Cross-posted from First Thoughts . . .

Many of us who are Christians and/or conservatives have enjoyed Russell Kirk’s books over the years.  Although The Conservative Mind gets most of the attention, I suspect some may have found The Roots of American Order to be a better read.  The difference is that The Conservative Mind is early scholarship that happened to hit just the right note at the time whereas The Roots of American Order is the wide-ranging reflection of a learned academic wise-man with a heck of a jazzy hook.  The Roots of American Order, it turns out, can be found in Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and London.  It’s a wonderful way to start a book which is a fusion of historical and political analysis.

Neither of these volumes is Kirk’s best seller.

The all-time champion of the Kirk canon, supposedly outselling all the rest combined, is The Old House of Fear.  Quite a few conservatives know that Kirk wrote some ghost stories, but haven’t read them.  I took the plunge several months back and read Ancestral Shadows, which is a fantastic collection of his stories offered by Eerdmans.  You can read that review here.

The publisher recently sent me The Old House of Fear so I could read Kirk’s novel length entry in the supernatural story genre.  Having finished the book, I can again express satisfaction with Kirk’s handiwork.  The novel features a good plot and a excellent character study.  A wealthy old man wants to buy land on a semi-inaccessible Scottish Isle, but has a terrible time pulling it off despite his fantastic means.  He hires a military veteran turned lawyer to travel there and find a way to make the purchase happen.  Events unfold in an exciting manner from that point.  The veteran/lawyer character is wonderfully drawn.  He is in his late 30′s, single, physically sturdy, resourceful and somewhat wasted in legal practice.  Part of what makes the book work is our desire to see what this complex man will do as he encounters obstacles.  The villains are well established, too.  And fairly creepy.

When you have that open weekend when you want to spend time in your favorite chair reading a good book, the kind you can just enjoy instead of alertly marking up and taking notes, I highly recommend The Old House of Fear and Ancestral Shadows.

The eminent British physicist has issued this seemingly troubling  pronouncement ex cathedra: Stephen Hawking: God was not needed to create the Universe. Though some may find this disillusioning, others will easily (and gratefully) recognize the measure of truth in his conclusion:

Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. . . . It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.

Hawking is right: the god he describes does not exist. The true God did not simply set the cosmos in motion. He does not merely inhabit the gaps in our explanatory theories. Rather he upholds his creation, including the laws of physics, at every conceivable moment. Without his doing so, it would cease immediately to exist. A god who is subsequent to the law of gravity is definitely not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who became incarnate in Jesus Christ. Thank God there is no such god as Hawking conceives of him.

Looking over the blogosphere as it relates to evangelicals has been an entertaining, yet frightening exercise. It is entertaining, so far as blogs go, to produce and weigh in upon controversy. It is frightening in that participating in the controversy has been an ugly affair. Take the dispute between Marvin Olasky and Jim Wallis or the one between Karl Giberson and Al Mohler. These are ugly because of their appeals to character assassination (Wallis accusing Olasky of “lying for a living” and Mohler not caring about truth [!]).Then, of course, there is the ongoing controversy over BioLogos and its aggressive campaign to reconcile science and Christianity. Our very own Evangel blog had to be “rebooted” in the wake of the divisive nature of the creation debates that attend to the subject. While these things are alarming up close, taking a step back  no one should be surprised considering the cultural context we find ourselves in.

Many think that postmodern thought originates and finds its legs in left-wing thought. Everyone can point to Rorty or Derrida or Foucault and cry foul about their promulgation of relativism, incoherence, and reductionism and teach young people to avoid the decay of truth running rampant in our universities and elite centers of cultural life. In fact, I think that is very godly and it is necessary for the good life. But there is what might be called a right-wing postmodernism, or better yet, a conservative acknowledgment of pluralism that inexorably frustrates public discourse.

Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out that such a frustration is the result of the multiplicity of systems that persist in our cultural milieu, In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre demonstrates that “tradition” gives shape to our presuppositions about justice and rationality and makes it almost impossible to resolve political disputes in our public discourse. Tradition according to MacIntyre is  “an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined.” Schools of thought, we might call them, govern our argument and it is very difficult to get behind them, because our rationality is shaped from within them. One can easily see how MacIntyre’s insights apply to theological discourse between competing traditions. After sharing this thought with a seminary colleague he incisively remarked, “It all part of the Tower of Babel if you ask me.”

Evangelicalism is a cacophony of voices. The fragmentation is easily seen in Patheos’ Future of Evangelicalism series. Emergent voices say the old coalition is passing, the Reformed movement is making a comeback, apologetic ministries a thriving in light of the renaissance of Christian philosophy, there is a storm brewing over the dialogue between science and religion, evangelicals are the new mainline, film is the new literature, and activists are re-discovering “God’s politics.” The sloganeering is dreadful to read through, but if one makes the effort one will see that there is very little common, unifying ground that makes for a cultural force called evangelical Christianity.

Back to the Babel story, the main problem seems to be that the builders were out to make a name for themselves, and Evangelical ministries have a lot in common with them it seems. It is difficult to imagine God frustrating the purposes of his people, but it may very well be that our purposes are not His purposes. I don’t doubt that there is much wisdom in the prophetic voices and the reality of what direction things are heading. I just wish I could be more optimistic about evangelicalism as a whole.

Reflections after reading Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Slavery was the original American sin.

I don’t know anyone who justifies race-based slavery, but I have known seemingly good folk with more than a dollop of sympathy for the Confederacy. Growing centralized government makes “states’ rights” look good, and self-determination is a popular modern cause.

If the South wanted to be free, why use brutal force to bring it back within the Union?

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When I was around 6 years old, I had a friend, whom I’ll call Billy, who lived round the corner from us. He was in my elementary school class, and I saw him virtually every day. We would play at each other’s homes, and I recall our walking one day to the Sunnyside Market, which was several blocks from our street. This was a big deal for us, because we were still quite small and our mothers naturally feared for our safety. But this minor adventure was something of a bonding experience for us.

Our friendship seems to have faded after he came over to my house one day to tell my mother that I had said a bad word (“damn”) during gym class. He made sure I was in my room before he told her, but I could hear him through the closed door all the same. Not only did my mother not get angry with me later; she didn’t even mention it, much to my relief. In any event, Billy and I were not quite as close after that episode.

I had other friendships as a boy, but the one thing that stands out about these is that not one of them lasted even into adolescence, much less adulthood. We moved out of that neighbourhood when I was 13, leaving behind an entire community that I had grown up in. In the context of North America, I doubt that I am unusual in this. While I was privileged to grow up in one town, many have moved from one city to another throughout their growing-up years, thus making it difficult for them to nurture friendships at all. (more…)

Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen recently asked the HBS class of 2010, and the readers of the Harvard Business Review, “How will you measure your life?”  (Tagline from the print edition: “Don’t reserve your best business thinking for your career.”) 

We all have different ways of measuring our lives and the lives of those around us, for better and for worse.  For some, this quest for meaning centers on the pursuit of happiness, while for others it might mean perfecting their bodies in search of fame and fortune.  I prefer a virtual sixty-foot sailboat.

To this variety of approaches, Christensen adds his own life experiences and professional expertise.  In his HBS classes, Christensen focuses on teaching models of effective business management theory and how the theory is built.  After the students learn the model, they have an analytical framework rather than a set of bottom-line answers.  In other words, they learn how to think, not what to think.  Christensen uses this same approach when he counsels major corporations and their CEOs on how to analyze the challenges their businesses face. 

On the last session of his HBS class, Christensen asks his students to turn their newly developed analytical skills back on themselves and answer three crucial questions, using his own life as a case study for evaluating the questions as they begin their careers.

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In the midst of his peripatetic activities, my friend Gideon Strauss has managed to come up with another thoughtful post for the Center for Public Justice’s Capital Commentary series: Becoming an American.

This decision [to pursue US citizenship] raises big questions for me: What does it mean to become an American? What does it mean to be an American? Is it possible to fulfill the responsibilities of American citizenship while retaining citizenship in Canada and South Africa, or must those citizenships be relinquished? What is the relationship between the duties of a citizen of the USA and the duties one has to all of humanity—that is, can one be both an American citizen and in some sense a cosmopolitan? And perhaps the biggest question of all: what is the relationship between being a citizen of the USA and being a citizen of the kingdom of God?

This is not the stuff one typically hears from those American Christians who speak too readily of “saving America” or of a supposed American exceptionalism. Yet I can easily resonate with Strauss’s questions, given my highest allegiance to the kingdom of God coupled with my subordinate citizenships in two (and possibly as many as four) political communities.

My own view is that, in a federal system, one already owes overlapping and simultaneous political loyalties to municipality, province/state and federation. Moreover, in a complex differentiated society an ordinary person has multiple commitments to such pluriform communities as state, church institution, marriage, family and a variety of voluntary associations. If any one of these claims ultimacy, in effect it assumes an illegitimate godlike status. True, many states may stake such a claim to the citizen’s ultimate allegiance, but the Christian’s citizenship in these is always a tempered and limited allegiance subject to the higher loyalty to God’s kingdom. The just state will recognize this and will refrain from asking more than it should from its citizenry.

(Apologies for cross-posting from my home blog, Scriptorium Daily. I thought the passing of Bloesch ought to be noted over here for the audience at First Things’ Evangel blog as well.)

Donald Bloesch, evangelical theologian, died this week. He was a unique figure in twentieth-century theology, and now that he has passed from the scene, what strikes me about his work is his noble isolation. I don’t mean that he was personally lonely: by all reports he sustained many close friendships, and inspired long-term loyalty and affection in those who knew him. But Bloesch ran several paces ahead of the pack, and had to make his own way.

Bloesch (whose oddly-spelled name is easy to pronounce: just remember that it rhymes with “keepin’ it fresh,” “nativity creche,” and “the word became flesh”) made his most influential contribution to theology by publishing the two-volume Essentials of Evangelical Theology in the late 1970s. Essentials stood alone for a long time in the evangelical field: where else could you find a comprehensive overview of all the major doctrines, written from an evangelical point of view, in dialogue with the great tradition and with recent mainline theology, and put forth in an active voice by a living theologian putting his own name on the line? Essentials may not have been perfect, but it became an inescapable reference point for serious evangelical theology for years to come. It was as if he wrote for an audience that didn’t exist yet, and when that audience came of age and started looking around for books of doctrine, there was Bloesch waiting for them.
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My alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, released an Institutional Statement Supporting the Choice for Life on 8 April 2010:

Consistent with the teaching of the Catholic Church on such issues as abortion, research involving human embryos, euthanasia, the death penalty, and other related life issues, the University of Notre Dame recognizes and upholds the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death.

Although this brief statement is fine as far as it goes, one might question the wording of the title. Why “the choice for life” rather than, say, “the defence of life”?

Evangelicals spend a lot of time fighting about Genesis and the proper interpretation thereof.  Catholics spend a lot less time on it for reasons which are not fully clear to me.  My area of scholarship is religion, law, and politics, so I am far from expert in this controversy as either a theologian or a scientist.

What I am curious about and would like to see discussion of here at this blog is why this issue commands so much attention relative to other matters.  Let me explain what I mean.  I became a Christian because I became convinced of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.  To me, his resurrection is the point upon which a person must become convinced.  Nothing else is comparable.

The resurrection of Jesus is where the whole thing rests, isn’t it?  If he rose, then we need to follow him.  If he did not, then we are back to just choosing our faith on the basis of preference or a mystical experience.

How does the Genesis battle get in front of that?  Am I missing something?  I am completely open to the possibility that I am.

(In bringing this up I am not jumping on the Darwin train.  I think reasonable people of all faiths or none should probably have strong reservations about buying that package, especially in its widest-reaching forms.)

Reading this article in The Wilson Quarterly, America: Land of Loners?, has inspired me to return to a topic I took up early last year in my personal blog, Notes from a Byzantine-Rite Calvinist. That topic is friendship, something that appears to have eroded in our highly  mobile, post-industrial societies. Many observers have written on friendship in the past, including Aristotle’s reflections on it in books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics. In the Bible we read of the deep bond of friendship between David and Jonathan, which endured in spite of the hostility of the latter’s father, King Saul. Abraham demonstrates that it is possible to be a friend even to God.

In the coming weeks I will be posting occasionally on the topic of friendship, beginning in the very near future. I am increasingly persuaded that in our society the decline of genuine friendship, as opposed to mere acquaintance or the utterly meaningless facebook friendship, is adversely affecting the larger web of human relationships, including marriage, family and the variety of communities of which we are part. Stay tuned.

It is all too common these days to play off love against justice. My friend and one-time colleague Gideon Strauss, now of the Center for Public Justice, has written a marvellous piece that properly draws an intimate connection between the two. It is worth republishing below in full: (more…)

Justin Taylor has reposted David Powlison’s critique of Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Powlison is the author of the so-called Biblical Counseling chapter of the IVP Five Views book on psychology and Christianity.

I’m not going to worry about the issue, pointed out several times in the comments, that the Bob Newhart video has pretty much nothing to do with CBT. I have two main things to contribute to the discussion, (1) as a philosopher and (2) as a parent of a child who has taken part in cognitive behavioral methods.

Powlison bases a lot of his critique on the fact that CBT uses (sometimes consciously) methods that can rightly be described as Stoic in that they do have a strong enough similiarity to key ideas of the ancient Stoics that I don’t think the comparison is inapt. Stoicism, at least on the issues relevant here, involves one key claim. The Stoics didn’t think it’s worth worrying about something outside your control. The reason is that your life is made worse off by your worrying, but you can do something about the worry. You can’t do anything about the fact that George W. Bush won the presidential election in 2004 or Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008. You can’t change the fact that lots of people died recently in China from landslides. You can do something to help those who remain, and you can do something to change people’s minds on policy issues and perhaps help elect a different sort of person next time, but there’s no point in worrying about something you can’t do anything about.

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What is oppression? According to the OED, to oppress means to “govern tyrannically, keep under by coercion, subject to continual cruelty or injustice.” There is general agreement, at least in the English-speaking world, that it is unjust for a government to infringe on such fundamental freedoms as speech, press, assembly, and religion. But is there something intrinsically oppressive in communities imposing standards on individual members?

Read more here.

Last week, pastor Trevin Wax posted an interesting blog entry about the way serious preaching demands serious presentation. Specifically, Wax is watching a trend of churches “focusing on the centrality of the Word in worship,” and noting that it clashes with the contemporary “chatty, street-level style of worship” marked by “casualness and novelty.” “Form and content mirror one another,” notes Wax, and when they clash, “something’s got to give.”

When the people of God are gathered to hear the word of God, the informal, “Hi there folks!” is not the right way to start a service. Wax uses the memorable analogy, “It’s like eating steak on a paper plate.”

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