Not What You Expect

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(Isaiah 55:6-13; John 3:5-17)

John Piper made the point early in his plenary message at GCNC that there’s a difference between the main point of a text and the most important point in that text, and that we need to be careful to keep them straight.  That’s an important thing to keep in mind in reading this passage from Isaiah, because the prophet here makes several very, very large points and draws on some huge and important truths, but he does so in the service of one very clear main point:  the call to his hearers to seek the Lord.

Seek the Lord. This is the point to which Isaiah has been building across fifteen-plus chapters, and the message he’s been trying to get across all along the way. In the beginning of this chapter, God issues the invitation, first in metaphorical terms—“Come, all who are thirsty”—and then in more direct language: “Incline your ear and come to me; hear me, so that your soul may live.” God is inviting his people to be his people in earnest; all that remains is for them to answer the invitation, and so Isaiah lays out the imperative as bluntly as it’s possible to do: seek the Lord, call on his name.

There are a few important things to note about this. First, there’s a time limit—the offer won’t be good forever, and the expiration date isn’t specified. Indeed, it can’t be, because whenever the final expiration might be, the offer is guaranteed to expire for each individual person at their death—and none of us knows when that will be. The point Isaiah is trying to make here is that this isn’t only a critically important invitation to answer, it’s also an urgent one, because none of us knows how long it will last; the future isn’t guaranteed, as death could come at any time, for anyone. Isaiah tells anyone who will listen that the only time to respond to God’s invitation, the only time to seek his face, is now, while he has your attention, while you’re thinking of it; after all, you won’t respond while you’re not thinking of it, and you can never be sure that you’ll get another chance. Seek the Lord while he may be found, before it’s too late.

Second, the offer is open now, for everyone; there is no one alive for whom it’s already too late, regardless of what they may have done. I was thinking about this at the conference, talking with a woman I ran into at one of the publishers’ tables. This woman was looking for materials to help her minister to a friend who was in the throes of despair, convinced that she had fallen so far from God that she was beyond hope—that she was so bad that God no longer wanted to save her. She believed that for her, the invitation had been withdrawn; she understood the reality and weight of her sin, but not the reality and power of God’s grace. Granted, that’s not an easy balance to keep, especially since the Devil’s always trying to knock us off one way or the other—which way doesn’t really matter, but if we get to the point where we see our sin and God’s grace as they really are, he loses. Yes, we should take our sin seriously, no question—God certainly does—but that’s why he sent his Servant, to deal with it. Now is the acceptable time; now is the year of the Lord’s favor.

Three, this invitation isn’t about being good enough. God doesn’t say, “Come, all of you who’re doing great and have everything you need, and I’ll give you even more,” he says, “Come, all who are thirsty.” Come, you whose lives are a mess, you who are struggling, you who don’t have it all together, you who aren’t even sure where all of it is. The call of God isn’t to those who think they’re doing just fine, it’s to those who know they need him; as Jesus said, it’s the sick who need a doctor, and he came for those who know they’re sick. That’s one reason we confess our sins together every Sunday, to prod ourselves into admitting—to God, to each other, but most basically to ourselves—that yes, we do still have sin and darkness in our hearts, and yes, we do still need the gospel, because we still aren’t good enough on our own. It’s to help us remember, week after week, that we still live only by God’s grace, and that we still need that grace—that we still need God—because for most of us, that’s something the Devil is always trying to make us forget.

What we need to remember is that this invitation, the invitation to seek the Lord, is an invitation to change. To seek the Lord isn’t just to learn things about him or to make sure he’s actually there, but to focus our lives on him, to seek to live every moment in his presence, before his face; and to do that, we need to turn from our thoughts and our ways. God calls us to come to him just as we are, because he loves us just as we are—but he loves us too much to let us stay this way, and so seeking him means opening ourselves up for him to transform us from the inside out. He will show us mercy, and he will pardon us freely, because of what his Servant has done for us—but we need to accept that, to accept that we need his mercy.

This is true for everyone, even the best of us. Notice that combination of “thoughts” and “ways,” because both are important. There are a lot of folks who think they’re doing just fine, because they’re doing all the right things—well, most of the right things, anyway—but they’re doing them for a lot of the wrong reasons, and their thoughts and beliefs aren’t right before God; outwardly, their lives look good, but the inside doesn’t match up. At the same time, we’ve all known people who can say all the right things about God, but the way they live doesn’t match. As James tells us, faith in God that doesn’t produce a life like God’s life is no true faith at all; but at the same time, as Hebrews says, it’s impossible to live such a life that pleases God except by faith. As Asbury’s John Oswalt puts it, “Sin is ultimately a matter of attitude. However superficially ‘righteous’ a person may be, if one persists in imagining that one can live independently from God, then that person is profoundly unrighteous.”

The bottom line is that God wants us to turn aside from our own thoughts and our own ways to seek his thoughts and his ways—no exceptions, no excuses, no ifs, ands, or buts—because his thoughts and ways are better, because he has something better to offer us. We tend to resist this because we’ve learned to want what the world trains us to want and expect what it teaches us to expect, but God doesn’t restrict himself to fulfilling our expectations; he’s on about something far bigger and far grander and far more wonderful than that. I don’t think anyone’s ever captured this better than C. S. Lewis in his essay “The Weight of Glory”—in my book, the best thing he ever produced—when he wrote,

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

The gap between us and God—in holiness, in wisdom, in goodness, in understanding, in love, in knowledge, in faithfulness, in power, in joy, in everything—is beyond our ability to imagine, let alone cross; we can’t even fully conceive of how much greater God is than we are, or how much more good he is, or how much more he sees and knows and understands.  That’s why God says through Isaiah, “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”—a statement which means even more to us than it did to his first hearers, because we know that much more about just how far up the heavens go.  We can’t even measure how far above us God is, and how great the gap is between us and him.  But the thing is, we don’t have to, because we don’t have to cross that gap; God took care of that for us. We just have to trust him that if we will forsake our own ways and our own thoughts, he’ll teach us something better, and give us blessings that surpass anything we could come up with on our own.

Now, this doesn’t come naturally. Giving up our own thoughts and our own ways, giving them over to God and letting him change us, is hard—we have to fight ourselves to do it; and God’s blessings on our lives have a way of including things like suffering that don’t really feel like blessings. He answers our prayers, but often not according to our expectations, in the ways that we would plan out if we had the chance. He just asks us to trust him that he is at work for what is best for us—that he knows what that is and has the ability to bring it about—in the midst of our broken, fallen world; and he promises us that we have good reason to trust him, for he never fails to do what he says he will do; he never fails to accomplish his purposes. God speaks his word—such as the call to repent and to seek him, and the promise that if we do so, we will find in him the true life that this world cannot offer—and his word carries with it his power to effectively and unfailingly bring about what he has promised.

Thus, Isaiah says, surely all creation will burst forth in praise at the Lord’s redemptive work; the extravagant imagery here makes it clear that he’s moved far beyond talking about the return from Babylon to Jerusalem, and is envisioning God gathering his people home from their spiritual exile. We do not yet see the creation rejoice in this way, because the time has not yet come for it to experience its own redemption—that will not come until the end of times when all the world is made new; this promise waits to be fulfilled with the completion of God’s redemptive work in us, when his kingdom comes at last in the fullness of his power, and all things are finally made right. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord and their vindication from me, declares our God.

Barack Obama, union enforcer

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Mariner fans once dubbed Seattle Times beat writer Bob Finnegan “Pocket Lint” because he was so deep in ownership’s pocket—his pieces were, dependably, dutiful recitations of whatever the company line happened to be—and now I’m starting to think the nickname may need to be revived for Barack Obama.  We knew the labor movement had him in its pocket, but the whole business with Chrysler is beyond anything I would have expected.  President Obama and his administration essentially took a crowbar and attempted to kneecap a group of Chrysler investors in an effort to win better terms for the United Auto Workers than the UAW will be able to get in bankruptcy proceedings now that the automaker has filed for Chapter 11.  As the ever-invaluable Beldar lays it out,

What the Obama Administration has been trying to do, however, has been to cajole or—it’s now becoming more clear—threaten people who carefully bargained for less risk, and who thereby had to settle for lower rewards all along, into voluntarily forfeiting the protections they bought and paid for in the event of the underlying business’ insolvency. Primarily through Chrysler’s pension and retiree health-care obligations, the UAW is a creditor of Chrysler, but one whose position is less favored by the bankruptcy laws than the investors (debt holders) represented by companies like Oppenheimer Funds or Perella Weinburg. Unlike the UAW, their clients negotiated, bought, and paid for the rights not to have to have to make the same “sacrifices” that equity holders or general unsecured creditors would be compelled to make under the bankruptcy laws. But Obama insists—on pain of presidential demonization and worse—that these so-called “corporate renegades” (who’ve been guilty of nothing other than greater prudence) make those sacrifices anyway, and that they do so specifically in order to benefit the UAW!

This goes beyond populism or pro-unionism. Barack Obama is engaged in an assault on not just the entire system of business in the free world, but on the American rule of law upon which it is founded.

And the crowbar in question?  The White House press corps, as the lawyer for one of those investors told a talk-radio host in Detroit:

One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under the threat that the full force of the White House Press Corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.

Not that we really needed any further evidence that the MSM is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party machine, but that’s still telling.  The White House, of course, is denying the story; as for the response from the aforementioned reporters?  Aside from Jake Tapper, crickets.

The bottom line here, in Beldar’s words, is that

the Obama administration is engaged in a colossal abuse of power whose magnitude far exceeds a mere subversion of the White House press corps. Barack Obama has become Guido, the thug who everyone knows has not only a nasty habit but a nasty taste for breaking kneecaps. And the beneficiary of his shakedowns are the United Auto Workers.

Regardless of your position on Chrysler, unions, or any of the other parties involved in this mess, that sort of thing isn’t good for anybody for very long.  The rules need to be the same for everyone, and the same at every point in the process.  When the government starts bending them to try to manipulate results—when the process is compromised for the sake of someone’s agenda—the system will adjust in a way that will only hurt our economy, and especially those who are most vulnerable.

The thing is, these folks invested a lot of money in an effort to help Chrysler rebound—yes, in the hopes that they would profit off that rebound; our economy doesn’t run on altruism—and they did so knowing what the rules were if their efforts succeeded and what they were if Chrysler went down anyway.  Let them and others like them get the idea that the government is willing and able to do whatever is necessary to change those rules after the fact in order to skew the results to its liking, and the next time a big company is looking for help (General Motors, anyone?  The New York Times?), the money won’t be there.

Investors are willing to take the normal risks of business, because those risks are predictable, and they’re taken into account in the terms of the contract.  If they perceive a significant risk of ex post facto government intervention on behalf of other parties—risks which are neither predictable nor quantifiable—they’ll sit on their hands, rather than take the chance that the next kneecap the Obama administration aims at will be theirs; and GM, or whichever company totters next, will go down.

For those frightened by the Mexican flu outbreak

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here are some words of wisdom that should allay your concern.  This comes from my uncle, a longtime specialist in infectious diseases who’s seen a lot of things come and go over the years; he knows what he’s talking about.

To family, friends and others:

Because of the widespread disinformation being perpetrated by the MSM, I feel obliged to share with my family and friends an accurate perception of the current H1N1 influenza outbreak. As many of you know, I am an acknowledged infectious disease specialist. What many do not know is that I have served as a subject-matter expert to both CDC and WHO over the years, and have an accurate assessment of their politics and capabilities. Therefore, I can presume to offer some opinions on this problem.

Seriously, it is somewhat of a problem, but mainly in perception. The MSM has blown it all out of proportion, showing street scenes of people wearing masks, etc, etc. This morning the Today show was all a-gog about “the first US death”, which wasn’t. It was a Mexican kid who was a few yards over the border in Brownsville, and got taken to Houston (where he exposed dozens of other people). But it was a Mexican case, not a US case.

All the US cases have been mild. The NYC outbreak is directly traceable to Mexico; a bunch of seniors had just returned from spring break in Mexico. The fact that the strain in NYC came from Mexico, but the cases are not so severe suggests that it is the Mexican health care system (or lack of same) that is contributing to the high fatality rates there (CDC acknowledged the same idea late today). It’s possible that the deaths are due to bacterial superinfection, similar to what happened in 1918. There is some suggestion that “cytokine storm” might be responsible, but, if that is so, why are Mexican immune systems reacting differently that US immune systems?

The acting head of CDC said on TV today that there is no vaccine against H1N1 influenza, which is only partially true. There have been many mixes of flu vaccine over the years which have contained H1N1 strains, just not this PARTICULAR one. Anyone who has had the flu vaccine regularly over the years should have at least partial protection, which might explain the difference between the US and Mexico.

The CDC on-line recommendations are reasonable and non-panicky. Its the media that is the problem. AND whoever the idiot was at WHO who pushed the “global pandemic” panic button. This is nowhere near a pandemic. It probably won’t ever turn into a pandemic. I think the folks at WHO are covering their sixes because of the SARS outbreak a few years ago (which wasn’t a pandemic, either, just a global episode.)

Apparently the bloggers are running wild, too. Some are saying this is a Chinese or Russian biowarfare plot (patent BS!). Others are saying it is a Federal scheme, and to avoid getting the vaccine at all costs (again, BS, but related to the 1970s swine flu immunization fiasco.)

What to do? Don’t panic. Obama has it all under control. His brilliant suggestion today that if a school has one case of swine flu, they shut down for the week is real stupidity. By the time a case is DOCUMENTED as H1N1, the exposure will have already been done. What he should do is close the border with Mexico for a week. The Cubans, and others, have already shut down all flights to and from Mexico.

A modicum of caution; avoiding crowds and enclosed, crowded places when possible; eating well and keeping a sense of proportion are the best means of prevention.

“This, too, shall pass”. We survived the 1918 pandemic; we survived SARS; we will survive this episode.

William O. Harrison, MD, FACP, FACPM, FIDSA
CAPT(MC)USN(ret)

Money and writing

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Sir, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

—Samuel Johnson

Always pleasant to be labeled a blockhead by a genius.  Still, fortunately for me, there are many other writers who disagree with Dr. Johnson.  There are also many who note, essentially, that if Dr. Johnson were correct, no one but a blockhead would ever write.  Fortunately for all of us, this doesn’t prove to be the case . . .

“Heresy” is a big word

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That was one of Mark Driscoll’s observations during his message at GCNC last week: “heresy” is a big word, a loaded word, that should only be used carefully, when necessary.  That’s not to say that we should never use it—sometimes it’s necessary, when people are claiming the name of Jesus to teach things that are significantly at odds with the gospel—but we must be very sure of our ground before we use that word, and equally sure of the spirit in which we use it.  That must never be an accusation hurled in anger, but must only be spoken gently, in a gracious spirit of loving correction.

S. M. Hutchens addresses this in an editorial in the latest issue of Touchstone called “The War on Error: The Business of Confronting Heresy”; it is in general a careful and thoughtful piece that takes note both of the need to name heresy for what it is and of the dangers in doing so overaggressively.

If an accusation is made, it must be made clearly, forcefully, and memorably, so that it is understood by those one is trying to protect from false doctrine: “This is untrue; it is heresy; avoid these people who teach it.”

This must be done judiciously and in the line of duty. If I have any quarrel with certain fathers, it is not that they identified false teaching for what it was, but that they sometimes did it so frequently that it may have become difficult to hear. There is besides a certain pathological temperament that enjoys hunting down and denouncing error and subjecting those who commit it to terror and humiliation that hardens them against truth. The heresy-hunting inquisitor is not a divine office, whereas pastor and teacher are. To the former mentality, exposing error is not a painful task cast in one’s path by the duties of office, but a form of pleasure—a dungeoner’s pleasure of which no good man would be proud.

However, I think there’s a point, named in the editorial, where Hutchens himself goes over the line.  Heretical doctrine is not merely doctrine which is in error, but doctrine which is in error on the core matters of the Christian faith, in such a way that the doctrine fundamentally threatens the integrity of the gospel message; it’s a significant departure from what C. S. Lewis called “mere Christianity,” nothing else, and nothing less.  Only those things which lead people away from the very means of salvation, then, deserve this label.  As such, I cannot agree when Hutchens writes,

These considerations have weighed heavily on me because of my concern with egalitarianism, which I have identified as a heresy. Although the identification was not difficult from a theological point of view—and our opponents are now in many places returning the compliment, accusing us of subordinationism: but surely one of us is heretical—its publication was very difficult indeed.

This is not just a matter of my being an egalitarian, though I will confess that being labeled a heretic is mildly irritating; it’s a matter of Hutchens using a word that’s far too big for the subject.  Is egalitarianism wrong?  Perhaps, though I don’t believe so; we can debate it.  But when he says “surely one of us is heretical,” he puts that out of possibility:  he says that those with whom he disagrees are not merely wrong, but grievously wrong, to such an extent that it threatens our salvation—and thus that if he were in fact wrong, the same would be true of him.

This is where I think Hutchens is seriously wrong.  I don’t see any support for his conclusion, and I don’t believe he can support it; scripturally, there is clearly an argument for his complementarian position, but not for the case that that position is essential for salvation.  Indeed, at this point it seems to me that he’s guilty of what Ray Ortlund dubbed “Galatian sociology”:  he’s added belief in something extrinsic to the gospel to belief in Jesus.  He may well be correct that belief in Jesus ought to lead to his position on male/female roles and relations, but that in and of itself is not enough to justify his conclusion that any other position is heretical.

If anything, in asserting that one must believe in Jesus and in complementarianism, he’s made himself vulnerable to a charge of heresy on the grounds that he has made salvation dependent not on Jesus but on right doctrine.  This is what the late Stan Grenz (if I recall correctly) called “the evangelical heresy,” that of putting our faith not in Jesus but in our creeds.  This is not to say that creeds don’t matter and right doctrine doesn’t matter, because the truth of what we believe matters immensely; but it is to say that it’s even more important to put the locus of salvation in the right place, not in the truth of what we believe, but in the truth of the one in whom we believe—or perhaps we might say, in the Truth in whom we believe.  The truth of our beliefs is important, because where we get things wrong, it obscures and distorts our understanding of the one in whom we put our faith—but it’s still he and he alone who saves us, not the correctness of our understanding of him.

As such, I believe Hutchens has shown himself guilty of a grave error in pronouncing gender egalitarians guilty of heresy, because he has elevated a particular belief about how God wants us to order our lives to a position of equality with belief in God himself; this is, I believe, a displacement of the proper centrality of the gospel of Jesus Christ for salvation, and that is a serious matter indeed.  I hesitate to declare that his error rises to the level of imperiling his eternal soul; as I said at the beginning, heresy is a very big word indeed, and I don’t consider that I have the right to make that judgment.  But I think that Hutchens would do very well to reconsider, if not his complementarian view of gender, at least the theological absolutism with which he holds that position, and whether he’s really in line with the gospel of Jesus Christ to declare all countervailing positions not merely wrong but fully heretical.  That way, it seems to me, lies nothing good.

 

The Obama administration and the criminalization of dissent

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I wrote a piece early last October laying out my thoughts as to what the Obama administration would look like, and what his presidency would bring. At some point, I intend to do a full-scale review of that post, evaluating what I got right and what I got wrong, but at this point I think I can call the shot on three connected predictions I made:  that Barack Obama’s talk of bipartisanship would be just empty words belied by a highly partisan administration, that Nancy Pelosi would run rampant, and (most worrisome), this:

I believe the approach we’ve seen from the Obama campaign to dissent and criticism will be repeated in the policies and responses of an Obama-led Executive Branch; given the clear willingness of his campaign to suppress freedom of speech to prevent criticism of their candidate, I believe we’ll see the same willingness from his administration and his chief congressional allies. This will mean a surge in the kind of the strongarm political tactics that we’ve already seen entirely too often this year. . . .

The Obama campaign’s efforts to shout down Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso (in an effort to intimidate Chicago radio station WGN into canceling their appearances on Milt Rosenberg’s show) ought to be disturbing to anyone who cares about free speech. Of even greater concern should be the Obama “truth squads” in Missouri, where the campaign enlisted allies in public office to threaten prosecution of any TV station that runs any ads about Sen. Obama that the campaign deems untrue. Not only is this approach outrageously biased (one side’s allowed to lie, but the other isn’t?), it gets into some very grey areas about interpretation and intent, and thus raises some real concerns as to the approach an Obama Department of Justice might take to the First Amendment.

This kind of approach, like Joe Biden’s suggestion that an Obama/Biden administration might prosecute the Bush administration, is nothing more nor less than the use (or threat of use) of political power to punish one’s opponents, intimidate critics, and silence dissenters; it’s the sort of thing we’re used to seeing in Zimbabwe, not here—and as the case of Zimbabwe shows, there’s nothing, not even money, that can corrupt a democracy faster, or more severely. I’ve argued before that one of the great problems with our politics in this day and age is that we absolutize our own perspectives—we assume that our own perspectives and presuppositions are the only legitimate ones, and that those who disagree with us can’t possibly be doing so sincerely, but must be acting out of motives that are selfish or otherwise wrong. The criminalization of politics, which we’re starting to see urged by the Obama campaign, is a more extreme version of that problem, because it argues that those motives are not only wrong, but are in fact criminal in nature. The chilling effect of that sort of approach should be deeply worrisome not just to conservatives, but also to true liberals.

Unfortunately, it appears that many leftist Democrats aren’t true liberals, because President Obama has now invited just such prosecutions, and they don’t appear to be worried at all; to its credit, the Boston Globe did call out Janet Napolitano and the Department of Homeland Security for the egregious report that pretty much labeled all conservatives as potential terrorist threats, but an awful lot of Democrats seem to be just fine with it.  Indeed, many who were First Amendment absolutists who loved to wax lyrical about the importance of dissent back when there was a Republican in the White House now seem to think anyone who dares argue with the Anointed One should be drug out into the street and shot.

To repeat:  the willingness of those in power to deal with opposition by criminalizing policy differences—to use brute force as a tool for gaining and maintaining political power—is one of the things that makes places like Zimbabwe the basket cases that they are.  We cannot afford to allow such an approach to corrupt our system.  But even if concern for what’s best for the nation doesn’t restrain the Obama administration from such banana-republic tactics, enlightened self-interest should, as Matt Lewis memorably illustrated (HT:  Joshua Livestro):

There has been a lot of debate on the potential prosecution of Bush Administration officials who offered legal opinions supporting waterboarding—with some even calling for investigations of high-ranking officials like Dick Cheney. However, one thing that hasn’t been given the attention it deserves is the precedent it would set if we were to criminalize national security decisions. Hence, I’ve finally decided to test out the time machine I’ve been building in my basement—and you would be surprised what sort of things grew out of the current debacle.

For instance, the following Associated Press story was filed on April 23, 2013, and if it sounds Orwellian, well, it is:

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS TO FACE PROSECUTION

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department announced today that charges could be filed against numerous Obama Administration officials as a result of last year’s terror attack in Los Angeles. In announcing the indictments, Attorney General John Cornyn said that top officials showed “gross and purposeful negligence” by releasing perpetrators of the attacks from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and demanding that interrogation tactics be softened against chief planner Mehmet al-Meshugeneh, who had already revealed that a major attack was being planned against a major U.S. sporting event.

“By purposefully disregarding crucial intelligence, and in releasing known participants in the plot into Saudi custody, numerous government officials took action which made the Staples Center bombing possible,” Cornyn said. He went on to note that “numerous individuals in the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security knowingly pursued policies which would endanger the lives of Americans. They placed their political priorities above the safety of the citizens of this country, and thousands of innocent people died as a result. These people must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

At the White House, Press Secretary Adam Brickley said that President Sarah Palin stands firmly behind the decision. “It’s not as if we relish the thought of prosecuting members of the previous administration,” Brickley said, “but, at this point, there is a clearly established precedent—set in place by the Obama Administration themselves—which says that government officials must be held accountable if they contributed in any way to major breaches of the law. In this case, the individuals under investigation do appear to have purposefully allowed these terrorists to continue their actions—prioritizing international public opinion over the lives of the American people. So, while this may be a politically charged issue, there is a real need to prosecute.”

In the end, the sort of tactics the Obama administration has now begun to employ are ineffective at silencing dissent (as the case of Zimbabwe, along with many other nations, shows)—all they really do is raise the stakes enormously.  If you’re willing to start prosecuting your predecessors, you’re going to get the same treatment from your successors unless you can manage to do one of two things:  a) overthrow the Constitution so that you can become President-for-Life, or b) never make a significant mistake.  Taken all in all, I’d say the first is likelier, and neither exactly probable.

All of which is to say that Barack Obama and his senior staff and advisors would do well to remember, and live by, an ancient piece of wisdom:

“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

—Matthew 7:12 (ESV)

Christians should be more Christian

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Remember, the three most powerful narratives on the planet are narratives of religion, narratives of nation, and narratives of ethnicity/race.  You cannot afford to forfeit that territory by talking about economics or the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Don’t be afraid to be Christian ministers.  If you don’t use the Christian narrative to define reality for your people, then someone else will define reality for them with a different narrative.

What makes this quote remarkable and unexpected is the speaker:  Eboo Patel, a devout Muslim.  Dr. Patel, an Oxford-trained scholar, teaches a course on interfaith leadership at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago together with a Christian woman named Cassie Meyer. McCormick being what it is, I would have expected such a course there to push lowest-common-denominatorism, but that seems to be far from the case. Judging by the fascinating article on Dr. Patel and the class in the latest issue of Leadership, “Ministry Lessons from a Muslim” (which doesn’t appear to be up online yet), he and Meyer advocate respectful conversation between unabashed truth claims.  We need to respect and love those with whom we disagree based on our own convictions, not by setting those convictions aside, and so Dr. Patel, as a Muslim, encourages his Christian students to be more Christian.  He explains this in part by saying,

If you enter a ministerial gathering as a Christian minister and downplay your Christian identity in an attempt to make everyone comfortable, as a Muslim leader, I’m immediately suspicious.  I don’t trust you.  Embracing your identity as a Christian creates safety for me to be a Muslim.

That isn’t a reaction I would have predicted, but it makes a lot of sense; after all, someone capable of neutering their own beliefs and identity for the sake of a particular goal is also perfectly capable of asking others to do the same—which, to those unwilling to do so, makes them a potential threat.  (By contrast, someone unapologetic about declaring and maintaining their beliefs either will make space for others to do the same, or else will expose their hypocrisy and other sin issues.  That’s not pleasant, to be sure, but at least such people can be dealt with straightforwardly.)

This is really cool

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I don’t remember how I ended up with a year’s free subscription to Wired, but I’ve really been enjoying it; I knew it was a good magazine, but either it’s gotten better over the last couple years or else I’d never fully appreciated it before.  The serious articles are consistently very good—for instance, there are a couple pieces from the March issue that I’ve been meaning to post on, serious pieces on the roots of the financial crisis and what steps ought to be taken to deal with it, and I was fascinated by the one in the May issue on Teller and the research he’s involved in on the neuropsychology of stage magic (if that sounds geeky, trust me, it isn’t)—but my favorite articles have been some of the lighter ones.

I was particularly pleased to see the piece in the April issue on the German board game The Settlers of Catan.  If you haven’t heard of it before, you’re not alone—in America, it has a ways to go before it’s as widely-known as, say, Monopoly or Scrabble; the only people I know who’ve heard of it found out about it the same way I did, from my brother-in-law—but when they call it a “perfect boardgame” that “redefines the genre,” they aren’t blowing smoke.  It’s a fascinating and enjoyable game on every level.  As the article explains,

Instead of direct conflict, German-style games tend to let players win without having to undercut or destroy their friends. This keeps the game fun, even for those who eventually fall behind. Designed with busy parents in mind, German games also tend to be fast, requiring anywhere from 15 minutes to a little more than an hour to complete. They are balanced, preventing one person from running away with the game while the others painfully play out their eventual defeat. And the best ones stay fresh and interesting game after game.

Teuber nailed all these traits using a series of highly orchestrated game mechanics. Instead of a traditional fold-out board, for example, Settlers has the 19 hexagonal tiles, each representing one of five natural resources—wooded forests, sheep-filled meadows, mountains ripe for quarrying. At the beginning of every game, they’re arranged at random into an island. Next, numbered tokens marked from 2 to 12 are placed on each tile to indicate which dice rolls will yield a given resource. Because the tiles get reshuffled after every game, you get a new board every time you play.

The idea is that players establish settlements in various locations on the board, and those settlements collect resource cards whenever the token number for the tile they are sitting on gets rolled. By redeeming these resource cards in specific combinations (it takes a hand of wood, brick, wheat, and wool to build a new settlement, for instance), you expand your domain. Every settlement is worth a point, cities are two points, and the first player to earn 10 points wins. You can’t get ahead by rustling your opponents’ sheep or torching their cute wooden houses.

One of the driving factors in Settlers—and one of the secrets to its success—is that nobody has reliable access to all five resources. This means players must swap cards to get what they need, creating a lively and dynamic market, which works like any other: If ore isn’t rolled for several turns, it becomes more valuable. “Even in this tiny, tiny microcosm of life, scarcity leads to higher prices, and plenty leads to lower prices,” says George Mason University economist Russ Roberts, who uses Settlers to teach his four children how free markets work.

Wheeling and dealing turns out to be an elegant solution to one of the big problems plaguing Monopoly—sitting idle while other players take their turns. Since every roll of the dice in Settlers has the potential to reap a new harvest of resource cards, unleash a flurry of negotiations, and change the balance of the board, every turn engages all the players. “The secret of Catan is that you have to bargain and sometimes whine,” Teuber says.

Teuber also made the game as flexible as possible, with numerous means of earning points. Building the longest road is worth two points, for instance, and collecting development cards (purchased with resource cards, these can offer a Year of Plenty resource bonanza or straight-up points) also brings you closer to victory. Having options like this is critical. The games that stand the test of time have just a few rules and practically unlimited possibilities, making them easy to learn and difficult to master. (Chess, for example, has 10120 potential moves, far more than the number of atoms in the universe.)

Finally, the game is designed to restore balance when someone pulls ahead. If one player gets a clear lead, that person is suddenly the prime candidate for frequent attacks by the Robber, a neat hack that Teuber installed. Roll a seven—the most likely outcome of a two-dice roll, as any craps player knows—and those with more than seven resource cards in their hand lose half their stash, while the person who rolled gets to place a small figure called the Robber on a resource tile, shutting down production of resources for every settlement on that tile. Not surprisingly, players often target the settler with the most points.

In addition to deploying the Robber, players will usually stop trading with any clear leader. In tandem, these two lines of attack can reduce a front-runner’s progress to a crawl. Meanwhile, lagging opponents have multiple avenues for catching up.

All of this means that players must use strategy and move smartly, but even flawless play doesn’t necessarily lead to easy victory. This is why kids can play with adults, or beginners with experts, and everyone stays involved.

“When a lot of us saw it, we thought this was the definition of a great game,” saysPete Fenlon, CEO of Mayfair Games, Settlers’ English-language distributor. “In every turn you’re engaged, and even better, you’re engaged in other people’s turns. There are lots of little victories—as opposed to defeats—and perpetual hope. Settlers is one of those perfect storms.”

If you like playing games—of any sort—and have people to play with, go pick up a copy and introduce yourself, and them, to Catan.  You’ll be glad of it.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

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With all due apologies to Inigo Montoya . . .

This is what the president promised us:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

So, what’s he doing about it? Well, according to the Washington Times,

The Obama administration, which has boasted about its efforts to make government more transparent, is rolling back rules requiring labor unions and their leaders to report information about their finances and compensation.

The Labor Department noted in a recent disclosure that “it would not be a good use of resources” to bring enforcement actions against union officials who do not comply with conflict of interest reporting rules passed in 2007. . . .

The regulation, known as the LM-30 rule, was at the heart of a lawsuit that the AFL-CIO filed against the department last year. One of the union attorneys in the case, Deborah Greenfield, is now a high-ranking deputy at Labor.

And courtesy of Michelle Malkin:

I wrote two weeks ago about transparency killer Ron Sims, the King County WA bureaucrat nominated to the no. 2 spot at HUD by supposed transparency savior Barack Obama. Those in his backyard who know him best know the lengths Sims has gone to in order to obstruct public disclosure and stop taxpayers from finding out the truth about his office’s shady dealings.

As I mentioned in the column, blogger Stefan Sharkansky sued Sims over his refusal to release public records related to voter fraud during the 2004 contested gubernatorial election. Today, Sharkansky reports, Sims and King County settled for $225,000, one of the largest settlements for public records violations in state history.

I think someone in the administration needs to go look up “transparent” in a good dictionary.

A pastoral comment on Sarah Palin

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I forgot to mention this yesterday, what with everything else going on, but I have another post up over on Conservatives4Palin.  Counsel for leaders within the church is also of value for Christians called to leadership outside the church, since I believe exercising Christian leadership in the marketplace and in government is an important form of Christian ministry.