Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Ethics

  • Todd Bentley Obedient to the Lord?

    Dave Warnock links to this disturbing video of Todd Bentley. He discusses it further in his post Reflecting on cancer healing – Todd Bentley style. Peter Kirk writes on a related topic at Gentle Wisdom.

    Before I comment further, let me simply say that both of these are men whom I have to respect. I appreciate their ministries as best as I can follow them on the internet. Nothing here is intended to get personal.

    Frankly, the video is gut-wrenching in more ways than one. My 17 year old son died after a five year battle with cancer. At a revival meeting a pastor told him that God had told him (the pastor) that anyone on whom he laid hands and prayed for healing would be healed of cancer. James was 12 years old at the time. He wasn’t healed. That pastor said something false in the name of the Lord.

    Now I didn’t decide that everything that happened at those revival meetings was not of God based on that one incident. Yet at the same time, it illustrates a problem of extremely active revival meetings. What exactly guides or limits what one says or does? People who label themselves “Spirit led” often look down on the people who are totally focused on the written Word as dry and powerless. Yet one would hope that there would be some limit, some control on what was said and done.

    My question here is just what standard would limit what Todd Bentley could say God had told him to do? My personal standard would be this: “Kicking someone in the stomach is bad. God isn’t telling me to do that.” I apply an ethical standard to my behavior. If I think God is telling me to do something that is wrong, I’m going to let my behavior be guided ethically.

    Update (7/4/08): Peter Kirk has objected to the term kicking, and Dave Warnock adjusted the wording. I noticed the knee thing, but didn’t regard it as significant. Perhaps that makes me worse than others who didn’t notice it. I would say precisely the same thing about kneeing him in in the gut as about kicking him. Further, I have viewed this video, in which Todd Bentley talks about kicking people. Unfortunately I don’t have the clip without someone else’s commentary.

    Now I admit that I don’t know the full context of this action. I’m not going to proclaim myself an expert based on a YouTube video. Nonetheless I am having a hard time imagining the context that would make me think this was ethically right. If someone could suggest something that went before and after that would make it look good, I’d be interested in hearing about it.

    The only thing I can imagine would be a complete healing of the man in question, but even then I’m likely to apply something I say very frequently: God knows how to answer prayers better than we know how to pray them. In other words, even if the man was healed, I would be inclined to believe that God was showing him grace and mercy (perhaps because he was kicked in God’s name?), rather than that he was confirming a kick as the proper action.

    At the same time, the question I run into is one that Dave Warnock has to deal with, as do some of my friends over in the Lakeland area of Florida. How do you respond?

    Here is where I remain convinced that the wheat and the tares is the better option. If you become a blanket critic of anything, you will be very limited in your ability to respond to those who are involved or considering involvement.

    The problem at the center of this is hurting people, people who are looking for something. In fact, I believe what sends many people off the rails is that overwhelming determination that something has got to happen, that somehow there must be a physical demonstration of God’s power. If it isn’t happening in the normal course of events, let’s force it.

    Now it’s not bad to try to get life into our Christian lives. At the same time, once you get desperate, the controls are off, and it becomes very hard to discern good from bad. You think, “Maybe a kick in the stomach wouldn’t be so bad if it would just bring healing.” If you’re at that point, beware.

    As I’ve said before, while I try not to do blanket approvals or condemnations–I often don’t do a blanket approval of myself; never, in fact!–particular things can be labeled properly. Prosperity teaching-bad. Kicking in the stomach-bad. I’m pretty certain of those two!

  • Flip-Flopping with Integrity

    I an earlier post, Public Financing, Integrity, and Mixed Emotions I discussed my mixed emotions on Barack Obama’s flip-flop on public financing. I dislike public financing of campaigns, and it’s nice to see the system receive a body blow, but at the same time, I have a serious problem with Obama’s action.

    Before someone thinks I’m looking for nasty things to say about Obama, I should mention that I’m over 90% likely to vote for him come November. The 10% is giving me room to change in changing circumstances. I like him, despite certain policy positions, but I believe this action, as carried out and explained, was wrong.

    I don’t believe politicians should be afraid to change their minds. If one is convinced by the evidence, then not changing one’s mind is more dishonest. But to change one’s mind honestly, and then to express that honestly is done in a different way.

    What would I like to see a politician in such a case?

    1. Acknowledge the error. Say “I was wrong.”
    2. Present the evidence and reasoning for changing one’s mind.
    3. Avoid spin, and don’t blame everyone else.

    I was watching a commentator the other day on I forget which network who commented that if Barack Obama didn’t reject public financing under the circumstances, he would have been committing political malpractice. The commentator went on to list the great benefits that would accrue to the Obama campaign and the Democratic party under these circumstances. It sounded to me as though one was advising someone to lie. They refuse. You point out just how much money one can earn from the lie. Would that make it right?

    My problem with Obama’s decision is that he still believes in public financing, yet he’s not living according to that belief. Nothing changed except for the fact that he found out just how effective he was as a fundraiser. The only difference between now and when he made the promise is that he found out just how much benefit he could derive from staying out of the system. The 527s were a factor before and they are now.

    If he had examined the system, and then announced that, while he used to support public financing of campaigns, he had learned the value of freedom, in the form of lots of ordinary people pooling their money to do great things, and thus he had come to realize that public financing was not the benefit he had once thought, I would have had no problem. It would be a simple changing of his mind based on the evidence.

    As it is, even though his current stance is closer to my own, I am deeply disappointed with the way in which it took place.

    Crossposted to RedBlueChristian.com.

  • Politicians, Adultery, and Integrity

    Despite the broad and pretentious title, this is going to be short and simple. James Poulos wrote today about politicians who commit adultery (HT: evangelical outpost), and said:

    …What I’m angling for here is simple: a basic public consensus that if you sleep around on your spouse you are a bad person, and to hell with your future in politics, because we still have enough talent in America to replace you with someone who isn’t a bad person and is nonetheless capable of being a ‘gifted’ and ‘dedicated’ public servant.

    That’s good within certain limits, and I’ve argued the same myself for folks like David Vitter, Larry Craig, and Eliot Spitzer. But that’s not because of my view of marriage, which some might say borders on the puritanical, but rather because I believe your actions should reflect what you say. For example, I vowed to be faithful to my wife “till death do us part” and others are welcome to hold me to that.

    Why is this not a personal matter, to be dealt with by the family alone? In the case of someone in public office, I would suggest that it gives a strong indication of whether that person will do what he says. He took marriage vows, he took an oath of office. If he violates the one, why should I regard him as a person of integrity who will uphold the other? It is unfortunate, of course, that there are those who are faithful to their marriage vows, but quite unfaithful to their oath of office, but that is another topic.

    In my view this is not primarily about sex. We get excessively excited about such scandals because they involve sex. We are too ready to excuse because they involve sex. The question is whether we, the voters, have enough integrity to demand similar integrity of our public officials. Can we do so when the politician is on our side of the aisle in the same way that we do when he or she is on the other side?

    I would add that by integrity I mean one’s intention and reasonable success at remaining inside one’s own moral boundaries, and also that one’s own moral boundaries are what one proclaims. If one’s actions do not violate one’s own standards, then I would not question that person’s integrity. I might, however, question his or her standards.

  • Eliot Spitzer Should Resign

    . . . oh, he did.

    I was a little slow on posting on this, but as I have said about David Vitter and Larry Craig, public officials who fail to live up to their publicly proclaimed standards should not be trusted with their public office. All of these men failed to do so. Craig and Vitter seem to be surviving for the moment. Spitzer has resigned, which I regard as a good thing.

    While I am an advocate of grace as a Christian, I also think that we should expect a high standard on the part of our leaders. If they cannot maintain that standard, they should be removed from such offices. There are people of integrity who can lead. We as voters should not be satisfied until we get them in office.

  • Different When WE Do It

    As I’ve watched the debates about various aspects of our behavior as a nation (the United States), I am very concerned with the way we seem to be able to rationalize things that normally would be totally unacceptable. The same action can be acceptable when we do it and a gross violation of justice when done by someone else. Something that is acceptable done to another person is a horrible violation of our rights if it is done to us.

    Here are just a few stray thoughts . . .

    When we grab terrorists and torture them, we are just protecting ourselves. When Russia does it in Chechnya, it’s a human rights violation.

    When we arrest someone without a warrant it’s a necessary part of defending ourselves against terrorism. When someone else does it, it’s an abuse of power.

    When we invade a country it’s preemptive defense; when someone else does it it’s naked aggression.

    This extends to our personal lives. As a nation we have a low view of congress, but we generally have a favorable view of our own congressman. We like it when our congressman brings home the pork; all those other congressmen ought to stop! We dislike attorneys as a profession, but we generally like our own attorney–at least as long as he wins.

    The other guy’s defense attorney is a sleaze who is prostituting himself to get a criminal off; our attorney is just using the best possible strategy to see to it that we get a just result.

    When we consider the justification–or more likely rationalization–for some of the things we are doing in the war on terror, we need to ask ourselves how we would react if some other country, or some other person, did the same things. I think we would find it much harder to justify these actions when done by others than when we do them.

    There is, of course, the argument that we must do these things in order to survive. But let me ask this: If I survive by lowering myself to the point of torturing someone else, just who is it that survived? Do I want to be that person?

    Who would Jesus torture?

  • Anthropology and Military Planning

    It seems that some people in the military have noticed the fact that we don’t really understand the territories and the countries about which we so glibly pontificate. And much of the pontification is official, which makes the ignorance more egregious.

    In an BBC article received via e-mail, I read the following:

    But that is not all. The US military has developed a new programme known as the Human Terrain System (HTS) to study social groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    The HTS depends heavily on the co-operation of anthropologists, with their expertise in the study of human beings and their societies.

    Steve Fondacaro, a retired special operations colonel overseeing the HTS, is keen to recruit cultural anthropologists.

    “Cultural anthropologists are focused on understanding how societies make decisions and how attitudes are formed. They give us the best vision to see the problems through the eyes of the target population,” he said.

    There’s a story that brings up mixed emotions. We certainly do need to understand people better, but a phrase like “target populations” presents an understanding that is at least equivocal. What exactly are we targeting these populations for? What are we going to do with them, and what gives us the right to do it?

    But despite my questions I welcome the notion of creating a better educated military. Hopefully somewhere in this process some military leaders will be asking just how we can cooperate with, rather than dominate local populations. Perhaps troops can learn how to work in a way that minimizes offense. But as long as those military forces are operating under orders to transform those societies into an image that is desirable in American eyes, I don’t think it will work perfectly. It’s good military strategy, but good military strategy needs to be employed in the service of good political and diplomatic strategy.

    And that is the level at which I believe our country as a whole, and particularly the appropriate portions of our government need to be better educated. A little bit of anthropology would go a long way with our diplomats. To those who suggest that we have such experts, I would answer that we are 1) not listening to them, 2) they are not as expert as they appear, or 3) we don’t have enough of them.

    I suspect all three. Why? Because somewhere up there in the American government somebody thought that we would easily accomplish the invasion of Iraq (we did), would be welcomed by the Iraqi people as liberators, and then would easily create a new government. Low cost in money, in lives, and even in time. Then we could get on with other targets in the war on terror.

    Whoever painted that scenario was somewhere between criminally negligent and grossly stupid. There was never any reason for anyone to believe that in the first place.

    Of course we need anthropologists and other social scientists in the military. The more wisely force is applied, the less force is needed. In social situations, the best result is when no force is actually applied at all. I’m not so optimistic as to think we can attain that easily, but the more intelligently we act, the less people we’re going to have to kill–our own and others.

    The tragedy is that we’ll be sending in anthropologists to help us deal with various tribal groups after much of the damage is already done. If we are to fight and win a war on terror, we will need more than a military strategy. The prime error of diplomats is the belief that diplomacy accomplishes all; the prime error of those who wield military power (but not usually of the soldiers on the front line) is to believe that force can ultimately solve all problems.

    A strategic approach to the [tag]war on terror[/tag] will have to involve an intelligent strategy, first political, and then military where problems are actually intractable.

    One further note–I can see the ethical objections to anthropologists in being part of these teams. Do you want to use your understanding of a tribal group to facilitate their manipulation by the military with no control over just what will be done and how? You would never know when your knowledge might become the key to destroying a culture. At the same time, applied at the proper level, such knowledge could result in great savings of life. Perhaps there is a balance to be sought here.

  • Larry Craig and Accountability

    I regard [tag]accountability[/tag] as an extremely important, even critical value. Not that it’s more fundamental than others logically, but it helps hold people to such values as they profess and as are expected of them by law and custom. If people are not expected to uphold the values they profess, then there is little point being concerned precisely what those values are.

    Senator [tag]Larry Craig[/tag], who hopefully won’t hold that title for long, has fallen afoul of this value of mine. He wanted to avoid public scrutiny, so he plead guilty. Now he wants to pretend that his pleading was improper. Is it possible that in some way a United States senator did not understand precisely what he was doing? I see two options. Either he knew what he was doing, and now he’s trying to avoid the consequences, and thus should not be a Senator because he lacks integrity, or he didn’t understand his own situation, and thus should not be a Senator because he’s too stupid.

    Having said this, I think there is a stronger reaction to Craig’s action largely because of the involvement of homosexuality, which is not fair. Senator [tag]David Vitter[/tag] has more to answer for morally, in my view, even though he has not been convicted, nor has he displayed the same level of stupidity that Craig displayed. I think much of this case doesn’t look so good from the police side. But if a U. S. Senator can’t take responsibility for his own actions who can we expect to do so?

    We are told that Senator Craig might decide not to resign if his guilty plea can be vacated (Source: MSNBC.com). I think that is ridiculous. We have a serious need for leaders with integrity. What we’re getting is loud claims and no accountability.

  • Just When I Think I’ve Seen Everything …

    … I find this: Marry Our Daughter. Hat tip: Hit the Back Button to Move Forward. Will someone please tell me that this is just a sick joke? I’m thinking that it would be considered illegal despite the claims on the web site.

    Update: I should have looked on snopes, as pointed out by commenter Black Knight:

    Sick joke:

    http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/marryourdaughter.asp

    I’ll leave the egg on my face for all to see and learn from.

  • Corrupt Politicians and Shrill Partisans

    OK, I’m shocked and amazed. Well, not so much. This time it’s Democrats, as the FBI arrests officials in New Jersey. This story just reminded me that people who have power will be tempted, and some of them will turn out to be corrupt. The question is what we’ll do about it. In this case, the FBI seems to have answered that one.

    But this reminded me of this post which tells us how awesomely horrible George W. Bush is, followed by comments in which various people repeatedly discuss how truly horrible the current president is.

    It happens I’m not a George W. Bush fan. I think the war in Iraq was a strategic mistake. But get some perspective folks! You can oppose someone without regarding them as corrupt. You can disagree, even on major issues, without assuming they are stupid. People can disagree on intelligence assessments without being congenital liars. Do preconceptions impact intelligence reports? Sure they do. Is that right? No. The appropriate congressional oversight committees should do their jobs when it does. (They probably won’t. They usually have their own agendas!)

    Some very smart people disagree with me on the war in Iraq. How do I know that? Well, first, I don’t make the assumption that disagreeing with me is the equivalent of being stupid. If I assume that, everyone who disagrees is stupid by definition. But supposing that I eliminate that one question from consideration. Is the person smart in other ways? If so, I should consider the possibility that an intelligent person can disagree. I know a fair number of them.

    Is it hard? Sometimes it certainly is. The Iraq war seems wrong to me in so many different ways that I have a hard time understanding how someone can support it. But I’ve had intelligent conversations with people who do.

    It’s interesting watching liberals get all frothy about W, because here in the Florida panhandle it was much like that during the Clinton administration, only it was the conservatives who were over the top. They would have a hard time telling me precisely what was so awful about what Clinton had done compared to Republican administrations. It sounded to me like they just disagreed with him on policy. But to many of them, Bill Clinton was a strong candidate for the antichrist.

    They have similar feelings about Hillary Clinton. There’s a certain “anyone but Clinton” attitude down here in these parts, because while they hated Bill Clinton for reasons passing understanding they reserved greater vitriol for his wife.

    And that’s where I come full circle to corruption. Partisans on both sides want to use the fact that some politicians are corrupt as leverage to get their own party into power. Thus they will try to spin corruption so that it falls largely on one party or the other. To hear the partisans, there’s always an excuse when “their” politician fails, but there’s never any excuse for the other politician. Republicans who were involved in impeaching Bill Clinton certainly don’t think it’s an appropriate remedy in the case of George W. Bush.

    Unfortunately this tactic often works, because people don’t really study candidates and issues in any detail. Whoever can work the media just right to make the other guy look more corrupt without crossing an invisible line and losing support for being nasty and mean will become a winner. That’s what we need to avoid.

    The discovery that a candidate who supports your views otherwise is corrupt should not cause you to vote for an opponent whose views you despise. It should make you look for a different candidate who supports your views. Corrupt people will get into office. Get over it. That’s why we have terms of office and elections. We can throw them all out.

    The partisans who are pushing corruption as an issue that favors one party over the other are doing themselves and the nation a disservice. Unfortunately, the greatest–and final–disservice is done by voters who let themselves be influenced by a general smear without digging out the specifics.

    If the voters were intelligent, 30 and 60 second ads would have no impact on a campaign. People would ignore them as the trash that they are.

  • Larry Craig, Family Values, and Hypocrisy

    I generally try to avoid scandal stories about celebrities, though I’m much more often tempted to read, listen, and comment when they involve political figures. Listening to the arrest interview tape of Senator Larry Craig was an interesting experience. I was immediately struck by how naive I am at age 50. None of the conversation made any sense to me. I’ll have to take other people’s word for it that this was clearly soliciting. In the end, I can’t imagine he actually plead guilty even though he was innocent. Surely a politician of his experience realized the story wouldn’t stay hidden forever.

    I want to make a few comments on the reaction. Democrats are pretty happy, of course, to see another Republican get caught with his pants down, so to speak. Republicans have a harder time defending this one, though there is clearly a willingness in congress to let things pass if they can get by with it. With the information age, such behavior becomes less and less possible, and politicians will realize that if they want to be surviving politicians.

    For many conservatives, it seems that the media reaction is the main part of the story. The media focuses in on the hypocrisy issue, and this bothers them. Surely the basic moral issue is more important. Well, from a Christian moral perspective we have several issues.

    First is that this is a married man who is engaged in infidelity. I think that fact must concern us whatever we believe about homosexuality and its compatibility with Christian faith. Yes, there are many pressures that are put on a gay man by the moral disapprobation of homosexuality, but at the same time there is the sacred vow of marriage. I would suggest that any time we choose to loudly proclaim a set of values that we are not and/or cannot live up to, we are simply asking for the pressures to build. Senator Craig set about gaining power in a subset of society that disapproved of who he was. I know he denies being gay, but at the least it seems he had some tendencies, tendencies that would not be approved by his colleagues. He put everyone around him at high risk by his behavior.

    Secondly, this isn’t directly about homosexuality. Being gay is not about seeking illicit sex in restrooms. This act is dangerous quite apart from any moral view of homosexuality. We should not view this act as any different from that of Senator David Vitter in going to a prostitute. Now there are other points about the two stories that are different, but the type of sex outside of his marriage that was sought by Senator Craig is not the main moral issue.

    Third, we all find it very easy to condemn others for sexual sins. We think sexual sins are so much dirtier than other sins. I am not here trying to define “sexual sin.” Use your own definition if you have one. But other sins such as gossip, theft, accepting bribes and so forth are just as immoral in the sight of God, and yet while we condemn the people who do them, we don’t have the “yuck” reaction that we do to sexual sin. I don’t believe God divides sins into “yucky” and “not-yucky.”

    Fourth, hypocrisy is significant. In my opinion, what Senator Craig did was wrong, irrespective of any issue of hypocrisy. (I must note that it’s hard to separate hypocrisy from this one, since we have a married man carrying out the action. One assumes he was at least hypocritical to his wife.) But I do believe that hypocrisy is another offense and adds to the list, so to speak. Thus the media are not off track in pointing to hypocrisy. If a person who has said nothing about being gay, or who is positive about gay rights comes out of the closet, there is no issue of hypocrisy. Some may still object that they believe homosexuality is wrong in itself, but no issue of hypocrisy arises. When someone has proclaimed that the “gay lifestyle” is wrong, that it is a threat to family values, and that various elements associated with it should be outlawed, and then we find out he has been engaging in those very acts all along, it’s a different matter.

    It is a matter of integrity. The voters should expect that their elected leaders are who they say they are. Then they can choose wisely. Those leaders should expect that the most serious breach of trust is for them not to be who they say they are. In politics, I think hypocrisy is one of the most serious sin–very funny, I know, considering how pervasive it is. But then I believe gossip is probably the most serious sin in the church–very funny also, considering how pervasive it is.

    So would I think Senator Craig’s behavior was OK if he just wasn’t a hypocrite? Well, this is where it’s hard to separate his act from the context. To avoid the charge of hypocrisy, he would have to announce something to the effect that he believed that seeking random sexual encounters in restrooms was OK. He’d still be stuck with the legal issue–it’s against the law, but at least he wouldn’t be a hypocrite. I would think he was unwise (would “incredibly stupid” be going too far?) as well. According to my moral beliefs, he would be morally wrong. There wouldn’t be any possibility that he would be Senator from Idaho under those circumstances.

    Let me use a simpler issue–premarital sex. Now my personal moral code, which I believe is in accord with Biblical and Christian teaching, says “no.” But I know people of generally good character, who don’t approve of random sexual partners, who nonetheless believe that a period of time living together is simply a good way to test the waters. (I’m not arguing that they are right, nor would I make the same suggestion, but these are in general very reliable people.) Now supposing I read a story about a candidate for office that says that he lived with his girlfriend for a couple of years before marrying her. How do I react? Well, if he had concealed the fact, and said such behavior was wrong, and he wanted it to be illegal (unlikely these days, eh?) then I would regard him as a hypocrite, and I would be unlikely to vote for him. The reason is that his words do not match his deeds. On the other hand, if his stated believe was that this was OK, I would still give him consideration, because his deed do match his words.

    Supposing he opposed such behavior but had confessed to his prior behavior? That would again be quite acceptable to me. As a Christian I do believe in redemption and restoration.

    Which brings up one last point–restoration of fallen leaders. I’m thinking of this mostly from a Christian perspective. I believe that a leader who has fallen into sin needs to take a substantial amount of time out of leadership, followed by serving and being faithful in small things, before being restored to leadership. (I’m not going to argue the definition of “sin” here. Use your own again!) I would neither close the door, nor would I make it a revolving door. Some of what I’ve been hearing about Ted Haggard leads me to think that some folks have a revolving door. Forgiveness is good, redemption is possible, but when we’re choosing a small number of leaders we need to make as certain as is humanly possible that we have chosen good examples.

    Having done so, we need to realize that leaders will fall. The tendency to sin is a strong Christian theme as well. That means we need to hold them accountable, and they need to seek accountability to make this kind of problem less likely to occur. The most important method of preventing sin, however, is being transparent. Any time you are pretending to be someone you are not, there will be a great possibility that the pretense will slip, and the real you will show through. If you are being the real you, that danger is removed.

    (Note: I made a number of related remarks on my wife’s devotional list here.