Echoes in Eternity

Kevin DeYoung has written the ultimate review of Rob Bell's new book. Case closed.

At the very heart of this controversy, and one of the reasons the blogosphere exploded over this book, is that we really do have two different Gods. The stakes are that high. If Bell is right, then historic orthodoxy is toxic and terrible. But if the traditional view of heaven and hell are right, Bell is blaspheming. I do not use the word lightly, just like Bell probably chose “toxic” quite deliberately. Both sides cannot be right. As much as some voices in evangelicalism will suggest that we should all get along and learn from each other and listen for the Spirit speaking in our midst, the fact is we have two irreconcilable views of God.

Here we go, a review of Rob Bell's book by the chief Christian book reviewer of our day, Tim Challies.

Bell begins the book with surprising forthrightness: Jesus’ story has been hijacked by a number of different stories that Jesus has no interest in telling. “The plot has been lost, and it’s time to reclaim it.” (Preface, vi)

A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better…. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear. (ibid)

You may want to read that again.

It really says that. And it really means what you think it means. Though it takes time for that to become clear.
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A God who would allow people to go to hell is not a great God, according to Bell, and the traditional belief that He would is “devastating … psychologically crushing … terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable” (pp. 136-7).

God is at best sort of great, a little great—great for saving some, but evil for allowing others to perish. Dangerous words, those. It is a fearful thing to ascribe evil to God.

So what of the gospel? Where is the gospel and what is the gospel? Ultimately, what Bell offers in this book is a gospel with no purpose. In his understanding of the Bible, people are essentially good, although we certainly do sin, and are completely free to choose or not choose to love God on our own terms. Even then he seems to believe that most people, given enough time and opportunity, will turn to God.
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Christians do not need more confusion. They need clarity. They need teachers who are willing to deal honestly with what the Bible says, no matter how hard that truth is. And let’s be honest—many truths are very, very hard to swallow.

Love does win, but not the kind of love that Bell talks about in this book. The love he describes is one that is founded solely on the idea that the primary object of God’s love is man; indeed, the whole story, he writes, can be summed up in these words: “For God so loved the world.” But this doesn’t hold a candle to altogether amazing love of God as actually shown in the Bible. The God who “shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8), who acts on our behalf not so much because His love for us is great, but because He is great (Isaiah 48:9, Ezekiel 20:9,14,22,44, 36:22; John 17:1-5).

That’s the kind of love that wins. That’s the kind of love that motivates us to love our neighbors enough to compel them to flee from the wrath to come. And our love for people means nothing if we do not first and foremost love God enough to be honest about Him.

Unfortunately, this is not unexpected. But it is still heart-breaking... not so much because of Rob Bell's soul (which is important) but because of the millions of souls he is leading astray to a very real Hell. May his words perish and wither so they may yet live.

Just when I thought I'd heard all of the most amazing stories of valor and survival from World War II, I stumble across one that blows them all away. A couple months ago, the book Unbroken was published, and it immediately jumped to the top of the New York Times' Best Sellers list, and even though it was only available the final six weeks of 2010, it was the 14th most-purchased book on Amazon for the ENTIRE year. Written by Laura Hillenbrand (the same author who brought the world the life story of Seabiscuit), Unbroken tells the unbelievable-yet-true story of Louie Zamperini, one-time Olympic star who found himself the summer of 1943 fighting for survival in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Though just over 400 pages long, the book flits the reader along at such an engaging pace that I read it all in just a few sittings. Not only is Zamperini's entire tale amazing, the spiritual redemption he finds offers a rare secular look into the freedom and forgiveness that can be found in Christ. I can't recommend this book strongly enough. Get it, read it, tell your friends about it. Then watch while its cinematic rendering takes theaters by storm in a few years.

How much do I care for these ants? I think I care. I'll stop to watch their wars. I'll buy my children documentaries - insect tributes. I won't crush them when I can help it.

But, if given the chance, would I be willing to become one of them? Would I be willing for them to drag me to the place of execution, taunt me, mock me, ridicule the gift I offered, a gift entirely beyond their comprehension? Would I be willing for the earwig, executed beside me, to add his insults to those of the ants? Would I be willing to die?

Hell no. Never. I have more self-regard than God does. I have less love for the characters beneath me. - N.D. Wilson in Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl

I just finished this book and it is amazing! Not many books are so engaging and so illuminating. Pick it up today if you get a chance! Or... win it.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy is when men are afraid of the light. - Plato

As a father who loves to read to my five-year-old daughter and can't wait to do so with my nearly two-year-old son (once he figures out the whole sitting-still-for-more-than-6.8-seconds thing), one obvious question that I need to answer on occasion (both for myself and for curious friends) is "what type of literature can they handle?" And I not just referring to literary vocabulary. Clearly, one can't read Crime and Punishment to a three-year-old because the words alone would lose him like Hansel and Gretel in the forest. But what about the content of that same Dostoevsky book? Even if a child can understand the words, are the "thematic elements" (as the movie rating industry might call them) too "adult" for him? I know plenty of parents who would answer with a resounding "yes."

But is the answer that clear-cut? Recently, I've been reading to my daughter the first in the 100 Cupboards trilogy by N.D. Wilson (Pastor Doug Wilson's son). We're not far enough into it yet to get an idea of where exactly the story is going to take us (my guess is some Narnia-like land), but I am willing to bet that, like the books of Aslan, this trilogy will have some dark moments in it. Isn't it interesting that the classic "children's" literature is ripe with dark plot lines (Dickens, anyone?), while much of today's kid lit is bereft of anything remotely bordering on truly sinister or foreboding?

For my part, I can't wait to read The Lord of the Rings to my kids and, when the time comes, watch the Peter Jackson film versions of the Tolkien trilogy with them (movies are a slightly different animal, as they can overwhelm a child's imaginative capacities). Kids need to know that the world is dark at an early age rather than pretend everything is just Santa Clauses and Popsicles til junior high. N.D. Wilson expands on this point here, saying that the difference between children's and adult literature should be that the truth is just deeper, that adult lit just adds "more dragonflies."

Sure, there are many authors out there who see a children’s book as an opportunity to wise some kids up to the heady ways of the adult world (issues, after all, are important, and future important people should grapple with them at a young age). These adult types want kids to face the Truth, and the Truth is hard. The world is hard and not necessarily interesting... Kid, you’ve seen the world now; I’ve shown it to you in this fine piece of award-winning fiction. Now you know that insurance companies are out to get you, and your sick grandmother and only you can save the wetlands. Or not. Have fun in high school.

On the other hand, the bestseller lists are crowded with kids’ books featuring dragons and vampires and dwarves and many, many comic variations on Tolkien’s creatures and characters. (To say nothing of all the happy, happy endings.) And if you push against this type of fiction for children, you’ll get some very grandmotherly defenses.

A few examples from my own pushings:

It’s important to preserve this time of innocence.

We need to water young imaginations.

What’s wrong with dreaming?

Some kids need to escape (especially when they’re getting beat up at school).

(And variations . . .)

I agree with all of this, but there’s an undercurrent to it that I dislike. The assumption is that kids don’t need/can’t handle the truth. They need some time to be happy before they discover how much the world sucks and/or how boring it really is. Lie to the kids now, and they will look back on it fondly later. (Santa anyone?)

I don’t want to lie to kids. Ever. I don’t want to lull them to sleep before the real world wakes them up with a head slap and a wet-willy in the ear sometime during adolescence. I like the hard-nosed commitment to Truth and The Real that I see in some of my issues-driven colleagues. And I like the joy and the happiness and the thrill that is woven into the work of many others.

The two belong together.

I write kids’ books because I can tell the Truth, and the Truth is that The Real is throbbingly fantastic... I want them to get a world vision that can grow and mature and age with them until, like all exoskeletons, it must be cast aside—not as false, but as a shallow introduction to things even deeper and stranger and more wonderful (and involving more dragonflies).

It is because I try to write this way that I use so much darkness. Evil is more than a prop. True sacrifice is not a sleight of hand. Laughter in the face of adversity is the first step to profound joy in triumph.
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C.S. Lewis wrote truth for the young, and he wrote truth for the old. The weave is finer in That Hideous Strength than in Narnia, but the truth and the ingredients are the same in both. That apple pie hasn’t lost its savor, and it continues to feed me even when I’m not reading, when I’m walking beneath a row of maples or climbing a hill or slaving on a project . . . when I’m writing.

The Bible routinely is the victim of people deciding to "kidify" it. Rather than tell the whole story of David and Bathsheba (leaving aside details they wouldn't understand), many children's Bible storybooks settle for "David was bad, God was mad" or don't tell the story at all rather than spend the time explaining why a just God would kill a child because of the sin of his father. Avoid those messy stories, and you may get a son or daughter who grows to find Brian McLaren quite appealing. Avoid the Truth of life, and your child will get one big "wet-willy" sooner than later. Be willing to tackle the dragon of life straight on and slay it with honesty rather than escapism.

Read hard children's books to your kids, and read them to yourself as well. As C.S. Lewis once said,

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty... The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.

From Money, Greed, and God:

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The Zero-Sum Game Myth is believing that trade requires a winner and a loser.
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Everything I Needed to Know About the Market I Learned in Kindergarten

It was sixth grade. We played the "trading game"... The teacher passed out little gifts to all of the students... [she] probably picked them all up in the dollar aisle at the local Kmart.

After giving every kid one gift, our teacher split the class into five groups of five students each. She then asked us to write down, on a scale of one to ten, how much we liked our gift. That was it. We didn't talk to anyone else. We just decided how much we liked our toy. Our teacher then compiled all the scores and added up the total.

Then she said we could trade with the other kids in our group. No one had to trade... Of course, a few students kept or got stuck with their original gift, but many ended up with a toy they liked more. Again, we graded our toys and the teacher added up the scores. The total score went up.

Then she told us that we could trade with everyone in the room. Now we all had twenty-four possible trading partners rather than just four...

After everyone had a chance to trade, we again graded our toys and added up the scores. The total number had gone way up. Almost everyone ended up with a toy he liked more than the one he started with. No one had a score that had gone down. The only kids whose scores didn't go up were the ones who happened to get gifts they really liked at the beginning...

I didn't get the point of the game until I played it again twenty-five years later. As it happens, the game teaches some of the most important lessons of economics.

Lesson One: Trading freely can add value even though the traded items remains physically unchanged.
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Lesson Two: Normally when trading freely, the more trading partners there are, the better.
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Lesson Three: A free exchange is a win-win game.
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Think about it. The trading partners wouildn't trade if each did not perceive himself as better off as a result. [This is what John Stossel calls the "double thank you."]
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Lesson Four: The game is win-win because of the rules set beforehand.

The players aren't allowed to coerce or steal from each other. A free market is not a free-for-all in which everybody can do what they want... Ideally, the players would be virtuous enough to play by the rules. But in the trading game, as in real life, you can't count on the virtue of others... So you need an outside enforcer. In the game... the teacher played this role. In real life, it includes parents, teachers, churches... and the government.

Lesson Five: Scarcity is almost always real.
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The peaceable kingdom of God with limitless plenty isn't one of the options. The basic options are a win-lose society based on the laws of the jungle, a lose-lose society of coercive socialism..., or a market where win-wins are possible...

Lesson Six: Opportunity costs.
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[N]o one gets to have more than one toy. In the real world, if I only have ten grand, I can't buy both a ten-thousand-dollar Chevy Impala and a ten-thousand-dollar first-issue Tales from the Crypt comic book... Trading can make me better off than I was before, but it can't give me everything.

Lesson Seven: Economic value is in the eye of the beholder.

I have to say, we need more of those teachers today as mentioned above. She was brilliant. Unfortunately, you're probably more likely to find a teacher who derides capitalism than actually understands it.

From Money, Greed, and God:

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The Piety Myth is focusing on our good intentions rather than on the unintended consequences of our actions.
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"Piety," said the Christian philosopher Etienne Gilson, "is no substitute for technique." What he meant is that having the right intentions, being oriented in the right way, doesn't take the place of doing things right. A pilot's caring deeply for his passengers and wanting to land a plane safely are no substitute for his learn how to actually land planes safely. Jesus suggest the same thing. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." Don't forget the third item: love the Lord with all your mind. And don't misunderstand heart. Your heart isn't just your feelings. In the Bible, heart refers to the seat of your will and your emotions. I hope you already have a heart for the poor. Lots of Christians do. But do you have a mind for the poor? Unfortunately, that's in rather short supply.

God knows your heart. Spiritually you're better off a little mixed up about economics than indifferent to human suffering. Economically, though, only what you do is important, whatever your reason. Buying a bunch of bananas at Costco will have the same economic effect no matter why you buy them.
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In fact, it's morally self-indulgent to feel good about our motives when it comes to actions that affect the world... when it's time to roll up our sleeves and actually try to help someone, fixating on our motives can become a stumbling block. It can distract us from discovering the right action at the right time.
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Henry Hazlitt, an economic journalist, thought this was so important that he defined economics in terms of consequences. "The art of economics," he said, "consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."

This is one of those principles that are easy to get and even easier to forget. Unfortunately, Christians have supported all sorts of policies that were well motivated but that made matters worse, not better. Let's look at a few popular policies that are long on compassion but short on prudence.

A "Living Wage"
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Fair Trade
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Foreign Aid
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Government-Run Welfare

(p. 35-49)

The Piety Myth concept is so important in all areas of life, not just economics. While liberals tend to be the worst violators of the idea that as long as you do something, it doesn't matter what you do, everyone (especially Christians) should remember to guard against it daily. Spend your time, money, and effort on useful things. Be discerning!

From Money, Greed, and God:

The Nirvana Myth is not simply the belief that good will triumph in the end or the belief that the kingdom of God is already present in history. It's the delusion that we can build utopia if we try hard enough, and that every real society is intolerably wicked because it doesn't measure up to utopia.

We learned in the twentieth century that acting on this myth can be disastrous. Never has there been a greater gap between ideals and outcomes than in communism. In fact, so many people would not have been led astray if communism had advertised baser goals. No, communist brutalities needed the cover of some grand moral vision. Communism appealed to, even if it inverted, man's moral impulse. This is the worst outcome of the Nirvana Myth.

But the myth can have subtle effects even if we reject utopian schemes. To avoid its dangers, we have to resist the temptation to compare our live options with an ideal that we can never realize... It doesn't do anyone any good to tear down a society that is "unjust" compared with the kingdom of God if that society is more just than any of the ones that will replace it.

Compared with Nirvana, no real society looks good. Compared with utopia, Stalinist Russia and America at its best will both get bad reviews. The differences between them may seem trivial compared to utopia. That's one of the grave dangers of utopian thinking: it blinds us to the important differences among the various ways of ordering society... The free exchange of wages for work in the market place starts to look like slavery. Tough competition for market share between companies is confused with theft and survival of the fittest. Banking is confused with usury and exploitation. This shouldn't surprise us. Of course a modern capitalist society like the United States looks terrible compared with the kingdom of God. But that's bad moral reasoning. The question isn't whether capitalism measures up to the kingdom of God. The question is whether there's a better alternative in this life. (p. 31-32)

My church is currently reading as a congregation (at least, 600 books were sold this past Sunday to them) Mark Driscoll's recent book, Death by Love. While I have only read a couple chapters thus far, I would strongly recommend it to every Christian who would like to better understand, in clear and accessible terms, how the Cross is meant to transform every area of our lives and annihilate our enslavement to sin.

The eyes of someone you kill are immortal, if they face you at the fatal instant. They have a terrible black color. They shake you more than the streams of blood and the death rattles, even in a great turmoil of dying. The eyes of the killed, for the killer, are his calamity if he looks into them. They are the blame of the person he kills. - Pancrace Hakizamungili

The above words of a Hutu murderer from Rwanda come from the book I just finished last weekend, Jean Hatzfeld's Machete Season: The Killers of Rwanda Speak. It is an amazing book, consisting primarily of in-person interviews (conducted by Hatzfeld) of a group of Hutu men in prison for their crimes during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. During the hundred early summer days that the genocide raged, over half a million Tutsis were slaughtered, mostly with the use of machetes and knives.

In Machete Season (the follow-up book to Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak), Hatzfeld has divided the interviews into different chapter subjects. For example, the quote that begins this post comes from the chapter entitled "The First Time," which is comprised by the killers' recollections of their first murder. Another chapter is "And God in All This?", which contains the killers' response to the question of rationalizing religion (Rwanda, colonized by the French, is primarily a Roman Catholic country, so many of the killers attended mass with their victims) and genocide.

Though not particularly gruesome or bloody in its details, the book does not hide any of the awfulness of the genocide and is not a read for the weak of heart. Neighbor cut neighbor, best friend stabbed best friend, doctor murdered patient, child killed child. What struck me most was the ability of these people to mercilessly butcher former friends, soccer teammates, and choir members with rarely a sign of compunction, and what little regret there was mostly became evident only AFTER the killers were brought to justice.

Another thing that stands out are the motives for the killing. While there were plenty of socio-political "reasons" for genocide in the political and intellectual arena (Hatzfeld makes mention of how the Hutu intelligentsia spurred on the idea of genocide for years prior to 1994, drawing striking parallels with 1930's Germany), the typical poor Hutu farmer who did most of the killing cared little for those motives. Instead, what drove them to wipe out the Tutsis was primarily a sense of entitlement, a deep-rooted spirit of envy, and an attitude of covetousness entrenched in the population. Hutus are mostly crop farmers, while Tutsis are known for their ability to raise cattle. Hutus don't know how to raise cattle, and the Tutsi herds would sometimes trample their crops. Furthermore, even though Tutsis are mostly indistinguishable from their Hutu neighbors in physical appearance, they were generally thought of as the taller, more handsome ethnic group. From what I understand, Tutsis were, at least in the eyes of Hutus, a more prosperous people, so they were quite envious of the Tutsi wealth. So when the killing started, each morning almost every Hutu man would go out into the forests and marshes to hunt and kill Tutsis while their wives and children would loot the abandoned Tutsi homes. When the men came home in the evening, they would all eat freshly slaughtered beef for supper. They all became extravagantly rich and stopped tending to their crops during the hundred days of killing.

The killing was not only left to the men. Women joined in at times, and even children were shown how to kill Tutsis. While some of the wives were disgusted by what was going on, they were by no means a more merciful group. As one killer's wife astutely put it, "there were also men who proved more charitable toward the Tutsis than their wives, even with their machetes in hand. A person's wickendness depends on the heart, not the sex."

There was significant pressure to kill, but usually not via deadly threats. If a Hutu didn't want to get his hands "dirty," he could pay a fine every day so that he didn't have to go out into the marshes. And if he couldn't pay the fine, he probably could hang back from the front lines of genocide and conceal his disinterest and moral qualms. While some Hutus were killed for showing mercy to Tutsis, generally the worst punishment a Hutu could expect for not partaking in the killing was a smaller share of the loot, a stiff fine, and the daily scorn of his Hutu neighbors. However, the interviewed killers said there were very few who attempted to keep their hands (and consciences) clean.

Eventually the reader asks if there were ANY Hutus who stood up for truth and right. Hatzfeld tells us that there were a few, but only a few. "In Search of the Just" is his chapter on just that: the handful of Hutus who stood up against the genocidal evil. Most of them were killed, which leads the reader to believe that it was truly a kill or be killed situation. That is only partially true, and ignores the role of the years building up to that point. Hutus everywhere freely joked on the radio, in pubs, at school, etc. about how they would someday kill all the cockroaches. The time to snuff out that genocidal hatred was NOT in the spring of 1994, but before that whenever an ethnic joke or a Tutsi slur reared its ugly head. The Rwandan genocide gives credence to the belief that ideas do indeed have consequences and words mean something.

Lastly, as a Christian, I was struck by something wholly unintended by the author: God's divine forbearance. It amazes me how God can be so patient with humanity, and I am left in further awe of His ABOUNDING forbearance, mercy, and righteousness.

"What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory..."

Romans 9:22-23

I recently read Theodore Dalrymple's latest book, In Praise of Prejudice, and found it to be as enjoyable and stimulating as his other books (he is, in my humble opinion, the best writer I've ever read). It is a short book (129 pages), with chapters as short as a couple of pages. But it is full of insight rarely found in today's authors. I'm not sure that I could do it justice in a review of my own, so I have decided to let Nathanael Blake's review suffice.

In Praise of Prejudice, the latest volume from the superb essayist Theodore Dalrymple, is a delightful addition to his oeuvre. It's a quick read that makes an essential point in Dalrymple's inimitable prose: prejudice is necessary for humans.

This is hardly a popular position. As the author notes, "I very much doubt whether anyone, at least in polite company, would admit to a prejudice about anything." He then sardonically draws out the implications: To judge by self-report, we have never lived in such unprejudiced times, with so many people in complete control of their own opinions, which are, as a result, wholly sane, rational, and benevolent. Nobody judges anything, any person or any question, except by the light of the evidence and his own reason."

As we all know, this description is hardly accurate. People continue, as they have always done, to think and act on habit, desire, authority and other unexamined grounds. People are simply incapable of functioning in a fully rational manner, and given the finite nature of human knowledge and reason, most of what is "known" is, and always will be, accepted on authority for most people.

Why then is there such a hue and cry against prejudice itself, then? Why not simply declare that the old prejudices against, say, giving birth out of wedlock were bad, but that the new prejudice against smoking is good? The answer, Dalrymple believes, is found in the uses skepticism is put to today. It isn't used to strip away until we finally locate a firm first principle (a la Descartes). Rather, it is "to cast doubt on everything, and thereby increase the scope of personal license, by destroying in advance any philosophical basis for the limitation of our own appetites." People are not skeptics about electrical theory, or the arrangement of the solar system, but "a ferocious and insatiable spirit of inquiry overtakes them, however, the moment they perceive that their interests are at stake--their interests here being their freedom, of license, to act upon their whims."

The breakdown of old prejudices may ease the social pressures to conform to standards of behavior, but the consequences are grim. The small graces of life fall by the wayside, as say, commuters are no longer willing to give up seats to the elderly and pregnant women. Worse, entire lives are plunged into vicious circumstances; the rate of illegitimacy among Britain’s underclass is similar to that of America’s inner-city black population, with similar results.
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Furthermore, the elimination of social prejudices necessarily leads to a more authoritarian state, as people refuse to recognize any authority between themselves and the law. The restraint that people formerly exercised because they had internalized the standards of community, family, church, and the like, must now be externally applied by government force.

Visiting my fiancé at her law school, I noticed an empty Miller Lite can sitting in the snow outside a nearby apartment. Considering it, I knew that I wouldn’t leave it around, not because of anti-littering laws, or reasoning about the economic or ecological impact of leaving empty beer cans about, but because I was raised to consider such tasteless, crude, and something that is just not done. And, if nothing else, if I were to leave the remnants of a celebratory drinking spree lying about, I’d be sure to want it to be something classier than Miller Lite. It’s pure prejudice, but it keeps me from throwing my trash about.

In this excellent book, Dalrymple demonstrates how such prejudices are essential to civilized life.

I just finished D.A. Carson's book, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church. It is a deep read, as Carson is first and foremost a theologian, but it is also a very thought-provoking and worthwhile read. I plan on writing some sort of review of the book in the upcoming days/weeks and posting it on here. The book appears to be a good critique of both the strong and weak points of the Emerging Church (EC). Carson's biggest weakness is probably that some of his criticism and compliments do not apply to all ECs, but more to the leading thinkers of the movement, such as Brian McLaren and Spencer Burke. However, Carson acknowledges this weakness throughout the book, but also makes the point that if the weaknesses he sees in McLaren aren't inherent in all ECs, then their leaders should speak up about where they differ from McLaren, rather than staying largely silent.

For a short overview of what the Emerging Movement is within the Western evangelical community, you can go to Wikipedia's description here. To sum it up here, the Emerging Church is a movement aimed at engaging the postmodern culture in which we (in the Western world) live. At best, it serves as a wonderful way of getting young people into the church who are sick of dogmatic beliefs and hypocrisy and are searching for authentic relationships that speak to them personally. At worst, it serves as a breeding ground for morally-relative, theologically-shallow Christians who are unable to speak Truth to a dying world.

I just borrowed John MacArthur's book, The Truth War, from a friend and am intending on reading it soon. It also serves as a critique of the EC. I also hope to soon get a book on the EC from the perspective of Emerging thinkers, such as this one.

I have just finished reading Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple. First, a bit about Dr. Dalrymple (or Anthony Daniels if you prefer his real name). He is an English writer and retired medical doctor and psychiatrist who spent his entire career working in slums all over the world, eventually ending up at a hospital and prison in England. He has seen the degradation of humanity as few have. He writes in Life at the Bottom of his recent experiences in England.

While I am not very good at book reviews, I will at least attempt at one with this book, as it is probably one of the most important books that have been written in the last 20 years. Or as Thomas Sowell said: "A classic for our times. It is as fundamental for understanding the world we live in as the three R's." Besides using wonderful prose and language that can't be found in any Tom Clancy novel, Dalrymple's topic is one of earnest importance. His premise: the impoverished in the developed Western world (Europe, America, etc.) are not thus because of economics but due completely to a worldview and value system created by the liberal intelligentsia (i.e. the intellectual elite). While liberal elite may have invented these ideas, it was left to the poor and underclass to live them out. And the whirlwind has been reaped. Life at the Bottom is a collection of Dr. Dalrymple's accounts of his experiences from the mid-90's to 2001. They are broken down into two sections; "Grim Reality," in which he describes in vivid and eye-opening detail what he has seen in the slums of England, and "Grimmer Theory," in which he discusses the ideas and worldviews (or Weltanschauung, as he calls it) that have helped to foster that "reality." One note: Dalrymple's stories and accounts are likely to seem a little unbelievable, but this is due to the likelihood that Britain is just 20 years ahead of America with the modern liberalism experiment.

Primarily, Dalrymple focuses on the complete lack of willingness within the underclass (or culture at large, for that matter) to take responsibility for one's own actions. Everyone seems to be suffering from an addiction or syndrome or mental disorder these days which, to some extent or another, negates their responsibility for their deeds. However, as the doctor repeatedly shows, most of these "addictions" are nothing more than the underclass adopting the terminology it has heard from the intellectual community and acting accordingly. So, to combat that, he calls for a level of "tough love" that few have the courage to mete out. For example, he constantly had domestically-abused women as patients who were blind to their own role in getting abused. They knew the men that were abusing them were violent and yet, the women would not press charges and usually went right back into the abusive relationship as soon as the broken bones had healed. So the doctor called them on it. Rather than allow them to wallow in their victimhood, he asked them simple questions which would, if they were ready to do so, make them admit their culpability in the abusive situation. Thus freed of their "victim" mentality, they could then take responsibility for their lives and leave the abusers.

The doctor also discusses the decline of esteem for manners and education and its role in making the underclass what it is today. The cause: moral relativism. Nothing is better or worse, just different. For example, Dalrymple writes that

Our educational practices are now so bizarre that they would defy the pen of a Jonathan Swift to satirize them. In the very large metropolitan area in which I work, for example, the teachers have received instructions that they are not to impart the traditional disciplines of spelling and grammar... to assert that there is a correct way of speaking or writing is to indulge in a kind of bourgeois [upper-class] cultural imperialism; and to tell children that they have got something wrong is necessarily to saddle them with a debilitating sense of inferiority from which they will never recover... I was told of one school where the teachers were allowed... to make corrections, but only five per piece of work, irrespective of the number actually present. This, of course, was to preserve the amour propre [self esteem] of the children, but it seemed not to have occurred that... [the] five-correction rule was likely to have unfortunate consequences. The teacher might choose to correct an error in the spelling of a word, for example, and overlook precisely the same error in the next piece of work. How is a child to interpret correction based on this principle?

After a few more accounts of this "grim reality," the doctor dives into the worldview (and its features) from which this cultural perversion was born. The first aspect he dissects: society's extremely damaging "rush from judgment."

Experience has taught me that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgment, that nonjudgmentalism is at best indifference to the suffering of others, at worst a disguised form of sadism. How can one respect people as members of the human race unless one holds them to a standard of conduct and truthfulness? How can people learn from experience unless they are told that they can and should change? One doesn't demand of laboratory mice that they do better: but man is not a mouse, and I can think of no more contemptuous way of treating people than to ascribe to them no more responsibility than such mice.

In any case, nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that... everything is the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged from the fertile mind of man.

In the last few "chapters," the doctor discusses the causes of crime as they pertain to worldview and ideas. One aspect of this is the utter lack of appropriate (or any, for that matter) punishment for criminals in England, and the personal examples Dalrymple gives will make you seethe at the injustices mentioned. Lastly, he closes with a few words regarding the liberal intelligentsia's complete disregard of the evidence proving their societal theories and worldviews to be rubbish.

The answer is to be sought in the causative relationship between the ideas that liberal intellectuals advocated and put into practice and every disastrous social development of the last four decades. They saw their society as being so unjust that nothing in it was worth preserving; and they thought that all human unhappiness arose from the arbitrary and artificial fetters that their society placed on the satisfaction of appetite. So dazzled were they by their vision of perfection that they could not see the possibility of deterioration.

And so if family life was less than blissful, with all its inevitable little prohibitions, frustrations, and hypocrisies, they called for the destruction of the family as an institution... It resulted instead in widespread violence consequent upon sexual insecurity and in the mass neglect of children, as people became ever more egotistical in their search for momentary pleasure.

If liberal intellectuals recalled their childhood experiences of education as less than an unalloyed joy, education had to become a form of childish entertainment
...
And if crime was a problem, it was only because an unjust society forced people into criminal activity, and therefore punishment constituted a double injustice, victimizing the real victim.
...
Every liberal prescription worsened the problem that it was ostensibly designed to solve. But every liberal intellectual had to deny that obvious consequence or lose his Weltanschauung [worldview]: for what shall it profit an intellectual if he acknowledges a simple truth and lose his Weltanschauung? Let millions suffer so long as he can retain his sense of his own righteousness and moral superiority. Indeed, if millions suffer they are additional compassion fodder for him, and the more of their pain will he so generously feel.

And so the prescription is: more of the same. The Liberal Democrat Party, Britain's third party, which is dominated by the middle-class liberal intelligentsia and is gaining an unthinking popularity born of disillusionment with the government and of the patent incompetence of the official opposition, recently held its annual conference. And what were the most important proposals put forward there? The legal recognition of homosexual marriage and shorter prison sentences for criminals.

Nero was a committed firefighter by comparison.

What an amazingly powerful book! Read it. I am now on to reading his more recent book: Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.