Blog & Mablog the blog of Pastor Douglas Wilson
Grace Agenda 2013

Injustice and Empathy

Saturday, May 25, 2013 7:51 am / Leave a Comment /

Don Carson, Kevin DeYoung, and Justin Taylor have posted a very good statement about the Sovereign Grace lawsuit here. I appreciated it very much.

The issue — among thoughtful Christians — should never be whether or not justice should be done. That should be a given. What should we seek out, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God? (Micah 6:8)

The issue is that we do not know what the just response is until after a fair and just trial. Just sentences do not fall out of the sky — they proceed from just trials. And in order to have a just trial, it must be managed and conducted by just men, men who hate bribes, men who have a backbone, men who know the law.

If a man is accused of child molestation, a horrendous crime, and charges are made and the evidence is being gathered, then patience is absolutely necessary. If a judge is ruled by the spirit of Prov. 18:17, and he is proceeding with all deliberation, and then he finds himself accused of covering up misdeeds, or enabling such crimes, or being soft on molestation, simply because he did not move straight to the sentencing, then we know that the spirit of injustice is on the loose.
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Posted in: A Justice Primer, Church Government / Tagged:

Don’t Waste the Point

Friday, May 24, 2013 1:06 pm / 14 Comments /

In the ruckus following Rachel Held Evan’s attack on various and sundry, at least three important things have been going on in the barrage of comments at various sites.

The first has to do with the alleged abuse case at Sovereign Grace Ministries. That is a situation about which I know next to nothing, and so I will content myself with the praiseworthy policy of saying nothing about it. But I will say something about a related matter. In my day, I have been the recipient of the tender ministrations of various discernment bloggers, the kind who have the discernment of a particularly dimwitted and goggle-eyed goldfish, peering out of a particularly curved bowl, to know that certain kinds of cases are best not tried in venues like this one. When I see a lynch mob outside the courthouse, yelling and waving a rope, it does not tell me if the man inside is innocent or guilty. But it does tell me something.

The second point has to do with whether or not John Piper is a “miserable comforter,” as Internet Monk put it. With all the perspective that Monday morning quarterbacks enjoy, I think it is possible that the original tweets would have been better placed had they been sent out a day or two later. So I understand why John took them down — it was precisely because he is not a miserable comforter, and was trying to be reasonable with regard to the feelings and responses of others. But notice how such accommodations make no difference at all to the fellowship of the grievance. For those who are theologically tweaked, their problem with you is that you still think it, and that God is still sovereign, and that the world is still the way it is. The problem is that the world (the way God governs it) is still resented, and especially resented are those who have made their peace with God’s majesty — a majesty on terrible display in tornadoes like this one. John Piper is among those who understand this, but anyone who believes that this makes him calloused or insensitive or unfeeling towards the sufferings of men, are huntsmen who do not know their quarry. It is like saying that Jeremiah didn’t love Jerusalem.

Related to this, whenever a dispute like this breaks out, ostensibly over the “timeliness” of the comments, this is frequently just a proxy for the real issue — in this case, distaste of Calvinism. If you don’t share that distaste, as I do not, then it will be harder to see the problem, if indeed there was a problem. We can illustrate this easily by flipping it around. If you do not share RHE’s peculiar theological approach, it is much easier to see her post as opportunistic ambulance-chasing. A Calvinist lecturing tornado victims in the rubble is an easy caricature to draw, but that’s not the only one. How about the pharmaceutical rep who says something like “our hearts are broken over the devastation caused by this tornado. It reminds me, in fact, of the heartbreak of psoriasis. I happen to have a bottle here . . .”

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Posted in: Brief Notes on Jet Fuel Calvinism, Theology / Tagged: , ,

Yeah, Well, Give Me Time

Friday, May 24, 2013 9:33 am / Leave a Comment /

I am currently on the road, and so my turnaround times are not what they ought to be. But I hope to have more on the whole RHE deal later today. I would tell what I am thinking now, but I don’t want to do that with my thumbs from the back seat of a car. In fact, I am amazed I have been able to tell you this much.

Posted in: Brief Notes on Jet Fuel Calvinism / Tagged: ,

The Crucifixion of Coercion

Thursday, May 23, 2013 6:59 am / Leave a Comment /

“Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless” (Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 153).

Girard calls this social condition a time of sacrificial crisis. Nothing coheres, nothing tastes. One of the reasons societies in this state (as we very much are) start to disintegrate is that while drumbeat demands for deeper and greater sacrifice come more rapidly, and are insistently louder, the law of diminishing returns has kicked in.

And generally the resultant hue and cry that is set up calling for shared sacrifice, or increased sacrifice, or deeper sacrifice, is a cry that is lifted up by someone clever enough to want to get in front of the mob. When crowds are calling for sacrifice, you can depend upon it, they are looking for the sacrifice of somebody else. Get in the right position early, man.

And this is why, for Christians, all coercion is such a big deal. Simple coercion, absent direct instruction from Scripture, is a big sin, and manipulative coercion, absent clear instruction from Scripture, is also a big sin. The way of vicarious substitution, what Jesus did on the cross, is how He overthrew the coercive principalities and powers. That way is doomed forever, and the sooner Christians learn to be done with it the better.

But the carnal heart turns naturally to making other people do things. This is why we must see the levy, or the referendum, or the law, or the conscription, or whatever it is, and follow it all the way out to the end of the process. When you don’t do what they say, men with guns show up at your house. Now this is quite proper when it is the house of a murderer, or rapist, or an IRS man from Cincinnati. But suppose it is just a regular guy trying to make a living who had a duck land in a puddle enough times for his land to be declared a wetlands? They still show up with guns.

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Posted in: Engaging the Culture / Tagged:

Rachel Held Evans Denies the Cat

Wednesday, May 22, 2013 11:09 pm / 86 Comments /

In the aftermath of the Oklahoma tragedy, Rachel Held Evans took John Piper to task for claiming, right in line with the Bible, that if disaster befalls a city, it is from the hand of God (Amos 3:6). Not only is it from the hand of God, but it is from the hand of a holy God. But to know — as insurance companies do — that such things are classified as acts of God, is not to say that God is abusive.

This stance of Piper’s upsets Evans, and she went on at length about it, maintaining that this creates abusive church environments, etc. I don’t want to go point-by-point through her post here — I simply want to make one observation, in line with the great Chesterton:

“If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.”

Here is the problem. Rachel Held Evans rebukes John Piper for answering the problem of evil as all orthodox Christians must, but then cops out herself. “We don’t know exactly why suffering happens in every situation . . .” Now of course this is quite right if we are maintaining that Henry got cancer because he cheated on his taxes three years ago. We don’t know that. But it is staggeringly wrong if we are talking about why our world is broken the way it is. We do know that. We have been told.

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Posted in: Brief Notes on Jet Fuel Calvinism, Theology / Tagged: ,

Crucial Context

Wednesday, May 22, 2013 4:16 pm / Leave a Comment /

“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)

The Basket Case Chronicles #117

“All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not” (1 Cor. 10:23).

There are verses where the surrounding context does not matter as much in the reading of the verse, and there are verses where the surrounding context matters a great deal. The phrase all things is qualified in context, but is unqualified within the confines of the verse. Apart from context, this passage appears to urge us on to the higher grace of antinomianism. But in context, Paul is talking about a particular set of behaviors—eating meat offered to pagan idols.

He is talking about particular cases of conscience. He is not talking here about, say, fornication, drunkenness, or extortion, as we can readily see by flipping back a few pages (1 Cor. 5:11). Here is a paraphrase of the passage, tailored so that it cannot be made to stand alone. “All the things we are talking about are lawful for me, but they are not expedient. All of those things are lawful, as I said, but doing them won’t help you edify your brother.”

Posted in: Grace and Peace, Practical Christian Living / Tagged:

Actual Thugs

Wednesday, May 22, 2013 3:07 pm / 5 Comments /

It is not too soon to begin referring to the Obama regime as scandal-ridden. But what does this mean?

I was amazed at Obama’s first election, amazed that more people didn’t see through him. His gauzy promises, his tip-tilted nose, his serene arrogance, were all a sight for the prescient gobsmacked to behold. And then I was amazed again at his re-election — but this time I was amazed that the electorate hadn’t seen him. Now it was not a matter of seeing through him, it was simply a matter of seeing him. He had a record now; he had actually done stuff. Lots of people could see it, and they kept saying to the others, “Can you see it now?” And the answer came back . . . no . . . no . . . no . . . call it a continent-wide Huxtable presidency wish fulfillment syndrome.

But the American people, bless their hearts, are now starting to see the big E on the eye chart. Of course, our collective nose is almost touching the big E on that eye chart, but we can at least see it now. The doctor has been most encouraging.

We have the AP scandal. We have the James Rosen scandal. We have the IRS scandal. We have the Benghazi scandal. We have reports waiting in the wings that these scandals are going to go much deeper, and that a couple more volcanoes may erupt any time now. And the reason we now have these scandals functioning as real scandals is that the mainstream media — fully complicit in helping maintain a purblind populace the last four years — has by some act of God awakened. This doesn’t make them virtuous, but it does make them interesting.

One of the central things this means is that we should be glad that Obama won re-election — this may well in retrospect be a profoundly merciful kindness from God. God draws straight with crooked lines. Obama is a Chicago thug and Romney appears to be a nice man, but they are both of them statists. Statism is always death, whether or not there are smiley faces at the top, and it needs to be discredited in real time, by those running it. And who better to discredit something than the discreditable?

Statism is thuggery, and I prefer my thuggery be run by actual thugs. It helps to concentrate the mind.

Posted in: Culture and Politics, Politics

Sitting on the Kitchen Floor

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 10:52 pm / 9 Comments /

All right, so if you come here often, you may have noticed things look a little bit different. I just moved from Joomla to WordPress, and boxes are still everywhere. Please pardon the clutter, especially in the categories over on the right. I am still learning the tags thing, and not very well I might add. But the best way to make sure a move like this happens is just to do it. So here we are, eating pizza and sitting on the kitchen floor.

Comments should be much easier for you to make now, and there will be other benefits as well, which I will announce as they get figured out.

Posted in: Getting By With a Little Help for My Friends, Shameless Appeals