SO TRUE! WHY ARE WE CAPS-LOCKING!

Episkopoi is bishop and presbyteroi is presbyter. Diakonos is deacon. Three-office=Biblical. 😎

What Winger does in terms of exposing abuse is genuinely a service tho. I think he's an earnest, well-meaning guy.

There's... a lot wrong with this, and very few Shonen anime protagonists fit the Christ-type worse temperamentally than Luffy. It's hard to unravel how impressively poor this is as a reading of One Piece and the Gospels.

It seems blatantly obvious to me that the Christian way is not individualistic laissez-faire free markets. Rather it is communally-oriented and service-oriented. I'm still unpacking my thoughts around this, around what a Christ-centered way of thinking about economics looks like, but nonetheless...

I mean, yeah, he's the presumptive successor, and he's definitely running for President in 2028. Trump probably doesn't care that much about this, so he's leaving it to Vance to riff on it and position himself.

I've heard this "there is no unity with" framework from the left first. I think it's borrowed language. Not to do a tu quoque, but I genuinely think this sort of barb began with the left.

a man with a beard is standing in front of a red background and says `` you have done that yourself ! '' ALT: a man with a beard is standing in front of a red background and says `` you have done that yourself ! ''

Lmao.

A query in regards to that. If I were to say, "I believe that we should cut Medicare and Social Security for the sake of long-term fiscal sustainability ", is this profoundly incivil? The intent is not to harm people, but it nonetheless does harm. Is what makes it incivil the harm or the intent?

I think it's appropriate to have a standard wherein the "defensive" side of discourses being asked to give something up is given greater grace in conversation, to be sure. I also think civility and irenicism is important to our shared political life, and it's important to recognize that.

Civility remains important because it affirms our shared humanity even as we have dramatically divergent visions of the good shaping our political action. /fin

The problem is rights and freedoms are themselves loaded terms that people have differing visions of. I could, under my understanding of rights, go to every Democrat rally and scream at them that they're "evil baby murderers". But that doesn't build up our shared polis; it tears it down. 1/

To a certain degree, we have to live with discourses that can be perceived as violence or oppression to be able to discuss our shared polis. That seems inescapable to me.

The state is a coercive body; every political call to action involves violence.

"I want more taxes for X"=violence
"Let's ban Y"=violence
"I want to intervene in A country to do Z"=violence

If the implication here is drawn out to its conclusion, there's no political discourse that survives.

For the record, this seems like a worthwhile addition to the discourse around the motives of Tyler Robinson. I also want to say it's entirely possible his motives are just "radical soup"; an incoherent mess of contradictory worldviews, as violent American shooters often are.

Lord have mercy.

Regardless of if the author thought it through that way, it is nonetheless the natural spot for a Christian theodicy to arrive in light of the New Testament.

Agreed that the "he got new ones so it all worked out" doesn't work. I think the only way to truly reconcile it is in the context of the eschaton; Job DID see the loved ones he lost, in Christ. Christ and the resurrection is what makes theodicy work here, not added earthly gains.

I was not aware you had a Substack. Good to know.

I would be disappointed if the Democrats nominated Newsom. But the party apparatus has historically been very deferential to whose turn it is, and it feels like it's Newsom's "turn". He's handsome, slick, governor of big state, fundraising is good. Very safe pick, but also not the pick they need.

The goalplsts have not moved. Just clarifying my position. Unfortunately the nature of discourse on this platform with the character limits makes it difficult to say all that needs to be said. I apologize if I was unclear.

For the record, I don't mean to say there's no precedent for pacifism in the Christian tradition. It's clear there is some precedent, particularly in the pre-Constantinian era, but I don't see it, at least not directly, in the NT, and it's not as though there were no soldiers or magistrate converts.

If pacifism was definitional to the Christian faith, any punishment or repercussions would be martyrdom no?

At all w/o precedent in the Scriptures. My namesake, Daniel, Esther, the entire books of Kings, Chronicles, etc. It seems to me a complete overapplication of "Christ-as-model" to toss all the political dimensions of our models in the OT because Christ had a particular mission in His incarnation.

Christ tells us to "go into all the world and make disciples and teach them to obey all that I have commanded you". The Tanakh explicitly lays out political dimensions to this obedience. It's our job as Christians to witness to our magistrate and teach our magistrate to obey Christ. This is not 1/

I can play the counterfactual game too by saying at no point was any soldier, magistrate, etc. told to repent of their position, either pre or post conversion. St Paul attempts to straightforwardly convert Agrippa without ever suggesting that. I'm not sure that exchange is determinative either way.

I think this is an altogether too narrow view of the implications of the Gospel. It's not particularly compatible with the Tanakh, especially the Psalms, which describe a Christic victory over the kings of the Earth and requires of them to "kiss the Son lest He be angry".

IDK... This, as-is, sounds fine. The Gospels are not the only parts of Scripture wherein Christ is revealed to us, and none of the New Testament operates as though that's the case. It's not even the only part of Scripture where the post-incarnate Christ speaks; He also speaks directly in Revelation.