Blogito ergo sum.

What would Moses, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther, Osama bin Laden, and Josef Stalin have in common?

 They were all leaders of mass movements comprised of The True Believer, as described in Eric Hoffer’s 1951 provocative classic.

 Impossible, you say?  Insane, you say?  Not if taken merely in the psychosocial terms that Hoffer lays out in his book.  He sets forth his working hypothesis and presuppositions in the preface (you should always read the preface!): “All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them…breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.  …There is a certain uniformity in all types of dedication, of faith, of pursuit of power, of unity and of self-sacrifice.  There are vast differences in the contents of holy causes and doctrines, but a certain uniformity in the factors which make them effective.  …However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.”

 Quick critique: One of Hoffer’s basic presuppositions is the moral equivalency of all mass movements.  Again, from the preface (you should always read the preface!): “The book passes no judgments, and expresses no preferences.  It merely tries to explain…”  Of course, this is self-referentially absurd: not judging is itself a judgment, and not preferring is itself a preference.  Complete objectivity and absolute neutrality are myths.  Leveling all mass movements is a reductive fallacy of the first order (I call it “nothing buttery’): reducing Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Communism, and National Socialism all to “nothing but” fanaticism may account for some of their similarity, but it fails to take into account not only the obvious differences in their doctrines, but also the stark differences in their outcomes. 

 However, on a strictly human level (akin to Solomon’s view of life “under the sun” in Ecclesiastes), Hoffer’s analysis is fascinating.  As I read, I found myself applying his characteristics of the true believer to various political, cultural, and religious leaders in the news today.  See if this reminds you of anything in our recent experience: “…extravagant hope, even when not backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring.  For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power – a slogan, a word, a button.  …As for the hopeful…they all proceed recklessly with the present, wreck it if necessary, and create a new world.  …When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed.  For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them.  It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”

 How and why do people become fanatical?  Said another way: what kind of person is susceptible to fanaticism?  This is what Hoffer is trying to explain most of all.  Basically, his answer is: those who are unhappy with their lives as they are and have no hope of changing their situation.  “The ideal potential convert is the individual who stands alone, who has no collective body he can blend with and lose himself in and so mask the pettiness, meaninglessness and shabbiness of his individual existence.”  The two greatest needs of the human psyche – a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose – are unfulfilled in this person, until the mass movement offers them both to him.  Part Two of the book devotes a chapter to each type of potential convert: the poor, misfits (including youth, unemployed college graduates, and immigrants), the inordinately selfish, the ambitious, minorities, the bored, and sinners (more on that last one later).  Do we know any of these in America today?

 What kind of society is a breeding ground for a fanatical movement?  “The milieu most favorable for the rise and propagation of mass movements is one in which a once compact corporate structure is…in a state of disintegration.  …Where the corporate pattern is strong, it is difficult for a mass movement to find a footing.”  So where families, churches, communities, and nations are strong and vibrant, people are satisfied with life, and they are resistant to being radicalized, but where these institutions and cultural bonds are in decay, mass movements may be fomented.  Do we know anything like this in America today?

 Hoffer maintains that the two outstanding marks of a mass movement are “united action” and “self-sacrifice.”  He deals with these two dynamics in detail in Part Three.  Techniques and tools used by movement leaders to unify their followers include: hatred, imitation, persuasion and coercion, action, and suspicion.  Factors promoting self-sacrifice include: identification with the group, make-believe (rituals, symbols, etc.), a coherent system of doctrine (plausible worldview), deprecation of the present in favor of a better future.  On the latter: “Possessed of a vivid vision of past and future, the true believer sees himself part of something that stretches endlessly backward and forward – something eternal.”  Of the fanatical self-discipline and self-sacrifice that these movements demand (and get!), Hoffer, consistent with his premises, gives a psychological explanation: “The self-mastery needed in overcoming the appetites gives [the true believers] an illusion of strength.  They feel that in mastering themselves they have mastered the world.  …It is a device to camouflage their shortcomings.”

 There are several types of leaders who generate, expand, and sustain mass movements.  One type is “the man of words.”  Observes Hoffer: “It is easy to see how the faultfinding man of words, by persistent ridicule and denunciation, shakes prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and familiarizes the masses with the idea of change.  …For it is a remarkable fact that the militant man of words…often prepares the ground not for a society of freethinking individuals but for a corporate society that cherishes utmost unity and blind faith.”  Does this sound familiar?

 Here are a few more random but quality soundbites.  Think about our current religious/political/social milieu and you will find these immensely and intensely relevant.

• “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding.  When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”
• “We cannot be sure that we have something worth living for unless we are ready to die for it.”
• “Every mass movement is in a sense a migration – a movement toward a promised land…”
• “The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.”
• “Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden.  Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual?”
• “There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement that the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.”
• “Glory is largely a theatrical concept.  There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience…”
• “When there is no hope, people…allow themselves to be killed without a fight.  …How else explain the fact that millions of Europeans allowed themselves to be led into annihilation camps and gas chambers, knowing beyond doubt that they were being led to death?  It was not the least of Hitler’s formidable powers that he knew how to drain his opponents…of all hope.”
• “It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.  What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.”
• “It is the true believer’s ability to ‘shut his eyes and stop his ears’ to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy.”
• “There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer.  He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning.  Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hairsplitting, and scholastic tortuousness.”
• “They pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion.  …They are easily persuaded and led.”
• “The atheist is a religious person.  He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion.”
• “It is doubtful whether the fanatic who deserts his holy cause or is suddenly left without one can ever adjust himself to an autonomous individual existence.  He remains a homeless hitchhiker on the highways of the world thumbing a ride on any eternal cause that rolls by.”
• “The fanatical soldier is usually a fanatic turned soldier rather than the other way around.”
• “Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents.”
• “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”
• “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.  Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.  A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.”
• “When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom – freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.”
• “It is probably as true that violence breeds fanaticism as that fanaticism begets violence.  It is often impossible to tell which came first.  …The practice of terror serves that true believer not only to cow and crush his opponents but also to invigorate and intensify his own faith.”
• “The leader…articulates and justifies the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated.”
• “Not all the qualities enumerated above are equally essential.  The most decisive for the effectiveness of a mass movement leader seem to be audacity…”
• “The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves.  Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment.  Whither they are led is of secondary importance.”
• “The true believer is eternally incomplete, eternally insecure.”
• “A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.”
• “The blindness of the fanatic is a source of strength…but it is the cause of intellectual sterility and emotional monotony.”
• “The fanatic is also mentally cocky…  At the root of his cockiness is the conviction that life and the universe conform to a simple formula – his formula.”

 Due to his methodological atheism, Hoffer gets a lot wrong – e.g., he asserts that fanaticism actually originated with Judaism and Christianity, he claims that Christianity was originally radically anti-family, he considers all religions to be irrational at their core, etc. – but he gets enough right that 60-year-old classic is worth a read, for as he says in the preface (and you should always read the preface!), “It is necessary for most of us these days to have some insight into the motives and responses of the true believer.  For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious.  The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image.  And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.”

Today I saw a guy walking – shirtless (that’s important) – north along 56th Street.

Because he was shirtless, his hairy shoulders were on display for drivers and pedestrians alike.  Why did he do that to the rest of us?  It was like an auto accident: you don’t want to look but you can’t turn away…

If I were going to walk along 56th Street – shirtless – I think I’d shave…

This 800-page book is not recommended for individuals with heart conditions, pregnant women, or short people.

 That said, The Making of America should be on the bookshelf of everyone who calls himself a student of American history and every citizen who cares what’s going on in American politics today.

 I spent part of my vacation reading MOA mainly because it will form the basis of the next Tampa 9-12 Project study course, which I will help to teach this fall.  It’s written by the same man who wrote The 5,000 Year Leap: W. Cleon Skousen.  Like a commentary on the Bible, MOA is a line-by-line explanation of the entire U.S. Constitution, including – and this is the best part! – copious notes and quotes from James Madison’s journal record of the Constitutional Convention.  You actually get to read who was for or against each of the provisions, and why they either prevailed or failed.  If you have ever wondered about the meaning of such obscure terms as “habeus corpus” of “ex post facto laws,”  MOA will enlighten you.  If you have ever glossed over such throwaway provisions as “bills of attainder” or “letters of marquee and reprisal,” MOA might cause you to take a second look.  Everything – everything – in the Constitution is there for a reason, and many legal protections we now take for granted were things under which they themselves had suffered and vowed to change for posterity’s sake.  We are the posterity for whom they suffered and labored.

 When I finished MOA, I went back and read through the Constitution.  I felt that I understood it for the very first time.

 MOA has some fascinating and little-known information about the background, meaning, and applications of the various provisions in the Constitution.  For instance, did you know…

• …that the states offered 189 amendments, that Madison reduced them to 17, that Congress approved 12, and that the states ratified only the 10 we now call the Bill of Rights?
• …that the 14-year residency requirement for presidential candidates might very well have prevented Benjamin Franklin from becoming president?
• …that the convention considered a provision in the Constitution requiring 3 presidents from different sections of the country?
• …that there is a second preamble in the Constitution (before the Amendments!) that is rarely printed in copies today?

 Another value of MOA is that it demonstrates the close conceptual ties between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.  I had never realized how many of the “long train of abuses” listed in the Declaration against King George were legislated against in this new country: bills of attainder, quartering troops, titles of nobility, the legislative branch of government (e.g., a parliament) essentially neutered by the executive branch (a king), and many, many more.  I had also never realized how the worldview of the Declaration, including the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and the “unalienable rights…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” laid the groundwork for the Constitution.  In other words, not just in an historical sense, but also in a political philosophical sense, without the Declaration, there would be no Constitution.

 From the “So what?” department, it’s more important than ever for American citizens to have a working knowledge of this foundational document…

• …when Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan declares that she has no knowledge of any natural rights outside of the Constitution itself (i.e., that aren’t granted by the government)…
• …when the Congress passes a law that requires American citizens to enter into private contracts with health insurance companies…
• …when the House Majority Whip James Clyburn announces that Congress is just making up the rules as it goes along…
• …when President Obama announces on national television, “Tomorrow I will meet with BP officials and inform them that they will set aside a fund for the victims of the Gulf Coast oil spill…”
• …when the Department of Justice brings a lawsuit against Arizona for enforcing federal immigration laws, but ignores sanctuary cities for violating those same laws…
• …when the federal government enforces a 6-month shutdown of a private industry (i.e., oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico)…
• …when the Department of Justice drops a lawsuit against voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers in Philadelphia and instructs its attorneys not to bring any more suits against minorities…
• …when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi responds to the question about where the Constitution allows Congress to do certain things, “Are you kidding me?  Are you kidding me?”

 Perhaps the most important feature of MOA is how it highlights the fact that this precise form of federal republic was (at that time) new, radically innovative, and unique among nations in the history of the world.  It was truly “the American experiment.”  The liberty and prosperity that we count our birthright is rare in history, and even in the world today.  The founding fathers themselves were astounded at what came out of the convention, and they considered it a miracle of the first order.  James Madison observed: “They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society.  They have reared the fabrics of government which have no model on the face of the globe…which it is incumbent on their successors to improve and perpetuate.”

 The torch of American liberty has now been passed to us, and only time will tell whether future generations will bless us or curse us for our actions or our inaction.  I dare say that most of us don’t value our freedom nearly enough, or appreciate the high price our ancestors paid to provide it for us, or what it will take for us to keep the torch burning – but I can think of few books more important or more helpful than The Making of America to open our eyes to the preciousness of our past heritage, the precariousness of our future legacy, and the urgency of our present task.

The brouhaha over the Arizona anti–illegal-immigration law (people will have to produce their papers on demand!) seems strange.

We all – including natural-born American citizens – have to “produce papers on demand.”

Case in point: My wife Cindy lost her driver’s license.  (She didn’t lose her driving privileges due to traffic violations; she misplaced the little plastic card.)  In order to replace it, she had to produce the following papers on demand for the DMV: birth certificate, marriage license, Social Security card…and maybe one or two others.  (A Catch-22 footnote: When she called the McLean County Clerk’s office to request a copy of our marriage license, they said she would need to send them…a government-issued photo ID – namely, a driver’s license – which is what she was trying to replace!)

Anyway, we all have to produce papers on demand at one time or another…

So, what’s the big deal…?

Here is a stunning exchange between Senator Tom Coburn and Solicitor General Elena Kagan during the latter’s Senate confirmation hearing:

Coburn: If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day and I got it through Congress and that’s now the law of the land, got to do it, does that violate the Commerce Clause?

Kagan: Sounds like a dumb law.

Coburn: Yeah, but I got one that’s real similar to it that I think is equally dumb. I’m not going to mention which it is.

Kagan: But I think that the question of whether it’s a dumb law is different from whether the question of whether it’s constitutional and I think that courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they’re senseless.

She can’t bring herself to say aloud that Congress cannot tell us what to eat…and she is going to be rendering decisions from the bench of the Supreme Court that affect the lives of all Americans?  Remember, during Kagan’s tenure on the court (likely the next 30 years), they will hear cases on: the healthcare law’s individual mandate, the oil drilling moratorium, Arizona’s anti-illegal-immigration law, financial regulation (now in Congress), campaign finance (now in Congress), cap-and-trade (now in Congress).  Does anybody really think she will vote against anything this rogue federal government concocts?

If Congress and the President decide that…

• we all have to drive GM cars…
• we all have to install solar panels on our homes…
• we can no longer order desserts in restaurants…
• we are limited to one child per family…
• water and electricity must be rationed monthly to American homes…
• the internet must be shut down to private individuals for 3 months prior to all national elections…

Will Elena Kagan stand up and try to stop them?

Thomas Jefferson must be spinning in his grave.

God have mercy on us all.

An illegal alien in Polk County, Florida, who got pulled over in a routine traffic stop ended up ‘executing’ the deputy who stopped him. The deputy was shot eight times, including once behind his right ear at close range. Another deputy was wounded and a police dog killed. A state-wide manhunt ensued.
 
The murderer was found hiding in a wooded area and as soon as he took a shot at the SWAT team, officers opened fire on him. They hit the guy 68 times.
 
Naturally, the liberal media went nuts and asked why they had to shoot the poor undocumented immigrant 68 times.
 
Sheriff Grady Judd told the Orlando Sentinel: ’Because that’s all the ammunition we had…’

If you haven’t heard of the roiling controversy over “the new perspective on Paul,” don’t be alarmed.  (It’s not about the aging Beatle’s recent support of President Obama’s handling of the oil spill, which I also wasn’t alarmed about.  Liberal political views and the onset of senility apparently have similar symptoms.)

 This is about the other famous Paul – the apostle, as in Saint Paul.  It’s about theology, and so it’s one of those things that interest only famous theologians in its initial stages.  Regular folks like you and me know it mainly as one of those distant clash-of-the-titans controversies that causes them to cross doctrinal swords in scholarly books and articles – mostly just to each other, because to the rest of us the positions they take and the points they make seem at once so arcane and ethereal.

 However – and I guess this is the point – what conquers the seminaries in one generation usually marches through the pulpits of the next generation and nearly always occupies the pews of the next.  So while it’s not yet time to be alarmed, we should at least be interested.  When I kept bumping into “the new perspective on Paul,” I thought I’d take a look-see about what might be heading our way.

 So for my birthday, I asked for two books, one on each side of the controversy.  Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision is by N. T. Wright (Bishop of Durham and formerly canon theologian of Westminster Abbey), the leading advocate of the new perspective on Paul (hereafter NPP).  The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright is by John Piper (Pastor of Preaching and Vision at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis), who argues that NPP changes the essential nature of the gospel.

 (On a personal note, this project actually gave me a chance to read something by Piper, whose books are given rave reviews by people I know and respect.  I have probably been the only Christian man in America who had neither attended a Promise Keepers rally nor read a book by John Piper.  Well, now I can check one of them off my bucket list.  Anybody know whether they’re still holding PK rallies?)

 One thing is clear from the titles of the books: the debate swirls around the Christian doctrine of justification.  Talk about arcane and ethereal!  That seems like the stuff of papal bulls and protestant creeds.  Honestly, have you ever used the word, “justification,” when talking to an unsaved person about Jesus?  For that matter, when was the last time you heard the word used by anybody, in any context, inside your church?  Uber-honestly, if you were called on to give a definition of this term or to describe the doctrine it entails, how do you think you would do?  Here’s a thought experiment: stop reading right here (if you even got this far, send me an email, please!) and formulate, either aloud or in writing, your definition/description of “justification.”  …See what I mean?  We regular folks kinda leave this to the professionals, right?

 Here I’ll quickly review the structure and style of the two books and then move on to an ever-so-brief summary of the contrasts of the two positions they stake out.

 Apologies to all of you Piper fans, but Wright wins all of the style points.  His language is livelier, his illustrations more memorable.  A couple of examples… 

• “Go to the blogsites, if you dare.  It really is high time  we developed a Christian ethic of blogging.  Bad temper is bad temper even in the apparent privacy of your own hard drive…  The cyberspace equivalents of road rage don’t happen by accident.” (27)
• “From Romans 6 we leap straight into Romans 8.  For a lifelong exegete to skip over Romans 7 is like a thirsty Irishman ignoring a pint of Guinness.” (233)

Piper’s pastoral concerns connect early with the reader, but are soon swallowed up by the polemical purpose and tone his book required.  In other words, both men write clearly and honestly, humbly and passionately, but Wright’s book just ends up being a more pleasant read.

 Then, too, Wright’s book is organized better.  The first half sets forth the main pieces of his argument (more about that below) – his working conclusions, and then the second half of the book applies these principles to the main Pauline passages that address justification to demonstrate how they make a very plausible reading of those texts (a better reading, Wright would say, than the traditional Protestant ones).  To the trained theologian, this structure might sound like eisegesis instead of exegesis, but we have to give Wright the benefit of the doubt when he says that he didn’t originally force these conclusions into the passages but rather saw them emerge from the passages.  (To be fair, both men claim the latter, and accuse the other of the former.)

 However, “pleasant” doesn’t necessarily equate with “true or helpful.”  (I can’t resist the obvious pun: Just because it’s Wright doesn’t make it right.  Sorry…but not so sorry I’ll try the other one: Is Wright wrong?)  So on to the differences between NPP (Wright) and OPP (Piper).

 Wright claims that the doctrine of justification in Paul isn’t about how we get saved, but rather how we can tell who is saved.  Thus it’s not so much about soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) as about ecclesiology (the doctrine of the church).  It’s not so much about our faith in Christ (appealing to Him to remove our sin from us and us from our sin), but rather about the faithfulness of Christ (in completing God’s saving mission to the human race and to the cosmos through His covenant with Abraham and subsequently through Israel).  It’s not so much about how through some mystical process in which Jesus earned righteous merit (by His sinless life and sacrificial death) and then bequeathed it to us in a legal transaction before God, but rather how He claimed us as His own and then sent the Holy Spirit to change us into people worthy to be accepted by God at the final judgment.  It’s not so much about whether we choose God, but more about how He chose us.  As Wright points out: we’re not the center of the universe; God is.  Our welfare isn’t the central focus of the gospel; His glory is.  (Although our welfare is certainly a happy corollary!)

 Wright claims to have recovered some key elements of Paul’s theology that were more or less neglected by the Reformers in their life-and-death struggle with the Roman church and the papacy: “…Abraham and the promises God made to him, incorporation into Christ, resurrection and new creation, the coming together of Jews and Gentiles, eschatology in the sense of God’s purpose-driven plan through history, and, not least, the Holy Spirit and the formation of Christian character.  …We have not been reading Paul, but only a fictitious character of our own invention, cobbled together from such Pauline jigsaw-pieces as we already know and like, forced together with the power of self-assured dogma, and stuck in place with the glue of piety and pastoral concern.  …For too long we have read Scripture with nineteenth-century eyes and sixteenth-century questions.  It’s time to get back to reading with first-century eyes and twenty-first century questions.”

 I will say that Wright’s descriptions and explanations of NPP in this book resonated well with me at certain points, to wit:

• Integrating the Old and New Testaments.  God didn’t move to Plan B after Plan A failed, but there was always and only one sovereign plan.  The Church is “Israel!”
• Making certain Old Testament images, motifs, and quotations seem less like add-ons or afterthoughts in Paul’s letters (Romans 4, Romans 9-11, Galatians 3).
• Reconciling between Luther’s view of the Law (bad) and Calvin’s view of the Law (good).
• De-emphasizing an individualistic, subjective view of salvation to a more comprehensive, inclusive one (as in all of our worldview talk).
• Making some sense of the quizzical statements throughout the New Testament that, on that final day, God will judge us by our works as well as by our faith in Christ.

 To go into any more detail or depth on NPP would go far beyond the scope of this review, which is far too long already.  To be fair and balanced, let me go to Piper’s criticisms of some of Wright’s positions.

• If the gospel (i.e., justification) isn’t about how a person gets saved, then it’s a death sentence, and thus not “good news” in any sense.
• Wright misunderstands imputation as the theological reality: Adam’s actual guilt is “imputed” to his offspring, and Jesus’ actual righteousness is “imputed” to His followers.
• (See point above): If we do not receive the perfect righteousness of Jesus, we are left to our own devices (works), and we will never have assurance of salvation, because we can never be perfect.  This makes us slaves again to sin, law, and death.
• Wright takes too many liberties with the passages he claims to exegete.  The way he translates some words (e.g., “justification”) and phrases (e.g., “faith in Christ” becomes for Wright “faithfulness of Christ”) may be grammatically permissible, but are they the preferred translations?  The burden of proof is on Wright as the innovator.  (The whole discussion gets pretty technical here: regarding the denotations and connotations of language.  These points are not for the already-drowsy or the faint-of-heart.)

 The two men trade accusations of logical fallacies (e.g., straw men, category mistakes, etc.), and despite their deep disagreement over what they consider to be the very core of the gospel, they conduct themselves as Christian gentlemen (both included a chapter on rules of engagement!).  Even the sarcastic pokes they take at each other are meant more to enhance their own rhetorical effect than to inflict any real psychological or reputational damage on the other.  Neither claims infallibility (Wright says he knows that 20% of his theology is wrong – he just doesn’t know which 20% it is!)  They don’t question each other’s salvation or honesty or integrity or motives or faithfulness (I don’t remember the word, “antichrist,” appearing in either book), and yet they cross swords with gusto.  May their tribe increase.  The church – and the world – would be better for it.  So I conclude with their expressions of mutual respect and common hope for the unity of the church and the glory of Christ.

 Piper: “My conviction concerning N. T. Wright is not that he is under the curse of Galatians 1:8-9, but that his portrayal of the gospel – and of the doctrine of justification in particular – is so disfigured that it becomes difficult to recognize as biblically faithful.  It may be that in his own mind and heart Wright has a clear and firm grasp on the gospel of Christ and the biblical meaning of justification.  But in my judgment, what he has written will lead to a kind of preaching that will not announce clearly what makes the lordship of Christ good news for guilty sinners or show those who are overwhelmed with sin how they may stand righteous in the presence of God.  …He is a remarkable blend of weighty academic scholarship, ecclesiastical leadership, ecumenical involvement, prophetic social engagement, popular Christian advocacy, musical talent, and family commitment.  As critical as this book is of Wright’s understanding of the gospel and justification, the seriousness and scope of the book is a testimony to the stature of his scholarship and the extent of his influence.  I am thankful for his strong commitment to Scripture as the final authority, his defense and celebration of the resurrection of the Son of God, his vindication of the deity of Christ, his belief in the virgin birth of Jesus, his biblical disapproval of homosexual conduct, and the consistent way he presses us to see the big picture of God’s universal purpose for all peoples through the covenant with Abraham…  In this book, my hope…is that Wright might be influenced to change some of what he thinks concerning justification and the gospel…that he might clarify, in future writings, some things I have stumbled over…[and] that those who consider this book and read N. T. Wright will read him with greater care, deeper understanding, and less inclination to find Wright’s retelling of the story of justification compelling.”

 Wright: “It is, after all, an interesting question as to why certain doctrinal and exegetical questions suddenly explode at particular points.  …[There are] cultural and social tectonic plates shifting this way and that.  …Everything is interconnected, and when people feel the floor shaking, and the furniture wobbling, they get scared.  …But sometimes worldview have to be shaken.  They may become idolatrous and self-serving.  And I fear that that has happened, and continues to happen, even in well-regulated, shiny Christian contexts – including, of course, my own.  John Piper writes, he tells us, as a pastor.  So do I.  In fact, he writes as one who, when it all comes down to it, shares my own concerns.  When his book came out, he sent me a copy, and in it he wrote kindly, in his own hand: ‘For Tom, with love and admiration and concern and the desire and prayer that Jesus Christ, the Lord of the universe, who holds our life in his hands, will bring us to one mind for the sake of the fullness of his glory and for the good of this groaning world.’  That is my desire and prayer as well.  …It is because I sense…in John Piper’s work and because, unlike some of my critics…he has been scrupulously fair, courteous and generous in all our exchanges that I write not with a heavy heart (‘Oh, what’s the use?  He’ll never get it.  Let him think the sun goes round the earth if it makes him happy!’) but with the hope that maybe, just maybe, if we take some time, get out some more books and perhaps telescopes, the penny will drop, the ‘aha’ moment will happen, the new worldview will click into place, and all will become clear.  …I hope not just to make things clearer than I have done before, but to see things clearer than I have done before as a result of having had to articulate it all once more.  Perhaps if I succeed in seeing things more clearly I may succeed in saying them more clearly as well.”

 May that be true of all of us.  Regardless of how we set it forth in precise doctrinal formulations, may we spend more time in the Word, more time in prayer, more time in worship, more time in fellowship, and more time in service – said another way, may we be more like Christ – as a result.  I for one am going to spend some time in Romans and Galatians this summer.

When millions of people sneak into the country - mostly poor and unskilled, who have no intention of learning the language, assimilating to the culture, or becoming citizens, who demand rights and privileges merely because they’re here now - it’s not immigration – it’s colonization!

Remember that big ol’ smacker that Al Gore laid on Tipper on the stage of the 2000 Democratic National Convention, right there in front of God and a national TV audience?

Who’d have thunk that, 10 years later, Al and Tipper would be splitting up…and Bill and Hillary would still be goin’?