Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 5
Q. Can you live up to all this perfectly?A. No.1
I have a natural tendency
to hate God and my neighbor.2Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references.
This is what causes all the problems. This is what people don’t want to admit; but it’s true. Left to ourselves, we can’t live up to what God wants from us, because we aren’t bent to really love God or the people around us. We’re oriented all wrong; we need to be re-oriented and straightened out.
In honor of the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, I’d like to draw your attention to an excellent article by Westminster-California’s W. Robert Godfrey entitled “Calvin: Why He Still Matters.” Here’s the beginning:
There can be no serious doubt that Calvin once mattered. Any honest historian of any point of view and of any religious conviction would agree that Calvin was one of the most important people in the history of western civilization. Not only was he a significant pastor and theologian in the sixteenth century, but the movement of which he was the principal leader led to the building of Reformed and Presbyterian churches with millions of members spread through centuries around the world. Certainly a man whose leadership, theology, and convictions can spark such a movement once mattered.
Historians from a wide range of points of view also acknowledge that Calvin not only mattered in the religious sphere and in the ecclesiastical sphere, but Calvin and Calvinism had an impact on a number of modern phenomena that we take for granted. Calvin is certainly associated with the rise of modern education and the conviction that citizens ought to be educated and that all people ought to be able to read the Bible. Such education was a fruit of the Reformation and Calvin.
Others have insisted that the rise of modern democracy owes at least something to the Reformed movement. One historian said of Puritanism that a Puritan was someone who would humble himself in the dust before God and would rise to put his foot on the neck of a king. Calvinists were strongly persuaded that they must serve God above men, and that began to relativize notions of superiority and aristocracy. King James I of England, who was also James VI of Scotland, once remarked as he looked at Presbyterianism in Scotland: “No bishop, no king.” If the Church is not governed by a hierarchy, certainly the political world does not need to be governed by a hierarchy either. Such Calvinist attitudes toward kings helped contribute to modern democracy.
Calvinism contributed to modern science with an empirical look at the real world. Calvin contributed to the rise of modern capitalism in part by teaching that the charging of interest on money loaned was not immoral. He was the first Christian theologian to do so.
When we look at that list—theology, church, education, science, democracy, and capitalism—here was a man that mattered. He had a profound influence on the development of the history of the West. But does he still matter? Should we care today to revisit John Calvin—who he was, what he thinks—and believe that what he taught is still significant, still valuable? Yes, he still does matter. John Calvin matters still above all because he was a teacher of truth. If truth matters, then John Calvin still matters because he was one of the great teachers of truth, one of the most insightful, faithful teachers of truth, one of the best communicators of truth. He was a teacher who had taken to heart the words of Jesus: “You will know the truth and the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
The bulk of Godfrey’s article, of course, is dedicated to expositing the truth of that last paragraph; I encourage you to read it. If you have additional time and interest, it’s also worth checking out Reformation21, which has a number of excellent pieces up in honor of Calvin’s 500th.
What can I say? I’m a humanities geek, not a math geek, but little things like this amuse me.
To restate the typical presentation of the gospel slightly, each of us on this earth is born with a global orientation toward sin, which manifests itself in various specific orientations toward particular sins—some stronger than others, some wider-ranging than others, some more fundamental than others, but all of them representative of our general inborn orientation toward rebellion and wrongdoing.
Jesus Christ was God become human. He lived a fully human life, but without that orientation toward sin; he was perfect, oriented totally toward God and his goodness and holiness. As such, he was innocent of any rebellion and wrongdoing. He died on our behalf to take on himself and pay in his own body the penalty for all of our sin; he then rose again from the dead to break the power of sin and death over us; he returned to the throne room of heaven to be our advocate with God the Father; and when he had done so, he sent us the Holy Spirit to live within all those who follow him, so that we might always be connected to his presence and power.
As such, Christ is at work in his people by the will of God the Father and the power of his Holy Spirit to reorient us away from sin and toward God. The work of sanctification is nothing less than a total change of orientation, replacing the sinward orientation with which we are born, to which we are accustomed, within which our mental, emotional and spiritual habits have been formed, with the Godward orientation that is the way of Christ, which is the way of the cross.
This is hard. The grace of God is not about leaving us as we are, or making us comfortable, or protecting us from pain; this is one reason why we resist true grace and prefer a counterfeit of our own making. This is why, as Flannery O’Connor said, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” But as painful as it may be to allow God to change our orientation, it is necessary, because the orientation with which we’re born points us, in the end, to nothing but darkness and death. It’s only if our souls are turned, if God reorients us to himself, that we can find light and life in his presence.
This is absolutely brilliant. (They did a good job with the meter and rhyme of the original, which is rare, and matching the sound, which is even rarer.)
I’ve had this list kicking around for so long, I no longer remember where I got it. Presented for your amusement (I hope), with a few edits . . .
Okay, we all know that 666 is the Number of the Beast. But did you know that:
670: Approximate Number of the Beast DCLXVI: Roman Numeral of the Beast 666.0000: Number of the High-Precision Beast 0.666: Number of the Millibeast /666: Beast Common Denominator 666i: Imaginary Number of the Beast 1010011010: Binary Number of the Beast 0000001010011010: Bitmap of the Beast 1 (666): Area Code of the Beast 00666: Zip Code of the Beast 1 (800) 666-0666: Toll-Free Number of the Beast 1 (900) 666-0666: Live Beasts! One-on-One Pacts! Call Now! Only $6.66 per minute! (Only 18 and older, please.) $665.95 Retail Price of the Beast $699.25 Retail Price of the Beast with 5% state sales tax $796.66 Price of the Beast with all accessories and replacement soul $656.66 Wal-Mart Price of the Beast $646.66 Wal-Mart Sales Price of the Beast Phillips 666 Gasoline of the Beast Route 666 Highway of the Beast 666° F Cooking temperature for roast Beast 666(k) Retirement Plan of the Beast 666mg Recommended Daily Allowance of Beast 6.66% 5-year CD interest rate at First Bank of the Beast ($666 minimum deposit) Pentium 666 CPU of the Beast G666 Pontiac of the Beast M666 BMW of the Beast 668 Neighbor of the Beast 667 Prime Beast 999 Australian Beast Mac OS 666 Operating System of the Beast
(Exodus 18:13-23; 1 Timothy 3:1-13)
We’ve seen a spate of high-profile sexual scandals lately; among pastors, the big name was Gary Lamb down in Georgia, and of course in politics we’ve seen the revelations about Nevada Senator John Ensign and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. I have to say, even as strange as politics can get sometimes, the whole story with Sanford is one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen in a long while. Usually those sorts of affairs are targets of opportunity—but Argentina isn’t exactly the next office over; and then to abandon his wife and four sons and the government of South Carolina to sneak down to Buenos Aires for a week (over Father’s Day, no less!), turning his disappearance into the talk of the tabloids . . . it’s hard to imagine how a man that smart could be that stupid. And this was a guy who would have been a real player in the presidential primaries next time around, if his life had matched his image; but now he’s wrecked himself.
The thing that blows my mind, though, is to see people popping up and defending these wretches on the grounds that “people deserve a private life,” and “what they do in private is nobody’s business but their own.” To which I say—and not just me; I say it with St. Paul—no! That is, and I say this very precisely, a damnable lie, because it’s a lie that can bring damnation. The first job of leadership is self-leadership; the first challenge of leadership is whether one can keep in honor the vows one swears. Someone who has failed in leading themselves to the extent of breaking the highest and holiest vow they will ever swear cannot be trusted to lead anyone else, or to be faithful to any other task.
Now, is that permanent? Does that mean that if your sin is bad enough, you can never be trusted to be faithful? No, for there is forgiveness and redemption with the Lord; restoration is possible, with repentance, and time for growth. But leadership isn’t a right, it’s a privilege, and the first qualification is real and demonstrated character.
That’s why, when Paul lays out what must be expected of the leaders of the church—overseers, whom we would call elders and pastors, and deacons—he doesn’t talk much about gifts or experience or skills; indeed, even though we know overseers were expected to teach, he doesn’t even focus on their knowledge of God’s word, though that’s mentioned. Mostly, he talks about character; he talks about what kind of people should be overseers and deacons. Put another way, he talks about leadership not as a job but as a way of life, and how it must be lived, and what people must be like to be ready to live it.
This goes to the heart of the problem with the false teachers in Ephesus. The crisis in the church was, at bottom, a question of leadership—who would the church follow? Who should the church follow?—and the issue with the false teachers was at its root not an issue of intellect but of character. The folks pushing the heresy in Ephesus weren’t innocent seekers after truth who’d gotten a few of their points wrong—they were doing it deliberately. They were people like the late science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, who said repeatedly that he wanted to get rich, and that the best way to do that would be to start a religion; thus we have Scientology, and Tom Cruise has never been the same since.
The false teachers in Ephesus had much the same approach, and much the same spirit. They had been given some authority—it seems pretty clear that at least some of them were among the leaders of the congregation—but they wanted more; they wanted to take the church away from Timothy and run it themselves. What their reasons were, we don’t know; but it’s clear that they were determined enough to refuse to listen to any voices telling them they were wrong, even the voice of God.
As such, Paul sets out to tell the church what kind of people they ought to listen to, and what kind of people they ought to follow. He’s already made it clear what message they ought to follow—namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, which he had proclaimed to them and which Timothy was continuing to preach; now he connects the character of the gospel to the character of those who are fit to lead—namely, people whose lives incarnate the gospel, showing its truth by the way they live. Overseers, Paul says, most be “above reproach,” and deacons must be “worthy of respect”; the whole picture of their lives has to add up, with no glaring flaws and nothing that dishonors God—to the extent that even those outside the church honor and respect them.
This is not to say that only perfect people are qualified to lead—were that so, no one would be qualified—but it rules out those who are living unrepentantly in sin of some kind or another, and those who have simply surrendered to their sin. A certain level of maturity in dealing with one’s own sin is necessary for anyone who would lead others in confronting, turning away from and refusing to turn back to their sin. We don’t need sinless leaders, but we do need leaders who show us by their honest example that growth in holiness is possible.
This is true across a range of areas. Sexual morality was a major one in that day, which tolerated a broader range of sexual sin than even our own; as the Presbyterian pastor-scholar Philip Ryken says, “Marriage was undermined by frequent divorce, widespread adultery, and rampant homosexuality.” Thus Paul insists that leaders in the church must, in the words of our denomination’s Book of Order, “live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.” (Not the most elegant way of putting it, I know, but it does make the point perfectly clear.) Sexual morality is not optional; it’s not something where you can say, “The culture knows better than that dusty old book”; it’s not something that’s private and has no bearing on one’s fitness to lead. It’s a necessity; it’s a requirement; it’s non-negotiable.
Why? Well, in the first place, because wrong is wrong, whether we like it or not. And as a practical matter, there’s probably no sin short of open idolatry that damages people as deeply as sexual sin; it warps us at the core of our being, and has power like few things do to pull us loose from the vows and commitments and promises that anchor and buttress us for godly living. We can’t simply accommodate ourselves to the way the culture wants to do things—which means we can’t afford to follow people who do. Christian leadership is, in part, an act of standing up to the world and saying, “There’s a better way—let me show you.” We need leaders who are willing and able to do that.
You can see this theme in other qualifications Paul lays out for leadership as well. Leaders must not be greedy—aside from an uncontrolled libido, there’s likely nothing that corrupts leadership faster than greed—but must be able to manage themselves; sins of lack of self-control are explicitly ruled out, and so Paul says that leaders must not be drunkards, must not be violent, must not be quarrelsome. Rather, they must have proven their ability to lead themselves and others, beginning at the most intimate level—with their households. (Even those who were single might well have had households, by the way, of servants or slaves.) As Paul says, if you can’t handle the people who are closest to you, those for whom you bear the most immediate and intimate responsibility, and if you can’t lead them in a godly way, how can you claim to be able to lead God’s church?
There are other things here as well—deacons must not be double-tongued, for instance; this makes sense, because the church entrusts its deacons with the care of those who are vulnerable. Elders must not be recent converts—it’s important to give people time to steady down and grow a bit before handing them that responsibility; name someone an elder before they’ve had time to learn how much they have to learn, you run the risk that they’ll figure they’re mature already and never learn otherwise. Elders must be hospitable, which seems odd to us because we undervalue the gift of hospitality; but it makes sense, because the leaders of the church should be people who make others feel welcome here. And most of all, elders must be able to teach, and deacons must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience: the leaders of the church should be people of the truth, people who know Jesus Christ and his gospel and are able to communicate that with others. That’s what this all comes back to, because that’s what this is all about. This is why Paul cares, because the church is being led astray by people teaching lies, and they need to sit up, realize what they’re doing, and start following the right leaders.
The bottom line here is that those who lead the church need to be people who embody what it means to live the gospel life, and who model that for the church as a whole. Elders, including pastors, and deacons need to be people who understand what it means to do all these things that Paul talks about here—sexual morality, gentleness, hospitality, not being greedy, honesty, integrity, the whole ball of wax—not out of a sense of duty or morality or compulsion, but out of gratitude for grace received. The people whom we call as leaders—whom God calls through us—need to be people who don’t just know the gospel up here as a bunch of things we say, but who know it down here, and in our guts; we need to be people who are viscerally aware of our own sin, and who feel the power and the significance of Christ’s redemption and God’s grace all the way down, and for whom love and gratitude for what God has done for us are driving factors in how we live each day. We need to be people for whom that reality shines through, so that others can see it in what we say and how we live our lives. That’s what it means, first and foremost, to be a pastor, an elder, a deacon; that’s our first and greatest responsibility.
For reasons of length, I opted not to take time in the sermon to address one much-disputed question on this passage: when Paul addresses women, what women does he mean? Most people offer one of two answers: either wives of deacons (which makes no sense to me at all), or female deacons. These answers attempt to make verse 11 part of the flow of the paragraph, which is understandable—but, I believe, misguided. It doesn’t fit, and it doesn’t need to.
Remember, Paul didn’t actually write his letters, he dictated them—which meant he had a tendency to forget to say things at one point and then stick them in later. I think that’s what happened here: in the middle of talking about deacons, Paul remembered something he’d meant to say and just stuck it in. On my read, this is a general comment about women in leadership (whether as deacons or as overseers) which is prompted by the fact that the false teachers in Ephesus were particularly successful among the women of the church. In describing the qualifications for Christian leadership, he adds a comment specifically about women, not because he’s saying anything new or different—he isn’t—but just to underscore the point that under the circumstances, any women in leadership positions needed to be particularly careful.
This sends chills down my spine. Thanks to Hurley for reminding me of it.
I’ve been flat on my back with an unpleasant bug, but the news yesterday of Sarah Palin’s resignation knocked me even flatter than I already was. My first thought was, “She’s finally decided that the price was too high, and she’s giving it all up”; my reaction was one of shame and anger at my own country, that had decided to destroy a gifted public servant rather than accept the challenge she represented.
And then after a while, I read her statement, and my brain started working again. I know there’s a lot of speculation about her motives—after all, politicians never tell you the real reason they do anything, right?—ranging from some kind of dirt that’s about to come out to a serious medical problem to marital issues under the strain of everything that’s been going on. I haven’t read all the speculation by any means, since I haven’t been at my computer much, but I can tell that a lot of folks out there think that this resignation must be (as most political resignations admittedly are) personal in nature, because it doesn’t make any political sense. With the case of Mark Sanford hanging in the near background, we’re primed to think this way.
On further reflection, though, I’m inclined to think that Sarah Palin’s resignation is probably in fact a political move at its core, and a brilliantly calculated one. It’s a gamble, no question, but I think the stakes are worth it, for several interlinked reasons—one of which Adam Brickley laid out yesterday with his usual excellent insight. It all begins (and began, I suspect) with a simple, huge question: should Gov. Palin run for re-election in 2010? I’ve gone back and forth on that one, but I’ve argued before that she would be better off not doing so.
At this point, Gov. Palin would have to be regarded as the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, but a lot of things can happen in four years; if she just rests on her laurels, she’ll see others pass her by. She needs to take her position as a leader in (if not formally of) the national party and use it, both to strengthen her own position and to advance the GOP cause. To do this, of course, she needs to keep herself out there as a national politician. . . .
There are several ways by which she can do this. One, as Adam Brickley notes, is to do her job as Governor of Alaska, and in particular to do everything possible to expedite the building of the natural-gas pipeline. This, combined with intelligent national advocacy of drilling in ANWR, will serve to strengthen the country both domestically and in its international position, to strengthen the identification of the national GOP with domestic energy production and energy independence, and also to help her maintain a high national profile as a conservative reformer who gets things done.
Another thought Adam had, which hadn’t occurred to me, would be for Gov. Palin to establish a PAC and do fundraising for national Republican candidates for 2010. By doing this, she could give the congressional GOP a real boost two years from now, as well as building support and loyalty among other leaders in the party. Even better, along with sending them money, she could spend time campaigning for Republican candidates across the country, using her own formidable political skills directly to boost their chances. Given that she will be a marked woman for the national Democratic Party in 2010, it might even be better for her not to seek re-election, but to take the time she would need to spend campaigning for herself and invest it instead in other Republican candidates (including, of course, Sean Parnell or whoever would be the GOP candidate to replace her in Juneau). Of course, if she did so, she would need to find another job, but I’ll come back to that in a minute.
Now, I also noted along the way (with regard to the possibility of a special election for Ted Stevens’ Senate seat) that staying in Juneau “gives the Left two years to hammer her and try to bring her down before her term as governor is up in 2010,” and so indeed it has. She’s gone back to Alaska and done her job well—but her opponents have found an effective way to turn the job into a straitjacket, and one she’s paid handsomely to have the privilege of wearing. They’ve put her in a position where she gets hit with huge legal bills for anything and nothing, where she’s legally restricted in her ability to do what she need to do to repay those legal bills, and where they’ve found ways to make it very difficult for her to be nationally active. In the meanwhile, other Republicans who don’t have jobs have been taking advantage of that fact and doing everything they can to maneuver against her, and to denigrate her in the process.
The biggest arguments, as regards her national political future, for sticking around and running for re-election had to do with the need to go back, do her job, and show that she could get re-elected; with no one really doubting the latter, and the party mandarins refusing to give her credit for the former, there doesn’t seem to be much reason why Gov. Palin should want to stay in Juneau after 2010 unless she wants to be a career governor—and given the way the Alaskan establishment has treated her, she shouldn’t. The best political move she could make, it seems to me, was to elect not to run, but rather to pursue other angles.
This is where the argument Adam made comes into play, and it’s profoundly important. By stepping down now rather than waiting until 2010, she sets up Sean Parnell as the incumbent in that election, greatly increasing the chances that a Palinite Republican (which is to say, a non-Murkowski-RINO-ite impostor) holds the Alaska statehouse—and with the Exxon-TransCanada deal in the bag, she does so at a pretty favorable time.
There’s something of a gamble here, that Gov. Parnell will be able to carry the water, but she knows him better than most people do, and she seems pretty clearly to believe he can; while he lacks her formidable political gifts, he also lacks the vulnerabilities she acquired as a consequence of the McCain campaign, so he may actually be able to do an even better job of carrying forward their agenda than she could. At the very least, he ought to do plenty well enough to hold the seat as a proven incumbent.
In the process, his candidacy (assuming nothing crazy happens to remove him) will serve as a test of Gov. Palin’s ongoing political clout; and here’s where the wider angle of the gamble she’s taken comes in. She’s now free of the ankle-biters; they’ve been using the ethics law she brought into being as a tool for political persecution, and they’ve now lost that lever on her. She’s much freer to raise funds, to speak, to write, and to campaign around the country on behalf of causes and candidates without having to worry that she’ll be accused of ethics violations for doing so.
Indeed, it seems likely that anyone with aspirations for 2012 will need to spend much of 2010 proving themselves by campaigning for GOP congressional candidates across the country—and not only would Gov. Palin not have been able to do that had she been running for re-election herself, she might well not have been able to do so even as a lame duck. Can you imagine the ethics charges folks like Andree McLeod would have filed? I’m sure Gov. Palin can; no doubt they all would have been dismissed just as all the ones so far have been, but they still would have cost her a lot of money. Now, she doesn’t need to worry about that.
On sober reflection, then, leaving office may well have been the best political move Gov. Palin could have made—and a necessary precursor to a 2012 presidential run, if she wants to make one—and if so, then far better to do so now, when it frees her from abuse of her ethics law and enables her to control the transfer of power, than to wait for the end of her term. It may also be the wisest financial move she could make. Not only does this preclude further attempts to bankrupt her via frivolous prosecution, it also gives her a much wider field to raise funds and earn money.
I suspect we’re likely to see far, far more Sarah Palin appearances around the country over the coming months, to prove to people that she’s not backing down or going away—since one of the real gambles here is that people will label her a quitter, someone who can’t take the heat, and look for someone else to support; she needs to address that if she does in fact want a political future—and to help pay the bills; and also for one other reason, which I addressed in that post last fall:
Gov. Palin would do well to work to win over conservative skeptics like Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Parker, George Will, David Brooks, and Christopher Buckley—not because their opinions are particularly important, but because impressing those who ought to be her supporters and currently aren’t is the most direct way to establish herself as the true standard-bearer of the Republican Party. The best way to do this is to address the current lack of a strong conservative identity in the national party, strengthening it and bringing it back to its roots, and to do so in a way which also dispells the easy caricature of her as an intellectual lightweight. Therefore, as one who framed the troubling challenge presented by Iran with the question “what would Reagan do?” I would suggest (as would Jim Geraghty) that Gov. Palin should ask herself the same question, and do what Gov. Reagan did in the 1970s:
Reagan . . . [spent] years in the 1970s mulling the great issues of the day, reading voraciously, and presenting detailed commentaries on everything from the SALT and Law of the Sea treaties to revolutions in Sub-Saharan Africa to the future of Medicare. Then and only then, finally, after 16 years on the national stage, did the GOP give Ronald Reagan its nomination and present him as its candidate for the presidency.
Obviously, she’s still going to have her day job, at least through 2010; but in and around that, and raising her kids, I believe Gov. Palin should devote as much time as she can to studying and writing on the great issues of our own day. Keep building her governing experience dealing with the challenges of Juneau—and as much as possible, take advantage of that to use Alaska as a “laboratory of democracy” on issues like health care—but engage intellectually as well with the challenges of Iran and Pakistan, Social Security and judicial philosophy, the future of NATO and how to deal with a resurgent Russia, practical approaches to changing the system in D.C., and what our stance ought to be toward China. Co-author pieces with leading conservative intellectuals—maybe an article on judicial nominations with Antonin Scalia, to throw out one wild idea. Help rebuild the conservative intellectual treasury that was squandered by the GOP during its time in power. And off these articles (and perhaps books), I’d like to see her give speeches under the auspices of the Hoover Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Foundation, the Institute for Religion and Public Life, and other such organizations. If she does decide not to seek re-election at the end of her term, she could go to work for an organization like AEI, or perhaps in the national party leadership structure, and use that as a platform to continue developing and arguing for her conservative agenda.
Obviously, she in fact no longer has that day job, or soon won’t; the rest still holds, at least as regards Charles Krauthammer. I agree completely with Joshua Livestro’s takedown of Jonah Goldberg (and with VO’s, as well), and with all those who’ve pointed out that Ronald Reagan was similarly dismissed and derided for his intellect; but one of the reasons that the attempts to convince the public that Gov. Reagan, and then President Reagan, was merely “an amiable dunce” failed to stick is that he had a pretty strong record demonstrating otherwise. I agree that Joshua’s dead-bang right that folks like Goldberg need to begin with the presumption that Gov. Palin is to be taken seriously and talk with her on that basis; but clearly, that’s not going to happen unless they’re forced to do so. The only way to force them to do so, I think, is for Gov. Palin to put in the time and effort writing and speaking to make their current flippant dismissals of her clearly untenable. I think that’s an important thing for her to do, not only for her own political future, but for the future of the party, for the reasons I laid out in the quote above. And, sadly, she wasn’t going to be able to do it shackled to the statehouse in Juneau. Her enemies in Alaska had made that impossible. To spread her wings and fly, she needed to leave office.
And so she has; and I’m reminded of an image one of my mentors, the Rev. Ben Patterson, used in a sermon one time. He talked about being up in the Rockies, looking out across a mountain canyon, and seeing a bald eagle hurl itself from its perch high atop the canyon wall, wings and head pulled into a tight ball. He saw the eagle tumble down into the depths at dizzying speed, apparently doing nothing to protect itself . . . until suddenly, well below them, it snapped its wings out and began to soar. With no wind in the canyon, it had used its own fall to generate the momentum it needed to fly.
That, I think, is what Gov. Palin just did. The risk to it is real, for she’s thrown herself into the canyon of our political cynicism, where nothing surprising any politician does is ever innocent—we know better, they’re all guilty until proven guilty. All the folks who got egg on their face defending Mark Sanford just underscore the point; many, many people, even those predisposed favorably toward Gov. Palin, are going to assume that there’s another shoe to drop in her case just as there was in Gov. Sanford’s, and it’s going to take a fair bit of time for her to overcome that. There’s a lot of shock here—I know, I’m still recovering from it—and I expect a lot of people feel burned; it will take time for her to rebuild trust. She has the political and intellectual gifts to do it, given that time and effort on her part—but she’ll need those of us who’ve found her to be a beacon of hope in our country’s politics to continue to believe in her and support her, and to continue to trust her judgment.
There is good reason to do so. Just hang on; it’s going to be a bumpy ride, no doubt (has it ever been otherwise?), but I think it’s going somewhere good. And for my part, I continue to believe that Gov. Palin is walking with God and seeking his will, and so I trust that I see His hand in this, for her good, for the good of her family, and for the good of this nation.
(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)
Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 4
Q. What does God’s law require of us?A. Christ teaches us this in summary in Matthew 22—
Love the Lord your God
with all your heart
and with all your soul
and with all your mind
and with all your strength.1And the second is like it:
Love your neighbor as yourself.2All the Law and the Prophets hang
on these two commandments.Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references. Also, earlier and better manuscripts of Matthew 22 omit the words “and with all your strength.” They are found in Mark 12:30.
As Kuyvenhoven notes (19),
our Lord Jesus made the love-commandment the centerpiece of his teaching. In fact, his whole ministry was designed to teach us that love is God’s law, which everyone has broken, as well as God’s gift that enables all of Jesus’ followers to lead a new life.
Along with that, it must be said, his ministry was also designed to teach us what love really is, and to correct the false ideas we learn about love from our fallen world. We’re perfectly happy to believe that love is God’s law if we get to be the ones defining what that means . . . but we don’t.
