Whimpering Commands We Must Follow

by F.X. Turk

In my family, we own two dogs.

This is Annie.  She is completely and utterly in charge of the house, trumping even my wife, and the reason is obvious.  That much cute in one body is actually immoral and a tool of the devil.  It up-ends the economy of our home so significantly that I really just don't want to talk about it.  We spend more money on her grooming than on mine in any given quarter, and often she has bows in her hair.

This is Tugger.  In spite of his charming exterior and athletic good looks, he is a natural-born killer.  He is the singular reason our home has never been broken into in spite of a rash of crimes in our neighborhood, and he is also responsible for the deaths of all the arrogant squirrels, chipmunks, and rabbits which have thought it was a good idea to try to steal our vegetables and strawberries (and also 2 copperhead snakes).  He is also more effective than an alarm clock to get me up to exercise every morning at 5 AM (more like 4:30 most days) as he is far more committed to running for 30 minutes than I am.  However, his efforts have helped me lose 20 lbs this past summer, and for that he is worth his weight in gold.

Having met them, let me explain one other thing about them before I get to the real reason for this blog post.  If we calculate what it costs to keep them up, and observe the amount of medical care they receive annually, and add in the dollars that my family spends to care for them when we travel and they cannot join us, I think it is entirely safe to say this: compared to most people ever, they are better fed; they have better physical health; they are more often warm when it is cold and cool when it is nekked-hot in Arkansas than most people who have shuffled off this mortal coil.  To say they are beloved members of our family is probably an overstatement, but not by much.

I break my hiatus to bring it up because something happened last week which, frankly, shouldn't surprise anyone but it did surprise me: a moral crisis was ginned up by the evangelical conscience-builders regarding the ethical treatment of animals.  I actually "got into it" with my internet foil Karen Swallow Prior, and the amount of venom I received in return (not from her, but from others who follow her on twitter) was also not surprising but still surprised me.  Maybe in spite of being 20lbs down I am out of fighting shape for the internet.  That's probably a good thing, but that's also a digression.

To further my surprise about this, something else happened in parallel a few days later. Al Mohler weighed in with this:

This statement achieves a very important balance, stating that we have a responsibility to the creatures that God made for his glory. That we have a responsibility to animals, but the first responsibility we have is to understand that human beings are not mere animals. That there is a distinction between human beings and other creatures that is not merely of degree but of kind. We come to understand that that is rooted in the fact the human beings and human beings alone are made in God’s image. But we have also come to understand that the animals are not evolutionary accidents anymore than ourselves. And we come to understand that God the creator, takes delight in these animals and that he created them for his glory and he created them for his pleasure. But he also created them for our use and they are as Scripture says, given unto us, for that use including explicitly for food. But even as we understand there is this categorical distinction between the human being and other creatures. We also understand that as we are given the responsibilities of stewardship and dominion in Scripture, we are given a responsibility to prevent cruelty to animals.

And it seems pretty hard to argue with that sort of semantic and theological fire power, yes?  What probably ought to happen at this point is that I ought to simply rethink my own biases here whenever the words "animal rights" come up because Al Mohler is Al Mohler.  Unfortunately for everyone, that is not what is happening, and here we are.

First, let me flash you back to 2009 when the Manhattan Declaration was originally proffered, and which Dr. Mohler signed.  I offered this response to the whole affair, Dan offered his 18-point assessment, and ultimately R.C. Sproul (not due to our involvement, but on the same page) had a few things to add which are probably worth your time.  At the root of it, the major failing of that document was that it made a big wind when it came to the clarity of the Gospel, and it was because it confused co-belligerence with Gospel partnership.  That's one kind of error that these sorts of declarations make, but fortunately for the "Every Living Thing" crowd they are all (at least at first glance) Evangelicals, so the words they use are probably not entirely confusing words.  They avoid the problem of confusing the Gospel by being on generally-evangelical soil for their declaration.

But as I read it, and I have my big dog at my right hand and my fluffy white dog on a throne above us all whimpering commands we must follow, I find myself facing another objection to such a thing: moral seriousness.  I honestly don't want to make too much of this, but let's for a moment shake off the disorienting exhilaration of falling down the cliff over which Western Civlization has been pushed: by a long shot, "Every Living Thing" is an incidental white paper and "animal rights" (or if we are fair, "creation mandate" maybe is how they would say it) is the least of our problems.

If we are anywhere right now in the neighborhood of that issue, it is here: we think we are completely in charge of nature and have the authority to say whatever we want about it.  That problem doesn't get us to the place where we are commonly making the lives of our pets and cattle hard: it is where we are calling what is in a human woman's womb a commodity which has a market value, and we justify the transaction as a "donation" on both sides.  We are at the place where there are a variety of ways to deny that boys will be boys and girls will be girls (it's a mixed up, jumbled up, shook up world, after all), but the only one which doesn't just indicate medical treatment but requires it is when someone says their mind is right but their body is wrong -- and we need to start cutting until we find the real body meant for that person's mind.  We are now remaking the family into something so unfathomable that it soon won't even be called a family anymore because why bother.  Not only are we content to do what seems right in our own eyes, we are in fact ready to rename everything in a grotesque burlesque of Gen 2:15-20, not because God asked us to but because we are ready to say to God, "hey: who asked you?"

In that world, signing a piece of paper that says sad puppies need love too seems a little small and short on sobriety (no matter how rhetorically and theologically gilded the language is) to be something the leaders of Christendom ought to be promoting.  Especially, I will add, when most pets in America live better than mine, and my pets live better than most human beings who ever lived.

You know what?  Nevermind.  I'm supposed to be on hiatus.  The people who don't get tired of telling you what's best next and don't go on hiatus have told you what they think is most important, and who am I to say they have lost their ever-lovin' minds if they think they can march out the weiner dogs of war against the moral zombie apocalypse we are facing today.  They must know something I don't know.

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"nekked-hot" is a term invented by by son when he was 2 or 3 after we moved to Arkansas. It is when it is so hot that he would rather be nekked than wear anything if he has to be outside. It does actually get this hot in Arkansas, but we have all grown out of succumbing to being "nekked-hot." I know you are greatly relieved.

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The Wrong Kind of Ice Cream

by The late Frank Turk

On principle, let me say this before I say the other thing, below: we're fans of Todd Friel. He's pretty much in our neighborhood, our orbit on a lot of things. When he's good, he's clever and clear and winsome.

And then there are videos like this one:



Which, let's face it ... I mean: I like Potato Soup, and I like Ice Cream, but I would be very hesitant to try Potato Soup Ice Cream because maybe not everything that is good is good when you mix it together like that.  And to be fair to Todd, my twitter feed has noted that this 2 minutes is actually out of context of a larger segment on the show, and maybe that causes it to lack nuance.

I don't have any adult children yet, so please take my advice about how to raise children theologically with a large warning label on it which says, "this man receives sinners and eats with them," yes?  But it seems to me that what happens in this video is that Todd has forgotten how a few categories overlap without the whole thing becoming the wrong kind of soup or the wrong kind of ice cream.

Imagine with me my son and I driving along someplace, and we're discussing our mutual inclination to sin.  That is: he lives with me.  He sees me every day and he knows that his Dad, while awesome, is still a sinner.  And because I live with him, I know that he is also a sinner.  He's just like his Dad after all.  So my son tells me, "Dad, I know it's a sin, but sometimes I'm just so angry I could pop, and sometimes I do.  What am I going to do?"

Now imagine that what I say to him about his anger is this:

You have to try to not be angry, but if you do get angry, you can go to the cross and seek forgiveness.  Think about this, son: of course I don’t want you to run out into the snow and get frostbite, but if you do, I want you to go ahead and dial 9-1-1 for help.  Because that’s the Gospel – angry people get forgiveness from Jesus.  Jesus makes angry people happy in God’s eyes.

That's simply not it -- that's simply not how Paul talks about the problem of sin, the solution in the Gospel, and the battle for sanctification.  Now, if I had less time this week, I would simply point you to this post from me from a while ago (2012) and be done with it.  But I want to approach this topic in the context Todd has laid out here (such as it is) as there are important differences from that previous situation which I think you personally will benefit from.

The one thing Todd gets right in this video, if there is anything, is that the Gospel is actually the solution to the problem he is pointing at.  The Gospel is actually the solution to lust and fornication.  For those who are in adultery and fornication right now, the Gospel is the solution to them because let's face it: Jesus did die for sinners.  But Jesus didn't just die for us because of the things we do: Jesus died for us because of who we really are.  Think about this: we aren't sinners because we have fornicated.  We fornicated because we have yet been sinners with no hope; we have sinned out the the overflow of our hearts. That act is simply what seems or seemed right in our own eyes in spite of God's law telling us the truth.

But those of us who have more than God's law -- that is, those of us who have the fulfillment of the Law in the Gospel, fulfilled for us because we were yet sinners -- have the means to do something other than what seems right in our own eyes.

First, we have the ability to see that Christ died to highlight the great value of the things which God has set forth as holy through the great price which Holiness demands.  This should give us a measuring stick which upsets the apple cart of what seems good in our own eyes at least long enough to reset our thinking caps.  Second, we have the ability to see that we are changed by the death of Christ from those who were no people at all to being God's holy people. born again with a new ability to want what God wants.  That's New Covenant language, I'll grant you, but what it means is that we are no longer dragged around by the cares of this world, but willing to do what God wants us to do.  It's funny that here when it matters most Todd misses this when in other places he has been so adamant that an unwillingness to do what God wants is a sign that one might actually not be saved at all.  Third, the reason handing a child a condom and saying, "well, best of luck; don't use that unless you have to," seems to look a lot like Todd's version of how to handle this is because it really is a lot the same.  That is, it is offering the wrong solution to the problem by looking only at the consequences and not at the causes.

You know: one cause of finding yourself working out the necessary consequences of unbridled lust is that you have already given away all the bridles on your lust -- for example, thinking primarily of the safety and honor of the other person; keeping a relationship under the accountability of others; staying on the right side of the right doors.  The condom is a solution to a problem which one ought not to create for one's self.  Thinking before it happens that Jesus will love you anyway is, in fact, the same thing: trying to find a solution for something you can absolutely picture yourself doing.

The right solution here (and there are more, which I suggest are best discussed between a child and a parent rather than on a blog) is not to find the way to resolve the worst possible moral failure before it happens.  It is to use the solution God gave us in order to see the problem for what it is and see his solution for what it is really doing for us in order to defeat the problem, not to merely hope that we don't have to trust Jesus to forgive us for that.

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