A Conservative, a Liberal, and a Libertarian Walked into a Bar

You already know this is a joke and that it will not end well!

      For one thing, Conservatives, liberals and libertarians don’t go to the same bar. Heck, they don’t even live in the same zip codes. If they did meet in a bar and would decide to actually speak to one another though, they would soon discover they speak different languages.

     So their conversation would soon descend into a black hole. They might keep talking but their words would no longer connect with anything.  

            Its like that old joke about a ball player named Who. Every time the announcer informs the audience that “Who is on first base,” his listeners think he is asking a question: “who is on first base?”

            If the audience doesn’t understand that the first baseman is from another country, they won’t know what the sports announcer is saying. If they are close enough to actually speak with that announcer, they will tell him they don’t know who is on first base. But the announcer will simply repeat what he said the first time, perhaps with a touch of frustration, “Who is on first base!”

Once again his listeners will repeat that they don’t know who is on first base. And so on.

It doesn’t take too much of that kind of misunderstanding to bring people to tears or blows. At very least, they will each walk away thinking the other is not quite right, that he perhaps took too many drugs in college or something.

            This is why Aristotle said the first step of a productive conversation is to define our terms.

            The conservative, liberal and libertarian might begin their conversation by asking one another to define “liberty,” “government,” and “common good,” for example.

The same process might help Catholic, Protestants and Orthodox Christians.

            As in political discussions, most arguments about theology and scripture would end before they began if each party would simply stop to define their terms.

            Understanding another's point of view requires getting under the hood of the different way we use language. Undoubtedly, a conservative, liberal and libertarian have real differences. But some of these apparent differences are really about language, not about actual concepts. Once we discover the different ways we use language, examining our other differences can actually be interesting. Sometime, we even learn something by examining a different perspective.

            This works for movies and books too. Once we identify the core principal of a work we can profit from spending time with it. 

When we read a book -- including the bible, by the way -- none of us just read what's there. Before we open the pages of a book, we have already been shaped by the opinions of our family, friends and culture.  Meanwhile, our neighbor, opening the very same book, has already been shaped in a different way. This means we may each read the same book through entirely different grids. Trying to converse about what we have read without understanding the nature of the different grids we read it through dooms most conversations.  

           We end up shouting, “you idiot – WHO IS ON FIRST BASE?????”

And our opponent storms out of the room, mumbling about our mother’s ancestry.   

            So if a conservative, liberal and libertarian actually do decide to converse about something, perhaps national security VS individual rights, they better stop for a moment to define their terms.

            And for God’s sake they must not drink.

            Someone will get hurt.

            It may be poor Mr. Who who was just innocently hanging out on first base. 

            

What If There Are No Miracles?

One of the things I most appreciate about my Pentecostal heritage is the way it teaches people to expect supernatural intervention. Pentecostals are open to the possibility of miracles; to dramatic divine intervention that brings deliverance, provision and guidance to God’s people.

One of the things I like least about my Pentecostal heritage is the way it teaches people to rely upon such supernatural intervention. For while it is healthy to expect a miracle, reliance upon miracles, especially in matters that call for the exercise of human responsibility, is a type of spiritual sloth.

The Old Testament celebrates a God who intervenes. It tells us that Jehovah pierces through the everyday orderly processes of nature to perform acts of deliverance, guidance and sustenance. However, that is not all the Old Testament has to say about spiritual life. Proverbs teach God’s people to cultivate character, and includes instructions about planning, budgeting, negotiating and so forth. Ecclesiastes and Job teach God’s people how to deepen their understanding of God by wrestling with apparent inconsistencies of spiritual life. We learn from those books that challenges to faith are not to be avoided, as though such struggles were hostile to faith, but should be embraced because struggle with faith is the way healthy faith develops. 

Then, there is the Book of Esther.

Esther doesn’t mention God. God doesn’t even seem to be present. The Jews are in real trouble. Nonetheless, no manna rains down from heaven. No Captain of the Lord’s Armies appears to defend them. They are, apparently, left on their own.

This lack of piety upsets some Christians and for that reason they dislike Esther. 

Too bad.

Esther is a canonical book. When a Christian doesn’t like part of the canon, it says more about him than about the book in question. Besides, it’s a bad habit to read the books of the Bible as though they were not parts of a greater context. The canon is the Word of God. The books within the canon are the Word of God because they are a part of that overall witness. It's like members of a corporate board; although a board has great authority within an organization, it's individual members do not. What they have is influence on the whole. It is the authority of the whole that gives weight to the parts. 

That is my two cents worth about canon, inspiration and all of that!

Anyway, Esther introduces a new idea to Gods people about miracles. It informs us that miracles are not always, or usually, earthshaking. They are not usually paradigm-altering events like walking on water. Esther introduces us to the miracle of providence; the idea that God works through His creation subtly, oozing through nature's pores, to subtly guide, provide and deliver His people. 

Reaping the bounty of providence requires believers to discern where God may be at work. Then they must join God in that work. The idea of providence assumes that God wants us to mature; that although we will always remain God’s children, there a time we should grow up.

The apostle James teaches that maturity requires an engagement with grace through a process James calls synergei in Greek and which Jerome rendered cooperateur in Latin. Neither word requires translation because both are so close to English. We all know what synergy is, or cooperation.

However, even if we are willing to bring our thoughts, talents, attitudes and actions into synergistic alignment with God’s purpose and work in the world, as James seems to teach, how do we know where God is? That is what we learn in the Book of Esther. 

We often stumble into it, by reflecting with others on the matters at hand and how we should respond as believers. There may be no bolt of lightening, or a disembodied voice telling us what to do. If that occurs, what believer won’t obey? In the meantime, we must grow in wisdom and in in community with others to figure it all out.

We must become aware of providence.

Providence was once an extremely important word in the Christian vocabulary. The founders of our Republic peppered their documents with it. They used it to name their daughters and towns. They assumed the presence of God in the mundane and everyday, and tried to train their minds and hearts to discern what God was up to so they could join in.

All farmers believe in providence. They seek only miracles when there is no rain.  Otherwise, they plow, seed the ground, hoe the weeds, and harvest the crops. They cooperate with creation, which God has made but which human hands must prepare.

The Book of Esther assumes the presence of God at work in fallible human beings. There is no Moses or Elijah in Esther. There is only a beautiful woman who has won a dancing contest. The hero, if there is one, is Mordecai, the prom queen’s uncle, who offers an intuition. “What if you won this contest because providence prepared you to be an undercover agent, an influence, a person with just enough significance to tip the scales one way instead of the other?”

Ether subtly teaches us that God is often subtle and prods us to pick up hints about what He is up to.  

Without this portion of the Biblical witness, we might be left believing that believers never need to study, mature, develop, process, plan, cooperate with others, reflect, discern or grow up. It would be virtuous to remain children, “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine.” We would insist on remaining in that season of life where “I thought as a child and spoke as a child,” and refuse to “become a man and put away childish things.”

Just so you know, I believe in miracles. I anticipate signs and wonders and often see them. In that sense, I am not a modern Western man. I am a throwback, a primitive, and perhaps even superstitious. I have dreams I believe contain messages from God. Al sorts of mystical hair-raising things occur in my life.

However, two things cause me to hold to all of that very lightly.

First, my personal judgment about such things is terribly unreliable.  To come to the right conclusion about supernatural things requires discernment with others, and most of all with scripture, which is in the apostle Peter’s words, “a more sure word of prophesy.”

Secondly, huge parts of scripture inform me that God created the world as He wished. He doesn’t lightly interfere with the order He purposefully imposed upon it. Instead, He calls us to learn from his creation and to cooperate with it so we will grow up. He won’t create a unicorn on Main Street, even if I ask Him to do to impress the heathen that I am His child.

Once you get into it, you see that Book of Esther actually contains a very great miracle. A beauty queen becomes a courageous and wise leader who delivers her people from the work of evil. Not bad. Not bad at all. It’s something that could conceivably happen to you, and to me; even if we are not a Moses or an Elijah.

So chalk one up for providence, that subtle and sneaky way by which our Almighty Father teaches us to become his eternal friends and coworkers.

The Militant Moderate

Pity the poor moderate, the weak underbelly of every great cause. He lacks the courage to stand up for his own convictions.  He does not promote the principles he claims to believe. He is in our cause but not of it, an embarrassment to all true believers. He never understands that a cause does not succeed until its resolute leaders eliminate from it all those middle-earth creatures who refuse to be either fish or fowl.

That is now the way of defining anyone unfortunate enough to be called "a moderate." It is a label of immanent political death. Few there be who claim it. Woe to those who confesses it. 

Nonetheless, I do claim it; willingly, proudly, and tenaciously.  I am, one might say, a militant moderate.

I say moderation has been maligned! I deny it is a weakened version of any thing else. I claim that moderation is its own philosophy. It is not an infection of pathological cold feet one acquires while reaching for something else. It is a deliberately cultivated attitude, an intentionally formed view of reality, and a chosen type of character. Moderation is, for self identified moderates, the Aristotelian ideal of existential balance and the holy grail of the eternal Tao.

Moderation is a quest for wisdom rather than for power. It is hunger and thirst for common sense. It is the belief that healthy community contains difference. It is curiosity about the unknown. It is civility, grace and respect. It is a repulsion of those great ones who know all and who never doubt their own rectitude.  It is a repudiation of pomposity and grandiosity. 

Moderation is a demand to know and to converse with one's adversaries. It insists on treating one's opponents with respect. It finds the dishonorable and unreasonable proponents of one's own camp more embarrassing than the honorable and reasonable proponents of the opposition. 

Moderation is a vote for civilization. It is a vote against ideological terrorism.  It holds down the essential center.

It resists the knuckle brain notion that there are only two sides of an argument. It is a realization that if everyone in a boat moves to the same extreme, the boat will sink. 

The Christian moderate understands he is beholding to neither liberalism nor fundamentalism. He does not equate orthodoxy with theological brainwashing. He shares liberal concerns but disagrees with liberal solutions. He shares conservative concerns but sometimes disagrees with conservative methods. He denies that the end ever justifies the means because he knows that the means employed always forms the end achieved. He strives to live in peace with all as much as lies within him. 

The moderate resists prepackaged opinions. He demands the right to participate in the construction of his own viewpoints. 

Despite these advantages, moderation has its drawbacks. 

A moderate may get lonely during election years. He may be a disappointing guest for for a talk show host.

Nonetheless, the moderate gains the freedom to think his own thoughts. He gradually learns to offer actual opinions rather than borrowed clichés. However, he avoids the futility of exchanging ideas with the already convinced. Such habits lead him to conversation partners who, like him, want to become real individuals rather than parrots or tape recorders. 

The moderate's most important reward though comes when he inherits the earth. He knows that this outcome is inevitable. Because, after the radicals kill each other, there will be no one else left to claim it.