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