What does the demise of the Surgically Altered One have to do with anything? Well . . .

A heavy box from Tyndale House publishers arrived at the house yesterday. It was full of these:

The Paul Harvey book has just been released in paperback form. I’m very pleased that Tyndale has chosen to do this. My hope is that it will find a wider readership in this new incarnation.

To be transparent for a moment, the fate of the hardcover edition of Paul Harvey’s America represents one of the most disappointing chapters of my life thus far. When in March of 2009, my dear friend Stephen Mansfield extended the invitation to collaborate with him on a book about the recently deceased radio icon, it represented a vision-come-true for me.

After ghost-writing or editing dozens of published books for other, more famous individuals, I had been hoping and dreaming of someday seeing a book or two with my name on the cover. And I was particularly interested in writing on subjects emerging from the colliding worlds of faith, media and the culture. The Paul Harvey book seemed custom tailored in Heaven.

Because of some unusual circumstances, the book had to be written in about a month. Even so, I felt very good about the content. Indeed, to this day I consider it the best writing I’ve ever done.

The book was scheduled for official release on July 4 (what better date for a book about a patriot) accompanied by a burst of publicity and media. Tyndale hired an outside publicist to generate buzz and get Stephen and I media interviews. I was told to clear my schedule because Stephen would only be available to do a couple of high profile interviews. The rest would come to me.

It seemed I was on my way.

As the end of June approached, the book actually released a little early. The publicity rocket was prepared for launch. Then, on the afternoon of June 29th, news began circulate online that Michael Jackson had died suddenly. For the next four weeks, no one in the media wanted to talk about anything else. The scandalous death of the scandal-plagued icon sucked all the oxygen out of the room for a full month.

Stephen did one interview–a taping with Mike Huckabee that didn’t run for weeks. Fox eventually ran it on a weekend and book sales jumped momentarily. I never did a single interview about the book.

Okay, that’s not completely accurate. A gentleman who does a weekend radio program on a Shreveport radio station interviewed me by phone for his show. He was gracious and I was grateful. And Paul Harvey’s America remains one of the best biographies no one has read.

Of course, it doesn’t help that we live in a youth-obsessed culture and people under the age of 35 have no idea who Paul Harvey was. Nevertheless, the writing gets a fresh chance at life now.

And Paul Harvey, America’s greatest optimist would have been the first to remind us that this great nation is all about second chances and the power of persistence.

Now to follow up on my previous post (Toward a Masculine Model of Spirituality.)

In it, I offered the thought that men have largely been offered what amounts to a feminine model of relationship with God. That is, one that is conversation-based rather than action-based.

As I mentioned in the earlier post, men generally tend to build or express friendship by doing things together. For men talking is usually incidental to, and a by-product of, the doing.

I know this leaves me open to charges of sexism from more progressive quarters. But every month I get written scientific evidence from AT&T Wireless about my phone talking and texting habits as they compare to those of the four wonderful women in my life.

Let me just say there is a consistent and astonishing disparity and leave it at that.

As I pointed out to the men in the group to which I spoke last Saturday, for most of us growing up, the most spiritual person we knew was a woman. (Usually a mother or grandmother.) Many men would say the same is true for them today–that their wives are more “spiritual” than they are.

Perhaps they are. Or maybe the current working definition of spirituality is simply skewed to reflect the natural feminine expression of friendship/relationship with God. Maybe deep, authentic friendship with God looks different in a man. As I’ve already made clear, I think that’s the case.

Here’s how that insight has affected my approach to being a Christian man.

The most dramatic difference has come in the way I approach prayer. Yes, I talk to God. And yes, I “with thanksgiving make my requests known” to Him. But that isn’t the meat of it. As I stated in the previous post, I no longer ask, “God, what do you want to talk about today?” I ask, “Father, what do you want to do today?”

The answer that comes back is never dull or lifeless.

Sometimes  I hear, “Let’s fight for the future husbands of your daughters.”

“But I don’t know who they are, Lord.”

“Oh but I do!”

Together, the Holy Spirit and I fight for their purity, for their destinies, and for their safety. We do battle with forces of discouragement, pornography, temptation, or deception that would scar their souls, pull them off the path, or damage their future prospects.

Sometimes he says, “Let’s fight on behalf of the persecuted church.” Sometimes we rush to the defense of embattled leaders.

Sometimes we build. Other times we tear down. We attack. We defend. We hunt (for enemy infiltrators.) We fish (for souls.) We travel to the other side of the world–to aid missionaries in perilous places. And we travel forward in time, doing preparatory work in my family’s future, even clearing out spiritual underbrush in the paths of my grandchildren yet unborn.

All of this happens without my ever having left the sitting area of our bedroom. That’s where I have my “quiet time.” Let me assure you, that phrase is a misnomer.

Now none of this spiritual activity is in any way the exclusive province of men. Women can and do make formidable spiritual warriors. Nevertheless, there is something about the way a man is wired that makes this kind of activity appealing and deeply satisfying. It is no accident that a lot of guys’ favorite historical movie is Braveheart and not Sense and Sensibility. And if more men viewed prayer and friendship with God in these muscular, action-oriented terms, a lot more men would be excited about it.

Naturally, this paradigm shift has implications that reach far beyond my prayer closet but I need to wind this up. As I said, I suspect that if men were presented a masculine version of spirituality, many more of them would sign up for it.

My thinking along these lines has also been profoundly impacted by a book I read about ten years ago. I’ll tell you which book, and why, in an upcoming post!

My buddy Jon E. snapped the following photo on Highway 377 in the Keller/Watauga area north of Fort Worth.

Can’t quite make out the message? Here, allow me to zoom in for you . . .

Still struggling? It says:

SAVE THE DATE!

RETURN OF CHRIST

May 21, 2011

Although the web site address at the bottom of the billboard is hard to make out, it is clearly the work of this group. These are the folks who, for at least the last nine months have been diligently and confidently warning the world that an event they call “Judgment Day” is scheduled for May 21st, 2011.

As the handy countdown clock displayed prominently on the eBible Fellowship home page reminds us, that’s only 12 days from now. Calling me “dubious” would be putting it gently.

As with many date-setters in years past, this bold, all-in assertion is built upon layer after layer of questionable (at best) assumptions. In this case, the assumptions include knowing the date of creation (11,013 BC apparently) and Noah’s flood (4990 BC). These day-counting calculations also have Jesus’ birth coming in on 7 BC (most Bible scholars place it in 3 or 4 BC) and His death and resurrection in AD 33 (which would have made Jesus 40 when He died).

But wait! There’s more

May 21 is just “Judgment Day,” not “the End of the World.” That, we’re told, is five months later: October 21.

Here’s the thing about that. October 21 is my birthday. I’m trying not to feel a little offended that these guys scheduled the final fiery apocalyptic collapse of all things on my special day.

On the other hand, five months and two weeks from now it could result in a conversation like this.

“Hey Dave, why so glum.”

“Well, I’m 52 today.”

“Hey, cheer up. It’s just a number. It’s not the end of the world.”

“Well, actually . . .”

It was a good morning yesterday. I spent it with about twenty men–ranging in age from roughly 22 to 82–and shared some thoughts about something I’ve been thinking, studying, and praying about for several years now.

“318” is a diverse group of men who meet monthly for breakfast, some worship and a Word-based exhortation. I was invited to be  yesterday’s exhorter. At the heart of my topic was a stunning revelation. Namely, that men and women are different. Very different.

Of course, saying this tends to run counter to what was the conventional feminist wisdom for most of the last half of the last century. Ten thousand Womens’ Studies masters theses were built around the doctrinaire assertion that there were no inherent differences between men and women other than some plumbing and a little difference in upper body strength. It was an article of faith that men and women are equally suited and equally adept at all tasks in all ways and at all times. And that sex roles were social constructs–culturally imposed–and reinforced artificially through the toys we give our children and the expectations we put on them.

These beliefs proved impervious to both common sense and observable experience for decades. But in recent years they have finally begun to succumb to neuroscience. It is now widely understood that brain wiring makes women better at certain types of tasks than men, and vice versa. We’re different in complementary ways (almost as if by design, imagine that!) and those differences are built into our hardware and software. But I digress…

Given that men and women are designed with significant differences in brain wiring, hormonal chemistry, and physical capacities (hardware and software) does it really make sense that spirituality or more specifically, relationship/friendship with God would be expressed in identical ways? I don’t think so.

Yes, every person is comprised of spirit, soul, and body. And the Bible makes it clear that there are no male or female spirits. (Galatians 3:28; Matthew 22:30) But as noted above, there are clearly male and female bodies and, more importantly, souls–the soul being comprised of the mind, will and emotions.

A light came on for me several years ago when I heard Jimmy Evans of MarriageToday say something in regard to the differences between men and women. What he said certainly rang true to my experience and observations. It was, “In general, women tend to express friendship by talking together, while men tend to express friendship by doing things together.”

Certainly you can point to exceptions to every generalization such as the one above. But that doesn’t mean it’s not generally true. Generally when women want to reconnect with a friend and strengthen the relationship, they do this:

or this:

Whereas men do this:

or this:

or this:

Allow me to restate the truism: Women tend to build and express friendship by talking to one another. Men tend to build and express friendship by doing things together.

Now ask yourself: “What have we traditionally been presented as the exclusive pathway for friendship with God?”

We’ve been told to have “a quiet time.” A time in which we sit down with God and share our feelings. We are supposed to talk to Him and let Him talk to us.

What men have been offered as a pathway to friendship with God and a model for prayer is essentially a sanctified tea party. We are to sit quietly, hands politely folded in our laps, and have a time of sharing.

And we wonder why traditionally women have far outnumbered men where interest in the things of God are concerned. We shake our heads sadly to observe that most prayer groups are filled with ladies.

I submit to you that we men have largely been presented with a feminine model of prayer and relationship with God. Let me hasten to add there there is nothing wrong with a feminine model of prayer . . . if you’re a woman . . . equipped with a female soul and body.

I can tell you that my prayer life and relationship with God has never been the same after that light came on for me upon hearing that factoid from Jimmy Evans. How did it change?

I’ll unpack that in an upcoming post. But I’ll tell you now that I no longer have a traditional “quiet time.” My times with God are anything but quiet. When I carve out some time to be with God, I don’t approach Him thinking, “What do I want to talk to you about today?” I approach asking:

“Father, what do you want to do today.”

More to come.

Four months and ten days shy shy of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the word at this hour is that Osama Bin Laden has been killed and that the U.S. military (or CIA) is in possession of his body. I had to smile when I saw the tweet of the political humorist “IowaHawk”:

US has Osama’s body? Good, now we can pour the foundation for WTC II.

This is obviously good news, and for many reasons. Nevertheless, it’s a shame it took so long. It’s unfortunate, in my view, that George W. Bush didn’t get to announce this news before he left office. But it is a great blessing that this nation will not have to mark the tenth anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington knowing that one of the key architects of those attacks is alive and at large.

And it is some consolation knowing that Bin Laden has surely lived a miserable existence over the last nine years–living in caves and underground bunkers and constantly on the move and scanning the skies in fear of a predator drone strike.

By the way, for understanding of the origins of Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the best source remains Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower.

Death ultimately puts every person’s faith and theology to the test. Today, Osama Bin Laden’s belief system has collided with the reality of eternity. I suspect it did not fare well.

I apologize for the extended radio silence. I’ve been so caught up in anticipation of the wedding that I fell off the grid altogether. And of course by “the wedding” I mean the NBA playoffs and the NFL draft.

It seems I did hear something about some wedding taking place in one of those formerly great, formerly Christian countries back East. I wondered out loud on Twitter this morning if there were going to be any pranks at the royal wedding reception. For example, Prince Harry could do that thing where you challenge the groom to remove the garter from his bride’s leg, blindfolded, but silently replace the bride with a grandmother. Ribald hilarity ensues. The bonus in this case would be that the grandmother is the Queen of the British Empire.

#####

Flew to Denver and back yesterday. The city looked beautiful with clean, clear air affording great views of a fresh dusting of snow crowning the mountains to the west.

The purpose of my visit was to meet with the wonderful folks at Marilyn Hickey Ministries. It was my first opportunity to meet the ministry’s namesake and I was delighted to do so. Marilyn will be 80 years old on July first, but she possesses more energy, vitality and drive than many people half her age. She co-hosts a daily television broadcast and still travels the world teaching and praying for thousands. In fact, she is heading to China in a few weeks and is scheduled to do a series of meetings in Pakistan this fall and can’t wait to get back there. Yes, Pakistan.

I remember a good friend of mine passing me Marilyn Hickey cassette tapes back in the early ’80s. Those teachings became a key part of my spiritual journey. So you can imagine how delighted I was to meet her yesterday. And how gratifying it was to find her every bit as gracious, warm and real as I had imagined she would be.

#####

In the past I’ve linked to a wonderful site that features the letterhead/stationery of famous people, companies and creative enterprises (see here and here). I popped in this evening just to see what was new. Here are a couple of my favorite new additions to the impressive collection at Letterheady.com.

Here is Charles Schulz personal letterhead from 1958:

This is Gene Autry’s personal stationery (1949):

And on a day in which British royalty is on the minds of many, here is the “mourning” stationery of Britain’s King Edward VIII (1936) who took the throne following the death of George V.

By the way, you may recall that Edward didn’t reign long. He abdicated the throne in order to marry the already-twice-married American socialite Wallace Simpson. It was a royal wedding of a different sort.

Let’s wind this up, shall we?

In the previous three posts (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) I have tried to lay the groundwork for a fresh way to think about what is widely called God’s “sovereignty.” I’m going to try to build on that foundation now, even though I’m strongly sympathetic to the comment made by regular reader “Ted” who, after the first post, wrote:

I’ve personally jettisoned the word “sovereign” from my theological vocabulary. It’s been misused so often and for so long that there is always the possibility of being misunderstood. It’s not even in the Bible, unless you happen to be reading a modern translation such as NIV or NLT that have added the word some 300 times.

The typical believer’s conception of God’s sovereignty lies somewhere between the powers displayed by Jim Carrey’s character in Bruce Almighty and Samantha Stevens on the old sitcom Bewitched.

But as I pointed out in the previous post, this view doesn’t account for Mankind’s God-granted freedom to choose, nor the self-limiting nature of God’s character in light of His legal grant of stewardship and dominion to Man. This creates that apparent paradox I mentioned before.

What’s more, those who believe that God is always getting His way and that every outcome has been predetermined by God, find themselves without much incentive to pray. (I’ll address this issue directly before I close.)

I believe the biblical path out of that paradox is to make a distinction between what I call God’s “Macro Sovereignty” and the concept of “Micro Sovereignty.” I’ll try to explain in fewer than 1,000 words.

The typical evangelical Christian on the street assumes God is behind every event in her day . . . That He is either the direct cause of the event or that He “allows” the event because it fits into His plan for her life. This is what I call “micro-sovereignty.”

This theology usually emerges after a tragedy. Well-intentioned believers offer it in the form of  comfort to themselves or others after something heartbreaking has happened:

“His ways are higher than our ways.”

“You just have to believe this happened for a reason.”

And my personal favorite:

“God wanted you to be able to minister to other people who have had this same horrific thing happen to them.”

Sound familiar? I trotted some version of these out myself on more than one occasion back in my younger days. Usually the recipient of this brand of comfort is too polite or grief-shocked to challenge that logic with something like:

“Hold on. So, God arranged for my kid to get hit by a drunk driver because He’s allowing other people’s kids to get hit by drunk drivers, too? But wait, He wouldn’t need me to minister to these grief-stricken parents if He didn’t “allow” those kids to be killed in the first place. Right? So… seriously… what the heck.”

There’s another logic problem confronted by holders of the micro-sovereignty paradigm:

Why pray? Seriously.

If God is getting His preferred outcome at the micro level every second of every day, what is the point of praying? Why did Jesus, after the disciples requested a clinic in effective praying, instruct them to pray: “Father . . . May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”?

Why would Jesus repeatedly say, “Ask the Father . . .” “Whatever you ask the Father in my name . . .” “Ask what you will . . .”?

Some micro-sovereignty-ists have attempted to come up with an answer to that question. As I heard a preacher on the radio say a few months ago: “Prayer doesn’t change God. It changes us.”

That sounds quite lofty and spiritual and profound when you first hear it. Then you think about the implications and it falls apart.

Of course, prayer doesn’t change God. That’s a red herring. The question is, does prayer change “things.”

This view is basically saying that prayer is the spiritual equivalent of running on a treadmill: You don’t actually get anywhere but it’s good for you.

An Alternative View

What if God’s sovereignty is the “macro” variety? What if God’s micro-sovereignty is limited . . .  by his grant of free will to Man; His delegation of legal stewardship rights and authority to Man; and most of all by his own righteousness and character.

As I suggested in the previous post, God is self-limited by His own character–His just-ness preventing Him from violating the spiritual legal structure upon which He framed the universe and placed Man within it.

Nevertheless, the Bible is clear that God is moving History (capital “H”) toward an end of His choosing. He has both foreknown and foreordained the way everything winds up. His intellect and power are so unimaginably vast that he can process the free choices of 7 billion human inhabitants, the effects of a fallen creation, and the activities of a rogue, outlaw enemy and still accomplish His plans and purposes in the earth and faithfully fulfill the promise of Romans 8:28 to every believer.

What a mighty, extraordinary God who can do that!

Adopting the paradigm I outlined above causes much of the paradoxical confusion and contradiction described in the previous three posts to evaporate. And it causes many previously mysterious passages of the Bible to suddenly make sense.

Why pray? Because God needs us to pray. Our asking God to move isn’t an empty or meaningless exercise. It opens legal/judicial windows through which He can move provision, power, and outcomes. It is the revelation behind Charles Wesley’s admission:

The longer I go in this faith, the more convinced I am that God does nothing except in response to believing prayer.

The Cornerstone of our Faith

God is all powerful but doesn’t care about the people of Japan, and therefore they’re suffering. Or, He does care about the people of Japan, but is not all powerful. Which one is it?

If you’ve hung with me through all four of these marathon blog posts, I suspect you know how I would respond to that challenge. I would say,

“Mr. Bashir, your use of the term “all powerful” indicates you have a common but cartoonish conception of God’s latitude to act in a fallen, broken world. But I can assure you that He cares desperately about the Japanese people. There’s no message in the earthquake and no lesson in the tsunami.”

God delivered His message on a barren hillside outside of Jerusalem roughly 2,000 years ago. Those with ears to hear, hear it say,

“Oh give thank to the Lord, for He is good. And His mercies endure forever.”

In two ridiculously long previous posts, (Part 1 and Part 2) I’ve written about the way tragedies such as the tsunami in Japan tend to generate a corresponding tidal wave of arm-chair theologizing about God’s sovereignty.

I won’t re-trample the ground I’ve already covered other than to quote something I said in the previous post about most people’s conception of God’s sovereignty:

This Hollywood view of God as having unlimited freedom of action on the earth and in History–the belief that everything is happening just as God has ordained right down to the granular level of the child molestations that are almost certainly taking place in various places around the planet as I write these words—is shared by most American Christians who simply haven’t thought too deeply about these questions.

To hear many Christians talk about God’s sovereignty, you get the impression that Romans 8:28 contains a period after the word things, i.e., “And we know that God causes all things.”

Of course, there is no period there. The verse says, “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” That’s something very different.

One of the unique characteristics of us humans is our capacity for cognitive dissonance–that is, the ability to hold two completely incompatible and conflicting beliefs simultaneously. Thus it shouldn’t surprise us to observe that most evangelical Christians will answer a robust “Yes” to both of the following questions:

Does God give humans free will . . . the ability to choose or reject God’s expressed will?

Does God’s “sovereignty” mean that “everything happens for a reason” and that God either causes or permits every event at every moment in every place on earth as part of His plan?

A little bit of logical thought will reveal that both propositions cannot possibly be true.

I’m convinced a flawed, simplistic view of God’s sovereignty is robbing believers of much of the motivation to pray and the ability to pray effectively. Even worse, it’s needlessly causing entire generations of people to dismiss Christianity’s message of a loving God who sent His Son to die for a sinful world. (See Martin Bashir’s question for Rob Bell in Part 1.)

I was a debater back in my college days and therefore know how to argue two different sides of a proposition. If pressed, I could easily cite scripture to support either one of the above questions.

On one hand, there are dozens Bible verses and stories that make explicit Man’s freedom to reject God’s will and go his own way. “Choose this day who you will serve . . .” Joshua challenged the Israelites. Jesus Himself said:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. (Matthew 23:37)

On the other hand, many scriptures speak of God’s infinite power to produce His desired outcomes. He “declares the end before the beginning.” (Isaiah 46:10) Indeed, Paul devotes the entire ninth chapter of Romans–in the course of trying to help the church at Rome know how to think about the Jewish people–to declaring that God gets what He wants.

So which is it?

Yes.

I’m satisfied that a proper, biblical understanding of how things currently work in the universe can reconcile this seemingly irreconcilable dilemma. (And do so without requiring either cognitive dissonance or just throwing one’s hands up in the air and saying “It’s a paradox!”)

As I hinted in one of the previous posts, making sense of all this requires an understanding of three things:

1. Free Will (and God’s corresponding stewardship/dominion mandate to Man over Creation)

2. The Fall (of both Man and Creation)

3. God’s Self-Limiting Righteousness

It would take a book to completely unpack these three elements (and I may just write that book someday) but in short, the Genesis account shows us God legally (covenantally) delegating authority, rights and responsibilities to Man over the earth:

God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

This is a delegation of stewardship authority accompanied by a dominion mandate.

This takes us to the second reality–The Fall–which subjected both Mankind and all of Nature to some pretty ugly effects. Since that day, lots of bad things have been happening on this planet. Many of those bad things are the product of evil choices made by fallen people. Other bad things are the result of a curse-wracked creation groaning for a form of redemption and restoration itself.

So WHY, after things got so horribly fouled up . . . God being God and all . . . did He not immediately jump in and hit the “Undo” button? Or the “Fix It” button? Or simply blow the whole thing up and start again? The answer lies in the third item on that list above–God’s Self-Limiting Righteousness.

God is holy, righteous and, above all, good. Given His character, He could not possibly create a universe built upon righteous law and principle and then toss all that aside when those laws got inconvenient. That’s something I’d do.

God, on the other hand, initiated a multi-thousand year plan to bring about the restoration and renewal of both Man and Nature (chronicled as the Bible’s “scarlet thread of redemption”.)

It was a plan that scrupulously followed the rules and laws established before the very beginning. It was a brilliant plan that didn’t violate God’s delegation of authority and dominion to Man.

There’s an old Philisophy 101 brain teaser that asks, “Can God make a rock so big, He can’t move it?”

The truth is, nothing can limit God except his own character. God is self-limited by His goodness and just-ness. That is why there is no period after the word “things” in Romans 8:28. God does not “cause all things.” But He is so smart, so powerful, so unimaginably creative, that in spite of all the bad things put in motion by our choices, an outlaw enemy, and a fallen creation, God still “causes all things to work together” for our good. He’s that smart.

I had hoped to finish this saga with this post. But I have a little more to share. I want to put all of this together and apply it to how we, God’s people, should approach prayer and deal with heartache.

But that will have to wait, for I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

{Read the fourth and final installment here.}

A swarm of socialists, anarchists, “students,” and random ne’er-do-wells took to the streets of London this week to smash, loot, burn and assault–all to express displeasure and general grumpiness about the British government’s attempts to restore some fiscal sanity and sustainability to the economy there.

Put simply, the British economic car is hurtling toward a cliff (as are most other national cars that have succumbed to creeping socialism and swelling entitlements over the last 50 years.) The current Tory government was elected by a majority of British voters to at least apply the brakes if not turn the car around. And in response to a tap on the brakes, the above-mentioned groups have responded as expected.

Yes, the violent anarchists are only a small subset of the teachers, firefighters, nurses (who in socialized Britain are government employees) who descended on the city in the hundreds of thousands. But they are all united in their profound wrong-headedness.

As with the riots in Greece, Spain and Italy over the last year–these protests serve to validate what conservatives and libertarians have been warning about for decades, going all the way back to Barry Goldwater and Bill Buckley in the ’60s and even earlier to Paul Harvey in the ’40s and ’50s.

(By the way, I know of a great book that brings you the timely wisdom of Paul Harvey plus his fascinating story–coming in softcover in June!)

Paul Harvey warned about a encouraging a sense of entitlement and fostering dependency on messianic government:

Well sir, when that early pioneer turned his eyes toward the West he didn’t demand that someone else look after him. He didn’t demand a free education. He didn’t demand a guaranteed rocking chair at eventide. He didn’t demand that somebody else take care of him if he got ill or got old.

There was an old-fashioned philosophy in those days that a man was supposed to provide for his own . . . and for his own future. He didn’t demand a maximum amount of money for a minimum amount of work. Nor did he expect pay for no work at all. Come to think of it, he didn’t demand anything.

That hard-handed pioneer just looked out there at the rolling plains stretching away to the tall green mountains, and then lifted his eyes to the blue skies and said, “Thank you, God . . . Now I can take it from here.”

That pioneer spirit isn’t dead in our country . . . it’s dormant, it’s been discredited in some circles, driven underground . . . but it isn’t dead. It’s just that a few seasons ago politicians, baiting their hooks with free barbecue and trading a Ponzi promise for votes, begin to tell us we don’t want opportunity anymore, we want security. We don’t want opportunity, they said, we want security. And they said it so often we came to believe them.

We wanted security. And they gave us chains. And we were “secure.”

Harvey wrote those words a few years after Harry Truman took over for FDR. Nevertheless, even FDR was opposed to public employee unions and “collective bargaining” for government workers.

All of which brings us to Wisconsin–where the very economic future of our nation is being fought out by proxy. In Madison, the rage is somewhat more controlled, but there has been enough union thuggery, muscle-flexing, intimidation attempts and even death threats against Republican legislators to make all the liberal hand-wringing about “civility” after a nut-case shot an Arizona congresswoman seem at once cynical and farcical.

When a critical mass of people in any society begin to believe they are entitled to certain levels of government largesse, and when a generation of citizens arise who have been trained to believe that government power can trump the laws of supply and demand–setting the prices of everything from bread to medical care–riots are inevitable.

In Europe, government regulation of business has almost made labor unions superfluous. The entire populous has come to adopt a union mentality. In Wisconsin and in other bankrupt states, the choice is being made as to whether to continue on the road to European decline, or to reverse course toward an American renaissance of pioneering spirit and self-reliance.

Update:  IowaHawk tweets:

Instead of ‘anarchists,’ call the London rioters what they are: shock troops for the Nanny State-Union Complex.

And:

Same message in London riots as in Madison. “Elections, shmelections. Keep forking it over or we burn the mother down.”

At the close of the post below titled Tragedy: The Mother of All Bad Theology, I wrote:

I believe this pervasive and flawed view of God’s sovereignty keeps most Christians from praying as often and as effectively as God intended. And I suspect it is turning a whole generation of Postmodern young people away from God.

In the time between writing those words and writing these, a video of MSNBC’s Martin Bashir interviewing Pastor/Author Rob Bell has gone viral on the interwebs. You may have heard buzz over the last few weeks about Bell’s just-released book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.

Immediate controversy about the book served to generate tons of advance buzz. The publisher has to be thrilled. People who hadn’t read anything except the proposed title were discussing it or condemning it. Now that it’s out, it’s hovering at #3 among all books currently moving on Amazon.com.

I don’t intend to address the central controversy surrounding the book (at this time, anyway). I mention it only because the opening question Bashir asked Bell strikes at the heart of the what I do want to tackle:

Bashir frames a question that encapsulates the age-old “If God is good . . .” problem of evil thing.

Bashir says:

Before we talk about the book, just help us with this tragedy in Japan. Which of these is true.

God is all powerful but doesn’t care about the people of Japan, and therefore they’re suffering. Or, He does care about the people of Japan, but is not all powerful. Which one is it?

Here Bashir does a pretty clever job of concisely summarizing the logical conundrum that has plagued thinkers for centuries and, in recent years, caused hundreds of thousands of young people raised in Christian homes to abandon the faith of their parents.

As a parent of late-teens and twenty-somethings, I’ve heard my girls talk about numerous friends at their Christian school and Christian college who were questioning everything about their faith as a direct result of grappling with this “if God is sovereign”–“problem of evil” thing.

For decades, media mogul Ted Turner pointed to the slow, painful death of his sister when he was a boy as the justification for his agnosticism and hostility to Christianity. (In recent years he has softened his rhetoric and apologized.)

If There Is a Loving God . . .?

Nevertheless, an entire generation of postmodern individuals are traveling the same road of logic. They say, “You Christians tell me that God exists and that He loves all mankind. Have you looked around? Reconcile mass starvation, human trafficking, and tsunamis with your concept of God.”

As with Bashir’s question posed to Rob Bell, there is a certain logical tidiness to the question. The problem is that all logical constructs stand upon some presuppositions (i.e., assumptions, premises, or “givens”).

A logical argument can actually be air tight, but if only one of the assmuptions underlying it is false, sound logic leads you to a false conclusion. For example:

If one assumes that the earth is flat, it is quite logical to be nervous about sailing too far in one direction, lest one fall off the edge.That’s sound logic built upon a flawed assumption. The insidious thing about presuppositions is that they tend to remain buried in our worldview–unexamined and unquestioned.

The fact is, the very reason that we have liberals and conservatives; Republicans and Democrats; Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly; Jersey Shore and Jerseylicious–is not because half the population is irrational or crazy. In the vast majority of cases, two people who disagree are both reaching logical, reasonable, positions built upon differing, largely unexamined presuppositions they hold to be true.

The “Bruce Almighty” Model

Underlying the doubts of most postmodern skeptics is a key assumption about any being in the role of “God.” The assumption is that God gets exactly what He wants in every spot on earth in every second of every day. This is what Bashir meant when He used the term “all powerful.”

The vast majority of Americans–Christian and otherwise–assume the answer  is “Yes.” This is basically the American, pop culture, Hollywood sitcom concept of God–pulling all the strings, hands on all the levers, including the levers of human action and choice.

In the movie Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey’s title character gets to become “God” for a couple of weeks. As a result, he finds himself with the power to make anything happen he desires, including the power to take control of a rival’s body and force him to make a fool of himself on camera.

This Hollywood view of God as having unlimited freedom of action on the earth and in History–the belief that everything is happening just as God has ordained right down to the granular level of the child molestations that are almost certainly taking place in various places around the planet as I write these words–is shared by most American Christians who simply haven’t thought too deeply about these questions.

We’re taught that God is “sovereign.” And, as the Bible makes it clear, He is. But most of us go on to define that sovereignty in the cartoonish Hollywood terms described above.

This view fails to properly build upon three fundamental presuppositions:

1. The Fall
2. Free Will
3. God’s Self-Limiting Character

In my humble view, the neo-Calvinists have a good handle on point one. And their Arminian brethren across the aisle have an important grasp on point two. But I haven’t heard anyone significant properly (in my view) articulate point three.

What does all that mean? I’ll explain in Part 3 of what is rapidly evolving into a dissertation (or perhaps a down-payment on my next book.)

{Read Part 3 here.}