Author: D. G. Hart

Speaking of Labels

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We do have an industry that supplies us with human identity — it’s called the medical profession. And it might be of help when it comes to people want to decide whether to let a sexual proclivity determine their personal identity. Here’s one blogger who rejects straight as an identity:

1. Publicly declaring that I am “straight” counts as ‘too much information.’

I’ve been asking myself what is the real point of coming out as “straight”? Is that really the kind of thing other people are really interested in? Don’t we all have a vast range of sexual impulses and attractions? Does my deeply personal effort to respond chastely to my sexual attractions really qualify as something I should share with others? To what end? Lots of questions about this—if we’re all human and all doing our best to cope with our own call to chastity, why does it matter whether anyone else knows that my particular discernment has to do with my attractions to the other sex? Rather, it would seem more conducive to personal holiness to strive to align my responses to sexual attraction by seeing a confessor or spiritual director. The parish or the general public? Not so much.

Meanwhile, Carl Trueman observes the latest example of sexual politics that desperately needs to buy a vowel:

Wesleyan University has taken the ever-expanding list of initials used to refer to sexual identities to new heights of absurdity or sensitivity, depending on one’s perspective. We are now apparently up to fifteen letters: LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM.

It is easy to laugh at such gibberish on the grounds that it is as absurd as it is self-regarding. Yet that would be a mistake. First, there is the long-established inability of such groups to laugh at themselves. Indeed, the new libertinism often makes the old Puritanism look comparatively self-effacing and gently playful. . . . Second, there are surely grounds for congratulating folks at Wesleyan on their consistent honesty in the cause of sexual liberation. Liberation, that is, of sex from any intrinsic moral significance. As Luther said to Erasmus in very different circumstances: You and you alone have placed your finger on the hinge on which everything turns.

The good thing about medicine is that a doctor’s determination of sex confirms what nature, Nature’s God, or the God of the universe (you can choose your god, not your sex) does. People come into the world either male or female, not straight, homo, confused, transgender, or even as believer or unbeliever. Sexual preferences are mere accidents of history.

Even better, the most basic human identity is still linked to the genitalia that God made:

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27)

Do We Need a Federal Agency to Regulate Religious Identity?

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I was reading this piece over the weekend on home schooling and the author struck me with her use of identifications:

From its inception, the movement included both religious homeschoolers who sought to remove secular influences from their children’s lives, and secular homeschoolers whose motivations were based on beliefs about child development. After the Supreme Court ended state-sponsored prayer in schools in the early 1960s, Calvinist theologian R.J. Rushdoony began to urge parents to consider homeschooling as a means of protecting their children from the secular school environment. Ray Moore, a Seventh-day Adventist who had worked in higher education, began to promote homeschooling for a combination of religious and developmental reasons. Moore argued that homeschooling cultivated children’s natural curiosity and allowed them to learn at an individual pace, an argument that appealed to parents across religious lines. Education theorist John Holt echoed the developmental case for homeschooling in his magazine Growing Without Schooling, founded in 1977. Holt believed that the concept of school was inherently flawed: it created an artificial environment that isolated children from natural learning experiences.

The author’s point about homeschooling may or may not have merit, but why would she not identify Rushdoony as an Armenian-American, an Orthodox Presbyterian, or a Californian? Why Calvinist? And why is John Holt only an “education theorist”? Which extends to the questions of why journalists labeled the Charlie Hebdo killers Muslim or why President Obama refuses to. Why not call them Arab-French? In other words, how do you decide what someone is? What is their primary identity? If you choose to identify someone by an adjective that your readers find odd or unappealing, haven’t you signaled to readers that they need to beware?

These questions are a further reminder that everyone carries around multiple identities. A reporter or scholar may mention one of the markers that identify someone, but it is only a part of who the person is (and perhaps a caricature). The Christian Right has not helped on this. Thanks to neo-Calvinism’s logic of every square inch, the notion that I am anything less than 100% Christian is a betrayal of Christ’s lordship. But if a reporter talks to me about Muslims in America, does it make more sense to identify me as a scholar of religion in the United States than as an elder in the OPC? And when I go to the ballot box, do I go as a Calvinist, a Phillies fan, or an American citizen? Last I checked, Calvinists in Scotland and the Netherlands can’t vote here in Michigan. Is the reason because the U.S. denies Christ’s lordship or immigration officials are wary of Calvinism? Or is it that temporal criteria like residency and citizenship trump belief and church membership? Think “duh.”

A related question is how does a scholar or journalist judge whether a subject qualifies as Calvinist, Roman Catholic, or Muslim? Who gets to determine religious identity? Is it the subject’s own judgment, as in President Obama’s account of his conversion?

So one Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, He would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in Him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth and carrying out His works.

Or do church, parish, Vatican, or imams decide whether the labels that persons self-apply are valid? David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network said of Obama’s account, “That, ladies and gentlemen, is called a conversion experience.” I’m not sure Jonathan Edwards would agree. And as clerk of session, I am definitely not going to trust the judgments of a broadcasting network executive about genuine faith. Heck, I wonder if networks can be Christian (remember, no corporate salvation).

And what if churches inflate their numbers? Terry Mattingly, who quoted the president’s conversion account, indicates that Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago did not record President Obama’s membership. (Are the birthers asking for Obama’s certificate of good standing?) I suspect that many churches don’t scrutinize potential members very carefully and don’t keep accurate records of members.

What is the solution? We need a government agency to keep track of religious identity and to issue religious passports. Someone wants to know if I’m a Christian, I flash my government authorized paperwork. It works for voting, health care, banking. Why not church or mosque or synagogue life?

Hope for Walter White

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You may violate the terms of church membership if you belong to the Mafia, but if your crime is disorganized, say as disordered as the scripts for Breaking Bad were, hey, man, there’s hope:

You cannot call yourself a true believer if you participate in organized crime, Pope Francis told members of the Cassano all’Jonio diocese in Italy on Saturday.

No one, the Pope said Feb. 21, can “call themselves Christians and violate the dignity of the person; those who belong to the Christian community cannot program or carry out acts of violence against others and against the environment.”

“Jesus never invited demons to lunch, no he chased them away, because they are evil,” he said, emphasizing that Christ and evil are incompatible.

Running Things

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In Miller’s Crossing, after gaining the upper hand over, Leo, the Irish mafia boss, Johnny Caspar, the Italian boss, complains that “running things” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Administration takes a lot of time and leads to a lot of compromise and loss of focus.

So, when the Renaissance popes built their capital city and their ecclesiastical office, did they ever consider what they might have done? How do you administer a global church with 1.2 billion souls and bodies? One way is through bureaucracy. Thomas Reese explains:

The Roman Curia is made up of the Secretariat of State, nine congregations, 12 councils, three tribunals, and a host of commissions, academies, institutes and other offices. Each of these was created in response to a perceived need or priority of a previous papacy.

But how do you reform these structures? You need one part Urban II and one part Peter Drucker:

Reforming the Roman Curia requires a theological vision for the Petrine ministry, a sense of what the church needs today, and a practical understanding of how to organize people to implement it.

First, what is the theological vision of the Petrine ministry? Is the pope an infallible, absolute monarch in whom all wisdom resides, or is he first among equals who acts collegially with the college of bishops?

If it is the former, then all important decisions will be referred to the pope or to those to whom he has delegated decision-making power in the Curia. Any issue that is in doubt must go up the chain of command.

If it is the latter vision, then the church needs a system for encouraging discussion and consensus building in the college of bishops. Here, the Curia is in service to the pope and the college of bishops; curial officials are not decision-makers.

Second, what are the needs of the church today? Does the church need more stability or change, unity or pluralism, clearer teaching or better witness? Should it be challenging or accommodating, devotional or prophetic?

Another way of asking this question is: What are the pope’s priorities? What does he want to focus on, and what does he want to delegate to others?

Third, all of this has to be organized into offices with people with specific responsibilities. Management experts note that different types of organizations are organized differently. An entrepreneurial startup is not run like an established utility. An emergency room is not a factory. The Department of Motor Vehicles is not the Marines. A business office is not a research lab.

Reform of the Roman Curia is difficult because there is no consensus on the Petrine ministry, the needs of the church today, or the practical issues of management.

While Jason and the Callers think that a magisterium fixes everything, they seldom notice that the very hierarchy that gives them such a sense of superiority lives life more like Johnny Caspar than John Wayne.

Making Excuses

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After reading defenses of the Crusades, this account of the Renaissance papacy by Eamon Duffy caught my eye.

First the bad:

The Renaissance papacy evokes images of a Hollywood spectacular, all decadence and drag. Contemporaries viewed Renaissance Rome as we now view Nixon’s Washington, a city of expense-account whores and political graft, where everything and everyone had a price, where nothing and nobody could be trusted. The popes themselves seemed to set the tone. Alexander VI (1492-1503) flaunted a young and nubile mistress in the Vatican, was widely believed to have made a habit of poisoning his cardinals so as to get his hand on their property, and he ruthlessly aggrandized his illegitimate sons and daughters a the Church’s expense. Julius II (1503-1513), inspired patron of Raphael, Bramante, Michelangelo and Leonardo, was a very dubious Father of all the Faithful, for he had fathered three daughters of his own while a cardinal, and he was a feocious and enthusiastic warrior, dressing in silver papal armour and leading his own troops through the breaches blown in the city walls of towns who resisted his authority. . . .

Papal audacity, indeed.

But just as the Crusades might qualify as a defensive omelet that required breaking eggs, so the excesses of the Renaissance popes were part of a package to restore the glories of Rome:

All this presents a luridly one-sided picture of the Renaissance popes. It takes no account of the massive task of reconstruction which confronted the papacy in the wake of the Great Schism. The popes of the later fifteenth century had to reinvent Rome. . . . Rome had no industries except pilgrimage, no function except as the Pope’s capital. The city and its churches were radically impoverished by the long absence of the popes in Avignon. . . . The Renaissance popes were determined to change all that, and set about planning new streets and raising buildings to perpetuate their own and their families’ names, buildings which would be worthy both of the centre of the Church and of the greatest of all earthly cities, the mother of Europe. The fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Rome were the age of Humanism, a great age of renewed classical learning, the rediscovery of the principles of classical art, the flowering of creativity in painting, sculpture and architecture, and of a delight in life and beauty which represented not just lavish extravagance, but a renewed sense of the glory of creation. (Saints and Sinners, 133-34)

All better, then.

But who am I to judge since I benefited last summer from all that papal spending?

Even so, this period in papal history makes you wonder about Michael Sean Winter’s assessment of Vatican II, when the church went from being parochial to engaging the wider world:

Recognizing the dominant dualism of Christian spiritual history, which saw the world as bad or at least tainted and the Church as holy and undefiled, they Council Fathers could not turn their back on that history, but they needed to expand it. The authors write: “The dualistic opposition to the world, the patronizing diminishment of those who are called to marriage and family life, and the disparagement of those who serve in politics, art, education, technology, etc. (the works of the world), must be set aside as Church leaders seek to understand that God dwells precisely within the world both through the Church and in the creation itself. Service to the world is the mission of God for which Jesus was sent, and for which the Church was called and developed.” This expanded understanding of the theological significance of “the world” does not mean we cannot all recognize, and recoil from, a “worldly” cleric, nor get nervous when some neo-Gnostic confuses the natural and supernatural realms. But, this expanded understanding of the world mirrored the expanded ecclesiology of the Council, recognizing that it is baptism, not only ordination, that confers upon all the faithful, most of whom work in the world, the tasks the Jesus entrusted to the Church.

Is it just me or did the Renaissance popes look like they were fairly engaged with the affairs of the world? And might not a case be made that reform is still needed?

But Won't You Still Go Into Exile?

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Tim Challies channels Paul in Romans 7 even if he avoids “oh wretched man”:

I still get angry. I still lash out in anger. I still simmer in anger. I still have desires that stem from anger and suffer the consequences of my anger. And that is just one sin. I still lust and am still jealous and am still thankless and still sin in so many ways. I have died to sin but sin has not yet died within. But here is the difference; here is the change: Sin no longer has dominion. And practically I cannot relate to it as if it has dominion. I have to ensure that my experience of sin is consistent with my theology of sin.

Anger does not own me. Christ owns me. Lust does not motivate me. Christ motivates me. Jealousy does not get the final victory. Christ gets the final victory. The cross stands there as assurance that I have been saved from its power and will some day be fully and finally delivered from its presence. Sin is in me but I am in Christ. And what is in me was put upon him on the cross. He triumphed over it then. He broke its power. And now I just wait, battling all the while, for him to speak the word and bring it to an end once and for all.

But the good news is that he is united to Christ, right? So isn’t the priority of union before justification just as antinomian as the priority of justification to sanctification? Either way, the assurance of God’s favor is a great comfort for believers who still carry around sin. But let’s not conclude that somehow union fixes what justification lacks. The only remedy for sin, before or after regeneration, is not obedience but the grace of Christ.

At the same time, wouldn’t the obedience boys tell Tim that he is going to have to suffer for his ongoing sin? Can he simply get away with all this anger and lust and jealousy? Won’t he experience God’s displeasure?

Neo-Calvinist Reality Check

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David Koyzis can’t help but notice that Kuyperianism didn’t work out so well:

As a young man I was shocked during a visit to Amsterdam to see the proliferation of “sex shops” and the brazenness of the city’s red light district. In the four decades since then the Netherlands has come to be known for its permissive attitude towards euthanasia, recreational drugs and, of course, sexual expression. What happened? And why did it happen so quickly, that is, within two generations of Kuyper’s death?

So what happened? Koyzis thinks that institution building got in the way of evangelism:

Kuyper’s efforts led to the establishment of a variety of explicitly Christian organizations parallel to their secular counterparts. (The painter Piet Mondrian grew up in this Gereformeerd subculture.)

As Kuyper’s heirs immigrated to North America, they brought over his penchant for establishing and maintaining Christian institutions of all sorts, including a network of Christian day schools, a Christian trade union, more than one political organization, and a network of institutions of higher education. I myself have long been committed to these efforts and have taught at one of these affiliated universities.

Nevertheless, I have found myself wondering whether Kuyper’s perhaps too peaceful coexistence with the forces of secularization in 1917 might not have been sufficient to maintain the subculture he led over the long term. Kuyper certainly wouldn’t have been pleased by his followers’ failure to evangelize, and pillarization needn’t lead to a lack of outward strategy, but historically such power-sharing agreements place a premium on reaching a least-common-denominator form of consensus and toning down differences. In a pillarized society, the distinct subcultures became adept at erecting and maintaining barriers against the other subcultures, yet the consociational arrangements they come up with have tended to be short-lived.

I am not going to enter into debates about consociations that may play to Koyzis’ strength as a political scientist, but the habitual turn of the neo-Calvinist mind to matters public and political instead of spiritual and churchly, may actually point to what went wrong. In point of fact, the institutions that Kuyper helped to found were valuable not simply for erecting a sense of Calvinist identity but most importantly for passing on the faith to another generation and keeping the existing ones in it. Whether those institutions were always necessary is one thing. But their aim I suspect was ultimately religious not temporal, that is, to propagate and maintain the faith once delivered. If all the Reformed Protestants who participated in Kuyper’s institutions had maintained the faith and if their children had remained in the church, chances are those institutions would still be vigorous and large.

But once those institutions became ends in themselves, the genie left the bottle along with subsequent generations. The issue is not evangelism vs. institutions — the old problem of the Pretty Good Awakening. It is keeping institutions on point. And the point is creating and sustaining believers who can say:

My only comfort in life and in death is I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.

The Grand Rapids Option

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It’s been a while but Tommie Kidd wrote a post about whether historians need a literary agent to get published. The short answer is yes, if you want to publish with a New York City house.

It depends on what type of publishing you wish to do. For most academic publishing, you don’t need a literary agent, because academic publishers are not generally engaged in “trade” publishing, meaning the kinds of books that end up on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. Strictly academic publishing is largely directed toward an academic audience of other scholars in the field, or perhaps graduate or even undergraduate students. Many academic books are priced in such a way ($50+) that the publisher plans to sell relatively few copies, maybe a couple hundred, to academic libraries and a handful of specialists.

For trade publishing, however, you generally do need a literary agent. The large, New York-based trade publishers prefer not to interact with authors directly about contracts, not even established trade authors. For these publishing houses, literary agents are gatekeepers and filters – they let the agents go find and develop promising projects, and trusted agents can typically secure contracts for most of the projects they propose.

Surprising here is that Kidd, who is one of the younger evangelical historians with an interest in writing for people in the pew, neglected to mention religious publishers as an option for historians. Once upon a time the evangelical historical mafiosa (Noll, Marsden, Stout, Hatch) regularly worked with Grand Rapids publishers such as Eerdmans, Baker, Zondervan and (further away) InterVarsity. In fact, you could argue that the Grand Rapids publishers were partly responsible for the renaissance of writing about the history of evangelicalism from which folks like Kidd and me benefit. And yet, for Kidd (and his generation of evangelical historians) these publishers do not seem to be on the radar.

As I say, this is odd because of Kidd’s admirable interest in reaching a non-academic and believing audience, which was one of the reasons he wrote his biography of Whitefield the way he did:

Fans of Whitefield know that the chasm between the academic and evangelical approaches to Whitefield is best exemplified by the differences between Arnold Dallimore’s 2-volume Whitefield biography, and Harry Stout’s The Divine Dramatist. Dallimore’s is an explicitly Christian biography, and while Dallimore certainly criticized Whitefield at certain points, it was written primarily for a Christian audience and focused on the ways that God used Whitefield in the Great Awakening. Yale historian Stout (who, for full disclosure, is a friend and a mentor to me) placed Whitefield in the context of England’s theater culture, and focused much more on Whitefield’s worldly context and motivations. To many readers, Stout’s approach seemed overly cynical; indeed, John Piper has said that Stout’s biography is “the most sustained piece of historical cynicism I have ever read.”

I find myself in the strange position of being an admirer of both John Piper and Harry Stout, and a fan of Dallimore’s biography, to boot! In fact, I think that Dallimore’s biography has been one of the best choices for general readers who want to know the amazing story of Whitefield’s ministry, and many evangelical readers will understandably find Dallimore more congenial than Stout. But Stout, and other academic writers like Frank Lambert and Jerome Mahaffey, add a dynamic missing in approaches like Dallimore’s: a broader understanding of the culture and economy that formed Whitefield and made his ministry possible, in an earthly sense.

If Kidd wants to reach a middle ground, and I have no doubt that he does, I suggest that Grand Rapids rather than New York City (sorry TKNY) is the place to go to access it.

Tomorrow begins another Round of Cherry-Picking

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While Justin Taylor advises on how to prepare for Lent (can you believe it involves a book published by Crossway?), Carl Trueman reminds about the arbitrariness of tradition among evangelicals (high and low):

The question of catholicity is, of course, more complicated than merely adopting a practice or a doctrine because it has deep historical and ecclesiastical roots. After all, Anglicans in the tradition of Hooker have rejected a large number of the elements of ‘catholic’ tradition. Roman supremacy, purgatory, transubstantiation, prayers for the dead, and the cult of the saints all have good claims to deep catholic roots. So why have Anglicans abandoned these? Presumably they have done so because they do not think that scripture gives grounds for retaining them. Well, once the scripture principle is allowed as an arbiter of true catholicity, the best we can say about Lent is that it might be a harmless, if biblically unjustifiable, personal preference with some historical roots – which is a point I never denied.

Yet if this point about the scripture principle is unpersuasive to Anglicans, let me offer an observation on Anglicanism along the same lines of Merrick’s critique of the Reformed. Anglicanism’s own selective catholicity would seem to imply that Hookerites regard those same centuries, 1500-1700, as a kind of moment of purity for the decision as to which prior catholic traditions can stand and which should be cast aside.

This is not a new problem for Anglicans. It was a significant part of what moved John Henry Newman Romeward. Of course, if the brilliant Newman could not persuade his friend, John Keble, Hooker’s greatest editor, of the immense difficulties of Anglican claims to historic catholicity, it is unlikely that I will do so with Hooker’s present disciples. Yet Newman’s critique surely remains a major challenge to anyone who blithely assumes the straightforward catholicity of the Anglican tradition as embodied in the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Homilies, and the Book of Common Prayer. It is actually much more theologically complicated and historically contested than that.

All of this is, however, largely beside the point of my original article. My main purpose was not to point to problems in the Anglican tradition’s claims to catholicity. It was to critique a recent cultural anomaly: The curious phenomenon of interest in Ash Wednesday and Lent among evangelicals whose ecclesiastical commitments do not theologically or historically sanction observance of such.

Funny how Trueman’s interlocutor assumes the historicity of Lent. But as with most subjects, history only makes certainties less certain:

The current state of research points to three possible conclusions. Because the evidence is slim and admitting of any number of plausible interpretations, one position has been to view Lent as a sui generis phenomenon—completely new and unique—that simply appears after the Council of Nicea. In this view, any attempt to hazard connections or lines of evolution from pre-Nicene fasting practices is too speculative to be of any value. Another, rather opposite, position has been to accept as historical the alleged Egyptian post-Theophany fast, to identify it as the dominant antecedent to Lent, and that Lent’s rapid dissemination throughout the Christian world is best explained in relation to the program of liturgical and theological alignment begun at Nicea. A final position, a sort of via media or middle road, acknowledges the incomplete and sometimes-contradictory nature of the evidence, but asserts nonetheless that Lent develops as an amalgamation of several early fasting customs and typologies of which the post-Theophany fast (if it existed) may have been but one of many. As with most issues in the study of the early history of the liturgy, certainty is elusive and we must be satisfied with possibilities. Judicet lector: let the reader decide.

Don’t mind me if I use the occasion to have an extra doughnut.

One Square Inch Not Covered

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I guess I should thank Father Longenecker for giving me so much material of late, but his recent post about the need to respond to ISIS raises an arresting question for those Christians with global outlooks (both neo-Calvinist and Roman Catholic). Do some sectors of life exist that Christ doesn’t claim as his?

The civilized nations of the world should begin equipping themselves for whatever it takes to overcome the ISIS threat. They should do so purely from a military and political standpoint. From our side religion should be taken out of the equation. This should enable us to make alliances with countries with Muslim majorities who also wish to extirpate the foe.

We should consider the ISIS threat the same way we considered the Nazi threat. Nazism may have been driven by a pseudo religious ideology of racial superiority, but we didn’t go in with an equally absurd ideology. We confronted the evil because it was evil. It was destroying innocent lives. It threatened our own way of life. We saw the evil for what it was, didn’t bother debating the stupid ideologies and simply rolled up our sleeves, put up our dukes and went into battle.

This reminds me of Damon Linker’s reaction (thanks to John Fea) to President Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast (why can’t it ever be dinner, or at least a brunch?) which also drew upon morality in hues black and white to justify retaliation:

Broadly speaking, morality is universalistic in scope and implication, whereas politics is about how a particular group of people governs itself. Morality is cosmopolitan; politics is tribal. Morality applies to all people equally. Politics operates according to a narrower logic — a logic of laws, customs, habits, and mores that bind together one community at a specific time and place. Morality dissolves boundaries. Politics is about how this group of people lives here, as distinct from those groups over there.

Now this certainly overstates the difference between the two realms. In the real world, they overlap in all kinds of ways — and it is one of the great achievements of liberal government to have tamed some of the narrow-minded excesses of politics by more strictly applying moral criteria to the political realm than was common for much of human history before the modern period.

If the president truly believes that ISIS poses a dire threat to the United States — one requiring a military response that puts the lives of American soldiers at risk, costs billions of dollars, and leads to the death of hundreds or thousands of people on the other side of the conflict — then it makes no sense at all for him simultaneously to encourage Americans to adopt a stance of moral ambiguity toward that threat.

This appeal to morality is unnerving. It places those who seek to eradicate evil in the position of the righteous. Why can’t some kind of action or policy receive support merely by appealing to the need for international order and a recognition of those sovereign entities capable of trying to recover it?

I am glad to know that Father Longenecker is not going to defend the Crusades just as I am happy to know that when push comes to shove practically every modern Christian is 2k. But I’m not convinced that relying on bloated senses of moral outrage is going to be much of a help. Can’t people fight with a sense of restraint and modesty? Remember the prayer that Luther wrote for soldiers:

Heavenly Father, here I am, according to your divine will, in the external work and service of my lord, which I owe first to you and then to my lord for your sake. I thank your grace and mercy that you have put me into a work which I am sure is not sin, but right and pleasing obedience to your will. But because I know and have learned from your gracious word that none of our good works can help us and that no one is saved as a soldier but only as a Christian, therefore, I will not in any way rely on my obedience and work, but place myself freely at the service of your will. I believe with all my heart that only the innocent blood of your dear Son, my Lord Jesus Christ, redeems and saves me, which he shed for me in obedience to your holy will. This is the basis on which I stand before you. In this faith I will live and die, fight, and do everything else. Dear Lord God the Father, preserve and strengthen this faith in me by your Spirit. Amen.