I’m afraid we need a little Sunday morning theology. Hopefully someone at the White House will read this and realize just how ill advised the President was to do what he did this week and we should be praying hard for him to see the error of his ways on this. In the Bible we read these things: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” Gen 1:28 (ESV) “Did not he who made me in the womb make him? And did not one fashion us in the womb?” Job 31:15 (ESV) “Your hands have made and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn your commandments.” Psalm 119:73 (ESV) “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” Psalm 139:13 (ESV) These are clear references to God intending people to procreate and recognize that, even in the womb, God played a vital role in the formation of children and we should not casually destroy life God himself created. These passages of scripture are what inspire so many pro-life advocates to defend the unborn. Had the President of the United States stood at the National Prayer Breakfast and uttered any of those passages and then announced his intent to protect the unborn, abortion rights advocates would have stormed the White House and the Courts all in the name of separation of church and state. The media would have had on Barry Lynn to proclaim his outrage that the President was mixing religion and politics. Jim Wallis would have gone on the news to dance around life issues and try his best to neuter God out of them and the media would have treated him as an objective source. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the President went to the National Prayer Breakfast and quoted Jesus Christ himself to defend a tax increase. The President paraphrased Luke 12:48, “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.” (ESV) He said it was because he was a Christian that he thought the rich should pay more in taxes. It’s a good thing President Obama did not draw from Matthew 13:12 instead or the poor would really be screwed. “For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” (ESV) It is worth pointing out that the very same people who would have been outraged had the President quoted clear scripture on life to defend the unborn were willing to be silent or even applaud the President perverting the words of Christ to pursue his tax plan. It is also worth pointing out that President Obama sat at the feet of Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, so this might be the best he can do. But we must also point out that Christians have an obligation to pray for their leaders and, given how the President of the United State just twisted the words of our Lord and Savior, we should pray all the more fervently for him because in reading Luke 12:48, he clearly ignored or has no understand of Luke 12:47, the prior sentence, which reads “And that servant who knew his master’s will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating.” (ESV) One must wonder about the Christian grounding of the people in the White House who encouraged the President of the United States to pervert the words of the Living God. What the President seems not to know is encapsulated well by Breeanne Howe here. Christ was not talking about money. The President, in making the case for his tax plan using that passage of scripture, perverts Christ’s meaning. Christ was talking explicitly about the blessings flowing from God to the apostles and us through the Word and the need to proclaim Christ as the Living God. To better understand what Christ was actually talking about, first understand that he was talking about an individual’s relationship with God. In fact, throughout President Obama’s speech he perverted a number of passages from Holy Scripture having to do with an individual’s obligations toward the poor and toward God, co-opting those passages as claims that the state can then tax and spend in the name of Jesus. I dare say I’d take peddlers of the “social gospel” much more seriously if they concerned themselves first with the actual Gospel as it pertains to men’s salvation and eternity. Not to delve deep into the theology, but Luke 12:47-48 is reflected in Hebrews 2:1-4, in which the writer preaches, “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard, while God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.” The Greek used for “pay much closer attention” ( prosecho ) and “lest we drift away” ( pararheo ) derive from Greek nautical terminology the original audience would have understood. Prosecho means to tie up or moor a ship in harbor (a metaphor for Christ) and pararheo means to negligently and knowingly let a ship drift past the harbor, or Christ. In other words, what Christ is telling us in Luke and what the author of Hebrews explains in greater detail is that these passages apply to people who, like the President, claim to be Christians and claim to have experienced blessings in life and then turn their back on or drift away from Christ without securing themselves to him. 1 What both Hebrews 2 and Luke 12:47 say that the President conveniently ignored is that anyone who claims to be a Christian or who has experienced the blessings that flow from being surrounded by believers and then does not accept Christ will be judged more harshly on the last day than those who never knew or experienced Christ’s love. Yeah, those levels of hell aren’t just for Catholics. See e.g. Matthew 11:21-22 in which Christ says, “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. ” [Emphasis added] Unfortunately for the nation, we have a President who claims to be a Christian who is willing to take God’s Holy Word repeatedly out of context, subsume God’s commands for individuals in their conduct with each other and with Him, and try to make the case for the government’s fiscal policy with that perversion. Contrast that with his other actions this week. The President, through the Department of Health and Human Services, has ordered religious organizations — targeting more specifically the Catholic Church — to offer health plans that cover the costs of contraceptives and abortifacient drugs. I started this post with, unlike the President’s use of Luke and Proverbs, un-perverted scripture Christians use to show their objections to abortion. But moreso, these are non exhaustive passages of scripture Catholics rely on as foundations both to their opposition to abortion and to contraception. God himself said, “Be fruitful and multiply.” The President this week chose to pervert God’s Word to make the case for a tax increase, but he also chose to ignore God’s word on life and is ordering Christians, while he claims to be one, to violate their Christian conscience on abortion — requiring Christian organizations to provide health insurance that will cover the cost of drugs that induce abortions. He is trying to have it both ways. He is trying to use God’s Word to defend a tax policy that dissuades individuals from giving gladly and charitably to the poor as God instructs and is ignoring God’s Word in order to force fellow Christians into violating their Christian conscience — something about which God cares a great deal. This cannot end well for him, particularly doing this claiming to be a Christian. And it might not end well for the rest of us either. Barack Obama has gone to war with Christians’ consciences and he is perverting God’s word in the process to get his way on public policy. “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.” 1 Timothy 2:1-2 (ESV) Pray hard. The President needs it. Some very silly secularists proving they have no clue what they are talking about have taken issue with my use of the word “claim” in this paragraph. It’s not that I am expressing or casting doubt on the President’s faith or my own. I’d use the word about myself too. The point is that this scripture applies to (1) people who claim, or hold themselves out to be, Christians and (2) those who have experienced the blessings derived from God unto Christians. The President explicitly said he was Christian in his speech. When a person says they are a Christian, the presumption for other Christians is that they must be Christian. The silly leftwing secularists attacking me here are proving their very deep and real ignorance about orthodox Christianity and their hostility to it as well. ↩
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The Perversion of the Words of Our Lord Jesus Christ by the Sinner Barack H. Obama
One of the most bizarre narratives I have ever seen take hold during a Presidential campaign is the narrative that Newt Gingrich, who spent three decades in Washington, ultimately rising to the top of the House leadership, is the “outsider” and “TEA Party” candidate whereas Mitt Romney, who has never had a job in Washington in his life (although admittedly that is not for lack of trying), is the “establishment” or “insider” candidate. Newt is not without his redeeming qualities but I have to confess that whenever he rants in his inimitable style about the “Establishment” I am struck with a powerful sense of vertigo. It isn’t just Newt’s ancient past that presents this problem. As recently as 2010, when TEA Party fervor was sweeping the nation, Newt Gingrich was completely absent from its key battles or just as often was on the completely wrong side of the debate. In NY-23, Gingrich endorsed Dede Scozzafava right before she bolted the party and endorsed the Democrat (for the record, Romney donated $5,000 to and endorsed Hoffman). In Utah, Bob Bennett kicked off his campaign with an endorsement from Newt Gingrich who aggressively campaigned on his behalf (Romney also supported Bennett and then donated $5,000 through his PAC to Mike Lee). In Delaware, Newt confidently predicted Mike Castle would win and then was completely absent from the discussion over the race until O’Donnell won the primary (Romney donated $5,000 to O’Donnell, but I’m not clear whether that was before or after the primary was over). In virtually every major TEA Party fight in 2010 – Toomey vs. Specter, Paul v. Grayson, Crist v. Rubio, Gingrich was either AWOL until the matter was completely decided or on the wrong side. The only Senate candidate that Newt’s PAC donated to whatsoever was Scott Brown . For all of his many faults (and watching his speech last night I have very grave concerns about his ability to ever learn to sound like a real human being), Romney apparently learned the right lesson from his thumping in 2008, as he busted his hump in 2010 raising money for and campaigning for Republicans, including TEA Party Republicans (Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, Jim Demint, Ron Johnson, Ovide Lamontagne, Marco Rubio, John Raese and Pat Toomey, among many others, got $5,000 or more from Romney in 2010). I again emphasize that there are a lot of candidates out there that I would prefer to see as our nominee than Mitt Romney but if this really is a contest between “Establishment Republicans” and “TEA Party Republicans,” I am at a loss to know how Gingrich has any claim to TEA Party support at all, or how he somehow escaped the label of “Establishment” when he is one of the most “Establishment” candidates who has run for President in my lifetime.
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Newt Gingrich, Establishment Sellout
[Posted by Karl] The kerfuffle over Newt Gingrich’s status as a Reagan Republican will be a footnote to the 2012 campaign at most. But that does not mean we cannot learn from it. On the surface, this is a silly issue. Last week , Mitt Romney was painting Gingrich as a minor figure of the Reagan revolution. This week ended with the following exchange during the CNN debate: Wolf Blitzer : Governor Romney, you criticized Speaker Gingrich for not being as close to Ronald Reagan as he says he was. When you ran for the Senate, you said you were, quote, “You weren’t trying to return to Reagan-Bush.” So the question is, do you think you can claim the Reagan mantle more than Speaker Gingrich? Romney : Oh, of course not. *** Romney then recited his biography, selectively omitting the 1994 Senate race which occasioned Mitt’s remark distancing himself from Reagan-Bush (a ticket which won Massachusetts twice). It’s an answer which tells the observant that Team Romney figured out this was a dumb line of attack (Newt can be unconservative, but Romney is not going to win an argument about Reagan). It also tells the observant that even after fumbling Mitt’s money issues, Team Romney was still capable of not recognizing that their attack would backfire in the first instance (Newt also launches attacks that boomerang, but Mitt is the one with the supposedly superior staff and organization). While Team Romney was figuring this out, a scrum of conservative punditry ensued. Notably, Elliott Abrams (an assistant secretary of state under Reagan) attacked Gingrich for not having been sufficiently supportive of Reagan’s foreign policy. Jeffrey Lord (a former Reagan White House political director) defended Gingrich as one of Reagan’s best lieutenants, including the story of how Newt helped keep a firm line against tax increases in the 1984 platform against the likes of Bob Dole and Lowell Weicker. Lord later claimed that Abrams had never complained about Gingrich at the time and distorted Gingrich’s comments on Reagan’s foreign policy. Rich Lowry then went after Lord for smearing Abrams as jockeying for a job in a Romney administration and for providing only partial context of Gingrich’s foreign policy remarks. So far, it appears that Lowry is correct that Lord has no evidence that Abrams was sucking up to Team Romney for a job. Moreover, the Abrams piece could easily have been a simple act of score-settling. I would not be surprised if Abrams and others in the Reagan administration were less than thrilled at Gingrich’s criticism at the time and feel vindicated by history (although history is not a controlled experiment, thus precluding a definitive judgment on the matter). However, Lord correctly notes (as does Reagan biographer Steven Hayward ) that Gingrich was hardly a lone critic of Reagan’s foreign policy at the time in question. Newt cited George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick in his speech, while Hayward lists others, including Howard Phillips, Jack Kemp, George Will and William Safire. The scrum demonstrates why Team Romney is running from the subject. The record tends to show that Gingrich backed Reagan on key issues and when he did critique the administration, he did so from the right. “More right-wing than Reagan in the ’80s” is not the frame Romney wants for Gingrich. What can we learn from this episode (beyond the fact that Team Romney still has some bugs to work out)? The reason that the right would spend a week discussing Gingrich’s connection to Reagan legacy is a testament to how much Reagan shaped the conservative movement and today’s GOP. By holding Reagan up as the ideal, he and his administration have become idealized — and it would serve us all well to be more clear-eyed about history here. This episode is a timely reminder that the Reagan GOP was an occasionally fractious coalition. To moderates, Reaganomics was voodoo, while Reagan’s confrontational foreign policy seemed unconservative. Reagan was a politician who pushed the envelope… but his coalition also contained those who wanted to push it further. It should be remembered that Reagan got to elected president as the result of many factors. He had experience running for president. He was an able and charismatic performer as a candidate, capable of disarming his critics with a down-to-earth chuckle as easily as a pointed barb. Stagflation had exposed the flaws of Keynesian economics. Iran and the Soviet Union exposed the impotence of Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy. Reagan’s election was as close to a perfect storm as one is likely to find in politics. This year, the GOP remains a fractious coalition, but its candidate will be no Ronald Reagan. (Occasionally, Ronald Reagan was no Ronald Reagan.) Moreover, if America is lucky, the economy and state of the world will not make Barack Obama look as bad as Jimmy Carter. It is by those parameters that GOP primary voters should be making their choice, rather than hoping a perfect storm rolls in. –Karl
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You’re no Ronald Reagan
Jeffrey Lord, former White House political director under Ronald Reagan, is slamming a piece in National Review Online that accuses Newt Gingrich of spewing “insulting rhetoric” about Reagan while he was president. The National Review piece, written by former Reagan Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, has gained significant traction as many conservatives have come forward to question Gingrich’s electability. The former House Speaker has repeatedly cast himself as a ” loyal lieutenant of Reagan’s bold conservatism ” against the more timid, “Massachusetts moderate” Mitt Romney. Writing in the American Spectator , Abrams, Lord says, has “been swept up in the GOP Establishment’s Romney frothings over the rise of Newt Gingrich in the Republican primaries.” But no more, he says, because Abrams has been “caught red-handed in lending himself to this attempted Romney hit job.” Some of the top examples Abrams cites come from a statement Gingrich made on the House floor in 1986. Lord obtained a copy of the speech, which he said Abrams is “grossly misrepresenting” as “some sort of anti-Reagan jihad:” Specifically, Abrams implies that Newt Gingrich was spewing mindless vitriol about Reagan on the House floor. Not only not so, it was quite to the contrary. Of President Reagan, Gingrich says: • “Let me be clear: I have the greatest respect for President Reagan. I think he personally understands the threat of communism.” Gingrich then goes on — at Newtonian length — praising Reagan for Reagan’s understanding of Lenin, Reagan’s understanding of the real “purposes of a Soviet dictatorship” and much more. He lists and applauds Reagan repeatedly for the President’s appreciation of “the threat in a more powerful Soviet empire” and the threats posed by Communist Cuba and Nicaragua. He ranks Reagan with the great cold war presidents in protecting freedom. In short, time after time after, Newt Gingrich — true to form — is there on the floor of the House relentlessly praising and crediting Ronald Reagan. Is it any wonder that years later Nancy Reagan would speak so publicly and warmly about “Ronnie” passing the conservative torch to Newt? Is there any wonder that Michael Reagan has stepped into the middle of this current brawl to endorse Newt? • Abrams quotes Newt for saying in this speech that Reagan’s policies towards the Soviets are “inadequate and will ultimately fail.” This is shameful. Why? Here’s what Newt said — in full and in context: “The fact is that George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick are right in pointing out the enormous gap between President Reagan’s strong rhetoric, which is adequate, and his administration’s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail.” In other words, Newt was picking up on a concern, prominent in the day and voiced by no less than Reagan’s then ex-UN Ambassador Kirkpatrick, not to mention prominent Reagan supporters Will and Kristol and the late-Mondale aide turned conservative Krauthammer, that Reagan’s anti-Communist policies could be stronger if better institutionalized and not tied as much to the Reagan persona. The entire speech focused on suggestions of how to do just that — to effectively institutionalize Reagan’s conservative beliefs in the government. Is Abrams seriously accusing Jeane Kirkpatrick and George Will of being anti-Reagan? Of spewing “insulting rhetoric” at a president everyone in Washington knew they staunchly supported? Really? Of course not. But in apparent service to the Romney campaign, in order to make Newt Gingrich appear to be doing just that, Abrams apparently quite deliberately cut out the original Gingrich reference to Will, Kirkpatrick, Krauthammer, and Kristol. You can read Lord’s full analysis here . Excerpt from: Former Reagan Adviser Questions NRO Piece About Gingrich’s Gipper Critiques
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Former Reagan Adviser Questions NRO Piece About Gingrich’s Gipper Critiques
As Ronald Reagan used to say: Well… Yesterday we took note of former Reagan State Department official Elliott Abrams’ piece over at NRO that went after Newt Gingrich on his relationship with Reagan. While voting regularly with Reagan as a young congressman from Georgia, Gingrich, claimed Abrams, “often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides and his policies to defeat Communism.” Abrams then goes on to cite ” a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986.” Or sort of cites it.
