"The Forgiveness of Sins" (part 2)

          Near the beginning of his famous Confessions, St. Augustine said to God, "You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You."

           St. Augustine said so because he learned from personal experience and with great difficulty that no matter where one looked, no matter how hard one tried, nothing in this world can satisfy the human heart except the God Who made it -- not money, not fame, not power, not privilege, not excitement and not prestige.  Our chief problem seems to be that we have not yet learned what Augustine knew centuries ago.  We insist on looking for love and joy in all the wrong places, in all places but the one where they can actually be found, namely in God.  That failure is sin.  We have not yet learned what Blaise Pascal knew -- there is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart, though we try foolishly to fill it with everything but God, always to our disappointment and injury.

         Sin, we fail to realize, results in the fragmenting of our hearts and minds.  The one who breaks the law is broken.  You do not break the immutable law of righteousness that governs the universe, you break yourself against it.  As Plato understood, because of the destructive effects of our own wickedness upon us, the horses that draw our heart's chariot now pull in different directions.  We are, so to speak, drawn and quartered by our own sin, though that has not persuaded us to pursue it with any less ardor or glee.  Sin is an employer for whom we all work and by whom we all get paid.  The payment we receive for our sin is death (Gen. 2: 15-17, Rom. 6: 23).  In other words, your sin has issued a death warrant bearing your name.  That warrant will be served.

         Nevertheless, we take sin lightly, as if it were unimportant, as if it would not eat alive both we ourselves and all those we love.  We even maintain our own pet sins, as if evil could be safely or routinely domesticated.  But to see sin as it really is, to see it in all its horrific ugliness, we need to see it as God sees it.  To do so we need to look carefully at the cross of Christ, at the death of the One Who made us and redeemed us.

         Imagine, if you will, that you are the proud and happy parent of a beautiful infant, whom you love.  Imagine further that one morning you entered the child's room only to find it lying in its crib, cold, motionless and blue, a snake curled up upon the child's small dead chest.  How much would you hate that snake?  That's how much we ought to hate sin, and that's a faint hint of how much our Heavenly Father hates sin, which cost Him the life of his only Son.  The passion of Jesus Christ expresses with eloquent pathos what God thinks of sin.  So does Hell.  The crucifixion of his only Son and the punishment that awaits the unrepentant are proof that God takes sin seriously.  They are evidence of what one theologian called the uncompromising severity of sin.  Still, in our self-deluding foolishness, we imagine that sin can be winked at, that it can be passed off as inconsequential or unimportant.  We tell ourselves that one or another particular sin is no longer of consequence because it was committed long ago, as if the mere passing of time were the cure for wickedness.  Not clocks ticking but Christ dying atones for sin.  That atonement can be appropriated only by faith, not by waiting.

          The more you sin, the more likely you are not to feel its sting, and the more likely you are to become oblivious to its approach.  Thomas Carlyle was right:  The best security against sin is to be shocked by its presence.  In that light, we leave ourselves utterly unprotected.  If you cannot feel sin's approach, you cannot arm yourself or ready yourself against it.  If you no longer feel pangs of conscience once you commit sin, you strip yourself of the remorse that makes you determined not to repeat your mistakes.  Without that determination, you sin all the more.  Thus, because it is morally debilitating, sin breeds sin.  The ancient Jewish Talmud puts it like this:  Commit a sin twice and it will no longer seem to you a moral crime. 

          Because He is completely pure, and because not to punish sin is to condone it, God cannot and will not say of our sin that He shall simply let bygones be bygones.  He does not shrug his shoulders and sigh to Himself about how boys will be boys.  He either punishes sin or forgives it.  There is no other way.  As a result, each of us stands in desperate need of mercy and grace.  We stand in need of the forgiveness of sins.  In the New Testament, to forgive sins means to cover them, to send them away, to blot them out.  Forgiveness entails both the absolute putting away of sin and the reinstatement of the sinner.  In the words of Wolfhart Pannenberg, "Forgiveness of sins means liberation from everything which divides us from God and therefore from a fulfilled and free life" (Pannenberg, The Apostles' Creed, p. 160).  Here we see why Christianity is a religion of joy:  It restores sinners to the filial relationship they ought to have had with God.

         The cure for sin is not moral reform, as important as that might be, but forgiveness, mercy, grace.  Forgiveness means that Christ has taken our place, that He has stood in our stead and received the punishment we deserved.  If we attach ourselves to Him by faith, his death in our place permits us to go free.  Our punishment has been paid.  But rather than turning to Christ in faith, too many people seek to deal with sin in a way that does not deal with it at all.  They seek to assuage their feelings of guilt but do nothing actually to rid themselves of the sin that spawns it.  They seem not to realize that most people feel guilty because they are.  All too often, such persons want badly to alleviate the symptoms of their disease but not the disease itself, as if the cancer in our souls would miraculously get better if only we ignored it, as if not going to the doctor were a form of therapy.  But sin is a real wickedness; it requires a real remedy.  That remedy comes only from the great Physician of our souls.  That remedy is the grace of God in the death of Christ.  Foolishly, however, rather than availing ourselves of the only antidote to evil, we flock to the secular messiahs of our age, the psychologists and psychiatrists who can lighten the feelings of guilt but not the guilt itself.  They drug the conscience instead of quickening it.  They cover sin instead of healing it.

          We seem not to realize that the pains of sin, our pangs of conscience, are a great grace.  We flee from them; we seek to rid ourselves of them by any imaginary means that presents itself rather than the only way possible.  To rid ourselves improperly of the pangs of conscience is to infect ourselves with a deadly disease without symptoms.  If you have no symptoms, you fail to realize you are sick.  If you fail to realize your sickness, you do not go to the doctor.  If you do not go to the doctor, you receive no medicine.  Without medicine, you die.

"Balanced and Compromised"

           Suppose you were sick and needed a doctor desperately.

Suppose your doctor prescribed a mixture of real curatives and of deadly poison, say penicillin and curare.

Suppose your doctor defended this approach to medicine as both “balanced” and a suitable medical “compromise.”

From such a deadly and incompetent doctor, you doubtless would flee for your life.  One does not “balance” penicillin with curare.  If you do, nothing is “compromised” but your survival. 

As hideous, bizarre, or unimaginable as that medical scenario seems, its political equivalent works itself out around us every day.  I am sorry to say that your doctor’s political cousins live and work in Washington, where they have been for decades.  For anything that ails us, whether it has a political cure or not, they prescribe poison and defend doing so as a “balanced” approach and a suitable “compromise.”  They want to “balance” the curative of deficit reduction with the double curare of higher taxes and greater spending.

It will never do; it never has.

It makes as much sense as hiring a football coach who calls a lot of plays designed to lose ground because he wants a “balanced” offense and wants to “compromise” with the other side.  You wouldn’t accept that nonsense from your football program.  Don’t accept it from your government.

If you refuse to accept nonsense from your government, those who work in that government will denigrate you publically and then banish you to Middle Earth, as if you, and not they, were the denizens of fiction, fable, and myth.

It’s as if a whole nation has gone mad with Rodney Kingism:  “Why can’t we all just get along?”

  We can’t all just get along because truth matters; because wisdom is irreplaceable; and because stupidity has consequences.

All but the most economically benighted among us (i.e., Harvard trained) understand that raising taxes in a time of severe economic hardship is a fool’s prescription.  It’s poison.  It kills.  It sucks away venture capital so that new businesses are not begun and old businesses are not expanded.  It creates a climate of uncertainty and economic oppression such that prudent investors either hold their money in reserve or else send it overseas, where policies are more sensible and predictable, where investment can actually pay off, and where the payoff won’t be confiscated to fund even more “balanced” poisoning.

In other words, sucking blood from the successful by raising their taxes (1) drives up unemployment to ever higher and higher levels; (2) higher unemployment levels create more poor; whom our political witch doctors (3) try to help by sucking even more blood from the successful, which (4) keeps the poor coming back to the witch doctors again and again, generation after generation, which (5) keeps the witch doctors in business and in power.

The political witch doctors and economic blood letters in charge of the federal budget, addicted as they are to their own medicine, cannot help themselves.  They cannot stop.  They habitually prescribe economic poison -- higher taxes -- and they relentlessly apply their tax code leeches to the veins of the successful.  It’s the only prescription they know:  Suck blood from some; turn it into an addictive; give that addictive to others; and keep them coming back for more.

In other words, imagine your horrid fate if your pusher were your doctor.

Of course, not all the political quacks and charlatans operate out of Washington.  We should be so lucky.  But we are not.  The witch doctors, the quacks, and the charlatans live and work here too.  We’ve been going to them for more than 60 years in a row, and they have tried to balance every proposed curative with old poison.  The results are everywhere to be seen.

Call your doctor “Democrat,” and call yourself “Detroit.”

The Flying Wallendas were a balancing act, too.  You might recall what happened to them -- in Detroit.

"Balanced and Compromised"

           Suppose you were sick and needed a doctor desperately.

Suppose your doctor prescribed a mixture of real curatives and of deadly poison, say penicillin and curare.

Suppose your doctor defended this approach to medicine as both “balanced” and a suitable medical “compromise.”

From such a deadly and incompetent doctor, you doubtless would flee for your life.  One does not “balance” penicillin with curare.  If you do, nothing is “compromised” but your survival. 

As hideous, bizarre, or unimaginable as that medical scenario seems, its political equivalent works itself out around us every day.  I am sorry to say that this doctor’s political cousins live and work in Washington, where they have been for decades.  For anything that ails us, whether it has a political cure or not (and most human problems do not), they prescribe poison and defend doing so as a “balanced” approach and a suitable “compromise.”  They want to “balance” the curative of deficit reduction with the double curare of higher taxes and greater spending.

It will never do; it never has.

It makes as much sense as hiring a football coach who calls a lot of plays designed to lose ground because he wants a “balanced” offense and wants to “compromise” with the other side.  You wouldn’t accept that nonsense from your football program.  Don’t accept it from your government.

But if you refuse to accept nonsense from your government, those who work in that government will denigrate you publicly and then banish you to Middle Earth, as if you, and not they, were the devotees of fiction, fable, and myth.

It’s as if a whole nation has gone mad with Rodney Kingism:  “Why can’t we all just get along?”
We can’t all just get along because truth matters; because wisdom is irreplaceable; and because stupidity has consequences.

All but the most conceptually benighted among us (i.e., Harvard trained) understand that raising taxes in a time of severe economic hardship is a fool’s prescription.  It’s poison.  It kills.  It sucks away venture capital so that new businesses are not begun and old businesses are not expanded.  It creates a climate of uncertainty and economic oppression such that prudent investors either hold their money in reserve or else send it overseas, where policies are more sensible and predictable, where investment can actually pay off, and where the payoff won’t be confiscated to fund even more “balanced” poisoning.

In other words, sucking blood from the successful by raising their taxes (1) drives up unemployment to ever higher and higher levels; (2) higher unemployment levels create more poor; whom our political witch doctors (3) try to help by sucking even more blood from the successful, which (4) keeps the poor coming back to the witch doctors again and again, generation after generation, which (5) keeps the witch doctors in business and in power.

The political witch doctors and economic blood letters in charge of the federal budget, addicted as they are to their own medicine, cannot help themselves.  They cannot stop.  They habitually prescribe economic poison -- higher taxes -- and they relentlessly apply their tax code leeches to the veins of the successful.  It’s the only prescription they know:  Suck blood from some; turn it into an addictive; give that addictive to others; and keep them coming back for more.

In other words, imagine your horrid fate if your pusher were your doctor.

Of course, not all the political quacks and charlatans operate out of Washington.  We should be so lucky.  But we are not.  The witch doctors, the quacks, and the charlatans live and work here too.  We’ve been going to them for more than 60 years in a row, and they have tried to "balance" every proposed curative with old poison.  The results are everywhere to be seen.

Call your doctor “Democrat,” and call yourself “Detroit.”

The Flying Wallendas were a "balancing" act, too.  You might recall what happened to them -- in Detroit.

"The Injustice of Affirmative Action"

If I hire professors for their race, their gender or their ethnic background, and not for their demonstrably superior professional and personal excellence, I devalue my students' tuition dollar.  That I must never do.  To hire professors on a basis other than demonstrable professional excellence is greatly to abuse the students, parents and taxpayers whose money helps pay academic salaries.  To endorse or to practice this financial abuse no academic institution ought ever to consent.

For me knowingly to hire less than the best professors available at the time of hiring and to charge students full tuition to sit under that professor’s tutelage is like the pharmacist who sells his customers an inferior medicine while charging them top-of-the-line prices, or like charging them for 60 pills and delivering only 48.   

I do not want professors who are merely qualified, or merely competent.  I want the very best professors available.  Excellent teachers are identified by their intellectual mastery and pedagogical brilliance, not by genitalia, not by surname, and not by pigmentation.  To provide students with anything less than or other than the very best teacher money can buy is simply to injure the very persons our colleges and universities seek to serve, and for whom they primarily exist -- the students. 

         But affirmative action also deals unjustly with prospective faculty members, not only with students.  Affirmative action is unjust to prospective faculty members because it punishes them for sins and crimes not their own.  It makes them pay for racial bigotry and discrimination they neither perpetrated nor condoned, indeed that their fathers, their mothers, their grandparents and their great-grandparents neither perpetrated nor condoned.  Yet some prospective faculty members are made to pay for these egregious sins and crimes solely because they were born to the wrong group, solely because they are white, or male, or both, which is bigotry, pure and simple.  Perhaps this bigotry is well-intentioned, and perhaps it is legal as well.  But it is not moral.  Justice is getting what you deserve, not being punished for the racial crimes of the distant ancestors of persons you never met. 

         For current women faculty members to insist that women be hired to fill an academy position for which they are not the very best qualified candidate is to do injury to women, namely to the women who are the wives and daughters of the man denied the job he was best qualified to have, indeed would have had, were he not male.  Thus, all the years of sacrifice, hard work, and poverty that those female spouses invested and endured -- the sacrifice, hard work, and poverty that characterize the lives of most graduate students -- get tossed lightly and cruelly aside, solely because Daddy is Daddy, not Mommy.

         To put a different point on it, although slavery was legal, it was never good, never right.  Likewise, although state-approved set asides (and the bigotry they inescapably entail) are now legal, they are not moral.  They are immoral regardless of the intention behind them, immoral regardless of the identity or ancestry of either the intended benefactor or of the intended victim, and immoral regardless of such actions’ legal status.  One’s bigotry is not made moral simply because it has either what the bigot believes is a good intention or else a legal sanction.  Good intentions and legality do not mend the matter at all.  Affirmative action is really bigotry under a more palatable name.  Beware of every euphemism. 

         Affirmative action is immoral in part because it uncritically assumes that ends justify means and that two wrongs now make a right.  They do not.  Robbing banks is wrong, even if you intend to give the money to the poor.  Preferential treatment (a euphemism for bigotry) based upon race, sex, or ethnicity, is wrong, regardless of whether or not it is used for you or against you, and regardless of whether or not the purpose for which you discriminate is one you think highly desirable.  You are not entitled to be a bigot simply because others have been bigots in the past.  Sending people to the back of the bus or to the back of the employment line because they are the wrong gender or the wrong color is evil.

Jim Crow has come back to college.  This time he’s politically correct.

Vs. Affirmative Action

Because as an academic I am regularly and predictably involved in the recommending, hiring, promoting and tenuring of other faculty members, and because as an academic I also play an active role in the recruitment and admission of prospective students, I cannot avoid the issue of affirmative action, by which I mean the selection or rejection of faculty members or students on the basis of race, gender, or ethnicity, for whatever good or bad purpose it might be imposed.  Furthermore, because as an academic I am honor-bound to conduct all my professional duties in the highest and most effective manner possible and to treat all persons justly, I reject affirmative action as an institutional hiring or admission policy.

I reject affirmative action because it is unjust both to students and to prospective faculty members.  As an academic, I must never steal value from my students' tuition dollar, a theft that inevitably results if I help place before them anyone other than the very best professors available.  The very best professors available are not those whose race, gender, or ethnic background most closely match those of the student body.  The very best professors available are those who, better than their academic competitors, master their respective disciplines, who communicate that mastery effectively to students in the classroom, and who embody the distinguishing marks of professionalism and humanity both inside the classroom and out, marks such as honesty, accuracy, geniality, determination, humor, courage, compassion, virtue and excellence.  These traits of professional character and expertise are the marks not of any particular race, gender, or ethnic group, but of our common, human moral and intellectual capacity.  They must be acquired and embodied by professors regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or sexual preference, and they must be learned by students on that same universal basis.  All professors ought to exhibit these virtues and habits of mind; all students ought to acquire them.  In so far as they are able to acquire them but do not, professors and students fail as human beings -- not simply as blacks, whites, browns, or yellows; not merely as males or females; and not merely as young or old, ancient or modern, Eastern or Western.  These virtues are human virtues; they are not gender-, race- or nation-based.  They can be learned by persons of all sorts, from persons of all sorts, in conditions of all sorts.  

         Put differently, young white males can learn the various academic disciplines -- and the personal virtues and habits of mind needed to acquire those disciplines -- from old black women; modern Asian girls can learn them from dead, white, European males; short persons can learn them from the tall, athletic persons from the bed-ridden, the old from the young, the living from the dead, the married from the unmarried, the gay from the straight, and the attentive and determined from almost anyone.  Thus, when I am called upon to help select either students or professors for admission to the academy, I look for teachability from the one and for the ability to teach from the other.  I do not look for gender, race, age, or ethnicity.  To do less or to do otherwise is to do evil.

         To make the point from a different angle, when we admit students for reasons other than their demonstrated ability and willingness to learn, we admit students more likely to fail and thus to waste their limited time, money, effort and good will in predictably fruitless endeavor.  To admit students more likely to fail does them and their sponsors (whether parents or taxpayers) significant disservice.  When we academic professionals admit underqualified students to the academy, those students are falsely persuaded that they can accomplish the plethora of difficult tasks set before them when their actual academic achievements say they cannot.  As a result, those students often spend many thousands of their own or taxpayer dollars on a mission quite likely to fail.  Our well-intentioned but misguided institutional decisions helped drawn them into this impoverishing and embarrassing debacle.  Such well-intentioned but misguided admissions decisions encourage weak students to misinvest their money -- indeed to waste their money -- usually money difficult to acquire and probably better used for other purposes.  I must never consent to such ill-usage of other persons and of their limited resources, no matter how highly I regard my political or academic intentions.