Exceptionalism is a flag that a hopeful politician in America can hardly afford to keep at half mast. Hesitation on America’s greatness gets you names – at best, “isolationist”; at worst, “unpatriotic.”
Some sail the ship of political showmanship by insisting that America has it’s own proud circle on the charts in the back of your grandmother’s Scofield Reference Bible. (more…)
Once upon a time, all the eagles had forgotten they were eagles. They used to live in high mountain eyries, but someone had convinced them they ought to be living on a farm. They still called themselves eagles, but they had little memory of what their make up was capable of; they had little imagination that their very constitution would allow them to fly. Instead they hunted and pecked. They were sometimes called back to books about the old mountain life, books written by their founding feathers, but mostly the eagles mentioned these ideas in passing, and with little reference to the actual books.
The eagles would get together to vote on important matters. When they would get together, they were often led by a couple of strange birds named Main and Grand. They were odd eagles. They didn’t look like eagles, but they did a really good job of doing what they said was a really good job. They were experts at hunting and pecking for corn.
One of the eagles was not like the others. He was not content to walk slowly around the farm, and to scratch at the dirt. He was alway suggesting they should try to move faster. We should run – he would say, looking to the skies. (more…)
“US: A promise”
A Poem of American Love For Vision and Revision
by V. O. Waver
—
Know I would never have you doubt our love; it will endure
For we, the people, spoke our words: of them we may be sure
That they were never writ in stone – now we are more mature
of this united state, my love, be ever so secure
Don’t tell of ancient meaning laid within our founding caper
Don’t say your freedom was elusive, fleeting as a vapor
Don’t say your liberty was strong, but now you see it taper
There’s been a revolution, love; it’s just a piece of paper
Once all you wanted was the freedom to procure a tea
For me to harbor your decisions in obscurity
But I’ve decided what you need is not my purity
And I’ll be watching you my dear to give security
For I will never let you go, as sands of time do run
And I’ll be firm with promises as rising of the sun
Here to enact some sequences next decade to be done
Your mind can know my faithfulness, while I’m out having fun
I may not have the means to fund, but there’s a strange solution
I bless your scooting over, dear, to make room for intrusion
I bless your silence, as I force your frequent absolution
I bless your will to love a man of weakest constitution
——-
Luke Welch is a conservative in politics. He has a master’s degree from Covenant Seminary and preaches regularly in a conservative Anglican church in Maryland. He blogs about Bible structure at SUBTEXT.<>
In broad daylight we see this. In broadcasted radio, we hear a serious situation described in terms that completely distort the nature of what is happening. And this is so common that we don’t have the ability to stop it. God has not yet seen fit for our groanings to be heard as anything other than the claims of Chicken Little. “Chicken Little” starts with a “C.” So does “Cassandra.” So does “Cliff.”
We are currently in talks to avoid government shutdown. More fiscal cliff negotiations. Topping the bill this week is a new musical called, “Sequestration,” coming to theaters on Broadway, Pennsylvania Avenue, and only later to Main Street, they say. But it is quite a show. And broad is the way that leads to destruction. That’s what they’re going to be selling you all week. Destruction is coming if the conservatives get their way. The conservatives are going to lead us into the pit with those scruples! They bicker, they whine, and they won’t compromise! The president will call on us to get something done. Experts will say that Boehner’s minions are obstructionists. 435 players are all sequined up for the big curtain call.
But, please, don’t be dazzled. They are selling lies. You are going to hear over and over this week that congress is “dysfunctional.” And we may even hear the blame spread around – that both parties are guilty of “brinkmanship.” They will try to show you that conservatism is nice, but holding too strongly to anything is petty in a time like this.
You can’t miss any of this if you are listening. Two lies that they want you to believe:
1) The chief good for congress is getting something done.
2) Republicans are conservatives.
Before I explain, let me fast forward to the truths which replace these lies:
1) The chief good for congress is to restrain extraconstitutional spending, now and in the future as a standard and a controlling policy.
2) Constitutionalists are conservatives. Fiscally self-controlled people are conservatives. Republicans are by and large neo-conservatives, which means “fakers.”
The goal of radio time this week is to set the public of the US up with ways of expressing what we’re feeling, as it happens. They would like us to think they are grief counselors after a mass, public tragedy, helping us find words for all the chaos. But really, they are more like the mysterious men taking Mary Mormon’s camera and re-educating her on the spot about how many shots she heard. But we’re so used to that now. We’re ready to give up our knowledge and let it be replaced with publicly approved emotional language we can repeat around the water cooler. While all of this sounds sinister, what is happening consistently is definition of terms and the building of a framework that will allow us to interpret the sequester events in ways favorable to the administration.
Morning news and commentary on NPR gives a healthy dose of this reeducation every time we come to it. If you turn on NPR, as I do every morning, your brain is going to pass through a police checkpoint, directing your mental travel. Monday I was right: I expected what I heard – I didn’t even have to listen to know what I would hear on the Diane Rehm show. So when I listened I was just timing it. And this is what I hear in the punditry of each iteration of this cliffhanger:
“Dysfunction,” “brinkmanship,” “bickering,” “lack of compromise,” “obstructionism.”
And I want to get across here that our annoyance ought to be directed in two places.
Democrats ramrodd spending past the constitutional limits, again and again. But they are just maintaining the status quo. Republicans, on the other hand, are pretending to care, while they say no up to the edge, and then change their mind at the last minute. They (the RINO’s in charge) only do this because somebody back home actually is a conservative. But in the end, they take off the mask (it’s suffocating under there), and move to hold the door open for the democrats. It’s like they like being doormats. Maybe their high calling in life is to vote against their conscience.
There are a few conservatives in congress, but not enough to overwhelm the face of the republican party.
If we divide the groups out by what they say, democrats would be on one side and the Republicans (including the conservatives) would be on the other. But if we divide them out by what they do, then Republicans and Democrats would be on one side, and a handful of libertarian-minded Constitution-lovers would be all by their lonesome in the empty other wing.
So it’s time to deconstruct a weak metanarrative here. Congress wants us to believe they are the source of power, source of goods, source of life in America. The halls of congress are a giant hamster wheel that feeds the power plants juice, if they run fast enough. That is, if they pass enough legislation. They actually talk like the passing of bills creates stuff. Like “getting legislation accomplished” lights up our living room on stormy nights, and keeps our hospitals from needing generators. What will happen, they tell us, if they stop the legislation wheel from spinning, is that America will grind to a halt. Financially, socially, militarily…we can’t live without Almighty Congress, maker of all things, judge of all men.
So when Neo-cons, who are temporarily playing the part of a principled conservative, obstruct passage of money-bills, they are shutting down the future. They are killing even the present. But this is just a show. In the end, after the neos have conned their constituents one more time about their credentials, they will quietly shake hands and hold the coats of the dems so the liberals can stone us while the neo-cons look on in approval.
Some people, conservatives who have not bowed the knee to Baal, will obstruct. Saying, “congress is not God,” and “congress does not supply all our needs.” But to no avail.
Maybe it’s because we have gotten so used to borrowing from China. Maybe we are taking a page out of the Three-Self Patriotic movement. Religion doesn’t come from God, it comes from the government. Financial prosperity doesn’t come from God, it comes from the government.
Well…since we believe that without the ever-giving hand of congress, we would have nothing, then any attempt to slow down the train, is “obstruction” done with “bickering.” But obstruction is good. It is the job of any God-fearing congressman to obstruct when the law is broken, and to obstruct when grubby hands are grasping and grabbing.
Imagine five bullies are confronted at the doorway of the classroom by two children with strong consciences. From a distance the teacher remarks the seven children in the room and says, “Look at those kids holding things up in the doorway. They are such obstructionists; why are they always bickering with all the other kids? Those few kids are holding up the majority of the people in the room!”
Is the main goal of the classroom to let the bullies out on to the playground? Is th main goal of congress to make up rules about our neighbors’ stuff? Is it to get more value out of the public pocket, and into the money pit of this wretched house we’re constructing? Is that progress? Is that good? Can you hear me? Is passing legislation the definition of good? Not often.
No, we are actually glad there are a few principled children in the class. But what is actually about to happen at the end of this week is that most of the way through recess, the supposedly principled children are actually going to shake hands with the bullies walk to the playground and beat up the younger kids with them, telling the younger kids who are being beat up, “I tried to stop them, but I realized the only think I was accomplishing was restraining those bullies. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything measurable… Hey, shut up Loser! You’re just a little kid. You want to fit in, don’t you?”
And if the Republicans DO allow the sequester, it is just a one-off show. They have already cried wolf too many time to be heard as truly standing up for what is right.
But true Conservatives still stand up to bullies. Republicans make a show and then back down. Democrats are still bullies. Republicans are just accomplices.
And Conservatives are still defined by conservatism and not by punditry on morning talk shows.<>
Ron Paul on Education and Freedom
Anyone who reads or writes for this blog may be interested in the upcoming publication of Ron Paul’s newest book, New School Manifesto. Ron Charles at the Washington Post Blog reports that it will be released on September 17, 2013, getting Paul’s post-congressional career off to a fruitful and visible start.
The WaPo article highlights the subjects within Paul’s book of 1) homeschooling and 2) “a history of American schooling and a critique of what went wrong.”
We here at the KC are not necessarily categorically insistent on homeschooling, but we are insistent on Christian education, which necessarily means education freely decided on by parents and not by governing entities.
This jogs my memory to some YouTube videos from a few years back, wherein you will hear Rand Paul say, “I think that kids belong to God and to our families, but they don’t belong to the State.” – (in video 1 below)
Near the end of the first video Rand also talks about keeping government out of religious institutions as a guard to the freedom to call things “sinful.” This, of couse, applies to schools as well as to churches.
Keep an eye on this man as 2016 floats off in the distance.
<>
Capitalism is not a system to be promoted or evaded. Capitalism is a fact. Capitalism is the way it works. Capitalism means: when the scale goes up on one side, it goes down on the other. Our love of law making to fix economics is the obsession with the irrational idea that you can push down on both sides of the scale at once without breaking the scale.
In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, the president said he wants us to raise the federal minimum wage to $9.
Hurray, we can buy more stuff! Like… apples.
If I have an apple, and you want to buy it, will you be surprised if at the register I tell you, “They’ve raised the price to nine dollars.” You say, “Is that what you want to sell it for?”
No, I say. No one can afford to buy them now. So I am having to throw out all my apples as they go bad.
When two people are trading at a price they negotiate for themselves like grown ups, and the buyer is forced to buy at a higher price, it will hurt the seller. The seller cannot sell $9 apples. Since the buyer is forced to buy them at a high price, he won’t buy, so the seller is harmed. But don’t get confused about the analogy, listen carefully to who the buyer and seller are.
In work and wage – the business owner is the buyer. Stores are hoping to buy some hourly work from a worker. The worker is the seller. Of course, we are used to thinking that workers are victims. But they are only victims where they aren’t free. Like slaves in Egypt. Rather, in a free society, workers are business people who sell labor to businesses that buy the product of work. Sellers, though, are the ones hurt by the intrusion of a minimum hike. Stores can’t afford as much work so the seller (the worker) is the one who is hurt – and that means higher minimums would hurt workers. As we said, in non-free societies, workers become victims. Minimum wage is a mathematical Pharaonic brick policy
It is simple math – more money for the same work equals less work for the same money. They will cut your work.
Suddenly, the business doesn’t have a choice, they have to charge workers nine dollars an hour (if they were to get that hike through congress). But they would have to alter something to deal with the effects of such a change, because they would have to pay more without more income. This means less hours assigned to workers. More bricks… less straw. The extra money has to come from somewhere. It will come from the hours of workers. It will come from the quality of products they can afford to buy from vendors to sell to the public. The higher minimum will obstruct the people who have jobs to offer; it will starve the people who are hungry for jobs. Companies will offer less jobs. The higher minimum wage hurts the very workers it purports to protect.
When the scale goes up on one side, it goes down on the other.
By the way, we are promised you would have more cash in your pocket. But those dollars would be spent by you in some store that now would have to comply with a higher minimum. Stores don’t just pass on these “savings” to their workers – they also pass them on to their customers. The most logical place for the business to recoup the difference in P&L is from you. The prices will go up. The hours worked by workers will go down. (So customer service will incidentally hurt as well).
And this movement is understandable, because the market IS free in a way, even under duress of big government intrusion. Capitalism is a fact. The market may get told what to do, but it will retain a mathematical balance on its own. Bernoulli tells us that if you squeeze the back end of the toothpaste tube, paste will come out the other. You may call that tightening up the system. But you could just as well call it bleeding the system. When the scale goes up on one side, it goes down on the other.
Listen, friends. If you make hourly wages, and if you make minimum, then I hope you can do better and better for yourself. But know that pushing down on businesses is not going to hurt the businesses. It will hurt you, the worker. If you make minimum wage, you need to know that raising the minimum wage is one of the worst things that could happen to you. You will get a bump, but then you will get laid off. Or just cut back. And then the prices will rise against your cut-hour paycheck.
We could stop voting for Pharaoh’s mathemagicians. But that would mean finding the candidate who promised less stuff. And since we don’t understand the scale, we think that promising less government enforced and funded stuff means we would get less stuff. But less intrusion means more freedom. Less intrusion means improvement of general welfare. And we love to hear big promises.
Pharaoh makes big buildings. And he promises big promises. But whenever you hear Pharaoh promising you so many more bricks, remember that you’re the one making them.
I’ve been a fool.
For a number of years now, I have gone around criticizing federal programs of Republicans, and federal programs of Democrats as if they were burning down our economy. I have sneered at what I thought was nonsensical, wanton, or even devious. But I have been confronted with a basic error in interpreting the events in our country. As I look back, I am afraid my own mouth has been used to promote falsehoods. “So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire!” I have prompted others to think as I did. I am sorry. I must use that same mouth to show what I should have seen.
We are indeed facing great conflagrations all around us – economic disaster, domestic security, oppression of the poor – the list goes on. Up to this day, I have thought that both George Bush and Barack Obama have been “throwing oil on the fire.” But I failed to see their daring to do what others were too weak to do. What I resisted was their very brilliance, and will be for us our great salvation. They were not throwing oil on the fire. They were going to beat the fire! When a forest fire threatens your home and community, how must you do battle? With the next sentence, you shall hear my repentance:
“You gotta fight fire with fire.”
Don’t you see? A controlled burn to create a barrier – that is how you stop the flames from licking at your heels! When something really awful is coming for you – you have to do the awful thing too! You have to do it first! And a lot! That way you will be immune! That way you won’t feel it when it gets there.
Take TARP for example. Back in my blindness, I would have told you that you can’t fix debt by adding on debt. They weren’t trying to make the debt larger! They were trying to make big, scary debt, right here, really fast…THAT way we would be really tired of debt and emotionally exhausted by it before it got here. Controlled burning, see!? They weren’t trying to conflagrate us, they were just controlling us. And that’s way better. You know for our own good.
But you know how fires catch on like ideas, and it’s a good thing too, because the controlled burn has been a good solution. And this style of burning the people has caught on everywhere. Which means they’ll probably be able to control more and more. And we can let them save us and won’t have to worry or fret or think anymore. Cheer up, you may think it isn’t widespread, but there are tons of areas they can burn us in. It’s going to be a wildfire!
Take domestic terrorism. It could be here at any moment. Out of 330 million people who are potential criminals, a good handful of us has already worked on doing domestic terror on our very own land. Will the raging fire of domestic terror get here first? NO, the government is already here at the scene of the future crime, and they aren’t merely getting ready to act. They have already started! They are fast at work, patting us down, and recording what we own, downloading our computer data, and taking photos with flying robot assassins. These robots could even get their own piece of the action. Don’t worry. Domestic terrorists may have flesh and blood, but they probably also have feelings, so these robots have an advantage – no analytical emotion to get in the way of triggering “fighting fire with fire!” Domestic future bad guys, prepare to be terrorized by the experts. Prepare to be put out of business by our corner on the market.
Consider violence against women. We can certainly round up the cash to pay for more Planned violence against women.
Consider elections – one sure fire way to get rid of current bad candidates is to put more bad candidates on the roster before they can hurt us with the bad candidates we already have.
Their waging an immeasurable war against us? We’ll wage an immeasurable war against them, whoever they are!
Unconstitutional legislation threatening us? We can throw a little unconstitutional court ruling at it!
Learn controlled safety at home.
This thing is just jumping from roof to roof now! Control the burn! Control the people! Control the fear! If we all work together as one, there will be nothing we cannot accomplish!
Look, you don’t have to wait for the government to help you. You can get involved. You can, in your own small way, wage war against the coming debt crisis! You can immunize yourself to the wave of debt by making big, painful debt as close as your own pocket. Your own kids can know debt today, and be free from pain in the future.
So, I am sorry that I have suggested voting for candidates of small and principled followings. I am sorry that I pretended that fiscal responsibility meant fiscal restraint. I am sorry that I called for friends to investigate candidates who said “sound economic principles” were wise. I recognize how alone and wrong I was, now that I see the brilliance that both of our upstanding parties have shared. Just how many candidates want sound economic principles, anyway? Three? Two? One? And what is the sound of one economic principle clapping anyway? Exactly. If a tree burns in the woods, and no one is there to control it… you had better believe it’s burning toward your house. And before it gets there – you know who to call.<>
The mean God of the Old Testament asks us to take a second look at the word “mean.”
Last week I read a post from Rachel Held Evans in which she criticized Evangelicals for having a heart-less faith. By this she means that Evangelicals are quick to accept the severity of God in order to retain doctrinal ease. For many an evangelical, a doctrinal card trumps the joker of doubt that shows up when confronted with the hand of God’s judgment. Such answers, she said, “never sat right with my soul.” Some things the Bible pins on God are at least, “morally reprehensible at an intuitive level.” Don’t we know what she means?
Let’s not kid around here – we all know what she means. But is she right that there is no answer to satisfy the question? No answer that actually resolves the problem? Mrs. Evans has done well to live with the doubt rather than leaving the faith. For that I am glad. Many of us have done this. Doubt makes Christians feel guilty. If we were to actively deal with doubt we would have to admit that we are actively questioning God. So we ask the doubt to please, Pipe down!
But the monster of doubt, I believe, does not like to sit quietly in his office minding paperwork. Doubt is a debt collector – wicked and persistent. You may not open the bills. You may even drop them into the filing cabinet without a thought. But the debt collector will hunt you down. He knows where you live, and he will eventually insist that you reconcile the math.
The deficit I am describing is “cognitive dissonance.” That’s the name for when you believe two things simultaneously that logically cannot both be true. The distance between your illogical beliefs is a debt that someday must be paid if you will ever have peace of mind. Between the contradictory views you hold, one will eventually solidify and edge out the other one. But notice that it is dangerous for us to resolve this dissonance by asking our own hearts, our own minds, and our own surroundings to show us the truth. All these sources are fallen and will lead us to unfaith rather than faith. Since we have become used to allowing our hearts or our culture to trump scripture, we are set up for solidifying against scripture when we resolve the cognitive dissonance. And this means we have effectively prepared ourselves for loss of faith when doubt comes to collect. I believe a whole generation of Christians have bought a bill of goods on bad credit. Like the youngsters a decade ago who bought adjustable rate mortgages because they were cheap, we have bought the mindset of our culture because it is easy. And now, a whole generation of Christians will be surprised when life changes the rates on them, and now they owe more than they can pay, and they have to call mom and dad and say, “I just don’t believe anymore.”
As I look at the current landscape of especially Evangelicalism, I believe it is helpful to identify three lines of thought that are going to continue to drag a lot of young Christians out of the church. I intend to look at one of these lines each in three separate posts.
1) Sexual Liberty — One such belief is the belief that sexuality is personal and cannot be judged. Once we are emotionally committed to a sexual situation which the Bible calls unlawful, it becomes nearly impossible to just “snap out of it.” Sex sells. And the first good sold by unlawful sex is doubt that anyone could judge us. Especially not a God who made us with these feelings. This debt is reconciled by accepting the lie that our desires tell us what God must have really meant.
2) Contra-theistic Science — A second belief that vies for our people is the belief that the only good explanation for the data of our material makeup is evolution. A great cloud of witnesses from Richard Dawkins all the way down to Koko’s kitten will tell us verified facts about our Genome. No problem. One little adjustment will render us safe: Tada! Genesis 1-11 is now a new genre of Bible literature: “true myth.” Now we Christians have discovered that we indeed did come from a common ancestor of the chimpanzee. However, Noah’s ark and Adam’s naming of the animals is somehow “theologically true,” even if they are not intended as history. We float along accepting that the Bible is cool with evolution, and then one day we happen to read Roman 5 or Acts 17 out loud, and it hits us that the New Testament also is laboring under the delusion of Genesis as fact. The debt monster makes us pay up by forcing us to decide between a flawless Jesus and the ease of believing NPR Science Friday.
Those are really great topics, by the way, for future discussion. And before I continue without dealing with the first two areas, let me say that if you are being hauled out of the church by these issues, I am not mocking your pain. This pain is so real that if we don’t deal with it, it will overwhelm many of us, and many of our children. Our culture, and our churches need to work all that out. But the third area is the one pertinent to this post.
3) Autonomous Justice — The third belief is that morality can be had without submission to a revealed will of God. We are not splitting hairs to point out the difference between saying that Atheists act as moral beings, and saying that Atheist possess logical grounds for supporting their moral actions. But it is hardly atheists with whom I wish to argue in this moment. Christians, we ourselves have gotten so used to being shown morality apart from scripture, that we too are willing to believe that morality is defined on its own, or according to our feelings, or by any means other than the revealed word of God.
When this happens, there is a funny game that happens. It’s kind of like when a dog runs in circles, trying to catch its own tail: we start with what we think the bible says, and let a partial reading of the bible to judge the actual rest of the bible as wicked. We say we accept the Bible, but we limit our knowledge of what the Bible means to a few feel-good prooftexts from Jesus. We come to the conclusion that Jesus was about being nice, and about “not-judging.” Because we are sure we know how Jesus was a pacifist and a sweetie, we form a view of what Christianity ought to be like, and how God would act if he were true to form, and this solidifies in our heads.
But then we read Psalm 58. We read the command to sacrifice Isaac. We read Psalm 137. Let’s not kid around here, we all know what I’m talking about. God is bloody and judgmental, and very unlike Jesus. Right? At least, we are starting to have trouble after reading that “Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal” (1 Sam 15.33). And that is how the doubt sets in. But let us look at this situation again and realize that this doubt is produced by fallen judgment, by our lack of knowledge of Jesus, and our lack of submission to the text as a whole. And especially it is produced by our inability to see ourselves as fallen. We are unable to be good judges without the transformation of God’s word.
Is Jesus a nicey? If we really read the Gospels, we would here: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword,” (Matt 10.34). If we listened to Jesus we would hear: “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled!” (Lk 12.49) That’s from the mouth of Jesus.
Are we submissive to the word we confess to believe? If we really used the Old Testament, and did not just read it, but if we really used it like we should, we would be singing Psalms. Psalm singers don’t just see vast portions of the Old Testament, but they actually confess the content of the Psalms as articles of faith. They confess that Yhwh is a warrior. They confess that God extracts vengeance. They confess that God is angry every day. They believe that God abhors the wicked. And not least – they believe that God is good and just.
Is all that blood and judgment talk making us queasy? Is it solidifying our doubt on the side that there just can’t be a God because all this uncomfortable stuff is so obviously bad? Is the supposed God of the Bible really a description of a being who would be vile if he did exist?
Here’s the trouble with that – You can’t judge the standard to be false while using the standard to judge. God can’t judge sin by his own authority and then be judged as a sinner by the authority of the sinners. If God is the standard, then God is also righteous. If there is no God for a standard, then nothing is wrong at all. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING could actually be wicked. Since God’s standard judges wickedness, we need to allow God to be a lethal God, and still call him righteous.
But we can’t easily hear that news…. because we are fallen in all our parts. We are fallen in our own ability to judge. Which is precisely why when our own sensibilities come screaming out against scripture, we had better ask God to change us. If you don’t believe the Bible already, that’s different. But if you do, then you need to recognize that the God who raised Jesus from the dead is also the God who damns the unrepentant.
Here’s a final review of the logic in short, starting with a presupposition that we have all already admitted, that evil exists:
There is evil. I participate in evil, and am affected by it (internally and externally). While I can sense that there is a difference between good and evil, I may not claim personal superiority, because I am part of it. There is a standard, and it sits over me, not I over it.
If I say there is evil, I admit the presence of a standard. I admit that the standard is real (otherwise evil is not evil), and that the standard is universal (or it is not “true”). So if we suppose good and evil are real, then there is necessarily a universal and always true goodness. We are saying then, that we believe in God. That we think the standard is real.
And as one of the billions of people in the world who are able to sense the difference between good and evil, I am also one of the people who can quite simply tell that I am part of the problem. I am a sinner, and it reaches as far as my heart. What Jeremiah says, I can sense to be consistent with my experience: “The heart is deceitful above all else, and is desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer 17.9)
Guilt, then, is a very true friend. It tells me both that there is a God, and that I am not him.
I have a conscience – sensing evil, but my conscience is flawed – “desperately sick” because I am part of the evil I sense in the world. There must be a God who universally and really arbitrates good and evil, because he is the sole cause of the standard, and he himself is good. If I am ever to have true wisdom, rising above my sinfully flawed conscience, I must ask God for that wisdom. I must submit to the word of his wisdom if I hope to overcome the desperately sick heart I have inherited. He must defeat me.
The very fact that humans make and enforce laws is imitative of the presence of the God we all naturally know to be present. I am not, of course, saying that no one is convinced otherwise, but rather that even the lawful atheist has a conscience. He knows good and evil are real. He therefore admits that a universal standard of goodness is present – even if he says he doesn’t.
Now, there are atheists who say there is no standard but who want to enforce one anyway, and there are also Christians who say that there is a standard, but they have decided the human conscience is a higher arbiter of truth than the word of the God they believe to be the source of that wisdom. These two share a bodyless soul: a conscience that has no source.
And that disembodied conscience is what our culture and our politics reflect. A conscience that still bothers us because of God, but a people who can’t be bothered to look at him. We want the “values,” but we want to have values in a world without specifics. Without historic realities. And most importantly in a world where Jesus himself is not looking over our shoulders.<>
Kuyperian Commentary Podcast
