Thoughts on the off-year races

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Sarah Palin called last night’s elections “A Victory for Common Sense and Fiscal Sanity”, and on the whole, I’m inclined to agree with her:

Congratulations to the new Governors-Elect of Virginia and New Jersey! I’d also like to offer a special word of support to the new Lieutenant Governor-Elect of New Jersey, Kim Guadagno, the first woman to hold that office.

Of course, the real victors in this election are the ordinary men and women who voted for positive change and a return to fiscal sanity. Your voices have been heard.

The race for New York’s 23rd District is not over, just postponed until 2010. The issues of this election have always centered on the economy—on the need for fiscal restraint, smaller government, and policies that encourage jobs. In 2010, these issues will be even more crucial to the electorate. I commend Doug Hoffman and all the other under-dog candidates who have the courage to put themselves out there and run against the odds.

To the tireless grassroots patriots who worked so hard in that race and to future citizen-candidates like Doug, please remember Reagan’s words of encouragement after his defeat in 1976:

The cause goes on. Don’t get cynical because look at yourselves and what you were willing to do, and recognize that there are millions and millions of Americans out there that want what you want, that want it to be that way, that want it to be a shining city on a hill.

The cause goes on.

—Sarah Palin

In retrospect, it’s nothing short of amazing that Hoffman came within two points of winning in NY-23; from a conservative point of view, he was clearly the best candidate in the race, but that doesn’t mean he was a particularly effective candidate. Certainly, having the GOP machine working against him and spending close on a million dollars to the ultimate benefit of Democrat Bill Owens didn’t help, but an even bigger issue is that he ran a poor campaign, while Owens ran a far better one. That he came that close despite the weakness of his campaign and Scozzafava’s endorsement of Owens (which packed considerable punch, given her far greater name recognition and the Hoffman campaign’s low profile in much of the district) shows the appeal of conservative ideas. Michelle Malkin is right to say,

NY-23 is a victory for conservatives who refuse to be marginalized in the public square by either the unhinged left or the establishment right. A humble accountant from upstate New York exposed the hypocrisy of GOP leaders trying to solicit funds from conservatives by lambasting Pelosi and the Dems’ support for high taxes, Big Labor, and bigger government—while using conservatives’ money to subsidize a high-taxing, Big Labor-pandering, bigger government radical. The repercussions will be felt well beyond NY-23’s borders. Conservatives’ disgust with the status quo has been heard and felt. They have been silent too long. They will be silent no more.

The GOP leadership knows it cannot afford to rest on its laurels, continue business as usual, and bask in yesterday’s electoral victories without confronting its abysmal abdication of principled conservative leadership in NY-23.

As Hoffman said in his concession speech, “This is only one fight in the battle.”

Onward. Upward. Rightward.

The truth is, while it’s definitely a downer that Hoffman’s half-court shot rimmed out at the buzzer, he was a JV player called up as a fill-in; had the varsity been doing its job, someone with a better shot would have been out there. His defeat is an indictment of the GOP establishment in New York, not of the principles Hoffman espoused—and compared to what the varsity did in New Jersey and Virginia, it’s ultimately far less significant.

As C. Edmund Wright says, the fact that the NY GOP screwed up the playcalling in their race only changes the dimensions of the overall rout, not the fact that the Democrats got routed. Bob McDonnell blew out Creigh Deeds for the governor’s office in supposedly-blue Virginia (perhaps scaring three Democratic first-termers in the House in the process), and Chris Christie won his gubernatorial race in true-blue New Jersey by an unexpectedly comfortable margin, despite the presence of an independent candidate. While these races weren’t referenda on the President, Michael Barone points out that they’ve served as useful indicators of national political trends before, and the voting patterns in these races suggest that they may do so again. Along with that, Maine(!) voted down same-sex marriage by a solid (though not overwhelming) margin, making defenders of the traditional definition of marriage a perfect 31 for 31 in state referenda.

Jay Cost makes an important point when he says one must be careful not to over-interpret electoral results, but the conclusions he does draw seem to jibe with the results of Gallup’s latest polling: having swung to the left in reaction to George W. Bush’s second term, giving the Democrats their big victories of 2006 and 2008, the electorate now appears to be swinging back to the right in reaction to the opening of Barack Obama’s time in office. Will this add up to a big year for the Republicans in 2010? Who knows? It could, though. If it does, I just hope those who profit from the swing are true Republicans, conservatives with integrity, not more of the same elite/establishment types who led the party to the debacle of the last two election cycles.

Sarah Palin, authentic feminist

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There’s been a fair bit of commentary since Gov. Palin’s abrupt arrival on the national scene about whether or not she’s a feminist (or even, on the part of certain wack jobs, whether or not she really qualifies as a woman); she’s never been shy about saying she is, while of course folks on the Left have coronaries at the idea and denounce her as a traitor to her gender. Why? Well, abortion of course is the key issue, but more specifically, William Jacobson was right to point out that the nubbin of the Left’s hatred of Gov. Palin comes down to four little words: Trig Paxson Van Palin.

If Sarah Palin had aborted Trig, the left would have been okay with it. If she hid Trig offstage and out of sight, all would be good. But treat the child as you would any other child, and that cannot be tolerated.

There is something about a Down syndrome child in plain view which has exposed the moral and emotional bankruptcy of the left-wing of the Democratic party. And they hate Sarah Palin because deep down, they hate themselves for being who they are.

The modern leftist-feminist orthodoxy is completely sold out to the abortion industry, and so cannot tolerate the suggestion that Sarah Palin, pro-life mother of a Down Syndrome baby, could possibly be considered a feminist; and so the discussion of her feminist views has raged on. Notably absent in the conversation has been much of a deep historical perspective on the meaning and essence of feminism.

Fortunately, that has now changed, courtesy of a young woman named Jedediah Bila, who is actually a scholar of feminism. In an essay published in six parts entitled “I’m a Feminist. Now What?” (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6), she writes on “Authentic Feminism: The Founders, The Distortions, and An Exemplary Modern Icon”—that modern icon being, quite rightly, Gov. Palin. Don’t let the number of parts fool you, it’s really not all that long a piece; indeed, my only real complaint with it is that it’s broken up so many times without proper internal linkage. If you’re not an historian or a history buff, you’ll learn a lot from it—and even if you are, you’ll still learn a fair bit, because Bila is thoroughly steeped in her subject. I certainly did (though my area of knowledge is much more 17th-c. America than 19th-c.).

Of particular interest and importance is Bila’s point that the founders of feminism were united by, among other things, “their harmonious, fervent opposition to abortion.”

In her publication The Revolution, Susan B. Anthony states: “. . . Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death…” In the very same publication, Elizabeth Cady Stanton affirms, “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.” In Woodhull’s and Claflin’s Weekly, Victoria Woodhull asserts, “The rights of children as individuals begin while yet they remain the foetus.” Alice Paul’s assertion that “Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women” has long been echoed by modern pro-life activists, and our “mother of feminism,” Mary Wollstonecraft’s doctrine with respect to abortion is clearly reflected through her Vindication, leaving little open to interpretation: “Women becoming, consequently weaker in mind and body, than they ought to be . . . either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born. Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.” . . .

So ultimately, what do we have here? We have a founding movement in which women devoted their days and nights to the acquisition of women’s rights, systematically struggled for the application of Rousseau’s Enlightenment fundamentals to both genders, and maintained that a woman’s choice of abortion reflected a weakness she’d come to inhabit (thanks to exploitation, sexual objectification, and a society that repeatedly indoctrinates women with the notion that abortion is their ticket to liberty). Who, in our current political society—more specifically, what woman—most closely echoes the convictions of these very brave, never forgotten heroes of herstory?

With that question, as you can probably guess, Bila comes to Gov. Palin. She lays out the significance of Gov. Palin’s membership in Feminists for Life, giving a brief history of that organization, which was founded in fairly early resistance to the hijacking of the feminist movement by the population-control/eugenics movement. She then exposes (and nicely fisks) some of the irrational and unhinged vitriol that’s been spewed at Gov. Palin by many on the Left who consider themselves feminists. In so doing, she sets up a telling contrast between the founders of American feminism and those who claim to be carrying their banner now—a contrast that does not flatter Gov. Palin’s hysterical critics. And then, magnificently, Bila closes with this:

So what does all of this mean for women, for feminism, and for the future of our country? Upon revisiting Sarah Palin’s statement that, “I am a feminist, whatever that means,” I can’t help but wonder if I’d have said the same thing. After all, what does it mean these days? Does it mean that one must condone abortion? Has a movement whose birth was so profoundly inspirational, whose leaders possessed uplifting intellectual and moral fortitude, been reduced to a single-issue agenda? Does it mean that a pro-life woman will be labeled an anti-feminist simply by nature of her pro-life ideology, which happens to be directly in line with that of the founding feminists? . . .

I can only hope in the months and years to come that women of all walks of life, of all parties and families, of all economic and social classes, take a moment to revisit what so many courageous women risked their reputations, their comfort, and sometimes their lives, to fight for. I pray that they see to it that the authenticity of their purpose and selfless beauty of their vision remain unscathed by the countless revisionists determined to corrupt that pure, righteous movement to suit their party or personal platforms.

Sarah Palin, I stand by your belief in women. I stand by your faith in the magnanimous potential of all human life. And, most importantly, I stand by your Wollstonecraftian integrity and unapologetic homage to the foundations of one of the greatest movements to grace our country’s history.

Through her essay, Bila offers and substantiates a pointed assertion, one that will no doubt infuriate the Left: the true representatives of authentic feminism are not the likes of Gloria Steinem. Rather, they are Sarah Palin and those who stand with her. She is the true heir of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the one who carries their mantle. My thanks to Jedediah Bila for making the case, and for substantiating the fact that when Gov. Palin calls herself a feminist, she’s only telling the truth.

(Cross-posted from Conservatives4Palin)

Sarah Palin’s second act

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This is not something I would have expected to find in the Washington Post:

He was called a dumb actor—a mere mouthpiece for wealthy controllers on the right, who fed him lines and pointed him toward a lectern to deliver them. He communicated well and knew how to act the part, having trained in those arts. But he was really an empty suit.

Today, many rank that man—Ronald Reagan—among our greatest presidents.

That he was not the derogatory things he had been called was a matter of record. Well before running for the presidency he had wedded himself to the core ideas he espoused in that office—anticommunism, smaller government and lower taxes. For years, he had spoken and written about them. Yet, even some who served in Reagan’s administration were surprised when, in his twilight years, the treasure trove of documents in his own hand emerged, demonstrating his long involvement with these issues.

Now, Sarah Palin faces a similar challenge. . . .

Supposedly, there are no second acts in American life. But history refutes that notion. Presidential candidates who have lost earlier races, including Reagan, have returned victorious. Americans love an underdog—especially one they suspect was treated unfairly.

Sarah Palin may fit that bill.

Palin’s activities indicate that she intends to remain in public life. There are signs that her viability remains strong. That her new book is ranked among Amazon’s bestsellers, even before its publication later this month, reflects that Palin still commands interest.

To strengthen her viability, Palin must seize this momentum and mobilize her supporters. Developing and espousing a small set of conservative values that become her “brand”—as did Reagan—will be critical. She has time.

The chap who wrote that, Darryl Jackson, is a former federal prosecutor and assistant secretary of commerce who’s competing for a slot as a columnist with the Post. As such, I have to salute his courage here, because this isn’t the sort of thing that newspaper’s readers generally want to hear; it didn’t impress the judges, either (though they had some valid criticisms of Jackson’s writing style). Even so, he has a point: those who thought they’d buried Gov. Palin—and who are now whacking her with spades trying to get her to cooperate and stay dead—did so far too prematurely to be credible.

The 2008 campaign as “reality TV”

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Looking back through my archives for something else, I ran across this piece from Dr. Violet Socks that I’d intended to post some time ago. Apparently, I managed to forget about it, which even for me is a bit on the absent-minded side. It’s a few months old now, but I think it’s still worth posting as a feminist perspective on Sarah Palin. Dr. Socks is hard-left, strongly pro-abortion and strongly anti-Christian; she’s also as fair-minded as you can reasonably expect anyone to be, and recognizes the horrible irony of those who call themselves feminists trying to destroy one of this country’s leading female politicians. It’s a great post, and I encourage you to go read it; Dr. Socks gets off some beautiful observations about Barack Obama and the media caricatures of the last campaign:

[Gov. Palin’s] speech also delivered some welcome punctures to the national gasbag known as Obama. And that’s another thing: it has not escaped my attention that many of the things Palin is accused of, falsely, are actually true of Obama. This is a guy who, as a U.S. senator from Illinois, didn’t even know which Senate committees he was on or which states bordered his own. (And don’t even get me started on Joe “The Talking Donkey” Biden, who thinks FDR was president during the stock market crash and that people watched TV in those days.) I’m not saying Obama’s a moron, but he’s sure as hell no genius. People say Sarah Palin rambles; excuse me, but have you actually heard Obama speak extemporaneously? As for being a diva, surely we all remember the Possomus sign and the special embroidered pillow on the Obama campaign plane. The fact is, Obama is an intellectually mediocre narcissist with a thin resume who’s lost without a teleprompter and whose entire campaign had all the substance and gravity of a Pepsi commercial. Yet people say Sarah Palin is a fluffy bunny diva.

So: are we back to Obama after all? Is this a transference thing? Are people subconsciously frustrated by the fact that Obama is an empty suit, and are they transferring that rage to Palin? . . .

One other observation, and then I’ll quit: it is striking to me how much of the political discourse in 2008 revolved around people who don’t exist. The main players last year, if you recall, were Obama, the genius messiah whose perfection and purity would save the planet; Hillary, the evil racist lesbian who killed Vince Foster with her bare hands before plotting the Iraqi invasion and then attempting to have Obama assassinated; and Sarah Palin, a crazed dominionist who hates polar bears and personally arranges for Christian girls to be raped by their fathers just so she can charge them for their rape kits.

None of these characters are real, of course. Yet, weirdly, people were much more interested in these fictional beings than they were in the real individuals who were vying for political office last year. There were times in 2008 where I felt that the entire national discourse had become one of those scripted faux-reality shows, where nothing is real and the producers edit everybody into barking stereotypes. And the people at home just watch and point and snicker. We’re actually having an election here, I kept wanting to say. These are the people who want to run the country. Don’t you want to know who they really are?

We are all New Yorkers now

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Writing in American Thinker, C. Edmund Wright makes a point about the NY-23 race that I hadn’t considered:

That we all know—let alone care—about the goings-on in New York’s 23rd Congressional District speaks volumes about how far away from our founding principles we have drifted. We should not know or care about NY 23 under our founding model, but make no mistake: we do know. We do care. We have drifted a long way.

His argument is essentially that the explosive growth of government over the past century and more has broken the practical and philosophical foundation and justification of that government.

The idea—quaint as it sounds now—is that any problem you might have with a tiny government could be solved by simply sitting down with some local citizen legislator and working it out. Think Mayberry, where you could hash anything out with Andy, Barney, and the mayor at Floyd’s Barbershop.

If that didn’t work, you could simply run for office in a fair fight in a couple years. The incumbent would probably have tired of government “service” by then anyway. What a process!

The Feds? Oh, they were just a few guys to handle the Barbary Pirates and such. The idea was that you could live your life and never have to see, let alone deal with, anyone from a strong centralized government if you chose not to. You sent them a few bucks to fund the military each year and everything was fine. Thus the once-true cliché: all politics are local.

Now, as he points out, that’s no longer true:

Most of the key people who are pushing this health care legislation are extreme liberals from parts of the country that will never fail to reelect them. The vast majority of the people they will affect, however, have no say in whether or not they get reelected.

This allows them to stay in the halls of power for so long that they accumulate power over years and years of simply being in Washington. Thus, the longer they are isolated from reality, the more power they have to change reality. Gee, what could go wrong with that scenario?

And this is exactly what our Founding Fathers did not want. King George was 5,000 miles away geographically, and even farther apart experientially from the colonies. Our country was founded precisely because the British model was deemed so unworkable and evil that it demanded we spill blood and treasure to stop it. Among the war cries were “Don’t Tread on Me” and “No Taxation Without Representation.” . . .

Consider that Barney Frank and Charlie Rangel can heap oppressive taxation on hundreds of millions of us, yet we have no say in their “representation” status. In Rangel’s case, he casually avoids living under those same tax rules. Now I consider this a slight violation of that “Don’t Tread on Me” concept.

The logical consequence of that is that the old cliché is inverted, and now all politics is national; the race in New York’s 23rd Congressional District will affect the whole country, and thus we all have a stake in it, far beyond the folks who can actually vote there. Which, I agree with Wright, is not the way this ought to work. Read the whole thing—he’s on to something important here.

In praise of humility

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There’s a fascinating piece up on Time‘s front page entitled, “The Case for Modesty, in an Age of Arrogance,” by one Nancy Gibbs. Gibbs begins,

Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny. But some virtues go dormant for generations, as we’ve seen with thrift, making its comeback after 40 years in cold storage. I’m hoping for a sudden outbreak of modesty, a virtue whose time has surely come.

In truth, what she really wants to talk about is not modesty but humility (which, as she notes, can be practiced in many ways: “Try taking up golf. Or making your own bagels. Or raising a teenager”); but I don’t have a problem with that, especially as she has good things to say about humility and its importance.

Modesty in private life is attractive, but in public life it is essential, especially now, when those who immodestly claimed to Know It All have Wiped Us Out. The problems we face are too fierce to accommodate arrogance. Humility leaves room for complexity, honors honest dissent, welcomes the outlandish idea that sweeps past ideology and feeds invention. We want to reimagine the health-care system, confront climate change, save our kids from a financial avalanche? The odds are much better if we come to the table assuming we don’t already have all the answers. . . .

Humility and modesty need not be weakness or servility; they can be marks of strength, the courage to confront a challenge knowing that the outcome is in doubt. Ronald Reagan, for all his cold-warrior confidence, projected a personal modesty that served his political agenda well. I still don’t know what President Obama’s core principles are, but the fact that he even pays lip service to humility as one of them could give him the upper hand in the war for the souls of independents—a group that’s larger now than at any time in the past 70 years. . . .

But I heed Jane Austen’s warning that “nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.” If Obama appears proud of how humble and open-minded he is, if he demonizes opponents instead of debating them, if his actual choices are quietly ideological while his rhetoric flamboyantly inclusive, he will be missing a great opportunity—and have much to be modest about.

Interesting closing comment, that.

 

Image: Black hole Cygnus X-1. Image credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss. Public domain.

Choose Your Side

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(Hosea 1:1-3; James 1:19-21, James 4:1-10)

If I were king of the world for a day—and we can probably all be grateful that I never will be, but if I were—one thing I might do would be to outlaw headings in pew Bibles. In fact, I might go a step further and order the headings removed from all translations—because those headings are put there by the translators, they’re not part of the Bible. If study Bibles wanted to put in headings, fine, but take them out of your basic Bibles.

Now, that might sound strange to you, and it might sound like a really minor thing to focus on, but I assure you, I’m serious. We read those headings as part of our Bibles, even if we know in our heads that they aren’t, and they shape how we read the Scriptures; and while they’re helpful if they get it right, sometimes they don’t. Too often, they don’t; and when they don’t, they mislead us. If you have your Bible open in front of you this Sunday, and if you did last Sunday—and I do think it’s better if you do—but if, as a consequence, you’ve seen the headings in your Bible, you may have wondered why I’ve broken the text up differently.

The truth is, what those headings miss in James is that we have two long sections here in the middle of this epistle. The first begins at 3:13 and runs through to 4:10, and this is the heart of the book: James has talked about how true faith produces a different kind of life—the works of faith—and he’s talked about how that different kind of life is impossible by human strength; no one can tame the tongue, and that corrupts all the rest of us, and everything we do. Now, in this long passage, he issues what the New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson calls “a call to conversion,” a call to fully embrace that different kind of life that Jesus gives us. True faith produces works, but where do those works come from? They come from true wisdom, from the wisdom of God, which is diametrically opposed to the wisdom of the world that produces a worldly way of living. And where does that wisdom come from? It comes from a complete change of allegiance and priorities.

And with this, we come to the fullest and starkest statement of this great theme in James, that there are two ways to live: the way of friendship with the world, and the way of friendship with God. James doesn’t pull any punches here—he wants to make it absolutely clear that this is critically important, and something God takes very, very seriously. He’s laid out what true wisdom, the wisdom of God looks like, and then he looks at the people he’s addressing—and bear in mind, this is a letter written to Christians—and their lives don’t show that. As he looks at them, he says—you’ll note, I differ with the NIV a bit here—“You want something and can’t get it, so you kill; you covet and don’t get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. But you don’t have because you don’t ask God, or because you ask with evil motives, just to spend it on your pleasures.” In other words, their lives did not show the wisdom of God because their hearts didn’t truly belong to God; they were still really in love with the world, wanting the things of the world, filled with the lust for more, not with desire for God.

And so James explodes at them: “You adulteresses!” The NIV changes that to “You adulterous people,” but literally, James calls them all adulteresses. This is the language of Hosea, of Israel as God’s adulterous wife; it’s the same language Paul draws on when he calls the church the bride of Christ. It’s language that makes clear that God isn’t just thinking about “religion” as we understand it when he saves us and calls us to be his people—a point too many in Israel never understood. It’s not enough just to give God an hour or two a week, especially if we grudge him the last fifteen or twenty minutes; it’s not enough just to show up and go through the motions. What God wants from us is what he offers us: love, loyalty, commitment, faithfulness. He invites us, in Christ, to be not just his servants but his friends; what he wants is for us to respond accordingly. That’s why James compares this to the highest form of friendship we know on Earth: the marriage relationship. If you’re married to someone, that person is supposed to be your first priority ahead of all other people and all other things. What God claims is that first place in our hearts and in our lives, ahead of all other people—even husbands and wives. If anyone or anything else draws our hearts away from him, that’s spiritual adultery; that’s idolatry, and it makes us an enemy of God.

This is why verse 5 reminds us—and unfortunately, the NIV takes the wrong reading here—of a common biblical theme: God is jealous for his people. He is the one who created us and breathed life into us; he is the one who made us spiritual beings, not merely animals, capable of consciously knowing and loving him and being his friends, not merely his adoring servants. He has given us every gift and every good thing we have, and created our capacity for joy and pleasure. He wants our absolute allegiance ahead of all others—he wants to be our unquestioned and unquestionable top priority—and he has every right to expect that from us.

The thing is, of course, we can’t meet his expectations on our own; our love, our loyalty, our faithfulness, our commitment, just aren’t up to that standard. That’s why James follows up by saying, “But he gives us more grace.” God by his grace enables us to do in his power what we cannot do on our own. He gives us the faith we need to please him, and the wisdom to live out that faith day by day in the works that demonstrate and realize our faith and bring it to life; he gives us his love, that we may learn to love him, and to love each other, as he loves us. He frees us from slavery to our desires, from the bottomless hunger for more of things that cannot possibly satisfy, and gives us his peace by teaching us to find our satisfaction in him.

All that he asks is that we draw near to him and submit ourselves to him—that we accept his will for our lives and his way rather than insisting on our own. That’s why Proverbs 3 says, as James quotes, that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Pride, at its core, is insisting on our own primacy, that we are first in our own lives and should be first in the lives of others; it is the attitude of active resistance to the claims of God in our lives. As such, it’s also the act of denying that we need his grace—for why would we need his grace to meet expectations which we refuse to accept? Pride tells us that we’re good enough already, and that anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about and has no right to say so. God opposes the proud because pride is, in its very essence, opposed to him—and unlike some politicians, he recognizes essential opposition when he sees it. He gives grace to the humble because the humble are those who are wise enough to know they need grace.

Which brings us back around to where the larger passage begins, with the connection between wisdom and humility, and the reality that the root of wisdom is the humility to acknowledge and accept our utter dependence on God, and our absolute need for his grace. James doesn’t talk about the Holy Spirit, but in the context of the broader New Testament we recognize that it’s by the Spirit of God that we do what James tells us we must do; and verses 7-10 really do contain the nub of the matter. Do you want to be wise? Do you want to please God? Do you want to live the kind of life that he wants you to live? Draw near to God. Bow your head before him; humbly acknowledge and accept him as the absolute Lord, and thus as the one who has rightful authority over your life. Recognize that saying “yes” to God means saying “no” to the Devil, that as God opposes the proud—of whom the Devil stands foremost—so if we bow to him we are committed to opposing those whom he opposes. Every “yes” logically implies a “no”—this is why saying “yes” in marriage to one woman means saying “no” to any others who might be interested; we cannot draw near to God if we do not resist the Devil. But if we will resist, God will give us the power to hold firm, and the Devil will flee.

The great requirement in this is repentance; the great promise is that if we will draw near to God, he will draw near to us. These two go together, because they must go together; God will not draw near to us if we’re still hanging tight to our sin. James lays out two components to the repentance God desires. Taking them in reverse order, one is godly sorrow at our sin. Those who are too much with the world take sin lightly and laugh it off; God wants us to take our sin seriously as that which mars our relationship with him, and to be honestly grieved by the sorrow our sin brings him, and the harm it causes to ourselves and others. This should then lead to purification, to cleansing ourselves of our sin; and this too has two components: we must repent and cleanse ourselves both externally and internally.

The external component is behavior, of the things we do or fail to do that we identify as sins; that, James pictures as washing our hands. But as important as washing our hands is, it isn’t enough by itself; if we’re sick, washing our hands may help keep the illness from spreading, but it won’t change the sickness within us. We must also, James says, purify our hearts—we must identify, repent of, and be cleansed of the unclean attitudes in our souls that produce the unclean behaviors in our lives. And note what he identifies as the root: double-mindedness. You may remember that word from back in chapter 1—it means those who are unwilling to commit to God, whose loyalties are divided and who are intent on keeping them divided. They are divided against God and thus against themselves, untrustworthy and spiritually unstable. To them, James says bluntly: get off the fence and choose your side. Choose this day whom you will serve.

Repentance is, of course, hard and painful at times, not anything we consider pleasant; but as already noted, it comes with a promise: if we will draw near to God and bow down before him, he will in turn draw near to us and lift us up. It’s God’s work in our lives, and if we will submit to him doing it, he will be faithful to be with us and to give us himself. Whatever he may call us to give up, he calls us to give up only so that we can realize that we have something far better in him; and he commands us to humble ourselves only so that he can exalt us. What God wants us to lay down is temporary, fleeting, not worth what we think it is; what he offers us in return is a gift beyond price.

Happy Reformation Day!

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Timothy George has an excellent piece on Reformation Day posted as the daily article on First Things—a juxtaposition which, I must confess, delights me no end. I particularly appreciate these paragraphs:

On this Reformation Day, it is good to remember that Martin Luther belongs to the entire Church, not only to Lutherans and Protestants, just as Thomas Aquinas is a treasury of Christian wisdom for faithful believers of all denominations, not simply for Dominicans and Catholics. This point was recognized several weeks ago by Franz-Josef Bode, the Catholic Bishop of Osnabrück in northern Germany, when he preached on Luther at an ecumenical service. “It’s fascinating,” he said, “just how radically Luther puts God at the center.” Luther’s teaching that every human being at every moment of life stands absolutely coram deo—before God, confronted face-to-face by God—led him to confront the major misunderstanding in the church of his day that grace and forgiveness of sins could be bought and sold like wares in the market. “The focus on Christ, the Bible and the authentic Word are things that we as the Catholic church today can only underline,” Bode said. The bishop’s views have been echoed by many other Catholic theologians since the Second Vatican Council as Luther’s teachings, especially his esteem for the Word of God, has come to be appreciated in a way that would have been unthinkable a century ago. . . .

Several years ago I was asked to endorse a book by my friend Mark Noll called Is the Reformation Over? I responded by saying that the Reformation is over only to the extent that it succeeded. In fact, in some measure, the Reformation has succeeded, and more within the Catholic Church than in certain sectors of the Protestant world. The triumph of grace in the theology of Luther was—and still is—in the service of the whole Body of Christ. Luther was not without his warts, and we can hardly imagine him canonized as a saint. (Remember: simul iustus et peccator!) But the question Karl Barth asked about him in 1933 is still worth pondering this Reformation Day: “What else was Luther than a teacher of the Christian church whom one can hardly celebrate in any other way but to listen to him?”

Right on.