Month: December 2008

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Knight in America

I had a great ten days in the US. It started with the SBL at Boston, bumping into the usual serendity of people – Tom Wright, Neil MacDonald, Doug Campbell, Alan Garrow, Mark Elliott, caught up with Murray Rae, roomed with Luke Tallon and Dan Driver and met some of their talented St Andrews mates. Lots of theological exegesis going on: I was impressed by Edith Humphrey and then by Peter Leithart on typological exegesis of the Book of Ruth. Ephraim Radner was there but gave me the slip.

Then on to Justyn Terry at Trinity Evangelical School for Ministry at Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving. The college was quiet so didn’t get to meet local heroes Bill Witt or Leander Harding, but I’m hoping they will invite me back. We went to service for Pittsburgh’s 250 year anniversary at the Cathedral Church with Bishop Bob Duncan, apparently not ‘deposed’ so no unseemly fight between bishops for the throne. From Justyn’s account both sides of the Episcopalian ruck seem to understand the Church as a corporation, with Presiding Bishop as CEO, bishops as the branch managers that can be sacked – so the churches, that is, actual Christians, would then be employees perhaps, or consumers? A properly ‘episcopalian’ church would understand that a bishop is king in his own diocese, his relationship with the people of the church in his city indissoluble, so that any other jurisdiction such as province or national church is not higher but simply honorary. Anyway, a wonderful time with the Terry family, while writing my piece for Princeton

Then Princeton and the new Institute for Theological Inquiry which had set us the task of talking about Covenant and the Human Future. Supper and (Episcopalian) Church with the Jensons. I was crushed to find that Jean Bethke Elshtain had withdrawn: her vast output anticipates most of my proposal. I want to produce my theological economics book along with new stuff, on the long-term political-and-demographic result of the dissolution of marriage, which Allan Carlson of the Howard Center is doing, as is Elshtain. A very mixed but also quite elderly company, Darlene Weaver and Gerald McDermott the exceptions, and one of the rabbis one was certainly impressive, but it is not easy to see what will emerge from this. Saw a lot of Rusty Reno, who was being extra-irenic and refused to reveal the identity of Spengler, my new hero, and on to a Madison symposium chaired by Robert George on Eric Cohen’s In the Shadow of Progress

Why are the wealthiest people in human history the least likely to want children? What kind of civilization will we become if we seek cures for the sick by destroying human embryos?

Also found Ben Myers, who has been working away on the Jenson book after all, I was very relieved to find. All in the US were very relaxed about political and economic developments, but here it feels as though we are about to disappear into the maelstrom, so not at all relaxed, but dithering between continuing the effort to interest London diocese clergy in their faith while working towards a marriage institute, and running away to Scottish island monastery.

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A long sea change in culture

The times dictate that we strive all the more diligently to emphasize the unchanging teachings of the creeds and the longstanding moral consensus of the church on matters under demonic seige these days: nothing less than the abolition of man seems underway, though we know that that project ultimately is doomed.

We also know that Christians around the world are being persecuted and that we must stand in solidarity with them. Whether persecution reaches those who do not expect it or not remains to be seen. We can only be ready.

It is all too apparent that a long sea change in culture – primarily in the concept of “family” broadly understood (i.e., sex, marriage, procreation, child-rearing, education, etc) – has rendered much (not all) of the church’s witness in the West anemic and hardly fruitful, because so many have gone along with much of it by slow degrees over many decades. What is the real difference between a typical Christian and a comfortable secularist American? And beyond this, in some cases the witness in some “churches” has really become anti-christ, apostate.

Mere Comments

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Soft Jihad and Libel Tourism

Most Western governments appear to have forgotten simple political truths which the Islamic challenge should have reinforced. Among these truths is that the principles of the free society require toleration of the tolerant, but demand that intolerance be shown towards those who not only reject such free society’s values but look forward to the day when they are brought down. If civil society is to be upheld and protected from pluralist dissolution, the obligations of the citizen, whether indigenous or incomer, must also be accorded parity of status with claims of rights and be enforced, in the interests of all.
David Selbourne

For those, like me, who have only recently become aware of the terms, let alone begun to understand them, they refer to the increasing use of the British (and American – though without so much success) law courts, by individuals like Saudi businessman Khalid Bin Mafouz who use libel law to stifle publication of books or articles that investigate the links between gulf oil money and terrorism.

The clearest recent British example of this was the law suit against Cambridge University Press which resulted in the removal from the bookshelves of Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World by J. Millard Burr and Robert Collins. CUP issued a full apology to avoid a suit.

Sean Oliver-Dee at Lapidomedia

We should be clear that you don’t overcome resentment by feeling guilty, or by conceding your fault. Weakness provokes, since it alerts your enemy to the possibility of destroying you. We should be prepared to affirm what we have and to express our determination to hold on to it. That said, we must recognize that it is not envy, but resentment, that animates our foes. Envy is the desire to possess what the other has; resentment is the desire to destroy it. How do you deal with resentment? This is the great question that so few leaders of mankind have been able to answer. But we are fortunate in being heirs to the one great attempt to answer it, which was that of Christ. You overcome resentment, Christ told us, by forgiving it. To reach out in a spirit of forgiveness is not to accuse yourself; it is to make a gift to the other. And it is just here, it seems to me, that we have taken the wrong turn in recent decades. The illusion that we are to blame, that we must confess our faults and join our cause to that of the enemy, exposes us to a more determined hatred.

Roger Scruton The Defence of the West: How to Respond to the Islamist Challenge (downloadable Word doc)