A serious man

Readers of this blog will know that I profoundly disagree with Barack Obama in a couple of areas. But one of the things I appreciate about him is that he's a serious person. What do I mean? It's evident that he's read widely and thought deeply about big issues. He has a sense of history. He's serious without taking himself too seriously. I'm sure being the father of two young children helps in that regard. This is a refreshing change. Contra the rhetoric from the right, Obama is no raving revolutionary, but a cautious realist whose first instinct is to build bridges not lob Molotov cocktails. The first year of his presidency has lacked (thankfully) the messianic overtones that characterized his campaign.

David Brooks had an interesting column yesterday on how Obama's engagement with the 20th-century Christian thinker Reinhold Niebuhr has informed his approach to foreign policy. Incidentally, another of Niebuhr's students was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though Bonhoeffer criticized Niebuhr for lacking the Christocentric focus which he found in his other mentor Karl Barth. I wonder if Obama has read Barth or Bonhoeffer? But back to Brooks. He traces the influence of Niebuhr on Cold War liberals like George Kennan. Unlike later generations of Democrats these men had a healthy appreciation for the limits of human virtue and the persistent effects of the evil within -- what a theologian would call original sin. What Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as the line running through every human heart.

Brooks writes:

As the cold war strategist George F. Kennan would put it: “The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.”

So as you act to combat evil, you wouldn’t want to get carried away by your own righteousness or be seduced by the belief that you are innocent. Even fighting evil can be corrupting. . . . But after Vietnam, most liberals moved on. It became unfashionable to talk about evil. Some liberals came to believe in the inherent goodness of man and the limitless possibilities of negotiation. Some blamed conflicts on weapons systems and pursued arms control. Some based their foreign-policy thinking on being against whatever George W. Bush was for. If Bush was an idealistic nation-builder, they became Nixonian realists.

Barack Obama never bought into these shifts. In the past few weeks, he has revived the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking and tried to apply it to a different world.

Obama’s race probably played a role here. As a young thoughtful black man, he would have become familiar with prophetic Christianity and the human tendency toward corruption; familiar with the tragic sensibility of Lincoln’s second inaugural; familiar with the guarded pessimism of Niebuhr, who had such a profound influence on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

You can read the whole column here. It's interesting that Obama has a better grasp of the doctrine of original sin than some of the politically conservative Christians that despise him.

Newbigin: revelation is personal and communal

In a preliminary consideration of the subject we may fairly say that the central importance ascribed to revelation in Christianity depends upon two beliefs about the nature of the world and of man. Firstly the belief that the meaning of the world is personal. For if the final meaning of the world is less than personal, then it [is] best understood by those methods of scepticism and experiment which are the requisites of scientific enquiry, but which would be the complete destruction of any personal understanding. For we know a person only as he chooses to reveal himself, and only as our own spirit is sensitive and trustful to respond to his revelation, and if the meaning of the world is personal then revelation is the only path by which it can be made known to us.

Secondly the belief that the meaning of man's life is in fellowship: if it were otherwise, we should not only expect that every man would be able to achieve for himself, apart from co-operation with his fellows, the necessities of physical existence and culture, and that pain and pleasure would always be distributed in mathematical accordance with sin and merit; but also that every man would be able to receive by direct revelation from God - apart from human telling - the knowledge necessary for blessedness. But if it be true that man was made for fellowship then we can understand not only the meaning of the co-operation which economic facts make necessary, and the strange incidence of pain and pleasure, so monstrously unjust by the standards of the law courts; but we can also understand the immensely significant fact that the revelation which is the key to our highest blessedness does not descend to us straight from heaven, but has to reach us passed from hand to hand of our fellow men along the chain of a historic community. (pp. 18-19)

Quotes from Newbigin, "Revelation" (1936) from Lesslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian: A Reader ed. Paul Weston

Wow! If true (as I believe it is) Newbigin's insight has far reaching implications for just about everything.

Shhh! It's a conspiracy.

From the interweb

I turn my head for a few months and Radiohead goes and releases a new track on the web.

Listen to "These Are My Twisted Words"

See a live performance

The writers of the Bible were real authors

The incarnation is an incomparable mystery -- the Word made flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, fully God and fully man. That mystery is reflected in how the Bible came to us, and is preserved in the doctrine of organic (as opposed to mechanical) verbal inspiration of Scripture. Here's Louis Berkhof:

We cannot explain the interpenetration of the divine and the human factors in Scripture, any more than we can explain that of the two natures in Christ. Scripture presents itself to us as an organic whole, consisting of several parts, that are interrelated in various ways, and that find their unity in the central, all-controlling, and progressively unfolding, thought of God reaching out to man, in order to redeem him from sin and to bestow upon him the blessings of eternal salvation. And therefore we should not ask where the divine ends and the human begins, nor where the human ends and the divine begins. We might just as well ask where in man the soul ends and the body begins. No such line of demarcation can be pointed out. Scripture is in its entirety both the Word of God and the word of man. (Introductory Volume to Systematic Theology, pp. 154-155)

The message of Advent

My wife was looking for Advent materials to use in teaching Sunday school this morning. She came across a good article called Preparing Children for Advent on the website of Creighton University. I encourage you to read the whole thing (especially if you have kids) but here's a wonderful explanation of the storyline of Advent using clear, simple language. This is so good I think I'm going to use it when I teach our adult class next Sunday.

We can tell our children about Isaiah, the prophet. We can tell them that God has wanted to be the one who would lead and take care of his people. But they rebelled against God, and demanded kings, just like all the peoples around them had. So, God let them have kings. As it turned out, there was one bad king after another. And God sent prophets to the people and the kings to remind them of the agreement - the "covenant" - God made with them: I'll be your God and you be my people.

Now the way the people made someone a king was to pour a bit of oil on their head. The one who was "anointed" this way with oil became the king. Well, the prophets began to tell the people that God would send them "an anointed one" (the word they use to say "anointed one" in Hebrew is "Messiah.") In fact, they said that this Messiah would be called "Emmanuel", which in Hebrew means, "God is with us."

So, the message of the prophets was about a promise - that God would save his people from all that they were suffering. The prophets use such wonderful images to tell the people that they could expect and hope for a day when "every tear would be wiped away." It would be a day of great peace - "the lion would lie down with the lamb" and the people will beat their spears into hooks to prune trees with. And, the most unbelievable promise of all: "death will be no more."

We all know now that what God was preparing his people for was the coming of Jesus, the Christ (Christos in Greek means "the anointed one.")

Unfortunately the author of this isn't identified so I can't attribute it.

Thoughts on Romans 7:4

Romans 7:4 says: "Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God." What struck me here is the implication that dying to the law is the same as no longer belonging to the law. I now belong to the risen Christ. This is a common thread throughout Paul's writings. It's explicit in Galatians 4 where Paul uses the contrast between Isaac and Ishmael to draw out the imagery of the law as guardian or master. Paul repeatedly returns to the language of Roman slavery to remind his readers who they belong to if they are in Christ. They no longer belong to the law/sin. Now they belong to Christ/righteousness.

I love this from John Piper:

. . . instead of belonging to the law, which demands and condemns, we now belong to Christ who demands and gives. Formerly, righteousness was demanded from outside in letters written in stone. But now righteousness rises within us as a longing in our relationship with Christ. He is present and real. By his Spirit he helps us in our weakness. A living person has replaced a lethal list. (Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came To Die, p. 81)

The corollary truth is that all those outside of Christ, who haven't experienced the new birth, are in a precarious position. Paul sets up a clear antithesis between belonging to Christ or belonging to the law. The latter means being under the law with it's perfect requirement on penalty of death. "For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life." (2 Cor. 3:6)

Coppola's best film doesn't have 'Godfather' in the title

Redeyespy:

The Conversation is one of the best films ever made. I'm not one to just throw such a statement out there. I've seen thousands of films. The accepted classics, generally agreed upon masterpieces that I likewise admire and laud. I've also seen many sleepers that sneaked up on me. Coppola's 1974 film is both, a quiet gem that, in my opinion, is as disturbing and fascinating as any of the great films of Bunuel, Ozu, Welles, Bresson, Antonioni. Such a simple scenario, explored not with grandiosity, but rather a beautifully modulated central performance by Gene Hackman (reputed to be his favorite role) and script by the director.

Intrigued? Read the rest of his spot-on assessment here.

The D-boys

As chronicled in Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down the Army Rangers of Task Force Ranger viewed the Delta Force operators in their midst with envy and awe. In ways both obvious and subtle the D-boys radiated their elite status. No guard duty or "fun" runs for these guys. They spent their down time in more creative ways.

When the force had first moved in, the pigeons had owned the hangar, crapping at will all over people, cots and equipment. When one of the D-boys got nailed while sitting on his cot cleaning his weapon, the elite force declared war. They ordered up pellet guns. The birds didn't have a prayer. The D-boys would triangulate fire and send a mess of blood and feathers plopping down on somebody's cot. Did these guys know how to kill time on a deployment or what? They all had custom-built weapons with hand-rifled barrels and such. Gun manufacturers outfitted them the way Nike supplies pro athletes. Some days Delta would commandeer a Black Hawk and roar off to hunt wild boar, baboons, antelope, and gazelles in the Somali bush. They brought back trophy tusks and game meat and held cookouts. They called it "realistic training." (pp. 59-60)

To the gung-ho Rangers, some of whom were teenagers seeing their first combat zone, hanging with Delta was just plain cool. It was a chance to learn the finer points of killing and mayhem from the best of the best. Not that the Rangers were any slouches in those departments, but the "Dreaded D" knew all the tricks. Including how to make the most of the 18-hour flight to Mog. . .

Aboard the giant C-141 Starlifter, when the air force blueshirts insisted that they all stay in their seats, the D-boys just blew them off. Right after takeoff they unrolled thermal pads (the shiny metal floor of the bird turns ice cold at altitude) and insulated ponchos, stuck earplugs in their ears, donned eye patches, swallowed "Blue Bombers" (Halcyon tablets), and racked out. They taught little tricks like wrapping tape around the pins of their grenades to make sure none accidentally snagged and pulled on a piece of equipment. They wore knee pads when they went into a fight, which made it easy to quickly drop and shoot, and stay there for hours if necessary. If it was hot, they didn't walk around in full battle gear. They wore T-shirts or no shirts at all, and shorts and flip-flops. They all had sunglasses. If they'd been up until all hours, they slept in a little in the morning. When they went out on a mission, they took the weapons they thought they'd need and left behind the stuff they didn't. With the D-boys, all of whom were ranked sergeant first class or higher, rank meant nothing. They all, officers and noncoms, called each other by their first names or nicknames. They were trained to think and act for themselves. Nothing was done by the book for its own sake; they were guided by their own experience. They knew their weapons and tactics and business better than anyone, and basically ran their own lives, which was an extraordinary thing in the U.S. Army. (pp. 151-152)

I don't know about you, but I'm glad to have a breed like the D-boys on America's side.

Excerpts from Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (Penguin, 1999)

Someone's child

This photo caught my eye because it's a view I'm familiar with when feeding my son.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN - A young girl eats some food as displaced Afghans queue to receive relief aid from the UNHCR, on December 1, 2009 in Kabul, Afghanistan. As temperatures begin to drop around the country, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Afghan government are providing relief supplies, to help some 200,000 vulnerable people cope with the harsh winter, including blankets, sweaters, plastic sheets, jerry cans and bags of charcoal. (Photo from Getty Images)