Category Archives: culture & value

The post where I act like a neocon, being brave from a distance

4 Replies

This post was marginal to begin with, but now I am confident it has no bearing on the Virginia Tech matter.  I leave it up only because I think the issues are important.  They just don’t have relevance to the event. 

OK, I’ve not said much about Virginia Tech. There is a reason. For the last few days I have wanted to say something that might judge other people who have been in insane circumstances that I have never endured. I don’t know what happened. I pray God that I am never in those circumstances. It may be that my worries are completely baseless in this case.

But the question has been haunting me. Even though I may some day prove to be nothing but a huge hypocrite, I have to ask it.

How does one man with two handguns get to kill whom he pleases and then choose his own time and manner of death?

I know that I am talking about something I know nothing about. Then again, I’m raising boys (sexist comment, I know. I’m unrepentant, though I’d be happy if my daughters take out a psychopath creep some day; but this is about being unarmed, so I’m stressing the male sex). I want to raise boys who take action when necessary and are willing to risk their lives for others. And, with that in mind, it is pretty much impossible not to aske the question.

I would never have articulated it if I hadn’t seen Mark Steyn’s piece.

The cost of a “protected” society of eternal “children” is too high. Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the “Montreal massacre,” the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

I have always believed America is different. Certainly on September 11th we understood. The only good news of the day came from the passengers who didn’t meekly follow the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures but who used their wits and acted as free-born individuals. And a few months later as Richard Reid bent down and tried to light his shoe in that critical split-second even the French guys leapt up and pounded the bejasus out of him.
We do our children a disservice to raise them to entrust all to officialdom’s security blanket. Geraldo-like “protection” is a delusion: when something goes awry — whether on a September morning flight out of Logan or on a peaceful college campus — the state won’t be there to protect you. You’ll be the fellow on the scene who has to make the decision. As my distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle says:

When we say “we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances”, we make cowardice the default position.

I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.

Now that I’ve thought about it more, maybe I can put it this way, as much as I don’t want to sound arrogant or boastful about deeds I have never attempted and facing fears I have never encountered, even more I don’t want to prepare myself and anyone I might influence for passivity and perhaps even cowardice. OK?

Of course, I’m speaking of the courage to rush an armed man while unarmed. I’d prefer a society where we were permitted tools that allowed us to get by with a little less courage. Rick Capezza led me to this article:

Nearly a decade ago, a Springfield, Oregon, high schooler, a hunter familiar with firearms, was able to bring an unfolding rampage to an abrupt end when he identified a gunman attempting to reload his .22-caliber rifle, made the tactical decision to make a move and tackled the shooter.

A few years back, an assistant principal at Pearl High School in Mississippi, which was a gun-free zone, retrieved his legally owned Colt .45 from his car and stopped a Columbine wannabe from continuing his massacre at another school after he had killed two and wounded more at Pearl.

At an eighth-grade school dance in Pennsylvania, a boy fatally shot a teacher and wounded two students before the owner of the dance hall brought the killing to a halt with his own gun.

More recently, just a few miles up the road from Virginia Tech, two law school students ran to fetch their legally owned firearm to stop a madman from slaughtering anybody and everybody he pleased. These brave, average, armed citizens neutralized him pronto.

My hero, Dr. Suzanne Gratia Hupp, was not allowed by Texas law to carry her handgun into Luby’s Cafeteria that fateful day in 1991, when due to bureaucrat-forced unarmed helplessness she could do nothing to stop satanic George Hennard from killing 23 people and wounding more than 20 others before he shot himself. Hupp was unarmed for no other reason than denial-ridden “feel good” politics.

She has since led the charge for concealed weapon upgrade in Texas, where we can now stop evil. Yet, there are still the mindless puppets of the Brady Campaign and other anti-gun organizations insisting on continuing the gun-free zone insanity by which innocents are forced into unarmed helplessness. Shame on them. Shame on America. Shame on the anti-gunners all.

Do I love everything about that article. Obviously not. These are the opinions of Ted Nugent, after all. Why couldn’t Ronnie James Dio or Bruce Dickinson have penned them?

But getting back to courage, we need it. We need to honor it. If my sons were drafted into some overseas war and were killed, I know how I would feel about that human sacrifice. If they laid down their lives for friends, I would be proud of them. It seems like everything in our culture is bent on discouraging such values.

Are our bodies transportation devices for our heads?

2 Replies

A friend sent Jennifer and I this video of Sir Ken Robinson. Despite the odious Gore reference at the end, we watched it quite intently and I’m feeling pretty convicted about some of the educational values I’ve been pushing for my children.

And I can’t help but think there is something to learn here about theology and theological education. I’m tempted to say that a lot of the controversy of over emerg-stuff is, at bottom, very much related to the issues Sir Robinson [Oops, I’m informed that is incorrect: Sir Ken] raises…..

(And does anyone else find it impossible to get Milne cadences out of their head? Brave, brave, Sir Robinson…)

Barabbas or Jesus?

Leave a reply

I tend to be skeptical of Rolling Stone, so I’m not going to comment on the expose of Ron Luce until I read more, if then. After all, Luce seems to oppose what RS peddles for a living, so they’re hardly unbiased.

But, if the stuff is true (or at least half of it), it does provide us with a very good window into what prompted Pharisaism in Israel in Jesus’ day. And it has been extremely gratifying to read the iMonk channel N. T. Wright on this issue:

When you read the New Testament, you never see the name Zealots, and there is some scholarly discussion over how definable the Zealot movement was in Israel in the first century. What’s not arguable is that there were people in Israel in the time of Jesus who were angry and believed that their anger was redemptive if channeled into a response that would overthrow the existing order. In other words, they were culture warriors.

These were Jews who felt their culture had been corrupted and violated by Greeks and now Romans. They resented what had happened to their children in a Hellenized, Romanized world. They weren’t surprised that God seemed to be letting things get worse and worse, leaving them in “exile,” because God’s people were compromising and “wimping out” when the times demanded strong action. These were people who were mad at culture, entertainment, moral standards and religious compromise. They despised those who preached tolerance and cultural diversity. They had their own rhetoric of anger. From time to time, extremists acted on these views and paid the cost.

These were people who wanted to purify Israel, march on Jerusalem, overthrow the corrupt political puppet regime of Herod and set the God of Israel against the pagan idolators from Rome. This was a culture war, a religious war and eventually, a real war.

Jesus was surrounded with this kind of anger from the time he was a child. He heard the Zealot voices in the synagogues, in the shops, and in the village square. He heard those who applauded John the Baptists direct attack on the immorality of the Herod family, and he felt the pressure to declare his movement a servant of that larger culture war.

Patriotism, zealotry and faith were never separated in Jesus’ world. To be a traitor to the cause of a renewed and liberated Israel was to be a traitor to God. There were plenty of people doing nothing, plenty of people to blame and plenty of targets for action and revolution.

[Read the Whole Thing]

What was astounding about Wright (well, there were several things, but this was definitely one of the top ones for me), was that he took a look at the Gospels, and, in the course of understanding the theological mindset of Jesus (in a way that was obviously faithful to the text) produced a call to repentance to “the Religious Right.” I don’t mean Wright’s actual political opinions, which I think are dreadfully leftist (and why in God’s name does the anti-imperialism apply to the Bush Administration but not the U.N.), but his point about how God saves us and how this applies to all forms of salvation, including any wish to “save” America. Wright showed me that Jesus had something to say about the culture war, and it was more or less that I was in danger of choosing an murderer as more like God than Jesus.

Bob’s fame gets extended

Leave a reply

Well, I wasn’t the only person who noticed Bob’s opinion piece about guns.  The Brady campaign against the Second Amendment has weighed in.

Rather than focus on the challenges of domestic abuse or the problems that occur when someone in a bad relationship can easily get a gun, columnist Bob Allen on Wednesday decided that the blame for tragedies like these should be placed on people who “cannot carry a weapon… without asking permission of the government.”

Typical.  How many studies have to show that armed populations are safer, not only from dangerous criminals but from government agents?  Every time an anecdote is used, government gun monopolists are going to pretend that “gun pushers” have nothing but anecdotal evidence.

Maybe something about the Second Amendment needs to be surgically implanted inside our chests.

1 Reply

His name is Charles.

Her name was Clara.

Was. Past tense.

The first and last time Charles saw Clara alive, she was being dragged by her hair through the CNN Center in Atlanta. Clara’s tormentor ordered Charles out of the way, and instead of standing his ground to defend an obviously distressed woman, he obeyed the thug’s order and let them pass.

[READ THE REST]

I’ve known Bob since the early nineties when we met in South Florida as fellow employees of Coral Ridge Ministeries. In an ironic twist of events, he and his family ended up moving to Nashville soon after we left for Saint Louis so I could go to seminary. He is a great guy with a spectacular voice and real knowledge of his craft. Though we don’t talk that often, from time to time I catch the beginning or end of some radio show and hear him. It feels like he’s in the car with me.

I note that the Supreme Court recently came down on Bob’s side on the constitutional issue. I think I liked Bob’s piece most of all because he shows so clearly that a Christian society cannot possibly be a disarmed one, either literally or mentally/emotionally. How many of need to take the safety off our basic courage?

For skeptics I offer this from my favorite group.

ADDENDUM: For the record, I visited Bob’s site for personal reasons.  I had no idea his column had already provided him with fifteen minutes of fame, far more than he’ll get from my blog!

Not going to play ball

2 Replies

ADDENDUM: Related links–

Sean Lucas pointed out this article on the SBC “doctrinal” fights. I use quotation marks because there is no real doctrinal issue, except that Darrin Patrick is probably more orthodox than his critic. It’s all about drinking beer and R-rated movies.

In other words, its about badges of identity. The “New Perspective”could not be more relevant to the social dynamics of what is going on. Claiming it is about theological belief is a customized path to confusion about what is really happening.

But, when I say it is about “badges,” we should remember what such things represent to people. Here is where I think Jeff‘s book on Ecclesiastes really helped me understand what lies behind a great deal of church politics:

I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity (Eccl 2.18, 19).

So here it is: “Moran, a boyish-looking 50-year-old father of nine and the owner of a trailer manufacturing company in Winfield, revolutionized the Missouri Baptist Convention from 1998 to 2003.” Right. He did all that work, using “old-fashioned political strategy” and “knocking on church doors, speaking at church rallies and making phone call after phone call to pastors” in order to accomplish “a conservative takeover of the organization, which has remained in control ever since.” And, no doubt, he was sure he was doing all this for the Kingdom–for Biblical inerrancy and other fundamentals.

And now all these young guys are completely changing the vision he fought for. I’ve met Darrin Patrick. I’ve heard him preach. He is a calvinist, and admirer of John Piper and Al Mohler and many other predestinarians, both Baptist and Presbyterian. But he is a threat to Moran. He is showing Moran that life is vapor and trying to gain an advantage is like trying to shepherd the wind. Moran’s fifty. He doesn’t have as much control as he would like to think about where his own grandchildren will end up going to church, let alone the shape of the denomination in Misourri or anywhere else.

But, of course, Darrin’s just as committed to Scripture and sound doctrine as Moran–perhaps more so. The vision is suddenly revealed to have always been about stuff that had little to do with inerrancy.

The result: completely inaccurate accusations and lots of desperate politics. Maybe if we just kick out that bad guys everything will be back under control.

It is all vapor. Trying to shepherd the wind.

The Rev. Darrin Patrick, pastor of the emerging church in St. Louis called The Journey, says Moran’s kind of theology is only driving away young Christian leaders. “When you’re stricter than God about what he commands and permits, younger pastors are not going to play ball,” Patrick said. “They’re not going to take one for the denomination.”

No, they’re not. The SBC is deciding its own fate, not those of these young calvinists who don’t conform to extra-Biblical criteria.

And the SBC is not the only denomination facing this sort of issue. When you see desperate politicing and lots of propaganda, you are facing people undergoing the crisis of learning they are not in control. Your most important duty is to realize your time will come when you see the next generation do things you don’t understand and never envisioned. Will you believe in the sufficiency of Scripture at that point, or will you start campaigning with slanders and half-truths to get your way?

In any case, if church groups were stock, I’d be watching SBC closely and filling my portfolio with shares of Acts 29.

Links: reaction to Dobson v. Fred Thompson

2 Replies

Regarding the topic of this post I made:

There are more, but I’m probably already pushing the edge of the envelope by linking blogs I don’t know much about. I’ll do some more Dobson-Thomas links later.

But I have to remind everyone that if Dobson would try to define a Christian by what the Bible says (given his lack of personal knowledge or ecclesiastical authority regarding Thompson), he would have ended up looking a whole lot more Christian himself. Yep. This is a case in which the so-called “Federal Vision” would once again help someone look a lot less like a Pharisee.

Would that our Purgists in the Reformed ghetto would take note.

Reganomics for Russia?

4 Replies

At the heart of the reforms lies the classical liberal tax theory according to which lower taxes translates into increased tax revenues. Therefore, it is an interesting historic irony that Russia, a country where the socialist creed reigned strong still very recently, has now been converted into the international showcase of economic liberalism. In America President Ronald Reagan and his supporters were known for campaigning for such tax policies, but it is Putin’s Russia that has actually implemented them. Hardly could Reagan have even dreamt of such measures as Putin’s 13% flat income tax rate. Fair to say that never before has there been such a dramatic and speedy shift from socialist tax policies to classical liberalism, and hardly could the results be any more impressive.

Is this article too good to be true? I sure hope not.