Freedom and the Laws of God

The laws of God, his commandments, are the righteous code of freedom, the rules that define and preserve both political freedom and its taproot, spiritual freedom.  God’s laws are not merely the suppression of fallen human impulse.  They are the honor code of liberation.  They are the way authentically free persons conduct their business with Him and with one another:  Now that you are free, here is how you ought to live.

God Himself declared as much to the ancient Israelites when, before He gave them His law, He reminded them that He was the very One who brought them out of slavery and bondage in Egypt (Exodus 20: 2).  Now that they were a free people, here’s the way a free people ought to act; here’s the way they ought to conduct their affairs.  If they were to be, and to remain, both morally and politically free, they must not lie (Exod. 20: 16); they must find ways of gaining rest for themselves and others (vv. 8-11); they must respect their elders, thereby acknowledging the debt they have to their ancestors and those who made the world they inherited (v. 12); they must respect and preserve private property (v. 15); they must respect human life and refrain from all murder  (v. 13); they must not serve any false gods, for there is one God and one God only (vv. 2-7); and they must keep themselves free from envy, lust and inordinate desires, which themselves are bondage and indicate moral slavery (v. 17).

In other words, the freedom God gave them came with responsibilities, and these laws articulate the responsibilities.  Freedom, to be preserved, comes with obligations.  These laws are the preservatives and the obligations.

Freedom, furthermore, must be extended to others, and these laws are how to extend it to those who are foreigners and who live among you.  As God never tired to remind the Israelites, they too were foreigners in other lands, and they knew first hand how bitter and crushing that experience could be (Exod. 22: 21, 23:9; Deut 5:5, 10: 19).  Imposing that crushing bitterness on others is not the way freed and righteous persons ought to live.

And if the ancient Jews found this freedom and its obligations beyond their reach, as the unregenerate always do, then the law would do something else for them:  It would lead them to The Great Liberator Himself (Gal. 3: 24), Who would set them free in soul, a liberation from which all other freedoms spring, and which helps to keep freed persons on the right side of the line that divides liberty from licentiousness.

“Learning and Language -- An Essay in Honor of Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian”

By speaking our universe into existence, God gave us a world with words at its root.  Language is at the core of reality.  The relationship between words and the world is intimate and enduring.  Because it is, unless you get the words right, you cannot get the world right.  Mastery of words makes understanding the world possible.  For that reason and others, education must include mastery of language, without which wisdom and knowledge are impossible, something the best educators have known for many centuries.

Classically, education proceeded along this path:  First grammar, then dialectic, and finally rhetoric.  If grammar is how to speak, then dialectic is how to speak sense, and rhetoric is how to speak sense beautifully, memorably and compellingly, a talent which, if you possess it, enables you to serve both God and the nation with far greater effect.  Classical educators reasoned that to be rhetorically adept is to be articulate, clear thinking and persuasive.  They devised their educational agenda accordingly.

But that is not the case today, at least not in many of America’s schools, whether public or private.  Whereas grammar used to be a chief or primary focus of grammar schools, it is so no longer.  What we euphemistically call grammar schools are too often grammar-free zones wherein the so-called learning facilitators are more intent upon making students feel good rather than do well, as if rewards precede achievement.  Mastery of grammar is often the one thing most conspicuously absent from grammar schools.  We no longer require of our youngest students that they master grammar as their first major step on the long and difficult journey toward becoming educated men and women able to think and speak for themselves.  Our failure to require this mastery of our students cripples them.

Let me explain.

A sentence is a complete thought.  But if you cannot write or speak a proper sentence, then you cannot think properly a complete thought.  Because you cannot, you also cannot tell that you are failing at thought.  You are ignorant even of your ignorance.  The things that pass for thought in such crippled minds are normally not thought at all, just an untutored rummaging around in one’s brain for whatever appears to be a suitable slogan to toss out at the moment.

In other words, not all mental activity is thinking.  Indeed, most mental activity is decisively not thought, but mere sloganeering and jargon, which together are the death of thought.  Sloganeering and jargon are to thinking what abortion is the unborn – the end, not the beginning.

You must master language and grammar because language is a logic, a rational way of understanding.  For example, because mastering prepositions makes understanding relationships possible, if you have not mastered prepositions, you cannot understand relationships.  If you have not mastered direct and indirect objects, or the active and passive voices, then you cannot understand either the complexities of causation or who is doing what to whom.  If you have not mastered adjectives and adverbs, then you cannot understand the connection between things and their attributes, on the one hand, or between actions and their attributes, on the other.  You do not think and then translate your thoughts into words; you think in words.  Grammar makes it all possible.

To put a point on it:  When the power of language is small, the power of thought is small.  Schools that do not require verbal mastery of their students render those students incapable of real thinking.  Whatever else this might be, it is not education.

That this failure to master language so often characterizes Christian schools and colleges is doubly appalling.  You cannot work effectively in the service of Him who is called the Word unless you have mastered words.  You cannot understand or explain the content of God’s inspired Word unless you have mastered words.  You cannot preach the message of salvation and hope powerfully to a fallen world unless you have mastered words.

Language is one of the chief means by which God enabled human beings to search for and acquire both knowledge and understanding.  By forcing ourselves to choose the right words and to put the right words in the right order in clear and concise prose, and by forcing ourselves to call things by their proper and rightful names, we begin to do what God intended us to do:  We gain fuller mastery over the world He called us to subdue and to develop, a task that began with Adam using language to name the animals.  So potent is the verbal power God gave us that He Himself had to hinder it at the tower of Babel, lest human evil grow even more destructive, perverse and all-pervasive.  The power of language is so extraordinary that it cannot be left unchecked in the hands of the wicked.   

         Politically the case is no different.  Regarding language, the choice the world gives you is this and only this:  Either you master language or those who do will master you.  Both human freedom and human dignity depend directly upon it.  Unless you know what and how words mean, and unless you can resist effectively those who mangle words for their own political ends, you will become the political and cultural captive of politicians whose unconstrained manipulation of language makes their alteration of government and society possible, and of the judges they appoint to carry it out.  They fervently hope that you do not know what the meaning of the word “is” is.

         Confucius’ way of saying this was to assert that when words lose their meaning people lose their freedom and their lives.

         Therefore, you must never be content with sloppy language.  Sloppy language makes sloppy thought possible.  Rather, even if you fall short, you must strive for complete verbal precision.  You must pause to find the right word and refuse to go on until you have found the right word.  When you pause to find the right word and do not go on until you have found it, you learn better not only what you do mean, but what you should mean.  But if you are content simply to use any word that is merely close, any word that comes quickly to hand or that even loosely approximates your intention, then you make it plain to those who do pay close attention to your words that you are thoughtless and careless.  You must never write or speak as if you graduated from the Hand Grenade School of Language, as if close were good enough.  It is not.

         Mark Twain was correct:  The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

         For these lessons and for so much more, I am deeply indebted to Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian, the wisest and shrewdest of my unofficial teachers.

         Regarding any text, if Richard Mitchell wrote it, you should read it.        

        

Slander from the Religious Left: On not Bearing False Witness Against Your Conservative Neighbor

From the religious left, one often hears the old canard about how cruel and unlike Jesus politically conservative Christians are because they oppose government welfare programs.  But that notion is (1) unbiblical, (2) ungrounded, and (3) flatly false.

(1) Unbiblical:  As demonstrated throughout His life and teaching, Jesus has a heart for the poor, and He commands the same of us.  But you’ll notice that nowhere does Jesus slough off the demands of Christian charity onto the Roman Empire.  Those obligations He reserves for the Christians themselves.  He demands sacrificial charity of us, and He illustrates how it ought to work with a story about a good man from Samaria, not a good leftist from government.  The good Samaritan, not the good bureaucracy, embodies Christ’s understanding of brotherly love.

Jesus does not direct his followers to consider their tax bill as their tithe, or even a part thereof.  He knows that governments can never be, and never have been, an agency of Christian love or a suitable substitute for individual or church involvement.  As her proper duty before God, the poor widow freely and graciously placed her last mite into the religious offering plate, not into the public coffers where it would be consumed by government, not by the hungry (Luke 21: 1-4).  No; Jesus knows better what governments are for and how they actually work.  He never once indicates that the state is the proper locus of Christian compassion and charity.  Instead, He tells you to help the poor, not to delude yourself into thinking that government bureaucrats can do it for you, as if higher tax brackets mean greater outpourings of Christian love.  He’s not the prototype of modern religious leftism.  Indeed, far from being an economic egalitarian, He tells stories, like the parable of the talents in Matt. 25: 14-30, in which the actual moral is sometimes to take from those who have little and give it to those who have much, not the other way round. (A talent, by the way, is not a personal ability, but an amount of money worth about 20 years of a day-laborer’s wages).

The New Testament view is that governments are supposed to be a terror to evildoers (Romans 13: 3, 4), not a channel for religious charity -- unless, of course, the state is your church and government is your god, which must never be.  As has been argued repeatedly by scholars like R. J. Rummel in his shocking Death by Government, in the 20^th century alone (an ostensibly civilized century), governments have killed nearly 200 million of their own citizens.  That is, on average, nearly 2 million persons are slaughtered every year at the hands of their own ruling elite.  In other words, the secular, modern nation-state is adept at distributing death, not love.  If you think you can turn government into an agency of Christian love, you are historically and politically delusional.  That’s not the biblical view, and that’s not the lesson of history.  Stop acting as if it were; and stop castigating others for not wallowing in your pool of error.

(2) Ungrounded:  I will not repeat here what I and many others have published repeatedly and at length elsewhere.  I simply say that government welfare programs -- those soul-crushing and abortive attempts at social engineering that we conservative Christians are criticized for not supporting -- have demonstrably injured the very persons they were intended to help, driving up unemployment, poverty, illegitimacy, broken homes, crime, drug use, incarceration, recidivism, and intergenerational dependency on government.  In so doing, they have produced a permanent underclass, wards of the state.  Yet, conservative evangelicals are criticized for not supporting those social and cultural mechanisms of devastation, as if we were obligated by our faith in Christ to make more victims rather than to affect the healing and escape of those already victimized.  I simply point you to Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion, Doug Bandow’s Beyond Good Intentions, Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, and countless works, both large and small, by Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, among many, many others.

(3) Flatly false:  Far from being uncharitable and unkind, those conservative believers who oppose government welfare programs are not selfish, unchristian, or uncompassionate.  Quite the opposite:  As Arthur C. Brooks and James Q. Wilson has demonstrated in the carefully researched and copiously documented book Who Really Cares?:  The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism, the most generous folks in America, those who give more to charity -- both secular charity and religious -- are precisely those politically conservative Christians whom the left criticizes as unloving.  Nobody, simply nobody -- no group in the history of the world -- gives more consistently and more sacrificially to charity of all sorts than do they.  And if the government tax code were not so relentlessly confiscatory, they’d give even more.  Yet, for all that, leftist Christians slander those generous folks as opposed to Christ.

And who gives least?

You guessed it.

“The resurrection of the body; and life everlasting." (part 2)

What the Scripture normally calls "eternal life," the creed calls "life everlasting."  Neither term means longevity of life, but a special quality of life, namely the life that comes from intimate knowledge of God and communion with Him.  According to Scripture, eternal life entails knowing and abiding in God (1 John 5: 20), which is why Scripture also says that eternal life is not something merely for the distant future.  It can be possessed and experienced right now, right here.  Eternal life is a knowledge, a relationship.  The One Whom we know and to Whom we relate is God.  In Peter's words, eternal life is our participation in God's own divine nature (2 Peter 1: 4), which means that we shall be like God, not in the foolish and sinful way attempted by Adam and Eve, but by the redeeming grace of God in Christ, the one into whose image and character we are ultimately transformed (Rom. 8: 29).

         Eternal life is not the same as mere endless existence, though such notions are included within it.  Nor does eternal life mean, as some commentators say it means, life "outside space and time" or "the absence of time."  Because eternal life entails resurrection of the body, because having a body implies a spatial context, and because space and time seem intimately and inextricably intertwined, eternal life cannot be timeless or spaceless life.  Eternal life is our life with Him Who is Life (John 11: 25), Light (1 John 1: 5), and Love (1 John 4: 8).  It is a life which death cannot end.  Quite the contrary; it is a life which in some ways death actually begins.  And as our resurrection is found solely in Christ, so also is our eternal life:  "God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son" (1 John 5: 11).

         Careful contemplation of the creed's teaching on this point is immensely practical and provides a much-needed spiritual therapy.  By contemplating the conditions of perfect beatitude that await us and the joy and satisfaction that arise from being precisely what our all-wise Creator intended us to be, we learn more effectively how to wean ourselves from the unprofitable attachments our fallen hearts too quickly make to evil.  Only in the face of infinite joy and godly bliss do we learn not to toy with the meager and shallow pleasures of sin, which can only hurt us.

         Eternal life is the final chapter of the world's great saga, a saga written by the hand of God, the Lord of History.  That chapter brings the end of sorrow, pain, evil and doubt.  Eternal life is God's final word to us -- not death, not annihilation, but life -- life eternal.  That is the creed's final word to us as well.  Where the creed leaves off, the life to come is just beginning.  Epilogue is but prologue after all.

“The resurrection of the body; and life everlasting." (part 1)

         "The sages have a hundred maps to give

         That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,

         They rattle reason out through many a sieve

         That stores the sand and lets the gold go free.

         And all these things are less than dust to me

         Because my name is Lazarus and I live."

                  G. K. Chesterton, "The Convert"

         "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." 

          Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

         If sin brings death and destruction, the forgiveness of sins brings life and hope, the result of which the creed brings before us in its twin affirmations concerning the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.  These two affirmations are the creed's last words to us, its parting declaration.  They are words of unparalleled hope and confidence:  If sin embraces the whole person and consigns the whole person to death, the forgiveness of sins and the blessedness to which it leads are equally all-embracing.  The victory to which the creed here refers is total.

         This is the second time the creed has struck the note of resurrection, the first being its reference to the resurrection of Jesus.  Those two grand events, his resurrection and ours, are intimately connected.  Christ is the head or pioneer of our race.  He is the first fruits of those who are raised from the dead (1 Cor. 15: 23).  The Spirit Who raised Him shall raise us (Rom. 8: 11).  We follow on to where Christ has gone before us, and He has gone to the grave and beyond.  Though He was dead, yet He lives.  So shall we, for what is true of Him shall be true of the race over which He is head. 

         From Christ's defeat of death we learn that earthly life is but a preface to the life to come.  This life is not all there is and must not be treated as if it were.  The grave that awaits us is a door not a wall, a beginning not merely an end.  The life to come, as the creed implies in its final words, is the end of the reign of death and of dying.  The life to come is the reign of life and glory, which makes it the death of death.  The One Who gave us life will give us life again.  Our Creator is also our Re-creator.

         As are so many of its affirmations, this part of the creed arose in response to the Gnostic heresy, which, because it contended that all matter was inherently evil, denied the resurrection of the body, which obviously is matter.  The Gnostic idea of redemption was to escape the confines and pollution of flesh altogether, not to grant it continued existence or redemption.  By contrast, the Christian doctrine of resurrection means not deliverance from the body but deliverance of the body.  Body and soul are not opposed; they are not enemies.  Their conjunction was pronounced good by God Himself at the creation, and He has not changed his mind, though the Gnostics might have wished otherwise.

         The Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection also stands over against both the ancient Greek belief in the immortality of the soul and the eastern notion of reincarnation, ideas that have some distant similarity to the Christian doctrine of resurrection, but that are by no means the same.  Immortality of the soul implies that our survival of death happens automatically or naturally, as if something in us were immortal of its own accord, or by its own power, rather than by the power and love of God, Who raises us from the dead.  If the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body really were the same as the Greek notion of the immortality of the soul, then the apostle Paul would not have been mocked by the Athenians for preaching it (Acts 17: 32).  By the same token, we must not confuse resurrection with reincarnation.  Reincarnation implies that we survive death only to die again, over and over.  Reincarnation is not the defeat of death, as is Christian resurrection, but rather its repeated victory over us.  Resurrection is the defeat of death, both body and soul, by Christ.  The death we must die is real, but no more so than the resurrection that overturns it, a resurrection found only in Jesus Christ, Who is the resurrection and the life (John 11: 25).

         The resurrection of the body is but a part of the restoration and renewal of all things, a part of Christ's work to create a new Heaven and a new earth, not out of nothing as He did at the world's beginning, but out of the only creation that is or ever shall be.  Just as the new Heaven and the new earth are made from those that now are, the resurrected body flowers from the one we lay in the grave, though that fact must not be crudely understood or misinterpreted, as if the phrase "resurrection of the body" meant something like the reassembling of the particular set of molecules that one's body happened to possess at one specific point in time, which cannot be:

         "Matter which appertains to one body at one time appertains to another body at another.  The notion of particle being joined to particle, so as to re-form a certain body, involves an impossibility, because that same particle may have belonged to a thousand different bodies, and may be claimed by one as rightfully as by another.  In fact, it is only necessary to bring the notion into contact with what we certainly know concerning material particles to break down and annihilate it." (Goodwin, The Foundations of the Creed 384)

Or, as George Hedley puts it, "the single datum of cannibalism absolutely refutes any notion that all human bodies can be raised again in their former constituencies of particular proteins" (The Symbol of the Faith 142).  Monseigneur Ronald Knox makes the same point more comically by bringing before us the bizarre sight of a cannibal and his victim engaged in heated debate over whether the physical matter in the victim's big toe belonged to him or to the stomach that digested it.

         But let us not miss the point by moving too far in the opposite direction.  Between the physical body we lay in the grave and the resurrected body that shall be ours forever there indeed exists "a physical continuity; but it is a continuity of life and not of simple reconstruction" (Westcott, The Historic Faith 138).  In other words, the physical bodies we now have and the resurrected bodies we shall inherit are materially continuous but not materially identical.  Rather, much as a seed is planted in the ground and by its decay gives rise to a stalk of corn or a mighty oak, the physical body that we lay in the grave decays and gives rise to a spiritual body, one no longer subject to death and weakness, one well suited to its purpose as the vehicle of eternal life.  In Paul's words, "What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.  It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory.  It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.  It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body" (1 Cor. 15: 42-44).  Though it springs from the physical body that now is, we must not think of the spiritual body in precisely the same terms, as if it were flesh and blood as we now know them.  As Paul also says, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 15: 50), and to that kingdom, and to the day of resurrection and judgment that precedes it, we all are hastening, both body and soul.

         Because they make it possible for us to see, hear, speak, touch and smell, our bodies make it possible for us to have relationships.  Spirit expresses itself by matter.  Our bodies allow us to exist at a particular place, to have a context, to come into contact with the universe around us and with those beings who inhabit it.  Our bodies are our means of self-expression.  To be without any means of gathering information from the world around us, or of injecting information into it, to be unable to respond to our world or to help shape it, is to be less than a person, is to be no different from those who are dead.  Bodies make possible our interaction with our universe.  To say that we are to have bodies in the resurrected life means that we are to be then what we are now -- real persons capable of real life.  We shall not be bodiless wraiths or phantoms, not ephemeral, ethereal, or unsubstantial.  We shall be genuine, solid, authentic human beings.  Our complete and genuine identity shall be preserved.  We shall be fully human, more human even than now we are.  This affirmation of the creed means that we lose nothing at death but our sin and its attendant hindrances.  Our bodies are not a tomb, they are the implements of eternal life:

                  "Our ultimate expectation is that our entire personality will conquer death, and thereby attain to a life fuller and richer than any which we can lead or even picture here.  This is what we mean when we speak of the Resurrection of the body.  Experience shows that the phrase is liable to crude and childish misinterpretation.  But it would be difficult (as with the Ascension) to find a substitute sufficiently terse to be included in a creed, and sufficiently concrete to convey any meaning whatever to the great majority of people."  (Malden, Christian Belief 82).

In other words, we anticipate the resurrection of the whole person, an entire human being, not simply a disembodied soul and not simply the physical body as it now is.  Had the creed meant to suggest only the resurrection of the physical body, it perhaps would have said "corporis resurrectionem" rather than "carnis resurrectionem."  By saying what it does, it teaches that our resurrection entails, but is not limited to, the body we now possess.  Nor is the resurrection we anticipate like that of Lazarus, who was raised only to die again.  Having died once, we shall put death forever behind us.

The Right Word (1)

The foolish debt deal to which Congress recently committed us is said by liberals to give the rich 60 billion dollars.  Not so.

Declining to take what is not yours in the first place is not the same as giving.  Decling to confiscate someone else's money is not the same as a subsidy.  Nor is it a government expense, as if not stealing from a bank were an expense for bank robbers. 

We are not "giving" the rich 60 billion dollars.  It's already theirs.  We decline to take it from them because that's a good way to make room for more private investment and job creation:  Let those with money invest it rather than using the government to take it. 

Only those with the money to do so can start new businesses and create new jobs.  Taking away billions and billions of their dollars diminishes their capacity to do so and helps to keep job creation low.

In other words, what liberals call a gift to the rich is really a gift to the unemployed.

Sloppy language makes sloppy thought possible.

"Iran is not Iceland, Ron"

I'm not saying that Iran will nuke Israel when it gets the chance.  Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is saying it, and I believe him.

When a man says he wants to start a second holocaust, this time on a larger scale and with nuclear weapons, which he then sets about to acquire, reasonable people take him seriously and act accordingly.  Taking him seriously and acting accordingly does not mean you wait for him to make his maximally-deadly move.  It means you take his move away from him before he makes it, or else your nation is wiped away forever.

Some nations cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons. Given its current militant leadership, Iran is one of them.  Either Iran's friends must stop Iran, or else Iran's enemies must do it.  Iran’s friends can accomplish this goal either by convincing the Iranian leadership to change its collective mind, or else by convincing the Iranian people to change their leadership.  Perhaps I have missed it, but to date I have seen no indication that Iran's friends will or can talk Iran out of its destructive nuclear intentions.  Maybe some of the more sensible powers that be in Iran can do it, or maybe they can effect a regime change.  I don’t know.  But if none of these things work, the options reduce to one:  Israel must take action.

Israel has been trying to avert conflict with Iran in many ways short of nuclear confrontation.  For that, it is to be commended.  For example, I do not think it was an accident that several of the Russian experts who aided Iran’s nuclear dreams died in a recent plane crash.  The Tupalev on which they died is a notoriously unsafe airplane.  I’d be willing to call their joint demise just terrible bad luck were it not that such "accidents" have befallen others who helped Iran in this project.  I also think that the recent cyber-crippling of Iran's nuclear program was a prudent effort, one made possible by help from Germany and the US.

Other lower level responses are still possible, though none have succeeded to date.  If none ever succeeds, then higher level responses are all that’s left.  Iran knows this.  Israel knows this.

Yet, despite this knowledge and despite the opposition Iran has met on these lower, sub-nuclear, levels, it persists in its deadly project.

If Iran persists in its purpose to obliterate Israel, it must beware the dire consequences, which are certain to follow.  No nation, Israel included, can sit patiently and passively by, awaiting its doom.  It must react.  In other words, Iran's future is up to Iran.  I sincerely hope it will turn away from its deadly intentions immediately.  Were it not to do so, the consequences are simply horrific.

Here’s what I mean:

Because the current Iranian leadership seems unable to resist the temptation to nuke Israel once it is able to do so, I cannot resist the conclusion that the Middle East will be set alight with the fires of nuclear weaponry whether Israel strikes first or not.  I hate that prospect -- I simply hate it -- but absent an Iranian about-face, it will happen.  Apparently the only thing separating us from this awful scenario is just the time it still takes Israel’s enemies to develop whatever capacity they deem necessary for this destructive action to be effective.  I have no confidence whatever in Iran’s capacity for self-restraint on this point, not when its leadership tells the world plainly, publically, and repeatedly about its intention to wipe Israel off the map.

Given Ahmadinejad’s implacability, and given that every lower level attempt to foil Iran’s destructive intentions have failed, this awful conclusion seems unavoidable:  Whatever weapon is not destroyed by Israel will be used against Israel, either before Israel acts or after.  Given Ahmadinejad’s implacability, Israel’s options are now reduced to two:  (1) either take out the Iranian leadership, or (2) pick the sequence of nuclear engagement:  first strike or second.  Unless the Iranian leadership changes radically, strikes there will be.  Ahmadinejad has told us so.  Israel, therefore, must destroy as much nuclear capability as possible before any enemy first use.  It must do so in a way that forestalls any nuclear response.  If it fails to do so, Israel will no longer exist.  For Israel, that prospect is utterly unacceptable.  For the Iranian leadership, it is a dream come true.  At least that’s what they say, both in word and action.

In a regional nuclear confrontation, you don’t want to throw the second punch.  You want to throw the first, and to make sure no second punch ever follows.  That first punch must be simply devastating -- so devastating that any effective second punch becomes impossible.  If you don’t make an effective second punch impossible, you have not struck hard enough, and you have not protected your nation.  The consequence of that failure are indescribable.

Like Israel, Ahmadinejad has options, too:  Either (1) drop the plan to nuke Israel into obliteration, or (2) face that same prospect yourself.

Along with billions of other concerned persons, I do not want that fate for either Israel or Iran. 

But if the recent past is any indication of the near future, it looks like no one is going to talk Israel's enemies out of their nuclear weapons, or out of their use against Israel.  Therefore, either the Iranian leadership must change or else their weapons must be forcibly taken away.  If not, those weapons will be used.  The only weapons not used will be those that are destroyed.

It does not please me to speculate about what I take to be this dire and horrific eventuality.  I deplore it.  But in my view, the future of the Middle East is extremely bleak.  Given Iran’s deadly intention and Israel’s desire to survive, the Middle East has a nuclear future.

Who knows if it can be limited to the Middle East?

Israel's Nuclear Future . . . . and Ours?

I'm not saying that Iran will nuke Israel when it gets the chance.  Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is saying it, and I believe him.

When a man says he wants to start a second holocaust, this time on a larger scale and with nuclear weapons, which he then sets about to acquire, reasonable people take him seriously and act accordingly.  Taking him seriously and acting accordingly does not mean you wait for him to make his maximally-deadly move.  It means you take his move away from him before he makes it, or else your nation is wiped away forever.

Some nations cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons. Given its current militant leadership, Iran is one of them.  Either Iran's friends must stop Iran, or else Iran's enemies must do it.  Iran’s friends can accomplish this goal either by convincing the Iranian leadership to change its collective mind, or else by convincing the Iranian people to change their leadership.  Perhaps I have missed it, but to date I have seen no indication that Iran's friends will or can talk Iran out of its destructive nuclear intentions.  Maybe some of the more sensible powers that be in Iran can do it, or maybe they can effect a regime change.  I don’t know.  But if none of these things work, the options reduce to one:  Israel must take action.

Israel has been trying to avert conflict with Iran in many ways short of nuclear confrontation.  For that, it is to be commended.  For example, I do not think it was an accident that several of the Russian experts who aided Iran’s nuclear dreams died in a recent plane crash.  The Tupalev on which they died is a notoriously unsafe airplane.  I’d be willing to call their joint demise just terrible bad luck were it not that such "accidents" have befallen others who helped Iran in this project.  I also think that the recent cyber-crippling of Iran's nuclear program was a prudent effort, one made possible by help from Germany and the US.

Other lower level responses are still possible, though none have succeeded to date.  If none ever succeeds, then higher level responses are all that’s left.  Iran knows this.  Israel knows this.

Yet, despite this knowledge and despite the opposition Iran has met on these lower, sub-nuclear, levels, it persists in its deadly project.

If Iran persists in its purpose to obliterate Israel, it must beware the dire consequences, which are certain to follow.  No nation, Israel included, can sit patiently and passively by, awaiting its doom.  It must react.  In other words, Iran's future is up to Iran.  I sincerely hope it will turn away from its deadly intentions immediately.  Were it not to do so, the consequences are simply horrific.

Here’s what I mean:

Because the current Iranian leadership seems unable to resist the temptation to nuke Israel once it is able to do so, I cannot resist the conclusion that the Middle East will be set alight with the fires of nuclear weaponry whether Israel strikes first or not.  I hate that prospect -- I simply hate it -- but absent an Iranian about-face, it will happen.  Apparently the only thing separating us from this awful scenario is just the time it still takes Israel’s enemies to develop whatever capacity they deem necessary for this destructive action to be effective.  I have no confidence whatever in Iran’s capacity for self-restraint on this point, not when its leadership tells the world plainly, publically, and repeatedly about its intention to wipe Israel off the map.

Given Ahmadinejad’s implacability, and given that every lower level attempt to foil Iran’s destructive intentions have failed, this awful conclusion seems unavoidable:  Whatever weapon is not destroyed by Israel will be used against Israel, either before Israel acts or after.  Given Ahmadinejad’s implacability, Israel’s options are now reduced to two:  (1) either take out the Iranian leadership, or (2) pick the sequence of nuclear engagement:  first strike or second.  Unless the Iranian leadership changes radically, strikes there will be.  Ahmadinejad has told us so.  Israel, therefore, must destroy as much nuclear capability as possible before any enemy first use.  It must do so in a way that forestalls any nuclear response.  If it fails to do so, Israel will no longer exist.  For Israel, that prospect is utterly unacceptable.  For the Iranian leadership, it is a dream come true.  At least that’s what they say, both in word and action.

In a regional nuclear confrontation, you don’t want to throw the second punch.  You want to throw the first, and to make sure no second punch ever follows.  That first punch must be simply devastating -- so devastating that any effective second punch becomes impossible.  If you don’t make an effective second punch impossible, you have not struck hard enough, and you have not protected your nation.  The consequence of that failure are indescribable.

Like Israel, Ahmadinejad has options, too:  Either (1) drop the plan to nuke Israel into obliteration, or (2) face that same prospect yourself.

Along with billions of other concerned persons, I do not want that fate for either Israel or Iran. 

But if the recent past is any indication of the near future, it looks like no one is going to talk Israel's enemies out of their nuclear weapons, or out of their use against Israel.  Therefore, either the Iranian leadership must change or else their weapons must be forcibly taken away.  If not, those weapons will be used.  The only weapons not used will be those that are destroyed.

It does not please me to speculate about what I take to be this dire and horrific eventuality.  I deplore it.  But in my view, the future of the Middle East is extremely bleak.  Given Iran’s deadly intention and Israel’s desire to survive, the Middle East has a nuclear future.

Who knows if it can be limited to the Middle East?

Dame Rose Macaulay on Mobs (23 February, 1952)

“Do you feel that people, particularly in crowds, are getting rather frightening?  Or perhaps they always were.  Mob hysteria seems to attack them so often and so violently, and they . . . climb onto the bonnets of their car, shriek like Maenads, and block the traffic completely, so that police have to clear a way for the wretched victims. . . I suppose this mass hysteria has always been with us; it crops up all through history, and has taken many forms.  The French revolution mobs shouting for the guillotine; the Jews shouting “Crucify Him!”; the wild religious revivalists of the Middle ages; the Jacquerie; the anti-Jewish pogrom crowds yelling against Jews; to-day football [i.e., soccer] crowds trampling one another to death at the gates; and all those terrible film fans screaming.

I suppose there is a deep potential excitement in human nature, like a wild animal, and being surrounded by a crowd unleashes it, and out it leaps, feeding on the excitement of its neighbors and growing madder and madder, till people are chased and lynched . . . Yet individually the mob are probably ordinary quite decent and kindly people.  How horrible a thing it would be to be at their mercy, when they turn into a pack of baying wolves.  O Sapientia!  What are we made of?  How can God endure us?"

Dame Rose Macaulay, a letter to Fr. J. Johnson, 23 February, 1952 

"The Forgiveness of Sins" (part 3)

This is the third and final installment of our explanation of "the forgiveness of sins," as articulated in the Apostles' Creed:

          God does not treat sin the way we do.  To forgive sin is not to ignore it or to play it down.  For God to forgive sin is to take it upon Himself, much the way creditors must pay for every outstanding debt owed to them but which they elect to cancel.  Thus, the cost of the bad loan is borne, though not by the borrower.

          In other words, from the creed we learn yet another thing about "God the Father almighty, maker of Heaven and earth:"  He forgives.  Our Maker is our Redeemer.  God does not excuse sin and He does not condone it.  He judges it.  The sentence He passes upon sin is a sentence He Himself has borne.  God brooks no compromise with evil.  He eradicates it root and branch, and at high cost to Himself.  He deals with it the only way a righteous God can -- judgment.  But because He loves us, this judgment He has taken upon Himself.  In the mirror of human redemption, therefore, we see two faces reflected -- God's and our own.  He is high, pure and loving; we are sinners in need of rescue.  Were God not merciful, we would be utterly undone.  Our redemption is the proof that God is love and that we are sinners, yet beloved. 

           Our forgiveness is based upon the saving work of God in Christ.  It rests upon the death of Jesus on our behalf.  It costs us nothing; it cost God everything.  The forgiveness God offers us is free, though it is not cheap.  That is, it was provided for us by Christ.  He saved us by his righteous life and atoning death.  He paid our penalty, providing for us what we, of ourselves, could never have provided.  God puts Himself in the place of the sinner.  He died so that we might live.  Mercy is free to us though not to God.  It is purchased at the price of God's Son, whose life was the ransom paid to redeem a race captive to evil.  He is the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world (John 1: 29).  The forgiveness of sins demonstrates that in the battle between love and evil, love is stronger.  Love has wrestled with sin, has engaged it in mortal combat, and won.  Once we accept this free gift of grace, however, we are to give ourselves fully to God, not in order to be redeemed, but because we are redeemed.  This is gratitude, not achievement.

           Repentance is not the same as regret or as the desire to escape punishment.  Desperately desiring to escape the punishment of sin is natural, but it is not repentance, only fear.  We are to repent of our sins, not merely to fear their consequences.  If we fear impending punishment and employ that fear as we ought, we repent of, and flee from, our sin.  Our flight from evil toward God is good, and is made possible partly by the fear instilled within us by divine judgement.  But if we permit our fear of punishment to loom so large in our minds that we see nothing else, if it prevents us from truly repenting, then the good has become enemy of the best.  For sinners, repentance is best. 

           In the New Testament, "repentance" (metanoia) means literally to have an after thought, to think again, to reassess one's actions.  Put differently, repentance is a U-turn, an about-face, a radical change of heart regarding one's sinful actions.  To wish to have God's forgiveness without this renunciation of things contrary to God, without this about-face, is impudence.  It is to play a nasty and dangerous game with the grace of God.

           To confess means, literally, to speak along with, or to agree with, someone.  To confess one's sins is to say about them what God says about them, to agree with Him that those sins are indeed evil.  To confess is to admit that you have done something wrong and to take responsibility for it.  You must own your sin.  Forgiveness depends upon the sinner being forgivable, that is, being in a condition where the remission of sins does no harm, a condition that sees sin as sin.  Were God merely to forgive sins indiscriminately, that is, without regard to the moral condition of the sinner, He would do us great injury, not great good, for He would be undermining, perhaps even obliterating, the difference between sin and virtue, for He would be treating them as if they were the same.  But this He does not do.  He requires us to confess.  If we confess our sins, the Bible says, God is faithful and just and will forgive us for our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1: 9).  But confess we must.  

           Finally, we must be forgiving if we are to be forgiven.  That is, we believe that God forgives sin; we believe that we ought to grow to be like God.  We too must be merciful.  He who would withhold forgiveness from his brother cannot expect to receive it from God, as Jesus Himself taught (Matt. 5: 7; 6: 14-15).  The possibility of forgiveness goes hand-in-hand with the desire, indeed the responsibility, to be forgiving.  Only the forgiving can be forgiven, for only they really believe in forgiveness.  To paraphrase something said centuries ago by the English poet George Herbert, he that cannot forgive others destroys the very bridge over which he himself must pass if he is ever to reach Heaven.

          But here is good news:  If you repent, if you confess and forgive, God will forgive you.  He will pardon your offenses and never call them to mind again (Jer. 31: 34).  Or, to return to the words of William Merrill, "If you want with all your heart to be rid of sin, and to live in the beauty of holiness, I declare to you that nothing can keep you from that great joy and success of overcoming; for God is merciful and gracious, long-suffering and tender" (Merrill, The Common Creed of Christians 138).

The Politics of Human Nature

            We are not born civilized. 

            We acquire civility, if at all, only later.  The truest and best way to acquire civility is under the guidance of a wise moral order, and under the nurture of a well-functioning traditional family.  While other paths to civility are possible and sometimes work, the happy combination of family and wise moral authority is the most dependable way to gain access to the hard-won wisdom of our ancestors, wisdom gained slowly and painfully over the centuries in the crucible of real life and in the light of revelation.

            In other words, because we human beings are not born civilized, we are always only one generation from barbarism. We must domesticate each new generation, just as we were domesticated in our turn.  To convert the brutes we all are born into the civilized persons we ought to be requires nothing less than the wisdom of God.  Barbarism is not behind us; it is within us, and it is persistent.  Our demons die hard, if at all.  If they are to die, God must kill them.  Government cannot.  The deepest and most profound human ills have no political solution.  To think and act as if they do is foolish.  How much time, effort, and treasure we have wasted trying to do by means of government what can never be done is far, quite far, beyond calculation.

            Faced with the perennial challenge of civilizing the next generation, and fully aware that in order to civilize it they must begin with God, Christian conservatives turn first to revelation, to the works and words God Himself, works and words graciously bestowed upon this fallen and twisted world, a world utterly lost and never to be found without them.  Thus, while Christian conservatives might value the good, the true, and the beautiful, they know that without God we can never find them or preserve them.  Indeed, without God we could not even convincingly define them.  While Christian conservatives set about conserving things like justice, the traditional family, and even civilization itself -- things always at risk and under siege -- they know that the best defense of them is the revelation of God, by which, and only by which, can things be seen and done aright.  I am not saying that we cannot begin without God.  I am saying that we cannot begin well without God.