November snippets

Although some observers believe the President of the United States occupies the most powerful office in the world, economic realities appear to be downgrading his country's status to one notch below that of the world's most populous country: China’s Role as Lender Alters Obama’s Visit. The following passage is especially striking:

“They wanted to know, in painstaking detail, how the health care plan would affect the deficit,” one participant in the conversation recalled. Chinese officials expect that they will help finance whatever Congress and the White House settle on, mostly through buying Treasury debt, and like any banker, they wanted evidence that the United States had a plan to pay them back.

It is a long way from the days when President George W. Bush hectored China about currency manipulation, or when President Bill Clinton exhorted the Chinese to improve human rights.

China may not be the military superpower the US is, but if it decides to call in its loans any time soon, it could exercise effective veto power over American foreign and defence policy.

First it was the Anglicans; now it's the Lutherans: Lutheran Dissidents Say New Church Body in the Works. We are obviously witnessing a major realignment in the traditional protestant denominations in North America. How large the break-away bodies will end up being cannot be determined in advance, of course, but they can only grow as the parent denominations continue their decades-long decline.

In radically secular Québec a beleaguered minority is holding onto the culture of life: Le ciel est bleu: Pour la Culture de la Vie. Let us pray that their influence will expand in that province pas comme les autres.

No, I have no plans at the moment — or any time soon — to read Sarah Palin's Going Rogue.

Today we received the new issue of National Geographic and were delighted to see an article devoted to that ancient monastic republic in northern Greece: Called to the Holy Mountain: The Monks of Mount Athos. And this so soon after an article on the Russian Orthodox Church appeared in the April issue: Soul of Russia. I will not try to speculate on what has sparked this sudden interest in Orthodox Christianity in this 121-year-old publication.

Jake Belder, our Canadian seminarian basking in the Florida sun, gives us The Semi-Pelagian Narrower Catechism.

An interesting discussion on baptism is occurring over at First Things' Evangel blog: The Cheapening of Baptism, by Jared C. Wilson. To be honest, I had not heard of the phenomenon of people undergoing repeated baptisms. Now that I know about it, I am quite prepared to state that ah'm agin it.

Confessions of a progressive Christian

My recent reading of the Progressive Revival blog provides a good opportunity to explain my own identity as a progressive Christian. Of course I must immediately point out that what the larger society deems progress may not necessarily be genuinely progressive, which raises the central issue of what makes for progress. How do we know it when we see it? How do we know what to work for?

The followers of the various ideologies have their own definitions. Marx famously believed in the inevitability of a global movement towards the classless society. History moves in a single direction through the mechanism of the class struggle.

Nationalism believes that the liberation of the nation from foreign control (however the words nation and foreign be defined) is a progressive development.

Liberalism has moved through more than one stage beginning with Thomas Hobbes and culminating in its most recent manifestation in North America. The eschatological vision of liberalism may be less obvious than in Marxism, but it can be said to consist of a society in which everyone acquires equally a maximum degree of personal autonomy, by means of either a small government getting out of the way or, more recently, an expansive government actively intervening to increase the range of personal options available to all.

From a Christian perspective, all three approaches are fundamentally flawed because they fail to account for the givenness and stability of human nature, and because they at least tacitly assume that all obligations not incurred voluntarily are intrinsically alienating and oppressive. Progress is mistakenly deemed to entail ever greater degrees of human autonomy over against such “oppression.”

Although this is a vast topic requiring considerably more than I can give it in this space, I believe that there are two basic ways of measuring progress. The first of these is rooted in the biblical motive of creation, fall and redemption. The second is based on what Reformed Christians call the cultural mandate, as found in Genesis 1:28 and following. There is a tendency in some circles to conflate the two, as found in this wikipedia article, where the human task of developing creation is erroneously identified with “redeeming the culture.”

First, all Christians are aware of the ways in which our culture falls short of God’s intentions. Here genuine progress would entail God’s image-bearers increasingly living up to their pluriform responsibilities in the various spheres of life: husbands and wives remain faithful to each other; parents do not abuse their children; governments refrain from oppressing their citizens; church attendance goes up; the gospel is preached; governments stop pursuing policies that, while pretending to enhance individual freedom, actually contribute to social anomie; political corruption decreases; people use technical developments for good rather than for ill.

Many Christians properly focus on the above, because they know that the proliferation of evil has deleterious effects on the social order. Christians on both right and left try to bring the larger society into conformity with the expressed will of God in, e.g., the Decalogue or the Sermon on the Mount, by focussing on such issues as abortion, euthanasia, alcoholic beverages (a century ago), or poverty.

Second, I would argue for a reading of the cultural mandate that recognizes that the divine call to form culture exists even apart from the post-fall realities of sin and salvation. We image-bearers are not called to redeem our cultures. Only God in Christ can do that. But we are called to develop culture. Here I would strongly recommend a reading of Andy Crouch’s excellent book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. While Jacques Ellul, George Grant and others view technology as nearly a fall from grace, I am persuaded that we should view our cultural creativity as rooted in our God-given nature. Certainly such developments are subject to abuse, given our sinfulness, but this cannot discredit the developments themselves.

Some possible examples of such progress include representative government, constitutional federalism, modern banking systems, the market, the limited liability corporation, improvements in transportation and communication, refrigeration, improved agricultural methods, international organizations, mass literacy and education, the welfare state (but not an omnicompetent one) and even the softening (though not the elimination) of gender roles. All of these arguably, if not incontestably, can be said represent positive developments of general benefit to humanity. Their absence centuries ago did not represent evils from which our ostensibly more enlightened contemporaries have recently liberated us. Their presence now simply represents legitimate uses and improvements of what God gave us from the outset.

However — and this must never be forgotten — the legitimate development of God’s creation is not itself redemptive. This is where both Social Gospellers and “Save America” types often go wrong. The invention of time-saving devices has freed both men and women to pursue life paths not open to their forebears. Yet this greater range of options in no way brings people closer to living obediently in the light of God’s word. In fact, it may tempt us to assume that we can easily cushion ourselves from the destructive consequences of living as we please. This points to the grain of truth in the negative assessment of technology in Ellul and Grant. We cannot redeem ourselves and we are guilty of overweening pride and idolatry if we assume otherwise.

To call ourselves genuinely progressive requires no small measure of discernment. We cannot afford to bypass this discernment process by assuming that we can accept the larger culture’s definition of progress and go from there. This is the error of many of our self-proclaimed progressive Christians. So, yes, with all these qualifications in mind, I am pleased to call myself a progressive Christian.

The fall of the wall, plus 20

The autumn of 1989 was an exciting time to be teaching political science, due to the extraordinary events occurring in the former east European Soviet bloc. The culmination was, of course, the dramatic opening of the Berlin Wall on 9 November. A political illusion that had seemed so immovable for four decades collapsed with unprecedented swiftness over the course of a very few weeks. By Christmas it was all over, and a new era had begun. To my current students, of course, this is all ancient history, of which they have no memory.

I might add that, in 1993, one of my former students travelled through Europe and brought back for me two pieces of the wall, which I have on a book shelf in my campus office.

Later: The New York Times carries some wonderful before and after photographs of the Berlin Wall: A Division Through Time. They’re definitely worth a look.

Is the end near?

Christians have been engaging sporadically in eschatological speculation for most of the last two millennia, but a lot of people these days seem to be focussing on 21 May 2011 as the predicted Day of Judgement. Could this be part of an effort to preempt the Mayan calendar? In any event, final exams should be over and my grades turned in by then.

Baptist preachers related?

I may be the first person to have noticed the uncanny physical (though by no means ideological) resemblance between these two Baptist preachers, John Piper, of Desiring God Ministries, and the late Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian medicare. See for yourself.


Rev. John Piper


Rev. Tommy Douglas

All Saints

Reformation

Late October snippets

The first and last President of the Soviet Union has spoken out on the poor health of Russian democracy: Kremlin rigged Russia’s regional elections, says Mikhail Gorbachev. He's not the only one: "The leader of the opposition liberal Yabloko party, which failed to win any seats, complained that even his own vote had been stolen. Sergei Mitrokhin voted for his party at his Moscow polling station — but Yabloko had, apparently, received no votes when the district election committee published the station’s results."

My employer, Redeemer University College, has once again earned high marks in The Globe and Mail's annual university report card. Surprisingly, Redeemer was given a D for campus pubs/bars, when we certainly should have got an F. One of my colleagues came up with a plausible explanation: "the students who hide 6 packs of beer in their dorm toilet tanks saved us from the F rating (as well as the faculty and staff who keep a bottle for medicinal purposes in their bottom desk drawer)." Great. Now I'll have to move mine to the top drawer.

This will anger many Quebeckers including the province's government: Top court strikes down Quebec English school law. Premier Jean Charest might have liked to invoke section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the so-called Notwithstanding Clause, to get around this ruling and to placate francophone opinion, but the clause does not apply to section 23, which covers minority language educational rights. Could this boost the popularity of the separatist Parti québécois and its leader Pauline Marois? The quietly simmering national unity issue looks set to heat up to a boil once again.

A group of former evangelicals who became Orthodox more than two decades ago appear to have started a trend, if this report is any indication: More Protestants Find a Home in the Orthodox Antioch Church. Many will be startled to learn that "some 70 percent of Antiochian Orthodox priests in the United States are converts." This may make the Antiochian Church the least ethnocentric of the several overlapping Orthodox jurisdictions in North America.

In addition to the several eastern-rite Catholic Churches in full communion with Rome, Pope Benedict XVI appears to have opened the door to the formation of an Anglican-rite Catholic church. Fr. Raymond de Souza is pleased. Yet not everyone is keen on the offer: Ottawa Anglicans reject Pope's offer. From what I know of it, St. George's Church is probably closer to the evangelical than to the anglo-catholic wing of Anglicanism. Yet one group that will almost certainly take advantage of the Pope's offer is the Traditional Anglican Communion.

The defective theology in this song would appear to prove conclusively what many of us long suspected: that lyricist Hal David is at least a semi-pelagian, if not a full pelagian:

Nurtured on the Word

This is crossposted with First Things' Evangel blog:

Some Christians accept without reservation the teachings of their church, including the status of Scripture as the Word of God, but they nevertheless seldom read it and consequently do not know it very well. This is definitely not true of most evangelicals, who from an early age are taught to read and love the Bible. And even to collect bibles! As an adolescent I once went through our family home and counted all the bibles I could manage to locate, including those in Greek. (My parents had had a bible school education and my father had grown up speaking modern Greek.) When I had finished counting, I was astonished to discover that among the eight of us we owned more than 80 copies of the Bible! Our own experience was obviously quite different from those households that may own but a single copy gathering dust on one of the upper shelves of the home library.

I am part of the last generation to grow up with the King James version, although other translations were beginning to be published at the time. I recall with special fondness my mother reading to us from J. B. Phillips’ paraphrase of the New Testament, whose fresh and colloquial renderings made God’s Word come alive for us children. Nevertheless, when we undertook to memorize passages from the Bible, as we were taught to do in sunday school, the KJV still held sway.

It was in sunday school and church that we learned that the Bible is not merely a collection of legal codes, genealogies, moral advice and wise observations about life. Nor is it a series of episodic vignettes from the national experience of a people distant from us in both time and place. Rather, the Bible is a grand story covering the entirety of history from beginning to end, from creation through the fall into sin, to redemption in Jesus Christ, up to the final consummation of his everlasting kingdom, as recounted in the Revelation. This was our own story, and we identified with the foibles and struggles of persons who lived long ago, but whose lives and actions vividly manifested God’s mighty acts in history, culminating in the sending of Jesus into the world.

The late Bishop Lesslie Newbigin writes that Christians are those who indwell the biblical narrative, who make it their own and find their place within it. This indwelling conditions everything they do, in the full array of their life’s responsibilities. Furthermore, it is incompatible with finding one’s place in another pseudo-redemptive narrative, whether it be the liberal expectation of a progressive expansion of freedom or the Marxian expectation of a classless society. No one can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24).

Those of us who grew up steeped in Scripture early came to love it. Its world is intimately familiar to us and its worldview is not the least foreign to our apparently modern sensibilities. For myself this love has worked itself out in my praying a simple form of the Daily Office throughout the past 30 years and in singing the Psalms, about which I will have more to say in the near future.

Political science?

This question is being asked of my own academic discipline: Field Study: Just How Relevant Is Political Science? The issues raised in the linked article are familiar to insiders, of course, but it's good that others become aware of them as well. I have one quibble with the University of Michigan's Arthur Lupia, whom author Patricia Cohen cites: "Political science can also help determine what institutions and arrangements are needed to help a dictatorship make the transition to a democracy . . . ." There is some truth to this, of course, but it raises a further question: Which deep-seated traditions are needed to support such proposed institutions and arrangements? Political science may be competent to propose favourable institutional arrangements, but it is utterly unable to establish pre-existing cultural mores capable of supporting them.

First Things: Evangel

As of this week I am one of the bloggers at First Things' new blog, Evangel. My first contribution was posted this morning: A confessional core versus pragmatism. Feel free to join the conversation.

Autumn

I must admit that autumn is my least favourite season, primarily because the daylight hours are noticeably shortening and the nighttime lengthening. However, listening to this great song by the incomparable Nat King Cole makes the season almost bearable.



More: As most of my readers are on the younger side, they likely do not remember the old 45-RPM vinyl records, which had a hit song on one side and another, less popular song by the same artist on the other. Yet my generation grew up with these. The very first one I owned was of Nat King Cole singing Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer. To be sure, it's not one of his better pieces, but it was cheerful and catchy enough to appeal to a 6-year-old. He died – a few weeks short of my tenth birthday – of the lung cancer that came from years of smoking. He was only 45. I recall a feeling of sadness at hearing the news.

Here is the great jazz musician once more with another song devoted to the season:

Worshipping together

In the churches in which I grew up sunday school for every age always preceded the church service proper. The small children continued with a separate children's church up to the beginning of school age, at which point they joined their families for "big people's church." However, since coming to Canada I have not seen this pattern, which seems unfamiliar to the people I know. Generally adults and children worship separately, sometimes even into adolescence when they ought to be assuming their places in an adult world.

Betsy Hart addresses this issue in an article very much worth reading and pondering: Why send young away during church services? Here's Hart:

[T]he belief seems to be that it’s more likely kids will stick with church over their lifetime if it’s more geared to them when they are young. But the evidence is that this isn’t what happens.

Two decades ago, Christian education expert James W. Write showed in his book, Intergenerational Religious Education (Religious Education Press), that studies reveal that children who worship regularly with their parents are more likely to consistently worship as adults than children who grow up primarily attending “children’s church.”

I have not infrequently wondered whether the lower rate of church attendance in this country relative to that in the US might have something to do with breaking up families on sunday mornings rather than keeping them together, which is the pattern I grew up with. There is undoubtedly more than one causal factor at work here, but keeping our older children in church with us has to be a step in the right direction.

Back to the future?

Is the troubled Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland being sabotaged from the future? Strange to say, but some in the know are taking this possibility seriously: The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate.

Drakensberg Boys Choir

On this Thanksgiving Day there is much for which to give thanks, but I would like to offer special thanks for the remarkable Drakensberg Boys Choir from South Africa, whose repertoire runs the gamut from western classical to African traditional. Here are two fine performances below:

Unexpected climate change

This BBC report on the global cooling trend since 1998 is likely to add more heat to the arguments on climate change: What happened to global warming? Nevertheless, even if the sceptics are correct, this should never be used as an excuse to relax our ongoing efforts to protect the physical environment. As for the proponents of the global warming thesis, they would be unwise to hang their efforts at reducing the production of greenhouse gases on this theory alone. Should they do so, they risk incurring a backlash from the public, which could set back the cause of environmental protection.

Nobel surprise

This is unexpected and almost certainly premature: Obama 'humbled' by Nobel Peace Prize win. Surely it would have been better to wait until the man had some concrete achievements to show in this area? On the other hand, it may be that the Nobel committee is elated at the passing of the Bush presidency and simply overreacted.

October snippets

Three decades later George Perlin's Tory Syndrome has become the "Grit Syndrome" as Canada's Liberal Party continues to implode under Michael Ignatieff's leadership: Liberal rift hurting party, insiders say. Ignatieff's threats to pull the plug on Stephen Harper's minority Conservative government suddenly look less formidable than before. Next election? My guess is 2010 or later, unless Ignatieff has a death wish.

Joseph Farah comments on Obama's Judenrein speech. By opposing Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, Obama is advocating "ethnic cleansing," as Farah sees it. Here's Farah: "I believe Israel – all of Israel – belongs to the Jews. By definition, it is a Jewish homeland. Unlike its enemies, Israel has always embraced non-Jews within its borders – extending to them full citizenship rights including representation in its legislature." How does this differ from the proposed solution of many Palestinians that the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean should be a multi-ethnic democracy? Would Farah agree with Jimmy Carter's proposal? Would not a greater Israel in which all residents had rights of citizenship not eventually lead to Jews becoming a minority in their own state? Someone needs to connect the dots for Farah.

Almost 25 years ago I subscribed briefly to the journal of the Mercersburg Society, to which I have paid insufficient attention since. The Mercersburg movement was named for Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, where the German Reformed Church in the United States had its seminary in the middle of the 19th century. Two of its faculty, John Williamson Nevin and church historian Philip Schaff, spearheaded an effort within that denomination to recover something of the catholic roots of the Reformed churches, emphasizing, among other things, the place of the institutional church and its means of grace in the lives of believers, the "mystical presence" of Christ in the Lord's Supper, and the need for a prescribed liturgy rooted in the ancient patterns of worship. Contemporary evangelicals need to familiarize themselves with Mercersburg, a school that stands in contrast to the revivalist strain that has dominated their movement since the turn of the 19th century.

The health care debate south of the border is bringing out ugly rhetoric on both sides of the partisan aisle. A Democratic Congressman is charging Republicans with wanting Americans to "die quickly" should they become ill. Republican Sarah Palin recently accused Democrats of wishing to set up "death panels" in connection with the President's proposed health care plan. When in doubt about such claims, it it is always best to seek out one of the many websites devoted to determining the truth, such as factcheck.org. It usually turns out that neither side cringes at creatively crafting its own credibility construct.

Canada's most prominent imprisoned expat recounts his faith pilgrimage: How I woke up from spiritual slumber and inched at a snail’s pace to Rome, which is excerpted in the National Post. A few surprises are to be found here: First, Lord Black was attracted by the impressive but now vastly diminished edifice of Québec Catholicism, that "endearing blend of idealism and cynicism." Second, John Wesley would be bemused to learn that he was a follower of John Calvin. Third and finally, despite Black's confession, Christians believe considerably more than that "Christ was divinely inspired." There are those little matters of the Incarnation and the Trinity which seem to have escaped him.

This is an intriguing development that bears watching: The steady rise of Islamic finance. My question is: what is the difference between rent and interest? Is the islamic mortgage really all that different from its western counterpart?

CDU victory

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has scored a victory for her CDU-CSU coalition over the Social Democrats, which were part of a grand coalition government for the past four years. It looks as though the old Christian Democratic alliance with the Free Democrats will return to form a new centre-right government.

Gaelic psalms. . .

. . . are posted on my Genevan Psalter blog.

Why abortion is different

The following is this month's instalment of my regular column, "Principalities & Powers," for Christian Courier, dated 14 September. Isn't it time you subscribed to Christian Courier today?

Over the years in this space I have been critical of those pro-life Christians who cast their votes solely on the abortion issue. After all, governments have a full array of duties to perform in fulfilling their central task of doing public justice. Even if a government fails in one area, it may discharge its other responsibilities conscientiously, thus earning the support of its citizens. On the other hand, a given leader may claim the pro-life label and yet demonstrate incompetence in governing. This ought not to be taken lightly.

However, those claiming that abortion is just another issue are themselves on shaky ground. In the current policy debates in the United States, a number of activists are claiming that health care too is a moral issue, as are the environment and the minimum wage. It would not do to belittle such claims, because there is a large measure of truth in them.

Yes, health care is important. It is only just that all people have access to the best medical attention possible so they can fulfil their life callings. Similarly, it matters that we protect the environment, because we owe it to future generations whose lives will depend on it. Christians in particular are aware that, as God’s image-bearers, we have been given a stewardship over his earth, which we are to use wisely and carefully. It is indeed necessary that we ensure that all workers be able to feed and clothe their families and to keep a roof over their heads.

Nevertheless, not all issues necessarily have the same import or significance – something the language of morality may mask. In fact, there is a qualitative difference between abortion and the cluster of issues touched on above. In the case of the latter, no one disputes that the environment must be protected; the current debate revolves around how best to do so. Some favour a market-oriented approach, while others are convinced that government must play a central role. Again no one denies the desirability of furnishing the best health care to all citizens. Disagreement arises over whether this is best done through private or public insurance plans. Though Canadians and Americans have taken different paths on the issue, both approaches have their flaws – serious flaws, as it turns out, which illustrates that calling health care a moral issue cannot itself resolve the political debate.

Abortion is different. Here the quarrel is not over the best way to protect the unborn; it is precisely over whether to do so at all. Those believing women should have the right to terminate a pregnancy hold this position despite the presence of the vulnerable child. Those who believe that the unborn deserve protection do so because of the child’s presence. This fundamental disagreement over what is at stake is what sets the abortion issue apart from most others. Proponents of the so-called consistent life ethic generally fail to comprehend this. Such bishops as Denver’s Charles Chaput are right to make a fuss over Catholic politicians who support abortion rights. Abortion is not merely a private opinion; it is a clear matter of justice that needs to be addressed head on.

This does not mean there is no room for compromise. It would be politically foolish for pro-lifers to push for a total ban on abortion and refuse to accept half measures that would fall short of this lofty goal. Yet it is quite another thing to deny, as some Christians do, that abortion is a justice issue at all and to equate it with, say, health care, where the overall policy goal, if not the means of getting there, commands general agreement.

September snippets

As election fever grips Ottawa, Democracy Watch is questioning the validity of last year's vote: Harper's 2008 election call challenged in court. Yet the relevant section of the Canada Elections Act, on which the challenge is based, explicitly states: "Nothing in this section affects the powers of the Governor General, including the power to dissolve Parliament at the Governor General’s discretion." Thus the Federal Court will almost certainly rule against Democracy Watch.

Could the Anglican Church in North America enter into fraternal relations with the OCA? Metropolitan Jonah calls for Full Communion With New Anglican Province. Although some with anglo-catholic leanings in the ACNA might be tempted by such an offer, the evangelicals will not be. For them the 39 Articles constitute a rather significant obstacle to reunion with the Orthodox. I somehow doubt that Metropolitan Jonah seriously expects his offer to be accepted.

Doing the Truth in Love has caught the attention of Zenit, the semi-official Vatican news agency: 68 Protestant Leaders Applaud Encyclical. Of course, not all evangelicals are enthusiastic about the statement, including some names familiar to readers of this blog. First: Caritas in Flagrande, written by our friend Darryl Hart, who has taken upon himself the hard task of disagreeing with anything produced by neocalvinists. (It's tough work, but someone's got to do it.) Second: How Many Evangelicals Does it Take to Comment on an Encyclical?, penned by the pugnaciously entertaining Caleb Stegall, who continues to work out his salvation in the plains of Kansas. One assumes that at least these two gentlemen will not be signing any time soon. Nevertheless, we'll keep a pen handy in case they change their mind.

All said, Doing the Truth in Love appears to be prompting discussion of Pope Benedict's encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. Which, as I recall, is exactly what it was intended to do.

In the wake of the murder of abortionist Dr. George Tiller, one person who was nowhere near the scene of the crime has surprisingly admitted his own guilt. Fellow Orthodox Christian layman George C Michalopulos is having none of this: The State of Kansas vs Frank Schaeffer in the Murder of Dr. George Tiller.

The President of the United States addressed his nation's school children on what is the first day of school for many of them. Although I have been from the start an Obama sceptic and although I am not a fan of nationwide presidential addresses when and where they are not obviously needed, I cannot help thinking that the hysterical reaction of some to this speech will do a lot to discredit those with legitimate reasons for scepticism. It should be possible to disagree with the current occupant of the presidency while continuing to respect the office. Too many are losing sight of this.