A great article by Hillsdale College’s current president, Dr. Larry Arnn. He is more charitable to Mr. Obama than qb would have been in writing it. Mr. Obama’s long and never-repudiated associations with Alinsky, Wright, and Ayers, together with his public ruminations on “single-payer” and “redistributionism,” do not permit qb to suspend disbelief as readily as Dr. Arnn has done. Mr. Obama is systematically attempting to remake American self-understanding in his own too-much-liberty-is-politically-inconvenient image.
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Speaking of Hillsdale, qb has been a big fan for a long time and wishes he could afford to send his three boys there. In any case, this month’s Imprimis says that Hillsdale’s Kirby Center will present a web seminar on the Constitution on Saturday, January 30, 2010. The webinar will feature faculty from Hillsdale College and promises to be substantive and inspiring for those who believe in the primacy of ordered liberty as a framework in which both private and public virtue can and should thrive. (As opposed, that is, to coercion, which yields not virtue but something else, more closely akin to compliance.) Check out www.thekirbycenter.org for more details.
qb
qb still remembers what it was like that first time he pushed open the doors to Brown Library at ACU and made his way through the remodeling rubble to the Theology section. It was January 2006, and qb was beginning his seminary career with a one-week inter-term class with the sterile name, “Introduction to Graduate Study.” An old friend from Aggieland, Craig Churchill, was the instructor, a younger man acquainted with unspeakable grief but yet possessed of such kindness, such a deft touch, such great sensitivity…and at the same time so funny and delightful, so humble, so knowledgeable, so competent and gracious.
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The smells that day were the aromas of centuries of pondering, of working with the Text, of working it out in life, of putting it to the test. It was a heady time, an assault on the senses, an overwhelming persuasion that Campbellites (of which I am unashamedly one) are but a tiny school of mackerel in a vast ocean of biblical thought. To walk the Theology stacks in Brown Library – and we’re mindful of how pale a shadow they might be of the truly great libraries at Oxford or South Bend – is to be enlightened: the Bible in its various forms has inspired a truly incredible mass of thought and reflection and argument, all in search of that most elusive quantity, truth. (Pilate wondered what it was, anticipating the chaos that is postmodernism.)
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Truth, Dr. Willard says, is what you run into when you’re wrong. (He is so concerned about practical application!)
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qb has now read a bunch of Bishop Wright. Not nearly all that he has written, but the major books, which probably synthesize, interpret, and apply what he has previously written in countless journal articles. His portfolio, to be sure, is almost inexhaustible. But qb has read a few of his more popular works – Simply Christian, The Last Word, Evil and the Justice of God – and a few of his massive works for academic audiences, The New Testament and the People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God, The Resurrection of the Son of God. There are so many more to read, it seems impossible to take it all in; but by now, the Bishop’s incomparable brilliance is in fairly clear view.
This is an iconoclastic master of biblical study, one on whom many large-caliber guns have been trained as if he were a two-bit heretic. His task, as he sees it, is to read the Bible as it was received by its immediate audiences in history, to soak himself in its best original manuscripts, and to understand the achievement of Jesus and the purposes of God in precisely those historical terms. It gets him in trouble with the Establishment. Frequently. And the book qb is now reading is one of Wright’s most impassioned, most polemical works in defense of what he has found as he explores the caves and canyons of the New Testament. In this work, he crosses swords with the Reformed theologian, John Piper.
He is not fighting for a draw.
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If there is anything in Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision that stands out above the rest, it is how deeply Wright loves, respects, admires, and wishes to emulate Paul, the apostle from Tarsus. (It is not idolatrous. Wright clearly imitates Paul as Paul imitates the Messiah, Jesus.) I have wracked my little brain this evening trying to find just the right verb to express Wright’s posture toward Paul, but I cannot find it. ”Admires” is too distant; “worships” is too obsequious and false. ”Respects” does not go far enough. ”Loves” is certainly true, but it is too ambiguous. But it is clear that, to N. T. Wright, Saul of Tarsus stands head and shoulders over the rest, with the letter to the Romans
[bestriding] the narrow worlds of scholarship and church like a colossus, and we petty exegetes walk under its huge legs and peep about…nevertheless, all roads led to Rome in the ancient world, and all roads in biblical exegesis lead to Romans sooner or later…The problem I now face is of compression and omission: how to squash what needs to be said into the space available without shrinking the argument beyond what it can bear, and how to leave out that for which there is no room – which favorite passages to avoid, which key debates to short-circuit, which supporters not to quote, which opponents not to take on – without damaging the argument I wish to put forward.
Dallas Willard is fond of saying that Jesus “was not only nice, he was brilliant.” His exposition of the Sermon on the Mount proceeds from the assumption that Jesus was a master teacher, a sage whose wisdom bore an almost otherworldly coherence and depth. Wright sees Paul in much the same light.
I don’t know how best to capture Justification. In many ways, it’s strictly inside baseball for the academics and theologians and religious cognoscenti. But I can say this: I am falling in love with Paul all over again. This time, though, it’s different, a new perspective on an old friend and teacher. I have N. T. Wright to thank for it.
qb
Finally, the greatest family ski area in the world is getting some snow. 14 days and counting! qb
For the record, qb isn’t at all interested in the alleged fact of Tiger’s infidelities. It’s not that qb doesn’t have an opinion on’t; it’s just that it’s terribly boring…and inconsequential, certainly for me, and for nearly everyone else, too, if they were honest about it. Tiger’s life does not impinge on mine in the slightest. (Not quite: I do have a couple of sleeves of Nike golf balls that were a gift from my late father-in-law.)
Who cares?
What is fascinating, and indeed hilarious, is how the nabobs of titillation can’t let it rest.
What is even more hilarious, though, is how it brings out the race-hustlers, race-baiters, and race-mongers. Tiger’s not black enough, he’s not Asian enough, he’s not “one of us,” he doesn’t choose the right skin color in the “skanks” (their word, not mine) he chooses to cavort with. He ain’t “down for the struggle” enough.
Who cares?
Only those, it seems, who have a personal and/or occupational stake in ensuring that America’s racial tensions are fomented and preserved. Racism is a potent political currency – just as is the fear of being called a racist. Identity politics moves needles, it moves votes, and it moves taxpayer cash.
When will we move on?
qb
One of the questions that haunts an American patriot has to do with the mathematics of war. At the time of Truman, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were justified in large part on the accounting of human lives saved vs. lives lost, both in raw terms and in terms of American soldiers and Marines vs. Japanese soldiers, Marines, and noncombatants. Back of this whole enterprise is the question: how many _____ lives is one American G. I.’s actually worth? Clearly, the son of an Afghan mother is morally equivalent to the son of an American mother. At the individual level, moral considerations mitigate for a 1:1 equivalence.
But Victor Davis Hanson asks us to consider the cultural dimension and the moral and arithmetic asymmetries that result from it:
Finally and most seriously, I think, there is what I call, for want of a better term, “asymmetry.” Western culture creates citizens who are affluent, leisured, free, and protected. Human nature being what it is, we citizens of the West often want to enjoy our bounty and retreat into private lives—to go home, eat pizza, and watch television. This is nothing new. I would refer you to Petronius’s Satyricon, a banquet scene written around 60 A.D. about affluent Romans who make fun of the soldiers who are up on the Rhine protecting them. This is what Rome had become. And it’s not easy to convince someone who has the good life to fight against someone who doesn’t.
To put this in contemporary terms, what we are asking today is for a young man with a $250,000 education from West Point to climb into an Apache helicopter—after emailing back and forth with his wife and kids about what went on at a PTA meeting back in Bethesda, Maryland—and fly over Anbar province or up to the Hindu Kush and risk being shot down by a young man from a family of 15, none of whom will ever live nearly as well as the poorest citizens of the United States, using a weapon whose design he doesn’t even understand. In a moral sense, the lives of these two young men are of equal value. But in reality, our society values the lives of our young men much more than Afghan societies value the lives of theirs.
Hanson, V. D., “The Future of Western War,” Imprimis 38(11):1-5.
Hanson concedes the moral question at the individual level. But those who declare war are not declaring it at that scale. They are declaring it at the societal and cultural scale of sovereign nations, nations whose attitudes toward the lives of their children are embodied and expressed in the political and cultural values that predominate; and where nations are not involved per se (think al Qaeda, for instance, or Hezbollah) the same calculus applies, perhaps even more self-evidently. We Americans, as a whole, value the lives of our boys and girls more than the terrorists value the lives of their boys and girls.
Food for thought.
qb
It is trite, of course, to say it. Shopworn. Redundant. Banal. Superfluous. But it needs to be said anyway.
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qb cherishes these days with the two younger ones, Silas and Isaac, because Dad still gets to coach them. All three of the boys are athletic and skilled, and over the years their teams have won far more games than they’ve lost. Keeping in mind that half of the teams (and therefore half of the players) that play on any given day will lose, our boys have lived fairly privileged sporting lives. They win…a lot.
Oh, how privilege seems to give way to a sense of entitlement.
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The youngest is on a basketball team that qb coaches, and somehow our team of seven ended up with the better players in the school. So when the P. E. teachers started this year’s school championships, which ended today, four of the boys grabbed one other talented boy and formed a sort of all-star team. Before this morning’s final game, qb overheard one of the P. E. teachers saying today that she had wanted to split them up, but they wouldn’t have any of it. And they breezed through the first couple of rounds, soundly beating all comers.
I suppose I should mention their team name to give you a flavor of what we’re dealing with: the “Chick Magnets.”
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You know what’s coming, don’t you? (Yep, they lost in the final.)
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So here’s why I love defeat:
1. It puts the lie to any sense of entitlement.
2. It is a Darwinian schoolmaster that ruthlessly punishes the one-man show.
3. It debases the superstars and exalts the humble, team-oriented ones.
4. It reminds us that when the competition is past, when the cheers have faded, and when the trophies have gathered their dust, what remains is whatever love has been invested in the friendships.
5. It exposes any feigned respect and synthetic friendliness.
6. It plants the seeds of empathy for the less fortunate, the less skilled, the less gifted, and the oppressed.
7. It fosters contentment and joy over greed and thrills.
8. It challenges our work ethic.
9. It reminds us that even God himself will mock God-given talent if it suits his purposes.
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Character, boys, character.
qb
qb is not sure that we celebrate the world’s more important loss of November 22, 1963. Here’s a sample of his legendary writing:
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Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs; to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual temptation, because we design them for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” them to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there, He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
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RIP, Professor. A year before qb was born, you left us, but you left us richer and better off. And this excerpt grows more poignantly apropos every day.
qb
Here is a beaut. Utterly shameless, if it’s true. In the meantime, perhaps Arizona will bless the Union with a test case for the SCOTUS that will unravel PelosiCare, ReidCare, and ObamaCare. Let us hope so.
qb
Here, in a tightly argued column, is the political case against bringing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terrorists to NYC for trial in the civilian court system. Here are some legal arguments proffered for KSM’s defense. And below is an excerpt – minus the invective for which she is rightly famous – from a blonde lawyerette the liberals love to hate:
Members of Congress have it in their power to put an end to this lunacy right now. If they don’t, they are as complicit in Mohammed’s civilian trial as the president. Article I, Section 8, and Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution give Congress the power to establish the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts and to create exceptions to that jurisdiction.
Congress could pass a statute limiting federal court jurisdiction to individuals not subject to trial before a military tribunal. Any legislator who votes “nay” on such a bill will be voting to give foreign terrorists the same legal rights as U.S. citizens — and more legal rights than members of the U.S. military are entitled to.
At best, it is a case of the president’s brazen negligence with respect to his most solemn responsibility. At worst, it is a willful exercise of…well, qb doesn’t even want to contemplate such a possibility, no matter how plausible it might actually be.
qb
Last week whilst in College Station for some meetings, qb hustled over to downtown Bryan to check in with the good folks at Los Nortenos. The “Brent Averman Special” (see previous post) costs $7.99 now instead of the $1.92 that qb paid when it was a la carte, but the plate is bigger, it still comes out steaming hot throughout, and it tastes as wondrous as it ever did. All of my eating companions loved their Tony’s Specials and the carne guisada.
And no, qb gets no kickbacks or royalties. He pays full price, even when he pays with a credit card.
It’s on S. Main St., across from the LaSalle Hotel.
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For qb’s “Brush with Greatness” file:
This old porch is like a steaming, greasy plate of enchiladas
With lots of cheese and onions
And guacamole salad
And you can get ‘em down at the LaSalle Hotel in old downtown
With iced tea and a waitress, and she will smile every time
Lyle Lovett, “This Old Porch”
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In case you’re interested, the double-meat, double-Death burger at the Dixie Chicken still rocks. Be sure and sweep your billiard table before you play, though…lots of little shards of chalk in inconvenient places, especially around the side pockets and along the rails.
