Ohio State University | HE STILL SPEAKS!

Tyranny IS lurking around the corner

Several weeks ago, President Obama gave a commencement address to a class of graduates of Ohio State University. As he stood before these students, Obama found the need to defend the expanding role of government to his robed audience who would soon go out to either launch their careers or move back into their parents’ basement.

“We don’t always talk about this idea much these days – citizenship – let alone celebrate it. Sometimes, we see it as a virtue from another time, a distant past – one that’s slipping from a society that celebrates individual ambition above all else… we know this country cannot accomplish great things if we pursue nothing greater than our own individual ambition…”

“Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s the root of all our problems, even as some of these voices do their best to gum up the works; they’ll warn that tyranny’s always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted. We have never been a people who place all our faith in government to solve our problems, nor do we want it to, but we don’t think the government is the source of all our problems, either…”

“As citizens, we understand that it’s not about what Americans can do for us, It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government.”

I’m not sure whose voices the president was referring to, since schools rarely teach what our nation’s founders said, but if they did those OSU students might have recalled the words of Thomas Jefferson:

“Experience hath shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

And one from Patrick Henry, “guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.”

And of course, there’s the famous line from Ronald Reagan, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

So, yeah, I guess a few people have suggested that “tyranny is always lurking around the corner.”

Also, “self-rule” has historically meant ‘each man ruling himself’ not ‘each man voting on who would rule them.’ Jefferson had something to say about that, too:

“A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

I have one more aside. I’ll take a brief moment to note that the idea of the citizenry working together to advance their nation and not themselves is the definition of fascism, not of a republic.

But, back to the subject at hand, if the president wanted to convince the public that the government was not some scary, tyrannical federation out to control their lives, he probably should have made sure that his employees were not harassing his political opponents and using their positions in the Internal Revenue Service to do it.

Here we are, however, in the midst of prying out the facts surrounding discrimination against conservative groups applying for 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 tax status with words like “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their groups’ names.

The biggest question on everyone’s mind is, ‘how far up does this go?’ As an anonymous Obama aide put it to CBS, “We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It’s actually closer to us being idiots.” Those do, indeed, seem to be the options. The problem is the ‘idiot’ defense starts to look so suspicious when it is used so often – the Benghazi cover up, investigating Associated Press and FOX News journalists, now the IRS, etc.

Ultimately, no matter how high any of these scandals go – whether President Obama is a master puppeteer or just a clown who’s lost control of his car – the lesson will be the same. It is that between President Jefferson‘s idea of government and President Obama’s idea of government, it is Jefferson’s that has been proven true. Here it is again, “… even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

The more power a government has, the closer it gets to tyranny. Tyranny IS always lurking around the corner, because when someone has power over someone else – especially someone they disagree with – it is often too tempting to exercise it inappropriately. Obviously, one would be a bigger violation of the public trust than the other, but, at its essence, it doesn’t matter whether the person in power is the President of the United States or a renegade IRS agent. Either way, they have perverted their power into tyranny.

http://www.americandecency.org/full_article.php?article_no=1899

In the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, as family members and friends of the slain and wounded suffer unspeakable agony, people around the world are asking, “Where was God?” But very few are asking, “Is God hurting too?”

According to Basilea Schlink (1904-2001), a German Christian leader who stood up to the Nazis, “Anyone who loves as much as God does, cannot help suffering. And anyone who really loves God will sense that He is suffering.” She found support for this view in the writings of the Japanese Lutheran theologian Kazoh Kitamori in his book “Theology of the Pain of God.”

God suffering? God in pain? How can this be?

If he is the Almighty Creator and Ruler, and if he has infinite knowledge of the future, why would he even create a world in which there would be so much suffering and pain on a daily basis? And if the scripture is true that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without the knowledge (or care) of the Heavenly Father (Matthew 10:29), how could he allow 20 innocent children – not to mention the adults – to be cut down in cold blood?

Questions like these are raised in the Bible itself, including cynical observations about the state of the world (see Ecclesiastes 7:15) and even harsh accusations against God uttered in the midst of extreme suffering (see Job 9:22-23). As one Old Testament scholar put it, if you’d like to voice your complaint to God, the Bible provides you with forms with the words already filled in for you.

Of course, as I noted in my Ohio State University debate with Prof. Bart Ehrman, a noted New Testament scholar and agnostic, if you remove God from the picture, there’s really no problem of suffering and evil. A spider kills a fly; a lion kills a zebra; a mugger kills his victim . . . this is what the random products of unguided evolution do! What’s wrong with the survival of the fittest? Why doesn’t might make right?

But if you believe that there is a loving Creator, then you recognize that suffering and evil really do present a problem.

How then do we respond to a mind-numbing tragedy like the Newtown massacre, and how does the concept of God’s pain help us process this tragedy?

First, we affirm that it was right for God to create the world, without which we would not exist, and we affirm that it was right for him to give us free will. But these are gifts with consequences, and the things we cherish most – our existence and our ability to make choices for our lives – are the very things for which we fault God at times like this.

C. S. Lewis sagely observed, “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself. . . . Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata – of creatures that work like machines – would hardly be worth creating.”

Put another way, love cannot be coerced; it must be freely chosen.

Second, we recognize that God created a world that would also cost him dearly, to the point that he had to send his Son to suffer and die that we might live. That was a consequence of his choice to give us freedom of choice.

In the words of Pastor Timothy Keller, “If we again ask the question: ‘Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?’ and we look at the cross of Jesus, we still do not know what the answer is. However, we know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us. It can’t be that he is indifferent or detached from our condition. God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself.”

That’s why Anglican leader John Stott stated, “I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross.”

Third, we understand that God is not a distant bystander but is himself in agony because of his creation’s agony.

The Scriptures teach that he is hurt by tragedy and suffering, and Jesus was even angered by it. In the words of Isaiah, “In all Israel’s affliction, he was afflicted” (Isaiah 63:9). He may not explain to us all the reasons for our suffering or tell us why he apparently doesn’t intervene more. But this much is sure: He cares deeply and he is suffering with us.

You don’t like the way this world is? God doesn’t either. In fact, he hates certain things that take place, but he is at work for good in the midst of it and, in the end, he will bring something beautiful out of it.

As expressed by quadriplegic Joni Erickson Tada, “God permits what he hates to achieve what he loves.”

Fourth, we realize that only God can bring good out of evil and light out of darkness. He who hurts with us will help us, and the one who understands the depth of human evil is the one who can bring healing and hope.

According to Kitamori, “Those who have beheld the pain of God cease to be loquacious, and open their mouths only by the passion to bear witness to it.”

And so, in the end, we stop talking and we stop writing, and we pray for God to bring beauty out of ashes and life out of death, in this world and in the world to come. Right now, the agony is great.

Michael Brown

Michael Brown holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and has served as a professor at a number of seminaries. He hosts the nationally syndicated, daily talk radio show, the Line of Fire, and his latest book is The Real Kosher Jesus.

http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2012/12/17/the-newtown-massacre-and-the-pain-of-god-n1468169/page/full/