Category Archives: Uncategorized

Living in Laodicea

Posted on by | 1 Comment

“And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘The words of the Amen,
the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation.“‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me
on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’”—Revelation 3:14-22 (ESV)I laid out below (or attempted to lay out, anyway) my principal concern about the iMonk’s recent jeremiad (a term I use as a compliment, be it noted) in the Christian Science Monitor.  I agree with him that there are far too many churches in this country that aren’t about the gospel, that have given themselves over to the idolatry of causes (whether political, cultural, or otherwise), and are doing a poor job of teaching the gospel to their children (in part because most of the available curricula are terrible).  I even went so far as to say the other week that “too many churches are doing a better job of training future atheists than they are of training Christians.”  But to make blanket statements about “evangelicalism” as if that’s just the way evangelical churches are, which is what it seems to me Michael Spencer was doing (and, imho, too often does), strikes me as unfair; I know a lot of churches that aren’t like that, too.  For my part, I know I do an imperfect job, but I do my level best to preach the gospel, week in and week out, and to see to it that our teachers teach the gospel—and I’m just not that unusual.  Rather, I’m a lot more typical than a lot of the critics of evangelicalism realize.  (And I’ll tell you this, too:  even among those big-church-with-hip-worship-team pastors, in my experience, there are those who really do care about the gospel; as they’re struggling free of the attractional paradigm, a lot of them are doing so with a real sense of relief.)That said, if this were still mostly an intramural conversation among evangelicals, I’d still be less concerned; even if I think Spencer’s argument is overstated, I do recognize that overstatement has its uses for getting people’s attention (as Flannery O’Connor memorably argued).  What concerns me now with its appearance in the Christian Science Monitor is how it’s likely to be used, and the purposes for which it’s likely to be used:  to beat up on people, and to push political agendas.  That, I believe, will be truly unfortunate—and quite possibly, ironically enough, serve to worsen the very situation Spencer was aiming to address.  That bell can’t be unrung, of course, and we can’t control what people outside the church will make of or do with his argument; but there’s one thing we can do, which is the one thing we need to do anyway:  rather than pointing fingers (whether at the iMonk, or at those whom he critiques, or at the media, or anyone else), we can stop, open our hearts, and examine ourselves.We have a model for this, as Jared Wilson pointed out earlier today, in Ray Ortlund, who responded to Spencer’s piece with a moving and thought-provoking meditation on this passage from Revelation, the letter to the church in Laodicea:

This was the church in Laodicea. This is too many churches today. We focus on our strengths and successes. And there is just enough good going on in our ministries that we can plausibly refuse a blunt reappraisal of our weaknesses. But the Lord is saying, “That whole mentality is wrong. It is lukewarm. It makes me want to vomit (verse 16). . .  I am confronting you that you don’t love me wholeheartedly, so that you go into repentance and reevaluation and change. Here’s what you need to do: Stop telling yourself you’re okay and go back into re-conversion (verse 18). Change your complacency into zealous repentance (verse 19). Hey, are you listening to me? I’m that faint voice you can barely hear any more. I’m outside your church, banging on your door. You didn’t even notice when I walked out. But I’m back, one more time. If anyone in there is listening, just open the door and I will come in. I won’t smack you down. I will befriend you (verse 20). The others in your church may or may not join us, but all I’m asking for is one open, honest heart.”Usually, our churches settle for half-way remedies, which is why they limp along in mediocrity. But every now and then, someone humbly opens that door, and Jesus walks in. He is ready to bless any church if anyone there is willing to start admitting, “I am not rich, I have not prospered, and I need everything.”

The path to life doesn’t begin with gathering political power and influence, or with building up money and possessions and prestige; it begins with that humble admission that those things aren’t really what matters, and that in truth, we really do need everything from Jesus.  May God humble our pride that we may truly depend on his grace.

An object lesson in humility

Posted on by | No Comments

A while back, linking to one of John Stackhouse’s posts, I wrote the following:

it’s not the belief in absolute truth as such that produces dogmatism, but the combination of a belief in absolute truth with a belief that the self is absolute; and it’s to defend that belief in the absolute self that people declare the truth to be relative. For my own part, I believe that the truth is absolute, and I am relative; my certainty is necessarily limited, not by the absence of absolutes, but by my own limited ability to perceive and apprehend them accurately. . . . We should believe what we believe firmly and with conviction; but also with humility. After all, the fact that we believe something doesn’t guarantee that it’s true; as Dr. Stackhouse says, it’s about confidence in God who is truth, not about certainty in ourselves, who aren’t.

That was something I’d been kicking around for a while, which I was foolish enough to think I’d come up with on my own.  Turns out the only reason I thought that was because it had been too long since I read Chesterton.  Here’s the root and spring of that idea, from Orthodoxy (only much better put, as you would expect), courtesy of Ray Ortlund—and along with it, the reminder of the importance of humility:

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself.

The coming evangelical collapse?

Posted on by | 4 Comments

The iMonk, Michael Spencer, has been arguing for a while now that American evangelicalism is going to collapse some time in the relatively near future; now the Christian Science Monitor has taken notice.  Yesterday, they ran “The Coming Evangelical Collapse,” a condensed version of his argument, in their op/ed section—to considerable notice.  After all, Spencer’s thesis is attention-grabbing (and easily exaggerated to be even more so), and one of the things he gets right—that evangelicalism is strongly identified in the popular understanding “with the culture war and with political conservatism”—means that his argument is seen to have strong political repercussions, and thus generates interest far beyond the circles of those who actually care about the problems and paucities of evangelical theology and praxis.I’ve been thinking about Spencer’s argument since he first posted this series, and meaning to interact with it here; I haven’t felt I had the time or energy to do so in detail (and anything less would be insufficient), but I think it’s important to do so, and all the more so now that he’s hit the mainstream.  I appreciate a lot of his critique, because the church in this country has some serious weaknesses, and religious complacency is definitely one of them in many areas; but I think his argument has serious problems as well which need to be considered and evaluated.The biggest one is definitional:  Spencer’s thesis is essentially about a word, “evangelical,” of which the definition is problematic in several respects.  In the first place, it’s viscerally problematic for him (and for others).  Mark Twain is credited with the line, “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it”; as far as I can tell, if the funeral Spencer is predicting actually comes, he will thoroughly approve.  I don’t deny that he has good reason for his negative associations with the word “evangelical,” but I do believe that his negative response to the word leads him (and others) to paint with a broader brush than is warranted, and to tar a lot of people unfairly.This goes along with the second problem, which is that the way that the word “evangelical” is used—its assumed definition—is problematic, because it’s extremely fuzzy.  This is the first issue John Stackhouse raised against Ron Sider, and it applies here as well:

What does Sider mean by “evangelical”? He doesn’t actually say. . . .Does Sider mean the evangelical Religious Right? Or does he mean all American evangelicals—say, those who identify with the NAE or Christianity Today magazine or Billy Graham—many of whom, like Sider’s own Anabaptist kin, would not recognize themselves in his contemporary sketch of American evangelical political power brokers? It’s not clear. And it never gets clearer.

This same “terminological confusion” applies to Spencer’s argument:  about whom, exactly, is he talking?  This fuzziness creates two problems.  One, it accepts and encourages an operating definition of “evangelical” that is disconnected from the core of evangelicalism and is based instead on cultural factors, then uses that definition to draw conclusions about that core.  Thus, for instance, if his statement that “evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism” is true, it’s at least as true that a lot of people have come to be identified as evangelicals because they’re politically and culturally conservative and want to attend a church that agrees with their beliefs; the problem is as much one of accretion of nominal Christians as it is of evangelicalism selling out to “Christianity And.”  I talk more about the idolatrous character of American politics than most people, but I still think it’s important to differentiate here.  The problem is less about evangelicalism going off the rails than it is about a number of the people in the pews not being evangelicals at all, but merely fellow-travelers.Two, this fuzziness allows Spencer to generalize his own experience and the view from his window to a greater degree than is actually warranted.  He declares, for instance, that

There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile.

I’m sorry, but while that might be true in his experience, it isn’t true in mine, and I know an awful lot of colleagues who would similarly demur.  For one thing, while I know it’s trendy in some places to beat up on megachurches, and I’ve taken a club to them myself once or twice, there are a couple of points which need to be made on this.  One, the real issue with megachurches isn’t their size, but rather the attractional approach that built so many of them (and far more smaller churches); and two, as the attractional paradigm is failing—and failing its practitioners as much as anything—more and more people are becoming aware of the fact, and turning away from it.  I’ve heard statements a number of times lately from large-attractional-church pastors to the effect that “I love the ministry but I hate what I do.”  There’s a growing and broadening awareness that the attractional paradigm has built institutions but not the church, and with it a growing and broadening aversion to servicing the institution anymore.  What we’re seeing, in many of these churches anyway, is the abandonment of the model born out of the awareness that the model isn’t the gospel and doesn’t serve the gospel.  What we’re seeing is a trend that could lead, by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit, to the conversion of many megachurches to the gospel.Of course, there are and will be many more that continue on in the the “pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented” model that has worked for them to this point; I suspect that they will shrink, as “customers” move on to other things, but I expect we’ll also see shrinkage among those who abandon that model, as people complain that “it isn’t our church anymore.”  Well, no, it’s God’s church, which is part of the point.  This does mean that I agree with Spencer that we should expect decline in the numbers of culturally-identified evangelicals, but I disagree with him on where that’s likely to come from:  I think  it will largely come from the decline of the megachurch, as the paradigm he identifies continues to fail, and as churches which have used it successfully to build numbers shift away from it in pursuit of something else (the gospel, one hopes).That said, characterizing the evangelical world outside the megachurch as composed solely of “dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile” is simply wrong.  Certainly there are some of both; on the other hand, there are also new churches whose foundations are strong and whose future is vibrant, and there are a lot of established churches that are a long, long way from dying.  Granted, these churches face a significant demographic challenge in attracting the unchurched among Gen X and younger, and granted, there are many established churches that will fail to do so; but that’s far from a new phenomenon.  I was taught in seminary that churches have a normal life-cycle, and that when they enter the decline phase, some manage to reverse it, some try to do so and fail, and some don’t even try; churches dying is a hard reality, but not a new one.  It’s also not an inevitable or a universal one, because some churches do revitalize themselves for a new period of effective ministry.  Those that don’t, make way for new church plants to take their place.  We’re seeing both those things in the American church—maybe not in Michael Spencer’s experience, but certainly elsewhere.What’s more, we’re seeing some denominations rising to the challenge of supporting, encouraging, and equipping that new growth—my home denomination, the Reformed Church in America, is an example of that.  Spencer asserts that denominations are going to become largely irrelevant, but he doesn’t support that and I don’t believe it; when it comes to denominations, I don’t get the sense that his horizon extends very far beyond the Southern Baptist Convention.  Some denominations will become largely irrelevant, those being the ones that are all about politics (whether external, national politics or internal, ecclesiastical politics)—such as, alas, the one in which I serve, the Presbyterian Church (USA)—if they don’t change their ways.  Those that follow the RCA’s path of refocusing themselves on being a support structure for the mission of the local church, rather than on using the resources of the local church as a support structure for the agenda of the national office, will be completely relevant; and as long as they dedicate their efforts to planting and supporting new churches and revitalizing older ones, the survival rate among both types of congregations should be considerably higher than Spencer’s prediction implies.Of course, this begs the question:  will those churches be truly evangelical in any meaningful sense?  Will they be gospel-centered and gospel-driven?  No doubt, some won’t be.  Having charged Spencer with conflating that which is truly evangelical with that which is not, I don’t want to be guilty of the same thing by implying that all church plants and revitalized churches are or will be gospel-driven.  Sadly, there’s nothing new about that; from what I can see, the only times and places in which the church has truly been united around the gospel have been times and places of external persecution, in which it was publically unprofitable to be a Christian and the gospel was the only intelligible reason to join the church.  As long as there are other reasons to do so that make sense to the world, people will do so for those reasons.  Nominalism isn’t an evangelical problem, it’s a problem for all streams of the church in all ages in which Christian faith is publicly acceptable.There is, of course, much more that can be said in regard to Spencer’s essay, and I do want to take some time later to respond to some of his individual points.  My great concern, though, is that the heart of his argument is muddled because he fails to define and delimit whom he means when he says “evangelicals,” and thus that he’s able, in my judgment, to draw conclusions which are rather more sweeping than his actual evidence warrants.  That said, the issues he raises are ones to which all who care about the church in this country, and particularly that the church should be about the gospel mission of Jesus Christ, should consider very carefully—we should all examine ourselves most closely to see whether we’re affected by the problems he lays out, and if we are, we’d best address them pronto.  As Spencer says (and on this I agree with him whole-heartedly), we live in a crux time in which “the future of our movement holds many dangers and much potential.”  May God so move our hearts to seek first his kingdom and his righteousness that we may avoid the former and realize the latter, not for our fame and profit but for his glory.HT:  Jared Wilson

Jesus loves Osama—and that’s not the worst of it

Posted on by | 5 Comments

This is spot-on:

A couple of years ago, the Telegraph ran a story entitled Church’s ‘Jesus loves Osama’ sign criticised. Apparently, some Baptist churches in Sydney, Australia, put up signs which read simply, “Jesus Loves Osama.” Smaller print at the bottom contained the Biblical reference supporting that assertion: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44).The signs were apparently not well received. Even the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, commented on the sign, noting the church “should have chosen a less offensive way of spreading its message.” . . .So, what’s so shocking about the “Jesus Loves Osama” sign? It isn’t that someone might understand that the church is saying that a human being’s killing of thousands of people is somehow morally acceptable. . . . No one who has the most basic understanding of Christian teaching would arrive at that conclusion. It isn’t that the church’s priority is wrongly focused. . . . The “Jesus Loves Osama” sign is a statement of straightforward Biblical truth.
The problem is this: we don’t want God to love Osama bin Laden. We want there to be people who do such awful things that God’s love doesn’t extend to them. We want some people—a very select few—to burn in hell. Our skin crawls to hear that some people like Osama bin Laden who have done great crimes may not pay for those crimes in the great hereafter. “Where’s the justice in
that?” we cry. It isn’t justice. It’s compassion. It’s mercy. It’s forgiveness.

This is the scandal of the gospel (or part of it, anyway):  “God loves everyone” actually means God loves everyone, including the people whom we don’t like and who hurt us and whom we consider enemies and of whom we don’t approve.  He loves those awful liberals and those awful fundamentalists and those awful atheists and those awful evangelicals, and those awful Republicans and those awful Democrats, and yes, those awful terrorists and those awful militarists, and pretty much anybody else that you might consider awful, just as much as he loves you.  And we really don’t want him to, and he does anyway; and not only does he love them, Christ died for them on the cross just as he did for you.  Whomever you define as “us,” and whomever you define as “them,” Christ died and rose again for both, and he loves both, and offers the free gift of salvation to both.  That, and nothing less, is the gospel.HT:  Shane Vander Hart

The importance of theory

Posted on by | No Comments

“Most modern people have a curious contradiction; they abound in theories, yet they never see the part that theories play in practical life.  They are always talking about temperament and circumstances and accident; but most men are what their theories
make them; most men go in for murder or marriage, or mere lounging because of some
theory of life, asserted or assumed.”—Gabriel Gale, in “The Shadow of the Shark.” The Poet and the Lunatics. G. K. Chesterton

Do these taxes feel high to you?

Posted on by | 5 Comments

Though the theory underlying the Obama administration’s response to the current economic crisis is usually described as “Keynesian,” it’s interesting to note that John Maynard Keynes himself would demur.  Michael Barone puts it well when he writes,

“Animal spirits,” said John Maynard Keynes, are the essential spring of capitalism. We depend on the animal spirits of investors, high earners and entrepreneurs for a growing economy.Keynes, a subtler analyst of market economies than the single-minded booster of high government spending that so-called Keynesian economists depict, knew whereof he spoke. People don’t just respond in linear quantum jumps to the incentives and disincentives they perceive around them. They perk up when their animal spirits are aroused, and they slump down into inertia when they are not.

A good illustration of this comes from, of all people, Whoopi Goldberg.  Read the link, then check out this video (they’re from different parts of the conversation):

My wife watched the clip and read the transcript, then looked at me and said, “I didn’t think Whoopi was a Republican.”  She isn’t, but she sure sounds like one here; and if someone like Whoopi feels this way, you can be sure a lot of other rich folk do too.  I think Barone’s argument goes a long way to explaining why.

The Clintonites managed to hit a sweet spot with the 39.6 percent rate. It was a number that started with a three. To high earners, not bothering to calculate exact returns to the last decimal point but just concentrating on the big picture, it seemed that the government was taking just about one third—hey, maybe a bit more—of their incomes. They would get to keep the other two thirds, pretty much. So they proceeded to try to make intelligent investments and to earn large amounts of money without being preoccupied with how much the government would snatch from their hands.Quite a contrast with the 1970s, when the high income tax rate was 50 percent, and 70 percent on “unearned” (i.e., investment) income. In that environment, the animal spirits of the productive class were directed away from making productive investments and toward sheltering their income from seizure by the government. . . .I think there is a serious risk that the Obama tax proposals are going to bring back those days. Yes, they call for returning the high income tax rate only to the sweet spot of 39.6 percent. But they also want to reduce the amount of the mortgage interest and charitable deductions for high earners, which would channel less money to charities and more to the government (and thus to public employee unions and, through them, to the Democratic Party) and would raise the effective rate on high earners to above 40 percent—a number with a four in front of it.Add on to that the state income tax rates of 10 percent or so in place or in contemplation in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California—states with more than a quarter of the nation’s high earners—and you are looking at income tax rates above 50 percent.When you get a number with a five in front of it, you are in grave danger, I submit, of directing the animal spirits of our most productive citizens away from productive investments and toward tax shelters: “Those bastards want to take half my money, and I’m not going to let them get it.” You are at risk of directing our economy back into the unproductive slog of the 1970s and away from the robust growth of the 1980s, 1990s and most of this decade.

His argument is, in essence, that most economic actions aren’t purely rational responses to a detailed command of the facts, but rather are in response to more general perceptions, and that these perceptions don’t shift gradually, little by little, but rather tend to do so all at once when a particular threshold is crossed.  As he notes,

When gas prices earlier last year were at $2, $2.50, $3 and $3.50, most Americans opposed oil drilling offshore and in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When they hit $4, opinion shifted. The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors and the governor of Florida suddenly favored offshore oil drilling. As for Alaska, nuke the caribou!

This suggests that taxes can in fact be higher than most conservatives would prefer without causing much of an adverse effect, as long as they don’t feel higher to the folks whose investments drive the economy; it also suggests, though, that if you overshoot your target even a little, the adverse effect of your miscalculation is likely to be a lot worse than you would consider to be rational.  If Whoopi’s reaction is any guide, I suspect the Obama administration isn’t going to know what hit it.

The Peter Principle in the White House

Posted on by | 2 Comments

As was the case more than once during the campaign, SNL’s doing a better job of dealing with the news (in its own inimitable way) than the people whose job it is to cover it; this sketch captures the deer-in-the-headlights cluelessness of the Treasury Secretary so well, it’s almost painful to watch.  For all his résumé, it’s clear that Timothy Geithner is out of his depth in doing the job he’s been given; he has risen to the level of his incompetence.Unfortunately, it isn’t just Secretary Geithner.  We were repeatedly told during the campaign that Barack Obama was going to improve America’s reputation around the world—but that doesn’t appear to include our allies, since we’re not even two months in to his administration and he’s already managed to infuriate the Brits.  Though delivered in the “stiff upper lip” tone that Americans associate with our closest ally, the outrage in the British media at the way President Obama responded to their prime minister’s visit is clear.  I’m sure they particularly appreciated this curt dismissal of their concerns from an official in the State Department: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”True enough, I suppose, except of course for the fact that unlike those other 190 countries, the UK has been a staunch and consistent ally of our government . . . Now, as the whole David Brooks episode clearly demonstrated, this White House is remarkably thin-skinned when it comes to criticism and complaint, and so when the firestorm erupted, they defended the President—if you want to call this a defense (emphasis mine):

Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been “overwhelmed” by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest.British officials, meanwhile, admit that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.But Washington figures with access to Mr Obama’s inner circle explained the slight by saying that those high up in the administration have had little time to deal with international matters, let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship.Allies of Mr Obama say his weary appearance in the Oval Office with Mr Brown illustrates the strain he is now under, and the president’s surprise at the sheer volume of business that crosses his desk. . . .The American source said: “Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero-sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.”

In other words, as Power Line’s John Hinderaker summed it up, “Don’t blame us, we’re incompetent!”  Except that there’s one other factor referenced in the Telegraph article:

A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama’s inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to “even fake an interest in foreign policy”.

It seems clear that indifference—to foreign policy in general and Great Britain in particular—also played a part in this:  Barack Obama and his administration simply didn’t care enough about Gordon Brown’s visit or our alliance with his country to try to be competent about it, or even to try to hide their lackadaisical attitude about it.That said, the portrait painted here of an overwhelmed president who’s unable to keep up with the demands of his job in any sort of effective fashion is deeply worrying, and particularly when combined with his own expressed opinion that he’s “very good” at the job.  This is a member of the Self-Esteem Generation, all right.  It’s no wonder he inflated his résumé (follow the links from that post), took credit as a Senator for work he didn’t do, and gilded the lily in his autobiography to make his first job look much better, and his decision to leave it much more meaningful and meritorious, than it really was; he’s the product of an educational system that’s been more concerned in recent decades with making sure students feel good about themselves than about giving them the education they need to live lives that merit a healthy self-respect.  It’s all of a piece with him taking a job at a law firm, slacking on billable hours, and spending much of his time working on his autobiography (which he didn’t even manage to finish, at least while he was there).Up until last November, none of this has been much of a problem for Barack Obama; he’s had the brains, the grace, and the charm to keep wangling his way along and retelling his story to suit himself without anybody minding enough to cause him any problems.  After all, nothing was really riding on him.  The law firm wasn’t depending on him; the Illinois State Senate got its bills passed whether he did any work or just voted “present” (though the man who ran the shop was happy enough to boost him by putting his name on bills anyway); the US Senate kept running along whether the junior Senator from the state of Illinois was in his seat or not.  Being President of the United States, however, is different; and now, this is a problem.  This is the first actual job he’s had since his days as a community organizer (which were, by his own admission, unsuccessful) in which his job performance actually matters—and it’s one of the biggest jobs in the world, and his performance is all-important.  Now, it matters immensely whether he gets things done, and whether they’re the right things; and unfortunately (for us), he has never cultivated the habit of digging deep and digging in to get things done, he has never cultivated the endurance necessary to true accomplishment—in Nietzche’s words, he’s never practiced “a long obedience in the same direction”—and so he doesn’t have the habits and skills and life patterns necessary to do that job effectively.This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, since it was all there in his résumé, for anyone who cared to look; but too many people didn’t.  The McCain campaign tried to make the point, but they couldn’t get beyond talking about “experience,” as if it was simply a matter of time served, when it was really a matter of character.  This allowed the Obama campaign to counter it emotionally, by making “experience” mean “old, tired, and four more years of Bush”; it allowed them to counter it mathematically by adding Sen. Biden to the ticket, when in fact Sen. Biden’s career in the Senate basically consisted of nothing much more than Sen. Obama’s time in the Senate, spread out over many more years; and perhaps most fatally, it allowed them to portray Sarah Palin, when she was named as John McCain’s running mate, as equally “inexperienced.”  Thus what should have been a powerful comparison for the McCain campaign—that Gov. Palin had accomplished far more of substance at a similar age than Sen. Obama—ended up being used against them.  People looked at the numbers and missed the real point:

Two things would leap out from Sarah Palin’s résumé—a pattern of overachievement and a pattern of actually getting things done. Two things would also leap out from Barack Obama’s résumé—an undeniable wealth of talent and an equally undeniable dearth of accomplishments. . . .In truth, Sarah Palin is the kind of employee virtually every enterprise seeks—the kind who gets things done. And Barack Obama is the kind of employee a company hires only when it’s in the mood for taking a risk and willing to wager that the candidate’s past performance isn’t predictive of his future efforts.

So far, that risk isn’t looking too good.

This is convicting

Posted on by | No Comments

from Brant Hansen of Letters from Kamp Krusty:

After working in both mainstream and Christian radio, I think I’m ready to write my own book about the many I encounter:  They Like Church But Not Jesus.I mean it.  I wrote before:  Based on my observation, Jesus is simply not the most influential guy around.  I’ve seen it over, and over, and over.  In fact, I’d say it’s a theme at my job:  People just aren’t that into Jesus.  He ticks people off.——————-I’ve been corrected many times by Christians—after reading something Jesus actually said.  They don’t like it.  I’m serious.  “You know, all the commandments can be summed up with love the Lord your God with all your heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus said that, and . . .”Ringing phones.   “Hello?””You forgot one:  Evangelize.”Jesus stands corrected.Ring.”Well, it’s not quite that simple, you see, because . . .”No, no.  It can’t be that simple.  Not here. . . .No big deal, but—so you know—it happens again and again.  This is where my “If Jesus Had a Blog” stuff comes from, by the way.  Real conversations with learned Christians, and real objections to stuff Jesus said.People do love the Bible.  But not the Gospels.  They quote Biblical stuff to me all the time, but it’s not ever stuff Jesus said.

Now, to some extent, my own experience doesn’t exactly fit with that; at least, I haven’t seen that degree of Jesus-avoidance.  What I see is more of a pick-and-choose Jesus—people love Jesus (just look at the songs that dominate “contemporary” worship, to say nothing of our Jesus-ish commercialism), but the Jesus of their own imagination and reconstruction.  Brant’s right that the real Jesus continues to tick people off now the same way he did 2000 years ago; the difference is that when he’s not physically right in our face about it, we can find tamer, safer, more “spiritual” ways to deal with him than killing him.  We find ways to reduce him to fit our own agenda—including, as Brant notes, using other Scripture to defend ourselves against the radically challenging things he says, which is of course a radical misuse of Scripture.  As Luther reminds us, the Scripture is first and foremost the word which contains the Word, the cradle that holds the Christ; Jesus is the center on which the Scriptures pivot.I appreciate what Bill Roberts had to say about this over at The Thinklings:

I think there are two paths we can take in response: the first and easiest one is separation: separating between us and them, “Christians” versus “Christ-followers”, those who believe they “get” Jesus and those who don’t (though all of us Christians think we do). Some have decided to chunk the church and be Christians all on their own. That’s tempting, because there are plenty of churches that don’t teach the Gospel, that are disobediently pursuing a success that is contrary to success as God defines it, and who avoid talk of Jesus because he offends people.The other path is the far better one, and far more difficult. It’s what I believe Brant’s saying here, and it’s being said by many others these days, and I’m so thankful for that. The other path is the path of reformation: to preach Jesus, to speak of Jesus, to speak of and live the Gospel 24×7. To face up to Jesus’ words, his glorious, terrifying words, and become people who live that Word out every day.

Another addition to the blogroll

Posted on by | 2 Comments

As someone who started posting on Sarah Palin a couple months before her nomination helped the MSM see that the deepest desire of their collective heart was to slander libel her to within an inch of their lives, I’ve been pleased to see the rise of various grassroots networks dedicated to her support.  I tend to be a late adopter on such things (it took a long time for friends to talk me into joining Facebook), but I’ve jumped in and joined one of them, the Read My Lipstick Network, and their blogroll is now in the sidebar.  (I must confess it seems a little strange to me, not being the type to wear lipstick, but American politics is in something of an odd phase these days anyway.)  For those who are into politics (which isn’t everyone who drops in here, I know), there are some good blogs in there, and I encourage you to check them out.

Word of the day: “Overcharged”

Posted on by | No Comments

Is it just me, or does this tell us way too much about this administration?

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greeted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on Friday before sitting down to their working dinner, she presented him a small green box with a ribbon. Inside was a red button with the Russian word “peregruzka” printed on it.”I would like to present you with a little gift that represents what President Obama and Vice President Biden and I have been saying and that is: ‘We want to reset our relationship and so we will do it together.'”Clinton, laughing, added, “We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?” she asked Lavrov.”You got it wrong,” Lavrov said.” Both diplomats laughed. “It should be “perezagruzka” (the Russian word for reset), Lavrov said. “This says ‘peregruzka,’ which means ‘overcharged.'”

While they’re at it, maybe they should give the American people one of those buttons.HT:  Monique Stuart, via R. S. McCain