Entries from December 2008 ↓

Happy New Year’s Eve! Today is a good day to look back on the previous year. Tomorrow is a good day to contemplate the year to come. So that’s what we’ll do on this blog.

Last year around this time, I asked you for your predictions for 2008, promising that we would check them once the year was over, seeing who was right and who was wrong. Read them all at Predictions.

The winners, who predicted the most at-the-time unlikely event that nevertheless turned true: A tie between FW, who said that “the mortgage meltdown is going to be on a massive scale that will dwarf the savings and loan scandal that that other republican administration had the taxpayers pay for”; and Larry, who said that Barack Obama would win both the Democratic nomination and the presidential election.

The losers, also a tie: also Larry, who predicted that Rudy Guiliani would be the Republican nominee; also FW, who said that Christ would return in glory; and Cindy for predicting that “the Packers will defeat the Patriots in the Super Bowl, and Brett Favre will retire as the reigning Super Bowl MVP.”

(Tomorrow we’ll take predictions for 2009.)

The election of Barack Obama and the financial meltdown are clearly events that will go down in history. Usually, though, it’s hard to say from near to the time what will prove to have lasting significance. Looking back on 2008, what events, people, ideas, trends, etc., do you think will be considered historic when scholars study our times decades from now? Or, put another way, for what will 2008 be remembered?

British columnist Christopher Booker of the London Daily Telegraph proclaims that 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved:

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century. . . .

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Today will have a “leap second.” From Tick tock … tick: Extra second added to 2008 :

The world’s official timekeepers have added a “leap second” to the last day of the year on Wednesday, to help match clocks to the Earth’s slowing spin on its axis, which takes place at ever-changing rates affected by tides and other factors.

The U.S. Naval Observatory, keeper of the Pentagon’s master clock, said it would add the extra second on Wednesday in coordination with the world’s atomic clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.

That corresponds to 6:59:59 p.m. EST (23:59:59 GMT), when an extra second will tick by — the 24th to be added to UTC since 1972, when the practice began.

British atheist Matthew Parris says that what Africa needs is Christianity–not just the material help but the spiritual and world-view transformation that conversion brings. From the article As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God | Times Online :

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good. . . .

We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall. . . .

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open. . . .

I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won’t take the initiative, won’t take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders. . . .

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I’ve just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I’m afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

I’m curious what Mr. Parris thinks will happen once the West’s Christian belief system is supplanted by the atheism he embraces. Already we have the malign fusion of Nike–the brand name, not the goddess of victory–and mobile phones. Aren’t we moving closer to a similar collectivism, passivity, and unfocused anxiety that he finds paralyzing in animistic Africa?

Thanks to Pastor Erick at Joyous Exchange for alerting me to this surprisingly comprehensive collection of resources on vocation: Monergism :: Vocation & Work.

It includes hard to find but exceptional material from Steve Hein and John Pless, as well as a series of brief articles that I have written on the subject.

The links includes treatments and applications of the doctrine of vocation from both Lutheran and Reformed perspectives. Sample some of both. What are the differences?

Remember when MTV ran a constant stream of music videos? And how people thought that was the wave of the future? A revolution in music, television, and youth culture? Well, MTV hasn’t been playing much music for a while now. And in response to new plummeting ratings, the network, which had already been reduced to running awful reality shows, is adding 16 more of them.

According to a fascinating bit of investigative reporting by Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Brady Dennis in the Washington Post, the cause of the world’s current financial collapse is not so much sub-prime mortgages but two young guys in the late 1980s who, with their computer modeling and sophisticated mathematics, invented a way to master the risk inherent in the marketplace. They partnered with insurance conglomerate AIG (remember them, beneficiary of our biggest bailout so far), and soon their scheme wove virtually all of the world’s financial players together in hedge schemes that would eventually drag everyone down. From the first in the series of articles, aptly titled The Beautiful Machine:

Howard Sosin and Randy Rackson conceived their financial revolution as they walked along the Manhattan waterfront during lunchtime outings. They refined their ideas at late-night dinners and during breaks in their busy days as traders at the junk-bond firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert.

Sosin, a 35-year-old reserved finance scholar who had honed his theories at the famed Bell Labs, projected an aura of brilliance and fierce determination. Rackson, a 30-year-old soft-spoken computer wizard and art lover, arrived on Wall Street with a Wharton School pedigree and a desire to create something memorable.

They combined forces with Barry Goldman, a Drexel colleague with a PhD in economics and a genius for constructing complex financial transactions. “Imagine what we could do,” Sosin would tell Rackson and Goldman as they brainstormed in the spring of 1986. . . .

Sosin and his team needed the backing of a company with deep pockets, a burnished reputation and the very top credit rating, a Triple A institution as unlikely to default as the U.S. Treasury itself. One name topped their wish list that fall: American International Group, or AIG, the global insurance conglomerate considered one of the world’s safest bets.

They would find a partner for their venture. They would create an elegant and powerful system that earned billions of dollars, operating in the seams and gaps of the market and federal regulation. They and their firm would alter the way Wall Street did business, particularly in the use of derivatives, and eventually test Washington’s growing belief that capitalism could safely thrive with little oversight.

Inspiring words to consider about your own mundane-seeming congregation from Rev. Rick Stuckwisch:

The catholicity of the Church comprises two aspects:

(1.) It is the unity of doctrine and fellowship, of teaching and practice, which is shared by all the congregations of the whole Church in every time and place; and,

(2.) It is the fullness of the one Church in each congregation, in each time and each place, wherever the apostolic doctrine of Christ is faithfully received and handed over in teaching and practice.

To say it simply, the whole Church is manifested in each congregation, and each congregation belongs to that same one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. . . .

The catholicity of any given congregation is therefore both inward and outward. Each congregation of the Church is fully the Church in that place, whole and complete in the means of grace; yet, no congregation of the Church is independent of the rest, but belongs to the whole, to the one Body of Christ, past, present and future. Congregational autonomy does not mean that a congregation is free and clear to go its own way and do its own thing. Rather, congregational autonomy means that the Church in each place is fully self-contained and self-sufficient in the local Ministry of the Gospel; because it is Christ Himself who speaks and acts in that Ministry. But the Ministry of the Gospel does not belong exclusively to any one congregation; because it is the sacred tradition of the one Lord Jesus Christ, handed over to His holy Apostles and to each succeeding generation of His Church on earth. Because a congregation lives from that Ministry, and is the Church because of that Ministry of the Gospel, it belongs to the fellowship of every other congregation that lives from that same Holy Ministry.

The whole post is worth reading. It gets into Lutheran stuff and Missouri Synod polity–including the problems with it currently, going so far as to make some positive suggestions for improving it. But still, as we discuss “denominations” and “non-denominations,” the catholicity inherent in each faithful congregation is important to contemplate.

Israel attacks the Gaza Strip , as Palestinians proclaim another intifada, one they vow will unleash “hell.” I understand that Israelis are fed up with Palestinians in Gaza shooting rockets at them from across the border. But choosing now to come down on the Palestinians does not help the United States. We finally have worked out a level of relative peace in Iraq, with progress on other fronts. We didn’t need Israel to stir up the Muslim world again. The timing also suggests that Israel is taking advantage of our leadership transition, striking hard one more time while President Bush is in office before the possibly more peaceful Barack Obama becomes president.

According to this story, Americans are saving $1 billion a day, thanks to the drop in gasoline prices from the $4 level.