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I was having dinner with some friends the other night when the question arose, “How important is the Presidency anyway?”. The person that asked it wondered why they were inundated for two years straight with presidential politics on every imaginable media outlet. It’s seemingly inescapable. Do we really need to focus on presidential elections this much? Is it just some deranged cult of personality hero fetish? Do we need to tune all of this stuff out?
No, we don’t.
Several people of different political persuasions catalogued various policy achievements of past presidents, money spent, judges appointed and wars fought. But the presidency is much more than a list of policies enacted or decisions made. It’s an institution, one that helps Americans know who we are, what we want, and what our hopes and dreams are.
This time around around we have seen a Republican party torn. Republicans don’t like Obama for a number of reasons, and Willard Mitt Romney seems like the man to beat him. And yet, Romney isn’t coasting to an easy coronation. There are social conservatives who don’t trust his reliability on abortion and gay marriage. There are fiscal conservatives that think Romney will be the return of the Bush era big government conservative with a vengeance. There are libertarians that worry about expansive government overreach that will continue to erode what little is left of the Constitution’s authority. There are dovish conservatives who worry that we just can’t handle another decade of military adventurism and nation building.
It looks as if this discordant host will not prevail and that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee. But this is not a foregone conclusion. Five million dollars in Newt’s coffers certainly make things more interesting (interesting is of course a clinically neutral term). But whether or not the five million dollars the former Speaker of the People’s House will make the difference in the coming weeks, the subsequent elections still matter.
The exit polls in New Hampshire revealed something interesting. Ron Paul’s supporters said that they would support Romney as the nominee if he wins, but that they wanted to send a message. They wanted to send a message. Presidential elections matter and they get enough media coverage to make us want to be Amish and swear off social media for a reason. Presidential elections give us a chance to regularly revisit our ideals as a people. They give us all together as Iowans, Alaskans, Pennsylvanians and Californians to decide what makes us a people, and what would serve to make us a more perfect union. The primaries do divide us, but they also unite us. They help us to identify what are the most important questions, and what the answer to those questions are. True in the end when November rolls around we only get two choices, but those choices are the product of a refining process, one that winnows it down to what matters most to the most of us.
So this election season, don’t tune out. Tune in and make your voice heard. The conversation won’t be the same without it.
“What happened to Jesus at his baptism…was given its counterpart in the church when the Holy Spirit sent by the Father in the Name of the Son came down upon the Apostolic church, sealing it as the people of God redeemed through the blood of Christ, consecrating it to share in the communion of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and sending it out into the world united with Christ as his Body to engage in the service of the Gospel.”
-T.F. Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation
When we read the apologetics of the second and third centuries, can we altogether avoid the painful impression that what we have here—as though the persecuted can only regard themselves as spiritually undeserving of the external pressure brought to bear on them—is, on the whole, a not very happy, a rather self-righteous, and at any rate a not very perspicacious boasting about all those advantages of Christianity over heathen religion which were in themselves incontestable but not ultimately decisive? In these early self-commendations of Christianity a remarkably small part is played by the fact that grace is the truth of Christianity, that the Christian is justified when he is without God, like Abraham, that he is like the publican in the temple, the prodigal son, wretched Lazarus, the guilty thief crucified with Jesus Christ. Instead, we have the—admittedly successful—rivalry of one way of salvation, one wisdom and morality with others, of a higher humanity consummated and transfigured by the cross of Christ with a decadent and defeated humanity which has rightly grown weary of its ancient ideals. How strangely did a man like Tertullian see the danger which threatened at this point, and at the same time never really see it at all, but actually help to increase it. And to the extent that the fact that grace, that Jesus Christ, is the truth of Christianity was never completely concealed in the doctrine and proclamation of the Church, did not the fact that Christianity is the special religion of grace and redemption easily appear to be its final and supreme advantage, although it was robbed of its real meaning and power to convince by the fact that the Church was not content with grace?
-Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.2.17
…Paganism is that view of life which finds the highest goal of human existence in the healthy and harmonious and joyous development of existing human faculties. Very different is the Christian ideal. Paganism is optimistic with regard to unaided human nature’ whereas Christianity is the religion of the broken heart…In saying that Christianity is the religion of the broken heart, we do not mean that Christianity ends with the broken heart; we do not mean that the characteristic Christian attitude is a continual beating on the breast or a continual crying of “Woe is me.” Nothing could be further from the fact. On the contrary, Christianity means that sin is faced once for all, and then is cast, by the grace of God, forever into the depths of the sea. The trouble with the paganism of ancient Greece, as with the paganism of modern times, was not in the superstructure, which was glorious, but in the foundation, which was rotten. There was always something to be covered up; the enthusiasm of the architect was maintained only by ignoring the disturbing fact of sin. In Christianity, on the other hand, nothing needs to be covered up. The fact of sin is faced squarely once for all, and is dealt with by the grace of God. But then, after sin has been removed by the grace of God, the Christian can proceed to develop joyously every faculty that God has given him. Such is the higher Christian humanism—a humanism founded not upon human pride but upon divine grace.
-J. Greshem Machen
At least theologically, there are two effective divisions between American Christians, One is between those for whom the gospel is itself the norm of all truth and the person of Christ therefore the founding metaphysical fact, and those for whom some other agenda or “theory” is the overriding norm. The other is between those who use “justification by faith” — or in the especially aggravated case of Lutherans, the “law and gospel” distinction — to fund their antinomianism, and those appalled by this. The language in which I have described the alternatives will doubtless betray on which side of each division I find myself.
-Robert Jenson, Christian Century (May 2, 2007)
In Against the Protestant Gnostics, Lee contends that for gnostics of all historical types, salvation is about knowledge of the self for the sake of the self, as opposed to knowledge of the mighty acts of God:
As far as the gnostics were concerned, the “many” were overly fascinated by historical happenings, even by the historical events in the life of Christ. Elaine Pagels, writing on the ahistorical views of Heracleon, reports that he claimed: that those who insist that Jesus, a man who lived in the flesh, is Christ fail to distinguish between literal and symbolic truth. . . . Heracleon goes on to say that those who take the events concerning Jesus “literally”—as if the events themselves were revelation—have fallen into flesh and error. Concern about the mighty acts of God in both the Old and New Covenants was from a gnostic perspective a lower stage in the development of an authentic Christian understanding. To know Christ was not in any sense to have knowledge about the “historical man of flesh and blood” but rather to be personally related to the mythical heavenly being who liberates humanity from historical concerns…
…The reason for this totally different concern of the gnostics is their conviction that the root problem of humankind is ignorance. Judaism and Christianity in their orthodox expressions would understand the basic source of all our misery to be sin, humanity’s failure to meet God’s expectations or its own potential; gnosticism would see the human predicament as resulting from a profound blindness concerning the human situation. “Ignorance of the Father,” states the Gospel of Truth, “brought about anguish and terror. And the anguish grew solid like a fog so that no one was able to see.
Before delineating the various aspects of the gnostic type, it should be understood that the one primary ingredient for the birth of gnosticism is a particular mood. The mood is one of despair. The gnostic solution can be satisfying only to those who have no tangible or rational hope. Because a certain number of people at every stage of history are caught up in despair, gnosticism of one sort or other always has a following. Throughout Christian history, certain individuals and small groups have been drawn toward the gnostic way. That historical reality is not terribly alarming; every great religion has variations on the theme. When, however, we come to a period like that of the first four centuries of the Church, when the gnostic way almost prevailed, how can we speak of a mood? Can an entire culture be in despair? And if so, why?
-Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics