There’s been a fair bit of chatter recently in certain conservative circles about the demise of the website Culture11. I have to be honest, I read this with a certain amount of bemusement, since (as Mencken might have put it) I must confess I never knew Lord Jones was alive to begin with; I’m not sure if that makes me un-hip, or what—but then, as a mainline pastor in small-town north-central Indiana, I’m probably un-hip by definition anyway, so I’m not too worried.In any case, I’ll confess that what strikes me about the conversation over the demise of this website is all the heavy breathing over the word “conservative.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one to get all bent out of shape over the use of labels; they’re useful shorthand. I’m perfectly content to be called a conservative, because in this context, that’s the label generally used for people who believe what I believe; if “liberal” still carried its classical meaning, I’d be perfectly content to be called that, too. It saves lengthy explanations, and that’s useful.
The conversation over Culture11, though, has a different quality, with lots of talk about the “alternative right,” what it means to be a “true conservative,” the deriding of “neocon echo chambers” and the like. What I see here, besides infighting and back-stabbing, is a concern for the label as such, and an almost Jacobin impulse to ideological purity—manifested, since the guillotine isn’t actually an option, by loud declarations of excommunication of the heretics. I see, quite frankly, a great deal of narrowness of perspective, marked by chronological snobbery (“that’s so 2001-04”) and snobbery of provenance (if it comes from Person X, or Group X—such as “the 2nd and 3rd generation neocons who rule the roost on FOX,” who are “bereft of all discernible signs of culture”—then it must be bad), and a vast ugliness of attitude. There’s precious little grace shown here toward those with whom people disagree, only the attitude that “if you aren’t my definition of conservative, then you’re the enemy just like everyone else.”Now, granted, none of these folks know me from a hole in the ground (I think I commented on Joe Carter’s blog once or twice, but that’s about it), so my reaction to this spat doesn’t really matter any; but I know what I’d say to these folks if I could, or to anyone else who finds themselves arguing in this sort of spirit.Grow up. Search for truth as best you can, come to the best conclusions you can reach, and don’t worry about who else holds them, or whether they’re sufficiently contemporary, or any of that junk. That kind of thing is, to be blunt, juvenile. Argue your positions with respect for those who disagree, and with openness to learn from them—and remember that politics and culture are pragmatic arenas, and that to get anything done, you have to build alliances and forge coalitions; hyper-puritanism leads finally to self-isolation, and the only door out of that trap is the abandonment of all the principles for which you fought in the first place. Don’t pronounce anathemas on those who agree with you on most things—that, too, is juvenile; find common ground, and work with them. Remember, you too are imperfect; that’s why we all need grace.
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
The gang that couldn’t govern straight
Never put yourself in a position where your party wins only if your country fails.
—Thomas Friedman
It hasn’t been a good start for the new administration. In the first couple weeks, we’ve seen them announce standards and then not keep them; we’ve seen two of Barack Obama’s nominees withdraw for legal and ethical reasons (following another nominee who had previously done so, and yet another who should have); we’ve seen the House Democrats running the show on his first big piece of legislation, which consequently has turned into a legislative albatross; we’ve seen him back down on some aspects of that legislation after some complaints from our allies; we’ve seen the response to the big ice storm botched; we’ve seen the appointment of a new ambassador to Iraq botched (which is not to say that Gen. Anthony Zinni would have been a better choice than Christopher Hill—I have no reason to think he would have been—but rather that offering a guy a job, thanking him for accepting it, telling him to get ready to go to work, and then actually hiring someone else behind his back without letting him know you’ve done it is no way to run a railroad); we’ve seen Iran rattling sabers, apparently emboldened by the President’s comments; and unfortunately, we’ve seen all this addressed by a McClellan-esque disaster of a press secretary who isn’t helping his administration at all. Only two weeks in, and some people are already deeply worried, while others are asking, “Who is Barack Obama?” and others yet are beginning to think that the administration is “on the verge of combining the competency of Carter and the ethics of Nixon.”For my part, I don’t think the most pessimistic talk is warranted—yet. Granted, no recent administration has gotten off to this bumpy a start, but false starts and missteps aren’t uncommon for new administrations; after all, you can’t really rehearse this. (Compare this article on the beginning of the Bush 43 administration, which managed the transition much better than the Obama administration has so far—courtesy of Dick Cheney, who had already seen it all and done most of it—but had some similar legislative splats.) These are bright people, and it’s perfectly reasonable to hope and expect that they’ll figure out what they need to figure out, and do a better job of managing the job as time goes on. On the other hand, we’ve seen a few troubling trends from the campaign repeating themselves in the early days of the administration, most notably President Obama’s tendency to duck unpleasant conversations—not telling Tom Daschle to withdraw his nomination, not telling Gen. Zinni he wasn’t getting the job after all, not going to Kentucky, not answering questions on William Lynn, and so on. As such, there’s reason for concern that some of these problems may persist, and that the comparisons to President Carter may ultimately prove out. That would be a bad thing for the country; and so, as a believer in Thomas Friedman’s dictum, I will be (along with many others I know) praying it doesn’t happen.
The blindness of self-worship
Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have
no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.—John 9:39-41 (ESV)There are a lot of folks who have trouble with these verses. For some, it’s a matter of not understanding Jesus’ rabbinic way of talking; I actually had an elder use this as an example of her contention that “there are lots of contradictions in the Bible.” Others, more seriously, wonder why Jesus says here, “For judgment I came into the world,” when he told Nicodemus in John 3, “The Son of Man did not come into the world to condemn the world, but to seek and save those who are lost.” The answer is that this isn’t a statement of what Jesus wanted to happen, but simply what he knew would happen; there are those who, in the face of God’s offer of salvation, do not want it. They would prefer to hold fast to their idols, to gods of their own invention, which they can control. They refuse to believe they need Jesus—they think they can see just fine without him, thanks—and in their refusal, their true blindness is revealed and confirmed. It isn’t that Jesus judges them, but that in response to his coming, they judge themselves.Now, Jesus is drawing this language from Isaiah, who repeatedly associates blindness and deafness with the worship of idols instead of the one true God—idols being blind and deaf lumps of inert material, those who worship them become as blind and deaf as the false gods before whom they bow; and the interesting thing about this when it comes to the Pharisees is that they weren’t blind in the same way as the people Isaiah was talking about—or at least, they would have said they weren’t. They knew the prophet’s complaint about the people of his time; they knew the dangers of idolatry, of worshiping the gods of the nations, and they were devoutly opposed to that. Their whole effort, their whole reason for existence, was focused on worshiping God faithfully and keeping his law as well as they possibly could. They no doubt saw themselves as the exact opposite of the blind and deaf Israel against which the prophet spoke. And yet Jesus makes the same charge against them: they are willfully blind.The biggest reason for this is that they were no longer truly worshiping God, for they had made an idol of their own religion; their focus had shifted from worshiping God and giving him glory to worshiping their own purity and glorifying themselves. They were worshiping their own worship, and their true god was their idea of their own wonderfulness. While they would no doubt have balked at 7 Simple Steps to Your Best Life Now, the spirit of their religion was really very similar to that sort of American self-help/therapeutic religion, just as it’s very similar to the idolatry of style, taste and preference practiced in so many of our congregations that underlies American Christianity’s “worship wars.” Our worship is supposed to be our gift to God and the window through which we look at him; they had stopped looking through the window and started looking at it, shifting their focus from the Giver to the gift. Too often, if we’re honest, I think we’d have to admit that we do the same.
The careless grace of God
Again he began to teach beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea, and the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. And he was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold
and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” And he said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God,
but for those outside everything is in parables, so thatthey may indeed see but not perceive,
and may indeed hear but not understand,
lest they should turn and be forgiven.And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? The sower sows the word. And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy. And they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. But those that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.”—Mark 4:1-20 (ESV)
Craig Barnes, “Careless Grace”
• download
Craig Barnes is one of my favorite preachers, and I was glad to see that he would be preaching and teaching at this year’s Worship Symposium; I’ve already referenced the workshop of his which I attended, and I’ll be commenting on that at greater length soon (I’d meant to do so already), because he had some very important things to say. I didn’t attend his seminar, but I was there for the opening service on Thursday morning, structured around the Parable of the Sower, at which he preached. This is a great and deep parable, but it seems to attract bad sermons; thankfully (if unsurprisingly), the Rev. Dr. Barnes’ message wasn’t one of them. Indeed, it’s a marvelous meditation on God’s extravagant grace, and on our proper response: listen, wait, and see. It’s well worth your time.
Why America needs Sarah Palin, Part II
- Fiscally responsible leadership, for Alaska and the nation
- A vision and perspective from outside the Northeastern elite
- A pro-life vision which is not only political, but personal, as seen in the lives of her youngest son, Trig, and her grandson, Tripp
Republican stupidity continues
The silver lining to the storm clouds that washed away so much of the GOP in 2006 and 2008 is that in the process they washed away many of the people responsible for shipwrecking the party, and most of the illusions those people promulgated. Unfortunately, that’s only “many” and “most,” not all, and we do have some big-government Republican quislings still hanging around. One of those guys is Charlie Crist, governor of Florida; I cringed every time he was mentioned as a potential running mate for John McCain, I cringe every time I hear him mentioned as a potential presidential candidate in 2012, and with this latest stunt of his, he should be ashamed to call himself a Republican. I’d say he ought to just change parties and be done with it, except that I’m not sure the Democrats would want him either. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal sums it up:
Who needs Mother Nature to cause a catastrophe? Florida’s politicians are busy creating an unnatural disaster in their state insurance market that will blow away taxpayers when the next big hurricane hits. And we mean taxpayers across America.Last month State Farm pulled the plug on its 1.2 million homeowner policies in Florida, citing the state’s punishing price controls. The state’s largest insurer joins a raft of competitors that have already reduced or dumped their property and casualty business in the Sunshine State, including Prudential, Allstate, Nationwide and USAA. This is the inevitable result of Governor Charlie Crist’s drive to control property-insurance premiums. The Republican also lobbied his GOP legislature to make the state government a giant competitor in the market, undercutting private insurers. . . .Every month in Florida, State Farm loses $20 million. So it finally said, No mas.Meanwhile, Floridians have been signing up with Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-run insurer that Mr. Crist unleashed in 2007. Because it has an implicit taxpayer guarantee, and because its actuarial assumptions are, well, loose, Citizens can offer lower premiums than private competitors can. Citizens has become the largest insurer in the state, with 1.1 million policies.Mr. Crist has thus guaranteed that Floridians, rather than the global insurance industry, will be on the hook for property damage when the next Katrina hits. Citizens is facing more than $400 billion in potential exposure, yet Citizens Chief Financial Officer Sharon Binnun was recently cited in the South Florida Sun Sentinel as saying it had only $3.4 billion in net assets. . . .Some 25% of the coastal property in U.S. hurricane zones is located in Florida, and another storm is inevitable. To pay for those claims when they come, Mr. Crist will either have to raise taxes on Floridians, or beg Congress for a rescue. . . .It’s scary to imagine the bill taxpayers will get when the next big hurricane hits Florida. It’s even scarier to think Mr. Crist is being touted as a potential GOP candidate for the White House.
No kidding.
Disproving Beethoven, and other failures of thought
My lovely wife has been sitting at her computer and intermittently reading me bits from an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers titled “The Lost Tools of Learning.” Like most Sayers, it’s thoughtful, incisive, pungent, and frequently funny. She identifies the problem with education in her time (a problem which I don’t think has changed all that much in the 62 years since she wrote this piece) this way:
Another quotation from the same issue of the TLS comes in fittingly here to wind up this random collection of disquieting thoughts—this time from a review of Sir Richard Livingstone’s “Some Tasks for Education”: “More than once the reader is reminded of the value of an intensive study of at least one subject, so as to learn ‘the meaning of knowledge’ and what precision and persistence is needed to attain it. Yet there is elsewhere full recognition of the distressing fact that a man may be master in one field and show no better judgement than his neighbor anywhere else; he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it.”
I would draw your attention particularly to that last sentence, which offers an explanation of what the writer rightly calls the “distressing fact” that the intellectual skills bestowed upon us by our education are not readily transferable to subjects other than those in which we acquired them: “he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it.
“Is not the great defect of our education today—a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned—that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play “The Harmonious Blacksmith” upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorized “The Harmonious Blacksmith,” he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle “The Last Rose of Summer.” Why do I say, “as though”? In certain of the arts and crafts, we sometimes do precisely this—requiring a child to “express himself” in paint before we teach him how to handle the colors and the brush. There is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observe: it is not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new medium. He, having learned by experience the best way to economize labor and take the thing by the right end, will start off by doodling about on an odd piece of material, in order to “give himself the feel of the tool.”
This is, I think, very much to the point even today—and that despite a great deal of talk from educators about “teaching children how to think, not what to think.” The reasons for that, and her proposed solution, she lays out in the body of the essay. As to the evidence of the continuing accuracy of her diagnosis, I offer the utter familiarity of this episode from over six decades ago:
We find a well-known biologist writing in a weekly paper to the effect that: “It is an argument against the existence of a Creator” (I think he put it more strongly; but since I have, most unfortunately, mislaid the reference, I will put his claim at its lowest)—”an argument against the existence of a Creator that the same kind of variations which are produced by natural selection can be produced at will by stock breeders.” One might feel tempted to say that it is rather an argument for the existence of a Creator. Actually, of course, it is neither; all it proves is that the same material causes (recombination of the chromosomes, by crossbreeding, and so forth) are sufficient to account for all observed variations—just as the various combinations of the same dozen tones are materially sufficient to account for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and the noise the cat makes by walking on the keys. But the cat’s performance neither proves nor disproves the existence of Beethoven; and all that is proved by the biologist’s argument is that he was unable to distinguish between a material and a final cause.
You could replace “well-known biologist” with “Richard Dawkins” in that paragraph, and nobody would bat an eye.
Yet at present
We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation? This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him. God also testified to it by signs, wonders and various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.
It is not to angels that he has subjected the world to come, about which we are speaking. But there is a place where someone has testified:
“What is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
You made him a little lower than the angels;
you crowned him with glory and honor
and put everything under his feet.”
In putting everything under him, God left nothing that is not subject to him. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him. But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers. He says,
“I will declare your name to my brothers;
in the presence of the congregation I will sing your praises.”
—Hebrews 2:1-12 (NIV)
In checking to see if Calvin had started posting audio and video from this year’s Symposium yet (they haven’t), I was reminded that there were a few from last year’s that I’d really wanted to post, and that I had forgotten to do so. Of those, the one I most wanted to post was Scott Hoezee’s sermon from the opening worship service, on which I commented briefly last January; a brief comment just doesn’t do the sermon justice. It’s been rattling around in my mind ever since, and when I listened to it again this evening, I knew I still wanted to post it. I can’t embed it, but the link to the audio is above; it’s a powerful statement of hope in Jesus Christ in the midst of the brokenness of our world. I encourage you to listen.
Photo © 2012 Flood G. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.
A modest proposal on the definition of marriage
I offer this with two notes. First, this isn’t a “modest proposal” in the satirical sense, along the lines of Jonathan Swift; I am serious. Second, this isn’t my own idea; I ran across it some years ago and no longer remember who came up with it. That said, here is the proposal.I would be willing to support same-sex marriage given two conditions:
the abolition of no-fault divorce and the recriminalization of adultery.Those who argue that it’s absurd for heterosexuals to oppose redefining marriage to include homosexual couples on grounds of the sanctity of marriage while tolerating divorce for non-biblical reasons have a point; where they go wrong, in my judgment (and, I believe, on the biblical standard) is in arguing for combining the two. The best course, I think, would be to hold the line on the definition of marriage while reversing the no-fault revolution—but I don’t expect that to happen. (To tell the truth, I don’t expect to see my own proposal realized either, but we’ll get to that.) As a realistic matter, politics is a matter of tradeoffs (except for short periods), and you have to give something to get something. Given that, I think that no-fault divorce and the lifting of formal societal sanction on sleeping around have done more damage to the institution of marriage than would inclusion of same-sex couples in that institution, and so I think the tradeoff would be, on the whole, beneficial.Including the recriminalization of adultery in this deal would also ensure that those homosexuals who supported it were actually serious about marriage. There are those who argue that the true agenda behind the push for same-sex marriage is the desire to bring down the institution of marriage, or at the least render it irrelevant; and I’m quite sure there are those for whom that’s true. I’m also sure there are those for whom it isn’t. The willingness to advocate and enter into legal marriage on grounds that would make that marriage much more consequential (and the violation of it much more consequential) would draw a clear and unambiguous contrast between the two groups.As noted, I would be very surprised to see this proposal enacted, since there are a lot more heterosexuals who would be inconvenienced by it than there are homosexuals whom it would benefit. I suspect for instance that most liberal heterosexuals, if these were the only terms on which they could win marital status for same-sex couples, would refuse. Their attitude, I think, would likely mirror that of New England environmentalists who are eager to see species in other parts of the country added to the threatened and endangered lists, but much less eager when it’s a species like the New England cottontail; easy to stand on your principles, after all, when it only inconveniences other people.I also suspect that many conservatives would dislike my proposed deal. Part of that is that many would disagree with my arguments for it; just because I believe that it would, on the whole, strengthen the institution of marriage doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree with me, or that I’m necessarily right. Part of it too is that, given the divorce rate among evangelicals and fundamentalists, you have to figure that even many conservative Christians would balk at reversing the no-fault revolution.I don’t know how prominent people of homosexual inclination would react if this modest proposal were ever seriously debated; I suspect some, at least, would advocate for it with a certain sardonic humor, pleased to see the onus put on heterosexual America for once. I do think, though, that if people were forced to discuss it seriously, the conversation would be both enlightening and entertaining; and who knows? We might even learn something.