Can girls play baseball?

I’ve had a very unexpected experience at Fuller.  I’m just reminded of it as I read through some assigned material on the women of the Reformation.  Fuller is one of, I think, three seminaries in the United States that requires its faculty to sign a commitment to the advancement of women in relation to the church.  Inclusive language is a huge priority here.  I wouldn’t dare write in a paper speaking about “man” instead of “humanity” or something of the like for fear of how it would affect my grade.

Over the last year, my view has changed on this issue from an initial “affirmative action”-type view to a full agreement-type view.  For me, it has made me sensitive to something that I perhaps never would have thought about otherwise.  It never would have occurred to me to consider how it makes women and young girls feel when everything is spoken of in masculine terms.  Having the extraordinary privilege of being the father to two lively daughters has helped me grow in this regard I believe.  We recently were able to go to a Dodgers game as a family.  As we watched the players warm up, one of my girls asked me, “Daddy, can girls play baseball?”  In a strange way, that question has really gotten to me.  Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I don’t know.  What it says to me, is that this little girl sees the world in a way such that there are things that girls can do and that there are things that girls cannot do.  I guess I have just assumed for the most part that such a view on the world was antiquated.  It persists, and this question made me realize that just because I see a world (at least around me) where by and large women are being treated with their due respect doesn’t make it so.  Maybe it is important to be reminded that progress in and of itself isn’t the goal.  Questions like this one, assignments such as reading about the women who played important roles in 16th century Western Europe (something I’ve never, ever heard about before), maybe such things are necessary to make people realize that not everyone sees the world in the same way.

I really don’t think that most of us are out to offend other people.  I think there is some truth to the notion that people are too easily offended these days.  At the same time, however, I think there is some truth to the notion that ignorance tends to produce offense.  Maybe if some made an effort not to be so easily offended, and others made an effort to inform themselves about those who are unlike them, offense wouldn’t be such a problem and we could see the world more like it really is than in some overly positive or negative way.

Wimbledon

Sitting on my couch early this Sunday morning, I was really pulling for Roddick against Federer in the Wimbledon final.  My adrenalin was flowing.  I was on the edge of my seat texting my wife in Texas about what was unfolding.   I just felt for the guy.  My sense is that he’s played so hard over his career and yet he seems to come up in the big Grand Slam tournaments just a bit short.  This Wimbledon may have been his best tournament yet.  A great win to get him to the finals, and then the finals.  And what to say about that match?  One for the record books.  One break by Federer in the entire match and it was the game that cost him the tournament – at 16-14 in the fifth set at that.  Add to it that the shadows stretching over the court due to the length of the match seemed, in my opinion, to play something of a role in the end.  Roddick was so close, and yet the headlines today are about Federer.  Roddick’s disappointment immediately after the match could not be missed.  In spite of his disappointment, though, when Roddick came to the on-court interview immediately after the awards presentation, he made a great impression on me.  The interviewer started by giving praise to the competitiveness of the match and then said that the sport of tennis can be cruel sometimes.  Roddick immediately rejected the interviewer’s interpretation of the situation and said that what just happened was not cruel, because he is one of the few who ever get the chance to be in that situation in the first place.  How wise!

Over the last couple of years I’ve been in a strange place.  As I try to make sense of it, I think it comes from the notion of being born again, of being somehow different than I was before.  The fact of the matter is that when the knowledge of God becomes true in one’s mind and heart, life really is not the same.  Reality becomes set, and all truth hinges on that reality.  Paradoxically, one consequence  for me at least has been a sense of isolation.  This is what I’ve felt for a couple of years.  I feel that in significant ways I’ve lost a dimension of relationship with so many people in my life.  One bright side of this is that I think it has drawn me closer and more dependent upon God and upon my wife and children.  At the same time though, it has made me, well, sad to feel like I cannot relate to people in the same way as I could before.  I have often thought, and just the other day had a discussion with another seminary student in my class who felt the same way, that it would just have been easier not to have been called to do what I’m doing.  I’ve never doubted the sense of call.  To the contrary, the call has gotten more intense and specific in the last year.  That, unfortunately, hasn’t made it any easier.

Enter Roddick’s response.  Isn’t is great how reality can be pointed out in such various and diverse ways?  Instead of lamenting the difficulty, I should be rejoicing in the privilege.  Trying to hold back tears after probably the most disappointing tennis match of his life, one that consisted of almost 80 of the most important games in his life, Roddick maintained an amazing perspective.  He considered himself fortuanate to have such disappointment.  He understood that he was priviledged to feel such heartache.

Tradition

I’m taking an extremely interesting philosophy class on Christ and Culture taught by the President of Fuller.  The issues discussed in this class alone could provide endless material for posts.  I wish I had more time to write on them, but there are just too many demands at the moment.  This is an easy post, though, because I just want to quote from an October 2004 article by Craig Bartholomew entitled, “Relevance of Neocalvinism for Today.”  There are  no comments I’m adding other than this.  Some of the language is maybe over the top, but I think it is intended to be.  It is interesting material to read and really consider.  I think there is a strong element of truth to the notion that our traditions have broken down and have been/are being replaced with whatever we now find to have in common with each other.  I think too often they are not the best things to build our culture around.

The remainder of this post is Bartholomew’s words:

“All humans are ‘traditioned.’  Part of being human is inhabiting a tradition/s that describes and directs our understanding of life . . . The great myth of the standard narrative of modernity was neutrality and progress . . . The outworking of modernity in postmodernism has however made it clearer that there are fundamental differences between modernity and Christianity so that accommodation is exposed as a futile task.  And for the West, philosophically at least, modernity has splintered into a myriad of fragments, so that the tenuous glue left holding the West together is, perhaps, consumerism.  This is not good social glue, neither for the West nor for the ‘developing world,’ and in this context it is urgent that Christians declare the faith as all encompassing and demonstrate theoretically and practically that the gospel is glue sufficient for individual and communal life . . .

Postmodernism represents a radical questioning of modernity, but culturally we are witnessing, by comparison, the triumph of a sort of global capitalism in the guise of our consumer culture.  Philosophically, I think that postmodernism represents the outworking of historicism that is inherent in modernity . . . (historicism means that everything is adrift, relative to the moment, and that there are no sure guides to how to live . . . historicism has no transcendent norm . . . if there are currents of dissatisfaction evident in a societal practice, they will be treated with great seriousness as signs of the evolution for which the practice is destined) . . . Modernity rejected tradition and religious authority but held on to the hope that reason alone would lead us to truth.  Postmoderns have given up on the illusion that reason alone will lead us to truth, but they have not recovered tradition and authority . . .

If postmodernism represents the triumph of consumer culture, in the absence of any other unifying metanarrative, consumerism fills the vacuum.  As Susan White notes, if there is any overarching metanarrative that purports to explain reality in the late 20th century, it is surely the narrative of economy.  In the beginning of this narrative is the self-made, self-sufficient human being.  At the end of this narrative is the big house, the big car, and the expensive clothes.  In the middle is the struggle for success, the greed, the incessant getting-and-spending.  Most of us have made this so thoroughly our story that we are hardly aware of its influence.  The result is, as Wendell Berry so aptly put is, ‘The truth is that we Americans, all of us, have become a kind of human trash, living our lives in the midst of a ubiquitous mess of which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators.’”

Heidi & Spencer – Way off topic

For some unexplainable reason, I have to share this.  I think it may be the result of a class I’m taking now that considers the issue of what relationship, if any, Christians have historically had to the greater culture that surrounds them.  Constantine “Christianized” the world over which he ruled.  The Anabaptists to varying degrees withdrew from their surrounding society.  I don’t know where on this spectrum my day today falls.  It seriously calls into question my own stance toward culture.

Mel watches a MTV “reality” show called “The Hills” set here in LA.  I admit, I used to watch it too, and probably would still if it was more convenient for me.  We don’t have cable so Mel has to watch it on the computer.  Anyway, Heidi and Spencer from that show got married today in Pasadena, not far at all from our apartment.  Of course, it is all a big MTV production.  Mel is in Texas with the girls and has just been beside herself that she could not be in town today.  She wanted me to go by and see if I could get some pictures.  Well, I did.  I drove by this morning on my way to the grocery store and saw the big set up that was taking place.  I went back by around noon and stopped to see if I could get some info.  I heard from one couple standing around that they had heard conflicting stories that it was supposed to start at 2 or at 4.  I got back over there right around 2 with camera in hand.  There was enough activity (paparazzi and fans) that I felt I should stick around.  I at least had the foresight to bring some books with me, though I didn’t get much reading done.  Long story short, I left the area to head back to the apartment about 6:45.

It was crazy.  Photographers on the roof of apartments across the street (not apartments like in the suburbs; apartments like
multifamily houses).  Girls screaming.  Fabulous people.  I was so out of place.  At the same time, though, like I told Mel, I was sucked in.  When “famous” people were around, the crowd went wild.  It was a weirdly attractive energy.  You just had this sense that something was going on and you were some sort of happy to be a part of it.  Forget the hour plus of down time in between the bursts of excitement.  Quite the phenomenon.   Very illustrative of the lure of the world.  I mean, seriously, Heidi and Spencer!

Anyway, of course I have to share some of the photos I took so you can share in it all.

It’s Our Duty to Change It – Part 2

First, an apology.  I had actually written most everything I had intended to say on this topic when I made my first post.  It seemed too long to make it one post, plus I thought I’d change it up some.  Then my computer crashed and I lost it all.  With school demands, I just haven’t had the time and motivation to sit down and try to recreate my thought process from the night I wrote that first post.  But I just caught the last half of an interesting Frontline piece on our national debt entitled “$10 Trillion and Counting” and I found the motivation to offer a followup.  I also apologize because I’m not putting forth a solution as promised (as if I could), just an alternative way of thinking about the issue.

First, as a sort of disclaimer, I want to make clear that I am not a true-blue free market person.  I have considered many of the arguments against a total free market system and I sympathize with the issues they raise.  At the same time, I can confidently say that I far favor the market system over government control; and yes, I do see these options as fundamentally antithetical.  Let me also be clear, though, that I don’t see either as a solution, nor do I see the synthesis of the two as a solution.  Instead, I look at them and consider which one does a better job of pointing to the solution.

The central problem with the market system is that it is financially focused.  The central problem with government control, in comparison, is that it is politically focused.  The initial difference I see here is that, and this is admittedly discussed in very general terms, in the market situation, the individual makes decisions based on his/her own financial objective.  In the government situation, the politician makes decisions basked on his/her own political objective, which always includes the overarching objective of reelection.  In this way, they are both individually focused.  This initial difference leads to the material difference.

The material difference between the two is the promises each system makes.  The market system, to the extent it is a free market system, promises that price will be the result of supply and demand; that risk will correspond to profit/loss potential.  The political system, on the other hand, promises unlimited prosperity.  Try getting elected on the message of failure.  In other words, one system embraces the idea of failure, the other system rejects it.  But failure has to be a reality.

Take the current situation of the US automakers as an example.  They made a mistake.  They bet on SUVs and didn’t hedge that bet.  It was a bad decision.  But that bad decision then became a political issue.  The market said they should fail.  Government said it could make everything better.  It doesn’t look like government can live up to that promise, but even if it does, is that good?  Shouldn’t bad decisions have consequences, even if they are drastic?  If bad decisions do not have consequences, how is that sustainable?  It simply isn’t.  We want to live our lives believing that “everything will be okay,” but that is a false reality unless there is a power that can make it so.

Government tends to promise us lives without suffering.  It is a promise experience tells us the government cannot keep.  The market tends to promise impartiality.  It too is a promise that cannot be kept, but the thing is that people who understand the concept of the market understand that it is a false promise.  The market can be beat.  The market can also beat them.  The market is nothing more than a set of assumptions that no one guarantees are correct.  In this regard, where the government offers a false sense that everything will be okay, the market offers nothing.

Why does this matter so much?  I just finished an assignment on Romans 10.  What I take away from that work is an understanding of the foundational points that Paul makes in Romans, and that the Bible makes as a whole.  These are those points:  Everything that happens happens for the salvation of those who trust in God, and salvation comes only from God.  To the extent we rely on anything but God for our salvation, we are wrong, and there are consequences for being wrong.

I also just completed a paper on the debate in the 1930’s between Emil Brunner and Karl Barth concerning natural theology, the idea that humanity has the natural ability to achieve some level of knowledge of  God.  Brunner argues for the idea.  Barth argues against it.  In my estimation, the crux of Barth’s argument is that any purported knowledge of God that does not include the knowledge of Jesus Christ revealed in the Scriptures is not a knowledge of God at all.  While I do have some questions regarding Barth’s argument, I took away from the debate an important point.  Barth argued that proponents of natural theology tend to look for a “point of contact” with their audience in order to reason them into faith.  Barth found this terribly objectionable.  He believed one who proclaims the gospel should simply proclaim the gospel, that it contains its own power to overcome and doesn’t need any help.  I have this sense of knowing that Barth’s point is true.  My short experience this past summer in a dialogue partially captured on this page strengthens this knowledge.  My conclusion is that there is something not right about the approach I took then, which was an attempt to engage this person on his own terms.  One of the great points of Scripture is that the ways of God are nonsense to the world.  The counterpart of this is that only the power of God can change this.  I can testify that when this happens, chaos becomes perfect order.  This is the link to what I was saying before about Romans.  It is God who has the power to save and He offers it to all who trust in Him.  So, the purpose of this entire rambling blog is simply to point to God.  I don’t have the answers to today’s problems.  I’m becoming more and more convinced that my role is not to offer suggestions to these problems, but rather to be a reminding voice that the only way that everything will be okay is to trust in God.  That doesn’t mean there will be no suffering.  It does, however, mean salvation, a topic which logically should be the subject of a future post.

It is our duty to change it (2)

This seems strange.  Does anyone else have trouble reading my last post?  When I see it, it has large sections of it whited out and I cannot fix it.  If you highlight those sections, though, you can read the text.  Sorry, that is the best I can do.

It is our duty to change it

I want to make some comments regarding a recent Wall Street Journal opinion article by Daniel Henninger  (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123681860305802821.html). Actually, I want to use the article as a starting point for a multi-part post on certain aspects of discipleship.  This will be the first of probably three parts that I intend to post in the next couple weeks.

The article addresses the new U.S. budget proposal from the White House, “A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise.  The President’s Budget and Fiscal Preview.”  Henninger argues that one particular graph in the budget proposal provides unique insight into the ideology behind this budget proposal and various other recent actions by the new administration.

The graph in question, entitled “Top One Percent of Earners Have Been Increasing Their Share,” is from French economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez and purports to track the percentage of total American income received by the top one percent of Americans.  From 1980 to 1995, the percentage rose from about 10% to 15%.  From 1995 to 2000 it rose from about 15% to about 21%.  In 2006, the last year of data in the graph, it appears to stand at about 23%.  So, that is to say, in 2006 the top 1% of American income earners earned about 23% of the total combined income earned by all Americans in that year.  The budget then apparently goes on to add that the top 10% of American households “hold” about 70% of total American wealth.

Henninger gives the specialties of Piketty and Saez as “earnings inequality” and “wealth concentration.”  Much like the “Laffer curve” is used to support the argument that raising taxes actually decreases tax revenues past a certain point, the Piketty and Saez chart is used to support arguments for tax policies which take from the wealthy in order to give to the poor.  The difference, Henninger points out, is that while the ideas behind the Laffer curve, which have been articulated since as far back as the late 14^th Century, are economic ideas, the ideas behind Piketty’s and Saez’s work are ideas of morality.  Here’s what the administration has to say about the issue in the budget proposal:

“There’s nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few. . . . It’s a legacy of irresponsibility, and it is our duty to change it.”

In other words, the new administration appears to have as its central goal the fulfillment of a duty it considers to be on it to redistribute money in order to “level the playing field” to where it feels is appropriate.  Henninger argues all this goes to show that the economy stood second in the recent stimulus bill, with the “moral failure” of the Piketty and Saez chart standing first.

It is true, I think, that, if accepted at face value, the Piketty and Saez chart raises for discussion a number of important and difficult questions.  I think most reasonable people will agree that there is something not right (i.e., wrong) with relatively few living in excess luxury while significant numbers live in financially desperate, or any other kind of desperate, situations.  I think most reasonable people who are informed on the topic will also agree that this is currently the situation in America.   It is far, far worse on a global scale.  But the question for those of us who see the problem is what is the best way to address the problem?  I, for one, do not find the solution in government, and I’ll try to state my case for why and for an alternative in the follow up posts.  In the mean time, think about what you think.

NT Wright Lecture

A Fuller news piece on an NT Wright lecture I attended last week:

Over 900 Fuller students and members of the wider Pasadena community gathered Thursday evening, February 26, to hear N. T. Wright, Anglican Bishop of Durham, speak at Pasadena’s Lake Avenue Church. His lecture, entitled “Learning the Language of Life, New Creation, and Christian Virtue,” focused on the role of virtue in challenging romanticism and existentialism, living in a manner befitting the eschatological vision of the New Testament, and sustaining the mission of the Church.

Wright, quoting St. Paul’s exhortation to be “transformed by the renewing of your minds,” emphasized that the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives doesn’t preclude the need to be thoughtful and disciplined when it comes to living out our identities as new creations in Christ. “Our culture prefers effortless spontaneity with occasional divine intervention in emergencies,” Wright stated, “but virtue is what happens when wise and courageous choices have become second-nature,” a process requiring time and intentionality. He likened the practice of virtue to the challenge of learning a second language. “We will often get it wrong,” he said, “but it’s worth persisting for the goal of what lies ahead.”

And that which lies ahead, according to Wright, is the full realization of the Kingdom of God, which Jesus inaugurated while on earth. The Western Church has gotten it wrong in recent times, he claimed, with its notion of a disembodied future existence in heaven. In his view, the real picture painted by Scripture is that of a “new heaven and new earth”—Christ rescuing the present creation from corruption and decay, destroying death itself, and reconciling all things to himself. Our efforts don’t usher in God’s reign—as Wright noted, “God’s new age remains God’s gift”—but we can anticipate this future reality by beginning to learn the language of God’s Kingdom that we will one day speak for eternity.

Wright believes that viewing virtue and the mission of the church through this eschatological lens makes virtue more than simple morality. “Virtue is about health and strength and human flourishing,” he said. “Virtue is about learning the language of life, the language of love.” Adopting this new language doesn’t always come easily, but with practice we can better live in keeping with our true human vocation to rule over God’s creation as his image-bearers, joining God to infuse a broken world with his healing, justice, wisdom, and beauty.

Wright’s talk concluded with a time for questions from the audience.

N. T. Wright is an acclaimed New Testament scholar who has written lengthy volumes on the historical Jesus and the resurrection in his academic Christian Origins and the Question of God series, as well as recent popular titles such as Simply Christian and Surprised by Hope. In addition to his Thursday evening lecture, Wright just completed teaching a week-long Doctor of Ministry course at Fuller on “A Church Shaped by Mission.”

A Global New Deal

Some believe the original New Deal had a positive value.  Some believe it had a negative value.  This from a US News and World Report article from April 2008:

“But if there’s anything more unpredictable than the direction of the market, it’s the effects of government tinkering with economic policy. And even today, economists and historians still vigorously debate not only whether or not the New Deal helped take the country out of the Depression but if it actually made things worse.

Just how divided are experts? In 1995, economist Robert Whaples of Wake Forest University published a survey of academic economists that asked them if they agreed with the statement, “Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression.” Fifty-one percent disagreed, and 49 percent agreed.”

In light of the fact that the “experts” cannot even agree whether the original New Deal was a good or bad idea, the notion of a global New Deal should be examined very closely.  The following is an excerpt from an opinion piece written by British PM Gordon Brown and published today in the Times of London in advance of his first trip to the US this week to visit President Obama.

“Globalisation has brought great advances, lifting millions out of poverty as they reap the benefits of economic growth and trade. But it has also brought new insecurities, as this – the first truly global financial crisis – underlines. Globalisation is not an option, it is a fact, so the question is whether we manage it well or badly.

I believe there is no challenge so great or so difficult that it cannot be overcome by America, Britain and the world working together. That is why President Obama and I will discuss this week a global new deal, whose impact can stretch from the villages of Africa to reforming the financial institutions of London and New York– and giving security to the hard-working families in every country.

I see this global new deal as an agreement that every continent injects resources into its economy. I believe that central to this new investment is that every country backs a green recovery for the future, that every country that wishes to participate in the international financial system agrees common principles for financial regulation, coordinated internationally, and changes to their own banking system that will bring us shared prosperity once again. And that, together, we must agree to reform the mandate and governance of global institutions to recognise the changing shape of the world economy and the emergence of new players.

It is a global new deal that will lay the foundations not just fora sustainable economic recovery but for a genuinely new era of international partnership in which all countries have a part to play.”

A Time for Dust and Ashes

Yesterday I went to chapel for an Ash Wednesday service.  To me Ash Wednesday has mostly been a day of repentence as we begin the season of Lent.  Repentence was certainly a major theme of yesterday’s service, but so was our mortality.  Obviously the two go hand-in-hand, but I really appreciated the reminder to consider my own mortalilty, for at least a few reasons.  First, it is always so important to remember that we are not God.  We have no right to demand all the answers, and we have no right to try to appropriate for ourselves the divine things, the forbidden fruit.  Secondly, we are not promised tomorrow.  Each day must be lived for itself.  Plans are helpful, but we should not make the mistake of planning to the detriment of doing.  When we die, it will not matter what our plans are.  Finally, our finite nature is the whole extent of our nature apart from God.  All is vanity apart from God.  Thinking about these things underscores the necessity of living each day for God.  Our work is the work He has for us.  Our joys are the joys He has for us.  Our meaning, our importance, our lives are in Him.

Psalm 39:4-6

Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is.  You have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing in your sight.  Surely everyone stands as a mere breath.  Surely everyone goes about like a shadow.  Surely for nothing they are in turmoil; they heap up, and they do not know who will gather.

“We Come, O Lord, in Mourning”

We come, O Lord, in mourning – in ashes and in dust.  How brief the life we’re given; how fleeting all we trust.  Remind us we are dust, Lord, and dust again we’ll be.  Before we turn to ashes, God, help us turn to thee.