Thinking By Dismissing

Source

When I read articles like this I shake my head and wonder if the author sees what she has done. On those occasions in the past when I was grading papers like this, I sent them back to students with the demand that they argue ideas instead of impugn those they disagree with. The article I read was an opinion piece in our local paper, The Gazette, and is titled, “Sinking Feeling America Won’t Elect a Woman President.” The crux of the article is that the author believes voters are leaning against Hillary Clinton and toward Sanders or a Republican because they are succumbing to their latent sexism, and that Clinton’s primary problem is "that she lacks male genitalia."

Not one sentence about substantive issues like background experience in politics, positions on economics or foreign policy, (one sentence on gun control), or ideas being the reason people may not be inclined to vote for another Clinton. Not one inclination that the author believes that people may not vote for Clinton because they disagree with her ideas.

There are a few reasons to be irritated by articles like this, but let me illustrate one. The author of the article, a white female and admitted progressive, will not even consider voting for one of two Cuban presidential candidates or the last remaining African American candidate. Therefore, she is displaying some latent racism and a fear of people who have a different skin color than herself.

So there. Job done. Mud slung right back. And ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ACCOMPLISHED.

Her opinion piece is sadly demonstrative of the low state of discourse in our culture. What she did was psychologize the opinions of people who disagree with her and label them with cruel words. She claims to know the inner states of those who believe differently and then plays God and declares them to be bad people. She dismisses substance and replaces it with the symbolic. She fails to engage in the arena of ideas by prejudging her opponents as below her and unworthy of conversation. To others in her ideological world, to disagree is akin to hatred. How convenient, and how childish!

And in the process, all she did was expose her position as weak and unworthy of serious consideration.

Our culture simply will not get out of the divisive death grip we are in until people who claim to think out-loud learn how to deal with substance and ideas, and how to treat those with whom they disagree with a modicum of charity and intellectual decency.

As an example, I sat down over coffee with a new friend and ended up talking all kinds of theological details. There were times when I knew the two of us see things differently, but he clearly came to his opinions honestly. He and his wife dove deeply into Scripture and interacted with informed people on these issues and came to their conclusions. It would have been the height of intellectual dishonesty to dismiss him has having some kind of "latent" psychological issues that prevented him from seeing the clear superiority of my view. Instead, maturity and humility teach me to take him seriously and listen to what he says. Maybe what I believe needs to be strengthened or changed.

Do you support Clinton or Sanders? Great - tell me why and tell me why those ideas and plans are needed and viable. Do you believe another candidate is better? Tremendous - show me you have thought it through and have interacted with their ideas. Just stop calling mud-slinging thinking.

Preaching from Whose Heart?

“Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel, who are prophesying, and say to those who prophesy from their own hearts…” Ezekiel 13:2

What follows this divine introduction is not good. Self-proclaimed prophets have been running about gathering crowds with the ever-popular message, “Peace! Peace!” and God has had enough of it. They speak the speech of prophets, but have only been saying what is in their own hearts to say. They did not hear from the Lord, but validated everything they said with, “thus sayeth the Lord.” And, as has been the case for thousands of years, people followed them in flocks. So it is left up to the one prophet who does not have the ear of the masses, smells a little funny from what God has recently asked him to do, and sticks out from the crowd, to speak the actual word of God.

Don’t fool yourself – the ratio of false to true prophets has probably not changed much. At the very least, the number of prophets/pastors who speak only what is in their hearts and is appealing to the masses for all the wrong reasons, is still great. If a pastor wants to avoid the traps described in Ezekiel (and there are more than one) and learn how to faithfully speak God’s words instead of their own, what should they do? Here are a handful of thoughts from someone who works at this, for better or worse, every week of his life.

Can you eliminate Jesus language from your sermon and sell it from the self-help shelf?

One of the tremendous pressures the modern pastor faces is the need to be relevant to the felt needs of the average non-Christian’s life. It is easy to feel as if the Sunday service needs to touch some kind of soft spot in the lives of people who are not coming to church, and provide enough “practical” advice for people from week to week to keep them “encouraged” and coming back. This is nothing but voluntary subjection to the tyranny of the felt needs of sinful people - the ones inside and outside the church. This is, to be frank, the Old Testament’s false prophet’s favorite sermon, “Peace! Peace!”

Can a sermon be helpful, encouraging, and practical? Of course it can, but how do you get there? Scripture by itself, and expounded well, can very encouraging and practical. Colossians chapter 3, for instance, is all about how to live life in every relationship and every season of life, but it does not begin with the felt needs of people or Hallmark holidays, it begins with the Owner’s Manual written by the Inventor and Creator of human life and relationships.  And the message of sin and grace is always valuable.

And what of the passages of Scripture that simply cannot be pigeonholed into “encouraging” categories? You need to preach and teach them. People need to hear them. The Church needs to learn how to hear them.

If you can eliminate all the “Jesus language” from your sermon and sell it from the self-help shelf, you probably need to rewrite it.

Do you read dead Christians?

They just see things differently than we do. Many of them faced opposition that most of us can only imagine, and it clarified the gospel in their writings and sermons. They may preach on good financial stewardship, but it begins and ends with sacrificial giving for the cause of the church and the gospel. They may preach forgiveness and grace, but it is often in the context of the realization of sin and disobedience.

They may be dead, but they are far from irrelevant to our theology. Most Western pastors are, like nearly everyone else around them, steeped in their Western culture to the point where it is hard to see other theological points of view. How might a Syrian Christian talk about Philippians 4:13? We already know how someone who lives a pretty comfortable life talks about it, how about someone who does not? Or someone who lived faithfully in a drastically different world from ours 1000 years ago? Certainly they have just as much claim on the text as we do.

Reading dead and faithful Christians helps fight our chronological snobbery. We gain a larger perspective on how the Word of God makes its impact in the lives of God’s people when we read them.

Do you read Christians you disagree with?

There are plenty of them. It’s almost overwhelming. There must be reasons for that. Just like the faithful Christian who lived centuries ago and absorbed Scripture in ways I could not imagine, these faithful souls are doing the same. So, when they are faithful to the God of Scripture, I need to learn to take them seriously and hear what they have to say before I ignore them and pass on.

This habit is, in fact, an act of humility and open-mindedness, both of which are virtues.

When was the last time you preached through a book of the Bible, verse by verse?

I cannot think of anything more effective for helping me avoid Ezekiel’s trap than being forced to read an entire book of the Bible out loud over time from behind a pulpit. Someone might hear something interesting and ask me later, “Why didn’t you talk about that?”

Does expositional preaching assure faithful preaching? Of course not. The pastor’s heart is still a human heart that wants very much to say what it wants to say. But it at least puts me in a place where I have to begin thinking about preaching the “whole counsel of God” and coming to terms with things I don’t like or understand.

Expositional or not, preaching should begin and end with the Word of God instead of, as we saw with Ezekiel’s warning, what is already in our human hearts.

Bonhoeffer and the Word of God Incarnate

"It is wrong to suppose that there is so to speak a Word on the one hand and a Church on the other, and that it is the task of the preacher to take that Word into his hands and move it so as to bring it into the Church and apply it to the Church's needs. On the contrary, the Word moves of its own accord, and all the preacher has to do is to assist that movement and try to put no obstacles in its path. The Word comes forth to take men to itself; the apostles knew that and it was the burden of their message....Now the burden of their testimony was simply this - the Word of God had become flesh, it had come to take sinners to itself, to forgive and to sanctify. It is this same Word which now makes its entry into the Church. This Word makes flesh, this Word which already bears the whole human race, can no longer exist without the humanity it has assumed. Furthermore, when this Word comes, the Holy Spirit comes, showing to Christians, both individually and corporately, the gifts of the incarnate Christ to man. He produces faith in his hearers, that they may discern in the preaching the entry of Jesus Christ."

The Cost of Discipleship

Economic Issues are Moral Issues and Should Be Treated as Such

Arthur Brooks, The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America (New York: Broadside Books, 2015) 246 pgs.

Arthur Brooks, the President of AEI, contends that Conservative economic and political policies will do the best good for the poor when they are implemented, but that they are unlikely to find wide appeal because Conservatives are bad at getting their message across.  The bulk of “The Conservative Heart” is dedicated to unfolding this first premise, and then helping people who believe in these principles learn how to communicate them in ways that address the moral issues people care the most about.

It is commonly thought that Progressives care more for people (polls show that people overwhelmingly give the edge to Progressive politicians on the “they care for me” score even when the same people disagree with their policies) while it can be shown that Progressive policies have been bad for the poor and for the working class. On the other hand, Conservative economic principles have nearly always been better for the poor and increasing their social standing, but they are rarely implemented due to this political climate where the compassion edge is given to the Progressive ideas. How can this change? Brooks argues that Conservatives not only need to have the courage of their convictions, they need to start seeing these economic issues as moral issues. It is popular, for instance, to champion the poor by advocating for raising the minimum wage. That sounds compassionate, but when it is raised, it is the poor worker who is laid off and hurt. Why continue advocating for it? Additionally, perpetual welfare wealth transfers have long-term negative effects on individuals and families, so why not advocate for welfare reform with a work requirement?

It may appear that The Conservative Heart is a policy wonk book intended to unfold economic policies in pretty dry and laborious fashion. The truth is very different. Brooks is himself deeply concerned for the poor, the working class, and the health of the family. He argues convincingly that our economic and political systems need to adopt Conservative principles in order to reverse many of the negative trends and bring health back into so many corroded parts of our culture. He says, “Conservatives are in possession of the best solutions to the problems of poverty and economic mobility. Yet because we don’t speak in a way that reflects our hearts, many Americans simply don’t trust us and are unwilling to give us the chance to implement those solutions” (pg. 15). The goal, as he says over and over, is not the creation of millionaires and billionaires, it is the infusion of opportunity, dignity, and family strength back into the economy.

Brook’s book is a wonderful survey of how economic policies affect the poor and the working class, and is a tremendous presentation of Conservative principles. From several surveys of economic research, to fascinating case studies, to a discussion on how to best communicate these principles, this is a wonderful case for the Conservative heart.

If you thought my review was helpful, please say so on Amazon.

On Worshiping The Same God

A friend of mine helped me think though some issues regarding whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. The issue is currently a hot potato in some circles because of professor Harris, her comments regarding wearing a hijab, and Wheaton’s reaction. It seems to me that the simple understanding of the issue is that Christians and Muslims (and all other worshipers of drastically different religions) believe in different Gods, but my friend raised a point held by the Catholic church and many philosophers and theologians that is helping me clarify the issue for myself.

[In addition to that, I have removed a previous post, not because I disagree with my conclusions, but because I have decided I was a bit strident. In reading several of the reactions against Wheaton’s actions against Harris, some of them have become simply disingenuous. Some are talking as if NOBODY EVER has actually held the ridiculous belief that Muslims and Christians worship different gods. I didn’t want to be one of those kinds of voices. So I wrote something much more involved and hopefully more thoughtful.]

This point of view is that Christians and Muslims believe in the same God and that this is the most obvious understanding of this issue. In two recent articles, both written by respected theist philosophers, the position is defended with the argument that Christians believe there is actually only one God, so therefore everyone who believes in God or worships God believes in the same God, but has different beliefs about that God [Beckwith, Rae]. And Protestant theologians, one no less than Mirislav Volf in a recent article and several tweets, have expressed the same opinion. It is commonly accepted, and not controversial in many circles, to say that two people can have two different sets of beliefs about the same thing or person (and one of them even be very wrong) and for both of them to be referring to the same thing or person. Two people can "point at" the same thing/individual, have conflicting accounts of what attributes belong to them, and yet refer to the same thing/individual. Both articles linked above raise this point and give examples.

My position is still that Christians and Muslims “believe in different Gods,” but that statement needs some work to make sense in light of the Same God (SG) position described above. I want to try to make two basic points, the second leading to a third. First, which is the simplest understanding of what two people believe - that they believe in the same God though with conflicting accounts, or that they believe in two different Gods? Second, what is the theological data we have to work with in the Christian scriptures? And third, what of worship and conversion?

It was argued in both Rae’s and Beckwith’s articles that the simplest position to hold is that two worshipers are pointing at the same God and yet hold differing beliefs about that God. My intuition is exactly the opposite. In one article written by a theologian who happens to be a convert from Islam to Christianity, he said his first intuition about this issue was that when converting he was still worshiping the same God but with a different understanding, but the more he came to know the God of the Christian Bible he changed his mind. Rae and Beckwith argue that in order to hold the position that we worship different Gods, one would have to do some pretty significant semantic work and even develop a robust theory of worship and how it works.

It seems to me that the semantic work is applied one step beyond the assertion, "they believe in different Gods." The conclusion, “they believe in different Gods,” can be arrived at by a very simple question like, “do you believe Jesus is God?” The rebuttal is the semantic move, "No, in fact, because Christians believe there is only one God, they actually worship the same God, but often attribute different attributes to God." The rebuttal relies on the train of thought that because two people can apply different attributes to the same person and still refer to the same person, and that there is actually only one God, these religions are pointing to the same God in different ways. But what if they are not pointing to the same God, but using the word "God" to talk about what they believe in? This, it seems to me, is just as easily the case, and can be discovered given some fairly straightforward inquiry regarding what different religions sincerely believe about what they refer to when they talk about God. Using one example cited in the articles linked, it is entirely possible for two people to talk about "Thomas Jefferson" using different attributes, and given the chance to point to the person they mean, they will point to two different people. In this case they both used the same word/phrase as their referent, but one (maybe both) were actually wrong about the referent, not the attributes. Pointing to two different Thomas Jeffersons has its theological equivalent in describing conflicting and contradictory attributes of God.

Referring to the same thing with different attributes is not the only way people disagree. They can refer to two different things with the same attributes or two different referents with overlapping attributes. To reduce religious propositional conflict to just the first form of difference might oversimplify the situation.

In addition, some semantic work might need to be done to explain how the phrase, "believe in," works in order to support the assertion that Muslims and Christians "believe in the same God." The articles linked above deal with the "same God" portion of the phrase, and I am sure someone somewhere has worked on the first phrase. Whether someone has or not, it needs to be done. Belief, roughly speaking, is an internal adherence and some significant level of commitment to a proposition. Christians and Muslims propose very different things about God, so from the start it should be pretty easy to see that they literally do not "believe in" the same God. Now are we at a place where the burden of work is on SG to tell us why two people who believe in different things actually believe in the same thing whether they say so or not?

Second, the theological data, it seems to me, allows for both to be possible.

"You shall have no other gods before me." God, Exodus 20:3.

Thinking primarily about a theology of idolatry, the worship of idols seems to be treated in two broad fashions in Scripture. First, it is the case the God warns against worshiping him so badly that a person has slipped into idolatry (Malachi 1 and 2 are examples). In this case, we may be able to say that two people can worship the same God and say they believe in the same God while at least one of them has so perverted worship that they have slipped into idolatry.

But the second, and what seems to be the primary warning, is idolatry in the sense that people literally worship other gods. In this case people can worship things, other people, themselves, or spiritual beings as god. In any event, the theological data regarding idolatry is focused in the first of the Ten Commandments, "You shall have no other gods before me." The commandment is not (and I don't believe can be interpreted to mean), "You shall not assert false attributes to me when actually worshiping me." The biblical worldview posits a universe of spiritual beings that humans have often mistaken as "God" and believed in and worshiped as gods. So, of course, people can believe in/worship different gods in the sense that they attribute ultimate divine worth to beings who are not God. They have been doing that for millennia.

This raises another point that Rae mentioned in his article. He stated that to assert that religions worship different gods would require a well-developed theology of worship. While that ought to be done regardless, I wonder if the case is exactly the opposite. The debate right now is about Muslims and Christians, and seems to be fuzzy around the edges because they are both Abrahamic faiths. Add Judaism to the list, and it seems fairly easy to say that these religions worship the same God, just differently. Given SG can we justifiably take it another step to say that Hindus and Christians worship the same God? If so, then Hindus substitute billions of gods with conflicting personalities for the unity of the Christian deity. That difference is pretty drastic, and worship in those two very different faiths would need to be explained to hold to SG. What about belief systems that straddle the religious/philosophical fence such as Buddhism and Confuciansim? In these systems ultimate reality is at direct odds with Christian beliefs about ultimate reality, leading some to even label these systems as atheistic. And yet (at least Buddhism) has a form of worship and beliefs about ultimate reality and salvation. How can both worship the same God? That would need to be explained. Then, at the extreme end of this train of thought is atheism. Atheism has been described as a kind of worship by both theologians and thoughtful atheists, and not without merit. If atheists worship (human potential, science, technology, transhumanism, etc.) and Christians worship, then SG implies that they worship the same God.

Are we at a point with SG where there is an inherent conflict, if not internal contradiction? A Christian who says there is a God and an atheist who says there is no god both worship the same god.

This raises a fascinating question for me- what about conversion? Does a convert believe that they are now worshiping the true God as opposed to a false god? Or do they believe they are worshiping the same God, only now they are worshipping more properly? And if SG is true it seems we are stuck with saying that in reality they were worshiping the same God all along and this seems incongruent with how both the OT and NT treat other religions and the move from one to another.

Correcting the Scoffing Fool

Proverbs 9:7-8 “Whoever corrects a scoffer gets himself abuse, and he who reproves a wicked man incurs injury. Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you; reprove a wise man, and he will love you."

Our first reaction to a passage like this ought to be a self-reflective question like, “How do I respond to correction and reproof?” I should begin by wondering about myself instead of immediately thinking of everyone I think is a fool. Does my reaction to legitimate correction incur anger or hatred toward the one who corrects me, or does it begin a process of self-improvement, and even thankfulness and love? If I am not open to correction, I may think of myself as basically perfect and not in need of correction, even if I do not think in those exact words.

A second insight from a passage like this is that proper correction from people who love us and/or are wiser than we are – or simply see something we do not - is part of growing in wisdom and maturity. We ought not journey on toward Christ without people who can speak into our lives about areas we may be blind to, or areas that are too sensitive for us to deal with personally. I am an imperfect person subject to a range of faults and I should learn how to react when I hear good correction. (I don’t like this anymore than anyone else, and I receive good correction more often than I would like.)

A third reaction can be something like this: It may be better to watch as the storm passes by, does its damage, and see if anyone is willing and ready to help pick up the pieces of wasted lives and ruined time. In the heat of the moment, or in the throes of passion, or in the wave of powerful cultural mythologies, people are often completely deaf to correction. And more than that, they are often hostile to an opinion that is simply different than the one they find fashionable at the time. Sometimes all you have to do is say something like, “I disagree,” and that is enough to get you labeled as a hateful ignoramus who needs to get with the times. But Solomon shows us that this is nothing new and that you really might do better keeping your mouth shut and waiting for the wise person to show up or for wisdom to come crashing into someone’s life.

This is hard to do, however, when we watch parts of the church do this. There are plenty of well-meaning individuals who, for all kinds of reasons, neglect wisdom and truth for powerful mythologies and label their causes as “what Jesus would be doing right now.” But cultural conditions are such that they may not receive correction. After all, they have the weight of conventional wisdom at their back, so why listen to voices preemptively categorized as unintellectual or outdated?

So, in the end, I need to first discern whether I am the scoffing fool, and then patiently pray for those who will not now listen to wisdom.  

At Advent May We Never Fail To Be Thankful

Trafalgar Square Tree

While preparing for Advent this week I ran across this beautiful story I had never heard before. Every year Norway sends a tree - a huge tree often groomed for years - to England to say thank you for their role in preserving and liberating their nation during WWII. For years they waited under tyranny for their freedom to come, and once it did they have never failed to say thank you.

During Advent we are reminded that we wait in the now and not-yet. Our world is broken and full of sin, but the Messiah has come. Abundant life and freedom have been given to whosoever believes in him for this life now. Jesus the King was born. And yet we still wait for the complete coming of his kingdom when he will reign in righteousness and justice, and of his peace there will be no end.

Advent allows us to never fail to be thankful for what has been given, and what is promised and sure to come.

HT: Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, The Time Is Now

Links with Little Context

Stream.org

Bedeviled by my Wife's Dementia
By Douglas Groothuis
"Through these trials, Becky struggled to write and edit. As her health declined, each work became more difficult than the previous one. After writing two books, she labored for four years co-editing a major work on the theology of gender, contributing a long and carefully argued chapter. That was the last thing she wrote for publication. But page after page of my writing—books, reviews, essays, and academic papers—were marked by her corrections, questions, and deletions. We seldom argued over any of it. She made my work better, and we both knew it. Only God, Becky, and I know how much of her wisdom is woven into my work.

But she did not edit this essay."


Perception and the Cartesian Theater
by Michael Egnor
[Warning: Philosophy Ahead. Materialist and non-Materialist philosophies make a difference.]

"Locating perception in the sense organs and/or in the brain is a central fallacy of modern neuroscience and philosophy of mind. The study of perception -- central to cognitive science -- is itself unmoored from reality by the implicit or explicit presumption of the Cartesian theater. A scientist trapped in a Cartesian theater can have no sure knowledge of external reality, which is the very object of science, and even the study of the Cartesian theater itself entails merely an infinite regress of Cartesian theaters, a Lowes multiplex of subjectivity and exclusion from reality."

How Yale University Became a Savage, Bigoted Tribe
by John Zmirak

"America is ruled by a political and media elite that takes as self-evident truths a long list of outrageous fallacies. Like post-hypnotic suggestions, these false beliefs linger beneath the surface of lazy minds. They wouldn’t withstand ten minutes of sustained intellectual argument. Luckily for them, they’ll never have to. These cobbled-together opinions aren’t passed on through reasoned discourse, and rarely have to make their way through the rational sieve of the mind. Instead, they travel from person to person on a transmission belt of fashionable sentiment and self-congratulation, attracting new subscribers by dangling the hope of membership in a self-selected elite of “decent” people who hold “enlightened” ideas that make them sophisticated and praiseworthy. These views lurk in bumper stickers and status updates, are transmitted in winks and nods, retweets and likes, rarely brushing against the sharp edge of opposition. When you dare to contradict such a precept, its believer won’t hunker down to engage you. He’ll roll his eyes, nod condescendingly, and silently cross your name off his “list” of respectable human beings. The dialogue ends there."

Like a Tree Planted by Streams of Living Water

What a cacophony of pressures is the pastor’s life! What a job exposed to the conflicting expectations of people whose whims and moods change! What a vocation where many of the best-selling authors write books about “leadership” and volunteer management as though they were writing a manual for an international conglomerate of toothpaste makers, and simultaneously the prophets warn against such crass reductionism of the pastoral task.

The moment a pastor feels at ease with the prophet’s words, the pressures of week to week volunteer management and “leadership” raise their heads. It’s like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole against Cerberus.

I want to pastor souls and see humans made in God’s image grow in that image. I want to see them find healing – deep, real healing like they cannot get anywhere else but in Christ. I want to disciple and pray for people. I am unwaveringly committed to expositing Scripture every change I get while the “bigger” church across the way has chosen to use Star Wars for their Advent series. Seriously. I want to apply my vocation in the ways I believe Scripture lays it out for shepherds of souls, but some of those souls are rarely around. And when I come into contact with them, many are far too happy for a glancing conversation and empty promises.

Even when I feel like I know what a pastor is supposed to do, don’t I need others to know as well so we can get along doing God’s work together? Should I be concerned about that? If they don’t know, is that my fault?

I grow more and more convinced of the necessity of the Church’s role in our world as the bearer of the knowledge of God – both in what we talk about when we are together and how we live our lives. But very few seem similarly convinced. And I mean pastors and churches. Should I be concerned about that? Is it even my job to be concerned about that?

I will wake up striving to be at ease in the sovereign grace of God instead of trying to make myself at ease with my ability to manipulate people, programs, or budgets. I will pray more. I am more and more thankful for faithfulness and endurance when I see it. I am more and more thankful all the time for God’s great gifts of family and friends.

This Advent I will meditate on what it means to wait on and work for an all-good, all-benevolent, and all-powerful promise fulfiller.

I want to be like the tree planted by the streams of living water whose leaves never wither and who bears his fruit in his season.

One of the World's Great Cataclysms Produced Two of its Great Authors

Joseph Laconte , A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, And A Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S.Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918 (Nelson Books, Nashville, TN, 2015). 235 pgs.

I read a lot of books. I read a lot of history, theology, biography, and philosophy. I cannot remember the last time I wanted a book to be longer that it was, but that is what happened to me in the last pages of Laconte's book. I believe the most useful kind of biography is one that pays careful attention to the history of ideas passing through the life of the subject. This means a good biography will not only mention historical and philosophical context, but find significant ways to relate it to what happened in the life or lives under scrutiny. This book does a marvelous job of doing just that.

I found myself overwhelmed with Laconte's description of the setting leading up to the Great War and the blood-letting facts of the War itself. It does not take much effort to overwhelm an attentive reader with the horrors of the world's first mechanized and modern war, but Laconte does a wonderful job of laying just enough groundwork to let the reader understand what it would mean for both Tolkien and Lewis to have been in the thick of some of the worst fighting. The Western world was awash in trust in the progress of humanity and all that we could achieve under our own steam when the War To End All Wars turned that optimism into deep and abiding pessimism at what humans are capable to doing to each other.

So, how do two of the English language's greatest authors not succumb to that humanistic nihilism, and instead turn to the Christian faith and hope in their work? In many ways, this is the track of the book as Laconte traces their faith, their friendship, and their writing. Throughout the book, he is able to relate the realities of WWI to the themes and characters of Tolkien's and Lewis' works. Laconte discusses the much neglected topic of friendship through what is possibly the most literarily productive friendship in the 20th century. Both authors know loss and grief and fold those lessons inexorably into their fictional works. Both of them know what it costs to overcome evil and pursue the good. Both of them know how hope in Christ works in a world full of false hope in human progress. The battlefields of France shaped those characters and stories. Their friendship shaped each other's work. And their faith becomes stronger than the humanism all around them.

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Opposing Evil is Hard. Sometimes, Very Hard.

If I name something as evil, a necessary corollary is the moral duty to oppose it.

When you name something as evil, that label comes with necessary moral obligations. Because of the very nature of evil, when you call something evil you are saying that it ought to be opposed where it can be, stopped when it can be, and that you will oppose and stop it where you have the ability to do so. This is an inherent and necessary moral obligation with evil. If you pick up a single coin it has two sides; if you name something evil and flip the coin over, the other face is the moral obligation to oppose it. It follows that the greater the evil, the greater the moral burden to oppose it. And it also follows that the greater the evil, the greater the possible cost at opposing it.

So, when a culture looks radical and murderous evil in the eye and cannot name it as evil, what is going on? Simultaneously, what is going on when a culture looks at an evil and mislabels it in the light of clear facts to the contrary?  The refusal to name it as evil is a sign of moral weakness or even turpitude. And over time the refusal to name real evils as evils turns into a corroded ethical system and becomes the inability to name real evils as evil.

Yet, the human is incapable of living in a world without recognizing some things as right and some things as wrong (it is simply the way we are created). So what does the person who is incapable of naming real evil do? They put the label of real evil on either minor evils or things that are not evil. This is one of the universal actions of the human intellect – we cannot avoid doing it no matter how tolerant we think we are – and it is the move that allows most of the great evils in human history to do the most damage. While the bull is charging the crowd, these folks would have us worried about the mouse in the corner.

For example, our current Federal Administration looks at the same evil we all do, perpetrated by Islamic radicals who (almost always) are heard yelling, “Allah is Great!” and hesitates to the point of foolishness to name it correctly. Two current favorite fallback positions are to call that kind of evil either “workplace violence” or “gun violence.”* The first fallback makes extraordinary evil seem common and easily done by any properly disgruntled employee, and the second is a self-serving political ploy. Both moves serve to distract millions from the root of the evil, and thus allow those in power to avoid dealing with the evil altogether. Simultaneously they raise other, much more debatable or minor evils, to the fore acting as if they have done something about terrorism by addressing their politically convenient evil while not actually doing anything about terrorism at all.

Take this one step further and we get what happens in parts of the cultural left. When Islamic radicals kill dozens of people, they step in front of cameras or turn to their keyboards and say that Christians are as dangerous as Islamic radicals. No facts are given because no facts can possibly be given in support of such dangerous foolishness. In fact, lies are told to support this meme. Hitler was not a Christian. But now that we know how naming evil works, we know at least one reason why these people will stare at real, murderous evil, and name the peaceful among them, and even the victim, as evil. The cost of calling a Christian evil is far, far less than calling an Islamic terrorist evil. In fact, in Progressive, elitist circles, calling Christians evil is haute couture. You are the smart gal in the room if you manage to slip that socially acceptable lie into a conversation. If you want to fit in, why utter an unacceptable truth? (Another theory of mine – everything is high school. Peer pressure does just as much intellectual and moral damage in our 40s and 50s as it does in our teens, if not more.)

Part of the philosophical power of Christian theology is that it predicts this kind of behavior for us and thus helps us avoid it if we are wise. If we are conversant in our theology and reasonably faithful to it, we are not at all surprised that the human heart is capable of naming evil good and good evil. We are equally not surprised when humans are willing to make mincemeat of other, less fortunate, humans for personal gains in power. It is all there for the attentive mind to see. But if Christians are the bad guys, who wants to listen to them?  

*Talking about gun control and gun violence today is a very popular and hotly debated issue. It is true that evil and mentally unhinged people do violence with guns. But we need to be much more careful in our thinking than we typically are in this debate. Imagine a widget that, in the hands of craftsmen, does much good, but in the hands of cruel novices, does much damage. If we are smart, we would want to limit the use of that widget to craftsmen; the morally significant variable in the equation is not the widget but the person wielding it. It is no different with guns. We can have a legitimate debate about who ought to own guns and how, but to make guns the morally significant detail (and yes, often the only variable discussed), is to miss the point and to miss an opportunity to talk about where the evil really lies. It becomes a form of intellectual dishonesty, and in cases of real ideological evil, it becomes dangerous.

The Pastorate: Both Local and Universal

My hometown suffered some recent tragedies entirely uncharacteristic of our self-image. Whether it is a little self-deceiving to believe it, we still see Colorado Springs as a sleepy, small town with lots of churches and conservative Christians (though in reality we are well over half-a-million is size, and mostly unchurched). With two “mass” shootings in the last two months, we are forced to take a second look at what is going on in our city. The pastor is uniquely poised to do exactly that because of what they are given to work with.

This has helped remind me that the pastor's job is always a combination of the local and current, and the universal and unchanging.

The Pastor’s Job is Intensely Local

The local congregation is a kind of focal point for the kingdom of God here on earth, like a child’s magnifying glass used to focus the rays of the sun on a dry leaf. The great and eternal truths of God are intensified when believers gather together to hear the Word of God, pray, and disciple each other. The presence of God is magnified when brothers and sisters in Christ join together to worship. Life with Christians over a period of time reveals things that would not be seen otherwise. The pastor learns what lies in peoples’ past, walks with them through some of the most difficult times you can imagine, and even gets to dedicate babies and baptize new believers. These events provide a local flavor for the pastor that cannot be developed if he or she has their study door closed and head in the sky. Some pastors neglect people for their study and thus miss the beauties and developed wisdom of living with people. Some seek broad acclaim and use their local congregation to reach the next rung in the ladder, thus using something God intended as an end as a means for their own glory.

The best pastors in our past were able to use their local congregation to meet the ends of both pastoral wisdom and deepening theological acumen (think of Jonathan Edwards on the American frontier and Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones during WWII). A pastor, as Scripture envisions him or her, is a theologian of sorts who lives, breathes, and works among a particular group of people in a particular setting. The local provides us with the warp and woof of daily life and naturally affects the pastor's work. But the local cannot subsume the universal.

The Pastorate is Inescapably Universal

In the local church, the pastor has the responsibility of communicating the truths of the faith once and for all handed down to us by the saints and communicated in Scripture. The pastor's text is (or, ought to be) the Word of God in all its full and varied wisdom. While we live within communities that experience their own seasons of blessing and cursing, the pastor is at their best when they bring the universal and unchanging truths of Christ to bear upon each season.

In our community's most recent tragedy, our congregation prayed for the loss of a sister congregation across town and reached out to them in Christian brotherhood, and those of us who have connections to those touched by the tragedy are reaching out as we can. But we also must talk about Christ. When the press of the current events seems the strongest, the church must remember to glorify the one, true hope of us all, Jesus Christ. Our Sunday text for the weekend of the latest shooting was Colossians 2:6-15. It was fitting for the church to emphasize Christus Victor on a weekend when we feel the weight of sin, and the despair into which it leads many. We must, as Paul admonished us, avoid false philosophies about human nature and false political utopianism, and keep ourselves rooted in the victory of Jesus Christ.

When the church proclaims the universal truths of Christ in an ever-changing world, we are the most relevant and the most powerful.

Consent as a Moral Category - Is It Enough?

[This post was inspired by a short Facebook conversation in which an individual appealed to "consent" as the kind of trump card in a conversation about sexual ethics. Further reading and research has led me to the discovery that he was not a cultural outlier. Many now observe, and I concur with this conclusion, that the only agreed upon category for sexual ethics is consent. Violate that, and you are in trouble. Violate any other traditional sexual boundary, and you are either ignored or celebrated.]

The term “consent” is commonly used now to describe what is and is not ethical behavior for sexual activity. It has been noted by several cultural observers that invoking consent is currently the one universal standard on sexual ethics. Because gender, marriage, family, and number have been effectively eliminated as ethical considerations, the current backstop against unbridled sexual behavior is the invocation of consent. With all serious considerations of human essentialism gone from the conversation about sexual ethics, is this enough? Despite the surface appeal it has as a moral category, it lacks all the force a real moral category needs in order to do its job. Consent fails to carry the ethical load it is currently given.

We find ourselves in a cultural position where the appeal to consent is replacing human essentialism (or some form of it) as our dominant sexual ethic. Human essentialism in this context is roughly the belief that there are things hard-wired into human nature that inform sexual behavior, uses, and ethics. So, things like gender, number, and community are significant concerns that persist over time and across cultures. In addition, issues like family and child welfare are considered as crucial to determining the value and ethics of sexual behavior. Without some robust form of human essentialism, all these concerns must be accounted for, and currently the place-holder for the chasm left by human essentialism is whether someone consents to sexual interaction.

Consent alone does not do all the moral work we think it does.

Can a 12 year old consent to sex? I will guess that most of those who use consent as the pivotal moral category will balk at saying yes, but it is quite clear that they can. A child may be so sexually informed (or exposed) that when presented with an opportunity, every indicator they give will look like consent. But if consent is our singular moral category, we find ourselves in contradiction with laws regarding statutory rape. These are old but significant laws that were informed by a much more robust sexual ethic which argued that people should be protected from most sexuality until a certain age of maturity no matter what they consented to. And if the "consent theorist" wants to keep their position and be in favor of statutory rape laws, they need to appeal to something else beyond consent to judge between the contradiction created in this scenario. They have then admitted that consent is not enough.

But what if the external indicators of consent are not genuine? Well, that is a thorn in the side of the consent theorist. If we want to rely on what is "really" going on with the 12 year old who consents, then we are not relying on consent, but some other set of moral or psychological categories that temper consent. And so what happens to consent? It is rendered a subsidiary moral concern.

In this case we find a situation in which an individual can consent and we still think the sexual activity is wrong and/or harmful. But if we are consent theorists, on what do we base that claim? If we have gone so far as to remove a form of human essentialism from the moral equation, where do we stand intellectually and morally in order to make this judgment in opposition to the consent given?

Can consent change over time? If it does, how do we judge the morality of the act when consent was given?

Of course consent can change over time and after the fact. This is so ubiquitous a reality, for example, that universities are doing summersaults to cover themselves legally from what is termed the “rape culture” and the fact that plenty of people regret decisions and make a big deal out of removing consent after they gave it. But if consent is our only tool here, we are in a pickle. Actually, it is another contradiction created by the removal of all other, far more robust, ethical categories. If we believe we can make judgments about the wrongfulness of sexual behavior after consent is withdrawn, our allegedly primary moral category is again rendered a subsidiary concern; it is most useful in the service of other, more robust, moral categories.

In both cases a sexual ethic that appeals to some form of human essentialism or ahistorical moral standards (like those found in some religions) is the more accurate, useful, and preferred ethic. Gender, age, community, family and other essentialist categories really do matter. We erode our sense of human essentialism to our great peril. Consent is clearly a moral category and very useful when reflecting on the ethics of sexual behavior, but we have found that other more robust concerns are also necessary to place consent within its most useful context.

What Does It Mean To Politicize an Issue? And Where Do Pastors Fit In?

The same day as the Umpqua Community College shootings, President Obama gave an impassioned speech regretting the violence and calling for more gun control. In his remarks he made an interesting statement, proactively responding to an inevitable criticism of more calls for gun control. He said that some complain that he and others would politicize this issue and remarked that of course he would politicize it - it in fact needed to be politicized.

What does it mean to politicize an issue? A simple dictionary search comes up with definitions like, "to cause an issue to become a political matter" or to "try and convince others of your political views." These are true as far as they go, but I believe there are at least two other ways of talking about this that are more comprehensive and helpful, and are intellectual and sociological consequences of politicization. To politicize an issue is to inherently change the way we talk about the meaning of the issue and the potential solutions of an issue.

So here are two ways politicization affects public discourse.

It (normally) removes discussion about the issue out of the realm of true or false.

Politicized speech is a devolution of argumentation. By in large it will take an issue that is normally quite complex with several thoughtful positions and reduce it to a handful of expressions that can be contained in sound bites, scribbled on protest signs, and printed on bumper stickers and presented in a dichotomous either-or way. Regardless of how President Obama and others talk about gun control, it just isn't that simple. It doesn't matter how quickly pundits explain the situation in Syria, or the Trans Pacific Partnership, or fracking - it is not that simple. But, in order to politicize the issue, it must be pulled out of the arena of nuance, research, and argument and turned into something simplistic. The goal of politicized speech is no longer truth-seeking or persuasion by argumentation, but poll numbers and votes. Sustained thought and back-and-forth reasoning is not possible (in the end) with politicized speech, but propaganda and peer pressure are.

It creates the illusion that the best (only?) solutions to our common problems are contained in the political and governmental arena.

To stick with my example, if you want to fix problems associated with gun ownership, the only place to go is the government. Pass another set of laws. Write another book of regulations and that ought to fix it. Expanding the examples from recent events - if you want to fix racism, pass a set of laws and ostracize certain people and expunge certain parts of history. To politicize these issues is to strongly imply that with a quick wave of the Presidential pen and enough funding, we can solve these problems.

Now, don't get ahead of me here. I believe that every public issue may have political consequences and rightfully so. Most people are all for federal background checks for the purchases of firearms. Amendments to the Constitution securing rights to vote and the end of slavery are obviously good things. But those are political solutions to certain public problems that do a large degree of good. Taken to its extreme, it becomes the belief that the best (only?) solutions we have to large common problems can be found in government. This is the act of politicizing an issue.

And government clearly does not have solutions to most of our common problems. Racism, for instance, is a hatred/heart issue with social consequences. Laws and regulations may stem the tide of those consequences, but they will never deal with the hatred/heart issue. And on and on the examples could go.

Here is where the pastor and the church come in. Without a long explication let me lay this on the table: Christian theology is the study of what is true in God's creation and in Christ. Pastors and churches teach and proclaim knowledge about the way things really are and not the way Christians want them to be in the secret corners of their hearts. God is Lord over all creation and the church is the repository of his truth. The church has solutions to our large, common problems and pastors are tasked with proclaiming those truths in wise and winsome ways.

Pastors - take your place in the public square.

Amnesty International, The Military, and the Sex Slave Trade

The New York Times published a horrifying story about the rape and abuse of Afghan boys by Afghan militia leaders and the U.S. military’s position that our soldiers are not allowed to do anything about it. In “U.S.Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies,” US soldiers tell their stories of knowing about the abuse and being told to look the other way. In addition, when they did interfere they faced official charges for getting involved. (Most recently a Green Beret is fighting his dismissal over doing something about the abuse.) An article like this rightly strikes us as horrific because of our innate moral sense that this kind of behavior is inherently immoral and it does not matter who engages in it. Pedophiliac rapists are wrong no matter what their culture teaches. Then we are doubly aggravated because our moral compass is frustrated by the illogical policy that sex trafficking, rape, and pedophilia are overlooked exactly because we are dealing with another culture. So, we find significant moral dissonance with something like this – a conflict between two strong moral intuitions in our current culture.

The first is that this kind of sexual exploitation and violence is simply wrong. And by "simply wrong" we mean to say that there are not situations in which we can imagine that kind of violence to be right. The second is that we have become deeply hesitant to judge the moral actions of other cultures out of a misguided sense of tolerance. Who are we to say they are wrong? And currently, the wining force is on the side of this conception of tolerance. Even if we still see pedophiliac rape as morally wrong, our cultural institutions are hesitant to act as if it is wrong. Our moral instincts are slowly running afoul of reality.

This kind of moral judgement (many will see it as a lack of moral judgement, but it is in fact a cowardly moral judgement) is not limited to some recently uncovered military protocol. It is systemic in the Western world. For example, the vaunted international human rights organization, Amnesty International, has recently begun to weigh in on the problem of the human sex slave trade and their growing record is decidedly mixed. They recently passed a proposal regarding their position on the sex slave trade that is less than brave. It leans in the direction of decriminalizing the sale and rape of human beings for fun.  From an article in the Washington Post:

Amnesty International recently adopted a proposal that recommends decriminalizing the sex trade, a move that it says is for the human rights and equal protections of sex workers. This proposal instead gives amnesty to pimps, brothel owners and sex buyers by recognizing everyone in sex work as “consenting adults.”

The moral reasoning is as baffling as the conclusion involving “consenting adults”:

This industry is not safe, and Amnesty International understands that sex workers in many countries face high levels of violence, but it draws the implausible conclusion that the danger lies in societal stigma, not in the precarious nature of the sex industry and those who exploit it.

Amnesty International is unwilling to take a stand against an aggressive, largely anti-female evil on the grounds that calling it a moral evil might stigmatize the victims. In some insulated circles this sounds like brave moral reasoning. In the clear light of day it is dangerous and sophomoric.

I know how complicated the world of aid to women and girls caught in the sex trafficking can be. I helped found an organization that provides long-term support, education, and ministry to girls rescued from the sex slave trade here in the United States. If you want to donate to an organization actually doing something for these girls, I encourage you to join me in giving to Sarah’s Home.

It is obvious that the girls we work with have deep and abiding issues they need to work through for a long time in order to lead healthy, independent lives. And they are not “easy” to work with. But far and beyond the complications of working with the girls is the snake’s nest of dealing with government bureaucracy. It is impossible to work with any single organization, so you have to convince several of them of the value of what you do, which inevitably does not fit into the pre-printed boxes on their paperwork. And if you get one branch of government on your side, you still deal with the inane and CYA policies of the others. Over and over our work is hindered by government, not primarily the girls.

And one of the most significant issues we face is how to categorize these girls once they are in the system. Because the American culture is just now coming to terms with the reality of sex trafficking in our borders, we simply do not have legislation that helps the victims in ways they need help. Technically they are often processed as prostitutes, even at the age of 13, and when a wise Police Officer realizes what is going on the best solution they often have is to put them in the domestic abuse system. The first category labels them as a criminal; the second doesn’t go far enough to help. So laws and policies need to change to make the work a long term success.

All that to say, I understand that Amnesty International may not have pre-approved legal categories for the victims of sex trafficking at their disposal, but their solution is the dumbest and most harmful possible. You don’t help these kids by de-stigmatizing the organized crime behind rape-for-profit. If you are moral and brave, you take a clear ethical stand and begin to change the system. We did that in our own small way, and if there are courageous people at AI, maybe they can do the same.

The Pastor As Public Intellectual

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Owen Strachan, The Pastor As Public Theologian: Reclaiming a Lost Vision (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015).

As soon as I heard this book existed I looked it up, read up on some of the details, and immediately purchased it. I knew it was going to resonate with my thoughts on the pastorate, what has been lost and what needs to be regained, and it had the promise of producing significant insight. It was only in the second paragraph into the Introduction when my pencil came out and began making notes:

Too many pastors have exchanged their vocational birthright for a bowl of lentil stew (Gen. 25:29-34; Heb. 12:16): management skills, strategic plans, “leadership” courses, therapeutic techniques, and so forth….Theology is in exile and, as a result, the knowledge of God is in ecclesial eclipse.

Amen, and amen. The goal of the book is to reclaim theology as the core of the pastoral vocation. In their educated opinion, and mine as well, theology has been successfully separated from the pastorate with serious consequences. In order to reclaim this ground, the authors delineate three publics, or arenas, which have laid claim on this change in the pastoral profession: the academy, the church, and the broader society. In each arena there are distinct challenges to meet in order to reunite the role of theology and the vocation of pastoring.

Their first broad argument is that the pastor is inherently and necessarily a theologian and is always in some sense a public theologian. As such the pastor ought to become a public intellectual, a generalist of sorts, or what they call an “organic intellectual.” The pastor is not as specialized as most academic intellectuals, but they are competent in the world around them, the Gospel, and in the human condition. So much so, that they are reliable voices on truth where these things intersect. They do specialize, but in the knowledge that is made available in Christ and his Word, and become adept at relating those truths to all that the church interacts with. If this sounds like a tall order, that may be for two reasons. First, it may sound like a lot because we have sold the vocation of pastor short by defining it in corporate and managerial terms. And secondly, it sounds expansive because maybe that really is what the vocation of pastor is supposed to be.  The authors write:

Pastor-theologians, like Solzhenitsyn, are generalists, yet with a difference: pastor-theologians give voice to the church’s understanding of the meaning of life – or rather, the meaning of the life hidden in in Christ (Col. 3:3). Pastor-theologians know something particular and definite, but strictly speaking, it is not specialized knowledge. The pastor-theologian is rather a special kind of generalist: a generalist who specializes in viewing all of life as relating to God and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Better: the pastor-theologian is an organic intellectual who is present as the mind of Christ, which animates the body of Christ. (pg. 25, italics theirs)

With a lot of challenging materials in just the Introduction, I am struck by the vision of pastoring presented by the authors. Pastors are not small figures overseeing the management and volunteer structures of their fiefdoms, employing some version of the same old marketing techniques to grow their influence. They are significant cogs in the spiritual and public lives of their congregation and the communities they find themselves in. They have significant things to say about reality and the way things ought to be. They are not relegated to some kind of spiritual social worker who everybody really knows is just a glorified food pantry operator. They are the bearers and translators of actual knowledge and ought to treat their lives as such.

But in order for this to be true about the pastor, they must recover a vision as old as the people of God in which the leaders of the congregation are deeply serious about the things of God, the souls of the people, and the life of the world around them.