A couple weeks ago, Karl Rove had an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he asserted that “Mr. McCain is one of the most private individuals to run for president in history,” and argued that the Senator will have to set his reticence aside and open up to American voters if he wants to win in November. Rove has a point regarding what the electorate will want, and what stories are important for Sen. McCain to tell in the course of making his case to the voters; but what I think he fails to understand is that it’s not just a matter of being a naturally private person, as if he just needed to overcome his embarrassment and brag a little more. Sen. McCain’s reticence, I believe, goes to the heart of who he is.In the first place, it seems to me that he has a real aversion to making political capital out of things that are truly meaningful to him. The stories he’s told about his life during this campaign have been stories he’s told to explain himself, to help people understand him, not to make himself look good or play on voters’ emotions. Clearly, he would prefer to inspire voters by talking about honor, duty, patriotism and courage, not by bragging about what a wonderful person he is; the stories he’s told about himself have tended to be self-deprecating rather than self-exalting. Similarly, though by any normal definition you’d have to call Sen. McCain an evangelical conservative (and one with a strong personal testimony, at that), he’s been very resistant to leading with his faith, preferring to duck such questions or answer them sidelong. I respect that; I think using one’s faith for political gain, turning Jesus into a means to an end, is spiritually a risky thing at best. That said, however, running for office is an act of self-communication; if your relationship with Jesus is at the core of who you are and why you believe and do what you believe and do, then you have to tell people that in a way that they’ll understand. Though I think his theology is notably off at points, I don’t think he deserves the skepticism he’s received from other evangelicals; if he wants their active, involved support rather than just (most of) their votes, he’s going to need to find a way to make that clear.Second, I believe there’s another issue as well with regard to Sen. McCain’s military experience. I think I’ve written about this somewhere (though I can’t find it), but having grown up in a military family, I’ve spent a lot of time around combat veterans, some of whom were Vietnamese POWs. In all that time, I’ve noticed a clear pattern in the kind of stories I hear and the kind I don’t. I hear funny stories, and stories that show what a sharp pilot Commander X was, or how good a shiphandler Captain Y was; I hear stories as object lessons about leadership and doing your job right, and sometimes I hear stories about fellow officers sold up the river by the politicians. What I do not hear, and have never heard, are stories about the blood and guts of combat (for lack of a better phrase). My brother was with my father when he went to the Wall, and saw him break down; I have never seen that side of his experience, and I would be surprised if I ever do. Because, you see, I have never been there; I don’t understand, and I can’t.From my own observations, combat veterans rarely talk about that kind of thing except among their own, with those who don’t need to be told how it was because they already understand, because they, too, were there. That’s why I never trusted John Kerry, because he was the kind of man who could make political capital out of his medals, and out of turning on those with whom he had served; which told me that he’d only gone into the military for what he could get out of it. Fundamentally, he was a political officer, someone who had put on the uniform as a politician, and such people are not to be trusted.Sen. McCain, by contrast, went into the service for very different reasons, and served out of very different motives; and though he, too, went into politics after returning to civilian life, he has made very different (and much more limited) use of his military career in the pursuit of his political goals. Karl Rove is asking him to change that, and to cross a line that I suspect he might find not only difficult but even somewhat dishonorable to cross. I think Rove is right, that his campaign will need to find a way to do that if they’re going to run successfully; but I also think it might be asking too much of the Senator himself to tell those stories. Maybe their best option would be to get folks like Col. Bud Day to cris-cross the country and tell them for him.
In defense of the church, part III: Doctrine
There’s a strong anti-doctrinal spirit in parts of the church these days, as the impulse in this direction of oldline Protestant liberalism is being reinforced by Emergent types who are assiduously reinventing Walter Rauschenbusch; it’s a spirit that’s captured quite well in this video from Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis.
[10/23/15: The video is no longer available, as far as I can tell.]
I’m struck, in that video, by the blithe confidence with which people look into the camera and assert that their church has no doctrinal statement that anyone has to believe because everyone has their different opinions and they’re all valid, and that upholding anything as unchanging truth is a waste of time because Scripture is evolving, as if a) they’re obviously true, and b) doctrine is obviously a bad thing. The problem is, these statements don’t hold.
They don’t hold for three reasons. The first is that if you want Scripture to mean anything at all, it can’t mean that. You will not find “everyone has ideas and they’re all valid” in the Word of God. What you will find instead is Jesus declaring, “I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6); what you’ll find is Paul telling Timothy, “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:14-17). What you’ll find, in other words, is a strong concern through all Scripture that the church know and believe and uphold the truth, which in fact does not change, because truth is of God and God doesn’t change. If we actually want to follow Christ, that necessarily means that we need to be concerned to know and believe and proclaim the truth—and that in turn means that we do need doctrine, and an understanding of at least the most basic beliefs that we need to hold if we’re to follow where he’s actually going (as opposed to where we want to believe he’s going).
The second reason is that, as John Hatton has noted in a brilliant post on Confessing Evangelical, doctrine is necessary as the “constitution for a community.” He pulls this phrase from Columbia law professor Eben Moglen, the lawyer for the Free Software Foundation who helped draft (and enforce) the GNU General Public License; according to Moglen, that’s the primary purpose of free software licenses, not that they provide a platform for enforcement, but that they constitute (which is to say, create and give form to) a community with a given identity and purpose. Without that constitution,
groups arise within the community who, being ignorant of the principles on which the community is constituted, start to reject and work against those principles. They do not mean to undermine the community—quite the opposite; they consider they are strengthening it—but by undermining that community’s constitution it is inevitable that they will end up damaging the community itself.
This is a phenomenon with which the church is all too familiar, and it shows why there is a need to teach people the faith. Not because people need to know doctrine inside-out in order to be good Christians; not because it is a useful technique that is effective in building up individuals and the church; but because poorly-taught Christians may find themselves inadvertently undermining the constitution on which the church is built, by coming to reject doctrines they have never even known or understood in the first place. . . .
In addition, the free software movement and the church are both faced by numerous external opponents (variously, the world, the flesh, the devil, and Microsoft 😉 ), and ignorance of the constitution on which each community is founded makes it easier for those external opponents to damage that community and the individuals within it.
The key here is that those who reject doctrine (or conceive themselves to be doing so, anyway) do so because they misconstrue it as primarily regulatory in purpose, as if the main reason we have doctrines is so we can punish those who disagree. As Hatton, applying Moglen, shows, that’s wrong: the primary purpose of doctrine is formative, creating us as the people of God, as the kind of community God wants us to be. Set it aside, and you may be fine for a while, but ultimately you’ll find “poorly-taught Christians . . . inadvertently undermining the constitution on which the church is built, by coming to reject doctrines they have never even known or understood in the first place.” Who we are and how we live begins with and flows out of what we believe; we cannot be a unified community in Christ, we cannot serve God together as his people, in any faithful way for any length of time without holding at least our most important beliefs in common (such as who this God is we’re worshiping, and who this Jesus is we’re following, and why we’re doing this at all). As Rich Mullins summed up the matter in his song “Creed,”
I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am;
I did not make it—no, it is making me;
It is the very truth of God and not the invention of any man.
The third reason the statements I referenced above don’t hold is that they fail the Francis Schaeffer test: “Can you live them out?” You can’t; Solomon’s Porch can’t, and their video shows it. In the snippets from Doug Pagitt’s sermon (at least, I assume it’s Doug Pagitt preaching), he makes such statements as, “Ultimately, community that’s Christian means to be a community of love.” That’s a doctrinal statement. It makes no sense whatsoever without a complete doctrinal context that provides definitions (so that we know what words like “community,” “Christian,” and “love” mean; they aren’t self-evident) and goals (so that we know, for instance, why we value community, and why we want a community that’s Christian as opposed to some other kind), and it asserts something that we must believe: a Christian community is a community of love. On the basis of what they say, the folks at Solomon’s Porch ought to be completely happy if someone stood up at that point and said, “You’re wrong; that might have been true once, but it isn’t now”—but they wouldn’t. They might say, “all those ideas are important and valued,” but if someone tried to interrupt the message to insist that a Christian community is not a community of love, they would find out exactly how important and valued that idea isn’t.
And that is necessarily so. It has to be; because if they really believed their own sweeping statements and tried to live accordingly, they would find that the rejection of doctrine is a universal acid that dissolves community. And so, even as the folks in that video insist that all beliefs are welcome, they also say, “If Jesus were alive today, what would he be concerned about? Well, he’d be concerned about what I’m concerned about” (and therefore, by clear implication, you ought to be concerned about that, too). They’re not rejecting doctrine as such; they can’t, because they wouldn’t have a coherent community if they did. What they’re rejecting is any doctrinal authority except themselves—which ultimately ends in rejecting the authority and primacy of Jesus, and building a church that’s all about us and how wonderful we are.
This is, I believe, where the attack on doctrine comes from. People may say they’re attacking the church because it insists on believing specific things, but their overt complaint is in fact incoherent, and merely a mask for the real complaint: that the church is telling them things they don’t want to hear. That’s not all bad, nor is it necessarily unreasonable, since no church has all its doctrines right, and too many churches teach things which are harmful, or proclaim things in harmful ways; but the problem comes when we start to think that the church should only tell us what we want to hear, and only ask us to believe what we want to believe. That’s not the model we have from Jesus. Jesus spent a lot of time telling people things they didn’t want to hear, because it was what they needed to hear; if we as the church are to be faithful to his call, we must go and do likewise.
(NB: the last paragraph has been edited to more clearly and accurately express my point.)
“Breathe Deep the Breath of God”
(Genesis 2:4b-7, Ezekiel 37:1-14; Acts 2:1-13)
When you say the word “Pentecost,” most people probably think of Pentecostals; and if they know the stereotypes, that’s probably where their minds go, to images of people jumping over pews and swinging from the chandeliers. Like most stereotypes, that one has at least a grain of truth to it—I remember a service at a Pentecostal church in Queens in which, while our friend Ralph Johnson was preaching, one of the choir members jumped up, let out a scream, and took off running, doing laps around the sanctuary. The fact that Ralph just kept on preaching as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening suggested that, in fact, this wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. That sort of thing, if not usually that extreme, does tend to happen in churches that emphasize the power and work of the Holy Spirit, if they’re open to such occurrences; and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as the leaders are careful and diligent to weed out things which aren’t of God, rather than letting services devolve into “anything goes.”
The problem comes when, as too often happens, people begin to associate the work of the Spirit only with the more flamboyant phenomena, such as speaking in tongues. I don’t disbelieve in such things, and I don’t see that Scripture does either, but they’re only a very small and particular part of the Spirit’s work; to focus on them, to say that it’s only when people are speaking in tongues and falling over that the Spirit is moving, is to have a very skewed view of the matter. Unfortunately, that sort of view is all too common in some parts of the church—and just as unfortunately, it has tended to push others in the church into the equal and opposite error of denying the work of the Spirit. You can hardly blame folks for saying, “Well, if that’s what the Spirit does, I don’t want any part of it; I’ll just stick with God and Jesus, thanks”; but that, too, misses the real work of the Spirit, and skews our view of God, ourselves, and the church.
You see, as we’ve been talking about the fact that the work of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection was only completed in his ascension, we’ve also been pointing to another truth: the work of his ascension was only completed at Pentecost, when he poured out his Spirit on all who believed in him. In Jesus’ crucifixion, the price was paid for all our sin, leaving no penalty or punishment remaining; in his resurrection, the power of sin and death over this world and over us was broken, freeing us to receive the life of Christ; in his ascension, Jesus opened the way for us as human beings to enter heaven, and took up his place as the one who intercedes for us before the throne of God; and in giving us his Spirit, at Pentecost, everything he did became for us, applied specifically to each of us. It is by the presence and power of the Spirit that the work of Christ becomes real in our lives, that it becomes not just redemption in general, but our redemption.
To understand why that is, think about breathing for a minute. I imagine there are a lot of folks here who never do; breathing is automatic, just something your body does while you’re focusing on other things. I assure you that’s not the case for an asthmatic, or for others in this church. For some of us here this morning, breathing is far less easy, far less of a given. There can be any number of reasons for that—for me it’s nothing major, just a combination of mild asthma, allergies, and sinus problems—but they all come down to the same thing: the experience of fighting for breath, of working hard to get enough air in, and the need for air that begins to build in the body. Breathing becomes, at least at times, a matter of conscious effort; you are aware of your body as you inhale and exhale, and you feel the air flow in and out as your diaphragm tenses and relaxes. And if you’ve ever been there, you never take breathing quite as much for granted again.
Indeed, if you’ve ever had a time when you were unable to breathe, it becomes very easy to understand why the ancient Hebrews equated breath with life, and why in Hebrew—and also in Greek—one word means both “breath” and “spirit” (and also means “wind”). The Greek word is pneuma, from which we get words like “pneumatic” and “pneumonia”; its Hebrew equivalent is ruach. Whichever word you use, though, the concept is the same—this is what is essential for life. It is the ruach that gives life, that turns the body from a dead lump of clay into a living being; and when death comes, it is the pneuma that is no longer present. Thus in Genesis 2:7, God breathes the ruach of life into the first human being, and he becomes flesh and gets up; and thus we have this extraordinary image in Ezekiel 37.
You see, the people of Israel were in exile—for their sin, God had allowed them to be conquered and hauled off to Babylon—and they were crying out for salvation, which they defined as a return home. What God understood, though, was that their problem ran far deeper than just their physical distance from the heartland of Israel; their real problem was their spiritual distance from the heart of God. That was why they were in exile in the first place, and without anything to change the situation, their return home would ultimately end with them getting dragged off into exile all over again. For the people of God to really be the people of God, they needed a lot more than merely a new address—they needed a whole new life, a whole new spirit, to enable them to live in a new relationship with God. And so through Ezekiel, through this extraordinary acted parable of the valley of dry bones, he tells Israel, “I will put my ruach within you, and you shall live.” Nothing less would solve the problem. And so at Pentecost, when all was ready at last, God fulfilled his promise, and his Holy Spirit came upon his people in power.
Jesus had told his disciples before he left that this moment was coming, and coming soon, and so they set about preparing themselves for it. As part of that, they gathered together regularly to pray, and so they were all together on the day of Pentecost, also called the Feast of Weeks, which is one of the high festivals of the Jewish calendar. Luke doesn’t tell us explicitly where they were when this happened, but it seems to me that they must have been in the temple, because where else would a crowd of devout Jews been on such a day? Not just the disciples themselves, but all the other devout Jews who heard them speaking. What’s more, the Spirit of God shouldn’t be kept under cover in a back room somewhere; when God poured out his Spirit on all his people as he had long promised, where else should it have been than right there in the Temple, the center of his people’s worship and the heart of their life as a nation?
The results were astonishing, as they tend to be when the Spirit is powerfully at work. Suddenly there was a sound like a high wind—a vast pneuma—and Acts says “it filled the whole house where they were sitting.” It might seem odd for Luke to use the word “house” to describe so great a building as the Temple, but it was often called the house of God, so his word choice does make sense. In any case, the emphasis is on the sound—on the size of the sound, if you will, that it filled the entire space. Along with a sound like a great wind came what looked like tongues of fire; and just as the wind is associated with the Spirit, so too fire is associated with God’s appearances. During the Exodus, he led Israel with a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night; and when he appeared to them on Sinai, we are told that “Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the LORD had descended on it in fire.” In other words, these were unmistakable signs to the Jews that God had just entered the building, and that he had come in power.
Note what happened: when the Spirit filled them, Jesus’ followers began to talk about God in many different languages. In fact, they began to preach the gospel, to proclaim the wonderful things that God had done, so that everyone who was there in the temple could understand the message—and there were a lot of people there from a lot of different places. In modern terms, we would say there were people from Iran, Iraq, Tur-key, Egypt, Libya, Greece, and the Arabian peninsula, as well as the capital city of Rome. Now, all of these people would have spoken either Aramaic or Greek, or possibly both, but this was something else: there in Jerusalem, where those were the languages they needed to communicate, suddenly they heard people speaking their own language.
And such people! Galileans! Now, to understand their reaction, you have to understand how Galileans were regarded by the people of Jerusalem. I think about the closest you can come is to think of the way many people in America think of the rural poor in the backcountry South; and that fits in two ways. One, if Jeff Foxworthy, with his “You might be a redneck if . . .” schtick, had been a first-century Jew, he would have been a Galilean. They didn’t quite match up with the rather cruel stereotype we get in jokes about people marrying their cousins, but there was definitely the sense that Galileans were hicks, less educated and less sophisticated, out of the cultural mainstream—certainly not the sort of people who would have studied foreign languages.
And even if they had, they weren’t the sort of people who could have spoken them intelligibly. Just as some people mock Southern accents, while others find the accents of the rural South hard to understand, Galileans were known for their difficult and rather mushy way of speaking, with consonants disappearing or indistinct, and a rather . . . different approach to vowels. So to hear Galileans speaking their own languages, and doing so clearly and fluently—well, these were people they thought of as uneducated, unsophisticated, and incomprehensible at the best of times, suddenly speaking the equivalent of flawless BBC English.
In other words, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, the disciples suddenly had the ability to tell people about Jesus and carry on his ministry in ways they could never have done before; they were empowered to do things as agents of his grace that they could never have done on their own. It’s not always as flamboyant as all that—indeed, it wasn’t for the disciples, either—but at bottom, that’s what the Spirit is on about. The Spirit isn’t with us, fundamentally, to do weird stuff, as if he liked to see how strange he can make us look or feel; rather, the Spirit is with us as the one through whom we receive and live in the life of God, that we might be his children, and the power of God, that we might do his work on this earth.
What happened that day in the temple was unimaginably great, a seismic shift in human existence; but it was also, in a way, a very simple thing. Before that day, only a small handful of people lived in the presence of the Spirit of God; most of God’s people had to do without. Spiritually speaking, they had no breath—they couldn’t breathe, because they were airless, living in a spiritual vacuum. That’s why, as we talked about a few weeks ago, they had to have the priests to pray for them. On that Pentecost in the temple, however, everything changed. There was a sound like a mighty wind, as the Spirit blew on Jesus’ followers, and they breathed in, and for the first time, God’s Holy Spirit filled all his people; and when they breathed out, they spoke words of life in every language. They had prepared themselves for his coming, clearing the decks for his work by committing to the work of unity and prayer, committing to integrity, and now all they had to do was breathe. It was that simple, for the Spirit of God—the breath of God—had filled them and had become their breath; the life of God had become their life. All they had to do was to be there and to be open, and the Spirit did the rest.
It’s the same way for us. Pentecost was a one-time event; on that day, God for the first time gave his Spirit to the whole church, not just a select few. What God calls us to is just to let go, to relax, and breathe deep—to breathe deep the breath of God, as a song I know puts it—so that the Spirit can give us his life; he calls us to open ourselves to his work and pay attention, and to let him move in us, changing us and stirring our hearts. We breathe in through prayer and worship, whether alone or together—most especially when we are together, when we can draw strength from and reinforce what the Spirit is doing in those around us, but also as we learn to worship and pray in and through the acts and moments of our everyday lives. And as we breathe in, we also breathe out, as the Spirit moves us to speak the words of Jesus Christ to those around us, and to love them with his love for them. Everything we do as Christians, we do in and by the Spirit of God; indeed, everything we do as Christians, we do only in and by the Spirit of God.
Understand this. It’s the Spirit who enables us to understand God’s Word, because it’s the Spirit who speaks to us through his Word. It’s the Spirit who is the power of that Word in our lives, carrying what we hear into our minds and hearts and using it to change us, bit by bit, day by day, from the inside out. It’s the Spirit who carries our prayers to Jesus, where he presents them to the Father, and the Spirit who brings his words to us in return. It’s the Spirit who is alive and active in this world, through whom God is with us every moment, guiding us, protecting us, speaking to us, strengthening us, shaping our lives, and growing us up to full maturity. It’s the Spirit who gives us the ability to resist temptation, if we ask, and the Spirit who inspires us to talk to our neighbors and friends, however haltingly, about Jesus.
I don’t, incidentally, just mean those who aren’t saved and don’t know him; I don’t just mean evangelism, as important as that is. I also mean those who go to church and have some relationship with Jesus, and the sorts of conversations that build us up in the body of Christ. You see, the Spirit loves the Father and the Son, and loves to talk about them; and when the Spirit is moving in us, so do we. But it’s all by the Spirit of God; it’s only by the Spirit of God, and none of it in our own strength. It’s the Spirit who is our wisdom and courage for the facing of this hour and the living of these days; it’s the Spirit who gives us power to love and follow Jesus. It’s the Spirit, indeed, who gives us breath to live at all.
Thinking with the fishes
Just a quick post tonight, because I’m dead tired—most of my neurons are sitting in corners sulking, refusing to talk to each other. I have several posts I’ve been hoping to get done, but . . . well, maybe tomorrow . . . maybe Monday.Anyway, if you’re not familiar with The Porpoise-Diving Life, check out the May issue on the website. I’m more than a little biased here, since my wife contributed a piece, and the editor is Erin Word, whom I like quite well, but I do think there’s some good material up. (Sara’s, btw, is the last one in the list, “The Mythical Good Christian Is Just a Piece of Topiary.”) Reading through a few of the pieces set me in mind, for some reason, of a certain theme that pops up a few times in Paul’s letters:“For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision,
but keeping the commandments of God.”—1 Corinthians 7:19 (ESV)“For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything,
but only faith working through love.”—Galatians 5:5-6 (ESV)“But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts
for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.”—Galatians 6:14-15 (ESV)Of course, the issue these days isn’t circumcision; the new legalism has its own equivalents. Let’s just be careful that in throwing off legalism, we don’t make a fetish of its opposite. As Paul is at pains to tell us, circumcision is nothing, but neither is uncircumcision . . .
The problem with historical parallels
is knowing what’s really parallel to what. This is where the deeper problem with Barack Obama’s attempt at historical equivalence comes in. After all, had he wanted to name Republicans instead of Democrats, he could have said much the same thing with greater accuracy by citing Nixon and Reagan; but though his comparison would have been correct in the letter of the matter, it would have been wrong in the spirit. When Nixon opened the SALT talks, or when Reagan went to the Reykjavik summit, they were dealing with a government that worked, fundamentally, on a modern rationalist Western understanding of power and politics in which “if you do this, you will die” is a deterrent. The ability to deter the action of other powers by making that threat is the linchpin of the Western approach to diplomacy; this is not to say that every diplomatic move rests on the threat of force, or that all such encounters are in some way fundamentally hostile, but it is to say that the rules by which the game is played have developed, over centuries, from that point and on that basis. Which raises the question: how do you address an enemy for whom death is not a deterrent? That, unfortunately, is the situation we’re in with respect to powers like Iran, and organizations like Hamas and Hizb’allah. This is the point Alan Dershowitz was trying to get across a couple months ago in his editorial “Worshippers of Death”; that’s why he hit his readers with this barrage of quotes:
“We are going to win, because they love life and we love death,” said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: “[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah.” Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us.””The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death,” explained Afghani al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah. Sheik Feiz Mohammed, leader of the Global Islamic Youth Center in Sydney, Australia, preached: “We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam. Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech: “It is the zenith of honor for a man, a young person, boy or girl, to be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to serve the interests of his nation and his religion.”
In other words, even if talking with our enemies has worked in the past (a dubious assertion, on the whole), there’s a lot less reason to think it might work this time, because we don’t have the same leverage here; we can’t make them behave, because we can’t deter them from acting. All we can do is stop them. (As Dershowitz points out, we’re at a disadvantage in that, as well; but that’s a subject for another post, at least.) Unfortunately, the message doesn’t seem to have taken, judging by Sen. Obama’s remarks. What matters here isn’t whether the American people think talking with, say, Iran or Syria, is a sign of weakness; what matters is that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Bashar al’Assad most assuredly will—and will react accordingly.
Why lawyers shouldn’t teach history
“I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk
not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did,
and Truman did.”—Sen. Barack Obama, 5/6/08I’ve been meaning to get around to commenting on this ridiculous case of historical malpractice. This might just be the single most wrongheaded political statement I’ve heard during this campaign (which, given this campaign, is saying something). I can’t think of a single enemy with whom either Roosevelt (either Roosevelt, come to that, though I presume he’s referring to the Democrat) or Truman had diplomatic conversations except the one with whom we were allied; as for JFK, it was talking to our enemies that got him into trouble. If he’d stood up to the shoe-pounder to begin with, we would all have been better off. (Then, of course, the Kennedy Administration’s misbehaviors in Vietnam are surely nothing Sen. Obama wants to hold up as a model.)RealClearPolitics’ Jack Kelly, in his helpful survey of the senator’s historical ridiculosity, suggests Neville Chamberlain as a better historical analogue, noting that Chamberlain’s declaration of peace “didn’t work out so well.” I might add that among American Presidents, the real appeasers are folks like Carter—or, if we want to include internal enemies, James Buchanan. I presume Sen. Obama wouldn’t have been in favor of continuing to negotiate with domestic slaveowners?
The Gospel in the Ascension
In the church, we talk a fair bit about Jesus’ death on the cross to pay the penalty for our sin, and how his death was for each and every one of us. (At least, we’re supposed to; if your church doesn’t, that’s not good.) Bill had a great little post reflecting on that over at The Thinklings a month or so ago. That’s an important truth for us to think about and talk about in understanding just how much God loves us. The only problem is that too often we stop there—we don’t realize that the truth goes even farther than that.You see, Jesus became a human being with a human body, and in that body he suffered temptation beyond anything any of us can imagine (since he never knew the lifting of temptation that comes with giving in to it), and in that body he suffered agony beyond anything any of us can comprehend—and as great as the physical torment of the crucifixion was, the spiritual torment of taking on the entire guilt for the entire weight of human sin and pain for all of recorded history was far, far greater; and having born all that pain in his body, with the scars of that pain permanently etched in his flesh, he kept it. He kept that body with its map of his suffering, and in that body he returned to the Father’s side. His incarnation was no mere temporary thing; the physical trainer from whom I took a spin class used to tell us, “You can do anything for five minutes” (when we were five minutes from the end and about ready to fall off the stationary bikes), but this was no matter of God calculating that he could, after all, bear being human for thirty years or so. This was permanent—a permanent change with permanent scars.And here’s the key: he did it for you. This is how much God loves you, that he would go to such lengths as this for you. The Son of God became human for all time, and as a human suffered wounds he will bear for all time, for you. If we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that like everything else about us, our love has limits: we reach a place, if people push us too far, where we have to say, “Yes, I love you, but not that much.” Some of us can go farther than others, but none of us can keep going forever. God’s love can, and does, and has, far beyond where we could have expected. No matter how far you go from God, the Father’s love goes farther. No matter how great your sin, it has a limit, and God’s love doesn’t, and neither does the meaning of his sacrifice on the cross; no matter how great your sin, it’s covered.That’s important for us to remember in our down times, and the times when we’re wrestling with a temptation we just can’t seem to beat, because those are the times when we risk giving in to despair; those are the times that the devil comes and whispers in our ears, trying to convince us that God has given up on us, that he can’t possibly love us anymore after all we’ve done. The fact of the matter is, when you look at everything Jesus did for us, everything he went through to save us, there’s no way that anything we can do can change his mind about that; the very worst we can do is but a small part of the pain he bore for us. He didn’t come down to this earth under the illusion that we’re better than we actually are; he didn’t come down to take just some of our sin, as if there were some things that even he wouldn’t die to redeem. No, he came down here to pay the price for all our sin, to heal all our wounds and carry all our diseases; he came to raise the dead of a dying world, nothing less, and now he has gone on ahead to prepare our way. Christ has gone up with shouts of joy in order that we might follow him, that we might be invited to live forever in the eternal blessing of the love of God.
Down to her last fingernail
After getting clocked in North Carolina and barely eking out a victory in Indiana, by any rational calculation, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is all but dead. Had she gotten the best-case scenario for which she was hoping—a double-digit win in Indiana and a loss within 5-7 points in NC—she could make a rational case for herself on the basis of the political situation; what the actual results indicate is that Sen. Obama has weathered the blows, at least with Democratic voters, and is still on his feet. Barring the unexpected, her hopes for the White House are over.The problem is, of course, in this craziest of all campaign seasons, how could we possibly have the cheek to bar the unexpected? When was the last time we had anything but the unexpected? Unless Sen. Obama completely self-destructs, he’s the nominee—but his self-destruction somehow seems completely possible, even if I can’t imagine anyone without Sen. Clinton’s ego actually betting on it. What’s more, I can even think of two completely possible ways by which that could happen.One, while we’ve heard all we need to hear about the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s beliefs, what we haven’t heard him talk about (at least in any detail) is his relationship with Sen. Obama. If someone starts asking him those questions, depending on his answers, that could torpedo Sen. Obama.Two, final arguments open Monday in the trial of Obama associate Antoin “Tony” Rezko. As Hugh Hewitt notes, “if Rezko is convicted and is facing a long stretch in jail, won’t he have to think long and hard about naming names in order to limit his years in federal prison?” Should that happen, things could get very, very messy for Illinois Democrats; the likeliest major pol to go down would seem to be not Sen. Obama but Gov. Rod Blagojevich, but the fact that Rezko did Sen. Obama large, expensive favors would tie him closely enough to the story to be fatal to his ambitions, should it end up breaking open on that scale.What are the odds of either of these things happening? Who knows? What were the odds of any of the things we’ve seen so far? But if Sen. Clinton stays in the race until she’s pushed out, she maximizes her chance of taking advantage if either one does. So, down to her last fingernail she may be, and there may be nothing but the strength of her blood-red polish keeping it from breaking off—but as long as it holds, she’s not going anywhere.
Song of the Week, for a distressed friend
These days, if people have heard of Stormie Omartian, most of them know her for her books, while her husband Michael is primarily mentioned as a producer; that’s a shame, because he put out some great albums of his own, beginning with White Horse and Adam Again back in the ’70s, and a number of fine ones together with her as well. The only one of their joint albums I have is Mainstream, and the tape is dying after a quarter-century, which is too bad, since it’s not even listed on Amazon. I’ll listen to it until it goes, anyway. This song is off that album; as I was listening to it in the car on the way back from work the other day, I had the sense that someone I know needs to hear the message of this song. So, no audio, but up it goes.
Believing for the Best in You
After all I’ve said to try to change your mind,
Are you still going to doubt my words?
You can show me your failures and point out your flaws—
I don’t hear you.
There are two sides to every story,
And glory is on your side;
One hope in every dreamer—the Redeemer;
And that is why
I’m believing for the best in you,
Believing for the best in you;
You’ve got Jesus in your heart, and you love Him so—
Well, that’s all I need to know, all I need to know.
I’m believing for the best in you.You’ve been searching through the garden of your life
For seeds that were planted there;
When I show you the blossoms and point out the vines,
You don’t see them.
You’re looking so hard for the flower
When the hour is still ahead,
And all that is not showing is growing,
And that is whyChorusThe eyes of the Lord are upon you;
He sees what He made you to be.
So arise and shine,
For thy light has come
And there’s no way to hide it from me.ChorusWords and music: Michael and Stormie Omartian
© 1982 See This House Music/Birdwing Music/Cherry Lane Music Publishing Co.
From the album Mainstream, by Michael & Stormie Omartian
This all made more sense on Mountain Time
Staying up to watch election returns, that is; it’s two hours earlier in Colorado. I can’t keep doing this when it means being up until midnight on a school night. (Why do elections have to be on Tuesdays, anyway?)
Political junkie or otherwise, I need to start putting sleep ahead of politics.