“One of the few advantages to the country in having Congress overwhelmingly in the hands of one party is that the lack of need to compromise lets the leaders of that party reveal themselves for what they are– in this case, people with unbounded arrogance and utter contempt for the right of ordinary people to live their lives as they see fit, much less the right to know as citizens what laws are going to be passed by their government. The question is whether voters will remember on election day in 2010.”—-Thomas Sowell

So I heard about John Franke’s new book, Manifold Witness, a book whose thesis is apparently that truth is inherently plural and that this is a profoundly Christian way of thinking.  Doug Wilson has begun reviewing the book here.  Wilson quotes from Brian McLaren’s foreword:

That for human beings, truth is inherently plural. John asserts this, not because it is fashionable (it’s the very opposite among his guild in the theological academy), but rather because he believes it is true, and is willing to suffer the scorn of some of his peers for this truth as he sees it. He asserts the plurality of truth, not as a capitulation to non- or anti- Christian thought, but rather as an expression of profoundly Christian thought — and specifically, of emergent, missional, and trinitarian Christian thought. In so doing, he gently implies that the dominant alternative view — that white, modernist, Western Christian scholars and institutions have a monopoly on truth — is actually a capitulation to modes of thought and power that have betrayed the life and gospel of Jesus Christ” (p. xii).

Aside from the fact that McLaren has the audacity to claim that Franke’s postmodern muddle is not fashionable in the academy (the academy is the engine that drives it!), does anyone else notice the profound irony in what McLaren says here?  Allow me to paraphrase:

John Franke advocates a pluralist view of truth, thereby denying a singular view of truth, because he is deeply convinced that his view is singularly true.  Anyone (probably a white male) who disagrees with him is hopelessly lost in falsehood, because the singular truth that Franke proclaims about truth being manifold can make no room for competing views of truth.  All truth is manifold, except of course, for the absolute, singular truth that truth itself is manifold.  Of that, I am absolutely certain, and anyone who looks at it differently is captive to modernist presuppositions and is, therefore, promoting falsehood.  John Franke is so certain of the absolute truth of his view that truth is manifold that he will gladly become a martyr for the cause. 

It looks like Manifold Witness is going to be another journey into self-contradictory postmodern quicksand, as if we haven’t had enough of that lately.

I am a bit surprised at the audacity of the Democratic Party.  In a week when off-year elections have proven that voters (even in New Jersey!) are fed up with the government expansion going on under the Obama-Pelosi-Reid socialist machine, the House of Representatives has decided to spend the weekend transgressing the Constitution by assuming unprecedented regulatory powers over the healthcare of all Americans. 

In doing so, Democrats have virtually handed Republicans a major victory next November.  And when it comes, it won’t be a moment too soon.

Dear All Southern States Like Virginia and North Carolina That Voted for Barack Obama Last November,

How’s that working out for you?

Sincerely,

Aaron O’Kelley

Is anybody else out there a bit weary of medical researchers playing God?  Every few months it seems there is some story that brings us one step closer to an Orwellian nightmare.

One thing I love about Douglas Wilson is that he can always come up with a fitting (and usually humorous) analogy for any situation.  This is the most recent one that caught my attention, from his post on the health care debate:

The unfunded obligations of Medicare and Medicaid are about 50 trillion dollars, give or take 5 dollars or so. The economic liars who are pushing Obamacare want you to believe their lie that the future will not go the way the past has gone, and that government mismanagement of programs like these, and Social Security, are no indicator of future performance. Things will be lots better this time around. Having floundered and almost drowned in the kiddie pool, we are now going to swim to Hawaii. If you predict unfortunate results, this is no doubt the result of you being full of spite and malice. For humanity.

Now, lest you think incorrectly, Wilson is no partisan.  He has harsh words for Republicans too, and most of the time I agree with him on that.  Read the whole thing.

I think of President Obama as a Nobel Prize winner the same way I think of Paris Hilton as a “celebrity.”  Both are famous for being famous.

I am so thankful to God for the years I spent in the youth group at First Baptist Church of Atlanta, Texas.  It was particularly when I was in the sixth grade that I first began to understand that the claims of Christ over my life are total and absolute.  Thus, my Christian faith cannot be tucked away in a private area of my life.  It must shape everything I do and think.  God knows I needed to hear that message at that particular time, and my life has never been the same.

But at the same time I was also introduced to textbook American evangelical activism.  I don’t mean that my youth group meetings were political rallies (we didn’t discuss politics).  I mean that, under the instruction of my youth minister, I dove headfirst into the “transform the world for Christ” mentality.  It has taken me years to recover from it, and I am still in process. 

Of course, a lot of good came out of that teaching.  I became more attuned to the public claims of the Christian faith.  I grew strong and bold (at least more so than I had been before) in personal evangelism.  I developed leadership abilities that have carried me through years of ministry.  I certainly don’t want to suggest that everything I learned in this regard was wrong or of no value to me.

But I also got entrenched in evangelical triumphalism.  I overestimated my own (and the church’s) ability to ”build” God’s Kingdom on earth (as though that is something any human hands could do!).  I dreamed big dreams, and more often than not I ended up with big disappointments.  I still wrestle with the ramifications of those dreams today.  And in some cases I have had to smash those dreams because they were nothing more than sugar-coated idols.   

This article by Michael Horton strikes me as one full of biblical and theological wisdom.  Please read it for insight into the relationship between the “already” dimension of the Kingdom of God, the “not yet” dimension of the Kingdom, and the church’s role in between. 

Does God expect me to go out and change the world?  Probably not.  Imagine how few people in the history of the human race can claim to have done such a thing.  We are not all, as Christians, called to be world changers.  But we are all called to be pilgrims, wayfarers on the road to glory who may not pull off a global makeover, but if we faithfully worship, pray, love, and work, day in and day out, as the New Testament calls us to do, we may just end up leaving this place a little better than we found it.  Evangelical triumphalism may not be satisfied with that idea, but if I read the New Testament correctly, it seems that God is.  And that’s so much the worse for evangelical triumphalism.

At the command of God the Father and at just the right moment, the Lord Jesus will bring the consummation of the Kingdom.  It is not yours or mine to build.  Maybe if we lowered our expectations a bit about who we are and what we are capable of doing, we might just find that there is a depth of joy and contentment to be found in living a life of simple faithfulness.  Sure, every once in a while a Paul, an Augustine, a Luther comes along and turns the world on its head, but in between those unusual moments in history, millions of faithful believers pass out of this world unnoticed by the earthly multitudes even while they are welcomed as heroes among the hosts of Heaven.  If I can be one of them, then that will be enough for me.

In the context of his review of Jim Belcher’s book Deep Church, Kevin DeYoung makes this bold statement:

I don’t think there is a single insight from the emergent church that cannot be gleaned from the best of the evangelical, and specifically the Reformed, tradition. We don’t need a third way between emergent and traditional. We need a revitalized, reformed evangelical church.

If this is the case, then it would mean that the primary value of the (artist formerly known as the) emerging conversation is not what it offers to the church.  Rather, its primary value is what it reminds the church: that there is a richness in the roots of evangelicalism that we ignore (and have ignored) to our peril.  If the (artist formerly known as the) emerging conversation plays any role in sending us back to our roots, then we owe it a debt of gratitude. 

What do you, O plenteous multitude of readers, think of DeYoung’s claim?

UPDATE: Many thanks to Adam for pointing out this link from factcheck.org about the czars.  It turns out that the real situation is a bit more complicated than I represented in the original version of this post.  I apologize for not doing my homework on this and admit that I was relying on information I had received exclusively from right-wing commentators. 

It turns out that Cass Sunstein was confirmed by the Senate, though by a narrow margin.  So I cannot say that Obama appointed him with no restraints whatsoever, and at this point I am unsure whether Congress has any oversight with regard to Mr. Sunstein.  But nothing I have seen causes me to doubt that he is a left-wing radical with regard to the question of abortion, and this fits precisely with what I have seen from Obama to this point.  I remain convinced that we have a president who considers abortion not just a lamentable necessity, but a positive good for society. 

I have eliminated most of the original version of the post and changed the title so as to correct my previous mistakes. 

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Obama has appointed a team of czars who are fringe leftists.  This leads me to believe (though I have never really doubted it) that Obama himself is a fringe leftist who happens to portray himself as something else. 

Take Cass Sunstein, for example, the current regulatory czar.  In his 1993 book The Partial Constitution, Sunstein wrote the following about abortion:

A restriction on access to abortion turns women’s reproductive capacities into something to be used by fetuses. … Legal and social control of women’s sexual and reproductive capacities has been a principal historical source of sexual inequality.

I have argued before that the pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy is actually more like a spectrum of views.  And this is about as far left as you can go on the spectrum.  This man actually claims that any restriction on access to abortion makes women susceptible to being “used” by fetuses. 

If only we could rid the world of those oppressive fetuses who go around using women as a way of sustaining patriarchy.  Oh wait, we can!  That’s right.  Abortion is the weapon of righteousness in the hands of oppressed women who can fight off these oppressive fetuses who are only seeking to use them for their own selfish ends.  Rise up, women of the world!  May you never be deterred from the righteous cause of killing off your oppressors, those wretched fetuses!

This is a far cry from the old Democrat party line: “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.”  Democrats used to say that kind of thing, claiming to lament the reality of abortion while acknowledging its necessity.  But the Obama administration apparently believes otherwise.  For Obama and those in his mold, abortion is not a lamentable necessity.  It is a positive good. 

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UPDATE #2: I was just thinking last night how ironic it is that Sunstein would speak of fetuses “using” the reproductive capacities of women, as though fetuses could make a conscious choice.  Doesn’t that attribute willpower to a fetus, which in turn implies that a fetus is more than a clump of cells but actually a person?  If Sunstein is serious about this argument, then it would represent a major revision of the pro-choice position.  Until now, pro-choicers have argued that it is okay to kill fetuses because they are not persons.  Is Sunstein perhaps suggesting that fetuses are indeed persons, but it is okay to kill them in self-defense?  Ironically, Ronald Reagan once actually made this (very bad) argument, but ONLY with respect to babies that were conceived as the product of rape.  Reagan said women who had been raped could terminate their pregnancies in self-defense, since their bodies had been unwillingly invaded by another person (or persons, meaning both the rapist and his offspring).  Sunstein apparently believes that any woman, no matter what the situation of conception, has the right to defend herself against the intruder who has entered her body.

I don’t particularly like either view, but Reagan’s is a lot better.  If we lived in a country where Reagan’s view prevailed, abortion would actually be rare, which is what Democrats used to claim that they wanted.