Immanuel

The Bible offers so many lenses through which we view our brokenness and God's recreation in Jesus: we are guilty, God makes innocent; we are ashamed, God honors; we are enslaved, God frees.

Christmas invites us to put on yet another lens by which to marvel. Part of what it means to be human is to yearn for a connection with God. We feel lonely, isolated, despairing that we dwell in an empty cosmos or worse - an angry one whose Creator frowns on us.

Into this solitude a baby is announced: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel (which means, God with us)".

In the incarnation God casts his lot with humanity. The "where are you?" of alienation at the fall becomes the "God with us" of solidarity in Immanuel's birth.

The Gift of Disillusionment

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wisely warns that the "greatest danger" of Christian community is idealism. We cannot help, and myself most of all, entering each church community with a host of wishful ideas. We bring agendas, priorities, our own reading of the biblical text and very quickly run smack into the wall of "divine reality", the church as it really is.

Bonhoeffer posits in Life Together that the next most important step for us in a true church setting is disillusionment: "we must be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves. By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in our dream world".

Far from resulting in static, lifeless communities, true disillusionment with our ideals tills the hard ground of pride and pretense to make way for good fruit. First, we receive our local community as we ought, with thanksgiving. Second, "the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deed which really binds us together - the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ". Third, we cease hindering God with our petty complaints of disappointment and allow him to grow our fellowship "according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ".

"He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter."

Blacks and Whites

A front page article of the New York Times today reported "A Racial Divide is Bridged by Recession". Remarkably a suburb of Atlanta is experiencing the easing of once sharp racial tensions as whites and blacks mingle in welfare offices and food banks. The article contends, "nothing else has worked to remove barriers as quickly as economic hardship". Blessed be the tie that binds.

Christians take note - rubbing racial shoulders is still newsworthy! We're not even talking about whites and blacks liking each other. All they have to do is cordially share a waiting room and the Times will slot that phenomenon next to Obama's China tour as front page material. I guess those (white) people who think race doesn't matter in America probably aren't selling newspapers.

Ephesians 2 is vehemently pointed in its vision for race in religious life. On our best days, we as the church understand the first half of the chapter - Jesus' death and resurrection achieves vertical reconciliation. But we rarely venture into the latter half - Jesus' death and resurrection achieves horizontal reconciliation. In other words, 2.5% of American churches can be considered racially diverse.

In reality, a vision for blacks and whites outside the gospel can scarcely hope to achieve more than a waiting room reconciliation. Only the gospel grounds a fellow citizenship, a dwelling place for God made up of the awkward, uncomfortable, self-sacrificing joining of all races.

But I guess the Times makes much of racial hobnobbing in Henry County because they haven't found it anywhere else.

Flags and the Sanctuary

After Matthew Milner posted this on his blog recently, I felt my former patrio-iconoclasm decay a little.

The issue of flags in the sanctuary begs some interesting questions about how design influences worship. Millner's point is valid, that, perhaps, in placing our flag on the "altar" of our respective church we are not worshiping the flag, but creating a visible reminder that if we love our neighbor we ought to pray for our country. This helps me come to terms with my church praying for the queen and singing the Canadian national anthem (once).

But surely there are times when the flag does become an object of idolatry. Where is the line? Why is a little flag next to the cross a helpful reminder while a large American flag in many evangelical churches seems so different?

Soon I think I will argue that this is an issue of ecclesiology as much as aesthetics, but this is enough for now.

The Place of Tradition in Hermeneutics

Among all of the controversies surrounding the Protestant reformation, one of the primary concerns was the proper appropriation of tradition. In Cardinal Sadolet's letter to the people of Geneva, he argues that Calvin and his contemporaries did not have the support of Christian tradition on their side. The reformers had a mere 25 years of tradition to the Roman Church's prodigious 1500 years. Calvin's response is cunning. He writes, “…the ancient church is clearly on our side, and opposes you, not less than we ourselves do.” (Calvin, John. “Reply by John Calvin to Letter by Cardinal Sadolet to the Senate and People of Geneva.”49). In responding this way he turns Sadolet's logic around and claims that the reformers are actually being more faithful to the tradition than the Catholic Church was. Thus, the appeal of the Protestant reformation was not meant to dispense with tradition. Rather, it was an argument against the way in which the Catholic Church had appropriated it.

The question then is this: What is the role of tradition in interpreting Scripture? The Catholic position appears to be that Scripture and tradition are to be held on the same level. The mainline Protestant reformers clearly hold up Scripture as authoritative (sola scriptura) without dispensing with tradition, but (perhaps problematically) leave the question of its proper position unestablished. The radical reformers seem to completely disregard tradition as irrelevant, professing that one can really read Scripture unassisted by tradition. The result of this lack of articulation on the part of Protestantism seems to be partly responsible for the fractious milieu that has become one of its hallmarks.

At the risk of muddying the waters of discussion, I will go ahead and say that, on this point at least, I think the radical reformers were more than a little naive simply because nobody is able to completely divorce themselves from their own context (cultural, historical, denominational, etc). Thus, even in the most deconstructed traditions, such as the Quakers, you will find them to be just that–– a tradition. But how does one interpret Scripture in continuity with all of Christian (and Jewish!) history? Can we just appeal to the early church without looking at the less flattering parts that follow? Should we go so far as the Catholic Church and put the two on the same level?

Our Membership

"This was our membership. Burley called it that. He loved to call it that. Andy Catlett, remembering Burley, still calls it that. And I do. This membership had an economic purpose and it had an economic result, but the purpose and the result were a lot more than economic. Joe Banion grew a crop on Mr. Feltner, but also drew a daily wage. The Catlett boys too were working for wages, since they had no crop. The others of us received no pay. The work was freely given in exchange for work freely given. There was no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up. What you owed was considered paid when you had done what needed doing. Every account was paid in full by the understanding that when we were needed we would go, and when we had need the others, or enough of them, would come. In the long, anxious work of the tobacco harvest none of us considered that we were finished until everybody was finished. In his old age Burley liked to count up the number of farms he had worked on in his life 'and never took cent money'.

"...The members, I guess you could say, are born into it, they stay in it by choosing to stay, and they die in it..."

Taken from Hannah Coulter this Wendell Berry quote might well be mistaken for the book of Acts, thick with covenantal, ecclesiological, familial language.

Somehow we've made mutual generosity an event. Appealing for help is the crescendo of maxing resources, dead ends, burgeoning shame and awkwardness. Its broaching the sentence, "I can't..." And God-forbid never twice in one month. Meanwhile, fervency, outdoing, contributing, and seeking are the verbs marking love of Christians in Romans 12.

I long to raise Judah and Amelie in this Membership. Being "born into it", as they grow to pray, worship, and trust Christ, they will learn there's more to our faith than family devotions. Our family is flanked by other families as one Family. "They stay in it by choosing to stay, and they die in it..."

On the Healthcare Question: A Rejoinder

I always apologize for doing this, but why? So here is another shameless link to another blog post written by a doctor– and not one of those doctors from the fifties who told us smoking is healthy for us (and who is apparently still telling John that snuff is good for him). Even if you won't agree with him, Eric Chevlen offers a good cross-section of the situation and some factors that may not be readily visible.

One word of warning: it's a bit on the long side, so you may want to pull up a rolling stool, don a hospital gown, grab a decanter of good 20 year old rubbing alcohol, and make yourself comfortable.

Confessions of a Health Care Rationer


My favorite line? "People love honesty, but they hate the truth," Ah, how deep our depravity runs!

Reading the Word with Liza Hamilton, Part 1

I love the Dickensian depiction of the "dour Presbyterian" Liza Hamilton in Steinbeck's East of Eden: "Her head was small and round and it held small round convictions...She had a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do".

Throughout the novel, Steinbeck is determined to bury her simple fundamentalism by the burgeoning free-spirited, individualism of her husband Samuel, his friend Lee, and their curious reading of Genesis 4. Samuel remarks, "Give me a used Bible and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers. Liza wears a Bible down evenly." This begs the question, Who's reading their Bible rightly? The seeking fingers or the even wearing?

Ultimately, there is room at the hermeneutical table for both readers. The Word is relevant and timely, answering burning questions of burdened fingers. If I cannot approach the Word with my aches and fears and joys to whom else may I go? It has the words of life.

Contra Steinbeck, however, it is not the only way or even the best way to read. To paraphrase Newbigin, the Bible does not have answers to all our inquiries because more often than not we are asking stupid questions. Our reading and preaching today has joyfully joined the ranks of Samuel and Lee, hungry for individualistic, therapeutic, myopic tidbits. This Sunday morning snackfood energizes us for another week of living within our own story, the one untarnished and uninterested by the one in Scripture.

Joining Liza in evenly wearing our Bibles is crucial. What breaks to the fore from Genesis to Revelation are not anecdotes for our ailments but the thundering story of God gaining glory for himself by redeeming a people and recreating a world. And we are guests on that sacred ground.

Oliver O'Donovan and Public Health Care

“It is a Western conceit,” O’Donovan writes, “to imagine that all political problems arise from the abuse or over-concentration of power; and that is why we are so bad at understanding political difficulties which have arisen from a lack of power, or from its excessive diffusion.” He cites the example of Somalia, admitting that “such power as there has been has, as a matter of course, been abused.” But a more crucial problem is that “political power was never strong enough to cope with the daunting natural obstacles.”

Disease and famine, he suggests, are as crucial “enemies” as tyrants and invaders, since they are “depoliticizing forces” that “prevent people from living in communities, from coordinating their efforts to the common good; from protecting one another against injury and maintaining just order; and from handing on their cultural legacy to their children.”

The above is a short blog post from Peter Leithart, where he is summarizing some of Oliver O'Donovan's thoughts from his 1996 book, "The Desire of the Nations." The skepticism of nation-state power that O'Donavan bemoans is relevant to the current debate over reforming health care. One of the main criticisms that is lodged against pursuing the option of a public health care plan is that health care is not a right, it is actually a commodity, or a privilege. Therefore, the American government, with a public health care plan, would be providing something that it does not have business or authority to provide. This has been shouted to the world via televised town-hall meetings with the threat that if we go this route we are wittingly lifting up the dust ruffle and inviting the boogy man with the S branded on his chest into our bedroom to have his way with us.

Beyond the obvious ridiculousness of such alarmism there is a more subtle problem with this warning. As O'Donovan is aptly pointing out, can it honestly be maintained that the tyrants that our military defends us from are more "depoliticizing" than the immobilization of our citizens from untreated disease? We have picked and chose randomly where we want government to interfere with our lives- a product of the post-enlightenment skepticism of everything authority. Yet, in the wake of increasing awareness of the things that threaten our health, and the technological wherewithall to combat them can these arbitrary distinctions be maintained? Why do we consider health care a commodity? Seriously, why? Why is this proposed plan any different from the preventative care I get from the United States Marine Corps? Why am I owed one (as a U.S. citizen) and not the other?

Church Plant in Lexington

I'm trying to come up with a catchy name for a new church in Lexington. Here's what I got:

coastal
seaside
seabreeze
seabiscuit
flamer
froth
foam
diameter
circumference
annihilation
exacerbation
consummation

Any suggestions?

Newbigin's Take on Mission

Lesslie Newbigin, village evangelist in India, takes his cue on the church's mission from the Gospels and Acts. In these five narrative accounts there is an "indissoluble nexus between deeds and words". Miraculous deeds perk curiosity of a new reality which is then explicitly stated in word. Preaching without these deeds is about as unhelpful as answering questions that aren't being asked. But where these deeds are present, questions abound concerning the new plausibility structure of which they are a part, and gospel proclamation answers those very questions.

The point here is not to prove every word was accompanied by a miraculous deed, but that such deeds prompted right questions to which the gospel could respond.

The Church inherits this mantle of powerful witness inasmuch as she marries deed and word. The Kingdom of God is not an abstract reality but a Person who we have encountered and whose new creation we have a forestaste in the Spirit. "To set word and deed, preaching and action, against each other is absurd. The central reality is neither word nor act, but the total life of a community enabled by the Spirit to live in Christ, sharing his passion and the power of his resurrection."

How do our lifestyles reflect a new reality? How do we proclaim "Jesus is risen" not just on Easter Sunday but in the company we keep at our table? In the hurt we mend? By the injustices we confront? Through aspirations for our children?

Sadly so much of our lives play out the script of this present reality. No wonder nobody's asking.

Thiselton's Question That Arise

Anthony Thiselton's recent work, The Hermeneutics of Doctrine, seeks to examine if a more substantial interaction between hermeneutics and doctrine could, "rescue doctrine from from its marginalized function and abstraction from life" (xvi). Christian doctrine's premier pitfall has historically been the high-level of abstraction it dwells in. In Thiselton's first chapter he corrects this by shifting the focus from "free-floating problems", to "questions that arise".

An example of this would be the way we exposit a doctrine of creation. Thiselton's position is that early understandings of human origins did not actually come from the question, "where did we come from", but rather from a gratitude for life, a sense of human dependence upon God, and a desire to rejoice in the great natural gifts that we experience. "My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth" (Ps. 121:2). The doctrine of creation, therefore, was sharpened at the dinner table, not in the study.

The issue is not then whether propositions such as, "God is creator" feature at all, but whether we engage these propositions detached from the way they originally arose. This gives a call to examine, as best we can, what context authors were originally asking their questions in. The answers to these questions will naturally have application built into them, because the questions were originally asked in a context where application was their jumping off point. The task of clearly articulating relevant Christian doctrine may not be as difficult as is thought. It is simply a matter of asking questions as they arise.

Seminarian Woes or New Testament Scholarship Has No Clothes

I'm deathly afraid of naive fundamentalism. The Jesus within it hovers six inches above the dusty near east earth. He opens doors for women, never passes gas, and speaks timeless principles that drift over the heads of his hearers and into my living room unscathed. He fits well into the moral majority mold made for him.

But my self-righteous flight leads me into the jaws of the burgeoning beast of NT scholarship. Deep within its bowels I can't make heads or tails of what I came looking for - Was it the Jesus of history? Or was it Matthew's spin? Or am I really seeking the church behind the author behind the text? Or did it all get fuddled in transmission anyway?

There, the Jesus who so winsomely and authoritatively turned Torah interpretations on their heads now slavishly fulfills every whim of Second Temple Jewish literature. The Jesus who confidently butted heads with Pharisees and Sadducees now double checks his theology with Qumran. And the Jesus who recreated the world in his resurrection becomes Paul's plaything, a vacuous two-dimensional figure brought back to life and relevance by a stroke of creative genius.

Who will deliver me from this hermeneutical body of death?

"Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" As I settle down to my English text, millenia removed from the events it contains, I encounter a present, abiding, divine Word. He neither sparkles like the gilded former version nor evaporates into the obscurity of the latter.

Jesus speaks. There is power in the written and risen Word.

"it's a powerful thing, family."

I have loved reading each of Marilynne Robinson's books, but this week I'm contemplating why her latest novel, Home, is by far my favorite.

There are the obvious reasons ... the narrator is female, one with whom I more comfortably identify than with Gilead's John Ames. And Housekeeping, while containing some of the most achingly lovely descriptions I've ever come across in literature, is just too dark for me.

But there's something deeper there, below the first impressions. I think at my very core I resonate with Home because it is a book about family.

As the story unfolds through Glory Boughton's eyes, I am given the rare gift of peering in on this woman's most private possession: the emotional inner-workings of her family. At times I feel the discomfort of an outsider, being made privy that that which is none of my business. And I wonder it if this is a gift I really want.

But I can't stop reading, partly because it is a story I want to know the end of, but mostly because as a human being I am swept up in my own story of family, and I identify all too well with many of the thoughts and emotions taking place within these pages.

This story gets at what is closest to the heart of all humans. To be in family is to be vulnerable. Aren't family relationships the most tenuous of all relationships? There is so much power there. A word can make or break them at any time. They can bring the most joy or the most pain to a person's life. A conversation about one's own family evokes feelings of enthusiasm or pain or anger, but rarely indifference.

As we live and work and play we are each living out our own version of the Boughton's saga - whether we interact with members of our family on a daily basis or never speak to them. Our own family's history, its patterns and wounds and victories and secrets often run too deep to be easily explicable to outsiders but they are part of the fiber of who we are - no matter how much we may try to run from it.

To really know another is to see him in the context of his family story. This is why Home is the most intimate of novels. And I think why it is my favorite.

Christians and the Corporation

“We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster.”
Grapes of Wrath, 45

In Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck paints a grim picture of the American economic landscape. His portrayal of the simple farmer who is closely tied to the land is contrasted against the leviathan-like qualities of a bank. The land managers roll up in their automobiles and roll down there windows, never making contact with the earth, to tell the tenants squatting in the dirt that they must leave because it is no longer cost effective to have tenants. Why deal with the messiness of tenant farmers when a machine can do just as much work in a fraction of the time? When the tenants protest, the manager simply defers to the “machine”. “It’s not us,” they say,

It’s the bank. A bank isn’t like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn’t like a man either. That’s the monster….It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it. (ibid)

The irony of the situation is hard to miss. If the men built the machine, who else but the men who built and comprise it would be responsible?
Steinbeck’s question is a deeply troubling one, particularly for the western Christian. Our own society has created something that historically has few direct parallels; whole businesses–– private enterprises–– that, to a very large degree, influence and even control the direction of the country and the world. Before capitalism, this sort of power resided almost entirely in the hands of the state (for better or worse). The Church was often better equipped to speak on issues of oppression and tyranny by the government because it has scripture that speaks directly to Christian’s relationship to the state (cf. Romans 13). Furthermore, it has an identity that is firmly established apart from the state (consider for instance, John 18:36), even if the men within the Church were prone to acquiescence. But how ought we as believers respond to institutions that are not the state and apparently reside outside of our scripture and our history? Specifically, how ought we regard those corporations that we know are causes of oppression? If an organization is responsible for indirectly killing a person, who is responsible?

It should be said first that if we affirm the authority of Scripture, then it must also be affirmed that the Bible and the Spirit have not failed to speak to this particular situation, so it is an artificial problem if we concede that somehow a scenario has arisen that Christ failed to prepare us for.

Where do we begin then? Should the corporation be regarded as the state, since it contains many of the same features as the state, minus the authority? Perhaps that is just it, since it possesses no real authority, should it be regarded at all? Should the Church support it or condemn it for its propensity keep one from loving his neighbor due to globalization (in which case our neighbor is not visible, but still there)?

Pragmatic Test

At some point the pragmatic test deserves its day in court. Usually its leveled against the pacifist - i.e., How can we live in a world without war? And that deserves an answer. But there is a more potent practical question the pacifist can ask: Has there ever been a just war?

Both questions appropriately demand livability, an essential component of any conception of Christian life. Something may look great on paper, adorned with proof texts and Luther quotes, but does it work? Can it be lived?

If a pair of scissors was used in a brutal murder, no one would call into question whether or not we should continue to manufacture and use them for their other effective purpose. Just because something is abused does not undermine its validity. But what if we lived in a world where scissors were only ever without exception used not for cutting paper but stabbing victims? Every single time any well-meaning school teacher sought to conduct an art project, she ended up with a room full of bodies. We might begin to wonder if scissors were such a great idea after all.

Enter "just war". Has there ever been a just war? Even if you support war without the "just" part, has there ever been a war for which a Christian could fully support its cause and fully support its means?

This might sound like an unfair test. It might sound like asking, Has there every been a completely untainted democratic process? But that's not what I'm asking. I'm not saying that we throw out democracy because its always tainted. I'm saying we throw out communism because we always end up with totalitarianism.

Enter "war". We don't abandon war for the Christian because it involves non-Christians and its always tainted by evil on both sides. We abandon war because when we set out for justice on paper we always end up with injustice. We fight for unjust reasons, with unjust means, and get unjust results. Sure there might be some mixed blessings in there. I could name a few mixed blessings under Mao or Stalin or Hitler. But collateral blessings are cause for abandonment not embodiment.

And so the pragmatic challenge stands: Has there ever been a just war?

Why Christians Make Bad Soldiers

Stanley Hauerwas' short article "Why Homosexuals (as a Group) are More Moral than Christians (as a Group)", written during debates surrounding admitting homosexuals into the military, made a great point - the real debate should be over whether to let Christians in. True ones make dismal soldiers. He could have gone much further.

First, the more Christian soldiers espouse just war theory, the more likely they may begin thinking through what they mean by it. Sooner or later protecting oil fields or killing Muslims is going to come up short. What are you going to do with a massive standing army who keeps asking, Should we be doing this?

Second, if a soldier obeys orders and kills civilians there's the nasty business of church discipline, handing them over to Satan. That's terrible for morale.

Third, Christians will (counter-intuitively) pray for their enemies. They will demonstrate mercy over justice. They will turn the other cheek. In fact, they may get confused and accidentally do corporately what they vigorously practice privately. Or they might just realize that's a stupid distinction anyway.

Fourth, they share a commission greater than capitalism. What happens when they begin to lose gospel credibility because they keep shooting everybody? They might be forced to choose baptizing over bombing, witnessing over water boarding.

Finally, Christian soldiers are ultimately under not the commander in chief but Christ. And worse, they are striving to become more and more like him. Which means they are becoming decidedly less and less what they are defending. Old wine skins can't hold the new wine.

Jesus was a Sexual Predator

At the crux of the story of Jesus is the cross. Without his humiliating death we are left proclaiming "another Jesus" (2 Cor 11:4), not the one of Scripture. No wonder Paul was forced to fight super-apostles in Corinth, missionaries in Galatia, and adversaries in Philippi over its centrality. Battle fatigue prompted him to assert Christ crucified is what he preaches (1 Cor 1:23), all he boasts in (Gal 6:14), and all he knows (1 Cor 2:2).

Our present aversion to the cross centers around a question posed by a friend: Is it a symbol of God's love or God's love itself? There is a world of difference. If the cross is a symbol it is a demonstration; it is a kind gesture (albeit confusing) out there. But if it is God's definitive act of love we invite two messy concepts right here, our sin and God's wrath.

There is no ambiguity in the Scriptures. Jesus died for sins. "For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God" (1 Pet 3:18). Language of imputation and balance transfers has the adverse affect of rendering what we mean by it as about as controversial as an accounting textbook. But as we approach Good Friday we are in a season to reflect very graphically and very precisely on what we mean.

On the cross, afflicted, bloodied, abandoned my God, naked, reeking of his own feces Jesus was a sexual predator. He raped women; he performed back alley abortions; he was an avid homosexual with multiple partners; he was strung out on coke; he was racist.

And just as the transition from Romans 1 to 2 indicts the self-righteous elder brother along with the prodigal, he was an online porn addict; he was anorexic; he said and did cruel things to his spouse; he insulated himself in the suburbs; he isolated himself in the city; he withheld the gospel from those who needed it most and collected trinkets for his modest home while others starved; he was proud, greedy, selfish, loving only people who were most like him.

For such a vile sinner there could be no humane execution, no heart attack in the garden or beheading before Pilate. The utter, vehement, violent wrath of God demanded abandonment, humiliation, horror, mocking, spitting, beating, whipping, thorns, nails, agony, desperation till Isaiah's prophecy could chillingly be fulfilled: "his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind" (52:14).

Martin Luther said, "The whole value of the meditation of the suffering of Christ lies in this, that man should come to the knowledge of himself, and sink and tremble."

Conversation Stoppers for Overeducated Evangelicals

I thought this was pretty funny.

Arminianism and the Unreached

How does an Arminian perspective address the question of the unreached? Whole swaths of peoples in various ages have lived and died without the gospel. If Paul is right, if God has "determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place" (Ac 17:26), is he not implicated in their condemnation? If God really does chose that certain persons are born in places where the gospel is not and will not be in their lifetime, is he not condemning them?

Some would argue that this is the church's fault, not God's, that there are unreached peoples. This does not answer the question. Regardless of whose fault, if God determines someone to be born where he knows the church has and will continue to fail to bring the gospel, is he not still condemning them?

Others argue that all people have general revelation and those who respond to this will receive special revelation. Ignoring the fact that the Scriptures' most explicit language about general revelation is its rejection not its acceptance (Rom 1), there are still two problems with this. First, it harbors implicit racism. Certain ethnic groups have responded to God's general revelation and received missionaries, while other whole races have utterly failed to respond at all. Are there cultures and peoples more hardened to God than others? Second, it does not scratch an Arminianist itch of fairness. How is it fair that I heard the gospel a thousand times before I accepted it while someone else must obey God generally for a season to prove their desire to hear the gospel for the first time?

The illusion of Arminianism is that God's sovereignty is a sliding scale. But the moment you tamper with the dial, even just a hair, you lose everything. If God does not elect some for salvation, how can he possibly become untangled from the web of temporal, cultural, geographical, cultural, personal factors that formulate each person's decision to respond? If God retains any control at all his hands are instantly soiled in determining eternal fates.

God either elects who will be saved and ordains how this comes to pass or he sets creation in motion and butts out. You can't have it both ways.

Pacifism

In the springtime, when kings go out to battle, it is worth pleading with Christians to reconsider our prevailing ethos of war. I might as soon question the ethics of oxygen than the American military juggernaut. We have so deeply cast our lot with our armed forces that it is difficult to locate where the church ends and Americanism begins. But the Scriptures clamor to be heard on this very point and to them we must go.

There are basically two categories of warfare in the Old Testament. First, God used his covenant people Israel as an instrument of judgment on surrounding nations. It was generally total warfare, a nasty business of razing cities to the ground, sowing salt, executing survivors, kidnapping virgins, collecting foreskins, and dashing babies to bits. The second category of war was that of secular nations used by God to judge and then were judged by God for judging. It was live by the sword and die by the sword - no sooner did God judge Israel with Assyria than he judged Assyria for her wickedness in the matter (Is 10).

Contra wishful thinking, America is not the new Israel. In fact, Israel is not even the new Israel. If you are looking for support for a secular government to be used by God to judge another nation and in turn be blessed for her efforts you won't find it in the Old Testament. Try Greek mythology. If you are looking for a "just war theory" - taking the word war from the OT and baptizing it in some of the humanitarian kindness from the New - you won't find that either. Try Augustine or Geneva.

There's no space to cover Romans 13 here. Suffice to say that it would take some fantastic hermeneutical gymnastics to balance America's worldwide jurisdiction over sovereign states on the point of the sword mentioned there.

Generally a defense for warfare is drawn not primarily from the Bible but our predicament, concerning Hitler, Al Qaeda, Darfur. At best this is thinly veiled scorn for the naivety of our Lord who failed to foresee this. At worst its blatant disregard for everything he said about laying down rights and taking up the cross.

Jesus said "blessed are the peacemakers" and Paul, "for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh"; and yet somehow we've spiritualized the peacemakers and materialized warmongers. Its long overdue for the burden of biblical proof to reside with the war makers.

Carey: An Unlikely Ally

I just finished S. Pearce Carey's biography of William Carey, and was surprised time and time again with some of the positions Carey took on issues.  It seems the new monasticism has got nothing on this guy.  Here are a few:

-  Carey refused to eat sugar because, at the time, it was grown, harvested, and produced by slaves.  

-  Carey was absorbed in the politics of his time.  As a Brit he supported the American and French revolutions.  

-  Carey was an avid gardener and horticulturist.  When he first moved to India he supplemented the money he was receiving from England by being an indigo farmer.  This infuriated the people that sent him to India, because of the potential for him to get too involved in "worldly affairs".  He later founded an agri-horticultural society in India.  He lamented that, 

 

"in one of the finest countries in the world the state of agriculture is so abject and degraded, and the people's food so poor and their comforts so meagre.  India seems to have almost everything to learn about the clearing of jungles, the tillage of wastes, the draining of marshes, the banking of river courses, the irrigation of large areas, the mixing of composts and manures, the rotation of crops, the betterment of tools and of transport, the breeding of stocks, the cultivation of new vegetables and herbs, the planting of orchards, the budding, grafting and pruning of fruit trees, and the forestation of timbers.  Their only orchards are clumps of mangoes crowded together without judgment.  The recent introduction of the potato and the strawberry suggest what might be done.  Many British farms have quadrupled their produce, since they pooled their information and experience through agricultural societies."  

-  6 years or so after Carey's ship had landed on India 3 families joined his mission.  The families decided that they should all live together, and hold everything in common for the sake of minimizing expense and also to promote Christian fraternity.  

-  Despite translating parts of the Bible into 35 different languages, Carey also translated many works of Indian classic literature.  One of these works is the epic Ramayana, more or less the Indian equivalent to the Iliad.  This was a projected 10 volume work, but all their work was destroyed in a fire after they had completed 3 of the volumes.  After the fire it had to be put down.  The Ramayana project was wildly controversial in England, with Baptist pastor and friend of Carey, Andrew Fuller, calling it, "that old piece of lumber."  Yet, Carey and his companions saw it as an essential element of their work.

-  During some delirium Carey was having because of a leg infection he chided his doctor for wearing a red coat, thinking him to be a military officer.  Carey yelled at the doctor, "How dare you come to me in that read coat?  Don't you know that God Almighty has decreed that all war shall be abolished."  The doctor withdrew, and returned in a black coat, but he was immediately recognized and rejected.  Though he was delirious Carey never accepted that this exclamation was out of line.  "There were truths in my delirium whose force I wish to feel, and for whose triumph to strive, to the end of my life."  

All this, and yet his name is so rarely brought into the current holism/prioritism conversation.