This feels like a good moment to remind all and sundry of one of the greatest moments of leadership in recent years:

“Our country right now, it’s got problems we don’t have in the military,” Mattis said. “You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.”

Like another military hero who was of more than military importance, he survives political service in the Trump era with honor intact.

They few, they happy few.

TGR carries the latest in my series on the biblical epic of Babel:

So if God is removing the sin problem, and will thus reverse the curse of Babel, what will he do? He’ll remove the multiplicity of languages. Right?

The miracle that shows the pouring out of the Holy Spirit from the ascended Christ, marking the founding of the New Testament church as a new kind of community, will be everyone miraculously speaking the same language. Presumably Hebrew. Right?

Wrong. God’s pattern is to take things that were introduced because of sin and redeem them rather than remove them. God’s people demand a human king, and at that moment, God says to Samuel, “they’re rejecting me from being king over them.” But when Christ comes, he doesn’t eliminate the Davidic (i.e. human) kingship, he inherits it and occupies it eternally.

When Christ rises, he rises with the five wounds still in his body.

Let me know what you think!

My series on seeing the Right after fusionism through the lens of Whittaker Chambers concludes at Law & Liberty with a consideration of the temptation to renounce modern life altogether:

Chambers’ early experience with the Quakers illustrates how efforts at building strict moral community become dysfunctional when those of different beliefs are viewed as threats to the community’s integrity. The community becomes a tribe, with a tribalistic suspicion of outsiders. This is a case of the “paradox of intentionality”—formative communities that exist for the purpose of moral formation tend to descend quickly into tribalism and self-righteousness, precisely because formation has become an end in itself. Moral formation ought always to be formation for a mission, and where that mission is authentic it will cultivate a lively sense of common humanity and civic solidarity with our neighbors of other beliefs.

I’m humbled to have had the opportunity to write this series. As always, your thoughts are welcome!

My series on Babel continues at TGR:

I’m glad that people have found the exile motif helpful in rethinking our lives and our work as God’s people within cultures that are not in covenant with God. But there is a lot more to it than that. Exile is only one stop in a larger story, and the larger story gives exile its deepest meaning. And if we miss that bigger story, we’ll draw the wrong lessons for our daily work from the exile.

Let me know what you think!

Law & Liberty carries part 2 of my series on rethinking the Right in light of Whittaker Chambers, this one on the temptation of economic reductionism:

Goldberg wants to have what Chambers called the communist vision (a godless universe) without the communist faith (a willingness to reorder society on the assumption that there is nothing higher than the human mind). That is unsustainable. As Bahnsen and Brian Mattson write: “A widespread effort to pretend to believe in God will not stave off suicide.”

Part 1 covered the temptation of nationalism; Part 3, next week, will cover the temptation of romantic nostalgia. Stay tuned!