Of Contracts and Covenants (Part 4) - The Myth of Consent

Hello and welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m your host this week, Bryan Broome, and I’m joined by Emily Maxson and Greg Uttinger.

Today we’ll be continuing our discussion on covenants and contracts and all those kinds of things, specifically looking at the idea of consent, particularly as it relates to John Locke and the Enlightenment and all of that. Greg, why don’t you get us started.

Wow.

I know, it’s a big order.

It is, because this is one time when I don’t have a specific text of scripture or story to jump from, because we’re kind of in the middle. We’ve been talking about covenant, which is a bond of life that we may by choice enter into if we’re called by faith in more mature years. We do believe for ourselves. God doesn’t believe for us. We do receive baptism. On the other hand, those in the Presbyterian Reformed tradition are not opposed to baptizing babies and recognizing their place in the covenant, though they have not consented to anything.

Then we can look at the world of contracts, and if you don’t sign on the bottom line it’s not binding. And generally, except in the case of minors, interestingly enough, no one can sign for you. You have to sign for yourself. You have to give your consent.

Then there’s the whole American system of government. We know that there are people who come from other countries and want to become American citizens, and they at some point give their consent. They swear an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and such. There are even classes and tests they have to go through to get there.

But then on the other hand it is also true that anybody born within the territorial boundaries or political boundaries of the United States, for instance a consulate or a military base, under certain conditions at least, are automatically citizens, whether they asked for it or not. Well, they didn’t ask for it because they were born there.

Then comes the question as young people come of age, “Why do I have to obey the stupid government? I didn’t vote for it. I didn’t invent it. It wasn’t my idea,” and so on and so on.

Normally that comes after their first paycheck.

That’s the truth.

The moment they see all the withholdings they’re ready to start the American Revolution all over again. It’s a valid question insofar as it goes, but often the roots of it are not all that valid, because man by nature wants to play God. That was the original temptation in the garden. “You shall be as gods, deciding for yourself good and evil.”

The implication is that every sinner by nature says, “If I don’t agree to it, if I didn’t sign on, if I didn’t say okee-dokee, then it doesn’t bind me.” In certain edges of the Enlightenment, even that wasn’t enough. “Well, I agreed to it a year ago, but I now know stuff I didn’t know then, so surely you don’t expect me to be bound by that.” That’s another topic, sort of.

“Speak what you think today in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.”

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” because new enlightenment may come, and even your past consent may not be enough to bind you. It’s the consent of the moment. It’s you as the autonomous individual at this moment in time, if you reckon time, deciding what you want to do. Well, if you’re God that’s great. If you’re not, then we start having some problems real fast.

Back to the simple question again of the young person who grows up in the United States. “I didn’t invent the Constitution. I didn’t invent the kind of government we have here. I didn’t agree to these amendments. I didn’t agree to the civil laws, the statute laws, the common law behind it, the decisions of the courts. I didn’t buy into all of America’s political, economic, and social history. I exist in this moment of time and I hereby disassociate myself from all of that, so that I can do what I at this moment believe is right,” or safe or something. Suddenly the words ‘cancel culture’ are coming to my mind. I’m sure there’s a tie-in there.

Then aside from the scene in the Garden, one passage did come to my mind, and feel free if others register with you. This is from Numbers 16. The children of Israel are in the wilderness after refusing to go to the Promised Land, and some of the people who fancy themselves leaders are getting tired of Moses and Aaron bossing them around, so they come and they say –

Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them. Wherefore then lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the LORD?

Here’s the myth of democracy or equality or everybody’s vote is as good as everybody’s else or “We will have no leaders except those that I agree to.” Dathan and Abiram are leaders who want the priesthood, but they don’t quite say it that baldly. They basically say, “All of God’s people are holy, so there’s no reason that you two should be bossing the rest of us around. We’re all kings and priests in Christ, right? So there should be no leaders or captains or priests or anything.”

But as you read what they’re thinking, Moses nails it down. “You want the priesthood, don’t you? You’re trying to tear all this down, claiming equality or egalitarianism, but what you really want is power to do what you want to do, and that means ultimately power over other people.”

This is the kind of thing we’re looking at as we come to contract philosophy or theology, because it’s both. We ask ourselves why is it then? Young person, teenager, 20-something – you ask why do you have to obey this system of government when you never voted for it.

We need to look briefly at what Locke said, and then we need to look at what would be a more biblical approach to it, and then we need to see – as if I haven’t already dropped the crumbs here – why would anybody follow Locke anyhow?

I was going to say, briefly looking at Locke, because Locke’s argument here is pretty weak sauce.

Okay, but considering that, it’s also the best I could come up with, so there’s that. My original springboard when I wrote the article behind this was a book that I confess I have not read. It was written by Sarah Conly, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bowdoin College. It was in 2012 and the title is Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism.

If that was a mouthful, what she goes on to argue is that free will, autonomy, my control of myself, my body, my rights and such, is highly overrated, and she’s not speaking as a Christian. She’s speaking as a complete secularist.

She’s saying, “Yeah, that’s all cool and such, but let’s face it. First of all, we’re not particularly rational beings. We don’t always want what’s logical or do what’s logical, so that’s kind of smoke in the eyes anyway. Further, the things that we want like health and safety and pleasure, our individual choices don’t always get us there because, again, we’re not very rational. We eat too much grease. We smoke too many cigarettes. We drink too much alcohol. Wouldn’t it be better if people who could see more clearly managed these things for us” – thus the paternalism, the Nanny State, the Fatherland – “and they can make these judgments for us? And yes, we’re going to have to give up some freedoms here, but we’ll be happy. Isn’t that what’s really important? Happy, safe, and healthy?”

The frightening thing is that she’s honest.

There’s a specter rising over the world, the specter of Utilitarianism.

It reminds me of that ad that’s like, “You’ll own nothing and be happy about it.” I forget what that was advertising.

I would like to know, what is that an ad for?

The World Economic Forum.

Was that a commercial for them? I thought that was just their statement.

Well, the distinction between advertising and propaganda is perhaps academic.

Talking about John Locke, some basics for those of you who may not be terribly familiar with him. As I’ve said before, John Locke was a professing Christian, Trinitarian at that, although he didn’t dwell on that publicly very much. He wrote some commentaries on scripture, which he kept under lock and key until after his death. He seems to have been a nice guy and all, but that’s not the issue here. The issue is what he wrote publicly.

He lived at a time when Europe was in the wake of the wars of religion, religious persecution and all that, and like others he was looking for some kind of standard that everyone could appeal to, that every rational good-natured kind nice person could look at and say with clarity, “Ah, here’s a starting point. Here’s a foundation, and it doesn’t come down to this text of scripture or that text, because when we start trying to build on scripture and interpret scripture, we end up disagreeing and we end up killing each other in the name of God. Why can’t we find something neutral with respect to God?”

He was willing to posit a Creator of some sort. In his treatise on government, he does acknowledge the existence of a Creator. He does not name him. He does not identify him with the Trinitarian God of scripture. He does not name use the name of Christ. He does quote from scripture occasionally, or reference it, but only in the sense that he quotes from lots of ancient sources to say this is what people in old times thought.

He's beginning from self, after the fashion of Rene Descartes. Begin with the autonomous self and build outward. This is a quote, I think from the second treatise.

Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent…

Let me just stop there. By nature – that is comes from the hand of whoever this Creator is. All men are free, equal to one another, and independent of one another. We have a word for that. That’s called anarchy.

There’s a lot of definitions that haven’t been given, like what do you mean by free? What do you mean by equal?

All of those words are up for grabs. I often go into spasms over the word ‘equal.’ I’ve done so in front of my Bible class before. It doesn’t always come out well. This idea that all men are created equal is so grounded in the American conscious that to even question the wording can be dangerous. You can be looked upon as an enemy of freedom.

Even to point out, “What do you mean by equal? Does that mean you’re all the same height? Same skin color? You all grew up in the same socio-economic environment? You all grew up in the same year? You all had the same mom and dad? What is this equality?”

“Well, it’s in the soul.” And as Lewis has Ransom say in That Hideous Strength, “The soul is the place where men are least equal.” We all bear the image of God differently, and some souls are bound for heaven and some for hell, so this whole idea of equality is a semantic problem.

Now, if by equal you mean equally subject to God’s law and equally accountable to it, you can go that direction. There may be some other ways – equally human in that we’re not gods. There are other things you can say to fill it out, but just throwing the word ‘equal’ out there doesn’t mean a thing.

Free – presumably from civil government and from one another is what he meant, but that’s not how most people would understand it exactly today, I would think. Independent – again probably of one another. Anyway, assume that this is man’s condition. Remember, he’s positing a state of nature where this is man’s original condition.

He is ignoring the Bible at this point. This is not how the Bible says man came to be or how men came to relate to one another. He’s ignoring that and just saying, “Imagine there was a time when there were men on the planet, and there were very few and it’s a big planet and they didn’t run into each other very much, if at all, and they all did their own things, so that was cool, that was fine. But sooner or later, as the population grows, they’re going to run into each other and there’s going to be the day when I reach for an apple and you reach for the same apple and we both look at each other and say, ‘Mine.’ How do we solve that? Do we simply fight for it right there? Do we hope that we’re both like, ‘Oh, after you.’”?

“No, after you. I insist.”

“No, you saw it first.”

“Ah, no.”

Yeah, we’re really going to do that. So what happens then?

I don’t know. That plan kind of worked pretty well in the Midwest, I feel like. “Oh no, after you.”

“No, no, you first.”

“No, you found this gold mine first. I wouldn’t dream of getting in your way.”

One thing he says can’t happen is that other people can’t come along with their already-existing civil governments or armies or police force or whatever and take it away from you. If it’s yours, it’s yours, and he argues about why it’s yours. It has to do with the fact that you encountered nature and applied your own effort to it, your own work as that’s something that’s uniquely yours, so it’s yours and no one can take that away. No one can force you to submit to their rules and their laws, unless you agree, so this is what he says next.

“No one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent. The only way whereby anyone divests himself of his natural liberty and puts on the bonds of civil society is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any that are not of it.”

That’s protection against outsiders, of ‘them.’

So here we go. Men run into each other and they can stand and fight it out or they can, if they want to, agree to some kind of – he uses the word ‘bond.’ Christians would say covenant. He says compact. Others have said contract. It’s some kind of civil arrangement that does lay bonds, obligations, upon everyone who enters into it, that generates this civil society, this group that is distinct from those outside of the group. The goal of this group is to ensure comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, with secure enjoyment of their property.

Elsewhere he tells us that the basic rights that every individual has are those of life, liberty, and property. Some have argued that they can all be reduced to property, depending how you define it. But for our purposes, what we’re talking about is this thing of consent. He’s saying that nobody has to obey any kind of society or any government founded upon such a society or by such a society unless he’s given his consent. So your government can’t tell me what to do, unless in some fashion – and there’s the weaseling – I have given my consent.

Now, the question comes of what does that consent look like? Our thought in 21st century America is I raise my hand and vote, or push a button and vote and hope it got tabulated accurately.

There are other forms of consent. The law recognizes something called tacit consent. If there’s a strip of land that’s part of my property that leads back to your property from the main road, and I let you drive it every day for a couple years and say nothing and don’t try to stop you and don’t attempt any legal action, at the end of that time I have given tacit consent to you doing that, though I have said nothing, and thus you now have a right to drive that road and to use it in the way you’ve been using it.

Generalizing, he would say that if you grew up in a country and live there long enough, you’ve given tacit consent to its laws. If you want to vote against it, leave. By the same token, a foreigner coming into a country, by the act of coming into that country agrees to submit to its laws while he is there, at least insofar as they apply to him.

But without the consent – and some of that is a little weaselly, but still let’s give it to him – without your consent, no one can tell you what to do or no one has the right, the authority, to tell you what to do. And that’s what’s to hold government together from generation to generation, the fact that a long time ago a bunch of people that we’ve never met got together and agreed to something we didn’t agree on, and because we’re unwilling to pack up and move, we are therefore bound. Anyone want to point out a couple problems here before I end up talking too much?

The first problem I can think of is that eventually you’re going to get enough people who think, “I don’t agree with this,” and then they’re going to move, or they’re going to move against you.

I was thinking in the American experiment in this field there was a moment when lots of people did not give their consent, and the rest of the people said, “Too bad. You can’t leave.” There’s a whole mythos that’s just kind of broken.

The interesting thing here is that I as an individual have these rights, and I as an individual sign onto this thing for my individual good, although I may have goodwill toward you as well, but primarily it’s about my good or the good of me and my family. But once I’ve signed onto it, everything becomes majority vote because there’s no other way to do it.

Now, you could in theory define percentages, straight majority, two-thirds, 90%, whatever, but at some point we have to agree on how we who have given up our individual choice to the society as a whole are going to be comfortable with that society making decisions when they aren’t ours.

What happens if I want to be able to eat my McDonald’s greasy hamburger freely, and the rest of the country says no, or 60% says no, or 50% + 1 say, “No, you may not. That’s bad for your health. We are banning McDonald’s from the universe.”

Didn’t I sign on this to keep my rights? And suddenly I have a percentage, and perhaps a very small percentage taking away my right to choose? I kind of just gave up my autonomy. In the name of autonomy, I gave up my autonomy.

That’s kind of where Ms. Conly is. “Aren’t there things that are worth giving up your autonomy for? Isn’t your health and happiness and the security of your family worth not having a say, not having a voice?” The problem here is that, outside of Christ, there’s a real problem.

Bryan, you made a passing remark earlier. I don’t know if you remember it, before we started. It was about you being tired of the Enlightenment.

Oh, it’s a meme statement, but it’s also kind of true. The Enlightenment project of justifying morality was doomed to fail.

Yeah, and that’s exactly what we’ve got here. We have Locke trying to justify the fact that you have to, get to, live in a society that you never made, under laws you never legislated, interpreted by courts that you have no hand in, and this is called freedom, because there’s nothing else to appeal to but the majority, and we’re going to slide the majority in by saying, “But you collectively individually in your autonomy agreed to this. You agreed to give up your autonomy for your safety and security and your pursuit of happiness,” and how is that not what Ms. Conly is saying?

“You’ve already agreed to give up your autonomy for these things that are good for you. Why not let us decide more of what’s good for you, because you’re obviously incompetent and irrational and moved by your guts. You worship your belly. We, however, are objective and scientists and we know stuff.”

At that point it becomes kind of hard to refute her, except by saying, “Fascist, fascist,” which is not an argument.

I think the only thing I’d like to add is that just kind of based on the general philosophical and practical ramifications of it, we should be able to conclude that the Enlightenment sucked.

[laughing] Yeah.

Hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to fault Locke and his Enlightenment buddies for departing from scripture, and I think that’s pretty much the only thing that it’s fair to fault him for, as well as the philosophers that followed, because they’re asking questions that scripture has an answer for, and they’re really fair questions, given everything that preceded them.

So when we get to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and it’s like, “Well, this all flowed from the Enlightenment,” it’s like, “Yeah, and it’s kind of logical.” It makes sense that they would go where they went.

It’s absolutely logical, and irrational at the same time, but that’s a different topic.

Right. But I think there’s a lot to be gained from – and this is definitely a little bit of a tangent – but reading these philosophers and seeing how they defeat their own underpinnings, as well as just reading them for fun and saying, “I feel like we would have been friends,” which is how I feel about Kierkegaard.

Yeah, I actually feel like I’d be more friends with Kierkegaard than Locke, but that’s just me.

There’s a book I’ve mentioned before, and I may even have recommended it, although I do so with a grain of salt, and it’s called The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. It was written I think in the 1920s by someone who considered himself epistemologically self-aware, some professor someplace. I don’t care. He’s not famous and rightly so, but what he points out is that the early Enlightenment philosophers were in protest against what they saw as the abuses of Christendom – the Inquisition, the wars of religion, anything that just was unjust, unkind.

What they’re doing, of course, is they’re holding up a Christian standard to measure Christendom by. But rather than conclude that Christians are 1) inconsistent, 2) hypocrites, and 3) don’t know their Christianity very well, they jump to, “And of course this means that God does not exist, or at least not their God.”

They go on to talk about how we need to build systems that will generate – I don’t know if any of them ever said it, but a heavenly city, a new Jerusalem, a Utopia, paradise on earth.

A tower to reach unto the heavens.

Yeah, but they actually thought they could do it. They actually thought they could maintain what they saw as the best parts of Christian morality, and reject Christ and God and the Bible and salvation. In fact, they saw those things as superstitions that were getting in the way. “If we got rid of that and just focused on the morality, the best parts of it, then we can have our Heavenly City.”

This man who’s writing the book in the 1920s is saying, “My, weren’t they silly? Weren’t they foolish? Weren’t they inconsistent? Couldn’t they see that in rejecting Christianity they had to reject all of it? But no, they were inconsistently holding onto Christian morality. They should have seen that it’s not necessary in order to get a better world, and shouldn’t we weep over them in their foolishness?”

There’s truth there, at least in some cases. In some cases I think it was a genuine confusion, a mental confusion in some cases. It was self-deception. We can think here of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, who writes books on how to raise your children, then puts all of his in orphanages.

But with more and more time, by the time we get to say the 1840s and Marx, it’s pretty plain where we’re going here. We’re rejecting Christian morality. We have no god but – well, we say the people, the majority – but what it means is somebody has to speak for the majority, and that someone is an elite, as Dr. Schaeffer warned us a number of times.

They may be an elected elite. They may be a self-appointed elite. They may be a technocratic elite. They may be a philosophical or religious elite, but somebody’s going to stand up and say, “We represent the common will, the general will of the people. We know what’s best for everybody, and whether you actually voted for us or not is not the point. We know what’s best. And since this whole majoritarian thing is you’re surrendering to what’s best for everybody, we’ll decide for you,” or “Please let us decide,” depending how early we are in the struggle. We’re at the point now where that seems logical to people. That sounds right. “Yeah, we want the right thing, so the government will…”

Wait, what happened to the ‘we’ here? What happened to individual responsibility? What happened to say a personal voluntary act like giving money to a particular charity that you’ve vetted, rather than saying to the State, “Tax us,” meaning tax everybody else, “and you give us the kind of thing that will make us all happy.”

Those are two very different things. One is individualistic to a degree, although still operating, one presumes, within the laws of the land. The other is a complete surrender of autonomy, of individual freedom, choice, and responsibility in the name of safety and security, or as Schaeffer used to say, “Personal peace and affluence.” Just give me what I need, what will make me happy, what will keep me safe. Give me my drugs and my sexual perversity and plenty of entertainment on the internet, and hey, I’m good.

Sure, because after that, everything outside doesn’t matter because you’re left alone in your home and that’s it.

And despite the fact that we protest how much we care, we don’t really care. We don’t find ourselves going out into the street and talking to people with real needs. We find ourselves yelling at people who aren’t doing what we think, and asking the government to punish them somehow, or control them or regulate them or something like that.

Now in passing we do need – and you both I think were kind of hinting at this earlier – the role of the Church. These people you say had good questions. Yeah, they did, and to simply say, “Well, you are an unbelieving blank blank blank and we don’t even talk to you or read your books or even think about you” is not necessarily helpful.

Sometimes it may be, but more generally when the questions are legitimate, this is a time to stop and listen and say, “Yeah, I understand your question,” and say either, “And here is the biblical answer” or to say, “Oh, I’m not sure what the biblical answer is to that. That is indeed a piercing profound question worthy of time and study. Give me a year or two and I’ll get back to you, but what I won’t do is drop you or insult you or call you names because you dared to ask something that I can’t deal with.” What’s even worse is to sort of, as it were, join their side while not admitting it.

At the time where the Enlightenment is moving into Romanticism we see, for instance, in the preaching of Finney saying – I use him as a whipping boy; there were certainly many others who were guilty of this, but he’s famous and that’s the price you pay – “This thing called salvation, this thing called the kingdom of God is wholly and completely your choice, and it’s your choice moment-by-moment. You can be a Christian today and not be a Christian tomorrow and then become a Christian a day after, based on what you choose to do. Christ is our example, but this whole thing of justification by faith and regeneration, that is a new nature, are out of court because man has no fixed nature. Man is what he makes himself to be.” He's foreseeing Existentialism, although not under that name.

I think that’s a great place to tie it back to the beginning where you were discussing what kind of equality are we talking about. If you basically take the tack of Finney and say, “Look, there’s no such thing as a fixed human nature. It’s always changing, even according to your own will,” and that means that over time it’s definitely changing for humanity, then there is no such thing as equality, no matter how much they say so.

I think the best way for the Christian to look at equality is not just before God or in reference to the law, but also in regards to the human nature that we all possess. We all possess the same kind of human nature, and when you take the tack of Finney you end up destroying one of the only bases for human equality that exists.

Yeah. If you can constantly redefine yourself, I like your point that you’re making yourself into something that may be wholly unlike what you used to be, and wholly unlike what everyone else is. Isn’t this in harmony with the next step in intellectual history, which was evolution. Some of us are more evolved than others. Some of us have made more useful choices - what was the word you used earlier, utilitarian choices – and so that’s going to leave us with some real problems.

Sort of along those lines but not completely was his response when asked about children who died in infancy. Are such souls saved? He was a little taken aback by the question because he didn’t really have an answer, and he basically said, “Well, they’re not capable of rational moral choice, so they’re hardly to be considered souls at all, but I suppose if God were going to do something for such beings, yes, He would bring them to heaven because, why not? But that’s not really my ball of wax.”

That said something very profound, that humanity is defined by its ability to make choices that we outsiders can perceive. We can’t perceive the child in the womb making choices. We can’t perceive a little baby making very many choices, at least none of them profound. Certainly we cannot see the child choosing Christ, so we begin to reckon the child as less than human because humanity is wrapped up in this rationalistic intellectual autonomy, whereby out of my rationality I make choices that at least ought to make sense.

What happens when that kind of theology percolates through American culture and religious cultures in churches for about 200 years is we get to the point where we’re told, “God’s decree is not the issue here. What’s at issue is your choice. Come forward.” God Almighty now stands helpless. You and you only can save your soul.

I don’t know if either of you ever heard anything like that in your years growing up. I’ve heard some things pretty close to it over Christian radio. I don’t think it maybe is as rampant as it was once upon a time, this exalting of man’s free will to the point where even God stands back and says, “Whoa, can’t mess with that.”

This is part of this whole picture. Until the individual gives consent, nobody can say anything. If the State tries to pass a law that I haven’t consented to, or if the church leaders make an enactment that I haven’t consented to, if mom and dad make a decision for the family that I haven’t consented to, then I have the idea that I am absolutely just and fair. I’m the one sinned against because they didn’t ask my say. They didn’t ask me what I want to do. When our very evangelical theology is resounding with that, it’s kind of hard to stop and say, “Wait, you’ve missed something here.”

The thing that we really haven’t said, and now in closing I think is the time to say it, is there is a God in heaven who grants authority and holds men accountable and writes the law that we don’t get to kibbutz about. We don’t get to decide whether or not that law is applicable to us. Now, we have to understand how it’s applicable to us, but that’s not the same thing.

We don’t have the decision of, “Well, God wrote that for uncivilized people 3,000 years ago. It doesn’t bind me. I am a new person in a new age and I have computers and other things, so I can make my own rules. I can make my own law, and even God doesn’t dare tell me what to do. And if any of you think you know what God says and what God means, you’re Fascists because you’re trying to trample on my autonomy, my personal authority over me, and that means that you are evil.”

Speaking as an elder in a church that is Reformed and that nonetheless has had many discipline problems over the years while I’ve been on-board, this happens. People look at us and say, “No, we’re out of here. You don’t get to decide that.”

“Um, we kind of do.”

“Nope, bye.”

We’re actually lucky if they say bye sometimes, but is something that’s true in civil government and it’s true in families. Kids wake up one day and say, “Mom and Dad, you’re not the boss of me.”

“Yeah, there’s this ‘Honor your father and mother’ thing.”

“Oh, that’s so old-fashioned.”

Old-fashioned is another word for ancient. That used to be good. It’s not now.

An old-fashioned is a great cocktail. They should take a lesson from that.

Oh, but I don’t think that’s mixed with equal parts, is it?

[laughing] And with that we will wrap this up, again pointing out that there is a moral standard by which the world must run. It’s God’s Word. And although we can disagree about details and what goes where and what does that mean now, that’s a far cry from saying, “God speaks to me in my heart, and you and your Bible have nothing to say to me.”

Society’s salvation, its temporal health, lies in learning to live by every word of God, to be taught every word that Jesus has commanded. That’s our commission. The power is in the Holy Spirit and we must never confuse those. If we try to think that mere education is going to change things, we become rationalists. There is content and there is word from God, but the Holy Spirit must supply the transforming power through that Word. So we must not be ashamed ever of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

That’s a wonderful place to end. Let’s do recommendations.

I’ll go first, I’m ready. I have probably recommended this before, but I recommend it today from a new place in life. It’s morning walks. Gretchen does much better on a day when we take a morning walk, and I find that I am much happier when we take a morning walk, and here it’s really hot so it’s nice to do it early and appreciate the morning. I’m not a morning person, but morning walks are nice.

I used to not be that much of a morning person, and to an extent I still am not, but getting up earlier in the day, which has mainly happened due to my Emily’s job first, and then later when I found a job that was not remote, it’s a better start to the day. It’s really wonderful.

I wish I could feel your pleasure. I haven’t gotten there, except on some of the trips to Europe because then our whole sense of time was so off that you automatically got up about three hours earlier in the morning.

Of course, to freak people out even more, I don’t drink coffee either. I just get up and I do it by myself.

Wow, I’m impressed.

For a while I was forcing myself to drink a 4:00 afternoon cup of coffee because it would get to be 9:00 and Gretchen would be fussy and we couldn’t get her down, and I was just so much more patient if I had that 4:00 cup of coffee.

Nice. I have two. One is literary and one is culinary. The culinary one is I’m going to recommend grilling kabobs. We did some of those last night for dinner. There’s quite a lot of prep work that goes into it, just all the slicing and dicing and cutting, but it’s very good. We did Asian-marinated chicken with bell pepper, onion, zucchini, and pineapple chunks. It was very good.

My literary recommendation – I actually talked with Greg about it at the end of our last recording. I hadn’t finished the book yet so I didn’t feel like I should recommend it, but I’ve finished it now and it’s called Walkable City by Jeff Speck. It’s very interesting as a read. I really enjoyed it. I came away basically going, “Wow, I really agree with everything this guy said.”

It’s about how cities in the United States in the past 60-70 years have all been rebuilt and remodified. Their facades have been re-fascaded specifically for the purpose of making it more friendly to vehicles, and that in the long run, while you might bring in more people from out of town for jobs, you’re ultimately not going to have a city that anyone wants to actually live in.

He talks about different strategies to help make your streets more pedestrian-friendly, more bicyclist-friendly, and essentially give the people who actually live in your city the option of whether or not they want to own a car in the first place.

He also says, “We’re not out to get rid of cars. I even love cars. I’ve driven the newest car that is the fastest every three years or so, because I love cars and I can afford it.” But it is to try to make cities a bit more car-optional and car-allowable, and mainly to prioritize foot traffic for the people who actually live within distance of the places that you want them to go and, from a very practical monetary point of view, to go spend their money in your district.

Then there’s more stuff where it’s like the law of supply and demand also applies to things like traffic lanes, parking spaces, etc. So if you build more lanes, if you spend millions of dollars adding a third lane to all of your city highways, they’re going to fill up again because you’ve just made it easier to drive.

Yeah, they’re free. There’s a demand and it’s at zero price.

Yes, and the same thing applied to parking spaces in front of businesses that were in downtown or anywhere really, if you make all the parking free after a certain amount of time. He gave an example which was if you have paid parking in your downtown area from 8-5, and then all the people who live nearby snag the free parking once it becomes free after 5, then all the people who just drove in from out of town to go to a fancy dinner don’t have anywhere to park and they may decide, “Oh, well, it’s only 10 minutes to go to this other place that’s out of town, so we’ll just go spend our money there.” Anyway, it was all very interesting and I was very fascinated by the statistics presented.

The name again is Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck. It’s a dramatic sub-title.

I remember seeing that book and thinking, “Boy, I really want to read that because it probably confirms all my biases.” The way that I have experienced small towns vs medium-sized towns vs small cities vs large cities is always sort of in terms of how you interact with the people. I really loved living in a small town where you’d walk everywhere, because when you’re walking there’s nothing to insulate you, to give you this illusion of being separate from the people you encounter.

When you live in a “walkable city” you run into people that you know because everybody is occupying sort of the same limited space, which is just a really nice thing for a community and feeling connected, which is important.

And not only do you run into people that you know, but you run into people that you don’t know but you keep running into them.

Right, and then you know them.

There’s one gentleman around here who walks his dog. The dog is a German Shepherd named Bear. I know this because after the girls saw Bear and his owner a number of times, I rolled down the window and we stopped at a corner and said, “Beautiful animal!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“What’s his name?”

“Bear.”

“Thank you,” and we drove off, but that’s now a fixed person in our reality, plus dog.

There were two funny anecdotes he listed. One was like, “Now, I may come across a bit biased in favor of walkability and this kind of sense of community that you get, because I happened to meet my wife by happenstance.” I was like, “That’s adorable.”

The other one was also interesting. I feel like with very good cause a lot of the time we tend to view cities with suspicion, and that’s mainly because of things like the fact they’re all blue, politically speaking, or the fact that the major ones that everyone knows about are deep, deep blue, from the bottom of the ocean.

And not pleasant places to be.

And not pleasant places. They’re kind of going against the things that made them great places to live in the first place. But interestingly enough, the author even said, “If you want to remain competitive as a city,” and he’s not talking necessarily to people like me who are reading the book, but city mayors and things like that, people in authority, he says, “You should try to become more competitive as a city by offering this kind of deep community, but the community will only be there if they feel safe walking there.”

He goes, “Otherwise, San Francisco and Portland and Miami and New York will all continue to aggregate young people who gravitate to them for that sense of community, and more normal cities will not.” I just thought that was so funny. It was like he gets it. Even he knows they’re weird.

Well, I have spent the last hour trying to come with some great recommendation, and this is a good recommendation, it’s just not something that I came up with after an hour. It just kind of materialized in my head, and it’s this – teach your kids to cook. That’s it. This requires, of course, you knowing how to cook yourself. I could expand that into “…and how to be homemakers and house cleaners in general, both boys and girls.” This is something that’s important.

As Bryan has been telling us about his adventures in moving into this new house and modifying it, I’ve been impressed more than once at his ability to take on all kinds of strange things that I really wouldn’t know how to do, and make them work and look good.

But bringing it back down to just the simple everyday, your children should be able to land in a kitchen and fix a meal for four or five people and it should taste good, and there should be more than one, not just bacon and eggs.

Not just mac and cheese from a box.

There’s not only the immense practical benefit of being able to do that, but also – and I don’t like using this phrase because it always feels transactional – but young men, you will win points with your wife if you’re able to vacuum and dust and do basic house-cleanliness things. It doesn’t all have to be in one big show where it’s like, “Oh, it’s piled up for weeks and now I’ve got to do all this work.” It could be over the course of a day like, “Oh, I just noticed I put something here and I need to clean it up,” or whatever.

And that wins you more points than, “Oh, now it’s intolerable.” It’s the daily not just knowing how to, but actually doing it.

Also on top of that, if you know how to cook you can show your love for your wife by cooking a meal for her, or by doing a fancy dinner night at home. For my wife, who is for all practical purposes Dutch in all but ethnicity, being able to cook something at home is a weight off the mind because it’s not going out and spending money. All the stereotypes of Dutch people are true, by the way.

I’m Dutch, can confirm.

There’s multiple facets there. If you know how to cook for yourself, not only will you benefit greatly, but you can benefit your spouse, you can benefit your family when you have children as well, and mom is tired from taking care of the kids all day, and food is not done – not that I know that from personal experience as I have no children yet – but you can save money. It’s nice to be able to know how to use your resources in a way that is not a drain, basically.

I think this does come with the warning that if you learn to cook and cook well and plate well, you might be dissatisfied with every restaurant you’ll ever eat at.

This is true.

We have multiple times sat down to eat something, taken a bite and gone, “Why do we eat out?”

To which the answer is, “I didn’t have to cook it, and more to the point, I don’t have to clean up after it.”

Exactly. That is the benefit that you pay for.

That’s where we all end up.

One other thing, speaking from the other end, is when your children come of age and they can go into other places and cook, it gives them a sense of being grown-ups, of having it together, of knowing what’s going on, rather than being complete incompetents and saying, “Why can everybody else do this practical stuff and I don’t know how?”

When other moms in other houses say to their children, “Get out of the way. I’m going to sit here with your friends and cook,” it does send a signal of 1) my parents did something right, I guess, and 2) I know what I’m doing, why don’t they? and 3) Good, I have some control over this meal I’m going to have to eat here in a moment, so I can make sure it’s not too weird.

There are all kinds of advantages. That turned into a good conversation so it must be a good recommendation. Teach your kids to cook.

Yes. Thank you so much for the recommendations. Thanks for joining us. If you’d like to follow us you can do so on YouTube or through Rumble. You can follow our very inactive at the moment Facebook page.

Moderately inactive.

Moderately inactive is the new word that we’re going for. Do we post episodes there? Is that what we do at this point?

I think so? We might even have transcripts. Oh, David is shaking his head at me. Never mind. We’re on Substack now, though.

Oh, we’re on Substack now? Wonderful, so there as well. You can also subscribe to the show through any podcast catcher if you want to stay up-to-date on each new episode as it comes out.

If you would like to reach out to us and give us your questions or suggestions for episodes, we’d be happy to hear them. Our email is [email protected].

If you would like to support us financially, you can do at anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. Thank you so much to all of you who do financially support us. You help make the show a reality.

Thanks to David Maxson for doing all the producing work and editing all the episodes and basically running everything else besides hosting the show. Big hats off to David!

We hope to see you next time. Bye.