Many are making much of the fact that while the US disaster relief is the highest in the world, it is not as high as a percentage of GDP.

One question you might ask of someone making that point- what choices did the US make to become the biggest economy in the world, to put itself in a position to give far more money than anyone else? We made the decision to allow most problems to be solved by private decisions, not federal or statist solutions. And as a result, we don’t have the bloated governments of Europe which are sucking their countries dry. Will they still get credit for being so generous for giving a larger proportion of their GDP for disaster relief, after their GDP’s have shrunk to nothing? Will their “percentages” feed any orphans (to paraphrase a commenter on Moxie)?

America has not taken the easy road that the European socialists have. They value leisure and security. We value personal responsibility and hard work. Americans work an average of 1800 hours a year, compared to 1400 a year for Europeans, according to the Wall Street Journal recently. So we have a huge economy and theirs are shrinking or stagnant. Lord willing, if we continue to value the same things, then we will continue to be around for years and years to come, shouldering the lion’s share of international aid just as we have for so long.

How do you suppose the comparisons would come out, if you measured giving as a percentage of available time in a year, instead of GDP? It takes time to make money, and Europeans have the same number of hours in a day as Americans do.

Scofflaw’s Subsidy.

Say it again with me:

Scofflaw’s Subsidy.

One of my favorite tech sites is Ars Technica. It’s a well written, knowledgeable site with great articles on a lot of the arcana of computers like “pipelines”, “bluetooth” and “caches” and things like that. Also I enjoy the Game reviews.

I haven’t visited in a long while, and I clicked on their bookmark today and got some weird error- not even a 404, some internal server thing.

I have been so disloyal. I can’t help but think this is my fault somehow.

UPDATE: That’s a relief. The site’s working again.

I put some new blogs on the blogroll. I don’t have a million blogs on my blogroll, but the ones that are there are ones I actually do read and enjoy. So check them out.

I’d call particular attention to Two Edged Sword. Lee’s an old pal of mine from seminary, and a great writer. I notice the two times he’s mentioned me on his blog, it’s been to criticize something I said. I don’t infer too much from that, though. Eating your own just proves he belongs to the RCUS. We take that whole “iron sharpening iron” thing VERY seriously. Keep up the good work, Lee!

Expanded upon from my sermon on Sunday:

The relationship between grace and works is a subject of continuous controversy within Christianity. One of the primary divisions between Protestantism and Catholicism is this question. The Reformers insisted on sola gratia, salvation by grace alone, while the Catholics believe that our works are a necessary part of our justification before God. Within the Protestant camp, there was further division. The Reformed, following especially John Calvin and the threefold use of the Law, believed that good works are a necessary result of our justification, while they are no part of the grounds for our justification. The Lutherans believed that this placed undue weight on works, and insisted that the only function of the Law was to condemn us and drive us to Christ (with, naturally, some variation within their own ranks in how they expressed this). This partially explains why Luther questioned the canonicity of the book of James, with its heavy emphasis on the importance of good works.

Finally, there have been and continue to be some in the Reformed faith who believe that the Reformers went too far in insisting on sola gratia, and that it is untrue to Scripture to say that works are no part of our justification.

But James never tells us that works are the grounds of our justification, in the way that Paul uses the word justification. The statement “faith without works is dead” corresponds to Jesus’ frequent use of the fruit tree as metaphor for the moral life of the righteous and wicked. The righteous produce good fruit, and the wicked produce bad fruit. But the fruit is not what makes the tree one kind of tree or another. The tree already was what it was. The fruit is the necessary result of what the tree is. Tying apples to an orange tree will not turn it into an apple tree. And tying fruit to a dead tree will not make it alive. James is talking about what the necessary results of a true faith will be, and how that faith is demonstrated in good works.

The traditional Reformed doctrine regarding this relationship, then, is that good works are the necessary result of our faith, but are not the grounds of that faith or of our justification before God. And the result of this is that while exhortations to good works are traditionally part of the Reformed ministry, such exhortations should not be seen as exhorting people to do good works, but rather how to do them, and how to do more of them, and how to do them in ways that are more true to God’s word. For telling a man to do good works is like telling a man to breathe. If the man’s alive, he’s already breathing. And if he’s not alive, he can’t hear you. Likewise, if a man has faith, he’s doing good works, according to James. And if he has no faith, he lacks the capacity to understand the word of God anyway (1 Cor 2:14).

The key then, is always faith. If a man’s works are lacking, and all of ours are, then the answer to that is not to tie more works onto a dead tree. It is to have more faith. Belief in Christ and in the Gospel will produce the results that Scripture says will always be the result of a true and robust faith in Jesus Christ.

My New Year’s resolution is to read more. I have well nigh lost any habit I once had of reading for pleasure, due to years of assigned reading in college and seminary. Now that I’m done with all that, I’m going to make an effort to regain the habit.

If anyone has any suggestions for books I ought to read, please post them in the comments.

May God bless you and yours in the coming year.

On the subject of postconservative theology or postmodern theology Phil Steiger, from my old stomping grounds of Colorado Springs, has written a perceptive post. It includes this point:

So what kind of worldview does not allow for reformation? In short, any worldview which cannot get outside of itself to make judgments about the world cannot support a reformation from a wrong state of affairs to a right/better state of affairs.

(Emphasis his)

Exactly. Once I’ve destroyed the rock out from under my feet, all I can do is drift with the tide.

Hugh Hewitt says that World Vision is the best place to give donations for the Asia disaster relief, and I’m taking his word for it. I don’t want my money going to the UN or any of its organizations, and I frankly don’t much trust the Red Cross these days either.

23,000 dead and counting. Ten countries affected. Billions of dollars lost. In just a moment, a disaster many times greater than 9/11 hit us, and nothing could have been done to stop it.

We get so arrogant sometimes. Even in this disaster, people are saying “if only we’d had an early warning system, we could have avoided a lot of the damage.” And perhaps that’s true. If they’d had a warning system in place for something that had never happened in that geographic area, then some might have been saved. It’s like saying we should have a blizzard warning system in Hawaii, you know, just in case.

Faced with evidence of our essential punyness compared to the world we live in, so many still feel the need to try to reassert control. And so anytime anything goes wrong in our society, somebody has to get sued. Because we have a right to a trouble-free life, and if anything intrudes on that trouble-free life, it’s because someone wasn’t doing their job. But the truth of the matter is, there is still a tremendous amount about this world that are outside of anyone’s control. There’s a big burp on the ocean floor, and many thousands die, just like that.

It’s also tempting, I think, for us to say to ourselves, “those were Godless dark-skinned foreigners that died. Nothing like that could happen here in America.” I think Scripture answers that quite effectively:

Luke 13:

2 And Jesus answered and said to them, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things?

3 “I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.

4 “Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all other men who dwelt in Jerusalem?

5 “I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.”

He said it himself:

He also catches on (actually, I think Hugh was one of the first to make this point, in a post on his blog) to the importance of what Chris Anderson is calling the Long Tail — that in the aggregate, the vast hordes of small blogs with a few dozen readers are more important than the small number of big blogs with hundreds of thousands of readers.

Oh, in the aggregate…

Well, it’s a good post anyway. It sounds like a good book, too.