*333Americans have a healthy aversion to foreign policy. it stems from a sense of thrift: who needs it? we're protected by 2 great oceans. we have this continent practically to ourselves. and we share it with just 2 neighbors, both friendly, one so friendly that its people seem intent upon moving in with us.
it took 3 giants of the 20th century to drag us into its great battles: Wilson into World War I, Roosevelt into World War II, Truman into the Cold War. and then it ended with one of the great anticlimaxes in history. without a shot fired, without a revolution, without so much as a press release, the Soviet Union simply gave up and disappeared.
it was the end of everything - the end of communism, of socialism, of the Cold War, of the European wars. but the end of everything was also a beginning. on Dec 26, 1991, the Soviet Union died and something new was burn, something utterly new - a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe.
this is a staggering new development in history, not seen since the fall of Rome. it is so new, so strange, that we have no idea how to deal with it. our first reaction - the 1990s- was utter confusion.
the next reaction was awe. when Paul Kennedy, who had once popularized the idea of American decline, saw what America did in the Afghan war - a display of fully mobilized, furiously concentrated unipolar power at a distance of 8,000 miles - he not only recanted, he stood in wonder: 'Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power''; he wrote, 'nothing...no other nation comes close...Charlemagne's empire was merely western European in its reach. the Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another
*334 great empire in Persia and a larger one in China. there is, therefore, no comparison'.
even Rome is no model for what America is today. first, because we do not have the imperial culture of rome. we are an Athenian republic, even more republican and infinitely more democratic than Athens. and this American Republic has acquired the largest seeming empire in the history of the world, - acquired it in a fit of absentmindedness; it was sheer inadvertence. we got here because of Europe's suicide in the world wars of the 20th century and then the death of its Eurasian successor, Soviet Russia, for having adopted a political and economic system so inhuman that, like a genetically defective organism, it simply expired in its sleep, leaving us with global dominion.
Second, we are unlike Rome, unlike Britain and France and Spain and the other classical empires of modern times, in that We Do Not Hunger For Territory. the use of the world Empire in the American context is ridiculous. it is absurd to apply the word to a people whose first instinct upon arriving on anyone's soil is to demand an exit strategy. I can assure you that when the Romans went into Gaul and the British into India, they were not looking for exit strategies. they were looking for entry strategies.
In David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, King Faisal says to Lawrence, 'I think you are another of these desert-loving English... the English have a great hunger for desolate places'. in deed, for 5 centuries, the Europeans did hunger for deserts and jungles and oceans and new continents.
American do not. we like it here. we like our McDonald's. we like our football. we like our rock and roll. we've got the Grand Canyon and Graceland. We've got silicon Valley and South Beach. We've got everything. and if that's not enough, we've got Vegas - which is a facsimile of everything. what could we possibly need anywhere else? we don't like exotic climates. we don't like exotic languages - lots of declensions and moods. we don't even know what
*335 a mood is. we like Iowa corn and New York hot dogs and if we want Chinese or Indian or Italian, we go to the food court...
that's because we are not an imperial power. we are a commercial republic with overwhelming global power. a commercial republic that, by pure accident of history, has been designated custodian of the international system. the eyes of every supplicant from East Timor to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Liberia, Arab and Israeli, Irish and British, North and South Korean are upon us.
that is who we are. that is where we are.
now the question is: what do we do? what is a unipolar power to do?
1. ISOLATIONISM
the oldest and most venerable answer is to hoard that power and retreat.
this is known as Isolationism.
of all the foreign policy schools in america, it has the oldest pedigree, not surprising in the only great power in history to be isolated by 2 vast oceans.
Isolationism originally sprang from a view of America as spiritually superior to the Old World. we were too good to be corrupted by its low intrigues, entangled by its cynical alliances.
today, however, I is an ideology of fear. fear of trade. fear of immigrants. fear of the Other. Isolationists want to cut off trade and immigration and withdraw from our military and strategic commitments around the world. even isolationists, of course, did not oppose the war in Afghanistan, because it was so obviously an act of self-defence - only a fool or a knave or a Susan Sontag could oppose that. but anything beyond that, Iists oppose.
they are for a radical retrenchment of American power - for pulling up the drawbridge to Fortress America.
*336 Iism is an important school of thought historically but not today. not just because of its brutal intellectual reductionism, but because it is so obviously inappropriate to the world of today - a world of export-driven economies, of massive population flows and of 9/11, the definitive demonstration that the combination of modern technology and transnational primitivism has erased the barrier between 'over there' and over here.
classical isolationism is not just intellectually obsolete, it is politically bankrupt as well. 4 years ago, its most public advocate, pat Buchanan, ran fro present of the US and carried Palm Beach. By accident.
classic Iism is moribund and marginalized. who then rules America?
II. LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM
in the 1990s, it was liberal internationalism. liberal internationalism is the foreign policy of the Democratic Party and the religion of the foreign policy elite. it has a peculiar history. it traces its pedigree to Woodrow Wilson's utopianism, Harry Truman's anti-communism and John Kennedy's militant universalism. but after the Vietnam War, it was transmuted into an ideology of passivity, acquiescence and almost reflexive anti-interventionism.
Liberals today proudly take credit for Truman's and Kennedy's roles in containing communism, but they prefer to forget that, for the last half of the Cold War, liberals used 'cold warrior' as an epithet. in the early 1980s, they gave us the nuclear freeze movement, a form of unilateral disarmament in the face of Soviet nuclear advances. today, John Kerry boasts of opposing, during the 1980s, what he calls Ronald Reagan's 'illegal war in Central America' - and oppose he did what was, in fact, an indigenous anti-communist rebellion that ultimately succeeded in bringing down Sandinista rule and ushering in democracy in all of Central America.
*337 that boast reminds us how militant was liberal passivity in the last half of the Cold War. but that passivity outlived the Cold War. when Kuwait was invaded, the question was: should the US go to war to prevent the Persian Gulf from falling into hostile hands? the Democratic Party joined the Buchananite isolationists in saying no. the Democrats voted no overwhelmingly - 2 to 1 in the House, more than 4 to 1 in the Senate.
and yet, quite astonishingly, when liberal internationalism came to power just 2 years later in the form of the Clinton administration, it turned almost hyperinterventionist.it involved us 4 times in military action: deepening intervention in Somalia, invading Haiti, bombing Bosnia and finally going to war over Kosovo. how to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks? the crucial and obvious difference is this: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were humanitarian ventures - fights for right and good, devoid of raw national interest. and only humanitarian interventionism - disinterested intervention devoid of national interest - is morally pristine enough to justify the use of force. the history of the 1990s refutes the lazy notion that liberals have an aversion to the use of force. they do not. they have and aversion to using force for reasons of pure national interest.
and by national interest i do not mean simple self-defense. everyone believes in self-defense, as in Afghanistan. I am talking about national interest as defined by a Great power: shaping the international environment by projecting power abroad to secure economic, political and strategic goods. intervening military for That kind of national interest, literal internationalism finds unholy and unsupportable. it sees that kind of national interest as merely self-interest writ large, in effect a form of grand national selfishness. hence Kuwait, no; Kosovo, yes.
the other defining feature of the Clinton foreign policy was multilateralism, which expressed itself in a mania for treaties. the Clinton administration negotiated a dizzying succession of parchment promises on bio-weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear testing, carbon emissions, antiballistic missiles, etc.
*338 Why? no sentient being could believe that, say, the chemical or biological weapons treaties were anything more than transparently useless. Senator Joseph Biden once defended the Chemical Weapons Convention, which even its proponents admitted was unenforceable, on the grounds that it would 'provide us with a valuable tool' - the 'moral suasion of the entire international community'.
Moral suasion? was it moral suasion that made Qaddafi see the wisdom of giving up his weapons of mass destruction? or Iran agree for the first time to spot nuclear inspections? it was the suasion of the bayonet. it was the ignominious fall of Saddam - and the desire of interested spectators not to be next on the list. the whole point of this treaty was to keep Rogue States from developing chemical weapons. rogue states are, by definition, impervious to moral suasion.
Moral suasion is a farce. why then this obsession with conventions, protocols, legalisms? their obvious net effect is to temper American
Monday, April 30, 2018
Friday, April 27, 2018
4.27.2018 THINGS THAT MATTER: 'Decline is a choice'(2009) by Charles Krauthammer
DECLINE IS A CHOICE (2009)
352 the weather vanes of conventional wisdom are engaged in another round of angst about America in decline. new theories, old slogans: Imperial overstretch. the Asian awakening. the post-American world. inexorable forces beyond our control bring the inevitable humbling of the world hegmon - a nation who exercises hegemony (leader, prominent, influence).
on the other side of his debate are a few - notably Josef Joffe in recent essay in Foreign Affairs - who resist the current fashion and insist that America remains the indispensable power. they note that declinist predictions are cyclical, that the rise of China and perhaps India are just the current version of the Japan panic of the late 1980s or of the earlier pessimism best captured by Jean-Fancois Revel's How Democracies Perish.
the anti-declinists point out, for example, that the fear of China is overblown. it's based on the implausible assumption of indefinite, uninterrupted growth; ignores accumulating externalities like pollution (which can be ignored when growth starts from a very low baseline, but ends up making growth increasingly, chokingly difficult); and overlooks the unavoidable consequences of the one-child policy, which that China will get old before it gets rich.
and just as the rise of China is a straight -line projection of the fearful, pessimistic mood of a country war-weary and in the grip of a severe recession.
among these crosscurrents, my thesis is simple: the question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes of no. there IS no yes or no. both are wrong because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. nothing is inevitable. nothing is written. for america today, decline is not a condition. decline is a choice . two decades into the unipolar world that came
about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance, decline - or continued ascendancy - is in our hands.
not that decline is always a choice. Britain's decline after World II Was foretold, as indeed was that of Europe, which had been the dominant global force of the preceding centuries. the civilizational suicide that was the 2 world wars and the consequent physical and psychological exhaustion, made continued dominance impossible and decline inevitable.
the corollary to unchosen European collapse was unchosen American ascendancy. We - whom Lincoln once called God's 'almost chosen people' - did not save Europe twice In Order to emerge from the ashes as the world's co-hegemon. we went in to defend ourselves and save civilization. our dominance after World War II was not sought. nor was the even more remarkable dominance after the Soviet collapse. we are the rarest of geopolitical phenomena: the accidental hegemon and, given our history of isolationism and lack of instinctive imperial ambition, the reluctant hegemon - and now, after a near decade of strenuous post - 9/11 exertion, more reluctant than ever.
which leads to my second proposition: facing the choice of whether to maintain or dominance or to gradually, deliberately, willingly and indeed relievedly give it up, we are currently on a course toward the latter. the current liberal ascendancy in the United States -controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture - has set us on a course for decline. and this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome.
the current foreign policy of the United States is an exercise in contraction. it begins with the demolition of the moral foundation of American dominance. in Strasbourg, President Obama was asked about American exceptionalism. His answer? 'I believe in American exceptionalism, just as i suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism'. interesting response.because if everyone is exceptional, no one is.
*354 indeed, as he made his Hajj from Strasbourg to Prague to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo and finally to the UN General Assembly, Obama drew the picture of an America quite exceptional - exceptional in moral culpability and heavy-handedness, exceptional in guilt for its treatment of other nations and peoples. with varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own country for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness (toward Europe), for maltreatment of natives, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo, for unilateralism and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.
quite an indictment, the fundamental consequence of which is to effectively undermine any moral claim that America might have to world leadership, as well as the moral confidence that any nation needs to have in order to justify to itself and to others its position of leadership. according to the new dispensation, having forfeited the mandate of heave - if it ever had on - a newly humbled America now seeks a more modest place among the nations, not above them.
but that leads to the question: how does this new world govern itself? how is the international system to function?
Henry Kissinger once said that the only way to achieve peace is through hegemony or balance of power. well, hegemony is out. as Obama said in his General Assembly address, 'No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation'. (the 'can in that declaration is priceless.) and if hegemony is out, so is balance of power: ''No balance of power among nations will hold'.
the president then denounced the idea of elevating any group of nations above others - which takes care, I suppose, of the Security Council, the G-20 and the Western alliance. and just to make the point unmistakable, he denounced 'alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War' as making 'no sense in an interconnected world'. what does that say about NATO? of our alliances with Japan and South Korea? or even of the European Union?
this is nonsense. but it is not harmless nonsense. it's nonsense with a point. it reflects a fundamental view that the only legitimate authority in the international system is that which emanates from
*355 'the community of nations' as a whole. which means, I suppose, acting through its most universal organs such as, again I suppose, the UN and its various agencies. which is why when Obama said that those who doubt 'the character and cause' of his own country should see what this new America - the America of the liberal ascendancy - had done in the last 9 months, he listed among these restorative and relegitimizing initiatives paying up UN dues, renewing actions on various wholly vacuous universalist declarations and agreements and joining such Orwellian UN bodies as the Human Rights Council.
these gestures have not gone unnoticed abroad. the Nobel Committee effused about Obama's radical reorientation of US foreign policy. its citation awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize lauded him for having 'created a new climate' in the international relations in which 'multilateral diplomacy was regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other institutions can play'.
of course, the idea of the 'international community' acting through the UN - a fiction and a farce, respectively - to enforce norms and maintain stability is absurd. so absurd that i suspect it's really just a metaphor for a world run by a kind of mulipolar arrangement not of nation-states but of groups of states acting through multilateral bodies, whether institutional (like the International Atomic Energy Agency) or ad hoc (like the P5+1 Iran negotiators).
but whatever bizarre form of multilateral or universal structures is envisioned for keeping world order, certainly hegemony - and specifically American hegemony - is to be retire.
this renunciation of primacy is not entirely new. liberal internationalism as practiced by the center-left Clinton administrations of the 1990s - the beginning of the unipolar era - was somewhat ambivalent about American hegemony, although it did allow america to be characterized as 'the indispensable nation', to us Madeleine Albright's phrase. Clintonian center-left liberal internationalism did seek to restrain American power to tying Gulliver down with
*356 a myriad of treaties and agreements and international conventions. that conscious constraining of America within international bureaucratic and normative structures was rooted in the notion that power corrupts and that external restraints would curb arrogance and over-reaching and break a willful america to the role of good international citizen.
but the liberal internationalism of today is different. it is not center-left by left-liberal. and the new left-liberal internationalism goes for beyond its earlier Clintonian incarnation in its distrust of and distaste for American dominance, for what might be called the New Liberalism, the renunciation of power is rooted not in the fear that we are essentially good but subject to the corruptions of power - the old Clintonian view - but rooted in the conviction that America is so intrinsically flawed, so inherently and congenitally sinful that it cannot be trusted with and does not merit, the possession of overarching world power.
for the New Liberalism, it is not just that power corrupts. it is that America itself is corrupt - in the sense of being deeply flawed, and with the history to prove it. an imperfect union, the theme of Obama's famous Philadelphia race speech, has been carried to and amplified in his every major foreign-policy address, particularly those delivered on foreign soil. (not surprisingly, since it earns greater applause over there.)
and because we remain so imperfect a nation, we are in no position to dictate our professed values to theirs around the world. Demonstrators are shot in the streets of Tehran seeking nothing but freedom, but our president holds his tongue because, he says openly, of our won alleged transgressions toward Iran (presumably involvement in the 1953 coup). our shortcomings are so grave and our offenses both domestic and international so serious, that we lack the moral ground on which to justify hegemony.
these fundamental tenets of the New Liberalism are not just theory. they have strategic consequence. if we have been illegitimately playing the role of world hegemon, then for us to regain a legitimate
*357 place in the international system we must regain our moral authority. and recovering moral space means renouncing ill-gotten or ill-conceived strategic space.
operationally, this manifests itself in various kinds of strategic retreat, most particularly in reversing policies stained by even the hint of American unilateralism or exceptionalism. thus, for example, there is no more 'Global War of Terror'. it's not just that the term has been abolished or that the secretary of homeland security refers to terrorism as 'man-caused disasters'. it is that the very idea of our nation and civilization being engaged in a global mortal struggle with jihadism has been retired as well.
the operational consequences of that new view are already manifest. in our reversion to pre-9/11 normalcy - the pretence of pre-9/11 normalcy - anti-terrorism has reverted from war fighting to law enforcement.high-level al-Quaeda prisoners, for example, will henceforth be interrogated not by the CIA but by the FBI, just as our response to the attack on the USS sole pre-9/11 - an act of war - was to send FBI agents to Yemen.
the operational consequences of voluntary contraction are already evident:
*unilateral abrogation of our missile-defence arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic - a retreat being felt all through Eastern Europe to Ukraine and Georgia as a signal of US concession of strategic space to Russia in its old sphere of influence.
indecision on Afghanistan - a widely expressed ambivalence about the mission and a serious contemplation of minimalist strategies that our commanders of the ground have reported to the president have no chance of success. in short, a serious contemplation of strategic retreat in Afghanistan (only 2 months ago it was declared by the president to be a 'war of necessity') with possibly catastrophic consequences for Pakistan.
*in Iraq, a determination to end the war according to rigid
*358 timetables, with almost no interest in garnering the fruits of a very costly and very bloody success - namely, using our Strategic Framework Agreement to turn the new Iraq into a strategic partner and anchor for US influence in the most volatile area of the world. Iraq is a prize - we can debate endlessly whether it was worth the cost - of great strategic significance that the administration seems to have no intention of exploiting in its determination to execute a full and final exit.
* in Honduras, where again because of our allegedly sinful imperial history, we back a Chavista caudillo seeking illegal extension of his presidency who was removed from power by the legitimate organs of state - from the supreme court to the national congress - for grave constitutional violations.
the new Liberalism will protest that despite its rhetoric, it is not engaging in moral reparations, but seeking real strategic advantage for the US on the assumption that the reason we had not gotten cooperation from, say, the Russians, Iranians, North Koreans or even our European allies on various urgent agendas is American arrogance, unilateralism and dismissiveness. and therefore, if we constrict and rebrand and diminish ourselves deliberately - try tho make ourselves equal partners with obviously unequal powers abroad - we will gain the moral high ground and rally the world to our causes.
well, being a strategic argument, the hypothesis is testable. let's tally up the empirical evidence of what 9 months of self-abasement has brought.
with all the bowing and scraping and apologizing and renouncing, we couldn't even sway the International Olympic Committee. given the humiliation incurred there in pursuit of a trinket, it is no surprise how little our new international posture has yielded in the coin of real strategic goods. unilateral American concessions and offers of unconditional engagement have moved neither Iran nor Russia nor North Korea to accommodate us. nor have the Arab states - or even the powerless Palestinian Authority - offered so much as a gesture of
*359 accommodation in response to heavy and gratuitous American pressure on Israel. nor have even our European allies responded: they have anted up essentially nothing in response to our pleas for more assistance in Afghanistan.
the very expectation that these concessions would yield results is puzzling. thus, for example, the president is proposing radical reductions in nuclear weapons and presided over a Security Council meeting passing a resolution whose goal is universal unclear disarmament, on the theory that unless the existing nuclear powers reduce their weaponry, they can never have the moral standing to demand that other states not go nuclear.
but whatever the merits of unilateral or en bilateral US -Russian disarmament, the notion that it will lead to reciprocal gestures from the likes of Iran and North Korea is simply childish. they are seeking the bomb for reasons of power, prestige, intimidation, blackmail and regime preservation. they don't give a whit about the level of nuclear arms among the great powers. indeed, both Iran and North Korea launched their nuclear weapons ambitions in the 1980s and 1990s - precisely when the US and Russia were radically reducing their arsenals.
this deliberate choice of strategic retreats to engender good feeling is based on the naive hope of exchanges of reciprocal good will with rogue states. it comes as no surprise, therefore, that the theory - as policy - has demonstrably produced no strategic advances. but that will not deter the New Liberalism because the ultimate purpose of its foreign policy is to make America less hegemonic, less arrogant, less dominant.
in a word, it is a foreign policy designed to produce American decline - to make America essentially one nation among many. and for that purpose, its domestic policies are perfectly complementary.
domestic policy, of course, is not Designed to curb our power abroad. but what it lacks in intent, it makes up in effect. decline will be an unintended, but powerful, side effect of the New Liberalism's ambition of moving America from its traditional dynamic individualism
*360 to the more equitable but static model of European social democracy.
this is not the place to debate the intrinsic merits of the social democratic versus the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. there's much to be said for the decency and relative equity of social democracy. but it comes at a cost: diminished social mobility, higher unemployment, less innovation, less dynamism and creative destruction less overall economic growth.
this affects the ability to project power. growth provides the sinews of dominance - the ability to maintain a large military establishment capable of projecting power to all corners of the earth. the Europeans, rich and developed, have almost no such capacity. they made the choice long ago to devote their resources to a vast welfare state. their expenditures on defense are minimal,as are their consequent military capacities. they rely on the US Navy for open seas and on the US Air Force for airlift. it's the US Marines who go ashore, not just in battle but for such global social services as tsunami relief. the US can do all of this because we spend infinitely more on defence - more than the next 9 countries combined.
those are the conditions today. but they are not static or permanent. they require constant renewal. the express agenda of the New Liberalism is a vast expansion of social services -massive intervention and expenditures in energy, health care and education - that will necessarily, as in Europe, take away from defense spending.
this shift in resources is not hypothetical. it has already begun. at a time when hundreds of billions of dollars are being lavished on stimulus and other appropriations in an endless array of domestic programs, the defense budget is practically frozen. almost every other department is expanding and the Defense Department is singled out for making 'hard choices' - forced to look everywhere for cuts, to abandon highly advanced weapons systems, to choose between readiness and research, between today's urgencies and tomorrow's looming threats.
take, for example, missile defense, in which the US has
*361 a great technological edge and one perfectly designed to maintain American preeminence in a century that will be dominated by the ballistic missile. missile defense is actually being cut. the number of interceptors in Alaska to defend against a North Korean attack has been reduced and the airborne laser program (the most promising technology for a boost0phase antiballistic missile) has been cut back - at the same time that the federal education budget has been cut back - at the same time that the federal education budget has been increased 100% in one year.
this preference for social goods over security needs is not just evident in budgetary allocations and priorities. it is seen, for example, in the liberal preference for environmental goods. by prohibiting the drilling of offshore and Arctic deposits, the US is voluntarily denying itself access to vast amounts of oil that would relieve dependence on - and help curb the wealth and power of - various petro-dollar challengers,from iran to Venezuela to Russia. Again, we can argue whether the environment versus security trade-off is warranted. but there is no denying that there is a trade off.
nor are these the only trade-offs. primacy in space - a galvanizing symbol of American greatness, so deeply understood and openly championed by John Kennedy - is gradually being relinquished. in the current reconsideration of all things Bush, the idea of returning to the moon in the next decade is being jettisoned. after next September, the space shuttle will never fly again and its replacement is being reconsidered and delayed. that will leave the united States totally incapable of returning even to near-Earth orbit, let alone to the moon. instead, for ears to come, we shall be entirely dependent on the russians or perhaps eventually even the Chinese.
of symbolic but also more concrete importance is the status of the dollar. the social democratic vision necessarily involves huge increases in domestic expenditures, most immediately for expanded healthcare. the plans currrently under consideration will cost in the range of $1 trillion. and once the budget gimmicks are discounted (such as promises of $500 billion cuts in Medicare that will never eventuate), that means hundreds of billions of dollars Added to the
*362 monstrous budgetary deficits that the Congressional Budget Office projects conservatively at $7 trillion over the next decade.
the effect on the dollar is already being felt and could ultimately lead to a catastrophic collapse and/or hyperinflation. having control of the world's reserve currency is an irreplaceable national asset. yet with every new and growing estimate of the explosion of the national debt, there are more voices calling for replacement of the dollar as the world currency - not just adversaries like Russia and China, Iran and Venezuela, which one would expect, but just last month the head of the World Bank.
there is no free lunch. social democracy and its attendant goods may be highly desirable, but they have their price - a price that will be exacted on the dollar, on our primacy in space, on missile defence, on energy security and on our military capacities and future power projection.
but, of course, if one's foreign policy is to reject the very notion of international primacy in the first place, a domestic agenda that takes away the resources to maintain such primacy is perfectly complementary. indeed, the 2 are synergistic. renunciation of primacy abroad provides the added resources for more social goods at home. to put it in the language or the 1990s, the expanded domestic agenda is fed by a peace dividend - except that in the absence of peace, it is a Retreat dividend.
and there's the rub. for the Europeans there really is a peace dividend, because we provide he peace.they can afford social democracy without the capacity to defend themselves because they can always depend on the US.
so why not us as well? because what for Europe is decadence - decline, in both comfort and relative safety - is for us mere denial. Europe can eat, drink and be merry for america protects her. but for America it's different.if we choose the life of ease, who stands guard for us?
the temptation to abdicate has always been strong in america. our interventionist tradition is recent. our isolationist tradition goes
*363 far deeper. when the ea of maximum dominance began 20 years ago - when to general surprise a unipolar world emerged rather than a post-Cold War multipolar one - there was hesitation about accepting the mantle. the liberal internationalism of the 1990s, the center-left clintonian version, was reluctant to fully embrace American hegemony and did try to rein it in by creating external restraints. nonetheless, in practice, it did boldly intervene in the Balkan wars (without the sanction of the Security Council, mind you) and openly accepted a kind of intermediate status as 'the indispensable nation'.
not today. the ascendant New Liberalism goes much further, actively seeking to subsume america within the international community - inter (between) pares (parish), not even primus (of first importance) and to enact a domestic social agenda to suit.
so why not? why not choose ease and bask in the adulation of the world as we serially renounce, withdraw and concede?
because, while globalization has produced in some the illusion that human nature has changed, it has not. the international arena remains a Hobbesinan state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power. if we voluntarily renounce much of ours, others will not follow suit. they will fill the vacuum. inevitably, an inversion of power relations will occur.
do we really want to love under unknown, untested, shifting multipolarity? or even worse, under the gauzy (def - thin, open, meshlike weave) internationalism of the New Liberalism with its magically self-enforcing norms? this is sometimes passed off as 'realism'. in fact, it is the worst of utopininsms, a fiction that can lead only to chaos. indeed, in an age on the threshold of hyperproliferation, it is a prescription for catastrophe.
heavy are the burdens of the hegemon. after the blood and treasure expended in the post 9?11 wars, america is quite ready to ease its burden with a gentle descent into abdication and decline.
decline is a choice. more than a choice, a temptation. how to resist it ?
first, accept our role as hegemon. and reject those who deny its essential benignity. there is a reason that we are the only hegemon
*364 in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance - as occurred, for example, against napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. there is a reason so many countries of the pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom.
and that reason is simple: we are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen.
so, resistance to decline begins with moral self-confidence and will. but maintaining dominance is a matter not just of will but of wallet. we are not inherently in economic decline. we have the most dynamic, innovative, technologically advanced economy in the world. we enjoy the highest productivity. it is true that in the natural and often painful global division of labor wrought by globalization, less skilled endeavors like factory work migrate abroad, but america more than compensates by pioneering the newer technologies and industries of the information age.
there are, of course, major threats to the American economy. but there is nothing inevitable and inexorable about them. take, for example. the threat to the dollar ( as the world's reserve currency) that comes from our massive trade deficits. here again, the China threat is vastly exaggerated. in fact, fully 2/3 of our trade imbalance comes from imported oil. this is not a fixed fact of life. we have a choice. we have it in our power, for example, to reverse the absurd de facto 30 year ban on new nuclear power plants. we have it in our power to release huge domestic petroleum reserves by dropping the ban on offshore and Arctic drilling. we have it in our power to institute a serious gasoline tax (refunded immediately through a payroll tax reduction) to curb consumption and induce conservation.
nothing is written. nothing is predetermined. we can reverse the slide, we can undo dependence if we (W)ill it.
the other looming threat to our economy - and to the dollar - comes from our fiscal deficits. they are not out of our control. there is no reason we should be structurally perpetuating the massive deficits
*365 incurred as temporary crisis measures during the financial panic of 2008. a crisis is a terrible thing to exploit when it is taken by the New Liberalism as a mandate for massive expansion of the state and of national debt - threatening the dollar. the entire economy and consequently our superpower status abroad.
there are things to be done. resist retreat as a matter of strategy and principle. and provide the means to continue our dominant role in the world by keeping our economic house in order. and finally, we can follow the advice of Demosthenes when asked what was to be done about the decline of Athens. his replay? 'I will give what I believe is the fairest and truest answer: DON'T DO WHAT YOU ARE DOING NOW.
352 the weather vanes of conventional wisdom are engaged in another round of angst about America in decline. new theories, old slogans: Imperial overstretch. the Asian awakening. the post-American world. inexorable forces beyond our control bring the inevitable humbling of the world hegmon - a nation who exercises hegemony (leader, prominent, influence).
on the other side of his debate are a few - notably Josef Joffe in recent essay in Foreign Affairs - who resist the current fashion and insist that America remains the indispensable power. they note that declinist predictions are cyclical, that the rise of China and perhaps India are just the current version of the Japan panic of the late 1980s or of the earlier pessimism best captured by Jean-Fancois Revel's How Democracies Perish.
the anti-declinists point out, for example, that the fear of China is overblown. it's based on the implausible assumption of indefinite, uninterrupted growth; ignores accumulating externalities like pollution (which can be ignored when growth starts from a very low baseline, but ends up making growth increasingly, chokingly difficult); and overlooks the unavoidable consequences of the one-child policy, which that China will get old before it gets rich.
and just as the rise of China is a straight -line projection of the fearful, pessimistic mood of a country war-weary and in the grip of a severe recession.
among these crosscurrents, my thesis is simple: the question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes of no. there IS no yes or no. both are wrong because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. nothing is inevitable. nothing is written. for america today, decline is not a condition. decline is a choice . two decades into the unipolar world that came
about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance, decline - or continued ascendancy - is in our hands.
not that decline is always a choice. Britain's decline after World II Was foretold, as indeed was that of Europe, which had been the dominant global force of the preceding centuries. the civilizational suicide that was the 2 world wars and the consequent physical and psychological exhaustion, made continued dominance impossible and decline inevitable.
the corollary to unchosen European collapse was unchosen American ascendancy. We - whom Lincoln once called God's 'almost chosen people' - did not save Europe twice In Order to emerge from the ashes as the world's co-hegemon. we went in to defend ourselves and save civilization. our dominance after World War II was not sought. nor was the even more remarkable dominance after the Soviet collapse. we are the rarest of geopolitical phenomena: the accidental hegemon and, given our history of isolationism and lack of instinctive imperial ambition, the reluctant hegemon - and now, after a near decade of strenuous post - 9/11 exertion, more reluctant than ever.
which leads to my second proposition: facing the choice of whether to maintain or dominance or to gradually, deliberately, willingly and indeed relievedly give it up, we are currently on a course toward the latter. the current liberal ascendancy in the United States -controlling the executive and both houses of Congress, dominating the media and elite culture - has set us on a course for decline. and this is true for both foreign and domestic policies. indeed, they work synergistically to ensure that outcome.
the current foreign policy of the United States is an exercise in contraction. it begins with the demolition of the moral foundation of American dominance. in Strasbourg, President Obama was asked about American exceptionalism. His answer? 'I believe in American exceptionalism, just as i suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism'. interesting response.because if everyone is exceptional, no one is.
*354 indeed, as he made his Hajj from Strasbourg to Prague to Ankara to Istanbul to Cairo and finally to the UN General Assembly, Obama drew the picture of an America quite exceptional - exceptional in moral culpability and heavy-handedness, exceptional in guilt for its treatment of other nations and peoples. with varying degrees of directness or obliqueness, Obama indicted his own country for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness (toward Europe), for maltreatment of natives, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantanamo, for unilateralism and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.
quite an indictment, the fundamental consequence of which is to effectively undermine any moral claim that America might have to world leadership, as well as the moral confidence that any nation needs to have in order to justify to itself and to others its position of leadership. according to the new dispensation, having forfeited the mandate of heave - if it ever had on - a newly humbled America now seeks a more modest place among the nations, not above them.
but that leads to the question: how does this new world govern itself? how is the international system to function?
Henry Kissinger once said that the only way to achieve peace is through hegemony or balance of power. well, hegemony is out. as Obama said in his General Assembly address, 'No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation'. (the 'can in that declaration is priceless.) and if hegemony is out, so is balance of power: ''No balance of power among nations will hold'.
the president then denounced the idea of elevating any group of nations above others - which takes care, I suppose, of the Security Council, the G-20 and the Western alliance. and just to make the point unmistakable, he denounced 'alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War' as making 'no sense in an interconnected world'. what does that say about NATO? of our alliances with Japan and South Korea? or even of the European Union?
this is nonsense. but it is not harmless nonsense. it's nonsense with a point. it reflects a fundamental view that the only legitimate authority in the international system is that which emanates from
*355 'the community of nations' as a whole. which means, I suppose, acting through its most universal organs such as, again I suppose, the UN and its various agencies. which is why when Obama said that those who doubt 'the character and cause' of his own country should see what this new America - the America of the liberal ascendancy - had done in the last 9 months, he listed among these restorative and relegitimizing initiatives paying up UN dues, renewing actions on various wholly vacuous universalist declarations and agreements and joining such Orwellian UN bodies as the Human Rights Council.
these gestures have not gone unnoticed abroad. the Nobel Committee effused about Obama's radical reorientation of US foreign policy. its citation awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize lauded him for having 'created a new climate' in the international relations in which 'multilateral diplomacy was regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other institutions can play'.
of course, the idea of the 'international community' acting through the UN - a fiction and a farce, respectively - to enforce norms and maintain stability is absurd. so absurd that i suspect it's really just a metaphor for a world run by a kind of mulipolar arrangement not of nation-states but of groups of states acting through multilateral bodies, whether institutional (like the International Atomic Energy Agency) or ad hoc (like the P5+1 Iran negotiators).
but whatever bizarre form of multilateral or universal structures is envisioned for keeping world order, certainly hegemony - and specifically American hegemony - is to be retire.
this renunciation of primacy is not entirely new. liberal internationalism as practiced by the center-left Clinton administrations of the 1990s - the beginning of the unipolar era - was somewhat ambivalent about American hegemony, although it did allow america to be characterized as 'the indispensable nation', to us Madeleine Albright's phrase. Clintonian center-left liberal internationalism did seek to restrain American power to tying Gulliver down with
*356 a myriad of treaties and agreements and international conventions. that conscious constraining of America within international bureaucratic and normative structures was rooted in the notion that power corrupts and that external restraints would curb arrogance and over-reaching and break a willful america to the role of good international citizen.
but the liberal internationalism of today is different. it is not center-left by left-liberal. and the new left-liberal internationalism goes for beyond its earlier Clintonian incarnation in its distrust of and distaste for American dominance, for what might be called the New Liberalism, the renunciation of power is rooted not in the fear that we are essentially good but subject to the corruptions of power - the old Clintonian view - but rooted in the conviction that America is so intrinsically flawed, so inherently and congenitally sinful that it cannot be trusted with and does not merit, the possession of overarching world power.
for the New Liberalism, it is not just that power corrupts. it is that America itself is corrupt - in the sense of being deeply flawed, and with the history to prove it. an imperfect union, the theme of Obama's famous Philadelphia race speech, has been carried to and amplified in his every major foreign-policy address, particularly those delivered on foreign soil. (not surprisingly, since it earns greater applause over there.)
and because we remain so imperfect a nation, we are in no position to dictate our professed values to theirs around the world. Demonstrators are shot in the streets of Tehran seeking nothing but freedom, but our president holds his tongue because, he says openly, of our won alleged transgressions toward Iran (presumably involvement in the 1953 coup). our shortcomings are so grave and our offenses both domestic and international so serious, that we lack the moral ground on which to justify hegemony.
these fundamental tenets of the New Liberalism are not just theory. they have strategic consequence. if we have been illegitimately playing the role of world hegemon, then for us to regain a legitimate
*357 place in the international system we must regain our moral authority. and recovering moral space means renouncing ill-gotten or ill-conceived strategic space.
operationally, this manifests itself in various kinds of strategic retreat, most particularly in reversing policies stained by even the hint of American unilateralism or exceptionalism. thus, for example, there is no more 'Global War of Terror'. it's not just that the term has been abolished or that the secretary of homeland security refers to terrorism as 'man-caused disasters'. it is that the very idea of our nation and civilization being engaged in a global mortal struggle with jihadism has been retired as well.
the operational consequences of that new view are already manifest. in our reversion to pre-9/11 normalcy - the pretence of pre-9/11 normalcy - anti-terrorism has reverted from war fighting to law enforcement.high-level al-Quaeda prisoners, for example, will henceforth be interrogated not by the CIA but by the FBI, just as our response to the attack on the USS sole pre-9/11 - an act of war - was to send FBI agents to Yemen.
the operational consequences of voluntary contraction are already evident:
*unilateral abrogation of our missile-defence arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic - a retreat being felt all through Eastern Europe to Ukraine and Georgia as a signal of US concession of strategic space to Russia in its old sphere of influence.
indecision on Afghanistan - a widely expressed ambivalence about the mission and a serious contemplation of minimalist strategies that our commanders of the ground have reported to the president have no chance of success. in short, a serious contemplation of strategic retreat in Afghanistan (only 2 months ago it was declared by the president to be a 'war of necessity') with possibly catastrophic consequences for Pakistan.
*in Iraq, a determination to end the war according to rigid
*358 timetables, with almost no interest in garnering the fruits of a very costly and very bloody success - namely, using our Strategic Framework Agreement to turn the new Iraq into a strategic partner and anchor for US influence in the most volatile area of the world. Iraq is a prize - we can debate endlessly whether it was worth the cost - of great strategic significance that the administration seems to have no intention of exploiting in its determination to execute a full and final exit.
* in Honduras, where again because of our allegedly sinful imperial history, we back a Chavista caudillo seeking illegal extension of his presidency who was removed from power by the legitimate organs of state - from the supreme court to the national congress - for grave constitutional violations.
the new Liberalism will protest that despite its rhetoric, it is not engaging in moral reparations, but seeking real strategic advantage for the US on the assumption that the reason we had not gotten cooperation from, say, the Russians, Iranians, North Koreans or even our European allies on various urgent agendas is American arrogance, unilateralism and dismissiveness. and therefore, if we constrict and rebrand and diminish ourselves deliberately - try tho make ourselves equal partners with obviously unequal powers abroad - we will gain the moral high ground and rally the world to our causes.
well, being a strategic argument, the hypothesis is testable. let's tally up the empirical evidence of what 9 months of self-abasement has brought.
with all the bowing and scraping and apologizing and renouncing, we couldn't even sway the International Olympic Committee. given the humiliation incurred there in pursuit of a trinket, it is no surprise how little our new international posture has yielded in the coin of real strategic goods. unilateral American concessions and offers of unconditional engagement have moved neither Iran nor Russia nor North Korea to accommodate us. nor have the Arab states - or even the powerless Palestinian Authority - offered so much as a gesture of
*359 accommodation in response to heavy and gratuitous American pressure on Israel. nor have even our European allies responded: they have anted up essentially nothing in response to our pleas for more assistance in Afghanistan.
the very expectation that these concessions would yield results is puzzling. thus, for example, the president is proposing radical reductions in nuclear weapons and presided over a Security Council meeting passing a resolution whose goal is universal unclear disarmament, on the theory that unless the existing nuclear powers reduce their weaponry, they can never have the moral standing to demand that other states not go nuclear.
but whatever the merits of unilateral or en bilateral US -Russian disarmament, the notion that it will lead to reciprocal gestures from the likes of Iran and North Korea is simply childish. they are seeking the bomb for reasons of power, prestige, intimidation, blackmail and regime preservation. they don't give a whit about the level of nuclear arms among the great powers. indeed, both Iran and North Korea launched their nuclear weapons ambitions in the 1980s and 1990s - precisely when the US and Russia were radically reducing their arsenals.
this deliberate choice of strategic retreats to engender good feeling is based on the naive hope of exchanges of reciprocal good will with rogue states. it comes as no surprise, therefore, that the theory - as policy - has demonstrably produced no strategic advances. but that will not deter the New Liberalism because the ultimate purpose of its foreign policy is to make America less hegemonic, less arrogant, less dominant.
in a word, it is a foreign policy designed to produce American decline - to make America essentially one nation among many. and for that purpose, its domestic policies are perfectly complementary.
domestic policy, of course, is not Designed to curb our power abroad. but what it lacks in intent, it makes up in effect. decline will be an unintended, but powerful, side effect of the New Liberalism's ambition of moving America from its traditional dynamic individualism
*360 to the more equitable but static model of European social democracy.
this is not the place to debate the intrinsic merits of the social democratic versus the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism. there's much to be said for the decency and relative equity of social democracy. but it comes at a cost: diminished social mobility, higher unemployment, less innovation, less dynamism and creative destruction less overall economic growth.
this affects the ability to project power. growth provides the sinews of dominance - the ability to maintain a large military establishment capable of projecting power to all corners of the earth. the Europeans, rich and developed, have almost no such capacity. they made the choice long ago to devote their resources to a vast welfare state. their expenditures on defense are minimal,as are their consequent military capacities. they rely on the US Navy for open seas and on the US Air Force for airlift. it's the US Marines who go ashore, not just in battle but for such global social services as tsunami relief. the US can do all of this because we spend infinitely more on defence - more than the next 9 countries combined.
those are the conditions today. but they are not static or permanent. they require constant renewal. the express agenda of the New Liberalism is a vast expansion of social services -massive intervention and expenditures in energy, health care and education - that will necessarily, as in Europe, take away from defense spending.
this shift in resources is not hypothetical. it has already begun. at a time when hundreds of billions of dollars are being lavished on stimulus and other appropriations in an endless array of domestic programs, the defense budget is practically frozen. almost every other department is expanding and the Defense Department is singled out for making 'hard choices' - forced to look everywhere for cuts, to abandon highly advanced weapons systems, to choose between readiness and research, between today's urgencies and tomorrow's looming threats.
take, for example, missile defense, in which the US has
*361 a great technological edge and one perfectly designed to maintain American preeminence in a century that will be dominated by the ballistic missile. missile defense is actually being cut. the number of interceptors in Alaska to defend against a North Korean attack has been reduced and the airborne laser program (the most promising technology for a boost0phase antiballistic missile) has been cut back - at the same time that the federal education budget has been cut back - at the same time that the federal education budget has been increased 100% in one year.
this preference for social goods over security needs is not just evident in budgetary allocations and priorities. it is seen, for example, in the liberal preference for environmental goods. by prohibiting the drilling of offshore and Arctic deposits, the US is voluntarily denying itself access to vast amounts of oil that would relieve dependence on - and help curb the wealth and power of - various petro-dollar challengers,from iran to Venezuela to Russia. Again, we can argue whether the environment versus security trade-off is warranted. but there is no denying that there is a trade off.
nor are these the only trade-offs. primacy in space - a galvanizing symbol of American greatness, so deeply understood and openly championed by John Kennedy - is gradually being relinquished. in the current reconsideration of all things Bush, the idea of returning to the moon in the next decade is being jettisoned. after next September, the space shuttle will never fly again and its replacement is being reconsidered and delayed. that will leave the united States totally incapable of returning even to near-Earth orbit, let alone to the moon. instead, for ears to come, we shall be entirely dependent on the russians or perhaps eventually even the Chinese.
of symbolic but also more concrete importance is the status of the dollar. the social democratic vision necessarily involves huge increases in domestic expenditures, most immediately for expanded healthcare. the plans currrently under consideration will cost in the range of $1 trillion. and once the budget gimmicks are discounted (such as promises of $500 billion cuts in Medicare that will never eventuate), that means hundreds of billions of dollars Added to the
*362 monstrous budgetary deficits that the Congressional Budget Office projects conservatively at $7 trillion over the next decade.
the effect on the dollar is already being felt and could ultimately lead to a catastrophic collapse and/or hyperinflation. having control of the world's reserve currency is an irreplaceable national asset. yet with every new and growing estimate of the explosion of the national debt, there are more voices calling for replacement of the dollar as the world currency - not just adversaries like Russia and China, Iran and Venezuela, which one would expect, but just last month the head of the World Bank.
there is no free lunch. social democracy and its attendant goods may be highly desirable, but they have their price - a price that will be exacted on the dollar, on our primacy in space, on missile defence, on energy security and on our military capacities and future power projection.
but, of course, if one's foreign policy is to reject the very notion of international primacy in the first place, a domestic agenda that takes away the resources to maintain such primacy is perfectly complementary. indeed, the 2 are synergistic. renunciation of primacy abroad provides the added resources for more social goods at home. to put it in the language or the 1990s, the expanded domestic agenda is fed by a peace dividend - except that in the absence of peace, it is a Retreat dividend.
and there's the rub. for the Europeans there really is a peace dividend, because we provide he peace.they can afford social democracy without the capacity to defend themselves because they can always depend on the US.
so why not us as well? because what for Europe is decadence - decline, in both comfort and relative safety - is for us mere denial. Europe can eat, drink and be merry for america protects her. but for America it's different.if we choose the life of ease, who stands guard for us?
the temptation to abdicate has always been strong in america. our interventionist tradition is recent. our isolationist tradition goes
*363 far deeper. when the ea of maximum dominance began 20 years ago - when to general surprise a unipolar world emerged rather than a post-Cold War multipolar one - there was hesitation about accepting the mantle. the liberal internationalism of the 1990s, the center-left clintonian version, was reluctant to fully embrace American hegemony and did try to rein it in by creating external restraints. nonetheless, in practice, it did boldly intervene in the Balkan wars (without the sanction of the Security Council, mind you) and openly accepted a kind of intermediate status as 'the indispensable nation'.
not today. the ascendant New Liberalism goes much further, actively seeking to subsume america within the international community - inter (between) pares (parish), not even primus (of first importance) and to enact a domestic social agenda to suit.
so why not? why not choose ease and bask in the adulation of the world as we serially renounce, withdraw and concede?
because, while globalization has produced in some the illusion that human nature has changed, it has not. the international arena remains a Hobbesinan state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power. if we voluntarily renounce much of ours, others will not follow suit. they will fill the vacuum. inevitably, an inversion of power relations will occur.
do we really want to love under unknown, untested, shifting multipolarity? or even worse, under the gauzy (def - thin, open, meshlike weave) internationalism of the New Liberalism with its magically self-enforcing norms? this is sometimes passed off as 'realism'. in fact, it is the worst of utopininsms, a fiction that can lead only to chaos. indeed, in an age on the threshold of hyperproliferation, it is a prescription for catastrophe.
heavy are the burdens of the hegemon. after the blood and treasure expended in the post 9?11 wars, america is quite ready to ease its burden with a gentle descent into abdication and decline.
decline is a choice. more than a choice, a temptation. how to resist it ?
first, accept our role as hegemon. and reject those who deny its essential benignity. there is a reason that we are the only hegemon
*364 in modern history to have not immediately catalyzed the creation of a massive counter-hegemonic alliance - as occurred, for example, against napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. there is a reason so many countries of the pacific Rim and the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Latin America welcome our presence as balancer of power and guarantor of their freedom.
and that reason is simple: we are as benign a hegemon as the world has ever seen.
so, resistance to decline begins with moral self-confidence and will. but maintaining dominance is a matter not just of will but of wallet. we are not inherently in economic decline. we have the most dynamic, innovative, technologically advanced economy in the world. we enjoy the highest productivity. it is true that in the natural and often painful global division of labor wrought by globalization, less skilled endeavors like factory work migrate abroad, but america more than compensates by pioneering the newer technologies and industries of the information age.
there are, of course, major threats to the American economy. but there is nothing inevitable and inexorable about them. take, for example. the threat to the dollar ( as the world's reserve currency) that comes from our massive trade deficits. here again, the China threat is vastly exaggerated. in fact, fully 2/3 of our trade imbalance comes from imported oil. this is not a fixed fact of life. we have a choice. we have it in our power, for example, to reverse the absurd de facto 30 year ban on new nuclear power plants. we have it in our power to release huge domestic petroleum reserves by dropping the ban on offshore and Arctic drilling. we have it in our power to institute a serious gasoline tax (refunded immediately through a payroll tax reduction) to curb consumption and induce conservation.
nothing is written. nothing is predetermined. we can reverse the slide, we can undo dependence if we (W)ill it.
the other looming threat to our economy - and to the dollar - comes from our fiscal deficits. they are not out of our control. there is no reason we should be structurally perpetuating the massive deficits
*365 incurred as temporary crisis measures during the financial panic of 2008. a crisis is a terrible thing to exploit when it is taken by the New Liberalism as a mandate for massive expansion of the state and of national debt - threatening the dollar. the entire economy and consequently our superpower status abroad.
there are things to be done. resist retreat as a matter of strategy and principle. and provide the means to continue our dominant role in the world by keeping our economic house in order. and finally, we can follow the advice of Demosthenes when asked what was to be done about the decline of Athens. his replay? 'I will give what I believe is the fairest and truest answer: DON'T DO WHAT YOU ARE DOING NOW.
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
4.18.2018 VOICES THAT CONFUSE - Reclaiming Biblical Truth from Interpretative (on homosexuality)
article in Harvest USA newsletter by Nicolas Black
the church is in confusion today. the voices advocating for the inclusion of same-sex relationships in the church have been loud enough to sow confusion even among ordinary church embers in solid, evangelical churches. the typical layperson's grasp of Scripture on the issue of homosexuality is weakening. studying the Scriptures on the matter doesn't seem to help anymore. Why? because these passages are increasingly undermined by strong, cultural worldviews that are driving alternative interpretations of Scripture.
Do you know what they are? these 'background doctrines' are influencing how Scripture is being read today. living our lives before God, aligning our wills with His, is the central objective of our Christian faith. it matters how we live and on what basis we claim God's approval.
here are just 3 of the worldviews we need to see operating in the background, along with ways we can respond to them with biblical faithfulness.
One, PERSONAL STORIES DRIVE BIBLICAL INTERPRETATIONS
in our culture, personal stories are how we discover 'truth' today. the individual - me - is the primary point of meaning and fulfillment. we don't look outside of ourselves, to God, to find truth or meaning. we look inside, to our own experience.
we see this when we look at behavior. there are no longer any agreed-upon moral standards to determine what is right or wrong. I discover truth; this in 'my truth'. and no one has the right to say my truth is wrong. my story, the way i experience life, validates what is true.
do not think this is merely a secular way of thinking. it is making headway into the church in subtle, but powerful, ways. for example, a video made several years ago. For the Bible Tells Me so, presents emotionally powerful stories of kids who grew up in the church and who took their won lives because of the discrimination, abuse, depression and isolation they felt growing up gay. these are powerful stories and they should move us. but the objective behind telling these stories is to cause us to question why we should hold on to the traditional view of homosexuality in light of how painful - even life-threatening, as the argument goes - that position is for people who live with same-sex attraction. the message? holding on to the orthodox view hurts people it's dangerous.
this illustrates how we decide what is righto r wrong: how does it impact others? how does it impact me? divine revelation, which is God's story, becomes secondary to my personal autobiography.
how do we respond to this cultural worldview, that our personal stories interpret God's will for us?
1. WE DO NEED TO LISTEN TO PEOPLE'S STORIES
there are things we need to hear and learn in all these narratives of people living with same-sex attraction. our hearts should be moved to compassion by stories of isolation, loneliness. abuse, rejection, fear.
but subjective experience can never be the basis for arriving at objective truth. personal stories illuminate; they challenge us; they help us apply the truth of Scripture to our lives. but they must be viewed in the light of what Scripture teaches about life and God. we need an objective word outside us to fully understand ourselves.
2.WE NEED TO RECOGNIZE THAT ALL OUR STORIES ARE BROKEN.
there is a hidden message inserted into these stories when they are presented in these ways and it's not immediately evident. it's this: my sexuality, no matter how it presents itself, is essentially good. the reason I struggle here is because the traditional view of Scripture doesn't acknowledge the truth of my own experience. I am not in need of rescue or redemption from myself - what I need is freedom to be what I believe I should be.
but the biblical view is that everything about us is broken by the Fall. when Jesus pursued society's outcasts (a major theme of pro-gay apologetics), he did meet them where they were - but He didn't leave them there. He healed the lepers and He forgave the 'sinners and prostitutes'. when we truly meet Jesus, we are not affirmed to go in the direction we want in life - our lives are turned upside down and redirected.
3. WE NEED TO GIVE TRUE COMPASSION.
ultimately, to allow these stories to reshape God's word to approve what it does not approve,k is to offer a false compassion. our Compassion to those who struggle must be god's compassion and not the world's. God's compassion comes to us in and through our suffering - and we recognize that sometimes God does not remove our 'thorns in the flesh'. we dare not think we can be more merciful that God by encouraging someone to live in ways that are incompatible with His calling.
Two, MODERN CULTURE IS SUPERIOR TO ANCIENT CULTURE.
this worldview doctrine goes like this: we moderns know more than people who lived long ago. they were ignorant. We're not. they didn't have the knowledge and data that we have today.
Now, this worldview centers on 2 arguments.
the first one its that sexual orientation is genetic and fixed. therefore, same-sex attraction is part of God's design for sexuality and is therefore natural and good. they allege we know this from science.
the second one is that the Bible's negative view on same-sex relationships was because the biblical writers did not observe, in their culture, positive, monogamous same-sex relationships like we see today. they were concerned with promiscuity, exploitative sex like prostitution and deviant sexual practices centered on cultic worship. so the Scriptures that prohibit homosexual behavior do not apply to loving faithful same-sex relationships. it's time to bring the ancient Bible into our time now.
so, how do we respond to this cultural worldview, that modern trumps ancient?
1. Regarding the argument that being gay is genetic and that orientation is immutable, we respectfully say that it has not been proved.
saying it is, is only a are assertion. right now the dominant evidence points not to nature, but to nurture - and maybe some sort of combination. but, let's be careful and wise here. we should be open to whatever medical research is discovering. we should not close our minds to the possibility that homosexuality might have some genetic or biological component. the Fall has affected everything about us,l even down to the smallest level of our biology. but the Bible's claim to be our guide to faith and life - in other words, how we ought to live - is not altered or threatened by this. ultimately, science cannot make a moral judgement.
2. When Paul wrote Romans, same-sex relationships, even long-term ones,were not uncommon.
Paul traveled widely in the Greco-Roman world, he was a highly educated man and it is safe to say that he would have been familiar with the varied sexuality embedded in Greco-Roman culture, just as anyone is today who has studied the classics. Paul is clearly saying that all homosexual behavior - not just promiscuous sexual behavior or sex connected with idolatry - is in need of redemption by the atonement of Jesus Christ.
3. We can agree that the Bible is not a science or medical textbook. but let's be clear on what it is: a book that is authoritative on the human condition.
it makes that claim - it says what is wrong with humanity and how God is redeeming it. II Timothy 3.16 is one of a number of passages that assert the Bible's authority over how we ought to live
one more thing: If Scripture is subordinate to whatever cultural perspective is current, then how can we believe anything God says? we will always throw out portions with which we don't agree, if we see the Bible as merely being man's ancient attempt to understand God. faith, then, will always default to what I want in life. as Tim Keller often says, if the Bible is an eternal word from God, then we should not be surprised that every generation and culture will be offended by something in Scripture. God's ways are not our ways.
Finally, doctrine is bad; love is good.
doctrine kills the human spirit. Religious rules and propositions place burdens on people, robbing them of freedom. the Bible is about love and that's what matters. whatever is loving among people is to be celebrated, especially when it includes those who have been religiously excluded or mistreated. so, any passages that appear unloving to any group of people are reinterpreted or dismissed as not being authentically from God (or Jesus).
this argument is being made forcefully today: how can loving relationships, regardless of sexual orientation, be wrong? that is a powerful argument. a powerful, Emotional argument.
Do we have a response here?
1. The biggest problem with this argument is that love needs an objective definition
Love is more than a desire that pulls me or a feeling that overwhelms. if the strength of my love for someone makes it right, then anything goes. I can love whomever i want, in whatever way I want. the logical end of this worldview is an definition of love expressed by Woody Allen when he married his adopted Step-daughter: 'The heart wants what the heart wants.
but love without definition or boundaries is not harmless. the Fall has corrupted all good things. without a moral standard, love is easily twisted into self-centered pleasure, vulnerable to abuse and poser. that's not love. God's design for sex - and marriage - was originally good, and it remains so even today in spite of our continual failing to faithfully live within its life-affirming boundaries. the transcendent meaning of sex and marriage is a vision we need to grasp anew.
but love without definition or boundaries is not harmless. it leads to chaos, relationally and societally. there's a reason why the old Testament had so many laws about sexual behavior - and why Paul in the New Testament was so incensed about the man in the church who was sexually involved with his father's wife, without a moral standard, love is twisted into radical self-centeredness. it is vulnerable to abuse and power. and that's not love . Love needs definition - and it is found in the One who is love himself. the foundation for loving others is first to love God and body his commandments. I John 5.1-3
2. It is significant to note that Jesus always appealed to showed His dependency upon Scripture when addressing controversial issues.
when in the one place where he discussed sexual behavior with the Pharisees. in the context of marriage and divorce (Matthew 19. 3-6), he referred to Gods creational order of male and female as affirming the only permissible boundaries for sexual expression. the so-called 'silence' of Jesus on the issue of homosexuality is clearly dismissed by his recognition of God-ordained sexual boundaries.
3. finally, another hidden message in this post-modern doctrine is that love requires sex.
Intimacy is much richer and more varied than sexual expression. intimate relationships - where vulnerability, transparency, companionship, selflessness and a sharing of mutual interests and life-goals are lived out - happen in friendships, tool God cares deeply about all of our relationships. He knows that some will not marry or cannot marry and that can be a significant loss to live with. he knows that. But he has placed us in a community of His body and deep, loving friendships should be the norm. we have lost that perspective today. C. S. Lewis said, in The Four loves, 'to the Ancients, friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of lire and the school of virtue. the modern world in comparison, ignores it.
finally, how we live regarding all issues of life ultimately reveals our hearts toward god. 'Thy will be done' - or my will be done - describes everyone's relationship with God. to possess a reliable compass to see if we are living for Him or for our own desires, requires that we submit everything to God. unless we work hard to discern our won personal or cultural 'background' agendas. the temptation to merge God's will with our won will always remain deceptively strong.
the church is in confusion today. the voices advocating for the inclusion of same-sex relationships in the church have been loud enough to sow confusion even among ordinary church embers in solid, evangelical churches. the typical layperson's grasp of Scripture on the issue of homosexuality is weakening. studying the Scriptures on the matter doesn't seem to help anymore. Why? because these passages are increasingly undermined by strong, cultural worldviews that are driving alternative interpretations of Scripture.
Do you know what they are? these 'background doctrines' are influencing how Scripture is being read today. living our lives before God, aligning our wills with His, is the central objective of our Christian faith. it matters how we live and on what basis we claim God's approval.
here are just 3 of the worldviews we need to see operating in the background, along with ways we can respond to them with biblical faithfulness.
One, PERSONAL STORIES DRIVE BIBLICAL INTERPRETATIONS
in our culture, personal stories are how we discover 'truth' today. the individual - me - is the primary point of meaning and fulfillment. we don't look outside of ourselves, to God, to find truth or meaning. we look inside, to our own experience.
we see this when we look at behavior. there are no longer any agreed-upon moral standards to determine what is right or wrong. I discover truth; this in 'my truth'. and no one has the right to say my truth is wrong. my story, the way i experience life, validates what is true.
do not think this is merely a secular way of thinking. it is making headway into the church in subtle, but powerful, ways. for example, a video made several years ago. For the Bible Tells Me so, presents emotionally powerful stories of kids who grew up in the church and who took their won lives because of the discrimination, abuse, depression and isolation they felt growing up gay. these are powerful stories and they should move us. but the objective behind telling these stories is to cause us to question why we should hold on to the traditional view of homosexuality in light of how painful - even life-threatening, as the argument goes - that position is for people who live with same-sex attraction. the message? holding on to the orthodox view hurts people it's dangerous.
this illustrates how we decide what is righto r wrong: how does it impact others? how does it impact me? divine revelation, which is God's story, becomes secondary to my personal autobiography.
how do we respond to this cultural worldview, that our personal stories interpret God's will for us?
1. WE DO NEED TO LISTEN TO PEOPLE'S STORIES
there are things we need to hear and learn in all these narratives of people living with same-sex attraction. our hearts should be moved to compassion by stories of isolation, loneliness. abuse, rejection, fear.
but subjective experience can never be the basis for arriving at objective truth. personal stories illuminate; they challenge us; they help us apply the truth of Scripture to our lives. but they must be viewed in the light of what Scripture teaches about life and God. we need an objective word outside us to fully understand ourselves.
2.WE NEED TO RECOGNIZE THAT ALL OUR STORIES ARE BROKEN.
there is a hidden message inserted into these stories when they are presented in these ways and it's not immediately evident. it's this: my sexuality, no matter how it presents itself, is essentially good. the reason I struggle here is because the traditional view of Scripture doesn't acknowledge the truth of my own experience. I am not in need of rescue or redemption from myself - what I need is freedom to be what I believe I should be.
but the biblical view is that everything about us is broken by the Fall. when Jesus pursued society's outcasts (a major theme of pro-gay apologetics), he did meet them where they were - but He didn't leave them there. He healed the lepers and He forgave the 'sinners and prostitutes'. when we truly meet Jesus, we are not affirmed to go in the direction we want in life - our lives are turned upside down and redirected.
3. WE NEED TO GIVE TRUE COMPASSION.
ultimately, to allow these stories to reshape God's word to approve what it does not approve,k is to offer a false compassion. our Compassion to those who struggle must be god's compassion and not the world's. God's compassion comes to us in and through our suffering - and we recognize that sometimes God does not remove our 'thorns in the flesh'. we dare not think we can be more merciful that God by encouraging someone to live in ways that are incompatible with His calling.
Two, MODERN CULTURE IS SUPERIOR TO ANCIENT CULTURE.
this worldview doctrine goes like this: we moderns know more than people who lived long ago. they were ignorant. We're not. they didn't have the knowledge and data that we have today.
Now, this worldview centers on 2 arguments.
the first one its that sexual orientation is genetic and fixed. therefore, same-sex attraction is part of God's design for sexuality and is therefore natural and good. they allege we know this from science.
the second one is that the Bible's negative view on same-sex relationships was because the biblical writers did not observe, in their culture, positive, monogamous same-sex relationships like we see today. they were concerned with promiscuity, exploitative sex like prostitution and deviant sexual practices centered on cultic worship. so the Scriptures that prohibit homosexual behavior do not apply to loving faithful same-sex relationships. it's time to bring the ancient Bible into our time now.
so, how do we respond to this cultural worldview, that modern trumps ancient?
1. Regarding the argument that being gay is genetic and that orientation is immutable, we respectfully say that it has not been proved.
saying it is, is only a are assertion. right now the dominant evidence points not to nature, but to nurture - and maybe some sort of combination. but, let's be careful and wise here. we should be open to whatever medical research is discovering. we should not close our minds to the possibility that homosexuality might have some genetic or biological component. the Fall has affected everything about us,l even down to the smallest level of our biology. but the Bible's claim to be our guide to faith and life - in other words, how we ought to live - is not altered or threatened by this. ultimately, science cannot make a moral judgement.
2. When Paul wrote Romans, same-sex relationships, even long-term ones,were not uncommon.
Paul traveled widely in the Greco-Roman world, he was a highly educated man and it is safe to say that he would have been familiar with the varied sexuality embedded in Greco-Roman culture, just as anyone is today who has studied the classics. Paul is clearly saying that all homosexual behavior - not just promiscuous sexual behavior or sex connected with idolatry - is in need of redemption by the atonement of Jesus Christ.
3. We can agree that the Bible is not a science or medical textbook. but let's be clear on what it is: a book that is authoritative on the human condition.
it makes that claim - it says what is wrong with humanity and how God is redeeming it. II Timothy 3.16 is one of a number of passages that assert the Bible's authority over how we ought to live
one more thing: If Scripture is subordinate to whatever cultural perspective is current, then how can we believe anything God says? we will always throw out portions with which we don't agree, if we see the Bible as merely being man's ancient attempt to understand God. faith, then, will always default to what I want in life. as Tim Keller often says, if the Bible is an eternal word from God, then we should not be surprised that every generation and culture will be offended by something in Scripture. God's ways are not our ways.
Finally, doctrine is bad; love is good.
doctrine kills the human spirit. Religious rules and propositions place burdens on people, robbing them of freedom. the Bible is about love and that's what matters. whatever is loving among people is to be celebrated, especially when it includes those who have been religiously excluded or mistreated. so, any passages that appear unloving to any group of people are reinterpreted or dismissed as not being authentically from God (or Jesus).
this argument is being made forcefully today: how can loving relationships, regardless of sexual orientation, be wrong? that is a powerful argument. a powerful, Emotional argument.
Do we have a response here?
1. The biggest problem with this argument is that love needs an objective definition
Love is more than a desire that pulls me or a feeling that overwhelms. if the strength of my love for someone makes it right, then anything goes. I can love whomever i want, in whatever way I want. the logical end of this worldview is an definition of love expressed by Woody Allen when he married his adopted Step-daughter: 'The heart wants what the heart wants.
but love without definition or boundaries is not harmless. the Fall has corrupted all good things. without a moral standard, love is easily twisted into self-centered pleasure, vulnerable to abuse and poser. that's not love. God's design for sex - and marriage - was originally good, and it remains so even today in spite of our continual failing to faithfully live within its life-affirming boundaries. the transcendent meaning of sex and marriage is a vision we need to grasp anew.
but love without definition or boundaries is not harmless. it leads to chaos, relationally and societally. there's a reason why the old Testament had so many laws about sexual behavior - and why Paul in the New Testament was so incensed about the man in the church who was sexually involved with his father's wife, without a moral standard, love is twisted into radical self-centeredness. it is vulnerable to abuse and power. and that's not love . Love needs definition - and it is found in the One who is love himself. the foundation for loving others is first to love God and body his commandments. I John 5.1-3
2. It is significant to note that Jesus always appealed to showed His dependency upon Scripture when addressing controversial issues.
when in the one place where he discussed sexual behavior with the Pharisees. in the context of marriage and divorce (Matthew 19. 3-6), he referred to Gods creational order of male and female as affirming the only permissible boundaries for sexual expression. the so-called 'silence' of Jesus on the issue of homosexuality is clearly dismissed by his recognition of God-ordained sexual boundaries.
3. finally, another hidden message in this post-modern doctrine is that love requires sex.
Intimacy is much richer and more varied than sexual expression. intimate relationships - where vulnerability, transparency, companionship, selflessness and a sharing of mutual interests and life-goals are lived out - happen in friendships, tool God cares deeply about all of our relationships. He knows that some will not marry or cannot marry and that can be a significant loss to live with. he knows that. But he has placed us in a community of His body and deep, loving friendships should be the norm. we have lost that perspective today. C. S. Lewis said, in The Four loves, 'to the Ancients, friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of lire and the school of virtue. the modern world in comparison, ignores it.
finally, how we live regarding all issues of life ultimately reveals our hearts toward god. 'Thy will be done' - or my will be done - describes everyone's relationship with God. to possess a reliable compass to see if we are living for Him or for our own desires, requires that we submit everything to God. unless we work hard to discern our won personal or cultural 'background' agendas. the temptation to merge God's will with our won will always remain deceptively strong.
Monday, April 16, 2018
4.16.2018 MY PROBLEM WASN'T AMISH ROMANCE NOVELS by Jessica Harris (article on women's porn addiction in Harvest USA Publication)
when I first felt God calling me to share my story, my answer was no.
I had spent my entire high school career addicted to pornography, in college, I was caught looking at porn after logging in on a school computer, but they concluded it couldn't be me. 'Women just don't have this problem.
my struggle escalated to the point where I sent nude photos to a stranger online. this was back in 2003 before sexting was in vogue. I was 17 years old and from my dorm room on a Christian college campus, I, a newly converted christian who had grown up in the church became someone else's pornography. to me, that was all my life was worth.
a year later, I finally told somebody about my struggle with porn. I confessed to the Student Life staff at the second Bible college I was attending. they began to work with me intensively and after nearly 2 years of a long, hard fight , I found freedom.
in my mind, freedom meant I didn't have to think about it anymore. the past was behind me. no one ever had to know this was part of my story.
when I realized God might want me to share it, I resisted. I tried to find anything else to do with my life. I told Him He could send me to China. He could call me to some jungle somewhere.
anything but this.
but I felt a bit like Jonah getting tossed around in life's boat. there wasn't peace. everything I tried to do wasn't working. so, angrily, I created my website and shared my story of porn addiction and shame. I wondered if God hated me and that's why he was making me do this. it felt like a permanent form of branding and punishment. now, the one thing I never wanted anyone to know was the first thing anyone would know about me. i was going to be 'that girl who watched porn'.
I was convinced I was alone -the only woman in the world who had managed to become addicted to porn.
then, the emails started coming in. a year after starting my site, a large Christian conference asked me to lead a workshop for women on the topic of lust.when women realized this workshop wasn't going to be your typical 'proverbs 31, and True Beauty is on the Inside' workshop, they stared planning to skip theirs and come to mine instead.
every seat was filled. women stood along the back. women even sat on the floor at the front of the room. God moved mightily in that workshop. at the end, I watched the small groups as women shared their struggles with each other and prayed together. God was setting women free.
I walked out of the room and had what I call my Esther moment. it was as if God said to me,'You can have what you want. you can do whatever you would like. no one really knows you, so you could keep silent and move on with your plans or you could be part of this.
that day I decided I was all in, having no idea what that might mean. I knew women were struggling, lost and hurting and I knew how they could bet help. how could I leave them? How could I just walk away and pretend they weren't there?
I moved forward more publicly, telling my story, trying to write for various magazines and reaching out to churches. the response was often, 'We don't need that kind of stuff for our women. our women don't struggle with that', it quickly became clear that the biggest enemy I was going to face wasn't pornography itself, but an old script and layer upon layer of shame.
there's a script we have when it comes to things like sexual struggles and pornography. it goes something like this:
men are visual, so men struggle with pornography. women are emotional, so women struggle with Amish romance novels. men are the eyes. women are the heart. men get Fight Club with resources and accountability groups. women get tea parties with talk about dating and 'protecting your heart?
and that leaves thousands of visual women who struggle with pornography with nowhere to turn. they need Fight Club, but when they knock on the door, they're met with disapproving glances or a belittling of their struggle.
when I stand on a stage and say, 'My name is Jessica and I was addicted to pornography', I have to clarify exactly what I mean. people try to change my story to fit the script. they either water down what I mean by 'addicted' or what I mean by 'pornography'. they assume, at the very most, I was compulsively into soft-core pornography.
that's not the case. I was never into soft-core pornography. instead, I spent hours, every day, watching hard-core pornography:the same type of porn men are known for watching and worse. mine is not a story of a young girl entrenched in romance novels. it's a story of a young woman having her identity completely warped and lost to years of compulsive, daily, hard-core pornography use.
sharing that story, whether from a stage, on my site or through my book, Beggar's Daughter, has never been easy . I still get emails questioning my experience or what might be wrong with me. after all, the email will say, 'this is a man's problem'.
the advantage is now, I know my story is not unique. in fact, it is far from it. the script we're using is old and needs to change, because the script itself is causing shame. the script itself is leaving women feeling trapped and hopeless.
how do we change that script?
1. use the word 'and' - when you address issues around sexuality, know that sexual struggles do not respect genders. men and women can struggle with pornography. men and women should be able to find hope, healing and grace in your community.
2. train women to help - Equip women in your midst to be able to minister to women in this area. women's ministry isn't all homemaking tips and studies on Proverbs 31. Equip and encourage your teams to tackle harder issues with truth and grace.
3. Stop worrying about 'causing' problems - many ministry leaders are concerned that discussing these issues will introduce sin into their circles. in the years since i published my book, I've not once had someone say, 'I wish you hadn't written this. it made my problem worse'. when we talk about issues in the light of God's redemptive grace, people find hope and freedom.
discussion an issue, no matter how hard, in relation to the Gospel and grace will always bring light, not darkness. mentioning that women struggle with pornography doesn't take women captive; it sets them free. it opens up the door for them to come forward, confess and find hope and healing.
as a body of Christ, that should be our mission. we should welcome His redemptive work in each other's lives, regardless of what He is redeeming us from.
it might be an overused saying, but if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. if your church or ministry isn't speaking out about these issues, then your silence is trapping women in shame. don't withhold grace from the women in your midst. we need to get rid of the script that destroys a woman's identity and, instead, speak the truth and invite grace to redeem our identities and be a part of every woman's story.
Jessica Harris is an author, blogger and international speaker speaking our on issues of sex, singleness and pornography, especially among young women in the church. Her memoir, Beggar's Daughter, was published in 2016 and her devotional, Love Done right: Reflections ..was released in 2017. visit her website for more information: beggarsdaughter.com.
I had spent my entire high school career addicted to pornography, in college, I was caught looking at porn after logging in on a school computer, but they concluded it couldn't be me. 'Women just don't have this problem.
my struggle escalated to the point where I sent nude photos to a stranger online. this was back in 2003 before sexting was in vogue. I was 17 years old and from my dorm room on a Christian college campus, I, a newly converted christian who had grown up in the church became someone else's pornography. to me, that was all my life was worth.
a year later, I finally told somebody about my struggle with porn. I confessed to the Student Life staff at the second Bible college I was attending. they began to work with me intensively and after nearly 2 years of a long, hard fight , I found freedom.
in my mind, freedom meant I didn't have to think about it anymore. the past was behind me. no one ever had to know this was part of my story.
when I realized God might want me to share it, I resisted. I tried to find anything else to do with my life. I told Him He could send me to China. He could call me to some jungle somewhere.
anything but this.
but I felt a bit like Jonah getting tossed around in life's boat. there wasn't peace. everything I tried to do wasn't working. so, angrily, I created my website and shared my story of porn addiction and shame. I wondered if God hated me and that's why he was making me do this. it felt like a permanent form of branding and punishment. now, the one thing I never wanted anyone to know was the first thing anyone would know about me. i was going to be 'that girl who watched porn'.
I was convinced I was alone -the only woman in the world who had managed to become addicted to porn.
then, the emails started coming in. a year after starting my site, a large Christian conference asked me to lead a workshop for women on the topic of lust.when women realized this workshop wasn't going to be your typical 'proverbs 31, and True Beauty is on the Inside' workshop, they stared planning to skip theirs and come to mine instead.
every seat was filled. women stood along the back. women even sat on the floor at the front of the room. God moved mightily in that workshop. at the end, I watched the small groups as women shared their struggles with each other and prayed together. God was setting women free.
I walked out of the room and had what I call my Esther moment. it was as if God said to me,'You can have what you want. you can do whatever you would like. no one really knows you, so you could keep silent and move on with your plans or you could be part of this.
that day I decided I was all in, having no idea what that might mean. I knew women were struggling, lost and hurting and I knew how they could bet help. how could I leave them? How could I just walk away and pretend they weren't there?
I moved forward more publicly, telling my story, trying to write for various magazines and reaching out to churches. the response was often, 'We don't need that kind of stuff for our women. our women don't struggle with that', it quickly became clear that the biggest enemy I was going to face wasn't pornography itself, but an old script and layer upon layer of shame.
there's a script we have when it comes to things like sexual struggles and pornography. it goes something like this:
men are visual, so men struggle with pornography. women are emotional, so women struggle with Amish romance novels. men are the eyes. women are the heart. men get Fight Club with resources and accountability groups. women get tea parties with talk about dating and 'protecting your heart?
and that leaves thousands of visual women who struggle with pornography with nowhere to turn. they need Fight Club, but when they knock on the door, they're met with disapproving glances or a belittling of their struggle.
when I stand on a stage and say, 'My name is Jessica and I was addicted to pornography', I have to clarify exactly what I mean. people try to change my story to fit the script. they either water down what I mean by 'addicted' or what I mean by 'pornography'. they assume, at the very most, I was compulsively into soft-core pornography.
that's not the case. I was never into soft-core pornography. instead, I spent hours, every day, watching hard-core pornography:the same type of porn men are known for watching and worse. mine is not a story of a young girl entrenched in romance novels. it's a story of a young woman having her identity completely warped and lost to years of compulsive, daily, hard-core pornography use.
sharing that story, whether from a stage, on my site or through my book, Beggar's Daughter, has never been easy . I still get emails questioning my experience or what might be wrong with me. after all, the email will say, 'this is a man's problem'.
the advantage is now, I know my story is not unique. in fact, it is far from it. the script we're using is old and needs to change, because the script itself is causing shame. the script itself is leaving women feeling trapped and hopeless.
how do we change that script?
1. use the word 'and' - when you address issues around sexuality, know that sexual struggles do not respect genders. men and women can struggle with pornography. men and women should be able to find hope, healing and grace in your community.
2. train women to help - Equip women in your midst to be able to minister to women in this area. women's ministry isn't all homemaking tips and studies on Proverbs 31. Equip and encourage your teams to tackle harder issues with truth and grace.
3. Stop worrying about 'causing' problems - many ministry leaders are concerned that discussing these issues will introduce sin into their circles. in the years since i published my book, I've not once had someone say, 'I wish you hadn't written this. it made my problem worse'. when we talk about issues in the light of God's redemptive grace, people find hope and freedom.
discussion an issue, no matter how hard, in relation to the Gospel and grace will always bring light, not darkness. mentioning that women struggle with pornography doesn't take women captive; it sets them free. it opens up the door for them to come forward, confess and find hope and healing.
as a body of Christ, that should be our mission. we should welcome His redemptive work in each other's lives, regardless of what He is redeeming us from.
it might be an overused saying, but if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. if your church or ministry isn't speaking out about these issues, then your silence is trapping women in shame. don't withhold grace from the women in your midst. we need to get rid of the script that destroys a woman's identity and, instead, speak the truth and invite grace to redeem our identities and be a part of every woman's story.
Jessica Harris is an author, blogger and international speaker speaking our on issues of sex, singleness and pornography, especially among young women in the church. Her memoir, Beggar's Daughter, was published in 2016 and her devotional, Love Done right: Reflections ..was released in 2017. visit her website for more information: beggarsdaughter.com.
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
4.10.2018 WOMEN AND SEXUALITY: The Church's Blind Spot -Harvest USA 2018(Caring for Sexually Hurting People in Jesus' Name) by Ellen Dykas
...women also are struggling..
*3 Crunch! my little Civic didn't stand a chance when the larger SUV swerved into my lane. even though I passed it slowly, a few seconds in the driver's blind spot racked up hundreds of dollars of damage to my car.
blind spots are dangerous when you're driving. when we don't acknowledge that we have them, the results can be devastating. relationships in our jobs, friendships, families, and even in the church are impacted when we fail to see what we can't or don't want to see.
I want to address 3 blind spots I have seen over the past 11 years of my ministry here at Harvest USA, three areas where he church has repeatedly failed women in their sexuality. there are others, but these three are the ones I consistently see when I talk to women who struggle with sexual issues. when churches recognize these 3 blind spots, they will be better equipped to understand and help women.
BLIND SPOT# 1: WOMEN DON'T STRUGGLE WITH SEXUAL SIN AND LUST LIKE MEN DO.
a few years ago at a Harvest USA fundraising banquet, I found myself defending my full-time position as Women's ministry Director. the conversation went like this:
well-meaning man: 'You're full time? are there that many wives who have Christian husbands looking at porn?
Me: 'Well, yes; not only do wives reach out for help but Christian women who are struggling with things like pornography and casual sex do as well'
Well-meaning man: 'Really? I never thought women struggled with that stuff!
it wasn't the first time I had to defend my job. women have felt invisible in the church. when it comes to sexuality most of the attention has gone to men. so, when a woman looks for help, no one is there for her because we rarely acknowledge women's sexual struggles.
Darcy (all names changed) came to me for help because she couldn't stop hooking up with men. she'd sought out more men that she could remember and her face and voice communicated shame and pain as she gave me her diagnosis, 'Ellen, I guess I'm just more like a man'.
why did Darcy think that ? because in her church circles, she only heard that men had problems with lust. yes, there was something wrong with Darcy, but it wasn't that her sexuality was more like a man's. she needed help understanding that lust and sexually-sinful behaviors are gender neutral! Idolatrous and lonely, selfish hearts don't belong to one gender.
I see 2 reasons that contribute to this blind spot. one has to do with how men perceive women. men do tend to have stronger sex drives as a result of their biology. and since men are overwhelmingly in church leadership, they know their own issues but somehow think that women are radically different than them. the standard script is: women are drawn to relationships; men to sex. you mean Women have libidos (def - sexual instinct or drive)? why does the church have this blind spot when current statistics on porn use show that 60% of females ages 18-30 acknowledge that they look at porn at least monthly?
Secondly, I have noticed that women contribute to this blind spot, too. we don't talk much about sexual issues (at Bible studies, retreats, etc.) if men are ignoring our struggles, we are complicit in not speaking up. it's what I call the ABC mentality.
A, men don't think women have these struggles;
B. women aren't speaking about them; therefore
C, churches don't devote resources and ministries to women in this area.
pardon me, but I have to Yell: THIS IS A DANGEROUS BLIND SPOT! it's leaving Christian women to struggle alone in silence and shame! I have taught on sexuality to women from all over the US and several countries and their testimony is consistent:
WE ARE STRUGGLING
WE DON'T HEAR THE CHURCH TALKING ABOUT THIS AS A WOMEN'S ISSUE and
WE DON'T KNOW WHERE TO GET HELP!
how can churches eliminate this blind spot?
first off, recall that Jesus had no problem coming alongside women who struggled sexually. from
the 'sinner' who most likely was a prostitute (Luke 7.36-50)
to the Samaritan woman who had multiple husbands (John 4.5-26
to the woman caught in adultery *John 8.1-11),
Jesus did not ignore women.
Jesus engaged these women as who they are: sexual sinners who need forgiveness and truth woven in with compassion.
here's how we can follow the example of Jesus:
1. pastors and women's ministry leaders, teach a full-orbed biblical sexuality. God gifted women with their sexuality for His glory. even though the Fall has marred its beauty, Jesus came to forgive and transform sexual sinners, women as well as men! when you speak or preach, utilize illustrations and testimonies that highlight how the gospel gives hope, courage and holiness for women who are bound up in sexual sin. perhaps do a sermon series or Sunday school class on the three passages listed above, explaining how we can follow Christ's example to protect and extend grace to women.
*4 2. take the courageous initiative to weave sexual topics into ongoing discipleship ministries and Equip women to come alongside each other.
out workbook, Sexual Sanity for Women: Healing from Sexual and Relational Brokenness, was written for this purpose and has a companion E-Book Leader's Guide. also, our website has loads of free articles and blog posts on sexuality that can give you ideas for rich discussion topics'.
BLIND SPOT #2: THE PRIMARY SEXUAL ISSUE IN CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE IS THAT HUSBANDS WANT SEX MORE THAN WIVES.
the first blind spot leads to another erroneous belief that married women, in particular, do not care about or lose interest in sex. wives are often told and counselled that this is why their husbands are looking at porn or have gone outside the arrange for sexual encounters.
the reality is far different. more Christian marriages than we realize have sexually-unengaged husbands. peek into my ministry world:
*a woman's husband has not initiated sex or responded to her initiation in over 2 years.
*a pastor's wife who hadn't had sex in 10 years with her husband said, 'I guess life just got busy with his ministry and we got out of the habit'.
*finally, there is a young wife who wants sex more frequently than her husband. there's no sexual sin going on ; she just has a stronger sex drive!
of course, there are many reasons for these stories. and yes, some wives are less than enthusiastic about sex with their husbands. I have met many wives who do not enjoy sex and even disdain it. but if you look a bit closer you'll see reasons that are important to know.
past sexual trauma will influence a woman's view of her husband and her own body. sex that is not physically pleasurable, like rarely experiencing orgasm, will impact a woman's desire. a full life of working and being a mom leads to exhaustion. who has the energy? and, I see this more all the time: wives who feel like nothing more than an object for their husband's sexual pleasure.
now, hear me on this point. I've already said that women have battles with sexual sin too, including pornography, fantasy, lust, compulsive masturbation and adultery. and like men, they bring the residue of past sin or current struggles into the marriage. so do Not hear me playing a blame game on men here.
but in the age of the internet, one stark reality is that far too many christian men are more than dabbling with a
*5 little porn here and there. it should not surprise us, given the degree to which the internet is embedded in our daily life and the ease with which pornography can be accessed, that Christian men are viewing pornography in greater and greater numbers (with the use of porn among youth and greater numbers (with the use of porn among youth and younger men being far higher). as one study concluded, 'Men of all ages and stages, but especially married men, are coming to pastors for help with pornography struggles.
when a husband trains himself to be aroused and satisfied sexually by images or other types of pornography, his ability to be aroused by his wife often diminishes. real life - and real bodies - pale against the photoshopped, fantasy stories the internet sells. Porn-induced erectile dysfunction is now a thing.
and when you hear of a marriage problem involving sex, dig for the reasons why.
1. do not accept pornography usage as being either a 'small porn problem' or 'just what men do'. regardless of how often a husband views it, pornography teaches a way of life and relating that is so terribly damaging. do not say to a wife of a husband who is involved with porn that she should 'have more sex', so that he won't look at it. I've heard so many tragic stories from wives who were counselled this way.
2. it is time to offer marriage classes that have discussions on sex. there is a lot of confusion about sex among God's people. I've been asked many questions from Christian married women like,
does anything go in marriage as long as it's mutual?
what do I do if my husband wants to do things I'm uncomfortable with
is it ok if we watch pornography together before we are intimate?
I masturbate secretly because I rarely orgasm with my husband...is that ok?
3. be proactive with pre-marriage couples. the best time to catch problems that will likely destroy a marriage is before the wedding. pre-marriage counselling must include a frank and hones discussion of sexual history, current sexual sin struggles, as well as a clear emphasis on God's beautifully good design for husbands and wives to serve and love each other selflessly in their sexual relationship.
*6 BLIND SPOT #3 WOMEN SHOULD HAVE NO PROBLEMS TALKING TO PASTORAL LEADERSHIP WHEN THEY ARE STRUGGLING WITH A SEXUAL ISSUED
there is a sad and tragic reality that i have seen in working with women. most women do not feel safe going to pastoral leadership to talk about sexual struggles.
a 40 year old woman came to me for help after 2 decades of promiscuity. she ran a highly successful business: an escort service which offered sex for money. at 19, she was an active member in her church, singing on the worship team and living a life of sexual integrity. What happened?
she had a secret: she had feelings for girls. she was scared and confused by finally mustered the courage to seek help from her pastor. she explained that she'd never pursued any romantic or physical experiences with girls but needed help.
His response? 'we don't have anything for you here and it's best you step down from the worship team'. she did step down and Out of that church and found acceptance in the LGBT community, which became her home for 20 years.
I've sat with too many women who have shared stories that have made me ache with tears; others have infuriated me. single women have been counseled like this, 'If you'd just find yourself a husband then you wouldn't have these kinds of issues'. wives have been told to submit to their husbands in the bedroom, even when that submission meant feeling degraded and used. wives have been diagnosed as paranoid because they suspected their well-known and respected-by-the-church husband of infidelity.
experiences like these teach women to keep their struggles hidden and silent. they live with shame for feeling like a failure in their life or marriage and hey are desperate to talk to someone who understands and is safe.
and there's the sober reality of sexual abuse survivors who are in your church. it has become common knowledge, backed by numerous studies, showing that 20% of women have experienced some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18. this trauma is devastating and while survivors respond to their abuse in unique ways, it is not uncommon for many women to fear men and authority far too many men in church leadership do not recognize this as a substantial issue for women. it's a glaring blind spot.
here are a few was church leaders can cultivate an atmosphere of safety and grace for women sexual strugglers and wives.
1. examine your beliefs about women and sexuality and discuss this article with women you respect. ask them WHERE DO YOU SEE MY BLIND SPOTS? WHAT DO I NEED TO LEARN?
2. offer anonymous surveys to the women in your church to learn from them about what their reality is regarding sexual struggles and sin.
3. work to make your church grow into a place where women have a voice and will be protected, defended, and helped if their husbands are unrepentant. raise up and train women leaders to whom the women in the church can go for help. this would greatly encourage women to address their fears of talking to pastors and leaders.
Paul's pastoral benediction to the Thessalonians, a church obviously struggling with sexual sin, was this, 'Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ'. i Thess. 5.23
brothers and sisters, our God's peace has been entrusted to us as His ambassadors, it is our calling to extend Christ's shalom or human flourishing, to women and their sexuality. will you engage it? will you consider implementing changes to the way you teach, preach and disciple your people? your women? I hope you will and will pray to that end.
Ellen Dykas is the Women's Ministry Director of Harvest USA. to reach her with questions or advice about her article, she can be reached at ellen@harvestusa.org
*3 Crunch! my little Civic didn't stand a chance when the larger SUV swerved into my lane. even though I passed it slowly, a few seconds in the driver's blind spot racked up hundreds of dollars of damage to my car.
blind spots are dangerous when you're driving. when we don't acknowledge that we have them, the results can be devastating. relationships in our jobs, friendships, families, and even in the church are impacted when we fail to see what we can't or don't want to see.
I want to address 3 blind spots I have seen over the past 11 years of my ministry here at Harvest USA, three areas where he church has repeatedly failed women in their sexuality. there are others, but these three are the ones I consistently see when I talk to women who struggle with sexual issues. when churches recognize these 3 blind spots, they will be better equipped to understand and help women.
BLIND SPOT# 1: WOMEN DON'T STRUGGLE WITH SEXUAL SIN AND LUST LIKE MEN DO.
a few years ago at a Harvest USA fundraising banquet, I found myself defending my full-time position as Women's ministry Director. the conversation went like this:
well-meaning man: 'You're full time? are there that many wives who have Christian husbands looking at porn?
Me: 'Well, yes; not only do wives reach out for help but Christian women who are struggling with things like pornography and casual sex do as well'
Well-meaning man: 'Really? I never thought women struggled with that stuff!
it wasn't the first time I had to defend my job. women have felt invisible in the church. when it comes to sexuality most of the attention has gone to men. so, when a woman looks for help, no one is there for her because we rarely acknowledge women's sexual struggles.
Darcy (all names changed) came to me for help because she couldn't stop hooking up with men. she'd sought out more men that she could remember and her face and voice communicated shame and pain as she gave me her diagnosis, 'Ellen, I guess I'm just more like a man'.
why did Darcy think that ? because in her church circles, she only heard that men had problems with lust. yes, there was something wrong with Darcy, but it wasn't that her sexuality was more like a man's. she needed help understanding that lust and sexually-sinful behaviors are gender neutral! Idolatrous and lonely, selfish hearts don't belong to one gender.
I see 2 reasons that contribute to this blind spot. one has to do with how men perceive women. men do tend to have stronger sex drives as a result of their biology. and since men are overwhelmingly in church leadership, they know their own issues but somehow think that women are radically different than them. the standard script is: women are drawn to relationships; men to sex. you mean Women have libidos (def - sexual instinct or drive)? why does the church have this blind spot when current statistics on porn use show that 60% of females ages 18-30 acknowledge that they look at porn at least monthly?
Secondly, I have noticed that women contribute to this blind spot, too. we don't talk much about sexual issues (at Bible studies, retreats, etc.) if men are ignoring our struggles, we are complicit in not speaking up. it's what I call the ABC mentality.
A, men don't think women have these struggles;
B. women aren't speaking about them; therefore
C, churches don't devote resources and ministries to women in this area.
pardon me, but I have to Yell: THIS IS A DANGEROUS BLIND SPOT! it's leaving Christian women to struggle alone in silence and shame! I have taught on sexuality to women from all over the US and several countries and their testimony is consistent:
WE ARE STRUGGLING
WE DON'T HEAR THE CHURCH TALKING ABOUT THIS AS A WOMEN'S ISSUE and
WE DON'T KNOW WHERE TO GET HELP!
how can churches eliminate this blind spot?
first off, recall that Jesus had no problem coming alongside women who struggled sexually. from
the 'sinner' who most likely was a prostitute (Luke 7.36-50)
to the Samaritan woman who had multiple husbands (John 4.5-26
to the woman caught in adultery *John 8.1-11),
Jesus did not ignore women.
Jesus engaged these women as who they are: sexual sinners who need forgiveness and truth woven in with compassion.
here's how we can follow the example of Jesus:
1. pastors and women's ministry leaders, teach a full-orbed biblical sexuality. God gifted women with their sexuality for His glory. even though the Fall has marred its beauty, Jesus came to forgive and transform sexual sinners, women as well as men! when you speak or preach, utilize illustrations and testimonies that highlight how the gospel gives hope, courage and holiness for women who are bound up in sexual sin. perhaps do a sermon series or Sunday school class on the three passages listed above, explaining how we can follow Christ's example to protect and extend grace to women.
*4 2. take the courageous initiative to weave sexual topics into ongoing discipleship ministries and Equip women to come alongside each other.
out workbook, Sexual Sanity for Women: Healing from Sexual and Relational Brokenness, was written for this purpose and has a companion E-Book Leader's Guide. also, our website has loads of free articles and blog posts on sexuality that can give you ideas for rich discussion topics'.
BLIND SPOT #2: THE PRIMARY SEXUAL ISSUE IN CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE IS THAT HUSBANDS WANT SEX MORE THAN WIVES.
the first blind spot leads to another erroneous belief that married women, in particular, do not care about or lose interest in sex. wives are often told and counselled that this is why their husbands are looking at porn or have gone outside the arrange for sexual encounters.
the reality is far different. more Christian marriages than we realize have sexually-unengaged husbands. peek into my ministry world:
*a woman's husband has not initiated sex or responded to her initiation in over 2 years.
*a pastor's wife who hadn't had sex in 10 years with her husband said, 'I guess life just got busy with his ministry and we got out of the habit'.
*finally, there is a young wife who wants sex more frequently than her husband. there's no sexual sin going on ; she just has a stronger sex drive!
of course, there are many reasons for these stories. and yes, some wives are less than enthusiastic about sex with their husbands. I have met many wives who do not enjoy sex and even disdain it. but if you look a bit closer you'll see reasons that are important to know.
past sexual trauma will influence a woman's view of her husband and her own body. sex that is not physically pleasurable, like rarely experiencing orgasm, will impact a woman's desire. a full life of working and being a mom leads to exhaustion. who has the energy? and, I see this more all the time: wives who feel like nothing more than an object for their husband's sexual pleasure.
now, hear me on this point. I've already said that women have battles with sexual sin too, including pornography, fantasy, lust, compulsive masturbation and adultery. and like men, they bring the residue of past sin or current struggles into the marriage. so do Not hear me playing a blame game on men here.
but in the age of the internet, one stark reality is that far too many christian men are more than dabbling with a
*5 little porn here and there. it should not surprise us, given the degree to which the internet is embedded in our daily life and the ease with which pornography can be accessed, that Christian men are viewing pornography in greater and greater numbers (with the use of porn among youth and greater numbers (with the use of porn among youth and younger men being far higher). as one study concluded, 'Men of all ages and stages, but especially married men, are coming to pastors for help with pornography struggles.
when a husband trains himself to be aroused and satisfied sexually by images or other types of pornography, his ability to be aroused by his wife often diminishes. real life - and real bodies - pale against the photoshopped, fantasy stories the internet sells. Porn-induced erectile dysfunction is now a thing.
and when you hear of a marriage problem involving sex, dig for the reasons why.
1. do not accept pornography usage as being either a 'small porn problem' or 'just what men do'. regardless of how often a husband views it, pornography teaches a way of life and relating that is so terribly damaging. do not say to a wife of a husband who is involved with porn that she should 'have more sex', so that he won't look at it. I've heard so many tragic stories from wives who were counselled this way.
2. it is time to offer marriage classes that have discussions on sex. there is a lot of confusion about sex among God's people. I've been asked many questions from Christian married women like,
does anything go in marriage as long as it's mutual?
what do I do if my husband wants to do things I'm uncomfortable with
is it ok if we watch pornography together before we are intimate?
I masturbate secretly because I rarely orgasm with my husband...is that ok?
3. be proactive with pre-marriage couples. the best time to catch problems that will likely destroy a marriage is before the wedding. pre-marriage counselling must include a frank and hones discussion of sexual history, current sexual sin struggles, as well as a clear emphasis on God's beautifully good design for husbands and wives to serve and love each other selflessly in their sexual relationship.
*6 BLIND SPOT #3 WOMEN SHOULD HAVE NO PROBLEMS TALKING TO PASTORAL LEADERSHIP WHEN THEY ARE STRUGGLING WITH A SEXUAL ISSUED
there is a sad and tragic reality that i have seen in working with women. most women do not feel safe going to pastoral leadership to talk about sexual struggles.
a 40 year old woman came to me for help after 2 decades of promiscuity. she ran a highly successful business: an escort service which offered sex for money. at 19, she was an active member in her church, singing on the worship team and living a life of sexual integrity. What happened?
she had a secret: she had feelings for girls. she was scared and confused by finally mustered the courage to seek help from her pastor. she explained that she'd never pursued any romantic or physical experiences with girls but needed help.
His response? 'we don't have anything for you here and it's best you step down from the worship team'. she did step down and Out of that church and found acceptance in the LGBT community, which became her home for 20 years.
I've sat with too many women who have shared stories that have made me ache with tears; others have infuriated me. single women have been counseled like this, 'If you'd just find yourself a husband then you wouldn't have these kinds of issues'. wives have been told to submit to their husbands in the bedroom, even when that submission meant feeling degraded and used. wives have been diagnosed as paranoid because they suspected their well-known and respected-by-the-church husband of infidelity.
experiences like these teach women to keep their struggles hidden and silent. they live with shame for feeling like a failure in their life or marriage and hey are desperate to talk to someone who understands and is safe.
and there's the sober reality of sexual abuse survivors who are in your church. it has become common knowledge, backed by numerous studies, showing that 20% of women have experienced some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18. this trauma is devastating and while survivors respond to their abuse in unique ways, it is not uncommon for many women to fear men and authority far too many men in church leadership do not recognize this as a substantial issue for women. it's a glaring blind spot.
here are a few was church leaders can cultivate an atmosphere of safety and grace for women sexual strugglers and wives.
1. examine your beliefs about women and sexuality and discuss this article with women you respect. ask them WHERE DO YOU SEE MY BLIND SPOTS? WHAT DO I NEED TO LEARN?
2. offer anonymous surveys to the women in your church to learn from them about what their reality is regarding sexual struggles and sin.
3. work to make your church grow into a place where women have a voice and will be protected, defended, and helped if their husbands are unrepentant. raise up and train women leaders to whom the women in the church can go for help. this would greatly encourage women to address their fears of talking to pastors and leaders.
Paul's pastoral benediction to the Thessalonians, a church obviously struggling with sexual sin, was this, 'Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ'. i Thess. 5.23
brothers and sisters, our God's peace has been entrusted to us as His ambassadors, it is our calling to extend Christ's shalom or human flourishing, to women and their sexuality. will you engage it? will you consider implementing changes to the way you teach, preach and disciple your people? your women? I hope you will and will pray to that end.
Ellen Dykas is the Women's Ministry Director of Harvest USA. to reach her with questions or advice about her article, she can be reached at ellen@harvestusa.org
Monday, April 2, 2018
4.2.2018 John Wesley Works; Vol. 5; SERMON #7 'The Way to the Kingdom' ; p76f; complete
*76 the kingdom of God is at hand: Repent ye and believe the gospel'. Mar 1.15
these words naturally lead us to consider, First, the nature of true religion, here termed y our Lord, 'the kingdom of God' which, saith He, 'is at hand' and, Secondly, the way
*77 thereto, which he points out in those words, 'Repent ye and believe the gospel'.
I. 1. we are, First, to consider the nature of true religion, here termed by our Lord, 'the kingdom of God'. the same expression the great apostle uses in his Epistle to the Romans, where he likewise explains his Lord's words, saying, 'the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost'. Rom. 14.17
2. 'the kingdom of God' or true religion, 'is not meat and drink'. it is well known, that not only the unconverted Jews, but great numbers of those who had received the faith of Christ, were, notwithstanding, 'zealous of the law', Acts 21.20 even the ceremonial law of Moses. whatsoever, therefore, they found written therein, wither concerning meat and drink offerings, or the distinction between clean and unclean meats, they not only observed themselves, but vehemently pressed the same even on those 'among the Gentiles' (or Heathens) who were turned to God' , yea, to such a degree, that some of them taught wheresoever they came among them, 'Except ye be circumcised and keep the law'[ (the whole ritual law), ye cannot be saved.' acts 15.1,24
3. in opposition to these, the Apostle declares, both here and in many other places, that true religion does not consist in Meat and Drink, or in any ritual observances; nor, indeed, in any outward thing whatever; in any outward thing whatever; in anything exterior to the heart; thee whole substance thereof lying in 'righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost'.
4. not in any Outward Thing; such as Forms or Ceremonies, even of the most excellent kind. supposing these to be ever so decent and significant, ever so expressive of inward things: supposing them ever so helpful, not only to the vulgar, whose thought reaches little farther than their sight, but even to men of understanding, men of stronger capacities, as doubtless they may sometimes be: Yea, supposing them, as in the case of the Jews, to be appointed by God Himself, yet even during the period of time wherein that appointment remains in force, true religion does not principally consist therein, nay, strictly speaking, not at all. how much more must this hold concerning such rites and forms as are only of human appointment! the religion of Christ rises infinitely higher and lies immensely deeper than all these. these are good in their place just so far as they are
*78 in fact subservient to true religion. and it were superstition to object against them, while they are applied only as occasional helps to human weakness. but let no man carry them farther. let no man dream that they have any intrinsic worth or that religion cannot subsist without them. this were to make them an abomination to the Lord.
5. the nature of religion is so far from consisting in these, in forms of worship or rites and ceremonies, that it does not properly consist in any outward actions of what kind soever. it is true, a man cannot have nay religion who is guilty of vicious, immoral actions or who does to others what he would not they should do unto him, if he were in the same circumstances. and it is also true, that he can have no real religion who 'knows to do good and doeth it not'. yet may a man both abstain from outward evil and do good and still have no religion. yea, 2 persons may do the same outward work, suppose, feeding the hungry or clothing the naked and, in the mean time, one of these may be truly religious and the other have no religion at all, for the one may act from the love of God and the other from the love of praise. so manifest it is, that although true religion naturally leads to every good word and work, yet the real nature thereof lies deeper still even in 'the hidden man of the heart'.
6. I say of the Hear. for neither does religion consist in orthodoxy or right opinions which, although they are not properly outward things, are not in the heart, but the understanding. a man may be orthodox in every point. he may not only espouse right opinions, but zealously defend them against all opposers. he may think justly concerning the incarnation of our Lord, concerning the ever-blessed Trinity and every other doctrine contained in the oracles of God. he may assent to all the 3 Creeds - that called the Apostles', the Nicene and the Athanasian and yet it is possible he may have no religion at all, no more than a Jew, Turk or Pagan. he may be almost as orthodox - as the devil, (though, indeed, not altogether for every man errs in something; whereas we cannot well conceive him to hold any erroneous opinion) and may, all the while, be as great a stranger as he to the religion of the heart.
7. this alone is religion, truly so called: this alone is in the sight of God of great price. the Apostle sums it all up in 3 particulars, 'righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy
*79 Ghost'. and, First, Righteousness. we cannot be at a loss concerning this, if we remember the words of our Lord, describing the 2 grand branches thereof, on which 'hang all the law and the Prophets' , thou shalt love the Lord they God with all thy heart and with all thy mid and with all thy soul and with all they strength: this is the first and great branch of Christian righteousness. thou shalt delight they self in the Lord thy God; thou shalt seek and find all happiness in Him. He shall be 'thy shield and thy exceeding great reward', in time and in eternity. all thy bones shall say, 'Whom have i in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that i desire beside Thee!' Thous shalt hear and fulfill His word who saith, 'My son, give me thy heart'. and, having given Him thy heart, thy inmost soul, to reign there without a rival, thou mayest well cry out in the fullness of they heart, 'I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength. the Lord is my strong rock and my defence; my Saviour, my God and my might, in whom I will trust; my buckler, the horn also of my salvation and my refuge'.
8. and the second commandment is like unto this: the Second great branch of Christian righteousness is closely and inseparably connected there with; even, 'Thou shat love thy neighbour as thyself'. Thou Shalt Love, - thou shalt embrace with the most tender good-will, the most earnest and cordial affection, the most inflamed desires of preventing or removing all evil and of procuring for him every possible good, -Thy Neighbour; - that is not only thy friend, they kinsman or they acquaintance; not only the virtuous, the friendly, him that loves thee, that prevents (def - archaic 'to act ahead of) or returns your kindness; but every child of man, every human creature, every soul which God hath made; not excepting him whom thou never hast seen in the flesh, whom thou knowest not, either by face or name; not excepting him whom thou knowest to be evil and unthankful, him that still despiteful uses and persecutes thee. Him thou shalt love As Thyself; with the same invariable thirst after his happiness in every kind; the same unwearied care to screen him from whatever might grieve or hurt either his soul or body.
9. now is not this love 'the fulfilling of the law'? the sum of all Christian righteousness? of all inward righteousness; for it necessarily implies 'bowels of mercies, humbleness of mind' (seeing 'love is not puffed up') 'gentleness, meekness, longsuffering
*80 suffering' (for love 'is not provoked' but 'believeth, hopeth, endureth all things') and of all outward righteousness; for 'love worketh no evil to his neighbour' either by word or deed. it cannot willingly hurt ore grieve any one. and it is zealous of good works. every love of mankind, as he hath opportunity, 'doeth good unto all men', being (without partiality and without hypocrisy) 'full of mercy and good fruits'.
10. but true religion or a heart right toward God and man implies HAPPINESS AS WELL AS HOLINESS. for for it is not only 'righteousness', but also 'peace and joy in the Holy Ghost'. what peace? 'the peace of God', which God only can give and the world cannot take away; the peace which 'passeth all understanding'., which God only can give and the world cannot take away; the peace which 'passeth all understanding', all barely rational conception; being a supernatural sensation, a divine taste of 'the powers of the world to come'. such as the natural man knoweth not, how wise soever in the things of this world; nor, indeed, can he know it, in his present state, 'because it is spiritually discerned'. it is a peace that banishes all doubt, all painful uncertainty; the Spirit of God bearing witness with the spirit of a Christian, that he is 'a child of God'. and it banishes fear, all such fear as hath torment; the fear of the wrath of God; the fear of hell; the fear of the devil; and, in particular, the fear of death: He that hath the peace of God, desiring, if it were the will of God, 'to depart and to be with Christ'.
11. with this peace of God, wherever it is fixed in the soul, there is also 'joy in the Holy Ghost', joy wrought in the heart by the Holy Ghost, by the ever-blessed Spirit of God. He is is that worketh in us that calm, humble rejoicing in God, through Christ Jesus, 'by whom we have now received the atonement'..the reconciliation with God and that enables us boldly to confirm the truth of the royal psalmist's declaration, 'Blessed is the man' (or rather, Happy) 'whose unrighteousness is forgiven and whose sin is covered'. he it is that inspires the Christian soul with that even, solid joy, which arises from the testimony of the spirit that he is a child of God and that gives him to 'rejoiced with joy unspeakable, in hope of 'the glory of God'; hope both of the glorious image of God, which is in part and shall be fully, 'revealed in Him' and of that crown of glory which fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for him.
12.this holiness and happiness, joined in one, are sometimes styled in the inspired writings, 'the kingdom of God', (as by
*81 our Lord in the text) and sometimes, 'the kingdom of heaven'. it is termed 'the kingdom of God', because it is the immediate fruit of God's reigning in the soul. so soon as ever He takes unto Himself His mighty power and sets up His throne in our hearts, they are instantly filled with this 'righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost'. it is called 'the Kingdom of heaven', because it is (in a degree) heaven opened in the soul. for whosoever they are that experience this, they can aver (def - assert or affirm with confidence) before angels and men.
Everlasting life is won,
Glory is on earth begun,
according to the constant tenor of Scripture, which everywhere bears record, God 'hath given unto us eternal life and this life is in His Son. he that hath the Son' reigning in his heart) hath life' even life everlasting. I John 5.11-2 for 'this is life eternal, to know Thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent'. John 17.3 and the, to whom this is given, may confidently address God, though they wee in the midst of a fiery furnace,
Thee, Lord, safe shielded by Thy power,
Thee, son of God, Jehovah, we adore;
in form of man descending to appear:
to Thee be ceaseless hallelujahs given,
praise, as in heave Thy throne, we offer here;
for where Thy presence is displayed, is heaven.
13. and this 'kingdom of God' or of heaven, 'is a hand'. as these words were originally spoken, they implied that 'the time' was then fulfilled, God being 'made manifest in the flesh', when he would set up His kingdom among men and reign in the hearts of His people. and is not the time now fulfilled? for, 'Lo! (saith He) I am with you always' you who preach remission of sins in My name, 'even unto the end of the world' Matt. 28.20 wheresoever, therefore, the gospel of Christ is preached, this his 'kingdom is nigh at hand'. it is not far from every one of you. ye may this hour enter thereinto, if so be ye hearken to His voice, 'Repent ye and believe the Gospel,
II. 1. this is the way: Walk ye i it. and, First, 'repent', that is, know yourselves. this is the first repentance, previous to faith; even conviction or self-knowledge. awake, then, thou
*82 that sleepest. know thyself to be a sinner and what manner of sinner thou art. know that corruption of thy inmost nature, whereby thou art very far gone from original righteousness, whereby' the flesh lusteth' always 'contrary to the Spirit' through that 'carnal mind' which 'is enmity against God', which 'is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be'. know that thou art corrupted in every power, in every faculty of thy soul; that thou art totally corrupted in every one of these, all the foundations, being out of course. the eyes of thine understanding are darkened, so that they cannot discern God, or the things of God. the clouds of ignorance and error rest upon thee and cover thee with the shadow of death. thou knowest nothing yet as thou ought to know, neither God no the world nor thyself. Thy will is no longer the will of God, but is utterly perverse and distorted, averse from all good, from all which God loves and prone to all evil, to very abomination which God hateth. thy affections are alienated from God and scattered abroad over all the earth. all thy passions, both thy desires and aversions, thy joys and sorrows, thy hopes and fears, are out of frame, are either undue in their degree or placed on undue objects. so that there is no soundness in thy soul, but 'from the crown of the head, to the sole of the foot' (to use the strong expression of the Prophet) there are only 'wounds, and bruises and putrefying sores'.
2. such is the inbred corruption of thy heart, of thy very inmost nature. and what manner of branches canst thou expect to grow from such an evil root? hence springs unbelief, ever departing from the living God, saying, 'Who is the Lord, that i should sere Him? Tush! thou, God, carest not for it'. hence independence, affecting to be like the Most High. hence pride, in all its forms; teaching thee to say, 'I am rich, and increased in goods and have need of nothing'. from this evil fountain flow forth the bitter streams of vanity, thirst of praise, ambition, covetousness, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life. from this arise anger, hatred, malice, revenge, envy, jealousy, evil surmisings: from this, all the foolish and hurtful lusts that now 'pierce thee through with many sorrows' and, if not timely prevented, will at length drown thy soul in everlasting perdition.
3. and what fruits can grow on such branches as these? only such as are bitter and evil continually. of pride cometh
*83 contention, vain boasting, seeking and receiving praise of men and so robbing God of that glory which He cannot give unto another. of the lust of the flesh, come gluttony or drunkenness, luxury or sensuality, fornication, uncleanness; variously defiling that body which was designed for a temple of the Holy Ghost: of unbelief, every evil word and work. but the time would fail shouldest thou reckon up all: all the idle words thou hast spoken, provoking the Most High, grieving the Holy One of Israel; all the evil works thou hast done, either wholly evil in themselves or, at least, not done to the glory of God. for thy actual sins are more than thou art able to express, more than the hairs of they head. who can number the sands of the sea. or the drops of rain or they iniquities?
4. and knowest thou not that 'the wages of sin is death?' - death, not only temporal, but eternal. 'the soul that sinneth, it shall die'; for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. it shall die the second death. this is the sentence, to 'be punished' with never-ending death, 'with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power'. knowest thou not that every sinner...not properly, 'is in danger of hell-fire' ; that expression is far too weak; but rather, 'is under the sentence of hell fire'; doomed already, just dragging to execution. thou art guilty of everlasting death. it is the just reward of thy inward and outward wickedness. it is just that the sentence should now take place. doest thou see, dost thou feel this? at thou throughly convinced that thou deservest God's wrath and everlasting damnation? would God do thee no wrong, if He now commanded the earth to open and swallow thee up? if thou wert now to go down quick into the pit, into the fire that never shall be quenched? if god hath given thee truly to repent, thou hast a deep sense that these things are so and that it is of His mere mercy thou art not consumed, swept away from the face of the earth.
5.and what wilt thou do to appease the wrath of God, to atone for all thy sins and to escape the punishment thou hast so justly deserved? alas, thou canst do nothing; nothing that will in anywise make amends to God for one evil works or word, or thought. if thou couldest now do all things well, if from this very hour till thy soul should return to God thou couldest perform perfect, uninterrupted obedience, even this would not
*84 atone for what is past. the not increasing thy debt would not discharge it. it would still remain as great as ever. Yea, the present and future obedience of all the men upon earth and all the angels in heaven, would never make satisfaction to the justice of God for one single sin. how vain, then, was the thought of atoning for thy own sins, by anything thou couldest do! it costeth far more to redeem one soul, that all mankind is able to pay. so that were there no other help for a guilty sinner, without doubt he must have perished everlastingly.
6. but suppose perfect obedience, for the time to come, could atone for the sins that are past, this would profit thee nothing, for thou art not able to perform it; no, not in any one point. begin now. make the trial. shake off that outward sin that so easily besetteth thee. thou canst not. how then wilt thou change thy life from all evil to all good? indeed, it is impossible to be done, unless first thy heart be changed. for, so long as the tree remains evil, it cannot bring forth good fruit. but art thou able to change thy own heart, from all sin to all holiness? to quicken a soul that is dead in sin, -dead to God, and alive only to the world? no more than thou art able to quicken a dead body, to raise to life him that lieth in the grave. yea, thou art not able to quicken thy soul in any degree, no more than to give any degree of life to the dead body. thou canst do nothing, more or less, in this matter; thou art utterly without strength. to be deeply sensible of this , how helpless thou art, as ell as how guilty and how sinful, - this is that 'repentance not to be repented of', which is the forerunner of the kingdom of God.
7. if to this lively conviction of thy inward and outward sins, of thy utter guiltiness and helplessness, there be added suitable affections - sorrow of heart, for having despised thy own mercies, - remorse and self-condemnation, having they mouth stopped, - shame to lift up thine eyes to heave, - fear of the wrath of god abiding on thee, of his curse hanging over thy head and of the fiery indignation ready to devour those who forget God, and obey not our Lord Jesus Christ, - earnest desire to escape from that indignation, to cease from evil and learn to do well; - then I say unto thee, in the name of the Lord, 'thou art not far from the kingdom of god'. one step more and thou shalt enter in . thou dost 'repent'. now, 'believe the gospel'.
8. The gospel, (that is, good tidings, good news for guilty,
*85 helpless sinners) in the largest sense of the word, means, the whole revelation made to men by Jesus Christ; and sometimes the account of what our Lord did and suffered while He tabernacled among men. the substance of all is, 'Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners'; or, 'God so loved the world, that He gave his only-begotten Son, to the end we might not perish, but have everlasting life' or, 'He was bruised for our transgressions, He was wounded for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon Him and with His stripes we are healed.
9. Believe this and the kingdom of God is thine. by faith thou attainest the promise. 'He pardoneth and absolveth all that truly repent and unfeignedly believe His holy gospel'. as soon as ever God hath spoken to thy heart, 'Be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee', his kingdom comes: thou hast 'righteousness and peace and joy in the HolyGhost'.
10. only beware thou do not deceive thy own soul, with regard to the nature of this faith. it is not, as some have fondly conceived, a bare assent to the truth of the Bible, of the articles of our Creed, or of all that is contained in the Old and New Testament. the devils believe this, as well as i or thou! and yet they are devils still. bu tis is, over and above this, a sure trust in the mercy of god, through Christ Jesus. it is a confidence in a pardoning God. it is a divine evidence or conviction that 'God was in Christ, reconciling the wolf to Himself, not imputing to them their' former 'trespasses' and, in particular, that the Son of god hath love Me and given himself for me and that i, even I, am now reconciled to God by the blood of His cross.
11. Dost thou thus believe? then the peace of God is in thy heart and sorrow and sighing flee away. thou art no longer in doubt of the love of God; it is clear as the noon day sun. Thou criest out, 'my song shall be always of the lovingkindness of the Lord: with my mouth will I ever be telling of thy truth, from one generation to another'. Thou art no longer afraid of hell or death or him that had once the power of death, the devil; no, nor painfully afraid of God Himself; only thou hast a tender, filial fear of offending Him. dost thou believe? then thy 'soul doth magnify the Lord' and they 'spirit rejoiceth in God thy Saviour'. thou rejoicest in that thou hast 'redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness
*86 of sins'. thou rejoicest in that 'Spirit of adoption', which crieth in thy heart, 'abba, Father!' thou rejoicest in a 'hope full of immortality'; in reaching forth unto the 'mark for the prize of thy high calling'; in an earnest expectation of all the good things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.
12. Dost thou now believe? then the love of God is' now 'shed abroad in thy heart'. thou lovest him, because he first loved us. and, because thou loves God, thou lovest thy brother also. and, being filled with 'love, peace, joy', thou art also filled with 'long-suffering, gentleness, fidelity, goodness, meekness, temperance' and all the other fruits of the same Spirit; in a word, with whatever dispositions are holy, are heavenly or divine. for while thou 'beholdest with open' uncovered 'face' (the veil now being taken away) 'the glory of the Lord' His glorious love and the glorious image wherein thou wast created, thou art 'changed into the same image, from glory to glory, by the spirit of the Lord'.
13. this repentance, this faith, this peace, joy, love, this change from glory to glory, is what the wisdom of the world has voted to be madness, mere enthusiasm utter distraction. but thou, O man of God, regard them not; be thou moved by none of these things. thou knowest in whom thou hast believed. see that no man take thy crown. whereunto thou hast already attained, hold fat and follow, till thou attain all the great and precious promises. and thou who hast not yet known him , let not vain men make thee ashamed of the gospel of Christ . be thou in nothing terrified by those who speak evil of the things which they know not.God will soon turn thy heaviness into joy. O let not thy hands hand down! yet a little longer and He will take away thy fears and give thee the spirit of a sound mind. He is nigh 'that justifieth': who is he that condemneth? it is Christ that died, yea rather, that rose again, who is even now at the right hand of God, making intercession' for thee.
Now cast thyself on the Lamb of God, with all thy sins, how many soever they be and 'an entrance' shall' now 'be ministered unto thee, into the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
these words naturally lead us to consider, First, the nature of true religion, here termed y our Lord, 'the kingdom of God' which, saith He, 'is at hand' and, Secondly, the way
*77 thereto, which he points out in those words, 'Repent ye and believe the gospel'.
I. 1. we are, First, to consider the nature of true religion, here termed by our Lord, 'the kingdom of God'. the same expression the great apostle uses in his Epistle to the Romans, where he likewise explains his Lord's words, saying, 'the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost'. Rom. 14.17
2. 'the kingdom of God' or true religion, 'is not meat and drink'. it is well known, that not only the unconverted Jews, but great numbers of those who had received the faith of Christ, were, notwithstanding, 'zealous of the law', Acts 21.20 even the ceremonial law of Moses. whatsoever, therefore, they found written therein, wither concerning meat and drink offerings, or the distinction between clean and unclean meats, they not only observed themselves, but vehemently pressed the same even on those 'among the Gentiles' (or Heathens) who were turned to God' , yea, to such a degree, that some of them taught wheresoever they came among them, 'Except ye be circumcised and keep the law'[ (the whole ritual law), ye cannot be saved.' acts 15.1,24
3. in opposition to these, the Apostle declares, both here and in many other places, that true religion does not consist in Meat and Drink, or in any ritual observances; nor, indeed, in any outward thing whatever; in any outward thing whatever; in anything exterior to the heart; thee whole substance thereof lying in 'righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost'.
4. not in any Outward Thing; such as Forms or Ceremonies, even of the most excellent kind. supposing these to be ever so decent and significant, ever so expressive of inward things: supposing them ever so helpful, not only to the vulgar, whose thought reaches little farther than their sight, but even to men of understanding, men of stronger capacities, as doubtless they may sometimes be: Yea, supposing them, as in the case of the Jews, to be appointed by God Himself, yet even during the period of time wherein that appointment remains in force, true religion does not principally consist therein, nay, strictly speaking, not at all. how much more must this hold concerning such rites and forms as are only of human appointment! the religion of Christ rises infinitely higher and lies immensely deeper than all these. these are good in their place just so far as they are
*78 in fact subservient to true religion. and it were superstition to object against them, while they are applied only as occasional helps to human weakness. but let no man carry them farther. let no man dream that they have any intrinsic worth or that religion cannot subsist without them. this were to make them an abomination to the Lord.
5. the nature of religion is so far from consisting in these, in forms of worship or rites and ceremonies, that it does not properly consist in any outward actions of what kind soever. it is true, a man cannot have nay religion who is guilty of vicious, immoral actions or who does to others what he would not they should do unto him, if he were in the same circumstances. and it is also true, that he can have no real religion who 'knows to do good and doeth it not'. yet may a man both abstain from outward evil and do good and still have no religion. yea, 2 persons may do the same outward work, suppose, feeding the hungry or clothing the naked and, in the mean time, one of these may be truly religious and the other have no religion at all, for the one may act from the love of God and the other from the love of praise. so manifest it is, that although true religion naturally leads to every good word and work, yet the real nature thereof lies deeper still even in 'the hidden man of the heart'.
6. I say of the Hear. for neither does religion consist in orthodoxy or right opinions which, although they are not properly outward things, are not in the heart, but the understanding. a man may be orthodox in every point. he may not only espouse right opinions, but zealously defend them against all opposers. he may think justly concerning the incarnation of our Lord, concerning the ever-blessed Trinity and every other doctrine contained in the oracles of God. he may assent to all the 3 Creeds - that called the Apostles', the Nicene and the Athanasian and yet it is possible he may have no religion at all, no more than a Jew, Turk or Pagan. he may be almost as orthodox - as the devil, (though, indeed, not altogether for every man errs in something; whereas we cannot well conceive him to hold any erroneous opinion) and may, all the while, be as great a stranger as he to the religion of the heart.
7. this alone is religion, truly so called: this alone is in the sight of God of great price. the Apostle sums it all up in 3 particulars, 'righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy
*79 Ghost'. and, First, Righteousness. we cannot be at a loss concerning this, if we remember the words of our Lord, describing the 2 grand branches thereof, on which 'hang all the law and the Prophets' , thou shalt love the Lord they God with all thy heart and with all thy mid and with all thy soul and with all they strength: this is the first and great branch of Christian righteousness. thou shalt delight they self in the Lord thy God; thou shalt seek and find all happiness in Him. He shall be 'thy shield and thy exceeding great reward', in time and in eternity. all thy bones shall say, 'Whom have i in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that i desire beside Thee!' Thous shalt hear and fulfill His word who saith, 'My son, give me thy heart'. and, having given Him thy heart, thy inmost soul, to reign there without a rival, thou mayest well cry out in the fullness of they heart, 'I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength. the Lord is my strong rock and my defence; my Saviour, my God and my might, in whom I will trust; my buckler, the horn also of my salvation and my refuge'.
8. and the second commandment is like unto this: the Second great branch of Christian righteousness is closely and inseparably connected there with; even, 'Thou shat love thy neighbour as thyself'. Thou Shalt Love, - thou shalt embrace with the most tender good-will, the most earnest and cordial affection, the most inflamed desires of preventing or removing all evil and of procuring for him every possible good, -Thy Neighbour; - that is not only thy friend, they kinsman or they acquaintance; not only the virtuous, the friendly, him that loves thee, that prevents (def - archaic 'to act ahead of) or returns your kindness; but every child of man, every human creature, every soul which God hath made; not excepting him whom thou never hast seen in the flesh, whom thou knowest not, either by face or name; not excepting him whom thou knowest to be evil and unthankful, him that still despiteful uses and persecutes thee. Him thou shalt love As Thyself; with the same invariable thirst after his happiness in every kind; the same unwearied care to screen him from whatever might grieve or hurt either his soul or body.
9. now is not this love 'the fulfilling of the law'? the sum of all Christian righteousness? of all inward righteousness; for it necessarily implies 'bowels of mercies, humbleness of mind' (seeing 'love is not puffed up') 'gentleness, meekness, longsuffering
*80 suffering' (for love 'is not provoked' but 'believeth, hopeth, endureth all things') and of all outward righteousness; for 'love worketh no evil to his neighbour' either by word or deed. it cannot willingly hurt ore grieve any one. and it is zealous of good works. every love of mankind, as he hath opportunity, 'doeth good unto all men', being (without partiality and without hypocrisy) 'full of mercy and good fruits'.
10. but true religion or a heart right toward God and man implies HAPPINESS AS WELL AS HOLINESS. for for it is not only 'righteousness', but also 'peace and joy in the Holy Ghost'. what peace? 'the peace of God', which God only can give and the world cannot take away; the peace which 'passeth all understanding'., which God only can give and the world cannot take away; the peace which 'passeth all understanding', all barely rational conception; being a supernatural sensation, a divine taste of 'the powers of the world to come'. such as the natural man knoweth not, how wise soever in the things of this world; nor, indeed, can he know it, in his present state, 'because it is spiritually discerned'. it is a peace that banishes all doubt, all painful uncertainty; the Spirit of God bearing witness with the spirit of a Christian, that he is 'a child of God'. and it banishes fear, all such fear as hath torment; the fear of the wrath of God; the fear of hell; the fear of the devil; and, in particular, the fear of death: He that hath the peace of God, desiring, if it were the will of God, 'to depart and to be with Christ'.
11. with this peace of God, wherever it is fixed in the soul, there is also 'joy in the Holy Ghost', joy wrought in the heart by the Holy Ghost, by the ever-blessed Spirit of God. He is is that worketh in us that calm, humble rejoicing in God, through Christ Jesus, 'by whom we have now received the atonement'..the reconciliation with God and that enables us boldly to confirm the truth of the royal psalmist's declaration, 'Blessed is the man' (or rather, Happy) 'whose unrighteousness is forgiven and whose sin is covered'. he it is that inspires the Christian soul with that even, solid joy, which arises from the testimony of the spirit that he is a child of God and that gives him to 'rejoiced with joy unspeakable, in hope of 'the glory of God'; hope both of the glorious image of God, which is in part and shall be fully, 'revealed in Him' and of that crown of glory which fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for him.
12.this holiness and happiness, joined in one, are sometimes styled in the inspired writings, 'the kingdom of God', (as by
*81 our Lord in the text) and sometimes, 'the kingdom of heaven'. it is termed 'the kingdom of God', because it is the immediate fruit of God's reigning in the soul. so soon as ever He takes unto Himself His mighty power and sets up His throne in our hearts, they are instantly filled with this 'righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost'. it is called 'the Kingdom of heaven', because it is (in a degree) heaven opened in the soul. for whosoever they are that experience this, they can aver (def - assert or affirm with confidence) before angels and men.
Everlasting life is won,
Glory is on earth begun,
according to the constant tenor of Scripture, which everywhere bears record, God 'hath given unto us eternal life and this life is in His Son. he that hath the Son' reigning in his heart) hath life' even life everlasting. I John 5.11-2 for 'this is life eternal, to know Thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent'. John 17.3 and the, to whom this is given, may confidently address God, though they wee in the midst of a fiery furnace,
Thee, Lord, safe shielded by Thy power,
Thee, son of God, Jehovah, we adore;
in form of man descending to appear:
to Thee be ceaseless hallelujahs given,
praise, as in heave Thy throne, we offer here;
for where Thy presence is displayed, is heaven.
13. and this 'kingdom of God' or of heaven, 'is a hand'. as these words were originally spoken, they implied that 'the time' was then fulfilled, God being 'made manifest in the flesh', when he would set up His kingdom among men and reign in the hearts of His people. and is not the time now fulfilled? for, 'Lo! (saith He) I am with you always' you who preach remission of sins in My name, 'even unto the end of the world' Matt. 28.20 wheresoever, therefore, the gospel of Christ is preached, this his 'kingdom is nigh at hand'. it is not far from every one of you. ye may this hour enter thereinto, if so be ye hearken to His voice, 'Repent ye and believe the Gospel,
II. 1. this is the way: Walk ye i it. and, First, 'repent', that is, know yourselves. this is the first repentance, previous to faith; even conviction or self-knowledge. awake, then, thou
*82 that sleepest. know thyself to be a sinner and what manner of sinner thou art. know that corruption of thy inmost nature, whereby thou art very far gone from original righteousness, whereby' the flesh lusteth' always 'contrary to the Spirit' through that 'carnal mind' which 'is enmity against God', which 'is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be'. know that thou art corrupted in every power, in every faculty of thy soul; that thou art totally corrupted in every one of these, all the foundations, being out of course. the eyes of thine understanding are darkened, so that they cannot discern God, or the things of God. the clouds of ignorance and error rest upon thee and cover thee with the shadow of death. thou knowest nothing yet as thou ought to know, neither God no the world nor thyself. Thy will is no longer the will of God, but is utterly perverse and distorted, averse from all good, from all which God loves and prone to all evil, to very abomination which God hateth. thy affections are alienated from God and scattered abroad over all the earth. all thy passions, both thy desires and aversions, thy joys and sorrows, thy hopes and fears, are out of frame, are either undue in their degree or placed on undue objects. so that there is no soundness in thy soul, but 'from the crown of the head, to the sole of the foot' (to use the strong expression of the Prophet) there are only 'wounds, and bruises and putrefying sores'.
2. such is the inbred corruption of thy heart, of thy very inmost nature. and what manner of branches canst thou expect to grow from such an evil root? hence springs unbelief, ever departing from the living God, saying, 'Who is the Lord, that i should sere Him? Tush! thou, God, carest not for it'. hence independence, affecting to be like the Most High. hence pride, in all its forms; teaching thee to say, 'I am rich, and increased in goods and have need of nothing'. from this evil fountain flow forth the bitter streams of vanity, thirst of praise, ambition, covetousness, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life. from this arise anger, hatred, malice, revenge, envy, jealousy, evil surmisings: from this, all the foolish and hurtful lusts that now 'pierce thee through with many sorrows' and, if not timely prevented, will at length drown thy soul in everlasting perdition.
3. and what fruits can grow on such branches as these? only such as are bitter and evil continually. of pride cometh
*83 contention, vain boasting, seeking and receiving praise of men and so robbing God of that glory which He cannot give unto another. of the lust of the flesh, come gluttony or drunkenness, luxury or sensuality, fornication, uncleanness; variously defiling that body which was designed for a temple of the Holy Ghost: of unbelief, every evil word and work. but the time would fail shouldest thou reckon up all: all the idle words thou hast spoken, provoking the Most High, grieving the Holy One of Israel; all the evil works thou hast done, either wholly evil in themselves or, at least, not done to the glory of God. for thy actual sins are more than thou art able to express, more than the hairs of they head. who can number the sands of the sea. or the drops of rain or they iniquities?
4. and knowest thou not that 'the wages of sin is death?' - death, not only temporal, but eternal. 'the soul that sinneth, it shall die'; for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. it shall die the second death. this is the sentence, to 'be punished' with never-ending death, 'with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power'. knowest thou not that every sinner...not properly, 'is in danger of hell-fire' ; that expression is far too weak; but rather, 'is under the sentence of hell fire'; doomed already, just dragging to execution. thou art guilty of everlasting death. it is the just reward of thy inward and outward wickedness. it is just that the sentence should now take place. doest thou see, dost thou feel this? at thou throughly convinced that thou deservest God's wrath and everlasting damnation? would God do thee no wrong, if He now commanded the earth to open and swallow thee up? if thou wert now to go down quick into the pit, into the fire that never shall be quenched? if god hath given thee truly to repent, thou hast a deep sense that these things are so and that it is of His mere mercy thou art not consumed, swept away from the face of the earth.
5.and what wilt thou do to appease the wrath of God, to atone for all thy sins and to escape the punishment thou hast so justly deserved? alas, thou canst do nothing; nothing that will in anywise make amends to God for one evil works or word, or thought. if thou couldest now do all things well, if from this very hour till thy soul should return to God thou couldest perform perfect, uninterrupted obedience, even this would not
*84 atone for what is past. the not increasing thy debt would not discharge it. it would still remain as great as ever. Yea, the present and future obedience of all the men upon earth and all the angels in heaven, would never make satisfaction to the justice of God for one single sin. how vain, then, was the thought of atoning for thy own sins, by anything thou couldest do! it costeth far more to redeem one soul, that all mankind is able to pay. so that were there no other help for a guilty sinner, without doubt he must have perished everlastingly.
6. but suppose perfect obedience, for the time to come, could atone for the sins that are past, this would profit thee nothing, for thou art not able to perform it; no, not in any one point. begin now. make the trial. shake off that outward sin that so easily besetteth thee. thou canst not. how then wilt thou change thy life from all evil to all good? indeed, it is impossible to be done, unless first thy heart be changed. for, so long as the tree remains evil, it cannot bring forth good fruit. but art thou able to change thy own heart, from all sin to all holiness? to quicken a soul that is dead in sin, -dead to God, and alive only to the world? no more than thou art able to quicken a dead body, to raise to life him that lieth in the grave. yea, thou art not able to quicken thy soul in any degree, no more than to give any degree of life to the dead body. thou canst do nothing, more or less, in this matter; thou art utterly without strength. to be deeply sensible of this , how helpless thou art, as ell as how guilty and how sinful, - this is that 'repentance not to be repented of', which is the forerunner of the kingdom of God.
7. if to this lively conviction of thy inward and outward sins, of thy utter guiltiness and helplessness, there be added suitable affections - sorrow of heart, for having despised thy own mercies, - remorse and self-condemnation, having they mouth stopped, - shame to lift up thine eyes to heave, - fear of the wrath of god abiding on thee, of his curse hanging over thy head and of the fiery indignation ready to devour those who forget God, and obey not our Lord Jesus Christ, - earnest desire to escape from that indignation, to cease from evil and learn to do well; - then I say unto thee, in the name of the Lord, 'thou art not far from the kingdom of god'. one step more and thou shalt enter in . thou dost 'repent'. now, 'believe the gospel'.
8. The gospel, (that is, good tidings, good news for guilty,
*85 helpless sinners) in the largest sense of the word, means, the whole revelation made to men by Jesus Christ; and sometimes the account of what our Lord did and suffered while He tabernacled among men. the substance of all is, 'Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners'; or, 'God so loved the world, that He gave his only-begotten Son, to the end we might not perish, but have everlasting life' or, 'He was bruised for our transgressions, He was wounded for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon Him and with His stripes we are healed.
9. Believe this and the kingdom of God is thine. by faith thou attainest the promise. 'He pardoneth and absolveth all that truly repent and unfeignedly believe His holy gospel'. as soon as ever God hath spoken to thy heart, 'Be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee', his kingdom comes: thou hast 'righteousness and peace and joy in the HolyGhost'.
10. only beware thou do not deceive thy own soul, with regard to the nature of this faith. it is not, as some have fondly conceived, a bare assent to the truth of the Bible, of the articles of our Creed, or of all that is contained in the Old and New Testament. the devils believe this, as well as i or thou! and yet they are devils still. bu tis is, over and above this, a sure trust in the mercy of god, through Christ Jesus. it is a confidence in a pardoning God. it is a divine evidence or conviction that 'God was in Christ, reconciling the wolf to Himself, not imputing to them their' former 'trespasses' and, in particular, that the Son of god hath love Me and given himself for me and that i, even I, am now reconciled to God by the blood of His cross.
11. Dost thou thus believe? then the peace of God is in thy heart and sorrow and sighing flee away. thou art no longer in doubt of the love of God; it is clear as the noon day sun. Thou criest out, 'my song shall be always of the lovingkindness of the Lord: with my mouth will I ever be telling of thy truth, from one generation to another'. Thou art no longer afraid of hell or death or him that had once the power of death, the devil; no, nor painfully afraid of God Himself; only thou hast a tender, filial fear of offending Him. dost thou believe? then thy 'soul doth magnify the Lord' and they 'spirit rejoiceth in God thy Saviour'. thou rejoicest in that thou hast 'redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness
*86 of sins'. thou rejoicest in that 'Spirit of adoption', which crieth in thy heart, 'abba, Father!' thou rejoicest in a 'hope full of immortality'; in reaching forth unto the 'mark for the prize of thy high calling'; in an earnest expectation of all the good things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.
12. Dost thou now believe? then the love of God is' now 'shed abroad in thy heart'. thou lovest him, because he first loved us. and, because thou loves God, thou lovest thy brother also. and, being filled with 'love, peace, joy', thou art also filled with 'long-suffering, gentleness, fidelity, goodness, meekness, temperance' and all the other fruits of the same Spirit; in a word, with whatever dispositions are holy, are heavenly or divine. for while thou 'beholdest with open' uncovered 'face' (the veil now being taken away) 'the glory of the Lord' His glorious love and the glorious image wherein thou wast created, thou art 'changed into the same image, from glory to glory, by the spirit of the Lord'.
13. this repentance, this faith, this peace, joy, love, this change from glory to glory, is what the wisdom of the world has voted to be madness, mere enthusiasm utter distraction. but thou, O man of God, regard them not; be thou moved by none of these things. thou knowest in whom thou hast believed. see that no man take thy crown. whereunto thou hast already attained, hold fat and follow, till thou attain all the great and precious promises. and thou who hast not yet known him , let not vain men make thee ashamed of the gospel of Christ . be thou in nothing terrified by those who speak evil of the things which they know not.God will soon turn thy heaviness into joy. O let not thy hands hand down! yet a little longer and He will take away thy fears and give thee the spirit of a sound mind. He is nigh 'that justifieth': who is he that condemneth? it is Christ that died, yea rather, that rose again, who is even now at the right hand of God, making intercession' for thee.
Now cast thyself on the Lamb of God, with all thy sins, how many soever they be and 'an entrance' shall' now 'be ministered unto thee, into the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
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