Opinions on the morality of Bobby Petrino April 14, 2012 – 1:43 pm

Bobby Petrino has achieved the American Dream, but still is looking for something more April 8, 2012 – 1:46 pm

Rex Nelson speculates that Petrino may be fired because “…trust has been so broken…” April 8, 2012 – 12:06 pm

Lying about Jessica Dorrell may get Bobby Petrino in a lot of trouble April 7, 2012 – 1:38 pm

If Bobby thinks he is bruised now, then he needs to read about the guy in Proverbs 7:10-27 and what happened to him. I really am hoping that Bobby Petrino can put his marriage back together. He has a clear choice between two paths. In the sermon at Fellowship Bible Church at July 24, 2011, […]

Kevin DeYoung|5:26 am CT

I know, I know—you really don’t like the term “culture war.” The mission of the church is not to “reclaim” America. The growth of the church does not rely on political victories or societal approval. And we don’t want the people we are trying to reach to think we are at war with them. I understand the phrase sounds more aggressive, confrontational, and militaristic than we like.

But call it what you want—a culture war, a battle of ideas, an ideological struggle—there is no question we have deep division in America. The most obvious division right now concerns homosexuality. When Dan Cathy’s off-handed, rather ordinary comment in of support traditional marriage sends big city mayors out on their moral high horses wielding the coercive club of political power—and when the subsequent response from middle America is a record-breaking avalanche of support for Chick-fil-A—you know there is more than a skirmish afoot. I know every generation thinks they are facing unprecedented problems, but it really does feel like free speech, religious freedom, and the institution of marriage are up for grabs in our day.

Given this reality, how should Christians respond?

Let me suggest three R’s.

1. No Retreat. In the face of controversy and opposition, it’s always tempting to withdraw into friendlier confines. But working for the public good is part of loving our neighbors as ourselves. The pietistic impulse to simply focus on winning hearts and minds does not sufficiently appreciate the role of institutions and the importance of giving voice to truth in the public square. Conversely, the progressive impulse to stay quiet for fear that we’ll invalidate our witness is a misguided strategy to win over the world by letting them win. Either that or a disingenuous attempt to hide the fact they’ve already sold the ethical farm.

2. No Reversal. No matter the pressure, we must never deviate from the word of God to please the powers of the world (Rom. 12:1-2). This principle does not automatically determine the course of action in every sphere, for politics must sometimes be the art of compromise. But as far as our doctrinal commitments, our pulpit preaching, and our public values, we mustn’t give a single inch if that inch takes us away from the truth of Scripture (John 10:35). He who marries the spirit of the age becomes a widower in the next. The church is not built on theological novelty, and souls are not won by sophisticated ambiguity. Whoever is ashamed of Christ and his words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man also will be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels (Mark 8:38).

3. No Reviling. If this is a battle, then the followers of Christ must be a different kind of army. Even when our passions run high, our compassion must run deep. There is no place for triumphalism, cynicism, and settling scores. We must be happy, hopeful warriors.  When reviled, we must not revile or threaten in return, but entrust ourselves to him who judges justly (1 Peter 2:23). We must not be surprised by suffering (1 Peter 4:12). We must not hate when we are hated (Matt. 5:43-44). And when we rest peacefully at night may it not be because all men think well of us or because the culture reflects our values, but because our conscience is clear (1 Peter 3:16). In the fight against powers and principalities we must never go away, never give in, and never give up on love.

In response to the critics of capitalism, many conservative Christians turn to philosopher Ayn Rand for ammunition. Rand was a staunch defender of capitalism, but also an anti-Christian atheist who argued that capitalism was based on greed. Greed, for Rand, is good. But if Rand is right, then Christians can’t be capitalists, because greed is a sin. Fortunately, Rand was wrong. She missed the subtleties of capitalism. First, we should distinguish self-interest from selfishness. Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, famously wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” True enough; but that alone isn’t a problem. Every time you wash your hands or look both ways before you cross the street, you’re pursuing your self-interest—but neither activity is selfish. Second, Smith never argued that the more selfish we are, the better a market works. His point, rather, is that in a free market, each of us can pursue ends within our narrow sphere of competence and concern—our “self-interest”—and yet an order will emerge that vastly exceeds anyone’s deliberations. Finally, Smith argued that capitalism channels greed, which is a good thing. The point is that even if the butcher is selfish, he can’t make you buy his meat. He has to offer you meat at a price you’ll willingly buy. So capitalism doesn’t need greed. What it does need is rule of law, freedom, and human creativity and initiative. And we can point that out without any help from Ayn Rand.

_____

If you’re over forty, you probably remember the 1987 movie Wall Street. Kirk Douglas played the key role, a ruthless corporate raider named Gordon Gekko. Gekko is famous for his defense of selfishness: “Greed…is good,” he tells a young broker. “Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all its forms…has marked the upward surge of mankind.” Gekko embodies the enduring stereotype of the greedy businessman.

Given the coverage of the current financial crisis, it’s no surprise that Twentieth Century Fox is now producing a sequel. Many people, including many Christians, believe that the crisis is the product of greedy capitalism—pure and simple. Others, including many Christians, want to defend capitalism, but end up drawing on the work of philosopher and playwright Ayn Rand, who called greed a virtue. That puts most of us between the proverbial rock and the hard place.

As if in response, some prominent evangelicals such as Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis, and Ron Sider have criticized capitalism as based on the “greed principle” (to quote Campolo).¹ And it’s hard to blame them, since even many fans of capitalism, such as Rand, seem to agree. And certainly for Christians, greed is not good. Greed, selfishness, or “avarice” is one of the seven deadly sins, and the Bible has nothing good to say about it. In the Gospels, when Jesus was asked to settle an inheritance dispute, He responded: “Watch Out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions” (Luke 12:15 TNIV). The Tenth Commandment says, “Do not covet,” which no doubt applies to greed as well. Jesus includes greed with murder and adultery in a long list of sins (Mark 7:21– 22). Paul tells the Ephesians that no greedy person—“that is, an idolater,” he explains—will inherit the kingdom of God (Eph. 5:5 ESV). These are just a few of the dozens of biblical passages condemning greed.

So what do we do? Must we embrace Rand’s anti-Christian philosophy to defend capitalism? Or must we reject capitalism because it’s based on greed? I don’t think we have to do either. The truth is much more interesting, and much more encouraging.

THE BEEHIVE

Rand wasn’t the first one to identify capitalism with greed. That honor goes to a Dutchman named Bernard Mandeville. In 1705, he wrote a poem called The Fable of the Bees. Nobody noticed it. So in 1714, he republished it with a lengthy commentary explaining that the poem was a metaphor for English society. Mandeville saw humans and bees as little more than bundles of vicious passions. The Parable reflected that belief.

In the beehive, different bees do different tasks, but they all have the same motivation—vice. The poem describes avarice, pride, and vanity as producing great wealth for the hive. The bees, however, are discontent. They grumble at the lack of virtue around them. They gripe so incessantly that Jove eventually gives them what they ask for. Honesty and virtue now fill the hive. And everything collapses. The bees’ virtuous actions led to disaster whereas the individual acts of evil had led to social good.

Taken literally, Mandeville’s claim is ridiculous. Good doesn’t come from evil. Virtue isn’t born from vice. Virtue doesn’t destroy society. Still, he did get one thing right: bad intentions don’t always yield bad results. Recall that the Apostle Paul once delighted that some were preaching the gospel out of envy of him. He didn’t delight in the envy, but in the preaching. So even private sinful acts may lead to a social good.

THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS?

After Mandeville came the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, who in 1776 wrote the most famous book in the history of economics, The Wealth of Nations. Though the book is long on pages and detail, its basic purpose was simple. Smith wanted to defend what he called the natural system of liberty: rule of law, unobtrusive government, private property, specialization of labor, and free trade. To prosper, a society needed “little else,” he said, “but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.”² But so far from flattering the business class, Smith famously said that “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”³ Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Smith never credited the happy outcomes of trade and business to the virtues of business people. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker,” he wrote, only to be quoted by every economics textbook ever written, “that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”⁴ Nevertheless, through the invisible hand of the market, individuals will “promote an end which is no part of [their] intention.”⁵ That end often benefits society overall.

If you don’t read Smith carefully, you might think that he’s making the same argument as Mandeville: individual greed is good for society. That’s a misreading of Smith, which was made wildly popular by Ayn Rand.

THEN COMES RAND

Perhaps more than anyone else, Ayn Rand not only identified capitalism with greed, but defended it in those terms. She even wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness.⁶ For Rand, greed was the basis for a free economy. Capitalism and greed go together like fat cats and big cigars. To prevent readers from thinking she was using hyperbole, Rand went out of her way to espouse atheism and stridently denounce Christian altruism as antithetical to capitalism: “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible,” she said, “they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.”⁷ In fact, she had a hard time distinguishing Christian altruism from socialism.

Rand was born in Russia in 1905 as Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum, and immigrated to the United States in 1925, just as communism was securing its stranglehold on the Soviet Union. Her hatred of the collectivism she saw in her youth was etched into her worldview, her writings, even her strange personality. After coming to the U.S., she worked as a script writer in various Hollywood studios. The release of her novel The Fountainhead in 1943 made her famous. Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, made her a sensation.

In her novels, she developed characters that expressed her philosophy “of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”⁸ Her books read more like tracts for her philosophy of “objectivism” than ordinary novels. As Daniel Flynn puts it, “The themes of Rand’s four novels—We the Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged—are identical. As far as the philosophy of her novels goes, to read one is to read them all.”⁹

But for millions of readers, her books still inspire. I discovered Rand during my senior year in college. Her books were like a blow to the chest. She mercilessly skewered every leftist cliché that I had taken for granted. I found her bracing prose and iconic heroes attractive and repellant at the same time. For a few months, she seized me. I frittered away a week of my senior year reading Atlas Shrugged rather than studying for a German final.

The book tells about an elite group of creative entrepreneurs and inventors, “individuals of the mind,” who go on strike against a state that implements the communist principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” For Rand, these entrepreneurial heroes, like Atlas in Greek mythology, hold up the world. By pursuing their long-term self-interest, they create value for everyone. So when they shrug—that is, strike—society begins to decay.

The hero of Atlas Shrugged, John Galt, founds a secret community off the collectivist grid, called Galt’s Gulch. Here in this New Jerusalem, individuality and self-interest are prized above all else. One long chapter of the book, “This is John Galt Speaking,” is nothing but a speech by Galt. It’s the perfect distillation of Rand’s philosophy.

Despite Rand’s official praise of selfishness, however, John Galt doesn’t look anything like Ebenezer Scrooge or that fat, cigar-smoking, tuxedo-clad guy in Monopoly. On the contrary, Galt is a pioneer, a brave creator of wealth who pursues his vision despite powerful obstacles, including a malevolent state bent on destroying him. In fact, although Rand despised Christian self-sacrifice, Galt is suspiciously Christ-like. He preaches a message of salvation, founds a community, challenges the status quo and official powers-that-be, who hunt him down, torture him, but ultimately fail to conquer him.

To be sure, there are dissonant notes. His symbol is not a cross, but the dollar sign. The book ends with Galt and his lover tracing the sign of the dollar across a dry valley. But insofar as Galt’s character works, it’s because he contradicts the miserly stereotype that Rand’s philosophy leads the reader to expect. In fact, not one of Rand’s best fictional characters fits her philosophy very well.

Rand convinced me that collectivism was a false moral pretense. She also taught me the importance of entrepreneurs in creating wealth. Rand knew, better than some economists, that you can’t have capitalism without capitalists. Rand continues to be popular with some conservatives, including some Christians. Based on my brief description of her work, that might seem unlikely. But the lack of robust moral defenses of capitalism has left a void. And for many, Rand has filled it.

That’s a problem, of course, since her philosophy as a whole is clearly incompatible with the Christian worldview. Fortunately, we don’t need Rand’s philosophy to defend capitalism. Capitalism and Rand’s defense of it are two different things. This is clear once you realize that Rand bought into a myth more common among critics of capitalism, that the essence of capitalism is greed.

notes:

1 Tony Campolo, Letters to a Young Evangelical (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 142.

2 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1994), xliii.

3 Ibid., 148.

4 Ibid., 15.

5 Ibid., 485.

6 With Nathaniel Branden (New York: Signet, 1964).

7 Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967), 195.

8 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957), appendix.

9 Daniel J. Flynn, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (New York: Crown Forum, 2004), 200–201.

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By Braden Gall (@BradenGall on Twitter)

The journey to claim the 2012 national title begins in February, March and April, as 124 college football teams open up spring practice over the next three months. Athlon will preview some of the top teams and storylines across the nation, as the countdown to 2012 inches closer.

Florida Gators 2012 Spring Preview

2011 Record: 7-6, 3-5 SEC

Spring practice: March 14-April 7

Returning Starters: Offense – 7, Defense – 11

Returning Leaders:

Passing: Jacoby Brissett, 18 of 39, 206 yards, 2 TD, 4 INT
Rushing: Mike Gillislee, 56 att., 328 yards, 2 TD
Receiving: Andre Debose, 16 rec., 432 yards, 4 TD
Tackles: Jon Bostic, 94
Sacks: Ronald Powell, 6
Interceptions: Matt Elam and De’Ante Saunders, 2

Redshirts to watch: WR JaJuan Story, S Valdez Showers

Early Enrollees:

Willie Bailey, DB (6-1, 167), Hallandale (Fla.) High
Jessamen Dunker, OL (6-4, 320), Boynton Beach (Fla.) High
D.J. Humphries, OL (6-6, 271), Charlotte (N.C.) Mallard Creek
Damien Jacobs, DL (6-3, 310), Scooba (Miss.) East Miss. C.C.
Antonio Morrison, LB (6-1, 209), Bollingbrook (Ill.) High

JUCO Transfers to watch: DT Damien Jacobs

2012 Schedule

SEC 2012 Schedule Analysis

Sept. 1 Bowling Green
Sept. 8 at Texas A&M
Sept. 15 at Tennessee
Sept. 22 Kentucky
Sept. 27 Bye Week
Oct. 6 LSU
Oct. 13 at Vanderbilt
Oct. 20 South Carolina
Oct. 27 Georgia
Nov. 3 Missouri
Nov. 10 UL-Lafayette
Nov. 17 Jacksonville State
Nov. 24 at Florida State

Offensive Strength: On a unit that has struggled ever since Urban Meyer left town, is it okay to say none? There is still plenty of offensive skill depth and versatility, but none of those hefty recruiting rankings have panned out. It’s not to say that there is loads of potential, especially in the receiving corps. There is plenty of speed with Andre Debose, Quinton Dunbar and Frankie Hammond on the outside while Jordan Reed and A.C. Leonard were two of the most highly-touted tight ends in the nation. This group can only improve.

Offensive Weakness: Since this entire offense was “highly-touted” and has yet to stabilize in any sense of the word, really every position could be listed as a weakness. However, the offensive line could feature two true freshman this fall and therefore gets the nod as the biggest area of concern. But make no mistake, the quarterbacks or running game (or receivers for that matter) aren’t in much better shape.

Defensive Strength: All areas of this defense are supremely talented and return intact, but if one area is the strength it would have to be the defensive line. Fourteen players registered a sack last fall for Florida and 12 of them are returning, including six of the top seven D-Linemen. This is an active, explosive, versatile and extremely talented front line. Fans have high expectations for uber-recruits Ronald Powell, Dominique Easley, Omar Hunter and Sharrif Floyd.

Defensive Weakness: This unit is quite the opposite of the offense. With 11 starters returning, there really isn’t a glaring weakness. Finding tall corners that fit Wil Muschamp’s scheme might be an area of focus for the spring. Developing a physical Alabama-esque edge in the extremely athletic linebacking corps is important. And adding bulk up front are small areas of development for a defense that could be the SEC East’s most talented unit.

Spring Storylines Facing the Gators

1. Stablizing the offensive coaching staff had to be Muschamp’s top priority this offseason. With the hiring of former Boise State offensive coordinator Brent Pease to call plays, the Gators will be featuring its fourth OC in four seasons. Hardly stable. Yet, Pease helped develop one of the most prolific offensive attacks in the nation in Boise and is charged with the continued shift from Meyer spread to Muschamp pro-style. There are a lot of moving parts on the offense and figuring out how they all fit together needs to be done quickly if Pease expects to complete the transition to the more traditional power offense.

2. Finding a quarterback will be Pease’s main focus this spring. For the first time in nearly a decade, the Gators truly have no clue who will be the starting quarterback on September 1. Both Jacoby Brissett and Jeff Driskel are dripping with talent, arm strength and size. Yet, both are young, inexperienced and need development. Additionally, Pease has no loyalty to either as he didn’t recruit them to Gainesville. It is a quarterback competition in its truest form and the winner of the job will get the keys to one of the most prolific offensive programs in the modern history of college football.

3. Does there seem to be a developing theme with Florida football this spring? With a new coordinator and new quarterback, the next step for the Gators is to develop the offensive line. Both in pass pro and the running game, the Gators front line struggled mightily a year ago. So even though 50 starts return to the O-Line, Pease knows he needs an influx of young talent to advance this bunch. Look for incoming freshmen and early enrollees D.J. Humphries, who was the No. 1 offensive lineman recruit in the nation, and Jessamen Dunker to push for starting spots in the trenches. These two big-time recruits cannot be asked to step in and be stars right away, but if they can simply play effective football, it should press the incumbents to improve. For a team that finished 73rd in the nation in rushing and 105th nationally in total offense, it all starts up front.

4. Last but not least is the running game. If the new coordinator can design an effective game plan, the quarterback can protect the football and the offensive line can develop, it will fall to the undistinguished ball carriers to pick up the tough yards in SEC play. Ironing out who will be will get the lion’s share of the touches is completely up in the air. Mike Gillislee is likely the most dependable. Trey Burton might be the most physical (and best suited for a pro-style attack) but is more of a fullback and H-Back than tailback. And sophomore Mack Brown might have the most upside. Someone in the backfield has to step up after the loss of Chris Rainey and Jeff Demps — who didn’t really fit Muschamp’s desired power scheme anyway despite their success. All three should be pressing in spring camp as they may simply be keeping the seat warm for 6-foot-2, 213-pound star recruit Matt Jones (who is definitely keeping the seat warm for 2013 superstar Kelvin Taylor).