I began my day reading through Jim Jordan’s magnum opus, Through New Eyes. Jim is a dear friend and we have worked together for three years (09-11). I have literally read and listened to hundreds of articles, sermons, & lessons. If Jim publishes, my eyes will seek to scan it. In many ways, he has taught me to love the Bible in a deeper way than before. (more…)
Bill O’Reilly had on Pastor Robert Jeffress of The First Baptist Church of Dallas, TX. Jeffress gained a lot of attention during the 2012 presidential elections when he opposed Romney—in favor of Perry—on the grounds that Romney was a Mormon. Jeffress argued that we needed an evangelical in the White House.
O’Reilly’s segment focused on whether the Bible should be understood literally or allegorically. The unstable Fox News host began the segment with an irresponsible remark:
“The Bible,” which was co-created by Mark Burnett and his wife, Roma Downey, “highlights fundamentalist Christian beliefs.”
The History Channel show can be debated (at another time), but the opening assumption already triggers the insult of ignorance of anyone who believes such events to be literal. “Fundamentalist Christian beliefs” is the media’s way of perpetuating evangelical Christians as theological dinosaurs. Further, it carries on the abusive stereo-types usually addressed towards Islamic radicals. If you are a fundamentalist, you are in some way capable of doing things the typical enlightened human being would never do. (more…)
Kuyperian Commentary began as an intense political interest of mine. My interest in Kuyper had its genesis in one of my independent papers I wrote under Professor John Frame at Reformed Theological Seminary. My desire initially was to write a few pieces expressing my opinion over the political turmoil that ensued in the 2006-2008 presidential political cycle. As the 2012 campaign approached, I realized that this project was larger than I could bear, and that I needed additional voices to join my concerns.
As a result, Kuyperian Commentary grew from the fingers of a solitary typist (more…)
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The University of Idaho hosted a public debate, to a crowd of over 800, on February 27, 2013. The debate was participated in by Andrew Sullivan, blogger and former senior editor of The Atlantic, and Douglas Wilson, pastor of Christ Church of Moscow, ID, author and educator. The topic of the debate: Is Civil Marriage for Gay Couples Good for Society?
Battle of the Beards
Bell’s book isn’t perfect, and there are a few areas where I think we are left with more questions than answers, but overall it is a very good introduction to just war history, theory, and practice from a distinctively Christian perspective, and its benefits and usefulness far outweigh its flaws.
While Bell avoids partisan debates for the most part he pulls no punches in speaking straightforwardly about what justice demands in the Christian tradition as it developed from the Augustine and the fathers (modified from Plato and the Greeks) through to Aquinas, Vitoria, and Grotius in the early modern period.it is an excellent introduction to the Just War tradition from a distinctively Christian perspective, and its strengths are much more prominent than its weaknesses.
After a brief history of Just War thinking, and making an important distinction between modern, secular, just war theory, what he calls Just War as public policy checklist or Just War (PPC), and Just War as Christian discipleship or Just War (CD), Bell asks the question, “Has there ever been a just war?”
Such is the history, in brief, of the just war tradition since its adoption and adaptation by Christianity. What the history reflects is that war is not one thing always and forever, that it is no necessarily and inevitably “hell” as Sherman and others would have it. To the contrary, it is a human practice and as such is capable of being waged in different ways, from the highly ritualized and almost game-like wars of medieval chivalry that were minimally lethal (my favorite example being a yearlong war involving one thousand knights in the 1127 CE during which five died, four of those being the result of accidents), to the limited wars of attrition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the total wars that characterized significant wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
At the outset of this chapter, the question was raised as to whether war could ever be just. Both pacifists and realists suggest the answer is no. While the historical overview suggests that war need not be total, it does not provide an entirely satisfactory answer to the question of whether war can in fact be just. By itself it does not refute the skeptics. These skeptics sometimes pose the question of just war in a more pointed manner by asking, Has there ever been a just war?
Such a question threatens to plunge us into the midst of the culture wars and the ideological battles of the current moment. After all, there is no shortage of persons willing to proclaim this or that war just or unjust in a manner that appears to be driven more by the political fortunes of the moment than by any deep familiarity with the just war tradition. From the longer perspective of history, there are historians of war and of just war who have argue that there have indeed been just wars.
From a Christian theological perspective, however, the question of whether there has ever been a just war is largely beside the point. From the standpoint of the Christian moral life, it is the wrong question. After all, the Christian moral life does not depend on whether that life has ever been lived faithfully before or not. If Christians are called to be a just war people by God then the proper response to that call is not to step back and ask, Has anyone else done it before us? Rather, even if it means going forth like Abram and his family into the unknown and unprecedented (Heb. 11:8), the proper, faithful response is to discern how our life should be so ordered in response to that call that we might be a people who wage war or refrain from waging war in accord with the precepts of just war. In other words, the proper response to the call to just war is not, Has it been done before? but, How then should we order our live so that we might respond to the call faithfully?
Perhaps the misguided nature of the question will be clearer if we put a similar challenge to another facet of the Christian life. Take, for example, the Ten Commandments. We might ask if there has ever been a Christian community that has embodied them perfectly? Has there ever been a Christian church that has succeeded in living out even one of them perfectly? Or take the Great Commandment that we love God and our neighbor. Has there ever been a church that has followed that commandment without flaw or failure? That the answer to these questions is no does not in itself render the commandments invalid, irrelevant, or unrealistic. That the Christian church has displayed and in the course of its life continues to terrible failures with regard to both love of God and of neighbor does not abolish that calling or erase the reality of that love in its life. That we miss the mark, that we continue to struggle with sin, does not diminish either the high calling to or the reality of holiness and virtue in the life of the church. Our failure as a people does not disprove God’s call; neither does our repeated failure establish that we are not in fact capable of accepting and embodying that call. All of this means that even if one could definitively show that the church had never even once embodied the just war discipline in war, that in itself would not prove that just war was neither the church’s calling nor a real possibility in its life.
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Just this past weekend (04/22/2013), Steve Jeffery, minister of Emmanuel Evangelical Church in Southgate, North London, England, hosted a colloquium for those who wish to experience the Word of God with new eyes.
The event featured special guest speaker Reverend James B Jordan, director of Biblical Horizons and soon to be joining Dr. Peter J Leithart at the Trinity House Institute for Biblical, Liturgical, & Cultural Studies in Birmingham, AL, who gave a four-part lecture entitled How to Read the Bible for the First Time…Again. (more…)
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.
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“Behind the conflict of rights (between the mother and the fetus MH), there is unveiled in the debate about abortion an even more fundamental question about rights themselves. What is it about human beings that makes it proper that we should have any rights at all? Because of this the abortion issue involves all modern societies in basic questions of political principle.
These questions of principle were brought out into the open for Americans, when the Supreme Court of that country made it law that no legislation can be passed which prevents women from receiving abortions during the first six months of pregnancy. In laying down the reasons for that decision, the judges speak as if they were basing it on the supremacy of rights in a democratic society. But to settle the case in terms of rights, the judges say that the mother has all the rights, and that the foetus has none. Because they make this distinction, the very principle of rights is made dubious in the following way. In negating all rights to the foetuses, the court says something negative about what they are, namely that they are such as to warrant no right to continued existence. And because the foetus is of the same species as the mother, we are inevitably turned back onto the fundamental question of principle: what is it about the mother (or any human being) that makes it proper that she should have rights? Because in the laws about abortion one is forced back to the stark comparison between the rights of members of the same species (our own), the foundations of the principles behind rights are unveiled inescapably. What is it about our species that gives us rights beyond those of dogs or cattle?
The legal and political system, which was the noblest achievement of the English-speaking societies, came forth from our long tradition of free institutions and Common Law, which was itself produced and sustained by centuries of Christian belief. Ruthlessness in law and politics was limited by a system of legal and political rights which guarded the individual from the abuses of arbitrary power, both by the state and other individuals. The building of this system has depended on the struggle and courage of many, and was fundamentally founded on the Biblical assumption that human beings are the children of God. For this reason, everybody should be properly protected by carefully defined rights. Those who advocate easy abortions in the name of rights are at the same time unwittingly undermining the very basis of rights. Their complete disregard for the unborn weakens the very idea of rights itself. This weakening does not portend well for the continuing health of our system.” —George Parkin Grant, Technology & Justice 1986
“George Parkin Grant, 1918-1988, has been acknowledged as Canada’s leading political philosopher since the publication of Philosophy in the Mass Age 1959. He was the author of Lament for a Nation, Technology & Empire, and English-Speaking Justice. He taught religion and philosophy at McMaster University and Dalhousie University.” (from the back cover of Technology & Justice)<>
Today’s Congress is the least productive in the nation’s history. At least, so claims a soon-to-be published paper by Rosanna Kim ‘13.
Kim’s work, which analyzes the 112th Congress using a model of legislative productivity designed by political scientist Sarah Binder, will be published later this year in The Fellows Review. Kim completed the research while working last year as a Fellow for the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (CSPC).
via Worst Congress Ever? Ask Rosanna Kim | Daily Gazette.
What a horror story we live in. It is bad enough we have an committee that meets regularly that justifies its existence by the passage of new laws. Now, they are actually criticized if they don’t pass more faster.
And why is there gridlock? Because there are many people, or a significant minority that opposes the law. What kind of democracy are we going to have if it is considered a problem when Congress doesn’t violate the will of the people?
Israel never had a legislature. Nor did Rome, truth be told. The English Common Law developed without a legislature. In fact, if England had always had Parliament it would never “common law” would never have come into existence.
The law is supposed to be the application of ethical principles to situations. It develops by court processes. It evolves naturally in a society (at least to the extent that the society has a known ethical code that is shared by the members of that society–maybe that helps explain the demand for “legislative productivity”).
Legislatures are interventionists in this natural process in society. They wreck it.
I realize that, due to our political circumstances and the nine rulers of the US known as the Supreme Court, that American conservatives have come to oppose “judge made law.” But, in general, judge-made law is far preferable to legislatures.
For further reading, I highly recommend Freedom and the Law by Bruno Leoni. It is by no means a Christian book, but it is of great value to Christians and will help them understand ancient Israel and how law is supposed to develop far better than many other Christian works.
You can read it online here.
Cross posted at Christendom Unbound<>
In a fascinating portion of Russel Kirk’s magnum-opus The Conservative Mind, he observes that Dewey’s educational philosophy denied the whole realm of spiritual values. For Dewey “nothing exists but physical sensation, and life has no aim, but physical satisfaction (418).” The utilitarianism of Dewey trashed the past, made the future unknowable, and only concerned itself with the present. That viewpoint coupled with Marxist economics has made Dewey the intellectual forefather of American progressivism.
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