A Theological Overview of Nature and Natural Function Implications for Christian Sexuality in the 21st Century

By Dr. Samuel Hensley
Reformation21

Arguably one of the most contentious and divisive issues confronting contemporary culture involves whether to regard homosexuality as an acceptable alternate lifestyle and, if so, what rights should be extended to gays. Given that most recent estimates place the gay population in the United States at 1-2%, one might be excused for concluding that the intensity of the current debate represents much ado about nothing. After deep reflection however, some authors regard this as one of the most important issues of the early 21^st century. Schmidt (1) begins his book “Straight or Narrow?” with the following statement, “I sit…looking for words to introduce a moral issue, an issue so important that it increasingly appears to be the battleground for all the forces seeking to give shape to the world of the next century.”
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The rhetoric is so inflamed that one seems justified in concluding that very different views of the world are behind the conflict. Orthodox Christians, following consistent church teaching over the past 2,000 years, have rejected this lifestyle as contrary to scripture. This is in contradistinction to contemporary approaches.

Unless orthodox Christians make the effort to understand and defend biblical teaching on homosexuality and in addition to study the biological and psychosocial implications of this lifestyle, the issue will simply be decided in the court of public opinion where tolerance and autonomy trump all other considerations.

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Before addressing particular scriptures, let us consider how significant this disagreement really is. What effect can such a minority have on the greater society? Unfortunately, the answer is that the effect can be quite far-reaching and deleterious. One of the most basic threats is the danger that acceptance of alternate or same sex lifestyles will undermine the family defined as one man-one woman in marriage according to God’s word. While some homosexuals may truly desire a “live and let live” attitude on the part of our society, many gays realize that their lifestyle represents a fundamental challenge to an orthodox understanding of the basic family unit. The contemporary homosexual movement is deeply tied to philosophical postmodernism with a resurgence of a pre-Christian pagan sexual ideal (2).

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Feminist theologians have objected to a biblical understanding of marriage as being sexually biased against women. More recently gay interpreters have further charged that there is a heterosexual bias in Scriptures that leads to social oppression of their lifestyle. This is a thoroughly postmodern attempt to assert that there is no way to find truth in these writings and therefore we can allow the bible to say whatever we want it to say. This would expand the expression of human sexuality far beyond the boundaries of the family and would legitimize same sex acts as well as other forms of sexuality previously considered taboo by our society.

The whole idea of gay marriage is destructive of Christian understanding of the family. While maintaining that marriage is a special desirable relationship, the arguments that favor extending marriage to same sex couples, must of necessity destroy its transcendence. Christians, for 2,000 years, have viewed marriage as having supernatural significance because God established it. In this view, the State does not shape marriage but only recognizes what God has ordained. In order to the give the government the authority to redefine marriage to include same sex unions, gays must argue that marriage is essentially a construction of society and that government has the power to redefine marriage however it wishes. By this stratagem, they destroy the sacred goal they wish to obtain.

A different but related problem is that social acceptance could lead to more individuals adopting this lifestyle. The proclivity to adopt this sexual orientation varies widely. In some homosexuals the orientation may be related to various factors. The danger is that adolescents, lacking any of these predisposing factors but with unresolved questions of sexual identity, could be drawn into this lifestyle. In ancient Greece, for example, where homosexuality had social acceptance, the incidence of this behavior was much greater than in contemporary society. The larger number of practicing homosexuals in pagan Greece suggests that this behavior can be learned or acquired. If same sex acts are contrary to our God given nature, then Christians have a responsibility to struggle against these current trends.

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Genesis 1:27-28—So God created man in his own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Genesis 2:18-24—And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.” Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beast of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beast of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was asleep he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. And Adam said, “This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

Verse 1:27 indicates not only that man is made in the image of God but that women bear the divine image as well. The terms “male and female” highlight the sexual distinctions within humankind and prepare for the blessings of fertility in verse 28 and the institution of marriage in Genesis 2:18-24. This designation of “male and female” have far reaching implications in regard to normal sexual function as Jesus clearly realized when he coupled Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24 to form the twin pillars of marriage (Matthew 19:4-6) (5).

The series of verses starting at Genesis 2:18 begin with a moment of tension in the narrative. After the seven fold exclamations of Chapter 1 that God’s individual acts of creation were either good or very good, we now have God surveying creation and identifying a situation that was not pleasing to Him. His statement, “It is not good that man should be alone” is a jarring note that something is amiss. It reveals to the reader the importance of suitable companionship for man and of God’s loving intent to provide the appropriate remedy.

These passages also make clear that the sexes are complementary. This can be seen from the language used. God creates a “helper fit for him” or literally translated “a helper opposite to him.” (5) The designation of woman as helper does not infer inherent inferiority. The word “helper” is used nineteen times in the Old Testament and on sixteen of these occasions it is used to describe God. The word signifies the woman’s contribution and not inadequacy. (6) God intends marriage to include intimacy and sexual relations. This marriage has Trinitarian overtones in that it is modeled on God’s triune nature—diversity in complete and perfect unity. The idea of complementarity stands in direct opposition to male sameness of identity. By God’s will, man was not created alone but was designed for the “otherness” of the opposite sex. The ideal intended by God is fulfilled not in the male alone but in the relationship of man and woman. Brunner comments on the idea that God’s full meaning is revealed in man and woman designated for each other by noting, “That is the immense double statement, of lapidary simplicity, so simple indeed that we can hardly realize that with it a vast world of myth and Gnostic speculation, of cynicism and asceticism, of the deification of sexuality, and fear of sex completely disappears.” (7)

Clearly implied in Genesis and made explicit through the Old and New Testament is the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Jesus confirms this impression (Matthew 193-8) in his dialogue with the Pharisees. “So while it is true that the overview of creation in Genesis does not provide explicit commands about sexuality, it provides the basis for other biblical commands and for subsequent reflection on the part of those people who wish to construct a sexual ethic to meet changing situations.” (l )

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Romans 1:18-28—The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things, rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done.

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It is important to realize that Paul’s overall theme in the beginning of Romans centers on the gospel of God’s righteousness. Here Paul’s main concern is to affirm God’s justice and integrity. In 1:18-20 Paul explains how God can be just and yet inflict his wrath on mankind. Paul begins with a general indictment of all men and women and asserts that it is perfectly reasonable for God to be wrathful against sinners. Paul’s point here is that humans are not simply ignorant of God but in direct rebellion against him. No one can be excused on account of ignorance because of God’s revelation of himself in nature and the presence of the knowledge of God within the heart. The only reason for denying God is that men have suppressed their knowledge of him.

After telling us that the truth was suppressed because of man’s unrighteousness or sinful nature, in verses 1:21-23 Paul explains the results of this action. The first result was that men did not honor God or give thanks to him. More significantly from man’s perspective is that the consequence of refusing to acknowledge God led to a darkening of their heart, their speculations about the nature of the world became futile and professing themselves to be wise they became fools. In Christian terms the heart is the spiritual core of life and Paul is saying that in their hearts barriers were erected against the truth. What begins as suppression ends in a determined rejection of God’s truth.

The next step after rejecting the true God is to find some substitute to worship in his place. In other words, rejection of God leads inevitably to idolatry. While this idolatry may take the form of worshipping man made images, it may be that we replace God with the worship of money, fame or power. It can be so subtle as to include denying the God described in the Bible but then recreating him in our own image.

In 1:24-25, we see God’s judgment against those who reject him. His judgment takes the form of “giving them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity.” This judgment against sin is to allow it to reign unopposed in our lives with all its destructive consequences. God’s judicial abandonment of men to their sins becomes the punishment of rejecting God. Looking at the pagan culture of his day, Paul could readily see that there was a direct link between pagan idolatry and immorality. When we refuse to be shaped by God’s truth, we will inevitably follow our desires and lusts. The sexual perversions of pagan culture were a direct result of idolatry. Man made his own gods and this allowed him to follow his own impure desires.

In 1:26-27 Paul uses what he considers the strongest example to bolster his case against the pervasiveness of sin in society. In male and female same sex acts, Paul sees a rejection not only of God’s ordained order for creation but the extent to which perversion has taken place in pagan hearts. While other sexual sins are grave and destructive, same sex acts have a particular seriousness because they are unnatural.

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Paul’s comments in I Corinthians 6:9-11 are fully compatible with this understanding of Romans 1.

“Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolater nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swinders will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God.”

Here Paul lists various sins that represent departures from sanctioned heterosexual practices including homosexual practices, which implies that same sex acts are a perversion in themselves. Only by considering the gravity and the corrupting powers of all these sins, including both heterosexual and homosexual sins—does the full glory of the gospel shine through in verse 11.

There is one further point to consider to avoid confusion in this attempt to clarify the natural/unnatural distinction. Current advocates who regard same sex acts as acceptable conduct have sometimes argued that gays are indeed acting according to their nature, that God created them this way and it is not unnatural for them. What Paul referred to as our nature, or contrary to our nature, refers to our created state before the Fall. Since the Fall, as Paul makes clear elsewhere (Romans 7:14-25, Galatians 5:17), everything has been inverted. What was natural before the fall in men and women’s created state now seems unnatural, that is acting in righteousness, living according to God’s created order and having communion with God. Conversely what the scriptures reveal to be unnatural acts contrary to God’s order now seem reasonable and natural.

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It is important, at this point, to ask if this perverted nature has destructive physical implications that would support Paul’s argument. While complementarity of male and female in Genesis is ordained by God and an exact male/male and female/female symmetry is not established, it seems reasonable for God to design the male and female in such a manner that natural sexual function is healthy. In monogamous heterosexual relations as described in scripture, this is so. In male homosexuality, we see physical evidence that the common homosexual act of anal intercourse is contrary to natural function.

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If one looks objectively at what seems the basic design for proper sexual function, it would seem to be a monogamous male-female relationship with penis and vagina “designed” for natural function. Homosexuals are not designed for procreative relationships and it must be remembered that the mutual stimulation and gratification indulged in by homosexuals is not sex as God ordained in Genesis. Although beyond the scope of this article, there are many reasons to believe that the male/female differences extend to a foundational psychosocial level in further support of complementarity.

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I would summarize by suggesting that homosexuality, while possibly indirectly affected by genes and certainly heavily impacted by environment, begins with reversible choices. Some individuals may be at risk for developing this orientation due to previous emotional trauma but no one is predestined to be gay. Their choices, which then gradually develop into basic patterns of function that seem beyond control, are an exchange of the natural for the unnatural, as Paul observes. To accept the view that these behaviors are unchangeable is to trap many persons, who wish to be different, in bondage especially since reorientation therapy offers hope to motivated individuals (30, 31, 32). The fact that we should be prey to maladaptive behaviors is not surprising from a Christian perspective. Since the Fall, our nature has been riddled with inherited and acquired sin leading to patterns of dysfunction that diverge from God’s design. Science and medicine can tell us what is, but not what ought to be. Only God’s revelation in scripture can tell us how we should live and function.

The accounts we have reviewed from Genesis and Romans clearly are incompatible with a homosexual lifestyle. Arguments to the contrary are inadequate and unconvincing. Still, when Protestants and Catholics alike reach these inescapable conclusions, they are accused of being intolerant and unloving. The opposite is actually true. If homosexuality is spoken against in scripture and if treatment options are available, then those individuals who teach that homosexuality is an acceptable alternate lifestyle before God and that it cannot be changed, are unloving. They close the door of hope to people caught in this maladaptive, unhealthy behavior and condemn them to a life without hope of change. It is because we love that we must speak the truth even if some reject us. Our message is the message of hope. (more)

Why Study War?

By Victor Davis Hanson
City Journal

The nuclear pessimism of the cold war, which followed the horror of two world wars, also dampened academic interest. The postwar obscenity of Mutually Assured Destruction had lent an apocalyptic veneer to contemporary war: as President Kennedy warned, “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” Conflict had become something so destructive, in this view, that it no longer had any relation to the battles of the past. It seemed absurd to worry about a new tank or a novel doctrine of counterinsurgency when the press of a button, unleashing nuclear Armageddon, would render all military thinking superfluous.

Further, the sixties had ushered in a utopian view of society antithetical to serious thinking about war. Government, the military, business, religion, and the family had conspired, the new Rousseauians believed, to warp the naturally peace-loving individual. Conformity and coercion smothered our innately pacifist selves. To assert that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because good men had done too little to stop them, was now seen as antithetical to an enlightened understanding of human nature. “What difference does it make,” in the words of the much-quoted Mahatma Gandhi, “to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”

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The public may feel drawn to military history because it wants to learn about honor and sacrifice, or because of interest in technology—the muzzle velocity of a Tiger Tank’s 88mm cannon, for instance—or because of a pathological need to experience violence, if only vicariously. The importance—and challenge—of the academic study of war is to elevate that popular enthusiasm into a more capacious and serious understanding, one that seeks answers to such questions as: Why do wars break out? How do they end? Why do the winners win and the losers lose? How best to avoid wars or contain their worst effects?

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Military history teaches us, contrary to popular belief these days, that wars aren’t necessarily the most costly of human calamities. The first Gulf War took few lives in getting Saddam out of Kuwait; doing nothing in Rwanda allowed savage gangs and militias to murder hundreds of thousands with impunity. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin killed far more off the battlefield than on it. The 1918 Spanish flu epidemic brought down more people than World War I did. And more Americans—over 3.2 million—lost their lives driving over the last 90 years than died in combat in this nation’s 231-year history. Perhaps what bothers us about wars, though, isn’t just their horrific lethality but also that people choose to wage them—which makes them seem avoidable, unlike a flu virus or a car wreck, and their tolls unduly grievous. Yet military history also reminds us that war sometimes has an eerie utility: as British strategist Basil H. Liddell Hart put it, “War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.” Wars—or threats of wars—put an end to chattel slavery, Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism.

Military history is as often the story of appeasement as of warmongering. The destructive military careers of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler would all have ended early had any of their numerous enemies united when the odds favored them. Western air power stopped Slobodan Milošević’s reign of terror at little cost to NATO forces—but only after a near-decade of inaction and dialogue had made possible the slaughter of tens of thousands. Affluent Western societies have often proved reluctant to use force to prevent greater future violence. “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things,” observed the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. “The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.”

Indeed, by ignoring history, the modern age is free to interpret war as a failure of communication, of diplomacy, of talking—as if aggressors don’t know exactly what they’re doing. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, frustrated by the Bush administration’s intransigence in the War on Terror, flew to Syria, hoping to persuade President Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. She assumed that Assad’s belligerence resulted from our aloofness and arrogance rather than from his dictatorship’s interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq, before such contagious freedom might in fact destroy him. For a therapeutically inclined generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Phil—and not on the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William Shirer’s Berlin Diary—problems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be argued about by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence.

Yet it’s hard to find many wars that result from miscommunication. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence. Margaret Atwood also wrote in her poem: “Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.” Hitler did; so did Mussolini and Tojo—and their assumptions were logical, given the relative disarmament of the Western democracies at the time. Bin Laden attacked on September 11 not because there was a dearth of American diplomats willing to dialogue with him in the Hindu Kush. Instead, he recognized that a series of Islamic terrorist assaults against U.S. interests over two decades had met with no meaningful reprisals, and concluded that decadent Westerners would never fight, whatever the provocation—or that, if we did, we would withdraw as we had from Mogadishu.

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So it’s highly doubtful, the study of war tells us, that a new weapon will emerge from the Pentagon or anywhere else that will change the very nature of armed conflict—unless some sort of genetic engineering so alters man’s brain chemistry that he begins to act in unprecedented ways. We fought the 1991 Gulf War with dazzling, computer-enhanced weaponry. But lost in the technological pizzazz was the basic wisdom that we need to fight wars with political objectives in mind and that, to conclude them decisively, we must defeat and even humiliate our enemies, so that they agree to abandon their prewar behavior. For some reason, no American general or diplomat seemed to understand that crucial point 16 years ago, with the result that, on the cessation of hostilities, Saddam Hussein’s supposedly defeated generals used their gunships to butcher Kurds and Shiites while Americans looked on. And because we never achieved the war’s proper aim—ensuring that Iraq would not use its petro-wealth to destroy the peace of the region—we have had to fight a second war of no-fly zones, and then a third war to remove Saddam, and now a fourth war, of counterinsurgency, to protect the fledgling Iraqi democracy.

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It would be reassuring to think that the righteousness of a cause, or the bravery of an army, or the nobility of a sacrifice ensures public support for war. But military history shows that far more often the perception of winning is what matters. Citizens turn abruptly on any leaders deemed culpable for losing. “Public sentiment is everything,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. “With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws.” Lincoln knew that lesson well. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were brilliant Union victories that by summer 1863 had restored Lincoln’s previously shaky credibility. But a year later, after the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, and Cold Harbor battles—Cold Harbor claimed 7,000 Union lives in 20 minutes—the public reviled him. Neither Lincoln nor his policies had changed, but the Confederate ability to kill large numbers of Union soldiers had.

Ultimately, public opinion follows the ups and downs—including the perception of the ups and downs—of the battlefield, since victory excites the most ardent pacifist and defeat silences the most zealous zealot. After the defeat of France, the losses to Bomber Command, the U-boat rampage, and the fall of Greece, Singapore, and Dunkirk, Churchill took the blame for a war as seemingly lost as, a little later, it seemed won by the brilliant prime minister after victories in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy. When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, over 70 percent of the American people backed it, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support. Four years of insurgency later, Americans oppose a now-orphaned war by the same margin. General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn’t wrong when he bellowed, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.” The American public turned on the Iraq War not because of Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore but because it felt that the battlefield news had turned uniformly bad and that the price in American lives and treasure for ensuring Iraqi reform was too dear.

Finally, military history has the moral purpose of educating us about past sacrifices that have secured our present freedom and security. If we know nothing of Shiloh, Belleau Wood, Tarawa, and Chosun, the crosses in our military cemeteries are just pleasant white stones on lush green lawns. They no longer serve as reminders that thousands endured pain and hardship for our right to listen to what we wish on our iPods and to shop at Wal-Mart in safety—or that they expected future generations, links in this great chain of obligation, to do the same for those not yet born. The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, should escape that terrible knowledge.

What, then, can we do to restore the study of war to its proper place in the life of the American mind? The challenge isn’t just to reform the graduate schools or the professoriate, though that would help. On a deeper level, we need to reexamine the larger forces that have devalued the very idea of military history—of war itself. We must abandon the naive faith that with enough money, education, or good intentions we can change the nature of mankind so that conflict, as if by fiat, becomes a thing of the past. In the end, the study of war reminds us that we will never be gods. We will always just be men, it tells us. Some men will always prefer war to peace; and other men, we who have learned from the past, have a moral obligation to stop them. (more)

The Name of God

By Robert T. Miller
First Things

Tiny Muskens, the Roman Catholic bishop of Breda in the Netherlands, says that Dutch Catholics ought to pray using the word Allah rather than God or its synonyms in Dutch. Muskens argues that it makes no inherent theological difference in which language one prays, and he notes that in countries where the word Allah is in common usage as a name for God, Christians already often use the word in their prayers. Adopting the word Allah, Muskens thinks, will eliminate “discussions and bickerings” between Muslims and Christians and so improve relations between the religions.

Muskens is right that, from a Catholic point of view, there is nothing inherently wrong in saying “Allah” for “God,” just as there would be nothing inherently wrong in saying “Miny Tuskens” or “Tuny Miskens” for “Tiny Muskens.” The problem, of course, is Tiny Muskens’ name is Tiny Muskens, and anyone who called Tiny Tuny or Muskens Miskens would be making fun of him. So, too, in theology; despite the conventionality by which strings of phonemes get their meaning, once names have been established, people who change them are doing so for a reason, and the nature of that reason counts in determining whether the change is reasonable or unreasonable, advisable or inadvisable.

In this case, even from a Catholic point of view, the name of God is not a pure triviality. When at the burning bush Moses asked God for his name, the Lord gave a very particular answer. “God said to Moses, I am who am. This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations” (Exod. 3:14–15). Many devout Jews treat this name, especially in Hebrew, with such reverence that they will not speak it aloud. And when Christ appropriated this name to himself (John 8:58), everyone understood that he was proclaiming his own divinity.

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But debating the merits of Muskens’ suggestion misses the larger point here. Muskens makes it sound as if the problems in Muslim–Catholic relations were merely silly arguments about semantics that distract from the truly important things on which we all agree. In fact, there is a serious, substantive problem dominating Christian–Muslim relations at the moment, the same problem that dominates Muslim–Jewish, Muslim–Buddhist, Muslim–Hindu, and Muslim–Orthodox relations, and that problem is that Muslim fanatics keep murdering innocents of all faiths, including their own, in terror attacks.

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I realize that the many responsibilities of a bishop can make it difficult to keep up with current events, but I think Muskens must have heard about these things. It is puzzling, therefore, that he doesn’t see them as having the importance for Muslim–Christian relations that most other people do. To be sure, there are other problems between Muslims and Christians, but anyone with a normal sense of morality recognizes immediately that such other issues pale in comparison with the wholesale slaughter of innocents. Muskens’ suggestion is thus strangely, even perversely, disconnected from real-world problems.

Worse, in saying that the things that divide Muslims and Christians are products of human invention, Muskens seems to imply that, on fundamentals, there is no difference between Muslims and Christians. The prevalence of Islamic terrorism refutes this simpleminded notion, but there is an even larger point here. Chesterton explained it well long ago:

There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion: “the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach.” It is false; it is the opposite of the fact. The religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach. It is as if a man were to say, “Do not be misled by the fact that the Church Times and the Freethinker look utterly different, that one is painted on vellum and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular and the other hectagonal; read them and you will see that they say the same thing.” The truth is, of course, that they are alike in everything except in the fact that they don’t say the same thing. An atheist stockbroker in Surbiton looks exactly like a Swedenborgian stockbroker in Wimbledon. You may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly godless in the umbrella. It is exactly in their souls that they are divided. So the truth is that the difficulty of all the creeds of the earth is not as alleged in this cheap maxim: that they agree in meaning, but differ in machinery. It is exactly the opposite. They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts. They agree in the mode of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught. Pagan optimists and Eastern pessimists would both have temples, just as Liberals and Tories would both have newspapers. Creeds that exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies that exist to destroy each other both have guns.

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Our blessed Lord told his disciples that he was sending them “out as sheep in the midst of wolves” and so they “should be as wise as serpents but as innocent as doves” (Matt. 10: 16). I am happy to acknowledge the innocence of Tiny Muskens, but he is exactly the kind of sheep who, if he ever met a wolf, would likely get eaten by it. (more)

Loving Your (Insert Wrong Idea Here) Neighbor As a Friend

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Bottom Line: Christians should forcefully oppose wrong ideas while loving their neighbor.
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Americans (to our shame) don’t take ideas very seriously. If Joe is a nice guy, the fact that he is a Communist is unfortunate but no bar to friendship. Most Americans would not even pause, especially if Joe is buying the drinks.

We don’t like ideologues and who can blame us? The person who cannot endure the slightest disagreement without splitting a community, church, or club is the bane of any leader’s life. But Americans run the risk of becoming so intolerant of ideologues that we forget the power of ideas.

Bad ideas lead to bad consequences. Bad ideas (such as racism, misogyny, or socialism) lead to death, destruction, and poverty.

Bad ideas should, at the very least, strain a friendship, especially if the ideas are very bad.

When should it end it? How much support can I give to my neighbor who is wrong?

I think it depends on the depth of the friendship and the nature of the bad idea.

Having a positive relationship with a person who is wrong is one way of helping them become “right.” Since there is a positive good to having a friendship with a wrong person, we should not refuse the possibility lightly.

This much we know. The Bible is clear that we should love our enemies. It is hard to imagine loving someone, praying for them, without having any relationship with them.

This love included praise for the heretical Samaritan.

Saint Paul also says (I Corinthians 9: 9-13):

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you.”

The fundamental rule seems to be: God judges outsiders. If my neighbor is someone “outside” the household of Faith, I can leave his condemnation to God. I can argue with this neighbor, witness to him, boldly proclaim the Gospel, but his judgment is in the hands of the Almighty.
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Willful evil from members of our Church community must be dealt with forcefully.
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Aside: We also must distinguish between a person exploring an idea and practicing it. One could consider (as a serious academic exercise) if Mormonism is true, without being a practicing Mormon. False ideas can harm, but only if we fail to recognize them as false and embrace them by putting them into practice.

Second aside: A man might also be better than his proclaimed ideas (or worse!). A man might say he does not believe in morality, but then behave as a gentleman. There are (I have been told) people who proclaim fidelity to Christ, but then behave as cads.

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The Biblical assumption is that the bar for fellowship with a non-Christian is lower than the bar for a Christian. The remainder of this discussion will be about friendship with the (insert wrong idea here) non-Christian neighbor.

Defining the types of friendship would require a book, but fortunately such a book has already been written. Aristotle was the first to write extensively of friendship in his Ethics and C.S. Lewis made good use of his categories in The Four Loves. I will borrow freely from both!

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Aside: Don’t mistake me. I don’t think we have to be “friends” with everyone to obey the law of Love. You can love a man without making him your friend or colleague. I can wish better for a man who joins the Communist Party, but I shan’t be working with him. Still refusing friendship is itself a major decision, a breach of community, that will seriously impact opportunities for my Christian witness. It should not be done lightly.

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My thinking to this point suggests I can be a (colleague level) friend:

1. when the error is not serious. Surely trivial errors are not the basis for the evil of denying friendship.

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2. OR when the error is serious, but is not relevant to the task at hand.

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3. AND when the serious theological error is held by a person “outside the Church.”

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4. AND when serious error is not directly empowering a civil (non-theological) evil that should be known (via natural law) as evil by all rational men.

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5. AND when a person practicing the evil is open to hearing my point of view.

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6. AND when the friendship does not publicly associate me with the evil or wrong idea.

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7. AND when the putative friend can also express their point of view, but can (with you) then agree to disagree. (more)

You Still Have a Chance Of Living Under the Mercy

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

I have chosen to go the wrong way. I have accidentally scarred my soul when I meant to find happiness. I have confused desire with love and short term pain relief with healing.
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I was in a spiritual desert trying to build a kingdom of self. Sand castles. Victories with play swords. It was always futile, but if I gave up the dream there would be nothing.

Fear consumed me in that desert place. This fear was twofold: that if I gave up on sin, that I was giving up on the only happiness I had ever known and that I was too loathsome for a universe with a God good enough to forgive me.

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Like many people I have known, the mere thought of a God so good and loving that He could have mercy on me made me afraid. Such fierce compassion! Such severe mercy would leave me for all eternity exposed as one so foolish, so unworthy, so hateful as to require the ultimate sacrifice.

I did not want to be a welfare recipient for all eternity. It was pride, but pride which did not want to be the flaw in perfection, the tolerated off-key singer in the angelic choir ruining the song in the conductors benevolence.

Healing at such price was too terrible, better the sweet oblivion of meaningless death.

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Then I realized what I should have known through Sunday School. The fierce perfection of Heaven was Love and not just the straight edge of a ruler. God was locked in compassionate cycle of healing and reconciliation in which no note would be allowed to remain sour.

He would not just “fix me,” but in a greater miracle reconcile all my history to Himself. Indeed, He would do this and make all well (and more than well!) whether I cooperated or not, but there was a chance to bow before this Divine rearrangement and enjoy it.

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Like the women in William’s poem, I had to see I was wrong from the very beginning. Even my virtue led to vice. My pride to abasement. My loves to hurt.

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The painful good news is that I could not really defy Heaven even in that. My folly became the means for Heaven’s wisdom!

The guilty woman had to hear that her very stumble had become a glorious victory. What next? Do we merely sit with head lowered in shame?

What comes after Mercy sets us free?

The poet Taliessin compares what remains for this penitent woman to the work of legendary Pheilippides.

This brave soldier brought the news of victory to Athens from the battle of Marathon. Pheilippides (the spelling varies) ran to Athens with the good news so the citizens would not burn the city (the first marathon!) and died as he spoke the word of victory.

All that is left for the forgiven woman (and for me!) is to run the rest of life in the glorious marathon announcing Heaven’s victory. Every step rings with the defeat of the ancient foe! All is well! Triumph! Victory! (more)

What You Can Learn from Calvin and Hobbes about the Message and the Medium

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily






The first time Watterson showed that he was a man of principle was when he refused to let his publishers exploit Calvin and Hobbes by making merchandise out of it. In an early interview (LA Times 1987), Watterson considered the constant requests he had already received for C&H sweat shirts, greeting cards, toys, and bumper stickers. “Calvin and Hobbes will not exist intact if I do not exist intact … And I will not exist intact if I have to put up with all this stuff.” “I’m very happy that people enjoy the strip and have become devoted to it … But it seems that with a lot of the marketing stuff, the incentive is just to cash in. It’s not understanding what makes the strip work.” The interviewer noted that Watterson was taking this stand “despite dangled millions,” and that the only explanation was: “Preserving the integrity and fullness of his characters is cardinal with Watterson.”

“Integrity and fullness.” Calvin and Hobbes is a comic strip about a friendship and a world of imaginative play. That’s not the most important thing in the world, but if it is to retain its integrity and show forth its fullness, these things have to be guarded jealously. Watterson is one of the few creators I can think of who understood this, and who stuck to it even when the millions were dangled in front of him.

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Basically I’ve decided that licensing is inconsistent with what I’m trying to do with Calvin and Hobbes. I take cartoons seriously as an art form, so I think with an issue like licensing, it’s important to analyze what my strip is about, and what makes it work.

It’s easy to transfer the essence of a gag-oriented strip; especially a one-panel gag strip, from the newspaper page to a t-shirt, a mug, a greeting card, and so on. The joke reads the same no matter what it’s printed on, and the joke is what the strip is about. Nothing is lost.

My strip works differently. Calvin and Hobbes isn’t a gag strip. It has a punchline, but the strip is about more than that. The humor is situational, and often episodic. It relies on conversation, and the development of per­sonalities and relationships. These aren’t concerns you can wrap up neatly in a clever little saying for people to send each other or to hang up on their walls. To explore character, you need lots of time and space. Note pads and coffee mugs just aren’t appropriate vehicles for what I’m trying to do here. I’m not interested in removing all the subtlety from my work to condense it for a product. The strip is about more than jokes. I think the syndicate would admit this if they would start looking at my strip instead of just the royalty checks. Unfortunately, they are in the cartoon business only because it makes money, so arguments about artistic intentions are never very per­suasive to them.

I have no aversion to obscene wealth, but that’s not my motivation either. I think to license Calvin and Hobbes would ruin the most precious qualities of my strip and, once that happens, you can’t buy those qualities back.

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The interviewer pushes back a little bit: “I’m sure some of the readers will say to all this, “Come on. The comic strip is a popular art form.” What’s wrong with indulging the public’s interest?” And Watterson replies:

Nothing, so long as it doesn’t com­promise the art itself. In my case, I’m convinced that licen­sing would sell out the soul of Calvin and Hobbes. The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize. Once you’ve given up its integrity, that’s it. I want to make sure that never happens.

Marshal McLuhan may have overstated the case when he pronounced that “the medium is the message,” but he surely indicated the way that what you say is entangled with how you say it. If you want to make a statement about people in relationships over time, you had better not try saying it on a t-shirt or bumper sticker. Communicators need to understand their message well enough, organically enough, to pick an appropriate medium for getting it across. Insensitivity to the medium-message connection is what makes most pop music so bathetic when it attempts profundity.

It also explains why the Christian message seems so bizarre and irrelevant when it is communicated via slogans, marketing campaigns, fashion, and advertising knick-knacks. Pointing this out hardly qualifies me for prophet status; any sensitive person confronted with the modern Christian marketing machine is bound to feel queasy. Keith Green had a famous rant to that effect:

It pains me to see the beautiful truths of Scripture being plastered about like beer advertisements. Many think it is wise to “get the word out” in this way but, believe that we are really just inoculating the world with bits and pieces of truth - giving them their “gospel shots.” (And we’re making it hard for them to “catch” the real thing!) People become numb to the truth when we splash our gaudy sayings in their eyes at every opportunity. Do you really think this is “opening them up to the Gospel”? Or is it really just another way for us to get smiles, waves, and approval from others in the “born-again club” out in the supermarket parking lot, who blow their horns with glee when they see your “Honk if you love Jesus!” bumper sticker?

If the subtle message of Calvin and Hobbes doesn’t fit on t-shirts, bumper stickers, and bedsheets, then it seems unlikely that the message of Christ does. That the almighty and entirely holy God would undertake the costly work of reconciling sinners to himself — that one of the Trinity died on the cross for us and our salvation — that the Spirit would be poured out and dwell in a created temple without consuming it — who is sufficient for these things? If we can easily rule out some media as being inadequate for containing this message, is it possible to identify any medium that could be adequate?

Keith Green concluded his rant with, “I think the world is completely sick to its stomach with our sayings and ‘witnessing tools.’ It’s time for us to be expressing the truth with our lives, and then the whole truth of God with our lips!”

The only appropriate media for communicating the gospel are lives and words. Christians have to wrap themselves up in the good news of Jesus Christ, live that mystery together in the fellowship of the church, and give the world something worth seeing. And they have to explain it in the form of sound doctrine, explaining biblical truth, making the message clear as only words can. There is a strong temptation these days to seek refuge in the claim that “my life is my testimony,” as if a set of behaviors could take the place of preaching, teaching, witnessing, and the host of other verbal interactions the New Testament is about. But the gospel is wordy, just as it is lifey. It just isn’t very bumper stickery.

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Watterson was worried that the very existence of these products would sap the power from the real thing; that a million Calvin window decals would make the Calvin comic strip harder to read. It’s possible that too many ineffective Jesus reminders all over the place might have a degrading effect on our ability to read Jesus where he really is. The only way to know if that’s the case is to know our message as well as Watterson knew his. Watterson could spot a deviation from the integrity and fullness of the Calvin and Hobbes mystique in an instant. Do modern Christians have senses so well trained, or a grasp of the gospel message so acute, that we can spot such deviations?

(more)

Lewis and St. Maximus the Confessor

By Mark Krause
The Right House

What Lewis is so darn good at, is translating his knowledge of old books, and in particular the deeper, ancient truths of the Christian faith, into literary tidbits that the non philosophically inclined can grasp ahold of. I find this most of all in his great work the "Chronicles of Narnia." For instance, if one cares to notice, his view of the atonement in the first book is very reflective of the so called "ransom theory," found in the Fathers. It doesn't line up nicely at all with the innovative (that word is not a compliment when I use it about theology generally) substitionary or penal substition views of the atonement as articulated respectively by Anselm and the reformers.
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For St. Maximus, it is necessary to tame all the passions and put them in subjection to our reason so that the whole person can be saved, because his anthropology was such that it did not merely place sole importance on the reason, but the complete unified human being. Christ saves all of us by uniting all of human nature to himself, and we must participate in that by taming the passions to bring them in subjection to Christ. Our passions are not evil because human nature is inherently good. Sure we inherit a corruption, but this is simply a dissordering of the inherently good components that make up human nature. Evil, or sin is in the use. Sin is personal not natural. We cannot attribute evil to any passion, but merely evil in our indulging that passion outside of its proper context, which is ultimately subjection to Christ.

Now to tie this in with Lewis, we must go to the scene in "Prince Caspian," the second Narnia book, where we see Bacchus dancing in Aslan's camp with the nymphs and the children. Now, when many people read this in the story they were horrified because of the horrorble obscentiy of Bacchic worship in ancient Greece. However, Lewis was really, I would argue, trying to show the same truth as Maximus. Bacchus is not inerently evil, because, as I mentioned, sin is in the use. Sin is personal, not natural. What we see here is the affirmation of the inherent goodness of Bacchus when he is put in subjection to Aslan, the Christ figure. So we see that Lewis seems to again be placing a complex theological truth, in an easier to swallow literary dose. This is Lewis' genius. (more)

The Folly of Biblical Ignorance Since the Bible Is a Great Book

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

There is evidently something about the Bible that irritates a few Americans the way the sight of a stake disturbs a vampire.
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Four Reasons for Weird Anger

Problem 1. The “Science-Guy”

There is always the “science-guy” (it is almost always a guy) who thinks nobody should waste their time reading any old book since only science contains knowledge. Give them a list of great books and they will complain that the latest technical journal article in their sub-field of physics is not there. The Bible makes them the most angry, because defenders of it (some ill advised) have been the least eager to leave all knowledge to the white jacket priesthood in the laboratories.

These are the people who think Richard Dawkins has a clue about philosophy of science.

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Their souls are dead to the importance of the human things (literature and art) as they have been taught to reduce humans to computers made out meat.

This is the kind of person who thinks any reference to the soul is “magical” thinking or that the goal of an educated man is to become a great fact-grinding machine.

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Whatever the merits of philosophical naturalism (and it has merits), anybody who cannot learn from Bach, Spencer, or Shakespeare what it means to be human has confused a good thing (science) for the only good thing.

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Problem 2. Understandable Reaction to an Error By Some Christians

The second common reaction is the fault of some Christians. Since a few Christians use the Bible in conversation with non-Christians in a way that assumes non-Christians should simply fall down and repent on hearing the Bible, non-Christians are turned off by any mention of the Bible.

Use of the Bible in public discourse should not be a conversation stopper, but a wise place to begin. Who wants to stop a dialog anyway? Certainly not a traditional Christian! We love dialog.

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Problem 3. Some People Cannot Read the Bible Well

There a few sad souls that take hard passages in the Bible and allow them to so consume their understanding of this highly complex book that they can no longer get anything else out of it.

I have known people so hung up on the interesting question of how Genesis relates to Darwin that they cannot get beyond that or ever give the topic a rest to learn other things from the book.

Joseph and his brothers? They cannot stop talking about days in Genesis.

Even more absurd, given the expansiveness of the text, is the person so worried about working out the chronology of the kings of Judah that they cannot pause to hear the central message in the Book about the King of Kings.

There is another kind of chronic misreading that leads to ignorant disrespect for the Bible.

Some people believe the Bible says things it doesn’t or read it woodenly. They forget the Bible is a collection of books and has to be approached that way. They don’t check context or try to understand what the author might be doing.

My favorite example of this is the confused person who worries notices that “back to back” verses in Proverbs say to answer a fool and to not answer a fool in his folly.

Isn’t that a contradiction? The writer of Proverbs must have been really foolish not to have noticed that he contradicted himself in two parallel lines!

Of course that could be true, but isn’t it more likely that the editor of Proverbs is making a point about there being no way to safely deal with a fool? I wonder sometimes if such readers are capable of catching written irony or humor.

Problem 4. Isn't quoting any old book as an authority a bad argument?

Finally, there are a few people who don’t understand the difference between the legitimate use of authority and the logical fallacy of the “false appeal to authority.” They think any helpful quotation from any book (but especially the Bible) must be fallacious.

It is not bad to quote experts or people who put complex ideas in pithy ways!

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We trust (as we should) to authorities. Our knowledge, such as it is, is derived from them. These recognized authorities give us “operating assumptions.” When we want to challenge the authorities (as we sometimes should), they still the background where we begin to do our Socratic work.

Cultures work like people in this respect. There are certain formative ideas that are at the bottom of societies that certainly can be challenged, but usually are not. Most of us are not equipped to sensibly challenge those assumptions most of the time and have to live as if they are true.

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Authority is good and useful in normal life (though it can be dangerous). The trick is in finding good, culturally accepted, general authorities.

The “false appeal to authority” is (generally) an inappropriate reliance on an authority or an appeal to a questionable authority. The problem is determining when an authority is being relied on “inappropriately” or is “questionable.”

There is an easy example of the false appeal to authority in the tendency to think any authority outside of “science” lacks weight. Many of us wait for “science” (really certain scientists) to pronounce on an ethical topic, when science is perfectly incompetent (on all but the most extreme view of science) to show us how we SHOULD live.

Science might tell us how we DO live. Science might tell us what actions will lead to certain outcomes, but science alone can never tell us which outcomes humankind should prefer.

Unless scientism is shown to be true, a scientist cannot use his authority (as a scientist) to make pronouncements on ethics.

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Now of course I personally believe more than this about the Bible. I accept, based on reason and experience, that the Bible is the written Word of God.

If this is true, it would simply be stupid of me to ignore God’s opinion. I don’t need any other argument to take the Bible seriously. (Of course, coming to that conclusion took time and was much more difficult for me.)

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In other words, the Bible is a (generally) useful authority that can be a good place for Western people to start a discussion about how we should live. (For Christians it will frame that continuing discussion inside the Church, since we have come, through discussion, to stronger conclusions about it.)

Five Non-Religious Reasons for Thinking the Bible is a Very Great Book

First, the Bible has shaped and continues to shape foundational social assumptions in the United States.

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Second, the Bible tells a compelling story (at least in places) that rings true to human experience. Especially in the context of the life of Jesus, this story can make complex issues and propositions “three dimensional” for us.

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Third, the Bible is very likely to endure globally.

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Fourth, the Bible (whether uniquely or not) contains many wise sayings and teachings.

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Finally, the Bible is a sublimely beautiful work of art.

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Ignorance of the Bible or undue resistance to its obvious importance as (at least) a highly influential book is too often bigotry, ignorance, and anti-intellectualism tricked out as skepticism. (more)

On Growing Old: Lines You Love

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

I was marveling at this fact to Hope, still the Fairest Flower in All Christendom, when she asked me what I expected. Here is roughly what my wise woman said:

“Growing old is what people do. You did not,” she pointed out, “do so well as a young man. You have done much better in middle age. We will,” she said with confidence, “grow old together and do better still.”

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Some of these shallow lines were put there by laughing with our children. The death of our baby, Edmund Saint John, contributed to them in a harsher way. I know, God have mercy, that some are there through my selfishness. (more)

America the Murderous

By Mark D. Tooley
FrontPage Magazine

The Religious Left, in its historical commemorations, rarely if ever recalls the great holocausts committed by the totalitarian tyrants of the 20th century. The tens of millions slain by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Tojo, not to mention the hundreds of thousands killed by Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il Sung, among others, never have reached a high level of importance.

But never do the anniversaries of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and August 9, go by that the Religious Left does not mournfully don its sack cloth and ashes to atone for the mass murders purportedly committed by a vengeful United States.

The National Religious Partnership on the Nuclear Weapons is now the main interfaith apologist for America's crimes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Founded by the late preacher-activist William Sloane Coffin, its members include the National Council of Churches, the Islamic Society of North America, Pax Christi, Sojourners, the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, the Episcopal Church, the American Baptist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Quakers.
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In the Religious Left's mythology, the U.S. willfully murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, rejecting numerous less destructive alternatives. The mythology asserts that Japan would have surrendered anyway. But the imperialist U.S., already anxious to stoke the fires of Cold War, wanted to intimidate the Soviets by demonstrating the first atomic weapons. Or, more benignly, the U.S. simply valued the lives of its military personnel more than it did Japanese civilians.

The mythology rests on the Religious Left's skewed assumption that the world is by nature a place of peaceful indigenous peoples, disrupted only by the violence of oppressive systems primarily originating out of Western Civilization: patriarchy, capitalism, militarism, imperialism and racism. None of the various Hiroshima/Nagasaki litanies focus on the years of vicious imperial expansion by the Japanese military junta; its slaughter and brutalization of millions of fellow Asians; and its plans to enslave the populations of the neighbors it invaded under its benignly named "Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere;" justified by the extreme racist chauvinism of Japanese Shintoism and worship of the Emperor; and culminating in the surprise attacks on American and British possessions on December 7, 1941.
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Thanks to the war that Japan's fascists had created and would not end, the U.S. decision makers in the Summer of 1945 had no pleasant options that would result in anything less than hundreds of thousands dead. The planned U.S. military invasion of Japan would have entailed tens and likely hundreds of thousands of dead American soldiers, sailors and airmen. It also would have assured the deaths of hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of not only Japanese military personnel but also civilians, all of whom were expected actively to resist the first ever military invasion of the Japanese homeland. Little Japanese children were trained to tie bombs onto their backs and crawl under American tanks. Japan's warlords, not unlike Hitler, thought their honor required national suicide before surrender.
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The lives of America, British, Canadian and Australian military personnel, as agents of Western imperialism, of course are not important to the Religious Left. But why are the lives of millions of Asians oppressed and killed by the Japanese occupiers not worthy of mention in any of the somber remembrances?

A Hiroshima/Nagasaki litany from the United Church of Christ asks God to forgive America "for being a nation that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent children, women and men."
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After Imperial Japan had killed tens of millions throughout Asia and the Pacific, starting with its invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had mercifully ended the nightmare.

At the dignified surrender ceremony on the U.S. Missouri on September 2, 1945, Douglas MacArthur showed more theological acumen than any of the Religious Left's painful remembrance liturgies:

"As I look back on the long tortuous trail from those grim days of Bataan and Corregidor, when an entire world lived in fear, when democracy was on the defensive everywhere, when modern civilization trembled in the balance, I thank a merciful God that He has given us the faith, the courage, and the power from which to mold victory. We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war." (more)

Help! My Student is Starting College! What Should I Read?

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Here are seven good reads that can help any parent to become one of the men of Issachar, men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do:

First, read Paul Johnson’s Birth of the Modern to find out how we got into this mess. (If history is not for you, then try Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (the screen crawl describing the birth of the modern)).

Second, read Phillip E. Johnson’s (no relation to Paul) most important book: Reason in the Balance. Johnson outlines the disastrous situation in education and proposes what should be done about it. Phil Johnson was influential in setting up the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University.

Third, read the most important essay of the twentieth century C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man Lewis attacks educators who teach children to depart from “the Way” of civilized humans of all eras.

Fourth, in a culture that has confused erotica with romance read A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken. Vanauken learns that the even the best romance cannot compete with the Love for which all earthly affection is just a sign.

Fifth, the best quick and up to date guide to the “cultural captivity” of Christianity is by Torrey Visiting Faculty member Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth.

Sixth, an important book on the state of Christianity and what should be done about it is J.P. Moreland’s Kingdom Triangle.

Finally, do read C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength a nearly prophetic novel about what can go wrong not just in education but in a scientific culture that forgets God.

Having limited myself to fairly contemporary books, I cannot emphasize enough the need for all of us who are of that parental age to reread the classics of our own college years. Get Dante out and work your way back through his journey. Read Republic. Netflix some Shakespeare. Grow mentally with your college age student. You will find the life experience you have gained over the years give you new insight into the classics! (more)

What Really Buys Happiness?

By Arthur C. Brooks
City Journal

Not income equality, but mobility and opportunity

The United States is a rich nation getting richer. According to the U.S. Census, between 1993 and 2003 the average inflation-adjusted income in the top quintile of American earners increased 22 percent. But prosperity didn’t end with the top earners: those in the middle quintile saw their incomes rise 17 percent, on average, while the bottom quintile enjoyed a 13 percent increase. This isn’t a short-term phenomenon, either. In the 30 years leading up to 2003, top-quintile earners saw their real incomes increase by two-thirds, versus a quarter for those in the middle quintile and a fifth among the bottom earners.
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Edwards is one of a group of liberal politicians, policymakers, and social activists who want to reduce economic inequality through greater taxation and redistribution of wealth. And their plan draws inspiration from a particular academic theory: that inequality is socially destructive because it makes people miserable. As a scholar working in the field of public policy, I have long witnessed hand-wringing about the alleged connection between inequality and unhappiness. What first made me doubt this prevailing view was not some new scholarly study but rather that when I questioned actual human beings about it, few expressed any shock and outrage at the enormous wealth of software moguls and CEOs. On the contrary, they tended to hope that their kids might become the next Bill Gates.

Were these people somehow unrepresentative of America? Or was the academic consensus wrong? I set out to discover which it was. What I found was that economic inequality doesn’t frustrate Americans at all. It is, rather, the perceived lack of economic opportunity that makes us unhappy. To focus our policies on inequality, instead of opportunity, is to make a grave error—one that will worsen the very problem we seek to solve and make us generally unhappier to boot.

The egalitarians’ argument usually starts with the assertion that prosperity is all relative. So long as we are above the level of basic subsistence, they say, we care more about our financial position relative to others than about our absolute income. Experimental evidence, they continue, supports this claim. In one study, two-thirds of subjects said that they would be happier at a company where they earned $33,000 while their colleagues earned $30,000 than at one where they earned $35,000 while their colleagues earned $38,000. In another, 56 percent of participants chose a job paying $50,000 per year while everyone else earned $25,000, rather than a job paying $100,000 per year while others made $200,000—forgoing $50,000 per year simply to maintain a position of relative affluence. In a world of economic inequality, the egalitarians point out, some people have less than others—and as these studies seem to show, that very fact will make them unhappy, even if they are suffering no actual deprivation. The solution to their unhappiness is to impose greater economic equality.

And the way to do that, of course, is to tax the haves and redistribute their income to the have-nots. Cornell economist Robert Frank, a major critic of income inequality, adds that such a move might not make the rich as unhappy as you’d think, since they tend to use their income on things they don’t really want or need. “We could spend roughly one-third less on consumption,” Frank writes, “and suffer no significant reduction in satisfaction.” Some egalitarians even make the astounding argument that we should tax the economically successful in order to discourage them from working, since their work will only make them richer and thus sadden the less successful. According to British economist Richard Layard, “If we make taxes commensurate to the damage that an individual does to others when he earns more”—the damage to others’ happiness, that is—“then he will only work harder if there is a true net benefit to society as a whole. It is efficient to discourage work effort that makes society worse off.” Work, according to this postmodern argument—contrary to millennia of moral teaching—is no different from a destructive vice like tobacco, which governments sometimes tax in order to discourage people from smoking.

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But there is another, more fundamental, reason that the arguments linking economic inequality to unhappiness are mistaken. If the egalitarians are right, then average happiness levels should be falling. But they aren’t. The GSS shows that in 1972, 30 percent of the population said that they were “very happy” with their lives; in 1982, 31 percent; in 1993, 32 percent; in 2004, 31 percent. In other words, no significant change in reported happiness occurred—even as income inequality increased by nearly half. Happiness levels have certainly shown some fluctuations over the last three decades, but income inequality explains none of them.

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But happiness does rise if people believe that their families have a chance of improving their standard of living. That belief is worth 12 percentage points in the likelihood of being “very happy.” The GSS asked respondents, “The way things are in America, people like me and my family have a good chance of improving our standard of living—do you agree or disagree?” Those who agreed were 44 percent more likely than those who disagreed to say that they were “very happy,” 40 percent less likely to say that they felt “no good at all” at times, and 20 percent less likely to say that they felt like failures. In other words, those who don’t believe in economic mobility—for themselves or for others—are not as happy as those who do.

This important fact is another reason that the two studies cited above don’t show what the egalitarians think they do: they posit a static universe, a fictional place where incomes don’t change. Perhaps in a world where you have no opportunity for advancement, the most important thing about your income really is how it measures up to other people’s. But in the real world, our attitude about the future matters a great deal. In the 1990s, economist Andrew Clark found that the happiness of British workers actually rose as their reference group’s average income rose relative to their own income—because they saw that rise as evidence of what they themselves could achieve. People take the average income in their group as a measure of their own potential. Rising inequality can even raise our happiness by demonstrating the success that our future may hold.

Believing in mobility helps make people happy, then. But does mobility actually exist in the United States? The Left doesn’t think so. Liberals, including rich liberals, are far less likely than conservatives to see a better future for people who work hard. Just 26 percent of liberals with incomes above the national average believe that there’s a lot of upward income mobility in America, versus 48 percent of conservatives with below-average incomes. And 90 percent of the poorer conservatives said that hard work and perseverance could overcome disadvantage, versus 65 percent of the richer liberals. If a liberal and a conservative are exactly identical in income, education, sex, family situation, and race, the liberal will still be 20 percentage points less likely than the conservative to say that hard work leads to success for the disadvantaged.

It is small wonder, then, that conservatives tend to be happier than liberals today. The 2004 GSS showed that 44 percent of people who identified themselves as “conservative” or “extremely conservative” were “very happy” about their lives; only 25 percent of self-identified liberals or extreme liberals gave that response. Conservatives believe that they live in a more promising country than liberals do, and that makes them happier.

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And those left behind, it’s important to note, will almost certainly not become happier if we redistribute more income. Indeed, they will probably become less happy. Policies designed to lower economic inequality tend to change the incentives of both the haves and the have-nots in a way that particularly harms the have-nots. Reductions in the incentives to prosper mean fewer jobs created, less economic growth, less in tax revenues, and less charitable giving—all to the detriment of those left behind. And redistribution can, as the American welfare system has shown, turn beneficiaries into demoralized long-term dependents. As Irving Kristol put it three years before the federal welfare reform of 1996, “The problem with our current welfare programs is not that they are costly—which they are—but that they have such perverse consequences for people they are supposed to benefit.”

Further, policies to redress economic inequality hardly affect true inequality at all. Policymakers and economists rarely denounce the scandal of inequality in work effort, creativity, talent, or enthusiasm. We almost never hear about the outrage that is America’s inequality in leisure time, love, faith, or fun—even though these are things that most of us value more than money. To believe that we can redress inequality in our society by moving cash around is to have a materialistic, mechanistic, and totally unrealistic understanding of the resources that we truly care about.

Finally, arguments against inequality legitimize envy. Americans may indeed have strong concerns about their relative incomes and may seek status as reflected in their economic circumstances. But to base our policies on the anxieties of those at the back of the status race is to bow before Invidia. A deadly sin is not, in my view, a smart blueprint for policymaking.

A more accurate vision of America sees a land of both inequality and opportunity, in which hard work and perseverance are the keys to jumping from the ranks of the have-nots to those of the haves. If we can solve problems of absolute deprivation, such as hunger and homelessness, then rewarding hard work will continue to serve as a positive stimulant to achievement. Redistribution and taxation, beyond what’s necessary to pay for key services, weaken America’s willingness and ability to thrive.

This vision promotes policies focused not on wiping out economic inequality, but rather on enhancing economic mobility. They include improving educational opportunities, aggressively addressing cultural impediments to success, enhancing the fluidity of labor markets, searching for ways to include all citizens in America’s investing revolution, and protecting the climate of American entrepreneurship. (more)

Religion and the Arts in America

By Camille Paglia
Arion

A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts. While leading conservative voices defend the traditional Anglo-American literary canon, which has been under challenge and in flux for forty years, American conservatives on the whole, outside of the New Criterion magazine, have shown little interest in the arts, except to promulgate a didactic theory of art as moral improvement that was discarded with the Victorian era at the birth of modernism. Liberals, on the other hand, have been too content with the high visibility of the arts in metropolitan centers, which comprise only a fraction of America. Furthermore, liberals have been complacent about the viability of secular humanism as a sustaining creed for the young. And liberals have done little to reverse the scandalous decline in urban public education or to protest the crazed system of our grotesquely overpriced, cafeteria-style higher education, which for thirty years was infested by sterile and now fading poststructuralism and postmodernism. The state of the humanities in the US can be measured by present achievement: would anyone seriously argue that the fine arts or even popular culture is enjoying a period of high originality and creativity? American genius currently resides in technology and design. The younger generation, with its mastery of video games and its facility for ever-evolving gadgetry like video cell phones and iPods, has massively shifted to the Web for information and entertainment.

I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion. Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat. But based on my college experiences in the 1960s, when interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was intense, I have been calling for nearly two decades for massive educational reform that would put the study of comparative religion at the center of the university curriculum. Though I shared the exasperation of my generation with the moralism and prudery of organized religion, I view each world religion, including Judeo-Christianity and Islam, as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe. Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West's foundational texts, is dangerously waning among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics (as has happened in the US over the past twenty years), all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.

The position of the fine arts in America has rarely been secure. This is a practical, commercial nation where the arts have often been seen as wasteful, frivolous, or unmanly. In Europe, the arts are heavily subsidized by the government because art literally embodies the history of the people and the nation, whose roots are pre-modern and in some cases ancient. Even in the old Soviet Union, the Communist regime supported classical ballet. America is relatively young, and it has never had an aristocracy—the elite class that typically commissions the fine arts and dictates taste. In Europe, the Catholic Church was also a major patron of the arts from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. Partly because of the omnipresent Greco-Roman heritage, furthermore, continental European attitudes toward nudity in art are far more relaxed. In Europe, voluptuous nudes in painting and sculpture and on public buildings, fountains, and bridges are a mundane fact of life.

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The Puritans who arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century brought with them the Calvinist hostility or indifference to the visual arts. A motivating principle of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation was its correction of Roman Catholicism's heavy use of images in medieval churches—in statues, paintings, and stained-glass windows. The Protestant reformers reasserted the Ten Commandments' ban on graven images, idolatrous objects that seduce the soul away from the immaterial divine. The Puritans, a separatist sect that seceded from the too–Catholic Church of England, followed the Reformation imperative of putting the Bible at the center of their faith. Through direct study of the Bible, made possible by Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, believers opened a personal dialogue with God. This focus on text and close reading helped inspire the American literary tradition. Both poetry and prose, in the form of diaries, were stimulated by the Puritan practice of introspection: a Puritan had to constantly scrutinize his or her conscience and look for God's hand in the common and uncommon events of life. Oratory, embodied in Sunday sermons, was very strong. Literary historian Perry Miller identified the jeremiad or hellfire sermon as an innately American form, the most famous example of which is Jonathan Edwards' sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which was delivered in Connecticut in 1741 during the religious revival called the Great Awakening. This enthusiastic style of denunciation and call to repentance can still be heard on evangelical television programs, and it is echoed in the fulminations of politically conservative talk radio (which I have been listening to with alternating admiration and consternation for over fifteen years).

The visual arts, on the other hand, were neglected and suppressed under the Puritans. The Puritan suspicion of ornamentation is symbolized in the sober black dress of the Pilgrim Fathers depicted every year in the Thanksgiving decorations of American schools and shops. The Puritans' attitude toward art was conditioned by utilitarian principles of frugality and propriety: art had no inherent purpose except as entertainment, a distraction from duty and ethical action. The Puritans did appreciate beauty in nature, which was “read” like a book for signs of God's providence. The social environment in England from which the Puritans had emigrated to America (either directly or indirectly via the Netherlands ) was overtly iconoclastic. Destruction of church art was massive during the Reformation in Switzerland and Germany as well as England, where destruction of churches, priories, and abbeys followed Henry VIII's severance of the English church from control by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the 1530s. Crowds smashed medieval stained-glass windows and intricately carved wooden altar screens and decapitated the statues of saints carved on church facades. Walls were whitewashed to cover sacred murals. Politically incited damage to churches was even more severe during the English Civil Wars (1642–51), when Puritan soldiers dispatched by Parliament attacked even the cathedral at Canterbury, which Richard Culmer, Cromwell's general and the leader of the ravagers, called “a stable for idols.” Puritan iconoclasm was a pointed contrast to the image mania of the contemporary Counter-Reformation, the Vatican's campaign to defeat Protestantism that would fill Southern Europe with grandiose Baroque art.

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The Protestant reformers were bitterly split, however, over the issue of music in church. Luther encouraged the composition of new hymns and was the author of a famous one—“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (“Ein' Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott”). In contrast, John Calvin, the father of American Puritanism, maintained that only the word of God should be heard in church; hence songs had to strictly follow the biblical psalms. Like his fellow reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, Calvin opposed the use of organs or any instruments in church: organs were systematically destroyed by Protestant radicals. Furthermore, Calvin condemned the complex polyphonic music endorsed by the more artistic Luther. Calvin rejected harmony or part-singing, so that the Holy Scripture could be heard with perfect clarity. Thus the American style of Protestant church song, based on Calvin's principles, was simple, slow, serious, and cast in unaccompanied unison. That intense, focused group sound has descended through the centuries and can be heard in the majestic hymns that have been adopted as stirring anthems by American civil rights groups, such as “Amazing Grace” and “We Shall Overcome.”

The Quakers, who were pivotal to the abolitionist movement against slavery, were even more restrictive about such matters: they frowned on music altogether, even at home, because they believed it encouraged thoughtlessness and frivolity. But the German and Dutch who emigrated to America from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries held the more expansive Lutheran view of church music. The German influence was especially strong in Philadelphia, to which German Pietists imported a church organ in 1694. By the start of the nineteenth century, hymn writing exploded in America. Over the next hundred years, hymns of tremendous quality poured out from both men and women writers. In many cases, they were simply lyrics—pure poetry that was attached to old melodies. A famous example from the Civil War is Julia Ward Howe's “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which Howe wrote overnight in a fever of inspiration after visiting a Union Army camp near Washington, where she heard the soldiers singing “John Brown's Body,” a tribute to the executed abolitionist rebel. Several other songs would become political hymns to the nation, such as “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” written in 1832 by a Baptist minister, Samuel Francis Smith, and “America the Beautiful,” a lyric written by Katharine Lee Bates, a native of Massachusetts whose father was a Congregationalist pastor. Bates saw the Rockies for the first time when she taught here at Colorado College in 1893. She wrote “America the Beautiful” after a wagon trip to the top of Pike's Peak. When it was published in 1899, it became instantly famous and has often been described as America's true national anthem. The huge nineteenth-century corpus of Protestant songs became part of common American culture for people of all faiths—thus the tragic power of that final scene on the sinking Titanic in 1912, when the ship's band struck up the hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Hymnody should be viewed as a genre of the fine arts and be added to the basic college curriculum. One of the most brilliant products of American creative imagination, hym­nody has had a massive global impact through popular music. Wherever rock 'n' roll is played, a shadow of its gospel roots remains. Rock, which emerged in the 1950s from urban black rhythm and blues of the late 1940s, had several sources, including percussive West African poly­rhythms and British and Scots-Irish folk ballads. But a principal influence was the ecstatic, prophesying, body-shaking style of congregational singing in the camp meetings of religious revivalists from the late eighteenth century on. All gospel music, including Negro spirituals, descends from those extravaganzas, which drew thousands of people to open-air worship services in woods and groves.

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The brilliant folk hymns of nineteenth-century camp meetings were inherited by modern revivals, such as the Billy Graham Crusade. In popular music, the spasmodic undulations and ecstatic cries of camp-meeting worshippers were borrowed by performers like Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and the late, great James Brown, whose career began in gospel and who became the “godfather of soul” as well as of funk, reggae, and rap. Gospel music, passionate and histrionic, with its electrifying dynamics, is America 's grand opera. The omnipresence of gospel here partly explains the weakness of rock music composed in other nations—except where there has been direct influence by American rhythm and blues, as in Great Britain and Australia. The continuing impact of gospel music on young African Americans in church may also account for the current greater vitality of hip hop as opposed to hard rock, which has been in creative crisis for well over a decade.

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Catholic immigration in the nineteenth century brought a radically different aesthetic to church architecture and decor. The typical American church had been in the Protestant plain style, white and rectangular with a steeple that formed the picturesque apex of countless villages—a design bequeathed by the British architects Sir Christopher Wren and James Gibbs. Originally, American churches were often simply a meeting house (a word still retained in Quaker practice). Also used for local government, the meeting house was a boxy space with exposed timbers and benches but no ornamentation—a template that was borrowed by town halls across the nation. Catholic taste was far more lavish. The influx of Irish immigrants in the 1830s and '40s—which caused anti-Catholic violence (including the burning of churches in Philadelphia)—was soon registered in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral, designed by James Renwick and constructed from 1850 to 1877. With its soaring spires, delicate stone­work, and stained-glass windows, it exemplified the current Gothic Revival—a grand style that was also adopted by Episcopalian churches in America.

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Catholic surveillance of American public life would come with the rise of Hollywood. At the start of the studio era, movies were still viewed as vulgar. In the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, there was a new rule-breaking energy and sexual adventurism in urban areas. Responding to audience demand, movies began pushing the limits with bare flesh and sexual innuendo. Small communities across the US felt they were being invaded by an alien cultural force. Resistance came from a collaboration between the Catholic Church and local Protestant women's groups, speaking from the perspective of concerned mothers. There were tinges of anti-Semitism in this protest, because so many of Hollywood's early producers and financiers were Jewish. A series of guidelines was instituted in moviemaking throughout the 1920s, but compliance remained uneven. The Motion Picture Production Code, written by a Jesuit priest, was adopted by Hollywood in 1930 but laxly enforced by the Hays Office. Finally, in 1933, a conference of US bishops created the Catholic League of Decency (later renamed the National League of Decency) and threatened a nationwide boycott. Hollywood responded by appointing a tough Irish Catholic, Joseph Ignatius Breen, to administer the Code, which he did through the Breen Office for the next twenty years. The Code, which wasn't officially abandoned until 1967, required scripts to follow a moral formula: crime had to be punished and marriage respected, with homosexuality and miscegenation forbidden.

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As avant-garde modernism triumphed in the first half of the twentieth century, it was only the movies that addressed or expressed the religious convictions of the mass audience. With few exceptions, most modern artists and intellectuals were agnostics or atheists, above all in Europe, where anti-clericalism has raged since the Enlightenment. In its search for ticket sales, Hollywood returned again and again to the spectacular bible epic, one of my favorite genres. Cecil B. DeMille, for example, made The Ten Commandments twice, in 1923 as a silent film and then as a wide-screen Technicolor extravaganza released in 1956. The latter is regularly broadcast on religious holidays and remains a masterpiece of heroic narrative and archaeological recreation of upper-class Egyptian life. The best-selling American religious novel of the nineteenth century was General Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, published in 1880 and widely imitated. Ben-Hur was also made into two films, the first a 1925 silent and the second yet another wide-screen masterpiece, released in 1959. The dynamic star of both The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur was Charlton Heston, who afterward became a conservative activist and president of the National Rifle Association.

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To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.

Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture. (more)