I have always had an affinity for the biblical David, who is second only to Moses in the esteem of the people of Israel down through the centuries. Initially, of course, this personal affinity had everything to do with my sharing his name, an awareness that came already in early childhood. Furthermore, David not only founded a dynasty that ruled for some five centuries, but he was also the ancestor of Jesus himself, “great David’s greater Son.”

Moreover, I have a great love for the Psalms, many of which are ascribed to David. The struggles David expresses in these heartfelt stanzas are ones with which most of us can identify in some measure. Finally, I have inherited my namesake’s interest in politics. Throughout much of scripture, David is seen as the paradigmatic monarch, a man after God’s own heart (I Samuel 13:14), who sang God’s praises and led his people to victory against their enemies.

However, as I was reading through the Davidic episodes in I and II Samuel last year, I was struck by the recognition that, in many respects, David was not that good a king. His reign was an exceedingly turbulent one, marked by warfare, rebellion and filial betrayal. He was a poor administrator and appears to have been propped up by his powerful nephew Joab, to whom he owed his political position. David loved his sons deeply but seemed unable to control them or to command their loyalty. He allowed his personal affections and private allegiances to overwhelm his public duties, especially as his mourning over Absalom’s death appeared to manifest an ingratitude to those who had risked so much to save his throne. Once more Joab had to rescue him from his poor judgement (II Samuel 19:1-8).

Worst of all, David had one of his own soldiers killed so he could take his wife for himself, which incurred the wrath of God as expressed through the prophet Nathan (I Samuel 11-12). Yet David repented and sought forgiveness (Psalm 51 is associated with this incident), which God freely granted while not exempting him from the consequences of this flagrant infraction of his law.

Finally, David appears to have been given to snap judgements based on hearsay, as seen in the case of Ziba’s slander of Jonathan’s son Meribaal (II Samuel 16:1-5, 19:24-30). In short, even the justice of David’s rule is in doubt, in stark contrast to the evident wisdom of his son Solomon (I Kings 3).

Nevertheless, somehow, through all this David remained a man after God’s own heart. Despite his evident flaws, he was still chosen by God to rule his people, “for the LORD sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (I Samuel 16:7). Though most of David’s descendants were wicked rulers, God remained faithful to his promise to David, maintaining a dynasty that would culminate in the King of kings, whose suffering and death we remember during this season of Lent.

Of course Lent also reminds us of our own sins, which weigh upon us and poison our actions and relationships with others. I personally find it comforting that, if God could love so flawed a servant as David, he can and will love us too, despite our failings. It is this hope of salvation in Christ that sustains us as we look forward to the feast of his Resurrection.

It turns out Karl Marx was wrong: religion is not the opiate of the people; it’s the Prozac of the people. So says the man who originated the concept of male bonding in this fascinating article in Canada’s foremost English-language newsweekly: Macleans interview: Lionel Tiger. Here’s a brief sample:

Q: That’s why you call churches “serotonin factories.” You hint about possibly developing the brain equivalent of bodily exercise. Serotonin pills as a religion replacement?
A: I’m not sure we’ll ever learn to manage brain secretions in any manner, and it may be that we don’t want to, but at least we now know that the feeling of oceanic identification with others in an assembly—a church assembly or whenever—is not magical, it’s neurophysiological. We can identify the juices. I think that’s fantastic, actually. And Mike [McGuire]’s work on serotonin did generate Prozac and a whole array of medications.

Q: Despite increasing secularization, especially in the West, most people have not become flat-out rationalists. Do you think that for many environmentalism is a religion?
A: That’s absolutely right, and that’s interesting because it is finally the fruit of pantheism, a very, very old religious idea. For many people, not using more than four sheets of toilet paper is an act of moral purification.

In addition to illuminating the roots of environmentalism, Tiger’s analysis further clears up an ancient and vexing mystery: why did so many saints willingly suffer a martyr’s death for the cause of Christ? It seems they just wanted to feel good.

What follows is a brief piece I wrote some years ago which I have adapted for our purposes here. This is a follow-up on comments I made to John Mark Reynolds’ posts yesterday.

It is generally acknowledged that the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) had a considerable influence on the American founding, as evidenced particularly in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. To be sure, other thinkers, such as Montesquieu and Adam Smith, would have their own impact, but Locke’s influence is such as to warrant mention in a speech delivered by President Bush at Whitehall in 2003.

Locke’s most famous works are his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690, 1706) and his Two Treatises of Government (1680, 1690). The latter was written to combat Sir Robert Filmer’s patriarchal theory of the origin of human government and to set forth a new theory based on consent of the governed. His refutation of Filmer is contained in the First Treatise, which is little read now, primarily because Filmer’s ideas enjoy no currency today. Consequently it is Locke’s Second Treatise that is the better known and more widely read of the two. Although it was apparently written before the Glorious Revolution of 1688, its publication followed it, and it is often seen as a defence of the deposition of the Stuart monarchs and the supremacy of Parliament.

Locke’s political thought has sometimes been viewed as something of an amalgam of that of Thomas Hobbes and Richard Hooker, the latter of whom he quotes directly. Hobbes is a philosophical nominalist who sets forth a number of categories that were borrowed and adapted by Locke for his own purposes, which are, admittedly, different from those of Hobbes. Hooker is the author of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which defended the quasi-protestant Elizabethan settlement in England and whose legal theory is dependent on the mediaeval scholastics, including Thomas Aquinas. It should not be surprising that Locke’s political theory brings together the older natural law tradition, with its recognition of intrinsic constraints on human action, and the newer liberalism, with its notion of voluntary contract.

Like Hobbes, Locke posits a prepolitical state of nature, which is a “State of perfect Freedom” wherein people have the liberty “to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of Nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man” (II.4). While Hobbes views this prepolitical state as characterized by a “war of all against all,” Locke is unwilling to go quite this far, believing that “the State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it,” which law teaches that “no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions” (II.6). Clearly, contra Hobbes, Locke cannot bring himself to admit that force and fraud are the only virtues in the state of nature.

Nevertheless, given that everyone has the executive power of the law of nature to protect his or her property, and given further that there is no generally-acknowledged common court of appeal in cases where this law is violated, the enjoyment of one’s life, liberty and property is precarious at best. If the state of nature is not automatically a state of general warfare, it is constantly in danger of becoming such.

This is where the social contract enters the picture. Another category adapted from Hobbes, the social contract stands at the origin of political society and the authority that presides over it. Because the enjoyment of property is so uncertain and precarious in the state of nature, individuals have an incentive to leave that state and to enter into political society, thereby gaining “a common establish’d Law and Judicature to appeal to, with Authority to decide Controversies between them, and punish Offenders. . . ” (VII.87).

Consent of the governed lies at the origin of all governments, or at least of those which have been established peacefully (VIII.112). In contrast to the Hobbesian contract, whereby human beings yield up all their rights, except that of self-defence, to the sovereign, the Lockean contract requires that people give up only the executive power of the law of nature, while retaining most every other right they enjoyed in the prepolitical state, especially the right to property. In short, government under the Lockean scheme is restricted to protecting life, liberty and property and ought not take on tasks much beyond this.

Why the word contract? It is not at all clear that this is a true account of the origin of human government. To be sure, the modern state, defined as a political community of citizens and government, can be traced only to the early modern era of half a millennium ago. But political authority seems always to have existed in some fashion. This is undoubtedly what Aristotle recognized in observing that the human being is a “political animal” or “political being.” This ubiquity of political authority is also what St. Paul had in mind in stating that “the powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1). Political authority would appear to have its origins in both created human limitations and in the fallenness of humanity.

Where then does contract enter the picture? Quite simply, it doesn’t. Unless, that is, one uses the term to describe the commission given by an electorate to a new government of the day. But government in the general sense has been a constant in every human society. In other words, Locke’s apparently proper emphasis on natural laws serving to constrain the parties to a contract cannot vindicate his use of this questionable term. Historically, the contract metaphor has taken on a life of its own, leading centuries later to unintended consequences.

Locke’s focus on the possession of property is also notable, as it constitutes the principal, if not the sole, end of political society and government: “The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property” (IX.124). Elsewhere he goes so far as to argue that “Government has no other end but the preservation of Property (VII.94, emphasis mine).

There are, of course, many ways to describe the central task of government, including: to do justice, to pursue the common good, to defend the innocent and punish the guilty, to enable us to live peacefully with each other despite our diverse interests, &c. Tellingly, Locke has chosen the protection of property, the possession of which is defined so as to emphasize its individual, private character. Defending the common property of the body politic, e.g., pasture lands, public buildings, forests and other Crown lands, appears to play little if any role in Locke. Even the acknowledgement of the diverse forms of property ownership, as related to the various responsibilities assigned to individuals and communities, does not seem to figure into Locke’s approach. The public and common would seem to exist primarily for the sake of the private. It is perhaps for this reason that, in his Whitehall speech, Bush’s speech writers saw fit to mention Locke in tandem with Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations (1776) laid the groundwork for classical liberal economic theory.

Finally, it should be noted that, if government fails to live up to the terms of this contract, i.e., if it fails to protect the citizens’ property, the citizens are within their rights to dissolve government, even by means of what Locke euphemistically calls an “appeal to heaven,” i.e., rebellion (XIV.168). Although Hobbes would not have admitted the legitimacy of rebellion, he did admit that a king who makes war on his subjects does so at the risk of losing his throne. Thus Hobbes made room for what might be called a practical right to rebellion. By contrast, Locke puts the matter this way:

Whensoever, therefore, the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society, and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly, or Corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People, by this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty, and by the Establishment of a new Legislative (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own Safety and Security, which is the end for which they are in Society (XIX.222, emphasis mine).

Similarly, Locke holds that, in the event of the government’s dissolution, “the People are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new Legislative”, &c. This is obviously something more than the legal dissolution of a parliamentary body and the holding of new elections, such as we see in a constitutional democracy. Although there is a superficial resemblance between Locke’s remedy for tyranny and that of, say, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Johannes Althusius, the latter three focus on the constitutional role played by lesser magistrates (ephors) authorized to check the power of the chief magistrate. In short, they envision an authoritative office playing this role under domestic positive law. By contrast, Locke’s cryptic phrases, “it devolves to the People” and “the People are at liberty,” leave unanswered the central question of who these “people” are and what offices they occupy authorizing them to take such an action.

To be sure, Locke understands that human activities are properly subject to constraints. He is not a partisan of sheer wilfulness or unlimited autonomy. He is not an anarchist or an advocate of late liberalism, which I have elsewhere labelled the “choice-enhancement state.” Nor can his thought be harnessed to something as potentially dangerous as Rousseau’s general will. Nevertheless, for all his debt to a much older tradition that recognizes our dependence on a higher law, there is an obvious narrative structure to Locke’s political theory which is difficult to square with the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption and renewal. The logic of this Lockean narrative tends in the direction of the choice-enhancement state, much as the logic of Marx’s thought can be said to have led to the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, even if its progenitor would likely have been horrified at what these régimes became.

In short, if Locke is heir in some fashion to Reformed Christianity, it is in a very much attenuated and secularized form.

One of the characteristics of an ideology is that it takes a genuine good and makes too much of it, that is, it effectively makes it into an idol. Thus it becomes difficult for those liberals emphasizing the validity of free markets to resist the temptation to claim a near universal efficacy for them. Case in point: Murray Rothbard, in For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, where we find this revealing remark:

The point is that the government has no rational way to make these allocations. The government only knows that it has a limited budget. Its allocations of funds are then subject to the full play of politics, boondoggling, and bureaucratic inefficiency, with no indication at all as to whether the police department is serving the consumers in a way responsive to their desires or whether it is doing so efficiently. The situation would be different if police services were supplied on a free, competitive market. In that case, consumers would pay for whatever degree of protection they wish to purchase. The consumers who just want to see a policeman once in a while would pay less than those who want continuous patrolling, and far less than those who demand twenty-four-hour bodyguard service. On the free market, protection would be supplied in proportion and in whatever way that the consumers wish to pay for it. A drive for efficiency would be insured, as it always is on the market, by the compulsion to make profits and avoid losses, and thereby to keep costs low and to serve the highest demands of the consumers. Any police firm that suffers from gross inefficiency would soon go bankrupt and disappear (Chapter 12; emphasis mine).

Note in particular Rothbard’s use of the word consumer to describe those benefiting from police protection. In its later manifestation, of course, liberalism is no longer so fixated on markets, yet its followers are still very much enamoured of freedom of individual choice, which they see fit to extend as far as they can possibly manage, mostly under the rubric of human rights, to which everyone is now obligated to pay lip service.

The alternative to the distortions of these political illusions? That which the great Abraham Kuyper described as sovereignty in its own sphere, and which I would call the pluriformity of authorities, which understands the positive role of political authority better than historic liberalism in its various permutations. If we take seriously this pluriformity of authorities, each of which has its own God-given task in his world, then we cannot simply reduce every relationship to that of buyer and seller in the market.

We have seen the consequences of this reduction in the institutional church, where different styles of worship services are held to appeal to different market shares within the congregation. Tradition is not simply that which is handed down to us by our forebears, as in the various traditional liturgies associated with the several traditions of Christianity; it is now simply one taste among many others. We no longer choose what we sing in worship based on what is most in accordance with the faith we confess.

In the past church denominations set up committees to compile hymnals for congregational use. Such committees decided what was and what was not appropriate for liturgical use in their tradition. Now, with the rise of the praise team and worship band phenomenon, individual congregations choose from one Sunday to the next what appeals to them from within the marketplace of contemporary christian music. The criterion used is primarily utilitarian: what will bring in the most people? Whether the song well expresses our beliefs is now a secondary consideration.

There is definitely a place for the economic market. There is nothing intrinsically amiss in viewing human beings as consumers of goods and services produced by the market. But we are, of course, much more than that. Consumption is only one side of who we are. If we try to reconfigure political and church life alike according to market categories, we risk taking a reductionist approach and missing the fulness of humanity as created in God’s image. Let the market be the market, no more and no less. Celebrate it, if you will, but don’t make too much of it!

In recent years, especially since 9/11, we have become used to hearing of the rise of Islam in the west and its possibly inevitable growth to majority status in some European countries. This is the story told by Mark Steyn in America Alone and by Bat Ye’or in Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. However, a recent convert from Islam to Christianity, named Daniel, tells a different tale in this interview worth reading in its entirety: A Muslim Preacher Converts to Orthodoxy. Here’s one paragraph:

The presence of mosques in the UK is very weak. Most Muslims won’t ever go to a mosque. The young people have effectively left Islam, even if they say that they’re still Muslims. In the mosques they don’t find a common language with the Imams from Pakistan or Bangladesh. Young people can barely speak Urdu or Bengali but only English. Many are ashamed of Islam because of terrorism. Our inter-religious council investigated mosque attendance and we know what the real picture is and it is especially alarming for Islam, but it is to the advantage of certain people to present Islam as an immense force. If one takes the list of mosques in Muslim publications, for example, in West London, we find that there are twenty mosques and much free space in each of these mosques, even though the number of people of Muslim origins in London is such that they would need even more mosques if a majority went. In one large mosque in London there might be three hundred people for Friday prayers. Many mosques are just small halls that are only used on Friday. In general, believers are very rare in mosques and most are children who bring their parents. When they grow, they disappear. Christianity offers a free choice, thus it is much better adapted to life in a climate of tolerance, and Islam is unable to pass this test.

Might Christianity take root amongst such nominal Muslims? We cannot say at this point, but we do know that the predominant secularism of the west cannot satisfy over the long term. This provides a possibly unanticipated opening for the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The following was published in the 9 March 2009 issue of Christian Courier as part of my “Principalities & Powers” column:

In our postchristian society, appeals to human rights have become the functional equivalent of the biblical prophets’ “thus saith the Lord.” They are treated as the final word on a subject, and those disputing such appeals are likely to be marginalized as heretics. In such a climate, some people are tempted to give up altogether on the concept of rights, simply because so many tend to use it as a justification for subjective wants. Yet abusus non tollit usum: the abuse of something does not rule out its legitimate use. There are two foundational problems with the current legal climate surrounding rights.

First, we tend to assume that all rights are justiciable, that is, properly to be brought before a judicial or quasi-judicial body to be settled in case of a claimed violation. However, this is an erroneous assumption that is incompatible with constitutional government and a recognition of the legitimate multiplicity of legal spheres. Matilda can be said to have a genuine right to her husband Frank’s love. Yet the state cannot force Frank to love his wife, because spousal love lies outside the proper competence of governmental authority.

So how would a violation of such a right be addressed? Primarily within the marital context itself. If Matilda feels that Frank is not paying enough attention to her, she does not complain to a human rights commission; she takes it up with Frank by reminding him of his responsibilities as husband. If this has no effect and if Frank stubbornly refuses to listen to and love her, there’s always the possibility of divorce. Yet even in this case the state has not really forced Frank to love Matilda; it has simply recognized the dissolution of their marriage. To be sure, the state has stepped in here, but only as a last resort. Respecting and protecting spousal rights properly belongs to the spouses themselves, and arguably to those who witnessed their vows. Government does not create these rights; it only provides a legal backup in case the marital community irreparably breaks down.

Second, the late Sir Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished between negative and positive freedoms, between “freedom from” and “freedom to.” In the past most bills or charters of rights limited themselves to protecting certain negative rights, including those to freedom of speech, religion, press, association and the like. Such rights call on government simply to refrain from breaching them. No extra expenditure of funds is required. In fact, a government may actually save money by closing down an agency responsible for censoring books, periodicals and broadcasting. In so doing it recognizes that there are certain activities lying beyond its normative competence.

When we get into the realm of positive freedoms the issue of rights becomes more complicated. In a democracy, of course, government undertakes to protect the right to vote, which is the most basic positive right. However, “freedom to”, if wedded to an expansive notion of rights and their justiciability, is incompatible with a recognition of limits to government. If I claim to have a right to nourishment, does that obligate government to force the local grocer to provide me with food?

If I claim a right to have my idiosyncratic lifestyle choices affirmed by society, does this entail government forcing others to express support for me and shutting down all expression of disapproval? If so, it does not fit at all well into a robust notion of constitutional government. Yet this is where much of North America appears to be going at present.

Repealing our bills or charters of rights is not the answer. What needs to be changed is the willingness of our courts to treat mere policy aspirations as rights; instead they should return them to the ordinary deliberative processes at the centre of representative government.

More than three decades ago I discovered a form of prayer that transformed what up to then had been a rather feeble prayer life. It is variously called the Daily Office, Divine Office, or Liturgy of the Hours, and has its origins in the monastic communities of the early christian centuries, particularly those influenced by the Rule of St. Benedict. My initial introduction to this came in the form of a little volume purchased at the bookstore of Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota: Herbert Lindemann, ed., The Daily Office, subtitled, “Matins and Vespers, Based on Traditional Liturgical Patterns, with Scripture Readings, Hymns, Canticles, Litanies, Collects, and the Psalter, Designed for Private Devotion or Group Worship” (St. Louis: Concordia, 1965). Although its language is by now somewhat dated, I found it a marvellous book, filled with the riches of the Christian ages, some of which were familiar to me but much of which at that point was not. Having grown up Presbyterian, with a youthful sojourn amongst the Baptists, my discovery of this ancient pattern of prayer was eye-opening. I felt as if something of great worth had been hidden from me until then.

For the benefit of North American evangelicals for whom this is unfamiliar, the Daily Office is a form of prayer growing out of the canonical hours observed in the monasteries. These are spaced about three hours apart and, in the western tradition, include Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. Hence the name Liturgy of the Hours. Each of these offices consists of the following items more or less in order: opening prayer versicle (e.g., Psalm 51:15 or 70:1); followed by Psalm 95 (for Matins) or another canticle; one or more additional psalms; readings from Old Testament, Epistles and Gospels; another canticle (e.g., Te Deum, Benedictus or Magnificat); the Kyrie (“Lord have mercy!”); petitions; the Our Father; collects; and a closing doxology or benediction. The prayers and readings are structured according to the traditional church calendar.

Outside the monasteries the canonical hours have been abbreviated to two or three daily prayer offices, usually Matins and Vespers, and sometimes Compline as well. The Book of Common Prayer prescribes two daily prayer offices: Morning Prayer, which combines Matins and Lauds, and Evening Prayer, a combination of Vespers and Compline.

What if all Christians lived in communities where morning, evening and night prayer were prayed on a daily basis? Ordinary Muslims pray five times a day. The ancient Israelites appear to have prayed anywhere from three to seven times daily (Daniel 6:10; Psalm 119:164; cf., Acts 10:9). How would this change our communal relationship with God? How would it alter the way we live our lives together? One suspects that, by God’s grace, the general adoption of the Benedictine principle of ora et labora could change history. Pray God it be so.

Having read the recent posts on creation and the age of the earth, I cannot but wonder whether the debate is finally an empty one. I would not stake my reputation on it, but I wonder whether the following might offer a way of getting beyond it. Could it be that God created, simultaneously and ex nihilo, everything in the cosmos fully complete and complex and, rather than giving it the mere appearance of age, gave it a genuine history, capable of being investigated scientifically?  If so, then the timing of creation, from a human perspective at least, would not be a relevant consideration. To assume that God created the heaven and earth at the beginning of what we experience as history might not be the proper way of looking at it. He could just as easily have created it yesterday (from his perspective, not ours; see Psalm 90:4) and given everything, including us, not just the appearance of age, but real age. After all, God is the creator of temporality and is not bound by it as we are.

This would not, of course, resolve the issue of biological macro-evolution. As I see it, whether human beings and the higher primates (with apologies to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York) have a common descent should not be deemed a confessional matter but one to be surmised on the basis of the evidence. That said, it should be obvious that Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection is grossly insufficient to explain the sheer complexity of the human person, with his/her cultural-forming capacities, and the huge gap that exists between human beings on the one hand and the chimpanzees and bonobos with which we apparently share such a large proportion of our genetic code on the other. Any worldview unable to account for human uniqueness in God’s creation is faulty at a basic level.

It is evidently the season for institutions of higher learning to select new presidents. We have recently heard announcements from Baylor University and Wheaton College. Now my own employer, Redeemer University College, one of a very few Christian universities in Canada, has just announced the appointment of a new president, Dr. Hubert Krygsman. This is from Redeemer’s website:

“Dr. Hubert R. Krygsman, currently the Associate Provost and Director of the Andreas Center for Reformed Scholarship and Service at Dordt College in Iowa, has been appointed to become the third President of Redeemer University College. This five-year appointment will take effect on June 14, 2010 following the retirement of Dr. Justin Cooper, who has served as Redeemer’s President for sixteen years.

“Krysgman obtained a B.A. in History and Philosophy from Calvin College in 1984. He completed a M.A. in History from the University of Calgary with a thesis on the theology of George Grant. His Ph.D. is from Carleton University in Ottawa with a dissertation on “Freedom and Grace: Protestant Thought in Canada 1920-1960.” His research and publication record includes a focus on modern Protestant Canadian history, on academic structures and curricular design, and on the relationship between Islam and Christianity.”

Redeemer University College was established in 1982 and stands in the Reformed tradition of Christianity. I myself have been privileged to teach there for all but five years of its existence. On behalf of my colleagues, I wish Krygsman God’s richest blessings and assure him that we will uphold him in prayer as he takes up this important office.

Lord Acton famously wrote that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” a statement frequently quoted and all too often accepted at face value. Mark Earley’s modification is an improvement:

But remember this: power corrupts, but power itself is not necessarily corrupt. God has given power to the state to be used to restrain evil and maintain order. It is the use of power, whether for personal gain or for the state’s ordained function, that is really at issue.

I would expand on this, because it has relevance beyond political life. All of us, as God’s image-bearers, are gifted with various capacities (i.e., powers) enabling us to fulfil the responsibilities of the authoritative offices in which God has placed us, the most basic of which is that of divine image-bearer. (Among other things, this diversity of capacities is why it is misleading, following the latter-day heirs of Marx, to divide humanity into the two exhaustive categories of  powerful and powerless.)

These God-given capacities are not themselves corrupting. However, like everything else in God’s good creation, they are capable of being misused by sinful human beings. It’s not power that corrupts; it’s our own rebellious nature that does so. Acton’s saying might be closer to the truth if turned around: Human sin corrupts the otherwise legitimate use of power.

Barack Obama has been president for just over twelve months and in his recent state of the union address he set out his priorities for his second year in office. It is no surprise that many observers are now questioning Obama’s overall effectiveness in the presidency as unemployment remains high and the effects of the recession continue to be felt by many. This points to a central difficulty in the organization of the executive branch: in effect, President Obama must function as both king and prime minister.

Read more at the Center for Public Justice website.

Every so often someone in the popular press will make the apparently earth-shattering discovery that evangelical Christians can actually think and are not, after all, “poor, uneducated and easy to command,” as journalist Michael Weisskopf notoriously put it nearly two decades ago. The latest example of this discovery appeared in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Jonathan Fitzgerald called “Winning Not Just Hearts but Minds.” The subtitle does more than hint at where the article will go: “Evangelicals move, slowly, toward the intellectual life.”

Read more at Comment’s website.

It is not difficult to find Christian theologians and liturgical scholars commenting on what makes for a good hymn text. For example, last year I read J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, in the course of which he discusses the merits of three familiar hymns, Nearer, My God, to Thee, In the Cross of Christ I Glory and When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, the last of which he judges superior to the other two, due to its obvious grasp of the place of the cross in the economy of salvation. Similarly, following the church fathers, the reformers and many others, I myself am persuaded that the psalms must have a pre-eminent place in the church’s liturgy. So much for texts.

But what of the church’s music? Is there better or worse music by which to worship the Triune God? Are some genres better suited than others to the liturgical assembly? Does it really matter whether we use organs, unaccompanied voices or electric guitars? Isn’t it all finally a mere matter of personal taste? That’s what many would argue. I strongly disagree. Although one could write an entire treatise on the subject, I will limit myself to putting forth five principles for consideration. Perhaps there are more, and I would welcome suggestions along these lines.

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Yves René Simon

Six decades ago the thomistic philosopher Yves René Simon observed that, since the French Revolution, authority has had something of a bad reputation. More than any other act of rebellion, the Revolution effectively solidified in western consciousness something of the mythology of heroic popular revolt against oppressive authority.  Now many are inclined to identify authority per se with at least potential oppression, irrespective of what it actually does and how it functions.

At one time it was generally assumed that those defying authority were committing a grave sin imperiling their eternal salvation.  They were acting so as to overturn a God-given social and political order, and were little better than common criminals.

Nowadays it is often, if not always, assumed that legitimate complaints undergird an insurrection, however violent its effects, and that governmental efforts to quell a rebellion are almost intrinsically repressive. During a church service near Toronto in early 1994, shortly after the Chiapas revolt broke out in southern Mexico, prayer requests were invited from the front.  A parishioner stood up and asked that  prayers be offered for the people of Chiapas, that they might receive justice and no longer find it necessary to rise up against the government to advance their cause.  The request was duly noted and it was included in the subsequent prayer.

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This is a sad account of the decline of Psalms in the western liturgy taken from the 1913 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia under the entry for “Gradual”. I have taken the liberty of breaking it up into paragraphs and deleting the source citations for easier reading.

Gradual, in English often called Grail, is the oldest and most important of the four chants that make up the choir’s part of the Proper of the Mass. Whereas the three others (Introit, Offertory, and Communion) were introduced later, [to] fill up the time while something was being done, the Gradual (with its supplement, the Tract or Alleluia) represents the singing of psalms alternating with readings from the Bible, a custom that is as old as these readings themselves. Like them, the psalms at this place are an inheritance from the service of the Synagogue. Copied from that service, alternate readings and psalms filled up a great part of the first half of the Liturgy in every part of the Christian world from the beginning.

Originally whole psalms were sung. In the “Apostolic Constitutions” they are chanted after the lessons from the Old Testament: “The readings by the two (lectors) being finished, let another one sing the hymns of David and the people sing the last words after him.” This use of whole psalms went on till the fifth century. St. Augustine says: “We have heard first the lesson from the Apostle. Then we sang a psalm. After that the lesson of the gospel showed us the ten lepers healed.”

These psalms were an essential part of the Liturgy, quite as much as the lessons. “They are sung for their own sake; meanwhile the celebrants and assistants have nothing to do but to listen to them.” They were sung in the form of a psalmus responsorius, that is to say, the whole text was chanted by one person — a reader appointed for this purpose. (For some time before St. Gregory I, to sing these psalms was a privilege of deacons at Rome. It was suppressed by him in 595.) The people answered each clause or verse by some acclamation. In the “Apostolic Constitutions” they repeat his last modulations.

Another way was to sing some ejaculation each time. An obvious model of this was Ps. cxxxv [Hebrew: 136] with its refrain: “quoniam in æternum misericordia eius” ["for his mercy endures for ever"]; from which we conclude that the Jews too knew the principle of the responsory psalm. . . . It appears that originally, while the number of biblical lessons was still indefinite, one psalm was sung after each.

When three lessons became the normal custom (a Prophecy, Epistle, and Gospel) they were separated by two psalms. During the fifth century the lessons at Rome were reduced to two; but the psalms still remain two, although both are now joined together between the Epistle and Gospel, as we shall see. Meanwhile, as in the case of many parts of the Liturgy, the psalms were curtailed, till only fragments of them were left. This process, applied to the first of the two, produced our Gradual; the second became the Alleluia or Tract. . . .

It is difficult to say exactly when the Gradual got its present form. We have seen that in St. Augustine’s time, in Africa, a whole psalm was still sung. So also St. John Chrysostom alludes to whole psalms sung after the lessons. . . . In Rome the psalm seems not yet to have been curtailed: “Wherefore we have sung the psalm of David with united voices, not for our honour, but for the glory of Christ the Lord.” Between this time and the early Middle Ages the process of curtailing brought about our present [1913] arrangement.

One of the things the 16th-century Reformers wished to do was to restore the Psalms to worship, an effort that appears to need renewal every generation, even in churches that are heirs to the Reformation. My own website, dedicated to the Genevan Psalter, is intended to be part of this effort.

The province of Québec is possibly the most secularized jurisdiction in North America, yet Montreal’s McGill University boasts a dissident from the apparent post-christian consensus that took over that province during the Révolution tranquille of half a century ago. He is Douglas Farrow, Professor of Christian Thought in the Faculty of Religious Studies at one of Canada’s premier universities.

The January-February issue of Touchstone carries an important article by Farrow, The Audacity of the State, whose title is an allusion to Barack Obama’s book and his former pastor’s similarly named sermon. Unlike many of today’s opponents of the most recent stage of liberalism, which I have elsewhere labelled the “choice-enhancement state,” Farrow is unwilling simply to fall back on an earlier, libertarian form of the ideology. This can be seen most clearly in his critique of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle:

The power of On Liberty to overturn social and moral and religious conventions arises from Mill’s exciting and flattering suggestion that freedom will lead you into the truth. That iconoclastic gospel from the Romantic period still competes very successfully, tractable as it is to post-modern cynicism, with the older idol-smashing gospel of Jesus, that “the truth will set you free.”

Mill’s gospel takes no account of the creator/creature distinction, or of the fallenness of man. It takes no account of a freedom higher than freedom of choice, and gives no thought to how the truth of our own good will be recognized, or how that good will prove commensurate with the good of others. It is incurably romantic and naively optimistic. Most significantly, it fails to reckon with the fact that, in the absence of an overarching common good, based on a prior truth to which both the individual and the state are subject, the state must become the arbiter of all the competing goods of “free” individuals. It is not the individual who triumphs, then, in the appeal to a freedom that is prior to truth, but the state.

Behind Mill stands Rousseau, of course, whose rather more obvious statism Mill hoped to avoid. The basic premise of On Liberty is drawn from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that “liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not injure another.” And that dictum is in turn drawn from Rousseau, who got it from the Marquis d’Argenson, to whom we actually owe the harm principle: “In the Republic each man is perfectly free in all things that do no harm to others.” Rousseau’s intention in popularizing it was to downplay the obligations imposed by civil society, which he regarded as a corrupting more than a civilizing influence, especially in the form of family and church [emphasis mine].

One’s primary obligations would hereafter be understood as obligations chiefly to oneself, on the one hand, and to the state on the other. That is what the harm principle is really all about—the elimination of the oppressive middle term between the individual and the state. This begs the question, however, as to what does or does not harm another, and who will decide that. Both Mill and Rousseau have ideas about that, and one gets glimpses of Mill’s ideas in the final chapters of On Liberty. Only glimpses, mind you, because Mill’s ideas aren’t really very libertarian after all.

Farrow’s astute analysis should be taken to heart by libertarians who think they are critiquing late liberal statism but in reality are doing no more than to facilitate its agenda over the long term.

While we’re on the subject, you might wish to read Farrow’s analysis of the latest chilling action of the government of his home province: The Government of Québec Declares War.

This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the first performance of English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’ masterpiece, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. I fell in love with this magnificent work nearly 30 years ago while studying for my written comprehensive exams at Notre Dame. The “theme” in the title is a tune composed by Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis for Archbishop Matthew Parker’s Psalter to which a versification of Psalm 2 is set. In most hymnals it is given the title THIRD MODE MELODY, because it’s in the phrygian mode, and it is sometimes paired with Horatius Bonar’s text, I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say. In the Christian Reformed Church’s Psalter Hymnal a metrical version of Psalm 62 is set to it. Here is the original psalm below:

The tune itself doesn’t seem especially strong, at least at first. There’s not much movement in the first half of the melody, which sneaks up on the listener hesitantly with a chant-like quality. Yet it is surprisingly compelling, all the same. Like most music of the period, it lacks a regular time signature, yet it’s in the double common metre ubiquitous in English psalmody and hymnody. Above all it is an “ecclesiastical” tune.

In the hands of Vaughan Williams this tune takes on an unforgettably haunting quality. The Fantasia is played entirely by strings, and the composer even employs parallel fifths, which defy musical convention but work wonderfully to heighten a sense of awe and mystery. When the piece finally brings us back to the original tune, we recognize that we have been on a remarkable musical journey – perhaps into a nearly forgotten past of some four and a half centuries ago. On more than one occasion this piece has left me with moist eyes. Listen for yourself below:

One can nearly picture the peaceful nobility of the English countryside in the composer’s swelling cadences. I myself tend to associate it with another tranquil landscape, namely, that formed by the land along the Illinois Prairie Path, where I rode my bicycle during that summer so long ago.

Remarkably, Vaughan Williams seems to have considered himself an agnostic, despite his having contributed so much to the music of the English church. Who does not love to sing For All the Saints, set to his whimsically (un)named SINE NOMINE? Incidentally Vaughan Williams was the grandnephew of Charles Darwin.

As for Tallis’ THIRD MODE MELODY, here is another elaboration composed by the late Texas composer Fisher Tull in 1971, Sketches on a Tudor Psalm. This has a quite different feel to it. While Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia is written entirely for strings, Tull’s Sketches are for brass band. This gives the piece a less tranquil and more dynamic and agitated flavour, as underscored by the discordant tonality and energetic percussion. There are echoes of Vaughan Williams in a very few of Tull’s phrases, as heard below:

Finally, soon after discovering Tallis’ tune, I wrote a metrical versification of Psalm 25 to be sung to it, which returns it to its original use, namely, as a setting for a psalm.

During my first years teaching at Redeemer University College, I quickly discovered the impact I was having on students and initially found it a somewhat jarring experience.  I had recently gone from being a lowly graduate student at Notre Dame’s Department of Government and International Studies to being a not-quite-so-lowly (but not terribly exalted either) assistant professor of political science at one of Canada’s few Christian universities. This commanded the respect of the students, most of whom had grown up in the Christian Reformed Church and similar bodies and had been educated in the day schools connected with Christian Schools International. The Dutch Reformed tradition in particular has long had a strong educational tradition, beginning at least with Abraham Kuyper’s Free University of Amsterdam in 1880 and extending to Calvin College and other institutions in North America. One need only think of Alvin Plantinga’s and Nicholas Wolterstorff’s works as premier examples of scholarship in this tradition, to which Redeemer is heir.

One day while I was sitting in the cafeteria around a table with some of my students, one of them turned to me and repeated something I had said in class as though it were gospel truth. Still being quite green, I was startled at this. That night I had difficulty sleeping and James 3:1 kept running through my mind: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” To say that this scared the hell out of me would be something of an overstatement, yet I had come to understand something of the awesome responsibility of a teacher, even at the post-secondary level.

Not too long ago I posted something on Academic freedom and the faith-based university in response to John Stackhouse’s defence of Trinity Western and other confessional universities in Canada’s University Affairs. I return to the topic here.

As I see it, there are two sides to this: teaching and research, each of which must be handled somewhat differently, even if they are interconnected in numerous ways. Ideally each should support the other, which is why universities try to provide sufficient time and monetary resources for research, even if some overburden their faculty with teaching responsibilities. Many of the smaller Christian universities tend to have their faculty teaching as many as eight courses per year under nine-month contracts, thereby making it difficult for them to pursue a scholarly agenda in any serious way. This is an issue for another time.

The crucial concern for present purposes is that Christian universities often require of their employees adherence to a particular confessional statement, sometimes associated with the supporting denomination. It is not unusual for a Presbyterian university to hire only those agreeing with the Westminster standards. Calvin College itself requires its faculty to attend Christian Reformed Church congregations or those of other denominations with which it is in ecclesiastical fellowship. It also requires adherence to the Three Forms of Unity. Do such requirements constitute undue limitations on academic freedom? Not necessarily, though they can do so, depending on the content of the prescribed statements.

The stereotypical case has a professor of, say, biology coming to believe that the bulk of the evidence points to macro-evolution, including the descent of human beings and the higher primates from a common prehistoric ancestor. However, because she has signed a statement supporting fiat creationism at the time she was hired, her findings threaten her continued employment. Or what of the professor of biblical studies who has come to conclude, based on literary evidence, that Isaiah 40-66 were written centuries after the first 39 chapters, or that Daniel was probably written in the second century BC? If this conflicts with the official understanding of biblical authorship supported by the institution, this puts him in a tough position and could result in the loss of his job.

These are the sorts of scenarios of which faculty at christian universities ostensibly live in constant fear. To be sure, I think it is unwise to prescribe a statement of faith in effect prohibiting faculty from exploring human origins and other fields of legitimate human endeavour. In short, it ought not to tell scholars what they can and cannot learn about God’s creation or what sort of evidence they are allowed to uncover. But that the world is God’s creation should obviously not be called into question.

Does this limit academic freedom? In one sense, yes, it does. Christian believers are not free to accept the sort of dualism that assumes that our ultimate convictions can be safely sequestered from pedagogical and scholarly pursuits. Nor should we embrace the various reductionisms that plague the secular academy in so many ways. We are not free to ignore the many idolatrous worldviews that vie for our loyalty or to pretend that they have no impact on the life of the mind. Any effort to rehabilitate, say, the Marxian project without noticing its reduction of the full complexity of human motivations to material productive forces falls well short of the spiritual discernment sorely needed in academia.

Furthermore, there is no such thing as a university without some form of undergirding faith commitment, even if it is only implicit. In a public university, which is supposedly neutral with respect to various religious commitments, there are certain academic activities that are at least unofficially out of bounds. J. Philippe Rushton’s controversial investigations into intelligence and racial differences have skirted the edges of these boundaries for obvious reasons. One suspects the same would be true of those exploring gender differences. Even if the latter were permitted by one’s academic peers, one would have to tread very carefully to avoid causing offence to the easily offended. Yet, ironically, questioning Darwin’s theory, which would appear to imply at least the possibility of biological inequalities, is also beyond the pale. It overstates the case to conclude that a common commitment to methodological atheism is required for teaching at a public university. All the same, one could not simply assume that, say, God created the heaven and earth and redeemed it from sin through Jesus Christ, and then proceed to conduct one’s academic inquiries on the assumption that this is true.

Yet this is exactly what scholars at a Christian university are privileged to do. There is no doubt that, given my own faith commitment and how I understand it to impact my field of political science, I am freer at Redeemer to follow my own interests in teaching and research than I would be elsewhere. Academic freedom? Yes, but I prefer to speak of academic responsibility, recognizing that true freedom is not mere licence, as many seem to think, but always functions within a larger communal context wherein we exercise a fearful responsibility, not only for the young lives God has put in our care, but for the larger world of scholarship.

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types–the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”

G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 19 April 1924.

Because these sorts of stories are not given the attention they deserve in the mainstream western media, those of us in what might be called the informal media have a special responsibility to alert our own readers to them: Muslims Slaughter Christians in Egypt. Fortunately, Egyptian authorities are doing something about it: Egypt security court to try suspects in Copt killings. While Chuck Colson’s charge that Christians in muslim countries are unprotected and unnoticed may be something of an overstatement, he is right to raise awareness of their plight amongst Christians in this part of the world.

Pakistan is another country in which Christians are routinely subjected to violence by members of the muslim majority. How many Christians live in that country? Two decades ago Gene R. Preston wrote: “The most recent census — conducted in 1981 — gave a rough count of 84 million people of whom not quite a million were Christian. The unofficial 1990 estimate is 108 million, with an explosive birthrate of nearly 4 percent. That could soon mean up to 2 million Christians in this land of Islam.” Wikipedia gives a figure of “2,800,000 in 2008, or 1.6% of the population.” However, Nazir S. Bhatti, President of the Pakistan Christian Congress, asserts that Christians make up fully 13 percent of the population of Pakistan, which the country’s government deliberately underestimates for its own purposes. However, a Pakistani Christian friend recently gave me a figure of 4 percent as more accurate. Whatever its true size, this minority certainly deserves just treatment at the hands of its government and fellow citizens.

Then on to Malaysia. Whatever one thinks of the correctness or advisability of Christians referring to God as Allah, I hope we can all agree that it is not the proper task of government to regulate this sort of thing.

Are faith-based universities intrinsically incompatible with the hallowed principle of academic freedom? The Canadian Association of University Teachers thinks so: CAUT versus Trinity Western. Against the homogenizing efforts of the CAUT, Regent College’s John Stackhouse commendably defends British Columbia’s Trinity Western University and similar institutions. However, his defence turns out to be a weak one at best:

To be sure, anyone who has actually worked in a secular university for more than about two weeks recognizes that there are ideological pressures there, too: to conform to the preferences of one’s departmental superiors who will be deciding on one’s tenure and promotion, to the fads of one’s discipline and to the priorities of granting agencies. Still, however compromised academic freedom might be, it is an ideal to be cherished and protected.

At the same time, however, I want to urge my fellow Canadian scholars to leave a space for the alternative of a community of scholars that can take a number of basic assumptions for granted and go on together to analyze a wide range of important questions. The synergy that comes from such shared intellectual commitments is simply not to be found in the secular university.

It is an obvious and yet important trade-off: the exciting stimulation of radical plurality versus the reinforcing energy of coherent perspectives. Both are truly educational and both therefore deserve the support of the academy and the Canadian public.

Stackhouse admits that there are constraints on academic freedom at a secular university, but he seems to view these as incidental and in principle capable of being dimished in the interest of seeking to implement this “ideal to be cherished and protected.”

Nevertheless, I think the constraints are more deeply rooted than he lets on here. I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would be permitted to teach my own Political Visions and Illusions at one of Ontario’s provincial universities, principally because I use the categories of religion and idolatry to understand ideology. It is possible to conceive of a university in which Christians, Jews and Muslims could teach out of their own perspectives, but this would necessitate a radical reorientation of its mission, I should think. Moreover, even in such an apparently ideal institution there would be no getting away from the reality of “a number of basic assumptions [being taken] for granted,” these assumptions undergirding the educational enterprise as a whole.

Contra Stackhouse, the crucial difference is not between “radical plurality versus the reinforcing energy of coherent perspectives.” Indeed what goes by the label of radical plurality inevitably finds its home in a controlling context of nonfalsifiable pre-theoretical presuppositions, or what might be called a basic worldview. Of course, Stackhouse may well understand this but sees fit to tone it down for the readership of University Affairs, judging it more politic to argue for tolerance of dissent, so as better to resonate with his audience.

The following article I wrote for the 8 June 2009 issue of the Canadian periodical, Christian Courier. Although it does not, admittedly, address the question of precisely what constitutes torture, I assume here that it encompasses methods that are in some fashion disproportionate to the legitimate quest for public security and are thus unjust.

At one time it was a commonplace occurrence to see convicted criminals treated in painful and humiliating ways. Grisly penalties were applied to murderers, pickpockets and heretics, and ordinary people turned out in large numbers to witness these spectacles, apparently learning the hard lesson that, to coin a cliché, crime does not pay. However the English Bill of Rights of 1689, adopted after the previous year’s ouster of King James II, prohibited the application of “cruel and unusual punishments,” in language that would eventually find its way into the US Bill of Rights and Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, where the word “treatment” was notably added.

What then of pre-trial treatment? What means are permitted in questioning a suspected criminal, that is, someone who has not yet been found guilty of a punishable crime? Since ancient times brutal means have often been employed to elicit a confession or incriminating information from a defendant. Such means are still used throughout the globe, despite the existence, among other similar treaties, of the 1985 United Nations Convention Against Torture, of which Canada and the United States are signatories.

Arguments against torture are based on two types of reasoning, principled and pragmatic. On the principled side, it is argued that human beings have an intrinsic dignity that ought not to be violated through mistreatment, even if it is in the interest of a larger good, for example national security. An argument can also be made that those who engage in torture must suppress their own humanity to bring themselves to commit such an act. In short, torture is unjust.

Those of a more pragmatic bent insist that, even if torture were not morally wrong, its use is not effective, as the victim could easily confess to something he did not do in order to end the ordeal. Even if the suspect is guilty of harbouring information about fellow conspirators that might be crucial to stopping a terrorist act, he could just as easily give false or misleading information to his interrogators, who would not necessarily know the difference.

Nevertheless, the temptation to torture is one that many officials find irresistible when confronted with a threat to the lives of innocent people, much as in wartime a country’s government will be tempted to retaliate in kind against an attack on civilians. There can be no doubt that al-Qaeda and similar organizations have employed unjust means, precisely to entice their opponents to respond in illegal ways and thereby discredit themselves.

Admittedly the United States was in a difficult international position as it sought an effective response to the 9/11 attacks. The Bush administration severely botched the public relations side of this as it needlessly alienated otherwise friendly governments needed to mount an effective multilateral defence.

Moreover, the fact that Washington has claimed to be waging a war on terror was, from the outset, deeply misguided. It is precisely because this “war” has such a nebulous and unattainable aim that the government prosecuting it will tend to lose sight of which means are appropriate in its pursuit. If our aim is to eradicate terror, residual bourgeois sympathies, schoolyard bullying or something similarly unrealistic, any effort to do so will almost inevitably tempt us, in our choice of means, to flirt with the edges of legality and rectitude. Why? Simply because no means whatever will enable us to reach a goal so vague as to lack a reasonable chance of success.

Better to keep a feasible goal before us and to choose methods proper to its accomplishment, avoiding those that corrupt us and transgress the norms of justice.