[The following is a brief excerpt from the forthcoming book on Baptists and Political Economy (still untitled) that I have written for the Acton Institute. The book will be available in November.]

One of the most influential Baptist ministers of the twentieth century was Martin Luther King, Jr. King was educated in the liberalizing (or neo-orthodox) theology that was prominent in the 1940s, studying under stellar scholars such as Reinhold Niebuhr. Though Niebuhr was no conservative, yet his mature theology took full account of human sin and the need for redemption, both personal and societal. King appreciated the Social Gospel theology of Rauschenbusch, but at the end of the day, rejected it. He believed that the idea that government and churches could somehow come together to improve the lot of humans was an illusion, and he likewise held out no hope, as Fosdick had, that some coalition of church, labor unions, and Progressive politics could solve the racial problems in this country.

King believed that a new generation was dawning. For him, the answer to the problem of racism lay in personal salvation and in appealing to the Christian consciousness of a nation by displaying the injustice of racism. His hope was that a younger generation of Americans would do better than their fathers had. In his 1963 Birmingham campaign he stated, “The purpose of . . . direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” King was no Socialist, nor was he an advocate of Liberation Theology, nor did he ask for special treatment for blacks. He just wanted blacks to have the same opportunities as whites. In keeping with his Baptist heritage, he believed in the importance of work, writing, “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” King’s concern was that black people in America had been cut out of the “American Dream,” and he wanted them to have an equal opportunity as whites to the table of flourishing in this great country. He was not looking for handouts for blacks in America. His understanding of human sin was as profound as that found in Augustine or Calvin. King also rejected any kind of strategy of coercion. What anchored Martin Luther King more than anything else was not his liberal theological education, but his deep roots in Baptist piety and ecclesiology, and the spiritual conversion that he experienced one night when his home was attacked with his daughter inside. King’s approach to justice was color-blind, unlike some of his successors today (Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson), it was not a plea for the Administrative State to come to the rescue. While some of us would find some fault in some of the positions he took, we applaud him as a man who stood for biblical principles and for the Baptist heritage in the courageous way that he fought racism and injustice. I, for one, was deeply moved when he was assassinated (I was thirteen), and see him as one of the heroes of the faith.

Chad Owen Brand

I saw that another SBTS faculty member posted a list of spiritual classics. I have been often asked by students and church members about the books that have most influenced my life. I am going to do a Top Ten with some annotations, and then I will list some “honorable mention” books. Except for the first one, they are in no necessary order, and if I wrote this a year from now the list might change a little, but not much. So, here goes . . .

The Bible. I say this not to be “spiritual,” or as a necessary and perfunctory comment, but because it is true. Literally true. I learned from my mentor early on, “Read the Bible every day to find God’s will for your life and do it every time you find it.” I have tried to do that. My early reading was from the KJV, so many passages are etched in my memory from that “most influential book in the world,” as it has been called. But I have also read it through in many other translations. A friend once said in a sermon, “We ought to know the Bible so well that our blood runs bibline.” I agree with that, and with Schaeffer’s famous dictum that nothing can so change a person’s life like reading the Bible every day for fifty years.

Augustus Strong, Systematic Theology. This may come as a surprise, what with all the newer theologies out there: Garrett, Grudem, Erickson, and with some of the great older ones now available to us like Bavinck. But they say you always remember your first kiss, and this was my first Systematic. I read it through in a one-semester theology class I took when I was nineteen. I though I was going t die in the first hundred pages, but by the time I was in the last hundred I heard the voice of the Spirit whispering (no, it was not a revelation, DB), “This is for you.” I do not use it as a textbook–I get enough complaints about Erickson and the fine print in Strong is a little daunting. But it was the book that sank in the hook. It still rests within arm reach of my desk.

D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, Spiritual Depression. Some of my friends reading this are probably saying, “That makes sense.” I read this when I was twenty (a theme?), and it began a revolution in my understanding of sanctification. I spent my teen years immersed in Keswick Higher-Life teaching. I had read every book with titles like “Keys to the Deeper Life,” “Life on the Highest Plane,” and with key words in their titles life “victory,” “secret,” “path,” “overcoming,” and so on. Now those books are often helpful, and now in my later years I see how some of them were actually close to the mark–some of them. But Lloyd-Jones introduced me to the Puritans and to a Reformed spirituality that was closer to a biblical model than that of Watchman Nee or Hannah Whitall Smith. I will always be grateful to him for that and plan to tell him one day.

J. I. Packer, Knowing God. I read this in my early twenties and in many ways it drove home much of the good that “The Doctor” had begun. I have re-read it several times and have always found new refreshment in its pages. If I had a top-hundred list, both Packer and Lloyd-Jones would have multiple entries.

I. Howard Marshall, I Believe in the Historical Jesus. This one may seem surprising since it is no longer even in print. This book introduced me to how to employ the historical method in doing biblical and theological analysis, and how to do it right! That is a challenge, but it is necessary. (I think of Grant Wacker’s book on Augustus Strong entitled, Augustus Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness, also a good book, but not on my top ten list.) Marshall is not where we are on every thing, but he is always helpful, even when he is wrong.

Augustine, Confessions. I have read this little book many times, and its humble, self-deprecatory flavor has left a mark on my soul. If I were ever to write my memoirs (and no, honey, don’t worry), it would look something like this. Refreshing to hear a bishop of the church “confess” his sins, “confess” Christ, and “confess” this theology in such a way (even though his theology was to grow remarkably in the next several decades).

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. I did not say these were all theology books, though this one might qualify. Next to the Bible, these writings have shaped me most. They gave me an appreciation for narrative, for the struggle between what is genuinely evil on the one hand and that which is good (even if tainted at times) on the other. I have read it thirty times (and no, just so you will know that I am not an idolater, I have read the Bible through many more times than that).

John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. This is truly a monumental production. Here, biblical exegesis (and no, I do not agree with all of his exegesis), spiritual truths, pastoral advice, and theological wrangling are all wrapped together. You don’t have to be a “Calvinist” to like this (whatever your definition of that term might be). If nothing else, just read the first twenty pages and you will find your soul enriched.

John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress. One of the greatest sellers in history, Bunyan’s allegory also will enrapture your soul. Many characters from this remarkable book pepper my lectures and sermons. And don’t read the modern version! Take the trouble (and a dictionary) and read the original.

B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible. I know this is old, I know that some of his arguments have been debated. But this was the book that nailed it down for me when I was struggling with biblical authority in my twenties. Few Americans write with such elegance–or such detail!

OK. There’s my Top Ten. Honorable mentions would go to Donald Bloesch, A Theology of Word and Spirit; Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers; A. Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes; Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom; John Warwick Montgomery, The Suicide of Christian Theology; Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism; J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism; C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (ask me some time); Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship; Carl Henry, Confessions of a Theologian; Isaac Asimov, Foundation (trilogy); Jules Verne, Mysterious Island; Richard Sibbes, A Bruised Reed; John Owen, Communion with God; Jonathan Edwards, The Freedom of the Will. That’s all the time I have since I have four grandkids upstairs. Send me your list. Let’s have coffee and talk about books.

Here is a guest blog from my good friend, Tom Pratt, who lives in the Greater Denver area.

MOUNTAIN MADNESS

In the wake of yet another mass murder event in Colorado (Columbine High School well-remembered and the Chucky Cheese Pizza saga not so well and more recently the killings at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, curtailed by a female armed security person) some mile high city residents and others perhaps across the country wonder if there isn’t something about the thin air that brings on a “rocky mountain high” of somber proportions.
Buffalo Springfield was famous for reflecting on other violent events in the 60s with the refrain, “somethin’s happenin’ here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.” The popular culture regularly takes to the air waves and the internet to prove this adage with speculations and pop-religio-psycho-politico babble when these moments seem to transcend everyday life, even the presidential political campaign. Early on, ABC News (Brian Ross and George Stephanopolous on Good Morning America) attempted to tie Aurora shooter James Holmes to the Tea Party, making it clear that class is in short supply in the media (the Tea Party participant of the same name received death threats after the reportage by ABC). And apparently Michael Grunwald of Time Magazine wants there to be less. He’s penned an op ed entitled “Sometimes There’s Nothing Wrong With Politicizing a Tragedy,” in which he defends the idea that politicians ought to use this particular tragedy for their own political gain. He confesses to his readers, “I feel terrible about what happened in that movie theater, and I’m agnostic about gun control, but there is nothing wrong with politicizing tragedy.” Just think with Buffalo Springfield, “a thousand people in the street, singing songs and carrying signs; mostly say, hooray for our side.”
More sober cogitation comes from the academic community (sometimes) as the local newspaper reports:
“I think it’s a tough but valid question,” said Del Elliott, founding director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “These events are disturbing to me, but they look like an anomaly — terrible but within the realm of random events.” Elliott said that nationwide, Colorado is in the bottom third statistically for gun violence. “But the particular form of this violence — shooting with massive amounts of death — we do seem to have more of that,” he added.
Elliott noted that the state narrowly avoided a similar disaster in 2006, when law officers killed Duane Morrison, who had taken students hostage at Platte Canyon High School. One student, Emily Keyes, was killed by the gunman.
“I’ve heard arguments about the number of guns in Colorado and the perspective we have on them,” Elliott said. “But these events seem very carefully planned, so that the availability of guns is almost irrelevant. Anyone with that level of intent is going to find weapons, legally or illegally.”
Others entered the fray in Congress, the mayors of New York City and Boston, and the inevitable and redoubtable Jesse Jackson, to name just a few. Roger Ebert averred that this was an “insane” act, but that American gun laws are “insane” as well. Mr. Ebert lives in a city (Chicago) that is deemed “safe” from the legal possession of firearms by citizens, but has seen 27 murders by gunfire already this year, none perpetrated by people with legal permits. The twitter-sphere was alive with blame toward Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney, the Tea Party, and “conservatives” in general, but especially the National Rifle Association. One response to all this is an e-mail making the rounds that says, “After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.”
More sober thoughts and actions have come from Christian people in the metropolitan Denver area, as prayer vigils and counseling ministries along with extraordinary pastoral care and concern are reaching out to victims and their families and friends and the thousands of others who are deeply troubled by this event. This is how the Christian church has “exploited” tragic situations from the first century on, sometimes at great risk to the lives of those who put themselves in harm’s way for the innocent (think here about ministries in the times of famine, plague, war, and natural disaster, and always in this generation the innocent life growing in a mother’s womb or wasting away in old age). This is a biblical “exploitation” that takes every tragedy as a reminder of the solemn paradox of life: Perfect health is the slowest possible rate at which one can die (see Wiley’s Dictionary in Hart’s B. C. comic strip).
“Somethin’” IS happening here! What it is is biblically clear. “There’s a man with a gun over there.” The Bible teaches we “better beware.” “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? ‘I the LORD search the heart to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds’” (Jer. 17:9, 10). A brilliant young man enrolled (until he recently withdrew) in a prestigious neuroscience Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado somehow was not able to find his way through the labyrinthine quagmire that was his own mind and heart. In the end he blamed others for his own failures and took it out at random on dozens of innocent victims. The society did not “fail” him so as to be culpable for his sin. His parents did not turn him into a murderer. His classmates did not taunt him into the killings. He alone planned for months, acquired guns and ammunition and explosives to booby-trap his apartment. He alone equipped himself with “body armor” and gas mask. He alone propped open an unguarded exit door and entered a crowded theater to wreak mayhem. And he alone will face the courts and his own guilt in the months and years ahead. Meanwhile, the blame game will target whoever happens to come within range.
The Christian response to this is the ONLY redemptive one. For if this young man can be made to see himself as he is in the sight of a holy, righteous, and merciful God—a moral agent responsible in eternity for his own sins—he, like all sinners saved by grace alone through faith alone, may one day join those in heavenly chorus singing the praises of the Lamb slain for the enemies of God. Russell Moore recently reflected on the possibility (brought to his attention by Carl Henry several years ago) that someone sleeping off a DWI in a holding cell might be the next great evangelist to catch the ear of the world. How about a mass murderer? Or, a wife-beater? Or, a …? If we believe what the Bible teaches about our sinful hearts and our hateful deeds, then the “answer” to all the tragic massacres of history lies not in public policy but in personal conversion through the Holy Spirit made possible by the redeeming sacrifice of the Son of God, “who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Gal. 2:20). Let us not “nullify the grace of God,” as Paul goes on to say (ESV) by supposing that political gambits and a hand-wringing societal guilt trip will suffice to somehow make right or ameliorate a terrible wrong. And, most of all, let not those of us who claim the assurance of eternal life for ourselves doubt that the same blood that covers our wicked hearts and deeds, even when we were “dead in sin,” can cleanse the heart of a mass killer to the glory of God the Father and His Son, Jesus Messiah!

Read more: In the wake of another mass shooting, a question: Why Colorado? – The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_21129878/wake-another-mass-shooting-question-why-colorado#ixzz21Lbs6qNQ
Read The Denver Post’s Terms of Use of its content: http://www.denverpost.com/termsofuse

This is not a blog about Vacation Bible School.  It is a Theology of Vacation.  That’s right!  You heard me.  Maybe you are thinking, “There’s no such thing as a theology of vacation.”  Well, now there is.  Tina and I just returned from five days out of town in Branson, MO, and other parts, and it occurred to me while away that I had never read anyone writing on this topic, so I thought I would put in my two cents.  You can decide whether or not to give me any change back.

In my ruminations I have come to see four elements in a theology of vacation.  The first has to do with the family component of a theology of vacation.  Paul tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church (Eph 5) and to raise children in the nurture of the Lord and without exasperating them (Eph 6).  My wife puts up with a lot from me, with a very busy time during the months when school is on.  I have some very long days, since I teach late one night per week, and since a lot of my time (even at home) is taken up with remaining current on theological issues.  When school is out in the summer and over the Christmas/New Year break I am usually engaged in research and writing (I will have three new books published in the next 6-to-8 months, and have been involved one way or another in the publication of fourteen or fifteen in the past ten years).  I am usually serving as a pastor/interim pastor, which means time spent preparing on Saturdays and usually late nights on Wednesdays.  Even when I am home, I am not “home,” but often have my head engaged in some kind of project (like this blog).  Part of my stewardship as a husband and father/grandfather is to give myself to and for my family, and that means sustained times of doing nothing but being with and doing things with them.  I read about a man who read his father’s diary after the older man died.  One entry said, “Just went fishing with my son.  Wasted day.”  How terrible!  I need to give my wife a couple of weeks a year just to “vacate,” along with shorter amounts of time with my children and grandchildren.  You don’t stop being a dad (or a mom) just because your children grow up, move away, and become parents themselves.

Secondly, there is stewardship of your soul component of a theology of vacation.  It is good to work hard, and in two of my forthcoming books (one of them written with Tom Pratt) I explore the theology of work.  If there is a theology of work, there is also a theology of breaking from work for a time.  The Bible speaks much about the Sabbath.  Pastors often do not experience the Sabbath (Sunday for us) in the way others do, and there needs to be those times when we, literally, take a break.  It is necessary to disengage from work so that, when we return, we can re-engage with freshness and vigor.  (I do have to confess to spending an hour writing last week while in a hotel.)  Our soul needs that.

Thirdly, there is a creation theology component to a theology of vacation.  We know God made the world, but there are parts of it that we do not use except when on vacation, unless you work at a resort, I suppose.  It really does not matter where you go: New York City, Hawaii, or in our case, the “Baptist Las Vegas” in southwestern Missouri.  ( I discovered that there were some Presbyterians there, as well!)  You have to get your head out of the books, off of the spread sheet, and away from the other duties that consume so much of our energy in labor, and really appreciate the beautiful world that God has given us.  Wordsworth said, “The world is too much with us, late and soon; Getting and spending we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.”  Now, I am not advocating some return to Romanticism, and my next quote will not come from Jack Kerouac, but there is something to be said for just lying on a beach for a few hours or going on a nature hike.  Appreciate parts of God’s handiwork that you do not normally enjoy.

Finally, there is the worship element of a theology of vacation.  ”The heavens tell of the glory of God” (Ps 19:1).  There are elements of worship that often do not occur to us when we are at home or even in our home church that do come to us in vacation.  Yeah, I know, that husband absent from church every Sunday in the summer tells you that he can worship God in his bass boat just as well as at church, but we also know that the only prayers offered in that boat are for “a big one on this cast.”  But the other night, standing on the upper deck of a paddle boat (ship!) on a dinner cruise, we were treated to a moonrise over the Ozarks that made we think what a great God we serve.  I would never have seen that moonrise from my pulpit (but I will be back in it this Sunday!).  There are some worship moments best had when you are not watching your cell phone for the next text message from your boss or your secretary.

As we drove home Friday my wife and I both commented how tired we were, and we said the typical, “Now we need a vacation from the vacation” stuff.  But you know what?  You ought to be tired after a vacation.  You should be so exhausted that you can barely drag yourself in the door!  If you are not, then it was all about you, and not about the other people in your family you are supposed to be serving!  Which brings me back to my first point . . .

Chad Owen Brand

The Twitter world is all abuzz with the news of the Supreme Court decision to uphold Obamacare, and especially with the proviso that it cannot be regulated under the Commerce clause, but can be as a new tax. I have little to add to what the pundits are already saying about Chief Justice Roberts, about some of the amazingly intemperate responses by leading democrats, and about the fact that this was sold to Congress not as a new tax but argued before the Court as just such a thing. Commentary on the slimy and deceitful ways of politicians and their lawyers are redundant. But it is at least to be noted. I want simply to dwell for a few minutes on the question, “And then what?”

And then what for the Democratic Party in Congress? Let me mention a couple of things. First, the Democratic Party is going to have to own up to its assault on religious liberty implicit in this law. If companies are going to have to provide insurance guarantees for contraceptives, including abortifacients, then the clamor from religious conservatives is going to become a roar, and Democratic members of Congress are going to feel the wrath of their constituents. They will either have to pony up to Obama and tow the line, or join the opposition party’s rallying cry to throw the law out. Vast numbers of those in the current House did not vote for this law. And now they will have a chance to throw down the gauntlet and get rid of this monstrosity.

What else for the Democrats? Marco Rubio has already gone on the air and made it clear that, if this is a tax, and it is going to be progressively implemented over the next few months, a dramatic tax hike on the middle class will have to be enacted. So, the Democrats are out in the unenviable situation of proposing tax hikes on middle Americans while we are still in the throes of steep unemployment and are teetering on the edge of recession. Add to that the very real fear that this decision will actually slow job growth (except in the IRS) since employers now really are going to be afraid of the fiscal implications of a massive government program that has survived judicial review.

And then what for the Republican Party and for Romney? Obviously, many factors have yet to be sorted out. I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I do have a tentative prediction. I predict that this will galvanize the Republican base. After twenty-four to forty-eight hours of venting on Twitter and in the hallways at businesses, I think many conservative Americans (remember that 60% of Americans oppose this law) will quietly resolve to band together and do what they can to “throw the bums out” in November.

I could not help but think of the scene in Lord of the Rings (The Two Towers) where the Ents assaulted Isengard. After crashing their way into the inner circle of the fortress they assaulted the Tower of Orthanc in their fury over years of injustice, until suddenly liquid fire was poured from above and one of the Ents went up in flames, dying a horrible death. At that point the others simply stopped their destruction, and quietly left the tower, only to begin their internal and subterranean destruction of the fortress, eventually flooding it with water and destroying all of their enemies except the two inhabitants of the tower itself, Saruman and Wormtongue, who were now imprisoned in their own fortress.

Slings and arrows will fly over the next few days. But if the opponents of this monstrous (in more ways than one) legislation want to end this insanity, they will settle down to doing the spade work that is necessary to save our country.

Chad Owen Brand

Twenty-four hours ago I was glued to my TV to see what the outcome was going to be of the recall vote in Wisconsin. A lot was on the line, in light of fiscal issues in both Wisconsin and the rest of the US (even the world!), and in light of the November elections and the historic significance they forebode. I have had more than a passing interest in such matters for some years now, engaged as I have been in research on the interface between politics, economics, and the Church. (I have a full-length book coming out in six months or so, a portion of which will appear as an e-book this summer, and a shorter book coming out through the Acton Institute shortly.) So, a little historical perspective and then my read on Wisconsin, for what it’s worth.

The main thing at issue here is Public Sector Unions, and what they ought to be entitled (sorry, it is hard to get away from that word) to. Public sector unions came into being in the United States in 1958 in New York, but unions have been around for a long time. They actually harken back to the older European trade guilds, guilds which seem to have appeared first around the time Charlemagne was having his way with the Saxons (9th century). The trade guilds had as their ostensible purpose protecting unsuspecting consumers from stone masons, weavers, ironmongers, tanners (and a variety of other trades) who were not fully trained and who might turn out shoddy work. So, there was a process that one had to go through to become apprentice, journeyman, and master (sometimes the terminology was slightly altered), ostensibly guaranteeing that this person could do what he (or she) said he could do. That was the theory. In actuality, in most towns in England (or France) people knew just about everybody and a person’s relative skills would have been known ahead of time. Even in a city like London, which, after the Black Death of 1348, had a population of about 50,000, the city was still small enough that it was unlikely that incapable tradesmen would have had much success in plying much of a trade. Rather, as Peter Ackroyd demonstrates in his magisterial London: The Biography, the guilds existed to control economic power and influence. It was members of the guilds in 1351 and again in 1377 (and many other times afterward) that elected the town council (the Common Council) of the city of London. The Council in turn passed laws that required persons working in these trades to be members of the guilds, or face fines and imprisonment. (Today we would call this “greasing the palm,” a phrase which comes from England in the sixteenth century.) There were criteria for being able to join a guild. You had to be an Englishman, you had to be recommended by others already in the craft, and so on. Membership was strictly controlled.

By the time that Henry VIII was at the height of his powers (he ruled 1509-1547), he had gained fierce control of the various guilds, though certainly with their own collusion. It is likely that Henry thought that he controlled them, and that they thought they controlled him. He and his three offspring who ruled, successively, after him, passed strict regulations about how many threads per inch had to be woven into cloth, how the cloth was packaged, the way it was starched and stretched, and so on. We are kind of familiar with governmental regulations like this in our day, but before the Tudor dynasty they were virtually unknown in England. These were passed with the full support of the trade guilds, and they effectively put London textile companies in charge of the trade all over England and edged out manufacturers in other parts of England, or at least kept their product out of the market in London. All the while the Tudor family was receiving “benefices” from the London textile makers. After all, putting on kingly and queenly parties takes a lot of cash, and they did not have the income tax system that recently funded Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee. We could go on and on, but we need to move on to American unions.

One of the earliest unions in America was the Mechanics Union Trade Association, formed in 1827. It constituted workers from several trades who would band together for solidarity and who could then strike their employers if they became convinced that there was too much of an imbalance in what the employers were profiting in comparison to workers wages. The modern union first appeared in 1886 with the formation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Samuel Gompers, an avowed Socialist, was elected first president and retained that position until his death in 1924. This was actually a grouping of unions, and was the largest union organization throughout most of the twentieth century. Internal disputes between different unions within the AFL led to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935. Twenty years later they would re-merge, forming the AFLCIO. This has been the most influential and powerful of union federations in American history, and in their heyday they controlled nearly half of industrial production in the US. There is no debate that these unions have often come under the control of local politicians, whether Richard Daley of Chicago of Huey Long of Louisiana, and names like Jimmy Hoffa are legendary. Unions have done some good, but there is so much money and so much influence that criminality is inevitable, and there is a long history of it.

Enough pre-history. What of the public sector? I mentioned earlier the year 1958. In that year Mayor Robert Wagner issued an executive order, known as the “Little Wagner Act” creating public sector unions and guaranteeing them collective bargaining rights. Before that, no such idea had even been conceivable. When the police force of Boston attempted to strike in 1919, Governor Calvin Coolidge broke the strike. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt virtually remade America’s economic profile in the New Deal years, he brought about some public unions, but strictly forbade any deal that would give them collective bargaining rights. For FDR, since collective bargaining implies two parties coming to the table to “bargain,” that can work in private industry where representatives of a company meet with representatives of the union and, bargain. But in public sector unions, you have the union and then you have, the public. He did not believe there was any way such a thing could work and so he opposed collective bargaining (see Brands’s book on FDR, Traitor to His Class).

That brings us to Wisconsin. I won’t spend a lot of time on the craziness of the protests, or on the ridiculous Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate eighteen months ago, or even on the decision (a very cheesy one, hence my title) to try a recall.  The unions use the politicians and the politicians use the unions.  Little has changed since London in 1355.  I will toss one barb in that direction, but not till the end of this post. I just want to focus for a minute on the economics of pensions and medical insurance.

In many public sector unions, a person can retire after twenty years, sometimes at a young age. At one time, say thirty years ago, that made a certain economic sense. After all, people only lived to about sixty five years of age. So, you work thirty or so years, pay into your pension, and then ten or fifteen years later, your family celebrates your life at a memorial service. But now in some parts of the country, life expectancy is over eighty-two years of age. Some public sector workers, retiring at fifty-two or fifty-five, have another twenty-five or thirty years to live. And they came into the system with a planned benefits package that guaranteed them a specific income at retirement. They also came in with all medical paid for and virtually nothing out of their pockets.

The world has changed. People in the private sector do not have those kinds of guarantees. We pay into a 401K and then, depending on how long we work and how much we have paid in, that’s what we have to live off of for however long it is. Also, we have to pay part of our insurance premiums and we have co-pays when we get medical care. For most of us, that is simply what life is. No guarantees; just opportunities and risks. These are the things that the Wisconsin public sector unions were so incredibly angry about.

By the way, it is not only a problem in Wisconsin, but right here in Kentucky as well. You can teach public school for twenty years, and if you are fifty-two, you can retire with benefits. Again, at one time that made sense; it does not anymore. With declining birth rates (fewer younger workers to support the retirees) the future is going to have to change. We do not begrudge those who came into a system with promises made to them. Those promises should be kept. But for the future, things will have to change, in both Wisconsin and Kentucky. Of course, they will only change in Kentucky if some of our people in Frankfort actually develop enough of a spine to do something about it.

Oh, I promised one final word about Wisconsin. In December of 1860 South Carolina seceded from the United States because of the election of Lincoln. He had promised no more slavery in the Western territories. Fearing for the institution of slavery, they seceded to protect their “peculiar institution.” How did that work out for you, South Carolina? In Wisconsin, we had the “cheesy recall,” and Scott Walker won by a much larger majority than he did two years ago, and his mild reforms to collective bargaining for public sector unions remains. Oh, and as to the potential future of big and dominant public sector unions, I just have one question: How’s that working out for you?

Chad Owen Brand

Some of us have spent several weeks looking forward to the appearance of the History Channel’s mini-series, Hatfields and McCoys. With a stellar cast (Kevin Costner, Bill Paxton, Tom Berenger and others), and produced by Kevin Costner (among others), the trailers have been whetting my historical appetite for some time, not least due to the fact that the events took place not far from where I have been pastoring for the last year and a half. The last three nights, my lady and I sat up and watched all three episodes, which, including commercials (entertaining ones, so they were not all that odious) ran to just over six hours of viewing. So, what of it?

First, the cinematography and acting were superb, even by lesser characters in the story. The events took place in what I consider one of the most beautiful places in America–the place where West Virginia and Kentucky meet. The beauty of the countryside is on display all throughout the film. Costner, as “Devil Anse” Hatfield, Andrew Howard as “Bad” Frank Phillips, Powers Boothe as Valentine “Wall” Hatfield, Boyd Holbrook as William “Cap” Hatfield, Sarah Parish as Levicy Hatfield, and Bill Paxton as Randall McCoy, all filled their roles with meaning, passion, and sympathy. The story truly came alive in their portrayals, and one felt torn between the warring figures, so that my wife and I kept asking each other, “Well who do you like now?” Truth is, that it was hard to feel sympathy for any character throughout the whole six-hour marathon, except for “Cotton-top” Mounts and maybe “Cap.” In sheer entertainment value the mini-series was not at all disappointing.

Historically, as well as I could tell, the events were told pretty straight up, with of course some of the interjected conversations and events that come with historical fiction. But the key events were related with a keen eye to accuracy. That was probably one reason that one alternatingly loves a figure for a while and then becomes disgusted with him (or her). Films like Avatar that have a whole series of monochromatic figures that are just all bad or all good sacrifice any sense of realism. There were only a couple of people that you hated throughout the film, notably Percy Cline (the attorney) and Nancy McCoy, the varlet. But even with Nancy you felt some sympathy since her father had been killed by the Hatfields when she was a child.

The movie opened with two scenes that may have startled some viewers. One, Anse deserting from the Confederate cause to go home to his family. Some may have been shocked by that. But this was a common experience, with something like 110,000 deserters from the South during the war (many returned after straightening things out at home). The Union saw similar numbers. The second puzzling (to some) image was a local Union soldier drinking at a bar in the aftermath of the war in West Virginia. He was certainly out of place in the scene, a fact that led in part to his murder early in the film. But you have to remember that West Virginia was created by the Civil War, as fifty counties in Virginia voted to secede from the state (appropriately enough) after Virginia voted to secede from the United States. The net effect was that some West Virginians (like some Kentuckians and Missourians) fought for Union while others fought for Rebellion. (Four of Henry Clay’s grandsons fought for the Union and three fought for the Confederacy.) That was the way it was, and the family feud was in some ways a statement that the Civil War did not end at Appomattox in April, 1865.

One side issue was raised by the film presentation, and one that is moral in nature. As I have followed the Twitter feed and Facebook comments the last two days, I have noted that some Christians were offended by the language, and dropped out of watching the first night, even the first half-hour. Admittedly, the language was rough–very rough–and I can understand their concerns. I would not have watched the presentation with small children in the house, no doubt one reason the History Channel aired the series from nine till eleven each evening. But for some that goes even deeper; for them, even listening to profanity in a film is too hurtful. I can understand that. Some may have grown up in a profane home where such words were hurled at them by a parent or a sibling. It just brings back memories that are painful and causes them to re-live scenarios that they do not wish to endure again. There may be other reasons not quite so understandable. Let me offer two comments about this side of the film.

First, art comes to us in two primary ways. Some art paints life as it ought to be, while other art paints life as it really is. Norman Rockwell represents the first kind of art. In fact, he was once criticized for his innocent illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post, and he responded in the very words I have used here: “I paint life as it ought to be.” There is a place for that. Picasso represents the other side of the story. His work often portrayed women and others in very dark and ugly ways. He had seen the dark side of life, and that was what he was depicting in his African death masks and his ugly women. There is room in art for Doris Day and for Bette Davis, for Jimmy Stewart and Jimmy Cagney, for Justin Bieber (may have to rethink that one) and Metallica. The problem with Picasso of course is that he does not give us reason to hope, but what he shows us is that there are many people in the world like that, and it ought to remind us of our calling before God. Dark artistic expression can sometimes reach our hearts in ways more cheery messages cannot.

Second, the “Hatfields and McCoys” film shows us that the gospel often comes into peoples’ live in the midst of profanity and pain. The Cross itself was profane, and was surrounded by profanity, whether profanity of a corrupt political system, the profanity of a high priesthood that was complicit in killing the Hope of Israel, or the profanity of a disciple of Jesus who stood in a courtyard during his trial and said, “I never knew the &%#@*.” What is more profane than the Savior of the world, naked and bleeding, dying for the very people who were killing him? The fact is that we live in a profane world, and if we are going to do anything about that profanity, we have to touch it, we have to rub our shoulders against it. CS Lewis once said that we have to feel and endure the horror of the world that we live in so that we can change it, and that God can enable us to do so “without stain, but not without pain.”

I want to drive this home with one last word. (If you have not seen the end of the film and plan to, you may want to stop reading here.)

The heart-wrenching ending of the film, I believe, brings out the point that I am trying to make. The very religious (but very unforgiving) Randall McCoy ends his life blaming God, in a drunken stupor, and in a hopeless and helpless inability to go on with life. Devil Anse Hatfield, a man who had no use for religion, the church, or God throughout the film, is baptized in the final scene, having found both forgiveness from God and forgiveness toward others. A profane man, now washed in the blood of Jesus. That is the Gospel! I think I will watch it again.

Chad Owen Brand

[Today marks the one-year anniversary of my father's passing. Two days after he went into the arms of the Lord, I wrote this tribute. In honor of this anniversary, I am re-posting it for those who did not see it last year. Miss you, dad.]

Hey, dad, it was just forty-eight hours ago, that your youngest son, my brother Lance, sent me a text message, stating, “He’s at home with the Lord.” The Apostle Paul, writing about the moment of death, describes it as an experience of “departing and being with Christ,” and that to be “absent from the body” is to be “present with the Lord.” So, my brother’s words were right-on. I can’t tell you how the last two days have been, only that they have not been what I expected. Some of my theological mentors and friends believe that the doctrine of the “communion of the saints” means, in part, that departed saints have some sense of what the not-yet-departed saints are up to. Believing that is probably true at some level, I just thought I’d write and tell you some things. Some of this I have told you before, but not all of it. The last time I saw you I told you “goodbye,” and, though I think you thought I meant, “see you later,” I had a deep sense then that it was really “Goodbye!”

I got that text message from Lance while I was sitting on the beach with Tina. I had only found out that morning that you had been in the hospital for several days, and that the afternoon before you had gone into coronary arrest. Our family did not want to alarm me to what might just be another in a long line of medical episodes spanning over ten years, especially since we were on vacation, a much-needed vacation for both Tina and me. So they had told me nothing till that morning. But coronary arrest is not just “another episode,” is it, dad? They had to bring you back and put you on a ventilator. I also found out from G (you know, your only daughter) that the preliminary tests after the episode did not look good. BP was down, blood sugar elevated, kidneys shut down, all those bad things that they explain in terms of numbers, as if numbers on a chart, read out to us clinically by a man or woman wearing a white smock, really say anything about what we are going through. The words from G were pretty grim.

We understand grim, don’t we, dad? You had your first heart attack at age twenty-four, bypass at forty-five (that has lasted thirty-one years, not bad!), and over the last years, aneurism, blocked carotids, diabetes, and then, to top it all off, dementia. I can’t tell you how much I have hated your dementia. Much of the last five or six years was lost to you, even though there would be moments of clarity and lucidity. (Sorry for that word, dad, I know you always told me to speak plainly so that every-day folk like you could understand. You were right about that, I have tried hard not to parade my PhD. You will be proud to know that I sometimes tell people it only means, “Piled higher and deeper.”) But I hated your dementia. I did not hate you, I hated it. I even invented names for it, but since mom might see what I am writing here, I will keep those to myself. I know you hated it, too. One day a year or so ago, though I am sure you forgot saying it within a few moments, you looked at G and said, “I am losing my mind, aren’t I?” No grammar check here—that was about as plain as you could put it.

So, here we are. I want to say some things to you, and so, in the hope that maybe you will be able to know that, I am going to write them here. Some of this is hard to say, and if you were still in this age, you might get a little angry with me, but now you have changed, since the Book tells us, “When we see Him we shall be like Him for we will see Him as He is.” Wow! That means more to me now than ever! Since you are no longer a man subject to temptation, I am sure you will be nodding your head, saying, “Yes, let’s get it out. Maybe somebody will be helped.”

I love you, dad, and I have always loved you, as long as I can remember. You taught me how to fish and shoot. I remember when you made me practice in the backyard, casting a rubber plug with my cheap Zebco fishing pole until I could make the plug land inside an old tire halfway across the yard before you would take me fishing. I spent an entire afternoon casting that rubber plug until I got it in nearly every time. Even today I am pretty good with a spinning reel and a fly-rod, and I thank you for that. You taught me how to shoot, and though I never got as good as you, I still love to do it. I suppose one of these days my brothers and I will decide who is going to get which of your many weapons that you have left behind. I don’t know that I am ready to do that anytime soon. As far as I am concerned, they are still yours, dad.

As you of course are fully aware, I am your oldest. I made you a teenage dad by just one week, so we were pretty close in age, in comparison to many fathers and sons. Sometimes oldest sons and their fathers have conflict, and that was true of us. I never liked it, but it happened. You expected a lot out of me as the oldest, and sometimes I lived up to your expectations and sometimes I did not. There were times I wished I had been born third in place of Mike, who came along two years after G and often asked me, “Why do you and dad fight so much,” or Lance, born last, and the least serious of all of us when he was a kid. (Sorry, bro, but it’s true, though you have turned out pretty well in your ‘forties and ‘fifties.) But I was first, and I was first in your line of sight. Yeah, that weapon analogy again.

I never told you this (remember that I said there were some things in my Epistle that you probably didn’t know), but when I was a kid, maybe through Junior High years, when you would get on me about something—whatever it might be, most of the details have escaped my memory by now—I would just take it and be quiet. I would slip off to my room and read, and think about what I would say to you if I had the courage to say it. I thought a lot during those years, because we had a lot of conflicts, you and me. Looking back, I am sure I deserved much of that, but at the time I usually thought that you had gone too far, said too much, expected too highly. So, I just thought about it. “If I had been criticizing me, how would I have done it differently?” “Rather than saying this, I think he should have said that.” Here’s something really interesting, dad. That developed a pattern and a habit in my life of going down deep inside and pondering over almost every issue I faced, “How could I say that differently?” “What is the more correct and communicable way of stating this problem?” As you know, dad, I am a teacher. Many of my students think I am pretty good at it. What I have never told any of them, what I have only shared with the two women most important in my life (and you know who they are) is that my dad made me a good communicator. Well, along with the Lord! You made me go deep inside and to labor for clarity and accuracy in all I say and do. That has never left me in all these years. Maybe the method could have been different, but we all have our ways of learning! Now, here, if you can find a way to read this, I am telling you, “Thank you!” You and the Lord made me what I am in this area, along with some help from my mentor, Tom Pratt.

Oh, yeah, I just mentioned reading in that last paragraph. I know that neither you nor mom made it through the tenth grade, but both of you inspired me to be a reader. Night after night I would watch the two of you read. You read Popular Science magazine and mom read the Bible, that old red leather Scofield Bible that looked like it had been run over by a Mac truck, but only because she wore it out in reading! You read. Of course, through elementary and into Junior High years you read because we rarely had a television that worked. We had one, it just didn’t work. There it sat in the living room with Rabbit Ears on top and a Pepsi bottle perched beside it. But it did not get any TV! You would buy them at second-hand stores and we would be all excited because we were going to be able to watch the whole season of Star Trek or Gilligan’s Island, but then about the seventh or eighth episode I would come home and the TV was out, and then we would not have one for another six months until you found another used one at a garage sale or some other cheap venue. A part me hated that, but what it did was it sent me to Jules Verne and Herman Melville and Zane Grey and Arthur Conan Doyle and Spiderman. (I didn’t say it was all high-culture reading.) And it also sent me to Tolkien when I was fourteen and we were in one of those “The TV is busted” periods. As much as anything besides God’s Word, Tolkien changed my life. Of course, at times you were frustrated with my addiction to reading, as was mom, who might find me in the morning under the covers with a flashlight and extra batteries, having spent the entire night reading through “Mysterious Island.” So, though you put up with a lot of complaining from me and the other three over the TV, and you griped at me often as not for my reading habits, you changed my life again. It happened as an “unintended consequence,” but it happened.

By the time I was in high school and afterwards, I started using some of the speeches toward you that I would work out in my head lying in bed at night. Dad, I guess that we have been “toe-to-toe” at least as often as we saw “eye-to-eye.” We had some doozies! Mom, saint that she is, often would speak to me afterward and say, “Now you just have to understand, your dad grew up in the Depression, and that’s why he is the way he is.” Or, “You know your dad’s father abandoned him and his sister and his mom when your dad was four, and that has left a mark on him.” It was all true. Of course, you were adopted by your maternal grandmother and her second husband when your mother said she could not raise you and your sister. That is why my name is Chad Owen Brand rather than Chad Owen Snyder. (Kind of glad on that one, no bad thoughts toward “Snyders.”) I am glad you were adopted by Charles Oscar Brand. Your birth mother was a real wildcat! When she got mad she would ring the heads off of baby chicks! We did not look forward to going to “Grandma’s house,” and I guess if you inherited some of her temperament, then our battles were understandable. I remember you telling me as a kid that you were your own uncle, and when I figured the whole adoption thing, I guessed you were right. If I had only had some entrepreneurial spirit and better rhyming ability we might have come up with a hit country song, though, “I’m my own Uncle” does not have the same ring to it as “I’m my own Grandpa.”

That reminds me, I probably have you to thank for my love for Western films and Country music. When we did have a TV, it was usually on a channel showing a Western film, or Gunsmoke, or Bonanza. I grew up loving the Duke, Johnny Cash and Hank Williams (the real one), and still rank Shane as one of my top-five favorite films. I remember the night you introduced me to that movie, claiming it was one of your all-time favorites. I also remember that I felt closer to you that night than I ever had before. When I started having kids, introducing them to my favorite movies was one of my favorite things to do, and now they are passing on that heritage to their own children, Tashia with Katelynn, Madison, and Cora, Owen with Buck, and Cassie with Keira and Kameron. Thanks for that, dad.

One of the things that I think about with pride toward you is that you were not unwilling to change. Notice how I put that. I did not say you were “willing to change,” only that you were “not unwilling to change.” The thing that comes first to mind is the race issue. You grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line, and when I was a teenager, that was obvious. I remember the debate at the dinner table that day in April, 1968, after MLK was assassinated. I defended the great man, and you denigrated him. We fought that battle for a long time, and not just that night. I grew up, left home, and raised my own family. Then one day about eight or ten years ago, my daughter Cassie told me she was going on a date. When the young man came to pick her up, I discovered that it was a young black man that she was going out with. I had to look myself in the mirror after they left and ask myself, “Did I mean all that stuff that I used to say to my dad when I was a kid?” I decided that I did, and before the second date, I had a long and direct conversation with him about my daughter and my expectations of him, but it was the same conversation I had had with the young men who had dated my older daughter Tashia several years before. I did not change it because he was a young black man. But here is the point, dad. Two years ago I brought my daughter and her black husband and children to meet you, and you treated him the same as you treated any of the spouses of my kids. That’s not necessarily a compliment, you understand! But you were not the Edd Brand of 1968, and I knew that the Lord was real!

But I realize now that I kind of moved too quickly away from the issue of conflict. I have to come back to that, dad, because there was one awful day, and it was not when I was a kid. It was when I was a man, a professor of theology, and a pastor. It was about seven years ago, and, though I am sure you had forgotten about it some time in the last few years, you will recall it if you see these words, since now you are healed of all hurts and sins. It was a day when we were at your house, helping you with some things that needed to be done. In the middle of it, you became very angry with me. We knew that you were changing at the time, but did not know how deep the dementia was working in your mind. But you became angry with me. You said some of the most hurtful things to me that you had ever said. Years of frustration welled up in me, and after listening to you speak, I looked at you and said, “I will never forgive you, and I will never speak to you again.” Mom came up to me and said, “You don’t mean that.” “Yes I do, I replied.” And I left.

I flew back to Kentucky, and over the next days, and even weeks, I thought about what I had said, what I had done. I read the words of Jesus, “If you do not forgive others, then your Father in heaven will not forgive you.” I brooded and waited, and delayed responding to what I knew was the right thing to do. Then one day I looked at myself in the mirror, literally, and the Spirit of God spoke to me and said, “If you do not reconcile with your father, you can never teach another class, you can never preach another sermon, because you are living a lie!”

I know you remember this now. I called you and between sobs and cries I asked you to forgive me for what I had said, to forgive me for my unforgiving spirit. You cried also and begged me to forgive you for what you had said to me that day. Maybe I just have bad memory, but I thought at the time that it was the first time you had ever asked me to forgive you. The next time I saw you, some months later, I think you had forgotten all about that exchange, since the dementia was working its effect on you. But I did not forget, and I will never forget the incredible healing power of repentance and forgiveness. If anyone should have known that, it should have been me. It is ever before me now, and I can’t help but be moved by it in these short two days since you have been gone.

I said earlier in my little note to you that these hours of reflection are not what I had thought they might be. I haven’t been able to remember anything that I am mad at you about. I know they are there, but they don’t matter anymore. I have watched your grandchildren, who virtually worship the ground you walked on, grieve for you in incredible ways. Maybe that’s another sign of redemption, since your grandkids gave you another shot at parenting, and the Lord knows we all fail at that task at some level. You should look at the pictures Cassie posted of you and your grandkids on Facebook. You should have been at Tashia’s this afternoon and listened to what everyone said about you. Remember that Tashia called you “Butterfly” when she first met you, and yesterday her six-year-old Madison was walking around the farm looking for “hurt butterflies” so she could “help fix them.” And she did not even know that her mom called you, “Butterfly.” I walked with my son, Owen, this afternoon on the grounds of the farm in Tennessee, and said, “You know, life is complicated and is mixed with good and bad, but right now all that matters to me is the good.” I also told him that a day would come when he would walk the same ground and talk with his kids about me. It makes me want to be as good of a “Poppi” as you were a “Grandpa.”

Well, dad, it has been forty-eight hours since you left, no, now it has been about forty-nine. You are in heaven with the Lord, and if you get to read these words, know that I love you and am happy for you. I will join you one day, but even that will not be the end of it. Scripture tells us that one day there will be a shout, the voice of the archangel, and the trumpet of God will blow. Then the graves will open and the dead in Christ will rise. You will rise from Denver, I will probably rise from Kentucky. But let’s make a deal, right now. When that day comes, you lean East and I will lean West, and when you see me, grab my hand. With tears in your eyes, you will probably say, “I should have said I am sorry more often.” I will say, “I should have been a more dutiful son.” And then, we will forget all of that because we will have all eternity to enjoy sweet fellowship together in the Lord. “Even so, come Lord Jesus!”

Chad Owen Brand

Economist Thomas Sowell has cogently argued that all consistent political positions arise out of a vision, a vision that entails “a sense of causation.” “If causation proceeds as our vision conceives it to, then certain other consequences follow, and theory is the working out of what those consequences are.” How does that play out? Though there are many different political theories, when you boil them down they can all be represented by two visions about political means and goals: the constrained vision, and the unconstrained vision. The constrained vision recognizes that life in this world will never be perfected in any given society, and that everyone will have to be content to live with trade-offs. The unconstrained vision has the goal of the perfectibility of society by removing all barriers to political idealism. The constrained vision gives much credence to pragmatic solutions to problems, and so holds that even common people with little education can do much to improve society. The unconstrained vision believes that intellectuals are better prepared to make the world better, and so “professors in a university turned statesmen” may be the best prescription for improving our world.

When it comes to social processes, the constrained vision “puts little faith in deliberately designed social processes, since it has little faith that any manageable set of decision makers could effectively cope with the enormous complexities of designing a whole blueprint for an economic system, a legal system, or a system of morality or politics.” One is reminded here of Friedrich Hayek’s comment on command (socialist or communist) economies. No man or group of men could ever know everything necessary to be able to determine supply, demand, production, price, the cost of labor and management, the quality of product, and countless other variables necessary to planning a nation’s economy. The unconstrained vision sees it differently. Building in part off of engineering models developed by engineer-turned-economist Thorsten Veblen, the unconstrained vision sees the solution to social problems as merely a matter of “technical coordination” by experts. All such problems are theoretically solvable; you just have to put together the right team of smart guys. The unconstrained vision believes that utopia can be achieved in this world that we live in. But in order to be able to pull it off, the Administrative State, that is, the all-encompassing federal government, has to be given the kind of power and authority that it takes to make it all happen.

Historically, our nation was committed to the constrained vision. Our founding fathers had been a part of unconstrained visions in Europe, where powerful monarchs taxed people at will, confiscated their property when it served their purposes, and ran rough-shod over the rights of common people. They employed “experts” to run the government, believing that common people were too inept to be given opportunities for important service. So, when they established our country, with its Constitution, they composed that founding document so that each part of government had only limited power, and so that no part, especially the executive branch, could ever simply force its own will upon the rest of society.

Enter our present Administration. Little wonder that former chief of staff Rahm Immanuel trashed freedom of speech as being “over-rated.” That freedom, enshrined in the Constitution, could be seen as a threat to a modern Progressive, grasping Administrative State whose intellectual hired guns think they know what our country really needs. Little wonder that a recently appointed Justice of the Supreme Court, giving a speech in Egypt, counseled the Egyptians not to model their constitution after that of the United States, since it is too out of date. Our Constitution limits the power of courts, of legislators, and of the Executive. Our current Administration wants all constraints removed, because it knows what we really need.

But the last ten days have seen all the chickens come home to roost. With the new mandate handed down from the White House regarding implementation of Obamacare, we have witnessed the trashing of freedom of religion. When the episcopal bishops issued a Response to the new mandate, chaplains in the US Armed Forces were warned by the Pentagon not to read those directives in chapel services. Freedom of religion and of speech curtailed. As the Administration attempts to seize control of more and more responsibilities that the Founders intended to be spread among other branches of government and to state legislatures, when are the American people going to wake up and realize that we have in the White House George Washington’s worst nightmare?

This is the unconstrained vision of governing that is as extreme as anything we have seen short of Soviet oppression. It wears a friendly face, a feminist face, a not-white face, a face that says it is concerned for the poor. But one thing is becoming more and more clear every day. It is all about power. Lord Acton had it right. We had better wake up.

Chad Owen Brand

On January 21, 1525, a small group of men gathered in the home of Felix Manz in the Swiss city of Zurich. For some months Manz and his friends, Conrad Grebel, Georg Blaurock, and others, had been convinced that the Catholic Mass and other Catholic teachings were contrary to Scripture. They had followed the lead of their teacher and mentor, Ulrich Zwingli, in calling for reforms in the churches of their city. Zwingli wished for these reforms, but was constrained by the slow hand of the city council, which, though it had ousted the Catholic bishop from leadership, was slow to authorize any real changes in the worship in the city’s churches. But the students of Zwingli wanted even more. Though they agreed with Reformers like Luther that much needed to be changed, they differed with the other Reformers on the nature of the church and the timing of baptism. They had concluded that infant baptism was an abomination, and that only believers’ baptism was consistent with the New Testament. To be even more specific, what they were contending for was not merely believers’ baptism understood generically, but disciples’ baptism, since baptism was to be reserved for “committed disciples who had shown by their steadfast faith, self-discipline and whole-hearted following of the ideals of the gathered community that they were genuine disciples.” That January evening they acted on their convictions. After prayer, Georg Blaurock stood up in the midst of their meeting and asked Grebel, “for God’s sake to baptize him with the true Christian baptism upon his faith and knowledge,” whereupon Grebel complied, and then Blaurock baptized the other adults in the room. They then pledged themselves as true disciples of the Lord “to live lives separated from the world and to teach the gospel and hold the faith.” Thus began the movement commonly known as Anabaptism, but better known to modern scholarship as the Radical Reformation.

It may seem an incidental thing to us, this evening baptismal event with only a dozen or so obscure figures present, but in reality it constituted a very tiny (at the time) but extremely significant revolution in theology. The age-old practice of infant baptism with its implications for politics and social relations was immense. Social expectations, legal enactments and
interpersonal relationships all built on this foundation. So to deny that the paedo-baptism (infant baptism) of all was legitimate and to insist on a later baptism of only a few could not be simply a personal decision with the goal of pursuing greater spiritual fidelity. It inevitably also entailed a stinging indictment of the Christian faith of the others and of the legitimacy of the civil state.

As much as anything, the Radical Reformation constituted a new way of understanding the church—“new,” that is, insofar as it is difficult to find others who sympathized with them any time in their own recent memory. For them the church was a believers’ church. Menno Simons, one of the important theologians in the movement, argued that he was simply applying Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith to the doctrine of the church. If people are justified by faith alone, then only such justified people ought to be “members” of the church. The church then is a “believers’ church” in the sense that only those are members of the visible church who are, by their own testimony at least, members of the mystical body of Christ. Menno further argued that the NT only depicts and teaches the baptism of those who have made a conscious choice to become disciples of Jesus, and that this was consistent with his views on the nature of the church. Luther had done much good in his reforming efforts, as would Calvin, but not enough. While the Magisterial Reformers (those who promoted reforms with the assistance of the magistrates) wished to “reform the church on the basis of the Word of God, the Radical Reformers were more concerned to restore the primitive church which they believed had ‘fallen’ or apostatized.” Menno viewed his work as a furthering or a completion of what Luther had started.

The implications of such a set of convictions are momentous. If the church is made up only of a believing community, Menno further contended, then it alone is responsible for its ministry, its leadership, its support, and its own reform efforts. This entailed a staggering impact politically. In all of the other reform efforts in Germany, Geneva, Basel, Strasbourg, Zurich and other places (including England), the reform efforts were supported by, and in some cases even initiated by, the political authorities. This in effect “put the state in a position of dominance in the life of the church.” Additionally, these reforms were carried out for the most part only under the approving watch-care of town councils, nobles, princes, and other political leaders. Grebel, Manz, and the other key leaders of the new Radicals rejected this out of hand. The church needs no assistance in carrying out its reforms. Whenever the government adds its lending hand to reform efforts it also looks for some kind of pay-back as well as complete cooperation with the political realities that are in place, whether those political realities are just or not. The Anabaptists in effect said, “We do not need the government’s help in carrying out our reforms, and we do not want its interference.” It was a truly radical position; these men were not, in all likelihood, fully prepared for the storm that was about to be unleashed on them.

The practice of “rebaptism” (the meaning of the term “anabaptist”) was outlawed in Zurich. Felix Manz was executed early in 1527 for “rebaptizing” persons, executed by drowning. The Radicals were proscribed all over Europe, with the exception of Holland. The reason is that their convictions challenged one of the most long-standing and universal beliefs of Western (and, indeed, Eastern) Christendom, the belief that church and state were in some sense two sides of the same coin. It is not that everyone else saw church and state as the same thing. It is not even that kings and popes always got along well. But the common belief, so common that it was part of the fabric of their very lives, was that there was only one state (in any given geographic area) and that there was also only one church, and that this seamlessness was requisite to a stable society. To contend for a different political reality was tantamount to treason or sedition; to contend for a different ecclesiastical reality was to do the very same thing. Starting a new church was seen as rebellion and insurrection. This was at least the view that outsiders took of the Anabaptists, a name that “came to be used in a general pejorative sense to describe those who were believed to oppose the existing social and political order.” There is only one way to deal with usurpers. This is why Manz was drowned by the Zurich authorities, in a kind of parody of his own baptismal practice. But the Radicals believed that practicing mandated infant baptism in the context of an established church was to confuse the church with the world.

The Anabaptists were attempting to break a millennium-old assumption. Their beliefs were counter to Augustine, contrary to the practice of the Medieval popes, counter to the convictions that launched the Inquisition, and they were inconsistent with the compromise position of Luther or the rational approach of John Calvin. Their belief was also not consistent with their own local situation in Zurich in which Zwingli was willing to allow the city council to set the tone and the pace of reform, in effect, to govern the church’s affairs. Grebel. in conversation with Zwingli, rejected the city council’s authority over the churches. He contended that the churches ought to be able to handle their reforms on their own. “The decision of Conrad Grebel to refuse to accept the jurisdiction of the Zurich council over the Zurich church is one of the high moments of history, for however obscure it was, it marked the beginning of the modern ‘free church’ movement.” Furthermore, this action by “Grebel and the Swiss Brethren who gathered around him in the ensuing year(s) planted the seed out of which has come, through the influence of the Anabaptists in Holland and England, the modern Protestant commitment of freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, voluntary church membership, and separation of church and state.” These are truly monumental issues! Grebel would pay for his actions with imprisonment in Zurich in 1525/26, but would be released and then die in August of 1526, probably from the plague in Maienfeld. Living only to the age of twenty-eight, he had founded a theological revolution that would live on for generations.

All of the previous theologies advocated the view that there can be only one government and only one church in any locale, and that there was some kind of mutually-supportive symbiosis between them, even though leaders of church and state did not always agree on how to handle any given situation. For the previous “Great Tradition,” the two (state and church) had to find a way to work together for moral, economic, political, and ecclesiastical advancement, in effect, to create a Christian Society. But this was not so for the Radicals, and in many places they paid a great price for their “sedition.” They did not see themselves as rebels, of course, but were simply calling for a new model of church-state relations, a model that actually would be tentatively attempted in the Low Countries by the 1540s. This does not mean that the Radicals in Zurich were advocating separatism. They rejected the Catholic Church and the idea of a state church, but they did wish for “one united church, not a little church outside the big church, for they believed that the majority of the people would accept their program.” They wanted one church, but not a church under the boot heel of the city council. Thus was the desire for true religious liberty born, in the heart and mind of a twenty-something university student who had learned from his mentor (Zwingli) that Scripture alone was the authority for all of life. Would that his mentor had learned the lesson as well as his students.

Chad Brand
From the forthcoming book, Seeking the City, by Chad Brand and Tom Pratt.