Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost fame (presently the web editor at First Things and the co-author of How to Argue Like Jesus) graciously allowed me to guest-post on Evangelicals, Nuclear Abolitionism and the Two Futures Project.  Joe followed up himself with a post on jus en bello and nuclear weapons and, this morning, Tyler Wigg-Stevenson–the founder and director of the Two Futures Project–posted his own well-argued rejoinder. 

As you’ll see from my initial post, I don’t agree with many of Wigg-Stevenson positions, but it’s been an all-around gentle and civil conversation and I’ve found Wigg-Stevenson to be an absolutely delightful and careful interlocutor.  I invite all Withered Grass readers to go to the Two Futures Project, read the material closely, and carefully think through what Wigg-Stevenson has to say.

Schabach is also the founder of Bridgefolk, which is:

a movement of sacramentally-minded Mennonites and peace-minded Roman Catholics who come together to celebrate each other’s traditions, explore each other’s practices, and honor each other’s contribution to the mission of Christ’s Church. Together we seek better ways to embody a commitment to both traditions. We seek to make Anabaptist-Mennonite practices of discipleship, peaceableness, and lay participation more accessible to Roman Catholics, and to bring the spiritual, liturgical, and sacramental practices of the Catholic tradition to Anabaptists.

At ETS in 2005, Grudem presented on “Why do poor nations remain poor? Economic Causes and Biblical Solutions” (short synopsis here).  Next, he offered a rather controversial analysis of the Bush administration: “The Bush Presidency: An Assessment of the First Six Years in the Light of Biblical Principles” (press account here; summary outline here).  In the next two years, he not only tackled the ethics of lying but also suggested a “new blueprint for Christian political engagement.”  Next month at ETS in New Orleans, Grudem returns to the subject of political economy and development, offering 50 “internal factors” that determine a nation’s [does he mean state's] wealth or poverty level (a precis of which can be found here).  All of this has been in preparation for a book, scheduled for release sometime next year, provisionally titled Politics: According to the Bible.  In it, as he remarked to Mahaney, he will be “discussing Christian worldview issues from the Bible, and how they impact over 40 specific political issues.”

Every once in a while over the next few weeks — yes, I’m giving myself considerable wiggle room, considering I have a toddler, a book review to write and (fingers crossed) a conference paper to start researching and writing — I’m going to be examining Grudem’s quest for a “Biblical” political science.  I’ll be using the above-referenced material, as well as additional work by Grudem, to analyze how Grudem systematizes political phenomenon and how he applies Scripture in support of his propositions.  Grudem has been very clear in his Sunday school class that there are “many different views” about politics within evangelical Christian circles, yet such a caveat notwithstanding, does Grudem’s approach lend itself to the interpretation that there is one, set “Biblical” way of acting within a political community?  Moreover, is Grudem attempting to craft a “regulative principle” not of worship, but of Christian political understanding and action?

1.  Phil Congdon (New Braunfels Bible Church, an Evangelical Free congregation in Texas) will be presenting on ”John Piper’s Diminished Doctrine of Justification and Assurance.”   I assume Congdon will be touching on the ongoing Piper – N.T. Wright debate over justification.

2.  Francis Beckwith on same-sex marriage and “justificatory liberalism”   This is a subject that Beckwith previewed at First Things in December 2008.

3.  One side of the ring – Joseph Cumming; the other side, Al Mohler and John Piper.  The referee: JP Moreland.  The issue: Muslim-Christian dialogue, evangelicals and “A Common Word“

4.  Anthony B. Bradley wins the prize for most-over-the-top paper title so far: “Puritanism: A Theological Tradition of Anti-Blackness, Racism and Social Injustice”

5.  Wayne Grudem will once again enter the realm of political science.  Over the past four years or so, Grudem has been using the annual ETS conference as a place to try out his ideas about Christians and politics.  In 2005, he presented on why poor nations remain poor — a topic to which he is returning to this year in New Orleans, where he will talk about 50 internal factors that distinguish wealthy and poor nations.  In 2006, Grudem caught everyone’s attention, including Baptist Press, when he argued in his paper that George W. Bush, Jr.  was a firmly Biblical president (a summary outline of this talk by an attender can be found here). 

6.  Craig Mitchell, Russell Moore, Richard Mouw and Peter Heltzel are going to engage in an organized debate/discussion on the legacy of Carl F.H. Henry.

7.  The most recent CT’s Books and Culture had a section re: 4 books on American evangelicalism and race.  Two of the books – - and a couple of the same individuals – are going to be addressed in a panel discussion.

8.  Denny Burk will be giving a paper entitled “Why Evangelicals Should Ignore Brian McLaren: How the New Testament Requires Evangelicals to Render Judgment on the Moral Status of Homosexuality.”  Earlier this summer, when Denny posted a video on N.T. Wright’s thoughts re: homosexuality, I dropped a note in his comments section and asked him if (a) the video was in anticipation of his ETS paper; and (b) if he would be using Andrew Marin’s work in the paper.   The answer to (a) was no; the answer to (b) was that he wasn’t sure if he’d be interacting with Marin’s work.  I’d be interested to know if (b) has changed.

9.  Philip Reed of John Perkins’ Voice of Calvary Ministries — “Practicing Evangelical Social Ethics: How to Live Out a Church-Based, Biblically-grounded, Christian Community Development.”

10.  As Justin Taylor mentioned this morning at Between Two Worlds, D.A. Carson is going to be speaking at the side breakfast hosted by Crossway.  The anticipated title is “The Changing (Changeless?) Face of Evangelicalism” and the talk will highlight some of the conclusions from his upcoming book.

Looking over the latest offerings from Princeton University Press, I note that Peter Paret is at it once again.  Paret, professor emeritus of European History at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, turned last year’s Lees Knowles Lectures at Cambridge into a full book:  The Cognitive Challenge of War: Prussia 1806.  Looking at the Franco-Prussian conflict, Paret provides (from the available excerpt) a very readable outline of how the changing character — vs. nature — of war precipitated new theorizing by Clausewitz and Jomini.   Reiterating one of Clausewitz’s main points, Paret relates the following in his opening salvo –

The components of war—mobilization of human resources, discipline, weapons, tactics, strategy, and much else, the issues they raise, and the problems they pose—are timeless. But the forms they take and the social context that does much to shape them are always changing. (page 1, emphasis added)

As we all consider the back-and-forth over General McChrystal’s 66-page Commander’s Initial Assessment (30 August 2009) regarding the need for ISAF to adopt a more explicitly COIN-oriented strategy in Afghanistan, let us keep clearly in mind Clausewitz’s (and Paret’s) cautionary words about the unchanging, timeless components of warfare and the need to adapt to war’s chameleon-like, ever-changing forms.

Due to family and work schedules, I can’t read as much as I’d like to right now, yet books and reading have always been a key part of my life.  One of the absolute joys of teaching national security and politics courses to graduate students and undergraduates was the opportunity it gave me to highlight authors and converse about “meaty” books.  It was also my goal (and fervent hope) as a professor to provoke a passion in my students for reading and the art of critical argumentation.  To help them improve their reading and arguing, I would regularly assign two books: Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book, and Wayne Booth, et. al., The Craft of Research.

Adler’s book on reading has recently been getting some well-deserved press in the Reformed blogosphere.  Since January, Justin Taylor’s Between Two Worlds has put out six posts highlighting How to Read a Book (including a summary of Adler’s stages of analytical reading).  Just yesterday, Justin quoted from Peter Kreeft’s book on Socratic logic.  In the excerpt, Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College, sings Adler’s praises, particularly his three-part division of apprehending, judging and reasoning. I wholeheartedly agree with Justin, Tony and Peter. Adler’s work is invaluable for Christians of all stripes and sizes — whether they be students, full-time Christian workers, or lay members in a church.

At the same time, I also think that the Reformed blogosphere is giving out some very mixed messages when it comes to critical analysis and argumentation.

Here’s a post dated 11 September 2009 from the blog of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW).  The post highlighted the recent Trinity and Gender panel discussion held at Southern Seminary, but for my purposes, I’m more interested in focusing on the very last portion –

For more information on this topic, check out these resources below:

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by Bruce A. Ware

Kevin Giles’ Trinity and Subordinationism: A Review Article by Peter R. Schemm, Jr.

Equal in Essence, Distinct in Roles by Bruce A. Ware

A Review of Jesus and the Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity by Kevin Giles by Jason Hall

JBMW Forum: Q & A on the Trinity with Bruce A. Ware and Wayne Grudem

Please note that my concern here is NOT to debate the relative merits of complementarianism vs. egalitarianism, or jump into an in-depth fight over the work of Kevin Giles, Bruce Ware or Wayne Grudem.  Rather, I want to highlight how, in this particular case, CBMW chose to “prep the ground” (so to say) in helping its readers to understand the work of someone with whom they have serious disagreement.  Notice zero mediation when it comes to Bruce Ware — the reader gets straight links to a book and an article.  The same goes for the Ware/Grudem Q&A.  Kevin Giles’ work, however, hasn’t been granted the same courtesy.  In lieu of being given direct links to Giles’ work in the original, CBMW’s blog readers are instead enjoined to read two review articles — the first of which concludes with, ” [t]he primary purpose of this article…has been to show that Giles often overstates his case and in some instances simply misrepresents the facts,” while the second ends with the assessment that “[Jesus and the Father] brings the debate between complementarians and egalitarians to an all-time low.”  Again, I’m not insisting that these reviews were poorly written or sloppily argued — indeed, they were not — but what is of serious concern to me is CBMW’s apparent decision in this case to “protect” its blog readers from engaging Giles in the original, unmediated by negative reviews, and what such a example possibly demonstrates about conservative evangelicalism’s “actual” or “functional” belief about Christians and the art of critical argumentation.

I will grant the point that I don’t know the precise motivations behind the structure of the CBMW post.  I will also grant that any parachurch/advocacy group has the right to base and structure its recommendations however it wishes.  Nevertheless, what could a reader walk away in light of the structure of this post?  First, you can’t be trusted to ask the right questions or come to the right conclusions about Kevin Giles, so we have to prepare you in a way that we don’t think is necessary should you want to read Ware or Grudem in the original.  Second, perhaps it’s not a question of trust, but we’re concerned that you, our readers, aren’t spiritually or theologically mature enough to read or analyze Giles without “help”; that is, we’re concerned that without such “help,” Giles will lead you astray.  Third, a CBMW reader might sense that apparently, I don’t need to be as discerning about Ware, Grudem — or for that matter, Peter Schemm or Jason Hall — as I do about Kevin Giles.

We’ve all read our Mark Noll.  We all want conservative evangelicals who are intellectually robust and strong in analysis. Yet, this type of example would seem to indicate that when it comes down to the pavement level, we as conservative evangelicals may not really desire that.  In academic circles, it’s very common to assign students review articles, plus any rejoinders and surrejoinders, but that’s not the case here.  Kevin Giles doesn’t get to speak himself at all.  His voice is only mediated through the CBMW reviewers.  Moreover, CBMW’s blog readers aren’t given the opportunity to learn how to read or study Giles critically without first undergoing innoculation.  The CBMW post could have offered direct links to everyone’s original work and, keeping in mind what CBMW considers to be a neo-pastoral mandate, provided study questions for its readers to think about or ponder while reading everyone’s work — Ware and Grudem’s works included.

In short, CBMW could have read Giles alongside its blog readers, rather than for them.

Coming up:  Critical thinking, the designation of “dangerous” books in American evangelicalism, and why Mark Dever’s “What I read on vacation” posts were more perilous to my soul than any of the reading I ever did for my undergraduate comprehensive examinations (minor field) on witchcraft and heresy in late medieval/early modern European history.

Imaginatively drawing on a wide range of theological literature, social, and political theory, Bourne, in a manner unlike anyone else, helps us see how the work of John Howard Yoder provides a constructive politics for Christians in our day. Only someone completely at home in Yoder’s work could have written such a lucid and helpful book. Bourne, hopefully, has made John Howard Yoder indispensable for work in political theology.”—Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University

…In liberal societies – societies that understand their social and political arrangements as limited by, and instrumental to, the ‘liberty’ of individuals – ‘security’ and ‘liberty’ are virtually certain to come into collision. Warfare on any scale is almost certain to involve a heightened degree of coercion as well as fairly extensive interference with rights to privacy and property. The difficulties for liberals are still greater when it is reasonable to suspect that there are dangerous enemies within – in other words, when there are grounds for treating the free members of the community as if they were external enemies.

These are not, however, novel difficulties, and there are well-known intellectual moves that go some way towards resolving them, conveniently summarised in the two ancient tags salus populi suprema lex esto (let the safety of the people be the highest law) and inter arma silent leges (amid arms the laws are silent). But neither of these slogans is any real threat to what we have called the Hadrian’s Wall image. The former presupposes the moral significance of membership of a particular ‘people’. The latter claims that there are times and places in which those values are inapplicable; even if the places are within a given community’s borders, it has deemed them, in effect, to be external.

The principal objective of our proposed research is to acquire a better understanding of an essentially conceptual shift that undermines the Hadrian’s Wall model. Though liberals of course aspire to treat all human beings equally, they have in general recognised a fairly firm distinction between their home societies and places (as it were, beyond the Wall) where liberal values have yet to be respected; a universalising value system has nonetheless accepted that there are areas beyond its practical control. But universalising liberalism is being replaced by a variant that is universalist, that is, that presupposes the existence of an established worldwide rights-based order. On this view, the liberal state’s duty in Rwanda and Iraq is simply to uphold the same arrangements that prevail in North America and Western Europe. Moreover, in its efforts to uphold them, it must itself be held to the high standards that it maintains that it is fighting for.

The kick-off event for the Liberal Way of War is scheduled for Saturday, 10 October 2009 at the University of Reading.  Two very well-known scholars of strategy and military operations — Sir Michael Howard and (my mentor) Colin S. Gray — will be presenting, in addition to Oxford (Balliol College) professor Sir Adam Roberts, who is a member of the steering committee for Oxford’s own Leverhulme-funded study of the changing character of war, and, finally, Alan Cromartie, the director of the Liberal Way of War programme at Reading and a professor of political philosophy and thought.  Sir Michael Howard’s talk is a retrospective and a revisitation of his work, War and the Liberal Conscience.

For prospective Ph.D. students interested in the possibility of studying in Reading’s Liberal Way of War programme, contact Alan Cromartie.  There appear to be a limited number of Leverhulme-funded Ph.Ds on offer between 2009 and 2012.