The Upper Register Blog

According to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, there are three means of grace:

Q. 88. What are the outward means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption?
A. The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption, are his ordinances, especially the word, sacraments, and prayer; all which are made effectual to the elect for salvation.

It may sound high-churchy, even Roman Catholic, to say that the word, the sacraments, and prayer are the means that Christ uses to communicate the benefits of salvation to us. But as Protestants we are able to speak this way because we believe that Christ uses the preaching of the gospel, by the power of the Spirit, to create faith in the hearts of the elect (i.e., “effectual calling”), and that he uses the continued preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments to further strengthen our faith and increase our assurance. And since our salvation doesn’t just have a beginning but a middle and an end, covering an entire life of faith from the moment of conversion to the day we die, it is legitimate to say that Christ uses the public ordinances* as means of grace. We may even say they are means of salvation, as long as we are defining “salvation” holistically to include the entire process that stretches from our initial response of faith to the gospel to our ultimate perserverance in faith to the end. 

*(I refer to the preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments as “the public ordinances,” since Christ has entrusted these things to the visible church for the edification of the saints in the context of public worship.) 

Public prayer and the public ordinances

So far so good. But notice that I haven’t mentioned prayer yet. It would be easy, of course, to immediately begin talking about the official prayers offered by ministers and elders in public worship. I would venture to say that all Reformed churches offer up prayers before or after the preaching of the word (most do it both before and after) asking the Lord to bless his word to the conversion of sinners and the building up of the saints. All Reformed churches, probably all churches for that matter, offer up prayers in connection with the administration of the sacraments, praying that he would use the sacraments for our spiritual benefit. Such prayers indicate our dependence on the Holy Spirit, apart from whose presence and power the public ordinances would have no effect. We may hear the word preached, but without the illuminating power of the Spirit, it will fall on deaf ears. We may attend to the administration of the sacraments, but without the Spirit’s presence, the water of baptism and the bread and wine will only be outward signs devoid of the inward reality to which they point. So public prayer has a very important role to play in connection with the public ordinances.

Private prayer and the public ordinances

This is all well and good. But the question naturally arises, how does private prayer relate to the public ordinances? Perhaps we haven’t given much thought to this, but I believe the question is important. My thesis is that there is an important symbiotic relationship between private prayer on the one hand and the public ordinances on the other. From my own experience, I would say that we are more likely to receive spiritual blessing from the public ordinances when we are cultivating a healthy private prayer life throughout the week. Of course we invite everyone to come and hear the sermon, and we invite all professing Christians who are members in good standing to eat at the table, even if their private prayer life is in shambles - which is most of us, most of the time! We can still benefit from the public ordinances as long as we come in repentance and faith. Thank God we are invited to come as we are, not as we should be. But I find that the spiritual benefit of attending on the public ordinances is increased if we have been consciously enjoying our relationship with Christ in the context of our private prayer life during the week. This only makes sense, because faith is like a muscle — if we haven’t been using the muscle throughout the week, it will be harder (though certainly not impossible) to exercise it at church.

Private prayer and the Lord’s Supper  

One thing that we don’t often discuss, but which I think is crucial, is that we enjoy communion with Christ through the Lord’s Supper. We are so focused on the debates over the metaphysics of Christ’s “real presence” in the Supper, that we forget the obvious:  we do have communion with Christ in the Supper, and, by definition, communion involves communication or prayer. The risen Lord Jesus says to the church, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20). We shouldn’t just sit passively during the sacrament and wait for lightning to strike. We must “open the door.” We must commune with Christ by addressing him privately, in our hearts, not just relying on the minister’s prayer of consecration at the beginning. Such prayers can also be in the form of hymns that are addressed to Christ — there are quite a number of such hymns, e.g., “My Jesus, I love Thee.” The point is, if we need to pray to Christ during communion in order to enjoy Christ’s presence, or at least to enjoy it better, then we need to learn how to pray to Christ during the week in order to prepare us to do so in a heightened way as we receive the sacrament.

Private prayer and preaching

Similar considerations apply to preaching. To understand how private prayer helps us benefit from hearing the word preached, we need to understand how private prayer helps us benefit from private, devotional Bible reading. I think it works something like this. When we are reading the Bible devotionally, some particular verse or pericope stands out to us, and we then turn it into prayer. Either we receive a certain comforting promise, which we then thank the Lord for. Or we are reminded of something wonderful about the person and work of Christ, which causes us to offer praise to Christ. Or we are called to some Christian duty or ethical imperative, and we ask the Lord to help us grow in personal holiness and sanctification. With this habit of prayerful reading in place during the week, we can then come to hear the word preached on Sunday and do the same thing. Having the habit in place during the week helps us to do it on Sunday. 

The symbiosis of public and private

As we prayerfully attend on the public ordinances and receive the spiritual benefit that the Spirit promises to give us through them, we are then sent forth to our week to continue the symbiotic process. What we gained from the sermon and the Lord’s Supper can overflow into Monday and Tuesday as we continue our private prayers to the Lord, seeking to apply what we were reminded of in the sermon, seeking the Lord’s grace to fight against our besetting sins, or receiving his guidance as we face important decisions. And the more regularly we are drawing near to God through Christ to receive grace to help in time of need throughout the week, the more we will be spiritually prepared to take advantage of the even greater spiritual blessings promised through the public ordinances during Sunday worship.

Conclusion 

Both public prayer and private prayer are critical to increasing the spiritual benefits that God desires us to receive from attending on the public ordinances. And this makes sense in light of my previous posts where I have argued that prayer is essentially an acting of faith. Since God promises to bless the public ordinances to our assurance and continued growth in grace only when we attend upon them in faith, it follows that we must attend upon them in prayer.  

John Fonville has a good post on gospel-driven prayer. I liked this quote from Walter Marshall:

It is the gospel that makes prayer possible. Christ, the Mediator of the new covenant, by whom justification and sanctification are promised, is also the Mediator who makes your prayers accepted by the Father (Hebrews 4:15-16). The Holy Spirit, who gives you the new birth, who unites you to Christ, who sanctifies you, and who shows you the things of Christ, is a Spirit of prayer (Zechariah 12:10, Galatians 4:6). He is like a fire inflaming your soul, and He makes you mount upward in prayer to God.

I don’t know what happened exactly but my blog was down for a couple of days this past weekend. I contacted my webhosting company to find out what was wrong. They said they had to reload the blog and reset some database settings. In any event, it’s back up again. Thankfully the old posts weren’t lost.

Now that the housekeeping is out of the way, I’d like to post again on prayer. I’ve had some additional thoughts since my previous post on developing a personal relationship with Christ.

First, I said that prayer is either addressed to the Father through Christ or to Christ directly. I’d like to mention an important verse on the first of these two. It’s Hebrews 7:25 which says, “Therefore He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.” There are several parallel verses in Hebrews that employ the language of “drawing near” (4:16; 7:19; 10:1, 22), but this one is unique in explicitly adding that we draw near through Christ. I think this is a helpful description of prayer. It is drawing near to God. And given our continued sinfulness and need, such drawing near can only take place as we consciously rest on the mediator, Christ. That is a helpful definition of the kind of prayer I have in mind, the kind of prayer that involves actings of faith in Christ. And this, in turn, is part of developing a personal relationship with Christ, since consciously resting on the mediator reminds us that he is our sympathetic high priest who knows us, loves us, and understands us. If Christ is praying for us, personally and individually, then surely we can pray to him.

Second, it’s important to avoid an overly activist concept of prayer. In the church group in which I was raised, we were encouraged to “wrestle with God in prayer,” using Jacob’s wrestling with the angel as a model. It was also called “prevailing prayer.” I guess the theory was that we must batter at the gates of heaven with such fervor, determination, and sheer amount of time spent on our knees, that God will eventually relent and answer our requests. The Assembly had a monthly ANOP (All Night of Prayer) where the church literally stayed up all night to pray until daybreak. We were told that the pastor had a sheepskin rug that he used with such frequency for prayer that his knees wore two holes in the rug. Such an overly activistic conception of prayer can become an intolerable yoke that will cause you to give up praying altogether. I don’t want to encourage that. You don’t have to pray for hours on end. You don’t have to pray on your knees. You can pray when you’re commuting to work or doing the dishes. Pray whenever a specific item of prayer or concern pops into your head. It is simply a matter of exercising trust in Christ. And since our trust in Christ is always weak, our prayers are also weak. But that’s okay. Our relationship with Christ does not depend on the strength of our faith or the power, duration, fervency, and frequency of our prayers. Every time we pray, we are essentially saying, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). It not our faith but Christ himself, in the fulness of his merit and by his continual intercession, who saves us. The outreach of our faith to grasp hold of him is but touching the hem of his garment. Your faith may be as thin as a spider’s web, but if it is lodged in Christ, it is enough. So don’t feel that you must have an activistic prayer life. Simply rest in Christ. Simply draw near to God through Christ. 

Third, I have argued that prayers are essentially “actings of faith.” In other words, I’m trying connect prayer and trusting in Christ. We all know that we are saved, justified, by trusting in Christ alone. Yet I think we tend to forget that trust in Christ, faith in Christ, is not merely a formal state in which our minds are convinced of the truths of the gospel, but must also be experienced or exercised in the form of prayer, that is, talking to the Father through Christ or to Christ directly. We sort of know this, because we talk about the need for unbelievers to pray the sinner’s prayer as a crucial element in conversion. Most Reformed tracts provide a prayer that can be used as a model, while encouraging the sinner to use his or her own words. Of course, as Reformed people, we also stress that this must be followed by a public profession of faith, baptism, and joining a local church for discipleship, Christian growth, and attending on the means of grace. But unless I’m missing something, we do not dispense with the sinner’s prayer. Romans 10:9-13 is still in our Bibles and we still believe that conversion includes humbling yourself before God, admitting your sin and guilt, and exercising faith in Christ for the very first time via a personal, heart-felt prayer. In other words, what Paul refers to as “calling upon the name of the Lord.” Well, why does this have to end at conversion? Shouldn’t we continually call upon the name of the Lord? So we already recognize that there is a critical connection between prayer and trusting in Christ. It is necessary and vital to intellectually affirm the gospel, and I don’t want to come across as denigrating the notitia (knowledge) and assensus (assent) aspects of faith. But unless we have fiducia, that is, trust in Christ, knowledge and assent become an empty profession. And as Paul says in Rom 10:10 (”for with the heart a person believes”), fiducia is exercised not primarily with our minds but with our hearts as we enjoy Christ, rest in Christ, and talk to Christ.

May we draw near to God through Christ the mediator. May all legalistic conceptions of prayer melt away as we simply enjoy Christ, prayerfully trust in him, and walk with him day by day. 

Two Sundays ago, I taught an adult Sunday School class on Developing a Personal Relationship with Christ, or How to Regain Your First Love (both handout and audio are available for free download from the New Life Burbank website - thanks to Charles Sy for putting it up).

Some Reformed people are allergic to the language of “having a personal relationship with Christ.” I understand why. It carries a lot of baggage from its use and misuse in evangelicalism. Believe me, I know, since I was raised in a cult called “The Assembly” that practiced a higher life spirituality that was quite successful at creating Pharisees (who thought they had achieved a superior spirituality) and burned out Christians (who threw in the towel because they never could).

The temptation for us Reformed people is to over-react and end up with a very cerebral, stoical expression of the Christian life that is loveless, prayerless, and cold. As with practically every issue, and due to the passions of our frail human nature, the pendulum so easily swings in the opposite direction. Having bottomed-out on the narcissism and shallowness of evangelical piety, we reject all the subjective aspects of the Christian life and opt instead for more objective expressions of piety — doctrine, corporate worship, and the sacraments.

Don’t get me wrong. These things are all valid and necessary. The problem is that they cannot serve as a substitute for a personal relationship with Christ. I find corporate worship and the public means of grace most beneficial to my growth in grace when I am maintaining a healthy prayer life throughout the week. If I am distant from the Lord throughout the week, it takes much more effort to enjoy the means of grace in public worship and it becomes much easier to sit through a church service without any spiritual benefit.

In my Sunday School lesson, I said that the key to having a personal relationship with Christ is faith — not just faith in the sense that I know that I believe the gospel. To have a personal relationship with Christ involves what I call repeated “actings of faith,” that is, continually talking to the Father through Christ, or directly to Christ himself. I know, the word “talking” sounds goofy, perhaps too intimate, as if we are bringing the holy and transcendent God down to our level as just another buddy that we can chat with. I don’t mean that. I use the word “talking” because it gets at the idea of having a relationship. We talk to the Father through Christ, or directly to Christ, about anything and everything that is on our minds, anything and everything that is causing us anxiety. We cast our burdens on the Lord. That is what a personal relationship is, right?

Of course, by talking to God, I mean “prayer.” But the problem with “prayer” is that it sounds too formal, as if we have to have a set time, a set pattern, a devotional, or whatever. That is good too, but we also need to have a lively, humble, continual relationship with Christ throughout the day, as we walk through our daily lives. We need to be able to shoot up “arrow prayers” to the Lord as we go along. We need to get used to the idea that the risen Lord Jesus Christ is really alive and really present in our hearts by his Spirit. And so we must relate to, talk to, and rest up him by repeated actings of faith throughout the day and throughout the week.

Anyway, that’s just a brief synopsis. Download the handout and audio to get the whole thing. I plan to expand these thoughts into a six week Sunday School series in the future. I particularly want to show how the private element connects with the corporate, i.e., attending upon the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments. The two must go hand-in-hand.

Here are my reflections on the preceding quotes from Harry Gamble’s article on Marcion.

When people accuse Klineans of having Marcionite tendencies, it helps to have a better idea of what Marcion actually taught in order to make clear the vast differences. Kline did not espouse ditheism, asceticism, or docetism. He affirmed that the God of Jesus Christ and the God of Israel are one and the same, and that he was the giver of the Mosaic Law. There is no hint in Kline of any disparagement of creation, but just the opposite. In fact, he made heavy theological use of the concept of the creation kingdom which will find its eschatological fulfillment in the (physical) new creation. 

Although it is totally unfair to accuse Kline or his followers of having Marcionite tendencies, it is good for us to reflect on the heresy of Marcion, for he stands as a monument in the history of the church warning all who would go off the cliff in that direction or even get close to the edge. Marcion is like Lot’s wife — a perpetual pillar of salt that marks a path that the church could have taken but did not. The church could have followed Marcion in (a) rejecting any continuity between the Old and the New Testaments, (b) selecting a truncated canon with Paul as the sole apostle, and (c) rejecting the Law as the work of an alien God.

I do not think Kline’s covenant theology is even remotely in danger of (a), since Kline clearly emphasizes the type-antitype connection between the OT and the NT, something that would have been anathema to Marcion. However, I do think we need to be careful about (b) and (c). We love Paul and his theological insights into the law-gospel contrast, but we must be carefuly not to elevate Paul so high that we fail to take into account the total apostolic witness contained in the NT, especially Matthew, John and Hebrews. 

And with regard to the divine authorship of the Law, no one would ever argue that the Law was the work of a demiurge, but we must not so disparage the Law that we give the impression that it is unworthy of the character of God. The Law is a legitimate revelation of God’s will for national Israel at a particular point in redemptive history. Its ethical teaching is not unworthy of the God we love and worship. The Law is holy and righteous and good (Rom 7:12). As much as we may want to emphasize the ways in which the will of God for the new covenant people of God has been deepened, intensified, and even changed on certain points, let us never do so in a way that makes the Law out to be a bad thing. It was good for its time, and it served its purpose well as a paidagogos (disciplinarian) until/unto Christ (Gal 3:24). Although the Law has been superceded by the final, eschatological revelation of God’s will in Christ (”the law of Christ”), let us be careful to point out the lines of organic continuity as we move from the acorn to the oak tree, from Moses to Christ.

A reader writes:

I enjoy reading your blog. I am also a Reformed Christian in the PCA who considers himself a political moderate. I’m also considering voting for Obama in the general election (I can only choose among Republicans in the primary because I live in a closed-primary state), and my wife and friends and I have enjoyed your posts on politics lately. I thought you might be interested in these two relevant op-eds from today’s papers:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/10/AR2008011003245.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/opinion/11brooks.html

I think a contest between McCain and Obama in the general would be the most interesting to watch. They preach a similar message on transcending partisan politics, but as I see it, the former has a lot more experience in actually doing it than does the latter. That McCain irritates some in the GOP for this reason is a plus in my book. On the other hand, Obama doesn’t generally irritate those in his own party, which to my mind says that he has not yet been trans-partisan enough. So for now, I’m with McCain. If he doesn’t win the nomination but Obama does, he’ll likely be my choice.

I particularly liked this comment: “That McCain irritates some in the GOP for this reason is a plus in my book.” Agreed. I’m sure this reader speaks for many other moderates out there in the Reformed community.

Continuing Gamble’s article on Marcion (again, headers added):

Rejection of Jewish scriptures

Beyond his ditheism, what drew the strongest fire of Marcion’s critics was his view of Jewish scripture. Because Christianity originated as a movement within Judaism, early Christian communities were accustomed to value the scriptures of Judaism as their own, fully convinced that the Law and the prophets pointed to Jesus as the Messiah of the God of Israel and to the church as his new covenant people …

Convinced of the utter incompatibility between the higher alien God of Christianity and the lower creator God of Judaism, Marcion roundly repudiated any positive Christian use of Jewish scripture. It spoke only of the creator God and his regime, and thus had nothing whatever to do with the new revelation. It was not that Marcion thought that Jewish scripture was untrue, historically inaccurate or in other ways misleading; to the contrary, he regarded it as a true revelation of the Jewish God. The problem was simply that it was Jewish scripture, not Christian at all, even in adumbration. Hence it was irrelevant, except to demonstrate the discontinuity and, indeed, the contradiction between the Jewish God and the Christian God, and between the Law and the gospel …

Marcion relentlessly represented the creator God, not as evil but merely righteous or just, yet in a strictly retributive sense, and went on to expose him as ignorant, weak, bellicose, capricious, petty and cruel, entirely unfit to be the God of Jesus Christ and unworthy of Christian worship …

Marcion’s view of Paul

Differentiating Christians and Jews as worshippers of different Gods and disavowing Christian appeals to Jewish scripture, Marcion located the authoritative basis of Christian teaching in the apostle Paul. Pau was, for him, the apostle - not simply the most important apostle, but the only apostle who had faithfully preserved the authentic Christian gospel. In various passages of his letters, Paul emphasised the startling newness of the revelation in Jesus, repeatedly drew contrasts between faith and works of the law, criticised Judaising Christians as perverters of the gospel, characterised the Mosaic dispensation as temporary, qualified the association of the Law with God and closely allied it with sin, spoke of ‘the curse of the Law’ (Gal 3:13) and even asserted that Christ was ‘the end of the Law’ (Rom 10:4). Marcion took such passages to signify a repudiation of Judaism … For Marcion, ‘only Paul knew the truth’ (Iren. Haer. 3.13.1), and Marcion claimed that his own teaching, because it corresponded with Paul’s, was the only true Christianity.

[From Harry Y. Gamble, “Marcion and the ‘Canon,’” pages 195-213 in The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 1: Origins to Constantine, edited by Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M. Young (Cambridge University Press, 2006).]

He’s Obama’s economic advisor. Very interesting young guy. Did his Ph.D. in economics at MIT in 1995.

See his University of Chicago page.

One libertarian commentator describes Obama’s Goolsbeean economic policy as “left-libertarianism”:

If this approach needs a name, call it left-libertarianism. Advancements in behavioural economics, public and rational choice theory, and game theory provide us with an opportunity to attend to inequality without crippling the economy, enhancing the coercive power of the state, or infringing on personal liberty (at least not to any extent greater than the welfare state already does; and as much as my libertarian friends might wish otherwise, the welfare state isn’t going anywhere). The cost - higher marginal tax rates - is real, but eminently justified by the benefits.

George Will said this:

Goolsbee no doubt has lots of dubious ideas — he is, after all, a Democrat — about how government can creatively fiddle with the market’s allocation of wealth and opportunity. But he seems to be the sort of person — amiable, empirical and reasonable — you would want at the elbow of a Democratic president, if such there must be.

If you’re like me, you’ve heard or read various snippets of information about Marcion, but you aren’t exactly sure what he believed. I’ve been reading the first volume of The Cambridge History of Christianity and enjoyed the article by Harry Gamble on Marcion. Gamble’s primary aim is to critique Harnack’s influential theory that the very idea of a canon was invented by Marcion. I think Gamble is right to question that theory, but it isn’t the focus of my concern here. Instead, I’ve selected some key paragraphs that simply summarize what Marcion taught. 

I’m interested in Marcion because I believe his heresy stands as a permanent monument in church history, a “pillar of salt” warning that we ignore at our peril, particularly in relation to the church’s irrevocable decision to accept the Old Testament as part of its canon, to view it as Christian scripture. I’ll comment further after I’m done quoting from Gamble. I’ve added some paragraph breaks and headers to make it more blog-legible.

We are acquainted with Marcion only through the writings of his detractors, and it is uncertain how fully or accurately they have portrayed him and his teachings. There are, however, points upon which his ancient critics were widely agreed. Fundamentally, he claimed that Christianity represented a radical novum - a fresh and unprecedent revelation of a previously unknown God of pure goodness and perfect love. This revelation, he insisted, was discontinuous with anything that came before, and so could not have been anticipated or predicted. The emissary of this alien God was God’s son, Jesus of Nazareth, who appeared suddenly in human likeness in the fifteenth year of Tiberius and proclaimed a new gospel of divine goodness to be received by faith and enacted in love.

Marcion’s ditheism

According to Marcion, this gospel differed so deeply and manifestly from Judaism that the God from whom it issued could not be identified with the God of Jewish scripture, whose existence was not denied, but who had a very different character and purpose than the God proclaimed by Jesus. Thus Marcion embraced a ditheism that juxtaposed the God of Judaism and Jewish scripture on the one hand and the God of Jesus and Christianity on the other.

The former he regarded as an inferior, demiurgic being who created the world and human beings, who pursued justice through a law that he had promulgated, and who recompensed persons strictly according to their merits. The latter, by contrast, was a higher God of unqualified love and mercy who, having no prior relationship with human beings, approached them entirely at his own graceful initiative and for their salvation. This conception of two Gods, one lower and one higher, one creator and one redeemer, one merely just and the other merciful and loving, stood at the heart of Marcion’s thought.

Disparagement of creation

A major corollary of Marcion’s ditheism was a sharp disparagement of the creation. His disdain for the material order found two principal expressions.

(1) Asceticism

One was a thorough-going moral rigorism with strongly ascetic features:  Marcion prescribed sexual abstinence and prohibited marriage, thinking that procreation only furthered the purposes of the creator God, and he harboured a deep repugnance towards biological processes and the nuisances of the natural world.

(2) Docetism

The other was a docetic  Christology, which denied the actual humanity of Jesus and, accordingly, the reality of his birth and death. In addition, Marcion taught that it was the creator God who brought about the suffering and (merely bodily) death of Jesus by crucifixion, which Marcion considered a ransom that redeemed the faithful from their thraldom to the creator. The death of Jesus was therefore held to be redemptive for those who had faith, whether living or dead. Thus Marcion regarded Jesus not as the Jewish Messiah, but as a universal saviour figure.

[From Harry Y. Gamble, “Marcion and the ‘Canon,’” pages 195-213 in The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. 1: Origins to Constantine, edited by Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M. Young (Cambridge University Press, 2006).]

As a registered Republican, I’ve decided to vote for McCain in the primary (California’s is Feb 5).

In the general election this fall, if Obama is the Democratic nominee, I’m leaning toward Obama. But that’s pretty far away and I want to keep my options open and see how the landscape looks then. Who knows how Obama will sound when he’s campaigning against a Republican.

If it’s Obama vs. McCain, it will be a tough decision because both are good candidates. Do I choose the integrity, leadership, and character of McCain, or do I go with something new and exciting? The emotional side of me says Obama, the rational side says McCain (especially since I see him as better than Obama on issues of taxation and government spending).

If it’s Hillary vs. McCain, I go with McCain, no question. I can’t stand Hillary for all of the standard Republican reasons.

If it’s Hillary versus any other Republican, I’m in a quandry. Do I hold my nose and go with Hillary as the lesser of two evils? At this point, I think she may be the lesser evil, given the fact that Giuliani, Romney, and most Republicans seem to believe that we should continue the Bush approach to Islamic terrorism, namely, using torture (waterboarding) when interrogating terror suspects, detaining prisoners without Habeas Corpus, and increasing executive power at the expense of civil liberties - all in the name of national security, when in fact these things hurt national security by taking away our moral high ground and alienating Europe. As a former POW himself, McCain has fought the good fight against Bush on torture and he deserves our respect for that.

I should be careful, though, about lumping Giuliani and Romney together. Giuliani seems like the type who would gleefully engage in torture and amassing executive power. In a Hillary vs. Giuliani contest, I think I have to hold my nose and go with Hillary, not because I agree with any of her policies, but because Giuliani would simply be too dangerous. But Romney is a different beast. At the moment, he is trying to win over the Republican base by praising Bush and criticizing those like Huckabee who have criticized Bush’s handling of the war on terror. But this is probably just pandering. And in a sense, this is a good thing. It means that his “double Gitmo” comment isn’t coming from a core place of integrity. Romney doesn’t appear to have any core principles that he’s willing to lose votes over (in contrast with Giuliani and McCain). He will easily bend with the wind to please voters. So in the general he’s likely to drop his current pro-Bush statements in order to fit in with the national sentiment of desiring change and tacking away from the Bush legacy. Thus, if the contest comes down to Hillary vs. Romney, it will be an agonizing decision.

As for Huckabee, first of all he doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hades against any Democrat in this election cycle. He represents a continuation of Bush’s discredited big-government, compassionate conservatism. He takes Bush’s theocratic tendencies - which were little more than Rovian pandering designed to win elections by securing the evangelical vote - to a whole new level. So Huckabee is unelectable. But even if he managed to get nominated, and we had a Hillary vs. Huckabee contest in the general, I would not hesitate to hold my nose and vote for Hillary, because, like the disaster that is the Constantinian project in the fourth century, the cause of the gospel would not be advanced by the mixing of religion and politics that Huckabee represents.

Of course none of these voting calculations is set in stone, especially my thoughts about the general election. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. A lot can change in the 10 months between now and then.

Anyway, Andrew explains why, for a Burkean, libertarian(ish), small government, non-social conservative, it’s down to either Obama or McCain, with a preference for Obama:

I don’t expect the Democrats to be the party of limited government. But any reward for the Republicans after the massive expansion of government power and spending under Bush would be much more fatal. Because it would destroy even the potential for a party of limited government in the future - by ceding the GOP to spendthrift Christianists. So voting for Obama to punish the GOP and then hope for a revival of conservatism in the ashes doesn’t seem like such a contradiction to me …

I also just think that Obama is a pragmatic liberal. His judgments in the past have been largely practical and reasonable. He is not an ideologue. Nor is he an excessive partisan. Those qualities are admirable from a conservative point of view … And all we’re talking about with Obama is a prudent response to an ill-begotten war, some measures to tackle a failing healthcare system and an attempt to tackle the emergent problem of climate change. And all in a spirit of national reconciliation …

Put it this way: if a Democratic president had added $32 trillion to the next generation’s debt in eight years, if he’d bungled a war, if he’d abrogated habeas corpus indefinitely and authorized torture, do you think a Republican would be criticized as a leftist for wanting to withdraw troops, and extend healthcare insurance - without mandates - for more of the working poor?

… There are two possible solutions to GOP degeneracy: Obama and McCain.