The cry [of lament] occurs within the context of the yet of enduring faith and ongoing praise, for in raising Christ from the dead, we have God’s word and deed that he will be victorious in the struggle against all that frustrates his desire. Thus, divine sovereignty is not sacrificed but reconceived. If lament is indeed a legitimate component of the Chris tian life, then divine sovereignty is not to be understood as everything happening just as God wants it to happen, or happening in such a way that God regards what he does not like as an acceptable trade-off for the good thereby achieved. Divine sovereignty consists in God’s winning the battle against all that has gone awry with respect to God’s will.

Wolterstorff, “If God Is Good and Sovereign, Why Lament?” Calvin Theological Journal 36 (2001): 42 – 52.

“The various problems that I have so far discussed can best be understood, I think, as failures of discipline caused by a profound confusion as to the functions and the relatives values of means and ends. I do not suggest simply that we fall with the ease of familiarity into the moral expedient of justifying means by ends, but that we have also come to attribute to ends a moral importance that far outweighs that which we attribute to means. As though we have arrived in our minds at a new age of fantasy or magic, we expect ends not only to justify means, but to rectify them as well. Once we have reached the desired end, we think, we will turn back to purify and consecrate the means. Once the war that we are fighting for the sake of peace is one, then the generals will become saints, the burned children will proclaim in heaven that their suffering is well repaid, the poisoned forests and fields will turn green again. Once we have peace, we say, or abundance or justice or truth or comfort, everything will be all right. It is an old dream.

It is a vicious illusion. For the discipline of ends is no discipline at all. The end is preserved in the means; a desirable end may perish forever in the wrong means. Hope lives in the means, not the end.”

Wendell Berry A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (130-131)

1. Does it envisage a change in God or in us? “Some theories of Christ’s saving work seem to suggest that God is angry with us, and what Christ has done is to satisfy God’s anger. But that cannot be right. It is we who need changing, not God. As St. Paul said, ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). It is the world that needs to be reconciled to God, not God to the world.”
2. Does it separate Christ from the Father? “Some theories seem to suggest that God the Father is punishing Christ when He dies on the Cross. I remember as a student in Oxford hearing that great evangelical preacher Billy Graham say, “At the moment when Christ died on the Cross the lightning of God’s wrath hit him instead of you.” I didn’t find that a very happy way of thinking of Christ’s work. Surely we should not separate Christ from the Father in that kind of way, for they are one God, members of the Holy Trinity. As St Paul states, in the words that I quoted just now, ‘God was in Christ’. When Christ saves us, it is God who is at work in Him; there is no separation.”
3. Does it isolate the cross from the Incarnation and the Resurrection? “We are to think of Christ’s life as a single unity. So we should not think only of the Cross, but we should think of what went before the Crucifixion, and of what comes after.”
4. Does it presuppose an objective or a subjective understanding of Christ’s work?“Does Christ’s saving work merely appeal to our feelings, or did He do something to alter our objective situation in an actual and realistic way?”

Remember at all times, that people must always come before ideas and not the other way around.

The Heartless Lovers of Mankind by Paul Johnson

The top choices among evangelicals for the chopping block are economic assistance to needy people around the world (56 percent), government assistance for the unemployed (40 percent), and environmental protection (38 percent). In each of these categories, evangelicals were more supportive of decreasing spending than are other Americans. In fact, evangelicals were more supportive of funding cuts in every area except military defense, terrorism defense, aid to veterans, and energy.

Evangelicals on Economics

One thought. Leithart talks about how education for liberty must be educating to love. We are forming the desires of students to love, and thusly to be truly free. Of course, the object of love is argued (which God is it?). But coming from the Christian perspective, our commands are clear: to love God and our neighbor. If our Framers were correct (and I’m not convinced they were) that church would train our souls (to love God) whereas education would arise from the other parts of life, perhaps the questions should be: what kind of education teaches us to love our neighbor as ourselves? What do you think? What would such an education look like?

If you cannot remember everything, instead of everything, I beg you, remember only this without fail, that not to share our own wealth with the poor is the same as theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life. It is not our own wealth that we are clinging on to, but theirs.

-St. John Chrysostom

HT: Reditus

“Often, to take just one example, a single fragment of an antique statue will be purchased at enormous expense by someone who wants to look at it every day.  He will give it a place of honor in his house and allow those who aspire to be sculptors to copy it.  The sculptors then make every effort to do work comparable to it. Think, on the other hand, of the immensely skillful deeds the history books record for us, deeds done by ancient kingdoms and classical republics, by kings, generals, citizens, legislators, and others who have worn themselves out for their homelands.  These deeds may be admired, but they are scarcely imitated.  Indeed, everybody goes to great lengths to avoid copying them, even if it only concerns and insignificant detail.  The results is not a trace of the classical military and political skills survives…

I do not believe the cause of this is the feebleness contemporary religion has instilled in the world, nor the evil consequences that a supercilious indolence has had for many Christian countries and cities. The real problem is people do not properly understand the history books. When they read them they do not get out of them the meaning that is in them. They chew on them but do not taste them. The result is countless people read them and enjoy discovering in them the great variety of events they record, but never think of imitating them, presuming it would not be just difficult but would be simply impossible to do as the ancients did. As if the heavens, the sun, the elements, human beings had changed in their movement, organization, and capacities, and were quite different from what they were in days gone by.”

Machiavelli’s Discourses I.Preface

It most behoves the honorable race
Of mightie Peeres, true wisedome to sustaine
And with their noble countenaunce to grace
The learned forheads, without gifts or gaine:
Or rather learnd themselves behoves to bee;
That is the girlond of Nobilitie.

But (ah) all otherwise they doo esteeme
Of th’heavenly gift of wisdomes influence,
And to be learned it a base thing deeme;
Base minded they that want intelligence:
For God himselfe for wisedome most is praised,
And men to God thereby are nighest raised.

But they doo onely strive themselves to raise
Through pompous pride, and foolish vanitie;
In th’eyes of people they put all their praise,
and onely boast of Armes and Auncestrie:
But vertuous deeds, which did those Armes first give
To their Grandsyres, they care not to atchive.

So I, that doo all noble feates professe
To register, and sound in trump of gold;
Through their bad dooings, or base slothfulnesse,
Finde nothing worthie to be writ, or told:
For better farre it were to hide their names,
Than telling them to blazon out their blames.

So shall succeeding ages have no light
Of things forepast, nor moniments of time,
And all that in this world is worthie hight
Shall die in darknesse, and lie hid in slime:
Therefore I mourne with deep harts sorrowing,
Because I nothing noble have to sing.

Edmund Spencer. The Teares of the Muses (79-108)

In both of these 16th century works, we hear the same post-Renaissance dirge intoned. The previous period had brought great learning from the Greeks (Constantinople and the Byzantine empire had fallen in 1453), but with it came the scourge of antiquarianism, the habit of ‘great’ men to collect great works of the past for the sake of collecting and the social pride that came with it. This false intellectualism can barely work up the courage of nostalgia, but simply lets the appearance of goodness wash over them. It is the loss of courage, that glorious desire to seek after the great virtu of the past, which is also the root of good education, that is lamented in the above passages. Those who don’t know history may be doomed to repeat it. But those who disdain history, who “Despise the brood of blessed Sapience” (Spencer 72), are simply doomed.

And yet, for these writers, this thought is just the start. For Machiavelli, this Preface gives way to his Discourses, where he renews and refreshes political thought; he takes up the continued work of the ancients instead of simply standing by and letting their statues gather moss (which does mean that at times he radically disagrees with them), and in doing so, writes a work that inspires numerous others (including, for example, the Founding Fathers). Spencer, on the other hand, goes on to write The Faerie Queene, a magnificent tale that continues to spur writers on today (if I’m remembering correctly, CS Lewis held this particular work in very high regard).

Do we memorize scripture or study the Bible to sound good or are we taking up the challenge to live anew the Christian life today? Are we letting history sit there as a trophy in our home or as spur that pushes us to new heights, to new challenges and hopes? As we read above, the tendency to merely collect is ironically the very same one the allows “all that in this world is worthie hight / Shall die in darknesse, and lie hid in slime”.

Scripture tells us the story of how a Garden is transformed into a Garden City, but only after a dragon had turned that Garden into a howling wilderness, a haunt of owls and jackals, which lasted until an appointed warrior came to slay the dragon, giving up his life in the process, but with his blood effecting the transformation of the wilderness into the Garden City.

Note: Ok, to be fair, there were other good ones too.  Seifrid‘s ‘Verbum caro factum est.’ gets closer to what needs to be said than perhaps all of the rest, but is shrouded within the language of theology and, unfortunately, is rarely unpacked in any meaningful way.

This is our festival, this is the feast we celebrate today, in which God comes to live with human beings, that we may journey toward God, or return—for to speak thus is more exact—that laying aside the old human being we may be clothed with the new, and that as in Adam we have died so we may live in Christ, born with Christ and crucified with Him, buried with Him, and rising with Him. For it is necessary for me to undergo the good turnaround, and as painful things came from more pleasant things, so out of painful things more pleasant things must return. “For where sin abounded, grace superabounded,” and if the taste of forbidden fruit condemned, how much more does the Passion of Christ justify? Therefore we celebrate the feast not like a pagan festival but in a godly manner, not in a worldly way but in a manner above the world. We celebrate not our own concerns but the One who is ours, or rather what concerns our Master, things pertaining not to sickness but to healing, not to the first shaping, but to the reshaping.

And how will this be? Let us not put wreaths on our front doors, or assembe troupes of dancers, or decorate the streets. Let us not feast the eyes, or mesmerize the sense of hearing, or pamper the sense of smell, or prostitute the sense of taste, or gratify the sense of touch. These are ready paths to evil, and entrances of sin. Let us not be softened by delicate and extravagant clothing, whose beauty is its inutility, or by the transparency of stones, or the brilliance of gold, or the artificiality of colors that falsify natural beauty and are invented in opposition to the divine image; nor by “revelries and drunkenness,” to which I know “debauchery and licentiousness” are linked, since from bad teachers come bad teachings, or rather from evil seeds come evil harvests. Let us not build high beds of straw, making shelters for the debauchery of the stomach. Let us not assess the bouquet of wines, the concoctions of chefs, the great cost of perfumes. Let earth and sea not bring us as gifts the valued dung, for this is how I know to evaluate luxury. Let us not strive to conquer each other in dissoluteness. For to me all that is superfluous and beyond need is dissoluteness, particularly when others are hungry and in want, who are of the same clay and the same composition as ourselves.

But let us leave these things to the pagan Greeks and to Greek pomps and festivals. They name as gods those who enjoy the steam rising from the fat of sacrificial animals and correspondingly serve the divine with their stomachs, and they become evil fashioners and initiators and initiates of evil demons. But if we, for whom the Word is an object of worship, must somehow have luxury, let us have as our luxury the word and the divine law and narratives, especially those that form the basis of the present feast, that our luxury may be akin and not foreign to the One who has called us.

HT: Kevin Edgecomb

Though we tried really hard to focus on the measuring…

it soon became apparent that our attention was elsewhere.

But can you blame us? She’s just so cute.



First, there’s a great flash presentation made a few years ago to talk about the different plans for reform that were being discussed in Congress.

http://www.slideshare.net/danroam/healthcare-napkins-all

Second, the Kaiser Foundation put out a surprisingly clear video describing the basics of the health care reform law that was put into place.

They also have a great website summarizing and evaluating the health care reform.

Thirdly, for those more interested in the economic side of things and who like reading reports, the Congressional Budget Office has some projections on health care.

For those who’d simply like to understand why our healthcare is unusually expensive, this economist’s series seems helpful.