Issue 11

VOLUME 11

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Punitive Violence and Forgiveness On the nature of punishment and the need for forgiveness • Blake Hereth, CU Alumnus

Having been raised in the Deep South, I recall the teachings on war and violence: they were evils to be avoided, but occasionally killing a human person was morally justified.

Aside from war, in which it was taken as given that killing was often justified, there was a slightly more controversial kind of case in which killing was allegedly justified: as punishment for severe crime.

While there may have been someone who regarded capital punishment as always unjustified, such as my Roman Catholic friends, most were adamant defenders of the view that capital punishment was at least sometimes, and probably often, justified. As my parents would advise me, “Because of what the criminal did, we’re justified in harming him.”

Occasional fights with my siblings confused me a bit, however. My parents would often say, “Just because they wronged you doesn’t mean you’re justified in harming them in return.” But this was odd: surely if criminals could be justly punished for their crime, then my siblings could be justly punished for theirs (though my siblings hardly deserved execution!).

At Cedarville, I read Saint Anselm of Canterbury.

I’ve admired his brilliance ever since, and I found in his work perhaps one of the best defenses of capital punishment (and punishment generally) I’ve ever seen.1 In short, Anselm claimed that it is wrong to treat the innocent and the guilty as if they were morally the same: just as it would be unjust to punish the innocent, so it would be wrong to let the guilty off the hook.2

Yet this view of punishment seems at odd with the New Testament teaching on forgiveness. We are to forgive one another just as Christ forgave us (Eph. 4:32), to forgive more often than we think we should (Matt. 18:21-22), and even to forgive all those against whom we hold any offense (Mk. 11:25).

There’s a pretty strong case to be made for the

Evangelicals & Immigration Reform

conclusion that forgiving someone entails not punishing them. If, for example, I forgive your debt of $500 and then demand that you pay it to me, I haven’t actually forgiven your debt. If God forgives us of our sin but still sends us to hell, then he hasn’t forgiven us of our sin. Forgiving someone, therefore, is foregoing whatever they owe (or are owed, if you believe you ‘owe’ them punishment).

What I’m about to say is controversial, and I’ll admit that I’m not entirely convinced of its truth. But it seems plausible to suppose that punishing someone is never obligatory: it’s never wrong to forgive someone.

To see why, consider that it’s initially very plausible to think that, when someone does something wrong to you, two options are available to and permissible for you: (i) punish them or (ii) forgive them. If someone steals from you, it isn’t wrong to forgive them, but you might punish them instead.

Since either is permissible, neither is obligatory.

Now, there are roughly two kinds of cases in which it might be wrong to forgive someone: (1) cases in which someone else is wronged and you lack a right to forgive their perpetrator, and (2) cases in which you would undermine the seriousness of human relationships by forgiving an unrepentant perpetrator.

Cases like (1) don’t matter for my argument.

Since everyone should always forgive, there’s nothing wrong with treating perpetrators the way victims should treat perpetrators.3

Cases like (2) don’t matter for my argument.

There’s certainly more than one way to take human relationships and transgressions seriously, and forgiveness is one such way. (This is why Anselm is wrong, I think, about punishment: when you forgive the guilty, you are treating them as morally different

Since the 2012 election, immigration reform has surfaced as a front-burner issue. Analysis of voting trends showed Republicans that their hopes of ever winning another major election might hinge on attracting larger numbers of Latino voters. If Romney had done half as well with Hispanic voters as George Bush did, he would have succeeded in his Presidential campaign. In 2012, Republicans started paying attention.

But before the 2012 election, a different group discovered the importance of advocating for immigration reform: Evangelical Christians.

In 2006, the last time that immigration reform was being considered, Evangelicals stood on the sidelines, not seeing it as their issue.

Catholics advocated for reform, as did mainline Protestants, but Evangelicals were nowhere to be found. That began to change in early 2011 when a group of Evangelicals that included Michael Gerson, Jim Wallis, and Richard Lard wrote a document called “An Evangelical Statement of Principles on Immigration Reform.” Later that year,

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Common Core The secret behind conservative opposition to Common Core education standards Grant Miller, CU Alumnus

Do you want to know why conservatives are so opposed to Common Core State Standards in education?

It is because many conservatives oppose postmodernism.

By definition, conservatives value what they see as unbending, immutable “truths” as underscored by the “self-evident truths” in the Constitution & the “inerrant, infallible” truths of the Christian scriptures. (It is not, mind you, that progressives discount the Constitution or that many progressives do not also value the wisdom contained in Christian scripture. It is, instead, how conservatives tend to wield these sources that set them apart from their progressive counterparts.)

Set against this backdrop, education research is currently focused on two areas: critical action research & practical action research.

“Critical action research,” according to Geoffrey E. Mills, “challenges the taken-for-granted assumptions of daily classroom life and presents truths that are relative, conditional, situational, and based on previous

The Ventriloquist

SEPTEMBER 2013

Evangelical themes in the push for change Dr. Carl Ruby, CU Alumnus

experience.” “Practical action research,” on the other hand, “places more emphasis on the ‘how-to’ approach…and has a less ‘philosophical’ bent.”

The Common Core State Standards focus heavily on accurate, skillful, wellrounded problem-solving abilities that encourage students to explain their answers through reasoning, citation of procedures or the text, and collaborative conversations that enhance the overall body of knowledge drawn upon by students in the learning environment.

The Common Core website states:

The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world,

reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success

in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the

future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in

the global economy.

In effect, we are training our students to think critically about the world around them and ask deep questions about the validity and accuracy of claims presented to them.

The alarm-raising code word to foment conservative opposition is, most likely, ”critical thinking.”

Our current understanding of the meaning of “critical thinking” is closely tied to postmodern concepts that humans have the power to question “truth,” come to

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Punitive Violence (con’t)

Galileo Was Wrong

from the innocent. The innocent don’t need forgiveness, and you would treat them wrongly if you acted as though they really did need forgiveness.)

Moreover, since forgiveness stands a better chance at restoring broken human relationships than violence, it’s difficult to see why forgiving someone would be anything but taking the relationship very seriously.

The next phase of the argument is the following moral principle, which most everyone believes: we should not do violence to anyone unless we’re obligated to do so. Put another way, you shouldn’t do violence to anyone unless it would be wrong not to do violence to them. This is true in part because if you, say, chop off someone’s arm without needing to do so, then you lack justification for harming that person. If there’s any morally permissible alternative available to violence, you should take it.

But if it’s always permissible to forgive persons, then it isn’t obligatory to do violence to persons. If it isn’t obligatory to do violence to persons, then it’s wrong to do violence to them. Since, as we’ve seen, it is always permissible to forgive persons, then it’s always wrong to do violence to them.

This doesn’t show that violence is always wrong.4 I’m not giving a full defense of pacifism, only a partial defense of pacifism. After all, if pacifism is true and violence against human beings is always wrong, then there’s no good reason to do violence to any human being, and therefore punishment is a bad reason to do violence to any human being. Since I’ve argued for that, I’ve given a partial defense of pacifism. (Because this is only a partial defense of pacifism, the claims here might still be true even if pacifism is false.)

If there is anything worth questioning, it’s our own beliefs about whether doing violence to human beings is justified. There’s both good theological and philosophical reason to think that punitive violence is always unjustified and therefore always wrong. Unless a better case can be made for the conclusion that punitive violence is sometimes justified, we should conclude that punitive violence is always wrong. ♦

A retraction of my statements in “Galileo Rises” Noah Lantz, CU Alumnus

In the November 2012 issue of The Ventriloquist, I made the controversial statement that young earth creationism flew in the face of basic observations about the universe. I also, more or less, made the statement that teaching it at an academic institution was an insult to our intelligence and basic capacity to reason. To put it in my own words:

"... vocal protests against the teaching of Evolution and basic science stand alongside the Church’s treatment of the Heliocentric Theory four hundred years ago...Dr. Pahl is dismissed for suggesting that portions of Genesis shouldn't be read literally...Answers in Genesis (pioneered by Ken Ham) fights tooth and nail against scientific progress. Yet, there is no verse in the Bible that teaches that the earth is thousands of years old. Ideas—evidence, basic observations of the world around us—to the contrary are labeled as unbiblical and falsely refuted by a few propagators of ignorance, whose teachings of pseudoscience are consumed by a choir eager to hear their message."

However, after reviewing the facts and thoughtful comments on that article, I've come to the realization that my beliefs, however grounded in reason I then thought them to be, were completely out of place and relied upon interpretations of astronomy and geology that are even now falling to the wayside. Someone even informed me told me that some scientists hold to a young earth model. Who was I, a political communications major, to declare an entire group of scientists wrong? I have since come the conclusion that the universe is only 6,000 years old: Evolution didn't happen: we aren't distantly related to apes: and most importantly: Ken Ham is right.

It first occurred to me while I was on a fossil dig in Kentucky, desperately trying to unearth any shred of evidence to back the old earth mindset I had falsely been led to believe. I unearthed a Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil in remarkable condition in the so-called Triassic layer. Oddly enough, I couldn't find any human remains that far underground. Conventional geologists would suggest that's because humanity didn't evolve into existence until millions of years after the Tyrannosaurus. Looking back, I can only shake my head at their ignorance.

Clearly, the lack of human remains was a testament to the beast's insatiable appetite: not evolution with a capital E. The reptile, along with his dinosaur friends, had eaten our human and not-ape-ancestors and ground their bones into a bloody pulp that nature could not preserve. That, or floodwaters had buried our ancestors last since they could make rafts during the Flood, and that's why the Tyrannosaurus was buried like, first. Little arms meant it couldn't swim. I couldn't believe geologists had arrived at any other conclusion over the last century or whatever.

My brief venture into geology was further complimented by my brief look into a telescope, which again told me that my tenuous belief that the universe was billions of years old was undeniably wrong. It was obvious that the starlight I was seeing from distant galaxies hadn't traveled billions of years from their point of origin to reach my telescope. Instead, I realized that this light had been created en-route by God six thousand years ago , thus creating the illusion that these galaxies are billions of years old. It was obvious.

In fact, the basic observation that the further away we look from our planet the younger stars and galaxies appear, only means they were created to look billions of years younger, and that their light got here all on the same day when it was spoken into existence six thousand years ago. That, or the speed of light slowed down. It's definitely one of those things, or some other thing that explains it more convincingly.

The evidence speaks for itself. It was then I realized that the dismissal of people like Dr. Pahl, people who have the audacity to suggest that some portions of Scripture should be read more like a poem than a science textbook should be fired. Their beliefs conflict with what I want to believe: that I can read everything in the Bible literally, word for word, and not have to think too hard about what it means.

Simply look at the fruit that Dr. Pahl's dismissal has since born for Cedarville University. Numerous professors and administrators have since left the university for more "open-minded" institutions. Articles in the New York Times, Dayton Daily News, and other publications have given the university free publicity. And most importantly, the so called "exodus" of faculty from the school have given us the ability to hire new professors who don't hold diverse opinions of what the Genesis text is supposed to mean.

That means we don't have to give any kind of humbling credence to people who may disagree with us on this matter. We're certainly not going to hire

1:

I don’t mean to suggest that Anselm’s work was intended to be a defense of capital punishment or punishment. But his writings do contain the philosophical materials to fashion such defenses.

2: Anselm, Prologion X: 1077-1087.

3: I’ve argued for this more extensively in a paper of mine, “Mactatis pro Familia.” The fuller objection to pacifism, of course, must be that we have an agent-relative duty to punish those who cannot be forgiven, since those with an agent-relative right to forgive cannot do so. If you’d like a copy of the paper (warning: it’s fairly technical), email me: sbhereth@email.uark.edu.

4: One objection I frequently hear is that there is a practical need for violence and killing.

After all, the world would be a dangerous place if we didn’t incarcerate or kill (some) capital offenders! But that justification for violence and killing is not punitive but rather preventative/protective. And that is an entirely different objection.

Cedarville Out The Ventriloquist values openness, inclusivity, and dialogue, especially with individuals that are members of groups marginalized by Christian or popular culture.

If you are questioning your sexuality and need honest dialogue, support, or a listening ear, Cedarville Out is available to help. Cedarville Out is online at CedarvilleOut.org or email cedarvilleout@gmail.com.

About The Ventriloquist The Ventriloquist is an independently-run, independently-funded student publication at Cedarville University. Our staff defines a university as an institution committed to collective learning. We believe this commitment should extend past the institutional level and include all members of the university community. We recognize that when each community member strives to cultivate creativity, critical thinking, and growth, richer education and character formation result. We believe healthy intellectual pursuit leads to more authentic followers of faith, the goal of any religiouslyaffiliated school. We accept well-written articles from anybody in the Cedarville community and publish them in hope that the reader will give each piece fair consideration. Article ideas, questions and comments can be submitted to ventriloquistpaper@gmail.com.

Generation Progress The Ventriloquist is proudly published with support from Generation Progress, a division of the Center for American Progress.

Generation Progress is online at GenProgress.org.

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Dan Sizemore, CU Alumnus Sarah Burch, CU Alumna Jonathan Hammond, CU Alumnus

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Common Core (con’t) new understandings of reality, and interpret perspectives in situational ways.

Of course, this flies in the face of the belief, popularized by mainstream Protestant influence, that truth is extant & non-malleable.

The great secret then, is that conservative power is eroding due to the fact that postmodernity and pragmatic relativism are de jure in today’s American culture. To combat this trend, conservatives are doubling down on their absolute view of the world with the full belief that a binary belief system of “always right” vs. “always wrong” will win out in the “culture wars” and that the tenants of conservative ideology will remain powerful because of their reliance on absolute morality and absolute, unwavering truth.

In conclusion, conservatives oppose Common Core because it seeks to foster robust “critical thinking” within the minds of the next generations of Americans. When critical thinking is commonplace (which, I submit, is not currently so), conservative authority will be diminished greatly, and the power of conservative evangelicalism will falter as a consequence.

The conversation is shifting and conservatives sense it. Prepare for a full-scale attack on “ObamaCore” and a continued rejection of Common Core by many conservative states. Prepare for the debate to shift towards the secularization of our society and either a lament by the Right or a revival of Moral Majority proportions.

Either way, the philosophical implications of this cultural shift run much deeper than the media is willing to admit and unless progressives work to clearly define our 21st century movement, we stand to lose immensely. ♦

The Problem with Unity

Why ignoring diversity does not equal oneness Verity, CU Alum

Fifty years. Half a decade since Martin Luther King Jr. made the historic march on Washington and declared in his speech that, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” I have firsthand accounts of the Cedarville experience for minorities. It has always been and will continue to be a very different experience from our brothers and sisters in the ethnic majority. Why? Well, old habits die hard. While segregation may have died long ago, racist conceptualizations and structures of power are alive and well today. If this doesn’t bug you, it should- it really should.

Why? Because we as humans cannot un-see what is to be seen. Allow me to explain.

Say you have a friend and the two of you got separated in a crowd.

You’re lost and trying to find your buddy. A police officer may have seen your friend and asks you to describe him. What do you say?

I’m sure we’d LIKE to believe in political correctness here- but ultimately the person you describe would include what you SEE with your eyes. Skin color and ethnicity is a huge part of that. You don’t describe strangers in terms of ‘he’s nice’ or ‘he has a good heart’, descriptions are based on what is visible about that person and what differences might stand out to a passerby.

To those who believe ethnic diversity is a ‘made up’ issue within the body of Christ- let me remind you that this make believe issue kept and KEEPS many people separate to this day. One has only to look at the demographics of a map in any city in America to see how this is accurate. In some instances there are firm lines where impoverished, minority neighborhoods meet with the majority.

We are all different and sometimes these differences are apparent. If you want to address the problem of unity you need to first focus on the aspect of diversity. What are the attitudes towards those on campus who are not white (or White)? Carl Ruby and Dean Purple were huge advocates for students who didn’t quite fit in because of who they were as people.

The wonderful thing about celebrating diversity is that doing so celebrates the different aspects of Christ. For lack of a better authoritative pronoun, we refer to God as a man- but is he? He is neither male nor female.

He isn’t black, white, brown, purple or any other color. Rather, ALL people are made in his likeness. Not just white males with blue eyes and brown hair. Ignoring diversity is tantamount to ignoring the many-faceted aspects

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Immigration (con’t) many of these same individuals gathered at Cedarville University for a conference called G92, a reference to the 92 passages in the Old Testament that speak to the issue of immigration.

The change among Evangelicals can be traced to individuals like Danny Carroll, Matthew Soerens, and Jenny Hwang, who wrote very persuasively about the scriptures’ teaching on immigrants. Polls show that the majority of evangelical Christians support immigration reform as long as it adheres to basic biblical principles, such as family unity, human dignity, and rule of law. At a recent meeting with World Relief, we identified seven themes that resonate with evangelicals.

First, immigration should be viewed primarily as a biblical matter.

Scripture is filled with narratives about immigration. Abraham, Rebekah, Moses, Joseph, Ruth, Daniel, Paul, and even Jesus were immigrants. Christ was an immigrant in a theological sense when he left Heaven and became incarnate here on Earth to identify with our struggles and die for our sin.

But he was also a political refugee when he and his parents fled the wrath of Herod’s corrupt regime. Scripture tells us that God loves and provides for immigrants (Deut. 10:18, Psalm 146:9) and he challenges his people to remember that they too are immigrants (Lev. 19:33-34). Immigrants even show up in the Ten Commandments when God tells us not to deny them Sabbath rest. In the New Testament, God uses immigration as a metaphor for what it means to enter God’s Kingdom (Hebrews 13:11).

Second, immigration is a missional opportunity. We are called to make disciples of all nations and immigration brings the mission field right to our door. Dr. Timothy Tennent, President of Asbury Theological Seminary reports that 86% of immigrants are likely to either be Christians or to become Christians after they immigrate. Christians should perceive immigration as an opportunity for ministry and evangelism, not as a political threat. A field manual prepared by World Relief reminds us that immigrants are not in our local communities by mistake; rather it is part of God’s sovereign plan. As followers of Christ we should practice grace and hospitality toward the immigrants who move into our communities. Not only will this be a testimony to of God’s grace to the immigrants themselves, but it will also send a powerful message to those who question the relevance of Christianity to the challenges of contemporary culture.

Third, immigration is an urgent issue impacting the church in the United States. The face of Christianity in America is changing. Immigrant congregations are growing much faster than other segments of the church.

According to Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, 92.5% of American churches are largely segregated, in spite of the fact that there is one church, one body, and one baptism. The church isn’t a country club for a bunch of angry old white guys; it’s a place of celebration for people of many hues, different languages, and varying nations of origin. We are told that heaven will be a place where people of different nations worship together and we are also taught by Christ to pray that heaven will come quickly. Embracing immigrants and welcoming them into our homes and churches is one way to get a small taste of heaven.

Fourth, immigration is a family issue. Christians have been quick to talk about how deeply they value the unity of the family, but many of these same individuals support immigration policy that separates children from their parents. This happens frequently and it happens in our community.

While working on this article, I received a phone call about a brother in Christ who is sitting in a jail cell in Springfield tonight due to a minor traffic violation. Jim Daly of Focus on the Family has endorsed evangelical principles for immigration reform because there are over two million mixedstatus families in the United States today who could be torn apart by deportation. Such deportations often remove the primary wage earner, putting the whole family at severe economic risk.

Fifth, immigration is a justice issue. Many evangelicals lament the fact that they were on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of the gospel during the Civil Rights Movement. We failed to realize that taking a stand for justice is an essential part of faithfulness to the Christian message.

It is rooted in the prophetic aspect of our faith. We are called to set aside our own comfort and speak truth to people in power. Esther did this.

Daniel did this. Martin Luther King did this, and we are called to do likewise. Isaiah 1:17 tells us to “seek justice.” John Perkins, the African American founder of the Christian Community Development Association says that immigration reform is one of the great justice issues of our time.

Perkins has paid the price of injustice and earned the right to speak with authority on this topic. Other people of color such as Barbara Williams Skinner call immigration “the civil rights issue of our day.”

Sixth, evangelicals need to be wary of groups who do not share our values and who are eager to mislead us on immigration. Glenn Beck did not write the sixth gospel; and Rush Limbaugh may be very entertaining, but his positions on immigration do not reflect biblical values such as grace, humility, hospitality, and human dignity.

Groups like FAIR and NumbersUSA pose as conservative political organizations with “concerns” about immigration. In reality, they are hate groups motivated by eugenics

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Immigration (con’t)

Unity (con’t)

and a desire to prevent the “mixing of the races.” Their leaders are on record calling China’s one-child policy, enforced with forced abortions and infanticide, the model for the rest of the world. These groups allege that immigrants are filling our nations prisons, committing much of the nations crime, and sponging off our generous social programs. All of these assertions have been forcefully refuted by conservative organizations like the Cato Institute (see research by Alex Nowrasteh).

Finally, as Christians we should promote immigration policy that reflects biblical values, unifies families, supports rule of law and national security, is fair to taxpayers, and provides a compassionate and reasonable solution for the 12 million who are already hear without documentation. To read more about such policy, I encourage you to visit the websites for the Evangelical Immigration Table (http:// evangelicalimmigrationtable.com/) or G92 (http://g92.org/) to learn more about how scripture can inform our approach to immigration reform. Also, allow me to suggest three action steps that you can take today.

1. Go the Evangelical Immigration Table site and sign up for the Pray4Reform campaign.

2. Google the “I was a Stranger” Challenge and commit to reading 40 passages that inform our approach to immigration.

3. Call (866) 877-5552 and tell your legislator that you support compassionate and common sense reform to our nations immigration laws.

Oh, and one last thing: Get to know an undocumented person. You just might meet a brother or sister in Christ. ♦

of God’s own creativity.

In an attempt to diversify Cedarville, we mustn’t forget that while Christ called the church body to unity, he also created each and every person differently. This difference should be celebrated and encouraged. It should not be pointed out to make brochures look good, but neither should it be swept under the rug of indifference. In pursuit of unity, are we sacrificing who others are in a call for one-ness?

Dr. White, “Christian unity that sees no race or division”1 is not the problem at Cedarville. The problem lies in Cedarville only identifying with white culture as a whole. One has only to look at the board of trustees to see that none of them are people of color, and only one is a woman. Diversity starts at the head until it is a heart issue- a heart to seek out and understand people for who they ARE- not being colorblind and praying for diversity.

This issue cannot be silenced. If we as a community remain silent, we do a great deal of injustice to the previous generations who have worked so hard to get where we are today.

Calling for blind oneness is easy when you do not walk away from that statement as an under-appreciated member of society. ♦ 1:

“Read MLK's I have a Dream speech again today and prayed for more diversity & Christian unity that sees no race or division @cedarville” – via Dr. White’s Twitter account from August 28th.

Galileo (con’t) those people!

Now, we can indoctrinate open minded college students with the only opinion that really matters: the true one. And we can add them to our wonderful choir; a choir that loves to hear its own beliefs spoon fed back to their young in an increasingly vain celebration of opinion. Who cares if what we're teaching them is accurate? Who cares if what we're teaching them lines up with reality? How else could we advertise in fringe publications like Answers in Genesis? This policy is what's going to keep bringing in tuition dollars from fundamentalist parents and donors. Not to mention keep us in line with an increasingly dogmatic Board of Trustees.

That's what college is supposed to be all about. ♦

xkcd.com

Crossword

Solution online: www.theventriloquist.us/puzzles/september_2013

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