Reading a book second-hand

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Now, there’s really no such thing as second-hand reading; it’s not like second-hand smoke, where you get to breathe the smoke that escaped someone else’s lungs. But there are times when someone else is so involved in a book that you get some of the effect—they keep reading you sentences or paragraphs, it keeps coming up in their conversation, and the book seems to be everywhere present.

Such has been my experience with my lovely wife and N. D. Wilson’s book Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World. She chose it to review as part of Thomas Nelson’s “Book Review Bloggers” program, and her capsule review is now up—I think she gives it 6.5 stars out of 5—but I think I can safely say that that won’t be the last thing she writes about it. Nor, I feel equally safe in saying, will this be the last thing I write about it. It’s an amazing book in what’s been a pretty good year so far for amazing books, full of godly wonder . . . which is a glorious thing.

If you want to know what’s really happening in Afghanistan

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read Michael Yon, who has established himself as the single most indispensable reporter from the Iraq-Afghanistan theater of operations. I’m realizing I’ve never linked to his site (that I’m remembering, anyway)—there’s always stuff I don’t get to, that falls by the wayside for lack of time or energy; it’s to my discredit that I’ve never actually gotten as far as posting on his work, because what he’s been doing is profoundly important.

And it’s only getting more important. He’s been embedded with the British forces there, butthey just canceled his ticket because of his last dispatch; this on top of financial problems which have forced him to appeal for support, without which he’ll have to give up his reporting and leave the country. If you care about what’s going on in Afghanistan, and are able to help support Yon’s work, it would truly be in your best interest (and the best interest of the nation) to do so.

This is a critical time for Afghanistan and Iraq both. As Yon testifies,

There is a crucial development and governance aspect to this war, and still a crucial smashing side. Sometimes you’ve got to swap hats for helmets. Mullah Omar is still alive, apparently in Pakistan, and he needs to be killed. Just on 20 August I heard a Taliban singing over a walkie talkie that Mullah Omar “Is our leader,” and they were celebrating shooting down a British helicopter only twelve hours before just some miles from here. . . .

The enemy often uses pressure cookers to make bombs, just as was done by the Maoists in Nepal. In Nepal, the government began confiscating pressure cookers (which angered many people), and the government often shut down cell service (angering many people) because the Maoists used cell phones. The Maoists won the war. We are operating far smarter in Afghanistan. Here it’s the enemy who actually shuts down cell towers—and this angers the people. Also, the enemy bombs around here are killing a lot of innocent people, and this also angers the people. Despite progress made by the Taliban, they alienate many people.

Meanwhile, Iraq is in a state of transition as the US is drawing down its presence there:

In the dangerous security vacuum that followed the demolition of Saddam’s regime, Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) ignited a civil war by unleashing ferocious terror attacks against the country’s Shia community. Now that American soldiers have withdrawn from urban areas and created another partial security vacuum, the shattered remnants of AQI are trying to ramp up that effort again. It won’t be as easy for AQI now as it was last time. . . .

Terrorist attacks against Shias by AQI won’t likely reignite a full-blown sectarian war as long as the Sunnis continue to hold fast against the psychotics in their own community and Maliki’s government provides at least basic security on the streets.

Iraq’s Sunnis have as much incentive as its Shias to fight the AQI killers among them. They suffered terribly at AQI’s hands, after all. Out in Anbar Province, they violently turned against “their own” terrorist army even before the Shias turned against “theirs.” And Tariq Alhomayed points out in the Arabic-language daily Asharq al-Awsat that Maliki faces the same pressure to provide security on the streets, especially for his own Shia community, that any Western leader would face under similar circumstances—he wants to be re-elected.

The uptick in violence following America’s partial withdrawal shouldn’t shock anyone. If you scale back security on the streets, more violence and crime are inevitable. The same thing would happen in the United States if local police departments purged the better half of their officers. That does not mean, however, that Iraq is doomed to revert to war.

Last time I visited Iraq, Captain A.J. Boyes at Combat Outpost Ford on the outskirts of Sadr City warned me that we should expect this. “When we leave and transition all of what we do now to the Iraqi Security Forces, will there be a spike in [terrorist] activity?” he said. “Absolutely. One hundred percent.” He thinks Iraq will probably pull through just fine, even so. “It should be up to the media to portray this as something expected. There will be a spike in violence because the insurgents are going to test the Iraqi Security Forces, but I have complete faith that the resolve of the Iraqis will be there. Eventually, the bad guys will understand that the Iraqi Security Forces are here to stay. They are improved. They are vastly superior to anything we have seen in the past.” . . .

Before he was promoted to commander in Iraq, General Petraeus was known for his mantra “Tell me how this ends.” It was something everyone needed to think about, though no one could possibly know the answer to. Iraq makes a fool of almost everyone who tries to predict the course of events. How all this ends isn’t foreseeable. Nor is it inevitable. But the current spate of violence we’re seeing was.

As a country, we can’t afford to forget about Iraq and Afghanistan, as if nothing of any importance is happening there anymore just because they’re no longer useful to a media establishment that no longer wants to use them to bring down the president; what happens there matters a great deal, and we need to know what’s going on. For that, we need people like Michael Yon and Michael Totten, and we should be thankful for them.

Let it slide?

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 10
Q. Will God permit
such disobedience and rebellion
to go unpunished?

A. Certainly not.
He is terribly angry
about the sin we are born with
as well as the sins we personally commit.

As a just judge
he punishes them now and in eternity.1
He has declared:
“Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do
everything written in the Book of the Law.”2

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

God will not let sin slide, because he cannot; it would be unjust, it would be against his nature, it would be wrong, and it would be inherently contradictory. At its core, sin is the assertion of our own self-will against God’s will in a declaration of mistrust: it is the insistence that God neither knows nor truly cares what is best for us, and that we’re better off going our own way. That is a defiant falsehood in the eye of the one who is Truth, a falsehood straight from the pit of Hell; he could not simply ignore it without ceasing to be true, nor would he be doing us anything but ill if he could. Nor, in truth, would his doing so be welcomed; having rebelled against God, why would we want him to come crawling to us to take him back?

The leaven of the Pharisees

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I was reading back through Ray Ortlund’s blog this afternoon, trying to remember where I’d read something, when I came across this post that I’d missed three weeks ago—I have no idea how, because it certainly grabbed my attention this time:

Moral fervor is our deepest evil. When we intend to serve God, but forget to crucify Self moment by moment, we are capable of acting cruelly while feeling virtuous about it.

Let’s always beware that delicious feeling that we are the defenders of the holy. Christ is the only Defender of the holy. He defends us from persecutors. He defends us from becoming persecutors. We can take refuge in him. But that esteem of him also means we regard ourselves with suspicion, especially when judging another.

He’s dead right. I’d actually go a little further and say that what he’s talking about is a combination of moral fervor and spiritual pride—that moral fervor combined with deep humility (as in a man like William Wilberforce) is a very different matter, because that’s a fervor which is rooted in our understanding of our own sin and our own need for grace, and thus is ultimately focused on Jesus Christ; spiritual pride, however, is focused on ourselves, it is self-exalting, and thus when combined with moral fervor puts us in a position which rightly only belongs to God—that of being the defender (which ultimately means the arbiter and the dictator) of the holy. Spiritual pride tells us that we’re already good enough to please God, and that therefore God is on our side as we judge all those people down there who aren’t; when combined with moral fervor, this makes the tyrant and the Inquisitor.

I agree with Dr. Ortlund that moral fervor, if not absolutely directed toward God, if not combined with deep humility and the dedication to “put to death the deeds of the flesh by the Spirit” (as Paul says), is our deepest evil; and that illustrates why, as I’m becoming increasingly convinced, spiritual pride is our most invidious evil, because the subtlest and the most corrupting. It is spiritual pride which turns the greatest desire for holiness into the greatest deeds of darkness, which warps and blights every aspiration of the soul toward sainthood and twists them toward corruption; spiritual pride produces ungodly people who think themselves godly, and there is not much worse than that.

Further links on Obamacare

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For those who doubt that the purpose of the Democratic health care “reform” is a government takeover of our health-care system—and that the only unsettled issue in their minds is the best way to get there as quickly as possible—watch this:

Those opposed to the expansion of the abortion industry should consider this comment from Ed Morrissey:

On the campaign trail, Obama told Planned Parenthood that the Freedom of Choice Act, which would eliminate state restrictions on abortion and repeal the Hyde Amendment ban on federal funding for it, would be his first legislative priority. ObamaCare allows him to pass FOCA without the head-on fight. If the public option remains in the bill and it covers abortion, that will have the de facto effect of repealing the Hyde Amendment. The interstate nature of ObamaCare and the public plan may also allow the Department of Justice to fight state abortion restrictions, such as parental notification, on the grounds that the regulations interfere with interstate commerce. It’s FOCA by other means.

For those still dubious about Sarah Palin’s invocation of “death panels,” ponder this from Nat Hentoff (no fundamentalist Republican):

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model)—as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill—decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It’s already in the stimulus bill signed into law. . . .

No matter what Congress does when it returns from its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama’s eventual master health care plan. Here is what Obama said in an April 28 New York Times interview (quoted in Washington Times July 9 editorial) in which he describes a government end-of-life services guide for the citizenry as we get to a certain age, or are in a certain grave condition. Our government will undertake, he says, a “very difficult democratic conversation” about how “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care” costs.

And if anyone is wondering why all the fuss—is this really that big a deal?—let Andy McCarthy explain:

These last seven months ought to tell us that the usual political rules don’t apply when predicting this president’s behavior. His purpose is revolutionary change in an American society he grew up understanding to be fundamentally unjust, racist, materialist, imperialist, and the agent of global misery. He is in Washington to transform the nation from the top down. Nationalized health care is key for him. If he gets it, sovereignty shifts from the citizen to the state. By law, government will be empowered to manage minute details of our lives. Over time—when, as the American Thinker’s Joseph Ashby observes, a “1,000-page health-care law explodes into many thousands of pages of regulatory codes”—that is precisely what government will do.

Obama is not a normal politician. He’s a visionary, and using health care to radically expand the scope of government happens to be central to his vision. For my money (if I have any left), achieving it is more important to him than is getting reelected. His poll numbers and those of congressional Democrats may keep plunging (for the latter, there must come a point where that is statistically impossible), but they have the votes to Rahm this thing through.

And if it comes to that, they will most certainly try, unless enough Democrats in Congress get cold feet. Sure, that wouldn’t be what the president promised to get elected, but so far, that hasn’t stopped him yet:

Initial returns on Obamanomics

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Mark Steyn has a good piece up on “Why the Stimulus Flopped” which dissects the president’s economic approach with his usual panache (Steyn’s, that is; the president’s not bad on panache himself, but he’s no match for Mark Steyn):

The other day, wending my way from Woodsville, N.H., 40 miles south to Plymouth, I came across several “stimulus” projects—every few miles, and heralded by a two-tone sign, a hitherto rare sight on Granite State highways. The orange strip at the top said “PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK” with a silhouette of a man with a shovel, and the green part underneath informed you that what you were about to see was a “PROJECT FUNDED BY THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT.” There then followed a few yards of desolate, abandoned, scarified pavement, followed by an “END OF ROAD WORKS” sign, until the next “stimulus” project a couple of bends down a quiet rural blacktop. . . .

Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan, and much of continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn’t afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world’s biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain, and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can’t compete with Obama’s $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

Actually, when I say “to less effect,” that’s not strictly true: Thanks to Obama, one of the least indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted—and getting ever more so. We’ve become the third most debt-ridden country after Japan and Italy. According to last month’s IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.

As Steyn sums it up,

The “stimulus” . . . didn’t just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats’ political priorities overrode everything else. If you’re a business owner, why take on extra employees when cap’n’trade is promising increased regulatory costs and health “reform” wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obama’s leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When he’s spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dust’s settled and you get a better sense of just how broke he’s going to make you. For this level of “community organization,” there aren’t enough of “the rich” to pay for it. That leaves you.

For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democratic terms. It’s no surprise that the president can’t make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare, because that’s not what it’s about—and for all his cool, he can’t quite disguise that.

Read the whole thing—it’s vintage Steyn. The only point he doesn’t make is that we shouldn’t have expected the “stimulus” to work, because we had immediate prior evidence that it wouldn’t: namely, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out a while back, the effect of similar political and economic approaches in New York, New Jersey, and California.

A decade ago all three states were among America’s most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

If “high tax rates on the rich, lots of government ‘investments,’ heavy unionization and a large government role in health care” haven’t worked for these states, why would we expect them to work for the country as a whole?

A dissenting view on health-care spending

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There is general agreement that our country spends too much on health care. I’m not so sure that’s actually true.

Why? The key here is recognizing the truth of David Goldhill’s distinction: “Health insurance isn’t health care.” This points us to another distinction, that of spending on care vs. spending on insurance. We tend to run them together, and I would certainly agree that we spend too much on these two things in combination; but we need to understand that in fact they’re two very different things—and I would argue that we should view spending money on them very, very differently.

Money spent on health care proper is money that goes to local businesses, perhaps a local non-profit organization (that would be, perhaps, your local hospital), and to other businesses that employ people to make things and to design new things to make. Money spent on healthinsurance is spent on bureaucrats who generate paper; indirectly, it also goes to subsidize trial lawyers and their campaign contributions to Democratic politicians. A good chunk of what you pay for health care also goes to this purpose, of course, in the percentage of your bill that is used to defray insurance costs for your doctor, your hospital, and so on.

Do we spend too much money on health care? No, what we spend too much money on—far too much money—is bureaucrats and trial lawyers. This is what needs to change most of all if we’re going to bring down the combined cost of health care and health insurance; and if we focus instead on reducing the cost of health care, we’re going to reduce the quality of our care without ever addressing the real problem and the real inefficiency of the current system.

This is, I think, what has happened to health care in Britain under the National Health Service. British cyberfriend David Riddick defends the NHS, in part, on the grounds that the UK spends less on health care than the US, and certainly the share of GDP spent on the combination of health care and health insurance is lower there; but given that they spend a higher percentage of that on bureaucrats, I don’t think that’s actually a good thing. That doesn’t drive good care, because the money isn’t being spent on care, and it doesn’t help the British economy any, either. Bureaucrats aren’t productive for the economy—they don’t create wealth, they don’t create jobs, they don’t create innovation; they just create red tape and paperwork.

The same is not true of much of the rest of the health care sector in modern economies. To take one example, the community where I live is the home of a cluster of orthopedics-products companies that make artificial joints, spinal hardware, and the like—products that relieve people (mainly, but not only, older people) of a great deal of pain and greatly improve their quality of life. These companies employ a lot of people, offering good manufacturing jobs as well as a lot of design and engineering work, and they drive research, as they’re always working on developing new and better products. So far, they’ve weathered the financial storm quite well; people will put off luxuries and elective purchases in tough economic times, but if you’re in pain and you can’t walk right, you’re not going to put off getting a new knee or a new hip if that will solve the problem.

Right now, though, they’re deeply worried about the push to nationalize our health care system, because it’s going to devastate their business. That artificial hip that the president keeps talking about, the one that he thinks might have been a waste to put in his grandmother, didn’t come from nowhere; it probably came from Warsaw, and it employed a number of people. His idea of how to cut health-care costs isn’t going to reduce the amount of money that goes to bureaucrats—it’s going to increase that spending, because we’ll need a lot more bureaucrats to run his program and decide which people are allowed to get new hips and knees. Instead, it’s going to reduce the amount of money that goes to companies like Zimmer and Biomet, which means it’s going to reduce the number of people they employ to design and build their products.

Health care “reform” as envisioned by the Democrats will take money out of their pockets to pay even more bureaucrats; it will shift money from a profitable sector of our economy, one that creates jobs that pay good wages and new products that improve people’s lives, to an unprofitable sector (the government)—and all in the name of spending less money. The contrast with the “stimulus” package is ironic. There we were told, “Spending money is good—increasing spending is good for the economy.” When it comes to health care, though, the government is telling us that spending money is bad, and so we need to hire lots and lots more bureaucrats so that we can cut down on the money we spend on actual health care. In the spirit of the “stimulus” package, wouldn’t it make more sense to increase the amount of money going to companies like Biomet and Zimmer so that they can hire more people and help the economy?

We tend to talk about the cost of health care as if cost were the only side of the coin, and it just isn’t; the money we spend doesn’t just vanish into thin air. Instead, that money goes to actual people, and much of it drives good things in our economy. Health care spending creates economic growth; it’s good for our country. We don’t need to spend less money on care; we need to spend less on bureaucrats and trial lawyers. Unfortunately, the president’s plan gets this backwards; we need to put it right way ’round.

 

Morning prayer

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Take, O take me as I am; summon out what I shall be;
set your seal upon my heart and live in me.

—John Bell

This is a simple little musical prayer written by the Iona Community’s John Bell, with a reflective melody that ends on an unresolved chord (the melody ends on re); I’ve seen it used most often as a congregational response, either to Scripture readings or during a time of prayer. For whatever reason, it floated into my mind this past hour, and has been flowing through it ever since. I guess this is the prayer of my heart this morning, for myself and for our congregation.

True Riches

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(Proverbs 23:4-5, Jeremiah 9:23-24; 1 Timothy 6:3-10, 17-19)

I admit it’s a little odd, chopping up the last chapter of 1 Timothy like this; but we have to in order to keep Paul’s thought together. Remember, he wasn’t sitting at a desk writing these letters—he dictated them; and maybe it’s just projection on my part, but I’ve always imagined him walking up and down the room, waving his arms, talking faster when he got more excited. Though for the letters he sent from prison, he was chained to two Roman soldiers, one on each side, so I have no idea how that worked.

In any case, this gives his letters a certain stream-of-consciousness quality, including Paul remembering he’s forgotten something and doubling back to pick it up. I think he did this in chapter 3, interrupting himself for a moment to add a note on women in leadership, and we see it here as well. Paul makes his comments about the false teachers in Ephesus, then goes on to give a personal charge to Timothy—and then suddenly realizes that his comments in verses 9-10 could be taken as an attack on the rich in general, which isn’t his point at all. To prevent that, he changes course for a minute to add say a few more things to those who are rich about how they should handle their riches.

The key thing here is that money is not the problem, and being rich is not the problem; the problem is one’s attitude toward wealth, and that’s something that can be as much of an issue for the poor and the middle class as for the rich. The issue isn’t having money, but wanting money, desiring riches, until that becomes the most important thing in your life, and the dominant factor in your decision-making. That is the kind of attitude Paul is talking about here; that’s the attitude which was the downfall of the false teachers, which led them to their ruin. Remember, these were people who had earned the respect of the congregation, whom the church had trusted enough to accept as leaders; clearly, they were people of great gifts and considerable wisdom—until they went off the rails.

By the time Paul writes this letter, of course, the false teachers have fallen a long way; their wisdom and understanding have faded to clueless foolishness, they’ve grown conceited, and they’re the sort of people who start arguments for the fun of it, simply because they enjoy making trouble, especially if they can make other people look silly in the process. And what was the root of their fall? Greed. They wanted to use the church to get rich. The irony of it is, they were probably being paid by the church—they were already making money off their position. It would be bad enough if some of our elders and deacons started doing this—not that I can imagine it—when they put a lot of blood, toil, tears and sweat into this church, and we don’t give them a whole lot back; but these folks were drawing a paycheck for being leaders in the church, and that still wasn’t enough for them. They wanted more; they wanted to be rich. And following that desire, following their greed, led them away from Jesus, and to their ruin.

But then, as Paul notes, if the desire to be rich is driving your thinking, if that’s what’s controlling your decisions, you’re going to wreck yourself sooner or later. The proverb he cites in verse 10 has often been misinterpreted, as if he were saying that the love of money is the source of all sin, or as if money were the root of all evil, neither of which is the point; indeed, letting ourselves be captured by any sort of strong desire, whether for wealth, power, praise, sexual pleasure, revenge, or anything else, will lead us into ruin. Paul’s point here is simply that greed falls into that category, and that the love of money doesn’t lead to good things, but only to evil. If we seek true wealth, and a truly good life, we must put aside the desire for money and look elsewhere.

This isn’t always easy for people to believe, especially with the current economy; but last fall’s crash underlines the truth of our text from Proverbs that financial security is really just an illusion, because material wealth is all too likely to disappear before your eyes. It’s simply too vulnerable to the vagaries of this world for us to count on it. Jesus doesn’t promise us that we’ll have a lot of money, or that we’ll be rich in things—instead, he promises that we’ll have enough in this world, and that in him we will find true gain, something this world can’t take away. As Paul defines that here, the true gain offered in Christ is godliness combined with contentment.

That word “contentment” is an interesting one, because in its normal Greek usage it meant “self-sufficiency” of the sternest kind, the ability to rely completely on one’s own internal resources Paul defines it in Philippians 4, where he declares, “I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” What Paul means by “contentment” is not self-sufficiency but Christ-sufficiency; it’s the power Christ gives us to trust him completely to meet our needs, rather than relying on our own efforts and abilities and possessions. Contentment is living free, emotionally, from our circumstances, whether we’re rich or poor, married or single, powerful or powerless, praised or scorned; it’s depending wholly on Christ, trusting wholly in him that he is with us taking care of us, that he knows where he has led us, and why, and what he is doing in and through our lives.

This, Paul says, is true riches: to be content in Christ, to know that Christ is sufficient for us in all circumstances, and to be living in accordance with his will. Anything else is less, and to spend our lives pursuing anything else is not to enrich our lives, but to impoverish them. Thus in verse 17 Paul turns to those in the church who are rich, and whose help in supporting the church is no doubt of great importance, and applies it specifically to them. There’s nothing wrong with their being rich; indeed, what they have, God has given them to enjoy, and to use to help others, as he gives us all good things. There is no moral status either to wealth or to poverty; but both create certain responsibilities and challenges. The rich must be careful not to look down on others, and they must be careful not to put their trust in money instead of in God. They must remember the words of Jeremiah, who warned us not to take pride, or put our stock, in earthly things: “Let not the wise boast in their wisdom, nor the strong boast in their might, nor the rich boast in their riches; but let them boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the LORD.” That’s the only thing, really, that matters; the rest are just tools God has given us to use in his service, nothing more.

And so, to the rich, Paul says, be diligent to use your riches in that way—do good works with your money, and be generous to others, and in that way, store up treasure for yourselves in heaven, which is the only treasure that will last. They need, as we all need, to be able to say to God—and mean it!—“Take my silver and my gold; not a mite would I withhold. Take my life—take all of me, everything I am—and may it be ever, only, all for you.”

Reflections on John Piper and the tornado

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In case you somehow missed it, there was a tornado in Minneapolis earlier this week—or perhaps we might say, there were two tornadoes in Minneapolis, one of winds and one of words; the original storm inspired a blog post from John Piper, “The Tornado, the Lutherans, and Homosexuality,” which caused quite a storm of its own.

Piper’s post begins with this description of the circumstances:

A friend who drove down to see the damage wrote,

On a day when no severe weather was predicted or expected . . . a tornado forms, baffling the weather experts—most saying they’ve never seen anything like it. It happens right in the city. The city: Minneapolis.

The tornado happens on a Wednesday . . . during the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s national convention in the Minneapolis Convention Center. The convention is using Central Lutheran across the street as its church. The church has set up tents around its building for this purpose.

According to the ELCA’s printed convention schedule, at 2 PM on Wednesday, August 19, the 5th session of the convention was to begin. The main item of the session: “Consideration: Proposed Social Statement on Human Sexuality.” The issue is whether practicing homosexuality is a behavior that should disqualify a person from the pastoral ministry.

The eyewitness of the damage continues:

This curious tornado touches down just south of downtown and follows 35W straight towards the city center. It crosses I94. It is now downtown.

The time: 2PM.

The first buildings on the downtown side of I94 are the Minneapolis Convention Center and Central Lutheran. The tornado severely damages the convention center roof, shreds the tents, breaks off the steeple of Central Lutheran, splits what’s left of the steeple in two . . . and then lifts.

He then proceeds to lay out an argument from Scripture—I won’t quote it all here; you can follow the link—leading to this conclusion:

The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great Lutheran heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture. Turn back from distorting the grace of God into sensuality. Rejoice in the pardon of the cross of Christ and its power to transform left and right wing sinners.

Now, as you can probably imagine, a lot of people aren’t very happy with that last paragraph—and not all of them are liberals, by any means. Scot McKnight, in a comment on this post, asked,

The text points us away from the specific sins of some persons or some group and to the fact that we are all sinners. Piper points to the specific sins of the ELCA and only then generalizes. Don’t you see the tension of these two approaches?

My wife, for her part, had a similar reaction, arguing that the concluding paragraph quoted above doesn’t really follow from the preceding five points.

From where I sit, I’m not sure Dr. McKnight is reading Dr. Piper’s post quite correctly, but I do agree with David Sessions that the certainty of Dr. Piper’s final paragraph is overreaching. I’ve pointed out elsewhere (not sure if it’s up on the blog or not) that biblically, whenever God sends a disaster as judgment, he always sends a prophet first so that you don’t have to waste time wondering if the disaster is judgment from God—he’s already told you it is. As far as I’m aware, nobody predicted this; it just happened, which makes me very dubious about efforts to put any sort of specific interpretation on this tornado.

And yet, as uncomfortable as I am with Dr. Piper’s conclusion (and particularly the absolute way in which he presents it), I think his argument has more force than his critics (including my wife) want to admit. If we believe in the sovereignty and the providence of God, then we have to conclude that that tornado did exactly what God wanted it to do—and it couldn’t have been more precisely targeted on the ELCA’s national assembly, and in particular their consideration of that study paper (which they subsequently approved), if it had been a Tomahawk cruise missile. It appeared where no tornado was expected, took a perfectly precise route, hit the target, doing noticeable but (as far as I can tell) superficial damage, and then lifted. Short of actually forming right above Central Lutheran and just yo-yoing down and back up again, I’m not sure how its behavior could possibly have been more suggestive.

But suggestive of what? I think it’s going a step too far to try to answer that question as outsiders. Certainly the passage Dr. Piper quotes from Luke 13 is apt, as the call to repentance is always apt; but I also think Dr. McKnight’s point here is well-taken, if not quite correct: Jesus’ words in that passage point us, not to the fact that we are all sinners, but to the fact that we ourselves are sinners, and that the deaths of those on whom the tower fell should inspire each of us to get right with God. Certainly the Minneapolis tornado, with its reminder that in God’s hands, even the weather is a precision weapon, should similarly inspire us.

Anything more than that, though—anything specific to the ELCA and why God might have hit them, at that particular point in their deliberations, with a tornado—is, it seems to me, between God and the ELCA. He didn’t see fit to tell us what to think in advance, nor does anything in Scripture give us warrant to make any judgments about them from the fact that they were hit with a tornado. There may well be a specific message to the leaders of that denomination in the behavior of this tornado, but if so, it’s for them, not for us. Jesus doesn’t talk to us about others and what they need to do—as Aslan tells Lucy in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, that’s not part of our story; instead, he talks to us about ourselves and what we need to do.

I agree with Dr. Piper that approval of homosexual behavior by the church is contrary to Scripture and the revealed will of God; but I also note very carefully that in Luke 13, when Jesus referenced those who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them, he said, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No.” This is where I think my wife was right, because if we really consider this tornado in the light of those words, what we would have to say is this: no matter how bad we might think the ELCA is, no matter how bad we might think it was for them to take the step they did, Jesus says to us, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than anyone else—including you? No; you too must repent.”