Author Archives: Rob Harrison

More links on Iran

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mostly from The New Ledger and American Thinker, which have had good runs of stories going.

The Case for Iran: Fighting for Freedom

Bush’s Domino Effect

The Seeming Iranian Sitzkrieg

Mullahs Cannot Stop the Persian Reawakening

Will Iran Get The Revolution It Needs?

The Mullahs and the Tiananmen Option

Montazeri Speaks, Iran Listens

Say Goodbye to Cairo: Obama’s Inaction on Iran Clashes With His Words

On Iran: Which Will It Be, Mr. Obama?

Why Obama Can’t Take a Light Touch on Iran

Too Little, Too Late: Why the Iranian election was doomed from the start

And, for a recap of the beginnings of the explosion, Iran’s Path: Bloodshed and Chaos

Hope begins with the right diagnosis

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 3
Q. How do you come to know your misery?

A. The law of God tells me.1

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

For John Calvin, this is the first use of the Law: it shows us our sin by showing us our fundamental inability to keep it. It strips away our self-deception and our rationalizations and forces us to face ourselves as we really are—which is the necessary predicate for our salvation, because we won’t accept God’s grace until we accept that we need it.

As well, the Law shows us the true reason for human misery, and thus points us in the direction in which salvation can be found. This is an important gift, because even when we’ve admitted the problem, we tend to want to misdiagnose it (usually out of wishful thinking of some sort or another) as being something we can address on our own. As Jerome de Jong asks in Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude,

Man seems to be aware of the fact that he is miserable, but has he found the true source of his misery?

Left to our own devices, the answer is, “No, not really.”

When man seeks to find the source of his misery within the context of his own experience, the answers which he gives are false. His answers turn him in upon himself and the things with which he hopes to satisfy self. So far is man’s own understanding of his misery from leading him to God that all about us we see those who have experienced bitterness, despair, and utter hopelessness, who have out of this experience denied the reality of God. Man’s understanding of himself will have to come from outside himself. It must be revealed to him.

We need climate change—in the House of Representatives

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I didn’t have the energy to post on this Friday night, and it’s taken a while to get back to it, but I can’t help thinking that we’ve seen the definitive moment of the Democratic leadership of this Congress: they were in such a hurry to ram through their energy tax, they passed a bill that didn’t even exist. Seriously. As David Freddoso put it,

Through a series of parliamentary inquiries, the Republicans learned that the 300-plus page managers’ amendment, added to the bill last night in the House Rules Committee, has not even been been integrated with the official copy of the 1,090-page bill at the House Clerk’s desk, let alone in any other location. The two documents are side-by-side at the desk as the clerk reads through the instructions in the 300 page document for altering the 1,090 page document.

But they cannot be simply combined, because the amendment contains 300 pages of items like this: “Page 15, beginning line 8, strike paragraph (11)…” How many members of Congress do you suppose have gone through it all to see how it changes the bill?

Global Warming is apparently so urgent that we can’t even wait until members of Congress know what they’re voting on.

There’s supposed to be a section of the bill establishing and regulating a financial derivatives market (that’s the “trade” part of “cap-and-trade”); as of the time the bill was passed, that hadn’t been written yet—there was only a “placeholder.” Barney Frank said it was OK because he was sure they’d put a good system in place, and that was apparently good enough. Somehow, the thought of Barney Frank presiding over a sub-prime carbon market, when herefused to see the collapse of the sub-prime housing market coming, isn’t encouraging.

More than that, the purpose of this haste is to keep people from thinking about the economic effects of this bill, which aren’t going to be good. Bloomberg, the Heritage Foundation, andInvestor’s Business Daily have all laid it out:

As we’ve said before, capping emissions is capping economic growth. An analysis of Waxman-Markey by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by almost 2 million (see charts below).

Consumers would pay through the nose as electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, as President Obama once put it, by 90% adjusted for inflation. Inflation-adjusted gasoline prices would rise 74%, residential natural gas prices by 55% and the average family’s annual energy bill by $1,500.

Hit hardest by all this would be the “95% of working families” Obama keeps mentioning as being protected from increased taxation. They are protected, that is, unless they use energy. Then they’ll be hit by this draconian energy tax.

Of course, the Democratic majority has been clever enough to make sure that the bill won’t actually take effect until 2012, so that it won’t mess up their chances for re-election in 2010; but once it does, as the Heritage Foundation notes, people will notice:

For a household of four, energy costs go up $436 that year, and they eventually reach $1,241 in 2035 and average $829 annually over that span. Electricity costs go up 90 percent by 2035, gasoline by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent by 2035. The cumulative higher energy costs for a family of four by then will be nearly $20,000.

But direct energy costs are only part of the consumer impact. Nearly everything goes up, since higher energy costs raise production costs. If you look at the total cost of Waxman-Markey, it works out to an average of $2,979 annually from 2012-2035 for a household of four. By 2035 alone, the total cost is over $4,600.

That’s not the only cost, though; Bloomberg notes that this bill will drive a lot of jobs overseas and give foreign energy producers a competitive advantage over American companies. At a time when we’re trying to reduce American dependence on foreign oil, this bill will onlyincrease it.

America’s biggest oil companies will probably cope with U.S. carbon legislation by closing fuel plants, cutting capital spending and increasing imports. . . .

“It will lead to the opportunity for foreign sources to bring in transportation fuels at a lower cost, which will have an adverse impact to our industry, potential shutdown of refineries and investment and, ultimately, employment,” Mulva said in a June 16 interview in Detroit. . . .

The same amount of gasoline that would have $1 in carbon costs imposed if it were domestic would have 10 cents less added if it were imported, according to energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie in Houston. Contrary to President Barack Obama’s goal of reducing dependence on overseas energy suppliers, the bill would incent U.S. refiners to import more fuel, said Clayton Mahaffey, an analyst at RedChip Cos. in Maitland, Florida.

“They’ll be searching the globe for refined products that don’t carry the same level of carbon costs,” said Mahaffey, a former Exxon Corp. refinery manager.

In short, this is going to blow a large hole in our economy. And to what purpose? Well, that’s still very much up for debate, as I’ve pointed out a few times. As the IBD editorial continues,

According to an analysis by Chip Knappenberger, administrator of the World Climate Report, the reduction of U.S. CO2 emissions to 83% below 2005 levels by 2050—the goal of the Waxman-Markey bill—would reduce global temperature in 2050 by a mere 0.05 degree Celsius.

Doesn’t sound all that impressive, does it? It’s partly because the countries to which we’ll be shipping all those jobs have significantly poorer environmental records than the US, as Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) notes:

If one truly cares about the planet, why do we want to make steel in China rather than in the United States where our carbon emissions are one-third that of the Chinese per ton of steel produced? One Arkansas refinery recently testified that under a cap-and-tax regime, they would be forced to close their 1,200-employee plant while India builds the largest in the world to ship fuel to the United States with nowhere near the environmental protections we have. We’re not helping the environment by sending industries that operate cleanly and efficiently in the United States to a regulation-free China or India.

That’s probably partly why even within the EPA, there are those who question the value of this bill—but the EPA is unwilling to listen, even to the point of trying to suppress the study challenging global-warming dogma, because “the administration has decided to move forward”and nothing is to be allowed to get in the way (not even the facts). This is a classic example of that “triumph of ideology over science” that the Obama Administration was supposed to be against. Apparently they don’t mind it when it’s leftist ideology. (Or when it gives them the opportunity to pump money to special interests.)

Now, it seems to me there’s hope that the Senate defeats this bill—Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) certainly expects that to happen, and he has a reasonable case—but there was never much for the House, since the House Republicans are functionally irrelevant. That said, I have to give House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) credit for making the most of irrelevance; he didn’t have the votes to back him up, but he did a grand old job of carving up this turkey anyway, in what some dubbed a “mini-filibuster.” The reason for his speech? Informing the House as to what was in that 300-page “managers’ amendment,” so that no one who voted for the bill could claim they didn’t know. Bravo, Mr. Minority Leader. Bravo.

 

The shape of comfort

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 2
Q. What must you know to live and die in the joy of this comfort?

A. Three things:
first, how great my sin and misery are;1
second, how I am set free from all my sins and misery;2
third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.3

Note: mouse over footnotes for Scripture references.

The 129 questions and answers of the Heidelberg Catechism are divided up into 52 parts, one for each Sunday of the year; in the old Dutch Reformed tradition, you’re supposed to go through it every year in church on that basis. I don’t know anyone who actually preaches or teaches through the Heidelberg every year, though I’ve heard there are folks in churches that still have Sunday evening services that use those to that purpose.

In any case, Q & A 1-2 make up Lord’s Day 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism and together serve as its introduction. #1 lays out the reason for our comfort: “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” #2 then connects that to the rest of the Heidelberg, which is laid out according to that threefold structure.

Andrew Kuyvenhoven, in his Heidelberg commentary Comfort and Joy, notes that the folks who wrote this weren’t talking about comfort in any light sense (14):

The people who confessed this in the time of the Reformation were being persecuted for their faith. They feared for their lives. But, they said, even if we get killed, we belong to Jesus, body and soul, in life and in death. They confessed their comfort in the face of all threats. . . .

It is the Christian’s answer to life’s deepest questions and death’s darkest riddles. For here and for now it is the only comfort available. Without this comfort, life is senseless and death is hopeless. We need to say with great emphasis that this is the one and only comfort for all people.

And as the Heidelberg says in Q & A 2, this is a comfort which can only be found through the profound knowledge—not merely of the head but in the heart—of the bad news of human sin, the good news of our redemption, and the response of grateful and humble service. Kuyvenhoven lays this out well (16):

True faith has knowledge of sin, grace, and gratitude. If people have a superficial faith, they have a superficial knowledge of sin, of salvation, and of gratitude. Anyone who is growing in faith is growing in the knowledge of guilt, grace, and gratitude. And those of us who have deep faith have a deep knowledge of sin, a warm knowledge of our Savior, and a profound sense of gratitude.

He’s right; so was Donald Bruggink when he titled the commentary he edited on the Heidelberg in honor of its 400th anniversary in 1963 Guilt, Grace, and Gratitude. The Christian life is a life of gratitude, born out of the awareness of the depth of our sin and the height of our salvation, or it’s nothing at all.

The Gospel for All

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(Malachi 1:8-11; 1 Timothy 2)

I said a few weeks ago that our big problem with 1 Timothy is that we read it as a manual for how to run a church; we reduce it to a practical handbook of disconnected instructions on church government. To be sure, this letter says a lot about how the church should be led, but to read it in that reductionist way is to miss why Paul is concerned about that; it’s to read these commands right out of their Ephesian context, and to fail to see that everything Paul says here is for one purpose: defeating the false teaching that is turning the Ephesians away from the gospel and destroying their relationship with Christ.

That’s true no less of this passage than of the rest of the book. We tend to read it, as we tend to read a lot of the Bible, as if it was written about five years ago to the contemporary Western church to address what we think are the most important questions—and it wasn’t. It applies to us and our situation, it’s the word of God to us and we must listen carefully and obey it, but it was written to different people in a different time and place and culture who had different issues and were asking different questions.

If we lose that and try to read this as a random collection of practical instructions, we miss the heart of this passage, because it follows right on from Paul’s concern in chapter 1. False teachers have arisen within the church in Ephesus, and they have set themselves above the authority of Timothy and the faithful elders of the congregation; they probably gave a wink and a nod to Paul, but only to try to convince people that they were teaching a higher form of what Paul had taught. In truth, though, it was nothing of the kind. According to the false teachers, only those who followed their teaching and the practices they prescribed could know the truth—they were the spiritual elite, and everyone else was cut off from salvation. They were preaching a religion that was elitist and exclusivist; it was only for people who were good enough for them, and smart enough to follow them. Against that, Paul hammers back that salvation is for everyone, the gospel is for everyone. That is what this chapter is about.

So, then, what’s all this about women? The answer is, not as much as you might think. The core of this passage is the first seven verses, which set out the basic imperative: God desires all people to be saved, salvation comes only through Jesus Christ, and the church’s job is to get that message out. Verses 8-15 address issues in the church that were getting in the way. It’s not just issues with the women, either; Paul has to tell the men of the church that they need to gather to pray without anger or fighting. This doesn’t mean they were fighting while they were praying (though they might have been); the point, rather, is that their arguments were dirtying their prayers. That’s the reason for the reference to “lifting up holy hands”; the standard posture of prayer in those days was standing with hands raised, and you were supposed to have purified them before worship began. Paul’s concern is that the men in this church were praying with hands that had been made unclean by their anger and their fights, and that they need to clean up their act.

With the women of the church, he addresses a different concern, because their behavior was interfering with the work of the church in a different way. It’s important to note a couple key things here. First, where the NIV reads, “A woman should learn in quietness,” the Greek word here and in verse 12 is the same as in verse 2, where Paul says to pray for those in authority “so that we may live peaceful and quiet lives.” His point here is about having a quiet and peaceable demeanor, not being noisy, disruptive, and quarrelsome—much the same as he told the men in verse 8. Second, in verse 12, the NIV reads, “I permit no woman to teach,” which sounds like a general command that applies everywhere—but that translation gets the tense wrong. A more accurate one would be, “I am not permitting a woman to teach”; you can still read that as a general command that applies everywhere, but it doesn’t have to be. Given the context, I don’t think it is; I think it’s here because it bears on Paul’s primary concern, which is the spread of false teaching in Ephesus.

If so, though, how, and what does dressing up have to do with it? It may seem strange to us that Paul should take the time to tell the women of the church not to dress expensively, braid pearls in their hair, and wear jewelry, but his audience knew why he said it. Every culture has its own set of signals. In that culture, for a woman to dress up and wear jewelry was the equivalent in our culture of wearing the miniskirt and the bikini top: it was understood that she was declaring herself available, or even intent on seduction. Thus for instance the Roman satirist Juvenal wrote, “There is nothing that a woman will not permit herself to do, nothing that she deems shameful, when she encircles her neck with green emeralds and fastens huge pearls to her elongated ears.”

Now, granted that what we wear affects how we feel about ourselves, that’s over the top; I suspect that many women really felt that as unfair and unreasonable, but there wasn’t much they could do about it; legally, a woman belonged to her father as long as he was alive unless she was married, in which case she belonged to her husband. Roman women didn’t even get names, they got numbers. You can see why the message of the gospel, of freedom in Christ and a God who loves us all as individuals, was liberating and greatly appealing to women in that culture; and you can see, I think, why the false teachers in Ephesus would have particularly targeted women, and why they found their most receptive audience among the young women, and especially young widows, of the congregation. Under the influence of those false teachers, it seems clear that some of the women of the congregation were using using their freedom and equality in Christ in ways that were extremely unwise and disruptive; combined with that, they’re spreading a false version of the gospel within the Ephesian church. Paul knows that Timothy has to put a stop to that and shut them down if he’s going to keep from losing the church entirely.

His concern, then, isn’t gender roles in the abstract—his concern is what people’s behavior is doing to the teaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ in Ephesus. He’s focused on the particular need to root up and stomp out the false teaching there; to that end, he tells the women of the church that they need to back off, settle down, stop talking, and find their bearings again—just as he tells the men of the church much the same thing, in a different way. The key here is that whatever the people of Ephesus are doing that’s disrupting the church and its work and worship, they need to stop doing—right now.

That’s because, as I said a minute ago, the church has a mission, with which nothing must be allowed to interfere—and the false teachers are doing just that, and so are the men and women Paul addresses. The mission is to bring the message of salvation through Jesus Christ to all people in all the world. Paul makes this clear in verses 5-6. There is only one God, and there is only one mediator, Jesus Christ; there is no other God in whom the peoples of this world may find life, and no other mediator through whom they may find salvation, and if they do not find this way, there is no other to be found. And this Jesus gave himself a ransom, not for some, but for all, for God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The good news of Jesus Christ is for all, because his salvation is for all—all peoples, all nations, all languages, all times, male and female both—and the job of the church is to proclaim this truth to any and all who will listen, wherever they may be found and whatever they may be doing.

This is why Paul says to offer every kind of prayer—he uses four different words there, just to make sure his hearers get the point that he means every kind of prayer—for everyone. The false teachers in Ephesus were preaching a religion that was only for “special” people, and so bred a narrow, superior attitude. I suspect from Paul’s command in verse 2 that they even considered themselves superior to the rulers of the day; they saw themselves as the true elite, while the people in positions of power and authority didn’t deserve their eminence. In any case, it seems clear that they lacked any real concern for anyone but themselves, and so they only prayed for those whom they considered worthy of their prayers; the rest of the world could go hang, and in fact deserved to.

Paul has no use for this, and so he says, “Every kind of prayer shall be offered for everyone, without exception; and indeed, you should especially offer every kind of prayer for all those in positions of authority, not only for their own sake, but so that we may live quiet and peaceful lives in all godliness and proper conduct.” The command to pray for those in power is a slight digression, but well taken: if the authorities are opposed to the work of the church, it can be extremely difficult to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. At that point, it’s possible to have a peaceful and calm life, or to live life in accordance with the will of God, but not to do both. For those in authority, then, we pray not only for their own sake, but also that they will use their power in such a way as to help the mission of the church, or at least not to hinder it.

And to those in the church, he says that we, too, must do everything in our power to carry out that mission, and not to hinder it in anything we do. That’s why he tells the men of the church to set aside their anger and their quarrels, which are hindering their prayers—and no doubt turning off people who might otherwise be open to the message of the gospel. That’s why he tells the women of the church not to flout the social conventions of their day, but to adorn themselves instead with their good works—not because jewelry and nice clothes are sinful, but because their dress and behavior was sending the wrong message to people outside the church, giving the enemies of Christianity something to use against it. Believe me, more than one book was written against the church, and more than one law decreed against it, on the grounds that Christianity was undermining the morals of the Roman Empire. And finally, as many of the women in the church were preaching the false gospel of Timothy’s opponents, Paul forbade the women of Ephesus to teach. Anything to keep the false teaching from spreading.

The fundamental point here is clear: we’re called to be people of the gospel, and only of the gospel. We can’t change the message we’ve been given, and what it reveals about God, to conform it to someone else’s expectations or desires—not even if we think it will help us attract more people, since if we’re attracting people to something that isn’t the gospel, we’ve done nothing good. And we can’t let anything other than the gospel get in the way of proclaiming the gospel message—we need to be committed to doing whatever we can to reach whoever we can reach with the good news of Jesus Christ in such a way that they will listen. We need to be committed only and wholly to the service of the Lord, and to doing whatever is in our power to ensure that people who don’t have a relationship with Jesus are introduced to him in the fullness of his truth and love.

Which means that we need to be clear on what’s worth fighting about—and for—and what isn’t. Anything that diminishes the gospel, anything that seeks to take away from the seriousness of human sin, the glory and holiness of God, or the greatness of his grace, we have to fight that, as Paul fought the legalists in Ephesus. That fight’s going on right now in this denomination, and we’re committed to staying Presbyterian so we can keep standing up for the gospel. But what about the other things we fight about—such as the role of women in the church, which drives most of the preaching on this passage? I had somebody call me a heretic in print a few weeks ago because I don’t believe, on my best reading of Scripture, that the word of God forbids women to lead and teach. I don’t claim to be infallible—we’re all fallen, we’re all sinners, none of us get everything right, and I’m no different—and if I’m wrong, I pray God shows me differently, but as I’ve studied the word of God, that’s the conclusion I’ve come to; and in the meantime, does it advance the cause of the gospel for Christians to beat each other up on this issue, or baptism, or communion, or how we do worship, or other such issues?

No, it doesn’t. Those sorts of fights don’t draw people to Jesus Christ, they just draw lines that people won’t cross. That’s not to say that those issues don’t matter, just that getting them wrong doesn’t keep people from perceiving and being captured by the heart of the gospel, that there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all so that we might be saved from the power and penalty of sin and brought to the knowledge of the truth—which needs to be the heart, the essence, the focus, of our preaching, our teaching, and everything we do. It all needs to be about the gospel, for the sake of the gospel, in the service of the gospel, so that when people look at us, yes, we have beliefs about what women should or shouldn’t do, and how we should do baptism and communion, and how we do worship, and all sorts of other things, but so that people recognize that those things aren’t what we’re about: what we’re about is Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Nice line by Sarah Palin

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This from her speech to some of our troops in Kosovo, in response to a rather lame attempt at a joke by John Kerry (or is that redundant?):

Senator John Kerry makes this joke, I don’t know if you saw this, but he makes this joke saying, “Well, shoot, of all the governors in the nation to disappear, too bad it couldn’t have been that Governor from Alaska.”

Well, when he said it, you know, he looked quite frustrated, and he looked so sad, and I just wanted to reach out to the TV and say, “John Kerry, why the long face?”

(laughter, applause)

Now Gov. Palin is on to Germany to visit the wounded in our military hospitals there; in her time in Kosovo, she gave the troops at Camp Bondsteel a real morale boost, and also met with the Lithuanian Minister of Defense, Rasa Jukneviciene.

My only comfort in life and death

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For a brief explanation of what I’m doing here, see the previous post. Mouse over the footnotes for the Scripture references. This is, in my book, as wonderful an opening as the famous Q & A 1 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, even if not as well known; I may very well come back to this one tomorrow and write something about it, but I’m too tired tonight. And then again, maybe I’ll just let it speak for itself.

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 1
Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own,1
but belong—
body and soul,
in life and in death—2
to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.3

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,4
and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.5
He also watches over me in such a way6
that not a hair can fall from my head
without the will of my Father in heaven:7
in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.8

Because I belong to him,
Christ, by his Holy Spirit,
assures me of eternal life9
and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready
from now on to live for him.10

Explanatory note on Heidelblogging

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Jared Wilson sparked a thought for me with his latest post, which quotes a section of the Westminster Confession. As a pastor ministering in the Presbyterian Church (USA), I am in some sense connected to the Westminster standards, and I do appreciate them a great deal—but though I serve a Presbyterian congregation, and though I was baptized in one (Northminster, in San Diego), my home ground within the church universal is the Dutch Reformed stream, and specifically the Reformed Church in America. As such, though I appreciate Westminster, it’s somewhat foreign to me; it’s the RCA’s doctrinal standards that I value most, and especially the one that (as it happens) the PC(USA) also affirms, the Heidelberg Catechism.

As such, I’ve decided I want to blog my way through the Heidelberg, question by question. I don’t know that I’ll get through all 129 questions and answers in 129 days—this isn’t a death march—but I expect I’ll post a Q&A most days. No doubt I’ll comment on some and not on others, and there will probably be more than a few times as well that I’ll quote one of the commentaries I have on the Heidelberg. (There are actually three on my shelves—Andrew Kuyvenhoven’s, the one Donald Bruggink edited, and the one by Zacharius Ursinus, who was one of the Heidelberg’s authors—which I suppose marks me out as the Reformed geek I am; the Kuyvenhoven was a gift from Hap back in college, which I suppose marks her out as perceptive.) One thing I haven’t figured out is how I want to handle the Scriptural footnotes; if I can find a way to include them that doesn’t look irritatingly intrusive to my eye, I will.

Reflection on the challenge of speaking the truth in love

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As a pastor ministering within (though not of) the Presbyterian Church (USA), I am in some sense under the leadership of the Moderator of the most recent General Assembly, the Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow (who has on occasion commented here, as I have on occasion returned the favor on one or another of his blogs, of which there are several; as a side note, I don’t know how Bruce keeps up with his life, given his schedule). As one would expect of an elected official in this denomination, Bruce is a lot more liberal than I am, but I like him a great deal, because he’s not a reflexive thinker; though I often disagree with his conclusions, he’s a careful and thoughtful observer, and I appreciate the thought he puts into reaching those conclusions—and his willingness to listen respectfully to those with whom he disagrees. Following him on Facebook, I have more than once had my own thinking sparked by the questions he poses for discussion.

Recently, for example, he asked

if speaking “the truth in love” in a way that ultimately causes a destruction of community and tears down the personhood of another can really be God’s Truth at all or are these things simply sometimes unavoidable realities to speaking “the truth in love”?

It’s a good question, not least because it forces us to face ourselves. It can be easy to justify hurtful words, to ourselves and to others, by saying that we were only speaking the truth in love, when in fact we weren’t motivated by love at all—and maybe weren’t speaking the truth, either, but just pushing our own agenda. We need to remember that when Ephesians talks about “speaking the truth in love,” it’s not talking about whatever we deem to be true on whatever subject, it’s talking about “the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God”; and we need to remember that if we cannot say something in love, out of a real desire to help and heal and bless the person to whom we speak, then we are not speaking truth.

That said, there’s another reality to bear in mind here as well: speaking the truth in love does not, unfortunately, guarantee that the person to whom we speak will be willing to hear and accept the truth, or to accept that love can come in the form of a truth that they do not want to hear. Sometimes, people refuse to accept a community that challenges them where they do not want to be challenged—but a community that depends on the avoidance of uncomfortable truths is no true community, for the real openness and authenticity that true community requires cannot exist under those conditions. We must always do our best to speak the truth in such a way that those to whom we speak can hear and accept it as truth, but we cannot allow our responsibility to speak the truth to be held hostage to the willingness of others to do so.

As to the tearing down of personhood, I think we need to draw a distinction here between our real personhood—who we are as God intended us to be—and our perceived personhood—who we understand ourselves to be. Because of our sin, the two are not the same, and indeed are never completely the same no matter how much we may grow in Christ. I think it’s safe to say that real truth spoken in real love never tears down real personhood, but when Hebrews tells us that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart,” it’s equally safe to say that real truth spoken in real love will at times cut to the division of our real self and who we only think we are. One of the necessary aspects of speaking truth to each other in love is helping each other see and accept the distinction between the two—that aspects of our lives that we consider to be part of our personhood reallyaren’t, and in fact are inimical to our true personhood. Again, though, that can be a very hard thing to accept, and some people refuse to do so; but we can’t let their reaction be the measure of the value of our actions.

Taken all in all, I think the key here is the distinction between that which is real and that which isn’t. The truth of God spoken in the love of God will never destroy that which is real and of value, but will only nurture it; it will, however, most assuredly and effectively destroy falsecommunity and false personhood, because clearing the ground of counterfeits is essential if the real and the true are to grow and flourish in their place. But how do we know if we are really speaking the truth of God in the love of God? Or if someone else claims to be doing so and we don’t want to hear it, how do we know if the community or the sense of our own personhood which we’re defending are real? All we can do is examine our hearts, and let the Spirit of God examine us, and let him lead us into the truth—even if, especially if, it isn’t what we want to hear.

 

To the list of Letterman’s sexist cruelties, add another

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Sarah Palin may have driven David Letterman to something of an apology, and she may have elected to accept his apology, but it doesn’t look like any of that changed his fundamental attitude much. In the middle of his (utterly predictable) Top 10 on “Mark Sanford’s Excuses,” the late-night host uncorked this beauty:

4. If you met my wife you’d be fleeing the country too.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, whatever mockery anyone wants to give Mark Sanford, he has it coming. I think Robert Stacy McCain’s (apparently fairly serious) suggestion that he deserves a case of .38-caliber lead poisoning is over the top, but within the confines of the law, whatever anybody can bring down on this man’s head is fine by me.

But his wife? This is a woman who has been betrayed at the deepest possible level by the one person on earth who was most responsible to be on her side, and has been dealt unfathomable public humiliation by that man for the sake of his own selfishness and gratification—she doesn’t deserve this . . . this . . . I’m trying to think of a word that pastors are supposed to use that’s bad enough to describe this, and I’m not coming up with one. What, by all that is holy, gave Letterman and his writers the idea that it’s acceptable, let alone funny, to beat a woman when she’s down like that? What are we going to get next, a crack about the joy of clubbing baby seals?

Once again, if Letterman weren’t such a narcissistic solipsist, he’d be ashamed of himself. What a poor excuse for a human being.