Reminds me of Kierkegaard once writing of his desire to negotiate with pastors a reduction in the terms of their employment by the state church: they’d continue to get paid on the condition that they would no longer have any parishioners.
He worried none would think it a punishment and quit.
Well, yeah, you could ask this about and in many a denominational bureaucracy as well … on those lines, it is reminiscent of a Pope who was once asked how many people worked in the Curia (the Vatican bureaucracy). He is supposed to have replied, “about half of them”.
Let us point out the many decades of the lawlessness which is the specialty of our Democratic judiciary, and thus expose their hypocrisy in accusing PresTrump of politicizing our judiciary.
Politicizing our judiciary has been Democrats organizing principle for decades now as they’ve overthrown the rule of law of God and man. All those still carrying on this lawlessness from the bench must be impeached, including SCOTUS.
That PresTrump’s calls for impeachment will at times be for the wrong thing, thus adding to the politicization of our judiciary, is not our goal. But when has reform ever been so precise and surgical that only the gangrenous or dead tissue is removed?
Impeachment should have begun when SCOTUS declared open season on little babies back in 1973.
Sure, few care about those little ones still today, but we Christians will never stop reminding everyone that this is the lawlessness of Democrats. Thus one happy side effect of even bad impeachments of judges is that the net will catch up a number of these moral monsters.
And yes, that is what judges are who stand in support of the murder of helpless babies.
We are not in favor of lawless impeachments. We are not in favor of any real politicization of our courts. Two wrongs don’t make a right. It is not proper to do a wrong that good may prevail.
But as Democrats make their hypocritical arguments against those presiding over our courts finally coming under the threat of impeachment, it is good and right to point out to them—and everyone watching and listening—the hypocrisy of their arguments, as well as the morally monstrous crimes many of our judges have been presiding over for many decades.
Let’s be clear: if God has been graceful, my socials are not of a status-seeking monkey. Otherwise, I would promote the men of MAGA, ESV, TGC, Keller, PCA, Carson, CrossPolitic, OPC, Crossway, and all those chest-thumping Masculinists. These posts would be perfectly consistent.
A shepherd guards his sheep.
He doesn’t flatter them.
Some prof who teaches like at Ivy Tech or La Mesa Junior College—or maybe it was Yale—is yelling abt how he can’t teach in US anymore. He’s moved to Canada saying US is now fascist and Canada is not.
So he’s moving to country where Christians are jailed for running bookstore selling books calling gays to repent. To country where academics have long been free to call for censorship of Christian repentance and faith.
Water finds its level.
When pastors don’t preach against sexual sins such as effeminacy and women teaching and exercising authority over men being committed within the congregation and its homes, the sheep are deceived and believe their effeminate sons and Amazon daughters actually will inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.
Maybe pastors’ self-censorship is more destructive and damnable than government censorship. #goodshepherd
Imagine being a pastor caring for a “gay” man, and knowing his sins can be covered by the blood of Jesus, but not telling him because you can’t bring yourself to tell him God condemns his sin as an “abomination.”
Just tell him the truth. Often, he’ll not hate, but love you, for it. Such joy comes with repentance! Joy in Heaven. Joy in the church. #goodshepherd
MAGA or not, what we have to remember is the threat PresPutin poses to our allies in Europe. We may not like their response to US/PresTrump discipline, but do we really think we can abandon our leadership of the world? Don’t want us to be an empire, but our wealth and power carry responsibilities. And who in the world thinks PresPutin is an honest man?
And therein is the challenge: the world needs America, but America needs the world, and this is also true in a specifically Christian sense as well.
Additional thoughts about EU PresvonderLeyen, PresTrump, PresPutin, and PresZelinsky:
Not an isolationist, but clearly it’s long been time for Europe to grow up and contribute to the household as an adult, rather than a child. They’ve been living in Dad’s (Mom’s) basement playing social welfare games with their electorates, and trusting Dad to keep the food coming, the air warm or cool, and the neighbors on their own property.
What I worry about is the EU being so resentful of the discipline that the US (not merely PresTrump) is bringing to bear on their inner (or outer) attitude of superiority towards those deplorable Americans that they will cause a permanent rift in the household.
US and PresTrump are not going to back down on this discipline, so the EU has a choice. Humble themselves and show gratitude for our many decades of bearing the lion’s share of the cost for their stability militarily, or go their own way. In my judgment, this is their choice—not ours.
They would be insulted by my putting it this way, but they can stop calling Daddy a fool and turning their back on him, or they can thank him, come up out of the basement and begin to cut the grass and take the trash out and tell the neighbor that he better stay off their property or Dad’s going to come and get him. My thoughts are that the EU’s humility is lacking-to-nonexistent, particularly toward America, and that is non-sustainable when the nation that is disdained is Daddy/hegemonic.
Anyone inclined to think that PresTrump is a selfish and proud man disinterested in European peace should remember the negotiation he did to get a security interest in Ukraine through precious metals contracts and his desire for Greenland.
One other thought occurs to me. People persistently underestimate that this USPres is best at the art of the deal, so go along with him and see how it turns out. We elected a dealmaking reformer, not a brash Manhattan empty suit. Comparing him to any other USPresin my lifetime (other than, maybe Reagan) is like comparing Margaret Thatcher to PresvonderLeyen.
Thanks for this, Pastor Tim. I too am concerned about long-term impacts to our relationships with Western Europe. But President Trump has been beating the drum about Euro countries freeloading on the US defense umbrella for 10 years. Putin has been at war in their back yard for three years now. Spending more than 2% of GDP on defense is a treaty obligation that many Euro countries are in violation of, which tells me everything I need to know about how serious they are about this whole thing.
So to stick with your parenting analogy, what to do when words fail?
Uh. Errr. Ummmm…
I think we can abandon our leadership in the world, and it seems to me that is what you would expect a malakoi nation with a North Korean birthrate and unfunded entitlements to do.
Though no Democrat wants to admit it, the commitment to abandon leadership and choose decline is bipartisan. PresTrump is continuing Obama and Biden policies under new names. It isn’t what Reagan would have wanted, but it’s very different now than in the Reagan era.
Seems to me are in a new Cold War. It can’t be stopped. Only question is how the free world responds.
Cryptic comment, but the above is just wrong. Were he continuing their policy, they wouldn’t be squealing so loudly. Love,
I think President Obama/Biden want to keep the GAE going strong, they are just incapable of it. President Trump, on the other hand, recognizes the limits of American strength in the 21st century and wants to focus it on the near abroad: Mexico, Canada, Greenland and Panama.
The two visions are very different. This is why no one in the Biden Administration said a word about peace in the Ukraine.
GAE? Global American Empire? Clever. A new acronym for me.
The common belief between the Obama, Biden and Trump administrations is that the projection of American power in the world is bad and does no positive good. The reasoning to get to the conclusion is different. The conclusion is the same.
That’s why, when Putin invaded Ukraine the first time, Pres Obama did basically nothing. Prior to that, he made a big effort to pursue good relations with Russia, when evidence suggested it was not a good idea. Same as the Trump administration is doing now. Same as Jimmy Carter did in a prior era. Sticking our neck out to be friendly with an untrustworthy adversary, giving out lots of carrots but no sticks. Inviting the bad guy to push his luck and see what he can get away with.
The entire Democratic party, in high hypocrisy, has been accusing Trump of being a secret Russian agent for 8 years, while Trump pursues an Obama-like policy.
Pres Trump seems to think the postwar order America built isn’t worth keeping, but being a regional hegemon is a better trade. Russia can have their sphere and we will have ours. He’s in for some rude awakenings, because Russia and China have larger ambitions, if they can get at them.
But we’ve been here before. Sometimes experience is the best teacher.
The very same.
I think this isn’t quite right. The Obama/Biden admin likes the gayness but doesn’t like the power. The Trump admin likes the power but doesn’t like the gayness (quite as much, at least, in quite the same way). As Pastor Tim points out, the level of the shrieking could tell you that these are not the same thing.
Well, different times are different. In Carter’s era, Russia was governed by a totalizing, globalist ideology. Now which of the adversaries does “totalizing, globalist ideology” sound like?
Russia is basically destined to be a regional hegemon. Countries that live on her doorstep should seek to have decent relations with her. The only time in the last 300 or so years that Russia has not been a global hegemon is the period from about 1990-2010 when America kicked her repeatedly while she was down. (How did a policy of pure sticks and no carrots work out, in retrospect?) These memories are quite fresh in Russia. So perhaps Russia isn’t the only untrustworthy adversary in the game.
I agree that there is some overlap between Trump’s Russia policy and Obama’s first and second term Russia policy. But there is one key difference: Strength. I think President Trump is likely correct that the Ukraine war would not have occurred on his watch. If it had, I think it’s likely that his early response would have been a lot like the Biden Admin’s: Arm the Ukrainians. The difference would have been that Trump would have done so with an eye to a negotiated settlement with as good a deal as the Ukrainians could have hoped for. Remember that there are credible reports that Russia and Ukraine were close to some sort of deal in the Spring of ‘22 that were scuttled by Boris Johnson, apparently at the behest of the Biden Admin.
This may depend on which war you’re referring to when you say “postwar.” The post-WWII order explicitly included regional hegemony—FDR and Churchill explicitly recognized a sphere of influence for the USSR in Eastern Europe. If you were Poland, that original causus belli? Sorry, not sorry.
And note the composition of the UN Security Council. It’s not just the USA.
The post-Cold War order was always bound to be unstable. We put Russia on her back foot for a couple of decades, but a continental empire like Russia was always going to regress to the mean at some point.
Imagine if the USA had lost the Cold War and the USSR had treated us like this. Maybe Mexico would have snuck into the Warsaw Pact, but we surely weren’t going to just sit there and let Canada join—or maybe a closer analogy, Texas!
Well, perhaps. Both Russia and China seem to have a lot of internal problems that would seem to me pose some limitations on their ambitions. Even the USSR was much weaker than it seemed for most of its post-WWII period.
But while the Uniparty has been fiddling in Ukraine, China has been building influence globally, including well within Monroe Doctrine places like Panama, Greenland and Canada. These seem like much more extreme threats to me personally than which Eastern European kleptocrat governs the Donbas. Squeezing on the balloon in the Donbas seems to have made it swell in other places much closer to where my children live.
Obviously enabling China’s rise over the last 30 years was an own goal from our leaders, but that can’t be undone at this point, only dealt with.
Even if this is true regarding Russia, and I’m not at all persuaded it is, early 21st century Russia is in a vastly different position to the mid 20th century USSR.
China is a whole different beast altogether (though internal economic and sociological concerns may warrant skepticism regarding its actual capacity to wage war).
But I do not understand the concern about Russia today as if it’s the same foe we fought at the height of the Cold War. The invasion of Ukraine was an absolute shambles. What on earth makes us think Russia is remotely capable of early-Reich ambitions?
Russia has been and likely always will be a bear. When the Iron Curtain fell, there was a great cartoon showing a sleeping bear waking up and getting ready to roll over. Onto a bunch of small European countries. Didn’t pan out for the first twenty years, but now…
Ridiculous, you say; they don’t have the capacity. Their invasion was a shambles and their birth rate is terrible and all the men drink vodka with life expectancy also terrible. No sane ruler of such a nation would ever pick a war with Europe.
Except for two things. First, they are the world’s second or third greatest nuclear power. Big sticks embolden bullies.
Second, they’ve been humiliated in the Ukraine, and this really is the forevermore Russian reality. Don’t ever ever forget the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). It was devastating to Russia’s image and maybe explains much more of the past century and a quarter than we give it credit for. But even before that war, Russia is a humble-proud nation, and that’s a dangerous pair.
This entire war started with NATO backing Russia into a corner with talk of encroaching on her borders. Remember that. Now we have to decide if we’re going to kill the angry cornered beast, or give it a way out that saves its dignity and our plausible deniability. Don’t back a skunk or racoon into a corner. Love,
At the start of the Ukraine conflict, one of my very conservative American friends observed, “During the Cold War, we thought that our opponent was Russian communism. With Ukraine, we now realise that the opponent was Russia itself”. I have also seen it observed that Russia’s antipathy to “the West” and “Western values” actually goes back … centuries.