Few things are more frustrating than watching members of the media, politicians, and activists who often know very little about guns, have the resources to hire security when they face threats, and don’t understand the weapons criminals use telling me what I “need” to protect my family. And what they invariably tell me I “need” is a weapon less powerful than the foreseeable criminal threat.
Or, let me put it another way. My family has been threatened by white nationalists. Why should they outgun me?
Few things concentrate the mind more than the terrifying knowledge that a person might want to harm or kill someone you love. It transforms the way you interact with the world. It makes you aware of your acute vulnerability and the practical limitations of police protection.
If you’re wealthy, you have a quick response: Hire professionals to help. Let them worry about weapons and tactics. If you’re not wealthy, then your mind gets practical, fast. You have to understand what you may well face. And despite the constant refrain that semi-automatic weapons with large-capacity magazines are “weapons of war,” if you know anything about guns you know that what the media calls a large-capacity magazine is really standard-capacity on millions upon millions of handguns sold in the United States.
This means it’s entirely possible that a person coming to shoot you is carrying something like, say, a Glock 19 with a standard 15-round magazine.
So, how do I meet that threat? Unless you’re a highly trained professional who possesses supreme confidence in your self-defense skills, you meet it at the very least with an equivalent weapon, and preferably with superior firepower.
In a nutshell that’s why my first line of defense in my home is an AR-15. One of the most ridiculous lines in yesterday’s New York Post editorial endorsing an assault-weapons ban was the assertion that semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15 are “regularly used only in mass shootings.” False, false, false. I use one to protect my family.
Why? The answer is easy. As a veteran, I’ve trained to use a similar weapon. I’m comfortable with it, it’s more powerful and more accurate than the handgun I carry or the handgun an intruder is likely to carry, and, while opinions vary, multiple self-defense experts agree with me that it’s an excellent choice for protecting one’s home.
What’s more, like the vast, vast majority of people who own such a weapon, I use it responsibly and safely. Don’t believe me? It’s the most popular rifle in the United States — one of the most popular weapons of any kind, in fact — and it’s used in fewer murders than blunt objects or hands and feet.
Here is the fundamental, quite real, problem that gun-control advocates face when they try to persuade the gun-owning public to support additional restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms: The burden of every single currently popular large-scale gun-control proposal will fall almost exclusively on law-abiding gun owners.
Even in the case of our dreadful epidemic of mass shootings, the available evidence indicates that so-called “common sense” gun-control proposals popular in the Democratic party (and the New York Post) are ineffective at stopping these most committed of killers. As my colleague Robert VerBruggen pointed out yesterday, a large-scale RAND Corporation review “uncovered ‘no qualifying studies showing that any of the 13 policies we investigated decreased mass shootings.’”
It’s one thing to ask millions of Americans to sacrifice their security for the sake of the larger common good. It’s quite another to ask for that same sacrifice in the absence of evidence that the policy will accomplish what it is designed to accomplish.
The criminal who seeks to harm my family has already demonstrated that he has no regard for the law. He doesn’t care about magazine-size restrictions or rhetoric about “weapons of war.” He doesn’t care that he evaded a background check or that he placed his girlfriend in legal jeopardy by using her as a straw purchaser. He doesn’t care if a previous felony conviction renders his gun possession unlawful.
By contrast, I care about the law. I want to remain law-abiding, and I want my family to remain law-abiding. I have immense respect for our nation’s legal system and its political processes. And so, as a person who has that respect and who also feels the keen anxiety of real threats aimed at the people I love the most, I’m making a simple request: Don’t give the white nationalists an advantage. Don’t give violent criminals the edge in any conflict with peaceful citizens.
In your well-meaning ignorance, you seek to provide greater security at the price of liberty. In reality, you would sacrifice both to no good end.
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As the phrase goes (and police officers I know do not deny this), when help is needed in seconds, the police are there in minutes.No comments on A purpose of the Second Amendment
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Some might argue that this program today in 1955 started the rock and roll era:
I have a hard time believing the Beatles needed any help getting to number one, including today in 1965:
That was in Britain. On this side of the Atlantic, today’s number one pop song:
Released today in 1967:
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J.D. Tuccille agreed with me:
Speaking on CNN Sunday morning, Democratic donor Tom Steyer blamed recent political violence, included attempted pipe bombings and the murderous attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue, on the nasty rhetoric of Republican President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Despite his own taste for throwing around the word “treason” and speculating that a nuclear war might be necessary to get Americans to turn against Trump, he might be forgiven his excess—he was the target of one of those bombs, after all. Yet, as leaders of both major American political tribes portray their enemies as not just wrong on policy but dangerous and depraved, they both bear responsibility for making government so frighteningly powerful that Americans increasingly feel that they can’t afford to lose control of governing institutions.
In the current environment, even when Americans don’t love their political allies, they hate their opponents—and have reason to fear their turn in power.
“Record numbers of voters in 2016 were dissatisfied with their own party’s presidential nominee and the opposing party’s nominee,” according to Emory University’s Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster. So the deciding factor came down to the fact that “large majorities of Democrats and Republicans truly despised the opposing party’s nominee.”
“Negative views of the opposing party are a major factor” in why people belong to political parties, Pew Research agreed this spring. In the U.S., many Democrats and Republicans alike say “a major reason they identify with their own party is that they have little in common with members of the other party.”
Pew had already found that “sizable shares of both Democrats and Republicans say the other party stirs feelings of not just frustration, but fear and anger.”
Why such fright and rage? Is it all about mean words?
No. Heated rhetoric is nothing new (the founders blistered each others’ ears) and insufficient by itself to inspire a Trump supporter to send pipe bombs to prominent Democrats, or to inspire a Bernie Sanders fan to shoot a Republican congressman and several others. Nor are the idiot leftists and right-wingers pounding on each other in Portland, New York City, Charlottesville, and elsewhere otherwise placid people moved to violence by politicians’ intemperate words. Heated rhetoric and violence have resulted and escalated as government has grown in size and power—and been weaponized for use by those holding the reins against those they see as enemies.
Officials can be vindictive creatures, eager to use the power of the state to penalize those whose lifestyles, economic activity, and political affiliations they dislike. Tax power was long ago turned to such misuse, probably because tax collectors had authority to intrude into people’s lives before other government employees gained such clout. “My father may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution,” Elliott Roosevelt observed of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In recent years, federal officials have abused their regulatory authority to squeeze financial institutions to cut off funds to critics such as Wikileaks. The practice was formalized at the federal level by Operation Chokepoint, which sought to deny financial services to businesses that were perfectly legal, but disfavored in certain circles, such as adult entertainers, gun shops, and payday lenders.
New York’s governor extended the abuse of state regulatory power over banks to target not just firearms dealers, but advocates of self-defense rights such as “the NRA or similar gun promotion organizations.”
President Trump has openly pushed the Justice Department to investigate Democrats who have rubbed him the wrong way. He also sees security clearances as personal favors to be doled out to friends and denied to critics. In this, he follows on his predecessor’s distaste for “enemies” and willingness to misuse the organs of government—including the IRS—as weapons.
Even those Americans who aren’t especially concerned with politics can find themselves on the receiving end of laws weaponized for use against businesses and pastimes that those currently in power associate with their political enemies.
“[T]he separation here seeps into the micro level, down to the particular neighborhoods, schools, churches, restaurants and clubs that tend to attract one brand of partisan and repel the other,” the Washington Post reported in 2016 of an era when lifestyle and partisan affiliation increasingly correlate. That makes it easy to punish partisan opponents through things they enjoy, such as hunting, marijuana, and brands of cars, without running afoul of constitutional protections for the way they vote.
There are few areas of human life into which government has not inserted itself. “More and more of what we do is dependent on permission from the government,” I noted in July. “That permission, unsurprisingly, is contingent on keeping government officials happy.”
If the government can reach into virtually every area of life, can grant or deny permission to make a living or enjoy pastimes, and has a documented history of abusing such authority for petty and vindictive reasons, why wouldn’t you be afraid of your enemies wielding such power? How could you avoid growing fearful and angry over their anticipated conduct once they took their inevitable turn in office? And what would you say—and eventually do—to stop them? Especially, if you were a little unhinged to begin with.
Are politicians further stirring the pot with nasty rhetoric about their critics and opponents? Maybe. We may well find that the man who murderously attacked a Pittsburgh synagogue and the guy who mailed poisonous ricin to U.S. officials became more prone to act in an environment in which overt expressions of hatred have become common.
But that rhetoric and the related partisan rancor have been building for years as government has become inescapable, and as victorious factions have used their time in power to punish those who lost the last battle—only to suffer in turn as the wheel turns. If you want violent political battles for control of government to end, make politics matter much, much less. When Americans have less to fear no matter who wins political office, they’ll be less prone to viciously fight each other for control of government.
Everything wrong with politics today is because of the outsized stakes in elections. The more power government has — taxation, regulation or laws that exceed the bounds government should have at any level — the more imperative winning elections is. Nasty rhetoric and (by some definition) too much campaign spending is the logical result.
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Today in 1965, the Beatles sought “Help” in purchasing an album:
Two years later, Beatles manager Brian Epstein tried to help quell the worldwide furor over John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comment:
“The quote which John Lennon made to a London columnist has been quoted and misrepresented entirely out of context of the article, which was in fact highly complimentary to Lennon as a person. … Lennon didn’t mean to boast about the Beatles’ fame. He meant to point out that the Beatles’ effect appeared to be a more immediate one upon, certainly, the younger generation. John is deeply concerned and regrets that people with certain religious beliefs should have been offended.”
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S.A. Miller and Seth McLaughlin:
Democratic voters are still enamored with former President Barack Obama, but the party’s 2020 presidential hopefuls are running away from his policies as fast as they can.
Although many voters say they are searching for an Obama-esque standard-bearer to run against President Trump, the candidates say the former president was a failure on immigration, health care and trade.
Even former Vice President Joseph R. Biden tossed overboard the man he called his “brother from another mother.” He griped during the Democratic presidential debate Wednesday that Obamacare needs changes, the trade deal they negotiated falls short and too many illegal immigrants were deported.
“Absolutely not,” he said when pressed on whether he would continue Obama administration deportation policies, which resulted in 400,000 removals a year, a figure that outraged liberal activists.
The Obama legacy took hits from Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California. She described the Affordable Care Act, often touted as Mr. Obama’s biggest accomplishment, as unacceptable “status quo.”
Sen. Cory A. Booker of New Jersey trashed the former president’s immigration legacy.
Deflecting criticism of his own administration, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio faulted the Obama Justice Department’s handling of the 2014 killing of Eric Garner, a black man who died in a chokehold by city police during his arrest for selling cigarettes on the street.
Mr. Biden pivoted Thursday to more forcefully defend Mr. Obama’s record.
“I was a little surprised about how much incoming there was about Barack,” he said at a campaign stop at a Detroit diner. “I’m proud of having served with him. I’m proud of the job he did. I don’t think there is anything he has to apologize for.”
Mr. Biden didn’t reverse course on where he distanced himself from the country’s first black president.
However, he defended the Obama immigration record, citing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals deportation amnesty granted to illegal immigrant “Dreamers.” He said the number of deportations was a poor yardstick for the administration’s accomplishments.
“The idea it’s somehow comparable to what this guy’s doing is bizarre,” he said.
Zach Friend, a Democratic strategist who worked on Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign, said it was a mistake to mess with the former president, whose popularity among Democrats has been as high as 97% in recent polls.
“It seems counterproductive to focus on concerns with his legacy rather than on President Trump’s current policies,” he said. “Ultimately, the differences in shades of blue between these candidates pale in comparison to the differences between these candidates and the policies of the current administration. The focus should be united on how we will make the lives better for everyday Americans and how to keep this president a one-term president.”
The Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit NAACP, agreed that the focus should be on Mr. Trump “because his record is destroying the nation and who we are.”
“They spent a lot of time talking about the past, rather than the present or future,” he said. “You don’t want to cannibalize the whole team so no woman or no man is left standing.”
If there was any doubt about the continuing appeal of Mr. Obama, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez put it to rest with his opening remarks at the debate.
“Am I the only one who misses Barack Obama in this room?” Mr. Perez called out to a roar of applause from the crowd at the Fox Theater.
The moment could have given pause to the 10 candidates about to take the stage and sow doubts about Mr. Obama’s legacy.
Criticizing Mr. Obama’s time in the White House is a dangerous undertaking for any of the 2020 hopefuls because they risk alienating the party’s voters who romanticize those not-so-long-ago days.
It is particularly treacherous for Mr. Biden, who is running as Mr. Obama’s political heir with the promise of restoring the normalcy of the Obama era.
Obama voters were irked by the attacks on the former president’s policies at the debates Tuesday and Wednesday.
Francois Demonique, a professional chauffeur in Detroit, said he “felt bad” seeing Mr. Obama’s legacy dragged through the mud.
“Democrats are not supposed to sling at another Democrat because they are giving President Trumpammunition to use against them in the general,” said Mr. Demonique, who is backing Mr. Biden because of his ties to Mr. Obama.
Mr. Demonique moved to the U.S. from Liberia more than 30 years ago. He said he got his U.S. citizenship so he could vote for Mr. Obama.
He was especially distraught that Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts want to replace Obamacare with “Medicare for All” government-run health care.
“That is like attacking Obamacare. If you want to take away current insurance, that is scratching everything and starting all over,” he said.
Jeff Link, an Iowa-based Democratic strategist, said it is smart for Mr. Biden to keep Mr. Obama close because the good in the eyes of primary voters far outweighs the bad.
“I wouldn’t put a lot of distance between [Mr. Biden] and President Obama on anything,” Mr. Link said. “I think he is smart to embrace Obama, and why not embrace the whole thing? Obama is still incredibly popular and respected among Democrats — particularly Democratic primary voters.”
He said Mr. Biden’s words against the former president may have been “in the heat of the moment” of the debate and noted that he tried to repair any damage afterward.
“I would hold on tight to Barack Obama if I were Joe Biden,” Mr. Link said.
Still, the Democratic Party has moved dramatically to the left since Mr. Obama was in office.
Some of the strongest challengers to Mr. Biden, who remains the front-runner, are far-left champions Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren.
Another powerful contender, Ms. Harris, is more moderate but also is embracing parts of the far-left agenda, including a variation of Medicare for All.
Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said it was an effective strategy for Mr. Biden to tap into Mr. Obama’s popularity with the party’s voters.
“That may well be Biden’s best claim to the nomination. However, in the current political environment, it will be hard to defend Obama’s record on deportation and trade,” he said. “The party has moved well to the left on those issues, and no one is going to accept those policies as the right ones at the current time.”
Yes, the 2009–16 Obama fails the 2020 would-be Obamas because he was insufficiently liberal. Ponder that one.
Jonah Goldberg adds:
For a while there, no modern figure was supposed to be as consequential. It’s difficult to describe the hype in the early days of the Obama era. Time, Newsweek, and countless deep thinkers cast him as a 21st-century Lincoln or FDR. Some literally saw a messianic figure — “The One,” in Oprah Winfrey’s words. Self-help guru Deepak Chopra said Obama represented a “quantum leap in American consciousness.”
George Lucas speculated that he might even be a Jedi.
It was a global phenomenon. In a move that embarrassed Obama himself, the Nobel Committee gave him a Peace Prize on spec — i.e., in anticipation of what they were sure he would do. A leading Danish newspaper editorialized: “Obama is, of course, greater than Jesus.”
Obama himself set his sights lower; he wanted to be the Democrats’ Ronald Reagan. And for a time, it seemed to many that he’d succeeded. As late as April of 2017, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria said, “Obama aspired to be a transformational president, like Reagan. At this point, it’s fair to say that he has succeeded.”
But this proved to be a mirage. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru observed in 2017, Obama left office almost as popular as Reagan, but when Reagan departed for California, he left his party stronger than when he found it, holding more elected offices at the federal and state level. And the public felt better about the direction of the country as well. By the time Obama left office, nearly 1,000 Democrats had lost their jobs, and the GOP was better positioned than at any time since the 1920s.
Some analysts plausibly argue that these statistics are unfairly inflated because they’re pegged to the large coattails Obama had in 2008. Even so, it demonstrates that Obama failed by his own standard insofar as transformational presidents expand and entrench their parties the way FDR and Reagan did.
In fairness, Reagan and FDR had an advantage that Obama did not: They were succeeded by allies. Since so much of what presidents do can be reversed by the next president, particularly when done by executive order — as Obama did for most of his presidency — it takes a new, friendly replacement to solidify a presidential legacy. Donald Trump reversed many of Obama’s policies with a stroke of a pen (just as a Democratic successor would do to Trump’s).
Still, it was hard to appreciate the extent of Obama’s incredible shrinking presidency until the recent Democratic presidential debates. Much of the post-debate punditry has focused on the fight between the handful of moderates, led by Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, and the far more numerous left-wingers, who attacked numerous Obama policies from the left, most notably his signature Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, but also his immigration and economic policies.
Attacks on the Reagan legacy on the right are lamentably increasing among some intellectuals on the right, but we’ve never seen anything remotely like this in a GOP presidential debate. Attacking Reagan is still risky for a Republican politician, and he left office over three decades ago.
The Democrats’ migration to the left is not merely a story of ideological or intellectual transformation, though it is that; it’s also the direct consequence of Obama’s presidency. However we’re supposed to measure the total number of Democratic losses under Obama, the important part isn’t the quantity of the loss, but the quality.
The ranks of moderate and conservative Democrats were disproportionately hollowed out under Obama, while Democrats in deep-blue liberal areas were emboldened to move even further left. (Trump has had a similar effect on the right, decimating the moderate wing of the GOP while intensifying the partisanship of conservatives in safe red areas.)
The big-name Democrats who survived Obama are more concerned by primary challenges to their left than by general-election threats from their right. As a result, they have a hard time talking to audiences that don’t already agree with them on the big questions.
Those ultra-liberal politicians — Warren, Sanders, et al. — now drive the party to such a degree that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is seen as a moderating force on the Democrats. The moderates in the debates are like refugees of a wing of a party that has shrunk to a feather. Only Biden stands as a formidable figure, because of his time at Obama’s side.
And now even that is turning into a liability, at least on the debate stage.
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Apparently, in contrast to those who claim Donald Trump has ruined this country’s reputation in the world (just as George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan supposedly did), people around the world see this country as a force for good, not evil, in the world.
As far as the video’s title, well, this isn’t intended as a spoiler alert, but perhaps you’ve seen this meme:
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First, a non-rock anniversary: Today is the 95th anniversary of the first broadcasted baseball game, on KDKA in Pittsburgh: Harold Arlen described Pittsburgh’s 8–0 win over Philadelphia.
Speaking of Philadelphia … today in 1957, ABC-TV picked up WFIL-TV’s “American Bandstand” …
… though ABC interrupted it in the middle for “The Mickey Mouse Club.”
Today in 1966, the Beatles recorded “Yellow Submarine” …
… and “Eleanor Rigby” …
… while also releasing their “Revolver” album.
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Gene Veith writes from the Lutheran perspective of a fundamentalist ex-Christian (according to himself):
Josh Harris had earlier repudiated his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which launched the “courtship movement” and “the purity culture” that influenced a whole generation of Christian young people. A few days ago, he announced that he is divorcing his wife of 22 years and leaving their three children. The next day he announced that he is no longer a Christian.
In his Instagram post in which he renounced his Christianity, Harris quoted Martin Luther on how the whole life of the believer should be repentance. (That is #1 of the 95 theses.) Harris, who was once a megachurch pastor, said that he has “lived in repentance for the last several years,” and that he is now repenting his former opposition to the LGBT movement and to same-sex marriage. Such all-pervasive guilt–which is not what Luther meant by repentance–has led him not to Christ but to running away from Christ. “By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian,” he concludes, “I am not a Christian.”
Rod Dreher gives him credit for refusing to stretch the Bible and distort Christianity to support his new unbelief. Dreher brings up a recent discussion in which Harris said that it would make more sense to reject Christianity altogether than to accept the contortions of progressive theology, which try to interpret away the sexual prohibitions of the Bible.
Still, I wonder about “all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian.” Such “measurements” may have led to his problems in the first place, defining Christianity first in terms of one’s “purity” and then turning against it when he fails his new purity tests.
David French, responding to Harris’s leaving the faith, recalls his own experience as a youth pastor, working with teenagers influenced by the purity culture. French says that the problem with Harris’s approach is not that it upheld Christian sexual morality–that was the good part about it–but that it put forward a Christianity without Christ:
It worked like this — sexual sin stained young persons, even if Christ forgave them. They would walk into marriage diminished in some crucial ways. The white dress, fundamentally, was a lie. And the message wasn’t confined to sexuality. Did you drink? Did you smoke a joint? Each one of those things altered a person’s self-definition. They were no longer “pure.” They could never be “pure” again.
All too many times, I saw the despair. A young person would come to me and say, “I screwed up.” They would really mean, “I’m ruined.” Their storybook dreams were dead. A 17-year-old with (God willing) 70 years of life ahead of him would approach me carrying the awful burden of thinking that he had defined his life forever. He was no longer — and never would be — the person he wanted to be.
Sometimes the despair would trigger wild rebellion. If they’re “ruined,” then why should they care about obedience? There are two states of being — virgin or not, teetotaler or not — and if you’re not, then you might as well indulge yourself. Other times the despair would trigger constant, nagging guilt and regret. A girl would walk down the aisle to marry a man who loved God and loved her, and she’d feel a shadow on her soul.
In point of fact, the gospel message rests first on bad news, then on indescribably good news. The bad news is simple: You were never “pure.” It’s not as if sex or drink or drugs represent the demarcation line between righteous and unrighteous. They are not and were never the “special” sins that created particularly acute separation from God. Yes, they could have profound earthly consequences, but they did not create unique spiritual separation.
The indescribably good news is that from the moment of the confession of faith, believers are not defined by their sin. They’re not defined even by their own meager virtues. They’re defined by Christ. Moreover, they find that “for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” This does not by any stretch mean that past sin wasn’t sin — one of my best friends is an eleven-years-sober addict who did dreadful things during his worst days — but it does mean that their past now gives them a unique ability to reach suffering people. Their terrible stories and past pain have been redeemed, transformed into instruments of grace and mercy.
Joy Pullman, from a Lutheran perspective, shows how legalism (the notion that Christianity is all about what I have to do) leads naturally first to antinomianism (the rejection of morality altogether, since I can’t achieve it) and then to unbelief (giving up on the whole impossible project). This is a theological error, she says, that pervades contemporary evangelicalism:
Is there going to be a public reckoning with evangelicalism’s major heresies that fuel cycles of this kind of legalistic faddishness? As Harris’s experience — and the history of American Christianity (indeed, of the world) — shows, legalism leads inevitably to antinomianism. Antinomianism is the fancy theology term for rebelling against God’s law after observing how hard it is to keep it. It’s how Puritans turn into Social Gospelers. Thus, as is human nature, people ping-pong between opposite sides of the gutter rather than taking a straight course between them. But Christianity delineates the straight course, not the gutters.
The answer to legalism isn’t antinomianism. The answer to finding you can’t keep all God’s laws isn’t to say thus God must not actually have any laws. It isn’t to say “I believed that God has careful designs for sex and marriage, but I and lots of people can’t stay in line with them so I’ll just pretend God isn’t real or maybe none of his rules are.” It’s to receive the truth that God perfectly kept all his laws for you, which prompts such great joy that you actually begin to want to do what is right — which the laws defined in the first place. It’s not law or gospel, legalism or license. It’s both, which is liberty.
How many other tragedies, scandals, and apostasies among contemporary Christians are also due to this kind of theological confusion? Reformed theologian Carl Trueman relates what happened with Harris to the meltdown of other leaders of the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” movement in Calvinist megachurches, of which Harris was a prominent figure (who took over a ministry vacated over a sex scandal). Could such legalism and the consequent antinomianism and unbelief be a factor in the Roman Catholic sex scandals?
We Lutherans are not exempt from scandals like those, and antinomianism is a besetting heresy of ours. But at least we are fixated on the distinction between the Law and the Gospel; how Christianity is not about our works but the work of Christ for us; that we are all “sinful and unclean” but that Christ redeems us “with His holy, precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death, that I may be His own and live under Him in His kingdom” (Small Catechism).
At a time when many evangelical theologians are running away from the doctrines of the Atonement and justification by grace through faith in Christ, this sad business is a reminder of the continuing necessity of a strong understanding of the Gospel. Lutherans can help convey that to the rest of Christendom. Meanwhile, as Joy Pullman concludes, “If you go to church, don’t go to one that consistently gets this basic and important point of theology wrong.”
Some Christians, and some non-Christians, try to criticize the church by telling the Gospel story of the woman about to be stoned, and Jesus Christ’s stepping in and suggesting that he who had no sin should start firing away. The biggest flaw in this is that the storyteller seems to omit Christ’s next five words: “Go and sin no more.”
However, no reading of the Bible I have ever done suggests that Christ expects us to be perfectly sinless. That is impossible, because we are human beings, and as the writer points out we have never been pure. I believe Christ does expect Christians to lead, or at least try to lead, a better life, but we do not lose Christ’s love when we fail to do that.
Here are two sort-of secular examples to prove my religious point. Baseball pitcher Orel Hershiser, who would sing hymns on the mound when he was in a stressful situation, said that he went on the mound trying to give up no hits. When he gave up a hit, he then resolved to give up no hits after that. And when he gave up another hit, he resolved to give up no hits after that. Hershiser never threw a no-hitter in his career, but he was one of the better pitchers in baseball in his day. That seems like a more Christian attitude (if it’s sincere) than the idea that Christians must lead perfect, sinless lives, because we can’t.
One of my two favorite phrases from Vince Lombardi is “If we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.” Lombardi did go to daily Mass, so maybe that’s where it came from. Put the two together and it seems to me that the Christian responsibility includes loving your neighbor (and as a former priest of mine put it, sin is against God, your neighbor and yourself), but when we fail to do that (and at some point we will), try again.
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Today in 1957, the Everly Brothers performed on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew …
… performing a song about a couple who falls asleep on a date, making others assume that they spent the night together when they didn’t. The song was banned in some markets.
Today in 1958, Billboard magazine combined its five charts measuring record sales, jukebox plays and radio airplay to the Hot 100. And the first Hot 100 number one was …
Today in 1967, a 16-year-old girl stowed away on the Monkees’ flight from Minneapolis to St. Louis. The girl’s father accused the Monkees of transporting a minor across state lines, presumably for immoral purposes.
Today in 1970, Beach Boy Dennis Wilson married his second wife.
Possibly connected: Jim Morrison of the Doors was arrested for public drunkenness after being found passed out on the front steps of a house.
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Today in 1963, two years and one day after the Beatles started as the house band for the Cavern Club in Liverpool, the Beatles performed there for the last time.
Three years later, the South African government banned Beatles records due to John Lennon’s infamous “bigger than Jesus” comment.
Five years later and one year removed from the Beatles, Paul McCartney formed Wings.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 