Starting Something You Cannot Finish: The Eschatology of Christian Mission

By Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

Commencements come and commencements go. There will be thousands of graduation ceremonies around the world this season, and each will mark an important turning point in life. We have become so accustomed to these transitions and the need for marking such occasions that many schools now hold something like a commencement for kindergartners ready for first grade.

Still, there is something momentous about a formal commencement ceremony in an institution of higher learning. Before us today are a host of graduates in all their array, and a distinguished faculty in all its regalia. Any passerby would know that something important is going on here, and most will recognize the basic structure of the event. Degrees will be awarded, pictures will be taken, congratulations will be extended, and all the pomp and circumstance will be observed.

Then, what? To the average observer of an academic graduation, that just about sums it all up. The gowns will be put away, the programs will be filed for memory, the degrees will be hung on walls, and life goes on.

That is where this commencement differs from so many others. Most graduates are sent out to the next phase of life, learning, and profession — encouraged by the congratulations and qualified by newly held degrees. But those who graduate from this school today, though rightly congratulated, are being sent out to put everything they have, everything they are, everything they have learned, and everything they hope for, on the line for mission and ministry in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

They are not starting careers. Indeed, this may end their careers. They are not newly-minted professionals. In fact, they may be largely useless in the eyes of the secular world. They are now deployed for a life of ministry that runs counter to the wisdom of the world.

The call to the Christian ministry is a profoundly counter-cultural reality. The conventional wisdom just does not fit. As children, we are taught the adage that we are not to start what we cannot finish. But these ministers of the Gospel will never really finish anything, and they are not very qualified to start anything. As the Apostle Paul told the Corinthians: “According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” [1 Corinthians 3:10-11]

They will take their places in a long line of faithful ministers. They will build upon the foundation laid by the apostles, and that foundation is Jesus Christ. They will toil and serve and witness and teach and preach and lead and build, but they will die with more undone than done. Some will serve long, some may serve only a short time in this earthly life, but they will serve a cause they cannot complete; they will tell a story they cannot conclude.

The American dream does not fit this calling. That dream calls for years of preparation to be followed by formal qualification, decades of professional accomplishment, and a happy retirement. Our hope today must be that these ministers of the Gospel will never retire, for the ministry is never accomplished. They may in due time be redeployed, but never really retired — never ready to rest and merely collect a pension or cash in their retirement accounts and live a life of leisure. They are to serve to the end, learn to the end, teach to the end, and be faithful to the end.

As a matter of fact, the Christian ministry is as concerned about the end as the beginning. With Paul, we look back to the beginning, when Christ declared the establishment of his church, commissioned the church with the Gospel, and promised that the gates of Hell will never prevail against it. But we also look forward to the end, and that ending puts everything into perspective. The Christian ministry is a profoundly eschatological calling.

Consider what John saw in the Book of Revelation, chapter 5:

And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. And he went and took the scroll from the right hand of him who was seated on the throne. And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying,

“Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.” [Revelation 5:6-10, ESV]

This vision of the throne of Christ and the opening of the scroll declares the victory of God in the Lamb, who was slain, and is alone worthy “to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.” It is He who sits on the throne forever and ever. It is his marriage supper we await as a multitude with the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder. He rides the white horse and is faithful and true. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood and known by the name of the Word of God. He is the one who casts Satan into the pit, who captures the beast, who throws the false prophet and the deceiver into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur. It is He who vindicates his martyrs and brings them to life. It is He for whom Death and Hades give up their dead. It is He from whose mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and He rules them with a rod of iron. He is the one who makes all things new, who judges the nations and all who have ever lived. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, and it is He who brings the new heaven and the new earth, the new Jerusalem, prepared as a bride for her husband. It is He who said behold I am coming soon. It is He who completes what only He can begin.

And He does complete that which He begins. As the Apostle Paul declares, we know whom we have believed, and we are convinced that He is able to guard until that Day what He has entrusted to us. [1 Timothy 1:12] Without this confidence, the Christian ministry is a losing proposition. We never get to see a single saint perfected — not in this life. We never get to see all things made well. We never get to see every tear wiped away and every eye dry — not yet, anyway.

Behind us is a line of faithful Christians who toiled and served and preached and planted and tended and witnessed and died. The graduates we see before us today get in that line, are indeed already in that line, and they will never get to finish what they start — and we can live with that.

Why? Only because Christ will finish what He has started. Only because we are absolutely confident that this is not about us, but about Christ — all about Christ.

And we are not alone. As John saw, before the throne of God are arrayed men and women from every tribe and language and people and nation. All of them ransomed together by the blood of the Lamb who was slain, now made a kingdom and priests to God, set to reign with Christ on the earth.

Let’s consider what this means. The Father’s purpose is to glorify himself in the Son, the Lamb, through whom sinners are ransomed by his blood — men and women from every tribe and language and people and nation. In these blood-bought saints the curse is reversed, sins are forgiven, and Babel is turned into a thunderous and endless chorus of common praise.

This vision frames the reality of the Christian ministry. Our task is to lay our lives on the line in service to Christ, knowing that this vision is truer than true and absolutely assured. The Gospel is to be preached to the nations, knowing that Christ will redeem sinners by his blood from every nation, every tribe, every language. We go, we send, and we sustain with this vision in view. We declare that today is the acceptable day of salvation, and we declare to all people everywhere that salvation is to be found in the name of Christ and in Christ alone.

These graduates will join the faithful line of Christian pastors and evangelists and missionaries who have preached the same Gospel — that Christ saves sinners. We tell this Gospel again and again, telling sinners of their plight and of the just judgment of God upon sin. We tell of heaven and hell, and make the difference clear. We point to Christ, and to his cross and resurrection, making clear that our salvation is his work and his free gift to all who believe. We call sinners to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, to confess him as Lord, and to receive the forgiveness of sins and life everlasting. We tell both the beginning and the end of this great story of our salvation — the story of the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.

This vision transforms the Christian ministry from a profession into a calling that makes no sense according to the wisdom of the world. The vast majority of Christian ministers and pastors have served without the slightest attention of the world, completely lacking in its accolades and attention. They preached the Word, in season and out of season, evangelized, baptized, taught, tended, wept, and cared — and they were laid in humble boxes and lowered into to the waiting earth. And all is well.

By the untold thousands, ministers and missionaries have become martyrs for the sake of Christ, impaled, burned at the stake, beheaded, shot, and strangled. And all is well.

Most of these faithful servants never received a theological education like that received by these graduates. Some of them received what education they had by reading in the dim light of a candle, holding every moment of learning dear, even when their seminary was a prison cell. We are all together in the School of Christ, and from that school we never graduate until He claims his church and clothes it in righteousness. On that day we will not be wearing the regalia of earthly schools or brandishing the faded glory of earthly degrees. We will be bowing to the Lamb, together, forever.

Graduates, as you experience this day and look ahead, you no doubt are aiming for some future, armed with some plans. May those plans and purposes be godly purposes, with the ministry of the Word and the commission of the Gospel your passions. But, as you look to the future, think not of retirement and the security of the American dream. Be ready to lose everything the world holds dear in order to gain what the world cannot give.

Be armed with the vision of the Lamb before the throne, and of the reigning saints from every tribe and nation and people and language. Take the Gospel to the ends of the earth and let the nations rejoice in Christ. Serve the Lord with gladness and tend the flock of God with love and care. Preach the Word, in season and out of season. Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also. Be those of which the world is not worthy.

Serve, preach, teach, and tell the world about Jesus until they put you in a box or until Jesus comes. And all will be well. Start what you cannot finish, and trust that Christ will finish what He has started. Serve so long as you live and live so long as you serve, and we will one day meet together again — when we smell sulfur and see a Lamb.

Bleeding Heart Tightwads

By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times - Opinion

This holiday season is a time to examine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but I’m unhappy with my findings. The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy.

Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.

The upshot is that Democrats, who speak passionately about the hungry and homeless, personally fork over less money to charity than Republicans — the ones who try to cut health insurance for children.

“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”

Something similar is true internationally. European countries seem to show more compassion than America in providing safety nets for the poor, and they give far more humanitarian foreign aid per capita than the United States does. But as individuals, Europeans are far less charitable than Americans.

Americans give sums to charity equivalent to 1.67 percent of G.N.P., according to a terrific new book, “Philanthrocapitalism,” by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green. The British are second, with 0.73 percent, while the stingiest people on the list are the French, at 0.14 percent.

(Looking away from politics, there’s evidence that one of the most generous groups in America is gays. Researchers believe that is because they are less likely to have rapacious heirs pushing to keep wealth in the family.)

When liberals see the data on giving, they tend to protest that conservatives look good only because they shower dollars on churches — that a fair amount of that money isn’t helping the poor, but simply constructing lavish spires.

It’s true that religion is the essential reason conservatives give more, and religious liberals are as generous as religious conservatives. Among the stingiest of the stingy are secular conservatives.

According to Google’s figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do. But Mr. Brooks says that if measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes.

In any case, if conservative donations often end up building extravagant churches, liberal donations frequently sustain art museums, symphonies, schools and universities that cater to the well-off. (It’s great to support the arts and education, but they’re not the same as charity for the needy. And some research suggests that donations to education actually increase inequality because they go mostly to elite institutions attended by the wealthy.)

Conservatives also appear to be more generous than liberals in nonfinancial ways. People in red states are considerably more likely to volunteer for good causes, and conservatives give blood more often. If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent.

So, you’ve guessed it! This column is a transparent attempt this holiday season to shame liberals into being more charitable. Since I often scold Republicans for being callous in their policies toward the needy, it seems only fair to reproach Democrats for being cheap in their private donations. What I want for Christmas is a healthy competition between left and right to see who actually does more for the neediest.

Of course, given the economic pinch these days, charity isn’t on the top of anyone’s agenda. Yet the financial ability to contribute to charity, and the willingness to do so, are strikingly unrelated. Amazingly, the working poor, who have the least resources, somehow manage to be more generous as a percentage of income than the middle class.

So, even in tough times, there are ways to help. Come on liberals, redeem yourselves, and put your wallets where your hearts are.

Paedobaptism vs. Credobaptism

By Allen Yeh
Scriptorium Daily



Although I am a Calvinist, I disagree with John Calvin on paedobaptism. Even my favorite preacher, John Piper, is a huge follower of Jonathan Edwards and agrees with him on everything except his paedobaptism as well. So clearly, one can be very much in agreement with someone while objecting to a few points. That, I think, shows true discernment and thinking, not just wholesale, uncritical acceptance of another person’s thoughts. I am not a credobaptist by virtue of my Calvinism; in fact, quite the opposite — so I must have a good reason to hold my position. Throughout church history, most people have been paedobaptists, so I (and others like me) hold a historically “unpopular” position, despite the prevalence of credobaptism in the United States. People who practiced believers’ baptism were often disparagingly called Anabaptists (those who “baptized again”), or simply Nonconformists. The Magisterial Reformers (like Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) were persecuted by the Catholics, but they in turn persecuted the Radical Reformers (like the Anabaptists). The Radical Reformers, for their part, thought that the Magisterial Reformers were still too Catholic and didn’t take the Reformation far enough. The famous British pastor Charles Spurgeon (nicknamed the “Prince of Preachers”) recognized that credobaptists have to stick to our guns and not be swayed by what others think about us, but rather be faithful to Scripture:

“If I thought it wrong to be a Baptist, I should give it up and become what I believe to be right… If we could find infant baptism in the word of God, we would adopt it. It would help us out of a great difficulty, for it would take away from us that reproach which is attached to us — that we are odd and do not as other people do. But we have looked well through the Bible and cannot find it, and do not believe it is there; nor do we believe that others can find infant baptism in the Scriptures, unless they themselves first put it there.”

Lest I misrepresent my own position, let me also clarify that credobaptism is not a new thing; it is found all over Scripture, and the first historical reference to paedobaptism was not until 206 A.D. (mentioned by Tertullian). Credobaptism fell out of favor for much of church history, but I am thankful that it has been restored as a viable position to hold. And being Calvinist and Baptist is also not an untenable position, as people like Spurgeon, Andrew Fuller, William Carey, John Bunyan, Benjamin Keach, Roger Williams (briefly), John Piper, Al Mohler, Mark Dever, and others are Reformed theologians who hold to believers’ baptism.

Abraham Lincoln grew up a Baptist, Jimmy Carter is a Baptist, and William Carey (the father of Modern Missions), Adoniram Judson (the first missionary from America), A.J. Gordon & Russell Conwell (the founders of Gordon-Conwell Seminary), Carl F.H. Henry (the greatest evangelical theologian of the 20th century), Kenneth Scott Latourette (the greatest church historian of the 20th century), Martin Luther King Jr., Billy Graham, Timothy George, and Rick Warren are all Baptists. We are in good company!

I should also give two notes of clarification: first of all, credobaptism means “believers’ baptism,” it is not adult baptism we’re talking about here! As long as you are old enough to believe in your heart and confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord (e.g. you can be a teenager), that’s good enough. Secondly, even paedobaptists believe in credobaptism. Clearly, if someone is evangelized as an adult, and becomes a Christian, he or she must have believers’ baptism done to them. So paedobaptists are people who accept both infant and believers’ baptism, it’s just that if, given the choice, they default toward infant baptism.

Now let me lay out why I am a credobaptist:

1) Infant baptism is found nowhere in Scripture. Not one example of it exists. In the Bible, baptism always, always, follows repentance and faith (e.g. Acts 2:37-38, 41), and only adults can turn from their sin and profess allegiance to Christ. Of course, paedobaptists would counter with “the entire household” being baptized and saved (e.g. Acts 11:14; 16:15,31-34; 18:8). However, this is an argument from silence. Do you really want to hang your hat on the argument that “there might have been infants in the household”? That’s putting a lot of weight on something that may or may not be there. Adoniram Judson, when he set sail from Boston in 1812 to become the first American missionary, left as a (paedobaptist) Congregationalist. Along the sea voyage to Burma, he read his Bible over and over, and realized that there was nothing about infant baptism in all of Scripture. So, without the influence of anyone else, just by reading his Bible, he became a credobaptist. Judson landed in Asia and sent word back to his mission board that he was now a Baptist, much to their surprise!

2) The word baptizo, in Greek, originally was a pagan word that means to soak, wash, dip, submerge. In the ancient world, it was often used in reference to dying cloth, or a ship sinking into the ocean. Would you do that to an infant? Highly unlikely. When I was in seminary, two of my seminary professors (one a credobaptist and one a paedobaptist) went to Israel and saw the ancient Israelite miqvahs (Jewish baptismal tanks) which were about four feet deep. The credobaptist professor turned to his paedobaptist colleague and said, “I’d like to see you try to baptize an infant in that!” Of course, Jewish baptism wasn’t the same as Christian baptism, but it was a precursor to it. Based on the usage of baptizo in the ancient world, and the size of the baptismal tanks, sprinkling/pouring is definitely not the right mode of baptism, and is only allowed for (see The Didache) in the case of insufficient volume of water. Not submerging the baptized person is a concession, not the norm. Of course the mode of baptism isn’t the same as determining who you baptize, but it certainly seems to rule out the possibility of infants.

3) If you baptize an infant, it’s like flipping a coin. Who knows if this child will become a Christian? It is just as likely that you’ve just baptized a future non-Christian as a future Christian—and at that point, what does baptism mean anymore? It seems kind of cheapened because it doesn’t seem dependent on faith but rather on being born into the “right” family. Now, I understand that the parents and the church will all have a hand in raising this child in the faith until adulthood, and this increases the likelihood that the person will be a Christian. But I’ve seen far too many instances of people who grow up culturally/nominally Christian, or rebellious to the ways of their family, that it just seems like such a crapshoot. If the person confesses with their own mouth and believes in their own heart that Jesus is Lord, and chooses of their own accord to make this public with their baptism—yes it is true that there is the possibility of backsliding, but overall it is far more likely that the person is a genuine Christian and will stick to it. Plus, what a wonderful evangelistic testimony to the grace of God that is!

4) I think that confirmation is basically paedobaptists admitting that they are unsure about the salvation of their baptized infants! Confirmation is done when the child reaches a stage where they are mature enough to understand and articulate their faith, but why is that necessary if the salvation of the person is sure? Or, I could also ask, why not just wait for the person to be baptized at the same time as confirmation, instead of jumping the gun on baptism when the person is an infant? However, to be fair, on the flip side, paedobaptists would argue that infant dedication is what credobaptists do to imitate the covenant community. So maybe this argument is a quid pro quo, showing that both sides are more alike than either would care to admit—paedobaptists do confirmation (which resembles believers’ baptism), and credobaptists do infant dedication (which resembles infant baptism).

5) The two sacraments, baptism and communion, represent the first two parts of salvation: justification and sanctification, respectively (the third and final part is glorification which doesn’t happen until we get to heaven). This is why baptism is only done once, but the Lord’s Supper is taken over and over again. However, if we are justified by faith alone, then why practice infant baptism when the child has no ability to have faith? It seems premature, because the paedobaptism is not matching up chronologically with the faith of the believer, and the two are meant to correspond. Also, why don’t paedobaptists give their infant children the Lord’s Supper? If they are already baptized, then they should not be denied communion, right? It seems inconsistent.

6) Probably the strongest argument for infant baptism, I think, is the theory that baptism is the New Testament form of circumcision (this view is promoted strongly by Presbyterians). This is based on passages such as Acts 15:1-2, 21:21 and Col. 2:11-12 which seem to equate the two, which further implies baptism as being a sign and seal of the Covenant and thus God’s grace. According to the Belgic Confession (sec. 33), sacraments are “visible signs and seals of an inward and invisible thing, by means whereof God works in us by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Therefore, baptism is seen both as the means of initiation into the covenant, and a sign of salvation. Millard Erickson writes, “For adults, those benefits are absolute, but the salvation of infants is conditional upon future continuance in the vows made.” This Covenant, which goes back to Abraham, seems to encompass children as Gen. 17:7 makes a reference to Abraham and his “seed.” Ex. 2:24 and Lev. 26:42 open the Covenant to other generations beyond Abraham, and passages such as Acts 2:39, Rom. 4:13-18, Gal. 3:13-18, and Heb. 6:13-18, further seem to extend the promises of the Covenant to New Testament Christians.

Baptists, especially Calvinist Baptists, do not deny everything that Presbyterians believe. Much of the above holds true in the minds of Baptists (in fact, you might be surprised to hear me say that I do think baptism and circumcision are parallel—but I don’t think that the former replaces the latter!), but where Baptists differ is in the trajectory and conclusion of the data. Is baptism representative of merely purification, or death & resurrection (which includes the idea of purification but is so much more)? All Old Testament forms of ablution—immersion, pouring, sprinkling—represent purification, which needs to be repeated time and again (thus, the Lord’s Supper is more akin to OT baptism than NT baptism is). The New Testament form is death & resurrection, as seen in passages like Rom. 2:29, 6:1-11. In other words, baptism is an assurance of God’s promises, and it is given not to heirs of physical descent but to those who have been spiritually transformed (John 1:12 makes this clear). And how does one become a spiritual heir as opposed to a physical heir? By faith. And infants can’t have faith! To contrast this with circumcision, the Apostle Paul dismisses it as nothing in passages like Gal. 5:2-6; 6:12-13,15. Why would we continue a practice which the Apostle Paul calls “worthless” if indeed that baptism and circumcision are the same thing? Millard Erickson, himself a Baptist, observes that, “While faith is possible without baptism, baptism is a natural accompaniment and the completion of faith.” This cannot happen with infants since “Baptism of infants rests on either the view that baptism is a means of saving grace or the view that baptism, like OT circumcision, is a sign and seal of entrance into the covenant.”

Two final objections to the Presbyterian paedobaptist view: first, if baptism is the New Testament form of circumcision, then it should follow that only males should be baptized since only males were circumcised. Second, clearly baptism didn’t replace circumcision, because both occurred in the early church.

I’m not saying that infant baptism is a bad idea through and through. There are actually some things I really like about the Presbyterian view. For example, there is something powerful about the covenant community, because truly “it takes a village to raise a child.” Also, a community vitiates against excessive Western individualism which is rampant in our society today. But, despite these attractions, the arguments for paedobaptism are still not convincing enough to me compared to the compelling evidence on the other side.

7) And finally: Jesus was baptized as an adult, and if that was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!

Let me end with this: though I may have come across strongly in this blog (why take a side if you can’t defend it, or feel passionately about it?), let me now extend the hand of fellowship to paedobaptists as my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. Baptism is not a salvation issue. It is not a heresy issue. It is a command of Christ, and all Christians do it. So in that sense, it should bind us more than tear us apart. It is a sign upon us that we belong to Christ. So, to my friends and colleagues who are paedobaptists (and/or complementarians and/or Arminians), Soli Deo Gloria. That is what is most important.

Can Animals Be Gay?

By Dr. Albert Mohler
AlbertMohler.com

The New York Times Magazine offered a photograph of bunnies on the cover of its Easter Sunday edition, but the paper was asking a rather unusual question: “Can animals be gay?”

“Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs,” reported Jon Mooallem. Well, that’s a rather surprising statistic on many levels. It seems that researchers have been attempting to document these activities and to explain them. Thus far, there has been only a smattering of documentation and significant controversy over how to explain it.

Mooallem explains:

Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing.

The magazine’s cover story begins in Hawaii, where observers are documenting the behavior of albatrosses. One researcher, Lindsay C. Young, noted the existence of some single-sex pairs of the birds, some of whom have “been together” for several years or more. Are these lesbian birds?

Young refuses to speak of “straight” or “lesbian” albatrosses because these are human terms. Nevertheless, she does use the term” homosexual animals” to discuss the albatross colony. “This colony is literally the largest proportion of — I don’t know what the correct term is: ‘homosexual animals’? — in the world.” She added, “Which I’m sure some people think is a great thing, and others might think it is not.”

Well, at least one Denver-based gay group celebrated the colony’s status, referring to the group’s “extensive lesbian albatross parent community.” Stephen Colbert reported the story on Comedy Central, referring to the birds as “albatresbians.”

The whole enterprise of animal sexology is likely to raise some eyebrows. To her credit, Lindsay Young seems quite clinical, speaking of activities like “supernormal clutches” — hardly explicit. One fascinating aspect of this research is the fact that determining the gender of some animals can be rather difficult. When scientists observe two animals in a sexual behavior, they generally assume the pair to be heterosexual. One biologist referred to this as “heterosexist bias.” Bruce Bagemihl said, ‘There is still an overall presumption of heterosexuality. Individuals, populations, or species are considered to be entirely heterosexual until proven otherwise.”

The magazine’s coverage is both interesting and generally even-handed. As Jon Mooallem acknowledges, this is a relatively new area of animal research, but one that has attracted a great deal of attention. The reason is obvious — the issue of homosexuality is one of the most controversial debates in our culture. Both sides in the debate are vitally interested in the data, and even more interested in the interpretation of the data.

Those pushing for the normalization of homosexuality are eager to make the case that homosexual behavior is natural, or at least not unnatural. The documented existence of animal homosexuality would presumably help that case. On the other hand, opponents of the normalization of homosexuality have long pointed to the central biological fact that homosexuality does not lead to reproduction — which is the goal of every species.

The scientists making these observations are committed to an evolutionary worldview, so their findings on animal homosexuality have to be fitted within the structure of evolutionary thought. Given the non-reproductive aspect of homosexual behaviors, this poses a significant challenge. Put bluntly, homosexual behavior in any form seems to run counter to the logic of evolution.

Mooallem tries to explain:

Something similar may be happening with what we perceive to be homosexual sex in an array of animal species: we may be grouping together a big grab bag of behaviors based on only a superficial similarity. Within the logic of each species, or group of species, many of these behaviors appear to have their own causes and consequences — their own evolutionary meanings, so to speak. The Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden told me to think of all these animals as “multitasking” with their private parts.

The political implications of the issue are clear — those pushing for the normalization of homosexuality want to be able to point to research that would prove the normality of homosexuality in nature. This is where Christians need to think very carefully. Some believers will be tempted just to dismiss the research as bogus or irrelevant. This would be a mistake.

The world we know is a world that shows all the effects of human sin and the curse of God’s judgment on that sin. Though the glory of God shines through even its fallen state, nature now imperfectly displays the glory of God. Because of the curse, the world around us now reveals and contains innumerable elements that are “natural,” but not normative. Illnesses and earthquakes are natural, but not normative.

Evidence of homosexual behaviors among animals is just another reminder that we live in a fallen world — one in which every dimension of creation bears evidence of the Fall. This new research points all the way back to Genesis 3.

Efforts to claim a genetic basis for homosexuality are rooted in the assumption that our genes tell us what God’s intention for us is. In a fallen world, that is a faulty assumption. Only the Word of God can tell us what God’s intention is. We cannot derive our sexual morality from a laboratory — much less from observations of an albatross colony.

“What animals do — what’s perceived to be ‘natural’ — seems to carry a strange moral potency,” suggests Jon Mooallem. That is understandable, given the highly contested battles over sexuality that mark our times. Indeed, the Apostle Paul warns us that homosexual behavior is indeed “against nature.” [Romans 1:26-27] But we did not gain that insight by observing albatrosses. We have that knowledge because God spoke it to us in his Word.

C. H. Dodd and Realized Eschatology

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

C. H. Dodd (born this day, April 7, 1884; died 1973) was a major twentieth-century New Testament scholar. He wrote on many topics, but his name is mostly associated with the idea of realized eschatology.

If eschatology is the doctrine of the final things (eschaton being the Greek word for “last”), then realized eschatology is the teaching that those final things have already happened. Realized eschatology replaces “the end is near” with “the end is here,” and Dodd argued that we should understand Jesus’ message that “The kingdom of God is at hand” with an emphasis on the kingdom’s actual absolute presence: “The kingdom of God is right here, at hand, at your fingertips, reach out and you’re touching it.”

There is much to be said in favor of realized eschatology. Jesus knew that certain things were going to happen at the end of the world:

The Messiah would come
God would pronounce final judgment on the sins of the world
The dead would rise
The Son of Man would be seen in the clouds of heaven
The Spirit would be poured out on all flesh

As the New Testament makes clear, these things all happened in the ministry of Jesus himself: He was the expected Messiah, his cross was the place of God’s judgment on the sins of the world, he rose from the dead as the firstfruits of the general resurrection, he was raised to the right hand of the majesty on high, and he poured out the Spirit on the basis of his finished work.

In the Revelation, Christ identifies himself as the first and the last, the protos and the eschatos. Just as he said, “I am the resurrection,” Christ can legitimately say, “I am eschatology” or “eschatology is realized in me.”

So realized eschatology is a great conceptual tool for understanding what’s happening in the New Testament. But it’s not enough, and Dodd’s theology came under some deserved attack for being one-sided. Realized eschatology has to be kept in tension with future eschatology, or, in New Testament terms, “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:11) Jesus may be the eschatological man, but that doesn’t mean his eschatological work is complete yet.

If all you can say about eschatology is that it was realized in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, you have nothing to say about our future. Inevitably this will lead to confusion of terminology (the end of the world was 2,000 years ago, the future is in the past, etc.) and will require you to ignore the unfulfilled prophecies of the Old Testament and the futurist passages of the New Testament –or at least offer gymnastically contorted reinterpretations of them. The first coming of Christ was eschatological, but the second coming will be eschatological… eschatologically eschatological!

Dodd put realized eschatology on the map of twentieth-century theology in a very helpful way, and as later scholars came to term with his arguments, they tended to balance his one-sidedness by integrating more of the full biblical witness. George Eldon Ladd was probably the most influential voice for evangelicals in coming to terms with the tension between realized eschatology (a biblical idea) and futurist eschatology (also a biblical idea). If “realized eschatology” is the slogan for Dodd, then Ladd’s slogan is “already / not yet.” The biblical tension between already (Christ brought the final things in his own person and work) and the not yet (this world shows all the expected signs of unredeemedness, and we await the return of Christ) is pervasive. In some ways, this clear biblical tension is so much a part of the intellectual furniture of evangelicalism that we’ve had Dove-award-winning pop songs about it since the 80s, and Russell D. Moore has recently shown how it serves as a consensus position for united social engagement.

As for C. H. Dodd, who did justice to the realized eschatology side of things, his theology did suffer from its one-sidedness. If eschatology is over and done with, then when we pray “thy kingdom come,” all we can really mean is “may your kingship be manifested in my life.” That is a great prayer, and people like Dallas Willard have been eloquent about how transforming it is for Christian life to acknowledge the reign of God here and now. But without the counterweight of a future kingdom of God, this “present reign of God” theology can be privatized. That’s certainly what happened in the wake of Dodd: The message of Jesus could easily be transformed into the message of Bultmann, a call for ultimate existential decision. In complex ways, his thought was folded into the English-language neo-orthodoxy that dominated mainline theology for the middle of the twentieth century, enabling academic theologians to hold on to Christian confession in the face of liberal denials, but limiting their ability to make much headway. Seminarians of that era were uniformly amused by the great commandment of Anglophone neo-orthodoxy: “Thou shalt love the lord thy Dodd . . . and thy Niebuhr as thyself.”

And as long as I’m reporting jokes based on what his name rhymed with, here’s a limerick that circulated for a while:

There was a professor called Dodd,
Whose name was exceedingly odd;
He spelled, if you please,
His name with three “D’s,”
When one was sufficient for God.

F. F. Bruce praised Dodd as having ” a brilliant intellect, a sober judgment and (not least) a reverent humility.” And Bruce has a wonderful, short account of how to think of Dodd’s position in his own time:

His earliest writings reflect something of the climate of theological liberalism in which he was brought up. It would be inaccurate to say that his later writings reflect a different climate; they helped to create a different climate. For Professor Dodd was a leading pioneer in the ‘Biblical theology’ movement; indeed, so far as Britain is concerned, he might justly be called the pioneer.

Why the Great Books Aren't the Answer

By Patrick Deneen
Minding the Campus

For several decades, conservative critics of higher education have argued against trends toward the elimination of "core" curricula and with equal ferocity against their replacement by "distribution requirements" or even open curricula. They have, in particular, defended a curriculum in "Great Books," those widely-recognized texts in the Western tradition authored by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Mill, and Nietzsche, among others. This curriculum - preserved still in some of the nation's leading universities such as the University of Chicago and Columbia University - as well as at the heart of the longstanding Great Books approach of St. John's College - is seen as a bulwark against contemporary tendencies toward relativism, post-modernism, and political correctness.

More recently, even some faculty who would eschew the "conservative" label have sought to restore sustained study of the Great Books to some place of pride in the curriculum. Some twenty years after the height of the "culture wars" over the Western canon - during which the phrase "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go" was chanted on the Stanford campus - there seems to be a growing sense among some moderate faculty that the curriculum has become too fragmented, and that something valuable was lost in the politically-motivated elimination of a common core. Notably, at Harvard an ad hoc effort by some faculty to establish a Great Books track in the "Gen Ed" requirement was advanced before crashing on the shoals of Harvard's new fiscal reality (as well as the opposition of some faculty).

This reassessment has been most articulately argued by Anthony Kronman - a moderate liberal - in his recent book Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Kronman, a professor and former Dean at the Yale Law School, laments the abandonment of a serious engagement with the Great Books. Their neglect has led to the decline of an examination of "the meaning of life," an activity that he argues should be at the heart of the university experience. He praises a period in the history of American universities which was dominated by what he calls a worldview of "secular humanism." This period of "secular humanism" followed the widespread disaffiliation of traditionally religious institutions and preceded the rise of the modern research university and the concomitant rise of political correctness in the humanities. He urges modern institutions of higher education to adopt something like the Yale program in "Directed Studies" - in which he teaches - which requires students to engage in a concentrated study of the Great books ranging from Homer to Luther, from Machiavelli to Kant, from Plato to Nietzsche - over a two year span.

While there is much to admire in Kronman's arguments - especially, in my view, his penetrating critique of the scientific basis of the university and his critique of "political correctness" - his defense of the "Great Books," and its basis in the worldview of "Secular Humanism," is deeply problematic and reveals the deep flaw of this longstanding tack by conservatives. Indeed, his argument suggests not that study of the Great Books is a true alternative to the relativism among professors of humanities on today's college campuses, but in fact was the breeding ground of the very relativism that a curriculum in the Great Books purports to combat.

The Great Books have long been recommended by figures ranging from Allan Bloom to William Bennett as the basic texts of a liberal education and for containing essential knowledge about the Western tradition. An education in the Great Books was seen as essential in the cultivation of the educated person, and as the source of ideas that gave rise to many of the treasured inheritances of the West - including constitutionalism, liberal democracy, separation of Church and State, individual rights, a free-market economy, and the dignity of the human person. Knowledge of the constitutive texts of the West was seen by many of its defenders as the prerequisite for the informed citizen, someone not only who would believe in the traditions of the West, but be able to muster an articulate defense of the same.

However, for anyone with even passing familiarity with those constitutive texts, it is readily evident that these texts provide nothing of the sort. These texts are hardly primers on liberal democracy or any other political, ethical or economic system, but rather contain a wide and ranging set of debates over the nature of the good and best life, the good and best polity, the good and best economic system, and so on. The texts typically listed in such a course of study are marked by severe and profound disagreements. For example, on the list of books provided by Kronman that have been recently assigned in the Yale Directed Studies Program, they have included such radically distinct books as The Hebrew Bible, The New Testament, Aristotle's Politics, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Machiavelli's Prince, Rousseau's Social Contract, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, the Federalist Papers, Mill's On Liberty, Marx's Communist Manifesto, Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, and Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Thus (to be somewhat reductionist), students are exposed to arguments on behalf of Judaism, Christianity, Teleology, Pessimism, Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Utilitarianism, Progressive Liberalism, Communism, Deontology, and Nihilism (among many other alternatives). On point after point and issue after issue, basic elements of each theology or philosophy contradict some fundamental aspect of all the other philosophies listed here (and others that go unlisted). An education in the Great Books is a potpourri of conflicting views, a set of strongly articulated arguments that continuously strive to refute other views that purportedly comprise a single "tradition." The "Western tradition" is a ferocious and ongoing set of disagreements about the most basic human beliefs.

What Does it All Mean?

Any student confronting such a wide variety of texts will be driven to make some sense of them, to evaluate their strong and contradictory claims. It's not enough to state that higher education should consist of an exposure to the Great Books and leave it at that: students will need some way of negotiating their way through the philosophical thicket into which they are being thrown. For Kronman, this is exactly the point: exposure to this diversity of views encourages a probing examination of the best way to live, or "the meaning of life." Any student confronting these texts in even a remotely serious way cannot be left complacent -he must confront his own presuppositions and articulate a response to the many challenges to which he will be exposed.

A confrontation with the Great Books, according to Kronman, is to disrupt easy assumptions about the meaning of life and force students to more deeply articulate their beliefs. But Kronman is quite explicit that arriving at life's meaning will be the result of an individual's negotiation between these various texts. The "meaning of life" will be developed from each person's own capacity to arrive at a personal response to the many challenges these books represent. Confrontation with these texts reveals the expansiveness of possible ways of life, beliefs, ethics, and economics: they teach us that "each of us can make, and wants to make, a life uniquely our own - a life that as no precise precedent in all the lives that have gone before and that can never be repeated exactly." These books reveal the "plasticity of human nature."

Thus, even as each student will be encouraged to arrive at a deeply informed and highly articulated "meaning of life," a deeper lesson is advanced by such a curriculum: the "meaning of life" is always highly personal and relative to each person. A person may arrive at a "philosophy of life" that is not itself relativistic - for instance, finding in the Biblical texts a religious basis for their beliefs - but overall, such a conclusion will take place within the context of a curriculum that is itself fundamentally relativistic, in which each student is encouraged to come to their own conclusion about the meaning of life, and thus to arrive at a personal set of criteria by which to evaluate all the respective arguments.

Indeed, such an approach in fact suggests that there is a single "meaning to life," and that meaning is fundamentally "decisionist." Most curricula in the Great Books offer the various philosophies as inherently coherent and valid systems, suggesting to each student that there is finally no basis on which to decide which philosophy to adopt other than mere preference. One must simply decide. This Nietzschean (or Schmittian) lesson is reinforced by the typical organization of such curricula (where they persist), which is typically chronological. Given that most students today have deeply ingrained progressive worldviews (that is, the view that history has been the slow but steady advance of enlightenment in all forms, culminating in equal rights for all races, all genders, and all sexual preferences), a curriculum that begins with the Bible and Greek philosophy and ends with Nietzsche subtly suggests that Nietzsche is the culmination of Enlightenment's trajectory. The fact that his philosophy is reinforced by the message that an education in the Great Books consists in exposure to equally compelling philosophies between which there is no objective basis to prefer only serves to deepen the most fundamental lesson of a course in the Great Books, which is a basic form of relativism. The choice of a personal philosophy is relative, and the basis on which one makes any such choice is finally arbitrary, the result of personal preference or attraction. De gustibus non est disputandam.

A Brief History

This basic feature of Great Books draws attention to the curious feature of Kronman's chronology that goes unremarked upon. According to Kronman, religiously-affiliated institutions with a longstanding emphasis on a classical education (particularly Classics and Biblical studies) dominated the American landscape until the late 19th and early 20th-centuries. Then, he argues, there was a brief flourishing of "secular humanism," during which the study of the Great Books was a central component of the curriculum. This period marked the rise of a view that life's meaning was not regarded to be unified in a religious creed, but rather that meaning was to be increasingly fashioned by individuals in an age of "pluralistic" belief. This phase lasted less than a century, followed in the mid- to late-twentieth century by the rise of the science-dominated and politically correct research university.

If we extend Kronman's analysis chronologically into the past, however, we would need to acknowledge that in one form or another, the religiously-affiliated university has dominated the scene in the West since the Middle Ages, persisting roughly for a millennium or more. By contrast, the age of "secular humanism" lasted not even for a century, a scant blink of an eye compared to the longer tradition of the religious university. Seen in this light, we need to ask why the very ideal recommended by Kronman was so fleeting and unstable in the light of the longer history of the Western religious university.

The irresistible conclusion is that the age of "secular humanism" was a brief period of transition between the decline of the age of the religious university to rise of the age of the scientific and "politically correct" university. Secular humanism sought briefly to provide a different kind of "scripture" to that which had been displaced - now the Great Books - but lacking any kind of philosophical or theological principle by which to assess the competing claims advanced by those texts, this period was destined to usher in a period of philosophical relativism and the rise of the science as the only form of knowledge that could provide certainty and true knowledge.

Many conservatives have long argued for the reinstitution of the Great Books without acknowledging that this is to serve as a kind of "replacement scripture," in the main satisfied that some common knowledge of the great texts of the West could constitute a common culture and supply the appearance of agreement in the absence of a deeper set of religious and cultural commitments. But, by the time this became a "conservative" argument, the more traditional defense of a more constitutive system of belief by which competing philosophic claims could be judged had long been displaced from the heart of the university. By the time Allan Bloom wrote of the thirty elite universities in the United States in the mid-1980s, he was writing of long-since religiously disaffiliated institutions that were already well on their way to complete relativism. Bloom argued not for belief in something, but on behalf of "the Socratic knowledge of ignorance," a kind of middle-point between skepticism and certitude. For Bloom, an education in the Great Books was to be at best a perpetual kind of suspension of belief, an eternal kind of play of ideas by philosophers. If Bloom resisted the "decisionism" that one sees in Kronman, at the same time he rejected the idea that there could be, or ought to be, any criteria by which one ought to judge between various philosophies. In the end, his peculiar understanding of Plato was to be recommended - the knowledge that we do not know.

This might be an appropriate goal for philosophers (though I doubt it), but it cannot exist as a reasonable curriculum for students who will enter the world wondering how they should live. Where they exist, contemporary arguments on behalf of the Great Books are often as pernicious, and even indistinguishable from, the forms of value relativism that they purport to combat. Many conservative academics have become lazy in the defense of the Great Books, content to let the phrase stand in for a deeper and potentially more contentious examination of the various arguments within those books and the West itself, and of the need for university faculties to provide some kind of organized and well-formed guidance to students on how best to approach these texts.

In my view, the reinstatement of the Great Books would accomplish little in the contemporary academic context. What is needed is a more serious and potentially contentious discussion of the underlying philosophy within which these books would be read and taught. Teaching as I do at a Catholic and Jesuit university, I would like to see these books taught explicitly within the context and in the light of the standards that the Catholic tradition would provide (I would be satisfied if this were done solely within the context of my own institution, leaving aside for the moment the sticky issue that I may merely propose a set of internally coherent institutions between which students would have to choose. This is merely to push relativism from the individual to the institutional level, but I would regard this as "progress"). If this would mean that the arguments of Marx and Nietzsche would be subject to severe critique, it would mean also that the writings of Locke and even the Founding Fathers would not escape criticism for their highly individualistic and Enlightenment basis. It would mean, too, that the work of Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas would receive special pride of place. The Great Books would and should be taught, but not as if the faculty is indifferent to the ways that they should be received. Students should at least know that these books cannot be rightly approached from a basis of "neutrality," since that approach itself contains a teaching, and that teaching is one that reinforces the relativist orthodoxies of our age. Better to rub against the grain than - in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson - go with the flow.

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Patrick J. Deneen is the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, and is the Founding Director of The Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy.

Albrecht Dürer, Northern Renaissance Man

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Albrecht Dürer (born 1471, died on this day, April 6, in 1528) was widely hailed as the greatest artist of his generation in the northern renaissance. All kinds of voluptuous shenanigans were going on in the wonderful world of the southern Renaissance, but if you want that stern northern sensibility, it’s hard to beat Dürer .

His artistic accomplishment is especially memorable for the range of visual media he mastered. He made enough large paintings to prove he could do it as well as anybody, and the big oil painting has always been the preferred medium for masters. But he also took up the challenge of the print media, from woodcuts to copper engravings. Compared to the richness of oil painting, woodcuts are incredibly limited in their expressive possibilities: the artist is basically restricted to lines and shapes. But Dürer was the kind of artist who responded well to the challenge of limitations, and made the restriction itself into an element of his self-expression. If anybody looked down on the humble woodcut, so useful for mass production and basic communication by craftsmen and printers with no artistic aspirations, Dürer exalted the medium to make it the vehicle of serious artistic intention.

Hundreds of Dürer images can be browsed here.

An 1889 book on Dürer gives a good summary of his views on the Christian vocation to art:

In all his doings Dürer felt himself to be under the directing power of God. He says he will return from Venice “when God helps him home.” He will accomplish a thing “if God will.” The name is lightly used in his earlier years, but later it is introduced within a halo of reverence. “The more we learn,” he somewhere says, “the more closely do we resemble the likeness of God, who knoweth all things.” “From God we receive all things.” ” God is perfect in goodness.” These and the like phrases are of constant occurrence. Many of them are taken from the New Testament, which Dürer studied diligently both in Latin and German translations. He held that the artist’s duty to God was especially great. The youthful apprentice is to be “brought up in the fear of God and taught to pray to God for the grace of quick perception and to honour God.” Great artists he held to be God-inspired. “God only knoweth what is the perfect figure of a man, and he knoweth it likewise to whom He revealeth it.” “God granteth great power to artistic men.” Again, “Painting is a useful art when it is of a godly sort and employed for holy edification. It is useful because God is thereby honoured, when it is seen how He hath bestowed such genius upon one of His creatures, in whom is such art.” The artist must therefore be pure, for “nothing so blunts the understanding as immorality.” He must work as in the sight of God, remembering that “work well done is honouring to Him.” A fine work of art is well-pleasing to God, and He “is angry with such as destroy the works of great mastership, for that is bestowed by God alone.” Such are some of the statements bearing on religion found in Dürer’s writings up to the year 1513.