Worth Reading

A handful of article I read today that are worth reading.

"How to Love Liberty More than a Libertarian Economist"- Joe Carter
http://blog.acton.org/archives/30356-how-to-love-liberty-more-than-a-libertarian-economist.html

"Syria: Should We Intervene?"- R.R. Reno
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2013/09/syria-should-we-intervene

"Jim Hamilton's Salvation History for Kids"- Andy Naselli
http://andynaselli.com/jim-hamiltons-salvation-history-for-kids-a-biblical-theology-that-rhymes

Are We Willing to be Hated?

For those who don't know, a 'millennial' is someone who is about my age (30) on down to the teenage range. This article deals with the issue of millennials and historic Christianity.

A key question that millennials must wrestle with is whether they have the nerve, character, conviction, or content of belief sufficient to make enemies. As Stanley Hauerwas has remarked, ‘Christianity is unintelligible without enemies.’ In a society that values tolerance above almost everything else, do millennial Christians have the nerve to voice truths that alienate, polarize, and antagonize our society, or to behave and speak in ways that might lead to them being hated? The sort of Christianity that spends much of its time criticizing benighted evangelicals for their unprogressive views may receive a friendly platform in places such as the Huffington Post religion section and may be looked upon more indulgently by secular society, but is hardly living up to its calling."

-Alastair Roberts, "Talking About My Generation: Millenials and the Church"

Read the whole thing here: http://alastairadversaria.wordpress.com/2013/07/31/talking-about-my-generation-millennials-and-the-church/

Are Your Children Wise Enough to be Given Options?

Relevant implications for child-rearing. Interestingly, on this point, the agnostic Dalrymple's advice coincides with that of Christian Ted Tripp's.

"If one is morally obliged to clear one's mind of the detritus of the past, in order to become a fully autonomous moral agent, it would seem to follow that we have an obligation not to fill the minds of the young with any detritus of our own manufacture. It is hardly surprising, then, that we increasingly invest children with authority over their own lives, and at ever earlier ages. Who are we to tell them what to do?...

The word "pupil" has almost been eliminated from usage in the English language, and has been replaced with "student." The two words have very different connotations. A pupil is under the tutelage or direction of someone who knows what the pupil, for his own good, ought to know and to learn; a student has matured to the point at which his own curiosity or ambition permit him to follow his own inclinations, at least to some extent, where his studies are concerned...

Perhaps some children are so naturally curious, and with such an instinct for the important and useful, that they can be left unguided almost from the first. But unflattering as it may be for our conception of human nature, this cannot be true of most children, who are not self-propelling along the paths of knowledge and wisdom.

Not all attempts to guide children on to these paths are successful, needless to say, as the disorder that prevails in so many of our schools amply testifies. But this in turn is evidence of a failure by parents to inculcate self-control in their offspring. And this is the result of investing their children with an authority to make choices and exercise vetoes as soon as they are able to express, or even to indicate them...

It is difficult to know in advance what practical effect a ban on advertising junk food to children might have (I suspect it would be slight), but [a certain] editorial was very revealing of what, for lack of a better term, I shall call the Zeitgeist. For the editorial stated that the advertisements gave children the impression that the junk foods in question were made just for them, and that they as children knew best what was good for them, and should therefore be the arbiters of what they ate. And this, said the editorial, made it more difficult for parents to control their children's diet.

Not a word was said about parents' proper authority over their own children. (We are speaking here of children of a very young age. According to the evidence, the obesity of children begins very early in their lives, well before anything that could possibly be construed as the age of reason. The pattern of overindulgence, principally in what is bad for them, is established before they go to school.) The author of the editorial regarded the television on which advertisements for junk food currently appear as a natural phenomenon, like the atmosphere, over the watching and influence of which parents could be expected to exercise no control. But what kind of parents, one might ask, is incapable of saying No when children want something they should not have?

Lazy or sentimental parents, no doubt. They use junk food in much the same way as (though with far less excuse than) Victorian parents used Godfrey's Cordial, that is to say opium in syrup, to stop the crying and screaming. But there is more to it than that. Anyone who has observed a mother in a shop or supermarket solicitously and even anxiously bending over a three- or four year-old child to ask him what he would like for his next meal will understand the sovereignty over choice that is now granted to those who have neither experience nor powers of discrimination enough to exercise it on the basis of anything other than the merest whim, without regard to the consequences. By abdicating their responsibility in this fashion, in the name of not passing on their own prejudices or preconceptions to their children, and not imposing their own view of what is right upon them, they enclose their children within the circle of their childish tastes. In the name of the struggle against prejudice and illegitimate authority, they instill a culinary prejudice that, though self-evidently harmful, is far more restrictive in the long run than any they might have instilled by the firm exercise of their authority; for, in the absence of experience, children will always choose the same thing, the thing that is most immediately attractive or gratifying to them.

The precocity encouraged by too-early an assumption of the responsibility for making a choice, as if children were the customers of their parents rather their offspring, is soon followed by arrested development. A young child, constantly consulted over his likes and dislikes, learns that life is, and ought to be, ruled by his likes and dislikes. He is not free of prejudices just because he is free of his parents' prejudices. On the contrary, he is a slave to his own prejudices. Unfortunately, they are harmful both to him as an individual, and to the society of which he is a member."

-Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas

Against All Forms of Authority (Well, Almost All)

More from Theodore Dalrymple. Note: "Bazarov" is a nihilistic character from Ivan Turgenev's book Fathers and Sons.

"Bazarov's attitude of repudiation-what I suppose would once have been called spiritual pride-is now, if not a mass phenomenon, a very widespread one. I experienced a striking instance of it on a flight to Dublin from England. Next to me sat a young Irish social worker, who noticed that I was reading a famous book, Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram, the famous American social psychologist who died young, in part from refusal to alter his living habits. In his book, Milgram describes the experiments he conducted to demonstrate that ordinary people would, without any compulsion except the presence of a figure supposedly in authority, electrocute a complete stranger. The social worker said to me that, having grown up in Ireland under the iron tutelage of the Catholic Church, she was against all forms of authority.

"All forms?" I asked.

"All forms," she replied. She had precisely the "indescribable composure" that Turgenev says is possessed by Bazarov.

"So you don't mind," I asked, "if I now go to the cockpit of this aircraft and take over the controls?"

This, it turned out (I think because it was a matter of her life and death), was a completely different matter. The authority of the pilot was based upon knowledge, experience, and proper certification.

"And who," I asked, "certifies his knowledge and experience?" The answer was obvious: people with even greater knowledge and experience. But surely, I asked, this must lead to an infinite regress that, in this imperfect world of ours, would have to stop somewhere? Of course, but the state had looked into all that, and decided who constituted the competent authority. But from where did the state gain its authority? We, the people, of course. But who gave us, the people, authority? Well, it is so inscribed in the Book of Nature. This being the case, how is it that it was discovered so late in the history of humanity? How come it was not evident to Shakespeare, Newton, and Bach, who were at least as gifted as we?  

These were deep questions for a short flight. But it was clear to me that the person who was against all authority was against only some authority, the authority she disliked. The one authority she really respected, of course, was her own."  

-Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas 

Selective Doubt, or 'Why Get Married? It's Just a Piece of Paper!'

Rene Descarte, you will remember, employed methodological doubt. He doubted everything--his sense experience, his memory, human authority--until he found something which he believed he could not doubt, namely, his own thought. Cogito, ergo sum. 'I think, therefore I am.' 'That's how I know I exist,' Descartes concluded.

Whatever you may think of Descarte's method, Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician and social critic, describes how human beings often use Descarte's doubting method selectively in order to justify their own whims and desires.

WE MAY I N Q U I R E why it is that there are now so many Descartes in the world, when in the seventeenth century there was only one. Descartes, be it remembered, who so urgently desired an indubitable first philosophical principle, was a genius: a mathematician, physicist, and philosopher who wrote in prose of such clarity, that it is still the standard by which the writing of French intellectuals is, or ought to be, judged. Have we, then, bred up a race of philosophical giants, whose passion is to examine the metaphysics of human existence? I hope I will not be accused of being an Enemy of the People when I beg leave to doubt it.

The popularity of the Cartesian method is not the consequence of a desire to remove metaphysical doubt, and find certainty, but precisely the opposite: to cast doubt on everything, and thereby increase the scope of personal license, by destroying in advance any philosophical basis for the limitation of our own appetites. The radical skeptic, nowadays at least, is in search not so much of truth, as of liberty-that is to say, of liberty conceived of the largest field imaginable for the satisfaction of his whims. He is in the realm of moral conceptions what the man who refuses to marry is in the realm of relationships: he is reluctant to foreclose on any possibilities by imposing limits on himself, even ones that are taken to be purely symbolic. I once had a patient who attempted suicide because her long-time lover refused to propose to her. I asked him the reason for his refusal, and he replied that it (marriage) was only a piece of paper and meant nothing. "If it is only a piece of paper and means nothing," I asked him, "why do you not sign it? According to you, it would change nothing, but it would give her a lot of pleasure." Suddenly, becoming a man of the deepest principle, he said that he did not want to live a charade. I could almost hear the argument that persuaded the man that he was right: that true love and real commitment are affairs of the heart, and need no sanction of the church or state to seal them.

The skepticism of radical skeptics who demand a Cartesian point from which to examine any question, at least any question that has some bearing on the way they ought to conduct themselves, varies according to subject matter. Very few are so skeptical that they doubt that the sun will rise tomorrow, even though they might have difficulty offering evidence for the heliocentric (or any other) theory of the solar system. These skeptics believe that when they turn the light switch, the light will come on, even though their grasp of the theory of electricity might not be strong. A ferocious and insatiable spirit of inquiry overtakes them, however, the moment they perceive that their interests are at stake-their interests here being their freedom, or license, to act upon their whims. Then all the resources of philosophy are available to them in a flash, and are used to undermine the moral authority of custom, law, and the wisdom of ages.

-Theodore Dalrymple, In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas

http://www.amazon.com/Praise-Prejudice-Theorists-Encounters-ebook/dp/B0056IJKAW/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374262539&sr=1-8&keywords=Theodore+Dalrymple

 

How to Justify Clone Murder

To appreciate the following excerpt you need a little background about the novel’s plot. So if you ever had any intention of reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, exit now, or forever have the ending spoiled.

Ishiguro’s novel is set in an alternate version of modern England. In this alternate reality, due to scientific discoveries made in the 1950’s, the UK has been pursuing something called the “donation” program for the past fifty years. In this program, an entire class of human beings has been cloned for the sole purpose of harvesting their vital organs when they reach peak adulthood. These children, having no natural parents, are reared in orphanages until they reach eighteen, and then sent to live in communes until they begin their “donations.” Some of them become “carers”—clones who care for other clones during the convalescent period of their multiple donations. When a clone finally dies, he or she is said to “complete.” (Note the language games that this society has to play to justify such a system.) All of these facts are revealed gradually during the first 80 or so pages of the book.

The novel centers on Kathy H. and Tommy D. (note the lack of last names), who grow up in a “school” called Hailsham. Kathy and Tommy fall in love, and although as clones they are neither allowed to marry nor physically able to beget or bear children, they eventually seek out a way to be together. This excerpt occurs near the book’s end. In it, Kathy and Tommy are talking with Miss Lucy, and elderly woman who served as a “guardian” at Hailsham when they were children. They have come to her asking for a “deferral” on their donations (translated: 'Please don't kill us yet. We'd like a chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'). They have heard rumors that some students, especially Hailsham students, can receive deferrals if they can prove that they’re truly in love. Tommy believes that this is why Hailsham was always taking away examples of their artwork when they children—because the artwork would show what they were like inside, and serve as criteria for which students could merit deferrals.

In this tragic ending, Kathy and Tommy learn that the rumors were false. There are no deferrals. But they, along with the readers, also finally learn the cryptic history behind the entire donation system. As Miss Lucy’s explanation unfolds, Ishiguro paints a frighteningly realistic picture of the lengths to which selfish human beings will go in order to make their lives more comfortable, and the rationalizations they will use in order to silence the voice of conscience.

The excerpt begins with Miss Lucy explaining to Kathy and Tommy the real reason Hailsham took their childhood artwork. Kathy is the narrator, so all first-person references are hers.

"‘We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove that you had souls at all.'

She paused, and Tommy and I exchanged glances for the first time in ages. Then I asked, “Why did you have to prove a thing like that, Miss Emily? Did you someone think that we didn’t have souls?”

A thin smile appeared on her face. ‘It’s touching, Kathy, to see you so taken aback. It demonstrates, in a way, that we did our job well. As you say, why would anyone doubt you had a soul? But I have to tell you, my dear, it wasn’t something commonly held when we first set out all those years ago. And though we’ve come a long way since then, it’s still not a notion universally held, even today. You Hailsham students, even after you’ve been out in the world like this, you still don’t know the half of it. All around the country, at this very moment, there are students being reared in deplorable conditions, conditions you Hailsham students could hardly imagine…’

'But what I don’t understand,’ I said, is why people would want students treated so badly in the first place?’

“From your perspective today, Kathy, your bemusement is perfectly reasonable. But you must try and see it historically. After the great war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthroughs in science followed one after the other so rapidly, there wasn't time to take stock, to ask sensible questions. Suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions. This is what the world noticed the most, wanted the most. And for a long time, people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum. Yes, there were arguments. But by the time people became concerned...about students, by the time they came to consider just how you were reared, whether you should have been brought into existence at all, well by then it was too late. There was no way to reverse the process. How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neuron disease, heart disease. So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren't really like us. That you weren't really human, so it didn't matter.”

-Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 

http://www.amazon.com/Never-Let-Me-Kazuo-Ishiguro/dp/1400078776

When to Drink, and When Not to Drink

"And if the way is too long for you, so that you are not able to carry the tithe, when the Lord your God blesses you, because the place is too far from you, which the Lord your God chooses, to set his name there, then you shall turn it into money and bind up the money in your hand and go to the place that the Lord your God chooses and spend the money for whatever you desire—oxen or sheep or wine or strong drink, whatever your appetite craves. And you shall eat there before the Lord your God and rejoice, you and your household." (Deuteronomy 14:24-26, ESV)

"You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth and wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine and bread to strengthen man's heart." (Psalm 104:14-15, ESV)

"Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy." 

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

Book Review: The Authenticity Hoax

Courtesy of Marc Hays.

http://kuyperiancommentary.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/book-review-the-authenticity-hoax/

Of Stylemongers and Split Infinitives

Just as those preachers who are least fastidious about Greek are often those who are most proficient in Greek (Moises Silva once remarked, "In my own preaching in the past twenty-five years, explicit references to Greek and Hebrew have become less and less frequent."), so those writers least fastidious about certain rules of grammar are often those most knowledgeable of grammar. After all, the man who wrote the following passage could think in Greek by the age of fifteen.

"Having said that the unliterary reader attends to the words too little to make anything like a full use of them, I must notice that there is another sort of reader who attends to them far too much and in the wrong way. I am thinking of what I call Stylemongers. On taking up a book, these people concentrate on what they call its 'style' or its 'English'. They judge this neither by its sound nor by its power to communicate but by its conformity to certain arbitrary rules. Their reading is a perpetual witch hunt for Americanisms, Gallicisms, split infinitives, and sentences that end with a preposition. They do not inquire whether the Americanism or the Gallicism in question increases or impoverishes the expressiveness of our language. It is nothing to them that the best English speakers and writers have been ending sentences with prepositions for over a thousand years. They are full of arbitrary dislikes for particular words. One is 'a word they have always hated'; another 'always makes them think of so-and-so'. This is too common, and that too rare. Such people are of all men least qualified to have an opinion about a style at all; for the only two tests that are really relevant...are the two they never apply. They judge the instrument by anything rather its power to do the thing it was made for; treat language as something that 'is' but does not 'mean'; criticise the lens after looking at it instead of through it."  

-C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism 

Having Heroes, Imitating Others, and "Being Yourself"

Heroes are people we look up to; people we want to be like. According to Professor Allan Bloom, the idea that we should have heroes tends to wither in a culture where we are encouraged to "be ourselves." At least that seemed to be the case with his students. Both Allan Bloom and Jason Hood observe, however, that we all have heroes and we all imitate others, whether we realize it or not. Even though people may claim they want to "be themselves," you will usually find that their "selves" look a lot like certain other "selves" around them (or on TV).

"Having heard over a period of years the same kinds of responses to my question about favorite books [i.e. dead silence], I began to ask students who their heroes are. Again, there is usually silence, and most frequently nothing follows. Why should anyone have heroes? One should be oneself and not form oneself in an alien mold...[But] from what source within themselves would they draw the goals they think they set for themselves? Liberation from the heroic only means that they have no resource whatsoever against conformity to the current 'role models.'"

-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987 A.D)

"...Imitation is simply inescapable. From birth to adulthood, imitation drives our behavior and beliefs. Peer pressure, the herd mentality, word of mouth, and other social factors and processes create fresh plausibility structures that facilitate experimentation with drugs, religion, facial hair, sushi, and new television programs. We rarely adopt a child, try a new diet, or engage in fasting and prayer unless exemplars model these actions and the mindsets that make the actions possible. We keep up with the Joneses, sometimes with reckless abandon, sometimes almost subconsciously duplicating their patterns of speech, consumption, dress, and recreation. We don't often use the word imitation to describe this phenomenon, perhaps in part because we love to think of ourselves as unique and independent actors. But we are all imitators, shaped in a thousand ways by what we see and hear around us."

-Jason B. Hood, Imitating God in Christ: Recovering a Biblical Pattern (2013 A.D.) 

Elijah Was a Human Being Like Us

Some authors have told me that a Christ-centered preacher shouldn't hold up Old Testament characters as examples for his hearers. 'That's moralistic,' they tell me. But does it have to be? I have gleaned much help from these authors, and will continue to do so. But I have come to believe that they have overreacted to the dangers of moralism. As a healthy balance, I heartily recommend Jason Hood's book Imitating God in Christ: Recapturing a Biblical Pattern. It demonstrates how Scripture sets forth God, Christ, and godly people as examples for us to imitate. 

"James refers to Old Testament characters five times in five chapters. Abraham, Rahab, Elijah, Job, and "the prophets" are all used as examples for New Testament-era believers (James 2:14-26; 5:10-18). All five characters responded to the work and promises of God. James notes that Elijah "was a human being like us" whose prayers worked powerfully (James 5:17). I suspect that many Christians today would not make such a connection as they read 1 Kings. Many leaders would never think to encourage their congregations to see themselves in Elijah's story so that they gain confidence in prayer. Only my charismatic friends seem to teach such things."
-Jason B. Hood, Imitating God in Christ: Recapturing a Biblical Pattern

http://www.amazon.com/Imitating-God-Christ-Recapturing-Biblical/dp/0830827102 

Peeling Back the Onion of 'Authentic' Culture

"In a nice metaphor from Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghanian scholar who teaches at Princeton, examining a culture is like peeling an onion, where you discover layer upon layer of influences, borrowings, re-imaginings, and wholesale imports from other places. As an example, he points out that in West Africa, traditional Herero dress for women comes from nineteenth-century Lutheran missionaries. In Canada, it is customary for political leaders to give as gifts to visiting dignitaries Inuit soapstone carvings, but few Canadians realize that carving was introduced to the Inuit by a white carver in 1948.

Examples like this are endless. Every aspect of almost every culture, from musing to music, from dining to dance and everything else you can think of, has been shaped by trade in goods, ideas, technologies, and--more than anything else--by the simple fact of people moving around the planet and interacting with one another. One of my favorite examples is the steel drum ensembles of Trinidad, whose main instruments are the fifty gallon oil barrels left behind on the island by U.S. forces after the Second World War. These drums, along with other metallic objects such as biscuit tins and frying pans, almost completely replaced indigenous drum technology, which used bamboo. But does anyone think Trinidadian steel drum music is any less 'authentic' for it?

A healthy culture is like a healthy person: it is constantly changing, growing, and evolving, yet something persists through these changes, a ballast that keeps it upright ad recognizable no matter how much it is buffeted by the transformative winds of trade."

-Andrew Potter, The Authenticity Hoax

http://www.amazon.com/Authenticity-Hoax-Lost-Finding-Ourselves/dp/B004NSVFOU 

Aslan Will Not Always Be Scolding

“I have come," said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him.” And in less time than it takes to breath Jill forgot about the dead king and remembered only how she had made Eustace fall over the cliff, and how she had helped to muff nearly all the signs, and about all the snappings and quarrelings. And she wanted to say, "I'm sorry," but she could not speak. Then the Lion drew them toward him with his eyes, and bent down and touched their pale faces with his tongue, and said:

"Think of that no more. I will not always be scolding..."

C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

"He will not always chide,
nor will he keep his anger forever."

Psalm 103:9

Better than their Creed

“…Men are often much better than their creed. That is, the doctrines on which they live are much nearer the truth, than those which they profess. They deceive themselves by attaching wrong meaning to words, and seem to reject truth when in fact they only reject their own misconceptions. It is a common remark that men’s prayers are more orthodox than their creeds.”

Charles Hodge, Ephesians Commentary

Everything but Plowshares

"Evangelical Christianity—like all branches of the historic church—maintains a tension between the "already" and the "not yet" of this kingdom. That tension seeks to avoid bringing the kingdom too near (in utopianism or political gospels) or keeping it too far (in prophecy-chart fixations or withdrawal from society). From the apostolic age to the digital era, the "already-not yet" tension has proven difficult to understand. But it's really no more complicated than reconciling Jesus' declaration that the "kingdom of God is in your midst" with the fact that two millennia have passed with swords still used for everything but plowshares. The difference between what's "already" and what's "not yet" is summed up in the question, "Where is Jesus ruling now, and how?" The kingdom comes in two stages, because King Jesus himself does."

--Russell Moore

Natural Law and Pressing Down a Wildcat

“The paradox is that the natural law is both really known, and really suppressed. Among my Catholic friends, who see the knowledge, I stress the suppression. Among my Reformed friends, who see the suppression, I stress the knowledge. Sometimes people think that suppressed moral knowledge is the same as weakened moral knowledge with weakened power over behavior. On the contrary…pressing down on one’s conscience does not make it weak any more than pressing down a wildcat makes it docile. It only makes it more violent. Its claws are even sharper in a culture with a Christian past, like ours, for then people have more to suppress.”  

-J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man

War Solves Nothing...or Does It?

“During the Cold War…many among the intelligentsia began repeating the old notion that war “solves nothing,” an echo from the 1930s, where the futility of war was proclaimed, among others, by Neville Chamberlain, who said that war “wins nothing, cures nothing, ends nothing”—and who was in turn simply echoing what many among the intelligentsia were saying in his day. But like so much that has been said by the intelligentsia upon so many subjects, the notion that “war solves nothing” had less to do with any empirical evidence than with its consonance with the vision of the anointed, which in turn had much to do with the exaltation of the anointed. Had the battle of Lepanto in 1571 or the battle of Waterloo in 1815 gone the other way, this could be a very different world today. Had the desperate fighting at Stalingrad and on the beaches of Normandy gone the other way during the Second World War, life might not be worth living for millions of human beings today. There have of course been futile wars in which all the nations on both sides ended up far worse off than before—the First World War being a classic example. But no one would make the blanket statement that medical science “solves nothing” because many people die despite treatment and some die because of wrong treatment or even from the remote risks of vaccinations. In short, mundane specifics are more salient in evaluating any particular war than are the sweeping, abstract, and dramatic pronouncements so often indulged in by the intelligentsia.”

-Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society 

On Conspiracy Theories

A post from Carl Trueman on conspiracy theories reminded me of several quotes I have collected through the years, all of which make similar statements.

Conspiracy theories have an aesthetic appeal: they make us feel more important in the grand scheme of things than we are. If someone is going to all this trouble to con us into believing in something, then we have to be worth conning; and the impotence we all feel in the face of massive impersonal bureaucracies and economies driven not by democratic institutions so much as multinational corporations is not really the result of our intrinsic smallness and insignificance so much of our potential power which needs to be smothered. Such views play to our vanity; and, to be brutally frank, the kind of virtual solitary vice which so much solipsistic internet activity represents.

Conspiracy theories don’t hold up, though. Nobody is that competent and powerful to pull them off. Even giant bureaucracies are made up of lots of small, incompetent units fighting petty turf wars, a fragmentation which undermine the possibility of the kind of co-ordinated efforts required to pull off, say, the fabrication of the Holocaust. History, humanly speaking, is a tale of incompetence and thoughtlessness, not of elaborate and sophisticated cabals. Evil, catastrophic evil, is not exceptional and brilliant; it is humdrum and banal; it does not involve thinking too much; it involves thinking too little.

-Carl Trueman, Histories and Fallacies

“Many issues are misconstrued, not because they are too complex for most people to understand, but because a mundane explanation is far less emotionally satisfying than an explanation which produces villains to hate and heroes to exalt. Indeed, the emotionally satisfying explanation may often be more complex than a mundane explanation that is more consonant with verifiable facts. This is especially true of conspiracy theories.” 

-Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society 

"My boyfriend, Jim, has so many conspiracy theories. I think he gives people too much credit. I so rarely meet a single person who is very well organized, or with any direction. What are the chances a meeting a whole group?"

Esme Raji Codell, Educating Esme

"Liberal historians often assume that people are omnicompetent. Because they believe that humans can do anything, they routinely assume that outcomes are almost always the planned results of some human intentions. (An aside: this is why conspiracy theories abound. When you think that men control everything, you assume that every bad thing is the result of some intentional human plan.) Not true. Fallen humans are both capable and myopic, both powerful and unwise. The result is that human history is littered with unintended consequences. The Great War for Empire (a.k.a. the French and Indian War) shattered the colonists’ largely warm relationship with Great Britain in the 1760s, but this was accidental and unplanned. Historical events have causes, but they are often unexpected ones. Indeed, we should not be surprised when fallen humans misjudge situations and unleash dynamics that yield surprising results."

-Robert G. Spinney 

What Should We Do with our Frozen Embryos?

Russell Moore responds to this question from a conscience-stricken  father.

http://www.russellmoore.com/2013/04/17/what-should-we-do-with-our-frozen-embryos/#more-10558

Media Silence and Suppressing the Truth

The Kermit Gosnell murder trial has all the earmarks of a great story, but thus far the media has largely silent.  Here are some good sources dealing with why:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevinwax/2013/04/11/8-reasons-for-the-media-blackout-on-kermit-gosnell/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/getreligion/2013/04/a-wapo-reporter-explains-her-personal-gosnell-blackout/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+getreligion%2FDmXm+%28GetReligion%29

http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/04/12/the-briefing-04-12-13/ (first seven minutes)

Abortion and the Right to Get What You Pay For

"Recently in Florida, Alisa LaPolt Snow, representing Florida Planned Parenthood organizations, testified against a bill that would require abortionists to provide medical care to babies who survive attempted abortions. Snow was asked: “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?” Snow replied: “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family and the physician.” She added, “That decision should be between the patient and the health care provider.” To this, a Florida legislator responded: “I think that at that point the patient would be the child struggling on a table. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Planned Parenthood, which receives more than $500 million in government subsidies, is branching out, expanding its mission beyond the provision of abortions to the defense of consumers’ rights: If you pay for an abortion, you are owed a dead baby."

 -George Will, "Johns Hopkins and Planned Parenthood's Troubling Extremism"

For more analysis of this story, see http://erlc.com/article/life-digest-infanticide-optional-p.p.-official-says

Temptation that Only Jesus Can Know

If Jesus never sinned, then can he really understand how strong our temptations are? 19th century bishop B.F. Westcott gives a thoughtful answer.

“Endurance involves more, not less, than ordinary human suffering: sympathy with the sinner in his trial does not depend on the experience of sin but on the experience of the strength of the temptation to sin which only the sinless can know in its full intensity. He who falls yields before the last strain.”

-B.F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews (1892 A.D.)

How to Live in the Age of Nuclear War

With Iran and North Korea making constant noise, Lewis's words here are as timely as ever.

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.” 

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors— anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

--C. S. Lewis, "On Living in an Atomic Age," in Present Concerns 

Guns and the Killing Chain

David Brooks, full of principled pragmatism and good sense, as usual.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/opinion/brooks-the-killing-chain.html?ref=davidbrooks&_r=0

A Brief History of Church Discipline

Greg Wills is a professor of church history at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In this excerpt, he gives a brief summary overview of how church discipline has been practiced across church history, and what factors impacted its practice.

"From the apostolic era to the end of the fourth century, church discipline was a standard practice in the church, though not always practiced universally or consistently. From the fifth century the practice of church discipline diminished, and the practice of private confession and individual penance largely displaced it. During the Protestant Reformation there was a broad desire to recover the practice of apostolic church discipline, but those efforts were not always successful. Both the practice of infant baptism and the control of civil authorities over the affairs of the church made full recovery difficult. The Anabaptists were more successful because of their insistence on the separation of the civil and religious realms as well as their practice of regenerate church membership. Although Baptists maintained active church discipline from the seventeenth until the late nineteenth century, during the twentieth century it waned dramatically. Churches rarely opposed it in principle, but for a variety of reasons they lost their resolve to practice it."

-Greg Wills, Those Who Must Give an Account: A Study of Church Membership and Church Discipline

Church Discipline and the Assurance of Love

The Assurance of Love

"In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul told the Corinthian congregation to wake up to the truth and to realize that they had someone in their number who was living as an enemy to the gospel he professed. A man was committing adultery with his father's wife (a serious crime even in pagan Corinth)! But the man is not the direct object of Paul's rebuke; that was reserved for the congregation. Why? Because the congregation was allowing the man to continue thinking of himself as a follower of Jesus when he was in open and unrepentant sin. His sin was as leaven in the loaf (as Paul goes on to say); it was infection in the body. The infection itself was serious but not nearly as serious as the congregation's toleration of it. To be welcoming and tolerant at this point was not simply an individual infection; it was a failure of the body's entire immune system. It showed that something essential to the body's life and health was missing, and it would quickly lead to the death of that local body if not immediately addressed. A body that could not resist such an intrusion would soon succumb to it.

Considered from the point of the individual disciplined, what Paul was calling them to implement was an act of love. Given that this man was obviously continuing to regard himself as, and was being regarded by others as, a Christian, he was clearly self-deceived. We know that professing Christians can be self-deceived. Paul later wrote to the Corinthians, "Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith. Examine yourselves" (2 Cor 13: 5; cf. 1 Pet 1: 10– 11). We should realize that offering someone assurance of their salvation, based merely on their profession of faith in Christ, may not be the most loving thing we can do. And if that is true for us as individuals, it is doubly true of our congregations. Joining a church is joining an assurance-of-salvation cooperative. We are to observe evidences of God's grace in one another's lives and to encourage one another. We are to correct one another when occasion requires. Paul was urgent in 1 Corinthians 6 that the Corinthians not be deceived about who would inherit the kingdom of God. That warning sprang from love. Membership functions to assure us that we truly know God's love and that we truly love God in response."

-Mark Dever, in Those Who Must Give an Account: A Study of Church Membership and Church Discipline http://www.amazon.com/Those-Who-Must-Give-Account/dp/1433671190/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365087341&sr=1-1&keywords=Those+Who+Must+Give+an+Account%3A

Jesus is on the Wrong Side of History

Trevin Wax at his best.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevinwax/2013/04/02/jesus-is-on-the-wrong-side-of-history/

Intended Allegory in the Song of Solomon?

Good article by James Hamilton dealing with the issue of whether Solomon intended his Song to describe both human married love and divine married love.

http://jimhamilton.info/2013/04/01/intended-allegory-in-the-song-of-songs/

Why Christians Should Read Fiction

Do you think reading fiction is a waste of time? Read this article, and think harder.

http://www.russellmoore.com/2013/03/25/why-christians-should-read-fiction/

Do You Still Want to be Like Mike?

Matt Smethurst writes a tragic but gospel-centered piece about Michael Jordan over at the Gospel Coalition.

Thanks to my pastor Donny for forwarding this article to me.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2013/02/21/when-greatness-meets-emptiness-michael-jordan-at-50/

Cussing, Crassness, and Lack of Love

With all the hubbub in the past decade over the crassness of some popular preachers, C.S. Lewis's counsel can provide a balanced corrective for young Christians.

“Some of the language which chaste women in Shakespeare’s day would have been used in the 19th century only by a woman completely abandoned. When people break the rule of propriety current in their own time and place, if they do so in order to excite lust in themselves or others, then they offending against chastity. But if they break it through ignorance or carelessness they are guilty only of bad manners. When, as often happens, they break it defiantly in order to shock or embarrass others, they are not necessarily being unchaste, but they are being uncharitable: for it is uncharitable to take pleasure in making other people uncomfortable.”

--C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

I would, however, add one qualification to Lewis's statement (a qualification I think he would agree with): it is not always unloving to make people uncomfortable. When people are 'at ease in Zion,' comfortable in their idolatry or their legalism, sometimes the most loving thing we can do is to shock them out of their stupor. But our goal must always be for them to be saved, not for us to look cool. When Isaiah informed the Israelites that their righteous deeds were like a filthy menstrual cloth ("a bloody tampon," as one preacher aptly paraphrased it), I doubt he was trying to contextualize to the younger generation.

The best sermon I have ever heard that deals with this issue is Ryan Fullerton's sermon on Galatians 5:12, a text in which the Apostle Paul wishes aloud that false teachers would emasculate themselves. Fullerton is pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Louisville, KY, and was formerly Chris and Tiffany Davis's pastor. The sermon, titled "Harsh, Sarcastic, and Crass for the Sake of the Gospel," can be heard or downloaded here: http://www.ibclouisville.org/old/sermon/06-27-2009/harsh-sarcastic-and-crass-sake-gospel

Why Evangelicals Should Care Who Becomes Pope

In a sermon a couple of weeks ago, I made two comments about the Roman Catholic Church's search for the next pope (who at the time was not yet chosen): (1) ecclesiastically speaking, we Protestants have no dog in this fight (2) culturally speaking, we Protestants should still hope and pray for a conservative pope to be chosen.

In the link below, Justin Taylor gives some helpful excepts from Carl Trueman, church historian at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. Trueman is hardly an ecumenical fan of the Roman Catholic Church (see his fascinating article here, http://www.reformation21.org/articles/pay-no-attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain-roman-catholic-history-and-the-e.php, yet he is always full of good sense. And his comments in the link below do a better job at making clear what I was trying to say two weeks ago.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2013/03/14/why-protestants-should-be-interested-in-rome/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+between2worlds+%28Between+Two+Worlds%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Should a Christian Dentist Fire His Too-Hot Hygienist?

Russell Moore discusses a thorny ethical question that was in the news recently.

http://www.russellmoore.com/2013/03/11/should-a-christian-dentist-fire-his-too-hot-hygienist/

Jesus Has Imperium

Imperium: Noun: absolute power or authority; the right to command.

"Most people in Western societies lump churches into the same category as soccer clubs or charity organizations. Churches are one more kind of voluntary organization, we say. Alternatively, we regard churches as a service provider, like a mechanic who services your soul or a gas station that fills up your spiritual tank.

But are local churches clubs or service providers that exist by the permission of the state, one more supplicant who depends on the mercy of the lord of the land? 

It's true that you as an individual Christian should submit to the authority of the state. But remember that the state is God's 'servant' and God's 'agent' for bringing judgment (Rom. 13:4). Yes, the state possesses the 'sword,' but it does so only at God's behest. It's also true that churches should abide by the laws of the land when it comes to regulations such as adhering to building codes (if it has a building) or paying taxes on staff salaries (if it has a paid staff). In that sense, churches are like every other business or organization.  

At the same time, there is one thing that should be utterly clear in the Christian's mind: the local church does not exist by the permission of the state. It exists by the express authorization of Jesus. After all, Jesus has imperium, not the state. 

To be a Christian is to know this: Jesus is where the buck ultimately stops. Jesus is the authority to which all other authorities must answer. Jesus will judge the nations and their governments. He is the one with final power over life and death. The state exists by Jesus' permission, not the other way around. States typically don't acknowledge this fact, of course. But churches know it's true (John 19:11, Rev. 1:5, 6:15-17).

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus, and he gave his church the authority to march on the nations. His church will therefore advance like an army that cannot be stopped. The boundary lines of the nations won't stop it. The executive orders of presidents and prime ministers won't stop it. Not even the gates of hell will slow it down.

Jesus has imperium."

-Jonathan Leeman, Church Membership: How the World Knows Who Represents Jesus

http://www.amazon.com/Church-Membership-Represents-Building-Churches/dp/1433532379

 

 

Health Care Laws and the Failure of Minimal Toleration

Yuval Levin writes about the HHS mandate and the meaning of religious freedom

So basically, the religious institutions are required by the government to give their workers an insurer and that insurer is required by the government to give those workers abortive and contraceptive coverage, but somehow these religious employers are supposed to imagine that they’re not giving their workers access to abortive and contraceptive coverage. If religious people thought about their religious obligations the way HHS lawyers think about the law, this might just work. But they don’t.

And that’s just the point here. This document, like the versions that have preceded it, betrays a complete lack of understanding of both religious liberty and religious conscience. Religious liberty is an older and more profound kind of liberty than we are used to thinking about in our politics now. It’s not freedom from constraint, but recognition of a constraint higher than even the law. It’s not “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” but the right to answer to what you are persuaded is the evident and inflexible reality of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. It’s not the right to do what you want; it is the right to do what you must.

Governments have to recognize that by restricting people’s freedom to live by the strictures of their faith they are forcing them to choose between the truth and the law. It is therefore incumbent upon the government of a free society to seek for ways to allow people to live within the strictures of their consciences, because it is not possible for people to live otherwise.

There are times, of course, when the government, in pursuit of an essential public interest, simply cannot make way for conscience, and in those times religious believers must be willing to pay a heavy price for standing witness to what they understand to be the truth. But such moments are rare, and our system of government is designed to make them especially so. Both the government and religious believers should strive to make them as rare as possible by not forcing needless confrontations over conscience. And in this case, I think it is just perfectly clear that the government has forced a needless and completely avoidable confrontation and has knowingly put many religious believers in an impossible situation. It is no secret that most of America’s largest religious denominations are opposed to abortion, and that some are opposed to contraception as well. And there are many alternative means by which the government can (and does) make abortive and contraceptive drugs and procedures available to people. The purpose of refusing to provide a religious exemption from this rule would therefore appear to be to force religious employers themselves to make those drugs and procedures available—to bend a moral minority to the will of the state. It is not only a failure of statesmanship and prudence, it is a failure of even the most minimal toleration.

--Yuval Levin, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/339566/new-round-intolerance-yuval-levin

Atheism, Humor, and Richard Dawkins

This is good satire. 

Richard Dawkins, of course, is a famous British atheist, and author of The God Delusion. 

Because It's Cool, or Because It's True?

If you have a few minutes, you would profit from listening to Carl Trueman and Todd Pruitt's discussion about Calvinism and coolness.

http://info.alliancenet.org/mos/podcast/birth-cool

'Obedience' is an Awkward Word

"Obedience is an awkward word for sinners. By nature we do not like it. We immediately think of abuses of authority. Abuse is widespread and at times terrible in its consequences, but such abuses do not delegitimize authority itself. Satan's attack on God from the beginning has been to tell humans that authority and love cannot go together. And Satan's proof of this dichotomy is God's call for us to deny ourselves when our own desires contradict His commands (e.g., in the garden of Eden). And yet God has shown Himself unbelievably loving as Christ sacrificed His comfort for our good (e.g., in the garden of Gethsemane). God is worthy of trust. Throughout creation, authority is to be an expression of God's own character (see Eph 3: 14– 15). David's final words are a beautiful reflection of authority's divine nature: "When one rules justly over men, ruling in the fear of God, he dawns on them like the morning light, like the sun shining forth on a cloudless morning, like rain that makes grass to sprout from the earth" (2 Sam 23: 3– 4 ESV). Authority exercised well blesses those under it. This is as true in the home as it is in the nation and as true in church as it is in marriage."

-Mark Dever, from the article "The Practical Aspects of Church Membership," in the book Those Who Must Give an Account: A Study of Church Membership and Church Discipline, ed. by John S. Hammett, and Benjamin Merkle, 

The True Jonah

The now former Pope Benedict XVI writes about the baptism of Jesus. I would certainly have major differences with the Pope on both baptism and the atonement, but this excerpt is insightful.

"The act of descending into the waters of this Baptism implies a confession of guilt and a plea for forgiveness in order to make a new beginning. In a world marked by sin, then, this Yes to the entire will of God also expresses solidarity with men, who have incurred guilt...The significance of this event could not fully emerge until it was seen in light of the Cross and Resurrection...Looking at the events (of Christ’s baptism) in light of the Cross and Resurrection, the Christian people realized what happened: Jesus loaded the burden of all mankind’s guilt upon his shoulders; he bore it down into the depths of the Jordan. He inaugurated his public activity by stepping into the place of sinners. His inaugural gesture is an anticipation of the Cross. He is, as it were, the true Jonah who said to the crew of the ship, ‘Take me and throw me into the sea’ (Jon. 1:12)…The baptism is an acceptance of death for the sins of humanity, and the voice that calls out “This is my beloved Son” over the baptismal waters is an anticipatory reference to the Resurrection. This also explains why, in his own discourses, Jesus uses the word ‘baptism’ to refer to his death."

-Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth 

Fornication is Blasphemy

Great article from a great author excerpted from a great magazine.

"Fornication, quite simply, isn't merely "premarital sex." It isn't only a matter of impatience. It is not simply the marital act misfired at the wrong time, a kind of, as it were, premature ejaculation. Yes, it is true that the sexual act in fornication is, or at least can be, the same sort of physical activity as wedded sexuality. And it's true that, in fornication, the couple involved may be doing that which they would be qualified to do if they were a married couple (which would distinguish fornication from, say, sodomy or incest). But fornication is, both spiritually and typologically, a different sort of act from the marital act, and is indeed a parody of it.

Sexual union is not an arbitrary expression of the will of God (much less of random Darwinian processes). It is instead an icon of God's purposes for the universe in the gospel of Christ. Paul's classic text on the one-flesh union of marriage from Ephesians 5 makes no sense if it is presented as it is too often preached: as a set of tips for a healthier, "hotter" marriage. Instead, this passage is part of an ongoing argument about the cosmic mystery of Christ, a mystery "which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit" (Eph. 3:5).

The Genesis 2 mandate to leave father and mother, to cleave to one another, and to become one flesh is a "mystery" and "refers to Christ and the Church" (Eph. 5:31–32). The husband/wife union is a visible representation of the Christ/Church union—a covenantal bond in which, as a head with a body, Jesus is inseparable from his bride, a bride he protects, provides for, leads, disciples, and sanctifies. He is as inseparable from his Body as a human head is from a human body—a truth the apostle heard from the voice of the Galilean himself, when Jesus asked the persecutor of the Church on the Road to Damascus, "Why are you persecuting me?" (Acts 9:4).

Fornication pictures a different reality than that of the mystery of Christ. It represents instead a Christ who uses the Church without joining her, covenantally, to himself. It is not just "naughtiness." To use another word Christians find awkward and antiquated, it's blasphemy.

This is why the consequences for fornication in Scripture are so severe. The man who leads a woman into sexual union without a covenantal bond is preaching to her, to the world, and to himself a different gospel. He is forming a real spiritual union, the apostle warns, but one that is of a different spirit than the sanctifying Spirit of God in Christ (1 Cor. 6:15–19)."

 -Russell Moore, "Sexual Iconoclasm," Touchstone Magazine, January/February 2013, 

 - See more at: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=26-01-020-v#sthash.lSiJDh2N.dpuf