the evangelical outpost: “But what do the millions of books and products represent? Does it reveal an interest in eschatology among non-believers or just a hunger for Tom Clancy-style thrillers with churchgoers? Is the dispensational theology inherent in the novels representative of evangelicalism or does it lead to misperceptions about our beliefs? Are the novels great popular art, good entertainment, or shoddy pulp being pawned off on a gullible public?”

Another great thread at a great blog, Evangelical Outpost. However, when I read it I said, “Great.” in a different tone of voice. You can see what is coming already.

Dispensationalists will often get treated as dim or as the cause of all the problems in the evangelical church. Too much excitement? Blame the dispensationalists. Not enough excitement? If only the evangelicals had not embraced dispensationalism!

Is it possible for dispensationalists to get respect? I work at a dispensationalist University. The reader can be assured that theology at Talbot Seminary is sophisticated, attempts to be Biblically based, and is subtle. Robert Saucy is a careful thinker and scholar. Fred Sanders, my co-worker in theology, screams along at pentium speed in theology while I toddle along as a Commodore 64. However, most posts (I am not commenting on Joe Carter) give dispensationalism no respect.

All forms of dispensationalism assert one core doctrine. What is it? They claim there is a future work for the Jewish people in God’s economy. The Church is not Israel. One may not agree, but since even the Roman church has moved in this direction, it cannot be considered a foolish position. Discuss it, but let’s stop the sneering. I have never been fond of attacks on Calvinism that start with assaults on the “monster god created by Calvin.” That is stereotype. However, in most discussions of the dispensational position all we get is caricature.

The biggest problem with the “Left Behind” series is if folk confuse pop dispensationalism with the scholarly version. However, perhaps Biola could promise not to assume that Father Greeley’s novels represent Ratzinger (if anyone is so inclined) if the rest of the Church does not assume La Haye is Saucy.

I confess to reading Star Trek novels. In a certain mood, I like them. They are comfort food for the mind. Kirk acts like Kirk and Spock like Spock. Plots are very safely predictable. Who would want anything else?

I have read every Left Behind book (childrens and adult). They were not great or even very good. Jenkins has written better books. However, they are not nearly as bad as many a summer book I have read. The theology is simple, but so is the book. Taken too seriously, they could lead people astray. My view is that Left Behind is o.k. summer popcorn reading and that Christians should mellow out.

Get a group of pastors into a room and a strange thing happens. They begin to tell a story and the size of the congregation begins to grow. As people nod more and more, the story gets better as the sermon grows ever more anointed and the response larger. Soon instead of fifty people coming to faith throngs came streaming down the aisle to pray. Without care, throngs becomes a number and five hundred are praying with the pastor. The little Baptist church in which he was speaking, one aisle wide, has grown to dwarf Saddleback in size. He has lied without ever knowing it by allowing a story to get away from him and telling folk he liked what they wanted to hear.

Academics are just as bad. Put them in a room together and the stories start to flow. The telling remark made to the opposition becomes so insightful that C.S. Lewis would have been proud to say it. Every academic becomes Samuel Johnson in his own story. His foes become brilliant, but wrong headed fools.

I am sure the same thing happens with journalists. Get a group of journalists in a room and things start changing. They begin to tell the group what they want to hear. What does a room full of journalists want to hear? What kind of speaking evangelistically goes on with them?

Hugh Hewitt points us to the strange case of Eason Jordan. Hewitt reports:

Here is the key quote from a first-person account of Jordan’s remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

“During one of the discussions about the number of journalists killed in the Iraq War, Eason Jordan asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-US crowd) and cause great strain on others.”

Everyone interested in ethics must work hard to avoid this in his or her life. Nobody is perfect, but it is interesting to note what they lie about. Pastors lie about helping more people. Academics lie about the life of the mind. Journalists lie about America.

Let’s assume that Jordan said it. Let’s also assume that our brave troops are not killing journalists. Why? We know our boys in harms way. Nothing could convince me that lads like Jon Dyke and Colin Anderson, classically educated patriots, would kill journalists. I know those men and through them the men with which they serve. Every unit, I assume, has men like them. Dyke and Anderson have read Aristotle and Christ. There is no way that such an army as Mr. Jordan describes could keep them. They would shout the evil from the housetops. Jordan assumes that the troops are the faceless fighters of some Lucas movie dying blindly from orders given. They are not. Every unit has a mix of many type of persons, including men with more education and culture than Mr. Jordan. We know US troops are not killing journalists in a large scale way in many places and at many times, because we know our friends in the army.

My guess is that an anti-war journalist speaking in public mostly ends up in a room of friendly folk. The temptation is to get more and more colorful until finally he tells falsehoods. He did not mean to lie, in fact he did not even feel the lie coming. It just slips out from being in a room with only nodding heads. He has made the story better, the congregation larger, and the witty remark wittier. In the case of Jordan, he ends up making his US troop behavior worse until finally he is saying monstrous things.

And everyone will cover for him, because they understand that they might someday do the same thing. He did not mean to lie, but said what people say in private in public in a fit of fervor. Polite folk look away when the demand for rigor comes up after someone speaks evangelistically. However, a cover up is impossible in the world of blogs.

What does it tell us about our media if a room of them encourage lies about the US military? It does not encourage jingoistic boasting, because the folk in the room would smell out such bombast. In the end, it allows for wicked lies such as those told by Mr. Jordan.

But Hewitt’s book is right, there is a new world out there. When I blog, I know critics will read it. I am not just writing to a small world of fellow believers. At the very least this discourages speaking evangelistically. It has its own pitfalls, including a limit on how much one can write and expect to be read and the difficulty of placing arguments in a blog. However, for “news” it is a better world with the blogosphere a bigger and more diverse group of people.

The legacy media has become sterile and in grown. It lacks new ideas and new voices on both the left and the right (not to mention the middle). Freedom, and blogging is just a growth of freedom, is a mixed blessing surely. But it is fundamentally a blessing and those who want to oppose it, however they try, will never win. They may pick on the downside of the blessing, but people like good things.

Tell the truth CNN. Release all the material and if your reporter was guilty of telling lies in an ingrown atmosphere consider shaking up that atmosphere. How different most newsrooms would be if one “out” evangelical sat at every table!

The Trivialization of James Dobson

Fit the stereotype, even once, and you are in trouble. Urban legend says that Evangelical Christians are joyless, book burners. These folk always live in a state to the South of you, even in the deep South where South is a state of mind not a place. Reports say they are always in the town next to your own: the one slightly more rural. It is hard to meet these folk, but you would know them if you saw them. With prune faces, empty wallets, emptier minds: the sort of folk who wore American flag pins before FOX News and 9/11. Everyone knows they exist, but nobody is quite sure where to find them. To be an evangelical in America, and thrive, means to prove every day that you are not one of “them.” Mess up once and you will never recover.

Bill Clinton’s great strength was that his sins insulated him from this worry. He could be as down home as he wanted, and quote the Bible more than the revival preacher, but no one would believe him one of them. His titanic indiscretions nearly sank him, but saved him from being a citizen of Jesus Land.

James Dobson was hard to stereotype. Secularly trained as a child psychologist, he has the right pedigree. He is soft spoken and cultured. He has no sex or money scandals and most of his advice was to the left of the Evangelical main stream just twenty years ago.

Now he has been linked in the public mind with Sponge Bob. Why? The pop culture belief, which no longer even needs to be true to be a hook, is that he wants to “censor a gay sponge.” It is a lie, but what does it matter? Dobson is religious and to the folk who own the mainstream media, this alone is enough to condemn him. Even some Christians, worried to cultivate their cool, rush to ridicule the man who would attack a cartoon. Book burner. Hateful. Opposed to tolerance. Jim Dobson.

It is all a lie, of course. It is a character blackening, sick, and twisted lie of the sort done by cynical people who will do anything to knee cap a foe. However, it fits the stereotype and so it sells. Like African Americans of an earlier generation no real evidence is needed. Whatever he said then, or says now, we know Dobson hates fun, just as we knew African-Americans were lazy, fearful, and dumb. The very denial of the victim leads to knowing nods. “Methinks he doth protest too much.” we say.

Here is what Dobson said and says (HT Hewitt).

What parent would not want to know if ideas must Americans thought wrong were being sold to their kids using innocent characters? Note that the point of concern is that characters like Winnie the Pooh and Sponge Bob are innocent. To hi-jack them for a message many of us think extreme and wrong with small children is wrong.

It is also wrong to wrap a message of hate up and call it tolerance. The groups that sponsor the video (itself a harmless bit of fluff) suggest using it with tools that convert the Pope’s views on homosexuality into mere bigotry. If your elementary school kids miss the subtle argument used to get there, it is because there is not any. One could be pro-gay rights and still find this sort of tax payer funded assault on the views of most the tax payers and users of the system very offensive.

Here is the pledge the We Are Family Foundation is using with the video. Some have suggested that this pledge is just about tolerance. Who can be against that? Stereotypes of Evangelicals and snickers begin at this point, but a bad thing may be wrapped in a lovely word. What this group, the WAFF, means by tolerance is a form of group think where anyone who disagrees with them is a bigot.

The pledge links race and sexual identity. By doing so, WAFF suggest that having majority American views regarding homosexuality is not just wrong, it is wicked. They are trying to get public air time, for free, in order to proclaim this view to very young children using suggestion and not argument.

It is not hard to look at their web site and discover the world view behind their bland exterior. If you want to know a site, check out who they recommend for resources. It is a list of usual leftist suspects. We are entitled to read their intentions with the school project in that light. After all, where are their conservative voices (far larger than the left in the USA) in this “neutral” project?

Their site contains projects such as this:

American Culture in the World is being co-organized by Americans for Informed Democracy (AID) and the We Are Family Foundation (WAFF). AID is an organization of young professionals and students from more than 70 universities who seek to promote global understanding through dialogue. WAFF is an organization dedicated to promoting diversity and multiculturalism and the vision of a global family through education. Other speakers involved in the series include World Press Review editor Alice Chasan , independent filmmaker and CNBC producer Danny Schechter , and A History of News author Mitchell Stephens .

Even if you agree with the point of view of the group to pretend it is “neutral” to the views of the vast majority of parents who voted for Bush (parents of kids were one of his strongest demographics) is nonsense. This group, WAFF, is not “world view” neutral. . . and should not be allowed to introduce materials into public school classrooms as if they were.

But perhaps Dobson is just a jerk. After all, isn’t he an evil white man? Wasn’t his dad a pastor, worse a Nazarene? American Christians, eighty percent of the population, should be warned. When the secular establishment and the legacy media turn on you, nothing will protect you.

For example, one of my heroes is Bernice King, daughter of MLK. See how she is treated by tolerance.org where her Evangelical views are described as “bigotry.”

If you agree with Ms. King, the sorts of folk who run the WAFF think you are a bigot. Period.

Shouldn’t Christians resent this? Wouldn’t it worry you if a group and its allies, that think Bernice King is a bigot, were writing stuff for your kids that looked “tame”? Wouldn’t you want to know if they might (!) have a not so hidden agenda?

Millions of Americans are not comfortable linking sexual preference and race in the manner of this pledge. In the context of the actual cultural debate, this pledge is loaded and everyone knows it. Race and sexual identity are side by side in the statement. The Civil Rights movement is being stolen to honor the gay rights agenda.

What about tolerance? Doesn’t the pledge say to respect all “beliefs” as well? Does this include the belief that the pledge is a bit of meaningless leftist good? Does it include the belief that the people who finished off Sadaam and the rape rooms did more for women than all the WAFF videos in the world?

That is not the worst of it. The site calls us to respect all beliefs. This is either fatuous, we really mean beliefs that all p.c. Americans include in the sanitized list we are talking about, or it is a wicked thing to teach kids.

How can I respect wicked beliefs? I can be nice to the people having them. . . but I have no respect for people thinking that persons of other races are inferior. Why should my child be taught that a Nazi should be given respect? Shouldn’t respect be earned? What does it mean to have “tolerance” and respect for such beliefs?

Isn’t it o.k. that I wish them stamped out?

I do not welcome differences over voting rights, as the pledge seemingly wishes me to do. People who think that terrorism is a good and that they should blow up people about to vote do not earn my respect. I hope their beliefs die out and that they, if they do not change, die with them. I would hope that schools, at a young age, cultivate a healthy bias toward freedom and voting and against torture chambers and despots.

My bottom line has always been (and I repeat): such “hot topics” do not belong in lower grades unable to resist, handled by people without training, using materials put out by groups with ideological points of view hostile to most parents in the government funded schools.

Iraq should note the difference. Conservatives removed despotic regimes and favor voting. Liberals would send smarmy videos and be unable to do anything but have respect for Sadaam while he is in power.

Isn’t this an old story? Shouldn’t I give it up? I don’t think so. I great man has been defamed and mocked by the creation of a false history. Some might say that Dobson should just suck it up and move on with his life. I am sure he will do so. Politics and the public square are tough and Dobson is a strong willed psychologist and he can handle it. The rest of us see what can be done by the legacy media when they decide on an issue. Most people will go on believing that Dobson said what he did not say and an evil little stereotype will be strengthened. You know the type: one not quite wicked enough to ever be exposed and rooted out, but enough to get some other Jim passed over for a job (”Too religious, not a team player.”) or a scholarship.

The legacy media should apologize to Dobson or the rest of us should start to realize that the bigotry of the old media will spare no one. If Dobson can be made to look the prude, what will happen to the rest of us? Instead, let’s break the stereotypes, because they are wrong, and keep our kids safe from socialists with cartoon characters.

Note: some of my comments appeared in somewhat different form in a conversation on the Biola public discussion boards. None of my comments here are directed to the fine people in that discussion.

HughHewitt.com: “And stay in touch with SmartChristian’s coverage of GodBlogCon I. Memo to the Phoenix team: We need a date. Memo to MarkDRoberts, John Mark Reynolds, and Tod Bolsinger and a ‘Catholic blogger top be named later’: Would you folks combine with me on a presentation in interview format as it would bring two author-pastors, an academic (and a ‘Catholic to be named later’) with a talking? Rather than a ‘keynote,’ I’d rather use my propensity to ask off-the-wall questions to push the ideas forward.

It would be an honor. I am ready, willing, and, God willing, able.

I cannot wait!

“

MSNBC - Arizona brushes up logo of outdated bird

The old Cardinal logo was a roundhead bird derisively referred to as a “parakeet.” The new version has decidedly more evil eyes and a menacing expression.

This is good news for Cardinals fans. A team does not need better players, what it needs is a better, meaner logo. I tremble when I think of my beloved Packers seeing this helmet when they enter the field. Will they be able to even play? Will the terror cause Farve to retire early? Does anyone actually think an evil eyed and menacing cardinal would scare anyone nearly as much as, oh let’s say, a bear or a lion, however cheerful looking? Our cat Athena reports that a menacing cardinal tastes as good as a supine parakeet. However, if this makeover works, then the Cardinal Rule should be applied more broadly. Organizations do not need to do better, just look better. For example, the LA Times would be much more relevant, if it renamed itself the LA Still-Relevant-Times.

Imagine if Custer and the Seventh Cavalry had been wearing tougher looking uniforms instead of boring blue. One can only imagine what would have happened if Custer had come to Little Big Horn as a member of the Raider Nation. The American Indians would have run away and Custer might have been President instead of fertilizing the earth with his genius. All of human history could have been changed. France, a tougher looking France, might have won a few wars. They needed to swap the Eiffel Tower as a symbol and go for a meaner looking hunk of cheese. If their troops were to borrow Packer Cheese-heads, then the next German invasion might be stopped before Paris without British and American help.

This applies to the present make over of the Democrat party. They need to lose the friendly Donkey symbol and go for a Balaam rebuking Biblical ass. This tough creature needs to have hooves of iron and a mean scowl. Placed on a natty jacket patch, even Howard Dean will look imposing. Imagine Dean yelling with the new logo on his shirt. For more entertainment, imagine Dean’s head in a football helmet. Who needs better ideas when you can simply have better marketing?

MSNBC - Democrats blast Iraq war policy in Rice debate

“I don’t like impugning anyone’s integrity, but I really don’t like being lied to,” Dayton said, “Repeatedly, flagrantly, intentionally.”

Once again my sources in Washington were able to bring us further details on this story.

Mark Dayton was angry, but he was also afraid. He felt betrayed by Dr. Rice. However, finding that holiday weight gain was making his tailored suit uncomfortable was even more irritating. Crouched beneath the desk in his Senate office, he realized that he could not stay in that position long. His belt and abs were betraying him. Where could he go? After fleeing the city during the last dangerous period, when his foes were out to get him and his own family had feared for his sanity under the great pressure that was the lot of the Senate’s most courageous maverick, the right wing press had a field day. They had mocked him for running, little knowing the danger in which he lived. Just today, in the elevator, he had noticed a shifty glance in his direction from the young man near him, a young man he had not seen before in that elevator. He had pressed his anti-bugging device in his pants pocket, but he knew that it was no protection against invisible rays or mind control devices.

However, he had to stay in Washington, even his most trusting friend told him that. The press would not let him leave again. He was, of course, not afraid for himself, but he was a target. A target for every hater and right wing crack pot in the world. His staying placed the entire city in danger, but so it would have to be.

Mark Dayton had taken on Dr. Rice on the floor of the Senate. He had boldly called her bad names. Dayton had become red in the face and been firm, a blow no one could safely ignore. His vast national following, Dayton’s Army, would threaten Rice too much. He knew how this White House worked. He had seen the very, very angry looks some Republicans had given him. His life, Mark Dayton’s life, so critical to the progressive cause was in danger. Rice would be angry. She would call him names in private. People would hear those names and might act. Like Beckett in the Cathedral, any apology would come too late. His desk had been armor plated and under it he was safe, but he had not counted on being heavier. He hugged Scruffy the stuffed bunny tightly to his chest. He had to stay calm and in command. His staff demanded it. He ceased chewing on his thumb and cleared his throat. His secretary stopped pacing. Just one sound from under his desk could bring such calm!

“I am o.k.” he called to his worried advisors. He would endure the pain, for which a just society would give him combat pay, in order to stay alive and working in his role as the Scourge of the Senate. Tomorrow, well tomorrow, he was going to call the President, “a nasty fellow who is often wrong.” Bold? You bet. He was Mark Dayton and that was his way.

Evangelist Says Offerings Lost in Mail: “Those employees said the ministry routinely used donations to pay for Hanegraaff’s personal expenses and luxury items, including a board-approved 2003 Lexus sports car and smaller items, such as repairs to his children’s computers and birthday flowers for his mother.”

This is a deeply disturbing story to all Christians. However, we should follow the same policy I outlined in the case of James Dobson. The minister gets the benefit of the doubt until the investigation is over. Here is hoping that this story is not true.

Stories like this make me glad to work at Biola University, a place with almost one hundred years of financial frugality, and a global impact in the area of Christian thought. If you have a choice and are unsure about a ministry, it is always wise to give to ministries that are EFCA members and have a long track record of ministry. When I started Torrey, this fine track record was one reason I was happy to be at Biola.

Times Online - Comment

But for many decades America’s share of the world’s economic output has been in decline. Think of a see-saw. America at one end is now easily outweighed by any substantial grouping at the other, and most of those powers are on friendly terms with each other. America’s modesty in 1945 understated its muscle, just as Bushite vanity overstates it today. He has over-reached. His country is overstretched, losing economic momentum, losing world leadership, and losing the philosophical plot. America is running into the sand.

The Times, which should know how to chronicle a nation in decline, has seen fit to publish an article on the end of American greatness. Of course anyone older than forty can recall that in the seventies, these same sort of people were proclaiming an end to American power as well. This Times writer is wrong, like a long list of doom sayers before him. The USA may be entering its most glorious period. Of course anyone who proclaims doom always sounds smarter than the optimist. Reagan was thought a dope, I think, partly because he believed in American greatness. Sit and read back issues of Time or Newsweek, or the London Times, boys and girls to see how his “hubris” and notions of “victory” were mocked by the self-proclaimed wise of the age.

Sometimes writers fall into the traps of the perfectly useful metaphor that nations have a “life span” like animals. Of course, no human institutions last forever. Human frailty promises that any institution will eventually fail. However, it is foolish to to think that nations must decline or that there is a set limit to their time on Earth. The USA may collapse. Its power may fade soon, but it will not do so because it is aging. It is not aging for ideas never age and America is an idea. When the idea of republican government is passe, when there is a more free economy and political state on the planet, and when that state builds a world-class army, navy, and air force, then will be the time to worry. What state will do these things? China? It is a revolution waiting to happen with an economy at war with the ideology of the state. Japan? This is a state that soon have the oldest population in human history. Europe? There is no Europe. There is only a collection of second-tier powers, with aging populations, economies burdened by growing rule making, and no defense system. My favorite candidate would be India, but one does not have to be in India long to see that this nation, deeply divided between haves and have nots in a way America cannot dream, has its own deep problem. It always has a rival in Pakistan which might lob an atom bomb on it at any moment, something the USA has much less reason to plausibly fear.

There are five reasons to think the doom sayers are wrong and that the optimists are right. America will remain the greatest power on the planet.

First, American military might is not stretched thin. We have no draft. We are not going to have a draft. We have not tooled our economy for war and yet we still, with harldy an effort by most of us, have liberated two nations. Our losses are small. If America has the will, we will win in Iraq. There is no plausible path to victory for the terrorists there as they represent no alternative idea of government. We still have troops in old Europe. All of those troops will soon leave, their mission accomplished. It too sixty years, but America did it. I remember reading that we did not have the resources or will to do that job as well. The vastly larger economy and population of the present American state will easily do what their fathers did in the fifties and sixties with much less raw power. As it is, we fight the War on Terror with the noble sacrifice of our brave young men and women, but do so with hardly a ripple in our economic growth.

If the American people or government felt the need, and it does not, we could put ourselves on war footing as we did in the Second World War. How many planes, tanks, and ships does the Times writer project that we could build if we desired to do so? A nation in decline, like ancient Rome or Tsarist Russia, cannot project power when fully mobalized. The Tsar lost World War I, because Russia could not win it. The British lost the Empire, because they were bled white by World War I and II. The also were trying to occupy a nation, India, many times their size. Unless the USA tries to occupy India or China (!), we seem to be in good shape. The Times writer keeps forgetting that our goal is not to occupy Bosnia or Iraq. We wish to help them get to their feet. If they refuse to behave for their own good, then we can leave at any time that the cost seems too high.

If our goal was to be a colonial power, then the Times writer might have a point. However, we have limited territorial ambitions. We seek long term control of no nation. We utterly control the air and the sea. We could bring Iran to her knees in days. Of course, if threatened we also have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. No one can rival our ability to project power.

Second, the American economy continues to grow. Of course, we have declined since the Second World War relative to the rest of the world. The world economy is growing and this is partly because of the fairly free trade practices of the USA. The writer is making the mistake of thinking economics a zero sum game. It can be better to have twenty-percent of a huge pie, than all of twinkie. The main issue is whether the economy is growing. It is. We have (for our size) on of the fastest growing free markets in the world. We hope other nations do well. China, as a larger nation by population, might become economically greater than us in theory. However, they lack the political structure to accomodate sustained growth. It is easy to remember when Japan was going to out strip the USA. No one says that now and Japan had a more stable government structure than China. China is not free and the lack of freedom will doom her. Declining empires have economies that are actually in decline, not relative decline.

Third, America has a growing population. We have many young people, unlike the dying European states. Young people bring fresh ideas and energy. Mexican immigrants, in the fourth generation, will be scientists and leaders. Where will England, France, and Japan find her next generation of leaders? In this sense, India and China are more a threat than any place else. However, their population growth cannot be as easily absorbed by their economies. We need our new workers, India dreads them.

Fourth, America has good ideas. Who has a more stable written constitution? Who has a more stable and fair legal system? We contine to produce great literature, art, and film. Our scientists produce millions of great idea a year. While we do not wish to have all the good ideas, it is still the case the America has a disproportionate amount of them. Republican government is the hope of mankind. What is better? Free markets lift up the poor. Who has another way? Our university system is the envy of the world, even with all its problems. Where is a better one growing? Oxford and Cambridge bemoan their own decline and are the only two top schools Britain can boast. There are no great schools in the Islamic world. Asian schools cannot compete with American schools for top flight research professors. Though we may decline even here in relative terms, American schools are not declining. Education is not a zero sum game either. As we grow, it is our hope that other nations have systems that grow as well.

Finally, America is one of the most religious nations on the planet. There is no sign that this is going to change soon. We are believers and have the power of belief. Our national faith, Christianity, remains robust. We have a healthy civil religion, which tolerates our large religious minority groups and helps them thrive. Our form of Christianity is at peace with republican government and free markets. I can think of no other nation on earth which has a unifying religious belief that is peace with modernity.

This translates into belief in all our institutions. We believe in our national ideals. We are not burned out like the Dutch on nationalism. We still have a large majority that believes in the Constitution and the flag. Americans are optimistic about our future. Can France say the same? If we are at times decadent, then it does not take much to change us from it. The Times writer has confused our love of comfort with softness, but in doing so he makes the mistake that Sauron made of the hobbits. We are comfortable, because it is sensible to prefer comfort to hardship when you can have it, but we are fierce fighters in a pinch. If needs must, we can still rouse ourselves to great deeds.

I love Britain which is the nation of much of ideological roots. However her own decline from great power status has caused her too often to look, almost hopefully, for it in everyone else. Britain declined because her great power status was in the end based on denying liberty to others. America will not decline because our great power status is not based on this error. We are great, because we are free and desire, imperfectly at times, to have others be free as well.

MSNBC - Fear not, these CRACKPOTS can be saved: “Since I am a compassionate and tolerant person”. . .

You know what follows will be neither.

Here is an idea:

Let’s use public schools to convince people their parent’s moral values are wicked. Let’s teach really young kids about “sexual identity.” Since most parents did not send their kids to government schools to have an ill educated, over worked, public employee instill philosophical notions, thinking instead Little Janet might be taught some basic math and science (though Harvard seems to think she cannot learn it anyway), this might cause a fuss.

So we shall have cartoon characters teach this moral lesson. It worked with Joe Camel. Of course, all right thinking people attacked Joe Camel, because he was used to sell “smoking” and we know that is bad. Our cartoons, hi-jacking characters having nothing to do with the topic at hand, have to do with something all right thinking people know is good.

Now when the bigots, I mean Christians, oppose our plan to propagandize their kids during tax payer funded time, we can laugh at them for thinking Sponge Bob is gay! Win, win! It is especially good if we can get some Christian figure to sound like he believes Sponge Bob is gay!

Lost will be the question of why schools should fund moral teaching rejected by the majority of votes in the last election. No. Instead, we can mock as CRACKPOTS any discussion of whether little children should be taught that the religious beliefs of their parents, the Pope, the President, and most Americans are wicked.

Lost are the right questions.

HT to Evangelical Outpost for the obvious point that no one should attack imaginary figures. Any sentence with “that Sponge Bob” in it is bound to be taken less than serously.

Comment: An earlier version of this post was too harsh. I deleted some of it.

Sloan stepping down, becoming Baylor chancellor: “Baylor University’s embattled president announced Friday that he will step down and become the school’s chancellor, a post with no administrative responsibilities.”

This is sad news. Anyone who is been in Christian colleges knows how to read this story. Sloan pretty plainly wanted to stay. At least a plurality of the faculty wanted him gone. Sloan was a true believer, unlike the Uncle Tony crowd who thinks being a Baptist is exhaused by nattering about soul liberty. Sloan wanted a college that was Christian and outstanding within his tradition, a Baptist Notre Dame. He failed. The Board forced him out to get “peace.” What they will get is either more fighting, if they hire someone with Sloan’s vision, since the faculty will taste blood or they will give up on the Sloan vision and hire some mediocrity to lead Baylor back down the road to being a shadow University of Texas campus.

Those interested in a good education could apply now to Torrey and Biola. We are Christian. We mean it and our leadership does too.

HughHewitt.com: “And how to explain the difference in treatment within the blogosphere accorded to Harvard’s President Lawrence Summers and Focus on the Family’s James Dobson? The New York Times ran a story yesterday on Dobson’s criticisms of this music video. I have been unable to find Dobson’s remarks except as chopped up by the Times, but today’s acid editorial by the Los Angeles Times must have a copy as it concluded that Dobson concluded that Spongebob’s ‘a menace.’”

First, no evangelical is ever allowed to denounce anything in pop culture. That is the first media rule. Since we all know, in a breath taking piece of stereotyping not seen since we danced Jim Crow, that all evangelical leaders are prudes and irrational no one ever asks if such concerns are valid. If an evangelical says it, then we know it is false and hopelessly reactionary. At this point, Michael Jackson’s best p.r. hope is for some evangelical to denounce him. The LA Times would then find some way to praise the King of Pop.

Second, evanglicals will by and large run away and hide when one of their own is outed for denouncing a pop culture icon, especially a cartoon. Nothing makes an evangelical young person or academic more nervous than that their carefully cultivated apologetic that “God can be cool!” will be blown away by a Jim Dobson in a minute. Such Uncle Tony award winners (to grasp the Uncle Tony award see here and here. . . put simply an Uncle Tony is a traditional Christian who enables the left in order to be taken “seriously” by the left), quickly pile on folk like Dobson to make sure they save their cultivated reputations. But to paraphrase William Shatner in his new album most of these folk are “never was” taking on “were and will be again.” Dobson has done heroic labor for the Kingdom. He deserves the benefit of the doubt until we know we he said and whether what he said is defensible.

I would like to offer our third Uncle Tony Award to the best example of an overly heated, before the evidence was out, distancing of a person from Dobson over Sponge Bob. Mail hopeful Uncle Tony hopefuls here.

What if he said it? How bad is it? What he said needs to be taken in context of “harm done.” The president of Harvard has the power to harm the self-esteem of his students. Does Dobson really have the power to finish off a cartoon sponge? If so, then Hewitt is right and he is the most influential man in America. If he did cause the Sponge to thrown in the, well, sponge, what harm? The Republic will stand without Patrick and Bikini Bottom, though my kids would be sad for at least ten minutes.

Compare that to Harvard’s president and his weird ramblings about women. Dobson is unlikely to kill Sponge Bob, the creators are busy doing that for him, but the President of Harvard may keep some girls and young women out of math and science. Call me crazy, but that seems worse than life without a Crabby Patty. If Dobson said what he is accused of saying, then he is at worst being overly dramatic and a bit culturally tone deaf. However, ABC goes on making Desperate Housewives which is gulity of the same problems and gets ads not vitriol. If the President of Harvard said what he said, without strong evidence to support it, then he was wrong aobut something important.

Finally, Sponge Bob was a creative and very funny cartoon, a PG South Park, that made fun of everything and everyone. It was parody that the whole family could enjoy! It always had a spam-like quality, given low animation standards and jokes borrowed from elsewhere, but it did not take itself too seriously. Sadly, Sponge Bob jumped the shark when they made the Spong Bob movie. If the creative energy that went into landing David Haselhoff for the movie goes into attacking traditional families, traditional families are safe for another century.

Adrian Warnock’s UK Evangelical Blog: And the winner of the first ever “warnie” blogger award is…..: “The first ever ‘Warnie’ blogger award goes to Dr John Mark Reynolds for a great all round blog which deserves much more attention than it currently gets. Covering the war on terror, philosophy, creation, Star Trek and a host of other subjects I love it. Dr Reynolds is a professor of philosophy and I can’t recommend his blog enough.

Please do mention his award on your own blog, and submit your own blog for the next ‘Warnie’ award ceremony which will happen as and when I feel that a worthy candidate has arrived.

You will hear more of Dr Reynolds blog in the future, why not be a part of expediating the rise to blogging stardom that I suspect is inevitable.”

(The following is my acceptance speech at the Warnock “Warnie” awards ceremony held at the Bird and Baby. Sadly, my fashion statement for the evening was widely panned. . . “Tweed a Trite and Over Done Warnie Wear” was the headline in the Sun. . . but the walk down to Narnia (as the walk to get the award is often called by winners) was a thrill. I have removed the usual throat clearings, but hope my nervous energy is conveyed.)

Ahem.

I would like to thank the members of the Warnock UK Evangelical Blog Academy for presenting me this award. When a man begins blogging, sitting in his jams on a winter morning, he does not think of where it might lead him. Then one day he wakes up and his betters have said, “Well done.” When I think of Jolly Blogger, Evangelical Outpost (I love you Marvin!), and all the other greater blogs that are out there, my own efforts seems small. That is the great thing about the Warnie awards. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

Since my first-born is named “Lewis,” getting an award named for the brother of Saint Jack, is especially moving to me. Since reading Adrian Warnock’s blog and receiving this award, I also feel much closer to him.

This is the first blog award I have ever won. Having won it, my career is likely to jump the shark. Already, I feel compelled to move the blog to another city, add a cute kid, go on a vacation (Eidos visits London!), or grow in blogging by starting to say nice things about Tony Campolo. There is indeed no place to go but down from here. However, like Glaucon, when I go down I hope there is good company.

Someday when the blogging gods, Hewitt and Warnock and Carter, are thinking about the bad old days of blogging when anyone could write a blog and everyone was doing so I hope they remember me and say, “At least he never blogged any of his own poetry.” Tip a glass and think of me.

I would like to thank all the people who got me here: To my parents, who made it possible for me to enter text by providing me with hands. To my wife, Hope, who sometimes lets me use my laptop to blog in bed. Greater love hath no wife than that she allows a Dell in her bedroom. To my son Ian who often brings me a glass of Diet Coke. To my daughter Jane, Scruffy the Bunny to all, who does cute things when the well of my inspiration becomes the desert of my discontent. To my son Lewis Dayton who will only be impressed when Stephen Lawhead reads my blog and so keeps me humble. To my daughter Mary Kate who looks at me and then kindly says, “It is more important to be beautiful on the inside than the outside.” To Phillip Johnson for allowing me to steal all the ideas on this blog. (I see from the flashing pint of bitter that my time is up, but just a few more please! No. Really!) To Frank Pastore, just because it allows me to show I know someone who is not a geek. To J.P. Moreland who brought me to Biola and Disneyland. Finally to Paul Spears and Fred Sanders. . . you know guys friends are friends forever, but I won the Warnie!

But the greatest thanks must go to Hugh Hewitt, my guiding blog guide. Like Beatrice was to Dante (only a guy, not an Italian, still alive, a Republican, and not so beautiful), he acts as the inspiration for so many of us in Christian blogging. Beatrice inspired the Divine Comedy. Hewitt inspires, well, this blog. Make of it what you will, but I lift this Warnie in the air right now and say, “This Warnie is for you, Hugh.”

So to the members of the Warnock Academy, I accept this award. My Anglophilia, a disease long raging, only grows. Thank you England. God save the Queen and God save Mr. Warnock from another speech such as mine.

(All kidding aside: this was really a thrill. I am thankful and hope I can help the Cause of God blogging in any possible way. Thank you, Mr. Warnock! My wife now thinks I may not just be wasting my time.)

MSNBC - Rice, Democrats duel over Iraq strategy

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., confronted Rice with her own words to argue that as Bush’s national security adviser, she had contradicted herself on Saddam’s weapons capabilities.

“You sent them [U.S. troops] in there because of weapons of mass destruction. Later, the mission changed when there were none,” Boxer told Rice.

(From a secret source following the hearings.)

Following her sometimes blistering assault on Dr. Rice, Senator Barbara Boxer was heard pressing the nominee even further on her central point in a hallway. “It is not enough,” said Boxer teetering on the highest heels seen on a government leader not from North Korea, “to act rationally. It is not enough to act on evidence and make statements based on what you know at the time. By golly, you have to be right! We expect nothing less than omniscience in our political leaders.”

Rice coughed politely and looked a bit embarrassed. Seizing on what she took to be her opponents weakness, the battling bantam Boxer buffeted Rice with a series of fast balls, “Think of all the historic tragedies that could have been averted if people followed the Boxer Doctrine in decision making.”

Rice looked puzzeled, “The Boxer Doctrine?”

Boxer’s voice cut through the chatter in the hall with her usual nails-on-chalk-board sound. Her mind sqeaked like a marker on a white board, but her voice still had that old fashioned tone. “You have not heard of it? It is the notion that one should never act based on faulty intelligence. I put it this way: it is not intelligent to have bad intelligence. I came up with it myself.”

Rice tried to respond, “But in an imperfect world, don’t we have to act on the intelligence we have?”

Boxer began to speak slowly as if training a very slow child, “Yes. And this doctrine if followed would have avoided so many tragedies. Like, well, take the whole World War I thing. It turns out the War was useless for a country like Russia. They ended up losing and having a whole Revolution. Shouldn’t they have known? And World War II. Don’t get me started. If the Boxer doctrine had been applied, we would known that Germany was not making an A-bomb. There were entire missions that wasted young men’s lives based on bad intelligence. We could have saved those young attractive lads lives if we had known everything. And Vietnam. We lost there in the jungle. People just did not want us there. Shouldn’t we have known that? After all the Soviet Union was going to fall in 1989 anyway. Why bother?And let me tell you some of those young men were also pretty good looking. I know, I was there at the time. Not in Vietnam, but hanging out and making a difference. We all were. And don’t get me started about sports. The Patriots won last year for crying out loud. They were the better team, so why did they have to play the whole gosh-darned season. We should have known who was going to win with better intelligence”

Boxer tossed her tipped hair with girlish glee. “If you aren’t right, you are wrong. Can you deny it? Guessing is not good enough so like follow Democrat strategy and attack when you know WMD are there. After all, if we waited until a nation used them, then we would have public opinion with us in taking out the rest! And there would be no chance we would ever be wrong! We would know they were there, right? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

Rice gurgled helplessly. Boxer was triumphant and moved in for the kill with a bearing that made many a man thankful for his wife, “The entire affair with that young couple Romeo and Juliet should never have happened. ‘Don’t kill yourself,’ I cried at the screen, ’she is not dead.’ But because Romeo jumped to conclusions two young people ended up without the right to choose. There is almost no end of the uses of the Boxer doctrine.”

Rice, “Isn’t that a fictional account?”

“Whatever,” Boxer snapped, her face stretching dangerously, her skin thin in so many ways. She gave her final blow to Rice as she tottered down the hall, “The right is not right. And that is wrong.”

HughHewitt.com: “Here is the story on Harvard President Larry Summers’ assertion that innate differences between the sexes could help explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers. Bottom line: It isn’t playing well with the feminist left, and probably won’t play well with every parent in America who had hoped that their daughter would have every opportunity that their son did.

In the era of instant commentary via the blogs, you can’t make such statements and then go to ground as Summers has. Too bad he doesn’t have a blog, as I recommended in my book. He’d have the ability to ‘revise and extend his remarks’ before the MSM gets them into circulation tomorrow.

If the president of a Christian university made the statement that Summers made, or a Bush Cabinet secretary, how long would they last in their job? How long will Summers last?”

Hugh has asked a good question. I think that the president of a Christian university might survive such a statement, if he or she had firm control of the board, but only barely. However, I cannot imagine one saying it. Why? There is a double standard for traditional Christians. Traditional Christians who favor a male priesthood on sacramental grounds like the Romans or traditional family structures like the Southern Baptists have been given an extra burden by the mainstream media on issues of gender. Because the MSM does not understand religion, the only reason they can imagine for a male priesthood is bigotry. As a result, a Christian college president has had to carefully determine what he or she believes about these issues. In that sense, the double standard has done some good. Therefore, it does not seem possible, that one would say what Summers did. We are light years ahead of practical, compassionate application of the best of tradition with the best of equality. Conservative Christian leaders are very clear when they speak about gender. They have to be. Most important, Christian colleges are people centered, not giant multi-billion dollar businesses. Most Christian college presidents know from personal experience the damage that such statements can do to actual students. Why? They have practical experience dealing with them. It is demanded by their faith commitment to mentoring and personal training.

My own University President, Clyde Cook, is a model of this sort of properly compassionate conservative leadership. He defends the traditional faith and over his long tenure has kept Biola University true to her mission. However, as a man with a great interest and professional expertise in inter-cultural studies, he has a real passion for diversity and for being sensitive to the issues of less fortunate groups in the nation. I have heard him become passionate about these things away from the lights or a public pulpit. As part of his traditional faith, and without becoming politically correct (another kind of stereotyping), he expresses deep concern about the lack of opportunity in our culture for some groups. He is always, publicly and privately, on the side of the less fortunate or groups that might have been victims of historic and present discrimination. He has a heart for getting women and minority persons into positions of leadership. There is no way, out of his sheer compassion, that he would say anything that might keep women from any field. What good would that do? Even if what Summers said were true (and I have seen no evidence for it), it would be misunderstood by undergraduates and applied in crude ways to individuals. Christian college presidents like Dr. Cook are required by the nature of their jobs and by their own faith to think first of people. I know it sounds ideal, but it is true. Of course no leader is perfect, and one never agrees with everything an administration does, but I have never known my own president to act in this manner.

If he did, Biola would hold him accountable. Morality matters, and charity towards all, at Biola University. Let’s see if Harvard University cares about her students as much.

The Three Essentials for Education: Part Two- Right Questions

Find an educational enthusiast and you will meet someone with more faith than a fighting fundamentalist at a tent meeting. Whatever his system, he believes it contains the answers to all of life’s problems. Just do what he says and his version of educational Cortaslim will solve your problems. Find the cure, the right way of doing education, and problems will be done.

To the contrary, my own experience suggests that having the right questions is more important than having the right answers. My answers must always be tentative. I try to have faith seeking understanding and not understanding seeking faith.

Dogma, if by dogma one means certainty, should have no place in my life. There are things I think are true based on best reason and best experience. They seem good, true, and beautiful. However, I must always acknowledge that I could be wrong. Certainty is not ever present this side of Paradise. I hold all my answers loosely, but keep to my questions passionately.

This does not make for a lack of zeal or boldness. To the contrary, I have great zeal for the quest for truth. I grow excited by open thought and can enjoy reading blogs and books with ideas contrary to my own. If my ideas are the correct ones, they will be strengthened. When I was younger anti-creationist work (before ID and the internet) provoked me. It challenged my certainty. What could I say to some of the arguments?

Over time, I allowed good arguments “from the other side” to change me. I became a theistic evolutionist. This was a good process. Sadly for my skeptical friends, I continued the process. I became skeptical about organized skepticism and began to be appalled by the group think demanded. The process went full circle and now I have returned, due to my questioning, to a skeptical approach to Darwinism. It is possible, though I think it unlikely, that the process will keep going. I still read anti-ID books more often than ID ones. The road is long! In the meantime, I can argue for my point of view and for an open discussion. The fact that I may be wrong does not mean that I must assume I am. Until sight is better, I must walk in the light I have and uncover darkness boldly. It is easy to be sure where darkness is even when tentative about knowing the final source of light.

(Footnote: I use Darwinism to refer to the philosophical assumptions first made plain by the genius Charles Darwin. Evolutionary biology as science has moved on from Darwin, but still maintains the important philosophical assumptions. For example, Darwin helped banish divine agency from Biology. This is still an assumption of mainstream evolutionary biology today whatever mechanism they believe gets the job done. Evolutionary biologists argue about mechanism, but they don’t argue about divine teleology as a part of Biology. In that sense, they are Darwinists. I favor an open philosophy of science and not the Darwinian closed one.)

As a result of loving questions, I think analytic philosophy has some valuable ways of looking the world and at intellectual problems. People who ignore those tools (like logic) usually get into trouble in the real world. Philosophy has my great respect because I have never experienced any censorship in it. Ideas are all welcome if argued for well. Plantinga can attack evolutionary reasoning in philosophy. His ideas receive fierce criticism, but there is no censorship and few attacks on his professional ability. This is the part of the analytic tradition I respect: learning to ask clear questions and follow them to the end wherever it leads.

Oddly, this dry and very disciplined discipline has come under attack. It has become popular to attack “foundationalism” in epistemology and analytic philosophy in general. I think this is a mistake. Foundationalism is not dead in philosophy and there are few viable alternatives that are that different (at least in the ways people think matter in the popular discussion).

However, I have found that the attack on philosophy or certain theories of knowledge is generally not really about philosophy. It is often lead by people who do not want imperial philosophy to claim everything for itself or certainty about things they know to be uncertain. They believe a more “post-modern” understanding will set them free from so-called “reason” which would deny any place to the arts as a knowledge tradition.

Modern philosophy often seems to elevate “science” as the only way of “knowing.” Sensible folk don’t want to be that exclusive. Philosophy, as the discipline most associated with the rise of this imperial science, is blamed for cutting us off from the human things.

Some philosophers are guilty of this. We all sometimes act as if everything could be cleared up if put in proper logical order. Some modern philosophy has gone all the way and restricted all truth to science and its handmaiden analytic philosophy. (At least, some claim that this has been done.) This need not be the case.

No classical philosophy, such as my own Platonism, has done such a thing. Plato was the consummate writer and poet. He believed in Divine Revelation and in philosophy. Each had its place. It is not philosophy (or science) that is the problem, but people who claim too much for both. You can be analytic without putting the universe into a tiny box.

Every human should be able to learn from a poet. No person should be deaf to the deep truth, every bit as important as that of science, in Bach. Of course, the way to escape imperial science is not to denigrate science or pretend it is not effective and beautiful in its own sphere. It is simply to push it back to its limits. Analytic philosophy (in the popular sense) and science are two ways to truth. They work, but they have limits.

To give but one example, for an old Platonist like myself, music must always remain the highest means of communication. Much of it is almost mathematical in its intellectual rigor. The best of it is full of passion, but it requires great physical labor to play it or listen to it well. It combines every part of a human, the soul and the body. Of course, good science can at moments do the same, but only at times. A good philosophical discussion sometimes approaches music in this wholeness, but not as often as music. No human can ever play music well or hear it played well without experiencing this sublime “wholeness.” There is much, therefore, to be learned from music.

If you read internet skeptic sites you are often reading the last gasp of the “closed” view of knowledge. You have heard the rant: science is a knowledge tradition and religion is a belief. The humanities are rarely praised, but made marginal. Science is everything.

Christianity does better or it should. Since it believes in Divine Revelation, told first in a story, it cannot close itself off from Mystery. It cannot limit the quest for knowledge to philosophy or science, however it might praise them.

We helped create modern science and philosophy. We believe in reason, but we cannot close reason off into mere propositions and facts. The world is higher and more mysterious. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth than can ever be dreamed of in any philosophy or system. We are therefore always expectant, always excited. We never are sure and so our eagerness never abates. We believe in order to understand and this sets us free to doubt and question everything.

The truth is that knowledge comes to us from poetry, music, Divine Revelation, analytic philosophy, and science. All are good tools in the appropriate place. I am no scientist, but I love science. The beauty of what it can do and the tentative steps toward truths science makes demand my respect. I am no musician, but I married one. She has slowly taught me the beauty that can come to hearing the questions, and tentative answers, found in the giants of her field. At times, for very short periods, she has taught me to enter into the music and find the wisdom there.

In some rare, but wonderful days, I can combine many quests for truth. I lead a class in asking hard questions about a great work of literature and then go home and work on a logical problem for my book on Plato. The evening may contain a concert and then end in prayers. When my soul is in good order, all of it becomes one. Mystery is not destroyed by proper philosophy, science, or art. Instead, I am lead from the propositional truths each suggests ever more mystery.

Truth is not merely propositional, but it contains propositions. Each truth leads to another and also to experience. Propositional truth and experiential truth can never war in a classical philosophy of life. Traditional Christians are neither modern nor post-modern. We are classical, pre-dating and enfolding the best of both.

This give hope that a resolution can come between those who love the humanities and those who love science. Both need to hear the wisdom of the other. Both can learn to do so without plunging into non-reason or ugliness. Both can do so by asking human questions and listening. I think I have experienced, a Divine Answer to those questions. This does not end my yearning, but merely spurs me to reason even more with the Divine Logos who under girds the world.