The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
—Edmund Burke
Category Archives: Quotes
The power of grace
I’m reading Larry Crabb’s book Real Church right now—I was given a copy by one of my fellow pastors here in town, and I expect we’ll be talking about it; I also expect I’ll be writing some about it, once I’ve finished it. I’ll have to, if I want to process it fully. For right now, I just want to post this quote from the book, which really struck me:
Grace has no felt power in our lives until it surprises the hell out of us.
Yeah, that’s the way of it, alright.
The gospel war in our hearts
The gospel of Christ’s painful death on our behalf has a way of breaking our pride and our sense of rightful demands and our frustration at not getting our way. It works lowliness into our souls. Then we treat each other with meekness flowing out of that lowliness. The battle is with our own proud, self-centered inner person. Fight that battle by faith, through the gospel, in prayer. Be stunned and broken and built up and made glad and humble because you are chosen, holy, loved.
—John Piper, This Momentary Marriage
I have nothing to add to that; I just want to lift up the truth of this this evening.
It’s not enough to be against sin
Listen, I’m against sin. I’ll kick it as long as I’ve got a foot, I’ll fight it as long as I’ve got a fist, I’ll butt it as long as I’ve got a head, and I’ll bite it as long as I’ve got a tooth. And when I’m old, fistless, footless and toothless, I’ll gum it till I go home to glory and it goes home to perdition.
I live in the home of Billy Sunday. Not literally in his house (that’s a museum), but in his hometown, and his hometown church. People don’t usually associate traveling evangelists with Presbyterianism, yet he was indeed a Presbyterian minister, ordained in 1903; as he explained it, it was because of his wife Nell, a formidable figure in her own right who’s still remembered around here as Ma Sunday. (In fact, in our church’s row of photos of past ministers, hers is first in line.) Billy said of his wife, “She was a Presbyterian, so I am a Presbyterian. Had she been a Catholic, I would have been a Catholic—because I was hot on the trail of Nell.” They were instrumental in the construction of our church building, and there are photos from his ministry in various places around the church; more than that, when his tabernacle by the shores of Winona Lake was torn down in the early 1990s, members of the congregation rescued some of the benches, and they sit in the entrance area of our building.
I’ll be honest, before I came here, I had more of an awareness of Billy Sunday the baseball player (a dangerous baserunner but a poor hitter, he was the man who first occasioned the observation, “You can’t steal first base”) than Billy Sunday the revivalist; I have a strong interest in the history of revivals, but I’ve mostly studied earlier ones, so I hadn’t really read much on his career. Obviously, that has changed, and is changing; even this late on, it’s important to understand the Sundays and their ministry to understand this community. The quote at the top of this post, for instance, is one which I first read on the front of one of the local tourist brochures (when I said his house is a museum, I meant that literally); and I’ve been interested to find some of his messages on YouTube.
In checking out some of his sermons, it’s clear that that quote is completely accurate: Billy Sunday was against sin. He was powerfully and insistently against sin; he painted it in stark colors, described it in no uncertain terms, and called his hearers to repentance, firmly and uncompromisingly. This is not to say he was a Hellfire-and-brimstone preacher—he recognized that trying to scare people into salvation is unbiblical and ineffective—but he didn’t stint talk of Hell, either, and he strove hard to make his hearers feel the badness of their sin and their need to repent.
The thing is, while I hear Sunday preaching hard against sin (most famously, against alcohol; the man preached Prohibition)—while I hear the bad news that tells us of our need for Christ—I don’t hear much of the good news. I don’t hear the gospel of grace. I don’t hear anything about the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. All I hear is works righteousness, with repentance held up as the chief work. It could be that this is from an unrepresentative sample of his messages, to be sure, but somehow I don’t think so; and even if that’s the case, it certainly suggests that his preaching wasn’t driven by the gospel of Jesus Christ, but rather by something else. It suggests that he didn’t really preach grace, he preached moralism and teetotalism.
That’s too bad, for reasons Ray Ortlund’s son Eric laid out well in a recent post titled “Grace or Moralism”:
Except that’s not the right title for this. It’s not this one or that one. It’s grace or nothing; grace or death. What I mean is, I was thinking about a great video I saw recently which talked about how important young men are for churches, and how feckless and wandering most young men are—and it’s true for me too. . . .
But then I thought, What if I were a pastor and I had a 20-something male who was into video games and porn and not much else, and I started to pound him and tell him to get his act together, and become a noble and valorous warrior? (I say that last phrase without any irony whatsoever.) If I were to morally exhort him that way, two results are possible: (1) He would fail to change and improve. (2) He would succeed to change and improve. Both options lead to death.
If #1 happens, shame would be added to sin, and he probably would be inclined to hide from further contact with the church.
If #2 happens, he would turn into a Pharisee. Moral exhortation made outside of the larger controlling context of grace and the gospel, if heeded and acted upon by its audience, produces Pharisees.
Read the whole thing—it’s great—and think about it. This is why Paul says that human rules and regulations “have an appearance of wisdom . . . but . . . lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence”; the most they can do is redirect that indulgence into other channels, which may well be even worse in the end. It’s important to be against sin—too many these days who consider themselves Christians aren’t, and that’s scandalous—but it isn’t enough by itself; we need to be against sin because we’re for Jesus Christ.
One starfish at a time
Earlier this week, I went along with the youth and kids of our church on a trip to the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo. While walking the path through the Indonesian Rain Forest exhibit, I came upon a display with this quote from Edmund Burke:
No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
My first reaction was amusement to see a quote from one of the intellectual founders of modern conservatism so prominently displayed at a pretty liberal institution. (That’s not a complaint; it’s probably inevitable that zoos end up mostly staffed by folks on the liberal side of the spectrum. I can let the agenda slide, and it’s a good zoo.) My second was that Burke, as so often, had hit the nail on the head—both in identifying the problem, and in identifying it as a problem.
The mistake he names there is a common one, and all too easy a mistake to make. The problems of our world are large, and most of us can do little about any of them. Indeed, most of us, even only doing a little at a time, can only really try to do anything about a few of them. We are small beings, and limited. Doing anything can easily come to seem pointless. And yet, even the little we can do is well worth doing.
Why? Well, for one thing, we can never be sure that what we can do is truly as little as we think. Yes, we are small beings—and yet the course of history has many times been affected by individuals who gave it their best shot at the right place at the right time. To take but one example, how many people today remember the name of the man who converted D. L. Moody in a New England shoe shop?—but his boldness in that encounter changed the course of history, as it was multiplied many, many times over in the boldness of the great evangelist.
If we only change the lives of a few people, is that really so small a thing? You may well have heard the story of the old man, the little boy, and the starfish, which is one of my favorites. If you haven’t, well, it seems that one day a tired, cynical old man decided to walk down on the beach. As he walked, he saw a little boy walking ahead of him, picking up starfish that were high and dry on the sand and tossing them back into the water. The little boy walked slowly, so after a while, the old man caught up with him; when he did so, he asked the boy, “Why are you doing that? There are too many starfish for you to save—what you’re doing can’t possibly matter.” The little boy looked down at the starfish in his hand a moment, then looked back up and said, “It matters to this one”—and threw it in.
We tend to underrate the value and importance of individual lives; we never know how much it will mean that we help that one person, or what they will go on to do as a result. We think that only big things are meaningful, and that the only people who really matter in this world are those who have the power and position to do big things; and we forget that the good we do has a way of multiplying, and if we do the little good things that are in our power to do, they can help and inspire others to do the same, and cumulatively that adds up after a while.
And perhaps even more significantly, we forget that the people whose lives we touch are infinitely valuable in and of themselves, which is why an infinite God offered an infinite sacrifice for their sake, for ours, for each of ours. Whatever we can do for the good is worth doing, however small it may seem to us, because if even one person knows love, and hope, and joy, and peace because of us, that’s enough to justify all our efforts; that’s enough to make it worthwhile.
H. L. Mencken, Grover Cleveland, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama . . . and leadership
Of all the blogs I’ve ever run across, I think Heaven Better Have Lightsabers has to have the most fun name. Fortunately, Hurley’s blog doesn’t waste its title. Today, he (?) has a post up called “H. L. Mencken on Leadership” which is a commentary on an extended quotation from a Mencken piece on Grover Cleveland, including these selections:
There was never any string tied to old Grover. He got into politics, not by knuckling to politicians, but by scorning and defying them, and when he found himself opposed in what he conceived to be sound and honest courses, not only by politicians but by the sovereign people, he treated them to a massive dose of the same medicine.
*****
No President since Lincoln, not even the melancholy Hoover, has been more bitterly hated, or by more people.
*****
He came from an excellent family, but his youth had been a hard one, and his cultural advantages were not of the best.
*****
He banged along like a locomotive. If man or devil got upon the track, then so much the worse for man or devil.
*****
Any man thus obsessed by a concept of duty is bound to seek support for it somewhere outside himself. He must rest it on something which seems to him to be higher than mere private inclination or advantage.
*****
He was not averse to popularity, but he put it far below the approval of conscience.
*****
It is not likely that we shall see his like again, at least in the present age. The Presidency is now closed to the kind of character that he had so abundantly. It is going, in these days, to more politic and pliant men. They get it by yielding prudently, by changing their minds at the right instant, by keeping silent when speech is dangerous. Frankness and courage are luxuries confined to the more comic varieties of runners-up at national conventions.
Hurley comments,
From my opinion it’s perfectly applicable to replace the ‘he/him/his’ with she and her, president with governor, and Grover Cleveland with Sarah Palin. I don’t know what the Governor wants in the future, but she doesn’t seem like the sort of lady who is going to let a hoard of ignorant tools define her as a person.
I have to agree, and to add that the last selection he cites is a dead ringer for Barack Obama (and, for that matter, for Joe Biden, definitely among “the more comic varieties of runners-up”). I am reminded in all this of a famous line about President Cleveland, from the speech in which he was nominated for what would be his second term (his third convention, since Benjamin Harrison held the office between Cleveland’s two terms), which I have often thought applies to Gov. Palin:
They love him for the enemies he has made.
Wow . . . liberal writer takes hatchet to Barack Obama
I can’t say I’ve ever been very aware of Ted Rall, but apparently he’s a syndicated columnist and editorial cartoonist of some significance; apparently he’s also an atheist and very liberal, but apparently willing to call out Democrats if he thinks they have it coming, rather than take the party line as a straightjacket. I think he does a remarkable job of proving that with this column (HT: Mark Hemingway):
We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.
From health care to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When a president doesn’t have the nerve to annoy the Turks, why does he bother to show up for work in the morning?
Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now—before he drags us further into the abyss.
My oh my. I’m not sure any conservatives have dared to cut loose with a broadside like that (and if they had, they would have been torn to shreds for it by the OSM); to read this coming from a liberal is nothing short of amazing. But then, I think the issue that provoked him to this point is one on which liberals and conservatives should agree, and unite in opposing the White House:
I refer here to Obama’s plan for “preventive detentions.” If a cop or other government official thinks you might want to commit a crime someday, you could be held in “prolonged detention.” Reports in U.S. state-controlled media imply that Obama’s shocking new policy would only apply to Islamic terrorists (or, in this case, wannabe Islamic terrorists, and also kinda-sorta-maybe-thinking-about-terrorism dudes). As if that made it OK. . . .
Preventive detention is the classic defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Because dictatorial regimes rely on fear rather than consensus, their priority is self-preservation rather than improving their people’s lives. They worry obsessively over the one thing they can’t control, what George Orwell called “thoughtcrime”—contempt for rulers that might someday translate to direct action.
He’s right about that; this proposal would be exactly the sort of banana-republic behavior I’ve been worrying about (as in this post) ever since the campaign, given some of the tactics we saw from Barack Obama and his flunkies then. In truth, the whole idea here is profoundlyilliberal, and really rather hard to explain. Either President Obama is one of those folks who has a sneaking hidden admiration for totalitarian techniques (something more common on the Left than one would think, as we saw with Code Pink and other leftist organizations when they snuggled up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), or else this is his solution to the dilemma he faces. After all, if he’s committed to giving captured terrorists the same rights as any American, and giving them the rights Americans have now would be a threat to national security, what else is he going to do?
The question is, will people go along with it? Not if Rall has anything to say about it, we won’t—and again, it’s hard to argue with his point:
Locking up people who haven’t done anything wrong is worse than un-American and a violent attack on the most basic principles of Western jurisprudence. It is contrary to the most essential notion of human decency. That anyone has ever been subjected to “preventive detention” is an outrage. That the president of the United States, a man who won an election because he promised to elevate our moral and political discourse, would even entertain such a revolting idea offends the idea of civilization itself.
Rall is here addressing the issue of terrorism, but this is in fact a much broader concern and temptation in jurisprudence, perhaps especially with regard to sexual predators—if preventive detention ever becomes a reality in the American criminal-justice system, it won’t be long before the clamor arises to have it applied to violent rapists; there are more than a few people even now who think it would be perfectly appropriate to pre-emptively imprison folks like that until they’re too frail to feed themselves. (Science fiction plays with this theme at various points; the apotheosis of this would of course be Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story “The Minority Report,” and the 2002 film based on it, with his concept of the “Precrime” unit that identifies and arrests criminals before they commit their crimes.)
All of this leads Rall to a remarkably strong statement:
Obama is cute. He is charming. But there is something rotten inside him. Unlike the Republicans who backed George W. Bush, I won’t follow a terrible leader just because I voted for him. Obama has revealed himself. He is a monster, and he should remove himself from power.
Now, the conclusion that President Bush was a terrible leader is Rall’s, not mine; I don’t happen to think he was. I do, however, think that all too many Republicans fell into line behind him when we shouldn’t have out of political calculation (calculation which, ultimately, proved incorrect, as that behavior turned out to be unwise politically as well as philosophically). I also don’t think it correct or fair to call President Obama “a monster”—that’s hysterical hyperbole of the worst sort.
The man’s a politician, nothing more and nothing less—though to be specific, he’s a Chicago politician, which is about the most cynical and manipulative sort our country has—and if there’s “something rotten inside him,” well, there’s something rotten inside each and every one of us. Traditionally, it’s called sin, though I would imagine that as an atheist, Rall doesn’t think he’s supposed to believe in it. And yet, it’s there all the same, in Barack Obama no less than in anyone else.
And that, I suspect, is the reason for Rall’s harshness in going after the president: Barack Obama was supposed to be better, and so far (and here I agree with Rall completely) he’s been worse. What you hear in this scream of rage is, I think, the anguished fury of severe disillusionment, as it has become apparent that Candidate Obama played the Left the same way he played everyone else. Such political principles and impulses as he has are hard-left, that much is clear, but (as with Bill Clinton) they are secondary to the main goal of gaining, maintaining, and extending power. If it suits his particular sort of Realpolitik to keep his promises, then he’ll keep them; if it doesn’t, he won’t; and if he can duck responsibility for not keeping them, or keeping them, or (if most advantageous) for addressing an issue at all, he’ll do that, too.
The political lesson of Ted Rall’s column (apart from its message) is this: the true believers aren’t going to stand for that very long. E. J. Dionne, in recognizing (and celebrating!) the fact that President Obama and his administration have been quite deliberately selling different stories to different ideological groups as a tactic for advancing his agenda and isolating conservatives, worried a little that the president might overreach, and that it might not ultimately work:
But establishments have a habit of becoming too confident in their ability to manipulate people and events, and too certain of their own moral righteousness. Obama’s political and substantive gifts are undeniable. What he needs to realize are the limits of his own mastery.
Dionne is correct in his concerns; and given the case of Ted Rall, I suspect that this approach ultimately won’t work, that the president will find that his mastery is ultimately too limited to pull off what he’s attempting.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
—Abraham Lincoln (attributed)
Money and writing
Sir, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
—Samuel Johnson
Always pleasant to be labeled a blockhead by a genius. Still, fortunately for me, there are many other writers who disagree with Dr. Johnson. There are also many who note, essentially, that if Dr. Johnson were correct, no one but a blockhead would ever write. Fortunately for all of us, this doesn’t prove to be the case . . .
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
With all due apologies to Inigo Montoya . . .
This is what the president promised us:
My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.
So, what’s he doing about it? Well, according to the Washington Times,
The Obama administration, which has boasted about its efforts to make government more transparent, is rolling back rules requiring labor unions and their leaders to report information about their finances and compensation.
The Labor Department noted in a recent disclosure that “it would not be a good use of resources” to bring enforcement actions against union officials who do not comply with conflict of interest reporting rules passed in 2007. . . .
The regulation, known as the LM-30 rule, was at the heart of a lawsuit that the AFL-CIO filed against the department last year. One of the union attorneys in the case, Deborah Greenfield, is now a high-ranking deputy at Labor.
And courtesy of Michelle Malkin:
I wrote two weeks ago about transparency killer Ron Sims, the King County WA bureaucrat nominated to the no. 2 spot at HUD by supposed transparency savior Barack Obama. Those in his backyard who know him best know the lengths Sims has gone to in order to obstruct public disclosure and stop taxpayers from finding out the truth about his office’s shady dealings.
As I mentioned in the column, blogger Stefan Sharkansky sued Sims over his refusal to release public records related to voter fraud during the 2004 contested gubernatorial election. Today, Sharkansky reports, Sims and King County settled for $225,000, one of the largest settlements for public records violations in state history.
I think someone in the administration needs to go look up “transparent” in a good dictionary.
The temptation and peril of theologized politics
The question of the proper interrelationship between religion and politics in this country is a complex one. There are those who argue that, essentially, there should be no relationship between them—that religion should be kept rigidly separate from politics; but as I wrote last month,
There’s a certain superficial appeal to this suggestion, but a little more thought shows it for the discriminatory idea it really is. Why, after all, should non-religious people be permitted to vote on the basis of their deepest convictions, but religious people be forbidden to do the same? Any attempt to make religion the problem is ultimately an attempt to privilege one mode of thought (the secular) over others, and thus is essentially antithetical to the nature and purpose of the American experiment.
That doesn’t mean, however, that an uncritical fusion of the two is a good thing, either; as I also noted in that post, that tends to result in religion becoming the handmaiden of politics. When our faith becomes “a tool to advance a political agenda,” and as such is no longer “free to critique and correct that agenda,” what we have is in fact a betrayal of Christian faith; we have the political heresy that I labeled “theologized politics.”
Now, it should be obvious why politicians encourage such a thing and seek to make every use of it they can; the short-term political benefits are undeniable. This approach essentially seeks to mobilize Christianity, with its adherents and their assets, as a political force to accomplish the political purposes of one party or the other. The goal is to deploy the church (or as much of it as possible, at any rate) as foot soldiers for the party in this or that political struggle. It’s an effective way to rouse people to active political participation, and to win not merely votes but enthusiastic and committed support. The theological side of the equation, however, is problematic, because the political side is primary; this results in a purely instrumental view of Christian faith, one which “make[s] men treat Christianity as a means,” as C. S. Lewis put it. It moves us from valuing social justice (or any other good) because God demands that of us, which is a good thing, to “the stage where [we value] Christianity because it may produce social justice.” This is a serious problem, because
[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop.
The problem with theologizing politics is that it can be a good political strategy in the short term, but in the long term it has a toxic effect on both the church and the political process. One negative consequence for the church should be obvious: if Christians come to value their faith primarily for the excellent arguments it offers for their chosen political agenda, they will value it less for everything else—and this is not good for the church. Beyond this, it’s bad for our spiritual health, in that it’s essentially a replacement of true faith with something else. It’s bad for the community life of the church, because that “something else” is something outside the church, and fundamentally distinct from it. It could well also be financially bad for the church: if the primary goal is the advancement of a political agenda, then contributions should primarily go to that agenda, rather than to the local congregation. And finally, it’s bad for the witness of the church, because when the church becomes identified with one party, then those who don’t support that party will view the church as the enemy and respond to it with hostility.
The toxic effect of this approach on our political system in this country may be less apparent, but it’s still very real. The problem is that good politics requires a mix of passion and dispassion. One must care about one’s own positions and believe in one’s own ideas enough to want to articulate them and fight for them; one must be passionate enough about the problems in this country and committed enough to one’s proposed solutions to be willing to put the work in to address those problems and implement those solutions. At the same time, however, one must have the necessary dispassion to be able to step back and evaluate those ideas and solutions when they aren’t working; to be able to disengage from one’s own positions enough to consider what may be learned from someone else’s; and to be able to work with those with whom one disagrees, to come to compromises when necessary, and to make common cause when the time is right. When religion is brought uncritically into the political mix, only as a way of supporting one’s own positions (and not as a means of critiquing them), it is excellent at stirring people to passion, but not so helpful in creating the dispassion necessary to balance that passion. The result is something which has been aptly called “the politics of inflammation.”
At this point, again, someone might argue that the solution is to remove religion from politics; and again, the response needs to be made that the true solution is not to break that connection, but to repair it. What is needed is to break ourselves of the habit of using the language of Christian faith to support what we have already decided we believe, and to teach ourselves instead to use our faith to critique our politics, and ultimately to rebuild our political convictions on the ground of our faith.
Photo © 2008 Son of Groucho. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.