Jeff Jacoby is riding one of my favorite hobbyhorses. I’ve long argued that Scripture doesn’t tell us how politically to fill its moral injunctions. It certainly doesn’t command the creation of the modern welfare state. Reasonable believers ought to be able to disagree about how to help the poor, the widows, and the orphans.
Readers of this blog should certainly affirm that Jim Wallis and his associates are entitled to their opinions, entitled to voice them in the public square, and subject to searching critique.
March 7th, 2011 | 11:33 am
Just as reasonable believers also ought to be able to disagree about how to help the unborn.
March 7th, 2011 | 11:37 am
Just as reasonable believers also ought to be able to disagree about how to help the unborn.
But not over whether the unborn should be protected from being killed.
March 7th, 2011 | 11:47 am
What reasonable believers should be able to agree about is that whatever help we want to give to “the poor, the widows, and the orphans.” whether individually, through the Church, through private charities or through the government, should be paid for by us and not by future generations. That is, we are to fulfill the moral injunctions of our time from our resources and not impose that burden on our children’s children while keeping up our consumerist lifestyle.
“A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.” Proverbs 13:22a (ESV)
March 7th, 2011 | 5:14 pm
Christianity is essentially a set of moral injunctions that have received Divine imprimatur. It has become obvious that the best way to meet those injunctions is through republican, small-, government. Case closed. Why discuss it?
March 7th, 2011 | 9:53 pm
St. Preux has proposed a vastly untested hypothesis.
March 7th, 2011 | 11:34 pm
Christianity is essentially Jesus Christ identifying Himself in with and through His ‘community of disciples’
March 7th, 2011 | 11:46 pm
Well, what do you expect from the Sider/Campolo/Wallis crowd that gave us the inane, “What would Jesus Drive” campaign a few years ago? (Correct answer: Jesus was a carpenter so he would drive a Ford F-350 Crew Cab, that is, when the KING OF KINGS is not cruising in his Harley Davidson Fat Boy).
The larger problem is that too many evangelicals–many of whom are too theologically sophisticated to be caught dead promoting a silly “What Would Jesus Drive” or “What Would Jesus Cut” campaign–continue to give these guys political cover. After all, we wouldn’t want to offend them because we need them to provide legitimacy to our next manifesto, declaration, statement etc. etc. etc. The driving impulse is to demonstrate how evangelicals are really united on….fill in the blank. The latest is “intergenerational justice.”
But it is all a facade. These evangelical leaders (so-called) can’t even agree on whether there should be a defense department (Sider and Wallis are absolute pacifists who are committed to the proposition that all wars are evil and that followers of Jesus should pursue unilateral disarmament) let alone how and where the defense budget should be cut.
But, hey, at least we can agree on “intergenerational justice.” That, the arguemnt goes, counts for something, right.
Wrong. It counts for nothing.
Rather than these ephemeral declarations/manifestos/statements evangelicals (and pseudo-Evangelicals like Wallis) would be much better served with robust dialogue and arguments over disagreement and the sources of the disagreement among themselves. (Achieving disagreement, as John Courtney Murray said, is no small achievement.) So, Jim Skillen and Tony Campolo should publicly square off over the issue of school choice for the poor (Campolo is hysterically opposed, Skillen and CPJ are rabidly in favor), Sider should square off with Wallis over gay marriage (Sider is opposed to gay marriage, Wallis supports gay marriage) and maybe two evangelical “leaders” (e.g. Gideon Strauss used to work for the Christian Labor Assn. of Canada) could have an argument over collective bargaining for government workers. Of course, that would erode the façade that these “evangelical leaders” share a broad agreement on contentious matters of public policy. But then, so what?
March 8th, 2011 | 8:56 am
Mr. Pavlischek:
Standing Ovation.
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