God considers us to be worth more than many sparrows (Matt. 10:31). As Joe Rigney reminds us, or will remind us when the book comes out, this is an exhibition of what philosophers call proportionate regard. God cares more for how we are decked out than how the lilies are (Matt. 6:30). At the central point of comparison, this is better than that.

That is to say, everything else being equal, mutatis mutandis, this is better than that. But what do we do when everything else is not equal? We are to conduct thought experiments that reveal our desire to grow up into maturity. We hold variables in abeyance for the sake of wisdom; we don’t throw the variables out.

Our perennial temptation is to try to freeze time, elminate all variables, so that we may then compare one frozen thing to another, in order that we may pronounce which one is better in some sort of fixed sense. Thus, to take an absurd example, for People magazine to pronounce somebody, out of a pool of billions, the “sexiest man alive” is not just a silly mistake. It is infantile, a revolt against maturity. But we do it with all sorts of things. But this is like listening to Beethoven’s Fifth, and pronouncing one note played by the second violinist the “most exquisite moment of the evening.” Really? Listen to yourself.

We must imitate God as we look up to Him. In this regard, we must look up in imitation of how He looks down. I need to think that people are more valuable than sparrows also — but I must do it in context.

I have argued before that we must learn to evaluate and appreciate all the gifts we have in the world around us, and after evaluating them, arrange them in a hierarchy, with God occupying the appropriate place of all honor in that hierarchy. We honor God by whether we place Him at the apex of the hierarchy of all things — which is not at all the same thing as eliminating the hierarchy of good and glorious things so that they might not be a distraction to us in our worship of Him.

When we look around us at a world full of stuff, and then some other stuff, and then some more stuff, all of which is not God, we can go one of two directions. We can arbitrarily select one ore more of these things to make an idol, or we can look at every last one of them as a potential recruit for the choir we are putting together in order to sing God’s praises. I am no idolater if I am singing shoulder to shoulder with all these others.

Praise Him . . . sun and moon.
Praise Him . . . roly poly bugs.
Praise Him . . . Bach cantatas.
Praise Him . . . jazz solos.
Praise Him . . . creepy crawlies.
Praise Him, stippled trout, brinded cows, and dappled things.
Praise Him, deep water, where no light comes.
Praise Him, dragons on the mountain.
Praise Him, fine reduction sauce at anniversary dinners.
Praise Him, motocross jumpers.
Praise Him, dignified worship.
Praise Him, exuberant worship.
Praise Him, Memphis ribs.
Praise Him, Memphis blues.
Praise Him, passionate lovemaking.
Praise Him, steak fries and ranch dressing.
Praise Him, water, wine, bread.
Praise Him, rocks of the driveway (Ps. 148, amplified).

One could go on, of course. One could go on and never stop. But when we compare this to that woodenly, as though they were in a marathon footrace, we are missing the symphonic nature of all created reality. You don’t praise God appropriately by sacking all the woodwinds because you think they might someday get above themselves.

So there is a way of taking creation thick that makes it more transparent, revealing God ever more clearly, and there is a way of diluting the creation for the sake of seeing God more clearly that actually makes an idol out of whatever the diluting agent is. God does not seem to think that the creation order obscures Him in any way. Go out and look at the night sky. He slings matter about like nobody else ever did.

But something obscures Him. Yes, that is quite right, something does. As every choir director knows, there is always somebody angling for a big solo part.

A real reformer is not a member of a faction. Men have always tended to divide into opposing factions, whether it is Crips and Bloods or Guelphs and Ghibellines. But factional differences (while very real) don’t go down to the deep foundations. An ancient city is debating whether to defend the city with a powerful navy, or with an entrenched army. The conflict between the factions arguing for both options can be very real, but everyone’s goal is to defend the city.

But real reform is not that which argues left at the crossroads instead of right. Reform opposes the revolution, and the revolution is that “faction” (if we must call it that) that is in full-throated opposition to the way God made the world. In contrast to this, we must have our debates, our conflicts, and even our wars, over differences that rest on the back of enormous commonality. When the question before the house is whether to stop on this island and build our city, or proceed to the next one, or if we shall allow the prince over our territory to be a Lutheran, or if our legislature should be bicameral or not — you can imagine the conflict getting hot.

But the question before the house in our day is whether we are going to live in the world God created, or shall we do otherwise. A reformer takes the affirmative view, and the revolutionary insists that we must, we shall, do otherwise. This puts the whole conflict on an entirely different footing. Who shall, at the end of the day, ascend to the sides of the north?

Think for a moment what sorts of “reforms” the revolutionaries are instituting. They want women to be able to marry women, and men to marry men. They are seriously discussing the minting of a trillion dollar coin backed with the requisite amount of balloon juice. And whether they ever mint that particular coin or not, they are doing the same thing in principle now, to the tune of trillions of metric tons of balloon juice. The Federal Reserve is now being run by non-Euclidians who have been a little too free with the bourbon. They want our philosophers to spin a new world for us that will provide full scope for all of our horny little lusts. And sexbots. Don’t forget the sexbots. They will be squaring the circle next.

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A generation ago “community organizer” Saul Alinsky famously penned his Rules for Radicals, and it is my conviction that those interested in reformation should match his craft and self-awareness without trying to compete with the speed and depth of his revolutionary destructo-vision.

Some revolutionaries are patient and some are not. Gramsci argued for the “long march through the institutions” and Lenin wanted the massive meltdown all at once. Most revolutionaries have what Billingsly described as a “fire in the minds of men,” but some are willing to go for the slow burn. So more than just simple patience is required to distinguish a revolutionary from a reformer.

So what are the basic rules for reformers?

1. Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. Reformation of culture is either a species of salvation or sanctification, and you can’t have either one without Jesus. Secular conservatism will sometimes buy you time, but that is about all it can do — that and lure you into the complacent notion that it can do more than this. Secular conservatism is like trying to use your pocket handkerchief to slow you down after the main chute has failed. The person and work of Jesus is not optional.

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The world is charged with the grandeur of God, as the poet put it, and it will flame out like shook foil. The world is only a set of blinders for the blind. In all other respects, the world is front-loaded with God’s glory. And in order for us to see that glory, really see it, the world has to get thicker — not thinner.

C.S. Lewis, in his wonderful way, shows us this in the second half of The Last Battle, and throughout The Great Divorce. The world really is “transparent,” and it is such through being really solid. The world is that which enables us to see God’s glory, and those who try to help this process along by treating the world as ephemeral and wispy are making a great mistake. The world does not need to be diluted to help God’s glory shine through. Do you glorify the jeweler by smashing the diamonds?

God has chosen how to reveal Himself. The Bible says that the heavens declare the glory of God, not that they obscure it. They obscure it only for the obscurantists.

Thinning out the world, gnostic style, does not glorify God. Focusing on the world as it is, without reference to Him, does not glorify Him. But seeing what He has done, the way He has done it, with matter packed tight, does glorify Him. This is why Christian hedonism doesn’t not climb up to the Beatific Vision by means of a material ladder in order to then kick the ladder away. We will always have bodies, and God will always speak to us in this way. It can only get more solid — in the great words of Newton’s hymn — “solid joys and lasting pleasures, none but Zion’s children know.”

Carl Trueman’s Republocrat was a quick and enjoyable read, but there is not a whole lot to say about it. Just three quick comments here, plus one follow up in the next post on another subject.

First, it is clear that Trueman is largely dealing with a spectrum created by MSNBC and Fox News. And as he points out the various foibles and inconsistencies created by Christians arrayed across that spectrum, he has what you might call an easy target. Rebuke a thoughtless Republican Christian for his doting reliance on the bleached blonde punditry of Fox News, that man can just shrug and quote Scripture. “Hey. Out of the mouth of babes . . .”

Second, the book was astonishingly light on the theological and intellectual case for real conservatism. This was a  rejection of a sophomoric populism, done by someone who seems largely unaware of the vast library of resources at the disposal of anyone who wants a genuine, well-thought-through, conservatism. There are more options out there, more traditions out there, than Marxism, fascism, and robber baron capitalism.

Third, at the same time, it is also obvious that Trueman’s time here in the States has been well spent. Despite his very English exasperation at the Dodge City conservatism he has clearly encountered in many conversations in the fellowship hall after church, it is clear (at least to me) that Trueman is a whole lot more conservative than he thinks he is. What exasperates him ought to, at least for the most part, and it is hard for me to imagine him reading the literature he ought to have read (before writing this book) without seeing his way home. His instincts are right.

In the Introduction to Republocrat, Carl Trueman gives us the thesis of his book straight up front — “that conservative Christianity does not require conservative politics or conservative cultural agendas” (p. xix). When Trueman moved from the UK to the United States, he records that he “suddenly found” himself “to be a man of the left” (p. xxiv). Nevertheless, he remains stoutly opposed to “abortion and gay marriage” (p. xix), and yet he is in favor of “gun control and nationalized health care” (p. xxv). So there you go.

In order to think straight about such things, it is important to say at the outset that Trueman is quite right to insist that conservative Christians ought not to be in thrall to whatever Fox News dubs to be conservative. Everything hinges on what it is you are conserving. Does conservative Christianity conserve theological truths only? Of course not — there are cultural ramifications in what we believe, as Trueman himself notes on the pro-life issue and the gay marriage issue. But by this I certainly do not want to say that conservative theology requires me to sign up for the Fox News brand of conservatism, the one that wants to protect the right of top-heavy starlets to fall out of their dresses, a regular event that to Fox appears constantly newsworthy. They have a theology that comes out of their halter tops.

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Right around the seven minute mark of this video, Kevin DeYoung says something that I would like to take note of. There are many good things said in the course of this clip, especially about the necessity of basic gospel proclamation, and basic disciple-making. That really is foundational. It is fundamental.

But I think Kevin leaves something important out of his statement of the Great Commission. The commission is not to “make disciples” in our modern individualistic sense. That is included, and amen to it. But the commission as the Lord worded it says that we are to disciple the nations. To say that cultural transformation is not part of this is to completely overlook the direct object of that verb. We are to disciple the ethnoi, their hearts, souls, and minds, but also their court systems, and their film industries, and their politics, and their art studios, and their publishing industries. This certainly means discipling their citizens, and we start with that. But it is just the beginning.

If the point of this video is to start with personal evangelism, then absolutely. If the point is to head off those who want to have a bunch of missional stuff that by-passes gospel declaration, then great. But when we make individual disciples, and we move on to the institutional structures of their cultures and societies, we are not changing the subject. We are not moving on to another area. We are not abandoning the Great Commission. We are just getting started.