John 6, Chronology, and the Lord's Supper

         One sometimes hears that in his gospel John is not concerned with time or with timing.  That is simply false.  I often hear this assertion when I argue that the so-called “bread of life discourse” in John 6 is not about the Passover, the Last Supper, the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, which are many chapters and much time away. Consider the following items:

Day one:  1:19-28

         “on the morrow”:  1: 29-34

         “on the morrow”:  1: 35-42

         “on the morrow”:  1: 43-50

Day three:                       2: 1-11

         “after this:              2: 12

         “abode not many days”

The Passover at hand:  2: 13-22

During Passover             2: 23-3: 21

During activity of John the Baptist 4: 1ff

         “after two days”:   4: 43

         “after these things”: 5: 1-47

         “after these things”: 6: 1-21

Passover at hand:  6: 4

         “on the morrow”:    6: 22-59

         “after these things”: 7:1-13

Feast of the tabernacles:  7: 2

         “the midst of the feast” 7: 14

Feast of dedication:  10: 22-39

Passover at hand:  11: 54-57

         “six days before the Passover”:  12: 1-11

         “on the morrow”:  12: 12-36a

Before the Feast of the Passover (13:1)

         “sixth hour”: 19:14

         “preparation”: 19: 31

         first day: 20: 1-18

                  evening: 20: 19-25

         eighth day: 20: 26-29

“After these things”: 21: 1-23

*from Merrill C. Tenney,  John:  The Gospel of Belief, pp. 40, 41

        

McCain, McConnell, and Graham: Why Republicans Lose

You might recall that soon after the Republicans nominated John McCain, and he nominated Sarah Palin, he held a four-point lead over Obama.  Then, as the economy grew worse, he decided to suspend his campaign and return to Washington until the financial crisis was solved.  He never again regained his lead.

By doing what he did, McCain ignored two important facts:  (1) Nominating Palin motivated the Republican base, a base that knows that the solution to our problems is not found in Washington.  That’s where you find their origin.  (2) If McCain had said that he would maintain his campaign aggressively and stay out on the hustings with the American people -- the only place where these issues can be well-resolved -- then he might have held on to win.  The base whose support put him ahead might have kept him ahead.  But just like his Democratic opponents, when things got bad, McCain turned to government and returned to Washington.  He could never convince the American voters that Washington is the problem because he didn’t believe it himself.  He believed Washington is the solution.  He still does.  So does the Republican leadership in the Senate and the RNC.  Do not expect him or them to beat the Democrats.  They share the Democrats’ ideology and solutions.  The difference between them and the Democrats is one of degree, not of kind.   Such Republicans cannot be trusted to lead conservative Republicans to victory.  Rather, they attack and marginalize the conservatives as unsophisticated.  They act as if they themselves never noticed that there can be no victory without conservative Republicans, who did in 2010 what they themselves failed to do in 2008 and 2012.  They never yet noticed that they don’t own the past or the future.  They are losers.  They have alienated their only means to victory by failing to fight for their conservative base and its ideas.  They fight against them and do to them what the Democrats themselves would love to do:  marginalize the Tea Party.  They spend more time and public political capital fighting the Tea Party than they do marginalizing the far left from its middle-left counterparts.  Why?  Because they are closer to the middle-left than to their own conservative base.

The McCain, McConnell, Graham cult will never win any significant battle in Washington because they are ideologically and tactically incapable of winning and because they do not want Tea Party ideas to prevail.  When those ideas emerge, those ideas are attacked -- by that cult -- a cult that thinks that merely by posing and primping as adults, they will win.  It doesn’t happen.  Pretending to be adults is what kids do.  They are Washington’s latest crop of kids, not its latest platoon of Conservative warriors.  They think that it is statesmanlike to feign adulthood and to denounce the warriors.

You can tell that about them because their actions and their words say so.  Then, when the warriors lose because they were undermined by their own leadership, the leadership says, “See, we told you it wouldn’t work.”

Do recall one more thing about McCain’s campaign for the White House:  He said he didn’t understand economics.  He’s right.  He doesn’t.  It’s not the only thing on which he and his ilk are a bit dull.           

Proof:

(1) Proof that feminists care more for Democrats than for women:   Jennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Monica Lewinsky.

(2) Proof that the anti-war left cares more for Democrats than for peace:  Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, drone strikes, and (a) giving Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize before he did anything at all in office for peace and (b) giving one to Al Gore for applying junk science to environmental extremism

(3) Proof that conservatives care more for Republicans than for the Constitution: John Boehner, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Mitt Romney, the Patriot Act, NSA, picking the Social security lock box, and failure to defund Obamacare

(4) Proof that libertarians care more for straight-jacketed, lock-stepped, ideological purity than for actually making the world better: voting for Ron Paul over and over and over

Whatever Happened to the Anti-war Left?

It looks like the anti-war left vanished, but it didn’t.  It just showed its true colors.  It isn’t so much anti-war as anti-Republican.

         (1) When a Democrat wants to go into a Middle Eastern country because a tyrant gassed a few hundred of his own citizens, the anti-war left doesn’t say a word, even if the Democrat has to go it alone, and even if the Democrat intends to leave the murdering tyrant in place.  But when a Republican wants to go into a Middle Eastern country because a tyrant gassed more than 5,000 of his own citizens and 50,000 citizens of another country, and even though the Republican has built a multi-national coalition for the purpose, the anti-war left goes all peacenik on us, even though the Republican gets the tyrant removed -- from earth, and even though the Republican declined to blame it all on an internet video no one involved ever saw.  The anti-war left opposed that war even after they voted for it.  They are silent about this war, even if no one votes for it.

         (2) The WMDs that Assad is using on his own Syrian citizens are the WMDs that, according to one of Saddam Husseins’s generals, were shipped from Iraq to Syria before we invaded Iraq to find them.  If you want proof that Saddam had WMDs, then read the daily news reports from Syria -- and read the book by that Iraqi general -- Georges Sada.  The book is called called Saddam’s Secrets.  It details the time, place, number, and destination of more than 30 shipments of WMDs from Iraq to Syria, with the help of the Russians, who (not surprisingly) are now supporting the Syrians against us.

         Please do recall that when Democrats intervene in other countries, things often go desperately wrong because the Democrats do not know not what they are doing, period.  Jimmy Carter throws the shah of Iran under the bus, and the ayatollahs take over.  Obama aids in the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt and Mubarak is deposed.  In his place the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power.  At least the Egyptians themselves now realize their error and have deposed the MB and released Mubarak.  They learned their error even if Obama has not.  In Libya, while leading from the rear, Obama helped depose Muammar Gaddafi.  Then Benghazi happened and Obama blamed a video.  The man is not ready for prime time.  Statesmanship is not what they teach in community organizer school.  His world-shaking incompetence does not matter to the anti-war left.  All that matters is party affiliation.  Oh, did I mention Anastasio Samoza? 

                

         Why does the anti-war left go silent and blind?  They do it because their guy is in charge.  As Democrat Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton confessed, she'd support the war in Syria simply because it's Obama's.  For the left, everything is about partisanship, not principle.  It’s a tactic and a ploy the anti-war left learned from the feminist left.  for example, if a Democrat (A) is accused of rape, (B) is accused of indecent exposure and groping multiple times, (C) employs power advantages over an intern for sexual purposes and then (D) lies about it under oath so that he is both impeached and disbarred, and if he (E) attacks the reputation of the innocent women who accused him, the feminist left doesn’t mind at all.  It’s hear no evil; see no evil; say no evil.  But if women raise accusations against Republicans -- especially if those Republicans are black -- then the feminists go ballistic.

         In short, with the feminist left, it’s not about women; it’s about partisanship.  With the anti-war left, it’s not about war; it’s about partisanship. 

        PS:   The anti-war left is silent even though Syria threatens to attack Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan if the US strikes. We do not know what Syria's most ardent supporters, Russia and Iran, will do in that case.  One hesitates to think how bad things might get if Obama strikes.  We do know that if Israel is attacked, it will respond accordingly.  The Middle East is a tinder box and Obama's foreign policy is an open flame.

         Or, consider it from anther perspective:  If you are a football coach, you don't tell the other team what your next few plays will be.  But if you are Barack Obama, you do.  In war, that gives the other side plenty of time to hide the weapons and persons you target.  After being tipped off as to Obama's intentions, the regime in Syria has dispersed its assets and hidden them in civilian population centers where Syria knows we are not likely to strike, thus securing those assets from damage.  For that reason, our strikes, being telegraphed in advance, will serve little, if any, positive purpose.

 

Government and the Rising Cost of College

In his speech in Buffalo, President Obama declared his intention to bring down rising college tuition costs.

His speech makes plain three things:  (1) He thinks rising tuition is caused by colleges; (2) He thinks government is the solution to the problem, not one of its chief causes; and (3) He thinks he knows how much tuition all colleges and universities ought to charge and, therefore, which ones are charging too much;

He is triply wrong:

(1) As everyone who ever studied economics ought to know:  All other things being equal, when the demand for a good or a service rises, its price rises as well.  By providing grants and low interest loans to millions of students, the government has driven up the demand for college enrollment dramatically, thereby driving up the price as well.  When colleges educate more students, they must build new classrooms in which to teach them, new dormitories in which to house them, new dining halls in which to feed them, new health facilities in which to care for them, new athletic facilities in which to keep them fit and entertained, and new parking lots for their cars.

Colleges also must hire new admissions counselors to handle their applications, new campus police to keep them safe, and new maintenance crews to keep them comfortable.

They also must hire new faculty members.  Those faculty members require competitive salaries, health insurance, retirement funds, research sabbaticals, offices, parking lots, and secretarial staff.  Like the faculty, the secretarial staff requires salaries, retirement funds, insurance, vacations, offices, and equipment.

Did I mention that a larger student body requires bigger libraries, more books, and more librarians?

What money colleges cannot get from donors to cover these crushing new expenses, they must get from students. 

Of course, government intervention and the rising costs it entails are not limited to the demands of expanding enrollment.  Government intervention also includes government regulations that tell colleges and universities whom to hire, whom to enroll, and what to teach.  If colleges do not comply, federal funds are cut off.  To avoid that cut off, institutions of higher learning must hire whole departments full of educational bureaucrats to implement, to assess, and to enforce government mandates.  Those departments of compliance must be housed and supplied.  The bureaucrats who administer them require salaries, retirement funds, insurance, and vacations, as well as expensive, well-equipped and air-conditioned office buildings in which to do their work.  If colleges opt out of hiring and housing teams of bureaucratic overlords to manage the rigors of government compliance, they run the risk of falling afoul of the laws, in which case they invite not only the loss of government funds but also possible lawsuits, the costs of which are rising along with everything else.

The heavy expense associated with meeting the needs of more and more students -- and the heavy cost of government mandates on colleges and universities -- can exceed many millions of dollars per campus, depending upon the size of the school.  The aggregate costs to colleges and universities nationwide are perhaps incalculable.  In order to meet the rapidly expanding financial burdens that government intervention places upon them, colleges must raise tuition, sometimes dramatically.

In other words, government itself has done things that drive college costs into the stratosphere.  And now that it has, the President wants to punish colleges for the soaring prices he and his ilk helped produce.

Please note:  I am not saying that by opening up access to college for millions of service men and women via the GI bill that the government did wrong.  That is not my point.  I am saying that by doing so it has cost colleges and universities enormous amounts of money.

(2) Expensive as those forms of government intervention are for colleges, they are not alone, and they are perhaps not the worst.  By printing many billions of dollars in fiat money every month, and thereby shrinking the value of every American dollar on the planet as a result, the government makes it necessary for colleges and universities to charge ever greater amounts of money for the services they provide just to break even.  Because it takes more newly shrunken dollars to buy what old dollars used to, more dollars are needed.  Even if all colleges and universities decided against raising tuition in order to cover the costs involved in servicing more and more students, the government’s monetarist chicanery still drives up prices dramatically over time. 

(3) Finally, I cannot imagine upon what possible basis Barack Obama thinks he can calculate how much tuition every college and university in America ought to be charging, or how much that tuition ought to go up each year.  But if, as he indicated in the past, he plans to punish colleges whose tuition rises too quickly or too much, then know it he must.  But know it he does not.  No one does. 

Suffice it to say that I am continually amazed at how much community organizers know, or think they do.

Colleges, Diversity, and Excellence

         When colleges and universities announce that they are about creating diversity, remind them that higher education is not about diversity.  It's about demonstrated excellence in teaching and learning.  If they say that diversity can be a great means to examining ideas, then remind them that diversity can be a great means of examining ideas only if those doing the examining are good at it.   Being good at it is not a function of race, gender, or ethnicity.  Because those factors are irrelevant to the task, they do not make one skilled at conceptual analysis.  Neither does being tall, bald, Swiss, or right-handed.  Conceptual analysis is about clear, accurate, and incisive thinking, which is not race-based, gender-based, nation-based, or follicle-based.  It’s skill-based.

         Remind the diversity-mongers of this, too:  If they think that looking for excellence in teaching and learning results in everybody being a white male, then THEY are racist.  Searching for excellence creates diversity.  All excellent people are not the same gender, race or ethnicity.  No race, gender, or ethnicity has cornered the market on excellence.   Alternatively, searching for diversity does not create excellence.  Regardless of the dogmas preached by the contemporary diversity lobby, some whites are very bad at conceptual analysis, some blacks and Hispanics are very good at it, and others in those groups are the opposite.  You simply cannot tell how good they or -- or how diverse -- simply by looking for diversity.  Rather, look for demonstrated excellence; stop checking for gender, skin color, or sexual proclivity.  We’re talking about skill.  Just as you don’t identify good curve ball hitters by nationality or race; you don’t identify good thinkers that way either.  You look for someone who has demonstrated prowess at the plate, on the one hand, and prowess at the keyboard or in the classroom, on the other. 

         To proceed, conceptual insight is not a function of race, gender, or ethnicity.  Nor is it a function of political orientation.  Conservatives can be remarkably astute, or remarkably obtuse, at analysis.  So can liberals, and they have proven so.  If you want robust debate resulting in good insight, then you won’t get it by recruiting thinkers from only one perspective.  Stacking the deck politically does not yield insight -- or diversity.  It yields uniformity and sameness.   To avoid it, recruit from across the political spectrum.  If you are one who fawns over diversity, try intellectual diversity for a change.  Do not be so foolish as to believe that a room full of liberals from different nations and both sexes equals diversity.  

         Here’s my point in a sentence:  It might be that a philosophy (or biology) faculty made up entirely of women from South Korea really is the best faculty available and, despite their background uniformity, it might be amazingly diverse.

         It might also be that a philosophy or biology faculty with no women at all, whether from South Korea or not, is the best and is the most diverse in all the ways that really count.  We simply cannot tell from that brief litany of irrelevant data.  It’s a matter of talent, not gender or ethnicity.  Gender and ethnicity are not talents.  Indeed, they are not even perspectives.  Not all women, not all women from South Korea, think the same things or in the same way.  Some South Korean women might be wonderfully talented professors; others might be just as wonderfully inept, even though they all share the same gender and background.  If you want excellence, you’ll have to know what to look for.  Diversity is not that thing.

         Look for talent.  Talent is not found by looking for, or avoiding, the last name “Park” or a particular set of genitalia.

Life in the Desert: Theology Today

        Too often when I read contemporary theological books and essays, I am driven to the question:  Is this the theological world?  Are these shallow, trendy, half-informed, anti-theological posers -- who know little, understand less, and yet who speak endlessly -- are they the current state, or even the future, of what Karl Barth rightly described as the happy discipline of theology?   These temporizing amateurs, who are they? 

         In Carlyle’s words, they are “ill-natured weaklings,” “unhappy souls” more ravenously hungry for notoriety than for truth.  “They are not red-blooded men at all,” he said.  “They are things only for writing articles.”  They have yet to learn even the fundamentals of the theological craft, much less the content of Biblically-based thinking.  They are fit only for writing articles that ought not be published, read, or studied, persons fit only for lecturing at conferences that ought not be attended; conferences that merely spawn more conferences of the same sort because conferences, like those who organize and attend them, reproduce after their own kind.  Those organizers and attendees, again in Carlyle’s words, “are more to be pitied than blamed.”  “I do not hate them,” he said, “I would only that stone walls and bars were constantly between us.”  One brief letter from Goethe was worth more to him than all the article mongers in London and Edinburgh could produce in a generation.

         When I look into the books and articles that emerge around me daily, I see there is no soul within them and, if no soul, no theology, at least not theology rightly so-called.  Living souls know God.  Indeed that is the very definition and description of a living soul -- it knows God.  Knowing Him gives life -- is life -- to the soul.  A living soul knows that metaphysical speculation and clever turns of phrase are things very different from the God it knows, loves, and worships.  No one ever did, or ever could, know, love, and worship an uncaused cause, a thought thinking itself, or a mover unmoved.  To the article mongers, the difference between these soul-starving metaphysical abstractions, on the one hand, and the articulate multi-Personal Spirit that spoke the universe into existence, on the other hand, is inconceivable and unwelcome.  They do not want to be reminded that dead souls give rise to dead gods, and that dead gods cannot give life to dead souls.   

         I know firsthand it does no good to point out to them their life-wide and heart-deep lack.  They respond only with bafflement and over-weaning offense.  They do not know what you are talking about, and they are very angry with you for talking about it.   To them, their offense trumps all contrary truth, which they label as hate.  The desert wanderer, craving water, indeed dying of thirst, spits it out in disgust when a cool draught from the very river of life is offered them.   Offer them medicine for their souls and they will wonder who you think you are.  They take it for arrogance, not compassion.

         Would it do any good to print their names here?

         If I thought so, I’d do it.