Author Archives: Rob Harrison

A clear-eyed view of the Middle East

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courtesy of one of the best observers out there, Reuel Marc Gerecht. Short form: the world out there looks rather different than you’ve probably gathered from the media. The irony of the Democratic Party position on the GWOT (we supported Afghanistan, but not Iraq) is that it’s led to all sorts of assertions that Bush lied to get us into Iraq, that it’s a quagmire, etc., but given the administration a free pass on Afghanistan—and yet, we’re over the hump in Iraq, clearly winning, and have dealt al’Qaeda a heavy body blow there, while we’re losing in Afghanistan, may wind up losing Pakistan as a consequence, and will almost certainly be fighting an actual war up there long after Baghdad is no scarier a duty station than Pusan. Of perhaps greater significance, this administration has never faced up to the immense problem of Saudi Arabia. It may well be that they were hoping to get Iraq stabilized as a trustworthy ally first—an understandable strategy, if so, and a possibility Gerecht doesn’t consider—but probably not; and even if it was, given the time Iraq has taken (and was always going to take), it still wasn’t a good idea in the end.

It’s a bit early yet for a post-mortem on this presidency’s foreign policy, but as we begin to think about that question, the good news is that the grand move for which the administration has been pilloried, the invasion of Iraq, is ending up a great accomplishment. The bad news is, with regard to the Arab/Muslim world as a whole, it’s been their only real accomplishment. Still, on the whole, I agree with Gerecht’s take on this: “Iraq and the war on terror will likely save the president’s legacy in the Middle East.”

Rice for Veep

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Condoleezza Rice, that is—just the thought has The Nation worried. They’re thinking for Sen. McCain, but I think she’d be equally good for Gov. Huckabee in the (increasingly unlikely) event that he ends up with the nomination. On the symbolism front, her presence on the ticket would balance the Democrats; what’s more, she would be an incredible campaigner, since she’s charismatic, tough, and deadly in debate. For Gov. Huckabee, she would shore up his greatest weakness, the widespread distrust of his ability to handle foreign policy; for Sen. McCain, she would amplify his greatest strength. (She might also help address his greatest weakness, the distrust he’s earned among the party’s evangelical wing; though not known primarily for her views on domestic policy, she is herself an evangelical and is well regarded among evangelicals.) Plus, she’s already a national figure with significant experience in the Executive Branch. Her presence on the ticket obviously wouldn’t address charges that Sen. McCain (or for that matter, Gov. Huckabee) “isn’t a real conservative,” but I would think that those could be addressed in other ways. (My preferred thought at the moment would be to bring Gov. Romney aboard the campaign as presumptive nominee for Secretary of the Treasury.)

Rice for running mate. If she’ll take it, who better?

It all depends on what the meaning of “shall” is

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but the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly (hereafter GA PJC) of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has apparently decided that “shall” actually means “shall,” and that if the church’s constitution says you can’t do something, then you actually aren’t allowed to do it. That might sound like a trivial exercise in logic, but not, alas, in this denomination, where there are many who insist their personal beliefs/preferences trump the decisions of the body, and thus that they don’t have to play by the rules. We even had a task force composed of a lot of bright people suggest that we formalize that; on their recommendation (at least as widely understood), if you want to be a Presbyterian pastor without believing and doing what Presbyterian pastors are supposed to believe and do, all you should have to do is stand up and say, “I don’t accept this part, that part, and the other part” (for instance, only have sex with a person of the opposite sex to whom you’re married; the deity of Christ; and the belief that salvation is only through Jesus) and your presbytery should say, “Oh, OK, well, we have no right to object,” and approve you as a pastor anyway. Now, however, the denomination’s top court has come along and said, “No, you can’t do that.”

—At least, that’s what they’ve said to the behavior part; as far as beliefs go, I’m not sure. On the one hand, when GA PJC told presbyteries they can’t adopt resolutions declaring that they’re going to hold candidates for ordination to the constitutional standards, their reason was as follows: “Adopting statements about mandatory provisions of the Book of Order for ordination and installation of officers falsely implies that other governing bodies might not be similarly bound; that is, that they might choose to restate or interpret the provisions differently, fail to adopt such statements, or possess some flexibility with respect to such provisions.” That would seem to imply that in fact other governing bodies are similarly bound. On the other hand, in the Pittsburgh case, they noted that the church requires candidates “to conform their actions, though not necessarily their beliefs or opinions, to certain standards” (emphasis mine); clearly, they’re leaving room for dissent. Which is fine, as far as it goes, since we don’t all agree on everything, and never have; the question is, how far does that go? Does that just apply to “manner of life standards”—you can disagree with the requirement to obey X, but you still have to obey it? Or does it apply to theological standards as well? Someone’s going to try to argue that it does, you can be sure of that. Which would mean, if we ended up there, that you could deny the deity of Christ, the necessity of his saving work, and pretty much everything else that has historically defined what it means to be a Christian, as long as you don’t have homosexual sex. If GA PJC has upheld the behavioral standards but not standards of belief, then at least we all have to play by some of the same rules; but how much have we really gained?

My greatest objection to all the toleration of defiance in this denomination, and to the task force recommendation which was clearly intended to institutionalize that, has always been that it’s a deadly blow to what we understand by “church”; if we’re truly to be in relationship with each other, then each of us has to honor and abide by whatever the body as a whole decides. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you”—if it does, then something is deeply, deeply wrong. We have every right to work to change policies and standards with which we disagree, but that doesn’t give us the right to act now as if they didn’t exist. To claim otherwise isn’t a mark of spiritual maturity, but of the highest degree of spiritual pride. For us to be a part of this denomination is to be committed to each other, and to recognize that we really do need each other after all; and to do that, we need to stand down and accept that if the denomination—which is all of us together—says, “No,” that means “No.”

A shift in the US political scene?

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So argues Michael Barone; and since there’s no keener or more insightful observer of American politics, if this is what he sees, we’d best take a long, hard look. It’s his explanation of what is otherwise a surprising and somewhat confusing fact: “every [presidential] candidate’s strategy has failed.” That’s not something one would expect, given all the seasoned candidates and operatives out there, but it’s the truth; Barone argues that the reason for it is that the ground has shifted out from under their feet.

For a decade from 1995 to 2005, we operated in a period of trench-warfare politics, with two approximately equal-sized armies waging a culture war in which very small amounts of ground made the difference between victory and defeat. It was pretty clear what the major issues were, what strategies were necessary to win a party’s nomination, how to maximize your side’s turnout on election day (and, increasingly, in early voting).

As more than a few people have noted, it was Karl Rove’s mastery of this situation (which he intentionally exacerbated as a political strategy) which produced victories for Bush in 2000 and 2004.

But times change. Somewhere between Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006, I believe we entered a period of open-field politics, in which voters and candidates are moving around—a field in which there are no familiar landmarks or new signposts. . . . The fact that every campaign’s experts came up with losing strategies suggests that, in this year’s open-field politics, all the old rules may be broken. It’s been a wild ride in the 35 days since the Iowa caucuses, and it may be even wilder in the 271 days until the polls open in November.

It’s an intriguing thesis, and a compelling one—especially coming from someone with Barone’s track record for being right. It suggests that, far from the foregone Democratic coronation many have expected, that the ’08 presidential election may belong to whoever figures the new rules out first.

Skeptical conversations, part I: Who is God?

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As part of my ordination process some years ago, I was required to write a credo—a statement of my beliefs. I wound up, for various reasons, writing it as a conversation between myself and a friend of mine who was an avowed agnostic; some of it came out of actual exchanges we’d had, while the rest is my invention. I’ve decided to start posting it in chunks (it’s fairly long); you can find the first section here.

Update: I’ve moved the first section here.

Lenten Song of the Week

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Last year during Lent, I posted Isaac Watts’ greatest hymn, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”; this year, I think I’ll start off Lent with another of his great ones (minus the frankly execrable Ralph Hudson chorus).

Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed?Alas! and did my Savior bleed
And did my Sov’reign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For sinners such as I?

Was it for sins that I have done
He suffered on the tree?
Amazing pity! grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide
And shut his glories in,
When Christ, the great Redeemer, died
For man the creature’s sin.

But drops of grief can ne’er repay
The debt of love I owe;
Here, Lord, I give myself away—
‘Tis all that I can do. Words: Isaac Watts
Music: Hugh Wilson
MARTYRDOM, CM

The idolatry of perfect parenthood

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Jason Byassee has a review up on the First Things website of a book by Methodist theologian Amy Laura Hall titled Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction; the review is wonderful, and it sounds like the book is, too. I won’t try to summarize it, I’ll just encourage you to read the piece and mull over the ways in which “mainline churches have pursued a theology of ‘Justification by meticulously planned procreation’ (emphasis original), exemplified in a mid-century conference at which Methodists pronounced the Christian family ‘the hope of the world’”—and to let yourself be challenged and (I hope) energized by Dr. Hall’s final words: “The call to be a Christian has become, for me, a call to risk seeming like just the sort of backward, crazy, Holy Spirit-inspired white girl that my grandmothers hoped I would progress beyond.”

Preliminary thoughts on the knowledge of God

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I should begin by noting that while I intend this post to be able to stand on its own, it doesn’t exist in isolation; it’s part of my response to a couple of questions Erin posed me in the comments on this post on her blog, and to the overall discussion. In order to keep my comment there reasonably short, I thought it best to offer some of my thoughts here.What sparked my original contribution there was this comment:

if the rules and standards we live by are God’s, then it would have to be true that love is the measuring stick for everything . . . including this ever elusive “holiness”. And maybe we can’t help but fly once we grasp the awesomeness of God’s love.

The last line there I agree with wholeheartedly—indeed, I think that’s a critically important truth for the church to grasp—and I regret not having said so earlier; but I raised the following objection to the first statement:

I would say that God is the measuring stick for everything. Yes, God is love, but God is not reducible to love—God is light without darkness, God is perfect good without flaw, God is life without death, God is the source of all good things . . . we have to be careful not to pick just one biblical affirmation about God, even one of the key ones (like “God is love”), and lose sight of the others; doing that makes it easier for us to reduce our view of God to the size of our definitions.

Now, it’s easy to say that, but (as Erin pointed out), what does that look like, and how do we do that? For that matter, since we already know what love is, what’s the problem with just collapsing it down and using love as our measuring stick? Ironically, however, that’s precisely the problem: we already know what love is—or rather, we think we do. The reason we need to “grasp the awesomeness of God’s love” is that, most of the time, we don’t, even though we have been grasped by it; most of the time, for most of us, our understanding of love doesn’t really get all that far beyond the one we’ve learned from the world, and the world’s idea of love is adulterated. It’s weak tea beside the real thing, nowhere near deep enough, high enough, strong enough, alive enough, selfless enough, committed enough . . . any of it. This is why I would argue that we cannot simplify our view of God even to “God is love,” because when we say that by itself, we tend to shrink God down to our understanding of love. We need to hold on to all those other affirmations, not just because they’re all true, but because collectively, they reinforce each other; when we say that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” it reminds us that when we say “God is love,” his love is a vastly greater thing than ours. Our love is too often sentimental, too often weak, too often prone to settle for comfortable half-truths and affirmations; we shrink back from challenging and confronting people, even when that would be the loving thing to do, perhaps because our love just isn’t strong enough to move us to do so, or perhaps because we don’t know how to do so as an act of love rather than as an act of anger driven by fear or hurt. We can’t really understand how a loving God could hate our sin as an act of love, and so either we keep our idea of love and soft-pedal the whole idea of sin, or else we keep the idea of sin and become loveless and merciless in judgment, because our understanding of love is too small. Because, as J. B. Phillips said, our God is too small. The problem underlying all this is that in logical terms, there is very little we can positively know about God; most of our affirmations about God are negative—which is to say, they take the form of “God is not this,” and “God is not that.” We can say, for instance, that God is eternal—that he is not bound by time as we know it—but we can’t say very much about what that means. Even some of the positive affirmations we find in Scripture work this way. “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.” We know from this that “God is light” means that there is no darkness in God—no shameful thing hidden in secret, no dark motives, no shadow of any evil desires, nothing of that sort—but speaking positively, what does it mean? Does it mean that the speed of God is 186,000 miles per second, or that he can be refracted by a prism? Clearly, the idea is absurd. But what it does mean that God is light is mostly beyond our grasp; we simply affirm that there is no darkness in him, and hang on to that. We run into similar problems trying to grasp everything the Bible says about God. We can understand that his life is undying, and that he gives us as his children undying life; we can even understand that his life is of a different quality from ours. But what that difference is, is much harder to grasp; we seek as Christians to live into that, to have his life more and more come alive in us, but we cannot define it, we can only experience it. It’s the same way, really, with his love. We can’t use it as a measuring stick, because a measuring stick is something we can pick up and hold and manipulate; it’s something which is useful precisely because we know its limits. We don’t know the limits of the love of God—if the cross should teach us anything at all (beyond that “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but shall have eternal life”), it should be that. We cannot hold it—rather, it holds us; and it is far too great a thing for us to manipulate. So, then, the question: “If we can’t measure things by Love, how would you measure things by God?” To which my rather perverse answer: we can’t. To say that God is our measuring stick is to say that we have given up measuring. It doesn’t mean there are no measurements; it simply means that we don’t make them, and we don’t determine them. We simply follow where he leads. That’s what defines us as Christians—not where we’re standing right now, or what we have right or what we have wrong, or what rules we follow and what rules we don’t, or any of that; what defines us is which way we’re moving. Christians are those who, however imperfectly and however confusedly, are on the road together behind Jesus, following him in his mission in this world. This is how we know God: not by affirming certain things or upholding certain rules, though some affirmations and rules are important in helping keep us going the right direction, but by following him. We know him as we know anyone: in relationship. And this is how we measure things by God: do they truly contribute to our following him, and to others’ doing the same? Which is to say, do they make us more like him? Or less? Because the way we know we’re truly following Jesus is that we’re becoming more like him, and thus doing the work he did: feeding the hungry; caring for the sick; welcoming the outsider; defending the oppressed; lifting up the downtrodden; loving the unlovable; breaking down the barriers between race and class and gender; and, when the opportunity arises, speaking the truth so clearly and unflinchingly that people want to kill us for it.

John McCain

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With Mitt Romney’s decision to suspend his campaign, the pundits would have you believe that John McCain is now guaranteed to be the Republican presidential nominee. He may well end up such, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near that certain; to this point, Sen. McCain has received less than half of the votes cast in Republican primaries, and if most of Gov. Romney’s supporters go to Mike Huckabee, I think the convention could well end up deciding this race. (On the Democratic side, I think that’s highly likely to happen. Heaven help Denver.) Still, the odds would seem to favor Sen. McCain at this point—which has a lot of the conservative talking heads completely apoplectic. “McCain’s not a true conservative,” etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, combined with dark suspicions about his stability and the like.Now, as a Navy brat, I know a lot of people who knew Sen. McCain back when he was still, say, LCDR McCain, and I trust them to have more of a perspective on the man than your typical pundit. Here’s what one of them, as true-blue a conservative as anyone I know, had to say about him a while back (this is posted with permission):

Lt. John McCain was a flight instructor in VT-7 based at NAS Meridian, MS in the summer of 1964 while I was a student Naval Aviator there. Based on my observations and those of my best friend then and now, it is my opinion that the best thing that ever happened to him was doing hard time in the Hanoi “Hilton.” He had a violent, hair trigger temper and was arrogant, self-serving and vindictive. Following his experience as “ground zero” of the Forestal fire (a lesser man would likely not even have survived that) he needed to find a way to get his now-denied combat experience to stay competitive for promotion. I have no doubt that he used his considerable political influence to immediately get a set of orders to CAG-16 deploying on the Oriskany.During his tenure as a POW he demonstrated immense courage and resourcefulness. He was tough and I admire him greatly for the way he handled himself and I think that experience took the edge off of his most negative qualities. Just a side note here for those younger folks who may read this and for whom the Viet Nam war is little more than a few pages in a dusty history book, the gutty conduct of most of our POWs in that war was nothing short of incredible. And Senator McCain was right near the top.I had the privilege of quaffing a couple of beers with him and a few of his pilots in Yuma following his repatriation while he was CO of VA-174 (the East coast A-7 RAG). He was mellow and gracious and a pleasure to be with then.I was a big fan of his until he started his first run for president and I became aware of his inconsistent positions on several issues that I held dear. In short, he didn’t appear to have a coherent conservative worldview. I also think he blew his chance for the nomination in 2000 because he didn’t understand and embrace the evangelical grassroots. He had that block for the taking early on when they were still skeptical of W. Instead, he thumbed his nose at them (us) and lost the nomination. Most of the grassroots energy in the party comes from the so-called “Christian right” and McCain missed his chance (although he may never have been any more able to connect with them than, say, Hillary).The problem with the entire Republican field is that there is no “Reagan conservative” anywhere to be seen so we are back to asking, “which one will we settle for?”On the plus side: McCain is pro life, anti spending and spot-on on the WoT. Negatives are: Soft on immigration, voted against tax cuts and McCain-Feingold was a disaster that gave us Soros, Lewis et al. Also, have to give him credit—though I was unhappy with him at the time—for getting our Supreme Court nominees through.Senator McCain may end being my man though I think the governor from Arkansas is the best of the bunch in debate and thinking on his feet.

Now, this is far from pure adoration of the “he’s the ideal candidate” type. Clearly, he isn’t. However, while there are certainly reservations here about McCain (reservations which I share), I don’t think there’s reason for hysterical opposition, either. Yes, he’s a man of great pride and greater temper who can be a bit short in the fusebox; no, that doesn’t make him “unstable” (the kindest insinuation I’ve heard). And yes, he’s spent too much time poking conservatives in the eye, and yes, he needs to give up the adulation of the NY Times and come back to his conservative roots on some things; but I agree with John Weidner: once he’s no longer a thorn in Bush’s side, but instead the guy standing between the MSM’s favored candidate and the White House, the NYT’s gloves will come off, and that will solve the problem.The bottom line: if Sen. McCain is the nominee, I think folks like Rush who are suggesting conservatives are better off if he loses have gone clean ’round the bend. As Dan Lehr says, if he isn’t the nominee we wanted, we need to grow up and get over it. Two reasons: one, we will get far better judges out of Sen. McCain than out of Hillarack Oblinton (two peas, one pod). Even if you don’t trust him on nominations, anyone he’ll come up with will be much, much better than anyone either of those two would put forward. And two, he will prosecute the GWOT, and probably far more effectively than the current administration; the Democrats will concede our gains. We have turned the corner in Iraq; we can’t afford to be in thrall to those who want us to turn back around it. I’m still voting Huckabee in Indiana, but if it’s McCain in November, then my vote is McCain all the way.