I’d never run across the blog “Shout First, Ask Questions Later” before today—I found it courtesy of a link from Kathryn Jean Lopez—but having found it, I’m glad I did. I linked a couple of her posts in the post immediately below this one (and there are more on the 9/12 march that deserve your time), and I’ve added it to the blogroll as well, as one of the loyal opposition. Check it out—but wait until you have a little time; there’s a lot there.
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Reflections on John Piper and the tornado
In case you somehow missed it, there was a tornado in Minneapolis earlier this week—or perhaps we might say, there were two tornadoes in Minneapolis, one of winds and one of words; the original storm inspired a blog post from John Piper, “The Tornado, the Lutherans, and Homosexuality,” which caused quite a storm of its own.
Piper’s post begins with this description of the circumstances:
A friend who drove down to see the damage wrote,
On a day when no severe weather was predicted or expected . . . a tornado forms, baffling the weather experts—most saying they’ve never seen anything like it. It happens right in the city. The city: Minneapolis.
The tornado happens on a Wednesday . . . during the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s national convention in the Minneapolis Convention Center. The convention is using Central Lutheran across the street as its church. The church has set up tents around its building for this purpose.
According to the ELCA’s printed convention schedule, at 2 PM on Wednesday, August 19, the 5th session of the convention was to begin. The main item of the session: “Consideration: Proposed Social Statement on Human Sexuality.” The issue is whether practicing homosexuality is a behavior that should disqualify a person from the pastoral ministry.
The eyewitness of the damage continues:
This curious tornado touches down just south of downtown and follows 35W straight towards the city center. It crosses I94. It is now downtown.
The time: 2PM.
The first buildings on the downtown side of I94 are the Minneapolis Convention Center and Central Lutheran. The tornado severely damages the convention center roof, shreds the tents, breaks off the steeple of Central Lutheran, splits what’s left of the steeple in two . . . and then lifts.
He then proceeds to lay out an argument from Scripture—I won’t quote it all here; you can follow the link—leading to this conclusion:
The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great Lutheran heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture. Turn back from distorting the grace of God into sensuality. Rejoice in the pardon of the cross of Christ and its power to transform left and right wing sinners.
Now, as you can probably imagine, a lot of people aren’t very happy with that last paragraph—and not all of them are liberals, by any means. Scot McKnight, in a comment on this post, asked,
The text points us away from the specific sins of some persons or some group and to the fact that we are all sinners. Piper points to the specific sins of the ELCA and only then generalizes. Don’t you see the tension of these two approaches?
My wife, for her part, had a similar reaction, arguing that the concluding paragraph quoted above doesn’t really follow from the preceding five points.
From where I sit, I’m not sure Dr. McKnight is reading Dr. Piper’s post quite correctly, but I do agree with David Sessions that the certainty of Dr. Piper’s final paragraph is overreaching. I’ve pointed out elsewhere (not sure if it’s up on the blog or not) that biblically, whenever God sends a disaster as judgment, he always sends a prophet first so that you don’t have to waste time wondering if the disaster is judgment from God—he’s already told you it is. As far as I’m aware, nobody predicted this; it just happened, which makes me very dubious about efforts to put any sort of specific interpretation on this tornado.
And yet, as uncomfortable as I am with Dr. Piper’s conclusion (and particularly the absolute way in which he presents it), I think his argument has more force than his critics (including my wife) want to admit. If we believe in the sovereignty and the providence of God, then we have to conclude that that tornado did exactly what God wanted it to do—and it couldn’t have been more precisely targeted on the ELCA’s national assembly, and in particular their consideration of that study paper (which they subsequently approved), if it had been a Tomahawk cruise missile. It appeared where no tornado was expected, took a perfectly precise route, hit the target, doing noticeable but (as far as I can tell) superficial damage, and then lifted. Short of actually forming right above Central Lutheran and just yo-yoing down and back up again, I’m not sure how its behavior could possibly have been more suggestive.
But suggestive of what? I think it’s going a step too far to try to answer that question as outsiders. Certainly the passage Dr. Piper quotes from Luke 13 is apt, as the call to repentance is always apt; but I also think Dr. McKnight’s point here is well-taken, if not quite correct: Jesus’ words in that passage point us, not to the fact that we are all sinners, but to the fact that we ourselves are sinners, and that the deaths of those on whom the tower fell should inspire each of us to get right with God. Certainly the Minneapolis tornado, with its reminder that in God’s hands, even the weather is a precision weapon, should similarly inspire us.
Anything more than that, though—anything specific to the ELCA and why God might have hit them, at that particular point in their deliberations, with a tornado—is, it seems to me, between God and the ELCA. He didn’t see fit to tell us what to think in advance, nor does anything in Scripture give us warrant to make any judgments about them from the fact that they were hit with a tornado. There may well be a specific message to the leaders of that denomination in the behavior of this tornado, but if so, it’s for them, not for us. Jesus doesn’t talk to us about others and what they need to do—as Aslan tells Lucy in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, that’s not part of our story; instead, he talks to us about ourselves and what we need to do.
I agree with Dr. Piper that approval of homosexual behavior by the church is contrary to Scripture and the revealed will of God; but I also note very carefully that in Luke 13, when Jesus referenced those who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them, he said, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No.” This is where I think my wife was right, because if we really consider this tornado in the light of those words, what we would have to say is this: no matter how bad we might think the ELCA is, no matter how bad we might think it was for them to take the step they did, Jesus says to us, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than anyone else—including you? No; you too must repent.”
The wikification of U.S. intelligence
This is highly encouraging:
The key, of course (as the video notes) is not the existence of Intellipedia but rather a shift in mindset among our various intelligence agencies—a shift which has yet to occur—from the fiefdom/guildhall-type thinking that has long prevailed to a truly wikified approach to the production of intelligence. This will be difficult for them, but as Marc Ambinder points out, the potential rewards of such a shift are high:
Rasmussen proposes a new production method called “transparent review” that would remove the walls between collaboration and agency vetting. On the same “page,” it would allow different agencies to revise and review the Wiki in question, and then, if they approved of the substance, endorse it, right there on the page. Or, if they differed, they’d be given the space, right there on the page, to explain why. The beauty of this construct is that the dynamism of the intelligence analytical product is kept but the totality of the product becomes authoritative. Dissent is still allowed; consensus is not necessarily encouraged.
Question on the twilight of the newspapers
This story on Hot Air (about an intelligent new strategy the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is trying to keep themselves afloat) got me thinking: why all the liberal angst about newspapers going out of business? Just think of the environmental benefits! Think of all the trees cut down every year to produce the reams and reams of newsprint used by the newspapers that are now critically endangered (as well as the ones that have already gone extinct); how environmentally unenlightened of these heartless major corporations to insist that they must be allowed to distribute “a five-pound lump of paper” to millions of people every day in order to do their jobs. Surely in this Age of Obama they should be required to Go Green just like everyone else and spare our nation’s forests, right? Shouldn’t we view the demise of dead-tree editions across the country as a good thing, rather than go looking for ways to prop up their environmental rapacity by putting them on the public dole?. . . OK, be honest with me—is that too far over the top? In all seriousness, I love a good newspaper (though they’re a lot fewer and farther between than those lamenting the state of the industry like to pretend), but it does occur to me that they’re getting a very different break from the Left in this country than a lot of industries. That’s no real surprise, of course; after all, they’re a structural component of the American Left, plus they get to set the terms in which their current peril is reported, analyzed, and discussed—an advantage that was never given to the PR flacks for companies like Philip Morris or Enron. Even so, as I think about it, I’m still a little surprised that I haven’t heard word one about what their failure could potentially do to pulp production in this country, either in terms of its environmental advantages or in terms of additional unemployment. I can’t help thinking that if there were somehow an equivalent failure on the conservative side of the political spectrum, we’d be getting stories with headlines like “Silver Lining of Industry Collapse: Will Save Millions of Acres of Forest, Experts Say.”
I have to admit, this makes me smile
I’ve been a fan of Law & Order almost since its inception. Like most folks, my favorite characters over the show’s life are the two big ones, Det. Lenny Briscoe (Jerry Orbach, RIP) and EADA/DA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston); part of that, probably, is that both actors have always struck me as people I’d enjoy knowing in real life, quite aside from the people they play. Also like most folks, my favorite character after those two was ADA Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon), whom I really wish had had a significantly longer run on the show (especially as I didn’t care for her replacement at all)—which meant it was a very pleasant surprise (dare I pull a Chris Matthews and say a thrill ran up my leg?) to read that she’s a fan of Sarah Palin:
I admire any kind of woman like her. My whole motto is to know what I stand for and know what I don’t stand for and have the courage to live my life accordingly and she does exactly that. The fact that this woman has made the decisions she’s made and literally lived her life according to that and takes heat for it is absolutely disgusting to me,” she added. “People cannot look at this woman. I really think they’re afraid of her and her morals, ethics and values and the fact that she hangs on them.
Of course, Fox News felt the need to conclude the article with a bunch of celebrities telling them how wonderful Barack Obama is and what a great job he’s doing; but Angie Harmon got the bulk of the piece to praise Gov. Palin (and also to express her dissatisfaction with President Obama, and with being accused of racism for not being liberal), and that’s an enjoyable little spark for the day.HT: Joseph Russo
There are days . . .
This is right up there with wanting the James Bond car so that one could drop oil slicks or caltrops for tailgaters. Excessive, yes, but on our worse days, the thoughtlessness of others can drive us to wishing, just a little, that we could actually do something like this. At least, for some of us, it can . . . Check the mouseover on this one.
The problematic blessings of God
Thus says the Lord God:
“Behold, I will lift up my hand to the nations,
and raise my signal to the peoples;
and they shall bring your sons in their bosom,
and your daughters shall be carried on their shoulders.
Kings shall be your foster fathers,
and their queens your nursing mothers.
With their faces to the ground they shall bow down to you,
and lick the dust of your feet.
Then you will know that I am the Lord;
those who wait for me shall not be put to shame.”—Isaiah 49:22-23 (ESV)The Jews get a lot of flak from many Christians for their failure to understand what God was trying to do and thus to fulfill the part in his plan. Now, obviously someone who believes as I do that Jesus is the promised Messiah is going to have a different take on that than someone who doesn’t; but without getting into comparative theology, I think it needs to be said that we should all be a lot humbler about such arguments. Many of us (perhaps most of us) have an unfortunate tendency to present our positions as if their truth is obvious, and should be obvious to those who disagree with us—meaning, of course, that we’re the noble ones who have the truth, and our opponents must be arguing for ignoble reasons. This is not only wrongheaded, it’s wrong-spirited.What’s more, in some cases, it’s also evidence of our own lack of self-knowledge and self-awareness; and this would be one of those. Consider this section of Isaiah (which is representative of other passages in the prophets): God is proposing to bless his people by bringing in the nations to join them. In order to accept this blessing, they need to do two things: one, they have to give up their national self-understanding—what we might, by analogy to the present day, call “Israelite exceptionalism”—and two, they have to welcome the other peoples of the world in.Now, to be sure, God isn’t asking Israel to take a secondary place; quite the contrary, the nations will honor them and bow before them in recognition of how much they owe the people of Israel. That said, remember, the nations are outsiders, and some of them are bitter enemies; he’s asking them to welcome strangers, rivals, and people who have hurt them badly into their land and into their people. He’s asking them not only to forgive their enemies, but to adopt their enemies, to welcome former enemies into their home, to love them, and to trust them as family.That’s a challenge, if we’re honest. If we really put ourselves into the story, it’s not necessarily all that obvious that it really qualifies as a blessing. After all, we’re used to thinking of blessings as being for us, while the blessing Isaiah promises here is as much for the nations as it is for Israel; God blesses Israel in part so that they may bless the nations. To recognize this as a real blessing, we need to understand that this is what the blessings of God look like—they really never are just for us. We aren’t merely recipients of his blessings, we’re conduits. That’s just how God works.God’s blessings often aren’t easy to receive. Grace isn’t easy. Love isn’t easy. They come with challenges, asking us to do things that we don’t necessarily want to do. I would venture to say that anyone who takes them lightly, who isn’t made at least a little uncomfortable by the blessings of God, doesn’t understand them as well as they should. I’m certainly not saying that we should encourage anyone not to accept the grace of God; but if we find anyone reluctant to do so, we should understand that their reluctance is not altogether unreasonable. God’s blessings are always best for us . . . but they’re often not what we think is best for us, and so we have to give up our own ideas of what’s best in order to accept them. Doing so is itself a blessing—but we should never make the mistake of thinking that it’s an easy and obvious step.
Just to get your feet tapping a little
I was keeping our littlest one happy yesterday afternoon after she woke up, still sick, from her nap; for whatever reason, one way I did that was by playing her a few CCR videos, and I got a couple of their songs stuck in my head.
And the best song ever written about baseball:
In Christ alone my hope is found
John Piper doing what he does best—preaching the gospel:
HT: Shane VanderHart
The limits of the merely human
Everything man-made lets us down. Sooner or later, everything man-made reveals its hidden weaknesses. Only Christ will not fail. Only Christ does all things well. I don’t. You don’t. Christ does. Always. Infallibly. . . .Man-made things go boom. They cannot be trusted. Respected, yes. Honored, yes. But not trusted.The only unfailing object of our trust and hope is Christ himself. Theological systems have their uses, but also their limits. Christ, Christ, Christ—the risen, living, present Person of the Lord Jesus Christ who is right here right now and always will be, forever keeping his promises—only he has no limits, only he cannot disappoint.
Amen. The wellspring of our thought must always be Christ; as theologians, we must always be biblical theologians first and foremost, and as preachers, we must be teaching our people to be biblical theologians, and the center and taproot of our biblical theology must always be hearing the voice of Christ and the word of the gospel in every part of Scripture.And it should be said, this applies to every aspect of life—to political systems, and politicians, for instance, no less than theological systems and theologians. Even the best political systems, though they have their uses, have also their limits; even the best politicians have their weaknesses and will let us down. We must seek to find and promote the best we can, systems and politicians alike, but always remembering that only Christ will not fail, only Christ has no limits, only Christ cannot disappoint . . . and the corollary, that there are many things that cannot be done well through political means and processes, but only by the body of Christ, whom he empowers for his purposes by his Holy Spirit.