This is Viewpoints for Thursday, July 21, 2016

Stop experimenting

See in The Telegraph that Mercer has removed charging stations. When will we stop wasting money experimenting? We have thousands of years of petroleum supply at reasonable prices. Time and money would be much better spent on studying how to handle the carbon byproduct.

Been here before

News from all sources can say the “recession” (my term is job depression) is over, but my eyes tell me otherwise. It makes me look back with renewed thankfulness to my engineering years of blessings when those 60-70-plus hour work weeks were a vacation while still bringing that briefcase home with work I could continue prior to the next day.

As I have recently observed the obvious struggle of so many in today’s economy, I better understand the taped interviews of my Jane’s dear father, Anderson Speir, whom I was privileged to interview years ago allowing me to write a biography of this remarkable carpenter. During the early part of the Great Depression, after losing his job he was forced to take his wife and infant daughter to his in-laws’ farm to avoid pending homelessness in Atlanta and follow road construction, returning to the farm every two weeks with earned money. His grandchildren on hearing the story asked which motel he lived in on the road. Response: the “starlight motel,” ground level, except when under bad weather it was the “Chevy coupe” with a view.

It’s the economy “stupid,” and much of our current nationwide trials and tribulations will fade when there are adequate good stable jobs available for those desiring the opportunity to work with dignity.

More truck control

After the terrible assault truck atrocity in Nice, France, I feel compelled to speak out about truck control. There are not enough government regulations on these dangerous instruments of mass destruction. Are you aware that anyone can walk into a store or get on the Internet and buy a truck? All it takes is cash to buy or even rent a truck. Trucks are everywhere. Violent people, the mentally ill and even Republicans can buy trucks quite easily, without a federal background check. There also is a significant business in international truck trafficking. One can buy a truck in a foreign country, like Canada or Mexico for example, and easily bring it into the U.S. Naïve Americans often leave dangerous trucks unprotected out in the driveway where children or people of evil intent can access them. I propose the following ideas for solving this public safety issue:

• Eliminate black trucks with dangerous add-ons such as winches, extra large tires and dark windshields.

• Require a fingerprint key lock so a truck can only be operated by its owner.

• All trucks must be governed, whereby the speed is limited to 15 miles per hour maximum.

• Truck fuel must require a government ID card issued only after an extensive background check. Although the ever-vigilant National Trucking Association (NTA), has vigorously objected to this truck control initiative, we believe that truck control is vital to public safety and call on Congress to do the right thing.

Gentle spirit

I’m writing in response to both the dogma and the dogmatic tone of Erick Erickson’s article, “the reality of the Resurrection.” Tensions run throughout Scripture and history, and arguments concerning them should be handled with a gentle spirit, rather than defining opponents as beyond the pale.

Saying that one is not a Christian unless one affirms “the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus” is wrong. That was an important point for some early heresy-hunters, and it became official when Roman power compelled uniformity in doctrine, but it was of little interest to most of the early fathers, for whom the new ethical life was what mattered. For instance, the Didache credits Jesus for making immortality known, but is otherwise nearly completely concerned with ethics.

Erickson contends that we are compelled to accept the bodily Resurrection because of the alleged eyewitness account in John’s Gospel and because of three early fathers who “attested” that John was a witness. Of course, those three were not eyewitnesses either, so the fact that they may have known John has no tendency to verify what, if anything, John saw 60 years earlier.

Serious tensions in Scripture have led the “learned men” that Erickson attacks away from the dogma. For instance, accepting John’s story in chapter 20 requires rejecting Matthew’s story in chapter 28. Accepting John’s story in chapter 21 requires rejecting the story in Luke 24 and Acts 1-8. Those tensions deserve to be taken seriously. (And contrary to Erickson’s claim that Bishop Spong “declared it silly to try to understand Jesus,” I commend Spong’s latest book on Jesus, a commentary which sees John’s Gospel not as dogma, but as Jewish mysticism.)

Erickson’s targets also take seriously differences in descriptions about Jesus’ resurrection. Alongside passages clearly describing a physical resurrection, there are others describing the resurrected body as vanishing, walking through walls, ascending to heaven (Luke 24:31, 24:51, John 20:19, Acts 1:9), all things that are difficult for a physical body to do. The body looked like a ghost in some stories, and Jesus was not recognizable in others (Luke 24:37, 24:16, John 20:14, 21:4). To Paul, the appearance was of a great light seen by him but not by others (Acts 9:3-7, 10:40-41), and he uses the same verb to describe how he and the apostles saw it (1 Co. 15:5-8). He describes the risen body as a “spiritual body,” in contrast to the physical body that dies (1Co 15:44), since “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” (1 Co. 15:50). It would be surprising if different people didn’t draw different conclusions from these writings.

Instead of labeling and attacking those with whom we disagree, which is the way of the world, we should consider their arguments and reason with them in a gentle spirit.

This story was originally published July 20, 2016 at 5:00 PM with the headline "This is Viewpoints for Thursday, July 21, 2016."