Monthly Archives: September 2008

The Ayers/Obama campaign to radicalize education

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Maybe this is why the Obama campaign tried to stop Stanley Kurtz from delving into the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge—they didn’t want him telling people what the CAC was all about:

The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn). . . .The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC’s first year. He also served on the board’s governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative. . . .Mr. Ayers’s defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.Mr. Ayers is the founder of the “small schools” movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to “confront issues of inequity, war, and violence.” He believes teacher education programs should serve as “sites of resistance” to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his “Teaching Toward Freedom,” is to “teach against oppression,” against America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming “guilt by association.” Yet the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

The fact that Ayers did plant bombs, and remains unrepentant about doing so, only makes it more of a story; this is why, before a national audience, Sen. Obama and his media subsidiary have done their best to keep it out of sight. It’s worth noting, however, that when he was just running in Chicago, Barack Obama offered his work running CAC as a major qualification for office:

Testimonial

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“There is one person who’s been consistent on reform issues, and that’s been John McCain.”Says who? President Bush? Dick Cheney? Mitt Romney? Sarah Palin?Nope—Barack Obama:

HT: Power Line (with thanks for a positive thought)

Wondering where John McCain’s wits went

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I’d figured that the crisis around Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be a hanging curveball right in Sen. McCain’s wheelhouse, since (as I pointed out at some length a few days ago) he’s been warning us for years that this was coming; all he really had to do was stand up and say so. Instead, we’ve seen a pretty erratic week from him. I think John Podhoretz overstates things a little, but not much, when he writes,

Substantively, this has been the worst week of John McCain’s campaign—and I mean since its beginning, in early 2007. With a perfect argument to make on his own behalf—that he saw the problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and called them out in 2005 while others were still angling for their largesse, and that therefore he possesses the experience and demonstrated the kind of leadership and insight that are required for the presidency—he instead flailed about. Calling for the firing of Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Chris Cox? Right there, in that act, we got a glimpse of why senators so often make bad presidential candidates. From time immemorial, senators haughtily acts as though the dismissal of executive branch officials is a form of policymaking when it is almost always the opposite—an act of scapegoating.As SEC chairman, Cox only possesses the regulatory authority granted to him by acts of Congress, i.e., by senators like McCain. Cox did not and does not possess the regulatory authority to halt the creation of the poorly collateralized securities that nearly brought Wall Street down last week. But the naming and pursuit of villains was McCain’s gut instinct last week, as he seemed to attempt to don Teddy Roosevelt’s mantle as the crusader against “malefactors of great wealth.”

This sort of thing is the reason why so many of us on the conservative side have long had reservations about Sen. McCain; that shot at Chairman Cox was completely uncalled-for, unjustified, and counterproductive. (If he really is serious about the egregious Andrew Cuomo to replace him, that would be even worse.) I don’t think it’s really likely that he will “blow the debate and lose the election” as a consequence, even if he doesn’t snap out of grandstanding mode and “start talking like a serious-minded person with a sophisticated sense of the stakes” again, since I don’t think Barack Obama will be in a position to take any real advantage if he doesn’t; but he certainly won’t help himself any—and of greater importance, he won’t be doing the country any favors either.

My favorite Justice

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I meant to post this months ago, back when Phil first posted these on The Thinklings, but somehow or other I forgot to do so. I have tremendous admiration for Justice Antonin Scalia as a brilliant moral and legal thinker, a man of deep and strong principles, and a Catholic of deep Christian faith. I also appreciate his wit, and from what I’ve seen of him, I think he’d be an enjoyable and fascinating person to know. He is, of course, unpopular with the Left, since a) they don’t agree with him on much and b) he doesn’t pull his punches (and in fact, he often lands them pretty hard); but like him or hate him, he’s truly one of the major figures in the history of American constitutional jurisprudence, and so deserves to be considered and understood on his own terms.

The speech they wouldn’t let Sarah Palin give

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is a splendid piece of work; I suspect part of the reason the Obama campaign didn’t want her to give it is that it would have done a lot to burnish her foreign policy and national security credentials in the minds of anyone who heard it. Kudos to the New York Sun for posting the speech text in full.Update: The Jerusalem Post has published an excellent analysis of Gov. Palin’s speech and of the effects of her disinvitation, which is well worth your time. I was particularly struck by the concluding paragraph, which is clearly intended as a hammer blow:

[The Jewish Democrats who disinvited Palin] should be ashamed. The Democratic Party should be ashamed. And Jewish American voters should consider carefully whether opposing a woman who opposes the abortion of fetuses is really more important than standing up for the right of already born Jews to continue to live and for the Jewish state to continue to exist. Because this week it came to that.

Is David Axelrod trying to smear Sarah Palin?

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Between Dr. Rusty Shackelford’s research, posted at The Jawa Report, and Ace’s followup, it sure looks like it; Patterico says pointedly, “In the criminal law business, we call evidence like that ‘consciousness of guilt.’” Didn’t Barack Obama promise us a new politics that would move us away from partisan smears and character assassination?Looks like his campaign didn’t get the memo.HT: Hugh HewittUpdate: Ethan Winner is trying to fall on his sword, claiming he acted alone and without any involvement of the Obama campaign; as Ace points out, there are strong reasons not to believe him, especially given the existing relationship between Axelrod and the Winners’ firm. Certainly, everyone’s behavior here is highly suspicious.

Alienation, reconciled

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And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless
and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed
in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.—Colossians 1:21-23 (ESV)Paul describes the effects of human sin and the work of Christ in a number of ways across his letters, to enable us to see it from different angles; unfortunately, the church has historically tended to pick and choose, to grab one description and lose sight of the rest. Thus, for instance, there are a lot of people who are quite fluent in the legal language which Paul uses elsewhere (which gives us the term “justification”) but miss the relational language which he uses here, talking about alienation and reconciliation. That’s too bad, because this is language which resonates with many people in our culture, and which helps us to understand ourselves and what Christ has done for us in ways that we might not otherwise catch.The truth is, the alienating effects of sin run in several directions. First, it alienates us from God; our sin separated us from him, breaking that relationship beyond our ability to repair—and indeed, beyond our ability even to desire to do so. Look at the old pagan religions, and you’ll see that they’re founded on fear; we take for granted this idea of a loving, caring God whom we can come to know on friendly terms, whom we can trust and on whom we can rely, but that’s not an idea people ever came up with. It took God even to give us the idea, because our sin had estranged us from him to that great an extent. Second, to be alienated from God is to be alienated from ourselves. It’s God who made us and who alone knows us as we really are; it’s God who holds us in his hand, and in his mind—we continue to exist only because he remembers us to ourselves. It’s God who is the source of all good things, including all the good gifts we possess. As a consequence, we cannot know ourselves truly, at least at the deepest level, if we don’t know him; we can figure out a great many things about ourselves, but we’ll always figure some of them wrong, whether just by mistake or out of our desire to believe ourselves better (or different) than we really are. What’s more, there will always be things about ourselves that we won’t be able to make sense of, and currents in our souls that run too deep for us even to see, though we may sense their effects. This is why we invented psychologists and psychiatrists and social workers, and why we conjured up Sigmund Freud so he could invent psychoanalysts, so they could tell us some of the nonsensical truths about ourselves that we would never have wit enough to see on our own; and even so, even at our best, we remain strangers in our own minds. Only God in Christ has the ability to reverse that alienation and restore us to ourselves; only in him can true healing be found.Third, since we were estranged from God, who is the source of all that is good in us, and since we were estranged from ourselves as a consequence, we were estranged from each other as well. We could build relationships across the divides between us as best we were able, friendships and marriages and families and business partnerships, and often, we did pretty well; but in our own strength, even the strongest relationships we can create are fairly fragile. The vagaries of life can break them, our own sinfulness can cause them to collapse, and even if everything else goes well, death brings them to an inevitable end. And even those who have the most and closest friends know far more people to whom they’re not close, some of whom may be rivals and competitors, and some of whom might even be true enemies. And beyond that, we divide ourselves up in myriad ways, companies and teams, political parties and ethnic groups, states and nations, and we fight with each other. War, of course, is one form of that—but economic competition is another, and sports yet a third, and politics a fourth.We as fallen human beings need reconciliation; we need peace with God, with ourselves, and with each other, and we can’t do it in our own strength. This world is never going to find a peace treaty to end all wars, and there will never be any such thing as a post-partisan political candidate, any more than there will ever be an economy where no company ever goes under or a sports league where every team ties for the championship. It’s just not in us. As Paul says, our wicked works prove that. It’s not just about life after death; Jesus didn’t just come so that after we die, everything would be good, though that’s certainly part of the gift he’s given us. More than that, though, he came to bring the reconciliation we need in this life. He came to remove the barrier of sin that isolates and alienates us, and to heal the breaches it created. He came to restore our relationship with God so that we could once again call him Father; he came to free us from the distorting burden of slavery to sin that warps and mars our souls; he came to bring reconciliation between us, that we might learn to love our enemies and do good to those who harm us. Indeed, he came to bring reconciliation to the whole created order, which has been broken and sent spinning off course and out of tune by our sin, to heal the damage we have done, to restore its harmony and set it right.He’s done this, Paul says, “in the body of his flesh by his death.” The one who is the image of the invisible God, the one who was God become human, the Lord of the universe and head of the church, in whom and through whom and for whom are all things, the one who holds all things together, hung bleeding on a cross in shock and agony until his heart stopped. This is the central fact of our faith, I think, taken together with the resurrection, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself by taking the overflowing cup of human sin with all its agony and draining that cup to the very dregs.This is what Paul wants the Colossians to understand, that there is simply no room for their delusions that they can contribute anything to their own salvation; the sacrifice of Jesus is so immense, in the awe-striking glory of who he is and the truly awe-full reality of the price he paid, that there is nothing we can add to it. The price he paid and the work he accomplished on the cross was sufficient for everything; it was truly an infinite sacrifice, the work of infinite love, the gift of infinite grace, and that sacrifice, that work, that gift, is sufficient. It is enough. Whatever may come, whatever may happen, whatever we may do, it is always enough; and it only is enough. It is Christ, by his work on the cross, who makes us holy and blameless in the eyes of God, able to stand in his presence with no reason for guilt or reproach; no matter how good we might be, we can’t live up to that standard, nor will we ever be able to on our own. We can’t earn our way there—and we don’t have to. In Christ, we have been given that status that we can’t achieve for ourselves; he took all our sin on himself on the cross and paid the price for it there, and gave us his righteousness in exchange.Now, you might have noticed that in verse 22, Paul says that Jesus has done this—“you who once were alienated . . . he has now reconciled in his body of flesh”—but then in verse 23, he says, “if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast.” What’s going on here? Does this mean that you can lose your salvation? There are those who argue that, of course, but no, that’s not what this means. The work of Christ on the cross is finished, it is completed, once and for all. At that moment, salvation was accomplished for all those who belong to him; it cannot be undone, and God isn’t going back on it. Paul isn’t turning around and casting any doubts on that, as if he were somehow lessening the work of Christ. Rather, what he’s doing is making a point that Jesus also made in Matthew 7 when he said, talking of false prophets, “You will know them by their fruits.” If we’ve been saved, if we’ve been reconciled through the work of Christ on the cross, if his Spirit is at work in us, that’s going to have certain clear effects in our lives; thus Jesus could go on to say, “Every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.” One of the good fruit that we bear if we’re spiritually healthy—which is to say, if we’ve received the new life of God in Christ by the power of his Holy Spirit—is perseverance: if our salvation is real, we don’t walk away from it. We may drift at times, but in the end Jesus always pulls us back by his Spirit. He is faithful, and he will not let us go.

Skeptical conversations, part X: The coming kingdom of God

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Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-IX here. Also, I’ve updated the credo Wordle post.

R: I believe it was Churchill who once observed that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others; I think the same applies to the presbyterian form. Not much of an accolade? Perhaps. But it’s still a human structure after all, and still human beings running it, and so nothing you can do is going to make it perfect. Really, to form a perfect government you need to find a perfect person and give them all the authority. The further you get from that, the higher the minimal degree of imperfection in the system—and the less damage any one person’s sin can do, and the more chances there are to fix whatever problems may arise.

You see, there’s this split view of the church, in a way. You look at it from one angle and it’s a group of recovering sinners who sometimes do things beautifully and sometimes make big mistakes; and it’s terribly easy, down in the trenches of the day-to-day, to lose sight of the big picture and forget that we’re all headed somewhere. But then sometimes it’s possible to step back and look at the bigger picture, to get a sense of the church mystical, “spread out through space and time and terrible as an army with banners,” as I think Lewis has the demon Screwtape say. We need that change of perspective; if nothing else, we need it for the reminder that we are a pilgrim people, a church on the way, that we are headed for the kingdom of God.

A: This is the second time you’ve said that. Are you ready to explain yourself now?

R: Yes. The kingdom of God refers to the time when he will reign unchallenged over everything (it doesn’t mean “kingdom” in the sense that we usually use it, as a defined land with borders). It’s a future reality, as clearly we don’t see God as the unchallenged ruler in this world, but at the same time much of what Jesus taught indicates that the kingdom of God had come into the world through his presence and work—so, for instance, he says, “The kingdom of God is among you.” It’s both already here and not yet here.

The best analogy is the one used by Oscar Cullman, a Swiss NT scholar, who compared the coming of the kingdom to the Allied victory in WW II and the difference between D-Day and V-E Day: with the success of the Normandy invasion, the war was really over; Hitler would have been wisest to sue for peace at that point. But he refused to give up even though all was inevitably lost, and so the war continued. The war was won on June 6, 1944, but that victory was not consummated until May 8, 1945—almost a year later. In the same way, the kingdom of God arrived in the person of Christ and the decisive battle was won in his death and resurrection, but the victory has yet to be consummated; that is still in the future, because though the enemy is beaten, he will fight for as long as he possibly can.

The church is a sign of the kingdom of God, a sign that the future kingdom has broken into the present, because the church is a body of people who have stepped outside this world order and are taking our marching orders from the future.

A: Would you call the church a “new world order,” then?

R: Let’s not go there. As I was saying, the proclamation of the message that Jesus is Lord produces a response, which is the work of the Holy Spirit, and that creates the covenant community of the church; the church then draws its purpose from the activity of God in the world, in the ways I talked about earlier. It is the company of those who bow in the present to the kingdom of God, and so looks fundamentally to the future when that kingdom will come in full. This is important, for a couple of reasons. One, it’s the reason why we are called to live holy lives.

A: Give things up now, get the reward later?

R: In part, but not just that. The reward, after all, is the life of the kingdom, and that’s what we’re called to live now. It’s harder, of course, because living that life now is countercultural, it’s in conflict with the system of this world, which is under the Devil’s thumb; but part of the reward is coming to know the joys of the life of the kingdom in this world. That’s one reason why it’s important to keep our eye on the goal. The other is that the kingdom is our promise and our hope in times of suffering and injustice. We have the promise that all will be made right, that God sees our suffering and that it will all be worth it in the end.

A third point is that the hope of the kingdom sets us free from the fear of death, because we know that death is not the end; rather, death is the point at which we pass from this world into eternity.

A: If I understood you correctly, you don’t believe that the soul is immortal and separate from the body. If that’s so, and if death is the point of transition into eternal existence, why aren’t people resurrected as soon as they die? I’ve been to a few funerals, and there’s been a body at every one of them.

R: We aren’t resurrected individually; rather, all those who die in Christ will be resurrected together at the Second Coming.

A: So if you pass into eternity at death but aren’t resurrected until later, what are you in between?

R: Outside of time. From the perspective of God’s eternity, there is no wait in between.

A: So you die at one point in time, are resurrected at another point, but those are the same point.

R: I’m not sure I’d put it exactly that way (though maybe I would); I’m just saying that it seems to me that from a perspective outside our time stream, there isn’t a problem. Luther taught the doctrine of “soul sleep,” that the soul sleeps in between death and resurrection, but I really don’t think that’s necessary. I should note, by the way, that the resurrection body is a new, improved body—it isn’t that God will reconstitute the atoms that made up our body, but rather that our bodies will be made new, just as our lives have been made new and as all creation will be made new.

A: If I may change the subject, what about those horrible popular novels—the “Left Behind” series and others of that sort?

R: Ever read any of them?

A: The “Left Behind” books? I picked one up in a bookstore, out of curiosity, and read a bit. They make Grisham look like Dostoevsky.

R: That’s too harsh, I think, but I’ll grant they’re far from great literature. That’s not really my concern with them, though. I think those books, and others that offer a similar view of the last days, are based on rather poor exegesis—an overly concrete reading of Revelation and other texts that really doesn’t try too hard to understand these texts in their proper context—and as such, I think they offer a rather distorted view of the end times. That’s not necessarily a criticism of the broader theological position they hold, which is a form of premillennialism, but of the way they present it.

A: What’s “premillennialism”?

R: There are three basic positions dealing with the chronology of the end times, and they are distinguished by their understanding of the millennium, which is referenced in Revelation 20:4-6: “I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given au­thority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony for Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or his image and had not received his mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with him for a thousand years.”

One position is postmillennialism, which is sort of the theological equivalent of a belief in progress: the church is going to succeed in converting the world to Christ; peace will prevail, evil will be banished, and the reign of Christ in the hearts of humanity will be universal. After a while—the thousand years may be literal or symbolic—Satan will launch a revolt, and Jesus will return, squash him forever, judge humanity, and reign unchallenged from then on. Besides being unduly optimistic, this view doesn’t fit Jesus’ own statements about the last days, which indicate that events on earth will not be going well at the time of his return.

Another position is amillennialism, which understands the millennium symbolically; there will not be a literal reign of Christ on earth. This is certainly reasonable, as Revelation is loaded with symbolic language, but there does not seem to be any consensus as to what that thousand-year reign might symbolize—and to me, none of the answers offered seems very convincing. More problematically, the amillennial interpretation runs into trouble when this passage references “the first resurrection,” since that is understood to happen before the millennium. Since every amillennial view understands the millennium as relating in some way to the period between Christ’s first coming and his second, “the first resurrection” can’t refer to the physical resurrection believers will experience when Christ comes again, and thus must be a spiritual resurrection. This interpretation seems to require straining the text beyond the normal bounds of interpretation to make it fit a pre-determined theory, and that is a problematic thing to do.

The most natural interpretation of Revelation 20 seems to be the premillennial one. Premillennialism understands the millennium as a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, but unlike the postmillennial view it holds that the church will not succeed in converting the world. Rather, the world will grow worse, and ultimately there will be a period of great tribulation, after which Christ will come, those who have been faithful to him will be raised from the dead, and he will reign on earth for a period—whether a literal thousand years or not, I don’t know. At some point, however, Satan will mount one last attack and be defeated forever. At that point will come the second resurrection, of those who have not yet been raised from the dead, and the final judgment.

The “Left Behind” books are premillennial in their understanding. They also posit the theory that Jesus will return again twice: once at the beginning of the period of great tribulation to take his people out of the world (this is called the rapture), and once at its end to wrap things up. In support of their doctrine of the rapture, those who take this position cite 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17: “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.” I think, though, that this is wishful thinking by Christians who don’t want to suffer. Nowhere in Scripture does it suggest that Jesus will return twice, for one thing; for another, this passage just says that we will meet Christ in the air—it does not say that we will leave with him. It could mean that we’ll meet him in the air as a welcoming party for his arrival on earth.

Rather, I believe that the church will go through the great tribulation, because it makes no sense to me that God would remove his people from the earth when they would be needed most, and that Christ will return again, once, at the end of that period. He will preserve his people in the midst of that period, just as he preserved Noah’s family through the great flood, but he will not remove the church. When Jesus returns, we will meet him in the air, yes—but as a welcoming party, and we will return to earth in his train.

A: I think I don’t know enough to make sense of the alternatives—though as you described postmillennialism, it sounded rather implausible to me. It seems that the central thrust of your position is that life will get very bad, but the church will win through.

R: Yes, and I think that’s the most important point. The details draw enough argument that it’s necessary to articulate a position on end-times chronology, and some of them really do make a difference—between postmillennialism and premillennialism, for instance, you have the difference between optimism and a more pessimistic view; and yet you also have the belief in a rapture, which allows some premillennialists to consign the rest of the world to the tribulation and not worry about it for themselves. That makes a difference, too. But the most basic point is just what you’ve said: the promise that if we are faithful to Christ, he is faithful to us and will bring us through all right by the power of his Spirit.

And then at the end comes the Last Judgment. I said earlier that I believe in Hell, so I’m not really saying anything new here. All that we have ever done and said and thought will be open for all to see, and we will be called to account for all of it; and then the choice we made in this life, for or against God, will be fixed into eternity. Those who have been faithful to God will be with him in the new creation, while those who have rejected him will be sent to Hell.

As C. S. Lewis put it in his book The Great Divorce, there are only two kinds of people in this world: those who say to God, “Your will be done,” and those to whom God finally says, “Yourwill be done.” Hell will be a place of God’s wrath, but at its core it will be the place of exclusion from fellowship with God. It will not be, however, a place where Satan reigns and God is not present; God will be just as present there as anywhere else in creation—but there will be no fellowship with him. Those in Hell will be in a state of complete estrangement and alienation from him, themselves and each other, and so the presence and love of God will be not a joy but a stabbing agony. God does not desire this for anyone, but it is his final act of respect for human freedom to allow those who reject him to have for eternity what they chose in this life.

A: But God is in control of that choice.

R: Yes, because he chose whom he would save. But those who reject him still do so of their own free will. God is sovereign in everything, but human beings are still free to choose as we will.

A: If God is sovereign in everything, why doesn’t everyone choose to serve him?

R: Do you want to change your mind and make that choice?

A: No.

R: Then how can you ask the question?

A: I’ll have to think about that.

R: While you’re thinking, one last point. I said earlier that I don’t exactly believe we go to Heaven. That’s because biblically we don’t leave this world for a different and better place; rather, the biblical picture is that this world becomes the different and better place. Once all this is accomplished, God will create the heavens and earth anew, as they should have been, with Jerusalem, the city of his temple, made new at their center. We will live eternally in the new creation, and nothing of the goodness of this world will be lost—not even that which is now lost.

Reconciliation

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(Isaiah 1:18-20; Colossians 1:21-23)

After the service last Sunday, Bryan Benjamin came up to me and asked, “Why didn’t you talk about Jesus being the firstborn from the dead?” You can always count on Bryan to ask those sorts of questions, which is one of the reasons I appreciate him. My answer, if you boil it down, was essentially that I didn’t want to preach another 45-minute sermon; I was trying to trace a line through the passage, and I could very easily have sent myself off on a long tangent if I’d tried to unpack that phrase, and so I just didn’t. I took it into account in everything I was saying, but I didn’t do so explicitly, or go into how it connected to the rest of the passage.

And yet, that doesn’t mean we can just ignore it and head on by. You might have noticed last Sunday—I didn’t explicitly talk about this, either, but you might have caught it—that in last week’s passage, there’s a movement to Paul’s thought from one part of the hymn to the next. He starts off talking about who Jesus is—“the image of the invisible God, firstborn before all creation”—and then moves from there to talk about his role in creation. That establishes Jesus’ supremacy—Christ is Lord over everything because it was all made through him and for him and he’s the one who holds it all together—which Paul then applies to the church. And with that, the language of the hymn pivots from talking about Jesus’ role in creating the world to talking about his role in re­-creating it, in making it new; and so where in verse 15, Paul calls Jesus the firstborn before all creation, in verse 18 he calls him the firstborn from the dead—in his resurrection in a fully restored human body, free from the effects of sin, we might also say, he is the firstborn of the new creation, the firstborn of the new heavens and the new earth. Just as he’s Lord over all creation because everything was made through him, so he is the head of the church and preeminent in all things because everything will be made new through him.

Which is good, because it needs to be. We need that—our world needs that. That’s why Paul concludes his great hymn by talking about Christ’s reconciling work, about how he made peace through the blood of his cross, and it’s why he continues by turning from what Christ did to why he did it, and why it had to be done. We were, he says, “estranged and hostile in mind”; we were alienated, as we talked about last week, in several ways. First, we were alienated from God; our sin had separated us from him, had broken that relationship beyond our ability to repair—and indeed, beyond our ability even to desire to do so. Look at the old pagan religions, and you’ll see that they’re founded on fear; we take for granted this idea of a loving, caring God whom we can come to know on friendly terms, whom we can trust and on whom we can rely, but that’s not an idea people ever came up with. It took God even to give us the idea, because our sin had estranged us from him to that great an extent.

Second, to be alienated from God is to be alienated from ourselves. It’s God who made us and who alone knows us as we really are; it’s God who holds us in his hand, and in his mind—we continue to exist only because he remembers us to ourselves. It’s Godd who is the source of all good things, including all the good gifts we possess. As a consequence, we cannot know ourselves truly, at least at the deepest level, if we don’t know him; we can figure out a great many things about ourselves, but we’ll always figure some of them wrong, whether just by mistake or out of our desire to believe ourselves better (or different) than we really are. What’s more, there will always be things about ourselves that we won’t be able to make sense of, and currents in our souls that run too deep for us even to see, though we may sense their effects. This is why we invented psychologists and psychiatrists and social workers, and why we conjured up Sigmund Freud so he could invent psychoanalysts, so they could tell us some of the nonsensical truths about ourselves that we would never have wit enough to see on our own; and even so, even at our best, we remain strangers in our own minds. Only God in Christ has the ability to reverse that alienation and restore us to ourselves; only in him can true healing be found.

Third, since we were estranged from God, who is the source of all that is good in us, and since we were estranged from ourselves as a consequence, we were estranged from each other as well. We could build relationships across the divides between us as best we were able, friendships and marriages and families and business partnerships, and often, we did pretty well; but in our own strength, even the strongest relationships we can create are fairly fragile. The vagaries of life can break them, our own sinfulness can cause them to collapse, and even if everything else goes well, death brings them to an inevitable end. And even those who have the most and closest friends know far more people to whom they’re not close, some of whom may be rivals and competitors, and some of whom might even be true enemies. And beyond that, we divide ourselves up in myriad ways, companies and teams, political parties and ethnic groups, states and nations, and we fight with each other. War, of course, is one form of that—but economic competition is another, and sports yet a third, and politics a fourth.

We as fallen human beings need reconciliation; we need peace with God, with ourselves, and with each other, and we can’t do it in our own strength. This world is never going to find a peace treaty to end all wars, and there will never be any such thing as a post-partisan political candidate, any more than there will ever be an economy where no company ever goes under or a sports league where every team ties for the championship. It’s just not in us. As Paul says, our wicked works prove that. It’s not just about life after death; Jesus didn’t just come so that after we die, everything would be good, though that’s certainly part of the gift he’s given us. More than that, though, he came to bring the reconciliation we need in this life. He came to remove the barrier of sin that isolates and alienates us, and to heal the breaches it created. He came to restore our relationship with God so that we could once again call him Father; he came to free us from the distorting burden of slavery to sin that warps and mars our souls; he came to bring reconciliation between us, that we might learn to love our enemies and do good to those who harm us. Indeed, he came to bring reconciliation to the whole created order, which has been broken and sent spinning off course and out of tune by our sin, to heal the damage we have done, to restore its harmony and set it right.

He’s done this, Paul says, “in the body of his flesh, through death.” This of course reaches back to what he said in verse 20, that Christ has “made peace through the blood of his cross”; Paul is driving this point home to the Colossians, hammering it home with repeated heavy blows. The one who is the image of the invisible God, the one who was God become human, the Lord of the universe and head of the church, in whom and through whom and for whom are all things, the one who holds all things together, hung bleeding on a cross in shock and agony until his heart stopped. This is the central fact of our faith, I think, together with the resurrection, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself by taking the overflowing cup of human sin with all its agony and draining that cup to the very dregs.

This is what Paul wants the Colossians to understand, that there is simply no room for their delusions that they can contribute anything to their own salvation; the sacrifice of Jesus is so immense, in the awe-striking glory of who he is and the truly awe-full reality of the price he paid, that there is nothing we can add to it. The price he paid and the work he accomplished on the cross was sufficient for everything; it was truly an infinite sacrifice, the work of infinite love, the gift of infinite grace, and that sacrifice, that work, that gift, is sufficient. It is enough. Whatever may come, whatever may happen, whatever we may do, it is always enough; and it only is enough. It is Christ, by his work on the cross, who makes us holy and blameless in the eyes of God, able to stand in his presence with no reason for guilt or reproach; no matter how good we might be, we can’t live up to that standard, nor will we ever be able to on our own. We can’t earn our way there—and we don’t have to. In Christ, we have been given that status that we can’t achieve for ourselves; he took all our sin on himself on the cross and paid the price for it there, and gave us his righteousness in exchange.

Now, you might have noticed that in verse 22, Paul says that Jesus has done this—“you who formerly were estranged . . . he has now reconciled in the body of his flesh”—but then in verse 23, he says, “Provided you remain firmly founded and stable in your faith.” What’s going on here? Does this mean that you can lose your salvation? There are those who argue that, of course, but no, that’s not what this means. The work of Christ on the cross is finished, it is completed, once and for all. At that moment, salvation was accomplished for all those who belong to him; it cannot be undone, and God isn’t going back on it. Paul isn’t turning around and casting any doubts on that, as if he were somehow lessening the work of Christ. Rather, what he’s doing is making a point that Jesus also made in Matthew 7 when he said, talking of false prophets, “You will know them by their fruits.” If we’ve been saved, if we’ve been reconciled through the work of Christ on the cross, if his Spirit is at work in us, that’s going to have certain clear effects in our lives; thus Jesus could go on to say, “Every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.” One of the good fruit that we bear if we’re spiritually healthy—which is to say, if we’ve received the new life of God in Christ by the power of his Holy Spirit—is perseverance: if our salvation is real, we don’t walk away from it. We may drift at times, but in the end Jesus always pulls us back by his Spirit.

This is the assurance we have in Christ, that whatever our own weaknesses or shortcomings, whatever the sins we wrestle with and however blatant or subtle they may be, our salvation doesn’t depend on us; it depends on him in whom we have put our faith and trust, and we can be certain that he is able to hold us safely and firmly in his arms through whatever may come, until at last he brings us home to him.