Advance Liberty, Overturn Roe!

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Every aborted baby looks alike, but every child allowed to live becomes absolutely unique. Abortion crushes liberty for the sake of a single choice—it ends possibility with the cruel actuality of murder.

Roe should be overturned because by judicial fiat it hallows killing the innocent as part of our Constitution. In a just society there can be no right to do evil. Not every evil should be illegal, but no evil action should be hallowed as a constitutional right.

It took years and much horror to remove slavery, another soul crushing immorality, from the Constitution, but at least the Founders authored this bad law. The court imposed a “culture of death,” to borrow a phrase from John Paul the Great, on our nation, contrary to our oldest traditions, our best moral impulses, and the gradual expansion of liberty and justice to all Americans.

Liberty always loses when the weak lose rights for the benefit of the stronger.

Though few wish their children to grow up to be abortionists, abortion gains some social acceptability because it became associated with women’s rights. Women should have power over their own bodies. Women often face cultural prejudices, stereotypes, and barriers based on sex. Abortion is presented as a tool for social equality.

Putting roses on the table while you serve a fetid meal will not improve the taste, though it might distract the guests for a time. Associating the moral good of women’s civil equality with abortion does not change the immorality of abortion. If anything, it harms the good cause by falsely associating it in the public mind with the moral evil.

The right to control over one’s own body ends at the other person’s body. Here, advances in technology have given Americans a window on the womb and knowledge which the authors of Roe did not have. The unborn child is not merely an organ of the mother’s body. Science is at war with the reasoning of Roe. The unborn child is genetically unique from the moment of conception.

Nor does history suggest that social equality for a group is best gained by suppressing a different group. When the state is given power to declare one group of humans unequal before the bar of justice, it does not restrain itself for long. Poor whites in the old South tried to advance by supporting the oppression of African-Americans. This strategy did not secure what they sought and made them complicit in a great evil.

Of course, abortion will not end if it is illegal. Other forms of killing continue though they have remained illegal for the decades that the failed abortion experiment has continued. If abortion is the taking of innocent human life, then making it safe should not be a goal of government.

Some assert that killing a baby is no worse than refusing to give a family a government welfare check. Being born into poverty is not good because it limits possibilities, but being killed is a good deal more limiting. Abraham Lincoln managed to overcome “regressive” social welfare policies and rise from poverty to the White House, but an aborted Lincoln would have never freed the slaves and saved the Union.

Asking us to wait for some Utopia where every child is born into “better” conditions is an excuse to tolerate evil. Nobody is sure of the best way to end poverty, or if poverty can even be ended, in a society that is otherwise livable.

Liberals and conservatives don’t take a different moral position: both think it wrong when children are born into stifling poverty. They disagree about what to do about it. The argument is about the best and appropriate means to an ideal end on which all agree.

The abortion issue is different. The disagreement is more fundamental. Pro-life voters (a group including both liberals and conservatives) wish to protect the unborn while those in favor of Roe do not. Pro-Roe voters may personally be opposed to abortion, but they must not think the unborn child is fully human or their failure to grant her the right to life is unconscionable.

Given this fact, why then should abortion regulations be left to the states?

There is a good pragmatic reason and also a reason related to our form of government.

Pragmatically it recognizes that only a “states-rights” solution will allow any civil progress on this issue in the immediate future. Effectively ending abortion in states with a pro-life consensus, such as Louisiana or Utah, will be better than the current situation. There is no reason Utah should be forced to have the same abortion policies as California.

As a federalist, I am also opposed to allowing the government in Washington the last word on everything of importance. The expansion of federal power at the expense of the states is another evil of the last fifty years of court decisions. Each state has different laws regarding the definition of murder and manslaughter. Each state is allowed different penalties regarding such crimes. There is no reason to make abortion a “federal” crime and there are good reasons for a federalist to oppose it.

When Roe is overturned, God willing, the battle for human rights will continue. It will be fought out in each of the fifty states. Legal abortion will be opposed by a broad coalition of secular and religious Americans.

I have confidence that in such a fight the American people will see the wisdom of Ronald Reagan who said: “Abortion concerns not just the unborn child, it concerns every one of us… We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life—the unborn—without diminishing the value of all human life.”

Jesus The Logician

By Dallas Willard

ABSTRACT: In understanding how discipleship to Jesus Christ works, a major issue is how he automatically presents himself to our minds. It is characteristic of most 20th century Christians that he does not automatically come to mind as one of great intellectual power: as Lord of universities and research institutes, of the creative disciplines and scholarship. The Gospel accounts of how he actually worked, however, challenge this intellectually marginal image of him and help us to see him at home in the best of academic and scholarly settings of today, where many of us are called to be his apprentices.

***

Few today will have seen the words "Jesus" and "logician" put together to form a phrase or sentence, unless it would be to deny any connection between them at all. The phrase "Jesus the logician" is not ungrammatical, any more than is "Jesus the carpenter." But it 'feels' upon first encounter to be something like a category mistake or error in logical type, such as "Purple is asleep," or "More people live in the winter than in cities," or "Do you walk to work or carry your lunch?"

There is in our culture an uneasy relation between Jesus and intelligence, and I have actually heard Christians respond to my statement that Jesus is the most intelligent man who ever lived by saying that it is an oxymoron. Today we automatically position him away from (or even in opposition to) the intellect and intellectual life. Almost no one would consider him to be a thinker, addressing the same issues as, say, Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger or Wittgenstein, and with the same logical method.

Now this fact has important implications for how we today view his relationship to our world and our life--especially if our work happens to be that of art, thought, research or scholarship. How could he fit into such a line of work, and lead us in it, if he were logically obtuse? How could we be his disciples at our work, take him seriously as our teacher there, if when we enter our fields of technical or professional competence we must leave him at the door? Obviously some repositioning is in order, and it may be helped along simply by observing his use of logic and his obvious powers of logical thinking as manifested in the Gospels of the New Testament.

*

Now when we speak of "Jesus the logician" we do not, of course, mean that he developed theories of logic, as did, for example, Aristotle and Frege. No doubt he could have, if he is who Christians have taken him to be. He could have provided a Begriffsschrift, or a Principia Mathematica, or alternative axiomatizations of Modal Logic, or various completeness or incompleteness proofs for various 'languages'. (He is, presumably, responsible for the order that is represented through such efforts as these.)

He could have. Just as he could have handed Peter or John the formulas of Relativity Physics or the Plate Tectonic theory of the earth's crust, etc. He certainly could, that is, if he is indeed the one Christians have traditionally taken him to be. But he did not do it, and for reasons which are bound to seem pretty obvious to anyone who stops to think about it. But that, in any case, is not my subject here. When I speak of "Jesus the logician" I refer to his use of logical insights: to his mastery and employment of logical principles in his work as a teacher and public figure.

Now it is worth noting that those who do creative work or are experts in the field of logical theory are not necessarily more logical or more philosophically sound than those who do not. We might hope that they would be, but they may even be illogical in how they work out their own logical theories. For some reason great powers in theory do not seem to guarantee significantly greater accuracy in practice. Perhaps no person well informed about the history of thought will be surprised at this statement, but for most of us it needs to be emphasized. To have understanding of developed logical theory surely could help one to think logically, but it is not sufficient to guarantee logical thinking and except for certain rarified cases it is not even necessary. Logical insight rarely depends upon logical theory, though it does depend upon logical relations. The two primary logical relations are implication (logical entailment) and contradiction; and their role in standard forms of argument such as the Barbara Syllogism, Disjunctive Syllogism, Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens--and even in strategies such as reductio ad absurdum--can be fully appreciated, for practical purposes, without rising to the level of theoretical generalization at all.¹

To be logical no doubt does require an understanding of what implication and contradiction are, as well as the ability to recognize their presence or absence in obvious cases. But it also requires the will to be logical, and then certain personal qualities that make it possible and actual: qualities such as freedom from distraction, focussed attention on the meanings or ideas involved in talk and thought, devotion to truth, and willingness to follow the truth wherever it leads via logical relations. All of this in turn makes significant demands upon moral character. Not just on points such as resoluteness and courage, though those are required. A practicing hypocrite, for example, will not find a friend in logic, nor will liars, thieves, murderers and adulterers. They will be constantly alert to appearances and inferences that may logically implicate them in their wrong actions. Thus the literary and cinematic genre of mysteries is unthinkable without play on logical relations.

Those devoted to defending certain pet assumptions or practices come what may will also have to protect themselves from logic. All of this is, I believe, commonly recognized by thoughtful people. Less well understood is the fact that one can be logical only if one is committed to being logical as a fundamental value. One is not logical by chance, any more than one just happens to be moral. And, indeed, logical consistency is a significant factor in moral character. That is part of the reason why in an age that attacks morality, as ours does, the logical will also be demoted or set aside--as it now is.

Not only does Jesus not concentrate on logical theory, but he also does not spell out all the details of the logical structures he employs on particular occasions. His use of logic is always enthymemic, as is common to ordinary life and conversation. His points are, with respect to logical explicitness, understated and underdeveloped. The significance of the enthymeme is that it enlists the mind of the hearer or hearers from the inside, in a way that full and explicit statement of argument cannot do. Its rhetorical force is, accordingly, quite different from that of fully explicated argumentation, which tends to distance the hearer from the force of logic by locating it outside of his own mind.

Jesus' aim in utilizing logic is not to win battles, but to achieve understanding or insight in his hearers. This understanding only comes from the inside, from the understandings one already has. It seems to "well up from within" one. Thus he does not follow the logical method one often sees in Plato's dialogues, or the method that characterizes most teaching and writing today. That is, he does not try to make everything so explicit that the conclusion is forced down the throat of the hearer. Rather, he presents matters in such a way that those who wish to know can find their way to, can come to, the appropriate conclusion as something they have discovered--whether or not it is something they particularly care for.

"A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." Yes, and no doubt Jesus understood that. And so he typically aims at real inward change of view that would enable his hearers to become significantly different as people through the workings of their own intellect. They will have, unless they are strongly resistant to the point of blindness, the famous "eureka" experience, not the experience of being outdone or beaten down.

*

With these points in mind, let us look at some typical scenes from the Gospels: scenes that are of course quite familiar, but are now to be examined for the role that distinctively logical thinking plays in them.

(1). Consider Matthew 12:1-8. This contains a teaching about the ritual law: specifically about the regulations of the temple and the sabbath. Jesus and his disciples were walking through fields of grain--perhaps wheat or barley--on the sabbath, and they were stripping the grains from the stalks with their hands and eating them. The Pharisees accused them of breaking the law, of being wrongdoers. Jesus, in response, points out that there are conditions in which the ritual laws in question do not apply.

He brings up cases of this that the Pharisees already concede. One is the case (I Samuel 21:1-6) where David, running for his life, came to the place of worship and sacrifice supervised by Ahimelich the priest. He asked Ahimelich for food for himself and his companions, but the only food available was bread consecrated in the ritual of the offerings. This bread, as Jesus pointed out (Matthew 12:4), was forbidden to David by law, and was to be eaten (after the ritual) by priests alone. But Ahimelich gave it to David and his men to satisfy their hunger. Hunger as a human need, therefore, may justify doing what ritual law forbids.

Also, Jesus continues (second case), the priests every sabbath in their temple service do more work than sabbath regulations allow: "On the sabbath the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are innocent." (Matthew 12:5) It logically follows, then, that one is not automatically guilty of wrongdoing or disobedience when they do not keep the ritual observances as dictated, in case there is some greater need that must be met. This is something the Pharisees have, by implication, already admitted by accepting the rightness in the two cases Jesus referred to.

The still deeper issue here is the use of law to harm people, something that is not God's intention. Any time ritual and compassion (e.g. for hunger) come into conflict, God, who gave the law, favors compassion. That is the kind of God he is. To think otherwise is to misunderstand God and to cast him in a bad light. Thus Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea: "But if you had known what this means, 'I desire compassion, and not sacrifice' , you would not have condemned the innocent." (Matthew 12:7; cp. 9:13) Thus the use of logic here is not only to correct the judgment that the disciples (the "innocent" in this case) must be sinning in stripping the grain and eating it. It is used to draw a further implication about God: God is not the kind of person who condemns those who act to meet a significant need at the expense of a relative triviality in the law. Elsewhere he points out that the sabbath appointed by God was made to serve man, not man to serve the sabbath. (Mark 2:27)

Now the case of sabbath keeping--or, more precisely, of the ritual laws developed by men for sabbath observance--is one that comes up over and over in the Gospels, and it is always approached by Jesus in terms of the logical inconsistency of those who claim to practice it in the manner officially prescribed at the time. (See for example Mark 3:1-3, Luke 13:15-17, John 9:14-16, etc.) They are forced to choose between hypocrisy and open inconsistency, and he does sometimes use the word "hypocrisy" of them (e.g. Luke 13:15), implying that they knew they were being inconsistent and accepted it. In fact, the very idea of hypocrisy implies logical inconsistency. "They say, and do not" what their saying implies. (Matthew 23:2)

And legalism will always lead to inconsistency in life, if not hypocrisy, for it will eventuate in giving greater importance to rules than is compatible with the principles one espouses (to sacrifice, for example, than to compassion, in the case at hand), and also to an inconsistent practice of the rules themselves (e.g leading one's donkey to water on the sabbath, but refusing to have a human being healed of an 18-year-long affliction, as in Luke 13:15-16).

(2). Another illustrative case is found in Luke 20:27-40. Here it is the Sadducees, not the Pharisees, who are challenging Jesus. They are famous for rejecting the resurrection (vs. 27), and accordingly they propose a situation that, they think, is a reductio ad absurdum of resurrection. (vss. 28-33) The law of Moses said that if a married man died without children, the next eldest brother should make the widow his wife, and any children they had would inherit in the line of the older brother. In the 'thought experiment' of the Sadducees, the elder of seven sons died without children from his wife, the next eldest married her and also died without children from her, and the next eldest did the same, and so on though all seven brothers. Then the wife died (Small wonder!). The presumed absurdity in the case was that in the resurrection she would be the wife of all of them, which was assumed to be an impossibility in the nature of marriage.

Jesus' reply is to point out that those resurrected will not have mortal bodies suited for sexual relations, marriage and reproduction. They will have bodies like angels do now, bodies of undying stuff. The idea of resurrection must not be taken crudely. Thus he undermines the assumption of the Sadducees that any 'resurrection' must involve the body and its life continuing exactly as it does now. So the supposed impossibility of the woman being in conjugal relations with all seven brothers is not required by resurrection.

Then he proceeds, once again, to develop a teaching about the nature of God--which was always his main concern. Taking a premiss that the Sadducees accepted, he draws the conclusion that they did not want. That the dead are raised, he says, follows from God's self-description to Moses at the burning bush. God described himself in that incident as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." (Luke 20:35 ) The Sadducees accepted this. But at the time of the burning bush incident, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had been long 'dead', as Jesus points out. But God is not the God of the dead. That is, a dead person cannot sustain a relation of devotion and service to God, nor can God keep covenant faith with one who no longer exists. In covenant relationship to God one lives. (vs. 38) One cannot very well imagine the living God communing with a dead body or a non-existent person and keeping covenant faithfulness with them.

(Incidentally, those Christian thinkers who nowadays suggest that the Godly do not exist or are without conscious life, at least, from the time their body dies to the time it is resurrected, might want to provide us with an interpretation of this passage.)

(3). Yet another illustration of Jesus' obviously self-conscious use of logic follows upon the one just cited from Luke 20. He would occasionally set teaching puzzles that required the use of logic on the part of his hearers. After the discussion of the resurrection, the Sadducees and the other groups about him no longer had the courage to challenge his powerful thinking. (vs. 40) He then sets them a puzzle designed to help them understand the Messiah--for which everyone was looking.

Drawing upon what all understood to be a messianic reference, in Psalm 110, Jesus points out an apparent contradiction: The Messiah is the son of David (admitted by all), and yet David calls the Messiah "Lord." (Luke 20:42-43) "How," he asks, "can the Messiah be David's son if David calls him Lord?" (vs. 44) The resolution intended by Jesus is that they should recognize that the Messiah is not simply the son of David, but also of One higher than David, and that he is therefore king in a more inclusive sense than political head of the Jewish nation. (Rev. 1:5) The promises to David therefore reach far beyond David, incorporating him and much more. This reinterpretation of David and the Messiah was a lesson learned and used well by the apostles and early disciples. (See Acts 2:25-36, Hebrews 5:6, and Phil. 2:9-11)

(4). For a final illustration we turn to the use of logic in one of the more didactic occasions recorded in the Gospels. The parables and stories of Jesus often illustrate his use of logic, but we will look instead at a well known passage from the Sermon on the Mount. In his teaching about adultery and the cultivation of sexual lust, Jesus makes the statement, "If your right eye makes you to stumble, tear it out, and throw it from you; for it is better for you that one of the parts of your body perish, than for your whole body to be thrown into hell," and similarly for your right hand. (Matthew 5:29-30)

What, exactly, is Jesus doing here? One would certainly be mistaken in thinking that he is advising anyone to actually dismember himself as a way of escaping damnation. One must keep the context in mind. Jesus is exhibiting the righteousness that goes beyond "the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees." This latter was a righteousness that took as its goal to not do anything wrong. If not doing anything wrong is the goal, that could be achieved by dismembering yourself and making actions impossible. What you cannot do you certainly will not do. Remove your eye, your hand, etc., therefore, and you will roll into heaven a mutilated stump. The price of dismemberment would be small compared to the reward of heaven. That is the logical conclusion for one who held the beliefs of the scribes and the pharisees. Jesus is urging them to be consistent with their principles and do in practice what their principles imply. He reduces their principle--that righteousness lies in not doing anything wrong--to the absurd, in the hope that they will forsake their principle and see and enter the righteousness that is "beyond the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees"--beyond, where compassion or love and not sacrifice is the fundamental thing. Jesus, of course, knew that if you dismembered yourself you could still have a hateful heart, toward God and toward man. It wouldn't really help toward righteousness at all. That is the basic thing he is teaching in this passage. Failure to appreciate the logic makes it impossible to get his point.

*

These illustrative scenes from the Gospels will already be familiar to any student of scripture. But, as we know, familiarity has its disadvantages. My hope is to enable us to see Jesus in a new light: to see him as doing intellectual work with the appropriate tools of logic, to see him as one who is both at home in and the master of such work.

We need to understand that Jesus is a thinker, that this is not a dirty word but an essential work, and that his other attributes do not preclude thought, but only insure that he is certainly the greatest thinker of the human race: "the most intelligent person who ever lived on earth." He constantly uses the power of logical insight to enable people to come to the truth about themselves and about God from the inside of their own heart and mind. Quite certainly it also played a role in his own growth in "wisdom." (Luke 2:52)

Often, it seems to me, we see and hear his deeds and words, but we don't think of him as one who knew how to do what he did or who really had logical insight into the things he said. We don't automatically think of him as a very competent person. He multiplied the loaves and fishes and walked on water, for example--but, perhaps, he didn't know how to do it, he just used mindless incantations or prayers. Or he taught on how to be a really good person, but he did not have moral insight and understanding. He just mindlessly rattled off words that were piped in to him and through him. Really?

This approach to Jesus may be because we think that knowledge is human, while he was divine. Logic means works, while he is grace. Did we forget something there? Possibly that he also is human? Or that grace is not opposed to effort but to earning? But human thought is evil, we are told. How could he think human thought, have human knowledge? So we distance him from ourselves, perhaps intending to elevate him, and we elevate him right out of relevance to our actual lives--especially as they involve the use of our minds. That is why the idea of Jesus as logical, of Jesus the logician, is shocking. And of course that extends to Jesus the scientist, researcher, scholar, artist, literary person. He just doesn't 'fit' in those areas. Today it is easier to think of Jesus as a "TV evangelist" than as an author, teacher or artist in the contemporary context. But now really!--if he were divine, would he be dumb, logically challenged, uninformed in any area? Would he not instead be the greatest of artists or speakers? Paul was only being consistent when he told the Colossians "all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are concealed in him." (2:3) Except for what?

There is in Christian educational circles today a great deal of talk about "integration of faith and learning." Usually it leads to little solid result. This is in part due to the fact that it is, at this point in time, an extremely difficult intellectual task, which cannot be accomplished by ritual language and the pooh-poohing of difficulties. But an even deeper cause of the difficulty is the way we automatically tend to think of Jesus himself. It is not just in what we say about him, but in how he comes before out minds: how we automatically position him in our world, and how in consequence we position ourselves. We automatically think of him as having nothing essentially to do with 'profane' knowledge, with learning and logic, and therefore find ourselves 'on our own' in such areas.

We should, I believe, understand that Jesus would be perfectly at home in any professional context where good work is being done today. He would, of course, be a constant rebuke to all the proud self-advancement and the contemptuous treatment of others that goes on in professional circles. In this as in other respects, our professions are aching for his presence. If we truly see him as the premier thinker of the human race--and who else would be that?--then we are also in position to honor him as the most knowledgeable person in our field, whatever that may be, and to ask his cooperation and assistance with everything we have to do.

Catherine Marshall somewhere tells of a time she was trying to create a certain design with some drapes for her windows. She was unable to get the proportions right to form the design she had in mind. She gave up in exasperation and, leaving the scene, began to mull the matter over in prayer. Soon ideas as to how the design could be achieved began to come to her and before long she had the complete solution. She learned that Jesus is maestro of interior decorating.

Such stories are familiar from many areas of human activity, but quite rare in the areas of art and intellect. For lack of an appropriate understanding of Jesus we come to do our work in intellectual, scholarly and artistic fields on our own. We do not have confidence (otherwise known as faith) that he can be our leader and teacher in matters we spend most of our time working on. Thus our efforts often fall far short of what they should accomplish, and may even have less effect than the efforts of the Godless, because we undertake them only with "the arm of the flesh." Our faith in Jesus Christ rises no higher than that. We do not see him as he really is, maestro of all good things.

*

Here I have only been suggestive of a dimension of Jesus that is commonly overlooked. This is no thorough study of that dimension, but it deserves such study. It is one of major importance for a healthy faith in him. Especially today, when the authoritative institutions of our culture, the universities and the professions, omit him as a matter of course. Once one knows what to look for in the Gospels, however, one will easily see the thorough, careful and creative employment of logic throughout his teaching activity. Indeed, this employment must be identified and appreciated if what he is saying is to be understood. Only then can his intellectual brilliance be appreciated and he be respected as he deserves.

An excellent way of teaching in Christian schools would therefore be to require all students to do extensive logical analyses of Jesus' discourses. This should go hand in with the other ways of studying his words, including devotional practices such as memorization or lectio divina, and the like. It would make a substantial contribution to the integration of faith and learning.

While such a concentration on logic may sound strange today, that is only a reflection on our current situation. It is quite at home in many of the liveliest ages of the church.

John Wesley speaks for the broader Christian church across time and space, I think, in his remarkable treatise, "An Address to the Clergy." There he discusses at length the qualifications of an effective minister for Christ. He speaks of the necessity of a good knowledge of scripture, and then adds,

"Some knowledge of the sciences also, is, to say the least, equally expedient. Nay, may we not say, that the knowledge of one (whether art or science), although now quite unfashionable, is even necessary next, and in order to, the knowledge of Scripture itself? I mean logic. For what is this, if rightly understood, but the art of good sense? of apprehending things clearly, judging truly, and reasoning conclusively? What is it, viewed in another light, but the art of learning and teaching; whether by convincing or persuading? What is there, then, in the whole compass of science, to be desired in comparison of it?

"Is not some acquaintance with what has been termed the second part of logic (metaphysics), if not so necessary as this, yet highly expedient (1.) In order to clear our apprehension (without which it is impossible either to judge correctly, or to reason closely or conclusively), by ranging our ideas under general heads? And (2.) In order to understand many useful writers, who can very hardly be understood without it?"²

Later in this same treatise Wesley deals with whether we are, as ministers, what we ought to be. "Am I," he asks,

"a tolerable master of the sciences? Have I gone through the very gate of them, logic? If not, I am not likely to go much farther when I stumble at the threshold. Do I understand it so as to be ever the better for it? To have it always ready for use; so as to apply every rule of it, when occasion is, almost as naturally as I turn my hand? Do I understand it at all? Are not even the moods and figures above my comprehension? Do not I poorly endeavour to cover my ignorance, by affecting to laugh at their barbarous names? Can I even reduce an indirect mood to a direct; an hypothetic to a categorical syllogism? Rather, have not my stupid indolence and laziness made me very ready to believe, what the little wits and pretty gentlemen affirm, 'that logic is good for nothing'? It is good for this at least (wherever it is understood), to make people talk less; by showing them both what is, and what is not, to the point; and how extremely hard it is to prove any thing. Do I understand metaphysics; if not the depths of the Schoolmen, the subtleties of Scotus or Aquinas, yet the first rudiments, the general principles, of that useful science? Have I conquered so much of it, as to clear my apprehension and range my ideas under proper heads; so much as enables me to read with ease and pleasure, as well as profit, Dr. Henry Moore's Works, Malebranche's Search after Truth, and Dr. Clarke's Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God?"³

I suspect that such statements will be strange, shocking, even outrageous or ridiculous to leaders of ministerial education today. But readers of Wesley and other great ministers of the past, such as Jonathan Edwards or Charles Finney, will easily see, if they know what it is they are looking at, how much use those ministers made of careful logic. Similarly for the great Puritan writers of an earlier period, and for later effective Christians such as C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. They all make relentless use of logic, and to great good effect. With none of these great teachers is it a matter of trusting logic instead of relying upon the Holy Spirit. Rather, they well knew, it is simply a matter of meeting the conditions along with which the Holy Spirit chooses to work. In this connection it will be illuminating to carefully examine the logical structure and force of Peter's discourse on the day of Pentecost. (Acts 2)

*

Today, by contrast, we commonly depend upon the emotional pull of stories and images to 'move' people. We fail to understand that, in the very nature of the human mind, emotion does not reliably generate belief or faith, if it generates it at all. Not even 'seeing' does, unless you know what you are seeing. It is understanding, insight, that generates belief. In vain do we try to change peoples' heart or character by 'moving' them to do things in ways that bypass their understanding.

Some months ago one who is regarded as a great teacher of homiletics was emphasizing the importance of stories in preaching. It was on a radio program. He remarked that a leading minister in America had told him recently that he could preach the same series of sermons each year, and change the illustrations, and no one would notice it. This was supposed to point out, with some humor, the importance of stories to preaching. What it really pointed out, however, was that the cognitive content of the sermon was never heard--if there was any to be heard--and does not matter.

Paying careful attention to how Jesus made use of logical thinking can strengthen our confidence in Jesus as master of the centers of intellect and creativity, and can encourage us to accept him as master in all of the areas of intellectual life in which we may participate. In those areas we can, then, be his disciples, not disciples of the current movements and glittering personalities who happen to dominate our field in human terms. Proper regard for him can also encourage us to follow his example as teachers in Christian contexts. We can learn from him to use logical reasoning at its best, as he works with us. When we teach what he taught in the manner he taught it, we will see his kind of result in the lives of those to whom we minister.⁴

Pity for a Devastated Wall Street

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Picking the moment when a friend’s house collapses due to choosing a location in the path of a hurricane to lecture him on his lack of prudence seems as insensitive as writing about greed while Wall Street melts down. Many of us make foolish choices, and many plutocrats are undoubtedly corrupt, but it would have been better to point this out when it required some moral courage to do so.

The Bible writes about a man named Job who suffered after a prosperous period. His unctuous friends came to instruct him on his obvious sins. God took a dim view of Job’s friends and I would rather not be one of them.

It is hard to blame politicians for acting as Job’s friends to Wall Street since their public demands it, but pundits on the payroll of media conglomerates show little taste by piling on. As many essentially decent traders and workers go broke, it is unseemly to lambaste them for their vices even if they are real, but apparently all human sympathy is lost for one if they happen to work on Wall Street.

The failure of a great business does not have to be the result of evil doing. When things don’t turn out the way we like, it is natural to look for scapegoats, but dangerous. The temptation will be to reduce our liberty to prevent the possibility of failure.

Failure is the tribute that any craftsman pays the cosmos for the possibility of success. Success is deeply meaningful to us, because in the world of liberty that God created it is not guaranteed. An attempt to live in a cosmos without the possibility of failure is unreal and will inevitably lead to tyranny. If the God who would have the right to create such a system did not, perhaps government bureaucrats and regulators should refrain more than they do.

When this sad period is done, we will discover that some men were bad and others good. Good men who failed should be pitied and their friends should aid them in making a fresh start. Honorable failure is no shame.

Bad men who broke the law should be punished regardless of their wealth or position, but men who simply failed should not be. Certain forms of moralistic proclamations should be left to pulpits and not to politicians. Greed is certainly bad, but God help us if it becomes illegal!

The difficulty in times like this is treating the powerful with justice. Some demagogues will wish to punish the rich for business failures to gain popular approval. Others will curry their favor and try to cover up crimes in order to gain wealth. Both actions are unjust and both are temptations that have long been with humanity.

American culture has been able to be free for so long because most individuals have resisted either form of corruption. Our courts are not perfect, but on the whole the rich are treated with justice. Money cannot buy acquittal, at least not often, and the public is not allowed to punish the businessman merely for failing. This can only continue if we teach and encourage people to be good.

Liberty requires good men and women, so friends of liberty would do well to pray for a genuine religious revival on Wall Street and in government. We need people who will not bribe regulators even if they could get away with it due to badly written laws. We need regulators who will not show favoritism to, nor discriminate against, the wealthy. These government officials will not posture for the public and punish the innocent for public acclaim nor will they develop cozy relationships with fat cats for their personal gain.

Without morality on the individual level, no laws, contracts, or rules will help our society. Bad men will always find a way to cheat. Given that we shan’t be in Utopia soon, there will always be bad men and so always the need for a police power to keep bad men from harming the public, but if too many men are bad and the police power grows too great, then liberty will be lost.

The Founders of our nation knew this, but we are sometimes in danger of forgetting it. Media often mocks the moral or is bored with moderation and then is shocked when immoral or immoderate men threaten the culture by their wickedness.

Today then is a good day to look with pity on those whose dreams have failed. We should pray for those whose lives have been devastated as surely as victims of a hurricane. Many of the hurting had no more responsibility for their failure than the devastated home owner who took the risk of building or purchasing a house in a flood zone. Both risked and both failed and it is only human to feel sorry for their failure. We should pray for justice for the wicked who exploit the honest and innocent.

Most of all we should be thankful for our liberty, even the liberty to fail.

Are Too Many People Going to College?

By Charles Murray
The American

America’s university system is creating a class-riven nation. There has to be a better way.

To ask whether too many people are going to college requires us to think about the importance and nature of a liberal education. “Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some special mode of gaining their livelihood,” John Stuart Mill told students at the University of St. Andrews in 1867. “Their object is not to make skillful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings.” If this is true (and I agree that it is), why say that too many people are going to college? Surely a mass democracy should encourage as many people as possible to become “capable and cultivated human beings” in Mill’s sense. We should not restrict the availability of a liberal education to a rarefied intellectual elite. More people should be going to college, not fewer.

Yes and no. More people should be getting the basics of a liberal education. But for most students, the places to provide those basics are elementary and middle school. E. D. Hirsch Jr. is the indispensable thinker on this topic, beginning with his 1987 book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Part of his argument involves the importance of a body of core knowledge in fostering reading speed and comprehension. With regard to a liberal education, Hirsch makes three points that are germane here:

Full participation in any culture requires familiarity with a body of core knowledge. To live in the United States and not recognize Teddy Roosevelt, Prohibition, the Minutemen, Wall Street, smoke-filled rooms, or Gettysburg is like trying to read without knowing some of the ten thousand most commonly used words in the language. It signifies a degree of cultural illiteracy about America. But the core knowledge transcends one’s own country. Not to recognize Falstaff, Apollo, the Sistine Chapel, the Inquisition, the twenty-third Psalm, or Mozart signifies cultural illiteracy about the West. Not to recognize the solar system, the Big Bang, natural selection, relativity, or the periodic table is to be scientifically illiterate. Not to recognize the Mediterranean, Vienna, the Yangtze River, Mount Everest, or Mecca is to be geographically illiterate.

College is seen as the open sesame to a good job and a desirable way for adolescents to transition to adulthood. Neither reason is as persuasive as it first appears.

This core knowledge is an important part of the glue that holds the culture together. All American children, of whatever ethnic heritage, and whether their families came here 300 years ago or three months ago, need to learn about the Pilgrims, Valley Forge, Duke Ellington, Apollo 11, Susan B. Anthony, George C. Marshall, and the Freedom Riders. All students need to learn the iconic stories. For a society of immigrants such as ours, the core knowledge is our shared identity that makes us Americans together rather than hyphenated Americans.

K–8 are the right years to teach the core knowledge, and the effort should get off to a running start in elementary school. Starting early is partly a matter of necessity: There’s a lot to learn, and it takes time. But another reason is that small children enjoy learning myths and fables, showing off names and dates they have memorized, and hearing about great historical figures and exciting deeds. The educational establishment sees this kind of curriculum as one that forces children to memorize boring facts. That conventional wisdom is wrong on every count. The facts can be fascinating (if taught right); a lot more than memorization is entailed; yet memorizing things is an indispensable part of education, too; and memorizing is something that children do much, much better than adults. The core knowledge is suited to ways that young children naturally learn and enjoy learning. Not all children will be able to do the reading with the same level of comprehension, but the fact-based nature of the core knowledge actually works to the benefit of low ability students—remembering facts is much easier than making inferences and deductions. The core knowledge curriculum lends itself to adaptation for students across a wide range of academic ability.

In the 20 years since Cultural Literacy was published, Hirsch and his colleagues have developed and refined his original formulation into an inventory of more than 6,000 items that approximate the core knowledge broadly shared by literate Americans. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation has also developed a detailed, grade by-grade curriculum for K–8, complete with lists of books and other teaching materials.

The Core Knowledge approach need not stop with eighth grade. High school is a good place for survey courses in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences taught at a level below the demands of a college course and accessible to most students in the upper two-thirds of the distribution of academic ability. Some students will not want to take these courses, and it can be counterproductive to require them to do so, but high school can put considerable flesh on the liberal education skeleton for students who are still interested.

Liberal Education in College

Saying “too many people are going to college” is not the same as saying that the average student does not need to know about history, science, and great works of art, music, and literature. They do need to know—and to know more than they are currently learning. So let’s teach it to them, but let’s not wait for college to do it.

Liberal education in college means taking on the tough stuff. A high-school graduate who has acquired Hirsch’s core knowledge will know, for example, that John Stuart Mill was an important 19th-century English philosopher who was associated with something called Utilitarianism and wrote a famous book called On Liberty. But learning philosophy in college, which is an essential component of a liberal education, means that the student has to be able to read and understand the actual text of On Liberty. That brings us to the limits set by the nature of college-level material. Here is the first sentence of On Liberty: “The subject of this essay is not the so-called liberty of the will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of philosophical necessity; but civil, or social liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.” I will not burden you with On Liberty’s last sentence. It is 126 words long. And Mill is one of the more accessible philosophers, and On Liberty is one of Mill’s more accessible works. It would be nice if everyone could acquire a fully formed liberal education, but they cannot.

Specifically: When College Board researchers defined “college readiness” as the SAT score thatis associated with a 65 percent chance of getting at least a 2.7 grade point average in college during the freshman year, and then applied those criteria (hardly demanding in an era of soft courses and grade inflation) to the freshmen in a sample of 41 major colleges and universities, the threshold “college readiness” score was found to be 1180 on the combined SAT math and verbal tests. It is a score that only about 10 percent of American 18-year-olds would achieve if they all took the SAT, in an age when more than 30 percent of 18-year-olds go to college.

The income for the top people in a wide variety of occupations that do not require a college degree is higher than the average income for many occupations that require a B.A.

Should all of those who do have the academic ability to absorb a college-level liberal education get one? It depends. Suppose we have before us a young woman who is in the 98th percentile of academic ability and wants to become a lawyer and eventually run for political office. To me, it seems essential that she spend her undergraduate years getting a rigorous liberal education. Apart from a liberal education’s value to her, the nation will benefit. Everything she does as an attorney or as an elected official should be informed by the kind of wisdom that a rigorous liberal education can encourage. It is appropriate to push her into that kind of undergraduate program.

But the only reason we can get away with pushing her is that the odds are high that she will enjoy it. The odds are high because she is good at this sort of thing—it’s no problem for her to read On Liberty or Paradise Lost. It’s no problem for her to come up with an interesting perspective on what she’s read and weave it into a term paper. And because she’s good at it, she is also likely to enjoy it. It is one of Aristotle’s central themes in his discussion of human happiness, a theme that John Rawls later distilled into what he called the Aristotelian Principle: “Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of the irrealized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.” And so it comes to pass that those who take the hardest majors and who enroll in courses that look most like an old fashioned liberal education are concentrated among the students in the top percentiles of academic ability. Getting a liberal education consists of dealing with complex intellectual material day after day, and dealing with complex intellectual material is what students in the top few percentiles are really good at, in the same way that other people are really good at cooking or making pottery. For these students, doing it well is fun.

Every percentile down the ability ladder—and this applies to all abilities, not just academic—the probability that a person will enjoy the hardest aspects of an activity goes down as well. Students at the 80th percentile of academic ability are still smart kids, but the odds that they will respond to a course that assigns Mill or Milton are considerably lower than the odds that a student in the top few percentiles will respond. Virtue has nothing to do it. Maturity has nothing to do with it. Appreciation of the value of a liberal education has nothing to do with it. The probability that a student will enjoy Paradise Lost goes down as his linguistic ability goes down, but so does the probability that he works on double acrostic puzzles in his spare time or regularly plays online Scrabble, and for the identical reason. The lower down the linguistic ladder he is, the less fun such activities are.

And so we return to the question: Should all of those who have the academic ability to absorb a college-level liberal education get one? If our young woman is at the 80th percentile of linguistic ability, should she be pushed to do so? She has enough intellectual capacity, if she puts her mind to it and works exceptionally hard.

The answer is no. If she wants to, fine. But she probably won’t, and there’s no way to force her. Try to force her (for example, by setting up a demanding core curriculum), and she will transfer to another school, because she is in college for vocational training. She wants to write computer code. Start a business. Get a job in television. She uses college to take vocational courses that pertain to her career interests. A large proportion of people who are theoretically able to absorb a liberal education have no interest in doing so.

And reasonably so. Seen dispassionately, getting a traditional liberal education over four years is an odd way to enjoy spending one’s time. Not many people enjoy reading for hour after hour, day after day, no matter what the material may be. To enjoy reading On Liberty and its ilk—and if you’re going to absorb such material, you must in some sense enjoy the process—is downright peculiar. To be willing to spend many more hours writing papers and answers to exam questions about that material approaches masochism.

We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a few people. Most students at today’s colleges choose not to take the courses that go into a liberal education because the capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students are not lazy, any more than students who don’t want to spend hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eighth-inch dice are lazy. A liberal education just doesn’t make sense for them.

For Learning How to Make a Living, the Four-Year Brick-and-Mortar Residential College is Increasingly Obsolete

We now go from one extreme to the other, from the ideal of liberal education to the utilitarian process of acquiring the knowledge that most students go to college to acquire—practical and vocational. The question here is not whether the traditional four-year residential college is fun or valuable as a place to grow up, but when it makes sense as a place to learn how to make a living. The answer is: in a sensible world, hardly ever.

Start with the time it takes—four years. Assuming a semester system with four courses per semester, four years of class work means 32 semester-long courses. The occupations for which “knowing enough” requires 32 courses are exceedingly rare. For some professions—medicine and law are the obvious examples—a rationale for four years of course work can be concocted (combining pre-med and pre-law undergraduate courses with three years of medical school and law school), but for every other occupation, the body of knowledge taught in classrooms can be learned more quickly. Even Ph.D.s don’t require four years of course work. The Ph.D. is supposed to signify expertise, but that expertise comes from burrowing deep in to a specialty, not from dozens of courses.

As long as it’s taboo to say that college is intellectually too demanding for most young people, we will continue to create unrealistic expectations among the next generation.

Those are the jobs with the most stringent academic requirements. For the student who wants to become a good hotel manager, software designer, accountant, hospital administrator, farmer, high-school teacher, social worker, journalist, optometrist, interior designer, or football coach, four years of class work is ridiculous. Actually becoming good in those occupations will take longer than four years, but most of the competence is acquired on the job. The two year community college and online courses offer more flexible options for tailoring course work to the real needs of the job.

A brick-and-mortar campus is increasingly obsolete. The physical infrastructure of the college used to make sense for three reasons. First, a good library was essential to higher learning, and only a college faculty and student body provided the economies of scale that made good libraries affordable. Second, scholarship flourishes through colleagueships, and the college campus made it possible to put scholars in physical proximity to each other. Third, the best teaching requires interaction between teachers and students, and physical proximity was the only way to get it. All three rationales for the brick-and-mortar campus are fading fast.

The rationale for a physical library is within a few years of extinction. Even now, the Internet provides access, for a price, to all the world’s significant technical journals. The books are about to follow. Google is scanning the entire text of every book in the libraries of Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, the New York Public Library, the Bavarian State Library, Ghent University Library, Keio Library (Tokyo), the National Library of Catalonia, University of Lausanne, and an expanding list of others. Collectively, this project will encompass close to the sum total of human knowledge. It will be completely searchable. Everything out of copyright will be free. Everything still under copyright will be accessible for a fee. Libraries will still be a selling point for colleges, but as a place for students to study in pleasant surroundings—an amenity in the same way that an attractive student union is an amenity. Colleges and universities will not need to exist because they provide libraries.

The rationale for colleges based on colleagueships has eroded. Until a few decades ago, physical proximity was important because correspondence and phone calls just weren’t as good. As email began to spread during the1980s, physical proximity became less important. As the capacity of the Internet expanded in the 1990s, other mechanisms made those interactions richer. Now, regular emails from professional groups inform scholars of the latest publications in their field of interest. Specialized chat groups enable scholars to bounce new ideas off other people working on the same problems. Drafts are exchanged effortlessly and comments attached electronically. Whether physical proximity still has any advantages depends mostly on the personality of the scholar. Some people like being around other people during the workday and prefer face-to-face conversations to emails. For those who don’t, the value of being on a college campus instead of on a mountaintop in Montana is nil. Their electronic access to other scholars is incomparably greater than any scholar enjoyed even within the world’s premier universities before the advent of the Internet. Like the library, face-to-face colleagueships will be an amenity that colleges continue to provide. But colleges and universities will not need to exist because they provide a community of scholars.

The third rationale for the brick-and-mortar college is that it brings teachers together with students. Working against that rationale is the explosion in the breadth and realism of what is known as distance learning. The idea of distance learning is surprisingly old—Isaac Pitman was teaching his shorthand system to British students through the postal service in the 1840s, and the University of London began offering degrees for correspondence students in 1858—but the technology of distance learning changed little for the next century. The advent of inexpensive videocassettes in the 1980s opened up a way for students to hear and see lectures without being in the classroom. By the early 1990s, it was possible to buy college-level courses on audio- or videotape, taught by first-rate teaching professors, on a wide range of topics, for a few hundred dollars. But without easy interaction between teacher and student, distance learning remained a poor second-best to a good college seminar.

Once again, the Internet is revolutionizing everything. As personal computers acquired the processing power to show high-definition video and the storage capacity to handle big video files, the possibilities for distance learning expanded by orders of magnitude. We are now watching the early expression of those possibilities: podcasts and streaming videos in real time of professors’ lectures, online discussions among students scattered around the country, online interaction between students and professors, online exams, and tutorials augmented by computer-aided instruction software.

Even today, the quality of student-teacher interactions in a virtual classroom competes with the interactions in a brick-and-mortar classroom. But the technology is still in its early stages of development and the rate of improvement is breathtaking. Compare video games such as Myst and SimCity in the 1990s to their descendants today; the Walkman you used in the 1990s to the iPod you use today; the cell phone you used in the 1990s to the BlackBerry or iPhone you use today. Whatever technical limitations might lead you to say, “Yes, but it’s still not the same as being there in the classroom,” are probably within a few years of being outdated.

College Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

College looms so large in the thinking of both parents and students because it is seen as the open sesame to a good job. Reaping the economic payoff for college that shows up in econometric analyses is a long shot for large numbers of young people.

When high-school graduates think that obtaining a B.A. will help them get a higher- paying job, they are only narrowly correct. Economists have established beyond doubt that people with B.A.s earn more on average than people without them. But why does the B.A. produce that result? For whom does the B.A. produce that result? For some jobs, the economic premium for a degree is produced by the actual education that has gone into getting the degree. Lawyers, physicians, and engineers can earn their high incomes only by deploying knowledge and skills that take years to acquire, and degrees in law, medicine, and engineering still signify competence in those knowledges and skills. But for many other jobs, the economic premium for the B.A. is created by a brutal fact of life about the American job market: Employers do not even interview applicants who do not hold a B.A. Even more brutal, the advantage conferred by the B.A. often has nothing to do with the content of the education. Employers do not value what the student learned, just that the student has a degree.

Employers value the B.A. because it is a no-cost (for them) screening device for academic ability and perseverance. The more people who go to college, the more sense it makes for employers to require a B.A. When only a small percentage of people got college degrees, employers who required a B.A. would have been shutting themselves off from access to most of the talent. With more than a third of 23-year-olds now getting a B.A., many employers can reasonably limit their hiring pool to college graduates because bright and ambitious high-school graduates who can go to college usually do go to college. An employer can believe that exceptions exist but rationally choose not to expend time and money to identify them. Knowing this, large numbers of students are in college to buy their admission ticket—the B.A.

Employers do not value what the student learned, just that he has a degree. They value the B.A. as a no-cost (for them) screening device for academic ability and perseverance.

But while it is true that the average person with a B.A. makes more than the average person without a B.A., getting a B.A. is still going to be the wrong economic decision for many high-school graduates. Wages within occupations form a distribution. Young people with okay-but-not-great academic ability who are thinking about whether to go after a B.A. need to consider the competition they will face after they graduate. Let me put these calculations in terms of a specific example, a young man who has just graduated from high school and is trying to decide whether to become an electrician or go to college and major in business, hoping to become a white-collar manager. He is at the 70th percentile in linguistic ability and logical mathematical ability—someone who shouldn’t go to college by my standards, but who can, in today’s world, easily find a college that will give him a degree. He is exactly average in interpersonal and intrapersonal ability. He is at the 95th percentile in the small-motor skills and spatial abilities that are helpful in being a good electrician.

He begins by looking up the average income of electricians and managers on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, and finds that the mean annual income for electricians in 2005 was$45,630, only about half of the $88,450 mean for management occupations. It looks as if getting a B.A. will buy him a huge wage premium. Should he try to get the B.A. on economic grounds?

To make his decision correctly, our young man must start by throwing out the averages. He has the ability to become an excellent electrician and can reasonably expect to be near the top of the electricians’ income distribution. He does not have it in him to be an excellent manager, because he is only average in interpersonal and intrapersonal ability and only modestly above average in academic ability, all of which are important for becoming a good manager, while his competitors for those slots will include many who are high in all of those abilities. Realistically, he should be looking at the incomes toward the bottom of the distribution of managers. With that in mind, he goes back to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website and discovers that an electrician at the 90th percentile of electricians’ incomes made $70,480 in 2005, almost twice the income of a manager at the 10th percentile of managers’ incomes ($37,800). Even if our young man successfully completes college and gets a B.A. (which is far from certain), he is likely to make less money than if he becomes an electrician.

Then there is job security to consider. A good way to make sure you always can find work is to be among the best at what you do. It also helps to have a job that does not require you to compete with people around the globe. When corporations downsize, they lay off mediocre managers before they lay off top electricians. When the economy gets soft, top electricians can find work when mediocre managers cannot. Low-level management jobs can often be outsourced to India, whereas electricians’ jobs cannot.

What I have said of electricians is true throughout the American job market. The income for the top people in a wide variety of occupations that do not require a college degree is higher than the average income for many occupations that require a B.A. Furthermore, the range and number of such jobs are expanding rapidly. The need for assembly-line workers in factories (one of the most boring jobs ever invented) is falling, but the demand for skilled technicians of every kind—in healthcare, information technology, transportation networks, and every other industry that relies on high-tech equipment—is expanding. The service sector includes many low-skill, low-paying jobs, but it also includes growing numbers of specialized jobs that pay well (for example, in healthcare and the entertainment and leisure industries). Construction offers an array of high-paying jobs for people who are good at what they do. It’s not just skilled labor in the standard construction trades that is in high demand. The increase in wealth in American society has increased the demand for all sorts of craftsmanship. Today’s high-end homes and office buildings may entail the work of specialized skills in stonework, masonry, glazing, painting, cabinetmaking, machining, landscaping, and a dozen other crafts. The increase in wealth is also driving an increased demand for the custom-made and the exquisitely wrought, meaning demand for artisans in everything from pottery to jewelry to metalworking. There has never been a time in history when people with skills not taught in college have been in so much demand at such high pay as today, nor a time when the range of such jobs has been so wide. In today’s America, finding a first-rate lawyer or physician is easy. Finding first-rate skilled labor is hard.

Intrinsic Rewards

The topic is no longer money but job satisfaction—intrinsic rewards. We return to our high-school graduate trying to decide between going to college and becoming an electrician. He knows that he enjoys working with his hands and likes the idea of not being stuck in the same place all day, but he also likes the idea of being a manager sitting behind a desk in a big office, telling people what to do and getting the status that goes with it.

However, he should face facts that he is unlikely to know on his own, but that a guidance counselor could help him face. His chances of getting the big office and the status are slim. He is more likely to remain in a cubicle, under the thumb of the boss in the big office. He is unlikely to have a job in which he produces something tangible during the course of the day.

There has never been a time in history when people with skills not taught in college have been in so much demand at such high pay as today.

If he becomes a top electrician instead, he will have an expertise that he exercises at a high level. At the end of a workday, he will often be able to see that his work made a difference in the lives of people whose problems he has solved. He will not be confined to a cubicle and, after his apprenticeship, will be his own supervisor in the field. Top electricians often become independent contractors who have no boss at all.

The intrinsic rewards of being a top manager can be just as great as those of a top electrician (though I would not claim they are greater), but the intrinsic rewards of being a mediocre manager are not. Even as people in white-collar jobs lament the soullessness of their work, the intrinsic rewards of exercising technical skills remain undiminished.

Finally, there is an overarching consideration so important it is hard to express adequately: the satisfaction of being good at what one does for a living (and knowing it), compared to the melancholy of being mediocre at what one does for a living (and knowing it). This is another truth about living a human life that a 17-year-old might not yet understand on his own, but that a guidance counselor can bring to his attention. Guidance counselors and parents who automatically encourage young people to go to college straight out of high school regardless of their skills and interests are being thoughtless about the best interests of young people in their charge.

The Dark Side of the B.A. as Norm

It is possible to accept all that I have presented as fact and still disagree with the proposition that too many people are going to college. The argument goes something like this:

The meaning of a college education has evolved since the 19th century. The traditional liberal education is still available for students who want it, but the curriculum is appropriately broader now, and includes many courses for vocational preparation that today’s students want. Furthermore, intellectual requirements vary across majors. It may be true that few students can complete a major in economics or biology, but larger proportions can handle the easier majors. A narrow focus on curriculum also misses the important nonacademic functions of college. The lifestyle on today’s campuses may leave something to be desired, but four years of college still give youngsters in late adolescence a chance to encounter different kinds of people, to discover new interests, and to decide what they want to make of their lives. And if it is true that some students spend too much of their college years partying, that was also true of many Oxford students in the 18th century. Lighten up.

About a third of all those who enter college hoping for a B.A. leave without one.

If the only people we had to worry about were those who are on college campuses and doing reasonably well, this position would have something to be said for it. It does not address the issues of whether four years makes sense or whether a residential facility makes sense; nevertheless, college as it exists is not an intrinsically evil place for the students who are there and are coping academically. But there is the broader American society to worry about as well. However unintentionally, we have made something that is still inaccessible to a majority of the population—the B.A.—into a symbol of first-class citizenship. We have done so at the same time that other class divisions are becoming more powerful. Today’s college system is implicated in the emergence of class-riven America.

The problem begins with the message sent to young people that they should aspire to college no matter what. Some politicians are among the most visible offenders, treating every failure to go to college as an injustice that can be remedied by increasing government help. American educational administrators reinforce the message by instructing guidance counselors to steer as many students as possible toward a college-prep track (more than 90 percent of high-school students report that their guidance counselors encouraged them to go to college). But politicians and educators are only following the lead of the larger culture. As long as it remains taboo to acknowledge that college is intellectually too demanding for most young people, we will continue to create crazily unrealistic expectations among the next generation. If “crazily unrealistic” sounds too strong, consider that more than 90 percent of high school seniors expect to go to college, and more than 70 percent of them expect to work in professional jobs.

Today’s college system is implicated in the emergence of class-riven America.

One aspect of this phenomenon has been labeled misaligned ambitions, meaning that adolescents have career ambitions that are inconsistent with their educational plans. Data from the Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development conducted during the 1990s indicate that misaligned ambitions characterized more than half of all adolescents. Almost always, the misalignment is in the optimistic direction, as adolescents aspire to be attorneys or physicians without understanding the educational hurdles they must surmount to achieve their goals. They end up at a four-year institution not because that is where they can take the courses they need to meet their career goals, but because college is the place where B.A.s are handed out, and everyone knows that these days you’ve got to have a B.A. Many of them drop out. Of those who entered a four-year college in 1995, only 58 percent had gotten their B.A. five academic years later. Another 14 percent were still enrolled. If we assume that half of that 14 percent eventually get their B.A.s, about a third of all those who entered college hoping for a B.A. leave without one.

If these numbers had been produced in a culture where the B.A. was a nice thing to have but not a big deal, they could be interpreted as the result of young adults deciding that they didn’t really want a B.A. after all. Instead, these numbers were produced by a system in which having a B.A. is a very big deal indeed, and that brings us to the increasingly worrisome role of the B.A. as a source of class division. The United States has always had symbols of class, and the college degree has always been one of them. But through the first half of the 20th century, there were all sorts of respectable reasons a person might not go to college—not enough money to pay for college; needing to work right out of high school to support a wife, parents, or younger siblings; or the commonly held belief that going straight to work was better preparation for a business career than going to college. As long as the percentage of college graduates remained small, it also remained true, and everybody knew it, that the majority of America’s intellectually most able people did not have B.A.s.

Over the course of the 20th century, three trends gathered strength. The first was the increasing proportion of jobs screened for high academic ability due to the advanced level of education they require—engineers, physicians, attorneys, college teachers, scientists, and the like. The second was the increasing market value of those jobs. The third was the opening up of college to more of those who had the academic ability to go to college, partly because the increase in American wealth meant that more parents could afford college for their children, and partly because the proliferation of scholarships and loans made it possible for most students with enough academic ability to go.

The combined effect of these trends has been to overturn the state of affairs that prevailed through World War II. Now the great majority of America’s intellectually most able people do have a B.A. Along with that transformation has come a downside that few anticipated. The acceptable excuses for not going to college have dried up. The more people who go to college, the more stigmatizing the failure to complete college becomes. Today, if you do not get a B.A., many people assume it is because you are too dumb or too lazy. And all this because of a degree that seldom has an interpretable substantive meaning.

Let’s approach the situation from a different angle. Imagine that America had no system of postsecondary education and you were made a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. Ask yourself what you would think if one of your colleagues submitted this proposal:

First, we will set up a common goal for every young person that represents educational success. We will call it a B.A. We will then make it difficult or impossible for most people to achieve this goal. For those who can, achieving the goal will take four years no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward for reaching the goal that often has little to do with the content of what has been learned. We will lure large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability or motivation to try to achieve the goal and then fail. We will then stigmatize everyone who fails to achieve it.

What I have just described is the system that we have in place. There must be a better way.

The Rap on Hip-Hop

By Mark Gauvreau Judge
The American Spectator

A review of

All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America
By John McWhorter
(Gotham Books, 186 pages, $20)

For the past forty years and more, a fraud has been perpetrated on the Western world. Since at least the appearance of the first issue of Rolling Stone in 1967, it has been a common assumption that popular music, particularly rock and roll, is about social change. The story has become an Ur-text for any child growing up in America -- or England or the rest of the world for that matter. It is a pop culture creation myth: In the beginning the world was void, without sound, thought or feeling, when Elvis Presley descended, Prometheus-like, to bring eroticism, fun and rebellion to the dull gray world. And as the Church Fathers followed Jesus, others came to carry the message of social revolution forward: the Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Who, even the Grateful Dead.

The great fallacy at the center of this thesis is that the cultural explosion that occurred when rock began carried such a heady charge because it was about overturning societal norms. In fact, the music was reinforcing orthodoxies that are as old as mankind. Put simply, most rock and pop songs, from Chuck Berry through the Beatles and including the latest single from Coldplay or Justin Timberlake, are about love. Not polygamous, destructive, selfish love, but about love for another person, monogamous love, spiritual love that transcends the laws of nature -- "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "She Loves You," "My Love." Pop songs are about heavenly love and the attempt to attain such love on earth.

There are, of course, exceptions. There are rock songs that are about rebellion and revolution, but they rarely become popular. However, one genre of popular music, rap, is hugely popular while simultaneously boasting that it is about social change and revolution.

It is a claim that is demolished by John McWhorter in his new book All About the Beat: Why Hip Hop Can't Save Black America. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is actually a fan of hip-hop music; thus his criticism of the form avoids the hysteria of some conservative condemnations of rap. He knows the music of Outcast, Ice Cube , Pete Rock and Public Enemy. The conclusion he draws is nuanced, but also blunt: Some hip-hop music is sonically clever and lyrically poetic. But none of it has anything to do with revolution.

Rap, in fact, is about -- to steal a line from Madonna -- striking a pose. It is a pose, as McWhorter notes, of "the upturned middle finger," the angry toe-to-toe facedown, the predatory bully. It has much more to do with 1960s street theater than with any kind of realistic social change. At one point McWhorter compares the lyrics to a song by rappers KRS-One and Marley Marl to the actual facts on the ground. The rappers claim that there is no employment, a charge that McWhorter calmly deconstructs with facts and references to welfare reform, faith-based initiatives, and a program by the evil Bush administration to help ex-convicts go back to work. But to rap about these things would mean losing one's "edgy street cred." This is essential to the self-image of many on the left, including Georgetown professor and rap champion Michael Eric Dyson, who comes in for a particular shellacking by McWhorter. McWhorter, a linguist, dissects a Dyson claim that rap "is neither sociological commentary nor political criticism, thought it may certainly function in these modes through the artist's lyrics." Here Dyson manages to have it both ways: rap is just pop music and doesn't serve as social criticism -- except when it does.


McWHORTER FALTERS in the later chapters, when he engages the meaning of rhythm. Quoting the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, McWhorter claims that there are two kinds of music, sensate music and ideational music. Sensate music is made to please the senses, ideational to serve a function. McWhorter claims that in ancient Greece, most music was ideational, but then moved to the sensate phase, growing more profane, sensual, "impure," complicated, and celebratory of "common themes." Yet a quick consideration of this dichotomy proves it to be false. As an example of ideational music, McWhorter cites Gregorian chant. But isn't Gregorian chant appealing to the senses as well, and focused on the common theme of humanity's aspiration to be with God? McWhorter labels rap sensate music, possibly forgetting that just a few sentences earlier he also put Mozart in that category. He also errs in calling sensate music more complicated than ideational music. What's more complicated -- "Satisfaction" or a Mozart symphony?

There is also a larger metaphysical point missed in All About the Beat. There is an element of healthy rebellion in many rock and roll songs, but it is a theological rebellion as old as man himself. In hearing the existential alienation in the music of a band like Radiohead, or the sadness of the blues, humans are reminded of their fallen nature and the brokenness of the world. Yet the same music, in the beauty of the sound created in those same songs, points to the beauty of the eternal. In the best of pop songs, it creates a sensation of experiencing a kind of holy sorrow -- sadness at the state of things yet a consciousness that there is truth and goodness and beauty beyond the world.

A great jazz critic once referred to the great black musical traditions as giving the audience the ability "to deal with adversity with grace." Rap teaches the very opposite, to deal with adversity with resentment, misogyny, and street theater left over from the 1960s. But it's probably here to stay, or at least as long as human beings are sinful creatures who hope for quick fixes and utopian solutions.

As McWhorter notes, "Something interesting about the Hip-hop revolution is that, like the uprising of the proletariat that Marxist predicted, it seems to be ever in the future. We move ever further into the future in real life, but never get any closer to that marvelous time when hip-hop becomes 'a political tool' and starts improving lives."

Even More Means, Even More Grace

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

When teaching about the means of grace, John Wesley habitually listed three things: prayer, Bible study, and the Lord’s supper. Those are the three in his best exposition of the doctrine of the means, and in many other places:

GOD hath in Scripture ordained prayer, reading or hearing, and the receiving the Lord’s supper, as the ordinary means of conveying his grace to man.

But he never seems to dictate these three as a comprehensive or exhaustive list. And a friend points out that in other places, Wesley commends not three but five means of grace. In his “Large Minutes,” which became part of the Discipline of American Methodism, he is exploring ways in which pastors should hold each other accountable for their spiritual lives. In particular, he begins inquiring into the way seasoned ministers should give guidance to their helpers, and says this:

We might consider those that are with us as our pupils ; into whose behaviour and studies we should inquire every day. Should we not frequently ask, Do you walk closely with God? Have you now fellowship with the Father and the Son ? At what hour do you rise ? Do you punctually observe the morning and evening hour of retirement? Do you spend the day in the manner which we advise? Do you converse seriously, usefully, and closely? To be more particular: Do you use all the means of grace yourself, and enforce the use of them on all other persons?

Fear not, he isn’t saying that rising early is a means of grace. He goes on to list five instituted means, as follows:

1.) Prayer

private, family, public; consisting of deprecation, petition, intercession, and thanksgiving. Do you use each of these ? Do you use private prayer every morning and evening? if you can, at five in the evening; and the hour before or after morning preaching ? Do you forecast daily, wherever you are, how to secure these hours? Do you avow it every where ? Do you ask every where, ” Have you family prayer?” Do you retire at five o’clock?

2.) Searching the Scriptures by

(i.) Reading : Constantly, some part of every day ; regularly, all the Bible in order ; carefully, with the Notes ; seriously, with prayer before and after; fruitfully, immediately practising what you learn there?

(ii.) Meditating : At set times ? by any rule?

(iii.) Hearing: Every morning? carefully; with prayer before, at, after; immediately putting in practice ? Have you a New Testament always about you?

3.) The Lord’s Supper : Do you use this at every opportunity? with solemn prayer before; with earnest and deliberate self devotion?

4.) Fasting : How do you fast every Friday?

5.) Christian conference:

Are you convinced how important and how difficult it is to “order your conversation right?” Is it always in grace? seasoned with salt? meet to minister grace to the hearers? Do not you converse too long at a time? Is not an hour commonly enough? Would it not be well always to have a determinate end in view; and to pray before and after it?

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

By Matt Jenson
Scriptorium Daily

The church is a visible reality. Sort of.

Evangelicals frequently forget, neglect or disdain the notion of the church’s visibility. This is more often than not a function of an ecclesiological minimalism. We get antsy around institutions and formalities, and we rejoice in the simplicity of the gospel. Do you trust in and love Jesus? Yes? Well, that’s good enough for us. Thus, an inner orientation to Jesus significantly shapes evangelical understandings of the church. Every thing else is secondary, and decidedly so. There is a purity of heart to this, and I think it is right in what it says, even if it could often say much more.

That said, the church of Jesus Christ, by its very proclamation of Jesus as Lord – a proclamation which laughs in the face of all the little would-be lords running around – is profoundly visible. It is conspicuous, a city set upon a hill. Its nature of witness demands this, and so, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words, ‘To flee into invisibility is to deny the call’ of Jesus.

Often enough, the need to speak of the visibility of the church will be grounded in the incarnation. The conversation goes something like this:

God took on flesh and became visible in Christ.
The church takes its cues from and is called to imitate Christ.
Therefore, the church should ‘take on flesh’ in the world and be visible.

Now, in one sense, this is patent (of course we should imitate Jesus) and inevitable (despite my own ambitions to superhero status, invisibility remains decidedly beyond my reach), and thus uncontroversial. As far as I know, there is not an invisible church sitting next to my house. I’ve never stubbed my toe on its invisible walls or unintentionally bumped into invisible Christians.

But the call for visibility is getting at more than this. On its good days, it is a way of taking seriously the public character of the church, a church of those whose Lord is Jesus and not my country, my party affiliation, my ethnic background, my gender, my family, etc. Further, the call for visibility seeks to stay the excesses of an overly-interior and individualistic spirituality: it is not content that each of us believes in the privacy of her own heart. In speaking of the visible church, we move from the realm of inner thoughts, convictions and affections to the realm of corporate practices. Piety, we come to realize, has to do with more than just ‘me and Jesus.’

On its bad days, the call for visibility can be a foolhardy and premature attempt to foreclose on the questions that only God is fit to judge, questions of who’s in and out, of which denominations or communions are the real deal, an attempt in which ecclesial realities are pinned down like a dead insect on a taxidermist’s board. It can reflect or lead to the reduction of a spiritual reality to a sociological one, with worship and obedience reduced to mere community-formation and social programming.

Back to the incarnational analogy in speaking of the visible church. Thomas Aquinas says this at one point in the Summa: ‘Thomas “saw one thing and believed another.” When he said: “my Lord and my God,” he saw a man. But by faith he confessed God.’ (ST II-II.1.4) I don’t know that I’m entirely comfortable with the bluntness of the contrast in Aquinas’ statement about seeing one thing and believing another, but he rightly suggests that even in Christ we do not simply see God without remainder. Indeed, as Colossians has it, Christ is ‘the image of the invisible God’ (1.15). I take that to mean that God remains invisible, even as he is seen in his Son, who is ‘the exact imprint’ of the Father’s nature (Hebrews 1.3). Were you or I to be walking around Palestine with Jesus, we could simply read off his divinity from his humanity. No, we would have to believe that he is the Christ, the son of the living God. ‘By faith’ Thomas confessed God.

So the Nicene Creed reminds us that we must ‘believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.’ Even in its visibility, the church must be believed in. And, faith is not sight. Or, echoing Aquinas, we see one thing and believe in another.

Of course, on the one hand, we do see the church. It’s really no different from any other organization in a number of ways. There are patterns of organization, structures of participation, designated leaders, regular practices and rituals that help build community, even things like budgets and buildings, potlucks and toy drives. Nothing overly mysterious about these things, all of which we can (to an extent) understand readily enough.

She does do some things differently, of course. In the church, the Word is preached and the sacraments are administered. Other, idiosyncratic things occur, too: praying, singing, evangelism, study of sacred texts, caring for the poor, widows and orphans.

At the end of the day, though, it’s not enough to articulate the church’s difference from other groups of people with reference to her unique practices. Sure, the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments mark her and help us locate her in space and time. That is, they render her visible. But to say that alone would be insufficient. Lots of groups are preachy and ritualistic. Rather, it is that the church preaches the Word of God and administers sacraments instituted by his Son and constituted by their Spirit that gives the church her sui generis character. In short, God makes his home in the church.

At this, caveats are called for. Surely, God is at home everywhere and anywhere in his creation. It is his creation after all. The Spirit blows where he will, thank you very much. I suspect we will be at once delighted in and ashamed by the extent and depth of God’s work outside the church at the last day.

That God makes his home amongst his people in the church ought never lead to the smug self-complacency that it sometimes does. (Have you read or seen Pride and Prejudice? Remember Mr. Collins’ sycophantic pride at leaving in the shadow of Lady Catherine?) Actually, God’s dwelling amongst us should make us nervous. Ours is not a God who plays the role of underwriter very well. More often, he assumes the part of underminer – all for the gospel’s sake, of course, and all for our good. But undermine our plans, our projects, our pretense he does, time and again.

Calvin writes somewhere that, in the Lord’s Supper, Jesus is ‘of a manner present, of a manner absent.’ Similarly, it seems to me we ought to speak of the church as ‘of a manner visible, of a manner invisible’. As long as the Lord of the church remains ‘in a manner absent’ (such that we cry, ‘Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus’), as long, too, as only a fraction of the communion of saints walks the earth at any given time, as long, finally, as our lives remain ‘hidden with Christ in God,’ we must speak of the invisibility of the church. Invisibility, then, is a metric by which we remind ourselves of the church’s provisional and derivative character. That is, there’s always more than meets the eye. More in the future, more to the church. More, precisely because it is the Father, through his Son and Spirit, who is the main actor in and on the church (as Reinhard Hütter writes, the church is fundamentally receptive, that company who ‘suffers divine things’); and none can see him and live. Invisibility reminds us that even the church is more about God than it is about us.

Or, and this may amount to the same thing, we can take John Webster’s route and speak of a spiritual visibility. This is far from a cop-out from Webster, one in which to corral all supposed visibility within invisibility. It is, though, to underscore that, while the church can be seen, the vision of her fullness belongs only to the eyes of faith. The world will see services and Bible studies, to be sure; but it will not see her.

I think a sort of postscript is in order. I began by speaking of evangelicals’ neglect of the church’s visibility. That’s only partly true. The very public, missional character of evangelical Christianity proves a functional understanding of the church as visible. It seems to me that the question is more one of what sort of visibility accords with and announces the gospel. But that’s for another post.