I hate to complain (really)

Blogging is slow this week and prolly next week due to personal commitments.

If you see Challies, tell him that the next time he compares me to Kevin Federline I'm going to go completely Samuel L. Jackson on him -- and that's a dance move he won't forget.

Spend this Lord's day in the Lord's House with the Lord's people. And read this sermon and listen to this one because that's what this blog is all about. Oh shoot -- also read this post at Triablogue because it's meaty. Red Meaty.

spider and crawler post

If somebody from Random House has a spider or crawler trolling for bloggers to review their books, I'm looking for a reviewer's copy of 978-0-307-26577-7 by Sam Harris.

e-mail me and I'll give you a shipping address.

word choice [1.5 of 2]

'k -- as I'm mulling over part 2 of 2 in this series, I subscribed to Greg Koukl's podcast (go to Stand to Reason and subscribe), and his last podcast (9/25) is called "Red Letter Christians".

Top shelf. It diffuses the idiom of liberal passive-aggressive political speak, which is, btw, exactly what I am on about. If we don't defend the words we use in framing the concerns we have for this world, we are going to get manipulated into doing unbiblical things in the name of the "red letters of the Bible" or some other theologically-thuggish argument. It comes hard upon the Doug TenNapel (language alert -- not for the squeemish) link Phil gave in his TIWIARN sidebar at TeamPyro.

You'll have to register at STR, but you can opt out of getting junk mail. You can also subscribe via iTunes, but I know a lot of you are luddites and think iTunes is a kind of entertainment fascism. Whatever.

The Difference

ood morning. Just got back from reinventing my exercise routine, and I read this, in which Mel Gibson again proves that nothing is too stupid for him to say.

Of course, the quote I'm talking about might require more context than Reuters gives in the link, but when Gibson asks the question, "What's human sacrifice, if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?" I am prompted to say, "You want a list, or were you making a larger point?"

The war in Iraq undoubtedly has its detractors, but let's assume for a minute that our soldiers there are engaged without a mission -- an assumption which cannot be substantiated with any facts. How, exactly, did a new Iraqi government come into being? How did Saddam Hussein come to stand trial? How has the #1 guy from Al-Qaida in Iraq come to a mortal end? Why does Osama bin Laden live under a rock like a lizard?

The other thing I'd point out is that there's a pretty significant difference between taking a drugged victim to the top of a temple mount and cutting his throat or impaling him, and getting volunteers to signup for military service and sending them off to fight a war which topples a dictator who enables his sick sons to rape and murder as a hobby.

If Mr. Gibson is reading this (it could happen), let me offer him some free advice: stick to fiction, and movies, and portraying crazy guys on film (apparently, you do that well because you have some life experiences to substantiate your work). That's your forte. Critical thinking, world events, politics, religion -- let someone else work that out.

And yes -- this does have something to do with the "choice of words" post from last week where we left off. I'll get back top it soon.

Word Choice [1 of 2]

The last post got a little attention, but listen: the reason I think it is important to make sure we choose our words clearly and carefully is because we are dealing with people who, very frankly, are demonstrably doing a far better job of choosing their words than we are -- both as a Western civilization and as bearers of the name of Jesus Christ.

Let me give you a particular example -- and I know: you don't read this blog for politics, but this is an issue where the Gospel, and orthodoxy, and politics all meet not just as passers-by on the road, but they are all wearing the same pair of pants at the same time.

Some of you may have read Hugo Chavez's remarks to the UN in the last 2 days -- and while his remarks took a lot of chutzpah to make in public where someone was writing down his words and people were videotaping him saying these things, there's a context he was pretty adroit in avoiding: the existence of the UN as an institution 100% without question requires the participation and protection of the United States of America.

If Hugo Chavez wants to wag his moralistic and humanitarian finger at George Bush while standing in the center of the UN stage and call him "Satan" and complain about a theory of global hegemony, the first thing he needs to do is realize that if the UN were in even Britain or Germany -- or his crappy little country which he seems to require a lot of violent force to keep in order -- it (the UN) would have ceased to exist a long time ago.

See: what Chavez is really on about is not "hegemony". Let's talk about that for a second -- can you define that word? In the global sense, it means "the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group". That is: it means somebody leads and others follow. Now: at no time in history has there ever been a lack of hegemony -- the question is whether or not there was global hegemony or merely-geographic hegemony. For example, Imperial China exerted hegemony over the East until probably the end of the 19th century, then Japan made a play for hegemony, and then Socialist China battled back, and now there is another kind of hegemony extant in the East which North Korea is trying to overcome.

And that sounds very noble, doesn't it? That North Korea is "trying to overcome hegemony"? But in fact, what North Korea wants to do is use force to overpower or leverage countries which are globalizing their ecomonies and prospering. The kind of hegemony that Japan, and China, and Taiwan, and even S. Korea are participating in is economic hegemony based on open market principles. Are they all exemplary players? Prolly not. But are they developing and trying to fix their problems? I think the answer there is, ultimately, yes.

And that said, the hegemony they are falling in-line with is unquestionably American hegemony -- the politically-democratic, economically-captialistic hegemony of market-based proliferation of goods, services and ideas. So America is certainly a leader in that field -- even though we ourselves have some remedial classes to take on all accounts.

And in that, what kind of leadership is possible in hegemony? It is totalitarian influence? Oh hardly! See: Noam Chomsky -- the guy who wrote the book Chavez was waving around -- paints the picture that hegemonistic dominance is somehow evil or insidious, but in fact it is far less damaging and socially debilitating than the kind of dominance Chomsky himself would advocate for -- which is in fact a anarchic view of government which goes beyond libertarianism and demands the equal distribution of wealth (a system which, in spite of its superficial advocation of trade unions and self-governnance, must by necessity rely on a centralized method of wealth distribution -- which is to say, totalitarian socialism).

Chomsky says he's for self-rule, but what kind of self rule is it in which one cannot choose one's economic outcome -- that is, that all economic devices (sloth, greed, hard work, inventiveness) result in the same personal economic reward?

The problem for Chomsky (and thus for Chavez, who we have not forgotten) is that he thinks it is evil for success to dictate terms. He thinks that failures deserve the same socio-economic weight as successes. He couches it in very sympathetic terms (you know: the West is dominating India and Somolia out of cultural existence, and the West must therefore be evil stormtroopers for violating the cultures of other nations), but when we take his argument out of the examples he gives and put them into the real world, his view is that because the West is irradicating disease and poverty in other nations by forcing them to surrender failed cultural practices for the kind of practice which have bread economic success in the West, the West is a bad guy for doing the things Chomsky claims he wants to see happen in the world.

Because Chomsky is a linguist foundationally, he thinks that the problem really is the words we are using to describe the problems we have -- not that, for example, that people are dying from AIDS because culturally they do not value monogomous, long-term family units headed by one husband and one wife. Or, for example, that the US has a better average standard of living than Angola because somehow the US stole Angola's share of the net-ZERO world economic pie and not because the US has a labor force which, on-net, outproduces any country in the world and that level of production drives a net level of consuption.

So the hegemonist "strategy" of the West to "dominate" is really a strategy in which the US is wildly successful, and we make the open-handed offer to join us in this kind of culture, but we also make the stone-cold decision that under no circumstance will we allow someone else to destroy our success. That is, you can join us, you can ignore us, but if you want to oppose us, we are going to have a problem -- "we" in the sense of "you" as someone who has to live with the consequences of being angry about the general improvement in the standard of living for those who get on the bus. Do not stop people from getting on the bus.

That's what Chavez is all "god-as-my-witness" about: the US is the economic leader in the world, and we would really rather that the world follow us into a culture where there is more economic prosperity, not less. Mostly he's mad that when he issues threats we take him seriously and, using the standard of "we are going to have a problem", he can't stagger around the world like a barfly looking for another drunk to fight with.

And in that, there's Chavez's second problem: the UN exists because of American hegemony. If he really wants to end American hegemony, my suggestion is this: let him build his own UN building in his low-rent country, perpetually provide the security for it, become the major financial supporter for the organization, and then he can parlay for the kind of global relationships he thinks ought to be in place. If you want to come into my house and use my living room as a toilet, and then complain that I'm an inhospitable host for telling you where the toilet is hand asking you to wipe your own back-side, the problem is not my hospitality: it is you inability to demonstrate continence.

Because the reality is that Chavez wants to trade the extant hegemony for some other plainly less-defined set of hegemonistic values and relationships. And under his kind of hegemony, there would be no UN in which George Bush or anyone else could stand up and accuse him of moral dispondency without being proclaimed an agent of Satan and a threat to the whole world. So my suggestion to Chavez is that he put his money where his mouth is. I think we, as a country, would be glad to see the UN go away from our land. Let the world have its collective hand-wringing sessions elsewhere, and they can send us the video tape for our reference. And if Chavez is the kind of guy they would prefer to follow into that brave new world, Amen to that, too.

Just don't come back in 6 months demanding things from us. You want us out -- we'll leave. We're taking our guns, our money and our beer with us.

You're going to have one kind of hegemony or another. You choose -- just don;t pretend that just because you call something "hegemony" or "Satan" that is what it actually is.

More later.

murder and martyr

With yesterday's post about Benedict's speech -- which, apparently, was an insult to Allah, to the extent that violence, murder and mayhem was warranted to refute the Pope's claim that violence, murder and mayhem are illegitimate tools of religion -- there has to be some mention of Sister Leonella, who was almost immediately a victim of Muslim outrage.

Let's be clear that this murder is a moral outrage, a political line in the sand, and an exemplary demonstration of what Islam is trying to achieve on the global stage. The death of Sister Leonella ought to be a wake-up call for the West -- and for anyone who values Western civilization in any way. That would include, for example, any country that makes a lot of money by selling oil to the West -- somehow our ideas are fetid and repulsive, but our money spends just fine.

The death -- excuse me: the murder -- of Sister Leonella is certainly a crime. It demonstrates that we are in a high-stakes game between two kinds of civilizations. It is the ultimate kind of injustice, when the merciful and the generous are murdered because of the alleged intellectual crimes of their leaders.

But let me ask a question if it will not turn the blog into a brawl: was her death "martyrdom"? That is: was she murdered for proclaiming the name of Jesus Christ and the Gospel, or was she a victim of another kind of crime which really didn't really have anything to do with the Gospel?

I think that's an interesting question. See: I'm not suggesting that because she's a Catholic that she could not have been advancing the Gospel -- that's a question which is itself interesting, but it ought not to be the topic we prop up on the grave of an innocent woman. What I'm suggesting is this: when we indisciminately call any death of a person with a religious title "martyrdom", we are cheapening the language of evangelism and of the faith by a significant degree.

I want you to think about this seriously. The primary reason the gunman who murdered Sister Leonella was the insult to Islam he perceived in the remarks by the Pope which had nothing to do with the Gospel. James White has done a fine job of outlining Benedict's use of 14th century sources to make a specific point, but what is that point? Jesus Christ is Lord and Christ? He who does not accept the Son does not accept the Father? No: the point is that no matter what your religion is, the use of violence to advance your point is both inhuman and evil.

Anybody could say that and be taken seriously. And the Pope has a fine pulpit from which to say such a thing because he is perceived by Muslims as speaking for a large part of the rest of the world. That is: if you really believe that there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet, say it, don't spray it with bullets.

And in that, Sister Leonella was murdered for the plea for mere political and intellectual civility on the part of the Pope. He didn't say, "let's just settle for the God of Abraham and call it quits, yes?" He said that if mankind is to address the moral questions which we encounter in this day and age, we must begin from a moral platform which allows for dissent and for reasonable encounter.

So on the one hand, let's not confuse some act of indiscriminate violence with martyrdom. Sister Leonella died not because the Gospel was preached but because merely-political philosophy was preached -- and rejected! Calling her death "martyrdom" discounts the message of the Gospel to worldly political reasoning.

But on the other hand, Sister Leonella was murdered to threaten and oppress Western values of political discourse and intellectual freedom. That shouldn't just scare Catholics, or Christians in a sociological definition: it should scare anyone who wants the human right to have one's own opinion about any subject.

Today, frankly, I mourn for Sister Leonella -- and the whole world should be mourning for her. She didn't die for the cause of the Gospel: she died because some people still think that you can make an argument out of the barrel of a gun. That's not an argument: that's war. And war is not an idyllic state: war is hell.

Let's remember that today as we consider who and what her death represents. She was assassinated for the sake of ending a conversation and suppressing any dissent -- even if she was not personally making that dissent. She was an innocent victim, and her blood is an object lesson in Muslim political reasoning.

Let me close with this: if you are a Muslim, and you think it is unfair to judge all of Islam based on the actions of "a few", I challenge you today to stand up and reject the murder of Sister Leonella as a valid expression of your religion. Stand up today and reject the burning of Christian churches as acts of righteous indignation. Stand up right now -- Blogger's free, my friend -- and denounce the use of violence and threats to advance your culture's way of life. Show us in some way your religion's peacefulness and love of men as image-bearers of God. That is, in practice.

God have mercy on us all if this is the way of the world we are going to leave to our children.

The purpose of rest

This is not a very insightful theological post. I just wanted to point out the purpose of rest in the modern world is, apparently, to have enough energy to catch up on all the stuf you had to let slide while youw ere away on vacation.

A coupla-three things:

-- Thanks to the SideKicks for keeping the blog fresh while I was away. They did a fine job.

-- In the next 2-3 days, JIBB will be replaced by Gummby as lead sidekick, and you'll see Daniel in the sidekick links. There's no nefarious reason or theological drum being beaten. My long-time internet friend Matt Pearson (aka JIBBS) has simply stopped blogging and has also fallen off the face of the Earth. I'm sure he'll be back when his life allows him time to do so. We love JIBBS.

-- I have a lot more to say about TNIV, Emergent, Baptism, Orthodoxy, the Gospel, scoundrels, malcontents, phony ecumenicists, and lots of other stuff -- but not today. I only have enough energy and time today to do the things they pay me for, and the next two days I'll be at an off-site meeting with little or no internet access. I hate that.

Nice to see you, too.

for future reference

The text of the Pope's controversial speech.

Whatever one has to say about this, let's remember that nobody I'd call a friend has called for war over these remarks -- or any remarks from this Pontiff. However, what should we think fo the people who are calling for war?

More on Monday. Shouldn't you be at church?

Sacrifice vs. Obedience.

We are all familiar with 1 Samuel 15:22,...

And Samuel said, "Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,as in obeying the voice of the LORD?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams. [ESV]

How many sermons have we heard already on this text - not to mention how many times we have heard our Christian friends, other bloggers or speakers make reference to this verse on their way to some other point. That is, by now, if we have been a Christian for a while, we will be somewhat familiar with the verse and the thought behind it: Avoiding obedience by doing things that in and of themselves are "good" cannot pacify God and trying to do so is just plain dumb.

Notwithstanding - we often do just that, not only individually, but corporately. Take the congregation (for instance) that has an outreach event. We say - an outreach event? You mean a concentrated evangelical endeavor meant to present the gospel to the unchurched through some sort of public forum (be that a social event or a performance or what have you)? Yeah. I mean that kind of event. You say - never in a million years could such a thing ever be bad.

Follow me for a second here. Let us first lay aside Saul's very poor motives excuses for not keeping the command of God - we could spend a lot of time playing with that - but we all know it was wrong, and most of us know why. Instead let us concentrate on the fact that even if Saul did sacrifice those animals - it wouldn't have been very profitable considering - yes sacrifices at the time were considered a "good" thing - but doing a "good" thing --instead of-- doing what God asks - instead of doing what is right, is not worship, it is a lame attempt to buy off God. We can guess at Saul's mind set

God must be pacified, and since God likes sacrifices, even though I am unwilling to do what He asked me, I can make it up to him by doing something that I -am- willing to do, and He will appreciate my efforts because they are the sort of thing (sacrifices) that I understand God to like.

I reel back at the blind arrogance of that mind set. Not that I imagine myself above Saul so that I "righteously" condemn it - hardly, I am not reeling back in a sort of exalted and righteous disgust - rather I can see myself in this sort of blind arrogance, and that is what causes me to hate it so!

You see, that attitude pictures God as just another deity (small "d") to be pacified by good deeds - and the deeds themselves have no relation to anything else - it is as if there were a list of good deeds, and if God asks you to do something - you can ignore it as long as you make up for it by doing something else from his "good deeds" list. That mind set says, I will worship God in whatever way seems right in my own eyes. That mind set is carnal, and entirely foreign to obedient Christianity. If I am unwilling to share my faith in my own walk with the Lord...

Which brings us back to our outreach event.

Can you imagine a church where every believer was living for God? I am talking about people who put God's agenda first. Can you imagine a church like that? Do you think they would need an outreach event to swell the ranks?

Now imagine a different kind of church - and I know this will be a stretch for some - but imagine a church where people miss prayer meetings because they would rather stay home and watch "The Sopranos." Imagine a church where 90% of the congregation hasn't led even a single soul to the Lord in the past five years. Imagine a congregation where many of its members are willing to work overtime to finance a large, comfortable house, in a comfortable neighborhood, with two or more comfortable cars - but can't put more than pocket change in the offering plate on Sunday. Imagine this same group now planning and holding an outreach event - and you will start to pick up on where I find my thoughts lately.

I could care less for such an event. Yeah, the event itself is nice - you know balloons for kids, or a barbecue - or whatever. Yeah it brings out the "worker bees" in the church who do practically everything anyway - and yeah it is mostly attended by them and their families - and yeah, at the end of the day the over-worked pastor did managed to corner a few people and awkwardly share the gospel - but is this a healthy event? Is God really pleased that a sick and near dead church pretends to be alive?

Do you see my point?

Now, I am not trying to poo-poo (can I say that on Frank's blog?) corporate evangelical efforts. Truly - just as there was nothing wrong with a sacrifice done right in Saul's day - so too there is nothing wrong with a healthy church hosting an outreach events in our day. But what --is-- wrong is when we do that sort of thing --instead of-- sharing our faith individually, instead of living a truly repentant life. The great commission has become the greater omission - and rather than do what is commanded - some substitute a living witness with planned - even annual "evangelical" events - as though evangelism was something you "do" and not the very fragrance of Christ within you.

I point it out, not so that we can slap one another on the back knowingly and agree that this is bad, nor to speak to those who see themselves in such a state and demand that they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps - but rather to remind us that the church must manifest the glory of God on the earth in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. If we don't see this happening - let's stop "playing church" and get honest with God. If our heart burns within us at the thought - we ought not to set that aside for another day. Consider how we sing, "There is room at the cross" - we ought to sing, "There is room -on- the cross" for us.

Worship God this Lord's day!

not like the other

Hey: what's the difference between this fellow and Mark Driscoll?

I'll give you a hint: there is one, and it is important.

I'm going back to vacation. You talk about that, and I'll get back to you.