Category Archives: Faith and politics

A few further notes on the “Obama-Antichrist” tripe

Posted on by | 6 Comments

Much easier to do this back in my office with my books to hand, so I can add a few things to my post last night.

One, the plural of bamah in Isaiah 14:14—to which the person who did the video refers in order to justify his back-translation of bamah—is indeed bamatey; or better, bāmātê, since the yodh there isn’t functioning as a consonant but rather as a vowel marker. (Actually, the root word should really be written bāmâ, since the closing hē isn’t really a consonant either, but also just a vowel marker.)

Two, now that I’ve had the chance to sit down with the New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology & Exegesis (NIDOTTE to its friends), I can say with confidence that this conjectured back-translation is completely wrongheaded. The word bāmâ is used in several places in the OT in the stereotyped phrase “to tread/ride on the heights of,” as NIDOTTE says, “to express God’s absolute sovereignty over land and sea”; Isaiah puts this phrase in the mouth of the king of Babylon to express his arrogant presumption. The word is never used to denote Heaven, the place where God dwells, however, and never would have been, since the primary meaning of bāmâ was a place of worship (the “high places” that the kings of Israel/Judah are criticized throughout the middle OT for not taking down); the word for “heights” that is used in this way is mārôm. Besides, if Jesus had used bāmâ, we wouldn’t have to guess, since it actually passed into NT Greek in the form bēma.

Instead, looking at the semantic field, the word Jesus would have actually used would have been šāmayim (or its Aramaic cognate), which is the word that actually means “heaven” (it’s paralleled with other words that mean “height,” “sky,” “firmament,” etc., but those words aren’t used by themselves to mean “heaven”). As such, even kībārāq min-ûbāmātê, as little as that sounds like “Barack Obama,” is clearly not what Jesus actually said; the likeliest back-translation of the words “I saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven” into Hebrew, rather, would be hāzâ (or rā’â) ha-śātān kībārāq min-vešāmayim.

All of which is to say, the idea that Jesus said “I saw Satan as Barack Obama” is utterly unsupported by the facts, and unsustainable on the basis of any real understanding of Hebrew; it’s contemptible nonsense to fool the credulous and pre-deceived, nothing more.

Update: Shane VanderHart’s post on this on his blog, Caffeinated Thoughts, is also well worth checking out, as he adds some good points.

UPDATED: This can only make serious conservatives look bad

Posted on by | 4 Comments

Ordinarily, I just ignore things like this; but for some reason, this idiot really irks me. (HT: Allahpundit)

This guy doesn’t even fall into the “knows just enough Hebrew to be dangerous” category, because he doesn’t actually know any Hebrew at all—or, indeed, much of anything about Hebrew. For all his pompous statement “I will report the facts. You can decide,” he’s precious short on facts and long on false assertions. Watch the video if you want to, and then let’s go through it, if you’re interested. (If you aren’t, don’t bother to click “Read More,” just scroll down to the next post.)

One: “Aramaic is the most ancient form of Hebrew.” That’s about like calling French the most ancient form of Portuguese. Aramaic isn’t a form of Hebrew, it’s a different language—closely related, another Northwest Semitic language, but a different language.

Two: he relies on back-translations, which are necessarily conjectural, but presents them as if they were proven fact. Sloppy. Very sloppy.

Three: barack is the Arabic cognate of Hebrew barak, which is also used as a name (so see Judges 4-5; “Barak” is the name of Deborah’s general). Barak means “he blesses” or “he kneels”; the word baruch, which we also know as a name, means “blessed” and is the noun form of this verb. Baraq may sound the same, but it’s a completely different word, with a completely different root (beth-resh-qoph instead of beth-resh-kaph); the similarity in sound is meaningless, nothing but a red herring.

Four: the person who made this video is clearly unaware that the Hebrew alphabet does not have any vowels. During the post-biblical period a group of scholars called the Masoretes added pointing (a system of dots) to indicate vowels, to preserve the reading of the text of the Hebrew Scriptures, but these are not original to the text. A couple consonants, yodh and vav, were used in the original Hebrew to indicate certain vowels (hē was also used this way at the end of words, much as we end words with “-ah” and “-oh”); the Masoretes included notations in their pointing system to indicate when these consonants were being, essentially, used as vowels.

Five: even if bamah (or rather its Aramaic equivalent) was in fact the word Jesus used in Luke 10:18, as this video suggests, it would have been plural, not singular, and quite different in form (bamatey, I think; I don’t have my language tools with me at the moment, and Hebrew was never my strong suit).

Six: the individual who did this video declares, “the Hebrew letter waw [or vav] is often transliterated as a ‘U.’ Some scholars use the ‘O’ for this transliteration. It is primarily used as a conjunction to join concepts together.”

This is wrong.

As I noted above, one of the ways in which Hebrew used the vav (and also the yodh and the he) was to indicate certain vowels; when the Masoretes came along to add vowel pointing to help people know how to pronounce the text, they came up with special points to indicate when, say, vav was being used as a “u” (sureq) or an “o” (holem-vav), as opposed to when it was simply a consonantal “v.” (The technical term for those is matres lectiones, or “mothers of reading.”) It is incorrect to say that vav “is often transliterated as a ‘u’,” and still more incorrect to say that ‘o’ is a different transliteration used by “some scholars.” Rather, sometimes when the consonant vav is in the text, it’s serving as a “u,” and sometimes it’s serving as an “o.”However, this is different from the use of vav in the Hebrew conjunction, which is the prefix ve-.

Now, that said, one of the oddities of Hebrew is that before beth, mem, and pe, the conjunction changes from ve to a sureq, becoming a “u” sound, which is no doubt what the person behind this video is trying, however ineptly, to say. Again, though, “heights” is plural, and so even if his assumption that bamah underlies the Greek text is correct, it would not be in the singular form bamah, but in a plural form.

Thus, it is simply wrong to assert that Jesus, in talking about Satan falling from heaven like lightning, would have said ubama; it’s wrong even if you assume that Jesus would have used bamah to denote heaven, which is unproven. Thus, the last name of our president isn’t in the text of Luke 10:18 in any way. As for our president’s first name, while Jesus might have said baraq, that’s not the same as barak. Plus, the person behind this video has forgotten that Jesus didn’t say, “I saw Satan fall lightning heaven,” but “like lightning from heaven”—there’s a preposition before, and another one in the middle, and rest assured the one in the middle isn’t “Hussein.” It would be, rather, the Aramaic equivalent to the Hebrew min-. The one before would be the equivalent to the Hebrew prefix ki-.

As such, the closest to “Barack Obama” that Jesus could have spoken would have been something like kibaraq min-ubamatey . . . and that just isn’t good enough to support this farrago of nonsense that Jesus told us that Barack Obama is the Antichrist.

Update: I’ve added a few key points to this argument here. I hate it when people misuse Scripture to their own ends; this is a particularly egregious example.

Where have all the good men gone? Blame Roe, for starters

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Richard Stith, a law professor just up the road from here at Valparaiso, has an excellent piece in the “Opinion” section of the latest First Things entitled “Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men” (subscription required until the November issue comes out). It’s an argument that may seem counter-intuitive to some, but it is, sadly, all too true. As Stith writes,

This summer, President Obama proclaimed again that we “need fathers to recognize that responsibility doesn’t end at conception. In a sense, of course, he is absolutely right. But the problem is that, in another sense, he is completely wrong: Male responsibility really does end at conception. Men these days can choose only sex, not fatherhood; mothers alone determine whether children shall be allowed to exist. Legalized abortion was supposed to grant enormous personal freedom to women, but it has had the perverse result of freeing men and trapping women. . . .

“Abortion facilitates women’s heterosexual availability,” [radical feminist Catherine] MacKinnon pointed out: “In other words, under conditions of gender inequality [abortion] does not liberate women; it frees male sexual aggression. The availability of abortion removes the one remaining legitimized reason that women have had for refusing sex besides the headache.” Perhaps that is why, she observed, “the Playboy Foundation has supported abortion rights from day one.” In the end, MacKinnon pronounced, Roe‘s “right to privacy looks like an injury got up as a gift,” for “virtually every ounce of control that women won” from legalized abortion “has gone directly into the hands of men.” . . .

That would be why, as Stith notes, “64 percent of American women who abort feel pressured to do so by others. . . . American women almost always abort to satisfy the desires of people who do not want to care for their children.” He continues,

Throughout human history, children have been the consequence of natural sexual relations between men and women. Both sexes knew they were equally responsible for their children, and society had somehow to facilitate their upbringing. Even the advent of birth control did not fundamentally change this dynamic, for all forms of contraception are fallible.

Elective abortion changes everything. Abortion absolutely prevents the birth of a child. A woman’s choice for or against abortion breaks the causal link between conception and birth. It matters little what or who caused conception or whether the male insisted on having unprotected intercourse. It is she alone who finally decides whether the child comes into the world. She is the responsible one. For the first time in history, the father and the doctor and the health-insurance actuary can point a finger at her as the person who allowed an inconvenient human being to come into the world.

The deepest tragedy may be that there is no way out. By granting to the pregnant woman an unrestrained choice over who may be born, we make her alone to blame for how she exercises her power. Nothing can alter the solidarity-shattering impact of the abortion option.

Dr. Stith spends the bulk of the article laying out the various ramifications of this reality, the various ways that it plays out. I would make only one correction to his argument: abortion empowers certain types of men, not all men. Specifically, it empowers the cads, the losers, the irresponsible, the promiscuous, the abusers, and those afraid of commitment. It empowers the worst in human impulses, and thus benefits guys who indulge those impulses, who want to take what they like without paying for it. Those who want to choose fatherhood, who want to take responsibility for their actions and choices, too often find themselves barred by the law from doing so.

We thus have a situation that favors “bad boys” over good people; we have a legal and social incentive to antisocial and irresponsible behavior. That’s a corrupting influence on our society, creating norms that skew young males away from responsibility and maturity, away from marriage and toward “playing the field.” In all seriousness, if young women want to know where all the good men are, one place to look is Roe, Doe, and their progeny; because of them, there are fewer good men than there ought to be.

 

John Calvin at 500

Posted on by | No Comments

In honor of the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, I’d like to draw your attention to an excellent article by Westminster-California’s W. Robert Godfrey entitled “Calvin: Why He Still Matters.” Here’s the beginning:

There can be no serious doubt that Calvin once mattered. Any honest historian of any point of view and of any religious conviction would agree that Calvin was one of the most important people in the history of western civilization. Not only was he a significant pastor and theologian in the sixteenth century, but the movement of which he was the principal leader led to the building of Reformed and Presbyterian churches with millions of members spread through centuries around the world. Certainly a man whose leadership, theology, and convictions can spark such a movement once mattered.

Historians from a wide range of points of view also acknowledge that Calvin not only mattered in the religious sphere and in the ecclesiastical sphere, but Calvin and Calvinism had an impact on a number of modern phenomena that we take for granted. Calvin is certainly associated with the rise of modern education and the conviction that citizens ought to be educated and that all people ought to be able to read the Bible. Such education was a fruit of the Reformation and Calvin.

Others have insisted that the rise of modern democracy owes at least something to the Reformed movement. One historian said of Puritanism that a Puritan was someone who would humble himself in the dust before God and would rise to put his foot on the neck of a king. Calvinists were strongly persuaded that they must serve God above men, and that began to relativize notions of superiority and aristocracy. King James I of England, who was also James VI of Scotland, once remarked as he looked at Presbyterianism in Scotland: “No bishop, no king.” If the Church is not governed by a hierarchy, certainly the political world does not need to be governed by a hierarchy either. Such Calvinist attitudes toward kings helped contribute to modern democracy.

Calvinism contributed to modern science with an empirical look at the real world. Calvin contributed to the rise of modern capitalism in part by teaching that the charging of interest on money loaned was not immoral. He was the first Christian theologian to do so.

When we look at that list—theology, church, education, science, democracy, and capitalism—here was a man that mattered. He had a profound influence on the development of the history of the West. But does he still matter? Should we care today to revisit John Calvin—who he was, what he thinks—and believe that what he taught is still significant, still valuable? Yes, he still does matter. John Calvin matters still above all because he was a teacher of truth. If truth matters, then John Calvin still matters because he was one of the great teachers of truth, one of the most insightful, faithful teachers of truth, one of the best communicators of truth. He was a teacher who had taken to heart the words of Jesus: “You will know the truth and the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

The bulk of Godfrey’s article, of course, is dedicated to expositing the truth of that last paragraph; I encourage you to read it. If you have additional time and interest, it’s also worth checking out Reformation21, which has a number of excellent pieces up in honor of Calvin’s 500th.

On Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address and the importance of grace

Posted on by | No Comments

Speaking of Garry Wills, I’ve been ruminating lately on his superb essay on Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which he rightly calls “Lincoln’s greatest speech.” I appreciate Wills’ piece a great deal, since he does a good job of setting the Second Inaugural in its proper context and then offers a careful, thoughtful and perceptive analysis of the speech’s purpose and line of thought. In particular, though he makes the case that Lincoln’s aim was to lay the groundwork for a pragmatic approach to Reconstruction—an approach based on only one fixed principle, that of the abolition of slavery, and in all other respects concerned solely with what would work best to restore a functioning Union—he shows clearly how the president’s argument to that purpose was fundamentally not political but theological, and rooted in a strong sense of the humility proper to human aspirations and human ability to plan and predict consequences in the face of the power, wisdom and will of Almighty God. As Wills writes,

The problem with compromise on this scale is that it seems morally neutral, open even to injustices if they work. Answering that objection was the task Lincoln set himself in the Second Inaugural. Everything said there was meant to prove that pragmatism was, in this situation, not only moral but pious. Men could not pretend to have God’s adjudicating powers. People had acted for mixed motives on all sides of the civil conflict just past. The perfectly calibrated punishment or reward for each leader, each soldier, each state, could not be incorporated into a single political disposition of the problems. As he put it on April 11,

And yet so great peculiarities pertain to each state; and such important and sudden changes occur in the same state; and, withal, so new and unprecedented is the whole case, that no exclusive, and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and colatterals [sic]. Such [an] exclusive, and inflexible plan, would surely become a new entanglement.

Abstract principle can lead to the attitude Fiat iustitia, ruat coelum—”Justice be done, though it bring down the cosmos.” Lincoln had learned to have a modest view of his ability to know what ultimate justice was, and to hesitate before bringing down the whole nation in its pursuit. He asked others to recognize in the intractability of events the disposing hand of a God with darker, more compelling purposes than any man or group of men could foresee. . . .

The war was winding down; but Lincoln summoned no giddy feelings of victory. A chastened sense of man’s limits was the only proper attitude to bring to the rebuilding of the nation, looking to God for guidance but not aspiring to replace him as the arbiter of national fate.

Wills further quotes a letter from Lincoln to Thurlow Weed on this subject:

Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told; and as whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford [an occasion?] for me to tell it.

In general, the thought and intent of our greatest president’s greatest work—which is, I think, perhaps the greatest piece of political theology ever produced on this continent—shines brightly through this essay. The one thing Wills doesn’t quite get is the way in which the address works and grapples with the grace of God. On the one hand, he says,

Americans must be judged in a comprehensive judgment binding on all—God’s judgment on slavery, which was to be worked out of the system with pains still counted in the nation’s “sinking debt” of guilt. There was no “easy grace” of all-round good will in the message. The speech was flexible, but it was flexible steel.

On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to fully understand what that means, because he writes,

People who stress only Lincoln’s final words about charity for all, about the healing of wounds, may think that Lincoln was calling for a fairly indiscriminate forgiveness toward the South, especially since he referred to the North’s share in the guilt for slavery. But the appeal to “Gospel forgiveness” is preceded by a submission to “Torah judgment” and divine wrath—an odd vehicle for a message of forgiveness.

What I think Wills fails to understand here (perhaps due to a lack of exposure to Reformed thought) is that this isn’t an odd vehicle for a message of forgiveness at all, but rather a necessary one if one is to avoid cheap grace. Those of us in the Reformed stream of Christian thought well understand, as Lincoln clearly understood, is that the good news of grace not onlycan but must be stated in the context of—indeed, as a response to—the bad news of human sin and divine wrath.

It’s precisely this understanding which enabled Lincoln to strike the balance which Wills rightly sees as central to the purpose of the Second Inaugural Address, which enabled the president to argue for “a moral flexibility—with emphasis on morality,” and thus to stake out a pragmatic position that meant more than mere lowest-common-denominator pragmatism. One would, I think, be correct in arguing that the failure of the American government to strike that balance after Lincoln’s death is the primary reason that Reconstruction ultimately collapsed into a form of least-common-denominator political pragmatism that set the cause of racial equality in this country back over half a century and more.

 

Called to be pro-love

Posted on by | 4 Comments

The most interesting thing I’ve ever seen written on abortion by a liberal was a column by Neil Steinberg in the Chicago Sun-Times of about five years ago. The original is no longer up on the Sun-Times website (which seems to be a real problem with that paper), and the copy that had been up on findarticles.com is no longer there either, so I can’t send you back to read the whole piece; but here’s what I saved at the time:

During one of the policy discussions that occupy my day, a flash struck me that seemed like, if not quite insight, then perhaps something other than just another tired lob from the same familiar ramparts.

Here goes: Is it possible that in their relentless drive to make abortion once again illegal, the religious right actually encourages more abortions to take place?

It makes sense, in a law-of-unintended consequences fashion. Pro-choice women’s groups correctly see themselves as locked in a life-or-death battle to preserve the legality of abortion, and so tend to close ranks and take an absolutist, it’s-our-right-and-no-one-can-take-it-away approach to the practice. Any questioning of abortion’s morality or desirability is seen as giving ammunition to those who would ban it. Thus, the idea that abortion is an ethically dubious procedure that nobody wants to go through is a luxury they can’t afford.

However, imagine for a moment that the religious right were not intent on its futile quest to reverse the law. Imagine that, rather than trying to work through the government, they instead focused on the undesirability of the procedure—as something women should choose not to do. Then the two groups might find common ground, since both agree that no woman is happy to feel the need to go through an abortion.

Steinberg went on to note, “I’m not expecting either side to embrace this idea,” and I think he was right not to be sanguine on the point, for a variety of reasons; but I also think he’d put his finger squarely on one of the things that makes the abortion debate so nasty: the number of people who can’t see the trees for the forest—and yes, you heard me correctly. There are a lot of folks on the Left who are so focused on the issue of abortion as a whole that they miss,dismiss or ignore all the details, including the actual people involved. It’s usually conservatives who get hit with this criticism, but anymore—due as much to battle fatigue and cynicism as anything—such voices on the Right are not representative. That attitude isn’t gone from the Right by any means, as the recent murder of George Tiller showed, but it’s much rarer than it once was. There are still a great many the Left, though, for whom any issue, any question of fact, any circumstance which bears in any way on abortion rights is to be viewed only with regard to whether it tends to advance or restrict abortion as a whole, and supported or opposed, proclaimed or rejected on that basis and that basis only.

The problem is, while that can be a good way to win an argument, it’s really not a healthy one, and it’s definitely not a good way to govern a country; those of us who are pro-life will always be tempted to respond in kind, but we need to look for more productive ways to argue our position. We need to take a step back from the political argument du jour, reorient ourselves, and go back to our most basic theological principles to make our case. In so doing, while we’re not likely to change the minds of any of our hard-core opponents, we’ll have a chance to find or create common ground with more moderate folks on the pro-abortion side, and thus perhaps to help them understand the real reasons why we believe as we do; out of that, we may be able to win some of them over, and find ways to at least moderate the abortion regime in this country.

With that in mind, it seems to me there are a few theological principles that need to be considered with regard to the issue of abortion. First and foremost, there is the truth that God is the one true King over all creation. This tells us two things of particular importance. One is that he is specifically Lord over us, and we’re under his rule; this makes us responsible to seek his will as honestly as we can, and to obey it with all faithfulness. In the last analysis, his will must come before our own desires, however strong those desires may be. The other is that he is Lord in everything that happens; there is nothing which surprises him, nothing which happens outside his control, and nothing which he does not intend to use for his greater glory and for the greater good of all who worship and follow him.

Second, the view that puts individualism and individual freedom of choice as the highest political good is alien to Scripture. We are called by God as part of his people, as part of the community of faith, and we are all dependent on each other; we as individuals aren’t the center of God’s plan, the community is. In the midst of our selfish, fallen world, he’s at work building a people, creating a community, to carry his message of redemption and reconciliation to all who need to hear it, and we’ve been given the gift of being a part of that plan. The key to this is recognizing that we need each other, and that we have responsibilities to each other, and as such that we are called to live lives of service to each other and to the world, not simply to pursue our own wills.

Third, we need to remember the importance of justice as a theme and emphasis of Scripture; one of the two great complaints the prophets raised against Israel and Judah was the injustice of their societies, that those who had wealth and power oppressed and abused those who didn’t. Those who cannot defend themselves, those who have no options, those who cannot support themselves, those who have no hope—these are the people whom God calls us to serve, first and foremost, and if we don’t, we will have to answer for our failure.

Fourth, we must always be humble in our politics. That goes first of all to our expectations, that we need to remember that we are limited, and play within ourselves, so to speak; if we overreach, we can end up doing more harm than good. It also goes to our view of ourselves, that we need always bear in mind that we are sinful, and therefore fallible. Even at our best, our motives and actions are still tainted by our sinful nature; even at our brightest, we are still prone to error. We need to bear that in mind and not get too impressed with either the brilliance of our ideas or the goodness of our hearts; we need to remember that we too are sinners, and that our salvation is only by God’s grace, not by any of our own effort.

Given these four points, what are we to make of the abortion issue? In considering that question, I think we need to begin not at the usual point, but with the sovereignty of God. In Psalm 139, we see that the psalmist understands his life as a gift from God, who made him in the womb and gave him all the days of his life; but the broader emphasis of that section of this psalm is that God didn’t make him and then wander off to do other things. This is critically important for us to affirm, that not only did the Lord create us, he continues to be with us and to watch over us. The Lord is far away, yes, ruling over all creation from his throne in heaven, but he is also very near, surrounding us and keeping his hand on us. There is no way, imagine what impossibilities you will, that we can go where God wouldn’t be with us, or hide where God wouldn’t see us; there is no part of our lives, no matter how seemingly insignificant, about which he doesn’t care.

This is a great truth about God, but it’s one which I’ve never heard mentioned one way or the other as the church discusses abortion. That’s a loss, because it seems to me it’s quite relevant to this issue, for two reasons. One is that, if we affirm that God is the giver of all life and that his concern extends even to those not born, as the psalmist does here—a point supported by God’s words to Jeremiah in Jeremiah 1:5—that God is Lord at every point and in every circumstance, and that he watches closely over us to care for us, that leads to the affirmation that God is at work in every pregnancy, even in those where the circumstances are difficult, painful, or disastrous; which, it seems to me, means that God values that new life whether or not anyone else does.

Equally, however, it means that God values the life and well-being of the woman who is pregnant; which leads to the second point, that the message of the sovereignty of God is a reason for hope for those who are pregnant under troubled or traumatic circumstances, because it means that the God who allowed those circumstances is a God who has the will and the power to redeem them, to give victory even in their midst, and to turn them to blessing. That needs to be the message of the church to all who are struggling, to all who are suffering, to all who can’t see hope in any direction, including women who are contemplating abortion: no matter how hard things look, God loves you, he is with you, and there is a way forward.

Of course, to say such a thing, the church needs to remember that we are always called to be a part of that way forward. This is part of what it means that we are called as the community of faith, that we have been commanded to bear each other’s burdens, to help each other carry what is too heavy for us to carry alone. This is also, I think, part of doing justice. Standing up for the unborn is one aspect of doing justice for the powerless; but so is standing up with and for those who are pregnant. Even in the best of circumstances, pregnancy is a burden, and in more than just the physical sense; and as Sarah Palin admitted in her Evansville speech, in bad circumstances, it can be enough to make even those most staunchly pro-life quail a little.

As such, for women who are in that situation, it is the church’s responsibility to step up and help in whatever way we can. Whether it be emotional support for those who are overwhelmed, financial support to keep young women from being trapped below the poverty line, academic support for those still in school, the gift of time, whatever, the church needs to offer whatever assistance it can to women who choose not to have abortions.

The fundamental reality here is that the church is called, if you will, to be pro-love. This doesn’t mean being uncritically accepting of every behavior we run across, but it does mean making it very, very clear that “come as you are” doesn’t just mean clothing, and it means putting our time and money where our mouth is. Jesus was uncompromising toward sin, but he welcomed and loved everyone who came to him honestly, even as he called them, just as he calls us, to leave their sin behind and follow him. He loved beyond reason, even asking forgiveness for his torturers as they were busy killing him, accepting his death willingly in order to redeem his chosen ones.

This is the love with which we have been loved; this is the love we are to show others. It’s a love which values others not for what they’ve done, or what they can do, or for how much they’re like us, or for what we can get out of them, but simply because they are; and consequently, it’s a love which “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” and which never hesitates to give of itself. Yes, I believe the church is called to show this love to unborn children; beyond doubt, we’re also called to show this love to the women carrying them. It’s the great tragedy of the abortion debate that too many people seem to love only one or the other.

To be truly pro-life is not simply to try to stop women from having abortions and to imagine the job done, nor is it to countenance manipulation in any way, shape, or form to achieve that purpose; rather, it is to provide the necessary support to make abortion the less-attractive option. Though abortion has become a political football, it shouldn’t be approached primarily as a political issue, as that sort of approach tends to run over the people involved; though changes in the legal structure and climate are important, the day-to-day work of the pro-life movement is at the grassroots level, converting minds and hearts and blessing lives by offering grace. Though there are certainly times when it’s necessary to call people to repentance, we must do so in love; there is no room for stigmatizing women who have had abortions, for that way lies nothing but unnecessary and pointless hurt. This is one of those places where humility is particularly important, remembering that none of us are really in any position to presume on our own holiness and righteousness, either.

To anyone pro-choice who might happen to read this, I would say: I know that right now, there are some loud voices trying to make Scott Roeder the face of the pro-life movement—please, don’t let them. Don’t judge those of us who disagree with you by our wingnuts. I’ve seen too many people on the pro-choice side of the aisle declare that pro-lifers hate women, but as a rule, it isn’t so. I realize that the rhetoric has too often been overheated and unbalanced; I realize that too often that has reflected an unbalanced concern on the part of many people. But I would ask you to accept our sincerity, and to work with us to offer better choices, truly better, to women for whom abortion might otherwise seem the only way out. Rather than allowing our disagreement over abortion to continue to drive us to attack each other, let’s turn it into a spur for improving the lives of women in this country, and especially for the poor, the abused, and the dispossessed; let’s learn to work on this together, as a way of showing the love and the grace of God to each other and to those in need. Rather than focusing on trying to win battles, let’s put our energy into bearing each other’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.

Barack Obama’s priorities

Posted on by | 2 Comments

The Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces finally saw fit yesterday, two days after the murder of Pvt. William Long and the attempted murder of Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, to issue a statement on this attack on two young men who had pledged him their service (HT:  Michelle Malkin):

I am deeply saddened by this senseless act of violence against two brave young soldiers who were doing their part to strengthen our armed forces and keep our country safe. I would like to wish Quinton Ezeagwula a speedy recovery, and to offer my condolences and prayers to William Long’s family as they mourn the loss of their son.

Compare this to Sarah Palin’s statement, issued Tuesday (yes, a sitting governor took this seriously enough to respond more promptly than the President of the United States):

The stories of two very different lives with similar fates crossed through the media’s hands yesterday—both equally important but one lacked the proper attention. The death of 67-year old George Tiller was unacceptable, but equally disgusting was another death that police believe was politically and religiously motivated as well.

William Long died yesterday. The 23-year old Army Recruiter was gunned down by a fanatic; another fellow soldier was wounded in the ambush. The soldiers had just completed their basic training and were talking to potential recruits, just as my son, Track, once did.

Whatever titles we give these murderers, both deserve our attention. Violence like that is no way to solve a political dispute nor a religious one. And the fanatics on all sides do great disservice when they confuse dissention with rage and death.

And then, further, compare this to the statement of our Commander-in-Chief on the murder of George Tiller:

I am shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning. However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.

What conclusions can be drawn from these comparisons?  I can think of four.

  1. Barack Obama cares more about the murder of abortionists than about the murder of American soldiers.  The former “outrages” him, the latter merely “saddens” him.
  2. Barack Obama is more willing to condemn those who act in the name of Christianity than those who act in the name of Islam.  Murder by the former is “heinous,” while murder by the latter is merely “senseless” (never mind that it made perfect sense to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, formerly Carlos Leon Bledsoe).  This makes sense, given that he appears to be committed to a policy of naïve appeasement of global Islam, while his attitude toward evangelicals who don’t like his actions is, “I won.”
  3. Governor Palin takes the murder of American soldiers more seriously than President Obama.
  4. The likes of al’Qaeda are going to be a lot more worried if Sarah Palin is elected president down the road than they will ever be about Barack Obama.

The fringe is not the mainstream

Posted on by | No Comments

I have to echo Robert Stacy McCain in expressing great gratitude and respect to The New Republic‘s James Kirchick.  Kirchick, an assistant editor at TNR who is also a contributing writer for The Advocate, is a liberal Democrat and practicing homosexual who had the integrity to write an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal declaring, “The Religious Right Didn’t Kill George Tiller,” and calling out his fellow liberals for their mendacious and invidious comparison of pro-life evangelicals to Islamic jihadists:

But if the reactions to the death of Tiller mean anything, the “Christian Taliban,” as conservative religious figures are often called, isn’t living up to its namesake. If “Christianists” were anything like actual religious fascists they would applaud Tiller’s murder as a “heroic martyrdom operation” and suborn further mayhem.

Radical Islamists revel in death. Just witness the videos that suicide bombers record before they carry out their murderous task or listen to the homicidal exhortations of extremist imams. Murder—particularly of the unarmed and innocent—is a righteous deed for these people. The manifestos of Islamic militant groups are replete with paeans to killing infidels. When a suicide bomb goes off in Israel, Palestinian terrorist factions compete to claim responsibility for the carnage.

There is no appreciable number of people in this country, religious Christians or otherwise, who support the murder of abortion doctors. The same cannot be said of Muslims who support suicide bombings in the name of their religion.

I greatly appreciate his willingness to come out and make this point.  For all that Kirchick doesn’t much care for us conservative evangelicals (understandably, I will admit), he clearly has a sense of perspective on the matter that most of his colleagues in the media willfully do not have:

I hold no brief for the religious right, and its views on homosexuality in particular offend (and affect) me personally. But it’s precisely because of my identity that I consider comparisons between so-called Christianists (who seek to limit my rights via the ballot box) and Islamic fundamentalists (who seek to limit my rights via decapitation) to be fatuous.

Read the whole thing—it’s an excellent piece.  Yes, there are those who attach themselves to the pro-life cause as a way of justifying their destructive, nihilistic desires and providing a channel for their anger and hatred; but then, there are those who join the animal-rights movement or write for Playboy for the same reason.  You can’t judge a movement by the most extreme folks who claim to be acting on its behalf, or else I’d be justified in arguing (on the basis of the now-pulled Playboy piece referenced in that link) that all liberal men want to rape conservative women, something which is clearly false.

The truth is, there is no room in the pro-life movement for people who believe in killing abortionists, and there never has been; but those of us who are pro-life cannot thereby stop would-be murderers from claiming hatred of abortion justifies their actions and choice of victims.  All we can say is that anyone who does so hasn’t been listening to what we’re actually saying.

Nor is this an empty statement on my part; pro-life leaders have long recognized that there are those who would use the cause to justify violence, and have long been working to prevent that and explain the evil of it.  (That might explain why, overall, there have been so few cases of violence against the abortion industry, relatively speaking.)  For instance, almost fifteen years ago, Paul J. Hill, who had been defrocked and excommunicated by two different (conservative) Presbyterian denominations for his extremism, shot and killed a Florida abortionist and his security guard, wounding the guard’s wife; he was sentenced to death, a sentence which was carried out nine years later.  In justifying himself, he argued that “Whatever force is legitimate in defending a born child is legitimate in defending an unborn child.”

First Things took his actions and his argument seriously enough to publish a symposium that December in which sixteen pro-life leaders and theologians laid out in detail the reasons why killing abortionists only compounds the evil of abortion.  (Robert George, who made his position on this matter crystal clear this week, took that opportunity to write a satirical paragraph on the issue instead.)  Anyone in any doubt as to whether Scott Roeder is in any way representative of the pro-life movement should take the time to read it and be disabused of their false perception.

(My thanks to Presbyterians Pro-Life for their statement on the Tiller murder which reminded me of the First Things piece.)

 

Sarah Palin weighs in

Posted on by | 2 Comments

A couple hours ago, Gov. Palin released the following statement on the murder of Wichita abortionist George Tiller:

I feel sorrow for the Tiller family. I respect the sanctity of life and the tragedy that took place today in Kansas clearly violates respect for life. This murder also damages the positive message of life, for the unborn, and for those living. Ask yourself, “What will those who have not yet decided personally where they stand on this issue take away from today’s event in Kansas?”

Regardless of my strong objection to Dr. Tiller’s abortion practices, violence is never an answer in advancing the pro-life message.

For my thoughts and comments on this, see my post this morning on Conservatives4Palin.

Using faith for political ends

Posted on by | No Comments

I’ve written a couple posts now on the dangers of what I’ve called “theologized politics,” which may be briefly defined as the appropriation of religion and religious believers by political parties as tools to be used to achieve political ends (chiefly, winning elections).  A good illustration of this would be recent Democratic efforts to draw religious (primarily Christian) voters away from the Republican party. Most such efforts have been rooted in the work of George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at the University of California-Berkeley, and particularly his book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think.

In Dr. Lakoff’s view, the reason for the political success conservatives had been having through 2004 lay not in conservative ideas and policies but rather in conservative manipulation of language. As he put it,

Conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing.

Dr. Lakoff’s response was to found a think tank of his own, the Rockridge Institute. The purpose of this think tank, as he described it, is “to reframe public debate, to create balance from a progressive perspective,” by asking, “What are the central ideas of progressive thought from a moral perspective?”

Dr. Lakoff first published his book in 1997, but his ideas really began to catch on following the 2004 presidential election. Ellen Goodman’s column of November 7, 2004 in the Boston Globe, which explicitly cites his work, provides one example:

This is the time for the losers to go back to basics, to restate their views into a basic simple, straightforward language of values and morals. It’s the time to parse what we believe in. Especially right and wrong.

The title of Goodman’s column, “Taking back ‘values’,” makes the point clear: following Dr. Lakoff, the issue wasn’t Democratic policies, but only the language in which they were presented. Explain to Republican voters that poverty is a moral-values issue, and raising taxes is a moral-values issue, and so on, and they’ll vote Democratic instead. This is the assumption on which the Democrats have been working ever since; thus for instance we have Howard Dean’s complaint that pollsters “have largely missed the story [in the 2008 primaries] because they’re using an outdated script, which leaves the impression that religion and faith matter only to Republicans . . . this bias . . . has in turn shaped news coverage, making it appear that one party has a monopoly on religion in this race.”

There is much that could be said in response to and assessment of this approach; for starters, Dean was certainly correct to point out that there are a lot of Christians in this country who vote Democrat, even if this fact does seem to elude most members of the American media. For present purposes, however, the most important point to note is that this is yet another instance of theologizing politics. Rather than subjecting political positions and platforms to theological scrutiny, this approach seeks to take existing positions and apply a veneer of religious language; rather than reflecting on them theologically and seeking to evaluate them accordingly, it assumes a positive evaluation and simply presents them as positions supported by Christian teaching.

Now, this should not be taken as a partisan criticism, for this is not something of which Democrats alone are guilty. Indeed, Dr. Lakoff has at least this much right: the Democratic Party came late to the game on this one. For all the biblical language used in Republican rhetoric, and for all the identification of American evangelicals with the Republican Party, there’s really very little in the way of meaningful theological engagement with much of the party platform. Some issues, certainly, are grounded in biblical and theological statements (most notably abortion), but the argument at these points tends to be issue-specific, not part of any coherent whole with the rest of the platform; on issues such as tax policy or immigration policy, there has been a strong tendency among evangelical Republicans to baptize conservative positions as the properly Christian thing to believe without really evaluating them.

This set the stage for the Obama backlash among a certain subset of self-identified evangelicals in the 2008 election. He didn’t actually gain many evangelical votes, but the ones he did attract tended to be very loud; he also managed to appear sufficiently unthreatening that many other evangelicals felt it safe to indulge their displeasure with John McCain and stay home instead of voting.  Among both groups, there was the sense that the Republican Party has been happy in years past to pay lip service to evangelical concerns in order to raise money and turnout, but has done little or nothing to actually address those concerns in a meaningful way; party leaders haven’t taken voters’ faith seriously, but have only seen it as something to be used and manipulated to their own ends.  This sense has been growing stronger for some time, and in 2006 and 2008, it manifested in voter defections that returned the Democratic Party to power.

In my view, that sense is entirely fair, and entirely unsurprising.  The thing about theologized politics is that it essentially amounts to the subversion of faith for political ends, leaving the political platform—and party—in the dominant position; religious folk are welcomed at the fundraising counter and the volunteer meeting, but when it comes to the actual making of policy we’re expected to just shut up and soldier.  This is what evangelicals found with the GOP—which is why so many of us are backing away from the party, even if we’re just as conservative as we ever were (or maybe especially so, since the party definitely isn’t)—and it’s what those who bought the rhetoric and voted for the candidate of Hopeychangeyness are now finding with the Democrats as well.  It is, after all, in the nature of political parties to use whatever they can with as little return commitment as they can; anything freely offered will be freely taken, with no sense of reciprocal obligation.

As a matter both of faithful Christian discipleship and of intelligent political engagement, then—and make no mistake about it, the former requires the latter—the critical need at this time is for Christians in America to break out of this pattern and assert a new model for the interaction between faith and politics; and to do that, we must begin with ourselves.  We must begin, as I wrote last time,

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.

And on that ground and no other we must assert ourselves in the political life of this nation, not as docile sheep to be shorn for the advancement of the agendas and ambitions of politicians and parties, but as independent agents for the glory of God and the advancement of the work of his kingdom.