Keeping The Issues Clear When Talking About Contemporary Israel

In his ongoing effort to be as juvenile as possible before leaving office, the Obama administration abstained from a vote at the United Nations that essentially condemned Israel in a bunch of ways, allowing it to pass without the courage of an actual vote from the U.S. one way or the other. This has led to the expected angry backlash online from conservative media sources with articles like this from pro-Zionism Frontpage Mag: President Obama Throws Israel To The Wolves.

Of course a UN resolution is as impotent as everything else the UN does. It has no real impact other than serving as a diplomatic black eye and with what appears to be an overwhelmingly pro-Israel administration about to take over in a few weeks, there is little doubt that this resolution will be yet another empty gesture of the sort that has generally marked the utterly useless body of yammering, self-important bureaucrats that bears the risible and inaccurate name "United Nations". In fact it might backfire spectacularly as many Republicans are using this as an excuse to push for defunding the UN, a move I would be all in favor of. For example former Trump Presidential rival Senator Ted Cruz said that he will push to withhold U.S. funding of the UN until the resolution if reversed. As I posted on Facebook, the U.S. pays billions of dollars in UN funding and foots the bill for 22% of the entire budget, a percentage more than double that of Japan with the next highest percentage at 9.68%. The total sum of over $3,000,000,000 is more than 185 other countries pay combined. When you add in the huge amounts we spend on our military the bill gets a lot higher. So much for "United Nations". A more appropriate name would be more like "Bags of Cash From American Tax-Payers To Be Spent By Other Nations In Foolish Ways" but the acronym BOCFATTBSBONIFW doesn't have quiet the same ring to it.

The response is understandable in many ways. Coming as it does at the very end of the Obama reign it smacks of the same sort of petulance that has marked his entire administration and doubly so the month since it was apparent that the American electorate rejected his legacy and replaced him with someone who, at least on the surface, couldn't be more different. But it also raises the same concern that I usually have when the topic of the contemporary nation of Israel is at the forefront of the news, namely the response of American evangelicals.

I want to be crystal clear on this. Whether or not you support the secular nation-state of Israel as a matter of geopolitical preference, a democratic ally of sorts of the United States in an otherwise largely hostile region and whether or not you think the resolution that was passed and the U.S. decision to abstain (itself a cowardly act of inaction, if we supported the resolution we should have voted for it and if we didn't we should have voted against it. Abstention was the cowardly response.) was wise or foolish is a matter of geopolitics and U.S. national security. It is not a theological question, at least insofar as it is not a theological question about specific loyalty from one secular nation toward another.

There are not many issues in American evangelicalism which are more confused and more potentially costly to our witness than the mass misunderstanding of the theological nature of ancient and now extinct Israel as opposed to the contemporary secular nation-state of Israel. When you combine the "America as God's chosen nation" misplaced patriotic fervor with the dispensational confusion over the nature of Israel, you end up with a toxic mix that is dangerous and misguided. The ancient Old Covenant nation of Israel was a covenant-breaking unfaithful people (Jeremiah 31:32). God replaced that Old Covenant, making it obsolete (Hebrews 8:13), with a New Covenant that is in every way better (Hebrews 8:6). People of ethnic Jewish ancestry who are born-again are part of the New Covenant. Those that are not born-again are cut off (Romans 11:13-24 esp. verse 20) and their fate is no different from any other unbelieving people. As such there is no special place for the contemporary nation of Israel as it exists in redemptive history and there is no obligation for Christians to show deference to the secular covenant breaking leaders of Israel over any other nation. We are often reluctant to make that case, even from non-dispensational church leaders, for fears of raising the specter of "anti-semitism" but it is dishonest to pretend that there is a sharp distinction between the historic Old Covenant nation of Israel and the secular reconstituted contemporary nation that bears the same name.

When we associate the church and the Gospel with a secular nation and favor that nation and that ethnicity over others we make a mockery of the Great Commission and tell other people groups that they are second-class citizens of the world even though the overwhelmingly unbelieving citizens of Israel have no special standing with God compared to the people of any other contemporary nation and indeed believers in places like Syria and China have a relationship with God unlike that which any Israelite ever had under the Old Covenant. We do the people of Israel no favors when we extend to them the promise of covenant blessings that they do not possess instead of preaching the Gospel of the New Covenant in Christ to them no differently than we do any other nation or ethnicity.

I think that the behavior of the President via his surrogates was cowardly and petulant toward Israel and pandering toward other nations that are no friend of the United States. I also believe that there are many troubling questions in general about the relationship between the U.S. and Israel that need sober reflection. The entire relationship between the United States, Israel, the rest of the Middle East, the "Palestinian" people and so many other variables is excruciatingly complex. That complexity and the peril of missteps is far too great for Christians to interject a clumsy hermeneutic into it that further muddies water already roiled by decades of antagonism. We should encourage our leaders in America to be even-handed toward all other nations, showing deference where warranted by friendship and mutual benefit but not based on erroneous theological assumptions. It is fine, proper and necessary to have our theological convictions inform our understanding and involvement in contemporary secular issues but let's make sure we have the proper theological framework to make those decisions.

For more on this topic see a couple of prior posts,  Israel, Gaza and the Gospel and One of the best summaries of the relationship between Christians and the modern state of Israel I have ever read.

Spare the rod...

The Biblical mandate for parental chastisement of children, including what is known as corporal punishment (i.e. measured spanking, etc when needed. On the Albert Mohler show, Dr. Mohler has been crystal clear and level headed in his defense and indeed advocacy for reasonable, measured, Biblical spanking to discipline children. On a recent radio show, he looked at an article by Alan Kazdin, a vocal advocate of the no spaking movement, on Slate.com. The article is pretty silly on it's face, as Dr. Mohler points out...

Here is some of the scientific research Professor Kazdin wants America's parents to take into account:

The negative effects on children include increased aggression and noncompliance—the very misbehaviors that most often inspire parents to hit in the first place—as well as poor academic achievement, poor quality of parent-child relationships, and increased risk of a mental-health problem depression or anxiety, for instance). High levels of corporal punishment are also associated with problems that crop up later in life, including diminished ability to control one's impulses and poor physical-health outcomes (cancer,heart disease, chronic respiratory disease). Plus, there's the effect of increasing parents' aggression, and don't forget the consistent finding that physical punishment is a weak strategy for permanently changing behavior.

All of this is put forth without even a single footnote or citation. We are just to take Professor Kazdin's word for all this. He argues that "the science" shows this and shows that, but anyone who reads scientific reports knows that there is nothing so clearly defined as "the science" about just about anything. The "findings" Kazdin summarizes in the paragraph above appear to be matters of correlation anyway. When a report suggests that spanking (or anything else) is "associated with" a list of ills and bad outcomes, realize that "associated with" is a very thin argument. Non-spanking may be just as or even more "associated with" these same issues, under the right conditions and described by the right definitions.

That sort of nonsense is pretty typical. Spanking can lead to cancer? There are always those who feel that children are best left to raise themselves with only minimal interference from parents. I do appreciate that Dr. Mohler calls Dr. Kazdin out for merely repeating "the science" with no citation of any scientific study, which as he also points out is pretty sketchy stuff when looking at social science anyway. But this guy rolls out some titles and everyone just takes it as gospel truth. He is a "scientist"! That is one of the big shutdown lines of the secular left: "scientist". It is like "racist" or "fundamentalist", used to shut down conversation. Shocking, Dr. Kazdin has a book out The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child: With No Pills, No Therapy, No Contest of Wills that purports to have discovered the secret to disciplining a child without any actual discipline. His methodology in his book is apparently the same as in his article on Slate, that is "trust me, I am a scientist!" From the Amazon.com page, this is an excerpt from the review by Publishers Weekly....

Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center and Conduct Clinic as well as president of the American Psychological Association, claims his method works with no pills, no therapy and no contest of wills. Instead, Kazdin uses a practical, science-based method of dealing with behavioral problems in children that relies on positive reinforcement and a reward system. Kazdin doesn't dwell on the scientific research (it seems the reader must trust him on this), though he claims his method works about 80% of the time with serious problems and therefore should have even greater success with everyday behavior glitches.

I love it, just trust him, the "science" agrees with him (we think). What is more disturbing is, once again, the mindset that it reveals among the self-declared intellectual elite. Read this and think of the potential impact of Dr. Kazdin getting his way on our families.

One result of this standoff is that the United States, despite being one of the primary authors of the U.N.'s Convention on the Rights of Children, which specifies that governments must take appropriate measures to protect children from "all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation," is one of only two nations that have not ratified it. The other is Somalia; 192 nations have ratified it. According to my colleague Liz Gershoff of the University of Michigan, a leading expert on corporal punishment of children, the main arguments that have so far prevented us from ratifying it include the ones you would expect—it would undermine American parents' authority as well as U.S. sovereignty—plus a couple of others that you might not have expected: It would not allow 17-year-olds to enlist in the armed forces, and (although the Supreme Court's decision in Roper v. Simmons has made this one moot, at least for now) it would not allow executions of people who committed capital crimes when they were under 18.

We have so far limited our national debate on corporal punishment by focusing it on the schools and conducting it at the local and state level. We have shied away from even theoretically questioning the primacy of rights that parents exercise in the home, where most of the hitting takes place. Whatever one's position on corporal punishment, we ought to be able to at least discuss it with each other like grownups.

Well frankly Dr. Kazdin, no we cannot have a conversation about this because the U.N. and you have no standing to dictate to me or my children. So here is the conversation: butt out. Last time I checked, the United States is still a sovereign nation (until Obama gets in) and as such I don't care what Iceland or Mozambique believes about spanking kids.

These are our children, and we have the right and the responsibility to raise them ourselves. Not to outsource them to secular schools, or day-care, or nannies or the United Nations. If you don't want to raise children, don't have them!