Is President Obama not funny?

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In response to my previous post, cyberfriend Doug Hagler suggested a couple reasons why late-night hosts haven’t done much with Barack Obama up until he was (startlingly) awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. One, Joe Biden, I agree with; the VP is a walking punch line, giving them plenty of material to work with all by himself. Doug’s right to call him a “comedic sacrificial lamb.” He also has a point in noting that we’re not that far into the Obama administration, though if you look back eight years, I think you’ll find that that didn’t slow the likes of Jay Leno much in going after George W. Bush.His other suggestion, though, I think is off: that the President is “an articulate public figure” who doesn’t give comedians many opportunities to poke fun at him. You know, the guy gives a good speech, but get him off his teleprompter and he’s startlingly mortal—even Bush-like. Here’s a few examples:

Austrian is a language?

Halting the rise of privacy?

When TOTUS fails:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMszKcpn2DU

Thinking on his feet:

57 of 59 states, one left to go:

None of this is to imply that the President is stupid, because he isn’t; but were these lines all attributable to George W. Bush, they would have been fed right into the Bush-as-drooling-clown meme, and the jokes would have come cascading down. When Barack Obama says them? Crickets from the big guns of the media. Clearly, something’s uneven here.

Now, I don’t blame this on bias on the part of late-night hosts. I do think they’re biased to some degree—because who isn’t?—but I don’t think bias drives their routines much at all; for those guys, the driver is getting a laugh, and they’ll do anything within reason to get a laugh out of their audience. (And for Letterman—who’s either the most biased of the group, I think, or just the meanest—maybe not just within reason.) They’ve tried telling Obama jokes, and studio audiences haven’t responded. They don’t want to tell jokes that leave the audience cold, and you can’t blame them for that.

Part of this is that the President started off with such an elevated mood, with such elevated expectations, that many people didn’t want to diminish that any by laughing at him; part of it is that over the course of the campaign, Barack Obama became increasingly unable to laugh at himself, and so far he’s been running an administration that really can’t seem to take a joke. That doesn’t encourage public levity. It will be interesting to see if the laughter over the Nobel is an indication that public attitudes—as represented by talk-show studio audiences—are starting to change, or if it’s just a blip. If it’s the former, then the President had best relearn to take a joke, because as JibJab has known all along, he’s plenty vulnerable to satire.

The Nobel Prize for laughter

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I have to say, the thing that has surprised me the most about Barack Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize has been all the laughter. Sure, I expected some people to laugh, but I wouldn’t have thought to see anyone literally doubled over and out of breath from laughter, and I have seen that. I would have expected more support from the decision around the world, instead of the incredulity that seems to be the general response from major global political figures. After all, someone argued that those who expected Copenhagen to hurt the President’s international prestige should similarly expect the news from Oslo to boost it, and that made a certain amount of sense; but it doesn’t seem to be playing out that way. And I thought that the Left would be pleased by the award, but so far, they haven’t been supporting it either.

Indeed, the late-night jokesters appear to have decided that this is something about President Obama that they can safely mock; and mock they have, with gusto. Here’s Jay Leno, for instance:

Congratulations to Barack Obama—he has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Apparently, the Nobel committee wanted to recognize the president’s fine work in bringing peace to a black professor and a white cop through the strategic use of beer.

President Obama said he was humbled to win the prize. Not as humble as he was when Rio got the Olympics. But still humble.

That’s pretty amazing, winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Ironically, his biggest accomplishment as president so far . . . winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

President Obama won another Nobel Prize today. This time in medicine for pretending to give up smoking.

The Nobel Peace Prize also comes with a cash award of $1.4 million. Apparently, this is President Obama’s plan to finance healthcare reform.

And Conan O’Brien:

Today, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The committee said they gave it to Obama partly for his idealism and commitment to global cooperation, but mostly for calling Kanye West a jackass.

It’s a great honor for America that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, our economy is so bad, Obama’s already been forced to trade the medal in at “Cash 4 Gold.”

The Nobel Committee is saying the reason they gave Obama the Peace Prize is for reducing tension around the world. So, the runners-up for this year’s Nobel Prize were “red wine” and ”the Brookstone 3-Speed Massaging Recliner.”

Jimmy Fallon took the opportunity to skewer a rival:

Congratulations to President Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize this morning. That’s quite an accomplishment. I’m sure he’ll pick it up as soon as he’s finished fighting two wars.

Along with the Nobel Peace Prize President Obama also gets $1.4 million. Usually to get a check that big you need to blackmail David Letterman.

Jimmy Kimmel added a shot at the VP:

A day after declaring war on the moon, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Vice President Biden was awarded the Nobel Hair-Piece Prize.

And Craig Ferguson got off the best line at the expense of America’s best-loved losers:

The Chicago Cubs are filing for bankruptcy. They’re from Chicago; they’ve spent millions of dollars they don’t have . . . I smell Nobel Peace Prize.

I’m not sure if this means the President’s media honeymoon is wearing off, or just that the funnymen are that happy to have a “safe” way to get laughs out of him.

Faith against the grain

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I made the point in a post Monday that faith works—that faith in God, by the essence of what it is, produces action. It’s not just a matter of mental assent; it’s not enough just to agree with the proposition that God exists—the demons believe that more strongly than anyone, and they’re certainly not saved. Their faith, if you want to call it that, doesn’t change anything for them, except to cause them great fear. True faith, by contrast, changes everything, because it’s not just believing with our mind, it’s believing with our whole being. It produces action in the same way that acorns produce oak trees—it’s simply the nature of the thing. If someone claims to have faith in God but shows no evidence of it in the way they live their lives, that faith is like a body without a spirit: dead.

This is not, however, the common understanding of faith in this country, even among many in the church. In truth, this understanding of Christian faith is really quite countercultural these days. The idea is widespread nowadays, even among Christians, that our faith should be a private matter, between us and God, which really shouldn’t mess up our public lives. It’s fine to be a Christian and go to church and all that if that’s what works for you, but people around you shouldn’t have to deal with that if they don’t want to; out in the “real world,” you ought to go about your business the same way as everybody else.

This is the way of thinking James calls “friendship with the world,” living in such a way as to keep the world happy; and as he makes clear, this is the exact backwards of the way of life to which God calls us. True faith cannot be merely a private matter; it cannot be something we keep restricted to safe times and places when there’s no one around who might object. It changes everything we say and everything we do, at every time and in every place, in every aspect of our lives. True faith isn’t concerned with whether we’re telling people what they want to hear, it’s concerned with whether or not we’re being faithful witnesses to the truth and the life of Jesus Christ—who, after all, often made people thoroughly uncomfortable by telling people exactly what they didn’t want to hear, because it was the truth they needed to hear.

(Excerpted, edited, from “No Private Matter”)

On agenda-driven orthodoxy and the need for humility

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In addition to my snark in the previous post, I do have a serious comment on the BBC’s admission that the Earth has been cooler since 1998—or perhaps I should say, sparked by that article. The remarkable thing about that article is that it’s a deviation from the liberal political orthodoxy on global warming (and it is a political orthodoxy, for all that it claims scientific status), which is not the sort of thing one expects from the BBC. Of course, it was a deviation driven by the facts; the author of the article did his best to uphold the global-warming storyline anyway, but facts are hard things to get around.

Which brings up the problem I have with the global-warming orthodoxy: it’s an orthodoxy based on an agenda. The agenda itself is not necessarily bad; in fact, I agree with its declared goals, though I disagree with the socialist/big-government approach to reaching them. From both a theological and a public-health perspective, as well as with an eye to future unexpected consequences, it’s obviously important that we continue to reduce pollution; I just think that encouraging innovation rather than regulating it is likely to be more productive in doing so.

The problem is, rather, that what we have here is an agenda in search of a crisis, because whipping up a crisis and motivating people by fear is considered to be the quickest and most effective way to drive action, particularly when that action involves expanding government control over the economy and people’s lives. The agenda comes first, and it looks for a plausible threat to which to attach itself, so as to be able to tell people that they must enact the agenda or Bad Things will happen. This is what we might call the Houghton Strategy, after Sir John Houghton, the first person to chair the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.”

Now, the problem with that is that even when it finds success at first, that approach will ultimately collapse. Eventually, as even a global-warming believer like Gregg Easterbrook recently noted, the facts refuse to cooperate, and the truth becomes inconvenient for the agenda. That’s when you get people rooting for disaster, because they’d rather be proved miserably right than happily wrong; getting their own way is the most important thing to them, and they react accordingly.

That’s when orthodoxy gets ugly, and when it fails. I am, obviously, not opposed to all orthodoxies as such; I believe there’s such a thing as truth, and that fact provides at least a philosophical and theoretical justification for orthodoxy (and, in my view, a good bit more than that). Humble orthodoxy that arises out of the search for truth and that recognizes that it is at best an imperfect grasp on that truth is, I firmly believe, a good thing; it’s also a flexible thing, able to discern what is truly essential and what isn’t. Orthodoxy that arises out of an agenda, however—that exists in service not to the truth and the desire for understanding, but to the desire to do certain things—is of necessity dogmatic and inflexible; it also tends to end up being shrill, because it’s forced to defend itself and advance its cause through denunciations and alarmist statements. By its very nature, it’s committed not to understanding what is true, but to winning the argument—and when winning is everything, it very quickly becomes the only thing, and all other concerns (such as truth and fairness) fall by the wayside, leaving behind only a naked power grab.

This applies to orthodoxies of all types—political, religious, cultural, scientific, legal, you name it. You can meet this in the church (whether the local congregation or the international denomination), in politics at every level, in business, and indeed in most spheres of human life. You can find it among the cynical and power-hungry, and in the hearts of the most selfless and altruistic. It is a universal danger for all of us who are strongly committed to any belief or set of beliefs: are we truly seeking to under-stand the truth, to pursue it and stand under it and allow it to shape us, or are we concerned with winning the argument, with being acknowledged to be right, whether in fact we are or not?

Prayer in the Roman world

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[Jesus said,] “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

—Matthew 6:7-8 (ESV)

This evening, my lovely wife discovered what looks like a fascinating blog, For the Sake of Truth, by a Ph.D. student at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary named Josh Mann. I’ll have to explore it a bit to see if I want to add it to the blogroll, but I can already say that the current top post, “How to Pray: Two Ancient Views,” is a keeper.

Commentators generally understand Jesus’ condemnation of “using meaningless repetition” (βατταλογήσητε) and “many words” (τῇ πολυλογίᾳ) as either (1) formulaic and legalistic repetition of intelligible prayers; or (2) pagan magical incantations (probably unintelligible gibberish). I lean heavily toward the first view, not least because of the prevalence of repetitious intelligible prayers carried out in the Roman culture (both private and public).

He then goes on to lay out examples of that (including a remarkable quote from Pliny the Elder), concluding,

It seems that in the Roman view, strict adherence to a formula would obligate the god or goddess to respond in kind.

This, of course, stands in the sharpest of contrast to the view of prayer taught by Jesus:

One should not think to obligate God by some formula. Rather, one ought to pray to God as a dependent child makes request to a Father (Matt 6:9-13). In my view, Jesus gives a model for prayer (rather than a strict formula!), but in any case, he clearly commands that prayer be done with sincerity and humility, recognizing one’s needs and the ability of the Father to provide for such needs. Prayer is no doubt petition at its core, but in Matthew 6, Jesus challenges the crowds regarding the attitudes and motives underlying prayer.

It’s a great post; go read the whole thing.

Faith works

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What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? . . . Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

—James 2:14,17 (ESV)

One of the main emphases for those of us in the Reformed stream of the Christian faith is that salvation does not come by our own effort in any way, but is purely by faith, which itself is a gift from God. We know that we can’t earn our salvation, because we can’t live up to God’s standards; rather, we receive it as a free gift—what we cannot do, God did for us in Jesus Christ. This was a major theme of the Reformation, as Martin Luther and John Calvin challenged a Catholic Church that had grown corrupt, because it’s a major theme in the letters of Paul; it was a significant recovery for the church, for all the conflicts that came along with it.

Unfortunately, one of the divisions that arose, in the mind of Luther—and among Catholics as well—was between Paul and James. Luther saw James as contradicting Paul, and dismissed the book as “a right strawy epistle.” He didn’t quite go so far as to leave it out when he translated the Bible into German, but he’s said to have ripped it out of his personal Bible. His objection was based, however, on a misreading of the book.

It’s easy to see where that came from, as both Paul and James talk about faith and works and salvation; superficially, they sound very similar in their language, and seem to be addressing the same issues. If you read a little more closely, though, you see that though they use the same words, they aren’t talking about the same things. When Paul talks about faith versus works, he’s talking about “works of the law”—that’s his phrase; his point is that you can’t earn your salvation by keeping the law, because you can’t possibly keep it well enough to satisfy God. His focus is on the most basic level: how are we saved? How do we enter into the life of the kingdom of God?

James, by contrast, isn’t talking about “works of the law” at all—he never uses the phrase. Rather, he’s talking about works of faith. He’s not talking about how we get saved, about how we lay hold of the life of God—rather, he’s talking about what that life looks like, and about true faith versus false faith. Where Paul’s argument deals with what we can do, or can’t do, in order to be saved, James’ concern is with how our lives should look because we have been saved. Like the whole rest of the book, this is about what it means to live the Christian life—to live the life of God in this fallen world. All he’s really doing in chapter 2 is restating and expanding on a point he made in chapter 1: it’s not enough for us to hear the word of God, we need to submit our lives to its authority and do what it says, if we want to call ourselves Christians.

(Excerpted, edited, from “No Private Matter”)

On this blog in history: April 17-21, 2008

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Holy discomfort
On Pope Benedict and his critique of the selfish, reductionist individualism of our culture.

The old made new—not replaced
All things will be redeemed, including the works of our hands.

The Ascension, the body, and the kingdom of God
Our bodies aren’t temporary.

Meditation: on barbering churches
Is the church defined by its edges? If so, how?

Brief meditation: on art
Considering art, God, mediation, and the problem of definition.

Skeptical conversations, part IV: Considering humanity
On what it means to be human.

No Private Matter

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(Genesis 15:1-6; James 1:22-25, James 2:14-26)

We celebrate when people come to join with us in our fellowship and ministry in this community; we rejoice when people come to faith in Christ and claim their place in his body. But those moments are just the tip of the iceberg, built on much that has come before. Part of that is the inquirers’ class that we run from time to time. I don’t call it a membership class, since taking it doesn’t mean you have to join; there’s no pressure. Rather, it’s for anyone thinking about membership, wondering if they should join this congregation, if they want to, what it would mean if they did, and still uncertain. I’m not much of one for high-pressure salesmanship, and quite frankly, I’m no good at it anyway; I’d rather just present the truth as best I can and let the Spirit lead people wherever God wills, and so that’s the approach I take.

Now, there are a lot of ways to do this, but given the busyness of people’s schedules, I figured I ought to keep ours short. As such, I use a three-session structure designed to answer this question: what does it mean to be a member of a Presbyterian church? What’s the significance of that word “Presbyterian”? More generally, what is this thing we call the church, anyway? And what does it mean to be a member? We don’t insist people agree completely with everything in order to join, but it’s still important to lay out what this church, being rooted in that theology and having that particular understanding of the church and the meaning of membership, is all about.

One of the things we talk about in the first class, because it’s at the heart of what it means to be Presbyterian, is that we understand that salvation does not come by our own effort in any way, but is purely by faith, which itself is a gift from God. We know that we can’t earn our salvation, because we can’t live up to God’s standards; rather, we receive it as a free gift—what we cannot do, God did for us in Jesus Christ. This was a major theme of the Reformation, as Martin Luther and John Calvin challenged a Catholic Church that had grown corrupt, because it’s a major theme in the letters of Paul; it was a significant recovery for the church, for all the conflicts that came along with it.

Unfortunately, one of the divisions that arose, in the mind of Luther—and among Catholics as well—was between Paul and James. Luther saw James as contradicting Paul, and dismissed the book as “a right strawy epistle.” He didn’t quite go so far as to leave it out when he translated the Bible into German, but he’s said to have ripped it out of his personal Bible. His objection was based entirely on our passage this morning, thirteen verses out of the 108 that make up the book; and it’s based on a misreading of this passage, which unfortunately has become all too widely accepted.

It’s easy to see where this came from, as both Paul and James talk about faith and works and salvation; superficially, they sound very similar in their language, and seem to be addressing the same issues. If you read a little more closely, though, you see that though they use the same words, they aren’t talking about the same things. When Paul talks about faith versus works, he’s talking about “works of the law”—that’s his phrase; his point is that you can’t earn your salvation by keeping the law, because you can’t possibly keep it well enough to satisfy God. His focus is on the most basic level: how are we saved? How do we enter into the life of the kingdom of God?

James, by contrast, isn’t talking about “works of the law” at all—he never uses the phrase. Rather, he’s talking about works of faith. He’s not talking about how we get saved, about how we lay hold of the life of God—rather, he’s talking about what that life looks like, and about true faith versus false faith. Where Paul’s argument deals with what we can do, or can’t do, in order to be saved, James’ concern is with how our lives should look because we have been saved. Like the whole rest of the book, this is about what it means to live the Christian life—to live the life of God in this fallen world. All he’s really doing in chapter 2 is restating and expanding on a point he made in chapter 1: it’s not enough for us to hear the word of God, we need to submit our lives to its authority and do what it says, if we want to call ourselves Christians.

Remember, one of the overarching themes of this book is that there are two ways of life, the way of friendship with the world and the way of friendship with God, and that the truly Christian life is the way of friendship with God. What does it mean to be friends with someone? Well, among many things, it means that you take seriously what’s important to them, and you don’t make a habit of doing things that will hurt or upset them; you spend time with them, listen to them, tell them the truth. If you have a pattern of disregarding someone’s feelings and treating them carelessly, chances are pretty good that your friendship with that person will not survive your behavior. The same applies to our friendship with God. There are differences, of course; our friendship with God is not a friendship of equals—he has a much greater right to expect certain things of us than any human being would. As well, where human friends will only take so much from us before walking away, God will not let go of us no matter what. Still, James’ point is clear, that if we are friends of God, we need to act like it.

This is where his discussion of faith comes in, because it’s by faith that we are brought into this relationship with God, and he wants to make the point that faith in God logically entails a change in behavior. Contrary to what a lot of people think, faith is not simply a matter of intellectual assent. It doesn’t just mean deciding in your mind that you believe certain things or agree with certain statements. Faith is a commitment of your whole person. It’s a difference captured in a story told of The Great Blondin, who used to entertain crowds by crossing Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Supposedly, one time as he came to the end of his show, he asked the crowd, “How many of you believe I could carry one of you back and forth across this tightrope?” There was a loud roar of agreement. Then he said, “Who’s willing to climb on my back?” Dead silence. The former is a kind of belief; true faith is climbing on. True faith is resting the whole weight of your life on Jesus and committing to go with him wherever he goes and do whatever he does. It’s not just giving him your agreement—it’s giving him your life, the whole thing, without reservation and with nothing held back.

This is why James says, essentially, faith works. Faith in God produces action. It’s not enough just to believe that God exists—the demons believe that more strongly than you do, and they’re certainly not saved. Their faith, if you want to call it that, doesn’t change anything for them, except to cause them great fear. True faith, by contrast, changes everything, because it’s not just believing with our mind, it’s believing with our whole being. If someone comes to you—James specifies a fellow Christian—so poor that they can’t even feed or clothe themselves properly, and you say to them, “Go in peace; I have faith that God will provide for you,” what good is that? Is that any kind of real faith? No! That kind of faith is empty, it is worthless, it is dead—there’s simply nothing alive there. True faith produces a response to the needs of others, moving us to step up and meet their needs, trusting that God will provide for us in our needs in turn. True faith produces action in the same way that acorns produce oak trees—it’s simply the nature of the thing. If someone claims to have faith in God but shows no evidence of it in the way they live their lives, that faith is like a body without a spirit: dead.

Now, there are a lot of ways we could go in applying this. We could talk about the importance of looking at ourselves and our lives to see if what we say we believe actually determines how we live. It’s certainly worth asking ourselves if our faith produces works—if we believe it with our hands and feet, not just with our minds and lips. As I was thinking about this passage, though, it was something else that struck me: this understanding of Christian faith is really quite countercultural these days. The idea is widespread in this country, even among Christians, that our faith should be a private matter, between us and God, which really shouldn’t mess up our public lives. It’s fine to be a Christian and go to church and all that if that’s what works for you, but people around you shouldn’t have to deal with that if they don’t want to; out in the “real world,” you ought to go about your business the same way as everybody else.

This is the way of thinking James calls “friendship with the world,” living in such a way as to keep the world happy; and as he makes clear, this is the exact backwards of the way of life to which God calls us. True faith cannot be merely a private matter; it cannot be something we keep restricted to safe times and places when there’s no one around who might object. True faith changes everything we say and everything we do, at every time and in every place, in every aspect of our lives. True faith isn’t concerned with whether we’re telling people what they want to hear, it’s concerned with whether or not we’re being faithful witnesses to the truth and the life of Jesus Christ—who, after all, often made people quite uncomfortable by telling people exactly what they didn’t want to hear, because it was the truth they needed to hear.

Now, this isn’t a matter of trying to work to turn ourselves into God’s friends—that would be works trying to produce faith—because this isn’t something we have done, or need to do. Rather, this is something God has already done and is doing. Remember what I said earlier, that the life of faith is all about the grace of God; it is God who by his grace has declared us to be his friends. We simply respond by recognizing that friendship with God is a far, far greater and more wonderful thing than friendship with the world, and pursuing him in turn as he pursues us, opening ourselves to the work he is doing and plans to do in our lives. It’s a matter of understanding how great and how wonderful is the love and the grace of God—how much better he is than anything this world can offer—and responding accordingly, by learning to desire friendship with God more than we do friendship with anyone else. When we truly want to please God, the rest will follow.