A Lop-Eared Son of a Sea Cook

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Introduction

Some have raised a question about the propriety of my Haman letter at such a time as this. The question is whether we really need to debate this Jew thing during this season of Christmas. Don’t we have better things to do during this Advent season of preparation?

The answer is no. We don’t. We are not just supposed to celebrate the fact that Christ came. We are also supposed to celebrate why He came. What was His purpose, what was His intent? Christ took on a body so that He could die, and He died so that He could slay the enmity between Jew and Gentile. “And that he might reconcile both [Jew and Gentile] unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby” (Eph. 2:16). He came to put an end to this nonsense.

But remember, such enmity only ceases in Christ. Unbelieving Jews must come to Christ. Unbelieving Jew-haters must come to Christ also. Put it all down. Come to Him.

The Sin of Noticing

The protest in response is that “noticing” is not the same thing as “hating.” That is quite true. Noticing is not the same thing as hating. Because it is not the same thing as hating, and because hating doesn’t ever like admitting what it is doing, it will often seek out a more acceptable verb to hide under.

Commenting is not the same thing as complaining, and so more than a few grumblers maintain that all they are doing is commenting. Admiring is not the same thing as lusting, and so more than a few lecherous thoughts have taken refuge under the gauzy film of art appreciation. Prayer requests are not the same thing as gossiping, and so more than a few wagging tongues have managed to work the new receptionist for Mr. Jones into a form of prayerful solicitude for Mrs. Jones. Don’t ever assume that sin has scruples about lying. “However bad sin is, you can always count on it to tell the truth!”

All of this is comparable to what goes on with the sin of empathy. For some, it is just a synonym for sympathy, and so nobody should be worried about it. That’s the innocent part. But untethered empathy is destroying the Western civilization, doing so as we speak. To use a phrase from William James, every ideological battle involves a “scramble for the good words.” Empathy doesn’t sound all that destructive because sometimes it isn’t, and this makes it all the more usable to those forms of empathy that are corrosive.

Take Israel, for Example

Should it be possible to believe that the interests of Israel and the interests of the United States don’t cohere automatically without being accused of being an antisemite? Of course. I believe that. Do you think it is possible to support ending the category of dual citizenship without being antisemitic? Sure thing, and that would include me also. Is it possible to pray for the conversion of the Jews without being antisemitic? Certainly, the ADL notwithstanding. Jesus didn’t tell us to “disciple the nations, except for the Jews.”

And so “noticing” doesn’t sound so destructive because there are numerous occasions when it isn’t. Ah, but what about all the ways in which it is? Precisely because noticing is actually fine, the kind that is not fine always wants to hide there.

How do you tell the difference? One good way is that when you make this fundamental distinction between fine noticing and not-fine noticing, and the person you are talking to absolutely refuses to acknowledge that you have made any such a distinction, claiming instead that your position is that all noticing of any kind is evil, then you are clearly talking to someone in the grip of the sin of noticing. You can see it clearly in my other examples. “Yes,” you say, “art appreciation is very important. But we must also take a stand against pornography.” If the response to this is that you are the declared enemy of all art, then you are talking to someone who is defending pornography.

Just as the problem is not vanilla empathy, but rather untethered empathy, so also the problem is not vanilla noticing, but rather malicious noticing, envious noticing, and a refusal-to-listen-to-reason noticing. An example of such a refusal to listen is thoughtfully provided to you in the first paragraph of the next section.

We Piped But You Would Not Dance

A true sign of fanaticism is when someone cannot afford to let you agree with them. After I posted my fictional letter regarding Haman last Monday, the spewing began, accusing me of slobbering all over the Internet on behalf of muh precious Talmudic Judaism. This is the designated talking point apparently. And so I tweeted out a chain of quotes from my book American Milk and Honey. “Replacing the Temple system with the tradition of the elders resulted in what might be called the triumph of Pharisaism, and the Talmud is the monument to that triumph” (AM&H, p. 49). “Indeed, the Talmudic traditions of the elders were the reason why Jerusalem was judged so severely” (AM&H, p. 50). But the talking points continued on merrily, treating my critiques of the Talmud as defenses of it. As Jesus noted once, responding to a similar frame of mind, wisdom is vindicated by her children (Matt. 11:19).

But instead of answering the arguments, the swarm continues to treat me, to borrow a phrase from Wodehouse, as the lop-eared son of a sea cook. That is, as one who needs not be answered.

Another sign that malice is in full control is that as long as the malice is given free rein, contradictions don’t matter. Some people hate Ashkenazi Jews for lying about their fake connection to the stock of Abraham, and also because they killed Jesus. But how does that work? They are uniquely evil because they are the biblical Jews and they are also uniquely evil interlopers who have no connection at all to the biblical Jews. So which is it? The answer frequently comes back as the equivalent of, “That doesn’t really matter, just so long as we are allowed to hate them.”

The Persian Setting

I chose the setting of Esther for a reason. The Hebrews certainly had regular enemies in the form of Pharaoh early on, and the Philistines later on. But the structure and outlines of antisemitism first appear in the Persian empire. By that point you have a dispersed people with a distinct identity, in a clear minority, and yet highly successful. Those are the sociological ingredients. That is the recipe, and the same kind of thing always happens, covenant people or no covenant people. Think of the Chinese in Malaysia.

Mordecai and Esther and the Jews of their generation were covenant-keepers, and God blessed them. Unbelieving Jews in the Christian era have often been in the same sociological situation, with similar challenges, but without the covenant protections of Jehovah. But the fact that their unbelief prevents an exact parallel for them with Mordecai and Esther does not prevent a different sort of unbelief from creating an exact parallel with Haman. As we can see around us.

Although Haman had tremendous blessings, this did not keep him from being riddled with envy and hatred. His hatred of Mordecai soured the honors he thought he was getting. And his wife and friends egged him on, encouraging him to build a gallows for Mordecai, acting kind of like all your bros in that Signal chat. This particular sin is invariably invisible to itself, blinded by envy, malice, rivalry, and conceit.

The Duty of Revisionists

When you do revisionist history, as I have done on more than one occasion, you need to be aware of a few things. One is the prospect of persuading people who will come to hold your views, and for basically the same reasons. Great, and that was the point, right? But another is the prospect of attracting people who want to shanghai your position in order to support ideas you don’t agree with at all.

For example, my work in Black & Tan is a revisionist work regarding antebellum slavery and the War Between the States. I had wanted people to understand that there were reasons why the balance of power between the states and the central government had been reversed, with a terrible impact on issues such as abortion and same sex mirage, and how that whole convoluted period of 19th century turmoil should have been addressed in a strictly biblical manner. After all, the Scriptures contain abundant material on dealing with slavery. However, the inerrantists among us couldn’t be bothered.

But I also knew that a position such as mine would attract people with far less savory motives, those being kinists and so forth. That is why a book like Skin and Blood was necessary. My first duty was to make my point. My second duty was to profoundly disappoint those who would distort that point, twisting it to line up with their own envious discontents.

Those who want to discuss the official narrative of WW2 are cordially invited to be my guest. That whole topic is fair game. Why wouldn’t it be fair game? It was a huge war, with lots of moving parts. But if you are going to do that, you need to be ready to disappoint the malevolent, who are sure to show up.

Danger Signs

Legitimate noticing sees that the Talmud contains some vile stuff. It can also recognize that some Jews are neck deep in bad deeds. And so on.

So what makes it malicious or self-serving “noticing?” Whenever someone points out a Christian sin, or a white sin, or a Euro-sin, or a Western sin, and the comeback is that the Jews are “behind all that,” what you have is blame shifting, pure and simple. When someone argues that Jewishness is a trait that not even baptism can deal with, you are dealing with a problem case, and probably a head case also. When anyone is interested in rehabing Hitler and the Nazis, you are not dealing with someone who is intellectually serious.

You can tell that someone has an axe to grind when Jews only do wrong, and he can’t acknowledge the good and valuable contributions they’ve made to society. Or, if he grants the productive contributions they have made, it is reckoned to be part of their devious plans for hiding their evil conspiracies.

You are dealing with an ideologue of ethnicity if he argues that white people sin because they are “only human,” descended from Adam. In this world, black people are also descended from Adam, but they have an additional problem in that they have another layer of sins they commit simply because they are black. And the Jews are also descended from Adam, but in addition they have a whole array of sins that they commit simply because they are Jews. When I say this, and the reply comes that that the Cretans were susceptible to certain temptations simply because they were Cretans, and that Scripture allows us to generalize about ethnic or cultural groups in this way, I do grant the point. But then I would ask this person what temptations and sins he struggles with simply because he is white. The answer will be something along the lines of um or errrr.

I would start by nominating this particular ethnic conceit. That has been a troublesome one for centuries.

I am reminded of Ambrose Bierce’s definition of a Christian—one who believes the New Testament to be a divinely inspired book, admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

The Motte and Bailey Aspect of All This

The Motte and Bailey fallacy is an informal fallacy in reasoning, named after the layout of a medieval castle. At the center of the layout is the motte, a tower or citadel that is formidable and easily defensible. The perimeter of the layout is the bailey, much more difficult to defend, but something which the defenders wish to hold. The informal fallacy is in operation when someone says something inflammatory which causes people to attack the bailey. The outrageous statement is the bailey. Under the press of fighting, the defenders are driven back to the motte, a version of the inflammatory statement, only now it is phrased in a much more reasonable way. Qualifications are given. The defenders drive the attackers off, ha! After this is accomplished, the defenders act as though their successful defense of the motte was also a successful defense of the bailey. Still with me?

Believe it or not, some people have argued that I do this. They believe I say things that get people riled up (the bailey), and then the following Monday I post a lengthy response that is filled with sweet reason (the motte), and then by Thursday I am standing on the bailey again, making faces at the passers-by.

The first thing to note is that it is an informal fallacy, meaning that there are times when it is not a fallacy at all. The ad hominem, arguing “to the man,” instead of to his argument is also an informal fallacy. But there are times when the reliability of the testimony rides on how reliable the person is. It is not a fallacy when an attorney successfully impeaches a witness. The same thing is true with this informal fallacy. Someone could say that Paul says that Cretans are evil beasts, etc. (bailey), but then moves on to tell Titus that it is possible for them to become sound in the faith (motte). That is true enough, but I don’t think Paul was guilty of reasoning poorly.

Say that I wrote somewhere that I thought that “some Bernie supporters were retards.” Say that people go up in a sheet of flame because I used the word retards, and so they missed the fact that I also said some. They accuse me of saying that all Bernie supporters are retards, but when I point out the some, this is not me falling back to defend the motte. This would actually be a continuation of the defense of the bailey.

But a good example of the fallacy in action as a fallacy would be when someone says something outrageous like “the Holocaust was that time when Jews were made to do manual labor, and so they claimed it killed them.” That is a provocation, and all sensible people storm the bailey. And then the person says, “what? what! All I am doing is noticing discrepancies in the official narrative. Do you not think it possible that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was less than 6 million? Could it not have been 5.2 million? You pastor of aging boomers, you.” Well, yeah, it could have been 5.2, but that is not what you said.

This would be the motte and bailey in an almost pristine form.

Chesterton’s Fence

The rule of Chesterton’s fence is that you should not be allowed to take down a fence until you can explain why it was put up in the first place.

I hold to the classic, Reformed understanding of Romans 11, and have just turned in a manuscript to Canon for a small book on the subject. The central point is not to show that the interpretation is correct (although it is), but rather to show that this interpretation has been the mainstream Reformed understanding from the 16th century on. Those who have adopted the preterist view of Romans 11 have departed from this tradition. The preterist view is that Paul’s prediction of a regrafting of Israel into the olive tree was fulfilled in the first century.

The fact that they differ with the Reformed consensus doesn’t make it right or wrong, but it does mean two things.

This traditional interpretation has been a Chestertonian fence against antisemitism in the Reformed world, and has been serving that function ably for centuries. Those who have a preterist (and pretty novel) view of Romans 11 have a consequent responsibility to replace the fence with something else. If they can’t see their way to . . . I had almost said “agree with the apostle” . . . to hope for a future restoration of Israel, they have a responsibility to see that the work of the fence still gets done.

Seriously, this is why it was really good that men who do take a preterist view were willing to sign the Antioch Declaration. I am referring to men like Uri Brito and Peter Leithart. The Declaration is not as good a fence as Romans 11 is, but it is a good fence.

Another good (chain link) fence is this recent statement on Natural Affection. I signed it yesterday, and was grateful to see that Joel Webbon signed it also. This is a clear and public statement of the kind that we were desiring, and I am thankful to see it. It is a decent fence also.

Noticing and Pattern Recognition

Noticing is an exercise in pattern recognition. “Have you noticed the last names of all the people who . . .”

Okay, but are we allowed to notice also? Yeah, so there are a lot of bankers with last names like Abrams, Adelmann, and Aronowitz. And yes, there are a lot of dispensational boomer pastors who have taken tours in the Holy Land, and who have seen the Valley of Elah from a bus. Go ahead, notice that too.

But what happens when we notice that there are a lot of millennials who think that Twitter is real life? Who think that exegetical arguments can be answered with eye roll and face palm gifs? Who believe that ministry validation comes in the form of likes, clicks, shares, and traffic? Who have come to think that they are online savvy because they grew up in it, but are apparently still unaware of the fact that the algorithms are feeding them lots of flammable material to react to?

A Gospel Conclusion