>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>The Machete of Curiosity

Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, October 20, 2010

So, then, the issues are perennial, but the terms are not. Anyone working through the tangled weave of religion and politics may need some help with terms. Anyone whacking away at the thicket of culture and faith with the machete of curiosity could probably use a simple lexicon. It seems only fair to provide some basic definitions.

By mere Christendom, I mean a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgement of the lordship of Jesus Christ, and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed. I do not mean establishment or tax support for any particular denomination of Christians, but it is possible (and necessary) to avoid such establishment without falling for the myth of religious neutrality. Religious neutrality is impossible. So mere Christendom stands in contrast to sectarian Christendom on the one hand and complete secularism on the other. Approaching these alternatives from the middle distance are the claims of radical Islam, about which more in a minute.

Secularism refers to the idea, popular for the last few centuries, that it is in fact possible for nations to be religiously neutral. This impressive trick is managed by having everyone pretend that secularism does not bring with it its very own set of ultimate commitments. But it does bring them, and so secularism has presented us with its very own salvation narrative, in which story the Enlightened One arose to deliver us all from that sectarian strife and violence. The horse and rider were thrown into the sea, and this is why you can’t put that Christmas tree up in the county courthouse. 

American exceptionalism is the idea that America is a more of a creed than a nation. This kind of American exceptionalism makes a certain kind of civic religion possible, a quasi-sacramental approach which all consistent Christians reject as, in equal turns, blasphemous and silly. American exceptionalism in this sense is currently the high church form of secularism.

American exceptionalism is not the grateful recognition that we live in a nation that has been enormously blessed in many ways. What might be called normal patriotism is not idolatrous, but is simply natural affection.

Radical Islam is a Christian heresy, but one of the features that it retained in its departure from the truth was the idea that religious claims are total and absolute. Islam functioned in this way for many centuries, competing head to head with the Christians, before the Enlightenment arrived in order to demote all religious totalism (except for their own). Muslims who have accepted the claims of this secularism are now called “moderate” Muslims, while Muslims who are faithful to the older, all-encompassing claims of Islam are called radical Muslims. The word radical comes from the Latin radix, which means root. Radical Muslims have gone to the root of the matter, and they are the ones who at least understand the nature of the conflict. If Allah is God, then follow him. If he isn’t, then we shouldn’t.

And I would say the same thing about Jesus. If He is Lord, we should do what He says. If He is not, then we needn’t bother.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Millennia of Bumpity Bumpity 

Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, September 08, 2010

At the point Christ came, the true faith had been kept alive up to that point, after a fashion, among the Jews. I say it was kept because of the many faithful believers among them who were looking in true faith for the Messiah. Jesus Himself said that Israel had teachers who sat in Moses’ seat, and who should be respected, at least to a point. I say “after a fashion” for another reason. The downside, obviously, is that the leaders of Israel conspired to have their Messiah executed in a rigged trial. So the state of the world was pretty bad when Christ arrived — the whole world was under the control of demonic darkness (1 John 5:19), and the Jews had made their peace with this arrangement. The harlot rode the dragon.

When Jesus rose and ascended, His disciples did not return to the upper room and unpack Christendom from the boxes He had left for them there. As has been pointed out repeatedly, Jesus did not give them a turnkey kingdom. The kingdom of God does not arrive as coup de main. The kingdom of God does not arrive like a tsunami. The kingdom of God does not arrive like the 101st Airborne. Jesus said, and He said repeatedly, that the kingdom was a slow growth affair, working through the loaf like yeast.

And now, two thousand years later, when we see that the Christian faith has grown and expanded throughout the world in just the way He said it would, should this be a cause for unbelief?.

In retrospect, we can see the milestones we passed in the journey to the first Christendom, and future historians will be able to point to milestones in our era that marked our passage to the resurgent Christendom. But one of our current problems is that we are a convenience store civilization, and we want the next iteration of our civilization to be obtainable the same way we get coffee at the convenience store. We want to plonk our two dollars on the counter, and walk out of there with the coffee.

If somebody, a madman with a blog, say, says that if Jesus is the Savior of the world, this might necessitate the world getting saved, he is answered with demands that show us the constituent building blocks of Christendom now. We want to knock on them with our knuckles. We want to squirt the mixed metaphor flavor in from the pump jar, and drink the coffee now. We want the world to become Christian the way the devil offered to make it Christian, if only Jesus would bow down and worship him.

But God works a different calculus, and He had His only begotten Son hanged on a gibbet instead. What was He doing? He was making the world Christian, but He was doing it His way and on His timetable. But He was making the world Christian (John 12:31). Jesus, by and through His death, cast out the prince of this world. And, by the way, in the original Greek “cast out” does not mean “kept around.”

With the vantage of centuries past, we can look back and see that when Ambrose had his famous conflict with Theodosius, this was a great moment in the formation of Christendom. But at the time, I doubt if Ambrose had any idea of what he was doing — except standing faithfully at his post. And in the development of Christendom, we do not just see the church putting the magistrate in his place. It goes the other way as well. Frederick, Elector of Saxony, protected the gospel when the Church had decided to quit doing that, and opted for attacking the gospel instead.

So how is the process of discipling the nations to be accomplished? With centuries, nay, with millennia of bumpity bumpity

>The Buck Stops at Our Desks

>Change That We can Believe In

Whilst a soul can be regenerated and converted in an instant, building Christendom take generations and many lifetimes. As it was with the first Christendom, so it will be with the next. There is no magical bullet. There is no quick fix.

We see this reality all the time (even if we may rarely stop to think about it). Many know that at a certain point in time–an instant even–they were first converted. They were conscious of believing personally in the Living God for the first time. C S Lewis testified that one day he got on the bus whilst not a Christian; but by the time he alighted, he was. He had been transformed. Many of us can give similar accounts.

But, whilst we had passed quickly from death to life, for the rest of our lives we labour to work out our salvation in fear and trembling. Transformation comes slowly, often amidst fearsome battles, with great struggle. Old habits die, but they die hard. God has ordained it so. The same is true with re-building Christendom–it takes a long, long time. God has ordained that it should be so. Why? Partly because whether speaking of the individual or an entire culture, the transformation required is comprehensive; it is root and branch stuff. If it were to be achieved instantaneously the very fabric of the creation would have to be torn apart. Gradual change allows the continuing of human life upon the planet. Grace restores Nature, it does not obliterate it.

This is what Jesus indicated when He gave the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13: 24–30). The landowner forbade his servants ripping out the tares because of the harm and destruction it would cause to the wheat. The christianising of a culture is such a deep, complex work it takes generations to accomplish, much as the great medieval cathedrals required multiple generations to complete the task.

Once again, our own experience testifies to this. All of us have inherited life habits and patterns from our parents, for good or ill. These have been ingrained in us without thinking. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. This reality applies when a culture is disintegrating and devolving from Christendom just as much as when a culture is reforming gradually into a new Christendom.

Above all else the coming reign of the Kingdom of God requires comprehensive Christian self-government and self-rule–by the overwhelming majority of the population. But self-government necessitates that we each take responsibility for those things with which God has charged us: personal sanctification, holy families, holy worship, the education of our children, faithful labour, faithful church service, thrift and laying up an inheritance for our grandchildren, taking care of the needy–all of these require a lifetime of habits and diligence–inherited from our parents and grandparents.

Christendom is not built by getting a few laws changed–although law will certainly be changed as a result of Christendom growing stronger. We betray just how much statism has infected us when we fall into the trap of thinking that the repeal or change of a law or two will ensure Christendom’s future. It will not.

Root and branch change is Christendom’s modus operandi. As the leaven leavens the whole loaf, changing a few laws will seem like the most obvious and natural thing to do at the time. But if the leaven has not yet done its work, even the simplest change to the most egregious and ungodly laws is usually a mountainous task, far beyond our capability and resources at the time.

>Fighting On Today’s Battlefronts

>Getting the Battlefield Right

Luther once famously remarked that if Christians are busy fighting battles that Satan is not waging we are being unprofitable servants. Consequently, it is possible for Christians in our day to be busy tilting at windmills in a Quixote-esque farce.

What are the battlefields of our day upon which all faithful Christians need to be found fighting? Here is Douglas Wilson’s take.

Now, with this said, what issues are fundamental in our day? This is key — one of the common mistakes is that of thinking that the decisive point in the 16th century has to be the decisive point today. This is yet another failure to read the narrative right. Principles are constant, but plot points aren’t. But, lest this point be mistaken, as it always is, our Protestant fathers in the 16th century were right to take the stand they did, and the pope and his Council were wrong.

However, the fact that I cheer for one side over the other at the battle of Gettysburg does not mean the battle of Gettysburg is still being fought. We are at a different place in the war; the terrain is different and the circumstances are different. The uniforms are different – but the long war is always the same.

Surrendering a place that is currently being contested, and justifying this surrender because you are a sound military historian, and understand who was in the right at Gettysburg, is folly and cowardice. Attacking others in your army who are courageously fighting where the current battle is raging, and all because you suspect that they are not as sound as they could be on Gettysburg, is more folly and more cowardice.

But before moving on, let me affirm, once more, three basics. I embrace the five solas, I whoop until hoarse for the five points of Calvinism, and I heartily lament Jeb Stuart’s ill-fated ride around the battle.

Where is the battle now? What are the issues that threaten the purity of the gospel now? Where are the compromises now?

The real rot that we must contend with begins with Darwin, not Bonaventure, and any and all accommodations with Darwin. Darwin gave modernity the mechanism it needed to throw off the authority of God’s Word, and the sovereignty of the Lord Christ. Darwin is foundational to the secularist modernity project, but there is more. He is also foundational to the postmodern goo cauldron that is our culture today, and every form of what I have called pomosexuality. It is striking that postmodernists never want to be post-Darwinian. The whole thing, modernity and postmodernity, is part of one sustained play in the football game.

And this is why theistic evolution is a big deal, and this is why compromises with every form of gender bending is a big deal. And this is also why a large number of people who are “contending for the gospel” . . . aren’t really.

>Evil Before Our Eyes, Glory From On High

>To the Ends of the Earth

The Associated Press has carried a story which is horrifying, to say the least. It is a story of man’s inhumanity to man, of evil, of what happens when sin is left unchecked, and when men set themselves up as the only and final reference point. Yet it is also a story of God’s love and grace to the world, mediated through His people. 

It concerns the Chinese and North Koreans trafficking in women. There is a shortage of women in China, due to the benighted One-Child policy causing abortion of girl babies (since women are less likely to be able to support their parents in old age–and remember the Chinese get only one shot at this, since they are officially allowed only one child). Chinese men are now buying North Korean women as chattel-wives.

Young female refugees from North Korea are increasingly becoming a commodity in China, where they are sold to farmers for up to 1,500 dollars a head, according to a Seoul campaigner.

The human trafficking is far from new but has become more prevalent as prices soar amid a shortage of Chinese women in the countryside, said Reverend Chun Ki-Won, head of the Durihana Association. Young female refugees from North Korea are increasingly becoming a commodity in China, where they are sold to farmers for up to 1,500 dollars a head, according to a Seoul campaigner. The human trafficking is far from new but has become more prevalent as prices soar amid a shortage of Chinese women in the countryside, said Reverend Chun Ki-Won, head of the Durihana Association, which offers aid to refugees, which offers aid to refugees.

Chinese bribe the border guards, who let the North Korean women in. A large number of them are then on-sold to Chinese men looking for a “wife”.

About 20-30 percent are destined for marriage and are resold to another broker for about 2,000 yuan. They are then sold to farmers, normally for 5,000-10,000 yuan, but the trafficking does not necessarily end there.

If the customer does not like his wife, he can resell her and add about 2,000 yuan to the original price. Some women are sold seven or eight times, Chun said.

The women rarely know what is in store for them, Chun said. “Most of the time, they are just told they will get a good job in China and will be able to earn a lot of money.”

Of course, the women cannot complain or they risk being sent back to North Korea where punishment and even death awaits them. Any children coming from such marriages are not recognised by the Chinese government. This leaves the child a refugee in the country of its birth.

Children fathered by Chinese men and North Korean women are the biggest problem, Chun said.

“The Chinese government does not recognise children whose mother is not registered. If the mother runs away or is taken back to North Korea, the children are left with nothing — no nationality, no parents and no identity.”

The children can be officially registered if the father pays a fine but most cannot afford this.

Some North Korean women are put to work in internet chat rooms for sexual voyeurism. Some South Koreans try to contact them, befriend them, and help rescue them by putting them in contact with missions such as Durihana.

We thank God for Durihana and similar Christian ministries. In the face of such terrible inhumanity and depravity, we see again the wonder and glory of Christ’s redeeming work.

Post Script: a history of the Durihana mission can be read here.

>Doug Wilson’s Letter From America

>Boobquake and the Meaning of History

Engaging the Culture – Meaning of Judgment
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, April 28, 2010

So there was this Muslim cleric who put his foot in it, clean up to the knee, by saying that women dressing immodestly is the cause of earthquakes. There was naturally a response in this country that called for women to show some principled cleavage in order to test that holy man’s thesis. On Monday, many thousands of them did so, in what passes for political discourse these days. It would be fair to say that there were many incidents of déclassé décolletage — unattractive feminist scientists flaunting what they thought was sexuality, attractive bimbo queens taking the opportunity, natch, aging beauties reliving the glory days, and all of them over the top, so to speak.

When an ignorant religious official, from any of the world’s great religions, sets up shop to pronounce on how this causes that, simpliciter, it is not surprising that hilarity ensues. The problem with this is that the hilarity is every bit as ignorant as the cleric. The fact that someone reads something wrongly does not mean that there is nothing there to be read. The fact that someone is illiterate does not mean that the book he can’t read doesn’t exist.

One time when our oldest daughter was around two-years-old, she was sitting in the car with her uncle in the parking lot of Safeway. They were waiting for her mom to come out, and while they were sitting there, she carefully spelled out the name of the store, and her uncle was quite impressed, until right at the end. “S . . . A . . . F . . . E . . . W . . . A . . . Y . . . Rosauers!” But the fact that she read the sign wrongly did not mean that there was no sign there to be read.

The fact that someone offers up a simplistic thesis (cleavage → earthquakes) only means that he is a simpleton. When numerous other simpletons answer him in kind, this proves nothing except that we have more simpletons around here than we initially thought.

When God judges nations, He does so on the basis of billions of variables. This does not mean that His judgments cannot be read, but it does mean that they cannot be read simplistically.

Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water. Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men (2 Peter 3:3-7).

My point is that jiggling your boobs for a YouTube clip is a response to an ignorant Muslim that works equally well as a response to the apostle Peter, which is to say, not at all.

On a related front, I am currently reading To Change the World by James Davison Hunter. This looks to be an edifying read, and he promises to nuance the heck out of everything, but I do want to register one fundamental concern up front. I have a lot more to read, and will have more to say on this anon, but here is an initial observation. When we talk about affecting the world, for good or ill, we have to recognize how big the world is, how expansive history is, and how small we are.

Any measurements we might take within the scope of a generation or two are going to be, of necessity, inadequate. They will be simplistic. And so, for example, if those who are training young people for “short term missions” promise returns too quickly, the result will be eventual disillusionment. It turns out that Africa was not transformed because you spent two weeks there hauling cinder blocks. But if those who believe that we cannot really change the world at all act on their belief, they will just slump down discouraged now.

We are like kindergarteners who, having planted their beans in the egg carton, dig it up every day to determine how it is doing. Not very well, the answer would be, because we are checking in too frequently. Daily check-ups are not what is called for — but that doesn’t mean that beans don’t grow.

Take some boy scout who helps a little old lady across the street. Is civilization saved? Did he make a difference? Not in any appreciable way, not that we can see. But then if we spent some time in a culture where nobody ever helped any stranger across the street, we get a glimpse of something larger. Taking your place at the end of the line at your local bank seems insignificant until you go someplace where standing in line is an alien concept. When the first people starting standing in line, where they making a difference? Were they changing the world? Not that they could see.

When evaluating how cultures change, how they rise, and how they fall, we really need to look at it in 500 year chunks. If we use two week slices for our sample sizes, we are just going to get confused — overconfident and confused, like the Muslim cleric, or full of scoffing, like the boobtubers.

Approach it from the other end. Is the world different than it was a thousand years ago? Doesn’t that mean that it changed? And, if it changed, was anybody or anything responsible? Not that they could see, but what is it that overcomes the world? Is it not our faith?

>Son of Hamas

>Surprised by Joy

Tim Challies has written a review of Son of Hamashttp://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1414333072&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr, by Mosab Hasson Yousef. We recently blogged on the conversion of this man to Christianity. He is the son of a founder of Hamas and was raised a jihadist. The book, recently released, has hit the NYT Bestseller list.

From his earliest days, Mosab Hasson Yousef had a view of the inner workings of Hamas. The son of one its founders, from childhood he was immersed in the shadowy world of Middle Eastern terror and politics. Arrested time and again by the Shin Bet, the Israeli internal intelligence service, he eventually made the decision to become a double agent, working for Israel instead of against her. For ten years, from 1997 to 2007, he lived like this, deeply embedded within Hamas, suspected by no one, yet passing vast amounts of information to Israel. In this way he prevented assassinations, stopped suicide attacks and provided information leading to the arrests or killings of many terrorists. He was Shin Bet’s most valuable source of information about Hamas.

In 1999 he had a chance encounter with a British visitor who invited Yousef to learn about the Christian faith. Curious and intelligent, Yousef took this opportunity and was immediately struck by the difference between Jesus Christ and Mohammed, between the Christian faith and the Islam he had inherited from his fathers. In the months that followed he made a slow conversion to Christianity and was quietly baptized.

Eventually Yousef grew tired of his double life and convinced the Israelis to release him from his position with them. With some reluctence they agreed and allowed him to move to the United States where he continues to live today. Son of Hamas is the story of his life, “A gripping account of terror, betrayal, political intrigue, and unthinkable choices,” according to the rather verbose subtitle.

And it’s a good story that is told well. Yousef offers a uniquely interesting perspective on Hamas and on the political background and context in that area of the world. His story involves just enough action and intrigue to keep it interesting. At times it is almost (but not quite) unbelievable.

One thing I found interesting is that Youself reveals the Israelis not as the good guys but as the less-bad guys. He develops some level of respect for them when he sees that they are fighting for their lives against a host of nations bent on their destruction. But still he shows how they are every bit as willing as the surrounding nations to torture and kill to further their own ends. Their respect for life is not much greater than that of their enemies. So the Israelis really are not the good guys in this story.

And of course I enjoyed reading not just of Yousef’s conversion to Christianity but also the long process and the inner turmoil that got him there. It was only through much soul-searching that he was able to see Jesus Christ not just as a prophet but as the Son of God who died for the sin of the world. So often I read books like this and am disappointed to see that the author finds joy in everything but Christ. But here Yousef finds rest and joy and peace only when he submits his life to Christ.

Yousef does not want to be a hero to Christians. At the end of the book he admits his own unsuitability for that task. He is a new Christian and one who is unskilled–still a novice. And yet he is one who has now written a book about his conversion that has landed on the New York Times list of bestsellers. His testimony is powerful and I both hope and expect that God will use it to show others the light that can be theirs if they turn to Christ.

This one is well worth reading. Buy a copy and marvel at God’s grace. Marvel at how God will go to great lengths to draw his people to himself.Verdict: Buy it and rejoice in the grace of God.

>Meditation on the Text of the Week

>We Remain Here, Whilst He has Departed, For a Reason

I do not ask Thee to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. John 17:15

What is Christ’s desire for His people?

It is certainly not that they should remain in the world, in its ethical sense. Already they had been given Him out of the world, and therefore they were no more of the world–no more than Christ Himself was. The truth had already been given them (John 17:8), that truth which should free from sin, God’s own name had been manifested to and in them (John 17:6)and they were in radical opposition to the world, so that the world hated them (John 17:14).

Accordingly His prayer distinctly is that they should be kept from that evil which constituted the very characteristic of the world, and that their sanctification should be continued in the truth. (John 17:16–17) He does not desire them to remain in the world in this sense. He has instituted a radical contrariety between them and “the world” ethically considered; and He is providing for this contrariety to widen into an ever broadening gulf.

Just as certainly, it is not that they should remain always in the world in its more local sense. The tone of joy with which the Lord notes that the time of His sojourn on earth is over and he is ready to re-enter His heavenly glory is unmistakable (John 17:1-2). Equally unmistakable is the tone of sadness with which he adverts to leaving His followers in the world. (John 17:11) They are in danger there; in danger from the world’s hate; in danger from the world’s temptation. They are away from their true and proper home there–in the enemy’s country–not householders at home, but soldiers on duty, pilgrims on their journey.

He longs for them to enter their rest. And though He leaves them joy and the means of more joy in the word of truth, His desire for them is something higher than they can find there below. Nay, His distinct “will” for them is that they also may be with Him where He is to be; that they may behold His glory; that they may share in that glory. (John 17:24) He wishes for them what His servant afterwards declared to be “far better” (Philippians 1:23), that they too like Him should go out of the world and enter into glory–where Christ is on the right hand of God, where God dwells and His knowledge is, and where love is perfected in all.

But it is that they may temporarily remain in the world, out of which they have in one sense already come, but in which, in the other sense, they are still left, while kept from the evil of it.

Why? Well, for one thing, for their own sakes–that they may be sanctified. God’s name has already been manifested to them; God’s world have already been given to them; and they have received them; and men hate them for it. The good work is already, therefore, begun with them. Its fruits are already shown it their radical departure from the world and the world’s consequent hatred. But the work is not completed. Therefore, the Saviour prays that “they may be sanctified in the truth”, just as He had been.

They are to remain in the world then for their own sakes that the good work begun in them may be perfected unto the end. This appears as needful. Not, of course, as if they might not conceivably, like the dying thief, be prepared for heaven in a moment. God’s almighty grace can work wonders. But that is not God’s ordinary way; the muscles of holiness must grow by practice; hence temptation itself and trials are blessings. Hence, too, it emerges that sanctification is to take place in this life, in the ordinary provision of God. God’s children are to remain in the world for their sanctification.

For another thing–(they are to remain here) for other’s sake. God’s plans need their presence in and work for the world. They are not the whole harvest, but the first fruits only. And that the first fruits may share in the harvest, it is needful to have them stay and labour here. They are to be the seed–“the good seed are they who . . .” And after a while this sowing is to ripen into a good in-gathering. Accordingly, our Lord prays not only for them but for them also who believe–throughout the whole future–on Him by their word (John 17:20). His glance takes in His whole Church, of all the ages; and these are to abide for it.

For still another thing, (they are to remain here) for the sake of the world itself. . . . The world is to be convicted of sin and convinced of Christ’s mission and glory. His own are to remain in the world and to propagate and grow into a mighty, unitary Church, in order that the world itself may know that the lowly Jesus whom it has despised and rejected is none other than the Son of God; and that these lowly followers of His, despised and persecuted by it, are loved of the Father even as the Father loves them (John 17:20–23). The mighty testimony of the Church of God! how little we are bearing it! How we ought to bestir ourselves to it!

And then, finally, we must say also, (they are to remain here) for the Son’s own sake. For He, too, reaps advantages for their abiding below. So, and humanly speaking, so only, may His mission be vindicated and His glory manifested to the world, in His Church; may His glory be fully manifested to His own, when at last they come to Him; may His love then be perfected in them (John 17:25-26).

For these reasons, at least, it is well that Christ’s people remain for a season in this wicked world.

>Meditation on the Text of the Week

>God’s Ways Are Not Our Ways

What are you doing here, Elijah?
I Kings 19:9

We all remember the story of the tremendous scene wherein Elijah–the prodigious Tishbite, as an old author calls him–challenges the prophets of Baal to meet him in a contest of worship on Carmel, and defeats them by simply calling on his God; and then draws down rain on the parched ground by the almighty virtue of his prayer. No scene of higher dramatic power is to be found in all the world’s literature.

As we read, we see the prophet ruling on the mount; we see him bent in prayer on the deserted summit; we see him when, the hand of God upon him, he birded up his victorious loins and ran before the chariot of Ahab, the sixteen miles through the driving storm, from Carmel to Jezreel. No scene we may say could have been more nicely fitted to his mind or to his nature. Here the king of men was king indeed and his victory seemed complete.

But God’s children must suffer for their triumphs. Were there no thorn in the flesh, messengers of Satan, sent of God to buffet them, there would be no one of men who could serve the Lord in the scenes of His triumph without grave danger to his own soul. And Elijah needed to learn other lessons yet. He needed to learn that God’s victories are not of the external sort and are not to be won by the weapons of men.

How quickly after triumph comes the moment of dismay.

Now Ahab told Jezebel all that Elihah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying “So may the gods to to me and even more, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time.” And he was afraid and arose and ran for this life and came to Beersheba . . .” I Kings 19: 1-3)

We need not wonder at his sudden flight. It is the price that strong, fervent spirits pay for their very strength, that they suffer a correspondingly strong reaction. So it was with the prophet’s antetype, John the Baptist, when in prison he lost his faith and sent to ask Him whom God had Himself pointed out to him on the banks of Jordan, whether, indeed, He was the Coming One. . . . But Elijah could not trust God, now, to deliver him from a woman’s hate; and that, although her very message bore in it the betrayal of her weakness.

Was there not a deeper spring for this distrust still? With all his training, Elijah did not as yet know his God. His life had fallen on evil days, times of violence that demanded violent remedies for their diseases. And he could not believe in the efficacy of any but violent remedies.

Fresh from Carmel and the slaughter of the priests, he was impatient of the continuance of evil, and expected the miracles of Carmel to be but the harbinger of the greater miracle of the conversion of the people of God in a day. When Elijah awoke on the morrow and found Israel altogether as it had been yesterday, he was dismayed. Had then the triumph of yesterday been s nothing? Was Jezebel still to lord it over God’s heritage? What then availed it that the fire had fallen from heaven? . . . . Elijah loses heart because God’s ways were not his ways. He cannot understand God’s secular modes of working; and, conceiving of His ways as sudden and miraculous only, he feels that the Most High has deserted His cause and His servants. . . .

But God . . . visits him; and leads him on to Horeb, where the Law had been given, where it had been granted to Moses to see God’s glory, the glory of the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy and truth. Reaching the Mount the stricken prophet seeks a cave and lodges in it. And then the word of the Lord came to him in the searching question, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (I Kings 19:9) We do not need to doubt that there was reproof in the question; but surely it is not reproof but searching inquiry that forms its main contents. The Lord had Himself led Elijah here, for this lesson. And now the Lord probes him with the deepest of questions.

After all, why was Elijah there? . . . . The honest soul of the prophet gives back the transparent truth:

I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the sons of Israel have forsaken Thy covenant, torn down Thine altars and killed Thy prophets with the sword. And I alone am left; and they seek my life to take it away. (I Kings 19: 10)

Here we see distrust in God and despair of His cause; almost complaint of God, for not guarding His cause better; nay, more, almost complaint of God that He had left His servant in the lurch.

The Lord deals very graciously with His servant. There is no need now for reproof; only the simple command to go forth and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And then the Lord passed by; first a great, strong wind rent the mountains and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but it was not in the wind that the Lord was. And after the wind, and earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake, fire; but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, a sound of gentle stillness. Elijah does not now need to be told where the Lord is. The terror of the storm, of the earthquake, and of the flame is as nothing to the awesomeness of the gentle stillness.

And it came about when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out and stood in the entrance of the cave. And behold, a voice came to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” I Kings 19:13)

To the question he returns the same answer as before; but surely in deep humility of spirit. . . .

(T)he Lord proceeds to tell him that He has yet work for him to do and sends him back along with instructions which imply that there is a long future for the fruition of His plans. And whether at once or more slowly we cannot doubt that the lesson had its effect and Elijah learned not to lose hope in God’s cause because God’s ways in accomplishing it are not our ways.

How full all this is of lessons to us! let us at least not fail to learn from it, firstly that the cause of God does not depend on our single arm to save it. “I, I alone am left,” said Elijah as if on him alone could God depend to secure His ends.

Second, that the cause of God is not dependent for its success on our chosen methods. Elijah could not understand that the ends of God could be gained unless they were gained in the path of miracles of manifest judgement. External methods are not God’s methods.

Third, that the cause of God cannot fail. Elijah feared that God’s hand was not outstretched to save and fancied that he knew the dangers and needs better than God did. God never deserts His cause.

Fourth, that it is not the Law but the Gospel, not the revelation of wrath but that of love, which saves the world. Wrath may prepare for love; but wrath never did and never will save a soul.

We close then, with a word of warning and one of encouragement. The word of warning: We must not identify our cause with God’s cause; our methods with God’s methods; or our hopes with God’s purposes. The word of encouragement: God’s cause is never in danger; what He has begun in the soul or in the world, He will complete unto the end.

Benjamin B. Warfield, The Cause of God, excerpted from Faith and Life

>The Truth About The Tolerant

>Urban Myths About Christian Fundamentalists

If you were to be given a list of various categories of people and be asked to rank them according to least tolerant to most tolerant, and “Right-Wing Christian Fundamentalists” was one of the category groups, we suspect that most people would think that they would feature as one of the least tolerant of social or religious groups.

We were intrigued to read the following in a book published by MatthiasMedia in Sydney on some research that has been carried out on this very question:

In a book called The Religious Factor in Australian Life, Gary Bouma analyses the results of an extensive “values survey” that was carried out in Australia in 1983.

One part of the survey dealt with “tolerance” by asking people about their attitudes to various “undesirable” groups. People were asked: “Would you object to your next door neighbours being–people with a criminal record; people of a different race; students; left-wing extremsists; never-married mothers; heavy drinkers; people with large families; right-wing extremists; emotionally unstable people; members of minority religious sects or cults; immigrants/foreign workers; unemployed persons; aborigines; homosexuals?”

The answers were analysed according to various social and religious groupings and an “index of tolerance” was calculated showing, on average, the tolerance level of different groups. In the religious category there were five groupings:

-Roman Catholic
-Anglican
-Presbyterian, Methodist, Uniting
-Right Wing Protestants
-No Religion

Can you guess which group was the most tolerant?

The survey results ranked them as follows, from most to least tolerant:

1. Right-Wing Protestants
2. Anglican
3. Presbyterian, Methodist, Uniting
4. Roman Catholic
5. No Religion

The result surprised everybody. The hardline, fundamentalist, Bible-bashing Christians turned out to be the most tolerant group by a significant margin. Those with no religion came last, also by a significant margin. We might well wonder why this is the case.

Why indeed? Here is our take on it. Bible-believing Christians have a clear view on what is right and wrong. Such things are defined by Holy Writ. Therefore, they will have convictions that such practices as abortion, homosexuality, and drunkenness are wrong and sinful. People naively assume that having such strong convictions means that Bible-believing Christians will be intolerant and uncaring of people taken in such sins.

But Bible-believing Christians also are deeply convicted over their own sinfulness and sins. Because of the gracious on-going work of the Holy Spirit in their lives they constantly see the logs in their own eyes. When face-to-face with one taken in such sinfulness, they are more likely to have a sorrow over sinfulness, rather than a haughty disgust and condemnation.

Moreover, all Bible-believing Christians hold to the redeeming love of Christ towards sinful men and that whosoever comes to Christ will be saved from their sin. Therefore, living next to notoriously sinful people or interacting with others in general tends to be framed by an over-arching desire that they, too, would come to know the Lord. Bible-believing Christians know that “there but for the grace of God, go I” and that at best they are nothing more than one beggar telling another beggar where he can find food.

Hence, while the survey results may surprise those who subscribe to the urban myths about “fundamentalist Christians”, they will certainly not surprise those who walk in fields of grace.

>The Twilight Years, Part VIII

>Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

This is the final post in our series on Britain during the Inter-War years, which interacts with Richard Overy’s recent history of the period. http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=067002113X&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Overy concludes his work on Britain in the Inter-War years (Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars [New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009]) by focusing once again upon the gathering clouds of war, as 1939 approached. The chapter is entitled “Voyage of the ‘Death Ship’”. He makes the point that the prevailing pessimism of the age made it seem as if another war-to-end-all-wars was inevitable. Ironically that belief made the matter itself far more likely.

The discourse on war defined the nature of future conflict not as limited police actions or small-scale intervention but always in millennial language. This meant that any crisis faced by the British public in the latter half of the decade would be interpreted in the most acute terms, and bound the idea of war indissolubly with the fate of the world rather than with short-term political or territorial readjustment.

The result was a complex and shifting relationship between ideas of peace, war and civilization which eventually locked both politicians and public into an existential dead end in which the civilized world was faced with the real prospect of a destructive war that no one wanted but everyone talked about. It is against this background that the international dramas of the last years of peace were played out.” (Overy, p. 319)

Note that the dominant apocalyptic “end of civilization and of the modern world” discourse paralyzed the nation, stopping it from prudent preparations for national defence. To take such serious steps would have been tantamount to willing participation in the destruction of the world, and had to be avoided at all costs. Only a madman would want to engage in such a thing–or so the dominant discourse ran.

It was this immobilising paralysis which fuelled the strong and popular pacifist movements of the period, and which ironically made war almost inevitable. Contrast this with the Swiss who had armed and trained to the point that they could deploy a marksman behind every tree. The Swiss avoided the war by implicit and explicit armed force, as the Second World War raged all around them; Britain, while being geographically far farther removed from the original seat of conflict, became ineluctably sucked in. Being militarily weak, it came to believe it had to join with allies against Hitler before it was too late for everyone. It was its prevailing apocalyptic pessimism which had made it so. Britain believed it was sailing on a death ship, and worked unconsciously to make its fears come true.

Ironically, in the end, as pacifism waned before the growing threat of a war to come, Britain decided that it had to enter the war because civilization itself was at risk. The perceived apocalyptic nature of the threat meant that non-participation was not an option. We note that the threat of the Soviet Union to “civilization” was not deemed equally serious at the time. Yet the reality is that the parallels between Hitler and Stalin are extraordinarily eerie, as Overy himself has demonstrated in his book, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2004).

In the end, the British public capitulated and accepted war as inevitable.

This fatalism had much to do with Hitler who was demonized as the agent of destruction, but the sense of certainty that war was coming and the futility of opposing it any longer derived from a popular discourse that saw war for all its arbitrary destructiveness as a possible means to resolve not just narrow issues of foreign policy but other issues to do with the political future and the progress of European civilization . . . (Overy, p.348)

War was now deemed “worth it”, because the stakes were so high.

These sentiments, mawkish as they now sound, were essential for many of those who made the passage to war because they could only accept it if the historical justification appeared sufficiently profound to transcend the terrible costs of the conflict (Ibid)

The account by Overy of a pervasive pessimism in Britain in the Inter-War years, leading to self-fulfilling prophecies of extreme “solutions” justified by an abiding view of a coming chiliastic war between light and darkness is a cautionary tale. With fulminations against climate change sceptics being morally equivalent to Holocaust deniers ringing in our ears, we realise that things have not changed much.

But it does serve to highlight the profound differences between Belief and Unbelief on these matters. Christians remain profoundly pessimistic about the future of Unbelief and the civilizations upon which it is built. But, at the same time, Christians are profoundly optimistic for the future, since the kingdoms of this world are being made the Kingdom and realm of the Christ.

Moreover, Christians are not naively simplistic. The evils of Unbelief’s culture are not univocal, but legion—in every place, complex, interwoven, interlocking and mutually dependant. The culture of Unbelief, like all human culture, is not thin but thick. The changes which our Lord is bringing to pass are likewise complex, profound, interlocking, gradual, as yeast gradually insinuates into the dough and leavens the loaf. We do not look for “the one Ring” to solve all problems and make all changes by brute, radical instruments. That way is always the way of the Enemy. It speaks of its war(s) to save civilization; its war(s) on poverty; its war(s) against injustice; its war(s) upon ignorance; its war(s) against terrorism; and its war(s) to establish and defend human rights.

But as the Kingdom comes, His yoke ever remains gentle and His burden light. This is a divine imperialism which brings laughter as His Kingdom transpires in human history. It establishes the only civilization that will last forever. While it may experience reversals and declensions from time to time, nothing can bring it to an end, nor destroy it. For the Divine civiliser holds everything in His hands, and commands every atom, every quark and all other realities in creation. So gradually all His enemies are placed under His feet.

>Why We Love the Jews

>Riches for the World

From the standpoint of the gospel they (the Jews) are enemies for your sake, but from the standpoint of God’s choice they are beloved for the sake of the fathers; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.
Romans 11: 28-29

In Romans 11 we have the course of redemptive history, which is to say human history, presented in a nutshell. Redemptive history is how God, over time and through the ages, is working to save the world. Since the world is ruled by His Messiah, Jesus Christ, and since all enemies of Christ are being progressively, gradually, and ineluctably placed under His feet, redemptive history is actual human history. There is no other true meta-narrative.

Within this glorious narrative the most important dynamic is the Jew-Gentile dichotomy.
From the very beginning of God calling Israel and entering into a covenant with the fathers He made it clear that Israel was being called so as to redeem the entire world. All the families of the earth were going to be blessed through His calling of the Jewish people (Genesis 12:3).

In this first phase of redemptive history God separated Israel from the nations to be a holy nation unto Him. In the second phase of redemptive history–in which we now live–the stubborn disobedience and rebellion of the Jews (the natural branches of the redemptive tree, Romans 11:16) have been cut off, and God has turned to the Gentiles–all the rest of the families of the earth to graft them in.

Now, over the course of this phase to date millions of Jews have been re-grafted back in as they have come to embrace Jesus Christ as their long awaited and promised Messiah of God, and have repented and believed. But the majority have not. But a time will come–the third phase–when the Jewish people as a whole, as a majority, will be grafted back in again. This will result in turbo-charged divine blessings being poured out upon the whole world. (Romans 11:12)

Paul reveals this when he says that the partial spiritual hardening will continue to hold the Jews in check, until “the fulness of the Gentiles” has come in; but then God will turn once again to the Jewish people, and all Israel (then living) will be saved (Romans 11:25–27).

This is why Christians must maintain a deep humility towards the Jewish people–a profound love and longing for them. Of course, this does not mean that we excuse or rationalise away Jewish idolatry or disobedience or rejection of Christ. We would continue to speak the truth in as winsome a way possible. But we ever remember that for the sake of our fathers they remain beloved of God and that one day He, when the fulness of the Gentiles has come in, He will turn again to His ancient people, their eyes will be opened, and they will see and embrace their Messiah. There will be dancing in the streets all over the world.

But the fullness of the Gentiles must come in first–including the conversion to Christ of Islamic people all over the globe. Therefore, because we love the Jews and long for their salvation, every year we double down on our labours to make all the nations of the world true disciples of Jesus Christ. Then true blessings will fall upon Israel, and as a consequence the entire world will behold and experience the fullness and glories of our Saviour God.

>Banishing the Neo-Platonists, Part II

>More From Sayers on the Holiness of Work

The official Church wastes time and energy, and moreover, commits sacrilege, in demanding that secular workers should neglect their proper vocation in order to do Christian work – by which She means ecclesiastical work. The only Christian work is good work well done. Let the Church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is church embroidery, or sewage farming. As Jacques Maritain says: “If you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian, and try to make a work of beauty into which you have put your heart; do not adopt a Christian pose.” He is right. And let the Church remember that the beauty of the work will be judged by its own, and not by ecclesiastical standards.

Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. When my play The Zeal of Thy House was produced in London, a dear old pious lady was much struck by the beauty of the four great archangels who stood throughout the play in their heavy, gold robes, eleven feet high from wingtip to sandaltip. She asked with great innocence whether I selected the actors who played the angels “for the excellence of their moral character.”

I replied that the angels were selected to begin with, not by me but by the producer, who had the technical qualifications for selecting suitable actors – for that was part of his vocation. And that he selected, in the first place, young men who were six feet tall so that they would match properly together. Secondly, angels had to be of good physique, so as to be able to stand stiff on the stage for two and a half hours, carrying the weight of their wings and costumes, without wobbling, or fidgeting, or fainting. Thirdly, they had to be able to speak verse well, in an agreeable voice and audibly. Fourthly, they had to be reasonable good actors. When all these technical conditions had been fulfilled, we might come to the moral qualities, of which the first would be the ability to arrive on stage punctually and in a sober condition, since the curtain must go up on time, and a drunken angel would be indecorous.

After that, and only after that, one might take character into consideration, but that, provided his behavior was not so scandalous as to cause dissension among the company, the right kind of actor with no morals would give a far more reverent and seemly performance than a saintly actor with the wrong technical qualifications. The worst religious films I ever saw were produced by a company which chose its staff exclusively for their piety. Bad photography, bad acting, and bad dialogue produced a result so grotesquely irreverent that the pictures could not have been shown in churches without bringing Christianity into contempt.

God is not served by technical incompetence; and incompetence and untruth always result when the secular vocation is treated as a thing alien to religion….

And conversely: when you find a man who is a Christian praising God by the excellence of his work – do not distract him and take him away from his proper vocation to address religious meetings and open church bazaars. Let him serve God in the way to which God has called him. If you take him away from that, he will exhaust himself in an alien technique and lose his capacity to do his dedicated work.

It is your business, you churchmen, to get what good you can from observing his work – not to take him away from it, so that he may do ecclesiastical work for you. But, if you have any power, see that he is set free to do this own work as well as it may be done. He is not there to serve you; he is there to serve God by serving his work.

>Banishing the Neo-Platonists

>Dorothy Sayers on Work

From Dorothy Sayers’s essay, “Why Work?” in Creed or Chaos (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949):

The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

. . . Let the Church remember this: that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his profession or trade—not outside of it. The Apostles complained rightly when they said it was not meant they should leave the word of God and serve tables; their vocation was to preach the word. But the person whose vocation it is to prepare the meals beautifully might with equal justice protest: It is not meant for us to leave the service of our tables to preach the word.

The official Church wastes time and energy, and moreover, commits sacrilege, in demanding that secular workers should neglect their proper vocation in order to do Christian work—by which she means ecclesiastical work. The only Christian work is good work well done. Let the Church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is Church embroidery or sewage-farming.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

>An "Old Friend" Returns

>Leviathan is Back, But It Never Went Away

Big Government is back, The Economist tells us in a recent article. Actually, it never really went away–it just hibernated for a few years. Now, however, it is out of the cave bigger, hungrier, and more rapacious than ever.

Fifteen years ago it seemed that the great debate about the proper size and role of the state had been resolved. In Britain and America alike, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton pronounced the last rites of “the era of big government”. Privatising state-run companies was all the rage. The Washington consensus reigned supreme: persuade governments to put on “the golden straitjacket”, in Tom Friedman’s phrase, and prosperity would follow.

Today big government is back with a vengeance: not just as a brute fact, but as a vigorous ideology. Britain’s public spending is set to exceed 50% of GDP (see chart 1). America’s financial capital has shifted from New York to Washington, DC, and the government has been trying to extend its control over the health-care industry. Huge state-run companies such as Gazprom and PetroChina are on the march. Nicolas Sarkozy, having run for office as a French Margaret Thatcher, now argues that the main feature of the credit crisis is “the return of the state, the end of the ideology of public powerlessness”.

Notice that vast expansions of government size and power occurred at the hand of “conservative” political administrations just as much as left-wing governments, and alike, it happened during the times of economic boom (artificially stimulated though it were through loose monetary policies and debt).

Yet even before Lehman Brothers collapsed the state was on the march—even in Britain and America, which had supposedly done most to end the era of big government. Gordon Brown, Britain’s chancellor and later its prime minister, began his ministerial career as “Mr Prudent”. During Labour’s first three years in office public spending fell from 40.6% of GDP to 36.6%. But then he embarked on an Old Labour spending binge. He increased spending on the National Health Service by 6% a year in real terms and boosted spending on education. During Labour’s 13 years in power two-thirds of all the new jobs created were driven by the public sector, and pay has grown faster there than in the private sector (see chart 2).

In America, George Bush did not even go through a prudent phase. He ran for office believing that “when somebody hurts, government has got to move”. And he responded to the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 with a broad-ranging “war on terror”. The result of his guns-and-butter strategy was the biggest expansion in the American state since Lyndon Johnson’s in the mid-1960s. He added a huge new drug entitlement to Medicare. He created the biggest new bureaucracy since the second world war, the Department of Homeland Security. He expanded the federal government’s control over education and over the states. The gap between American public spending and Canada’s has tumbled from 15 percentage points in 1992 to just two percentage points today.

All the while the people clapped and cheered. Their governments were “doing things” for them. In New Zealand, when the previous (Labour) administration deliberately planned and executed an expansion of entitlements to ensure that most of the middle class became recipients of entitlements, known as Working for Families, there was no resistance–only thankful, outstretched hands. By the time the government changed to a “conservative” administration, Working for Families had become one of the vitally important entitlements that had to be conserved. (Actually, the name of this new entitlement is a perverse irony. “Working for Families” was supposed to refer to the kind paternalistic government “working” for families. This of course is a sleight of hand. Everyone receiving “Working for Family” entitlements has other people working for them–like slaves. They work, government takes, and a subset of society receives.)

The Economist article goes on to point out some of the intrinsically bad things about Leviathan’s return. It then rather lamely concludes by suggesting we had all better have a serious think about the role of government ought to have in our society, and work out what governments do well and what they do not. But having recourse to a “common-sense pragmatism” to answer this question is ostrich-head-in-sand type stuff. Western governments will not be rolled back: they will merely hibernate for a time, only to re-emerge bigger than ever. It is politically impossible.

New Zealand is a classic example of this truth. Facing imminent national economic bankruptcy–that is, a genuine crisis–Muldoon’s eastern-bloc command economy was reformed by Roger Douglas in the eighties. But it was a pragmatic reformation: Douglas’s slogan was “There’s got to be a better way.” It was a change led by an academic elite which had been influenced by Milton Friedman and pro-free market economists, largely in the US. It represented a pendulum swing. Parts of the economy were reformed, and the government was stripped of some powers. But what remained untouched were two impossible-to-change foundations of Big Government: welfare entitlements and government redistribution. So, within thirty years, despite the Douglas reforms, Big Government is now back in New Zealand, bigger than ever before. Hello, darkness, my old friend.

We cannot be sure whence the following quotation came, but it definitely hits the nail:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always then followed by a dictatorship.

Arguments amongst pragmatists about where the line ought to be drawn between the government and the private sectors are irrelevant. Wherever that line might be drawn by academics and theorists, it will ever be nothing more than a worthless Maginot Line rapidly outflanked by panzer-like electoral realities driven by the lust, greed, covetousness, and envy of the voter. All Western democracies rest upon immoral foundations that finally will cause them to self-destruct, at least as democracies. It it only a matter of time.

The commandments, “Thou shalt not steal”, and “Thou shalt not covet” prohibit voters from demanding, or political parties from offering, state entitlements and the expropriation via taxation from one citizen and distribution to another. These evils are just as immoral as murder. It is only our modern social conditioning which pans the former as acceptable and continues to reject the latter (except in cases like abortion).

But these convictions will not hold sway in Western democracies until the vast majority of people also embrace the first table of the Law, particularly, “Thou shalt have no other gods in My presence.” We believe this will indeed happen in time. In the meantime, we work with our own hands and raise our children to fear God and be free of, independent of, the State and maintain at all times a clear, generous eye toward the weak and the needy. Nowadays, to live this way is to lead a truly revolutionary life.

>It’s the Arrogance, Ma’am

>Why Conservative Governments Do Better

All democracies, unless they are grounded in the Christian faith, drift inevitably into despotism. Democratic governments invariably expand their controls and regulations over all of human life.

Consequently, it is reasonable to expect that left-wing governments will hold political office for the majority of the time in modern democracies. Democracy and big-government ideologues would appear to be a marriage made in heaven. If democracies are ever drifting leftward as electorates persistently look to government for the solution even to their petty problems, then it seems inevitable that political parties with names such as Labour, Democrats, Social Democrats, or Liberals (in Canada, not Aussie) would hold the reins of power more or less persistently and consistently.

But clearly this is not the case. It turns out that despotically drifting democracies tend to prefer “right wing” or conservative rulers far more than one would expect. There are at least two reasons for this. In the first place, conservative parties and factions are themselves subject to the universal democratic drift towards despotism. If mini-skirts are “in”, conservatives will wear their skirts just one centimetre longer than the labourites. They will follow the left-ward drift albeit at a respectable distance. Thus, it is relatively easy for conservative regimes to retain popular support.

As we have seen in New Zealand, when centre-right governments are returned to power their first order of business is not to scare the horses. Thus, they conserve the previous left-wing’s advances of statist controls and powers. Modern right-wing governments tend to be consolidators: they have the function of making the electorate comfortable with the newly enhanced state powers. But they often do so with a “human face”. They set about calming and quieting the horses, speaking mellifluously about freedoms and commitments to individual liberty and upholding the integrity of families. Uttering the words, even while continuing to maintain or even expand government despotic control, has a strangely calming narcotic effect upon skittish electorates.

Thus, democracies which really lust after bigger and bigger government, provided it continues to pay them out, tend to be more comfortable with conservative administrations. They “feel” better and more comfortable whilst the despotic drift continues.

But there is another reason why left-wing political parties do not do as well as might be expected in ever increasingly socialistic democracies. It is that they are quickly perceived to be arrogant by the electorate. The problem is that left-wing politicians tend to believe that they actually do know what is best for people: essentially more government, bigger government is better. Quickly this translates into politicians knowing what is best for voters. Left wing politicians are easily and naturally perceived as arrogant.

Voters hate arrogance on the part of their servant-rulers. The irony is that both voters and politicians really share a common belief that governments can do it better (in virtually everything). But voters don’t like to have this rammed up their noses–as it were. They like to be respected, courted, won-over. They like their politicians to do the dance of a thousand genuflections in their direction. But left-wing politicians are more hidebound by naked ideology: the risk is that ideology quickly overshadows the mincing dances towards the electorate. The lust for the “greater good” can make left-wing politicians stridently impatient.

The rapid declension of the Obama administration and the Democractic Congress in the United States is an apt illustration of the conundrum. Obama and the Democrats have been increasingly fixated upon introducing socialised medicine into the US. With good reason they believe that if they get it in now, the conservatives will never turn it back. They just know that it is going to be good for the country. At heart, we suspect the overwhelming majority of the electorate probably likes the idea that the government will be there for them in a medical emergency or costly illness. But quickly the Democrats political capital has evaporated as an electorate has felt un-consulted, jilted.

Obama and the Democrats are now tagged with elitism and arrogance. Their response is to double up and drive harder–as all ideologues will. If they continue, it is possible that the 2010 elections will send them into a generational political wilderness.

But, let us be clear. If the Republican party ends up dominating federal and state politics in the US for the next twenty-five years it will not stop the despotic drift of the US into socialism-by-another-name. It will only effect the speed of the drift and the comfort of the electorate along the way.

The only way this would not occur is if a significant majority emerges in the United States which no longer regards government as their de-facto god because they have truly repented and humbled themselves before the Living God, and received mercy at His gracious hand. Such things, however, usually take two or three generations to eventuate. And, like all true works of Messiah, they are impossible to predict; they can only be seen and known after the fact.

Regardless, all Christians who are properly taught, understand that there is no hope and no salvation in modern secular democracies. Can there be any hope in a culture which, in its final analysis, has nothing other than a creed of “our god is our belly”? But our hope ever remains in the King of all kings; His realm is inevitably growing and expanding. In the end, truly sustainable democracy will emerge all over the earth where the power of government is extensively proscribed out of the people’s love for God and for their neighbours. Omni-competent despotic governments, and the secular democracies which spawned them, will be obsolete.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>The Future is the True East

Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, January 11, 2010

We need to start thinking about church/state relations in eschatological categories. If we think of them in static categories, the Christian church will find it hard to avoid becoming reactionary. That kind of conservatism is the way of death.

The Marxists know what they are supposed to be doing right now because they have an eschatology of the state. They say that the dictatorship of the proletariat will eventually wither away, which is perfect nonsense, but they nevertheless do have an eschatology of the thing. But when believing Christians get involved in politics they are hampered by the fact that politics is inherently an eschatological discipline, and their eschatology is either lurid, confused, pessimistic, or non-existent. Why should we want to drive the car if we don’t believe the car is going anywhere? Why should anybody let us drive the car?

So I want to think of where church/state relations are headed teleologically — we need a political eschatology. This will orient us where we need to be oriented. Man was created to be informed by the past, but oriented by the future, not the past. The future is the true East.

We have been all sorts of places. History is messy and at certain times we should want to identify with the Methodists, or Moravians, or Baptists, or Reformed, because that is where the Spirit was moving at that time. There were times when some form of anabaptism was closer to center of faithfulness. We should always identify with faithfulness, whether that faithfulness was connected to “our faction” or not. But in doing this, we need to stand with those faithful saints while avoiding the false eschatologies that arose from those situations. I say this because someone can be where they ought to be, but not know where all of us ought to go. Those are two separate questions.

So the central question I am trying to ask and answer in this discussion is this: where is the Spirit taking us, considered in thousand year chunks? What is it supposed to look like 500 years before the end?

Now, that said, if the Church is everything that matters for the new humanity, then one option is that the state outside the Church goes to hell and we let it (anabaptism). Another is that the functions of the state are subsumed into the Church (which for various reasons I don’t want). Yet another logical option is that the functions of the state wither down to nothing or virtually nothing because of the prevailing Edenic conditions brought about by gospel preaching. We don’t have the problem of reconciliation between church and state anymore because one of the parties needing to be reconciled went poof.

The problem I have with this third option is not a logical one, but rather the fact of the prophecies of healing for the nations, and the honor and glory of kings receiving much higher and greater glory because of their submission to the Church. When kings come to Christ, their glory will grow. When kings die to their own glory, they will be raised in the glory of Another. And incidentally, though I am a minarchist (not an anarchist), and I believe that the kings of the latter glory will largely be ceremonial figureheads, I do not intend this as demeaning or as some kind of a nothing-honor.

Why would any of us think that ceremony is a trivial thing? I suspect it will be shown to be the chief thing, far better than the current techniques for lording it over people — to wit, kicking butt and taking names — peace through superior firepower. That is a model that has a certain rough justice about it, but we have to admit that improvements could be made. When the lion lies down with the lamb, it will not be because men with block letters on their jackets are standing over them with automatic weapons.

So my proposed solution to all this, my fourth option, is to divide a believing world into Church (believing administration of Word and sacrament) and Kingdom (believing administration of bread baking, lovemaking, candlestick making, warfare, sewage treatment, etc.) The Church is the central cathedral and the Kingdom is the parish. The Kingdom may certainly be called the Church by synecdoche, just as all ancient Israel could be called Zion, just so long as we maintain a category elsewhere that keeps them clearly distinct. I want to keep this distinction sharp because I don’t ever want to have ministers of the Word too closely involved in chopping off the heads of miscreants. Wanting to do better than the Inquisition is not setting the bar too high. Whaddaya say?

No one nation replaces Israel — there is one global Israel, an international kingdom, with the worship of Christ at the center. Let’s call it Christendom. We could also think of all the individual civil societies as so many little israels, but only to the extent that the national churches are “churches.” But if the universal Church is the Temple of the new order, then all the nations taken together are the outskirts of the new Israel.

The language I use for this distinction is Church and Kingdom. The Church is the heart of the Kingdom, but not everything in the Kingdom is Church proper, although it is “Church” in some sense. The Church is at the center, and Christendom surrounds her.

The early Church was not Israel complete “in itself,” but was rather an entity that took on certain civil functions in a jury-rigged fashion until a believing culture around the Church had been planted. In other words, Paul told the Corinthians to handle civil disputes in the Church, not because they belonged there ultimately, but rather because it would be worse to let unbelievers handle it. But Paul’s requirement of a jury-rigged small claims court in the Church disappears once the civil magistrates are all Christians, the laws are biblical, and the witnesses are sworn in on a Bible.

So America, Nigeria, Scotland, etc. never become the city of God. But they do all bring their honor and glory into the Church (Rev. 21:24, 26). They do become nursing fathers to the Church (Is. 49:23), submitting themselves to the Church, and being discipled by the Church. They all become parts of the Kingdom, they assume their station as one of the many nations of Christendom. I don’t see how the leaves on the tree of life can be for the healing of the nations without the nations actually getting better (Rev. 22:2).

So the Church is not gathered into the State, with ecclesiastical functions delegated to some part of the bureaucracy. Rather, I see the nations gathered to the Church, with the remaining civil functions distinct from the Church proper, but subordinate to it. The honor and glory of the kings really is honor and glory, and that honor and glory is really brought as tribute to be laid on the altar. In other words, I don’t see the nations gathering the Church, but rather the Church gathering the nations.

Remember, this is a purified Church, and not a grasping Church with a thin veneer of piety. Remember, this is eschatology, and depends upon the Spirit working through millennia. I am talking about 3500 A.D., and not proposing a sorry retread of the Sanhedrin or the Council of Constance to be implemented tomorrow.

Against this, it could be argued that in ancient Israel citizenship in the nation and membership in the congregation were identical, and so that creates problems for us in the era of an international Church, when they can’t be identical. But actually I deny the premise. I don’t agree that the two citizenships were identical in ancient Israel (Dt. 23:2-3). If Moabites and bastards could not come into the congregation of the Lord until after ten generations, that had to be ten generations of some sort of probationary catechumen status, presumably circumcised but maybe not. And then there were sons of Belial who were headed in the other direction. There were ways to be “cut off” from the congregation short of execution, which means that the two citizenships were logically distinct, but drastically intertwined — like being English and being Anglican at certain points in their history.

This is admittedly a rough, preliminary sketch. But Christopher Dawson once said that the Church lives in the light of eternity, and can afford to be patient. Recall that I am a postmillennialist. We have all the time in the world.

>Meditation on the Text of the Week

>Why We Are Upon the Earth

God be gracious to us and bless us
And cause His face to shine upon us–
That Thy way may be known on the earth,
Thy salvation among all nations.
Psalm 67: 1-2

The sixty-seventh Psalm is a remarkable revelation. The first verse, “God be gracious to us and bless us, and cause His face to shine upon us,” could be seen as a typical Jewish prayer, at least of the Third Age. One of the characteristics of that Age was an abiding hatred of the Gentiles (non-Israelites) on the part of the many Rabbis and ordinary Jewish folk.

By the time of the Third Age, the notion that the Lord might show favour and mercy to Gentiles had become blasphemous. It was for this reason, after all, that the Jewish crowd in the temple precinct (ironically in the very Court of the Gentiles) went ballistic and tried to kill the Apostle Paul.

When Paul recounted to the crowd how the God of their fathers had appeared to him and commanded him to go to the Gentiles, Luke records “And they listened to him up to this statement and then they raised their voices and said, ‘Away with such a fellow from the earth, for he should not be allowed to live.’” (Acts 20: 21-22)

The prayer, then, that God would be gracious to us (that is, Israelites) implies naturally enough that His grace would be withheld from non-Jews. Well, actually, no. The rest of Psalm 67 explodes that notion forever. The psalmist prays for God’s favour and blessing upon Israel so that the ways of the Lord would be made known to all the earth, and that all the nations would come to bless and praise God.

It has always and ever been so. The redemption of God is global—covering the entire creation and all the nations of the earth. The covenant with Israel was not a denial of this, but a means to that end. Faithful Israelites, Third-Age rabbis notwithstanding, always understood this. They were a kingdom of priests, that they might represent and mediate for all the nations of the earth before the face of the Lord.

It continues to be so today. We, believing Gentiles, have been grafted into the vine of Israel’s election not for our own sake, but for the sake of the entire world, that “all the ends of the earth may fear Him”. (Psalm 67:7)

It is entirely legitimate—indeed absolutely necessary—that we pray God for His blessing to dwell upon us in indescribable fullness. Like our father, Jacob we would wrestle with the Lord and not let Him go until He blesses us (Genesis 32: 26). But the reason and purpose and end does not rest upon us. Rather, we seek the blessing of God so that all the peoples of the earth would be likewise blessed.

This is the essence and heart of our calling upon the earth.

>The Problems of Haiti

>What a “Failed State” Looks Like

We may well ask, Can anything good come out of Haiti? That is not to say that we ought to do all we can to help the emergency aid efforts on the ground, now–as soon as possible. But Haiti was in a terrible situation before the earthquake–which will have only made things so much worse.

The terrible earthquake–as is true of all natural disasters–was amplified many times over in terms of its devastation because of the abject poverty and degradation of the inhabitants of that island. The bald reality is that applied civil engineering protects people when natural disasters strike. Haiti has virtually none. The magnitude of the social and human problems existing before the earthquake struck was such that no government, top down, imposed solution is ever going to make things better. Consider the following litany:

First, Haiti has been virtually ungovernable.There was no functioning Parliament or judiciary system, no political compromise or consensus, and extreme violence perpetrated by paramilitaries, gangs, and criminal organizations. Corruption and drug trafficking ran rampant. No government enjoyed much legitimacy.

Second, U.S. administrations suspended, reduced, or delayed foreign aid to pressure Aristide and the opposition [in the nineties] to stop the conflict, contributing to extreme poverty and economic and political stability.

Third, the 1991-1993 international economic blockade further impoverished Haiti’s people and economy.

Fourth, Haiti remains the object of an ever changing U.S. foreign policy, that on occasion has made problems there worse, making Haiti a U.S. responsibility.

Since 2001, the US has poured over $1billion into Haiti in the form of various aid projects. The rest of the international community has contributed roughly the same. And the result has been nada. If ever there was an example to prove that showering money and aid from the top down upon a society does not work, it is Haiti. The problems in Haiti are nursed within the national soul, and until that is changed, very little can be achieved. Here is a brief profile of Haiti’s troubles:

The facts of Haitian poverty are startling. The UN Human Development Index (HDI) ranks Haiti as 153rd least developed among the world’s 177 countries. About three-fourths of the population is impoverished—living on less than $2/day. Half of the population has no access to potable water. One-third have no sanitary facilities. Only 10% have electrical service.

Ninety-five percent of employment in Haiti is in the underground economy; while 80% of businesses in urban areas are “off the books.” Official unemployment rates range from 50% to 70%, but no one really knows. Haiti’s private sector is comprised mostly of subsistence farmers and micro-businesses.

A small elite organized in family groupings controls all exports and imports, tourism, construction and manufacturing.About 4% of the population owns 66% of the country’s wealth. Some 10% own nothing. About 5% to 8% of the population has HIV/AIDS, and that percentage is rising. Haiti is the most severely affected by HIV/AIDS outside Sub-Saharan Africa. Only an estimated 5% to 10% of those with HIV/AIDS receive treatment. HIV/AIDS is reducing life expectancy in Haiti by
10 years. In addition, tuberculosis, and recently polio, have emerged as epidemics.

Non- governmental organizations (NGOs) deliver four-fifths of public services.
As many as 250,000 children work as unpaid servants in homes placed there by their
biological parents.Around 2,000 children annually are victims of human trafficking primarily to the Dominican Republic. Two-thirds of women have been violently abused.

Haiti ranks among the worse countries environmentally: 141st out of 155 on Yale University’s Environmental Sustainability Index. Because Haitians are forced to use wood for fuel—70% of energy use is from this source—and because of excessive wood harvesting by private companies, Haiti is now 97% deforested, an irony for a tropical island. Deforestation causes chronic, catastrophic flooding with extensive loss of life. In 2004, tropical storm Jeanne caused property damages at 3.5% GDP.

According to a recent poll, 67% of Haitians would emigrate if they could. Many already have: 2 million Haitians live in the United States, of whom 60% are now American-born. Four-fifths of Haiti’s college-educated citizens live outside of the country.

One well-meaning, but failed, initiative by the West was to get Haiti to adopt a Western style constitution. The 1987 constitution is based upon an amalgam of the French and US constitutions. But such edifices have no foundation upon which they can be supported when law and law keeping is not part of the cultural fabric. There are so many checks and balances in the constitution that the only way any decisions can be made is by the application of graft and bribery. Consequently, Haiti is ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

The Canadian International Development Agency has been very active in Haiti. Its summary of the situation is bleak:

• A society profoundly divided between a traditional culture and an elite, ex-military and petit bourgeois class, each seeking or clinging to power;

• An unstable government and a weak public institutional capacity;

• Seriously deteriorated economic and social infrastructures;

• An absence of capacity for law and order, allowing continued violent insurgencies
and rioting, perpetrated by paramilitaries and gangs;

• An uncontrollable flux of migrants from rural areas into slums of Port-au-Prince;

• Concentration of wealth in the hands of a few traditional families and new mafia-
like groups; and

• An inadequate and constantly deteriorating environment

We believe there is no one “key” to solving Haiti’s problems. No external aid programmes, trying to apply external solutions will bear any good fruit. The unintended consequences of this approach have been disastrous to date, exacerbating many existing problems and creating massive new calamities.

Secondly, there is no short term solution: it has to be an intergenerational solution, working from the bottom up.

Third, solutions have to be familial and mirco-orientated, personal, face-to-face, focusing upon parents, children, employment, training, education. This necessarily means that the approach must be uneven in application and results. Some will benefit; others will get no opportunity. Sorry, that is the way it has to be. Otherwise, some big bwana will have to run a government or NGO programme, and a towering tsunami of corruption will sweep in.

Fourth, and most importantly, the light of the Gospel needs to dawn in the hearts of Haitians. That benighted place needs an army of Christian missionaries proclaiming and living the light and healing of the Gospel of God’s mercy to Haitians in a dark, dark world. It would be good to have Haitian ex-pats making up a large proportion of these divine emissaries–people who themselves have become Christians and who yearn for their countrymen.

>John Piper in Angola Prison

>“I was in Prison And You Came to Me”

According to Wikipedia,

The Louisiana State Penitentiary (also known as Angola and “The Farm”) is a prison in Louisiana operated by the Louisiana Department of Corrections. The prison is the largest maximum security prison in the United States with 5,000 inmates and 1,800 staff members. It is located on an 18,000 acre (73 km²) property that was previously the Angola and other plantations owned by Isaac Franklin in unincorporated West Feliciana Parish, close to the Mississippi border. . . . Current Warden Burl Cain maintains an open-door policy with the media, which led to the production of the award winning documentary The Farm.

Angola Prison, under the leadership of Warden Cain, encourages an active Christian ministry throughout the prison, which is actually one of the largest working farms in the US. Many of the prisoners are “lifers”: while not on death row, their prison sentences are so long, they will die in prison. Many prisoners have been converted. A mission training institute has been set up, and missionaries have gone from Angola into other prisons in the US to spread the Gospel amongst prisoners in other prisons.

In the video below, visiting Pastor John Piper conducts a 30 minute Q&A session with prisoners. The calibre of the questions would put many contemporary Christians to shame. When you consider the background of the audience you cannot but marvel at the wonder of God’s redeeming grace in Christ. God alone can do what man cannot do–save sinners.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor