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.
Something to brighten up your Monday morning
Just because.
Skeptical conversations, part X: The coming kingdom of God
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
(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.
The incredible shrinking Obama?
So says Rex Murphy in today’s Globe and Mail, in a fascinating analysis of Barack Obama’s appeal (and one which tracks in some interesting ways with Shelby Steele’s analysis two months ago that I noted here).HT: Hot Air
To understand our economy, play Monopoly
So says Lawrence Lindsey, a former governor of the Federal Reserve, in a fascinating article titled “High Anxiety” that uses the rules of the game—and particularly, the comparison between the original rules and the modern variants by which most people play—to illustrate the current economic situation.
Reason for hope in Zimbabwe
I’ve been distracted enough the last little while that I missed the latest news from Zimbabwe—which is a shame, because there’s actually some good news for once: Robert Mugabe has agreed to share power. I suspect that if there hadn’t been a split in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), he wouldn’t have agreed on these terms, because his party, ZANU-PF, will actually have a minority of the 31 cabinet seats, but because three of those seats will go to a breakaway faction of the MDC, ZANU-PF will still have a plurality. Mugabe will continue as president, but Morgan Tsvangirai, head of the MDC, “will become prime minister and chair a council of ministers supervising the cabinet” if the agreement goes through. That “if,” of course, is the silver lining to this cloud, because it’s a very real if; just because Mugabe has signed the deal doesn’t necessarily mean he intends to comply with it in any meaningful way. As always, the Devil is in the details; it’s one thing to agree to give up cabinet ministries to the opposition, and quite another to let important ones go, and the agreement could still come apart in consequence. The MDC, though, is clear on what they want:
The two political rivals met on Saturday and agreed to share out the cabinet posts. The powerful state security ministry was abolished while the justice portfolio was split into two and a new prisons department was created.The MDC wants to take control of ministries of home affairs in charge of the police, local government to oversee councils, one of the justice ministries, foreign affairs and the finance ministry—giving it responsibility for rescuing the shattered economy.In return, the MDC is ready to leave Mugabe’s ruling Zanu PF in charge of other key ministries, including defence.
Unfortunately, with Mugabe telling members of his party that the agreement is a “humiliation” and insisting, “We remain in the driving seat,” he’s trying to avoid ceding any of the major ministries to the MDC; his aim is to try to give the appearance of power-sharing without giving up any real power. The agreement was brokered by Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, and now that Mbeki’s party (the African National Congress) has forced him to resign, Mugabe might be thinking that he can break the agreement and get away with it. One thing is certain: the MDC won’t go along with a farce.
Nelson Chamisa, a spokesman for Tsvangirai’s MDC faction told the private SW Radio Africa Mugabe and Zanu PF wanted to take “all the key ministries, literally rendering the government exclusive . . . and we are not going to countenance that approach.”
No more they should. Yes, Mugabe can always refuse to cooperate, let the deal collapse and blame it on Tsvangirai, but not without consequences to himself. Inflation in Zimbabwe is over 11 million percent, and the country is in dire need of outside help—which it isn’t going to get if he goes back on this agreement. Keep praying for Zimbabwe, that the opposition would have the courage and will they need to stand strong, and that this time, Mugabe would fold.HT: Itayi
Another collapse is looming
According to a story on the Times website,
Four years after it was last cleaned and repaired Michelangelo’s statue of David in Florence is “at risk of collapse”, according to a restoration expert.
Apparently, the problem is partly the result of vibrations from traffic, both car traffic outside the Galleria dell Accademia and foot traffic within, and partly the consequence of Michelangelo’s decision to make a really big statue out of really bad marble. Here’s hoping they can figure out some way to keep David intact.
Barack Obama runs from his record
It appears that Gianna Jessen’s ad has really rattled the Obama campaign.
They’ve now come up with an ad in response (one which tries to blame John McCain for running the original ad, even though it was produced by a different organization):
There’s just one problem with the Obama campaign’s ad: his record. Here’s what he had to say on the subject when he wasn’t running for office (scroll down to p. 87):
[I]f we’re placing a burden on the doctor that says you have to keep alive a previable child as long as possible and give them as much medical attention as—as is necessary to try to keep that child alive, then we’re probably crossing the line in terms of unconstitutionality.
Personally, I agree with Yuval Levin on this one:
So a child who has been born and is living and breathing outside the womb can’t get medical care because by some legal definition he or she is “pre-viable”? That doesn’t sound like always supporting medical care to protect infants.
And here’s audio of another statement by Sen. Obama on the issue:
The truth here is that
Barack Obama defended infanticide in the Illinois statehouse. He voted against protecting children who survive abortions—viable children were left to die in a Illinois hospital and he would not take legislative action to make that a clear criminal act.
In other words: Sen. Obama, Gianna Jessen isn’t lying—you are. Which is odd, because doesn’t the Left always tell us that pro-lifers are “extremists” who are “out of touch” and “out of the mainstream”? If that’s so, why wouldn’t you stand by your vote and your record, instead of running from it?
On the roots of the crisis and the way forward
Note: I don’t believe our economy is in crisis. To be sure, times are tougher than we’ve grown used to seeing them, but they’re still a long way better than the true crisis points this country has seen in the past. John McCain is right to say that the fundamentals of our economy are still strong; the cracks we’re seeing are real and significant and need to be repaired, but they aren’t going to bring the house down. Certain financial institutions are in crisis due to some very poor decision-making, and this is causing problems for the economy, but I think we need to be careful not to overstate the problem.Rather than panicking, I think we need to ask ourselves where this mess came from and how we’re going to get out of it—and, this being an election year, who’s likeliest to provide the leadership we need. Obviously, I believe that’s Sen. McCain; despite all the disagreements I have with him, he has a record of seeing problems coming and trying to address them, even when such actions aren’t popular. He did it in Iraq, with his advocacy of the surge beginning in 2003, and for all his deprecation of his economic knowledge, he did it in the area of economic policy as well.On my read, the biggest root of the troubles we’re facing has been maladept government involvement in the economy; this has produced a feedback loop in which lobbyists have used money to win passage for federal subsidies of their corporations which have, among other things, given them more money to expand their influence. In 2002, bipartisan legislation in Congress, co-sponsored by Sen. McCain and Rep. Dick Gephardt, would have created a Corporate Subsidy Reform Commission to address this issue. As Peter Wallison tells the story,
The purpose of this group was to eliminate what McCain called “corporate welfare.”In a statement at the time, he noted that “There are more than 100 corporate subsidy programs in the federal budget today, requiring the federal government to spend approximately $65 billion a year . . . These programs provide special benefits or advantages to specific companies or industries at the expense of hard-working taxpayers. In years past, Congress has insisted that it would eliminate the existence of this corporate welfare, but virtually no such program has been eliminated . . . This bill aims to remove the special treatment given to politically powerful industries . . .”
Though not aimed explicitly or solely at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they definitely stood in the crosshairs of this bill; thus Wallison can say that
as far back as 2002, John McCain realized that underlying what would ultimately become the Fannie and Freddie crisis was the willingness of Congress to provide financial support to private corporations. And he was willing to take on powerful interests to stop this process. If his bill had resulted in action at that time, the unprecedented steps that the Secretary of the Treasury and Congress had to take in the last two weeks would not have been necessary.
Though Congress refused to pass the bill, that wasn’t the end of such efforts; indeed, with respect to the government-backed lenders at the center of the crisis in our financial institutions, it was only the beginning. On September 11, 2003, the Bush administration proposed
the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt—is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.
Unfortunately, Congress rejected this proposal as well; Congressional Democrats led the fight against it as an unwarranted threat to low-income and affordable housing programs.
Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.“These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. “The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed. “I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.
It’s worth remembering, as these old quotes point out, that it wasn’t all bad motives that created this mess; what people are now calling “irresponsible lending practices” were commended at the time as creative efforts to undo decades of racism in the lending industry and enable poor people to enjoy “the benefits of home ownership.” It worked fine as long as housing values continued to go up; it’s just that most people didn’t think about what would happen when housing prices began to drop.To give Sen. McCain credit, though, he recognized that there was a problem, and in May 2005 he and others took another whack at it:
Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae’s regulator reported that the company’s quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were “illusions deliberately and systematically created” by the company’s senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. In the case of Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae’s former chief executive officer, OFHEO’s report shows that over half of Mr. Raines’ compensation for the 6 years through 2003 was directly tied to meeting earnings targets. The report of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac.The OFHEO report also states that Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator’s examination of the company’s accounting problems. This report comes some weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004 to 2005. These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform.For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs–and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO’s report this week does nothing to ease these concerns. In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO’s report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay.I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.
They didn’t; in fact, thanks in large part to Christopher Dodd and his fellow Democrats, the bill never even came to a vote in the Senate. (NB: this was one of those issues the Obama campaign has been lamenting on which Sen. McCain “voted with Bush.” On this one, it doesn’t mean Sen. McCain wasn’t the maverick reformer fighting Washington business as usual—it means President Bush was.) This was highly unfortunate, because as Ed Morrissey correctly says,
In this speech, McCain managed to predict the entire collapse that has forced the government to eat Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with Bear Stearns and AIG. He hammers the falsification of financial records to benefit executives, including Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson, both of whom have worked as advisers to Barack Obama this year. McCain also noted the power of their lobbying efforts to forestall oversight over their business practices. He finishes with the warning that proved all too prescient over the past few days and weeks.
Still, Sen. McCain is never one to give up; and so the next year, he tried again; as the Washington Post pointed out,
In 2006, he pushed for stronger regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—while Mr. Obama was notably silent. cIf Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole,” Mr. McCain warned at the time.
Unfortunately, Congress once again did not act, and Sen. McCain was dead right about the consequences.And what’s Barack Obama’s record in this area? Not great, as the McCain campaign has started pointing out:
As noted, Sen. Obama didn’t back Sen. McCain’s efforts to reform the system. Given what the Center for Responsive Politics discovered, this isn’t surprising. When they tallied up the contributions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have made to members of Congress over the last 20 years, it was no surprise whose name was #1 on the list: over the last 20 years, Sen. Dodd, the ranking Democrat (and thus current chair) on the Senate Banking Committee, collected $165,400 from the corporations’ PACs and employees. The surprise was who placed second: in less than four years in office, Sen. Obama had already raked in $126, 349 (most of that from corporate employees) to pass John Kerry and hit #2 with a bullet.
As well, Sen. Obama has made a place for ex-Fannie Mae CEOs Franklin Raines and James Johnson; according to the Washington Post, he’s been “seeking [Raines’] advice on mortgage and housing policy matters” (never mind that Raines “stepped down as Fannie Mae‘s chief executive under the shadow of a $6.3 billion accounting scandal”), while Johnson was the head of his VP search committee. The Obama campaign didn’t like it when the McCain campaign pointed out this connection with Raines:
and I’m sure they won’t like this ad focusing on James Johnson, either:
but though they’re getting increasingly fond of calling any sort of criticism “lies,” even their allies recognize that that won’t wash. The Obama campaign has also tried to respond by distorting Sen. McCain’s record in this area, but even the Washington Post caught them on it:
TO LISTEN to Sen. Barack Obama, Sen. John McCain is a Johnny-come-lately to the cause of regulating financial markets. “He has consistently opposed the sorts of common-sense regulations that might have lessened the current crisis,” Mr. Obama said in New Mexico yesterday. “When I was warning about the danger ahead on Wall Street months ago because of the lack of oversight, Senator McCain was telling the Wall Street Journal—and I quote—‘I’m always for less regulation.’”But the full quotation from Mr. McCain’s March interview with the Journal’s editorial board belies Mr. Obama‘s one-sided rendition. The Republican candidate went on to say, “But I am aware of the view that there is a need for government oversight. I think we found this in the subprime lending crisis—that there are people that game the system and if not outright broke the law, they certainly engaged in unethical conduct which made this problem worse. So I do believe that there is role for oversight.”
The fact of the matter is, Sen. Obama likes to talk about himself as an agent of change, but when it came to efforts to bring change to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before it was too late, he was firmly ranged on the side of the status quo. When it comes to the AIG bailout, he seems to be trying to take both sides at once; one might be forgiven the sense that he doesn’t understand the situation well enough to take a position on it, given that his initial statement got the company’s name wrong. Unfortunately, the decision of the Democratic leadership of Congress to declare themselves incompetent to deal with the crisis and refuse to address it isn’t going to help that perception any; it will be hard for them to live down this opening from the Bloomberg News report:
The Democratic-controlled Congress, acknowledging that it isn’t equipped to lead the way to a solution for the financial crisis and can’t agree on a path to follow, is likely to just get out of the way.
Ouch. Under ordinary circumstances, now that Sen. McCain has started talking in more detail about his economic plan, you’d expect the Democrats to start going after him about it; but that abdication of their responsibilities is going to make it hard for them to do so. After all, at least he has a plan—and if the media can’t drown him out, the contrast alone is going to make him look like the real leader in this race.Update: I appreciate what the Anchoress has to say about the Congressional “leadership”:
If the Democrats have forgotten how to lead, then they need to look to NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani on 9/11, and pattern some leadership based upon how he responded to the challenges of that day. It’s the most basic lesson of leadership, but the one that matters the most: When there is a serious problem, you acknowledge the gravity of the situation, and then—even if you are discreetly looking for outside expertise to address the crisis—you STAY WHERE YOU ARE and you deal straight with the nation, and keep them apprised of the rescue and recovery operation. It’s okay to admit you don’t know anything . . . but you tell the nation, “we’re going to come through this, and we’ll be the stronger for it; we’re going to work together to make sure everything that needs seeing to is seen to. We are here; we know this is bad. Trust us to understand what you need. Yes, this is frightening for us, too, but we are here to lead; we will not abandon you.”The Democrats are saying they can’t do that. They’re saying they have not the tools to lead. To obstruct, yes, to vilify, yes, to blame, yes…but not to actually lead us out of an economic ground zero. They’re admitting they can’t lead us out of the hole; they’re just running to make sure they can stay safe.I am very glad to read Reid’s admission that “No one knows what to do” . . . except it’s not really true. . . . [John McCain] is showing leadership. He is not telling you “we don’t know what to do.” He is not telling you “there are no answers.” He’s telling you this is going to be hard, but we’re going to get through it. He is being Rudy Giuliani on 9/11.
And here’s a helpful analysis of where we need to go from here.