Today, Law & Liberty runs part one of my three-part series on how Whittaker Chambers can help the Right rethink its future after fusionism:

Chambers also shows why we must not give tribes a final veto power over people’s choices. Tribes consistently fail to live up to their own standards. If given a veto over our lives, tribal leaders will not use it to build us up morally. They will use it to insulate themselves from moral accountability. That’s part of the crisis of history, from which tribes are not immune. Under modern conditions, it is no longer possible—as it was when we were radically poorer and less mobile—to uphold traditions in society without giving unaccountable power to people who will abuse it.

This builds on my previous L&L article on how Chambers can help us understand why fusionism failed. Let me know what you think, and look out for parts two and three coming next week and the week after!

My series on Babel returns on TGR:

To be God’s people faithfully and fully, we must work God’s way. This calling can be carried out individually under any circumstances. The Roman slave toiling for pagan masters in isolation from the church is serving Christ, we are told. But it is not enough for God’s mission that his followers are faithful individually. God also builds a people for himself, working together to work God’s way insofar as circumstances permit. Between Genesis 11 and Acts 2, this apparently requires a covenant nation – a national community dedicated to working God’s way.

Let me know what you think!

Grateful to Crossway for running my article “5 Myths about Calvinism,” adapted from my book:

Today, the phrase “free will” refers to moral responsibility. It means people are not just puppets of exterior natural forces like their heredity and environment. But in the sixteenth century, at the very beginning of the Reformation, one of the key debates was over “free will” in a completely different sense. The question then was whether the will was, by nature, enslaved by sin and in captivity to Satan. Believing in “free will” meant believing that human beings are not born as slaves of Satan. Denying “free will” meant believing that they are. Calvin even called the slavery of the will to Satan “voluntary slavery.”

At TGR, I take a break from my series on Babel to reflect on the Faith at Work Summit just concluded. Regular programming resumes next time.

Then when I’m done with Babel, I’ll take down the Universal Basic Income – megaphone for dog-whistlers, builder of border walls and harbinger of the Gattaca future.

My series on Babel continues at TGR:

God doesn’t laugh at the human aspiration to build without limit. And not only because it isn’t a laughing matter. God doesn’t even think it’s an aspiration beyond our reach. On the contrary, he explicitly affirms human capacity to build without limit.

That is indeed the whole crux of the problem – we can build sinfully without limit.

Let me know what you think!