I've posted some verses in relation to the resurrection on my seminary blog: http://wesleyanseminary.wordpress.com/2010/04/04/blessed-resurrection-day/
Celebrate the resurrection, and anticipate the resurrection of the cosmos!
Sunday, April 04, 2010
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Commanding Heights 1
Over the last few weeks I've been slowly making my way through the superb PBS trilogy called "Commanding Heights." It's about economics in the twentieth century going through 9-11. I hope to finish the final episode in the series tonight. The first episode leads up to the rule of Keynes. The second with the Reagan/Thatcher revolution and the reign of Hayek. The third with globalization.
Very interesting. Very helpful. I may post later when I'm done with the final episode, but I found a number of things striking that I was not fully aware of. One is the extent of socialization of things in Britain and even in America until Reagan. All the more shocking because I was alive at the time and voted for Reagan my first time voting in 1984.
This gives me a little perspective. When I was in high school, still during the cold war in the early 80s, we were required in Florida actually to go through a book against communism. And of course the McCarthy trials were in the 50s against "communists" in America. The perspective is basically that those who cry socialism of Obama's health care bill have no perspective on how much more socialized we were at the very time when we were most decrying communism. It's a little like the complaints about rolling back tax breaks that were only enacted at the beginning of the Bush 2 administration.
We can certainly debate the benefit/harm of doing these sorts of things. It sure looks like history has vindicated Hayek big time on the whole. But those who cry socialism and Marxism have lost complete perspective on what America was like before deregulation in the 80s--when our rhetoric against these things was at its height!
It also seems pretty clear to me that the down side of the Freedman/Hayek approach is the potential human toll. The immediate aftermath of opening up free markets is almost always atrocious for the common person for a few years. I don't have the answers but my knee jerk thought is that it is better to have a longer recovery with less human toll than to have a quick recovery with extreme human loss.
Another thought I have is that the best role for the government in economics fits with my more general sense of the best government as one based on a social contract between the people. We agree to live together in a way that gives each individual maximal freedom while setting up certain rules so that our individual freedoms do not impinge on the freedoms of others. So each is free to practice their religion as long as that religion does not impinge on the freedoms of others. We set up the police and the justice system as a way to guard the rules of the social contract.
In economics, then, it would seem that the best role of government is not "central planning" but a policing role. We let the free market run freely as long as it does not impinge on the basic rules of the social contract. We thus set certain standards of minimum wage and prevent monopolies. We set safeguards against price gouging in instances where crisis prevents competition. The government does not own any business but it regulates them, preferably less than more, but enough to let the free market flow without running over the little man.
However, we cannot view capitalism as an end in itself. Indeed, the goal is the overall health of the society, not at all the enrichment of the most successful. A wide gap between the richest and the poorest instead shows that the system is not working as it is supposed to. The primary goal, since we are talking of a contract between all Americans, is the uplift of the whole society, not the enrichment of a few (which ironically undermines the very social contract itself on which America is founded).
Better for everyone to have more and the richest to have less, but ironically, it is the free market that can best accomplish this. Taxation ironically tends to the opposite result.
Fun stuff.
Very interesting. Very helpful. I may post later when I'm done with the final episode, but I found a number of things striking that I was not fully aware of. One is the extent of socialization of things in Britain and even in America until Reagan. All the more shocking because I was alive at the time and voted for Reagan my first time voting in 1984.
This gives me a little perspective. When I was in high school, still during the cold war in the early 80s, we were required in Florida actually to go through a book against communism. And of course the McCarthy trials were in the 50s against "communists" in America. The perspective is basically that those who cry socialism of Obama's health care bill have no perspective on how much more socialized we were at the very time when we were most decrying communism. It's a little like the complaints about rolling back tax breaks that were only enacted at the beginning of the Bush 2 administration.
We can certainly debate the benefit/harm of doing these sorts of things. It sure looks like history has vindicated Hayek big time on the whole. But those who cry socialism and Marxism have lost complete perspective on what America was like before deregulation in the 80s--when our rhetoric against these things was at its height!
It also seems pretty clear to me that the down side of the Freedman/Hayek approach is the potential human toll. The immediate aftermath of opening up free markets is almost always atrocious for the common person for a few years. I don't have the answers but my knee jerk thought is that it is better to have a longer recovery with less human toll than to have a quick recovery with extreme human loss.
Another thought I have is that the best role for the government in economics fits with my more general sense of the best government as one based on a social contract between the people. We agree to live together in a way that gives each individual maximal freedom while setting up certain rules so that our individual freedoms do not impinge on the freedoms of others. So each is free to practice their religion as long as that religion does not impinge on the freedoms of others. We set up the police and the justice system as a way to guard the rules of the social contract.
In economics, then, it would seem that the best role of government is not "central planning" but a policing role. We let the free market run freely as long as it does not impinge on the basic rules of the social contract. We thus set certain standards of minimum wage and prevent monopolies. We set safeguards against price gouging in instances where crisis prevents competition. The government does not own any business but it regulates them, preferably less than more, but enough to let the free market flow without running over the little man.
However, we cannot view capitalism as an end in itself. Indeed, the goal is the overall health of the society, not at all the enrichment of the most successful. A wide gap between the richest and the poorest instead shows that the system is not working as it is supposed to. The primary goal, since we are talking of a contract between all Americans, is the uplift of the whole society, not the enrichment of a few (which ironically undermines the very social contract itself on which America is founded).
Better for everyone to have more and the richest to have less, but ironically, it is the free market that can best accomplish this. Taxation ironically tends to the opposite result.
Fun stuff.
Friday, April 02, 2010
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Whatever happened to evangelicalism... (7)
In yet another proof of miracles and God's existence, I have finished reading a book, Donald Dayton's Discovering an Evangelical Heritage. Today I read chapter 10, "Whatever Happened to Evangelicalism?" and the Epilogue, "Reflections on Some Unresolved Issues." This book, we remember, came out in 1976.
Here are the previous posts on this book:
Evangelical Heritage
Finney and Weld
Oberlin and Civil Disobedience
Louis Tappan Quotes
Luther Lee and Antoinette Brown
Gospel to the Poor
The Epilogue was enticing because it has stuff I am actually more interested in than what this book covers. Dayton was writing in the wake of the civil rights conflict and the Vietnam War and was trying to justify the social action history of American evangelicalism. My sense is that the current generation of evangelical children are, if anything, focused more on social action than they actually are on personal salvation (although I sense the political climate in relation to the Obama administration, in addition to a generation that was just beginning to look around at the world when 9-11 happened, could actually result in some sort of a reveral of this trajectory--we'll see). In any case, I am much more interested in the history of my own tradition than in recovering a sense of our past social action.
I hope to read through Bebbington next. But I am especially interested in what Dayton calls "two types of Evangelicalism," which I'll call the old Princeton school and the revivalist school. Finney, Dayton says, represents a reaction to the "old Calvinism" of B. B. Warfield and Charles Hodge. The Princeton school opposed the abolitionist and women's rights movement represented by Finney, Oberlin, Wesleyan Methodists, and so forth.
We find Hodge saying things like, "females... are judged... incompetent to the proper discharge of the duties of citizenship." And of abolitionists, that they were "a small minority of the people. They have never included in their ranks either the controlling intellect or moral feeling at the North." Hodge also could proudly say, "I am not afraid to say that a new idea never originated in this [Princeton] seminary."
I am quite happy to say that my Wesleyan roots had nothing whatsoever to do with the likes of Hodge and Warfield. I do not have to be embarrassed by the B. B. Warfields and Charles Hodges of nineteenth century Christianity. They are like those Christians in the 60s who opposed letting African-Americans sit anywhere on a bus or in a movie theater or to use any water fountain or go to any school. These are all on the wrong side of history, individuals who were out of touch with the Holy Spirit.
The nice thing about history, as Gamaliel once reminded us, is that it doesn't care who you are, how much power you have, or how loudly you can shout. History, like truth, simply doesn't care about people's feelings. The Flood comes, some people are saved, some people drown with "Oops" as their final words.
But Dayton also tells of "what happened to evangelicalism," remembering that the majority of the Christian institutions recognized by a magazine like Christianity Today as evangelical have their roots not in the old Princeton type but the revivalist type of evangelicalism. What happened was that "the sociological, theological, and historical currents produced a movement that in many ways stood for the opposite of what an earlier generation of Evangelicals had affirmed. What had begun as a Christian egalitarianism was transformed into a type of Christian elitism. Revivalistic currents that had once been bent to the liberation of the slave now allied themselves with wealth and power against the civil rights movement. Churches and movements that had pioneered a new role for women became the most resistant to contemporary movements seeking the same goals" (134).
Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Seminary left Finney's type of evangelicalism (Gordon was criticized by Warfield in their day) and would eventually follow the Princeton model. Wheaton would go the same way. If Finney emphasized redemption, the Princeton school emphasized sin. Even the Wesleyan Methdodists would be impacted by some of these these forces under the influence of individuals like Stephen Paine and, ironically, people like Donald Dayton's own father, Wilbur Dayton.
Among the changes in post-Civil War revivalist groups was a shift toward pre-millennialism. Thus while the original Wesleyan Methodists tended toward postmillennialism and an optimism about the possibility not only of personal but of societal redemption. The Wesleyans after the Civil War became increasingly premillennial and withdrew more and more from social involvement.
Dayton does mention another very significant factor, although very briefly. The rise of things like evolution, biblical criticism, and so forth were also major elements in catalyzing the influence of the old Princeton school on revivalist traditions like mine. The old Princeton school put its emphasis on right doctrine while not so much emphasizing the new life that revivalism did.
But this was not the emphasis of John Wesley or revivalism. John Wesley, for example, while certainly orthodox in doctrine, never tired of affirming that religion does not "consist in orthodoxy or right opinions... A man may be orthodox in every point... He may be almost as orthodox as the Devil... and may, all the while, be as great a stranger as he to the religion of the heart."
Even today I have often said this. Revivalist evangelicalism of the Wesleyan sort is interested in your head. But we are far more interested in your heart and life. Thus, "it was revivalist Evangelicalism that supported the antislavery movement and opened up new roles for women." The evangelicalism that Mark Noll and George Marsden portray as the mainstream might just as well be interpreted, at least in the nineteenth century, as the backwater.
Here are the previous posts on this book:
Evangelical Heritage
Finney and Weld
Oberlin and Civil Disobedience
Louis Tappan Quotes
Luther Lee and Antoinette Brown
Gospel to the Poor
The Epilogue was enticing because it has stuff I am actually more interested in than what this book covers. Dayton was writing in the wake of the civil rights conflict and the Vietnam War and was trying to justify the social action history of American evangelicalism. My sense is that the current generation of evangelical children are, if anything, focused more on social action than they actually are on personal salvation (although I sense the political climate in relation to the Obama administration, in addition to a generation that was just beginning to look around at the world when 9-11 happened, could actually result in some sort of a reveral of this trajectory--we'll see). In any case, I am much more interested in the history of my own tradition than in recovering a sense of our past social action.
I hope to read through Bebbington next. But I am especially interested in what Dayton calls "two types of Evangelicalism," which I'll call the old Princeton school and the revivalist school. Finney, Dayton says, represents a reaction to the "old Calvinism" of B. B. Warfield and Charles Hodge. The Princeton school opposed the abolitionist and women's rights movement represented by Finney, Oberlin, Wesleyan Methodists, and so forth.
We find Hodge saying things like, "females... are judged... incompetent to the proper discharge of the duties of citizenship." And of abolitionists, that they were "a small minority of the people. They have never included in their ranks either the controlling intellect or moral feeling at the North." Hodge also could proudly say, "I am not afraid to say that a new idea never originated in this [Princeton] seminary."
I am quite happy to say that my Wesleyan roots had nothing whatsoever to do with the likes of Hodge and Warfield. I do not have to be embarrassed by the B. B. Warfields and Charles Hodges of nineteenth century Christianity. They are like those Christians in the 60s who opposed letting African-Americans sit anywhere on a bus or in a movie theater or to use any water fountain or go to any school. These are all on the wrong side of history, individuals who were out of touch with the Holy Spirit.
The nice thing about history, as Gamaliel once reminded us, is that it doesn't care who you are, how much power you have, or how loudly you can shout. History, like truth, simply doesn't care about people's feelings. The Flood comes, some people are saved, some people drown with "Oops" as their final words.
But Dayton also tells of "what happened to evangelicalism," remembering that the majority of the Christian institutions recognized by a magazine like Christianity Today as evangelical have their roots not in the old Princeton type but the revivalist type of evangelicalism. What happened was that "the sociological, theological, and historical currents produced a movement that in many ways stood for the opposite of what an earlier generation of Evangelicals had affirmed. What had begun as a Christian egalitarianism was transformed into a type of Christian elitism. Revivalistic currents that had once been bent to the liberation of the slave now allied themselves with wealth and power against the civil rights movement. Churches and movements that had pioneered a new role for women became the most resistant to contemporary movements seeking the same goals" (134).
Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Seminary left Finney's type of evangelicalism (Gordon was criticized by Warfield in their day) and would eventually follow the Princeton model. Wheaton would go the same way. If Finney emphasized redemption, the Princeton school emphasized sin. Even the Wesleyan Methdodists would be impacted by some of these these forces under the influence of individuals like Stephen Paine and, ironically, people like Donald Dayton's own father, Wilbur Dayton.
Among the changes in post-Civil War revivalist groups was a shift toward pre-millennialism. Thus while the original Wesleyan Methodists tended toward postmillennialism and an optimism about the possibility not only of personal but of societal redemption. The Wesleyans after the Civil War became increasingly premillennial and withdrew more and more from social involvement.
Dayton does mention another very significant factor, although very briefly. The rise of things like evolution, biblical criticism, and so forth were also major elements in catalyzing the influence of the old Princeton school on revivalist traditions like mine. The old Princeton school put its emphasis on right doctrine while not so much emphasizing the new life that revivalism did.
But this was not the emphasis of John Wesley or revivalism. John Wesley, for example, while certainly orthodox in doctrine, never tired of affirming that religion does not "consist in orthodoxy or right opinions... A man may be orthodox in every point... He may be almost as orthodox as the Devil... and may, all the while, be as great a stranger as he to the religion of the heart."
Even today I have often said this. Revivalist evangelicalism of the Wesleyan sort is interested in your head. But we are far more interested in your heart and life. Thus, "it was revivalist Evangelicalism that supported the antislavery movement and opened up new roles for women." The evangelicalism that Mark Noll and George Marsden portray as the mainstream might just as well be interpreted, at least in the nineteenth century, as the backwater.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Gospel to the Poor (6)
The previous post in this series was on Luther Lee and others.
With chapter 9 we are getting close to the end. I frankly don't know how common it is for churches to have food pantries for those who might wander by looking for food, but I certainly grew up with it in the Wesleyan Church. Despite often being very conservative on issues like governmental welfare, the Wesleyan pastors I grew up with saw it as important to have these sorts of things available at the parsonage for the needy.
Now mind you, there were also the stories of abuse. The person who called yesterday and was given yesterday. Then calls again today forgetting where they were in the phone book. There is an old Latin expression though that exposes yet another common fallacy of logic like the various fallacies associated with labelism that I mentioned last week: "Abuse is no excuse." If last week I mentioned the fallacy of jumping to conclusions (hasty generalization), presuming everyone is a certain way because some are a certain way (fallacy of composition, sometimes called prejudice :-), this is the fallacy of diversion, of changing the subject.
The question of whether we should try to help the poor is one question. The question of whether some will abuse our attempts is a different question. And the question of how to help them is yet another. The answer to the first question is so well established biblically that it is beyond reasonable doubt. The answers to the second and third are where practical complications come in. But it is the fallacy of diversion to think they in any way undermine the fundamental Christian concern for what has long been called "social justice." The term is not so important--to focus on the term is again a diversion, a changing of the subject. I suspect, however, it would be rather inappropriate to abandon the term just because of some passing comments by the uninformed on television. He and that hype will pass. Social justice goes back to Deuteronomy, Jesus, Christianity throughout the centuries...
... and evangelicalism in the 1800s, as Dayton discusses in his chapter 9. It is not to be confused with the social gospel, which was a form of liberal Christianity in the early 1900s that rejected personal salvation, miracles, and historic Christianity but retained the Christian emphasis on helping those in need. This is an important point. Those who promoted the social gospel lost their historic faith and were only left with a general concern for humanity. But the faulty thinking that has often gone on here absolutely boggles my mind.
Their concern for the poor and for humanity was not some evil aim that cropped up because they were liberal. Rather, this was all that was left of their Christianity after they had lost their faith in the historic tenets of the faith! Like I said, I am dumbfounded with the way many Christian groups came to dismiss concern for the poor because "the liberals" were concerned for the poor. Death by association. If the people who don't believe Jesus was God are concerned for the poor, then it must be wrong to be concerned for the poor. Heaven help us!
This of course is not our Wesleyan heritage, to drive a wedge between personal salvation and social justice. Abolitionist drives after the Civil War were channeled into a fight against prostitution and alchohol. But the flavor of these quests were not of sticking it to the sinner--not at all. The flavor was to rescue girls who were part of the "white slave trade" and to pull the drunkard out of his stupor.
This is, by the way, an interesting difference between the fight against homosexuality today and the fights of the 1800s. There is a potentially significant difference between the fight against abortion and the fight against homosexuality, for example. Many think of the "fight against sin" in terms of speaking against. But the evangelical social activists of the 1800s were "speaking for" in their speaking against. They were speaking for the slave, for the prostitute, for the drunkard or at least his family. The abortion movement fits this pattern--speaking for the unborn. The flavor of the homosexuality fight seems different. It does not tend to speak for anyone as it speaks against. It seems a distinction worth some reflection.
The Free Methodist Church, a sister denomination I hope we will one day merge with (and with whom we once came very close to merging with, if not for a parliamentary maneuver by a general superintendent), was founded both in favor of the freedom of the slave and against the practice of the day of renting pews. The effect of renting pews was to give the wealthy the best seats and to sequester those without resources to certain pews that by their very nature said, "I'm a nobody." Prior to the Civil War there were also special pews for African-Americans whose name I won't mention here.
Free Methodists again withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church over this issue. By the way, it is pretty clear from these chapters why groups like mine often have not thought much of the Methodist Church, and it wasn't originally because they were "liberal." In fact, their siding with slavery and with burgeoning capitalists looks rather conservative from the standpoint of debates today. It was later that some Methodists would go theologically liberal, after we revivalists left their fold. We can all rise above our history, of course, and as I've said, am not anti-Methodist today.
B. T. Roberts saw following Jesus' example in relation to the poor as an essential sign of a true church. "It may be that there cannot be a church without a bishop... There can be none without a gospel, and a gospel for the poor." "They are not called up. The great are called down." The Christian and Missionary Alliance also started when A. B. Simpson's efforts were rejected by his Presbyterian Church in New York. His new movement had a special call to the "neglected classes both at home and abroad."
The Church of the Nazarene again had similar founding, another denomination I hope we might one day also merge with. Phineas Bresee wrote, "We can get along without rich people, but not without preaching the gospel to the poor." During this period rescue missions like the Pacific Garden Mission were formed. The Salvation Army came to America from England, a church in the holiness tradition so dedicated to the impoverished that most people don't even know it is a church in the Wesleyan tradition.
Again, we can debate how it is best done. But this is who Wesleyans are, this is who Christian are, take it or leave it. God is not elected.
With chapter 9 we are getting close to the end. I frankly don't know how common it is for churches to have food pantries for those who might wander by looking for food, but I certainly grew up with it in the Wesleyan Church. Despite often being very conservative on issues like governmental welfare, the Wesleyan pastors I grew up with saw it as important to have these sorts of things available at the parsonage for the needy.
Now mind you, there were also the stories of abuse. The person who called yesterday and was given yesterday. Then calls again today forgetting where they were in the phone book. There is an old Latin expression though that exposes yet another common fallacy of logic like the various fallacies associated with labelism that I mentioned last week: "Abuse is no excuse." If last week I mentioned the fallacy of jumping to conclusions (hasty generalization), presuming everyone is a certain way because some are a certain way (fallacy of composition, sometimes called prejudice :-), this is the fallacy of diversion, of changing the subject.
The question of whether we should try to help the poor is one question. The question of whether some will abuse our attempts is a different question. And the question of how to help them is yet another. The answer to the first question is so well established biblically that it is beyond reasonable doubt. The answers to the second and third are where practical complications come in. But it is the fallacy of diversion to think they in any way undermine the fundamental Christian concern for what has long been called "social justice." The term is not so important--to focus on the term is again a diversion, a changing of the subject. I suspect, however, it would be rather inappropriate to abandon the term just because of some passing comments by the uninformed on television. He and that hype will pass. Social justice goes back to Deuteronomy, Jesus, Christianity throughout the centuries...
... and evangelicalism in the 1800s, as Dayton discusses in his chapter 9. It is not to be confused with the social gospel, which was a form of liberal Christianity in the early 1900s that rejected personal salvation, miracles, and historic Christianity but retained the Christian emphasis on helping those in need. This is an important point. Those who promoted the social gospel lost their historic faith and were only left with a general concern for humanity. But the faulty thinking that has often gone on here absolutely boggles my mind.
Their concern for the poor and for humanity was not some evil aim that cropped up because they were liberal. Rather, this was all that was left of their Christianity after they had lost their faith in the historic tenets of the faith! Like I said, I am dumbfounded with the way many Christian groups came to dismiss concern for the poor because "the liberals" were concerned for the poor. Death by association. If the people who don't believe Jesus was God are concerned for the poor, then it must be wrong to be concerned for the poor. Heaven help us!
This of course is not our Wesleyan heritage, to drive a wedge between personal salvation and social justice. Abolitionist drives after the Civil War were channeled into a fight against prostitution and alchohol. But the flavor of these quests were not of sticking it to the sinner--not at all. The flavor was to rescue girls who were part of the "white slave trade" and to pull the drunkard out of his stupor.
This is, by the way, an interesting difference between the fight against homosexuality today and the fights of the 1800s. There is a potentially significant difference between the fight against abortion and the fight against homosexuality, for example. Many think of the "fight against sin" in terms of speaking against. But the evangelical social activists of the 1800s were "speaking for" in their speaking against. They were speaking for the slave, for the prostitute, for the drunkard or at least his family. The abortion movement fits this pattern--speaking for the unborn. The flavor of the homosexuality fight seems different. It does not tend to speak for anyone as it speaks against. It seems a distinction worth some reflection.
The Free Methodist Church, a sister denomination I hope we will one day merge with (and with whom we once came very close to merging with, if not for a parliamentary maneuver by a general superintendent), was founded both in favor of the freedom of the slave and against the practice of the day of renting pews. The effect of renting pews was to give the wealthy the best seats and to sequester those without resources to certain pews that by their very nature said, "I'm a nobody." Prior to the Civil War there were also special pews for African-Americans whose name I won't mention here.
Free Methodists again withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church over this issue. By the way, it is pretty clear from these chapters why groups like mine often have not thought much of the Methodist Church, and it wasn't originally because they were "liberal." In fact, their siding with slavery and with burgeoning capitalists looks rather conservative from the standpoint of debates today. It was later that some Methodists would go theologically liberal, after we revivalists left their fold. We can all rise above our history, of course, and as I've said, am not anti-Methodist today.
B. T. Roberts saw following Jesus' example in relation to the poor as an essential sign of a true church. "It may be that there cannot be a church without a bishop... There can be none without a gospel, and a gospel for the poor." "They are not called up. The great are called down." The Christian and Missionary Alliance also started when A. B. Simpson's efforts were rejected by his Presbyterian Church in New York. His new movement had a special call to the "neglected classes both at home and abroad."
The Church of the Nazarene again had similar founding, another denomination I hope we might one day also merge with. Phineas Bresee wrote, "We can get along without rich people, but not without preaching the gospel to the poor." During this period rescue missions like the Pacific Garden Mission were formed. The Salvation Army came to America from England, a church in the holiness tradition so dedicated to the impoverished that most people don't even know it is a church in the Wesleyan tradition.
Again, we can debate how it is best done. But this is who Wesleyans are, this is who Christian are, take it or leave it. God is not elected.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Luther Lee and Antoinette Brown (5)
For previous posts in this book review series, click here.
If you are Wesleyan and ever interview for a teaching job at Indiana Wesleyan, there is a question you are sure to get from Bud Bence or one of his surrogates: "Do you have a lover's quarrel with the Wesleyan Church?" He is basically asking what you would change about the Wesleyan Church if you could blink and instantly change anything. It's a tricky question because you want to convey the idea that you are a critical thinker but you don't want to convey that you don't belong in the Wesleyan Church!
I am a lifelong Wesleyan for these 43 years of my pilgrimage thus far. Obviously I did not choose to become Wesleyan. I was born into it. Who knows what I would choose if I became a Christian out of the blue today. Probably not Wesleyan, simply because it is an extremely small denomination (around 1700 churches in North America, many more overseas). If I were in England, I would almost certainly be Anglican. In America I have never experienced the crazy side of the United Methodist Church and would feel very much at home in most of the congregations I've visited in the past.
But as I reflect on Dayton's 7th and 8th chapter, I am reminded of how significant some of the origins of my denomination are, particularly on its Wesleyan Methodist side (I actually come from the "Pilgrim" side). Indeed, it was not the Methodist Episcopal Church (the UM church of the time) that stood up against slavery or for women to be ministers. The Methodist hierarchy of the time refused to take a stand and cow-towed to powerful slavery owners in the South (voted down 120-14 affirming elements of their Discipline on slavery that traced back to John Wesley himself). The UM church didn't ordain women until the 1950s when it became more convenient and respectable in terms of the broader culture.
Rather, it was people like Orange Scott and Luther Lee, founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, who were willing to stand up for what was right and not play along. Luther Lee would later show that he was not a schismatic by returning to the Methodist Episcopal Church after the Civil War. But they had started something and it continued. The women's rights movement started in 1848 in Seneca Falls at a meeting held in a Wesleyan Methodist Church. The first woman's ordination was in 1853 and was preached by Luther Lee, one of the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Church.
If you visit Southern Wesleyan University, you can still see the bullet holes of the church Adam Crooks planted in Alamance County, North Carolina in 1847, Freedom's Hill church. There he preached abolition in the south until he was forced to leave to escape harm. At least one Wesleyan minister was lynched in those days leading up to the war.
I talk about history with my youngest children on the way to school on Mondays, and I was sharing some of this history yesterday morning. As we got out of the car, I thought to myself, "Wow. For such a small denomination, we sure have some huge things in our past to be really proud of!"
All the holiness denominations of the late 1800s ordained women and promoted the equal rights of women to vote. There is a tendency for those in the Wesleyan tradition to reach back to respectable Wesley once they begin to study. But he is really more our grandfather than father. Like it or not Phoebe Palmer is more our immediate parent, a lay Methodist evangelist of the mid-1800s.
Luther Lee's sermon at the ordination of Antoinette Brown was superb and I have uploaded a PDF of it here. It is interesting to see how much my booklet on Women in Ministry is similar in argument (you can get this booklet at cost from the Wesleyan Church, Department of Education and the Ministry, or I can get you one). B. T. Roberts, founder of the Free Methodist Church, wrote a book on it. Catherine Booth was co-founder of the Salvation Army, a completely egalitarian organization.
Somewhat more surprising is to realize that key founders of what become Gordon-Conwell and Trinity Evangelical were supporters of women in ministry. The Baptist A. J. Gordon argued for the right of women to speak at missionary conventions based on the "your daughters will prophesy" prediction in Acts 2 and also from Galatians 3:28. Frederick Franson, founder of the Evangelical Alliance Mission that would flow into the Evangelical Free Church, the denomination of Trinity Evangelical, defended the right of women to preach.
The word feminism is a dirty word in my circles, and there is a real drive to draw distinctions between this feminism of the 1800s and the secular feminism of the 1950s and after. I personally don't see the difference in the word feminism but in the word secular. Maybe I'm missing something about the feminist part of the more recent movement, but I suspect the main problem with it is the secular part.
It seems to me that the values of the civil rights movement--truly to give African-Americans all the same rights and opportunities as the dominant ethnicities--are fully Christian. Yet my own denomination, ironically founded because of abolitionism, pretty much said nothing during that era, like the Methodist Episcopal Church of 150 years ago.
Our number of women ministers actually declined from the 50s on. At one time, as many as 40 percent of Pilgrim Holiness Church preachers were women in some segments of the church. It was as much as 20 percent of Nazarene ministers at another point. When Dayton wrote in the 70s, it was something like 6 percent in the Nazarene Church.
In some of these things to our shame it looks like in these last decades God has had to use the world to move things toward kingdom values and the church has largely stood idle, even opposing God's will. Today, though, I am proud to belong to a denomination that fully affirms that God calls women to preach the gospel and that fully supports that African-Americans can ride anywhere on a bus and drink from the same water fountain I can.
We are glad for individuals to sit peacefully in the Washington Mall listen to someone of another skin dream about "on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." Why did anyone equivocate about those things back then, again? Why do some of my friends and family still sneer at the name of Martin Luther King Jr.?
And, yes, since it is biblical, you will find the words "social justice" on our denominational website. If you have a problem with that, you have a problem with the Bible.
What a wonderful heritage I have as a Wesleyan! Wesleyans, accept no substitutes.
If you are Wesleyan and ever interview for a teaching job at Indiana Wesleyan, there is a question you are sure to get from Bud Bence or one of his surrogates: "Do you have a lover's quarrel with the Wesleyan Church?" He is basically asking what you would change about the Wesleyan Church if you could blink and instantly change anything. It's a tricky question because you want to convey the idea that you are a critical thinker but you don't want to convey that you don't belong in the Wesleyan Church!
I am a lifelong Wesleyan for these 43 years of my pilgrimage thus far. Obviously I did not choose to become Wesleyan. I was born into it. Who knows what I would choose if I became a Christian out of the blue today. Probably not Wesleyan, simply because it is an extremely small denomination (around 1700 churches in North America, many more overseas). If I were in England, I would almost certainly be Anglican. In America I have never experienced the crazy side of the United Methodist Church and would feel very much at home in most of the congregations I've visited in the past.
But as I reflect on Dayton's 7th and 8th chapter, I am reminded of how significant some of the origins of my denomination are, particularly on its Wesleyan Methodist side (I actually come from the "Pilgrim" side). Indeed, it was not the Methodist Episcopal Church (the UM church of the time) that stood up against slavery or for women to be ministers. The Methodist hierarchy of the time refused to take a stand and cow-towed to powerful slavery owners in the South (voted down 120-14 affirming elements of their Discipline on slavery that traced back to John Wesley himself). The UM church didn't ordain women until the 1950s when it became more convenient and respectable in terms of the broader culture.
Rather, it was people like Orange Scott and Luther Lee, founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, who were willing to stand up for what was right and not play along. Luther Lee would later show that he was not a schismatic by returning to the Methodist Episcopal Church after the Civil War. But they had started something and it continued. The women's rights movement started in 1848 in Seneca Falls at a meeting held in a Wesleyan Methodist Church. The first woman's ordination was in 1853 and was preached by Luther Lee, one of the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Church.
If you visit Southern Wesleyan University, you can still see the bullet holes of the church Adam Crooks planted in Alamance County, North Carolina in 1847, Freedom's Hill church. There he preached abolition in the south until he was forced to leave to escape harm. At least one Wesleyan minister was lynched in those days leading up to the war.
I talk about history with my youngest children on the way to school on Mondays, and I was sharing some of this history yesterday morning. As we got out of the car, I thought to myself, "Wow. For such a small denomination, we sure have some huge things in our past to be really proud of!"
All the holiness denominations of the late 1800s ordained women and promoted the equal rights of women to vote. There is a tendency for those in the Wesleyan tradition to reach back to respectable Wesley once they begin to study. But he is really more our grandfather than father. Like it or not Phoebe Palmer is more our immediate parent, a lay Methodist evangelist of the mid-1800s.
Luther Lee's sermon at the ordination of Antoinette Brown was superb and I have uploaded a PDF of it here. It is interesting to see how much my booklet on Women in Ministry is similar in argument (you can get this booklet at cost from the Wesleyan Church, Department of Education and the Ministry, or I can get you one). B. T. Roberts, founder of the Free Methodist Church, wrote a book on it. Catherine Booth was co-founder of the Salvation Army, a completely egalitarian organization.
Somewhat more surprising is to realize that key founders of what become Gordon-Conwell and Trinity Evangelical were supporters of women in ministry. The Baptist A. J. Gordon argued for the right of women to speak at missionary conventions based on the "your daughters will prophesy" prediction in Acts 2 and also from Galatians 3:28. Frederick Franson, founder of the Evangelical Alliance Mission that would flow into the Evangelical Free Church, the denomination of Trinity Evangelical, defended the right of women to preach.
The word feminism is a dirty word in my circles, and there is a real drive to draw distinctions between this feminism of the 1800s and the secular feminism of the 1950s and after. I personally don't see the difference in the word feminism but in the word secular. Maybe I'm missing something about the feminist part of the more recent movement, but I suspect the main problem with it is the secular part.
It seems to me that the values of the civil rights movement--truly to give African-Americans all the same rights and opportunities as the dominant ethnicities--are fully Christian. Yet my own denomination, ironically founded because of abolitionism, pretty much said nothing during that era, like the Methodist Episcopal Church of 150 years ago.
Our number of women ministers actually declined from the 50s on. At one time, as many as 40 percent of Pilgrim Holiness Church preachers were women in some segments of the church. It was as much as 20 percent of Nazarene ministers at another point. When Dayton wrote in the 70s, it was something like 6 percent in the Nazarene Church.
In some of these things to our shame it looks like in these last decades God has had to use the world to move things toward kingdom values and the church has largely stood idle, even opposing God's will. Today, though, I am proud to belong to a denomination that fully affirms that God calls women to preach the gospel and that fully supports that African-Americans can ride anywhere on a bus and drink from the same water fountain I can.
We are glad for individuals to sit peacefully in the Washington Mall listen to someone of another skin dream about "on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." Why did anyone equivocate about those things back then, again? Why do some of my friends and family still sneer at the name of Martin Luther King Jr.?
And, yes, since it is biblical, you will find the words "social justice" on our denominational website. If you have a problem with that, you have a problem with the Bible.
What a wonderful heritage I have as a Wesleyan! Wesleyans, accept no substitutes.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Lewis Tappan Quotes (4)
To sneak back
Arthur and Lewis Tappan were business men of the 1800s who helped subsidize a good bit of abolitionism, Finney, etc. Here are some quotes from Don Dayton's chapter on the two men.
Lewis Tappan: Children should be raised sensitive to the issue of race so that as adults they, with African-Americans, would "be able to meet at the polls, sit on juries, attend political meetings, practice at the bar, unite in processions, and mingle with their fellow-men in the various walks of life, on equal terms, as the religion of Jesus, and the laws of the land require." Sad that it took the civil rights movement over a hundred years later to get us anywhere close to this vision. I continue to attribute a good deal of the degree of anger toward Obama to the fact that he is black.
In 1863, near the end of his life, Tappan joked that while some claimed blacks were superior to whites in intelligence and strength, he wasn't so sure. Just maybe "a white man was just as good as a black man, if he behaved himself." Tappan ended with this poem:
"Judge not of virtue by the name, Or think to read it on the skin; Honor in white nad black the same--the stamp of glory is within."
Arthur and Lewis Tappan were business men of the 1800s who helped subsidize a good bit of abolitionism, Finney, etc. Here are some quotes from Don Dayton's chapter on the two men.
Lewis Tappan: Children should be raised sensitive to the issue of race so that as adults they, with African-Americans, would "be able to meet at the polls, sit on juries, attend political meetings, practice at the bar, unite in processions, and mingle with their fellow-men in the various walks of life, on equal terms, as the religion of Jesus, and the laws of the land require." Sad that it took the civil rights movement over a hundred years later to get us anywhere close to this vision. I continue to attribute a good deal of the degree of anger toward Obama to the fact that he is black.
In 1863, near the end of his life, Tappan joked that while some claimed blacks were superior to whites in intelligence and strength, he wasn't so sure. Just maybe "a white man was just as good as a black man, if he behaved himself." Tappan ended with this poem:
"Judge not of virtue by the name, Or think to read it on the skin; Honor in white nad black the same--the stamp of glory is within."
The Infamous Middle Shuffle...
I was reminiscing about one of my seminary exegesis professors this past week with someone and then again today was reminded of an assignment he always had his exegesis classes do. I went to Asbury, and so there was of course a primacy among most professors on coming up with Wesleyan-Arminian interpretations. I doubt anyone who has looked at this blog for very long will doubt that I am an advocate for Wesleyan-Arminian theology, but the Bible simply says what it says, and we just have to deal with it.
This professor always had his beginning exegesis classes do an interpretation of Acts 13:48, which says something like, "As many as had been appointed to eternal life believed." Well of course this sounds Calvinist. There was an underground rumor that if you suggested the verb in the sentence was in what is called the "middle" voice, you would get an A on the assignment. The translation would then become, "As many as had appointed themselves to eternal life, believed."
Don't get me wrong. I loved this professor. But in more than one respect, this story illustrates much that is wrong with biblical interpetation. First of all, any professor who basically requires you to parrot back what they want to hear in order to get a good grade is a bad teacher. We all know there are both liberal and conservative teachers who are the same way on this score. Tell them what they want to hear and you'll get an A. Disagree with them and watch out. That's bad teaching.
But this professor's infamous "middle shuffle" illustrates a more important point. Exegesis is not about the possible but about the probable. The goal of interpretation is not to find a possible way to support convenient conclusions for my tribe. The goal is to let the text say what it says.
There is no evidence whatsoever for the middle voice in this verse. The rule I teach in Greek is that you should always assume forms like this one are passive if they make sense. If they don't make sense, then you might explore a middle. Acts 13:48 makes perfect sense grammatically and contextually as a passive, "had been appointed." It is a "naughty verse" for my theology. But I'll just have to deal with it (and I can) and accept the most likely meaning of the text.
P.S. Here I am of course talking about original meaning interpretation, exegesis. I have gone on record as supporting the coherency of theological interpretation as a legitimate form of Christian reader-response which is perhaps even more important than original meaning interpretation.
This professor always had his beginning exegesis classes do an interpretation of Acts 13:48, which says something like, "As many as had been appointed to eternal life believed." Well of course this sounds Calvinist. There was an underground rumor that if you suggested the verb in the sentence was in what is called the "middle" voice, you would get an A on the assignment. The translation would then become, "As many as had appointed themselves to eternal life, believed."
Don't get me wrong. I loved this professor. But in more than one respect, this story illustrates much that is wrong with biblical interpetation. First of all, any professor who basically requires you to parrot back what they want to hear in order to get a good grade is a bad teacher. We all know there are both liberal and conservative teachers who are the same way on this score. Tell them what they want to hear and you'll get an A. Disagree with them and watch out. That's bad teaching.
But this professor's infamous "middle shuffle" illustrates a more important point. Exegesis is not about the possible but about the probable. The goal of interpretation is not to find a possible way to support convenient conclusions for my tribe. The goal is to let the text say what it says.
There is no evidence whatsoever for the middle voice in this verse. The rule I teach in Greek is that you should always assume forms like this one are passive if they make sense. If they don't make sense, then you might explore a middle. Acts 13:48 makes perfect sense grammatically and contextually as a passive, "had been appointed." It is a "naughty verse" for my theology. But I'll just have to deal with it (and I can) and accept the most likely meaning of the text.
P.S. Here I am of course talking about original meaning interpretation, exegesis. I have gone on record as supporting the coherency of theological interpretation as a legitimate form of Christian reader-response which is perhaps even more important than original meaning interpretation.
Congress and the American Situation
This piece from Newsweek is deeply troubling to me: http://www.newsweek.com/id/235560
Every American--and every member of Congress--needs to stop, take a deep breath, and hit the reset button on their thinking. If we are not willing to reconsider our positions in the light of evidence and openness to other perspectives, we will drive ourselves into the ground or into violent conflict.
I have never felt so strongly as I have these last months that philosophy needs to stand at the heart of intellectual education: the rules of logical thinking and a true understanding of competing points of view on politics, economics, ethics, religion, science, how knowledge takes place, what a human person is, and so forth. I don't mean shoving one position down students' throats but a real attempt at objective presentation of pros and cons for all positions. Postmodernism as it has trickled down to the common person has been used to legitimize tribalism of all sorts, and only a return to a chastened modernism and sense of objectivity will give us an intellectual path out of our hobbled thinking.
True love of our neighbor and enemy would of course be the stronger cure for who we are and give us the fullest education.
Every American--and every member of Congress--needs to stop, take a deep breath, and hit the reset button on their thinking. If we are not willing to reconsider our positions in the light of evidence and openness to other perspectives, we will drive ourselves into the ground or into violent conflict.
I have never felt so strongly as I have these last months that philosophy needs to stand at the heart of intellectual education: the rules of logical thinking and a true understanding of competing points of view on politics, economics, ethics, religion, science, how knowledge takes place, what a human person is, and so forth. I don't mean shoving one position down students' throats but a real attempt at objective presentation of pros and cons for all positions. Postmodernism as it has trickled down to the common person has been used to legitimize tribalism of all sorts, and only a return to a chastened modernism and sense of objectivity will give us an intellectual path out of our hobbled thinking.
True love of our neighbor and enemy would of course be the stronger cure for who we are and give us the fullest education.
Labelism
I have a suggestion for a new word for the dictionary:
labelism: The tendency to skew diverse particular ideas, events, people, and so forth by grouping them under overly generalized labels in the service of argument.
Examples:
Logical fallacies involved: 1) hasty generalization, where differences between one observation and a general conclusion are ignored in the midst of argument; 2) fallacy of composition, where a whole is assumed to have certain characteristics because some parts have certain characteristics; and 3) fallacy of division, where all parts of something are assumed to all have certain characteristics because of some characteristic of the whole.
Explanation: The human mind is generally unable to process large amounts of particular facts without grouping them together into schemata, as Piaget called them. In deductive reasoning, where all the data can be accounted for and where all the data is usually of a simple nature, universal groupings can be fully coherent.
In inductive thinking, however, which is the nature of our lives in the world, all the data can rarely be accounted for, and the data is almost never a simple nature. People, events, and various other particular data are extremely complex and interwoven together. Simple ideas thus can hardly represent them without skew of some kind.
Beware of generalizations bearing fallacies! The Devil is in the details.
labelism: The tendency to skew diverse particular ideas, events, people, and so forth by grouping them under overly generalized labels in the service of argument.
Examples:
- Those who favor women in ministry are liberals because radical feminists push for equal rights and pay for women.
- True conservatives are opposed to gun control because gun control is generally pushed by Democrats.
- Allowing the government to manage some area of its citizens' life shows that we are becoming socialist like China.
- Taxing us to support the health care of the elderly shows that we are becoming communist like the Soviet Union.
- Making decisions that are unpopular shows that President Obama is a Fascist like Hitler.
- You can't believe in the idea that Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke because that is an idea that comes from higher criticism.
- The students at Oberlin were transcendentalists like Emerson who didn't believe in a personal God because they put a high emphasis on religious feeling like the Romantics.
Logical fallacies involved: 1) hasty generalization, where differences between one observation and a general conclusion are ignored in the midst of argument; 2) fallacy of composition, where a whole is assumed to have certain characteristics because some parts have certain characteristics; and 3) fallacy of division, where all parts of something are assumed to all have certain characteristics because of some characteristic of the whole.
Explanation: The human mind is generally unable to process large amounts of particular facts without grouping them together into schemata, as Piaget called them. In deductive reasoning, where all the data can be accounted for and where all the data is usually of a simple nature, universal groupings can be fully coherent.
In inductive thinking, however, which is the nature of our lives in the world, all the data can rarely be accounted for, and the data is almost never a simple nature. People, events, and various other particular data are extremely complex and interwoven together. Simple ideas thus can hardly represent them without skew of some kind.
Beware of generalizations bearing fallacies! The Devil is in the details.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Frederick Douglass quote
This runaway slave had this to say, "Beat and cuff your slave... Give him a bad master, and he aspires to a good master; give him a good master, and he wishes to become his own master."
Oberlin and Civil Disobedience (3)
Just read chapter 5 of Donald Dayton's Discovering and Evangelical Heritage. If you want to follow the crumbs back, the previous one is here.
I had a number of thoughts about the incident of chapter 5, one in which an escaped slave being hid on the Oberlin campus was seized by some southerners who had come looking for him. A crowd of Oberliners met up with them in nearby Wellington and retrieved him, then sent him north to Canada. The Democrats who held sway in Cleveland were going to have their way with these Oberliners as violating the Fugitive Slave Law, but the Republicans of Oberlin cleverly set the trial for the southerners for kidnapping at the same time. In the end the compromise was that both charges were dropped.
I am struck by a number of things. First, the Oberliners used "higher law" arguments for civil disobedience. This is always a tricky thing, as I think we now know and many knew then. Although I support the civil disobedience of the Oberliners, recourse to "higher laws" is always iffy because everyone has a different sense of what that higher law is. For example, those who are threatening Democratic congressmen right now might easily say they are following a higher law, as might someone who shoots abortion doctors or sets homosexuals on fire. If you truly believe something like the Oberliners did, you must simply be willing to face the consequences of civil disobedience because you disagree with the law.
Probably the most striking thing is how much the values of the Republicans and Democrats have reversed in the last century and a half. The Republicans used to be the ones advocating civil rights and the power of the federal government over the states. Now these are values of the Democratic party. In that sense, I am an old Republican.
I have not studied the issue thoroughly, but it seems to me that somehow, seemingly without much reflection, the issue of abortion has inadvertantly pushed conservative Christians toward a states rights orientation. I suppose since a large portion of conservative Christians are southerners, it is natural that many conservative Christians would take this position anyway. But it is fascinating to me how others have absorbed this point of view that really has nothing to do with conservative Christianity and is actually antithetical to the original orientation of Republicans.
States' rights issues, for example, are involved in Roe vs. Wade. Its repeal will only send the issue back to the states. In itself, its repeal will not stop a single abortion. What I think we would prefer is a federal ban on abortion. But would the Supreme Court justices Republican presidents have sent up support such a federal law any more than Roe vs. Wade?!
I had a number of thoughts about the incident of chapter 5, one in which an escaped slave being hid on the Oberlin campus was seized by some southerners who had come looking for him. A crowd of Oberliners met up with them in nearby Wellington and retrieved him, then sent him north to Canada. The Democrats who held sway in Cleveland were going to have their way with these Oberliners as violating the Fugitive Slave Law, but the Republicans of Oberlin cleverly set the trial for the southerners for kidnapping at the same time. In the end the compromise was that both charges were dropped.
I am struck by a number of things. First, the Oberliners used "higher law" arguments for civil disobedience. This is always a tricky thing, as I think we now know and many knew then. Although I support the civil disobedience of the Oberliners, recourse to "higher laws" is always iffy because everyone has a different sense of what that higher law is. For example, those who are threatening Democratic congressmen right now might easily say they are following a higher law, as might someone who shoots abortion doctors or sets homosexuals on fire. If you truly believe something like the Oberliners did, you must simply be willing to face the consequences of civil disobedience because you disagree with the law.
Probably the most striking thing is how much the values of the Republicans and Democrats have reversed in the last century and a half. The Republicans used to be the ones advocating civil rights and the power of the federal government over the states. Now these are values of the Democratic party. In that sense, I am an old Republican.
I have not studied the issue thoroughly, but it seems to me that somehow, seemingly without much reflection, the issue of abortion has inadvertantly pushed conservative Christians toward a states rights orientation. I suppose since a large portion of conservative Christians are southerners, it is natural that many conservative Christians would take this position anyway. But it is fascinating to me how others have absorbed this point of view that really has nothing to do with conservative Christianity and is actually antithetical to the original orientation of Republicans.
States' rights issues, for example, are involved in Roe vs. Wade. Its repeal will only send the issue back to the states. In itself, its repeal will not stop a single abortion. What I think we would prefer is a federal ban on abortion. But would the Supreme Court justices Republican presidents have sent up support such a federal law any more than Roe vs. Wade?!
Republican Advice...
Adam Thada mentioned in a comment that David Wright had linked to this article. I finally read it and liked a good deal of it too. Here is the better part of it:
____________
1) One of the worst things about the Democrats' plan is the method of financing: an increase in tax on high-income earners. At first that tax bites only a very small number, but the new taxes will surely be applied to larger and larger portions of the American population over time.
Republicans champion lower taxes and faster economic growth. We need to start thinking now about how to get rid of these new taxes on work, saving and investment -- if necessary by finding other sources of revenue, including carbon taxes.
2) We should quit defending employment-based health care. The leading Republican spokesman in the House on these issues, Rep. Paul Ryan, repeatedly complained during floor debate that the Obama plan would "dump" people out of employer-provided care into the exchanges. He said that as if it were a bad thing.
Yet free-market economists from Milton Friedman onward have identified employer-provided care as the original sin of American health care. Employers choose different policies for employees than those employees would choose for themselves. The cost is concealed.
Wages are depressed without employees understanding why. The day when every employee in America gets his or her insurance through an exchange will be a good day for market economics. It's true that the exchanges are subsidized. So is employer-provided care, to the tune of almost $200 billion a year.
3) We should call for reducing regulation of the policies sold inside the health care exchanges. The Democrats' plans require every policy sold within the exchanges to meet certain strict conditions.
American workers will lose the option of buying more basic but cheaper plans. It will be as if the only cable packages available were those that include all the premium channels. No bargains in that case. Republicans should press for more scope for insurers to cut prices if they think they can offer an attractive product that way.
4) The Democratic plan requires businesses with payrolls more than $500,000 to buy health insurance for their workers or face fines of $2,000 per worker. Could there be a worse time to heap this new mandate on smaller employers? Health insurance comes out of employee wages, plain and simple. Employers who do not offer health insurance must compete for labor against those who do -- and presumably pay equivalent wages for equivalent work.
Uninsured employees have now through the exchanges been provided an easy and even subsidized way to buy their own coverage. There is no justification for the small-business fine: Republicans should press for repeal.
That platform is ambitious enough -- but also workable, enactable and likely to appeal to voters. After 18 months of overheated rhetoric, it's time at last for Republicans to get real.
I've been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes, it mobilizes supporters -- but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead.
Now the overheated talk is about to get worse. Over the past 48 hours, I've heard conservatives compare the House bill to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 -- a decisive step on the path to the Civil War. Conservatives have whipped themselves into spasms of outrage and despair that block all strategic thinking.
Or almost all. The vitriolic talking heads on conservative talk radio and shock TV have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination.
When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say -- but what is equally true -- is that he also wants Republicans to fail.
If Republicans succeed -- if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office -- Rush's listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less and hear fewer ads for Sleep Number beds.
So today's defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it's mission accomplished.
For the cause they purport to represent, however, the "Waterloo" threatened by GOP Sen. Jim DeMint last year regarding Obama and health care has finally arrived all right: Only it turns out to be our own.
____________
1) One of the worst things about the Democrats' plan is the method of financing: an increase in tax on high-income earners. At first that tax bites only a very small number, but the new taxes will surely be applied to larger and larger portions of the American population over time.
Republicans champion lower taxes and faster economic growth. We need to start thinking now about how to get rid of these new taxes on work, saving and investment -- if necessary by finding other sources of revenue, including carbon taxes.
2) We should quit defending employment-based health care. The leading Republican spokesman in the House on these issues, Rep. Paul Ryan, repeatedly complained during floor debate that the Obama plan would "dump" people out of employer-provided care into the exchanges. He said that as if it were a bad thing.
Yet free-market economists from Milton Friedman onward have identified employer-provided care as the original sin of American health care. Employers choose different policies for employees than those employees would choose for themselves. The cost is concealed.
Wages are depressed without employees understanding why. The day when every employee in America gets his or her insurance through an exchange will be a good day for market economics. It's true that the exchanges are subsidized. So is employer-provided care, to the tune of almost $200 billion a year.
3) We should call for reducing regulation of the policies sold inside the health care exchanges. The Democrats' plans require every policy sold within the exchanges to meet certain strict conditions.
American workers will lose the option of buying more basic but cheaper plans. It will be as if the only cable packages available were those that include all the premium channels. No bargains in that case. Republicans should press for more scope for insurers to cut prices if they think they can offer an attractive product that way.
4) The Democratic plan requires businesses with payrolls more than $500,000 to buy health insurance for their workers or face fines of $2,000 per worker. Could there be a worse time to heap this new mandate on smaller employers? Health insurance comes out of employee wages, plain and simple. Employers who do not offer health insurance must compete for labor against those who do -- and presumably pay equivalent wages for equivalent work.
Uninsured employees have now through the exchanges been provided an easy and even subsidized way to buy their own coverage. There is no justification for the small-business fine: Republicans should press for repeal.
That platform is ambitious enough -- but also workable, enactable and likely to appeal to voters. After 18 months of overheated rhetoric, it's time at last for Republicans to get real.
I've been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes, it mobilizes supporters -- but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead.
Now the overheated talk is about to get worse. Over the past 48 hours, I've heard conservatives compare the House bill to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 -- a decisive step on the path to the Civil War. Conservatives have whipped themselves into spasms of outrage and despair that block all strategic thinking.
Or almost all. The vitriolic talking heads on conservative talk radio and shock TV have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination.
When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say -- but what is equally true -- is that he also wants Republicans to fail.
If Republicans succeed -- if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office -- Rush's listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less and hear fewer ads for Sleep Number beds.
So today's defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it's mission accomplished.
For the cause they purport to represent, however, the "Waterloo" threatened by GOP Sen. Jim DeMint last year regarding Obama and health care has finally arrived all right: Only it turns out to be our own.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Evangelical Heritage 2
I've read chapters 2-4 since last I posted. Chapter 2 was on Finney. Chapter three on someone named Theodore Weld. Chapter four on the "Lane rebellion" and the founding of Oberlin College.
Don Dayton's main point in chapter 2 is that social reform was a principal element of Charles Finney's ministry, sometimes excised from sources about him. He even encouraged women to pray in the presence of other men.
Theodore Weld was a vocal opponent of slavery and advocate for immediate abolition. He lived, ate, worshipped with freedmen from the south. Dayton makes a strong case that Weld demonstrates that abolitionists were not all long distance friends of the slaves. Weld truly lived out his belief that these freedmen were entirely equal to him. He was also refused to take over his wife's property upon marriage because he considered her an equal.
Probably most striking to me was the story of the founding of Oberlin College. I feel quite confident that, if the 43 year old Ken Schenck who is typing this post were transplanted to 1834 and didn't know much of what came after, he would be a moderate abolitionist rather than some of these radical individuals.
Oberlin vowed to "strive continually... while living, provide for the widows, orphans, and famlies of the sick and needy." Blacks were admitted to Oberlin right alongside whites from the college's inception (the first college ever to do this). They were opposed to the relocation of Indians. Many of them were pacifists, some even vegetarians as a physical discipline. Antoinette Brown, the first ordained woman in America (ordained in a Wesleyan Methodist church), was not allowed to take classes officially but did so unofficially.
Let no one call un-Wesleyan anyone who advocates social activism along these lines--toward civil rights, toward equal rights for women, toward the empowerment of the stranger in our midst. Perhaps we might argue the wisdom of the tactics some of these individuals took at the time. But it goes without saying that the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Church were not particularly considered "conservative" in their day, and we should share their values.
Don Dayton's main point in chapter 2 is that social reform was a principal element of Charles Finney's ministry, sometimes excised from sources about him. He even encouraged women to pray in the presence of other men.
Theodore Weld was a vocal opponent of slavery and advocate for immediate abolition. He lived, ate, worshipped with freedmen from the south. Dayton makes a strong case that Weld demonstrates that abolitionists were not all long distance friends of the slaves. Weld truly lived out his belief that these freedmen were entirely equal to him. He was also refused to take over his wife's property upon marriage because he considered her an equal.
Probably most striking to me was the story of the founding of Oberlin College. I feel quite confident that, if the 43 year old Ken Schenck who is typing this post were transplanted to 1834 and didn't know much of what came after, he would be a moderate abolitionist rather than some of these radical individuals.
Oberlin vowed to "strive continually... while living, provide for the widows, orphans, and famlies of the sick and needy." Blacks were admitted to Oberlin right alongside whites from the college's inception (the first college ever to do this). They were opposed to the relocation of Indians. Many of them were pacifists, some even vegetarians as a physical discipline. Antoinette Brown, the first ordained woman in America (ordained in a Wesleyan Methodist church), was not allowed to take classes officially but did so unofficially.
Let no one call un-Wesleyan anyone who advocates social activism along these lines--toward civil rights, toward equal rights for women, toward the empowerment of the stranger in our midst. Perhaps we might argue the wisdom of the tactics some of these individuals took at the time. But it goes without saying that the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist Church were not particularly considered "conservative" in their day, and we should share their values.
Pre-History 2
Here's the rest of the pre-history of the seminary:
http://wesleyanseminary.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/pre-seminary-history-part-2/
http://wesleyanseminary.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/pre-seminary-history-part-2/
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Brogan and de Tocqueville quotes...
Two quotes that stood out to me today:
"The men of the eighteenth century came to expect, and inexorably to demand, more than the seventeenth-century ordering of their world could possibly provide." (Hugh Brogan)
"The system that a revolution destroys is almost always better than that which immediately preceeded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually that in which it begins to reform." (Alexis de Tocqueville)
"The men of the eighteenth century came to expect, and inexorably to demand, more than the seventeenth-century ordering of their world could possibly provide." (Hugh Brogan)
"The system that a revolution destroys is almost always better than that which immediately preceeded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually that in which it begins to reform." (Alexis de Tocqueville)
Pre-History of Wesley Seminary@IWU 1
The seminary board met for dinner last night and Russ Gunsalus, Keith Drury and I shared some of the pre-history of the seminary. I posted the first installment on my seminary blog: http://wesleyanseminary.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/pre-history-of-wesley-seminary/
Monday, March 22, 2010
My Sermon: "Do not let Sin reign"
I gave this sermon in chapel a week ago as part of the Cox Deeper Life Series:
"Do not let Sin reign"
"Do not let Sin reign"
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Historic Health Care Bill passes
I know that feelings run high on this one. Indeed, there will be challenges ahead of various kinds. Republicans in the Senate will try to stop the fixes. There will be legal challenges made, and we know that the make-up of the Supreme Court leans "conservative." Frankly, might a Republican Congress and President completely reverse it in three years?
In any case, I wanted the historical marker here. If you can do it civilly, what is your prediction for the days to come--specifically (generic ranting isn't what I'm looking for)? Do you agree with the independent budget office that it will reduce the deficit over 100 billion dollars in ten years and a trillion in 20? Does it foretell a huge defeat for the Democratic party in the Fall and next presidential election? Will there be riots? Will the insured forget about it if there is no real change to their insurance? Will those who have to get insurance ultimately be glad to have it? Will it lead to the greatest fracture between the states and the government since the Civil War? Will someone try to assassinate certain lead Democrats? Will history look back at this decision as a crucial moment in the decline of the United States as a superpower, or will history wonder why anyone ever argued against it?
Again, civilly, specifically, what do you think the concrete consequences will be? If I remember, I might check back in a year to reflect on what things look like then.
In any case, I wanted the historical marker here. If you can do it civilly, what is your prediction for the days to come--specifically (generic ranting isn't what I'm looking for)? Do you agree with the independent budget office that it will reduce the deficit over 100 billion dollars in ten years and a trillion in 20? Does it foretell a huge defeat for the Democratic party in the Fall and next presidential election? Will there be riots? Will the insured forget about it if there is no real change to their insurance? Will those who have to get insurance ultimately be glad to have it? Will it lead to the greatest fracture between the states and the government since the Civil War? Will someone try to assassinate certain lead Democrats? Will history look back at this decision as a crucial moment in the decline of the United States as a superpower, or will history wonder why anyone ever argued against it?
Again, civilly, specifically, what do you think the concrete consequences will be? If I remember, I might check back in a year to reflect on what things look like then.
Chariots found in the Red Sea!?
In the space of about a week, I've had two students reference chariots, horse hooves, and human remains found in the Red Sea. The source is apparently this website and someone called Ron Wyatt, who I guess died in 1999. For a debunking piece on Wyatt, see here.
Here's the deal. There's a reason why some people are called scholars and others aren't. There are conservative archaeological resources, Biblical Archaeology Review, for example. If it hasn't made it there, it probably isn't legit.
This is the problem with the internet and with email chains. It's not just this sort of stuff with the Bible. It's stuff about Obama's Christmas tree and how he was really born in Kenya. It's everyone from Al Gore to John Kerry to Obama misquoting John 3:16 as John 16:3. It's the Iraqis sneaking WMD into Syria just before the invasion.
It's we Christians making God look stupid by being gullible! You should question anything of this sort that has not appeared in a peer reviewed journal or on a mainstream newscast. In the words of Jack Handy, "Sometimes I think the experts actually are experts."
Here's the deal. There's a reason why some people are called scholars and others aren't. There are conservative archaeological resources, Biblical Archaeology Review, for example. If it hasn't made it there, it probably isn't legit.
This is the problem with the internet and with email chains. It's not just this sort of stuff with the Bible. It's stuff about Obama's Christmas tree and how he was really born in Kenya. It's everyone from Al Gore to John Kerry to Obama misquoting John 3:16 as John 16:3. It's the Iraqis sneaking WMD into Syria just before the invasion.
It's we Christians making God look stupid by being gullible! You should question anything of this sort that has not appeared in a peer reviewed journal or on a mainstream newscast. In the words of Jack Handy, "Sometimes I think the experts actually are experts."
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