Boast In Christ, Fools.
Religion — By Dustin R. Steeve on May 10, 2009 at 11:01 pmIt’s time for Christians to have some pride. Christian pride. Actually, I think thinking of it as Christian “boasting” is a more robust, good, and Christian way to express what I mean. I came to the conclusion that Christians need to boast after spending time considering the shame that some Christians, most notably our Christian president, seem to have about their Christianity and Christian heritage. I contrast this sense of shame with the pride most often praised and accepted in our current culture: gay pride.
Recently the President has made headlines for his being ashamed of public displays of Christianity. The Obama Whitehouse requested that Christian imagery be covered up during a presidential speech at Georgetown, a Catholic university. President Obama himself has felt the need to deny the prominent influence of Christianity on America’s growth, denying on multiple occasions that America is a Christian nation. Just last week, President Obama snubbed Christian leaders at the National Day of Prayer. A statement from the Whitehouse remarked the President prayed in private. As an aside, I know the reason why the President didn’t attend the Day of Prayer and I sympathize with him. After all, how is the President supposed to give a public prayer with his eyes closed? He can’t read the teleprompter. All kidding aside, I wonder why he feels the need to hide his Christian heritage. I am an Evangelical Christian, proud of my Christian heritage. As a brother of the President in Christ, I would like this Christian president to explain himself.
As opposed to feeling ashamed of Christ, Paul tells us we are to boast in Christ. In his letter to the church in Galatia, Paul says in Galatians 6:11, “But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” Christianity provides us with a comprehensive, true, explanation of the universe. The cross of Christ is at the center of that explanation. That is a big thing. Yet Christians like President Obama are ashamed of Christianity. Instead, the President and his party boast in small things like gayness. Gay pride is a defining mantra of the President and his party; his supporters regularly throw colorful parades triumphing homo-sex. I have two problems with the President being unashamed to boast in gayness while being ashamed to boast in Christ. First, homosexuality is immoral. However, let me grant the opposition’s point that homosexuality is moral. Even if homosexuality was moral, boasting in gayness treats gayness as equal with the work of Christ on the cross.
Now I ask, how can something as controversial and small as homo-sex merit boasting when the true story of the death and resurrection of God does not? Only a fool would deny the absurdity of boasting in the former, but not the latter. Paul dealt with a similar foolishness in Corinth. In II Corinthians 11:12, Paul tells us how to deal with such foolishness when he says, “And I will keep on doing what I am doing in order to cut the ground from under those who want an opportunity to be considered equal with us in the things they boast about.” Paul unashamedly boasted in the truth of Christ’s work on the cross. In so doing, he cut the ground from under those who wanted an opportunity to be considered equal with Christians in the things they boasted about. How? Well, if Christianity is defensibly true, it is good for everyone to know it. Moreover, if Christianity is true, then Christians should be proud of their Savior and should boast in His good work. A sensible person will recognize that pride in a cosmic truth and good work is greater than pride in one’s sexual preference. What are those things in which our culture takes pride? Most of them are acts of folly; some are simply shameful and indecent! Boast in Christ, unashamedly.
*** UPDATE ***
President Obama recently signed a presidential proclamation, declaring June 2009 “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Month.” To date, there is no indication that the president intends to sign a presidential proclamation for “Christ Crucified” month.
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Liberal economics would have been virtually impossible without Christianity.
(Joh 8:32) And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
(Joh 8:36) If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.
(Luk 4:18) The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised…
(Rom 8:21) Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
(1Co 8:9) But take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumblingblock to them that are weak.
Hard to believe that, with those, they could enslave. However, though Paul was imprisoned, he was still free in the Lord. So, those enslaved should not rely on the world’s definition of “free,” rather on the Lord’s.
I sleep easy at night knowing that there are people out there like Mr Incredible. The truly dangerous people are invariably undone in the end by the idiots they keep company with. Can’t read, can’t think — they scatter when the narrative falls apart.
miliukov,
First, let me say that you have given me a lot to think about. Thank you for your thoughtful remarks and your great questions. I won’t respond to everything you have brought up because, in many cases, I need to think further on your point. Please know, I have read everything you’ve written thus far.
In regards to your concluding remark to Dave, you said:
I think I hear you saying that, when a person comes before the Lord on judgment day, their patriotism will not be tallied. I don’t disagree. Ultimately, it is one’s belief in Christ that will be meaningful on the day of reckoning. I fear that it might sound like I’m taking a simple, easy out of a complicated question, but let me be clear: being patriotic does not make one a good person or a good Christian.
I think that there are worldly goods (actual good things that are of this world, not worldly goods in the negative sense that Christians warn against) and there are transcendent, soul shaping goods. Charity is a transcendent, soul shaping good. The Lord will ask us if we loved the least of these. Patriotism is a worldly good, though I believe that it can lead one to a transcendent good. It is good for helping us build community, for example. A strong sense of community is good for helping us practice charity and goodwill towards our neighbor.
In your response to David, you also said:
Did liberal economics alone do this work? Don’t Christian virtues play an important in setting boundaries and casting visions for good use of liberal economics? For example, you cite that liberal economics allowed us to read the words on our computer screens. True enough, but literacy itself was and continues to be a central project of Christianity, no? Even today, organizations like Wycliffe travel to remote parts of the world to help develop written languages for people groups without them.
Perhaps this is not the best place for such a question (since it gets us pretty far off the topic of the original post), but I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on the role Christian assumptions should play in establishing goals (and boundaries) in our liberal economy? I think I should start up a “forum” post where you, I, and other interested persons could discuss this in greater detail, but if you have a quick thought or a good book / essay to point me to, I’d love to hear it.
Also, are you familiar with the work of the Acton Institute?
Thanks miliukov.
Those who say that God condones slavery hold the Truth in unrighteousness [Romans 1:18 [KJV]] and fail rightly to divide the Word of God [2Ti 2:15].
The Liberal believes that everything is up to men, that the hands of men, not God, and their traditions control what happens on Earth. The Liberal believes that God is a mere bystander, waiting to be called upon to step in, that men know better than He.
Therefore, the Liberal believes, for example, that his economics is the key to Salvation, that, if everybody would just go along with him and do it the world’s way, everything would be fine.
Those who are born again, however, look to God, not men, for guidance.
thank you dustin for your kind response (and now i’m embarassed by my cheeky and sarcastic comment about mr incredible — but there it is — haughty spirit and destruction before a fall and all that). Will respond tomorrow, God willing and the creeks don’t rise, as my mother would say. Appreciate your diligence.
Yes, but an atheist, for example, can do that. So can a Buddhist, or a Muslim. They do it out of a sense of worldly self-satisfaction. They pride themselves on “good works.”
Those who are born again are supposed to have another motivation. One that is not of this world.
Mr. Incredible,
Where do you get your definition of “Liberal”? (And is it safe to assume that your contrast of it with “one who is born again” is a veiled reference to a Conservative, or at the least an argument for the incompatibility of liberalism and Christianity?)
Dustin –
I’d be happy to join an organized discussion forum — but I can’t always guarantee a time commitment. I’ve got a day job after all…and there is a global financial crisis still ongoing…
But I’d like to respond, long-windedly and way off-topic I fear, to the following. You asked:
Did liberal economics alone do this work? Don’t Christian virtues play an important in setting boundaries and casting visions for good use of liberal economics? For example, you cite that liberal economics allowed us to read the words on our computer screens. True enough, but literacy itself was and continues to be a central project of Christianity, no? Even today, organizations like Wycliffe travel to remote parts of the world to help develop written languages for people groups without them.
First of all and for clarity’s sake, when I talk about “liberal economics”, I’m talking about generally “open” markets, and the institutions required to support those markets. And I am also using the term in a global context, not in an expressly American one.
[There are obviously many, many variations and models; some work better than others; and the whole system is always evolving because of technological changes, political shifts, economic developments, etc. It would be impossible to say "Liberal economics mean X" or "Open markets are Y" without writing an enormous treatise, that would be obsolete almost immediately. I hope that the readers will bear with me for the short-hand.]
So for starters, I’m not sure I would use the phrase “good use” in describing the outcome of liberal economics; rather I might call it “self-interested use, that when undertaken by many participants, leads to a more efficient outcome”.
My thoughts are that open markets operate with ruthless, but absolutely agnostic, efficiency — this is particularly true in capital markets; i.e, a fancy name for markets in which the good that is exchanged is money itself in its different forms: currency, debt, equity, derivative instruments, etc. And even if there are external constraints, markets re-price the new information, or the new factors, very, very quickly. And even if you try to shut down a market entirely, the basic forces are still at work, just in ways that are not immediately transparent: the best example I can think of that is easily identifiable is when the Soviet Union collapsed, one of Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s first decrees was to lift price controls on all goods, including food, in December 1991 and January 1992. Prices skyrocketed; but Moscow’s famous bread lines immediately disappeared. Basically, several decades of inflation and underinvestment had accumulated as a shortage of goods, rather than an increase in prices. Once the price controls were lifted, supply and demand rebalanced. [I'm slightly over-simplifying the story: there were other factors in play also, but that's the idea.]
The problem I see in markets is that even though they are efficient, they are not necessarily rational. This is where I differ with a lot of classical liberal economists, as well as almost the entire financial academy and a lot of popular conventional wisdom (see the book Wisdom of Crowds for an example of the latter). It would be an even longer and more off-topic posting to do it justice, but Dostoeveky’s Notes From Underground gives a nice take-down. It was written as a critique of Russian nihilism, which was an early forerunner of communist thought in Russia; but it is hugely relevant for the sort of stateless, post-modern capitalism we have today. Which is kinda funny if you think about it: some crazy Russian gambling addict, a devout Orthodox Christian when he wasn’t spinning his way around the roulette table and chasing skirts, critiqued the 20th century’s two great strains of economic philosophy in a single short, biting booklet-length work.
But this makes sense (not Dostoevsky; that markets are efficient, but not rational): one need only to look at securitized subprime lending; dot.com stocks; ruble-denominated debt circa 1998; oil prices in 1H2008; emerging market banking stocks; Phoenix home prices; Dubai commercial real estate; and so on. None of these were economically defensible anywhere near their peak levels — and yet, that is where the market priced the assets. Indeed, the whole unfolding crisis of the past two years almost perfectly encapsulates both the efficiency, and the irrationality, of global capital markets…
So back to your question: it probably won’t surprise you that I don’t think that Christianity has a particular relevance, nor irrelevance, for setting markets’ boundaries. For everything to work — to get to that efficient outcome — what it important is that everyone acts in their own self-interest, not because they think that they are doing “the right thing” or “the good thing” (although they may think that), but that they are making decisions that give them what they want at the lowest price. And I think that the reason that markets can and do take irrational turns — mis-price the risk/return trade-off really — is because the perception of what the self-interested decision should be is wrong: “Hey, bank sez I can take out 100 grand HELOC because the price went up so much!!!! Free money!”
And whether we like it or not, whatever boundaries — Christian or otherwise — we think we can set up to shape a market, according to one particular vision or another, are probably really just distorting it around the edges, while the market itself in question largely chugs along driven by human desire, malice, greed, goodwill, wretchedness, self-interest, charity, hope and despair all at once. I mean, there are not enough social workers in the whole of Bangkok to stop the flow of guys with bad moustaches trolling for underage innocence on sale; there are not enough DEA officers to stop the traffic of recreational narcotics from Mexico or Cali; there will never be enough laws, nor lawyers trying to enforce them, in New York City to stop the friendly flow of “material non-public information”; and there are not enough human rights groups to shut down even a fraction of the child-labor sweat shops outside Karachi or Hanoi or China’s Peal River Delta churning out leather sporting goods and running shoes. All that can happen is that the costs are reflected differently — like Moscow’s bread lines — if we try to distort the market by artificially tinkering with the supply or the demand. Now, of course we may still want to make those distortions — to restrict child prostitution, or limit sale of pornography near schools (or clamp down on executive pay…!) — as a matter of social conscience or policy, but we should not fool ourselves that we’re instilling a redemptive vision on the market. Even if we see less of the revulsion on the surface; the true revulsion ever lurks in the heart.
What Christianity does claim to be able to change is not the structure or outcome of the Market*** by external imposition (see: “abolition, failure of”), but through the choices that the individual participants make: how they come to those self-interested decisions that keep it ever-whirring and ever-spinning along as it continuously reprices the equilibrium points falling out into every direction for every item and good and service, like a contour map of material human desire haphazardly and irregularly unfurling in all directions, the edge of which is just slightly but always beyond reach (Dostoevsky is somewhere chuckling, by the way, as I type this) — according not to what we might want or hope or envision the outcome to be, the shape of the contours, but what the contours actually are based on the shifting desires of Market’s participants themselves from flesh unto Spirit, death unto life. Which through the Gospel is the ongoing process of redemption that we discussed yesterday. But this is a spiritual response to a spiritual void, not a market response to an unmet niche. And it is also precisely why I think it is a worthless exercise to try to copy non-Christian culture with a Christian simulacrum. It either exists un-self-consciously in the folds of that contoured map, or it doesn’t.
Your part about literacy and Wycliffe: obviously what Wycliffe does is laudable, and important work — that soul-shaping work you mentioned. But I have a sense that they’d try to do that, even if we did not have an ascendant liberal economic order. That we do, means that they can achieve their goals more efficiently, and at lower cost. But if the Wycliffe Foundation never existed, we’d still have the same economic structure, while Cisco and Lucent and Google and Microsoft would still be helping you set up websites while we tap out missives to each other like this one.
Actually, smmtheory made a similar, but more sweeping, point yesterday. It’s sort of the logical end if you keep asking your Wycliffe question again and again and again enough times, with enough examples. His point is that without Christianity, there never would have been a liberal economic order. I suppose that that’s true. But the corollary ought not be forgotten: without Christianity, there would not have been an Enlightenment. And without the Enlightenment, we also would not have liberal economics and a post-modern global capitalist economy. As I wrote yesterday, applying causes and effects in history is a tricky thing.
Finally: I recall I visited the Acton Institute website a while back, possibly because of one of your postings — can’t recall now. I’ll look again.
***That’s “Market” with a capital-M; not the small-m “market”.
Boast In Christ, Fools. http://ff.im/-2VmbT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
miliukov,
Yea! Delightful. Lots of thoughts, but the gist is that I think we largely agree. Perhaps you view the market as more of a science of raw mechanics where I see it as part science, part art, but let me think more about your comments and come back to them soon.
Thanks Miliukov!
By the way: I obviously meant “prohibition” not “abolition” in the above post. How embarassing. Dostoevsky is indeed laughing.
There is far too much nationalism, so-called patriotism, and political intrigue and ideology in the church today and far too little kingdom building.
What ever happend to the scriptural understanding that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world? America is no more or less Christian than any other Western nation – simply stating the fact that the majority of the founders had some relationship to Christianity (many were also deists, unitarians and freemasons) does not make us a Christian nation, neither does the fact that a moajority of Americans may identify as Christian.
Get on with it, stop trying to “take America back for God” and starting building the kingdom whose only authority is Jesus Christ!
While I did vote for Obama, I do agree with you on the whole in this article.
One thing that stood out though was the term “homo-sex”. I understand that it’s the basic root of the term homosexual, but after watching “Fall From Grace” this past week something about *how* you used it seemed very Fred Phelps.
Lindsay Stallones says:
May 14, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Mr. Incredible,
Where do you get your definition of “Liberal”? (And is it safe to assume that your contrast of it with “one who is born again” is a veiled reference to a Conservative, or at the least an argument for the incompatibility of liberalism and Christianity?)
—————————————–
The Lib relies on men for ultimate wisdom. The Lib says the “we” must do it, and he never mentions God as being involved. This contrasts with those who are born again; they rely on God, Who, through Christ, guides them. Those who rely on the world to save them cannot claim to be born again.
Lindsay Stallones says:
May 14, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Mr. Incredible,
Where do you get your definition of “Liberal”?
————————————————–
Observation and experience.
Lindsay Stallones says:
(And is it safe to assume that your contrast of it with “one who is born again” is a veiled reference to a Conservative…
—————————————————–
No, it isn’t safe to assume that.
Lindsay Stallones says:
… or at the least an argument for the incompatibility of liberalism and Christianity?)
—————————————–————————————–
I virtually never hear a Lib reference God as his Reliance. A Lib virtually always refers to his/Man’s own strength and might.