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Sen. Obama inserts foot in mouth, commences chewing

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You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them—like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they’ve gone through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns, or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

So says Barack Obama, as of April 6 in San Francisco, in an astoundingly condescending moment which demeans many Americans on multiple levels; and in defending himself, his response has essentially been, “Why all the furor? All I did was say what everyone knows is true.” Paging Thomas Frank . . .To this, Hillary Clinton responds,

You know, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it’s a matter of Constitutional rights. Americans who believe in God believe it is a matter of personal faith. Americans who believe in protecting good American jobs believe it is a matter of the American Dream. . . The people of faith I know don’t “cling to” religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich. Our faith is the faith of our parents and our grandparents. It is a fundamental expression of who we are and what we believe.

And,

I saw in the media it’s being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter. Well, that’s not my experience. As I travel around Pennsylvania, I meet people who are resilient, who are optimistic, who are positive, who are rolling up their sleeves. They are working hard every day for a better future, for themselves and their children. Pennsylvanians don’t need a president who looks down on them; they need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families.

On Commentary‘s “Contentions” blog, Jennifer Rubin called that first comment “probably the smartest thing she’s said in her entire political career”; I think Rubin is right. Of course, John McCain’s campaign is on top of this as well, as witness this quote from one of his advisors:

It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking. It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans.

The theme is clear here: Sen. Obama is an out-of-touch ivory-tower elitist snob who looks down on ordinary folks. As David Paul Kuhn put it,

Last year [Sen. Obama] responded to an Iowa farmer’s concerns about crop prices by asking if “anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” There are no Whole Foods in Iowa. Recently Obama tried to bowl in Pennsylvania and looked like the sort of Democrat who thinks of Whole Foods when discussing crop prices. Now Obama talks about what drives rural voters’ cultural concerns and ends up looking like the kind of Democrat who bowls a 37 in seven frames. Soon there is a storyline. The silly is now serious.It seems that every time Obama makes a mistake he brings it up again, offers context, laughs about it, and then defends it. No matter, the bowling and arugula mistakes were still small time. But the bitter remark was a game changer.

Unfortunately for the Obama campaign, this is a theme that reminds a lot of folks of the Jeremiah Wright diatribes against America and Michelle Obama’s “the first time I’ve ever been proud of my country” comment; it seems to fit with them all too well. The question is, is this his helmet-in-a-tank moment? Certainly it looks like it might be in Pennsylvania; and while it’s too early to tell for the long term, you can be sure that if Sen. Obama manages to hang on and win the nomination, we’ll be hearing a lot about this from now to November. Sen. Obama shot himself in the foot good and proper; now he’d best just hope he doesn’t get gangrene.

On praying for heart attacks

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As Robert Mugabe continues to dig in his heels, I’m reminded of a conversation I had a while back with a couple folks I know in Zimbabwe. When we asked them how we should pray for them, one of them said, “Pray that God will strike Mugabe with a lightning bolt.” We were rather taken aback by that, but they know their country can’t begin to recover until Mugabe is gone, and in their view, the only way he’ll leave is feet first. As long as he’s alive, they don’t believe he’ll ever relinquish power. It’s hard to argue with them.

There are those who would have trouble with the idea of praying for the death of our enemies; that point of view came up last summer when the Thinklings discussed this question. Certainly I understand the concern, given that Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us; but he doesn’t tell us what to pray for those who persecute us. Clearly, we should strive not to pray anger and hatred against our enemies, but I don’t think that means we can’t or shouldn’t pray that God would bring them down, one way or another. I remain convinced as I was at the time of that discussion that David’s prayers serve as a model for us on this point, boiling down roughly to this: “God, either bring my enemies to repentance or strike them down, I don’t care which, but remove them as my enemies.” As Jared put it at the time, “in extreme cases, in unrepentant, ongoing, debilitating situations of abuse on those who cannot protect themselves, I am driven to pray for God’s justice in a radical deliverance. So the motivation is not ‘kill this person’—it’s ‘make them stop or make them gone.'”

That’s where I am with regard to Robert Mugabe. If God wills to strike him dead, good. If God wills to strike him to his knees in full repentance, good—indeed, better; better that he be redeemed, and besides, with all he’s done, I think for him, repentance would hurt more. But whichever kind of heart attack God may send, I’m praying he sends it soon, for the sake of my friends, and the sake of all Zimbabwe. Amen.

Score one for SCOTUS

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The Supreme Court of the United States struck a blow for national sovereignty recently—and along with it, a blow for the separation of powers. Medellín v. Texas is a decision that deals with some weighty issues of domestic and international law, but I think the Court made the right decision; I appreciate that they stood up to an attempt by the Bush administration to overreach the authority of the executive branch, and even more that in doing so they didn’t claim more authority for themselves, but rather upheld the proper sovereignty of the legislative branch. Most of all, I think they were right to say that while the US must honor its treaty obligations, it’s the principles of our own Constitution rather than the diktat of international organizations which determine how we do so.

A further point of interest to this decision, noted by the article to which I’ve linked here, is that it deals a body blow to the efforts of pro-abortion activists to use international organizations and treaties to overrule pro-life laws here in the US; this too is a good thing. In general, I’m not a believer in surrendering any part of our sovereignty to international organizations which all too often don’t have our best interests at heart; I particularly oppose allowing the opinions of folks in other countries to determine important issues like abortion policy.

Further thoughts on the Ascension: the value of our humanity

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The most basic significance of Jesus’ ascension is that he returned to heaven as a human being. This was a controversial statement in the early church—that’s why the creeds explicitly affirm that Jesus ascended into heaven, because there was a lot of argument about that point. The reason for the argument is that a lot of people just couldn’t deal with the idea that anything as gross and physical and material as a human body could be in heaven, in the presence of God. They were very “spiritual” people, in the same way as many people nowadays are very “spiritual”—which is to say, they saw “spiritual” reality as very different from, and superior to, mere physical, material reality. They’d be very happy to talk about their immortal souls going to heaven when they died—but the body? Ugh. No thanks. That was just a temporary thing, even a temporary prison, which they believed their souls would eventually escape to live a purely spiritual existence with God, who himself was pure spirit, and therefore superior to us physical beings.

Obviously, on such a view, Jesus couldn’t possibly have returned to the presence of God as a human being—that would defeat the whole purpose, and contaminate heaven. Yet this is precisely what the Scriptures affirm: the first-century Jewish human being Jesus of Nazareth ascended bodily into heaven, and at the end of all things he will return to this earth in exactly the same way. His human body, his human identity, wasn’t just something he put on for a while and then set aside—it’s a permanent part of who he is. The Son of God is still, seated in heaven at the right hand of God, the Son of Man, Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Jew with nail scars in his wrists and feet and the wound of a spear in his side, and so he shall ever be; he didn’t just wear a human suit for a while, he became fully human, and he remains fully human.

This isn’t something we tend to think about very often, but it’s a profound and critically important truth. Jesus took our humanity with him when he returned to his Father; which means that in Jesus, God has taken our humanity into himself. He has not discarded our flesh, nor has he separated himself again from this world we know and love; rather, the stuff of creation is inextricably woven into the being of God. This is why the author of Hebrews can declare that we have a high priest who understands our weaknesses and our struggles. It’s not just a matter of Jesus remembering what it was like once upon a time to be human, powerful a thing though that is; his humanity is not merely a memory from the past, it’s a present reality. He still knows what it is to be human, because he still is human.

If Jesus cared so much for us human beings that he was willing to identify that completely with us in order to save us, it suggests that we should probably value our humanity rather more highly than we often do. We tend to value ourselves for what we do, what we have to offer, what we can contribute—and to value others on the same basis; there are even those voices which say that if people have nothing to offer, because they’re too disabled or too old or too sick, then we’re justified in getting rid of them. We don’t tend to value ourselves or others simply for being human beings. But God does. Jesus does. In fact, he values us so much—he loves us so much, just for ourselves, just because he made us to love—that he became one of us. Maybe, rather than measuring ourselves and each other by the world’s standards, we ought to learn to look through Jesus’ eyes instead.

“The oboe as an instrument of torture for oboists”

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Slate has a perfectly wonderful piece up titled “Death by Oboe: How acoustic instruments torment their players.” Speaking as a double-reed player myself (albeit one on a fairly lengthy hiatus just at the moment), I particularly appreciate this bit:

In the modern world, nothing in music is more tragicomic than the subject of double-reed instruments like the oboe and bassoon. If you’re an oboist or bassoonist in a high-school band, you buy ready-made reeds. Otherwise, you make your own from scratch, using expensive aged cane from particular terroirs, preferably in southern France. Cutting and trimming and binding and shaving reeds consumes a good deal of your days, while other musicians are practicing and regular people are having fun or making love. If you play the oboe seriously, much of your free time is spent making reeds, not love. Besides being ridiculously fragile, reeds are also sensitive to humidity, which on a soggy night can turn an orchestral woodwind section into a squawkfest.A professional oboist will tell you more than you need to know about what constitutes a Mozart reed, a Mahler reed, a Stravinsky reed, and so on. If he plays in a pops orchestra, there’s probably a Lennon/McCartney reed. If he wants to show you his reed knife, which is razor sharp, you should keep an eye on the exit. Reed making and the pressure on the brain that comes from blowing into an oboe can do unpredictable things to a person.

The strangest person I ever met was an oboist, the younger brother of one of my fellow bassoon students; when he had a reed he was making turn out badly, he would stand it on end, stand all his other reeds around it in a circle, facing inward, and set the offending reed ablaze with a lighter—pour encourager les autres.(The title of this post is taken from Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers story “The Missing Item.”)HT: Alan Jacobs

The church, the prophet, the whale—and God

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The latest issue of Touchstone has a remarkable article surveying children’s versions of the story of Jonah—and showing just how badly wrong they get the book, on the whole. (About halfway through I got up to check our copy of The Jesus Storybook Bible, which I posted on a while back, to see how it answered the challenge; it did better than most, but was not without flaw, cutting Jonah’s story off before chapter four.) There’s no question that most adults (even in the church!) have a seriously distorted mental picture of the book of Jonah, one which rarely gets beyond the question, “Was it a whale or was it a fish?” (Answer: to the ancient Jews, they were both fish.) From Ronald Marshall’s survey, it’s not hard to understand why.

What I particularly appreciate about the piece is that his analysis of the matter goes beyond anything I’d thought of. I’d always figured that most of the sanitizing of the book was rooted in the fact that Jonah, as an anointed prophet of God, ought to act like a hero and doesn’t—that the primary concern was squeezing him as much as possible into that mold. Wouldn’t do, after all, to admit that one of God’s prophets could be such a whiny, priggish, self-righteous, hateful jerk. The Rev. Marshall goes further, though, suggesting that “Jonah is a horrifying book”—which he’s right, it is, though I’ve never particularly felt that—and that the main concern has been to neuter it, to remove the horror and render it “safe for children.” (C. S. Lewis would have had a pungent comment about that, I think.) The problem is, as the article’s subhead puts it, “In removing the fear from the story of Jonah, children’s versions remove the gospel, too.”

This is because the great truth at the heart of the book of Jonah is the juxtaposition of God’s holy fury at human sin with his holy will to show mercy to human sinners. God’s hatred of the evil practiced by the Assyrian Empire was so great (with good reason) that he wanted to destroy Nineveh; yet he preferred to destroy them as his enemies by bringing them to repentance, so he sent Jonah to preach a message of warning to them. God’s hatred of Jonah’s rebellion was such that he sent a storm to drive him into the ocean, into the terror of drowning and the hell of the stomach of the sea-beast; yet he desired to show mercy to his recalcitrant prophet, and when Jonah prayed for forgiveness, he relented, and Jonah was vomited up onto the shore. And when Jonah sat down to try to shame God into destroying Nineveh despite its people’s repentance, God made the shade tree grow, then killed it, in an effort to bring Jonah around; where Jonah’s motto seems to have been, “Hate the sin, hate the (non-Jewish) sinner more,” God seeks to teach his prophet to love mercy.

In all this, of course, God isn’t nice to Jonah; one could easily argue that he’s far more considerate of the Ninevites who would destroy his people than he is of the prophet whom he called to serve him. But then, Jesus wasn’t nice to those who were leading his people astray, either—nor was God the Father nice to Jesus. God’s purposes are far, far bigger than being nice to us and making us comfortable and happy; his hatred of our sin is no less real and great than his hatred of the sin of others, nor is his desire to show mercy to those others any less than his desire to show mercy to us. If we’re seeking a God who’s “on our side,” we’re looking in the wrong place. The Bible doesn’t give us a God who’s on our side, it shows us God and calls us to be on his side. (This is the greatest error in all typically American forms of theology, including even black liberation theology, which is rooted in the great truth that God lifts up the cause of the oppressed.) To the extent that we resist what God is doing, he isn’t on our side at all. As Rev. Marshall puts it, working from Kierkegaard:

Kierkegaard stunningly ties this story to Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 5:44 to love our enemies. When God destroys the tree, he is being “so terrible” to Jonah. If this is the way God loves his servants, there are no “syrupy sweets” in it at all. Rather, the “strenuous and sacrificial” marks this love.

Because God is so rough on us, Jesus said we should love our enemies—knowing full well that God is our “most appalling enemy.” Loving our enemies is primarily about loving God. Therefore, Kierkegaard concludes, “God wants you to die, to die to the world; he hates specifically that in which you naturally have your life, to which you cling with all your zest for life.”

God makes Jonah miserable, but for his own good. He breaks apart his worldly hopes and dreams and pushes him into a new life. He shows him that his own comfort does not matter. He calls Jonah to set his mind “on things that are above, not on things that are on earth”—things like some wilting shade tree (Col. 3:2). And for all this cruel treatment, Jonah is to love God anyway, simply because Matthew 5:44 says we are to love and not hate our enemies.

This is the hard truth of the life of faith, that following God isn’t about “our best life now” and God helping us realize our potential as we see fit, according to our own desires; it’s about denying ourselves, even dying to ourselves, and God killing that part of us that needs to die. Granted, he does so in order “that we might have life, and have it abundantly,” but it isn’t our best life, it’s his; and getting there means confronting our darkness, and the horror of which we’re capable, head on. It means understanding both the full measure of the awesome wrath of God against sin—and the fact that our sin deserves that wrath—and the awesome depth and breadth of the mercy of God for sinners, which took that wrath upon himself on the cross. Just as Jonah sacrificed himself to save the sailors from the wrath of God (though he did so because he preferred death to obedience), so Jesus sacrificed himself to save “the entire boat of humanity” (in St. Jerome’s words). And as Jared’s been arguing over at The Thinklings, and as C. J. Mahaney talked about with Sinclair Ferguson, it’s only if we understand that fact in its full significance that we truly understand the gospel.

Keep praying for Zimbabwe

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Mugabe’s decided to dig in and fight; the opposition is still standing up to him, but I guess he’s figuring if he just terrorizes Zimbabweans enough, he can make them more afraid of voting him out than of letting him stay in power. Pray he’s wrong—pray the people of Zimbabwe stand up to him and to these tactics and vote him out anyway. And pray that when they do, that somehow, he’ll go quietly. Please keep praying.

Song of the Week

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In his weekly links post yesterday, Jared quoted a hymn that I’ll have to look up, because I love these lines (thanks to Sinclair Ferguson for quoting them):

O Jesus! full of pardoning grace,—
More full of grace than I of sin.

That’s perfectly put, and well worth remembering. It reminded me, though, of a hymn I haven’t thought about in ages, one which Dr. Packer used to quote us from time to time in class; so I decided to post it.

I Sought the LordI sought the Lord, and afterward I knew
He moved my soul to seek Him, seeking me;
It was not I that found, O Savior true;
No, I was found of Thee.

Thou didst reach forth Thy hand and mine enfold;
I walked and sank not on the storm-vexed sea;
‘Twas not so much that I on Thee took hold,
As Thou, dear Lord, on me.

I find, I walk, I love; but O the whole
Of love is but my answer, Lord, to Thee!
For Thou were long beforehand with my soul;
Always Thou lovedst me.Words: The Pilgrim Hymnal, 1904
Music: George W. Chadwick
PEACE, 10.10.10.6

The life of faith vs. the life of politics

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“A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think that the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquility,
we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith. A person has to get
fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for
the world of grace.”—Eugene PetersonThis quote was at the head of The Thinklings yesterday. It is, I think, one of Eugene’s more important insights (which is saying something); grace is truly an acquired taste. I think this is particularly important because it points us a bit beyond Eugene’s own point to its corollary, that it’s as easy to lose that appetite as it is difficult to acquire it; the world is always trying to pull us back into valuing its own ways and solutions as much as it does, and if we aren’t careful, we tend to go along with that pull. Falling back into old habits of mind is easier than holding fast to new ones rigorously developed.That, I think, is why so many Christians who really ought to know better are so wrapped up in politics, because we’ve lapsed back into thinking that the next election will solve the problem (whatever we understand the problem, or problems, to be); we’ve forgotten that the tools of human beings will not accomplish the righteousness of God, and we’ve gotten into the habit of thinking that the work of the kingdom of God depends on electing this or that candidate, or winning a majority for this or that party. It isn’t so. Yes, we need to do politics to the glory of God, just as we’re supposed to do everything else to his glory; yes, God calls people to serve him in the political arena; yes, politics done to the glory of God is kingdom work. But in saying that, we need to remember two things:1) Politics done to the glory of God is conducted in humility, remembering that it’s not about us or what we can accomplish—and that God’s plans and purposes are bigger than what we can see, let alone understand; the plans of God are not to be identified with our own plans and dreams and ideas.2) Politics done to the glory of God is fundamentally different than politics done to the glory of getting re-elected, or of “winning” the issue. Indeed, sometimes the two stand diametrically opposed; when that happens, the desire to win must be set aside.