The Crisis of the Cross

52,000 Words

UNEDITED FIRST DRAFT

THE CRISIS OF THE CROSS

Why Operation Rescue Had To Fail (in the American Church).

"Come!" Says the abortion culture, "Be reasonable, debate us, write pamphlets, preach fine sermons, have a symbolic march or two, or even do a rescue once if you have to, but be respectable. Don't actually act as if you believe the unborn are living human beings."

Joseph L. Foreman 1033 Franklin Rd. Suite 297 Marietta, GA 30067

Copyright © 1991 by Joseph L Foreman

This book, like any good thing in the Pro-life movement after 1988, is dedicated to the person whose tireless vision and energy made it possible. Without his personal work, sacrifice, and dedication, none of us little people running around today would even begin to have voice or impact ___ and the impact of the big names would be considerably lessened. We would be like little candles going out one by one, instead of where we are today realistically planning how we can unite in a blaze which will destroy every vestige of legalized child murder. In short, this book is dedicated to Randy Terry.

THE CRISIS OF THE CROSS

Why Operation Rescue had to fail (In the American Church)

INTRODUCTION:

What is Rescue and Where is it Going?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

SECTION I: PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF THE CROSS

1. What is Rescue? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2. Theological Root of Rescue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

3. The Tactics and Goals of Rescue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

4. Rescue and the Christian Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

SECTION II: ISSUES OF THE CROSS

5: Ending Idolatry The Price of the Cross. . . . . . . . . . . . 16 6: Martyrdom: The Witness of the Cross . . . . . . . . . . . 21 7: Intolerance: The Enmity of the Cross. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

8. Prophet, King, Priest: The Way of the Cross. . . . . . . . . . . .

SECTION III: THE CROSS AND LIFE

9: The Cross and the Pro-Life Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 10: The Cross and the Politics of Rescue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 11: The Cross and the Rhetoric of Rescue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

12. The Cross and the Release to Rescue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

CONCLUSION:

The World Behind Me, the Cross Before Me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

INTRODUCTION:

WHAT IS RESCUE AND WHERE IS IT GOING?

When you see a two year old child wandering out into the middle of a busy intersection, you don't stop to ask some very important questions like, "What if I get killed trying to save him?"; "Would I be a responsible parent to my children if I get hit by a truck?"; "Wouldn't I do more good if rather than risk my life (and my family's well being) I tried to do something about the parents and children on my block who do not seem to take the dangers of the street seriously?"; and finally the real question, "Kids are always wandering out into streets all over the city why should I try and save this one?" And besides, "A lot worse can happen to a kid than getting killed by a car. And if he is killed, he will probably go to heaven." These are very reasonable considerations.

We would raise them if we had time to stop and think. But thankfully, for all the children who have been snatched out of streets, those running to their aid did so spontaneously, they did not stop to act reasonably in their own best interests. But this poses an ethical dilemma: Is it the spontaneity which makes rescuing the small child right? Had we reasonably measured the risk to the small child against the risk to our families, and social responsibilities, we may well have concluded that it was not morally right to risk it all just for one small life ___ or would we? Operation Rescue was like that.

As the Jews of Nazi Germany knocked on their neighbors' doors seeking refuge, the children being ground up in our local abortion factories were knocking louder and louder on the doors of our hearts. When Randall Terry showed us a way to respond to that knocking and literally rescue them, thousands of Christians poured out all over the country. Hundreds of children were confirmed saved directly, and thousands more indirectly. They had such high hopes. They figured a few months of this and surely this nation will wake up, repent, and child killing will be a thing of the past. . . . But, the spontaneity passed. The abortion industry was thoroughly grounded in an abortion culture.

We stepped back and began to ask some of those key questions which weigh the value of the effort of rescuing the life of a child, against our many important responsibilities, ministries, and possessions. As we did, many who led the war cries of the Church-to-the-rescue a few years earlier, concluded that the little ones were indeed worth some suffering to protect, but we had to be reasonable about the value of their lives and seek out other strategies which would "rescue" them with less risk to our way of life. These other strategies run from prayer and witnessing, to activism, to politics, to personally harassing the doctors and staff, to bombing.

Having been intimately involved in the designing, founding, launching, and flying of Operation Rescue, I am amazed at two things. First, that we succeeded at all ___ that American Christians today had what it took to even cross the street in somebody else's behalf, much less risk jail and imprisonment. The second, is how few seem to understand the heart of what we were trying to do. Whether for or against it, most people mistakenly confuse Rescue with the modern movements of social dissent and protest. There seems to be little appreciation of how Rescue is a coming into its own of a distinct Biblical methodology for dealing with entrenched social evil.

This distinctly Christian response to evil takes its cues, neither from theologies of revolution, nor from the modern movements of social dissent, but from the work and nature of Jesus Christ. The spirituality and distinctly Christian nature of Rescue runs much deeper than the fervent worship which often characterizes the rallies, Rescues, and jailings. Rescue at its heart is about issues which are of the essence of Christianity. When Rescuers waver from them, then Rescue will simple become some activist's, or politician's tool, and we will devolve into seeking a king like the other nations.

The first key issue Operation Rescue raised was that of our complicity in the carnage ___ "We permitted public child murder for sixteen years, we must repent before God and stop permitting it." This idea is not unique to Rescue. All pro-life efforts have in their view stopping what we have permitted for so long. What Operation Rescue did was make our personal responsibility and repentance a central theme. We then Rescued. We made possible a way to withdraw our permission for the child scheduled to be murdered today, and in so doing, withdrew the Church's cooperation with the abortion industry and culture.

The second issue this immediately raised was that of the cost of protecting these children: "Can we afford to stop cooperating with child killing in America?" What will be the price of such a repentance ___ such a withdrawing of permission ___ and can we bear to pay it? This is a very practical consideration: If you try and physically protect an unborn child, his killers will come after you instead. So, who can afford to try and protect the unborn? Since the idea that God has commanded us to love and protect the innocent helpless is at least as old as Jesus and Moses, what do you do when the state decrees that we may not protect them? This second issue presents us with the cost of living as if God's word really is final. Who will be our God? America?

"Law and order at any cost?" Our church buildings and houses? Our organizations? Our reputations? Our jobs? Who is the final authority in our life? You can see why such issues would create intense controversy. The first implies that we are somehow responsible for abortion. Thus the accusation that Rescuers are judgmental ___ Rescuers leave the safe neutrality of Pro-life causes. They point the finger directly at themselves and all who believe it murder. They accuse us all of granting de facto permission for each abortion performed. To those who feel judged by the first issue, the second will seem even more so.

It implies that Christians are idolaters who have sold out to materialism ___ that they prefer the things of this world to obedience to God ___ that they prefer dead babies to living babies if the price of protecting these children would cost them their jobs, homes and Church buildings. Neither message will make you a popular preacher. There is no question that such a message, preached by untried and unproven messengers ___ Operation Rescue leadership ___ would have to fail . . . but then who else in the success oriented American Church could afford to risk their ministry with such a ministry destroying message? Only Christian leaders of the highest integrity, like James Dobson, James Kennedy and a few others were willing to risk their public relations ratings.

It is also why both the critics, and many popularizes, of Rescue have tended to focus on the simpler side-track of the relative merits of bringing about change through social unrest, rather than on the truly offensive issues of Rescue ___ that obedience to God costs you everything. But it is time to tell the truth about this movement whether in the form of epitaph, or foundation for the future. To do this, we must get to the heart of what Christianity is and what Rescue is. Operation Rescue as an initial popular movement had to fail. The seed was sewn in thorny, rocky soil. But we also succeed beyond our hopes. The seed grew more than anyone imagined it would.

The soil and the Church's lack of root finally shriveled it, but in the mean time, it managed to bear a small fruit which struck terror to the heart of both the pro-abortion world, the Christian Church, and much of the established pro-life world as well, because it came the closest of any attempt yet to put the raw, unadulterated case of the children before the nation ___ not the case of the politicians, lawyers, theoreticians, philosophers, and theologians, but the case of the children who though being dead yet speak. We tried to let the children speak for themselves through our willingness to suffer to protect them. We do not need to speak in behalf of a mangled mutilated baby. He speaks very well for himself. The question is, will we answer his question?

If not Rescue, what? That question terrifies the Church and the world. All of our philosophers, theologians and lawyers work over time to tame and render it harmless. The harmless Rescuer rubs our nose in it, not by his judgmental rhetoric, but by his simple willingness to act, and his incredulity that any Christian could find such a life saving act objectionable. With the taming of Rescue as a movement, the voice of the children, crying out through the lives laid down for them, has been briefly silenced. But not all the seed fell on thorny ground. There are hundreds of thousands of Christians in whom it is beginning to grow. It will take a bit more time to see fruit, but the pressure of this holocaust will begin to build, and something will touch it off.

Next time, there will be tens of thousands in the streets. Will we remain non-violent? I believe so. If we can learn the lessons of 1988 and '89. In this book I want to share with you, not another argument for Rescue, but the heart of what the Rescue Movement is all about ___ taking up the cross of our Lord. This book could just as easily be a book about world missions, inner city ministry, Christian businessmen, or the Christian marriage and home. The material would not change significantly, because this book is about the thing which is at the heart of all of these things ___ the cross. This is a book about missions ___ God's commission. I do not want to recruit you to some organization, because God requires much more and the hour is late for our generation.

No, I want to help you transform even the way you wash dishes, whether or not you sit-in at an abortion clinic. Discover the thousands of years of Rescue history which stand behind us ___ not in a history lesson, but in the simple doctrines of orthodoxy which we pass on to our children at age three and six ___ the doctrines of creation, providence, the atonement, and incarnation: God created everything good; We are sinners; God punishes sin; Jesus loves you; Jesus is God become man, so God could punished Jesus instead of you; God through Jesus can make everything clean and new; Jesus wants you to obey Him; God will provide for you in everything; Jesus wants you to be like Him.

Kids, now that you've learned your Sunday School lesson, who wants to tell God you're sorry and from now on you want to obey and be like Jesus? Who wants Jesus in his heart? . . . Well, the more I have discovered about this Jesus, the less I like Him. I would rather be like the Positive Public Image portrayed of a successful evangelist, or missionary, or conference speaker, or Christian businessman, frankly! Jesus is dangerous. I am very uncomfortable with the Jesus who came into my heart, the Jesus who stands in righteous anger at the door of the Church ___ my church ___ knocking. He is not very nice. He insists that we either open to him, or He destroys that door, our house with it, seizes His candle stick, snuffs out our light, and goes away.

When you start taking these Sunday School doctrines seriously, you find that the core of authentic Christianity is Rescue. Not the act of sitting-in at abortion clinics, not a complex systematic theology, but the heart of utter abandonment to God on behalf of others regardless of risk and price ___ something even a small child can understand. It is this core I want you to see. Usually we only see it in moments of crisis. But it is not a spontaneous act in the face of a crisis which makes selfless action at great risk right, it is the cross itself ___ something which God thought thoroughly through from the foundation of the world and then took it up anyway. It is still right today for us to take it up whether in a moment of passion, or with cool-headed forethought.

Reading this may not get you arrested at an abortion clinic, and that is fine, if only you understand the way of the cross for what God has called you to do. You see, the problem is not that we do not want to leave everything and follow Jesus. In some sense we do want to. We sing about it. We read about it in our Bibles and missionary books. But for most of us it is an idle dream. Most of us could not lose our lives in order to find them even if we wanted to.

That is the tragedy which Operation Rescue merely uncovered in the Church by showing us how we could not even cross the street to save a baby, much less be bold in witness to our neighbors, or tithe, or deal with pornography, or keep our churches from splitting over hairs, or lower our personal life styles a notch so as to enable others to do more work in the Kingdom, or even get out of personal debt. When we learn to die to self, then we still may not sit-in at an abortion clinic, but the idea will seem quite normal ___ neither heroic, nor radical, nor wrong. The fact is, in America, we do not want to put ourselves in a position where we must die to our own agendas for victory.

Dying to self has become an internal existential experience which makes us feel at peace in our little hearts. But even this can be exciting if you listen to the right television preachers and schools of Church Growth. It was into this exciting world of Spiritual Warfare American Style, that Operation Rescue came with a beautifully tailored program: Die to yourself on the weekend and still make it to work Monday (or Tuesday) morning. We became popular because all Christians know the undeniable urgency of dying to ourselves, obeying God, and saving a baby's life. Operation Rescue showed us how we could sacrifice like a hero in a way which fits a busy schedule. It was like not having to win the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously.

You can see both why we succeeded, as well as why we had to fail sooner or later. If we are ever going to impact our world for Jesus Christ in any arena, we must go beyond activism to true Christianity: A faith that is a pearl of great price. Operation Rescue poked into our tents the camel's nose of what it means to live like a Christian in only one small part of the American culture. The rest of that camel is not encouraging to us if we consider the pattern of the cross for dealing with pornography, drugs, government schools, ever expanding government "solutions" to social problems, national and personal debt, and the government's battle to control both Church schools and Church hiring practices.

In all these arenas we have been willing to cooperate with whatever the world wants to do ___ just like abortion ___ if they would only leave us alone to raise nice Christian families in nice churches and politely object to their abominations from time to time. In Rescue is a clear pattern of the cross, one which needs to be applied in every area of Christian life. The only problem is, it runs counter to everything America teaches us about how the successful Christian life ought to be lived. The cross not only runs counter to all forms of cooperation with evil, but it runs counter to how we want to deal with evil once we decide to try. The cross does not always honor the First Amendment.

American Christians are caught between two inadequate alternatives: being spiritual on the one hand, and being an activist on the other. I wish I could find Biblical support for either of these extremes. But there are no such comfortable solutions in the Scriptures. The support for these extremes comes from the American Way which calls us to either the soul-warping personal peace and prosperity of do-nothing spirituality, or the life-warping ideological excitement of the battle which is activism. God preserve us from either, or from an illegitimate union of the two, because, like Christianity, the theological framework of Rescue is neither of these. Rescue is nothing less than the warp and woof of Christianity.

And Christianity is the warp and woof of true civilization ___ true government, true churches, true families, true men and women ___ in covenant with the true and living God for all their needs. Transforming the world by laying down your life is the heart of Rescue. It is the heart of the Cross. It is Evangelism. When you are done, my goal is not that you get arrested, but that you never again fear what men may do. I want you hungry to begin to set your affairs in order to do whatever it is God gives you without making law suits, tax exemptions, going to jail, and losing your job, the major considerations. This will take time, what are the first steps? Where can you begin to die to yourself in order transform the part of the world God has entrusted to you?

Most of us were not ready to die to ourselves to protect children from abortion/murder, because we have not died to ourselves in the mundane areas of dish washing, careers, report writing, finances, obeying our parents, making up our beds, picking up our own socks, tithing, being Christian businessmen, being a husband who reflects Christ ___ dying for our wives that they might stand resplendent in all their gifts, free to build the future ___ or we were wives who rejected God's offer to establish the future and instead chose to be someone else's secretary and "fulfill" ourselves. These are the lessons Operation Rescue can teach us. Operation Rescue as a movement stalled. Had we succeeded what would we have done with our success?

Can we afford "success" built on short term commitment and fever pitch, crisis, crisis, crisis excitement? Would it be success to seize the mere external reins of power and change a law temporarily whether through political or social activism? I think not. We need to be instruments of true heart change ___ a change evidenced in our willingness to lose everything for what is right and true ___ a willingness to serve. Whether the Christian puts his hope and energy to bring about change through revolution, normal political process, or prayer divorced from simple obedience, they share the same weakness which only a personal willingness to lay down one's life begins to address. I believe the days of ten thousand person Rescues are still ahead.

I believe we will see huge crowds of Christians descend on free standing clinics and each take a brick home with them. I know for a fact that most abortionists expect this of us. But, this will require a tremendous spiritual transformation in each of us for this to be not only possible but a positive step. This transformation in the Church will come as a result of enough Christians trading their lives for the children, thereby purchasing the right to speak to our society. The power to serve is the power to rule. If we want to rule in the world we must first learn to lay down our lives in service.

The Church in America must again become the Church of Jesus Christ, not a crusade, not an inquisition, not a mass evangelism rally, not a recruiting pool for activist and political issues, not a spiritual bath house, not even a think-tank, but rather, functioning Christians in functioning churches unafraid to lose everything. Someone will have to begin this process. While it may be a first step for many of us, it is only our first steps down an old well worn path, trod by the Church through the ages. Is God calling you to take your first steps with that company of saints through the ages? If so, stopping child killing may not even be the arena you lose your life in. But where ever it is, God calls you to continue down that path.

This is the Crisis of the Cross in America.

Joseph L. Foreman 1991 Fulton County Jail; Atlanta, Georgia.

SECTION I:

THE PRINCIPLES

AND PRACTICE OF THE CROSS

Because we have strayed so far from our heritage, of sacrificial obedience to God, in all arenas of life, peacefully stopping a baby murderer seems extreme. Because we do not Rescue in any area of life, Rescue at an abortion clinic seems pushy. Face it, Rescuers ___ which is to say, Christians ___ are pushy where life and death, or heaven and hell are at stake. The cross does not wait until a more polite, humane era when people can be crucified with their clothes on, and take anesthesia for the pain. We take up our cross, period. And if you do not take it up where God has called you, that "humane era" will never come. We fail to remember that God rescued us, therefore we can never be embarrassed to risk rescuing others. So consider the rock from which you were hewn.

1. What is Rescue? 2

2. The Theological Root of Rescue. 6

3. The Tactics and Goals of Rescue. 10

CHAPTER 1:

WHAT IS RESCUE?

The Challenge to God's Name In 1960, there was a day when the Sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. And the Lord said to Him, "From where do you come?" So Satan answered Him, "From going to and fro on the earth and from walking back and forth on it." Then the Lord said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant the American Church how there is none like them in all the earth for seminaries, missionaries, budgets, buildings and programs to advance my kingdom, how they fear God and shun evil." So Satan said, "Do they fear God for nothing? Look at them. You have given them everything they could possibly want, you have hedged them about. You deceive yourself. They do not love you, they love the things you have given them.

They worship your blessings. They will never do something which might risk losing them." "Yes?" "I will not say that I can get them to curse you to your face ___ I failed with Job. But, I will say this: your people are incapable of even the most basic acts of Christian faith and charity, acts by which you yourself said that others could determine the difference between your children and my children, your sheep and my goats." "Yes?" "Yes." Said Satan. "You say your people follow you like sheep? You will not be able to get so much as one Christian to follow you across the street to save a baby's life. Then you will have to turn, remove their lampstand, and visit their land with a curse." In 1973, Roe v.

Wade struck down all anti-abortion laws in America establishing the right of all women to hire a doctor to kill their children at any time before birth for the full nine months. Its companion decision, Doe v. Bolton on the same day, established that a woman could do so for any reason she wished. And no Christian could be found to so much as cross the street to physically intervene for these children. And the slaughter grew quickly to 4,500 a day. A slaughter carried out in most hospitals and in publicly advertised centers, established to make the killing quick and easy for everyone.

So acceptable did it become that most Christian women thought nothing of having the same doctors deliver their own children who would be as willing to kill them, or go to child murdering hospitals, or buy every day necessities ___ from cheerios to toilet paper ___ from companies who helped promote child killing organizations. Pastors feared rebuke from their congregations if they mentioned the "A" word too often. Again, in 1989, there was a day when the Sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them.

And the Lord said to Him, "From where do you come?" So Satan answered Him, "From going to and fro on the earth and from walking back and forth on it." Then the Lord said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant the American Church? 50,000 have crossed the street and physically protected my little ones from murder though you incite me against them to destroy them without cause." "Skin for skin!" Answered Satan. "Touch their houses, their Church buildings, their families, their careers, their savings, threaten them physically with beatings by police, beatings and aids infested urine from pro-abortion demonstrators, long jail sentences, and you will see them abandon your command to love and serve you only, as they scramble to abandon their neighbor.

In fact, you will see the very Christians who spoke the loudest in defense of rescuing them from my butchers become the leaders in justifying, in your own Name, why they should no longer protect them physically but seek some other way to "Rescue" them. You will see them bow and worship the same gods the feminists, the mothers seeking abortion, and the doctors worship ___ the god's of respectability, career, self-preservation. They will cry out to these new gods to preserve their organizations, reputations and bank accounts ___ even those of the Rescue organizations themselves.

Yes, your people will knowingly allow my doctors to offer me sacrifices of the fruit of the womb, and these will become sacrifices on behalf of your people which they believe will purchase for them the peace, prosperity, and blessing which they crave. They will make peace with me to preserve their good way of life at all cost."

* * * *

Job never did get a clear revelation of the divine issues at stake in his life, he just lived with integrity and let God be God. I believe that all saints in their hour of testing experience this same mystery. Their purpose and vision only seem clear as we look back on the battle they fought. Like them, we can never get a clear look at all which is at stake for us, but we must obey God anyway and hope that as future generations stand on our shoulders, our purpose and resolve will be equally clear. When thousands of children are killed daily in our presence, what else could it be other than a divine question being asked of each of us. Can it be that so much more is at stake than a sinner's right to be legally sinful? More than just the lives of the children?

Perhaps even the integrity of the Name of God in His people? To find out we need to correctly understand both what Rescue is, as well as what Christianity is. Like Job it is important to try and understand what is at stake in the American Holocaust, and so I will begin with our crisis today where Vince Lombardy started with the Green Bay Packers: "Gentlemen, this is a football!"

Brethren, This Is Rescue: Rescue is basic Christianity. A Rescue is one or more people using their passive yet physical presence to prevent others from killing children at an abortion clinic. Usually this involves kneeling in front of the door and not letting anyone in. In some Rescues people enter the building, pray in the killing chambers, and counsel the women waiting to have their children killed. Sometimes Rescuers will lock themselves together, or to something in the death camp, with case hardened steel bicycle locks, to slow down their removal. Sometimes they will render the murder weapon harmless by damaging or destroying the suction aspiration machine.

While the doors are blocked, other Christians stand outside to meet the women coming in for their appointments with death. As long as the mothers cannot get in, they have the opportunity to hear about the reality of abortion and are offered compassionate, caring alternatives. In almost every Rescue one or two women will change their minds directly and their children will not be killed. Many more will drive by and never return. The common thread in all Rescues is that child killing is made impossible by Christians who are physically, but peacefully, preventing it by standing in solidarity with the unborn. It is important to grasp the simplicity of Rescue. Often when people argue about Rescue, those against it are arguing against sit-ins which break the law.

Those arguing for it are arguing for us to prophetically imitate Christ whose name ___ Yeshua ___ means God Rescues. It is not hard to see why a sit-in does not seem to carry the same prophetic weight as the name of our Lord. This book is both about Rescue in the grand scheme of God's plan, as well as about sit-ins. "Rescue" has come to refer to the simple act of protecting children by a sit-in at an abortion clinic. The arrest, the prayer, the suffering, the prison, the fear, the challenge to the legal powers of darkness in this age, these things grow out of the Rescue, but the Rescue itself is when a mother comes and fails to kill her child because Christians would not let her in that day and her heart was moved to spare her own seed.

Many other things "rescue" children ___ picketing, prayer, sermons, burning down the high place, changing laws, properly loving and raising our children. In no way are these things minimized by reserving the title "Rescue" for a specific event. In fact, it is because we recognize the validity of Rescue itself in the grand sense, that we can recognize all these activities as being Rescues in a derivative sense, and for the child led to slaughter, the primary form of Rescue would be when someone stops it cold. And that is what this book is all about: the connection between Rescue at abortion clinics, and Rescue in every sense ___ the Christian life, or being a citizen of God's Kingdom. The Rescue often ends with the arrest of the Christians.

But arrest is never the purpose of a Rescue, nor is a Rescue's primary purpose to challenge the legal or political system. That is why we always speak of "risking arrest," instead of, "going out to get arrested." Christians who rescue, will rise to whatever legal or political challenge comes their way following the Rescue, but their heart is in saving lives by physically preventing the killing. The power of their challenge to the legal-political system, and the clarity of their witness to the world of the saving power of Jesus Christ, depends on the focused purity of the Rescue itself ___ it rests on trying to save a particular baby scheduled for execution today and letting the chips fall where they may.

So We Tried It as a New Strategy ... When we began to rescue we got arrested. Now what? Do we do it again? Did we try and save lives just to make our point? Or is physically protecting children a normal way of life for Christians? We figured it was worth trying again and again. But still it was a strategy it was not proposed as a normal way of life for a Christian. The courts understand civil disobedience as a strategy. To be sure we keep it a mere strategy, the courts and police will beat us, or throw us in jail, or seize our property in lawsuits. The courts want to intimidate us out of protecting children again. They are happy to let us make our point, but want us to stop after one or two times.

The court's idea is that protecting the pre-born is a mere political issue for Christians. They do not believe that we really will act as if the children have equal value to a person who is born just because God tells us they do. The suffering with which society threatens us becomes their intimidating yardstick for our faith. How much suffering is that little life worth? How much suffering is God's Name worth? How much suffering is God's word worth? For the most part, the strategy of the abortion culture and its courts has been successful. They discovered that we were not prepared to treat the pre-born as equals in real life, only equal in theory. Therefore, we drew back. We were not prepared at this time to "love not our lives unto death" ___ or even much jail.

Nor were we prepared to "endure joyfully the seizure of our property," for that matter. Are the children's lives really worth risking the loss of everything? That is the question. The Abortion Culture's has called our bluff. "If you really believe they are human, why do you spend so much of your life acting as if you don't? Why don't you picket every day? Why don't you rescue every day? Why don't you bomb these "death chambers" as you call them?" These are not unreasonable questions based on simple pro-life ideas. We must ask, if defending innocent human life is a calling or an obligation? Is it a strategy, or a way of life? Is it what we do when it is convenient, or is it fundamental to Christianity and even Civilization?

In Operation Rescue, we have called it fundamental and yet treated it as a neat strategy. Which is it? Even though today, Christians by and large, refuse to lay down their lives and suffer for others in any ministry, I believe that this will change in the next few years. Ultimately the response of the Church will be to throw all caution to the wind and lay down its life. Until then, a few Christians will risk losing everything in order to rescue even one child, or one marriage, or one reputation, or one Church from splitting, or one sould from hell. That is the cost of building a road for the world to follow. While this road is a very old and well established road, it has become badly eroded and overgrown in our day.

It can be resurveyed with our words, but, it can only be cleared and repaved with our lives, as it was by the lives of the saints and martyrs who went before. For those who are rediscovering this road today, the Rescue does not end with arrest and a kangaroo court's probation. The Rescue continues as Christians become witnesses throughout the legal system by declaring with their lives what the saints have always declared, that there is only one God and we will love and serve Him at any cost ___ and in the arena of child killing we will not cooperate. Rescue seeks to fulfill not only the second table of the law, but the first as well.

More and more Christians, who continue to Rescue do not do so because of the strategic possibility of saving a few lives in a way which enables them to keep their jobs, nice houses, and Churches, while making a large media impact, and stirring consciences. They rescue because it is right. They ask: "If it is right to try and physically save a life, then will I let a legal system make me act like it is wrong?" In other words, "Will I go back to acting as if the unborn are no longer worthy of my protection?" Whenever the legal system is through with its punishment, whether jail, fines or probation, there they are again physically standing between the abortionist and his tiny victims. Will Christians ever learn? Learn what?

Learn that it is right to join the state in protection of murder? No, they will never learn this.

... And Discovered It to Be the Christian Way of Life To answer the world, many have had to reject Christian compassion as a "strategy", and replace it with Christian compassion as a way of life. A local pastor in Milwaukee summed up this commitment when he was brought before a local judge for the 45th time. The Judge asked, "Reverend Trewhella, aren't you ever going to get tired of this? When will you quit?" To which the pastor replied, "When are you going to quit being a judge? You chose your career because it was a good one and you probably plan to keep it as long as you can. That's how I feel about protecting children from butchers. It's a worthy way to spend the rest of my life and I plan to do so until they are safe.

I am a minister of the gospel, what else would you expect of me?" There is a new kind ___ or should I say, a refreshingly old kind ___ of Christian emerging. Rescue is the cutting edge of the Church's compassionate intolerance to legalized child killing. It is not a crusade. It is about laying down your life again and again until this holocaust is over. It is only out of a general population marked by repentance, intolerance to murder, and open hearts and homes to provide loving alternatives, that laws will spring forth with sufficient power and clarity to rid us of legalized child murder and the supporting culture which so readily accepts killing the weak or "unfit" as the solution to society's problems.

This example of sacrificial obedience no longer exists in the American Church. Therefore, our culture must be transformed, not by politicking for a surface change in the law, but by the example of Christians who are not afraid to live what they believe ___ who would rather lose every church, house and, job they have, than to go down in history as the Christians who presided over the greatest human carnage in the history of the world ___ Christians who preferred to rescue their things instead of neighbors. When we dabbled with Rescue, we found that as a strategy it was fun at first, but costly in the end. As a way of life . . . well, it is becoming very dangerous to everything we hold dear in this life.

Will enough embrace simple compassionate Christianity for the Gospel to get a hearing in our Churches and in our land?

The Crisis of the Cross Protecting a baby is one of those fundamental requirements of life. Protecting the lives of babies may be among the fundamental issues of any society and even a watershed test of faith in the living God. Protecting innocent children is not "activism", but among the deeper implications of orthodox Christianity as it is displayed in not only Rescue, but in the possibility of civilization, law, order, prosperity, civil rights and any other good and perfect gift God might have to offer this or any other society.

In the early days of Operation Rescue we made the mistake of tying Rescue only to the second great summary of the Law, "Love your neighbor as yourself." We did not see as clearly then, how loving God was the primary issue facing the Church in our country. Will we love God though it costs us everything? This may seem judgmental, but I believe that there is an acid test: If our churches were characterized by an all consuming love for God, then the cost of lawsuits and prisons would never have intimidated us to seek out and cling to strategies which were "safer" than Rescue.

Had we considered the value of that blood which bought us in all our other areas of life and ministry, we would laugh at the paultry counter-offers the world made for our soul in this matter of getting us to protect abortion/murder with them, instead of the babies being murdered: "Give us your soul and we won't sue you; Give us your soul and we won't send you to jail." they murmured soothingly. We would have joined God in laughing at the derision of His enemies. Did they think so little of our Lord and His cross that they thought they could get us to defend child killing with them and sell out our Lord because of a few beatings, jail time, and loss of property from lawsuits?

Yet, instead of presenting the grand issue of Rescue ___ love the Lord with all your heart soul mind and strength ___ we got tied down in petty arguments about strategies and tactics. We wondered if this or that form of activism was better than this or that form of prayer and politicking. The reason so many Christian leaders cannot see the relationship between blocking the doors of an abortion clinic and the broader Rescue ministry of the Church, is that in American society we have all but abandoned the broader costly ministry of Jesus Christ. We follow a Jesus who cannot say, "No!" to the comforts of this life ___ church building projects, homes in the suburbs, and a well paying job to support these necessary blessings of the Kingdom of God.

In Hebrews 11:35 ff., the writer describes how God's people "chose to be tortured not accepting release because they looked for a better resurrection ... they were sawn in half, scourged, imprisoned ... they wandered in goat skins and sheep skins, living in holes in the ground." This level of commitment simply has not characterized our faith at any level, so how could any of us have been expected to sacrifice to protect and provide for children in the womb and their mothers? If we are unable to be called, "people of whom the world was not worthy ... whom God was not ashamed to be called their God," then, how could we be expected to see the relationship between our faith and the lives of the children?

The point is not to berate us for our prior blindness, it is to ask, "How long will we use the excuses of 1989 to justify why we cannot leave all and follow the Lord in 1991." Where is the offense of the cross in American Christianity? What will prevent you from losing everything for our Lord in 1993?

What Is Rescue? When we get to the heart of it, Rescue is doing something which will put someone else ___ his benefits and comforts ___ first. Rescue is doing it in a way which sacrifices our benefit and comfort for another. If a sit-in does this, we might call it a Rescue. But there is more. When we protect others sacrificially ___ in a way that honors God first ___ we begin to tear down the idols which rule our life today. Where the specific act of sitting-in does not reflect this tearing down of idolatry, then it is a mere sit-in, not a Rescue. It is still a very good thing, like money, a good reputation, and ministry programs, but not sufficient. For the children who are saved, the sit-in is a very-very good thing, but still not sufficient to stem the tide.

The idols we use to justify and preserve our good life must be torn down. These idols are manifested in our daily response to human sacrifice which goes on not ten minutes from where we live, work and worship. Rescue is physically intervening to protect a child from legally protected murder in a way which does not hurt anyone, and which causes us to throw in our lot, our reputation, and our future with that child whose life has been declared refuse. We become refuse with him in the name of Christ who became refuse for us. All solutions to abortion must clear away the idols at their heart or in the end they will become merely nice variations of idolatry. What makes a statue an idol? The place it stands in our life.

What makes the material and social blessings of God an idol? When we seek to preserve them at any cost to our soul, to the lives of the children, and to His Name.

CHAPTER 2:

THE THEOLOGICAL ROOT OF RESCUE

Ethics Must Be More Than Spontaneity On the coldest day of 1984 a small child wandered out the front door of our house dragging her snow suit behind her. She walked half a block up the windswept Philadelphia street and looked both ways before walking out into the middle of the busy intersection. It was below zero, and the wind chill made it 30-40 degrees colder than that. There she was. Standing pitifully in the middle of the intersection holding her little coat, too cold to even cry. Only her nose ran. Did the traffic stop? No, their careers and lives called them on that morning and they rode past on either side as she stood there. No one felt led of God to help this child. God understood why there was really nothing any of them could do.

He had given each passerby an important ministry and call that morning. I remember it so vividly because she was supposed to be my responsibility. My wife was earning some extra money baby-sitting and she had stepped out for a moment and left the front door unlocked by mistake. The little girl had tried to follow her a few minutes later. By the time she was in the street I was searching the house frantically. I'm sure if you had driven by that day you would have immediately stopped your car. You would have risked breaking the law and walked out into traffic, or even blocking the whole intersection until the girl was safe ___ she was not even two years old. You would have had some angry thoughts about whoever it was who was so careless of innocent trusting little ones.

You would not have checked yourself to repent of those hostile thoughts aimed at me. You would not have felt like a hero, but you would be shocked to think that anyone could argue against you or condemn you. You would laugh at the idea that blocking the whole intersection could be compared to the civil rights activists who did the same thing in the '60's. You would be stunned to hear that leading Christian pastors looked down on you because you brought child to safety, instead of doing the Christian thing which would be to prophetically stand by the edge of the street and preach powerfully to the cars as they drove past, or perhaps break a pot like Jeremiah to symbolize what God would do to such a careless generation.

You would be amazed that leading Christian thinkers would scoff at you because you did not stop to consult with them to gain a proper perspective and analysis for when someone should or should not break the law. You would not write a treatise called, The Theology of Rescuing Small Children in the Street. You would not have started a movement called "Operation Rescue". You would have just Rescued. Unfortunately you were not driving by that morning. Rescue was like that for many of us. We stopped driving by and rushed across the street to the abortion clinic and saved a few lives. But unlike the little girl I was responsible for, it is no accident which brings the mothers and their helpless babies to the clinic. Our abortion culture is dead serious about killing.

Now we have to think about why we wanted to Rescue in the first place. If we cannot respond in simple spontaneous Christian compassion, can we still respond? Were our instincts to Rescue correct, or just emotionalism? These are the questions which the continuing attempt to protect the people in the womb raises to all Christians on both sides of the fence. Whether Rescuing a child in the street, or a child in the womb, we see one of the more striking examples of orthodox Christianity in daily practice. It was this that moved 50,000 God fearing, law abiding people to get arrested protecting children.

Rescue: the Heartbeat of Faith It may be argued that they rescued, because they took to heart what actually happens to the child if no one tries to rescue him. Also, 16 years of frustration were waiting to ignite. But there is more to Rescue than the publicity of a serious demonstration; more than the opportunity to challenge bad laws in the branch of government which spawned them ___ the judiciary; more than the attempt to save a mother from being exploited and her child from being killed. Beyond these lies much deeper the true heart and root of Rescue which is starkly theological emanating from the center of our Christian faith.

Rescue showed people that saving a baby's life is as normal and an expected part of a Christian life as church attendance, prayer, and Bible reading. People understood that to refuse to save a child whom we could have saved is to incur the guilt of innocent blood. People saw that even though saving a life may lead you to break the traditions of men, which are in this society falsely called "law", saving an innocent life is not breaking a law, no matter what the policemen and judges of this age might think, because God not man defines law. Those who Rescue understood these things, but it still does not get to the heart of Rescue.

There is no end of arguments which try to balance Romans 13 with biblical examples of godly obedience in the teeth of evil government decrees ___ Daniel, Moses, the Prophets and Apostles. But those who accepted, or rejected, Rescue did not do so based on them. At the bottom of it all is one simple fact which explains why people rescue as well as why people flee Rescue: Rescue resonates with the deepest heart-beat of what it means to be a child of God. This explains its attraction ___ what Christian does not want to respond joyfully to that which touches the wellsprings of his life? But being challenged to the core exacts a price. It uncovers a willingness to peacefully coexist with the vilest evil.

Even as we rescue, we discover our overwhelming desire to keep the comfortable tokens of our faith around us ___ a nice home, job, and freedom to worship. Until Rescue we could honestly say, "What can I do about this child being killed today?" We feared the consequences of the only other real solution to child killers we could think of ___ do unto them before they get a chance to do unto the little ones." But, the closer the children are to the heart of God, the more Rescue could not simply be taken for granted. The more perfectly that Rescue reflects the cross, the more dangerous it became to the comfortable sense of our spiritual "business as usual" approach to life. We could not just take this for granted. We either have to reject it or go live it.

There is no neutrality where the cross is concerned.

What Did Jesus Do? People Rescue because it agrees with almost everything the Church and the scriptures have proven to be true in theory as well as in practice. Protecting an innocent child from dismemberment in a way which offers compassionate help to his mother strikes a deep chord in the life of Christ and His Church. It is not what Jesus would do. It is what Jesus did do. He Rescued. Did He become a political activist? Did he lobby? Did He only help those who could find His name in the yellow pages? Did Jesus picket? Did He only preach and pray? Did He even visit John the Baptist in jail? Did He start Hospitals? Did He run for King, or Caesar? No, His name is Rescue, and that is what He did.

Jesus went to the heart of the matter ___ He personally took up His cross to shield us from the butcher of souls and on that cross, in our place, he suffered and died. Foolish? Yes. From the perspective of Peter's plans for Him ___ the perspective of big crowns, big crowds, big budgets, big building programs with cushioned pews ___ very foolish.

But, it is where Jesus put the center of His ministry, and He says, "The servant is not greater than His master." In the end, His pattern is the only pattern for any ministry that calls itself Christian: "Whoever does not bear his cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple." In this light hear His last command: "Go make disciples of all nations." For these unborn neighbors and their mothers, their only knowledge of the cross in this life will be when those who claim to bear it dare to defend them from the butcher who seeks their life.

The Three Principles of the Cross There are three facts about the cross which define Rescue: 1. It is an act of physical intervention. The greatest preacher of all time did not save us by His words alone. The greatest man of prayer did not emerge from Gethsemane and say, "It is finished." When Peter tried to take the cross out of our Lord's ministry, Jesus called him Satan. Jesus did not just talk about physically intervening on behalf of the helpless, He did it. He Rescued us. Had he simply proven his dedication at the cross, but walked away at the last minute delivering himself from death, we would not be saved. Therefore we do not walk away from abortion clinics regardless of the consequences.

His substitutionary atonement not only uniquely saves us, it also becomes our "take up your cross and follow me" example for ministry to others: Stand in the path of harm intended for others. 2. He was harmless toward His enemies and took destruction to Himself. Rather than come in wrath against the world, He took the wrath on Himself. He did not harm the soldiers, or the priests. He suffered in our place. He had to be harmless in order to take the wrath in our place, and to identify with our weakness. That's why he refused to walk away from His position on the cross which directly intervened between us and the wrath we deserved ___ he could have, but he did not, because we could not walk away from our sins. to save us he had to limit himself to our limitations.

It was not Jesus' arrest and walk to the cross which saved us, it was the cross itself ___ from that point, Jesus stopped walking. Which is why we stop walking when we get to the point of intervention ___ not our arrest, but our blocking the door. Jesus did not swerve from His place of intervention by coming down from the cross, and so we strive to remain harmlessly in the path of destruction for the child, his mother, and our society. It is why we do not fight back when we stand in the place of others. We cannot assist in the removal process itself by walking away, otherwise we would no longer be harmless toward the children. 3. He identified with us. God became flesh. Then He became sin. He did not Rescue from afar, He personally took on our helplessness.

In essence the cross explains His incarnation to us: "If you reject them, you reject me." And He bore our rejection in His person. He then calls us to bear the rejection of others and so minister to Him: "In so much as you do it to the least of these, you do it unto me. ... Have in you the mind which was in Christ Jesus. ... Let us therefore go up with Him outside the camp, bearing His reproach." This is the incarnation as we are to practice it by throwing in our lot with the fatherless, the widow, the stranger, and poor, imitating Him who threw in His lot with us.

Rescue, brings these three principles together into one action: 1) we physically intervene, 2) in a way which does not harm anyone, 3) taking on punishment and judgement to ourselves so that children and their mothers (not to mention the doctors and police) might live. This explains why we are non-violent, and yet we insist on physically blocking access. It explains why we go limp rather than assist the process of our removal ___ as long as we are standing between children and killers we, like Christ, will not walk away from the cross. Like Christ, we identify with the child's helplessness. The child cannot flee, neither do we. The child cannot post bond, or pay a fine, and so save his life, neither do we do so to protect ourselves.

Some Rescuers remain helplessly limp throughout court and prison in solidarity with those who are helpless before their murderers.

.

Principle #1: Principle #3:

PHYSICAL IDENTIICATION

INTERVENTION (with pre-born)

RESCUE

Principle #2:

HARMLESSNESS

The Law of Love Now, if the incarnation and atonement are not enough to show what Rescue means in the Christian life, consider how Rescue applies the two great summaries of the law: First, through the cross Jesus Christ secured an inheritance which would love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. In other words, God's inheritance ___ the Church ___ is to be like Christ and put no authority or standard higher than God's regardless of the personal cost to them. Second, in the cross Jesus established the pattern of loving His neighbor as Himself by being His brother's keeper. He was no mere "righteous" bystander. He did not pass by on the other side.

In the cross God gave us the heart of all law which is binding on a Christian as a pattern for life ___ love of God and love of neighbor regardless of cost. The cross is God's final answer to evil. Is it ours? Or do we answer evil with bombs, prayer meetings, picket signs, and politics? Surely there is a place for these, but what is our final answer? The Christian lays down his life for his unborn neighbor ___ the love of Christ compels him. When it comes to unborn neighbors, our Nation's laws say: "You must not love your neighbor as yourself." God says, "Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed ... Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself ... Do unto others as you would have them do unto you ...

In so far as you have done it unto the least of these you have done it unto me ... For all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution" Whose love will control our lives? Whose standards will guide our actions? Will we obey trespass laws and protect abortionists? Or will we obey God and protect the unborn? Rescue, then is practical, basic Christianity. It reflects in one activity the atonement, the incarnation, the law of love, and God's final authority. In the face of legalized human sacrifice the Rescuer raises the cross.

Here is his guide for behavior and his hope for this generation: "Whoever wishes to make himself a friend of the world, makes himself an enemy of God." Rescuers hold fast what Christians have always understood about their faith ___ it is directly related to the fate of the real world they live in. If the cross is the center point of history, as well as of the believer's faith and life, then until churches grasp and live by this principle of laying down their lives for others, they will be peripheral to God's work in history and infants in the faith ___ they will not see revival, only more innocent bloodshed, more pornography, more messianic government, more mindless revolutions, more poverty, more cultural bankruptcy, and more conversions to dead faith.

Without revival, our entire civilization hangs in the balance. Over what, a call to sit-ins? To activism? No, over the call to compassionate, prophetic, godly obedience in every part of our community ___ to have the mind of Christ. God willing the Church will always call for and stand behind its representatives, its missionaries, who are willing to break every compromise with evil in every arena where the Church is at war. God willing, we will never use the fact that we do not rescue in one arena as an excuse to hide our eyes, heart, and support from those who are persecuted for rescuing in another. The Church which will neither suffer itself, nor stand with its missionaries who suffer, is a church which cannot follow Christ.

Chapter 3:

THE TACTICS AND GOALS OF RESCUE

Doctrines of Demons Fulton County jail was going to be my home for the next several years because after I got out I was going to go back to the death camps and try to protect children in Atlanta. So I was making the most of this phase of my missionary ministry to the unborn with Bible studies and ministry to the prisoners. Most of whom were mere shells of humanity. These men were precious. They had all prayed the sinner's prayer to accept Christ. They would go forward at every Sunday chapel service when a local pastor would come in to preach and give an invitation to invite Christ into their lives. And they would return to cell block 500 with the same foul vocabulary, humor, and dreams of sex and drugs.

Throughout the week they would pray with me for God to do more than be invited to live in them, but to change them, and yet the grip of the world seemed unchallengeable in their lives. I did all I could to instruct them, but they were already evangelical Christians. They believed everything you and I believe: God is Three and One, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Jesus is fully God and fully man; He died so that we could have life; The virgin birth, the miracles; The Bible is God's infallible word; His work on the cross must be personally accepted; We are sinners and cannot save ourselves. We must grow in grace and purity. Many of them had even prayed to receive the baptism in the Holy Spirit and some of them spoke in tongues.

And they prayed desperately to God and found so much joy in our Bible studies. But the world still claimed them. Their lives were almost unchanged. What was I doing wrong? Suddenly what James had to say about the doctrines of demons took on a new light. When James defined the doctrine of demons he pointed out that they believe the truth just like us. They believe in one God. By implication, they also believe that Jesus is God, the Bible is God's word, that Jesus died for our sins, the Trinity, and every other tenet of the faith once for all delivered to the saints. So what is the difference between Demons and Christians? Living faith and dead faith. Doesn't faith save you? Faith which transforms you saves you. Is the other kind really faith? Or is it demonic?

I remember struggling with this dilemma into the night and suddenly waking up with a powerful realization: If God has a place reserved in heaven for the first evangelical Church of Atlanta, or any other city, then he has a place for the sinners of cell-block 500. Is this good news for the inmates in my cell block? Or is it bad news for the evangelicals of American Christianity when you stop to consider that if there is a room in hell for the denizens of cell block 500 who share the same faith, there might be room for them as well?

The comparison between nice suburban evangelical faith ___ faith which has supported and financed the growth of the Church around the world in this century ___ and the wasted faith of the average prison Christian is not obvious at first until you start thinking about the implications of basic doctrines for how we should live when they are killing babies. We all have a way of easing into the good life and fashioning a faith to fit, whether fit to the life in the urban jungle, or in the suburbs. These are the doctrines of demons: Transforming truths which fail to transform us. Rescue is nothing more than orthodox Christianity transforming Christians in the arena of legalized child murder.

Fundamental Christian doctrine can transform even something as established as the Pro-life movement . . . or the American Church.

Rescue Is Not the Same as Civil Disobedience Unfortunately, many commentators, have not seen how the cross defines Rescue for two reasons. The first is their general knowledge of Gandhi, Thoreau & King. They suppose that little more can be learned in the area of "nonviolent civil disobedience". And certainly not from this unlettered rabble of Rescuers. Their general knowledge gives them a false sense of knowing the issues at stake. As a result, they feel little need to glean facts first hand. They content themselves with fitting the few facts they do encounter into their pre-conceived categories. The second reason these commentators fail to see the heart of what we do is because they do not want to. Such knowledge is too costly.

Pro-life literature is full of the slippery slope argument: First they kill the unborn; then the new-born "defectives"; then the old and infirm; and then the "useless parasites" whose beliefs do not square with the state, like Christians. But this is not the slippery slope which most Christian fear. We fear the simple assertion: "Abortion kills children. What will you do today about these children?" Once you start down that slope, where will you end? To understand Rescue is to actually stop and listen with God to that silent scream ___ scream after scream, after scream, after scream. There has yet to be a critique of Rescue from within the Church which has the courage to look these children in the eye. Read them.

Each one focuses on "civil disobedience", and "strategy", and "long range thinking". They are monumental efforts to justify why it is right to cooperate with baby killers and the authorities who protect them . . . anything to keep the screams of today's children out of mind and heart. For some reason, those who argue about the best strategy to overcome legalized abortion never seem to think that laying down your life is a reasonable strategy. But what is wrong with this long range strategy: "We forty million Christians in America would rather sit in jail and see our houses and churches seized for the next 100 years than possess them at the expense of cooperating in any way with child killing."? True, they will not do it, but would it be wrong if they did?

Then what of a strategy which is within my reach: "I would rather spend the rest of my life in jail than cooperate with child killing."? What of sacrificial obedience as a long range strategy, and teaching tool, and political motivator, and gospel witness? Framing the issue in terms of Civil Disobedience and protest is a very convenient and scholarly way to keep the matter an "issue" instead of a child. But it constructs a straw man. Rescue theory, while bearing the resemblance of a 2nd cousin to civil disobedience theory, is not reducible to it, in the same way that Jesus' ministry, though having points in common with mass evangelism and seminar ministries, is not reducible to the categories of mass evangelism. The things we do are shaped by very different concerns:

1) Lawbreaking ___ We do not break man's law in order to make a point, show our resolve, or even protest the injustice of the law we broke. At the outset we contend that we have not broken even man's laws because we saved a life. The value of human life still precedes mere property in American law. Never the less, since the police and courts value property more than life in this matter, they charge us with law breaking. But even if you see our actions from their point of view, we still "break man's law" only at those points where to fail to break it will make us accomplices of the abortionist's murder. Getting arrested does indeed make a point and show resolve, but this is not even close to the heart of Rescue.

2) Protest ___ People are forever calling Rescues "protests". To do this displays only ignorance of the most fundamental facts. Traditional civil disobedience advocates law breaking as a means of protesting injustice. It is obvious, however, that if you were protesting an unsafe pool in which a man were drowning you might shout, "I hate drowning!" or, "It's immoral to permit pools with no life guards!" And you might even write your congressman, or picket offending pools. But if you were engaged in stopping this man from drowning you would not shout, you would jump in with something to bring him to land. This is Rescue. Protest is important, but incidental to Rescue.

We could use civil disobedience to protest abortion in many ways: We could tie up city blocks at rush hour; shut down businesses; picket on private property; or even sit-in at city hall. All of these would be classic acts of symbolic civil disobedience. But for what has come to be called "Rescue", the cross, not Gandhi, or Thoreau, controls where we go and what we do. Rescue goes far beyond promoting the idea that abortion is wrong, which is the goal of a protest ___ even a civil disobedient protest. It goes on to shape an activity which says, "To permit abortion is wrong."

The Two Goals of Rescue There are, then, two goals of Rescue. The first and controlling goal is that of saving a life. The second, is to do so in a way which conforms our message and method to the principles of the cross so as to bring lasting heart change to our Church and society.

Goal #1: Saving Life: Every symbolic and tactical point in a Rescue and its aftermath in courts, jails and politics, flows out of this central concern. The Christian shapes everything he does by his desire to quit protecting child killing himself and to make it impossible for courts and politicians to protect the killing. He goes to the doors of the abortion factories, and personally closes them. In court he becomes a witness to proclaim the God whom he serves at any penalty, and to defend the children whose lives he has protected -- never himself.

Goal #2: Symbolic clarity which will bring change to the hearts of men and the standards of society. To go beyond mere revolution and surface change, Rescuers realize that every action must preach a very particular message. This symbolic dimension of Rescue is defined by the cross of our Lord. It is not enough to just save a life, we must do so in the way Jesus himself laid out the pattern. Even small details of our tactics are agonized over for the message and symbol they will convey to the watching world.

In a nutshell, the message is: "The Church will stand with the helpless children and against their killers, and whoever seeks to forcibly protect their killers." This message preached by the cross is the necessary heart of true social change ___ good law requires the fertile soil of hearts prepared to live and die according to it. As Christians become that rich seed bed of practical righteousness, child killing will become illegal from within our system as it becomes intolerable to our lives.

As Screwtape might comment to his nephew: "If the church keeps protecting the little ones, then the government might as well change the law to make abortion illegal, because the Christians won't let our doctors do it anyway." These two goals may be added to the last chapter's diagram by adding two rings. The inner ring is the more primary goal of saving a life. And the outer ring is how we focus our actions and how we describe them. But there is more that we can do to this diagram to illustrate how the principles of the cross define Rescue. Many critics have misunderstood and misapplied these principles, not seeing how they work together. If you take each principle and press it to its extreme, you have an activity, but it is not Rescue.

Rescue is where all three principles come together:

EXTREME CONCLUSIONS EXTREME CONCLUSIONS

Extreme of #2:

DO NOTHING

Extreme of #1: Extreme of #3: DESTRUCTION SELF- IMMOLATION Goal #1: Save lives

RESCUE

Goal #2: Principle #1: Change Hearts; PHYSICAL Symbolic Clarity

INTERVENTION

Principle #3:

IDENTIFICATION

with pre-born Principle #2:

HARMLESSNESS

BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE CROSS

These three principles of the cross establish the three boundaries of each Rescue tactic. If you follow any one or two principles too far, you are not taking the "next logical step" of Rescue. Rather you are stepping out of the realm of one clearly defined activity ___ Rescue ___ into the realm of some other activity. Press harmlessness to its extreme, and you do nothing. Press identification with the child, and you have self-immolation. Press intervention and you have bombing. Put them all together and you have none of these, you have only Rescue.

Thus the most popular criticism of Rescue ___ that in principal, or logically, Rescue leads to violence ___ is seen to be as groundless in theory as it is obviously groundless in fact: while many people went from Operation Rescue into doing nothing, or politics, or CPC work, not one has gone on to burn down clinics. Those who argue this way mistakenly put all pro-life activity on a simplistic continuum between doing nothing and violence. They then set man's law as the barrier which prevents them from crossing over to violence. Then they reason that since Rescuers "break man's law" there must be nothing in principle which holds them back from violence.

This diagram shows how their continuum is a distortion of the facts in addition to a distortion of the Scriptures and logic.

The Tactics of Rescue Consider, then, the tactics of Rescue bounded by God's pattern. Each tactic can be seen to be directly related to a particular principle and yet so modified by the other two so that Rescue cannot be fully reduced to any one principle. In the same way, different Rescuers seem to be moved more strongly by one principle or another. This not only makes for heated debate as the Church hammers out how its historic principles of Rescue apply to the child killing arena, but it also leads to confusion on the part of onlookers who often only see one or two of the principles expressed by the Rescuers they know. The popular phase of the movement is still so young (barely 3 years old) that most Rescuers themselves cannot articulate the deeper unity which the cross gives to our thinking even though they all sense that it is there. What follows is a catalogue of the 3 principles, the extreme version of them, the sort of Rescuer who represents each, and the tactics each suggest.

1) Physical intervention ___ The extreme interventionist would be the bomber. But within Rescue, the person motivated primarily by this principle will be the one who encourages more aggressive and confrontational tactics ___ move people around strategically, crawl past officers, link arms, go limp on paddy wagons if it prolongs removal, and crawl back to the door after being arrested. Once in the legal system, the intervention continues as an element which makes it hard for the system to hold you. They have falsely arrested you, now it is their problem to punish you falsely as well. I will say more on this under Principle #3 below ___ Identification.

This confrontational element is limited by the example of our Lord's harmlessness and by our willingness to take on the helplessness of the child ___ we will not intervene in a way which hurts anyone. But intervening means more than keeping the doors closed, it also means having aggressive and sympathetic sidewalk counselors; providing homes on the spot for mothers who change their mind and need a place to stay; having doctors lined up for alternative care; and finding churches willing to help with other needs. Intervention requires both the courage to confront and the compassion to provide for physical needs.

2) Harmlessness ___ The extreme of being harmless would be the proverbial Christian couchpotato. But the Rescuer motivated by this principle tends to be either the conscientious pacifist, or the quiet middle class businessman who simply detests demonstrations, or making a fuss in public. We generally walk once in custody and our being limp no longer prolongs the removal of ourselves or others. It affects the demeanor we try to maintain at Rescues. Even chanting, or any kind of verbal response to the abortion advocates is discouraged. It is why we crawl rather than risk a direct confrontation. It is why we sit or kneel, and why we avoid picket signs, why we call those who come to watch, "prayer supporters."

3) Identification with the child ___ Most people understand the first two points. This third point deserves more discussion. The extreme of identifying with the victim would be some form of self-immolation ___ suffering for suffering's sake. The Rescuer motivated by this principle will tend to be the one who gravitates toward those tactics which will give him the least amount of personal defense. He wants the world to see in his helplessness before an unjust legal system and society, the far greater helplessness of the child. Though most misunderstood, the tactics related closely to this principle also touch the deepest chords of concern to end this holocaust.

As we identify with the children, people suddenly realize that our mistreatment is only the shadow of what they know must be an indescribably greater horror. We become the visible representatives of the children whom church and society refuse to see. When several fully grown Christians decide to be as helpless as the tiny child in the womb, it poses a genuine problem to a legal system which recognize the rights of the one but not the other. We can grind up their tiny remains, but what do you do with a 200 pound man who refuses to move? Does he have rights? Or can he be ground to hamburger too? We have found that the more closely you identify yourself with that part of a society which has no rights, the more you will be hated by that society and lose your rights.

Both established pro-life groups as well as the pro-abortionists will join in their resentment of you, which always begins with a studied attempt to ignore you. This phenomena was seen in the 1850's as both pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions joined to curse the abolitionist. What has added to the misunderstanding of this third principle is that within Operation Rescue circles, most of the tactics which flow from it have been discussed as mere bargaining, chips with the police, and as ways to crush or clog the system ___ going limp through the whole system, giving your name as "Baby Doe", refusing to post a bond, or pay a fine.

In many negotiations with police, I have threatened noncooperation as means of gaining the limited cooperation of police and courts to prolong the Rescue, streamline processing, permit our defense of necessity in court, and limit the sentences. But this misses their powerful symbolism. I believe the most significant development in the Rescue movement will be the development of this dimension of Rescue. Of course it has been there all along articulated by Joan Andrews, Richard Cowden-Guido, Tom Herlihy, and many others. What does it mean to become the visible representatives of Jesus Christ when we stand with the children?

The child cannot walk away from the abortionist and save himself, so we do not exercise our right to preserve ourselves and walk away from the door, or seek to escape judgement in court by paying fines or accepting probation. The child cannot purchase his life by paying off the abortionist, and more and more Rescuers will likewise refuse to by their freedom by paying bail, or a fine. There are no cheap solutions. Some Rescuers will carry this identification through court by never walking, never recognizing the authority of the judge, but after giving him a chance to repent, they will literally turn their back on him as a visible renunciation of his usurpation of power.

They then call themselves "Baby Doe." They reason that if rights are denied any of us then we should all renounce those rights until they are restored to all. The purest form of this is called Category Zero. What keeps these tactics within the field of Rescue is how they are bounded by the principle of physical intervention and harmlessness. By refusing financial solutions, the Rescuer will help the courts realize the futility of harassing rescuers (Principle #1), and will in the process inspire others by his act of courage to act themselves.

Because the Rescuer insists on identifying with the helplessness of the child in a way that renders him harmless, (Principle #2) his goal is never to crush the system or choke it, but to be merely a witness who does not participate in its injustice. To walk where a jailer or judge tells you to walk is to treat that jailer as if he had legitimate authority to prevent you from protecting children. If it is important enough for him to put you somewhere, other than outside the jail, then he will have to pick you up and move you. Every day you are held is a day that your jailers (and the Church which permits them to hold you) is directly accountable for the bloodshed you might have prevented were you free.

Someone is always willing to argue that officers strain their backs and courts get bogged down and cannot attend to legitimate criminal matters. But this is precisely our point ___ in direct proportion to the extent that police and courts wish to aid and abet abortion/murder they merely bring judgement and confusion on themselves and their bureaucracies. They chose to arrest and drag us away. They choose to hammer us with long trials and prison sentences. It is the courts who clog themselves. All we do is make ourselves helpless, harmless lambs led to slaughter in place of the little ones.

They could always simply not arrest, not press charges, or give us "time served." Our "slaughter" in God's economy will simply bring judgement on them and serve as a sign for the Church. When will the rest of the Church realize this and prevent it? If they cannot hold us "for fear of the people" then we can make abortion first impossible by our presence, unthinkable by our witness, and illegal by our votes. Identification, then, is one of the dominating symbols of Rescue and an opportunity our Lord extends to all of us to join Him outside the camp by standing in the place of His little ones. We intervene on behalf of the helpless in a way which is both harmless and yet also shows forth our identification with their helplessness.

What Is the "Next Step"? If you can see the internal dynamic of Rescue, then you can see how determining the next logical step is not a simplistic matter of taking one principle to its extreme. It is as unreasonable to say that Rescue "leads to" violence as it is to say that Rescue leads to doing nothing. The next step cannot be violence, that is just the extreme of intervention. It cannot be a return to doing nothing, that is the extreme of the 2nd principle. Nor can it be mindless suffering or self-immolation which is merely cutting free the principle of identification from the requirements to remain harmless and to intervene. It is clear that with the rise of Rescue, clinic bombings dropped off almost completely.

With Rescue's apparent demise as a publicly perceived force, the bombers will no doubt return. Will Rescue lead to these bombings? To credit us with leading to bombing, one must credit us with the increased political activity and picketing which has followed in the wake of Operation Rescue's decline. But if anything leads to bombing, it is the absence of a clear sacrificial call to live and die a Christian. This vacuum leads to every other "solution" ___ from politics and Jericho marches, to bombings. For most of us, the pearl of great price just is not worth the cost of what we would have to sell to purchase it. There is no further "step" outside of Rescue which its internal dynamic leads to.

The only real question will be, "Will we finally learn that it is wrong to try and peacefully save a baby from murder?" When all is said and done, regardless of how you handled the legal system, whether through complete non-cooperation or through complete cooperation, will you try and protect the unborn again? Or will you have learned your lesson? This is the driving question behind fellowships like the Mission to the Pre-born and others. Is saving life a way of life, or is it just another strategy to fit into our busy schedules? Rescue does lead to two things, but they are not outside of Rescue itself. The first is to free ourselves from those things which become idols in our lives.

We cannot free ourselves from every responsibility ___ like marriage and supporting a family ___ nor would we suggest doing so. But we can make every responsibility a reflection and springboard to Rescue. We can begin to take steps today so that within a year or two we will be free to do more. We can begin to prepare ourselves, our possessions, our families, and our churches to do those things which might cause us to forfeit everything we and the pagans cling to in this life. The tragedy is not that so few Christians are ready to sit-in. The tragedy is that so few Christians are free to leave everything behind to follow our Lord no matter what the issue might be. This must change. Every time you cannot Rescue, you should be supporting someone who does.

We cannot be free of responsibilities, but we can keep our responsibilities from being our excuses to let the children die, to let the inner city die, to let the nations die, to let our churches experience a living death ___ we must not let our legitimate responsibilities become illegitimate idols. The second thing Rescue will lead to, is greater clarity in people's minds as to how it is merely an application of the on-going historic ministry of the Church. Rescue uniquely fulfills the Church's obligation of compassion toward people in the womb, and discipleship outside the womb, in a way which no other pro-life ministry does. This does not nullify other pro-life activities, but rather it fulfills them. It provides them all teeth and final credibility.

On the cross Jesus did not nullify his preaching and healing ministry, nor did he do away with the law of righteousness ___ rather he fulfilled them. We need to bring Rescue into the full ministry of churches so that they no longer fear what men can do to their tax status and property. But there is only one way to effectively communicate this and that will never be in books like this, but in our lives. How does someone looking at your life know that you refuse to compromise with evil? How can they tell the difference between your faith and the faith of those in cell block 500?

The Ministry of the Church Rescue is a ministry of the Church. When a Christian is held in jail, or goes to court for righteousness sake, he gives the Church a striking opportunity to minister to the world in its unique role as prophet, priest, and king. The Church should call forth, lay hands on, send out, and support missionaries to these people in the womb: men and women who will refuse any compromises with whatever worldly principle or law is sending Christians to jail for obeying God.

By doing so we all become: 1) Prophetic: The church by defending its own, speaks a clear message to the legal-political system: "Let my people go that they might serve me!" Society cannot receive God's blessing by persecuting the righteous, nor can the Church by ignoring their persecution; 2) Priestly: The Christian in jail for defending children gives churches a priestly ministry to the Rescuer and one of interceding on their (and the children's) behalf to the authorities holding them; 3) Kingly: The church sets the example not by coercive decree, but by suffering and service. By standing in solidarity with Rescuers, and through them the children they protect, the whole Church becomes a living example of the law of love. In love of God they serve Him at any cost.

In love of society, they suffer by standing in the path of its sinful destruction of others and itself. As our King led through suffering service we do too: we suffer rather than accept either the extreme of striking back at society, or leaving society to its own devices. For love of the little ones we stand in their place. The church by standing with the Rescuers ___ its direct representatives ___ makes its ministry of healing compassion known by personally paying the price to establish justice even if for the moment that price means the seizing of our houses and sanctuaries or the inconvenience of a daily phone call to hold a judge accountable to the King.

If we cannot express our kingly office as He did, on a cross, then we are not fit to change any law or seize political power through lobbying and voter registration. We serve God even if that means jail, and as God sees fit, let whatever authority He gives us come to us there rather than lust after it in our political caucuses. The power to rule is the power to serve. It would be a shame if the cost of the cross as expressed in Rescue would cause the church to draw back from this unique opportunity to stand in the gap either personally, or through direct support of our missionaries who stand there as much for us as for the nameless little ones.

SECTION II:

ISSUES OF THE CROSS

It is not enough to determine whether or not the world permits something. We have to ask whether God allows us to permit it.

We tend to approached the question of intolerance backwards. When you are dealing with mass killers, and their protectors, you must justify those points at which you tolerate and cooperate with them, not those points at which you do not tolerate them. The day may come when we are in danger of being too intolerant to child killers. Until then, what must be explained is why we are so cooperative.

4. Idolatry pg. 16

5. Brutality pg. 21

6. Intolerance pg. 24

CHAPTER 4:

IDOLATRY

God Jus' Gonna Have to Unnerstan' I do not know if I had any lasting impact on the lives of my fellow inmates. But I know that many of them left me changed forever. Take Slim, for instance. He was an engaging young man who could talk his way into or out of most anything. Jail was just a momentary problem. Of course he would never wind up back here again. In fact, God was going to get him out soon, he was confident, because God is a good and merciful God and Slim was his son ___ he was a Presbyterian you know. Slim was not that bad. True he had sex with an awful lot of women. But they all seemed to love him and understand and he was very gentle and compassionate with them. He really liked them. Drugs were just fun and harmless enough.

He was able to work for a good living. He was proud of his college education and his ability as a brick layer. He loved the Lord too, with all his heart, and we would often pray and read the Bible together. I thought that surely this good man just needs a little more education and so we would study together and we reviewed over the months what it meant to be a Christian ___ His doctrine was orthodox. Then one day, we were studying the book of Galatians, "No whore-monger, adulterer, etc. shall inherit the kingdom of heaven?" He looked at me and said, "Rev. I believe in God jus' the same as you. I know that sex and rocks (crack cocaine) is sin. But I know that God forgives sinners otherwise I cain't be saved.

I confessed my sin, an' I prayed for God to give me a new heart. So I guess God is jus' gonna have to unnerstan' that I need that shit to get along, that's all. God's jus' gonna have to unnerstan'." I was stunned. Here was a man who had neatly combined salvation by grace with free sex and drugs. But it was not his audacious feat which stunned me. What hit me was the voice of the Church speaking through him: "We know that abortion, pornography and secular government education are destroying lives all around us. But we've confessed our sin and prayed for God to give us a new heart. So I guess God will jus' have to unnerstan' that we cain't risk all the good things o' this life jus' to obey him and get rid of abortion. We need this [stuff] to get along, that's all.

God's jus' gonna have to unnerstan'." What Slim meant of course, was that he could count on Good ol' God to keep on accepting him the way he was even though he refused to give up what to him were the good things of this world. We are shocked at the presumption of someone who thinks that God will wink at persistent physical fornication and drugs.

But are we as shocked at Christians who have drugged, their heart and mind with materialism to the extent that God just has to understand that their spiritual fornication with the good things of this world must be accepted because they cannot give them up in order to do what it takes to be a light in this world ___ protect the unborn, bring an end to pornography, transform the entire government and education system ___ to sacrificially bear witness to the saving grace of Jesus Christ to lost souls. Well, we are bright lights for Christ except where it gets threatening to our things, and of course good ol' God understands. He was once flesh like us. Right? The Kingdom of God is the blessing of meat and drink?

My eye wandered down the passage in Galatians, "uncleanness, jealousy, wrath, factions" and I thought about other similar passages which include, gossip, bearing a grudge, even cowardice, and drawing back, which "God jus' has to unnerstan'" in our lives. How much of our life is built on the same arrogant presumption toward God. How deep is our fornication against Him. How many god's infest our pantheon. How much our fear to rescue only reveals the fact that we need Rescuing from all these other god's first. Does God overlook and understand Slim excuses and save him? Does he understand the excuses of the American Church any better?

The whole matter of being Rescued from bondage to the other gods in our life ___ whether the god's of sex and drugs, or the gods we make of our house, job, church building, and the American Way ___ is bound up in the question of authority. It does no good to protest that houses and jobs are not sinful in and of themselves as are Slim's god's of sex and recreational drugs. Nothing may excuse us to disobey God whether it is a good thing in and of itself or a sinful thing in and of itself. Do these other gods have authority in our life to compel us to disobey God?

Let's list them separately: 1) Does a government have the God-like authority to command us to protect murderers? 2) Does our house have God's authority to command us to protect abortionists lest we lose it in a law suit? 3) Does our church building, or ministry, have God's authority to forgive us for letting children be murdered because our ministries were more important than their lives? ("Is this the sacrifice God requires?" Isaiah asked.) 4) Does our family have authority to replace God by threatening to disintegrate if we put God first and lay down our lives to protect His little ones? 5) Are we really putting our families first in a biblical way when we use them to justify why we must protect the rights of child killers instead of the rights of the children being killed?

In all of these ways we make idols out of our families, or the law, or houses, or ministries. All of these good things will rise up and condemn us one day as the Queen of the South and Sodom will rise to condemn Israel. These questions boil down to one: If God calls Slim's attempt to maintain his way of life "physical fornication", will He not call our attempt to maintain our way of life "spiritual fornication"? Will he find either acceptable? Can either of us escape damnation? Who has authority to refuse to commit spiritual fornication? That depends on who authorizes us to protect the innocent vs who authorizes us to protect their killers.

Who Authorized Rescue? After hearing what a Rescue is, in Section I, there are many who feel that we have rushed ahead in our explanation and rhetoric. They want to go back and ask, "Why ___ by what right and in whose name ___ can an individual claim authority to physically stop the killing of children when the government has made it legal and is even willing to protect these killers with its police, courts, and jails?" This is a question of authority: does the Bible give you the authority to protect a child's life? If so, is your authority to protect the child, greater than the state's authority to protect the child's killers? Some say the state has the authority to stop you at a property line and prevent your going on to save a baby from being murdered.

Not to stop at that line, they say, is rebellion against God's authority as it is handed down to human authorities ___ the state. In other words, if asked by God, "Why didn't you try and physically rescue these children? Why did you join with the state in protecting their killers by stopping your activities at the property line?" They believe they can confidently answer God, "Because you gave us no authority to protect these children when the state commands us to protect their killers." The problem with this understanding of authority, is that there are no instances in Scripture where a human government at any level was given the authority to frame laws which protected those who killed its innocent citizens. In fact, the exact opposite of this is the case.

Much of Scripture deals with the judgement God brings against the rulers who frame such laws, against their people who obey those laws, and even against those who tolerate those laws by permitting them to be obeyed by others. The implication of this is clear. Because God has not given the state the authority to pass laws which defend those who slay the innocent, then clearly when Christians rescue the innocent they are not in conflict with any authority which God has given the state. What is more, if the state does not have the authority to command you to disobey God by protecting baby killers, then it has no authority to justify you when God calls you to account for protecting child killers.

Romans 13 establishes these limits put on the governing authorities to, "reward good and punish what is evil." Coercing people to protect child murder is not good, therefore they have no authority to bind your conscience or behavior.

The Challenge: Let the Children Speak for Themselves Even though there are literally hundreds of reasonable answers to those who claim we have no authority to protect the innocent from murder, I have discovered that most people are neither for or against Rescue because of the dictates of cold reason. On a talk show once, I was called insulting for insisting that a caller explain how it was she could believe abortion to be the public murder of a fellow human being ___ equal to her ___ and not think it right to literally save that life.

I was accused of treating those who were against Rescue as if they were not pro-life by suggesting that they come to grips with the simple statement, "Abortion kills children." The next caller said, "Of course we believe abortion is murder, why do you keep saying that we are denying this belief just because we are against Rescue?" This accusation took me quite by surprise, but I'm afraid many have a similar misunderstanding of why I go back to the bottom line again and again: it is not because those against Rescue do not believe abortion is murder, it is because they do believe it to be murder and I am trying desperately to get them to see that under any other circumstances they would say that it is never wrong to prevent murder, regardless of the price one might pay, for trying to rescue the victim.

I am not saying that those who deny the validity of Rescue are not pro-life. I am saying that they are inconsistent with what they believe. If you believe that abortion is murder, but also that we must obey laws which protect each murder, try this: write Human Life International and ask for one of their postcards of a dead child, and put it on your bathroom mirror. Forget this book, let the child speak for himself. This is perhaps my most offensive challenge: I do not believe that you can do this for long and continue to object to Rescue. There may be a thousand reasons why we do not set up that picture, but they all boil down to one: We cannot.

We do not have what it takes to listen to the testimony of this child for even five minutes a day and still say it is wrong to physically protect him. I am not making a moral argument here, I am simply stating a fact: you cannot do it without your life changing. If you think I have condemned you of a moral lapse, then you need to examine why you think being unable to look a dead child in the eye is a condemnation of you. What has happened to us? There was a time when the only argument we had about babies was whether or not to baptize them. How is it that now we are seriously arguing that it is wrong for someone to physically protect babies from murder?

And why is it that so many leaders feel like they ought to defend why they are not doing it, by condemning those who do try to save these children's lives? "But who is condemning who?" asks the non-rescuer. "Isn't this whole book a condemnation of those who don't do sit-ins?" No. It is a book about why we refuse to sit-in at abortion clinics. It is about how sittingin can reflect a God-centeredness to our lives which no other activity yet proposed can. It is also about how sitting-in can be just another idol. God wants our hearts, not our treasure, not even our sit-ins, because He knows that where our heart is there will our treasure be also.

This book is about the cross in all of our life, not just in the pro-life part, or the Sunday morning part, but in all of our lives ___ manifesting a fearlessness of those who can only destroy the body and a reverent fear of Him who can destroy body and soul. Idolatry ___ looking to something other than God to save or provide for us ___ cuts us off from God, not just in the small realm the idol rules, but finally for our whole life, twisting and stunting it, because God will not tolerate a rival. There are five blessings of God which have become idols in the sanctuaries of our churches and lives, The cross threatens them. We will either put them in their proper place, or God will put us in our proper place of judgement.

5 American Idols in Our Churches Today there is a growing number of people who no longer assume that being human has any fundamental connection with having a right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. How can the Church speak prophetically to them? If we purchase our freedom to do what we want to do ___ worship, build buildings, be incorporated and tax exempt, have ministries, and "obey God" ___ at the expense of permitting doctors to kill babies, why should not the world purchase its freedom to do what it wants to do by killing babies? Ask not for whom the mother sacrifices her child.

1. The idolatry of thinking man's laws can save us. Where does the idea come from that if we just seize the reins political power in the land then, we can make it illegal to kill the unborn? Moses could have become the next Pharaoh and brought legal emancipation to Hebrew slaves. But God knew that Pharaoh's law could never free His people from the slavery which dwelt in their heart. He knew that no secular government could grant freedom to His people, or they would look to governments instead of Him. This slavery always looks to Egypt, Chaldea or the American Constitution for liberty rather than the word of God. This slavery always asks the laws of the nations to define what is permissible and impermissible for the Christian.

It says, "Show us the way, nations of the earth, that we may walk in it." He knew only a desert could begin a process which is still going on today 4,000 years later. We His people still hate that desert as much as ever, and are still whining around looking for some way to get out of that desert without having to face the giants in the land. Instead Moses identified with God's people against the "law" of Pharaoh, preferring suffering and reproach with God's people to all the treasures of Egypt. He would not tolerate a citizenship which forfeited his identification and citizenship with God or His people. Daniel, like Moses, also refused to identify with the world against God.

Can you hear the Jewish elders approaching Daniel to remind him that God had given him political obligations which should not be thrown away by breaking a temporary injunction against prayer: "But Daniel, it is just thirty days that you cannot pray. If you throw away the political stewardship God has given you, then who will protect Israel in exile from men like Haman? God has put you here. God has not given you a lion's den ministry!" Can you hear Daniel's scorn: "You blind elders. You think the lions you can see are the ones which can hurt me? They can only crush flesh and bone. It is the political lions you cannot see whom you ought to fear ___ they purchase your very soul for a compromise. You say God has put me here? So He has.

And if I am to be faithful to Him politically, if I am strong enough to protect your skins from persecution, then I must be strong enough to stand up to mere physical lions, or I will never have what it takes to withstand the true test in the political arena where spirit and soul are bought and sold." How many times have we heard, "The real solution to abortion is to change the laws!" This is idolatry. Are we who are afraid to lay down our lives for our neighbor fit to wield political power? "Maybe if we can just get worldly power we can make everything right." We mutter to ourselves. Thus "change the law" becomes little more than a chant to our new God, "Law-and-Order." Maybe he can make it so we do not have to take up our cross in this generation.

Maybe Law-and-Order can enable us to keep our possessions and save babies too. The solution to legalized murder must go deeper than a mere law against it. This is why politics is a false God, a false solution to abortion ___ or any other social evil ___ white-wash on a tomb. Yes, we must change the law, but never as an excuse to avoid taking up the cross. In fact, only cross bearers in the political arena ___ those who do not worship man's laws, law courts, or voters' whims ___ will be able to change it.

2. The idolatry of thinking that saying the right words or pushing the right education program can save us. We must do more than make people aware that the unborn are human. We must raise up a generation that will do what it takes to personally and corporately defend the innocent. Our society's legal and social structure is built on the foundation of the sanctity of all human life and the personal responsibility of each citizen to protect his neighbor. This foundation stone ___ that all men are equal and obligated to protect one another ___ was not the insight of secular men, but is itself rooted in the more profound cornerstone on which Christ built His Church.

In Matthew 16, Jesus said that Peter's confession, "You are the Christ the son of the living God." would serve as the cornerstone of the Church and nothing could prevail against it. Peter did not realize that intrinsic to being the Messiah-King was the requirement that He lay down His life for His people. So in the next breath, Jesus had to rebuke Peter for wanting to build the Church on a different cornerstone. In fact, Jesus played on the two stones by calling Peter's rejection of the cross a "stumbling stone" and called Peter, "Satan," for even suggesting it. The cross ___ dying to our self and living for our Lord, laying down our lives for each other ___ this is the foundation of the Church. Against these things the gates of hell will not prevail.

The captain of our salvation leads in these matters ___ He is the cornerstone and we align our lives on His as stones are aligned on the corner stone. "If any man would be my disciple. . . ." Jesus ended his comments to Peter that day. If words could make us free, then men would not have died because of the Gospel, or for the Declaration of Independence, or anything else. At best words can only survey the path of freedom, they cannot walk it for you. If a constitution could make men free, then the 75 banana republics which have constitutions identical to ours would be free. If education could make us free then Jesus would not have bothered to die, he would simply have instituted a new Rabbinic school.

The religious root of the Declaration of Independence and the fundamental principle of law which has made our civilization possible is the universal call to lay down our lives for the least of these among us. This is what equality means. We must live as if we are not equal by chance or by choice. Rather, because we were created equal before God, we have rights only because we are endowed with them by our Creator. Only when the Church lives or dies as if this is true, does the world have a chance at freedom. This religious cornerstone, and the political house built on it are under serious attack, in this nation, because we have reduced ourselves to mere words.

Those who kill people who are useless to them, are no longer afraid to use our words and admit that those they kill are "human". The abortion culture is no longer afraid of the implications of destroying unnecessary, unwanted, human life, and they are unafraid of any who might oppose them with cheap words. For the humanist, the value of unborn human life is negligible compared to the value of the life-style of the mother. Though the American Church may want to answer the world in the name of the Living God, our words fall to the ground: we affirm the humanity and equality of the unborn, yet refuse to protect them. For the Church today, the value of a child's life is negligible compared to the value of the life-style of the Christian.

Other things are more important than their lives, things like the world's respect, tax exemption, not getting sued, and our "ministry" ___ these things are more valuable than the very life of our neighbor. And this is why the solution to legalized murder must go deeper than mere words and pictures which educate people. Liberty and justice for all is not built on words alone. Education that does not lead to lives laid down a false god, a false solution to abortion or any other evil.

3. The idolatry of thinking that "stewardship" can save us by excusing our disobedience. Most of our "good reasons" for not protecting children come under the category of being a good steward of our possessions, ministry, calling, or family. We have put stewardship of our possessions and career above human life. Could you imagine Jesus telling the Pharisees in Mark 2:27: "God did not create possessions to serve man, he created men to serve their possessions!"?

Apparently the Church today can: "Korban!" we self-righteously declare to the pre-born, and so we set aside God's law for our traditions, "What we would have to lose in order to protect you, we preserve so that we can live comfortably in large Churches and devote ourselves to `Gospel ministry.'" Do I say this because possessions are wrong, or the Gospel should not be preached? Of course not. The Pharisees were not wrong for wanting to hallow the Sabbath, or support the temple. They were wrong for thinking God is hallowed by ministry, worship, buildings, and budgets established at the expense of innocent human life where these victims could have been rescued. The work of the Kingdom cannot be used an excuse to let someone kill a baby in public.

The solution to legalized murder must go deeper than plans which do not threaten our lifestyles, buildings and programs, otherwise stewardship becomes a false god, a false excuse to permit abortion or any other social evil ___ a false way to keep our possessions and justify first our making idols of them, and finally making love to them, all in the name of being a good steward of them in the kingdom.

4. The idolatry of thinking that activism ___ doing the right things ___ will save us. Rescue does not make us right with God. The act of sitting-in itself must not be treated as an act which absolves us of blood guiltiness. If we preach Rescue at the abortion clinic as if it is the totality of righteousness, then we who Rescue there have been found with a another form of idolatry. We must always keep the prophetic edge of our ministry sharp and not become recruiters for some new activist strategy. Activism cannot become God. Where Rescue is reduced to an activist strategy it loses its prophetic edge. Ultimately laying down your life for another is not a strategy, it is God's design for His Kingdom.

Dying to self is not a matter of the special calling of the activist, it is the pattern of Christian living. "Die to self" must not become the exclusive a code word for "anti-abortion sit-in". If we as different parts of the body of Christ were truly faithfully dead to ourselves in each area where God has called us, then mere jail or fines, or the seizing of our houses would have been irrelevant to our willingness Rescue the unborn ___ persecution would be a way of life. Yes, dying to self has strategic implications, but the power of any strategy derived from it will be lost if we reduce ourselves to making it an activist strategy.

The irreducible core is that we must protect the innocent in theory and in real life, in legal institutions and in history, in Sunday School and in the street. The solution to legalized murder must go deeper than activism and sit-ins, otherwise these activities can become a false god, a false solution to abortion or any other social evil.

5. The idolatry of thinking that preserving God's material blessings is a reason God will accept for us to permit murder. The abortionist we say worships the God of Money? So do we, fearing to lose the favor of the Money God if we get fined or sued. Do we accuse the women who seek abortions of sacrificing their infants to the gods of Career, Family Name, Respectability, and Nice Things? Then we only accuse ourselves when we refuse to risk our career, family peace, respectability, and nice things to save these children. Far be it from us to incur the wrath of our local 20th Century deities ___ Baal Money, Baal Status, Baal Family Time.

Do the abortionists and the women seeking to murder their children worship the God of the State by letting what is merely legal dictate their moral choices? Then our obeying trespass laws and injunctions becomes that much more an act of homage to our new lord, the State, by letting his protection of child murder dictate our moral response as we join in the protection scam. To the extent that we draw back in order to protect any part of our lifestyle instead of protecting the children, that part of our life is purchased by infant sacrifice. The mother's sacrifice of her child, which we might have prevented but did not, becomes our sacrifice with her to our mutual gods.

This will only seem harsh and judgmental if we do not take into account that the same God who commanded these women and their doctors saying, "Thou shalt not kill!" has commanded us to be our brother's keeper, to love our neighbor as ourself, to defend the fatherless, to rescue the innocent, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. In a word, He commands us to have the mind of Christ.

All the reasons for not protecting children, may be, in and of themselves, the good blessings God promised us ___ money, possessions, a good reputation, social stability, honoring the governor, a good job, ministry programs ___ they are all good, until they are bought with something other than blood of Christ and grasped after as if they can cleanse us of our sin of blood guiltiness on that day when we must give account of why we rescued our blessings instead of the innocent. Who will justify us on that day when He says, "Why should I not judge you according to your own measure? In so far as you did not find my brethren worth suffering to protect in this life, I do not find you worth suffering to protect in the next."?

What god will we then call to be our defense attorney? The Money God? The Reputation and Career God? The Stewardship God? The Political God? The Education God? The Ministry God? the Law-and-Order God? Where are our building programs now? Where is our reputation? Our money? Our Ph.D.'s? Our pastors, elders and governors who convinced us that we had better things to do than worry about "Abortion". Of these things we made our mighty fortress in this life ___ a fortress which did not include His little ones ___ let them protect us now. Whose blood will cover our sin? The blood of Him who said, "Inasmuch as you did not do it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you did not do it unto me.

Depart from me you cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels."? The solution to legalized murder must go deeper than limiting our efforts to those which do not threaten God's material blessings to us, otherwise these blessings ___ given by God's hand ___ become a false god, a false confidence that God will not spew us and our "blessings" out of His mouth as we have spewed out the little children from our lives. Idols never look like idols to those who need them to survive the problems and realities of every day life. All five of these idols in the Church are actually God's blessings which we have bowed down to. Pointing them out got the prophets killed because God's people would not permit those prophets to touch what had become holy to them.

Idolatry is looking for justification, sanctification, wisdom, and authority in this life or the next from any thing other than God. Whose covenant will sustain us, our covenant with God or our covenant with the gods of this world? Who alone can provide for us in all things, God or the abortionist whom I agree to protect? God or my job whom I serve? God or the house and family which I build? God or the city which I vainly watch? These are the issues of Christianity and culture. These are the issues of Rescue.

CHAPTER 5:

BRUTALITY

Building up the Monuments to the Prophets

"NO! CHRISTIANS WILL NOT TRADE THEIR SOUL TO AVOID BEATINGS BY POLICE, THEIR HOUSES BEING SEIZED BY JUDGES, OR SITTING IN JAIL FOR MONTHS OR YEARS. GOD'S CHURCH IS BIGGER THAN ANY THREAT THE WORLD CAN BRING. THERE IS NO PIT SO DEEP THAT GOD IS NOT DEEPER STILL. OUR POSSESSIONS AND OUR SKINS BE DAMNED! WE WILL NOT SELL OUT OUR LORD." There was a time when such an impassioned speech would be considered heroic. Can't you just hear someone crying out in agonized faith, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an abolitionist, or a Christian listening to the roar of the bloodthirsty Roman crowd as he awaits his turn in the arena. Can't you hear them crying out to God in some forgotten jail cell?

And it makes you feel all brave and warm inside because you are a part of this great church which has been so often willing to die rather than deny its Lord. And look what such faith has produced. The blessings of God! The greatest missionary country in the world with the wealth and technology to support massive outreach. "Yes, God heard those cries." We say to ourselves. "And to be honest, we'd risk it all again ___ I'm sure ___ if there ever were a real need." It was with similar conviction that the Pharisees brought their flowers to the monuments they had built to the prophets: "Great men! Great men!" They muttered, "Now, had we been there, we would have backed that Jeremiah right up! We'd have walked with him step for step! . . .

Great men!" they used to mutter as they gathered around the tombs. And so, like the Pharisees, we bear witness against ourselves as sons of those who murdered the prophets. "Great men, those saints and Martyrs! Why If I were in ancient Rome, I'd have been right there sticking it in Caesar's face." I imagine to myself.

We Have Met the Pharisees, and They Is Us This is why I have a difficult time condemning the police officers who beat us, or the judges who imprison us, and threaten us with lawsuits. I know that they are wrong for doing these things to us because it is the children who suffer ultimately. But how can I condemn others when I see their sin writ large in my own overwhelming temptation to shrink back? When I stop to ask, "Who are these judges and police the agents of: the terrible abortion industry? The secular humanist plot?" I realize, "No. They are agents of you and me, of Pastor Smith and Dr. Jones Th.D..

They are agents of all those who know better but would rather tolerate those who protect the killers." It would be one thing if we could just condemn them as pagans, but God gives us no such opportunity for pride. For one thing, many in the forefront of crushing Christian Rescuers, are not just Christians, but notable Christians ___ Major Burnette of the Atlanta Police Department for 25 years kept an open Bible on his desk and certificates of distinguished standing with Bill Gothard on his wall. Assistant Chief of Police Bob Vernon of the Los Angeles Police Department, wrote books on what it means to be a Christian police officer.

Yet he personally presided over the systematic torture of thousands of "fellow" Christians ordering 65 year old grandmothers, physically handicapped people in wheel chairs and pregnant mothers to be beaten, all so that women 6 months pregnant could kill their children without delay. And he did so, like Burnette, in the name of the Lord. Christians like prosecutors Lee O'Brien of Atlanta and the prosecutor of Santa Clara County, California, who defend abortion from the Scriptures in court "because it's my job." Christian men like Judge Guarino of Philadelphia or Judge Catskey of Redding, California take their Christian Faith seriously and yet do all they can to protect the murder of children in their own communities.

I would say that the horror of these men is that they are the professional representatives of the church in the legal system of America today. I would say that the horror is that they are actively supported and defended by their pastors and conscience. This is true and horrible, but it is a bit self-righteous of me to point it out, given my own failure of nerve. No, the real horror is that those of us who are not legal professionals are just as bought out, just as weighed down by the pressing needs of day to day life, as our legal representatives. We cannot live lives that reflect our faith any more than they can. Even though we are not police officers and judges, we are brought to the same terrible precipice of decision ___ the children or your job, choose!

Most of us are merely simple business men and women, pastors, homemakers, salesmen of insurance, cars, homes ___ the good life in its infinite forms. Yet even so, we cannot afford to risk leaving all this good life by risking jail, lawsuits, and beatings . . . we just can't. And here is the horror: Knowing, as few others do, the ghastly slaughter taking place at the heart of motherhood and humanity in each abortion, we knowingly close perhaps the clearest window God has begun to open into the womb ___ the window of our willingness to share a small, tiny fragment of the suffering of the unborn. Thus we join hands ___ on our small insignificant level ___ with the Christian judges and officers who see to it that the doors of America's Dachau's stay forced open.

We voluntarily draw back, not only from Rescue, but from standing with Rescuers who are brutalized by beatings, jail, and lawsuits. Because we are not there, they are not freed to rescue again, and others fear to step up to replace them.

The Window on the Womb This is what abortion brutality means to me. It is not a very flattering perspective. "If wombs had windows," we pro-lifers say with a knowing look, "there would be no abortion!" Well, wombs do have windows ___ you. How does your life expose the horror of the dismembered child? How does your brokenness reflect their brokenness? How does your unity with them rebuild the ties of a common humanity which are being sundered in our generation child by child, church by church, school by school, Christian by Christian? What do people see in the window of your life? Do they see the reality of the shattered child? Or do they see the sleek easy health and comfort of the abortionist snug in the bosom of our society's esteem?

How can I look down on judges and policemen who refuse to use their authority to give these children a hearing in their courts or a chance in the street? How can I condemn, when I put the cares of my world as much above the sacrifice of protecting children as the judges and policemen do? What is brutality? Brutality is often what God permits to prove the authenticity of His Word and ours. It becomes our crucible. "No crucible, no gold." the scriptures say again and again. That is to say, as we walk with the Lord at an abortion clinic, we must not shrink back from treating the brutality to the unborn child as He would.

Nor should we be surprised when a measure of the brutality directed against the child becomes directed at us in the form of beatings, injustice in court, and long prison sentences when we chose to "be mistreated along with the people of God rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time, and regard the disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt." When brutality threatens us personally, it is tempting to shift attention from the suffering of the unborn to the "suffering" of the Christians who defend them. God preserve us from such "compassion" which turns our focus from their murder to our discomfort; from loss of life to loss privlege.

To put our suffering above the children is like confusing a window with the things you see through it. God has made you a window for others to see through your life, to the reality beyond. You don't take a window and mount it on a museum wall and autograph it. Our "suffering" is not an end in itself, it is a window through which we can see clearly what is beyond. By trying to save a life, we become first a window and then a portal through which an otherwise indifferent world might first see, and then enter into a new way of life. We want others to pass through us and be themselves transformed into the image of God, and with Him, take up His cross and follow. It is not the door or window itself, it is the reality beyond that we seek to frame by our lives.

Your compassion for the prisoner of Christ in jail must be compassion that reaches through the brutality against that Christian to lead you to do something to prevent the brutal murder of the child, even if all you do is help free that Christian so he can rescue again. Your actions to defend fellow Christians from police and court brutality must not be to create a climate where we escape persecution, but rather to encourage Christians to be free to obey regardless of the persecution. Our freedom in this or any country does not depend on what the law says. We are always free to obey God whether in America or in North Korea. The only difference is the nature of the punishment we will receive if we act on our freedom.

To treat the laws of a country as if they give or deny freedom is idolatry. Man's laws can merely reward or punish our freedom in Christ. They never grant, establish, or remove freedom from us. We must exercise our God given freedom to protect the innocent, or we are in bondage.

The Martyr's Crown This is why the martyr lies at the heart of Christian witness. He has remained free in His obedience to God ___ He witnesses to the finality of Christ's Lordship ___ regardless of the cost. If you think there are no pro-life martyrs, it is only because the windows of our lives have been so clouded by activism, and politics, and sermons, and books, and articles that we cannot see the true martyrs ___ the 25 million children ___ much less join them. These children are martyred by Christians who cling to the American Way at any cost to the little ones. Each child is a unique witness to the creative love and care of his Father in Heaven. Each one is struck down for the testimony he brings to his parents . . . and to us.

The children become in their death, windows into the murderous selfishness of their parents, the doctors, the police, the courts, and if truth be told, our own murdering hearts: Every reason a mother uses to justify her act, and the police and judges use to justify their defense of her act, all of us use to justify our protection of their bloody work. Should we be surprised if the brutality directed against the pre-born should be directed at us if we stand in solidarity with them? By not walking, by being beaten by police, by going to jail, we pay the price of refusing to assist those who seek to silence their still small voices. When we rescue, we join the children in their word of hope to their mothers, fathers, and even to the whole world.

As the police beat us we buy precious time for their mothers, as well as the world, to hear their tiny testimony and turn. As we prefer jail to paying money for our release, we join them in their inability to buy, not their freedom, but their very lives. The Christian's willingness to spend years behind bars opens up a window onto their plight and our coming judgement: "You have more than theoretical value, your life is worth at least 3 days, 3 months or even 3 years of my life in jail. I will not walk away because you cannot walk away. I will not pay bail or fine to be free, because you cannot purchase your life, much less your freedom.

Because you have had your rights stripped from you without mercy, I will renounce my rights in this society and not use my time in court to plead for mercy for me, but I will insist on pleading for mercy for you." Those years in jail become a picture of what is in store for us if we harden our hearts to their cry. As we see the Christian sitting in jail, his body broken by the brutality of the Christian police officers, who are directed by Christian judges, ignored by Christian pastors, and abandoned by fellow Christian laymen, may we all see the far greater injustice in the womb ___ the wrath of discovery poured out on the little ones.

As Christians sit in cells bound by the visible walls of concrete, and steel; may we see through them to the far greater threat to our freedom in the invisible walls of our voluntary cooperation with the abortion culture. These invisible walls hold us back from the simple call of the cross to love our neighbors as ourselves, to do unto them as we would have them do unto us. Our invisible bonds of cooperation hold us back as surely as the visible walls hold back the missionary who has become a prisoner of Christ.

Who Is Sufficient for These Things? But let's be practical. How many of us can afford to leave everything and stand with the Church at the door of the death camp? How many of us can afford to lose our jobs, our houses, our church buildings? Isn't it much better to just stand symbolically somehow? This is the example judges like Catskey, prosecutors like Lee O'brien and police officers like Bob Vernon have set for us. Furthermore there is no pro-life leader or follower who has been truly consistent in standing with the children at all cost. Whose example will we walk in? Is it even possible? Yes it is possible. We have the example of Jesus Christ and we must continue to strive to walk in it.

Regardless of how many times we compromise, we must never accept our compromise as a way of life. Today maybe you can't rush out and stand. But you can begin to take steps to take that stand next year. You can begin to protect your property or get rid of it. You can begin to raise support, or take a second job to contribute it to the support of someone who is leaving everything. You can make a daily or weekly phone call to some petty tyrant judge somewhere and tell him to let God's people go that they might serve Him. You can begin to set your affairs and priorities in order so that your whole life reflects the holocaust ___ so that your whole life becomes a window onto the reality of what is happening in the American womb.

Brutality and injustice toward us raises the question, "Will you stand with the children and so become a window to their world of torture and death?" or, "Will you stand with the world and cooperate with those who protect their killers." The hardness of society's heart, the Church's heart, and even our own heart, makes us realize that we are not prepared to become that window and so we must ask: "What are we doing to be able to stand with them 2 or 3 years from now?" The need is not going away. Will we still be using the same old excuses for not standing then? The church will stand. I will stand. You will too. Why am I so confident that we will stand? Because God has promised that He will not be left without a witness!

Your broken body, your life poured out, may be the only view our generation has, not only into the womb, but onto the cross itself. You know God is calling you. Begin now to answer and prepare for that coming day when you can answer fully.

CHAPTER 6:

INTOLERANCE

What Does It Mean to Be Intolerant? I have this neighbor, and my wife cannot tolerate his loud music. When she asked what we should do I suggested: "You can: block it out of your mind; argue with him; make friends and convert him to your kind of music (or just get him to play his quietly); lobby for a noise ordinance; threaten his (or his dog's) life; throw a rock through his window; picket his house; destroy his hi-fi; move away; or shoot him (or his dog). All of these are ways we can express our intolerance. Which one, will effectively win his heart and end his loud invasion?" To which she answered, "Do we really want to win his heart?

A lot of those other things sounded more fun." Much of our life is spent trying to match the appropriate level of intolerance to the many things that we should not tolerate. Intolerance is what we do to those things which we do not want to see continued in our presence and would like to see eliminated from the world all together. Intolerance conveys closed mindedness, putting you beyond investigation and discussion on the matter. It puts you in a frame of mind to take action, to bring to an end whatever it is you are intolerant of. The key concept of intolerance is "eliminate". In a word, intolerance is the opposite of choice. Almost anything that you would like to see eliminated is something that someone has chosen to bring into being.

If we can understand intolerance, perhaps rather than fearing it, we can be proud of it in its rightful place.

Four Expressions of Intolerance. 1. Symbolic Intolerance. If you are intolerant to ideas, you can close your mind against them, be rude about them, speak against them, publish against them, publicly demonstrate against them. This is the battle of one idea against another.

2. Positive intolerance. Usually we think of eliminating something as negative. But sometimes the best ways to remove what we cannot endure is to provide alternatives to it. Prohibitionists, for instance, installed drinking fountains in the work place and on street corners so sheer thirst would not be an excuse for the working man to drink.

3. Physical intolerance of things. If you are physically intolerant of "things", such as nukes or beer, you will attempt to physically neutralize them. Of course you want to make them illegal, but in the mean time you want to do things which will both protect society from them and move others to take their threat seriously. If it is "actions" you are intolerant of, you could prevent them from taking place.

4. Physical intolerance of people. You eliminate the things and actions you cannot tolerate by physically hurting, or killing, the people who do them, or create them. For instance, in 1989 a woman planted a remote control land-mine next to the parking place of the chairman of a large corporation which was involved in animal experimentation. Apartheid and Jim Crow laws are particularly odious forms of legal intolerance directed physically toward people in a minority group. The ANC, race riots, and reverse discrimination in equal opportunity laws are equally odious forms of personal intolerance directed toward the people in the racial majority.

Who Is Intolerant in the Abortion Wars? For pro-lifers, we fear being called "intolerant" about as much as we fear any name they could throw at us. This is because we have confused mercy and kindness with toleration. Often kindness is the exact opposite of toleration. Failure to apply appropriate intolerance toward bad behavior of children can be deadly for the child. And, depending on who the child is, for a whole society as King David found out. It is time we understand what intolerance is and how we can express it effectively to drive child killing back to hell. We must lead our society and Church to be as intolerant of child killing, and those who defend it, as they are of the Nazi party, and those who defend it.

I am intolerant of child killing, of child killers, of the police and political systems which protect child killers, of a society which encourages child killers and of a Church which tolerates the whole lot of them. I think you should be too. I think we need to express our intolerance in a way that appropriately reflects God's intolerance to each of these facets of the growing abortion culture. But, I am amazed that so many people are afraid of being called intolerant when the accusation comes from perhaps the most intolerant people on the earth: abortion advocates. Go through the four kinds of intolerance in respect to how abortion advocates treat the children they do not want:

1) They are symbolically intolerant by calling them "fetuses", "products of conception", or "parasites"; calling the murder a "termination", or "surgical procedure". They call pro-lifers "violent" when we picket, and "emotional" when we argue.

2) They express no positive intolerance of children ___ they have never provided alternatives for women who bear their children and need help ___ because even more intolerable to them than pregnancy is motherhood. What they try and pass off as their two "positive" solutions to children are: contraception ___ prevent them from even existing in the first place; and government welfare and day care programs ___ forced wealth redistribution and government control of child rearing ___ but never an act of personal charity. They fight personal charity because they are so hardened against children that they cannot imagine that anyone else might be capable of simple compassion (see how they fight adoption).

3) They show physical intolerance of things by painting signs on the Supreme Court steps and defacing offices buildings which hold pro-life organizations.

4) They show their physical intolerance of people by bodily attacking Rescuers, throwing aids infested urine and sperm on them, often beating and biting them until bloody. But most pointedly, they show ultimate physical intolerance of people by terminating children they have no use for with what terrorists and the CIA call, "extreme prejudice".

Regardless of how intolerant or violent we become, we will never even come close to practicing the kind of intolerance which they practice 4,500 times a day. If we treated abortionists with the intolerance that they treat their victims, then in two or three days we would run out of abortionists. Another way to put the pro-life movement's intolerance into perspective is to compare it to any other movement of conscientious civil dissent. Pro-lifers have never rioted, looted, or burned down sections of town as happened in the sixties. More property damage was caused in the 1986 campus demonstrations against apartheid than in all abortion clinic bombings put together since 1973 (about 32 death camps burned). Compare also the harshness with which pro-lifers are treated: The average bomber gets 20 years of prison, the rioters, at most got suspended sentences. First time Rescuers (who are entirely passive) can get maximum penalties.

This Present Darkness It is important to put even the most violent aspect of the pro-life track record into perspective. Because if you listen to the abortion culture, you can easily get the impression that pro-lifers, generally, and Rescuers in particular, are hate filled, violent, and abusive liars. Many Christians are suddenly emerging after a 60 year cultural sleep to hear all of these accusations willingly portrayed by the press. Often, they automatically assume that there must be some substance to them. No one, in their sheltered experience, is willing to lie so thoroughly to slander someone else. "Surely," they think, "if the police say that they were assaulted and even charge someone with a felony, there must be some substance to it.

When the child killing advocates say that picketers and sidewalk counselors are rude and abusive ___ why would they lie?" This phenomena of bald faced lies on the part of the child killers, the police who protect them, and the willingness of the public to believe them, has disturbed me more than any other part of this battle with the exception of the mangled bodies of the children and the deep scars of their mothers. I have three explanations for their lies and the Church's willingness to believe those lies:

1. The act of abortion, itself, is fundamentally inhuman. Abortion violates everything that men and women are at the core of their being. To uncover it in its stark reality is more than the soul can bear. Any lie, any covering, is preferable. The guilt runs so deep that mothers coming in to kill their young and the staff of the death camps really hear us calling them abusive names when in fact all that is actually said is, "Let us help you, don't kill your child." by one young woman offering a mother help. Their own guilt abuses them. They must flee it.

2. The act itself is the epitome of mindless violence. The image of a mother holding her child still while the hands of a physician trained in healing stalk her helpless child to dismember it for money, defies explanation ___ it must be hidden. We will accept any lie about those who expose it if only we can redraw the veil of ignorance over it.

3. Knowing that this is taking place publicly in our towns and neighborhoods makes us fellow conspirators. Such knowledge is too terrible to contemplate. It cannot be true! Splatter movies ___ The Texas Chain-saw Massacres, Jason, and Freddie Kreuger ___ come close to portraying the reality of innocence stalked by evil. If abortion is what our entire society knows in its heart that it must be, then all of us have helped unleash a monster of this magnitude in our neighborhood. It just cannot be!

The mass hysteria which stoops at nothing to hide this nightmare from awareness has projected its own sin onto the pro-life movement. Intolerance, violence, rudeness, lack of love and compassion ___ this is abortion. They cannot bear to think of what they have done in the name of freedom, career, sex, love, and personal rights. And yet, listening to the media you would think that it is those seeking to protect the unborn who are guilty of violence. You would think it should be easy to convince people that this insanity should stop. But insanity listens only to its own twisted, guilty logic. Those who could stop it are stunned by the awesome reality which they have permitted to grow up along side them. It cannot be true. We must not let it be true.

And so we turn our backs and pretend that it is not true. Psychiatrists and counselors have often noted the phenomenon of mothers who willfully blind themselves to husbands who sexually molest their daughters and sons. She will do anything to hold her family together. She even thinks that protecting her children from divorce, and the public revelation of their father's evil, is more important than preventing the evil by protecting them from him. Though she "sees" what is going on, she refuses to see it. Facing the reality of her own personal failure to protect her children and family is more horrible to her than the reality of her husband's perversion ___ and so she continues to let her children be devoured.

It is not unusual for a wife in these circumstances to project the very things she is hiding onto those who disturb her illusions. Any lie will do to cover her sense of shame. She will physically attack anyone who threatens her dream world ___ including her own children who are seeking to escape. Is this insanity? Welcome to America, the land where 25 million children were publicly murdered in sight of at least 40 million people who believe that it is murder but not only did next to nothing to stop it, they attack anyone who tried to expose it or protect her children. Can you see why all solutions which lack in principle the element of physical intolerance will never generate the moral force to pierce the layered veil of shadowed conspiracy which shrouds this cancer?

The evil is too great. Our guilt overwhelms us. We do not want to know. We will attack whom ever tries to tell us. We will attack anyone who shows us that there is something we can do to prevent it. So we cannot afford to even support Rescuers. That is why any activity which does not deal directly with and overcome our fear of the reality of abortion will never arouse people to penetrate the veil of evil darkness which protects child killing today. This is why we must be visibly intolerant.

Piercing the Darkness Intolerance is usually thought of in terms of narrow minded people who pick insignificant things on which to base their rejection and hatred of others. But there are a number of things which demand intolerance, rape, bigotry, wife and child abuse to name four things. People who are intolerant of these things are not considered narrow minded. We need to know how we can tell what those things are which no one should be free to choose. What should we be intolerant of, that is, what should we not let others choose to do? Some people say that the law should be their guide to toleration.

Some have even made an absolute moral principle along these tolerant lines: "What the law permits (or tolerates) we permit." This principle is dangerously useless for helping someone think through Rescue. It is useless because it is nothing more than a description of what we normally do. It is dangerous because it deceives us into thinking that what we normally do is a moral principle to guide what we ought to do. That is why it seemed so correct on the surface: we follow it most of the time. But that is because in most circumstances the cost of stirring ourselves to be the lone voice against what is at the moment a relatively harmless (i.e. a socially accepted) evil, is more than we care to pay. This does not make our tolerance right.

It is not enough to determine whether or not something is socially permitted. We have to ask whether or not it is something that God allows us to permit. When it comes to answering this question, the "what the law permits" principle is utterly useless. Of course the law permits it. We want to know if God will permit us to join in that sin by obeying that law. Does God allow us to tolerate or permit child killing? Compare child killing to rape. You may believe that you would try to physically prevent a rape, whether or not there were a law permitting it.

But, "Let not he who putteth his armor on, boast as he who taketh it off." It is not surprising that Proverbs 24:11, "Rescue those dragged to the slaughter," is introduced with the words: "If you faint in the day of adversity, how small your strength is." All of us are bold as a lion in our dreams. All of us have joined Corrie ten Boom in occupied Holland, and Richard Wurmbrandt in solitary confinement in the Gulag. We just know that we would protect Jews and preach the gospel no matter what anyone said.

Many of us cling to this self-delusion even in the face of the fact that we do not have the courage to speak out when ethnic slurs are cast and most of us have not shared the Gospel with anyone in the last three months, much less preached it to people who threaten us harm if we continue to bring them the claims of the Most High God. With Peter we say, "I will never forsake thee Lord!" And yet, in the day of adversity, the Church lets IRS 501(c)3 dictate what we preach. We let the Supreme Court determine where we pray. We let the child-killing trespass law determine our commitment to life.

We forgot that Jesus gave a very simple formula for our love and concern for him: "In as much as you do it to the least of these my little ones, you have done it unto me." "For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the Glory of His Father with the holy angels." What would you do for Jesus the King of the Universe? Probably as much as you do for the children crying out to you today for protection. Hitler never required the common people to kill Jews. He merely required them to permit him to kill them.

Hitler, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the National Education Association, the National Endowment of the Arts, your local abortionist ___ all they ask for is your toleration of what they do ___ in effect, your permission. So how far should our intolerance to child killing extend? Surely we need a symbolic form of intolerance: it must include a philosophical and theological dimension in addition to visible demonstrations, protests and lobbying. We should be providing positive intolerance in our alternatives to murder ___ crisis pregnancy centers, mom's houses, shepherding homes and chastity based sex education. But because it is murder, we must be physically protective, physically intolerant.

We should be willing to sympathize with and be unashamed of those whose intolerance to child killing leads them to destroy the abortion death camps. But more than anything else we must shine the light of intolerance toward abortion/murder which shone from the cross of Christ as he became utterly intolerant of a world of sin ___ which goes far deeper than the light created if they burn down at night, as satisfying and good as the warmth of that glow might be.

Shattering the Darkness What we do must reflect the differences, between child killing in the womb and other forms of assault. First, the mother has to be willing to at least go along with it, and usually finance it. Second, our society has degenerated to the point where it can be done publicly even with advertising. It is covered by insurance programs which do not cover child-birth. It is carried out and approved of by the educated cream of our society ___ the physicians and lawyers. Third, there is a political dimension: the Feminist movement has identified pregnancy as the central tool of male domination. Killing her child is an act of liberation for a woman, freeing her to take her rightful place in western civilization.

And fourth, we ___ you and I ___ have all permitted it to continue for years on end in our towns and cities. These realities set the field of combat which has come to be called the pro-life movement. Whenever you develop an analogy to guide what you would do, how you do it must take into account the complex reality of the lay of the battlefield. And the pro-life movement has certainly attacked the scope of the field in the vast array of activities it provides. But they all seem to be guided by divergent principles and yet they could compliment each other as parts of a greater whole: political activism, crisis pregnancy centers, care for pregnant and new mothers, public protest, and sidewalk counseling.

These have been going on for sixteen years but have always seemed to lack both a unifying concept as well as something which would galvanize large numbers of people into action more than once a year to fight an evil which goes on 4,500 times a day. What all of these lack is physically intolerant intervention. It does not matter that physical intervention is not necessarily appropriate to each of these areas any more than shooting a gun is appropriate to the Army surgeon, chaplain or even quarter master. But they must be part of the greater whole, if it is to be called an "army". The Pro-life movement is like a vast army. There are more than enough people and related organizations -- the hospital units, the equipment, the supply lines.

But they lack the attack capability to actually reach through the enemy's defenses and choke it to death. Perhaps the cost of such a weapon stretches the war department ___ it might cost someone their life, job, or rank. But if the enemy is worthy of your engagement, then the only way to get close enough to defeat him, is to get close enough for him to defeat you. And when you look at the cross you see that the only way to defeat him is to let him defeat you. Most assume that the only truly effective intervention is legal intervention ___ we must make it illegal to have an abortion ___ only the law can forcibly intervene. But the law alone is an inadequate solution, it must be rooted in the intolerance of a community committed to seeing it enforced.

The letter of the law is not sufficient to unify the efforts of the battle for life. In Canada, long before abortion was made legal, picketers were arrested for picketing an illegal abortion clinic. We need more than a change of law, we need a change of heart ___ hearts no longer afraid to spend and be spent for the kingdom of God. There must be something which incorporates the different forms of intolerance and directs them toward a grand conclusion which society can live with, a spiritual conviction which can undergird that law. Rescue provides that unifying field which can bind the elements together wherever the cross is the focus of their vision. Only changed hearts will do what it takes to shatter the darkness.

If the darkness is not being shattered then should we be confident that what we call "evangelism" is actually changing hearts? Rescue incorporates the necessary level of intolerance for each of the other elements of the solution to child killing to be most effective. Each Rescue is a capsule of the entire pro-life movement ___ compassionate counseling, offering alternatives, creating the basis for a legal challenge to Roe v. Wade in the courts, making a political statement, giving politicians a platform on which to take action, personally involving a cross section of the community, and reviving the church through a deep affirmation of the core of Judeo-Christian Faith in a God who saves, a God who intervenes, a God who Rescues.

The intolerance of Rescue uncovers the child killing conspiracy in our society root and branch. The persecution of Rescuers by every branch of government shows that child killing is not an isolated phenomena, it is not just "permitted", it is enforced by every level of our democratic/republican institutions which have become like gods to us. Rescue reveals the true heart of organizations such as the National Education Association, the Democratic Party (and many Republicans), main Line Denominations, the entire American penal and justice system, not to mention Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The persecution of Rescuers blandly permitted by the Church shows how much of the Church is hopelessly wed to the treasures of Egypt, hopelessly lusting after Babylonian officers painted on the walls of our temples. The power of Rescue is the power of the principles of the cross which build on repentance for our toleration of child killing, and a commitment to refuse to tolerate it. When you rescue, God physically intervenes through your life laid down for your neighbor ___ not just the unborn neighbor, but the abortionist, the police, the judges and fellow Christians who look the other way. When the Church becomes characterized by the light of this kind of love, it will finally shatter the darkness.

This should not be surprising, since repentance leading to healing is the keynote of the Church. It is what Jesus died to establish, rose again to secure and sent his Spirit to empower. In the cross God manifested his utter intolerance of sin, His supreme intolerance of a fallen creation. In Rescue we manifest the same intolerance, the same way, by paying part of the price for bringing healing. How does the Christian "kill" the abortionist, or "destroy" his clinic? By laying down our life for him, when we stand in solidarity with those he would murder, as Christ stood for us 2,000 years ago.

SECTION III: THE CROSS AND LIFE

"You will find," says the abortion culture, "that you cannot help but agree with our fundamental premise, which is, `there can never be any difference between the hungers of the flesh, and the will of God.' You watch, we will show you that in reality, you are on our side, despite what you say. Just look at yourself, you will stop rescuing in order to surround yourself with the same comforts of the flesh we surround ourselves with. You call it God's will that your fleshly comforts ___ or rescue organizations, or churches ___ might be preserved even if it means that you must permit these little ones to die today. And that is what we say about abortion and preserving the opportunity of the woman to surround herself with equal comforts even if it means her child must die."

The day of the rescue rally is past. It is now time to do what we said we would do at all those rallies ___ don't expect the cheering to continue when you answer the challenge of Satan to God.

7: The Cross and the Pro-life movement. pg. 29

8: The Cross and the Christian Life. pg. 34

9: The Cross and the Rescue Movement. pg. 40

CHAPTER 7:

THE CROSS AND THE PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT

"If I Were Pro-choice, You'd Be Dead!" In November of 1989, realizing the threat Rescue posed to their right to choose, the pro-death factions rallied the largest crowd they had ever had in order to run head to head with our first National Rescue in Washington D.C. Jeff White, Western Regional Director of Operation Rescue, a few others, and I put on our Operation Rescue T-shirts and walked into the crowd. We managed to get within a hundred feet of Molly Yard thundering on about the right to choose to kill when the police threw us out of this historic gathering.

As we were driving away in Jeff's full size pick up truck, he accelerated toward a of mob satisfied feminists crossing the street and slammed on his brakes skreetching to a halt within inches of the crowd scattering them. He stuck his head out the window and bellowed, "If I were pro-choice, you'd be dead now!" This might horrify the delicate pro-lifer, and confirm her suspicion that Rescuers really are out of control, but it is worth seeing in what Jeff did, a fundamental truth about how different we must be from those who advocate the choice to kill as a prime civil right. We are not pro-choice when it comes to killing people ___ if we were pro-choice then baby killing doctors would be killed by the dozens.

What does it take to get this across, not just to the pro-abortion majority in America, but to the Pro-life majority as well? Whether or not those scattering feminists got Jeff's point, do you? In the 1950's and '60's abortion was an issue ___ some argued for it and some against it. But by 1973 it stopped being an issue and became a national fact. Those who believed that killing the unborn was right were free to practice their faith. To the shame of the Church, who believed it murder, we were afraid to practice our faith. Their religion called them to cruelly murder children in order to advance their own ends. Our walk with the living God called for us to protect the defenseless in spite of what it did to advance or hinder our "ends".

We treated our faith as if it were theoretical, while they have treated theirs as worth living by, even worth sacrificing babies for. We have lost our credibility and they have gained credibility turning us into an abortion culture. Those who boldly proclaim what they believe, and then live consistently with it, will tend to gain credibility. They did, we did not. When the Church finally did begin to get tentatively involved in pro-life activities, we were very careful to make them permit choice. By permitting it, we worshipped in principle the "right" of the state to ordain murder, and the "right" of the mother to kill.

Every time there is a pro-life activity carefully announced as, "completely safe and legal," remember who first coined those words ___ those who want safe sex, and the feminist who demand safe, legal abortion. When the Church makes respectably safe legality in the eyes of a decadent, murdering world its cardinal virtue, it is sliding on a spiritual condom and going forth to a sterilized faith with only the appearance of fruitful vigor. It is ironic that intervening to save children is in need of lengthy defense among those who believe abortion is murder. And yet the activities which Christians believe "legitimate" are shaped by a philosophical foundation which permits women to choose to kill.

The litmus test for whether or not we have made compromise a principle in our pro-life activities is not sitting-in at an abortion clinic. The litmus test is the reaction to Rescue. Wherever Rescue is supported, compromise is only tactical. Where it is not supported, the right to choose has become a way of life, a principle. How is Rescue the litmus test? Because the other pro-life weapons in order to achieve their objective, must permit the choice to kill. Rescue is the one activity which does not permit choice. Did rescuers dream this test up to condemn non-rescuers? Not at all. Ending choice in the realm of child murder is the goal of all Pro-life efforts.

Though the idea still seems a bit radical, we need to see that it is the political activist, the educator, the crisis-pregnancy center administrator, the preacher, who must justify how they can engage in activities which do not challenge the basic assumption that a woman must be left free kill if she so chooses. Please hear me. People involved in these activities should no more feel guilty than a military doctor should feel guilty because he is not carrying a gun. Tactically some pro-life activities must permit choice, it is the nature of the activity. But this does not mean that cooperation should become a principle, or that non-rescuers should be afraid of defending and cheering for those who shut down the death camps.

We must become legally, intellectually, morally, and physically intolerant of murder regardless of what are part in ending it might be. This chapter will outline how the different areas of pro-life activity can more effectively reflect the cross as they become a part of a growing intolerance to child murder ___ as they become a part of Rescue. Each area is vital to an overall solution only as it reflects the pattern of the cross. Remember the fundamental question is not, "Did you do a sit-in?" Rather, it is, "What are you doing to sacrificially protect your neighbor; to honor God; to be like Jesus?"

Political Activism Politics is the half-way house between symbolic and physical intolerance. The political activist tries to get citizens concerned enough about the issue to vote for representatives who will pass laws which physically protect the unborn from murder. They want the law to bring its coercive force against all child killing not just some of it. In the realm of politics, compromise and coalition is the name of the game, but it cannot be the final word for child killing. We cannot write into to the Constitution that it is right to kill some children but not others. The task of the political activist is to work for laws which utterly eradicate child killing by keeping the utterly heinous nature of the crime in focus. Rescue helps keep this goal in focus in two ways:

1. The uncompromising nature of the cross brings back to center stage the fact that child killing is not ultimately conceptual or theoretical, it is killing real, little, innocent children ___ we will not tolerate it in whole or in part. The politician is helped to resist compromise by being brought back to the reality of what his laws will produce. He will want protection for everyone's life, not just the lives of those who are socially acceptable. Politically this means that the platform which Rescue builds for pro-life issues makes very clear that we will not settle for laws or politicians who tolerate killing anybody's children, even those whose fathers are rapists or incestuous.

2. The cross is a standard which recruits and trains the sort of person who is not predisposed to settle for easy solutions ___ he is willing to be as intolerant as he has to be for as long as he has to be, to be willing to suffer at least as much rejection as an aborted child, until each child is protected. The political Rescuer's intolerance to compromise will be like new wine in old wine skins. Furthermore, when the law does change, like the Swiss, they will not lay down their weapons, but keep them close at hand to provide the firm roots needed to make the constitutional amendment against child killing stick. He will not confuse his call to stand for the children with the need to be elected at any cost.

The weakness of the political solution without the cross, is that it is vulnerable to sheer manipulation. To be effective, laws must grow out of the broad resolve of the people who are governed. Rescue galvanizes that resolve. It is too easy to come up with a political half-way house or even a politically manipulated victory only to see it die a few years later for lack of public backbone. In a related field, all the pornography laws in the world will never work if you, the citizen, are willing to tolerate it in the drug and video store by continuing to treat these places as good neighbors. The District Attorney will only enforce the laws when he sees that there is sufficient public resolve to back him up.

Child killing only requires a great deal of explanation if you keep hidden the fact that they are killing children. Otherwise, it is the easiest thing in the world to convince not to do, not to support, and physically prevent. The political Rescuer will help keep the intolerance we should have toward child killing at the center of the political/legal agenda, by making obvious who his constituents in the matter. You cannot argue with someone who is crucified. They really do not care about your agenda, or ultimately your vote. They win by being willing to die for this child, and that child, child by child as long as any child is threatened.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPC) CPC's reflect positive intolerance. They provide the alternatives to murder. When the abortion culture confronted the Church with the argument that we did not care what happened to children and their mothers after birth, the Church was stung into action. All over the country CPCs sprang up advertising free pregnancy counseling, medical care, and compassionate homes to shelter any mother who felt that death was the only acceptable solution. Amazed and threatened by this outflow of compassion, the abortion industry has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuits, television news exposes, picketed, and even had sit-ins against these centers of Christian love and concern.

When abortion advocates speak of "choice", it is only cynical rhetoric designed to manipulate the broader society which might be tempted to feel some compassion toward children, their mothers and those who try to help. The dark side of this ministry of hope and life is the up-hill struggle it requires to keep their doors open. As with most parts of the pro-life effort, the organized church approves highly of this work but cannot really get involved. It is too . . . costly. It only helps out a few girls who got into er, ah, "trouble". They give a few baby clothes and permit some bulletin space, but beyond that it is someone else's problem, someone else's ministry. People do not realize that this is a life and death ministry.

I do not know of any pastoral counselors who face the stark reality in each counseling session that if they say the wrong thing, and sometimes no matter what they say, the person they are talking to will go kill someone. Yet that is the daily burden of these volunteers! And what sort of recognition do they get? A few baby clothes and grudging attendance at their yearly banquet to hear some nice stories and give a few dollars. Rescue brings to awareness the life and death struggle these centers face simply by acting it out in the street. Once bearing a cross characterizes the Church ___ CPCs will have an audience of people who will become suddenly appreciative of the issues at stake, and willing to give themselves to this ministry.

Rescue will do more than raise support and volunteers for these alternative centers, it will bring intolerance back into focus for them again. The wear and tear of running an alternative center tends either to galvanize people to the battle, or wear them down enough to compromise their portion of the fight. This is why some CPCs will directly support Rescues, and others will publicly denounce Rescue. This is why some CPCs will represent themselves as abortion clinics in order to talk with a woman seeking to kill her child.

And it is the same reason others go to great lengths to tell the "truth" and pharisaically denounce pregnancy centers which do not fit their standards of openness ___ they would rather give a mother information she will use to kill her child than withhold or distort that information in order to get the mother to where she can hear the truth. Some have even given directions to the death camps to mothers who ask for them after counseling. Into this, the cross can inject a new level of hope ___ it is acceptable to be intolerant of child killing. It is worth all the sacrifice to make alternatives to murder accessible to women and their children. These life centers do not have make coexistence with death centers their goal.

They, as much as the Rescuer, are working to see murder abolished. Life is not the alternative to murder. Murder is no alternative at all. We must not let the motto: "Pro-life, Pro-family, Pro-choice" describe us.

Demonstrations, Protests and Marches Demonstrations are a symbolic effort to publicize the outrage of legalized killing. Through the eighties there has been a growing visible presence outside of hospitals and abortion mills. The goal of these efforts is to be a symbolic demonstration of the community's intolerance to killing. There is nothing like on-going Rescues to put teeth into a picket. The police presence alone will save lives. The tension mounting in the death camp keeps them from being acceptable jobs in the community. The killing on the inside is reflected in the war-zone atmosphere on the outside.

Ironically, the presence of picketers makes the abortionist much more careful not to do something which would require an ambulance ___ we actually help make abortion safer for the mother. Rescue gets more people out to marches because Rescue uncompromisingly puts the case for the child first. It makes intolerance reasonable again. People begin to follow courage: "If you can rescue, the least I can do is march." Rescue brings the children back into the focus of our demonstrations. We do need a reminder here. Remember before Operation Rescue? Being pro-life was in most places like the kiss of death in the Church. Except for an annual march or banquet, people just did not want to know.

Then after Operation Rescue suddenly all pro-life groups were experiencing growth and vigor. Because of Rescue, people felt compelled to do something. Non-rescue groups became as shameless as Rescue groups were condemned for being, when it came to capitalizing on the fear and guilt of people who did not Rescue, in order to get them to support their functions: "Guaranteed safe and legal ways to stop abortion!" they cried, "You can save a baby without arrests, we promise." Repeated every hour over the speaker at the April '90 Right to Life march in Washington D.C. was the promise: "Every dollar donated here goes to saving a baby." And sure enough, people came to march.

As soon as they saw people coming out to their events, suddenly Operation Rescue personnel were banished from them: "Too dangerous! Too offensive! Turns people off! We might get sued!" The head of Right to Life even went so far as to meet with me in January 1990 before their mega-march in April to explain why Rescue would not even be mentioned from the platform. "The fact is," he said, "Right to Life is the only pro-life organization which has any clout, and the pro-choice people know it, and they are just waiting to sue us. They don't care about the other groups.

If we go down then there will be no organization left which can effectively fight abortion." What this whole mentality misses, is that it is not the legality which brings people out or keeps them away from events, it is the sense of accomplishing something against child killing. As soon as the moral pressure of Christians sacrificing to protect the children is removed, others will stop marching too. The Operation Rescue goose has been killed, and 1990 and '91 will be spent by establishment pro-life groups fighting over the golden egg. You will hear Operation Rescue blamed for scaring people away. But just ask, "Where were they before Operation Rescue." They were scared away for 16 years. Operation Rescue brought them out for the first time.

The failure of nerve on everyone's part ___ O.R.'s included ___ beginning in 1989 sent them packing. The lack of a call for sacrifice which measures up to the horror of the issue will keep them away. We will not see change in the nation until we hear another credible call to sacrifice on a level at least as serious as abortion. That call is coming. The heart-change necessary for such a call to go out, and a response which will overwhelm child killing has begun and it will continue. We will be the Church of God to the pre-born and to their killers. When Christians realize that more than words are needed, they will return in numbers to the death camps, only next time without the overblown rhetoric and media glitz.

We will replace that with measured words, lives to back those words, and a cross to back up those lives. Until then it will be the job of the few to prepare by their own sacrifice a way for the hundreds of thousands to follow.

Sidewalk Counseling The last people to offer hope to a mother and her child are the sidewalk counselors. There is a sense of urgency here which makes more public demonstration acceptable, and yet too much demonstration frightens the women away from the counselors. They blend the CPC and the demonstration. Usually these counselors will walk alone from the parking area to the door of the death chamber with the women offering them help, literature, and contacts for post-abortion counseling. The death industry and their defenders in the judiciary are so committed to promoting the right to kill that they impose court injunctions against sidewalk counseling even on public property and parking areas.

The guiding principle for sidewalk counseling is to say whatever will most effectively change a heart in thirty seconds, because usually that is all the time a child has before his mother goes inside the execution chamber. For many children, the arguments of the sidewalk counselor is all that stands between the child in the womb and death. Sidewalk counseling requires stamina. You speak with woman after woman who just walks past. On their own, sidewalk counselors burn out quickly. But, the pattern of the cross has given a fresh vision to sidewalk counselors. In all of Southern California, for instance, before Operation Rescue there were about 30 side walk counselors. Now groups like Shield of Roses and Knights of Columbus estimate that there are 1,000 there.

They see their task as more than saving this or that baby, but as becoming a sacrificial extension of the hope of the Gospel regardless of the result. In addition to trying to save individual children, there is a greater game plan. They can see how their hours of dedication are working toward the end of child killing itself, how someone sitting in jail becomes a spiritual breaking of the heavenly authorities who stand behind the earthly authorities who have ordained blood sacrifice. In the coming year, Rescue/sidewalk counselors will step up their pressure on the death camps, but not through media hype. Rather they will be people who so deeply reflect being crucified to themselves, that the world will not know what to do with them.

They will lead the battle not only at the door, but they will bring together a broad coalition of intolerant neighbors to these death camps so that they are put under siege every hour they are open. Why? Because it is not a political or social issue, it is life and death. Rescue opens doors to many other first amendment means of intolerance, like sidewalk counseling, which until now people would not get involved in because they would not see the children. The physical intolerance of Rescue imparts a vision of the children. Our willingness to take up our cross on behalf of others enables us to become a window into the womb. Our imprisonment becomes a large picture of the far greater voluntary imprisonment of the churches in America.

Woman's Litigation Projects Many women with legitimate medical damages can sue the abor-tionists but either feel too guilty, or do not know how. The excellent result of litigation projects is to expose the vicious underworld of child killing and the effect it has on the mother. These law suits bring to the surface hundreds of hurting women who need restitution, even though their child had no case which can bring the abortionist to criminal justice. The presence of the billboards advertising for these women makes public the pain which every victim of abortion knows and the feminists try desperately to cover over: "Damaged by abortion? Medical, Legal, Emotional Help.

Call 1-800-2224." Charles Wysong, the pioneer of this movement, is the picture of intolerance he is a Rescuer. Rescue gave him the platform he needed to make Atlanta one of the strongholds of his operation. Rescue made him successful there for several reasons. Many people who would never have otherwise given him the time of day were stung into action by the siege of Atlanta and supported the litigation project as an alternative to Operation Rescue which they opposed. More positively, as he was initially making inquiries in Atlanta, he came to me because a number of key potential contributors felt that Operation Rescue should be heading this effort up as well.

I encouraged those who wanted to sue abortionists through Operation Rescue, to support him directly, and introduced him to other key supporters. Litigation is a vital part of the overall reversal of the myth that abortion serves any useful purpose in society. And yet, the elegance, and simplicity of getting patients to sue doctors should not make us lose sight of the fact that it does not attack the legitimacy of killing children. It only asks that they be killed in such a way that the mother is not damaged sufficiently to bring suit. If taken on its own, it actually helps the purveyors of death move toward their goal of truly safe abortion ___ safe for the mother. Charlie has developed a brilliant strategy to put the abortionist at odds with the medical world.

But has often said that to be really effective, it must be part of a larger movement of intolerance toward child killing. He has told me many times that he is most effective in those areas of the country where his tactics are employed by Rescuers. This should not be surprising. No matter what you are doing, if you do it in order escape from the cross to a less costly means of attacking child killing you will simply be less effective. Charlie is effective precisely because he takes up his cross rather than saying, "Oh look. This is easy and safe." Rather than cleaning up the industry men like Charles Wysong are butchering it.

Education Education, is the effort which gets the word out to large groups of people before they are directly confronted with the issue. In one sense, all the branches of the pro-life movement are committed to education. But there are groups which are exclusively devoted to this end. The constant temptation of educators is to deflate the charged atmosphere surrounding the "issue of abortion" by presenting their facts in an emotionally neutral manner in order to appeal to the "unimpeded reason" of their hearers. Often, however, in the effort to be neutral, they lose the horror. Then the real lesson learned from a presentation is that dismembering children is bad but worthy of toleration. The facts do speak for themselves.

They do not need to be glamorized by a lot emotionalism. But they can never be depersonalized. As long as the facts are presented in a context which reflects the personal horror they portray, and the obligation to do something to change this horror, then the presentation will be valuable. We must never train people to accept and tolerate the slaughter of the innocent. The commitment of Rescuers to the children gives the educator both the platform he needs as well as examples he can point to: first to gain a hearing; then to train people in the facts which call for intolerance; and finally to connect them with organizations which are living out different expressions of intolerance.

In this way, he becomes a crucial link in the chain that will bind the child killers and their culture back to the bottomless pit. The problem is, when the cross becomes evident in his presentation he may find that many people do not want to talk to him as much. It will be tempting to gain an audience at any cost. But we are moving into an era in which being human does not guarantee civil rights. There are no cheap facts, any more than there are cheap solutions. If they reject the children, why should the accept you? Better to stand for something and have people afraid to talk to you than stand for nothing and be everybody's advisor.

What it Takes The bottom line of being any part of Christ's body is that if you get involved in that area as an escape from suffering, then you will not do that area much good. If you are trying to be popular, leave pro-life ___ no, stop trying to do Christian ___ work of any sort. None of these activities is easy or free of sacrifice. I am not advocating arrest and prison because pro-lifers have it too soft. I advocate abandoning everything to protect the children because God abandoned everything for us and calls us to go and do likewise if we are called his disciples.

If you are in any part of the effort to free the world of child killers, and you are embarrassed by some other part of it ___ whether they are too whimpy or too hard-nosed ___ you really need to rethink what it is you hope to accomplish. Every facet of the movement should have as its primary aim, the elimination of the killing. There is no necessary conflict between Rescue and any other pro-life activity, except where that other activity (or activist) is formed and motivated by the principle that the choice to kill is permissible. There is a difference between recognizing the reality that the law is on the side of the killer, and letting that reality dictate what you ought to do. Your goal is to change that reality not live with it.

Everything you do should be done with an eye to undermining child killers. Never undermine those who oppose them regardless of how strident or quiet they might seem to you. Remember how Obadiah and Ezekiel worked together in God's economy. The goal of Rescue never was distinct from the goal of any other part of the movement. Rescue rhetoric is not strident, it is standard pro-life terminology with no apologies. We did not invent the idea that the unborn are human; or that killing an innocent human with premeditation is murder; or that the innocent should be protected. Likewise, Rescues become more effective the more every other part of the body is strengthened.

This is why everywhere I have gone in the country I have stressed that Rescue communities must pump volunteers into every other part of the battle. Every phase of the process which changes the mind and heart of society must be addressed symbolically, persuasively, and physically. The pro-life argument must be matched by pro-life activities which are appropriate to the specific end in mind without abandoning the specific reality which has called us forth: tiny individual children are being killed today. When any other phase of the Church supports and advocates Rescue it is by this connection eliminating the baneful effect of the pro-choice form it must take as long as it is confined to symbolic intolerance.

The comprehensive goal must be the same: make killing the unborn impossible by our presence, unthinkable by our teaching and compassion, and then we might have a chance to make it illegal by our votes in a way which will last. In all we do we must show forth the love of God at the core of these efforts in two ways: First that we repent of our failure to be intolerant of child murder laws. And second, to turn from our tolerance, and become intolerant of the killing in a way that is consistent with each activity, yet modeled after the example of the cross of the one who was physically intolerant of our sin against Him. He calls us to be similarly intolerant of sin ___ we die for those whom we oppose, because our goal is their conversion.

CHAPTER 8:

THE CROSS AND THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

Yo! Rev.! What You Know 'bout Satisfyin' Wimmen? The inmates in Fulton County Jail lived in a world which had no up or down, no right or wrong beyond the motto: "Don't get caught." To them the very idea of marriage or fidelity was impossible, unthinkable, unbearable. How, then, could the simple values of the scripture reach them? If they couldn't understand faithfulness in respect to marriage, is it any surprise that they were so untrustworthy in the rest of their life? One day, I was writing letters in the common room and the argument raging around me that morning was between which sexual practices would satisfy women the best. As the argument came to a stalemate ___ so to speak ___ one of the wags noticed I was there and said, "Yo! Rev.!

What you know bout satisfyin' wimmen?" Without looking up, I answered, "Probably more than the rest of you put together, listening to how you all talk so big." "Whooo Weeeeee!" They began to hoot and holler. "The Rev. dun an' become a expert on sex!" So I kept on writing my letter. Another cackled, "He probably does know more'n you Red!" "It ain't hard to know more'n Red!" "That what Trina tells me anyhow." chimed in three at once. As the clamor died down, they finally had to accept my challenge and ask, "What you mean? I mean, you the Reverend and everything, and you say you know more'n the rest of us?" "Well, I'll say this, none of you in this room can keep a woman satisfied for 14 years and have her still coming back for more.

Anybody has what it takes to keep a woman happy for a day or two, but from the sound of it, you can't keep it up much longer than that. You want the real thing, you just do it for 14 years with the same girl and and you'll find out it takes more than technique to satisfy. Then come back and lets talk about who can satisfy who."

Yo! Church! What You Know 'bout Satisfyin' God? The world is an expert on satisfying its gods and stops from time to time to mock the Church with, "Yo! Church! What you know 'bout satisfyin' God?" But how can the Church answer? Half the Church only has the same shallow faddishness of bless-me fire insurance which lures converts by mimicking the world's way of satisfying its trendy Gods; while the other half has a relationship to God which is like a marriage that died years ago though the outward forms of fidelity remain "for the children's sake".

The Church today is incapable of understanding what any solution to abortion will require, because we are no more capable of committing ourselves to faithful suffering sacrifice for years, than my congregation in Fulton County Jail was capable of understanding faithful commitment in marriage. And so the fruit of such faithfulness seems like a mirage. To those Christians not given to excesses in the expression of their faith, losing everything for Jesus Christ is what they respect only those who are safely dead ___ preferably for centuries. For those churches which are making headway in the land of the fad, Christianity has to stay exciting and fun ___ as if the message of the cross was only for the Early Church.

It has almost become a point of dogma that God's Spirit moves in waves: the Latter Rain Movement, then the Charismatic Movement, then the Shepherding Movement, then the Rescue Movement and tomorrow who knows what other movement. But, isn't it time we get beyond designer gods? God has been faithfully patient for thousands of years working His plan, the climax of which was a cross. He rescued us and calls us to become rescuers with Him having lives which exhibit the same cross. There are no cheap or simple solutions to abortion, certainly no political and educational solutions. This is because abortion itself is not a problem to be solved, but a solution in its own right ___ a very costly solution as all murder is costly.

Think about it: All abortions kill an innocent person for one of two reasons: Either he is an innocent witness to sin who must be silenced, or he is too costly a person to love and care for. Any solution that hopes to replace the abortion solution must be equally costly. Only the cross is costly enough. It is time to stop deceiving Christians by telling them, "`All' we are asking you to do is write a letter, or come to this picket, or do this `rescue' with us." The children ask considerably more. God who hears them demands considerably more. Creation groans longing for considerably more. God will do considerably more, either with us, or to us. The sum of this book is that Rescue is Christianity and Christianity is Rescue.

Yeshua ___ Joshua ___ Jesus ___ Savior ___ Rescuer. Have no other God's before Me. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Love your Neighbor as yourself. Have the mind of Christ who became a servant. Be not conformed to this world but be transformed. If you love me you will keep my commandments. Make disciples of all nations and teach them to obey whatsoever I have commanded you. If any man would be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow me. These things are so common to all Christians that there is no need to foot note them. They are not taken out of context. They are all Rescue passages pure and simple.

They are the core passages for understanding Christian living because Christian living is a commitment to be a Rescuer until God calls us home, not a commitment to surf the faddish waves of His Spirit until the next wave comes in.

What Makes a Sit-in a Rescue? A crucial weakness of Operation Rescue was that we never defined what exactly Rescue was. On the one hand Rescue leaders sensed it was a profound expression of our faith. On the other hand, it was an activist tool to go after abortionists with. So when the popularity failed, it was hard to continue to call for more sit-ins unless there is more to the sit-in than met the eye. What many Christians fail to see is that a sit-in could have far more to do with the heart and soul of our faith than it does with abstract questions of civil disobedience and social tension. Of all pro-life activities it is the most patterned after the cross. It is not a way-station on the continuum between violence and non-violence.

It is not a technique of social protest we borrowed from Gandhi and Thoreau. It is not even the most strenuous or costly thing someone could do. We do it because of everything within our power to do, sitting-in is more like what Christ did on the cross than it is like any other type of activity, whether pro-life, religious, or civil disobedience. Rescue is not civil disobedience, it is godly obedience, first and last. I am not against blowing up clinics, in the same way that I am not against political action, crisis pregnancy centers, taking an unwed mother into your home, and sidewalk counseling day in and day out.

These activities all, in their own way, have as their goal protecting children from the psychopathic, child-molesting, serial, killers whom the law protects. But which one of them fulfills all three aspects of the cross at once? Only sit-ins as they have been modified and developed by Operation Rescue bringing together 15 years of intervention experience in front abortion death chambers with 4,000 years of Biblical experience and church history.

Why Do We Not See Sit-ins in the Bible? The Bible does not have much in it dealing with how to change society through movements of social protest, and sit-ins have been used historically as a means of social protest. But what if sitting-in is not primarily used for protest, but for the defense of life? This is the question which no critic of Rescue has dealt with. What if the sit-in is no longer used as a tool for exposing evil (its traditional use) but instead becomes a tool of protecting those against whom some evil thing is intended? The Bible says a great deal about intervening to protect the innocent. Most of the Biblical interventions were a bit more violent.

Yet, I do not think that God is upset if our intervention takes the form of a group of people standing between a killer and his victim, regardless of how often a sit-in has been put to other purposes. The reason we do not see social protest in the Bible is because the Bible focuses on more direct means of bringing social change. These revolve for the most part around people who personally went about the business of obeying God regardless of the cost, and in time the laws fell into line, or God brought down the government, or they just got killed. Then on the cross, our Lord showed us how to serve, how to be pastors, missionaries, housewives, husbands, workers, children, parents, masters, servants.

"This is how you bring social change." says the cross, "Be a Rescuer in every area of life ___ take up your cross, deny yourself and follow me." As Rescuers see that stopping their cooperation with child murder is no longer good press, will they turn to other things? To keep from feeling compelled to sit-in, will we cling to the straw man of "the futility of protest," or "the wrongness of marxist tactics of creating social tension."? Or will finally decide that it is worth while for someone to lose his life in the effort to intervene for the helpless, in a way which is harmless (non-revolutionary) and identifies us with them so thoroughly that for the world to destroy them it must destroy us first. My point is not that the structure of the sit-in itself is required.

My point is that giving yourself utterly in this three-fold way is required. So far, I have only seen the sit-in fulfil this form for the children. You see, as I have said again and again, Rescue is not a strategy. It is how we live our lives as Christians. The underground railroad was not a strategy to abolish slavery. It is what the serious Christian did to abolish slavery for this slave, then that slave, and the next slave. They did not look at slavery as an "issue". They looked at slavery personally: young Tom who was sold away from his wife Anne and small children Tommy Jr., Jenean, and Anne-Marie. They saw slavery as people in bondage, not some vague social evil. Therefore they helped people escape bondage.

They knew that ultimately until the warping of the soul which slavery effected in the slave holders was healed, there would be no satisfactory solution. But they did not use this huge vague philosophical/spiritual reality to justify why they would quit. Instead they focused on what they could do: free as many slaves personally as they could. What kind of a solution was that? What kind of strategy? It was not a strategy at all. If slavery lasted another hundred years their grand-children would have kept on fighting it one freed slave at a time. The underground railroad was not primarily a strategy, it was a way of life ___ it was Rescue.

For all the talk I've heard about the civil rights movement being similar to Rescue, I have never been able to see many similarities, with one exception. Martin Luther King made a crucial shift in the black civil rights movement which had been getting nowhere for about 100 years. Because of his shift, his Southern Christian Leadership Conference was resented by the more respectable main stream black rights groups like the NAACP. What did he do? He decided that instead of acting like a second class citizen and begging to be given first class rights, he would act like a first class citizen, assume those rights, and let others prove that he was not human enough to deserve them. He would drink out of the white man's water fountain and use his toilets.

He would eat in his restaurants, buy shoes in the front of the store and ride in the front of a bus or not at all. This "disrespectful" approach horrified the establishment civil rights groups even more than the white racists. But it is hard to argue against his logic even had he failed as so many failed before Him. His logic was simple: If even you are not going to act like a full citizen where your rights are at stake, then why should anyone else think that you deserve to be treated like a full citizen? In the same way, the Christians who claim the people in the womb are fully their equals, do not treat them as equals, why should anyone else treat them with full equality ___ especially someone who does not think they are equal?

Rescue breaks with begging for the recognition of their right to life. We simply recognize it, act on it, and let the chips fall wherever God has ordained them to fall. We will treat the unborn as first class citizens. This will become the keystone of all other efforts for their enfranchisement and constitutional protection. As a strategy? No! Because it is the Christian way whether they ever gain constitutional protection in our life time or not. The Constitution after all can only protect those whom the people have a will to protect. Ask any Black man. Ask any Japanese American. Ask any unborn American being carried to the abortionist for his final check-up. This is how sit-ins become Rescue ___ they are simply an expression of a normal Christian way of life.

What else would a Christian do? If they seem limited, or you think something far more drastic or consistent with pro-life rhetoric is called for, then by all means do it. Don't stand around using the excuse that because I am not doing the more drastic thing you cannot do the less drastic. If you can think of a better way to protect a life then do it. I am not arguing for sit-ins as such. I have simply been unable to think of an alternative. I have concluded that if protecting a child by passively keeping his killer away from him seems odd, it is not the Rescue which is out of order, it is the rest of our life. To understand this, see how the cross is the pattern for all of life.

Rescue: the Pattern of Christian Ministry The pattern of the cross, so clearly reflected in Rescue, is seen in every other kind of Christian ministry. The basis of world missions and home missions is that Christians work together to send a missionary over to live with and minister directly to those who need the Gospel ___ to physically intervene. They become a part of the native's life to whom they minister ___ they identify with the person to whom they go with the Gospel. They share the risks of disease, losing their families, and in some cases even being killed when they go. All the spiritual weapons of war will not convert one pygmy if they are not backing up a Christian who is working with pygmies.

The person in the field gives the rest of the Church a tangible point to reach through to others who would not otherwise hear or see the Gospel. This is Rescue. The Church banding together to support its members who are the living extensions of Christian love and witness. Inner-city ministry, or any other home ministry also, shows this pattern. While it is good to take a youth group into the city and work on someone's roof, or street preach, or witness in the bars, the foundation for this is laid by men and women who buy a flat in the ghetto and live with the rats, roaches, and life threatening crime which mark our urban crisis. They put their lives and their children's lives on the line. They are Rescuers. They understand spiritual warfare.

They understand the hell men can make on earth where God's standards are not respected. So they go to where it is the worst, socially speaking, and begin to make a difference just by living by the self-sacrificing standards of the Gospel. It really is Good News. They physically intervene in the lives of those around them, they are harmless to their neighbors, they are not out to build a personal power base or kingdom. They voluntarily suffer the degradation, humiliation, and powerlessness of those to whom they minister. They Rescue. When I think of an effective pastor, who bears his people's burdens, I think of my brother, a presbyterian minister in Kentucky.

He knows their circumstances intimately and he will suffer whatever he must to see them built up in their faith and practice of godliness. No one is too insignificant for him, and no one too great. He is far more than the man you keep around to bless various occasions of state, like the high school football game, or the pot luck supper. In his ministry you can see the cross made plain. He is physically with his flock in good times and bad. He is harmless, not grasping after wealth, prestige, or pulpit power plays. Rather he is always laying down his life for the sheep. This is the pattern of Rescue. The good shepherd is a Rescuer.

Rescue: the Pattern of Marriage Many people will tell you that heavy involvement in Operation Rescue can take a toll on your marriage. While this is generally true of all heavy commitments, not just Rescue, it is also true that marriages today are quite fragile, because we have set a track record in our marriages of being unfaithful and undependable. Not big time, but in all the small petty areas. We do not have biblical marriages. We have good American marriages. We are sexually faithful. We work hard at our career. But you cannot find the cross in many marriages. When you do, you notice something different about that couple.

Operation Rescue was one of the best things which could have happened to Anne and my marriage, because starting years before I had ever heard of Randall Terry, I realized that if Anne and I were ever to be biblically one, I was going to have to die to myself. What I discovered years later is that this is not a unique requirement for marriage, it is the general pattern of the Christian life, it is Rescue. The principles which prepared me to take leadership in Operation Rescue were hammered out in my marriage years before I ever thought about abortion. In 1981 I was graduating from seminary, looking for my first Church. Anne and I had two children and a marriage which was about as empty as one could be. Not bad, just empty. We had very little in common.

I did things to make her feel small and insecure. She did things to make me feel useless. Not big things. Just consistent thoughtless small time selfishness on each of our parts, built up over years and years. Nothing to lead us to a life changing crisis, nothing to apologize for and start afresh. I realized that both of us had the ideal in mind of the perfect husband and wife. Yet, we were both disappointed, because there seemed to be no way for this perfection to manifest itself. Why were finances always an argument? Why were so many things a struggle? Why didn't she love me the way I loved her? Why couldn't I love her the way she wanted to be loved? Why couldn't we work together instead of picking away at each other -- even in front of people?

Why couldn't we agree on how to discipline the kids? Why couldn't we resist making small publicly embarrassing comments so regularly? The answer that came to us was so simple. It was in Ephesians 5: "Husbands love your wife as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her that He might sanctify her and cleans her ... that He might present her to Himself a glorious Church." The pattern of the cross in marriage. I was to lay down my life for Anne in a way that makes her glorious. As Proverbs 31 says, "Let her own works praise her in the gate." But how? How could I free her up to shine in all her glory? I realized I had to become her servant. I had to make her look good. I must decrease but she must increase.

Until 1981, I believed that there were no problems that a good long heart to heart talk could not unravel ___ the education solution to marriage. If nothing else, I figured that I could always just take authority and assume my rightful place as head of the family ___ the political solution. But unfortunately, my track record of five years of marriage said it all, and it robbed me of all authority in the family. I could not sit down with Anne and say, "I'll be different. I'm really going to make you the most important woman in the world. In time you will trust me because you know that on this earth you are my highest priority." I had to say it with my life ___ for as many years as I had been telling her the opposite ___ or not at all. I began.

I picked seven small things I would begin to do to serve her and communicate my love and respect and support to her. These were small ways that I knew I could do consistently ___ consistency became a higher priority than flashy success. I was sick of big promises and hype. What I did is not that important. What was important is this: I would be utterly consistent; I would never point out what I was doing so she would "know what a great husband I was"; And most important, I figured it took five years to dig this hole (8 if you include our years of dating) and so I would give my plan five years before I even began to look for fruit. What was the result? Even these puny faltering steps began to bear fruit.

As I began to learn how to give my life for Anne, we began to become a family prepared to be able to give its life for Christ. Rescue became my family's way of life long before we ever sat in at an abortion death camp. Rescue at an abortion clinic is no different from rescue in a Christian marriage. Both stem from imitating the principles of the same cross. We went into full time pro-life work with no visible means of support. We have had to sell our home. We have not had a steady place to live since then. We have five children. I have led over 100 Rescues. I have spent eight months in jail. There is no source of income except for people who decide to send checks to Anne. Because of my lawsuits I cannot earn any money that will not be garnished or seized.

We have spent months on the road as a family. Yet all these things strengthened rather than destroyed our marriage. Why? Because we are learning how to die to ourselves. This is the message of the cross. This is Rescue. In our marriage we try to physically intervene for each other in a way that is needed, not just ways which are convenient to the one intervening. We try to be harmless, repenting of the many ways we try and manipulate each other to build a edge over the other. We try and identify with what the other must be going through rather than put the worst possible construction on what the other says and does in order to justify and nurse our suspicions and resentments. This is the pattern of the cross, this is Rescue.

So many families ran into problems with Operation Rescue did so because they were not prepared to die to themselves. The more that one of the parents got involved with protecting children, the more the other was threatened. Rescue was a strategy it was not the mark of the cross over their way of life and so their marriages were suffering. Their children (like their parents) had not been brought up to take suffering for Jesus Christ for granted, so the kids kept wondering why everyone else seemed to be normal but not Mom and Dad. Mom, or Dad, would play on the children's doubts, and then turn them against the one who was involved in Rescue. Again and again we heard husbands and wives say, "I just can't continue because of my wife (or husband).

God has called me to put my family first. I can't afford a divorce." Of course they needed to stop rescuing. But was the problem rescue? Or was it for too many of these families, that their god was the American Dream and under normal circumstances they would never see the inadequacy of their strange god. But when the cross poked into their lives, the choice between the average good American Life and losing everything for Jesus Christ became intolerable to them. Yes, divorce would be wrong. But so is the idolatry which had rotted their marriage, making them unable to devote themselves to the kingdom of God, whether in protecting children from murder, or any other task which would require them to lose their life that they might find it.

Rescue was blamed for putting stress on the marriage. But Rescue only revealed the cracks which were there held together by the illusion of a regular job and peace at any price. Having said this, it was all too often true that the husband or wife would flee to the heroic sacrifice of sit-ins in order to avoid family problems ___ and this is as wrong, as the resulting bitterness of the one who did not get involved as he filled his soul with resentment. To both of these sins, the cross calls out to let their warfare cease with one another and learn how to trust and be trustworthy, to give and to receive. That takes time, but it can begin now. Such a couple should drop out of Rescue, but not to return to their old way of life.

Instead they need to address the idolatry in their marriage which made them unfit for God's service in any arena, not just the anti-abortion arena. They must learn to lay down their lives for each other or they will never get back into the battle. As we did with our marriage, American Christians have spent years digging our society into deep trouble. There are no quick fixes. All we can do reestablish the kind of track record which says, "I love you. God loves you. You can depend on it." Our words have lost their meaning because our society does not see Christians willing to lay down their lives for anything beyond their own peace and prosperity, much less murdered babies.

What they see is Christians splitting their churches, destroying their marriages, chasing the same mirages of success the world chases ___ Religion grown quite comfortable thank-you. This is all they will see until our lives establish the long term commitment necessary to give the Gospel credibly ___ not respectability, but credibility. This is true of those parts of our marriage we do not like. It is equally true of grave social evils like abortion, pornography, government education and the judicial and fiscal crisis our country faces. Our solutions will only come as we quietly die to our selfish agendas and live for others by the power of the Spirit ___ without having the media spotlight what faithful and good Christians we are.

For the children being murdered I know of no strategy for success, only a life-style which strips us down to recognize the crisis we face, the danger we are in, and begins to take hold with courage those things which charity, not self-preservation, dictate. We are always trying to tell Jesus what Peter told him, "No Lord [the cross] is not for you." We tell him this in our marriages, our ministries, and our careers. But Jesus Rescued us from this perspective when He answered Peter, "Get behind me Satan, you are not mindful of the things of God but the things of men." When God rescue our marriage, He made possible our good intention to sacrifice for the unborn.

More than any other argument to our husbands, wives, or children, the Rescue marriage says, "I believe you have the same value I do. Therefore, three days, three months, three years, thirty years, of my life laid down to meet whatever need you have, is worth it to restore us to what God intends." More than any other argument to our society and churche, abortion Rescue says, "I believe you have the same value I do, therefore, three days, three months, three years, or thirty years of my life laid down in jail to protect you is worth it to restore us to what God intends." This is an unanswerable argument. What do you say to a crucified man or woman? He's not arguing with you, he's just setting an example.

What can you say to his family who is willing to be crucified with him? What can you say to a church willing to be crucified with Him? They have stopped arguing too.

Rescue and the Church Rescue should be recognized by churches the same way they recognize any other Christian ministry. Each Christian should be encouraged to do his part to personally engage in it to the extent that he has the time and opportunity. Churches should be calling forth people who will devote themselves to protecting children with their lives full time. The elders should examine those who come forward the way they would examine any missionary. If acceptable as a missionary, they should have a public time of presenting them to the congregation, laying on hands, sending them out, and helping raise the necessary financial support. We must come to grips with the fact that the iron curtain has fallen on portions of our country.

It is now illegal to be a public Christian in these sectors. Churches have quietly skirted these zones, or set up alternative structures. Often, Christians explain how godlessness really is the best way in these public areas of life and what goes on there is none of our business. One area where the iron curtain has decisively fallen is around the death camps. It is illegal to be a Christian brother to a child whose murder we could easily postpone, or in many cases prevent. This makes supporting missionaries difficult, because society will strike back at any support base for the missionary. We used to get lots advice from people on how Operation Rescue should be organized and conduct its business.

None of it took account of this reality ___ it makes havoc of incorporation and board structures. And that is the organizational trick of all Rescue groups ___ how do you maintain accountability without liability? Therefore when a church stands with a missionary to these children, it would be wise to direct diaconal funds into his prison account. If he is married, his family can be supported through diaconal funds for the needy to his wife, without the church being liable for the father's ministry. The Church can act wisely with its finances.

But if comes to the point where there is no way to avoid the choice of sharing liability, vs standing with those who protect children, then we hang the buildings and budgets, "and joyfully accept the confiscation of your property because you yourselves have better and lasting possessions. So do not throw away your confidence." Having said this, we are a long way from this either/or decision. There are still many avenues open. There is more that the Church can do. In addition to members Rescuing as they are able, they can make one phone call a day to the mayor, the judge, district attorney, or jailor, and request that these men and women stop keeping Christians from protecting children from murder: "Let my people go that they might serve me!"

In the Church or Not at All It is tempting to turn to a crusade for salvation, But it is better to risk the property of the church than it is to let Rescue become a ministry outside the Church. A crusade will not accomplish what only a church can do. God longs after His people, His body ___ the Church. It seemed like a good idea at the time for Sarai to give Hagar to Abram to get the job done and fulfill God's promise. But it was not God's way. The Church is always asking God to be fruitful and fulfill His promises through some hired servant, whether Hagar, or Eliazar, never the congregation itself. One of the common criticism of Rescue groups is that they seemed to lack organization and planning. This was not due to ineptness on our part entirely.

If you go back and look at what we preached from 1987 to 1990 you will see a consistent emphasis which held us back. We said with the Song of Deborah, "The leaders led in Israel, and the people followed, Praise the Lord." Our goal was to see churches, not organizations, rise up to defend the children. In the beginning this happened with great success as more pastors were arrested with us than with any other organization in the history of this country. As organizations sprang up, we kept pushing local leaders to put pastors and elders in leadership and minimize the Rescue organization and pray for them to dissolve entirely. The result was organizationally disastrous, but it was the right way to lose. How can this be?

How can we actually prefer to lose with the Church than to win without it? How could anyone truly hoping to win think that the Church would ever overcome its inertia? Campus Crusade, Inter-Varsity, China and Sudan Inland Missions, YWaM, Helemissions, Samaritan's Purse ___ now these are organizations who know how to get a job done, and you do not see them tying themselves down to churches. How could the Church ever deal with the child killing? We cannot even deal with basic issues of congregational life. And besides, most Churches do not want to be involved. Do we stop everything until they move? The answer to this is the bottom line of my life. If God does not do it in the Church, He will not do it anywhere.

Our goal is to bring the Church along, not by our preaching, but by our example. The number of rescues in a city indicates how prepared the Church is to protect children there. This is true whether the rescuers spend the time between rescues in jail, or at home. When a missionary to the pre-born has to spend months in jail for a single Rescue, he has raised the stakes for all of us. He is no longer the one standing between the killer and the victim. He has joined the victim, now they both need someone who will stand in the gap for them so they can be free to Rescue again. We have no plans to clog the jails and courts. It is moral authority, not physical clout which will turn the tide. Standing on principle we give the Church an opportunity to move.

I do not have any plans for success apart from God changing hearts of stone to hearts of flesh. It does not matter that we are talking about Christians needing a heart transplant. The most famous evangelistic text, "Behold I stand at the door and knock." was not written to unbelievers, but to the Church. To protect the pre-born from the American Church itself, God is prepared to remove our lampstand. The book of Revelation does not present the Church with the option of leaving the door closed as so many evangelists misapply this verse to their unsaved hearers. No, Jesus Christ is coming through that door whether or not we open it. It is His Church and His door.

If we do not open it in a communion of heart felt obedience, then He will blast it in and remove us, as he would waft away an odious stench from His nostrils ___ for this is what our prayers will become to him, filtered through the bloody screams of the pre-born as they are ushered into His presence. I pray that the Church will see in the visible bonds of the bars and chains which prevent us from protecting children, the far greater invisible bonds of wilful cooperation which bind them from protecting the pre-born. At least let the Church see in us a picture of what is coming to it if they do not stand today for others. There are three kinds of exorcism in the New Testament.

In one the exorcists fail and are either discouraged, or are thrown from the house naked and bleeding because they have no power. In another, the exorcism is a success, but there is nothing to replace the demon and he returns with seven demons worse than he is. And finally, there is the removal of the foul spirit and its replacement with God's Holy Spirit. I see the current establishment pro-life groups as being the first sort of exorcism. All the best intentions and sincerity but with solutions which will never come close to matching the demonic horror. The second type of exorcism is the popular crusade approach. It seemed good in the middle ages as a way to take the Holy Land for Christ.

Crusades certainly streamline your effort and get it away from stodgy church governments. But it does not replace the demon with something that will last. Operation Rescue fell into this kind of trap. Rescue should put fire back into the cultural imagination of men and inspire them to live by the standards which make civilization possible, but a crusade will only short circuit this process. The Church must be matured to bear the weight of authority God has prepared for it. Therefore, the only solution is what Daniel foresaw: not a crusade, but the expansion of the kingdom of God itself to fill the earth.

Those with this vision can only suffer faithfully until God ignites this vision again in the heart of His Church . . . or simply obliterates us and starts again in another part of the world. It will not be the first time. Until the Church takes on its historic role, and full of the Spirit, inspires its sons and daughters to be utterly intolerant of evil, it will never become the civilization creating force God mandated for it to be. It will only be a parasite sucking the blood out of those who have gone before. This is why, in weighing what I will do with my life and influence, such as it is, I can see no more effective plan than living as if these words are true. There is not much more to say. But much more to do.

As I write this in June of 1991, I am very skeptical of ever seeing these words published. And if they are published, I am skeptical of them penetrating anyone's heart. That is why I must return to the death camps even of a city like Atlanta, because once there, I am in a place where it makes no difference whether or not you read these words, whether you change your life or not. The question is not, "Are we being too radical?" The real question is, "are we being faithful enough?" Read the prophets. They speak graphically of Israel's unfaithfulness to God in terms of adultery and excrement smeared on the faces of priests. Isaiah preached in the nude for three years. Ezekiel spent a year lying on his side just to illustrate the coming siege of Jerusalem.

Hosea marries a whore. Jesus called the Charles Stanleys and the Bill Gothards of His day ___ that is the highly respected and astute religious leaders of His day, in a word, the good guys ___ white washed tombs, blind guides, snakes and vipers, hypocrites. He walked into the middle of the temple and ran everyone out and then he bodily blocked the entrance. Imagine that on Sunday morning. Or better, don't imagine it Sunday morning, go do it on Monday morning at your local death camp. Imagine Jesus or any of the prophets ___ real men ___ upset over the fact that they just were not getting anywhere with their ministry. They all had talent, would we have advised them to read How to Win Jews and Influence Greeks?

Would we advise them to change their "Church Growth" strategy? Their ministries were failures. Would to God the American Church would fail in its ministry the ways these men failed ___ because it has become too hard hitting and offends the world with a cross, not because it whines and begs to be left alone with the freedom to worship and nice buildings to worship in. Let us never fail because we did not have the courage to hit hard enough with our desperate situation, a situation which will require not years, but generations of sacrificial obedience to dig out of. Our situation requires nothing less than the conversion of our families, businesses, and our politics ___ in other words, the very conversion of the Church itself to Christianity.

Not sit-ins, not activism, not the revival hour, strong preaching and strong singing, but old fashioned, take up your cross and follow me Christianity.

CHAPTER 9:

THE CROSS AND THE RESCUE MOVEMENT

Can We Measure Up? Is it possible for the Rescue movement itself live up to the demands of the cross which it made so offensive in its rhetoric? To live up to those demands in accord with Philippians 2 ___ to actually be rejected in place of those who are daily led to slaughter ___ seems impossible. And yet, to fail to come to grips with how we can live up to the demands of the cross, will lead to discouragement and alienation within any movement which cannot bear the weight of its own words.

If you can understand how we have fallen short of what is required to live up to the standard of the cross, then you will understand how the stumbling of the Rescue movement ___ and the Church through it ___ is not the result of the failure of individuals, whether leaders, or followers. Rather it is the result of built in problems which no leader, organization, or philosophy, can possibly overcome without transforming the nature of the movement. The Church and the Rescue movement are now in the process of making just this painful transformation. The Pro-life movement needed to develop a center which would take its description of child murder to its logical conclusion, and so gave birth to Operation Rescue.

In the same way, the Rescue movement had to produce that same center in order to fulfill God's call. Without such a center, all of the various parts ___ including the other unrelated parts of the body of Christ whose primary calling is not to pro-life ministry of any sort ___ would have no way to focus their particular gift and calling, to bring this holocaust to an end. This is a simple fact of life: Publicly murdered infants call for more than politics, more than alternatives, more than sermons, more than demonstrations, more than prayer meetings, pamphlets, and books ___ they do not call for less, they demand all of these things and more.

That "more" must be produced or every other part of the movement, and body of Christ, will lack a focus and coordination point capable of bringing this particular evil to an end. That "more" is not just more activity, but rather something which focuses the intolerable nature of child killing to eliminate it. That "more" will be produced. God has promised to bring this holocaust to an end. It will either be God's gracious judgement in behalf of the children by bringing revolution from within and invasion from without on those who could have protected them but would not; or it will be a cross whereby God's people learn to lead through laying down their lives. But the blood of the children cries out for it. God will answer.

This is why it is imperative that the pro-life movement and the Church understand what only the Christian has to give, and then give it. This then, is the crisis faced by those who know the horror of child murder and have stepped out forward to rescue some of those children. All our words come home to roost. To understand our difficulty think about how Winston Churchill silenced one of his critics. It is how the Church silences rescuers, and how the world silences the Church.

What Is Your Price? One of the matrons of high society in London was berating Sir Winston Churchill for some offense or other in his conduct of the war. He was desperate to get her to leave him alone, she had followed him about all evening until finally he turned to her and asked, "Madam, would you make love to me for a million pounds sterling?" Like you, she gasped at the vulgarity of his question. But wanting to get on with her point, she thought a moment and decided that one million pounds was nothing to turn up her nose at. To appreciate her answer you need to know that by today's standards, that would be about fifty or sixty million dollars. "Well, for a million . . . But really what has that to do with anything? As I was saying before . . ." But he cut her off.

"Well, madam, how about for 15 shillings? Are you interested?" "Sir Winston!" she said in great shock, "Just what sort of a woman do you think I am?" Fixing his eye on her he said, "Madam, what you are has already been established. Now the only question is, what is your price?" The world is convinced that Christians are not radically different from anyone else. They believe everyone has a price, regardless of his rhetoric. Therefore, they will teach Rescuers to protect child killers like everyone else if they can only discover what their price is. Is it lawsuits? Is it high fines and jail? Is it a wife or husband who forces the rescuing half of the marriage to quit from internal strife?

Whatever it is, the world has one conviction, and that is that you can be bought, just like them. Whatever Christianity is, they know it does not make you a truly new creature. And this is the horror of our complicity with child killing ___ even the complicity of the most faithful Rescuer among us ___ we as representatives of Jesus Christ have lost our credibility. Richard Cowden-Guido, speaking to Rescuers in Valhalla prison who were serving four and a half months, put a razor edge to the challenge the world gives Rescuers as he encouraged them to persevere.

He says that every time they arrest us, each day they hold us in jail, and each day the church permits it, is a hideous evil, not because of what they do to us, but because our government, by holding us, and our churches by permitting it, say that each unborn child has no value. To enforce that lie it tells us that each child is so worthless that even non-violent attempts to protect him are wrong, illegal, and should be punished. By refusing to honor their no trespass law, more than we honor God's command to love our neighbor, we did not join them in the charade that these children are not worth our suffering for, any more than the human waste matter they join in our sewers is worth protecting.

And therefore it is vital to them that they destroy this witness to a God who really can strengthen us to do all things. The Christian's willingness to suffer, not blindly but specifically because the people in the womb are as human as they, exposes this lie as nothing else can. This is the great Lie God calls us to stand against. The abortion culture through its courts and police wants to prove all Rescuers hypocrites: "You are happy to grandstand," it says, "Happy to force others to suffer for the unborn, happy to talk about Jesus and the value of the fetus: but you don't really believe it any more than we do, and we will prove it. You have not even been in jail as long as a woman is pregnant, not to say for the 20 and more years of effort it demands after birth.

Now that your little stunts haven't worked, now that you are learning what it means to suffer for these children ___ or for truth, or the will of God, or all your fine sounding talk ___ you will discover that you agree with us after all, that these kids, fetuses actually ___ and we hope you'll be honest enough to use that word when you get out of court or jail ___ these fetuses are certainly not worth suffering for. You will find that you cannot help but agree with the fundamental premise of the abortion culture, which is, `there can never be any difference between the hungers of the flesh, and the will of God.' You watch, we will show you that in reality, you are on our side, despite what you say.

Just look at yourself, you will stop rescuing in order to surround yourself with the same comforts of the flesh we surround ourselves with. You call it God's will that your fleshly comforts ___ or Rescue organizations, or churches ___ be preserved even if it means permitting these little ones to die today. And that is what we say about abortion and preserving the opportunity of the woman to surround herself with equal comforts to yours, even if it means her child must die." The more deeply anyone stands against this lie, in any part of the Church, or pro-life movement, the more he will realize how entrenched the American Way is in his own faith, the more he will realize his need to repent and stop judging others.

The more he will realize that this calls for daily sacrifice. But, to break away and serve God daily in any arena, must be more than an impulse to activism or altruism. It will cost you your whole life. And that is why, when we launched Operation Rescue, we launched it by calling for profound commitment, even though at the time the risks were minimal and the work was exciting. Such great sounding words as, "Life, Fortune and Sacred Honor," seemed grandiose, like children playing dress up in their parents clothes ___ indeed, that is what we were. Those still rescuing today see less and less excitement, and more of what it will cost. But that is not why so few Rescue.

To understand why, requires a deeper look at the contradiction we created in our call to Rescue which made it seem meaningless in the end to us, even as it always seemed overblown to others. We faced a contradiction at the heart of our movement: we called for ultimate sacrifice ___ for that is what the children, Scripture and the raw facts of abortion call us to ___ but only organized safe rescues which would fit the schedule of the Christian not called to devote his full life to this. This might work on the national level ___ it's a big country and there are many places to hold low cost rescue events ___ but local leaders soon realized they had no place to hide if they wanted to do it again and again.

They either take up a martyr's crown and be crushed by the system, or they retreat and be crushed by their rhetoric. Most Christians had no objection to saving a baby, but realized intuitively the cost, and so stayed away. But where could those who took a stand turn? What could we do? The rhetoric was sound ___ they are killing babies; we can stop it, or at least stop cooperating with it; God really does command us to love our neighbor, and do unto him not only as we would have him do unto us, but as we would do unto Christ Himself. But how can the Christian not called to Pro-life martyrdom have a part in this ministry? It is necessary that they all be involved. But how? This rock and hard place trapped more than one leader and crushed him.

The call of a sweeping movement, minimized personal risk. But the pre-born gave us no room to back down should the "movement" disintegrate. The cold fact is, very few leaders or followers thought they would actually have to stand alone behind their words. This is not the first time the Church has had to deal with an issue so great that it seemed to eclipse all other issues, and call into question even our faith itself, and yet so small that it is easy to close our eyes and walk around it as if it did not exist. How can the Church maintain its integrity as a full body of ministry to the world, and yet bring its entire strength to bear on the particular needs of the day? To answer this problem it has historically, produced a core of people to focus the effort each day.

It then surrounded that core with spiritual and financial support, and finally, reinforced it with the periodic efforts of the other parts of the body of Christ lending personal a hand from time to time as their primary calling permitted. Rescuing children from murderers need not be different. But when the part time Rescuer had no center to hold his vision on target ___ no day to day focusing in the lives of full time Rescuers ___ a sense of futility set in, and we drifted. Our call to change the world, became drum-beating for a particular activist/political agenda ___ we lost our prophetic edge.

As more than one national pro-life leader has told me, "You may as well have turned to politics in the first place and not wasted everyone's time." This lack of a center is not Rescue's peculiar problem. It cripples the entire pro-life movement so much so that most Christians called to other parts of the body of Christ see no meaningful way to become involved in any pro-life activity. This is not because there are no ways to be involved. Instead, because these things lack a focused center of action to harness them, a center which is consistent with the nature of legalized child killing, these actions though good, seem meaningless.

They sound like one activist agenda among thousands of others in a hundred arenas ___ poverty, public education, national debt, the drug crisis, souls going to hell. The harried Christian simply asks pro-lifers, "When you have a meaningful solution, call us. I am not called to sign petitions, do a rescue, picket a clinic, or work in a CPC." In this sense they are absolutely correct, not everyone is called to the same thing. They stay away because they see no unifying center to the Church's ministry to the pre-born ___ no way to be meaningfully involved without losing themselves in the endless stream of "more things you can do", and it just is not their calling. Christians who say this are not condemning Pro-life work, or Operation Rescue.

Nor are they cowards and compromisers. Rather, we need to take Operation Rescue (and the pro-life movement, and the Church) for what they are, and what they declare abortion and Christian responsibility to be, and provide the focal point everyone's rhetoric needs to focus the majority of people who will never devote their full time because God has called them to another arena. Given the condition of the Church prior to Operation Rescue, a step like Operation Rescue had to have built in contradictions in order to make it possible for Christians to take a step closer to the jugular of the child killers and their supporting culture ___ a step of selfless compassion.

It is worth studying in detail how we were able to take this step, how we broke ourselves, and how we can move forward.

Our Lives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor These words launched the Rescue Movement in May of 1988. It is the title of the sermon Randall Terry preached Sunday night, before rising at 5:00 Monday morning to lead 1000 people into the heart of Manhattan to close down an abortion clinic for the day ___ the first of 4 to be shut down that week while we were there. The rhetoric of Operation Rescue left no room to hide: 1987-1988 ___ The Leaders Led in Israel and the People Followed. From the song and victory of Deborah, Operation Rescue envisioned God's people led by their pastors going out in simple obedience and before the world knew there was opposition, we would expose the horror of abortion making it a thing of the past. We intended to spur the Church to take on its historic task, not replace the Church. When the Church would not, we had no plan "B" to fall back on, and still lack such a plan.

May 1988 ___ We commit our Lives, Fortune and Sacred Honor. We must be willing to sacrifice and pledge support to each other to the death. Knowing the fear of stepping out in a venture as bold as this, we said, "Courage is not the absence of fear, it is the willingness to do what is right in spite of our fears."

July - Oct. 1988 ___ Goliath must Fall. Atlanta's defense of child killing became symbolic of the entire nation's complicity in murder. While 1,200 Christians were arrested and held in jail, over these three months, we declared, "Atlanta will be the pattern which the nation will follow. Either we make it safe for children here, or every city knows that we can be bought if they just make the price high enough. Therefore, Goliath must fall!"

January 1989 ___ Jabesh-Gilead ___ no covenant with the enemy. The men of Jabesh Gilead were willing to make a covenant in which they would gouge out their right eye in exchange for protection from the Philistines. This was the message in our return to New York, to defy the $50,000 injunction of Judge Ward. It was winner take all, no half-way win, no covenant with the abortion culture: "We must run to the roar, face the greatest threat, or they will know our price. Better to die than compromise and gouge out our eye."

Aug. - Sept. 1989 ___ The Lessons from Jeremiah. The terrible crisis of innocent blood facing this country and the inevitable coming judgement requires people willing to sacrifice everything today, and if necessary, rescue where we might be kept in jail indefinitely. "We must be willing to sacrifice to win the war, all we hold dear is at stake."

Oct. 10, 1989 ___ The October Letter from Atlanta's Jail. Its message so completely brought Operation Rescue to its rational conclusion that it is worth quoting, at some length, our call to stand: "Winning the war for America's soul will not come easily, cheaply, nor quickly ... we're going to have to suffer. Some of us may get lengthy jail sentences ... lose our jobs ... "respectable" ministries ... or homes. But if we are willing to pay this price, I believe we can rescue this enslaved ... dying nation. I think it's worth it. Do you? [Our sacrifices will] teach our children that there are things worth fighting and dying for. We will leave them a heritage of commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ and His word.

They will learn what is important in this life and what is not, what is temporal and what is eternal.... If we can endure the hardships God is calling us to, rather than run from them, I believe this movement will grow. If we don't, we may die. As a movement we are at a critical time.... Those committed to child killing have fully blossomed. Will we fully blossom in our holy call to lay down our lives for the children? God help us to do so." The D.C. Project a month later echoed that call: "Now is the time to stand in Atlanta."

Oct. - Thanksgiving 1989 ___ Bail out now. In the memos within the leadership-group planning a return to Atlanta, we envisioned an ultimate commitment on the part of the national leadership. Lines such as, "This battle is not going to be won quickly, expect to be here into the Summer or Fall of 1990." and, "Tell everyone in leadership that you could be looking at 3 to 8 years of jail from felony charges so they should bail out now if they don't have the heart for it." or, "I don't want our organization to do what it takes to survive only to have God destroy our country a few years later." were commonplace in these letters as we planned the second siege of Atlanta.

Thanksgiving 1989 - January 1990 As the realization began to set in that a return to Atlanta was not going to produce a quick all out climactic battle, the question arose as to whether or not it was worth trying at all in a city which showed no signs of life. Ironically, the discussion on how to proceed in December and January did not disagree over the facts of the national situation.

We all agreed that: It was obvious that groups were beginning to turn in on themselves as they began to experience decline and exhaustion; Rescue had become "old news" for the media; Groups were beginning to get turf conscious and skeptical of how expending energy out of town would help their own efforts; For every local and national leader, the threat of the martyr's crown loomed with no hero status to make it seem glorious; A short battle could not muster the necessary intensity, given the condition of the troops. Would a long patient battle capture the imagination of the Church, and grow into something winnable? What would save the Rescue Movement?

The idea that it was time to develop the core of people who would rescue at any cost, and Atlanta being the proof of that commitment to the word of God and to the children, seemed hopelessly discouraging. Therefore, any attempt to continue in Atlanta could not be associated in any way with the name or concept of Operation Rescue. You can see the dilemma. Our rhetoric left us no place to hide. We had said, "We will stand in Atlanta with the children of Atlanta at any price!" And now the price was that we would be standing alone.

What was played out dramatically at the national level was nothing new, it is faced daily at the local level in every Rescue community which says in effect the same thing we said nationally: "We, the Church, stand with the children of this city at any cost!" Not a bad position to take, but where can a local leader hide after he says those words if he discovers that no one really wants to stand with him? There was no place to dodge this bullet. We were frustrated. We knew how brave we would be if we could only find enough people to be brave with us. But brave alone? That seemed foolhardy. We brought the movement to the brink of its rhetoric and realized that we did not have what it took to take the ridge.

We discovered that most of those 50,000 people who had been arrested over the prior two years were not rescuing children at all, they were rescuing themselves from a profound sense of guilt. Our focus on God and the children, turned into either an introspective focus on our personal sense of guilt, or a faith in our ability to accomplish something. The daily effort to physically shut down death camps ___ that is, rescuing at any cost, overcoming the punishment barrier until they imprison us, kill us, or leave us alone to do what is right ___ is demanded by all Christian, Pro-life, and Rescue rhetoric: either that, or revolution. But nothing less.

What we planned to do in Atlanta might have provided the wholeness and focus to the movement by growing naturally out of the Rescue movement as it sought greater consistency with its commission. Instead, those who stayed in Atlanta became orphaned stepchildren, seeking reunion with a parent which by abandoning them, had lost not only its focus, but any intention of raising up that focal point elsewhere. All the while, local rescue group leaders wondered where the fire went, and why we couldn't just get on with things. Much as children of the '60's wonder why the Beatles don't play together any more. To succeed, parent and child must come together. But a direction had been set and only God, in His time, could bring the two together again as He is now doing.

Only now, it is not as two organizations, but as two concepts.

The Cross Leaves No Escape Routes Reviewing our battle cries makes clear the dilemma of all Rescue leaders: we had left no escape clauses. This crushed more than one person who signed up to be part of a movement, not be a voice crying in the wilderness. The legal authorities in some cities like Charlotte, NC said, "Do what you want." and would hardly prosecute. Others like Atlanta, Los Angeles and Denver said, "We will crush you." Rescue groups ran the spectrum from "Category Zero", to walking instead of going limp; from traditional Catholic, to wild Pentecostal. Rescue leaders ran from golden tongued charisma, to cold fish; but the overall trend was the same, with few exceptions every group has dwindled and the promise of the great groundswell has died.

To find a solution, or pin the blame, some people look to leaders, others to methods of rescue and recruiting, others to philosophical, spiritual, or theological purity. But I am convinced that neither blame nor solutions lie in these areas. It is much simpler. Everything necessary had already been said ___ a good bit of it was said 4,000 years ago. We just needed enough foolish people to do to do the foolish things we claimed God told us to do. The day of the rally is over. The day of doing what we rallied to do has arrived ___ don't expect the applause to continue when you actually answer Satan's challenge to God. We said we would take up a cross, and in the end, we will.

The world, and certain Church leaders, pray that we would not have what it takes ___ that in the end we would agree that the children are not worth anyone laying down his life every day. As long as there is not the daily presence, we can all stand back and say, "What can anybody really do about abortion. At least we aren't hypocritical guilt mongers like those Rescuers and pro-life activists out there. We support them and CPC's from time to time ___ I've picketed and some of my best friends have rescued ___ but they are so harsh." And within the Rescue movement we argue back and forth about how to woo or transform our critics. But what solution would you suggest: Given: not everyone will drop everything and Rescue daily.

Given: that is what our call seems to demand ___ what else does the public murder of children demand? how can it call for less than our whole life? Dilemma: How can we tone down our description of the crisis and call to sacrifice without misleading our hearers, and yet to go full bore would leave only a few fanatics. Is there no way around this dilemma? This dilemma keeps us all from just "going on about our Rescue business" until it is resolved. Think about it: We all want a national call ___ a national leader ___ to get everyone together to "really do something". But that is intrinsically impossible. What call can you give to take a stand?

If the demands of standing are so small that no one's life is seriously disrupted, lots of people come, but, the fruit of the stand will be correspondingly small ___ abortion goes on as usual the next day, largely unfazed, and people feel like it was all a lot of shouting for nothing. But if you call for a level of commitment which will actually dent the abortion industry, it will result in a battle so tough that everyone will decline the call except the weirdos who like pain -- and not enough of them show up to dent the industry anyway. Everyone knows we are at a cross roads, but from where to where? Defeat is built-in at every turn. Is it time to just quit? Or is it possible to bring these two things together?

Tell Me Where We Went Wrong, so We Can Retire with Honor. As I worked to launch Operation Rescue, I had often thought of what I would do when it was over, win, lose, or draw. There was no question in my mind. I would seek out a pastorate and raise my children satisfied that I had done the best that could be expected. But as the decline began back in the Summer of 1989 I became trapped by the lack of escape routes. At first I thought it was simply a problem of how we had stated the case for Rescue. Surely, Randall Terry had just gone overboard and overstated the case for protecting people in the womb. A more sober evaluation of the case for Rescue must show that it is only one activist strategy among others.

Then God could call me to lead a more balanced life ___ I could go back to being a good Presbyterian. So I reviewed what, for two years, we had preached from the Scriptures. So far did I fail to find any loop holes, I concluded that we had not done God's requirement to Rescue justice. Think about it: "If you cannot love your brother whom you have seen, how can you love God whom you have not seen?" We had not even begun to touch all the Scriptures teach and demand in the area of Rescue at a house of legalized murder, quite aside from Rescue as the characteristic of the Christian life. The first three chapters of this book began to form in my heart. I was stuck. Taking up the cross is not optional. Randall Terry was not overboard in his rhetoric.

He was if anything, by God's grace, terribly understated, or no one would have taken the first step. Does it really matter whether or not anyone else in the country thought the children worth dying for? Even if nobody stood with them, would that change the reality that they are worth standing with? My wife was no help in trying to retire from Rescue. She had come to the same conclusions long before me. "But Anne, everyone will think we are kooks. What will it mean for our children?" Her answer was devastatingly simple. "They are our children." Jesus went to His cross alone. The children are ripped up in their mother's womb alone. At least we have a family which will stand against this together.

But, even if you are the only one left who will act like abortion is murder, even if you cannot possibly succeed, does that change where you or at least somebody should be? Anne and I could only conclude that God wanted us to persevere and so we would if He would continue to find support for us. As Anne would often say, "What's the worst thing which could happen? God stops paying our bills, and we have to leave Atlanta and its jails. I can live with that." But where does that leave the other leaders not to mention the rank and file? Can they retire with honor? Are they compromisers or quitters if they turn to something else?

Unless we reshape the whole nature of the Pro-life and Rescue work of the Church, we would be forced to answer these question with a simple "Yes." and in so doing, would mark the end of Rescue as a live option for most people. If we tried to present sit-ins at abortion clinics as a sacramental obligation for Christians, proving their Christianity, then we must conclude that for any who do not, they have left the faith. In short, these are two caricatures of Rescuers which many hold and if they were correct then we will never stir the Church, because we would be calling it to less than the Gospel. They lead to bitterness, division and condemnation.

If you can understand that the true message of Rescue is that laying down your life is the obligation, where you do it is a matter of calling, then you will be free. Those who are not Rescuing at abortion clinics can no less be laying down their lives, they are simply doing it in another arena. The only question we must honestly answer is, "Am I not rescuing at the abortion clinic because I am fleeing the obligation to lay down my life?" This perspective should offer hope, especially leaders, and offer them a way out of the corner they painted themselves into: 1) Maybe God did not call them to risk being martyrs in the child killing arena.

If not, though they might lead Rescue groups for a season they will not be able to lead long term, they were raised up like King Saul to create a platform for others to carry the torch. 2) There is no shame in working to support others whom God has raised up to lay down their lives for the children, even if at first you thought that you were going to personally pay any price to Rescue. Such a person is not eating their words, they are simply finding their place in this ministry. 3) God may not have called you to lay down your life for the children daily. But this does not mean he has not called you to lay down your life somewhere daily.

You may have been released from an obligation to Rescue at an abortion clinic, but you have not been released from your obligation to continue to Rescue in God's kingdom. We do not have the luxury of choosing between a Rescue at an abortion clinic and living in accord with the god of the American Way. Too many people have followed the fact, "I am not called to Rescue at an abortion clinic." to a false conclusion, "I can live the good life." The army of the Lord is in the field. You may be able to choose which city you will attack, or which part of the army you are in, but you cannot leave the battle to eat grapes with David and Bathsheba in Jerusalem.

CONCLUSION:

THE CROSS BEFORE ME, THE WORLD BEHIND ME.

The Body of Christ "Let goods and kindred go. This mortal life also. The body they may kill, God's truth abideth still. His Kingdom is forever." The day will come when the reality of aborted children burns so deeply into the heart of the Church that tens of thousands will pour out daily into the streets to bring it to an end, and provide real alternatives in every Church and every home. And this will be one of the signs that the revival everyone likes to talk about and pray for is upon us. But until then, what will bridge the gap, move hearts, and make that outpouring possible? We need to take the next step. We need a bridge. But what could it be?

What is needed for the people led to slaughter in the womb, is for Christians to take a step as far beyond Operation Rescue, as Operation Rescue was a step beyond the traditional pro-life movement. As Operation Rescue forced the pro-life world to take another step closer to living Christianity we must take yet another step toward living faith. Only as someone takes this step, will there be a way for all other parts of the body to coordinate their efforts to bring the holocaust to an end. Revival ___ every part of the body of Christ working together to stand for righteousness regardless of the cost, in every arena ___ will be the first step. Then massive conversion to a faith which really does mean more than personal peace and prosperity will be the second step.

Standing against abortion is not the keystone to revival because we think our activist agenda is most important. It is the key, because if we will not stand against those next door who rip arms and legs off of little children, God will not give us the strength to stand anywhere, but will harden our hearts to further fit us for destruction. There will be no secular solutions to abortion. This is because abortion is itself the best secular solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancy. It is a solution which makes the whole secular structure of values possible. To remove abortion, you leave the secular world with no way to implement its new faith in man. Legalized abortion, like secular humanism ___ men made God ___ is profoundly religious.

It will only be replaced by a religion of equal or greater profundity and power ___ the cross is our only answer. It remains to be seen which religion American Christianity represents. Therefore, the only solution to abortion, or any other evil which destroys the very fabric of any possible civilization, is to live according to the tenets of the faith once for all revealed, and do so regardless of personal consequences ___ regardless of the law. For everyone to do so? Yes. But not everyone will. Do we just excommunicate them (before they can excommunicate us)? No. We raise up in the body of Christ the part that will pay the price, and the rest of the body through backing up its member has a tool which can do the job, and an example which in time it can follow.

The missionary to the pre-born is as useless cut off from the body, as a hand severed at the wrist. And without that hand, the body has nothing with which to reach through the iron curtain to take hold of the jugular of the child killing industry.

Missionaries to the Pre-born What if we recast the whole abortion question and ask, "Where is the largest group of people in America who will never be reached by the Gospel?" We would have to answer, "In the wombs of mothers on their way to the abortion clinic." For the Church, the next question must be, "Are they not worthy to have missionaries sent to them? Not their mothers, not their congressmen, or aborting doctors, but to the children themselves ___ are they not worthy? How can the 4,500 unreached people who are scheduled for murder today be reached by the Gospel? The same way the Church reaches all unreached people ___ by sending missionaries into the harvest.

The unique call of the Church is to minister the Gospel reaching everyone for whom Christ died, regardless of the cost, or where they live. There are 400 different mission groups in America and yet none of them have chosen to reach this group of people with the Gospel. Each day 4,500 of their number are slaughtered, with no chance to hear and see what the Gospel means in the lives of God's people. These are the children whose mothers reject crisis pregnancy centers, walk past the picketers, are unmoved by sidewalk counseling, and are brought into abortion death chambers ___ these are the children God calls us to reach out to and protect at any cost to ourselves.

There is no way to reach these needy children without crossing to the other side of the iron curtain of American law which has descended protectively around the abortion industry. The Church's mission to the pre-born reaches through that curtain to rescue those children from certain death. The Church has long supported ministries and missions which reach behind the various iron curtains in our world. In these other iron curtain ministries, we do not limit our outreach to word only otherwise radio ministries would fulfill God's commission. Instead, we send people where it is illegal for them to go, with a message it is illegal to preach, and activities which are illegal to do ___ ministries such as Eastern European Missions, and Operation Mobilization.

Today in America it is illegal to protect unborn people. When it is illegal to save a child from murder, it is illegal to be a Christian. The weapons of our warfare are no different from the weapons of warfare in any ministry which governments have made illegal ___ the willingness of the missionary to put himself in the line of fire intended for those he is ministering to, joining them regardless of the cost to Himself. The weapon and power source of all spiritual warfare is the cross: Physically intervene, in a way which is harmless, in a way that brings suffering to yourself rather than the intended victims, or their persecutors.

In our case, that person is the helpless child and the cost of standing with him to protect him is beatings by police and pro-abortion thugs, mock trials, imprisonment, and law suits which make it impossible to own any property.

What is a Missionary? Someone who believes that God is calling Him to lay down his life to reach people for whom Christ died. Missionaries are committed: to represent the Church; to a particular field; to people who would not normally hear the Gospel; for their whole life.

Then, what is a Missionary to the Pre-born? Everything any other missionary is, only his field of work requires a unique commitment: to rescue the children in a particular area; whenever he is free of jail; until he is free to Rescue every day; until they finally stop the killing.

This is what more and more Christians are moving toward as the movement redefines the issue in Biblical terms. These children in the womb are people in need of the Gospel. If they are unsaved at the time of the abortion, then they go directly to hell. If they are saved, then their abortion sends them directly to heaven. In either case, the Gospel, to be effective for them, must begin where God began with us ___ with protecting their lives. For those bound to hell, rescuing them gives them the possibility of hearing the Gospel, in addition to seeing it acted out in the Rescue itself.

For the aborted who are bound for heaven, they are the brethren of our Lord, and to reject protecting them is the same as rejecting our Lord Himself according to Matthew 25 ___ which can call into question our own salvation according to verse 46. We are finally leaving behind the controversy of Rescue as a strategy ___ a means of highlighting a social evil by periodically demonstrating our abhorrence of it and the illegitimacy of the laws which protect it. Instead, the Church is raising up those who will express the deepest elements of our faith in simple obedience and stand on them. We will, as a corporate body of Christ, do for the children a small bit of what our Lord did for us, and bear their rejection in their place.

We will do this by raising up a core of people who will rescue on a daily basis, or as often as they are not held in prison. They represent all of us. All Christians are called to bring the Gospel to the gates of hell and bear His reproach as a way of life, not a periodic demonstration of sincere intent. We cannot all do it in every arena in which the Church is called to warfare. Therefore, the rescuing missionary ___ whether at the abortion clinic, in the business world, raising lots of children, or overseas ___ becomes the representative of the Church whose dedication and effectiveness in his particular arena, is no more or less great than the dedication of those he represents.

Around them, the rest of the battle and all the other gifts take on meaning, direction, and depth. I believe that God has given the Church everything necessary to change the world. The Pro-life movement modeled itself after political and social action, education, and soup kitchens. Operation Rescue came a step closer to the Church modeling itself after the camp meeting and the crusade. I believe it is time in the arena of child killing, to turn the Church back to its own historical and biblical roots: Gospel missions.

Released to Rescue The Christian in all of his life is released by God from sin and death in order to Rescue. Throughout the Gospels and letters, we are commanded to take up the cross in our daily lives. The cross was an act of grossly physical intervention making possible the spiritual and physical reality of redemption. The spiritual authority of the Church and of individual Christians will always have a physical dimension ___ and so do we when we Rescue. For it to be possible for the cross to be presented to mankind as God's solution to evil, our Lord had to be harmless ___ and so we are harmless while keeping others from harm.

He specifically rejected revolution and political activism as lasting solutions, and instead took all violence to himself in place of His people, because He would settle for nothing less than the heart changing transformation of the world ___ "ministry", and "leadership", mean imitating our Lord's self-denial if we would play our small part in winning the world. Finally, the cross is the supreme expression of the incarnation, where God emptied himself and became flesh, ultimately suffering for us outside the camp becoming sin in our place, and calling us to join Him there. The call of salvation is this call to join Him there outside the camp.

Philippians 2 makes this the pattern of the Christian Life ___ we have the mind of Christ and put the business of others (including that of the people in the womb) above our own. We will not all Rescue in the same arena ___ but we are all called to find how the cross applies to the arena God has called us to Rescue in, and lay down our lives for others there. In the arena of legalized child murder, I do not know of any other approach which incorporates these three aspects of the cross: physical intervention, harmlessness, and emptying oneself to the status of another and taking on his weaknesses and punishment in the act of protecting him.

In an abortion Rescue, Christians gather at an abortion/death camp, they prevent the murder by blocking the doors or being locked into the actual killing chambers. While they are there, no one can be killed. They do not hurt or attack. And when the time comes for punishment, they receive it in place of the children whose lives were spared that day. But if they are to continue to rescue children in a particular city or state, sooner or later they must be able to overcome whatever punishment the courts ___ by permission of the local churches ___ deal out, and then return to rescue again. These fines and long jail sentences are nothing more than the world's re-education program for Christians who dare to return to Rescue.

The missionary will overcome them by making his release from jail a release to rescue again. The courts want to know what it takes to re-educate us ___ to make us learn that we cannot protect children here. What is our price? This problem is not unique to abortion Rescue, it is the problem of every mission field of the Church: Satan wants the price so high that no one will dedicate his life in any arena. Because not everyone will go, sending missionaries is how the Church pushes beyond this impasse. For the analogy of the body to work, someone must go and the rest of us stand behind him. Regardless of the obstacles faced by the missionary in any field, when he overcomes them, he overcomes them to continue his work of Rescue, not to retire and enjoy the good life.

God's people are always released from their trials to Rescue. If we can apply this to Rescue at the abortion clinics, the full time missionary to the pre-born reaches the children in the name of God's people. By supporting him we join him as we can, no longer burdened by a load of rhetoric we cannot bear. We prepare for the day when every heart shall burn to end this murder in our midst. There has been an ongoing debate within Rescue circles about the best way to rescue. This debate has revolved around how much we should cooperate, or refuse to cooperate, with the legal system. The purest form of this is the Category Zero rescues developed in Knoxville, Austin, and Dobbs Ferry.

But the Missionary principle of being released to rescue cuts through the gordian knot of how to do the "perfect" rescue. The missionary encourages each person to focus on the heart of where we stand in solidarity with the pre-born person: at the door of the death camp keeping his killer away. Regardless, then, of how one deals with the system ___ whether after blocking the door he walks away, gets arrested, he pays a fine, takes probation, or goes limp for three years ___ when he is released, the only question will be, "Has he been re-educated by this legal system in this town to let them kill children?

Or will he return to those death camps as soon as it is possible for him to do so, to resume his part in the ministry to the Pre-born?" For the full-time missionary to the pre-born, the return will be very quickly after his release. For the short-term missionary he may return only as often as his primary calling in the body of Christ permits him. But no longer will we use one part of the Gospel, ministry to justify why another part of that same ministry is off limits to us. This same principle of consistency over technique applies to those who support the missionary.

If someone's part in ending child killing is to amplify the missionary's work by calling courts daily, prayer, and financial support, then they will do that with a zeal, purpose, and faithfulness against all odds, which matches the missionary's. Finally, for those primarily involved in non-rescue Pro-life ministry, or any other sort of ministry in the body of Christ, this same sacrificial call to faithfulness in their arena, and those who primarily support them in that arena, will lead them to do all they can to maintain the Church's uncompromising hostility to the world.

The Cross and the Rescuer The issues of this book must be summarized. Yet the very problem of summarizing is the problem the book was written to resolve: How can we describe the issues faced by all pro-life Christians if the very description offends them? How can we call for a solution if we are found ourselves to fall short? Our problem is very much like trying to explain to your wife ___ or husband ___ that you are only unfaithful once a year. "But honey, you are far more important than this other person. I love you the whole rest of the time." Imagine rebuking someone for seeing their prostitute monthly and encouraging them to be pure like you and only visit her once a year?

This is the precarious situation which first the pro-life movement found itself in, and then the Rescue Movement inherited. No wonder they thought we were judgmental back in 1988, and still do today. Our own words found us as guilty as the non-rescuer. Many, when they realized this, quit Rescue altogether. Others just lived with the tension and did the best they could. Others became irrationally bitter, knowing they would have the courage to be consistent with their rhetoric if they could only get enough others to be consistent with them. Still others sought to do the impossible, to tone down Rescue rhetoric so as to be less offensive.

But Rescue rhetoric is nothing less than calling people to take their Pro-life and Christian rhetoric seriously ___ how could it be toned down? The problem was, as radical as the solution of sitting-in at abortion clinics might sound, we were not even close to as radical as our own words demanded we be. Listen to those words: Rhetoric: "If you call abortion murder, then act like it." Proposed solution: "Even though they murder every day, you only need to `act like it' with a sit-in three to twelve times a year." A center is needed to hold the whole together and give meaning to it. Who will take that step? The Church is taking that step. But first the inherent weakness in the logic of the Rescue Movement had to work itself out.

Accordingly, we have begun to stagger on an inadequate definition of what Rescue is in the first place. Because we preached sacrifice as a way of life ___ Rescue ___ but only proposed periodic "sacrifices" ___ rescue ___ other Christians believed that we were using the cross to beat the "dead church" over the head with. When the call of the cross penetrated our rescue mania, we were dismayed. We realized that we would have to either get on it, or set it down. The cross is not bludgeon for one hypocrite to swing at another. Each of us has only one question: "Will I get on that cross or not?" If we answer, "Yes." then it is only a question of which arena we are called to die in. It does no good to criticize others for what they do or fail to do.

The question for our Lord in Gethsemane was not, "Will Peter go to the cross with you?" But, "Will you go to the cross for Peter even though he sleeps through your dark night of the soul, flees from you, and denies you?" As Rescue Missionaries take up the full time challenge, and work in the dark leaving organization to others, a wholeness can be restored to the movement. And each can do his part with no sense of shame that we are leaving something undone ___ the body will become an apt analogy again. As the Lord restored Peter after his denial when he had quit because his life did not match his rhetoric, our Lord comes to each of us who have failed, to restore us.

Around the country, groups are springing up committed to this ideal of rescuing whenever the killing factories are open. These groups will not become instruments of condemnation for the periodic Operation Rescue. Rather they will become a mutual affirmation, of the periodic mass rescue, as the mass rescue becomes an affirmation of their daily sacrifice. This is so important to understand. If Rescue missionaries become obsessed with their own sense of sacrificial importance, they will accomplish nothing. And if part time and non-rescuers continue to apply solutions which fall short of what their rhetoric demands and yet talk as if the body of Christ is doing all it can, then we will have child killing with us until God removes our lampstand in disgust.

Full time Rescuers will only strengthen every other part of the Rescue Movement, Pro-life movement and Church whrn they are united with each other each playing their part in enabling the other to do its part. The missionaries will fill up what is lacking by providing that core of the Church around which the rest can rally, not in order to condemn but to give their work meaning. The "rest" of the Church represents that overwhelming flood of compassionate intolerance which is rising to destroy child killing and restore the very foundations of Western civilization. Without this flood of light we are all only candles on a glacier.

In those cities where the legal system follows each rescue with months or weeks of jail, these witnesses, these Missionaries to the Pre-born, become the opportunity of every Christian to hold the entire legal system accountable for the murder it protects. In so doing, they will free the missionary to Rescue more often, and finally, every day the doctor is killing, until there is no more killing. As God moves in the heart of His church, daily phone calls will begin to pour into the courts demanding, "Let my people go that they might serve me!" Courts will be astounded that Christians do not support them. They will argue that if they let these missionaries go they will only go "break the law again!" To which the thousands of Christians will answer, "No.

They are not breaking the law, they are protecting children. Free them to continue protecting them." The message of the Church is not, "Free us so that we can go back to living in pursuit of the American Dream." But, "Free us to go back to the death camps until they are gone. This city, this nation, is too small for Christians and child killers to live in the same place." The next day, week, month, year, decade, will find the same Christians there at the death camp, there in jail, there in court, there on the phones. They will not be going from city to city, but will be eyeball to eyeball with every part of our legal system which keeps them from protecting children.

And because a few are unflinchingly eyeball to eyeball, they bring the rest of the church within striking range. There will be no talk of "soft targets" vs "hard targets." All baby killers will be seen as God's target, and we will take them out by laying down our lives for them. We will stop running to the roar, or from the roar. Every child killer in time will have hoards of Christians dogging every step, and blocking every step which takes him closer to a killing center. As missionaries take an attitude toward abortion which forces it to become a "me or you" issue, the rest of those against abortion will reflect that same implacable determination to rid the land ___ not fight abortion, but to rid the land of it.

These missionaries will become the cutting edge of the Church's historic intolerance to the murder of the innocent. They will represent the Church as they give the world the four historic options the Church of Jesus Christ has always offered a hostile world: 1) put us in jail forever; 2) kill us; 3) leave us alone to live like Christ; 4) flee your perversion, be converted, and join us. Will the Church turn because we have finally converted it to activism? No. Rather we have finally found a biblical vehicle to express the unity of the Body of Christ and His crucified love in its intolerance on behalf of His little ones.

Four Conclusions 1) No solution to abortion that is not distinctly Christian will be a lasting solution. This is because abortion itself is one of the costliest solutions to any problem imaginable, in essence, we murder the innocent witness to our sin, or the child who would cost too much to love and care for. Any solution which actually successfully replaces the solution of abortion must of necessity be equally costly. Only the cross evidenced in the lives of God's people will provide such a solution. All solutions await revival.

2) Operation Rescue as a concept and as a movement was headed in the right direction, but still held too many presuppositions of the world ___ presuppositions held by most Christians themselves I would hasten to add ___ and lacked foundation in people willing to pay the price of their convictions. The major worldly presupposition was that a crusade would accomplish God's will. Therefore it was child's play for Satan turn the energy of protecting children into political or social activism ___ to trade a Rescue Crusade for a political illusion. Satan continues to offer God's people the kingdoms of this world. God's counter offer is a cross and His Kingdom founded in heart-felt loving obedience at any cost.

Only out of the standards of righteousness and sacrifice of the cross, can politics become Christian, redemptive, and fruitful. All too easily the world proved that we were not willing to sacrifice to save a life. If they can prove this, then they are correct to suspect that our political solutions will be little more than forcing others through law to carry burdens we do not lift a little finger to carry ourselves: we ask the young mother to sacrifice for us either her child through abortion, or her life by bearing the unwanted child. The cross has a more perfect way ___ love laying down its life for another whether at the abortion clinic or opening up your own home.

3) The nature of legalized abortion in America is such that it presents the Church with a fresh version of a very old problem ___ today it has been made illegal to act like Christ. When it is illegal to physically protect another human being from murder, it is illegal to act like Christ. Will we act like the world and protect child murder, or will we act like Christ and protect children? I do not believe that we will see an end to child killing until enough people do for the children what Christ did for us ___ make it a personal matter of life or death to protect. We are gathering those people together, one missionary, one supporter, at a time, who can say to the child killer: "It's you or us, from now 'til the day either you quit killing or we die.

We want to live at least as consistently with our beliefs as the abortionist does, and commit at least as much of our lives to standing with the people in the womb as he commits to standing against them." Through its representatives, the churches will be able to say to Satan at his clinics in their cities what the Gospel says to Satan in the world, "This place is too small for killers and Christians to live in the same place."

4) There will be no lasting solution at law, or in alternatives and education, until enough people treat the pre-born as their human equals. When we begin to treat them as true equals to ourselves we will find that there is a tremendous price to be paid. Only by paying that price, will we purchase the necessary respect for the pre-born to have their inalienable right to life respected by the rest of the world. In so doing, we will begin to realize how much value our Father puts on His image bearers ___ enough to cause Him to take up a cross and call us to the same level of sacrifice with Him outside the gate.

When we join Him, "being made conformable to His death," then true change ___ from the heart ___ of men and societies can take place, that is to say, we will, "know the power of His resurrection." These missionaries will not replace Operation Rescue any more than Operation Rescue could replace the Pro-life movement, or the Pro-life movement could replace the Church. They are each an expression and focusing of God's command to become intolerant of evil by loving and serving God only, and loving our neighbor as ourself. In short, to let the Church be the Church.

In the next several years, you will see Christians converging on one city, not to battle that city, not to make a great media splash, but to become a part of the churches there, and in the name of the Lord of the Church, make child killing impossible by their presence, unthinkable by their teaching and personal example, and finally illegal by default. From that example, the Church in each city around the country will take courage, because God will begin to move in His people. And the reality of abortion in all of its intolerable horror will spread. God's people will reclaim their heritage. We will show, city by city that the time has come for the child killers to leave town and kill somewhere else.

This will not be the heroic effort of a few isolated fanatics, but will represent a focus of effort from the entire Church as each part of the body coordinates its work around the center of missionaries who refuse to stop protecting children regardless of the cost ___ refusing to stop even to organize others. Be prepared to take your place when this window opens.

Rage for Order

Rage for Order Joseph Foreman February 16, 2002 – DATE \@ "MM/dd/yy" 06/14/07

“He has put eternity into the heart of man yet in such a way that he cannot see the end from the beginning. Solomon, The Bible, Ecclesiastes 5 Question Why can we know things but not conclusively prove how or why we know them? Why is it that absolute proof of knowledge depends on perfect or infinite, knowledge, which we cannot have, and yet we cannot help but act as if we do know some things absolutely? Why does common sense philosophy end up being about as far from common sense as any other Philosophy? Why do the principles and rules for organizing thought depend on internal rules of consistency and yet the system created by these internally consistent rules and definitions can still make accurate predictions of the outside world?

Why does knowledge and experience seem to be divided up into opposing or dualistic pairs: 1) neither pole is able to fully explain the world; 2) each pole seems to be inescapably true; and 3) each pole seems to thoroughly contradict the other? Why do you try to be reasonable about the things you do? Why is it that to live we must follow rules and laws? Why can we (indeed why do we) organize our lives and our societies — from small clubs to empires — and yet we never come up with a fully coherent legal code, a coherent self-evident social morality, much less can we flawlessly run even the simplest organization, much less the empire? Why is it that reason inevitably sets us on a search for universal principles to order the rules and laws, which govern what we do?

Why is it that having organized these laws around a set of universal principles the legal matrix will tend to grow until you can do nothing without reference to some law or other? Why is it that when social order advances to this point more and more people revolt against the laws and those who apply them to the extent that they can, mock, insult, attack and even kill others over the very laws so necessary to life? How can something so simple as the Ten Commandments become as complicated as the Talmud, or even as complicated as Federal Law? How can something as incomprehensible as the Q’uran be so simple as the 7 pillars of Islam, or match even the simple affirmation, “There is one god Allah and Mohamed is his prophet?

Why is it that no matter how you see the world, you have a range of acceptable deviation from exact agreement with others? Why is it that those outside your range of acceptable deviation are hard to live with and if sufficiently deviant even killing them seems reasonable? How do we pick an appropriate level of intolerant behavior toward it. For instance, how much deviance warrants character assassinate through gossip or verbal rebuke? And how much deviance warrants physical discipline, or ostracism? How deviant must someone be to imprison, or finally to kill him? If truth is knowable, then why can we not all agree? If it is knowable, then why do we tolerate any deviation at all?

But if we will tolerate deviation at all, why do we suddenly decide that a particular deviation has gone too far and is intolerable requiring our corrective action or at least a hostile withdrawal on or part? Why are we the most intolerant of those whose beliefs, ethical systems and daily behavior are closest to ours but not quite in complete conformity? Why do we turn whatever dots we manage to connected into the order we are driven to impose on everyone around us . . . and yet we are not fully consistent even with our own dots? Can we be sure and yet question our certainty at the same time? Is it possible not to know God, yourself, and your world? Is truly rigorous intellectual atheism even possible? What does it mean for anything to exist?

What does it mean to know it? How can you decide what to do about what you know — what to fix, and what to leave alone? How can you know if it’s broken in the first place? And if broken, what makes you think you can fix it . . . or that you must fix it? What makes you think you can resent people for either not fixing it, or not helping you fix it? Why do we all in our gut expect men and women, husbands and wives, boys and girls to dress and act in certain ways? What stone or tree did we read these rules from? Why do we feel uncomfortable where our expectations are not met, especially with husband, wife, child or parent? Why is it that even the simplest most incontrovertible moral maxims cannot lead to a self-evident moral fabric in society?

Abstract Because we create a world beyond the physical world we are inexorably trapped in two illusions. One is that there is no knowable world other than the illusion we create. The other is that the illusion of knowledge we create is irrelevant to the real world. Because we live in a world that we did not create we are inexorably trapped in two illusions. One is that we know what is there. The other is the illusion that because we never can experience it fully it is always unknowable. To live is to seek, receive, and impose order. This order is the way life is. We either assume that this order is the way the world is, or we justify it by appeal to reason, tradition, experience, or revelation.

All of these appeals to be sustained depend on the assumption that there is a knowable relationship between what we know and the way the world is. Neither assumptions nor appeal to authority can prove this relationship between our thoughts and the world. Perhaps it is the impossibility of challenging these assumptions which becomes the proof to even the most rigorous skeptic that unless he is catatonic, even he must act as if there is a relationship in order to sustain the illusion that he has disproved his own existence, or God’s existence or the world’s or the existence of rules of right and wrong. The most effective refutation of skepticism is skepticism itself. To be a skeptic is to deny skepticism.

The most effective proof of skepticism would be a catatonic state or as close to such a state as one could get which would be the self imposed unity with the ONE brought about by Eastern techniques of meditation. Human reality is simply variations on the fact that we cannot know anything without also knowing God, the world, ourselves and morality. These four are the presupposition of knowing inescapably making possible all thought. Limitations of Order: Because we are finite, we are never able to create perfect order either in our minds or in the mind’s ability to grasp what is really out there.

All we know exists in a dynamic harmony created by contradictory, elusive, and unattainable ideals of perfection, which exist wherever there is an attempt at coherent thought — which is to say whenever we think. Within limits, those who create more coherent and dynamic patterns of thought achieve their goals better than those who do not. But there is a law of diminishing return. Beyond those limits, the search for coherence ends in madness, despair, or the illusion that you found it — the beatific vision. What those “limits” are is hard to pin down. Sometimes that madness is merely personal eccentricity and harmless to others. Other times it is genius. Still in other cases, our rage for order is the root of the most remarkable acts of love, patriotism and kindness.

And again the search for order is the root of hatreds from personal intolerance, to psycho-pathologies, to world wars and racial strife. We are limited, finite, and imperfect. Yet our knowledge (all of it even the unreflective sort such as brushing teeth) is based on the hypothetical existence and knowability of the unlimited, the infinite, the perfect — as if we could grasp the absolute in our relative, perspective-bound hands. Eternity truly is in the warp and woof of our conscious existence yet we cannot know its end or beginning. These are our limitations. They lead to interesting trade-offs because we cannot have it all either theoretically or in daily life.

The tradeoffs of order: Though there is no true group consciousness, within limits those who divide up the possible tasks of life provide each other with a greater ability to achieve their personal goals. A whole that is greater than each part makes each part more fulfilled and effective than the part attempting to supply the whole. The trade-off on a personal level is that the greater the order one brings to one area, the less order and the narrower the range of informed choices one has in other areas. The trade-off of specialization on a corporate level means that the more finely the labor is divided the more each person knows about less and less, and the less each person knows about more and more.

Survival is based on the creation of a human ecology of which economics is only a small index. In this social ecology we must trade with others to fulfill each other’s needs and wants. You must also trust others to deliver in areas where you have only limited knowledge. Covenant becomes the basis of any order involving more than one person. This is as true of love and friendship as it is of which car or tomato to buy. These intrinsic limits and tradeoffs are rooted in the limitations of life-experience itself. This paper is about those limitations and how the ideal of eternity both makes our world possible on the one hand and yet impossible on the other. It is about knowing what you believe and yet being able to question it.

It is about why people cannot help but not get along with each other while at the same time getting along. They must. It is a matter of keeping order and ruling creation or descending into hell. The MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction of the last Century is simply a global expression of our daily experience. We get along because the alternative is destruction. That’s abstract all right, so what does it mean? I’ll tell you so what, it is our drive to order everyone, everything and ourselves that is the source of every evil and every good. Perhaps the greatest act of deadly compassion today is the idea that good and evil reside in things around us, or in the drive to order them. But it resides in neither.

This drive is neither right nor wrong, good nor bad, this drive simply is what you are. The things around us are neither right nor wrong until they are incorporated in the order we develop and in what we do with those things around us as a result of that order. This drive is not something you turn off or on. It is not itself right or wrong nor able to tell you what is righteous or evil. It is what and who you are. This won’t help you answer the true/false questions you’ve always wanted answers to: “How can I know the world exists? That I exist? That God exists? That morality exists?

And if there is morality, what is it?” But it can help you understand how to function in a world where people really do see things differently, and a world where those differences are often punished and rewarded entirely apart from any human system of rewards and punishments — a world where gravity and the Ten Commandments will have their way. A world where our sense of order is often confused with the will of God and the way the world really is. God’s will and the world are often quite different from what seems to be a reasonable order in our mind.

Having said this, it is still inescapably true that at every point our drive for order presents us with a way of seeing that makes sense and we cannot help but believe that what we see and know is really true — the way things . . . are. Surely, there is a God and he agrees with us! “Believe” is really the wrong word to use because it implies a moment of decision where before there was doubt. As if one moment we do not believe our senses and the next moment we decide to believe that we know something truly. Though there are some issues that we believe in this way, the vast majority of our moment to moment life and reflection is the spontaneous conviction that things are as they seem to us. We are capable of stepping back and questioning anything.

But we live as if the questions are answered. Indeed, we cannot live any other way. Those who try doubting everything share the fate of Jabez Daws. Very few exist. Even fewer amount to anything. Though the landscape seems littered with Nietzsche’s and palsied artists. Statistically they are few and far between. Occasionally a comic like Woody Allen makes a living portraying the attempt to question everything. We call it neurotic. If you will bear with the technical discussion, I will try to show you the difference it can make in your perceptions and actions. The Story Look, all philosophy is really just a story. You see, I grew up in a family where my mother’s brother was killed in World War II.

A war that my father sat-out because he did not believe he could kill others. Instead he became a missionary burning with conviction that the weakest and poorest should be the object of his love and life. First they went to the Appalachian backwaters of North Carolina where they lost their second daughter Carol at birth in inadequate medical facilities. Then in 1949 my father went to China toward the end of the civil war in hopes of establishing contacts that would outlive the Communist creation of the new man. Had he been able to stay he would have spent the rest of his life working with the boys in the tin mines of South West China who never saw the light of day and had a life expectancy of 3 years. His call to go came in the middle of this civil war.

One glance exchanged between him and my mother and he accepted the call, leaving a wife and two children, one not old enough to even remember him when he returned. On his return from a year under Communist arrest, he was introduced to Sam, my brother. Sam told him soberly, “You aren’t my father, my father is in China.” Within two years of returning from China, they left for Korea, my mother 6 months along with me. It was 1954. The ink on the armistice was wet. I asked them once why they were so committed to their work and weren’t around to spend much time with me. Their answer was that their friends and their family were killed in the war (WWII) for mere material issues how could they shrink back when it was eternal issues at stake?

But I was an eternal issue too, wasn’t I? Where does family fit into changing the world? If you are a world changer, why is the first thing you sacrifice your family? Does changing the world mean we have to kill people or be killed ourselves by the stress and strain of trying to change everything? Why does everything need to be changed? Little did I know that 40 years after asking them why they did not give more attention to their family I would spend four years with a community where family was the only thing they would give attention to at the expense of almost every other human consideration and decency. They would change anything and everything in order to protect their little unit.

In this environment did they really save the family or did they simply find a new more devious destruction. Could it be that families were designed to disintegrate over time as the children grow up and leave. Is Socialism and all its various forms merely the search to make permanent on a social even global level what is lost when we come of age and go out to seek our fortune? The Garden of Eden – our Family. Why do we have to change everything? Why not just have families, spend time with them and live our lives? Why must we choose between calling and family? My father was fired by the mission board for trying to get the evangelical missionaries in Korea to buck the thoroughly secular even pagan Presbyterian Board of World Missions.

Undeterred, he entered Princeton to get a Ph.D. and then teach in one of the unbelieving seminaries and so win back the Southern Presbyterian Church for Christ. After getting his doctorate they settled instead in Montreat, North Carolina, a hot bed of Christian missions where my mother became the first elected mayor. Her first two years as mayor were consumed with correcting the host of illegal actions of her predecessors, much to the dismay of the ruling clique in that town who did all they could to stop her. There I grew up from 1965 until 1973, embroiled in debating every theological and social issue I could think of, on a mission to change the world.

I could have gone back as many generations in this sketch as you would like, and you would have heard similar stories such as my great, great grandmother a missionary in the wilds of Northern Alabama praying at every turn with her eight children, “Lord set my family apart to serve you.” He has. That prayer has endured and became the theme of her great, great, great grand daughter’s, (Laurel Anne’s), Senior Thesis in college. She traced the calling of her family to serve God through the generations changing everything around them they could get their hands on. Or I could tell of my great uncle Lapsley who died in the wilds of the Congo bringing the Gospel there with the first black Southern Presbyterian missionary.

His goal was to break the slavery on King Leopold’s rubber plantations. I’ve already told you about my mother’s brother (also named Lapsley) killed trying to bring change to France and Germany in the Battle of the Bulge. Or a great, great, great, great, grandfather in Virginia Joseph Lapsley, who when the ballot counting went bad, shot out the lantern, grabbed the ballot box, and shattered the window as he leapt through it onto his horse shouting, “I’ll be good for the count boys!” And rode all night to the capital with the ballot box safe. My great grandfather Charles Waldo Foreman nearly killed himself in privations working his way through the University of Rochester.

When newly married he came home after hoisting a few at the pub and his wife Elizabeth tied him to the bed posts and slapped him with wet towels until he sobered up saying, “Charles if you will be my husband, you will never do this again, besides you know that no Lewis has ever been able to take the bottle without the bottle taking him.” Our family has been dry ever since and on a crusade to keep all around us dry. In 1903 the same Elizabeth with two children moved to Montreat North Carolina, a three or four year old Presbyterian retreat deep in the Appalachian Mountains where she taught in the first school in Eastern Buncombe County. This has been our family’s home base ever since.

I won’t stop now to tell you about all the things my Father has done to bring or resist change in this pleasant little valley. Even a summary would fill a book of its own and you can find it in his faithful daily correspondence to his children, in the annals of the courts of Buncombe County, in the records of the higher courts of the State of North Carolina, and minutes of the Town Commissioners of Montreat andin the minutes of the Mountain Retreat Association . He has lived his life as a thorn in the white man’s side. There has been no escape. I was born and bred to bring change. After College and Seminary, I didn’t start a church. Though claiming to be a divine perspective on all of life, everyone knows that theology is designed for Churches.

So I started a janitorial service because I wanted to see if the theological ideas and the Reformation ideology I had been committed to for generations, really did work in the real working world. I knew it worked in books, and from pulpits, but how about where the cleanser meets the bowl? Can you clean ashtrays for Christ? Or is Christianity merely an emotional issue foisted on people in moments of psycho-social-emotional weakness? I mean, if a theology degree from Westminster Theological Seminary fails to teach you how to clean toilets then what good is their theology degree? For three years I labored and to my gratification I found that Westminster’s theology is good for cleaning toilets.

One night while kneeling in front of a porcelain idol with my hand deep in its bowels, I prayed, “Lord, I can see that knowledge of you does apply to every part of life, I’m willing to keep on cleaning toilets and discipling others to do so also, but is there anything else I could do?” He answered that prayer and six months later I was sitting in a prison holding-tank worshipping God, as is so often the case, not even remembering until years later that I had asked God to deliver me from toilets and ash trays. For the next ten years I committed myself to stopping the murder of children and jails became a second home. I led about 12,000 people into and out of jail, spent over two years there myself and in the course of it all got to know activists really well. . . .

I was never an activist myself of course. Activists are people committed blindly to ideologies. That’s not me. I don’t know who said it, but it’s true: When a normal person digs himself into a hole he throws down his shovel and gets out of it. When an ideologue digs himself into a hole he thinks he will get out if he digs twice as hard. In time I came to see to my horror that I was the sort who simply kept digging. The question is, how do you know if you are digging in the right spot? The need to dig is our rage for order. We will dig somewhere.

But the question that this rage cannot answer is, “Is this the right spot or should I seek another?” I realize now that the reason I said I was not an activist, is not because my mind does not gravitate to well-oiled systems of thought . . . it does. I am and always will be a Calvinist. It is not because I didn’t do the radical thing . . . I did. No, I tried to tell myself I was not an activist for two reasons: First: I always distrusted people for whom the patterns of their mind fit together so neatly that nothing they encountered in real life ever shook their theories. They would bend all legs to dance to the music playing in their head. These are the last people to entrust political power to.

They do much better in their anabaptistic, counter-cultural, ludite world slamming their fundamentalistic head against the wall (or liberal, freethinking, peacenik, or tree-hugging, Allahu Akbarring head depending on the ideology – whatever the title, they are all fundamentalists). Besides, sometimes the slamming works and things really do change. Good for them I say. But that’s not me I thought. Second: I never tried to talk other people out of their positions. I know most people think that is what I was doing. But that is never why I argued. I argue in order to get people to see a different perspective and thereby to better understand theirs. I would state my case for doing this or that. I would explain why they could or should join me.

But my conclusion was always, “Make up your mind to do this, or to do something else, but don’t just sit there. Whatever you do, even if you are doing nothing, it has an effect. Own up to the effect and either be proud of it or try something you can be proud of, but don’t condemn others for acting. We all act and we all have an effect, the only question is, are you proud of what you have done and are doing?” For me the worst evil was hypocritical apathy. For goodness sakes, there is no such thing as doing nothing, at least own up to it and do nothing on purpose! For instance, it wasn’t until the end of 1996 that I would carry signs to persuade people.

Until then I didn’t rely on argument, I relied on keeping children from being murdered whether anyone was persuaded or not. You see as long as we blocked access to the killing center, we weren’t arguing or persuading, we were saving that life. This was a small, but important distinction. So I couldn’t be an activists could I? You might ask, “How could you think that preventing abortion by sit-ins was less radically activistic than picketing?” And my answer back then would be simple, “Most activists thought of it as the ultimate act short of violence. For them it was the most radical thing they could do. For me, by contrast, it was not activistic because it had nothing to do with attempting to persuade or change a person’s mind or heart.

It had everything to do with saving a life whether someone’s mind were changed or not. Perhaps change would come. Perhaps the abortionist would return to his grizzly trade the next day. But for today, for now, a moment was bought for the innocent child scheduled for murder. And there was nothing they could do about it.” I see now that that is simply a different method of bringing change. But the drive to order things was there none the less. Certainly I was driven to live by an order radically different both from the killing world and from the church which then as now was willing to let children be murdered within 20 minutes of where it lived, worshipped and worked.

But my answer today to the question: “How could you think that preventing abortion by sit-ins was less radically activistic than picketing?” is truly simple, “You and I today are as much of an activist in defense of our order today, whatever it might be, as I was an activist while sitting in jail.” What I finally came to see is that we are all activists about something. Everyone demands consistency; relies on consistency; and believes they represent a measure of consistency in their life and thought, whether or not they have a shred of it. Everyone strives to find that consistency in the world around them and believes that they are relatively successful in their efforts. The fact is, we must think we are consistent in order to survive at all.

We are so driven by this yen for consistency that we will bend and twist all who get in the way of our ideas — even if those ideas are that we should leave it all alone and not try and change anything. We will hate (or at least resent) all those who try to get us to see the world in such a way that it calls for actions that at the moment we are not willing to take.

The unconscious reasoning goes like this: All deviation from my thoughts and actions is proof that my thoughts aren’t final, therefore they are a threat to my self-assurance — my conviction that I really do know something about how the world really is and my conviction in light of this reality that I am acting properly, morally, that I am good apart from the inescapable imperfections common to the human frame. No one is free of this conviction of consistency. Oddly enough, no one is really successfully consistent either. You would think that someone would succeed in perfectly bending things to fit his theories! Or you would think that someone would successfully bend all his theories to encompass all things and capture the world as it is.

The fact is, however, no one escapes the drive to bring order, yet no one succeeds in it either. The question is not whether changing things is right or wrong. You will change things. You cannot help but change things. The two questions are, “Is there a right or wrong, better or worse way to bring change?” and “Is the change I represent an improvement or a detriment to true progress and goodness?” What will we grasp hold of and re-order to our sense of proportion and how will we do it? For we will grasp hold of something or we are dead, these are the only options – be human or cease to be at all. In time the fervor of our pro-life cause was broken. Why?

How could Christians one day declare: “Saving Babies is God’s will!” And the next day declare with equal fervor: “Go ahead and crucify him, and while your at it kill the little bastards!” This has stuck in my craw, along with the first question: “How can the ideologically committed spend so much time doing nothing but discuss the sub-sub-sub-points of their ideology without end?” and “How can anyone resist being sucked into the ideological maelstrom of reason and logic on any side of any question?” Judges would rant at me saying, “I will not permit you to turn this courtroom into a debating chamber for your ideas.” No sooner were these words out of their mouth than they would feverishly lecture me for five or ten minutes about why killing children in the womb was right and why their court would defend it.

Many of these judges did so as professing Christians weaving God into their defense of murder. But of course they were perfectly neutral in what they said, I was the one who was trying to debate the issue though I stood silent and listened to them. We are all actively seeking to impose our order. And to do so we must maintain in our minds that we are the neutral ones and the other guy is the fevered ideologue. The belief in our personal neutrality or objectivity is central to our rage to bring order. We must believe in the final analysis that we are not bringing order, we are simply supporting the world the way it really is. We after all represent the still point of the turning world.

See I can’t even tell you the story without devolving into what this book will soon enough be consumed with. So, back to the thread: Seeing the futility of trying to work outside the Church, I became the pastor of a quiet little church and then immediately became convinced the sky would fall at midnight December 31, 1999. My only comfort is Chase Manhattan and all the major banks spent about a Trillion dollars each laboring under the same Y2K delusion. Me? I simply liquidated all my assets (a quick task) and the church voted unanimously to sell its property and move to Virginia with me.

There we were part of a new community (not a commune) with other ideologically sold out families. (By the way, the crucial difference between a commune and a community is not the ideology, but it is the tools of control. In a community each person owns his own property. In a commune each person gives his property to a person or group of trustees. Those rulers have close to absolute power when they get hold of your assets. This form of government works only where those in custody are truly dependent such as for children, or in groups where men and women voluntarily give up their liberty and independence for a higher calling, such as religious orders, or military.) For society in general such a social scheme is called a cult, communisms or socialism.

It is all the same thing. This community called Rivendell was a landmark of the back to family movement. Back to the simple life, the soil, and family values where fathers rule and mothers serve them well. I was shocked to discover people who, like me, were moths drawn to the flame of ideological consistency — it was simply a different flame that held them mesmerized. I had preached patriarchy, and family values for years. Feminists hated me to the tune of 1.4 billion dollars worth of lawsuits. Non-Presbyterians found me to be legalistic because of my commitment to God’s law, constitutions and other covenantal documents. I was pro-community and pro-Church structure. Pro-Male Elder rule. Heck, I still am, come to think of it.

But in four short years all of the aging I should have done from 10 to 44 caught up to me. If you don’t believe me, compare the pictures of me in San Bernardino at age 44 after years of jail, and me after leaving Rivendell to come to Montreat at age 48, four years later. These were procrustean activists (as all activists are) who believe all the same things . . . almost. But some in the group took those ideas and created a tight web of social rules and orders that defined righteousness and gender roles to a degree that I and others found to be absurd and destructive even of their own goals. And, truth be told, for all my protestations otherwise, I was one of them: both an activist and committed to ideals so similar to theirs that outsiders would not tell us apart.

But my fellow Rivendwellers couldn’t see the similarities between me and them, only the differences. Why? This time instead of changing the world all we wanted to do was get a community going. I traded the outward direction of Operation Rescue for the inward direction of Rivendell. I had no better luck with family issues than I did with abortion issues. We found that even the simplest of moral dictums resisted our efforts to weave them into a moral and social fabric, which was necessarily deducible from those first principles. There are still many who believe that they had the moral social fabric and if it wasn’t for my obstinacy it would have worked. But I contend that their failure is simply an inevitable part of the package they have bought into.

It is built into the nature of ideology. All ideologues fall prey to it. And ideologues will always fight and devour one another, especially when they try to form a community of like minded ideologues. For instance, honor your father and mother; respect your elders and those in authority. Women should dress modestly. Men should lead. The family is the basic unit of social organization and its authority should be honored. Don’t steal, don’t lie etc. All of these are the fundamental bedrock of social order. No society can exist for long without these or similar convictions. Yet they do not dictate necessarily a particular web of rules and customs.

If you try to derive such a web — such an ecology — you must again and again arbitrarily choose the details of your social order from a vast array of possible rules that could stem from any of these fine principles. There is no necessary set of derivative rules or practices. People as diverse as Hindus, Buddhists, Ancient Greeks, Jews, Christians, Barbarians and Romans held to a similar set of values as the back to family patriarchs of Rivendell, yet their social orders were vastly different from each other. I discovered that if we were to make this social order work, we would have to act as if there is no other acceptable order, at least for us. You can see, the problem: Women either can or can’t pray in public, or make prayer requests.

Girls either can or can’t wear dresses. You either must say “Yes, Sir or Ma’am” or you don’t have to. As soon as you decide one way then you discount the other. A social ideologue insists that to please God (or to please their eternal ideals of philosophical wholeness) you must decide on one set of customs and traditions. But here’s the problem. Take the simple and obviously true dictum that it is vital to know the difference between mine and thine. The 8th commandment is fundamental to civilized and orderly society. But as simple as it seems to say “do not steal,” the reality is that most of the things you touch and use in life belong to someone else. The issue is not, “don’t steal,” but, what is it legitimate to do with what isn’t yours?

And that issue is not answered by the 8th commandment or any derivative principle, neither is the issue of clothing answered by the law, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Once worked out, like all other applied details of any moral code, the details are dependent on what everyone decides to finally agree on, not on mere logical necessity flowing from the moral first principles, which we try to follow. This apparent relativism was unnerving to many in this community. My insisting on this obvious fact and making it stand in the way of fine-tuning the code made me a libertine in their eyes. I can’t say I was comfortable with the implications of this myself, but I could see no other alternative.

We would either give liberty in these areas, or we would have to make rules where our first principles simply did not give us the rationally necessarily deducible details. First we decide on the details. Secondly we would elevate these detailed rules to the level of the first principles through a series of tortuous arguments linking them all together in a seamless garment. Me genoito! If we give liberty we are not libertines. If we refuse to confuse man’s law with God’s we are not evading God’s law. So to if we insist on the absoluteness of God’s law (or any law) we are not therefore legalists. I am comforted to find this same dilemma in Jesus one of the clearest on the subject – he hated legalists, but he also taught that even the details of Moses’ Law must be kept.

What I found disturbing and many there in Rivendell found intolerable is the fact that regardless of how the first principles might descend from heaven, inevitably, details of a social order are covenantal. Which is to say, based on the consent and agreement of the people. Which is to say, arbitrary within limits. They are not necessarily deducible from first principles. And yet this seems to be even the Bible’s argument: “Does not nature itself tell you that long hair for a man is shameful?” What is nature? It is the social convention of the day governing hair in this case.

Paul links a divinely revealed standard to the social convention and calls it “Nature.” Certainly this is the only word in the Bible condemning long hair and it is based on social norms as a reference point not God’s law. It is that arbitrariness that drives us crazy. We want the details of moral behavior to be fixed, eternal, as simple as the simple moral dicta that we find so direct and refreshing – “taste not touch not handle not.” We do things thus and so because thus and so is the pattern of the cosmos. But that logical link between incontrovertible dictum and particular social practice does not exist in a form that gives the particular practice the same authority as the dictum.

It is as illusory as the missing link of the evolutionist – which of course the evolutionary fundamentalist like the Biblical fundamentalists believes that link must be there, after all the end result is unarguably true. A physical example of this search for an eternal pattern of life we can all live by is found in the martial arts. In the execution of balanced patterns the adept enters into the eternal pattern of the cosmos. Of course these patterns were thought up by Sensei So and So, and passed on by his disciples. But they go through their gyrations believing that in doing so they enter the eternal. And so did we in Rivendell in attempting to follow the Tai Chi of intricate patterns of our invented social order.

To bolster this order many argued that all social systems throughout history followed Rivendell’s ideas of order, except the moderns of course. This is patently false but the faithful needed the bolstering more than they needed the truth. They needed the sense of consistent pattern more than they needed reality itself. Indeed, many could not function in what might be termed reality and had to create their own special ecology to sustain the order they wished to find. The movie matrix is not so far off as a social analogy. We may not dwell in cocoons hooked up into a great computer generated illusion, but the fact is, our social ecology by analogy is not necessarily any more grounded in realty.

If Christianity is real, if there is such a thing as a Christian civilization or social order, then it must be more than self-consistent and bolstered by claims of antiquity and our interpretation of divine revelation. It must be true. It must in the end (and beginning) be that divine order. Now, don’t think if you are not a Christian that these same issues do not apply to you. If what you believe is real, if it is capable of sustaining social order or civilization then it must be not only believed and generated by enough people like you, it must be bolstered by claims that this is they way things really always have been, it must be true.

Not being a Christian does not mean that you can evade truth claims any more than being a Christian means that you may supersede them. I use the examples found in a Christian community because that is where I have lived. But you can’t escape the issues regardless of where you live, nor can I simply by living somewhere else.

Perhaps it can be summarized this way: There were two families in our community whose children in completely different ways and on different issues and at different points asked their parents the same question: “Is this which we are attempting to create here in Rivendell True Christianity?” One Family answered, “Yes.” And the price they paid was the apostasy of at least two of their children, so far, and the vain attempt to cover it up since they make a living publishing a magazine that hands out this patriarchal claptrap as if it is found somewhere in either the Bible or written on some rock in the world somewhere.

Another family said, “No!” This family with some difficulty kept its faith but at the expense of relativizing much of its practical content as far as social order went. But the test was grueling and will have after-effects for years to come on all of us. The other families in Rivendell fell somewhere in-between in belief, conviction and outcome. How can it be that things, which are agreeable to most in the group and are helpful on the level of rough calculation and day to day living, can become deadly when they become the nexus of a tight web of consistent reasoning applied to life? How could something good — family values — become the death of us? It was like a mother dying in child-birth.

Nothing wrong with the child — still God’s blessing — but father and child must live with this reality of the part they played in the mother’s death for the rest of their lives. It was here as families were torn apart in the name of FAMILY VALUES that I started to wander again in my old question: what could the world possibly be like if I could agree with so much of what is taught and said, and yet find others in such heart-felt disagreement with me? By the time I left I had been charged with over 30 pages of charges including heresy, feminism and coarse language in sermons. (Among other things I had brought a cactus into the pulpit as a sermon illustration describe visually what an “offense” might be. I asked why it was that people are so eager to take up an offense.

I then mimicked several places that those who take up offenses might put it. Coarse? Yes. True? A gross understatement of our life in that community.) Incidentally those who brought the charges were themselves disciplined and the intricate church covenantal court system I was so enamored of did protect me and them from what we might have done to each other. But it also made the grueling torture possible at a level that without those church courts their enmity could never had the fertile field to grow as it did. In the end it proved an utter disaster for all of us. Why?

How on earth could it be that we could agree on so much that no outsider would be able to tell us apart . . . and yet . . . and yet by the time it was all over, 1/3 (about 70) of our number had slipped away quietly in the first two years and then by the end of the third year another third (about 70) slipped away with great noise and orgiastic schism. Then about 20 more slipped out quietly in the aftermath. And finally I am slipping away myself, bankrupt, no job, my house foreclosing. The land signed in security to buy our mobile home sucked into the vortex of the foreclosure. And I go back to live with my parents in Montreat, take a coaching job at Montreat College and to make ends meet I grovel for a minimum wage Mr.

Fix It job at the college in the maintenance department and people suggest I sell knives from door to door. But I finally settle on earning some extra cash by delivering pizzas for Pizza Hut. Here is the guy who was so smart he thought he could change the world. And I still think I can, just read this. It is about how and why we all want to find true order and bring it to the world for its own good. I’m not against it. Don’t think I’m saying its all a mistake, Candide just go tend your garden. I’m arguing that it is inevitable for all of us to be this way. Even those of us who only tend our garden are simply limiting the extent of the world on which we will impose our order. But imposing order is what makes you human.

What is the nature of human belief, human knowledge, the world, God, morality such that we do these things to each other? Why is it that the drive for purpose, meaning and wholeness, community and individual integrity, peace, truth and justice are the things that make life worth living . . . and so we end up dying for them — or what we think is them. Or we end up trying to force them on others so that they die for the things that make our life worth living and their life worth removing. What is Christianity? What is Atheism? Polytheism, who is Joe Six Pack – the fellow who lives moment to moment? What is conversion? What are belief systems? Is everything really relative? If so, why is “everything is relative” a self-contradictory statement?

How could everything be self-contradictory in fact? And yet if there are absolutes, how could they be knowable to a finite mind? As a sign of my rage, I actually think that this paper is the closest I have come to a coherent explanation of the ironies and self-defeating nature of radicalism, belief in God, normalcy and what it is that drives us. It is the rage for order, which can never be fully satisfied. Some of us are driven by it to bend all into the shape of our patterns. Others of us are driven by it to bend themselves into the shape of other people’s patterns. And most of us are somewhere in between, believing that we know a thing or two but with a healthy skepticism about how well we know it.

The problem is, that skepticism usually looks an awful lot like apathy and the horror of the unexamined life. But the alternative leaves us on our own or each other’s Procrustean beds. Or is it that we can never get others off of that bed or even ourselves off of it without the moral and philosophical equivalent of mind altering drugs? Is this why the Bible forbids drunkenness but compares the God-directed life to being drunk and encourages moderate drinking especially during times of legitimate rejoicing or when you are on death row? God recognizes that there is no escape from our design to bring order except by dulling down that rage for order to the level where we can accept disorder and not be consumed.

Some do it with drugs, others do it naturally, but to live with others in this world we must dull something. In the same way that my first book was a plea to sell out to the light. This book is a caution against the madness sight brings you. It is my argument that because there is something more, something absolute, therefore we can rest in our finitude and not bend absolutely everyone and everything to our designs. Relativism is only a blessing to those who believe they have a grasp of what is absolute. “Relative” is what everything else is, relative to those absolutes. Without absolutes, of course, everything else would not, could not be relative, everything else would be utterly incoherent. Patterning by its very nature demands more than everything being equal.

A pattern always reaches beyond itself to sustain its pattern. No pattern is self evident or self sustaining. I’m not just shouting hip hip hooray for Christianity. My opinion of those who fancy themselves absolutists is a fairly dim both personally as well as intellectually they have their challenges. For instance, if everything were absolute, then of course there would be no room for change, diversity of opinion, economic exchange, any tolerance at all, or any other human thing we experience in the course of a day which call for our good manners to endure. If there were absolutes then they would be unknowable for all knowledge is finite. So what advantage is there to saying that there are things which are beyond knowledge.

If they are beyond knowledge then how do you know about them? Granted my explanations are a bit technical at this point. In time perhaps I’ll spice the old bag up with some clever stories like I did my first book which was every bit this technical and dry before I figured out how to make my life stories into chapter illustrations. Perhaps in time I can do the same here. But for now what you see is what you get. When this is done I’ll start on my next project, that, the West, and the Christianity that made it, is not lost and is not losing. We are winning and have been winning for at least the last 2,000 years.

I don’t see a significant set-back on the horizon . . . unless of course they manage to regulate the price of oil and keep it artificially low or high or raise the minimum wage to a point at which the entire economy is destroyed and with it the last hope of the poor for any sort of decent employment. But even that will take a good 200 years to become a major set back. But that is the next book about the ultimate triumph of all those things which today seem so quaint, like God, like the world, and like morality. This book is about what Martin Marty called our blessed rage for order, which is to say, it is a book about why all those quaint things will inevitably triumph — we are designed for the triumph of God which is why we are designed to be ordering beings.

It’s a funny world, but I think it works like this: Summary Unlike the physical things of creation and the other animals and plants, we are designed to create an ecology that incorporates, interprets and transcends the physical world around us. This psycho-social ecology is our primary environment. To do this we are designed to 1) create and test patterns for internal consistency; 2) to test that consistency against the environment; and 3) choose a course of action. Our patterns, our environment, and our evaluation process (P-E-E) interface continuously but only in a never ending instant. No more, and no less . . . ever. This is the moment of experience — “now”. It can never be intentionally repeated. We discover, recreate and test order.

We do this in, around, and out of that moment of experience. That reality is inescapably driven by the patterns that we create to order that experience. In that moment — which is to say at all times — we are inescapably engaged with the objective world order as it is and as we imagine it to be in constant interaction. In actual experience, neither pattern nor objective world may be abandoned without the individual being reduced to chaos. In the philosophical attempt to make sense of the world, neither the pattern of our understanding nor the reality of the objective world may be abandoned without the philosophy being reduced to chaos. Each moment — “now” — we are organizing particulars into rational wholes.

Those rational wholes are subgroups — particulars — of larger systems because they cannot explain themselves within the terms of the system, which ties them together. Those larger systems to be fully explained must become particulars of yet larger systems in a drive to order everything. We are always taking these systems apart and putting them back together every moment of our life seeking a better fit, a higher more satisfying order, or just an answer to a question – such as, where are my sox? or Does God really care when I suffer? This is how we both shape and are shaped by our environment.

This is why we are always attracted to utopian ideals, rational patterns, and ideologies — in the very neatness of their explanation and scope they represent ultimate order and our place in it. They are the irresistible candles of our design drawing us like moths. The failure of ideals is why we become discouraged when nothing works or fits perfectly, and we are consumed by the flame even as our flapping puts it out in a guttering smoking waxy mess. Because we are self-conscious and self-reflective, the patterns we create are also part of our environment as are the patterns of others like us. There is no knowledge, meaning, purpose or awareness apart from the order discovered and imposed by a patterning person.

It is impossible to share the same awareness or pattern with another. The individual is the lonely center of his experience — and yet that experience is always one of comparing patterns with others so he is never utterly alone, he can to a certain extent match up his understanding with those around him. Greater order demands greater abstraction and theoretical distance from our environment and its ability to correct a developing pattern. So while greater abstraction enables us to gain more coherent patterns, and broader range of action and knowledge, we may also be shooting further and further in the wrong direction with less and less ability to note the error. The more developed our order the harder it is to prove or disprove that it is coordinate with our environment.

Thus the definition of the activist is one who digs in the same hole with all the more zeal in direct proportion to his lack of finding the treasure chest. To avoid being stuck in a fruitless rut of logical and ideological dead ends, doubt plays a crucial role reigning our patterns in. Doubt questions everything that order organizes. Neither order, nor doubt is reliable in the end to tell us what is there or what is not there, what is true or false, what is right or wrong, what is illusion and what is reality. This is because both are tools of our PEE, not themselves things that are true or false, existent or non-existent. Our patterning drive finds connections everywhere. Our doubt keeps sifting through those connections discarding the ones which are . . . doubtful.

The areas in which individuals develop their patterns give them a more effective range of information and of action. The trade-off is that every decision to go in one direction is a decision not to go in all other directions because we only have a finite series of moments to do any thing at all. Cooperating with others compliments personal specialization and thereby brings order to more than we could order alone as we rely on the results of each other’s ordering efforts. This cooperation shortens the learning loop enabling us to start with the patterning work of others rather than force every man to reinvent the wheel in every issue of life. This cooperative effort is more a social ecology than an economy.

It puts far larger areas of our environment within reach granting a higher range of choices in some respects while limiting even fundamental choices in other respects. In fact it becomes our ultimate environment. It is our ecosystem, the spidery web of our psycho-social reality. It is man’s true environment. The Story The other day Anne and I went down to look for a new hot water heater. We didn’t know anything about hot water heaters, but we knew the people who did. We went to Lowes, Sears, and Home Depot. The interesting thing is, the sales people there did not know much more than we did about hot water heaters.

In the months and years before we got there, they had been approached by representatives of different hot water heater manufacturers who told them quite a bit about the product. Not enough for them to make one, but enough for them to decide which ones were the best to offer their public. Before going out, the sales reps of the manufacturer were educated by those who made them. Those who made the heaters were given the design by engineers who had spent their lives studying how to make water hot efficiently. Here is a wealth of knowledge that was mysterious to any given level of the chain that passed it on. But the varying degrees of understanding were sufficient to serve as an index for those who needed to make a choice.

The fact is, manufacture and sales are as mysterious to the engineers who know all about heaters as the principles and engineering that undergirds the invention of heaters is to those who make and sell them. Specialization and those who organize or manage specialists (a field mysterious to all including management) is what puts vast amounts of knowledge, power, learning and technology at our fingertips. All we need to know is where to go and who to ask. This same three-dimensional web exists for government, for business, for entertainment, and literally everything in any civilization. It depends on a moral code at every point as much as it does on engineering, manufacture and sales.

We must be able to trust each link in the chain and forget our natural cynicism that such a chain could produce anything for in theory no one can see its end from its beginning. Only the hermit puts his cynicism into actual practice. The rest of us trust each other no matter how much our grumbling, doubt, regret or frustration disguise that trust. It is the moral code that produces the benefits of the cooperative whole. At a number of points, this moral code prevents us from taking many actions that would be of direct benefit to us at the moment.

Theft, murder, adultery and coveting are among those things that might momentarily benefit us, but we refrain from them in order to make broader benefits possible, even though no one can trace a one to one relationship in any given case. So Anne and I paid good money, which we had earned through hard labor trading our lives for the index of trade — cash—and then trading that cash for a heater. It was real, not forged money. It was earned not stolen money. We came during store hours, and didn’t break in to steal. We did not curse or resent the salesman for the price. The salesmen told enough of the truth conveyed by the sales reps who in turn received it from the engineers and brochure copywriters.

We enjoy hot water even though we don’t have a real clue as to why or how it stays hot. Our guests believe we are civilized and we have status in society. Status? Everyone has hot water heaters, they aren’t status symbols like a BMW. Yes, status. You would think a family with no hot water to be scarcely above the cave men. One thing that greater social organization does is require a higher and higher minimum standard of living. The reason you don’t think of it as a status symbol is that it has become a minim requirement of cultural status. At every point we repress a quick though immoral solution to our need for hot water that would destroy the social fabric. And hot water is a central piece of that fabric though it makes it into no book on social ethics.

And this is where the trouble lies. As long as we don’t see an immediate benefit to ourselves of breaking it, the code makes sense. The moral fabric of civilization also makes sense by protecting us, our wives, our husbands, children and possessions from others who need them as much as we needed that hot water heater. But when we want what isn’t ours; when we have an appetite that can only be fulfilled with someone else’s property, wife, husband, labor etc. Suddenly the code gets in the way of true prosperity, true love, true dominion and power. How could it be wrong if it feels so right to light up your life at someone else’s expense? And yet the irony is, as long as we live in a cooperative effort, everything we do is partially at someone else’s expense.

There is no such thing as a pure pay-as-you-go system. Grace and keeping the law are essential to organized life with others. WE all function with grace and law even though none of us really knows what it is. As with all things in our life. Back to the Summary The benefits of living in a cooperative whole have over the centuries gradually increased. Until now the minimum standard of moderate success are impressive: one-touch heating, individual homes (or apartments) with separate rooms for all with common and touch of the finger cooking. Vacuum cleaners, garbage disposal, hot and cold running water, individualized fingertip transportation and mass communication in most rooms.

These have lost their wonder and are minimum requirements of civilized living — that is to say cooperative living. Obviously they are not minimum requirements of survival. Yet in a true sense they have become the minimum requirements of survival in the western ecosystem. But whether we include them in the minimum requirements of true survival or not, we find that we cannot live without the benefits of the cooperative whole. At the same time we enjoy the fruit of cooperation, we find it easy to resent the restraint on our actions imposed by the common consent needed to make cooperation work.

Issues of property, infringement of others, telling the truth, the attraction between men and women, offense, praise, glory and blame are things, which govern our actions far beyond the material profit/loss statement or anything in the physical world itself. These are all human habitat issues – including the concept of profit and loss. Isolated individualism and the perfectly coordinated cooperative are the two polar illusions of this tension. Like everything else, adopting one or the other pole as the only legitimate principle of operation can give you a tight internally consistent ideology. Indeed, the demands of rational coherence will drive you toward one pole and away from the other.

However, if you give in to this, in time you will develop insurmountable conflict with your environment even while suggesting courses of action, which may be highly beneficial in the sense that they seem free of doubt because of their tight coherence to the patterns of your mind. These courses of action often work in the beginning. For instance, the third Reich in 1941 attacked in a series of brilliant strikes through the Ardennes forest and forever changed the nature of modern strategy naming it blitz kreig. Four years later the same army did the same thing to a similarly unprepared enemy in the same forest. They failed miserably. We know of that attempt not as a brilliant shift in strategy but as a failed push called the Battle of the Bulge.

Many of us experience a similar failure of design as the diet of our energetic youth produces a sleek physique enabling us to streak through life, though in later years the same diet is reduced to a vain battle of the bulge. With the greater benefit of diversification and cooperation also comes a decreasing ability to produce our basic necessities for ourselves. We depend on others to feed, clothe, house, educate, entertain, and defend us. In fact, there is a threshold of social diversity that when passed over renders the overwhelming majority of society utterly unable to create the bare necessities of life for themselves.

These things are beyond them whether we are talking about food and shelter on a survival basis, or those minim social requirements for civilized living like the vacuum cleaner and hot water heater. How the cooperation of diverse specializations in our social ecology should be organized, if at all, has been the endless debate of history. The debate is beyond resolution. It is rooted in the finite nature of personal experience and so defies any final answer to the problem of the morality/benefit of personal freedom vs. the morality/benefit of the constraints on that freedom required by corporate cooperation. But this social restraint on our actions goes further.

The boundaries of socially agreed upon patterns both limit and expand how we interact with the environment or even perceive it. Seat belts are the foolish luxuries of over protective worry warts in one decade only to become the legally enforced symbol of good parenting three decades later. The mad scientist today is the Nobel Prize winner tomorrow. Heroes and villains alike break the social boundaries — disrupt the psycho-social ecosystem — and there is nothing within the ordering process itself to tell you which is the hero. Who is the hero and who is the villain, Antigone or Creon? Bacchus or Pentheus? Dirty Harry or Scorpio? Simba or Scar? Each accuses the other of tearing down the foundations of social order. Each believes that they are upholding social order.

Every year movies and art portray the villain as hero (In Moulin Rouge a French whore is the fascinating heroin) and hero as villain (Dirty Harry must break the law in order to protect citizens who curse him for protecting them). Some proper citizens are thrilled by the show and others are deeply disturbed. In either case, their reaction proves that art is touching something fundamental to the ambiguity of their life. If the social fabric were sufficient there would be no need of heroes. And yet without heroes there would in time be no social fabric since the ultimate work of a hero is to confirm that social fabric even as they might violate it to accomplish that higher confirmation. Without a higher purpose there are no lower purposes.

It is the nature of patterns and systems. This larger social environment is as vital to our life as the physical environment is to an animal. Our existence is an ordering force that interfaces with our personal, social, and physical environment. But we can never have sufficient interface to grant finality to any order we attain. And yet we cannot live outside of an order which in many crucial respects we create and sustain. Like Jonathan Edward’s loathsome spider, we cannot resist fiddling with our web, constantly reordering, redefining, reinventing it and finally forcing it on everyone else while trying to get their sticky webs off of us. Unlike the spider, however we do this through reflection more than instinct.

The nature of order (and living in a cooperative whole) demands satisfaction, completion, comprehensiveness — perfection and above all that others see it our way and agree with us. We are intrinsically held back from that comprehensive satisfaction which our ordering nature demands. Yet we strive for it none the less. It is a rage we cannot restrain because it is who we are. Order demands but cannot produce certainty, objectivity, thing-in-itself, clear and distinct ideas that correlate perfectly with our environment.

And yet everything we learn, every paradigm shift we experience, every conversion, every important conversation, like a good meal, fills us with a real though temporary satisfaction as if we had found that full-orbed completion our rage for order dangles before us like a carrot on a stick driving us on, never letting us rest. It should not surprise us that even the ideal of rest holds out two very different possible ideals. The one is the satisfaction of a full-orbed pattern-evaluation-environment perfectly fitting together — abundant life, wisdom — and the other is Entropy, Nothingness, Oneness, Death. The Medieval Rose contrasts sharply with the 8 fold path of the meditating enlightened one.

The wild-eyed stare of the icon and desert mystic contrasts with the sleepy inward eye of the Buddah. But both are symbols of infinite rest. The one is the rest of final resolution of an infinite being, the other is the disciplined disintegration into the infinite nothingness — the Tovu Wuvohu, the Deep, Chaos, the Void. Both claim ultimate meaning. Our patterns are inevitably finite, limited by the single moment of awareness on the one hand and the constraints of abstraction on the other. From these limitations come the contradictions of life which are the explicit study of theoretical thought and the necessary limits of normal thought and action in the marketplace. These contradictions are often defined in terms of matched pairs of balancing ideas.

Taken alone, either side of the pair leads to impossible patterns both in terms of their own internal logic as well as in their divergence from experience. Together they form balanced dualisms of different sorts which share the following characteristics: 1) if both are true then neither is true; and 2) if only one is true then neither is finally explicable. The fact is, dualistic pairs reflect the limitation of our patterning. They are the result of abstract knowledge, which is to say all finite knowledge. Like the balance of any ecology whether social or physical, the dynamic competition of check and balance seems to be what moves us forward making life and awareness as we know it possible.

Some basic examples of these in the theoretical realm are the one and the many problem, and Freedom and Determinism. Politically these are reflected by the polarity of individual freedom and the constraints of the corporate state; perfection and imperfection; abstract knowledge vs exhaustive knowledge; absolute moral standards and the variations of a million applications. But this dualism of finite thought is not perfect. The two sides are never equally ultimate because the dualism is a result of how things really are, not merely how they must be to be rational in our patterns. The early astronomers and mathematicians were disappointed to discover that the spheres were not perfectly spherical. The elliptical orbits of the planets let them down.

So too, the opposites, which define our patterns, are not truly balanced dualisms. This is discouraging to some, and you know why, it is discouraging because most of us gravitate toward symmetry. It is more orderly. Nonetheless, like Order and Doubt, one side is primary and the other derivative, dependent or relative. That is to say, life is conceivable if one side is fully realized even if it is impossible to attain or explain. Whereas life is inconceivable if the other side were realizable. For finite creatures, dynamic balance between unattainable ideals is the mechanism that moves us forward. The alternative is entropy. As any Special Forces commando can tell you about combat operations, if you stop you die.

This drive — to make order; to find order; to create order; to impose order; to accept order, the sense that order must be grounded in the absolute, with the secondary check that doubt provides to balance and keep us honest — is not merely the most fundamental drive of existence. Our rage for order is inescapably a moral rage and is existence, as we know it. It is an order of being designed for a fellowship that on its own it can never attain. We were meant for fellowship with ourselves, each other, the physical world and God. We can neither prove nor escape the reality of any of these objects of our fellowship – our purpose. This order is somehow connected with the way the universe really is and we ought to be connected with that pattern.

That connection lies deeper than argument, we either know it exists or we are deeply disturbed and deracinated by trying to deny that existence. The Moment of Consciousness “Now” What is a moment? Look inward (or outward) and try to define that moment which you call consciousness, or “now”. That moment of awareness, though it must have dimension and time, lacks these things as significant, measurable quantities, even though it is the integration point of space, time, consciousness, action, and personal identity. “Now” is the only point of interaction of our environment and the pattern of memories, anticipation, and action.

These are the things, which we build within that moment of interaction with our environment and ourselves to make sense of it and tie it together with all other moments. We sustain those patterns into the next moment and the next and the next in a way that makes it irrelevant whether or not each “now” is a discrete time period, or simply a continuous process. In either case, the pattern sustaining process gives continuity to the evaluation and the physical and social environment, which “now” plugs us into. In each “now” we evaluate pattern and environment by contrasting the patterns in the environment we experience in that moment with the environment, as we believe it to have been, to be, and to become in our patterns.

I have no doubt that some day even “now” will be abstracted and quantified in some mathematical or spiritual model. This knowledge may help us understand the mechanics of the process the way neurophysiology and psycho linguists sheds light on the interface of mind, brain and world. If so it will be no more relevant to us than it would be for a batter, before going to bat in the bottom of the ninth, to work out on paper the mathematical dimension of the trajectory of a grand slam. And there is no math yet discovered that can describe the significance of that one ball going over the fence with three men on base at the end of a game. The simple reality of our experience (or non-experience) of “now” will not change.

The batter has within him what it takes to connect with the pitch. Reality is our inextricable attachment to our environment by a never-ending moment called “now.” That attachment is made by building up a set of patterns, which interface with that environment and open up a range of possible actions. Some actions we will take and others we will reject. Some things we will see which are there. Others we think we see but they are either not there, or not there the way we think they are. Still other things will remain beyond our sight even though they are right in front of our face because we do not have a pattern capable of granting internal reality to match the external presence. This is demonstrated in things as different as radio waves and love.

But if something is to be seen, unseen, or denied “now” is the only moment in which it happens. If you have worked your way through that sentence you have exhibited a high degree of exactly what I am talking about. Even the word “see” is used both literally as a sensation as well as figuratively as a metaphor for all understanding interaction with the environment. In reading this paragraph and understanding it, you have in the end done no more than even retarded people do when they navigate their way through the simplest of actions such as nodding to indicate “yes.” Your mechanisms for ordering are simply superior . . . but they are the same mechanism for bringing and dealing with order.

We can no more shake ourselves of the reality of the environment than we can shake ourselves of the illusory nature of that awareness. We simultaneously organize and doubt our organization. In the moment called “now,” order and doubt weave together to sharpen and perfect the patterns we create, comparing them to each other and the environment, so providing the best range of choices in the widest areas we can to make things better. We hope. P-E-E the Elements of Consciousness or Experience Three things go to make up Experience: 1) Patterns — “Abstract” means to connect the dots. We take from experience salient features — dots as it were— as opposed to all experience exhaustively. We relate them in a pattern that represents like a map how the world works.

This pattern grows and develops throughout our life and directs our attention. 2) Environment — Everything external to the evaluation process at any given moment including, the external world, other people, the social ecology and remembered patterns. 3) Evaluation — We constantly test our patterns for consistency with themselves and with the environment, and we test our environment for consistency with our patterns and our memories of prior perceptions of it.

Three presuppositions make Experience possible but cannot be proved within P-E-E: 1) Concerning our Environment — that the objects and relationships in the environment are truly related apart from the patterns we have created to abstract and describe that relationship. (Objectivity, Ontology, Cosmology, Beauty, Aesthetics, the study of things and relationships existing apart from us.) 2) Concerning our Patterns — that the relationships in our environment are knowable — reproducible by the patterns we create. In those patterns we really do have a workable analogical understanding of the world.

We believe that internal consistency of patterns really is the key to dealing successfully with the world. (Epistemology, how we can know the things and relationships that exist apart from us, Psychology, Sociology, Love, Jealousy Hatred and Attraction.) 3) Evaluation — that our evaluation process really does enable us to gain a more correct and increasingly comprehensive grip on and control over our environment and our patterns.

Both self-correction and environmental correction are possible. (Morality, ethics, methodology, test controls, models, any sort of testing or valuation process that enables us to evaluate our environment and patterns and check them against each other uncovering causal relationships and consequences of patterns.) The fact is, no one would do or know anything if they, the world or God did not exist. There is no doubt that we not only know these things because they are what we must presuppose in order to make knowledge or doubt itself possible. We know them because they are there. Without them there would be nothing. This P-E-E mechanism is not what we ought to do, it is what we do that makes us what we are. It is inescapable human reality.

The only way to escape is through catatonic madness, or highly artificial and contrived meditation based on the illusion that there is benefit in suppressing the reality that makes us human. Our experience is the comparison of the feedback between selective patterned order (internal, subjective) and exhaustive environmental order (external, objective). In this comparison, we evaluate and change the order found in both the pattern and the environment. Moment by moment we sustain a pattern that gives meaning and continuity to our consciousness. In the feedback of experience, the following things (among others) take place: We experience the environment. We experience the patterns we create of that experience with the environment.

We examine our pattern for internal consistency. We test the pattern against the environment. We test the environment against the pattern. We test it all against our memory of these things. We predict what will happen next and take appropriate action to change ourselves, our pattern and our environment. All this in the twinkling of an eye. Animal existence is this ordering process, more fundamental than the things we often call basic drives and appetites such as survival, sex, power, chaos, food, shelter, beauty, pleasure, rest, or control. “Do all things decently and in order.” Some argue that it is good to have order. They create seminars and schools to encourage methods that increase our order. They believe that goodness is found in proportion to order.

But surely not all order results in beatitude. The irony of course is that though Paul urged greater order, his lasting impact on Christianity lay in a series of ad hoc letters, which survived the decay of time. “Paul! Your learning has driven you mad!” “Of the writing of books there is no end.”” Others argue that it is bad to have too much order and urge us to kick back and smell some roses, not get too educated, and not to think too much — to get out of the box, to spend a bit of our time in irrational things, chaos. These recognize that goodness is not found in proportion to order. But surely there is no blessing in disorder is there.

The irony here is that it was the governor who represented the order of Rome, the most vastly ordered empire to that date who was upbraiding Paul for being too ideological, too ordered, mad. “Tend your Garden” Some despair of ordering the whole world yet cling to the idea that a perfect order is attainable. These argue for perfecting order on a scale that is manageable — such as one’s personal life, or one’s family, church or business. Various self-control movements such as EST, or back to family movements such as the Patriarchy movement, some Wiccans, and even the Know-Nothings, Mugwumps and Anti immigrationists of political isolationism are examples of this limited perfectionism.

Some argue that this or that method of ordering our experience gives us objectivity and therefore more control, power, sex, food, knowledge, technology, pleasure, friends, satisfaction, or whatever else we believe we must have. These methods run the gamut from the scientific method, to spiritual disciplines, to “God’s way of raising children,” to self-help books, marriage and sex manuals, business franchising and the vast legal systems of modern government. This rage for order is not only found in the ideologically driven tyrant, sybarite, desert hermit, or academician. It is present in those not ideologically driven such as the proverbial housewife, the working stiff, and in any of us in between from the least to the greatest.

Creatively ordering our experience is as inescapable to the living animal as breathing or heart beat. It is the relative excellence of our rage that puts us at the top of the heap. Bacon’s scientific method and Kipling’s Poem “If” makes explicit the ideal of securing certainty through methodology. The futile Eastern Mystic makes use of methodology to erase the possibility of method. In either case both are extreme examples of what all people have always done and always do every moment of their existence. Experience = Pattern-Examination-Environment. Ordering is the fundamental process of life beyond which we cannot go.

The feedback of experience is not a truly circular process because our experience of time as moment flowing into moment does not permit us to come back to repeat any starting point. There is no “GO” to pass, no $200 to collect. And so the trick is to be able to create the pattern that really does square with the world as it is, the world as we have conceived it before, and the world as others conceive of it. The closest we come to re-experiencing something is to reenact a situation that simulates a previous situation and comparing our memories of prior moments that were like it and from these adjust our patterns.

NOW

Fig. 1 Pattern maintenance spiral — Pattern-Evaluation-Environment. Our moment of experience “now” moves through situations, which are similar to former situations, where we see the lines crossing over, but they can never go back to re-experience the past. All we can do is attempt to create methods of remembering what happened and controlling the context of experiences or experiments and compare notes, Dejavu. The rough nature of the diagram grates on our sense of order. The spirals should be neat. We demand this even though we have no experience of an orderly sequence of the Patterning-Examination-Environment correction process.

Longing for symmetry is part of our rage for order and pattern which enable us to carry out the tasks beholden to those at the top of the heap of the created order. Who I Am Human personality, personhood, “I,” is something you can never put your finger on. By now this should not be too surprising. Where doubt is granted ultimate status not even you exist . . . except as the self-made ignoramus who just doubted. Such doubting does not prove that you exist any more than any other verb, or action you might engage in. The presupposition of anything you do is that you and your environment exist in a way that for better or worse makes possible your interaction. But what is that presupposed “I”? If you take a deductive approach, you peel back the layers of who you are.

What this really means, is you examine all the verbs of your life — all the things you have done and thought — your patterning processes and their interaction with your environment. This is as fruitful as peeling an onion in search of its core. In the process you aren’t sure whether the tears are from laughter, sadness, or boredom. There are many different levels. But there is no core. What you are left with is different piles of onionskins. In one pile are standards we hope to keep. In another pile are our successes, and in another our failures to keep them. In another pile is the way we feel about it all, and in yet another pile is our opinion of what others think of it all.

We can feel praise and blame radiating from them, but we can’t find out where it is coming from or what it is that is feeling it in the first place. In still another pile are all the things which have to do with our physical bodies which like every other pile of skins are inextricably “I” and yet not “I”. This is disturbing, because if your “I” or your “self” has existence, then there should be a core down there somewhere — something measurable. But you won’t find it. How can I know “I” exist and yet not be able to know it or prove it? So what am I? If you take an inductive approach you add up the different layers and make the total the reality of who you are — I am the sum of all I have thought and done and not to be limited to any one thing that went into that sum.

It is no surprise that we end up with what is nonsense mathematically, but still the simple reality we cannot escape: We are more than the sum of our parts. That pile of onion skins taken severally or jointly is less then what we know ourselves to be. That onion growing under ground is more than what it is when placed under the analyst’s microscope. And yet it is also everything the analyst sees. So what am I? No, it is, so who am I? Though it is possible to speak of the “I” as a thing — a what— we are more, we are persons — Who. We are self-defining and we are defined by what is outside ourselves. We are both defined by what we have done, also by what we might do. Yet we are beyond all these things.

This ambiguity is consistent with what we know of our experience being that integration point of Pattern, Evaluation, and Environment. That it is something real, that we can know it, is part of the presupposition of experience even as it also may become a part of the objective experience itself. That I am more than the sum of my parts, and yet that I am connected integrally with each part is another dynamic aspect of our reality built into the core of who we are. We are that point of balance, the parts and the greater than the parts. But exactly what that is, is beyond us. Is this evaluating “I” an illusion to which we grant pretended objectivity in order to make sense of things but in the end it has no existence? Is it merely a delusive projection?

No, it is that which makes all projection possible. “I,” like “now,” like “morality”, like “God”, like the “reality of the world”, like the priority of one pole of a dynamic balance over the other, is not an illusion. These are the realities that make experience every moment of our existence possible as a coherent experience. They are realities that when systematically doubted result in our own and even society’s corporate destruction. And finally, these are realities that cannot be established by measurement, argument or force. They are prior to these things. It is their reality that establishes them in our beliefs making understanding of even the most mundane thing possible, not our belief which establishes them.

You don’t prove God’s existence or nature’s existence, their existence proves you. Our social ecology cannot sustain itself without them, and yet they must be established in each heart — freely known and understood or they have no lasting power. The deviant person is the one who does one of two things. He tries to take one or another onion layer and make it the core of reality — which is idolatry; or he denies his own existence because he cannot define that “I” and uses this as a pretext to engage in destructive activities. This is akin to chewing on your tongue or cheek before the Novocain wears off. If you can’t feel it, it must not exist.

If “I” is not a definable core of existence that you can measure, weigh and number, then the fool deduces that any Pattern-Evaluation-Environment is as good as any other and so he chomps away. The harmless fool hurts only himself. The ideologically driven fool destroys as many people and things as he can touch in his mad drive to conform the earth to his image. Not content to chew on his own cheek he requires us all to chew on ours, and failing that he wants to bite off our tongues on our behalf. The substance of reality is found in Faith Hope and Love even these terms are most often reserved for things we know are not. The normal person is the one who knows his limitations and positively builds a world that is better than the one he found.

He knows that his ideas of “better” are limited, and yet he also knows that “better” is more than his subjective valuing. He must believe that it is worth being better. He puts his hope on it and even falls in love as he is driven to achieve it. He knows that there are true standards, which are knowable even if not perfectly knowable. He knows that he cannot do or be perfect. He knows he is an individual, an “I.” He knows he must work with many other “I’s.” He knows that there is more to it than he can grasp. Yet he is confident — he has faith — that when he grasps something, he himself is real who grasps. He is confident – he hopes — that the grasping is real and that there is reality to what he grasps.

And finally there is the inescapable reality that in this whole process there is one who has first grasped him. To be human is to have felt that grasp however one might have defined it. This desire for what is real and true leads him on — he wants to walk in the footsteps of that greater reality. Faith, Hope and Love are inescapable realities of who we are as individuals, and the good we can accomplish in this life. They are fundamental to “I.” Remove yourself as a responsible individual agent drain dry the presuppositional reality of faith, hope, or love and you have removed the possibility of humanity and any possibility of yourself as more than a speck of fly’s dung on the wall of someone else’s reality.

Many pit the responsibility of the individual against the responsibilities of being part of a greater whole, the corporate man. But the individual is always himself and a part of a greater self, though never fully integrated. The one is necessary to the other. There is no such thing as one who is perfectly individualistic and no such thing as a corporate consciousness comparable to that found in an ant hill, a bee hive or for the more fanciful, the Borg. But however you want to say it, the “I” is whatever it is that creates and examines the pattern from its impression of the environment. It is forever distinct from whatever it examines including itself. And yet it is identified with what it examines.

The word for this identification between the “I” and what it examines is “Responsibility.” It is impossible to doubt it, yet it is impossible to define or prove it. It is not an illusionary figment of the need for an ordering principle. It is the ordering principle for individuals. The Rage for Order The drive to order anything is necessarily the drive to order everything. “He has put eternity into the heart of man yet in such a way that he cannot see the end from the beginning.” The process of establishing order when you are finite has maddening side effects. They all stem from the fact that the drive for order itself has no internal rational limitation — it is a drive to comprehend all in a unified field.

It causes us to see that which fits the pattern and ignore or explain away that which does not. We feel a wholeness and completion, which our drive for order gives to everything. Yet we never escape the sense of diversity and particularity which defies the wholeness and completeness of any pattern. On the one hand, people are able to function. They can sense the world around them. They do remember the past, evaluate their circumstances, enjoy the fruit of good decisions and suffer the consequences of the bad. All of these things are the result of their P-E-E.

But there is nothing within the pattern or its brief though never ending interaction with the physical world that tells them when the order in the pattern is sufficiently deviant from the environment to cause them problems. Sometimes our patterns create an illusion that is harmless — we dream, we see a mirage. Sometimes our patterns create illusions that are beneficial — we set goals, we write and read novels, start businesses, get married, sign Declarations of Independence, bind ourselves to contracts, see movies, dance and sing . . . We see or understand anything at all as meaningful assomething more than random sensations.

Other times our patterns create what seems to be an illusion in terms of prior experience but it turns out that we have discovered a more fundamental organization of our environment — we make scientific and technological discoveries, learn skills, learn anything at all, have a paradigm shift, solve mysteries, have a religious awakening, develop a more unified field theory that explains our experience, become heroes, fall in love, or discover that we were cuckolded.

Other times our patterns create a deadly illusion where the logic of the pattern drives us further and further from the environment as others understand it and as it really is — insanity, perversion, alienation, anomie, paranoia, blasphemy, murder, theft, adultery, rape, covetousness, conspiracy theories, suicide, just one more drink, signing the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Communist Manifesto, the Humanist Manifestos, and other forms of ideological fanaticism such as Mein Kampf or almost anything coming from Marx and Engels and their idiot children.

And finally when we are in conflict, we try to create a pattern that will give us sound information about what is happening and disrupt our opponent’s ability to create a pattern that would give him sound information. We also use our patterns to define our opponents in any way that creates an advantage for us and justifies our victory over them and in some cases our destruction of them. Puni Delendum est. Our capacity to order does not have within the patterns we create the ability to determine when order has gone awry.

There are built in safeguards such as pain mechanisms, logical inconsistency, social sensitivity to others, and anomalous observations (observations of things which suggest a different pattern, or at least do not fit our current pattern) which if true would force us to change our pattern to one in which the observation along with the rest of what we know is explainable in terms of a new pattern. The crazy doctor who like a bestial raccoon is constantly washing his hands and imposing his neurotic fetish on the doctors and nurses around him is kicked out of medicine one day and then hailed as a visionary the next when the germ theory is proven to the medical world’s satisfaction. And the opposite happens.

A man with a powerful gift to explain and order the world one century, such as John Locke, is utterly ignored by the analytical thinkers of another century except as an historical curiosity. And in some cases even the name of the most widely published man in one era is utterly forgotten in the next. (The name of the most widely published thinker of the French enlightenment has been so thoroughly forgotten that he slips my mind even as I write this. If I or a future editor were to recall him to mind you still would not recognize him unless Continental Enlightenment happened to be a curious fetish of yours. Joseph Butler I think is his name. May 29, 2007) Yet this rage to order burns on. We are convinced that what we know and see is true.

We also know that it might not be. So we develop methods to distinguish truth from error, fact from opinion, reality from illusion. Our temptation is to trust the result of the method — to raise it to an ultimate height. And yet when we engage in systematic doubt, none of these methods is capable of grounding any of their results in absolute reality whether mathematical, intuitional or spiritual. The best we can do is use doubt to minimize error because the most we have to work with are abstractions of a partial though real perception of our environment and patterns. When these interact they give order to our world. We must have order, but the ordering process itself cannot tell us when it is advancing our cause or degrading it.

Sometimes our errors and illusions are deadly and sometimes they are delightful. But most often error is merely irritating. Greater certainty lies in greater order. So does greater insanity. Doubting the order is healthy. It is how we correct ourselves and gain a higher order. But there is no formula for knowing when we have doubted, or even not doubted, enough. Doubt can lead to paralysis, weakness, and abject fear. The lack of doubt can lead to arrogance and foolishly destructive errors. Both doubt and order by their nature drive us toward unachievable goals. Neither can tell us when to quit or which is appropriate at the moment. What is the difference between the Alchemist and the Chemist? The astrologer and the astronomer? The Numerologist and the Mathematician?

The theoretical mathematician of the 19th Century and the nuclear physicist of the 20th Century? The Philosopher and the Theologian? The cult leader in the desert and John the Baptist? or Moses? Mohammed, Sidhartha, or Jesus? Nostradamus or Isaiah and John? The Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Matthew? John Newton was the leading alchemist of his day not before he wrote the Principia but during and after his writing. There is nothing in the ordering or doubting process itself that can tell you the difference between these examples of contrasting belief systems and the men who forge them. Not all belief systems are equally true. The differences between belief systems are real. They are rooted in both the world and in our P-E-E mechanism.

If you chose wrongly in the end you will pay for it. The world is a very unforgiving place and no amount of wishful P-E-E will change that. Nature is not a kind loving place it is a harshly unforgiving place where failure winds you up on someone else’s dinner plate. The only place Nature seems kind is in the patterns mankind has given to it putting it to use in our stewardship. Outside of that, the otter is carefully nursed back to life in a safe human environment. This seems unnatural to some and therefore unkind and unloving, so they release it. Within five minutes the entire town who came to witness this symbolic freeing of nature and spontaneous joy watched in horror as an Orca ate the otter after first playing cruelly with it for an hour.

Hell is not merely a place for eternal consequences to be realized it is the reality we experience here and now for those who do not think that responsibility and consequences are real. For those who think there is a kindness in nature apart from the kindness of a purposing agent who reshapes nature to be kind. Order, Disorder and Dualism. Order and disorder are not coequal forces. The drive for order is primary. Even disorder is not the original state of the external world. It too is ordered and we seek to know that order and transcend it as well. That is what true progress is all about. That is why faith hope and love are integral to any reality system of man.

Our whole being is to create a higher organization making use of the real structures of the physical, spiritual and social world. Doubt tears order apart so as to examine its constituents. Think of the things you know like boxes. They are coherent wholes containing constituent parts that are bound together by an idea. Doubt dissolves the unifying idea in order to take the box apart to see what the parts are apart from the box/idea which unifies them. Doubt asks how we can know for sure that these contents all belong in this box. Once scattered on the floor you discover that each part in that box is also a smaller box made up of things in it which can be taken out and asked if they belong in that littler box.

You also discover that you can put many of the parts into different boxes which often do not suggest themselves until after you have torn the boxes apart. This is the proper function of doubt. This is the essence of creativity — we tear apart what is and imagine what might be if we reorder the “what is” a bit differently. The world will forever be divided between those who want to freeze the process – the box tearing project — at some point of development, and those who want to forever think outside of any preconceived boxes. Both of these are impossible ideals and those who ideologically pursue them make life miserable for all those around them who have learned to be content with partial success.

Creative thinking means tearing the boxes apart in a controlled way that produces a better box in the end. This is what most of us do most of the time. The fall of a social order is marked by the ascendance of either a legalist freezing of the box project or the unbridled tearing apart until we lose faith in the possibility of boxes at all and the culture loses faith in the idea that its boxes are better or worthy of their faith, hope and love. In all of this what is evident is that you don’t begin with doubt, you begin with concrete attempts to put two and two together. When the patterns don’t match the environment, it gives rise to the doubt that our patterns and their coherence with the environment are perfect.

This doubt can remain simply as a random humility — I can be wrong so I won’t shout too loudly — or it can itself be turned into a systematic method and made part of the ordering process to check ourselves. But in neither case is it primary. Doubt enters in after there is something positive to doubt. Doubt doesn’t build the boxes or fill them. Doubt can only examine what is in them and tear them apart. Order is primary because without it there would be no box to tear apart and no ability to construct a better box. Another reason doubt, or disorder, is not a coequal of order is that the ideal of order, though unachievable, is nonetheless livable. Order is the ideal of perfect knowledge and perfect actions based on it.

By contrast, the ideal of doubt is that formless void, the “field” of perfect entropy where there is truly no order, which is to say, nothing, or death — the ideal of Eastern mystical trance where the one is submerged in the ALL. There can be something if the finite ordering process could be perfectly ordered. There is in fact a reality that is exhaustively ordered, whether we understand it or perceive it correctly or not. But it can only be known in part. By contrast, there is nothing if the ideal of doubt were achieved. If achieved, even the ability to refer to doubt as an “it” or as an “ideal” or in any way at all would be impossible. If skepticism were the last word, there would be no word at all first or last. To even argue for it is to deny it.

This is not true of order. Perfect order may be impossible to attain in our understanding, but if attained, it is indeed something because it is the attempt to correctly understand the fullness of order that does exist in the world of our environment and in the world of our knowing life. Perfect doubt if attained in our understanding is nothing and there is nothing in the world of or environment that corresponds to it. Doubt is what enables us to think hypothetically and therefore it cannot be something substantial on its own. Doubt is the servant of order and not vice versa. They are not equal concepts or drives. They are not equally productive. As the doubt-corrected order grows it becomes more effective in solving problems and giving us broader explanatory systems.

Disorder can go no further than entropy. Destruction and construction though both an aspect of creativity, are not coequal actions. In a finite world we advance only when the destroyer is the servant of the builder. Yet we cannot advance without the destroyer tearing down and doubting those things which need perfecting in our order. This can be deeply disturbing, but it is necessary if our thinking is to advance. The question we face is how to keep that doubt in check where it can carry out its useful function without taking over. Destruction is an inescapable part of creativity and any private or social order. There is no escaping law and its consequences. This is why we do not simply dabble with order.

We do not try to bring order when it is fun or convenient or as opposed to those who do not want order. We are beings who try to order everything regardless of what we do with it. And that drive to order has no internal boundaries, it is a rage that we might try to direct, and control but we can never turn it on or off. Regardless of how much we might doubt, all who continue to live deny by their very life whatever argument they make that either doubt is final or that doubt and order are a balanced coequal dualism. The Psycho-social Rage for Order Our rage for order creates psychological and social environments which are more real to us than the physical world because they are patterns created by processes similar to the one which provides our own experience.

And yet the social environment is less objective or ultimately provable than the physical world, which is at least there in a tactile sense and far more agreeable to measurement. All animals to some extent create a social environment that has a reality comparable to their physical environment. We, however, create a social environment or ecology that is more real than our physical environment. Words hurt more than sticks and stones. Creatively tearing apart and rebuilding our social patterns is what we are, it is not something we strive to be. We do this on the level of individual perception and we do it on the broader scale of our social ecology. We create our social environment and then use it as the foundation for our patterns and evaluation process.

This environment then constrains us until it is torn down and rebuilt with new constraints. It is the most significant aspect of our environment. Because it is generated by social concensus and not found in any “natural” law or process, many have bought into the illusion that it is therefore whimsical, or relative or lacks objective substance. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is the stuff of which objective substance is given its meaning and reality to the perceiver. The process of conscious awareness — experience, P-E-E — secures order on the individual level that if analyzed sufficiently (that is systematically torn apart by doubt) will ultimately end in disorder.

If that disorder is anything more than an intellectual exercise, it will render the individual helpless, useless, or dangerous to himself and everyone around him. On the social level, it is equally true that if enough people lose their stake in maintaining the social pattern of agreements, (cultural norms) then the disorder — the anomie, psycho-pathology, alienation, mental illness, clinical insanity in all its forms, and in simple human terms the looting and lawlessness — can be disastrous. This leads social theorists (and parents and politicians) to look for some way to ground the social order in an ultimate confidence that this really is the way things are. But by its nature the contradictions and dynamics of life are built-in socially no less than individually.

We are beings who must order ourselves to survive and discover that this very attempt to bring order can have deadly consequences in reality and insoluble dilemmas for the theoretician, whether academician, businessman, parent or politician. The limitation of our drive for order creates the psychological and social anomaly of being complete and yet incomplete at the same time. Organizing with others gives us a greater independence while at the same time making us dependant. We are always alone, and yet we are always working with others in an interdependent social fabric or ecology. These are a few examples of dynamic processes, which serve as checks and balances that order reality, from economics, to physical systems, to legal/social systems and politics.

It is not that a free market is better than a command economy. It is not that a government with checks and balances is better than one without them. It is not that community is better than living alone. The fact is check and balance, free market, individuals living in community is how we function regardless of how someone might try to take complete control of anything including himself. It is not “better” it is. The ideal of absolute control is the illusion. Our ability to control is always limited and yet our desire to control is infinite.

What is “better” is seeing the best way to control what we can and work with others to extend a cooperative control or order that does not confuse what we can change with what cannot be changed — what we can organize with what cannot be organized. The market will always be free no matter how much an individual or group tries to control it. Governments will always have some form of check and balance regardless of how much a tyrant tries to remove all opposition. You will always want to do things outside the box you build of how you ought to live, no matter what that box is.

The problem is how to order and control what can be ordered without using this as excuse for disorder, or a mandate for utter control resulting in idealizing a complete-command organization as if we were God. In fact the basis of the Christian concept of freedom lies precisely in the first commandment – Have no other Gods. The Bible relativezes all human attempts to control and compares them to stewards working for the final authority and controller, God. To aid this project, Christian societies have turned toward checks and balances in government and in economic theory in order to mitigate our tendency to grasp after ultimate power to ultimately order all things.

It is not our task and having checks and balances in government helps keep the governors from acting like gods. It helps keep businessmen honest. Recognizing the limitations of all human projects and building safeguards against absolutizing one or another’s drive to order is the real structure of our constructed world. The Contradictions of Order By its very nature, order generates a simultaneous conviction of determinism and freedom; objectivity and subjectivity; a sense of knowing the difference between fact and opinion and the inability to prove it; morality and immorality; reality and illusion, particular and universal. Though these distinctions are impossible to fully explain rationally, we know there is a difference.

We know that though they are balancing realities in our experience, in each case, one is prior to the other. We search for a unified field of explanation, and yet cannot find a single thing, concept or pattern in the created world under which to unify everything. Such a pattern or concept by definition would lie outside of the order and by definition would be unknowable. Of course we know all this. The side effects of our rage for order give us the compelling conviction that logic and mathematics provide conclusions that must be true, objective, real, the thing-itself, and indubitably clear and distinct ideas.

It is not just Jesus who came with miracles to attest that he was the Truth, these mathematical-logical conclusions of modern science linked with the scientific method seem to verify their ultimate truth claims by the attending technological miracles of our modern world. But at the same time the processes that produce logic, math and the scientific method produce with them mathematical-logical conclusion that these ways of ordering the world are dreadfully incomplete and their truth-value an illusion, or at best only one small side of things as they really are. The validity of this doubt has been logically and mathematically proven showing that logic, math and scientific method cannot explain themselves or any ultimate issue.

All ordered patterns have in them statements which are true but incapable of proof in terms of the pattern itself. At the very least, no system can provide proof of its own presuppositions in terms of which it justifies the rest of the system. When self-contained, no system in our environment can supply the energy (or logic) necessary to order itself forever. It must reach outside itself for support. Every action of a system to create or maintain order moves it one step closer to entropy — that is, no order. The observer influences what he observes. The closer the tools of observation come to the size of what is observed, the more they affect the outcome of their observation.

This is why the more particular things are analyzed and broken down to be explained by a theory, the more particular observations will be found which deviate from that theory and defy regular description. When we get to the point that we must kill in order to see and only see by killing should it be a surprise that death is all we know? The more internally consistent a pattern of order is, the more of our experience it will seem to explain in its system and finally the more it will disagree with our observation of the environment in increasing detail.

This is true on the perceptual level as more and more actions have unexpected results and the system to remain harmonious must adopt increasing convolutions and epicycles — or undergo a systemic shift in its explanatory model. This is true on a personal level where individuals try to understand their world. And it is true on the political and social level: the more a system of law (or social order) strives for perfect objectivity and comprehensive application, the more it becomes a rigid system cut off from human experience and reality and the more it must depend on coercion to sustain itself.

Yet in a social order as with the mathematical sciences there is systematic regularity which we call “law.” This is both undeniable and necessary to our existence or the existence of our system and it is what ultimately undoes any system. Order by its very nature demands exhaustive correspondence in P-E-E, which would result in actions which can exhaustively control and maintain that order. But finite ordering systems cannot be exhaustive. This limitation builds anomalies into our experience, understanding and explanation. These anomalies are not the peculiar problem of math and science, nor are they the whimsy of sophists and philosophical theorists, nor are they the illusion of religion and morality.

The demands of order require that we always reach for more and more which brings in less and less. More than the law of diminishing returns, our rage for order is an appetite that insatiably demands more, more wholeness, more completeness, more explanation, more order. “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Nor the ear filled with hearing.” This is why government will always tend toward tyranny. It is why economically we tend toward socialism in order to insure against failure by controlling all facets of our market. It is why personally we want to discipline ourselves to perfect performance and decisions. It is why legally we create more and more laws, rules and customs.

It is why we search for the smallest particles of matter and the magnitude of the outer limits of our space time continuum. We seek after the beginning of all things and their end. We know things to be true, yet we know there is no way to finally prove their truth because we cannot access perfect coherence between pattern and environment. We know that we can rationally doubt anything, including the apparent agreement of others. Yet we know that the end result of unfettered doubt is that even doubt itself becomes doubtful. We search for the single thing to unite our patterns, and yet that universal simply becomes a particular in need of a higher order to explain it. We break every universal down into its parts only to find that each part is a universal set of its own.

In this search some realize the limitations of finitude and so abandon the quest for complete control of all things and turn to the quest for perfect control in limited areas. This turn is equally disastrous. It is as impossible for a finite person to control even the smallest particles of life and society. This person is just as obnoxious to all he touches as was Napoleon or Stalin. And finally some realizing the futility of perfection make an ideal out of the imperfect. But this never works either for obvious reasons. You can’t make an ideal out of something that is by definition incomplete. Imperfection is a lack, a null set. Again look at the eastern monk, the western ascetic.

They too along with a science which can only see by freezing a moment have met their dead end in idealizing the individual which demands though cannot incorporate unity or the unity with which admits no individuality though if experienced at all is meaningful because of the reality of the individual. The reason for all of these dead ends regardless of our direction is that the pattern produces our security — it does work, we can function in the world. But it also produces our insecurity — our patterns are correctable and need correcting meaning that right now we may well be wrong about whatever it is we figured out. They cannot explain themselves or all we experience nor can they guarantee the future. We know that more order produces a wider range of choices.

But that way also lies madness where all choices are based on uncorrectable illusion. Our ordering process simultaneously produces our longing while our fulfillment lies at hand discarded. We starve in the land of plenty — the rich steal; the happily married commit adultery; the wisest of philosophers realizes that he is the most ignorant, while the ignorant man think himself wise. Ordered life is impossible without law, and yet unchecked order turns that law into a destructive force making the Hydrogen bomb look like match. The more a scientist learns the more questions he has. Children resent those who have given them everything including life itself. Those pregnant with life abort their only future.

The science, which gave us absolute objectivity, truth and methodology, is in the end based on creative hunches and cannot provide a coherent explanation of its own processes. Nonetheless, the technology it produces tells us that something is working out there. And regardless of the tree hugger’s ideology, he still posts madly on websites living in the city or on city produced goods to sustain his “back to nature,” the hippie-techno-peasant ideal. The advocate of world population reduction refuses to kill himself. In this they all admit that something is better than nothing even though they cleave madly to their starving nothingness as if they had found the crown jewels. In all this they have a considerable rage and frustration as well they should.

Though they find their ideological horse shit good, they resent the fact that the rest of us simply aren’t ready to partake of their sacrament and would prefer to leave it in the stable. Indeed they don’t really like it either. But where is a grown man or woman to turn? Once mastered the thing that consumed our entire attention, now bores us. To define imperfectly, the finite must develop a theoretical ideal of exhaustive perfection and yet it can never comprehend it much less grasp such perfection as long as it is finite. Our patterns, to be true must be complete — infinite — and yet we know things to be true even though that truth is forever limited.

To properly govern the affairs of state (or of family, club or business) we must have absolute knowledge and absolute control. To make an ideal of improper government . . . is an oxymoron. But we function none the less with what we have, imperfect as it is. To think or define limited or particular truth at all requires the unlimited to measure against, yet there is no measurement where there is no limit. The full long for one more bite and go away empty. Nothing under the sun can satisfy, even the drive to make others perfect. Complete and Incomplete Our ordering patterns are always incomplete because they are the salient features of our experience stitched together, remembered, and tested over time.

They are not nor can be exhaustive reproductions of every aspect of things, much less every aspect of what we can experience or remember. Therefore the seeds of disorder lie in the heart of every order we try to impose. This is called abstraction. It is incomplete. Yet it gives the illusion of completion when it is not rationally examined the way swiftly moving frames give the movie the illusion of action, the way a photograph gives an illusion of the person photographed. When rationally examined, our experiece gives the illusion that perfect knowledge must surely lie beyond the next hill in a coming synthesis. But that perfection does not lie on the far side of any hill in this world.

For instance, all systems of order have in them things that must be true for the system to be orderly and true, and yet cannot be proven true by that system — so there is the drive to provide an ultimate order that enfolds all subsets of order and proves the unproven aspects and incorporates the anomalous observations of a lesser system. Yet that new order will require a greater one. All definitions of objectivity have this built in problem: anything less than perfect coherence and exhaustive one-to-one correlation between pattern and environment are by definition subjectively approximate reproductions masquerading as objectively exact and complete realities.

The more our drive for order produces internal consistency in the details, the more those details are inconsistent with the environment. This inconsistency demands that those patterns be torn apart, discarded or reassembled in a more comprehensive order. For instance, we cannot do without rules and laws, and yet laws are capable of infinite proliferation until we strangle in them and their very consistency demands that we be executed on our own guillotine or find a way to develop laws without their suffocating us. The same is true of theological systems, of scientific and mathematical systems, and of social systems that govern families, communities and nations.

All subjectively correct or internally coherent patterns have this problem built into them — the mathematical as well as the social. The drive to consistency is ultimately the drive to trash the pattern and start over. The patterns of our order tell us what is dangerous and what is safe, friend and foe. But they can’t tell us infallibly and so we must curse or bless before we can verify the full worth of our object of blessing and cursing. We must shoot before we can verify our target — and so must those around us.

There is no simple internally consistent solution such as pacifism (the drive to perfect the world by controlling nothing at any cost to yourself and those around you) or activism (the drive to perfect the world by controlling everything at any cost to yourself and those around you). Both pacifism and activism are the result of striving for perfect internal consistency in the face of the intrinsic ambiguity of our experience. Morality is rooted in the nature of the ordering process itself. Morality is what we ought to do given our pattern. Therefore it shares the problem of all of our patterns, evaluations and environment.

We must rely on our moral principles as if they absolutely define the consequences of good or bad organization and yet like the proven results of mathematical science, they too are finite and lack exhaustive definition either in our patterning, environment or our evaluation processes. And so we find ourselves see-sawing between libertinism and legalism, anarchy and tyranny — ecologies that have abandoned dynamic balance and spun into cocoons of monolithic consistency. The examples above (and in the prior section) set forth theoretical problems of finite order. In a word: The ordering process intrinsically demands more information and greater order than our finite experience is capable of providing, processing, encompassing or acting on.

The conclusion is that objective truth must be impossible based on a theoretical dilemma that would do Zeno justice: to know anything we must know everything. The corollary is that if we cannot know everything then we must know nothing. The good news is that, theoretical difficulties notwithstanding, our patterning process of experience provides sufficient objectivity and testability to enable us to function in, work with others, and even master our environment in many important ways. The bad news is that, for the sake of order, many conclude that absolute power to enforce a way of life must be given to a person or small group of people who to be free to act must be free of many of the social restraints of the system they are controlling.

To function beyond the most rudimentary level of organization comparable to an amoebae, someone one or some group is given a level of public power far beyond the private person. But those who grant that power cannot grant the absolute knowledge (P-E-E) to match the power. This leads to horrific results. Seeing these horrific results, others retreat to anarchy which ineffectively solves the problem by lodging absolute power in the individual. This too leads to horrific results, abject poverty of all is only the least of the horrors. Others create various utopias which can only work on paper, but never with flesh and blood reality. A utopia is an illusion created by a social pattern which solves the social ills of society as it now is.

This pattern seduces others to the ideal which when attempted runs afoul all of the above problem in a much higher degree than a normal socially evolved society because of the commitment to make the system work regardless of how disastrous the result. In the end, it devours its devotes. The pattern consumes the pattern makers. And so we career down the halls of history bouncing from Tyranny to Riot and back with only an occasional respite. Here is the frustration of it: we should be able to dismiss the broader reaches of theoretical and religious thought as the unnecessary illusion of a constructive ordering process of awareness that doesn’t know when to quit.

We should be able to dismiss the broader popular reaches of superstition and religious behavior as a similar patterning process on a more personal and practical level. Yet we cannot resist powerful systems of thought directing our actions — ideologies. And the average person apparently cannot resist the idea that there is more and he should do something to respect that “more” even if it to knock on wood, go to Easter mass, or burn a bit of incenses or candle at the local pagoda.

It is all the rage in the modern scientific world to argue that we should be able to see through the illusion of absolute truth and cast it off the way so many cast off God, morality, art, athletics, social conventions and the human studies themselves in favor of the hard sciences, hard reality, or just plain common sense living from day to day. And too it is the similar illusion of the Post modern post-scientific world that we can see through the illusion of absolute truth and cast it off the way so many cast off God, morality, art, athletics, social conventions and the human studies. With the moderns the Post Moderns cast off God, morality and self, but they go on to get rid of the hard sciences, hard reality, or just plain common sense living from day to day as well.

Some extremists cast off anything that is not a mathematically reducible description declaring it a meaningless subjective illusion. Other extremists cast off theoretical thinking believing that virtue lies in ignorance, and simply doing the task at hand. Others cast off any hope of the possibility that there could be agreement or understanding between people whether political or literary. “Reality is what you make it.” “May the best story win,” Is the deconstructionist’s motto. Romantics, whether Buddhist or New Age, speak of “experiencing the moment fully.” But when pressed as to what a “full moment” might be, they often fall back to vague self-contradictory statements, analogies or stories and myths.

One delightful, back to the good old days, homey example of this, comes from a man who uses computer desktop publishing to put out a magazine devoted to what he calls Biblical family living and morality, “It’s a good thing for mothers to can with their daughters instead of buying everything from the store. It keeps them at home and out of trouble learning useful skills and values. They learn all they need to know without having to leave home or go to college.” The humor of course comes from the fact that while he finds the relatively primitive life good for others, he himself uses the cutting edge of technology rather than keep himself and his sons busy and out of trouble on a genuine lead type screw down printing press.

Of course like all idealists he has no way to explain why canning is superior to sending the girls out foraging day to day for just enough daily bread to eat for that day. Why preserve any food at all? Why print? Why not make your sons scribes the good old fashioned way. It worked for thousands of years look at all the evil that Gutenberg unleashed with his dawning information age. Golden age idealists whether looking back to Biblical ages, or to the Victorians have no basis to freeze one era and accept it in place of another era. This fellow is simply a picture in my back yard of the nonsense and even evil all back to naturists create.

The problem is that in the end the broader reach of theoretical and religious thought make greater ordering and therefore control of our environment and our lives possible at every level even for extremists as seemingly different as scientists, Tree hugging earth firsters, Ludites, Bohemians, and back to 1890’s (er . . . Biblical) family advocates. They are all intellectual street people. They are all fundamentalists of varying stripe. That is, they adhere to a fundamental text, or methodology and find all others deviant or derivative. But this rage for order and control has no intrinsic end. Limiting it has no intrinsic mid balancing point.

And in the end we are all found to be fundamentalists of one sort or another since we all attempt to order our lives and this order depends on accepting some text as final. In the search for truth the text of one’s heart has not advanced the cause beyond the text of Deuteronomy. Indeed it seems to have placed whatever good we might have gained over the last 5,000 years forever out of our reach. The inner light often proves to be the most direct route to outer darkness. You might say that theoretical thought’s benefit to overall advancement in personal, social, and technological organization of our patterns is like my father-in-law, a golfer who hit enough excellent strokes (say one of 50) to keep him coming back to the course for more torture. But that is not it at all.

In reality, we are theoretical and religious because finite organization presupposes it — it is not an illusion, it is the insatiable hunger of our existence requiring regular finite satisfaction for us to exist at all as surely as we require food, water and air to live, though no one meal or lung full will fully satisfy our life-long need. Can there be a well of water that if you drink from it, you will never thirst? Bread that if eaten will end your hunger? Labor that if entered into is our rest? A still point in the turning text? A fountain of youth, a meal that when consumes grants eternal life? A bush that burns without being consumed?

Everything about us demands this at every level of existence, but nothing in this order of existence though demanding it can either produce it or sustain life without it. The Rage for God “There is more in this world than is dreamt of in your small philosophy Horatio.” It is this incompleteness groping for more that gives rise to the classical proofs of God’s existence and at the same time they are the basis for the proof that He could not exist. These proofs from incompleteness run from the simple argument that you have a God or Jesus shaped hole in your life, to the most complex causal and ontological proofs of God’s existence. Our incompleteness argues for One who will complete us.

And so we hear argued that we are complete except for one small hole and that small hole is God’s little acre. Others argue that causal chains require a PRIMAL CAUSE to start them outside the system. Others argue that all the patterns we find in creation demand one who Patterns; that the Personal does not arise from the impersonal; that something cannot come from nothing; that there is no such thing as autogenesis as any Biologist can tell you. And the Great Mother of them all: the idea of perfection to be perfect it must also exist or it is not perfect, therefore God to be a perfect being must also exist or he is only an idea and less than He would be if He existed.

Each of these with their children is capable of elaboration into a book but they are all variations of the idea that being incomplete and groping for completion proves that the COMPLETE must exist. The proof that God does not exist is the same as proof of His existence turned inside out — everything works just fine without a starting point, without God the great organizer. Reality is groping for completeness, but that doesn’t mean that “The Complete” is really out there. We are simply beings who attempt to fill that void but cannot. This might lead some to despair and others to the illusion of religion. But for the truly enlightened it leads to Promethean greatness realizing that the world, especially right and wrong, are what you make them.

They go on to say that you cannot argue from a finite cause that there must be an infinite uncaused cause. Nor can you argue from the existence of order to an infinite person who orders all things. And that God shaped hole? It’s just that, a hole, nothing. You cannot argue from nothing that there must be something that fills the void. Besides, if God were to fill that hole, then he would no longer be God. He would have to be reduced to the dimension of that hole at the very least. This hole shaped “God” would be measurable and therefore not God at all. If the hole can be filled at all, then it could not be God who fills it because by definition he is not reducible to any measurable shape, size or hole. But if this is what you want to worship, have at it.

By definition God cannot be of this finite created order and therefore He can have no influence in it whatever else His function might be in realms beyond it. He is infinite therefore unknowable. If unknowable, then why speak more of him? Imperfection does not prove that The Perfect exists. Incompleteness does not prove Completeness. If anything 5,000 years of recorded imperfection with no perfection on the horizon would seem to prove that the perfect is an illusion. To one the need for completion proves the existence of God and to the other the need proves the non-existence, or at best the irrelevance of God. In reality it proves neither in the classical or mathematical sense of the word “proof”. These are the same proofs.

They both argue that experience points beyond us to this need for fulfillment. They both argue that God is demanded by this rage for order that doesn’t know when to quit. At this point they diverge: One says the demand for order proves the reality of God, and the other says that the demand for order is the basis of the illusion of God. The problem is, neither is capable of reaching beyond the finite to prove that God is or is not there. Proof of the existence of God, like proof of the existence of ourselves and even proof of our environment rises and falls together. Transcendence — “I”; the existence of a world external to the “I,” morality, and finally God — has this peculiar problem.

We directly experience these four – the “I”, God, the world, morality – all the time, but they defy the sort of measurement, which is the limit of our experience. The search for the perfect pattern or system to order our thought and world caused 16th and 17th Century skeptic and saint alike to embrace the scientific method and mathematical logic as a final resting place for human certainty. Christians found in it a metaphysical foundation for an absolute God who has provided an absolute way of knowing and absolute morality. It is parallel to the idea that this absolute God in an absolutely knowable world has given an absolute and inerrant revelation. By contrast, skeptics found in the methods of an absolute mathematical science proof that God was unnecessary.

The ironic mark of this new age which is so skeptical of God is that with God’s irrelevance so too “I” and morality became impossible to quantify and so too illusory. In time even the world, our physical environment, became impossible to define. But those first two hundred years were a heady time for everyone on all sides of any question. The world was now utterly knowable. Both skeptic and saint turned to do all they could to tear down the metaphysical efforts of the world up to that era which had become to them cobwebs of religious and scientific superstition from a Dark Age. But mathematical science did not and could not transcend human finitude. Neither did mathematical Christian fundamentalism which capitalized on that absolutism.

“Nature lay in darkest night, God said, let Newton be and all was light.” The light of John Newton, failed to give a foundation for the Transcendent Christian God, but rather could only produce an emaciated god dependent on the finite, the imperfect. God became dependent on Newton to give value and substance to His infinite perfection and independence. A primal billiard ball putting things in motion is not worth worshipping and is certainly not the personal God of the Bible or else Democritus would be a saint. The skeptic did not fare much better than the saint in Newton’s light.

But is was not just religion which suffered, Newton and Bacon could not advance math, logic, and physics past the intrinsic inability of all finite systems and ordering patterns to comprehend all. It was not just the saint who was let down, the skeptic as well found that math, logic and method failed to give him those god-like qualities he has longed for since the garden. These observations of the one side against the other have filled books since Newton. Our incompleteness is the ground of our rage to order both our patterns and our environment and in that order to transcend the moments of our life to which we are bound. But they neither prove nor disprove God, our selves, nor the reality of the world around us. They do not guarantee a method of knowing reality.

Our dilemma has been aptly described by Paul in the First Century. Speaking of people both as individuals and in society, he said, 24God . . . 26has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, 27so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; 28for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, “For we are also His offspring.” 29Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man's devising.

We can never comprehend God fully nor properly represent Him with anything in the created order such as gold, silver or philosophical/religious concepts devised by man. Yet we will always believe in God because we will always experience our finitude longing for the infinite. We will always believe that effects must have a cause, that pattern must be the result of purposeful reason and action. We cannot escape believing that these things represent truly significant aspects of the world. Though we apprehend them imperfectly we know that they are more than constructs of our imagination. The fact is, our reality, whatever it is, is requires these conviction/truths if we are to escape madness.

This reality itself is only escaped in madness — which madness itself if it is human, is merely another order, or a principled disorder, cut off from the possibility of correction. Those who prove or disprove God are stuck with the same maddening dilemma of those who prove or disprove anything. He is not far from us. Like children we cannot escape our parent. He is not just in everything around us, His character is stamped in our being. Our circumstances have designed us to grope after him. His existence – like the existence of the world, the “I” and morality — is obvious. It is demanded by the nature of our own existence. And yet it is always beyond that experience and not reducible to it which if you think about it is the only way it could be.

Those who do not believe that they exist will always presuppose their existence in their argument against it. Those who do not believe that the external world exists must presuppose that world in order to argue at all. Those who do not believe in morality must be kept at a safe distance from everyone else because they become a danger to everyone – choices have consequences and morality is the study of those consequences which are quite real. And so too in the same way those who do not believe in God will always have to work hard to doubt Him because they must suppress the fulfillment and completion that their very being and their environment — their conscious awareness itself — demands if anything is to exist for them at all.

And by the same token those who try to prove God must work at believing because they are unable able to go beyond the limits of human experience to prove anything they experience much less God. Which of course is the same maddening thing about all we seem to know. We know we know something, but when we set about proving what we know, we fail to prove that we can know anything at all much less the thing we thought was so obvious. The reason we fail is because all knowledge depends on the existence of our selves, of an external world, of God and of the right and wrong actions to take in light of anything we know. These four are by definition unknowable and known as the structure of all thought and perception.

Take these away and there is no knowledge, no personhood, no right and wrong, no God, no world, no “I”. Proof of God’s existence stands or falls with the proof of the existence of everything else we believe exists, including the one who believes or doubts in the first place. God, like our environment and our patterns, is beyond proof because these are proven by everything and yet not “proven” at all. There is no final proof of God or anything else because of the limitations of our ordering processes. There is no temple of silver or gold, which we can build to hold him. And yet there is no escape from the proof in all we are — our silver and gold cry out to us that there is a God and we depend on Him. And so we worship something.

Worship or ultimate wonder, allegiance, and the drive to explain is inescapable to the human condition — it is our condition. Therefore Paul says to the post modern world: 22". . . I perceive that in all things you are very religious; 23. . . .

Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: 24God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. 25Nor is He worshipped with men's hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things . . . . 30Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, 31because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead." Anything on earth whether pattern or environment, method or madness has been seized on to worship — to bring comprehensive order to our life and reality.

The intrinsic inadequacy of any thing in pattern or environment to sustain the burden of reality does not change the conviction that reality is held together at every level, not merely internally in our patterning drive for order, but out there in our environment as we experience it. Only in despair do we say, “Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Even then very few act as if that statement is true however much they may say it. For Lear to even speak it is for him to deny it. The nature of experience and environment requires us to find that unifying field theory to explain the unified field.

But the limitation of our pattern and environment is that there can be no concept, thing, or pattern — no temple — that is sufficient to order all reality — no ark in which select abstractions from creation may rest above the flood of doubt — no human approach, much less a human bridge, to God. If such a thing exists that will grant a comprehensive order, then it cannot be called a “thing” at all, and yet it must be able to order all things. God cannot be worshipped in temples which hands can make, and yet that is all we have — hands which create patterns, and environments which can be shaped and which shape us.

The most our hands can do is hope that their work is good enough to receive a reward, and yet we know that no one, much less you or I is that good, that perfect. The most our hands can do is to point to the unknowable which must be known if we are to know anything. But this is not proof. This is not a system, which ends all systems offering final verification for all subsets but needing no verification itself. It is simply the final reality of our condition — we cannot reach God, yet we cannot do anything that is not reaching for him. We were designed to reach HiNovemberm because we cannot lower our arms if we wanted to, if we are alive at all we are trying to order that life and that drive for order constantly reaches out for what it can never create.

If our reach is to become finally the embrace it longs for, the infinite must take the initiative. The infinite must become finite, the divine must become human. God must explain what is true, as incomplete and perspective bound as that explanation might be. That explanation must be the starting point or there is in the end no explanation at all. To even curse God or deny His existence requires that He lift us into his lap so that we can pluck out his beard. Human reality is the inescapable fact that the fundamental things of life are both knowable and unknowable at the same time. This is the significance of, “now”. There is the hope and conviction that though 12For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face.

Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. In its most fundament form, despair is when we lose our faith and abandon our hope that disorder and partial order will some day be swallowed up in order — when we set our love on that which can never fulfill. Our hope — whether skeptic or saint — is that we are sufficiently like God to be able to understand His world and Him with the apparatus we have been given assuming He directs our steps. With this perceptual apparatus, P-E-E we can understand the need for the Infinite, the Perfect, the Personal, the Good, the Beautiful, the Rational even though they cannot be fully comprehended by finite systems.

This understanding of God or His world cannot be proven since all proofs depend on the finite system of which they are a part and God is not a finite part of anything however present He is to everything. It cannot be disproven, since any disproof of God attacks our ability to be certain of (that is, to prove) anything at all — His is the universal order intrinsically demanded by every skeptic’s disproof for that disproof to even approach coherence of meaningful doubt and avoid nihilism. The skeptic cannot disprove God or the environment (that is, the psychological, social and physical environment of all thought) except by assuming the very thing he is disproving.

What we know is that there is an order producing reality, which seems to be as incapable of sustaining its own existence as the image in a mirror is incapable of self-generation regardless of how perfect its partial reproduction of the reality might be. What we are is a mirror image of One Who creatively puts all things in place and sustains them for His purpose. You can’t point to the mechanism of understanding and order within each of us and say that it proves or disproves its maker. A mechanism is just a mechanism. Discussing or discovering this mechanism does not disprove or establish any part of either religion or philosophy or knowledge any more than the discovery of sound waves would prove or disprove the love conveyed in the love song carried on them.

Nor does the most ardent love song mean that the singer loves you . . . or anyone else. What you can say is that this mechanism forces us to recognize our incomplete finitude and with it the incomplete finitude of our environment as we perceive it. We can say that this mechanism’s very existence drives us to either create perfect order ourselves or accept that there must be a perfect order and seek to approximate it. This does not prove a perfect order, much less that our approximation is correct or that it is personal. What it does prove is that we are beings with whom God can communicate because we are finite representations of His order — His image. We are beings with whom He can have communion and even take on their finite form without losing His infinitude.

This does not prove that this happened or will happen. But there is nothing in the nature of our experience or experiential mechanism that would make this either impossible or as improbable as the alternatives. As both sides would agree, everything points to God. It should be no surprise then that the most powerful argument for God’s existence does not come from the classical proofs, and is not a rational “proof” at all.

It comes from the nature of our own experience which is utterly consistent with the idea that we are His offspring, His dependents, made in His image: “for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.' Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man's devising.” I don’t know what you would call this sort of argument. But it argues from the possibility of meaningful perceptions. To deny the God set forth in the Bible would be to deny the possibility of not merely argument, but meaningful perceptions themselves. Having said this, you know it is true.

To deny it would be to deny something that resonates with the very nature of how and what you know to your core if you know anything at all. To deny God is to suppress what even your poets, philosophers and wise men of the post modern age have said. To deny God is to suppress what all our P-E-E tells us at every moment. It is as futile as trying to deny existence itself. This is not the same as arguing that because you can think of the most perfect thing, therefore it must exist since without existence it would not be perfect. Rather it is to argue that argument, evaluation, speech itself requires that we assume the infinite in order to make any finite argument, evaluation or speech meaningful at all. Our existence is predicated on His Existence.

Our knowledge, our patterns, our actions are predicated on His. Our personhood is based on reflect his Person. We can suppress this awareness. We can flee it, ignore it and focus on the particular tasks at hand or lofty alternatives. We can replace Him with a surrogate whether another deity, aspect of this order, or concept. We can discover the mechanism and use it to replace the creator. We can worship something else, anything else.

But, 20since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, 21because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man--and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. 24Therefore God also gave them up. . . 32who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.

Whether in terms of our ordering process as we know it — the “clearly seen” created world P-E-E — or its moral dimension —the relationship between P-E-E and the consequences of our actions — we cannot escape knowing God and what He requires. The only question is will He accept us, or will He permit you to continue suppressing Him? All of your creative efforts to find a unified field run into this same anomaly: if your standard is truly infinite you cannot know it or measure yourself by it. If finite, then it is inadequate to give you certainty. And so, however much we speculate in our theories, we forever recognize in our practice the limitations of our psychological and social ecologies. We recognize the limitations of our physical environment.

After contemplating the infinite, we return to the finite as the only means we have to reach beyond to where our being demands we reach. Physical, theoretical , psychological and social environments cannot reach beyond themselves, yet built into them is that reach. We are driven to try and cannot ignore that drive — it is life itself. This is the source of idolatry whether physical statues, theoretical constructs and patterns, or mere day to day busyness with job, car, family or tending your personal garden as if these are the limit of what gives meaning and pattern to life. It is also the source of true worship because we were designed to figure things out and run all these things in God’s Name. Man was made for dominion and order.

Order, checked by tempered doubt, acted upon rightly is the basic tool of that dominion. And worship of God, is what brings it all into perspective. It is naïve to think that religion is one more illusion of our experience. That is a similar error to putting doubt on the same level as ordering. The illusion lies in our attempt to make the finite serve for the infinite. Idolatry is the illusion. Idolatry exchanges the glory of the infinite God for images of man or beast or theoretical constructs such as “oneness” or prime movers, or any attempt at ultimate understanding which makes ultimate either the particulars or universals of this world order. The unknown God must reach to us if He is to be known.

All we can know apart from Him is that more is required but we can never reach that more. Someone who made things the way they are must reach those things and He has done so by making us able to truly know as He can know, and yet know finitely and imperfectly as an image or analogue of how He knows infinitely and perfectly. Every mechanism of science and understanding indicates that this is our nature. The things we discover about our patterns and environment cannot do more than provide the mechanisms dependent on faith, hope, and love. Our P-E-E and its products are finite tools in search of an infinite redemption. Their lack finds its expression in the failure to replace God at any level with an explanation of how the world works.

God cannot be replaced on the level of 2+2=4 and He can’t be replaced at the level of the most complex psycho-social organization, moral conviction or law order — even those coming from His revelation of Himself. He can’t be replaced in the simplest of materialistic hope we might place in our job, our wife our husband or our children giving us meaning in life. The things we would replace God with must themselves have someone to give them meaning. Our reality is finite, our need is infinite. This is what the Bible says we can expect to find. God can and does communicate and supplies the answers whether at the level of 2+2=4, or the most complex psycho-social organization or at the level of moral conviction and the order brought by law.

He does it in a way that we are able to understand and so necessarily our being — pattern, evaluation and environment — demands more, must constructively use doubt to understand, and yet knows that what He said is true, reliable and sound. And so He not only reaches through and speaks to men, He becomes a man. He takes on the ambiguity of His finite created order and those within it whose Rage to Order demands daily that He appear to justify himself. But his appearance is not to justify himself to us, it is to justify those he wants to reach to make them fit to be with him, it is to bridge with His life the death our incompleteness and our moral dereliction inevitably leaves us.

The Morality of Experience Morality is not an illusion thrown off by our way of experiencing the world. Morality is the most fundamental ordering of that experience. It ties pattern, environment and evaluation together with their consequences. Morality ties the principles, which govern our patterning, to the consequences of following them. We find that the success in our ability to organize our personal life revolves around the ability to harmonize and order more and more discrete subsets of patterns finding greater and greater coherence with the environment. We therefore discipline our thoughts, actions and environment accordingly. This is the root of personal morality.

In the same way, greater success lies in the ability to coordinate our patterns with others like us who, by virtue of their humanity, have this same mechanism at work in their life. This ordering extends into getting animals to cooperate. They, like us, find the order of their world improved when they work with the human order of existence. (Training is how we get animals to agree with our order.) This ordering extends into the inanimate world, which we break down and reorganized in ways that make life better for our ordering patterns as all animals do to a less organized extent. Consequences are an inescapable aspect of all organizing and patterning.

It is why we call “law” the most important causal regularities between pattern and environment, which perceived regularities organize our patterns and actions. For instance, we speak of the laws of mechanics such as F=MA or; of Math such as the Associative Property of Addition; or of the land such as No Trespassing; or geometry such as a2 +b2 = c2; or of community, such as the significance of certain forms of clothing, gender distinctions and propriety; or of God such as Thou Shalt Have No Other gods Before Me. All these and many more are forms of moral organization that have different consequences if we keep or violate them. Morality is more than a word for the coherent application of the principles governing the patterns we create.

Morality encompasses the consequences of keeping or violating those principles — the unwanted outcomes in both the internal pattern and its external application. Morality, like God, is not a subjective illusion of the ordering process simply because we can subjectively outline its reality. Morality is an intrinsic a part of both the ordering process and the fruit of its interaction with the environment. To the extent that the environment is capable of being patterned, understood and acted upon, the morality of that understanding and action is part of its character, and not merely something we attribute to it.

Morality is the internal consequence to correctly ordering our patterns and the consequence to those patterns’ coherence with the order of the environment from which they are an abstracted model. There is no human experience, pattern evaluation process, or environment apart from moral structure and its consequences. Decision-making is quite impossible when cut free of moral principles. In this world, ideas and actions both have consequences — regular, describable causal connections which must be incorporated into our patterns and acted on. So fundamental is the connection between thought systems and the consequences of acting on them, that morality can be seen to be an organizing factor for every form of knowledge that has an application.

The fundamental laws of ethics are not mysterious or left up to each imagination. But rather ethical systems (even those Eastern ethical systems in which ethics is fundamentally a contradiction to their denial of reality) will to one degree or another reflect the same laws. They reflect them because these laws are the presupposition of the human habitat. To escape them is inconceivable and beyond our ability. The following ten laws are not rules imposed by men, but are the very structure of humanity. They are the presupposition of what it is to be human. Without them there is no human. Have no other God — no society can grow or survive without some metaphysical ideal that binds it together.

But a metaphysical ideal that is nothing more than an idea or personification of ideals is a thin emaciated shadow of the full blooded Personal God of Creation who reveals himself. All societies prosper in proportion to their ideals which are absolute binding them together. But ideals without the embodiment of the Personal God who made them are not sufficient to ground human order. The god of any society must not be too theoretical, impersonal or abstract. That fundamental relationship must remain in tact personally and corporately. There is no human society that is conceivable where the opposite of this is made an ideal, where God and each member are not covenantally bound to each other through ritual and conviction. It will fly apart.

Make no graven image — Materialism will ultimately destroy a society because this world will always end in dust as will any part of it that we try to elevate to the level of the infinite. Societies (human relationships) must have a God, but the God must not be too small. Anything that stands within the world order is finite and therefore incapable of the weight of Deity – and yet societies will settle for something because they must have a God to exist at all. Don’t take the name of the Lord your God in vain — Society will embody its fundamental ideals. If they loose respect in society, it will fall apart. Each society is called by the name of its God and His values. It must maintain those values. And they must be good values. But ultimately it cannot be coerced.

Each member must find them reasonable in their own heart. (See the 10th.) You must work and you must rest relation to your God — Interspersing rest with work is fundamental to prosperity. Society will only be as strong as its work ethic and its play ethic as these reinforce its relationship with is God. Honor your Father and Mother — The family must stay in tact and parents even when finite and wrong must be respected or the society will not pass on to the next generation the values and laws which make it possible. By extension Honor is due to all who are in authority even where they must be disobeyed. Society without respect for those bound together in covenantal authority is inconceivable.

Authority structures with officers in charge is fundamental to human organization and division of labor. Do no murder — Society where a principle is made of killing those who are innocent is impossible. Thou shalt not commit adultery— confining sex to covenantal relationships is not simply one option among others, its opposite is inconceivable since it breaks down the family unit, and in the end will denigrate women and children making them the property of the strongest to use as they will. Don’t steal — human society is inconceivable if an ideal is made of taking whatever you want. Beyond that impossibility, the concept of private property is the concept of personal responsibility. It is fundamental to being an adult as opposed to a child.

The only human institution which can function on a communal command economy is the family and that only works while the parents are distinguished from the children. As the children grow up each particular family form of human organization falls apart, and replaced by the children’s families. The illusion of utopian socialized thinking is that human society is possible where all but a few people are treated as children. Don’t bear false witness — Covenant is the basis of social life. You cannot even imagine a coherent social order based on lying as an ideal or breaking your word as an ideal. Human organization and economics depends on the truth being the ideal and distinguished from the lie.

Don’t covet — For human society to be possible these values must be more than grudgingly forced on society from the outside. They must be convictions from the heart, from the center of our patterning drive for order. Though these values can, must and will be enforced in different ways, it is from the inside that they must take root or society dissolves. These ten laws when made universal ideals make personal and social life possible. By contrast to the extent that their opposite is made a universal ideal society and knowledge become inconceivable, not merely impossible.

The inversion of these laws is only socially possible when those who embody the inverted ideal are able to pimp parasitically off of a morally healthy host which embodies the ethics and fundamental principles of the human social habitat. In other words, morality is not an imaginary ideal based on the illusion of absolute right and wrong. It is a nonnegotiable necessity for any human ecology. Virtue If morality is how we tie the structure of our patterns with the consequences of their application, virtue is how we proceed. The chief of these is humility. Humility is the ability to change our patterns without losing confidence in our ability to change our environment.

And the converse, humility is the confidence to change our environment without losing our ability to be corrected by it. “I send you out to be sheep among wolves, therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” “And he set a little child among them and said he who would humble himself as this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” “Moses was the meekest of men.” Humility is not the opposite of confidence, or boldness. We are humble in the face of the possibility of error and look for needed correction without losing the courage to do the best we can with what we know But more than humility is needed. To function effectively, we must have faith that there is a past and our patterns can actually capture it sufficiently to shed a true light on the present.

We must hope that our patterns are sufficient to provide a range of wise choices from which our future will grow. We must love what is right and good and do it. “Therefore these three remain, Faith, Hope and Love and the greatest of these is Love.” Virtue is not morality or knowledge, or experience, or anything else we have discussed so far. Virtue is not the principles or patterns of organization or a description of their consequences. Virtue is not a process of evaluation or a thing found in our environment. The ignorant are no more incapable of virtue than the knowledgeable. The immoral no less capable of virtue than the moral. The weak no less capable than the strong. Those who do wrong no less capable of virtue than those who do right.

Virtue describes how we approach, use and interact with our own patterns, evaluation methods, and the environment. It is how we deal with the decisions and consequences of life. Virtue does not commend one pattern, principle, moral, or environmental option over another. Rather it makes the ongoing evaluation and growth of our lives as pleasant and fruitful for ourselves and others as circumstances permit. The lack of virtue makes the ongoing evaluation of our life, fearful, a burden and odious to others. Demanded by the Nature of Human Reality God — Our patterns and systems are always incomplete driving us to seek that which is infinite in its comprehensive grasp. God is that infinite person in whom all finite persons and their patterns may rest fully comprehended.

Despite its foray into emergent evolution, the Biological sciences are discovering this same inescapable purpose either presupposing their theoretical efforts, or their efforts dissolving into nonsense. I — Our self is always capable of distinguishing itself from any object it considers including the self that is considering. I is never capable of being known but it must exist or meaning and knowledge are impossible. Environment — The Environment is always out there, and our perception of it is confined to the patterns we create out of what seems significant. But there is a real world that is the object and source of our patterning. It is what we are patterning abstractly and it is the place which we reconstruct and change based on those patterns.

Ethics — Morality is always debatable in its fine applications, but that there are consequences to our patterns and actions is beyond debate as are the fundamental moral laws which make private and social ecosystems possible. Having no other God (1-3), interspersing rest with work (4), honor to parents and to all whom honor and respect is due (5), confining sex to covenantal relationships (6-9), prohibiting murder, theft, and lies (6,8,9), finding the source of these ethics in the center of our patterning (10), these ten commands when made universal ideals make personal and social life possible. By contrast to the extent that their opposite is made a universal ideal Society and knowledge become inconceivable, not merely impossible.

The inversion of these laws is only socially possible when those who embody the inverted ideal are able to pimp parasitically off of a morally healthy host which embodies the ethics and fundamental principles of the human social habitat. (Some of these pimps are simply called thieves robbers, adulterers and murderers.

Others elevate these inversions to a noble level and call themselves, socialists, communists, artists and idealists as if they are capable of transcending their human frame because of their theories or gifts and abilities.) In fact one might make the argument, that if social order is the fundamental habitat of human beings, then these four structural realities will always force themselves to the surface and societies which embody them will in the end prosper to a greater extent than those which either do not embody them as ideal, or embody some set of ideals that is close to them. This could be seen as the evolutionary argument for the social version of the survival of the fittest.

The physical form is that the strongest and meanest who spread their seed the farthest will ultimately take over. The social version is that faith, hope and love will ensure the ultimate take over of those who are most truly human, who most clearly ground their patterns in what the Personal God has revealed, who believe that there is an objective world which is knowable and that they exist as responsible moral agents whose reality is structured by the Ten Commandments whether they acknowledge them or not. Control, Power, Survival, Sex, Food, etc.. The drive to organize is a more fundamental drive than any other such as survival, power, sex, food or shelter. In fact, it is not a drive at all in the same sense that these things are drives.

You can overcome your desire for sex, food, control and power and do without them. But you cannot overcome your drive to organize even for an instant except by suicide or sedation. If life is supported at all, your body and the autonomic nervous system is keeping the heart beating the lungs breathing and making order out of nutrients and biological processes. This is only the rudimentary bare bones of our ordering efforts. But it shows that life at every level from biological to psychological, social and spiritual is an ordering process. This ordering at every level is the life force that animates us. We can know no other reality or drive apart from it. In fact, though we experience it or we would experience nothing, we can’t even describe it.

Go ahead, try examining the moment called “now” and tell us when it began, when it ended, and what you did in it. The most mundane and common of human experience — the consciousness of “now” — is the only concrete thing we ever experience and yet it is beyond our experience because it is that experience. What ordering does is make sex, eating, working, controlling, thinking, planning and all other things of life, possible. The more we order our lives, the greater the range of informed choices we have and the greater control we have. This opens the door for better satisfying whatever it is our appetites desire — sex, food, friendship, recreation, productive labor, intellectual stimulation, rest or any other good thing.

Particulars and universals There is no such thing as a universal or a particular. They are the result of the internal demand of a finite system of organization. Our process of organization depends on the ideal of a pattern that exhaustively replicates the environment. To organize at all is to organize toward this ideal seeking perfect knowledge of particulars in the environment and perfect knowledge of how they all fit together in a unified field. This ideal in both directions is intrinsically demanded yet unattainable. Human thought can be defined as an organizing effort that finds relationships among particulars and so organizes them into groups. Duh! As the modern scholar might say. And he is right. It is a useless truism.

As useless as it is, if you try to go further what you find is that you are incapable of actually grasping anything more on the question. We find that “universal” and “particular” are words used to describe relatively smaller and relatively larger groupings, neither capable of exhaustive categorization in either direction, both demanding it. If we are to organize at all, organization demands a satisfaction the finite knower strives for but cannot experience. When we turn our attention to examine any universal we find it becomes a particular along with other particulars fitting into a larger pattern which becomes the particular of yet a larger pattern.

This progression is infinite because no system is capable of proving every part of itself in terms of the system and so its unresolved elements drive us to more universal systems of explanation and order. When we look in the other direction at any particular, we discover that it is its own universal system made up of yet smaller groups of particulars which are in fact universals in their own right. The process is driven to break down these ever-descending groups of particulars because our concept of order demands that we find the irresolvable particulars on which we can inerrantly build our larger concepts.

This demand for absolute particularity is intrinsically doomed to fail because the smaller the particulars get, the more they resist measurement from perceptual tools that are not fine enough to determine their nature, much less the composition of what makes them up. East and West The West asks, “How do we make use of each moment to make the next moment better in a steadily improving progression?” Kipling’s answer is as Western as you can get: If you can fill each minute to the fullest, then you qualify as fully human, and can own the world.

For the last 500 years we have done this by abstracting from our experience a quantifiable model of the world — one that does well with mathematics — breaking minutes to seconds and seconds to nanoseconds in our drive to fill each minute as full as it can be and so fulfill our manhood and world dominion. This is the ideal of computerization now a term which is interchangeable with digitalization. The East asks, “How do we escape the cycle of pain which is the inevitable result of the limitations and ambiguities of each moment of human experience?” Their answer is to erase human experience by disciplines, which plug into personal nothingness/oneness with the Great All.

The Buddha (light or enlightenment) leads us into an eight fold path to shut the ordered world out, to create entropy in our minds that merges all order into ultimate non-order — the illusion of entropy. The reason it is illusion is not a bias against Eastern thought forms in favor of the Western. There is a fundamental difference between the priority that order has over disorder. The East does not mean by Oneness an organized field that unifies all particulars. By “oneness” or “unity” they mean the oxymoron of a distinctionless field at rest — entropy or nothingness where all values are equal. The object of Eastern enlightenment is not a “field” at all whether at rest or otherwise. It is despair.

It is giving up hope in life even while seeming to cherish it as an illusion. The Zen monk devoted to preserving every life whether insect or otherwise, nonetheless is personally devoted to the idea that that life is an illusion and his discipline calls him to erase the illusions of existence through his various disciplines whether of meditation, diet, exercises, or martial arts. By contrast, though impossible to achieve, a unified field of all particulars such a goal embraces the ideal of the fullness of life, whereas entropy is quite literally nothing at all. The West may make an idol out of order, but at least there is substance to their error and hope for correction. In nothingness, there is nothing to correct, only a living death.

But whichever way you turn, East or West, fullness of comprehension or entropy, perfect measure or suppression of all distinctions, it is still that same fundamental pattern-creating ability at work in the Western Scientist or the Eastern Monk/scholar. We create patterns and compare them to reality, and compare reality to that pattern and take action — even if that action is to deny that it is all happening. Ironically in the case of the East, the systematic attempt is made to obliterate the patterning itself. The eight-fold path of the enlightened one, the Buddha, leads to the elimination of even the illusion of eight-foldness or “path”. Their method of ending illusion is itself an illusion.

Regardless of the direction we turn, we find ourselves changing the environment on the one hand and trying to fit into it on the other. You might say the West is the ultimate attempt to change the environment and the East is the ultimate attempt to fit in. Neither is fully human. For 500 years we stayed in the Casino of Western materialistic objectivity as long as we thought we could win and this is the great appeal of the West: we have won a lot. But in the 1960’s when we thought we were losing, suddenly a whole generation tried to cut its loss, collect their chips and go home to our Inner Light and Peace, only to discover that there is no home in Eastern subjectivism any more than in the drafty sterile castles of Western materialism.

The escape into subjectivity, like the escape into objectivity is trying to escape who and what you really are. When the objective materialism’s answer could not provide a unified explanation of why we are winning — or that we were winning, or that material well being is worth winning — we turned to subjectivity and finally the East where we despair of winning at all in spite of all that our winnings have created for our ease and comfort. The pattern-evaluation-environment ordering mechanism itself is both the source of truth as well as the source of illusion. It creates an illusion, an analogy, of what is in our environment. But what it creates an illusion or pattern of is truly there and the pattern truly approximates it and can truly be discussed and corrected.

The mechanism that creates the possibility of true knowledge is also the mechanism which is itself an illusion creator. How can we know the difference? Yet we do whether we can explain it or not. It is why we argue with the umpire. It is why we are careful when we cross the street. We have all experienced how the order in the environment, though defiant of full explanation, is often the final judge of fatal illusions. “Give her the fruit of her hands and let her works praise her in the gates,” is more than a kind piece of advice for how to make your wife happy. More than a dictum of justice calling for honorable action or what we should do.

It describes what actually and inescapably happens as the end result of our Patterning-Evaluation-Environment behavior — we take action and those actions have consequences. Whether bitter or sweet, we must eat “the fruit of our hands”. Our actions, come to final judgment and that result is served back to us for better or worse. The question is not: Can we escape consequences of behavior? Is God unfair for making the world the sort of place where there are consequences to our behavior?

The question is not: Seeing I can’t control the whole world perfectly, Does God want me to cut out a segment of the world so small that I can exhaustively govern and control it and so guarantee only good consequences and make Him and those around me happy (righteous, fulfilled, mature etc.)?

The answer to those questions is, not only, “no.” it is “Wrong question that only leads you around in circles at best.” The question is, “Is it possible to do or know anything, small and great that will make the consequences of your life good?” The answer to that last question is, “Yes.” But you can’t know fully, you can’t guarantee the outcome, you can’t become one with anything or anyone, you can’t do it entirely on your own, you can’t depend on others to do it all for you, you can’t do it all yourself, and whatever happens, you can’t take it with you. But within these constraints you have lived all your life crying out to God for the sort of wholeness that He does not give you and rejecting the forgiveness, love and fulfillment that He does give. Why not accept it?

Bringing order when pattern conflicts with environment There are three consequences of disagreement between our organizing patterns and the environment. 1) You are driven to force that internal order and pattern onto the world. Thus we have the good fruit of cultural differences, laws, courts to sort out legal differences, schools and teachers, artists, craftsmen, athletes, technology, police and soldiers, inventors, builders, bankers, traders, clubs and organizations, leaders in business and government, fathers and mothers, saints, and heroes. Thus we have the evil fruit of slave masters, tyrants, tax collectors, warlords, torture chambers, perverts, villains and glory hogs.

Our order enables us to glory in our diversity while at the same time it can cause us to hate those who are different and fit everyone to our bed. 2) You are driven to impose your perception of the external order onto your internal patterns and calculations. Thus the positive fruit of change and growth in ourselves and our understanding; increased pattern-to-environment consistency; personal satisfaction; and the improved decision making these bring — in a word, wisdom.

And with these come the threat of the negative fruit of imposing external order on our internal patterns: slaves, taxpayers, opium dens, paralysis, pusillanimity, neurosis, self-doubt, paranoia, and sophomoric pontification. 3) You are driven to impose the order of your patterns onto the environment or the order of your environment on your patterns and yet lack the ability or grit do to either. The positive solution is to peacefully accept your limitations and make small changes in your pattern and in your environment that move in the right direction. But there can be an evil fruit of your frustration with your inability to change things internally or externally: you can engage in bitter introspection.

You prove to yourself at every twist of the pattern the rightness of using your personal order as a basis to force others by any means necessary to twist with your twisting pattern turn by turn, even if you fail yourself to be consistent with your own vision. The vengeance is masked by the altruism of acting in their best interests. It is driven by the idea that your lack of virtue is the fault of those around you who fail to be virtuous themselves — that is, they fail to fulfill the ideology your pattern has become. Not having the grit to do it yourself drives you to think of more and more terrible ways and justifications for using political power to force your way on others.

Your daydreams will consist of new and better fantasies of how force could reduce those around you to your ideal; avenge yourself on the world which has ignored you; and make it all a better place for everyone. And perhaps if all could be forced to live by your ideal you too might be able to do so. If you are a writer and thinker, you put all this into an ideological system, and write it down to be picked up by others (or yourself at a later date) who can do what you only dream of today.

Humorously this is seen in Liza Doolittle’s song of revenge on Henry Higgins, “Just you Waits!” In a mundane way we experience petty bitterness that snips and tears small holes in the social fabric around us every day as we join with our fellow workers, sociologists, politicians, wives husbands, and children, in a litany of how things ought to be and how much better the world would be if I could run it. But far more deadly are the theories of greed and envy that have spawned concepts of social “justice,” class envy, class warfare, socialism in general and Marxism and fascism in particular. ****

Rejected addenda If this is true, then error is built into our patterns, Evaluation and Environment for the following reasons. 1) We are limited to knowing directly only what takes place in the moment we call "now." This moment is like a geometric point, though "now" in some cases seems to be as long as a day, week or year, when we examine excatly when now is, we find that it can shrink to a point beyond measurement. So what gives it the illusion of having duration? It is the continuity of the pattern we bring to the moment. As we examine and define "moment" or "now" what we are doing is breaking down that pattern of continuity in search of the actual point of interface between space, time and pattern. It cannot be found, but we all experience it.

Thus our experience itself is mostly memory and that memory is the structure of our expectation, even though we experience everything at first hand. 2) The significance of points in our pattern is granted by their connection in the pattern. Since what we are doing is abstracting salient features of our experience — including our memories — we could mistakenly select the wrong points to abstract and overlook significant points simply because our pattern does not recognize their significance. The significance of any particular lies in grasping the pattern in which that particular finds its significance. Sherlock Holmes is a delightful example of this, but so is all problem solving. This limitation is part of the warp and woof of how we know and see.

When looked at one way the salient points of the pattern indicate such and such a relationship, when looked at another way their relationship indicates something different. The significance of oil was missed for most of recorded history until it was finally seen from the point view of a refinable energy source. 3) Objectivity in a scientific sense is impossible since no moment is repeatable nor can it be revisited. All we have are memories of what happened and patterns of which memories are significant. The Scientific Method posits the ideal of controlled repeatability but no point in time is repeatable. The best we can do is reconstruct as closely as possible similar conditions, and develop ways of recording our memories of earlier events to compare the results.

Statistics helps us smooth out the different results we run into when we repeat experiments. The ideal of repeating an event is unattainable yet it still stands as the standard for confirming truth when we can see it happened twice the same way.

What we replace actual repetitiveness with is a method to control the approximate repetition, the salient features we believe are causally related, and our mechanism for recording them. 4) Objectivity in a scientific sense is impossible since we cannot measure anything without affecting the object being measured thus skewing the observation. (Heisenberg) 6) Objectivity in a mathematical sense is impossible since the examination is of the internal pattern which can only prove anything based on assumptions that cannot be proven within the system. (Goedel) We create and sustain each moment a pattern of awareness which governs our perception, our understanding and our actions. The first thing we compare those patterns to is our social environment.

Creating patterns that cohere with other's patterns is our primary source of meaning. We are aware of the limitations of our experience. We know that some patterns are not true, some are delusions, some are harmful some are harmless. We call objective and factual those patterns which we believe are demonstrably coordinate with patterns in our environment. We call opinion those patters, which we believe are probably coordinate with our environment. And we call humor those patterns, which intentionally reverse or twist our environment harmlessly. We call entertainment/art those patterns, which create imaginary worlds or environments for purposes of telling a story or recording an impression for later enjoyment, edification or meditation.

We call Science, and in other cases Court, patterns that are sustained beyond shadow of reasonable doubt only after rigorously examination by multiple witnesses and if possible repeatable tests subject to rigorous methods and controls. Since human awareness is fundamentally a creative enterprise, what are the fundamental illusions that our form of experience creates? Limitations on our P-E-E is built in. We are finite, therefore knowledge cannot be exhaustive but is limited to abstraction of significant points woven together in a framework of meaning -- or pattern of relationships constantly checked for internal and external consistency. Our patterns depend on a regular and evaluation with the environment.

There are two definitions of truth which are often used by skeptics to prove that because we cannot know something according to those definitions it means we can know nothing. 1) The demand for exhaustive reproduction in our minds of the pattern that is actually found in our environment. Since this is the ideal of knowledge, and since this ideal can never be achieved, therefore all human knowledge will never be true. Our patterns are always abstractions, and therefore by definition capable of improvement -- higher coherence to the environment. 2) The demand for perfect internal coherence within a pattern. Since perfect coherence is intrinsically impossible, therefore true knowledge of even our patterns apart from comparison with the external world will be found lacking.

The odd thing about this is, no one has been able to demonstrate that we can know anything outside of our model. And yet at the same time we all act, think, and assume a real and verifiable connection between what we think and the world. That is to say, objectivity means that something is true apart from out opinions concerning it. In theory this is possible, in life we believe we experience the objective world most of the time. And yet proof of what we experience or our conclusions concerning it are impossible to maintain. The history of subjectivity, or doubt winds its way through every religion and philosophy. In the east the road is so convincing that all positive attempts to build a comprehensive model assume the fundamentally illusory nature of the world.

In the West, the skeptical critique has never been overcome. But every attempt has been made to incorporate it into a constructive philosophy or religious statement. Skepticism is used to tear down the opposition. The result has been a general 500 year retreat into subjectivism. The irony of course is that this retreat into subjectivism has been made during recorded history’s greatest growth in objective and tangible advances. With the success of mathematical science, one might ask how is it that the philosophy that has grown with it is a philosophy that denies the possibility of the very objectivity that Science would seem to demonstrate. We stay in the Casino of objectivity as long as we think we can win and this is the great appeal of the West we have won a lot.

But when we start to lose, suddenly we try to cut our loss, collect our chips and go home, only to discover that we are home.. When it comes to providing a unified explanation of why we are winning we turn to subjectivity and finally the east where we despair of meaning in spite of all which our belief in meaning has created for our ease and comfort. What sort of people are we such that we can do the things we do and think the things we think – so clearly so precisely and yet not be able to find the end or the beginning of our thought? We have quantified and proven and described more than all men put together and yet we have no idea of how to explain how it all goes together or works.

Early modern Philosophy, a number of the ancient Greeks and much Buddhist and Hindu thinking takes time to prove the illusory nature of experience and our internal models. We are able to pull memories together into patterns that follow that internal coherence. We are able to piece patterns together into larger coherent orders. We are able to compare our patterns with further experience with two results, we correct our patterns where they diverge from the world, We experience something different from what is out there. We share patterns of understanding sufficiently to understand others. Patterns understood by the broader society are part of the world of experience we account for. Order is the definition of the reality of our experience.

Order defines meaning, purpose and perception. The definition of disorder is that there is no meaning, purpose or ultimately even perception only perfect entropy—a state of null order. Our goal is always the same as our assumption: Goal—to find the coherence between the order of the patterns we create and the order of our environment. Assumption: there is coherent order and pattern in our environment that can correct our effort. The presupposition of human existence is that the environment is ordered; its order is capable of being abstracted and patterned; and that our abstract patterns are sufficiently accurate to be able to reorder both themselves and the environment.

Theoretical thought searches out those boundaries of change, to define the objective and the subjective and provide an explanation of how we can know truly and do rightly with what we know. However, theoretical thought cannot overcome the limitations of life — our moment by moment experience. The ordering process of experience demands theoretical coherence at higher and higher levels of abstraction. And yet that process denies order its goal because it is limited by the bottleneck time, finitude and abstraction creates for observation and evaluation. The things of this world — power, control, sex, food, recognition — are more readily attained if you have a grasp on how the world works.

The better your pattern, the more it will give you the information necessary to do the things needed to secure whatever it is you value. That may be as simple as self-supporting solitude or as complicated as the life of a president of a great multinational corporation or the founder of a religious sect (or their respective wives and children). Whatever the environment is you are ordering, the better your model or pattern is, the better you will be able to see in each situation the important things to develop a course of action that will secure what you value most. As a general rule you only discover what you value most when you look back and see what you have done. Some After thoughts

PAGE \# "'Page: '#' '" With due respect to Martin Marty for the title of a book I never read but have thought about ever since hearing the title cited by Grady Spires, and spending my entire life as an activist in the midst of activists of very different sorts. My first activism was in a family of missionaries. My broader experience was growing up in a Church where evangelism was preached and practiced and we were expected to be and were radical Christians in the midst of the Jesus Revolution of the late sixties and early seventies. During that time I lived in a Christian conference ground where people came from all over the world to have their lives changed and change the lives of others. Finally I started my own business creating it out of nothing.

Then I went into full time Pro-life activism of the 2nd most extreme sort, becoming a national leader of Operation Rescue. From there moving to Missionaries to the Pre-born an organization designed to recruit the few willing to be full time missionaries who would either sit in jail or at the door of an abortion clinic as a calling as opposed to a weekend activity. After a three year hiatus in the mid nineties, I became concerned about Y2K and we moved our entire Church from California to the Appalachian mountains of South Western Virginia. There I became involved in a community of the hardest core activists I had ever met and it was with them that I began to sit back and wonder where this rage for order was coming from.

I have spent my whole life trying to get everyone else in line with my idea of order. Now I was out in the middle of nowhere with these folks who were committed to making the family the central pillar that ordered all of life. No family, no life, no order. This is good you might say. Our society is destroying the family and might not survive its destruction. Yes it is. It is also destroying the idea of law, constitutional consistency, gender roles, community traditions, and high moral standards. But mumbling affirmation of these things you have only repeated the rhetoric of family values and the broad issues of patriarchy which in effect say it’s good to have men being manly with warm family ties and values.

Even the non radical extremist feminist like a man to be manly. But get a few families off in a corner where they can invent the perfect society and church and enforce it and no one can afford to leave . . . “And they redecorate your home from the cellar to the dome and when done with that they start about the enthralling task of overhauling you.” (Henry Higgins) I have never seen anything like it. Where does this rage for order come from? Are they/we wacked? Is it normal? Do we all have it? What is it? If we discover the mechanism of order, and why we cannot help but do it, do we disprove God? Or prove Him? Can we now explain the things that we used to resurrect God in order to explain?

Twelve men in a boarding house bed, Roll over roll over. They all rolled over when anyone said, “Roll over, roll over.” One of them thought it would be a great joke, not to roll over when anyone spoke, and in the confusion he got his neck broke, roll over, roll over. Eleven men in a boarding house . . . Did you notice that masculine pronoun, “his.” If you did it is because the feminists have accomplished the Herculean task of bending the language to fit its grammar to their ideology whether you applaud or abhor their success.

On the other hand, if you didn’t notice the masculine “his” it means that you are thoroughly bent in the other direction and have no clue about the psycho-social forces swirling about you in the world today, a personal achievement equal to that of the feminists. The Bible, I Corinthians 10. Thomas Kuhn The Bible, Proverbs 10 vs the ideal of Eastern Meditation. The Apostle Paul’s First Letter of pastoral advice to the Corinthian Church (Chapter 14) Felix Agrippa, in response to Paul’s statements when on trial before him.

Also Solomon on the vanity of life in the words of the Preacher found in The Bible Acts 24 and Ecclesiastes 11.) Voltair’s Candid at the conclusion of his idealistic journey through the world that killed all idealism except this last isolationist dream that perhaps he himself is an region he can control and order infinitely. With Voltair there are some unsuspecting bed fellows who advocate isolationist perfection. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, “Avoid foreign entanglements.” The modern cry to seal our borders and cut off immigration. The naturalist searches for simplicity in harmony with the spiritual rhythms of a fecund nature.

The desire to start isolated Christian communities or develop theories of the family, church or state that cut us from others as if our community (or family) is a perfectible domain if we could just remove all foreign influences flowing from the chaos of the rest of the world which is out of control, and now out of bounds. And yet the scientific method, like the religious commune and isolationistic political thinking is based on the idea that we can isolate elements to determine their true causes and so take coercive control our environment.

Kipling made hortatory use of our ability to change our environment moment by moment. to define manhood If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son Bacon turned our ability to change our environment into a stylized method to guarantee an objective result now enshrined as “The Scientific Method.” Eastern mystics recognize the intrinsic illusion of seeking ultimate objectivity or success. They reject the search for reality in the particulars of life. Instead they commit themselves to passive indifference — the ultimate attempt to fit into the environment — surrendering objectivity and particularity — becoming one with the Great All.

By contrast Saint Francis sought Christian realism, “Lord Grant me the Grace to change what I can and accept what I cannot change.” And perhaps this is why Christianity like no other thought form has created the greatest civilization to date bringing under its wing east and west. Cogito ergo sum is no more profound, indubitable or fundamental to existence than what one wag wrote on the bathroom wall in my high school: Coito ergo sum. Nor is thinking more indubitable than any other verb which “I” might engage in. An example of the political conundrum this gives rise to is appropriate. Destructive belief systems ultimately destroy both the individual and the cooperative effort. The temptation is always there to solve the defects of a belief system by imposing it by force.

This is intrinsically impossible. If people don’t believe from their own convictions, then no external force on earth can sustain the belief. The very nature of belief systems is that they must be believed because they are true, not because someone says they are. Yet a belief system that drives us to use force on others to believe it denies the very nature of the limitations of systems. This is the terrible temptation of all ideologies — to supply with force what is lacking in argument or self-evident proofs. Yet all governments are created to use force to defend society’s ideals. No ideology, no government. No government, no order.

Yet at some point we must remove by force those who are sufficiently deviant from an agreed upon order because sufficient deviation threatens the order that makes ordered life in society possible. But “how much deviation should lead to how much force to correct it and what sort of ‘force’?” is the question which defies exact measurement. There is no doubt that “From the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.” But that heart is beyond the reach of coercion. One solution to this conundrum is to strictly punish behavior, not belief. And to severely limit the list of punishable behaviors. This is just a metaphor you say?

Just last month Ahmed Adinijad ruler of Iran brought the head of Iran’s Bus Driver’s Union into the middle of the main square of Tehran and had his tongue torn out of his head publicly. The Bible, Ecclesiastes 5 John Boyd This is the conclusion Dilthey came to. But it is not some abstract philosopher’s ideal. If you have been delighted by a book from another era or meditated on an artifact, a Grecian Urn perhaps, then you have experienced this common bond of humanity as you recognize the Patterns-Evaluations-Environments of old and the light these remains shed on our own. Peter Berger Solomon in The Bible, Ecclesiastes Godel; 2nd Law of Thermodynamics; Heisenberg; Boyd.

Jesus Christ, as quoted in the Bible, Matthew 23 applies a similar withering analysis to those who attempt to create a perfect social law order even when they try to do it with God’s law itself. Even divine, law, revealed from heaven will not guarantee that the law order or civilization based on it will share those divine perfections. CS Lewis, The Abolition of Man. And the more those who try to uphold it will abandon argument and turn to force if it is available to them. If it is not they will articulate an argument for why someone should use force to defend it. And those who oppose it will either want to take over that power for themselves, or to adopt a hyper individualism to resist it. The Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:8 C.P.

Snow, Thomas Kuhn Sartre; Being and Nothingness; Solomon, the Bible, Ecclesiastes. John Boyd, Destruction and Creation. Jesus Christ, The Bible, Matthew 23, C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, provocatively answers this illusory solution to illusion. Hamlet Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra; Ayn Rand. CS Lewis, The Silver Chair Alexander Pope The Bible, Genesis 3. The Bible, Acts 17 Nihilism, absurdism, irrationality. The Bible, Acts 17 Shakespeare, King Lear. The Bible, I Corinthians 13 For example, who is the skeptic arguing with? Why does he think he is understood? In the same way that order cannot provide its own ultimate order, neither can doubt doubt everything without doubting itself. The Bible, Genesis 1:28 The Bible, Acts 17:28-29. The Bible, Romans 1.

The Bible, Matthew, 10; 19; & Deuteronomy The Bible, I Corinthians 13. Godel Democritus Heisenberg “If you can fill each unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run, yours is the world and everything that’s in it, and what is more you’ll be a man my son.” The experience of everything is in the end the experience of nothing. The Bible, Proverbs 31 Like this paper?

Rage for Order Joseph Foreman February 16, 2002 – DATE \@ "MM/dd/yy" 06/14/07 Page PAGE 51

PAGE \# "'Page: '#' '" It’s too bad that environment is a noun and has no verbal form. How about experiencing-examining-surrounding? The endings align — ing — but the parts of speech are still not parallel. This exercise is itself an exercise in testing our internal consistency. And what I find most irritatingly is that the offness of the symmetry. PAGE \# "'Page: '#' '" Look for the correspondence between this list and the list in the section preceding (Contradictions).

Point of reexamining or recreating a prior experience

Point of experience, “now” where Pattern-Evaluation-environment, come together

Introduction to Biblical Theology

Biblical Theology Core Seminar Class 1: Defining the Topic

Introduction

[Questions for the class in italics throughout] Let’s start with a pop quiz. I’ll save the right answers till the end. Three questions:

• Can someone tell me what all these things have in common? The Prosperity Gospel; Liberation Theology; Roman Catholicism. • What do these have in common? Christian counseling or preaching that focuses entirely on your responsibility; Christian counseling or preaching which tells you it’s all your parents and society’s fault; Christian counseling or preaching which emphasizes positive thinking? • And what about these? Characterizing the church’s mission as “transforming culture”; Christian pacifism; and the church/state settlement which characterized the West from Constantine to the time of the Reformation, whereby the power of state and church ruled over one “Christian Europe.”

The answer to all these three questions is, all these options are driven by bad biblical theology. Bad biblical theology is behind everything from prosperity gospel and Roman Catholicism to moralistic preaching and counseling to wrong ideas about how the church should engage culture.

To put it positively: biblical theology (i) helps us rightly interpret the Bible, (ii) protects the church from false Christianity’s, (iii) is the engine of gospel-centered exposition, (iv) is the handmaiden of biblical counseling, (v) is the foundation for proper Christian cultural engagement.

Why should we study biblical theology? That’s why. Those five reasons.

Thank you for coming to the Biblical Theology Core Seminar. • 3 weeks of intro: “What is Biblical Theology”; What are the Tools; and What Role Does It Play in the Church • Then we will apply this in two ways: • for 6 weeks we’ll take a look at 6 Storylines of the Bible • for 4 weeks we’ll look specifically about Bible Texts and unpack them using the tools of Biblical Theology Today, let’s spend our time introducing the topic. First, let’s define biblical theology.

I. What Is Biblical Theology?

Big Idea: Biblical theology is the discipline of learning how to read the Bible as one story by one divine author that culminates in the person and work of Christ, so that every part of Scripture is understood in relation to Christ.

It’s a way to read the Bible. A hermeneutic.

Turn to Luke 24. Jesus, after rising from the dead, met two believers on the road to Emmaus, Jesus offered a crash course Biblical Theology for them. Verse 26: “26 Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” (Lk 24:26–27)

Then look down at verse 44: “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” 45 Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, 46 and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

What book is he referring to in verse 44 that must be fulfilled? The Hebrew Bible, or what we call the Old Testament. He names the three parts as the Jews divided it: the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings (or the Psalms, for short).

Then what does he do in verse 45? He opens their minds to understand them, apparently in a way they had not before.

And with opened, enlightened minds, what could they now understand that the Old Testament actually teaches? That the Christ should suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations.

What striking about the beginning of verse 46? It’s those words “Thus it is written.” This is what is written in the Old Testament: that the Christ should die and rise, and that will lead to the preaching of repentance and forgiveness. You can sum up what is written in the Old Testament with the 33 words that comprise the message following the word “written” in verse 46.

Let me use an illustration from the book Reverberation. Suppose you woke up one morning and looked at a newspaper and saw the headline, “Nationals Win World Series.” And beneath that headline was, say, a 40 paragraph story of how they did it. If I then called you in the next moment and said excitedly, “Hey, did you hear the news?” You could answer “Yes,” whether or not you had read the 40 paragraph story because you had read the four word summary “Nationals Win World Series.” The four words sum up the news or the story in those 40 paragraphs. In the same way, those 33 words in verse 46 provide us with a headline for the whole Old Testament. In fact, they provide us with a headline for the Bible, because, just as the Old Testament points forward to this even, the New Testament Epistles point back to it.

I think this illustration of story and headline helps understand the relationship between Scriptures’ use of words like “Word” and “gospel.” If I refer to “God’s Word,” what am I referring to? Think of 1 Peter 1:23 which says, “you have been born again through the living and abiding word of God.” Does that mean Peter’s readers were born again from reading the whole Bible? All 39 books from the Old Testament and however many books of the New Testament that had been written at that point? No, the “word of God” is the word of the gospel, because the gospel summarizes the message of the whole thing. The words “The Christ should suffer and rise again for forgiveness” summarizes the Bible, like the headline “Nationals Win World Series.”

Interestingly, 1 Corinthians 15 even uses “word” and “gospel” interchangeably: “Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, 2 and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. 3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” These verses provide us with Paul’s version of Luke 24.

Jesus says something very similar to the Pharisees in John 5:39: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.”

Okay, a moment ago I said that biblical theology is a way of reading the Bible. It is knowing how how to read the Bible so that every part is understood in relation to Christ. It’s having our minds opened, like those two disciples on the road to Emmaus, so that we can see how it all points to Jesus.

Now, this doesn’t mean we carelessly impose Jesus on every text. It means we pay close attention to each text on its own terms, but then how every text falls into one of countless subthemes, and tracing out that subthemes like following a tributary river, until pours into a larger river, and finally into the ocean, or the story of the whole Bible.

Listen to how Don Carson defines the subject of biblical theology: “Biblical Theology…seeks to uncover and articulate the unity of all the biblical texts taken together, resorting primarily to the categories of those texts themselves” (NDBT, 100). When you first open the Bible and read through it, you encounter a multitude of categories and themes and ideas: creation, law, rebellion, rule, judgment, sacrificial lamb, atonement, a special people, and so forth. Biblical theology seeks in Carson’s words to “uncover and articulate the unity” of all these categories.

Or Michael Lawrence, in his book Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church (which you can find on our bookstall), simply says, biblical theology is the attempt to tell the whole story of the whole Bible as Christian Scripture. The key words here are “story” and “Christian.” The whole thing is telling one story, and it’s a Christian story, because it’s all about Christ.

Here’s one other analogy, one that might be helpful for any of you who grew up in the 1980s like I did. In the original Star Wars trilogy, what is the amazing piece of news that we discover right at the end of the second movie, Empire Strikes Back? We discover that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s Father. Wow, that changes everything. That crucial piece of information changes how you watch the first two movies, and it changes how you anticipate the third movie, as well as the significance of everything that unfolds in the third movie.

In Scripture, the identity and the work of Christ are the crucial piece of information around which everything else revolves.

So what is biblical theology? It is the discipline of learning how to read the Bible as one story by one divine author that culminates in the person and work of Christ, so that every part of Scripture is understood in relation to Christ.

A quick example from Scripture itself. Suppose I am preaching about Samson from the book of Judges. You remember Samson. He tears apart a lion with his bare hands. He kills a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey. He’s every Sunday School boy’s favorite red-blooded biblical hero.

Will teaching about Sampson killing a thousand Philistines with a jawbone really cause people to be “born again”? I mean, didn’t Peter tells his readers that they had been “born again…through the living and abiding word of God.” Certainly Judges is a part of God’s Word. What do you think?

I think the answer to this last question is, it depends. If Samson had been preached properly, then, yes. But rightly preaching Judges takes more than extolling Samson’s virile virtues as a call to be courageous or wild at heart.

Your might talk about Samson as a type of Christ. You would say that he is a God-anointed judge, endued with remarkable power through the Holy Spirit, who his handed over to the enemies of God’s people for the purpose of rescuing God’s people (e.g. Judg. 15:14-15; 16:30).

You might ask what Samson’s story teaches us about God—his patience with his people and his determination to judge sin? What does his story teach us about our need for a savior—for one who will not disappoint us like every judge or king who has ever lived, except one?

Samson’s strength is striking. He fells a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey. But how much more striking is the picture of Christ coming on the last day, with a sword coming out of his mouth with which to strike down the nations, treading the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty (Rev. 19:15)! Only this judge is perfectly just and good.

Samson’s death is also striking. He defeats his enemies and rescues God’s people through his death. Then again, Samson’s folly and pride led to his death. Not so with Jesus, who deliberately went to his death in humility. Samson should indeed provoke our wonder, but wonder at Christ, not Samson.

In short, an expositional sermon on Judges 14 to 16 should be a gospel sermon, not a sermon that could be preached in a synagogue or a mosque. And the same is true of any sermon from the Bible. No matter where a text is located on the plot line, it should always be preached with the entire plotline in view. Again, each point of the plot gains significance only as it relates to the entire plot.

II. What Is the Bible (and what about the Bible makes biblical theology necessary)?

Now, there is a major presupposition or assumption I’m making in all of this: the way we read something is typically determined by the kind of literature it is. So if you pick up a newspaper, you read a news story in a certain way. And you read a news story differently than you read a novel, or a greeting card, or a direction manual for your latest piece of IKEA furniture. Each of these are different kinds of literature, and so there are different rules for how you go about reading them.

Biblical theology is crucial because of the kind of book the Bible is. What is the Bible—what kind of book is it—such that the discipline of biblical theology is crucial for how we go about reading it?

Of course, not everyone reads the Bible this way. Most significantly, people who don’t think the Bible is God’s inspired Word don’t read the Bible this way. An older generation of liberal scholars, for instance, might have used the phrase “biblical theology,” but they were fascinated with just the diversity of authors from a diversity of cultures and the diversity of themes of themes that run through the 66 books of Scripture. They weren’t so much interested in uncovering and articulating the unity amidst all that diversity, to use Carson’s phrase.

But we do biblical theology like this because of several things we assume about how God and how he reveals himself in Scripture (adapted from Vos, Biblical Theology, pp. 5-9).

A. God Word Was Written by Humans

Think of 2 Peter 1: 19-21: “you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. 21 For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Notice that the verse refers to prophets as men who spoke, and when men speak, they use human language that both creates and reflects the culture they live in. What’s more, the authors of Scripture didn’t all speak the same language, live in the same place, under the same government. The Bible is an intensely human book, and to understand it, we have to understand the diversity of languages and cultures and contexts of the authors.

B. God’s Word Was Written by God

There’s not just diversity in Scripture, there is also unity because the Bible is a divine book. As 2 Peter 1:19-21 points out, behind the various human authors and prophets stood God. Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:16, “all Scripture is God-breathed.” This is the doctrine of inspiration, a doctrine that doesn’t mean God blanked out the minds and personalities of the human authors and used them like a keyboard. Rather it’s the Scriptures own description of itself, as the product of the Holy Spirit working sovereignly through the human author. The Bible is God’s self-revelation. What Scripture says God says. [Hacksaw Ridge illustration] Despite the plethora of human authors, behind the text of Scripture stands a single divine author, a single mind and will. This means that we should expect to find unity and coherence to the overarching story. The human authors may not have been able to see it at the time of their writing, but the Divine author could and did see the whole story, and wrote it so that it all fits together.

C. God’s Revealed Himself Progressively

Islam understands that the Koran was revealed to Mohammed all at once, miraculously lowered down from heaven. The sacred texts of Buddhism and Confucianism are confined to the lifetime of a single man. But God progressively revealed more and more of himself and his story over time. Scripture was written over two millennia, and its contents are not like pearls on a string, discreet and unrelated. Rather, each act of revelation followed on from what came before and prepared for what would come next.

D. God Revealed Himself in History

The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ are objective events in history that not only reveal information about God and redemption, they did something in history. Specifically, they accomplished redemption. The Bible therefore is not merely a story told by humans about God’s salvation of them, it is a drama enacted and then explained by God about God. It is “Show-and-Tell” in History. Thus in Biblical Theology we speak of redemptive history. This isn’t as opposed to real history, but rather a history that is selective and focused on the unique events that make up the narrative of God’s redemption of his people.

E. God’s Revelation Has an Organic Character

It doesn’t simply proceed like a construction site, which moves progressively from blueprint to finished building. Attach this piece to that piece. Rather it unfolds and develops from seed-form to full-grown tree. Something starts small, but then it grows, like the idea of sacrifice: • First, it’s just a burnt sacrifice whose aroma pleases the Lord with Noah. • Then it’s a substitutionary sacrifice with Abraham. • Then it’s substitutionary sacrifices that causes an angel of death to Passover with Moses. • Then it’s a substitutionary sacrifices that brings atonement in the Levitical Law. Do you see what I mean by organic? Ideas grow like a seeds, so that their meaning expands until the originally simple truth reveals itself as complex and rich, multilayered and profoundly beautiful.

F. God Reveals Himself in Narrative

The Bible as a whole is best understood as a narrative, or single story: a story about a King, a Kingdom, and the King’s relationship with his subjects. It’s a story that encompasses us today. It doesn’t mean to merely inspire us; it encompasses us. We’re in it, so that not only do we interpret it, it interprets us, telling us who we are, and what real reality really is.

G. God’s Reveals Himself in News

So the Bible presents a story, yes, but that story presents us with news! It’s like the newspaper story illustration that I used above. But unlike the newspaper story of who wins the World Series, this news has dramatic implications for our lives. It’s practical. Don’t think that biblical theology is just for history and literature buffs. If it encompasses our lives, as I just said, it must have a word for how to live.

H. God Reveals Himself in Christ

There is a climax of the story of God’s redemptive acts is the person and work of Jesus. This is the point and center of gravity of the story, as we considered above.

III. How do Biblical Theology & Systematic Theology relate to one another?

Now, when I say the phrase “biblical theology,” I expect that most people don’t think of biblical theology as the discipline of reading the Bible as one story which centers on Christ. Instead, they think simply of theology that’s biblical—theology that has its source in the Bible. And this is what we typically refer to as systematic: theology that systematizes the truths of the Bible.

Just so that you have a sharper understanding of what biblical theology is, let me related it briefly to systematic theology.

A. What Is Systematic Theology

So what is systematic theology?

1. An Orderly and Comprehensive Summary of the Bible’s Teaching by Topic

First, it is the attempt to summarize or systematize what the whole Bible has to say about any given topic in an orderly and comprehensive manner. Systematic theology isn’t concerned with the story-line, so much as it’s concerned with the bottom line. What does the Bible say about God, salvation, heaven and hell, sexuality, politics?

2. The Line Between Truth and Error, Orthodoxy and Heresy

Systematic theology seeks to formulate those summaries into precise and accurate doctrines which define the boundary between truth and error, between orthodoxy (right belief) and heresy. Systematic theology seeks to make normative statements.

3. Scripture Applied

Finally, systematic theology not only summarizes, organizes and defines. Systematic theology also seeks to apply these truths to our lives today. John Frame even defines theology as the application of Scripture to our lives.

B. How Do Biblical and Systematic Theology Relate to Each Other?

How then do systematic and biblical theology relate to each other?

Biblical theology is a mediating discipline, says Don Carson, while systematic is a culminating discipline (NDBT, p. 102-3). Biblical theology culminates, leads to, systematic theology.

Or let’s look at the chart in your handout to walk you through this:

Biblical Theology Systematic Theology Scripture as Authority Scripture as Authority Organizing principle: Historical, tracing the development of revelation Organizing principle: Topical, logical, hierarchical Starting point: Bible on its own terms Starting point: contemporary questions Provides: Storyline (news story) Provides: Doctrine, Worldview, Application (the headline) Connection: Bridge To ST Connection: Summarizes and Rearticulates BT

They are both helping us understand our Bibles. • But the organizing principle of biblical theology is historical. It traces out the development of revelation. The organizing principle of systematic theology is topical, logical and hierarchical: “How do we understand the relationship between God’s three persons and one nature? What the connection between our doctrine of sin and our doctrine of salvation?” • Biblical theology seeks to describe the Bible’s teaching in its own terms. Systematic theology tries to summarize and rearticulate the Bible’s teaching in self-conscious engagement with our culture. • Biblical theology immerses us in the story-line of the Bible; Systematic Theology synthesizes the Bible’s worldview into doctrine and ethics. • One’s a bridge; the other summarizes and systemtatizes.

There is a sense in which biblical theology provides the new story—like the 40 paragraphs of our newspaper article. And systematic theology offers us the headline—like the 4 word “Nationals Win World Series.”

C. Test Case: The Gospel

Consider how each of these disciplines help us answer the question: What’s the gospel?

Biblical Theology: Creation->Fall->Redemption->Consummation. The coming of the Kingdom of God. It’s the big overarching plan of God’s for the World.

But how is that good news to me? Do I have any reasons to believe that I need to be redeemed? That I will be redeemed?

Systematic Theology: God->Man->Christ->Response. Here’s how the grand narrative of history envelopes me and become becomes good news for me. In view of the coming of the Kingdom of God through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection (biblical theology gospel), I am either condemned or saved depending on how I respond to that good news (systematic theology gospel). For there is a message that brings me into the kingdom.

You see that both of these are related and important - to see the Big Picture of What God is Doing; but also to see the Personal Application of it for Our Lives.

IV. Why Is Biblical Theology Important?

Last question: why is biblical theology important. We’ll think about this a lot more next week. But the short answer right now is, it helps us read the Bible rightly, so that we can engage with the world rightly. A few examples which refer back to my opening questions:

1) Suppose we turn to the Old Testament promises of a fruitful womb and fields, wealth and prosperity, for obedience to the law. Should we read those promises as applicable to us? Well, it depends on how you put the storyline together.

2) Should we treat the priest as a mediator who mediates for our sins through a re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice in the mass? Well, it depends in part on how you put the storyline together, and whether we need another mediator.

3) Should we expect history to get progressively better, such that our works of art and architecture, justice-seeking and neighbor-loving, will actually help to usher in the eschaton, the Last Days? Well, it depends on how you put the story together.

4) Finally, how should we preach and counsel? Moralistically? Therapuetically? Triumphalistically? Or centered on the person and work of Jesus Christ? Again, it depends on how you put the story of the Bible together.

Biblical theology, in short, is critical for knowing how to read our Bibles, which, in turn, is critical for knowing what to believe and how to live.

Let’s pray.

How to Pick Your Politician

10 Principles How to pick your politician. These are 10 Principles to evaluate a politician without getting into political parties and partisan politics.

These ideas compare the big picture against how we know the world really works in our own experience. • The person who controls how the money is spent is the person who is in control. • When a representative of the government asks for money it is to be able to increase his control. • The more money a person can spend the more freedom that person has to do what he wants and to influence others. • The ideal of freedom then is to enable as many people as possible to earn as much as they can without forcing others to involuntarily give money to them or forcing them to do any particular labor, but leaving them free to choose their labors and find the best price they can for their labor and for what they produce or wish to consume. • It is true that no one can force another

to convert to his way of believing/thinking/acting, and it is also true that in prison or in death a person’s tenacious freedom to believe or act a particular way may greatly influence the world, still reducing us all to prison and privation is not our ideal for freedom, but rather freedom’s ideal is to give each person as much individual freedom to act on his beliefs as he is able to earn through productive living or as much as others are willing to voluntarily donate. • Does he believe that we can spend more money than we have? • A government takes its money by force whether it is doing a good job or not a business can only get money if someone wants to pay it for what it makes or does. • A government is not a business therefore it can never be run like a business.

If the politician claims to run it like a business know he is either ignorant or lying. • Fundamentalist Liberals • How to Pick your Politician tip 1 Hey Sam what do you want today?” “Whateva! Fagetaboutit!” He answered with a wave of his hand. “Sorry we don’t have a New Yorker any more. It’s all washed out. But for you a Brown Sugar and Butter Latte.” “Definitely not New York, fagetaboutit, do it!

And while your at it tell me if there’s a dimes difference between the two candidates.” “Seriously?” “Yeah I tried to follow them but they are both for what’s right, both for making us prosperous both for mom and when they talk about the other guy, . . . well whatevah he is the Great Satan.” OK this is your lucky day because I can tell y o in one sentence all you need to know about politics.” “Yeah right you and everyone else. Let me guess you’re republican.” “Nope. Republicans and Democrats both pray you never figure out the First Principle of Choosing Politicians. You want to hear?” I asked. The latte was almost finished and there was a line forming. “Why not?

Take your shot.” He said skeptically.” “Hey, you asked.” I shrugged, “But the answer is simple: “The person who controls how the money is spent is the person who is in control of whoever’s life that money comes from.” “So I vote for the guy who I want to spend my money? You call that advice?” “No, no, no! The more money you control the more freedom you have to do what you want to do. The more money someone can force you to give them, the less freedom you have. So whenever you hear the word money in politics replace it with the word, ‘Freedom’ and vote for the person who promises to take less money — less freedom — from you. Here’s your latte.” “I’d just like a coffee please, large and black.” Said the girl next in line.

“How do I figure out who that is?” Asked my friend not wanting to leave. I grabbed a large cup and began to pour, “You do it every time you shop. You’re always looking for the best bargain, because the more money left over from any purchase the more freedom you have to exercise your freedom of choice on something else. Take at least as much time to check out your politician’s spending ideas as you do the clothes you wear.” “So I look for the cheapest politician?” “Hey that’s great! I’ll add it to my list of how to pick a politician. Look he’s spending your money. Your money. Your money, get it?

You have to give it to him and the more you give him, the less freedom you have and the more freedom he has because now (not you) he’s deciding what to do and has more money to do it with, not you. You have fewer things you are free to decide to do.” I was just finishing ringing up the large coffee when the girl instead of walking away said, “That’s pretty materialistic isn’t it?” “Yeah, I agreed money is very material. So is the coffee you are drinking and the clothes you’re wearing and the school you go to. Wait a sec you asked the best question of the day but I need to ask Mrs. Jones if she wants one or two shot latte this morning?” “Two. And please answer her question because I think it’s important for us to support the poor people who are out of work.” said Mrs.

Jones. While I ground the espresso I said, “Because you had enough money you were free to choose to come in here to get the best coffee on earth, and the clothes you wear and anything else you buy. But if you were taxed a little more or if government policy drove the price of gas up a little, you might instead have had to go to a gas station for your caffeine at half the cost of this coffee, or perhaps even quit drinking coffee, not because of a choice you were making, but because of a choice that was made for you — someone else is spending your money so you can’t.” “Still that’s materialistic isn’t freedom about the soul and spirit?” She asked “Yes it is.” I agreed. Then I stopped and wiped the shot glass I was holding and then looked up at her.

“but if you want your free spirit to express itself in a material world it will have more freedom to express itself if your soul has more money to spend and less freedom to express itself if someone takes that money from you.” “I’ve got to go,” said Mrs. Jones “But it sure sounds like you don’t want poor people to be helped by the government.” Come back and I’l

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The Fearful Side of Abolish Human Abortion

The Scariest Thing About Abolish Human Abortion November 27, 2002

An activist is someone who has the following Characteristics: 1) He believes that people can change. 2) He believes that his actions can make a difference in the world. 3) He believes that on the whole if he does it right, he will make things over all better rather than worse. 4) He believes that even if the larger picture does not change, or if an evil or unforeseen use is put to what he does, then even so if he does the right thing he will make particular things better rather than worse. 5) He believes in consistency.

He has a blessed rage for order. 6) He believes that it is right to sacrifice good things he could have in order to do the things that if done right will bring about changes that will be better for all and will establish a good and proper order in the world. 7) At some point (and some times at all points) the activist is willing to set aside almost any relationship in order to accomplish something that his drive for consistency tells him is necessary to accomplish. This is why we don’t like activists. They drive us to think clearly on issues that we would rather leave fuzzy. We too (or if you are an activist reading this, instead of “We too” read, “Those around you too”) have a drive for consistency that we (they) would rather not have awakened.

Activists tend to awaken that drive. There is no resisting their logic. Next thing you know you are out there writing your congressman, putting together literature for distribution, or God forbid doing a sit-in. So when contemplating a conversation with an activist often we realize that the best thing to do is stop now, walk away, enjoy your life, what’s left of it. Because if you do not succumb to the logic of the movement, you will be written off their list of useful people. Who wants to be written off like that? In this regard there is an eighth characteristic of activists, 8) Activists tend to build their relationships with those who either join their enthusiasm, or who are willing to listen to them and not feel guilty or condemned.

The rest they are willing to write off, offend, or even attack. WOW! So why are we even thinking about having a conversation with someone who is into Abolish Human Abortion? It’s you and I believe in Truth. And no matter what you try to tell yourself, to warn yourself, you recognize the Truth is in the Abolition of Abortion. You know that somehow they aren’t activist trying to get you to be an activist in their special cause. AHA has many things you can do, of course, but they don’t think that doing something on their list is what causes God’s hand to move. Anyone in AHA believes to the core that God’s hand moving is what causes you to do something. “God moves you, not vice versa” is the concept which catapults them into a class of their own.

I know of no movement (other than Rescue of course) who has attempted to deal with the murder of children from the perspective of God’s sovereignty. If you are theologically inclined you will notice that the list of 8 characteristics of an activist are fairly heavily weighted on the works-righteousness side of the scale. And so Activists with their to do lists tend to make you feel guilty if you don’t take up the cudgel in the cause of the hour. I write this to put up front the fact that if you are afraid of this sort of a person then you need to get to know AHA. They are not an attempt to get you to join a movement and be an activist.

You have already joined The Movement, you are a Christian saved by grace and you have a full life and range of obedient activities that God has called you to. You are already a member of the Abolish Abortion movement in all your life’s callings. It is in that full life that God will move in you to act. AHA doesn’t need to recruit you to the cause so that your efforts joining ours will move God to act. Ending the murder of children is in all the things you do, like brushing your teeth, going to Church, earning a living, tithing, raising a happy wholesome and healthy family, learning more about your world and God every day, and so forth. In each of the moments of our days in all the richness of your life and thought you will unfold who and what you are in Christ.

It is this common core that you have with AHA, that is all they are. This is a book that puts the battle for the lives of your unborn neighbors into the context of what we need. NOT MORE ACTIVISTS! We need more moms and dads, kids, grand parents, factory workers, supervisors, bankers, lawyers, politicians, cross walk guards, homeschoolers and university professors, politicians, – whatever you are in the full range and panoply of your life. We do not need more people who will throw out of their life all that makes it rich and full as if it were so much baggage and become a monk for the monastic cause of fighting child killing. We need you who can see how God has given you a seed to plant, a stone to throw, a life to live in its fullness.

You do not need to divest yourself of that fullness to serve God, but rather serve him in each aspect of what makes life good. It is this overflow pressed down and running over, the spring of eternal life welling from God’s throne in your innermost being that transforms and makes us intolerant of that which is intolerable and nurture that which will change the world. The body of Christ needs all its members and prolife ministry is part of the ministry of that body in all its parts. Don’t go giving up what God has made you in order to become what God has made Troy or Cheryl.

See how in your banking, your spanking, your mealtimes, your business your pleasures and your labors and all other parts of the world God has put into your hands . . . see how many ways God gives you to bring the good news of life in a way that fits the circumstance, seasoned with salt in terms of whatever it is you are doing. You never have to change the topic to Christ, or God or Pro-life issues. To know you is to immediately see the strongest argument for life. This is what this book attempts to recruit. People like you who see the opportunities God has put in your hands right now. This might mean you carry a sign, it might not. It might mean you go to China and teach English or stay home and get married. I don’t know God’s plan for your life.

Indeed I do not think he has a plan as if your life may be boiled down to one abstract thing or purpose or gift for which he has put you on earth. God’s plan is as diverse for your life as all the different things in your life. This book will help you see how whoever you are and wherever you are there is something you can do in all you are. An activist strives after works that if done right will please God and change the world – particular those around him who in his estimation so desperately need changing to become more like him. The activist strives to recruit you to those works.

But a Christian is already made in the image of Christ and seeks for Christ to be formed in others who do not know him and to build on the foundation of the cross in those who do know him -–a process that no deed however correctly done may accomplish, and yet every deed works together for Good to that end for those who love God and are called according to his purpose. Thus you will read arguments in this book that will not call you to stand for Christ as if when you fulfill the good things you might do for the cause you can then go home justified knowing that you truly stand for Christ. God forbid we reduce standing for Christ to something that your filthy rags can accomplish if you just do it the way the book says.

Instead this book will call you to continue the stand Christ has already taken in your life with a deeper understanding of the life and death that depends on you being what Christ has called you to be in all your own fullness and uniqueness. Biblical man and woman is about Grace, not a to-do list which the Pharisees of righteousness want to reduce your life to. You are about being transformed, not about pulling yourself up by your boot straps. You may or may not do everything on the list that an activist would do or Troy or I think you should do. But God is at work in you and that confidence breaths from every page of this book. It is in this spirit that I commend this little book to you.

It could change your whole understanding about what God wants us to be to change the world.

Joseph Foreman November 17, 2002 Rivendell, Virginia

* * * * * But wait . . . is that all you have to say for activists? After all you were an activist are you not repudiating who you are and what you have done?

No. I was never an activist. I was always a Christian first. There is much in activism that closely mimics and parallels Christian living. Much that is good about activism comes from this imitation. For instance, our belief that what you do does make a difference but it is only when it is God who works it in you to will and to do his good pleasure. And of course we believe that change is possible after all, we “believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life who proceeds from the Father . . .” So of course we believe people can change and that God’s order is desirable and we want to walk in it.

But the similarity is akin to many things about true faith that have their counterpart in the world – and the world is usually a better place for it – none the less it is merely a mirror image, a likeness. The real thing is so much more than you could ask or imagine. And so to we commend Christ to you and fullness in him and action that overflows from there, not a place on our organizational chain and a set of activities which if you are faithful in them you too might be considered righteous. I do hope this answers your question. Now lets quit talking about it and start reading this most remarkable little volume on the matter of blood. As I was saying: Joseph Foreman November 17, 2002 Rivendell, Virginia