HEY, BABY! “Calvinist Pick Up Lines.”

“Hey, baby! Your name must be grace because you’re irresistible.” Heh! (HT: John Fea)

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JESUS THE INDEPENDENT: “Why Jesus might be a Republi-demo-liber-green-peace and freed-O-crat.” Over at Red Letter Christians, Kurt Willems makes the obvious point that “Jesus is not a partisan politician.” He then articulates what policies Jesus might support in the respective platforms of the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, Green, Peace and Freedom parties. You probably won’t agree with everything in this article—I certainly didn’t—but I found the conclusion to be spot on.

Jesus would be a pick and choose independent.  He would focus on the alternative.  He would speak truth to the powerful in a prophetic fashion and offer a better way for his covenant community.  Jesus would tell his followers to be prophetic when needed but to also model what a truly just government ought to look like in the way you deal with each other!

And ultimately, he already won the most important election in history. His deeper concern is for an empire that transcends borders. He called such the “kingdom of God” and Jesus is calling his people to live in allegiance to that nation.

He is king of the universe and one day, all things will be underneath his feet.

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OCCUPATION OR INVITATION? “What Would Jesus Occupy?”

Jesus was a revolutionary, but not against the temporal authorities of the day or the distribution of goods in society. His revolution was against the resentful measuring tape of the unrepentant human heart. As long as we want to focus on how the schemes of others have gone awry, we are operating in our own power and in our own names. If we truly want to be doing what Jesus would do, we must seek our entitlements from the right source, and cease thinking in terms of “occupation” altogether. Jesus did not say nothing would change. His message is that we will change, one by one: not through occupation but by invitation.

J. E. Dyer makes some valid points in this article. And yet, I can’t help but think that her conclusion is the mirror image of the left-wing Christians who support “Occupy Wall Street”—like Jim Wallis. His Jesus reorganizes the social structures of society, but her Jesus focuses on individual change. Isn’t there some mediating position in which, for example, Jesus invites individuals into a new community?

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SAME OLD, SAME OLD: “What’s Old Is New: ‘America’s New Evangelicals.’” In his review of Marcia Pally’s new book, The New Evangelicals (Eerdmans), Matthew Lee Anderson

Yet whether the new evangelicals are really new depends upon our understanding of what came before them. And unfortunately, Pally’s understanding makes it difficult to discern what’s actually new about the movement. For instance, she argues that the new evangelicals practice a “third way” of political engagement, avoiding the twin traps of theocratic ambition and privatized piety. They do this through “voluntarist associations” that “advocate for their positions through public education, lobbying, coalition building, and negotiation.”

This “civil society activism” is a commendable approach, but couldn’t Pally apply the same description to the Religious Right? Historically, this movement was propelled by a cluster of voluntary parachurch organizations—many of them avowedly non-sectarian in their approach—that worked to influence society by means of lobbying and public persuasion. Moreover, and somewhat ironically, traditional approaches to limited government have often been justified precisely because they leave room for the mediating institutions of civil society, rather than relying upon the coercive powers of the state. Because Pally conflates conservatism with what amounts to libertarian economics, she overlooks the possibility of a mutually reinforcing relationship between “civil society activism” and limited government principles.

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 “THE THREE GREATEST OPPRESSORS HUMANITY HAS EVER KNOWN”: “A Fully Biblical Liberation Theology” links you to an excerpt of Mark Galli’s new book, Chaos and Grace: Discovering the Liberating Work of the Holy Spirit.

…liberation theology as it usually comes to us seems more indebted to Marx than to Moses. Yet the main problem is not that liberation theology went too far but rather that it did not go far enough. When the Bible—in particular, Jesus—speaks of liberation, there is much more at stake than politics. And it is for this reason, among others, that I think evangelicals should adhere to a liberation theology of our own. And we should frame that theology not with politics but with religion, morality, and spirituality—the three greatest oppressors humanity has ever known.

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DEAD ENDS IN THE SCIENCE/RELIGION DEBATE: “Religion’s truce with science can’t hold.” Atheist Julian Baggini argues that the truce won’t hold because naturalistic science has more explanatory power than supernaturalistic religion. I disagree. Nonetheless, I do think he has pointed out (1) the impossibility of maintaining a fact/value distinction in the science/religion debate and (2) the necessity of some form of evidential apologetics.

One of the most tedious recurring questions in the public debate about faith has been “is religion compatible with science?” Why won’t it just go away?

I’m convinced that one reason is that the standard affirmative answer is sophisticated enough to persuade those willing to be persuaded, but fishy enough for those less sure to keep sniffing away at it. That defence is that religion and science are compatible because they are not talking about the same things. Religion does not make empirical claims about how the universe works, and to treat it as though it did is to make a category mistake of the worst kind. So we should just leave science and religion to get on with their different jobs free from mutual molestation.

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It sounds like a clear enough distinction, but maintaining it proves to be very difficult indeed. Many “why” questions are really “how” questions in disguise. For instance, if you ask: “Why does water boil at 100C?” what you are really asking is: “What are the processes that explain it has this boiling point?” – which is a question of how.

Critically, however, scientific “why” questions do not imply any agency – deliberate action – and hence no intention. We can ask why the dinosaurs died out, why smoking causes cancer and so on without implying any intentions. In the theistic context, however, “why” is usually what I call “agency-why”: it’s an explanation involving causation with intention.

So not only do the hows and whys get mixed up, religion can end up smuggling in a non-scientific agency-why where it doesn’t belong.

This means that if someone asks why things are as they are, what their meaning and purpose is, and puts God in the answer, they are almost inevitably going to make an at least implicit claim about the how: God has set things up in some way, or intervened in some way, to make sure that purpose is achieved or meaning realised. The neat division between scientific “how” and religious “why” questions therefore turns out to be unsustainable.

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The religious believer could bite the bullet, accept that religion does make some empirical claims, and then defend their compatibility with science one by one. But the fact that two beliefs are compatible with each other is the most minimal test of their reasonableness imaginable. All sorts of outlandish beliefs – that the Apollo moon landings never happened, for instance – are compatible with science, but that hardly makes them credible. What really counts, what should really make the difference between assent and rejection of an empirical claim, is not whether it is compatible with science, but whether an evidence-led, rational examination of a view supports it better than competing alternatives.

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INDIVIDUALS AND CULTURES: “Pornography, Public Morality, and Constitutional Rights.” Over at Public Discourse, Robert P. George offers these thoughts on porn and public morality:

Theorists of public morality—from the ancient Greek philosophers and Roman jurists on—have noticed that apparently private acts of vice, when they multiply and become widespread, can imperil important public interests. This fact embarrasses philosophical efforts to draw a sharp line that distinguishes a realm of “private” morality that is not subject to law from a domain of public actions that may rightly be subjected to legal regulation.

Considered as isolated acts, someone’s recreational use of narcotics or hallucinogenic drugs, for example, may affect the public weal negligibly, if at all. An epidemic of drug abuse, however, though constituted by discrete, private acts of drug taking, damages the common good in myriad ways. This does not by itself settle the question whether drug prohibition is a prudent or effective policy. But it does undermine the belief that the recreational use of drugs is a matter of purely private choice into which public authority has no legitimate cause to intrude.

Much the same is true of pornography. Even in defending what he believes is a moral right to pornography, Ronald Dworkin has identified the public nature of the interests damaged in communities in which pornography becomes freely available and widely circulates. Legal recognition of the right to pornography would, Dworkin concedes, “sharply limit the ability of individuals consciously and reflectively to influence the conditions of their own and their children’s development. It would limit their ability to bring about the cultural structure they think best, a structure in which sexual experience generally has dignity and beauty, without which their own and their families’ sexual experience are likely to have these qualities in less degree.”

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ASK, SEEK, KNOCK: In “Who does God listen to?” my friend Jason Frenn offers this answer:

Throughout the Bible, there is only one prerequisite to God listening to our petitions. If your heart is sincere when you pray, God will listen and offer an answer to your prayers. This is true for everyone, everywhere, every time.

Jason’s new book is The Seven Prayers God Always Answers.

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QUESTION: “Would You Attend a Same-Sex Marriage Ceremony?” The pseudonymous Url Scaramanga posted this question over at Christianity Today’s blog, Out of Ur, using Al Mohler’s critique of Joel Osteen’s answer on Piers Morgan’s TV show. What would you do? More important, why (or why not) would you? Given cultural trends, I get the feeling that more and more Christians are going to face this question.

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IT’S GONNA TAKE MORE THAN AN APP: “Want to be a priest? There’s an app for that.”

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BISHOP ROMNEY? “When the Candidate Was a Bishop.”