A map of Antarctica without the ice. Hands up if you thought the land was contiguous?

One of the most important parts of a pastor's ministry is preaching Christ's resurrection and life when death comes near. In this chapel sermon at @grimkeseminary, I offer a few reflections on preaching funeral sermons. youtube.com/watch?v=8GfSjEYr…

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders. And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap. I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece. A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable. Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000. At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation. At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product. Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved. At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper. B. The mechanism: why it's systematic. When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient. In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work. The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in. C. Suffering demands a culprit. A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second. But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat. And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world? D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain. Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem. Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit? No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time. E. One lens, a thousand causes. And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them. F. The perfect inversion. Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second. It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene. G. The ballot box confirms it. In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease. In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state. H. The way out. These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target. The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture. That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

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No One Was Ever Executed in Geneva for “Disagreeing” with John Calvin (1509-1564) By the time Michael Servetus (c. 1511-October 27, 1553) reached Geneva, Switzerland, he’d been a fugitive from Roman Catholic justice as a notorious heretic for 21 years following the July 17, 1532 decree of the Inquisition at Toulouse that he should be arrested to stand trial for his 1531 book, De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity). He eluded Catholic authorities all those years by traveling and working under assumed names (Michel de Villeneuve, Miguel de Villanueva, and sometimes the nickname Revés) until shortly after he decided to publish another heretical book while working in Vienne, France, as physician to the archbishop (of all things!). After years of being off everyone’s radar, he wrote to Calvin in early 1546, including portions of the book he was working on and requesting safe passage to Geneva in order to have a face-to-face debate with him over the Trinity and other topics, which Calvin refused. About 7 years later, on January 3, 1553, his latest anti-Trinitarian Christianismi Restitutio (Christianity Restored) came off the presses, which restated and elaborated upon all the heresies in De Trinitatis Erroribus that made him a fugitive in 1532, but without naming a printer, place of origin, or the identity of the author beyond the initials “MSV” (for Michael Servetus Villanovanus). He no doubt thought he’d go undetected as the author, even with his locally high-profile position, but he was eventually identified and then arrested on April 4, 1553. After formal interrogations on April 5 and 6, Servetus escaped on April 7 and was condemned to death by burning in absentia and was burned in effigy in Vienne on June 17, nearly 2 months before his arrest in Geneva. And they didn’t do all that because Servetus “disagreed with Calvin.” Far from it! The fugitive Servetus was now a man on the run, his life in jeopardy throughout France, so he headed for Geneva, about 109 miles (175 kilometers) northeast by road, where he was arrested after some attendees recognized him during afternoon worship on Sunday, August 13th. In the 38-count August 14, 1553, indictment against Michael Servetus, the only person executed for heresy during Calvin’s tenure in Geneva, Switzerland, not a single charge had anything to do with election, predestination, total depravity, particular redemption, effectual calling, or perseverance of the saints. Considering the 20 or so charges that include the doctrine of the Trinity, these alone were sufficient to condemn Servetus to death both in Roman Catholic and other Protestant cities—and again, none of this had anything to do with Servetus “disagreeing” with Calvin. Martin Luther (1483-1546) Had Affirmed the Necessity of Executing Notorious Heretics In his commentary on Psalm 82, Martin Luther wrote, “Moses in his Law commands that such blasphemers and indeed all false teachers should be stoned (Lev. 24:16). So, in this case, there ought not to be much disputing…” (LW 13:62). And in 1531, Luther signed a memorandum of advice (Gutachten) composed by his protégé Philip Melanchthon to Elector John of Saxony, as well as a second one in 1536 to Landgrave Philip of Hesse, both of which assented to the execution of Anabaptists for religious views that were deemed seditious (for the first see Corpus Reformatorum, volume 4, columns 737–740; for the second, Weimarer Ausgabe, volume 50, pages 6–15). Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560) Endorsed Servetus’s Execution Nearly a year after Servetus’s execution, on October 15, 1554, the mild-mannered Melanchthon wrote, “The church, both now and in all generations, owes and will owe you a debt of gratitude. I entirely assent to your judgment. (Tuo judicio prorsus adsentior.) And I say, too, that your magistrates did right in that, after solemn trial, they put the blasphemer (hominem blasphemum) to death.” (Philip Schaff and David Schley Schaff, History of the Christian Church, volume 7 [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910], 62.) This Was in Keeping with the Common Political View of Those Times The general political consensus in the 16th century was that notorious heresy was not only a sin against the church but also a crime against the state deserving punishments up to and sometimes including death. Since the 13th century, kings, princes, and other magistrates operated on the assumption that once heretics were tried and found guilty by the church, they were turned over to the magistrate for civil punishment. Maintaining social order among the masses was seen as dependent to some extent on maintaining a degree of obedience to the church, and rulers accepted this role. Protestant cities altered this process by removing the office of church inquisitor that had been responsible for trying heretics and instead trying heretics themselves in order to remove coercive power from the church. This fact serves as historical background for Calvin’s role in Servetus’s trial. Calvin’s Authority in Geneva Is Often Grotesquely Exaggerated For all practical purposes, John Calvin was a foreign (French) employee of the Genevan government that had hired him. To the extent that the government wanted their head pastor to be respected, as any 16th century government with a state church would, they protected him and his reputation. But that wasn’t always the case. There were times he was on thin ice, and once the ice completely broke under him. Up through the time of Servetus’s trial, the Church in Geneva could be overruled by the City Council (le Petit Conseil). To be a council member you had to not only be a citizen, but your parents did as well. As a Frenchman, Calvin didn’t even become a citizen until 1559, 6 years after Servetus’s execution, 5 years before his own death, and 23 years after he first came to Geneva. He didn’t even have the power to change the church liturgy or church calendar without council approval. The council refused his requests for weekly communion and common as opposed to unleavened bread, and it refused to give the church’s pastors sole authority in church discipline cases. At most, Calvin could influence its decisions in civil matters, but it had no problem rejecting his requests and suggestions, as for example when he pleaded for a more humane execution for Servetus than burning at the stake and it turned him down. Calvin had devoted some time and energy trying to persuade Servetus to repent and believe. In Paris in 1534, at some personal risk as a Protestant there, he arranged a personal meeting, but Servetus stood him up. Calvin tried to take advantage of the opportunity when Servetus initiated correspondence with him in 1546 by sending him a copy of his Institutes, but his efforts were a dismal failure. The Geneva council fired Calvin once in 1538 and they could have fired him any time after his return in 1541 (which the council requested) had they so chosen, and there were several times it seemed as though it would come to that again. But all this historical reality doesn’t appeal to people who prefer to rely on centuries-old slander and libel fabricated and encouraged by Calvin’s enemies. In Servetus’s trial, Calvin served as a witness for the prosecution, the theological examiner, and the author of the prosecution’s case, but he was not the prosecutor. That job belonged to Geneva’s public prosecutor, who presented the case that Calvin authored. For further reading on this topic: Alister E. McGrath, A Life of John Calvin, 107-110. The Geneva Council Did Not Consult with Calvin When It Came to Sentencing Servetus Before the Genevan council sentenced Servetus, it sent a written request for advice to the magistrates and ministers of four other Swiss Protestant cities, Zürich, Bern, Basel, and Schaffhausen. Those cities’ replies were received in Geneva on October 18, 1553, were unanimous in condemning his doctrine as heresy and blasphemy and in urging that he be stopped, with force if necessary so the churches would not be infected. The cities didn’t specify what kind of force. The idea of burning at the stake came from the council. Calvin’s request for a more merciful execution was overruled on October 26, 1553, the day the sentence was issued.