A theological critique of the New Calvinist movement

Recently, Kevin DeYoung linked to an article in The Christian Century about the New Calvinist movement.  In the article, Western Theological Seminary Professor J. Todd Billings evaluates the movement’s faithfulness to the broader Reformed tradition.  He believes that “The New Calvinists, with their God-centered message and their focus on dogmatic theology, make a robust contribution to contemporary ecclesial theological conversation.”  As DeYoung notes, Billings briefly highlights some of the ways that the movement has crossed racial boundaries (click here for my thoughts on this development):

Moreover, the New Calvinism displays considerable diversity. African-American rapper Curtis “Voice” Allen is known for his distinctively Calvinist lyrics (“I been exposed to bright lights, the doctrines of grace, I’m elected, imputed perfected . . . Cuz nothing can stop his plan, and as far as the east is from the west more than time zones, man”). The New Calvinists admire not only white Puritans but “black Puritan” voices like Lemuel Haynes and Anthony Carter, who gives an African-American take on the themes of the New Calvinism in On Being Black and Reformed.

Christmas, the Incarnation, and cosmic redemption

Chuck Colson’s Christmas Breakpoint commentary urges us to look at what the nativity scene promises to the world:

It is a staggering thought. Think of it: The Word—that is, Logos in the Greek, which meant all the knowledge that could be known—the plan of creation—that is, ultimate reality—becomes mere man? And that He was not born of an earthly king and queen, but of a virgin of a backwater village named Nazareth? Certainly God delights in confounding worldly wisdom—and human expectations.

Thirty years after His humble birth, Jesus increased the Jews’ befuddlement when He read from the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor…to proclaim release to the captives…to set free those who are downtrodden…” Jesus then turned the scroll back and announced, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Do we get this? I am afraid most of us are so preoccupied, distracted by last-minute Christmas shopping and consumerism, that we fail to see God’s cosmic plan of redemption in which we, as fallen creatures, are directly involved.

The average Christian may not “get” this announcement, but those locked behind bars do. Whenever I preach in the prisons, and I read Christ’s inaugural sermon, Luke 4:18, and when I quote His promise of freedom for prisoners, they often raise their arms and cheer. The message of Jesus means freedom and victory for those who once had no hope. They are not distracted by the encumbrance of wealth and comfort.

People in the developing world get it, too. Whenever I have shared this message with the poor and oppressed people overseas, I see eyes brightening. Stripped of all material blessings, exploited by earthly powers, they long for the bold new kingdom of Christ.

Abortion and morality from an abortion-rights perspective

Albert Mohler wrote that Jennifer Senior’s article in New York Magazine “might be the most important article on this issue in recent history.”  It is definitely worth reading as Senior looks at public opinion, the political process, and abortion services and their defenders to try to discern the security of abortion rights.  She finds that the consensus for abortion rights is hardly secure.  And a big part of her reasoning is that the pro-choice side hasn’t been able to make the moral case for abortion rights.

Here is an extended quote where she looks at the causes of the decline in abortion support:

But that downward trajectory [from the height of abortion rights support in the early 1990s to today] could continue. If forced to choose, Americans today are far more eager to label themselves “pro-life” than they were a dozen years ago. The youngest generation of voters—those between the ages of 18 and 29, and therefore most likely to need an abortion—is the most pro-life to come along since the generation born during the Great Depression, according to Michael D. Hais and Morley Winograd, authors of Millennial Makeover, who got granular data on the subject from Pew Research Center. Crisis Pregnancy Centers, dedicated to persuading women to continue their pregnancies, now outnumber the country’s abortion providers, who themselves are a rapidly aging group (two-thirds are over 50, according to a National Abortion Federation study from 2002). In the wake of the murder of Dr. George Tiller this year, the Senate couldn’t even pass a resolution condemning violence against abortion providers.

Netanyahu, man of peace?

A columnist for a left-of-center Israeli newspaper made waves last month by suggesting that Israeli PM truly supported Palestinian statehood.  Ethan Bronner analyzes this possibility in the New York Times today.  Here is how he describes Netanyahu’s actions:

After a long career supporting Israeli settlement in occupied land and rejecting Palestinian statehood, Mr. Netanyahu said last June that he accepted two states. Three weeks ago, he imposed a 10-month freeze on building new residential Jewish housing in the West Bank, something no Israeli leader had done before. Settlers are outraged, and Mr. Netanyahu is facing a rebellion from within his party. Together with his removal of many West Bank checkpoints and barriers to Palestinian movement and economic growth, these steps went well beyond what many ever expected of him….

There is a school of thought, both here [in Israel] and in Washington, that says Mr. Netanyahu is going through the same shift experienced by previous hawks who became more conciliatory as prime ministers — Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.“As we say in Hebrew, things look different from there than they do from here,” observed Isaac Herzog, Israel’s welfare minister, who comes from the Labor party, referring to a saying that seeks to describe how responsibility blunts ideology. “My keen impression is that he is serious, perhaps more than people realize. He is saying ‘test me’ and I am afraid the world may be missing a golden opportunity.”

Shimon Peres, Israel’s president and a long-time advocate of a two-state solution, says he meets frequently with Mr. Netanyahu and seeks to serve as a sounding board and occasional guide. He believes that Mr. Netanyahu wants to cut a deal with the Palestinians but is worried about his political base.

Bronner describes the Palestinian reaction to Netanyahu:

But the Palestinians have concluded that they can get further by appealing to international bodies than returning to negotiations with this Israeli government. Mr. Abbas repeated his rejection of negotiations without a full settlement freeze at the start of a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Council on Tuesday. Palestinian politics is also deeply divided not only between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank but also within each group.

A senior Israeli official acknowledged that the building stoppage was also aimed at the Obama administration, which had demanded a settlement freeze last spring.

“The credibility of the United States president is important to Israel so we had to respond in a positive way,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It was actually decided in the summer but we waited while the Americans tried to get some response from the Palestinians and Arab states. When that failed we decided to go ahead anyway.”

The freeze was less than what was demanded by the Americans and Palestinians. It permits nearly 3,000 units to be completed, includes some 28 new public buildings and leaves East Jerusalem out. Still, senior American officials say it will greatly reduce the construction as the months roll on — as many as 15,000 by some estimates, including one by President Peres. In addition, the American officials say, if the Palestinians return to negotiations, the freeze will likely be extended.

This is one of the more optimistic pieces that I have read about Israeli-Palestinian peace, but of course it takes two sides to make peace.  And perhaps the Palestinian negotiators are justified in holding back.  I’m still trying to piece together a coherent way to look at this situation.

A fair-minded evaluation of Obama’s Middle East policy

Michael Totten links to an article by Michael Young, editor of the Beirut Daily Star, which reacts to Obama’s Afghanistan policy speech.  It’s a concise but nuanced evaluation of the speech and the potential impacts of American foreign policy changes on the Middle East.  Read the whole thing if you’re at all interested in either the Middle East or America’s international relations.  Here are some key excerpts:

It’s not often that Barack Obama and Hassan Nasrallah agree, but both made important speeches this week, and both appeared to concur that American power was on the decline.

Of course Obama didn’t quite put it that way. Instead, he merely implied the growing sense of American difficulty, the fact that the United States was “passing through a time of great trial,” which he made more palatable by sandwiching it between words of encouragement and resolve. His speech to West Point cadets on Tuesday was an effort to explain to his countrymen why it was important to send an additional 30,000 or so troops to Afghanistan. But what remained, despite the soaring rhetoric toward the end of the president’s speech, was the terrible burden all this placed on an America much gloomier than it was decades ago.

Obama chose to highlight domestic American rifts, when he remarked that “years of debate over Iraq and terrorism have left our unity on national security issues in tatters, and created a highly polarized and partisan backdrop for this effort.” He drew attention to America’s economic travails by noting that “[i]n the wake of an economic crisis, too many of our neighbors and friends are out of work and struggle to pay the bills. Too many Americans are worried about the future facing our children. Meanwhile, competition within the global economy has grown more fierce. So we can’t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars.”

As for the American enterprise in Afghanistan, the centerpiece of Obama’s speech was that he would actually start withdrawing American soldiers by July 2011. No, the United States would not bankroll an Afghan nation-building project, because (and here the president sounded more like a shopkeeper than a purveyor of global domination) such a scheme “sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost.”…

Expect America’s foes in the Middle East to take more advantage of this situation. The Iranian regime, rather visibly, does not believe the Obama administration will attack Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear capability. And Obama’s haste to get out of Iraq, or Afghanistan as soon as he can, like his bellyaches about the economic difficulties facing the republic, exhibit far too little American nerve to frighten Tehran.

In Lebanon, Iraq, and on the Palestinian front, to name only these, the US has also had little to show for itself. The “peace process”, which Obama had described as the centerpiece of his regional considerations, remains hopelessly stalled; the Obama administration is so keen to pull out of Iraq that it has looked the other way while Iran has continued to increase its influence in Baghdad, and while Syria has allowed more Al-Qaeda militants through its borders to murder Iraqi civilians….

Obama’s caution is defensible in some regards. War alone cannot be the benchmark of American power. Nothing would do more to harm the US than for it to sink itself into myriad conflicts it cannot win outright. In some ways, however, Obama failed to pick up on that lesson in the political realm, making ambitious promises concerning several complex Middle Eastern issues, without setting clear priorities, so that today, with little progress evident in any of them, the president stands discredited.

The mounting perception of American weakness will, arguably, be the most destabilizing factor in the Middle East in the coming years. It will alarm Washington’s allies and empower its foes, and Barack Obama’s stiff-upper-lip displays of candor, his persistent enunciation of American inadequacies, will only make things worse. Power may be a source of great evil, but not nearly as much as a power vacuum.

Three thoughts:

• This logic makes sense.  Unless the administration’s diplomacy can persuade other countries or international organizations to replace American power and influence in the Middle East, you would expect that regional actors would fill the vacuum.  That’s not a very pleasant scenario to imagine, given the cast of characters leading many Middle Eastern governments (not to mention the non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah).
• Even if the above is true, at what point does the U.S. get to stop paying for its previous attempts to influence the region, most recently the Bush administration’s grand strategy to “transform the Middle East”?  Do we simply need to continue or increase our level of involvement because of what might happen?
• Finally, given the unpredictability of events, is it possible that our involvement is actually propping up a status quo that is unsustainable in the long term?  Would regional actors stepping into the power vacuum sort things out in a way that we haven’t envisioned?  I shudder, though, at the human cost that “sorting things out” might entail.

I wish I had good answers to these questions.

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=130308

Turkey’s role in the Middle East

Marc Lynch thinks that Turkey is poised to play an important role in regional relations.  Its president, Recip Erdogan, is in Washington this week.  Lynch writes:

Erdogan, of course, heads the government of the mildly Islamist AKP. The electoral success and governing style of the AKP has proven absolutely fascinating to many in the Arab world. I’ve had many conversations with, and read hundreds of papers and op-eds by, Muslim Brotherhood members keen to figure out the lessons of the AKP’s success. As a model of workable political Islam, the AKP offers an important model — if a dual-edged one.  Many Turkish secularists continue to sound the alarm bells of creeping Islamism, complaining that even if the AKP is committed to democracy it is using its governing power to radically reshape Turkish political culture and governing principles. These strike me as healthy debates and normal politics, though, not the stuff of political apocalypse.

Erdogan burst into a new level of Arab popularity with his much publicized outburst at Davos, when he stormed off a panel with Shimon Peres in protest over Gaza as Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa sat by bemusedly. This demonstration captivated Arab audiences and become the talk of Arab politics for weeks. Turkish diplomacy has built effectively on Erdogan’s sudden personal popularity by seeking a more active and independent diplomatic role. Its diplomacy in many ways resembles that of Qatar, also an important American ally which has found considerable popularity with Arab public opinion. Like Qatar, Turkey explicitly and determinedly talks to both sides of the great Arab political divide, maintaining relations with Israel and the United States while also engaging regularly with Syria and Iran. It isn’t for nothing that Turkey was well-positioned to mediate the secret Syrian-Israeli talks last year….

Turkey’s cultivation of good relations across the spectrum makes perfect sense for a player on the periphery without a direct stake in old battle lines which wants to maximize its diplomatic clout. And it is potentially extremely  useful. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Turkey is exactly the sort of player which the Obama foreign policy needs:  one able to talk to both sides of deeply rooted conflicts, while maintaining its credibility and protecting its own interests. Turkey can mediate Syrian-Israeli talks in a way which no Arab country could (I heard a rumor a few weeks back, which I couldn’t confirm, that Syria was actually urging Turkey to rebuild its ties with Israel so that it could resume an effective mediation role). Turkey can bridge the gap with Iran in ways which few Arab states could — and without the vulnerabilities of, say, a Qatar.

A different view of the West Bank

Tom Gross, in an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, says that the economy of the West Bank is flourishing in a way that will lay the foundation for Palestinian independence.  In fact, he says, Israelis have provided a great deal of support for Palestinian economic growth.  After describing the some of the conspicuous wealth and the film festival that he saw in Nablus, he writes:

Wandering around downtown Nablus the shops and restaurants I saw were full. There were plenty of expensive cars on the streets. Indeed I counted considerably more BMWs and Mercedes than I’ve seen, for example, in downtown Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

And perhaps most importantly of all, we had driven from Jerusalem to Nablus without going through any Israeli checkpoints. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu has removed them all since the Israeli security services (with the encouragement and support of President George W. Bush) were allowed, over recent years, to crush the intifada, restore security to the West Bank and set up the conditions for the economic boom that is now occurring. (There was one border post on the return leg of the journey, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but the young female guard just waved me and the two Palestinians I was traveling with, through.)

Words and deeds: another critique of Obama’s post-Cairo policies

Yasser El-Shimy, a former Egyptian diplomat and current Ph.D. student at Boston University, echoes Marc Lynch’s observation that the June Cairo speech has not been followed with policy changes:

Today, Dec. 4, marks six months since Barack Obama gave his milestone Cairo speech. America’s standing across the Muslim world, however, is starting to dwindle back to its status quo ante, for a simple reason: The president committed the strategic blunder of not following up his words with actions.

For instance, even after Israel rebuffed Obama’s demand for an immediate halt to settlement expansion on Palestinian lands in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu for “unprecedented” concessions. To Muslims, it appeared that the new sheriff in town was not that different from the old one, at least not when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

To be sure, Muslims resented President George W. Bush, but it was above all his policies they could not fathom. Indeed, more broadly, Muslims’ discontent with Washington has mostly been political in nature. Polls almost uniformly demonstrate that Muslims are disappointed with America’s policies towards the Middle East, and that those policies drive anti-American sentiment. The long list of grievances includes U.S. bias towards Israel, its abiding military presence (in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with massive military bases in the Persian Gulf), as well as its support for autocratic regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region.

El-Shimy offers these policy suggestions to regain momentum:

• Stand firm on the settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and on allowing “the flow of vital goods into the Gaza Strip. This should send the unambiguous message that America is ready and able to lay the groundwork for a peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that, in addition to Israel’s security concerns, Palestinian suffering does, in fact, matter.”
• “Second, the formation of a Lebanese national unity government headed by Saad Hariri presents a tremendous opportunity for peace. The arrangement terms should include Israeli withdrawal from the Shib’a Farms and other occupied Lebanese territories, in exchange for the disarmament of Hizbollah.”  Presumably this means that the US should support this process.  I’m not sure that Hizbollah would agree to disarm, though.
• Engage diplomatically with Syria, which has shown openness to talks.
• Don’t bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, and persuade Israel not to do so either.
• Withdraw from Iraq under the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement.

Not sure how possible or how good those suggestions are, but they are a point of view from someone with a different background than your average American commentator.

Tim Keller’s “The Prodigal God”

Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith is a great book.  In this short volume, Keller presents the gospel to his readers with a gentle integrity using the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32).  Building on the teaching of his mentor, Edmund P. Clowney, he notes that while the prodigal son is saved in the parable, the story ends with the father appealing to his older son to come in for the celebration of the younger brother’s return.  Keller writes that this party was being paid for out of the older brother’s inheritance, since the younger brother had already taken and spent his part of the father’s property.  Jesus’ target in this parable was the Pharisees and scribes (Luke 15:2), the “elder brothers” who criticized Jesus for associating with sinners, the “younger brothers.”

Keller argues that the two brothers represent the two ways that people sin against God: we can be younger brothers who pursue pleasure with disdain for tradition, or we can be moralists who try to earn favor with God and try to create their own righteousness.  Both are in opposition to loving God for who He is and acting morally because of God’s love and grace to us.  These two types of people often criticize each other, but each is missing God’s grace.  Following the interpretation that the parable is mostly directed at Jesus’ self-righteous critics and counteracting the usual focus on the younger brother, Keller spends more time unpacking the elder brother’s attitude.

Keller discusses our sin and the resulting alienation from God, although he does not say much (if anything) about hell.  This may be the one weakness of the book, although from this article you can tell that Keller considers the doctrine of hell important.  On the other hand, the final three chapters of the book focus on how sinners are redeemed, and give a compelling description for the costly love of Christ and the hope and glories of salvation in its different facets: relationship with God and other believers, the restoration of the creation, and sanctification.  One of the great parts about these chapters is that they point people to the wonders of salvation in a very deep and biblical way, which perform the important task of not simply scaring people away from hell but asking them to consider the joys of knowing God through Christ.  I think that this is a great book for Christians to examine their own hearts for elder and younger brother tendencies and to remind themselves to look upon God’s great love for us.  I also think that it is a fresh way to present the timeless gospel to someone who doesn’t believe in Christ.