Gideon Strauss

I am at the beginning of a 40-Day Journey with Gerard Manley Hopkins during my morning devotions, and thought one of the instructions for the day quite apt: “Pray in praise and thanksgiving for God’s creation.” The day’s two Bible readings helped prompt such prayer:

But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.

(Job 12:7-10)

Praise the LORD from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy winds fulfilling his command! Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars! Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds!

(Psalm 148:7-10)

I have so many things to be thankful for here at CPJ: we are blessed with a wise and visionary board, I am blessed with enterprising and diligent colleagues in Jim and Doreen Skillen (and soon Stephanie Summers), we enjoy the support of a faithful and encouraging network of associates,  we have good work to do under the provident guidance of a good and trustworthy God, and we live at a moment when the prospects are good for our work to flourish and bless others. With my dear friend (and favorite bookseller) Byron Borger I rejoice that we live in a moment when an abundance of Christian writers and publishers are “doing books about social justice, for and from the new generation who are serving the poor, and resources for those who are taking up this struggle to seek God’s reign in ways that bring hope to the hurting and hungry.” (And yes, Byron does mention CPJ in his Thanksgiving note.)

As a family we Strausses also have much for which we are grateful: among many other things, Angela and I enjoy the privilege of meaningful, remunerative work, she as a church musician and liturgist, I here at CPJ and as the editor of Comment magazine; our daughters Tala and Hannah are daily making fresh discoveries and diligently persevering in the faithful practice of their skills as students, Tala as a first-year student at Gordon College and Hannah as a high school senior; we enjoy the freedom to gather for worship with the good folk of New City Church, and to share the good news of the life, death and resurrection of Christ and the reign of God.

But what I am most grateful for today, prompted by my morning devotions, is bees. Angela came home from fetching Tala (home for Thanksgiving) at the airport yesterday all enthused by a radio program she had heard about the wonders of bee life and of honey, and deeply concerned over the crisis of colony collapse threatening the honeybee population of North America. As I listened to her, spooning a little honey into my rooibos tea, it is for these creatures that my heart filled with thanks. What a wonderful God, to have made the bee! May our gratitude continue to translate into caring stewardship and ingenious work to let bees flourish and participate in the disclosure of the rich possibilities of God’s world.

I am visiting Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, and enjoying it immensely. As I talk with students, faculty, and staff, I am realizing that students who graduate from Dordt enjoy a significant advantage: yes, Dordt is far from the culture making hubs of the world, but here in this greenhouse environment students enjoy a community in which their character is being formed as citizens of the kingdom of God, so that when they are transplanted out into the post-college world they have strong roots and can flourish. At Dordt students breath the atmosphere of the Spirit, are rooted in the soil of the people of God, are watered with the gospel.

No wonder, really, that the Center for Public Justice has its historical roots in the same Siouxland countryside as does Dordt. And no wonder that CPJ and Dordt share a vision of equipping the people of God to be citizens of the kingdom of heaven … and therefore graceful citizens of this American republic, seeking the common good because of our knowledge of God’s common grace.

Yesterday I enjoyed giving an address on “Silly walks need no justification” (Monty Python meets Hans Rookmaaker), engaging two of Dr. Don King’s politics classes in conversation, having lunch and dinner (a very fine dinner!) with students, faculty and staff, and giving a public lecture (with several long-time CPJ suppporters and the chair of our board, Harold Heie, in the audience) on “Graceful citizenship.”

Today I have wall-to-wall appointments for conversation with individual Dordt people, as well as a radio interview with President Carl Zylstra and a conversation with Jason Lief and Barb Hoekstra’s Gen 300 capstone class.

I am beginning to wonder how to track down the Dordt diaspora of students across America, and how to connect the gifts they have received on this campus with the needs of people elsewhere seeking to live as citizens of the kingdom of God, but lacking a similarly deep learning … ?

“Let princes hear and be afraid.”

I still remember the cold thrill with which I read chapter 20 in John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion on train rides toward downtown Cape Town in 1989.

Dissatisfied with passive resistance against apartheid, uncertain that I had an understanding of political life that was both faithful to the teachings of the Bible and adequate for making sense of the tasks of government after apartheid, and unaware of the tectonic shifts already taking place below the surface of South African politics — shifts that were to bring about a quake of change the following year — I had been reading backwards from a book that had opened up fresh possibilities for me, Bob Goudzwaard’s Idols of our time. Goudzwaard made Christian sense of the political situation in which I found myself, and I wanted to understand where he came from. So I read those that influenced him, slowly making my way backwards into history: Herman Dooyeweerd, Abraham Kuyper, Guillaume Groen Van Prinsterer, Johannes Althusius, a slight detour to Samuel Rutherford, and then, John Calvin.

I think I can date my grafting into this tradition — going beyond ambivalent interest, joining the tribe — to the morning that I read these sentences very near the end of the Institutes (in the Beveridge translation):

When popular magistrates have been appointed to curb the tyranny of kings … so far am I from forbidding these officially to check the undue license of kings, that if they connive at kings when they tyrannise and insult over the humbler of the people, I affirm that their dissimulation is not free from nefarious perfidy, because they fraudulently betray the liberty of the people, while knowing that, by the ordinance of God, they are its appointed guardians.

But in that obedience which we hold to be due to the commands of rulers, we must always make the exception, nay, must be particularly careful that it is not incompatible with obedience to Him to whose will the wishes of kings should be subject, to whose decrees their commands must yield, to whose majesty their sceptres must bow. And, indeed, how preposterous were it, in pleasing men, to incur the offence of Him for whose sake you obey men! The Lord, therefore, is King of kings. When he opens his sacred mouth, he alone is to be heard, instead of all and above all. We are subject to the men who rule over us, but subject only in the Lord. If they command anything against Him let us not pay the least regard to it, nor be moved by all the dignity which they possess as magistrates — a dignity to which no injury is done when it is subordinated to the special and truly supreme power of God.

(I prefer the Ford Lewis Battles translation, which I discovered ten years later when studying with J.I. Packer at Regent College. It translates the first of the sentences above in this more imaginatively compelling way: “I am so far from forbidding them to withstand, in accordance with their duty, the fierce licentiousness of kings, that, if they wink at kings who violently fall upon and assault the lowly common folk, I declare that their dissimulation involves nefarious perfidy, because they dishonestly betray the freedom of the people, of which they know that they have been appointed protectors by God’s ordinance.”)

The work of John Calvin changed cultures in ways that go far deeper than politics — and influenced my own life, eventually, in ways that go far deeper — but my first debt to Calvin is a political debt: he wedged open anew a way for Christians to understand that political authority is relative, and that there are times when tyrants must be resisted, and centuries later I, too, could slip through that wedged opening, with deep gratitude.

Jim clarifying what the Bible has to say about the state.

I attended the first two days of this year’s Civitas Leadership Seminar in Washington DC. Jim Skillen, the current president of the Center, opened the week-long seminar with an overview of what the Bible teaches that has bearing on political life. The first question Christians must answer in this regard, says Jim: “Is government/political life given as a result of sin, or as a result of what we have been created to be?” The majority tradition in the history of Christianity has been to see the state as being instituted only after humanity fell into sin, to act as a restraint on human wickedness. Jim suggests that the Scriptures teach, instead, that the public administration of our common life is a gift given to humanity in creation already.

While there will be many discontinuities to my work life before and after October, one continuity will be Comment magazine — to my great gratitude and relief. If you are unfamiliar with Comment, do pop over to its web page, where you can see the most recent online articles, and search its growing archives. For a sense of what we are trying to do with the magazine, I suggest that you take a look at the 2008 Comment Manifesto. I also recommend that you become a fan of Comment on Facebook!

Comment is a publication of Cardus, a think tank equipping people of influence with credible theories and practices of public life that will contribute to a renewal of North American social architecture. I have been involved with Cardus since 1999, when it was called the Work Research Foundation, and owe a vocational debt of gratitude to its founder, Harry Antonides, to Ray Pennings, my colleague at Cardus from the start, and to the president of Cardus, Michael Van Pelt — all of whom are not just colleagues, but dear friends. Working alongside the Cardus crew is one of the great delights of my life, and I am grateful to be able to continue to edit Comment alongside the wonderful Dan Postma and Alissa Wilkinson, after starting my formal role here at the Center in October.

In her answers to my questions in the previous post, Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen mentioned a course she taught on a Christian worldview. Here is a link to the course outline: Constructing a Christian World View.

Since the announcement that I would be joining the Center for Public Justice I have received a great many messages of support and encouragement, many of them rather moving. With the permission of my correspondent, I am publishing one exchange out of the many, but I want to convey my gratitude to all of you who sent me notes of encouragement. They are very much appreciated. 

 
On Wednesday, May 13, I received the following message by email.

Dear Gideon,
 
I think your name is appropriate as you take on a HUGE task, with comparatively few resources!  I was blessed with being on the “ground floor” , having served APJ from 1975-1981 picking up the mail, recording the donations, and sending out the receipts and Thank yous from my small basement office.  My daughter, Joyce Campbell (now a missionary in Guinea, West Africa , with CRWM) who caught the Reformational “Bug” from Dr. McCarthy at Trinity Christian College, and spent a year at the Toronto Institute, served as an Administrative Assistant  in DC for several years.  Dr. Skillen and his wife are long-time friends.
 
Now a widow , age 86, living in an Assisted Living Retirement Village , near my youngest son, a Prof. at VA Tech, I continue to maintain an interest in CPJ, though my financial support could now be called “the widow’s mite”!  I praise God for His blessing in the steady growth of CPJ, and that they are reaching far beyond it’s simple beginnings among mostly the CRC, with its strong Dutch heritage. 

As many in my age group, who still have vivid memories of WW 2, I fear for the future of our grandchildren.  But those of us who have been blessed with a strong faith in the Sovereignty of God take comfort and hope in that God is in control of the nations, and is accomplishing His purposes in and through the sometimes foolish  godless conduct of our leaders.  It has been a joy to me to hear the  positive, enthusiastic goals of  Christians in the new generation, and I promise to pray for you as well as all those who are taking up the cause of Justice under the banner of the cross! 
 
I am sending you a few names, which you may or may not have on your Mailing List.
 
GOD BLESS YOU , and give you much GRACE for the trials that will surely come your way!  (It has proven true in most cases I have experienced and observed, that whenever God is going to do a GREAT WORK, the devil will surely bring some trial or obstacle).
 
Love and Blessings in Christ,
Clarice Ribbens (widow of William Ribbens, a pastor in the CRC).

I replied on Friday, May 15:

Dear Mrs. Ribbens, thank you for this wonderful letter, your encouragement, and your prayers. I am writing about my preparations for starting at CPJ online, at http://cpjustice.org/gideonstrauss/, and I wonder if you will give me permission to publish excerpts of your letter there? I think it is a great testimony of the Lord’s faithfulness, and I think it will be an encouragement of CPJ’s current and potential supporting community. I would also appreciate any advice you have for me, and of course your continued prayers.
 
With gratitude,
 
Gideon Strauss

A little later that day I received another message from Mrs. Ribbens:

Thank you for your prompt reply, as well as expressions of appreciation!  At my age, I find that there are two types of “young people” –some who enjoy my “input” and others who have little use for it, considering our generation totally “out-of-date”!
 
 Yes, you may use whatever may be of help to your initial efforts.  I hope I can meet you some day.  I must confess that my very first impression, especially hearing of your roots in South Africa , was to wonder what you would know about our political situation in the US!! But the more I read — especially how you have been a scholar involved with Dr. Skillen, as well as the sincerity and clarity of your personal letter, the more I am convinced that under God’s mysterious and always wise providence  you and CPJ have “discovered” eachother!
 
As to further advice, I guess it would have to be to take Ephesians 6:10-19 very seriously.  Your vision for CPJ is bound to throw the devil into high gear!   With the power of the Holy Spirit, and Christ as your chief “role model” as well as your Savior and Lord, you can be assured that  God will protect you from the onslaughts of the evil one, and use you to advance His kingdom in the area of justice in our political arena.  Although we are in no way a “Christian nation”, we can trace our history to many Christian influences and beginnings.  Our responsibilities to bring justice beyond our borders to the world are tremendous!  I praise God when I see the younger generation accept the challenge.
 
Blessings in Christ’s Love,
Clarice Ribbens

As my wife, Angela, and I talked about this correspondence, I realized that the most important work in service of the purpose and mission of the Center for Public Justice is continues to be done by people like Mrs. Ribbens: at the heart of what we do as the people of God in the world is prayer.