Parents should parent

Mona Charen explains some of "The Good Obama Can Do."

...Michelle and Barack Obama, just by modeling good parenting, have the capacity to set a great example. A report from the Chicago Tribune suggests it has started already. “Seven-year-old Ava Childers will soon be responsible for making her own bed every day. . . . Ava’s mother, Danita, got the idea after hearing that the soon-to-be first daughters . . . are required to make their beds in the morning.“

Obama has not shrunk from lecturing his audiences about parenting. Back in May, at a campaign stop in Gary, Ind., the future president gave his audience a pretty good harangue:

“Parents, if you don’t parent, we can’t improve our schools. You’ve got to parent. You’ve got to turn off the television set in your house once in a while. You’ve got to put the video game away once in a while. You should meet with the teacher and find out what the homework is and help that child with the homework. And if you don’t know how to do the homework, don’t be embarrassed, find someone to help you.”

Obama is setting a fine example. And good for him. His father walked out on him. Rather than repeat that destructive pattern, he is doing the opposite. Is it a total stretch to imagine him lecturing young people about the need to get married before having babies?

But he can do more than that. He has said that he will continue some of the faith-based programs that President Bush initiated. He should also maintain and expand the marriage promotion policies that began under the current administration. ....

The Good Obama Can Do by Mona Charen on National Review Online

Perelandra

I first read C.S. Lewis's science fiction trilogy well before I discovered Narnia. I am no particular fan of either science fiction or fantasy, tending — when I do read fiction — rather toward historical fiction or mysteries. But I both enjoyed and admired Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit by Tolkien, and at about the same time - not yet realizing that Tolkien and Lewis were friends — I read Out of the Silent Planet and then the others. My favorite of the three by Lewis is Perelandra [or Voyage to Venus in Britain]. Lewis was particularly good at helping you imagine something beyond your experience, for instance the fruit that grew on the floating island on Perelandra:

.... He picked one of them and turned it over and over. The rind was smooth and firm and seemed impossible to tear open. Then by accident one of his fingers punctured it and went through into coldness. After a moment's hesitation he put the little aperture to his lips. He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger. But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant. For one draught of this on earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed. It could not be classified. He could never tell us, when he came back to the world of men, whether it was sharp or sweet, savoury or voluptuous, creamy or piercing. "Not like that" was all he could ever say to such inquiries. As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. ....

A fine site called bethinking.org has published a "lightly edited" doctoral thesis by Pete Lowman about the absence of any presence of the real God in the contemporary novel. The introduction is "The Loss of God in the Novel." Among the chapters available online are those about The Lord of the Rings and Lewis's science fiction trilogy:

• Out of the Silent Planet
• Perelandra
• That Hideous Strength

Read the books themselves first.

The image is of the paperback cover of my first copy of the first book in the trilogy.

bethinking.org - Who are you God? - Chronicles of Heaven Unshackled - Part 0 - Introduction

Barbarians within the gates

Theodore Dalrymple, onetime prison doctor, is a British essayist who has been quoted here more than once (here, here, here, and here), and someone who I obviously think is worth reading. Not a believer, he nevertheless has a profound understanding of human nature, and little patience with utopianism. A new collection of his essays has been published, Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline, and it has been reviewed by Patrick Keeney of the Canadian National Post. Excepts from the review:

He believes that man is a fallen creature and so is dismissive of the idea of perfection or utopian thinking of any kind. He is unmoved by Marxism, or indeed any other ideological system that posits causation by abstract social forces. For Dalrymple, the locus of moral concern falls on personal behaviour rather than on social structure, and he is caustic about any notion that negates the idea of personal responsibility, or that suggests that we are simply passive victims of our environment. And unlike so many of the intelligentsia, he is ever mindful that, in this world at least, we do not get something for nothing: Improvement usually comes at a cost. Ideas that arise from the very best of intentions often result in disastrous social consequences.

Dalrymple knows how potent and costly ideas can be. As a physician, he spent his working life among the poor, the imprisoned and the indigent. ....

...[E]ven as the welfare state ensures that no man goes hungry, we are met with new kinds of social pathologies, ones that result in what at best might be termed a sort of vulgar coarsening of the social fabric, at worst a senseless and random kind of violence that spares no one but that is particularly perilous for the poor. In an essay titled "Real Crime, Fake Justice," he references "the unholy alliance between politicians and bureaucrats and .... liberal intellectuals who pretend to see in crime a natural and understandable response to social injustice." The result of this "experiment in leniency" is that it has debased the lives of millions of citizens, especially the poor, who suffer disproportionately from rapes, murders, muggings and a general collapse of the criminal justice system.

Dalrymple's essays provide a kind of eulogy for those public virtues that the world once associated with Britain: reasonableness, honour, stoicism, fair-mindedness, civility and courteousness. His analysis of the British fall from grace also provides fair warning to those nations, such as our own, which, having travelled some way along the path pioneered by Britain, might yet avoid such a fate.

Decline, fall and then some

Imagined perfection and imperfect reality

R.R. Reno believes "It’s wrong to wring our hands over the shrill and intensely competitive nature of politics. The alternatives are so much worse: tyranny or indifference." Nevertheless, he thinks that our political divisions are becoming dangerous, that we are "careening toward an ever-deeper split, one that threatens the underlying unity of our nation." The reason is "that progressives are socially divisive. We forget that revolutionaries seek revolutions, because we tend to think of progressives as idealists, people who just want to make the world a better place." As many have done before, Reno finds Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France a source of wisdom. From "Conservatism and the Culture Wars" at FIRST THINGS:

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke helps us see beyond our usual moral sentimentalism. He recognized the way in which abstract principles can become objects of devotion. The great patrons of liberty and equality in revolutionary France loved their ideas of justice, so much so that they would willingly destroy the actual goods of their imperfect society in order to implement an imagined state of perfection. Nothing is so selfish as to attack reality—and to do so on the basis of one’s own ideals.

Burke had an epithet for these selfish idealists. They were “men of theory,” and they so often seem to have the rhetorical advantage. The imagined world is shiny and spotless, unlike the real world and its hopelessly compromised institutions. It’s easy to compliment your moral insights when you juxtapose the ideal with the real.

“The pretended rights of these theorists are all extreme,” he wrote, “and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false.” And more than false. Reflections on the Revolution in France is a very passionate book, urgent and strident in tone, because Burke thought the “men of theory” wicked.

The wickedness comes from a crucial fact about progressive politics: Our social world needs to be destroyed in order for moral and political ideals to be realized, unsullied by the past. ....

Burke’s insight in the imperialism of theory helps explain why culture wars seem to be escalating. Economic progressives are not terribly influential, as Obama’s cabinet appointments demonstrate. But the cultural progressives are very much in ascendancy. Every desire has an equal right to its fulfillment. And this ideal can only be realized if every desire feels free to speak its name.

Therefore, establishing an empire of desire requires more than political triumph, more than legal protection. Like all progressive ideals, it requires the destruction of the sentiments and pieties that lead people to think otherwise. This ideological project takes on the familiar distortions of all modern propaganda. “Words take on new meanings,” James Kalb writes in The Tyranny of Liberalism, “hatred comes to include opposition to liberal initiatives, while inclusiveness requires non-liberals to abandon their principles and even their identity. Tolerance treats objections to liberalism as attacks on neutrality that are oppressive simply by being made.” [more]

FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Conservatism and the Culture Wars

In defense of teasing

Datcher Keltner, a professor of psychology, writes "In Defense of Teasing." The argument is that teasing - as opposed to bullying and harassment - is important for learning how to be human. One of the difficulties with making rules or laws against harassment is that the distinctions seem impossible for the often obtuse rule enforcers to make. From the New York Times Magazine:

.... Today teasing has been all but banished from the lives of many children. In recent years, high-profile school shootings and teenage suicides have inspired a wave of “zero tolerance” movements in our schools. Accused teasers are now made to utter their teases in front of the class, under the stern eye of teachers. Children are given detention for sarcastic comments on the playground. Schools are decreed “teasing free.”

And we are phasing out teasing in many other corners of social life as well. Sexual-harassment courses advise work colleagues not to tease or joke. Marriage counselors encourage direct criticism over playful provocation. No-taunting rules have even arisen in the N.B.A. and the N.F.L. to discourage “trash talking.”

The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, harass and humiliate. Sexual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threatening passes. They’re pretty ineffectual flirts. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human. ....

.... Productive teasing is rarely physically hurtful and doesn’t expose deep vulnerabilities — like a romantic failure or a physical handicap. Off-record markers — funny facial expressions, exaggeration and repetition — also help mark the tease as playful rather than hostile. And social context means a lot. Where teasing provides an arena to safely explore conflict, it can join people in a common cause. Especially when they’re allowed to tease back. ....

In seeking to protect our children from bullying and aggression, we risk depriving them of a most remarkable form of social exchange. In teasing, we learn to use our voices, bodies and faces, and to read those of others — the raw materials of emotional intelligence and the moral imagination. We learn the wisdom of laughing at ourselves, and not taking the self too seriously. We learn boundaries between danger and safety, right and wrong, friend and foe, male and female, what is serious and what is not. We transform the many conflicts of social living into entertaining dramas. No kidding. [more]

Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the reference.

In Defense of Teasing - NYTimes.com

Scrubbing history

It seems to be a struggle to get the government to acknowledge the actual part religion has had in American history, much less keep the public square open to those whose political views are affected by their religious convictions. David Waters in "God Bless America", at the Washington Post's On Faith blogsite, recounts some of the battles:

.... Take the new $621 million capitol Visitor Center, which opened this week to mixed reviews. Among the critics were Sen. Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican who several weeks ago noticed that something was missing from a center's replica of the House Speaker's rostrum. The words "In God We Trust" - engraved over the actual rostrum in 1962 - were not included in the replica.

The center identified "E. Pluribus Unum" (rather than "In God We Trust") as the official national motto. Displays deleted these words from Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance; "Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind..."; and the words "in the Year of Our Lord" from Article 7 of the Constitution.

DeMint and dozens of other congressmen objected and the deleted phrases were restored. ....

DeMint and other concerned evangelicals say this is only the latest in a series of attempts to erase God from public life in Washington.

• Neither the World War II Memorial (2004) nor the FDR Memorial (1997) - Washington's two newest monuments - contain references to God. The WWII memorial includes a God-related quote from Eisenhower's D-Day message, but it ends just before the general seeks "the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking."
• In 2007, a replica of the Washington Monument's aluminum cap, on display inside the monument, recently was turned so that the words "Laus Deo" (Latin for 'Praise be to God') were no longer visible to vistors. After receiving 28,000 email complaints, the National Park Service said it was a simple mistake and they'd turn it back.
• In 2007, after protests from House Republican Leader John Boehner and others, the Office of the Architect of the Capitol reversed its stated policy of removing references to God or religion from certificates that were given to citizens along with flags flown ceremonially over the Capitol.
• The new John Quincy Adams Presidential Dollar, released earlier this year, contained the words "In God We Trust" along the edge of the coin rather than on its face. After receiving many complaints, the U.S. Mint announced that the motto will appear on the heads side of the 2009 Adams dollars.

FDR talked publicly about God as much as any president. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Churchill and other leaders delivered public prayers during World War II. Nearly every major public building and monument in Washington has at least one reference to God.

Separation of church and state is vital to our liberty. But trying to scrub from American history or public life every reference to God or faith isn't just silly. It's inaccurate and misleading.

Under God: God Bless America - On Faith at washingtonpost.com

Newsweek, religion, and gay marriage

Newsweek, in the person of its religion editor, Lisa Miller, has decided to instruct us about what ought to be the Christian position on gay marriage. The opening quotation below is from that Newsweek cover article.

Let’s try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. “It is better to marry than to burn with passion,” says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

It is no wonder that the uninstructed in our increasingly secular and Biblically illiterate society might become confused about what the Scriptures do teach about Christian marriage - especially if they read Newsweek. Mollie Hemingway, in "Sola scriptura minus the scriptura" at GetReligion comments on the validity of the argument [and that's putting it mildly!]:

....[I]f you are going to pretend that opposition to same-sex marriage is based Scriptura, could we at least get our Scripture right?

This is such hackery that it’s offensive. Abraham and Sarah, while certainly noted for their eventual trust in God were basically poster children for marital disobedience when they didn’t trust God to provide them with children. Even though he promised them they would have offspring. Sarah was a jealous and cruel slavemaster and Abraham was pliant and cowardly during their Hagar offensive. In fact, if you are reading the Old Testament as a self-improvement book based on anything other than the commandments from God, you are an idiot. God’s chosen people, some of them with great and abiding faith, are sinful disasters — the lot of them.

I hold sacred the New Testament model of marriage and find Miller’s comments to be beneath contempt. I also wonder what, if anything, she has read from the New Testament.

When my husband read the opening graph of this train wreck of a hit piece, he wondered if these words of Jesus, found in the Gospel of Matthew, indicated indifference to family:

And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Would that be the indifference that Miller is referring to? Because it really just doesn’t sound indifferent to me. This quote from Jesus comes in a larger section on, well, earthly attachments. One part notes that only those who have the gift of celibacy are to be celibate. I have no doubt that my elementary school-age nieces know these things. Shouldn’t Lisa Miller?

And while St. Paul does endorse single life enthusiastically, for those who are able (a key point left out of Miller’s little opening paragraph), he writes extensively about marriage. In fact, he’s normally picked on for his clear endorsement of traditional marriage, as in Ephesians 5:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

There is nothing lukewarm about this. In fact, there is nothing lukewarm about any of the writings of Paul. ....

The piece then goes on to pretend that homosexuality isn’t really mentioned much in Scripture (except when it’s talking about, you guessed it, King David and Jonathan!) and, of course, discounts St. Paul’s teachings on the matter as not really about homosexuality but modern-day sins having nothing to do with homosexuality. Not that the actual New Testament passages, such as this one, are included in the story:

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

Some may find that passage ambiguous. Many will not. But what’s amazing is that Miller actually also writes that Scripture never once refers to sexual relations between women. Um, if you don’t know what the Bible says, you probably shouldn’t preach about it, you know? .... [much more]

I once subscribed to Newsweek, years ago when it was still a news magazine.

Update: Rob Bowman explains its "Fallacies in Biblical Interpretation" in response to Newsweek’s "Defense of Gay Marriage."

Sola scriptura minus the scriptura » GetReligion

In terror or in peace?

Bob, at In the Clearing, writes about Christians and death in "Death, where is thy sting?" There are those who seem to believe that it is unfair and unjust of God whenever bad things happen to Christians - or, on the other hand, that those bad things must be the work of the devil. The real question isn't why bad things happen, but why not?

I don't want to break anyone's heart, but I hope you all know you're probably going to die someday.

I recently heard a Christian friend of mine say, "I just don't understand how God can allow so-and-so to get cancer." I wanted to say, do you really think certain people should be immune from the normal frailties of the flesh? Or that being a believer should mean not getting cancer, heart disease, MS, etc.? The real question is, why shouldn't he or she get cancer? Or you? Or me? Or anyone else? ....

One of the darkest regions of our interior continent is that place where we harbor our thoughts about death. Our selfish feeling that death is just not fair, and our childish fear of it, which only reveals the shallowness of our faith. .... See, the wages of sin is death, but when Christ took care of sin on the cross, he took care of death. The crosswork of Christ took care of both sin and death.

I know a fellow whose ministry it is to "walk with the dying." He befriends and advocates for dying people, and he's often at their side when they pass from this world. He told me once, "Bob, there's no way to predict how someone is going to die. I've seen atheists die peacefully in their beds and lifelong Christians die in abject terror. You can never tell."

I am not foolish enough to claim to know in what way I will face my end, whether in terror or in peace. But I know how God would have me go. Giving him the glory right to the end! .... [more]

In the Clearing: Death, where is thy sting?

Doug Sanford, RIP

Yesterday afternoon a good man died. Doug Sanford was a member of the Madison Seventh Day Baptist Church where I am also a member. He was more than just a member. He was the first there every Sabbath to open the building, set up the chairs, heat water for the coffee, and make us all welcome as we arrived. He was also one of our worship leaders and very well prepared and thoughtful in both the preparation and conduct of the service. He loved to be provocative and thoroughly enjoyed a good joke or a bad pun. Our small congregation will miss him very much. I will miss him very much.

Doug was a convinced and committed Christian. His faith and courage over the months of his illness have been an extraordinary witness to me and to all of us. He loved hymns and those by Fanny Crosby were particular favorites. I am reminded today of these words:

I know I shall see in His beauty
The King in whose law I delight;
Who lovingly guardeth my footsteps,
And giveth me songs in the night.

Redeemed, redeemed, Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb;
Redeemed, redeemed, His child, and forever, I am.

I've known Doug since he moved to Milton, Wisconsin, as a teenager. When he became active in the Madison church, I got to know him a lot better. He was a generous and genuinely caring person more likely to do something than to engage in sentimentality. He was not the sort of person who wanted to burden others with his troubles and so we only gradually became fully aware of the seriousness of his illness, although it has been apparent for some time now. He moved from his home into a hospice on Sabbath and died on Sunday.

Doug leaves behind his wife, Renee, his daughters, Tina and Kathleen, and a son, Caleb. He is also survived by his father, a brother and three sisters, and many friends.

Jesus said “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live...."
(Jn 11:25, ESV)

Science and moral impotence

Steven Lenzner, at The Weekly Standard, reviews Yuval Levin's Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy. The cental thesis seems to be that modern science is not, as many would claim, neutral, but utopian and dismissive of moral objections. Because health and long life are the highest values — and science promises to deliver them — anything that seems to stand in the way gets shoved aside.

It is necessary to remind ourselves that, although health and long life are very good things — and medical progress has contributed enormously to both — death still comes, and that this temporal life has a context that demands much more of us than mere extended existence. "Health and wealth" have become ultimate values for many inside the Church — people who should have been taught to know better.

From the review:

Ancient science was contemplative: It sought to understand nature, but was content to let it run its course. The scientific project founded by Bacon and Descartes saw nature as hostile to human prosperity, as penurious and arbitrary. Far from being a source of guidance on how to live, nature was something to be overcome or conquered. Science was, in Bacon's famous phrase, to be put in the service of "the relief of man's estate." A new order was to emerge in which science would progressively conquer poverty and disease and hold out the prospect of the indefinite extension of human life. Empirical science was to be the means of political reformation. Levin nicely sums up the less sober aspirations born of the modern scientific project in this way.

From the very beginning, the modern worldview has given rise to peculiar utopianisms of various stripes, all grounded in the dream of overcoming nature and living, free of necessity and fear, able to meet every one of our needs and our whims, and able, most especially, to live indefinitely in good health. This brand of utopianism generally begins in a benign libertarianism, though at times it has ended in political extremism, if not the guillotine.

We're far from the guillotine, but you only have to think about the relative capacities of smoking, on the one hand, and blasphemy, on the other, to generate indignation and see precisely to what extent this peculiarly modern moralism has taken hold. ....

The problem, as Levin diagnoses it, is that our constitutional order depends upon modern science and its blessings, yet science also works as a subtle moral corrosive that threatens to undermine the moral judgment essential to a healthy liberal democracy:

In our time, we are perhaps less inclined to recognize science as a set of ideas with aspirations to universality precisely because the scientific enterprise has been so successful. But the authority we cede to science, both as the servant of health and as the master of knowledge, weakens our allegiance to those other sources of wisdom so crucial to our self-understanding and self-government. Those other sources serve to ground our moral judgment, while science avoids or flattens moral questions, since it cannot answer them and rarely needs to ask them.... For all its power, science risks leaving us morally impotent.

Put another way, the hidden moral premises of science — especially those concerning health — have so insinuated themselves into our collective consciousness that any attempt to challenge them in the name of other goods is almost invariably a defensive, rearguard action. Such attempts can slow but not stem the tide of "progress," and rollbacks are all but unimaginable. ....

Insofar as "traditional morality" appears to stand in the way of our aspirations for physical well-being and medical progress, it will be under assault. Yet the capacity for unreflective moral intuition (and indignation) is alive and well in certain important realms of American life. Consider higher education. Sad to say, it is precisely in the only institution where untrammeled questioning can do no harm — where it is the indispensable means to its end — that it is least respected. Political correctness employs the means of traditional morality, especially shame, less to silence certain opinions than to make them unthinkable. [more]

PREVIEW: Biomorality

Everyone needs to be converted

Darryl Dash interviewed Tim Keller about "Ministry in a Post-Christian Culture" and asked him, among other things, "You've said that we need to change significantly—beyond ordinary approaches like new programs or staff.... What are some of the deeper issues the Church needs to face?" Part of Keller's answer:

...Lloyd-Jones, of course, believed the need was for spiritual revival. The trouble with naming this is that, unfortunately, in many evangelical circles, especially charismatic ones, "revival" is always said to be the cure-all for our ills. But Lloyd-Jones was thinking of the historic revivals and of a theology of revival of Jonathan Edwards. This means we must, as in all the revivals, recover the gospel of grace.

I agree with Lloyd-Jones on this, but this is a very unpopular view right now in much of the evangelical world. In parts of the Reformed world, Edwards' view of revival is under attack as individualistic and inimical to the importance of the Church. Oddly, in the emerging church Edwards' view of revival is unpopular for the same reasons, because of its emphasis on the "individualistic" views of substitutionary atonement, forensic justification and so on.

I think these attacks on (or indifference to) the importance of revival are very wrong. We live in a society in which revival is necessary. As Peter Berger shows in The Heretical Imperative in contemporary pluralistic societies, everyone who believes a faith has to make an individual choice to believe it. There are no longer inherited, authoritative faith traditions. Whether you raise a child Lutheran, Muslim or Baptist the child at some point will have to choose to make the faith of his parents his or her own. In other words, they will have to have a conversion experience.

When revival breaks out through a recovery of the gospel, three things happen:

1. nominal church members realize they'd never been converted;
2. sleepy, lethargic Christians are energized and renewed;
3. outsider non-Christians are attracted into the beautified worship, community and lives of the converted and renewed church members.

That's how it works. We need it. (more)

Thanks to Justin Taylor for the reference. Ministry in a Post-Christian Culture: An Interview with Tim Keller - Darryl's Blog

Why believe?

A group called I Believe Too is raising money to counter the American Humanist Association's atheist poster campaign on Washington, D.C. buses with the this message [click on the image to enlarge it]. At their site they describe the intention of the campaign:

Our goal is to counteract the AHA with a positive, upbeat ad of our own that identifies God as our true and loving creator.

They are also selling a bumper sticker with the same message here.

I Believe Too - Home

"God is my Führer"

TIME, December 23, 1940:

"Not you, Herr Hitler, but God is my Führer." These defiant words of Pastor Martin Niemoller were echoed by millions of Germans. And Hitler raged: "It is Niemoller or I."

So this second Christmas of Hitler's war finds Niemoller and upwards of 200,000 other Christians (some estimates run as high as 800,000) behind the barbed wire of the frozen Nazi concentration camps. Here men bear mute witness that the Christ—whose birth the outside world celebrates unthinkingly at Christmas—can still inspire a living faith for which men and women even now endure imprisonment, torture and death as bravely as in centuries past.

More than 80% of the prisoners in the concentration camps are not Jews but Christians, and the best tribute to the spirit of Germany's Christians comes from a Jew and agnostic (TIME, Sept. 23) — the world's most famous scientist, Albert Einstein. Says he:

"Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks....

"Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly." [....]

Taking a leaf from the Nazi-verboten Old Testament, where King David got rid of Bathsheba's husband by having him set "in the forefront of the hottest battle . . . that he may be smitten and die." the Nazis mobilized over 55% of Germany's Protestant pastors for Army service, most of them as privates. They singled out Confessional pastors especially. In some districts 75% of the recalcitrant Confessional pastors were drafted for front-line service. [more]

Thanks to Tom Gilson at Thinking Christian for the reference.

German Martyrs - TIME

A pagan feast?

In 2003 Touchstone published "Calculating Christmas", by William Tighe. Since, every now and then, people appear in our churches who fall into the category he defines as "the fringes of American Evangelicalism" and vehemently oppose Christmas or some aspect of its traditional observance, and since atheists are also apt to charge that the day is really a pagan celebration of the Winter Solstice, the article may be helpful in setting the record straight. Read it all.

Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance.

The idea that the date was taken from the pagans goes back to two scholars from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Paul Ernst Jablonski, a German Protestant, wished to show that the celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25th was one of the many “paganizations” of Christianity that the Church of the fourth century embraced, as one of many “degenerations” that transformed pure apostolic Christianity into Catholicism. Dom Jean Hardouin, a Benedictine monk, tried to show that the Catholic Church adopted pagan festivals for Christian purposes without paganizing the gospel.

In the Julian calendar, created in 45 B.C. under Julius Caesar, the winter solstice fell on December 25th, and it therefore seemed obvious to Jablonski and Hardouin that the day must have had a pagan significance before it had a Christian one. But in fact, the date had no religious significance in the Roman pagan festal calendar before Aurelian’s time, nor did the cult of the sun play a prominent role in Rome before him.

There were two temples of the sun in Rome, one of which (maintained by the clan into which Aurelian was born or adopted) celebrated its dedication festival on August 9th, the other of which celebrated its dedication festival on August 28th. But both of these cults fell into neglect in the second century, when eastern cults of the sun, such as Mithraism, began to win a following in Rome. And in any case, none of these cults, old or new, had festivals associated with solstices or equinoxes. (the explanation)

The conclusion:

Thus, December 25th as the date of the Christ’s birth appears to owe nothing whatsoever to pagan influences upon the practice of the Church during or after Constantine’s time. It is wholly unlikely to have been the actual date of Christ’s birth, but it arose entirely from the efforts of early Latin Christians to determine the historical date of Christ’s death.

And the pagan feast which the Emperor Aurelian instituted on that date in the year 274 was not only an effort to use the winter solstice to make a political statement, but also almost certainly an attempt to give a pagan significance to a date already of importance to Roman Christians. ....

Thanks to Joseph Lawler at The American Spectator for the reference.

Touchstone Archives: Calculating Christmas

Milk instead of meat

John Whitehead interviews Julia Duin, author of Quitting Church: Why the Faithful are Fleeing and What to Do about It:

John Whitehead: Why are people leaving the church?

Julia Duin: People who are leaving have been in church for some time. They’ve been believers more than ten years and are burned out. They’re not getting anything new in their churches. They’re not seeing the three major things—decent preaching, good community and feeding.

JW: What do you mean by “feeding?”

JD: Content and spirituality. What we hear today are slogans. The whole seeker friendly movement has ruined the church.

JW: Why do you call it “seeker friendly”?

JD: The seeker friendly movement started in the 1980s. It was the effort to dumb down a lot of church services, make them shorter, easier to grasp, cut the number of hymns, cut the preaching time and get it to a kind of package deal. The idea was to get nonbelievers interested in going to church because it would not take up too much of their time and wouldn’t challenge them too much. But what happened is that a lot of people who had been believers for some time suddenly found that the sermons were like milk instead of meat. They were so simplistic. Many were finding that what they were getting was pabulum. ....

JW: What type of people are you talking about in Quitting Church?

JD: The people I wrote about in Quitting Church aren’t necessarily the kind attending Osteen’s church. It’s the older Christians. It’s the ones who have been around for more than ten years and are experiencing a spiritual brain drain. These people are the ones heading for the exits. These are the strongest Christians in a given church, the ones who are going out the door. Ironically, a lot of pastors are not asking questions. They’re not saying, “Why are you leaving?” A lot of people who leave church tell me that no one comes after them. No one ever calls them after they’ve left the church. .... [more]

Quitting Church

A better covenant

Denny Burke recommends an interesting new book, Hebrews, Christ, and the Law: The Theology of the Mosaic Law in Hebrews 7:1-10:18 by one of his faculty members, Barry Joslin:

...Joslin is trying to ask and answer the question, “What is the theology of the Mosaic Law in Hebrews?”

The answer Joslin gives will be surprising to some because he does not believe that Hebrews abrogates the Law under the new covenant. According to Joslin, the New Covenant does not abrogate the Old, rather it transforms it. He writes:

The work of Christ has transformed the law, and this transformation involves both its internalization and fulfillment in the NC [new covenant]; the law has forever been affected Christologically. . . The writer of Hebrews does not suggest that the law itself (the OC’s regulations) in toto has been abrogated” (pp. 2, 4).

» Hebrews, Christ, and the Law | Denny Burk

Habit becomes character

Theodore Dalrymple writes that English culture has changed - and not for the better - in "The Quivering Upper Lip" in City Journal. His observations about the older generation of Englishmen remind me of my own American parents, born early in the last century.

.... No culture changes suddenly, and the elderly often retained the attitudes of their youth. I remember working for a short time in a general practice in a small country town where an old man called me to his house. I found him very weak from chronic blood loss, unable to rise from his bed, and asked him why he had not called me earlier. “I didn’t like to disturb you, Doctor,” he said. “I know you are a very busy man.”

From a rational point of view, this was absurd. What could I possibly need to do that was more important than attending to such an ill man? But I found his self-effacement deeply moving. It was not the product of a lack of self-esteem, that psychological notion used to justify rampant egotism; nor was it the result of having been downtrodden by a tyrannical government that accorded no worth to its citizens. It was instead an existential, almost religious, modesty, an awareness that he was far from being all-important.

I experienced other instances of this modesty. I used to pass the time of day with the husband of an elderly patient of mine who would accompany her to the hospital. One day, I found him so jaundiced that he was almost orange. At his age, it was overwhelmingly likely to mean one thing: inoperable cancer. He was dying. He knew it and I knew it; he knew that I knew it. I asked him how he was. “Not very well,” he said. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” I replied. “Well,” he said quietly, and with a slight smile, “we shall just have to do the best we can, won’t we?” Two weeks later, he was dead.

I often remember the nobility of this quite ordinary man’s conduct and words. He wanted an appropriate, but only an appropriate, degree of commiseration from me; in his view, which was that of his generation and culture, it was a moral requirement that emotion and sentiment should be expressed proportionately, and not in an exaggerated or self-absorbed way. My acquaintance with him was slight; therefore my regret, while genuine, should be slight. (Oddly enough, my regret has grown over the years, with the memory.) Further, he considered it important that he should not embarrass me with any displays of emotion that might discomfit me. A man has to think of others, even when he is dying.

My wife, also a doctor, worked solely among the old, and found them, as I did, considerate even when suffering, as well as humorous and lacking in self-importance. Her patients were largely working-class — a refutation of the idea, commonly expressed, that the cultural ideal that I have described characterized only the upper echelons of society.

Gradually, but overwhelmingly, the culture and character of British restraint have changed into the exact opposite. Extravagance of gesture, vehemence of expression, vainglorious boastfulness, self-exposure, and absence of inhibition are what we tend to admire now — and the old modesty is scorned. .... (more)

The Quivering Upper Lip by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Autumn 2008

Religious liberty

We have a First Amendment, guaranteeing religious liberty. Not everyone does. An interesting story from the Washington Times points out what should be an example of appropriate reciprosity:

The Saudis have recently asked permission to build a mosque in Moscow, a city where there are only four mosques and 2 million Muslims. The Russians, however, are saying they want, in return, an Orthodox church in Saudi Arabia. ....

Not only are hapless Christians terrorized and jailed for daring to hold private prayer services in Saudi Arabia, but God help them should they try to convert someone to their religion. And that's for a fellow People of the Book: One can only guess at what the treatment of Buddhists and Hindus must be like.

Wouldn't it be so ironic if the Russians were the first Christian body to win acceptance of the right to build a church in, say, Riyadh? ....

The image is of the minaret of the Islamic Center in Washington D.C., where religious liberty is protected by law.

A Russian church for a Saudi mosque? - Duin - Religion Commentary - Washington Times

"'Till death do us part"?

A site called Divorce 360 provides a calculator which predicts your liklihood of getting divorced, based on comparing your experience with the census data. The calculator is here.

Since we have all read that about half of all marriages end in divorce - an extraordinarily discouraging statistic - this calculator can provide encouragement. Maggie Gallagher at NRO:

My husband sent it to me. His risk of divorce is 1 percent. Mine is 5 percent. Statistics are wonderful things.

divorce360.com | Marriage Calculator, What's Your Divorce Risk? - Maggie Gallagher - The Corner on National Review Online

Sabbath Recorder, December 2008

The December, 2008, Sabbath Recorder is available online here as a pdf.

This is a Christmas issue of the Sabbath Recorder with several articles about the significance of the Incarnation including one by my pastor, Herb Saunders. A short quotation from his contribution:

God chose to enter our human drama as a baby to be like one of us. He chose to accept our human frailty. He grew up facing the very same situations in life that any baby, toddler, child or teenager faces. Francis Thompson shared:

Little Jesus, was Thou shy
Once and just so small as I?
And what did it feel like to be
Out of heaven, and just like me?

Although divine, He chose to become fully human having the capacity to sin. [....]

Had He come to us in any other way than as a baby we would not be able to relate to His life or example. C.S. Lewis wrote, “The Son of God became the Son of Man so that sons of men may become sons of God.”

According to Athanasius, “He became what we are that He might make us what He is.” ....

The Sabbath Recorder is the magazine of the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference and has been regularly published in some form since 1844.