The week started with a Turkish movie, Distant, from Nuri Bilge Ceylan, one of Turkey’s leading directors according to The New Republic‘s Stanley Kaufmann. It is slow in the manner of a Krzysztof Kieslowski but not as full of dialogue as the Polish director’s films. Its portrayal of Turks coming to terms with modernization is understated but thoughtful. Worth seeing even if you have not recently taken a trip to Turkey.

Then we reverted to the seventh season of Curb Your Enthusiasm — our first disk from Netflix. We had seen these six episodes before but I had not remembered them very well. They are clearly funny and their humor is all the more catchy because of the nervous tension created by embarrassment for Larry David (much like you cannot believe how impolite David Brent is in The Office). What I find remarkable is Larry David’s observations about etiquette and manners, and his defense of them in many occasions. This is not Henry James’ study of morals and manners, of course, but when Larry discusses with Jerry Seinfeld whether he needs to call back a friend after his cell signal dropped, he is putting his finger on precisely the ambiguities that lurk in so many contemporary interactions among people. (My favorite from an earlier season is when Larry is walking with Ted Danson — as if they ever walk in So Cal — and wants to put an apple core — the remainder of what he has just eaten — in a neighbor’s trash can positioned by the curb and discovers that notions of private property extend not simply to not littering on someone else’s yard but to not even having access to their trash can.)

With the Mrs. away for part of the week, I decided to give Breaking Bad another try. I thought starting with episode three of Season One would get me past the removal of the bodies. But it did not. I persisted, but the series has not yet gripped me. I do remember that it was not until the sixth episode or so of The Wire that I was hooked. So I will not give up yet. But I am doubtful.

Finally, I watched This is England, again without the better half, suspecting that she would not have much of an interest in a movie about skinheads in the U.K. during the early 1980s. I’m sure if I knew more about English history and politics, the writer’s decision to surround this story of a 12-year old boy drawn into a gang with clips from the Falkland War would have made more sense. The most I could pick up was the same kind of disapproval for skinheads as for Maggie Thatcher’s foreign policy. Without the politics, the movie might have been really good. As it was, it was kind of good.

The post What the Cats Missed This Week appeared first on Old Life Theological Society.

Listeners should also know that Rakoff was anything but a believer. He was at best (near as I can tell) an agnostic, though of Jewish descent, outspokenly homosexual, and almost always irreverent. Despite these attributes, he was a tribute to the maker he did not acknowledge. Rakoff demonstrated so many of those remarkable qualities that separate human beings from the rest of creation. As such he also showed how great God’s creatures can be even in a willfully fallen state. Creation suffers when we lose such talented creatures.

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Stewart, as you might expect, dishes it out both ways, which is fine since using a sandwich as a form of political identity does not exactly seem what the Greeks had in mind when thinking through representative government. But (spoiler alert!) when he concludes that Chick-Fil-A’s and gay marriage’s products are both good, I demur. For one, has Stewart really considered how healthy a fast-food fried chicken sandwich is? I’m sure that dressings, fat, and steroid drenched chicken breasts make such meals a challenge to good health. For another, how do we know that gay marriage is a positive social arrangement? In fact, one objection to this change in law is that we have no idea what the consequences — positive or negative — of such a change to millenia of legal arrangements and cultural expectations will be. Though we do have some data from social scientists on the benefits of regular marriage.
(For instance, we have enough time to say that the National League is superior to the American League because the former does not use the designated hitter.)

So maybe the way to resolve the kerfuffle over Chick-Fil-A is to be doubly contrarian. Both Chick-Fil-A and gay marriage are unhealthy for America.

Then again, has anyone noticed that homosexuals are among the leading defenders of marriage at a time when marriage is at an all time low in the United States? Could it be that folks who used to thrive on an anti-bourgeois, urban, and culturally and politically radical identity have now embraced a convention associated with white-bread, middle-class, suburban life? Or is gay marriage simply a way of flipping the bird at all those Chick-Fil-A eaters who made family values a political slogan? You want family? You got it.

The post Calling Jon Stewart’s Bluff appeared first on Old Life Theological Society.

What is less clear is whether Americans are capable of distinguishing among the depravity of various vices the way, say, the Shorter Catechism talks about some transgressions of the law being more heinous in the sight of God than others. The case of Joe Paterno is proof. The overwhelming condemnation of the recently deceased coach would tempt a visitor from Mars to think that Paterno himself had molested the boys who came through Penn State’s football facility. But covering up a felony is not the same level of offense as committing a felony. Just ask Chuck Colson and Richard Nixon.

The laws of Indiana, the site of NCAA headquarters, may be instructive here (even though they played no role in Mark Emmert’s decision to punish Penn State and the reputation of Joe Paterno. Child molestation is a Class A felony in Indiana and is punishable by a sentence of a minimum of six years in prison (according to a 2000 summary). Perjury, on the other hand, is a Class D felony in Indiana and brings with it up to ten months in prison and a possible fine of $10,000. It is fairly clear that Paterno did not commit child molestation. The worst that he did was to lie before the Grand Jury, a difference between a Class A and Class D felony (it would seem to this legally challenged observer). If his offense was simply not reporting Sandusky, Indiana law classifies this as a Class B misdemeanor, which could bring a fine of $1,000 and a prison sentence of up to 180 days.

But this is all based on Indiana law, the jurisdiction where Mark Emmert and his colleagues work. According to one story from last fall, Pennsylvania has no law requiring persons to report child abuse.

What this suggests is that the NCAA is a lot harder on crime than the states themselves which have law enforcement officers with real guns and facilities with real bars and really sharp barbed wire. That may be a good thing, though I can’t imagine Emmert taking away JoePa’s wins if the coach were still alive. (The courage of the NCAA only goes so far.) But it does confirm my impression, after several viewings of The Wire, that justice mediated the state is more forgiving than justice executed outside the law. For anyone who challenged Avon or Marlo, eliminating the challenger’s existence was the only way to maintain order. But inside the agencies of the police, public school teachers, city administration, or journalism, if you violated procedures or lied to bosses, you got a reassignment, a demotion, or at worst lost your job. But unlike Barksdale’s lieutenants who cheated their boss, if you lied to the city editor of the Sunpapers about your source, you lived to see another day.

After today’s actions, the NCAA appears to exhibit a form of justice much closer to drug dealers than to civil authorities. Unfortunately for Paterno, he is not alive to see a day on his calendar that includes a visit to Emmert’s office in Indianapolis.

The post Mark Emmert, the Avon Barksdale of College Athletics appeared first on Old Life Theological Society.

That line came to mind when reading a recent Christianity Today editorial about Chuck Colson and his efforts to unite Roman Catholics and Evangelicals in an Abraham-Kuyper like coalition to oppose “spiritual nihilism.”

Colson, like Kuyper, was concerned about the effects of modernism and later postmodernism on contemporary culture. And like Kuyper, he believed that unless believers are equipped with the critical tools of worldview thinking, they are unlikely to make any headway in redeeming culture.

When Colson and Richard John Neuhaus formed Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), their new Protestant-Catholic initiative, the group focused its initial statement on the common mission of the church in the third millennium. That mission, their 1994 document said, involved contending together “against all that opposes Christ and his cause.” In “developed societies,” that included “widespread secularization” that had descended “into a moral, intellectual, and spiritual nihilism that denies not only the One who is the Truth but the very idea of truth itself.”

Within the framework of Kuyper’s vision, this was an excellent summary of what Protestants and Catholics needed to address together.

As commendable as it may be for Christians to combat nihilism, why would this be a project that would exclude religiously conflicted folks like the Dude’s good friend and bowling team member, Walter? Lots of people who are not Christians oppose nihilism. Some of them are Christian. Some are Muslim. Some are Mormon. Some profess no God. If you want to oppose nihilism, then why not broaden the tent?

It could be that Christians think they alone have the true basis for a proper opposition. Or it could be that “spiritual nihilism” is different from Karl Hungus’ version of nihilism. But it does seem to me to be a form of shooting yourself in the foot when you make a common cultural cause into a matter of the gospel of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Postscript: are neo-Calvinists really comfortable with Colson carrying the water for Kuyper’s legacy?

The post Why Exclude Walter and the Dude? appeared first on Old Life Theological Society.

Take, for instance, the plot. What exactly is it? Not to give the story (such as it is) away, but a tragic outcome awaits one of the members of the featured family. And we needed 140 minutes to learn that this development deeply moved parents and siblings? Meanwhile, after all that time we have no more of a clue about the circumstances surrounding this tragedy than we do about the vastness of the universe. What we do learn — news flash — is that the family suffered as a result.

Oh, wait. Maybe this tragedy was the consequence of the Big Bang theory. If so, that might explain the inclusion of a half-hour sequence of shortish takes that seem to show the evolution of the physical universe. Again, visually bedazzling but what is the connection to the family?

As for character development or dialogue, “The Artist” goes well beyond “The Tree of Life” even though the former is about a silent-film era movie star. Even so, “The Artist” has virtually more dialogue than “The Tree of Life.” The DVD we watched instructed viewers to turn the volume way up. That helped us to figure out a few of the words that sounded more like grunts and accompany various visual sequences. But cranking the volume up to 80 wasn’t enough to come anywhere near figuring out the mother of the family. I sure hope feminists were upset by the film because this woman – who was not as visually stunning as the Milky Way – had no excuse for a presence in the movie other than to observe or weep.

But for all of its defects, “The Tree of Life” was successful in one very important way. It confirmed what most viewers suspect about Sean Penn. The experience of the boy who grows into the adult played by Penn must have been exactly what the actor was like when an eleven-year old – willful, devious, and rebellious against a disciplinarian father. Still, I didn’t need 140 minutes to have that hunch confirmed.

The post Visually Stunning, Narratively Challenged appeared first on Old Life Theological Society.

Mike Horton tries to make a case that support for gay marriage is a function of w-w:

What this civic debate—like others, such as abortion and end-of-life ethics—reveals is the significance of worldviews. Shaped within particular communities, our worldviews constitute what Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann coined as “plausibility structures.” Some things make sense, and others don’t, because of the tradition that has shaped us. We don’t just have a belief here and a belief there; our convictions are part of a web. Furthermore, many of these beliefs are assumptions that we haven’t tested, in part because we’re not even focally aware that we have them. We use them every day, though, and in spite of some inconsistencies they all hold together pretty firmly—unless a crisis (intellectual, moral, experiential) makes us lose confidence in the whole web.

Every worldview arises from a narrative—a story about who we are, how we got here, the meaning of history and our own lives, expectations for the future. From this narrative arise certain convictions (doctrines and ethical beliefs) that make that story significant for us. No longer merely assenting to external facts, we begin to indwell that story; it becomes ours as we respond to it and then live out its implications.

It seems to me that gay marriage is much more a function of deeply ingrained American instincts than anything Nietzsche or Hegel might cook up. Equality and fairness is one aspect of American confusion over gay marriage. Why can’t everyone have the same access to the benefits of marriage? Another is a post-Civil Rights desire to keep anyone in America from feeling inferior? If gays can’t marry, doesn’t that mean we have a 2-tier social system and isn’t that like Jim Crow? Finally, Americans have learned to sever marriage from reproduction (largely thanks to Protestants). If marriage is more for fulfillment than for procreation, why can’t everyone have access to marriage?

This doesn’t mean Mike’s piece is wrong. But I do wonder whether the invocation of w-w will help with this conflict among Americans. By invoking w-w we conceivably turn this debate into a consequence of the antithesis. And that won’t do because so many non-Kuyperians (i.e. Roman Catholics) oppose gay marriage. And if we look around and see non-Reformed opposition to gay marriage, and still cling to w-w, then don’t we need to say that Roman Catholics have the same w-w as Reformed Protestants? Say hello to the Manhattan Declaration.

Better it seems to (all about) me simply to follow what God’s law requires in our churches and think through what changes in marriage policy mean for our societies. Has it not occurred to any baby boomer, rapidly approaching Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, that we need more babies who will grow up to pay taxes that keep our senior citizens medicated and fed? Has anyone heard of what’s going on Europe? Now is a bad time in the history of the West to make permanent a divide between marriage and child-bearing.

The post The Problem with Gay Marriage appeared first on Old Life Theological Society.

Still, the tolerance that anti-2kers show to non-Reformed Protestants (e.g. Ron Paul) and even to non-Christian ideas (more below) is puzzling and suggests a level of personal antagonism that is unbecoming. In the case of Ron Paul, Bret tries to justify his intention to vote for the libertarian Republican as consistent with Christian faith because this proposed vote has received flak from a theonomist whom he apparently follows on Facebook. Bret explains:

I intend to vote for Rep. Ron Paul if I can I do acknowledge that there are issues he supports that I do not think are Christian. Paul’s recent vote supporting homosexuals in the military is not the vote a Christian man would have made. Also, Ron Paul’s fuzzy stand on illegal immigration is a head scratcher. I also would that Rep. Paul would clearly articulate that the Constitution as it currently stands outlaws Abortion, and because of that States should overturn laws on their books that are contrary to that Constitutional requirement. I also do not believe that Dr. Paul’s Libertarian instincts will work in a country that has been balkanized by both it’s legal immigration policy pursuit since 1965 and it’s benign neglect of illegal immigration. . . .

Our greatest need of the hour in order to restore biblical statecraft is for someone to slay the Leviathan State. This is the platform on which Dr. Paul is campaigning. Biblical statecraft will not be restored until the Leviathan state is slain. First things first. To suggest that any Christian who intends to vote for Ron Paul is abandoning biblical principles for voting and statecraft is like a Jew complaining that the person who stopped the rape of his wife was not circumcised. It is true that there are faults with Dr. Paul, but currently he is the gentleman who promises to help us with our most current and pressing problem. Mr. Ritchie just isn’t thinking correctly.

First things first? Does not the first table of the law come before the second table? Does not doing what is right in God’s eyes take precedence over what may be beneficial to the survival of the United States? In which case, could it be that Bret is letting his own political convictions dictate what comes first? As I’ve said a guhzillion times, Covenanters would not construe first things this way. They refused to vote, run for office, or serve in the military because the first thing — Christ’s Lordship — was not part of the U.S. Constitution. I disagree that the Constitution must include such an affirmation. But I greatly admire the Covenanters’ consistency and wish Rabbi Bret would be as hard nosed in the political realm as he is with (all about) me in the theological arena.

What seems to be operative here is that Rabbi Bret borrows selectively from 2k by using non-biblical standards for evaluating the United States’ political order. He says we must follow wisdom in the current election cycle. Well, what happened to the Bible as the standard for all of life? And just how do you get a license to practice such wisdom (when 2kers are the ones who issue them)?

Additional evidence of the Rabbi’s appeal to wisdom and implicit use of 2k comes in a good post he wrote about the differences between “classical” conservatism and neo-conservatism. I’ll paste here only one of the piece’s five points (though the entire post is worthwhile for those who don’t know the differences among conservatism):

Neo-conservatives believe that America is responsible to expand American values and ideology at the point of a bayonet. This was the governing ideology of progressive Democrats like Woodrow Wilson who desired to make the world safe for Democracy. However, before the Wilsonian motto of making the world safe for Democracy (a motto largely taken up by the Bush II administration) Wilson understood the American instinct for a humble foreign policy by campaigning in 1916 with the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” Before American entry into W.W. II the classically conservative approach to involvement in international affairs was one of modesty, as seen in the previous mentioned Wilson approach to campaigning in 1916. Classical conservatism, as opposed to neo-conservatism embraced the dictum of John Quincy Adams who once noted that, “America is a well-wisher of liberty everywhere, but defender only of her own.”

However, today’s conservatism is internationally militantly adventurous. What is sold by those who have co-opted the title of “conservative,” is the exporting of American values but the dirty little secret is that the American values that are being exported in the name of Democracy is just a warmed over socialism combined with some form of Corporate consumerism.

Good point, but where exactly is the justification for this from Scripture or the Lordship of Christ or the antithesis? I’m betting that loads of Christian Reformed Church ministers and laity who invoke the antithesis every bit as much as the Rabbi does, would never countenance Bret’s understanding of U.S. foreign policy. In which case, either the Bible speaks with forked tongue about a nation’s military involvement or all neo-Calvinists are dictating to special revelation what their “wise” observations of the created order and contemporary circumstances require. Why then are 2kers guilty of doing something illegitimate if Rabbi Bret or liberals in the CRC do the very same thing?

Which leads me back to the deep emotional wound mentioned at the outset. In his response to my post on epistemological self-consciousness, Bret says that it all comes down to this:

I mean that is what this boils down to isn’t it? Van Til repeatedly emphasized the necessity of epistemological self-consciousness while Darryl is suggesting that each man must do what is right in his own unique epistemological self consciousness. One epistemologically self-conscious Christian likes Kant, another epistemologically self conscious Christian likes Hegel. Vive la différence!

This is an odd summary of the entire difference since at the beginning of the post Bret says that the notion of the Lordship of Christ was hardly a Dutch Reformed idea, and then he goes on to say that it all comes down to a point made (as he understands it) about the Lordship of Christ by a Dutch-American. But aside from the intellectual hiccup, does Bret really not see that his own support for Ron Paul throws the antithesis to the wind. Paul doesn’t have to be a Reformed Christian affirming the Lordship of Christ to gain Bret’s support. Bret’s analysis of conservatism doesn’t need to follow the dictates of the antithesis in order for it to be wise. And yet, if I or other 2kers don’t follow the antithesis when recognizing a common realm of activity for believers and unbelievers, or when finding truths by which to negotiate this common terrain other than from Scripture (only because the Bible is silent, for instance, on basements or how to remove water from them), we are relativists and antinomians. (We don’t even get a little credit for putting the anti in antinomian.)

Until the critics of 2k can possibly create a world in which the antithesis applies all the time, they will be indebted to 2k for borrowed capital. The reason is that it is impossible to live in a mixed society if the sort of antithesis that will ultimately result in the separation of the sheep from the wolves is going to be the norm. The antithesis requires not only withholding support from Ron Paul, but also opposition to a political order that would allow him on the ballot (not to mention that difficult matter of what to do with Mitt Romney’s Mormons or Rick Santorum’s Roman Catholics). Bret believes that the “Escondido” theology will one day pass away like the Mercersburg Theology did. I too believe it will, whenever God chooses to separate believers from unbelievers. But until then, as long as we live with unbelievers, guys like Bret will need and use 2k theology. I only wish he’d show a little gratitude and start to pay off the debt. He is well behind in payments and snarky about it.

The post Rabbi Bret Borrowing Capital from Those 2k Swiss Bank Accounts appeared first on Old Life Theological Society.

Religious citizens who regard themselves as loyal members of a constitutional democracy must accept the translation proviso as the price to be paid for the neutrality of the state authority toward competing worldviews. For secular citizens, the same ethics of citizenship entails a complementary burden. By the duty of reciprocal accountability toward all citizens, including religious ones, they are obliged not to publicly dismiss religious contributions to political opinion and will formation as mere noise, or even nonsense, from the start. Secular and religious citizens must meet in their public use of reason at eye level.

Leithart doesn’t believe the burden is equal and grabs support from Peter Gordon:

Does it even make sense to say they are both burdens? Consider the analogy of translation between profane languages: If a Frenchman is asked to express his claims in public where English is the only language in principle intelligible to all participants, then of course the Frenchman can be required to obey the rules of English grammar. That is surely a burden, and it may be a great challenge for someone who has spent his entire life thinking in French. But it makes no sense to say that the Englishman bears a symmetrical burden because he cannot think of himself as a “judge” concerning the comprehensive merits of France. There is nothing about speaking English that makes such a judgment plausible, let alone necessary. Habermas, I suspect, is trying to dress up the unidirectionality of the burdens of translation in a way that promotes a more favorable vision of reciprocity. This may be diplomatic—and, given the frequent intolerance of both parties, religious and secularist, some diplomacy may be called for—but the notion of a shared burden in translation does not accurately capture Habermas’s deeper commitments to profane reason.

According to Leithart, who continues to invoke Gordon, Habermas’ notion of translation is weak and invalid because the very idea of translating religion into the secular public sphere is — I guess — unequal. Gordon writes: “Translation, after all, is a linguistic event of semantic transfer, from a language of origin to a target language—from religion to the secular public sphere. The analogy thus reveals how Habermas’s earliest ideas concerning the character of public reason have not lost their validity.”

I am not interested exactly in Habermas’ or Gordon’s points, but I am intrigued that Leithart finds the idea of translation to be revealing of the difficulties that believers confront in secular societies. Is it the case that Christians do speak a different language of government, or law, or public policy from non-Christians? Do Christians even have their own language? This is particularly important since the Reformation sought to put the Bible, the liturgy, and theology into the vernacular. That included indirectly Luther’s translations of the Bible setting the agenda for modern German and Calvin’s French functioning as an important stage in the development of modern French (so I’ve read; I don’t presume to be a historian of language).

In other words, language is a common human activity. When the Holy Spirit regenerates Christians they don’t and shouldn’t speak in new languages (at least cessationist ones don’t). When Christians talk about politics, nations, and laws, they use the same words, syntax, and punctuation as other citizens. They may use words like morality, justice, king, Lord, or law. But non-Christians don’t have any trouble understanding what those words mean. They may disagree about the virtue of a monarchy, since they live in a republic (or an empire that in its “aw shucks” moments pretends to be a republic). But the words that Christians use, even the words to describe Christ as king of kings, or the magistrate’s duty to enforce the entire Decalogue are not foreign to non-Christians. Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean you are speaking a foreign tongue. To think that a difference of opinion is really a problem of translation is bizarre.

But it does indicate the lengths to which the application of the antithesis between believers and non-believers may run. In the haste to assert that Christianity goes all the way down and claim a victim status for believers who live under oppressive secular governments, Federal Visionaries, transformationalists, and neo-Calvinists make the world safe for thinking that Christians are so different that they speak in ways that other people can’t understand. In other words, they pave the way for those Christians who really do think they have a Christian language — Pentecostals.

The post Speaking of Leithart and Language appeared first on Old Life Theological Society.

I made our first loaf this weekend, the cinnamon swirl number from the booklet that came with Cuisinart’s machine. The bread was good but butter, like bacon, makes everything better. As Homer would say, bacon sauteed in butter — mmmmmmmmmmm.

But I was disappointed that I had to purchase the ingredients, measure and put them into the machine, and even roll out the dough at one point to add the cinnamon and sugar and then roll up the dough. I expected the machine to do everything since it was supposed to save time.

I know the Baylys would disapprove of a godly man making bread. But I hope the use of the machine shows that I am not a sissy all the time.

The post Baking Bread the Manly Way appeared first on Old Life Theological Society.