So, Why Is Incest Wrong?

By Dr. Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

There are certain questions now pressed upon us that previous generations would never believe could be asked. One of these is thrust upon us by events in New York City, where a well-known Ivy League professor has been arrested for the crime of incest. What makes the question urgent is not so much the arrest, but the controversy surrounding it.

David Epstein is a professor of political science at Columbia University, where his wife also teaches. He previously taught on the faculties of Harvard and Stanford. Last week, he was arraigned before a judge in Manhattan, charged with a single count of felony incest. According to authorities, Professor Epstein was for several years involved in a sexual relationship with his adult daughter, now age 24.

Though the story was ignored by much of the mainstream media, it quickly found its way into the cultural conversation. William Saletan of Slate.com, who remains one of the most relevant writers working on the issues of bioethics and human nature today, jumped on the story with a very interesting essay that openly asked the question many others were more quietly asking: “If homosexuality is OK, why is incest wrong?”

After reviewing the various legal arguments used to justify criminalizing incest, Saletan comes to the conclusion that genetics cannot be the fundamental basis, since incestuous sex could be non-reproductive. Similarly, the basic issue cannot be consent, since no one is arguing in this case that the sex was non-consensual.

He gets the liberal response just about right: “At this point, liberals tend to throw up their hands. If both parties are consenting adults and the genetic rationale is bogus, why should the law get involved? Incest may seem icky, but that’s what people said about homosexuality, too. It’s all private conduct.”

Saletan comes to the conclusion that the basic reason for the wrongfulness of incest is damage to the family unit. As an Ohio court ruled, “A sexual relationship between a parent and child or a stepparent and stepchild is especially destructive to the family unit.”

Now, remember that Saletan raised the morality of incest as related to the question of homosexuality. He argues that the family-damage argument against incest does not apply to homosexuality. In his words: “When a young man falls in love with another man, no family is destroyed.”

Saletan’s argument is easy to follow, and if you accept his fundamental premise, it can even make sense. But his fundamental premise assumes that there is no damage to a particular family unit if a homosexual relationship exists. That argument can be made only by ignoring the impact upon a family of origin. Beyond this, it limits the family-damage argument to an individual family, when the argument must be more broadly applied to the family as an institution.

This article is a very interesting window into the sexual confusions that lie at the heart of our age. To his credit, Saletan gets the conservative argument basically right:

The conservative view is that all sexual deviance—homosexuality, polyamory, adultery, bestiality, incest—violates the natural order. Families depend on moral structure: Mom, Dad, kids. When you confound that structure—when Dad sleeps with a man, Dad sleeps with another woman, or Mom sleeps with Grandpa—the family falls apart. Kids need clear roles and relationships. Without this, they get disoriented. Mess with the family, and you mess up the kids.

That’s a pretty fair summary. Of course, the Christian argument goes much deeper than the merely conservative argument, affirming the fact that, with exacting precision, God has spoken to the sinfulness of such behaviors — specifically condemning both homosexuality and incest. In other words, Christians move the question from mere wrongfulness to sinfulness, and place all issues of sin within the biblical account of sin and redemption.

It is extremely revealing that, for many of our fellow citizens, incest may merely “seem icky.” And yet, all around us are folks who, with a straight face, deny the inevitability of this slippery slope.

God Bless Us Every One

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Scrooge repented of his greed and changed at Christmas. His sin was not his wealth, but his misuse of that wealth. Thank God the American and British governments of the eighteenth century did not confuse wickedness with wealth. Nobody should act like Scrooge, but the problem was his love of money not his money.

As a boy I heard people laugh when a rich man died: “It will only take six feet of earth to bury him,” they said, and I became aware that hating the rich was a vice that my poor home state indulged in at will. It is, I think, one reason we were, and are, poor.

No human being should be given special treatment because of his wealth or lack of wealth. No human being should be punished because of his wealth or lack of wealth. The United States should treat each citizen justly. When justice is denied the poor, the nation suffers, but when justice is denied the rich the nation will also suffer.

Jesus does not love Scrooge more than anyone else, but He does not love Scrooge less. When the government forces Scrooge to do what it thinks proper, it removes the ability of Scrooge to freely repent and do what is good himself.

It would be immoral not to cut the taxes of the wealthy, because we are cutting everyone else’s taxes. Our present system where we take a greater percentage of the wealth of the rich is simply legalized theft based on covetousness. It enriches the state and does little to help the poor. Some citizens lose liberty and other citizens become wards of the state. You cannot free Cratchit by enslaving Scrooge.

Taxation is a necessary danger. Without consent of the taxed, any taxation is wicked and consent is hard to get. The majority is always tempted to vote themselves the property of the minority. Graft and tax breaks based on bribes from the rich are unjust, but so is pandering to the mob by stealing from the rich to enrich government.

God takes ten percent from all, rich and poor. Tyranny buys influence by pandering to the mob or the plutocrat with tax policy. Favoring either rich or poor dehumanizes one at the expense of the other.

Hatred of the rich is based on the sin of covetousness. He has and I want. Not all taxation is based on covetousness, but when we judge the rich as “not needing” his own money, then Cratchit is in danger of deciding for Scrooge what Scrooge needs based on Cratchit’s desires.

Second, hurting the rich is not the same things as helping the poor. Read the chapter “Scouring of the Shire” at the end of the Lord of the Rings. When we take from the rich, the poor never get most of the money, because those who tax use it to enrich themselves. Punishing wealth, instead of wickedness, is punishing success, and we will always get less of what we tax. Cratchit is likely to trade an oppressive individual, Scrooge, for an oppressive state. History says individuals are more likely to repent than governments!

Third, asking the rich to pay a greater percentage of their income than the poor is unjust. Property rights are an excellent measure of liberty. If I lessen one man’s right to his property, then I have made his liberty less. To let some men keep all their liberty (or property) because the state arbitrarily decides they have “too little” and to take liberty from another man because the state decides he has “too much” is unequal treatment under the law.

Finally, taxing the rich to support this particular government is empowering the real robber barons. Both political parties have wasted billions of tax money and will waste billions more if given the chance. Giving these politicos more funds is like handing the keys of the car to a drunk that is staggering out of liquor store on his way to Vegas.

You cannot redeem Scrooge by giving his money to the town looters and moochers.

The poor should receive equal treatment under the law, but so should the rich. We cannot steal from the rich and give to the poor and anticipate anything but hoods running our government. This Christmas Scrooge should give, but not because a group of moochers and looters made him. Instead, America should cut the tax burden on all and each American should pay his fair and equal percentage. Rich and poor: “God bless us, every one.”

The Knowledge of the Self-Revealing God: Starting Point for the Christian Worldview

By Dr. Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

One of the most important principles of Christian thinking is the recognition that there is no stance of intellectual neutrality. No human being is capable of achieving a process of thought that requires no presuppositions, assumptions, or inherited intellectual components. All human thinking requires some presupposed framework that defines reality and explains, in the first place, how it is possible that we can know anything at all.

The process of human cogitation and intellectual activity has been, in itself, the focus of intense intellectual concern. In philosophy, the field of study that is directed toward the possibility of human knowledge is epistemology. The ancient philosophers were concerned with the problem of knowledge, but this problem becomes all the more complex and acute in a world of intellectual diversity. In the aftermath of the Enlightenment, the problem of epistemology moved to the very center of philosophical thought.

Are we capable of knowing truth? Is truth, in any objective sense, accessible to us? How is it that different people, different cultures, and different faiths hold to such different understandings and affirm such irreconcilable claims to truth? Does truth even exist at all? If so, can we really know it?

As the modern age gave way to the postmodern, the problem of knowledge became only more complex. Many postmodern thinkers reject the possibility of objective truth and suggest that all truth is nothing more than social construction and the application of political power. Among some, relativism is the reigning understanding of truth. Among others, the recognition of intellectual pluralism leads to an affirmation that all truth claims are trapped within cultural assumptions and can be known only through the lenses of distorted perspective.

In other words, the problem of knowledge is front and center as we think about the responsibility of forming a Christian worldview and loving God with our minds. The good news is this—just as we are saved by grace alone, we find that the starting point for all Christian thinking in the grace of God is demonstrated to us by means of his self-revelation.

The Self-Revealing God of the Bible

The starting point for all genuinely Christian thinking is the existence of the self-revealing God of the Bible. The foundation of the Christian worldview is the knowledge of the one true and living God. The fact of God’s existence sets the Christian worldview apart from all others—and, from the very beginning, we must affirm that our knowledge of God is entirely dependent upon the gift of divine revelation.

Christian thinking is not reducible to mere theism—belief in the existence of a personal God. To the contrary, authentic Christian thinking begins with the knowledge that the only true God is the God who has revealed himself to us in the Bible.

As the late Carl F. H. Henry reminded us, “Divine revelation is the source of all truth, the truth of Christianity included; reason is the instrument for recognizing it; Scripture is its verifying principle; logical consistency is a negative test for truth and coherence a subordinate test. The task of Christian theology is to exhibit the content of biblical revelation as an orderly whole.”

That same affirmation is true for all Christian thinking. Christianity affirms reason, but divine revelation is the source of all truth. We are given the capacity to know, but we are first known by our Creator before we come to know him by means of his gift of self-revelation.

The Total Truthfulness of the Bible

Once our dependence upon the Bible is made clear, the importance of affirming the total inspiration and truthfulness of the Bible is apparent. Affirming the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible is not merely a matter of articulating a high view of Scripture. The affirmation of the Bible’s total truthfulness is essential for believers to have an adequate confidence that we can know what God would have us to know. Furthermore, our affirmation of the inerrancy of Scripture is based, not only in Scripture’s internal claims, but also in the very character of God. The God who knew us and loved us long before we came to know him is the God we can trust to give us a completely trustworthy revelation of himself.

Even so, ignorance of basic biblical truth is rampant. Remarkably, this is a problem inside, as well as outside, the church. Many church members seem as ignorant of the true and living God as the general public. Too many pulpits are silent and compromised. The “ordinary god” of popular belief is the only god known by many.

As Christian Smith and his fellow researchers have documented, the faith of many Americans can be described as “moralistic therapeutic deism”—a system of belief that provides the image of a comfortable, non-threatening deity who is not terribly concerned with our behavior but does want us to be happy.

The accuracy of the Christian worldview in the modern age can be traced directly to a significant shift in the doctrine of God. The God worshiped by millions of modern persons is a deity cut down to postmodern size.

The One True God

The one true God, the God who reveals himself in the Bible, is a God who defines his own existence, sets his own terms, and rules over his own creation. The sheer shallowness of much modern “spirituality” stands as a monument to the human attempt to rob God of his glory. The Christian worldview cannot be recovered without a profound rediscovery of the knowledge of God.

Inevitably, our concept of God determines our worldview. The question of the existence or non-existence of God is primary, but so is the question of God’s power and character. Theologians speak of the “attributes” of God, meaning the particulars about God’s revealed nature. If we begin with the right concept of God, our worldview will be properly aligned. If our concept of God is sub-biblical, our worldview will be sub-biblical, as well.

God’s attributes reveal his power and his character. The God of the Bible is omniscient and omnipotent, and he is also faithful, good, patient, loving, merciful, gracious, majestic, and just.

At the foundation of all the attributes ascribed to God in Scripture are two great truths which form central pillars for all Christian thinking. The first of these is God’s total, final, and undiluted sovereignty. God’s sovereignty is the exercise of his rightful authority. His omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence are the instruments of his sovereignty.

The second of these great pillars is God’s holiness. Just as sovereignty is the great term that includes all of God’s attributes of power, holiness includes all of the moral attributes ascribed to God in the Bible. At the first level, holiness defines God as the source of all that is good, true, beautiful, loving, just, righteous, and merciful. In other words, holiness establishes that God is not merely the possessor of these moral distinctives—he is the ultimate source of them, as well. In the end, God is not so much defined by these moral attributes as much as he defines them by the display of his character in the Bible.

In other words, to say that God is righteous is not to say that he passes muster when tested against our own understandings of righteousness. To the contrary, we gain any adequate understanding of righteousness only by coming to know the self-revealing God who is himself righteous. One of the central problems of modern thought is the attempt by human beings to judge God by our own categories of moral perfection. Our proper responsibility is to bring our categories into submission to the reality and revelation of God.

The question of the existence or non-existence of God is primary, but so is the question of God’s power and character. The Christian worldview is structured, first of all, by the revealed knowledge of God. And this means the comprehensive knowledge of the self-revealing God who defines himself and will accept no rivals. There is no other starting point for an authentic Christian worldview—and there is no substitute.

An Exceptional But Not Chosen People

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

A Chosen People

I have met the Chosen People and some of them are Americans, but not all of them. To be Chosen is special, but a mixed blessing as the history of the Jewish people demonstrates.

Just as the blessings of my neighbor do not make me poor, so the Chosen status of the Jews does not make me less. As an individual standing before God, I am equal to any man or woman, but that does not mean I share all the same roles. My sex prevents my enjoying the blessings of motherhood, but that does not make me less than my wife as a human being.

In the great drama of human history, the Jews were chosen to play a special role. God gave His Law to Moses and transformed the legal, social, and political world for good. The brave fight of the Jewish people to maintain identity and liberty is uniquely inspiring. As a Christian, I believe that God took on Jewish flesh forever on the first Christmas. This singular blessing can never be changed or lost.

History, however, also contains exceptional peoples, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, that leave a deep mark on human history. The world was changed by the Mongolian people under the Great Khan. The small island nation of Great Britain created an Empire and culture that had exceptional impact on the very words I am writing and you are reading. Nations that fail their exceptional opportunities through vice disappear.

The Chosen always will be chosen, but the exceptional might become unexceptional. All men are created equal, but not all nations. Some have a big role to play and others, in God’s good providence, a small one.

It is a false humility to hide from blessing or pretend it does not exist. Economic choices in the United States impact the health of people all over the world in an unparalleled way at present. If we pretend America is not exceptional, then we will be tempted to act irresponsibly. If we acknowledge our leadership of the free world, then this great power will be tempered by great responsibility. Our very election choices must be shaped by knowledge of our exceptional status.

A minor nation can afford petty leaders, but a great nation cannot.

An Exceptional People

America is not “chosen” in God’s plan, but we are exceptional.

God created all men as equals, but not all nations are equal in importance. If you are a citizen of the United States, you are blessed to be part of a wonderful experiment and one of the greatest nations in history. You are not of greater value to God than a citizen of Liechtenstein, but you have greater power and responsibility.

America is exceptionally powerful and wonderfully modest in the use of that power. At the end of World War II, the United States was the only nation with atomic weapons. Most Empires in the history of the world would have used this great power to quickly wipe out their foes and seize the wealth of the world, but the Jewish and Christianity moral majority in the United States never considered doing this. We abused our power too often, but it should never be forgotten that we chose the hard road of the Cold War and of alliances rather than the easy road of true Imperial power. The pagan Romans with nuclear bombs would not have been so kind.

The United States is blessed with an exceptional Constitution. The genius of the Founders in balancing law and liberty amazes any objective person. The hard work of generations of Americans in making the initial promise a reality, mostly through peaceable means, is remarkable. Any nation with one leader of the caliber of Abraham Lincoln is exceptional, but the United States also found Frederick Douglass in the same decade.

Pretending we are not exceptional tempts us to moral laziness. A sports star simply is a role model to young people (are you listening Brett Favre?) and America simply is a model to all the nations of the world. We are deciding right now whether we will model a decadent and materialistic Babylon to the world or the balance between public and private morality.

Beloved Persons

Some of us are part of groups, nations, or families that are not exceptional in a good way. America’s exceptional blessing and power from God has allowed us to do wicked things as well as good ones. The shame of race based slavery in our history, when sane nations knew better, is nearly unbearable. Our treatment of First Americans was dreadful by the standards Americans set for themselves.

We quickly assert that our national shame is not, after all, our personal shame. This is true, but it means we cannot take personal pride in the greatness of America. I benefit from the Constitution, but did not write it. My duty is to preserve it.

Another problem with the great blessing of being an American is to turn our wonderful nation into an idol. We are exceptional in many ways and some of them are bad. A patriot loves his nation and is proud of her achievements, but also is ashamed when we fail. Patriots take pride when we liberate nations and shame when we torture prisoners.

In the end, Christians are called to deal with nations, but love men. We are not just a member of a group, our jobs, or a tiny fragment of humanity. There is no human being in the entire world that is unloved or forgotten by God. Every human being is created in His image and has a remarkable chance at redemption.

Why Cultural Theology Is Not Relativistic

By Allen Yeh
Scriptorium Daily

African theology. Asian theology. Latin American theology. Aren’t all these “cultural” theologies just relativism? Why can’t we just do “pure” theology?

I encountered this question just earlier today, though phrased a little bit differently. Let me explain the background leading to this question. I am in Atlanta for the annual ETS (Evangelical Theological Society) conference. This year I decided to start a new initiative: a World Christianity consultation, in light of the fact that the center of gravity of Christianity has shifted to the non-Western world in the last 25 years. I’ve been attending ETS for many years now, and I noticed something: there is nothing about missions, World Christianity, or non-Western theology, in the entire program. In contrast, I counted how many consultations or study groups there are about systematic theology and Biblical studies: 31 and 67 sessions, respectively! Now, as Evangelicals, I find this lack of world perspective surprising. Shouldn’t we, as Evangelicals, be on the forefront of concern with evangelism/missions/contextualization?

Five years ago, the AAR (American Academy of Religion) started a World Christianity consultation. This caused me to have two reactions: 1) Disbelief at ETS. How is it that the AAR, who don’t even call themselves Christian, who are extremely liberal in a variety of matters, has keen enough insight to launch a World Christianity consultation, and the ETS is still lagging so far behind? Evangelicals should have been the first to understand this global move of God! So I decided to do something about it, to take the bull by its horns. 2) A deep frustration and dissatisfaction with the way AAR was going about their sessions. I attended the AAR World Christianity consultation several times, and it was always the same refrain: postcolonialism. This is an example of Western categories being imposed upon the non-Western world, and it doesn’t do justice to indigenous non-Western theology. This is why I wanted to do a World Christianity consultation at ETS: it is (I hope) the best of both worlds: orthodox in its theology, but also highly indigenous (which are, as is the point of this blog, not contradictory—read on for why).

Our inaugural World Christianity consultation went well this morning. I am the chair of the steering committee and I moderated the 3-hour session. We opened with Andy Peloquin (Western Seminary) talking about soteriology in China; then Ray Tallman (Golden Gate Baptist Seminary) presenting on contextualization in the Arab-Muslim world; followed by Ed Smither (Liberty University) discussing missions from Brazil; and ending with Bob Yarbrough (Covenant Seminary) lecturing on New Testament studies in Africa. We covered four major geographical areas with four solid papers, and it was as fine a kick-off celebration as I could have asked for, with quite a fair audience turnout. It was the final paper, Yarbrough’s, that prompted the “cultural theology” question. A man in the audience asked, “Why do we need to look at the New Testament from an African perspective? I mean, we don’t ask what the African perspective on gravity is, so why do we need to ask what the African perspective on Biblical theology is?”

Again, I had two reactions: 1) frustration with the ignorant presuppositions behind the question; and 2) vindication that ETS needs this World Christianity consultation, precisely to dialogue about questions like this.

Basically, the presupposition behind this man’s question is that all “ethnic” theologies are cultural, while Western theology is “pure.” That’s why he made the comparison with gravity. It wasn’t in my place to respond to the man, but I would’ve made this analogy: people have different perspectives on me, don’t they? If you ask all my acquaintances, some will know me as a scholar, some will know me as a baseball fan, some will know me as a musician, and some will know me as a world traveler. Are all of them true of me? Definitely. Does anyone have the full picture of me? No—they will all emphasize one thing over another, or be missing certain pieces of my profile. In order to fully understand me, you would have to ask everyone that knows me, and then slowly the whole picture will come together. So it is with theology (which is the study of God). A European will say one thing, an Asian another, an African another, and a Latino yet another. Nobody has the full picture of God, and though every perspective might be true, each is incomplete in and of itself, and every cultural perspective is needed to fully understand this global God.

Therefore culture, rather than giving us relativistic lenses, gives us instruments which help us see our Lord better. Non-Westerners will be able to understand agrarian metaphors and supernatural phenomenon much better than Westerners—and agriculture and spirituality are all over the Bible! Another audience member also mentioned that African culture is much more similar to Biblical culture than we in the West are—so in that sense, Africans may have a better perspective on the Biblical text than we do, because of their culture.

Not only do non-Western perspectives give us insights into God that we in the West could never get on our own, Western theology also has some serious flaws in it. For example, we are often beholden to Platonic dualism which has filtered down to us through the millennia, and it is so hard for Western Christians to shake this dichotomistic thinking about the spiritual and physical worlds (this is played out in missions in the sense that evangelism is seen as more important than social justice; non-Westerners would never make such a prioritization!). Another example is the influence of the Enlightenment on Western thought—well, we all know what the Enlightenment did to European Christianity: it killed it. Today, Europe is the most secular continent on earth, thanks to the Enlightenment and rationalism. Do we really want to export that to the non-Western world? A third example is individualism. Most cultures throughout world history have been communal, but we now have Korean Christians who come to the West to study in our seminaries, imbibe individualistic theology, then bring it back to their communal Asian contexts. It is destructive, because the pastors end up doing theology completely wrongly in their native context. A fourth example is a poverty in our Pneumatology. The rest of the world understands spiritual realities far better than the West does, and we are, effectively, “Binitarian” (rather than Trinitarian) in our theology: we have a great theology of God the Father, a wonderful Christocentrism, but very little knowledge or experience with the Holy Spirit; and the third person of the Trinity is the one that is with us today! Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing segment of Christianity in the non-Western world today for a good reason; perhaps we in the West can teach the rest of the world about Christology; but the rest of the world can teach us about Pneumatology.

In short, cultural theology is not relativistic (relativism = “truth is whatever I perceive it as”); culture is needed to more fully see this infinite God who we worship (we all have true, but incomplete, perspectives—some cultures are good at seeing God as physician; some are good at seeing God as judge; some are good at seeing God as Creator; some are good at seeing God as immanent; etc). We need Latinos and Asians and Africans and Europeans and Americans all bringing their perspective of God to the table like a potluck dinner (or, in the analogy above, like all my friends sharing stories about me). Together, all our contributions make up a fabulous cornucopia of stories, images, and theologies (perspectives on God) which start to make God a little clearer to us, we who would all have blind spots if it were not for the contributions of our Christian brothers and sisters from around the world who cover our backs in the areas where we are weakest. This is why we all need each other, and why culture helps rather than hinders!

[Appendix: World Christianity is one of the hottest topics in Christianity right now. Many publishers—such as Oxford University Press, Eerdmans, Blackwells, IVP, and Orbis—are chomping at the bit to put out books on World Christianity. However, the number of authors that are writing on the subject I can count on two hands: Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Dana Robert, Philip Jenkins, Joel Carpenter, Brian Stanley, Todd Johnson, Tim Tennent; there might be a couple of others, but that’s about it. (Even Mark Noll, the quintessential historian of American Christianity, has thrown his hat into the World Christianity ring with one of his latest books, The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith.) We need new (and younger) scholars to be contributing to this burgeoning field; it is not enough for the same ten scholars to be producing 90% of the material on the subject. This is one of my hopes for this World Christianity consultation, that it can be a catalyst for new scholarship in the field.]

On Keeping Goats

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

The Book of Proverbs says I should look after my flocks, because if I do my goats will take care of me in an economic time of trouble.

Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds, for riches do not last forever; and does a crown endure to all generations? When the grass is gone and the new growth appears and the vegetation of the mountains is gathered, the lambs will provide your clothing, and the goats the price of a field. There will be enough goats’milk for your food, for the food of your household and maintenance for your girls. (Proverbs 27:23-27)

If I take the Bible seriously, should I go buy goats?

No, because I take the Bible seriously, I will not go buy goats.

The path to liberalism is not paved with the taking the Bible in context. Instead, we take the Bible literally, when we take it in a literary manner. Genre matters. The idea that one can find science in the Psalms is foolish, because the Psalms are poetry and not science.

The Psalms no more teach a flat earth or a spherical earth, than the Charge of the Light Brigade (half a league, half a league, half a league on) gives the distances at the Battle of Baclava. To press the Psalms into scientific duty is an abuse of the Psalms.

In the same way, Proverbs is giving general advice, which is only generally true, to an ancient people group. The obvious fact that we do not live in an ancient agricultural society means that we have to contextualize the Proverb.

Goats are not the basis of wealth in our culture as they were in ancient times, though you can still get milk from them. It is obvious, of course, that the principle behind the Proverb still applies: make sure you watch after the thing that makes you money. If you are a goatherd, take care of your goats, if you are computer programmer, your code. If you program for Microsoft, your code may be figuratively goat-like, but it is not a literal beastie.

Context

This is not particularly controversial amongst Christians, but oddly I meet few secularists who understand it. If you talk about “application,” then they think you are not taking the Bible “literally” or making excuses for the Bible.

Many Bible difficulties, though certainly not all, disappear if we understand that making a book say something it could not possible be saying is abusing the book, not taking it literally. The Bible forces an ancient people to progress and we get to witness these pilgrim’s progress.

It also contains timeless truth, ancient history, and a full explication of God’s plan of fixing and repairing a broken human race. Humans do not change in essence, but they do change in important ways.
It is hard for me to remember that I lived for a long time before the Ipod and before mobiles. They are now such a part of life that it seems they must have also been there, but to my kid’s shock Dad is too old to have had a favorite video as a child.

The odd thing is it seems odd to me as well.

We must struggle to put ourselves into a mindset where the very concept of monotheism was new and difficult to understand. This is pre-philosophy, pre-theology, pre-scientific thinking. These were not barbarians, because they gave us philosophy, theology, and science, but it did not come to them in a flash. When God did come with shock and awe to His people, it did not seem to help.

The same group that saw the Red Sea part was worshipping a golden calf later.

Some new atheists believe that ancient culture was just a stinking version of modern culture. Instead, ancient culture is what produced modernity. Salvation history is a long educational program between God and humanity where human free will is preserved, but God leads ancient people to truth.

In some areas, people cannot understand or recognize a concept until they have a word for it. God had to teach His people over time the concepts of liberty, salvation, and law. Progress was not steady as we are not very good learners. Just as with technological innovation, early ideas, which seem simple now, were easier to grasp, while a combination of simple ideas would eventually lead to rapid conceptual breakthroughs.

How valid are the lessons for an agricultural people today? Some are directly valuable, since cheating your neighbor has never been good for long term business and is still bad for the soul. Some are only indirectly valuable and have to applied.

Our political leaders are not despotic kings ruling for life, so we have to contextualize the advice we are given. Our economy is driven more by ideas than things, by thought than muscle power, and this also will change the direction of the advice.

Making an appropriate application of principles is not usually very hard, but does require training. This is a good reason for seminary and for the hard work a pastor puts into his sermon. Only a fool would urge his congregation to buy goats or think there was nothing to learn from this advice.

Proverbs are, of course, only generally true. They are not “promises,” but reflections of the way things generally turn out. You should obey a proverb except when you shouldn’t! They don’t so much tell you what you should do in a particularly situation, but what you generally should do in a situation of the sort.

A proverb is valuable advice, but not an iron law telling you what to do.

Going to the Goats

So what do we learn from the goats of Proverbs?

First, we learn that a leader should tend to his core business. Though diversification can be a good strategy, if it destroys or weakens the focus of the main money maker. A family farm might fund some foreign trade, but the trade had better not put the family farm at risk.

Second, Proverbs is reminding us that times change. Nothing good lasts and so a person needs a fall back plan. This sounds obvious, but anyone who watched the churning activity in California land knows that moderns can also fall for the idiocy that good times will last forever.

Finally, goats are tangible and there is something to be said for tangible assets. A point of this passage is Proverbs seems something like this: “If all else fails, at least you can drink goat’s milk.”

This seems right.

Buy stock in a worthless company and you have paper, but land is at least land. There are many things you can do with land in a crisis. Even gold, which seems so tangible, is in a severe crisis not something you can eat, wear, or which will shelter you.

Goats, or things like goats, at least partially cover very basic human needs. In ancient times, the economy was much more fragile and a more severe “fall back” position was necessary. Americans are much less likely to starve (at least at the moment) than ancient Israelis.

One bad harvest could spell doom for ancients, but we can weather more bad weather.

Having a fall back plan for emergencies is prudent even if it need not be as severe as an ancient needed. In our culture, it might include buying life insurance for the family, having sufficient savings, and in Southern California having an earthquake preparedness kit.

Nobody needs to prepare for the apocalypse, because it is so unlikely to happen and so difficult to anticipate the particular conditions if it does.

That doesn’t begin to exhaust the advice one can get from these Proverbs, but it does get me thinking: “What are my goats? How can I tend them? What is my plan for hard days?”

Consider the Polar Bear

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

Consider the polar bear.

Really it is quite impossible not to do so, since environmental evangelism is all about us. That this is so is one of the best things about contemporary culture. As a Tolkien-nerd, I have always favored the Ents over Saruman.

Traditionalists and liberals may disagree about how to do it, but we agree that being green is good. Phillip Johnson, the Berkeley law professor and gadfly, once noted that the best thing about community radicalism is that it had preserved Berkeley untouched in a 1950′s time warp.

While the means were regrettable, some of the ends were magnificent. Every year my family celebrates the Fourth of July in the all American city of Berkeley with buildings that the Cleavers would recognize and sidewalk hippies the Partridge Family would adore.

It is the West Coast version of Williamsburg.

Traditional Christians know that God’s creation is good and is designed with great wisdom. Fallen men and women hesitate over great changes to Creation. Our first rule as stewards of that Creation, given our vanity, is to first do no harm.

Better to save a tree and lose a strip mall, then quickly to cut down the work of centuries without counting the cost and have our grandchildren regret it.

So both traditional Christians and the rest of America have reason to consider the polar bear.

The Christian conservationist and the secular environmentalist agree that the polar bear is worth considering. While lilies of the field and the polar bears of the ice floe are worth less than a man, beauty of the field and might of the bear is surely worth more than any given gross of plastic parts.

And that agreement should give the secularist pause when he becomes too critical of the Christian God. It is a complex cosmos and God has many cares in it. God considers the lilies, the fields, the bears, and the ice flows. He must balance the needs of each against the greater good.

At the same time, God has made humankind the crown of His creation by giving to men and woman a free will. This further complicates the calculus of the goods of bears, lilies, fields, free will, and men.

Humankind has not even come close to deciding how to do this calculus, but secularists are quick to judge God for any perceived shortcoming. And yet if people concede all these competing goods, we must first know what a better world would look like if we would judge God.

How can we know that this is not the best of all possible worlds when we do not yet have a good idea of what such a world would look like?

How many polar bears does this planet need to be good? How much freedom do men need?

We value polar bears and ice fields to some extent over gadgets and strip malls, but have no real knowledge of the extent we should value them. How then can we judge the justice of God? What is the basis of comparison?

If God stopped a particular hurricane at great cost to the ecosphere, what cost would be too high for the secular environmentalist? When environmentalists are willing to ban DDT, and allow the spread of disease bearing misquotes, the same person must not too hastily judge a God balancing many environments and many goods.

The calculations are further complicated by the cosmos not being the way God made it. Humans put grit in the mechanism which complicates everything. We refuse to listen to caution and build cities where prudence would suggest we should not and then fail to take basic precautions to protect human life in those cities.

When Pompeii is destroyed by yet another volcano, will men blame God? What if volcanoes are needed to keep Italy the way it must be to support its fragile ecosystem? Why have we built a new city there and provided the people in it no adequate means to escape the volcano everyone knows will erupt?

God, and not just Al Gore, considers the polar bears, though God may value Gore more than bears. When I read the work of modern scientists studying the complexities and fragility of even one ecosystem, I recognize how hard it would be for me to see God’s actions in any particular detail of environmental history.

I can see God’s goodness overall in Creation, but the devil has room to roam in the details, cracks created by our sin. To paraphrase Saint Augustine, we can see Providence in the existence of polar bears, but strain to see it in any given day of their, or our, lives.

So consider the polar bears.