Pastor's Blog

I have been slowly making my way through Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present . In his treatment of George Bernard Shaw he describes the political confusion that took place during the 19th and 20th centuries such that labels and realities often do not match. What Shaw and all the other publicists who agitated the social question helped to precipitate was the onset of the Great Switch. It was the pressure of Socialist ideas, and mainly the Reformed groups in parliaments and the Fabian outside, that brought it about. By Great Switch I mean the reversal of Liberalism into its opposite. It began quietly in the 1880s in Germany after Bismarck “stole the Socialists’ thunder”—as observers put it—by enacting old-age pensions and other social legislation. By the turn of the century Liberal opinion generally had come to see the necessity on all counts, economic, social, and political, to pass laws in aid of the many—old or sick or unemployed—who could no longer pro...

Harold J. Berman argues that law is so fundamental to life that we have all been law students since a very young age. A child says, "It's my toy." That's property law. A child says, "You promised me." That's contract law. A child says, "He hit me first." That's criminal law. A child says, "Daddy said I could." That's constitutional law.

I recently acquired the above mentioned  book  by the highly esteemed legal scholar,  Harold J. Berman.  A quick perusal of its introduction makes me think I'll enjoy it even more than I originally expected. Just a brief quote and a few quick comments: The principal affirmation is that law and religion are two different but interrelated aspects, two dimensions of social experience--in all societies, but especially in Western society, and still more especially in American society today [1973]. Despite the tensions between them, one cannot flourish without the other. Law without (what I call) religion degenerates into a mechanical legalism.  Religion without (what I call) law loses its social effectiveness . [Italics added] Indeed. Law is a necessary and inescapable part of life in this world. Civilization cannot function without it. For Christians to ignore or deny God's law and its ongoing applications both for the individual as well as for society at la...

Nigel Barber wrote a piece this week for the Huffington Post in which he predicted that atheism will defeat religion by the year 2038. He appeals to what he calls “the existential security hypothesis” in order to make his case. This is the idea that, “as people become more affluent, they are less worried about lacking for basic necessities, or dying early from violence or disease. In other words they are secure in their own existence. They do not feel the need to appeal to supernatural entities to calm their fears and insecurities.” Barber studied data from the nine “most godless countries” (Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom), specifically looking for each country’s GDP per capita when it made the “atheist transition” (moving from majority religious to majority secular). He discovered that on average the figure was $29,822. Then, applying current global economic growth patterns, he arrived at 2035 as the...

In his national bestseller,  From Dawn to Decadence:  500 Years of Western Cultural Life , Jacques Barzun describes the impact of the reformers' efforts in translating the Bible into the common tongues:  The results for Protestants were remarkable. To start with, it gave whole populations a common background of knowledge, a common culture in the high sense of the term... The Bible was a whole literature, a library. It was an anthology of poetry and short stories. It taught history, biography, philosophy, political science, psychology, hygiene, and sociology (statistical at that), in addition to cosmogony, ethics, and theology. What gives the Bible so strong a hold on the minds that once grow familiar with  its contents is its dramatic reporting of human affairs. For all its piety, it presents a worldly panorama, and with particulars so varied that it is hard to think of a domestic or social situation without a biblical example to match and turn to moral ends...

Recently a friend alerted me to a KU News Release, " Distractions, quick thinking lead to conservative thoughts, research finds ." It begins, Could knocking back a few beers influence a person's views on property rights or the role of government in production and trade? By asking bargoers to take a political survey and blow into a Breathalyzer, a scholarly investigator at the University of Kansas has found that as blood alcohol levels rise, people become increasingly intoxicated with conservative policies, too. Sounds interesting, methinks. So I pours meself a cold one and reads on. The press release refers to a study, Low-Effort Thought Promotes PoliticalConservatism , by two researchers from the University of Arkansas and one each from universities of Kansas and Wisconsin. They introduce their study thus,   Conservative political ideology in Western democracies may be identified by several components, including an emphasis on personal responsibility, ac...

Good interview with Thomas Woods, author of "Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century," with the standard leftist group-think zombie-like responses.

I have just started reading Mark Levin's new book, Ameritopia . His thesis is that a desire to build a utopian society is the justification for totalitarian government. In his own words, "Utopianism is the ideological and doctrinal foundation for statism." "Utopianism substitutes glorius predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science, and reason, while laying claim to them all. Yet there is nothing new in deception disguised as hope and nothing original in abstraction framed as progress. A heavenly society is said to be within reach if only the individual surrenders more of his liberty and being for the general good, meaning the good as prescribed by the state. If he refuses, he will be tormented and ultimately coerced into compliance, for conformity is essential. Indeed, nothing good can come of self-interest, which is condemned as morally indefensible and empty. Through persuasion, deceit, and coercion, the individual must be stripped of his identi...

The Bible doesn't expressly forbid the practice of cremation, but the examples we have in Scripture of the people of God caring for the remains of the dead are decidedly in favor of burial. And of course the burial of our Lord Jesus Christ serves as an example which Christians have generally wished to follow. Normally in Scripture, burning the dead was a sign of a person’s having died under God’s curse. It was a punishment inflicted upon the corpse of a particularly egregious offender. We see this punishment commanded, for instance, in the case of Achan. By the command of God, Achan was stoned for his offense of stealing from God, and his body was burned (Josh. 7:15 , 25; see also Lev. 20:14 ; 21:9). A number of cultures, both ancient and modern, have at different times practiced cremation for various reasons—some for practical and others for religious reasons. Burial seems at first to have been the usual custom among the ancient Greeks; but later cremation became ...

When I first began to post on Paul Johnson’s excellent book on secular intellectuals, I thought I would post a little here and a little there on each of the figures he chronicles. But what I discovered was that to do so would be to sound like a broken record. The personal circumstances and the extent of the influence of each person he describes vary, but the ideals to which they were committed being the same, their character and behavior were for the most part identical. So rather than making as many posts as a full review would require, let me simply quote Johnson’s own summary. We are now at the end of our enquiry. It is just about two hundred years since the secular intellectuals began to replace the old clerisy as the guides and mentors of mankind. We have looked at a number of individual cases of those who sought to counsel humanity. We have examined their moral and judgmental qualifications for this task. In particular, we have examined their attitude to truth, the way in w...