The question of whether a cleric can kill a sinner (criminal) is not one that occupies the thoughts of Christians today. But whenever we find such a question that occupies a past thinker it’s important to reflect on why we don’t find such questions pressing. Sometimes we don’t find the question pressing anymore because the past thinker has settled the question decisively. Take, for example, the question of whether Christians should read and theologize about the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament). This isn’t a pressing question today among Christians partly (perhaps primarily) because Augustine settled the issue in The City of God. Similarly (perhaps), we don’t think the question of whether it’s lawful for a cleric to kill a sinner as pressing because Aquinas (at least partly) settled the issue.

So, what are the reasons to think that it might be lawful for a cleric to kill a sinner? First, you might think that since Christians are supposed to imitate God, and since God killed sinners, clerics who want to imitate God should kill sinners. You might also think that since the secular authorities are inferior to the clerical authorities, and since the secular authorities put sinners to death, the clerical authorities should put even more people to death than the secular authorities. Or you might think that in cases where clerical authority and secular authority coincide in one person, that person could kill sinners.

Truthfully, you might not think any of these things. But these are the objections Thomas addresses.

Here’s how Thomas responds. He quotes from the apostle Paul. He’s working with the Vulgate, so he states that a “bishop should be blameless . . . not a striker” (1 Tim. 3:2–3). Then he gives two reasons to think that this criterion for clerics makes good sense. First, that clerics in the “ministry of the altar” should be imitators of Christ, who did not return blows when he was struck. Second, that clerics are ministers of the “New Law” according to which “no punishment of death or of bodily maiming is appointed.” Thomas points out that the priests and Levites of the Old Testament were ministers of the Old Law, so it was lawful for them to kill sinners with their own hands since the Old Law had provisions for corporal punishment.

With these reasons in hand, Thomas addresses the objections you might have. First, it’s true that Christians should be imitators of God, but each Christian should imitate God “in that which is specially becoming to him [the Christian].” I don’t know what is specially becoming to you, but (even as a noncleric) I find this argument convincing. Second, it’s true (again) that clerical matters are higher than secular matters, but this doesn’t mean that clerics should express their superiority by doing a super duper job in secular matters. It means instead that clerics should leave the minor matters to secular authorities and not concern themselves with what’s beneath them. Last, in cases where spiritual and secular authority coincide in one person, that person should not punish sinners with his own hands. Others should punish sinners in virtue of the cleric’s authority.

I find the most interesting part of this discussion to be Thomas’s understanding of the Old and New Laws. Specifically, he thinks that the New Law does not contain any provision for human, spiritual authorities to carry out corporal punishment. If a Christian layman is not being a good Christian (in some respect or other), his priest or pastor has no right by the New Law to corporally punish him. Contrast with the Old Law where, Thomas thinks, corporal punishment for spiritual matters seems a live option. (Question for Old Testament scholars: Is Thomas right about this?)

How well does Thomas’s reasoning transfer to those ministers outside the Roman Catholic tradition? If Thomas is right about what the New Law enjoins and forbids, then I think his reasoning transfers quite well. Protestant ministers, for example, see themselves as ministers of the New Law, so they should also consider that as ministers of the New Law they should not corporally punish sinners. I suppose a question could arise about the phrase “as ministers.” Suppose a Protestant pastor is both a pastor and, say, a police officer. (Anyone know of such an instance?) Why not say that the person punishes as a police officer? I think Thomas would say that such a person ought not be both a pastor and a police officer because the office of a pastor should not be confused with (that is, mixed together with) other offices. Why not? Probably because of the sanctity of the pastor’s office.

I recently had the chance to read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for my Teach For America credentialing program at Loyola Marymount University. Reading the book in that setting prompted notice of the near absence of school in the novel. In one way this is disappointing, as I’m sure Morrison would powerfully present how her protagonist, a young black girl, experiences school. At the same time, however, I wonder if this absence helps an educator remember what is often very hard for educators to remember: school is not a very powerful force in the lives of many students. School for many is a span of time they must endure, but it does little to animate their emotions and thoughts.

What does animate students’ (or better, “childrens’”) emotions and thoughts is their relationship with their parents. Morrison investigates parental influence over and over in her book, sometimes sparingly, sometimes quite vividly. To risk superficiality, here is a catalog of a few of the studies: Frieda’s patronizing sovereignty inherited from her mother. Pecola’s need to be accepted inherited from her ostracized mother Pauline. Cholly’s anger from his father Samson. Elihue’s, “Soaphead Church,” Gnosticism from his bookish father. Junior’s cruelty toward low-income blacks from Geraldine. However Morrison chooses to show us in each episode, the message across the book is bracingly loud and clear: Those who influence children determine their destiny, and those most influencing children are their parents.

The troubling trend of public education is the expansion of a problem inherent in the idea of public education: the replacement of the parent with the school as primary instructor of a child. There are two reasons this germ of public education is problematic: first, American public education, as it has been established, shies away from moral instruction, leaving children who are not trained in virtue by their primary educator. The second problem seems to be inherent in public education, but perhaps isn’t. This problem is the slow but eventual surrender from parents to state of responsibility for more and more aspects of their offspring’s future. Parents take less and less initiative, are less confident, and defer to the school on more and more. One aspect of this seems to be because of a certain view of education, explained well below by Leon Kass in the article “In Search of an Honest Man,” published in the most recent National Affairs:

I had unthinkingly held the Enlightenment view of the close connection between intellectual and moral virtue: Education and progress in science and technology would overcome superstition, poverty, and misery, allowing human beings to become at last the morally superior creatures that only nature’s stinginess, religion, and social oppression had kept them from being. Yet in Mississippi I saw people living honorably and with dignity in perilous and meager circumstances, many of them illiterate, but sustained by religion, extended family, and community attachment, and by the pride of honest farming and homemaking. They even seemed to display more integrity, decency, and strength of character, and less self-absorption, vanity, and self-indulgence, than many of my high-minded Harvard friends who shared my progressive opinions.

As mentioned, Morrison does not often talk of school, but one can imagine how Cholly, the most tragic adult in the book, would have done in school. Cholly is an instructive example to consider because his parents abandoned him at a young age; how would he survive the modern day without the parental function of public schools? This is a good question, but first notice Morrison’s mention of Cholly’s zeal in reuniting with his father in Macon: “Surely that would be enough to get to Macon. What a good, strong-sounding word, Macon.” The power between a child and parent, a power of influence, is not present between a child and a teacher he or she has for nine months. Even if a teacher stayed with a child for ten years, the two are not as intimately connected, and as able to positively benefit from one another, as parent and child.

But what about bad parents? If The Bluest Eye is anything, it is a tragic examination of what happens when no one intervenes in bad parenting. Parents are often bad, and they do not need references or background checks to influence their children the way teachers do. But public school is hardly an appropriate intervention for bad parenting. In fact, it seems to encourage bad parenting, with the subtle but corrosive notion that teachers and classrooms are with whom and where students learn, not with parents at home.

Previously I covered what Thomas says about killing plants and animals and killing sinners. Regarding plants and animals, Thomas says it’s okay to kill them because they are for our use. Regarding sinners, Thomas says it’s okay to kill them because they have by their actions descended to the level of animals—sinners have lost their human dignity. He also says that it’s permissible to kill sinners because they threaten the health of the community, and any part that threatens the health of the whole may be excised in order to safeguard the whole.

We progress now to the next article: Whether it is lawful for a private individual to kill a man who has sinned. (Killing in self-defense is a question Thomas takes up later. So let’s put that aside for now.) Here’s one reason you might think that a private person (as opposed to a person invested with public authority) could lawfully kill a sinner: Sinners are equivalent to animals, and anyone can kill an animal, especially if it’s dangerous. Here’s another reason: Protecting the common good is praiseworthy; so if a private person kills a sinner, he deserves to be praised.

Thomas won’t accept either of these reasons. In fact, a private person who kills a sinner is a murderer and worse: he’s also a usurper of legitimate governmental power. Why? Only those who have been entrusted with the care of the community can legitimately take action against threats to the community. Thomas gives the example of a physician who amputates: Only the physician can legitimately amputate because only the physician has been entrusted with the health of the body. Similarly, only those “persons of rank having public authority” have been entrusted with the health of the public good, so only they can kill sinners.

Now, about that suggestion that anyone can kill a sinner because sinners are animals and anyone can kill an animal. I can’t tell what distinction Thomas is relying on to make his point. (Thomas almost always makes a distinction in settling a dispute.) First, he distinguishes between wild animals and domestic animals. No one needs permission to kill a wild animal, but if one kills a domestic animal without authority, then one has to compensate the owner for the loss. Second, he distinguishes between a sinner’s being distinct from other human beings “by nature” and being distinct from them in that the sinner no longer has his human dignity. A sinner is still a human being by nature even though he has taken action (freely) to destroy his human dignity. (The distinction between being a human being by nature and maintaining one’s human dignity was made in the reply to the third objection in the previous article on killing sinners.) From these distinctions Thomas concludes that “a public authority is requisite in order to condemn him [the sinner] to death for the common good.”

It seems to me that Thomas thinks of a sinner as somehow being on the level of a domestic animal, not a wild animal. Perhaps he thinks that in virtue of being a human being by nature, the sinner is still part of human society and is entrusted to the care of the civil leaders, much like a domestic animal is cared for by its owner. So if someone harms the sinner without the proper authority, then he has gone against the (rightly appointed) civil authorities.

Thomas’s response to the other objection is clearer: You can do anything to support the common good provided your action does not harm another. If your action in support of the common good will harm someone else, then it must be approved of by the one to whom the care of the health of the society is entrusted.

We should note that in this section Thomas has not stated the conditions for someone being a legitimate authority. He supposes that there are (or can be) legitimate authorities in a commonwealth. I don’t know enough about his political views to know what he would think about the authority of citizens in a democratic republic. However, what he does say seems to rule out the vigilantism of, say, Batman. (Though perhaps he might say that Batman (at least in most versions of the story) is not, strictly speaking, a vigilante because he has at least the tacit approval of Commissioner Gordon, who is a legitimate authority.)

I was thrilled to have Mark Galli, a Senior Editor at Christianity Today, respond to my critiques of his insightful essay on evangelicalism.  I asked him if I could repost his comment here, and he graciously accepted.  My reply is at the bottom.

Matthew, thanks for the careful reading and reaction to my piece—and, of course, for bringing it to the attention of your readers. One reason I follow this blog is it’s willingness to do more than drive-by shootings, but to engage more deeply and thoughtfully in issues before us.

I hardly think my take is the only nor necessarily the most incisive, but I think it is true as far as it goes, and more conversation about the issue (short of navel gazing) should prove helpful. A few points of clarification and/or further discussion:

“Galli doesn’t say it, but by framing theology within the context of our ecclesiastical struggles…”

I would not call such struggles “ecclesiastical” (though I wonder if the word meant is “ecclesial”). To my mind, evangelicalism is not in whole or in part a church; it is a movement of like-minded Christians who come out of a variety of church traditions. As such, the later concerns about “the Church” I don’t find germane to this essay.

Thus I am not trying to locate “the church” but only us as individuals and as members of one sub-movement or another at Golgotha. Given the point of the piece, the Cross—vs. the Ascension, Pentecost, and so forth—has to be at the center of the piece because I’m trying to draw out a Lutheran/Barthian paradox that right now we evangelicals stand on the razor-edge of both judgment and grace.

In some ways this is, as noted, “only the starting point” but Matthew’s inclusion of the word “only” (perhaps inadvertently) suggests one problem I’m trying to address—grace as assumption, an “of course,” a given, a mere prolemgomena, something we can acknowledge and move on from to get to more substantive matters. If we do not grasp that this “starting point” is also the middle point as well as the end point—the “impossible possibility,” a supernatural miracle which leaves us dumb struck and in awe—well, all the pnuemetological character of the faith will become nothing but abstract mysticism.

As for the supposed “obligation” to attend to the “pragmatic aspect” in future issues: since I’m talking about grace, I am implying faith, and in implying faith, I am implying obedience. Instead of “acquiescing to the problematic methodology” I am critiquing, it may be that I am trying to follow the biblical teaching that indeed there is no faith without works. The issue is not the horizontal as such; it is the idolatry of the horizontal.

In fact, there is no evangelicalism without the horizontal: evangelicalism is a movement of like-minded pietistic activists. We have never left our respective rooms and gathered in the “mere Christian” hallway (to use the image of C.S. Lewis) to merely worship and bask in God’s grace—but always to do something. We simply cannot not talk about the horizontal. The horizontal is the movement’s charism. But it becomes “empty works,” idolatry, “works righteousness,” and even Pelagianism if Christ-centered grace does not precede, sustain, and conclude its activism.

This Christocentricism must be a regular feature in our life together. And so the closing admonition is a good one—as is the larger theological vision of the Ascended Christ and the role of the Holy Spirit. Our activism, our works, our transforming work and our transformation, should point like John the Baptist in Grunewald’Crucifixion, to Christ.

Does this make sense, or have I missed some crucial point?

My reply:

Mark,

Thanks for the kind words, and the clarification. They are both much appreciated.

I’m still working through many of these issues, and you’re much further down the road theologically than I am. I really appreciate the clarification that your not concerned with ecclesiology in your essay. I misread you on that, and I apologize.

In fact, thank you for the gracious smack-down. It’s not often that I read a critique of something that I write and find myself nodding in agreement as much as I did here.

That said, while I was clearly interpreting “evangelical” in such a way that it had ecclesial connotations (under the mistaken notion that ‘ecclesial’ and ‘ecclesiastical’ could be used interchangeably), I wonder whether the fact that you used it strictly of individuals is at the core of the problem you are identifying. Grace must be experienced and articulated in an ecclesial context if it is going to maintain its vitality and evangelicals are going to avoid the traps that you identify. But you hint at that when you discuss the preached Word and our inductive Bible studies, which is (perhaps) the source for my misreading.

Additionally, I still have a few worries about where we stand when we look at the cross, even as individuals. In the Episcoaplian liturgy of Holy Week, for instance, they extinguish the Christ candle on Good Friday so that we can identify with the disciples. I think that practice is problematic, as the subsequent reality of the Resurrection and Pentecost definitively change the way we look at Christ. We can’t stand at Golgotha, at least not the Golgotha represented in Grunewald, as the only means we have of accessing the death of Jesus is in and through the resurrection power of the Spirit.

Our Christocentrism, then, needs to be of a different sort than Luther or Barth’s (or the medieval Catholics). It needs to be pneumatologically powered, a point which while present in Luther and Barth, seems to often get pushed to the background (at least in my understanding). Calvin and Wesley are much better on this issue, I think.

I think, though, that there’s probably not much real disagreement here except on matters of presentation. But those matters…matter.

Update:  see also Hunter’s thoughts here.

Hunter Baker’s new book, The End of Secularism, is a breath of fresh air in the ongoing debate over how Christians ought not act in the public square. Baker systematically treats the historical, sociological, political, and epistemological dimensions of the most prevalent–and problematic–formulation of the relationship between religion and society. The End of Secularism is both helpful clarification and instructive critique of the de facto rules of political discourse: that God ought stay out, and that it ought proceed strictly on secular grounds.

Baker’s argument proceeds, it seems, along three general lines of thought that are woven together.

First, Baker examines the history of church-state relations and scrutinizes the emergence of secularism–which comes by way of deism–in late modernity. Baker’s historical analysis culminates in a brief examination of the role of Christianity within the American experiment. Baker is at his best navigating the perils of interpreting America’s founding documents, simultaneously arguing against the “Christian nation” and the “secularist” interpretations of America’s birth. Baker argues forcefully that the Constitution provides no substantive guidance on questions of religion and politics, but instead is designed to give jurisdictional guidance. The question of religion, in other words, was to be left to the States. Baker’s treatment of this question and of the Fourteenth Amendment are worth the price of the book by themselves.

Additionally, Baker examines the sociological component of secularism. While secularization has been identified with progress by thinkers like Rodney Stark and Peter Berger, the facts have, in fact, proved the opposite. But Baker goes one step further, pointing out that the social forces that have promoted secularism have failed in their attempts to create a neutral public square, as they claimed. Instead, a social elite has acted inhospitably to religious people who wanted to contribute their voices to civil discourse. Writes Baker:

“The early stalemate among religions in the immediate wake of secularization might seem refreshing, but it could also create resentment and a sense of unfair censorship over the nature of public and institutional expression and the types of education that have gained favor versus those that have lost favor. This is in fact what has happened.”

The sociological character and ascendancy of secularism depends upon its philosophical foundations, which is why Baker goes to pains to demonstrate the falsity of the warefare analogy for the relationship between religion and science. Secularism is often aligned with an empirically bound notion of public reason wherein truth claims are determined strictly by their scientific verifiability (one thinks of the debate over stem cells). Baker argues in favor of science, but a science that is appropriately bounded.

But the heart of the book is the critique of the purported neutrality of the secular public square. In making his critique, Baker makes friends with a surprising thinker, the renowned post-modern theorist Stanley Fish. Fish argues that the political arena is fundamentally constituted around the exercise of power, and hence inevitably excludes those whom we are exercising power over. In such a system, there is no “neutral process for adjudicating claims between groups, institutions, and persons based on common ground.” The secularist thesis is, in this way, nothing more than a shell game. Baker doesn’t adopt Fish’s anti-foundationalism, of course. At points he suggests that a natural law theory would be his preferred method of making political decisions. But Baker’s use of Fish as an ally against secularism highlights, I think, the potential usefulness of (broadly) post-modern thought for Christians who are worried about the totalizing impulse behind secularism.

Baker doesn’t stop with Fish, but moves on to address the work of John Rawls. Rawls, perhaps the foremost proponent of the purported neutrality of secular civic discourse, argued that public discourse should be kept free of comprehensive doctrines, including religion, about which there could be reasonable disagreement. Baker points out that Rawls’ notion of public reason is too thin to actually be practical, and that it ignores the holistic approach of people’s interaction in the public square. Writes Baker:

“[The comprehensive doctrines] are intertwined with the political system in such a way as to be at least partially inseverable. The reason persons bring their comprehensive views to bear upon the political process is that they have integrity. They are undivided persons. They agree to be bound by democratic outcomes but not by a system which would bind their participation in the way Rawls proposes.”

Yet while Baker’s use of Stanley Fish occupies a central role in his argument, I am worried that it give up too much. While I am sensitive to critiques of what people do not say, Baker is unclear about precisely how we can deploy Fish’s criticism of public discourse as being fundamentally oriented around the pursuit of power without adopting his anti-foundationalism. Baker rejects theocracy and monism repeatedly, which are (ostensibly) grounded in the sort of foundationalism that Fish rejects. But he does not specify an alternative mode of discourse. He hints that he likes Robert George’s notion of public reason, but does not say whether this too will be subject to Fish’s critique, or how it would provide a better means of public discourse than the false neutrality of secularism.

But this may well be a critique of Baker’s particularist approach to the relationship between Church and society. Writes Baker, “No elegant political philosophies or legal rules are needed to police the boundaries of religious and secular argumentation. The focus should be on the wisdom and justice of particular policies, not on the motives for the policies. An endless fascination with perfecting the way we form our reasons for policies, religious or otherwise, leads to absurdity and arbitrary decisions.”

Baker’s point happens in the context of legislation, and on this he might be right. But the particularities, for instance, of the Republican Presidential primaries raised a host of theoretical questions that were absolutely crucial to navigating a number of difficult political decisions for evangelical Christians. I wonder whether a strictly particularist approach to political reasoning can account for the election of officials to represent us, where representation demands some sort of identification between the people and the governor. Additionally, argumentation about the boundaries of religion and politics frequently happens in pre-political settings–society–on issues that are not necessarily tied to specific policy discussions, but rather are about the philosophical presuppositions that drive policy. Here it seems some criterion is needed for what is acceptable and not acceptable, unless the only goal is persuasion, wherein the only canon for public discourse would be what moves your audience to agree with you–a mildly depressing thought.

All this to say, if there is one thing about Hunter Baker’s The End of Secularism that makes me sad, it is that it is (for now) incomplete–and consciously so. Baker is well aware of the limitations of his deconstructive project, even if he hints occasionally at a positive alternative. But I sincerely hope that now he has told us what we ought not think, he will at some point expand this positive viewpoint. Baker has no interest in a naked public square, but I am left wondering how it ought be clothed.

This should not, however, dissuade you from buying and reading Baker’s vitally important book, and then buying a copy for your friends and pastors.  Secularism as a mode of discourse has been given a free pass for far too long, and there is no better nor more comprehensive treatment of its history or troubles than The End of Secularism. It is necessary reading for Christians who wish to speak in public about their faith–which, I presume, is all of them.

As observers of evangelicalism, few are better positioned than Mark Galli, a senior editor at Christianity Today. And what he sees is a movement divided into factions, but united by the nature of our solutions to the malaise we have all bemoaned. Galli examines the spiritual disciplines movement (Dallas Willard), the social justice movement (Sojourners), and the movement to rescue the church from its cultural captivity (Soong Chan-Rah) and points out that our solutions are not properly theocentric. Writes Galli:

“For now we should note that the diverse solutions seem to share a common methodology: If evangelicals divorce too often, preach that they should not. If evangelicals are individualist, tell them to be more communal. If evangelicals are privatistic, tell them to get involved in social justice. If evangelicals are worldly, tell them to start practicing the spiritual disciplines. And so on.

In short, we frame the problem horizontally. We focus on what we fail to do, and then talk about what we should do differently. To be fair, such solutions often start with a strong vertical dimension: that is, a sense that we can address the horizontal only by first looking to God. But our practical and activist sensibility—one of our movement’s stellar attributes—tends to undermine the vertical. “

Galli doesn’t say it, but by framing theology within the context of our ecclesiastical struggles, we run the risk of discovering in the vertical what we set out to find. As Dr. Fred Sanders once pointed out, in recent years evangelical discussions about the Trinity have largely been motivated by gender issues. We find in God precisely what we hope to see, a trap that might have ensnared the missional movement and its minimization of the inner life of the Church. The vertical becomes a support our preferred solutions, rather than a good pursued for its own sake. J.I. Packer’s admonition seems particularly relevant in this context. We might begin with theology in the order of writing, but it is not clear it leads us in the order of knowing.

Galli goes on to argue that the balkanization of the evangelical movement is nothing less than the judgment of God, as at Babel. Again, Galli:

Is it any wonder that we reside in the midst of Babel, finding it increasingly difficult to hear and understand one another? I contend that the cacophony we hear is nothing less than the judgment of God. It is not a judgment only against the other parts of our movement, as if our part has learned to live in the grace and obedience of the gospel! Neither is it a judgment only against those Moralistic Therapeutic Deists in our midst, those who need to be reformed to become like us. No, it is a judgment against every strand within the evangelical movement, and every individual therein. It is a judgment against our making the horizontal an idol, against the “weightlessness” of our faith in God.

It is this judgment, though, that is the context for the reversal that occurs at Pentecost. But that is not where the Church stands. Instead, Galli locates the Church in the shadow of the Cross:

Thus, we stand in the place where the cacophony of Babel can become the miracle of Pentecost, when we hear each other again, where we do not see incomprehensible foreigners in our midst but a variety of charisms, callings of the Holy Spirit.

It is where the incessant hectoring and nagging, the doing and striving, can be transformed into acts of love motivated by inexpressible gratitude. It is where our scatteredness can become the fulfillment of God’s mission in the world. It is where the horizontal can become not a denial of the vertical but the expression of it. Where we stand, in short, is Golgotha, under the shadow of the Cross, a sign of God’s judgment on our pretensions and God’s forgiveness of our sin.

Galli gives us only the starting point for his particular reform proposal:

The first thing to do when we confront the dysfunctional horizontal, then, is not to address it as a horizontal problem. That would be to deny the word of the Cross; it would be to pretend we can, of our own wisdom and strength, attend successfully to the problem. The Word of God says the way to start working on the horizontal is to look up, in particular, at the one hanging on the Cross. The place to begin is not more feverish doing but a type of non-doing, acknowledging the complete inadequacy of any doing and the utter powerlessness of the horizontal to fix the horizontal. It means to allow oneself to be borne up by the Word of grace.

Notice that Galli’s suggestion is that it is the word of the Cross that we need to encounter. While Galli rightly points to Jesus as the Word made flesh, this focus allows him to ground the traditional evangelical emphasis on Scripture and preaching.

Galli’s essay is undoubtedly evangelical in its orientation. But I worry about his choice to locate the church at Golgotha, looking up to Jesus on the cross. While perhaps only symbolic, our formulation of the vertical will significantly alter the resources we have to bring to bear on the horizontal. And how we structure these issues matters, a point Galli clearly agrees with and uses against those who are advocating spiritual formation. But the Church does not look up at Christ on the cross, but rather looks up to the ascended Christ. By positioning the Church at Pentecost rather than Golgotha, we preserve and maintain the Church’s distinctly pneumetological character, a distinction that it might be said is particular to evangelicalism and our emphasis on the contemporary working of God through conversion.

Galli’s piece functions as a kind of prolegomena for a newly redesigned and refocused Christianity Today, and he promises that they will unpack the pragmatic aspects of this message in future issues. But given his start, I wonder why he feels obligated to do so, as it seems to acquiescing to the problematic methodology he is critiquing. If the problem is as Galli says, then evangelicalism would be better served by a refusal to be co-opted by the horizontal through relentlessly pointing at Jesus and saying with Peter, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

This summer I interned at the field office of Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti. I spent the days taking calls from constituents, working to build support for a program that has reduced graffiti in the area by 82% in six years(!), and learning about city government. On my last day I facilitated a staff discussion on the introduction of Jane Jacobs’ study of urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It’s no accident that Jacobs leads with “Death” in the title:

Look at what we have built…low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels or dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with vapid vulgarity. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore… This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs’ book is a systematic indictment of orthodox modern city planning and architectural design, an orthodoxy that largely remains. In fact, one can read Jacobs’ book and never encounter temporal dissonance; despite the fact that it was published nearly fifty years ago, everything seems just as true today.

There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend—the figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollars—we could wipe our all our slums in ten years, reverse decay in the great, dull, gray belts that were yesterday’s and day-before-yesterday’s suburbs, anchor the wandering middle class and its wandering tax money, and perhaps even solve the traffic problem.

Jacobs’ criticism is not just one of arriving at different conclusions—whether cities ought to be built or rebuilt in this way or that way—but also one of methodology. While Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, two patriarchs of modern urban design, began, bizarrely, with anti-city ideologies and theorized toward these ends, Jacobs begins with a love for cities and proceeds only by careful observation. A love for cities is as much a starting axiom as any. But from this love she makes progress through analysis of actual streets and neighborhoods, not just hypothesizing.

This I think speaks to the difference between honest and dishonest study, and the reason honest study can be trusted. Honest study depends on initial assumptions, but grows, developing knowledge and continuity with greater experience with the subject. Dishonest study becomes more and more theoretical and detached from the subject, because what is real about the subject often does not serve the ends of the student. Jacobs is intent on deep understanding of the subject itself:

It may be that we have come so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.

No recent essay I have read captures the potential intrusion on natural human life by political borders better than Joshua Treviño’s recent piece for The New Ledger. It is not a policy proposal, or even a philosophical defense of any particular position on border enforcement. Instead, Treviño provides an intimate account of life on a particular section of the US-Mexico border. As such, it functions as the datum which philosophical and political conversation seeks to understand and integrate.

Treviño’s central theme is the absurd treatment of American citizens by border patrol agents and the infringement upon civil liberties that routinely occurs…

Continue over at First Thoughts…..

Yesterday’s installment of Public Discourse features an intriguing essay by Professor Gerard Bradley on why marriage law depends upon the procreation of children. Bradley highlights from the outset the impossibility of neutrality by the government on this issue, a shot across the bow at Rawlsian theories of public policy.

Bradley then turns to the heart of his argument, which he states this way:

The most important moral truth about the family is the radical equality and mutuality at the heart of family relationships, which relationships have an unbreakable foundation in the way children come to be within marriage. When the spouses’ marital acts bear the fruit of children, the children are perceptively called (in law) “issue of the marriage.” For children embody in a unique way their parents’ union. Just as the married couple is often referred to as two-in-one-flesh, so too each of their children is the two-of-them-in-the-one-flesh. Each child just is their union, extended into time and space, and thus into human history and into the whole human community. The parents can see in each of their children an unsurpassable reflection of them as a unity, that is, of their identity not as Jack and Joan but as the two-of-them-as-one flesh—literally.

Bradley makes the opposite move of Professor George’s piece in the recent First Things by making children intrinsic to the meaning of marriage–at least from a legal standpoint.  Bradley’s proposal pushes these relationships into the identity of the children, a move that is potentially problematic.   Children grow up, it seems, to be something more than the image of their parents union and establish identities separate from those of their parents–at least currently.  Bradley’s metaphysic perhaps offers support for the sort of localism that the Front Porcher’s (and Chesterton!) so love.

But Professor Bradley states that children just “are” the union and then goes on to call them an “unsurpassable reflection of [the parents] as a unity.”   This gap between the reflection of the unity and the union itself distended through space and time is enormous, and while the latter concept softens the idea of the former, I wonder whether in doing so it gives away more than he intends.

I am curious, though, to hear responses by our readers on the essay, especially in light of the interesting discussion we have had in the comments on Professor George’s piece.

From a book that has helped me think more clearly about the moral implications of what I buy at the grocery store:

You want the best ‘organic test’? Go to any farm unannounced and see what is on the bookshelf of the farmer. Because what I’m feeding my thoughts and my emotions dictates how I raise a chicken.”

This gem is from Joel Salatin, founder of Polyface Farm, a family owned, multi-generational, pasture-based, beyond organic, local-market farm and informational outreach in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. You can read about Salatin’s farm in many places; I came across him in Michael Pollan’s arresting book An Omnivore’s Dilemmna: A Natural History of Four Meals. I read a lot of books; few will probably have as immediate and sustained impact as this and Pollan’s most recent, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, have had on my wife and me.

Of course it’s true, but I still find myself surprised at how dramatically one’s worldview shapes the decisions one makes. What’s truly stunning is the way we can be blinded by familiarity. Not only are many of the back-allies of my brain nearly identical with what is floating around the atmosphere, but even many of the thoroughfares. I buy food every week, sometimes every day in a week, but I have never before thought about how price is usually the only piece of relevant information regarding my purchase, aside from the other variable, packaging. As Pollan points out, produce advertisements don’t usually need to waste space with words, a number will suffice. Such a rubric would sicken me when applied to education, or travel, or housing, but when it comes to what I eat, how it was grown, and what informed the grower, I am very content to score the deals. Until recenlty I even eyed the more scrupulious eater with suspiscion. There is a foodie-snobishness that ought be avoided, but for me that’s a long way off. For now, I speak for the trees, and the Cornish/Rock crosses.

Edit–Goodness, I changed the title so that it reflected the fact that I am quoting without comment.  And with that, I’m starting my weekend.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve come across a number of pieces that have lingered with me in various ways.  I hope to offer more substantive reflections on many of them at some point in the distant future, but for now, I simply commend them to you as worthy of your attention and time.

Matthew Milliner’s hauntingly beautiful piece on his unborn son (read the whole thing):

My unborn son’s story began, five years before he died, on my parents’ screened-in porch on a cool September evening. The reception for my sister’s wedding was going on around us, but my aunt was distressed. She justified her job at the abortion clinic by claiming she was a caring presence to those who needed it most. But months on the job were wearing down her resolve. She saw things her determination to help could not cancel out. Her conscience was protesting.

From J.I. Packer:

We have been brought to the point where we both can and must get our life’s priorities straight. From current Christian publications you might think that the most vital issue for any real or would-be Christian in the world today is church union, or social witness, or dialogue with other Christians and other faiths, or refuting this or that -ism, or developing a Christian philosophy and culture, or what have you. But our line of study makes the present day concentration on these things look like a gigantic conspiracy of misdirection. Of course, it is not that; the issues themselves are real and must be dealt with in their place. But it is tragic that, in paying attention to them, so many in our day seem to have been distracted from what was, and is, and always will be, the true priority for every human being. That is, learning to know God in Christ.

Dr. John Mark Reynolds on the prophetic witness of Daniel:

We are an age where every Christian with a keyboard and an Internet connection fancies himself a prophet. We cast doom casually, but forget that few are called to issue jeremiads and the few that are called will weep like Jeremiah wept for the people he loved. Too many times we should endure and love our enemies, but instead we hurl the easy truth at them and leave. Duty sometimes demands such a prophetic role, but most often our duty is like Daniel’s: we must be patient and persistent.

John Dyer on the role of images and pornography:

Pornography is not just about lust. It is also about the power of images to connect to the deepest parts of person’s soul through the intensity of story. My suggestion is not to merely try harder to avoid lust, but to think about how you can avoid connecting to the stories of naked women and instead reconnect your life story – both the pain and the triumph – to the Gospel, the story of God working in the world to save his creation through Jesus Christ, the Son of God. That story alone has the power to heal.

Leithart on secularization:

Sociologists and historians have been making the same mistake ever since. Christianity does not promote “secularity” in the modern sense. Where Christianity has become dominant, Christians have always sought to reshape public life, law, social order, custom, and economic life, in accord with the demands of the gospel. They have not considered public life a safe-zone, free from the influence of the gospel. But the gospel does challenge and overthrow the institutions and patterns of the old world. Wherever the gospel arrives, sacred sites lose their sacredness, the gods go silent, the religious ceremonies that encrust daily life go by the wayside, blood and sacrifice cease. When the good news gets to the scattered tribes of the Amazon, or unevangelized peoples of Africa or Asia, it comes as an announcement of a new exodus, a baptism that leads out of Egypt into a new world, guided by the pillar of the Spirit.

Joe Carter on the cultish nature of conservatism:

The American right has begun to mimic the left in adopting a perverse form of political syncretism. A decade ago we’d mock well-intentioned, but misguided, liberals for being so intent on advancing their cause that they’d gloss over the views of their nutcase, extremist radical allies. Now, we do the same thing without giving it a second thought. Indeed, if you point out that there may be something wrong with embracing the loony ideas of fringe cultists—directly as with Ayn Rand, or indirectly, as with W. Cleon Skousen—you’ll be accused of being, depending on how polite your accuser, everything from an elitist to a socialist dhimmi.