Let the Left be the Left

Pundits right and left lament the fact that religious themes increasingly shape Congressional battles over everything from the President's judicial nominees to controversy surrounding the late Terri Schiavo. From bloggers to TV talking heads, they mourn the tragedy that the debate would "sink so low." Righties decry religious accusations from the Left, while Lefties often seem offended by mere religious impulse on the Right.

But today's indignant rhetoric doesn't show deterioration in political argument as much as an inevitable realization of where all argument truly originates. Theologians call it "epistemological self-consciousness," a fancy description for light and darkness progressively becoming more self-aware, and hence less pretentious, about what they really are.

Thus both sides of America's cultural divide are simply coming to an unavoidable conclusion: Religious neutrality is impossible. Secularism, like all other isms, is a religious viewpoint.

Take, for example, the average frat boy's favorite comeback when his conduct is questioned: "You can't legislate morality." That's nonsense. Always has been; always will be. The fact is, every law on the books is someone's morality codified. That's the nature of law. But America's formerly entrenched elites don't like the fact that many of us have awakened to the idea that, when it comes to lawmaking, Moses and Jesus might be preferable to the likes of Maxine Waters and Barney Franks.

So the question has progressed (for the better, I think) from "does religion have a place in public discourse?" to "which religious paradigm will prevail in public discourse?". Prevalence is inevitable in a free society, because debates, elections, and other competitive exercises, unlike outcomes-based school curricula, have winners and losers. And the great virtue of a truly free society is that prevalence does not include persecution. Not coincidentally, that is also the model of both biblical Testaments.

The Left didn't squeal as long as they dominated the pre-blog era and Christians slept. They didn't filibuster Clarence Thomas' nomination, for example, and they could have. But now that they've been freely elected to fewer seats at the table, they moan and wail and prophesy doom. "Theocracy" they screech, and then howl at the moon and every available news outlet about DeLay and Dobson and an "American Taliban." Such tripe worked for years, when pointy-fingered crying sent spineless conservatives scurrying to secularism's altar of repentance.

But it doesn't work anymore. So both sides are merely going to their respective religious corners (whose existence they can no longer deny), and are putting in their mouth pieces. This showdown was inevitable.

The fight is unfair in one respect: The Left worships at an altar of double standards. They cheat. Oh, the Right can play dirty sometimes too, but the Lefties are masters at it. Howard Dean, once the non-sectarian candidate but suddenly a pew-jumping pharisee, slings barb after brimstone barb at the Christian Right, and no MSM eye blinks. Al Gore, at his smug, smarmy worst, compares Christian fundamentalists to Moslem fundamentalists, ignoring fundamental differences between the two in theology and praxis, in order to paint an Osama Bin Robertson in the lesser minds of the masses, lesser than his own to be sure. His wrists aren't even slapped, much less lopped off.

But a misquote of James Dobson about Sponge Bob is proof positive that Jackbooted Thugs For Jesus are just around the corner. Whose corner? Why yours, of course, while you're sleeping with the doors unlocked.

The beauty of the situation—and the reason conservatives should fight a clean fight without worry—is that the choice is becoming plainer to the electorate every day. The public's flight from MSM to the Blogosphere shows that they want honesty. So the Right presently is going about tidying up its House (and Senate), while the Left is faced with a much riskier choice: Expunge the loonies and take a hard Right at the yellow light, or make ever more outlandish claims to justify falling off the Left edge of the Earth.

Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama are the relatively smart Libs; they appear to be heading Right (with Obama the far more convincing and attractive of the two). But Dean, Gore, Pelosi, Boxer, and Co. are trapped in the mindset of the old Soviet KGB: Scream ever more absurd accusations long and loud and eventually people will believe you. It would be comical if the stakes weren't so serious.

It reminds me of an article I read years ago in the Moscow Times, when it was just a propaganda rag the Soviets placed in their tourist hotels. I had landed in Russia just in time for the price of gasoline literally to double overnight. An explanation was required, but of course the truth of rising prices could not be told. After all, Socialism being theoretically flawless, inflation was impossible. Some other reason, no matter how ridiculous, had to be found. So it was, I read with my own eyes, that popular demand had precipitated the immediate, one-hundred percent rise in the price of benzin! Yep, it just wasn't fair for everyone else in the world to pay so much, while the noble Soviet people reveled in low-cost paradise. No, they had demanded of their government higher, much higher, gas prices at once or else!

Sure, and Al Gore invented the Internet one night while John Kerry was defending America in Cambodian waters while his fellow GIs were too busy maiming Vietnamese peasants to come help him.

Just let the Left be Left. Their folly is as transparent and hopeless as that of a couple of wizards who once tried to outfox Moses with a snake trick. No, the Left will do themselves in. It's the Right and their (our) tendency to compromise that worries this writer. As Howard Philips once observed (pre-1994) in my hearing, conservatives in Washington never really have fought to win the culture war; they just want to lose it as slowly as possible. "Great idea, son. Really noble, but not on my watch."

May God have mercy on us all, pachyderms and asses alike, who claim to represent Him. May the Right remain ever mindful of the number one conservative temptation: To embrace "a form of godliness, while denying the power thereof." And may the Left awaken to the living, lumpy, Dorian Gray portrait that prophesies their destiny every time Michael Moore opens his mouth.

And God Created GSM

I've just gotten home from three weeks in Eastern Europe, and I can tell you, Americans do a lot of stuff right: Bathrooms (especially heated ones with showers), mattresses, ice cream, cozy kitchens, hotel rooms, cheeseburgers. But we trail in other areas: tea kettles, fresh bread, chocolate, free airport luggage carts, fresh cream. And in one particular regard, we're way behind Europe, Asia, and most likely the Falklands: Mobile Phones.

GSM technology runs circles around, over, and under anything the USA offers. Compared with GSM, my Alltel CDMA (Cave Dweller's Mobile Assistant) gizmo is a joke, and not a funny one.

For example, two weeks ago in Estonia my dinner host parked in Tallinn's old town, dialed an electronic attendant, punched in his minivan's tag number, and paid his parking fee by phone. Marconi would have declared it wrought by God! Bell would have said, "Come here Watson. You gotta see this." Edison would have spoken in tongues!

And that's not all. European phone users roam seamlessly from country to country, and upgrading to a new phone is a simple matter of moving a tiny chip from one's old phone to the new one. Oh, T-Mobile and Cingular offer an American version of GSM in the States, but coverage is spotty. In fact, a T-Mobile GSM phone here in the USA is a little like a car with a navigation system in Bethel, Alaska: You can drive up and down that lone, two-mile road and never get lost!

Also, both Cingular and T-Mobile typically "lock" their customers' GSM phones. Thus the international roamer's only choice is whether he will pay through his right or left nostril for such "convenience."

Yeah, the Europeans have really got this cellular thing down. Sometimes I think I might move over there just for the phones. But then I'd want to come home to go the bathroom.

Ezzo in a Can

I have a plan. Get up at 4:15 am, dressed by 4:45, check email, haul luggage downstairs, be ready for my ride by 5. Leave by 5:15, arrive for airport check-in by 5:45, relaxed and ready for my 7 am flight to Amsterdam, the first of three legs from Bulgaria back to the States.

So much for plans. Afraid of oversleeping, I awaken at 3:30, tossing and turning 'til 3:55 when I admit to myself I'm awake. I arise and ready myself a full half hour ahead of schedule, happy for the extra time to iChat with Dolly, who is undoubtedly still at her computer at 9:30 Monday night. Nope, no Dolly, so I read blogs: Hewitt, Hootsbuddy, Thinkgeek. Google News until 5 o'clock. No driver arrives. 5:15 comes and goes. Still no driver. 5:20.

My insomnia has been prophetic, but not for me: At 5:25 I rouse him by cellphone, and he's loading luggage by 5:50. Now commences one of the fastest rides to an airport I've ever experienced. In fact—I realize as we confront a speed bump at full tilt—I've been on slower flights than this.

Villages and suburbs fly by at triple legal speed; Sofia's red lights grant us amnesty; "Gypsy town" smiles and opens a potholed shortcut to the airport. At 6:16 I am standing at Bulgaria Air's check-in counter, hugging my embarrassed host and promising to return.

Through security, past the green zone, and a final passport check, and we're on the bus to the plane. Bummer: I look at my boarding pass and see the dreaded "E." A middle seat in row ten. We board. Bummer #2: The rows are cramped, mine in particular, which looks as though it has been installed by Soviet mechanics: It's actually bolted in crooked. Bummer #3: The seats don't recline. Oh well, I'll sleep or read. It's only three hours.

Ten minutes into the flight I look up from the airline's inflight magazine (which is imaginatively named "Inflight Magazine") and notice there are no visible hairdos a few rows forward. I look behind me; the plane is jammed as far as I can see. Maybe a short family is up there, or a Hmong tour group. No, wait...it's Break #1: Empty rows! Sixteen beautiful, 80s-blue upholstered, non-reclining empty seats.

There's no rational explanation for cramming all the passengers into the rear of the plane. In fact, unless the flight crew weighs in at three-quarter tons, we're back heavy. So for the safety of my fellow passengers, I nobly nestle into lovely, vacant, odor-free row 6. Break #2: No one follows me. Ah, my limo in the sky!

The pilot greets us, first in Bulgarian, then broken English. Being the single-tongued, mono-cultural, North-Central Floridian American that I happily am, his effort is welcome. But I'm struck by the remarkable resemblance of this captain's voice to Stephen Hawking's voice synthesizer. It's the old Macintosh sore throat monotone, "Izzuntit gray-to have aye compewter that can tawk to-yew?" My goodness. My old Powerbook had a Bulgarian accent all along! Either that or Hawking is flying this plane with one finger and a little wheelchair joystick.

Break #3: There is a recline button after all. It's just hidden where only a person without thighs would find it, a design feature from the pre-cellulite school, no doubt.

Sleep beckons, I recline, and am at peace for an hour, until the toddler behind me finds the tray table. The spirit of Buddy Rich has seized him and for twenty minutes my head bounces to a happy, spastic infant beat. I love babies, of course, but I find myself wanting to give his oblivious mother a gift set of Mr. and Mrs. Ezzo's "Raising Kids God's Way" videos in whatever language she understands.

Suddenly every child under two on the plane is seized by midnight-barking-dog syndrome. They all go berserk at once. A little girl in the aisle has a fit, while her helpless Dad stands behind her not even looking embarrassed. Drummer Baby cries, triggering a diaper-clad chorus from every direction. Dear Lord, the whole plane needs Ezzoing. Forget Estonian seminars, Latvian worship conferences, Bulgarian seminaries; Eastern Europe needs the Ezzos!

Now I wish I had Ezzo videos for the whole planeload of screaming children, unclued parents, unglued attendants, and tortured businessmen. We need some sort of spray, Ezzo in a can: EzZone! Ffffffffttttt! Instant discipline. Oh, wait--We have it already: Benadryl. They need Benadryl and Ezzo videos.

Now I'm fuming. How much longer 'til we land in Amsterdam-it? "Long enough to repent," a little voice whispers, followed by a gentle "while you were out" message: Hey Jim, listen. A calm, as sudden as the previous storm, has filled the cabin. Either God has bought into my EzZone idea and whipped up a batch of His own, or Bulgaria already knows Benadryl.

We land and board another bus. Oblivious Mom sets up her stroller on my left foot. Then Drummer Baby grins at me through an orange pacifier, and I miss my own little Lexi. What a sweet, happy little guy. I am at peace again.

I board Delta 39, seat 29C, bound to Atlanta and Gainesville and Dolly's arms. Potential Drummer Baby 2 is soon deposited in front of me. He smiles and I love him at once. Life's okay. Then again, I'm not the lady in 27C.

My Contingency Plan

I am 54, my daughter, Lexi, is three, and my wife is not telling. And I've stated in various posts my intention to stay young for a long time, not because I dread old age, but because I want to enjoy grandkids. (I hear they're even better than kids, which I cannot imagine.)

But of course one needs contingency plans, so I have mine. I want to be ready, in case age sneaks up on me in the middle of a motorcycle ride, or when I'm playing Cranium with friends, or chasing Dolly around the bedroom. So, purely as a contingency (mind you sonny), I hereby make the following vows:

1. I will shave every day, no matter how many wrinkles my electric Norelco must navigate.
   
2. I will not scan the obits for friends, but I may hire someone to do so.
   
3. I will not cover my pate with a comb-over. I will instead shave my head bald, and this will probably involve an expensive polish.
   
4. I will trim ear and nose hair as passionately as Lexus pursues perfection.
   
5. I will not wear boxers, ever.
   
6. I will not walk around in my underwear in front of the grandchildren.
   
7. I will not act old, nor will I make a fool of myself trying to be hip.
   
8. I will not dye my hair, unless a professional gives me legal assurance that no one can tell, and I will sue if they lie.
   
9. I will continue watching stupid comedies on the order of Mr. Bean and Meet The Parents.
   
10. I will go to outdoor sporting events.
    
11. I will never own a Mercury Grand Marquis, and if I have to drive one as a rental I promise to go faster than my age.
    
12. I will consider the occasional speeding ticket an honor.
    
13. I will not hold others up on the golf course.
    
14. I will go without food and water in order to own the best hearing aids.
    
15. I will give anyone treating me like a "cute little old man" the first and worst octogenarian wedgie of their life.
    
16. I will remain everyone's favorite "Papa," and make Lexi glad she didn't have one of those young, inexperienced dads.
    
17. I will keep this list with me when my memory starts going. If I remember.
    
18. I will try to ensure that my funeral inspires others to enter the ministry and adopt children.
    
19. I will age in such a way that my funeral is likely to be attended by a youthful majority.
    
20. I will be a legend in the minds of my great-grandchildren.

Things Go Better Without Coke: A Recovering Soft Drink Addict Speaks

I was a Dad for years; I just didn't have kids to prove it. So by the start of my fifty-second year, when Lexi came along, I was suffering from a severe mush build-up, a backlog of fathering, kissing, tickling, teaching, and just plain loving that badly needed expressing.

Dolly and I had watched and learned about parenting over the years, trying to be good students of that fine art in faith that our day would come. We were inexperienced, but not naive. I expected a bit of Adam or Eve eventually to rise up from that tiny bundle of joy and try to snatch an apple, so I knew spankings would inevitably be a part of loving. Sin in a perfect baby was no surprise. In fact hardly anything about fatherhood really caught me off guard. Even the joy that was greater than I could have imagined was still something I had known would be greater than I could imagine. So, really, there weren't many surprises.

But I did not expect to get younger.

Three years have passed, and I should be almost 55. Yet my annual physicals reveal a man who is younger than he was at 49. I am, in every respect, in better health than I was five years ago. And I've discovered that I really enjoy being younger, so I've decided to accelerate the process. I've begun to search for ways to live as long as possible, not from dread of death, but from love for life. Especially changing dirty diapers, chasing her through the living room, watching Veggie Tales and Spongebob (yes, Dr. D!); those things will all keep you younger. Plus, lifting 33 pounds off the floor several times a day does more for the biceps and back than pushing one's thumb around a trackpad.

I've also changed my eating habits and started exercising, the latter being the hardest discipline to develop after all these years. Changing eating habits was something I dreaded and thought would be difficult--doesn't everyone hate dieting?--until a friend (my pastor) gave me the key by his own example: It can't be a diet. It has to be a permanent change of lifestyle. If it's a diet, I'd always be waiting for the end of it. But a permanent change? I can do that.

That little tidbit, along with a strong desire to enjoy grandchildren someday, made all the difference. So...lots of fruit and raw veggies. Organic everything I can get my hands on. Olive oil, honey, lemon juice, pomegranate juice, in fact juice in general. I bought a juicer for organic carrots, beetroot, apples, celery, and whatever else can be pulverized for better living. Yoghurt, not "yogurt" like pudding, but yoghurt with the "hurt" in it. Real lumps and not too sweet. For drinking: Hot tea of all varieties, especially green. And water, with added water, and a sprinkle of water for flavor. And for a change of pace, water.

The list of no-no's is, of course, longer: No more white flour, white sugar, white milk, white rice, white supremacists (actually I never liked that taste anyway): No more white stuff that kills. Also no more Nutrasweet (Pat Robertson is happy) or other artificial stuff. No more frequent steaks, barbecues, not much chicken, hardly any ice cream. No candy, except a little dark chocolate because it's good for the heart. No more coffee unless they force it on me in Bulgaria and my mission will fail if I don't drink it.

And no more soft drinks, including Caffeine Free Diet Coke...ever.

Now there was where my idol got toppled. I was weaned on Pepsi; I literally graduated from mother's breast to glass bottles. Mom actually has Super-8 home movies of two-year-old me hauling a Pepsi bottle through the house. Soft drinks were such a family sacrament that when my father died, I went to the hospital vending machine and bought a can of Diet Pepsi, before walking back to his room and saying goodbye with a pop of the seal and a toast. It was just a sentimental act, but it would have made him laugh, so I did it. It was us.

Switching to Diet Coke had been a major concession in adulthood, and I was never willing to go any further. Until Lexi was born. Then I realized I loved my wife and daughter enough to admit my addiction. "Hi, my name's Jim and I'm a Diet Coke addict. For me, things definitely don't go better with Coke."

Now it was time to do what Gideon had to do in Judges 6: Go back to my father's house (the "me" my Dad built) and destroy the idols of Baal and Asherah, or in my case, soft drinks from Dad and coffee from Mom. Baal, my bottle-master, and Asherah, my Starbucks goddess.

I also got tired of feeling rotten every morning, and suspected that diet was to blame. In fact, there was not a single day from January, 1990 (or perhaps earlier) through March 1, 2005 that I awakened feeling good. Every morning upon arising I ached from head to toe from oxygen deprivation (sleep apnea), and migraine headaches beat my alarm clock to the punch at least three times a week.

The root of it all: I had steadily gained four pounds a year for the past eight years, ballooning to a morning weight of 201, and worse, to the edge of diabetes and heart disease. It was time to read the handwriting on my artery walls.

Seven weeks later I'm down to 181 and feeling great every morning. I've accomplished more, written more, lived more, in the past seven weeks than all of 2004. This trip to three Eastern European nations has included no jet lag or persistent fatigue.

On Tuesday I will go back home. But I will never go back to burgers, fries, and the carbonated life. I love my wife and daughter more than I love coffee or ice cream. In fact, for the first time in a 36-year ministry career, I love life!

Soli Deo Gloria!

Gypsies, Airplanes, and Ace Ventura

I'm in Sofia to teach an intensive on Missiology and Covenant. We blathered with translation for eight hours plus breaks today, and have sixteen to go over the next two days.

I wrote a 63-page outline, and worried that we'd never cover it all, but wouldn't you know it, today we shot past page 30 before the supper bell rang. Now a spectre (not Arlen) haunts me: Everything said and done sometime Monday morning, with a translator staring at me for one more sentence that will never come. Of course, it's highly unlikely that I should run out of words (ask my family), but thoughts are another story. As Beetle Bailey once said of Sarge's typewriter style, "He types 90 words a minute, but only thinks two."

But I have a plan: If page 63 arrives too soon, I'll resort to the spiritual fisherman's friend: Stories. Laptop photos of my family. Anecdotes about almost meeting John Paul II and Mother Teresa (on separate days). Theories on whether Tim LaHaye makes any long-term investments. I got lotsa stuff.

We laid a good foundation today, covering the theology-missiology connection, and the history of modern Protestant missions. Tomorrow we get into anthropology and cross-cultural communication, and Monday into missions strategies. Of course it's possible that we might follow laying a good foundation by laying a large egg. But something tells me we're going to have fun. (My gosh, I'm actually calling a seminary class fun. I'm getting as old as Lileks.)

I asked for feedback at the end of today's last session, mainly to see if everything was getting through in translation, and partly to find out who should win a gen-u-wine Amurican Old Glory t-shirt. There were several good answers, but the lone Gypsy student took the gray XL home. Here's a paraphrase:

"I was glad you said your church includes white and black pastors, and that if you had a church in Sofia it would eventually include at least one Gypsy pastor. That is my dream also."

I'd said it as a passing remark hours earlier when discussing William Carey's work in India. But the guy was sooo moved when he recalled it. So he got the shirt.

Maybe I still had Gypsy fever from last night's church service in the town of Ihtiman (pronounced with a real wet "Ich"). Those folks grabbed me by the soul the moment they started singing. The pastor played a little keyboard/beat box with reverb so cheesy it sounded genuinely exotic. The melodies were Middle Eastern note-benders, oddly gorgeous, like the Grand Ole Opry if your turntable started to wobble.

My turn came, so I grabbed the little keyboard and did a blues version of Andrae Crouch's "I Don't Know Why Jesus Loved Me," before preaching a you-had-to-be-there sermon I won't bore you with (because you had to be there). Pastor Krahssi thanked me, but got my name wrong. So those folks will forever remember the time Jim Carrey came to their little fellowship.

Then the night got interesting...

We headed down the deeply rutted ghetto road, and two miles later pulled into one of Bulgaria's three country clubs, complete with a par-71 golf course. Developed by the nation's lone astronaut, it's actually a nice little place, complete with a clubhouse built around an actual vintage military aircraft. The big silver tail sticks out of one end of the building, while indoors a winding wood staircase leads to the fuselage and a dining area in the cabin.

The most delightful aspect of the whole thing: The Gypsy pastor, Krahssi, owns the construction company (which employs 37 of his church members) that built the clubhouse. Thus the local "Samaritans" are building their town's prettiest, most imaginative, well-constructed buildings. And they are prospering and earning respect from all corners.

Jim Carrey would have loved it.

Still Tilting at Evangelical Windmills

I'm about to get shot out of a cannon.

My Bulgarian friend, Pastor Tony, is due to pick me up an hour ago for a day trip to Plovdiv, with a speaking engagement at a Gypsy church on the way home tonight.

Tomorrow morning I'll begin 3 days of teaching, 10 hours per day, an intensive course on Missiology, to freshmen at this Bulgarian seminary. (Gosh, what a sentence; I got tired just writing it.)

You may not see another post until Wednesday from back home in Florida, although I have an idea I might give up tonight's sleep just to write about being at the Gypsy church.

We'll see...

On to matters of the heart:

I am saddened at how low we contemporary Evangelicals have set our spiritual sights. Despite our success in electing many godly political leaders, and Heaven's pleasure in giving a billion Roman Catholics the best Pope electable, we seem to have resigned ourselves to the inevitability that the world, especially American society, is too far down the sluice for redemption.

In fact, being an optimist, especially about the "end times," can get one into trouble, even banned from pulpits. Yet pin-the-tail-on-the-antichrist preachers feel free to broadcast their theories and brandish their charts everywhere they go, despite the fact that thus far every deadline ever set for Christ's return has passed.

Now, people's eschatologies don't bother me (God could have made things clearer, but He didn't). But the fruit of closed-mindedness does. On the one hand there are the few who embrace Post-Mil optimism as though it's the latest multi-level way to get ahead in the world without working hard. And they're the first guys to jump into any fray, political or otherwise, and make the rest of us look just as silly by association.

Then there are those (actually many) who bastardize the message of Christ's coming into one of our leaving. Theirs is a gospel of evacuation rather than occupation. And they write paperback books (unfit for hard cover) with a sensationalism worthy of the National Enquirer (which Robin Williams said his cat refused to...well, you know).

And somewhere along the way this cacophony on catastrophe has caused us all to stop expecting great things. Nineveh (which I'm told is modern-day Mosul, Iraq) repented, and they had a jerk named Jonah for an evangelist! But the Bible says one greater than Jonah has come (Matthew 12:41, Luke 11:32), so why not expect whole cities, even nations, to turn to God? Ditto for Solomon (same passages), to whose God foreign royalty brought tribute. Why can't we expect something greater in our time?

Yes, I know Jesus is the Greater One in those passages, and He got crucified, not acclaimed. But did He just mean He was "greater" as in morally superior? Or did He mean that He would accomplish something greater than the other two? I think the latter.

He said if He were "lifted up," i.e., crucified, He would draw all peoples to Himself (John 12:32). And isn't that exactly what He began doing shortly thereafter through His church? Within a very few years, in fact, they were both renowned and vilified as having turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6).

End of sermon. Return to blog.

I don't know if I'm ranting or pleading with a post like this. All I know is when I stand before Eastern European Christians, I still see bleakness in their eyes, tentativeness at best. Their lands have known hundreds of years of war and suffering--the Soviets were just the latest invaders--and they're still afraid to embrace hope and faith for their little nations.

So I celebrate freedom for them, sing songs of hope for them, pray preposterous prayers for their lands to turn to Christ and flourish.

I shouldn't do such things you say? I'm tilting at windmills? Well why not? It worked in '91.

Pluralism Redux: A Reply to Mr. Dumpling

Dave, master blogger at Revenge of Mr. Dumpling, is a bright young "20-something Christian" blogger, who clearly has more time to write than I (so I'm happy for him and jealous for me), and who is destined for a great career in Christian apologetics, if he so chooses. I found him after learning that we both recently had written essays on Judeo-Christian Morality in an Ethically Pluralistic Society. You might want to read Dave's essay here, before moving on to my comments below.

In my essay I had declined (actually resisted the urge) to get too deep into the subject of biblical and civil law and their potential compatibility. But after reading Dave's post and the excellent questions he raised, I decided to post a comment to him. I have reposted it here, and shall add to it at the bottom of this post.

Dave,

Three quick comments on your main points:

1. Israel had 3 kinds of laws: symbolic (which became redundant with the reality of Christ), case laws (which demonstrate a "spirit" that should operate in any era), and moral (such as laws against bestiality, a topic on which the New Testament is silent, but which obviously should be obeyed to the letter). I believe biblical laws, if interpreted within these categories, could serve a society quite nicely.

2. The Bible also clearly shows an administrative separation of church, state, and family authorities, with each having its jurisdiction. I agree with you that the church should not interfere in the state's biblically mandated function to restrain evil and punish criminals. But the state is still accountable to God and His word for the job it does within its jurisdiction. So let's not give in to sacred/secular strawmen. Church and state are both to serve under God within their separate domains.

3. Every law on the books is someone's morality. (And I personally prefer Moses to Barney Franks anytime!) But I agree that good law should restrain immoral behavior, not mandate the good. As one of the ancients said, God is willing to "proscribe vice, not prescribe virtue."

Thanks so much for the thoughtful read. You'll be on my blogroll now.

Let me expand these three thoughts a little more:

1. Regarding the three kinds of biblical law: Symbolic, or ceremonial laws, such as animal sacrifices, clearly were the "shadow" done away with by Christ's "substance" (Colossians 2:17). That's not really a subject of great dispute throughout Cristendom. But the case laws and moral laws are a sticking point for many.

The occasional claim that all Mosaic law is made redundant by the New Testament cannot be true. If it were, St. Paul would not have appealed to Deuteronomy 25:4 as binding upon Christians regarding a worker's worthiness of his wages (1 Cor. 9:9, 1 Tim. 5:18). But Paul appealed to the spirit of that law, not it's letter, because like so many others (including that to which Dave's cheeseburger objection alludes) it was a case law. The brilliance of case law is that it saves us from legal inflation, about which I've commented elsewhere.

Moral laws, on the, er, third hand, cannot be interpreted symbolically or as mere cases from which to learn a bigger point. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" is pretty clear. And again, for those who insist that all Old Testament laws are nullified unless restated in the New Testament, here's a question: What about bestiality? The New Testament is absolutely silent about it in specific terms. Of course, one might appeal to "natural law" in prohibiting a date with Miss Piggy, but one cannot rely upon legislators such as the aforementioned Congressman Franks to rightly determine what is or isn't natural. Natural law theory is useless as an alternative to Scripture.

2. There's currently all kinds of mewling on the left, and stuttering on the right, about the dangers of "theocracy," and I spoke to that in my brief essay. The fact is an ecclesiocracy (the domination of the state by religious institutions or clerics) is as unbiblical as socialism (the domination of the family and church by the state).

But it's clear to me that today's American Left already subscribes in spirit to a provision in the erstwhile Soviet constitution that decreed the Church separate from the State but not the State from the Church. In other words, "We politicians reserve the right to tell you what to do, and we'll revoke your tax exemption and bludgeon you to death with zoning regulations if you don't toe our line!"

The Left's hypocrisy really shines when one considers that they've never once faulted the likes of Jesse Jackson for his outright campaigning in pulpits across America, yet they make Tom DeLay, and even Bill Frist, the Clark Kent of Congress, to be wild-eyed evangelical mullahs, hellbent on making little Suzie speak in tongues while she goose-steps to school.

The simple biblical truth is that Israel allowed pagan religions to exist and function, short of breaking civil code (like rituals wherein babies were thrown into fires). But Israel also officially recognized and endorsed their own religious foundation. Such peaceful coexistence was assured by the simple premise that, over time, the real God would show Himself real. In other words, the real moral majority didn't need to force anyone's hand, since the Truth they believed in would eventually prove self-evident.

3. Dave worried a little about "legislating morality," which he admitted is necessary to some extent, and his comments show essential agreement with my last paragraph above. But he also asks, "...do we have a right to impose our beliefs on those who do not share them?" So let me fire a question back: What law is not an imposition of a belief on at least someone who doesn't share it? The fact is, it's impossible NOT to legislate morality, for that is the nature of law-making.

Furthermore, why doesn't Dave ask the Left this question, since imposing their beliefs (Roe v. Wade comes to mind) never seems to bother them?

Law-making, like the rest of civil government, is religious by nature. The question always comes down to whose religious sensibilities (or lack of them) will prevail. And that is why I chose to side-step the question in my essay. Until we Christians have shown ourselves to be a fountain of blessing, above reproach, American society will never want to listen. Until the Schumers and Boxers of the Left are laughed off the podium by an overwhelming majority of Americans, Christians must imitate the Apostle in using every means to win some.

I'm not saying we should fall for the con and shake hands with the bad-guy wrestler, because we know he's going to cheat. But we have to fight a clean fight.

Soli Deo Gloria

Oughta Be a Book

My recommending anything by Joe Carter is like a homeless man giving directions to a taxi driver, but this is amazingly good material that no one should miss.

Pre-Mediterranea Miscellanea

Pre-Med: It occurs to me that Bulgaria, being just north of Greece, could be called the Pre-Med. The landscape is lush, the grapes are big and sticky, olive oil graces every table, and they have bananas, which means they're no banana republic since, as PJ O'Rourke noted in "Give War a Chance," banana republics never have bananas.

Year of the Tiger: Steve Jobs and Co. are about to release Tiger, Apple's OS X 10.4, and I'm breathless with anticipation. I get this way every year about the time the newest cat from Cupertino is set to make its first appearance. I can't wait to try Dashboard and use a real Widget, which if you know American slang, has never been real before.

Poor PC prisoners, staring out of--or actually at--their prison Windows, don't know what they're missing. The reason they use Windows, they insist, is that they need compatibility with Klingon computers somewhere, or that they "love" Microsoft's latest offering and are quite satisfied with it.

Sure, and I'm sure East Germans used to rejoice over brand new Trabants, until their worthless marks were accepted at one-to-one in West Berlin and they could pay cash for new Volkswagens. Then their little two-stroke rattletraps littered the roadsides all over, because they just stopped driving them and got out...forever.

Ah well, if the Soviet Union could collapse, then I can still be a missionary to the Wintel World. Oh that they might be free!

New Books: I've just started reading Robert Webber's "Ancient Future Faith" (which I admit I should have read a long time ago), and am struck by the modernity of his advocacy of Post-Modernity. He makes strong abstract arguments that symbols should replace abstract communication. But I suppose a book of symbols would look like caveman illustrations, so I don't mind the words. The guy is brainy, that's for sure, and I enjoy his work.

I also brought his "Ancient Future Evangelism," but have decided to give that one to the Bulgarian seminary, along with a big tome on missiology. I'll buy replacements next month.

Also read Hugh Hewitt's "Blog" while crossing the Atlantic Ocean a few days back. Am I the one-millionth observer to see Hugh's "blogosphere" as eerily similar to the Borg that Captain Janeway finally killed off as Voyager ended?

We are the Blorg, a kind of "happy Borg" for the new century. We believe a great Head guides us, and that the world will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Soli Deo Gloria.

Latvian Chocolate: Six weeks ago I swore off sweets, soft drinks, and coffee, in other words, everything that once made earthly life worthwhile. But now I'm 54, with a daughter only three and a wife who'll hit 90 with ease, so I want to live a lot longer. I eat organic foods whenever possible, hardly any meat, lots of fruit and veggies, and drink only water and hot teas with honey.

Unless I'm in Eastern Europe. There's some Latvian chocolate on the shelf six feet behind me, so I'm writing this to exorcise a demon. (Didn't St. Paul say bodily exorcism profits us a little?)

I have lost 19 pounds since March 1, although Bulgarian hospitality may have reduced my net loss by a kilo or so.

The good news is that I feel absolutely great every day, including mornings, which for the past fifteen years were times for headaches and soreness all over.

I will never go back!

Bulgaria: Second Thoughts

Okay, hold the ketchup.

These Bulgarian guys are definitely not eschatological escapists, but they're still Post-Trib, Pre-Mils (and if that doesn't make sense, just click here and consider yourself blessed). And they still believe in a Future and Hope (see yesterday's post) for their beloved Bulgaria.

Take my primary host, Pastor Tony (not his real name, and not changed for his protection, but because I can neither decipher nor spell Bulgarian names). He's a true thinker and possibly the most forward thinking pastor I've met in thirty-two years of coming to Eastern Europe. We were walking around Sofia, pretending to tour the city, but too caught up in the joy of tossing epistemological Frisbees to one another to pay much attention.

We were discussing Clark Pinnock and his "open view" of God, but since neither of us has read Pinnock enough to find him guilty as charged on all counts (even though we're sure he must be), we switched to the more predictable Calvinist-Arminian dilemma that all new theologically-oriented friends discuss when they're sniffing each other out. That's when Tony made a great point: "Western Christians think Truth on any given subject must lie somewhere between two extremes. Here in the East we see Truth as often inclusive of the extremes; we're happy with the mystery of not having to know precisely."

We rejoiced in the moment, and then I said something equally profound just to stay competitive, before we meandered on to the real charismatic lightning rod: Eschatology. (I should mention here that I'm the eldest son of a late Pentecostal pastor.)

I volunteered that my introduction to Reformed Theology back in the mid-80s had come as a result of discovering that my own "chief end" was not missionary work but worship and eternal enjoyment of God. That, in turn, had led me to a more historically optimistic view of the end of history, although I remain content to leave the exact timing of Christ's return to God the Father and a few Christian paperback writers who've apparently figured it all out. Tony then asked me if I'm a Reconstructionist, and I essentially answered, "Heck, being a charismatic Calvinist is dangerous enough."

(I was predestined to spend my first 37 years an Arminian, but then I freely switched to Calvinism.)

Tony laughed and I suddenly experienced a Sally Field Moment (you like me--you really like me) as we made our way back to his impossibly-parked car. After making a 32-point u-turn at the end of a one-way alley, we drove over to his church office for a quick tour and a meeting with the Academic Dean of the seminary.

Tony opened his laptop and, in passing, mentioned that Bulgaria's pastors have really taken the lead in adopting new Internet technologies. Then the dean, whose name really is Athanasius (!), offered his view that the Apostle Philip would have made full use of online technology in reaching unbelievers (transported to the Eunuch's chariot via Wi-Fi?).

That led me to evangelize both men on the merits of blogging, show them a few favorites of my own, and further wax rhapsodic on the potential for Bulgarian Christians to do an end run around media monopolies.

Tony's laptop finally closed, we made our way to an authentic Bulgarian supper of Shopska salad, and toasted the news of Pope Benedict XVI.

And we finally concluded that God uses Post-Tribbers to toughen believers for battle, and Post-Mils to give them hope.

This is going to be a fun week.

First Impressions: Sofia, Bulgaria

Bulgaria has always sounded cold to me. I mean the name itself; it’s a blue sounding word, sort of like Sahara sounds red. But stepping into the sunshine from the plane, I can feel the balm in the weather. It’s almost Mediterranean, even though the temperature is still below sixty degrees. I see snow capped mountains on two sides of Sofia (who knows which direction they are—guess I’m not magnetic enough), and judging from the nearness of the snow line, this city stands at a higher elevation than I expected.

Beyond the clime, another sign that we’re nearing the Mideast is the carefree driving style of the locals. U-turns are no problem for my host, no matter where he decides to make them. I am thankful for the relatively slow speed of the traffic, but whether such thanks are owed to leftover repression from the communist era or the leftover potholes from that same era, I can’t tell.

Whoever named the Soviet arena an “Eastern Bloc” might easily have added a “k” for all the concrete blight that exists in the post-communist world. Sofia’s streets are lined with mile after crumbling mile of multi-storey apartment buildings, the sort preferred by five out of five totalitarian dictators. (They prefer them for the masses, of course, not themselves.)

Both airport and city remind me a bit of Latvia circa 1992, maybe a year into independence. There are little spots of beauty and bounty popping up here and there, pizza restaurants and cell-phone shops, a few shiny skyscrapers, glass icebergs breaking through the gray floes of the old regime. And Macdonalds is hawking its greasy gospel “on every other corner,” which is probably the wording on their import permit.

“Future And Hope,” the seminary where I’ll spend the coming week teaching a Missiology course, is in Bankya, which my driver calls a suburb of Sofia, but which I have decided is a village in the boonies. Then again, I’m sitting here with broadband Internet service, so maybe it’s just an “exclusive” suburb.

The same phenomenon of spotty progress that marks a nation recently freed also shows up in microcosm. The seminary is generally clean but spartan. My room is just right, white walled with yellow pine floors and new-looking yellow pine furniture that might have grown up right out of the floor. It’s a lovely, bright room, simple and functional.

But my bathroom next door? The Donald might have built it. For one thing, it’s penthouse huge. I’ve visited Russian families of five living in smaller places. Done up in white marble flecked with black, and a black marble floor flecked with gold, it looks as though somebody robbed the presidential suite of the Hilton downtown. Just razored around the edges and made off with the whole room on a flatbed truck.

The toilet and bidet, like the sink, are black with gold fittings. The shower, which resides in a gigantic white jacuzzi, needs no curtain: water simply couldn’t splash far enough to hit the floor. Small murals of green and gold palm fronds are etched into the back wall. Matching palm leaves on a black background form a trim line around the whole room.

But it’s still Eastern Europe. Four of the five gold spotlights are burnt out or missing from their sockets. And the room is unheated. At first I thought the hot water was broken as well, but it turns out they hired the same sub-contractors here that built my home in Florida: The faucet is simply installed backwards. Thus the water heats up only after you aim it fully at the blue mark, not the red one. Ah, goose bumps be gone!

At any rate, I am simply thrilled that Bulgarian Christians have a mind to study missions! Istanbul, the doorway to Asia, is a few hours down the road, and I know Islam is heading this way as fast as possible. So I have come to present a philosophy of missions based on generous love and earned friendship. If the smiling young couple who met me at the airport are any indication, we should be a good fit here.

I also like the name Future And Hope, especially compared to…oh, say…Left Behind Seminary, or Late Great Planet Earth Institute. (Hey, it could happen! You know, a three and half-year program, followed by a really tough internship. Or a seven-year program where you graduate up front and then disappear.)

I’ll have to eat those words if it turns out the name “Future and Hope” has to do with an exit strategy rather than a missionary one. Keep the ketchup handy.

I haven't met the Bishop. He's in the States searching for faculty and curriculum, while I'm here teaching. But he sounds absolutely lovable, and judging from his busy schedule, is irrepressible. I do know that he has suffered in past years, and doesn't want to waste a moment of his new found liberty.

Come to think of it, maybe the Bishop's own history is where the name comes from. Here's a man who, no matter what the big bullies with all the guns said, knew he had a future and a hope. Oh, I am so thankful to be here.

God save Bulgaria.

Cool

Notes in the Warsaw Airport:

Irina, a Russian-Latvian friend, speaks halting English, but she made an eloquent observation yesterday: "Russian pepple no look friendly, but very friendly pepple. California pepple smile, look friendly pepple, but (pushing her nose up with her forefinger) not really so friendly."

I've always thought of Californians--especially southern Californians--as cool, not in the sense of insufficiently warm, but in a benign, casual, easy-going, Jesus-is-just-alright-with-me sense. You know, cool!

Yet I have to admit, California cool (which has leavened all of America to some extent via television and movies) is also too often the detached, nice-to-see-you-but-I-don't-really-need-you, apathetic kind of cool. All in all about as genuine as the smiles in a toothpaste commercial. And a savvy Russian woman noticed.

The irony is that she was referring to the staff at a Christian mission agency's headquarters, who came to work that day specifically to welcome Irina and her husband to America. They smiled and said the right words (they really are good, kind people), but their lack of heart still came through.

Now, Irina isn't a complainer, and the rest of this post will not be self-immolation about how we Americans lack compassion and concern for poor East Bloc souls. But her remarks are a worthwhile reminder that cool is no substitute for warm.

It's really amazing that a place as crowded as southern California can accommodate so many isolated people, everyone driving through life side by side with their windows rolled up. Maybe sheer population density triggers some seclusion defense.

No doubt technologies play a part: 60-inch televisions, telephones, air-conditioners, and especially computers and the Web, enable us to cocoon, sometimes robbing us of face time even within our own families. (I'll admit to emailing my wife, even though she's a mere wall away.) Having the whole world one click away can mean no real touching, tasting, seeing; when the whole world is virtual, it also becomes less real.

Likewise, moving every couple or three years drives up prices on more than real estate. It also makes deep relationships more demanding; brotherly love often requires a commute.

There are probably other, more sophisticated reasons beyond my grasp. But whatever the case, most of the Pac-Coasters I know have lots of casual friends but hardly any close ones.

Russians, on the other hand, tend to be xenophobes. In fact the term "casual friend" would strike them as oxymoronic. In Moscow or St. Pete a shallow acquaintance may be necessary for business purposes, but it certainly wouldn't qualify as any degree of friendship. Acceptance into a Russian inner circle takes awhile. But once you're in, boy oh boy, you're really in.

When my wife and I were first welcomed into a Leningrad home in 1980, I knew the little matrushka of the house had accepted us when she stuffed us full of food, instructed us how to hold our forks, drink our drinks, and generally bossed us right through the meal. Because that's what Russian grandmas do if they love you.

And her granddaughters, two nervous pre-teens, were not allowed to retreat to the bedroom. They were expected to sit in the parlor with grandma's foreign guests, to show interest even though they couldn't understand a word we were saying, and to attend to any need we might have. Why? Because we were now among the few; we were friends.

Children will not learn warmth in a virtual world. They might learn other things: Doom strategies, the Bible, history lessons, HTML markup code, writing skills, hacking skills, a million things. But they will not learn warmth there.

Warmth is something only learned in person, and hardly ever in a formal way. It's Daddy's presence when he watches cartoons with you. The laughter in Mom's voice when she's drinking coffee with a girlfriend. The approval of a Sunday School teacher when you've made a manger scene on paper, with crayons, a glue stick and pink confetti. (Months later my three-year-old still points to it on the refrigerator door and exclaims, "I did all by myself, Daddy.")

I've met a few American kids--mainly home-schoolers--who understand warmth. But there are a lot more who know how to be cool.

The Day the Monkey Died: Darwinism Takes a Dirt Nap

Charles Darwin succeeded in foisting bad science upon the world only because bad science was preferable to the truth that God really is God and we have to stand accountable before him. Being a smart monkey is a better deal to sinful man than admitting he’s sinful. Grow a tail, lose a soul. Nice trade.

The outworking, effluence actually, of Darwin’s theories culminated in a modern vanity called communism, that state of perfection society achieves after socialism has worked its magic. Vladimir Lenin promised, in fact, that within two generations he would produce a perfect state, a “worker’s paradise,” where the only government necessary would be a few administrative clerks, and where the public urinals would be made of solid gold. Ah, yes, gold: But would they flush?

That’s the big problem with collectivist praxis: Nothing works, or at least not for long. Why? Because being God is too big a job for anyone except, well, God. In fact, adding more bureaus to the bureaucracy only clogs the hopper even worse than it already is, because it just makes the beast churn out more of what he’s already too full of. As one historian has noted, free men write books; bureaucrats fill out forms in triplicate and then shuffle papers all day.

One of my friends in the Soviet Union served two prison terms in the 1980s, both times for fictional crimes. I asked him later how the KGB found it so easy to take him. “We have a joke,” he said, “that Soviet law is so marvelous that it contains something for everyone. You see, we have so many laws that I cannot keep one without breaking another. There are always grounds to get me for something.”

Just as printing too many dollars makes money worth less (and eventually worthless), so writing too many laws only breeds lawlessness. Such irony was not lost on the average Russian in the mid-80s. That’s why they referred to their land as a place of “unlimited impossibilities,” and called Moscow, the capital of Absurdistan (it’s the same word in both Russian and English).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the locals didn’t know how to govern cooperatively. How could they? They had only known totalitarianism. Freedom, they assumed, must be the opposite, which is to say that the answer to bad government must be no government. Chaos reigned.

Moscow’s bureaucrats, who never left office but simply declared themselves reformers, began making rules on their own. What once had been micromanagement from the Kremlin now became a regulatory peeing contest. One guy levied a ten percent tax on business, so his comrade down the hall levied an additional eleven percent burden on the same business. And so on.

Eventually Muscovite businesses were being taxed at more than one hundred percent of gross revenues, so nobody paid much of anything. And what’s more, the pencil pushers upstairs didn’t really expect them to. Everybody understood that if you want a little juice you’ve got to squeeze the whole lemon. If you want to collect twenty percent, go for a hundred-twenty. But such a philosophy assumes you won’t run out of lemons.

What Russia had immediately after Gorbachev wasn’t true freedom any more than a recently beheaded chicken’s flopping around the farm yard is dancing. It was simply the absurd death waltz of statism.

My question is: Why do so many lefties keep lining up for a turn with the chicken? Why do tenured American professors and congressional “progressives,” none of whom have ever had to live with it, keep pressing for a way of governance that so recently failed so spectacularly?

Because so many people think they’re better dancers, that’s why.

Both socialism and communism would have been abandoned world-wide by now, were it not for one particularly evil conceit: “We can do it better.” Time after time around the globe new pretenders connive or shoot their way to power in the name of doing it better, and then bring their various societies to ruin.

As PJ O’Rourke once commented (and this is a paraphrase because I’m in Latvia right now and can’t look up the quote), “Saying the Soviet Union was a good system run by bad people is like saying hell is a nice place plagued with bad weather.”

Thank God, when the Berlin Wall came crashing down in 1989, Darwin’s monkey died in the rubble. The Modern Era was done at last. Some might argue for an earlier or later date, but in front-page terms, what better headline is there? Everything else, including the Soviet implosion, was aftershock. The quake that brought the house down happened that day in Berlin.

Of course the dawn of the Post-Modern era doesn’t mean an end to chaos, just Darwin's species of chaos. Today’s Post-Mods have mostly traded V.I. Lenin for John Lennon. But at least they’re willing to sing a different song. They don’t yet know who they are (they’re just Post-something else), but they are on a quest. Which makes for great opportunity if the Gospel is what it claims to be.

And I’m out to get them, one by one. It will be so much more fun without that danged monkey.

Genticide

Margaret Thatcher famously pegged socialist governance nanny statism. Though the monicker stuck, she might more accurately have termed it wicked step-mother statism, for the way it emasculates a society. In fact, the Soviet system was guilty of nothing less than “genticide,” the systematic destruction of all things manly.

As you might have guessed from previous posts, I love Estonia, the little Baltic enclave that for half a century endured the smothering mothering of Soviet occupation. During the past twenty-five years I’ve journeyed there some two dozen times, most recently last week.

Visiting a nation in reconstruction is a bit like seeing your brother’s kids at Christmas: The changes, the sheer growth, hit you all at once. And so do the disappointments.

Estonia has changed and grown dramatically for the better since 1991, thanks to lots of foreign investment and the simple goodness of free(r) market exchange. But there are disappointments to be sure, chief among them the sorry lot of men and boys, who still have not begun to recover from—and I have agonized over using this term with evangelical readers—the castrating bitch of communism.

Check the statistics of any nation in decline, or of one trying to rise from the pit, and you will see the common characteristic that (a) marriage is in trouble, and (b) manhood, especially head-of-the-house fatherhood, has withered. (Obviously my benchmark is a biblical one, so if you define family or fatherhood differently, you won’t like my observations, and perhaps should click to the left, way left.)

The causes vary, from the spiritual inertia of Hinduism to Stalin’s wholesale slaughters. But the result is the same: Take away a man’s raison d’etre as protector/provider for his wife, and mentor/sage to his children, and you have rendered him less than a man.

Take away manhood, and you kill womanhood, childhood, brotherhood, the whole neighborhood. That’s why this is about men. Sure, women have suffered just as much, maybe more. But shoot the head and you’ve killed a whole body. So I’m writing about heads.

In the case of Estonia (fill in the blank with Latvia, Lithuania, Alaskan Inuits, inner-city Washington, D.C.) civil government replaced men as heads of households, providers, property owners, and as educators of their children. So they wandered aimlessly through half a century, smoking and drinking themselves into earlier and earlier graves.

They’re still wandering.

Oh, there are entrepreneurs, to be sure, talented self-starters who’ve gotten rich and helped society in the process. And there are highly motivated thieves as well, who try and manipulate the system in the arena they know best: Politics. Old oligarchs, masquerading as reformers, they pollute parliaments and hound decent freshmen into compromising on real reform. They have dyed their red coats E.U. green, but it’s the same cloth, with the same oversized pockets.

Today’s Estonia suffers higher than ever suicide rates, and rising tides of drug addiction and STDs, including AIDS. And one member of parliament told me they can’t even measure how many families actually exist in Estonia, since people don’t bother to get married anymore.

It probably will take a generation for the corruption of old ways to die off. That’s how long it took Israel in the wilderness. But there is also the promise of a new generation, born in that same wilderness.

The only example they’ve had thus far is what they were born to: Parents forced to do laps around socialism’s desert, in this case for 50 years, not 40. So they wander too, desperately needing a Joshua or Caleb to follow, to lead them forward. They need spiritual fathers and mothers (but especially fathers) to teach them not just to say their prayers at night. They need mentoring in honest economics, to be taught the nobility of any job well done, to learn that “civil service” is supposed to be both, and how to hold a door open for a woman. They need fathers.

I am not their father. But I can be the uncle who shows up every year to cheer them on, make them laugh, and cause them to dream a little bolder.

God save Estonia.

Latvinos

Jurmala, Latvia, near Riga, April 14:

I'm adding a new term to my vocabulary: Latvino, which means funky or rhythmic Latvian.

Until now I considered the concept of a funky Latvian rather oxymoronic, kind of like a surfing Nebraskan or a Kansan hula dancer. But last night, at the opening session of an evangelical conference on worship, the local band (comprised of ethnic Russians and Latvians) really got a groove on.

At times it was the Brooklyn Tab. choir, at times Russian rap (honest), and at times they did samba or mamba or something like that. (I can't even get the Mamas and Papas straight after 35 years, so I sure can't distinguish samba from mamba.)

There are delegates from several countries in the former USSR category, but one thing they have in common is a great love for God and a knack for expressing that love enthusiastically and artistically.

God save Latvia.

Judeo-Christian Morality in an Ethically Pluralistic Society

Joe Carter, of the wonderful EvangelicalOutpost.com, has raised the question of "Judeo-Christian Morality in an Ethically Pluralistic Society." Here's my two cents worth:

It's tempting to frame the discussion in terms of law, specifically biblical laws and whether or not they have a place in today's society. But this leads straightaway to wails about theocracy and warnings of Jim Jones' grape drinks. (The secularist watchmen mean "ecclesiocracy," the rule of the church, but why should precision ruin a good buzzword? One would think the actual rule of God might be a good thing!)

It's also important to distinguish between a plurality and a pluralistic society. Plurality differs from pluralism the way femininity differs from feminism or community differs from communism. (I value all three "ities" and loathe all three "isms.")

Israel, for example, was a plurality, in that Jehovah God did not prohibit Gentiles in Israel from practicing their religions, short of breaking civil law (such as throwing babies in volcanoes). But Israel was not a pluralistic society; they knew the truth and stood for it as a nation. They just didn't force every Tom, Dick, and Abdul immigrant to bow with them.

Besides, law-talk misses the point. Judeo-Christian morality might ideally lead there...someday, but not until its proponents had won the respect of the nation. In other words, if we'd just BE a moral majority, we wouldn't have to name ourselves one.

Such a notion leads to Jesus' teaching that real authority is exercised through serving, that we are kings who lay aside our robes for simple ephods. This is a morality that shows itself through action, not reaction, through being defined by what we're for rather than what we're against.

Society knows we're anti-abortion, but are we really pro-life? Until we're better known for having and adopting babies than for protesting, that image won't change.

They know we're against the welfare state, but are we willing to make the bureaucracy redundant by our initiatives in helping the poor and elderly? The fact is, heavy taxation started only after faithful tithing, and the good deeds it paid for, stopped.

The secret to selling our no-absolutes nation on Judeo-Christian absolutes is to convincingly practice virtue instead of only proscribing vice. Passing laws, even good ones, won't win them, because laws are negative by nature. They are meant to cut away rotten fruit, not heal it.

This is why biblical laws are usually "thou shalt nots" instead of "thou shalts." God is willing to restrain evil, but He does not wish to mandate specific good. Instead, men are free to find creative ways to please Him and bless one another.

Jesus understood this, and thus summed up ten mostly negative commandments with two perfectly positive ones: To love God wholly and to love our neighbors thoroughly.

The defining feature of Post-Modern, ethically pluralistic America is hunger for authenticity. Don't preach to me; don't show me your menu of morality; just cook something that smells good.

They are hungry, and they will eat. Will we cook?

Rant: A Thousand Points of Blight

I hate communism.

I don’t know how else to say it, and if I could say it plainer I would. It is at once the ultimate Darwinian conceit and ultimate anti-Darwinian irony.

Marx and Lenin called man “the highest being for man,” and then proceeded to act out the inevitable corollary, that atheism also renders man the lowest being for man. They pronounced everyone equal, but no one ever seemed quite equal enough, so they killed anyone who didn’t measure up. Stalin extended the logic by also killing anyone who didn’t measure down.

The greatest irony is that by dethroning God they debased man instead of elevating him. They would have made monkeys of us all, had not their own process of devolution killed them off.

An old Soviet-era joke says, “The government thinks it is God; if it’s right, then all our problems are solved.” Indeed, being God ultimately proved too hard. After all, He is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. That’s One Hard Act to follow.

Omnipotence necessitated big armies, lots of policemen, and an absolutely muscle-bound bureaucracy. No private guns. No radios or televisions with unauthorized crystals. Even typewriters--especially typewriters--had to be registered with the authorities.

Omniscience required spies to spy on everyone including other spies. Microphones disguised as hotel ceiling sprinklers (yeah, we found them). Little microphones in flower pots. Big parabolic microphones aimed from tall city buildings at little apartment windows. And cars with ears, like the little Lada that followed us around Riga one night, two or three thousand bucks worth of radios in a little junker whose resale value temporarily doubled with every fill-up.

Omnipresence meant loads of propaganda, and I use the word “loads” advisedly. Every street of every town was festooned with big red love notes from the State. “Dear Workers!” “Dear Citizens!” “Dear Comrades!” Dear Lord! The paint was so red as to be nearly audible. And the exclamation points! They!loved!their!exclamation!points! Forget periods, commas, semicolons! Exclamation points! Ah, these are the screams of love! Pointy paroxysms of passionate concern for my wellbeing! LISTEN TO ME, I LOVE YOU AND I’M NEVER GOING TO LEAVE YOU ALONE FOR A SINGLE MOMENT POINTS!!!

Oh, I know they had colons too, but only because they emptied them onto the billboards. The exclamation points were simply there to make the bilge smell good, like trying to drown body odor with a really strong, cheap cologne. A thousand points of blight.

No wonder my Estonian friends loved going for long walks in the woods. The woods were silent, they smelled good, and the fertilizer lacked an alphabet. And flowers: I have never seen a people so in love with flowers. Roses, carnations, lilies, lilacs, orchids. Heck, even dandelion fluff was more interesting than anything Soviet. And more durable! (Sorry for the! I meant...durable.)

Yes, I hate communism, even when it incubates as cute little socialism. In fact, let me propose a contest, with prizes: The reader who most successfully argues that life is better under communism will win my grand prize: One week in Pyongyang, North Korea.

Second prize is two weeks.

Viktor's Song

Monday evening in Tallinn, Estonia:

This evening I dined with friends at the Balthasar garlic restaurant, which, like dozens of other posh eateries in Old Town, was not there in Soviet times. Our second-floor table overlooked the cobblestones of Apteegi Street, the site of a 1983, late-night encounter that is forever last night in my soul.

I had heard about Viktor for three years. An unpaid but effective youth pastor, his interest in evangelism (an illegal pursuit under Soviet law) had earned him the wrath of the local KGB, who decided to make an example of him when local "revival" meetings started filling Tallinn's churches with ardent teen worshipers. He had gone to prison in the summer of 1980, but not before laying the plans for our upcoming visit.

Thus, though we had never met, we were now co-workers, and that meant Dolly and I had to do something. So from 1980 until his release in 1983, we and fellow "musicianaries" across the USA fomented a letter-writing campaign to the Soviet government, urging Viktor's immediate release. Tens of thousands of Christians all over the free world responded, flooding Moscow with petitions. And I wrote and recorded a song about him:

Viktor was a friend I never knew
And livin' for Jesus was all he lived to do
But now he suffers a private hell
In a Soviet prison cell
And since he can't be here
I'll sing his song for you
And it's my song too...
They can take me away
Doesn't matter I'll still be free
Take away my voice
But they won't silence me
They can put me in the dark
But they'll never put out the light
And if they try to take my life
Don't worry
I'll just fly away.

Flash forward to 1983 and our third trip to Estonia. Viktor had been released, and had learned about the campaign. He had also heard my song. Now I got word that he wanted to meet us, even though it meant risking his restored, but still tentative, freedom. We got our instructions.

Tonight at ten, go to the square and wait by the old town hall. Keep your eyes peeled in the direction of Apteegi Street. When he appears don't acknowledge him; just follow at a distance.

Dolly and I left the hotel early that night and walked a circuitous route through Old Tallinn, hoping we could evade (or at least tire out) whomever might follow us. Eventually a thin shadow emerged at the corner of Apteegi Street two hundred feet away, right below the window of what is now my garlic restaurant. Street lamps illuminated a spiked shock of blond hair; I'd seen that 'do a hundred times in pictures. It was Viktor all right. A living, breathing hero of the faith, at least to us.

He turned down Vana Turg to the corner of Viru Street and we followed him into a dumpy little "kohvik," one of only two or three cafes in those days. Bad heavy metal music blaring from cheap speakers behind the bar was Viktor's chief reason for choosing this spot; it meant the KGB would hear a cacophonous racket instead of our conversation.

The three of us sat down and for a long moment just sat smiling at one another through our coffee steam. Then Dolly slid a shopping bag under the table to him; we had filled it with good Finnish coffee, chewing gum for his little girl, and some blue jeans he could either wear or sell for good money. My album, with his song, was near the top. He spotted it and the smile left his face. "It's so kind, but I don't deserve such words. I'm not worthy," he said, pronouncing it "wur-vee."

He was wrong, of course. Sure, Viktor was far from perfect, but what hero is? If anything, great strengths often emerge to compensate for equally great weaknesses. But he was definitely worthy, and to this day hundreds of Estonian lives are better off because of his bravery all those years ago.

Sad to say, Viktor's church board, over the pastor's objection, chose to excommunicate him, even while he was still in prison. Gullible old men, they believed the lies the KGB had spread to discredit him.

Viktor never forgave them. Independence came in 1991, and with it less need for old friends. Additionally he found the Christian life somehow harder to live in a free country; oppression had been easier to handle. He has never gone back to church, and I have lost contact with him.

If he ever reads this:

I love you old friend. Yeah, you're still far from perfect. But you're also still a hero.

Back in the USSR: Estonia 25 Years Later

I've been in Tallinn, Estonia since Friday. Already one of Europe's most charming cities, this Baltic capital is more captivating than ever. Old, pre-Stalin buildings have been renovated, while Soviet era ramshackles, not worth saving, have been razed. The result, to my eye, is a pleasing mix of old stone and new steel. Eesti architects and planners are not, like other Northern Europeans, so minimalist that they sacrifice warmth. New buildings--and there are many--complement more than contrast.

It's such a far cry from 1980 when Dolly and I first came here. Back then everything was gray, other than the red Soviet propaganda billboards, ugly crimson pimples on a sad-faced town. Oh, there were a couple of government buildings slathered in that old commie favorite, Institutional Mustard, a shade you'd think someone chose because it was on sale cheap. But everything else, buildings, cars, streets, even people, wore a lifeless gray, a whole city in primer, awaiting its real color. But, like a redneck Camaro, it stayed that way for years.

This was the Brezhnev era, and the KGB watched tourists like hawks, especially those of us with no local relatives. We found out years later the Fifth Directorate considered Dolly and me harmless sentimentalists, since we came every year just to sing songs to the local registered congregations, but they were curious as to where we got the money to do it. (Turns out we were good at protecting our cover, to supply brave Christian workers in the underground church with everything from small electronics to cash.)

One of today's leading local pastors was a teenaged alcoholic back then, in and out of church, but a good musician and someone we considered worthy of attention and investment. The KGB knew we were friends, so they took him out one night, plying him with booze, hoping he would loosen up about us. He got stinking drunk at their expense, but never squealed.

(We were always careful; in fact I couldn't get so much as a good-night kiss once Dolly found out our room was bugged. Our discretion paid off, oddly enough, in a lack of dramatic stories, the sort that help raise funds back home but jeopardize the work.)

The same young rogue, now a busy pastor going to seminary on the side, drove me around town today, and every corner evoked a memory from August, twenty-five years ago: The park outside Hotell Viru, where I went searching for a pay phone in order to make first contact with the Christian underground; it took three hours to find one that worked. The street corner where we finally made contact; an erstwhile empty field across the lane now boasts an ultra-modern shopping center. The sea shore south of town, once a forbidden border zone overlooking a Soviet submarine base; now the barracks house a Bible school. (When a nuclear sub goes missing in "The Hunt for Red October," a Soviet general barks "Call Tallinn." This is the base he would have called.)

Yes, the town was always pretty; even communism's corrosive acids couldn't eat away its charm. But now it's beautiful, revived, almost born again.

Almost.

Recollections of John Paul II and Poland, 1978

"The vital signs of Pope John Paul II have gone flat." Those words, spoken just a moment ago, signal the end of earthly life for a true hero.

John Paul II was one of my two "favorite people I almost met." The other was Mother Teresa, dysentery having greeted me thirty minutes before I would have greeted her.

My JP II "almost" took place in October, 1978, during my second trip to Poland. Living Sound, the team of "musicianaries" for whom I directed music, had been singing and preaching in Catholic churches and cathedrals around the nation for a couple of weeks. We were "Protestants," (the old catch-all for anyone non-RC), but that didn't matter in the least, since we were there at the invitation of Poland's two cardinals, the elder Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, and the younger Karol Cardinal Wojtyla. Their imprimatur overruled any objections a priest or bishop might raise. Not that they or anyone else objected. To the contrary, we were treated like, well...saints!

We were famous in Poland in 1978, thanks to the highly reliable national "rumor mill," the only way real news made it around that poor, propaganda-laden country. It was "wi-fi" the old fashioned way: Whispers. Mouth to ear. It was the only way to shut Big Brother out. And we had hit the lip-services big nearly six years earlier, because of an incident at a nightclub in Krakow.

We were touring in southern California when the letter of invitation came. Would we like to perform two concerts at a club in downtown Krakow, Poland's university hub? There were tens of thousands of students living there, so the place would probably be packed.

Would we? This was instantly the biggest deal of our lives: An open door to sing Christian songs to young people behind the Iron Curtain! Who could say no?

We telegrammed our acceptance as fast as we could, even though we didn't know exactly to whom we were saying yes--the official seal of our sponsor was in Polish. But we had an address and a date, and we were going to be touring Western Europe that November anyway.

The drive from Vienna was a long one, not because of the miles--less than 200--but because of the border crossings at both ends of Czechoslovakia. The Commies were sticklers about searching buses and luggage; that took long enough. But they were absolutely freaks about making sure faces matched passport pictures. A couple of the guys stood on the bus shaving their beards. That oughta solve it. No, wait...still a problem. One of the guys, Don Moen (yeah, the same one on those Time-Life worship CD infomercials), had shaved his beard SINCE his passport photo. This was a curve, and you NEVER throw communist bureaucracies a curve.

We had been at the border longer than we'd been on the road, when finally one weary guard said something to his equally tired buddy in smart-aleck Czech, or smart-aleck something else with a lot of cees and zees, and they both started laughing. No translator needed for this one: "Are we going to stand here while he grows a new beard?"

Suddenly the frowns were at least non-frowns, and we were on our way, pulling into Poland's unofficial southern capital shortly before midnight. The first of our two back-to-back concerts was less than eighteen hours away.

(One salient point about our group: We had a preacher. Terry Law, our then twenty-nine year-old leader, was--and still is--a skilled orator. He can't tell a joke, mind you, but he more than makes up for that little deficiency in the way he tells a story. And boy, was he about to "wax the elephant" this time.)

Set-up and sound-check the next afternoon were exciting. We usually played churches and high schools, not night clubs. Especially not night clubs (reverb please) BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN, CURtain, Curtain, curtain...although I was taken aback when one of their local guys asked one of our foreign guys if we had any drugs. Didn't he know we were a Christian group?

By concert time the place was packed and cheap beer was flowing. This would be sooo cool. Translators wouldn't be necessary. Virtually every college student in the nation studied English. (They had to choose either English or Russian, and as John Paul II's spokesman once said, "Everybody in Poland understands Russian, but nobody speaks it.")

We had a plan: Open with a couple of current pop hits, do half a dozen contemporary Christian numbers, and then Terry would speak before the final song. He was going to bridge the culture gap, admire a few famous Poles, promote commonalities, stuff like that.

Didn't happen. Terry walked onstage after the third song and took the mic. I could tell right away he had his preach on. "We're here to tell you Jesus Christ is the only way. Marx and Lenin were wrong. They did not know the way. Only Jesus is the way." That's as much as I heard before my knees drowned out everything else. Terry left the stage after ten minutes, and we went into the next song.

We had taken a quiet old chorus and turned it into a rockin' six-part Gospel choir number: "God is moving, by His Spirit, moving thru all the earth. Signs and wonders, when God moveth. Moo-oove O Lord in me." We sang our hearts out while our brass section blew their Blood-Sweat-and-Tears-meets-Tower-of-Power best.

All over the room young people grinned, cried, and drank beer, while a Spirit they had never been allowed to worship grabbed them by their hearts and desires and hugged the despair out of them. And I watched the song come to pass while I sang it.

As soon as the last note ended I started looking for Terry, to find out what kind of response he'd gotten. After fifteen or twenty minutes I finally found him in the basement. It was a scene straight out of a B-movie. There he sat, at a small table, a single glaring light bulb hanging low overhead. Men in dark clothes paced the surrounding floor, questioning, ranting, accusing--I got there right at the "CIA spies" part of the lecture--while Terry sat there, eyes twinkling, enjoying every minute of it. And why not? This was another story in the making, one he could tell for the rest of his life.

The dark-clothes guys were obviously shocked to learn that we were a Christian group. They hadn't caught that fact when an exchange student from Oklahoma told them she could get them an American band. She just hadn't told them what kind of band.

Their leader, whom I assumed to be the club manager, continued his lecture, with a passing reference to something he assumed we knew. Now it was our turn to be shocked: This was the Komsomol Club, the official Youth Communist entertainment center, owned and operated by the Party. Good grief...We were doing a fund-raising benefit for communism! The second irony hit me as fast as the first, but with sheer joy: They had sold tickets to a revival meeting!

By now it was time for the second gig to start, and the crowd upstairs was already pretty well sudsed. They weren't about to take refunds, and the club managers knew it. Besides the Party needed the money. Plus the crowd was growing by the minute; word was already on the street that this American band was up to something that would make a noise all the way to Moscow. Terry, after all, had done a reverse Andrew Dice Clay move, breaking a social taboo with shocking language, in this case dissing Lenin and promoting Jesus.

Okay, they said, you can sing your songs. But you (they pointed to Terry) cannot say anything! You cannot even go onstage. "No problem," he grinned. After all, the songs were the most dangerous part.

We left the club sometime after midnight, having talked and prayed with as many young people as we could. And that was when we hit the "news." Word of the Party's embarrassment did indeed spread all over Eastern Europe. And it reached across town, of course, to Cardinal Wojtyla, who also happened to be the Bishop of Krakow.

It didn't take Poland's junior Cardinal long to issue an invitation for us to return, not to the club, but to the hundreds of Catholic churches and cathedrals all over that increasingly religious nation.

Flash forward to October, 1978. Now we were special guests at Sacrosong, a Roman Catholic fine arts festival in Krakow. These were still communist times, and Americans were very welcome in maverick, freedom-minded Poland, especially young, musical, Christian Americans.

Cardinal Wojtyla, Sacrosong's patron, loved modern music, and loved young people even more. He would greet us personally, and present us with a signed scroll of welcome as the festival's featured guests. But of course that did not happen.

We got the scroll, but by that time he was gone. (It must have been one of the last times he would ever sign that name.) The energetic cleric was called to Rome the day before we arrived, not knowing that he would never come home again, at least not to live. John Paul I, the "smiling Pope" had died suddenly of heart failure on September 28, and our favorite Cardinal was destined to become Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian pontiff in four hundred years.

Yep, I missed meeting him by a few hours. But I still hope to...someday.