Christian Meeting Review

I have been thinking a lot lately about how my theology ought to shape the way I look at every aspect of my life. Specifically, I have been trying to think through how Reformed theology might influence how I approach parliamentary procedure and business meetings as a professional parliamentarian.

So, because of that curiosity, I decided to start a monthly publication where I would try to work out some of those issues by writing about them. I will call this publication the Christian Meeting Review, and the first issue is below. For more information, you can visit my website.

View this document on Scribd

(By the way, I have uploaded several of my parliamentary procedure documents for free download on my Scribd account.)

Barney Frank 2005 vs. Barney Frank 2009

June 27, 2005: “Homes that are occupied may see an ebb and flow in the price at a certain percentage level, but you are not going to see the collapse that you see when people talk about a bubble. And so those of us on our committee in particular are going to continue to push for home ownership.”

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April 20, 2009: “You know, people haven’t fully understood, one of the causes of the terrible crisis we had over the last two years, which is giving us today’s problem, it came from people being pushed into buying houses, taking out loans, that they couldn’t afford. Part of that was a conservative view that rental housing was a bad thing. I had been trying with a lot of others to try and continue programs to build decent rental housing for people. What we had were people in power who didn’t like that that said, “No, no, we’ll help them become home owners.” Well, people were pushed into home ownership who shouldn’t have been there.“

Why is this man “tasked with enacting broad reforms of the financial system“?

Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae Hearing in 2004

Although I think that this would have been a stronger video without the highly partisan written commentary throughout, I think the statements of these politicians speak for themselves. From the perspective of 2009, this is almost hard to watch — not only because this problem blew up the way it did, but because Democrats very effectively pinned this crisis on Republicans in the last election, one of the reasons that Democrats won so handily.

To this day, Rep. Barney Frank continues to blame Bush and the Republicans for not effectively regulating the housing loan industry and Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae. I don’t think that setting this up as a Democrats-bad/Republicans-good issue effectively deals with the issues (trust me, I’ve got plenty of problems with a lot of Republicans right now), but I do think that if Rep. Frank adamantly opposed regulation to Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae in 2004 (see 4:53 and 6:05), he should be held accountable today when he tries to blame the Republicans for pushing irresponsible, sub-prime loans through the government.

His statement is all the more outrageous when he now claims that the problem in the mortgage lending industry was apparent in 2003 (when the Republicans were in power), a year before this hearing took place. As I said above, the written comments in the video are somewhat partisan, but it does make clear that the Republicans are pushing for regulation, and the Democrats are the ones opposing it.

Pray for China

In a little over a week, I will be heading to China for three weeks on a mission trip with a few other people from my school. I would appreciate your prayers now and during those three weeks, especially because China is not exactly the most friendly country in the world toward Christianity.

In my preparations for leaving, however, I have learned that China is not as bad as I had thought — we shouldn’t be in any real danger. Also, we will be going there with a man who was a missionary there for 17 years, so he knows the lay of the land pretty well.

Nevertheless, I was saddened to read this story about a man who was recently imprisoned for printing and distributing Bibles to rural Chinese people:

BEIJING – By all accounts, Shi Weihan was a model Chinese citizen.

A kind-hearted man with a sense of social responsibility, he donated funds to send poor kids to school, raised money for those suffering from congenital heart disease, and when the Sichuan earthquake hit, worked tirelessly for the emergency relief effort.

But Shi had a fatal flaw.

He printed Bibles – and gave them out for free.

This week a criminal court in Beijing sentenced him to three years in jail.

Read the rest of the story here.

Incentivize, Don’t Nationalize

Steven A. Burd, the CEO of Safeway, wrote a brilliant editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal on how his company have cut almost 40% of health care costs, compared to the national average over the past few years.

The solution?

They bill health insurance premiums on the basis of behavior, following the auto insurance industry, rather than giving a flat rate of insurance to all, regardless of blood pressure, weight, tobacco usage, etc…:

As much as we would like to take credit for being a health-care innovator, Safeway has done nothing more than borrow from the well-tested automobile insurance model. For decades, driving behavior has been correlated with accident risk and has therefore translated into premium differences among drivers. Stated somewhat differently, the auto-insurance industry has long recognized the role of personal responsibility. As a result, bad behaviors (like speeding, tickets for failure to follow the rules of the road, and frequency of accidents) are considered when establishing insurance premiums. Bad driver premiums are not subsidized by the good driver premiums.

As with most employers, Safeway’s employees pay a portion of their own health care through premiums, co-pays and deductibles. The big difference between Safeway and most employers is that we have pronounced differences in premiums that reflect each covered member’s behaviors. Our plan utilizes a provision in the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that permits employers to differentiate premiums based on behaviors. Currently we are focused on tobacco usage, healthy weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

President Obama is right to recognize that rising health care costs mean serious problems to the American economy, but I think that he is disastrously wrong in his proposed solution.

Read Burd’s editorial here.

Once for All

I was driving home from a wedding in Tennessee yesterday morning, and so I listened to a sermon on the radio in hopes of having some kind of substitute (however insufficient) for missing church. I found a couple that I had no interest in listening to beyond the first few sentences, and then I found a man who didn’t seem too bad.

On the whole, he preached a pretty good sermon, but one portion particularly bugged me. He was preaching from Hebrews 10:11-14:

¹¹And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. ¹²But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, ¹³waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. ¹⁴For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

In describing the Levitical priests, he said something like, “So they were just there, going through the motions days after day, doing their ‘religious thing,’ offering one sacrifice after another. But their hearts weren’t in it.”

The thrust of what he was saying was that the Israelites had “religion,” but not a “true relationship” with God. I don’t think that this is a good way to handle this passage for three reasons.

1. Some Levitical priests just “went through the motions,” but others certainly didn’t. Do you really think that, when the tabernacle (Ex. 40:34-38) and the temple (1 Kings 8:10-11) were consecrated, and the glory of YHWH descended, that the priests there were just going through the motions? I find that difficult to believe.
2. This kind of preaching almost makes it sound as though, if the Levitical priests only would have performed their duties with whole hearts, then everything would have been okay. The whole point of this passage, though, is that no amount of Levitical sacrifices could ever have accomplished anything definitive: “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Heb. 10:4).
3. The total effect of (1) and (2) is to detract from the glory of Christ. God gave the Levites a glorious covenant, but even its glory was only to point forward to the greater glory of Christ. This is Paul’s argument in 2 Corinthians 3: “For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, the ministry of righteousness must far exceed it in glory” (2 Cor. 3:9).

Instead of trying to explain the failure of the Levites, it is probably safer and more edifying for us to preach the matchless success of Christ in making atonement for our sin, once for all.

Nebraska Football and SCOTUS

For lighter news about the Supreme Court of the United States, you should read this article about Clarence Thomas and his plane ride with a Nebraska Cornhusker football recruit if you haven’t already.

New Angle on Tiananmen Square Tank Man

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the famous Tiananmen Square Protests, from which came this picture:

Interestingly, a new photograph has surfaced which captures the same man from a different angle:

You can see the man in the top left of the photograph, between the two trees. This is a pretty cool photograph, especially given the iconic stature that the original picture gained.

Read the story here.

Garbage Island

The other night, I introduced my wife to one of my favorite movies, Ladykillers. (Allison did not like it, by the way.) I have seen it many times before, but I have never heard/understood/appreciated this line from the sermon at Marva’s church, which you might remember better from his “I smite! You smite! He smites! We done smote!” line.

…To smite is to reMIND! We got to
STOP that decline! And scramble back
UP to the face a the almighty Gyod!

(Amen!)

…’Stead a worshippin’ that GOLDEN
calf, that earthly TRASH on that
GARBAGE island! That GARBAGE island
in that shadowland WAY outside the
Kingdom a God!

(“Way outside!”)

…That GARBAGE island where scavenger
birds feast on the bones a the
backslidin’ damned!

(“Yes they do!”)

…And so, let us pray…

Admittedly, the motif of taking all the corpses of the criminals on barges to the garbage island makes it a clear image of hell without this explanation, but I like that the sermon has a larger function in the movie than simply motivating Marva to smite Gawain later on. (“Sometimes it’s the only way!”)

I suppose that this also suggests that we are meant to see the casino money as the golden calf, and that Marva is supposed to represent Moses, especially as she tries to reform the criminals by inviting them to church once she learns of their plot.

(Text from Screenplays for You)

Different Regiments of the Same Army

I have been thoroughly enjoying Perry Miller’s The Life of the Mind in America, which presents a highly complex picture of early American Christianity. One of the interesting issues he describes is the unique way in which Christians in America achieved a form of unity.

On the one hand, Miller credits the absence of an official state church with the “competition” among the different denominations to gain for themselves their share of the population. On the other hand, Miller argues that the revivals and interdenominational associations for the propagation of Christianity (through supporting missions, printing Bibles, publishing tracts, etc…) led to a unity that transcended that “competition.”

This situation had two major effects. First, some of the suspicion between traditions fell away as members of different denominations began to work with one another toward the total Christianization of America. So, rather than seeing one’s own denomination as the only true believers, Christians began to look differently at their divisions:

From Bangor, Maine, Enoch Pond pleaded that without the associations, our efforts “must be sectional, insulated, feeble, and ineffectual.” Meanwhile, the associations seemed to prosper, providing occasion for much oratory about the glories of co-operation which still haunt the American Protestant imagination. Our Bible societies, declared George Cookman in 1828, are a line of forts along the enemy’s frontiers; our Sabbath schools are military academies for young cadets, our tract societies are shot-houses for the manufacture of ammunition. Our Methodists are cavalry, Presbyterians are infantry, and the Dutch Reformed are heavy artillery. That the associations and churches never quite got themselves arrayed in so beautiful a military formation does not alter the fact that in the effort to combine them a vision of the American community took shape. (48)

The second effect, though, is a general degradation of the unique attributes and contributions of each of these traditions. Miller writes,

For the truth is that while the religious leaders were ostensibly talking about harmony among the churches, they were actually charting the way toward a homogeneous America. (48)

By laboring at a “lowest common denominator” level, both the good and the bad aspects of different traditions disappeared, leaving a generic kind of Christian who pursued a generic kind of Christianity.

The problem with this, according to Mark Noll in his excellent book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (which I recently finished), is that most of these Christians limited themselves to working toward the conversion of America through revivals — they did not, therefore, give all that much thought or energy toward creating a thoroughly Christian society, where the gospel permeated the pursuit and development of science, politics, philosophy, economics, etc…

Unfortunately, that only left a bunch of Christians without much idea of how to live as Christians — except, of course, that they were supposed to seek to convert more people to Christianity.