Huh?...

Can't Obama find better people to advise him on the economy than Jennifer Granholm, Governor of the beloved state of Michigan? Michigan has the third highest home foreclosure rate in America, not to mention the highest unemployment rate, topping at 7.5 % Should she really be telling our President Elect how to run the economy?

It can only be guessed that Granholm is trying to sweeten any plan Obama has for bailing out GM.

Only Time Will Tell

Here are some very interesting thoughts from Helmut Thielicke on the relation between person and structure. I am ever amazed at the timelessness of much of Thielicke's writing. Right now, at this very moment, this is the very ideological and anthropologic struggle that is going on in Iraq. It is a reflection of the old proverb: "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." Only time will tell how this relation between person and structure will play out.

"Nevertheless, it is also a fact of experience that new structures can change the awareness of men and therefore men themselves. While it can be very dangerous to introduce a democratic system of government before people are ready for it, in some cases the system can itself produce the necessary maturity. Similarly social legislation can foster a respect for humanity and thus help to engender a new state of mind. It is thus correct that structures can change men and open them up to a recognition of their neighbors as fellow-men.

"All the same, one cannot infer from this that the causal relation of "first the person and then the structure" may be reversed. Instead we must ask: Who is pressing for structural change, who wants this first, perhaps by immediate revolution, and therefore who is not ready to begin by creating intellectual readiness for the new structures? Of the initiators at least we must say that they can will the new structures only because their own consciousness has reached a point where their structural postulates are possible.

"If, then, structural changes can change men, the revolutionary or reforming pioneers at least must have been changed or, in some sense, "converted" before they could work out their program of structural change. If not, the role of Karl Marx is impossible to understand.

"In the heads of the elite, then, there must have formed a conception of the relation between person and structure. In other words, they must have developed a specific understanding of man which has normative significance for this relation. This understanding will either respect man as unconditioned and see him as an end in himself or it will treat him as the mere bearer of a function and thus evaluate him pragmatically. On this alternative will depend whether man is made for the sabbath (i.e., institutions) or the sabbath for man (Mark 2:27)."

-Helmut Thielicke, The Hidden Question of God, trans. Geoffry Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1977), 83.

The Age-Old Myth of Change

I thought these words from Helmut Thielicke express well many of the things many are being fascinated with lately. It is really one of the more human tendencies to dream of change. These words could probibly be read a thousand years from now and mean exactly what they did in the mid twentieth century.

"Utopians have a mobilizing power because they measure the present by the standard of imagined perfection and they condemn it in the name of this standard. They thus give rise to criticism and protest. They do this even when as goals they have no sharp contours but are simply the object of obscure pressure with no clear end in view. Even in this case they trigger the idea of a dialectic of the negative which will later of itself lead from protest to more clear-cut goals.

"Those who see the future in this utopian way, and who are thus critical of the present, can easily play an avant-garde role and downplay all others as reactionaries. Even if they are negative and destructive, few connect this with carping spirit. The shapers of public opinion seem to think that they must be highly visionary and open to the future if they can leave the present and judge it at such a distance. If this were really so, they would be proved right by the future when it comes and they would thus achieve lasting stability. But this is not so. Nothing is more transitory than their programs. Some day a historian ought to write a history of avant-gardists and their criticisms, but I fear that he would need a slow-motion camera to do so. For the fads rise so quickly and then disappear again that the normal organs of sense, even those of a historian, cannot register them. And how comical the idols of the past are when we look back on them."

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-Helmut Thielicke, The Hidden Question of God, trans. Geoffry Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1977), 76.

Can You Say: "Total Depravity"?

It's hardly believable that anyone could support such atrocious acts. The (not only, of course) sad thing is that I don't even question Obama's belief that he is doing the right thing by supporting something this evil. It is perfect proof of the sinfulness and falleness of man; that a smart, well educated, well meaning man can with reason and moral conviction support something so evil shows our complete enslavement to the devil, and our need of the Lord's redemption.

ερχου κυριε ιησου - Come Lord Jesus!