredient for keeping students connected to christ

2011-12-15T13:42:00.000-08:00

Contemporary culture is suspicious of habits, preferring novel experiences and amusement, but the Christan life is a habit of connecting with Christ and His people in order to become the persons God wants us to be, doing the work He wants us to do.

The secret ingredient for keeping students connected to christ:

The million dollar question seems to be something like, “How do we keep students committed to jesus into adulthood?” This is one of the main questions I have been wrestling with during my tenure as a youth pastor. And depending on the season, I end up somewhere swinging between it all being on Jesus or all being on me. It is true that Jesus is the author and perfector of our faith and as shepherds we are called by god to build up or students in their faith. At the end of the day, it is both. I plant, you water, I plant, you water, and God causes there to be growth and life. This is a mysterious partnership.

In this mysterious partnership there are always better techniques and practices to improve our planting and watering. And if we take a step back, I think we will see that the solution to fertile and usable soil has been there all along. We try all these ways to make the gospel more appealing, to make the good news seem better. In the process we distance ourselves from the church. The church is old, bureaucratic, institutionalized, boring, irrelevant. While that might win us points in the short term, by making us seem hip, flexible, and relevant. This attitude decimates the chances of our students becoming adult followers of christ.

If our time and energy is spent winning students to us or to our student ministry at the expense of the church we really are cutting off the nose to spite the face. The church, warts and all, is where adult followers of Christ gather for worship, discipleship, fellowship, and ministry. Student ministry is temporary, college ministry is temporary, big church has to be the place we help students land if we want them to continue to know and love Jesus into adult hood.
One of the greatest quotes I have ever heard was from a random volunteer on a Mexico mission trip. he said, “Student ministry is a short term mission in a long term life.” If you think about it, this is a revolutionary concept. Just like short-term missions, we are only around for a short period of time. And to be effective and a true blessings, we partner with those people who have been there and will continue to be there in the long term. We don’t show up as the end all to ministry, because we know we are there for only a short amount of time. Instead we work our butts off in that short amount of time and are a blessing to the community we are partnering with. Then we graciously hand them off to their long-term community.

Student ministry as short-term missions: Student ministry must be seen as short-term mission, and the landing place for long-term mission is the church. For students to not get caught in the middle, we must do a better job of loving the church; highlighting how the church has been caring for the students, helping students fit into adult worship, encouraging students to serve, and finding meaningful ways to transition students into the adult life of the church. This allows there to be meaningful, long-term faith and commitment to Jesus Christ. The following are some principles we have implemented at our church to help our students stay connected to the church.

First, it is not ok for student ministry leaders, myself included, to be among the biggest critics of the church. Our jobs and budgets are there because the church loves students. They shell out tons of money to provide a person and place for students to figure out who Jesus is in an environment that works for their development. And if we take their money and recourses and then discredit the very people who provide for us and our students, everyone loses. We must communicate with our students that the old, out of touch, adult church, loves them so much. That is why we have a youth worker, a youth room, a budget. that is how our mission trips get paid for. Tis happens because students are valued by the church. (But sometimes the adult leaders don’t know the best way to show it)

Second, everything we do points to getting our students connected to “big church.” Big church is the formal term for the adult worship gathering. with all the great things that happen at youth group and sunday student worship, we do a huge disservice if we don’t help our students engage in adult worship. There is a discipline to singing worship for 30 minutes, or for standing and sitting liturgy, for long sermons that don’t speak directly to students’ lives. This is where the adult church gathers and is ministered to and worships together, and it is a learned habit. If this habit is instilled in junior high, it will be much easier for them to continue to worship with adults when they are one, as opposed to only worshiping with their peers in services designed only for them.

Another way we are helping our students connect is by making service to the church part of our ministry diet. Our students regularly serve in children’s ministry. Their service is not just because we need warm bodies there, it is because we are continually reminding them of how we develop spiritually, that is we are always pouring our lives into someone younger and always finding people older than us to pour their lives into us. Children’s ministry is a great place to remind our students that the church loves them and cares for them. It did when they were little, it does now, and it will as they get older.

The last thing we do to connect our students to our adult worshiping community, is by having a transition service for the senior class in our student ministry. We spend an entire service in the spring for our seniors to share their testimonies. In these testimonies we work with them to reflect on how they have been loved for and cared for by our church. Then we commission them by having the church lay hands on them and pray for them and welcome them into the adult community. It is an amazing service, and i am always reminded at god’s goodness and faithfulness. Our church is reminded as well of God’s goodness and faithfulness through their love and support of student ministry.
Like you, I still have students who don’t do any of the things I encourage them to do, show up here and there, and end up being amazing followers of Christ, and I still have students who are totally committed to everything we do as a student ministry and choose to walk away from Christ. But one of the transitions we have seen is that when students return from college, their gathering place is in big church, not outside the youth room. Big church can not only be for adults, we must help our students develop that habit. I said at the beginning, the spiritual development of students is a mysterious balance between us planning and watering, and God causing growth. I do think we make god’s job harder if we cut the legs out from the church instead of helping students find their rightful place in the larger body of Christ.

We give our students an amazing gift when we give them the tools and the habits to develop their faith into adulthood within the adult worshiping community. It is then they have the best chance for loving jesus for the long haul.

KEEPER: Will Wilimon: Ayn Rand and Christmas

2011-12-14T23:39:00.000-08:00

In which Willimon contrasts Rand's "grand truth" with the Truth of God incarnate.

To quote a friend:

"My general rule of thumb is, never vote for anyone who admiringly quotes Ayn Rand."

To which I say, AMEN!

Will Willimon: Ayn Rand and Christmas

In college an older student handed me a book, solemnly saying, “This tells the truth.” The next day I read Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” cover-to-cover. Even as a freshman I could tell it was a poorly written novel. I assumed Rand’s bloated prose was due to her having to learn English as a second language. Like all of her novels, “Fountainhead” is a tract that depicts rich people as victims of small-brained, weak people who use government to punish others for genius, hard work and financial achievement. Rand’s “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” repudiate family and community. Their major characters’ families and spouses are leeches whose communities are filled with sponges attempting to live off the powerful, brilliant few.

Only later did I learn the seminal truth about Rand -- she was a fanatical atheist.
Mention of Rand in church would be a waste -- particularly during Advent -- were it not that this tough old atheist now enjoys a renaissance under the patronage of some prominent public figures. She has been cited frequently in congressional debate, most often by Congressman Paul Ryan, but also by presidential aspirant Ron Paul. Ryan doles out Rand quotes during budget committee hearings and cites her many times with approval in public debate. Congressman John Boehner also reverently quotes her, pushes Rand’s books as brilliant social political tracts, and says that her thoughts are his on America.

To Rand, public interest counts for nothing. “There is no such entity as ‘the public,’ since the public is merely a number of individuals,” many of whom, in their weakness, deserve to be stepped upon by the rest of us geniuses on our way up. Yet the Ayn Rand Center sustains Rand's ideas and the Tea Party has adopted her as its ideologue. I’ve seen her picture carried as a placard at Tea Party rallies even though some Tea Partiers have misgivings about her anti-family ideas.

William F. Buckley, a perceptive conservative, had enduring contempt for Rand and her “philosophy,” not only because of his wisdom but because he was a Catholic in a way that Congressman Ryan is not. Buckley knew Rand didn’t just happen to be an atheist. Her views on the danger of government, the sovereignty of the individual, the evil of the family, and the sanctity of self-aggrandizement directly relate to her hatred of God and religion (God as a primitive, silly illusion, and religion, any religion, as “a crutch” used by weak people who can’t cut it in a competitive market). Atheism accounts for Rand in a way that it doesn’t even count in Marx.

I’m amazed that these politicians promote Rand’s philosophy without concern for her atheism. But more amazing is the grand celebration we Christians are about to witness. Christmas, the nativity of Jesus Christ, is an eloquent rebuke to Rand and her contemporary devotees, because Christmas is God’s grand revelation of who God really is.

The incarnation, as Luke tells the story, occurred among those on the bottom. Poor shepherds working the night shift were first to get the news that a poor, unwed Jewish woman was bearing Emmanuel into the world. Old people once made silent -- Simeon and Anna -- were the first to sing. These social leeches, as Rand regards them, were the first to be told by God of “God with us”. The rich and powerful, Rand’s chosen few, resisted Jesus from the day of his birth.

And Christians believe that strange story is the whole truth about God. Jesus Christ -- a poor, vulnerable baby whose family (according to Matthew) was forced to immigrate to Egypt, who cast his lots among the homeless, the hungry, the jobless and the poor -- is God among us.

This unexpected truth explains why North Alabama Methodists have spent the last eight months helping the victims of the April storms. That’s why this week (by my informal estimate) as many as five thousand people will be fed by our churches. That’s why some of our folks will spend Christmas Eve, not around the warmth of their family hearth but hosting some of Jesus’ less fortunate families at Christmas suppers and soup kitchens, allowing some to stay the night to keep from the cold.
Why? Not because we are soft-headed liberals, or because we have weak economic theory. No, it’s because unlike the devotees of Rand we really believe that the babe in the manger is the whole truth about God and about who we are meant to be. Ayn Rand is lying.

That’s the grand truth we get to preach this Christmastide.

Will Willimon is a United Methodist Bishop serving in Birmingham, Alabama.

KEEPER: "God can do anything!"

2011-12-14T22:40:00.000-08:00

Six years ago I wrote a blog entry, prompted by the children's song:
"My God is so great, so strong and so mighty, there's nothing my God cannot do."
The truth is, there ARE some things that God cannot do:

1) he can't lie ( Numbers 23:19; 1 Samuel 15:29 and Titus 1:2);
2) he can't not exist (Exodus 3:13-14)
3) he can't not be holy (Lev. 11:4-45; Ps.99:3,5; Is. 45:11, etc; 1 Peter 1:15-16 etc. ).

Why would we want a God who could contradict himself? (cf. James 1:17; Malachi 3:6) Such a God would not be sovereign, but nonsensical.

As C. S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain,

“His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it’, you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can’. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”

Of course, Lewis was no nominalist. Neither am I, and because I am not a nominalist, I cannot be a voluntarist or a Calvinist.
-------------------------------------------------------

From Jesus Creed: December 13, 2011

“God can do anything he wants!” (by David Opderbeck)
Filed under: Law — scotmcknight @ 12:06 am

David Opderbeck is Professor of Law and Director of the Gibbons Institute of Law, Science Technology at Seton Hall University Law School. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophical Theology at the University of Nottingham. David’s post today is academic and complex, but he’s right in saying it is this distinction that was at work in the Rob Bell and hell debate with with Francis Chan. Chan’s appeal to submission to God at times sounded like nominalism. Read on, read slowly.

Nominalism, Voluntarism, and God’s Being and Will

“God can do ANYTHING he wants.” So say Preston Sprinkle and Francis Chan in their book Erasing Hell. It’s fair to say that this proposition is the cornerstone of Sprinkle and Chan’s theodicy of Hell. “Won’t God get what he wants?” So asks Rob Bell in his book Love Wins. It’s also fair to say that this question, along with the belief that God wants everyone to be saved, is the cornerstone of Bell’s theodicy of Hell.

Both Sprinkle / Chan and Bell focus on God’s will. But is there something missing from their theodicies? Theologically, the question concerns the relation of God’s will to His nature. Philosophically, the question relates to whether “universal” substances exist apart from their particular instantiations (“universals”), or whether substances are merely names for particular instances of things (“nominalism”).

Consider an apple. What is an apple? Is this particular apple on my kitchen table one instantiation of the substance “apple” – a substance with some sort of universal metaphysical (“beyond-“ or “above-“ physical) properties that are shared by all apples? Or is “apple” simply a name I apply to this object before me as a result of some observable similarities with other objects (other things we also call “apple”) that have no metaphysical connection to the “apple” on my table?

What do you think? Do nominalism and voluntarism improperly taint our conversations about ethics, justice and theodicy? Or, does “realism” about universals compromise God’s sovereignty? How can we avoid speaking about God in ways that seem either to compromise His sovereign freedom or to reduce His actions to the arbitrary exercise of power?

For many who claim a modern scientific worldview, there are only particular objects called “apple,” which are more or less related to other particular objects in morphology and chemical composition, all of which are categorized as “apples” for the sake of convenience. What is “real,” in this view, is merely chemistry and physical laws, not any substance “apple.” In contrast, for those who believe in universal properties, “apple” implies properties that are real and transcendent of any one apple. This apple on my table has properties such as “red” in common with other apples because those common properties transcend any one particular apple. (For a good overview of the problem of “universals,” see the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

The modern nominalist view of “nature” derives from and is related to nominalist and “voluntarist” views of God in late medieval philosophy. The medieval scholastic philosophers wrestled with this question: Is God’s will a product of God’s rational nature, such that God only calls things “good” that are substantively “good”? Or is God’s will utterly unconstrained, such that God is free to call “good” whatever He desires to call “good,” without any limiting principle (referred to as “voluntarism”)?

One of the key figures in the development of these ideas was the monk and philosopher William of Ockham (c. 1288-1348). Ockham took a strong – some would argue extreme – view of Divine sovereignty in relation to morality and ethics. Here is an example of Ockham’s voluntarist approach:

I say that although hate, theft, adultery and the like have a bad circumstance annexed de communi lege [“by the common law”] so far as they are done by someone who is obliged by divine precept to the contrary, nevertheless, in respect of everything absolute in those acts they could be done by God without any bad circumstance annexed. And they could be done by the wayfarer even meritoriously if they were to fall under a divine precept, just as now in fact their opposites fall under divine precept . . . But if they were thus done meritoriously by the wayfarer, then they would not be called or named theft, adultery, hate, etc., because those names signify such acts not absolutely but by connoting or giving to understand that one doing such acts is obliged to their opposites by divine precept. (Ockham, Various Questions, Vol. 5 (emphasis added)).

For Ockham, then, there was no “absolute” notion of “the good.” “Good” is just a word we apply to whatever God commands. The parallels to both Sprinkle / Chan’s and Bell’s theodicies are obvious.

This sort of view sounds humble and pious. Who are we to question God? The problem, however, is that it begs the question of who “God” is.

Before the rise of nominalism, Christian theology generally held that God’s being and will are inseparable. God is “simple” and does not have separate “parts” such as “being” and “will.” This means that God wills and acts as He is. If God acts in ways that are “loving,” it is because in His Triune being “God is love” (1 John 4:8); and if God acts in ways that are “just” it is because in His Triune being God is just.

To be sure, Christian theology has always held that God’s essential nature is fundamentally unknowable by human beings, because God is radically other than His creation. However, many of the Church’s great thinkers believed we could know about God either through His “energies” in creation (e.g., many of the Eastern Fathers) or by “analogy” to the being of creation (e.g., Thomas Aquinas). At the very least, the apophatic theologians held that we can speak about what God is not like.

Nominalism and voluntarism, in contrast, divorced God’s will from His being, and thus drastically limited the role of theology for ethics. As theologian John Milbank notes,

In the thought of the nominalists . . . the Trinity loses its significance as a prime location for discussing will and understanding in God and the relationship of God to the world. No longer is the world participatorily enfolded within the divine expressive Logos, but instead a bare divine unity starkly confronts the other distinct unities which he has ordained. . . . This dominance of logic and of the potential absoluta is finally brought to a peak by Hobbes: ‘The right of Nature, whereby God reigneth over men, and punisheth those that break his Lawes, is to be derived, not from his creating them, as if he required obedience as of gratitude for his benefits; but from his Irresistible Power.’” (John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, at pp. 15-16 (quoting Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.))

Catholic philosopher Edward Feser recently summarized the fruits of Ockham’s reductionism as follows:

the Renaissance humanists’ revolution in culture, Luther’s revolution in theology, Descartes’ revolution in philosophy, and Hobbes’s revolution in politics also have their roots in Ockhamism. With the humanists this was manifested in their emphasis on man as an individual, willing being rather than as a rational animal. In Luther’s case, the prospect of judgment by the terrifying God of nominalism and voluntarism – an omnipotent and capricious will, ungoverned by any rational principle – was cause for despair. Since reason is incapable of fathoming this God and good works incapable of appeasing Him, faith alone could be Luther’s refuge. With Descartes, the God of nominalism and voluntarism opened the door to a radical doubt in which even the propositions of mathematics – the truth of which was in Descartes’ view subject to God’s will no less than the contingent truths of experience – were in principle uncertain. And we see the moral and political implications of nominalism in the amoral, self-interested individuals of Hobbes’s so-called “state of nature,” and in the fearsome absolutist monarch of his Leviathan, whose relationship to his subjects parallels that of the nominalist God to the universe.

I might not agree completely with Feser’s hasty appraisal of Luther. Note, however, Feser’s reference to judgment by “the terrifying God of nominalism and voluntarism – an omnipotent and capricious will, ungoverned by any rational principle….” If the governing principle of a theodicy is that “God can do ANYTHING he wants,” how does that theodicy avoid the capricious, irrational god of nominalism and voluntarism? How could even someone presently confident of his election to salvation have any reason to believe that his election will not be suddenly and arbitrarily revoked on the last day? Why should God keep His promises? At the same time, if the governing principle is that “God always gets what he wants,” how can human beings retain any moral freedom or responsibility?

Note also Feser’s linkage between nominalism, voluntarism, and ethics. If law and ethics derive from God’s commands, and God’s commands are the product of pure, ungoverned power and will, then what principle can check the tyranny of earthly rulers who claim absolute and unquestionable power on the basis of Divine right?

Finally, note Feser’s reference to epistemology. This relates to the broad question of universals versus nominalism, because a belief in metaphysical universals suggests that God first conceives of and then brings into existence by His commands a reality with stability and purpose. For Augustine and Aquinas, universals were Ideas in the mind of God, and so to investigate the order of things was to learn something of God. For Ockham, there was no reason for any similarity between things other than God’s choice. This lead Ockham to conceive of “science” as a strictly empirical and logical investigation into particular things, a move that led to the sort of empiricism in which God is no longer a necessary “hypothesis” (ala Pierre Simon-Laplace and Richard Dawkins).

This in many ways gets to the heart of Calvinist theology which is in the forefront of many theological discussions these days. Even my daughters, whom I homeschool, have picked up on the idea that God can do anything he wants. When I have expressed that God cannot act outside of his nature, they are incredulous.
My problem with this thinking, as expressed by Ockham and even somewhat by Aquinas is that it ignores scripture and presents a God who resembles Allah more than Jesus. Lewis writes of God worthy of worship, not because of his power, but because of his goodness.
We worship a God who lives in loving relation within the Trinity and with creation. While I can’t get to the point of all will be saved, as some don’t want to be, I also can’t accept that God is choosing who will go to Hell just because without him becoming a monster. If we are to trust God, then we must believe in his inherent goodness.
Comment by Gina Wright Hawkins — December 13, 2011 @ 12:50 am

Correspondance with a Student about Truth, Part 2

2011-12-07T23:29:00.000-08:00

X replied:

Thanks for the handout i think i was thinking reason not truth, however i still have heard that truth is not important and some of these arguements i have heard are from bible professors on our campus!

To which I responded:

Dear X;

Sigh. What do these professors do with all the scripture about truth? Are they all postmodernists who deconstruct scripture into shreds? You must be very confused, listening to them and then listening to me. It is very important to evaluate people's worldviews, (including mine!) because what we say and do comes (in a large part) from what we think. My guess is that these professors want you to accept their ideas. Why do you suppose they do? If it's not because those ideas are true, then what is the reason they teach them? Is it because those ideas give them some sort of power over you? Is it because they wish, for some reason, to make their students able to overpower others? Because postmodernists do not see the world in terms of truth, beauty and goodness, they are left with power plays: oppressors and victims. That's a rather sad way of looking at things.

Postmodernism has been called "hyper-modernism;" modernism taken to its logical conclusion. Like a laxative, postmodernism can be very useful; however, if one makes a diet of it, the result is spiritual and intellectual anorexia. I am fond of fellow premodern C.S. Lewis' observation:

“We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-

turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest

is the most progressive.-- C. S. Lewis

In my opinion, modernism is the wrong road, and postmodernism is taking a further wrong road off the original wrong road. I would be happy to explain further, but that would involve telling you the history of philosophy/ ; )

Blessings,

Beth

Correspondance with a Student about Truth, Part 1

2011-12-07T23:17:00.000-08:00

Grading more Ethics papers....and tonight I get this from X, a Christian student:

"The relationship between god and truth is a very interesting one to me. In christianity and jewish belief some people will tell us that there is no room for truth and that we just have to believe. This is because christianity has a lot of unknown things that if we used truth we wouldnt be able to proov and it would creat loop holes in our religion."

Here is my response:

Finally, X, I'm fascinated by your comment that you have heard some people say that there is no room for truth in Christianity and Judaism. Do you think perhaps you have this confused with "reason?" How could a Christian reject "truth" when Jesus himself claims to BE the Way, the TRUTH and the life? What are we believing if it isn't the truth? Go look in a concordance or do a keyword search for "truth" on Bible Gateway and see how important truth is to Jews and Christians!

That is why I think what you might really mean here is "reason," rather than "truth." Typically, the way these discussions go is for people who have swallowed the Modernist "either-or" way of thinking to insist we must choose: EITHER faith OR reason, EITHER religion OR science. Thus, one hand, we get Enlightenment rational humanists, who are suspicious of anything they can't empirically verify (taste, touch, smell, see, or hear). For them, science is the only way to truth. On the other hand, we get Christian "fideists" who are afraid of the mind, and whose anti-intellectualism makes them totally forget Scriptures that demand we put not only our hearts but also our minds in Christ's service.

In this course, I've tried to suggest that we can think outside the modernist/postmodernist box, and be "both-and" people, for whom faith and reason are God-given and avenues to His Truth.

So, here's a "handout" I give my students when I teach Introduction to Philosophy. I hope this will help you see that those who are telling you to fear truth and reason are on thin ice.
__________________________________________________________________
CHRISTIANS AND PHILOSOPHY
Select Scripture on Minds, Reason, Philosophy, Wisdom, Truth, Knowledge

Premodern philosophy has always been about the love of wisdom, and the pursuit of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. Traditionally, Christianity has not feared this pursuit, because Christians know that it ultimately lead seekers to God.

It shouldn't be surprising that this infuriates Satan, who is a great counterfeiter. Everything that God has created good, he mocks by presenting an infernal alternate. It should not surprise us that he has done he same thing when it comes to intellectual endeavors, and so he has snared many away for himself. That is why, among many Christians, philosophy and the life of the mind have gotten such a bad reputation. Satan has succeeded, not only in presenting philosophy as a worldly, human activity, but in getting Christians to believe that that is all philosophy is.

However, we can counter Satan’s lies with God’s truth: Jesus Christ wants to capture our minds, and that when He does, the result is Christian philosophy-- a way of thinking that eschews intellectual vice, and which understands Him to be the Way, the Truth and the Life.

A. Is it possible to be a Christian and a philosopher?

Luke 10:27
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.

2 Corinthians 10:55
We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

Colossians 2:8-10
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy,
which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather
than on Christ. 9 For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, 10 and you have been given fullness in Christ… (implying that there is a philosophy which does not depend on human tradition and worldly principles, but on God’s revelation—both natural and special—and on Christ Himself.)

1 Corinthians 1:20
Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? (implying there is a perennial l philosophy, and one seeking the wisdom of God)

B. Why should a Christian be a philosopher?

Isaiah 1:18
“Come now, let us reason together,” says the Lord.

Acts 17:11
Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they
received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

Matthew 22:37 Jesus replied: ”‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all
your soul and with all your mind.’

Matthew 22:4 (Jesus poses a dilemma for the Pharisees) “Jesus asked them, “What do you think about the Christ?”

1 Peter 3:15
But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,

Romans 12:1-2 1Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is true worship. 2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Philippians 1:7 It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart; for whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me.

Acts 17:22 As his custom was, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures,

Colossians 1:9-13 For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding.10 And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, 11 being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully12 giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.

Colossians 1:28 We proclaim him, admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ.

Colossians 3:1-21 Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.

1 Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

2 Corinthians10:4-5The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 5We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

2 Corinthians11:1-6 I hope you will put up with a little of my foolishness; but you are already doing that. 2 I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. 3 But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. 4For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough. 5 But I do not think I am in the least
inferior to those “super-apostles.” 6 I may not be a trained speaker, but I do have knowledge. We have made this perfectly clear to you in every way.

Ephesians 1:17-18 I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation,so that you may know him better. 18 I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,

Ephesians 4:14- 24 Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men int heir deceitful scheming. 15 Instead,speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ…17 So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. 18 They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. 19 Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more. 20 You,however, did not come to know Christ that way. 21 Surely you heard of him and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. 22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

Philippians 1:9-11 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God. Philippians 4:88 Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

1 John 3:18 Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

1 John 4:5-6 They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. 6 We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.

2 John 1-4 To the chosen lady and her children, whom I love in the truth—and not I only, but also all who know the truth— 2 because of the truth, which lives in us and will be with us forever: 3 Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, will be with us in truth and love. 4 It has given me great joy to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as the Father commanded us

3 John 3-4 It gave me great joy to have some brothers come and tell about your faithfulness to the truth and how you continue to walk in the truth. 4 I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.

(continued)

KEEPER: Mormonism is not Christianity

2011-12-06T21:31:00.000-08:00

Mormonism is Not Christianity

by Bethany Blankley

Reading the results of the Pew poll about Mormonism, reminds me of what Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in Strength to Love: "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

The fact that two thirds of mainline Protestants and Catholics believe Mormonism is a Christian religion is an unfortunate example of both.

The Mormon faith is not the same as the Christian faith. Examples abound, consider these few.

The ministry of Jesus:

In the 2 Nephi 5:21, in the Book of Mormon, in 600 B.C., Lehi, a Jewish prophet from the tribe of Manassah, left Jerusalem with several others, sailed east, and landed in South America. Two of Lehi's sons, Lamen and Lemuel, rebelled against God. God cursed them and gave them dark skin -- birthing the Native American race. In 2 Nephi 12:3-12, in A.D. 34, Jesus Christ descended from heaven, baptized the Native Americans, called and commissioned twelve disciples, instituted sacraments, and taught the message of the Sermon on the Mount.

According to the first four gospels of the Bible, Jesus Christ lived and ministered in the region of modern-day Israel. He never appeared in the Americas.

The virgin birth:

The Mormon Church teaches that Mary, the mother of Jesus, conceived Jesus through sexual relations with God the father. Brigham Young wrote in the Journal of Discourses 8:115, "The birth of the Savior was as natural as are the births of our children; it was the result of natural action. He partook of flesh and blood -- was begotten of his Father, as we were of our fathers." Likewise, the Mormon Apostle Bruce McConkie wrote, "Christ was begotten by an Immortal Father in the same way mortal men are begotten by mortal fathers" (Mormon Doctrine, 1966, pg. 547; Read also, The Seer, by Orsen Pratt; Doctrines of Salvation Vol. 1; or The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson).

The Bible teaches that Mary, a virgin, "was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit" (Matt. 1:18). It is a miracle that is difficult for many to understand, but not one that occurred as a result of Mary having intercourse with a human or a spiritual being.

The spirit world:

Mormons believe that God, angels, and humans are the same. BYU religion professor Robert Millet clarifies this concept in The Mormon Faith: A New Look at Christianity (1998, pg. 39): "Latter-day Saints believe that angels are men and women, human beings, sons and daughters of God, personages of the same type as we are. Parley P. Pratt, an early apostle wrote, 'Gods, angels and men are all of one species, one race, one great family.'"

Additionally, angels are created through sexual relations, better known as "celestial exaltation" between God and his heavenly wife in the spirit world. In the LDS Church manual, Achieving a Celestial Marriage, celestial exaltation "includes the ability to procreate the family unit throughout eternity. This our Father in heaven has power to do. His marriage partner is our mother in heaven. We are their spirit children, born to them in the bonds of celestial marriage."

Spirits are gender specific, immortal, and eternal: "Each [male and female] is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose" (The Family: A Proclamation to the World, issued by the First Presidency and the Twelve Apostles of the LDS Church, 1995).

Brigham Young stated: "Mankind are organized of element designed to endure to all eternity; it never had a beginning and never can have an end. There never was a time when this matter, of which you and I are composed, was not in existence, and there never can be a time when it will pass out of existence; it cannot be annihilated.

"It is brought together, organized, and capacitated to receive knowledge and intelligence, to be enthroned in glory, to be made angels, Gods -- beings who will hold control over the elements, and have power by their word to command the creation and redemption of worlds, or to extinguish suns by their breath, and disorganize worlds, hurling them back into their chaotic state. This is what you and I are created for" (Discourses of Brigham Young, p. 48; see also Doctrines and Covenants 93:29-33).

The Bible teaches that angels (immortals) and humans (mortals) are to worship God (the sole eternal being) their creator (Heb. 1). Angels have taken on anthropomorphic characteristics but they are not human. They bore messages to humans from God (Matt. 1:20; Luke 1:11, 26, 2:9; Acts 8:26) and assisted Jesus (Matt. 26:53; Luke 22:43) and his people (Psalm 91:11, 12; Acts 5:19; Heb. 1:14).

Jesus and Satan:

The Mormon church explicitly teaches in the Pearl of Great Price in both the books of Moses (chapter 4) and Abraham (chapter 3) that Jesus Christ and Satan are both sons of God and are not only spirit brothers to each other but are spirit brothers to humans and angels as well. Brigham Young referred to "the Devil, the mighty Lucifer, the great prince of the angels, and the brother of Jesus" in the Journal of Discourses 6:207. In an Ensign magazine (a publication of the Mormon church) answer to a question from a reader, "How can Jesus and Lucifer be spirit brothers when their characters and purposes are so utterly opposed?" the magazine stated, "On first hearing, the doctrine that Lucifer and our Lord, Jesus Christ, are brothers may seem surprising to some--especially to those unacquainted with latter-day revelations. But both the scriptures and the prophets affirm that Jesus Christ and Lucifer are indeed offspring of our Heavenly Father and, therefore, spirit brothers....But as the Firstborn of the Father, Jesus was Lucifer's older brother" (1986, pg. 25).

The Bible teaches that God has only one son, Jesus Christ (John 3:16, 17) who came to destroy the work of the devil (I John 3:8).

Both Mormonism and Christianity make very different truth claims.

Christians must know what they say they believe otherwise their claim to faith is meaningless.

KEEPER: Biblical vs. Deistic Economics

2011-12-06T13:48:00.000-08:00

Scot McKnight point us to this article...

Biblical vs. Deistic Economics

I’m not sure I’d push this onto deism; but what David Dunn says in response to Dave Ramsey is worth consideration and conversation. Much of what Dunn says here was said years back by Ron Sider. The issue even for a Christian libertarian, as I see it, is two-fold: (1) all that we have is not “mine!” but “God’s” and what God has given us, and (2) the fundamental idea of taxation, which runs right through Israel’s laws, is not theft by the government but support for the people.

I’m for a good solid reading of the Bible, but one has to be careful about thinking levitical laws are for today; one has to see what the law was driving at (care for the marginalized); one has to think these things into the NT teachings and the radical attitude of Jesus and the early church toward possessions and even property; and one has to baptize it all into changing times, including a vastly different economy in our world, and how best to live this out in our world. Yet, even after all those moves have been made … well, there’s too much to say here. Here’s Dunn’s response to Ramsey.
Even though the Christian financial “guru” Dave Ramsey claims not to understand Occupy Wall Street, he does know why protesters (and by extension most Americans) want to raise taxes on the wealthy: We are sinners. “At the core of this demand [to raise taxes],” he says, “is envy.”
This judgment is not just offensive and wrong (see my last post) but sadly ironic: Dave Ramsey tells people to bring the Bible to their personal finances, so he should know that God’s economy is all about (what he scornfully calls) “wealth redistribution.”
Being a theologian, I could talk about how sharing in the life of the Trinity obligates us to share our lives with others, but another excuse to “spiritualize” our wallets is the last thing we need. I am also tempted to “tear apart” Ramsey’s caricature of the “Occupy” movement (it may truly be one of the finest examples of a “straw man fallacy” I have ever seen). But I respect Dave Ramsey as a fellow Christian and a person who has helped free thousands of families from crushing debt. (He does “God’s work.”) Therefore I will focus on the practical, theological root of his economic “heresy.”…
If we are truly the possessions of a loving God (Leviticus 25:23), then rights must be regulated by needs. In contrast to the deistic view Leviticus 25 (the closest thing the Bible offers to a clear economic “policy”) presents a more “open” theology of people and property. That is why this chapter gives more rights to the poor than the rich, saying that a person who falls into poverty, and sells his property to survive, has the right to buy it back at any time (with some exceptions). Or a relative may but it back for him.
This “policy” does not exactly qualify as what Ramsey calls “theft” (yet) but it does not support his deistic concept of exclusionary property, either. If Ramsey says nobody has a right to take his “stuff,” then I assume he believes nobody has a right to make him sellit, either. Though he agrees that everything we have comes from God, which is why he rightly stresses private giving, he sadly fails to let that belief get in the way of his laissez faire economics. Otherwise he might not be so quick to condemn progressive tax reform.
What Ramsey calls “wealth redistribution” the Bible calls “Jubilee.”
Ramsey says, “When someone takes my money and gives me no say in the matter, that’s called theft — whether they’re using a gun or the government.” Though this statement begs the question and shows a desperate need to Google “social contract,” it is most troublesome because of its exclusionary theology of property. Or as toddlers say, “Mine!” This doctrine does not come from Ramsey’s Christian faith.
Exclusionary property rights require Deism.

KEEPER: "Authority, Social Contract Theory, and Christian Faith"

2011-12-03T23:36:00.000-08:00

Authority, Social Contract Theory, and Christian Faith
by By Paul DeHart,

What is the Christian philosopher of politics to make of the pretensions of social contract theory—namely the requirement of consent for the legitimacy of any given regime and, in some versions of the theory, not merely the stipulation that consent is necessary for legitimate government authority (or for the establishment of society) but also sufficient? At one level the Christian political philosopher need not respond as a Christian but can respond, rather, simply as a political philosopher. Responding as a political philosopher, such a person might note the self-referential incoherency of voluntaristic accounts of obligation per se—which is to say, of any account of obligation whatsoever, whether moral, political, or legal. Responding simply as a philosopher, such a one might note also the impracticability of obtaining actual consent (whether express or tacit) in a way that clearly underwrites the authority of any given regime. As a result of that impracticability, no extant regime has obtained the clear consent of most of its citizens (nor has any society obtained the unanimous consent of all those it takes to have the full responsibilities of citizens). Responding again simply as a philosopher, such a person might note that many presentations of social contract theory seem to commit the genetic fallacy. And, finally, responding as a philosopher, the Christian political philosopher might note the incoherence of deriving any normative content from hypothetical social contracts (and hence from hypothetical consent), such as occurs in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Whatever we are to make of theories of covenant or consent, it is clear that the early modern theories of social contract—such as those proffered by Hobbes and Locke—leave much to be desired on purely philosophic grounds.

To return to my question, though, how should the Christian political philosopher respond as a Christian political philosopher? Just here I think it’s worth taking into account the work by outstanding Christian analytic philosophers working in logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion—philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, to name two. On Plantinga’s epistemology, any person x can said to know something y just in that instance where y is a true belief that x holds precisely as a result of the proper functioning of his (or her) cognitive faculties. And x’s cognitive faculties are functioning properly if they are functioning in accordance with their design plan and in a proper environment. Such an account of knowledge is quite different from the strong foundationalist account I described, following Plantinga, Wolterstorff, and others, in any earlier post on the problems with Jeffersonian philosophy. Given what Plantinga and Wolterstorff call “Reformed Epistemology” (an epistemology that Plantinga builds on Aquinas, Calvin, and Reid), it is plausible that one knows the claims of faith of to be true even without any evidence (or without any evidence under the definition of evidence advanced by strong foundationalists). Such claims could be properly basic. It is possible that I hear such claims from a trustworthy source, that I believe them, and that they are true. In such a case, if my cognitive faculties were designed to produce true beliefs as a result of testimony from some trustworthy source, it is plausible that I have knowledge of such claims. Now, I see plenty of reason to reject the dominant alternative of the Enlightenment—its strong foundationalism—just because that account is self-referentially incoherent. And so far as I can tell, no one has offered a knock down argument (such as that which led to the demise of Enlightment evidentialism) against the account just described. But given all this, it is plausible that the Christian person knows (if Christianity is true) the particular claims of the Christian faith--and this whether or not the Christian person can demonstrate (i.e., show) by rational argumentation the truth of such claims. But if that’s the case, then why shouldn’t such claims be taken into account in the practice of political philosophy? Why shouldn't the Christian engaged in the practice of political philosophy make use of all that he or she knows to be true?

Given Christianity, one thing the Christian person knows by faith is that Jesus of Nazareth is LORD (kurios) and king. Moreover, the Christian person knows by faith that Christ has a kingdom—such a person is by faith a member of that kingdom. Such a person accepts by faith (and not irrationally) Christ’s claim, in Scripture, that all authority has been given to him as a result of his conquest of death through his death, burial, and resurrection. It is just because all authority has been given to Jesus of Nazareth that, according to the Scriptures, “The kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdom of our of God and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever.” That is, Jesus of Nazareth, not Caeser, is the King of kings—the authority over authorities. His Kingdom is the Kingdom over the kingdoms. And the Christian is, by faith (and faith freely given), a member of this Kingdom of kingdoms. Thus, St. Paul writes to his fellow Christians that their citizenship (or polity) is in Heaven. And he says so in the present tense. The resurrection of the Christ, according to the Christian faith, establishes Jesus of Nazareth as the word’s rightful kurios, as its ultimate authority. And he has this position by virtue of who he is and what he has done and without the consent of those over whom he rules. According to Christian scripture, Jesus of Nazareth will judge the nations. It says nothing of their consent to his judgment. Christian Scripture says that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus of Nazareth is kurios. But, again, nothing here about consent.

Just here an important objection might emerge. Aren't human beings creatures with free will? Doesn't St. Thomas rightly note that such creatures are governed by God in accordance with their special nature and so in light of this very important feature of human nature? And precisely at this point I must register my enthusiastic endorsement of not only the spirit behind the question but also of the proposition that animates the objection. For I believe, contra Hobbes or Mackie (or some other determinist), that humans not only have free will but also that this free will is only rightly understood as free will of the incompatiblist sort. I believe human persons have what philosophers call libertarian free agency (not in the political sense of "libertarian") or contra-causal freedom. Moreover, I believe that the Kingdom of Heaven is about right relationship with God and that right relationship among free creatures can only be established freely and without compulsion. Even more, on Christian belief, God became man in order to restore human persons to right relation with Him (the right relation of man to God being part of what Augustine of Hippo means by pax in his De civitate dei).

Even so, when the Christian person by faith enters the Kingdom of God, part and parcel of what that person freely does is to acknowledge the LORDSHIP of the Messiah of God as the universe's rightful kurios. Indeed, part of what the Christian freely does is to submit to that Lordship--which is, of course, nothing but the Lordship of infinite love and the authority of infinite Goodness. But this means that in his or her freedom the Christian person freely recognizes and submits to something that, according to the Christian gospel, already obtains--namely the LORDSHIP, and hence, the authority--of Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover, I think there is an important modal distinction between the way in which Jesus of Nazareth (and likewise, the God of Israel) exercises that LORDSHIP and the ontological ground of that LORDSHIP. When it comes to entering or living as part of the Kingdom of the Heavens, then that LORDSHIP (because of who the God of Israel is and because his human creatures bear his image) is exercised in accordance with our free will. But, as the exercise of LORDSHIP is distinct from the possession of it, the way in which YHWH exercises LORDSHIP over creation and the way in which the Messiah of YHWH exercises authority in His Kingdom, is distinct (modally so) from the possession of that LORDSHIP and so distinct from the ontological ground of it. Christ exercises his governance in accordance with our free will (at least to some extent) but not on account of it.

To reiterate the initial point, Christian Scripture clearly teaches that the ground of the LORDSHIP of Israel's Messiah is his death, burial, and resurrection from the dead. As a result of these things, part of the Christian gospel (as N. T. Wright says) is the announcement of His ascension to the right hand of the Father. This Christian proposition is a Hebraic way of saying that He has been exalted to the place of rulership--the place of authority over the entire cosmos and over all other authorities and powers. And, if Christian belief is also true belief, then the Christian knows these things by faith.

Now, to return to social contract theory and the principle of consent . . . Given the foregoing, we can note two things. First, the Christian political philosopher as political philosopher knows (or can know) that conventional social contract theory, which stipulates that consent is both necessary and sufficient for the establishment of authority among human persons, is self-referentially incoherent. The Christian political philosopher as Christian knows that in the paradigm instance of authority—the authority of God and of his Messiah—consent is not even necessary. At the base of things, consent is neither necessary nor sufficient for authority per se. Therefore, when the Christian person enters arguments about the nature of political authority among merely human persons, he or she must reject arguments that, without qualification, establish consent as sufficient or even necessary for authority per se over human persons.

The Christian person may of course subscribe to the proposition that consent is required in particular circumstances--which is to say that consent is conditionally, though not absolutely, necessary. For instance, there are occasions upon which we are not dealing with the outright exercise of authority but only with the stewardship of human affairs in particular times and places--times and places in which people equally valued and loved by God find themselves in need of human governance but also find that God has neither established a human intermediary between God and a certain people (such as with Moses and Israel) nor appointed a judge (such as Samson) nor anointed a King over his people (such as with Samuel's anointing first of Saul and then of David). In such a situation, it would seem that Locke is right. The only way that authority (for the governance of temporal matters) can obtain among people who are equal, when the divinity has not ordained some particular ruler, is through their consent. But such stipulations as are given here and as, in fact, are given by Locke himself entail necessarily that consent is not an absolutely necessary condition for the governance of even temporal matters. That is, to reiterate, consent is neither necessary nor sufficient for authority as such. Nor is it absolutely necessary (nor, for that matter, sufficient) for authority relations among human persons. Even in the world as we have it, on Christian revelation, consent only applies to people in certain circumstances. It is a matter of contingency. Consent is not an unimportant contingency. For I would stipulate that consent is a necessary condition for government legitimacy for most people at most times and in most places--for instance, people situated such as we are. Still, consent is never more than conditionally necessary.

Here’s what I'm trying to get at. When you read a political theorist like Hobbes or like Filmer you find, the gaping canyon between them notwithstanding, a surprising agreement. They both think the power of human sovereigns mirrors the sovereignty of God. That is, they think divine authority and human authority are both species of the same thing—authority—which are considerably alike in nature. Thus, one should take Hobbes seriously when he refers to the Leviathan as the mortal God. The source of the power to bind for Hobbes’ immortal and mortal God is much the same—irresistible power. But what the Christian knows by faith seems clearly to entail something quite the contrary—namely that divine and human authority aren’t much alike at all (perhaps not even analogically similar). For only God exercises authority in the proper sense; mere humans never do. Though, just here, it must be noted that most Christians would not attribute to the immortal God the sort of "power" that Hobbes ascribes to Him. For the Christian also knows, by faith, that God is good--not tame, to be sure, but certainly and unequivocally good. For the Christian person, the authority (or power of God) just is the authority (or power) of goodness--and substantive goodness (both in the metaphysical and moral sense), though infinite, goodness at that. Hobbes, of course, will have none of this. But why think his conception of power or authority as such is right or even that it matters much at all? But to return to my point--mere humans never, on the Christian account, exercise authority as such. Rather, given Christianity, the most that a human "ruler" ever exercises is something given in trust. Such "rulers" or "authorities" within human polities, whether they be one, the few, or the many, only ever exercise a stewardship over human affairs. As the Apostle says in Romans 13, the "authorities" are God's--which is to say that rulership over things human ultimately belongs only to Him. Moreover, that the "authorities" are God's is something, given Christianity, that the Christian person knows by faith.

I say that the Christian knows all this by faith. What I mean is that if the articles of Christian faith are true and if the Christian person believes them to be true as a result of properly functioning cognitive faculties, then the Christian does in fact know such things by faith and in the rational sense of know. Of course the Christian person will not have Cartesian or Lockean certainty about the tenets of the faith. But, as a number of philosophers point out, no one can have such certainty about much of anything and maybe about nothing at all. But why think one need Enlightenment certainty in order to have knowledge? The self-referential incoherency of the standard Enlightenment account opens the door to knowledge of the tenets of faith where the knowledge in question is not beliefs held with Cartesian or Lockean or Clifforidan certainty. Indeed, the self-referential incoherency of those accounts opens the door to knowledge of the articles of Christian faith even in the case where the efficient cause of the beliefs in question is the transmission of testimony through reliable sources (and even in that cases where the sources are reliable but we remain unable to establish, to a certainty, there reliability). So, from the Christian standpoint, if the tenets of the faith rule out the social contract account of authority as such, then so much the worse for conventional social contract theory. If, as a result, the ontological ground of human authority is not to be found in consent, then we must look elsewhere. If the Declaration of Independence nevertheless suggests that all governments acquire their just powers only from the consent of the governed, then we will have to reply that this is to claim too much for consent. The government of God--or of the Messiah of God--requires the consent of none. Nor does God require the consent of men when He ordains and establishes, in trust, human "authorities" among them. Consent is at most conditionally necessary for authority among human persons--such as those instances in which God has not anointed a King or chosen some judge and yet in which His creatures, made for society and equal among themselves, nevertheless require some form of governance (instances which, to be sure, we think obtain for most persons at most times and places). But, given rulership of Jesus of Nazareth at the Right Hand of God, given that He is King of kings whether or not He is recognized as such, there is no absolute necessity in consent. Consent is not one of those bedrock principles of reality--of even political reality--that goes all the way down.

KEEPER: "What I've Learned"

2011-12-02T21:41:00.000-08:00

Reflections from a pastor celebrating his silver anniversary of ministry:

What I've Learned

Today is the 25th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. It seems like in the course of that time, I should have learned something about my craft, and I’d like to think I have. So I spent some time reflecting on this, and here is some of what I came up with.

1. When I look back over the years, it’s not so much “my accomplishments” that I remember. It’s the people. I think if was going to give my newly ordained self some advice, I think I’d say, “Don’t worry so much about being a visionary, or being relevant, or finding strategies to grow your church. Just love the people God brings your way, and love them well.”

2. The more “in-step” with my calling I’ve been, the more “out-of-step” I’ve been with the culture around me. Maybe another way of saying that is that being hip isn’t worth it. Being true is.

3. Managing energy is so much more important than managing time. A pastor has to know what makes the fire in his belly blaze like the sun. If a pastor allows himself to become depleted, all the time in the world won’t help.

4. Whether through death or disagreement or a hundred other ways, people will always be leaving you. It will not always or even often be personal, but it will always feel personal. To the degree that a pastor is true to his calling and loves these people well, a piece of him will always leave with them. What will be left? Perhaps more than anything else, this can turn an inspired, enthusiastic new pastor into a sad, broken man. This is one with which I think every pastor must find a way to make peace, and to do so very early on. I cannot overstate how much is riding on this one.

5. As Job knew only too well, doing everything right doesn’t keep the bad stuff away. Call it what you will, but there is a capriciousness to life that can, and most likely will, cause a pastor who is honest to question everything. There had better be some good people who know a pastor well enough and love him deeply enough to help carry him through, because there is a very good chance that absent such folks, he won’t make it through on his own.

Perhaps this is the place to stop for now, and to say thanks to all those people who have helped me, and who continue to help me , not only make it through but to see God’s glory in it all. And seeing the glory of God is something I would wish for all of you as well, because even after 25 years, I have never known or experienced anything else like it.

December 01, 2011 | Permalink

KEEPER: "Why We Need More 'Chaplains' and Fewer Leaders"

2011-12-02T21:37:00.000-08:00

Why We Need More 'Chaplains' and Fewer Leaders
What's a pastor for?
Mark Galli | posted 12/01/2011 10:41AM

In my email recently came another list of suggestions on how to tell if your church is healthy. The warning signs of a sick church were lack of outreach ministries, increasing dropout rate, church conflict, little corporate prayer, and finally, the pastor has become a chaplain.

It's becoming increasingly common to infer that when a pastor becomes a "chaplain," the church is in trouble. A few years ago, one website encouraging "innovative" ministry listed five types of pastors that a church might call: Catalytic, Cultivator, Conflict-Quelling, Chaplain, and Catatonic. The page clarified that "each of these types carries positives and negatives," but it seemed clear that the further one went down the list, the more problematic was the pastor. At the top of the list were Catalytic pastors, who are "gifted in the prophetic and tend to be charismatic leaders. These pastors have lots of energy and are focused on the mission of the church … that is, reaching the community for Jesus Christ. In the 'right' church, they'll grow it without a doubt."

A Chaplain pastor, on the other hand, was mired near the bottom. A Chaplain pastor is "wired for peace, harmony, and pastoral care. This is the type of pastor that has been produced by seminaries for several decades, though a few … a very few … seminaries are retooling. Chaplain pastors eschew change and value status quo. They don't want to stir the waters; rather, they want to bring healing to hurting souls." And if that weren't bad enough, "Chaplain pastors don't grow churches. In fact, a Chaplain pastor will hasten a congregation's demise because they tend to focus on those within the congregation rather than in bringing new converts to Jesus Christ."

The assumptions here are all too common, I'm afraid. So we hear in many quarters that pastors should be leaders, catalysts, and entrepreneurs, and the repeated slam about pastors who are mere chaplains.
* * *

This, of course, inadvertently denigrates every clergyperson who is literally a chaplain—in hospitals, in the military, and elsewhere, as if these ministers are second-class clergy. If they were real ministers, they'd be growing a megachurch. Instead, they are only good enough to "bring healing to hurting souls."

We find ourselves in an odd period of church history when many people have become so used to large, impersonal institutions that they want that in their church as well. Thus the attraction of megachurches, where people can blend in and not be seen if they want. Many thought leaders who ponder church life naturally end up championing massive institutions and denigrating (inadvertently, to be sure) the healing of hurting souls. And this in a community whose theology is supposedly grounded in the universal and cosmic love of God who gives attention to each of us as individuals.

There may be something else going on as well. A chaplain is a minister in the service of another. A chaplain at a hospital or in the military is clearly not the highest ranking member of the institution, clearly not the person in charge of running things. The chaplain's job is defined by service—service to the institution's needs and goals, service to the individuals who come for spiritual help. The chaplain prays for people in distress, administers sacraments to those in need, leads worship for those desperate for God. In short, the chaplain is at the beck and call of those who are hurting for God. He's not his own man. She is not her own woman. There's no mistaking a chaplain for an entrepreneurial leader, a catalyst for growth. No, the chaplain is unmistakably a servant.

In an increasingly secular, capitalist culture, it's understandable that so many clergy are fascinated with the idea that they can be leaders and entrepreneurs. These are the people our culture admires most—those like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or whoever has made a ton of money and a practical difference. I can appreciate this. When I was a pastor, I felt I gained more credibility with my church board—composed of mostly business people—when I could wax eloquent about the church's "decadal growth" and the need to "target a young demographic" and create "revenue models" that would "ensure long-term stability" for the church.

Such is the culture we live in, where successful business people seem to enjoy really important work, and pastors, if they are not careful, will be chaplains, mere servants.
* * *

It's interesting to note how much time and energy our Lord spent on "healing hurting souls." Take this typical summary in Matthew's gospel: "So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, epileptics, and paralytics, and he healed them" (4:24, ESV). When Matthew wanted to sum up what Jesus did over and over, time and again with people, this is the sort of thing he said: "He healed them."

It's also interesting to note the way Jesus framed how his disciples should think about their ministries: "And Jesus called them to him and said to them, 'You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles like to be seen as "leaders," "entrepreneurs," "catalysts for growth," and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many' " (Mark 10:42-45).

Okay, I paraphrased a bit. But I'm not convinced the paraphrase is false to the sense of Jesus' words. In any case, it seems clear that Jesus was a chaplain of souls, and that he encouraged his disciples to think of themselves in the same way.

One wonders where we got our other ideas about the pastorate. For centuries, the pastorate was thought to be about "the cure of souls"—souls being understood not as the spiritual part of us, but as the fullness of our humanity. The pastor has traditionally been thought of as one who does ministry in the midst of a people who are sick and dying, and who administers in word and sacrament, in Scripture and in prayer, the healing balm of the Lord.

So who told us that the pastor is primarily a leader/entrepreneur/change agent and anything but a curer of souls? And why do we believe them?
* * *

The good chaplain-pastor recognizes that the ministry of healing hurting souls has many dimensions. Take King David's chaplain, Nathan. It's clear that Nathan is at the beck and call of his king, and that he sees himself as a spiritual presence to comfort and affirm his patron. At one point, he tells David, "Go, do all that is in your heart, for the Lord is with you" (2 Sam. 7:3). But he also knew that if he was truly going to serve his king, he was going to have to challenge him from time to time—like when he confronted David about his adultery.

But note how pastoral even that conversation is: Nathan tells David that he has "despised the word of the Lord," and David admits, "I have sinned against the Lord." Nathan is acting as a chaplain, to heal the sinful soul of his king (2 Sam. 12).

o say that a pastor is first and foremost a chaplain—someone who is the Lord's means of healing—is not to suggest that his or her role is primarily therapeutic. It includes therapy-like moments, for example, in helping parishioners deal with their ordinary fears and worries. But it is fundamentally about the healing of souls—helping men and women, boys and girls, to become right with God, and therefore, right with others.

This will happen in a variety of ways, as the pastor leads worship and hears confession and simply spends time with the congregation. This happens even when presiding over those functions we tend to think are perfunctory. When the pastor is present, you see, people get this intuitive reminder that God is present. That often puts people on their best behavior—sometimes annoyingly so! But when the pastor communicates in word and deed the graciousness of God, the pastor's presence can be a great comfort to people. For it is by grace that we are healed.

Eugene Peterson put it this way in The Contemplative Pastor: "The primary language of the cure of souls … is conversation and prayer. Being a pastor means learning to use language in which personal uniqueness is enhanced and individual sanctity recognized and respected. It is a language that is unhurried, unforced, unexcited—the leisurely language of friends and lovers, which is also the language of prayer."

I've been a parishioner in many churches over many years. In each church, the pastor has been tempted, as I was, to become the great leader, to shape himself in our culture's image of success. To be sure, the modern pastor does have to "run a church"; he or she is, in fact, the head of an institution that has prosaic institutional needs. I've been thankful when my pastor carries out these institutional responsibilities with efficiency and joy.

But the times I remember most, the times when my troubled soul has been most deeply affected and moved—outside of preaching and receiving the sacraments—have been when my pastor acted like a chaplain. When he pulled me aside in the narthex, put his arm around me, and prayed with me about some matter. When he visited me in the hospital. When in unhurried conversation I felt less alone, because I knew in a deeper way that God was present.

Some say that pastoral moments like these are like germs, and if we let such moments take over, they'll make the church sick. I beg to differ. During such moments, the church is never more healthy.

Mark Galli is senior managing editor of Christianity Today, and author of Chaos and Grace: Discovering the Liberating Work of the Holy Spirit (Baker). He also blogs at www.markgalli.com.

Occupy Thanksgiving

2011-11-25T16:28:00.000-08:00

Calvinism as a Nominalist Project

2011-11-09T21:35:00.000-08:00

Great discussion over on Jesus Creed about Calvinism, Arminianism, double predestination, and the character of God.

I especially appreciated comment#2:

The closer I get to this debate the more I am convinced that underneath it is the ongoing issue of realism vs. nominalism. Luther was a nominalist, a strong and growing movement of his time. Nominalists believe that attributes like love, goodness, beauty, etc. are not real existences. They are only names we give those attributes, hence nominalism. When applied to God categories like the good, the true and the beautiful are not real in and of themselves, as if for God to be those things he has to meet a standard outside of himself. This would seem to make God less than God since he is subject to a measure and it would seem to make God less free since he is constrained by that measure. Luther’s response? He glories in the God who simply is apart from categories that do not arise from his own being. What this can lead to is an arbitrary God, who no matter what he does is always glorious. Therefore, God can be exalted for what on the face of it would normally be considered horrendous evil – i.e., damning people you could save. So we can end up with the strange configuration of being willing to go to hell for the glory of God as a sign of true salvation. To which I respond, huh? In fact, the more arbitrary God seems to be, the more glorious he is. And in some of the Reformed circles I have been exposed to, moral categories for God can seem unstable. And in such a case arguing as Olson does seems to diminish God’s glory. This is always the Reformed response. Olson is simply pleading for the existence of real moral categories. If these are thrown out, there is nothing left to discuss anymore and moral debate becomes senseless. So, to sum it up, I am not so sure that the debate is primarily about free will in man. It might be more about free will in God. I think pursuing the debate along these lines would be more fruitful. I am hoping that Olson presses this trajectory a bit more.

Comment by don bryant — November 9, 2011 @ 2:48 am

The Objectivist Tree

2011-11-06T23:24:00.000-08:00

Shostakovich before bed

2011-11-04T22:07:00.000-07:00

A slice of heaven for a cold November night...

Dmitri Shostakovich's son, Maxim Shostakovich conducts Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major which is performed by Maxim's son, Dmitri Shostakovich Jr. and accompanied by the I Musici de Montreal

Intellectus: one of the keys to Steve Jobs' Success

2011-11-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

The lie of the Enlightenment was that "ratio" was the only component in intelligence. Walter Isaacson points to "intellectus" as an additional necessary part.

Was Steve Jobs Smart? Scientists on the Keys to Success

COLUMN by LEE DYE
Nov. 2, 2011

You don't have to be the brightest kid in the class to become the best scholar. Researchers are finding new clues about what it takes to succeed in school, and probably throughout life.

For centuries thinkers have argued about what intelligence is, and how much it takes to make a genius, whatever that means, and how important intelligence is in guaranteeing success. Today, most would agree that intelligence is the cornerstone of academic success.

But there's more to success than that, and there's plenty of examples, including Steve Jobs, the legendary innovator who changed the world.

No one would suggest that Jobs wasn't very, very smart. But he probably didn't have to walk far across the Apple campus to find a bunch of employees who were just as smart as he was, and maybe much smarter.

Biographer Walter Isaacson argued in the New York Times that Jobs was not overly smart in a traditional sense, in that he did not try to solve problems by rigorous analytical pursuit, common marks of intelligence, but relied more on "imaginative leaps" that "were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical."

Jobs made his mark in the business world, not academia, and his success was due to many things, including personal charisma, and he was the kind of salesman who could peddle ice cream to Eskimos in the middle of the winter.

Bright, yes, but much more than that.

But what about us commoners, who shuffle through life without the gifts that enabled a man like Jobs to do so much? What does it take for us to succeed?

Although Jobs dropped out of college to launch his career, nearly all of us need a first rate education to compete in what has become a highly competitive world. And even in the realm of academics it takes more than intelligence to succeed, although only a fool would argue that intelligence is unimportant. It establishes the basic foundation.

Beyond that, however, educators agree on a second component – effort. No matter how bright you are, you've got to work.

And now, researchers have added a third component. You need intellectual curiosity, or as they put it, a "hungry mind."

In a huge study, scientists in England and Switzerland gathered data from 200 studies involving about 50,000 students to see what it took for them to excel in school. They published their findings in the current issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Curiosity turned out to be a major player.

"Curiosity is basically a hunger for exploration," coauthor Sophie von Stumm of the University of Edinburgh said in releasing the study.

In brief, the study concludes that effort and curiosity together were as important as intelligence in achieving academic success.

"Our results highlight that 'a hungry mind' is a core determinant of individual differences in academic achievement," the study concludes. Curiosity, which they call the "third pillar of academic performance," has been largely overlooked by educators, according to the study

And that, they argue, is a huge failure in schools today.

"Schools and universities must early on encourage intellectual hunger and not exclusively reward the acquiescent application of intelligence and effort," the study says, adding this:

Academic success is likely to be achieved by "not only the diligent class winner who writes an excellent term paper but also the one who asks annoyingly challenging questions during the seminar, a habit that is, unfortunately, not appreciated by all teachers."

In other words, the kid who has all the answers deserves no more encouragement than the one who asks curious questions, clear evidence of a "hungry mind."

The study doesn't attempt to explain how to create that hunger. Encouraging those annoying questions may help, but it probably sends us back to that old debate over nature vs. nurture. Some kids are probably born with it, others learn it in a home that encourages curiosity.

Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis, who has spent decades studying what it takes to be a genius, argues in a new book that it takes more than good genes. It also takes good surroundings.

Other factors also contribute, like good health, financial support, and a little luck.

Any genius needs that. Theirs is not an easy road to follow.

Stanford University researchers, for example, found a link between genius and mental illness, including manic depression. Most highly creative achievers, they concluded, are a little disturbed, which in turn gives them a broad emotional range that possibly contributes to their creative efforts.

And, by the way, over the years I've interviewed many brilliant scientists who easily rank as geniuses. They aren't all nuts.

The only person to receive two Nobel prizes in physics, John Bardeen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was described in a biography by historian Lillian Hoddeson as "a humble, calm, soft-spoken Midwestener who had plenty of friends and who liked to play golf and have picnics with his family."

He was also very bright, worked very hard, and had a "hungry mind."

That leaves us with this question. How many Bardeens are there out there who will never get that spark that ignites their intellectual curiosity?

Four Reforms that Don't Require Bureaucracies to Implement

2011-11-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

The following article appeared in the NYT. I'm especially fond of suggestion #4.

Did You Hear the One About the Bankers?

CITIGROUP is lucky that Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed when he was. The Libyan leader’s death diverted attention from a lethal article involving Citigroup that deserved more attention because it helps to explain why many average Americans have expressed support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The news was that Citigroup had to pay a $285 million fine to settle a case in which, with one hand, Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.

It doesn’t get any more immoral than this. As the Securities and Exchange Commission civil complaint noted, in 2007, Citigroup exercised “significant influence” over choosing $500 million of the $1 billion worth of assets in the deal, and the global bank deliberately chose collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, built from mortgage loans almost sure to fail. According to The Wall Street Journal, the S.E.C. complaint quoted one unnamed C.D.O. trader outside Citigroup as describing the portfolio as resembling something your dog leaves on your neighbor’s lawn. “The deal became largely worthless within months of its creation,” The Journal added. “As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits.”

Citigroup, which is under new and better management now, settled the case without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. James Stewart, a business columnist for The Times, noted that Citigroup’s flimflam made “Goldman Sachs mortgage traders look like Boy Scouts. In settling its fraud charges for $550 million last year, Goldman was accused by the S.E.C. of being the middleman in a similar deal, allowing the hedge fund manager John Paulson to help choose the mortgages and then bet against them without disclosing this to the other parties. Citigroup dispensed with a Paulson figure altogether, grabbing those lucrative roles for itself.” (Last Thursday, the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case demanded that the S.E.C. explain how such serious securities fraud could end with the defendant neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.)

This gets to the core of why all the anti-Wall Street groups around the globe are resonating. I was in Tahrir Square in Cairo for the fall of Hosni Mubarak, and one of the most striking things to me about that demonstration was how apolitical it was. When I talked to Egyptians, it was clear that what animated their protest, first and foremost, was not a quest for democracy — although that was surely a huge factor. It was a quest for “justice.” Many Egyptians were convinced that they lived in a deeply unjust society where the game had been rigged by the Mubarak family and its crony capitalists. Egypt shows what happens when a country adopts free-market capitalism without developing real rule of law and institutions.

But, then, what happened to us? Our financial industry has grown so large and rich it has corrupted our real institutions through political donations. As Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, bluntly said in a 2009 radio interview, despite having caused this crisis, these same financial firms “are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they, frankly, own the place.”

Our Congress today is a forum for legalized bribery. One consumer group using information from Opensecrets.org calculates that the financial services industry, including real estate, spent $2.3 billion on federal campaign contributions from 1990 to 2010, which was more than the health care, energy, defense, agriculture and transportation industries combined. Why are there 61 members on the House Committee on Financial Services? So many congressmen want to be in a position to sell votes to Wall Street.

We can’t afford this any longer. We need to focus on four reforms that don’t require new bureaucracies to implement. 1) If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big and needs to be broken up. We can’t risk another trillion-dollar bailout. 2) If your bank’s deposits are federally insured by U.S. taxpayers, you can’t do any proprietary trading with those deposits — period. 3) Derivatives have to be traded on transparent exchanges where we can see if another A.I.G. is building up enormous risk. 4) Finally, an idea from the blogosphere: U.S. congressmen should have to dress like Nascar drivers and wear the logos of all the banks, investment banks, insurance companies and real estate firms that they’re taking money from. The public needs to know.

Capitalism and free markets are the best engines for generating growth and relieving poverty — provided they are balanced with meaningful transparency, regulation and oversight. We lost that balance in the last decade. If we don’t get it back — and there is now a tidal wave of money resisting that — we will have another crisis. And, if that happens, the cry for justice could turn ugly. Free advice to the financial services industry: Stick to being bulls. Stop being pigs.

Corporations and Government

2011-10-24T12:05:00.000-07:00

Corporations are not people

2011-10-24T11:49:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, We're Not all Christians

2011-10-22T19:31:00.000-07:00

Just read this, from the Salt Lake Tribune:

We’re all Christians
First published Oct 22 2011 01:01AM
Updated Oct 22, 2011 01:01AM

Some Evangelical Christians are noising it about that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is a new and frightening cult, far removed from traditional Christianity.

In fact, Mormons represent a tradition that was present in the beginning of the Christian faith. Mormons believe in a separation of the personalities of God the Father and the Son, while most Catholics and Protestants believe they are one and the same.

This idea of physical distinction between the two deities goes back to the early Christian church’s Arian wing, which was a quite large minority segment of Christianity. At times, Arians were the established or preferred denomination of Roman and Byzantine emperors and their realms.

When politically motivated church people wag tongues and shake fingers today at Mormons, making them seem like second-class citizens, they display a degree of ignorance of this history. They also act like religious bullies, lording it over a minority just because they can. This invites the question, are they truly Christian?

Kim Shinkoskey
Woods Cross

This is my response:

Wow. Arius was twice deemed a heretic, first by the First Council of Nicea in 325, and then again by the First Council of Constantinople in 381. How very postmodern of this writer to think that just because Arianism was a "marginalized" view that it should be approved. By this reasoning, the LDS should abandon their views and embrace the RLDS/CofC understanding of the Trinity as three persons in one substance, their refusal to baptize the dead, and their conviction that men do not become gods. The CofC is, after all, a minority compared to the LDS!

That said, I think it is quite possible that we will see our Mormon friends at the great feast...it's just that I don't think they are justified in saying that they represent traditional, orthodox Christianity.

For more information about the differences between the LDS and RLDS/Cof C, look here

Snap Judgment: The story of Xiao Xiao

2011-10-22T13:41:00.000-07:00

Listen to this incredible story of love...a four-year old girl gives us a glimpse of what Jesus' love must be like for us.

http://snapjudgment.org/audio/by/title/xiao_xiao

"The way I think about it is this: if you think about love being a state where you can't be happy if the person you love isn't happy, this is the way she loved that little boy. She never could rest knowing that he was still there." --Jacqueline's mother

the power of prayer;

http://snapjudgment.org/lost-in-translation

Creativity's letter to Christianity, and a response from a forgotten lover

2011-10-21T22:39:00.000-07:00

The following is A letter to Christianity from Creativity" found at Matthew Paul Turner's blog, "Jesus needs new PR."

Hi Christianity,

It’s me, Creativity. Listen, I got your text message last week. I also heard from Social Media that you really wanted to talk to me. And according to Statistics, you need me. I’d like to see you again, but honestly, I’m torn about whether or not I want to work with you again.

Now, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t miss you sometimes. You’re sort of like Tom Cruise–completely nuts, yet intriguing enough to still want to watch you on Oprah.

Now, regarding your text message, of course I remember the good times working together.

We had lots of fun back then. I remember fondly the day I hooked you up with Michelangelo. Gosh, you absolutely loved what Mitch dabbed on the ceiling of The Sistine Chapel. And you just about walked on water when you saw his painting of The Last Judgment. Sure, we had a mishap or two. Yes, David’s penis should have been circumcised; still, that sculpture is one of the most magnificent erections the world has ever seen.

Oh, and your God loved what I was able to whip up through Bach, Mozart, and Handel. But honestly, back then, finding good musical talent among God’s people was easy, like looking for homely Jehovah’s Witnesses. Still, I helped you discover the cream of God’s musical crop.

And then there was Rembrandt who often made you look brilliant. And of course, Da Vinci! He was a pain in the ass to work with, but when we were able to get him to stop wasting his time on science, the art was usually well worth the wait.

Heck, Christianity, in our heyday, you and I were unstoppable. People called us the Abraham and Sarah of the Modern Times! Yes, you were angrier back then. And I didn’t like the fact that you killed people. But ironically, you were much easier to work with. Fighting wars, governing nations, and roasting heathens over an open fire kept you preoccupied and out of my hair. And back then, I knew what you wanted from me. Even though I didn’t always agree with your politics and theologies, and yes, you were sexist and racist and utterly hypocritical, but I did what you asked me to do: I looked for new ways to tell the stories of God. And I did it well.

Let’s face it; the art I helped you create is pretty much one of the very few redeeming qualities of your reign across Europe. And much of it is still appreciated today.

But then the Puritans happened. And while they loved you, they also wanted Freedom. And as much as you promote Freedom, let’s be honest, you don’t like her all that much. Surprisingly, Freedom has done wonders for me. She’s pretty, talented, mostly fantastic, really. And flexible, which is very hot. I think she might have a drug problem, but she doesn’t interfere with my work, so I love her. But it seems that, ever since Freedom and I became friends, my relationship with you has been a bumpy mess. You basically walked out on me during the late 19th century. Do you remember why?! Because I wouldn’t help you sell your “rapture” idea. I don’t create sensationalized fear, Christianity-well, I don’t unless it’s a horror flick or science fiction or something produced by JJ Abrams. Besides, we’d already spent centuries–long, dark, and ugly ones–promoting your whole “God/fear” thing. I’m over it, and so is everybody else.

At best, our relationship has been bumpy since the late 1950s. And we’ve gone our separate ways a few times. You spent years revitalizing fundamentalism. And I spent time in London discovering the Beatles. Both of us have made our mistakes: You started whoring around with the Republican Party and you told Michael W. Smith he could sing. But to be fair, I made the mistake of loving heroin and thinking that Elizabeth Shue had talent.

Now, that’s not to say we haven’t experienced a couple moments of Pentecostal glory. We wrote a few decent songs together. Switchfoot was fun. But I take no responsibility for Chris Tomlin. And I’ve enjoyed working on a few books with you. In my mind, Joel Osteen is one of the best fiction writers out there. If only he knew it!

But if the rumors are true, that you are indeed interested in working with me again, I’m interested. But I must be blunt, things will need to be different. So before you write back, please consider the following list of ideals.

1) Building a healthy and productive relationship with me begins with this: Give me a good story to tell, preferably a true one, and one that doesn’t conclude with a sales pitch. I’m not Capitalism; I don’t do sales, at least, not the kind that come with eternal damnation. I tell stories. I present truth. I entertain.

2) If you want me to be brilliant and imaginative and to do it on a ministry budget, then trust me. Give me the freedom to tell the stories that you want told. I don’t work well when I’m stressed, paranoid, and fear-filled.

3) When the morality police come to you and complain about my work, I expect you to grow a pair and support me once in a while. I will not create my best work if you continually fall prey to the one person who throws a fit about what I do. No, I don’t want you to cut off their heads. I want you to stop letting them cut off mine.

4) I don’t do Amish fiction, bald eagles, or Michelle Bachmann.

5) The truth is sometimes ugly. When you leave out the ugly parts of a story, it ceases to be the truth. Let me tell the truth.

6) Most importantly, you must learn to say no to Kirk Cameron.

Here’s the thing, Christianity: Putting roadblocks up in front of me doesn’t simply prevent me from being my best at presenting you, it actually leaves me empty. Offering me guidelines and hints and direction is fine, but mandating how I tell a story or paint a picture has never been your gift and it only stifles mine.

Look forward to hearing back,

Creativity

This is the response from Creativity's forgotten lover:

Dear Creativity…

You seem to have amnesia…that was no one night stand we had together! We went together for nearly 1500 YEARS! Have you forgotten us?!!!??? We know that modernism and nominalism split right brain from left, head from heart, faith from reason, earth from heaven, fact from value, and all other sorts of nasty either/ors. But we never were part of that scene. Please, please, don’t ignore us. We loved you, and we continue to love you. Let us together inspire Christianity once again.

–Love,

Hagia Sophia,Sant’Appolinare Nuovo, San Vitale, the Byzantine mosaics and icons, the Romanesque Cathedrals, the Gothic cathedrals, innumerable illuminated manuscripts, Utrecht Psalter, the Dagulf Psalter, Gregorian Chant, Stained Glass artists of Chartres,etc., Dante, Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, the Wilton Diptych,The Limbourg brothers, Gillaume de Machaut, Francesco Landini (and other Christian artists of late antiquity and the Middle Ages)

For the Department of "Do as I say, not as I do" files

2011-10-21T14:22:00.000-07:00

Just read this over on Naked Capitalism:

Friedrich Hayek Joins Ayn Rand as a Hypocritical User of Medicare

We’ve been a bit hard on the left of late, so we figured we’d take some steps to balance our programming. Mark Ames, who has been doggedly on the trail of the Koch brothers, found a delicious failure to live up to his oft-repeated standard of conduct by a god in the libertarian pantheon, Friedrich Hayek. And this fall from grace was encouraged one of the chief promoters of extreme right wing ideas in the US, Charles Koch.

Bear in mind that Charles Koch has not merely promoted libertarian ideas generally but in particular founded the Cato Institute, which has done more than any other single organization to wage war on Social Security. Koch wanted Hayek to come to the US in 1973 to become a “distinguished senior scholar” at the Institute for Human Studies, which Koch quickly made into a libertarian citadel. Hayek initially turned the opportunity down, saying he had just had an operation, which made him particularly aware of the dangers of falling ill abroad. Austria had close to universal health care; Hayek’s comment strongly suggests he took advantage of it.

Per Yasha Levine and Ames in the Nation:

IHS vice president George Pearson (who later became a top Koch Industries executive) responded three weeks later, conceding that it was all but impossible to arrange affordable private medical insurance for Hayek in the United States. However, thanks to research by Yale Brozen, a libertarian economist at the University of Chicago, Pearson happily reported that “social security was passed at the University of Chicago while you [Hayek] were there in 1951. You had an option of being in the program. If you so elected at that time, you may be entitled to coverage now.”

A few weeks later, the institute reported the good news: Professor Hayek had indeed opted into Social Security while he was teaching at Chicago and had paid into the program for ten years. He was eligible for benefits. On August 10, 1973, Koch wrote a letter appealing to Hayek to accept a shorter stay at the IHS, hard-selling Hayek on Social Security’s retirement benefits, which Koch encouraged Hayek to draw on even outside America.

(go here to see a copy of Charles Koch's letter to Friedrich Hayak)

This should put Hayek in some sort of libertariam circle of hell, along with Ayn Rand, who took Medicare and Social Security payments when she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

To quote Blue Texan at FireDogLake:

And before any glibertarians come back with “but…but…she paid into it so there’s no hypocrisy” in comments, Rand herself wrote,

There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.

Adding an extra layer of crow to the deliciousness, the Ayn Rand Center for the Center for F*ck You I Got Mine Individual Rights has an article on its website right now titled, “Social Security is Immoral“.

The Problem, explained

2011-10-21T00:08:00.000-07:00

The New Perspective and Justification

2011-10-19T10:43:00.000-07:00

File for future use:Scott McKnight has begun a new series on the New Perspective, the Old Perspective and Justification. Here is his analysis of the historical background:

October 19, 2011
New/Old Perspective on Justification 1
Filed under: New Perspective — scotmcknight @ 12:08 am
5Share

Nothing has rocked the theological world of evangelicals and the Reformed more than the “new perspective on Paul.” In contrast to the “new” perspective is the “old” perspective, but it ought to be observed here that this is mostly an evangelical intramural debate and not a widespread scholarly debate. Ed Sanders got this going way back in the late 70s and he was a liberal Methodist, and Jimmy Dunn was next and he’s a Methodist, and then Tom Wright’s stuff came along, and he’s an Anglican. But it was the conservative evangelicals of the USA who mostly got upset about this new perspective stuff, and they asserted the “old” perspective, which mostly means Reformation/Augustinian theology either in a Reformed or Lutheran key. So let’s not think “New Testament” when we think “old” because both the “new” and the “old” think they are most faithful to the New Testament.

Thanks to the fine efforts of James Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy, we now have a new volume that gets major thinkers to interact over the new perspective vs. old perspective on justification. The book is called Justification: Five Views (Spectrum Multiview Books). I’m really glad the first piece is by Michael Horton because I haven’t received his book “For Calvinism” yet and so the blog has tipped toward Roger Olson’s book “Against Calvinism.” But at least we can begin this series on a Reformed note, even if not today. Today we look at the big picture in the history of the church: How has justification been understood? (Next post will examine just the “new” perspective.)

The various authors who define justification and then interact with other views are Michael Horton (traditional Reformed), Michael Bird (progressive Reformed), James Dunn (new perspective), Veli-Matt Kärkkäinen (deification view), and Gerald O’Collins/Oliver Rafferty (Roman Catholic). Well, this is a dream team.

If justification is so central to the gospel, and it surely is for the Reformation, why does it not come up in 1 Cor 15 and only once in the sermons in Acts, and hardly at all in the Gospels? Or, does it come up in those texts? How important is justification by faith to the gospel?

And the editors provide a wonderful sketch of the history of justification theology in the church. Origen, who against Marcion did not separate faith and works as many have done. The earlier Augustine didn’t either, but later in his life Augustine (392, 396 and later) did develop a much more grace-shaped justification. But, Augustine saw justification as transformative and not just forensic. Medieval justification theory is Augustinian. So Aquinas: infusion of grace, movement of free will toward God through faith, movement of free will aginst sin, and remission of sin. Thus, justification is both forensic and transformative process.

The Reformation, which is what most mean by “old” perspective, shows a powerful “newness” when it comes to justification. For Luther, justification is the heart and soul and the article by which the church stands or falls. Here ar three major ideas about justification for the Reformation, and this is what “old” perspective basically believes: it is a forensic declaration about status, it is not the same as either regeneration or sanctification (so transformation is not a part of justification), and it is an alien righteousness (imputed righteousness). (McGrath famously argued that Luther was himself more Augustinian in seeing transformation while it was later Lutherans that developed the forensic stuff so thoroughly.)

Wesley: forensic but not emphatic on imputed righteousness; sanctification differs from justification. John Henry Newman: both declarative and transformative. Trent: declarative and transformative. Same in modern Catholic Catechism: “… not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man.”

Pietism worried about separating the forensic from the transformative, though most were traditional Protestants in this issue. Schleiermacher, a Pietist and a Lutheran, resisted an purely forensic view. Ritschl found a way to move form a Reformation view into a Kantian view, in that justification is a means to an end: communal striving for the kingdom of God. Tillich moved between sin and doubt as conditions of justification. Bultmann sees justification as a forensic judgment by God in the present time, but he emphasizes the confrontation through preaching of the human in order to make a decision (and here Bultmann has a curious likeness to much of contemporary evangelicalism). Karl Barth makes justification profoundly christocentric. Both declarative and “a making righteous.”

Anabaptists have struggled with the prospects of a too-forensic imputed righteousness for it can undo the moral vision they had/have. But JC Wenger’s view is essentially that of the Reformation. Justification has not been central to either liberation or feminist theology. Among the Pentecostals the same wariness about too much forensic is clear enough. It becomes more Trinitarian and Spirit-shaped for Pentecostals and thus leads to transformation. And Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen explores justification through Spirit and the Eastern idea of deification/theosis.

And there has been serious dialogue between Catholics and Protestants about justification.

Why evangelicals reject reason, or, Catholics have an easier time

2011-10-18T22:08:00.000-07:00

A friend pointed out this article from the New York Times:

The Evangelical Rejection of Reason
By KARL W. GIBERSON and RANDALL J. STEPHENS
Published: October 17, 2011

THE Republican presidential field has become a showcase of evangelical anti-intellectualism. Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann deny that climate change is real and caused by humans. Mr. Perry and Mrs. Bachmann dismiss evolution as an unproven theory. The two candidates who espouse the greatest support for science, Mitt Romney and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., happen to be Mormons, a faith regarded with mistrust by many Christians.

The rejection of science seems to be part of a politically monolithic red-state fundamentalism, textbook evidence of an unyielding ignorance on the part of the religious. As one fundamentalist slogan puts it, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” But evangelical Christianity need not be defined by the simplistic theology, cultural isolationism and stubborn anti-intellectualism that most of the Republican candidates have embraced.

Like other evangelicals, we accept the centrality of faith in Jesus Christ and look to the Bible as our sacred book, though we find it hard to recognize our religious tradition in the mainstream evangelical conversation. Evangelicalism at its best seeks a biblically grounded expression of Christianity that is intellectually engaged, humble and forward-looking. In contrast, fundamentalism is literalistic, overconfident and reactionary.

Fundamentalism appeals to evangelicals who have become convinced that their country has been overrun by a vast secular conspiracy; denial is the simplest and most attractive response to change. They have been scarred by the elimination of prayer in schools; the removal of nativity scenes from public places; the increasing legitimacy of abortion and homosexuality; the persistence of pornography and drug abuse; and acceptance of other religions and of atheism.

In response, many evangelicals created what amounts to a “parallel culture,” nurtured by church, Sunday school, summer camps and colleges, as well as publishing houses, broadcasting networks, music festivals and counseling groups. Among evangelical leaders, Ken Ham, David Barton and James C. Dobson have been particularly effective orchestrators — and beneficiaries — of this subculture.

Mr. Ham built his organization, Answers in Genesis, on the premise that biblical truth trumps all other knowledge. His Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Ky., contrasts “God’s Word,” timeless and eternal, with the fleeting notions of “human reason.” This is how he knows that the earth is 10,000 years old, that humans and dinosaurs lived together, and that women are subordinate to men. Evangelicals who disagree, like Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, are excoriated on the group’s Web site. (In a recent blog post, Mr. Ham called us “wolves” in sheep’s clothing, masquerading as Christians while secretly trying to destroy faith in the Bible.)

Mr. Barton heads an organization called WallBuilders, dedicated to the proposition that the founders were evangelicals who intended America to be a Christian nation. He has emerged as a highly influential Republican leader, a favorite of Mr. Perry, Mrs. Bachmann and members of the Tea Party. Though his education consists of a B.A. in religious education from Oral Roberts University and his scholarly blunders have drawn criticism from evangelical historians like John Fea, Mr. Barton has seen his version of history reflected in everything from the Republican Party platform to the social science curriculum in Texas.

Mr. Dobson, through his group Focus on the Family, has insisted for decades that homosexuality is a choice and that gay people could “pray away” their unnatural and sinful orientation. A defender of spanking children and of traditional roles for the sexes, he has accused the American Psychological Association, which in 2000 disavowed reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality, of caving in to gay pressure.

Charismatic leaders like these project a winsome personal testimony as brothers in Christ. Their audiences number in the tens of millions. They pepper their presentations with so many Bible verses that their messages appear to be straight out of Scripture; to many, they seem like prophets, anointed by God.

But in fact their rejection of knowledge amounts to what the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll, in his 1994 book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” described as an “intellectual disaster.” He called on evangelicals to repent for their neglect of the mind, decrying the abandonment of the intellectual heritage of the Protestant Reformation. “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he wrote, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

There are signs of change. Within the evangelical world, tensions have emerged between those who deny secular knowledge, and those who have kept up with it and integrated it with their faith. Almost all evangelical colleges employ faculty members with degrees from major research universities — a conduit for knowledge from the larger world. We find students arriving on campus tired of the culture-war approach to faith in which they were raised, and more interested in promoting social justice than opposing gay marriage.

Scholars like Dr. Collins and Mr. Noll, and publications like Books & Culture, Sojourners and The Christian Century, offer an alternative to the self-anointed leaders. They recognize that the Bible does not condemn evolution and says next to nothing about gay marriage. They understand that Christian theology can incorporate Darwin’s insights and flourish in a pluralistic society.

Americans have always trusted in God, and even today atheism is little more than a quiet voice on the margins. Faith, working calmly in the lives of Americans from George Washington to Barack Obama, has motivated some of America’s finest moments. But when the faith of so many Americans becomes an occasion to embrace discredited, ridiculous and even dangerous ideas, we must not be afraid to speak out, even if it means criticizing fellow Christians.

Karl W. Giberson is a former professor of physics, and Randall J. Stephens is an associate professor of history, both at Eastern Nazarene College. They are the authors of “The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age.”

Here's my response, after reading the above article:

Mark Noll wrote "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" in 1995. Things haven't changed much, have they?

Protestantism has always had a complicated relationship with the mind. Recall Luther's 1569 Table Talk: “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but—more frequently than not—struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.” Then there's this little gem: "Reason is the Devil's greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil's appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom ... Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism... She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets."
Martin Luther, Erlangen Edition v. 16, pp. 142-148. Also,

Calvinists have a more difficult time articulating their nuanced attitude toward the mind, because they hold differing interpretations of the extent and the degree to which man has been corrupted by original sin. See this . Furthermore, it is harder to hold a balance between faith and reason when one stresses the "sensus divinitatus" as the means of knowing God, and denies argument and disputation a role in that process. Ultimately, for Calvinists, faith is "beyond reason;" See this. For those whose Calvinism is more loosely held, or more remote (for example, many Baptists and non-denominational types) a "faith beyond reason" can easily slip into being a "faith AGAINST reason."

No doubt, Catholics have had their share of Jacopone da Todi's, mystics, and holy tortillas...but they've never been able to completely repudiate the "both-and" orientation of Thomas Aquinas toward faith and reason. I know many Catholics who are infuriated by American Catholic politicians, whose spiritual formation reflects more of Protestant nominalism/modernism/anti-intellectualism than their own tradition. But at least they can appeal to their tradition, which is not anti-intellectual, in criticizing those politicians. I envy them.

Happy Sukkoth!

2011-10-16T00:18:00.000-07:00

In honor of Sukkoth, 2011, I give you one of my favorite films: "Ushpizin" ("Guests")

A Brief Summary of the 2008 Financial Collapse

2011-10-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

Matt Henderson reflecting on Michael Lewis' The Big Short, gives a brief summary of the 2008 financial collapse:

The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, is an amazing book about the banking crisis of 2008. Having watched the events unfold over the course of about a year, and not really understanding everything involved, the tragedy of situation wasn’t quite as impressive to me at the time, as it is having read Lewis’ concise, clear and compressed explanation of it.

While I’d encourage everyone interested to read the book, I’m going to try to summarize the story here.

1980s—Adding innovation to the boring old bond

A bond is a promise — usually from a government or corporation — to make regular interest payments on borrowed money, and, eventually, to pay back the borrowed principal. For generations, financial markets have traded bonds.

Given that a bond represents an income stream based on borrowed money, Wall Street, in the late 1980s realized that it could create “bond-like” financial products from other debt-based income streams like credit cards, student loans and home mortgages.

The “mortgage bond” was born, and became another financial product bought and sold by Wall Street investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bear Sterns, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley.

Addressing the inherent problem of the mortgage bond

The mortgage bond collects thousands of home mortgages, purchased from lenders, and packages their associated income streams (monthly mortgage payments) into a financial product, that can be bought and sold like a bonds. Mortgage bonds, however, suffer from a couple of unique problems, related to the fact that home owners often refinance their debt during periods of low interest rates, prematurely repaying the principal.

To address this, Wall Street structured mortgage bonds into stacked layers (called “tranches”) — the lowest layer representing the first N mortgages to be paid off early, and the highest layer being the last N mortgages. Investors seeking the higher returns on their money (and accepting the highest risk) could invest in the lower “tranches”, and those wishing lower return (and lower risk), could invest in the higher tranches.

1990s—Where to find new profit? Subprime mortgages

In the 1990s, Wall Street firms began to create mortgage bonds from “subprime” mortgages, i.e. mortgages of much higher risk, but paying much higher interest rates, made to borrowers with lower levels of credit. The structural “tranches” of the mortgage bonds built from subprime mortgages, at this point, represented not only pre-payment, but also outright default.

With increasing demand from Wall Street to buy subprime mortgages, lenders became motivated to place ever more subprime loans (since they were no longer at risk, should the loans fail), and began to push messages like, “refinance your home, unlock all that equity, pay off your credit card debt, and go on vacation.” Often, lenders convinced those without credit and who can’t afford a mortgage at all to get one anyway. To entices these consumers, a new type of mortgage was created — variable rate, with extremely low (even zero) initial interest rates, which later reset to higher levels.

Americans took on these mortgages in masses, not realizing that the real estate bubble forming around them was being fueled by their own actions.

Early 2000s—How to address an ever risker foundation? Rating agencies

As the underlying mortgages became of lower quality, Wall Street’s mortgage bonds became inherently riskier, which should have made them more difficult to sell to investors. Why? Because buyers of Wall Street products look to the rating agencies Moodys and Standard & Poors for guidances, through their ratings, and risker products are supposed to receive lower ratings.

But there’s an inherent conflict of interest between Wall Street and the rating agencies, since it’s Wall Street who pays the agencies to rate their products. Likely due to this conflict, the rating agencies assigned surprisingly high ratings for these ever-riskier mortgage bonds.

Using models provided to them by the Wall Street firms, the agencies would rate mortgage bonds based on the average borrower FICO scores. This allowed Wall Street firms to structure bonds to contain mortgages from both high and low FICO borrowers, to increase the overall bond rating. It never occur to the rating agencies that the solvency of a bond composed of 10 borrowers of score 680 is dramatically different than one with five 700s and five 670s, since only a relatively small percentage of the underlying mortgages needed to default for the bond to fail.

2000s—Insatiable desire for more profits. The collateralized debt obligation

Despite the boom in mortgage bonds, Wall Street’s desire for ever more profits grew stronger led them to focus on the relatively lower ratings of the bottom (riskiest) tranches of the mortgage bonds. They came up with a clever idea. If they could package the bottom tranches of hundreds of different mortgage bonds together, then on the principal of diversification, perhaps they could convince Moodys and S&P to give higher ratings to the collection as a whole.

That’s exactly what happened, and the “Collateralized Debt Obligation” (CDO) was born. What in retrospect seems unthinkable, the rating agencies gave CDOs a rating of triple-A (AAA) — communicating a risk rating equivalent to US Treasuries. This was based on the premise that if one group of Americans began to default on their mortgages, it would be unlikely that other groups would.

Just think about that.

These AAA ratings opened the door to a huge market for Wall Street firms — allowing them to sell CDOs to organizations such as state and private pension funds, whose bylaws prohibited them from investing in anything other than AAA-rated financial products.

2003—An autistic man foresees the collapse. The credit default swap.

Rather than focus on the culprits, the The Big Short tells the story through the eyes of the few who foresaw the coming collapse, and made fortunes as a result. One was Mike Burry, a young man with autism and a glass eye (from a childhood cancer tumor).

Mike studied what was happening, and performed deep analysis of the underlying mortgages. He recognized that the enormous demand by Wall Street for mortgages drove the lending process, which in turn artificially drove up housing prices, creating an unsustainable real estate bubble from the fabric of financially fragile American consumers. When that bubble would eventually burst, through massive defaults, he realized it would result in the collapse of the entire mortgage-backed financial markets.

Considering how he could profit from this collapse, Mike went to Deutsch Bank and asked, “Can I buy insurance against the failure of a mortgage bond?” Deutsch Bank obliged, and when a couple more people wanted such insurance, an industry standard product was conceived, and the “Credit Default Swap” (CDS) was born.

A credit default swap is an insurance policy, against something you don’t have to own yourself. It’s a mechanism to speculate. To purchase a credit default swap, Mike (and others) paid regular insurance premiums to insure massive dollar amounts of CDOs and mortgage bonds (again, which they didn’t own themselves). As long as the CDOs and bonds didn’t default, the insurers made profits on the premiums. If, over the life of the CDOs and mortgage bonds, they collapsed due to defaults, then Mike (and the others) would be paid fortunes.

But who was selling the insurance?

From 2003 through 2007, Mike and a few others built up large portfolios of credit default swaps, paying their regular insurance premiums and waiting for the day their investment would reap fortunes.

They often wondered who was on the other side of their bet — i.e. who was selling the insurance. Turns out, it was the world’s largest insurer, AIG. Somehow, through utter incompetency, the world’s largest insurer insured massive amounts of CDOs and mortgage bonds. Rather than deeply analyze the internal makeup of these CDOs, they were content to trust the AAA ratings of Moodys and Standard & Poors. To them, it was like insuring US Treasuries, and so they considered their regular income stream of insurance premiums to be easy profits.

An important aspect of the credit default swap market was the absence of regulation, the way insurance is normally regulated. For example, AIG wasn’t required to post a percentage of insured asset as collateral.

2007—Running out of mortgages, let’s just used the credit default swaps!

Around 2007, the market for mortgages was drying up, home prices were leveling off, and defaults were already on the rise. Rather than seeing the obvious by now, the Wall Street investment banks remained focused on the continued sale of CDOs. But with their source of mortgages drying up, what income stream could they collect, and pack into these CDOs?

The answer was the income streams from credit default swaps. So the banks themselves got into the business of selling credit default swaps, and packaging those income streams (the insurance premiums) into new CDOs.

2008—The collapse

By 2008, the Wall Street investment banks were making obscene profits, but held large amounts of CDOs and mortgage bonds waiting to be sold. They were also on the liability end of huge amounts of credit default swaps, often sold and exchanged between themselves. AIG was on the liability end of billions of dollars worth of credit default swaps. Pension funds around the world had huge investments in CDOs and mortgage bonds. And then everything collapsed.

Real estate prices began to drop. American began defaulting in masses on their mortgages. The investment banks began seeing losses on their CDOs and mortgage bonds, and the market for hedging credit default swaps collapsed. Reports of potential insolvency of Bear Stearns surfaced and its stock collapsed, triggering the same for the other financial firms. The government allowed Lehman Brothers to go bankrupt, which triggered more panic in the markets. Commercial lending froze, paralyzing businesses in American and across the globe. Many Americans lost their jobs, savings and retirement funds.

With AIG and other of the world’s largest financial firms facing collapse, the US government stepped in, and bailed them out, paying off their debts, assuming their liabilities, and placing a burden of debt on the American people that likely won’t be paid off through the lifetimes of our grandchildren.

And after it was all over, the executives of these same Wall Street firms went home with billions of dollars of taxpayer money in their pockets, in the form of bonuses.

Reflecting on what happened.

Wall Street, in its search for profits, created products based on ever riskier mortgages, and found ways to sell them as secure investments.

The rating agencies, Moodys and S&P, gave risky assets gold-plated ratings, equal to US treasuries, which opened the door to a huge market of CDO buyers.

Having someone to sell their mortgages to, lenders were no longer concerned about whether a borrower could pay them back. Freed of risk, and in search of profits, lenders used deceitful tactics to convince Americans to take out mortgages that they couldn’t afford.

Americans, with their insatiable desires for consumption and for whom the average savings level had dropped to less than 1% (consider that the Chinese save 30%), accepted these mortgages in masses, giving up the equity in their homes.

When everything collapsed, the US government rescued the Wall Street firms, passing an unimaginably large bill to the US tax payers, and creating a debt burden that will take generations to repay.

Much of the US tax payers’ rescue money went in the private pockets of the Wall Street executives, in the form of bonuses.

It seems hard to uniquely place the blame.

I’ve always been a believer in the free-market philosophies of Milton Friedman, and I wonder whether, in the long run, it would have been better to allow the banks to fail, even if it meant the collapse the American economy. (I also now question my own beliefs against government involvement in business through regulation.)

Perhaps all we did is simply defer that collapse (and perhaps a more consequential version of it) to the lifetimes of our children, or their children. At least in allowing a collapse, our children could have likely looked back, and have seen the dire consequences of irresponsibility and unbounded greed.

Update 2011-03-11

Reading the thesis work of A.K. Barnett-Hart, discussed in this WSJ article, she believes the AAA ratings from the rating agencies wasn’t due to a conflict of interest:

The errors of the rating agencies stemmed from neither conflicts of interest nor preferential treatment given to certain banks. The true culprit behind the rating agencies’ failure was the outsourcing of credit analysis to computer models and the low level of human input used to rate CDOs.

Extremely interesting article. And the thesis is directly downloadable here....

Purpose of the Occupy Protests?

2011-10-11T09:48:00.000-07:00

QUESTION: Does anyone involved in a single one of the occupy protests actually know specifically what they are trying to achieve and why they think protesting will do something to achieve it? Because try as I might, all I see is confused people saying things that are not even close to consistent and factual information.

MY RESPONSE: Hanging around Wall Street could be a way to remind those on Wall Street of the effects of mortgage bonds, subprime mortgages, and collaterized debt obligations on the average American. People who are angry and frustrated because their voices have been drowned out by lobbyists also tend not to be very coherent. Angry people attract other angry people, who might not be on the same page as they are. When viewed through a camera lens, all one sees is confusion. Most of us prefer stability to chaos, so we dismiss the entire thing and go on surfing the internet and listening to our Ipods.about a minute ago ·

Correcting an Increasingly Common Misconception

2011-10-11T00:05:00.000-07:00

Here are my comments on Chad Estes' review of Rachel Held Evan's Evolving in Monkeytown:

Thanks for your review...but I'd like to address one part of it. I know it's popular nowadays to see postmodernism as the "synthesis" of premodern mysticism and modernist reason, but this reveals a shallow understanding of history and philosophy.

Chad, where did you get your information about the Middle Ages? Unless you take the Middle Ages to be a 300 year period from 500-800 AD, it wasn't "all mysticism, all the time." Among other scholars, Charlemagne brought Alcuin of York to start his Palace School and other schools (particularly in the Frankish empire), develop a standard curriculum, edit corrupt manuscripts, standardize Latin, introduce the Carolingian miniscule (that later inspired Renaissance Italic). These folks weren't just praying and doing Gregorian chants all day!

Scholasticism was huge throughout the Middle Ages,and it was a LEFT brain enterprise that focused on analysis, definition and verbal clarity. Every educated person had to study dialectic as part of the Trivium. Only then could they move on to the Quadrivium, which included the hardly-mystical study of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

We can thank the Middle Ages for the invention of the university, and the dialectic practiced in places like the Universities of Paris, Bologna and Oxford was a method of thinking that proceeded as follows:

1. The Question to be determined
2. The principal objections to the question
3. An argument in favor of the Question, traditionally a single argument ("On the contrary..")
4. The determination of the Question after weighing the evidence. ("I answer that...")
5. The replies to each objection

This is exactly how the greatest philosopher/theologian of the Middle Ages-- Thomas Aquinas-- structured his magisterial Summa Theologiae. And I haven't even begun to discuss science...for that I refer you to Edward Grant's The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages.

I hope I've made a case that as well as being an age of faith, the middle ages were also an age of reason. In fact, it was the only time in Western Civilization when the two were in such equilibrium. Nothing would please me more than for Postmodernists to rediscover that equilibrium...and admit that they weren't the first to achieve it. ; )

Five Facts about the Wealthiest 1%

2011-10-07T23:53:00.000-07:00

5 Facts You Should Know About the Wealthiest One Percent of Americans

1. The Top 1 Percent of Americans Owns 40 Percent of the Nation’s Wealth
2. The Top 1 Percent of Americans Take Home 24 Percent of National Income
3. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Own Half of the Country’s Stocks, Bonds and Mutual Funds
4. The Top 1 Percent Of Americans Have Only 5 Percent of the Nation’s Personal Debt
5. The Top 1 Percent are Taking In More of the Nation’s Income Than at Any Other Time Since the 1920s

(see the article for helpful charts)

Letter on behalf of Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani

2011-09-29T21:32:00.000-07:00

Below is a copy of my letter to the Iranian Embassy as per Christian Solidarity Worldwide. I thought about inserting the the following verses from the Koran but then thought that they might provoke, rather than persuade, the judiciary.

"Nor can Goodness and Evil be equal. Repel (Evil) with what is better: then will he between whom and thee was hatred become as it were thy friend and intimate!" (Surah 41, Verse 34).

"O ye who believe! stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to Allah, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be (against) rich or poor: for Allah can best protect both. Follow not the lusts (of your hearts), lest ye swerve, and if ye distort (justice) or decline to do justice, verily Allah is well-acquainted with all that ye do." (Surah 4, Verse 135).

"God advocates justice, charity, and regarding the relatives. And He forbids evil, vice, and transgression. He enlightens you, that you may take heed." (Surah 16, Verse 90).

Your Excellency, the Ambassador of Iran,

I am writing on behalf of Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani, who is facing execution because he is a Christian. This violates the Islamic Republic of Iran's own agreement as per the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 18 and its own constitution, article 23.

I hope that the Iranian judiciary will cease to pursue its current course of action against Pastor Nadarkhani, and that it will acquit him of all charges, in accordance with Iranian and international law.

Would you be so kind as to pass my appeal on to the Iranian government as quickly as possible, as Pastor Nadarhani's life hangs in the balance.

Thank you.

Beth Bilynskyj

Seen at a recent protest

2011-09-28T13:08:00.000-07:00

Music for a September Afternoon

2011-09-15T15:23:00.001-07:00

Brian Crain, Adagio con Amore, from his Symphony #1

Brad Boydston Explaining the Trinity

2011-09-14T23:31:00.000-07:00

Brad Boydston does a great job here...I especially like the way he underscores God's essential relationality

Record of a Facebook Dialogue about Rand Paul at the Tea Party Debate

2011-09-14T23:12:00.000-07:00

It all started with this:

Audience at tea party debate cheers leaving uninsured to die

By Rachel Rose Hartman | The Ticket – Tue, Sep 13, 2011

If you're uninsured and on the brink of death, that's apparently a laughing matter to some audience members at last night's tea party Republican presidential debate.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a doctor, was asked a hypothetical question by CNN host Wolf Blitzer about how society should respond if a healthy 30-year-old man who decided against buying health insurance suddenly goes into a coma and requires intensive care for six months. Paul--a fierce limited-government advocate-- said it shouldn't be the government's responsibility. "That's what freedom is all about, taking your own risks," Paul said and was drowned out by audience applause as he added, "this whole idea that you have to prepare to take care of everybody …"

"Are you saying that society should just let him die?" Blitzer pressed Paul. And that's when the audience got involved.

Several loud cheers of "yeah!" followed by laughter could be heard in the Expo Hall at the Florida State Fairgrounds in response to Blitzer's question.

You can watch the exchange below:

Paul disagreed with the audience on that front. "No," he responded, noting he practiced medicine before Medicaid when churches took care of medical costs--a comment that drew wide audience applause. "We never turned anybody away from the hospital."

Paul voiced support for legalizing alternative health care and argued that the reason medical costs have skyrocketed is that individuals have stopped taking personal responsibility for their health care.

Though Paul spoke to the larger issues of health care and government-backed health insurance--both pivotal in the 2012 election--the audience's reaction has overshadowed the substance of the exchange between the candidates. And the day after the event, Texas Gov. Rick Perry offered his own criticism of the audience response.

"I was a bit taken aback by that myself," Perry told NBC News and the Miami Herald of the audience reaction after appearing at a breakfast fundraiser in Tampa Tuesday morning.

"We're the party of life. We ought to be coming up with ways to save lives."

The campaigns for Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann did not immediately respond to The Ticket's request for comment.

Conservative Andrew Sullivan writing for The Daily Beast's The Dish Tuesday noted that the United States obligates society to save someone in an emergency room. "America, moreover, has a law on the books that makes it a crime not to treat and try to save a human being who walks into an emergency room. So we have already made that collective decision and if the GOP wants to revisit it, they can," Sullivan wrote.

Sullivan also decried the audience reaction, writing: "Maybe a tragedy like the death of a feckless twentysomething is inevitable if we are to restrain healthcare costs. But it is still a tragedy. It is not something a decent person cheers."

I saw this link up on Brad Boydston's wall. His comment: "Echoes of Ayn Rand."
Then I shared the link, and wrote, "Brad's right. I fear we'll be seeing more and more of this sort of thing in the near future. That's when it got interesting. "A," a teapartier, and I entered into a dialogue:


A:    "I watched the video, and I didn't see what others are seeing, I guess. I saw the crowd cheer Paul's statement about freedom being about the right to make choices and live with the consequences. Then, when pressed further about letting the man die, I heard a handful of idiots shouting to, essentially, let him die. How do 4 people represent the tea party? I'm a bit confused.

Me: Listen to the rest of it. Did you hear Paul chastising those idiots? Or disagreeing with them? No. He punted to "let the churches take care of them," to loud applause. How convenient to be able to dump the sick, weak and poor on
somebody else! That's the nasty underbelly of libertarianism. Leave me alone...if you need help, don't ask me...go ask somebody else! Shades of Luke 10:30-37. I refer you to Brad Boydston's message:

"I'm hoping that at least some of the people who supported tax-cuts and reduction in government services to the poor, saying that such things should be done through non-profits and churches, will step-up, and take some initiative to get the ball rolling. (Now that we're paying less in taxes than anytime since the 1980's we can most certainly can afford to be more generous.)

Some of the guys in our church are in desperate need of health services. But options are few in our area. We've been helping people with medicine, food, some other medical expenses, public transit passes, and job searches.

I've got a list of people who want to work. Some need training but some are ready to go as soon as a job opens up.

Checks can be sent to:
MasterPiece Church
PO Box 1113
Laveen AZ 85339-1113"

Note: "Marginalized Ministry"

Please help me see what you and the people in the crowd are doing to give to those churches to provide for those without health insurance, jobs, etc. I'm ready for lots of heart-warming stories! : D

A: Beth, my main point the headline and accompanying heartache is misleading. They did not cheer the hypothetical death. There are arguments to be had regarding the policies promoted by Dr. Paul (I'm no fan), but claiming the tea party crowd "cheers leaving uninsured to die" is horribly (purposefully?) misleading. As for your challenge. It's a valid one, and I'll admit that I've been caught up with living life to the point that I've deferred a lot of that burden to others in our church. Heck, I may find myself relying on them soon if I can't find employment.

Me: Perhaps that headline is like the image of the old woman/young woman where you see what you are "set" to see. As for the view that it was only 4 people, and that the rest of the crowd did not share that their sentiment, I am reminded of how how Glenn Beck used to quote Martin Niemoller,

"First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me."

A: What should they have done in that setting? Beat the 4 people to their senses? ;) Seriously, every ideological group I know how has fringe idiots who will do such stupid things as chear the hypothetical death of a purposefully uninsured
man or cheer the very real hospitalization of a vice president while hoping for his death. The fact that one group got lucky enough to be televised doesn't make them more reprsentative than the other group

Me: No, they shouldn't have beaten these four people senseless, but I'm amazed that I didn't hear any jeers. After all, we are talking about people here who hold a strong belief in PERSONAL responsibility; who want to see less government and
social interference and more INDIVIDUAL initiative. The lack of any audible or visible disagreement from the audience makes me think they are either 1) inconsistent in their belief or 2) in agreement with the fringe idiots.

Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?

2011-09-14T21:50:00.000-07:00

This, from The Economist, shows why it isn't.

Social Security: A monstrous truth

Sep 9th 2011, 18:22 by M.S.

NO PONZI scheme in the history of the world has ever lasted 75 years. Ponzi schemes depend on garnering an ever-increasing pool of new investors to pay out returns to prior investors. When the potential pool of new investors runs dry, they collapse. This will occur when the scheme runs up against the natural limits of its recruitment strategy; in the ultimate case, it can't keep going past the point where the entire population is already subscribed.

This should provide us with a hint as to why, as Kevin Drum writes (rebutting Shikha Dalmia), Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. The entire population of working Americans has already been subscribed to Social Security for decades, yet the system continues to pay out benefits on time. That is because the actuarial calculations underlying its revenues and benefits are sound. Rick Perry may consider Social Security "a monstrous lie", but my parents and one surviving grandparent keep getting checks in the mail, year after year. Social Security does face a shortfall in the coming decades, because of the population bulge of retiring baby boomers. Those costs are limited and, measured as a percentage of GDP, will flatten out. They can be absorbed through a modest, gradual increase in Social Security taxes and modest reductions in benefits for wealthier recipients. As my colleague notes, this is what a graph of Social Security's finances looks like:

This, meanwhile, is what a graph of a Ponzi scheme's finances looks like:

The difference is clear.

If you wanted to call Social Security an investment, you would say it is a play on the proposition that America's GDP will continue to grow over the long term. This is the safest play one can imagine making, which is why the returns are so modest. Like any investment, it could go bad. But if it goes bad, if the economy of the United States ceases to grow over the long term, it is inconceivable that any other investment large enough to feed a pension plan covering the entire working population could do better.

My colleague's partial defence of Rick Perry's attacks on Social Security construes them not as a call to scrap the system, but as a warning about its long-term problems. "Mr Perry is targeting Social Security because the current system taxes workers under an explicit commitment to provide described benefits that, as it stands, it cannot meet," she writes. If Mr Perry were in fact calling for limited changes to ensure Social Security can meet promised benefits past 2036, that would be fine. I disagree that this is what he's doing. You don't call something a "monstrous lie" when you want to tinker with it. What Mr Perry is doing is part of a consistent decades-long habit across much of the conservative right of attacking the foundations of Social Security. Up until about 2007, the goal of such attacks was clear: conservatives wanted to replace it with a Chilean-style defined-contribution plan that would be invested in securities. Within its own assumptions, that programme did at least make sense; but since the financial crisis, and with average returns from Wall Street now sharply negative over an entire decade, both the logic and the political support for any such programme have evaporated. If Mr Perry is no longer arguing for the dubious concept of turning Social Security over to the states, then it's not clear what he proposes as an alternative to the current system. The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin, generally a reliable voice for mainstream Republican views, has had no luck getting Mr Perry to clarify what he thinks, and warns that he "can’t afford to offer half-baked ideas and allow his past, troublesome statements to float around."

Perhaps opposition to Social Security has become a runaway train, a rhetorical and intellectual commitment too strong to give up even after it has lost its connection to an actual policy programme. But the effect of continued inaccurate attacks on the foundations of Social Security is to deepen most people's confusion about the actual soundness of the concept, and to reinforce young people's scepticism that they will ever benefit from it. I've been hearing such scepticism from my own cohort for almost 20 years now. It doesn't make any sense. If my generation does in fact fail to receive our Social Security checks, it will only be because we inexplicably decided to vote ourselves out of them.

My grandmother cast her first presidential vote for FDR, in 1936. He had passed the Social Security Act one year earlier. She began receiving Social Security checks in the year Jimmy Carter was elected president. She turns 100 in December, and the checks are still coming in. She has since been joined on the rolls by her two daughters. There is every reason to believe that their children, who have been paying taxes into the Social Security system for decades now, will also enjoy its benefits when they retire. Unless, of course, conservative politicians succeed in convincing working Americans that the whole thing is a "monstrous lie".

How Banks Got Too Big to Fail

2011-09-14T21:34:00.000-07:00

From Mother Jones Jan/Feb 2010 issue:

How Banks Got Too Big to Fail

The nation's 10 largest financial institutions hold 54 percent of our total financial assets; in 1990, they held 20 percent. In the meantime, the number of banks has dropped from more than 12,500 to about 8,000. Some major mergers and acquisitions over the past 20 years:

(Click on the chart for a larger view)

Jonathan Sacks on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11

2011-09-13T22:51:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sack's response to the tenth anniversary of 9/11: Let's rebuild the West's moral authority

TWO things have haunted me since 9/11. The first is the pain, the grief, the lives lost and families devastated, the sheer barbaric ingenuity of evil. The scar in our humanity is still unhealed.

The second is our failure to understand what Osama bin Laden was saying about the West. We did not hear the message then. I'm not sure we hear it now.

After the shock and grief subsided, two theories began to be heard. Firstly, this was an event of epoch-changing magnitude. The terms of international politics had been transformed. The Cold War was over. Another war had begun. The enemy was not the Soviet Union and communism. It was radical, political Islam.

The second was the opposite: 9/11 was terrifying and terrible but it changed nothing because acts of terror never do. The most important thing is not to overreact. Terror may bring dividends in local conflicts but it never succeeds in its larger political aims.

There is something to be said for both theories. But there is a third: why did al-Qa'ida attack the US? Because it believed it could. Because it thought the US was past its prime, no longer as lean and hungry as it believed it was.

Robert McNamara said the first rule in politics is to understand your enemy's psychology. As I struggled to understand 9/11 I began to suspect the answer lay in the events of 1989. That is when the narratives of the West and the rest began seriously to diverge.

In the West, 1989 was seen as the collapse of communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The Western narrative was triumphalist. It saw those events as heralding the victory of its values without a shot being fired. The free market and liberal democratic politics had won for the simplest of reasons. They delivered, while communism did not. They would now spread across the world. It was, said Francis Fukuyama, the beginning of the end of history.

There was, though, another narrative that said the Soviet Union collapsed not because of the triumph of liberal democracy but because of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan earlier that year. It had invaded in 1979 and was forced to withdraw, not because of superpower politics but because of the determined resistance of a small group of highly motivated religious warriors, the mujaheddin and their helpers. That, historically, is the event that captured the imagination of bin Laden. According to this account, the humiliating retreat of the Soviet Army set in motion a series of internal crises that resulted in the fall of a great power. If one of the world's two superpowers was vulnerable to asymmetric warfare -- the war of the few against the many -- why not the other, America itself? What 1989 represented was not the end of history but the end of a history dominated by the twin superpowers of communist Russia and capitalist America. Both were vulnerable because both were overripe and about to fall from the tree. Much excitement was felt in the West by the failure of communism. Less attention was paid to what Daniel Bell called the cultural contradictions of capitalism.

Throughout this period there were voices that few seemed to be listening to. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his 1981 masterwork After Virtue argued that the moral discourse of the West had broken down.

The "Enlightenment project" of a purely rational ethic had failed -- not because there was no such thing, but because there were too many. They clashed inconclusively and people were left with a sense that morality is whatever you think it is.

His minatory warning was: "The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time." That was a scary thing to hear from one of the world's great philosophers. I soon began to hear it from other leading intellectuals also, such as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Robert Bellah.

That is what I heard in the echoes of 9/11: that all great civilisations eventually decline, and when they begin to do so they are vulnerable. That is what bin Laden believed about the West and so did some of the West's own greatest minds.

If so, then 9/11 belongs to a wider series of phenomena affecting the West: the disintegration of the family, the demise of authority, the build-up of personal debt, the collapse of financial institutions, the downgrading of the American economy, the continuing failure of some European economies, the loss of a sense of honour, loyalty and integrity.

These are all signs of the arteriosclerosis of a culture, a civilisation grown old. Whenever Me takes precedence over We, and pleasure today over viability tomorrow, a society is in trouble. If so, then the enemy is not radical Islam, it is us and our, by now unsustainable, self-indulgence.

The West has expended much energy and courage fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq abroad and defeating terror at home. It has spent far less, if any, in renewing its own morality and the institutions -- families, communities, ethical codes, standards in public life -- where it is created and sustained. But if I am right, this is the West's greatest weakness in the eyes of its enemies as well as its friends. The only way to save the world is to begin with ourselves. Our burden after 9/11 is to renew the moral disciplines of freedom. Some say it can't be done. They are wrong: it can and must. Surely we owe the dead no less.

Lord Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth.

The worst day in history was not 9/11

2011-09-11T17:20:00.000-07:00

"It was shattering to admit that we had lost the theological means to distinguish between the United States and the kingdom of God. The criminals who perpetrated 9/11 and the flag-waving boosters of our almost exclusively martial response were of one mind: that the nonviolent way of Jesus is stupid. All of us preachers share the shame; when our people felt very vulnerable, they reached for the flag, not the Cross.

September 11 has changed me. I'm going to preach as never before about Christ crucified as the answer to the question of what's wrong with the world. I have also resolved to relentlessly reiterate from the pulpit that the worst day in history was not a Tuesday in New York, but a Friday in Jerusalem when a consortium of clergy and politicians colluded to run the world on our own terms by crucifying God's own Son.
--William Willimon, Christianity Today, "How Evangelical Leaders Have Changed Since 9/11"

De-regulation, Simplified

2011-09-05T01:01:00.000-07:00

Reality of de-regulation outside Tea Party distortion field:

1) De-reg banks = Wall Street meltdown, Great Recession
2) De-reg energy = Enron debacle, gutting 401Ks, Calif. cheated of $20 Billion
3) De-reg environment = Exxon Valdez, BP oil spills
4) De-reg mortgages = Liar's Loan / securitization fiasco.

Political Cartoons

2011-08-31T01:11:00.000-07:00

Is Libertarianism compatible with democracy?

2011-08-30T22:33:00.000-07:00

An eye-opening article from Ann: "Why Libertarians Appologize for Autocracy."

it is curious that American conservatives and libertarians have not seen fit to discuss the view of fascism held by one of the heroes of modern American libertarianism, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. In his book "Liberalism," published in 1927 after Mussolini had seized power in Italy, Mises wrote:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.

Friedrich von Hayek, who was, along with von Mises, one of the patron saints of modern libertarianism, was as infatuated with the Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet as von Mises was with Mussolini, according to Greg Grandin:

Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian émigré and University of Chicago professor whose 1944 Road to Serfdom dared to suggest that state planning would produce not "freedom and prosperity" but "bondage and misery," visited Pinochet’s Chile a number of times. He was so impressed that he held a meeting of his famed Société Mont Pélérin there. He even recommended Chile to Thatcher as a model to complete her free-market revolution. The Prime Minister, at the nadir of Chile’s 1982 financial collapse, agreed that Chile represented a "remarkable success" but believed that Britain’s "democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent" make "some of the measures" taken by Pinochet "quite unacceptable."

Like Friedman, Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom, who would rule as a dictator only for a "transitional period," only as long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation. "My personal preference," he told a Chilean interviewer, "leans toward a liberal [i.e. libertarian] dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism." In a letter to the London Times he defended the junta, reporting that he had "not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende." Of course, the thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet’s regime weren’t talking.

The Pinochet dictatorship was admired by the right in the U.S. and Britain for turning Chile’s economic policy over to disciples of Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago, who inflicted disastrous social experiments like the privatization of social security on Chile’s repressed population. Following the libertarian reforms, the Chilean economy collapsed in 1982, forcing the nationalization of the banking system and government intervention in industry. According to Grandin:

While he was in Chile Friedman gave a speech titled "The Fragility of Freedom" where he described the "role in the destruction of a free society that was played by the emergence of the welfare state." Chile’s present difficulties, he argued, "were due almost entirely to the forty-year trend toward collectivism, socialism and the welfare state . . . a course that would lead to coercion rather than freedom."

Friedman politely neglected to mention the lack of political and civil liberty under the Pinochet regime. Many of its victims were drugged and taken in military airplanes to be dropped over the South Atlantic, with their bellies slit open while they were still alive so that their bodies would not float and be discovered.

One of the members of Pinochet’s cabinet, Jose Piñera, has enjoyed a second career at the leading American libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, and is credited with having influenced George W. Bush’s failed attempt to partly privatize Social Security in America. The Cato website says:

Distinguished senior fellow José Piñera is co-chairman of Cato's Project on Social Security Choice and Founder and President of the International Center for Pension Reform. Formerly Chile's Secretary of Labor and Social Security, he was the architect of the country's successful reform of its pension system. As Secretary of Labor, Piñera also designed the labor laws that introduced flexibility to the Chilean labor market and, as Secretary of Mining, he was responsible for the constitutional law that established private property rights in Chilean mines.

Piñera, the brother of Chile’s billionaire president Sebastian Piñera, has a personal website in which he claims that he played a major role in the transition to democracy in Chile. Piñera’s portrayal of himself as a champion of democracy is somewhat undercut on the same Web page by several defenses of Pinochet's regime that he includes, including this one by a writer in an Australian magazine:

Indeed, in all 17 years of military rule, the total number of dead and missing -- according to the official Retting Commission -- was 2,279. Were there abuses? Were there real victims? Without the slightest doubt. A war on terror tends to be a dirty war.

Still, in the case of Chile, and contrary to news reports, the number of actual victims was small.

The Cato Institute’s problem with democracy is not limited to its appointment of a former functionary of a mass murderer to direct its retirement policy program. Cato Unbound recently hosted a debate over whether libertarianism is compatible with democracy. Milton Friedman’s grandson Patri concluded that it is not:

Democracy Is Not The Answer

Democracy is the current industry standard political system, but unfortunately it is ill-suited for a libertarian state. It has substantial systemic flaws, which are well-covered elsewhere,[2] and it poses major problems specifically for libertarians:

1) Most people are not by nature libertarians. David Nolan reports that surveys show at most 16% of people have libertarian beliefs. Nolan, the man who founded the Libertarian Party back in 1971, now calls for libertarians to give up on the strategy of electing candidates! …

2) Democracy is rigged against libertarians. Candidates bid for electoral victory partly by selling future political favors to raise funds and votes for their campaigns. Libertarians (and other honest candidates) who will not abuse their office can't sell favors, thus have fewer resources to campaign with, and so have a huge intrinsic disadvantage in an election.

In his recommendations for further reading, Friedman included the Austrian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book "Democracy: The God That Failed," which appeared in 2001, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, during the greatest wave of global democratization in history. In his Cato Unbound manifesto, Friedman called on his fellow libertarians to give up on the whole idea of the democratic nation-state and join his movement in favor of "seasteading," or the creation of new, microscopic sovereign states on repurposed oil derricks, where people who think that "Atlas Shrugged" is really cool can be in the majority for a change....

Seasteading: Government as Industry, Citizens as Customers.

2011-08-30T21:30:00.000-07:00

Here's how Wikipedia describes "seasteading:"

The Seasteading Institute, founded by Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman on April 15, 2008, is an organization formed to facilitate the establishment of autonomous, mobile communities on seaborne platforms operating in international waters. Gramlich’s 1998 article "SeaSteading – Homesteading on the High Seas" outlined the notion of affordable steading, and attracted the attention of Friedman with his proposal for a small-scale project. The two began working together and posted their first collaborative book online in 2001, which explored aspects of seasteading from waste disposal to flags of convenience.

The project picked up mainstream exposure in 2008 after having been brought to the attention of PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who invested $500,000 in the institute and has since spoken out on behalf of its viability, most recently in his essay "The Education of a Libertarian," published online by Cato Unbound. TSI has received widespread and diverse media attention, from sources such as CNN, Wired Magazine, and Prospect Magazine. American journalist and commentator John Stossel wrote an article about seasteading and the Seasteading Institute in February of 2011 and invited Patri Friedman onto his show on the Fox Business Network.

"Let's forget about left and right...and instead, put our entrepreneur hats on. Let's think of government as an industry, where countries are firms and citizens are customers. Now this is not just any industry, this is the world's BIGGEST industry.....a start up country could be the world's first trillion-dollar business....What we need is a new frontier, an open space for political experiments, and the next frontier is the ocean."
-- Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman, The Seasteading Institute

I think this is a splendid idea for all those libertarians who want freedom from territorial government. I hope the Cato Institute finds a nice oil rig out in the middle of the brine and settles in. Can't you just see it now?

"I pledge allegiance to the flag, and to the United Corporation of the Pacific for which it stands, one seastead under Rand, voluntarily joined, with liberty and profit for each shareholder."

Crater Lake, August, 2011

2011-08-29T00:29:00.000-07:00

Steve and I, August 2011

2011-08-29T00:26:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday, Mother Teresa

2011-08-27T21:21:00.000-07:00

Today, in 1910, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born. We know her better as Mother Teresa. Here is one of my favorite quotes: ""It is a great poverty to decide that a child must die so that you might live as you wish."

GKC wrote, "It is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most." Mother Teresa would certainly be a contender for such a saint. Her compassion and sacrifice stand as a testimony to Christ against the world's self-absorption and greed.

English Music: Vaughan Williams: Lento, Symphony #2

2011-08-23T23:18:00.000-07:00

In Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, Peter Ackroyd writes, "If that Englishness in music can be encapsulated in words at all, those words would probably be: ostensibly familiar and commonplace, yet deep and mystical as well as lyrical, melodic, melancholic, and nostalgic yet timeless."

"The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself."

Doonesbury and Jon Stewart Nail it

2011-08-21T21:25:00.000-07:00

Today's Doonesbury makes a perfect accompaniment to Jon Stewart's broadcast:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

World of Class Warfare - Warren Buffett vs. Wealthy Conservatives

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

QUOTES: Bauman on Consumerism

2011-08-14T15:46:00.000-07:00

But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the Spirit you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough. --II Cor. 11:3-5

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. --Gal. 1:6-7

from The London Riots – On Consumerism coming Home to Roost
09/08/2011 by Zygmunt Bauman

"We are all consumers now, consumers first and foremost, consumers by right and by duty. The day after the 11/9 outrage George W. Bush, when calling Americans to get over the trauma and go back to normal, found no better words than “go back shopping”. It is the level of our shopping activity and the ease with which we dispose of one object of consumption in order to replace it with a “new and improved” one which serves us as the prime measure of our social standing and the score in the life-success competition. To all problems we encounter on the road away from trouble and towards satisfaction we seek solutions in shops.

From cradle to coffin we are trained and drilled to treat shops as pharmacies filled with drugs to cure or at least mitigate all illnesses and afflictions of our lives and lives in common. Shops and shopping acquire thereby a fully and truly eschatological dimension. Supermarkets, as George Ritzer famously put it, are our temples; and so, I may add, the shopping lists are our breviaries, while strolls along the shopping malls become our pilgrimages. Buying on impulse and getting rid of possessions no longer sufficiently attractive in order to put more attractive ones in their place are our most enthusing emotions. The fullness of consumer enjoyment means fullness of life. I shop, therefore I am. To shop or not to shop, this is the question.

For defective consumers, those contemporary have-nots, non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life un-fulfilled – and of own nonentity and good-for-nothingness. Not just the absence of pleasure: absence of human dignity. Of life meaning. Ultimately, of humanity and any other ground for self-respect and respect of the others around."

QUOTES: Freeman Dyson's response to Steven Weinberg

2011-08-10T15:05:00.000-07:00

"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion." --Steven Weinberg

"Weinberg's statement is true as far as it goes, but it is not the whole truth. To make it the whole truth, we must add an additional clause: 'And for bad people to do good things—that [also] takes religion.' The main point of Christianity is that it is a religion for sinners. Jesus made that very clear. When the Pharisees asked his disciples, 'Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?' he said, 'I come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.' Only a small fraction of sinners repent and do good things but only a small fraction of good people are led by their religion to do bad things." --Freeman Dyson

Visually Understanding the Debt

2011-08-02T23:24:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has an excellent graphic to help tell the story of how we have come to find ourselves in such debt:

And here is a helpful Q&A about the Clinton years:

Q: During the Clinton administration was the federal budget balanced? Was the federal deficit erased?

A: Yes to both questions, whether you count Social Security or not.

FULL ANSWER

This chart, based on historical figures from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, shows the total deficit or surplus for each fiscal year from 1990 through 2006. Keep in mind that fiscal years begin Oct. 1, so the first year that can be counted as a Clinton year is fiscal 1994. The appropriations bills for fiscal years 1990 through 1993 were signed by Bill Clinton’s predecessor, George H.W. Bush. Fiscal 2002 is the first for which President George W. Bush signed the appropriations bills, and the first to show the effect of his tax cuts.

The Clinton years showed the effects of a large tax increase that Clinton pushed through in his first year, and that Republicans incorrectly claim is the "largest tax increase in history." It fell almost exclusively on upper-income taxpayers. Clinton’s fiscal 1994 budget also contained some spending restraints. An equally if not more powerful influence was the booming economy and huge gains in the stock markets, the so-called dot-com bubble, which brought in hundreds of millions in unanticipated tax revenue from taxes on capital gains and rising salaries.

Clinton’s large budget surpluses also owe much to the Social Security tax on payrolls. Social Security taxes now bring in more than the cost of current benefits, and the "Social Security surplus" makes the total deficit or surplus figures look better than they would if Social Security wasn’t counted. But even if we remove Social Security from the equation, there was a surplus of $1.9 billion in fiscal 1999 and $86.4 billion in fiscal 2000. So any way you count it, the federal budget was balanced and the deficit was erased, if only for a while.

Update, Feb. 11: Some readers wrote to us saying we should have made clear the difference between the federal deficit and the federal debt. A deficit occurs when the government takes in less money than it spends in a given year. The debt is the total amount the government owes at any given time. So the debt goes up in any given year by the amount of the deficit, or it decreases by the amount of any surplus. The debt the government owes to the public decreased for a while under Clinton, but the debt was by no means erased.

Other readers have noted a USA Today story stating that, under an alternative type of accounting, the final four years of the Clinton administration taken together would have shown a deficit. This is based on an annual document called the "Financial Report of the U.S. Government," which reports what the governments books would look like if kept on an accrual basis like those of most corporations, rather than the cash basis that the government has always used. The principal difference is that under accrual accounting the government would book immediately the costs of promises made to pay future benefits to government workers and Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. But even under accrual accounting, the annual reports showed surpluses of $69.2 billion in fiscal 1998, $76.9 billion in fiscal 1999, and $46 billion for fiscal year 2000. So even if the government had been using that form of accounting the deficit would have been erased for those three years.

- Brooks Jackson

Sources
Congressional Budget Office, "Historical Budget Data," undated, accessed 6 Sep 2010.

Austerity and the American Dream

2011-08-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

My friend C. sent me this article, written by an Australian:

American dream comes with a heavy cost

Ros Coward

The US debt debate reveals a nation living beyond its means.

ONE word is missing in the American debate over the debt crisis: austerity. It's a revealing absence. In spite of the vast deficit, and despite the US being the home of individualism, no way is being offered for individuals to make a difference by changing their lifestyles.

People in Britain have become familiar with talk of the ''new age of austerity''. Politicians of both left and right use the expression to frame the narrative about the cuts Britain is now facing. While both sides ''warn'' about this coming era, austerity is not negative in the British psyche. Associations with wartime Britain soften it. Austerity is associated with personal changes that benefited society and made sense to people who learned to tackle wastefulness, to ''make do and mend''.

Long before the current cuts, austerity was making a comeback in Britain, associated with the environmental issues of recycling, cutting consumption and reducing our carbon footprint. Indeed, the New Economics Foundation recently launched the New Home Front, arguing that wartime lifestyles are positive models for reducing environmental impact.

Not so in the US. In the five months I spent there earlier this year, I never heard the word austerity in political discussion. There was nothing about individuals living beyond their means. Yet the US deficit is founded on overconsumption, made possible by too much consumer credit and, less well recognised, too much environmental credit.

In the current war of words in Congress, there is no reference to the immoral lending that encouraged people who could not afford it to invest in the American dream. Yet that is what led to the property crash and the financial crisis. From individuals I heard nothing about the need for prosperous people to change their ways. There are, of course, many worthy ''green shoots'', such as the ''locavore'' movement or the ''greening the campus'' initiative at the university I was visiting, where a newly appointed sustainability officer tries to cut energy use. But people like him have their work cut out.

The whole of the east coast and the rust belt are vast, shocking landscapes to which many Americans seem oblivious. This is a society that has lived not just beyond its economic means but beyond its environmental ones, too, as the hundreds of miles of abandoned buildings, abandoned cars, and endless highways bear witness to.

Yet the American dream survives. You're either in it, or out of it. Being out means destitution. In Britain I know many people who reject consumerism, getting involved in poorly paid environmental or political work. We regard them as rather honourable. In the US, if you don't have money you don't count.

None of this is supposed to indicate Britain has got it right. Far from it. The relaxation of planning controls with the potential to trash the environment is a case in point. But at least words such as thrift and sustainability don't carry such negative connotations. They suggest a place to work from. In the US, the ideological mindset makes these negative terms, which in turn makes the future there look bleak. Their problem isn't just fixing government spending, but ultimately counting the real costs of the American way of life.

Here's my response:

Austerity is not an American virtue. Making a profit and consuming are. "The concept that making money (employment) and spending money (consumerism) is the primary goal of individuals within a market economy, and the assumption that individuals must work for an employer to "make a living" and that such activity is the most meaningful and desirable of human activities." wikipedia

So we have tended to equate consumption with success and happiness and being good Americans. We define ourselves in terms of our quarterly earnings reports and our "stuff." Buying and selling on credit just allows us to have more stuff, feel better about ourselves, and keep the economy rolling. Austerity is taken to be un-American, because it is a refusal to participate in this economic and social engine.

The housing crisis stands as a challenge to all this, because it means the conveyer belt has stopped. See this. Austerity is being imposed upon us, whether we want it or not. The question is, in the process, will we come to realize that the culture of capitalism is a false kingdom? If sin is missing the mark, then the gyrations between the extremes of consumerism and austerity are evidence that we are not where Christ intends us to be.

Debt Ceiling Crisis: Cutting off your nose to spite your face

2011-07-30T13:21:00.000-07:00

Could this be what the Republicans/TeaPartiers had in mind all along? If politics is like a chess game, the players plan their moves long ahead of their actions. But to force such a constitutional and economic nightmare upon the American people seems more like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

The Debt Ceiling Crisis: Approaching the Witching Hour

by Geoffrey R. Stone,

Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago

As the clock runs down toward the witching hour on August 2, I see three possible solutions to the crisis. First, the Republicans and Democrats in Congress can agree on a compromise plan that raises the debt ceiling for a reasonable period of time and deals with at least some of the issues of spending cuts and new revenues that have thus far so furiously divided the parties. I suppose this is still possible, but it seems unlikely.

Second, the Republicans and Democrats in Congress can agree to increase the debt ceiling for a reasonable period of time without addressing any of the bitterly divisive spending and revenue issues. This is pretty much what has always happened in the past. Congress has separated the debt ceiling issue from the more difficult and more contentious issues of taxing and spending. At this point, that might be the best solution, but it too seems unlikely because of Republican intransigence.

Third, Congress can remain paralyzed and simply do nothing. If they follow that approach, which now seems likely, the current debt ceiling will remain in place and as of August 2 the government will not be able to borrow any more money and thus will no longer be able to pay its bills -- for the first time in American history. What happens then?

The most obvious outcome is that for as long as that state of affairs exists, the president will have to decide which bills to pay and which to ignore. In other words, the president would have to decide whether to suspend Medicare payments, cancel Social Security payments, withhold the salaries of government employees (including the military), default on our debt obligations, etc. With each passing day, the spending cuts would need to be deeper and deeper.

Some people have argued that, even if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling, these cuts and non-payments don't have to happen, because the president can ignore Congress' action and just keep on borrowing to pay the nation's bills. Some have argued that a little-noticed provision in section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment authorizes precisely this course of action. This provision states: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."

This provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was enacted shortly after the Civil War, was intended, in part, to prevent the former Confederate states, when they resumed their positions in Congress, from attempting to cause the federal government to renege on the debts the Union incurred to put down the "rebellion." A careful reading of the text, however, reveals that the provision goes well beyond that. It does not say that the validity of the public debt incurred to put down the rebellion "shall not be questioned," but that the public debt more generally "shall not be questioned," citing the Civil War issue as merely an illustration.

So, what is the relevance of section 4 to the current crisis? What it seems to say is that the government must honor all public debt "authorized by law." This suggests that non-payment of our existing debt is not a constitutionally-permissible option for the president. As a result, in making spending cuts beginning on August 2, the President apparently cannot constitutionally decide not to pay our outstanding debt. Rather, all of the cuts must come from ongoing expenditures. This would, of course, dramatically magnify the impact of the crisis on government programs, services and operations.

Faced with this dilemma, what is the president to do? There are those who argue that this entire controversy is much ado about nothing, because the President can simply "raise the debt ceiling on his own." They argue that, in light of "the president's role as the ultimate guardian of the constitutional order," President Obama should disregard Congress' failure to authorize additional debt and assume the authority to do the "right thing" for the nation. As Justice Robert Jackson observed more than half a century ago, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact."

This is a dangerous argument. Its proponents point to the one dramatic instance in American history in which a president openly exercised this extraconstitutional authority. (President Bush II, by the way, attempted to exercise this authority secretly when he authorized the use of torture and the NSA surveillance program in violation of federal law.) But that earlier instance, involving President Abraham Lincoln, was quite a different situation. It arose at the very outset of the Civil War, when Union troops needed to get to the nation's capital to protect it from possible Confederate attack.

Confederate sympathizers in Maryland were tearing up the railroad tracks in order to prevent the Union troops from moving south to the capital. Because the local authorities, who were sympathetic to the Confederates, did nothing to prevent this interference, the only way to end the obstruction was for Lincoln to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and authorize the military to arrest and detain those who were preventing the army from reaching Washington.

The problem was that the Constitution authorizes only Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. But Congress was not in session, and in 1861 it could not be convened quickly. Faced with this crisis, historians and legal scholars agree that Lincoln was justified in doing what he did, even though it was not expressly authorized by the Constitution.

Even if one thinks that the danger to the national interest today is comparable to that facing Lincoln in 1861, the situations are importantly different. Today, Congress is in session and is refusing the raise the debt ceiling, even though it could easily do so. Because the Republicans in Congress refuse to do this, President Obama (unlike Lincoln) is faced with a "decision" by Congress. It may be a reckless and irresponsible decision, but it is a decision and it is much harder to justify ignoring a decision than to act in a situation where no congressional action was possible.

Having said this, I think the president is likely to (and should) take control of the situation and do the "right thing" for the nation, even though he has no express constitutional authority to do so. But to suggest that this crisis is much ado about nothing because the president can avoid a calamity by extra-constitutional means, and by doing something that no other president in American history has been called upon to do, is absolutely no excuse for the conduct of the Republicans in bringing us to this point.

Moreover, even if the president does this, there may be serious repercussions. First, the Republicans in the House may well attempt to impeach the president for acting "unconstitutionally." Even though this would go nowhere in the Senate, the very act of impeachment would exacerbate the dire state of politics in the United States today. Second, there will almost inevitably be litigation challenging the constitutionality of the president's action. (Note that in 1861, Chief Justice Taney held Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland unconstitutional and ordered him to lift the suspension. Lincoln ignored the Taney's ruling.). Is that a crisis we want to repeat?

The plain and simple reality is that unless the Republicans agree to raise the debt ceiling in the next two days, they will throw the nation into a constitutional and economic nightmare. If nothing else, they should have enough sense and self-discipline to know that they will pay dearly for this with the American people

QUOTE: On the National Debt

2011-07-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

"My advice to Congress. If your car is spinning on the ice don't slam on the brakes or you'll flip it. Steer into it to get control of the vehicle." --Brad B.

JUST WONDERING about the Federal Debt

2011-07-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

I was curious to see how many times the debt ceiling was raised under the previous administration, and I found this, dated Sept 29, 2008:

On the day President Bush took office, the national debt stood at $5.727 trillion. The latest number from the Treasury Department shows the national debt now stands at more than $9.849 trillion. That's a 71.9 percent increase on Mr. Bush's watch.

The bailout plan now pending in Congress could add hundreds of billions of dollars to the national debt – though President Bush said this morning he expects that over time, "much if not all" of the bailout money "will be paid back."

But the government is taking no chances. Buried deep in the hundred pages of bailout legislation is a provision that would raise the statutory ceiling on the national debt to $11.315 trillion. It'll be the 7th time the debt limit has been raised during this administration. In fact it was just two months ago, on July 30, that President Bush signed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, which contained a provision raising the debt ceiling to $10.615 trillion."

Consistency is not a virtue for political parties, is it?

Even more interesting are charts dealing with federal spending, federal debt, and GDP, available here. Isn't it curious how Ronald Reagan was able to get by with the following % increases in federal debt, while Obama's 12.5% hike in 2010 is being heralded as the end of the republic?

Percentage increase in Federal Debt under Ronald Reagan
1983: 15%
1985: 12.3%
1986: 13.9%

Curious.

A Simply Amazing Rebuttal to the Simply Amazed Obama Skeptics, or "Oh Yes They Can"

2011-07-22T01:45:00.000-07:00

So here's the latest nonsense being passed around:

Isn't it amazing that, within only one week of Tiger Woods crashing his Escalade, the press found every woman with whom Tiger has had an affair during the last few years? And, they even uncovered photos, text messages, recorded phone calls, etc.! Furthermore, they not only know the cause of the family fight, but they even know it was a wedge from his golf bag that his wife used to break out the windows in the Escalade. Not only that, they know which wedge! And, each & every day, they were able to continue to provide America with updates on Tiger's sex rehab stay, his wife's plans for divorce, as well as the dates & tournaments in which he will play.
Now, Barack Hussein Obama has been in office for two years, yet this very same press:

· Cannot find any of his childhood friends or neighbors;
· Or find any of Obama's high school or college classmates;
· Or locate any of his college papers or grades;
· Or determine how he paid for both a Columbia & a Harvard education;
· Or discover which country issued his visa to travel to Pakistan in the 1980's;
· Or even find Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis on racism
They just can't seem to uncover any of this.
Yet, the public still trusts that same press to give them the whole truth!
Simply amazing, isn't it?

Here's my rebuttal:

Simply amazing how stubbornly some people cling to lies, and perpetuate gossip! Of course, if one is a skeptic, no amount of memory, testimony or sense experience will convince him. Just try proving to a skeptic that he is not the only one with a mind, and that other people aren't robots! Or try proving to him that the world wasn't created five minutes ago! If one prefers doubt, then not even God himself can change his mind--as Jesus demonstrated when he walked among us. http://bible.cc/luke/13-34.htm

Not that it will probably change many minds, but just for the record, here are responses to all the allegations:

Now, Barack Hussein Obama has been in office for two years, yet this very same press:

1) Cannot find any of his childhood friends or neighbors;

Oh yes they can!

http://obamasneighborhood.com/friends.html

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2989722&page=1

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/2637523/Barack-Obamas-childhood-friends-deny-he-was-a-Muslim.html

http://www.barackobamahawaii.com/

2) Or find any of Obama's high school or college classmates

Oh yes they can!

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=3082803&page=1

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/columbia.asp

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2081836/posts

3) Or locate any of his college papers or grades

Oh yes, they could if it were legal!

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/columbiathesis.asp

http://www.oxy.edu/x7992.xml

here's another perspective:
http://www.redstate.com/davenj1/2011/04/28/farewell-birthers-hello-transcripters/

I have been a college instructor for over 20 years.The 1974 federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (34 CFR Part 99) protects the privacy of student education records. Remember how teachers used to leave graded papers and tests outside their office doors for students to rifle through and pick up? Thanks to this act, it is illegal for instructors to reveal student info to anyone except the student, without his or her permission. Think of it as HIPPA for education.

I've thrown out my own papers, and I routinely throw out student papers/tests if they are not reclaimed after one semester. It is only recently that computers have been around to easily store information. Now that that is possible, I do have student's online work.

4) Or determine how he paid for both a Columbia & a Harvard education;
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/money.asp

Oh yes they can!

Per Obahma's book Audacity of Hope, p194 "Where Americans do need help, immediately, is in managing the rising cost of college-- something with which Michelle and I are all too familiar (for the first ten years of our marriage, our combined monthly payments on our undergraduate and law school debt exceeded our mortgage by a healthy margin)."

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_did_Barack_Obama_pay_for_his_extensive_education#ixzz1SlYT3ybk

How did W pay for his education?

5) Or discover which country issued his visa to travel to Pakistan in the 1980's;

Yes, they have a good idea:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/passport.asp

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/06/more-birther-nonsense-obamas-1981-pakistan-trip/

(One good question deserves another: Exactly where was George Bush during the Vietnam War, particularly 1972-73? http://www.google.com/search?q=Oh+yes+they+can%21&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8&rlz= )
6) Or even find Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis on racism.

Oh, yes they can! This is too easy:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/columbiathesis.asp

Michelle LeVaughan Robinson Obama's Princeton thesis is available for you to read here:

part 1: http://www.politico.com/pdf/080222_MOPrincetonThesis_1-251.pdf

pert 2: http://www.politico.com/pdf/080222_MOPrincetonThesis_26-501.pdf

part3: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8642.html

part 4: http://dyn.politico.com/pdf/080222_MOPrincetonThesis_76-981.pdf

Rob Bell: crypto-Covenanter?

2011-07-21T01:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I finally broke down and read Bell on hell. I don't usually read the latest evangelical best sellers until at least a couple of years go by. That way anything that isn't worthwhile will be remaindered and forgotten, and I won't need to waste my reading time. If something is still around, then it merits my attention.

However, Bell's Love Wins has created quite a fuss among some New Hope students and faculty. Wayne Cordiero, NHCC president, is a close friend of Francis Chan, who has recently written his own book in response to Bell. I certainly didn't want to be drawn into discussions and pull a Piper so I figured I should have a look. (I am grateful that a good friend loaned me the book, so I could save my money for something more deserving, like James Dubay's The Evidential Power of Beauty or Peter Leithart's Defending Constantine. )

Anyway, it's my first Bell book. It's easy to read, full of questions, very, very popular and deliberately non-scholarly. In fact, it's downright sloppy about exegesis. That's really frustrating! find myself agreeing with Kyle Small, writing in the June 2011 Covenant Companion, that the book isn't really about heaven and hell: it is about election, and that Bell is reacting against his Reformed Calvinist tradition. This might explain Bell's stridency at various points. For those of us who do not share that tradition, reading "Love Wins" is not all that upsetting or enlightening.

I had to laugh at Kyle's observation:

This book is anything but radical for the Evangelical Covenant Church. The Covenant has held strongly to a view of the atonement where “God’s love for the world is magnified” and less so to the more classic substitutionary model of atonement where “the wrath of God is satisfied.” Covenant theology rejoices that God came to love the world and generously gave himself fully to us. I would venture to say that Bell becomes a Covenanter in his middle chapters. He even sounds like P.P. Waldenström in a few places (who was also wrongly criticized for being a universalist). As I re-read sections of the book, I wondered if the Covenant Church (via the Communications Department) had been invited to edit the work, especially the tone and phrasing, would this book have be more palpable? Perhaps!

Kyle is spot on as he concludes his review:

This book that many of us cannot understand. I continually felt like I had entered another family’s argument. Bell is overly polemical throughout these pages. Several friends have commented that wherever Bell says something clear and helpful he uses the next page to make a point that resembles a sword and not a ploughshare. He seems to write as if embattled from the outset.

I think Bell is responding to his theological past—a past that many North American young people continue to revolt against—in profound ways. Bell is a Reformed guy with a love for C.S. Lewis. If you grew up Baptist, Bible church, Reformed Church, or even conservative Presbyterian, this book might deeply resonate with you. And most Americans have a Reformed view of God in their back pocket, even when they are not aware of it (see Sydney Ahlstrom’s A Religious History of the American People). Lutherans would be one of the few groups to be somewhat disengaged from the topic altogether.

Reformed theology is centrally concerned with the theological topic of election. Bell’s tradition most often stresses certainty of salvation and election, including predestination. Reformed folks, like John Piper, read the Bible through the lens of election, asking, “Who has God chosen and not chosen? God chose Israel, God chose Jesus; did God choose me?” This question strikes fear in the heart. This fear responds by seeking salvation because the other options scare the hell out of us.....

American Calvinism has this interesting acronym for their theology called TULIP. I don’t necessarily understand it, but it has to do with the question, “Who is in/out?” If you resonate with John Piper, your perspective is primarily on “Who is in?” and “How do we assure ourselves of this?” If you resonate with Bell, the perspective is “Who is out?” and “How do we welcome them in?” If you resonate with neither and wonder why this book has produced such a firestorm, perhaps it is because you believe in a God who blesses the world, inside and out, or possibly because regardless of debates about heaven and hell, open or closed, you believe that Jesus Christ is the world-concerned story of how love wins.

Precisely. Reformed theology has nominalist DNA. One of the by-products of nominalism is individualism, and a preoccupation with the problem of how it is possible to "group" individuals. This leads to a focus on a sovereign God who becomes the ultimate agent for grouping. "Either/or" thinking prevails. However, those of us whose theology is informed by a realist metaphysic delight in the way all things are related and ultimately relate to God, who Himself is a perfect community of Three Persons. Sin ruptures relationship, and separates us from God, and this leads us to focus on Jesus Christ, who is the ultimate agent of reconciliation. As Waldenström writes,

When we started to speak of reconciliation, we raised the question if it was God, or man, or both parties, who was, or were, to be reconciled. Now we have searched the Bible and have found that it does not speak of God as being reconciled. The love of God had not been diminished through man's sin, so that it needed to be improved, increased or restored; nor could God's hatred of sin be done away with, for if He did not hate sin, He would not be righteous; neither could God's displeasure to those who live in sin be done away with, because even yet, this very day, God is displeased with all who live in sin. No change has taken place in Him. He remains the same; with Him there is "no variableness, neither shadow of turning." He is the eternally faithful, unchangeable God, whose name is Jehovah (that is, "I am that I am").

On the contrary, man needed to be reconciled to God....The Scriptures testify that man, as estranged from God, is carnal. It is not the Spirit of God that fills and rules him, but the flesh. But "the carnal mind" ("the mind of the flesh," according to the Revised Version) "is enmity against God," says Paul (Rom. 8:7). That is the chief trouble; not this or that transgression or misdeed; nay, but the very mind, is enmity against God: "for it (that is, this mind) is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be." Of the same thing the apostle speaks in Col. 1:21, where he says to the Christians: "Ye were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works." "The wicked works" of the ungodly are never isolated; they are expressions of the wicked, or evil mind. And the evil mind is enmity against God. This the natural man will never admit. Even though he may admit that now and then in his life and in his works he may be at fault or be mistaken, still he will hold that in the depths of his heart he is good. But no, says the apostle, the natural mind itself in man is enmity against God. It is a terrible judgment which the apostle by these words pronounces upon all that bears the name of man; but it is a true judgment.
In short, the heart of the world is estranged from and dead to God, averse to him; and this makes it unblest. Here, as we have said, a reconciliation must take place, a reconciliation which brings man into an entirely different relation to God, if he is to become happy. But how, then can such a reconciliation be brought about? By the removal of sin, and by the justification of man. That which separates must be removed. Otherwise there can be no reconciliation. But that which separates is sin. From this fact we understand why "the reconciliation of the sinner to God" always depends on "the atonement of the sins," that is, on removal of the sins. We repeat it again: By being cleansed from sin, the sinner comes into a right relation to God. In no other way can such a relation be brought about.

Hell, then, is that condition of being estranged from, averse to and dead to God, just as heaven is that condition of being in a living, loving relation to Him. Rob Bell gets it right when he writes,

There are individual hells
and communal, society-wide hells,
and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously. (p. 79)

Eternal life doesn't start when we die;
it starts now.
It's not about a life that begins at death;
it's about experiencing the kind of life now that can
endure and survive even death. (p. 59)

Jesus invites us
in this life,
in this broken, beautiful world,
to experience the life of heaven now.
He insisted over and over that God's peace, joy, and love
are currently available to us, exactly as we are...

There's a heaven now, somewhere else.
There's a heaven here, sometime else.
And then there's Jesus's invitation to heaven
here
and
now,
in this moment,
in this place. (p. 62)

Bottom line: IMO Bell asks good questions, but doesn't have the personality, mind and theological tradition to provide good answers. I'm going to look for Jerry Wall's Hell: The Logic of Damnation. It's been out for 9 years now, and it has infuriated some Calvinists, so it ought to be good. ; )

RECIPE: Spinach and strawberry salad

2011-07-14T16:55:00.000-07:00

Ingredients:

2 bunches of spinach, rinsed and torn into bite-sized pieces

4 cups sliced strawberries

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1/4 cup white wine vinegar

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 tsp. paprika

1/4 cup sesame seeds

1/8 cup poppy seeds

Mix the last 6 ingredients to make the dressing.

VARIATIONS: when strawberries are expensive, I sometimes add canned mandarin oranges, or substitute them entirely for the strawberries. For those who like nuts, I sometimes add sliced almonds.

"Rupert Repents" Conversation

2011-07-14T00:46:00.000-07:00

In response to my previous message, "Rupert Repents, or Why we need Government," a student wrote me:

I think anyone who says "the government doesn't help me" is either speaking in a very general term, or is a moron. What the guy pointed out is fine, and I don't think that's the hot issue. From what I know, no one has asked to quit building roads, quit producing power, quit producing water, cut police and fire, etc. Those are seemingly the very things that government wants to take FROM! You don't hear "Let's cut back PERS, and governor salaries, presidential salaries, congress salaries!". Although I can't say for certain but I have a feeling that I do more work each year than many politicians do, I'm not say all, or even most, but many; yet they receive decent (even BIG) salaries and perks that most mortal men would LOVE to have! (I could be wrong on that, but that's just a feeling/perception I have.) Anyway, I digress...

My main thought of the article was that it was pretty shallow, didn't really dig into "serious" or even "controversial" issues that are ACTUALLY being discussed. Or the other option is that I'm misinformed, which is possible!

My response:

... The whole libertarian movement is about holding government to the minimum and attracts people who take themselves to be sovereign as individuals. See the Libertarian Party Platform. Joel Salatin, self-described ""Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic-Farmer" is typical of this viewpoint.

Trust me: in the name of efficiency, cost effectiveness and free markets, I have heard people argue for the privatization of social security, and/or prisons and/or schools and/or utilities and/or police and fire departments. (Just do a google search, "privatization + fill in the blank, and you'll see what I mean. ) For example, The Ludwig von Mises Institute (an extremely influential think tank ) promotes the privatization of roads and highways! (See this)

Part of the reason we are in the economic mess we are in is because of the financial degregulation of the financial sector. (See this and this.)

I grant you that politicians are a lot of the problem. Unfortunately, if we conflate politicians with government (as many people seem to be doing) we will be in worse shape than before. That is why I think it is important to be reminded of the positive things government does. If we are upset with politicians, we should also be upset with CEOs and multinational businesses that buy them off, and only care for their own profit, at the expense of the middle class. (See this.)

Rupert Repents? or Why We Need Government

2011-07-13T16:14:00.000-07:00

Pardon my cynicism...but I wonder, is Rupert Murdoch doing damage control? Or has he found religion, as he enters his eighties?

In 1999, The Economist reported that Newscorp Investments had made £11.4 billion ($20.1 billion) in profits over the previous 11 years but had not paid net corporation tax. It also reported that after an examination of the available accounts, Newscorp could normally have been expected to pay corporate tax of approximately $350 million. The article explained that in practice the corporation's complex structure, international scope and use of offshore tax havens allowed News Corporation to pay minimal taxes. -- The Economist, BBC

Nevertheless, this Fox News Opinion makes some much needed points. (See also my June 16, 2010 entry, "Too much Government?

Government Helps You -- Whether You Like It Or Not

By Sally Kohn
Published July 12, 2011
FoxNews.com

When I hear conservative critics of government getting in the way of business, I always think about a trucking executive I know who shared the same complaints -- until I pointed out that he made his fortunate running rigs across the government highway system.

How’d you get to work today? Did you drive on a road dug and paved by the private company you work for? Or maybe you took a bus or train that your employer personally invested in?

Over 90% of American school children attend public schools. Over 89% of Americans get the water in their homes from public water systems. One-in-ten households get electricity from public power plants, and those households are disproportionately located in rural, hard-to-serve communities that lack the incentives for private investment. Plus, recall that originally, even most private electrical grids were public investments --- before they were sold into private hands. Plus don’t forget about the police and firefighters and search and rescue teams that hopefully you don’t need everyday but fortunately are there when you do need them.

In fact, researchers at Cornell University found that many Americans who even more directly benefit from government spending deny that government helps them personally.

Did you know that so-called "529" savings programs for your kids’ college tuition are subsidized through favorable tax status with the government? Well, 64% of 529 investors don’t think they use government programs.

Do you own a home and benefit from favorable mortgage interest deductions? At least 60% of Americans who do also don’t think they get government help.

Even 44% of Social Security recipients, 39% of Medicare recipients, and a whopping 27% of welfare recipients --- the mother of all government social programs that conservatives love to hate -- don’t believe they are beneficiaries of government social spending.

Political rhetoric is one thing. Facts are another.

The fact is that while the private market is undoubtedly the best way to create wealth and innovation in America, we know that left to its own devices and unchecked by any other forces, the market will also produce enormous inequality impossible for subsequent generations to surmount.

Chances are your kids will not become one of the 400 very, very wealthy millionaires and billionaires in America but one of the 307,000,000 of the rest of us who serve them. If that’s your idea of success, then by all means support conservative anti-government rhetoric that denies your children the government stepping stools on which big business and the rich so heavily depended.

Of course government isn’t perfect. But every time there’s a corporate scandal or even, say, excessive risk-taking and profit-seeking on Wall Street threatens to crash the entire economy, we don’t throw out capitalism, do we?

The fact is that, whether you want to admit it or not, it was government spending on social programs --- from the crop insurance and housing subsidies to the GI bill --- that got our nation out of the Great Depression, put the private sector back on its feet an created fairly prosperous decades for America thereafter. Oh, and do note that during that recovery, the ratio of government debt to GDP was even higher than it is now.

An all-powerful government is not the solution. But slashing government in order to provide more and more resources to big business and the super-rich who our government already bailed out and who are now reaping historic profits but still aren’t creating jobs --- that’s not a solution, either. Just as we need the private sector, we need government programs that shore up the middle class and create a fair ladder of opportunity for all. Like it or not, you need government, too.

Sally Kohn writes frequently for Fox News Opinion. She is the founder and Chief Education Officer of the Movement Vision Lab, a grassroots think tank. You can follow her on Twitter@sallykohn.

Spiritual Nomads

2011-07-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

I recently had a conversation with a woman who seems to have been bouncing around the Body. She started out Lutheran, then attended several popular charistmatic churches in our area, then sojourned among the Baptists, then then Presbyterians, and now is hanging out with us. Why does this happen? She became upset with doctrine at some places, upset with divine laughter and "slaying in the spirit" at another place, at dispensational dismissal of the charismatic gifts at another place, upset with the pastor at another place, and at lack of fellowship at another.

I wonder how long she'll sojourn with us?

Every tradition has its distinctive doctrine. Christian sub-groups foster their identity through the cultivation of distinctive doctrine. Not only do they have a distinctive take on this doctrine, but they also place a distinctive emphasis on it. The unique gift that each group offers the church universal is its distinct doctrinal emphasis. Yet, the temptation of each tradition is to turn their distinctive doctrine into a trump card that subjects every other Christian doctrine to its service. The challenge for each tradition is to offer their gift to others while at the same time reformulating their doctrine in light of the whole Christian faith.

--John L. Drury

That is part of the challenge of each tradition. It is the challenge for each Christian to decide what part of the garden they will plant their seed, and stay there long enough for their plant to bear fruit.

Dependence, not Independence

2011-07-03T16:32:00.000-07:00

excerpt from today's Sermon
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene, Oregon
by Pastor Steve Bilynskyj
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj

Romans 17:13-25
“Law Good, Sin Bad”July 3, 2011 - Third Sunday after Pentecost

"...Law is like adult diapers. It’s a treatment for the symptoms of moral incontinence, not for the problem. And like a diaper it probably only makes you that much more aware of what you can’t control. Like a diaper it only makes you carry around your sin with you that much more closely. What’s needed is a cure for sin, not a better diaper to hold it in.

No, it is not the primary mission of Christian people, of the Church of Jesus Christ, to get whatever country we live in to adopt and enforce good laws. Law is good, but it doesn’t change people. It doesn’t help people do what is right just to know what is right. No, the mission of the Church is to proclaim the Good News of a Savior who changes people, who can set us free from the power of sin.

As I said, in verse 23 Paul asks for a rescue, for freedom from the “body of death.” As anyone with physical incontinence knows—and I don’t mean at all to make light of an embarrassing and frustrating condition—the only answer may be a new body. We’re promised just that for the future in the resurrection of Jesus. But for right now, we are promised and given an escape from our bigger problem. The last verse of the previous chapter, 6:23, says “the wages of sin is death.” That verse then says, “but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord,” and verse 25 of our text gives the same answer, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Freedom through democratic government and just law is a good thing. God bless the United States of America. But freedom from sin in Jesus Christ is the best thing, the most important thing. It’s available even where there is no just law. Freedom in Christ can be had when no other freedom is offered. Freedom from the law of sin is the gift of God in Jesus Christ to all of us who fail to keep the law of God.

It’s Jesus who delivers us from the slavery Paul pictures at the end of our text. No matter how much we celebrate independence, we are spiritual slaves to both the good law of God and the bad law of sin. But faith in Jesus Christ calls us out of both slaveries, not into independence, but into dependence on Him."

Song: "In the Blazing Summer"

2011-07-03T00:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, while waiting to board our flight from Denver to Eugene, a fellow passenger told us that her car thermometer had read 111 degrees in Omaha. Today, Brad Boydston posted the above photo of his thermometer in Phoenix, at 2:15 pm.

I have noticed a lot of hits on a song I previously posted, entitled "I Hate Summer," (sung to the tune of "I Love Paris." ) It's time for a new song, I think, and so in honor of all of you who are suffering, I offer you "In the Blazing Summer," to be sung to the tune of "In the Bleak Midwinter." (CRANHAM, by Gustav Holst.)

1. In the blazing summer
mercury makes moan,
temp is oe’r 100
in this torrid zone.
Sweat is falling, sweat on sweat,
sweat on sweat,
It’s the hottest summer
Ever yet.

2. The sun: the sky can’t hold it,
Nor earth sustain;
What we’d give to have some
hard and cooling rain!
In the blazing summer
here’s some good advice:
Keep yourself hydrated,
and use lots of ice.

3.Those without some A/C
wince at old Sol’s glare,
vainly try to escape
July’s burning air.
Shall we see a movie?
Swim or shower or shop?
It’s too hot to move, I think
I’m going to drop.

4.Where can I find some shade?
I am getting charred!
(If I weren’t so fat
this might not be so hard.)
If I were a wise man
I would do what’s best,
Leave this wretched hell-hole,
Move to the Northwest!

Choose this day whom you will serve: Ayn Rand or.Jesus?

2011-06-07T23:07:00.000-07:00

Christians Must Choose: Ayn Rand or Jesus

GOP leaders and conservative pundits have brought upon themselves a crisis of values. Many who for years have been the loudest voices invoking the language of faith and moral values are now praising the atheist philosopher Ayn Rand whose teachings stand in direct contradiction to the Bible. Rand advocates a law of selfishness over love and commands her followers to think only of themselves, not others. She said her followers had to choose between Jesus and her teachings.

GOP leaders want to argue that they are defending Christian principles. But, at the same time, Rep. Paul Ryan (author of the GOP budget) is posting facebook videos praising Rand’s morality and saying hers is the “kind of thinking that is sorely needed right now.” Simply put, Paul Ryan can’t have it both ways, and neither can Christians. As conservative evangelical icon Chuck Colson recently stated, Christians can not support Rand’s philosophy and Christ’s teachings. The choice is simple: Ayn Rand or Jesus Christ. We must choose one and forsake the other.

Look here for the links below:

Ayn Rand: The GOP’s Favorite Bonkers Demagogue- The Daily Beast

Is Ayn Rand A Political Liability?- The New Republic

Heightening The Republican Contradictions- The Daily Beast

Paul Ryan’s Ayn Rand Problem- Time

Budget Battle Pits Atheist Ayn Rand vs. Jesus- Religion News Service

Column: You can’t reconcile Ayn Rand and Jesus- USA Today

Letters: We have strayed too far from Christian values- East Valley Tribune

Ayn Rand, the GOP and Libertarian’s Foundation, and Jesus- Unsettled Christianity

The GOP Must Decide: Ayn Rand or Jesus- Huffington Post

Choosing Ayn Rand or Jesus- The American Spectator

Must Christian Voters Choose Between Ayn Rand and Jesus?- The Atlantic

Ayn Rand ‘Atheists’ vs. Liberal Christians; A Battle of Dogma- The Examiner

Rand Paul, other Republicans can’t have it both ways on Ayn Rand – Courier-Journal

Ayn Rand: The GOP’s Godless Philospher – Time