This is the fourth installment of my grandfather's prophecy book.
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III. God's Work On This Four Promise Program
Let us now turn to a consideration of how God has worked and is working on this program. His work will finally bring the Coming for the Second Time of the Jewish Messiah—our blessed Lord Jesus. God's work in the past, as well as in the present, was seasoned with mercy, expediency and wisdom. Although Abraham was willed the entire Holy Land, God let him be a sojourner only in it and never let him possess personally one foot of it except the cemetery lots which he bought of Ephron the Hittite among the children of Heth—namely the field of Machpelah with its cave near Hebron. Here he buried Sarah. God's mercy is seen in this in that the cup of iniquity of the Amorite was not yet full (Genesis 15:16) so God postponed their destruction and dispossession of the land. The expediency and wisdom is seen in that God's instrument of destruction—the children of Israel—was not yet available. As we have indicated before, God sent Jacob and household of seventy-five souls into Egypt in order to form the nation and build this instrument till the cup of iniquity above was filled. Then God under Joshua destroyed and dispossessed the Canaanitish tribes and gave possession of the land, under warnings and promises, to the 12 tribes of Israel. Just before they entered, Moses (Deuteronomy 11:7-21) told them that God was the great, divine Caretaker of this Holy Land—from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates—and that the Lord's "eyes were always upon it from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year" (verse 12). He also promised that economic prosperity would be theirs for wholehearted obedience to the Divine Caretaker and that reverses and chastisement would follow their failure in obedience. According to Joshua 24:31 Israel gave this obedience all the days of Joshua and all the days of the contemporary elders who overlived Joshua. Afterward failure upon failure followed till God's chastisement fell upon them and God's instrument of punishment, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, destroyed their capital city, burned Solomon's temple and carried the people into the seventy years Babylonish Captivity. Up to this time God and His work on the Four Promise Program to Abraham had carried out mainly only 2—(1) the making of the nation and (2) the giving of the Land for that Nation. On account of Israel's failure and the consequent Babylonish Captivity, God's work on the Four Promises was partially suspended.
When the seventy years Captivity was accomplished in 536 B. C. God resumed His work by causing the great Persian king Cyrus to command his Jewish captives to return to the Holy Land and to rebuild the temple. Some over 49,000 under the governor Zerubbabel returned and finally built the Second Temple called Zerubbabel's. Later under Ezra the scribe and Nehemiah the Persian King Artaxerxes' Butler, another group returned, rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and helped to restore the nation in the Promised Land. Thus God resumed His work on the promises to Abraham. If we want to understand the Bible and the meaning of prophecy we need to remember the part the descendants of Abraham through Isaac have in God's purposes and plan for our world and also remember that they will play the leading earthly role under God in the millennial earth. Israel is a key to Bible truth. With the return from Babylon and with the remainder of the Old Testament, God was shaping things for and working toward the third promise to Abraham—namely to bless him by sending his greatest Son, Jesus Christ, into the world.
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Monday, August 15, 2016
Monday Review: Great by Choice 5
1. This chapter is called "Leading Above the Death Line." It deals with the third of Collins' three distinctives of companies that weather difficult times. The first two were 1) fanatical discipline and 2) empirical creativity. The third characteristic is "productive paranoia."
2. He starts with the story of David Breashears climbing Mt. Everest in 1996 trying to shoot a panoramic view from the top for an IMAX movie in the works. Coming up behind him were two experienced guides, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer. Given the circumstances, Breashears decided to go back down, let the groups coming up pass and any erratic weather, and then try again. He had brought enough extra oxygen to wait a little.
A day later, Hall and Fischer and their groups were dead, and Breashears had enough extra oxygen both to find them and still go to the top himself.
3. Collins breaks down productive paranoia into three aspects: 1) having reserves for a crisis, 2) carefully managing 3 different kinds of risk, and 3) being able to zoom out and then zoom back in when a crisis seems looming.
So 10X companies carried 3 to 10 times the ratio of cash to assets. Intel, for example, had a free cash flow that was 40 percent of its monthly revenue as opposed to the more average 25% of AMD). "It's what they do before the storm comes that matters most" (105). Southwest had a billion dollars in cash on hand when 9-11 hit. They were the only airline that posted a profit not only in 2012, but in the last quarter of 2011.
Breashears had the extra oxygen canisters to postpone his push to the top of Mt. Everest.
4. There are a number of types of risk that productively paranoid companies watch. The first is the Death Line Risk. These are the type of events that could kill or severely damage an enterprise.
A second kind of risk is an asymmetric risk, one where to fail would produce a much greater negative than the positive of success (think Pascal's Wager). Finally, uncontrollable risks are ones that a company would have little ability to manage or control.
10X companies made far fewer decisions in these risky areas than the comparison companies (22% as opposed to 43%).
They added another kind of risk near the end of their study--time-based risks, risks relating to the speed of decision and action. The study found that recognizing a threat early and then taking the time to make a rigorous and deliberate decision yielded better outcomes than quick decisions.
(Their example, though, involved a decision in a couple weeks, so we're not really talking about a whole lot of time. Basically, they didn't just make a decision the day they recognized the looming crisis.)
5. Being able to zoom out and then zoom back in relates to stopping to brainstorm when leadership gets paranoid about a crisis that could happen. So the threat of Motorola led Intel to spend a week zooming out to formulate a strategy before then zooming back in to go full tilt.
Let me say again, they are not counseling inaction. Dare I say that in my circles (education), there's not a lot of leaping at all. The advice to slow down is not what is needed in this case. It is to get paranoid.
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Seminary PL 19: Leading Healthy Teams
This is the fifth post on church management in my "Seminary in a Nutshell" series. In this seminary series, first I did a section on the Person and Calling of a Minister. Now this is the nineteenth post in a section on the Pastor as a Leader (see at the bottom).
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1. Patrick Lencioni has written a classic book on team dynamics called, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Although the book is written with a business setting in mind, the basic ideas apply to any organization working toward goals together, and the church certainly falls into that category as well.
The five dysfunctions are 1) absence of trust, 2) fear of conflict, 3) lack of commitment, 4) avoidance of accountability, and 5) inattention to results. Lencioni wrote the book in the form of a "fable," which helps bring the ideas home in a powerful way.
The first dysfunction, a lack of trust, refers to a team that does not open up to each other. They don't really know each other. They don't let their guard down to each other. They don't become "vulnerable" in front of each other. How can the juices flow and synergize to do great things if everyone on the team holds back with each other?
Spending time together on retreat is one way to work at trust. Going through personality inventories like Myers-Briggs or Strengthsfinders is another. Having team members who don't trust the rest of the team--or who poison trust on the team--can be so serious that the team will not be able to achieve anything great.
The second dysfunction can be particularly true of Christian circles, especially holiness circles--a fear of conflict. I personally grew up associating conflict with carnality. But an "artificial harmony" only squelches important voices of disagreement. Lencioni makes it clear that he has in mind constructive conflict, not name-calling or getting personal with sarcastic remarks.
A great team considers the positive and the negative sides, and if someone doesn't trust the rest of the team enough to push back, then you're in danger of heading down the wrong paths when you could have seen otherwise. "Consensus is horrible" (95), if you mean that no one feels free to voice contrasting points of view.
A lack of commitment to a decision is the next. This could be the person who continues to argue against a decision after it is already made or the person who doesn't go all in. Lencioni talks in terms of "buy-in." If the team doesn't buy-in to the direction you are headed, then the team isn't going to give it their all.
I might point out that Lencioni is talking about the executive team here, those who actually implement decisions. The other author we are looking at today, Larry Osborne, wisely points out that a board or congregation does not have to have full buy-in for a pastoral team to move in a certain direction. He suggests that you need "permission" from this circle more than "buy-in" (77).
Failure to hold each other accountable is a fourth dysfunction. Unless you trust each other, then this dimension can come across as destructive. But if a team recognizes each other's strengths and weaknesses and positively encourages when necessarily, the team will accomplish more. If the team doesn't hold each other accountable and has "low standards," then it won't achieve much.
Inattention to results is the last dysfunction. If the team has no collective goals, it won't achieve them. A key dimension here is that they are collective rather than individual goals. The pitfall here is the individual who is just out to achieve status or success for him or herself rather than the greater good of the group as a whole. A team owns each other's goals as their goals.
2. The second resource on teams for this week is Larry Osborne's Sticky Teams. Osborne's book is of course more directly relevant to the church situation because he is writing with the church in mind. He thus deals with the specific dynamics of the three team layers of a typical congregation: the staff level, the board level, and the congregation level. Even more helpfully, he recognizes that the dynamics of the relationships between these three teams changes as a church grows from small, to mid-sized, to a large congregation.
A helpful metaphor for the way the team dynamics change is a sports metaphor. So in the smallest size church, the pastor can be something like a "track star." He or she does just about everything. As the church gets a little bigger, Osborne suggests that the church can become a little like a golf game, the team is playing together but really everyone is playing his or her own game. Lencioni might suggest that it should never be like this.
Particularly helpful are the sports Osborne suggests for the mid-size and large church. The mid-sized church, he suggests, is like a basketball team. You are working together toward a common goal but no one person should be hogging the ball. When the church grows to a certain size, then it become more like a football team. You can't know what everyone else is doing but need to focus on your part of the game.
3. Perhaps the biggest dysfunction for Osborne is a lack of unity. Here he doesn't mean that everyone agrees on everything. In other words, he is not contradicting Lencioni's thoughts on conflict or artificial harmony. He is also not as worried about doctrinal unity or personal unity. On most church boards, he suggests, there is a doctrinal unity. He doesn't seem as worried about "respect and friendship" either, which is the kind of unity that Lencioni targets.
Perhaps he passes by these first two dimensions of unity too quickly. He insightfully points out that different Christian groups may use the same words but mean quite different things. I have found that both with transfer pastors to the Wesleyan Church from other denominations and at Indiana Wesleyan University with new professors. There are often assumptions that certain words mean the same thing as the places from which they came when it has not historically been so.
What Lencioni calls "philosophical unity" is an agreement about the priorities and methods of ministry (31). He tells a story about a conflict in a parking lot over pcolitical fliers. An attender not only assumed that the church had the same political slant as he did (which probably was a good assumption of its individuals), but he did not know that the church as a method, did not take political sides. They agreed on the ideas but not on the methods. Realizing that it's best to convey such things before conflict happens, Osborne set up a retreat of sorts for new people.
4. Osborne suggests five major roadblocks to team unity: 1) meeting in the wrong place, 2) ignoring relationships, 3) not meeting often enough, 4) constant turnover, and 5) too many members. More on meetings when we get to the administration part of this series.
He also mentions some key characteristics to look for in a good team member. So you want people who speak up (or if they don't, who then shut up). He suggests "leaders, not representatives." He wants people who are thinking of the greater good, not people who are simply representing interest groups in the church. No "theys" allowed--if you're on the team, then it is a "we." "Good enough" probably isn't. Everyone looks better on paper than in person. Character is more important than giftedness. Philosophical unity is important--on methods and priorities.
5. There are many good insights and tips in this book. For team leadership tips he gives six: 1) ignore your weaknesses. That is to say, focus on the strengths, as we've pointed out before. 2) Surveys are a waste of time, because people answer what should be the case rather than what is the case. 3) Seek permission, not buy-in. 4) Let squeeky wheels squeek. This relates to Lencioni's point about welcoming constructive conflict. 5) Let dying programs die. Languishing people and programs will sap the energy of the mission.
6) Plan in pencil, because things change. For this one he suggests fuzzy budgets and flexible policies. "A budget is a planning tool, not a straight jacket" (84). "At no point should a policy be allowed to trump common sense."
6. He gives the following advice to pastors as leaders: 1) present first drafts, not final proposals, 2) Keep no secrets from the board, and 3) Follow the board's advice.
As the sports game changes as a church grows, he suggests that the role of the church board changes accordingly too: 1) in the small church, the board does everything. 2) Then when there is some staff, the church approves everything. 3) In a still larger church, the board reviews everything. 4) In a fairly large church, the board sets direction and boundaries. 5) Finally, in the mega-church, a board gives wise council, applies brakes, and is a crisis team in waiting.
Similarly, the function of staff changes as the church grows too. 1) At first every staff member has to be a generalist, because there is so much to be spread around. 2) Then the staff shift toward being specialists in specific areas. 3) As the church grows, staff leadership become empowerers of those under them. 4) Also key, as with Lencioni's fifth dysfunction, is that the staff do not see their area as a silo but as a contributor to a greater good.
7. There's a lot of miscellaneous wisdom in Osborne's book. He has a whole chapter about making sure that "young eagles" have a seat on the table. I completely agree with him when he says that leadership roles shouldn't have to do with who has been here the longest. He has his board and staff read some of the things he's reading. In other words, he takes people who have experience from other walks of life and gives them some enculturation to ministry. Imagine when the church boss reads what seminary classes have been saying about him or her for years!
He clarifies that a pastor shouldn't "lobby." Inform of philosophy and such long before you get to the moment of conflict. People tend to polarize in a conflict and often don't back down once they've staked a public position. It's good to have addressed issues before the conflict comes. "In any field, the seemingly obvious solutions are often the wrong solutions" (130). That is to say, experts in a field often know better than what seems common sense to an amateur.
For moving forward, he gives the following advice: 1) Test the waters. Informally put some feelers out before you bring a proposal forward. You'll get good advice and won't surprise anyone. The most natural first reaction to change is resistance. 2) Listen and respond to resistors. 3) Put the idea before individuals before groups. "If there are more than 6 people in the room, then the decision was already made elsewhere" or there will be just be mindless wandering in discussion. 4) Lead boldly. Champion the cause once it reaches that stage. All in.
Next Week: Pastor as Leader 20: Good Communication
Leadership in General
Strategic Planning
- The Mission, Great and Small
- Identifying Mission
- Casting Vision
- Vision Statements
- Thinking Missionally
- Evaluating Strengths
- Identifying Core Values
- Setting Goals
- Leading Change
- Evaluating Progress/Resetting Goals
Saturday, August 13, 2016
4.1 Current in a Series Circuit
Module 4 starts today of the Navy Basic Electricity and Electronics series. The first three modules were:1. Electrical Current
2. Voltage
3. Resistance
This module has to do with measuring current and voltage in series circuits. The multimeter it pictures is out of date (analog), so there was a lot in this long section that is more or less irrelevant. I've pasted in a picture of my multimeter below. The black lead goes on the negative. The red lead goes on the positive. A few key points:
- When using the ammeter function, the multimeter needs to be connected in series. That means all the current needs to run through the meter.
- You disconnect the power when connecting, then energize the circuit for measurement.
- Current in a series circuit will have the same value everywhere in the circuit.
- A series circuit is a circuit where there is only one path for circuit flow.
- A parallel circuit is one where there is more than one path for current to flow. Each path is called a "branch."
Friday, August 12, 2016
Friday Science: Are Numbers Real?
1. Penrose continues his exploration of the intersection between math and reality as he looks at several different types of number and asks if they have any basis in the physical world. As he proceeds through different categories of number, he interacts with Euclid, the Greek mathematicians and these questions as the Greeks first posed them.
2. So what about natural numbers, the counting numbers? Obviously they have a basis in my fingers. I can count distinct items. (Zero was of course added by mathematicians from India since the time of Christ.The natural numbers plus zero constitute whole numbers.) In the end, Richard Dedekind (1831-1916) and Georg Cantor (1845-1918) created set theory to be able to define numbers abstractly and not by way of physical objects.
3. Brahmagupta also came up with the notion of negative numbers. The whole numbers and their negatives together form the set of integers. Penrose asks if negative numbers exist in the physical world. After all, I can define a certain direction as negative (in space or time) but that's just a matter of definition. If I treat my distance as a "scalar" (directionless quantity), then all directions are positive.
Penrose suggests that the discovery of the electron and other negative entities in physics (e.g., antimatter) suggest that there is in fact a physical correspondent to negative numbers.
4. The chapter starts with the Greek quest to see if all numbers can be expressed in a rational form. That is, can all numbers be expressed as a ratio of two numbers, one number divided by another. As it turns out, they cannot. The length of the hypotenuse of most right triangles usually cannot be expressed as a fraction.
One question he addresses briefly in the chapter is the scale of the infinite. The invention of the calculus theoretically divides numbers up into infinitely small quantities. Similarly, the scale of the universe as we know it is quite large. There is debate to which he will return later in the book about whether there is some ultimately small unit of length (the Planck length), smaller than which you cannot go. I personally am sympathetic to this idea.
5. So the Greeks conceded that there are irrational numbers. These are numbers that cannot be expressed in the form of a ratio. Together, the set of rational and irrational numbers constitute the set of real numbers. The chapter that follows deals with imaginary or complex numbers, which it turns out also have a basis in the physical world.
The irrational numbers are basically numbers that when expressed in decimal form (decimals were also invented in India and based on to Europe through Arab mathematicians) go on forever without a simple repetition. Intriguing to me is that the Greeks were able to express these irrational numbers in terms of "continued fractions." These are fractions like the picture above.
The Greeks were able to find a repeatable pattern in these continued fractions. "Quadratic irrationals" are irrational numbers that can be put into the form of a whole number plus the square root of a number. (Pi would be an example of an irrational number that does not fit this form.) In decimal form, the numbers right after the first number of the square root form a chiasm (a, b, c, ... c, b, a). Then the next decimal is always twice the first one. Then this pattern repeats itself forever.
Here is the square root of 14: 3. 121 6 121 6 121 6 121 6...
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Thursday Novel Excerpt: Drowning in Full Armor 1
Ten years after Augustine Shelburne was born in Jamestown, Maarten Peterse Schenck von Nydeck boarded the ship de Valckener with his family for Nieuw Amsterdam. The year was 1650.
The family of Schenck was a military family. Martin's father and uncle had fought fiercely in the Dutch War of Independence from Spain, which lasted eighty years (1568-1648). However, his uncle--after whom he was named--had not always fought for the same side. And his uncle had not fared well in the Dutch courts. Why live in the Netherlands out of favor when you can carve out your own destiny in America?
The tale of his uncle Maartin was infamous. Born in Goch, he had first fought for William of Orange in the Dutch revolution as the head of twenty-two men. He successfully defended the castle of his ancestors, Bleijenbeek Castle, against attack from a province loyal to Spain. But then when Dutch courts had him forcibly removed and gave the castle to his cousin, he fought for the other side for a time. Whichever provinces he fought for generally won.
But it was his death that was most infamous. Fighting now on the side of Dutch independence again, he tried to sneak into the city of Nijmegen to take it by surprise with 20 barges of men. But because the river was flooded, they overshot their mark and entered into the windows of a house where a wedding was taking place.
The alarm was sounded. His men were pushed back. And Maartin himself ended up in the river in a full suit of armor. He inevitably drowned. And once the townspeople dredged him up, they took off his head--still with a scowl on his face--and stuck it on a pike. Then they drew and quartered his dead body, placing various body parts in public for all to see.
The tale of his uncle Maartin was infamous. Born in Goch, he had first fought for William of Orange in the Dutch revolution as the head of twenty-two men. He successfully defended the castle of his ancestors, Bleijenbeek Castle, against attack from a province loyal to Spain. But then when Dutch courts had him forcibly removed and gave the castle to his cousin, he fought for the other side for a time. Whichever provinces he fought for generally won.
But it was his death that was most infamous. Fighting now on the side of Dutch independence again, he tried to sneak into the city of Nijmegen to take it by surprise with 20 barges of men. But because the river was flooded, they overshot their mark and entered into the windows of a house where a wedding was taking place.
The alarm was sounded. His men were pushed back. And Maartin himself ended up in the river in a full suit of armor. He inevitably drowned. And once the townspeople dredged him up, they took off his head--still with a scowl on his face--and stuck it on a pike. Then they drew and quartered his dead body, placing various body parts in public for all to see.
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Gen Eds H2: From 9-11 to the Present
This election year is the strangest I can remember. I think it's fair to say there has never been a candidate like Donald Trump in my lifetime. How did we get here?
Today I start looking back through world history. See my previous post for my basic framework. I am starting from the present and moving backward, and I am starting from my present. When I say "my" present, I recognize that I am an American of European descent. So that is the best place for me as narrator to start.
This is a series of posts on World History, the second topic in a series called, "General Education in a Nutshell." These are ten subjects you might study in a general education or "liberal arts" core at a university or college. The first topic in the overall series was philosophy.
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1. In the previous post, I presented a rationale for the way I am approaching world history. As we start today, I want to mention two key components of my analysis. The first tool is what I am calling "pivot points." Certainly any decision we make, even the smallest ones, can have massive repercussions for later history. But I am going to focus my analysis on what I consider to be the most crucial points where history would be massively different if the event had not occurred or had happened differently. [1]
The second tool I want to use is the "counterfactual." What might history have looked like if the event had played out differently? Of course we cannot know for certain, but these thought experiments help us reflect on the real impact of the pivot point on the course of history.
Each week we will start at the moment before a major pivot point. We will start with the question, "How did we get here?" Then we will proceed back to what seem to be the most important pivot points in that period of history. Of course there are an infinite number of things going on at any one time. Any selection of certain events means we are "de-selecting" an almost infinite amount of other events. Only God knows all the events, characters, and settings in all their details and proper relationships.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders
1. This is the most unusual election of my lifetime (2016). In Bernie Sanders we had a candidate who called himself a "democratic socialist," which is truly strange given the negative connotation the word socialist has had throughout most of twentieth century US history. [2] Meanwhile, Donald Trump, a businessman, has managed to undermine the entire Republican establishment with a campaign that has channeled the anxiety and anger of a demographic whose default dominance in US society seems to be steadily diminishing.
How did we get here?
2. It is interesting to say, but I don't think the election of a female president would truly reflect a change in the current trajectory of American history. Clinton represents the current momentum of history and Sanders perhaps an accelerated version of that momentum (possibly where the trajectory is currently headed). It more seems like the election of Trump would represent a turning point or at least a turning blip.
[Turning blip option: Constantine made Christianity legal in AD313. The trajectory was then toward making Christianity the only legal religion, which happened under Theodosius in 380. But there was a "push-back" emperor, Julian "the apostate" (361-63). For a brief time, the empire went back to its non-Christian, "pagan" roots. But he was a last push back, a blip rather than a turning point.
Similarly, Bloody Mary (ruled 1547-58) tried to bring England back to Catholicism after her father left the Roman Catholic Church. But it was only a blip. When her sister Elizabeth became queen in 1558, the Protestant trajectory of England was ensured.]
If Trump were elected, it is not clear that he would ultimately change the current trajectory of American culture--at least not without a violent and devastating hand. It is more likely that he would prove to be a blip on the current trajectory. At the moment, it is looking as if he will be defeated. But many things can change in 89 days.
Supreme Court Obergefell Decision
3. The first pivot point I want to mention is the 2014 Obergefell decision of the Supreme Court. This decision afforded gay marriage the same status as heterosexual marriage in the United States. The decision did not come out of the blue. It represented the culmination of over a decade of legal back and forth on the subject, with some states having opened the door to gay marriage and others passing laws against it.
[The speed with which this situation has changed is striking. As an opinion, I tend to see movies and media as the most significant trigger of these changes. They have created a climate of acceptance that not only humanized what had largely been a distant concept, but they have encouraged individuals to be open in a way that had previously been rare.]
Obergefell put into effect a trajectory that was already well in play in American culture. However, it has had a seriously disorienting effect on a certain segment of the American population, not least conservative Christianity. Although the Trump campaign has publicly supported the current trajectory on this specific issue, the insecurity and anger on which his campaign feeds was greatly fomented by the Obergefell decision, IMO.
3. As our first counterfactual, we can ask this question: Would Donald Trump be the Republican candidate if Obergefell had not taken place? Was this Supreme Court decision the straw that broke the back of a camel that had been watching as America became more and more what Trump has called, "politically correct"?
Opposition to "political correctness" has been a key feature of Trump's campaign. In this category we might place a number of current trends and factors that play into his push-back against the cultural trajectory: 1) the empowerment of gay Americans and transgendered individuals under the law, 2) the rising dominance of the Hispanic demographic, 3) protests by the African-American community about violent treatment by law-enforcement, 4) an African-American president and the prospect of a female president, 5) increased negative pressure and rebuke in relation to language and actions that were once casual behaviors, and 6) a perception of increasing disadvantage at the same time that white males are being told they are privileged.
In consequence of these forces, a rising anger and anxiety has built within a certain segment of the American population. The animus of Trump's campaign toward illegal immigrants, toward all Muslims, and toward refugees relates at least in part to this racial insecurity (we will mention the terrorism component in a moment). Trump himself has occasionally moved beyond individuals in these categories who are threats to decry individuals who are legal and even war heroes. [3] These moments in the Trump campaign suggest that it is not merely illegal immigration in play or merely Islamic terrorism that is the driver but race itself at least to some degree.
Video of the deaths of a number of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement have set in motion first a "Black Lives Matter" movement protesting the way African-Americans are treated by the police. But the shootings of certain police officers have provided others with fodder for a counter protest ("Blue Lives Matter" or "All Lives Matter"). Long standing stereotypes are in play, fueling anger on all sides. Certainly some of those who support Trump are fueled in part by this aspect of our current situation.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)
4. The recent surge in Islamic terrorism is also a major factor behind the current climate of insecurity. ISIS coming to dominance in 2014 is seen by some as a major failure of the current Obama administration.
A number of factors seem to have combined to empower ISIS, which previously was informally called Al-Qaeda in Iraq. One was certainly the withdrawal of troops by the Obama administration in 2011. Iraqi forces were simply not strong enough to resist ISIS when it stepped into a power vaccuum. The US likely resisted intervention at first because of the prevalent view among experts on the Middle East that US involvement usually creates as much future difficulty as it solves current problems. Similarly, there is the matter of giving space to Iraqi sovereignty. Nevertheless, the US resumed its military involvement in Iraq in 2014 when ISIS' forces had advanced so far as to put significant Kurdish territory in danger in the northeast part of Iraq.
5. Another factor in the rise of ISIS is what has been called the Arab Spring. It began in Tunisia in 2010 and spread to Egypt, Libya, and Syria. While the idea of democratic overthrow of dictatorships might seem desirable, the results have not been entirely positive, to say the least. Democracy without guaranteed rights for minorities usually becomes a situation where the majority party oppresses minorities.
In Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein led to a civil war between Shi'ites and Sunnis, with the Shi'ite now playing the role of the party in power where the Sunnis had been before. In Egypt, the army ended up taking back over the government because the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood began to impose Islamic law on the entire population. In Libya we had the death of Ambassador Stevens at Benghazi in the chaos after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. Meanwhile, we are currently watching "democracy" erode the rights of minorities in Turkey.
By the time these revolutions reached Syria, the US was much more hesitant to get too involved, and Russia would soon take the side of the dictator in question, Bashar al-Assad. A stalemate would ensue that created a vacuum into which ISIS began to insert itself. Those inclined to support the jihadist cause flocked to Syria to join in the cause and be trained by ISIS.
Some of these jihadists have returned to Europe, along with the flood of refugees from the Syrian crisis. We have seen recent terrorist attacks in Belgium and France associated with such individuals.
6. ISIS has arguably facilitated the rise of home grown terrorists. Al-Qaeda did not have a fixed geographical location, but it was still strongly located first in Afghanistan and then Pakistan. When it pulled off the 9-11 attacks, it sent people here.
But ISIS has catalyzed lone terrorists who have no direct connection with ISIS and yet are nevertheless following its lead. The recent shootings in San Bernadino and Orlando may have involved multiple factors, but the example of ISIS is surely one of them. We should expect to see more because it is virtually impossible to identify such individuals until they strike or are about to strike. [4]
Something should be said about the rapid development of social media. It featured prominently in the Arab Spring. It may have stopped a 2016 coup attempt in Turkey. It has been a key trigger for outrage at police violence and thus the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is playing a significant role in the 2016 election and in world events today. It is having a profound effect on history.
The Great Recession of 2008
7. If racial and national insecurity have created a climate in which a Donald Trump could become a candidate for president in 2016, the economic crisis of 2008 was the backdrop to the 2010 and 2012 elections in the United States. This economic crisis came on in the last year of Bush's presidency and some of the emergency actions that were taken in late 2008/early 2009 were taken jointly by the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations. TARP, the "Troubled Asset Relief Program," was passed by Congress a month before the 2008 election.
By that time President George W. Bush had become deeply unpopular as a result of the prolonged Iraq War, the longest war in US history (with military action still continuing today). Obama won the 2008 election handily as a result. But the bail out of the auto industry, banks, and "too big to fail" corporations like AIG was seen as unfair by many when some of them had arguably played a role in the origins of the crisis.
The Iraq War, the beginnings of the bail out, and perhaps other features of the Bush era left a 10.6 trillion dollar deficit to Obama the day he took office. Continued bailouts would drive this figure much higher. [5] This economic situation gave rise to a subgroup within the Republican Party called the "Tea Party," for whom fiscal responsibility became the focal concern. They swept Congress in the 2010 election and were a major factor in the nature of the Republican primary in the 2012 election.
8. The idealism of the Tea Party in the face of the veto power of President Obama has resulted in six years of intense gridlock in Washington. One of the most defining features of Obama's administration will likely prove to be the passing of the Affordable Care Act (somewhat derisively known as Obamacare). While some of the individual components of this sweeping health care legislation are popular (no denial on the basis of pre-existing conditions, ability to keep children on a parent's plan till they are 26, 20 million more people insured), it has been widely unpopular in certain circles. Among those who previously had good insurance, it is widely blamed for a significant increase in health care cost.
This act was created during 2009 when Democrats had overwhelming control over both houses. However, it nearly did not make it fully through the system when Ted Kennedy died and was replaced in a special election by a Republican, which made it possible to filibuster any modifications to the legislation. This was ironic because Kennedy had long been one of the strongest proponents of health care reform. Nevertheless, the bill had already gone far enough through the system that it could be passed without modification. For the next six years the repeal of Obamacare would be a major goal of Republicans and a Congress now controlled by Republicans.
The deficit has been a major concern of the Tea Party for the last six years. On more than one occasion, what had been the routine increase of the debt ceiling was blocked by filibuster in protest of an ever increasing deficit. [6] In October 2013, the government actually shutdown for 16 days as this group in Congress refused to authorize the funding of several parts of the Affordable Care Act that were then scheduled to go into effect.
9. Different causes for the global Great Recession are often mentioned. Perhaps there is some truth in all of them. For example, a climate had persisted for some time in which large numbers of housing loans were given to individuals who were not likely to be able to pay them back. Similarly, a "housing bubble" was in play, where loans could be taken out on property that far surpassed the actual value of the property.
More complex was the new practice of bundling bad debt, where banks took collections of debts from bad loans and sold them to each other. This practice continues, leading some to suggest that the economic practices of Wall Street that at least partially caused the recession continue to pose a threat to the global economy. Bernie Sanders' campaign included a call for further regulation of Wall Street in these areas.
The Iraq War of 2003
10. Perhaps the most determinative event for the current world landscape was the war launched in 2003 against Iraq. Is it possible that this war was a greater pivot point in history than 9-11 itself? If we look at this event from a counterfactual point of view, the war arguably dragged on far longer than President Bush had originally anticipated. Indeed, less than two months after the offensive began, he announced that the mission had been accomplished (May 1, 2003) and that major combat operations in Iraq were ended.
Instead, the US would get mired in the middle of Iraqi infighting and insurgencies for almost nine years, with December 31, 2011 considered the final withdrawal. It is hard to imagine the profound effect this invasion has had on the world. More than 4500 soldiers lost their lives in Iraq and over 100,000 Iraqis. More than 1.5 million Americans served in Iraq during the almost nine year war. The impact of this service on families and on the soldiers themselves has been profound. It is easy to doubt if President Bush would have made the decision to go to war if he had known the way it would play out.
11. Again, it seems hard to underestimate the amount of hostility this invasion created in the Muslim world toward the United States. Most experts on the Middle East would argue that it is directly responsible for the exponential rise of terrorism in the last decade, creating a generation of potential enemies who would like nothing more than to destroy us. This is arguably the war with the West that Osama bin Laden had set out to ignite on 9-11. Without the Iraq War, there would have been no ISIS. Without the Iraq War, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would arguably not have been elected as president in Iran in 2005.
In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, the entire world seemed united behind the United States, including the countries of the Arab world. There was wide UN support for the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The situation was quite different in the lead up to the Iraq War. Few major powers backed the US, and the case for war was thin, even though most of the world did believe Saddam Hussein had WMD (weapons of mass destruction).
It would turn out of course that Iraq did not have such weapons. But in the climate after 9-11, it would have arguably been suicide for anyone in Congress to vote against the war. Only those in the most liberal of districts or states could have voted no and hoped to be reelected. The Bush administration seems to have had a noble but naive hope that they could "liberate" Iraq and that the Iraqi people would flock to democracy, greeting Americans as liberators. Then, with an ally in the Middle East, the entire landscape of the region could be changed for the better.
Alas, it did not turn out that way. The culture of the Middle East turned out to be quite different than such Western expectations.
9-11
12. The attacks on 9-11 punctured the psyche of America. There had been no attack comparable to it since the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It was almost unimaginable. Some insignificant figure from the Middle East had somehow managed to take down the most prominent feature of the New York City landscape.
Before 9-11, security at airports was generally casual. You used to be able to walk back to the gate and see your family board the airplane. There was no Department of Homeland Security to coordinate the security organizations of the government.
After 9-11, everyone was paranoid. Where was a terrorist going to jump out next? The then mayor of Marion, Indiana actually barricaded the courthouse after 9-11, as if the Middle East cared about some obscure town in Indiana that no one has ever heard of. Air marshals were put on planes, and paranoid people like me were on constant look out for someone to try to take over the plane. We watched the video of planes flying into the towers over and over again in disbelief.
The sense that the world was a safe place was gone. There was a twinge of doubt that America was invincible. Someone needed to pay.
13. 9-11 interrupted what was arguably a lazy but steady progressive trajectory of American history. An event of this kind inevitably causes a surge of conservatism, for conservatism by its very nature is a protective stance. Christian college students at the turn of the millennium tended to be very interested in social justice and not particularly interested in the theological debates that evangelicals of earlier decades had conducted. In 2002, Robert Webber wrote The Younger Evangelicals, highlighting a generation of evangelicals who were quite different from their forebears in these ways.
9-11 did not eliminate that trajectory. There remains a strong strand of Christians under 40 who are committed to social justice and progressive causes. Many of them supported Bernie Sanders in the recent primary. Some of that age demographic also, disgusted by a surge of Christian fundamentalism, have become "nones," young people with no religious affiliation whatsoever. This is currently the fastest growing religious demographic in America.
But 9-11 also naturally caused a resurgence of Christian fundamentalism in various forms. The strong rise of hyper-Calvinism ("young, restless, and Reformed") in some circles is one example of a conservative backlash no doubt fostered in part by the impact of 9-11. Several Christian colleges have undergone theological purges of sorts in the last decade. The Christian classroom of 2016 includes not only the progressives I mentioned above, but zealous neo-fundamentalists as well. These are students who were only three or four when 9-11 took place, students whose psyche was arguably formed in the zeal of the post-9-11 decade.
Next week: History 3: World War II to the Millennium
Major Take-Aways
[2] Marian Tupy suggests a more accurate term for Sanders would be a "social democrat."
[3] For example, when he suggested that a judge was being unfair to him because the judge was of Mexican descent or when he insulted the parents of a Muslim soldier killed in Iraq.
[4] The Constitution would prohibit any blanket action toward the Muslim community as Muslims and, in fact, the best way to stop such acts over time is for the Muslim community itself to identify such individuals among them. In the end, blanket targeting of the Muslim community is more likely to increase the number of future home grown terrorists rather than to diminish it.
[5] The federal deficit is 19.4 trillion dollars as I write this post.
[6] Filibuster can take place if the House does not have a supermajority of 60. It can thus keep a bill from even being voted on. The use of the filibuster by the Tea Party in Congress to prevent votes in the last six years is unprecented in US history. Increases of the debt ceiling are necessary in order to pay for budgets that Congress has already approved. In that sense, refusing to increase the debt ceiling prevents the government from paying its existing debts and commitments. It does not involve any new budgetary items.
Today I start looking back through world history. See my previous post for my basic framework. I am starting from the present and moving backward, and I am starting from my present. When I say "my" present, I recognize that I am an American of European descent. So that is the best place for me as narrator to start.
This is a series of posts on World History, the second topic in a series called, "General Education in a Nutshell." These are ten subjects you might study in a general education or "liberal arts" core at a university or college. The first topic in the overall series was philosophy.
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1. In the previous post, I presented a rationale for the way I am approaching world history. As we start today, I want to mention two key components of my analysis. The first tool is what I am calling "pivot points." Certainly any decision we make, even the smallest ones, can have massive repercussions for later history. But I am going to focus my analysis on what I consider to be the most crucial points where history would be massively different if the event had not occurred or had happened differently. [1]
The second tool I want to use is the "counterfactual." What might history have looked like if the event had played out differently? Of course we cannot know for certain, but these thought experiments help us reflect on the real impact of the pivot point on the course of history.
Each week we will start at the moment before a major pivot point. We will start with the question, "How did we get here?" Then we will proceed back to what seem to be the most important pivot points in that period of history. Of course there are an infinite number of things going on at any one time. Any selection of certain events means we are "de-selecting" an almost infinite amount of other events. Only God knows all the events, characters, and settings in all their details and proper relationships.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders
1. This is the most unusual election of my lifetime (2016). In Bernie Sanders we had a candidate who called himself a "democratic socialist," which is truly strange given the negative connotation the word socialist has had throughout most of twentieth century US history. [2] Meanwhile, Donald Trump, a businessman, has managed to undermine the entire Republican establishment with a campaign that has channeled the anxiety and anger of a demographic whose default dominance in US society seems to be steadily diminishing.
How did we get here?
2. It is interesting to say, but I don't think the election of a female president would truly reflect a change in the current trajectory of American history. Clinton represents the current momentum of history and Sanders perhaps an accelerated version of that momentum (possibly where the trajectory is currently headed). It more seems like the election of Trump would represent a turning point or at least a turning blip.
[Turning blip option: Constantine made Christianity legal in AD313. The trajectory was then toward making Christianity the only legal religion, which happened under Theodosius in 380. But there was a "push-back" emperor, Julian "the apostate" (361-63). For a brief time, the empire went back to its non-Christian, "pagan" roots. But he was a last push back, a blip rather than a turning point.
Similarly, Bloody Mary (ruled 1547-58) tried to bring England back to Catholicism after her father left the Roman Catholic Church. But it was only a blip. When her sister Elizabeth became queen in 1558, the Protestant trajectory of England was ensured.]
If Trump were elected, it is not clear that he would ultimately change the current trajectory of American culture--at least not without a violent and devastating hand. It is more likely that he would prove to be a blip on the current trajectory. At the moment, it is looking as if he will be defeated. But many things can change in 89 days.
Supreme Court Obergefell Decision
3. The first pivot point I want to mention is the 2014 Obergefell decision of the Supreme Court. This decision afforded gay marriage the same status as heterosexual marriage in the United States. The decision did not come out of the blue. It represented the culmination of over a decade of legal back and forth on the subject, with some states having opened the door to gay marriage and others passing laws against it.
[The speed with which this situation has changed is striking. As an opinion, I tend to see movies and media as the most significant trigger of these changes. They have created a climate of acceptance that not only humanized what had largely been a distant concept, but they have encouraged individuals to be open in a way that had previously been rare.]
Obergefell put into effect a trajectory that was already well in play in American culture. However, it has had a seriously disorienting effect on a certain segment of the American population, not least conservative Christianity. Although the Trump campaign has publicly supported the current trajectory on this specific issue, the insecurity and anger on which his campaign feeds was greatly fomented by the Obergefell decision, IMO.
3. As our first counterfactual, we can ask this question: Would Donald Trump be the Republican candidate if Obergefell had not taken place? Was this Supreme Court decision the straw that broke the back of a camel that had been watching as America became more and more what Trump has called, "politically correct"?
Opposition to "political correctness" has been a key feature of Trump's campaign. In this category we might place a number of current trends and factors that play into his push-back against the cultural trajectory: 1) the empowerment of gay Americans and transgendered individuals under the law, 2) the rising dominance of the Hispanic demographic, 3) protests by the African-American community about violent treatment by law-enforcement, 4) an African-American president and the prospect of a female president, 5) increased negative pressure and rebuke in relation to language and actions that were once casual behaviors, and 6) a perception of increasing disadvantage at the same time that white males are being told they are privileged.
In consequence of these forces, a rising anger and anxiety has built within a certain segment of the American population. The animus of Trump's campaign toward illegal immigrants, toward all Muslims, and toward refugees relates at least in part to this racial insecurity (we will mention the terrorism component in a moment). Trump himself has occasionally moved beyond individuals in these categories who are threats to decry individuals who are legal and even war heroes. [3] These moments in the Trump campaign suggest that it is not merely illegal immigration in play or merely Islamic terrorism that is the driver but race itself at least to some degree.
Video of the deaths of a number of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement have set in motion first a "Black Lives Matter" movement protesting the way African-Americans are treated by the police. But the shootings of certain police officers have provided others with fodder for a counter protest ("Blue Lives Matter" or "All Lives Matter"). Long standing stereotypes are in play, fueling anger on all sides. Certainly some of those who support Trump are fueled in part by this aspect of our current situation.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)
4. The recent surge in Islamic terrorism is also a major factor behind the current climate of insecurity. ISIS coming to dominance in 2014 is seen by some as a major failure of the current Obama administration.
A number of factors seem to have combined to empower ISIS, which previously was informally called Al-Qaeda in Iraq. One was certainly the withdrawal of troops by the Obama administration in 2011. Iraqi forces were simply not strong enough to resist ISIS when it stepped into a power vaccuum. The US likely resisted intervention at first because of the prevalent view among experts on the Middle East that US involvement usually creates as much future difficulty as it solves current problems. Similarly, there is the matter of giving space to Iraqi sovereignty. Nevertheless, the US resumed its military involvement in Iraq in 2014 when ISIS' forces had advanced so far as to put significant Kurdish territory in danger in the northeast part of Iraq.
5. Another factor in the rise of ISIS is what has been called the Arab Spring. It began in Tunisia in 2010 and spread to Egypt, Libya, and Syria. While the idea of democratic overthrow of dictatorships might seem desirable, the results have not been entirely positive, to say the least. Democracy without guaranteed rights for minorities usually becomes a situation where the majority party oppresses minorities.
In Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein led to a civil war between Shi'ites and Sunnis, with the Shi'ite now playing the role of the party in power where the Sunnis had been before. In Egypt, the army ended up taking back over the government because the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood began to impose Islamic law on the entire population. In Libya we had the death of Ambassador Stevens at Benghazi in the chaos after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi. Meanwhile, we are currently watching "democracy" erode the rights of minorities in Turkey.
By the time these revolutions reached Syria, the US was much more hesitant to get too involved, and Russia would soon take the side of the dictator in question, Bashar al-Assad. A stalemate would ensue that created a vacuum into which ISIS began to insert itself. Those inclined to support the jihadist cause flocked to Syria to join in the cause and be trained by ISIS.
Some of these jihadists have returned to Europe, along with the flood of refugees from the Syrian crisis. We have seen recent terrorist attacks in Belgium and France associated with such individuals.
6. ISIS has arguably facilitated the rise of home grown terrorists. Al-Qaeda did not have a fixed geographical location, but it was still strongly located first in Afghanistan and then Pakistan. When it pulled off the 9-11 attacks, it sent people here.
But ISIS has catalyzed lone terrorists who have no direct connection with ISIS and yet are nevertheless following its lead. The recent shootings in San Bernadino and Orlando may have involved multiple factors, but the example of ISIS is surely one of them. We should expect to see more because it is virtually impossible to identify such individuals until they strike or are about to strike. [4]
Something should be said about the rapid development of social media. It featured prominently in the Arab Spring. It may have stopped a 2016 coup attempt in Turkey. It has been a key trigger for outrage at police violence and thus the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is playing a significant role in the 2016 election and in world events today. It is having a profound effect on history.
The Great Recession of 2008
7. If racial and national insecurity have created a climate in which a Donald Trump could become a candidate for president in 2016, the economic crisis of 2008 was the backdrop to the 2010 and 2012 elections in the United States. This economic crisis came on in the last year of Bush's presidency and some of the emergency actions that were taken in late 2008/early 2009 were taken jointly by the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations. TARP, the "Troubled Asset Relief Program," was passed by Congress a month before the 2008 election.
By that time President George W. Bush had become deeply unpopular as a result of the prolonged Iraq War, the longest war in US history (with military action still continuing today). Obama won the 2008 election handily as a result. But the bail out of the auto industry, banks, and "too big to fail" corporations like AIG was seen as unfair by many when some of them had arguably played a role in the origins of the crisis.
The Iraq War, the beginnings of the bail out, and perhaps other features of the Bush era left a 10.6 trillion dollar deficit to Obama the day he took office. Continued bailouts would drive this figure much higher. [5] This economic situation gave rise to a subgroup within the Republican Party called the "Tea Party," for whom fiscal responsibility became the focal concern. They swept Congress in the 2010 election and were a major factor in the nature of the Republican primary in the 2012 election.
8. The idealism of the Tea Party in the face of the veto power of President Obama has resulted in six years of intense gridlock in Washington. One of the most defining features of Obama's administration will likely prove to be the passing of the Affordable Care Act (somewhat derisively known as Obamacare). While some of the individual components of this sweeping health care legislation are popular (no denial on the basis of pre-existing conditions, ability to keep children on a parent's plan till they are 26, 20 million more people insured), it has been widely unpopular in certain circles. Among those who previously had good insurance, it is widely blamed for a significant increase in health care cost.
This act was created during 2009 when Democrats had overwhelming control over both houses. However, it nearly did not make it fully through the system when Ted Kennedy died and was replaced in a special election by a Republican, which made it possible to filibuster any modifications to the legislation. This was ironic because Kennedy had long been one of the strongest proponents of health care reform. Nevertheless, the bill had already gone far enough through the system that it could be passed without modification. For the next six years the repeal of Obamacare would be a major goal of Republicans and a Congress now controlled by Republicans.
The deficit has been a major concern of the Tea Party for the last six years. On more than one occasion, what had been the routine increase of the debt ceiling was blocked by filibuster in protest of an ever increasing deficit. [6] In October 2013, the government actually shutdown for 16 days as this group in Congress refused to authorize the funding of several parts of the Affordable Care Act that were then scheduled to go into effect.
9. Different causes for the global Great Recession are often mentioned. Perhaps there is some truth in all of them. For example, a climate had persisted for some time in which large numbers of housing loans were given to individuals who were not likely to be able to pay them back. Similarly, a "housing bubble" was in play, where loans could be taken out on property that far surpassed the actual value of the property.
More complex was the new practice of bundling bad debt, where banks took collections of debts from bad loans and sold them to each other. This practice continues, leading some to suggest that the economic practices of Wall Street that at least partially caused the recession continue to pose a threat to the global economy. Bernie Sanders' campaign included a call for further regulation of Wall Street in these areas.
The Iraq War of 2003
10. Perhaps the most determinative event for the current world landscape was the war launched in 2003 against Iraq. Is it possible that this war was a greater pivot point in history than 9-11 itself? If we look at this event from a counterfactual point of view, the war arguably dragged on far longer than President Bush had originally anticipated. Indeed, less than two months after the offensive began, he announced that the mission had been accomplished (May 1, 2003) and that major combat operations in Iraq were ended.
Instead, the US would get mired in the middle of Iraqi infighting and insurgencies for almost nine years, with December 31, 2011 considered the final withdrawal. It is hard to imagine the profound effect this invasion has had on the world. More than 4500 soldiers lost their lives in Iraq and over 100,000 Iraqis. More than 1.5 million Americans served in Iraq during the almost nine year war. The impact of this service on families and on the soldiers themselves has been profound. It is easy to doubt if President Bush would have made the decision to go to war if he had known the way it would play out.
11. Again, it seems hard to underestimate the amount of hostility this invasion created in the Muslim world toward the United States. Most experts on the Middle East would argue that it is directly responsible for the exponential rise of terrorism in the last decade, creating a generation of potential enemies who would like nothing more than to destroy us. This is arguably the war with the West that Osama bin Laden had set out to ignite on 9-11. Without the Iraq War, there would have been no ISIS. Without the Iraq War, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would arguably not have been elected as president in Iran in 2005.
In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, the entire world seemed united behind the United States, including the countries of the Arab world. There was wide UN support for the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The situation was quite different in the lead up to the Iraq War. Few major powers backed the US, and the case for war was thin, even though most of the world did believe Saddam Hussein had WMD (weapons of mass destruction).
It would turn out of course that Iraq did not have such weapons. But in the climate after 9-11, it would have arguably been suicide for anyone in Congress to vote against the war. Only those in the most liberal of districts or states could have voted no and hoped to be reelected. The Bush administration seems to have had a noble but naive hope that they could "liberate" Iraq and that the Iraqi people would flock to democracy, greeting Americans as liberators. Then, with an ally in the Middle East, the entire landscape of the region could be changed for the better.
Alas, it did not turn out that way. The culture of the Middle East turned out to be quite different than such Western expectations.
9-11
12. The attacks on 9-11 punctured the psyche of America. There had been no attack comparable to it since the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It was almost unimaginable. Some insignificant figure from the Middle East had somehow managed to take down the most prominent feature of the New York City landscape.
Before 9-11, security at airports was generally casual. You used to be able to walk back to the gate and see your family board the airplane. There was no Department of Homeland Security to coordinate the security organizations of the government.
After 9-11, everyone was paranoid. Where was a terrorist going to jump out next? The then mayor of Marion, Indiana actually barricaded the courthouse after 9-11, as if the Middle East cared about some obscure town in Indiana that no one has ever heard of. Air marshals were put on planes, and paranoid people like me were on constant look out for someone to try to take over the plane. We watched the video of planes flying into the towers over and over again in disbelief.
The sense that the world was a safe place was gone. There was a twinge of doubt that America was invincible. Someone needed to pay.
13. 9-11 interrupted what was arguably a lazy but steady progressive trajectory of American history. An event of this kind inevitably causes a surge of conservatism, for conservatism by its very nature is a protective stance. Christian college students at the turn of the millennium tended to be very interested in social justice and not particularly interested in the theological debates that evangelicals of earlier decades had conducted. In 2002, Robert Webber wrote The Younger Evangelicals, highlighting a generation of evangelicals who were quite different from their forebears in these ways.
9-11 did not eliminate that trajectory. There remains a strong strand of Christians under 40 who are committed to social justice and progressive causes. Many of them supported Bernie Sanders in the recent primary. Some of that age demographic also, disgusted by a surge of Christian fundamentalism, have become "nones," young people with no religious affiliation whatsoever. This is currently the fastest growing religious demographic in America.
But 9-11 also naturally caused a resurgence of Christian fundamentalism in various forms. The strong rise of hyper-Calvinism ("young, restless, and Reformed") in some circles is one example of a conservative backlash no doubt fostered in part by the impact of 9-11. Several Christian colleges have undergone theological purges of sorts in the last decade. The Christian classroom of 2016 includes not only the progressives I mentioned above, but zealous neo-fundamentalists as well. These are students who were only three or four when 9-11 took place, students whose psyche was arguably formed in the zeal of the post-9-11 decade.
Next week: History 3: World War II to the Millennium
Major Take-Aways
- There are often temporary reversals in the overall trajectories of history.
- It's best to talk through certain issues long before flash points take place.
- Democracy is not natural for many cultures. Great care must be taken when moving in that direction.
- Meddling in the affairs of other nations should be a last resort of action. Trying to fix other countries regularly makes things worse.
- Don't start a war as a strategy, only as a last resort.
- Deregulation has its limits. Unbridled capitalism does almost always lead eventually to economic crises.
- Don't over-react to terrorists. Over-reaction tends to play into their hands.
[2] Marian Tupy suggests a more accurate term for Sanders would be a "social democrat."
[3] For example, when he suggested that a judge was being unfair to him because the judge was of Mexican descent or when he insulted the parents of a Muslim soldier killed in Iraq.
[4] The Constitution would prohibit any blanket action toward the Muslim community as Muslims and, in fact, the best way to stop such acts over time is for the Muslim community itself to identify such individuals among them. In the end, blanket targeting of the Muslim community is more likely to increase the number of future home grown terrorists rather than to diminish it.
[5] The federal deficit is 19.4 trillion dollars as I write this post.
[6] Filibuster can take place if the House does not have a supermajority of 60. It can thus keep a bill from even being voted on. The use of the filibuster by the Tea Party in Congress to prevent votes in the last six years is unprecented in US history. Increases of the debt ceiling are necessary in order to pay for budgets that Congress has already approved. In that sense, refusing to increase the debt ceiling prevents the government from paying its existing debts and commitments. It does not involve any new budgetary items.
Tuesday, August 09, 2016
Harry Shepherd (1961) Prophecy 3
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Promise Two:- Give Abraham A Land To Contain The Nation
The Second Promise to Abraham was to give him the Land of the Canaanitish tribes in which he had been a sojourner. In other words give him a Land to contain the nation. The title to this land was to pass down to Isaac to his descendants--the Israelites-- and not through Ishmael to the Arabs. By this warrantee deed the present Jews have a clear abstract in the archives of heaven to the Holy Land. The Arabs though descendants of Abraham through the Egyptian maid Hagar are squatters and not the rightful owners.
Promise Three: Bless Abraham And Make Him A Blessing
The Third Promise to Abraham was that he was to be blessed and to be a blessing. In this blessing God would bless all families and nations of the earth and thereby make Abraham's name great. This blessing would, of course, be brought about by the coming of the Kinsman-Redeemer of the stock of Abraham with redeeming grace. It is a known fact that Abraham’s name is great among Moslims, Jews and Christians.
Promise Four:- Abraham’s Descendants A Main Determining Factor In The Destinies Of Other Nations And Of Individuals
The Fourth Promise was that Abraham and his descendants through Isaac would be, at times, The Determining Factor in the Destinies of Other Nations and of Individuals. This truth is found in Genesis 12:3 in the declaration, “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.” Nations, rulers and individuals who have had a major control and handling of the Israelitish people have met the truth of blessing or curse according to this verse. Egypt, Syria, Babylon, Rome, Spain, Germany, Russia, England and America could testify to this fact—the latter two from the blessing angle. An individual example of the working of this Fourth Promise is to be found in the last election of President Harry Truman when the Dixiecrats split the Democratic Party in the south (1948). In 1912 when the Bull Moose Party, headed by Theodore Roosevelt, split the Republican Party, a keenly-discerning cartoonist drew the following cartoon: the elephant (the Republicans) the Bull Moose (the Progressives) the donkey (the Democrats--with Woodrow Wilson sitting on the donkey smiling, with hat in hand). The obvious meaning was a split Republican Party meant the election of Mr. Wilson. And so it was. Likewise a split Democratic Party in 1860 gave the election to Abraham Lincoln. I know of no exception to this rule in American History up to 1948 that the split in a major party through the election to the other major party. This held true till the election of 1948 when President Truman was reelected in spite of the Dixiecrat split. What is the explanation of this fact? God fulfilling this Fourth Promise, because the night of May 15, 1948, President Truman cabled the United States’ recognition as a nation of the little Israeli nation then being born. This recognition evidently in divine providence and order and also necessary to the establishment of the Israeli nation, was blessing Abraham's modern descendants and God paid President Truman back with enough votes to reelect him. This is my view of it. You may refuse it if you don't see it that way.
Monday, August 08, 2016
Monday Review: Great by Choice 4
1. So the previous chapter presented Collins and Hansen's conclusion that companies that thrived in difficult times had "fanatic discipline." Mostly what they mean is that these 10X companies set difficult but attainable goals that they stuck to in good times and bad.
This fourth chapter is called, "Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs." The idea is that the most successful companies did low-cost, low-risk innovations first and only then fired "calibrated cannonballs" in the directions of what worked.
2. So the first section points out that it was not the most innovative companies that had the phenomenal growth. Usually it was a company that came just a little behind the initial innovators. They were innovative, to be sure. Unless they met some minimum innovation threshhold for their market, they didn't go anywhere. But beyond that threshhold, being more innovative didn't make much of a difference.
3. The next section gives examples of the bullets then cannonballs idea. Amgen tried its recombinant DNA innovation on about a dozen possible uses (bullets) before it shot a cannonball at an applicant relating to anemia. A bullet is a) low cost, b) low risk, and c) low distraction.
Then they give examples of groups that shot cannonballs first, risky cannonballs that ended up sinking the companies. PSA was the model for Southwest, but it shot risky cannonball after cannonball and ended up sinking.
4. So even the 10Xers didn't get it all right all the time. Progressive made a rather big gamble, a uncalibrated cannonball that failed. So from then on they shot bullets first. From then on they used "empirical validation," test bullets, before firing any more cannonballs. From now on they were calibrated cannonballs.
Bill Gates was not able to predict whether IBMs new OS/2 would take over the market. At Microsoft, he kept some of his people still working on Windows. Surprisingly, Windows won out. If Bill Gates didn't succeed by predictive genius, then what hope do the rest of us have.
The chapter ends with Steve Jobs coming back to Apple. He has the idea of setting up local stores. But they don't make a huge investment. They make some bullet trials. They recalibrate. They fire again. He goes back to the old MacIntosh and improves it. The iPod starts as a branch of their computer business. It expands inch by inch.
Thus, "empirical creativity" is Collins second key, after fanatic discipline. It is innovation implemented in dialog with evidence gathered.
Sunday, August 07, 2016
Seminary PL18: Church Position Descriptions
This is the fourth post on church management in my "Seminary in a Nutshell" series. In this seminary series, first I did a section on the Person and Calling of a Minister. Now this is the eighteenth post in a section on the Pastor as a Leader (see at the bottom).
_________________
1. Chances are, the general structure of your church is going to be a given. If you pastor a Methodist church, for example, there are standard committees and positions. Although large Wesleyan churches have done some creative things with church governance, there is still a standard structure in the Discipline, the manual for Wesleyan Church polity.
Another overall given are the "outcomes" of a church, as we have repeatedly mentioned. A church will worship. A church will (hopefully) participate in God's mission. There will be proclamation and discipleship. Individuals will want counsel and fellowship. As a church grows in size, some of these functions will become ministry staff positions.
The management and administration of a church can also grow into staff positions. Who will handle the church finances? Who will handle the church's communications and records? Who will oversee the church's facilities and property? As the church grows, who will help administrate the details and manage projects for those whose attention is steadily drawn toward concerns on a larger and larger scale?
2. So church structure probably has some major givens and the outcomes of the "church system" have some major givens. A third factor is the result of strategic planning, which becomes a church-determined given as well. Here I mean the mission, vision, values, and goals of a local church, determined in a church's strategic planning.
These certainly affect the responsibilities of the staff and volunteers of a church. We should remember, by the way, that much of what happens in a church is not done by individuals in official or paid positions, but by volunteers. In some cases, the specific vision and goals of a church can result in specific positions.
3. In most cases, it is important to define clearly what the job of each staff person is. On the one hand, a clear description of the person's position tells them how to use their time. What is their focus? What stands or falls as his or her responsibility? What does he or she have authority to do? How will he or she know if they are succeeding or failing?
The question of lines of authority is important as well. Who are your "direct reports"? That is to say, who reports to you? Who are you the boss of? Who has the authority to hire or fire someone? What are the criteria by which a person might lose the job?
In general, it is best for each individual to report to one specific person. Sometimes a person has a "solid line" to one superior and a "dotted line" to another. In such cases, the solid line is the direct report, the direct boss, so to speak. It is possible, however, that it will not be within that person's authority to hire or fire them.
"Chain of command" helps reduce chaos. That is to say, a staff person should hesitate to skip their immediate superior to deal with someone higher up the chain. This sort of "end round" can get them into problems with their immediate boss.
4. Having said such things, a thriving organism seldom fits in rigid boxes. In Good to Great, Jim Collins has a chapter titled, "First Who... Then What." This chapter will annoy the bureaucratically minded because he suggests that a great venture doesn't know exactly where it is headed until it knows who is in the room. "You need the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats on the bus."
This dynamic suggests that, while there are general positions you might hire for (e.g., outreach director), the specifics of that position are best tailored to the strengths of the specific individual you hire. Then when you hire the next position, you should take into account the weaknesses of the existing team and try to hire someone who complements them. Support staff can be hired with a specific view to maximizing the strengths and minimizing the weaknesses of a particular person.
The static view, that sees jobs in the church as boxes into which a new person has to fit, is thus a starting point for hiring and creating a "position description." But if you want a church that functions on a "great" level, position descriptions will change a little, depending on the team you have.
5. By all means it is best to hire the right person to begin with rather than have to let someone go. I also deeply appreciate those churches and Christian organizations that try to find a place for someone who just isn't working out in the position he or she is in. However, at some point the mission (and finances) of the church may require letting someone go for the greater good.
This should be done with grace and love. But it is better to have a brief time of difficulty than prolonged agony, even decline for the church. There is a time for a pastor to leave. There is a time for staff to leave. There should be clear reasons and good documentation. It should not be done on a whim or in a fit of anger.
6. 1 Corinthians 12 suggests that different individuals have different roles to play in the body of Christ. God's gifts don't come in rigid packages. A church that functions in a thriving way will work like the body, with different parts doing different things in harmony with each other. When one blood vessel gets blocked, the body works around the blockage.
So if a crazy structure seems to be working for a particular church, why fix what doesn't seem to be broken? A certain personality with a penchant for symmetry can organize an organization right into decline. But most of the time, clear organization is a great help to thriving.
Next Week: Pastor as Leader 19: Leading Healthy Teams
Leadership in General
Strategic Planning
- The Mission, Great and Small
- Identifying Mission
- Casting Vision
- Vision Statements
- Thinking Missionally
- Evaluating Strengths
- Identifying Core Values
- Setting Goals
- Leading Change
- Evaluating Progress/Resetting Goals
Saturday, August 06, 2016
3.4 The Ohmmeter
This is the fourth and final week of Module 3 of the Navy Basic Electricity and Electronics series, which is on resistance. The three posts so far are:- 3.1 What is resistance?
- 3.2 Resistors
- 3.3 Resistor identification
Of course usually these measurement functions are combined on a "multimeter," a device that can measure all of these. There are often "ranges" to these devices. So one might measure resistance in units of 1. Another setting might measure in units of 100 ohms. Another might have units of 10,000 ohms.
"It is best to use a meter range which causes the pointer to rest over the center two-thirds of the scale" (86-87). I imagine they're all digital today. :-)
2. Some miscellaneous elements of this section:
- Don't connect an ohmmeter to an energized circuit.
- The ohmmeter needs to be "zeroed" each time you change the range.
- You touch the leads together and turn on the "zero ohms" control to zero it.
- Turn the range switch to the 1000 volt scale when you are done to save the battery.
- An ohmmeter can help you find the point where a circuit is disconnected (an open circuit). At that point it will read infinity.
Friday, August 05, 2016
Friday Science: Do parallel lines meet?
1. The second chapter is titled, "An ancient theorem and a modern question." The ancient theorem is the Pythagorean theorem (a2 + b2=c2). As it turns out, the Pythagorean theorem only works if the old idea that "two parallel lines never meet" is true.
The "parallel postulate" goes back to Euclid, the old Greek (c. 300BC). Euclid was not able to prove it. In the 1700s, a man named Girolamo Saccheri devoted much of his mathematical life trying to prove the parallel postulate by pursuing its opposite. That is, he tried to show that if you assumed that parallel lines did meet, it ended with a contradiction. Perhaps he died feeling a failure, for he did not show any contradiction.
After him, another mathematician named Heinrich Lambert (1728-77) continued to develop a geometry in which Euclid's parallel lines do meet. But Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) would get the credit. Gaussian geometry, also called Lobachevskian geometry after a Russian who also explored it, is a geometry in which parallel lines do meet. It is thus a "non-Euclidean" geometry.
2. Another name for the type of geometry these individuals were developing is called "hyperbolic" geometry, and the key is that they are not exploring lines on a flat plane but on a curved one. In particular, hyperbolic geometry is the kind of geometry you end up with if you are drawing your lines on a saddle type figure. Penrose and the artist Escher (see picture) had some fruitful interchanges that resulted in several of his drawings that have "tesselations" like the one above.
From a Euclidean perspective, it looks like the fish get smaller and smaller as you approach the edges, but in fact this is an allusion caused by flattening out the saddle. In reality each fish perceives itself to be the same size as all the other fish. Similarly, the boundary is artificial because of the flattening. In reality, the fish go on forever.
3. There are two ways, if I am understanding correctly, of representing this hyperbolic saddle geometry in a flattened, Euclidean plane. The one way is called conformal and the other projective. The conformal representation has all the lines hitting the boundary circle at right angles and the lines are curved. Some sense of proportion is retained.
The other model, the projective, flattens the figure even more. The lines are straight rather than the curved lines of the conformal. The angles are distorted.
So if there is Euclidean geometry (flat), hyperbolic geometry (like a saddle), there is also spherical or elliptical geometry. Parallel lines meet on a sphere and thus defy Euclid's fifth postulate.
4. I won't pretend to understand everything in this chapter. Penrose is trying to be clear but he needs a translator. :-) The reason for the chapter is the fact that physical space exemplifies some non-Euclidean features when we get into Einstein's general relativity. He is laying some ground work for things to come.
There is debate as to whether the universe as a whole is Euclidean, hyperbolic, or elliptical. The majority I believe are currently leaning Euclidean. But I'm guessing that Penrose is a hyperbolic guy.
Thursday, August 04, 2016
Thursday Novel Excerpt (a wife!)
The first real influx of women to Jamestown came in 1620, ninety women. Many of them were married before the end of their first day ashore. The demand for a wife among the mostly male, severely isolated colony was tremendous. The gentlemen absorbed the newcomers so quickly there was nothing left for nobodies like Thomas, far down the totem pole.
It was much more likely for someone like Thomas to find a widow to marry. Each year, the chances for survival increased. There was of course the "Indian massacre of 1622," when a third of the colony was killed. Thomas had such a thorough knowledge of the land and good enough relations with the native Americans that he was able to escape death in those skirmishes.
The marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe in 1614 was a peace treaty of sorts that significantly slowed down the fighting until her death back in England in 1617. The four years of fighting leading up to that marriage had been brutal.
He was a nobody, a stowaway. When King James granted land, he was passed over. He fished and helped others farm their own land. He didn't need much. For three decades he fished and farmed and laid low whenever the natives attacked...
The first real change for Thomas came in 1640. In those days he was helping a fairly new arrival figure out how to plant tobacco on his land, a man named John Augustine. This man was almost Thomas' age but knew nothing of farming. He had no children but had come with a 36 year old wife named Elizabeth. Thomas knew the business as well as anyone and so helped them get started.
Then suddenly, after being in Virginia less than a year, John suddenly fell ill and died. Elizabeth was distraught. How would she survive? She had no family to rely on. She had no interest in farming. What would she do?
It was not long before she and Thomas were married, in 1640, and that very year they gave birth to a son, whom Elizabeth wanted to name Augustine in honor of her dead husband.
Thomas kind of liked the name Augustine. For him, it was a very Catholic name. Although his childhood in Wales was only a shadow to him now, someone else's life, he remembered how the ministers of his childhood praised the Celtic missionaries over "that blasted Catholic Augustine" who first brought the papist poison to England in the late 500s. It was their way of handling the Protestant revolution that had taken place under Henry VIII.
At home, however, Thomas' father, also named Thomas, wasn't so convinced. He remembered his father say, "The English do whatever the English do, and we just go along with them."
Captain Wynne had been a closet Catholic. Indeed several of the earliest settlers had been, like Gabriel Archer. When Gabriel died in the starving time of 1609, he made sure he was buried with the little flask of holy water he had brought with him. Captain Wynne had shared all sorts of stories about his time in France and other Catholic countries during his spying days. For men like Archer and Wynne, coming to America in part was a way to find a breathing space.
And so Augustine Shelburne I was born. The first of the Shelburnes to be born in America.
It was much more likely for someone like Thomas to find a widow to marry. Each year, the chances for survival increased. There was of course the "Indian massacre of 1622," when a third of the colony was killed. Thomas had such a thorough knowledge of the land and good enough relations with the native Americans that he was able to escape death in those skirmishes.
The marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe in 1614 was a peace treaty of sorts that significantly slowed down the fighting until her death back in England in 1617. The four years of fighting leading up to that marriage had been brutal.
He was a nobody, a stowaway. When King James granted land, he was passed over. He fished and helped others farm their own land. He didn't need much. For three decades he fished and farmed and laid low whenever the natives attacked...
The first real change for Thomas came in 1640. In those days he was helping a fairly new arrival figure out how to plant tobacco on his land, a man named John Augustine. This man was almost Thomas' age but knew nothing of farming. He had no children but had come with a 36 year old wife named Elizabeth. Thomas knew the business as well as anyone and so helped them get started.
Then suddenly, after being in Virginia less than a year, John suddenly fell ill and died. Elizabeth was distraught. How would she survive? She had no family to rely on. She had no interest in farming. What would she do?
It was not long before she and Thomas were married, in 1640, and that very year they gave birth to a son, whom Elizabeth wanted to name Augustine in honor of her dead husband.
Thomas kind of liked the name Augustine. For him, it was a very Catholic name. Although his childhood in Wales was only a shadow to him now, someone else's life, he remembered how the ministers of his childhood praised the Celtic missionaries over "that blasted Catholic Augustine" who first brought the papist poison to England in the late 500s. It was their way of handling the Protestant revolution that had taken place under Henry VIII.
At home, however, Thomas' father, also named Thomas, wasn't so convinced. He remembered his father say, "The English do whatever the English do, and we just go along with them."
Captain Wynne had been a closet Catholic. Indeed several of the earliest settlers had been, like Gabriel Archer. When Gabriel died in the starving time of 1609, he made sure he was buried with the little flask of holy water he had brought with him. Captain Wynne had shared all sorts of stories about his time in France and other Catholic countries during his spying days. For men like Archer and Wynne, coming to America in part was a way to find a breathing space.
And so Augustine Shelburne I was born. The first of the Shelburnes to be born in America.
Wednesday, August 03, 2016
Gen Eds H1: History Overview
World history starts today. Last week, I finished twelve posts overviewing philosophy as one of ten subjects you might study in a general education or "liberal arts" core at a university or college. I'm calling this series, "General Education in a Nutshell."
Today we begin the second series of posts on World History. The format will be similar--an opening overview, ten posts, and a concluding wrap-up. I'm going to try to present multiple perspectives when I know them.
__________________
1. As part of my philosophy series, I did a post on the philosophy of history. In it, I mention the famous quote by George Santayana that "those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it." This quote suggests one of the key benefits of studying history, namely, to get a sense of how cause and effect work in history so that we can get some sense of what certain decisions and events might lead to next.
Is a particular candidate for office similar to some political figure from the past? How did that work out? Is a particular world situation similar to a situation of the past? How did that work out? Of course a great deal of subjectivity is often involved in such comparisons. History never repeats itself exactly. But there is a reason why generals study military history and politicians study political history. There is the hope that it will sharpen their decisions toward the future.
2. Of course the past has always been a tool of rhetoric. We tell stories of our origins to instill pride and a sense of identity. We tell family stories to do the same. Human storytelling is seldom "critical." That is to say, we are typically gullible when it comes to our history-telling. We omit the warts of the story and key figures take on a legendary character.
"I cannot tell a lie," the young George Washington says. "I chopped down the cherry tree." Serious historians have examined the primary sources and have discovered that this story is unknown before 1806 in the sixth edition of Mason Weems' sensational The Life of Washington. Almost no serious historians think it is historical. But the story has done its work. Even when he did wrong, George showed himself the ideal, rational, repent-er.
More often real history is like the words of Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest: "The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
We are also fond of the "grand narrative" (grand recit), the overarching story that claims to explain the whole of history or of some era. Recently, Dinesh D'Souza has given us the "nefarious" history of the Democratic party (Hilary's America). Unfortunately, a quick switching out of the names and we might find a similar version could be made of the Republican party.
Responsible historians at least try to be dispassionate rather than partisan. [1] Like any true academic discipline, scholars engage in an "agonistic" enterprise where interpretations are brought against contrasting interpretations. Primary evidence is weighed against primary evidence. Sometimes there are consensuses. Sometimes there aren't. Often there simply isn't enough evidence to draw a firm conclusion.
There is no book of the Bible that gives God's specific perspective on the last two thousand years. Different Christian groups certainly have their own versions of certain parts of the story, but none of these have any definitive divine endorsement (although we sometimes treat our "grand narratives" as if they had more authority than the Bible itself).
3. In reality, aside from learning from the past to predict the future, the past is only relevant to the present if it is still "touching" it in some way. The etymological fallacy is the belief that the past somehow determines the meaning of the present. But in fact that past only impacts the meaning or the nature of the present if it is still "touching" it directly in some way.
This "touching" can take place in two ways. First, the past can touch the present materially. For example, there can be a geographical or environmental feature that is the result of some event from the past. If you go to Chernobyl, the past "touches" its present with radiation. My great-grandfather may be materially relevant to my present if he has bequeathed me with certain genes.
The second way in which the past can impact the present is when human beings bring the past into the present with our ideas, always in fragmentary form. [2] This can be conscious or unconscious. Sometimes we do not realize the ideological impact of the (almost always recent) past on us. At other times, we use some version of the past rhetorically, as I mentioned.
But we are always selective, simplistic, and skewed in our ideological use of the past. It is usually not the real or literal past that we resurrect in such cases but a narrowly perspectivized version. The ideological use of the past is as much or more the present influencing the past, as it were, than the past influencing the present.
Ideas from the past only impact the present when they are in someone's head today. As ideas, they do not have a life outside of the specific people in specific places and times that have those ideas in their heads. Meaning is always a matter of now, not of the past.
It is true that God is a constant who touches every moment throughout history. But his movements are often complex, mysterious, and unpredictable. We make ourselves feel good by saying we know exactly what he was doing at a particular point in time. Maybe we are right sometimes, but we have no way of verifying for sure. The Bible doesn't give details on a definitive interpretation of God's movements in the United States in 2016.
Any attempt to reduce God movements or actions to a simple scheme says far more about the person looking back at history than it does about the real God.
4. Accordingly, I am going to treat world history moving backward. [3] We can learn from the distant past to be sure, but far more often it is virtually irrelevant to the present. [4] Indeed, the overwhelming majority of all the past has completely disappeared from our view. We have only the barest of archaeological remains from thousands of years of human history, and even what literature remains represents only the elite of the elite. [5]
I am also going to start inevitably from where I sit on the historical bus. I am a twenty-first century citizen of the United States, a person of English, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, and German descent. So that is the center point from which I will start, although my intention is to connect with a broad range of groups and places. That is my starting point but hopefully not the ending point. Ten posts clearly won't allow much.
The sense that history should be told from the beginning to the end fits with the way the human mind works and it fits with the nature of cause and effect. However, history in terms of its true impact and relevance, is most relevant and impactful in terms of the recent past, and it becomes increasingly less relevant as we move backward in time.
5. So, moving backward in time in broadening circles, I suggest the following ten posts in this series:
Classic Reading
Extremely skewed versions of history are rampant, versions that do not really try to arrive at the most likely conclusion given the evidence but that explicitly let certain ideological presuppositions drive the organization of the data. In other words, critical history is inductive (looking for what is most likely true) rather than deductive (assuming certain perspectives and then reading the evidence in that light).
[2] I run the risk of letting back in the door a whole host of fallacious thinking by saying ideas can continue from the past unconsciously in fragmentary form. I believe we have to accept that there are often fragments of past ideas bouncing around our heads. What I am not saying is that ideas from the past have some life of their own that transcends or determines how a person uses that fragment today. Specific people in the present determine what an idea fragment means now. The sense of an idea in the past does not determine what it means now.
[3] My colleague Keith Drury had this brilliant idea for studying American church history when we were designing the curriculum of Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University.
[4] As Christians, of course, we believe in some major exceptions to this general truth. The fall of Adam and Eve, the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection of Christ--these still touch the present in an overwhelming way, for example.
[5] Of course, some of what has survived has survived by coincidence. E.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.
Today we begin the second series of posts on World History. The format will be similar--an opening overview, ten posts, and a concluding wrap-up. I'm going to try to present multiple perspectives when I know them.
__________________
1. As part of my philosophy series, I did a post on the philosophy of history. In it, I mention the famous quote by George Santayana that "those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it." This quote suggests one of the key benefits of studying history, namely, to get a sense of how cause and effect work in history so that we can get some sense of what certain decisions and events might lead to next.
Is a particular candidate for office similar to some political figure from the past? How did that work out? Is a particular world situation similar to a situation of the past? How did that work out? Of course a great deal of subjectivity is often involved in such comparisons. History never repeats itself exactly. But there is a reason why generals study military history and politicians study political history. There is the hope that it will sharpen their decisions toward the future.
2. Of course the past has always been a tool of rhetoric. We tell stories of our origins to instill pride and a sense of identity. We tell family stories to do the same. Human storytelling is seldom "critical." That is to say, we are typically gullible when it comes to our history-telling. We omit the warts of the story and key figures take on a legendary character.
"I cannot tell a lie," the young George Washington says. "I chopped down the cherry tree." Serious historians have examined the primary sources and have discovered that this story is unknown before 1806 in the sixth edition of Mason Weems' sensational The Life of Washington. Almost no serious historians think it is historical. But the story has done its work. Even when he did wrong, George showed himself the ideal, rational, repent-er.
More often real history is like the words of Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest: "The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
We are also fond of the "grand narrative" (grand recit), the overarching story that claims to explain the whole of history or of some era. Recently, Dinesh D'Souza has given us the "nefarious" history of the Democratic party (Hilary's America). Unfortunately, a quick switching out of the names and we might find a similar version could be made of the Republican party.
Responsible historians at least try to be dispassionate rather than partisan. [1] Like any true academic discipline, scholars engage in an "agonistic" enterprise where interpretations are brought against contrasting interpretations. Primary evidence is weighed against primary evidence. Sometimes there are consensuses. Sometimes there aren't. Often there simply isn't enough evidence to draw a firm conclusion.
There is no book of the Bible that gives God's specific perspective on the last two thousand years. Different Christian groups certainly have their own versions of certain parts of the story, but none of these have any definitive divine endorsement (although we sometimes treat our "grand narratives" as if they had more authority than the Bible itself).
3. In reality, aside from learning from the past to predict the future, the past is only relevant to the present if it is still "touching" it in some way. The etymological fallacy is the belief that the past somehow determines the meaning of the present. But in fact that past only impacts the meaning or the nature of the present if it is still "touching" it directly in some way.
This "touching" can take place in two ways. First, the past can touch the present materially. For example, there can be a geographical or environmental feature that is the result of some event from the past. If you go to Chernobyl, the past "touches" its present with radiation. My great-grandfather may be materially relevant to my present if he has bequeathed me with certain genes.
The second way in which the past can impact the present is when human beings bring the past into the present with our ideas, always in fragmentary form. [2] This can be conscious or unconscious. Sometimes we do not realize the ideological impact of the (almost always recent) past on us. At other times, we use some version of the past rhetorically, as I mentioned.
But we are always selective, simplistic, and skewed in our ideological use of the past. It is usually not the real or literal past that we resurrect in such cases but a narrowly perspectivized version. The ideological use of the past is as much or more the present influencing the past, as it were, than the past influencing the present.
Ideas from the past only impact the present when they are in someone's head today. As ideas, they do not have a life outside of the specific people in specific places and times that have those ideas in their heads. Meaning is always a matter of now, not of the past.
It is true that God is a constant who touches every moment throughout history. But his movements are often complex, mysterious, and unpredictable. We make ourselves feel good by saying we know exactly what he was doing at a particular point in time. Maybe we are right sometimes, but we have no way of verifying for sure. The Bible doesn't give details on a definitive interpretation of God's movements in the United States in 2016.
Any attempt to reduce God movements or actions to a simple scheme says far more about the person looking back at history than it does about the real God.
4. Accordingly, I am going to treat world history moving backward. [3] We can learn from the distant past to be sure, but far more often it is virtually irrelevant to the present. [4] Indeed, the overwhelming majority of all the past has completely disappeared from our view. We have only the barest of archaeological remains from thousands of years of human history, and even what literature remains represents only the elite of the elite. [5]
I am also going to start inevitably from where I sit on the historical bus. I am a twenty-first century citizen of the United States, a person of English, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, and German descent. So that is the center point from which I will start, although my intention is to connect with a broad range of groups and places. That is my starting point but hopefully not the ending point. Ten posts clearly won't allow much.
The sense that history should be told from the beginning to the end fits with the way the human mind works and it fits with the nature of cause and effect. However, history in terms of its true impact and relevance, is most relevant and impactful in terms of the recent past, and it becomes increasingly less relevant as we move backward in time.
5. So, moving backward in time in broadening circles, I suggest the following ten posts in this series:
- From 9-11 to the Present
- From the Cold War to the Millennium
- From Waterloo to World War II
- From Cromwell to Napoleon
- Renaissance and Reformations
- The Age of the Church and Jihad
- The Age of Rome
- Waves of Conquest
- Classical Civilizations
- The First Humans
Classic Reading
- Will Durant, The Story of Civilization
Extremely skewed versions of history are rampant, versions that do not really try to arrive at the most likely conclusion given the evidence but that explicitly let certain ideological presuppositions drive the organization of the data. In other words, critical history is inductive (looking for what is most likely true) rather than deductive (assuming certain perspectives and then reading the evidence in that light).
[2] I run the risk of letting back in the door a whole host of fallacious thinking by saying ideas can continue from the past unconsciously in fragmentary form. I believe we have to accept that there are often fragments of past ideas bouncing around our heads. What I am not saying is that ideas from the past have some life of their own that transcends or determines how a person uses that fragment today. Specific people in the present determine what an idea fragment means now. The sense of an idea in the past does not determine what it means now.
[3] My colleague Keith Drury had this brilliant idea for studying American church history when we were designing the curriculum of Wesley Seminary at Indiana Wesleyan University.
[4] As Christians, of course, we believe in some major exceptions to this general truth. The fall of Adam and Eve, the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection of Christ--these still touch the present in an overwhelming way, for example.
[5] Of course, some of what has survived has survived by coincidence. E.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.
Tuesday, August 02, 2016
Harry Shepherd's Prophecy 2
Last week I started transcribing my grandfather's booklet on prophecy. Today I'm transcribing half of the second section of the booklet.
___________________
II. God Chooses Abraham and Gives Him Four Promises.
These promises according to Genesis 12:1-4 seem to have been made to Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees before he left home for the land of Canaan which later would be the Holy Land of the Bible. These promises would not and had not set aside the much earlier promise to Adam and Eve of the Kinsman-Redeemer. After they were driven out of the garden sin and people had multiplied until finally the Earth was full of violence (Genesis 6:13). Yet God was not dead nor His promise broken nor cancelled. In calling Abraham and giving him the four promises God was setting up the earthly machinery for the fulfillment of this promise to Adam and Eve, given nearly two millenniums previously.
While Abraham received his call at home when his name was Abram and when he was yet childless, yet he must make some separations before God could begin the fulfillment of these promises to him. He must let go of his country, a godless, idolatrous world, his relatives on both sides of the house—thy kindred—and his immediate family—thy father’s house—and accept an unknown country with resultant conditions which would arise in the future—the yes to an unknown bundle. When he started to carry out the conditions of his call he halted at Haran in Mesopotamia with the excess baggage of a brother's son—Lot. Here his aging and possibly ailing father Terah finally died, being an old man of 205 years. With this death Abram was now about ready to enter the Promised Land which suggests the truth that the old man of sin must die before the believer can enter the Canaan or Promised Land of Holiness. Upon his entrance his first stop mentioned in Genesis was at Sichem afterwards called Shechem where Joshua later said, “as for me and my house we will serve the Lord” and where Abram’s greater son, Jesus Christ saved the woman at the well of Sychar. Here he began his Canaan experience with an altar service and probably with prayer. Genesis 12:6-8. Here God refers to the second one of his four promises to Abram and probably included the others also.
Promise One:- Make Abraham A Great Nation
The first of these what was that God would make Abram a Great Nation. Farther over in Genesis (13:16 and 17:4) we learn that many nations were to come out of the loins of Abram but the promises applied more especially to the descent through Isaac the son of Sarah (the princess). These descendants were the dust of the earth promise (Genesis 13:16). The stars of the heaven promise (chapter 15:5) would be Abram's spiritual posterity, many of whom would come through the church under promise three. This nation through Isaac was to be three things: First it was to be a storehouse for the Holy Scriptures—God’s redemptive truth to man. Second it was to be the channel through which the Messiah—the Lord Jesus—was to come. Third this nation was to be a witness for Jehovah God before and unto the nations of the earth. It carried out the first two but failed on the third one.
In order for God to start the process for making Abram—later called Abraham meaning father of a great multitude—a great nation, He had to rule and overrule in some unusual ways in Abraham's own family as well as in the affairs of nations. He turned the envy and hatred of Abraham's great grandchildren against their own brother Joseph so as to put Joseph in a position where the latter could save the lives of the family and many others. Later God sent a very sore famine into many lands and into Canaan in order to cause Jacob and his seventy-four souls to move into Egypt where God could get the building of the Israelitish nation well under way. After about four hundred years of servitude and multiplication of the people in Egypt God was now able and ready to institute the beginning proceedings of the First Promise of Making Abraham a Great Nation and of arranging for the Second Promise. We may consider the nation as formed and the First Promise first fulfilled with the giving of the Law at Sinai.
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On to the second promise next Tuesday. Some very interesting typological interpretation here.
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II. God Chooses Abraham and Gives Him Four Promises.
These promises according to Genesis 12:1-4 seem to have been made to Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees before he left home for the land of Canaan which later would be the Holy Land of the Bible. These promises would not and had not set aside the much earlier promise to Adam and Eve of the Kinsman-Redeemer. After they were driven out of the garden sin and people had multiplied until finally the Earth was full of violence (Genesis 6:13). Yet God was not dead nor His promise broken nor cancelled. In calling Abraham and giving him the four promises God was setting up the earthly machinery for the fulfillment of this promise to Adam and Eve, given nearly two millenniums previously.
While Abraham received his call at home when his name was Abram and when he was yet childless, yet he must make some separations before God could begin the fulfillment of these promises to him. He must let go of his country, a godless, idolatrous world, his relatives on both sides of the house—thy kindred—and his immediate family—thy father’s house—and accept an unknown country with resultant conditions which would arise in the future—the yes to an unknown bundle. When he started to carry out the conditions of his call he halted at Haran in Mesopotamia with the excess baggage of a brother's son—Lot. Here his aging and possibly ailing father Terah finally died, being an old man of 205 years. With this death Abram was now about ready to enter the Promised Land which suggests the truth that the old man of sin must die before the believer can enter the Canaan or Promised Land of Holiness. Upon his entrance his first stop mentioned in Genesis was at Sichem afterwards called Shechem where Joshua later said, “as for me and my house we will serve the Lord” and where Abram’s greater son, Jesus Christ saved the woman at the well of Sychar. Here he began his Canaan experience with an altar service and probably with prayer. Genesis 12:6-8. Here God refers to the second one of his four promises to Abram and probably included the others also.
Promise One:- Make Abraham A Great Nation
The first of these what was that God would make Abram a Great Nation. Farther over in Genesis (13:16 and 17:4) we learn that many nations were to come out of the loins of Abram but the promises applied more especially to the descent through Isaac the son of Sarah (the princess). These descendants were the dust of the earth promise (Genesis 13:16). The stars of the heaven promise (chapter 15:5) would be Abram's spiritual posterity, many of whom would come through the church under promise three. This nation through Isaac was to be three things: First it was to be a storehouse for the Holy Scriptures—God’s redemptive truth to man. Second it was to be the channel through which the Messiah—the Lord Jesus—was to come. Third this nation was to be a witness for Jehovah God before and unto the nations of the earth. It carried out the first two but failed on the third one.
In order for God to start the process for making Abram—later called Abraham meaning father of a great multitude—a great nation, He had to rule and overrule in some unusual ways in Abraham's own family as well as in the affairs of nations. He turned the envy and hatred of Abraham's great grandchildren against their own brother Joseph so as to put Joseph in a position where the latter could save the lives of the family and many others. Later God sent a very sore famine into many lands and into Canaan in order to cause Jacob and his seventy-four souls to move into Egypt where God could get the building of the Israelitish nation well under way. After about four hundred years of servitude and multiplication of the people in Egypt God was now able and ready to institute the beginning proceedings of the First Promise of Making Abraham a Great Nation and of arranging for the Second Promise. We may consider the nation as formed and the First Promise first fulfilled with the giving of the Law at Sinai.
_______________
On to the second promise next Tuesday. Some very interesting typological interpretation here.
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