From National Review Online. Leon Kass says:

Leon Kass was Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, 2002-2005 Reprogramming of human somatic cells to pluripotency is an enormously significant achievement, one that boosters of medical progress and defenders of human dignity can celebrate without qualification. The evidence in the papers released Tuesday is complete and compelling: Cells as versatile and useful as embryonic stem cells, obtained without embryo creation and destruction or the need to exploit women for eggs. Best of all, these cells can be created from everyone — permitting the study of cells with different diseases and genetic makeup and, when stem-cell-based therapies eventually become available, providing rejection-proof tissues for personalized transplantation. The ethical and political benefits may be equally great. The alleged need for so-called therapeutic cloning — cloning embryos for research — is now passé. We can therefore disentangle the “life issue” of embryo-destruction from the “dignity issue” of baby manufacture, and enact a legislative ban on cloning and other degrading forms of baby-making, as recommended unanimously by the President’s Council on Bioethics: Prohibit all attempts to conceive a child by any means other the union of egg and sperm, both obtained from adults. Erecting such a barrier against the brave new world would be a great achievement, one that pro-lifers can now happily embrace without reservation.

— Leon R. Kass, M.D., is Hertog Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

At 9 Marks.

Tullian at New City Church has an interesting site. He raises the question of how to use the adjective "Christian." This is an interest of the HB. He's the reply I posted. (There are more posts on this topic under this category)

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Hi,

For an alternative point of view you might want to see Darryl Hart, Secular Faith. David VanDrunen has been doing good work on the "two-kingdoms" and natural law.

The marginalization of common grace (admittedly not the most felicitous language) may reflect the influence of theonomy/reconstructionism which categorically rejects the doctrine of "common grace." Gary North wrote a volume on this in the 80s rejecting Van Til on common grace.

For Reformed folk there is no question whether Christ is Lord of all. The question is how he exercises his Lordship. What if, in his providence, our Sovereign Lord exercises his rule over two great spheres in distinct ways?

Of course Scripture speaks directly to aspects of what we might call creational life, but its primary focus is, of course, on the history of redemption. Scripture does speak a great deal about "wisdom," which is a category that seems to be lost in this discussion.

Scripture speaks chiefly and most directly to "ultimate" (salvation, eschatological) issues and to the Christian life. It speaks much less directly to "proximate" or pentultimate issues.

It is this fact that makes some of us reluctant to speak about "Christian baking" or "Christian street sweeping." This sort of language or the the verbiage about Christ "redeeming" various aspects of cultural life is troubling. God did not send his Son to redeem "baking." Much of our life is lived in common with unbelievers and lived in a roughly similar way. Creational life is human, lived as image-bearers and understood differently, but it remains creational.

Certainly we have a different understanding of why things work as they do (because we are theists and because we have and submit to special revelation) but as to most proximate issues we have no special insight into how things work. We're not specially gifted or enlightened by Scripture to understand fiscal policy or defense policy or baking.

Some of the language about "Christian baking" or "Christian economics" the like has to be judged an illegitimate attempt to confer authority upon opinions held by Christians by cloaking them with the adjective "Christian."

When pressed, however, most defenders of this use of the adjective "Christian" are unable to say clearly what exactly is distinctively "Christian" about their tentmaking or their food preparation. Did Paul make tents in a distinctively "Christian" way?

It seems to me that 1 Cor 8 speaks to this. If there is "Christian" food prep, then there is also pagan food prep, isn't there? But Paul says that even food prepared by pagans and devoted to their "gods" may be eaten by Christians so long as it Christians are not involved in a pagan feast or other Christians are not made to stumble (perhaps back into paganism) by the exercise of such freedom. When a meal touches ultimate, cultic, matters, then our course is clear. As long as it remains in the creational realm, it is a matter of freedom. Paul's approach to this difficult question can only be understood in the light of his strong commitment to a creational ethic and a common life with unbelievers.

For these reasons, it's more helpful to distinguish between the two kingdoms: the spiritual and the civic. Natural revelation is real and does speak to the civic kingdom and that revelation is common to believer and unbeliever. The same law is written on my pagan neighbor's heart and mine. That law is objectively true for both of us. We can appeal to it as Paul does in Acts 17. Yes, there is ambiguity in such an appeal, but the alternative seems, sometimes to approach a sort of magic. "Here is the 'Christian' view." "How is it 'Christian'?" It gets hard to say.

The Scriptures speak unequivocally to the spiritual kingdom of the church, to the administration of the Word and sacraments, and to discipline. We've spent a lot of time and energy in modern times applying the adjective "Christian" to common endeavors while, at the same time, our congregations are losing their saltiness. Our worship looks more common and cultural and we baptize our "Christian" bookstores and businesses. This is profoundly ironic.

It seems to me that we ought to spend more time Christianizing our congregations and less time trying to Christianize common life and the civic kingdom. Our pagan neighbors may be more willing to hear us about the gospel if they perceive that we are not implicitly keeping a theocratic sword behind our backs or if we don't claim secret knowledge or the authority of special revelation for our public policies as we talk to them about the suffering and risen Savior.

There's a bit of a dustup over at CT with Tony Campolo regarding the progressive "evangelical" group Red Letter Christians. One of TC's claims is that it's okay to give priority to Jesus' words in Christian ethics. Guess what, it means adopting a socially "progressive" (or social-democrat) agenda. This is the flip-side to the Jerry Falwell/James Dobson bunch.

What we have here are "right-wing" evangelicals and "left-wing" evangelicals (socially and theologically) neither of whom know how to do distinguish between the two-kingdoms. Jesus doesn't work for either of them. He has his own kingdom and the visible representation of it exists from the time the minister says, "Our help is in the name of the Lord" and the time he says, "The grace of God, the love of Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." The only weapons it has are the preaching of the Gospel, the administration of the sacraments, and discipline.

Christ has authorized and informs by general revelation another, civic, kingdom but none of us has any claim to special revelation here. I don't think the right or the left gets this.

About Campolo, however, one should say that his move to give "priority" to Jesus' words over against the rest of Scripture is pernicious. It's the same old stuff that the liberals peddled for years. The more I read about the "emergent/-ing" folks this is what I'm seeing: old fashioned naive social liberalism cloaked in Christianity. It's just Pietism and social liberalism or pietism with a slightly leftist social conscience.

What's so daring about that? I was reading Abbie Hoffman (c. 1972-73 -- yes, I was very young and yes, we had an oddly political house) and other leftist radicals before I was reading Jesus (1976). I don't need Tony Campolo to teach me about social justice. My Dad integrated the Topeka YMCA in the 1950's (accidentally -- but hey, integration is integration - and I think it happened before Brown v Board of Education) when it was dangerous and unfashionable to do so. I was raised a Hubert Humphrey democrat. I think I remember putting up Humphrey yard signs with my Dad in Omaha before the 1968 election and I was only 7! I know I had a fist fight with the neighbor boy whose family supported the racist George Wallace.

Not that it matters much, but my politics have changed since then. Still, I don't need Tony Campolo (or the emergents) hijacking the Bible for a social agenda by isolating the words of Jesus from their canonical context, the context in which they are intended to be read, any more than I need right-wingers like Dobson doing the same thing or telling me that I can't vote for candidate x because he doesn't meet their litmus test for ushering in the kingdom.

Both the religious right and the religious left have more in common with Münster than they do with the kingdom of God and, as I recall, that experiment didn't work out too well.

At Creed or Chaos.