God's Judgement on the Nation cont....

Wouldn't you know it........

Following a reference from one of my buddies in response to reading "God's Judgement on the Nation" he lead me to a couple resources he knew of that would perhaps answer some of the questions I proposed in that post.

The issue came up not long ago in an Mars Hill Audio Journal interview with Prof. Steven Keillor, author of a book called "God's Judgment." Unfortunately, if you click on the link you have to pay for the podcast or other form of media you'd like to use to hear it. I didn't get to hear the podcast but was given the highlights and the following link with an excerpt from a critical but largely favorable review of the Keillor book, which appeared in Books & Culture and was written by Prof. Brad Gregory of Notre Dame:

Those of us skeptical of Keillor's aim [to show that it's possible to argue seriously that God intervenes in history -- my note.] need not accept his premises in order to see the force of his arguments. His claim that the Bible offers a divinely revealed understanding of history can be tested (albeit never proved) by its analytical power in interpreting major historical events. Keillor seeks "to correlate known causes of the event with known categories of divine holiness and judgment" as disclosed in Scripture, well aware that such interpretations can be perilous and are often abused:

We must beware of presumption in claiming to know the mind of God. But the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme, where the inability to know for sure morphs into a refusal to ask questions that cannot be known with certainty and then into a dismissal of the category of divine judgment.

In short: if God's purposes are such and such, then certain events are plausibly understood as his judgments in the flow of human history.

I won't get into the details of Keillor's theory of how we can discern God's purposes in historical events -- the B&C review does this nicely. Bible Girl's column, though, was a good reminder as to how rarely many of us serious Christians ever think about God's judgment with regard to national events -- and how unbiblical that is. In the Mars Hill interview, Keillor explicitly discusses the temptation to read divine purposes into the events after the fact, or perhaps to justify wars and other events. But just because it's common for people to do such a thing doesn't mean that we should dismiss entirely the idea that God uses dramatic events to chastise nations and to teach them something about their behavior.

We all remember Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson's pronouncement right after the 9/11 attacks that the event was God's judgment on America brought about because of the actions of the abortionists and gays. When I heard that, I was enraged and furious. Some time later, though, I had to confront the possibility that they were right, that the events of that day were, in some sense, permitted by God as a judgment upon America. I think that given the symbolic power of the attacks, a far stronger case can be made that if -- if -- the God of the Bible intended those attacks as a judgment, the symbolic meaning of the targets would lead us to conclude that He was trying to teach us a lesson about the corrupting power of wealth and materialism (the Twin Towers), and about American militarism (the Pentagon). That interpretation wouldn't suit the political purposes of the Revs. Falwell and Robertson, but it makes a lot more sense to me. See the difference?

It seems to me no bad thing for American Christians to think more rigorously about how our nation measures up to the Biblical standard, and how God might be speaking to us collectively through historical events to call us back to obedience and fidelity. We so often assume that our national aspirations and intentions are consonant with the Almighty's, and that's a profoundly hubristic assumption. So many US Christians support the idea that spreading liberal democracy is a fulfillment of the Great Commission, a sort of divine "mission civilisatrice " for the world, that we don't even stop to consider how God might see what we do. Even the Chosen People fell away from the divine will, and suffered for it. Why shouldn't we?

In the Mars Hill interview, Keillor said that one reason we modern Americans are uncomfortable thinking about interpreting history in this way is that we are opposed to the idea of collective guilt. We judge individuals, not groups, in our legal system. We expect God's judgment to conform to that model. But insofar as the Bible is a reliable testimony of God's literal historical dealings with humanity, we are imposing our own model on Him, and it's baseless. He does judge nations. Neither the United States nor righteous Americans are immune.

So: laugh at Bible Girl if you want to, but whether or not you agree with her conclusion, she's standing on firm Biblical ground in asking the right questions.

Throwing a Hissy Fit

MoveOn.org threw a hissy fit, taking out a newspaper ad suggesting Gen. Petraeus is "General Betray Us." Good stuff, if you like semi-snappy language that libels a soldier at war. And this, days before he even presents his findings to Congress.

MoveOn leaders pretend to know more about Iraq than the general who lives there. MoveOn was founded as a special interest group amid the bitter partisan warfare in Washington in the late 1990s. But now the organization itself vomits up partisan bile.

In a recent poll, 63 percent of Americans say they have confidence in Petraeus, who holds a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton. His 63 percent is substantially higher than the numbers for Bush and the Democrats in Congress.

So, Moveon.org took out a full page ad in the most influential paper in the country to impugn the integrity of David Petraeus - a highly decorated four star general who has spent his life in service to America and is currently leading 160,000 of our citizen-soldiers in war - and to call him a liar two days before he offered testimony to the United States Congress. Yes, it generated "buzz." But it was still a truly slanderous, repugnant thing to do.

Mitt 2008?...getting closer now.



And one more 9/11 item......

Here is some sentiment from 6 years (it is a PDF file) and right on.

6 years

Grief has always been our most well-policed emotion. Mourning is painful, so we make it the stuff of pageantry -- of muffled drums and riderless horses and black draped catafalques. To suffer collectively is, if nothing else, to suffer prettily.

What's harder to know is, When is enough enough? A lot of Americans are quietly, and guiltily, asking themselves that question today. Today is the sixth September 11 since 2001. A sixth anniversary is an awkward thing, without raw feeling of a first or the numerical tidiness of a fifth or 10th. The families of the 2,973 people murdered that day need no calendrical gimmick to feel their loss, but a nation of 300 million -- rightly or wrongly -- is another matter.

Some have suggested that we discontinue the moments of silence and solemn speeches and all the other ceremonies that have marked our recent Sept. 11s. While many argue that would leave the day bereft of meaning, it's possible that there are deeper kinds of meaning to be had.

On Sept. 5, German authorities announced the arrest of a group planning a series of terrorists attacks described as "massive" and "imminent." The day before, Denmark pulled off a similar coup, raiding 11 locations in Copenhagen and arresting eight people who had been storing "unstable explosives" in preperation for their own terrorist strike. Both groups are said to have links to al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, at ground zero in New York City, the steel and concrete of the building that will replace the lost towers have at last risen to street level -- not much compared with what was once there but plenty compared with the smoking hole the site had been. And in a briefly scary preamble to the week -- one in which no one was hurt -- New Yorkers jumped and then rolled their eyes as a criminal fool set off an inept built pipe bomb on a quiet street downtown. The locals, who now know a thing or two about what real danger is, made a few jokes and then went about their day.

There are many ways to remember the dead. It's hard to argue that learning how to defeat real evil, slap aside pretenders and rebuild in the face of abiding sorrow aren't three very good ones.