Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For July 23, 2014

To R. Scott Clark and his 2nd response to my comment on his blogpost questioning how biblical it is for the Church to try to change culture. This appeared in Heidelblog.


Dr. Clark,
When are you going to understand that quests for justice do not necessarily have anything to do with utopian eschatology? Many quests for justice have fixing an immediate problem as their focus just as when the session of a church intervene to fix an immediate problem when two people in a church have a dispute. This is what I pointed to when I wrote in my 2nd comment:

Also, if we are followers of God, shouldn’t we celebrate every act of justice and peace, regardless of how temporal, rather than thinking in all-or-nothing terms? 

or when I wrote

And finally, I don’t know of anyone who works for justice and peace who presume that they are Christ. Nobody. The ones I know aren’t looking to bring some sort of utopia or the final Kingdom of God. Rather, they are trying to partially address what is before them. 

So while you categorize the concerns which I and others have expressed as being out of bounds by misrepresenting us as being utopian, the problem is still there. Isn't there a problem of being a respecter of persons when we so eagerly preach to the individual sinner to repent of private sins but are silent in the face of system sins especially when these sins are committed by those with wealth and power? And historically speaking, the conservative church tends to align itself with wealth and power. So how does the silence before and thus complicity with sin help the Church be a minister of word, sacrament, and mercy?

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To R. Scott Clark and his last response to my comments. This is my second attempt to reply to his response seeing that he blocked my last response. This appeared on his Heidelblog


This is my last comment on this discussion. The some questions that come to my mind here are:

1. What does classifying any attempt to improve the current system Utopian say about the current system?

2. Why do you insist that any attempt to improve on the current system is done from an eschatological perspective? I ask this especially because much of my views on changing the system come from secular scholars who do not have a Utopian vision and thus no eschatological perspective.

3. Is your view more based on the Bible or on an affinity for a more simple Christian life?

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To Elise Hilton and her blogpost on whether the current border crisis was predictable. This appeared on the Acton Blog


When our foreign policies involved coups and support violent dictators and when unfair competition from trade agreements wreck financial sectors as well as temporarily employ workers until cheaper labor is found elsewhere, what shouldn't we expect on our border? To try to address the border crisis without acknowledging our part in creating the need to leave one's country is to embrace something beyond neurosis.