Category: Culture

There are at least two kinds of ministers.

One kind ministers in such a way so as to help his people fit their Christianity into the culture in which they live. The thrust here is to help people fit in and navigate their culture while being Christian.

Another kind of minister ministers in such a way so as to help his people understand that Christianity can’t fit into the culture in which they live. The thrust here is to encourage people not to let the world around them squeeze them into its mold.

These two ministers won’t typically understand one another very well.

It’s true.

I attended a Huckabee for President campaign rally in St. John’s Michigan last Friday Night. Please don’t hold it against me as it was Huckabee who invaded my space and not my going out of my way to swoon over his rock star like status. My Son was competing in a Homeschool basketball game and the Huckabee campaign decided that the venue would be a great photo op and rally site. Now, I could have decided to just miss the game since it was being converted into a ‘All ignorant Jesus lovers vote for me’ rally but since I am an assistant coach for Anthony’s team I though I would grin and bear it.

However, since I was forced to be there I do have an observation about those gathered, a observation about Huckabee and an sociological observation regarding social behavior towards those who refuse to drink the kool-aid and who scream loudly that others shouldn’t drink the kool-aid.

First concerning the gathered lemmings — it was as if I was transported to a Tom Jones concert of 40 years ago. You know … the type where all the women would throw their undergarments on the stage along with their hotel room keys in hopes that Tom would pick them. The swooning was surreal. Before Huckabee arrived their were announcements on the PA about how the Huckabee staffers were nervous that the crowd would swarm him and pleas that everyone would let the candidate approach them and not approach the candidate. The people in charge of the campaign kept giving us minute by minute updates on the coming of Huckabbe. “Governor Huckabee is 10 minutes out. Governor Huckabee is 5 minutes out. Governor Huckabee is 2 minute out.” And on and on it went. The last time I’ve seen a person tracked this closely was Santa Clause on Christmas Eve. Every time an update was given the 500 souls in the gymnasium would swoon like teenage girls being asked out on their first date. Then we had practice cheering runs. “Let me hear what kind of noise you’re going to make when future President Huckabee shows up.” I found myself wondering how Royalty was ever treated any differently. These people were wetting their pants over getting to be in the same room with a guy that makes Tricky Dick and Slick Willie look like amateurs.

And then when Huckabee shows up it was more of the same. The Huckster’s speech was boiler plate political vapid. There was no there ‘there.’ My 18 year old daughter characterized it as ‘bushwah.’ And yet people were screaming their lungs out as if Huckabee was serving as the prophet of Allah making pronouncements revealing Allah’s will.

To be honest I was ashamed of myself. Ashamed because despite all my skepticism and cynicism I had underestimated the ability of those who call themselves Christians to be totally deluded. Those 500 people present, most of whom no doubt would label themselves ‘Christian’ have no idea who Mike Huckabee is or what policy he has pursued, and further have no desire to know. It is enough for them that Mike says he is the Jesus candidate. I used to think that these people were being manipulated by their Pastors but having spoken to a few Huckabee Pastor types I realize that the fog in the pew is because of the mist in the pulpit. In short, their Pastors are just as deluded as the rank and file. Somehow a lemming avalanche for Huckabee got started and once the avalanche begins no amount of reasoning will thwart its kinetic energy.

I know this because I got snowed over by the avalanche. When it was announced that Huckabee was going to be in St. Johns and when I realized it was the homeschooling organization that I am loosely a part of that was pushing it I sent a e-mailing out to those in the homeschooling group simply explaining some of the liberal and Statist tendencies of Mike Huckabee and providing links for people to look closer at this wolf in sheep’s clothing. Given the response I received you would have thought that I had committed blasphemy by touching the Lord’s anointed.

So here is the summary of the first observation. People, including Christians, so desperately want heroes that they will turn off rational thought once they decide, for whatever reason, that some person is going to be that hero. Secondly, the Christian community is no different from the non-Christian community when it comes to shallowness, practicing thought by emotion, and sheer unmitigated gullibility.

The observation about Huckabee is that he is slick the same way that Clinton was slick except that he has added Jesus coating to his slickness. This is the my chief reason for disliking Huckabee. It is my estimation that he is cynically using Jesus to get elected. Let’s face it if it weren’t for Huckabee’s ministerial ties and willingness to invoke Jesus at every turn he would be running neck and neck with Duncan Hunter. Recently, I am blaming him less and less for this and increasingly I am blaming the ‘Christian community’ for being such willing fools. Huckabee’s ‘I am the bible’s candidate’ spiel came out again in the few minutes that he spoke where he appealed to people to help him slay the giants he was facing in the Michigan primary the way that David slew Goliath. More identity politics and more red meat for the Jesus fools.

Here is the summary of the second observation. Huckabee will ride this ‘I love Jesus’ train as far as he can. What is unfortunate about it is that he is getting away with what so many ministers in our Churches get away with and that is constantly having Jesus on their lips while preaching a Theology that is not particularly Christian. The goods are out there on Huckabee in terms of his leftist, Statist and non-Christian agenda but Christians just don’t care because it is enough to invoke Jesus.

My final observation is sociological and has reference to the way people treat those who are unwilling to drink the kool-aid. During the 36 hours when all this was unfolding I was told it was inappropriate for me to e-mail people to warn them about Huckabee. My Son was told by someone that they ‘felt sorry for him that he had the Father he had,’ and the most benign look I seem to get now is one that is quizzical as if somebody is looking at a hunchback cannibal with the remnants of dinner still wedged between his teeth. Like the human body, a community protects itself by attacking foreign elements that it perceives does not belong there. Much of the Christian community has decided that Huckabee is the man and woe unto those who suggest that a vote for Huckabee is a vote which is, in reality, precisely against their best interest.

So yes… I attended a Huckabee rally.

And my worst fears were realized.

Given the speed of todays news cycle this next observation is already well past old news but it reminded me of something that I read about 25 years ago and I couldn’t resist recalling.

On Monday Hillary Rodham Clinton was giving a Political speech somewhere in New Hampshire when some adolescent kid stood up towards the front of the auditorium where she was speaking and interrupted her speech by waving a sign that said “Iron My Shirt” while chanting the same. After a few seconds of this Hillary paused, asked for the lights to be turned up (presumably so everyone could see her heckler and his sign) and then after he was very speedily removed said,

“Ah the remnants of sexism alive and well…”

“As I think as has been abundantly demonstrated I am also running to break through the highest and hardest glass ceiling for our daughters, for our children, for our country, and really for women around the world…”

This response brought the house to their feet.

Since then it is been widely observed on the net that fat boy who was waving the sign and chanting was likely a Hillary plant which I believe makes abundant good sense.

Consider that this is not the first time this kind of thing has happened. About 25 years ago I read an account Richard Nixon’s biography about Jack Kennedy campaigning in the Wisconsin primary. (This is all from recall so some of the details could be wrong) where Bobby Kennedy had handbills made up and passed about different venues in Wisconsin calling into serious question Jack Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism. Nixon believed that that voter backlash over this ploy, in sympathy of Kennedy, helped Kennedy win the Democratic Wisconsin primary.

So if Hillary’s campaign did pull of this stunt it has historical precedent. In both cases the campaigns created a situation that would appeal to one of the more noble American instincts — identifying with and standing up for the underdog.

Now, if you combine this campaign ploy with the ploy of Hillary’s very public forced tears in New Hampshire (what Husband has not caved to his wife’s tears?) with the great likely hood that the Clinton’s bussed in supporters to vote in a loosey goosey New Hampshire voting environment maybe all that starts to explain how wrong the pollsters were in New Hampshire.

You got to give her campaign credit … they really know how to pull all the right strings.

“Democracy and free markets do not a country make. Constitutions, no matter how eloquent — abstract ideas no matter how lovely do not create a nation. A nation writes its constitution. A nation drafts its own birth certificate. What makes a people and a nation is a common and unique homeland and people, history and heritage, language and literature, song and story, traditions and customs.”

Pat Buchanan
Day Of Reckoning

You cannot import thousands of Muslim Somalians into Lewiston Maine and expect them to become Americans all because they wanted ‘Freedom.’ You can not import tens of thousands of Laotian Hmong to Minnesota and expect them to fit into American culture. You cannot allow millions of illegal immigrants from Hispaniola and expect that they will reinforce Americana. A nation is not defined by its propositions but by the shared participation that its citizenry has in its historical tapestry.
Generational participation in a nations Historical tapestry is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Nations are built on what Abraham Lincoln referred to as the ‘shared chords of mystic memory.’ These shared chords are made up first and foremost by a shared religion which produces a common culture that expresses and reinforces itself through societal institutions. When aliens are introduced in overwhelming numbers into the life of a nation without time to assimilate and with only marginal cultural touchstones the result is not diversity that strengthens but rather diversity that divides and balkanizes.

Those who suggest that these United States are a propositional nation should well consider how other nations have lately done who were formed by means of cobbled together nationalities and religions trying to live as one Nation. Yugoslavia is now five nations going on six. Czechoslovakia divided itself between its Czech people and its Slovak people. Quebec does all it can to distinguish itself from British Canadians. Nations are not formed by shared economic interests. Such an arrangement may be a means of building alliances but it is not a means of building cultures or peoples. Nations are not formed by assenting to a set of abstract propositions. Proposition nations are only as deep as the fortunes of economic prosperity, whithering with the advent of national misfortune. Nations are formed first by a common faith, and then by years of sharing the land together informed by that shared faith as it produces a shared culture that results in shared literature, song, legal structures, economic paradigms and family relationships.

Those who are insisting that nations are made by people from different religions and cultures having only in common the desire to own the latest technological gadget are in for a rude awakening when something happens to turn the market upside down. Shared mystic chords of memory can sustain and carry a people through difficult and adverse times. The absence of those shared chords will result, when adversity arrives, in the different nationalities and religions splitting along their natural lines just as they have been doing in the nations already named.

A couple of days ago I brought up the idea of ‘intrusion ethics’ which has become popular in some quarters of Reformed Churches and Seminaries. This hermeneutical idea is most closely associated with Dr. Meredith Kline, who first floated the idea in an article written over 50 years ago, and is now heavily pushed by the academic community at Westminster West in California, where Dr. Kline taught for a number of years.

What I intend to do in this article is to spend a little time defining ‘intrusion ethics’ and the hermeneutic to which it belongs. Also I hope to give some examples of how ‘intrusion ethics’ work as well as looking at the implications for ‘intrusion ethics’ when they are consistently followed. Finally I hope to critique ‘intrusion ethics’ with a view to introducing grave doubts in the reader as to the legitimacy of this hermeneutic.

In order to understand ‘intrusion ethics’ we must first understand that originally it was developed as a means to understand the incremental growth of the covenant of redemption after the fall. The thinking was that in redemptive history God was pleased to introduce (thus intrusion) a sort of eschatological reality (an in breaking of the consummation in physical time and place) into the period of delay that represents the time of common grace, the period of time that lies between the historical bookends of the fall and the full consummation. The purposes of this redemptive-historical ‘intrusion ethic’ were twofold. First, the ‘intrusion ethic’ serves to bring God’s people into contact with the yet future consummation thus revealing that God dwelt in the midst of His people. Second, the ‘intrusion ethic’ serves to foreshadow and adumbrate the fullness of the consummation age that is promised and is yet to come and presumably finds its inaugurative fulfillment in the advent of the Christ. Dr. Kline offers that, “The Covenant of Redemption all along the line of its administration, more profoundly in the New Testament but already in the Old Testament is a coming of the Spirit, an intrusion of the power, principles, and reality of the consummation into the period of delay.”

By Dr. Kline’s lights this time of intrusion is a time where in the context of divinely sanctioned redemptive-historical temporal forms a time of preparation for a later age of fulfillment is commenced. This ‘intrusion time’ both suggests and veils (suggesting by veiling) the consummation that is yet to come. Within this ‘intrusion husk’ there is an abiding kerygma that anticipates itself.

Thus far this is really quite excellent stuff. The problem though comes in with the application for what Klineans do is they use this ‘intrusion time’ as what seems to be a dispensationalizing tool in order to invalidate those portions of the Scripture that putatively belong only to the ‘Old Covenant intrusion time.’ For example, laws that were given to God’s people as applicatory and explanative of the Moral law are seen as no longer valid for this ‘non Old Covenant intrusion’ time. Klineans hold that the case law as part of and along with the Theocracy that ruled God’s people in the Old Testament was part of the intrusion husk that fell away with coming of the reality of all it foreshadowed.

Now, Klineans don’t believe that the ‘intrusion time’ was taken away with the advent of He who is the consummative Kingdom. Instead they seem to hold that the intrusion time remains but that it is characterized and takes shape differently. Again here we would have to agree with this assessment in general. Who could disagree that there was a certain ‘eschatological nowness’ (thus the presence of ‘intrusion’ in the Old Covenant) about God’s Kingdom in the Old Covenant that informed the clear ‘eschatological not yetness’ of the coming Kingdom? Likewise who could disagree that there remains a certain eschaotologial ‘not yetness’ (thus the necessity for an intrusion) about the eschatological ‘nowness’ of the present Kingdom? The problem with the Klineans seems to be that they have either weighted the Old Covenant time of the ‘not yet’ with to much eschatological ‘nowness’ or they have characterized the age of ‘eschatological nowness’ with to much ‘not yetness.’ This problem is seen when Kline says, “While, therefore, the Old Testament is an earlier edition of the final reality than is the present age of the new covenant, and not so intensive, it is on its own level a more extensive edition, especially when considered it its own more fully developed form, vis., the Israelite Theocracy.’ What Dr. Kline is saying here is that the Old Covenant, at least in some sense, has more of the consummation in and about it then we have in the Church age even after the consummation has come in Christ Jesus.

It is sheer speculation but one can’t help but wonder if this staggering admission is due to the strongly affirmed a-millennial tenets of the Klineans school of thought. Certainly the idea that consummation will only come in a catastrophic in breaking fashion would be served by a redemptive historical hermeneutic that insists that the very means (the application of God’s Law Word to all of life) for seeing the already present consummative mustard seed Kingdom incrementally grow must be held to be null and void for the Church age. By dismissing the applicability of God’s Law Word to every realm due to its putative uniqueness to the Old Covenant – only a a-millennial story line can possibly bring in the consummation.

Another Klinean School tenet that is served by this redemptive-historical hermeneutic is their insistence on divorcing common and sacred realms. If God removed the ‘intrusion ethic’ of the Old Covenant time with the intrusion of He who was the incarnation of God’s Law Word then there is no Scriptural standard by which God’s people, as a covenantal entity, can measure what happens in the shared common realm. In other words by insisting that with the disappearance of the Old Testament Theocracy along with the case law that governed it what the Klineans have done is, by means of Theological interpretation, created a secular realm.

While it has been hinted at already, another problem with this reading is that in some respects it burdens the Reformed person in their explanation of how it is that the New Covenant is better than the Old Covenant. If in the Old Covenant God’s people, corporately and covenantally speaking, had God’s laws to live by but in the New Covenant we have to appeal to controversial notions of Natural Moral law in order to be ruled then clearly the person in the Old Covenant had a better covenant, in the respect just mentioned, then God’s people currently living. In this respect at least it must be questioned how it is that the New Covenant is a ‘new and better’ covenant.