Trinitarian Don

New Blog

2011-07-31T06:46:00.000-07:00

Please visit my new blog at http://dwarvestotea.wordpress.com/.

Rivendell Sanctuary this Summer

2011-02-01T14:34:00.000-08:00

After ten years of full-time service at Trinity International Universitiy’s Trinity Law School, and over ten more years of part-time teaching for Trinity and Simon Greenleaf Law School, I have been called to a new teaching ministry. We are moving to Minnesota this summer, where I will become a tutor at the new Rivendell Sanctuary program. Rivendell has an 18-month great books program that is designed to satisfy college undergraduate general education requirements. The program has many innovative features, including devoting time to each subject in turn in a systematic fashion that unites and organizes the whole curriculum so each subject is in context and builds on each of the prior subjects. Students stay together in a cohort with two faculty tutors and two mentors throughout the program. There is a focus on the whole life of the student, including spiritual life, interpersonal skills, and perspective. The goal is to produce capable men and women of honor, depth, and virtue, not to just check the boxes of fulfilled units. Part of each cohort’s experience is a trip to Italy for six weeks during the art section of the curriculum. I am looking forward to being part of the Rivendell team. Their web site is: http://www.rivendellsanctuary.com/. Over the course of the spring I will also be shifting over to a new blog at: http://dwarvestotea.wordpress.com/.

Book Review of Nancy Pearcey's Saving Leonardo; a Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, & Learning

2011-01-17T16:26:00.000-08:00

Nancy Pearcey’s new book Saving Leonardo; A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning is an excellent book that proves God has given her a double portion of the spirit of Francis Schaeffer. The book is an exploration of the common secular worldviews in our culture, how they have affected culture (and even the church), and how they contrast with the real Christian worldview.

Pearcey helps us learn how to do worldview analysis on our own with examples of how to evaluate movies, books, art, and more. She shows how approaching the arts as though they were only entertainment can be dangerous. This well-researched guide is of great importance because what we believe matters: it affects our behavior and choices. What we believe can undermine effective actions of love for our family and our neighbors. What we believe can affect our relationship with God. And what we believe can impact our feelings and motivations in ways that make Christian practice and growth more difficult.

Mrs. Pearcey starts with examples of how Christians can be deceived into exposing their children to secular worldviews if they lack parental commentary and support. She counters the cultural claim that neither truth nor ideas are important with wise counsel from figures like C.S. Lewis and Socrates.

A key set of insights in the book is an exploration of the major ways in which our culture divides life into “upper and lower stories” – dichotomies in which the lower story is accepted as the exclusive source of facts, and an upper story designed to deal with the rest of human experience without giving those areas traction in public policy, business, and critical choices. These bases of the so called fact/value spilt are a hydra of personal and social problems in the contemporary world. They include the current dualist acceptance of postmodernism in religion and morality while we still use modernism in science and industry. In a similar fatal division, the liberal view of the human being divides personhood (realm of the “autonomous self”, entitled to freedom and dignity) from the body (a mere “biochemical machine”, and hence, disposable and manipulatable). This false dichotomy facilitates the rationalization of abortion, euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research on a public policy level, and the dehumanizing “hookup culture” of sex separated from relationship. It goes even further in allowing the separation of identity and desires from biology and reality.

A magnificent panorama of history unfolds as the author describes the major paths to the secular worldview – the ideas of the enlightenment, such as empiricism and rationalism on the one hand, and romanticism on the other. She traces these roads, not only through their expression in art and literature, but as they changed philosophy. Pearcey illustrates how changes in the world of philosophy had real impact on “everyday” life and thought. She also explains the philosophical fork which leads to the split between analytical philosophy and European philosophy.

We are guided from Kant’s dualism of freedom and nature through the two major streams of modern art – one protesting the scientific worldview, the other portraying the scientific worldview, or in other words, expressionism and formalism. The book sails through the seas of art handing out broadsides and laurels to both sides of the great split. The analysis will please non-artists who have any interest in worldviews, theology, philosophy or apologetics as well as providing a fascinating perspective to those who do know and love art of all sorts. There are also surprises. It never occurred to me to class the Pre-Raphaelites (my personal favorite in art) on the “science” side because of their romantic subjects from myth, legend, and literature, but Pearcey’s analysis is persuasive

Pearcey also deals with so-called Christian art, and attacks head-on the need for good art as opposed to the cloying saccharine sweetness of so much craft devoted to Biblical objects. She gives some excellent examples of quality art by Christian artists such as Fujimura.

After a well thought-out discussion of worldview in movies, the book concludes with a challenge to believers to be makers of quality culture ourselves instead of responding with reaction and criticism to the values of secular culture.

Throughout this whole expedition into darkest culture Nancy Pearcey is remarkable in her attitude of charity and understanding. The book points out what happened and how it happened, but does not condemn anyone for the roles they played. Pearcey seems to expect that we cannot just break out of the confines of the current ideas. She understands that the most godly, talented and creative of Christian artists will still create art in the traditions of expressionism and formalism even while exploring new directions and pushing the envelope of culture because we are where we are, culturally speaking.

The book is very well-written and communicates complex ideas in understandable ways without reductionism. While Schaeffer was a true prophet of the problems of the church, he was often criticized for some controversial opinions in intellectual history. Nancy Pearcey’s book is far above possible reproach in this area. She bases her conclusions on the writings of a host of eminent and well accepted scholars while at the same time holding fast to the truth in her critique of the church, her explanation of secular beliefs, and her diagnosis of how Christ’s people can escape seduction by the spirits of the age.

It is, almost always, only by understanding the false categories that have led us into bondage to the spirits of this age that we can be free of them, and not cast them out only for them to return and find a tidied up vacancy ready for them to move back in. We need to know them so we can pray for God’s help, and receive the mind of Christ, to reject the false ideas of our time and to fill our minds with the genuinely good and true and beautiful. Without analysis like Pearcey’s we are like the church of
Laodicea. So often, our society has taught us to say we see and are clothed and in our right mind when we are spiritually blind, wretched, poor, and naked.

The good, truth and beauty really exist, and are to be found in God Himself. We can know Him by knowing Jesus. We know Jesus by believing and understanding what the Bible actually says. The Bible assures us that if we seek Him we will find Him, indeed because it is God who draws us to seek Him in the first place. When we believe God, we suddenly begin to see that all creation also speaks of Him. The knowledge of God already covers the earth as the water covers the sea, but we deny that we are wet. When we believe God and acknowledge that all the problems and pain we experience come from human sin (Adams, ours and other people’s) and that while mysterious and often unpleasant, the ways of God are just and good, not in error, Jesus cleanses us from our sin, corrects our errors, and slowly restores His damaged image – always there, but twisted and under a lot of gunk. We can then participate in Christ’s work in the world; work that includes not only preaching and helping the poor, but growing things, making things, doing art, writing, teaching, serving, designing everything from beautiful buildings to beautiful spoons, and glorifying God in all we do. Christianity is infinitely simple-those who call on the name of Jesus will be saved-but it is also infinitely complex. Learning the fullness of the Christian worldview and applying it to every area of life is the life’s work of a civilization, not even an individual or many individuals. But the gemstones we uncover in the search are well worth the effort. We need to return to the Christian tradition of searching out the precious stones of beauty, truth and goodness, polishing them to luster and displaying them for all to enjoy for the glory of God.

Why Do Many Protestants Christians Fail to Believe in Natural Law

2011-01-04T15:28:00.001-08:00

One of the strange questions in Christian legal philosophy is why most Protestant Christians no longer believe in the doctrine of natural law – the idea that there is an unwritten identical trans-cultural objective moral standard accessible to all human beings. Evangelicals frequently associate natural law with Roman Catholicism, even though the doctrine of natural law is actually a better fit for Protestants than it is for Roman Catholics. After all, Rome believes we need a Magisterium to tell us what to think. It is Protestants who have stood up for the idea that ordinary people can figure some things out on their own – at least with God’s help. J. Budziszewski in his book, Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law, argues that natural law “is not just a Catholic thing.” Stephen Grabill, Harold Berman, John Witt, and others have written extensively on the history of Protestants and natural law, showing that the Protestants of the reformation period took it for granted that natural law was a biblical doctrine, not a matter of Roman Catholic tradition to be rejected by the Protestants. So why do so many Evangelicals still feel uncomfortable with natural law? What are the deeper reasons for the discomfort?

One major reason Protestants tend not to believe in natural law is they think natural law is incompatible with a strong view of the fall. These natural law doubters maintain that since Adam’s fall, human beings are so sinful they cannot even know right from wrong. This belief assumes no view of mankind’s sinfulness can be zealous enough. This view neglects a couple of things. First, the Bible does not teach that humans are as sinful as they could be. We can easily imagine a state of even greater degradation in which the maintenance of families or societies was impossible. So, even though human beings may not do anything which is purely good because they always act with impure motives, human beings actually do some things that are somewhat “good” by nature of the act. They do give to charity, they do love their children, they do nice things for their spouses. They may do so out of impure motives and hence even sin in the doing of these good acts, but nevertheless they do such acts. As Jesus said, “You, being evil, still know how to give good gifts to your children.”
In addition, the Bible clearly teaches human beings do have moral knowledge. There is a very important theological reason for this. God does not send the human beings who reject Him to eternal punishment merely as a matter of caprice. He does so because human beings are morally accountable to Him. In order to support that moral accountability, human beings have to have known something of the difference between good and evil and to have deliberately chosen evil. Adam did so and all of us are in his sin (apart from Christ). But we all also do the same thing in our individual lives. We do know some of what God wants and we deliberately choose not to do it. We know much of what God hates and we deliberately choose to do it. We act this way almost from our very conception.
Some of the Christians who have the view that the fall cancels out natural law have tended to believe having moral knowledge would somehow mean man also had the ability to keep God’s rules. This simply isn’t true. The Bible says knowledge of good and evil actually seems to promote a desire to do evil in fallen human beings rather than empowering them to do good. Paul says the command, “Thou shalt not covet”, inspired all sorts of coveting in him. Knowledge, by itself, is not moral power. An understanding of what is right and wrong is needed for virtue, but does not create virtue. Beings know right from wrong, and because they choose wrong they are morally accountable to God for their choice (apart from God’s work of salvation through Jesus Christ). No human being, apart from God’s help, has the power to consistently choose to do good despite whatever knowledge of God’s will they have. To confuse knowing what is good with doing what is good is a category error. You can believe in natural law and still believe in total depravity – the idea that all human faculties and all of our being is affected by sin.
A second reason many Protestants do not believe in natural law is kindred to the first: this is the belief man’s reason is fouled by sin and hence does not support moral knowledge. The first objection to natural law, which I have just discussed, is often an attack on the version of natural law (yes, there are many versions, or theories of natural law, although the content is the same – more on that later) which says moral knowledge is somewhat innate in human beings. This second attack, based on the fallenness of human reason, is a criticism of a second view of natural law: the view of natural law that man’s moral knowledge flows from man’s reasoning power. The view of natural law as innate in the human mind is in some ways platonic and has tended to be associated historically with Protestants. The view of natural law as flowing out of reason is more Aristotelian and has been associated to some degree with the Roman Catholic Church. Robust theories of natural law held by Protestants often accept that innate knowledge or knowledge by illumination, and reason both play a part in natural law.
It is true the fall affected our practical reasoning. Human beings often insist two plus two equals five, even though it does not, because of the way our sinful natures have affected our will and caused our will to impinge upon rational reasoning. It is important to realize real reason comes from God and is not fallen in its pure divine form even though the examples of it we see in human beings are affected by the fall. If we agree we reason correctly when we say two plus two equals four, we are thinking God’s thoughts after Him, as beings made in the image of God were originally created to do. That we do so in only limited areas and for limited amounts of time because of our human sinfulness ought to be fairly obvious. But, it is true we sometimes agree with God about very basic items, such as some of the rules of mathematics. We also agree with God when we agree with the things in His revealed word, the Bible. Though our reasoning is damaged by sin it is not so fouled that it has no ability to tell us some of what we do is wrong or some of what we omit is right. Paul, in Romans 2, talks about how the Gentiles’ conscience pleads for them and against them in various circumstances. God says in Isaiah, “Come and let us reason together.” Our reason is damaged by sin, but it is not so annihilated that we have no knowledge of right and wrong. Based on the work which Christ and God’s Holy Spirit does in our lives, God’s elect can also have their reason enhanced beyond its previous fallen state, although it will not reach perfection this side of the final resurrection. And, our primary concern in discussing natural law is the reasoning level available to the non-elect.
Some will object that the moral knowledge of sin only comes to those under the conviction of the Holy Spirit. But the Bible does not say this. Saving faith requires the Holy Spirit. But there is no biblical reason why condemning knowledge should be exclusive to the elect of God rather than those to be condemned. Some will then say this knowledge of good and evil which results in condemnation may exist, but all it does is condemn, it never enlightens. But knowledge is knowledge. It makes sense to say non-believers resist practical benefit from their knowledge of God’s laws, but it is going too far to say a benefit is impossible. Do not nearly all nations ban theft and murder? Don’t they do so because God teaches them in general revelation that it is wrong? If unregenerate humans have no benefit from general revelation why does John say Jesus was “The true light that gives light to every man” (John 1:9) even though not all men are saved? Does he not say this about general revelation through Christ?
The third reason many Protestants do not accept natural law is that they have never heard a proper explanation of it. Many times the only arguments Protestants hear about natural law are straw men. A common argument made against natural law is one that defines it as a separate law from the law of God as expressed in the Scriptures. While there are some people who claim natural law exists as a separate law from the law of the Bible, this is not a preferred natural law view and was not the common one in most of the history of natural law. John Calvin and Philip Melanchthon, for example, both believed in natural law and believed the content of natural law was identical with the content of the moral law expressed in the Bible. They did not think natural law was some sort of separate autonomous law that could be different from the laws God has set forth elsewhere. It is making a straw man argument to critique all natural law as though it fell in this questionable definition rather than in the definition held by Calvin and Melanchthon. Those who use the straw man also often seek to press the attack by saying that because the Scripture is sufficient we don’t need natural law. I find though, it is an incorrect view of God to see him as a minimalist who only creates the minimum of what we need in any area. One type of beetle would have been enough for me. But God wanted more types of beetles than we can count. I could live with thirty or forty kinds of fish – mostly the edible or attractive ones. But God made thousands of kinds of fish. He never seems to do only what is sufficient. Instead He does immeasurably more than all we ask or think.
If, by “natural law” one meant a law separate from the law of God and of differing content, then it would make sense to deny the existence of such a law. But historically, natural law has not been regarded as such an independent law. Rather, it is the expression of God’s law in general revelation. There is only one God and he is consistent and agrees with himself. If we claim the content of special revelation and general revelation are at variance, it is our understanding which must be at fault. The law of God is consistent whether revealed in the Old or the New Testament and whether revealed in the book of Deuteronomy or by the song of creation as in Psalm 19.
A fourth opposition to natural law comes from an imbibing from a particular theological stream, that of voluntarism. Many proponents of natural law have classically believed the law of God flows from God’s own nature. While God can, may, and does make positive commands that are not purely based upon morality, God’s commands are an expression of Himself, of His goodness, justice, love, mercy and holiness. As a result, we can determine in many instances what is good and evil by looking at what God would do or not do, or by deciding what courses of action are in accord with all of the united attributes of God. An act cannot be unjust, unloving, or merciless and still be in accord with God’s natural law. Although, merely because some act exemplifies a particular virtue does not mean it is permissible if it conflicts with God’s law in other ways. The murderer or thief who acts with courage does not have his crime vitiated by the virtue with which he pursues it. So, classically understood, God’s nature is behind God’s will, and He expresses His moral nature in His law, both in Scripture and in natural law.
By contrast, voluntarists reject this idea. They believe God’s will is more important than any other aspect of God. The voluntarist believes God could have made a world in which murder, adultery and deceit were good and commanded as such. But such a belief makes God’s freedom prior to God’s eternality. The Scriptures teach us God is not only good and just and merciful, but that God is forever the same. His nature does not change. God is consistent in all He does and wills. Some people believe that belief in such a consistency is a belief which, in some way, binds God or weakens His freedom, thereby making Him in some way less divine. I do not believe this is true. Instead, a belief that will is more important than any other attribute denies God’s eternality and transtemporality. It treats God like a being in time who can change, rather than acknowledging that although God is everywhere, including in time, God is beyond time and is its creator. As a being beyond time, God does not change, He acts eternally. He expresses His emotions eternally, and He expresses His decrees eternally. They all flow forth from who God is. Just as God’s law flows forth from who He is.
Fifth, just as the last objection to natural law involved a theological presupposition, this next one involves a philosophical one. Some Protestant Christians reject natural law because they have come to believe in the philosophy of nominalism. Nominalism is the belief that there are no universals: that objects or concepts or attributes we cannot see do not really exist. There are concrete actions which can be described as loving but there is no objective universal idea of love according to the nominalist. Likewise, the nominalist does not believe there is any objective definition of justice, property, unity, or beauty apart from concrete examples. Instead of the existence of objective ideas, the nominalist believes only in the sense experiences we have in the world and the pressures of social community which cause us to associate certain sounds or names with certain concrete things. Hence, the term nominalism comes from the idea that universals are merely names, not objective ideas.
For hundreds of years most Christians have rejected nominalism. Godly men, like Augustine of Hippo, Philip Melanchthon, Calvin, Francis Turretin, and many others, rejected nominalism. Nominalism appears to be contrary to the logos doctrine, to the idea that Christ is the embodiment, not only of God’s communication to man, but of God’s logic, reason, order, definitions and concepts. The mind of God, and by extension, the mind of Christ is the receptacle of the objective ideas which make up the true universals. Justice is justice because it defines the way God is, with respect to justice. Beauty is beauty because God is beautiful and creates beautiful things. Goodness is good because it defines its example and definition in the nature of God Himself, and on and on. As Plato said, even though he did not understand God, “God is preeminently the measure of all things.” Because God is the definer of universal concepts, they have an objective existence in Him. Because human beings were created in the image of God, even though that image was damaged by sin, we have some access to universal ideas. We have some ability to understand concepts like truth, goodness, beauty, justice, etc. Although our understanding is affected by the fall it is not fully effaced. We have the ability to communicate with one another using these universal concepts, albeit in an imperfect way. But universals also have one other effect – they are interconnected with the natural law. If you know what is good, true, beautiful, just, merciful, etc. you know what you are supposed to do in order to do what God would want. If you know that, then you should not do things which are ugly, unjust, cruel, and evil, as well. Knowledge of universals and knowledge of the moral law e.g. the natural law – are inextricably intertwined. Nominalism is not really a biblical doctrine. Recognition of God and the objective ideas that exist in God is contrary to the spirit of nominalism.
A sixth objection by Protestants to natural law comes from the effect of culture upon them. Today, many Protestants have bought into post-modern culture. They feel it is somehow arrogant or unjust to claim there are objective moral standards, objective ideas by which cultures and societies or individuals can be measured or evaluated, or objective truths which can not only be identified as true, but by their truth identify some other ideas as false. They find the notion of objective measuring to be somehow embarrassing, neocolonial, or bigoted. This is the effect of post-modern culture, which teaches all of these things for even more complex philosophical reasons which are, for the most part, incompatible with Christianity. While it is true that human claims are often expressed in an arrogant way, this does not mean truth does not exist. If truth exists, it is extremely unloving to ignore and deny what is true since truth provides for the best and safest life. Who would tell someone that it is safe to walk through a mine field merely because that person did not believe the mines existed? Who would tell someone who wished to pick up a poisonous snake that it was acceptable for them to believe the snake was not poisonous merely because they firmly held to that belief? While truth needs to be expressed lovingly rather than arrogantly, truth does exist and it measures the actions of individuals, cultures and societies. We can find truth in God and in His revelation. God has revealed truth to us in the Bible and through the natural law. We know the natural law because of our ability to reason from cause and effect, our conscience, from the creation of mankind in God’s image, from the order of the creation God has made, from the evident purposes of the things God has made, and because the Bible discusses the idea of natural law even though it does not use that phrase to describe it.
The seventh objection to natural law which we will address here is rooted in the notion that man cannot understand the revelation of God apart from the regenerative activity of the Holy Spirit. Some people believe this means the natural man cannot understand the natural law. The Scripture is full of passages in which God points out that only his elect will understand and believe his message. But it is the message of grace – the gospel – non-regenerate man fails to understand. The unregenerate are perfectly comfortable with the idea of law. Every human religion capitalizes on man’s knowledge of law and tries to parlay some limited obedience to a distorted moral code into a claim upon a god or gods who are less holy and more arbitrary than the God of the Bible. Law is the very stuff the Muslim, the rabbi, and the student of dharma all depend upon. They forget what the whole book of Romans tells us – it is not those to whom the law came who are justified by the law, but only those who keep all of it – a thing no son of Adam or daughter of Eve can do apart from Christ. God gave humans knowledge of law so they could rule over themselves and the creation as his regents, and so that they would know how they are separated from God by their sins – not as a means of salvation. There is no passage of Scripture which denies to mankind knowledge or understanding of the law. In fact, as David Van Drunen has pointed out, when God’s people have assumed the ungodly have no knowledge of the law, God has proven them wrong, as we see in the histories of Abraham and Abimelech, and Abraham and the Pharaoh.
An eighth reason many Christians fail to accept the natural law as real is that a belief in a structure of eschatological change or evolution is seen as incompatible with natural law. This is the class of objection whose proponents, Karl Barth and others, Carl Braaten described in his 1992 First Things article on Protestants and natural law. Such theologians and ethicists articulate in many different ways that while natural law might have made sense in the past, now for the church in Christ today, it does not. I believe this error has at its root not a commitment to some portion of Scripture, but a hidden commitment to the philosophy of Hegel. We live in an age so saturated with the ideas of evolution, dialectic, construction, development and change that we even try to place God on this Procrustean bed and force him to go through process and development. But the God of the Bible does not change. His laws and institutions do not change. Abraham was saved by faith just as we are saved by faith. Christ came not to do away with the law, but to fulfill it. I know the brilliant men who propounded neo-orthodoxy and other such views were far smarter than I and spoke in language far more elegant and irenic than I can muster. But in the plain meaning of Scripture I find all humans were made in the image of God, and still retain a distorted version of that image after the fall. I find the Gentiles who did not have the law still had a conscience which served them in the same office. I find pagan kings knew what God did and did not want even when they ignored that knowledge. I find all humans are morally accountable to God. I find all governments are God’s servants – and how can they carry out his service unless he has left one and all of them, from Rome to Cathay and Siberia to Patagonia, a set of instructions and orders through general revelation. And I find none of this changes the gospel or the role of the church. To borrow a metaphor from Calvin, the fact that men have occasional strikes of lightning in the night does not obviate their need of the greater light of the gospel.
In conclusion, there are many reasons why Protestants do not believe in natural law, but most of them are not particularly biblical or Christian. By contrast, because the Bible does teach the existence of natural law and the ideas behind it, it is a very Christian thing and a very Protestant thing to believe in it – as properly understood. It would be wrong to think the existence of the natural law, as revealed by God in general and special revelation meant human beings could save themselves. It would be wrong to think God is not really God. It would be improper to be arrogant in our expression of our ideas to others. But, avoiding these errors does not warrant the opposite errors of claiming that man has no moral knowledge, that God is not consistent with His own nature, or that God is not the source and definition of objective ideas. Nor is it appropriate to reject natural law because we recognize only a false version of it, such as the false claim that natural law is independent of God’s moral law or of God’s nature. There is indeed objective truth in God that He has revealed to us. And so I commend to you a belief in natural law.

Truth

2010-10-07T16:17:00.000-07:00

Truth is to be found in God Himself. He is the definer of all else. God is the central reality of the universe. All other truth is subsidiary to Him, either flowing from His nature, His decree, or the actions of the order He created. We can know truth only because God made us in His image, with mental faculties, that though puny and damaged, still reflect His own. That a human being can know truth was proven by the incarnation of Christ, when the One who was truth also became a man.

Legal Change in Moses Time

2010-09-29T10:52:00.001-07:00

A commenter recently said they did not believe the law of ancient Israel was allowed to incorporate change. As this is an important issue, I thought I would say something about it here on the main blog.
Deuteronomy 4:1-2 says:
“ 1 Hear now, O Israel, the decrees and laws I am about to teach you. Follow them so that you may live and may go in and take possession of the land that the LORD, the God of your fathers, is giving you. 2 Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it, but keep the commands of the LORD your God that I give you.”
By this God meant that no one should claim God gave commands he did not give or claim that commands God did give were not given by Him. He clearly did not mean there would be no additional revelation from God because there obviously was additional revelation. He also did not mean to bar common law judicial decisions or additional human laws for Israel. I have reasons for believing this:
1) Look at the example of the case of the daughters of Zelophehad in Numbers chapters 26, 27, and 36. The law was modified to deal with a new circumstance, thereby setting the precedent of common law development.
2) Historically, the Mosaic Law did provide for common law style human legal additions. The rabbinic method of expounding the law to new circumstances actually influenced the development of English and American common law methodology.
3) That is how ancient law codes of this type worked and were understood. The Ten Commandments, or the ten words and they are known to the Jews, are the core principles of the code. The other “commands”, like “if a man steals a sheep . . .” etc are exemplar analytic dispositions to serve as guidelines for judges on how to apply the principles in the central Ten Commandments.
4) In practice it has to be that way. No legal code can deal with all possible future human conduct. Additional common law rulings and or statutes will be necessary to deal with new technology, new scams, new threats, and new business patterns that did not exist when the code was made.
5) Better and brighter men than I have interpreted scripture this way. For example, look at the collective teachings of John Calvin in the Institutes.
The Bible also never says other nations have to have exactly the same laws as ancient Israel. These laws were given by God to Israel. Because they came from God, it makes sense to pay attention to the timeless truths they embody. But, a code for an ancient agrarian people is not adequate for a country with cars, computers, nuclear reactors, and banks.

Should Social Conservatives Set Their Views to the Side for the November Election

2010-09-21T14:49:00.000-07:00

Laurie Higgins from Illinois Family Action writes:
“The Republican governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, recently called for a “truce” on the divisive social issues. Republican governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, concurs saying, “Any issue that takes people’s eye off of unemployment, job creation, economic growth, taxes, spending, deficits, debts is taking your eye off the ball.”
Earlier I asked, if one of the “social issues” that divided the country were not the slaughter of the most defenseless but were instead the enslavement of African Americans, would these same “moderates,” be chastising conservatives for refusing to subordinate social issues to fiscal issues?
When social conservatives retreat from the cultural and political debate, the cultural and political views of the public are shaped by those who are publicly engaged. Our retreat creates a vacuum that leftists are only too glad to fill with false moral propositions and destructive legislation. Soon there won’t be enough conservatives who think rightly on fundamental social issues, and the ones who do will lack the courage to speak. Society would be much better served by heeding the words of John Adams who said, “Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody….If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not.”
It should be noted that a truce requires that both sides agree to a cessation of activity. Surely, some have noticed that Democrats aren’t participating in the truce. In fact, carnivorous leftists are licking their chops while waiting to devour the carcass of social conservatism. And while they await its demise, they engage in ever more fevered efforts to advance their pernicious goals to preserve the right to annihilate the unborn and destroy the family.
No, Daniels and other likeminded conservatives are not calling for a truce; they’re effectively calling for a forfeit.”
While economic issues are important, I believe Laurie is correct. While social conservatives are pressed to drop their issues and vote for so called moderates, the other side is going on the offensive to dominate social policy and the party. The Manhattan Declaration signers and others have made some progress in refusing to be cowed and continuing to press on social policies as well as economic policies. And it is well that we should.
The reasons America is in trouble in our time are not purely economic. America is in trouble because Christians who believe in and live out the Christian world view and Biblical ideals are not the dominant culture makers and leaders in our society. Instead the church is often failing to teach the truths of the Biblical world view and how they apply to life. We in the pews are failing to learn and live as we should. And in the end, we do not even take significant part in most of the institutions that shape the culture. Without more really Christian University professors, artists, movie makers, and writers doing high quality work that reflects the good in a compelling way (e.g. Bach and Burke), it is no surprise we cannot find solid Christian candidates for political offices who understand law, human nature, and the limited ability of governments to solve problems.
In turn, if we keep electing people who believe the wrong things about human nature and human dignity, about rights and the sources of rights, and about governments and what they can and cannot accomplish, we will continue to get corruption, bad laws, foolish priorities, and selfish “legal” graft from our law makers. Social issues ARE important, because they are bellwethers of a person’s true beliefs and priorities. A politician who does not understand why he should be against abortion on demand and against gay “marriage” does not understand human dignity, human rights, and the rule of law. Such a person is not going to make wise choices in the long run about “economic” issues either, no matter what they tell you between now and Election Day.

Apologetics.com show on Federal Prop 8 Cse Perry

2010-08-10T14:33:00.000-07:00

At the link is Chris Neiswonger's article about the Perry case and audio of last weekend's Apologetics.com radio show on the same topic. I was happy to be one of the guests on the show. Link: http://www.apologetics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=526%3Aproposition-8-and-the-gay-marriage-debate&catid=43%3Akkla-995-fm-los-angeles&Itemid=74

Luther on our Treasure in Christ

2010-08-09T11:02:00.000-07:00

"When I have Christ, I have all that is necessary. Neither death, sin, nor the devil can hurt me. If I believe in Christ I have fulfilled the law; it cannot accuse me. I have conquered hell; it cannot hold me. Everything that Christ has is mine. Through Him, we obtain all his possessions and eternal life. Even if I am weak in faith, I still have the same treasure and the same Christ that others have. There is no difference: we are all made perfect through faith in him, not by what we do." - Martin Luther (Trans. James Galvin)

Perry v. Schwarzenegger, post II

2010-08-05T16:15:00.000-07:00

The whole role of the trial court in Perry v. Schwarzenegger is an example of why decisions about distributive justice – who should get what in society and how society should be structured – were normally made by legislators, not courts. Sure, courts announced what the law should be in new cases or cases where the rules announced before made no sense, but they did so in the context of affecting one plaintiff and one defendant. Courts did corrective justice – restoring the balance between the doer and the sufferer, as Aristotle might have put it. No court prior to the last forty years or so would have considered it right for it to restructure the entire law and institution of marriage. Yet that is exactly what this court hopes will happen if its opinion is ratified by the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the US.

In the trial, the court heard a small selection of “experts” pontificate on vast areas of knowledge well beyond the verification of science or art, particularly in such a short time by so few individuals. Yet, in theory, the whole future history of the United States could turn on these few poorly grounded opinions. One of the more interesting factual findings of the court was:

“Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are
sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and
lesbians.” P.101

Is this a precursor to persecution and harassment of Christians who publically hold true to the moral beliefs of centuries of mankind and the clear teaching of the Bible? Perhaps that is too radical a supposition, but it is hard to see it in any other light since religious belief has nothing to do with the facts of the case before the court. No such “finding of fact” was necessary. Certainly too, the experts could not prove such a thing. That no one likes to be told their conduct is immoral is obvious. But it is good for people engaged in immoral conduct to be reminded of their error and of the true way regardless of how embarrassing that may be. No doubt brothel owners and professional con men would prefer their chosen livelihoods to be legal and socially acceptable. Perhaps they cry real tears at night over the hostility of antiquated religious beliefs. No doubt they justify their conduct to themselves and say they are only giving people what they want and need to be happy. No doubt it would be a great personal loss to them to change occupations since their upbringing and inclinations may have equipped them for no other trade. But no court should say laws against prostitution or pyramid schemes violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution as a result of their hurt feelings. Nor should any court threaten people with faith in God by proclaiming their beliefs “harmful” to the pimp or fraudster so in need of repentance.

PERRY v. SCHWARZENEGGER, the opinion in the Prop. 8 trial, part I

2010-08-04T17:09:00.000-07:00

A Federal district court in San Francisco, months after hearing witnesses and closing arguments, has declared California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional. Proposition 8 had declared merely that in California the term “marriage” could be applied only to one man and one woman. It accomplished little more than preserving the appearance of a distinction between legally recognized relationships for one man and one woman, and California’s legally recognized relationships for homosexual couples (groups are yet to come, but in principle cannot be stopped if current trends continue).

The Plaintiffs in the case argued successfully that Proposition 8 and the old fashioned understanding of marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States because it treats same sex couples differently than heterosexual couples. Of course, such different treatment was expected by the moral core and religiously orthodox core of nearly all cultures for nearly all of recorded history, but courts today assume we know better. The people of the past thought it was just as obvious that homosexual relationships were not like marriages as that burglary was not like entering your own home. Somehow we miss the difference.

The defendants argued that the will of the people should carry the day. In the big scheme of things this is a difficult argument, because sometimes the majority of people want the wrong thing. That is why our founders created a republic instead of a pure democracy. But then the founders would have been shocked by this outcome in a court of law and would have considered it a vicious refusal by the court to apply the law. The defendants also made the utilitarian arguments, which I believe to be true, that children are better off being raised by a mother and father, and that heterosexual relationships are more stable than homosexual relationships. The defendants also made the tactical choice not to present much evidence. I think they were more afraid of their witnesses being mocked for their ideas than of the lack of evidence for their side before the court. And indeed, because of the way our legal system works today, making an argument this court would have found persuasive is as difficult for us as it would have been easy for our ancestors.

The underlying problem here is one addressed by a number of Christian writers, including Dallas Willard and Nancy Pearcey: our society divides "reality" into the objective sphere of science on the one hand and the subjective sphere of religion and morality on the other hand. This is not really so. Moral truth and real religious truth are objective and knowable species of truth. But, on the basis of the alleged subjectivity of morality and religion, morality and orthodox Christianity are banned from consideration in making public policy. The judge in this case said:

“ A state’s interest in an enactment must of course be
secular in nature. The state does not have an interest in
enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an
accompanying secular purpose. See Lawrence v Texas, 539 US 558,
571 (2003); see also Everson v Board of Education of Ewing
Township, 330 US 1, 15 (1947).”

And by “secular” they mean that arguments from any moral system not based on utilitarianism or pure reciprocity are also excluded. Naturally science cannot actually tell anyone what they "ought" to do - science measures and describes things and events in the experimentally and observationally repeatable material world, science says nothing about normativity. So public policy is made through a variety of shell games that involve elite manipulation of the courts or manipulation of the public, whichever works best. Practical political power and will are really the only criteria; though arguments to salve the dishonest intellect and to appeal to the passions and emotions must be made to keep up appearances. Materialist scientism, and instrumentalist faith in autonomous humankind is the established religion of our government. We no longer have the Rule of Law because the Law above the Law - the reason, universal eternal truths, and moral order of God are disregarded unless they too can be smuggled in, through some appealing way, as "tradition."

This situation is extremely dangerous. If the current paradigm exhibited by the federal trial court in San Francisco prevails, it may take decades, but extreme damage to the souls of our children and the character our civilization is inevitable. On the other hand, if people yield to the temptation to use power politics, or worse, violence, to impose their will on the elites who back the current standard, the precedents set could prove just as devastating to freedom, reason and truth in the long run as the immoral rule of judges is becoming in the short run. May God guide us in how to unravel the maze of evil we have made for ourselves by our failure to clearly teach and maintain the truth as the truth in all areas of life.

Test the Prophets

2010-08-04T11:49:00.000-07:00

Dunbar Plunket Barton relates an interesting story about John Holt, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench appointed by William III. Holt was a strong Christian, but did not suffer fools or false prophets.

A man came to Holt announced that he, the visitor, was a “prophet of the Lord God” and that God had instructed him to tell Holt to issue a document called a nolle prosequi to release a particular man currently held in prison and awaiting trial. A nolle prosequi, by the way, was a document issued by a prosecutor stating that he would not continue to prosecute a case against a particular defendant. Holt said to the would-be prophet “Thou art a false prophet and a lying knave. If the Lord God had sent thee, it would have been to the Attorney-General, for He knows that it belongeth not to the Chief Justice to grant a nolle prosequi. But I, as Chief Justice, can grant a warrant to commit thee to bear him [the prisoner] company.”

There is an old saying “The Devil Knows Latin”; but Holt knew the Lord knows the law.

The Complexity of Legal Change

2010-08-03T17:30:00.000-07:00

History is full of examples of the complexities of legislation and law. While everyone has some idea of what is just, our own interests and passions tend to get in the way. It is often difficult to procure productive change without overstepping the legitimate powers of government and thereby setting precedents useful for destructive change later on. It is also difficult to protect some real or imagined rights or interests without infringing other real or imagined rights. These difficulties are among the reasons “conservatives” favor relative stability in law.

One example from the reign of the English King James II is seen in the circumstances surrounding the Declaration of Indulgence and the trial of the Seven Bishops.

One of the great injustices of England has been the persecution and discrimination against religious minorities that occurred from the middle ages up to modern times. The legal impediments to dissenters from the national church were only gradually eliminated. In part, the problem stemmed not from malice, but from the mere existence of a national established church and from the good intentions to maintain unity and avoid seditious and destructive opinions as much as possible for the good of the people and the commonwealth.

But, from our perspective with the passage of time, we can see how the best intentions often worked a mischief. The same England that gave us Magna Charta, the King James Bible, and the Westminster Confession also burnt the bones of Wycliffe, burned Cranmer at the stake, imprisoned John Bunyan, and refused to let Baptists hold political office for an unconscionable amount of time. When we limit freedom for the sake of unity or purity of doctrine, it is an inevitability, given fallen human nature, that we will sometimes be mistaken in what is correct or true, that we will make mistakes even when we do know what is true in the abstract, and that the enemies of truth will at some point gain enough power to use the same rules against those who believe the truth – or so the experience of history seems to teach us.

King James II tried to change the situation in the late 1600s by issuing a decree known as the Declaration of Indulgence, and a second decree known as the Second Declaration of Indulgence. The first Declaration of Indulgence was issued in 1687, the third year of James II reign. In the declaration James II says his intent is to make the people of England happy by “granting to them the free exercise of their religion.” James II sensibly writes “conscience ought not to be constrained nor people forced in matters of religion.” James II observed truthfully that all the efforts of the last four monarchs to promote a single unified religious opinion in England had failed, and all such efforts were doomed to failure. Building on these principles, James II says he will protect the established church, but that all penal laws punishing people for failure to adhere to and participate in the established church are now suspended. James goes on to declare that all religious groups may have their own meetings (which had not been allowed). But, as he is still worried about sedition, the non-Church of England groups must meet openly, allow visitors, disclose their regular meeting sites to local government representatives, and avoid preaching any sort of treason. James II went even further to eliminate all existing oaths of religious orthodoxy as tests for holding office in England. To crown all this off, James II pardoned everyone who had been accused or punished under the laws eliminated by the Indulgence.

In the Second Declaration of Indulgence, issued in 1688, James II essentially said, though not in these words, “despite what you may have heard about the Declaration of Indulgence, I really meant it and it is for your own good – freedom of conscience is good for everybody.”

You would think that these declarations would have put James II down in the history books as a great wise king, far ahead of his time. But they did not. James II got a bad reputation with the majority that has lasted down to this day. Why? Well, a lot of other things entered into it: James abused the court system by trying to intimidate judges, he wanted to become an absolute monarch, he had a Roman Catholic wife and people thought he was trying to bring back absolutist Roman Catholic rule over England despite all the talk about religious liberty . . . oh, and he conspired to have France invade England to back him up in his fight with Parliament. Many members of Parliament thought that the Declaration of Indulgence was beyond James' proper authority as King. He could not do something like this – only Parliament could make such a radical change in the laws. Indeed, the Declarations claimed to unravel many Acts of Parliament, and spreading the Declaration of Indulgence itself was seen by many as a violation of a law laid down in the time of Elizabeth that involved not only possible legal penalties, but carried an anathema – a sort of theological curse – against any churchman who so violated it. And, Parliament suspected James did not really believe in freedom of conscience for the long run – he just wanted it long enough to get his pro-Roman Catholic friends into enough government offices and positions of power to seize control of the government and return England by force to the Romanist fold.

In the context of this fight, along came the Case of the Seven Bishops. Seven of the rulers of England’s established Anglican Church, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, objected to the Declarations of Indulgence. The King issued an order that the Declaration of Indulgence be read in every church and distributed by clergy to their people. The seven bishops petitioned the King refusing to read the Declaration in church or to distribute it. The King had the Seven Bishops prosecuted for libeling him with their statements in the petition for relief from the law.
Do you see the tremendous irony? In order to further a statement supposedly meant to establish religious conscience the King brought criminal cases for libel against five clerics over what they did not do in church. As if that were not enough, he was punishing them for asking him for help to avoid violating the law and coming under the threat of prosecution from Parliament and a curse from the church. On top of this, the King’s authority in the whole matter was suspect. The King was violating freedom of conscience and religion in the name of freedom of conscience and religion – and was doing so in violation of England’s unwritten constitution. If the King lost, it was a setback for religious liberty. But if the King won it helped establish that the King had the power to act as a tyrant – a precedent that might ultimately result in the King talking away religious liberty.

The King lost. The jury came in with a verdict on not guilty. The same year Parliament drove James from the throne and replaced him with monarchs with unimpeachable Protestant Christian credentials. Religious liberty would be won, but on a slower time table. Absolute monarchy, the threat of tyranny, and the specter of a new Roman Catholic established church were banished.

I hope this very brief description serves to illuminate the problem of legal complexity. Today, the problems of the complex interactions of rights, powers, and laws are no less byzantine. There are many today who seek radical changes in society. They wish us to think differently, feel differently, eat differently, make less dust, ignore moral rules handed down by God and endorsed by every major culture for centuries, educate children differently, and ultimately – they hope – change human nature itself. They seek to do all this through laws and regulations of questionable legal pedigree and authority. And they often are heedless of the sweeping chaos they will unleash. They are willing to take away rights given by God to uphold new rights given by man. At least the letter of James II’s Declarations bore on its face a noble sentiment. The same cannot be said of those who seek to replace the hard won freedom of religion with freedom from religion, and the liberty to choose among goods with a petty tyranny over plows and breakfast tables. The new progressives too often seek James II’s claimed power without James II’s claimed excuse.

Cornerstone and Capstone

2010-07-19T14:58:00.000-07:00

In normal architectural theory, a cornerstone and capstone are usually two different things. A cornerstone is a foundational stone that is placed first. All the other stones are placed in relation to it and so its solid placement and solid resting place are key to the structure and survival of the building. By contrast, a capstone is usually the last stone placed in a stone building. It is the stone that finishes off the building and finally holds the completed walls in place or finishes off the appearance of the wall by being the last stone put in place. In 1 Peter 2, Peter quotes two passages from the Old Testament with reference to Christ:

“4As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him— 5you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6For in Scripture it says:
"See, I lay a stone in Zion,
a chosen and precious cornerstone,
and the one who trusts in him
will never be put to shame."Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe,
"The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone, and,
"A stone that causes men to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall." They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for.
9But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 10Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”

When my wife Julia and I were discussing this other day she pointed out to me something I had never heard or seen even though I have read this passage many times and had it quoted many times. Lots of people notice that Jesus is the cornerstone and we are like blocks that are built on him, our firm foundation building a house dedicated to God. We are included in this structure because of Christ and our position is made firm and secure by Christ. We are here by virtue of our relationship to Christ. In other words, our relationship to God through Christ is analogous to the relationship of the stones of a building to the cornerstone. I have heard this before, but I have heard very little about the capstone. What’s interesting is that Jesus is a capstone to those that reject him. The capstone is the final stone in a building. That means that when the capstone is put in place, no other stones are needed and no other stones are allowed in. This means that when people reject Jesus and he is the capstone to them, they find no place in the church and no place in God’s building. It is already completed and capped off. They are excluded by their relationship to the capstone. This too is of course a set of verses that deals with the question of predestination and god’s election. Thanks be to God that our salvation depends upon him and not on our good works or the lack thereof. And thanks be to God that we have come to Christ as a cornerstone rather than rejecting Him. Naturally we cannot know if anyone will final reject Christ in this life. Only God knows that. So we should see our fellow human beings as potential stones in the church - potential members of the elect who need to hear the gospel and be blessed with our good conduct and good faith. So this passage should ultimatly be encouraging.

Return to the Classroom

2010-06-09T09:58:00.000-07:00

After much consideration, I have decided that I am going to return to teaching full time and leave my administrative duties as Dean. My last day as Dean will be June 30th, 2010. Being Dean of TLS has been rewarding and challenging. During the last five years, the TLS team has been able to work together to achieve many things:

Increased enrollment to its highest level

Expanded its position as a Christian law school with aggressive marketing through videos, blogs, heralded radio commercials, and the most successful print materials ever used for the law school

Achieved its highest overall bar pass rate since a statistically significant number of students were taking the exam

Renewed its California Bar and Higher Learning Commission accreditation without external supervision or extra reports

Revised and improved the curriculum

Hired all current full time and most current part-time law faculty

Managed a balanced budget each year with an aggregate surplus of income over expenses around one million dollars

Received over $479,000 in gifts

Expanded the law school's mission

Hosted the successful God and Governing Conference

Opened an internship program for Pacific Justice Institute on campus

Opened a legal clinic at the Orange County Rescue Mission

Hosted speeches by over a dozen nationally known speakers

I have to admit I am thankful to give up the stress and tension of being Dean in favor of getting back to the writing, research, and teaching that I enjoy most.

I am also happy to announce that Professor Myron Steeves has accepted the offer to serve as interim Dean of Trinity Law School effective July 1, 2010. Professor Steeves has been a valuable member of the law school family since 1992, serving as an adjunct professor and - currently - as Director of Development and Alumni Relations. Please provide Dean Steeves with your support and pray for him, that God would bless his time as Dean and guide him as he leads Trinity Law School.

It has been a pleasure and an honor to serve God and all of the Trinity community in the role of Dean of the law school. I am very thankful to have had your prayers and encouragement throughout these five years. I look forward to continuing to serve God and the Trinity community as a full time faculty member once again.

Very Truly Yours,

Donald R. McConnell

Apologetics.com radio show on sacrifice and the Chrsitian Life

2010-05-31T16:38:00.000-07:00

Apologetics.com Radio Show - Sacrifice and the Christian Life with Donald McConnell and Doug Eaton: A Memorial Day Special

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.apologetics.com%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26view%3Darticle%26id%3D505%253Asacrifice-and-the-christian-life%26catid%3D43%253Akkla-995-fm-los-angeles%26Itemid%3D74&h=876a5

Click on the title or cut and paste the link.

A Guide to Basic Ideas #5: Death

2010-05-18T17:35:00.001-07:00

We mentioned in the last entry that mankind’s fall into sin disrupted both every part of mankind and the physical itself. One of the results was that death entered the world. According to the scriptures, before mankind entered into sin, there was no death. This is undoubtedly difficult for modern man to accept since he expects to see the universe functioning in a mechanistic way and expects to see physical evidence to confirm such radical ideas. However, we don’t know how long the world existed without death, nor do we know exactly when these events occurred. Nor do we know all of the physical processes that have created the appearance of distance or time between us and the events of Genesis. We have ideas, but we can’t fully reconstruct what happened. In part because we were not there, in part because we cannot reconstruct what happened, and in part because God is a volitional actor of infinite power not a lab rat that can be put into an experimental maze and made to perform at will. The bible teaches that death entered the world through the sin of mankind. This death is both physical and spiritual. Human being’s bodies not only die, but human being’s, because of their rebellion against God, eventually suffer judgment and separation from God. The bible teaches that this involves eternal torment. While that may seem highly unpleasant or undesirable to us, it is completely just. God has behaved toward mankind in an incredibly loving, merciful, and gracious manner. Yet human beings rebel against God and behave selfishly, greedily, and sinfully almost from their very conception. God, through the provision He made in Jesus Christ, has made every opportunity for us to come back to Him. Through general revelation, He has revealed the way the world works, our sin, and our need for Him. Yet most human beings still reject all of this and do not seek God. God has to come out and find us and drag us almost kicking and screaming into His kingdom. God’s sentence of death is just and reasonable under the circumstances even though we as opposing parties to this judgment at times find that difficult to accept. God, in His mercy, has made it possible for us to avoid eternal death and to obtain eternal life. God has promised to resurrect to eternal joy and happiness those who are willing to accept His provisions in Christ. More on that will follow. It is interesting that the resurrection that God promises is a resurrection of human beings with bodies as well as a spirit or soul. We will continue to have a material and an immaterial element in eternity. This is another reason why Plato is wrong in thinking that only spirit is good.
The bible says it is appointed to man once to die and then the judgment. People who believe in reincarnation believe something completely incompatible with the biblical worldview. Every human being has only one life, dies, and then will face God’s judgment with a resurrection to eternal life or a resurrection to eternal suffering. There is no do-over. No human being is reincarnated or has any past or future life ahead of them except for the eternal life in Christ or the eternal life apart from God following the judgment. There certainly are some people who have an affinity for the past. I certainly feel that way myself. I can easily see that in many ways I am more of a pre-modern person than a post-modern person. But I never lived before 1960. I am not reincarnated from any prior person. Neither is anyone else. This basic teaching of Christianity is important because it means we have to get things right the first time around. There is no second chance. So, we try as hard as we can to persuade people to respond to God and to accept his mercy and grace.

Basic Ideas 4: Where Plato was Wrong

2010-05-03T16:05:00.001-07:00

If you’ve read my blog you’ll notice that I’m an admirer of many of the ideas of Plato provided that they are reinterpreted to match the Christian worldview. However, there were areas where Plato was seriously wrong. One of these areas has to do with Creation. As Nancy Pearcey discusses in greater detail in her book Total Truth Plato believed that spirit and matter had both preexisted eternally and that spirit was associated with goodness and order and matter was associated with evil, intractability, and insufficiency. This simply isn’t the case. And Plato’s view led to a variety of negative results, especially in the Middle Ages. The emphasis of some early Christians on asceticism and the rise of the monastic movement as an ascetic phenomena as well as the improper belief that full time preaching of the gospel, either as a missionary or a pastor, is somehow the only really holy occupation or vocation are all negative fallout that came the idea the spiritual is good and the material is bad. Pearcey describes Plato’s view led to a “two-story” view of reality in which spirituality was superior and material or worldly things were inferior.
The biblical view of reality contrasts sharply with this idea. When God created the heavens and the earth He created them out of nothing. Matter is not eternal and did not exist before God created it. This ought to be obvious from a scientific point of view because what we know about matter now is that it simply isn’t the sort of thing that can be around for an eternity. If the universe had been around for an infinite period of time, it would already be cold and atoms would be equally spaced out in the emptiness of space. This is because universes run down. They become less organized and lose energy as time goes by. All matter behaves this way. Happily, God is not matter and God is the sort of thing that can exist eternally, indeed outside of time. God created time and the time space continuum as well as matter. Matter has been under His total and complete control from the very beginning. When God created the universe, He pronounced it to be good. Later, because of human sin, evil entered into the world and that evil brought about by human sin resulted in the world experiencing futility. When God created the world it was good, but after mankind sinned God cursed the world and it began to function in an imperfect way. Instead of merely bearing edible fruits and seeds, some plants began to bear poisonous thorns and to create toxic chemicals. Instead of animals living on the herbs of the field, some animals began to live by eating other animals. The entire way the world functions was affected as a result of mankind’s fall into sin. Naturally the greatest effect was on mankind himself. Human sin affects every part of our being. It does affect our material bodies, and it also affects our immaterial soul or spirit. Escaping from sin does not merely involve escaping from matter. It requires an escape from our immaterial personage as well or the transformation of that personage. As a result, we can’t escape from sin by merely avoiding certain things or having an ascetic lifestyle. Instead, the only escape from sin is through the transforming power of God made possible through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We’ll talk more about that later. For now, it’s enough to point out that Plato was incorrect in believing that the material world was inherently evil because of its materiality. By contrast, Aristotle was also in a sense in error in acting as though the material world was entirely good and that every impulse, act, or pattern within that world was always for the good and fully in accord with the design and purpose of each thing. Thomas Aquinas, though he does talk about sin, sometimes seems to over emphasize the goodness of the natural world when he discusses the function and design of mankind and the elements of the natural world. Plato went too far one way, Aristotle and Aquinas went too far in the other in not taking into account the effects of the fall.

Video on Rights

2010-04-22T18:01:00.001-07:00

Sermon on the Authority of Scripture

2010-04-16T10:06:00.000-07:00

What is Justice?

2010-04-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

What is Different about a Christian Law School?

2010-04-13T13:52:00.000-07:00

Basic Ideas Post 3: Words

2010-04-12T11:42:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that when we talk about basic ideas, we’re using words. You may also have noticed that in talking about the Bible as a source of fundamental knowledge, this also involves words since the Bible is a book written using words. Furthermore, we called it God’s words. If you haven’t noticed, the God of the Bible is a very verbal being. In creation, many of God’s acts of creation are described as speaking. God spoke the world into existence. He spoke something out of nothing. The Hebrew tradition concerning the Ten Commandments isn’t to call them the Ten Commandments; it’s to call them the ten words. In the scriptural account, it appears that God created Adam and Eve with knowledge of language. They didn’t invent language or discover it; they simply awoke talking and thinking in words. They were able to communicate with God and each other in words. Of course, Genesis also explains at the Tower of Babel, the Divine origin of the confusion and multiplicity of languages. Throughout the Bible, God seems quite unconcerned with the fact that language is a useful medium for his revelation. It appears that he takes it quite for granted that while words might have some ambiguity in the fallen human mind, they are more than an effective way to communicate. God also describes Jesus as the Word of God or the Divine Logos, a word that means more than word, also logic, reason, argument, order etc. But it does also mean word. When the prophets speak in the Bible, they often say “the word of the LORD” or “the word of the LORD came to so and so” or “proclaim the word of the LORD” and such phrases. There is constantly an emphasis on word, or words, or messages from God in human language.

The postmodern person who thinks that language is a human invention, or the nominalist, a person who doesn’t believe that universals exist, all this reliance on language as a way of trying to communicate truths that are allegedly objective could be a bit troubling. But it really shouldn’t be. I believe the traditional answer of Christian theologians and Augustine in particular suffices. God created human beings in His image. Part of this creation of humans in His image is that, like him, human beings are verbal beings. We are able to understand language and express ourselves in language. Furthermore, the language that we understand is not purely referential. We don’t merely have words for things we can point to and see. We also have words for things we can’t ever see but yet we know what they mean. Words like justice, freedom, unity, truth, beauty, property, negligence, agreement, consideration, law, justification, mercy, tenderness. All these words are what we call universals, that is, words that everyone seems to know and understand the meaning of but that no one has ever seen in their pure form, that is, unless perhaps you have seen God. It is also the tradition of Augustine and many other Christian theologians that the positive universals are embodied in God himself. As Plato said, and we’ve mentioned before, God is preeminently the measure of all things. He is the origin of language and the origin of the meaning of the universals. The positive universals in one way or another describe aspects of God. For this reason, while they each have a distinctive core meaning, the meaning of positive universals tends to get fuzzy the more broadly you examine them. It’s difficult to tell the difference sometimes between righteousness and justice, or beauty and goodness and while each of them is distinctive, they tend to blend together at the edges. This is because God is one and you can’t really divide Him up into pieces or sections. And yet, all of these words find their referential in God’s character, personality, and nature. Negative universals are those things that find their opposite or find their meaning by being unlike God such as evil, hatred, bitterness, envy, and other sins and destructive impulses, emotions, and ideas.

Now, in saying this, we’re not saying that human’s understanding of language is perfect. Our understanding and use of language was affected by our fall into sin, just like every other aspect of our personalities. But language is still practical for working purposes. While it may take a lot of discussion for us to come to an agreement about justice, we all, more or less, know it when we see it, provided that we’re honest with ourselves and others. We often times want to redefine justice in order to justify ourselves or to make a complicated concept simpler than it really is. While there have been many attempts by philosophers to define words like justice, they fail. It simply isn’t possible to provide a perfect definition of any universal in words, deeds, examples, or concrete reference other than by reference to God himself. And yet we can talk about what those universals mean in various aspects. So, while many definitions of justice may tell us something about justice itself – Socrates idea that justice is doing your work excellently and minding your own business – Plato’s idea that justice is living by what we know of the divine – Aristotle’s idea that justice is giving to everyone according to their deserve – or Justinian’s three fold concept of justice that includes hurting no one and rendering to everyone his due – are all good, but are not the last word in Justice. For the last word on Justice we have to look to the Word of God Himself.

10 Tips for looking for a legal job after law school

2010-04-05T11:18:00.000-07:00

1. Learn the common areas of practice.

When you apply for a legal job, the lawyers interviewing you will ask you what areas of practice you’re interested in. Of course, the optimal answer is that you’re interested in the very area of practice that they themselves work on and are hiring an associate to help them with. So in order to properly answer this question you have to first find out what the common practice areas are. Legal practice is divided into a variety of unofficial practice areas. Lawyers usually concentrate on cases within a particular practice area or a couple of practice areas. Sometimes, sole practitioners will do some things in several different practice areas but most lawyers find comfort in sticking to a definite practice area. What are the major practice areas? Here are a few: criminal prosecution; criminal defense; insurance defense law (representing defendants in personal injury cases where you are hired by the insurance company for the defendant); plaintiff’s personal injury; real estate transactions; real estate litigation; entrepreneurial business practice; corporate business practice; securities law; entertainment law; wills, trusts, and estate; intellectual property; mergers and acquisitions; maritime law (in which there are sub-practice areas of plaintiff’s personal injury, insurance defense, cargo loss, and some even more esoteric divisions); tax law; environmental law; bankruptcy law; and workers compensation law. There are other areas, but these are the most common.

2. Decide what you can do and what you love to do.

Once you know the practice areas, the next important question is: in which practice areas is it reasonable for you to believe you can get a job? And of those practice areas, what do you really love doing? It may be that in the beginning you’ll have to be happy doing something like insurance defense cases that focus on auto accidents even though your real desire is to be a specialist in products liability law. If the area you love and the area you can reasonably get into are two different things, try to pick something close to what you love. People are most effective in their work when they enjoy it. So what do I mean by asking what you can do? For example, many of the firms that do mergers and acquisitions law are large, powerful, corporate law firms that only accept graduates from the top of the class in the top law schools. As a result, unless you’re able to find a smaller firm in a smaller city that does mergers and acquisitions work, it may not be reasonable to think you can get into that practice easily if you’re from a small law school or were not in the top of your class.

3. Find the firms that engage in the practice areas you want to target.

There is a lot of information about law firms and what they do on the internet. It is also worthwhile to talk to people and network to find firms that have particular practices. Knowing someone in a firm is often the best way to find information about a viable job. Look for as many firms as possible since you will probably have to talk to more than 100 firms to find a job in a tight market like the one that currently exists.

4. Research the target firms.

To be successful in a legal interview, it not only helps to be a good candidate, but to know as much as possible about the firm you’re interested in. You especially need to know their practice areas. If you know what their partners do, where they went to school, what interests they have, and what published cases they may have been involved with or what major litigation they have been involved in, you can ask and answer questions intelligently and you have a chance of demonstrating to the firm that you picked them because you really are interested in their particular practice, not because you’re merely applying to every law firm in Southern California.

5. Write a good resume and cover letter.

You need to explain in your cover letter what kind of job you’re looking for and why. What attracted you to this particular firm? In your resume you need to present personal information about yourself, your education, and your job experience that demonstrates you have the qualities that a law firm would be looking for in a potential candidate. That would include things like proof that you know how to work hard, proof that you’re intelligent, that you’re capable of thinking on your feet, that you’re a good legal researcher, that you know how to write, that you’re good with public relations, that you have an excellent memory, etc. It is definitely worth getting advice from someone in the legal field about your resume and cover letter to be sure it meets with the expectations of the industry. In addition, you must carefully proofread the resume and the cover letter. Many many people have failed to obtain jobs because of spelling errors or errors in spacing or consistency in their resume. When employers are making a snap judgment of who to interview by going through hundreds of resumes, small difference make a big impact. You also don’t want your resume to be ugly, too plain, or too ostentatious. You want a resume that is businesslike and well-balanced. It should be appealing to the eye and provide the information the reader wants quickly and easily.

6. Send your resume and cover letter to as many target firms as possible.

In particular look for firms that are advertising openings. The daily newspaper provides a list of law firm classified ads at the back in every daily issue. Firms also sometimes advertise online. Word of mouth, though, is probably the best way to find an opening. Don’t be skimpy in the number of firms you apply to. The more you apply to, the more likely it is that you’ll get a job.

7. Follow up on your letter.

You need to find out who in the firm is responsible for hiring decisions or who that person’s secretary is. Follow up with the secretary to be sure your letter and resume were received and to find out what, if anything, the next step would be.

8. Be persistent.

Hard work pays off in seeking a job. Don’t nag the people who you’re applying to, but make sure that you apply to many places and that you follow up with each of them.

9. Network.

As I’ve mentioned above, a personal contact is the best way to get a job. When you’re looking for a job, you shouldn’t only do the things mentioned above. You should get involved with networks which may lead you to a job source. Join chapters of the local county bar association, especially chapters that deal with the practice area in which you are interested. If you’re a conservative or libertarian, it doesn’t hurt to become a member of the federalist society. If you’re a believer, you may want to join your local Christian legal society chapter. Having attorneys as friends may help you get a job and may also give you an opportunity to refer cases to someone, to obtain referrals, and to occasionally get advice and help. The best way to make friends is to be a friend. If you talk to others, listen to them, and encourage them, they may be able to help you as well.

10. Be positive and thankful.

In the brutal world of looking for work it’s easy to feel bitter. But any kind of bitterness, resentment, or unthankfulness will show on your face and make you look bad to potential employers. You need to remain positive and thankful for whatever it is that you have and the opportunities that you face. Prayer is an important part of any job search. Knowing Jesus Christ is the one thing that can help you be positive and thankful throughout the unpleasantness of the job search experience.

Basic Ideas, Post 2

2010-03-24T15:36:00.000-07:00

In A Guide to Basic Ideas post 1, I advocated the notion that God is the foundation of all truth and that in order to truly know, one must accept Him. I quoted Augustine and Anselm who said we must believe in order to understand. But, while significant, our natural knowledge of God is not really enough considering how dimmed by sin our will and faculties have become. In order to know not only that there is a God, but to confirm to our dim understanding what we should already be able to deduce about his nature and plans but usually do not, we need his written revelation: the Bible. I don’t doubt that the acceptance of a postulate that is over 1000 pages long and many printings will be a difficult pill to swallow for many people. But if we are trying to establish truth and create a system of ideas that will last, we must believe the scriptures in order to understand the universe. Once again, this cannot be an instrumentalist relationship either. The scriptures must be accepted for the sake of God not merely for the sake of human knowledge.
The Bible is a self authenticating divine message. The Bible itself claims to be inspired by God and to have authority as a communication from God that is full of specific communications from God. 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.” 2 Peter 1:21 says that the prophecies of the Old Testament did not come “by the impulse of man” but “men knew by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” There are also the times when Jesus attributes words in the Old Testament scripture written by the authors of the Old Testament to God himself such as Matthew 1:21 and Matthew 19:5. The same thing is done in the book of Acts in Acts 1:16, and by implication, in Acts 2:16-17. There are also the many passages in the Old Testament and the New where it describes God himself as speaking or says Thus sayeth the LORD. I could go on and on. If you’re interested in the details, you should consult a good systematic theology treatise like Wayne Grudem’s systematic theology or Gordon Clark’s book God’s Hammer: the Bible and its critics. So the Bible claims for itself to be a divinely inspired communication. When we read the Bible we are also convinced of its claims and convinced that its words are a communication from God. Just as God cannot be proved, neither can his words be proved in an ultimate objective sense of being forced to receive them. But when we are confronted with the truths in the scriptures, if we seek the truth with an open mind we will be convinced by the Holy Spirit that the Bible’s claims to be God’s words are accurate. The Bible is systematically consistent and fits the facts. It meets the needs of the human condition. The apologist Carnel made these points in a very persuasive way. We can also see, in looking at the scriptures, that it claims to be a set of eye witness accounts. It is not written in the once-upon-a-time manner of fairy stories or myths. The Bible claims to be set of descriptions of events in time and space as well as poetry and prophetic literature. The Bible is full of fulfilled prophecies, eyewitness testimony to divine intervention in everyday life. The greatest and most important eyewitness testimony of divine intervention is the testimony of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. We also have the evidence of lives transformed by the Bible’s message today and throughout history. The Bible is also extraordinary in that it is the only book of its kind and the only book to have survived the many attacks, persecutions, hostilities, and attempts at refutation that the Bible has survived. While many religions have experienced persecution, no religion or religious message has been so besieged as first Judaism and then Christianity. The message of their scriptures has been resented by the world since it was spoken and then put in written form. Yet despite all of the attempts to destroy it and refute it and to kill and torture its people into recanting, the Bible has survived as have God’s believers. To sum up, the Bible is self authenticating. While it cannot be proved by putting you in an intellectual situation where you are forced to accept it, God has not left himself or his word without evidence. From here, we will go on to see what the Bible and God’s general revelation tell us about God himself.

An Update on Religious Liberty

2010-03-15T14:45:00.001-07:00

Many people who read my blog post on religious liberty and who have read similar accounts of the dilemmas facing society in the realm of religious freedom find it difficult to believe that religious liberty could actually be under siege in any way. They don’t believe there are people out there who would like to do away with the freedom of Christians to teach the truths of Christianity to their children. While such people are definitely not the majority and are definitely not in control of the government, they do exist. For example, the blog Cranmer has an extensive quote dated Friday, March 12, 2010 from David Laws, the shadow Secretary of State for children, schools, and families of the Liberal Democrat party in England. Now mind you, the Liberal Democrats are not in control in England and are not likely to be. The Tories should win the next election if everything continues along its current path. But this is some of what David Laws has said about the approach of his political party to the question of schools with a religious mission. You also need to keep in mind in reading this that religious schools in England are called faith schools and they are partially funded by the government. Laws has stated:

"Can it be right that a child living in the catchment area of a faith school whose parents want to choose that school for the child should be denied entry to the nearest taxpayer funded school on the basis of a religious test? That is a reality in many communities. Liberal democrats therefore voted to require all faith schools to have a more inclusive approach to entry…democrats also decided that, with the exception of religious instruction, staff in faith schools should be chosen on the basis of the ability to teach and not simply on the basis of faith. That is surely right – anything else is unfair both to children who need the best education, and to the teacher with the right skills.
Finally what of sex and relationship education? … Is it really acceptable that in the 21st century that – for example – a school should be able to teach about homosexuality while at the same time making clear those same sex relationships are morally wrong or that hell could await those who find their sexuality defined in this way? Can we really expect young people to be treated with respect and gain confidence in themselves if state-funded schools are allowed to teach such nonsense? Liberal democrats will defend the role of faith schools in state education. But state funded prejudice is not a freedom that liberals or liberal democrats should feel the need to justify or tolerate."

In other words, to recap, the third largest political party in the United Kingdom maintains as part of their platform that faith school should not be able to discriminate against potential students on the basis of their faith, should not be able to hire teachers primarily on the basis of the faith of the teacher, except in the area of religious instruction, and should not be able to teach that homosexuality is morally wrong or could result in eternal judgment. Such policies might never be implemented. But if people who believe in the need for Christians to be able to teach the truth don’t stand up for their rights to do so, who knows what could happen?

A Guide to Basic Ideas: Post 1

2010-03-06T20:26:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting article about Christians and postmodernism in the March 2010 First Things magazine. It inspired me to attempt a series of posts on reality and knowledge. None of the ideas in these posts will be new or original, but will attempt to synthesize and summarize common knowledge Christian thought on these issues from many sources.
How do we begin to describe the truth? How can we discover and catalogue the contents of the world of ideas? We cannot. To find out the order of things and see reality, we cannot start with any thing. We cannot start with seeking what we hope to find. We cannot lay a foundation of our own making. We cannot even start from the perspective of “we” or “I.”
That which is, that which was from the beginning, the word of truth. Before all else comes God. Nothing is more fundamental. As your eyes rely on light to see, your mind relies on God to think or know or reason. Nothing is more fundamental than God. In a sense, God cannot be proved because He is the most fundamental reality. All other reality depends on him for its being and purpose, its existence and definition, its context and relationships. God is before all else.
You may be wondering how can we accept what we cannot prove? You have no real choice in this matter if you want to know or prove or think or accept anything else. Whether you yield on this or not, all knowledge, reason, being and form depend on God. To deny Him is like claiming you do not believe in light. You go on seeing by the light anyway, and your rejection of the light can only hurt your efforts to improve your vision.
But then it is also the case you do not need proof of God because you already know He is. You know He is there whether you acknowledge Him or not. You always have. In fact, it was probably easiest for you to just accept He exists before you could think much or talk much about Him. Your mind has tried hard to pretend He is not there as you have grown into an adult and have wanted to be comfortable with doing more and more you knew was incompatible with Him.
Of course knowing God in any way is made possible by Jesus, the Messiah, and the second person of God. And there are different qualities of knowledge. Everyone knows God exists and knows more than enough about what God is like and what he wants for the purposes of everyday life. But you need to know Him, not just know He is there.
So, acknowledge that God is there – and is here. God is the center. God is the start and the end. God is the foundation and the capstone. Everything else depends on Him. As Augustine and Anselm said, we must believe in order to understand. But to know the goal cannot be knowing, the goal must be God Himself, just as God Himself is our starting place.

Religious Liberty

2009-12-25T21:00:00.000-08:00

Religious liberty is one of our most cherished ideals. Humans have struggled and yearned for religious freedom from the start. Attorney Sam Ericson has pointed out that when Cain killed Abel, committing the first murder, the motive was religious: Cain was angry that Abel’s way of worshiping God was not only different from his own, but was more pleasing to God. Rather than “convert”, Cain killed his brother. People have been persecuting each other over religious differences ever since.

Christians remember the decades of persecution of Christianity under Rome and other governments. This persecution of Christians still continues today in many places around the world. Christians from non-established churches or dissenting churches remember the persecution and pressure applied to them by the national churches of various countries. In addition, horrible crimes have been committed because of national and ethnic prejudices linked with religious language. The founding fathers of the USA remembered these terrors, too, and sought to avoid them through the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Religious liberty is America’s first freedom, the most important cornerstone of our Bill of Rights. And yet, religious liberty is becoming an increasingly difficult thing to achieve and maintain.

For over a hundred years religious liberty in America was not a huge issue. Churches were allowed to meet in US government buildings even during the Presidency of that most liberal and secular of the founders, Thomas Jefferson. In fact, he attended services in government buildings while President. Most Americans were members of a limited number of protestant Christian churches, or shared the worldview of those churches, or were at least happily accepting of those who did. It was understood and accepted by many that religious faith was important for social order and the self government of citizens. As Os Guinness has pointed out, it was important that most people not only obeyed the law, but did what was ethical and moral without being coerced to do so. It was also important, except on a few very difficult issues, that most people had agreement about basic moral ideas and principles. America was nearly destroyed by the one great disagreement she had: slavery. Everybody knew that slavery was wrong but many people were reluctant to stop doing something that was so linked to the old Southern way of life. People increasingly tried to justify it as right as the 1800’s went by. The great war and conflagration which followed magnified other smaller issues and tensions, and caused some people to lose their faith rather than continue to believe that morality could justify or require the carnage of the Civil War. They lost their conviction that freeing the oppressed sometimes requires great sacrifice, including the use of force and the suffering of force. Sadly, without the moral guidance of Abraham Lincoln, and with the great bitterness raised by the war, America did not completely free the oppressed, but continued to discriminate on the basis of race for many more decades. Our laws are still affected by the philosophical gymnastics used to justify laws that sanctioned slavery and discrimination even though everyone knew that the natural law did not. (See my prior post, “When American Law Went South”).

Nevertheless, America had great religious renewal in some parts of the country following the Civil War. This recommitment to Christianity also resulted in great reform of the law, including laws against prostitution, abortion, and human trafficking. Do people today realize that the same women who were lobbying for the vote were also lobbying for these issues, which were near and dear to their hearts?

The first real battles over religious liberty didn’t happen until the 1960’s. It was at this point, strangely enough, that some very old tensions asserted themselves. Some protestant members of the Supreme Court of the United States were concerned about the rise of Catholicism and the influence of parochial schools. Afraid that parochial schools would benefit from government help and that Roman Catholics might lead prayers in public schools, the Supreme Court was willing, with the sanction of many religious believers, to ban public prayer and much of the public support of Christian works that had gone uncontested for nearly two hundred years. As atheism became more popular in America, and as more Americans either stopped taking the Bible seriously, or decided to re-interpret it to mean whatever they wanted it to mean, a radical political liberalism that sought to separate government policy and law from morality became a dominant sentiment in American law schools. (Or should I say a dominant faith? The truth is, all beliefs about reality involve a faith commitment of some kind.) The religion clauses of the first amendment were reinterpreted from their old meanings. Instead of merely preventing the federal government or the states from establishing a particular church as the official church of the government, the establishment clause has now been used as a bludgeon to protect government from any religious influence and atheists from any reminder of God’s existence in any public place. This has been done to such an extent that children attending public schools today must surely be convinced that God does not exist and is not important because otherwise He would have a greater role in the knowledge of reality that they are given through their public education. The scope of religious free exercise has also been diminished by many recent court opinions that were more concerned that religion would be used as an excuse for license than with preserving genuine religious liberty and freedom of conscious.

With the rise of the great social issues; abortion; cloning; embryonic stem cell research; killing of the aged, the unfit, and the suffering; and a desire to eliminate the globally acknowledged understanding of marriage in favor of a sort of contractual, sexual free-for-all, the debate over religious liberty has been raised to a fever pitch because some people seek to impose their views of abortion, euthanasia, same sex marriage, etc., upon society through education and law to such an extent that even religious faith and conscience will not be an excuse for dissenting from particular political views on these topics. Those who favor abortion, etc., have also adopted the tactic of claiming that laws against abortion or against gay marriage interfere with their religious liberty. In a recent First Thoughts blog post, Matt Cavedon, mentions how Brian McGrath Davis has argued that the house healthcare bill “discriminates against religious freedom” by forbidding the use of public funds for abortion (I was unaware any religions still required child sacrifice). These new political tensions are only the tip of the iceberg, grating against the side of the ship of state.

An even bigger issue than the desire to mobilize the religious liberty argument as a way to foreclose political arguments on various topics is the friction between some of the worldviews in our heterogeneous globalized world. Modern radical political liberals are frustrated by the fact that evangelical Christians do not feel they have religious freedom unless they are able to witness about Christ anywhere, anytime, and in any way they wish, including in the public square. Atheists, agnostics and religious liberals often feel that granting evangelicals what they would consider religious liberty would in some way impinge on what they believe is a right of their own to be free from religion. They do not feel religiously free if they are reminded of the existence of God or the moral claims made in the Scriptures. For them, religious freedom means complete toleration of what used to be thought of as moral and ethical license, but is now accepted as a progressive lifestyle. This conflict is not the only one. While there are many types of Islam, and they are not all in agreement with each other, there are sectors within Islam that do not feel religiously free unless they have Shari’a law. They also require, for a feeling of true religious freedom, that their people must not hear about Christianity, and must not be allowed to convert to Christianity. Even beyond this, if anyone says anything about Islam that would be likely to make people unwilling to convert to Islam, even if those statements are historically true or endorsed by Muslim documents themselves, some Muslims do not feel religiously free unless they can ban and prosecute such comments as “hate speech” or what we used to call “blasphemy”. Among high ranking academic elites today there is actually talk about forbidding parents from having any religious influence over their children in the name of “religious liberty”. Obviously most parents would regard the need to share their religious faith with their children as paramount and that any ban on such communication would be the ultimate interference with religious liberty by the state.

Needless to say, these competing understandings of religious liberty create a problem: they are mutually exclusive of one another. It is probably not possible to create a regime or a settlement in which radical Muslims, radical atheists, radical political liberals, and evangelicals Christians all feel free. Our system of government is designed to try to accommodate all the major variations in religion, and yet these conflicting world views threaten to destroy the American system itself. This is a serious difficulty. In the long run it is going to require a great public debate and a new settlement of exactly how religious liberty works and what it means in practice.

One of the things that is difficult about this for Christians who take the Bible seriously, is that the difficulties outlined above form a sort of pincer movement. If we protect our ability to use truth to influence the state we also protect the ability of radical Islam to influence the state. If we take steps to limit radical Islam, those same steps may be used to shackle our own religious liberty and deprive us of the ability to teach truth to our children or to use truth to influence the state.

I would argue that history shows that commitment to true religious liberty is critical. On the one hand as Os Guinness has pointed out, we don’t want the complete banning of all religious dialog and ideas in the public square. On the other hand, we do not want an established religion, whether it be Islam, secular humanism, or evangelical Christianity. But maintaining a balance in which everyone is free to discuss ideas, even though they may come from a religious worldview, while at the same time not creating what would objectively be oppression, or what could amount to persecution of Christians, is increasingly difficult. I do not believe that it has become impossible. But I think that the ultimate solution to the problem can only rely on a spiritual awakening and a recommitment to objective moral truth rather than on greater liberalism and greater relativism.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-24T14:53:00.000-08:00

May God bless you and lead you to an increased knowledge of Him as we celebrate His incarnation. God, who being fully God, became fully man too. He lived among us and is called Jesus. Jesus lived a perfect life, died on our place, and rose from the dead. He did this so we who believe what God has revealed through the Bible could be forgiven, reconciled to God, have Jesus' righteous life accounted to us, be resurrected when Jesus returns, and enter into an eternal life of joy with God. This is truly good news. Merry Christmas.

Manhattan Declaration

2009-11-30T17:14:00.000-08:00

It’s always exciting when Christians stand up for the fundamental truths. So often we are either confused, complacent, or unwilling to speak out on justice and the common good of our communities. But a recent new declaratory statement signed by a large number of Evangelicals, Roman Catholics and East Orthodox Christians has recently appeared on the internet. This is the Manhattan Declaration, a statement taking a detailed position in favor of the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union between one man and one woman, and the importance of the rights of conscience and religious liberty. These are three of the great issues of our time and it is really wonderful to see a comprehensive declaration dealing with these three areas at once. To see the Manhattan Declaration and add your signature in support, go to the following link: http://manhattandeclaration.org/.

Liberty University Law Review Article on Natural Law

2009-11-30T17:12:00.000-08:00

In February of 2008 I attended a symposium on Natural Law at Liberty University. I gave a talk on “The Nature in Natural Law”. That talk is now published as a complete law review article in the Liberty University Law Review, Volume 2, Number 3, Spring 2008 issue. Copies should be available through Hein & Co., New York. Their contact information is as follows:

William S. Hein & Co., Inc. 1285 Main Street Buffalo, NY 14209-1987 Phone: 1-800-828-7571

The symposium issue contains a number of very interesting articles on natural law by authors like J. Daryl Charles, Gilbert Meilaender and David VanDrunen. My own natural law article deals with the question of why natural law is called “natural”. The article performs a historical survey of different definitions of natural law from ancient times up to the present. It provides some analysis and commentary on each of the views, and put them in an overall perspective that I believe points to the true nature behind natural law.

Listen to the Apologetics.com Radio Show on Christ, Government and the Law

2009-09-09T14:28:00.000-07:00

How can a Christian lawyer defend a guilty client? What is the proper relationship between church and state? These and other questions are discussed on the Apologetics.com radio show available as a podcast on itunes and at this link:

http://apologetics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=385:christianity-the-church-and-government&catid=43:kkla-995-fm-los-angeles&Itemid=74

I guest hosted the show with Trinity Law School Admissions Director Doug Eaton and Trinity Law School student Lane Chaplin as discussion panel members.

Upcoming Apologetics.com Show

2009-09-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

At midnight between Friday September 5 and Saturday September 6, and for the next two hours, lasting until 2 am Saturday morning, Trinity Law School Dean Donald McConnell will be hosting the Apologetics.com radio show on KKLA 99.5 FM. With Dean McConnell will be TLS Director of Admissions Doug Eaton and Trinty Law School student and famed podcaster Lane Chaplin. The show will answer questions about a Christian perspective on human law and government.

Doubt and "Fundamentalism"

2009-08-20T17:56:00.000-07:00

A strong Christian friend of mine recently showed me an article by Gregory Rodriguez in the L. A. Times. The article discussed a new book by Peter L. Berger and Anton C. Zijerveld: In Praise of Doubt: How to have Convictions without becoming a Fanatic. I admit I have not read the book, but the article raised an interesting question. Attempting to summarize Berger and Zijerveld, Rodriguez says “you must have conviction and uncertainty simultaneously in order to ward off fundamentalism. Beliefs are necessary.” He proposes that radical relativism is dangerous because it encourages people to respond by retrenching into a radical fundamentalism; that the chaos and angst generated by those deconstructing society causes people to retreat into the “safe” territory of believing in really absolute absolutes and thereby becoming equally undesirable “fundamentalists.” (I don't really like this use of the word fundamentalism - but it is so common we must deal with it).

The antidote, Rodriguez tells us, is balance: believe a few “core certainties”, but be flexible about other “negotiable beliefs.” Then we are told that: “The most important core certainty, and one found in most belief systems, is ‘do unto others ...’ -- the Golden Rule. It leaves enough wiggle room for your beliefs, my beliefs and their beliefs to coexist. And what makes it all work is the same thing that burdened us all to begin with: doubt. Berger and Zijderveld believe that doubt can serve as a type of psychic cushion between all our different certainties.”

I think this line of thinking has appeal for many people today. First, many people have doubts about things that are important to them. It is human to doubt. The Bible tells us that after he had been in prison for some time, John the Baptist began to doubt if Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus sent him back the message of the works and words of his Messianic ministry to reassure the soon-to-be martyr. Some of us deal with our doubts by encouraging others to admit they have doubts – a sort of cultural group therapy that makes us all say “I’m ok and you are ok about doubts” These people are especially comfortable with the sort of opinion Rodriguez is documenting. And there are many people in this position in our society today.

A second group of doubters deals with doubt by violently embracing it: for them doubt makes God and the whole world false. I think of the “new atheists” and the old German philosophers when I think of this group. At some level and to some degree we all know innately and from reason that God exists, that he is not identical with the created world or ourselves, that God has standards, and that we have not lived up to those standards. Many of us place faith in God that he has redeemed us from this situation himself in the person of Jesus Christ through his life, death, and resurrection. But for some people, when God does not play by their rules or meet their demands – whether for empirical certainty or for moral license or rescue from the tragedies of life in a fallen world – they respond by being so angry with God that they try to punish him by telling people he does not exist. In a way, these dogmatic unbelievers are a culture of fundamentalism all to themselves. Rodrigeuz et al are probably right that this assault on the foundations of the Universe turns some people into what they call “fundamentalists.” But is this really why people become “fundamentalists”?

A third response to doubt is to embrace doubt with sad sentimentality like the philosopher George Santayana. The great liberal theologians, who believe in religion, but not in God, often come from this stock. They too can probably be seen to encourage fundamentalism by their smug refusal to see that their argument of an emotional need for religion is an evidence for a true religion somewhere, not a proof that all religions are false. By contrast to the liberals, C. S. Lewis argues that a world in which all get thirsty is evidence for the existence of water. Somehow these sad philosophers who embrace doubt with feigned reluctance prefer to speak of the “beautiful myth of water” while dying of thirst.

Second to last in my analysis, though undoubtedly in reality we could find hundreds of categories, are those who do deal with doubt by what I suspect the authors mean by “fundamentalism.” These are those who deal with doubt by violently forswearing doubt. You see, because doubt is rooted in our imperfect human nature, we not only all have it from time to time, but we sometimes feel guilty about it. One way to deal with this guilt is to suppress it and deny it: to emphasize to yourself and others just how certain you really are – because you think doubt would be unacceptable to them or to yourself. In traditions where doubt is punished, or might even be fatal, this out is common. This repression can break out in persecution of others, fear, hostility, and all the other negative behavior that Rodriguez, et al, are thinking of when they think of “fundamentalists.” This kind of doubter tries to drown his doubts in zeal. Because he is still human, and therefore still sinful, the repressing doubter sometimes impresses others as a hypocrite rather than a “believer.”

Would the approach recommended by Rodriguez moderate these repressing doubters? They probably would not be changed. They would reject the suggestion that they should hold even questionable beliefs less tightly. It would also not deal with what I believe to be the driving force behind what Rodriguez thinks of as “fundamentalism” – the guilt about doubt. Accepting some doubts without more than a pragmatic reason for doing so would only cause more doubt and more guilt.

But who are my fourth group of doubters? I will call them the “believing doubters.” Believing doubters vanquish the cultural and psychological trappings known popularly as “fundamentalism” through additional knowledge and faith in a few key ideas that deliver them most of the time from the pitfalls of doubt.

Believing doubters know God has called them to love their enemies. This means treating people with respect and dignity. It does not mean we cannot disagree. It does not mean we cannot try to persuade others. It does not mean we cannot tell others they are wrong. It may not even rule out the use of humor, satire and parody to convince others. In extreme cases, love does not rule out just wars. But love does mean, to paraphrase the late ethicist Lewis Smedes, that we must wish our enemies well and act reasonably to further their best interests to the extent it does not harm others. We cannot lie about our enemies. We cannot demonize them. We must not try to convert them through violence nor try to exterminate them because they will not convert.

Believing doubters know God is the source of their faith. When they doubt, they say “I believe, God please save me from my unbelief.” They do not panic when a doubting thought comes into the mind because they know their salvation depends on the love and sacrifice of Christ, not on their own effort. They know Christianity is about being in God’s hands, not about clinging to the edge of a cliff through their own power. The believing doubter is a real person. The believing doubter can have doubts. They can go through the dark night of the soul. They can feel angry with God. They can feel disillusioned by the failings of fellow humans or themselves. But ultimately their faith is about God, not about themselves.

Believing doubters know about human fallibility – including their own. They know that humans are sinful and often wrong, so they are slow to anger on the peripheral issues where our beliefs are based more on judgment and philosophy than on revelation. In the areas where revelation is clear, they believe firmly. Where revelation is unclear, they believe, but hold their belief more loosely. Believing doubters know that human sinfulness has lead to unjust persecutions throughout history; so they do not trust themselves or other individuals with corrupting absolute power over the whole of the state and or the whole church.

The believing doubter is also forearmed against doubt by the doctrines she/he believes. Because the believing doubter knows he/she is a sinful human being, knows he or she is weak, and knows how bio-chemistry and circumstances can prey on his/her mind, the believing doubter knows that doubts cannot be trusted. The believing doubter doubts her/his doubts more than his or her faith. For this reason, some believing doubters go through life almost appearing to have no doubts at all because the few fleeting doubts they have are such mere shadows without substance that they are mistaken to be no doubts at all.

Believing doubters know their own experience is limited. Though they may be tempted not to do so, they try to put the universally true revelation of the whole of scripture ahead of personal experience (a luxury people who lived before scripture did not have). So if they see evil triumph, they remember that the Bible says God will eventually bring the evil to judgment. If they see the bad things happening to a person, they do not assume that it must be caused by his/her sin since the bible clearly teaches there are other reasons that bad things happen to good people.

As you can tell, I believe that only Christians can be real “believing doubters.” The “believing doubter” has had his mind illumined by the Holy Spirit of God. He or she believes in the Bible and takes it seriously, recognizing it as a self authenticating message from the living God. The believing doubter follows Augustine and Anselm in “believing in order to understand.” The believing doubter’s faith is rational – but by a God-centered rationality that flows from the mind of Christ, not a self-centered rationality that depends on the power, experience and ego of the believer’s mind alone.

Everyone should be a believing doubter. But the difficulty is that it is something you can ask God to do in you, but not something you can do for yourself. But if you ask God for a good gift, like the gift of faith, surely he will give it to you. He may give it on his own terms and in his own time and in his own way – but faith will come if you seek it. It will not be guaranteed to make you rich or to solve all your problems or to free you from all temptation. I can’t even guarantee you will not be considered a fundamentalist. But I do believe that the negative behavior associated with what Rodriguez means by “fundamentalism” will be less common in believing doubters because of what they believe.

Believing doubters may solve the personal problem for some, but what of the global problem of fundamentalisms like radical jihadist Islam? I don’t think there is an easy answer to that question because I do not believe the problems and mechanics of belief are the same for all religions. And I do believe that there is real evil in the world; not just the typical evil of each fallen human, but dark spiritual evil that raises up evil empires and false ideas to enslave and denigrate human beings if it can. In responding to evil we must remember the sin within our own hearts and not succumb to being as bad or worse than those deceived by the dark spiritual forces we are resisting. We do need to maintain religious liberty. As Peter L. Berger and Anton C. Zijerveld say, we ought to keep the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And we need to remember, that quite literally, but for the grace of God it would be us advocating some terrible false idea because of the pressures of family, culture, and sword.
People with dangerous false ideas can sometimes be contained. But if they are persistently violent, they may need to be converted by persuasion or defeated militarily to prevent harm to third persons. Persuasion is often still a necessity. War alone cannot solve problems caused by ideas. Happily, uncontainable error is rare. False sects within America can easily be tolerated and dealt with merely through words. With the exceptions of guerilla wars, Korea, and Viet Nam, Soviet Communism and Chinese Communism have largely been contained and converted, except on University Campuses. The Communists killed 80 million people, but their expansion was limited. Nazism required a war to defeat, but we also had to deal with the ideas behind it. Radical jihadist Islam has led us to war, but is so widespread that war alone, at least on a humane scale, cannot solve the problem. Persuasion is always the key. To do so we must try to persuade – not try to accept. Persuasion does require understanding and love, though. And it requires more. In the final analysis we need God’s help to persuade others. Prayer is our most potent weapon against “fundamentalisms” like radical jihadist Islam, Communism, and yes even fundamentalist atheism. But sadly, the only cure to fundamentalist Islam will strike those with an allergy to Christianity as “fundamentalist Christianity” because it believes in what they, as fundamentalist secularists, will not believe in. But we cannot help that. We can be well behaved on behalf of the truth, but we cannot change the truth to accommodate error.

Rodriguez in his understanding of the book he is reviewing draws on our emotions. We all know people who believe things we think they should not believe or who are obnoxious about their beliefs. But asking people not to believe strongly in what they believe cannot be the right answer if truth really exists (which I believe it must). The only course of action can be to seek truth and encourage others to do likewise in the faith that real truth brings virtue not vice.

Great Law Quotes: Calvin Coolidge

2009-08-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

"About the Declaration of Independence there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. . . If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, that is final. . . No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward. . ." - Calvin Coolidge

God and Governing Conference in Print

2009-07-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

The book based on the God and Governing Conference put on by Trinity Law School will be in bookstores in August. Orders can be placed now at: http://wipfandstock.com/store/God_and_Governing_Reflections_on_Ethics_Virtue_and_Statesmanship

The book includes chapters by some of the leading evangelical thinkers of our time (and one by myself) on the problem of why evangelicals have not been more successful in changing the political climate in the USA, and what we should do from here on.

Moon Landing

2009-07-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

Today is the anniversary of the first landing on the moon by human beings. It was and remains a remarkable achievement.

Talk on Prop 8

2009-07-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

While it is a little dated now, here is a talk I did eight months ago on Prop. 8 before the last California Supreme Court opinion. Happily,the opinion turned out better than I suspected. My thanks to Mike Stecker for posting it on the internet.

Prop 8 from a legal perspective from Mike Stecker on Vimeo.

Asking the Real Questions of a Supreme Court Nominee

2009-07-14T18:00:00.000-07:00

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has been saying some of the right things in her hearings. Specifically: “judges must apply the law and not make the law.” So far, so good. But a further and more important questions need to be answered in detail: What is the law and how do you discover it? Can a Supreme Court precedent be wrong? How do you know when a Supreme Court precedent is wrong? How do you interpret what the Constitution means? When defining the words in the Constitution do you look to what the words mean in common usage today or at what they meant at the time the clause was written? Is there a higher law above the law that gives Constitutions and statutes their meaning? If there is not then where do the rules for interpreting Constitutions and statutes come from? Can you change those rules of interpretation? If so, when and how is it appropriate to change them? If they do not change, and are not a higher law, why are you so sure what they are? Why do judges interpret the law instead of making it? What happens if some judges on the Supreme Court in the past “made law” – what do we do about that now?
I could go on. The point is that judicial thinking is a lot more complicated than asking someone of they are an “activist judge” or not. I hope the committee is asking the right questions and that the press will actually cover the answers.

Unicorns and CIA Assassins

2009-07-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

Many Americans think the agencies of their government are far more powerful and capable than they really are – especially in the areas of defense and intelligence. Unhappily this is often fantasy or wishful thinking. Stories like the one at the link give us a clue to the reality.
I remember back in the eighties, trying to explain to people that we needed strategic and tactical ballistic missile defense. What was odd was the number of people who insisted we already had it; who insisted America had more than enough anti ballistic missiles to stop any soviet attack already – but they were secret. I tried to explain in vain that you may be able to hide an experimental airplane or missile, or maybe a squadron of airplanes; but you cannot hide a massive continental system or an air force. The interceptors simply did not exist. At least now we have a handful of missiles in some places with some anti-ballistic missile capability – but we still would have no chance at all of blunting a Russian attack on the USA.
Assassins are a subject of similar faith on the part of most Americans. We have movies full of professional CIA and MI6 assassins. Thriller novels about CIA assassins are a major share of the book market. Famous conservative talk show hosts celebrate the “realism” of these books. This fiction just reflects reality right? So Americans are constantly killing people secretly all over the world, right? We have super secret hit teams chasing Osama Bin Laden, right? Wrong. It is the stuff of fantasy and wishful thinking. The CIA may help drop bombs on terrorists from drones and airplanes, but it appears they do not and have not been killing Al Qaeda operatives up close and personal.
Oh, they did think about it following 9/11, but they never did it.
So the Congress should be angry that the CIA is not out there killing the terrorists who are trying to kill us, right? No. Actually the Congress is angry the CIA did not tell them they were thinking about killing terrorists. Really. See the articles.
Original article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124752710888335275.html
Hat tip to Rantburg, who linked article:
http://rantburg.com/poparticle.php?D=2009-07-14&ID=274261&HC=2
To give them a break, you need a Presidential Order to assassinate people, and apparently the supposedly bloodthirsty President Bush did not issue one for up close and personal assassination of Al Qaeda people. Second, all the globalist international law lawyers will insist that such “extrajudicial” killings are illegal – so you could get in more trouble for doing it than you can for water boarding. After all, we live in a world that no longer feels confident to execute pirate caught in the act; why should we think they would let intelligence officers kill terrorist agents planning the murders of thousands?
The truth is the CIA has never been any good at killing people. They mostly try to collect intelligence and explain what they think it means. The CIA consists of much more college professor types than of James Bonds.
Why is this important? Because decisions and policies need to be made and voted on by people who are honest about reality. Neither the public nor the Congress seems to have a grasp on reality.

Babies and Music

2009-06-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

Babies in the womb hear and respond to music. Fascinating (but not surprising). See:

http://www.informz.net/pfm/archives/archive_805161.html

Book Review: George Orwell's 1984

2009-05-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

Though most people today have no fear of left-wing totalitarianism, and though many people alive today were born so recently that they cannot remember anything about the history of the Soviet Union (which doesn’t appear to be taught in schools at all either), 1984 is still a fascinating book in many ways. 1984 is a novel that takes place in what, in Orwell’s time, was the future. George Orwell wrote the book around 1948. But part of the point of the book is that the main character doesn’t even know that the year is actually 1984.

Winston Smith, the central character of 1984, lives in one of the three totalitarian societies that together cover the entire globe in the hypothetical year of the novel. In this society, there are three classes: the proletariat, the party, and the inner party. The inner party uses the face of “big brother” as its ubiquitous symbol. In all probability, big brother is not even a living human being. Instead, he is an invention of the party. The state in 1984 has complete and utter control over the lives of party members and inner party members. It pays little attention to the lives of the proletariat, but nevertheless dominates them as well. The party meticulously trains their members from childhood upward to be ruthless informers and to police their own minds through techniques of thought discipline. This thought discipline is aimed at eliminating all unorthodox thoughts that are in any way contrary to the doctrine, ideas, facts, and teachings of the party. But I must use the word “facts” loosely because one of the main points of 1984 is that the party has created a society in which they treat all facts as mutable. The party also seeks to facilitate this by creating a new language in which all unorthodox thoughts are essentially impossible because the words necessary to formulate them - like “right,” “liberty,” or “justice” - are no longer part of anyone’s vocabulary.

The party uses not only constant propaganda and intrusive monitoring, but also insidiously clever undercover operations and meticulous torture to force all party members into complete and utter submission. Big brother wants not only physical obedience, but the souls of his captives.

The idea of the mutability of history, of current events, and of reality itself is extremely post-modern. It’s interesting that Orwell had such a post-modern vision of the future as early as 1948. The pieces were already all there, but no one was putting them together in quite the way Orwell has. 1984’s post-modern vision is also curious because of the idea of the immutability of history. The party in 1984 is able to collect all books, papers, newspapers, magazines and documents that contain information that they wish to change, and to destroy those old documents and replace them with new ones that contain only what the party wants people to know or believe. The old Soviet Union actually tried to do this. There is a remarkable book called the The Commissar Vanishes that shows sequential picture modification in the old Soviet Union. First a picture will appear with both Lenin and Trotsky, then in a subsequent release of the same picture, Trotsky will disappear, and then in yet a later incarnation of the picture, Stalin will be standing next to Lenin, then Stalin will disappear and a young Nikita Khrushchev will be standing next to Lenin when he could not possibly have been there at all. This sort of attempt to manipulate reality was common in Soviet Russia even though the Russians could not obliterate existing documents to the contrary of the party’s new legends. Today we need not fear this in our own day because there is such a proliferation of documentary sources about the past. But I suppose that with the digitalization of information and the rotting of so many books that were printed on acidic paper, an attempt by government to change perceptions of history is certainly a real threat. We already have an academy full of revisionist historians who sometimes discover unknown truths about the past but who just as often perpetuate new fictions about a past that never really was. It has almost always been popular in modern times to discount historical accounts of people who were close to events when often those are the best accounts of what happened that we possibly have. Why should anybody start off presupposing that there was no Trojan War despite Homer, or that George Washington was a profane and godless man despite the accounts of his early biographers and friends? With the digital age, it some day may be possible for a government to meddle with the internet sufficiently to change most of the digitalized texts on past history. If every book is on Kendall and the worldwide web and none of them are on paper or vellum, there would be little difficulty to manipulate the history and texts of the past. It is now true as it has always been that libraries full of good, true, and beautiful books are one of the best defenses against tyranny. But of course it only works if you read them and believe the true things that they say.

A variety of things jump out at you when you listen to or read Orwell’s book. He has a strange insistence on the reality of class differences. While it is very true that different people have different gifts, and that not everyone is gifted in the same way, Orwell’s understanding of the people who he regards as proletarians as being completely un-thinking and only interested in drinking, gambling, and the like, may occasionally be true of many people, but it is certainly not true of everyone within that supposed class. Every level of society has its brilliant minds, its intellectuals, and its students of philosophy. And every level of society has those who have common sense and spiritual depth. Each level also has those who may be gifted in loving or in some other way, but lack wisdom and understanding. But Orwell seems blind to the dignity and variety of what he thinks of as the lower classes. I suppose Orwell might defend himself by saying that the party absorbed everyone that they regarded as intelligent. But the truth is that not all kinds of intelligence are measurable by standardized tests or the other ways in which technocrats try to discover what they believe to be natural aristocrats. Every person has something they do well, and many more people than we appreciate have practical wisdom in one area or another. Hence, I found Orwell’s apparent insistence on class troubling. The same thing appears in his story, Animal Farm. Orwell seems to believe that it is reasonable to think of the different classes of society as being like different animals with different levels of intelligence and ability. This is simply not true. The image of God appears in every human being. There are no lower human beings. Yet even human beings who are highly gifted in working with their hands, or in working with plants, or in being a help to others in vocations that the elites of society do not value, still have the inherent dignity of being created in the image of God and often have depths and complexities that are completely unappreciated.

It is also interesting that Orwell’s story seems to imply a fundamental selfishness of all political orders. Orwell’s characters concede that some past orders may have developed certain sympathies for idealistic principles, but treats these mainly as weaknesses rather than strengths. Perhaps I am misunderstanding Orwell’s pessimism, or mistaking Orwell’s mere pessimism as a description of reality in 1984. Yet so little light appears in the story that this seems to be his assumption.

One thing that clearly stands out in 1984 is the persistent nagging of natural law. Orwell never mentions natural law or the objectivity of morality or right and wrong. In fact, I wonder if he really believed in such things. But the whole effect of his book is premised on the notion that we will find the states’ obliterating the truth about facts, and substituting their own will as immoral and wrong. If you don’t feel this when you are reading the book, it really isn’t working. Orwell’s character evidences that there really is some kind of an objective reality that gnaws at the conscience of even extremely selfish and flawed human beings even after they have been extensively trained, conditioned, and educated in the opposite notion, and even after they have been tortured to beat objective truth out of them. Despite all of this, the conscience still gnaws at us, and, as J. Budziszewski would say, “It has its revenge.” In the end, big brother and his minions are able to break the people of 1984, and to cause even those who harbored the notion that perhaps two plus two must equal four, to finally conclude that if the party says two plus two equals five, or three, or seven, then that is true and real and to be loved and embraced. But the people who are forced to believe these things through torture, conditioning, and manipulation lose their souls in the process. They become shells of human beings who are torn and hollowed out in a way that has sucked the life out of them. This is caused not merely by the torture itself, but by what is lost when a human being is finally separated from his connection with reality, truth, conscience, and beauty. We all desperately need the good, the true, the beautiful, the divine—and when we don’t have it, it scars us deeply. When we turn our backs on it and reject it, it destroys us even if our physical body continues to go on for some time after our soul has died in addition to the Adamic spiritual death that we were born with. Of course I mean “died” here in a certain way.

We have the comfort and the fear of knowing something that Orwell’s characters have long forgotten: that there is an eternal kingdom of God in which those who believe in Christ will be comforted, blessed, have their tears dried and their hurts completely healed. By contrast in this eternity, those who rebel against God will enter into a darkness, a loss, and a hollowing out that is far worse than the pale foreshadowing of the torment faced by the people of 1984.

The state in 1984 has sought to make itself god. It seeks to control reality, to control the minds and thoughts of its people, not merely their external actions. It has sought to re-define right and wrong, language and truth, and to make its own reality. In doing so, the big brother state is the ultimate fulfillment of post-modern philosophy. Post-modernism insists that there is no objective right or wrong, no objective reality behind language or ideas, and no real way to communicate effectively across cultural boundaries. Instead, the committed post-modernist believes that all reality is constructed by human communities. We make and shape our reality in our own image. We use force to make people concede that reality is what the community says, and that words mean what the community says they mean. The post-modernist rejects the centrality of an objective logos of God, and instead embraces a shattered world in which each community is its own miniature pantheon of deities. The Oceania state of big brother is the ultimate fulfillment of this post-modern vision because it creates a unified perception of “reality” throughout the community, creating complete harmony and homogeneity. It then labels this totalitarian nightmare as joy, happiness, peace and love. And who can discount these labels, or dispute them if there is no objective reality beyond the will of the community, or beyond the mind of big brother?

Thanks be to God that there really is an objective, divine logos. Thanks be to God that there is a God, and that He cares about human beings and has entered our world in order to reveal to us the truth about goodness, truth, beauty, morality, sacrifice, sin, and atonement. And especially we ought to be thankful that God has come into our world, died for us, and revealed the truth about resurrection. In 1984, the central protagonist wonders often if there is any hope that big brother can ever be destroyed, or that anyone can escape from his iron grip. Orwell gives us no hope. He leaves no chink of light gleaming through any small crack or window. But Christians know that this dark vision can never be fully fulfilled except in hell because there is a God who transcends the universe but who involves Himself in the affairs of mankind. There is a God who not only provides objectivity, but who restrains human governments. There is a God who will ultimately at some point end human history and bring all to judgment. If some day a real big brother succeeds in attaining global hegemony, he will be crushed by the return of Christ or by God’s sovereign hand.

I suppose for some people they think of God or Christianity as being somewhat like big brother. This is not the case. God actually is a source of objectivity. He has created us and given us our sense of right and wrong. God is the source of goodness itself. But unlike big brother, He is entitled to His position as being the source of goodness itself as the creator of the universe. Big brother and his ilk are distorters of what God has already created. They are those who bend and break, and seek to remold God’s creation into their image. But they are not God. Certainly it is popular today to find fault with God. The “new atheist’s” essential argument is to say “I strongly disagree with the ideas and actions attributed to the Christian God, ergo He must not exist.” Of course this doesn’t follow logically and usually they distort the ideas and actions actually attributed to God. They long for an impossible world that bears more resemblance to the old hobo song about the “Big Rock Candy Mountains” instead of moral adventure of real life.

Christian Social Conservatives Not Doomed

2009-04-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

On Friday May 17 the blog Cranmer posted an interesting response to allegations that Christians in the USA with a socially conservative mindset have been decisively defeated by the forces of amorality. Cranmer responded in part as follows:

"There is a concern that church attendance in the United States ‘is heading the way of Britain, where no more than ten per cent worship every week’. As far as Evangelicals are concerned, the United States of America was founded ‘purely as a Christian country’, which President Obama refutes. Recently in Turkey he said quite emphatically: "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation."

Really? Did the Mayflower Compact proclaim the Pilgrims were establishing their colony for ‘the advancement of the Islamic faith’? Does the dollar proclaim ‘In Allah We Trust’? Do patriotic Americans join in the refrain of ‘Allah Bless America’?

America was founded unequivocally upon the Christian ethic, and it permeates the cultural fabric of the nation. God has blessed America with Protestantism and Enlightenment, but now follows the counter-reformation couched as postmodernism to move the nation into the ‘post-Christian’ era. Recent surveys on religious adherence all indicate a significant shift in the American religious landscape: ‘A study by Trinity College in Connecticut found that 11 per cent fewer Americans identify themselves as Christian than 20 years ago. Those stating no religious affiliation or declaring themselves agnostic has risen from 8.2 per cent in 1990 to 15 per cent in 2008’.

But Cranmer is intrigued by the divergent diagnoses of the cause. One view holds that ‘Conservatives became so obsessed with the political process we have forgotten the gospel’, while another believes that the Christian movement failed ‘not because its views were unpalatable for moderates and liberals, but because it was not Christian enough’.

Christians may indeed have been corrupted by politics. But politics corrupts, and absolute politics corrupts absolutely. Evangelicals identified their movement with the culture war and political conservatism. They are apparently persuaded that their failure to transform culture and the mass rejection of political conservatism means that Christianity is dead.

This is fatuous reasoning.

The Founding Fathers choose the Christian ethic and the First Continental Congress made its first act a prayer. They had a ‘firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence’ which has guided and inspired Americans to spread abroad ‘freedom’s holy light’. The Founders of the United States of America were steeped in religion – and that religion was not Judaism, Islam, Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism or Jedi Knightianity: it was religion of the Protestant Christian variety.
. . .

Those who created the United States did so after meditating upon the divine precepts and laws of the Christian God. This foundation was their virtue; from this virtue came their liberty; and from this liberty came stability and prosperity.

President Obama is neither the Messiah nor the Antichrist: he is just another man to occupy another political office, and, like all Democrats, he seeks to make the United States more statist, Socialist and amoral.

The Christian response is not to curse God and die, but to repent, believe and trust; indeed, to rejoice in suffering, because suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

Hope that the Forces of Conservatism shall soon be on the ascendancy, and that government shall once again soon be concerned with whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, and whatever is admirable."

Have a Blessed Resurrection Sunday

2009-04-11T15:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we commemorated Good Friday, the anniversary of Jesus willing submission to death on the cross as a sacrifice to pay for the sins of all who truly believe in his identity, work, and message.

Tomorrow is Easter, the day we celebrate Jesus crowning proof that he was not only the Messiah, but fully God and fully man. Jesus permanent resurrection from the dead, never to die again, vindicated his claims and message in a way no other message has ever been vindicated. The resurrection is the seal of God's approval on the work of his second person, the greatest evidence ever offered by God to man, and the first permanent resurrection foreshadowing the resurrection of the dead by God before the final judgment.

That Jesus has not only solved the sin and guilt problems and reconciled us to God, but has proved that death has been conquered as well is a source of great joy to every believer in Jesus.

Have a blessed resurrection Sunday!

Video on What the Christians Need to Consider When Thinking About Politics

2009-03-23T10:54:00.001-07:00

Here is a video about suggestions for improving the quality of political involvement by Christians. We need to avoid two extremes: The belief that we do not act upon the truth as citizens because "separation of church and state" somehow bans any truth believed by Christians from the marketplace of ideas on the one hand, and the idea that there is one definitive Christian answer to all political issues and that if Christians could take over they could create heaven on earth on the other. I don't believe either extreme. Christians should be active citizens. Government in about coordinating for the common good an restraining evil. Truth about good and evil has every place in politics. On the other hand, Christians are imperfect humans too. Exactly what specific political policies best vindicate the good in every situation is a fair matter for debate. In an imperfect world filled with imperfect people there are no perfect human political fixes that will bring heaven on earth. More follows in the video. It is very far from a perfect speech too.

More Obama Hardness of Hearing

2009-03-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

President Obama has signed an executive order allowing federal money to be spent on embryonic stem cell research. The President made a statement that the prior policy made a “false choice between science and moral values.” The President also said that human cloning is dangerous and wrong. While it is true that cloning is immoral, it is odd the President does not understand that killing humans at the embryonic stage of development, a necessity for the research he plans to fund, is also clearly immoral. He is also apparently unaware of the practical connection between embryonic stem cell research and cloning.

The current research on random embryos’ stem cells is not likely to produce any cures for diseases. There are three major problems with directly using the stem cells from just any embryo: The embryonic stem cells have DNA foreign to the patient, mass producing the embryos at levels needed for a therapy to hundreds of people would require thousands of human eggs (which are very difficult to obtain in even small numbers) and, embryonic stem cells consistently produce tumors in the recipients. There is no easy solution to the egg problem, but there will be an attempt to solve the other two problems by taking a patients DNA, cloning dozens of twins of the patient, killing the embryos to harvest their stem cells, and then using the twins’ stem cells for the “therapy.” Why anyone would do something so monstrous when you can already use the patient’s own adult stem cells in therapies that work is unfathomable to me; but that is what will be done at some point in the future if researchers can get enough eggs.

Is it not obvious that the offspring of a human being is a human being? Is it not obvious that from the moment the DNA in a living egg and the DNA in a living sperm connect you obtain a living human being with a distinct identity? Does anybody really believe humans come to life from dead parts just after birth? Does anybody really believe it is moral to kill other human beings and use their body parts for research that might lead to a treatment for a disease - a treatment that can only prolong life, not ultimately prevent death? Obama is famous for saying he would listen to both sides. How can he be listening and still do what he is doing?

According to Rick Peary’s blog, the Obama administration has also asked for a change of the regulation that protects the conscience of medical personnel by protecting their right to refuse to take part in performing abortions. (See http://www.pearceyreport.com/blog/2009/03/obama_cares_not_for_conscience.php).

While Obama’s presidency is for many a sort of symbol of social justice, it is sad that this image is costing uncounted people their lives.

Thoughts on Sanctification

2009-03-02T09:35:00.000-08:00

Sanctification is the process of God working in the lives of believers to make us more like Jesus. Looking at the word itself, sanctification essentially means the process that makes a person set apart for God. Sanctification is not how we are saved, but how we are improved by God as a result of the salvation we have by grace through the faith God has given us in Christ's work.

One of our professors here at Trinity, Professor Steve Kennedy, recently said something to me that really struck me as interesting: He said that the process of sanctification should improve in us all of the communicable attributes of God and not merely God’s righteousness. In other words, as a result of sanctification, we should not only become more obedient to God, but we should also become wiser, more creative, more beautiful, better mannered, and a blessing to others in every way.

It strikes me as true. There is always a strong emphasis in speaking about sanctification as an improvement with regard to keeping God’s moral commands. Some people go further and speak of an improvement in virtue. But few people speak of sanctification with respect to creativity. Yet I suspect that this ought to be the case. That being sanctified means making us more like Christ. Being more like Christ means having the mind of Christ. Having the mind of Christ should mean being more creative, not only more virtuous. And, the things that we create should be more beautiful, as well as our own mind, soul, and spirit evidencing the beauty of God in us.

The End Times?

2009-02-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

At the link is the site for my most recent appearance on the Apologetics.com radio show. This time the subject was eschatology.

http://apologetics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=320:eschatology-101-repent-the-end-is-possibly-nearer&catid=43:kkla-995-fm-los-angeles&Itemid=74

Darwin's Birthday

2009-02-12T15:06:00.000-08:00

Today is also the birthday of Charles Darwin. Darwin has, perhaps, had a more lasting influence on society than Lincoln. It is ironic that Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day. Lincoln was the great emancipator and the advocate of equality before the law. Darwin’s ideas, by contrast, have been misused to justify racial discrimination, colonialism, and ruthless, almost lawless competition in business. Even more ironically, those who believe, as Lincoln did, that humans are equal because they were all created to be the same kind of thing and share the same ancestry, are commonly held in contempt today by the disciples of Darwin, who consider themselves to be more enlightened.

Darwin and his disciples have convinced most people that common features of biology are not the result of common design for common function, or the result of design elegance, or the result of design unity, or even the result of common needs in meeting design requirements for coping with a common environment, but are instead the result of common ancestry. Thumbs on chimps and humans could be viewed as a result of a designing God finding thumbs useful for his more intelligent creations and unnecessary for his more mundane creations. Elegant design of DNA might mean that whales would also share the “thumb gene” even though they have no thumbs. For Darwin by contrast, the thumb and thumb gene are “proof” of development of humans, chimps, and whales from common biological ancestors.

It is undoubtedly true that animals adapt in minor ways to their environments and that new varieties of species can “evolve” through selective breeding. The modern varieties of dogs, cats, and citrus fruit produced from a few dogs, cats, and citrus fruits show this to be true. But, some people still doubt that chance, solar radiation, and natural selection could create cats from citrus fruit or dogs from cats, or all three from common ancestors without the intervention of God. The problem of life from no life is greater still. The problem of something that cannot last forever coming from a forever of nothing is even greater. The solution of an immaterial eternal God creating time, space, animals and all is much more elegant and satisfying. Sadly, scientific experiments in the present cannot confirm ether historic creation or historic evolution - though they may one day, show the impossibility of evolution as we currently understand it.

Unhappily, believing Darwin undermines the basis of objective human rights, the rule of Law, and belief in a “Common Good” to be sought by human communities. Nevertheless Darwin’s disciples have not abandoned his discipleship and will be celebrating his birth with great joy and some bitterness over hold outs like myself. I wish them well and pray for their enlightenment.

Abraham Lincoln's 200th Birthday

2009-02-12T14:28:00.000-08:00

Today, February 12, 2009, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States. Lincoln was born in Kentucky. His family moved to Indiana and later to Illinois. At 22, Lincoln made a trip to New Orleans via flat boat to sell a variety of goods with friends. The scenes of slavery that he saw in New Orleans scarred his mind and haunted him for the rest of his life.

Lincoln started his political career at 23 as a member of the Whig Party. He was elected to the Illinois State Legislature in 1834. He read the law, and was admitted to the Bar in 1837. He moved to Springfield and began a practice of law that would ultimately become very successful. Lincoln had a number of impressive clients, including railroads. He served four terms in the Illinois Legislature, and in 1846, Lincoln was elected to a term in the U.S. Congress. He went on record both against slavery and against the Mexican War. In the 1850s, Lincoln became involved in the formation of the Republican Party. In 1858, Lincoln made one of his most famous speeches alluding to the biblical quotation that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln compared the government of the United States to the house that would not stand saying the US would not survive if it tried to remain half slave and half free. He believed that either the entire Union would come to allow slavery, or would abolish it. The divided Union could not remain. Future legal events bore him out. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott opinion had implications, which if unchecked, would have forced the spread of slavery to all of the states and territories.

In 1858, Lincoln engaged in a series of famous debates with national political figure, Stephen Douglas. One of these debates occurred in my own home town, Quincy, Illinois, where there is still a large monument commemorating the debate in the town’s old Central Park. Lincoln lost the Illinois Senate race, but he won the 1860 presidential election also against Stephen Douglas. Lincoln received fiery criticism from both sides. He was hated by those who favored slavery for his statements on the immorality of slavery and the need for its eventual abolition. He was likewise despised by the radical abolitionists for his unwillingness to immediately end slavery through force. At the time Lincoln was elected president, the country was already firmly divided over slavery and the South had already repeatedly threatened to secede from the Union and make war against the northern states in order to preserve slavery and to avoid the North’s regime of industry protecting tariffs. It’s easy to see now that the South would have been better off economically if they had renounced slavery, turned their former slaves into employees, and industrialized by building their own cotton mills to produce thread, fabric, and clothing. The South was caught in a delusion. They saw a false image of themselves and of their northern opponents. The north failed to deal well with the problem of slavery because of greed. The evil of slavery had warped the understanding of law and culture in both north and south. Faced with Lincoln’s election, the South seceded from the Union and began attacking Union outposts among the southern states. This, of course, was an act of war which began the terrible Civil War of the United States between the southern states and the northern. Lincoln led the country through the horrible cataclysm of the Civil War.

Lincoln famously noted in his second Inaugural Address that the horrible suffering of the Civil War was in some way a chastening from God for the horrors of slavery as practiced in the South and long encouraged and tolerated by the North. Lincoln ended slavery through his sponsorship of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. During the war Lincoln ordered the freedom of slaves in Confederate controlled territory through the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln is justly famous for arguments against slavery. We would consider those arguments to be natural law arguments. Lincoln argued from the nature of human beings and the implications of their choices to say that slavery was improper. He noted slavery’s incompatibility with the Declaration of Independence and slavery’s incompatibility with morality and sound public policy.

Lincoln is still resented by some today because of his centralization of power in the federal government and his resistance to the secession of the southern states. Some Southerners still resent the destruction of the south meted out by the Union Army, acting under Lincoln, in its attempt to demoralize the south and end the war. It is often forgotten that Lincoln did not threaten to attack the South, but that the South did, in fact, attack the northern outposts in southern territory, triggering the war. Lincoln tended to be a pragmatic incrementalist, seeking to make changes a bit at a time. The Civil War forced quicker and more radical changes.

Shortly after the end of the war, Lincoln was assassinated. The bitterness of the war led to harsh treatment of the south. After early attempts at promoting racial equality in the south, the United States abandoned those efforts and left political control of the south to the almost entirely Democrat white population. It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950’s that legal inequality was finally dealt with once again. We still suffer from the damage to law and society done by the evils of slavery and discrimination.

The young Lincoln was not known as a particularly religious person, though his parents had been Baptists and he himself attended a Presbyterian church from time-to-time. Lincoln began reading the Bible during the war, and admitted to friends that this most sublime document had a transformative effect upon his life. He was also strongly influenced by the Declaration of Independence and its statement that “all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” America will always remember the eloquent way in which Lincoln reminded us of that and other timeless truths.

CA Court of Appeal Protects the Religious Freedom of a Private School - says school not a business under the Unruh Act

2009-02-09T11:38:00.000-08:00

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times by Maura Dolan, dated January 28, 2009, documents a unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the Fourth District Court of Appeals holding that the California Lutheran High School in Riverside County was not a business under the Unruh Act, and as such was allowed to enforce rules against apparent lesbian conduct.

According to the article, the case involved two female students who were expelled in their junior year for lesbian-like conduct. The court cited the 1998 California Supreme Court precedent finding that the Boy Scouts of America were not a business establishment under the Unruh Civil Rights Act. The girls sued the school for invasion of privacy, false arrest, and discrimination. The court found against them and for the school on these matters as well.

The court recognized the school’s religious belief that homosexuality is inappropriate. The court understood that the school’s conduct code allowing students to be expelled for engaging in immoral or scandalous conduct was an essential part of its religious message. The court wrote, “The whole purpose of sending one’s child to a religious school is to ensure that he or she learns even secular subjects within a religious framework.” This understanding is of key importance. Religious freedom would be a meaningless cliché if parents were not able to send their children to schools that actually teach and reinforce those religious beliefs. If religious schools are forced to engage in practices or allow practices that are antithetical to the core of their beliefs, those schools will no longer be able to truly reflect their faith.

This is not to say that there can’t be difficulties with religious schools. This is not to say that there can’t be grave difficulties with what a religious school might teach. Radical Islamic madrasas that advocate violence against non-Muslims merely because of their lack of faith in their radical brand of Islam, or who demand female genital mutilation are obviously problematic. But belief that sexual immorality is improper and should be discouraged particularly among the young is not a damaging or aberrant belief. The orthodox versions of all major religions and the majority of all world civilizations have taught that some restraint of human sexuality is good, necessary, and appropriate. Nearly all of them have agreed that homosexual conduct is inappropriate and immoral. Discouraging young people from homosexual activity is in no way physically damaging to them or to other people. Most religions and most civilizations would say it is actually spiritually and mentally beneficial and wholesome to discourage homosexual activity and other sexual immorality. This should not be mistaken as a bias against sexuality itself either. Biblical Christianity and again most major religions and civilizations have strongly encouraged the expression of sexuality within the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Sex is a wonderful, beautiful, and powerful thing when it is part of the bond between a married man and woman. In other instances, this powerful force can be destructive in many ways. It is only reasonable that private schools should be allowed to teach what Christianity and indeed other religions have taught for thousands of years. They should be allowed to teach what the experience of millions of Christians has ratified. And it is a good thing that a court has been willing to recognize the law and its boundaries and limitations rather than giving in to the constant pressure of those who demand social approval for sexual immorality.

In the 37-page opinion in Jane Doe v California Lutheran High School Association et al, the court was considering an appeal from a summary judgment in favor of the defendants. The plaintiff’s attorney has indicated a desire to petition the Supreme Court of California to take up the case. Sadly, the California courts have already decided that certain religious corporations, even non-profit religious corporations, can sometimes be businesses under the Unruh Act. The court noted that the school is a social organization whose primary function is the inculcation of values. They cited the school’s mission statement that “CLHS exists to glorify God by using His inerrant Word to nurture discipleship in Christ…” The school is selective in its membership based on what it believes. The court pointed out that the school offers admission to Lutheran families and those who “are in harmony with the policies and principles of our school.” The court also cited a 1998 California attorney general opinion that the admissions decisions of private religious schools are not subject to the Unruh Act. The court further noted that precedent establishes that “private organizations can engage in some business transactions with members without the risk of becoming a business enterprise for the purposes of the Unruh Act.” The court does not address the question of whether the school would be allowed to violate the Unruh Act as an expression of association, religious freedom, or the rights of parents if they actually came under the Unruh Act. They merely looked at the narrow question of the Unruh Act’s applicability.

The court further noted with respect to the invasion of privacy count, that disclosing the school’s suspicions about the students’ sexual orientation to their parents was not an invasion of privacy. Indeed, the court noted that the parents had a right to know why their children were being expelled. The court noted that “even assuming plaintiffs had some legitimate expectation of privacy regarding their sexual orientation, that expectation was diminished once they enrolled in a private school that deemed homosexual conduct to be a violation of school rules. This is true even if they had never read the Christian conduct rule; obviously, the school had rules, and they could be subject to them even if they never read them.” The court further noted that there were no feasible or effective alternatives that would have had a lesser impact on the students’ privacy than the measures that were taken.

The court also rejected the cause of action for false imprisonment based on the questioning of the students by the principal for a period that allegedly extended over two hours. The plaintiffs had conceded that their false imprisonment claims stood or fell with their Unruh Act claim. Because the school’s purpose in the detention did not violate the Unruh Act, it was not unreasonable or contrary to law. There was no allegation that, apart from the Unruh Act violation, the confinement was excessive in duration or scope.

The court also ruled on a variety of discovery matters and dismissed a count of unfair competition that was also based on the Unruh Act. It is always encouraging to see the Court of Appeal apply California law in a clear, reasonable, and narrow manner.

Should Christians Ever Revolt against a Tyranous Government?

2009-02-09T11:21:00.000-08:00

Should Christians ever resort to the violent overthrow of governments? Apart from the pragmatic issue of how well it works, Romans 13 seems to forbid rebellion. Many Christian thinkers have thought this passage only protected governments acting legitimately. But I have to admit the text makes no such distinction.

I think that the answer to the use of rebellion may be tied up in a variety of other questions. First is the question of whether or not objective moral rules change over time. I am quite sure that they don’t. Genuine moral rules flow from the nature of God Himself, and God never changes. Sometimes individuals or societies come to know more about God, but God Himself does not change, and His rules don’t change. If God does not change, then the events that are approved of morally in the Old Testament can give us some guidance. We have to be careful because there are some events in the Old Testament that were immoral that the text does not comment on clearly. With respect to revolts, we do find a couple of examples in the Old Testament. First, we find a revolt against foreign tyranny or hegemony in the book of Judges. In Judges 3:12 Ehud kills the king of Moab. One does have to be careful with the book of Judges though. So many foolish actions amid a few brave ones. Another revolt takes place in Judah itself. In II Kings 11, there is a rebellion against the usurping queen Athaliah by the priests, the military, and the true heir to the throne, Joash. This revolt seems to meet with nothing but approval from the text. While Athaliah was a usurper, she did represent the status quo.

These examples lead to a second problem. What makes a government a government from God’s point of view anyway?

The third problem in trying to resolve the issue of rebellions is whether or not there is a hierarchy to moral rules. While there are many nuanced positions available, popular theologian Norman Geisler has pointed out that there are basically three positions among Christians who hold a strong view of Scripture. First, the classic Pietist position that moral principles never come into conflict and there is no real hierarchy of moral principles. Second, the Lutheran position that there is a hierarchy of morals, but when they come into conflict we do the lesser evil. The lesser evil is still a sin, but often a necessary one which God can forgive. Third is the Calvinist position that there is a hierarchy of moral principles and that you are not sinning when you follow the greatest good. You can readily see how this might apply with the problem of rebellion. If it is a moral truth that we are to obey the government, what happens when it comes into conflict with a higher moral principle like preserving innocent human life or preventing the murder of innocent human life? It becomes even more complicated in states where the government and the people are intertwined so that the people become accomplices in whatever the state undertakes or fails to undertake. Pietists would tend to say that you could never rebel against the government because no moral principle can override any other. Lutherans would say that if the government is up to serious evil like murdering innocents, you may rebel against the government in an emergency, but doing so would be a sin for which repentance and forgiveness would be necessary. The classic Calvinist position would be that if the government is going around killing innocent people, it is actually your duty to rebel against it and replace it with a better government, but that you need to be awfully cautious about taking this step and what the actual results are going to turn out to be. Under the Calvinist position, you are not sinning by rebelling against the government because preserving innocent human life and maintaining appropriate and legitimate government override the general moral principle of obedience to the state. By the way, while the Pietists, Calvin, and Luther are the names associated with these views, all these views have been around as long as there have been human beings. Their application has merely been less systematic or group linked.

A fourth major issue is the question of whether or not application of moral principles should be based on playing it safe or on accepting moral adventure in which we may do the wrong thing for good reasons. Pietist groups generally stick with playing it safe. Calvinists, like Presbyterians and Congregationalists in the early United States, and the Puritan Anglicans have tended to practice moral adventure. Certainly there is always a danger of arrogance or mistake involved in any choice to use violence. Nevertheless, I think it is arguable from the parable of the talents and other passages in Scripture that God probably does call us to moral adventure rather than to moral safety. But the use of violence is so serious it should only occur in very unusual circumstances – such as when no alternative of the ballot box or the news paper is available.

The Good, the Bad, and the Terrible: President Obama's first weeks

2009-02-03T15:12:00.000-08:00

President Obama’s first weeks in office have been full of all sorts of announcements and statements from the president. One of the good ones was his presidential memo mandating transparency and openness in government. I hope that the government follows up fully with the kind of disclosure Obama says he favors. Unfortunately, not everything was that good. Something that seems good on its surface but may not really be so was the president’s executive order concerning “ensuring lawful interrogations.” This order limited interrogation techniques used by the military and a number of other government agencies to those listed in the Army Field Manual. The purpose behind this is in some ways noble. It is important that it be completely clear that the American government does not in any way condone the torture of prisoners. Torture is largely ineffective. It makes people tell you whatever you want to hear rather than what is necessarily true. There are also serious moral problems with inflicting torture upon even the most evil of people. However, successful interrogation may not require torture, but often does require innovation, creativity, and surprise. I have to admit that I haven’t read the entire Army Field Manual section on interrogation, so I don’t know everything that it says. But the problem is that people in training to be terrorists can read the Army Field Manual and will know everything that it says. The anticipation that everyone will follow the Field Manual allows them to prepare themselves much more adequately to face future interrogation if captured. It’s probably a good idea to be able to surprise detainees with interrogation techniques that, while not amounting to torture, are not what they expected or were prepared for.

The president’s executive order on ensuring lawful interrogations was not the worst thing that’s come out of the Obama White House in its first week, however. The most terrible thing was the January 23, 2009, presidential memoranda setting aside the Mexico City Policy. In 1985, Ronald Reagan created the Mexico City Policy. This was an announcement that directed the United States’ Agency for International Development to withhold US aid funds from all organizations that used non-US aid funds to support abortion overseas. It was the official government policy between 1985 and 1993 when President Clinton rescinded it. George W. Bush reinstated the Mexico City Policy in 2001, and it remained in force until rescinded by Obama on January 23 of this year. Opponents of the Mexico City Policy call it the “global gag rule.” They feel constrained because they would rather promote abortion than any other kind of family planning. Some organizations have chosen to go without government funding rather than give up the right to perform and promote abortions overseas. I am always shocked by this strange eagerness to kill unborn children in foreign countries. Sadly, the Obama administration has decided to allow the government to provide money to organizations that promote and perform abortions throughout the world with the stroke of a pen in the form of this new memorandum repealing the Mexico City Policy. But this was not a surprise. Obama promised during his campaign to repeal the Mexico City Policy. In his interview with Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren, Obama indicated that he did not know when human rights vest in a human being. This is strange for a constitutional lawyer and a person who wants to be president of the United States. But it is in some way consistent with someone who thinks that it should be legal and reasonable to kill human beings in the womb. For a president who prides himself on his practicality and non-partisanship, the immediate rescission of the Mexico City Policy seems a strangely partisan and ideological act with which to begin a presidency. I and many others have prayed that God would restrain President Obama from taking this step. Let us hope that he is convicted of his error and at some point not only reinstates the Mexico City Policy, but becomes an advocate for the right to life for all living human beings. Let us hope that he comes to recognize what is obvious, that in conception a living sperm joins with a living egg to form a living human being who is alive for legal purposes until natural death. Human beings do not go from a state of being physically unalive to a state of life when they come out of the womb. All the wishes and social construction and linguistic distortion of abortion promoters will not change reality. Let us hope that some day President Obama and the rest of our nation are willing to open their eyes and accept reality rather than seeking to perpetuate a woman’s license to kill her own children.

Always Winter and Never Christmas

2009-01-06T14:03:00.000-08:00

On Dec. 20 I was on Apologetics.com with Chris Neiswonger and Pastor Kent Moorlach to discuss C.S. Lewis and Christmas. See info about the show at:
http://www.apologetics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=297:always-winter-and-never-christmas&catid=43:kkla-995-fm-los-angeles&Itemid=58

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-24T13:09:00.000-08:00

As we celebrate the incarnation, may you all have great joy.

I recommend the December 24 post by Cranmer of a sermon by his curate at:

http://www.archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/

Blessings! Merry Christmas!

Grace Hidden in the Words of the Law

2008-11-17T10:31:00.000-08:00

Lately, as part of my daily Bible reading, I’ve been reading through the Pentateuch—the first five books of the Bible, also known as the five books of Moses—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These books contain not only a historical account of the world from creation to the time the Israelites reached the promised land following their exodus from Egypt under the leadership of Moses, but also describe the guidelines that God gave the Israelites to run their future polity, to guide them in moral living, and to teach them how God wanted them to worship Him at that time. It includes rules about nearly everything from public health to festivals. Most people think of the Mosaic Law found in the Pentateuch as legalistic, and in some ways it is. The Mosaic Law is impossible for people to actually keep if rightly interpreted, so it lets people know that they are sinful people in need of God’s grace and forgiveness in order to be saved. The law also shows us what God wants and why, how to live well, and provides a foreshadowing of what God would eventually do through the redemptive work of the Messiah, Jesus. This foreshadowing aspect is particularly interesting. In a very real way, God’s grace—His unmerited favor—is hidden in God’s dictates of the law. The law cannot save anyone. But God put hints about how we could be saved by grace in the text of the law.

One interesting little example is found in Leviticus 16 on the Day of Atonement. Here God instructs Moses about exactly what the priests will have to do in order to celebrate a day in which they atone for the Israelites through sacrifices made to God. The sacrifices have to follow a specific format and involve all sorts of ritualistic acts, clothes, etc. Describing the various sacrifices, it says in verse 29, “This is to be a lasting ordinance for you: on the tenth day of the seventeenth month you must deny yourselves and not do any work whether native born or an alien living among you—because on this day atonement will be made for you to cleanse you. Then, before the Lord you will be clean from all your sins. It is a Sabbath of rest and you must deny yourselves; it is a lasting ordinance.” The high priest who is presenting the blood of atonement does the work on the Day of Atonement. The people being atoned for are not allowed to work. In other words, the people aren’t really to do anything to make the atonement happen. They don’t earn their atonement by working. Instead it is based on the sacrifice made for them by the high priest. This is definitely a foreshadowing of the work of Christ to come. Christ is our great High Priest who offered His own blood as the atonement for our sins—a lasting atonement forever. It superseded the need to sacrifice bulls and sheep and to release scapegoats into the wilderness. But interestingly enough, our salvation is by grace through faith. It is based on the unmerited favor that God gives to us. It is a gift of grace, not of works lest any man should boast. In terms of our atonement we do no work. So when God instructed the Israelites not to do any work on the Day of Atonement, perhaps He was trying to help them realize that they did not have any part in earning their forgiveness through works. Instead, it was something given to them—an act of grace.

Now this is not to say that we shouldn’t work for God and do His will in a response of gratitude for the salvation that He brings to us. But we should never think that we earn our salvation by works. Instead, our right state before God is made possible by the shed blood of Jesus Christ and we do no work in order to earn it or obtain it.

May God Bless and Guide the President Elect

2008-11-05T16:20:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to President Elect Obama. The best thing about his election is that it shows that whatever difficult people may still exist in the world, if, in America, you are smart, hard working, friendly, well spoken, polite, optimistic and creative, you can become or do almost anything humanly possible – including becoming President – no matter who your parents were or were not, no matter where your ancestors were from, and no matter what your background has been.
In addition, all the leftists who predicted the Republicans could or would steal the election, or that Americans were too racist to elect Obama, were proved wrong.

No country is perfect. But by the grace and mercy of God America is a great and very blessed country. I hope Obama's election reminds people of that.

We will now see what the Democrats can do to fulfill their many conflicting promises of utopia. I am confident that if closely observed, the Democrats will demonstrate they are even more involved in what remains of legal opportunities for graft and government partnership with “big business” than the Republicans, despite folk legends and examples to the contrary.

I hope and pray we do not see laws and Presidential orders dehumanizing very young and very old human beings signed by the very man who claims to be the embodied remedy for past dehumanizations of minorities. I hope and pray we can avoid a more costly war than the one we now face. I hope and pray our religious liberties will not be trashed by those appointed by a man who used more religious language and iconography in his campaign than anyone in memory. I hope and pray the government does not seize our retirement accounts "for our own good" or limit access to beneficial medical treatment. And I hope and pray the government does not worsen the economic crisis in the name of saving us from its deprivations. Actually I have little hope. But not no hope. Nothing is impossible for God - but many things are impossible for man, whether we say "yes we can." So long as we remember we are not God, respect the rules and order he established, and seek God's help, there is real hope. If we think we can build heaven on earth by human means there is no hope for those plans to succeed.

Best of wishes to President elect Obama. May he have four wonderful years in the White House that are much much better for America than I expect.

VOTE!

2008-11-04T15:32:00.000-08:00

Today is election day. The next four years of Supreme Court of the United States appointments hang in the balance. How the war with Islamofacism is handled will change in one way or another. Taxes, both on income and social security, may change in one way or another. Legislation, by a House and Senate dominated by the Democrat party, on issues like homosexual marriage, abortion, retirement funds, the fairness act, military spending, and a lot more will either be signed or vetoed. Both candidates have strengths and weaknesses. The results of their victories will not be identical. And there are many other offices and initiatives on the ballot all over the country.

Your vote will make a difference. If you have not voted yet, and are eligible to do so, please go out and vote now.

May God grant us a better government and a better future than we deserve. Best wishes.

Happy Reformation Day

2008-10-31T11:20:00.000-07:00

Today in 1517 Martin Luther tacked up 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church. Luther's insistence on the primacy of scripture, on justification by faith through grace (not works), on the priesthood of all believers, on the preaching of the Word, and on fidelity to truth is still critical today.

Recent Radio Show on Marriage

2008-09-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

At the link, the audio of my recent appearance on the Apologetics.com radio show to talk about In Re Marriage Cases:

http://www.apologetics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=272:a-christian-look-at-the-law-in-relation-to-gay-marriage&catid=43:kkla-995-fm-los-angeles&Itemid=58

(Somehow it does not seem right to call being on radio an "appearance." But then what is it? It cannot be an audience.)

Case Review: California Supreme Court Case In Re Marriage Cases

2008-09-18T11:58:00.000-07:00

In 1999, the California Legislature enacted domestic partnership legislation. In 2000 and nearly every year thereafter, the benefits associated with domestic partnership were expanded by the State Legislature. By 2006, the state had given domestic partners nearly all of the benefits of marriage, including married filing status on state income taxes. There were still some differences relating to the parameters of defining domestic partnership, i.e. that it can’t be secret, that the parties must live together, etc.

In the year 2000, a backlash to the growth of gay rights in California occurred with Prop. 22, a proposition that made it a state law that marriage in California should be between one man and one woman. The law, however, did not affect domestic partnerships. In 2004, the Supreme Court of California rejected an attempt by local officials to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples. That decision was based largely on the local authorities’ lack of constitutional authority to force such a change on the state. The court, however, did not foreclose the possibility of future litigation. In the case In Re Marriage Cases, the question of the constitutionality of limiting marriage to opposite sex couples came before the California Supreme Court. On May 15 of this year, the California Supreme Court found that it was unconstitutional under the California State Constitution to limit marriage to opposite sex couples. The court concluded that denying same sex couples the label of “marriage” treated them as second-class citizens and violated equal protection under the California State Constitution

The court started off its reasoning by discussing several technical arguments such as the argument that the case was moot, that it was barred by Prop. 22, or that current marriage law already allowed domestic same sex marriage. After rejecting these, the court also went through a long summary of the development of laws related to marriage in California.

The court noted a general right to marry based on case law interpreting the California Constitution and the Federal Constitution. The court quoted Ortiz v L.A. Police Relief Association (2002) 98 Cal. App. 4th 1288 at 1303:

“We have recognized that the concept of personal liberties and fundamental human rights entitled to protection against overbroad intrusion or regulation by government extends to such basic civil liberties and rights not explicitly listed in the Constitution as the right to marry, establish a home, and bring up children.”

The court also referred to the right to marry as discussed in the federal courts in Meyer v Nebraska and Griswold v Connecticut. In this way, it associated a right to marry with fundamental rights and with privacy. But while the court cited federal cases based in natural law and natural right, it sought to avoid the traditionalist moral claims associated with that line of reasoning by focusing on the evolving nature of legal norms. The court noted, “Constitutional concepts are not static…we have never been confined to historic notions of equality.” It noted that in California, the right to marry “is not based on anachronistic notions of morality”…but is “rooted in the necessity of providing an institutional basis for defining the fundamental relational rights and responsibilities in an organized society.” The court, however, did make “moral” judgments of its own, and took a swipe at people who believe that homosexual acts are immoral by implying that the past was essentially wrong when it “once denigrated the general character and morals of gay individuals, and at one time even characterized homosexuality as a mental illness rather than as simply one of the numerous variables of our common and diverse humanity.” The court noted that by contrast, “this state’s current policies and conduct regarding homosexuality recognizes that gay individuals are entitled to the same legal rights and the same respect and dignity afforded all individuals and are protected from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation.”

The court characterized the question before it as not a question of whether or not there is a right for homosexuals to marry each other, but rather whether or not the right to marry could justly be denied to anyone based on sexual orientation. The court was aware of the argument that marriage law in California passes the equal protection test by allowing all persons to marry persons of the opposite sex regardless of sexual orientation. But they dismissed this as essentially requiring people with a homosexual orientation to change their orientation or live unsatisfied lives:

“In light of the fundamental nature of the substantive rights embodied in the right to marry—and their central importance to an individual’s opportunity to live a happy, meaningful, and satisfying life as a full member of society—the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all individuals and couples, without regard to their sexual orientation.”

The court finds that marriage is actually a cluster of rights that includes “the opportunity of an individual to establish—with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life—an officially recognized family.” The court tries to bolster its expansion of the notion of who’s entitled to marry by referring to other civil rights cases such as those involving miscegenation and the case involving reproductive freedom for a disabled woman. The court tries to say that rights should be interpreted broadly and has given a sweeping definition and scope, rather than limiting it through a narrow definition. The court attempts to distinguish the cases cited by the California Court of Appeal in which the Supreme Court had used a narrow definition of rights in order to avoid their expansion, such as its narrowing of the definition of autonomy in order to avoid a right for assisted suicide.

The court proceeds to an equal protection analysis in which it finds that sexual orientation is a suspect class. The court claims that sexual orientation is the equivalent of an immutable trait because “whether or not sexual orientation is based on biological factors, which may be a matter of some controversy, it is a deeply personal characteristic that is either unchangeable or changeable only at unacceptable personal costs.” The court concludes with little or no discussion of data that it is prima facia the case that homosexual people make a contribution to society and that that categorization does not in any way eliminate that contribution or mitigate it. They also discuss the history of stigma associated with homosexuality. Given those three criteria, they find that sexual orientation is, in fact, a suspect class and that strict scrutiny is the appropriate standard. The court finds no compelling interest for excluding people with a homosexual orientation from marriage to one another. The court claims that there is no harm to children either from gay parents or from the existence of homosexual unions, asserts that there is no harm done to opposite sex couples by expanding the scope of who may marry whom, says that the new definition of marriage will avoid the disparagement of people with a gay sexual orientation, and maintains that the law must not treat these people as second-class citizens. The court has an extensive discussion of the statutes that limit marriage to couples of the opposite sex, and concludes that these statutes are in effect unconstitutional. But the court recognizes that it should not destroy marriage itself, and so essentially allows that marriage will have to be understood to include same sex couples.

The practical impact of this case is, of course, that same sex couples can now officially marry in California. Now all of the rights pertaining to marriage will apply to them, including, for example, California Family Code sections 7540 and 297.5 that provide that a child born to one member of a couple is presumed to be the child of the other member of the couple as well. This, and the law related to annulment, will fit uncomfortably with same sex couples, but the California Supreme Court has not felt challenged by these anomalies.

The court has also already applied the Unruh Civil Rights Act to require that businesses not discriminate against people based on sexual orientation. This will undoubtedly also be expanded to include non-discrimination on the basis of same sex marriage. The court tried very hard to claim that its ruling would not interfere with religious freedom. The Court cited a provision of the California Constitution that says, “Free exercise and enjoyment of religion without discrimination or preference are guaranteed. This liberty of conscience does not excuse acts that are licentious or inconsistent with the peace and safety of the state.” The court said:

“Affording same sex couples the opportunity to obtain the designation of marriage will not impinge upon the religious freedom of any religious organization, official, or any other person; no religion will be required to change its religious policies or practices with regard to same sex couples, and no religious officient will be required to solemnize a marriage in contradiction of his or her beliefs.”

Of course, this statement is dicta. It remains to be seen whether or not future courts will accord churches the religious freedom, or whether they will conclude that the exercise of that religious freedom in deciding against the morality of same sex unions is “inconsistent with the peace and safety of the state.”

The same dilemma will face policy makers with respect to private schools. It remains to be seen if private schools will be allowed to maintain statements of faith or other documents that have either the intent or effect of discriminating against homosexual couples or individuals. The effect on public schools, however, is quite certain. Public schools will almost certainly be required to teach that same sex marriage is entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded the unions traditionally designated as marriages. In effect, it is now public policy in California that homosexual sex is just as normative and normal as any other kind. It will need to be discussed in a positive light in sex education classes. It will need to be depicted in a positive light in books K through college graduation. Students who are critical of same sex relations will need to be disciplined just as if they expressed racial animus or other irrational or bigoted ideas. It remains to be seen how the parents in the state will accept this. But it would appear that so far the court has made this shift in conjunction with the legislature without any real opposition except for Proposition 22 and Proposition 8.

Yet to come from the effects of this ruling are a variety of other demands, issues, and conundrums. It is likely that this issue will be used as a wedge to get rid of civil marriage as we know it and only have contractual relationships and a separate non-legal, non-state recognized religious marriage. That would be a precursor to encouraging an uncommitted “free love” society with no civil benefits for marriage and no special rights for parents of families or special family control over children. Such a situation would encourage lack of marital commitment on the part of nearly everyone except sincere religious believers or people who recognize their self interest in having some sort of a marital union. It would also facilitate the shift of parental responsibility from families to the state.

Calls to get rid of exemption for faith-based organizations and churches in hiring may only be the beginning of the difficulties that faith-based organizations face. Will the California Legislature ultimately claim that the Bible is hate speech because of its opposition to homosexual sex or same sex unions?

Demands for the right to clone human beings and utilize other genetic manipulations are likely to increase with the desire of same sex couples to have children with the genes of one or both “parents.” Polygamy and polyamory are also on the horizon. While the court in a footnote denied that polygamy was consistent with “mutual supportive and healthy family relationships,” that can easily be contested through pseudo-scientific studies like those supportive of same sex parenting, and can easily be subjected to the same gradual change through social pressure and avant garde legislation. There is no principled way under the court’s reasoning in In re Marriage cases to prevent polygamy or polyamory. Practitioners of polygamy and polyamory can likewise claim that their propensity to this is in some way immutable and linked to their fundamental personality. They can also claim that there is nothing wrong with their sort of unions and that they will benefit society. Certainly they can claim that they, too, have been subjected to social opposition and stigma. In other words, they can easily obtain the same strict scrutiny that the court used In re Marriage Cases and, given a few years of social pressure and Hollywood TV and movie-making to approve them, they can easily obtain the same imprimatur of a court eager to please a left-leaning contingent in society.

Of course the results from this court decision are going to be devastating. There will be widespread adjustment problems for the children of same sex marriages. Think what will happen when they are confronted with moral and biblical truth as they grow up. In the 1970s and 80s, there were literally hundreds of books written by people who identified the cause of their dysfunctional families as the stoicism of their fathers and grandfathers. Just wait until we have to deal with the hundreds of male children raised by two women who hate men and the female children raised by two men who hate women. In addition, it is likely that the levels of child abuse and subsequent acting out are likely to increase as we see more non-genetic parents who recognize no inherent moral limits on what they consider legitimate activity. While not all homosexuals are pedophiles, and not all pedophiles are homosexuals, there is a high correlation rate between pedophilia and male homosexuality. As a result, we are likely to see increases in child abuse for that reason alone. In addition, other moral ideas will erode because there is less fear of God and man in a society that is willing to sanction same sex unions. Instead, we have only desire and an arrogant demand for human autonomy. Most people fear God or man enough to be “civilly righteous.” In other words, they don’t openly kill people, or openly steal things, or do other obvious and open crimes. One aspect of civic righteousness was that people avoided public sexual immorality. Now the Supreme Court of California says the public must endorse certain kinds of sexual immorality. We now “not only do such things, but approve of those who do them.” Romans chapter one clearly speaks of the acceleration of moral decay based upon such gradual rejection of God and His order.

Of course one other problem that is likely to accelerate is that we will face unprecedented legal shell games with the most fundamental and sweeping aspects of our culture even at the hands of supposedly conservative justices like Justice Ronald George. This is due in no small part to the way lawyers and judges are trained in secular law schools. Unless the fundamental nature of legal education is altered so that lawyers and future judges and future legislators are once again taught and made to understand the implied limits of law, the nature of the rule of law, and the relationship between law and objective morality, we will see more and more of the same, even if there is a temporary reprieve through the passage of Proposition 8 or other constitutional legislation.

There are several lessons we can learn from all of this. Allowing social evil in the present leads to more social evil later. Slavery and racial discrimination in the United States were very wrong. They were heretical and should never have been allowed by Christian people in a society dominated by Christians. Allowing them for so long and dragging feet in correcting them created the judicial power and template for the In Re Marriage Cases decision. If we had not allowed slavery and discrimination, this never would have happened because the courts would have been limited to dealing with individual disputes instead of becoming broad social policymakers in these areas. In other words, the court accrued power dealing with a legitimate moral evil, but now has used that power in order to create a moral evil. Had the first moral evil not been tolerated politically, it never would have been necessary for the court to accrue that power.

This also goes to show that incrementalism does work if pursued consistently over time. You have to hand it to the homosexual lobby that they have survived tremendous moral and social pressure and worked through an incremental agenda that has achieved incredible results for them in a remarkably short period of time. This also shows that giving some groups a compromise of legal ground does not necessarily end an issue, but gives them a foothold for their next claim. The nature of legal change is also evident here. Changes in the law often seem sudden, but usually the reality is that small incremental changes in the law build up and create a tension that is suddenly resolved in a change that appears rapid—but was really foreshadowed and pre-arranged by all the small changes that went before. So no small change in the law is necessarily really small if it is part of a trend. In re Marriage Cases is also part of a trend in the public square to exclude or reject arguments based on morality or the Bible. Yet the abolitionists and Martin Luther King could cite the Bible and did so successfully. But in our culture and society, speaking straight from the Bible is no longer a socially viable strategy. Increasingly there is even hostile pressure from those who sense a religious belief behind a secular argument. To you, my fellow users of the internet, this should be more than apparent. The attack comments by radical secularists are quite common on religious blogs. This has led many bloggers to go to a moderated format.

What do I actually think about In re Marriage Cases? Well, I think you can tell from what I’ve already said about the implications. I think it is a perfectly dreadful opinion that uses legal sleight of hand and makes an argument that is quite inappropriate. What the court is really doing is changing the understanding of marriage. Marriage has always been understood as a union between a man and one or more women in all societies. There are no sustained and numerous instances of men marrying men or women marrying women. There aren’t even common instances of many men with one woman. Christianity and an enlightened understanding of the interest of women has illuminated what Jesus Himself said that originally God created Adam and Eve—one man and one woman—and the two of them joined together and became one flesh. What God has joined together, human beings really shouldn’t tear apart. Of course the problem with marriage as with all institutions is that human sinfulness creates additional problems that often mean that a marital union cannot survive. Yet it is still the case in nearly all civilizations that marriage is between one man and one woman, or at the very outside, one man and a handful of women. Same sex unions really are an exceptionally radical idea. But then ideas are not inherently bad because they are radical. They are bad if they are immoral. And indeed, same sex marriage is immoral. The Bible teaches in many places, including the first chapter of the book of Romans, that homosexual acts and desires are not in accord with God’s optimal design for the way human beings are meant to live. They are damaging to society as well as to the individuals who engage in them. This is not to say that they are the very worst of all sins. Certainly there are many sins and there are probably sins worse than same sex unions (certainly genocide, for example). But no sin is excused because other people commit other sins.

Here the court has transgressed a major boundary. It has sought to create a civil right to do something that is inherently wrong. As I have said on this blog before, real objective rights that come from God cannot be rights specifically to do something wrong. They may be rights that make it easier for you to get away with doing something wrong, but there cannot be a right to do wrong in itself. Humanly created rights should similarly not transgress this boundary and specifically enable evil. Yet that is exactly what the court has done here. It is requiring a civil imprimatur for evil.

The court essentially did this by saying that there is a right to marriage itself and that that right applies to all people regardless of who they are inclined to marry. Now the court could have stopped there if it was willing to say that the right to marry is the right to do what marriage has always meant, marrying someone of the opposite sex who is above the age of consent, and not a close of a blood relation. Instead, they have decided that marriage includes the ability to marry whoever you want, even if they are of the same sex. This is a fundamental radical change, and yet the court does very little to justify it apart from saying that attitudes against homosexuality are outmoded, outdated, and contradicted by the legislative trend of the state of California. The court also tries to say that marriage law is really in the realm of positive law. But the court uses many citations from Meyer v Nebraska and other cases that are speaking about natural law, natural rights, and the right reason of the common law as sources for fundamental rights. It is those kinds of arguments that made marriage a fundamental right to begin with, not any kind of positive law finding or indication. The court is cheating not merely by saying that they are merely expanding a recognized right to marriage, but in their claim that they have positive law power vis á vis the right to marry.

Based on this, what can we do? We need to react in love and prudence, and NOT in hate and fear. Certainly the most important thing we can do is to pray. We need to pray for more people to come to Christ, and for revival among those who already believe. We need to pray for good sound doctrine to be taught, believed, learned, and lived. We need to pray for wisdom and for better leaders and judges than we deserve. We need to pray for repentance and for at least a temporary reformation of society. Practically, we can support Proposition 8. We can also make sure that our churches have appropriate expressions of policy on same sex marriage that make clear our religious beliefs and why we believe them so that they can be protected as religious beliefs. We also need to get more good people involved in the political process and train more good people as lawyers. We need to stand against societal evil and injustice regardless of what it is so that we can prevent this kind of situation in the future. We need to educate and train our children in the faith and in sound doctrine and reasoning, and we need to support good Christian education, especially legal education.

McCain's Good Choice

2008-08-29T17:00:00.000-07:00

I have not always been happy with Senator McCain’s choices, but I am very glad he picked a pro-life running mate in Governor Palin of Alaska. It is sad that Obama picked a solidly pro-abortion rights VP, and is committed to retaining abortion on demand himself.

While there are many other important issues, the recognition that human beings have rights at conception and onward is the great issue of our time. It is an issue that reveals the wisdom, understanding, and philosophy of a candidate or that shows the lack of those things. The way a candidate thinks on the life issue (if their position is thought out and not just assumed for political purposes alone) can reveal a lot about how they will deal with other issues. I am glad that McCain chose a pro-life running mate and glad he stood up for the idea that rights vest at conception during his interview with Rick Warren.

The other most important issues - judicial appointments, the war against islamofacism, wise spending priorities in a time of unmeetable public expectations, allowing people to keep more of their own money, vouchers for education, tax reform, and energy development - are all issues where McCain/Palin are way ahead of Obama. And Palin has a history of reform and anti-corruption that gives her real credibility as an agent of change. While not perfect, McCain and Palin have exhibited character in the adventures of their lives. Obama claims character in his rhetoric, but I have yet to see it in his practice.

I appreciated Obama’s admission, in his acceptance speech, of the importance of family - and of fathers in particular. But much of his speech seemed to claim he could do things that no President or government can guarantee to do. Obama also does not seem to appreciate the need for government to sometimes get out of the way and let charities, non-profits, individuals, and even business get things done. His speech impressed me as having goals that can only be attempted through additional government spending, power, and coercion on a massive scale. Am I being a pessimist? I can be convinced if I hear actual practical steeps to do things another way – but I did not hear that – I just heard a lot of general promises and bootstrapping from Obama and his people.

Perhaps there is still a chance in this election that God will give us far better leaders than we deserve.

Rick Warren Asks Obama About When Human Rights Vest

2008-08-21T09:45:00.000-07:00

From what I have watched so far Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Church, did a great job interviewing Barrack Obama. The questions were excellent. Obama’s answers are stereotypically political. I am afraid the post –political man is having difficulty living up to his rhetoric.

The transcript I have seen on the internet included the following:

WARREN: “. . . at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?”
OBAMA: “Well, you know, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.
. . .
If you believe that life begins at conception, then — and you are consistent in that belief, then I can’t argue with you on that, because that is a core issue of faith for you.”

First, the question as asked was not purely a religious or scientific question. When rights vest in a human being is a legal question. Obama is supposed to be a high powered constitutional law attorney. He wants to be the head of the executive branch, including the Department of Justice. Even if he lacks certainty, in both roles he must have at least a working assumption with which to answer that question. And it is critical in evaluating his candidacy to know what his working assumption is and why.

The quote from further down in the transcript implies Obama does not believe “life” begins at conception. And, he thinks belief on that is answering a question of “faith.” This is a bit ironic. The question Warren asked was a legal question. Now, when faced with a question science has answered, Obama takes refuge in a “faith” that chooses to disbelieve the obvious. In conception a living sperm and a living egg join to form a living human being. It is true the being needs a special environment to survive – all human beings do at all stages of life. But it is scientifically clear the newly conceived being is of the human species at an early stage of development, and is clearly alive. Believing dead or inanimate objects become living human beings really would be unscientific and really would require a sort of blind “faith” like that behind the old belief in the spontaneous generation of vermin from food. Obama must not have really taken the time to think this through – or he is so committed to a political position that uncomfortable realities are to be ignored rather than dealt with in the area of abortion. There are people who recognize that abortion is taking a human life but still want women to have a license to kill their babies because of the pain, social problems, economic problems, and career problems that can come from an unwanted pregnancy. Or they believe the license to kill is necessitated by society's current inability to accept limits on abortion. While such suffering is real, and while the politics of abortion are an obstacle to reform, neither is a proper justification for the intentional taking of a human life with malice aforethought. But it would be easier for me to respect Obama’s view if he was one of the license advocates instead of one of the “know nothings.”

By the way, real faith does not believe the impossible; it believes what God has revealed to be true in general and special revelation. Real faith requires God’s help. So I sympathize with those who do not have it and pray that God will give them eyes to see and believe the truth. I pray for Obama, that God will give him the ability to see and believe the truth about abortion.

An Apology

2008-07-24T13:31:00.000-07:00

Sorry I have not been blogging much. Academic assessment work and a vacation have kept me very busy since early June. New posts will appear soon. Best wishes to you all for a great summer!

Does God Call Christians to be Lawyers?

2008-06-09T12:30:00.000-07:00

My latest Trinity Open House Speech "Does God Call Christians to be Lawyers" is available on Godtube at the following links:

Part 1
http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=172c2f0cb4503f18af6a&page=1&viewtype=&category=mvd

Part 2
http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=7f43961891c290006177

The Hitchens/Prager/D'Souza Debate Part III

2008-06-03T14:08:00.000-07:00

This is a part of an ongoing series based on a debate between Christopher Hitchens, Dennis Prager and Dinesh D’Souza.

Question 3: Does the bitter suffering of mankind support the notion that Judaism is true, that is Christianity true, or that the new atheism is true? Christopher Hitchens clearly believes that no god worthy of being called a god would allow the suffering that we experience in the world. Prager maintains that part of the Hebraic answer to this question is that we cannot fully understand suffering in the world, but that God does. (Certainly you see this in the book of Job.) Dinesh D’Souza more or less agrees with Prager’s position.

What I would add to the problem of suffering is that Christianity deals with suffering not only by saying God has a deeper understanding of life and a deeper set of purposes than we have, and not only is suffering in some way necessitated by human free will and by the drama God is playing out in the universe, but that the Christian answer to the problem of suffering relates to Jesus’ incarnation itself.

God’s answer to suffering is not only His superior knowledge, power, position, and right, but that He Himself has suffered. In the incarnation, God became man. He came and lived among us. He put aside the power, prestige, perks and pleasure of His deity and experienced the pain, suffering, indignity, distress, weariness, anxiety, and even death that we experience. And for God, this would have been a far greater contrast to His prior experience than any change from pleasure to pain is for us. God would have been perfectly happy and had a perfect existence both within and beyond time. By becoming incarnate within time, His change from omniscience to human senescence would have been worse than a human being becoming deaf, blind, and dumb. His change from being able to do and accomplish anything within His own nature and will to the frailty and impotence of human life would have been a far greater change than any paralyzing or crippling disease that grips and terrorizes the poor human frame. God’s descent from absolute omniscience to the limited knowledge, perspective and ability of human beings was in proportion greater than any human descent into dementia or Alzheimer’s. From the infinite to the extremely finite He descended. And beyond that, He lived a life far poorer and more difficult than most western human beings are familiar with, and died a death more painful and ignoble than that suffered by most human beings. On top of all this, He went from being sinless and honorable to bearing the crushing weight of the sins of the entire world. The emotional pain would have been greater than the physical pain. We tend to take all of this for granted, and yet I believe it was so. C.S. Lewis’ stepson, Douglas Gresham, recently remarked in a radio interview that Christ’s resurrection may have actually been a more painful experience than His death because of the re-entry into a pain-filled world from the perfect paradise of heaven.

The Christian’s response to suffering is that God knows suffering; He has suffered as we suffer, suffered with us as we suffer, and suffered for us as we suffer. Stephen Lawhead has repeatedly pointed out in his adventure novels, especially the novel Byzantium, how different this makes Christianity from other religions. The idea of a deity that suffers with and for human beings is so different from the disinterested and triumphalist deities of paganism.

As Dinesh D’Souza alluded in the debate, we have to take into account the new heaven and the new earth that is yet to come. Christianity does not teach, as Christopher Hitchens believes, that the universe has been filled with millions of years of incredible suffering and will face millions of years yet to come of incredible suffering. Instead, the time from creation to God’s re-creation of a new heaven and a new earth will, from the perspective of eternity, seem like a brief period of time. In eternity, God will right every wrong, dry every tear, reward every truly good deed, and deal justly with every wrong. Thankfully, He has already dealt with our wrongs through Christ if we will but accept His mercy and grace.

California Proposition 98 or 99?

2008-06-02T10:25:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the election in California. Some people are very confused about propositions 98 and 99. 98 is a response to the Kelo court decision which upheld the growing practice of governments seizing land from private parties and handing it over to other private parties for uses preferred by the government. 98 will make it more difficult for the government to seize land for good and legitimate purposes too, but it will still be possible. 98 also gradually ends rent control. Rent control seems nice for people who have a rent controlled apartment, but it creates housing shortages and encourages landlords to do as little as is required to improve and keep up their properties.

99 is a response to 98. If it passes by more votes it blocks 98. 99 protects rent control and allows broader latitude for the government to continue to take land than 98 allows.

If you want to read more here are some links:

Full Text 98:
http://www.smartvoter.org/2008/06/03/ca/state/prop/98/#text League of Women Voters guide. Their analysis & the full text of the proposition

Full Text 99:
http://www.smartvoter.org/2008/06/03/ca/state/prop/99/#text League of Women Voters guide. Their analysis & the full text of the proposition.

Difference between Props. 98, 99. Orange County Register
http://yesprop98.com/modules/article/list/release.php?_adctlid=v%7Cwynx8c5jjesxsb%7Cx5kuhdmp3iomiw&pi=wynxp4qld3kyxw&id=x44exoni0lc8z1&done=index.php%3Fpi%3Dwynxp4qld3kyxw

PLF on 99
http://eminentdomain.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/05/what-would-prop.html

Yes on 98, No on 99 http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/DebraJSaunders/2008/05/21/yes_on_98,_no_on_99?page=full

Radio Review of Prince Caspian Movie

2008-05-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

At Apologetics.com (http://www.apologetics.com/default.jsp) you can currently find a radio show on which Chris Neiswonger, Lindsay Brooks and I reviewed the movie Prince Caspian. Our radio show on the movie Expelled is also linked at the site this week.

The Hitchens/Prager/D'Souza Debate Part II

2008-05-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

This is part of an ongoing series based on a debate between Christopher Hitchens, Dennis Prager, and Dinesh D’Souza.

Question 2: What is the proper response to the ethical claims of the new atheists? In the Hitchens / Prager / D’Souza debate, Christopher Hitchens maintained (as many new atheists do) that religion is questionable because it does not conform to his superior morality. He furthermore indicated that human beings are quite capable of having a uniform, agreed to, moral and ethical system that is “good” and indeed better than that obtainable through religions. Hitchens claims to believe in altruism, mercy, and most of the normal virtues as well as the Golden Rule. Is this really tenable? Certainly people have been working on this project for over two-thousand years. People have wanted to have the benefits of objective morality without the cost of believing in the God behind reason and morality. Usually this is motivated by a desire to omit certain parts of morality—particularly those dealing with sexuality. Sometimes I think it is just due to a response of anger against God for specific or general suffering in the world. There have been a wide variety of feelings, approaches, and hypotheses used to try to fulfill this quest for a morality without a divine author. Atheists have attempted to come up with means of claiming that altruism supports the survival of the fittest. Kant tried to find a way to create an objective moral system that was based purely upon human will. In truly post-modern fashion, the community of new atheists have basically tried to claim through sheer force of hubris and rhetoric that every reasonable person agrees with them about morality. But there are problems with these claims.

To begin with, I would admit the existence of common objective moral principles in all of mankind, in all cultures, and throughout all time. I openly admit that those moral principles have not been kept by any human being, culture, or society. But all human beings, cultures, and societies are aware of the requirements of objective moral principles. Ironically, Christopher Hitchens seemed to indicate that he believed in the existence of such an objective moral standard. The problem for him is that the existence of that moral standard is one of the strongest evidences for the existence of God. And not just any god, but rather the specific God found in classic Christian theology. Atheists attempt to argue that natural conditions of the world result in the evolution of identical moral principles everywhere. This makes little or no sense. In the animal world, we see highly diverse and numerous ways of dealing with environmental needs which have evidently “evolved” or been designed to appear in different species in different places. All creatures have the need for obtaining the raw material necessary for life and for digesting it in some way for growth and for reproduction. Yet these simple needs are dealt with through a myriad of strategies. Even in creatures of the same species, various strategies may occur in populations in different areas. The same species of bird in different regions may use different mating calls. Apes in different areas may have different techniques for satisfying their need for nourishment. One group uses primitive tools to eat termites whereas another neglects that but has special techniques for obtaining fruit in higher trees. Likewise, there is no reason to suppose that if human beings genuinely developed through evolution in separate communities, each of these communities would come up with identical and objective moral principles. Yet this is what we find. While application of moral principles may vary in certain ways, the basic moral principles themselves remain the same. And it is difficult to associate those moral principles with mere survival of the race or the best genetic material. Extreme altruism usually results in the destruction of the unit bearing the genetic material that might in some way be associated with the altruism. Yet we all find that altruism is indeed good and desirable. It simply is less likely to result in survival than a certain degree of ruthlessness. The reason altruism has prospered and survived is because there is an altruistic God behind the universe, not because survival in a hostile environment is made more likely through altruistic behavior. Survival of the group perhaps, but not survival of the most altruistic individuals. Scientists are trying to come up with theories that explain how altruism could have developed through evolution, but I have not found any of them particularly satisfying. Instead, it appears to me that the universal existence of an objective admiration for altruism is, in fact, evidence of an altruistic God behind the universe itself. I wouldn’t claim that this is a completely conclusive “proof.” But I would claim that it is evidence. Indeed, in a side note, it is interesting that atheism really is not an adequate explanation for the twists and turns of history. Based on evolutionary ideas, we would expect the “fittest” groups to be those that survive and are dominant. Yet this is not the case. It has quite often been the case that underdogs have survived, flourished, and been victorious due to apparently unexpected and unanticipated twists and turns of history. Certainly you can try to find an explanation for all of them, but it’s really quite amazing how often it happens. In spite of repeated and bitter attempts to destroy them, the survival of the Jewish people and of Protestant Christians is really quite remarkable. By contrast, the great towering empires of atheism such as China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, and Cuba have not flourished, prospered, or succeeded in their goals. The new Soviet man has not evolved from the socialist economic environment.

Next, another issue within this question, if altruistic transcultural objective morality is not achievable through evolution, is it achievable through philosophy? I would not even hazard to try to attempt a full argument on this subject on a blog. It’s simply too large and I’m probably not well trained enough in all of the aspects of philosophy to answer the most sophisticated philosophical arguments. But if Nietzsche and post-modern philosophers have achieved anything, it is an excellent refutation of the attempt by modernism and materialism to have an objective rational morality without God. I think they make it clear that the real choice is between classic
Christianity and nihilism. Of course within nihilism there are both the “hostile ubermensch branch” and the “community-based wishful thinking branch.” But neither of them meets the need for objective transcultural moral principles.

Questions Raised in the Hitchens/Prager/d'Souza Debate on God

2008-05-22T19:33:00.000-07:00

On May 1, I had the pleasure of attending a debate in Orange County, California, sponsored by Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Temple Bat Yahm, and Fieldstead & Co. The debate considered whether the truth was in the Christian God, the Jewish God, or in no god at all. As with most debates, there was perhaps more heat than light generated in some instances. But this was a very good debate by debate standards. While I don’t agree with Hitchens, I must admit he is a masterful debater both in terms of his fair and unfair tactics. Dennis Prager has great presence, popular appeal, and is an insightful thinker, and Dinesh D’Souza is both polite and bright. Hearing the discussion in the debate made me want to discuss a few of the issues raised.

Question 1: Is the New Testament more deferential to Christians than the Old Testament is to the Jews? Dennis Prager made the claim that the Old Testament is constantly complaining about how bad the Jews are, but that the New Testament makes Christians look fantastic.

I think that Dennis must have missed much of what is actually in the New Testament text. It is true that the Old Testament is hard on the Jewish people. They are always rebelling against God. But then this is because human beings tend to rebel against God. As it says in the New Testament, “Now all these things happened unto them for examples: and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.” I Cor. 10:11. We see the Old Testament Jews in their sinfulness and rebellion because we are all sinful, rebellious and stiff-necked people who would just as soon reject God if He did not call us to Himself. The New Testament clearly recognizes that Christians are no better than their Jewish forbears at being the people of God.

Throughout the Gospels, the disciples are always making foolish mistakes, misunderstanding Jesus and failing to get the point of whatever He is telling them in fairly clear terms. In the books of Acts and Galatians, we see Peter move away from the revelation God has just given him about His relationship with the Gentile Christians because He is cowed by those who demand obedience to the Jewish law. Paul has to rebuke him and there is a big argument.

Paul himself is “no saint” in that he has an argument with one of his co-workers so severe, they split up and start working separately. Perhaps under God’s guidance, or perhaps just because he was difficult, Paul also rejects a variety of prophecies warning him of the dangers of returning to Jerusalem.

Nearly all the epistles of the New Testament are written to churches or individuals who are having trouble obeying God and have allowed one type of heresy or misconduct or another to creep into their lives. In the book of Revelation, Jesus speaks to the seven churches of Asia Minor. He has severe criticism for five of them, and none is described as holy, strong, hearty and pleasing to God in every respect.

So I don’t think it can really be said that the New Testament is any easier on the people of God than the Old Testament. It, too, depicts us as sinful human beings, entirely dependent upon God’s grace, forgiveness, mercy and sanctifying power. One of the major differences is that the emphasis in the New Testament makes it even clearer than the Old Testament that God is concerned not only about outward conduct, but about the deepest thoughts of mind and heart.

Bobby Jindal for VP?

2008-05-06T13:43:00.000-07:00

Michael Medved and Bill Kristol have suggested that John McCain should consider the 36-year-old former two term congressman and current governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal for the Vice Presidential candidate slot.

This is a great idea. Jindal has a conservative pro-life record and more real experience than either Democrat in the Presidential race.

Civility In Decline

2008-04-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

Cranmer, on April 28, 2008 has an excerpt of an article by England's chief Rabbi at this link:
http://www.archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/.

The article, which appeared in the Telegraph, shows that problems in the UK and the USA are not that different. One of the major problems is a loss of civility and a loss of respect for life. Trinity had a discussion of these same problems as they appear in politics at our Feb. 2008 God and Governing; a Conference on Ethics, Virtue, and Statesmanship.

My favorite excerpts from the article:

"The liberal revolution of the Sixties, which separated morality from law, is leading us, says Sacks, to "a new form of barbarism". The view that "it's legal, so I can do it" is destroying the fabric of social harmony. Manners are disappearing, along with courtesy and shame.

. . .

The family courts, he said, are witnessing "a never-ending carnival of human misery". So, too, are hospitals and clinics, as the number of abortions in Britain continues to rise. When young hoodlums are prepared to hack someone to death in broad daylight, I suppose we should not be surprised that their teenage girlfriends switch off unborn life without remorse. I spoke to a leading female academic who said "more education" was needed to ease the problem. She was, I'm afraid, making excuses for many who are comfortable with abortion as a form of contraception.

. . .

While Court of Appeal judges fret over the human rights of terrorist suspects, blocking their extradition in case they don't get a fair trial, British law is happy to approve the extermination of unwanted foetuses at 24 weeks.

. . .

When our legal system loses its moral compass, it is only to be expected that on the mean streets of Britain many impressionable children will do the same."

Naturally we need people to return to God. But we also need a change in behavior and education as a result. So long as legal education and practice separate morality and law as completely as they now do, and so long as Christians in general separate good conduct from their expectations about how to live, we will keep coming back to where are now. It is true that we are saved by grace, not works - but we need to live in gratitude to God - not in licence. It is true that human laws cannot require all good or condemn all sin, but government and education must stop legally encouraging gross evil and immorality.

Movie Review: Expelled

2008-04-24T10:54:00.000-07:00

On Sunday afternoon, I had the privilege of seeing the new documentary motion picture Expelled featuring Ben Stein and a host of scientists. Expelled deals not so much with the technicalities of the debate over intelligent design, but rather with the issue of academic freedom within the scientific community. Expelled traces the firing and persecution of scientists and journalists over mere mentions of intelligent design. It then goes deeper to examine why intelligent design excites such fervor among many scientists and why freedom of speech about intelligent design is an important issue.

The film is highly artistic and uses clips from old documentary and newsreel footage as well as a few older major motion pictures in order to present iconic images that make us think, draw our thoughts in certain directions, and makes emotional impressions upon the viewer. The images used by this motion picture will be considered controversial. But I must say that their use is high art. Most controversial will be the argument showing the connection between hard-line Darwinian evolution and the eugenics movement, Planned Parenthood and Nazi Germany. Also controversial is the image of the Berlin Wall illustrating the walling off of intelligent design from the world of accepted scientific education, research, and publishing. The disturbing images do make the film unsuitable for small children.

The film only briefly goes into some of the technicalities behind intelligent design. It only uses animation to illustrate the complexities of the living cell. But the arguments made by the film will be understandable at a popular level and are sophisticated enough not to be boring. Both sides have their say as Stein interviews scientists opposed to intelligent design and intelligent design advocates. Clearly the documentary has an agenda, but it is an agenda that is presented to us in a reasonable fashion and with attention given to opposing positions. The film is masterfully edited. The editing is clearly a work of cinematic art. But the points made by the documentary film are legitimate. I strongly encourage people to see Expelled and to consider its message.

Darwinian evolution explains development within species, but is an entirely inadequate explanation for the original origin of life and for the rapid development of multiple existing species. Darwinian evolution cannot explain the so-called Cambrian Explosion, and does not adequately explain the origin of living cells. Now that we know enough about the complexity of the individual cell we know how difficult it would be for a cell to “evolve” one process at a time. In all of our experience and experimentation life does not come from non-life. Dead materials and chemicals do not result in life. Intelligent design posits that the most logical explanation for the vast amount of information in living cells. It is perhaps the only coherent explanation for the origin of life in a dead universe.

Scientists often claim that intelligent design has no place in science because it is not a materialistic process verifiable by purely materialistic assumptions and experiments. But Darwinian evolution as the origin to life is likewise not verifiable by experiment. Science can determine what can be duplicated, but it cannot determine what actually happened. We can say that based on current appearances certain things are possible (yet experiments fail to show life from non-life is possible), but we cannot say what actually occurred with any great certainty. Random material processes have not succeeded in providing a coherent explanation for the origin of life or for the origin of original living cells. Closed-mindedness toward the questions and hypotheses offered by intelligent design shows a closed-mindedness to truth rather than a reasoned commitment to reason.

Scientific opposition to intelligent design is predicated upon the idea that science is a discipline with clear boundaries. Law in the past two centuries has also attempted to make a similar claim. Just as science now claims that it should be free of metaphysics, philosophy, religion, and history, law has also claimed that it should be free of ethics, religion, and philosophy. But such freedom from other disciplines tends to result in error, distortion, and wrong doing rather than in knowledge, freedom, and truth. The reason is simple. The real world holds no such boundaries. Truth is a seamless web in which everything that is true is inter-related with everything else. Attempts at rending this seamless web are often based on worldviews that actually deny the reality of religion, ethics or morality. But then that isn’t searching for truth, that’s making a presuppositional conclusion and seeking to ignore anything contrary to the conclusion. Truth is best sought holistically rather than in a way that excludes any evidence outside certain boundaries and limitations. This doesn’t mean that we should consider things that are absurd or nonsensical or irrational or wrong. It merely means that we should consider everything that is genuinely true and logical. We should look at all of the evidence.

I once heard philosopher Frank Beckwith compare science to a detective story. We’ve all seen those detective shows on television and in the movies where the bad detective assumes that every death is a suicide and refuses to consider any evidence that might lead to a consideration of murder—particularly if the doors and windows to the room where the death occurred were locked. When we are watching a movie or television program, we always know instinctively that this foolish detective is likely to be wrong and that there is some way in which a murder actually occurred. In some ways, scientists opposed to intelligent design are like the detective with a one-track mind for suicide—they want to insist that the windows and doors were not only locked, but that they must stay locked to prevent any free moral agents from outside coming in and tampering with the evidence available in the room. The problem is that reality is not so neatly contained.

Science can focus on being science. But it needs to be open to connecting with and recognizing all truth. Disciplinary strengths and limitations should never become a reason for ignoring reality.

You would be wise to see the movie expelled and to consider the message it presents.

Gun Owners Not Angry After All

2008-04-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

At the link is an opinion article at the Wall Street Journal on the attitudes of gun owners verses non-gun owners. Apparently Obama's perception of gun owners in not accurate.

http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/html_article.php?id=77&CALL_URL=http://online.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB120856454897828049.html%3Fmod%3Dopinion_main_commentaries

Hat tip to Rantburg.

Hearing Steve Forbes

2008-04-15T16:21:00.000-07:00

Recently I was blessed to attend the installation of the new president of Westmont College, Dr. Gayle Beebe. At the installation and at the breakfast preceding the installation, we heard an address from Steve Forbes, the famous publisher and presidential candidate. Forbes’ addresses were excellent. His ability as a speaker and his insight into global affairs and economics has only continued to improve over time. Hearing the speech made me wish that John McCain would choose Steve Forbes for his vice presidential candidate. Forbes is one of the few figures who might please both pro-life evangelical conservatives and Wall Street at the same time. He is also innovative, brilliant, and willing to tell it like he sees it rather than seeking to be popular at all times.

Forbes said a variety of very worthwhile things. He restated what I am always saying on this blog about free market economics: that God designed the world in such a way that we get ahead best not through greed but rather through seeking to effectively meet the real needs of others. Forbes was also aware of the role that western skeptical philosophy, such as the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger, has played in the rise of Islamo-Fascism. And Forbes had been prophetic in his earlier presidential race in opposing the use of food grains such as corn to fuel automobiles. As he pointed out in the speech, this is resulting in a spike in world food prices and threatens food shortages. Food should be for eating rather than for fueling vehicles. He also emphasized what he saw as a need for stable monetary values as opposed to the roller coaster free float that is currently occurring with the dollar. All in all, it was a very interesting set of addresses and very much appreciated.

Not Again! California Assembly to Consider Spanking Ban

2008-04-04T15:47:00.000-07:00

I have just seen an e-mail from CRI here in California which states:

"Assemblywoman Sally Lieber has introduced a bill that will effectively ban spanking
in California. Identical to last year's highly publicized AB 755, this new AB 2943
will make it a crime to spank a child."

I discussed last year's bill at:
http://trinitariandon.blogspot.com/2007/01/california-proposes-law-against.html

Don't people like Ms. Lieber ever get tiered of trying to take away fundamental rights? Do they ever question their desire to ignore human nature and change exchange the proper order for unworkable Utopian schemes? Don't they have any fear that they are not wiser than the best parents of the last five thousand years? I know the answer is no. I just wonder sometimes. We need to be tireless too in defending the rights of parents to properly and reasonably discipline children of appropriate age. But until higher education, and especially legal education are re-framed in this country so that our schools do not keep producing endless copies of people who think (or don't think?) like Ms. Lieber, it is going to be a very long struggle.

Update: Happy news! The bill has been defeated. Many thanks to our legislators and those who called them.

Discussion of Abortion and Politics

2008-04-04T10:58:00.000-07:00

At the link is a great discussion on the same information about Obama and the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act I linked to earlier:
http://theologica.blogspot.com/2008/03/obamas-opposition-to-born-alive-infant.html

Strive for Reality

2008-04-03T10:36:00.000-07:00

Today's Cranmer (http://www.archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/) post included this wonderful Plato quote:

"' [T]he true lover of knowledge naturally strives for reality, and will not rest content with each set of particulars which opinion takes for reality, but soars with undimmed and unwearied passion till he grasps the nature of each thing as it is, with the mental faculty fitted to do so, that is, with the faculty which is akin to reality, and which approaches and unites with it, and begets intelligence and truth as children..' (The Republic, Book VI)."

Indeed. So we strive on, seeking, prayerfully, with God's help, to see things as they really are.

Sanctity of Life Speech

2008-04-01T10:07:00.000-07:00

Here is a Speech I gave at Rolling Hills Covenant Church's Sanctity of Human Life Event some time ago. At YouTube there is a play list of all five ten minute segments at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV0QjrnRLEI&feature=PlayList&p=E117A671781F7BE2&index=0&playnext=1

The Trinity Channel

2008-03-31T12:56:00.000-07:00

Trinity Law School in now posting video of various speakers on YouTube. The Trinity channel is at: http://www.youtube.com/user/TrinityLawSchool

Rights and Duties

2008-03-28T14:56:00.001-07:00

Every once and awhile, I come across Christians, and even lawyers who are Christians, who are comfortable with the idea of duties, but very uncomfortable with the idea of rights. There are also a number of interesting debates about exactly what a right is. I’m not sure there is a definitive answer to that question.

Some people believe that all rights have a reciprocal duty associated with them. A number of great legal scholars have maintained this, and a good friend of mine maintains this in conjunction with the theory that a right stems essentially from “belonging.” I suspect he may be right that belonging has something to do with rights, but I don’t think that’s really linked to the proper definition of a right. I’m skeptical about the idea that every right has a reciprocal duty. One reason is that when we think about the rights we’re familiar with, like the right to free speech, for example, the sort of duties we have to create are sort of backward, upside down kinds of duties. For example, in response to the right to free speech we could say the government has a duty not to interfere with someone else’s freedom of speech. But isn’t it kind of odd to say there is a duty not to do something? We don’t normally contend that people have an obligation to facilitate speech. Simply, the government should not stop proper free speech.

I think there is also some confusion involving rights that people maintain should be entitlements versus rights of the classic sort. For example, I would maintain that people do have a right to health care. But by that I mean that no one should interfere with someone else being able to procure or obtain health care. I also mean that in the ideal world, people would all be able to obtain good health care. I do not mean that the taxpayer has an obligation to pay for everyone else’s health care. Many people who think there’s a right to health care would maintain that the government (which really means all of us) has an obligation to pay for everyone’s health care. I do think that there is, instead, a sort of charitable moral obligation. Providers of health care have a moral obligation to help those who cannot afford health care, and, in fact, they generally do just that. Hospitals provide millions of people with free treatment every year when those people can’t afford to pay. But charity is something that has to be given from the heart willingly—it isn’t something that can be taken through the force of a legal coercive right. There is great difference between the fact that we ought to help the poor and saying that the poor can demand our help and make the government take money from us by force if we don’t help them. An entitlement of that sort in a sense makes giving meaningless.

Aristotle long ago argued that one of the reasons government should not eliminate private property was because eliminating private property deprives everyone of the opportunity to be virtuous. Virtue in large part deals with how we give our money and how we spend our money. If no one has any private property, there are no decisions about how to give or how to spend. Hence there is a whole area of virtue that remains undeveloped. By the same token, I don’t think it makes sense to recognize the existence of entitlement rights of the socialist sort because they too deprive people of the opportunity to be virtuous. We must maintain a distinction between moral duty and legal right in such cases. If we do decide, as a people, to provide money to the poor for food or health care, it should be seen as national charity given by all tax payers, and not something that can be demanded as an entitlement.

So if a right isn’t essentially always an entitlement and doesn’t involve a reciprocal duty in every case, what exactly is a right? My thought is that a right is a predisposition of justice. That is to say, based on God’s nature there is a certain order in which the universe is designed to function normatively. There are certain things that are good or evil, just or unjust, the way they’re supposed to be, or the way they’re not supposed to be. When things are in accord with this general order, we can say that they are just. There are then certain ways in which to describe a just order that indicate certain predispositions of the way things ought to be unless there are heavy countervailing factors. So for example, people ought to generally be free to practice whatever religious faith they believe in without anyone interfering with their freedom of conscience. They have a right to free exercise of religion. This right can occasionally be countervailed if, for example, an individual believes in practicing active human sacrifice. There is also a right to freedom of the press which can also be overridden temporarily during times of emergency and which is limited by the law of defamation. There is also a right in all cases of criminal and civil accusations to a full and fair hearing by an impartial tribunal, with proper rules of evidence, that allows for a good faith attempt at discovering the truth of what really happened, and that will base the ultimate disposition of the case on reality as it can best be determined. In countries like the United States, this right grows and blossoms in many particular customs associated with the way in which we provide this due process. But in certain situations, such as international combat with combatants who do not abide by or obey the principles of international law, a more minimal level of due process would be both practical and just. Hence rights are essentially shorthand descriptions of the general predisposition of justice—of the way things ought to be in a just order and just system. They do not necessarily create reciprocal duties but creation of duties or the existence of duties may be an appropriate way to maintain rights or to vindicate them.

So those are my basic ideas about rights. I’m curious about what you, the reader, think and if you are aware of anyone else who has said basically the same thing. Your comments are appreciated.

Only Mostly Dead - Apparent Brain Death not Always a Reliable Criterion

2008-03-26T16:59:00.000-07:00

Another case of a person who appeared to be brain dead and recovered at the link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080324/ap_on_fe_st/not_dead

The California Home-Schooling Case In Re Rachel L.

2008-03-25T14:23:00.001-07:00

On February 28, 2008, the Second Appellate District Division 3 of the Court of Appeal for California issued an opinion in the case called “In Re Rachel L.” This opinion denies that there is a fundamental right for parents without a teacher’s credential to homeschool their children outside the statutory exceptions to California’s compulsory education law. It does not ban all homeschooling. The sections of the law quoted by the court do not mention homeschooling, but have been interpreted to allow some homeschooling in certain circumstances, such as when parents with a teacher’s credential set up a private school in the home. The opinion is only an appellate opinion; it is not binding on all appellate districts in the state of California, but is only truly binding on courts in the Second Appellate District. The Second District includes Los Angeles and Ventura. Courts in other districts regard the arguments of fellow appellate courts in the same state as arguments that should be given attention and deference, but which need not be agreed with if the other courts disagree in good faith on what the law, as laid down by higher authorities or equal authorities, requires. The opinion is still significant because it is always damaging for an appellate court to deny the existence of a fundamental right that really exists, even if the court’s opinion has a narrow practical impact. The gradual and incremental accumulation of ideas in multiple opinions is how legal change often occurs. Each opinion going in the wrong direction makes it easier for another court to head in the wrong direction.

In Re Rachel L. is an extremely controversial case. Undoubtedly the judges involved mean well and are trying to apply the law as they see it to protect children and further the interests of the state and people of California. But judges are only human. And if they hear weak arguments for the truth and strong arguments for error, it is often easy to go the wrong way, particularly if the outcome seems best for the particular parties before the court as the court sees them. In Re Rachel L. may be a good example of the adage that bad facts make bad law. The court doesn’t come right out and say it, but it does insinuate in its opinion that it suspects the parents of the children involved in this case, or at least somebody in their home, of child abuse. It also suspects that the reason that children are being homeschooled is to prevent the discovery of that abuse. Now none of that may be even remotely true, but the court’s intuitions may color its approach to the case. The court also mentions that the father is said to have recently said that educating his children outside the home exposes them to “snitches.” (Not a helpful sentiment in litigating your case—although not the worst faux pas I’ve ever heard. The worst was a criminal sentencing hearing where the young defendant appeared in court with a tee shirt on that had a bloody skull cleft by a bloody hatchet on it.) If we’re going to take homeschooling to the Supreme Court, while it is difficult to control the sort of case that gets litigated, it would be much better if we had two unimpeachable but uncredentialed college professors giving their children a rigorous Great Books education who had been subjected to the ire of an unreasonable school board.

The whole tone of the opinion is that parents are somehow doing their children a disservice by homeschooling them. While there are undoubtedly those who do a poor job of homeschooling, nearly all parents love their children and want what they believe to be best for them. Most parents try to make sure that their children get a good education. Parents normally don’t choose to homeschool unless they obtain the resources and training necessary to make sure that they do a good job. I don’t think for a minute that being able to educate your children requires getting an education credential. While many education programs are no doubt excellent, and while knowing how to teach is beneficial, not all credentialed programs are helpful, not all credentialed persons know how to teach, and not all uncredentialed persons are unqualified to teach. I have known many people who are credentialed and actually attended a few classes with one person. My experience and the experience with my friend was that the California credentialing process is largely dedicated to political correctness and indoctrination and has little to do with actually learning how to teach students what they need to know. I also think that most parents love their children more than the average bureaucrat. While the set of people who want to homeschool their children may include a handful of the stereotypical anti-intellectuals, like those depicted as resisting public education in old 1960’s westerns, there are certainly plenty of teachers who mass produce educational problems within the public school system. To make a literary reference, there are “Dolores Umbridges” out there in the public school system in numbers at least comparable to bad homeschooling parents.

The appellate court notes that the trial court found a right to homeschool but still had some reservations about homeschooling. The trial court indicated that it was worried that homeschooling would interfere with the children’s ability to interact with people outside the family, deprive them of the help of people outside the family if something is “amiss” in the children’s lives, and prevent them from developing emotionally. While there might be rare cases in which these things are true, it certainly isn’t true for the vast majority of homeschooling parents. Law should be made based upon general truths about most people rather than on odd exceptional circumstances. After all, child abuse is already independently illegal. It isn’t necessary to outlaw homeschooling in order to try to prevent child abuse. My experience with homeschoolers is that they are more poised, better educated, better socialized, and far more capable in social interaction than the vast majority of people I meet who were educated in the public schools. I think that perhaps our system actually exposes students to peer pressure much earlier than it really should. Students are more capable of being socialized properly when they’ve been socialized in the family first. They’re much more likely to learn manners, good behavior, and a coherent worldview at home when properly homeschooled than they are in the incoherent post-modern collage of the public schools.

In the In Re Rachel L. opinion, the court briefly covers some of the cases that ought to be seen as supportive of a right to homeschooling and a few very old California cases that support compulsory public education. The court completely mis-states the holding in Pierce vs Society of Sisters 268 US 510, a Supreme Court of the United States case. The Pierce case allowed an injunction against a statute essentially banning private schools and requiring all children between the ages of 8-16 to attend public school. The U.S. Supreme Court believed that such a statue was unconstitutional in that it interfered with the liberty guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The court in Pierce said:

“We think it entirely plain that the act of 1922 unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control. As often heretofore pointed out, rights guaranteed by the Constitution may not be abridged by legislation which has no reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the state. The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public [school] teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have a right, coupled with a high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

The In Rachel L. court tries to distinguish Pierce by saying that since California law allows alternatives to public education, it isn’t really unconstitutional. I think that the point of Pierce, however, is that states don’t have any business trying to standardize education. Parents have a right to guide their children’s education in different ways, and I think Pierce is correct in this respect. God has entrusted children to their parents. It is the responsibility of parents to raise children. There is nothing wrong with them delegating some of their children’s education to institutions voluntarily, but it is primarily the parents’ responsibility and the parents’ right to control and direct their children’s education. Parents have not given up that right to the state merely by being citizens of a republic. It is not merely a right, but also an obligation. While parents may allow others to help educate their children, it is ultimately the parents who are responsible for the education of their children. That responsibility should neither be taken lightly nor removed from the parents—even by a well-intentioned state.

Another case mentioned in In Re Rachel L. but not adequately dealt with is Meyer vs Nebraska 262 US 390. In Meyer, the Supreme Court of the United States invalidated a statute that made it unlawful to teach children the German language. The court notes that Plato and others have understandably sought to use education to mold children into model citizens. The court notes that the state does have the power to “compel attendance at some school and to make reasonable regulations for all schools.” But the court saw no reasonable basis for refusing children to learn German. The court notes that the Fourteenth Amendment is not merely about freedom from bodily restraint, “but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, to establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and, generally, to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the ordinary pursuit of happiness by free men.” I would argue that homeschooling is part of the fundamental right to bring up children to worship God according to the dictates of one’s own conscience. When we deprive parents of the opportunity to educate their children at home, we effectively make it possible for the state to abridge freedom of speech, conscience, and assembly by indoctrinating children while they are the most malleable and the most vulnerable.

If the state is genuinely concerned that students learn while being homeschooled, they merely have to set general standards. In any standard based test on general reading, writing, mathematics, or science, I imagine that most homeschooled children will exceed most public school children. So there is clearly a less restrictive means of obtaining the end of quality education, within the fundamental rights of parents, without a ban on homeschooling. I think that this failure to use this less restrictive means should render the current California compulsory education law unconstitutional. Credentialing is not as well tailored to the end, and places an unreasonable burden on the parents’ right to educate their children.

In most of the balance of the In Re Rachel L. opinion, the court deals with a variety of old California cases upholding California’s compulsory education statute at different stages of its development. What the court neglects to do is to deal with the advisory arguments in the dozens of cases in other jurisdictions that uphold the right to homeschooling. The court also fails to deal with the fact that homeschooling is considered a fundamental right in most other states. The fact that California’s compulsory education statute was believed constitutional in the 1950s or even in the 1960s certainly does not mean that it goes without saying that there is no fundamental right to homeschooling recognized today. If the weight of opinion outside of California had been on their side, I have no doubt that the court would have looked at opinions and realities in other states.

In the end, it’s very sad that the court has chosen to take this route. It is going to be necessary for those who believe in homeschooling to work to get this opinion de-published, overruled, or questioned. We also need to prepare for other appeals in other cases. We should also consult our legislators and try to get them to change the California law to expressly allow homeschooling. If all of this fails, we may need to undertake an initiative to amend the California constitution to provide an express recognition of the right to homeschool. The Pacific Justice Institute and the Homeschool Legal Defense Fund are already involved in these and other efforts to patch this “leak in the dam” and secure the right to homeschool in California. The governor of California and other public officials have been very supportive of the right to homeschool. This is a fight that can be won if approached properly. But until legal education begins producing more lawyers who believe in the fundamental right to homeschool and know how to argue for it, this right will always be in jeopardy. This is why law schools like Trinity are so important.

UPDATE: The Court of Appeal has vacated the original opinion and decided to rehear the appeal. This is great news. Now friends of the court like PJI and HSLDF should have an opportunity to file briefs and make sure that the legal arguments are fully presented to the court. While little is known about the case, it appears that did not happen last time around.

Are There Jurisdictions of Ideas?

2008-03-20T10:57:00.001-07:00

Have you ever tried to have a discussion with someone in which you’re trying to persuade them of the truth, or to perhaps get the truth out of them, and instead of dealing with truth as though it were a unitary and seamless whole, they seek to avoid dealing with sticky problems of things we don’t know or things that appear contradictory by invoking a jurisdictional barrier between different sorts of ideas? For example, in the debate over intelligent design it is popular today for scientists to say “Oh I’m sorry, intelligent design is theology or philosophy, it just isn’t science.” In other words, they seek to rule out a discussion about what really happened by saying that the question of what really happened belongs in some other discipline that they’re not willing to talk about. I’ve found the same weakness in Aristotle. Aristotle is happy to assume that things have a telos or purpose within their design or nature. But Aristotle is unwilling to discuss the issue of the designer that must have been present for the design or nature to have normative implications. I don’t know enough about Ayn Rand to know if this is true of all her followers, but I’ve had at least one very intelligent believer in Ayn Rand’s philosophy tell me that she takes the human mind’s capacity to understand and reason through concepts for granted while having no explanation as to exactly why this capacity exists. Apparently Ms. Rand would say that that is an issue for science to discover rather than an issue for philosophy to determine. But of course this is an essential part of developing a philosophical system. The epistemology must not only explain that we have knowledge, but provide some coherent internally consistent theory about how it is possible for us to have that knowledge. If we do, in fact, have a knowledge of universals and, if as seems to be the case, universals cannot be known purely through empirical experience, it would seem that there must be a God who in some way illumines our minds or created our minds so that we can know, understand, and communicate universals like love, beauty, truth, and unity. And isn’t it also the case that we all have a knowledge of the greatest universal of all—God Himself. We both know He exists and have very little trouble understanding what sort of being He is despite the fact that while there is evidence for Him in the empirical world, His precise nature is not exactly like anything within the material world. Christians are not innocent of this either. One of the ways in which some Dutch Reformed political scholars have sought to deal with the problems of apparent conflicts between law, morality, science, etc. is to give them each spheres or jurisdictions in which each discipline is to be allowed to reign and rule regardless of the contrary implications of the others.

I don’t really believe it’s proper to divide up ideas by jurisdiction. God Himself is the source of all real truth and knowledge. God is a unity. While we can discuss His various attributes in a loose sort of way, those attributes are a unified whole within Him. We know what love is because of God embodying love. We know what justice is because of God’s embodiment of justice. It isn’t really possible though to truly separate love and justice completely because they all find themselves in God and God is a unified whole, not a patchwork quilt or picture puzzle assembled from unique pieces. And so it is with all truth. While human beings cannot know everything, both because of our lack of ability and our lack of time, we divide ideas up into disciplines that we study independently like nibbling at various items on a smorgasbord, but truth itself is not easily divided. There is no dividing line between realities scientific, philosophical, theological, or ethical. Things are either real and true or not. The demarcations between areas of study do not indicate demarcations between areas of reality. I would suggest that when we invoke the jurisdictional barriers, we are often trying to escape from truth rather than to pursue and discover it. It is almost always a mistake to try to escape from truth. Fleeing or repressing the truth almost always has negative consequences. Indeed, since truth is tied up in and bound to God Himself, whenever we say yes to genuine truth, we are saying yes to God, and whenever we flee genuine truth, we are fleeing God Himself. Of course I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to say that we always know particular things to be true or that we will in this life know everything that is true or only believe things that are true. But as a philosophical predisposition, we ought to pursue genuine truth rather than seeking to avoid it. And I think that when we invoke jurisdictional barriers as a means of avoiding contradictions within our thought, we are, in fact, often trying to escape the truth.

David Forte on the Commerce Clause

2008-03-17T17:30:00.000-07:00

On March 7, I was happy to attend a meeting of the local Federalist Society chapter. We heard an excellent presentation by Professor David Forte on the Commerce Clause. Forte pointed out how in most of the jurisprudence since the late 1940s the Supreme Court has given the Congress a blank check for legislating about nearly anything via the justification of the Commerce Clause. This is problematic to people who see the Constitution as attempting to set up a government of limited powers. It also seems contrary to the founders’ intent. Why specify carefully in the Constitution that the Congress had the power to legislate about things like patents and post offices if the Commerce Clause was meant to legislate about everything?

Forte points out that two of the major approaches to a more limited version of the Commerce Clause involve either a quantitative approach or a qualitative approach to how the problem the legislation seeks to remedy affects interstate commerce. Forte proposes a fourth alternative to the blank check, the qualitative or the quantitative approach based on the opinions of Judge Benjamin Cardozo. Forte believes that Cardozo was really advocating a foreseeability based proximate cause approach to Commerce Clause litigation. The Congress would need to show that the mischief they were legislating against had a foreseeable proximate causal impact on commerce. This does seem like an interesting alternative.

Book Review: The Harry Potter Books

2008-03-12T11:05:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reading all seven of J.K. Rowling’s books about Harry Potter. I have both praise and a caution.

There tends to be a great battle among Christians between those who reject the Harry Potter books completely because they involve witchcraft, and those who love the Harry Potter books because they incorporate Christian themes such as the struggle between good and evil and life after death. I think that both sides are partially right and partially wrong.

I would first give my cautionary warning: the Harry Potter books are not fit for small children who do not yet know that the occult is wrong or know the difference between real good and real evil. The Harry Potter books are very complicated. One of the major themes of the books is death. Another major theme is the problem of revenge, dislike, hatred, and anger. For children’s books involving children at school, the books are extremely violent. And it is true that the books do incorporate some ideas and practices from the world of secondary witchcraft and historic alchemy. Children who do not understand why magic is wrong are likely to pick up sticks to use as wands and to go around attempting to cast spells as part of their play after reading the Harry Potter books. I think there is a risk that reading Harry Potter could interest children in the occult or in possible experiments with alchemy (that could be physically dangerous). But the books do not actually create a view of witchcraft or alchemy that makes it practical in the real world. So for older and more mature children, I do not think that the books are particularly dangerous. Indeed, if one understands them, the books can be quite enjoyable.

After having read the books, I am willing to accept that J.K. Rowling may be a Christian of some sort. She does incorporate a variety of Christian themes and arch-types in her work. It is also true that she is a post-modern person and incorporates some of the themes, ideas, and approaches of the post-modern worldview either consciously or unconsciously. Nevertheless, I must say that the Harry Potter books are a magnificent work of literature and enjoyable to read.

Many others have already documented the amazing literary aspects of the Harry Potter series. One of the most well-known is John Granger, author of Looking for God in Harry Potter, Unlocking Harry Potter, and a blog at http://hogwartsprofessor.com/. Granger describes many of the ways in which Rowling incorporates Christian themes, pays homage to classic Christian literature such as Dante, and incorporates a philosophy of character change called literary alchemy. I haven’t read Granger’s books and have only looked at his blog, but I definitely think that he is on to something.

The Harry Potter books are not just separated individual stories, but rather are each part of a larger story. Ideas that are mentioned in the first book and the subsequent books culminate together to explain and set up the situation in the final book. Every little tidbit of information that you’re given by the author is used at some point or other in the course of the stories. They form a whole that is locked together in quite an amazing way. In a sense, this sort of writing in which past events, current events and future events all come together to work things out just perfectly is a literary testimony to providence. In a random world, it would not be the case that people would always learn along the way exactly the fact that they will need to know in order to solve a problem near the end. And yet this is exactly what happens in these books and in many other Christian works of literature such as the writings of C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers, not to mention writers like Charles Dickens or William Shakespeare. Writing that expresses a providentially guided reality is antithetical to the materialist scientific worldview whether its adherents recognize this or not. These books can be said to reflect a Christian worldview if for no other reason than because they clearly reflect a world that is guided by providence in which things work out as though they were planned even though they could not have been planned by mere mortals.

Another aspect of the books that could be thought of as consistent with the Christian worldview is Rowling’s admission of the reality of good and evil. Rowling describes a world in which all human beings are flawed. All struggle with sin and difficulty within themselves. But some of them are clearly worse than others, having sold themselves out to purer and more vicious forms of evil. But there are aspects of Rowling’s dealings with good and evil that are somewhat post-modern – that is to say they imply a world in which morality is relative to culture, family, or individual rather than implying a world in which morality is flowing from a universally accessible objective moral order. While Rowling incorporates many good themes and plot motifs that reject racism, bigotry, and stereotypes in a variety of ways, there are at least three examples of a more post modern approach to morality. First, Rowling almost seems to accept that being on the “dark arts” side of things is in some way natural and acceptable for some people. Second, the witches and wizards slice and dice various relatively intelligent sentient creatures in order to make their potions and medicinal compounds with no moral qualms. And, third, no real thought is given to the question of whether or not practices like divination might be wrong rather than merely ineffective.

There are ways in which Rowling attempts to make her magical world more compatible with the Christian world. For example, she admits in one of the later books that ghosts are not actually the souls of dead people but rather “projections” of them. She is not at all clear about what may or may not happen to people after death. At one point, Harry despairs about facing death. He does see visions of people who have gone on to death before him. But are these, like the ghosts, merely projections or are they actually the real souls of the real departed people?

The magic in Harry Potter differs from that in Narnia and Middle Earth in that it looks so much more like our popular images of occult magic – black pointed hats and all. But, the magic used in Harry Potter is, as other writers have pointed out, “incantational” rather than “invocational.” In other words, people are witches and wizards in Rowling’s world because they have magic in them that they are able to project into the outside world in accord with various laws not unlike the laws of physics. In the Christian worldview, occult power is generally seen as flowing from the invocation or use of the power of unclean demonic spirits. In the real world both invocational and incantational magic are problematic. While magic, in the occult sense, may seem like an application of laws like the laws of physics, it is, in a sense, an attempt to force God’s hand or to make the universe function in certain ways that it is not actually designed to function in – to obtain forbidden power by forbidden means. The way Rowling deals with magic in her books makes it seem quite different - like a natural talent, power, or ability within certain human beings. The mature can accept this conceit in literature. The weak of character may be lead astray by it unless assisted or guided by the more mature. After a thousand years of Christian freedom in the west, most people have come to deny the existence of spiritual power. Indeed, most appearances of the occult in the west are shams, frauds, and play acting. But, as C.S. Lewis has written, there is real personal evil in the world, and it is as much a mistake to ignore the reality of evil as it is to become obsessed with it. But one can read Harry Potter without being drawn into the occult.

Some people have suggested that in Rowling’s world the distinction between wizards and witches on the one hand and non-magical people known as “muggles” on the other, is one that involves two different species, and hence there is no real problem with genuine humans getting involved in magic. But this is not true. In Rowling’s world, children of normal muggle parents can be born with enough magic in them to be witches or wizards. By the same token, the children of witches or wizards can be born without magic in them and be what they call“squibs.” No explanation is offered as to why some people have this innate magical power versus others, but the innate magical power seems to render them far more durable than non-magical human beings. Characters of the Harry Potter stories survive many physical injuries that would clearly prove fatal to non-magical people in the real non-magical world. The apparent between children attempting to become witches or warlocks like those in the Harry Potter stories is not their muggle birth, but rather the problem that we have no magic wands made with the magical creature parts such as dragon heartstrings or unicorn hairs required for the direct application of magical power in Rowling’s magical world. But I don’t suppose this will stop new ageish human beings from looking for such magical devices even though they cannot exist.

But while I would disagree with many of the ways in which Rowling goes about her project, no one who has read the books can contest that she tries to deal with some important themes. Rowling emphasizes the power importance of both real love and romantic love. Truly God’s love is far more important, but one must understand and deal with the realities of romantic love as well in order to fully live life in the real world. Rowling also illustrates the problems of prejudices and loyalties, but from a very post-modern aspect. She shows how they can turn out well or turn out badly, but that the way they turn out is in many ways almost beyond the control of those who have them. Rowling also extensively mocks government. But then one must admit that government is so often worth mocking. I wonder if Rowling realizes that the Ministry of Magic in her books is more like the real labor government of England not because it abuses civil rights, but because it fails to recognize the true nature and power of radical Islamo-Fascism in much the same way that the Ministry of Magic refused to recognize the return of Voldemort (Rowling’s villain).

The Harry Potter books start out at a lower reading level and gradually increase to a higher reading level. The vocabulary goes from relatively simple to relatively complex. The concepts and situations to which the reader is exposed go from the dramatic but simple to the deeply complicated and troubling. In that sense, the books do appear to be designed to correspond to the growth and continued education of children over time. But as I say, I don’t think that Harry Potter is really good for young children who don’t understand why the occult is bad or who don’t understand the difference between good and evil and the importance of not taking revenge or of disliking people purely because they have irritating personalities. On the other hand, the books are extremely enjoyable and a wonderful reading experience for mature readers. They can stimulate thinking about character, loyalty, romance etc. The books are suspenseful, engaging, and fun.

Christian adults should read Harry Potter in order to be culturally literate. I believe that they will be seen as classical literature at some point in the future. Certainly a variety of elements including the fairy tale of the Deathly Hallows will be grist for the English professional journal writing mill for decades to come. For people who have any sort of reservation about adding to J.K. Rowling’s already vast wealth, the books can always be read by checking them out from the library or buying copies at used bookstores. But they probably should be read—just don’t go out and try to do any magic because of what you read.

Obama's Abortion Views

2008-03-10T16:22:00.000-07:00

Michele McGinty of “Reformed Chicks Blabbing” (http://blog.beliefnet.com/reformedchicksblabbing/) at Beliefnet posted a story on March 5, 2008, drawing attention to Obama’s extreme pro-abortion position. She, in turn, linked a Wednesday, March 5, 2008, post from Between Two Worlds ( http://theologica.blogspot.com/2008/03/obamas-opposition-to-born-alive-infant.html ) that documents Obama’s systematic opposition to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act over a period of three years when he not only voted against the bill, but argued against it on the floor of the Senate twice. The post in turn linked a January 10, 2008, article by Jill Stanek describing the ten reasons why Obama was opposed to Illinois’ Born Alive Infant Protection Act when he was a state senator. It is worth noting that the ten reasons are all notably bad. Obama tries to claim that the activity forbidden by the bill—letting babies born alive during an abortion live—never occurs. This is simply not true. There are documented instances of it. And if it never did occur, there would be no legitimate reason for not making it illegal. Obama also shows his lack of understanding of legislative distinctions by claiming that making a baby born alive as the result of an abortion a person would require that unborn babies also be regarded by the law as persons. I certainly do believe that the law should regard unborn babies as persons, but unfortunately, this is an easy distinction for courts to make because they think personhood status is something they can assign or take away. Obama also thought that allowing the babies to live would be a “burden on women” which makes no sense at all. The natural mother will not need to raise the baby. She need never hear about it again. Obama also claimed that there is no reason to oppose abortion that is not tied to a particular faith. This is simply not true. Even people who have no faith at all can recognize the idea that a human being is human and entitled to human rights from conception when its biological life obviously begins rather than at some arbitrary point chosen for the convenience of other human beings. As Hadley Arkes has pointed out, we would consider it tyranny of the grossest kind if we applied the same sort of logic to any other class of human beings. Obama also tried to claim that the Born Alive Protection Act was purely political. This too is an argument that makes little or no sense. Obviously the bill has an effect or no one would be interested in passing it.

For all his supposed warm fuzziness and desire to find a new way, it would appear that Obama’s position on abortion is actually harsh, extremist, and old. It is decidedly not warm and fuzzy. There is nothing kind and generous about allowing a living newborn to die simply because its mother had tried to kill it earlier and been unsuccessful. Nearly everyone in the House and Senate have been unanimous in supporting the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. Opposition to it is indeed an extremist position.

Dean McConnell on Apologetics.com

2008-03-06T11:41:00.000-08:00

I recently had the pleasure of appearing on Apologetics.com's radio show. I was a guest for the show on God and Governing, and a guest host for the recent show on globalization. On the show we did not have time to get into all the negative aspects of globalization, but we did talk about the opportunities it presents for the gospel. Both shows are available as pod casts at the Apologetics.com web site at: http://www.apologetics.com/default.jsp

A Christian View of Human Law

2008-03-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

We have uploaded my lecture on A Christian View of Human Law to Godtube. It is in three 30 minute segments. There is no video to it, so the viewer will see a few pictures as they listen. You may want to press pause as soon at it begins and give it some time to load.

http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=2731b7307f0e425b4530

http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=34406d84a9bff13f98a6

http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=148d5f45de46e1c801b1

You can also find them at Trinity's Profile on Godtube.

http://www.godtube.com/TrinityLawSchool

Natural Law Symposium Questions: Is the Natural Law Sufficient for States?

2008-02-29T13:51:00.000-08:00

God has revealed His moral law to human beings in multiple ways. We call His express revelation through the Bible “special revelation” and His revelation through the divine light, cause and effect, the nature of human beings, and the order of creation “general revelation.” Is general revelation sufficient for running a state? Many Christian writers have suggested that it is not.

While the Bible makes God’s revelation to us far more clear and specifically describes the work of God in history through Jesus Christ, it still must be said that while the Bible is the most desirable source for knowing God’s will, that the natural law is sufficient for running a human state. Why? Because for millennia states have existed without the Bible. Hence, it must be possible to run a state without the Bible. While most states founded on ideas other than Christianity and Judaism have been oppressive and unjust in one way or another (but then even states run by Christians are often oppressive and unjust in one way or another), there still have been remarkable successful states that relied primarily upon general revelation. While both the Greek city-states and the Roman republic had severe problems, if one compares them to states throughout human history, it is apparent that the Roman republic and the government of city-states like Athens were actually fairly good governments despite their injustices and abuses. The structure of the Roman republic was probably a better government than the proposed government of the states of Europe under the E.U. The small village democracies of tiny villages throughout the world throughout history cannot be said to be inherently bad governments. They merely reflect the character of their own citizens. While such good governments are rare, they are undoubtedly possible. Calvin compared the light offered by general revelation to lightening strikes out on a plain. In some ways this is not a bad analogy. We see a few very bright spots in the general darkness showing that relative success through the application of general revelation is possible. Hence, it must be said to be truthful that while it is preferable for states to be based on the entire Christian worldview—which would require access to the Scripture—the general revelation is sufficient for the running of a state.

Natural Law Symposium Questions: Is Mercy Part of the Natural Law?

2008-02-27T15:40:00.000-08:00

One of the questions raised at Liberty’s Natural Law Symposium was whether or not mercy is a part of the natural law. Some of the professors in attendance indicated that they believed it was not. They thought that only justice was required by the natural law or the moral law and that mercy is something else altogether.

I believe that mercy is part of the natural law. To begin with, it is always difficult when we begin attempting to completely parse and radically separate divine attributes. Both mercy and justice are attributes of God. They find their pure expression in His own nature. As a result, true justice and true mercy must be in some way compatible or reconcilable in the person of God and in the person of Jesus Christ. Certainly we see this in God’s fulfilling the law in Christ and providing for our salvation through His sacrifice of Himself in atonement for our sins. But what do justice and mercy mean for human government?

As this blog has pointed out before, human law cannot be based on the pure totality of the moral law. All human beings violate aspects of the moral law every hour of every day. As a result, we cannot enact the moral law into human law and then enforce it in its entirety. To begin with, many violations of the moral law are simply beyond the state’s power to find out. And it would not be good to have a state with the totalitarian power to figure out what we thought or said. All human legal systems have to be a compromise. They must be based upon true morality but they cannot require everything that is moral or forbid everything immoral. If they did so, no human being could stand before the law. Since this is true at the very root of the nature of human legal systems, and since the natural law is a revelation from God intended in large part not only to encourage human self-government but to provide an international and trans-cultural standard for human government, it follows that it must be part of the natural law to recognize that human government must incorporate a compromise with pure morality. It should be the case that all human beings are aware of the fact that they are incapable of meeting the demands of pure and absolute morality. Hence they all know by reason and intuition that human government must be a compromise with the demands of absolute morality that both restrains evil for practical purposes and also allows human freedom in some way so that we are not all constantly guilty of violating the government’s rules all the time. Human law should forbid only the worst crimes, things that most of us can avoid doing most of the time. It would seem obvious from the nature of human government as ordained and designed by God. The inherent limitation of the scope of human law is an inclusion of mercy in human law – an inclusion supported by the Natural Law as in tune with God’s nature, God’s design for human government, and necessitated by human nature.

Many people try to deal with this question of the limited power of government by asserting that government’s power is limited by its “jurisdiction.” In the Scriptures they seek to find implied jurisdictional mandates limiting the power of government. While I respect this effort, I do not believe that it is really the strongest argument. While there are implied jurisdictional notions in the Bible, none of them are discussed expressly. In addition, while we do see substantive discussions of the roles of government in advanced non-Christian societies, we do not see the concept of jurisdiction as such appearing internationally and trans-culturally to the degree that one would expect if it were the primary limitation on government in the natural law or divine order of creation. Instead, I would say that the notion of jurisdiction is partially related to the application of other deeper concepts. One of these deeper concepts is the idea of mercy - that government must to some degree be merciful instead of requiring absolute morality and absolute justice.

We can see that Mercy is part of the Natural Law if we look at human reactions to an historic situation. One of the rulers of ancient Athens was Draco. Draco’s name is tied to the origin of our word “draconian.” Draco’s law ordered the death penalty for nearly all crimes. Draco said “the lesser crimes deserve death, and I have no greater penalty for the greater crimes.” Draco was succeeded by the Solon, the composer of Athens democratic constitution. Solon replaced the laws of Draco with a new legal system that did not punish all crimes with death, and allowed juries to choose between a penalty offered by the prosecution and a penalty offered by the defense. The Draconian code could be said to be supported by the moral law because “the wages of is death.” If there was no mercy in the Natural Law or in Justice then the Draconian code might be the most just. But we do not recognize it as such. Instead, generations of people, including generations of Christians have heralded the laws of Solon as more just and more in accord with Natural Law and Justice than those of Draco. While generations of humans can be wrong, their opinion on the application of universals like justice is some evidence of the truth – especially when not contradicted by scripture.

Proportionality of penalties to crimes and the mitigation of sentences when appropriate are both aspects of Natural Law, Justice and Mercy. The three go together rather than being in strict opposition.

Natural Law Symposium at Liberty

2008-02-27T14:22:00.001-08:00

I have recently returned from presenting a paper at a Natural Law Symposium at Liberty Law School put on by the Liberty Law School Law Review. The event was really splendid. I was impressed with Liberty’s hospitality and with their students and faculty members. All of the invited speakers were very interesting and very much worth hearing and talking to. There were many interesting questions raised at the symposium. Here at the blog I will address some of these questions in future posts.

Your Questions Answered: Why is Huckabee Still Running?

2008-02-25T15:54:00.000-08:00

I’ve been asked why Arkansas governor Mick Huckabee has stayed in the presidential race even though it is quite clear that he cannot win the nomination based on delegate count. I have some speculative reasons why he would continue the race:
1. The more delegates he has, the more influence he can have at the convention in matters like platform votes or discussions. I think Huckabee would stand firmly for the pro-life plank of the Republican platform and it will be important to have people who are willing to fight against legalizing stem cell research in the Republican platform.
2. I think he wants to be able to say that he came in second in the presidential primary season rather than third or fourth if there is another opportunity to run in four or eight years.
3. This is politics—you never know what might happen. What if, heaven forbid, McCain has a heart attack or a stroke before the convention? The more delegates Huckabee has committed to him at the convention, the more likely he might be able to salvage a nomination in the event of an unforeseeable crisis or emergency.
4. I think he likes running for president. People really enjoy traveling and making speeches, etc.
5. This is probably designed to help him be in a better position for a presidential run in four or eight years vis á vis people knowing him, understanding him, and having a campaign machine available to him. I’m not conversant enough on the current incarnation of the campaign finance laws to know whether it would be legal or not, but I imagine he can maintain a campaign war chest for the next time around with whatever money he is able to raise this time. In fact, he may need more money to pay off debts from this campaign.

So, those are my speculations about why he continues to run.

Neiswonger on Post-Modernism etc.

2008-02-12T10:02:00.000-08:00

Click on the title for a link to an interesting blog by TLS alum and TIU grad student Chris Neiswonger on Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Church.

The Death Penalty and Belief

2008-02-11T13:29:00.000-08:00

As many have pointed out, if you are a thinking radical materialist, there are few things worse than death. So, such secular people tend to oppose the death penalty. At this link is a Weekly Standard article on how religious people tend to be more comfortable with the death penalty:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/656wdzwt.asp?pg=1 . Hat tip to "This Wasn't in the Plan": http://vesler.blogspot.com/ .

If you believe in Christianity, death is not the end or the worst thing that can happen at all. So it sort of makes sense that Christians are more likely to allow the death penalty. The Bible justifies the death penalty by noting the special dignity of human beings as persons made "in the image of God."

I have been unhappy with the death penalty as applied. Too many innocent people get convicted in our courts. But I do believe it is in accord with justice and moral law when properly applied. Taking life intentionally and unjustly forfeits the right to life of the murderer. Human life is too sacred not to have the highest penalty for its destruction. But, as I say, you need to be sure the person you seek to execute is really guilty of murder.

Archbishop Forgets Last Three Millennia of Struggle for the Rule of Law

2008-02-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that one law for everyone is not a good idea. Instead, Rowan Williams said Muslims in the UK should be allowed to have Sharia law, at least in some way or to some extent. Articles have appeared on Feb. 7 at "Cranmer" ( http://www.archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/), "if Sam . . ." (http://samtarran.blogspot.com/2008/02/is-it-ever-unavoidable.html), "Gates of Vienna" ( http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2008/02/archdhimmi-speaks-out.html#readfurther) and elsewhere.

Americans, Englishman, and many others (even Frenchmen) have fought for centuries against the idea of special castes and classes with separate laws. Part of real freedom is the idea that everyone is equal before the law and subject to the same law, and we make the law the most reasonable, proportionate, enlightened and prudent compromise between human weakness and pure morality that we can achieve in a society as a whole, with added respect for liberty to choose among goods, and with a healthy margin of safety against tyranny.

Some people claim that human laws are all about power and interest groups. If that were true, what the Archbishop proposes might make sense. But it is not so. Law is about unity and justice and mercy - about punishing evil and coordinating for the common good. There can be no justice if we licence some people to do things we know to be wrong because they belong to a group we are afraid of.

There is nothing wrong with protecting religious liberty with the occasional religious exemption. It is sometimes appropriate not to make some things that are immoral illegal because people cannot or will not abide by the law. Occasionally society cannot agree on what is best either because the application of morality is unclear or because the facts are unclear, and in those instances we often leave people at liberty. But when, as with slavery, something is wrong, even though it is popular with those who profit by it, we struggle for equality under the law for all human beings - even if a few examples with "Stockholm syndrome" or "false consciousness" can be found to claim that they love being in slavery.

We cannot let Sharia become the law of a separate caste within the west. We do so at our peril.

UPDATE: Williams did say in the interview "That principle that there is only one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a western democracy" which makes his conclusion even more puzzling.

An Interesting Health Care Observation

2008-02-08T09:18:00.000-08:00

At the God and Governing conference Paul Marshall made a humorous observation with a point. He was critical of the way Pietists and Anabaptists are opposed to Christian involvement with government because they see (wrongly) government as solely a realm of evil under the control of the powers of darkness - the "antichrist." But many of the same people support socialized medicine - a huge enlargement of government power over our everyday lives. Marshall then quipped "Is it wise to entrust our health care to the antichrist?"

Civility in Government

2008-02-06T13:20:00.000-08:00

One of the recurring themes of God and Governing, a Conference on Virtue Ethics and Statesmanship was civility. All of the speakers mentioned the need for civility in politics and government. Os Guinness specifically spoke at length on the role of civility in the dispute over how our freedom of religion and freedom from establishment of religion should play out in the public square. He advocated a "civil public square" as opposed to a sacred public square or a secular public square.

After the conference, my friend Marc brought up an interesting idea. Everyone had mentioned the need for civility at the same time as we advocate zealously for different ideas and points of view. Marc noted that the old fashioned civility of Common Law Lawyers of the past and many lawyers still today is a good model for the handling of conflict in a civil and civilized way. While I have run into very uncivil lawyers, and occasionally should have been more willing to have lunch with my opponent's counsel my self, it is true that the tradition of the bar is one of civility, especially outside the courtroom. It is a model for how things should be.

Trinity Law School Video

2008-02-05T16:19:00.000-08:00

Here is the new promotional video for Trinity Law School.

Post Conference Euphoria

2008-02-05T14:00:00.000-08:00

Trinity Law School and the California campus of Trinity Graduate School just held our first major conference in ten years. By all accounts "God and Governing: A Conference on Virtue, Ethics, and Statesmanship" was a great success. DVD's of the conference should be available in a month or two.