The average person in America can sense that something has changed profoundly in the era since Obama won his second term. They might not be sure what it is, how to describe it, or what to do about it, but they know it’s there. While the market for denialism and business as usual is still big, it’s shrinking by the day as people look for ideas that will actually help them figure out how to live in today’s cultural moment.
The Three Worlds, Once Again
Yoram Hazony and the Conservative Life
There was a time when politics was understood not simply as the maneuverings of special interest groups seeking power, but as a way of talking about the best ways for human beings to live together in the world. Yoram Hazony’s new book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, is firmly situated in this older understanding of politics. It is also a brilliant, moving, and compelling account of what it means to be a conservative in today’s world
Protestant Politics and Natural Law
Whatever its genesis and cause—some suggest Karl Barth’s infamous “Nein!” to Emil Brunner—Protestants largely abandoned the natural law tradition sometime amidst the tumultuous twentieth century. It should be noted that this abandonment conspicuously coincided with the advent of a positivist Supreme Court led by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and his militant campaign from the bench to detach law from a “brooding omnipresence in the sky.”
Why Protestants Need Natural Law
Protestants can and should use natural law arguments to help society pursue and protect the common good of all people. By pursuing and protecting the common good of society, peace in the earthly realm is promoted and protected. This allows for the freedom peacefully and publicly to present the Gospel to all men, which all Christians should desire. As such, natural law can be used not only to promote civil goods, but also eternal good.
Church
Protestants can and should use natural law arguments to help society pursue and protect the common good of all people. By pursuing and protecting the common good of society, peace in the earthly realm is promoted and protected. This allows for the freedom peacefully and publicly to present the Gospel to all men, which all Christians should desire. As such, natural law can be used not only to promote civil goods, but also eternal good.
Bruce Gordon’s biography of Zwingli is an informative, well-written, and thought-provoking source for contemporary reflection, for its historical interest, but also for the issues it forces aspiring reformers in the present day to grapple with as we partner together to patiently preach and prayerfully work toward a church and society that honors God.
Today’s tendency to find our identity in our own experience and achievements contrasts with the New Testament and the ancient martyrs, who in confessing Christianus sum, found their ultimate identity not in their name or history but in the name and history of the Christ, which became theirs through Word and Sacrament.
What is offered in this book . . . is not care aimed at growth; it is more like the palliative care offered to a hospice patient. It is care when there is no hope for a cure. It is care for those who have been judged to be dying and beyond help. The best it can offer is kindness and pain relief, coupled with the hope that one day soon it will all be over.
Culture
The average person in America can sense that something has changed profoundly in the era since Obama won his second term. They might not be sure what it is, how to describe it, or what to do about it, but they know it’s there. While the market for denialism and business as usual is still big, it’s shrinking by the day as people look for ideas that will actually help them figure out how to live in today’s cultural moment.
Let the reader understand: although the first sip of deconstruction and postmodernism will taste like mastery and liberation, relativism and nihilism are waiting for you at the bottom of the glass.
As a magisterial Protestant, I warmly welcome Catholic skeptics of liberalism into a shared project of renewing the common good and the conscience, through respect for natural law and constitutional liberty; but let us call this project what it is: political Protestantism.
If restlessness was, as historian Paul Johnson notes, a defining feature of our post-revolutionary sense of national self, it culminated in the twentieth century’s alienated metropolitanism, and while the passenger train provided the gift of democratized transportation it also fragmented human interaction.
Family
When I began my academic career, traditional Christian teachings on sexuality were embraced by the majority of my evangelical students even if they often struggled, as I did, to live up to them. That no longer appears to be the case.
Marriage and family life may be the arenas of human life where the ongoing work of sanctification plays out most vividly. They cannot make human beings holy, but they open the human heart to accept God’s grace and to understand it.
One of the core insights of From Tolerance to Equality is the way in which the homosexual acceptance movement presented itself as a struggle by an oppressed underdog against social injustice even though the core of its support came from corporations, government bureaucracies, the wealthy, and the powerful in society rather than the working classes and politically marginalized.
Many Christians, rightly concerned about the state of society, fail to begin in the very place where they can actually have a significant impact: their own homes. If we cannot get our homes in order what makes us think we will ever be able to get our communities, states, and nations in order? Even more importantly, of course, the eternal well-being of our children is at stake.
Society
There was a time when politics was understood not simply as the maneuverings of special interest groups seeking power, but as a way of talking about the best ways for human beings to live together in the world. Yoram Hazony’s new book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, is firmly situated in this older understanding of politics. It is also a brilliant, moving, and compelling account of what it means to be a conservative in today’s world
Baptists will also be faced with very real questions about who will best represent them in the public square on something as straightforward as abortion. Like it or not, abortion is the area where those who hold the keys to institutional power in the SBC have decided to double-down in defying the will of the messengers.
The view of politics I am promoting here does not mean that the ends justify the means. No; but we need to be clearer about the proper ends of political action. Again, our political stances should not be developed, articulated, and pursued primarily in view of minimizing offense so that the gospel can be heard.
When a problem is posed—for DiAngelo the key issue is race or skin color, but no real solution is offered, we have a recipe for cultural disaster and chaos. It is—in a sense—bad news with no good news whatsoever. Even through DiAngelo’s understanding of the problem is not as deep as Augustine’s, there is no meaningful solution whatsoever.
State
Whatever its genesis and cause—some suggest Karl Barth’s infamous “Nein!” to Emil Brunner—Protestants largely abandoned the natural law tradition sometime amidst the tumultuous twentieth century. It should be noted that this abandonment conspicuously coincided with the advent of a positivist Supreme Court led by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and his militant campaign from the bench to detach law from a “brooding omnipresence in the sky.”
The sects and factions that dominated the socio-political life of the early republic were predominantly of Protestant heritage. Their theological commitments, for better or worse, conditioned the early character and trajectory of the nation. Any who deny this are simply not paying attention to the historical data.
Much as modern secular scholars have tripped over one another in their eagerness to try and complicate the historical record of the role of religion in the American Founding, clinging like drowning men to the corpse of Thomas Jefferson as their beloved apostle of reason, the verdict of history is fairly incontestable.
While Divided We Fall is surprisingly (and commendably) critical of the left, it also reveals that French is likely to dismiss any meaningful countermeasures by conservatives as manifestations of paranoia and delusion. To acknowledge conservatives’ grievances and fears as fundamentally legitimate, after all, would be to give up on the established order for which French has become a self-appointed guardian.