Archives for May 2025

On Silence During Chaos, Part 4: Peace 1

May 8, 2025 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Part 1: Personal | Part 2: Political | Part 3: Panic

I can’t discuss any life application—indeed, any topic at all—without basing my thinking on Scripture. I’ve studied the Scripture professionally all my adult life, and I am more convinced than ever that that was a good choice, informed even in my many ignorant times by the kind providence of God. I’ve written about my reasons for seeing the Scripture as more than an ancient book written by well-meaning but primitive people that has received outsized attention throughout cultural history, so I won’t repeat them here; but they inform all my thinking.

I have a couple of bases in biblical theology for the reticence I’ve been advocating. Maybe two posts can cover them.

The first theological basis is far broader than just politics or social upheaval; it covers literally everything in this world, and everywhere else, throughout all time and forever.

God is in charge.

I have social media connections, whom I care for, who disagree profoundly with that statement. But I’ve never seen them refute it.

Oh, they’ll complain about it—“If there’s a God, why did he …”—but logically that’s not a refutation; it’s just an assertion that they disagree with him.

I’m a lot older than most of them are, and with time I’ve come to recognize the foolish arrogance of a “lifted from the no of all nothing, human merely being” thinking that his disagreement with the Creator of heaven and earth, the covenant-keeping God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “Yahweh God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth, who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin, yet he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations” (Ex 34.6-7)—whew—is in some way the basis for argument, application, or wisdom in life.

God is in charge.

Applying that principle to the current topic is fairly straightforward.

First, history makes sense; it’s not a random sequence of events, but the outworking of a plan that leads to a sensible, rational conclusion—and that plan is from the mind of a great and good God.

Now, that fact raises all kinds of questions. Why does God include in his plan things that make people miserable, that harm them in significant ways? I don’t know the answer to that, and neither does anybody else. But I do know God, and I have decades of experience, in both the lab and the field, that he is in fact great and good. And I expect that a great God, who is by definition infinite, will occasionally (!) go beyond the horizon of my understanding. When he does that, I trust him.

I’ve never been disappointed.

It should be said, of course, that we should do what we can to ease suffering. We ought to feed the hungry; we ought to clothe the needy; we ought to shelter the homeless. There are many ways to do that, including any number of organizations that have been doing those things long enough to have some expertise in the field, and whom we ought to support.

(I’ll note as an aside that human nature these days is to assume that the government should be that default organization—and it’s precisely that kind of thinking that has gotten us into the unsustainable economic crisis we’re in now. The current administration claims to have cut $150 billion in spending—whether they actually have or not, I don’t know—but the naked truth is that the spending cuts are going to have to be an order of magnitude larger than that if the nation is going to be on a sustainable footing.)

So. There is a God in heaven, who raises up kings and sets them down again, and who is so much greater than evil that he uses the greatest evil in all the world to accomplish his good plans (see “Crucifixion”). He knows infinitely better than I do, and I trust him.

There’s a second theological basis for my reticence. More on that next time.

Photo by Jonathan Harrison on Unsplash

On Silence During Chaos, Part 3: Panic

May 5, 2025 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Personal | Part 2: Political

You didn’t really think we were going to get through the sociopolitical situation in one post, did you?

At the end of the previous post, I noted the almost constant pressure to see the current sociopolitical situation as apocalyptic: if we don’t do something now, everything will be ruined!

A few thoughts about that.

First, one of the basic rules of detecting and preventing fraud is to resist salespeople who are pressuring you to Act Now!, to get this special deal that won’t be available later. This technique happens in sales flyers for grocery stores; it happens at Wal-Mart; it happens at car lots; it happens when people are trying to lure you into a timeshare, or an investment in gold, or some hot stock, or some dark horse at the track.

And it’s bogus. People who listen to those salespeople are going to lose their money, or at least they’re going to get less than they paid for. Fear makes for lousy decisions.

Now, politicians and pundits are salespeople too. And they know, from long experience, that pressure tactics work. As one former advisor to President Obama famously said, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” (That was Rahm Emanuel, in 2008.) Sometimes it’s a war; sometimes it’s an economic issue such as inflation or recession. Sometimes it’s an environmental catastrophe, or even just an apparent one, that serves as an opportunity to goose the level of governmental control. But it’s always something.

So Trump is “a danger to democracy.” Biden’s immigration policy—or lack of one—will eventuate in “the last election of our lifetime.” Gotta do something. And the something you gotta do is vote for our guy, or support our policy.

And thus has it ever been. Goldwater was going to bring nuclear death to that little girl picking daisies. Johnson was a warmonger, and Humphrey would bring us back to peace. Then Nixon was the warmonger, and McGovern would bring peace. Then Carter was going to destroy the economy. Then Reagan—oh, boy, did they unload on Reagan. “We begin bombing in five minutes!” Clinton. Bush 43 and the “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. Obamacare. Trump the First. Biden and the immigration invasion. And now Trump the Second.

One of the benefits of living for a while is that you realize that the news never changes.

And in a day when everybody has a publishing platform, the simplest thing for individual citizens to do is to cooperate by spreading the story or the meme that confirms your bias, that makes the side you want to be on look right and righteous and rigorous.

And here’s the thing. Most of the people who are doing this have no idea what they’re talking about. They think they’re fighting the good fight, but they can’t possibly be sure, at least not in an informed way. And some of them even post—after having done their “research,” which consists of reading an outlet that they have chosen to trust specifically because it tells them what they have already decided to believe—that their friends should “educate themselves.”

So given the likelihood that any given political crisis is being overhyped—perhaps by both sides—I would conclude that waiting for a bit and seeing how things go is the better part of wisdom. Most of the predicted catastrophes never happen.

I have an acquaintance, a Facebook friend, who’s professionally in a position to interact with influential people, including some people whose names you would likely recognize if you follow the news. He’s no fan of Trump. And the other day he posted that the likelihood is that things are going to turn out all right.

But what if it’s a real crisis? What if we really do need to act immediately? In the previous post I noted the importance of being informed, and cool-headed, in a crisis. That means that even if the current situation is in fact a crisis, and not just a manufactured one, those who are acting out of fear or ignorance—that’s most of them—are unlikely to be of any real help, and in fact are likely to do harm.

I don’t want to be one of those people.

If I’m not an expert on tariffs or immigration or law enforcement or military readiness—as, apparently, everyone else on Facebook is—then I’m going to get out of the way and let the people who know what they’re doing take care of the situation. I’m not going to add to the chaos on-scene by shouting uninformed opinions at the people who are actually trying to accomplish something.

Now, if they need help with Koine Greek, or biblical exegesis, or Christian theology, or online teaching, or experiential learning, or poaching an egg, or roasting a Thanksgiving turkey, I’ll be glad to help. But in the meantime I’ll stay in my corner.

Next time: about that Christian theology …

Photo by Jonathan Harrison on Unsplash

On Silence During Chaos, Part 2: Political

May 1, 2025 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1: Personal

Another factor in my political reticence is the current sociopolitical situation.

I’ll start with the fact that we have the biggest and most powerful government in the history of the world. That’s a lot of power. And when there’s that much power, a lot of people are going to want a piece of that action. And typically, those people are not potential statesmen; they’re in it for themselves, and they’ll do whatever is necessary to get it.

Some of them go the route of political office. They run for something achievable—say, city council—and they manage their image carefully, working up through the ranks until they get the Big Prize: US Senate. (I’d suggest that that’s usually more desirable than the Presidency, because it’s more likely to be achievable, and because it has lower visibility; once you’re the President, everybody’s after your job—even the people who say they’re on your side. The Senate consists of 100 people who think they ought to be President instead of the current guy.)

Some go the route of journalism. They go to journalism school (which, by the way, no longer teaches accuracy in reporting; it teaches advocacy, taking a side and “reporting” in such a way that you influence the public to your position—which is a virtue, because of course you’re right), then work their way up from the local newspaper (if it even exists anymore) or TV newsroom to one in a larger city and then, if possible, to the network. Again, you’re not likely to get the anchor chair—though a home-town girl from Wade Hampton High in Greenville did a few years ago—but you can be the White House correspondent, or national security correspondent, or some other reporter who’s likely to make the national newscast multiple times per week.

Some go the route of influencers—maybe because they’re rich (we’ve seen a lot of that lately) or because they have expertise in foreign affairs or monetary policy or political campaigns, and they can thereby get the President’s ear.

The situation is complicated by the fact that in a complex political or policy environment, truth is damaged not only by what the outlet says; it’s damaged too, sometimes even more, by what it doesn’t say. If a network refuses to carry a story because they think it would help the “other side,” they’re leaving the public with a skewed view of reality. I’ve seen the New York Times do that, and I’ve seen Fox News do it; and for those for whom Fox News is too far left, I’ve seen the fervently pro-MAGA outlets do it as well.

But all of this is about the power. Big government attracts the power-hungry. Those who have the power will do anything to keep it, and those who don’t will do anything to get it.

In that environment, what will the news, and the news releases, be like? They’ll be telling one side of every story, the side most likely to get the government office, or the corporation, or the journalist, more power. And even those who speak most ostentatiously about putting out “no spin” are spinning. That’s a power grab too.

Now. In that environment, what’s a consumer to do?

Well, the standard advice is to hear both sides. But if both sides are skewing, who’s to say that Side 1 + Side 2 = The Truth? I’m reminded of the engineer who, upon hearing a friend say that she used a cheap tire pressure gauge but took the average of three readings, say, “Why do you think the average of three unreliable readings will be more reliable?”

In practice, then, our short-term sense of the situation is simply not going to be reliable; it’s going to take some time for the truth to come out.

To use a current example, President Trump says he’s going to use tariffs to negotiate deals with other countries, likely eventuating in what is effectively free trade. His opponents say it won’t work, and that in any case he’s inflating the number of countries who want to negotiate. Now, the only way to know who’s right is to wait and see whether his claim is verified.

But that raises another problem.

There’s no time for that!

This will be the end of the world!

We need to act now!

We’ll talk about that next time.

Photo by Jonathan Harrison on Unsplash