oakleys.org.uk

"If the apostle Paul would not allow an inspirited prophetess -- whose words were from the Spirit himself -- to join in the weighing and sifting of the prophetic utterances, then why would he let her do it just because she has an MDiv from Fuller? (Why Ministers Must be Men, p. 29).

"I doubt that there is such a thing as a measure of spirituality, but if there is, gratitude would be it. Only the grateful are paying attention. They are grateful because they pay attention, and they pay attention because they are so grateful" (Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet, p. 64).

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich has given an important speech on the threat posed to us by Sharia law and the encroachments of Islamic fundamentalism. He was right to do so, but like so many, the ground where he wants to stand in this fight is ground that gives way under his feet. Sharia law is "abhorrent to Western values." So? Who cares about that?

The Islamists are driven by what Allah has revealed. The answer to this is not what the people of the West think at the present moment. If you want a good example of the voice of that god, then take a gander at the House of Representatives. A transcendental appeal, even if it might be false, appears to outrank a horizontal appeal that is known by everyone to be false.

Here is the basic problem. Why should we resist the encroachments of Sharia law based on our Western values? What is the opposite of Western values? That would be Eastern values, and can anybody give me a reason why we should prefer one position over another on the basis of geography?

Western values only have value if they are a coded way of referring to something else. And that something else cannot be another horizontal fact, like representative government, or womens' rights, or anything like that. That just pushes the question back a step. Why should we prefer those? And if we say that Western values simply means "our values," then why should those outrank "their values"? In the ebb and flow of Darwinian struggle, ours sometimes loses to theirs.

"Western values" as an appeal works only if it is a coded references to Christendom, and that only works if Christ is still there. Anything else is arbitrary, jingoistic, and stupid. Anything else is a couple of dogs fighting over a piece of meat.

The problem is illustrated by secular or atheistic Zionism, which is racism, straight up. If you make a theological argument for Jews in the land of Palestine, that argument is based in the will of God and not in the inherent right of a certain DNA imprint to hold the rights to a certain bit of territory. Even if that theological argument is wrong, the appeal it makes is not to race (Dt. 7:7-8). But if there is no God, and hence no theological argument, all you have left of your Zionism is race. "I can have this, and you cannot have it, because I am a Jew and you are not." Zionism of that sort, Zionism with no God, is racist pure and simple. Of course, if there is no God, there is nothing wrong with such racism, and nothing wrong with answering it in kind, but that is another point for another day.

In the same way, Western values are a bundle of wind, a bunch of nothing. The postmodernists have pointed out to us that there are different communities out there, and they all have their values, and so now these communities careen around in our global village like so many bumper cars. Who's to say?

Western values are only to be preferred in a conflict like this if they are grounded in some way in the will of God. If they are not, then they will go down before the will of Allah like dry grass before the scythe. Islamism will go through deracinated Western values like a hot knife through butter. It goes back to Chesterton's adage -- if you don't stand for something you will fall for anything.

Now there have been times, times of unreflecting youth, when a people with their false little democratic gods on a shelf might successfully stand against another people with their false allah-god up in the air. Sometimes Jupiter prevails over Mithra and sometimes it goes the other way. That kind of thing has been done, and it has actually been done by the people of the West to the Muslims. Think of the Western democracies of the early twentieth century carving up the Middle East like it was a pie. Yes, it has been done.

But that was before the rot of postmodernism set in, the reductio that made all our crackerjack thinkers realize (some of them reluctantly) that our great Kantian sky hook wasn't actually bolted to anything, and one man's guess was as good as another's.

So this means, in short, there is now no way to defend the West without rejecting, root and branch, the last one hundred years of Western intellectual history. That's fine with me, and all my modest proposal entails is that we undertake to defend the West by rejecting the last two hundred and fifty years of Western intellectual history. I am willing to defend the next Christendom, and am in fact eager to do so. I am not willing to take my stand on the basis of the dregs of the last Christendom.

And here is a sane defense of voting GOP. Worth reading.

In exchange for a pleasing dance, Herod is willing to give away up to half his kingdom (Mark 6:23). The devil is a piker. The Lord is pleased to give us the entirety of His kingdom (Luke 12:32). In exchange for everything we have -- which isn't much, let me tell you -- God is willing to give us everything He has.

INTRODUCTION:

In this last chapter of Romans, Paul says his farewells, gives various greetings, and does so in a way as to teach us many invaluable things. Some might wonder what kind of message we might get out of a passage in which Paul basically says hi to everyone the Roman church phone directory, but we have to remember that all Scripture is profitable.

THE TEXT:

“I commend unto you Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea: 2 That ye receive her in the Lord, as becometh saints, and that ye assist her in whatsoever business she hath need of you: for she hath been a succourer of many, and of myself also . . . (Rom. 16:1-16).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT:

Paul commends to the Romans a woman named Phoebe, who was probably the messenger who carried the letter to the Romans. As valuable trusts go, this was probably one of the most important missions in the history of the church. She is called a sister, and is identified as a “servant” of the church at Cenchrea (v. 1). In the next verse, Paul urges them to give her a saints’ welcome, and to assist her in whatever business she might need to use them. She had been a great help to many, Paul included (v. 2). Greet Priscilla and Aquila, Paul’s helpers in Christ (v. 3), who risked their lives for Paul (v. 4). Greet their house church (v. 5), along with Epaenetus, the first convert in Achaia (v. 5). The greetings are then extended to Mary (v. 6), Andronicus and Junia (v. 7), Amplias (v. 8), Urbane and Stachys (v. 9), Apelles and the household of Aristobulus (v. 10), Herodian and the household of Narcissus (v. 11), Tryphena, Tryphosa and Persis (v. 12), Rufus and his mother (v. 13), Ayncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, Hermes and the brothers with  them (v. 14), Philogus and Julia, Hereus and his sister, and Olympas, and all the saints with them (v. 15). Paul then tells them to greet one another with a holy kiss (v. 16), and says that the churches of Christ salute them (v. 16).

SOME DETAILS ABOUT THE NAMES:

Paul is greeting a number of the saints who are there at Rome, and it is striking how many of them he knows—and it appears a number of them quite well. I take v. 7 as saying “notable among the apostles” as opposed to “notable apostles,” as Junia is a woman’s name. These saints were converts out of paganism, as most had common names for that culture and others had the sorts of names that a Christian mom would not have given—such as Hermes or Olympas. Paul refers several times to kinsmen (vv. 7, 11), and that he and Rufus had the same (unnamed) mother. These are most likely like kin, and not actual relatives. But who knows? After all, a nephew shows up in Paul’s life around this time (Acts 23:16).

THE VALUE OF LABOR:

We can see how close Paul is to these people. We can also see how he got close to them—for Paul, labor and sacrifice were at the center of his value system. Phobe was a great help to many (v. 2). Priscilla and Aquila put their necks on the line (v. 4). Mary was a hard worker (v. 6). Urbane was a helper in the Lord (v. 9). Tryphena and Tryphosa labored in the Lord (v. 12). Persis labored much in the Lord (v.12).

We were created for work. The fall into sin makes that work harder, true enough, but it also gives us more that we have to do. We should gather up the kind of friends that Paul had, and get to work.

THE CHURCH AT THEIR HOUSE:

The church at Rome was actually a cluster of churches. One of them met at the home of Priscilla and Aquila (v. 5). It is possible that a couple of others met at the homes of Narcissus and Aristobulus, who may have been unbelievers since there were not greet by name. Two other groups are mentioned in vv. 14-15. At this point in history, there were no church buildings, and so the singular church at Rome (which Paul could write one letter to) was actually a collection of churches. Paul could write to them, give a number of greetings to the saints in different gatherings, expecting them to be able to see one another in order to pass on those greetings. Geographical separation, whether or Paul across the ocean or the other Roman saints who were across town meeting at the Best Western, is not a separation in fellowship.

PHOEBE OUR SISTER:

Phoebe is called a number of things, from which we learn a great deal. She is “our sister” (v. 1), she is a servant (diakonos) of the church at Cenchrea, clearly serving that church in some sort of official capacity. She was the one who delivered the letter to the Romans, and Paul instructs them to help her out now that she is in Rome (v. 2). The word translated in the AV as “succourer” is a word that means benefactress or patronness. She was clearly wealthy, and came from the eastern port of Corinth (Cenchrea), a place that had been about six miles east of Corinth, and is now underwater. The word diakonos as it is used here can either denote a formal office, or it can simply mean a generic “helper” or servant. Given Phoebe’s prominance, and the importance of the help, it seems that the former is meant. But it does not follow from this that the church at Cenchrea had a deacon board, and that women were on it. To reason that way is anachronistic.

A HOLY KISS:

Speaking of anachronism, some Christians take Paul’s reference to the kiss here to mean that Christians are required to greet each other in some special liturgical fashion, i.e. with a liturgical kiss, or a “holy” kiss. Others, like myself, would want to say that your greetings, such as they are and how they function, should be holy. Your  kiss, or your handshake, or your Christian side hug, should be holy. They would want to point out that Paul has just finished a long list of ordinary greetings, and he then urges them to greet one another (using the same word)—and to do so in holiness. In other words, a woman could be eligible to be enrolled as a widow, even if she had never, ever washed any of the saints’ feet (1 Tim. 5:10). As we make cultural transpositions, we must always remember the difference between principles and methods.

When we gather at this Table, we are partaking of Christ and we are partaking with Christ. The thing that makes this an efficacious blessing is of course faith, but this faith does not work apart from what it was told to do. We were told to eat and drink, and so believing faith eats and drinks in faith. Believing faith does not jettison the bread and wine, and try to gin up the same results by means of naked faith. Naked faith is not what the Reformers meant by sola fide, faith alone.

When Moses was told to extend his rod over the Red Sea, he would not have been exhibited greater faith if he had left his rod in his tent. That would have been unbelief, not greater faith. When Peter got out of the boat to walk toward Jesus, he would not have been exhibiting greater faith if he stayed in the boat so that his faith could walk out toward Jesus. Faith always deals with the appointed objects. Superstition keeps the object, and neglects the faith which we were commanded to have, while super-spiritualism dispenses with the object, and tries to keep the faith going. But this is as unbelieving as the superstition. If God tells you to do something, how could it be super-faith if you refused to do it?

We gather here to eat bread and drink wine. We gather to do this with a particular demeanor, one which God calls us to throughout all Scripture. We are called to assemble in living, vibrant, robust, evangelical faith—a faith which does what it is told, the way it is told. And so, come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.

Flattery is deadly, and before you start flattering others, you must first flatter yourself. The reason it is such a deadly sin is that it is the sin that hides from you your clear need to repent. Flattery rushes up to you as soon as the Holy Spirit has convicted you of something, and hastens to assure you that it “is not that bad.”

“Only human,” “faults on both sides,” and my “motives were good” are all ways we tend to flatter ourselves. It is true that some practitioners of worm theology in the history of the church have tried to make themselves out to be worse than they actually are—and yet, even here, there is a hidden source of secret pride. But most of us like our self-flattery straight up. We take ordinary sin, sin as ugly as a mutant chimpanzee, and instead of killing it, we put earring and lipstick on it. We tell ourselves soothing lies instead of the hard truth.

In what areas do we tell ourselves lies? In what areas do we pretend that we are not sinning, when we clearly and obviously are? We do it with harsh correction of our children. We do it with lying manipulations of our parents. We do it by being catty to the new girl in our class. We do it by mentally undressing women we are not married to. We do it by flaking on our responsibilities, and then trying to make someone else the fall guy. We do it with chintzy little donations so that we can tell ourselves how generous we are. We do it by being so busy we neglect our Bibles, and then priding ourselves on our work ethic. We do it by failing to confess our sins honestly and accurately.

Our Father and God, You have established Your Church as a royal priesthood in this world, and so we intercede for the nations of men now, confessing on their behalf so that the grace of Your forgiveness will soon be extended to them all.

We acknowledge that we are nation of flatterers, and that we mostly flatter ourselves. We confess this sin on behalf of our people and ask that You would give us a spirit of true humility, not an aw shucks false humility. Father, we acknowledge that we are too concerned for the good opinions of others, and we know that this is inescapable so long as we are not consumed with what it means to have Your good opinion. We know that a good opinion of sinners is impossible outside of Christ, and we lament and confess the fact that our people want to have a public identity outside of Christ. We confess this as a grievous sin.

We know, Father, that if we in the Church regard iniquity in our own midst, or in our own hearts, this prayer will be ineffectual.

Father, we confess that we in the Church have been flatterers of the non-believers, and instead of prophetic courage, we have devised theological systems that allow them to have arenas to live and work in that are not under the authority of Jesus. We pray that You would forgive us for this deceitful flattery, and that You would pour out a spirit of truth and courage upon Your people.

And Father, we confess our individual sins to You now—and Selah . . . We do this in the strong name of Jesus, and amen.

Hear the gospel declared. You have humbled yourself before God, and You have appealed to His mercy through Jesus Christ. And so as a minister of His new covenant I declare that your sins are forgiven through Christ.

Congregation: Thanks be to God!

There was a conservative and Dutchy denom
That passed a report with indignant aplomb.
But we never bleed,
If our critics can't read,
And so here's to a missing-the-point pheenom.

. . . I don't believe I have ever footnoted a limerick before, so here you go.

One trap that parents fall into is the trap of not wanting sin around their kids. But I suppose this requres some explanation.

The mistake arises because there are a bunch of sins that parents should keep away from their kids -- kidnappers, for starters, and cocaine dealers, and pornographers, and seducers, and Cartesian dualists. One of the accusations leveled against private Christian education is that conservative parents are sheltering their kids. What next?! Parents sheltering children! We feed them too.

But here is where the mistake come in. There is a question of degree here. We are not supposed to keep our children away from the presence of all sin whatever. And that's a good thing, too, because it is impossible. There is a type of sin, common to the human condition, that your children will encounter (on a daily basis) on the playground of the finest Christian school imaginable. If you don't send your kids to that school (because of all the sin there), they will encounter even more of it at church, in their relationships with their siblings, in their bedroom all alone, and in the midst of all the dirty thoughts between their ears. The task of parents in this is not to avoid this kind of sin, but rather to teach their children how to battle it. You cannot learn to battle something if you are constantly endeavoring to stay away from it.

In short, with this kind of sin, there are two errors -- equally bad. One is to accommodate yourself to the  presence of this kind of room temperature sin, in such a way as to assume room temperature yourself. That is the way of spiritual death. The other is to pretend to yourself that the choices you have made have somehow successfully distanced you from all that icky stuff. But it is as close to you now as it ever was, but is now invisible because you have daubed your eyes with a special Pharisee salve. This is another way of spiritual death.

The mere presence of sin discredits nothing and no one. A school is not a poor school because junior high girls are catty at lunch, because one of the boys in the fourth grade makes earthy observations about certain bodily functions, or because some blonde named Kimberly gets great grades and the word among the kids in the back row who don't like to study is that she might be the teacher's pet. Welcome to earth, everybody. This is not the kind of sin parents are required to keep their kids away from. They are in fact required not to try. This is the kind of sin that parents need to teach their kids to handle, and avoidance is not a biblical strategy. Because it will be necessarily unsuccessful, avoidance is simply a pretence of avoidance, with the down side -- because you are too busy kidding yourself -- of having children who are not learning how to respond and resist.

Suppose your child is in the classroom of a fine Christian school, one with a great reputation. You know the teachers and administrators, and they really love the Lord. But you know for a fact that two/thirds of the kids in your son's class are all hot about the latest skanky movie. Just last night, after the youth group get together, they all went to see Skanky Movie III, one that has set records for both kinds of box office gross. What will your temptation be? Your temptation will be to think that however well-intentioned the folks running the school might be, the "tone" of the school is not nearly "high enough," and that all these families clearly have poor standards. You regret having to do this, but you are considering pulling your son, wrapping him up in cotton batting for two final semesters of Mom School.

You think the problem is low entertainment standards, when the actual problem is that no Christian parents -- including you -- are teaching their kids what moral leadership looks like. About a third of the kids who went to that movie didn't really want to, and wouldn't have gone if someone in the class -- I am thinking of your son in particular -- had done more than simply studied his shoelaces when the subject came up. You are tempted to think that the others have low entertainment standards, when the real lesson is that your son is not a moral leader. The response ought not to be to do something that will make him even less of one.

"Before the discussion gets sidetracked on the basis of caricature, lett us grant that the arbiter of long and short ought not to be a particularly strict dorm monitor at a fundamentalist Bible college. Paul says short, not 'less than a quarter inch, with pink sidewalls around the ears.' He says long, not 'over a foot and a half.' Long and short are relative, comparative terms. A short walk could be five hundred yards, and a long drive could be three thousand miles, but if they are comparative terms, what do they compare to? The obvious answer is that they compare to one another . . .  Just as Christian women ought not to wear jewelry in an ostentatious way because they are following the apostolic rule, so also modern Christian women ought not to cut their hair like a boy. And men must not wear their hair long, in that languid soccer-player way that makes other men start looking for the garden shears" (Why Ministers Must be Men, p. 27).

"Gravitas can also be inherited from relatively healthy families who simply tell their stories well. The southern novelists Flannery O'Connor once claimed that anyone who pays attention to his or her childhood could write novels for the rest of his or her life" (Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet, p. 50).

Suits and Haircuts from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

"A common evangelical saying is that many miss heaven by eighteen inches . . . the distance between the head and the heart. We also need to remember that many others miss heaven by thirty-four inches" (Why Ministers Must Be Men, p. 23).

"The old seminary professors used to speak about a necessary trait for pastoral ministry called gravitas. It refers to a soul that has developed enough spiritual mass to be attractive, like gravity. It makes the soul appear old, but gravitas has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with wounds that have healed well, failures that have been redeemed, sins that have been forgiven, and thorns that have settled into the flesh. These severe experiences with life expand the soul until it appears larger than the body that contains it" (Barnes, The Pastor As Minor Poet, p. 49).

"When men follow a teacher like Jezebel of Thyatira, they are doing so not because her doctrinal reasons are so compelling and her academic credentials so impressive, but rather because following her will greatly increase their chances of getting laid (Rev. 2:20). If a prophet comes prophesying wine and beer (Mich. 2:11), he is sure to get a following. And if it is a prophetess, declaring that love is grace and grace is sexy, then even better" (Why Ministers Must Be Men, p. 23).

"This is why poetry does not have to be defended, inculcated, or coerced. It only appears defenseless. Its power resides not in the orthodoxy of the verse, and certainly not in the creativity of the poet, but in the inspired word that has the power to untangle the distorted image of God. The truth of holy poetry is buoyant. It will rise to the surface to do all the convicting and compelling once it is freed simply through expression" (Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet, pp. 36-37).

So I have been using the phrase mere Christendom. What does the mere mean?

First we need to address what it does not mean. It does not mean Christendom Lite. It does not mean "faith-based" civilization, the same way you might have faith-based soup kitchens, with the content of the faith being diluted enough to not bother those who are providing the secularist tax monies. If Christ is Lord, and He is, then those who believe that He is Lord should also think that it follows that He is the Lord of these United States and, going beyond our shores, that He is the Lord of every other place as well. Once this is accepted in multiple nations, in a formal and public way, you have the beginnings of the next Christendom.

So I do not mean a civilization is grounded on the Christian faith, but in such a way that keeps us from taking it "too seriously" -- because we all know what happens when religiotards start taking their faith seriously. Hands get chopped off, the woman caught in adultery that Christ forgave is condemned at the appellate level, baptistic pastors are flogged for their incorrect exegesis of Col. 2:11, and so forth. That's what will happen, right? Wrong. Or, to be more accurate, mostly wrong.

But why do we think that, and why is it (mostly) wrong? Often our baptistic brethren will lead the way in asking these questions, and it has to be said they have historical reasons for being jumpy.

We have to remember several things. First, history is messy and when Christians have thrown other Christians into the slammer, sometimes the jailing Christians were at fault, other times the jailed ones were, and sometimes both. Sometimes the persecution was provoked by the one with the guns and keys, and other times it was provoked by the ones with nothing more than a talent for brinksmanship. For example, take Servetus coming to Geneva, with a double-dog-dare-ya attitude. And, speaking of Servetus, it should be mentioned that his execution was a brief ecumenical moment for a troubled Europe -- Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed all threw their hats in the air. And that means that the people we really have to watch out for today are those who really, deeply care what everybody else thinks. But that is another subject for another time.

I need to look like I am changing the subject for a moment, but this appearance is illusory. When I made my peace with infant baptism almost twenty years ago, one of the things I knew I had to account for was the presence of baptized infidelty, and kicking it up a notch, baptized wickedness. You sometimes get those things, and you have to have a theological framework for it beforehand, one that takes biblical discipline seriously. But for the paedobaptist, that is not the real pastoral problem. You sometimes get baptized wickedness, but you always get baptized immaturity. Baptized immaturity is built right into the system, by definition. Peter Leithart points out that this is Yoder's problem with Constantine -- he has no theological room to allow for such immaturity. File that away for a moment.

When the modern era was forming, we have to remember that there was a battle for the soul of that modern era. It was not the case that "religion" fought itself to the point of exhaustion in the Thirty Years War, decided to privitize itself in order to let the secularists run things, since the secularists had invented all these cool, modern gadgets. That would be a tad simplistic. The modern era was actually birthed by the Reformation, and the Enlightenment highjacked it, claiming credit for a whole bunch of things they didn't really do. Anachronistic and self-serving claim-jumping is what they do best. Had the Enlightenment not happened, we would still have a recognizable modern era -- just the same, only different.

This means that a return to Christendom does not entail a return to Geneva, circa 1590 A.D. It means that we are allowed to remember some of the things we have learned in the interim. I am just insisting that we place the lessons we have learned in an explicitly Christ-honoring context, and that we reject, throw away, and otherwise dispose of those bogus things we just thought we learned. An example of the former would be a political space for true liberty of conscience -- a development demonstrably grounded in Christian theology. An example of the latter would be the Darwinian idea that we are all nothing more than a raggle taggle collection of protoplasm, with no more rights than what the ruling classes decide we should have this coming week.

Now, one of the basic lessons we should have learned in the interim is this. The leaven works through the loaf slowly. The mustard seed grows slowly. The living water from Ezekiel's temple get gradually deeper. But when doctrinaire Christians get power, one of their temptations is that they want to impose their whole system, down to the jots and tittles. We must refrain from doing this, not because truth is relative, because it isn't, not because truth is a matter of community-perspective and there are multiple communities, for that is incoherent, but we must refrain from doing this because Jesus Christ demands that we refrain.

I said above that the fear of Christians mistreating Christians was mostly wrong. It has been, and it will be, regretfully, sometimes right. The temptation mentioned in the previous paragraph is not universally resisted. But it ought to be -- Christian maturity demands it. But if I grant that it will not be universally resisted, then why do I want to run the risk? The answer is that we are not registering our wishes from some neutral zone. I am wishing for a civilization where, my critics would say, a baptist might be fined for failing to understand the covenant with Abraham. Right, but I am not wishing for this civilization from the balconies of Heaven. Rather I am wishing for it in a civilization where baptists are fined for not separating their garbage, fined for having the wrong kind of light bulb, fined for providing a baptist education to their homeschooled kids, and fined for holding Bible studies in residential neighborhoods that aren't zoned for that. In large part, I want out of this secularist paradise we are in because I think it is high time that we laid off the baptists.

I want to live in a baptized civilization. That is what I mean by mere Christendom. But this means, if I understand what I want, that I also want to live in the midst of baptized immaturity. If we are the Dufflepuds, and a glance at the national debt indicates that we most certainly are, then we have a long way to go. But if that is the raw material, what should you prefer? Wicked, infidel Dufflepuds or baptized and thoroughly exasperating Dufflepuds. I go with the latter.

In his last chapter, "Toward a New City Commons," Hunter takes Jer. 29:4-7 as his key text, wherein the Jews in exile were told to seek the peace of the city they would inhabit for a time.

"Clearly it would have been justifiable for the Jews to be hostile to their captors. It also would have been natural enough for them to withdraw from engaging the world around them. By the same token, it would have been easy for them to simply assimilate with the culture that surrounded them. Any of these three options made sense in human terms. But God was calling them to something different -- not to be defensive against, isolated from, or absorbed into the dominant culture, but to be faithfully present within it" (p. 277).

Yea, and amen to that. But what happened then?

"Then was the king exceeding glad for him, and commanded that they should take Daniel up out of the den. So Daniel was taken up out of the den, and no manner of hurt was found upon him, because he believed in his God. And the king commanded, and they brought those men which had accused Daniel, and they cast them into the den of lions, them, their children, and their wives; and the lions had the mastery of them, and brake all their bones in pieces or ever they came at the bottom of the den. Then king Darius wrote unto all people, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth; Peace be multiplied unto you. I make a decree, That in every dominion of my kingdom men tremble and fear before the God of Daniel: for he is the living God, and stedfast for ever, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed, and his dominion shall be even unto the end. He delivereth and rescueth, and he worketh signs and wonders in heaven and in earth, who hath delivered Daniel from the power of the lions. So this Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius, and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian" (Dan. 6:23-28).

Okay, so Darius, like Constantine, had a few rough edges. Come to think of it, Nebuchaddnezzar had a few rough edges too.

"Then Nebuchadnezzar spake, and said, Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who hath sent his angel, and delivered his servants that trusted in him, and have changed the king’s word, and yielded their bodies, that they might not serve nor worship any god, except their own God. Therefore I make a decree, That every people, nation, and language, which speak any thing amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall be made a dunghill: because there is no other God that can deliver after this sort. Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, in the province of Babylon" (Dan. 2:28-30).

I would counsel extreme caution. Do you see the sorts of excesses that faithful presence can lead to? I mean, political opponents, and their wives and children, fed to ravenous lions? Theological critics, who were simply publishing their honest opinions about Daniel's God in respectable and refereed theological journals, getting cut into pieces and their houses made into dunghills? I mean, this is a dangerous business, this faithful presence stuff. You have to watch your step constantly. If you are too faithful, you might win, and that would set the cat among the pigeons.

Hunter is calling in this chapter for a "new city commons." In order to have that commons, you must have a new city. What is the nature of Hunter's new city? Well, according to Hunter's description, it is a pluralistic one.

"What is 'new' in the new city commons? Against the dominant liberal modernist notion that the public sphere is constituted by a diversity of autonomous and unencumbered individuals, in this view there is a recognition that public diversity -- whose focal metaphor is the city -- is also defined collectively by multiple traditions and communities. Needless to say, some of these are very different from, if not hostile to, the community of Christian believers. But even where there is disagreement, tension, and conflict, there is also a recognition that there are common goods that communities of Christians, drawing on the resources of their tradition, must still hold up, pursue, work at, foster, and practice. In short, commitment to the new city commons is a commitment of the community of faith to the highest ideals and practices of human flourishing in a pluralistic world" (p. 279, emphasis his).

This is simply amazing. In short, instead of individual-based pluralism, we now have community-based pluralism. But the theological name for pluralism is polytheism. Instead of household baals, Hunter wants us to configure the new city commons in such a way as to accommodate the baals of every shire and valley. But how can Christians make principled peace with any other gods? Jesus is Lord, and His claims are total. Our assigned task was to take every thought captive, right?, and to throw down every high thing that sets itself against the knowledge of God (2 Cor. 10:5). Isn't that what we were told to do?

The Bible describes a new city, and a new city commons, but it is nothing like this. There are no other gods in it, for starters.

"And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it" (Rev. 21:23-24).

Why is this book so popular in our circles? We don't have to read any further. This book has been well received because, at the end of the day, Hunter lets us off the hook. And we conservative Christians love nothing more than getting us a little bit of being let off the hook.